CHAPTER III

THE COLUMBUS JOURNEY

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We left the beautiful harbor of Cadiz, with its white houses and palm trees and its daintily silhouetted towers and turrets, and the shores unclasped the blue bay and we rode upon the billows of the ocean.

The ship was a Spaniard and all the people on it were Spanish or West Indian, and the voyage we were making was the one Columbus made, seeking a new way to India and coming upon the Indies. And the first evening and every evening we pushed "our prows into the setting sun," not seeking, of course, but knowing, with the romance of the first journey mostly forgotten.

The passengers are mostly Cubans, and they kiss their hands to tell me what a fine place Cuba is, how perfect their capital. They put salt in their _café au lait_, plaster salt on their sliced oranges before eating them, and pour from the salad oil bottle on to every dish they eat. Their children, with bare legs, black hair, gold earrings, run about all day with little dogs on strings, and shout. There is no dancing on the ship, no orchestra, but instead Mass three times a week and the saloon made up as a chapel. The ladies are very big, if young, and lie in deck chairs doing nothing. The men play dominoes and smoke cigars.

We put in at Teneriffe and take on crates of onions for twenty-four hours. Boys in boats beset us with canaries in cages, pups in sacks, and fat, wise-looking parrots on perches. The reek of onions drives out the stowaways from the hold. Onions litter the bottoms of the empty barges, squashed onions disfigure our decks. Indeed, everybody and everything smells of onions for two days.

The food is Spanish and of a sort the sailors of Columbus must have known. All is cooked in olive oil, and I notice the Cubans and Porto Ricans are not pleased if the plates do not gleam. Heaped-up plates of rice and chicken, rice and little bits of rabbit, rice and bits of beef come nearly every day, and Spanish omelettes and olive stew and remarkable dishes of highly spiced fish covered with flaming pimento. There is an excellent table wine of which there is an inexhaustible supply and it is free as air, and there is a glass of sherry for every one on Sunday evening. The Spaniards do well on this. Even little Maria Luisa, aged ten, and Ysabel, aged eight, my two best friends, have their wine and sherry and disperse with vigor the oily heaps of food. One evening these precious little girls borrowed some matches--what to do?--to finish smoking a fat Habana cigar which one of the men passengers had left on deck!

The children talk to one another more by gestures than by words, and I shall never forget how one of them, Palmyra, described a bullfight she had seen at Barcelona and the horror of it, lowering her head between her shoulders and looking out with gleaming eyes to imitate the bull, jumping to indicate terror and assault, putting her little hand before her eyes at the thought of the disemboweling of the horses, and showing with a horrified twinkling of her fingers the impression of the flowing of the blood. Bullfights are forbidden in Cuba, but these children had been to Spain on a holiday and so had seen the national and traditional festival for the first time.

In fifteen days on a little ship with two dozen passengers one naturally learns a great deal. An English person is a rarity on such a ship, and every one sought to engage me in conversation. They were as much interested in Cristobal Colon and Ponce de Leon and Nuñez de Balboa as I was, and had pictures of Columbus in their pocketbooks, and thought how greatly he'd have been struck to be traveling on such a boat as ours.

This one is a beautiful voyage, so serene, with blue skies every day and a just-waving sea and a breeze behind the boat that wafts our smoke ahead of it. It is delicious to sit up on the very nose of the vessel and be a Columbus now. We are splashing it new, splashing it white, in stars and white balls and darts of surprised foam. Green and yellow seaweed sags up from the depths of the ocean and, like untraversed liquid glass, the sea is ahead of us in curving lines, in natural wild parallels to the sun. It is afternoon, the sun is going over and will go under. He is drawing us on, and I could almost believe our steam counts for naught. He is illuminating the wide empty ocean, and we stare till we veritably see latitude and longitude upon it. We ascend, we lift, we rive a way o'er the mirror in virginal v's of new frothing foam. We are making for the center of the far horizon, the sun ahead of us; we are making a new way to India; we are going to make West East.

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Each still night we seem to pass through something, as it were through mists and veils which are hiding something new. Each morning we rush on to the decks whilst they are still wet and the Castilian sailors are swabbing them. We peer with glasses over the virginal, fresh, foaming blue. The sailors go. The sun dries the timbers. We partake of coffee and smoke a sweet-scented Habana cigarette. The sailors return and pull up white canvas awnings at the cracks and at the sides of which glimmers blue of sky and brightness of sea. The children come out from their cabins to play, tumbling over their pet dogs. All is happiness.

The men indulge in a new sport to while away the time--they try to catch the fast-passing seaweed which lies in sponges and coils in the limpid sea. While Columbus took heart of grace because of the banks of seaweed his ship encountered, believing it a sign of the proximity of land, we on our Spanish ship making in prosaic fashion a bought-and-paid-for passage to the Indies, find the same seaweed a means of fun. Four or five Cubans and Spaniards take a bottle and a rope and a tangle of wire, and fish for seaweed from the bows. The weather-side gets quite a little crowd upon it, for the crew also take part in the joy of throwing out a bottle and wire to entangle floating green tresses of sea-maidens or big floating sponges of their toilets. Often the bottle flies through the air and often goes up the chorus of disappointment as it hits a wave instead of a bank of weeds. But the exultation is great when a tangle is caught and brought up on deck. It is very pretty and hairlike, and the little children press it between the pages of Ibañez' novels which form the only literature on board. That which heartened Columbus diverted us.

Then we entered the tropics and slept in the hot noontides, waking to clatter up on deck into the freshness of afternoon breezes. The evenings were very beautiful, sunset always giving a pageant. One night there came the most flaming and devastating sunset, descried beyond perilous and mountainous clouds, and from the north all the way to the west a grand processional mass of shadows was seen fleeing, like the pageant of the world's vanities going to judgment. To us it was poetry, but to Columbus and his companions it might well have suggested a growing nearness to the actual place of doom, to where the sun actually dipped down and went under the flat earth--a terrible thought, yet for a daring spirit a haunting and alluring one also.

I suppose there came a point in Columbus' voyage when he might as well keep on as turn back. Turning back became more terrible the longer they kept on. And curiosity must have fed on itself and increased. At any rate, it is still terrible to stand in the stern at night and look back. There in the darkness lies the past like a book that is read, or written, and a door that is shut. It breathes silence. The clamorous Old World is far behind and cannot be heard.

We started with a young crescent moon, and she grew to the full with us over the still ocean. The stars seemed to wave, and our mainmast jagging to and fro seemed intent on sighting and taking aim at the loveliness in the sky. We are escaping; we are going away; we are doing what they did; we are shooting the moon.

All the Cubans and Porto Ricans and Haitians seem to take on more life, become more vivacious. There is no mistaking it, they are nearing their homes. They have been as homesick for the Indies as the mariners were homesick for Spain. It's all in reverse order. "You'd like Habana--it's bigger and better than Barcelona," I am told; "yes, better than Madrid."

The ship comes into more humid airs, and in the evening all the passengers begin to croon Spanish songs. They are all together and happy, men, women, and children, and they feel they are getting near their blessed islands. It infects the crew, infects every one, like an extra idleness, till we come at last one night to a balmy and dreaming coast, where the coconut palms like cobweb dusters rise up to the low clouds of the sky, and the full moon through the mists shines in silver--from the waves to the shore. We are there at last. We have got to the other side.

The ship goes still and hoots. We have our last supper together. There is plenty of wine. "Drink deep," cry the Cuban passengers to those of us who disembark at Porto Rico. "It is _ultimo vino_, your last glass of wine."

"Porto Rico is not dry?"

"Oh, yes," say the Porto Ricans, mournfully. "You see, it belongs to the United States. Cuba is only under supervision of America, but Porto Rico belongs to her, and is dry."

"_Seca! Seca!_" they cry explanatorily in Spanish.

"Well, with the last glass, here's to Christopher Columbus, who discovered the island. He made the bridge from Old Spain and incidentally brought the first firewater too. All we who arrive, arrive after him."

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We enter the harbor of San Juan de Porto Rico and leisurely pass the old stone castle on the rock and the Spanish fortifications. They look to be several centuries older than they are and are not unlike the weather-beaten ruins at the entrance to old ports on the east of Scotland. They mounted Spanish guns but were without power to repel the North American invader of 1898. The island was then wrested from Spain and added territorially to the United States. Natives of Porto Rico are now _ipso facto_ American citizens. It was novel to me to realize that a whole population of American citizens was without English and that many did not know George Washington from Abraham Lincoln.

The boat was hailed by the quarantine authorities and stopped. The Spanish captain, the doctor, and the officers all seemed very nervous. This was apparent to the American doctor and immigration officials, who strove to keep them calm. There was nothing to worry over--the inspection was only a formality. The crew and the passengers lined up and showed their arms to be free from skin disease. The "aliens" were vaccinated. The immigration officers were remarkably polite. They brought copies of the New York _Times_ on board, and those who could read English glanced at the news. They sat us one by one in front of them and asked us all those funny questions--what is your nationality? what is your race? are you a polygamist? do you believe in subverting an existing government by force? have you ever been in jail? how much money have you got? where is your final destination? are you booked through? Imagine old Columbus being questioned by an immigration officer--there's something humorous about it. And Spaniards, whose forefathers manned the galleons of the Plate Fleet and lorded it on land and sea, now pay, in addition to ten dollars for passport visa, a head-tax of eight dollars ere they land. But all that is prose.

There is no poetry in it, as there is little poetry in the "White Books" of the United States--"lies, damned lies and statistics," as we say in England. The Americans are a light-hearted, humor-loving people, but they are dull and forbidding as officials. The Spanish, even in an old Spanish harbor, felt nervous.

At last the ship is free and moves upon the silken water towards the palm trees and the white houses and the brigantines and schooners and sailing boats beside the shore. Negroes all in white, with fat cigars in their mouths, handle our luggage, and in ten minutes the passengers are dispersed to hotels and to their homes.