CHAPTER II.

ISLAND OF TRINIDAD. LA BREA

I.

We were led to believe, through various accounts from former travellers, that the excursion to the Pitch Lake would be attended with considerable discomfort and some hardships.

After a run of about four hours from Port of Spain, Trinidad, we made La Brea at two o'clock in the afternoon of a blistering hot day. Fully one-third of the ship's company were frightened off, while the rest of us made ready for the much-anticipated expedition.

It was a funny-looking company that stood at the gangway, waiting for the first boat ashore.

Handkerchiefs took the place of collars and ties; coats and vests were, for the most part, discarded, and all endeavoured to make themselves as light in wearing apparel as possible.

The Caribbean Sea, which had, until now, been ruffled only by the regular sweep of the "trades," was badly tossed by a strong wind, so that the embarkation in the ship's boat was to me unpleasantly exciting. The sea was running so high that, in order to reach the boat without being wet through, we had to gauge our time well and take the jump just as the boat was lifted to the top of the wave. As we started down the ship's ladder, with Little Blue Ribbons tightly holding Daddy's hand, Sister having gone before in the whale-boat with friends, the ship's mate begged us to leave the Wee One with him. He said the sea was too rough and the landing too difficult; and besides he would take such good care of her, and she should have ice cream, and be a little queen all day,--if she would only stay. So, with some tears, and disdain for ice-cream, Little Blue Ribbons remained on board; the only time in the journey thus far when she was not one of the party.

Had it not been for the confident man, who likes the water, and the absurdity of the thing, I should have begged to be taken back to the ship.

We were in the second boat. The captain had arranged to have the launch tow us ashore, but the launch--true to the traditions of "oil engines"--had no intention of towing us ashore; it puffed and popped and made a great fuss, but would not move an inch. The engineer lost his steerageway, and it seemed every moment as if the great, clumsy thing would crash into us; and there we lay, going up and down the side of the ship, rolling from side to side, and bobbing from bow to stern, in a very disagreeable situation for those who don't like that sort of thing.

I know quite well that I was not the only one who would gladly have felt himself safe on the solid decks of our ship. For once, the incessant talking had ceased, and our boat-load of people sat there absolutely quiet, thinking very hard.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts to make the launch behave, they gave up the attempt, manned our life-boat with six round-faced, lubberly, German "jackies," each with a big oar, and went off independently.

I was heartily thankful not to have been assigned to the launch, for it could not compare in sea-going qualities with the boat in which we were placed.

As I said, it was a long row to the landing, but we finally reached smooth water, and disembarked at the end of a long bridge-like pier; not, however, without some difficulty.

We were still some distance from shore, which was reached by means of a narrow board walk, carried along one side of the pier, and bridging over the shoal water.

At the quay, a big "down-east" schooner (thank Heaven, there are a few American merchant vessels left!), two barks, and one full-rigged ship, were being loaded with pitch, by means of great steel buckets, travelling on an endless wire cable, which went from the end of the pier, up an incline, to the works on the hill, near to the great deposit of pitch beyond.

This ship at the pier was the first full-rigged merchant ship we had seen during the cruise--most merchantmen seeming now to be rigged as barks or barkentines--and was, even in spite of its black cargo, a beautiful sight. There is something in the look of a ship--its mass of rigging, its straight yard-arms, well set up, its black, drooping sails, half-furled, its inexplicable riddle of shrouds and stays and braces and halliards and sheets--that always stirs my soul mysteriously. Black as this vessel was, prosaic as was her cargo, unsightly the hands that loaded her, she was a picture. By right, she should have carried teas, and spices, and silks, and jewels; but she was worthy of admiration despite her humble calling.

Once on land, we realised, looking up the long, black hill ahead of us, and feeling the heat from a blazing sun directly overhead, that the walk would be a hard one, and that we must go slowly, in order to make it with any degree of comfort; but walk we must, or stay on the beach.

The pitch was in evidence immediately. Reefs of hard asphalt ran through the sandy beach into the sea. The hill was covered with asphalt, and down near the shore it lay in great wrinkles, where, when the road was being made, it had overflowed and taken to the hedgeway. It was apparent under the grass and weeds, around the roots of trees, and in the banana groves; in fact, there was pitch everywhere, black, oozing, and dull.

II.

Up the hill laboured the little procession of red-faced adventurers, in all conditions of negligée. The large lady from Kansas puffed and sweated and mopped her face; the doctor vowed we would die of sunstroke; the mother and her daughter, from Boston, made the ascent as their ancestors had stormed Bunker Hill, with features rigid and teeth set; our neighbour at table, who had been thrice around the world, wondered what on earth we would think of Manila in the summer-time if we called this hot; our jolly, delightful friend from New Haven laughed us all the way up the hill, and said he was suffering with the cold; the German baron, under his green umbrella, passed us with the superb stride acquired from his sturdy ancestors and his military training; down the hill back of us straggled on the rest of the company: the little women, the tall women, the lean ones, the fat ones, urged and supported by long-suffering husbands and brothers and friends who mopped and fanned furiously.

There were hats of all descriptions: white East Indian helmets built of pith and lined with green, deliciously light, cool things; and all conceivable shapes of Puerto Rican hats, of a pretty, fine white palm "straw," very much like the Panama; and hats from Haïti; and French hats from Martinique; and then there were Puerto Rican sailor hats, one of which I wore with great pride. Our shoes were the heaviest we had, and our clothing the oldest and lightest available.

Thus all marched on in broken file, with very hot faces, and shaded by all manner of outlandish umbrellas, over the hot asphalt to the Pitch Lake.

As our little party plodded along, going so slowly it hardly seemed as if we were making any progress at all, my courage began to wane somewhat, for I remembered most vividly a similar day on the island of Capri, when I had been overcome by the sun, and in consequence of which had suffered many months after. With this in my mind, we stopped at a shanty half-way up the hill, where we saw some bananas growing, tore off part of a leaf, and asked for some water of a negress, who was one of many watching the procession with great amusement. In fairly good English she told me not to wet the head; in fact, by her vociferous rejection of our plan, we were led to believe that it would be dangerous to carry it out at all, so we threw away the leaf, and worked on up the blistering highway to the top of the hill.

There was not a bit of shade in sight. To right and left, rank weeds and cacti grew in wild confusion, and with the exception of a few banana groves, and the huts of negro labourers farther down, there was nothing of a shade-producing nature along the road. The asphalt was so hot to the feet that we broke company, and took to single file in among the weeds on the edge of the road.

As we approached the summit of the hill, a fine breeze gave us new courage, and the sight of the Pitch Works, not far distant, dissolved our fears of the heat into most absorbing interest of the great phenomenon coming into view. An endless train of buckets, which led the way up the long ascent, on a wire rope supported at short intervals by large sheaves on iron pillars, went squeaking along, one row down to the dock, full of great chunks of pitch, and the other back, empty, to be filled and started on its round again.

III.

I looked ahead as far as I could, and located our fellow voyagers, now here, now there,--white dots on the strangest landscape I had ever seen. I sat down on a barrel of pitch under the welcome shade of a rough shed in the power-house, and had my first glimpse of the great lake.

Why it has been called a "lake," I fail to discover; it was probably named thus by the English. In that case, the matter is explained; it is called a lake because it is not a lake at all. The Englishman never seems to understand that the object to be named ought to bear some slight relation to its appellative. He decides upon a name, and the unfortunate victim has to fit himself, herself, itself, into its new form as best he can. If this curious deposit had been called the "Pitch Bed," there might have been some reason in the naming; some, possibly not all, but some of the existing physical conditions would have been suggested to the mind, and the traveller might thus have been able to form an approximate idea of the phenomenon before seeing it.

Instead of a lake, you see a vast, flat, fairly smooth, black surface of pitch, with only here and there small pools of water,--in places, yellowish; in places, clear,--intersecting the black surface in all directions. Sometimes they enlarge, and, uniting, cover the surface quite a distance, and in the centre several feet deep; and again the intersecting, stream-like pools shrink to mere threads, but, as I said, the general aspect of the Pitch Lake is a flat, solid, black surface, covered occasionally with water, the water being only in the crevices between great masses of pitch that have pushed up from beneath.

We were as yet unconvinced of its carrying qualities, and, not wishing to run the risk of getting stuck in the pitch, we waited the approach of one of the trains of little cable-cars, running from the works out on to the lake, which we could see coming toward us. The brakeman is good enough to stop, and we pile into the ridiculous little steel cars and hang on as best we can, while we are sent flying down over a narrow-gauge track, laid on top of the pitch, to the place where most of the digging is going on.

Here a great crew of black men--black as the pitch in which they stand--with bare feet, all with picks, dig out the wonderful formation, which breaks off in great brittle pieces. Seeing these men so fearlessly defying the forces of nature, we gained confidence, and stepped out of the buckets on to the surface of the so-called "lake;" and although our feet would sink in a half-inch or so when we stood still, we found that we could walk everywhere with perfect safety, with the exception of a few places where the surface seemed to be in big bubbles and disposed to crack and break away under us.

It was remarkable to me that the pitch is both viscous and brittle at the same time. When standing still, the water--thick and yellow, with a sulphurous odour--would ooze up about the feet and form new rivulets, which, uniting, would trickle into some near-by pool. There were innumerable small, crater-like openings, some like air-bubbles in the sea beach, others, deep, black holes, two and three feet in diameter, but no appearance of heat or fire. All over the lake, small springs of yellowish fluid were constantly bubbling up into the pools. The supply of pitch is apparently inexhaustible, for, after a great trench has been dug out along these temporary tracks, some four feet deep, and many rods wide, by the next day the hole will again be so far filled that the mining goes on as before.

The manager told us that it had not been found necessary to change the tram tracks for two years, that the level of the pitch fell only seven inches last year, after immense amounts had been removed for shipment.

The depth of this deposit is not known. It has been sounded a number of times, but it seems to be impossible to find the bottom. I do not know the exact dimensions of the lake, but, making a rough estimate, should say that it is half a mile wide, and about a mile long; its extent is said to be about one hundred and ten acres. The great asphalt deposit in Venezuela, which has been the cause of so much recent trouble,--through, I am sorry to say, the quarrels of two American companies,--is thought by some to be shallower than the one of La Brea, although it is apparently much larger, being in the neighbourhood of ten miles in circumference. This Trinidad pitch is also worked by an American company, under concession from the British Colonial Government.

IV.

It seemed to me that I had never before seen such black pitch or blacker "niggers." They were a good-humoured lot of men, making no complaint of the heat, although they worked untiringly, bare-footed, in the hot, oozing pitch.

We stopped one fellow, about as black and tattered a figurehead as we could find, and told him we wanted his picture. He was perfectly delighted, and struck a very fetching attitude. After the button had been pressed, we gave him a bit of silver, and then came a howl from a dozen others for a similar opportunity, all posing for us as fancy struck them. Seeing that we were obdurate, the fortunate holder of the silver doubled up with a tremendous laugh, and I can yet see before me his two rows of glistening white teeth and his wreck of a hat and his rag of a shirt, and his bepatched breeches. His laugh so exasperated the others, that one, an elderly gentleman who wore grand side whiskers, shouted out in tones of deepest sarcasm: "Guess I'd git my picture took, too, Sam, if I was such a orangoutang as you is!" It seemed as though they would come to blows, but, had I known the good-humoured blacks better, I should have had no fear, for their battles, fierce as they seem, are only words, and usually end in a laugh.

There are two kinds of pitch: one, pure pitch, dead black, was loaded in the small cars, and the other, of a light brown colour, was carried off in dump-carts, drawn by mules. This black pitch forms the basis of all our asphalt pavements, and such a deposit must be worth millions to the _concessionaires_.

Now, when did this mighty process begin, and what internal force is at work producing this continual outpouring upon the earth's surface?

At the farther end of the lake, women and young girls were busy gathering pieces of wood which were thrown up out of the pitch. I do not claim to understand this marvellous phenomenon. I would rather put the question to those of you who have access to the wisdom of libraries, and give you the privilege of bringing some light upon these strange manifestations of God's unknowable. As I understand it, pitch is obtained from tar, boiled down, and tar is a black, viscous liquid obtained by the distillation of wood and coal, so this residuum which we see is the third step in one of Nature's great caldrons; a process millions of years in forming, a process still in operation.

Is this wood which is continually coming to the surface of the lake an unused part of that vast primeval forest which was when time did not exist; when chaos was revolving into form? How long has it been wandering, and what force is it which sends it thus unharmed, save for the loss of bark, out again into the light?

Some very strange implements and tools, recognised as South American workmanship of a remote day, have come to the surface of this lake, and one theory for their appearance is, that they have been drawn under the Gulf of Paria, and up through the lake of La Brea by some unseen, but mighty power from the lake of pitch in Venezuela, of which this is supposed by some to be the outlet.

The wood, gathered by the women, is not petrified, but merely impregnated with the pitch, and has all its original qualities as when it first left the parent stem, with, however, the additional affinity for fire which its pitchy bath would naturally give.

We were much entertained by the women and children, who stood knee-deep in the fresh pools at the further end of the lake, doing the washing. The clothes were laid out on the pitch to dry, and the naked babies rolled around on the black stuff quite as much at home as our babies are on the clean nursery floor. The women had on but very little clothing, or none,--and some of the girls and boys, fourteen and fifteen years of age, were entirely nude. One young girl, as we approached, modestly hung a little fluttering rag about her loins, and, thus clothed, was not ashamed.

I have seen more immodesty on the floor of a modern ballroom than ever from the bare bodies of these black women. But terrible as the stories are which one hears of the immorality of the West Indies, I feel that here the evil is less heinous in the coloured races on account of the primitive nature and conditions of a half-savage people. Unfortunately this great and degenerating danger to the white inhabitants is ever present. The pitch lake foreshadows the terrible conditions of the people in Trinidad and Jamaica; the continual welling up of this black mass suggests the doom which awaits these beautiful islands, unless a giant hand is put forth to save them.

The difficulties of this excursion have been much exaggerated. To be sure, we had a long walk, but we also had a good breeze most of the way, and our fellow traveller who, in spite of all warnings, had worn his immaculate white suit, came off without spot or blemish, notwithstanding the old proverb about "keeping away from the pitch."

V.

Hot and tired, I left the party, who wished to make the entire circuit, and took my way over the yielding pitch, over the sulphurous yellow puddles, until I finally came to the grateful shade of the power-house. A rickety old carryall looked very inviting, and in no time I had ensconced myself therein, and leaned back in full anticipatory enjoyment of a restful quarter of an hour.

As I sat there, looking out over the distant sea,--for I was on the brow of a hill,--gradually the unsightly power-house, the pitch cars, the little huts where bananas were sold, the native shanties, the long, narrow bridge, even the rim of the canopy above my head, seemed to fade away into nothing. The ships at anchor had slipped their cables and were gone; the iron pier, with its busy life, had disappeared; all had changed, vanished. It was silent, ghostly.

Then, out of nothing, out of dimness, there came a moving, a forming, a changing, and I became conscious that I was no longer alone, but that a company, great and illustrious, was assembling by ship-loads upon the beach of La Brea; and that, without word or confusion, five ancient, lofty-sterned, lumbering craft, and a quaint little caravel, lay bow-on to the strand, while one was already being careened on her side in the shoal water of the beach by cumbersome tackle fast to her thick mastheads. Their huge, clumsy hulks were gray with time; their gaping seams told of hot, blistering suns, and upon their decks there lay an array of guns and armament, crudely ancient and unwieldy. Silent men were noiselessly moving about at the command of one most beautiful to behold, in scarlet cloak, and silken hose and doublet of rare elegance, with hat beplumed, and glittering sword, who walked amongst the company as a king.

To and from the ship there moved a ghostly procession of grimy sailors, carrying pitch to the beach, where fires were burning, and the venerable three-deckers were being daubed with the smoking fluid, and made ready for the high seas.

It was a merry company, in truth, of lords and gentlemen, and scholars, too, who came upon my vision, and wonderingly my eyes followed the gallant leader. It seemed to me that I could all but catch his words. He spoke with a poet's grace, so full of charm and so deliberate, so courtly was his address. His face once turned, I knew him to be English. His fair skin was burned by deep-sea voyaging; his pointed beard just touched the lace of a deep, white ruff, and over his shoulder hung a plume, white and curling. In all my life, I had never seen so gay a gentleman, and I could not get my fill of looking and of wondering.

Could it be that this great company were the revivified followers of the dauntless Sir Walter Raleigh, searching, centuries ago, for _El Dorado_? And it came to me, in that curious mixing of past and present, of which dreams are made, "Does Sir Walter, with all his wisdom, suspect that here, where he pitches his ships, is to be the great gold mine--some later man's _El Dorado_--while he eagerly sails away in futile quest of golden sands that are always just beyond his reach?"

I lifted myself to strain my farthest sight, when lo! all was gone; galleons, gentlemen, scholars, sailors, even the little caravel--all! The sun was beating down upon the black road, the air was blistering; negroes were weighing the buckets of pitch, and the machinery clanked, with deafening indifference, through the quivering air; and up from behind a clump of bushes a red bow, atop of a well-known white hat, chased away the phantoms of long ago. I took off my dark glasses, rubbed my eyes, and, half-dazed, stepped from my enchanted carryall.