Long before the soldiers and the surveyors, the working economy of Tampa Bay faced south, toward Havana. For generations, Cuban fishing crews came to these waters each season to net and cure the mullet that schooled in the flats, and their camps, the ranchos, were the bay's first real industry and its deepest tie to the Caribbean. Mullet Key's earliest known buildings were their huts. This is the bay's other history: not conquest or defense, but the patient, salt-stained business of making a living from the water.
The estuaries of Tampa Bay teemed with mullet, and in Catholic Cuba there was a steady market for salted, dried fish, especially through Lent and the many fast days of the church calendar. Cuban fishermen sailed north to the Gulf coast of Florida to meet that demand, establishing seasonal camps where they could net the fish in huge numbers and salt and dry the catch for the voyage back to Havana. What began as seasonal visits hardened, over the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, into established ranchos, fishing settlements with permanent buildings, smoking and salting operations, and, in time, year-round residents and families.
The ranchos were among the most genuinely multicultural communities on the early Gulf coast. Their crews and residents blended Spanish and Cuban fishermen with Native American men and women, and with people of African descent, into a distinctive frontier society that lived in the loosely governed space between empires, answerable in practice to neither Spain nor, later, the United States. Native women often married into the rancho families, and the children grew up between cultures and languages. The British surveyor Bernard Romans recorded Spanish fishing huts on Mullet Key in the 1770s, the earliest known human-built structures on the island, a small, salt-cured trace of this world.
By the early nineteenth century, the ranchos had grown into substantial operations, the largest and best documented being that of the Baltimore captain William Bunce, who ran a major fishing rancho on the bay in the 1830s, employing a diverse workforce and shipping salted fish to Cuba. Bunce's enterprise was the high-water mark of the rancho world, a genuine commercial fishery tying Tampa Bay directly into the Havana economy, operating on these shores a full lifetime before the first gun was emplaced on Mullet Key.
That world was deliberately destroyed. During the Second Seminole War, American military authorities came to view the polyglot fishing ranchos with deep suspicion, believing, with some reason, that they traded with and supplied the Seminoles, and distrusting their mixed Native and Black membership and their independence from American control. In 1840, federal forces moved against the ranchos, and Bunce's camp and others were burned, their people scattered. The destruction of the ranchos was part of the larger removal that emptied the bay of its older, mixed, Caribbean-facing society to clear the way for American settlement. The fishing world that had named the bay's first buildings and fed Havana for generations was swept off the map, leaving little behind but a few place names and the memory carried in this archive.