WIND FROM THE CAROLINAS

Not quite up to snuff yet so I am posting a draft I had worked on right before I got the punies.   Hope to be currently creative by next week.


Ginnie at Goldendaze-Ginnie  wrote an interesting post about an adventure she and her husband had in the Bahamas. You can read about it here

It reminded me of my family history which includes the Bahamas.  In 1964 Robert Wilder wrote the best seller, "Wind From the Carolinas" which is a fictionalized account of my ancestors.

Though not all that well known, during the Revolutionary War, some Americans were not unhappy with England nor did they want independence.  While I had some relatives who did fight for freedom, I also had several who were plantation owners in the Carolinas who remained loyal to England and were referred to as Tories. As one might guess, that was not a popular stand to maintain during or after the war.

When the war was over, England offered the loyalists large land grants in the Bahamas as a reward. Thus, some of my family moved from the United States, along with their slaves, to the promised land on the islands. The purpose was to  produce profitable cotton plantations but what was not accounted for was the poor soil quality there.

It was a failed experiment and eventually one of my relatives, William Curry, chose to move back to the USA from the Bahamas to the island of Key West. There he took up wrecking. Wrecking was the lucrative practice of coming to the aid of stranded cargo ships and being rewarded anywhere from 10 to 50% of the value of the cargo.

It is rumored my multiple great grand pappy knew when and where the ships would run a ground on the 12 mile reef for he allegedly hired the pilots of the ships to purposely strand the ships.  Thus he knew when and where to be waiting to claim salvage.

A profitable venture if not all that honest. It enabled him to become Florida's first millionaire.  The movie "Reap the Wild Wind" about wreckers, was loosely based on that multiple great grand pappy.

So Ginnie's story got me digging into the past. I found the book "Wind from the Carolinas". I had read it many years ago and will be digging into it again shortly. Sadly I could only get the paper back version.  There was no Kindle version and the hard copy was around $120. Yikes.

Sadly I have to adjust to reading a real book once more as I have become really spoiled via Kindle. Let's see, you pull the cover back and turn pages with your fingers?? This might be fun.

Have you ever had someone else's blog post send you on a hunt?  And I am curious.  Do you have some unconventional or shady folks in your family tree also?