The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative from the earth’s tenth largest body of water. Within this magnificently written quantity, John S. Sledge explores individuals, ships, and metropolitan areas that have produced the Gulf’s human history and lifestyle so rich. Many famous statistics who sailed the Gulf’s viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee. Sledge also introduces a about The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History fascinating selection of people connected to maritime lifestyle in the Gulf, among them Maya priests, French pirates, BLACK stevedores, and Greek sponge divers.

Gulf events of global historical importance are comprehensive, like the just defeat of equipped and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the initial accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a previous truck driver discouraged with antiquated loading practices, as well as the most severe environmental disaster in American annals.

Sometimes shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world’s most exotic cities-Havana, New Orleans, and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico’s oldest city, founded in 1519 simply by Hernán Cortes.