Landmark · St. Simons Island, GA
Igbo Landing
In May 1803, roughly seventy-five captive Igbo people aboard a slave schooner rose up off the Georgia coast, seized the vessel, drowned their captors, and ran it aground in the tidal marsh of Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island. Rather than submit to enslavement on the Couper and Spalding plantations, they walked together into the dark water, said to be chanting in their own tongue, "The water brought us, the water will take us away." The Gullah Geechee carried the story down through generations, and it bloomed into the legend of the Flying Africans who rose up and flew home. Locals still hold the brackish creek and its reed-choked marshes as hallowed and haunted ground. On nights of a full moon, it is said, a faint chant drifts across the water, the sound of the brave marching home as they did more than two centuries ago.
📍 Dunbar Creek, St. Simons Island, GA 31522, St. Simons Island, GA · Get directions