About noon the next day signs of cultivated life appeared, and we passed the houses of some settlers, and the saw-mill of a New Yorker.  At dusk our boats entered a little sound, and by nine o’clock in the evening we arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, in a region of shoal water, much cut up by oyster reefs.  The tide being very low, the boats were anchored inside of an oyster reef, which afforded protection from the inflowing swell of the sea.  We shaped our course next day for St. Marks, along a low, marshy coast, where oyster reefs, in shoal water, frequently barred our progress.  From South Cape to St. Marks the coast, broken by the mouths of several creeks and rivers, trends to the northeast, while for twenty miles to the east of the light house, which rises conspicuously on the eastern shore of the entrance to St. Marks River, the coast bends to the southeast to the latitude of Cedar Keys, where it turns abruptly south, and forms one side of the peninsula of Florida.

The great contour of the Gulf of Mexico, into which St. Marks River empties, is known to geographers as Apalachee Bay.  On that part of the coast between the St. Marks and Suwanee rivers, the bed of the Gulf of Mexico slopes so gradually that when seven miles away from the land a vessel will be in only eighteen feet of water.  At this distance from the shore is found the continuous coral formation; but nearer to the coast it is found in spots only.

While traversing this coast from St. Marks to Cedar Keys, I observed the peculiar features of a long coast-line of salt marshes, against which the waves broke gently.  With the exception of a few places, where the upland penetrated these savannas to the waters of the sea, the marshes were soft alluvium, covered with tall coarse grasses, the sameness of which. was occasionally broken by a hammock, or low mound of firmer soil, which rose like an island out of the level sea of green.  The hammocks were heavily wooded with the evergreen live-oaks, the yellow pine, and the palmetto.  From half a mile to two miles back of the low savannas of the coast, rose, like a wall of green, the old forests, grand and solemn in their primeval character.

The marshes were much cut up by creeks, some of which came from the mainland, but most of them had their sources in the savannas, and served as drains to the territory which was frequently submerged by the sea.  When the southerly winds send towards the land a boisterous sea, the long, natural, inclined plane of the Gulf bottom seems to act as a pacifier to the waves, for they break down as they roll over the continually shoaling area in approaching the marshes; and there is no undertow, or any of the peculiar features which make the surf on other parts of the coast very dangerous in rough weather.  The submarine grass growing upon the sandy bottom as far as six or eight miles from shore, also helps to smooth down the waves.