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There was nothing extraordinary about how I came upon Francis R. Stebbins ’s Florida adventures. It happened in the usual way. I was looking for references to nineteenth-century Florida, and they ¤guratively reached out and grabbed me. At the time I was working through the Library of Michigan’s micro¤lm collection of Michigan newspapers that I had previously identi¤ed as a treasure trove of contemporary writing about postbellum Florida. The¤rst Stebbins article I found was useful in itself. Then more and more pieces by the same talented author came to light. When it became clear they formed a series spanning ten years, I was overjoyed and astounded. It was an exciting discovery to ¤nd a gem like Stebbins’s travelogues. The collection was so complete and so cohesive that it immediately suggested a book. In the beginning, I was lulled into thinking that transforming the articles into a manuscript would be a short-term project. Various distractions and emergencies taught me how wrong I was, and the Stebbins project languished for a while. But after I returned to it, I felt rewarded for perseverance, for then a surprisingly large amount of pertinent information about Stebbins, his family, his traveling companions, and his Florida trips surfaced. The new data added crucial detail to and closed some gaps in Stebbins’s story. In the end, The Winter Sailor bene¤ted from the delay. Stebbins’s corpus is indeed a gem. It is nothing less than a new major primary source for postbellum Florida history, arguably the state’s most de¤ning period and certainly its most neglected. It is ¤lled with new data, new analysis from an expert contemporary observer, and a perspective new to modern historians . Perhaps its most unexpected feature is its readability. Stebbins aimed his travelogue at a general audience and strove to entertain as much as inform. He imbued his text with his own humor and delight. Fate added an ending that turned his travelogue into a story. It is easily on par with such wellknown nineteenth-century books as George M. Barbour’s Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers, Sidney Lanier’s Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History, and Silvia Sunshine’s Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes, all of which were deemed suf¤ciently meritorious to reprint for the nation’s bicentennial. Stebbins’s approach to Florida differs from theirs in ways that make his work invaluable to researchers. First, he was not a paid writer assigned to Preface promote the interests of the state of Florida. He was a private citizen expressing his personal opinions, some of which would horrify Florida’s boosters. Stebbins represented Northern tourists’ response to the state. Their views tended to be more mixed than those of supporters and state businessmen. His observations and evaluations provide the tourist’s reaction to Florida and its voluminous promotional literature, something that until now has been missing from the equation. Second, Stebbins’s travelogue has a strong regional focus. While he did record his travels throughout east Florida—the primary tourist destination of the day—and one Gulf Coast visit, he devoted most of his attention to the Indian River–Lake Worth area. His annual excursions occurred before Henry Flagler pushed rail service through Indian River to points south and changed the region’s character. Stebbins thoroughly documented the Indian River country in its ¤nal frontier years and furnished readers with an unparalleled study of the land and its people. Third, and most important, is the long consecutive time span his articles cover. Stebbins left a moving picture lasting ten years, not the typical one visit snapshot. The advantage of his long-term portrayal of the Indian River–Lake Worth area is that now change and growth in frontier Florida can be more easily chronicled and the rate of settlement expansion and its impact on the natural environment better determined. There is no other late nineteenth-century Florida account that affords modern scholars this degree of time depth. A word about the editing is in order. Because Stebbins’s ¤fty articles are complete in themselves and his personality pervades his style, it seemed best to make as few changes as possible. I limited myself to removing the attention-grabbing subheadings the contemporary newspaper editors added to his text, excising only two extraneous passages, noting typographical errors, and correcting misspelled names. Because of the frequency with which he used two misspelled words, cavalli and cocoanut, I substituted their modern spelling, crevalle and...

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