South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Following after the ‘gentleman explorer’
Canoeing the path of the first man to map the southern Everglades
Few human beings ever reach the deep interior of the Everglades.
125 years ago, a wealthy “gentleman explorer” had a wild idea. While his peers at the Explorers Club were off shooting trophies or plundering archeological sites in foreign lands, Hugh Willoughby chose to be the first non-Native American to cross the southern Everglades from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic. He would also be the first person to map it, and the first to collect scientific data on water quality.
His arduous, 130-mile, 15-day canoe trip happened in the nick of time. He collected his data while the Everglades was still much as it had been for the previous 5,000 years.
It would not stay that way for long. Around the same time, Henry Flagler’s railroad reached the pioneer village of Miami, population around 1,600. The railroad would set in motion the modernization of South Florida, and thus change the Everglades forever.
Since then the River of Grass, which once slowly seeped south from Orlando all the way to Florida Bay, has been dammed, sliced,
lacerated, drained and subdivided into sugar cane fields and housing. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, only half of the original ecosystem remains.
Government entities have captured the Everglades’ seasonal sheet flow and sent it east and west, where farm runoff and septic pollutants spawn destructive algae blooms in coastal estuaries near Stuart and Fort Myers.
This October, a crew of four Floridians — Christophe Vandaele and Harvey Oyer III from The Explorers Club, scientist Tracie Baker from the University of Florida and navigator and outdoorsman Charlie Arazoza — set out in canoes to retrace Willoughby’s 130-mile journey.
Their goal was to collect scientific information on the watershed and compare it to Willoughby’s pure baseline data. They would also look for new modern contaminants such as microplastics, pharmaceuticals and cocaine. The expedition, though, would end up revealing more to them than science.
The 2022 trip entered the Everglades where Willoughby did, on the mangrove fringe, along the Gulf of Mexico.
The first day was pretty straight forward. They paddled into the labyrinth of the 10,000 Islands in Everglades National Park, covered 16 miles up the Harney River, and camped out.
On the second day, things got interesting, confusing and exhausting.
Finding the right creek finger, again and again and again, among the overgrown mangroves was the only way to find the airboat trail that would lead them north to their campsite (the only one for miles), explained trip navigator Arazoza. Miss the creek and you’re sleeping in the canoe — not ideal given the impending mosquito horde.
“You pop out into the grass, you pop back into the mangroves — it’s like a back and forth transition until you get to the airboat trail that goes north,” said Arazoza, who was relieved when they finally reached the open sawgrass.
Willoughby wrote of the same moment in his book, “Across the Everglades: A Canoe Journey of Exploration”:
“A little way farther and an opening appeared, letting in a flood of daylight, and we suddenly burst into the pathless Everglades … What a sea of grass!”
When Willoughby writes “we” he means him and his guide, Ed Brewer. Brewer had a shady reputation around the wilds of South Florida, but had been trained in the ways of the Everglades by the Seminole Tribe and was a keen hunter and “splendid poler,” meaning he could pole a canoe over grass where a paddle might get stuck. “In the Everglades the paddle is useless,”
Willougby wrote.
He and Brewer poled their way through the sawgrass and Willoughby took copious water samples and mapping information. “He looked at pH, salinity, temperature — all useful today,” said trip scientist Baker, an associate professor of environmental and global health at the University of Florida who has competed in Ironman triathlons.
Arazoza explained that once Willoughby and Brewer reached the wet prairie interior, they were following “leads,” subtle dips or indentations in grass that might be 8 feet tall, indicating a canoe trail, or at least an easier path.
“Sometimes those leads peter out,” Arazoza said. “We have an advantage with GPS in that we know which is the right lead and that it goes through.”
The grass dictates everything.
“It’s not that the water gets shallow, it’s that the grass gets thick,” Arazoza said. “We had mapped a route through the grass that was the least s——- way to go.
“It’s almost like cave diving — you don’t get from Point A to Point B in a straight line, you gotta go the way the grass lets you go. You gotta pick your way along.”
Willoughby and Brewer had similar battles.
“There seems to be plenty of water, and most of the leads have been good, enabling me to go in a northeasterly direction, but much dodging around is necessary, to avoid heavy bunches of grass … the saw-grass, which is the worst of all. [It] grows to a height of about four feet, but where the soil is deeper it has very little water around its roots and reaches a height of ten feet. This is the great barrier to Everglade travel; it pays better to go twenty five miles around than half a mile through.
What makes this grass so formidable and so much to be dreaded is the saw-like edge with which it is armed on three sides. If you get a blade between your hand and the pole, it will cut you to the bone, with a jagged gash that takes long to heal.”
Trip co-leader Oyer said that even though they’d reconnoitered the area via helicopter, and knew there were miles to cross without airboat trails, “there were many more hours of being stuck in sawgrass than we anticipated.”
The 2022 team hit patches so thick that indeed, paddles were useless. They had to pull on the grass with their hands to move forward, as if having a tug-o-war with the marsh. “There’s water but you have so much friction [on the canoe] from the grass that it’s easier to pull yourself,” Arazoza said.
Oyer had on a pair of cut-proof gloves while pulling on the grass. By the end of the trip, they were shredded.
Being 15 miles into the sawgrass without a road nearby gave Oyer a deeper respect for Willoughby. “There was no GPS, no maps. He navigated purely on stories that the Seminoles had told him, and by the stars. That’s a lost art today,” Oyer said.
Willoughby was, by all accounts, a Renaissance man. He had the means to be a “gentleman explorer” as Oyer puts it, and did so with gusto. He raced yachts in the northeast, raced cars on the beaches of Dayton, set a car speed record driving from Philadelphia to Newport, R.I., was an early pilot who knew the Wright brothers, and developed and manufactured seaplanes.
“There was no sat phone, no one tracking him, no fire rescue helicopter to call,” Oyer said, “so he was completely on his own in a completely unmapped, uncharted territory. It makes him all the more remarkable to me.”
Darkness in the swamp
As they pulled themselves along, the sun set and the mosquitoes descended upon them. It was soon fully dark. “It’s mentally challenging,” Baker said. “As the sun goes down and you know you’re not there [at the campsite] and it’s going to be even more difficult to find.”
By the time they reached the campsite it was 9:30 at night and they’d covered 20 miles. They set up their tents and cooked dinner on a skimpy wooden platform that stood a few inches above the water. When Baker turned her headlamp into the grass, she could see glowing alligator eyes.
Willoughby found the darkness revealing as well.
“As the hours advanced new combinations of sounds broke on the ear, until it seemed that a menagerie had arrived and all the animals were exercising their lungs.
The first to tune up were the frogs. … They make a noise like a creeky sheave in an old block. … But the worst sound to sleep through is the
cry of the limpkin [a wading bird that eats apple snails]. ... Their conduct at night is something most disreputable.”
Oyer had concerns about alligators, water moccasins and pythons.
Friends had told him, “‘You’re crazy … We’ve seen alligators snatch ducks 6 feet out of the air, we’ve seen pythons take down deer. That’s going to be you!’ We didn’t see any of that,” he said. “Only a few alligators. [Snakes] could have been there, but they didn’t make their presence known.”
The stars were thick, Arazoza said, and so bright you could almost see better without a headlamp.
Despite the grueling paddle, “It was more beautiful than I expected,” Baker said.