1896.] OOb [Cashing. 



veritable haven of ancient wharves and pile-dwellings, safe alike from 

 tidal wave and hurricane within these gigantic ramparts of shell, where, 

 through the channel gateways to the sea, canoes might readily come 

 and go. 



It occurred to me, as I made my way thrcmgh one of these now filled- 

 up channels, that the enclosures they passed were probably other courts 

 — marginal, but artificial bayous, some of them no doubt like the one at 

 Key Marco — and that perhaps the largest of them had not only been in- 

 habited also, but that some were representative of incipient stages in the 

 formation of platforms or terraces, and within these, as the key was thus 

 extended, of other such inner courts as the one I have here described. It 

 seemed reasonable to expect that the islets visible in numbers farther on, 

 which my skipper described as almost exactly like this, would reallj^ prove 

 to be not only shell kej^s, that is, of artificial origin, but also, that in them 

 I would find the essential structural features of this one, as such, repeated. 



Possessed by this idea, I became doubly anxious to proceed with the 

 explorations, and forthwith returned to the boat and sailed down to a 

 point about midway between the northern and southern ends of Pine 

 Island, which lay some two and a half miles off to the eastward. There 

 stood, near where we anchored, upon rough and barnacle-encrusted 

 stilts or piles, two dilapidated platforms, placed end to end, but at an 

 angle to one another. Upon these were perched a couple of old and 

 weather-beaten huts which had been formerly used, I was told, as 

 fishermen's stations. 



As evening fell and the tiile went down, there appeared with startling 

 suddenness, black, in the foam of the receding waters, — much as in 

 the illustration on Plate XXVI, — the scattered crags of two or three 

 series of parallel and concentric oyster reefs or bars. Some of them 

 reached directlj^ toward us from close to the old fishing stations, 

 while others extended off" to the right, semi-circularly around ns, 

 in a long succession of level, broken masses, thus enclosing quite 

 half an acre of deeper water, at the entrance of which we lay. It was 

 in the shallows, between the widest of these bars, at the corner or blunt 

 angle formed by the two main lines of the reefs, that the platforms 

 stood. Hither now flocked hundreds of cormorants and pelicans, fol- 

 lowed by a few cranes and curlews and by many gulls — these continu- 

 ally on the wing. But the cormorants and pelicans settled on the plat- 

 forms and along the uniform inner edges of the reefs in close ranks. 

 They seemed to have come hither from the neighboring bird-kej^s or man- 

 grove rookeries, — where they nested in common by thousands, — simply 

 to rest and dress their plumage ; until, out in the channel appeared, swiftly 

 rushing in toward the shoals, an enormous school of fish, fleeing noisily 

 before several puffing porpoises and two or three monster sharks, whose, 

 sharp dorsal fins cut the water swiftly hither and thither in the wake of 

 their affrighted prey. Then of a sudden the cormorants and many of 

 the pelicans took wing, joined forces behind the on-coming fugitive hosts 



