Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  And Joshua was surely rough. Except in books with “a very limited vocabulary,” a clergyman friend wrote in 1861, “he would soon be reading in what, to him, was quite an unknown tongue.” His rustic speech was studded with odd verbal tics and tortured syntax, with a-goin’s and a-tellin’s. His appearance must have been frightful—the British found Tangier a place of “wretched poverty.” But he could read the water and nature in general. He listened carefully, spoke the truth, and displayed a wry sense of humor. He was good company.

  In August 1814, the fleet weighed anchor to carry four thousand Redcoat troops up the Potomac to Washington, where they sacked the capital and burned the White House. Once back on Tangier, they readied for their next presumed victory: an assault on Baltimore, at the time America’s third-largest city, roughly 110 miles northwest of the island.

  “I told them they had better let it alone,” Thomas recounted many years later; “they might be mistaken in their calculations; for the Baltimoreans would resist them, and would fight hard for their city and their homes.

  “‘Oh!’ said they, ‘we can take it easily.’”

  In early September, as the British prepared to shove off, Thomas was informed he was to “exhort the soldiers.” And so Joshua Thomas stepped onto a small platform before the gathered Redcoat thousands, officers flanking him left and right, and started to shout. He talked about “what made this once good, happy world, so full of evil and misery as it now is; and what brings ruin on men, soul and body,” he recalled. “Sin, I said, done all this.” He reminded them “of the great wickedness of war, and that God said, ‘Thou shall not kill!’”

  Then he got down to business. “I told them it was given me from the Almighty that they could not take Baltimore, and would not succeed in their expedition,” he said. “I exhorted them to prepare for death, for many of them would in all likelihood die soon, and I should see them no more till we met at the sound of the great trumpet before our final Judge.”

  This nervy forecast must have seemed far-fetched to his listeners, who’d prevailed in every encounter they’d had with the Americans, at least in this go-round. But they sailed off to Baltimore and proved Joshua Thomas right. The city’s chief defense, Fort McHenry, shrugged off the Royal Navy’s bombardment. Redcoats on the ground suffered heavy casualties. The defeated attackers limped back to Tangier.

  The failed assault might have faded from memory like so much about the War of 1812, except that a young American lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key happened to witness the nighttime battle and celebrate it in verse. Later set to music, his poem became “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Word of Thomas’s bold exhortation spread even as the song gained popularity, and he achieved a stature unmatched by any Tangierman before or since.

  Alas, no plaque marks the place where he delivered his warning. The site was deep underwater by 1900. Nowadays, it’s probably half a mile out to sea. Which brings up one passage of Sugar Tom’s book that rings more or less true. “When Captain John Smith first discovered the island it was then thickly set in pine timber of old growth, and the land was much higher than it is now,” he wrote. “Whenever a ditch is cut through our lands now we are troubled with pine stumps. And as everybody knows where there is a pine stump standing, well rooted, there was a pine tree there at some time, and I know the land has sunk at least eight inches perpendicular since I was a boy.”

  He didn’t get that exactly right. Sugar Tom was born in 1833 and his book appeared fifty-eight years later. In that time, the island didn’t actually sink that much.

  Even so, he was onto something.

  EARTH HAS SEEN its oceans rise and fall over the eons, and the coastal plain of the Mid-Atlantic states has, at various points, been deep underwater or high above it. In the deepest cold of the last ice age, twenty-one thousand years ago, glaciers extended south from the Arctic to cover much of North America and Europe, and one of these glacial masses, the Laurentide ice sheet, covered virtually all of what would become Canada and the northern tier of the United States. Near the shore of Hudson Bay in present-day northern Quebec, the ice was two miles thick.

  It’s well established that these ice sheets pulverized and gouged the land in their paths, shaping it into new lakes, plains, and valleys, but they also left their mark on land they never touched. The Laurentide was so heavy that Earth’s crust sagged beneath it and, in so doing, compressed the mantle, which underlays the crust and forms the bulk of the planet’s mass. Part of the mantle is viscoelastic, meaning it’s goopy, and when squeezed it acts as a gel is prone to do, flowing away from the point of compression. The pressure from the ice sheet propelled this plastic part of the mantle southward, and wherever it went the crust above had to make room. The ground there bulged, and this uplift was especially pronounced in what is now America’s Mid-Atlantic region.

  At the same time the ground was lifting, the oceans fell: With so much water locked up in glaciers, seas around the world dropped to roughly four hundred feet lower than they are today. The East Coast as we know it was well inland; the ancient shoreline followed the edge of the continental shelf, which lies forty to seventy miles east of today’s Mid-Atlantic beaches and barrier islands.

  So most of what we know as the Chesapeake Bay was dry land—a valley, down the middle of which ran the lower Susquehanna River. Tangier wasn’t an island. Neither were its modern neighbors to the north, Maryland’s Smith, South Marsh, and Bloodsworth islands, and what little remains of Holland. All were part of a continuous ridge that stretched south from the Eastern Shore and formed the eastern flank of the Susquehanna’s valley. The future Tangier lay at or near the ridge’s southern tip. The possibility exists, therefore, that the arrowheads that Sugar Tom held in his hand, as well as some found by Carol Moore and her fellow proggers, were fashioned by Indians who didn’t paddle across the bay to hunt on what’s now Tangier Island. They might well have been on foot.

  Then, roughly twelve thousand years ago, the ice age ended. The glaciers melted away, and sea levels rose around the globe. The continental shelf off the East Coast slipped beneath the waves. The Susquehanna’s lower valley was flooded, forming the long, slender Chesapeake. And the rising water made a peninsula of Tangier’s ridge.

  To the east, two other rivers flooded to become arms of the bay. What had been the lower Nanticoke River became Tangier Sound, four or five miles wide, lying to Tangier’s east and Watts Island’s west. The lower Pocomoke River became Pocomoke Sound, which runs between Watts and the Eastern Shore.

  The changes wrought by the melting glaciers didn’t end there. For with the great weight of the ice lifted from the crust in the far north, the ground there began to rebound and its displaced mantle to ooze back home. At the same time, the bulging ground to the south began to slump. As the crust beneath the bay settled, the Chesapeake inundated the lowest-lying portions of the two peninsulas, then chipped away at the surviving uplands until they became chains of distinct islands. That process, which scientists term “glacial isostatic adjustment,” is still under way. The mantle continues its seepage, seeking equilibrium beneath the crust, and the Mid-Atlantic’s ice age bulge, subsiding for thousands of years, is expected to continue doing so for thousands more.

  Sugar Tom had never heard of glacial isostatic adjustment and lacked the tools to accurately measure it, but he sussed out its essential effect: His island was sinking, and it is still sinking today. The annual rate seems tiny—scientists estimate that subsidence measures about 1.6 millimeters per year at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, not far away on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and doubtless it’s very near that at Tangier. That amounts to just an inch every sixteen years.

  But even that small loss makes a difference in an island’s relationship to the surrounding bay. It amplifies the erosive power of tides and wind-driven waves. Every year sees the Chesapeake soak a little more upland into marsh and drown a little more marsh into open water. Every year sees the shoreline more salty, soggy, and vulnera
ble to the wiles of nature.

  Assuming the rate of subsidence was the same in the nineteenth century as it is today (and it was likely close), Sugar Tom’s island sank by about 3.6 inches between his birth and the time he wrote his book. That said, his eight-inch figure wasn’t an exaggeration, because even as Tangier sank, the bay around it was rising—something an oysterman of 1891 would not have known. Ocean temperatures were rising, which increased water volume. Ice caps and glaciers were melting, which added new water to the seas. For most of the twentieth century, sea-level rise around the world averaged about 1.7 millimeters per year. Because it has accelerated since the mid-nineteenth century, it probably wasn’t as rapid in Sugar Tom’s day. Even so, the combination of ground sinking and sea level rising in those fifty-eight years would have approached eight inches.

  He may have mangled the island’s human history, but he detected and more or less described an ongoing and relentless process that would, a century later, threaten Tangier’s end.

  BY THE TIME SUGAR TOM published his history, 283 years had passed since John Smith’s sighting of Russels Isles. We can only guess what the bay and its islands looked like in the explorer’s day, but we do know that the relative sea level was about three feet lower than it was in 1891, and that the Tangier Sugar Tom knew was thus a vestige of its earlier self.

  The first carefully surveyed map of the island—that is, drawn with sufficient context and detail that it can be accurately compared with more modern renditions—didn’t come along until 1850. But earlier maps do provide general impressions, and the sum of them is this: What Sugar Tom knew as wetland had been dry ground in the seventeenth century, and much that lay underwater likewise had broken the bay’s surface, and much less water separated Tangier and Watts Island from their neighbors. John Smith’s map from 1612, though so vague that islands are little more than blobs, shows Russels Isles as two side-by-side chains so closely spaced that their origins as peninsulas (or “necks,” as they’re called in the Chesapeake) seem obvious.

  The 1850 map, the work of the federal government’s Coast Survey, offers startling insights to anyone familiar with the middle Chesapeake. It depicts a Tangier almost unrecognizably bigger than we know it to be, extending about half a mile farther to the west; the 76th meridian, which on the map runs through the island from north to south, just west of center, today crosses only water, well off the western shore. The West Ridge isn’t that much west at all on the 1850 chart, but smack in Tangier’s middle.

  Uppards and Tangier proper are a single big island. West of Canaan, Uppards extends almost a mile north of the present shore, in a thick peninsula that meets and all but connects with a big island, Goose, at its north end; a trifling few feet of water lie between them. That peninsula has disappeared entirely. Goose Island survives as a squiggle of low sand and marsh, much withered and frequently overwashed.

  Canaan appears on the old map, and the chart shows Uppards dotted with other occupied high ground, too: Aces, an oval of upland just to Canaan’s west; Rubentown, a long ridge that lay well inland to its southeast; and Persimmon Ridge, a narrow rectangle of homesteads still farther south and closest to Tangier proper. Nothing remains of the settlements, and little of the dry earth on which they stood.

  Tangiermen ascribe those changes solely to wind-driven waves, not rising seas, and it’s true enough that waves have claimed much of their island’s vanished acreage. But erosion and sea-level rise are no either-or proposition: They are inextricably linked, for the bay’s erosive power grows as its level climbs. Accelerating erosion is a symptom of a global phenomenon, not a product of local winds alone.

  That’s borne out in the old map’s depiction of Tangier’s tidal creeks, which appear as slender rivulets, most of them narrow enough to leap. The Big Gut, which now wriggles clear through the island, did not do so in 1850; it petered out in the marsh. Likewise, Canton Creek, now a wide and straight passage that splits that ridge from the rest of Tangier, is shown on the map as a thread of water that dies halfway through the wetlands. Why? Because the bay has risen in relation to the island, converting wetlands to open water.

  The map testifies that about a half mile west of the West Ridge, another hamlet occupied a fourth ridge on Tangier proper. Oyster Creek it was called, and it lasted long enough that old Tangiermen can remember it today. When I stayed on the island in 2000, I spoke with Ooker’s father, Will, who recalled the place. “They had pine trees grew over there,” eighty-nine-year-old Will told me. “They used to play ball over there. Oyster Creek was a right big place.”

  Leon McMann, twenty years younger than Will Eskridge, told me he played in the tall grass over that way as a boy, when a couple of houses, not long abandoned, still marked the spot. Jerry Frank Pruitt, a Situation Room regular thirteen years younger than Leon, remembered playing there, too, though by that time the houses were gone, along with most of the trees.

  Today, a navigation beacon rises from the bay one hundred yards offshore. The foundations of Oyster Creek’s homes lie at its base, under eight feet of water.

  OF ALL THE 1850 MAP’S REVELATIONS, the most dramatic might be its depiction of Tangier’s now-amputated spit. It was simply massive—a mile-long rib of sand rooted to the island’s southwest corner, curving south and east until, at its hook, it broadened to a sandy rectangle covering dozens of acres. The map shows a grove of trees at this widening: the old Methodist camp meeting grounds.

  As word of Joshua Thomas’s famed sermon on those grounds spread after the War of 1812, the summertime gatherings on the spit became huge affairs, drawing the faithful by the thousands. By 1820 steamboats were carrying campers from Norfolk and the big cities up the bay. “From every creek come vessels of all sizes . . . ,” Henry A. Wise, later Virginia’s governor, wrote of his own visit, “loaded with people and provisions, until the island harbors are studded with shipping and a forest of masts, which gives the wharves and island the appearance of some considerable mart of commerce.”

  Renowned preachers and humble exhorters shouted to the masses from bowers erected among the ghosts of the old British redoubts. The prayerful sang, danced, wept, swooned—and, it was said, witnessed the Almighty’s hand. In August 1824, one Miss Narcissa Crippin, nineteen years old and “a zealous Christian,” according to a report in the Norfolk Beacon, was “so operated on by the Spirit of God that her face became too bright and shining for mortal eyes to gaze upon, without producing the most awful feelings to the beholders.”

  “It resembled the reflection of the sun upon a bright cloud,” related an eyewitness. “The appearance of her face for the space of forty minutes was truly angelic, during which time she was silent, after which she woke and expressed her happy and heavenly feelings, when her dazzling countenance gradually faded and her face resumed its natural appearance.”

  Better documented were spirits of an unheavenly sort. A motley assortment of hangers-on, not much hungry for the Word, pegged their tents in the sand alongside those seeking salvation. “Here the ministers of the Church winning souls away from Satan, and there the sons and daughters of vanity sipping the siren draught of sensual pleasure in all the ways of wanton delight,” Wise wrote of the 1828 gathering; “here, at night, the camp at rest, and all its suburbs drinking, fiddling, dancing, and doing worse, uproarious in shameful frolic until morning light. The night is far spent, and at early dawn the horn is blown. The tents rise again to repeat the last day’s scenes and exercises, and the sinners sink away to sleep until the curtain of the night falls again.”

  By the time the map of 1850 was drawn, the camp meetings were so trammeled by “the spirit of traffic and Sabbath desecrations,” in the words of the Reverend Charles P. Swain (later the pastor of the church that bears his name), that they’d become all but useless. The islanders themselves didn’t misbehave, “but others from abroad brought their wares here for sale, from a watermelon to a boat, and even whiskey was smuggled in, and, as is always the case, where it gets in sense gets out, and tr
ouble was constantly being caused.”

  One August before the Civil War, a gang of Eastern Shore toughs, riled by talk that a camp preacher was exhorting the virtues of abolitionism, launched an amphibious assault on the beach. “By some means used of God the people were made aware of the coming of the mob,” Swain reported, and “a band of courageous men so defeated and banished the devil’s cowards as to make them jump into mud holes and creeks to escape the genteel thrashing that every one of them received.”

  Even so, Tangier’s passion for the gatherings cooled. Joshua Thomas died in 1853, and missing his eccentric but firm-handed presence, the island hosted its last camp meeting four years later. Not long after that, an Eastern Shoreman gained ownership of the spit “and built a large boarding house with thirty-five rooms right on the camp ground,” Swain wrote. “The waves as if angry at this innovation began to encroach upon the place until every vestige of the place, pines and all, has been carried into the bay.”

  “Thus,” Swain concluded, “has God kept unholy hands from despoiling the place.”

  IN THE LATE SPRING 208 years after Joshua Thomas brought the Word to Tangier, his spiritual descendants convene for two farewells, bittersweet affairs that draw members of both churches and a good number of the unchurched as well. First comes the funeral of Henrietta Wheatley, on a Sunday afternoon wrapped in a gloom befitting the occasion. Rain falls cold and steady from a low ceiling of dark clouds, ponding on yards and pavement, and the unseasonable chill that has kept the crabs in deep water, beyond reach of the pots, continues to grip the town.

  I ride my bike to Swain Memorial from my rented rooms on the West Ridge, a few hours after attending a morning service at New Testament that started with tugboater and church elder Kim “Socks” Parks opening the floor to prayer requests.

  “Pray for relief from the flu situation,” came from the pews.

  “Oh, yes,” Socks agreed, nodding. “That’s terrible. Pray for the flu situation.”