A HUNTER’S CABIN ON THE CANAL, DISMAL SWAMP.
Crossing Hampton Roads by steamer to Norfolk, we proceeded southward by the Norfolk Southern Railroad, through a region known as the Dismal Swamp, famous alike in fact and fiction. The term has been indelibly affixed to two extensive stretches of morass, the larger of which lies between the James River on the north and Albemarle Sound on the south, thus covering a part of Virginia and North Carolina, having a length of about forty miles and a breadth of twenty-five miles. Little Dismal Swamp is wholly within North Carolina, in the peninsula between Albemarle Sound and Pimlico Sound, and while occupying considerably less than one-third as much area as Great Dismal, is probably better known to readers because of the tragedies which have been enacted within its dark and gloomy districts. Speaking generally, the swamps are composed of a spongy, vegetable soil, but without any mixture of earth, which supports a dense growth of aquatic plants, brush-wood and timber. Sir Charles Lyell, the distinguished geologist, was first to bring to notice the curious fact that the surface of the swamp is actually twelve feet higher in many places than the surrounding country, so that its drainage is outward, except where a few small streams flow in from the west side. The center of Great Dismal is occupied by Drummond’s Lake, an oval basin six miles long and three wide, with perpendicular banks and fifteen feet depth of water. In and around this lake is a veritable paradise for hunters, for its waters abound with fish and wild fowl, and the adjacent woods are the favorite haunts of deer, bears, wild-cats, coons and swamp-rabbits. The region, inexpressibly dreary as it is, contributes largely to commerce by furnishing immense supplies of timber. To facilitate transportation the Great Swamp is intersected by canals, the two largest being those which connect the Elizabeth and Pasquotank Rivers, and Elizabeth River with Carrituck Sound.
Some queer little cabins are built along these water-ways, a few being occupied by timber cutters, but generally they are the temporary abodes of hunters who find shooting and trapping both pleasurable and profitable, and who work at logging out of game season. Little Dismal Swamp, though smaller than its more northern neighbor, is very much more dense with brush-wood, and decidedly more forbidding, because its gloomy depths rarely echo with the voice of man, or the sound of the woodman’s ax. Fifty years ago it was the refuge of runaway negroes, and a dangerous place for a white man to be seen, because the blacks who hid in its thick coverts were usually of the most desperate character, who would not hesitate at crime. One of the best-remembered, because the most tragic, negro insurrections that ever occurred in Virginia was headed by a Samsonian black named Nat Turner. Under his leadership more than a hundred armed negroes rose against their masters and massacred a score of men, women and children. When a sufficient force of whites was mustered to oppose them, the negroes fled to Little Dismal Swamp, where, after great length of time, they were starved into surrender. Nat Turner, however, was last to submit to his pursuers, and committed so many crimes, while the search for him continued, that his very name became a terror; but he was at last captured through betrayal by a negro whom he trusted, and after due trial was convicted and hanged.
PONCE DE LEON HOTEL, ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA.—This photograph represents the court of the hotel, around which the walls extend in the form of a hollow square. The hotel itself is a revival of the richest examples of Moorish architecture. It is old Spain of the golden reign of Ibn-l-Ahmar transported to American shores. With its lavish adornment, picturesque style and exquisite grounds, in which every known tropical plant is made to add its beauty and shed its fragrance, while flowing fountains cool the summer air, the Ponce de Leon is not only a reminder of the great palace of Spain in the time of Columbus, but it is also one of the best representatives of modern convenience, comfort and artistic beauty of architecture and construction.
