FREE RIDE 
(SIZ) Ralph De Sola, Federal Writers’ Project. 
and permits them to escape. Baby alligators are only eight inches long 
when hatched. 
One of the earliest and most colorful accounts of American alligators 
was written by Sir William Bartram who, alone, paddled an Indian canoe 
along the St. Johns River in Florida, in 1773. 
He described the region as alive with the reptiles. On one occasion 
they issued from the marshes in such numbers as to completely surround 
his canoe, “rushing up with their heads and part of their bodies above 
water, roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me.” When a 
school of fish came down the river, “the alligators were in such incredible 
numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have 
been easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been 
harmless.” Adept fishermen, the alligators devoured the fish “by the hun¬ 
dreds of thousands. The floods of water and blood rushing out of their 
mouths, and the clouds of water and vapor issuing from their wide nostrils 
were truly frightening.” Bartram probably would have been more at ease 
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