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Earlier this summer, I made the trek with an old friend to paddle a waterway called the Wacissa Slave Canal. I wrote about the practicality of paddling it, and some of the history, for The Gabber Newspaper this week.

Here’s some of what I wrote in that piece:

“The Canal also reveals a rich tapestry of wild Florida and some rarely paddled waters. It connects the Wacissa River with the Aucilla River in the Florida panhandle, southeast of Tallahassee. Although the canal existed in some form before human contact, over time, humans have changed it. As long as 3,000 years ago, ancestors of the Seminole and Miccosukee lived along the waterway. Some evidence suggests people may have widened the canal during Spain’s control of Florida.

“In the 19th century, enslaved people built dams to divert water from the Wacissa to the Aucilla, through the canal. This was to more efficiently get cotton to market. Today, some of the natural features bear the names of the people who owned the enslaved people. However, little if any, record of the enslaved people were who worked on the Canal remains. “

The rest of the article talks about how to get there and the possible put-ins. What I didn’t write was how much I hated it.

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Why I Hated Paddling the Wacissa Slave Canal

That’s an unusual experience for me; I don’t think I ever had a bad paddle before this one. It wasn’t that it wasn’t a gorgeous area; it was. This is easily one of the wildest, most remote places in Florida you can paddle without spending the night camping along a river.

Everything about this paddle should have been amazing. We spent the night at an Airbnb along the Aucilla River; it was gorgeous. I sat on the deck, looking over the water, with high hopes for the paddle next day.

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The next morning, we had a short paddle from the boat ramp on the Aucilla to the Wacissa Slave Canal. We passed only one other person, a man fishing in a small boat. The sunlight barely broke through the canopy to reflect the dark water; lush greenery on either side of the water moved with the gentle breeze. A small gator looked at us, then disappeared under the water.

It was when I realized the edge of the water had darkened limestone rocks, stacked in a fashion not found in nature, that things started to go sideways in my gut. We’d only paddled a short bit — the Canal is five miles long, and I doubt we’d gone more than half a mile — but something in my brain started to scream at me to turn around. I fell behind my paddling companion.

I’m not prone to the mystical — at least, I don’t think I am — but instead of communing with nature and reveling in seeing history alongside the riverbanks, I only pictured the men forced to labor here.

Who Built the Wacissa Slave Canal?

While I don’t know the names of the enslaved men — I’m assuming it was mostly men — who were forced to build the dams and work along the Canal, I know how it came to be.

The Wacissa and Aucilla Navigation Company contracted with plantation owners in the panhandle to use their enslaved labor to build a dam. The dam would ideally divert water from the Wacissa River to the Aucilla River, along the Wacissa Slave Canal.

The Wacissa and Aucilla Navigation Company, incidentally, included various plantation owners. Essentially, these plantation owners formed a company to pay themselves to use their enslaved people to perform the most brutal work imaginable.

They sent these enslaved people along the river to carve out the Canal in a way that would allow them to move the goods those same enslaved people grew for them.

It would have been brutal, backbreaking work. The danger of malaria, dengue fever, and other mosquito-borne illnesses was real. Plantation owners are not known for an embarrassment of kindness towards the people the enslaved.

The images of men suffering and ill, dehydrated, beaten, and dying along the path I paddled filled my head. I couldn’t seem to orient myself in the present. At one point, I stopped paddling because I couldn’t physically command my body to keep going.

Ultimately — much to the disappointment of my old friend — we turned around, left the river, and went to paddle the nearby Wacissa. My dark mood had settled over me, though, and even the clear waters of the Wacissa’s spring-fed flow wouldn’t help. It wasn’t until we left the next day that I felt the cloud start to lift.

This place left me feeling so horrified and emotionally drained, I have no desire to go back. I do want to know more about its history, though, so instead of paddling through this history, I’m going to wade through old records.  Maybe, if I learn more about the history, I can return to the Wacissa Slave Canal and feel something more than horror.

I’ll keep you posted.