At the end of that week, sailing to Key West, I had my first look at Lost Man’s River, said to be the wild heart of this whole wilderness. In Shark River, farther south, huge dark mangroves rose to eighty and a hundred feet in an unbroken wall: the boy happened to know these were the largest in the world. From Shark River, the mangrove coast continued to Cape Sable, the long white beach where Juan Ponce de Leуn and his conquistadors went ashore in heavy armor and clanked inland in wet and heavy heat to conquer the salt flats and marl scrub and brown brackish reach of a dead bay.
From Cape Sable our course led offshore along the western edge of great pale banks of sand, with turquoise sand channels and emerald keys on the port side and a thousand-mile blue reach of Gulf to starboard. Erskine pointed when he heard the puff of tarpon as one of these mighty silver fishes leapt clear of the sea: farther offshore, giant black manta rays leapt, too, crashing down in explosions of white water.
In late afternoon the spars of an armada of great ships rose slowly from the sunny mists in the southern distance. Cayo Hueso or Bone Key. Early in the nineteenth century, Bone Key, now called Key West, had been built up as a naval base to suppress piracy on the high seas, but these days Key West pirates lived on shore as ship’s chandlers, salvagers, and lawyers.
On a southwest wind, the Veatlis passed the Northwest Light and tacked into the channel. Who would have imagined such a roadstead as the Key West Bight, so far from the mainland at the end of its long archipelago of small salt keys? Or so many masts, so many small craft, so much shout and bustle? New York merchantmen and Havana schooners mixed with old sailing craft from the Cayman Islands, fetching live green turtle to the water pens near Schooner Wharf for delivery to the turtle-canning factory down the shore, Erskine explained. Tacking and luffing, servicing the ships, were whole flotillas of “smackee” sloops with baggy Bahamian mainsails, dropping their canvas as they slipped up alongside-reef fishermen with live fish in the sloop’s well, hawking snappers to the Key West Market and king mackerel to the Havana traders. The sponges drying in open yards ashore were shipped to New York on the Mallory Line, which supplied and victualed this city.
Having unloaded our cordwood cargo into horse-drawn carts backed down into the shallows, we went ashore. Key West is a port city, with eighteen thousand immigrants and refugees of every color-eighteen times as many human beings as could be found on the entire southwest coast, all the way north two hundred miles to Tampa Bay. The island is seven miles by three, and the town itself, adjoining the old fort, is built on natural lime-stone rock. The white shell streets are potholed, narrow, with broken sidewalks and stagnant rain puddles and small listless mosquitoes. Coco palms lean over the green-shuttered white houses in shady yards of bright flowers and tropical trees. Sweet-blossomed citrus, banyans, date palms, almonds and acacias, tamarind and sapodilla-so an old lady instructed me when I inquired about which trees might do well on a likely plantation farther north in Chatham River.
While in Key West, I paid a call on the Monroe County sheriff, Richard Knight, in regard to a certain notorious fugitive depicted on the Wanted notice in the post office. The murderer Will Raymond, I advised him, could be found right up the coast in Chatham River. The sheriff knew this very well and was sorry to be reminded of it. He sighed as he bit off his cigar. My report would oblige him to send out a posse when, like most lawmen, enjoying the modest graft of elected office, he much preferred to defer these thorny matters.
Taking the chair the sheriff had not offered, I said I sure hated to cause trouble for Mr. Raymond, but as a law-abiding citizen, I knew my duty. Looking up for the first time, Knight said, sardonic, “That mean you won’t be needing the reward?”
Sheriff Knight and I understood each other right from the first, and our understanding was this: we did not like each other. But a few days later, a sheriff ’s posse laid off the river mouth until three in the morning, then drifted upriver with the tide (as I’d advised them), and had four men ashore before they hollered to Will Raymond to come out with his hands up. Will yelled he’d be damned if he’d go peaceable, and whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it, but he was peaceable as he could be by the time the smoke cleared. They flung his carcass in the boat and offered his widow their regrets along with a kind invitation to accompany the deceased on a nice boat ride to Key West, and the widow said, “Why, thankee, boys, I don’t mind if I do.”
On my next visit, when I went to the sheriff ’s office to offer my congratulations, I happened to mention the information which brought justice to Will Raymond. Wincing, he slid open a drawer and forked over $250 in hard cash reward without a word.
I never kept a penny of that money. I went straight over to Peg’s boardinghouse on White Street and offered it to the Widow Raymond as a consolation in her time of bereavement. By now, the Widow was looking a lot better or at least a good deal cleaner. Perky, she said, “Mr. Stranger, this sure is my lucky day and you sure are my savior, bless your heart!” She offered corn spirits and a simple repast, then took me straight to bed, out of pure gratitude and the milk of human kindness.
Buttoning up, I mentioned the late Mr. Raymond’s quit-claim, and she implored me to accept it with her compliments, declaring her sincere and fervent hope that she would never set eyes on that cursed place again. Altogether, a touching story with a happy ending. I strode away to the docks with a lilting heart, confident at last that my path in life had made a turning in the right direction.
On my next voyage to Key West, I encountered Captain N. N. Penny, a fine, fierce fellow with a cigar thrusting from the very center of his mouth who had made his mark hauling freed slaves to Liberia after the Civil War; However, his clipper ship would arrive in port somewhere up the coast only a few days later without its cargo; also missing was the heavy anchor chain he was rumored to replace after each voyage. Even today Cap’n Penny was renowned as a practical man who would march his cargo overboard rather than risk capture by a federal vessel. We exchanged but a few words before he recognized me as another man who meant to get ahead in life and entrusted me with the information that the commerce in human beings which had made our nation great was by no means dead. Chinese coolies and other illegal immigrants would gladly pay enterprising captains to set them ashore in Florida, where most wound up as indentured labor for the new railroad companies, resort hotels, large-scale drainage schemes, and development enterprises seeking to bring both of Florida’s wild coasts into the modern world. It made his red blood tingle and his pockets jingle, quoth this jolly patriot, to contribute prime “Chinks” to Florida’s exciting future.
Captain Penny and I were especially convivial since we shared a liking for hard drink and dark humor; he suggested that we might “do some business.” However, I had already perceived that Penny was only a small cog (a very large small cog) in the great engine of our nation’s progress. The very next day, introduced by Penny at the Catherine Street mansion of the cigar tycoon Teodoro Pйrez, I made the acquaintance of Napoleon Broward, Esq., who was already preparing for the dashing role in Cuban liberation which would get him elected governor of Florida a few years later. With Mr. Broward was the Cuban revolutionary Josй Martн, a pale small man, very thin and tense, with more hair in his long sad moustachios than on his pate: Josй Martн’s financial support in the fight for Cuban independence came mostly from these rich cigar manufacturers in Key West and Tampa.
Napoleon Broward was a bold sanguinary man of direct action, in the mold of Gould and Astor, Carnegie and Frick-in short, a man who could be counted on not to be squeamish about how the nation’s progress was achieved while never losing sight of his private interests, whether in politics or in industry and business. To the sweet chortling of redbirds, which our cultivated Spanish host displayed in small wicker cages like crimson canaries, Broward spoke admiringly of Hamilton Disston, who had pioneered the shipping canal connecting Lake Okeechobee to the Calusa Hatchee River and the Gulf, and I made bold to mention some of my own ideas about the drainage of the Everglades for large-scale agriculture and also the eventual development of the virgin southwest coast and the Ten Thousand Islands. Here Broward raised his beetled brows: “Hold on there, my friend.” Mistaking our host, Seсor Pйrez, for the butler, he snapped his fingers and commanded him to fetch Mr. Watson and himself another round of brandy and cigars.
Broward remarked that we had common interests and must by all means stay in touch. By the time we met again in the year following, I had studied all the Everglades reports, all the way back to the visionary schemes of Buckingham Smith, who had written the first drainage recommendation in the days of the Seminole Wars; I also furnished him the details of that 1850 Act of Congress which had patented this entire “swamp-and-overflowed wilderness” to the state of Florida. As early as the 1860s, a colonel of the Army Engineers had estimated that if Lake Okeechobee’s water level could be lowered by six feet, nine inches-the approximate fall from the lake to the Atlantic-the vast wetlands from the Kissimmee River south could be settled and cultivated without fear of annual overflow and flood.
“By God, Watson, you intrigue me!” Flushed and fulsome, Broward vowed that if he were ever to be elected governor as was his ambition, E. J. Watson would be summoned to the state capital at once to help set Glades development in motion. “You’re an up-and-coming feller, Ed,” Nap said warmly as we parted. “If I am elected, you can write your own damn ticket.” By God, I thought, it’s happening! I’m on my way!