CROSSING THE EVERGLADES BY AEROPLANE
A recent experience told by an aviator belonging to one of Uncle Sam’s flying squadrons and authorized by the War Department at Washington, graphically pictures a modern view of the Everglades, and illustrates, too, that the same hospitality extended by the Red Man to the bewildered Spaniards, as they landed on these wild and unexplored shores four centuries ago, may be found in the heart of the jungle and marsh wilderness of the Seminole camps today.
The airmen were attempting to “cross the Everglades” in order to make a shorter flightbetween the aviation fields of Florida. Encountering a storm, they were compelled to make a “forced landing” and headed for the nearest open space in the Big Cypress country, which proved to be soft muck, where the ship turned over on its back, wrecked and submerged in the black water.
The aviators wandered, hungry and exhausted, for two days, finally finding a camp inhabited by Seminole Indians. There they received a welcome, and food and shelter were given.
The Seminoles, lurking in their swamp-hedged wigwams, fear the intrusion of the white man, but like their ancient forbears they stand ever ready, with Samaritan-like kindness, to help the white brother in an hour of necessity. The airmen were later piloted by the red men through their hidden channels to a dredge-boat where aid was secured and they soon reached the Marine fields at Miami. With the help of the Indians, who made frequent trips to the base camps for equipments, the “fire ship of the clouds” was “launched”; the propeller took the air, droning a new tune to the silent Seminoles, who say “fire ships littly too much, to cross the West Wind of the Great Spirit.”
This aquatic jungle, whose secrets are known only to the Indian, has not changed since the day Columbus found a new world for Castile and Leon, as a brief extract from the airmen’s report verifies:
“The territory in which we made our landing is known as the Everglades (Big Cypress). Its sameness is appalling; just one small cypress hammockafter another; water and mud everywhere; innumerable mosquitoes, alligators, water moccasins and black snakes. Here and there a hammock would be found with a rock base and on some of these bases Seminole Indians eke out an existence. The mosquitoes attacked us in hordes. We drank no water, for fear it might be infected with malaria germs or some other swamp fever, nor had any food been found.... We were compelled to spend the night again in the swamp, this time on ground covered with an inch or more of water, a maze of water and prairie ways, with treacherous under-currents and impregnable barriers.”
The solemn silence of this mysterious swamp is only broken by the splash of the Indian canoe, but here the Seminole lingers, giving a background of tragedy and romance to aboriginal America.