The Ocklawaha, the "dark, crooked water," comes from the south, by
tortuous windings, through various lakes and swamps, and then turns
east and southeast to flow into St. John's River, after a course of
over three hundred miles. It rises in Lake Apopka, down the Peninsula,
elevated about a hundred feet above the sea, the second largest of the
Florida Lakes, and covering one hundred and fifty square miles. This
lake has wooded highlands to the westward, dignified by the title of
Apopka Mountains, which rise probably one hundred and twenty feet
above its surface. To the northward is a group of lakes--Griffin,
Yale, Eustis, Dora, Harris and others--having clear amber waters and
low shores, which are all united by the Ocklawaha, the stream finally
flowing northward out of Lake Griffin. This is a region of extensive
settlement, mainly by Northern people. The mouth of the Ocklawaha is
sixty-five miles from Lake Eustis in a straight line, but the river
goes two hundred and thirty miles to get there. To the northward of
this lake district is the thriving town of Ocala, with five thousand
people, in a region of good agriculture and having large
phosphate beds, the settlement having been originally started as a
military post during the Seminole War. About five miles east of Ocala
is the famous Silver Spring, which is believed to have been the
"fountain of perpetual youth," for which Juan Ponce de Leon vainly
searched. It is the largest and most beautiful of the many Florida
springs, having wonderfully clear waters, and covers about three
acres. The waters can be plainly seen pouring upwards through fissures
in the rocky bottom, like an inverted Niagara, eighty feet beneath the
surface. It has an enormous outflow, and a swift brook runs from it, a
hundred feet wide, for some eight miles to the Ocklawaha.
This strange stream is hardly a river in the ordinary sense, having
fixed banks and a well-defined channel, but is rather a tortuous but
navigable passage through a succession of lagoons and cypress swamps.
Above the Silver Spring outlet, only the smallest boats of light draft
can get through the crooked channel. This outlet is thirty miles in a
direct line from the mouth of the river at the St. John's, but the
Ocklawaha goes one hundred and nine miles thither. The swampy border
of the stream is rarely more than a mile broad, and beyond it are the
higher pine lands. Through this curious channel, amid the thick
cypress forests and dense jungle of undergrowth, the wayward and
crooked river meanders. The swampy bottom in which it has its course
is so low-lying as to be undrainable and cannot be improved, so that
it will probably always remain as now, a refuge for the sub-tropical
animals, birds, reptiles and insects of Florida, which abound in its
inmost recesses. Here flourishes the alligator, coming out to sun
himself at mid-day on the logs and warm grassy lagoons at the edge of
the stream, in just the kinds of places one would expect to find him.
Yet the alligator is said to be a coward, rarely attacking, unless his
retreat to water in which to hide himself is cut off. He thus becomes
more a curiosity than a foe. These reptiles are hatched from eggs
which the female deposits during the spring, in large numbers, in
muddy places, where she digs out a spacious cavity, fills it with
several hundred eggs, and covering them thickly with mud, leaves
nature to do the rest. After a long incubation the little fellows come
out and make a bee-line for the nearest water. The big alligators of
the neighborhood have many breakfasts on the newly-born little ones,
but some manage to grow up, after several years, to maturity, and
exhibit themselves along this remarkable river.
It is almost impossible to conceive of the concentrated crookedness of
the Ocklawaha and the difficulties of passage. It is navigated by
stout and narrow flat-bottomed boats of light draft, constructed so as
to quickly turn sharp corners, bump the shores and run on logs without
injury. The river turns constantly at short intervals and doubles upon
itself in almost every mile, while the huge cypress trees often
compress the water way so that a wider boat could not get through.
There are many beautiful views in its course displaying the noble
ranks of cypress trees rising as the stream bends along its bordering
edge of swamps. Occasionally a comparatively straight river reach
opens like the aisle of a grand building with the moss-hung cypress
columns in long and sombre rows on either hand. At rare intervals fast
land comes down to the stream bank, where there is some cultivation
attempted for oranges and vegetables. Terrapin, turtles and water-fowl
abound. When the passenger boat, after bumping and swinging around the
corners, much like a ponderous teetotum, halts for a moment at a
landing in this swampy fastness, half-clad negroes usually appear,
offering for sale partly-grown baby alligators, which are the prolific
crop of the district. Various "Turkey bends," "Hell's half-acres,"
"Log Jams," "Bone Yards" and "Double S Bends" are passed, and at one
place is the "Cypress Gate," where three large trees are in the way,
and by chopping off parts of their roots, a passage about twenty feet
wide had been secured to let the boats through. There are said to be
two thousand bends in one hundred miles of this stream, and many of
them are like corrugated circles, by which the narrow water way, in a
mile or two of its course, manages to twist back to within a few feet
of where it started. At night, to aid the navigation, the lurid glare
of huge pine-knot torches, fitfully blazing, gives the scene a weird
and unnatural aspect. The monotonous sameness of cypress trunks,
sombre moss and twisting stream for many hours finally becomes very
tiresome, but it is nevertheless a most remarkable journey of the
strangest character possible in this country to sail down the
Ocklawaha.