Their pleasure in being afloat was short-lived, for "the northeaster had well nigh emptied the creek of its usual quantum of water," and they were again obliged to wade to effect a landing, their object being to gain the east Florida coast and thus make their escape. This was finally attained after abandoning their boat, when began a long tramp on the beach, in the teeth of the wind,
through sand that sent our feet back six inches at every step of two feet that we made. Well, through this sand we all waded, for many a long mile, picking up here and there a shell that is nowhere else to be found, until we reached the landing place of J. J. Bulow. Now, my heart, cheer up once more, for the sake of my most kind host.... I assure you, I was glad to see him nearing his own comfortable roof; and as we saw the large house opening to view, across his immense plantation, I anticipated a good dinner with as much pleasure as I ever experienced.
All hands returned alive; refreshments and good care have made us all well again, unless it be the stiffness occasioned in my left leg, by nearly six weeks of daily wading through swamps and salt marshes, or scrambling through the vilest thickets of scrubly live oaks and palmitoes that appear to have been created for no other purpose but to punish us for our sins.
Readers of the following account who have visited eastern Florida may conclude that Audubon was not a good prophet, but probably at that early day no one could have made a better forecast of the future:
The land, if land it can be called, is generally so very sandy that nothing can be raised upon it. The swamps are the only spots that afford a fair chance for cultivation; the swamps, then, are positively the only places where plantations are to be found. These plantations are even few in number; along the coast from St. Augustine to Cape Carnaveral, there are about a dozen. These, with the exception of two or three, are yet young plantations. General Hernandez's, J. J. Bulow's, and Mr. Durham's are the strongest, and perhaps the best. Sugar cane will prosper, and doubtless do well; but the labour necessary to produce a good crop, is great! great!! great!!! Between the swamps of which I now speak, and which are found along the margin laying west of the sea inlet, that divides the main land from the Atlantic, to the river St. John of the interior of the peninsula, nothing exists but barren pine lands of poor timber, and immense savannas, mostly overflowed, and all unfit for cultivation. That growth, which in any other country is called underwood, scarcely exists; the land being covered with low palmitoes, or very low, thickly branched dwarf oaks, almost impenetrable to man. The climate is of a most unsettled nature, at least at this season. The thermometer has made leaps from 30 to 89 degrees in 24 hours, cold, warm, sandy, muddy, watery,—all these varieties may be seen in one day's travelling.... Game and fish, it is true, are abundant; but the body of valuable tillable land is too small to enable the peninsula ever to become a rich state.
EARLY UNPUBLISHED DRAWING IN WATER-COLOR OF THE CAROLINA PARROT, ON BRANCH OF THE HICKORY, DATED "HENDERSON, JUNE 9TH, 1811." THE ORIGINAL BEARS THE NOTE: "POOR IMITATION OF COLOR, THE NATURAL BIRD BEING EXTREMELY GLOSSY AND RICH."
Published by courtesy of Mr. Joseph Y. Jeanes.
On January 6, 1832, the party started to visit a famous spring near the sources of the St. John's River, which was described in his third letter to Featherstonhaugh as well as in a later "Episode."[14] There his host, Colonel Rees, who utilized the abundant flow from this curious spring for grinding the whole of his sugar cane, took them down the Spring Garden Creek to a series of muddy lakes which emptied into the St. John's. The mud on this occasion was the cause of great disappointment to the naturalist, for it made it impossible for him to recover what he believed to represent a new species of Ibis, which was shot in one of those bottomless pits. "Being only a few yards distant from us," to quote from Audubon's third letter,[15] "and quite near enough to ascertain the extent of my loss, I submitted to lose a fine pair of a new species, the which if I ever fall in with it again, I shall call Tantalus fuscus."