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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2005 125

Hitherto we have been in pursuit of information pure and
simple; I now claim the privilege of a relaxation, and ask

you to paddle off with me to the hunter’s fairyland, to the ely-
sium of reminiscences.

Let us go camping out. You know how it is in camping out;
a man divests himself of every artificial surrounding that makes
life enjoyable and then sets out to enjoy it.

Indian River, a vast salt-water lagoon, is the paradise of the
camper-out. The eddies of the Gulf Stream, in ages past, have
thrown upon Florida’s eastern shore such an accumulation of
broken shells and coquina that the mouths of the Southern
rivers have been closed, and their waters thrown back on the
country, uniting laterally and forming extensive lagoons.

Indian River, 120 miles in length, connects with another
system, the Mosquito Lagoon and Matanzas, giving altogether
over 300 miles of protected water travel within the sound of the
surf beat of the ocean.

All the game in Florida, bear, deer, turkeys, panthers, were
once here in the greatest abundance. In the swamps along its bor-
ders were vast heronries, where, gathered by hundreds, were beau-
tiful egrets and snowy herons with downy, filamentous plumes.
Pelicans breed here by thousands, oysters are abundant, and on
the sea-beach, in June, scarcely a night passes that we cannot turn
over an immense turtle’s nest containing half a hundred eggs. In
this lagoon also is captured the bulky sea-cow, or manatee, some-
times 8 feet in length, and weighing 500 or 600 pounds.

Far down in the everglades, in the little-known interior of
Florida, surrounded by impenetrable swamps and gloomy for-
est, lies the mysterious lake of the South, the vast Okeechobee.

At the commencement of the present century this lake was as
little known as in the time of De Soto; and even 50 years ago,
at the beginning of the Seminole war, every thing about it par-
took of the vagueness, and was tinged with the romance, that
such an unexplored region, surrounded by Indians alleged to be
hostile, was likely to create. Such it was even in 1874, when I
organized my expedition to explore it. We were a month absent
on this exploration, and my boat was the first to float upon its
waters in nearly 30 years. We succeeded in dispelling the halo of
exaggeration that surrounded the lake, and gave to the world a
truthful account of its resources.

No creek or river formed the outlet of this vast body of
water; the accumulated drainage of thousands of square miles of
territory slowly percolated through the everglades by countless
channels. Since my visit to Okeechobee, a company of capital-
ists has effected its partial drainage and added a vast area of cul-
tivable land to Florida’s territory. The only sections not in swamp
or under water were covered with huge “India-rubber” trees, del-
icately foliaged box, and sweet-scented bay, their trunks covered
with gorgeous epiphytes with flaming blossoms, and their
branches, draped in Spanish moss, the roosting-place of vultures
and turkey-buzzards.

In the southern portion of the peninsula—around Lake
Okeechobee and near the northern keys—reside the few

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) became endangered
throughout Florida and much of the southeastern United States as a
consequence of legal hunting and, more recently, poaching. Hides and
meat were valuable commodities. Alligators have benefited from legal
protection and their conservation status has been upgraded from
endangered to threatened. The species is now abundant in many areas,
although habitat loss and changes in water management continue to
threaten them, as well as many other species in Florida.

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Roseate Spoonbills (Ajaia ajaja), like many other species of wading
birds, were decimated by plume hunters around the turn of the 20th
Century. They have recovered due to protective legislation, but have
not reached the populations densities recorded by Ober and others
during the late 19th Century.

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Florida and the West Indies1

Prof. F. A. Ober

1 Excerpted from the 1886 Journal of the American Geographical
Society, volume 18.



Seminoles left in Florida by the treaty of 1842—between two
and three hundred only in number; and here they lead a peace-
ful life, cultivating their fields, and hunting.

It was while among the Seminoles, in 1872 and 1874, that
I enjoyed my best sport hunting the alligator. All are, of course,
sufficiently familiar with this saurian not to need a further
description from me. By thousands and thousands the guileless
alligator of tender years has been ruthlessly torn from the mater-
nal breast and sent adrift upon the frozen North; hence, the alli-
gator in a menagerie is as familiar as the ubiquitous monkey.

Even to-day, after having been the sport of tourists for years,
they may be shot on the St. John’s; though the best hunting is
to be found in secluded creeks and bayous.

Though the alligator attains sometimes a length of 12 or 14
feet, he is more commonly found at 8 or 10. His jaw is always
one fourth his entire length, and one 12 feet long displays an
open countenance a yard wide. The teeth work up well into ivory
ornaments, and the skin, when properly tanned, makes the most

durable of leather. Some hunting boots I had made from a pair
of nine-footers lasted me five years’ wear and tear by flood and
field. The alligator’s vulnerable spots are the eye, ear and just abaft
the fore-leg. The rifle is the best weapon, but I have shot several
dozen with a shot-gun and some even with a small revolver.

The alligator is daintily-choice in his food, preferring a dog
to the piney-woods hog, and a juicy, well-developed negro to
either. The bull alligators have a tremendous roar, which shakes
the forest when they indulge in a concert. I once found them so
numerous, in the Indian country, that we gave over shooting
and took to harpooning them; a certain hunt by moonlight
lingers in memory yet through a dozen intervening years.

One hundred years ago, when that quaint old philosopher
and botanist, Bartram, sailed up the St. John’s in his Indian
canoe, the river was without a settlement its entire length, and
the worthy man was frightened nearly out of his wits by the
enormous alligators, which bit pieces out of his boat and nearly
succeeded in devouring him.

126 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2  •  JUNE 2005 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Frederick Ober was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, to a
relatively impoverished family and had little formal edu-

cation. At 14, he learned the shoemaker’s trade, the tradi-
tional winter occupation of local fishermen; at 18, he was
working in a drug store; at 21, he was in business with his
father. However, his passion was ornithology. As a teenager,
he taught himself taxidermy, collected and classified nearly
all the birds of New England, and attracted the attention of
Alexander Agassiz, the distinguished biologist from Harvard.

In 1871, Ober abandoned business and went on a
major expedition to Florida to explore Lake Okeechobee,
writing a series of vivid journal articles. For the next twenty
years, he was an almost constant traveler, principally in the
Caribbean, but also in México, Spain, North Africa, and
northern South America. Ober initially saw himself as a sci-
entist; he sent much material back to the Smithsonian
Institution, two species of birds carry his name, and the
Smithsonian published the report of his first Caribbean
expedition. However, after the commercial success of his
travel book, Camps in the Caribbees: The Adventures of a
Naturalist in the Lesser Antilles (1879), Ober broadened his
horizons and, after some financial struggles, made a career
for himself as a travel writer, journalist, public lecturer, nov-
elist, and historian.

Ober wrote over forty books, including three classic
travel books: Camps in the Caribbees (1879), the long and
beautifully produced Travels in Mexico and Life among the
Mexicans (1884), and the book that resulted from his
appointment as collector of Caribbean and Columbus-

related material for the quatercentenary, In the Wake of
Columbus: Adventures of the Special Commissioner sent by the
World’s Columbian Exposition to the West Indies (1893). In
addition, two of many novels had a contemporary
Caribbean setting: Under the Cuban Flag, or the Cacique’s
Treasure (1897) and The Last of the Arawaks: A Story of
Adventure on the Island of San Domingo (1901).

In the last years of his life he worked as a real-estate
dealer in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he died in 1913.
Since his death, nobody has taken much interest in
Frederick Ober or his writings, but, during the last decade
of the nineteenth century, Ober probably knew as much
about the Caribbean as anyone in the United States. He
had traveled widely in the region, especially in the more
remote parts rarely visited by other travelers, met with
many of the statesmen and leading figures, and read widely
about the area’s history. Nobody knew the contemporary
situation of the small indigenous populations as well, and
few had a better knowledge of its history and the history of
Spanish colonialism with which it was intertwined. In one
sense, however, this made Ober an atypical figure. After
1898, when the stream of writing about the Spanish-speak-
ing Caribbean became a torrent, his would seem like a
minor voice, that of an amateur drowned by the instant
expertise of economists, sociologists, and other analysts of
the backward islands that had fallen into U.S. hands.

B I O G R A P H I C A L  S K E T C H

Frederick Albion Ober (1849–1913)

Adapted from the online literary encyclopedia (http://www.
litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3390).




