FOREST AND STREAM 
689 
On The Trail of The Florida Manatee 
A LIBERAL offer from St. Louis, prior to 
the opening of the great Louisiana Ex¬ 
position there, was the reason that three 
of us, including Captain Jack, were on the west 
coast of southern Florida in search of a mana¬ 
tee. A few years before that the manatee was 
thought to be near extermination. But of late 
it had been frequently seen, especially along that 
melancholy coast extending southward from 
Oyster Bay and the Caloosahatchee River, which 
is bordered by innumerable keys fencing off the 
Gulf, and with the Big Cypress Swamp and the 
Everglades, inland, to the east. In our efforts 
to capture one Captain Jack and I, assisted by 
Nelse, a stray Minorcan lad from the east coast 
near St. Augustine, had about exhausted our in¬ 
genuity. 
We had stretched nets between banks of 
streams flowing from the Swamp or the Glades, 
but somehow the manatee turned back or trav¬ 
eled seaward by other routes. We built a plat¬ 
form on a skiff to hold nets of large mesh, 
amply provided with floats and sinkers. We 
towed this skiff behind our motor launch over 
bays containing the richest areas of manatee pas¬ 
ture; but, whenever we tried for a sea-cow 
or bull, it would back out and seek some avenue 
of escape. 
One night we camped on a low sand-key, shad¬ 
owed by cabbage palmetto, near which a slug¬ 
gish fresh-water stream wandered amid other 
islands from the swamps near Cape Romano. 
“I’m a gittin’ tired o’ this,” quoth Captain Jack, 
who, so far as looks and loquacity went, might 
have been first-cousin to the immortal Bunsby 
himself. “D'ye see that thar crawl out yander?” 
He pointed toward a water-pen of palmetto 
logs ranged close together in perpendicular rank, 
-where the water was, perhaps, five or six feet 
deep. It stood at the mouth of the stream, 
where the mingling of fresh and salt water was 
of that flavor which manatee most affect, espe¬ 
cially when feeding. 
“Me and a feller built that one season when 
we was down from Tampy. He had a offer 
from a zoo up north. We wasted two months. 
Nary sea-cow, or calf, or bull. Damdest luck 
ever! This is the fust time I been back since. 
We’ll try here. I knows this Alipatioky Creek. 
We’ll try ’er to-morrow.” 
Well, we “tried ’er,” and the results were, to 
say the least, astonishing. Nelse, a leathery¬ 
faced youth, cooked, chored, and between times 
amused himself by cutting mangrove branches 
and the kinds of sea grasses manatee are sup¬ 
posed to be fond of. These he placed in the 
old crawl, which was still sound and firm. 
“What you doin’ that for?” I asked him at 
length. 
“For fun, mebbe. We ketch manatee, we use 
crawl, mebbe. He want grub. Well, manatee 
find it. Keep him there till we build tank.” 
Considering that we had never, so far, had 
our nets or clutches on one of the sea-cow we 
By William Perry Brown. 
had tried to entrap, Nelse’s labors looked prema¬ 
ture, if not futile. 
“He’s a fool,” commented Jack, with Bunsbyan 
oracularity. “But he ’lows he knows manatee. 
’S more’n I do.” 
One reason the crawl had been built at this 
point was that old Tusteenuggee, a former chief 
of the South Florida Seminoles, had told Cap¬ 
tain Jack’s old partner that it was one of the 
few breeding localities of the manatee along 
that lonely coast. 
We ate a supper of slapjacks, bacon, strong 
coffee, then fought mosquitoes until we had to 
hunt our sand-fly bars for what sleep they and 
the fleas would permit. Nelse, with the cast 
net, had caught some fat mullet for breakfast. 
A Sluggish Stream Shadowed by Cabbage 
Palmetto. 
In the night a heavy swashing from the creek 
month made Nelse say, 
“Big fish feedin’. Mebbe manatee; mebbe 
shark after mullet.” 
In the morning, while Nelse cooked breakfast, 
Captain Jack and I, loading nets into the skiff, 
rowed up to where two rows of stakes spanned 
the creek channel above the old crawl. Instead 
of trying to buoy the nets across the channel, we 
strung them along the stakes. 
“Them chaps feeding last night ought to be 
down ag’in soon.” 
“Suppose they take some other route,” said 
I, thinking of the inner network of waters that 
make of this region a puzzling semi-watery laby¬ 
rinth, except to manatee and other wild things. 
“We can’t help that. Wait till I make them 
ends fast to shore.” 
So the net ends were anchored to old cabbage 
logs embedded by tides deep in the oozy marsh 
bottom. Then we breakfasted. After that, while 
Nelse fished a little and slept a good deal, I 
took my Winchester and the skiff, and tried still¬ 
hunting for deer on a pine island well toward 
the north of Alipatioka, with half-open marshes 
to the northeast. Captain Jack watched the nets 
and the water, and wished for a third net, lest 
the manatee, if any came down, should break 
through the two then stretched. It was hardly 
safe to calculate where a full-grown bull-mana¬ 
tee, weighing, say, a thousand or more pounds, 
would stop. Though gentle and seemingly de¬ 
fenceless, it has enormous strength, as we were 
afterward to find out. 
It was about half-ebb tide as I was leisurely 
returning in the skiff, not with a deer, but a 
good-sized gobbler, when I heard Captain Jack 
rousing out Nelse in vigorous language. 
“Git up from thar!” he yelled. “We got one 
at last. Where’s that skiff? Hit’s a tearin’ 
loose that upper net right now.” 
In a trice I was pulling for shore, realizing 
that the skiff was in sudden demand. Sure 
enough, up the stream a heave and swirl of red¬ 
dish bayou water was visible. My gobbler, of 
which I had been quite proud, having “yelped” 
him to destruction quite unexpectedly, became, 
as it were, much like the traditional “thirty 
cents.” 
As I, with my game, piled out, Nelse and 
Captain Jack piled in. 
“Give way!” shouted the old seaman. “He’ll 
tear t’other one loose next. Give way, ye 
domned dago!” 
In his eagerness Jack leaned forward, his eyes 
like those of a boiled lobster, while Nelse pulled 
at the clumsy skiff until grimaces of pained ex¬ 
ertion distorted his swart face. The lower net 
now appeared to be giving way. It happened 
that the posts, set years before, were not all of 
them sound. Two of the middle ones were 
breaking under the mysterious surgings of some 
as yet unseen monster, probably a manatee. At 
last an upward surge disclosed to me, amid a 
boil of water, the transient glimpse of a glisten¬ 
ing head and jaw, hairy and leathery. Nelse 
was excited almost to frenzy. 
“Hit’s a big one! He got tangled in both 
nets, mebbe. Git holder dat end, Cap’n! He’s 
mad ! He’s real mad.” 
“More likely scared,” I thought. For mana¬ 
tee are timid, though often wonderfully gentle. 
The captain had seized a shoreward end of the 
second net, already drifting down stream with 
a broken post attached. 
“Pull for the other bank, Nelse!” called the 
captain. “Pull quartering up stream. Hey you!” 
This was to yours truly. “Wade out with a 
boat-hook and give us a lift.” 
While I waded along the edge of the sand¬ 
bar, jutting from the nearer end of the island, 
Nelse and Jack, pulling and hauling in the slack, 
finally, with the aid of said boat-hook, were 
about to gain shallow water. Their aim was to 
join the two ends on shore—for one still held— 
and then tow the tired sea-cow or bull into the 
nearby crawl. But as we drew in on the slack 
the surging of the manatee, as space grew more 
restricted, became more and more violent. Its 
great back, side or head, hairy yet slick, would 
show above the muddied stream within danger¬ 
ous proximity to the skiff. 
“Dat feller bust this boat next, mebbe,” said 
