Outing Magazine Volume LII
April, 1908 – September, 1908
Yachting In A Canoe
By A. W. Dimock
Illustrated by Julian A. Dimock
The hurricane month had come. We had laid up our cruising boat and were foot-loose–with four weeks to spare.
“Why not go down the coast in the canoe?” suggested the camera-man.
“Without a guide?” I asked.
“Sure!” he replied. “What do we want of a trained nurse?”
“Supplies?” I inquired.
“Ellis’s equipment–‘matches, gun, and a handful of salt,” said he.
Three hours later we were paddling down the Peace River, with Punta Gorda low on the horizon behind us. We had outfitted with the aid of a stereotyped schedule of a hundred cruising essentials, using it as a list of the things which we didn’t require.
A blanket, mosquito bar, and the usual toilet things for each of us were rolled in a piece of waterproofed canvas on which we knelt or sat as we paddled the canoe.
The one essential of every cruise was met by a fifty-pound lard can filled with water; the needs of commissary were assured by a cheap shotgun, fly rod, hooks and trolling line; a tin plate, cup, fork and spoon for each of us with a saucepan, corn meal and coffee made for comfort; while a lunch basket of bread, cheese and fruit added luxury to our sendoff. Our provisions would have been accounted inadequate for an afternoon picnic, but it served us for a month of camp and canoe in the wilderness of South Florida.
The money cost of the entire outfit within the canoe, excepting camera fixings but including the clothing we wore, was well within twenty-five dollars, and the expenses of the month that followed added barely twenty per cent. to this sum.
Two hours of paddling had carried us well within the mouth of the Miakka River, when black clouds, rising from nowhere in particular, sent down upon us a squall of wind and rain. We kept under the lee of the river bank, but quite ignored the pluvial portion of the performance.
Darkness overtook us where the meadows meet the pine woods, and we slept the sleep of the just on a grassy bed beneath the stars. Our supper was hurried and cold, of bread and cheese, but the coffee of breakfast, although made in a saucepan, was delicious to us as the finished product of the civilized chef to the epicure of the yacht.
For nine hours we paddled easily against the current of the river, resting five minutes during each half-hour. In avoiding the swift, midstream current we paddled among rushes and tall ferns; past broad meadows; around the borders of palmetto-dotted islands; besides banks of myrtle and scrub palmetto; and beneath the shade of great live oaks covered with orchids and streaming with Spanish moss. From every bend in the river birds flew up, and I secured four ducks at a cost of half a dozen cartridges.
In the middle of the afternoon we camped on a high bank of sand where our dinner, consisting of a brace of ducks broiled on a bed of coals and an ash cake baked in a jacket of leaves, would have seduced an anchorite. It was the feat of mosquitoes and not their presence that persuaded us to stretch our bars for the night, but I was glad of it later, when in the darkness I heard the soft step of a panther not far from my cheese-cloth barricade. These creatures, which are plentiful in South Florida, are as cowardly as they are powerful, and I have often known them to prowl around a camp at night, but never heard of one attacking a camper.
I was awakened in the morning by a redbird’s reveille, sounded joyously from the top of a near-by tree, and putting aside my bar watched the birth of a new day, until the tops of the palmettoes were blazing in the light of the rising sun. For an hour the camera-man and I reveled in a sense of freedom never before realized during the cruise of a year. Always had been the inharmonious presence of an alien spirit. The irritating conventions of civilized life have their analogues in the wilderness and the ideas of guides, boatmen and cooks are bounded by phantom walls of precedent.
The creatures of the wild were all about us and unafraid. A little brown rabbit nibbled at a husk of pineapple that I had thrown aside; a tree rat showed himself among the leaves of the branches above us; while a grave old ‘gator floated on the stream that flowed past.
Fat grasshoppers, four inches long, garbed in garments of many colors, climbed stalks of wild cane; birds, singly and in flocks, flew over and around us; from every side glad cries of creatures of forest and field came to our ears. We dawdled for another hour, ate the cheese that was left and some wild grapes that we gathered; and lastly, built a fire and made coffee, finishing our breakfast later with a duck that we broiled over the fire.
It was about the middle of the forenoon–we carried no watches–when the spirit moved us to embark and we began an exploration of the upper Miakka which made strenuous the working hours of the rest of the day. Sometimes our course lay between banks ten feet high, canopied by branches of great trees tangled with ropes of vine and long festoons of gray moss, where the current was so swift that to make a mile an hour demanded desperate paddling.
Birds were plentiful and alligators abounded. Soon after starting I shot the four birds that our commissary called for, and when later a wild turkey flew across the stream a hundred feet ahead of the canoe, I remembered that the game laws protected him and also that my gun was empty.
The spirit of exploration continued in possession of us and we devoted another day of much toil to getting nearer the source of the stream. After a night of oblivion, on a bed of Spanish moss, we paddled, rested and floated with the current to the mouth of the Miakka in a single day.
The next morning the tide helped and a wind from the east sped us on, so that we reached Charlotte Harbor early in the day. As we were passing a supply boat that lay beside a fish ranch near Mondongo Key, I was hailed by name and recognized an old acquaintance in the captain of the craft. When I asked for a cool drink he filled our water can with fifty pounds of ice. We tied a thick layer of moss around the can and for three days we reveled in a luxury quite unknown to dwellers within the pale of civilization. As we took up our paddles the captain tossed four fat pompano into the canoe, and when I asked if I could pay him, replied:
“If you’re lookin’ for trouble, you can.”
I seldom passed Mondongo without stopping, and on this occasion we bought of its occupant a peck of sweet potatoes, a small bunch of bananas and received the customary invitation to help ourselves to all the limes we could carry. There was a lack of legitimate pockets in the few clothes I had on. But I recalled the example of a Florida girl of my acquaintance, and when I embarked in the canoe a bushel of limes went with me and the bulge in my shirt-waist was aldermanic.
An hour’s sharp paddling brought us to Boca Grande, the Big Pass, and we camped on the beach outside; ate broiled pompano, roasted potatoes, baked bananas and drank iced limeade–without sugar. No mosquito bars were required that night and we lay on the beach just beyond the sweep of the surf and were soothed to sleep by the rhythmic crash of the breaking waves.
The wind increased in the night to a fully fledged nor’wester. We pulled our canvasses over us to keep off the rain of spray, and we pitied the folks in yachts and battleships. The crescendo roar of each incoming wave uplifted my spirts and the visions of a faraway boyhood came back to me, freed from the later disenchantments of a too material civilization.
The never-ending procession of white-topped billows, the rushing wind, the salt spray beating on my face and the stars shining between the tops of towering palm trees beside me, were merely the materialized dreams of childhood. The postman, the messenger boy with the yellow envelope, and the bell of the telephone seemed less real to me than the lamp of Aladdin, and the automobile more of a myth than the enchanted horse.
I was awakened at dawn by the voice of the camera-man quoting: “Alone, alone, all alone,” and as I realized our freedom from care with no one near to criticize our conduct, I wondered if ever again I could bear to commune with Nature with a hired guide beside me.
We had planned to paddle up the coast to Gasparilla Pass in the morning, but the waves were big and were breaking in the white windrows that extended far toward the horizon. If need had been, we could have weathered them, but they were a bit too big to be tackled for fun, and the danger to camera and plates would have been considerable. The canoe was of little weight and we carried it across the point of beach at Boca Grande to the harbor inside and paddled along the lee of Gasparilla Island to Big Gasparilla Pass.
For half a mile a manatee swam near us and we dipped our paddles with exceeding care, lest we alarm him, until rising beside the canoe with friendly sniff, he nearly swamped us with a parting wave of his broad tail. At night the wind died out, but in the morning the sea was heavy and we made the day one of rest, visiting in the forenoon a fish camp that had been established between Big and Little Gasparilla Passes. More pompano were give us, but when we offered to pay the answer was: “We catch mullet to sell and pompano to eat.”
We played on the beach all afternoon, sometimes casting a fly in the quiet water inside the pass at a hurrying Spanish mackerel, cavalli, ladyfish or sea trout that was coming in with the tide in search of its supper; sitting and musing on a worm-eaten barnacle-covered copper-bolted piece of timber that might have been washed up from the wreck of some old galleon; watching the crabs, which, scurrying along close to the beach, were often driven ashore by their active enemies in the water; then wandering slowly at the edge of the surf on the beach outside, we fathered multicolored shells of pompano with their living tiny tenants; traced home the trails of pretty panamas; chased to their holes the shadowy, almost transparent sand crabs that skittered along the beach; and lying prone on the sand in the shadow of a palm, dreamed dreams that pulsated with the roar of the surf in our ears.
At daylight the next morning we paddled out of the pass and down the coast past Boca Grande where an east wind, meeting heavy rollers and a strong tide, gave us for a mile more excitement that we really cared for. Big loggerheads rose beside the canoe, dolphins played around us and once we turned out of our road that we might not disturb a great devilfish, which, lying on the surface where the waves were biggest, was being “rocked in the cradle of the deep.”
At Captiva Pass we were tempted by a bunch of cavalli, which were tossing the water into spray as they devoured a school of minnows. A big cavalli would have kept my light fly rod busy for the rest of the day, so I tied a hunk of twine to the hook on a trolling line and the camera-man paddled us into the mêlée. In an instant the lure was seized by a cavalli so large that when, half an hour later, I landed him on the beach my hands were cut and burned and I was quite as exhausted as my captive.
The jackfish is not a conventional food fish but a big one has a thick layer of red flesh which looks and tastes much like very tender beef. Tarpon were plentiful in the pass, but I only cared to catch them for the camera-man who was too busy with his paddle and keeping the canoe trimmed, to think of using the tools of his trade in the cranky craft and the rough water.
We were scheduled to reach Punta Rassa that night, but dawdled over dinner too long. When I suggested getting under way the camera-man demurred, said he didn’t want to move and added that the big jackfish steak he had eaten made him feel as if he was lined with satin and he wanted to prolong the enjoyment of it.
The lack of sweetness in our iced limeade reminded me of a bee man who lived a few miles north of Captiva Pass, and after camping on the beach for the night we paddled to his ranch. The bee man was walking barefoot among his fifty hives when we found him and was pawing over bunches of bees as fearlessly as a Bostonian would have handled beans. His enthusiasm overcame our shyness as we walked with him among the hives, yet he watched us closely, warned us a little and advise us more; and we heeded his warning and attended strictly to his advice. Then we sat in his shack, talked bees and drank metheglin, a beverage which I had trailed vainly in spirit from Shakespeare’s time but had never before encountered in the flesh. When we left we carried with us a bottle of honey and a box of comb and envied the Gods neither their ambrosia nor their nectar.
Three hours’ paddling brought us to Sanibel Island within six miles of Punta Rassa at a point once known as Oyster Creek. The name had disappeared, but the oysters remained and we roasted enough for our supper. The water was full of sea trout and I took in a score with the fly rod in the early morning. We breakfasted on their sounds, which were large, gelatinous and made a more delicious dish that the cod’s tongues and sounds by which the old New Englander swears.
A heavy rain squall, about noon, drove us ashore near Sanibel Light and we camped on the outside beach where we waded out in the warm surf to escape the chill of rain, wind-driven through garments of gauze. In the afternoon we wandered up the beach and made collections of shells that we hadn’t room to carry.
On the following day we atoned for past laziness by paddling twenty-five miles and camping in the great hyacinth garden of the Caloosahatchie River, some miles above Fort Myers. Myers was avoided as being too conventional and calling for more clothes than we were wearing. It suggested newspapers and soft drinks, tempted us with candy and cakes and invited us to invest in tinned and bottled luxuries that were subversive of the spirit of our excursion. Our camp that night was in a little cove on the north bank of the river that was free from flowers, but a change of wind before morning hemmed us in with a hundred acres of the tentacled bulbs of the water hyacinth. Forcing our way through the mass was difficult work, for it was imponderable as a bubble to pressure or thrust of paddle, but clung to the canoe like the shirt of Nessus to the son of Jupiter.
We ascended the Orange River a few miles, through hyacinths that often extended from bank to bank and found the residents waging a war of extermination against the plague, by forming a cordon of boats across the stream, hoping to drive and drag the whole tangled, floating mass down to its mouth.
Our canoe rested low in the water, as we descended the Caloosahatchie River, because of the grape fruit and oranges that had been contributed to our commissary. It was afternoon when we arrived at Punta Rassa, but as the breeze favored we started down the coast, arriving at dusk at Carlos Pass, the entrance to Estere Bay. The olden-time charm of the bay had departed for us and we preferred camping on the beach to entering it. It had become the home of the Koreshan Unity, a band of fanatics and imbeciles, under the hypnotic control of an apostle of undiluted bosh.
Our itinerary was interfered with on the following day by a couple of heavy squalls, the fear of which drove us on the beach, although only one of them reached us. While ashore we roasted a few bunches of oysters which we gathered from mangrove trees and broiled some mangrove snappers which I took with the fly rod.
Marco had been our home for many months at a time, and we spent twenty-four hours there, for (italics) auld lang syne, helping ourselfs to sugar apples, sapadilloes, alligator pears and cocoanuts, until our canoe looked like a fruit freighter. When the usual afternoon storm came on we watched the gathering clouds from the protection of the piazza, our only concession to convention during the cruise.
From Marco to Coon Key the usual route is inside, among the keys, but we chose to follow the beach and our next stop was at Caxambas where one and a half million pineapples were growing on a single plantation–when we arrived. Theses figures had been reduced when we left.
The weather got troublesome and from Caxambas to Coon Key we spent half our time getting on the beach and behind trees and began to wonder what would be the effect on our health if our clothes happened to get dry. The tide was beginning to pour out of West Pass when we reached it at noon, so we camped on the pretty beach at its mouth, and roasted clams which we took from a near-by clam bar. Fortunately we unloaded the canoe before going for the clams, since we capsized the craft while getting aboard. The camera-man utilized the afternoon by photographing some pelicans and an osprey’s nest.
We went up the Pass with a rush in the morning and paddled among the pretty keys of Chokoloskee Bay to Everglade, which we had often made our cruising headquarters. One can here get a ripe guavas from the trees 366 days of the year, if it happens to be leap year. A small boy resident, who knew of my weakness for guavas and sugar cane, nearly swamped the canoe with baskets full of the fruit and stalks of cane twelve feet long.
From Everglade our course lay among the Ten Thousand Islands with no convenient beaches at hand, but with the prospect good of having to hunt camping ground and evict moccasins after dark; wherefore I added a lantern and a bottle of kerosene to our equipment. For four days we paddled amid a wilderness of keys without knowing, or seeking to know, where we were.
At times we were in rivers, deep and swift, where fish abounded and dolphins played about the canoe. At other times broad shallow bays spread out, from which grass-choked, currentless waterways led us, by routes that were crooked and long, back to the starting point. Yet in no hour was there lack of life and interest. At every turn in our course herons flew up from the water, while snake birds dropped from the trees above; turtles, alligators and fish of many varieties disturbed the water; moccasins made lively the bits of soil that rose above the surface, while night herons croaked about our camps and owls hooted at us by night.
It was hard to find ground solid enough for camp or campfire and the wood of the red mangrove was nearly as combustible as asbestos, but we managed to broil a brace of ducks each day and bake an occasional hoe cake. For the rest, the half of a rich, creamy avocado pear as a salad and a couple of pineapples for dessert sufficed to keep us going.
One afternoon we failed to find a place to camp, although we prolonged the search by lantern light well into the night, and were finally compelled to pile enough branches in a shallow place to keep us from drowning while we tried to sleep. I slept on, or in, my canvas which proved its waterproof quality by holding the barrel of water that poured over it soon after I laid down for the night.
In the morning the camera-man rolled out of his bed into the water–to dry himself, he said–and we rustled enough fire to broil a bird which we ate while we sat on a branch in the water. We gathered cocoa plums and wild grapes; watched the ways of birds, reptiles and fish; and laughed at the deluge of the daily rain squall until the morning of our fifth day in the unknown wilderness when the camera-man gave me a shock by producing an empty water can and quoting in tones worthy of the Ancient Mariner:
“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
The one danger of the country in which we were picnicking had befallen us, and it was time to hustle. There was fresh water to the east of us–an ocean of it, the Everglades–but no road to it that we knew. West of us lay the Gulf of Mexico, which we could probably find in a day, after which a few hours would give us the water we wanted. We couldn’t wait so long. We were thirsty already. Somewhere south of us were big rivers which ran from the Glades to the Gulf and south we headed our canoe.
Always our road twisted, often it turned us back and we had to stop frequently to fight the tendency, born of imagined thirst, to paddle with a fierceness that would have run into a panic or ended in exhaustion. After some twenty miles of paddling, which scarcely advanced us half that distance, we found a stream with land on its borders and the wooded banks of a river. Its current flowed to the west, but we strove against it, keeping to the eddies and the banks until the river broke up into creeks and the water came fresh and sweet from the Everglades. We drank and we drank, we filled ourselves and our can with the beautiful water; and we camped joyfully upon a high bank which overlooked the lovely river and stretched bars that we didn’t need between a palmetto and a fig tree, under a canopy of wide-spreading, fruit-laden wild grape vine.
The head of the river was unfamiliar to us and as we explored, the creeks subdivided and one after another ended in tangles which shut out the canoe and another day had departed when we entered the open water of the Everglades. For two days we zigzagged among the little sloughs of clearwater that spider-web the southern Everglades, working always to the south. We dodged strands of heavy saw-grass, paddled over submerged meadows covered with white water lilies and followed the faint trail of Indian canoes until we struck the head water of Harney River and slept, once more, on our camping ground among the lime trees
While the camera-man and I were enjoying the peace of the wilderness after supper, eating limes and chewing sugar cane, it occurred to us to figure up how much of our month had gone. It ended our dream of peace. Two days only of our month were left, for on the morning of the third day we must take the mail boat up the coast to connect with the train which we were to take for the North.
Half an hour after daylight in the morning we were paddling swiftly down the grass-choked river; past the almost deserted rookery, the otter slides, and the pools where the tarpon play; through the swift, crooked creek and the larger stream it leads to; across Tussock Bay, with its picturesque keys and Indian camping ground; and by way of lower Harney River to the Gulf of Mexico. Near Seminole Point, we made our final camp in a cruise of a month, without guide, without a compass, and without a suggestion of actual peril from the beginning to the end.
