Florida and the Game Water-Birds of the Atlantic Coast and the Lakes of the United States With a full account of the sporting along our sea-shores and inland waters, and remarks on breech-loaders and hammerless guns

THE INLAND PASSAGE.

Florida--so named by its discoverers from the abundance, beauty and fragrance of its flowers. The Land of Flowers--what a beautiful sentiment. Alas, it was never called anything of the sort. Land happening to be first seen by the brave and sturdy warrior but not imaginative linguist, Juan Ponce de Leon, on Palm Sunday, his discovery was called, with due and Catholic reverence, after the day and not after any abundance of flowers, which were probably not abundant on the sand spit where he planted his intrusive feet. But no matter about the origin of the term, the epithet is more than justified, and the Peninsular State is not only glorious in the endless beauty and variety of its flowers--till in good old English it might be termed one huge nosegay--but it is magnificent in the grandeur and originality of its foliage. The jessamine climbs above the deep swamps and lights up their darkness with its yellow stars; the magnolia towers in the open upland a pyramid of vestal splendor; the cabbage palmetto waves its huge fan-shaped leaves, seven feet long, like great green hands, and the moss hangs and sways and covers the bare limbs with its ragged clothing.

To the rough, practical Northern mind, Florida is a land of dreams, a strange country full of surprises, an intangible sort of a place, where at first nothing is believed to be real and where finally everything is considered to be possible. When the visitor first arrives he cannot be convinced that the cows feed under water; before he leaves he is willing to concede that alligators may live on chestnuts. The animals and birds are as queer and unnatural as the herbage, or as a climate which furnishes strawberries, green peas, shad, and roses at Christmas. There is the Limpkin, the pursuit of which reminds one of hunting the Snark. You are in continual terror of catching the Boojum. It is a bird about the size of a fish-hawk, but it roars like a lion and screeches like a wild-cat, although it occasionally whistles like a canary. It has a bill like that of a curlew, adapted to probing in the sand, and yet it sits on trees as though it were a woodpecker. It is conversational and talks to you in a friendly way during daytime, but at night it harrows up your soul and makes your blood run cold with the fearful noises it utters. If you hear any charming note or awful sound, any pretty song or terrifying scream, and ask a native Floridian, with pleased or trembling tongue, “What is that?” he will calmly answer, “That? that is a Limpkin.” There are no dangerous animals in Florida, only a few of Eve’s old enemies, and the sportsman is safer in the woods at night under the moss-covered trees and on his moss-constructed mattress than in his bed in the family mansion on Fifth avenue. If he hears any unearthly noises, any soul-curdling shrieks, he can turn to sleep again with the comfortable assurance “that it is only a Limpkin.”

To the sportsman it is needless to say that Florida, when properly investigated, is a Paradise. Birds and fish and game are only too plentiful, till it has become a land of shameful slaughter. The brute with a gun slays the less brutish animal for the mere pleasure of murder when he cannot get, much less use, what he kills, till on most of the pleasure steamers shooting has been prohibited; while the idiot with the rod fills his boat with splendid fish that rot in the hot sun and have to be thrown back, putrefying, into the water from which his undisciplined passion hauled them. Sportsman should not come to this land of promise and performance unless they can control their instincts, for fear that they should degenerate into mere killers. In truth, the excess of abundance takes away the keener zest of sport, which is largely due to the difficulties that surround success. But for the ordinary inhabitant of the rugged North, the quaintness of this border land of the equator has an immense charm, while to the invalid the pure, dry, warm air of both winter and summer brings balm and health. The feeble and sickly, especially the consumptive, should seek Florida, for to them it offers the fabled springs of perennial youth, which Ponce de Leon sought more coarsely in vain. To the seeker after amusement, to the man and woman of leisure, who wish to improve as well as enjoy themselves, it is a very wonderland of delight. It has a store of novelties which are absolutely exhaustless, and tracts of interesting country which, while perfectly accessible, have never even been explored.

To enjoy Florida, however, one must seek it aright. If the visitor follows the beaten track, he will see the beaten things--well beaten by many vulgar footsteps. If he takes the steamers and lives at the hotels, he will make quick trips and have good, accommodations. If he wants originality he must pursue original methods. There are many ways of reaching this floral El Dorado--the ocean steamer will carry you to Savannah, whence the steamboat will transport you through byways and inside cuts to Jacksonville, or the railroad will drag and hurl you through dust and dirt by day and night at headlong pace from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf. But if you want to enjoy Florida, if you want to go where no man has gone, and see what no eye has seen, and handle what no hand has touched, then go there in a yacht--in a small yacht, just as small and of as light draft of water as will accommodate comfortably the party, that must be composed of individuals sufficiently accustomed to one another to be sure they can live together for three months without quarrelling. Then, indeed, will you learn what Florida is, will possess its charms in close embrace and have experiences and pleasures never to be forgotten and not otherwise to be obtained. How is this to be done, you may ask, and the purpose of this chapter is to tell you exactly how.

A wealthy magnate may go in a big yacht to Florida, give good dinners aboard and live in grandeur and luxury, and he will see about as much--not quite--as if he had left his yacht at home; or the hasty-plate-of-soup man may take a little steam launch and stave her in on the first snag or oyster rock he runs her against. But if the traveller and his friends hire or buy a light-draught sailing vessel, they will require more time, but they can go almost everywhere and see absolutely everything. It was just such a vessel that I had built for use in the shoal Great South Bay of Long Island--a sharpie, to give its nautical appellation--of sixty feet length and fifteen beam, with two state-rooms, a cabin having four comfortable berths and over six feet head-room, and a cuddy for the men and for cooking, although we had an auxiliary cook stove in the cabin. This vessel was intended to carry six passengers and two men; but boats of seventeen feet length and a catamaran have safely made the passage to the St. John’s River and are there now, so that a much smaller craft would do. The advantage of the sharpie style of construction was that the yacht only drew two feet of water, and as I proposed to run entirely by chart, and not to use the services of a pilot, this was an inestimable advantage. We could have braved the battle and the breeze of the Atlantic and gone outside all the way, but those who know most of the ocean care least to have to do with it unless equipped on the most thorough basis to encounter its buffets. As an old sea captain said to me:--“When I go to sea I want to go in a steamer, and the biggest and strongest steamer at that.” Moreover, the inside route is much the more interesting; there is nothing very novel about the sea but the danger of it, whereas the bays, creeks, canals and rivers furnish a fresh and continually changing panorama. There is a frequent encounter with strange people, with vessels of queer rigs and builds, an alternation of scenery, the arrival at and departure from cities, the chance to occasionally kill a bird or catch a mess of fish--something new happening every day. At sea there is the ocean--a great deal of ocean--and nothing else.

There exists a complete inside route from New York to the St. John’s River, with the exception of about a hundred miles south of Beaufort, North Carolina, and on this stretch there are many accessible inlets only a few miles apart, so that no vessel need be caught out overnight or can fail to make a safe harbor in case of necessity. The charts are nearly complete and enable a person of ordinary intelligence, in a vessel drawing not over four feet of water, to be entirely independent of pilots. The lighter the draught, however, the better, and I should not advise the use of any boat which requires more than three feet to float in, two feet being greatly preferable.

Do not start for the South before the first day of November unless you wish to encounter a multiplicity, variety and intensity of fever that would be the delight of the medical profession. Until frost comes, there is waiting for you a choice between fever and ague, intermittent, remittent, typhoid, putrid, break-bone, yellow, and d’engue fevers, each of which, when you have it, seems a little worse than all the others until you have one of them also, an event which is very likely to happen, when you discover that your first conclusions were erroneous. Then before you start get good and ready. Look over your fishing tackle; be sure you have cartridges enough, and load them all with powder, but not shot, so as to avoid unpleasant explosions. Use your five hundred pounds of shot for ballast.

Lay in a tub of Northern butter and some white potatoes, but do not imagine you are going to a land of barbarism. You can get better hams, better hard-tack, and as good and cheap canned goods in Norfolk as you can in New York. Fresh eggs are to be had everywhere, turkeys and chickens are fair, and are sold in market cleaned, and if Southern beef is tough it has a peculiar game flavor which is very agreeable. Take in a good supply of coal; use it for ballast if there is no other place to stow it, for you may get frozen in during a cold spell, and will surely want plenty of extraneous warmth before you reach the “Sunny South.” Then when you are ready, sail up Raritan Bay, get a tow through the Raritan and Delaware Bay Canal, and even across to Delaware City if you please, and so across to the Chesapeake Bay, where your journey may be said really to commence, for thenceforth you will have to rely on your sails and your brains, your motive power and your charts. There are very thorough and complete charts of the Chesapeake, six in number, carrying you the entire way to Norfolk and insuring you a good and safe harbor whenever you need it. Do not forget that this is a big sheet of water, and that you are on a pleasure trip, and will be much more comfortable if at anchor during the night. Besides, there is time enough; you have all winter before you, as you cannot get back until spring if you wanted to, now that Jack Frost is about shutting the gates. From Norfolk you can take a tow through the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal or not, as you please; much better not if you happen to have a good northerly wind, as there is only one lock, and you can make the distance more pleasantly and safely under sail. If your vessel draws less than three feet, you leave the canal when you reach North Landing River, of which there is a chart, and you go down through Currituck Sound by Van Slyck’s Landing, and thence through the Narrows. Beyond that for some distance, as the chart says, you “can only carry three feet of water, and that with difficulty.” If your vessel is of greater draught, you must take the extension of the canal which carries you to North River, from which point there is plenty of water all the way. You can get a condensed chart from the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal Company, which will give you a general idea of the route from Norfolk to Smithville, and which will be found very useful. But the Government charts of Pamlico Sound, which were completed in the fall of 1883, should by all means be taken also, as they are simply invaluable in case of storm and the necessity of seeking harbor unexpectedly. Government chart No. 40 or 140 (both numbers are used) will give you Currituck Sound from just above Van Slyck’s, and also North River from the mouth of the canal, all that is necessary of Albemarle Sound, Croatan and Roanoke Sounds, either of which you may take, and the magnetic courses and distances to steer by as far south as Roanoke Marshes Light. The post office at Van Slyck’s Landing is called Poplar Branch Post Office, Currituck County, N. C., and you can get your letters and coarse supplies there, but no bread. The next good harbor is Kitty Hawk, where there is also a store and post office. If you go through Roanoke Sound, remember that below Shallowbag Bay the channel runs close along shore, closer than it seems on the chart. You will have to feel your way carefully across below Broad Creek. There is plenty of water if you find it, but it is not easy to find. From the southerly end of Roanoke Island to Long Shoal Light the course is south by west; from Roanoke Marshes Light it is south, one half west. You can go a mile inside of this light, but not further, as the shoal beyond has not a foot of water on it. Just north of this light is Stumpy Point Bay, where you can make a good harbor, carrying clear inside four feet of water. From Long Shoal Light the course is south-west to a buoy on Bluff Shoal; but as there is seven feet of water on the shoal, accuracy is not necessary, and the same course continued will take you near Royal Shoal, which is easily made out, as there are two lights on it. From this the course is south by west to Harbor Island light, at the entrance of Core Sound. This light is abandoned and is falling down, but during the day the building is visible a long distance. If you can get a free wind, you can make the run from Long Shoal to Harbor Island in a day, provided you get under way early, which every sensible yachtsman is careful to do. If not, you must hug the main shore and look out, as there are many shoals and no tide to help you off if you get aground. The waters are salt and only moved by the wind; and as Pamlico Sound is a miniature ocean and gets up a big sea, it is well to be careful. If you are caught near Royal Shoal, unless you are acquainted with the channels, steer for the beach, where you can get holding ground if not much of a harbor. The charts of Pamlico Sound are Nos. 42, 43, and 44.