Greek Sponge Boats in Florida

This is the story of the cultural crisis of the Kaliope, a sponge boat operating out of the Greek sponge fishing community at Tarpon Springs, Florida. Data for this study was gathered during a summer field trip in 1963, and in two weeks which were spent at sea with the craft. Essentially, we are dealing here with the social structure of the boat, especially the division of labor and the main principle of organization which I have chosen to call specialization sets. The Kaliope is one of thirteen diving boats now operating out of Tarpon Springs, Florida. It is part of a fleet which today represents a remnant of a fleet of sponging craft once numbering eighty-five; a fleet which represented an extension in a borrowed home of two millenia of Greek sponge fishing in the islands of the Aegean; and a fleet which now flounders in its new home, as it does in Greece, against the reef of technological progress, the synthetic sponge. The development of the sponge fishing industry in Tarpon Springs began when one John K. Cheyney, a Philadelphia banker with large land interests in the then new town on the Gulf coast of Florida, decided that sponging would be a good way to put Tarpon Springs on the map, economically. He had noticed the spearing and hooking of sponges going on around Key West and thought that Tarpon Springs, with its proximity to northern commercial routes and outlets, and its naturally protected river harbor would be ideal for the creation of a sponge fishing center to supplant the Key West center. His efforts failed, however, for fully nine years until the outbreak of the SpanishAmerican War at which time the boats around the Keys and in the Caribbean began working out of Tarpon as a precaution against meeting the Spanish war fleet. The first Greek in Tarpon Springs, John Cocoris, arrived in 1896 as a sponge buyer for a firm of sponge merchants in New

Archaeology · Art · Sponge · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Geology · History · Paleontology

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