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Pirates, Indians, Spanish treasure, good friends, dolphins, endangered turtles and Victorian architecture… All on one 32 mile-long, 21/2 mile-wide barrier island? Of course we wanted to go! Galveston Island is home to several small towns, the largest being Galveston with around 60,000 people.

The first written account of the island was by Cabeza de Vaca who was shipwrecked there in 1528. He found it to be so inhospitable that he named it Malhado (Island of Doom). An appropriate name as you’ll soon discover. De Vaca and his surviving men quickly left the island and the native Karankawa Indians were again alone.

The Karankawa were a nomadic people who feasted on the bounties of the Gulf. They left behind huge shell middens on the island and along the Gulf Coast. La Salle claimed the entire coast for the French in 1685 although historians doubt that he ever set foot on the island. A century passed and the island was overlooked until it was named after the Count of Galvez by the Spanish.

Well, it wasn’t entirely overlooked. The island’s prime location and questionable ownership made it a favorite rendezvous point for some infamous men: Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. I grew up calling them pirates but Morgan and Kidd were privateers (meaning they had permission from one government, the Spanish, to attack the ships of another government, the English, and vice versa).

Blackbeard, however, was a pirate, he also murdered, raped, pillaged and plundered but without government approval so he was a bad man. He should’ve asked permission! The privateering continued until 1821 when Jean Lafitte was ousted by the U.S. Government.

Lafitte was the first to colonize the island when he founded “Campeche”, a town of over 1,000 of his men (and women) near the east end of the island in 1817. Lafitte claimed to have the permission of the U.S. Government to attack Spanish ships in the Gulf. The U.S. never formally acknowledged his claim, perhaps they looked the other way because Lafitte and his crew had assisted the U.S. in the 1812 Battle of New Orleans.

With Lafitte gone, Mexico established a port of entry on the island. Shortly after the Republic of Texas broke away from Mexico, the town of Galveston on the east end of the island was laid out. The excellent harbor made Galveston extremely important to the young republic. Soon Galveston was the largest and wealthiest town in all of Texas. Galveston claims many of Texas’s firsts: post office, opera house, hospital, telephone and electric lights.

The future looked rosy until the 8th of September, 1900. The water line began to rise, it started to rain and then the wind began to blow. The Great Storm was a Category 4 hurricane that destroyed almost everything in it’s path. It is estimated that over 8,000 people on the island died, the pictures are disturbing. Clean-up crews were formed and the first order of business was to deal with all the rotting bodies. At first they weighted the bodies and threw them in the sea. Unfortunately, the erratic tides washed the bodies back onshore. They began burning the bodies instead. The government had to dispense free whiskey to help the men handle the disgusting task.

I would have given up and abandoned Malhado. Instead, the residents built a 17’ high, ten mile-long seawall and raised the elevation of the entire town by 17’. The process took over ten years and involved the physical raising of 2,100 buildings—but they did it. The buildings that survived the Great Storm now proudly bear commemorative plaques.

We arrived on a blustery Saturday afternoon of the first weekend in December, which on Galveston Island means one thing: Dickens on the Strand. The holiday celebration lasts all weekend and is centered around the historic buildings in downtown Galveston.

We attended the 33rd annual festival and found it to quite enjoyable despite the chilly breeze. It sprawls over several blocks and seems like part Renaissance festival, part concert and part street fair. Although there is no historical connection to Galveston, Mark Charles Dickens, Dickens’s great-great-grandson was on hand to autograph his ancestor’s books.

Sunday we drove out to Galveston Island State Park where our friends Karen and Rich are workamping. Workamping is a term many RVers are familiar with, basically you volunteer at a park and you receive free hook-ups. It is a win-win situation, the volunteer saves money and gets to stay in a neat place and the budget-strapped park receives much-needed help. Which is how we met last year, Rich and Karen volunteered at Boyce Thompson Arboretum where I worked. They were invaluable in teaching us about RVing (it’s more complicated than you might think); without them, I don’t know where we’d be!

The Park protects over 2,000 acres of beach, prairie, and wetlands on the island. A good thing too, although most of the 32 miles of beach are public, the rest of the island is under rapid development. I don’t know about you but a pile of shifting sand doesn’t strike me as the best place to live. Yeah, yeah, I’m a landlubber. We got a kick out of all the houses on stilts, the majority of them are vacation homes.

It’s official, we have entered the South. The restaurants all have sweet tea, Cajun food is everywhere, there are alligator warning signs (did you know… the name was derived from Spanish el lagarto, which means the lizard), every night we saw opossums (did you know… they are immune to rattlesnake venom—that’s amazing!) and armadillos (did you know… during the Depression they were also called Hoover Hogs because people resorted to eating them when Hoover failed to make good on his “chicken in every pot” promise), the streams are called bayous, it’s humid and the natives say “y’all”.

The accent is distinctive and if you’ve ever heard Bill Engvall’s comedy you’ve heard the accent. Bill was born in Galveston in 1957 during a hurricane. He claims the low pressure is why he turned out to be so funny. I don’t know about that but we do find him to be quite humorous.

Our ten days flew by. We went for walks on the beach (almost everyday), searched for pirate treasure (didn’t find any), toured the island (from beach to bay), watched the birds (so many different kinds), collected shells, learned about sea turtles (at the NOAA lab), tried crabbing (caught some keepers) and enjoyed visiting with Karen and Rich.

We almost forgot to leave (honest, we totally forgot what day we were supposed to check out). Perhaps that’s because we didn’t want to leave, but we had to; we had an appointment in Houston to keep.

Photos View photos from our stay in Galveston Island State Park.

Dates: We visited Galveston Island State Park from 12/02/06 to 12/12/06.