XIX
THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA
At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?
Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course. Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.
Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”
A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to Savannah. |St. Augustine.| At Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and excessively uninteresting; though here, as almost everywhere else on the east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.
I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon, and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St. Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for this; but it passed my divining.
Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate. |The American Riviera.| (I heard the Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.
Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami. The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low, board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say, acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of some turpentine company.
Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.
An Ocean-going Railroad.