An Everglades expedition follows in the footsteps of a legendary explorer

The expedition followed the path of Hugh de Laussat Willoughby through the once pristine Everglades.

In 1897, the explorer and amateur scientist Hugh de Laussat Willoughby climbed into a canoe and embarked on a coast-to-coast expedition through the Florida Everglades, a wilderness then almost as vast as the peninsula itself and as unknown, he wrote, as the “heart of Africa.”

Willoughby and his guide were the first non-Indians to cross the Everglades from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, and Willoughby’s meticulous notes, maps, and water samples would form the basis of scientists’ historical understanding of the fabled “river of grass.” . .”

Now a new expedition has followed his journey, aiming to measure the impact of modern humanity on a watershed that is today among the most altered on Earth and responsible for the drinking water of some 12 million Floridians. The expedition also commemorates the 75th anniversary of Everglades National Park, which was dedicated on December 6, 1947.

“We think we will see the full spectrum, from one of the most remote parts of the continental United States to one of the most urbanized parts of the United States — all in one basin, all in one trip,” said Harvey Oyer, co-leader of the four-man expedition and author of a series of children’s books about Florida’s historic frontier. “That, I think more than anything else, will illustrate the impact of humanity from the time of Willoughby to today.”

Willoughby’s thorough work provides a tantalizing opportunity to compare conditions in the Everglades then and now. During a six-day, 130-mile journey along the region’s rivers and canals, Oyer and the team collected water samples from the same spots as Willoughby, according to the coordinates he documented, sometimes from some of the most remote and hard-to-reach areas. parts of the region. subtropical region.

The water samples are being analyzed at the University of Florida for the same constituents Willoughby researched, such as magnesium and sulfates, along with nutrients now known to affect the Everglades, such as phosphorus and nitrogen. The samples are also tested for modern contaminants such as microplastics, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pesticides and pharmaceuticals. It will take several months for the analysis to be completed. The team completed its journey on November 2.

For the past 20 years, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been working to restore the Everglades.

At the time of Willoughby’s expedition, the Everglades were largely an unexplored, uncharted expanse of highly inhospitable terrain, characterized by relentless heat, mosquitoes, and swampy prairies of sawgrass sharp enough to cut into the skin. Now considered a vital ecosystem for the region’s drinking water and dozens of threatened and endangered species, the wetlands were then widely considered a worthless swamp and known only to the Seminole people and their Calusa predecessors. Willoughby completed his expedition just before Henry Flagler’s rail system would connect communities along the east coast of the peninsula, propelling Florida from border state to the third most populous state today.

Willoughby later wrote: “It may seem strange, in our days of Arctic and African exploration, for the general public to learn that we have right in our midst, in one of our Atlantic coastal states, a stretch of land one hundred and thirty miles long and seventy miles wide that is as unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa.

Restoring the Everglades and saving other Florida wetlands will be critical in combating climate change and sea rise.

Today, the Everglades, which begin in central Florida with the headwaters of the Kissimmee River and extend to the peninsula’s southern tip, remain the world’s largest subtropical wilderness. However, the region’s watershed has been drained to a fraction of its size. While drainage has made modern Florida possible, with the massive construction of some of the most complex water management infrastructure in the world, it has also led to a cascade of environmental problems, perhaps most notably chronic blooms of toxic algae.

The watershed has been at the center of decades of bitter water quality litigation and a multi billion-dollar restoration effort, one of the most ambitious of its kind in human history. Restoration will take many decades, but water quality in Everglades National Park has vastly improved since the first lawsuit was filed in the 1980s. The park’s water quality now meets or exceeds federal and state requirements, according to the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency that oversees the restoration of the Everglades.

The modern Willoughby Expedition, as it is called, began in Everglades National Park at the mouth of the Harney River in the Gulf of Mexico, where the relatively pristine environment would have been similar to what Willoughby experienced. The team on the project, who paddled the entire way in canoes, also noted egg clusters left behind by apple snails, the sole food of the endangered bird known as the snail kite. To protect themselves from the razor-sharp sawgrass, team members completely covered themselves and wore gloves like butchers wear, Oyer said.

These wetlands are on the fringes of urban development on the west side of Miami-Dade County.

“We still had some sawgrass,” he said. “We ended up, unintentionally, just as it managed, in sawgrass overhead, completely surrounding us for probably 10 hours, not consecutively but cumulatively, including four or five hours at night, which was not intended, of course. We had not reached our planned destination.”

Within a few days, however, the environment changed radically as the team stretched far into what is now Miami. As members approached the urban jungle and passed through a series of canals dug for drainage from the Everglades, the water quality went from pristine enough to drink to littered with detritus such as Styrofoam and plastic, indicating the high level of microplastics that water tests likely to cause to detect.

The journey ended in downtown Miami, at the mouth of the Miami River. Charlie Arazoza, who served as the expedition’s navigator, grew up in the Everglades and remains an avid paddler of the Grass River. “I spent a lot of time in the Everglades,” he said, “but for once I finally got to string it all together.”

“It’s really cool to bring all these historic waterways together in one trip,” he said. “It’s like stringing pearls.”

This story was produced in collaboration with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-editorial initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.