Chapter 6

Within these hospitable doors Horace might banquet better than he did with Nasidienus, and drink such wine as can only be found among the descendants of the ancestry who, improvident enough in all else, learnt the wisdom of bottling up choice old Bual and Sercial ere the demon of oidium had dried up their generous sources forever. To these must be added excellent bread, ingenious varieties of the _galette_, compounded now of rice and now of Indian meal, delicious butter and fruits, all good of their kind. And is there anything bitter rising up from the bottom of the social bowl? My black friends who attend on me are grave as Mussulman Khitmutgars. They are attired in liveries, and wear white cravats and Berlin gloves. At night when we retire, off they go to their outer darkness in the small settlement of negrohood, which is separated from our house by a wooden palisade. Their fidelity is undoubted. The house breathes an air of security. The doors and windows are unlocked. There is but one gun, a fowling-piece, on the premises. No planter hereabouts has any dread of his slaves. But I have seen, within the short time I have been in this part of the world, several dreadful accounts of murder and violence, in which masters suffered at the hands of their slaves. There is something suspicious in the constant, never-ending statement that "we are not afraid of our slaves." The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and watch-houses, and the police regulations, prove that strict supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary. My host is a kind man and a good master. If slaves are happy anywhere, they should be so with him.

These people are fed by their master. They have upward of half a pound per diem of fat pork, and corn in abundance. They rear poultry and sell their chickens and eggs to the house. They are clothed by their master. He keeps them in sickness as in health. Now and then there are gifts of tobacco and molasses for the deserving. There was little labor going on in the fields, for the rice has been just exerting itself to get its head above water. These fields yield plentifully; for the waters of the river are fat, and they are let in whenever the planter requires it, by means of floodgates and small canals, through which the flats can carry their loads of grain to the river for loading the steamers.

[Following our traveller in his peregrinations through the South, we next take him up on a sugar plantation on the Mississippi. The part of his journey in which we now find him is to be taken by boat.]

Charon pushed his skiff into the water--there was a good deal of rain in it--in shape of snuffer-dish, some ten feet long and a foot deep. I got in, and the conscious waters immediately began vigorously spurting through the cotton wadding wherewith the craft was calked. Had we got out into the stream we should have had a swim for it, and they do say the Mississippi is the most dangerous river for that healthful exercise in the known world.

"Why! deuce take you" (I said at least that, in my wrath), "don't you see the boat is leaky?"

"See it now for true, massa. Nobody able to tell dat till massa get in, tho'."

Another skiff proved to be stanch. I bade good-by to my friend, and sat down in my boat, which was soon forced along up-stream close to the bank, in order to get a good start across to the other side. The view, from my lonely position, was curious, but not at all picturesque. The landscape had disappeared at once. The world was bounded on both sides by a high bank, and was constituted by a broad river,--just as if one were sailing down an open sewer of enormous length and breadth. Above the bank rose, however, the tops of tall trees and the chimneys of sugar-houses. A row of a quarter of an hour brought us to the levee on the other side. I ascended the bank, and directly in front of me, across the road, appeared a carriage gate-way and wickets of wood, painted white, in a line of park palings of the same material, which extended up and down the road far as the eye could follow, and guarded wide-spread fields of maize and sugar-cane. An avenue of trees, with branches close set, drooping and overarching a walk paved with red brick, led to the house, the porch of which was just visible at the extremity of the lawn, with clustering flowers, rose, jasmine, and creepers clinging to the pillars supporting the veranda.

The proprietor, who had espied my approach, issued forth with a section of sable attendants in his rear, and gave me a hearty welcome. The house was larger and better than the residences even of the richest planters, though it was in need of some little repair, and had been built perhaps fifty years ago, in the old Irish fashion, who built well, ate well, drank well, and, finally, paid very well. The view from the belvedere was one of the most striking of its kind in the world. If an English agriculturist could see six thousand acres of the finest land in one field, unbroken by hedge or boundary, and covered with the most magnificent crops of tasselling Indian corn and sprouting sugar-cane, as level as a billiard-table, he would surely doubt his senses. But here is literally such a sight. Six thousand acres, better tilled than the finest patch in all the Lothians, green as Meath pastures, which can be cultivated for a hundred years to come without requiring manure, of depth practically unlimited, and yielding an annual profit on what is sold off it of at least twenty pounds an acre at the old prices and usual yield of sugar. Rising up in the midst of the verdure are the white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices and sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the distance. And who is the lord of all this fair domain? The proprietor of Houmas and Orange grove is a man, a self-made one, who has attained his apogee on the bright side of half a century, after twenty-five years of successful business.

When my eyes "uncurtained the early morning," I might have imagined myself in the magic garden of Cherry and Fair Star, so incessant and multifarious were the carols of the birds, which were the only happy colored people I saw in my Southern tour, notwithstanding the assurances of the many ingenious and candid gentlemen who attempted to prove to me that the palm of terrestrial felicity must be awarded to their negroes. As I stepped through my window upon the veranda, a sharp chirp called my attention to a mocking-bird perched upon a rose-bush beneath, whom my presence seemed to annoy to such a degree that I retreated behind my curtain, whence I observed her flight to a nest, cunningly hid in a creeping rose trailed around a neighboring column of the house, where she imparted a breakfast of spiders and grasshoppers to her gaping and clamorous offspring. While I was admiring the motherly grace of this melodious fly-catcher, a servant brought coffee, and announced that the horses were ready, and that I might have a three hours ride before breakfast.

If I regretted the absence of the English agriculturist when I beheld the six thousand acres of cane and sixteen hundred of maize unfolded from the belvedere the day previous, I longed for his presence still more when I saw those evidences of luxuriant fertility attained without the use of phosphates or guano. The rich Mississippi bottoms need no manure; a rotation of maize with cane affords them the necessary recuperative action. The cane of last year's plant is left in stubble, and renews its growth this spring under the title of _ratoons_. When the maize is in tassel, cow-peas are dropped between the rows, and when the lordly stalk, of which I measured many twelve or even fifteen feet in height, bearing three and sometimes four ears, is topped to admit the ripening sun, the pea-vine twines itself around the trunk with a profusion of leaf and tendril that supplies the planter with the most desirable fodder for his mules in "rolling-time," which is their season of trial. Besides this, the corn-blades are culled and cured. These are the best meals of the Southern race-horse, and constitute nutritious hay without dust....

As we ride through the wagon-roads,--of which there are not less than thirty miles in this confederation of four plantations held together by the purse and the life of our host,--the unwavering exactitude of the rows of cane, which run without deviation at right angles with the river down to the cane-brake, two miles off, proves that the negro would be a formidable rival in a ploughing-match. The cane has been "laid by;" that is, it requires no more labor, and will soon "lap," or close up, though the rows are seven feet apart. It feathers like a palm top: a stalk which was cut measured six feet, although from the ridges it was but waist-high. On dissecting it near the root we find five nascent joints not a quarter of an inch apart. In a few weeks more these will shoot up like a spy-glass pulled out to its focus....

In the rear of this great plantation there are eighteen thousand additional acres of cane-brake which are being slowly reclaimed.... We extended our ride into this jungle, on the borders of which, in the unfinished clearing, I saw plantations of "negro corn," the sable cultivators of which seem to have disregarded the symmetry practised in the fields of their master, who allows them from Saturday noon until Monday's cockcrow for the care of their private interests....

Corn, chicken, and eggs are, from time immemorial, the perquisites of the negro, who has the monopoly of the two last-named articles in all well-ordered Louisiana plantations. Indeed, the white man cannot compete with them in raising poultry, and our host was evidently delighted when one of his negroes, who had brought a dozen Muscovy ducks to the mansion, refused to sell them to him except for cash. "But, Louis, won't you trust me? Am I not good for three dollars?" "Good enough, massa; but dis nigger want de money to buy flour and coffee for him young family. Folks at Donaldsonville will trust massa,--won't trust nigger." The money was paid, and, as the negro left us, his master observed, with a sly, humorous twinkle, "That fellow sold forty dollars' worth of corn last year, and all of them feed their chickens with my corn, and sell their own."

AMONG FLORIDA ALLIGATORS.

S. C. CLARKE.

[To the several stories of hunting life which we have introduced into these pages we may add one description of the large game of the streams and lakes of Florida, the bone-clad alligator. With it is given a sketch of the Everglade region which may be of interest.]

Having organized an expedition to the great Lake Okechobee, some thirty miles due west from the Indian River Inlet, we hired a wagon and pair of mules to carry our tents and necessary baggage, but, no other animals being attainable, only those of us who were fit for a tramp of nearly a hundred miles could go. Colonel Vincent, Macleod and Herbert of the "Victoria," Captain Morris, Roberts, and myself, with the two pilots, Pecetti and Weldon, as guides, and Tom and a negro whom we picked up at Capron for cooks,--ten men in all, well-armed,--we were strong enough to insure respect from any roving party of Seminoles who might have been tempted to rob a weaker party. There are at this time, it is supposed, two or three hundred of these Indians in the region between Lake Okechobee and the Keys, descendants of a few Seminoles who concealed themselves in these inaccessible fastnesses when the greater part of their nation was sent West in 1842. They plant some corn on the islands of the Everglades, but live principally by the chase. Hitherto they have not been hostile to the whites, but as they increase in numbers faster than the white settlers, it is not impossible that they may reoccupy Southern Florida sooner or later, it being, in fact, a region suited only to the roving hunter....

The first day we made about twenty miles through a forest of yellow pine, such as stretches along the Southern coast from Virginia to Alabama, the trees standing thirty or forty feet apart, with little underbrush. Here and there we came upon a hummock of good soil, covered with the live-oak, magnolia, and cabbage-palm, all interlaced with vines and creepers, so as to form an almost impassable jungle. Now the road would lead into a wide savanna or meadow, waving with grass and browsed by herds of wild cattle and deer. In these meadows were set bright, mirror-like lakes, the abodes of water-fowl and wading birds, black bass, and the grim alligator, which in these solitudes, not being impressed with the fear of man, will hardly trouble himself to move out of the way. March in this region corresponding to May in the Middle States, the birds were in full spring song in every thicket,--the cardinal, the nonpareil, the mocking-bird, and our old familiar robin, whose cheerful note greets the traveller all over North America. Up and down the great pine trunks ran the red and gray squirrels, the little brown hare scudded through the palmetto scrub, and the turkey-buzzards floated above our heads in long easy circles.

So we fared on our way till about four P.M., when we made our camp on a clear branch or creek which issued from a lake near by, and while some of the party went to look for a deer, Captain Herbert and I took our rods and went up the creek towards the lake. Casting our spoons into a deep hole, we soon took a mess of bass and pike, which were very abundant and eager to be caught, when, as we were preparing to return to camp, we suddenly saw an alligator about eight feet long quietly stealing towards us. I seized a young pine-tree about as thick as my arm, and made for him. Not at all alarmed, the beast opened his jaws and advanced, hissing loudly. I brought down my club with full force upon his head, but it seemed to produce no impression; he still advanced as I retreated battering his skull.

"What is that brute's head made of?" inquired Herbert, as he came to my assistance with another club; and between us we managed to stun the hard-lived reptile, and left him on the ground.

The hunters brought in a young buck and two turkeys, so that we had a plentiful supper after our tramp....

About two o'clock that night we were disturbed by the mules, which had been staked out to graze hard by, and which retreated towards the camp to the end of their ropes, snorting with terror. The dogs rushed to the scene of disturbance, and appeared to have a fight with some animal which escaped in the woods. Our guides thought it was a panther, and at daylight they started, with Morris and myself and all the dogs, to hunt for it. The hounds soon hit the trail, which we followed into a cypress swamp about half a mile from the camp, in the midst of which they started a large panther, which, being hotly pressed by the hounds, treed in a big live-oak on the farther side of the swamp. When we came up we plainly saw the beast lying out on a branch which stretched horizontally from the trunk about twenty-five feet from the ground.

"Now," said Pecetti, "you two fire first, and if you don't kill, Weldon and I will be ready. Aim at the heart."

Morris and I fired, and the panther sprang from the tree among the dogs, which all piled on him at once. There was a confused mass of fur rolling on the ground, snarling, and snapping, for half a minute; then the panther broke loose, and was making off, when Weldon put half a dozen buckshot in his head, and he rolled over and over, so nearly dead that when the dogs mounted him again he could do no mischief. He had badly cut both the deer-hounds, however, which had been the first to seize him: Weldon's fox-hounds, having more experience with this sort of game, had kept clear of his claws. It was a fine male, measuring eight feet from the nose to the tip of the tail, and we took the skin for a trophy. The tenacity of life in these large cats is very great. One of our balls had penetrated the chest, and the other had broken the fore leg, but he was still able to shake off the dogs, and would probably have escaped but for Weldon's shot....

The next morning, March 13, we breakfasted upon a couple of gophers or land-tortoises which the men had found the day before in the pine-woods. These creatures are about eighteen inches long, and weigh twelve or fifteen pounds. A stew of the gopher and the terminal buds of the cabbage-palm is a favorite Florida dish. About noon we came suddenly upon the shore of the great lake Okechobee, which extends away to the west and south as far as the eye can reach: in fact, the shores are so low as to be invisible at any distance. This is by far the largest sheet of water in the State, being about forty miles long and thirty wide, but it is not deep. It contains on the western side several islands, which are occupied by the Seminoles. To the south and east of this lake are the Everglades, or Grassy Lakes, a region where land and water are mingled,--rivers, lakes, dry islands, and wet marshes all jumbled together in confusion, and extending over many hundred square miles, the chosen abode of the alligator, the gar-fish, the snapping-turtle, the moccasin snake, and other hideous and ferocious creatures more or less mythical, and recalling those earlier periods in the earth's history when the great monsters, the Ichthyosauri and the Plesiosauri, wallowed and crawled over the continents.

We made our camp in a grove near the lake, almost on the spot where Taylor fought his battle in 1838. As soon as this was done the pilots went in search of a tree to make canoes. They found not far off a large cypress which served, and by the next night they had completed two canoes, each about twelve feet long and eighteen inches wide, suitable for navigating the lake and able to carry four men each. In the mean time we had commenced hostilities against the alligators, which were here very large, bold, and numerous. They lay basking in the sun upon the beach in front of our camp, some of them fifteen feet long, and it became necessary to drive them away, lest they should devour our dogs, or even our mules, for some of these monsters looked able to do it. We opened fire upon them with repeating rifles, and if any Indians were within hearing they must have supposed that General Taylor had come back again, such was the rapidity of our fusillade. The brain of the alligator is small, and developed chiefly in the region of destructiveness; but after a dozen were killed and many more wounded, it seemed to dawn upon their perceptions that this part of the lake was unsafe, and they gradually took themselves away. I disapprove of killing animals for mere sport, and destroy not deliberately except when I wish to use them for food; but the alligator is the enemy of all living creatures, the tyrant of the waters, and the death of one saves the lives of hundreds of other animals. So blaze away at the 'gators, O ye Florida tourists!--you will not kill many of them, anyway: their shells are too thick,--but spare the pelicans, who are a harmless race of fisherfolk, like ourselves.

There were great numbers of large turtles in the lake, _Chelonura_ and _Trionyx_, from two to three feet long; gar-fish also, almost as big as the alligators. These mailed warriors, like the knights of old, exercise their prowess chiefly upon the defenceless multitudes of the fresh waters, but I have heard of half a large alligator being found in the stomach of a shark at a river mouth. In spite of all these destroyers, the lake swarmed with fish. Pecetti could generally get enough black bass, pike, or perch at one or two casts of his net to feed our whole party if at any time it happened that they would not bite at the hook.

A curious feature of the lake and river scenery is the floating island. This is principally formed of the water-lettuce, or _Pistia_, an aquatic plant with long roots which descend to the bottom. These beds of _Pistia_ become matted together with grass and weeds, so as to be thick enough to bear the weight of small animals, and even sometimes of man. In strong winds these islands break loose from their anchorage and float away for miles, till they bring up in some quiet bay, where the plants again take root. Lake Okechobee contains many of these floating meadows, which are a great resort for ducks and water-fowl. In fact, one would think that all the ducks, divers, herons, curlews, ibises, cranes, and waders generally had assembled here in mass-meeting. Among them are those rare and beautiful species, the scarlet ibis, roseate spoonbill, and black-necked stilt. The ducks, being birds of passage, spending their summers up North, are acquainted with men and their arts, and are comparatively shy, but the native birds are very tame and can easily be approached.

I was awakened the next morning at sunrise by sounds from the woods as of a gang of ship-carpenters or calkers at work. It was the great ivory-billed woodpecker (_Picus principalis_) tearing off the bark and probing the dead trees for insects and grubs, and making a noise which could plainly be heard half a mile in the still morning air. Another sound of a different character now made itself heard from the swamps. It was something like the bellowing of bulls, and proceeded from the old male alligators calling to their mates. This indicates the coming of spring, the breeding-season of these creatures. William Bartram, who travelled in East Florida a hundred years ago, gives a thrilling account of the terrible combats which he witnessed in the St. John's River between these rival champions, who did not hesitate to attack him in his boat.

The next day, March 15, being in want of meat, Colonel Vincent, Dr. Macleod, Morris, and I started for a hunt, taking Pecetti for guide, since nothing is easier than to get lost in this wilderness. We kept up the lake shore to the north on the sandy beach, towards the mouth of the Kissimmee River, which here enters the lake. This is a deep and rapid stream, which drains the great wet prairies to the north, and in the rainy season must carry a large volume of water. Like the lake, it has great patches of water-lettuce, which in some places almost bridge the channel. Much of its course is through swamps, though in some places the pine barrens and live-oak hummocks approach its banks. It contains immense quantities of fish,--pike, bass, and perch.

In the first hummock which we reached the colonel shot a buck, and I got two young turkeys from a flock. As we emerged from this hummock the guide spied a herd of wild cattle feeding on the prairie about half a mile off, and by his direction we crept through the scrub as far as it afforded cover, and then trusted to the high grass for concealment till we got within a hundred yards of the herd, which consisted of about twenty cows and calves, with a couple of bulls. The doctor and colonel fired together and brought down a heifer. A big bull immediately charged towards the smoke and report of the guns, for he could not see us. On he came, head down and tail erect, bellowing with rage,--a magnificent animal of brindled color, with an immensely heavy neck and shoulder, like a bison, but without the mane. When within fifty yards I fired at his head: the ball struck him full in the forehead and staggered him, but he shook his head and kept straight for us. I gave him another shot, which struck him in the chest and turned him, when Pecetti gave him sixteen buckshot in the shoulder from his big double-barrel, which brought him down, dying bravely in defence of his family.

"His carcass is too old and tough to be of any good," said the guide, "but I'll take off his hide: the heifer will give us meat enough."