Dauphin Island, Alabama
© 2012 J. G. Coleman
There’s something especially macabre about a place called “Massacre Island”. Indeed, my latest print release, “Tidepool at Massacre Island”, embodies a certain tension between the soothing and the unnerving. On one hand, this new work features the beautiful sandy shores of an island that sits amidst the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. On the other hand, you have the dark tones of pre-dawn twilight, a palette of especially cool colors and the ripples of a wind-swept tidepool which suggest anything but an idyllic day at beach. “Tidepool at Massacre Island” expresses a subtly anxious mingling of those contrasting qualities.
“Massacre Island” is actually a historical name for modern-day Dauphin Island, a small barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Alabama. Connected to the mainland by a bridge, Dauphin Island has been a beloved beach hangout for many decades. The eastern end of the island even boasts a small town of the same name. But the earliest record of European visitation to the island reveals a much less inviting first impression.
In 1699, French explorers Pierre Le Moyne and Sieur D’Iberville anchored their vessels off the coast of what would one day be called ‘Alabama’ (at that time, it was part of a large swath of territory called ‘New France’). When they landed their longboats on a narrow island of more than 20 miles in length, they were aghast to discover heaps of sun-bleached bones upon the beach. Surely, they imagined, this had been the scene of a terrible slaughter and it made perfect sense to call this place Isle Du Massacre, or “Massacre Island”. Although the island was officially renamed Dauphin Island in 1707 (after the great-grandson of King Louis XIV of France), it was still popularly known as Massacre for many years. In modern times, more than 300 years later, few people have ever heard of this gorgeous place being referred to as Massacre Island… but the foreboding feeling of my latest print seems to hearken back to those earlier times when the European mind thought of North America as a place of mystery, danger and uncertainty.
In time, the French eventually learned that the supposed site of the “massacre” for which Dauphin Island was originally named had only seemed like a terrifying place because it was interpreted out of context. Shortly after the voyage of Le Moyne and D’Iberville, more Frenchmen began arriving in the area and making contact with local Native Americans. In their discussions, it became clear that the heaps of skeletons upon the beach had simply been unearthed from a burial ground by wind and waves; there had never actually been a massacre on Dauphin Island.
If you enjoyed “Tidepool at Massacre Island”, be sure to take a look at some of my other fine art prints from Alabama’s Dauphin Island such as “Sunset Dunes at Dauphin” and “First Light Over the Gulf”.