Isle of Caprice — The Island That Disappeared

In 1926, three partners opened a casino resort on a shifting sandbar twelve miles off Biloxi — the Isle of Caprice, a place where bootleg liquor flowed openly and the rules of Mississippi didn't reach. Tour boats ferried thousands across the Sound to dance and gamble on an island that stood partly outside U.S. territorial waters. Bootleggers had already been using the fresh water; the resort made it famous. The sandbar had come and gone for decades. Shoals between Ship Island and Horn Island occasionally broke the surface, appearing on maps in 1848, then submerging, then returning. Around the turn of the century, several smaller shoals grew together into one larger island, charted by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1917. By the time the cabanas hotel opened, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had already earned its nickname — "America's Riviera" — a warm alternative to Florida where illegal gambling operated openly at certain resorts. The Isle of Caprice was the offshore version of what the coast had been doing on land for years. Natural erosion worked continuously. A hurricane struck. By 1932, the island was abandoned. Today it lies a few feet underwater. NOAA marks two nautical passes where it stood: Little Dog Keys and Dog Keys. No ruins. No marker. Just the name, which a Biloxi casino chain borrowed decades later when gaming became legal in Harrison and Hancock counties. Susan Hunt — granddaughter of Isle of Caprice owner Walter Henry "Skeet" Hunt — keeps the taxes paid on the sunken island, in case luck turns their way again. The Mississippi Gulf Coast has always been a place where the land itself gambles. The Isle of Caprice lost.