Mr. Hornaday's War (15 page)

“Done!”
Hornaday cried, momentarily letting loose the small boy, covered with mud and cockleburs, who had actually hatched the plot in the first place.
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Hornaday could hardly wait to dash off a letter to his relations back in Indiana, a place that already had come to seem like a sad backwater in the glow of his new reknown as a world-famous adventurer. With the same elaborate casualness he'd used in his encounter with Professor Ward, he wrote his Uncle Allen that he was mounting a collecting expedition for gorillas to West Africa, just like Paul Du Chaillu. It was several weeks after he posted the letter that his Uncle Allen, hero of the Civil War, an enormous man whose eyes had seen death, showed up at the door of his boarding house in Rochester. Uncle Allen was not smiling. In fact, he was quite determined to prevent his intrepid, moronic nephew from vanishing forever into the mists of Africa.

In his autobiography, Hornaday recalled how Uncle Allen told him, “I'm prepared to offer you a good position in a business office in Buffalo, run by an acquaintance of mine, at a starting salary of $75 a week.” That was more than
eight times
what Will made as an apprentice taxidermist. But the thought of going gray sitting in a business office in Buffalo made him want to die.

“Thank you, uncle, but I'm sorry—I just can't do that.”

Then Uncle Allen upped the ante, offering the boy a flat-out bribe.

“All right, I am prepared to offer you $500, outright, if you'll abandon this crazy plan to go to Africa. Honestly, Will—you'll get yourself killed over there.”
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Will wavered, but still refused. Then, realizing that his Uncle Allen was here only because he cared about him, he gave ground. But not all of it.

“Well, Uncle, if you feel that way about it,” he said, “I cannot go on,
regardless of your feelings and judgement. I will not rob you of your $500, and I am willing to make my first venture abroad in some less dangerous place.”
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With Uncle Allen's approval, Will and Professor Ward settled on the coast of Cuba and the Florida Everglades, because—though they were both still largely unexplored—these places were safer, and because Ward was in particular need of Atlantic seaboard maritime specimens. In October 1874, Will Hornaday sailed for the Everglades. He was not quite twenty years old.

When the sixteen-ton, three-masted mail schooner
Liberty
hove into Miami Harbor on a sparkling afternoon in early January 1875, with Will Hornaday at the rail, there was barely a Miami Harbor, or even a Miami, to be seen. The tiny neotropical settlement was not even incorporated as a town, and in fact, it wasn't much more than a remote postal stop for mail ships. Hornaday wrote in a letter to a friend that “there is no town here atall, three houses at the mouth of the river, and others at intervals of one and two miles, scattered along the shore of the Bay.”
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Standing beside Hornaday at the rail was a dishevelled-looking young man, a bit older and a bit taller than Hornaday, wearing filthy clothes and a look of wonderment on his face. Every lucky man eventually stumbles upon a best friend, and the starlight of good fortune seemed to follow Hornaday wherever he went. “I shall always believe I was born under a lucky star as a compensation for not having been born rich,”
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he would later say. A month earlier, in Key West Harbor, Hornaday had met Chester Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old gallant from Racine, Wisconsin, who was taking a rambling winter trip through the South—Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida—and had wound up in Key West, as so many adventurers do, because it was as far south as you could get in the United States. That's where Jackson had noticed an intense gentleman, his sleeves rolled up, sweat glistening on his brow, dressing out a freshly killed loggerhead turtle he'd bought from a fisherman on the docks. Loggerheads, one of
the largest turtles in the world, have immense, heart-shaped, keeled shells and huge dark eyes filled with a kind of infinite sadness. They are like living submarines that can plunge to great depths and grow to eight feet long and weigh a thousand pounds or more (at least in those days, before the species was savaged to the edge of extinction). In his journal, Jackson later scribbled his first impressions of that first meeting:

It was on a sunny morning when I wandered down to the fish market to see the great fish come in. . . . In the shade of the market near the wharf, a large Loggerhead laid on his back with an energetic young man taking off his carapace or breast plate. I thought him a fisherman at first, his working clothes (blue flannel shirt and light pants—straw hat, I believe) and occupation making me think so . . . in age he was about 20—Short in stature—roundly built—fine-shaped hands—head strongly set on a short neck—square shoulders—very dark hair—darkest brown eyes, bright, deep and quick—prominent nose, short upper lip that can easily turn into a sneer—firm mouth—with an expression over all of untiring energy—backed by a strong confidence in self and the desire to make the most of everything—he looked fully five years older than his age. A man's face with a boy's body, as it were.
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When Hornaday struggled to turn over the great, glistening, reddish-brown shell, he couldn't help but feel a pang of sorrow. Yet, if he didn't prepare this specimen for museum display, its delectible flesh would simply be used to make turtle soup, and its huge carapace, broad as a sled, would be thrown away. To the local fishermen, the sea seemed bountiful and infinite. In fact, there were virtually no bag limits or restrictions on fishing, or even any licenses required, to dip a net into an ocean that appeared to be as boundless as the sky. Bringing the sea turtle back to Rochester and “restoring” it to life for Professor Ward would at least bring people face to face with something that was, to Hornaday, more beautiful and perfect than a Mozart concerto.

Jackson watched the intense young man at a distance for awhile and then approached him. Jackson was curious about what he was doing, for one thing, but he was also “bursting for congenial company.” Chatting while he worked, Hornaday told Jackson he was a collecting naturalist for Ward's Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester,
New York, and that he had delayed an expedition to Africa to undertake a specimen expedition into the Everglades, Cuba, and perhaps other places farther south. Maybe even to the Amazon. He asked if Jackson knew anything about a mail schooner called the
Liberty,
which was supposed to be headed north to Miami in a couple of days. Jackson, as it turned out, had already booked passage on the boat himself. Taking this serendipitous coincidence as a sign of traveller's luck, Jackson decided to abandon his plans (such as they were) and throw in his lot with young Hornaday, accompanying him for the rest of his expedition—possibly all the way to the Amazon. It seemed just too delicious a chance to pass up. Huck Finn had met his Tom Sawyer.
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When the two young adventurers arrived in the ragged settlement of Miami a couple of days later, Hornaday and Jackson pitched a tent on the sandy shore of Biscayne Bay and managed to scrounge a meal at a nearby farmhouse. They immediately set about getting ready to hunt specimens by sighting their rifles. They'd just met a local man, who walked around with a rifle casually slung under one arm, so the three of them set up targets at a distance of forty yards. Hornaday, armed with the trusty .40-caliber Maynard rifle that his half-brother David had given him, took aim and nailed four bull's-eyes, one right after another. Chester hit just one, and so did the local gun-toter. Hornaday had boasted to Professor Ward that he was a “crack shot,” and that was proving to be true.
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In the following days, the two aspiring naturalists asked around to learn where they might go to find specimens, but everyone they met told them that even around this lonely outpost at the edge of the Everglades, the “river of grass,” the flamingoes, spoonbills, scarlet ibis, magnificent frigatebirds, and other flamboyant avifauna had largely disappeared. Even in places where humanity had established only the most fragile foothold, nature seemed to be in full retreat. One day, Hornaday met a Seminole man who'd come into the settlement to trade, but he was disappointed to learn from him that most of the tribe had gone into the Everglades on a hunt, and their chief had instructed that no one be told the location of their wilderness camp. The man also declined to serve as guide into the swamp, as if it were a secret society to which the two young white men were not admitted.

Stymied in their attempt to penetrate the swamp, Hornaday and
Jackson rented a little flat-bottomed dinghy with oars for a dollar a week and crossed Biscayne Bay to the narrow spit of sand that would one day become the glittering high-rise metropolis of Miami Beach. In 1875, it was just a fragile dune and mangrove swamp flung between bay and ocean, where for the next couple of days, the two young men collected maritime specimens for Professor Ward. They found sponges, seashells, sea turtle eggs, about ten scorpions living in the sand not far from their tent, a leatherback turtle that they bought from another Seminole, and even the decomposing carcass of a manatee, one of the strange, bewhiskered “sea cows” thought to have given rise to the myth of mermaids. Rolling in the surf, the corpse was so rotten it could not be salvaged, but they managed to extract its skeleton for science. Still, picking up bones and shells on the beach was a far cry from hunting ape-men in Africa, as Hornaday had imagined himself doing.

By talking with a local family who lived near their camp, Hornaday learned that there were alligators in Arch Creek, one of many small, brackish, mangrove-tangled creeks draining out of the Everglades into the north end of Biscayne Bay. The family also told them something else: a mile back up the creek was one enormous alligator that had gotten that big by being fearsome, cunning, and elusive. For years, people had tried to bag the beast, but nobody had succeeded.

The two adventurers decided to move their camp up to the north end of the bay, and in fact, they pitched their tent directly on top of the odd natural limestone “arch” that spanned the water and gave the creek its name. The next morning, they stealthily rowed down Arch Creek for about a mile, dipping their oars into the water without a splash, then lifting them, dripping, back to the next stroke. They had just come around a bend when they spotted an enormous reptile sprawled on a mudbank, sunning, at a distance of about 150 yards. Its sheer size was startling—it appeared to be fourteen or fifteen feet in length, and fat as a hog. It would make a handsome museum specimen, for sure, if they could succeed in outwitting it.

From the bow of the boat, Will turned around and put one finger to his lips. Chester nodded, and they let the boat drift a little back downstream, slipping behind the bend and out of sight of the huge 'gator. They pulled alongside the bank and stopped, and Will pulled out his binoculars, and his Maynard .40-caliber. Then, with furtive oar-strokes, Chester began silently moving the boat forward
and they crept back around the bend. The beast was still there, sprawled on the sandbar, facing them. Will brought him into focus with his glass . . . and then recoiled in shock.
It wasn't an alligator.
Its grey-green back, its long, sinister, tapered snout, and the protruding fourth tooth of its lower jaw made it clear that the beast was actually a crocodile.

A
crocodile!
But there were no crocodiles in the United States: this was a “fact” about which virtually all naturalists agreed. There were plenty of American alligators in Florida,
Alligator mississippiensis,
but crocodiles? None. There had been rumors that there might be some in Florida, but never any solid scientific proof. The only crocs in the Americas lived farther south, in Cuba, in Mexico, in Central America, and in certain places in South America like the fabled Orinoco River delta, in Venezuela.
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For a moment, Will Hornaday hardly dared to breathe. Had he and Chester just discovered the first crocodile in the United States—had they, perhaps, even discovered a whole new species? Was he, just like Du Chaillu, about to carve his first notch on the trophy-belt of scientific history? Just then, sensing some faint perturbation in its zone of safety, the immense reptile abruptly belly-paddled across the sandbar, plunged into the water and sank out of sight. For a moment, it was as if Will Hornaday had not even seen what he had just seen.

Basking on the sandbar, the croc had looked primitive, almost antediluvian, like an amphibious dinosaur. And, in fact, it would later become known that crocodiles are as old as dinosaurs, having arisen more than 220 million years ago, in the steamy swamps of the Triassic. Fairly early in this evolutionary saga, the physical design of the crocodile became so terrifyingly efficient, its hunting methods so crafty and so pitiless, that it actually evolved very little for the remainder of that unimaginably long span of time. Their size did change: early in their evolutionary history, ancient crocodillians called “archosaureans” grew so immense—fifty feet long, weighing eight tons—that they were capable of killing and consuming a dinosaur. And their means of locomotion changed somewhat: in ancient times, these fearsome monster lizards were able to walk upright, some of them on two legs, and could apparently “gallop” at high speeds, like the huge saltwater crocs of Australia do today. Crocodiles outwitted the dinosaurs in another way, too: when the great extinction event of 65 million years ago obliterated the dinosaurs and much of the rest of life on Earth,
the crocodiles, waiting patiently in the murky water with only their eyes and nostrils exposed, survived.
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The skull of the present-day crocodile, with its distinctive tapering snout, still carries a basically archosaurean shape, making it a kind of living fossil, but one capable of crushing virtually anything that lives or breathes. Its phenomenal evolutionary success has to do with two things: stealth and savagery. Crocodiles are ambush hunters, able to remain perfectly still and almost perfectly invisible, adrift just beneath the water's surface until the moment they lunge. In fact, crocs spend most of their lives in a state of near-motionlessness, still as a log, adjusting their position with faint, quiet paddle-strokes. Then, with a ferocity unparalleled in the animal kingdom, they strike, and in a fraction of a second, they turn into the most ferocious reptiles on Earth. A rottweiler's bite force has been measured at 335 pounds per square inch; a great white shark, which can slice another shark in two, at 800 pounds per square inch. But nothing compares to a crocodile, whose bite force is more than 5,000
pounds
per square inch. It is the most savage bite, by far, of any living creature on the planet.
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