The skipper in the stokehold below waxed blasphemous at the man who had “got the shore on board;” but he did not cease from shoveling coals; neither did the big donkeyman, save at those moments when the clang of the telegraph-bell called him to stand by the throttle or reversing gear in the engine-room. So the _Port Edes_ drew up this narrow, unknown sea-river, through the shallows which fill that bight of the S. W. Floridan coast, and the tired man who was governing her steered every hour with stronger confidence and duller consciousness. Now he held on to what was apparently an unbroken line of surf, where, if the steamer struck, she would be a stove-in wreck within the hour; but as she closed with it a passage opened out which took her through in clear water, although the yeasty surges of the backwash would leap like live things far up her sides, and scream and bellow through the scuppers. Now he dodged, with helm hard a-starboard one minute, hard to port the next, amongst an archipelago of unnamed keys, where the first mangrove trees were getting to work at building these outlying scraps of animal stone into part of the North American continent. Beyond was a broad, smooth lagoon, shimmering in the sunlight, dancing with little silver waves, and beyond, again, was a wall of woodwork growing in one solid mass of trunks from behind the tangle of slimy mangroves which sprawled along the water’s edge. Bare land was to be seen nowhere; all was blotted out by the rank luxuriance of the subtropical flora. The steamer held on her course athwart this placid sea-lake, aiming straight as a rifle-shot for what appeared to be the densest part of the forest. But as she neared it, an overlapping cape gradually distinguished itself from the rest of the greenery, and directly afterwards banks of milky sand opened out, with a gut of river between them. Onslow steered on, sitting upon the grating now, and holding the wheel one-handed by the lower spokes; and in the fat, hot stew of the stokehold below, Kettle and the donkeyman shoveled coal to the light of reeking slush-lamps and the tune of furnace-roar. The steamer, in grip of the river-stream, swung round the bights and twistings, finding deep water everywhere, though often she could not make the turn quickly enough, and bruised with her forefoot the slimy mangrove-stems which marked the bank. But the current was strong, and each time swept her clear, and those below were scarcely conscious of the graze.