Wood—logs, lumber, staves, ship masts, and spars—was Mobile’s most common export to Cuba. The island’s good timber was long gone, and its sugar planters and shipbuilders desperately needed forest products. For years, a self-sustaining trade loop operated. Cuban planters imported firewood to stoke their mills, lumber to erect their buildings, staves to make barrels for raw sugar, and shooks (slats) to fashion crates for refined sugar. The loaded barrels and crates then returned to Mobile, which sent back more staves and shooks. On the same winter day that the Belle made Mobile with the coffee, tobacco, and fruit, the schooner Augusta cleared the bay channel for Havana with 1,333 barrel staves, and the brig Guadalette with 2,500. The shipments steadily increased as the century progressed. In 1853–54, Mobile sent 180 finished masts and spars and more than two million board feet of sawn lumber to
PRINT BY PIERRE TOUSSAINT FREDERIC MIALHE, COURTESY DAVID RUMSEY MAP COLLECTION
seaport noted the presence of Cuban oranges on the store shelves, “at six cents a piece … besides bananas and cocoa nuts in abundance.” Some 15 years later, Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review enthused, “Mobile is more accessible from the Gulf than New Orleans. She is nearer Havana than either New Orleans or Charleston, and is better situated than either of those cities for supplying the great [Mississippi] valley with West Indian products.” And so the trade flowed back and forth in steamships, schooners, sloops, brigs, and barques. Shortly after Christmas 1841, for example, the schooner Belle tacked into Mobile Bay loaded with 931 sacks of coffee, 150,000 cigars, and numerous boxes of fruit out of Havana. Not surprisingly, Mobilians especially loved the tobacco, and several cigar shops downtown advertised Cuban smokes “for cash only.”
View of Havana Harbor, c. 1847–48.
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Havana, more than any other foreign port. By 1860, Havana was Mobile’s top lumber trading partner. All of that traffic meant numerous Mobilians visited the Cuban capital. When not working, they sampled its exotic pleasures. These included the renowned Havana Lottery and Cuban women. One Alabama sailor recalled his pre-Civil War attempts at winning the lottery. He and his mates quit unloading lumber at 2 pm when the Spanish customs officials knocked off early due to the heat. “We all invested money in the Royal Lottery,” he wrote, “but drew no prizes. The tickets were sold on the street by vendors, who received a commission on their sales.” On one trip he attended the drawing “in a building like a theatre.” The prizes started at $250,000 and finished at $100. “A remarkable audience was in the seats: rich and poor, black and white, and of all nationalities.” Excitement and interest