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Updated: June 16, 2025
These gave sufficient employment to our botanists, all the time we stayed upon it, and occasioned my calling it Botany Isle. On it were several water-snakes, some pigeons, and doves, seemingly different from any we had seen. One of the officers shot a hawk, which proved to be of the very same sort as our English fishing-hawks.
Large sea-turtles come to the surface to sun themselves, stretching their awkward necks to get a sight of our hull; dolphins and flying-fish are too abundant to be a curiosity; big water-snakes raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish.
We saw here some cormorants, gulls, crab-catchers, etc., a few small land birds, and a sort of white parrots, which flew a great many together. We found some shell-fish, viz., limpets, periwinkles, and abundance of small oysters growing on the rocks, which were very sweet. In the sea we saw some green turtle, many sharks, and abundance of water-snakes of several sorts and sizes.
However, the wind shortly after came about again to the southward, and then we jogged on again to the northward, and saw many small dolphins and whales, and abundance of cuttle-shells swimming on the sea, and some water-snakes every day. The 17th we saw the land again and took a sight of it.
One had to pinch oneself to be sure that one was awake as one heard this sane and practical Professor in cold measured tones describing the monstrous three-eyed fish-lizards and the huge water-snakes which inhabit this enchanted sheet of water.
We sometimes thought we saw fire on the horizon; but it was the light of the rising stars enlarged by the vapours. After having wandered a long time in the savannah, we resolved to seat ourselves beneath the trunk of a palm-tree, in a spot perfectly dry, surrounded by short grass; for the fear of water-snakes is always greater than that of jaguars among Europeans recently disembarked.
There was a great roar of laughter, in which Dol's abettors, Will and Martin, joined with cheerful shouts. The little joke had the effect of winning everybody's thoughts from roaring flames, wrecked forests, and the dreary brûlée. Uncle Eb killed the snake, maintaining that water-snakes were "plaguy p'isonous," while Cyrus scouted the idea. The supper that evening was a merry enough meal.
Watch, too, the speckled water-snakes gliding upon the gravel or lurking like the ancient serpent in mimic gardens of Eden. Mark all the varied life and wondrous beauty of nature there. Above all, do not hurry, for little is seen by those who hasten on. At a weir of sticks and stones forming a rather wide dam, overgrown by tall hemp-agrimony now in flower, we met with our first difficulty.
Was it possible that an hundred serpents could have surrounded the camp? Brought suddenly to his feet, Leon stood for some moments uncertain how to act. He fully believed they were snakes anacondas, or water-snakes no doubt that had just crept out of the river; and he felt that a movement on his part would bring on their united and simultaneous attack upon the sleeping party.
And everywhere a feeling of snakes wicked water-snakes with yellow rims around their eyes. "They crossed great rivers, Ockmulgee, Oconee, Ogechee, making a bridge of men and paddling their way across with the help of saddle cruppers and horses' tails. If the waters were too deep for that, they made piraguas dug-out canoes, you know and rafts of cane.
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