On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks . . . I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land.
—Lafcadio Hearn, CHITA: A MEMORY OF LAST ISLAND (1889)
In the summer of 1856, Emma Mille traveled with several of her family members to Isle Derniere, or Last Island, the westernmost of the long, sandy barrier islands that line the Gulf of Mexico shore off central Louisiana. They crossed the inhospitable Mississippi River delta to reach Isle Derniere, where they planned to spend most of the summer. They would join a former governor of Louisiana and the state’s speaker of the House of Representatives as well as hundreds of affluent planters, merchants, their wives and children on the narrow strip of sand that was emerging as a much-sought-after resort.
The Mille family departed from their sugar plantation near the Mississippi River town of Plaquemine (pronounced plak-a-men), located upriver from New Orleans and ten miles below Baton Rouge. Emma chatted with her family members in French. She was eighteen years old and excited about the trip. Her father had owned a house on Isle Derniere for several years, but the family had never used it until now. They likely rode in horse-drawn carriages several miles to the landing on Plaquemine’s riverfront. There they boarded the steamboat Blue Hammock, which made the scheduled runs from Plaquemine to Isle Derniere, a straight-line distance of ninety miles. It was owned and often captained by Michael Schlatre Jr. (pronounced Slaughter), a relative and neighbor of the Milles.
The vessel’s crew stoked the boiler fire, bringing a full head of steam. The two-story-high paddle wheel began to rotate, and the steamer slipped into the river’s powerful current. The seventy-fourton side-wheeler with twin smokestacks was one of hundreds of steamboats that plied antebellum Louisiana’s waterways, the byways and highways of that time and place. During its journey to Isle Derniere, the steamboat would cross a remarkable sequence of diverse natural environments. It also would pass signs that foretold a coming disaster, though its passengers would not have recognized them.
Leaving the broad Mississippi River, the Blue Hammock threaded the delta’s narrow bayous toward the Gulf of Mexico. These waterways cut into an easily eroded land composed of tiny bits of earth. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi had dumped these sediments into fan-shaped accumulations projecting tens of miles into the sea. “It is a place that seems often unable to make up its mind whether it will be earth or water, and so it compromises,” wrote Harnett Kane in Bayous of Louisiana. “The result is that much of Louisiana belongs to neither element. The line of demarcation is vague and changing. The distinction between degrees of well soaked ground is academic except to one who steps upon what looks like soil but finds that it is something else.” To Emma, this “something else” became increasingly apparent as she approached the Gulf of Mexico.
The steamer meandered through bayous shaded by two-hundred year-old live oaks. They were squat trees with muscular, twisted limbs that dripped the silvery-gray hair of Spanish moss. In places their branches reached across the waterway in a canopy that brushed against the vessel. The steamer’s dual stacks billowed black smoke through green foliage.
Soon the scene changed. The bayou swelled over its channel into the surrounding trees, submerging their roots in a swamp where oak gave way to cypress. Their flagpole-thin trunks rose from still water to heights of seventy to eighty feet. At the tops of these trees, branches and leaves were so close together, and the moss so thick, that they nearly blocked the light from reaching the ground. “The weird and funereal aspect of the place [was:] perfect,” observed Harper’s Weekly of a Louisiana swamp in 1866, “presenting a forbidding appearance sufficient to appall a stranger.”
The steamer followed the narrow channel through the forest. The air was stagnant, the confines ovenlike. Emma and the other women aboard sweltered in their floor-length hoop dresses and layers of petticoats. Their bodices had long sleeves to shield their arms from the sun. The only relief from the heat was found on the open deck. As the vessel cut through the muggy air, it created the semblance of a breeze against their faces.
From the deck, the passengers had a clear view of the environment around them. Stumplike roots, or cypress knees, rose out of the water to help the soaring trees breathe. Among them were alligators, only their eye sockets and snouts poking above the murk, and water moccasins, skimming wavy trails in green slime. Colorful birds darted under the mossy canopy; long-legged heron and crane stood in shallow water watching for prey.
Miles across the swamp, the forest began to diminish, trees began to die, as if the water engulfing their roots had been poisoned. The sun now blazed through thinning woods, and the passengers retreated to the shade under a cabin’s overhang. Forest gave way to grass, willowy stems of Spartina, three to five feet high, massed into an endless prairie that was inundated by every high tide. The passengers rejoiced as they left the suffocating swamp and breathed in the fresh salt air that signaled the proximity of the sea.
The waterway splayed across the prairie, branching into an indecipherable maze of channels like veins on the back of an aged hand. The helmsman knew the correct route by pillars of grayed driftwood that had been driven vertically into the mud, marking the proper forks to follow to the sea. As the Blue Hammock navigated these turns, the wetlands of south Louisiana showed their richness. On nearby fishing boats, nets teemed with shrimp and fish. Oysters grew on channelside bars, their exposed mass glistening in the afternoon sun.
Hours later, and miles closer to the sea, there were forks in the route that the driftwood no longer accurately marked, channel prongs that had broadened, merged, altered shape and direction, seemingly from one month to the next, one year to the next. Captain Schlatre had traveled this route many times over the years. He would have recognized lakes in the grassland that had once been ponds, and before that uninterrupted pasture. It was as if the grass had sickened and decayed, roots no longer binding mud together, pasture melting into water.
The vessel chugged from the marsh and into open water, a fivemile-wide bay. The hot, late-afternoon air rose over the delta and sucked a breeze in from the Gulf of Mexico, rippling the bay’s surface. The passengers felt the change, the awkward roll of the flat-bottomed steamer as waves passed under its hull. The sea breeze dried and cooled their skin. They looked across the open water for the first signs of Isle Derniere.
From afar, the island would have been difficult to discern, merely a thread floating on the horizon, one line merging into the other. An 1853 chart of the region included a note to mariners: “Isle Derniere may be readily known by the numerous houses on the beach.” As Emma’s steamer drew closer, those buildings became clear, their roofs breaking above the horizon. Soon, the foundation on which the buildings were constructed emerged from the water, a narrow and low-lying accumulation of sand that extended along the coast for twenty-four miles. On the western end of this accumulation stood the Village of Isle Derniere with its majestic homes tucked amid oleanders and a bustling hotel packed with guests.
As the steamer neared the village, Emma and the other passengers could see across the strand to the Gulf of Mexico. The island was only a two-hundred-yard-wide strip of sand on its Gulf side, with a broader fringe of marsh on its bay side. Its total width was over one mile in places, much narrower in others.
There were no soaring sand dunes, like those found on some barrier islands that lined the eastern and Gulf coasts of the United States. The highest ground on Isle Derniere was at the crest of its beach, where the sand rose only five to six feet above the sea. The island’s lack of physical presence was a symptom that it suffered from the same affliction that killed the cypress trees and the grass, the same affliction that made prairies develop ponds that broadened into lakes.
By the end of the summer of 1856, the Isle Derniere had changed forever. The homes and hotel were gone. The island was barren, as if swept clean, except for a strange forest standing in the surf. The trees were snapped off to stumps. Nothing but their scraggly tips rose above the waves. This forest in the sea was a sign of an island moving, diminishing. The Isle Derniere had been ravaged by a hurricane that killed many of the most prominent residents of antebellum New Orleans and the sugar plantations of south Louisiana. And it irreversibly changed the life of Emma Mille.
---
This is not the story of an isolated disaster that started with the first gust of wind and ended with the last survivor saved, the last body buried. It began centuries earlier, before Europeans arrived in America, and its implications will be felt on other coasts around the world through the twenty-first century and beyond.
This is a story of the sea rising relative to the land—and the land changing in ways that made Isle Derniere, and the people who lived there, vulnerable to a great storm. This is a portrait of a coast in motion, a delta whose surface rose and fell and whose shore systematically changed in position and form, evolving over centuries into a barrier island with degraded terrain that invited the sea to encroach and a storm to ravage.
This is the story of how the people on Isle Derniere came into harm’s way, how they were driven to the island by unexpected consequences of human development of a dynamic land and by seemingly disparate, sometimes odd intersections of science, culture, disease, and agriculture.
In the end, this is the story of an island dying. Between the 1890s and 1988, the Isle Derniere retreated landward about two-thirds of a mile while losing three-quarters of its surface area. And it is a story that is not over. At its heart lies an image of a warmer world—and of what our children and grandchildren may endure from future hurricanes coming ashore on rapidly rising seas.
http://www.AbbySallenger.com
On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe
that the trees—where there are any trees—all bend
away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when
the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely
pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of
oaks . . . I remember as especially suggestive: five
stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like
fleeing women with streaming garments and
wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and
thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save
themselves from falling. And they are being pursued
indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land.
—Lafcadio Hearn, CHITA:
A MEMORY OF LAST ISLAND (1889)
In the summer of 1856, Emma Mille traveled with several of her family members to Isle Derniere, or Last Island, the westernmost of the long, sandy barrier islands that line the Gulf of Mexico shore off central Louisiana. They crossed the inhospitable Mississippi River delta to reach Isle Derniere, where they planned to spend most of the summer. They would join a former governor of Louisiana and the state’s speaker of the House of Representatives as well as hundreds of affluent planters, merchants, their wives and children on the narrow strip of sand that was emerging as a much-sought-after resort.
The Mille family departed from their sugar plantation near the Mississippi River town of Plaquemine (pronounced plak-a-men), located upriver from New Orleans and ten miles below Baton Rouge. Emma chatted with her family members in French. She was eighteen years old and excited about the trip. Her father had owned a house on Isle Derniere for several years, but the family had never used it until now. They likely rode in horse-drawn carriages several miles to the landing on Plaquemine’s riverfront. There they boarded the steamboat Blue Hammock, which made the scheduled runs from Plaquemine to Isle Derniere, a straight-line distance of ninety miles. It was owned and often captained by Michael Schlatre Jr. (pronounced Slaughter), a relative and neighbor of the Milles.
The vessel’s crew stoked the boiler fire, bringing a full head of steam. The two-story-high paddle wheel began to rotate, and the steamer slipped into the river’s powerful current. The seventy-fourton side-wheeler with twin smokestacks was one of hundreds of steamboats that plied antebellum Louisiana’s waterways, the byways and highways of that time and place. During its journey to Isle Derniere, the steamboat would cross a remarkable sequence of diverse natural environments. It also would pass signs that foretold a coming disaster, though its passengers would not have recognized them.
Leaving the broad Mississippi River, the Blue Hammock threaded the delta’s narrow bayous toward the Gulf of Mexico. These waterways cut into an easily eroded land composed of tiny bits of earth. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi had dumped these sediments into fan-shaped accumulations projecting tens of miles into the sea. “It is a place that seems often unable to make up its mind whether it will be earth or water, and so it compromises,” wrote Harnett Kane in Bayous of Louisiana. “The result is that much of Louisiana belongs to neither element. The line of demarcation is vague and changing. The distinction between degrees of well soaked ground is academic except to one who steps upon what looks like soil but finds that it is something else.” To Emma, this “something else” became increasingly apparent as she approached the Gulf of Mexico.
The steamer meandered through bayous shaded by two-hundred year-old live oaks. They were squat trees with muscular, twisted limbs that dripped the silvery-gray hair of Spanish moss. In places their branches reached across the waterway in a canopy that brushed against the vessel. The steamer’s dual stacks billowed black smoke through green foliage.
Soon the scene changed. The bayou swelled over its channel into the surrounding trees, submerging their roots in a swamp where oak gave way to cypress. Their flagpole-thin trunks rose from still water to heights of seventy to eighty feet. At the tops of these trees, branches and leaves were so close together, and the moss so thick, that they nearly blocked the light from reaching the ground. “The weird and funereal aspect of the place [was:] perfect,” observed Harper’s Weekly of a Louisiana swamp in 1866, “presenting a forbidding appearance sufficient to appall a stranger.”
The steamer followed the narrow channel through the forest. The air was stagnant, the confines ovenlike. Emma and the other women aboard sweltered in their floor-length hoop dresses and layers of petticoats. Their bodices had long sleeves to shield their arms from the sun. The only relief from the heat was found on the open deck. As the vessel cut through the muggy air, it created the semblance of a breeze against their faces.
From the deck, the passengers had a clear view of the environment around them. Stumplike roots, or cypress knees, rose out of the water to help the soaring trees breathe. Among them were alligators, only their eye sockets and snouts poking above the murk, and water moccasins, skimming wavy trails in green slime. Colorful birds darted under the mossy canopy; long-legged heron and crane stood in shallow water watching for prey.
Miles across the swamp, the forest began to diminish, trees began to die, as if the water engulfing their roots had been poisoned. The sun now blazed through thinning woods, and the passengers retreated to the shade under a cabin’s overhang. Forest gave way to grass, willowy stems of Spartina, three to five feet high, massed into an endless prairie that was inundated by every high tide. The passengers rejoiced as they left the suffocating swamp and breathed in the fresh salt air that signaled the proximity of the sea.
The waterway splayed across the prairie, branching into an indecipherable maze of channels like veins on the back of an aged hand. The helmsman knew the correct route by pillars of grayed driftwood that had been driven vertically into the mud, marking the proper forks to follow to the sea. As the Blue Hammock navigated these turns, the wetlands of south Louisiana showed their richness. On nearby fishing boats, nets teemed with shrimp and fish. Oysters grew on channelside bars, their exposed mass glistening in the afternoon sun.
Hours later, and miles closer to the sea, there were forks in the route that the driftwood no longer accurately marked, channel prongs that had broadened, merged, altered shape and direction, seemingly from one month to the next, one year to the next. Captain Schlatre had traveled this route many times over the years. He would have recognized lakes in the grassland that had once been ponds, and before that uninterrupted pasture. It was as if the grass had sickened and decayed, roots no longer binding mud together, pasture melting into water.
The vessel chugged from the marsh and into open water, a fivemile-wide bay. The hot, late-afternoon air rose over the delta and sucked a breeze in from the Gulf of Mexico, rippling the bay’s surface. The passengers felt the change, the awkward roll of the flat-bottomed steamer as waves passed under its hull. The sea breeze dried and cooled their skin. They looked across the open water for the first signs of Isle Derniere.
From afar, the island would have been difficult to discern, merely a thread floating on the horizon, one line merging into the other. An 1853 chart of the region included a note to mariners: “Isle Derniere may be readily known by the numerous houses on the beach.” As Emma’s steamer drew closer, those buildings became clear, their roofs breaking above the horizon. Soon, the foundation on which the buildings were constructed emerged from the water, a narrow and low-lying accumulation of sand that extended along the coast for twenty-four miles. On the western end of this accumulation stood the Village of Isle Derniere with its majestic homes tucked amid oleanders and a bustling hotel packed with guests.
As the steamer neared the village, Emma and the other passengers could see across the strand to the Gulf of Mexico. The island was only a two-hundred-yard-wide strip of sand on its Gulf side, with a broader fringe of marsh on its bay side. Its total width was over one mile in places, much narrower in others.
There were no soaring sand dunes, like those found on some barrier islands that lined the eastern and Gulf coasts of the United States. The highest ground on Isle Derniere was at the crest of its beach, where the sand rose only five to six feet above the sea. The island’s lack of physical presence was a symptom that it suffered from the same affliction that killed the cypress trees and the grass, the same affliction that made prairies develop ponds that broadened into lakes.
By the end of the summer of 1856, the Isle Derniere had changed forever. The homes and hotel were gone. The island was barren, as if swept clean, except for a strange forest standing in the surf. The trees were snapped off to stumps. Nothing but their scraggly tips rose above the waves. This forest in the sea was a sign of an island moving, diminishing. The Isle Derniere had been ravaged by a hurricane that killed many of the most prominent residents of antebellum New Orleans and the sugar plantations of south Louisiana. And it irreversibly changed the life of Emma Mille.
---
This is not the story of an isolated disaster that started with the first gust of wind and ended with the last survivor saved, the last body buried. It began centuries earlier, before Europeans arrived in America, and its implications will be felt on other coasts around the world through the twenty-first century and beyond.
This is a story of the sea rising relative to the land—and the land changing in ways that made Isle Derniere, and the people who lived there, vulnerable to a great storm. This is a portrait of a coast in motion, a delta whose surface rose and fell and whose shore systematically changed in position and form, evolving over centuries into a barrier island with degraded terrain that invited the sea to encroach and a storm to ravage.
This is the story of how the people on Isle Derniere came into harm’s way, how they were driven to the island by unexpected consequences of human development of a dynamic land and by seemingly disparate, sometimes odd intersections of science, culture, disease, and agriculture.
In the end, this is the story of an island dying. Between the 1890s and 1988, the Isle Derniere retreated landward about two-thirds of a mile while losing three-quarters of its surface area. And it is a story that is not over. At its heart lies an image of a warmer world—and of what our children and grandchildren may endure from future hurricanes coming ashore on rapidly rising seas.
more info:
http://www.AbbySallenger.com
Island in a Storm