Part 8
If genuine storms and honest ignorance of these dangerous passages do not supply a sufficient number of wrecks to satisfy the gambling tastes of the wreckers, and of the merchants who make fortunes by their spoils, it is found easy enough to make bargains with unprincipled captains, by which, for a certain sum, a wreck can be achieved at a given time with unfailing certainty. This is so managed that captain and wreckers shall make a comfortable little speculation of the affair and nobody lose anything except the all unsuspicious insurance company or the innocent owners of the vessel.
_Nassau, New Providence, Royal Victoria Hotel, April 13th._--After being rocked gently to sleep, and then sung into deep slumbers all night by these pure-voiced ocean nurses, I was awakened this morning by the firing of guns announcing our entrance in the bay of Nassau. This city is to be our destiny for the next month, at the end of which the next regular steamer goes north. It is thought prudent to graduate in this way the change from the heat of Havana to the probable cold of New York.
We hung on deck to reconnoitre this little item of our future, and to find ourselves anchored in the brightest, lightest possible pea-green water, through which the clean, beautiful bottom is so clearly revealed, that the numerous swarming boats seem to be floating in an atmosphere only a little more dense and colored than the delicious nectar we are breathing.
While waiting for the inevitable custom-house officer, we lean over the deck railing to watch this phantom loveliness, and the boatmen that are urging us in English that sounds as droll as did the Spanish at first in Havana, to buy their wares. These consist of the only exports of the island,--sponges, bananas, pineapples; some of the larger boats have the bottoms covered with living turtles, others are half full of huge conch shells, or varieties of smaller shells arranged regularly in partitional boxes.
Presently the captain comes and points out the just arrived custom-house officer, a regal-looking negro, dressed in uniform. While B---- goes with him to examine the luggage, the captain shows us the white pilot-boat from which one of his men was knocked overboard on the last voyage, by the rough waves in this bay. The negroes who were rowing him fled in affright: before help could arrive he had gone down for the last time, and was never seen again. But a few days after, a shark was caught and killed, and safely in his stomach lay the man’s hand, immediately recognizable by the sleeve and cuff; beside it lay a goat’s head and horns, and various other trophies of a shark’s victories.
But now we must go: the boat waits for us here, and the hotel carriage on shore. A farewell with our Spanish friends, by whose cards I find, as I have before been informed, that the husband and wife in Cuba have distinctly different names; the name on the card of one gives you no clue to name or address of the other.
An English carriage brought us up the English road, past the English faces to the English-built hotel here on the hill, overlooking the English town, the bright bay, and outstretched ocean that owe allegiance to Her Majesty. Even the hotel belongs to the British government.
The high upper parlor opens upon a piazza commanding a noble and extensive view. While waiting here for my room,--its occupants go north in this steamer,--a quiet, elderly gentleman, with much blandness and benevolence in his not extraordinary face, entered, and sitting down by the table addressed some kind and casual remarks, evidently intended to make a stranger feel at home, while I, tired of this long silent sitting and waiting, was glad enough of any change. On going down stairs I found I had been conversing with ex-President P----, who has been here since January for the health of his invalid wife, and also possibly to find a place where he can escape being lionized, and enjoy the retired literary leisure of which he is fond.
At half-past two came dinner. It is so late in the season, that not more than a dozen guests are left. Turtle soup of nicest and freshest quality commenced the ceremony, turtle pie helped to continue it, so did turtle steak, otherwise you might imagine yourself at an ordinary American hotel except that beef and mutton, and ducks and chickens, appear in an excellent state of mummification, as if they had all died of a lingering consumption, and would severally assist us to follow their example. The climate of the tropics is ill-adapted to our domestic animals. We are told that the best American cows die here after a few months, even if brought in the fall. Still it is a question, if want of care, and a general shiftlessness in all matters of the sort, have not more sins of animal murder to answer for than this delicious climate. The residents confess as much. By the way, can you guess the proper, legitimate name of the natives of New Providence? Not, as they are sometimes called, “Bahamaites,” or “Nassauers,” or “West Indians,” but _Conchs_.
This evening our first drive; pleasant, but exhausting, I much fear; all that the island has of novelty or interest, measuring, as it does, only fourteen miles in length and eight in width. In the first place, it is not only founded upon a rock, but it _is_ a rock; the _debris_ of coral reefs up to within a few inches of the surface. This surface is clothed with a light soil, which in the country is clothed with a light verdure, mostly of shrubs, briers, and weeds, interspersed here and there with stray dwarfed palms and cocoas. Occasionally the curious cotton-tree is found, with wide patriarchal branches covered with delicate green leaves, or else with a long, large pod full of perfect cotton to all appearances, perhaps intents, but not purposes, for it is proved to be useless. The roots of this tree, doubtless for want of soil, grow very much out of the ground, living in the air almost as much as the branches. In the town and its suburbs, oranges, bananas, sabadillas, mangoes, etc., are cultivated extensively, giving the whole place from a distance the air of an inhabited garden.
The streets and roads are a phenomenon. Every one is of solid rock covered with some kind of cement most dazzling to the eyes in its whiteness; so much so, that strangers are advised to never go out without veils. I see many of the inhabitants wearing blue and green glasses. But no rain or drought can affect them; never mud, never dust; always as smooth and white and clean as the cement floors in the parlors of Havana.
I am more than anything else impressed with the quantity and quality of the negro element. There are, according to statistics, eight black to one white person, but in passing the streets you would suppose the pepper to be more than the rule, and the salt less than the exception. Bless me! how they bubble and swarm in every street, every corner, every alley, every hut; to each man two women, to each woman at least a dozen babies; and men, women, and children always idle, and intensely contented with their idleness; fat, and lusty, and happy, and good-for-nothing. I think no one can come from a slave country to this without acknowledging the obtrusive difference, the increased appearance of happiness; if jolly contentedness can be called so. And rapidly as they increase in the States, no colored fertility can match this, where babies are undoubtedly indigenous to the soil, cuticle though it is. Every way I turn I expect to see a head just budding from the ground, hands sprouting, wool germinating, or possibly a foot grown uppermost, with the rest of the dawning body just bursting from the ground, and like Milton’s hind, or calf, or some other quadruped in Eden, “pawing to get free.”
If I were to ask one of these bouncing negresses, as Willis did, what curiosity or product peculiar to the island I could find to carry home, I should unquestionably get the same answer,--except that his, being on the island of Martinique, was in French,--“_Bien que les enfants. En voulez-vous?_”
_Saturday, April._--This evening a drive on the “Eastern Road,” the Paseo of Nassau.
I thought the air in Cuba unparalleled, but this is freer, purer; an always fresh and warm-enough seabreeze. It has a richness, roundness, completeness; it is not a thin, sharp, cutting melody, but a perfectly elaborated harmony. In what a gentle, healing affectionate way it possesses one, interpenetrating all the sensitive fevered fibres of the lungs like a blessing, or like a spirit full of blessings, bringing with it vitality, repose, and life!
In our drive we met all the _beau monde_ of Nassau, the government officers and families, with their always English faces and figures, which are in strikingly redundant contrast with the consumptive Americans seated up and down our hotel table. One thing assures me that I am not in Spanish Cuba, with her tenacity for national customs and habits; a tenacity for which I, coming from the shifting fancies of Yankeedom, sincerely honor her. It is this: We are once more in a land of gloves and bonnets. How stiff are these London exported bonnets compared with those exquisitely graceful Spanish veils, or prettier hair-ornamented Spanish heads; and as for the gloves, I can now understand without surprise that when Cubans first saw foreigners wearing gloves they supposed them used to hide some frightful blemish or deformity.
Our drive lay along the shore of this extraordinary bay, with its long parallel lines of brightest, lightest blue and pea-green, contrasting with the dark ultramarine purples and browns of all hues and densities, sometimes shading into each other, again preserving themselves, in spite of all republican efforts of the wind, clearly distinct. The cause of this phenomenon, I am told, is still a disputed question among the scientific. On the other side of the bay are built the cottages of wreckers and fishermen, the latter including those who dive for sponges, many of which we saw lying about in immense heaps; also those who dive for conch shells, which are exported in large quantities to France to be used in various artistic manufactures. The shores are covered with superannuated and dilapidated conchs, bleaching in the sun and calcining in the waves.
Another novelty is the turtle houses, built of poles out in shallow water, in such a way that the water can get freely in and out, while the self-roofed crawlers do neither the one nor the other.
X.
_The Military Church--The Zouave Costume--Sunday come again--Twilight Rambles--The Kirk--Miscegenation--A Private Misery--The Old Fort--Lazy Negroes--Wrecking--The Town Library--Shopping--The Zouave Band--The Search for Coolness--The Government House--Silver key--Buying Shellwork--Nassau grows Purgatorial--Farewell to Nassau._
SUNDAY, April 15th.
One of the ladies having invited me to accompany her to the military church, we started early, hoping to arrive in time for the military music and procession, but both were over. Everybody was quietly assembled in the church, a plain, old-fashioned building, with large windows wide open, and between them numerous tablets and inscriptions. Two clergymen officiated; the English officers occupied the front pews; a few chance visitors besprinkled the body of the church, while thickly packed in the background, or blackground, were the soldiers with tall, fine forms, Moorish features, and jet-black skins. The gallery was also filled by them; the services and hymns were played by their band, and sung by their choir; all the colored people above and below responded heartily from open prayer-books during the entire service, and listened with intelligent interest to the sermon. This was a farewell discourse from their young pastor of the last year: it was appropriate in spirit, but so mouthed and mumbled that I scarcely comprehended a word of it.
When, at last the services were over, the black soldiers,--for all the soldiers on the island are black,--with their white officers, filed in a long procession while performing certain military evolutions, and then marched off to the music of a quiet march.
A novel feature of all this was the quaint and picturesque Zouave costume of the soldiers, which has within a few months been adopted,--the bright red embroidered jacket, white sleeves, full blue Turkish trousers, caught just below the knee into a leathern leggin which half conceals the shoe; the pretty red cap, with a white turban twisted gracefully around the crown, from which hangs a huge yellow silk tassel,--all this entire wild and oriental dress harmonizes so completely with these black, well-formed, often handsome faces and stately forms, and with this gorgeous sunlight and tropical brightness of coloring everywhere, that these soldiers seem things wholly unique and original, beings born just as they are from the burning maternal heart of this bounteous nature. How mean and modern these Parisian-dressed men looked beside them! Never were stove-pipe hats so high and stiff--mathematical tailoring so prim and prosaic and square cut![A]
[A] The Zouave costume having been so universally worn by soldiers of the United States, since the above was written, it has, of course, lost what was its greatest charm--its novelty.
In every thing we constantly see the complete dissimilarity of the islands of Cuba and New Providence, and in nothing more than in the recognition of Sunday. A few hours’ sail floats you down through centuries; from much poetry, it is true, alas! to much prose, but nevertheless from the dark ages to one of civilization, and from a chain of weeks linked together by no golden clasp into a country where one seventh of the time the Presence comes so near that you can hear--if you have ears to hear--the trailing of its robes down the dismal steps of all the following week.
_Monday, 16th._--Last evening we commenced a twilight ramble which terminated at the kirk.
As our walk had been a little long, we sat down to rest, before arriving, on a little retired rock, commanding bay, city, and clouds of perfumes from neighboring gardens. Presently a tremendous explosive sound took place just behind us, and continued on in a perpetual thundering till we came near being as much petrified as the rock under us. I had only sense enough left to discover that it was undoubtedly the church-bell inviting to the house of quiet. But why so tremendous a summons? Is it to ring out the piety of the entire island? or to break into shivering fragments the after-dinner naps of the church-goers? or to deafen them in defence of the stupid sermon to come? or perchance it may be to call the mermaids and respectable shell-conchs, and other residents of the surrounding vasty deep? With my questions still unanswered, we arose to go, and on turning the first corner found that close behind the wall where we had been sitting, in a little low shelter for the purpose, situated in the remotest corner of the church grounds, was the ordinary-sized bell, that had seemed terrifically loud, not from its size, but from its proximity. Why this wretched attempt at a campanile is preferred to our method of enthroning the bell on the pinnacle of the temple, I cannot divine.
The kirk we found even plainer and less tasteful than the established church of the morning. The noble-faced but prosy clergyman, a Presbyterian in gown and scarf of the Episcopal clergy; the excellent though a little shrill-voiced choir, composed entirely of mulattoes. Just before services began, a handsome lady, well dressed, and whiter than myself, walked into one of the central pews, followed by a tall, equally well dressed and perfectly black husband. This is the only negation of races I have seen, and I cannot tell if it is often paralleled.
_Monday evening._--I impart to you a private piece of misery. My windows overlook, and, still worse, overlisten the poultry yard, where med-_lays_ and _mêlèes_ and sound-_lays_ make the “nights hideous,” as well as the mornings. The reason is, these West Indian chickens have no respect for almanacs. They not only ignore the comings and goings of the sun, but they have no shadow of respect for his definite intentions that everybody should sleep in his absence. In short, which means in long, very long, they crow all night, insisting on waking at eleven o’clock to inform me that the daylight has gone, just as conscientiously as at one to assert that it is coming, and at four to suggest that it has just arrived. The geese, the turkeys, the guinea-hens, and, most vociferous of all, the ducks, are equally assiduous in performing their vocal responsibilities. No wonder they turn to universal lungs and come on the table pathetic carcasses, painful relics, poultryitic proof that bipeds fare best when sound is sacrificed to substance.
A drive this evening on the “Western Road,” which, like all the other roads, is of smooth solid rock. It lies along the sea shore, where shells are said to abound; but my enthusiasm, as well as feet, was sadly dampened by fruitless searchings on the sharp wave-riddled rocks, and the equally infertile sand-beach.
A little way out of town stand the curious ruins of a fort, built by the Spaniards when they possessed this island; for you must know, it was handed about from one government to another, changing hands half a dozen times or more before England could get a secure hold. Victoria now finds it a constant drain on her treasury, but, good mother that she is! her feeble children are nourished and supported with no less fidelity than that with which the strong ones sustain her.
The fort is circular, with a curious pointed, perfectly solid wing on one side, the design of which nobody can now discover. Another fort, built by the Spaniards on the hill opposite my window, has the same singular appendage, which is, however, well preserved and appropriated to some military use.
The ruined fort which we passed possesses a subterranean passage, leading to the government house, in which are numerous mysterious apartments, having the always-attractive reputation of being haunted. At various times, various ladies and gentlemen have undertaken to penetrate them, but these irreverent pursuers of spirits under difficulties are always summarily dismissed by the inhospitable ghost.
Farther on, we found numerous desolated plantations, presided over by dilapidated country houses. It is universally found, that since the emancipation of the slaves, some thirty years since, the impoverished owners are obliged to abandon their estates.
The negroes now cannot be coaxed or hired or driven to work more than is absolutely necessary to keep soul and body from a divorce. No public improvements have been built since the emancipation. It is doubtless true that the wrecking trade, which of late years is become so flourishing, has, in its speculating, I may say gambling, influences, had a tendency to destroy legitimate industry. What is the use of working their black fingers to the bone, when any day an ill wind may blow them enough good or goods to make everybody rich? when any wind that is good for anything, and knows what it is about, comes to them dressed in silks and satins of the latest fashion, sometimes with a Paris bonnet on its head, sometimes loaded with jewelry which it lays at their feet, and begs they will be good enough to accept as a present.
_April 17th._--The town library is well filled with books, excellently bound, none of them in paper or muslin. It has also a respectable number of curiosities; there we pass a pleasant early morning hour.
To-day my first shopping excursion in Havana. We heard enticing accounts of the great bargains to be made here, not only in wrecked goods, but in English importations free of duty. I found, however, nothing of the sort; on the contrary, heaps of wrecked and damaged goods lying about the doors of the shops, or strewn upon the sidewalks; mostly sell as high as the same thing uninjured in New York.
These merchants are constantly in the practice of wetting and wilting their superannuated goods in salt water and then displaying them as wrecked articles, thus imposing on foreigners and ignorant customers, who suppose that, as a matter of course, they are making “stunning bargains.”
After dinner, like everybody else, we drove to hear the Zouave band. On Tuesday and Friday afternoons they find themselves the centre of a large admiring carriage audience. On benches ranged immediately around them, are seated crowds of colored nurses with English infants, while older children are running and playing everywhere with the sweet inexhaustible happiness which children find in every clime under the sun.
These Africans play operatic music with expression as well as precision. Like all the negroes of these English islands, they are taught reading, writing, and the elements of an ordinary school education. The surgeon of the army tells me that their ready emotional nature and quickness for time and tune, nearly atone for the, to them, unattainable intellectual and artistic culture ordinarily necessary to the full expression of these musical compositions.
We everywhere find coolness the thing most sought by these adopted children of the sun. Witness their universal white linen umbrellas to whose blinding glare no coolness could ever reconcile me. Witness also the prevailing thick, white flannel coats, vests, and trousers worn by the gentlemen as a morning and business dress. In a country where dust and mud are matters of merely books and faith, and where perspiration is a matter for draughts of air to manufacture fevers of, this soft, cool, non-conducting dress has its advantages.
As we were coming out from tea this evening, General P---- called over the bannisters to know if we were ready for the usual game of whist. We found him in the upper parlor, seated opposite the rocking-chair, which nobody will occupy at whist but myself. I find in him qualities not often combined in a whist-player,--scientific skill, and what I am far more capable of appreciating, patience and kind encouragement for the mistakes of his partner.
_Wednesday evening, April 17th._--This morning the General knocked at our door to say that the United States Consul would be here at half-past three, with his carriage, to carry us up to the Government House, this being the reception day of Mrs. B----, its mistress. We went, accordingly, to find the walks and house filled with coming and going guests. On sending in cards we were at once ushered into the drawing-room, where was her ladyship seated in one corner of a sofa, without crinoline, which she has never worn. There is character for you! Her dress and cap were of some gauzy material tinctured with purple; the same color looked from the underside of her point lace collar and cuffs, and after my turn was over for commonplaces, I had leisure, or seized it from the stupid conversation of Doctor somebody on the other side of me, to discover that the lady’s face was full of culture and spirit, and that her high-toned guests perfectly agreed with me in the opinion. A grand piano occupied one side of the octagon room, its polished feet, like those of its mistress, standing upon a bare, shining oak floor; the wide open windows commanded a triple view of sea, valley, and forest. As we came out Mr.----, the graceful bachelor consul, registered our names in a book kept for the purpose and then brought us home.