Before the soldiers, before the surveyors' fort was ever built, the working life of these islands belonged to the fishermen, and the most prominent of them was a Baltimore sea captain named William Bunce. In the 1830s he ran the largest commercial enterprise in all of present-day Pinellas County, a hard, polyglot, prosperous fishing rancho on Tampa Bay, and it was burned to nothing in the violence of the Second Seminole War. His name survives on the chart, attached to the pass at the south edge of the park.
For generations, Cuban fishing crews had come north each season to net the mullet that schooled in Tampa Bay's flats, salting and curing the catch in beach camps for sale in the Havana market. By the early nineteenth century these seasonal camps had grown into established ranchos, year-round fishing settlements with permanent buildings, mixed crews, and families. They were genuinely multicultural communities, blending Spanish, Cuban, Native American, and Black people into the distinctive frontier society of the Gulf coast, and they operated in the loosely governed borderland between Spanish, and then American, authority.
Captain William Bunce, a sea captain out of Baltimore and a Key West merchant, established his rancho at the mouth of the Manatee River in 1834 and shipped smoked and preserved fish to markets in Havana and beyond. It was no small camp. By the accounts gathered by the historian Dorothy Dodd, roughly one hundred and fifty people, Seminoles, runaway slaves, Cubans, and Spanish fishermen, worked at Bunce's operation, giving his rancho a larger population than the small village of Tampa across the bay. It was the single largest, and probably the only real, commercial enterprise in the region in its day, and it tied the bay directly into the Caribbean economy. Bunce was a man of standing, too: he was elected a delegate from Hillsborough County, which then included all of present-day Pinellas, to the St. Joseph Constitutional Convention, and on 11 January 1839 he signed Florida's first Constitution.
That world was destroyed by the Second Seminole War. The fishing ranchos fell under deep suspicion from American military authorities at nearby Fort Brooke, and General Thomas Jesup came to believe that Bunce was advising the Seminoles to resist removal and that his camp sheltered and supplied them. Pressed to surrender many of his workers to removal, Bunce refused. In 1837 a federal expedition from Fort Brooke destroyed his Manatee River rancho. Undeterred, Bunce moved to the mangrove keys at the mouth of the bay and set up a new rancho near the pass that now bears his name. The military did its work again: in October 1840 federal gunboats burned his new camp, said to number some forty buildings, along with his boats and his nets. The destruction was part of the larger removal that swept the bay's older, mixed frontier society west with the Seminoles, even people who claimed to be Spanish, to clear the coast for American settlement.
Bunce did not long outlive his rancho. His exact date of death is unknown, but by 1842 General Jesup was referring to him as “the late Capt. Bunce of Tampa Bay.” The precise site of his final camp is not perfectly settled in the record either; the accounts gathered by Dodd point to Palm Island, now part of Tierra Verde, while other tellings place a Bunce village on Mullet Key itself, a question a careful researcher could still pursue through the state's site files. What is certain is the memorial the map has kept: Bunce's Pass, the channel at the south end of Mullet Key, carries his name to this day. Every boat that runs that pass crosses the memory of a Baltimore captain and the lost fishing world he stood for, a thriving frontier on these islands a full lifetime before the first gun was emplaced.