Chapter XVIII: Alligator Shooting in a West Indian Swamp

Jamaica is a land of perpetual peace and sunshine. The hills and valleys of this, the most beautiful of all the fair islands of the West Indies, are always clothed in a great profusion of the richest greenery; its soil gives birth to almost every luscious fruit the world contains; the sweet scents of its myriad blossoms give to the land an atmosphere of the wildest loveliness; yet it is a country almost entirely barren of native animal life. Birds there are in great numbers, and insects too; fish of many kinds swarm in the rivers and mountain torrents, but the languorous climate of the Queen of the Antilles gives shelter to no four-footed game of the plains or forest lands. The place has no claim on the hearts of sportsmen.

It is stated that there are a few wild pigs still roaming at large in one or two of the forests in the north of the island, and certainly there are a few alligators to be found among the swamps at the mouth of the Rio Cobra River in Kingston Bay. But the prospect of finding a boar or two, and the certainty of having a shot at a savage alligator, mark the beginning and the end of the possibilities of the island so far as exciting sport is concerned.

Of the two, the alligator gives more trouble and excitement to the sportsman bent on slaughter; for though the West India alligator never grows to the size of the African crocodile, he is easily large enough to do an ordinary man to death.

Alligator shooting is one of the most unhealthy pleasures it is possible to imagine. The beasts choose such unhealthy resting-places that the sportsman has to run the risk of many fevers for every reptile he may chance to kill.

A sluggish stream, or silent, deep lagoon, heavy with weeds and creeping plants, alive with the buzz of insects, and half hidden by a deadly steam of malarious vapour, is the sort of place dear to the hearts of alligators. There it is that they are to be found, floating, log-like, with half-closed eyes, or lying on the marshy bank with wide-open jaws, basking in the yellow glare of a fearful sun. Wise men are content to leave the beasts alone; but once we essayed the task of hunting them.

We started from Kingston Harbour in an open whaler, and ran before a spanking breeze towards the murky creeks which run beyond the half-deserted Fort Augustine. It was Fort Augustine most of all that, in the days of old, gave to Jamaica its reputation as a country of death. In the time of our fathers’ fathers, the British regiments were sent from England to this same Augustine Fort, where they were destroyed in

companies, even battalions, by the malarious exhalations of those swamps in which to-day we went to shoot the alligator. Seen from our little boat, Kingston, just missing the deep shadow of the great mountain range which overhangs the town, lay green, and gold, and white in the pale glare of the sun. Fronting Kingston, Port Royal, a tiny strip of sand, be-palmed and dotted with houses, lay symbolic of the Caribbean coral reef. In line with Port Royal, but towards the lagoon, Fort Augustine lay enshrouded in gloom, as though brooding over the tragedy of its own sad history. And beyond the Fort, a great half-circle of the giant harbour, we saw the swamp land--Hunts Bay and the mouth of the Rio Cobra--a flat stretch of sand, yellow deepening into mud colour as it left the sea, and then breaking into scrub, and low grass, and spikey bush. Among the grass and the bush, and even through gaps of the high tree-land beyond, one caught glimpses of dull water, silent and murky and very still.

We anchored the boat and waded ashore, the clean water reaching our arm-pits. In this manner we reached the fever-hole of Jamaica; the home of every insect pest the West Indies can produce, the place in which the Jamaican alligator still lives and moves and has its being. Not a pleasant spot either to linger in or look upon, just evil swamp-land, with the evil stench of damp vegetation and rotting wood. You step from the sand of the seashore into brittle stubble, through which the water surges as you pass. You squelch to the river-bank over rotting weed, ankle-deep in slime, half smothered by a cloud of gnats, and mosquitoes, and buzzing flies. It is the Jamaica Avernus--the white man’s grave.

The Rio Cobra River at its mouth is emptied by a dozen twisting streams, just as the trunk of a cotton tree is supported by many twisted roots. Sometimes these twisted streams join together, sometimes they flow apart; so if progress is to be made inland, much wading must be done. It is in these little streams that alligators love to lie, so you must walk warily, with your rifle ready. We waded many streams, and trudged ankle-deep through long stretches of oily slime; we stumbled over logs half hidden, and our stretched hands disturbed the nests of scores of creeping things. The black guide, a famous sportsman of the swamp land, grinned his joy at being really chief, the indisputable and indispensable head of a party of white men. He forgot to tincture his commands with respect, and though clad in nothing save a decayed merino undershirt, looked and played the man.

“De beast there,” pointing a joyful finger to a heap of filth, green and brown. Rifles were raised, and the explosions of three Winchesters reverberated round those sickening pools. The green mass surged heavily, and a streak of dark water showing in the centre of the thick slime marked the place where the alligator had dived. “Him gone; never see him more,” said our happy chieftain, and we trudged through more slime, waded across more streams, some deep as our waist-belts, others with water only ankle high. Once the youngest of us stealthily massacred a floating tree stump, mistaking a twisted root for an opened jaw, and then dropped to the rear under the glance of a contemptuous native.

“You want him log for rifle butt?” The youthful sportsman attempted no defence.

Again we fired, this time at a sleepy family of two--a father and a son. The son was hit, but the father had twisted and dived with the speed of a springing snake. We could not reach the wounded one, which, lashing his tail and snapping his jaws in the death agony, rolled into the river to die.

We paused to drink tepid water drawn from a scorched barrel, and talked and listened to stories of mighty bags; of beasts thirty feet long, shot after fearful battles, of mauled natives, and of all the dangers of the sport. Our thoughts and words were all of slaughter.

After the water--just enough to create a thirst--we trudged along, and forgot everything save the hunting. The sun blazed down and scorched us right through the thin stuff of our shirts. Blisters came on our hands and arms, and our skins tingled as though we had rolled in countless beds of nettles. But these things we only remembered afterwards; then we strained our eyes and ears, waded into streams, and pushed through rotten scrub in search of prey.

“We make much too plenty noise,” said our guide after a fruitless two hours’ search. “We must sit down and wait.”

So our party divided, and I went with the black man and squatted against the stump of a rotting tree overhanging the river and waited. Fortunately the hunter did not object to my pipe, and the smoke did something towards relieving me of the clouds of insect pests. Conversation was not permitted. My companion knelt motionless, his eyes straining riverwards; and I, inspired by his eagerness as well as by my own curiosity, watched also.

The spit of mud that separated us from the river was covered by a surface crust of grey-black sediment, hardened by the sun; from where we sat a double line of little pools filled with soft inky slime stretched to the water, and showed the direction of our coming. I examined the surface of mud bay, and noticed that ours was not the only spoor. Ten yards to my right I saw a place where very recently a heavy body had rested--a mark which might have been left if a tree trunk had been removed. I touched the black man on the shoulder and pointed to the spot. He grinned and nodded. Evidently the marks were familiar to him.

I placed my rifle across my knees and waited. The still water of the river showed a slight ripple here and there, and occasionally a splash would mark the place where a fish had risen to a fly. The glare and the strained attention tired my eyes, and I saw things through a slight mist. Once I saw the water dividing as something passed towards the shore, and I jerked my rifle to the shoulder. Then the moving strings of

water turned and ceased. And my companion scowled. The noise of a distant rifle-shot came like the muffled noise of a pop-gun, and then a green-black snout lifted itself above the water in midstream a few yards to our right. Behind the snout a long black body appeared, only partly submerged, and I made out the head and tail of an alligator. Slowly it drifted towards the mud patch on which we were waiting. Presently a long snout and a mud-encrusted head reached out of the water and rested on the bank, and our gruesome enemy was within easy reach of our guns. Not fifteen yards divided us. His little eyelids flickered like those of a nervous lizard, and his sinister jaws were open just wide enough to show the long line of white teeth. I brought my rifle round very slowly, and fired from where I sat. The alligator twisted with the swiftness of a cat and dived. I stood still and waited. The troubled water showed that he had been hit; I could mark the direction of his flight by the fury of his struggle. Once he lifted himself half out of the stream, and I fired again. The result was a mad plunge towards the shore on which we stood. I started back, but ere the beast found land, the water swirled again, and I knew that he had turned aside. I followed him with my eyes, and in midstream saw him churning the water with his tail and then plunging round in circles; then he dived to the right, and I saw him no more.

“Him gone now,” said my guide. “You should have waited until him come right up to the shore.”

I relit my pipe, and we retraced our steps.

In the fever swamps of Jamaica there are a few alligators, but I fear that most of the sport of the place is to be found in the imagination of the sportsmen and the tales of the native guides. Danger there is, but that is the danger of the sun and the risk of fever; and in daring these things there is little sport.

So we tramped back again and regained the sweet-scented water of the bay. We waded to the boat, and the sensation of the clear sea-water washing clean our sun-dried, muddy bodies gave us a few moments of ecstasy. But we could not linger for fear of the dread cousin of the alligator, the West Indian shark. We swam aboard, and hoisted our sail, and sailed homewards. The boat was bare of awning, and the strong, pitiless sun completed its burning work, so well begun in the swamp lands. The charred barrel had exhausted its cargo of tepid water, and there was no food. But the few hours’ sail was not unpleasant. We were enveloped in the sweet breezes of God’s fair ocean, and soothed by the fresh sea-scent. There were no miasmic exhalations, and no clouds of winged insects. The mosquito was gone, and our scorched eyes might now be closed or held half opened towards the cool breeze.

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