Gardens of the Caribbees. Ida May Hill Starr
and shook his head and told us nothing. He was a wise man, that Rudolph! Then he suggested that we get up and dress, after he had lashed the trunks back where they belonged, and had straightened up a nice little round spot in the middle of the room, where we could stand and reach for things. With a grim determination, I pulled down the towel, opened the lattice, and looked out. There is no use in trying to tell you anything about the sea, because I couldn’t. All I can do is advise you never to round Cape Hatteras in a gale. “But what shall we do about the Islands of the Blest?” you ask. That is a simple problem, start from well down in Florida, and take the shortest cut across!
At seven o’clock by the ship’s bell I went to work to keep my promise to Rudolph. I have a distinct remembrance of having put both stockings on wrong side out. I was an hour hunting for my shoes. Everything else had to be scrambled for in the same way. It was two o’clock when I was dressed sufficiently to make a decent appearance; but I needed to have had no fear of criticisms, for as I made my way on deck, crawling up the main cabin stairway, there wasn’t a soul to be seen, except the jackies in their oilskins, who looked rather amazed when I poked my head out of the door.
I then had a view of the ship’s deck which I had not hitherto had. She was very narrow and long, I hadn’t before realised how long and how narrow. No wonder she rolled like a gigantic log canoe, but she was a beauty though! I began to forget her temper because of her looks—a common blunder in judging her sex, I am told. She was stripped naked for the plunge, and to see her pitch headlong into the seething water, throwing foam to the mast-heads, sending a deluge of crashing seas adown our decks, made me scream with delight. It was glorious, glorious, glorious! Down she went—the beauty—roaring, cracking, twisting, groaning, howling, and hissing. She fought as with a thousand furies, plunging and rolling into and through the seas, which rushed down upon her as if they would crush her to atoms.
Just then the sun broke from out the fast-moving clouds, and sprang upon the water in a million glistening rays of brilliant light, and my whole being was filled with joy that I had eyes to see such wonders. The storm was at its height the night before when we were to the southeast of Cape Hatteras, after we had steamed well into that beautiful Gulf Stream one reads about. There we were hove to, with head to the storm, engines slowed down, and oil dripping over our bows for twenty-four hours, and were carried one hundred miles out of our course. Unfortunately the oil did little good, for we were in a cross sea which occasionally broke with a thundering crash over our stern as well as over our bows, and we were horribly twisted and shaken. But at last, on Monday afternoon, at four o’clock, the storm quieted so we were able to square away again for the Windward Passage. So much for that terrible gale from the Gulf, which, as we afterward learned, did much damage to coastwise shipping.
As the storm broke, one by one, poor forlorn remnants of our fellow passengers began to appear in all possible states of dilapidation; and for the rest of the day, inspired by a subject of common interest, we sat about, clinging to fixed chairs, talking over our experiences, and watching the fast disappearing tempest.
It was then I learned that my original plan of buying a ticket home from Nassau in the Bahamas and through Florida by rail was shared by every second person I met, and whether the purpose is fully carried out or not remains to be seen.
IV.
There was one peculiar and unlooked-for feature in the experience of seasickness which may be universal to all like sufferers, but it was novel to me. It was when in one of my sane moments the morning before the storm that I threw myself down on a couch in the main saloon, too inert to lift my head, too woebegone to think that I could ever smile again, that I raised my eyes and caught sight of a figure opposite me, compared with which I was in a state of heavenly rapture. It was none less than his Excellency, Herr Baron von Pumpernickel Donnerwetter Hohenmaltsteinhaufen, high officer in the service of his Majesty, the Kaiser. He was all in a heap, a big soft heap, wound about by a big brown ulster. Poor soul, he didn’t care much how it was buttoned, it was all wrong anyway, but he was not thinking of trifles. On a bald pate was a comical felt hat—one of those little Alpine hats German tourists affect—jammed over the left eye; his face was unshaven, his hair unshorn and uncombed, his nose big and red, and his eyes watery, meaningless, colourless, glassy eyes rolling about in helpless agony. He sat there with his arms dangling at his sides, mumbling to himself. I hadn’t anything else to do, so I watched him and listened. What can he be saying? I suppose it’s the “Lorelei;” maybe he dreams he’s on the Rhine! His sorrowful, wife-forsaken look aroused my sympathy; I listened more attentively. I have always had a lingering affinity for the German Folkslieder, but, oh, dear, it wasn’t a Folkslied at all! He was swearing volley after volley of feeble, limp oaths, uttered in a broken and scarcely audible voice. I thought the sight of a woman might stop his flow of wrath, so I lifted myself up a little and looked at him as severely as I could under the circumstances, but to no purpose. His monotonous oaths went rolling on and on, until a kind steward came and asked his Excellency if he would have something to eat. Now that steward ought to have known better. I knew there would be trouble. There are times when men must be left alone, and this was his Excellency’s time. I tried to warn the steward, and even worked up an especial groan to attract his attention, but, like a stupid old dunderhead, he stood there with his mouth open; and then he caught it: “Verdamter—damter—damity—dam—” it pealed, bellowed forth with royal spontaneity, and the steward was a white streak out of the saloon door.
There were sufferers in the room besides myself, and it was remarkable to note, how that full and complete expression of his Excellency’s wrath worked like a healing balm upon us all. I shall not confess to any such lapses on the part of my immediate family and friends—no, I shall never confess to that! but I will say that there are times when the use of strong language is an outlet most beneficial to overwrought digestive organs. I will say that much.
The little blue map of the West Indies given to me at our departure, which same map has lain very snugly between the unopened pages of my journal until to-day, shows me, as for the first time I unfold the wrinkled paper, that we have just passed Watling’s Island (the San Salvador of the early explorers) and a lot of other little islands; while a row of tiny dots shows that we are somewhere near the Tropic of Cancer. Daddy tells of watching until late last night to make out the light on San Salvador, and how it blinked up finally from the waves far ahead on our starboard bow and as quickly disappeared, to gradually grow brighter as we brought it abeam of us—our first smell of land since we dropped the bleak shore of New Jersey. My eyes tell me as they look seaward that we have left the great lonely waste of the Atlantic and have come into sweeter waters, on seas of heavenly rest, which flow away from us as do the rolling white clouds above. I watch dreamily the shoals of flying fish darting aside from under the bow in long low lines of flashing silver; and I look away to where ships come up from over the meeting of sky and ocean.
I know now why Rudolph can not give it up.
CHAPTER II.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAÏTI
I.
FROM the rising of the sun to its sudden drop into the sea, this has been a funny day in Haïti, our first land-fall. All night we had been threading through the dangerous shoals and past the lower islands of the Bahama group, until at last we turned into that great thoroughfare, the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haïti, and finally were at rest in the harbour of Port-au-Prince. Knowing