. . .Florida. It is fourteen miles in length, with an average width of one and a half miles. One of its tributaries—the Manatee River proper—extends still further eastward, some twenty miles; and another northward, half that distance. Its course is nearly due west to Egmont Key, where it mingles its waters with those of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It lies between the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth parallels of north latitude, and in longitude 5½° west from Washington. A person passing up the bay on the mail steamer for the first time, will be charmed with the tropical and semi-tropical scenery that meets his view on either side of the bay, from its mouth to Braidentown, the present terminus of steamboat navigation. Egmont Key, with its forest of cabbage palmettos nodding their evergreen plumes in the morning sun; the stately date-palms and olive trees on Snead’s Island, on the north side of the bay, and the pretty villas surrounded by young. . . Read More