Part 12

The interior of the Franciscan convent, the door of which stood wide open, presented a sad picture of desolation. So many stones had fallen from the roof and such large portions of the walls, that most of the altars lay scattered in fragments, or were covered with rubbish; several of the colossal figures of saints had fallen from the niches, and lay with their finery all covered with dust and stones; but the people, who the day before had been carrying them about in triumph, now did not trouble themselves any more about them: everybody was occupied in saving his life, or, if possible, his most valuable possessions.

Of the new university buildings only one wing was left standing: it was the one containing the clock-tower, and in this the clock was still going on, regularly striking the hours. The roof of the Episcopal Palace had fallen in, and some stones had struck the sacred head of the bishop with no more ceremony than had been shown towards our profane pates, though this bishop was Don Tomaso Saldana, a man most justly held in high repute for the excellence of his life. Much injury had also been sustained by the President of the Republic, Senor Duenas, who was originally a monk, but afterwards a lawyer and statesman, and perhaps the man of the greatest capacity in the whole country.

The streets were empty and desolate, and we had to scramble over heaps of ruins to get through them: not a creature was to be seen but a few sentinels, and in the interior of the houses also there reigned the stillness of the grave. Even in the broadest streets the people did not think themselves safe, and rich and poor were huddled together indiscriminately in the great square, praying, singing, and screaming whenever a new shock startled them with its terrible explosion; but fortunately, in the midst of all this, the new President, Don Jose Maria San Martin, showed much presence of mind, and gave his orders for the preservation of property with much composure.

[Fortunately, the previous warning shock had driven most of the people from their houses, a chance which saved most of their lives, though several hundreds were found buried in the ruins.]

The rising sun of Easter Monday morning shone on a mournful spectacle, and the few people who were left in the town wandered about looking pale and worn, the women with a total disregard of their dress very unusual with them. Among these I noticed the wife of the President, who was entreating him to fly, like so many others, from the scene of danger; but he remained faithful to duty, and was exerting himself vigorously to keep order. He had established a kind of court-martial under a tent in the University Square, before which every thief caught in the act was brought, and, on the evidence of two witnesses against him, immediately shot.

Since the ruins of San Salvador could now no longer offer me a shelter, I set off on foot, at an early hour, towards the hacienda of Mr. Kronmeier, and on the way felt four more shocks, the strongest of which lasted six or seven seconds, and was accompanied by violent oscillations of the ground, and detonations like the salvos from Vesuvius, when, in the lesser eruptions, you stand near the crater while stones are being thrown up. I was now more than ever convinced that the centre of the subterranean action was very near, and that the explosive steam and glowing masses of the interior were seeking a new outlet.

The country-house of Mr. Kronmeier was still standing, but its thick walls had been rent in so many places that it offered only an uncomfortable and insecure shelter. From the steep cliffs on the left of the river's bed masses of rock and earth had fallen, and the hot springs at the foot of the hill had ceased to flow; the mill-stream was dry; one of the cocoa-palms was prostrate, and the whole landscape, so lovely before, had a dejected and melancholy aspect, increased, of course, by the general flight of the inhabitants of the district.... The shocks still went on, though they were not so frequent as on the two Easter nights; and, as the subterranean forces were evidently struggling for a new vent, no one could feel himself safe within the sphere of their operations.

Many of the people whom we met, however, were leaving the place, though not so much for any reason of this kind as on account of a prophecy of the worthy bishop, "that before the new moon the whole district of San Salvador, with the ruins of the city, would be swallowed up." But, unluckily for the bishop's character as a prophet, the prediction was not fulfilled.

SCENES IN TRINIDAD AND JAMAICA.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[Froude is scarcely known as a traveller, his reputation being founded in another field of literature, that of history. Yet he is the author of two works of travel,--"Oceana," from which we have elsewhere given a selection, and "The English in the West Indies," from which our present selection is derived. He visited most of the British West Indies, and has given picturesque descriptions of them all. We append some extracts from his account of Trinidad.]

Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The Orinoco River and the ocean-currents between them have cut a channel between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is approached are narrow, and are called _bocas_, or mouths,--one the Dragon's Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood the water is brackish, and the brilliant violet hue of the Caribbean Sea is changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbor which is so formed would hold all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be the depot one day of an enormous trade.

[Landing was made at Port of Spain, the capital, so called when Trinidad was a Spanish possession, and Mr. Froude found pleasant quarters in the house of a friend.]

The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and the rain and the Johnny crows [a black vulture that acts as scavenger] between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a large savanna or park, where the villas are of the successful men of business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool, airy habitation, with open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off from the savanna by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a cabbage-palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit-trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had collected in the woods.

The borders were blazing with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn-color, the largest that I had ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting-room, loaded with the perfume of orange-trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room assigned to myself would have been delightful, but that my possession of it was disputed, even in daylight, by mosquitoes, who for blood-thirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and examined him through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius, had drawn his exact likeness as the devil,--a long black stroke for a body, a nick for a neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for line, there the figure was before me, which in the unforgetable tail-piece is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the lookout for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land-crabs, who would bite me if I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet he is without a match in the world.

From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco-smoke, or hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided. Otherwise I found every provision to make life pass deliciously. To walk is difficult in a damp, steamy atmosphere, hotter during daylight than the hottest forcing-house in Kew.... Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took us around the savanna. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are fond of fine colors, especially black human beings, and the park was as brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene became even more wonderful, air, grass, and trees being alight with fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glow-worm. The palm-tree at our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky, a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and clashing against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night-wind, while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.

[The governor's residence and the botanical gardens next call for attention.]

The "Residence" stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own, at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built, regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba or silk-cotton-tree, umbrella-shaped, fifty yards in diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.

Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil.

From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens. I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water.

Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another.

Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia nobilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.

Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice-trees, orange-trees, coffee plants, and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odor, in which I might have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel-tree.

Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other, the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock's neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one. "That sort no let catchee, massa," he said; and I was penitently glad to hear it.

Among the wonders of the garden are the vines, as they call them, that is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees. Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty "cedar." It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had been murdered by a "fig-vine" which had started from the root, twined itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and spreading out in all directions, had covered boughs and twigs with a foliage not its own. So far the "vine" had done no worse than ivy does at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether. The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything, formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an ordinary swing.

In three distinctly perfect instances the "vine" had executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig-vine threw out fine tendrils which hung downward like strings. The strongest among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them, the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.

But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage at the extreme angle of it, where Kingsley[A] had been the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep verandas lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out into the savanna through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape, peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing evening of his own life.

[Footnote A: Charles Kingsley, who wrote here his "At Last," descriptive of tropical scenes.]

[Happiness makes its home with the negroes of Trinidad, whom nature keeps in pristine idleness. They have little to do other than to pull and eat.]

In Trinidad there are eighteen thousand freeholders, most of them negroes and representatives of the old slaves. Their cabins are spread along the road on either side, overhung with bread-fruit-trees, tamarinds, calabash-trees, out of which they make their cups and water-jugs; the luscious granadilla climbs among the branches; plantains throw their cool shade over the doors; oranges and limes and citrons perfume the air, and droop their boughs under the weight of their golden burdens. There were yams in the gardens and cows in the paddocks, and cocoa-bushes loaded with purple or yellow pods. Children played about in swarms in happy idleness and abundance, with schools, too, at intervals, and an occasional Catholic chapel, for the old religion prevails in Trinidad, never having been disturbed.

What form could human life assume more charming than that which we were now looking on? Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well off, so well cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the sons and daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian Islands. Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can grow with small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may "better his condition," if he has any such ambition, without stirring beyond his own ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not turned off upon politics.

Even the necessary evils of the tropics are not many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden. "Plenty snakes," said one of them who was at work in his garden, "plenty snakes, but no bitee." As to costume, he would prefer the costume of innocence if he were allowed. Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and to the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame, superfluous for decency. European prejudice, however, still passes for something; the women have a love for finery, which would prevent a complete return to African simplicity; and in the islands which are still French, and in those like Trinidad, which the French originally colonized, they dress themselves with real taste. They hide their wool in red or yellow handkerchiefs, gracefully twisted; or perhaps it is not only to conceal the wool. Columbus found the Carib women of the island dressing their hair in the same fashion.

The water-works, when we reached them, were even more beautiful than we had been taught to expect. A dam has been driven across a perfectly limpid mountain stream; a wide open area has been cleared, levelled, strengthened with masonry, and divided into deep basins or reservoirs, through which the current continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine with crimson blossoms. Innumerable humming-birds glance to and fro among the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung by magnificent bamboos, which so astonished me by their size that I inquired if their height had been measured. One of them, I was told, had lately fallen, and was found to be one hundred and thirty feet long. A single drawback only there was to this enchanting spot, and it was again the snakes. There are huge pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed the straits from the continent. Some washerwomen at work in the stream had been disturbed a few days before our visit by one of these monsters, who had come down to see what they were about. They are harmless, but trying to the nerves.

[We shall conclude this selection with a leap from Trinidad to Jamaica, and the relation of an adventure experienced by our author in that island. He was on his way back from an excursion into the island.]

The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset. The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea-breeze had fallen, the land-breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge. Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me to my destination before dark.

So I calculated; but alas! for human expectation. I engaged a "buggy" at the station, with a decent-looking conductor, who assured me that he knew the way to Cherry Garden as well as to his own door. His horse looked starved and miserable. He insisted that there was not another in Kingston that was more than a match for it. We set out, and for the first two or three miles we went on well enough, conversing amicably on things in general. But it so happened that it was market day. The road was thronged with women plodding along with their baskets on their heads, a single male on a donkey to each detachment of them, carrying nothing, like an officer with a detachment of soldiers.

Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked my friend if he was not ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so cruelly, while their lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to his feelings as a man, as if it were likely that he had got any. The wretch only laughed. "Ah, massa," he said, with his tongue in his cheek, "women do women's work, men do men's work,--all right." "And what is men's work?" I asked. Instead of answering he went on, "Look at they women, massa,--how they laugh, how happy they be! Nobody more happy than black woman, massa."

I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till he got excited too, and we argued and contradicted each other, till at last the horse, finding he was not attended to, went his own way, and that was a wrong one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a deep sandy flat, overgrown with brush and penetrated in all directions with labyrinthine lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarrels, and neither of us knew where we were. The sand was loose; our miserable beast was above his fetlocks in it, and was visibly drooping under his efforts to drag us along even at a walk.