The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dick in the Everglades, by A. W. Dimock

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Dick in the Everglades

Author: A. W. Dimock

Release Date: August 13, 2004 [EBook #13168]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICK IN THE EVERGLADES ***

Produced by Sandra Brown, the Online Distributed Proofreading Team,
and Internet Archive; University of Florida, Children

Dick
In the Everglades

BY

A.W. DIMOCK

Author of "Florida Enchantments"

WITH THIRTY-TWO HALF-TONE ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY
J.A. DIMOCK

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1909.

[Illustration: author's handwritten note.]

PREFACE

Dick in the Everglades is a true story. All that imagination had to
do with it was to find names for the boys and arrange a sequence of
events. Other characters, white and Indian, appear under names
similar to, or identical with their own. Any old alligator hunter,
familiar with the swamps and the Ten Thousand Islands, can follow
the course of the explorers from the text of the story. It would be
possible for two fearless boys, imbued with a love of Nature and the
wilderness, to repeat, incident by incident, the feats of the
explorers in the identical places mentioned in the story.

Many of the stories are understatements, seldom is one exaggerated.
I have been asked if it were possible for a boy to handle a manatee
in the water as one of the boys was represented as doing. I have
done it myself three times with manatees three times the size of
these in the story. In the story the manatees escaped. Two of those
which I captured were sent to the New York Aquarium, where one of
them lived for twenty months. The crocodiles which the boys sent to
the Zoological Park may be seen to-day, alive and well in the
reptile house. The frequent swamping of canoes and skiffs by
porpoises, or dolphins, tarpon and manatees are all experiences of
my own.

Aside from the Government charts which give the coast line only, the
existing maps of the scene of the story are worse than useless. In
them a hundred square miles are given to Ponce de Leon Bay, which
doesn't e