Reviewed by: Barrier to the Bays: The Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and Their Pass by Mary Jo O'Rear Christopher Morris Barrier to the Bays: The Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and Their Pass. By Mary Jo O'Rear. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press: 2022. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This slender volume breezes through four centuries of history along the Texas Coastal Bend, from early Spanish encounters with Karankawa peoples to President Franklin Roosevelt's catching a prize tarpon. The focus of the book is on the Port Aransas area, Mustang and St. Joseph Isles, water- and wind-sculpted mounds of sand and shells that have marked the Texas Gulf Coast for the last 3,000 years, and the natural passes, shifting bars, and shallow bays around them. The region sustains a diversity of plant and animal life despite significant human-induced alterations, most significantly, the construction of Aransas Channel. Adaptation and contention rather than chronology structure this history. The title, Barrier to the Bays, has a double meaning. The islands bar tumultuous gulf seas from entering the placid waters of what the Spanish called the Laguna Madre and the organisms that thrive therein. The islands also bar ship access to the mainland, much to the frustration of battleship captains and merchant mariners. When General Zachary Taylor planned to use the Texas Coast as a staging area for war with Mexico, he discovered that getting soldiers from New Orleans to St. Joseph Island was easy. Getting from St. Joseph to Corpus Christi Bay was another matter. As O'Rear explains, "Herein lay one of the greatest drawbacks of the waterways of the coast: they silted" (37). Ocean-going schooners could not safely navigate the bay, Taylor's cartographers could not reliably chart its depths, and sailors found the passes "onerous" (39). What was a drawback for generals was a godsend for oysters, shrimp, and sea turtles. But this is no simple history of humans versus the sea. The islands barred destructive winds and waves from coastal settlements. They also prevented waste produced by sheltered towns and ranches from flowing out to sea, allowing it to collect in the bays where "estuaries began to resemble rancid smorgasbords" for sea life (79). The more sewage in the waters, the bigger and more numerous were the turtles and the more the [End Page 607] canning industry thrived. The 1880s saw more than 400,000 pounds of sea turtles processed by Aransas Bay canneries. Barrier islands that sheltered ecologies and the industrious people who lived off them also restricted access to global markets. All those cans of turtle meat had to go somewhere, and by the turn of the century dredging and infrastructural development were in full swing. By 1909, two massive rock jetties reached from the pass between Mustang and St. Joseph Islands nearly a mile and a half into the gulf. The current forced between them scoured the channel bottom to a depth of twenty feet, providing safe passage for ships between the Texas mainland and the Gulf of Mexico. By linking the Laguna Madre to the Gulf, the pass expanded opportunities for commercial fishers and for the service and tourist industries of Port Aransas, which profited from crowds of sport fishers. Fishing guide Barney Farley was a local celebrity by the time he helped President Roosevelt land his big fish a mile or two beyond the jetties. Aransas Pass brought cold gulf water into warm estuaries, altered patterns of wind and water erosion, and sent sediment but also larvae and planktonâfish foodâin new directions. By the mid-twentieth century in this altered habitat, Portuguese man-of-wars, starfish, pelicans, and numerous other creatures thrived. Sunken shipwrecks became reefs for gamefish. However, all but gone were the sea turtles, and the shrimp fishery began to decline, both victims of habitat change, industrial development, and over-fishing. A practical understanding of gain and loss inspires present-day conservation efforts among many Coastal Bend residents. Readers should not permit O'Rear's cheery prose and unfortunate penchant for using sentence fragments as topic sentences and chapter openings to diminish the importance of an argument well...