The Chiquimula lies somewhere beneath the black water where the Blakely River flows into Mobile Bay. She burned to the waterline in 1953—a “fire of undetermined origin,” the paper said the next day—but for years she remained visible at low tide, fading away, little by little, until she was more memory than roadside curiosity.
By the time the Chiquimula burned, she’d been sitting next to the causeway for thirteen years. Storms had robbed her of three of her four towering masts, but none of her mysteriousness. To Gulf Coast tourists armed with cameras, and to artists who’d sit on the riverbank and put brush to canvas, she was a beautifully decrepit hulk—176 feet of “what’s her story?”
“And like a lady who has been around a bit—her presence has inspired a world of gossip,” the Mobile Press-Register wrote on March 10, 1946.
If the gang in Key West wondered where the new guy had come from, the Chiquimula held a few clues. Jimmy Buffett wasn’t the first Buffett to set out for adventure—that would have been his grandfather, the Chiquimula’s former captain.
“Skipper Draws Back Pages On History of Sailing Ship,” read the headline striped across page 1-B that long ago Sunday. “Schooner Deserted in Mobile Bay Skirted World Before Taking Rest.” Captain James Buffett, then residing at 316 McKinley St., Pascagoula, Mississippi, shared a little of his history, too.
He’d been aboard another windjammer, running oil and ammunition to Europe during World War I. Before that, he’d “hustled case oil” to Japan for the Standard Oil Company and taken a stab at seal hunting in the Indian Ocean.
When he made call in Mobile in 1946, he was delivering the 440-foot aircraft repair ship Maj. Gen. Robert Olds to the Mobile Air Technical Service Command for decommissioning. A year earlier, he’d guided the Olds through a typhoon off Okinawa, riding out 60-foot seas and 142-mile-an-hour winds.
“From windjammers to B-29s is the story of Capt. Buffett,” the Press-Register wrote, “and while he admits he would rather have the rolling quarterdeck under his feet, he had to concede the airplane was here to stay after making a round trip from Guam to Oklahoma City via Superfortress.”
Built in Seattle for United Fruit Company, the Chiquimula launched in 1917 hauling railroad and steel parts to the company’s Central American plantations. When Captain Buffett took command in February 1924, she was carrying lumber, salt, and coal between the West Indies and the Unites States. He sailed her until 1927, long enough to put a fast end to one rumor. Had the old ship been part of the rum-running fleet off New Orleans during the nation’s “dry spell”? “No, sir,” the captain said. “I don’t believe it. She’s far too slow!”
He recalled pushing her through a hurricane north of Cuba en route to the Canary Islands. “The gallant ship weathered the blow,” the paper said, “although she strained her timbers to such an extent that she has leaked from that day to this.”
Then there was the time the wind stopped. Running salt from the British West Indies to New York, the Chiquimula was stranded for three days off Atlantic City. “For a while,” the New York Daily News reported on page two of its Sunday, September 20, 1925, edition, “the outlook was black . . . Helpless in a dead calm, she finally signaled a coast guard cutter and got a scanty supply of food to bring her to New York.” When the Daily News reporter visited the Chiquimula in quarantine, Captain Buffett had gone ashore to “clear his ship,” but his wife and two children, Jimmy and Patricia, were among those aboard. “Mrs. Buffett,” as Hilda was identified, said it was her second time to sea with her husband, and likely her last. The ship’s first mate—”taciturn and short of speech”—shrugged while reading a paper. “You have to expect calms and short rations now and then,” he said.
Captain Buffett shared his first mate’s nonchalance. Something as elemental as a lack of wind wasn’t going to keep him from the sea. In 1961, when the Press-Register attempted another story on the remains of the Chiquimula, writer Ed Lee was left to fall back on earlier reporting. “We tried to contact Capt. Buffett,” Lee wrote, “but he is still going to sea. At present he is master of the Tiny Tim, a pogey boat operated by Smith Fish Meal Co. of Pascagoula and he was away from port every time we tried to reach him. However, according to our records, the good captain, who told us he began his career as a mariner at fifteen, has been sailing for forty-nine years.”
Fifteen. Other versions of the story put James Delaney Buffett Sr. to sea at thirteen, fourteen, or sixteen. In all of them, he was young when he jumped out the window of his family’s home in Sydney, Nova Scotia, hopped a ship, and set out into the world, putting oceans between himself and the dark, cramped coal mines dotting the landscape back home.
The thought of a life confined in those mines, huffing dust and dirt with every breath, might have been enough to push him and his younger brother (William) out that window toward whatever unknown sat waiting beyond the horizon. More than a leap from a window, it was a leap of almost unimaginable faith in what could be.
From Nova Scotia, James Buffett worked his way to Pascagoula, Mississippi, and back out of Pascagoula, and back to Pascagoula. Returning again and again to Horn Island, one of a string of barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico where ships hauling lumber would moor and unload. While the ships were emptied, sailors waited and wandered and crashed in boarding houses.
Mrs. Seymour’s place was on the Pascagoula River, but its nickname, the Singing River, is more poetic. Legend holds that the Pascagoula tribe worshipped a mermaid and when the first Catholic missionary arrived in the 1500s, the mermaid, not particularly interested in competition, rose from the water and called the Pascagoula to her with a song. They followed her voice into the river’s waters and were never seen again. But they are heard—in a low hum over the river that builds to a crescendo and continues to this day. No one’s been able to explain it, but in an 1890 story written for Popular Science Monthly, Pascagoula resident Charles E. Chidsey did identify the song’s single note. It’s an F.
A more peaceful (if no less alluring) siren’s song drew Captain Buffett to Pascagoula on a more semipermanent basis. The oldest of Mrs. Seymour’s seven children was Hilda, who was seventeen in 1916 when James Buffett walked into the boarding house.
The best telling of the story belongs not to the captain’s famous storytelling grandson, but to Mary Loraine “Peets” Buffett. In “A Sailor’s Life,” written in 1986 for Mobile Bay Monthly Magazine, Captain Buffett’s daughter-in-law recalled the night she met her boyfriend’s father for the first time. It was 1941. They were at a restaurant called Pelham’s. The captain was running a cargo ship named Delmundo between New Orleans and South America for the Mississippi Shipping Company. When he was at sea, life in Pascagoula moved on whims; when the captain returned home, so too did order. Catherine, the third-born, didn’t date. The youngest—and wildest—Billy, didn’t delay on his way home from school. Patricia, the second oldest, married and living next door, was at the ready for whatever the captain might want or need. As for the captain’s oldest child, “J. D. was in early each evening,” Peets wrote. Everyone was well behaved.
Peets was nineteen then, working at Ingalls shipyard and living in Gulfport. She was her own woman, curious, nervous, and a touch apprehensive as she walked into the restaurant. She’d heard plenty about the captain, and figured him “demanding” in that way that keeps a ship sailing but doesn’t make for a particularly entertaining dinner companion. But she also sensed J. D. was a potentially serious proposition. “Besides,” she wrote, “we planned to sneak off after dinner and go for a moonlight sail.”
First, the captain chastised J. D. for being late (her own fault, Peets wrote). Next, he asked Peets what kind of name Peets was for a girl. Then he offered a sturdy handshake and invited her to sit down and have a beer. “Help yourself to some of this seafood, too,” he said. “It’s mighty damn good.”
To the question of her name, Peets noted it was her last name, and it was Welsh. The captain agreed he’d call her Peets, adding that his familyI also came from Wales. By the time dinner broke, she was enthralled by his stories of life at sea. She wanted to know more. Like how he landed in Pascagoula.
Hilda was how. The captain came and went from Mrs. Seymour’s boarding house without noticing that one of the daughters had taken an interest in him. Eventually, Hilda took matters into her own hands and slipped a note into a book he was reading. They were married in 1918. James Delaney Jr. (J. D.) was born in 1919 and would celebrate his first birthday in Cuba.
The Buffetts had set sail from Pascagoula to New Orleans aboard the Monfalcone,II a 372-foot, five-masted barkentine. At St. Andrews Dock, they picked up three million feet of lumber and set out for Havana. A storm delayed their arrival. By the time they made port, there was no money to pay for the lumber, and so the ship waited for a deal to be cut.
It was there, on the deck of the Monfalcone, where J. D. took his first unsteady steps—on his first birthday. Captain Buffett celebrated by hoisting the ship’s signal flags, and each skipper followed suit until all the flags on all the ships in Havana harbor were flying in celebration.
Soon the Chiquimula would be the ship to take the captain away and bring him home again. Sailing ships would give way to steamships, and then steam to diesel, and Captain James Buffett would master them all and carry licenses as proof. Life would loosen when he was gone, and tidy up when he returned. He was the moon controlling the tides. To his grandkids, he was the key to the universe. They called him Foo Foo.
With his father’s discipline and eye for detail, J. D. Buffett enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers on his twenty-second birthday and flew around the world with stops in Maine, Montana, Africa, and India. He and Peets married on May 6, 1942, and he was a master sergeant by the time he was discharged in February 1946—a month before his father guided the Olds into Mobile.
On December 25, 1946, J. D. and Peets welcomed their first child, James William Buffett. This was the same day W. C. Fields died. The same W. C. Fields who could juggle anything he could lift. W. C. Fields, who said, “ ’Twas a woman drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her.” W. C. Fields, who also said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.”
“I think this only goes to prove God does have a sense of humor,” Jimmy would write nearly fifty years later, marking his half-century milestone with a Christmas album named Christmas Island.
Buffett was born in Pascagoula, but he grew up in Mobile, thirty-six miles east on U.S. 90. They call Mobile the Mother of Mystics. It’s home to the country’s first carnival societies. It’s where each year the Order of Myths (the Double-O Ms), founded in 1867 (and first parading in 1868), punctuate Fat Tuesday with Folly chasing Death around a single broken Greek column atop a float pulled by mules and flanked by flambeaux men—their kerosene-fueled lanterns flickering dancing light about one last night of sin before Ash Wednesday’s salvation.
The Order of Myths qualifies as the oldest mystic society in America, and its founding the beginning of Mobile’s modern carnival era. But the first celebration dates to 1703—fifteen years before New Orleans began throwing its more famous bacchanal. Mardi Gras continued in Mobile until the Civil War put an end to the party. The story of carnival’s return stars a Confederate soldier named Joe Cain, who came home to find Mobile occupied by Union troops uninterested in letting the good times roll.
On Fat Tuesday, 1866, Cain decided it was finally time to have a little fun. He and some friends dressed as a Chickasaw Indian tribe, with Joe masked as the fictional Chief Slacabamarinico. He was said to be from Wragg Swamp, “which is west of midtown Mobile,” L. Craig Roberts wrote in Mardi Gras in Mobile, “now filled in and the site of Mobile’s major malls and shopping centers.” The group paraded through town—past Union troops—with Confederate uniforms under their costumes.
The next year, Cain and company rode again. This time in the company of a bass drum, on the side of which was written, “The Lost Cause Minstrels.” That was 1867. In 1868, Cain and his group paraded with the Double-O Ms, marching straight into history. Some of the story is even true.
Steve Joynt is the editor and publisher of Mobile Mask magazine. In the 2015 edition of his “Reveler’s Guide to Mardi Gras,” Joynt dug into the Joe Cain story. In a History Museum of Mobile file titled “Myths and Mardi Gras” he found a 298-word article with the byline of Joseph S. Cain. The date and publication are missing. But the story puts Joe in New Orleans in 1866, with Mobile’s Washington Fire Company No. 8. “Even in Joe’s account there are factual errors,” Joynt wrote. Washington No. 8 traveled to New Orleans in 1867. Whenever exactly Cain visited New Orleans, he did write the event was “so pleasurable that I determined on my return home, that Mobile should have its own Mardi Gras celebration . . .”
Joynt found more than enough evidence to suggest Joe Cain didn’t lead parades in 1866 or 1867. There’s no mention anywhere of revelry that would have been noticed and noted as it was in 1868 when Mobilians opening the Mobile Daily Register on Ash Wednesday would have read, “Yesterday was a new era in the mythical, mystical, poetic, romantic, and artistic history of Mobile.” Carnival had returned. Joe Cain and his Lost Cause Minstrels likely did lead the way, even if they were maybe only a few steps ahead of the Order of Myths, and his legend only grew.
In the Church Street Graveyard, cheap plastic beads decorate Joe’s gravestone, which reads: “Here Lies Old Joe Cain. The Heart and Soul of Mardi Gras in Mobile.” Joe Cain Day is celebrated each year on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday and features the Joe Cain Procession, also known as the People’s Parade. It’s preceded by Cain’s Merry Widows, a mystic society founded in 1974 whose members, veiled and dressed in black, wail and moan on their march to Joe’s grave before moving on to his former home for a toast or two (or many more).
“Down in Mobile they’re all crazy,” Eugene Walter wrote in his 1953 novel, The Untidy Pilgrim, about a man from central Alabama who goes to the coast—below the salt line—and settles among the offbeat. “Because the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts and musicians and Mobile is sweet lunacy’s county seat.”
Lunacy’s is but one flag Mobile’s flown. Spanish explorer Alonso Álvarez de Pineda, who charted most of the Gulf Coast, arrived in 1519. Twenty years later, Hernando de Soto followed in search of gold. In 1559, a third Spanish explorer set up shop and was blown away by a hurricane.
The French arrived in the late 1600s, setting up first at the western tip of Mobile Bay on what is now Dauphin Island. Finding bodies strewn about (likely a Native American burial ground washed out by the weather), they called it Massacre Island.
Brothers Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville established the first permanent residence in 1702, miles upriver from Mobile Bay. It must have appeared inviting, though an invitation accepted mostly by disease, natural disaster, and an angry Native population. Mobile moved to its current site in 1711. The French held the area until 1763, the English until 1780, and then the Spanish got their shot. The United States took over in 1813 when General James Wilkinson marched American troops from New Orleans and Mobile became part of the Mississippi Territory.
Mobile grew into the second-largest seaport on the Gulf Coast and is home to two wrecks more notable than the Chiquimula. In 1860, the Clotilde, thought to be the last slave ship to arrive from Africa, was abandoned nearby.
The U.S.S. Tecumseh, sunk by a Confederate mine in 1864, rests at the bottom of Mobile Bay. It was aboard the Tecumseh that Adm. David Farragut is said to have made famous the phrase, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
They say if you weren’t born in Mobile, you’ll never be a Mobilian. “Been here fifty years and I’ll never be a native,” says one local. “They used to say, ‘Unless you’re conceived under an azalea bush in Mobile, you’re not a Mobilian,’ ” says another. And inside the centuries-old mansions on Government Street, power and prestige are passed down through the generations and codified in carnival’s royal courts. And if you weren’t a native, and if you lived outside the power structure, you stood on the sidewalk and shouted yourself hoarse hoping for a box of Cracker Jacks to come flying from a float and then scrapped for the loot when it landed. Jimmy Buffett fought for the Cracker Jacks like everyone else.
J. D. and Peets got jobs at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company. J. D. worked his way from the estimating department to managing government contracts, a job that demanded an attention to detail that came naturally to the son of a sailor. Each job had a checklist, and each box on that list had better be checked. Slip up, miss something—anything—and maybe the next job goes to another company. Lose enough contracts and people lose jobs. Best to get things right the first time, and if you’re overseeing the entire operation, best to know the job inside out and from every angle.
“Our dad was, to say the least, ‘old school,’ ” Buffett wrote in the foreword to his sister Lucy’s cookbook, LuLu’s Kitchen: A Taste of the Gulf Coast Good Life. Old school is strict, but it isn’t without style. He recalled his father’s grill, a sturdy, after-hours project “constructed out of titanium plates designed as armor for warships and smuggled in pieces from the welding shop.” He loved to cook, a glass of Cutty Sark in his hand, and that grill, built to survive hurricanes, did just that and would follow him from house to house, from one side of Mobile Bay to the other, until Lucy one day put it to work in the kitchen of a restaurant.
Peets Buffett remained her own woman—a sledgehammer against glass ceilings and conventions. She was the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company’s first equal-employment coordinator. When she retired in 1979, she was the company’s first female director of industrial relations. After she retired, she went back to school. At the age of 64, she graduated cum laude from the University of South Alabama. If she loved one thing, it was learning. If she loved two things, they were learning and a good party.
When she died in September 2003, not six months after J. D. succumbed to Alzheimer’s, 60 Minutes’ Ed Bradley gave the eulogy. He recalled a wheelchair-bound Peets at the foot of a New Orleans staircase that led to a French Quarter soiree.
“Ed,” she said, “I’m going to trust you to get me up those stairs.”
As friends and family arrived at the funeral mass, they were handed a card. Peets’s eight-point guide to life (which Lucy reprinted in her cookbook):
1. Read often, even the classics.
2. Accept everyone for who they are, not what they do.
3. Be well traveled.
4. Learn to be a listener. Shhhh!
5. Live by the sea.
6. Listen to your spirit and find joy.
7. Education, like money, doesn’t make you happy or successful, but it sure helps.
8. Love AND family are the best things we have.
Peets was, Bradley said, a lot like Jimmy’s song “One Particular Harbour,” a warm, inviting, protecting presence where children play and “all are safe within.” Corcoran knew her well and calls her the ultimate rock-and-roll mom. “A lot of Jimmy’s sensibilities came from her,” he says. “She was just everybody’s coach and best friend.”
J. D. and Peets added two daughters, Loraine Marie (Laurie) and Lucy Anne (LuLu), to the family, and Jimmy endured a traditional Southern parochial education in Mobile, first at St. Ignatius and then at the McGill Institute, an all-boys school (until it merged with the Bishop Toolen High School for Girls in 1972, long after Jimmy’s shadow had become a ghost). He was an altar boy. He played trombone in the band. He was even a cheerleader, the perfect extracurricular for the relentlessly upbeat. He worked as a lifeguard. He kept his hair short and his smile wide. He idolized Huck Finn and Jim Hawkins. He could have been any kid, anywhere, starring in a middle-class American story. He was that kid, and might have followed that kid’s path into law or finance or some other middle-management outpost in a cubicle culture—but for the captain.
The captain and Hilda lived on Parsley Avenue in Pascagoula, and from their backyard, a path cut through brambles of reeds and blackberry bushes to the edge of Baptiste Bayou, where there was a little crab pier.
One day, the captain pulled a nautical chart of North and South America from a cedar chest in his workshop and led his grandson to the pier.
“Where are we?” the captain said.
“On the crab pier.”
“Look again,” the captain said, pointing to the chart.
Slowly, his point came into focus. They were at the beginning, of everything. Jimmy could trace a path with his finger down Baptiste Bayou to Mississippi Sound and past the barrier islands—the Cajun Bahamas—to the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the only thing standing between Jimmy and the world would be a lack of imagination or an overabundance of caution. At the bottom of the map, Captain Buffett had written two words: Start Here.
All he had to do was leap and the world would be his, and that turned out pretty well for Huck and Jim and Foo Foo, didn’t it?
In Buffett’s father’s later years, as Alzheimer’s left him “chasing false echoes,” as Buffett would write so poignantly in song, they’d travel together in search of a little truth and beauty and peace of mind. They took a trip to Nova Scotia to see again where it all began for the captain, and, therefore, where it all began for the kids.
“We were in Sydney and we had an aunt there and she took us to the house,” Buffett said onstage in Key West in April 2015. The house, the one the captain left behind.
Later, Buffett asked his dad what he thought of the day. “He just said, ‘Well, I’m just glad he jumped out of that window or we’d all have been goddamn coal miners,’ ” Buffett said. “So thanks for jumping out that window, Foo Foo.”
I It is possible Captain Buffett’s English ancestors include John Buffett, a sailor who, upon arriving in the Pitcairn Islands in 1823, married the daughter of one of the H.M.S. Bounty’s mutineers. This was a point of emphasis in a 2005 Wall Street Journal story about the long-suspected family connection between Jimmy and billionaire investor Warren Buffett. In 1983, the two traveled to Norfolk Island, between Australia and New Zealand in the Tasman Sea, to meet all the many descendants, “legitimate and otherwise,” of John. How many were actual descendants was tough to say. As Warren Buffett’s sister told the Journal, “There are plenty of miscellaneous Buffetts.”
II In 1923, the Monfalcone set out from New Orleans to Los Angeles, where she was to begin running lumber along the West Coast. Instead, she hit a storm three days out, had her masts ripped free, and barely made Panama. Eventually she was towed to Los Angeles. By 1925, steamships and market conditions made most sailing ships obsolete, and so, in 1928, she was purchased and refitted for duty as a gambling barge. Anchored in international waters off Los Angeles, the Monfalcone regularly ran afoul of the law, and occasionally, other gambling ships. In 1930, she caught fire with nearly three hundred passengers aboard and burned to the water line. A United Press story noted the orchestra “played lively music until all the passengers had been removed” to water taxis for the six-mile ride back to Seal Beach. What didn’t burn sank, including a safe containing $50,000.
