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[Illustration: ROBERT BARNWELL ROOSEVELT.]




                                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 SEASHORES
                   AND INLAND WATERS, AND REMARKS ON
                  BREECH-LOADERS AND HAMMERLESS GUNS.


                                  BY

                      ROBERT BARNWELL ROOSEVELT,

    AUTHOR OF “THE GAME-FISH OF NORTH AMERICA,” “SUPERIOR FISHING,”
        “FIVE ACRES TOO MUCH,” “ISMS,” “POLYANTHUS,” ETC., ETC.


                             ILLUSTRATED.

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                               NEW YORK:
                         ORANGE JUDD COMPANY,
                             751 BROADWAY.
                                 1884.

    Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by the
                         ORANGE JUDD COMPANY,




PREFACE.


In preparing this work, after I had written the account of Florida,
which, as a sporting country, had never been fully described, and was to
occupy the principal part of my attention, and when I came to the second
division, that relating to the game-birds of our waters and coasts
generally, I found so much in a book on a kindred subject, which I had
written years ago, that I concluded I could do no better than quote from
it freely. The directions therein given are as correct now as then, the
information as well founded, and I hope the reader will find the stories
of sporting excursions as interesting.

My main purpose is to call the attention of my brother sportsmen to that
paradise of the devotee of the rod and gun, the Southern Peninsula of
our Atlantic States. Game is disappearing from our home country;
woodcock and ruffed grouse have almost been exterminated; ducks are less
plentiful; bay snipe now make many of their flights directly at sea
without passing over the land; and if we are to obtain satisfactory
shooting, we must go some distance for it. Many persons who are fond of
outdoor life cannot stand exposure to cold weather, and still more, to
keep up their interest, must have the chance of making a larger bag than
they can count on at the North. Yachtsmen are in the habit of laying up
their craft during the best season of the year for the enjoyment of
sailing. They have looked upon the South either as an uninteresting or a
dangerous country, a land merely of alligators or of hurricanes. They
will be as surprised as pleased to learn that there is no better sailing
ground, and that the Southern waters in winter are as safe as Northern
waters in summer; so much so that small vessels and open boats have
braved their terrors, while their sporting advantages are not to be
surpassed, if they are to be equalled, by any in the world.

While not absolutely the pioneer in this exploration, I happen to be
nearly so, for no completed work or continued record has been published
which covers the ground described, or conveys the information contained
in these pages. No more delightful excursion can be conceived than that
to Florida during the winter, and no man can so thoroughly enjoy it as
the yachtsman. Thousands of tourists have been going there for years,
and their number is augmenting every season. But such persons merely
rummage a country; they do not possess it; they rush along sight-seeing
and curiosity-purchasing. Let the sportsman or the invalid go to remain
during the inclement winter weather, and they will never regret the
excursion.

THE AUTHOR.




                                PART I.

                               FLORIDA.




                               CONTENTS.


                          PART I.--FLORIDA.

                                                                    PAGE

 CHAPTER I.--Florida.--The Inland Passage                              9

 CHAPTER II.--In Florida                                              59

 CHAPTER III.--Currituck Marshes                                     116


                    PART II.--THE GAME WATER-BIRDS.

 CHAPTER I.--Game of Ancient and Modern Days.--Its Protection and
 Importance.--The proper Shooting Seasons.--The Impolicy of Using
 Batteries and Pivot-Guns                                            139

 CHAPTER II.--Guns and Gunnery.--Breech-loaders compared
 with Muzzle-loaders.--All the Late Improvements in
 Breech-loaders.--Hammerless Guns                                    159

 CHAPTER III.--Bay-snipe Shooting.--The Birds, their Habits,
 Peculiarities, and places of Resort.--Stools and Whistles.--Dress and
 Implements appropriate to their pursuit.--Their Names and Mode of
 Capture                                                             185

 CHAPTER IV.--The New Jersey Coast.--Jersey Girls and their pleasant
 ways.--The peculiarities of Bay-snipe further elucidated.--Mosquitoes
 rampant.--Good Shooting and “Fancy” Sport.--Shipwrecks and
 Ghosts                                                              219

 CHAPTER V.--Bay-Birds.--Particular Descriptions and Scientific
 Characteristics.--A Complete Account of each Variety                261

 CHAPTER VI.--Montauk Point.--American Golden Plover or Frost-Bird.--A
 True Story of Three Thousand in a Flock.--Lester’s Tavern.--Good
 Eating, Fine Fishing, and Splendid Shooting.--The Nepeague
 Beach                                                               301

 CHAPTER VII.--Rail and Rail-Shooting.--Seasons, Localities,
 and Incidents of Sport.--Use of Breech-loader or
 Muzzle-loader.--Equipment                                           313

 CHAPTER VIII.--Wild-Fowl Shooting.--General Directions, from
 Boats, Blinds, or Batteries.--Retrievers from Baltimore and
 Newfoundland.--Western Sport.--Equipment                            328

 CHAPTER IX.--Duck-Shooting on the Inland Lakes.--The Club
 House.--Practical Views of Practical Men.--Moral Tales.--A Day’s
 Fishing.--The Closing Scenes                                        344

 CHAPTER X.--Suggestions to Sportsmen.--A Definition of the
 Term.--Crack Shots.--The Art of Shooting.--The Art of not
 Shooting                                                            398

 CHAPTER XI.--Directions for Building a Battery                      415




FLORIDA.




CHAPTER I.

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 Currit