About 11 o’clock on our fifteenth morning out from the Cape of Good
Hope, the southwestern end of the island of Mauritius was visible
from the masthead, and we put on all our furnaces so as to reach
Port Louis before night. On approaching the land we ran for two
hours, past highly-tilled fields encompassing the cosy houses of the
planters, sloping to the water’s edge in living green. As we neared
the small crescent on which is built the little town of Port Louis, we
were boarded by two English harbor-masters, who conducted us to our
anchorage, and assisted in mooring the ship head and stern, as the
place is too contracted for a vessel of any size to swing in. Their
costume showed the philosophy which John Bull always carries into
torrid temperatures. They were dressed in white linen roundabouts,
pants and shoes, and on their heads were wide-brimmed hats, made of the
pith of a tree and covered with white. We had gotten the ship secured
just about the time a gun from one of the forts nigh us, announced
the hour to be 8 o’clock. I sat upon the wheel-house looking at the
necklace of lights that marked the town; the moon as if moved by the
notes of our band which was playing delightfully “Katy Darling,” and
the “Old Folks at Home,” seemed to rise more rapidly, and as it came it
displayed the lofty outline of Peter Botte mountain, of Penny Magazine
memory; the tall palms that fringed the beach on the right looked more
stately and graceful in the silver light, and the scene altogether was
so enchanting, that no one who looked upon it, could keep from feeling
Bernardin-St.-Pierreish.
At daylight next morning we got a look at Port Louis. The town is not
extensive, though nestling prettily under tall volcanic hills. Its
suburbs are composed of the red-roofed huts of liberated Africans,
making long streets. In its bazar, like nearly all places in that
portion of the globe, your attention is first arrested by the
grotesque—the kaleidoscope of costume. Of course your ubiquitous
pig-tail friend “John Chinaman” is present. Here he attires himself in
dark nankeen clothes, wears his clumsy shoe without sock, twists his
plaited queue under a Manilla hat, and with his Paul Pry umbrella which
he seldom hoists, looks as much like another “John Chinaman” who passes
him, as two bricks in a house. You see the Arab with his head entirely
shorn, or the dark-haired Lascar most diminutive in loin wardrobe,
but gaudy in the vest that covers his fine-formed chest; the Parsee
clothed in his gown of white muslin, his turban and pointed shoes; the
Malayan women in very brief attire, their children strapped on their
backs, sitting on the wayside, chewing the areca-nut or the betel-leaf
that they may spit blood-red saliva, and none the better looking for
having a large ring fastened through the skin of their foreheads, or
hanging from one nostril. These people are all very graceful in their
movements. Their religions are comprised in Mohammedanism, Buddhism,
Hindoo, &c. They number some six thousand of the population of the
place.
I had a pleasant drive into the country, over fine English roads,
Macadamized with volcanic stone by chain gangs. Our fancy-turbaned
Lascar driver kept up the while a noise like that of our
swamp-sparrows, to encourage his horses. We saw the large fields of
sugar-cane, rustling in their deep green, with here and there the
tall white chimneys of a sugar-house, or the painted roofs of the
chateaus of the Creole, who live very luxuriously, rising in the
midst of the promising crops, whose aggregate yield it was thought
would be one hundred and sixty millions of pounds of sugar. The
foliage that encroaches on the roadside with its luxuriance, or
stretches way back to the base of the steep volcanic hills in sight,
says “Tropical, tropical;” “the acacia waves her yellow hair,” you
have the wide-spreading banyan, the tall rough barked cocoa, the
cabbage-tree—its branches interlocked, the banana, the plantain, the
ever-graceful palm,— each one of its leaves large enough to make a
fan; and then too the traveller’s tree, which on being tapped, affords
the weary and athirst a substitute for water. Underneath this mass of
rank green, you notice the straight-stemmed aloe with its graceful
top-knot, and in the hedges that porcupine plant, the cactus, whose
prickly leaf and long thorn, prevent the hump-backed, or Hindoo cattle
of the country from getting in the fields of green cane. Then the
birds are beautiful to see: the pure white boatswain, the noisy little
paroquet, the black frigate bird, and the pretty little cardinal with
his feather cowl.
The morning scene along the roads is at all times animated. With his
proverbial industry, in rope-harness, one John Chinaman is pulling and
another John Chinaman is pushing, heavy burdens in a small wagon; or,
footing it in a trot to the town, with his bamboo-baskets strapped
on shoulder, goes the chicken-merchant with his juvenile Shanghaes.
Walking past you in groups, their hands clasped one with another, or
stretched on their back, the rays of the sun kept off by the shady
branches of the palm, or sitting under a roof made of its leaves,
having his head shaved, or the hairs of his moustache plucked out here
and there, to make the outline more graceful, is the semi-denuded and
meat-hating Lascar.
This is a very small picture.
I visited the village of “_Pamplemouses_,” where is situated the
church—as the delightful story, hath it —in which worshipped the
mother of Paul and the mother of Virginia. Not far from this building,
in the grounds of a resident, placed on either side of an artificial
lake containing red and gold fish, are two square cemented pedestals,
surmounted by rude urns, entirely overgrown with the pretty “Pride
of Barbadoes.” These are the tombs of Paul and Virginia—so said the
good old lady who accompanied us to the sentimental spot, and called
our attention to the fact that they were drowned, when these cocoa,
palm, and camphor trees around, were not so large as now. Mauritius
being an English colony, of course we paid a shilling. Some sentimental
Laura Matilda perhaps “in tears and white muslin,” has striven for
affectionate immortality, by writing on the tomb of Virginia, in a
rather masculine hand, her name; and also lets admiring gazers know,
that when she is “to hum,” she is in Massachusetts.
Next you have a view of Tomb Bay, where the young unfortunate went to
her death by shipwreck, and after thinking about the height of the
breakers, and the hardness of the coral reef, you soothe the fervid
mood by a stroll through one of the most attractive botanical gardens
that the whole East presents. The sun poured down his hottest rays,
but the lofty and strange trees that meet above your head, as a Gothic
archway, afford shade, and the great moisture produced under foot, by
this exclusion of the sun, brings up a thick green moss, so you walk
on a thick velvet carpet, while on both sides of you, rivulets of clear
water run gurgling all the time. Whether there was ever such people as
the two little loving recipients of morality, Paul and Virginia, or
not, or that the Saint Giran was ever wrecked, it is a beautiful spot
apart from the story.
But there is reality as well as romance in the Isle of France; the
present owner, John Bull, supplies it. On the iron gateway under
which you pass, in landing, is “Victoria Regina,” and Victoria Regina
levies heavy taxes on the planters. A walk on the esplanade shows you
a fence of half-buried cannon—the trophies of the English when they
captured the island from the French. In front of the house of the
governor, who gets ten thousand dollars more salary than our president,
red-coats continually mount guard. Policemen throng the streets in the
same uniform I saw in Canada, and in the barrack is quartered a fine
regiment of fusiliers to keep the people in subjection.
The island, like others in the Indian ocean, has suffered from
hurricanes; the cane may be most promising in the field, but destroyed
before garnered. The most violent hurricane they ever had, piled three
hundred houses of Port Louis in ruins, and stranded thirty ships in its
harbor.
The Portuguese, the discoverers of the island, called it Cerni; the
Dutch who came afterward, “Mauritius,” after Prince Maurice of Holland;
and the French, Isle of France. In the Champ de Mars, a fine open
plain, where the regimental bands play, the troops drill, and the
pretty Creole women take their evening drives and promenades, I noticed
a very tasteful tomb of a French governor, Malartie, which was finished
by the munificence of Sir William Gomm, an English governor.
Four days after our arrival, being the anniversary of the birthday of
the Father of our Country, our ship was appropriately dressed with
our national ensign, and at mid-day we fired a salute of twenty-one
guns, in which the English man-of-war, the “Styx,” which had reached
port, would have joined us, but an order from the admiralty forbids
the firing of salutes by their national vessels unless their battery
reaches a certain number of guns.
We reached Mauritius just in time to enjoy its pleasant fruits,
consisting of the pine-apple, the banana, the plantain, the mangoe, and
the alligator pear, which could be plentifully obtained from the fruit
boats that flocked around the ship; and then, too, before breakfast, we
drained the cocoa’s milky bowl.
With a pleasant remembrance of the hospitalities received from the
people of Mauritius, we left Port Louis for Point de Galle, on the 25th
of February.
We had a run before us of two thousand five hundred miles, and expected
in the stormy ocean we had to traverse, to meet with rough weather
on the passage, perhaps one of those dreaded typhoons; and that its
approach might be indicated at the earliest possible moment, our
barometer had been compared with the standard one in the observatory
at Mauritius, whose able and persevering superintendent is devoting
himself to the advance of meteorological information in that quarter
of the globe, and the increase of nautical science, like our own
Maury. His name is Bosquet, and, at the time of our visit, he was
preparing a moveable index card, showing the various quadrants of a
revolving gale or cyclone, which must prove of great benefit to the
practical navigator in those seas. We had a smooth sea during the run,
hot weather, and a light head wind. When General Pierce was taking
the oath of office, on the 4th of March, our nine o’clock lights were
extinguished.