The gulf was formed almost 200 million years ago, when tectonic plates separated and crashed, creating a “super basin” and trapping organic matter in pockets beneath the land, which became the crucible for massive reserves of oil and gas.
“Much of the remaining oil lies buried beneath ancient salt layers, just recently illuminated by modern seismic imaging,” according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
That wasn’t what first attracted humans to the gulf. It was home to busy ports and trade routes for the Mayan and Aztec empires, a source of food and salt, which was valuable in trade. It was named for the Mexica, what the Aztecs called themselves in the Nahuatl language, according to linguist T.S. Denison’s 1913 book.
Spanish explorers tried to erase the Mexica when they first arrived and put this gem on Europe’s conquering to-do list. They showed its vast, curving shore on a map they presented to the continent in the 16th century and called it “Golfo de Nueva España.”
The name clearly didn’t take, although the conqueror’s use of the gulf when traveling back and forth to Spain made it colloquially known as the “Spanish sea,” according to historian Robert S. Weddle’s book of the same name.
About 100 years after the Spanish floated the “New Spain” label, French Jesuits drew the gulf on their map in 1672, calling it “Golphe da Mexique.”
The French colonizers made their stand in Mexique more than 150 years later, blockading Mexico’s vibrant ports during the Pastry War. Yes, French aggression in Mexico involved croissants.
The Guerre des Pâtisseries was sparked in 1838 after a pastry chef in Mexico complained to King Louis-Philippe that the widespread civil unrest following Mexico’s independence from Spain included the ransacking of his bakery.
The gulf was the road to riches, the quickest route for luxury goods: gold, silver, cotton, sugar, spices, enslaved people. And that brought the pirates.
“An American brig from Madeira for N. Orleans, is reported to have been taken in the Gulf of Mexico, and BURNT by a FRENCH PRIVATEER, probably the same privateer which lately fired on a U.S. vessel,” the Portland Gazette reported on Sept. 9, 1811.
News reports of pirating — part of the marine lists printed in local newspapers — were like the maritime crime blotters of the early 1800s, logging the ships, the deaths, the cargo, the locations of the attacks.
Congress finally got fed up and passed a bill in 1819 called “An Act to protect the commerce of the United States, and punish the crime of piracy,” and sent armed cutters into the Gulf of Mexico.