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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).




