XIX The Fringe of Florida
At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?
Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course. Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.
Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”
A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to Savannah. |St. Augustine.| At Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and excessively uninteresting; though here, as almost everywhere else on the east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.
I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon, and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St. Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for this; but it passed my divining.
Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate. |The American Riviera.| (I heard the Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.
Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami. The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low, board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say, acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of some turpentine company.
Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.
An Ocean-going Railroad.
A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way terminus at Knight’s Key.
For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied, no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?
On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; but there are patches of beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft schooner shining in the sun.
Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangely contorted and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle, and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine forest) I saw not a single human habitation.
Soon, however, we begin to catch occasional glimpses of the open sea—iridescent and exquisite—through gaps in the outer barrier of reefs. And now there are one or two houses to be seen. We stop at what seems to be a station. Some one in the car calls to a negro navvy on the line: “Say, what’s the name of this town?” Negro: “Illago, sa’.” Passenger: “How many people live here?” Negro: “None at all, sa’.”
Under the Palm-trees.
Now we are practically out at sea, crossing miles of blue water between the islands, sometimes on limestone (or coral?) causeways, sometimes on long bridges of wooden trestles. At one point there lies, about half a mile from the line, a little island, perhaps a mile long, entirely covered with palm-trees, and with a single wooden house upon it—suggesting an atoll of the Southern Seas.
At a place called Long Key we stopped for lunch. Long Key is a settlement of some twenty one-storey wooden houses, all raised on piles about four feet from the ground, and with every doorway and window screened with wire gauze. The whole place is embowered in palms; and under the palms, twenty yards from the green sea, a wooden counter had been set up, with the word “lunch,” rudely painted on a shingle, displayed above it. Two white women served behind the counter and dispensed coffee (the milk poured through a gimlet hole in a tin), sandwiches, coco-nut milk, and little packages of coco-nut candy. I had never before tasted coco-nut milk and am not eager to quaff it again. It suggests nothing so much as weak eau sucrée. The frugal meal, in its romantic surroundings, was pleasant enough; but I could wish that the wire-gauze screens had been run round the lunch-counter. It was a “quick lunch”—only fifteen minutes allowed—yet when I returned to the train I found my neck quite rough with mosquito-bites.
From Long Key we presently ran out on an immense viaduct, some two miles long, I should say, of concrete arches. |Asia and Africa.| Then again across jungle-covered islands and some smaller lagoons. Here signs of life grew more frequent, for we were approaching the point where the extension of the line is actively proceeding. The labourers seem to be for the most part accommodated in huge house-boats, which we saw here and there moored in convenient creeks and channels. The majority, I think, are negroes, with a considerable intermixture of “Dagos” and some East Indian coolies.
At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured, muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere, unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes; but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.
Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.