Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  By talking with a local family who lived near their camp, Hornaday learned that there were alligators in Arch Creek, one of many small, brackish, mangrove-tangled creeks draining out of the Everglades into the north end of Biscayne Bay. The family also told them something else: a mile back up the creek was one enormous alligator that had gotten that big by being fearsome, cunning, and elusive. For years, people had tried to bag the beast, but nobody had succeeded.

  The two adventurers decided to move their camp up to the north end of the bay, and in fact, they pitched their tent directly on top of the odd natural limestone “arch” that spanned the water and gave the creek its name. The next morning, they stealthily rowed down Arch Creek for about a mile, dipping their oars into the water without a splash, then lifting them, dripping, back to the next stroke. They had just come around a bend when they spotted an enormous reptile sprawled on a mudbank, sunning, at a distance of about 150 yards. Its sheer size was startling—it appeared to be fourteen or fifteen feet in length, and fat as a hog. It would make a handsome museum specimen, for sure, if they could succeed in outwitting it.

  From the bow of the boat, Will turned around and put one finger to his lips. Chester nodded, and they let the boat drift a little back downstream, slipping behind the bend and out of sight of the huge ’gator. They pulled alongside the bank and stopped, and Will pulled out his binoculars, and his Maynard .40-caliber. Then, with furtive oar-strokes, Chester began silently moving the boat forward and they crept back around the bend. The beast was still there, sprawled on the sandbar, facing them. Will brought him into focus with his glass . . . and then recoiled in shock. It wasn’t an alligator. Its grey-green back, its long, sinister, tapered snout, and the protruding fourth tooth of its lower jaw made it clear that the beast was actually a crocodile.

  A crocodile! But there were no crocodiles in the United States: this was a “fact” about which virtually all naturalists agreed. There were plenty of American alligators in Florida, Alligator mississippiensis, but crocodiles? None. There had been rumors that there might be some in Florida, but never any solid scientific proof. The only crocs in the Americas lived farther south, in Cuba, in Mexico, in Central America, and in certain places in South America like the fabled Orinoco River delta, in Venezuela.6

  For a moment, Will Hornaday hardly dared to breathe. Had he and Chester just discovered the first crocodile in the United States—had they, perhaps, even discovered a whole new species? Was he, just like Du Chaillu, about to carve his first notch on the trophy-belt of scientific history? Just then, sensing some faint perturbation in its zone of safety, the immense reptile abruptly belly-paddled across the sandbar, plunged into the water and sank out of sight. For a moment, it was as if Will Hornaday had not even seen what he had just seen.

  Basking on the sandbar, the croc had looked primitive, almost antediluvian, like an amphibious dinosaur. And, in fact, it would later become known that crocodiles are as old as dinosaurs, having arisen more than 220 million years ago, in the steamy swamps of the Triassic. Fairly early in this evolutionary saga, the physical design of the crocodile became so terrifyingly efficient, its hunting methods so crafty and so pitiless, that it actually evolved very little for the remainder of that unimaginably long span of time. Their size did change: early in their evolutionary history, ancient crocodillians called “archosaureans” grew so immense—fifty feet long, weighing eight tons—that they were capable of killing and consuming a dinosaur. And their means of locomotion changed somewhat: in ancient times, these fearsome monster lizards were able to walk upright, some of them on two legs, and could apparently “gallop” at high speeds, like the huge saltwater crocs of Australia do today. Crocodiles outwitted the dinosaurs in another way, too: when the great extinction event of 65 million years ago obliterated the dinosaurs and much of the rest of life on Earth, the crocodiles, waiting patiently in the murky water with only their eyes and nostrils exposed, survived.7

  The skull of the present-day crocodile, with its distinctive tapering snout, still carries a basically archosaurean shape, making it a kind of living fossil, but one capable of crushing virtually anything that lives or breathes. Its phenomenal evolutionary success has to do with two things: stealth and savagery. Crocodiles are ambush hunters, able to remain perfectly still and almost perfectly invisible, adrift just beneath the water’s surface until the moment they lunge. In fact, crocs spend most of their lives in a state of near-motionlessness, still as a log, adjusting their position with faint, quiet paddle-strokes. Then, with a ferocity unparalleled in the animal kingdom, they strike, and in a fraction of a second, they turn into the most ferocious reptiles on Earth. A rottweiler’s bite force has been measured at 335 pounds per square inch; a great white shark, which can slice another shark in two, at 800 pounds per square inch. But nothing compares to a crocodile, whose bite force is more than 5,000 pounds per square inch. It is the most savage bite, by far, of any living creature on the planet.8

  If Jackson and Hornaday were going to get anywhere close to the croc, they would have to match its furtiveness with their own. The next morning, they dressed the boat in branches and leaves so that it looked like a drifting sea-mat and very gently rowed it through the current toward the dragon’s lair. He was on the mudbank again, sunning like a lizard king. But he wasn’t fooled by their disguise: almost as soon as they drifted into view, he scrambled into the water and sank out of sight. Not for nothing had he gotten so old and huge.

  The third morning, Hornaday and Jackson got up before first light and set in motion a new plan. Hornaday would take his .40 Maynard and creep along the far shore of the creek until he was opposite the croc’s sandbar, and then he would hide in the mangroves. Jackson, also armed, would row the dinghy up the creek and stop just behind the bend. Then they’d both lay in wait, hoping that one or the other of them would get a chance at a shot. But when they arrived at their positions, the croc was not there, just the sunny sandbar and the gentle, peaceful current, slipping sweetly downstream. A long time passed; the soft dawn light faded away into the blank glare of full tropical day. Then, suddenly, an immense, gray, pebbly back surfaced in the middle of the stream. It paused there for a long time, motionless, until an inattentive observer would have mistaken it for nothing but a drifting log. But its stillness was not of inaction; it was of cunning. Its apparent lifelessness, so easily mistaken for lack of danger, was actually part of a pitiless plan. It was part of the reason its kind had outlived the dinosuars by 65 million years.

  Then, gently, the log drifted slowly through the water towards the sandbar, stopped, seemed to change direction, and then began drifting back out to the center of the stream. Hornaday was an experienced hunter, but he was still only twenty years old. He could not wait any longer. He stood up, drew a bead on the old croc’s head with the Maynard and fired. The croc seemed to explode in rage and pain, churning the water in a frenzy of froth, dove out of sight, then resurfaced, tail first, thrashing the surface of the creek. Hornaday got off a second shot, then yelled for Jackson.9

  Chet, bring the boat up here! I got ’im once, but he’s not down!

  Jackson rowed furiously up the stream, then stopped, stood up in the boat, and tried to get off a shot. But his gun just clicked—a misfire. He rowed still closer to the thrashing croc, grabbed a long-handled fishing spear lying in the boat, and drove it into its back. The handle of the spear snapped off like a twig, and the croc headed downstream. Hornaday leaped from the bank into the bow of the boat and the two of them pursued the crazed monster downstream, Hornaday repeatedly firing whenever its body appeared above the surface. Finally, the beast’s thrashing began to subside, and it rolled up against the muddy bank and succumbed, after all the many years of its life. (One Australian crocodile in captivity is thought to be 130 years old, so its life had no doubt been a long one.)

  When Hornaday and Jackson were able to stretch the croc out to its full length on the shore, they discovered it was fourteen feet, two inches in length—but par
t of its tail had been bitten off, so it was likely closer to fifteen feet long. It was over five feet around at the belly. The animal was so huge that Hornaday had to dress it out in the swamp and bring back only the skin and skeleton because the body itself, which he estimated weighed over a thousand pounds, was too heavy to be dragged behind the boat. As Hornaday hoped, this great beast, which the two of them nicknamed “Ole Boss,” would prove to be the first crocodile ever taken in Florida, and one of the largest crocs ever found in the state since that time. The day after they slew this monster, the adventurers returned to the swamp and shot a female, possibly Ole Boss’s mate, which measured ten feet eight inches in length.

  Flushed with success and heady with the idea that he might become the next Du Chaillu, Hornaday wrote his first scientific paper about the croc, for American Naturalist, when he returned to Rochester. In the paper, he proclaimed that he had not only discovered the first crocodile in Florida, but also that it was a brand-new species, which he called Crocodylus acutus floridanus. He based this claim on the fact that the skull and dorsal plates of “Ole Boss” were different than any known crocodile, with a snout midway between the narrow-beaked gavial and the broad-nosed alligator. But when the twenty-year-old naturalist’s paper was published, it was greeted with something close to indifference. Few, if any, zoologists were convinced that young Hornaday had really notched a new species on the eighteen-member list of known crocodilians (which include alligators, crocodiles, caimans, and gavials). But Hornaday, as usual, was fiercely determined, pugnacious as a bulldog, and he stuck to his claim. Years later, when he had become a renowned naturalist, he continued to stick to this assertion through thirteen editions of his book Hornaday’s American Natural History, a popular guide to the higher animals of North America, published from 1904 to 1931.10

  In the twelfth edition, published in 1927, he placed the Florida crocodile as a subspecies of the American crocodile, describing it as native only to southern Florida and “the only crocodile which inhabits a country that is visited by killing frosts.” Then he retold the story of the taking of “the alleged ‘big ‘gator’ of Arch Creek,” who was so crafty that he had permitted no one within rifleshot except the crafty author of the book. (Hornaday’s taxonomic boast has long since been discarded; the beast is known to be an exceptionally large American crocodile.)

  Even so, there was no disputing the fact that Hornaday and Jackson were the first to confirm the existence of crocodiles in North America, a zoological coup on its own. Hornaday returned to Rochester with the remains of Ole Boss and his mate packed in brine, then painstakingly mounted the big male, bitten-off tail and all. The mounting was later sold to the Smithsonian for $250, a sum that paid for the entire trip. Later, “Ole Boss” was exhibited by the Smithsonian at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and created a sensation.

  Many years earlier, when he was nine years old, Hornaday had killed a blue jay with a stone, and the stinging remorse he felt in that moment lingered for decades. But now, as a young naturalist intent on making his mark in the world, he’d grown increasingly numbed to the youthful sin-sorrow of the kill. Now “Ole Boss” was a primarily a jaunty feather in the cap of a young man who yearned, perhaps all too much, for fame.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Empress Josephine

  The autumn after Hornaday returned from the Everglades and Cuba, Professor Ward sent his rising star to Chicago to help set up an exhibit at the Chicago Exposition of 1875. The exposition was a comparatively minor affair, dwarfed a few years later by Chicago’s great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, said to be the greatest fair ever mounted, with the world’s first Ferris wheel, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” and other modern wonders like a new food called the “hamburger,” as well as electricity, which illuminated the entire 600-acre fairgrounds in such specactular fashion that it came to be called “The White City.” Still, at the 1875 fair, Hornaday succeeded in mounting a handsome display of Ward’s gemstone collection, mounted animals, and casts of ancient fossils, whose strangeness and significance was not fully understood at the time.1

  On his way back home to Rochester, Hornaday stopped to visit his guardian, Ben Auten, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Auten was an officer of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, one of the world’s most famous health resorts, whose regimen was based on principles advocated by John Harvey Kellogg—including frequent enemas, fresh air, sunshine, and a grain-based diet that later led to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Battle Creek’s notable patients had included Amelia Earhart, Henry Ford, and Mary Todd Lincoln. Hornaday’s mother had spent the last few months of her life at the sanitarium before her death nine years earlier. While he was in Battle Creek, Auten invited the young naturalist to dinner at the home of an acquaintance. It was one of those seemingly chance events that would change his life forever. Also attending the dinner was a high school teacher named Josephine Chamberlain, who, like Hornaday, was twenty-one years old. When he saw her, it was as if his whole previous life melted away, and the only thing that remained was that moment:

  With an all-devouring look, my astonished eyes strove to take in that lovely and commanding personality. Never had I seen in the form of young womanhood anything quite comparable to her. I noted her ample height, her beautifully modelled form, and her wonderfully well-balanced head. . . . Miss Chamberlain’s intellectual head and finely chiseled face, all perfectly modelled and poised, thrilled me. . . . She was a clear blonde, of a model fit for a figure of Diana, and her enunciation of pure English was a positive delight. . . . I was able to realize that her taste in dress was of the best, and that she wore her clothes in a jaunty and aristocratic air that in any country would make both men and women turn around and look.2

  A quarter of a century later, in a letter to her, Hornaday remembered again that day:

  Several times recently I have found my thoughts going back to you as you were 24 years ago. . . . I remember you vividly in your best black silk gown at the never-to-be-forgotten dinner party of Emily Fellows—blessed Emily Fellows, whose hospitality gave me the opportunity to meet the finest Girl on earth.3

  For her part, Josephine was a little taken aback by the presumption of this handsome young adventurer, and his forwardness, verging on rudeness, in bursting into her conversation whenever he pleased. He seemed to simply disregard the conventions of Victorian etiquette, looking directly into her eyes, even reaching out and touching her arm as he spoke. “Now who is this bold young man who dares to dispute my opinion on first acquaintance?” she wrote later, recalling this first meeting.4

  He told her about his exploits in Cuba and the Everglades, and about slaying the king of the dragons, a brand-new species unknown to science. He told her that Professor Ward had asked him to go on a new collecting expedition, this time to the fabulous and menacing Orinoco River delta in South America. He couldn’t help but mention the old saying, well known among seasoned adventurers like himself, that “when five men go up the Orinoco, only two return.” Up the river, there were immense crocodiles, among the largest in the world; flesh-eating piranha, which could skeletonize a cow in seconds; and giant electric eels, which could produce a 650-volt shock that was enough to kill a man in a single jolt. Josephine listened to all this demurely, dropping her eyes frequently, as custom required, wondering how much of it might be true.

  Hornaday did not leave the dinner without getting Josephine’s mailing address and a promise to correspond with him from parts unknown. He would be sure to write back, he said—in the unlikely event, that is, that he survived the Orinoco.5

  Actually, the South America trip had been mostly Chester Jackson’s idea. After Jackson returned to the weary tedium of Wisconsin following his adventures in the Everglades, the two pals kept up a lively correspondence, and at one point—mostly in jest—Jackson suggested that the two of them, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, keep going south, all the way down to the Amazon. It was, after all, Hornaday who had first implied that’s where he was bound when they
first met. Maybe they could even spend the winter down there, Jackson suggested, hunting and collecting for Professor Ward and having splendid adventures along the way.

  Hornaday took him seriously. He thought maybe Professor Ward might actually go for it, especially in light of the fact that Ward had just returned from a trip abroad that proved to be a disappointment, because most of the European specimen dealers had only a paltry supply of museum-quality items. To procure the kind of specimens that he needed to fill his catalog, Ward would have to mount his own expeditions to some of the world’s most remote and dangerous places, such as central Africa, southeast Asia, and of course the great river deltas of South America. Hornaday could not have picked a more propitious moment—especially after his recent triumph in the swamp—to propose that he and his new sidekick Jackson embark on a collecting trip to the Orinoco. Ward agreed to the trip and fronted them half the money. Jackson put up the rest. Still, it would be a shoestring operation all the way because the budget—as usual—would be so tight it squeaked.

  By January, when Rochester was thigh-deep in snowdrifts, Jackson arrived in town, and he and Hornaday spent a couple of frantic, dizzy days getting outfitted for their big trip. They bought rubber blankets, wool blankets, a tent, ammunition, fishing tackle, ammonia for snake bites, alum, arsenic, quinine for malaria, a device for testing the strength of alcohol (for preserving specimens), a thermometer, New Bedford harpoons, field glasses, flasks of brandy, “court plaster” for cuts, various skinning knives and scrapers, two hatchets, forceps, a rock hammer, a couple thousand blank paper labels, and other supplies. Hornaday also had brought along a small collection of favorite weapons. There was his favorite of all, the trusty .40 Maynard rifle—the Excaliber that had slain the dragon. (Actually, it had two barrels, one .40 caliber and the other .45–.85 caliber.) He had another double-barreled, smoothbore gun, a breech-loading number 10. He had a Maynard shotgun, number 16. And he had a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, with cartridge belt and bag. He was like a regular Buffalo Bill, except better armed.6