The Gulf Coast Stretch: Mobile to Pensacola

This is one of the older and quieter stretches of the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, and it is easy to drive through without registering how much history it carries. Mobile Bay, which you crossed or are approaching, was the site of the Battle of Mobile Bay in August of eighteen sixty-four, when Admiral David Farragut ordered his fleet through a mine-defended channel and into the Confederate-held bay. The phrase attributed to him, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, is probably not exactly what he said, but it captured the moment accurately.

The bay fell. The Confederacy's last major Gulf port east of the Mississippi was closed. Mobile itself, Alabama's only saltwater port, had been a French colonial settlement before it was British, before it was Spanish, before it was American.

The Mobilians and Tohome peoples whose territory this was before all of that had no say in any of those transfers. Pensacola, sixty miles east, has a similar biography: Spanish, French, British, Spanish again, American, all of them drawn to the same deep natural harbor that made this bay valuable. The white sand beaches along this stretch, the Florida Panhandle's Emerald Coast, are made of quartz sand washed south from the Appalachians over millions of years.

It is genuinely white. It does not look like generic beach sand. The Gulf here is warm and shallow and intensely developed.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout in April two thousand ten released approximately two hundred ten million gallons of crude oil into this Gulf. The oil came ashore on these beaches. The beaches look fine now.

The seabed and the deeper ecology have recovered more slowly and less completely.