Folklore a part of our Foundation

Folklore and legends have been a part of man's history from the beginning and many have morphed and woven themselves into the foundation of who we are.

Folktales permeate our everyday lives, often without our realization. Consider Friday the 13th or Halloween as just two quick examples. In the telling of the history of the Laguna Madre area, we would do future generations a disservice not to record the charming folktales and legends that have been birthed locally.

The oldest area legends and folktales found their roots in our Spanish Colonial past. Many of these may actually have foundations in the stories told by the Native Americans of this area and were then blended into the folklore of the Spanish settlers in the mid to late 1700s.

Most of the folklore of Hispanic origin involves the locals' everyday jobs such as the fishermen or the aguadores, and most are adaptations of previous folklore.

Then in the mid 1800s, as Anglo Americans began to arrive, the legends and folklore of their past were adopted into the blended culture, making a mix of local folktales that became part of our collective heritage.

Among the oldest of the fishermen legends is the story of the pelicans. The old fishermen used to tell children that when a fisherman perished at sea, his soul would live on in the form of a pelican. The good fisherman would return as a white pelican and the bad ones as brown pelicans. When a fisherman failed to return from his daily work and was found drowned, the first pelican spotted gave a window into the fisherman's soul.

A spotted pelican was often thought of as a soul in limbo or purgatory and required much prayer and ritual to become white.

Another old fisherman's yarn speaks of the spots on the tail of the redfish, always a favorite catch in the Lower Laguna Madre. The old fisherman said that those spots were the fingerprints of Jesus, left behind when he fed the masses loaves and fishes.

The legend of the White Horse seems to date back locally to the time of pirate Capt. Jean Lafitte. In the 1830s, area pioneer William Neale recorded that the people along the bay spoke of a white horse seen periodically among the dunes of Padre Island that guarded the spot where the old pirate buried his loot. This folk belief is widespread throughout Hispanic America and was adapted to fit our history by using the pirate.

The Angel of the Lighthouse legend dates to the mid 1800s, naturally after the construction of the Point Isabel Lighthouse. It speaks of a young woman who was pledged in marriage to a local fisherman who was lost at sea. The lovely young maiden was so distraught that she climbed the lighthouse to look for her lover and slipped and fell to her death. The legend states that her spirit stayed in the lighthouse and when storms threatened the lives of the local fishermen, she would safely guide them back to port.

Interestingly, two years ago during a near miss of a Category 1 hurricane, my wife and I went out to see the storm's fury. As we walked past the lighthouse, there she was! As the rain-charged wind wrapped up the walls of the lighthouse, it would build two spinning vortexes that would advance up the structure during hard gusts. The light from the cupola above illuminated these misty spirals forming two angelic wings.

Each renewed gust would form another such wispy wing, giving the impression that the wings were flying. The water-charged wind gave the light a definite halo effect, causing the lighthouse to look like a giant angel looking out to sea. It does not require much imagination to figure the origin of this fascinating area legend, and I feel privileged to have witnessed the phenomena.

The last local folktale we will discuss here is the tale of the ghost ship of the Brazos de Santiago Pass.

From time to time on still, foggy days, visiting ships would report seeing a ghostly vessel sailing through the pass. Often, the ship would silently sail by with her sails full in a steady breeze, even though the wind was calm. Many said that the ghost ship was of an antiquated type, such as a Spanish galleon; perhaps the ghostly remains of the ill-fated vessels that deposited 300 Spaniards on Padre's sandy shores in 1554.

Over the course of the first 150 years of the port of Brazos Santiago, the ghost ship was reportedly sighted by several different vessels and became a permanent part of our area's fascinating folklore and history here at the Point.

Rod Bates writes about the history of the Laguna Madre area for Island Breeze. To experience more history, visit Bates at the Rio Bravo Gallery at 107 E. Tarnava St., a half block south of the Lighthouse Square in Port Isabel.