I shall not soon forget the first manatee hunt I saw. We embarked at early dawn, and glided silently along the green shore, from which the mist of the night was lifting and rolling in white clouds far up the mountains. After long skirting the mangrove wood, we turned from the main channel into a narrow creek, slipping along in perfect silence. Listen as I would, I could not even hear the water at the canoe’s bow, her mould was so perfect, and so steady the strokes which propelled her. The drip of the water from the paddles, as they were lifted, alone made a slight tinkling sound. The sea-breeze had not yet begun to blow, and the sun came down scorchingly upon the tangled wood and the green water, the surface of which glanced like bright, clear oil. Presently Blue Peter laid his paddle noiselessly down, and took up the harpoon. I looked anxiously ahead. Clustered round the trunk of a vast mangrove, which rose up out of the water, there was a tangled heap of soaking grass and weeds. The kneeling Indian crouched as if he were a graven image of ebony or bronze, and I saw the floating weeds move, and heard a grinding, spluttering sound, as of a cow grazing. Then the Indian moved a finger of his left hand, which he had kept outstretched; his comrade at the stern saw the sign, and a peculiar sweep of the paddle sent the canoe slantingly towards the weeds. As she diverged from her course, Blue Peter stood erect, and raising his right arm, with all the muscles swelling out like knots and lumps of iron, darted the harpoon, as it appeared to me, into the centre of the moving weeds. Instantly there was a great splash and plunge, and the canoe rocked upon a wave, which scattered the floating herbage, so that I saw disappearing in the water the broad brown back of a creature as large as a cow. Blue Peter, the instant he struck, sank again upon his knees, and snatching up the paddle, prepared to move. Meantime I could see nothing of the harpoon, for it had been carried under water. The Mosquito men then talked to each other in their own tongue, pointing to the direction in which the manatee appeared to have dived, and then began to paddle lustily. About five minutes might have elapsed, when Blue Peter exclaimed, ‘Ho!—there!’ and pointed. I, looking in the same direction, descried the staff of the harpoon seeming to fly along the surface of the water, the round bobwood throwing up a foam two feet high. Then the Mosquito-men pulled hard in chase. I could never have thought that their gaunt, brown bodies had so much strength in them. The muscles of their naked arms and chests strained and swelled, the paddle-shafts cracked, and the canoe seemed at every stroke to be lifted out of the water. Still they did not gain upon the harpoon towed by the manatee, but, on the contrary, rather lost, so that I began to fear that we would never see either harpoon or quarry; but, on a sudden, the motion of the former stopped, and it floated tranquilly upon the water.