Gualquini. As it was in mid August 2015

A while back I was poking around looking for stuff about St Simons and stumbled upon Arredondo’s Map. Dated 1737, it is one of the earliest known that shows any detail of the island itself and surrounding area. I am fascinated with it, and have been trying to piece together a picture of Antonio Arredondo ever since. Sent back up from Havana in June 1742 to assist in the Spanish expedition against Georgia, he was a trained engineer, mapmaker, strategist, and did a lot of intelligence gathering for the Crown. You can read his journal of the infamous assault on St Simons that same year.

Arredondo made several maps, some with long-winded titles. This one is called, in English, “Chart for the Entrance of Gualquini, River of St. Simon, Lying in the North Lat. 31 degrees”. The legend at the top right is in Spanish and hard to read in places, but a translation appears along with the map on page 71 of the archived journal linked above. The first thing that jumped out at me was the name the Spanish used for Jekyll Island- “Isla de las Ballenas” or “Island of Whales”. The Right Whale calving ground off the coast here must have been unique enough to have earned the name. Up around where the SSI lighthouse is now, the map shows a small cluster of houses with palm thatched roofs, some earthworks and a small fort with the number and size of the cannons. This was called Gualquini, which started out as an indian village. In the early 1600’s a Spanish mission was built in the vicinity, then Oglethorpe and the English came and built a fort. Still later came the cotton plantations, and finally, then, folks from Baxley started showing up. It has been downhill since.

A couple of roads are shown, very roughly where parts of Demere, Military Trail, and King’s Way roads are now. The map legend notes a “lookout, made of logs”, that appears to have been about where Railroad Avenue was, before Hurricane Donna lopped off that section of the island. The Spanish journals mention the erosion of the beach even way back then.

Down about at what is now Gascoigne bluff and Epworth, it shows a couple of fresh water sources “good, but turbid” and un horno , or oven (I wonder who built it?). From there over to the south, there is a careening ground -a hard, fairly level, sandy beach that dries out at low tide, where boats of all stripes would, and still do, clean and paint their bottoms. There was, and still is, good deep water all the way around the south end of the island, and up the river to the town of Frederica. There was no causeway or bridge then, of course, so a lookout at Frederica could see all the way down the river, and across the sound to Isla de las Ballenas or Jekyll, as Oglethorpe named it.

The Spanish referred to passable inlets as barras. The current bar channel between SSI and Jekyll is referred to as Barra Gualquini, and the inlet into St Andrews sound below Jekyll was called Barra de las Ballenas. Anyway, I think the map is very cool. You can download the file from Hargrett Library’s site and print it out for your living room.

Anyone with any more info on Antonio Arredondo, please e-mail me.

Edit: The indian name is also spelled as Guadalquini here