Foot-prints of Travel by Maturin Murray Ballou (buy e reader TXT) 📖

pass through a crude but picturesque hamlet, having the mouldering stamp of antiquity, with low straggling houses built of rude frames, covered at side and roof with palm-bark and leaves. Chimneys, there are none,--none even in the cities,--charcoal being alone used, and all cooking is done in the open air. About the doors of the long, irregular posada, or inn, a dozen saddle-horses are seen tied to a bar erected for the purpose, while their owners are smoking and drinking inside; but there are no wheeled vehicles to be seen. The roads are only passable for men on foot or horseback. The people, the cabins, and the horses all are stained with the red dust of the soil, recalling our Western Indians in their war paint. This pigment, or colored dirt, penetrates and adheres to everything, fills the railroad cars, and decorates the passengers with a dingy brick color. It is difficult to realize that these comparatively indifferent places through which we glide so swiftly are of any importance, and the permanent home of any one. When the cars stop at the small way-stations, they are instantly boarded by lottery-ticket sellers, boys with tempting fruit, green cocoanuts, ripe oranges, and bananas, all surprisingly cheap. Here, too, is the guava-seller, with neatly sealed tin cans of this favorite preserve. Indeed, it seems to rain guava jelly in Cuba. At a shanty beside the road where we stop at noon, a large mulatto woman retails coffee and island rum, while a score of native whites lounge about with slouched hats, hands in pockets, and puffing cigarettes,--pictures of idleness and indifference.

Stray dogs hang about the car-wheels and track to pick up the crumbs which passengers throw away from their lunch-baskets. Just over the wild pineapple hedge close at hand, half a dozen naked negro children hover round the door of a low cabin; the mother, fat and shining in her one garment, gazes with arms akimbo at the scene of which she forms a typical part. The engineer imbibes a penny drink of thin Cataline wine and hastens back to his post. The station bell rings, the steam whistle is sounded, and we are quickly on our way again, to repeat the picture six or eight leagues farther on.

As we approach Matanzas, the scene undergoes a radical change. Comfortable habitations are multiplied, good roads appear winding gracefully about the country, and groves and gardens come into view with small dairy farms. Superb specimens of the royal palm begin to multiply themselves, always suggestive of the Corinthian column. Scattered about the scene a few handsome cattle are observed cropping the rank verdure. There is no greensward in the tropics, grass is not cultivated, and hay is never made. Such fodder as is fed to domestic animals is cut green and brought into the city from day to day.

Notwithstanding the ceaseless novelty of the scene, one becomes a little fatigued by the long, hot ride; but as we draw nearer to Matanzas, the refreshing air from the Gulf suddenly comes to our relief, full of a bracing tonic which renders all things tolerable. The sight of the broad harbor, under such circumstances, lying with its flickering, shimmering surface under the afternoon sun, is very beautiful to behold.


CHAPTER XXIV.

The island of Cuba was discovered by Columbus, in October of the year 1492; the continent of America was not discovered until six years later,--that is, in 1498. Columbus and his followers found the land inhabited by a peculiar race; hospitable, inoffensive, timid, fond of the dance, yet naturally indolent. They had some definite idea of God and heaven, and were governed by patriarchs whose age gave them precedence. They spoke the dialect of the Lucagos or Bahamas, from which islands it was thought they originated, but it would seem more reasonable to suppose that both the people of the Bahamas and of the West Indian islands originally came from the mainland; that is, either from north or south of the Isthmus of Panama.

The natives were at once subjected by the new-comers, who reduced them to a condition of slavery, and proving to be hard taskmasters, the poor overworked creatures died by hundreds, until they had nearly disappeared. They were of tawny complexion, and beardless, resembling in many respects our native Indians. As Columbus described them in his first letter sent to his royal patrons in Spain, they were "loving, tractable, and peaceable; though entirely naked, their manners were decorous and praiseworthy." The wonderful fertility of the soil, its range of noble mountains, its widespread and well-watered plains, with its extended coast-line and excellent harbors, all challenged the admiration of the discoverers, so that Columbus recorded in his journal these words: "It is the most beautiful island that the eyes of man ever beheld, full of excellent ports and deep rivers."

The Spaniards were surprised to see the natives using rude pipes, in which they smoked a certain dried leaf with apparent gratification. Tobacco was native to the soil, and in the use of this now well-nigh universal narcotic, these simple savages indulged in an original luxury, or habit, which the Spanish invaders were not slow in acquiring.

The flowers were strongly individualized. The frangipanni, tall, and almost leafless, with thick, flesh-like shoots, and decked with a small, white blossom, was fragrant and abundant. Here, also, was the wild passion-flower, in which the Spaniards thought they beheld the emblem of our Saviour's passion. The golden-hued peta was found beside the myriad-flowering oleander and the night-blooming cereus, while the luxuriant undergrowth was braided with the cactus and the aloe. They were also delighted by tropical fruits in confusing variety, of which they knew not even the names.

This was four hundred years ago, and to-day the same flowers and the same luscious fruits grow upon the soil in similar abundance. Nature in this land of endless summer puts forth strange eagerness, ever running to fruits, flowers, and fragrance, as if they were outlets for her exuberant fancy.

Diego Velasquez, the first governor of the island under Spanish rule, appears to have been an energetic magistrate, and to have ruled affairs with intelligence. He did not live, however, in a period when justice erred on the side of mercy, and his harsh and cruel treatment of the natives will always remain a blot upon his memory. Emigration was fostered by the home government, and cities were established in the several divisions of the island; but the new province was mainly considered in the light of a military station by the Spanish government in its operations against Mexico. Thus Cuba became the headquarters of the Spanish power in the west, forming the point of departure for those military expeditions which, though small in number, were yet so formidable in the energy of the leaders, and in the arms, discipline, courage, fanaticism, and avarice of their followers, that they were fully adequate to carry out the vast scheme of conquest for which they were designed.

The Spaniards who invaded Mexico encountered a people who had attained a far higher degree of civilization than their red brethren of the outlying Caribbean Islands, or those of the northeastern portion of the continent, now forming the United States. Vast pyramids, imposing sculptures, curious arms, fanciful garments, various kinds of manufactures, filled the invaders with surprise. There was much which was curious and strange in their religion, while the capital of the Mexican empire presented a fascinating spectacle to the eyes of Cortez and his followers. The rocky amphitheatre in the midst of which it was built still remains, but the great lake which was its grandest feature, traversed by causeways and covered with floating gardens, is gone. The Aztec dynasty was doomed. In vain did the inhabitants of the conquered city, roused to madness by the cruelty and extortion of the victors, expel them from their midst. Cortez refused to flee further than the shore; the light of his burning vessels rekindled the desperate valor of his followers, and Mexico fell, as a few years after did Peru beneath the sword of Pizarro, thus completing the scheme of conquest, and giving Spain a colonial empire more splendid than that of any power in Christendom.

In the meantime, under numerous and often-changed captains-general, the island of Cuba increased in population by free emigration from Spain, and by the constant cruel importation of slaves from Africa. It may be said to have been governed by a military despotism from the outset to the present time, and nothing short of such an arbitrary rule could have maintained the connection between the island and so exacting a mother country, situated more than three thousand miles across the ocean.

The form of the island is quite irregular, resembling the blade of a Turkish cimeter slightly curved back, or that of a long, narrow crescent. It stretches away in this shape from east to west, throwing its western end into a curve, and thus forming a partial barrier to the outlet of the Gulf of Mexico, as if at some ancient period it had been a part of the American continent, severed on its north side from the Florida Peninsula by the wearing of the Gulf Stream, and from Yucatan on its southwestern point by a current setting into the Gulf. Two channels are thus formed by which the Mexican Gulf is entered.

One neither departs from nor approaches the Cuban shore without crossing that remarkable ocean-river to which we have so often referred in these pages,--the Gulf Stream,--with banks and bottom of cold water, while its body and surface are warm. Its color in the region of the Gulf is indigo-blue, so distinct that the eye can follow its line of demarkation where it joins the common water of the sea. Its surface temperature on the coast of the United States is from 75 deg. to 80 deg.. Its current, of a speed of four to five miles per hour, expends immense power in its course, and forms a body of water in the latitude of the Carolina coast fully two hundred miles wide. Its temperature diminishes very gradually, while it moves thousands of leagues, until one branch loses itself in Arctic regions, and the other breaks on the coast of Europe.

The sea-bottom, especially near the continents, resembles the neighboring land, and consists of hills, mountains, and valleys, like the earth upon which we live. A practical illustration of this fact is found in the soundings taken by the officers of our Coast Survey in the Caribbean Sea, where a valley was found giving a water-depth of three thousand fathoms, twenty-five miles south of Cuba. The Cayman Islands, in that neighborhood, are the summits of mountains bordering this deep valley at the bottom of the sea, which has been found, by a series of soundings, to extend over seven hundred miles from between Cuba and Jamaica nearly to the Bay of Honduras, with an average breadth of eighty miles. Thus the island of Grand Cayman, scarcely twenty feet above sea-level, is said to be a mountain-top twenty thousand five hundred and sixty feet above the bottom of the submarine valley beside which it rises,--an altitude exceeding that of any mountain on the North American continent. A little more than five miles, or say twenty-seven thousand feet, is the greatest depth yet sounded at sea.

Cuba is the most westerly of the West Indian Islands, and compared with the others has nearly twice as much superficial extent of territory, being about as large as England proper, without the principality of Wales. Its greatest length from east to west is very nearly eight hundred miles, its narrowest part is over twenty miles, and its average width fifty. The circumference is two thousand miles, and it contains over forty thousand square miles.

The nearest port of the island