452 



THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



I sent the skin to Professor Marsh 

 of Yale College, who wrote me that it 

 was a noble specimen and, making due 

 allowance for the end of her tail which 

 had been bitten off, was fourteen feet 

 two inches long. It was many years 

 later that I learned that my friend, 

 Dr. Hornaday, had not only killed one 

 of the creatures in 1875, thus beating 

 me by fourteen years, but that his was 

 fourteen feet two inches long without 

 making any allowance for an amputated 

 tail. Anyhow mine was a female which 

 ought to count for something. 



In the years that followed I fre- 

 quently visited the little colony of Flor- 

 ida crocodiles which seemed definitely 

 limited to a region at the .extreme 

 southern end of the peninsula of Flor- 

 ida, a strip about ten miles long by 

 three wide. Saurians were plentiful in 

 this part of the world but, outside of 

 the limits named, all were alligators, 

 none of which did I ever discover 

 within them. I had specimens enough 

 of the creatures and I never did kill 

 them for sport, but my son and I found 

 ways of making them contribute to our 

 amusement. It was really exciting, 

 after locating the mouth of a crocodile's 

 cave in the bank of a river, to hang the 

 noosed end of a rope before it, while 

 standing on the bank above. As I 

 waited for a bite, my boatman busied 

 himself thrusting a harpoon pole into 

 the earth from ten to twenty feet behind 

 me. This was followed by the outrush- 

 ing crocodile and some excitement at 

 my end of the line. The big reptile 

 struggled and fought, he clutched at 

 the line and rolled over and over, he 

 swam out in the stream and he sulked 

 in its depths, but the noose was tightly 

 drawn and never allowed to slip, and 

 the end found the creature facing the 

 camera on the bank. It was a matter 

 of ethics that the crocodile should be 

 free when his photograph was taken, 

 and removing the lasso called for much 



agility on the part of the volunteer. 

 After a few vain attempts to escape, 

 a crocodile would become discouraged, 

 and our hunter boy would hold open 

 the jaws of a very much alive reptile 

 while the camera-man photographed 

 them. 



As compared with their alligator 

 congeners, the Florida crocodile is the 

 more combative as evidenced by the 

 larger proportion of mutilated members 

 of that family. Of the thousand alli- 

 gators which in my unregenerate days 

 I killed, a very small percentage were 

 battle-marked, while among the com- 

 paratively few crocodiles which were 

 my victims the number of mutilated 

 ones was surprisingly large. 



It was not until 1906, just seventeen 

 years after my introduction to the 

 Florida crocodile, that I carried out my 

 project of sending some living speci- 

 mens to New York, and on March 1 

 of that year I sent from Key West to 

 the New York "Zoo'' a pair of the crea- 

 tures which I had captured in the Ma- 

 deira Hammock. 



From the fact that I often found the 

 Florida crocodile far out from land 

 where the alligator was never seen, I 

 inferred that he was of an exploring 

 species, which, coming from the West 

 Indies, had established a colony at Cape 

 Sable with a view to the conquest of the 

 country. It was therefore with much 

 interest that last year, while cruising 

 with Commodore Benedict in his 

 "Oneida," I heard at Trinidad that a 

 river near by abounded in "alligators." 

 Happily there was in the party a man 

 younger than I by enough scores of 

 years to permit of carrying a rifle under 

 a tropical sun while wallowing through 

 waist-deep mud, and he brought home 

 as the result of an arduous day four 

 specimens of the Trinidad "alligator" 

 which were identical in species with my 

 Florida crocodiles of twenty-eight years 

 before. 



