THE BAY OF THE MOTHER OF GOD

The Bay of the Mother of God I arrived in Baltimore in 1973 via New York City and Connecticut, where I’d lived most of my life. In 1974, when I sailed from Middle River on the Western Shore of the Bay to Fairlee Creek, my first port of call on the Eastern Shore, I discovered the Chesapeake Bay. In 1570, a lone Spanish vessel sailed into the Chesapeake Bay. The Spanish, perhaps the first Europeans to have seen it, named the Bay Bahia de Madre de Dios, or the Bay of the Mother of God. That name, Bay of the Mother of God, suggests to me that what they saw and experienced on their arrival held spiritual significance for them. Brother Carrera, a religious sailing with the Spanish expedition wrote of the Bay that it was “a great and beautiful port . . . in it there are many deep water ports, each better than the next.” As the Blessed Mother Mary of Catholicism had been to the Spanish faithful, the Bay, too, may have also felt welcoming and hospitable while offering refuge and safety to the travelers. The following are essays accompanied by my photographs. They describe some of the discoveries I made living and sailing around the Chesapeake Bay. The stories are true, many are playful, and all are reflective. My discoveries in themselves were unremarkable. However, I felt as I lived them out that they had a spiritual character to them, the kind that assumes that the total of an experience equals more than the sum of its parts. My discoveries around the Bay were “each better than the next.”