Ship Island sits twelve miles off the coast of Gulfport, and for three centuries it has been the front door to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Iberville anchored here in 1699 before founding the first French settlement on the mainland. Fort Massachusetts was built on the island in the 1850s and held by the Union throughout the Civil War — one of the staging points for the capture of New Orleans. Confederate prisoners of war were held here. The island was a quarantine station for yellow fever ships. Camille split it in two in 1969, creating a gap that the Army Corps of Engineers finally closed with a massive sand restoration in 2023. Today Ship Island is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, accessible only by ferry from Gulfport. The fort is intact, the beaches are undeveloped, and the water is the clearest you will find on the Mississippi coast. Every layer of Gulf Coast history touched this island, and it looks almost exactly the way Iberville found it.