The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). Frederick Whymper

      HAVANA.

      Havana is a very gay city, and has some special attractions for the sailor—among others being its good cigars and cheap Spanish wine and fruits. Its greatest glory is the Paseo—its Hyde Park, Bois de Boulogne, Corso, Cascine, Alamèda—where the Cuban belles and beaux delight to promenade and ride. There will you see them, in bright-coloured, picturesque attire—sadly Europeanised and Americanised of late, though—seated in the volante, a kind of hanging cabriolet, between two large wheels, drawn by one or two horses, on one of which the negro servant, with enormous leggings, white breeches, red jacket, and gold lace, and broad-brimmed straw hat, rides. The volante is itself bright with polished metal, and the whole turn-out has an air of barbaric splendour. These carriages are never kept in a coach-house, but are usually placed in the halls, and often even in the dining-room, as a child’s perambulator might with us. Havana has an ugly cathedral and a magnificent opera-house.

      Slave labour is common, and many of the sugar and tobacco planters are very wealthy. Properties of many hundred acres under cultivation are common. Mr. Trollope found the negroes well-fed, sleek, and fat as brewers’ horses, while no sign of ill-usage came before him. In crop times they sometimes work sixteen hours a day, and Sunday is not then a day of rest for them. There are many Chinese coolies, also, on the island.

      Kingsley, speaking of the islands in general, says that he “was altogether unprepared for their beauty and grandeur.” Day after day, the steamer took him past a shifting diorama of scenery, which he likened to Vesuvius and Naples, repeated again and again, with every possible variation of the same type of delicate loveliness. Under a cloudless sky, and over the blue waters, banks of light cloud turned to violet and then to green, and then disclosed grand mountains, with the surf beating white around the base of tall cliffs and isolated rocks, and the pretty country houses of settlers embowered in foliage, and gay little villages, and busy towns. “It was easy,” says that charming writer, “in presence of such scenery, to conceive the exultation which possessed the souls of the first discoverers of the West Indies. What wonder if they seemed to themselves to have burst into fairy-land—to be at the gates of the earthly Paradise? With such a climate, such a soil, such vegetation, such fruits, what luxury must not have seemed possible to the dwellers along those shores? What riches, too, of gold and jewels, might not be hidden among those forest-shrouded glens and peaks? And beyond, and beyond again, ever new islands, new continents, perhaps, and inexhaustible wealth of yet undiscovered worlds.”112

      The resemblance to Mediterranean, or, more especially, Neapolitan, scenery is very marked. “Like causes have produced like effects; and each island is little but the peak of a volcano, down whose shoulders lava and ash have slidden toward the sea.” Many carry several cones. One of them, a little island named Saba, has a most remarkable settlement half-way up a volcano. Saba rises sheer out of the sea 1,500 or more feet, and, from a little landing-place, a stair runs up 800 feet into the very bosom of the mountain, where in a hollow live some 1,200 honest Dutchmen and 800 negroes. The latter were, till of late years, nominally the slaves of the former; but it is said that, in reality, it was just the other way. The blacks went off when and whither they pleased, earned money on other islands, and expected their masters to keep them when they were out of work. The good Dutch live peaceably aloft in their volcano, grow garden crops, and sell them to vessels or to surrounding islands. They build the best boats in the West Indies up in their crater, and lower them down the cliff to the sea! They are excellent sailors and good Christians. Long may their volcano remain quiescent!

      When the steamer stops at some little port, or even single settlement, the negro boats come alongside with luscious fruit and vegetables—bananas and green oranges; the sweet sop, a fruit which looks like a strawberry, and is as big as an orange; the custard-apples—the pulp of which, those who have read “Tom Cringle’s Log” will remember, is fancied to have an unpleasant resemblance to brains; the avocado, or alligator-pears, otherwise called “midshipman’s butter,” which are eaten with pepper and salt; scarlet capsicums, green and orange cocoa-nuts, roots of yam, and cush-cush, help to make up baskets as varied in colour as the gaudy gowns and turbans of the women. Neither must the junks of sugar-cane be omitted, which the “coloured” gentlemen and ladies delight to gnaw, walking, sitting, and standing; increasing thereby the size of their lips, and breaking out, often enough, their upper front teeth. Rude health is in their faces; their cheeks literally shine with fatness.

      But in this happy archipelago there are drawbacks: in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, 5,000 persons lost their lives in the one town of Point-à-Pitre alone. The Souffrière volcano, 5,000 feet high, rears many a peak to the skies, and shows an ugly and uncertain humour, smoking and flaming. The writer so often quoted gives a wonderfully beautiful description of this mountain and its surroundings. “As the sun rose, level lights of golden green streamed round the peak, right and left, over the downs; but only for a while. As the sky-clouds vanished in his blazing rays, earth-clouds rolled up from the valleys behind, wreathed and weltered about the great black teeth of the crater, and then sinking among them and below them, shrouded the whole cone in purple darkness for the day; while in the foreground blazed in the sunshine broad slopes of cane-field; below them again the town (the port of Basse Terre), with handsome houses, and old-fashioned churches and convents, dating possibly from the seventeenth century, embowered in mangoes, tamarinds, and palmistes; and along the beach, a market beneath a row of trees, with canoes drawn up to be unladen, and gay dresses of every hue. The surf whispered softly on the beach. The cheerful murmur of voices came off the shore, and above it, the tinkling of some little bell, calling good folks to early mass. A cheery, brilliant picture as man could wish to see, but marred by two ugly elements. A mile away on the low northern cliff, marked with many a cross, was the lonely cholera cemetery, a remembrance of the fearful pestilence which, a few years since, swept away thousands of the people: and above frowned that black giant, now asleep: but for how long?”

      The richness of the verdure which clothes these islands to their highest peaks seems a mere coat of green fur, and yet is often gigantic forest trees. The eye wanders over the green abysses, and strains over the wealth of depths and heights, compared with which fine English parks are mere shrubberies. There is every conceivable green, or rather of hues, ranging from pale yellow through all greens into cobalt; and “as the wind stirs the leaves, and sweeps the lights and shadows over hill and glen, all is ever-changing, iridescent, like a peacock’s tail; till the whole island, from peak to shore, seems some glorious jewel—an emerald, with tints of sapphire and topaz, hanging between blue sea and white surf below, and blue sky and white cloud above.” And yet, over all this beauty, dark shadows hang—the shadow of war and the shadow of slavery. These seas have been oft reddened with the blood of gallant sailors, and every other gully holds the skeleton of an Englishman.

      Here it was that Rodney broke De Grasse’s line, took and destroyed seven French ships of war, and scattered the rest: saving Jamaica, and, in sooth, the whole West Indies, and bringing about the honourable peace of 1783. Yon lovely roadstead of Dominica: there Rodney caught up with the French just before, and would have beaten them so much the earlier but for his vessels being becalmed. In that deep bay at Martinique, now lined with gay houses, was for many years the Cul-de-sac Royal, the rendezvous and stronghold of the French fleet. That isolated rock hard by, much the shape and double the size of the great Pyramids, is Sir Samuel Hood’s famous Diamond Rock,113 to which that brave old navigator literally tied with a hawser or two his ship, the Centaur, and turned the rock into a fortress from whence to sweep the seas. The rock was for several months rated on the books of the Admiralty as “His Majesty’s Ship, Diamond Rock.” She had at last to surrender, for want of powder, to an overwhelming force—two seventy-fours and fourteen smaller ships of war—but did not give in till seventy poor Frenchmen were lying killed or wounded, and three of their gun-boats destroyed, her own loss being only two men killed and one wounded. Brave old sloop of war! And, once more, those glens and forests of St. Lucia remind us of Sir John Moore and Sir Ralph Abercrombie, who fought, not merely the French, but the “Brigands”—negroes liberated by the Revolution of 1792.