twenty-three feet. Their body is as large as a horse; their shape exactly
resembles that of a lizard, except their tail, which is flat or cuneiform
...thewholebody is covered with horny plates or squammae, impene-
trable when on the body of a live animal, even to a rifle ball, except about
their head and just behind their fore-legs or arms....Onlytheupperjaw
moves, which they raise almost perpendicular, so as to form a right angle
with the lower one....Butwhat is yet more surprising to a stranger, is
the incredible loud and terrifying roar, which they are capable of making,
especially in the spring season, their breeding time. It most resembles
very heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but caus-
ing the earth to tremble; and when hundreds and thousands are roar-
ing at the same time, you can scarcely be persuaded, but that the whole
globe is violently and dangerously agitated.William’s summary was possibly even better expressed in his extraordi-
nary drawings of the beasts. Normally a skilled draftsman of plants and
other animals, Bartram botched his alligators. They are less representa-
tional than any other subject he drew, to my mind more like movie mon-
sters than recognizable amphibians. One must concede, though, that his
monsters are an honest match for his experience.
William Bartram was hardly responsible for the near-extermination of
the American alligator during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He bashed a few of them on their snouts but shot and killed only one that
we know of. About a century later, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s fictional
Penny Baxter shot one only occasionally, when he needed dog food. Alli-
gators do not figure large in Rawlings’s oeuvre. They are nocturnal crea-
tures, after all, who laze about, sleeping mostly, while humans are awake
and afoot. Shooting one during daylight is nearly the equivalent of taking
a barnyard chicken. But not long after the gentle Penny’s time, the great
slaughter began. Excursion boat operators as far away as Charleston and
Savannah invited tourists to cruise down the St. Johns with their rifles
and take target practice at birds and alligators. In the Georgia-born
poet Sidney Lanier, in hire to a railroad, advised infirm Yankees to win-
ter in St. Augustine and plunder the adjacent riverine environment for
sustenance: ‘‘You may,’’ he wrote, ‘‘kill alligators and sell their teeth...
or shoot herons, and collect their plumes for market—an occupation by
which at least one invalid...hasmanaged to support himself.’’ Prospec-
tive visitors with means sufficient to live without work might simply shoot
‘‘for pleasure.’’ (One must think of the beloved conservationist ex-president