In the morning the wind arose and sent the waves tumbling far in upon the beach. After breakfast I walked to the extremity of the cape, and dined with Mr. Robert Colman, the principal light-keeper. He was a most ingenious man, and an expert in the use of tools. The United States Light House Establishment selects its light-keepers from the retired army of wounded soldiers. In all my voyages along our coast, and on inland waters, I have found the good results of the perfect discipline exercised by the superintendents of this bureau. These keepers live along a coast of some thousands of miles in extent on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico, many of them in isolated positions, but honesty, economy, and intelligent skill are everywhere apparent; and these men work like an army of veterans. I have intruded upon their privacy at all hours, but have never found one of them open to criticism. There is no shirking of the onerous duties of their position. Too much praise cannot be given to these light-keepers in their lonely towers, or to the intelligent heads which direct and govern their important work.
As I was leaving the light-house, a young woman approached me, and introducing herself as a visitor to the keeper's family, said she had a favor to ask. Would it be too much trouble for the stranger, after he reached New York, to inquire the price of a switch of human hair of just the shade of her own flaxen locks, and write her about it! Of course such an appeal could not be disregarded; but I confess that as I gazed upon the boundless sea, and along the uninhabited strand, and into the unsettled forests, I wondered where the men or women were to be found to appreciate the imported New York switch. Would it not "waste its sweetness on the desert air" in the unpeopled wilderness?
The boisterous weather kept us on the beach until Friday, when we launched our boats and rowed along the coast three miles to a point opposite a lagoon which was separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. While pulling along the beach, great black-fish, some of them weighing at least one thousand pounds, came up out of the sea and divided into four companies. The first ranged itself upon our right, the second upon our left, the third, forming a school, proceeded in advance, while the fourth brought up the rear. Unlike the frisky porpoises, these big fellows convoyed us in the most dignified manner, heaving their dark, shining, scaleless bodies half out of the water as they surged along within a few feet of our boats.
When we arrived at our point of disembarkation, and turned shoreward to run through the surf, our strange companions seemed loath to leave us, but rolled about in the offing, making their peculiar nasal sounds, and spouting, like whales, jets of spray into the air. A landing was accomplished without shipping much water, and we immediately hauled the boats across the beach, about three or four hundred feet, into a narrow lagoon, the western branch of St. Vincent's Sound.
Indian Pass was two miles east of our portage. It is an inlet of the sea, through which small vessels pass into St. Vincent's Sound, en route for the town of Apalachicola. Heavy seas were, however, breaking upon its bar at that time, and it would have been a dangerous experiment to have entered it in our small boats. Emerging from the lagoon, the broad areas of St. Vincent's Sound and Apalachicola Bay met our gaze, while beyond them were spread the waters of St. George's Sound.
Following the coast on our left, numerous reefs of large and very fat oysters continually obstructed our progress. We gathered a bushel with our hands in a very few minutes; but as the wind commenced to blow most spitefully, and the heavy forests of palms on the low shore offered a pleasant shelter, we disembarked about sunset in a magnificent grove of palmetto-trees, spending a pleasant evening in feasting upon the delicious bivalves, roasted and upon the half shell.
The tempest held us prisoners in this wild retreat for two days, and during that time, if we had been the possessor of a dog, we might have supped and dined upon venison and wild turkey. As it was, we were well content to subsist upon wild ducks and the fine oysters, with bread from fresh wheat-flour, baked in our Dutch oven, or bake-kettle, and coffee that never tastes elsewhere as it does in camp.
At last the gale went down with the sun, and we rowed in the evening thirteen miles up the bay to Apalachicola, and went into camp upon the sandy beach at the lower end of the town. While sleeping soundly in our boats, at an early hour the next morning some one came "gently tapping at my chamber-door," or, in sea phrase, pounding upon my hatch. I soon discovered that my visitor was Captain Daniel Fry, United States Inspector of Steamboats. His pretty cottage, environed with beds of blooming flowers, was perched upon the sandy bluff above us. The captain, in a nautical way, claimed us as salvage, and we were soon enjoying his generous hospitality. In this isolated town, once a busy cotton-shipping port, there was a population of about one thousand souls, among whom, conspicuous for his urbane manners and scientific ability, lived Dr. A. W. Chapman, the author of the "Flora of the Southern United States."
While at New Orleans I had addressed a letter to the postmaster at St. Marks, Florida, requesting him to forward my letters to Apalachicola, but the request had not been noticed. The mystery was, however, explained by Lieutenant N., of the Coast Survey schooner Silliman, who one day called upon me, and said that when he stopped at St. Marks for his mail, a few days previous to my arrival at Apalachicola, he saw about thirty letters addressed to me lying loosely upon the desk of the negro postmaster of that marshy settlement. My letter of instruction had been received, but as the postmaster could not read, no notice had been taken of it. The coast survey officer had kindly gathered my letters in one parcel, and had deposited them for safe- keeping with the postmaster's white clerk. The responsible position of postmaster was filled by an ignorant colored man, because his politics were those of the party then in power.
Nor was this an exceptional case, many such appointments having been made, as an inevitable result of a peculiar enfranchisement in which there is no restriction, and where license stands for liberty. While on my "Voyage of the Paper Canoe," I met in one county in Georgia, through which flows the beautiful Altamaha, the colored county treasurer, who lived in a little backwoods' settlement a few miles from Darien. He could neither read nor write, but his business was managed and the county funds handled by a white politician of the "reconstructing" element then in power, which was sapping the life- blood of the south, and bonding every state within its selfish grasp by dishonest legislative acts. The poor black man was simply a tool for the white charlatan, living in a miserable log cabin, and receiving a very small share of the peculations of his white clerk. When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day endangers our future liberty of self-government. We are floating in a sea of unlimited and unlettered enfranchisement, vainly tugging at the helm of our ship of state, while master-minds stoop to cater to the prejudices of hundreds of thousands of voters who cannot read the names upon the ticket they deposit in the ballot-box—the ballot-box which is the guardian of the constitutional liberties of a republic.