Florida

THIS is the time of year when there isn’t very much for us Hardy Northern Races who live in New England to do, except to sew ourselves into our red flannels and parkas — in itself no mean feat — and creep into our igloos. Some of us do not emerge until the blithe season of strawberry festivals in our respective Sunday Schools. It is our privilege to spend the winter months in contemplation. We can ponder the thought that it must be a pleasant season somewhere else, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that a severe climate inevitably produces people of great physical strength and moral virtue.

To me, however, as an adopted Floridian, the season brings nostalgic memories of escapist flights to warmer climes, to “that vanishing Eden,” as our Dr. Barbour, in a downright treacherous mood, calls it. Writing, as I am, in an early Igloo phase of the moon, my indignation as well as my nostalgia has been roused, not only by Dr. Barbour’s book (which should be instantly banned and burned by the Watch and Ward Committee of the Miami Chamber of Commerce), but also by a volume recently published by the Yale University Press and edited by Evangeline and Charles Andrews. This volume bears the title:

JONATHAN DICKINSON’S JOURNAL or God’s Protecting Providence Being the Narrative of a Journey From Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 and April 1, 1697

The original edition of this famous journal, brought out in 1699, is more explicit in its title page. God’s Protecting Providence is “Evidenced in the Remarkable Deliverance of divers Persons from the devouring Waves of the Sea, amongst which they Suffered Shipwrack, and also From the more cruelly devouring jawes of the inhumane Canibals of Florida.” This is the earliest and one of the unkindest references to our well-known Florida realtors which I have seen in any publication.

On the face of it one would think it unlikely that either Dr. Barbour or Jonathan Dickinson was a Southern Californian. There is little or no external evidence to prove this thesis. In fact the dates of Dickinson’s Journal strongly argue against what is admittedly a moot point. But the internal evidence seems to me overwhelming. We Floridians are psychic about Southern Californians.

Before analyzing Brother Dickinson’s document, it may be well to explain certain aspects of the Good Neighbor policy which prevails between Southern Florida and Southern California. To the outsider the fundamental principle of that policy would seem to be summed up in the one word Sympathy, the sympathy felt by the Floridian for the Californian and, laughably enough, rice versa. This sympathy manifests itself, not so much in the ordinary, placid routine of life, as in moments of sorrow and tribulation. If Mother Earth so much as shrugs a shoulder or raises an eyebrow beneath California’s drenched and frozen winter soil, knocking down a brown Fedora or two, or canting a Filling Station and Barbecue establishment (Eat Here and Gas Up!), the Florida newspapers are one great wailing wall of sympathy for their suffering brethren in that unhappy land. Miami papers, with one accord, will spread the sad news all over the front page. Editors will devote their allotted space to establishing “A Rescue Fund for Southern California’s Homeless Earthquake Victims!

The response is uniformly generous. Not in money, perhaps, — though I have known one Rescue Fund which reached the grand cash total of $14.97,but in other ways. Citrus fruits — of which, as is well known, there are few of any decent quality in California — will be generously forwarded to the starving refugees. We do not need or possess, in Sunny Florida, clothing suitable for the cold, rainy climate of Southern California. Yet Northern tourists are canvassed, and sometimes quite respectable collections of turtle-neck sweaters, galoshes, ear muffs, and heavy underwear are forwarded, post haste, by “Bundles for California.”

But when a high wind happens to run off its course and strike our famous beaches instead of New England, what does California do? She pretends that it is a hurricane! Ha! Ha! Hurricane! And sends us carloads of tomatoes. Tomatoes! As if our truck lands did not produce the finest tomatoes—faugh on such hypocrisy disguised as sympathy! Let us have done with their crocodile tears and return to the healthier subject of Brother Jonathan.

That good man, a Quaker planter and merchant of Jamaica, went to Florida the hard way. Together with his wife and six-month-old child, two other passengers, one of whom was Robert Barrow, “the Quaker Saint,” and ten of Jonathan’s Negro slaves, he sailed on August 23, 1696, from Port Royal, Jamaica, in the barkentine Reformation, Joseph Kirle, Commander. She carried a crew of eight men. After stormy wanderings, they were driven ashore near Jupiter Inlet on the Florida East Coast in the latter part of September. While they were getting ashore and trying to salvage useful material from the wreck (four of the party were invalids, the Commander having broken his leg in the storm), they were greeted in a dreary fashion by the native sons: “. . . their Casseekey (for so they call their king) with about thirty more came down to us in a furious manner, having a dismal aspect and foaming at the mouth.” The travelers were robbed of everything, stripped naked, beaten, abused, starved, threatened with death.

During their long and dreadful odyssey to St. Augustine, on foot and by canoe, marching barefoot on the sandy coral beaches and in constant danger in their unseaworthy craft, exposed to flood and storm, they suffered almost every elemental misery. (The next edition should be expurgated by the Chamber of Commerce, deleting the passages on pages 42 and 49, and elsewhere, dealing with sand flies and mosquitoes, and those really unfortunate references to the extreme cold from which they suffered as they approached St. Augustine. Tactfully edited, with certain omissions, footnotes could point out that, after all, only four of them died from cold and starvation and that, at any rate, in going from St. Augustine to Charleston, they did not have to change trains at Jax.)

It would be hard, however, to excuse the conduct of the local Indians — unless one adopts the plausible but unproved theory that they were really Japanese. Incidents like the following were constantly recurring: “ My wife received several blows, and an Indian came and took hold of her hair, and was going either to cut her throat or something like it, having his knife nigh her throat ; but I looked at him, making a sign tHat he should not, so he desisted: at which time another Indian came with a handful of sea-sand and filled our poor child’s mouth. By this time the Casseekey’s wife came to my wife seeing her oppressed and they pulled the sand out of our child’s mouth.”

In fact, barring a few instances of kindness by Indian women who suckled the sick child, these noble redmen hardly rate as people. The child, incidentally, survived and grew to manhood in Philadelphia. It is pleasant to record that these unfortunate travelers — at their last extremity — were received by the Spaniards at St. Augustine, which they reached on September 15, with the greatest sympathy and kindness, and nursed back to health, clothed and fed, and sent under military escort to Charleston, whence they took ship to Philadelphia. Robert Barrow died there, shortly after landing, truly a saint, if genuine piety, Christian fortitude and firmness, enduring faith in “God’s Providence,” and utter selflessness are attributes of sainthood. Of him, the author writes on February 4, 1697: —

Tins day in the evening Robert Barrow departed this life and was buried the 6 instant having passed through great exercises in much patience; and in all the times of our greatest troubles was ready to counsel us to patience and to wait what the Lord our God would bring to pass. . . . And so this good man having finished his course with joy laid down his body and is with Him who rewards the just.

Many editions of this journal have appeared in the past, from the first, published in 1699, to the fourteenth in 1868. Never before, however, has it been treated in so thorough and scholarly a manner. Itself a mine of valuable source material concerning the Indians of Florida, it has been embellished by the editors with maps, reproductions of old engravings and of former title pages, and with appendices filled with apposite information.

The editors have traced, where possible, the antecedent and subsequent careers of the leading characters among these unhappy castaways. They have left — as far as I can discover nothing undone to explain and illustrate this short but moving chapter in American history. And they have preserved unspoiled a story written as Bunyan wrote, but of an earthly pilgrimage.

Although Florida has been denied me this season, thanks to my iron-hearted partners, nevertheless I did manage to sneak in a fortnight or so of absence from my office. It was hardly worth while. On my return I was faced by a desk fairly groaning beneath its load of bad things. The reason for the paper shortage is crystal clear. All kinds of people print all kinds of things on perfectly good paper and send them to all kinds of other people who don’t want them. Then we other people turn right around and send our product to them and they don’t know what to do with it, and we keep the circle circling, and thousands of acres of forest melt away and erosion sets in, and the climate changes, and no one’s sales resistance has responded with the slightest quiver or tremor. Nothing happens except on those days when you have mislaid your letter opener, and then you are very likely to cut your forefinger tearing envelopes apart.

Take a look, just take a look at my desk! First, sort out the publishers’ announcements and advertising and publicity. Ninety-eight per cent of this material consists of adventures in futility. Publishers fall over their feet to assure me on December 15 that publication of “Who’s Who in Tien-Tsing” has been postponed from November 3 to November 9. One and all labor under the natural delusion that they are writing either to Mr. Davidson or to Mr. Daniels. This gives an atmosphere of eery unreality to such a one-sided correspondence. Even when the tone of the message is chummy and cozy, I feel as if there were a mistake somewhere and that I am really the ghost of somebody else.

Wandering in this limbo of anonymity, I have some hesitation in criticizing the output of my colleagues in the outer publishing world. Probably they send more interesting data to people whose names mean something to them; but at that, they send me certain communications they shouldn’t send to anyone. First of all, I object to glossy photographs of authors and authoresses. I am unable to explain why it is so -except perhaps that ours is a sedentary and inward trade—but it is a fact that most authors look like shad. Not the vigorous shad, he or she, who rushes up the cloacae we call rivers, in order to perpetuate the shad race, hut the tired shad who lingers in tidewater and spends its time breathing deeply and making pouting faces at other tired shad. And it does something to one’s simple faith in the godlike quality of ladies to look at the shining face of the authoress who has just produced a best-seller and to be forced to the conclusion that there is something vaguely marsupial about her. Also, it is distressing to learn from a photograph that the author of that profound work, “What’s Wrong With Everything?” will not require a razor for another ten years or so. How can so young a man know so much? No, authors should profit by that aura of mystery which enshrouds the great and the aloof. No more photographs, please.

It is heartening to see how many people, every day, want to help me in so many ways — people whom I don’t know at all. There’s the Commodity Research Bureau, Inc., for instance, standing ready to help me with my income tax problems. The American Iron & Steel Institute thinks I ought to know more about iron and steel and very kindly sends me a copy of Steelways, an excellent magazine of its kind.

Then there’s the George S. May Co., which mails me a handsome folder entitled "20 Years of Trouble" - a work of supererogation in my opinion. Another friend obliges with “The Facts About Jacksun Hole,”and Facts Magazine furnishes me with an entrancing leaflet, “How to Write a Letter.” The People’s Lobby of Washington, D.C., wants to help me too, but I can’t make out how. A lumber company — to me unknown — announces cryptically, but perhaps with an eye to my coffin comfort: —

We have on hand

Dry Spruce Crating

5/8"x 4” to 7" Wide 5s5

The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities wants money, probably to preserve me, and lots of other people want to help me to give money to excellent causes in other continents and climes. It is all a little confusing but at the same time extremely comforting to realize how many altruistic people are trying all the time to be of service to me, telling me what to do and how to do it. I’m afraid I must be a disappointment to most of them. My thanks to them, just the same.