On Useppa

"When the fish was at the stern, plunging and cutting from side to side in desperation, the old man leaned over the stern and lifted the burnished gold fish with its purple spots over the stern." Old Man and the Sea








The old men of the Calusa tribes spoke of the strange objects that might wash up onto the shoreline when the tide turned out, or that was sometimes felt at the toes of the fishermen as they waded out with their nets to catch their schools of pinfish.  These silver objects, often objectless, but raw, undefined, did not come from these islands.  There had been spoken over the years stories of large floating houses that might trail one another in the distant sea.  Sometimes, when the great southern wind blew the

palm trees flat, when the hut roofs would shake and shutter, the traveling fisherman would report of a great floating house sunk far off shore.  Salvage parties of Calusa might have paddled out to the wreckage where, before the great mass had been fully plunged into the bottom sand and reef, large trunks of timber might still stick out of the surface and teeter to the expanding blue waves.  Dolphins often inspected the new phenomenon for themselves and could be seen in bent backs diving into the underworld without a second thought.  It might take days for this news to travel back to the Useppa home island, but goods of all sorts, all foreign to the Calusa, might begin washing up ever closer to the shore.  The silver was heavy but would churn over to shore – it did not, of course, have the same value to the Indians as the Spanish, yet, being gifts from the sea, from some foreign power that randomly patrolled their aquatic territory, the silver was in fact precious.  The Indian chief had his men bring in all the new treasures and he set it aside on a wooden bench to watch over.  Young tribal boys might

gather around the treasures and begin to speak among themselves of the days to come when they might carve their own dug out canoes and set off beyond the reef lines of the ten thousand islands to seek what must be more treasure.  Mothers would warn against such cavalier attitudes; the great floating houses from a foreign land likely were present to do harm to the Calusa and should be avoided at all costs.  There had also been stories of other tribes at other islands who had been taken away by the floating houses never to be seen again.  The chiefs set out alarms, armed the men in newly sharpened pikes, spears, bows and arrows and axes.  At the sight of anything out beyond the islands, scouting parties were sent, which this night had happened as a new ship had arrived very close to their own god-chosen island.  The ship had purposefully run aground sideways and the men on board,

according to the scouting party, had begun to tie the great large timbers sticking straight up into the sky back onto the trunks of trees and pulled the boat down sideways to shore.