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THE MODERN LIBRARY
OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS
JUNGLE PEACE
_Turn to the end of this volume
for a complete list of titles
in the Modern Library_
JUNGLE PEACE
BY
WILLIAM BEEBE
Foreword by
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
[Illustration: (Publisher's Logo)]
THE MODERN LIBRARY
PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1920, by_
HENRY HOLT & CO.
_Manufactured in the United States of America_
_Bound for_ THE MODERN LIBRARY _by H. Wolff_
TO
COLONEL and MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I OFFER THIS VOLUME WITH DEEPEST FRIENDSHIP
NOTE
With three exceptions these chapters have appeared in the pages of _The
Atlantic Monthly_, and I publish them through the kindness of the
Editor, Ellery Sedgwick. "Hoatzins at Home" is adapted from a title in
my _Tropical Wild Life_, Volume I, published by the New York Zooelogical
Society, which deals with the more technical results of study at the
Research Station. The illustrations are from my own photographs, except
the frontispiece and those facing pages 162, 186, and 268, which were
taken by Paul G. Howes. All the chapters dealing with the jungle relate
to Bartica District, British Guiana, except X, which refers to Para at
the mouth of the Amazon.
FOREWORD
Mr. Beebe's volume is one of the rare books which represent a positive
addition to the sum total of genuine literature. It is not merely a
"book of the season" or "book of the year"; it will stand on the shelves
of cultivated people, of people whose taste in reading is both wide and
good, as long as men and women appreciate charm of form in the writings
of men who also combine love of daring adventure with the power to
observe and vividly to record the things of strange interest which they
have seen.
Nothing like this type of book was written until within the last century
and a half. Books of this kind can only be produced in a refined,
cultivated, civilized society. In rude societies there may be much
appreciation of outdoor life, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing
for adventurous wandering, but the appreciation and joy are
inarticulate; for in such societies the people who write are generally
not the people who act, and they express emotions by words as
conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the popular poetry which has
come down to us from early times, in the ballads of Britain and France,
and the folk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there are
occasional lines which bring before us the song birds in Spring, in the
merry greenwood, or the great flocks of water fowl on the ponds of the
plains of green grass; but they are merely a few words of incidental
description of the land through which the hero rides to foray and
battle. We do not pass much beyond this stage even with Chaucer and the
Minnesingers; and although the heroes of the Nibelungenlied were mighty
hunters, those who described their deeds knew nothing of the game, even
of their own forests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotion to
the bolder forms of the chase was a passion; and Kings and Queens of
Memphis and Thebes who with absorbed and intelligent curiosity sought
for information about the life of far-off lands; but their laborious
writings, if they did not deal with business contracts, were generally
concerned only with boastful annals or religious ritual.
Hitherto there have been only two periods of Western history in which
both the art of expression, and the breadth of interest among cultivated
men, grew to a point which permitted the cultivated man to turn back to
the life of the open which his inarticulate ancestor had gradually
abandoned, and to enjoy, appreciate, and describe it.
One of these periods included the society which enjoyed Theocritus and
the society which applauded the country poems of Virgil. The other
includes our own time, and may roughly be said to have begun when the
rise of writers like Pope showed that English eighteenth century society
had at last regained the level of the ancient society which enjoyed
Cicero and Horace and Pliny; in France the advance had been more rapid.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that there appeared
(in primitive form, of course, as with all early types) "nature books"
and books of natural history, big game hunting and adventures in
out-of-the-way lands. In the Middle Ages there had been many
"beastiaries," in which the natural history was for the most part
fabulous; and many French and German, and some Italian, Spanish, and
English hunting books, which were for the most part as stiff and
technical as treatises on farriery.
But Bruce and Le Vaillant at last foreshadowed the
wilderness--wanderers, half explorers, half big game hunters, of our own
day; with Gilbert White, there appeared the first book of literary work
by a stay-at-home lover of nature and natural history; and a century ago
Waterton's "Wanderings" marked the beginning of the literature wherein
field naturalists who are also men of letters and men of action have
described for us the magic and interest, the terror and beauty of the
far-off wilds where nature gives peace to bold souls and inspires terror
in the mind.
Gilbert White and Waterton added in new ways to the sum of achievement
of men of letters. Each made a contribution to literature as new and
distinctive as the Idylls of Theocritus--it is not necessary to compare
the worth of two kinds of literary work, and in speaking of Theocritus I
am making no such comparison, but merely indicating that literature may
be literature even although of a totally new type. The new literature,
of appreciative love of nature and of hardy outdoor life, will appeal
only to the never very extensive class which neither ignorantly believes
that literature is purely an affair of the lamp and the library, nor
ignorantly proclaims its own shortcomings and conceit by boasting that
it does not value books because, forsooth, it is too "red-blooded" to
care for anything except action. A really first-class hunting book, for
instance, ought to be written by a man of prowess and adventure, who is
a fair out-of-doors naturalist; who loves nature, who loves books, and
who possesses the gift of seeing what is worth seeing and of portraying
it with vivid force and yet with refinement. Such men are rare; and it
is not always easy for them to command an audience.
In his own much larger field Mr. Beebe is just such a man; and he has
such marked ability that he can make and command his audience. Exactly
as John Burroughs is the man who has carried to its highest point of
development the school in which Gilbert White was the first scholar, so
Beebe is the man who has turned into a new type of higher literature the
kind of work first produced by Waterton.
Nothing of this kind could have been done by the man who was only a good
writer, only a trained scientific observer, or only an enterprising and
adventurous traveler. Mr. Beebe is not merely one of these, but all
three; and he is very much more in addition. He possesses a wide field
of interest; he is in the truest sense of the word a man of broad and
deep cultivation. He cares greatly for noble architecture and noble
poetry; for beautiful pictures and statues and finely written books. Nor
are his interests only concerned with nature apart from man and from the
works of man. He possesses an extraordinary sympathy with and
understanding of mankind itself, in all its myriad types and varieties.
In this book, and in his other recent writing (for I wish to draw a
sharp line in favor of what he has recently written as compared with his
earlier and more commonplace work), some of his most interesting
descriptions are of the wild folk he meets in the wilderness--black or
yellow, brown or red--and of some nominally tamer folk with whom he has
foregathered in civilization.
I don't know in which category, civilization or savagery, the trenches
at the front ought to come; but Mr. Beebe, a man of deeds as well as of
books, knows the trenches and the people in them, and the pathetic or
pitiful or else wholly brave and admirable people back of them; and his
sketches of some of them and of their deeds and of the by-products of
war as waged today are wholly admirable. Lowell, praising the
Elizabethans as both doers and writers, spoke of Ben Jonson's having
trailed a pike in the lowlands, and of Kenelm Digby's having illustrated
a point in physics by the effects of the concussion of the guns in the
sea fight in which he took part off Scanderoon. Beebe, as bomber, has
sailed in planes over the German lines; in company with a French officer
he has listened to a wolf howl just back of the fighting front; he has
gone with Iroquois Indians into the No Man's Land between the trenches
of the mightiest armies the world has ever seen.
This volume was written when the writer's soul was sick of the carnage
which has turned the soil of Northern France into a red desert of
horror. To him the jungle seemed peaceful, and the underlying war among
its furtive dwellers but a small thing compared to the awful contest
raging among the most highly civilized of the nations of mankind. It is
the same feeling that makes strong men, who have sickened of the mean
and squalid injustice of so much of life in the centres of material
progress, turn with longing to the waste places where no paths penetrate
the frowning or smiling forests and no keels furrow the lonely rivers.
The jungle he herein describes is that of Guiana; and in the
introductory chapters he gives cameos of what one sees sailing southward
through the lovely islands where the fronds of the palms thrash
endlessly as the warm trade blows. He knows well and intimately Malaysia
and the East Indian islands, and Ceylon and Farther India and mid-China
and the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas. All of these he
will some time put before us, in volumes not one of which can be spared
from the library of any man who loves life and literature. This is the
first of these volumes. In it are records of extraordinary scientific
interest, in language which has all the charm of an essay of Robert
Louis Stevenson. He tells of bird and beast and plant and insect; of the
hoatzin, a bird out of place in the modern world, a bird which comes
down unchanged from a time when birds merely fluttered instead of
flying--and had only recently learned to flutter instead of gliding.
Whatever he touches he turns into the gold of truth rightly interpreted
and vividly set forth--as witness his extraordinary account of the
sleeping parlor of certain gorgeous tropic butterflies.
If I had space I would like to give an abstract of the whole book. As it
is I merely advise all who love good books, very good books, at once to
get this book of Mr. Beebe.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
Reprinted from the _New York Times_. REVIEW OF BOOKS.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Jungle Peace 3
II Sea-wrack 5
III Islands 33
IV The Pomeroon Trail 66
V A Hunt for Hoatzins 92
VI Hoatzins at Home 123
VII A Wilderness Laboratory 140
VIII The Convict Trail 177
IX With Army Ants "Somewhere" in the
Jungle 211
X A Yard of Jungle 239
XI Jungle Night 263
Index 295
JUNGLE PEACE
I
JUNGLE PEACE
After creeping through slime-filled holes beneath the shrieking of swift
metal, after splashing one's plane through companionable clouds three
miles above the little jagged, hero-filled ditches, and dodging other
sudden-born clouds of nauseous fumes and blasting heart of steel; after
these, one craves thoughts of comfortable hens, sweet apple orchards, or
ineffable themes of opera. And when nerves have cried for a time
'enough' and an unsteady hand threatens to turn a joy stick into a sign
post to Charon, the mind seeks amelioration--some symbol of worthy
content and peace--and for my part, I turn with all desire to the
jungles of the tropics.
If one looks the jungle straight in the face and transcribes what is
seen, there is evolved technical science, and until this can be done
with accuracy and discretion, one can never feel worthy now and then, of
stealing quietly up a side aisle of the great green wonderland, and, as
I have done in these pages, looking obliquely at all things, observing
them as actors and companions rather than as species and varieties;
softening facts with quiet meditation, leavening science with thoughts
of the sheer joy of existence. It should be possible occasionally to
achieve this and yet to return to science enriched and with enthusiasm,
and again to play some little part in the great physical struggle--that
wonderful strife which must give to future peace and contentment new
appreciation, a worthier enjoyment.
It is possible to enter a jungle and become acutely aware of poison fang
and rending claw--much as a pacifist considers the high adventure of
righteous war. But it is infinitely more wonderful and altogether
satisfying to slip quietly and receptively into the life of the jungle,
to accept all things as worthy and reasonable; to sense the beauty, the
joy, the majestic serenity of this age-old fraternity of nature, into
whose sanctuary man's entrance is unnoticed, his absence unregretted.
The peace of the jungle is beyond all telling.
II
SEA-WRACK
Suspended in the naked air eight thousand feet above New York, I look
down and see the city and its inhabitants merged into one. From this
height the metropolis is less interesting and hardly more noticeable
than many tropical ants' nests which have come under my observation.
Circling slowly earthward, I have watched the city split apart into its
canyon streets, and have finally distinguished the caterpillars which I
knew were trains, and the black beetles which must be automobiles. Last,
and apparently least, were resolved a multitude of tiny specks, weird
beings all hats and legs, which were undoubtedly the makers and owners
of these beetles and worms and canyons.
In many similar bird's-eye-views of the city one phase of activity
always amuses and thrills. Circling as low as I dare, bumped and jolted
by the surging uprush of invisible spouts of warm air, I head, like a
frigate-bird, straight into the teeth of the wind and hang for a time
parallel with the streaming lines of gray and white smoke. Near the
margin of the city where the glittering water reaches long fingers in
between the wharves, a crowd of people push, antwise, down to the brink.
Many burdened individuals pass and repass over slender bridges or
gang-planks, for all the world like leaf-cutting ants transporting their
booty over twigs and grass stems. Then comes a frantic waving of
antennae, (or are they handkerchiefs), and finally part of the wharf
detaches itself and is slowly separated from the city. Now I can mount
higher to a less dangerous altitude and watch the ship become a drifting
leaf, then a floating mote, to vanish at last over a curve of the world.
I cease chuckling into the roar of my motor; my amusement becomes all
thrill. The gods shift and change: Yoharneth-Lahai leaves me, and in his
place comes Slid, with the hand of Roon beside me on the wheel. I hasten
hangarwards with the gulls which are beating towards their roosting
sands of far Long Island beaches.
On some future day I in my turn, scurry up a gang-plank laden with my
own particular bundles, following days of haste and nights of planning.
I go out on the upper deck of the vessel, look upward at a gull and
think of the amusing side of all the fuss and preparation, the
farewells, the departure, which sufficient perspective gives. And then I
look ahead, out toward the blue-black ocean, and up again to the passing
gulls, and the old, yet ever new thrill of travel, of exploration,
possesses me. Even if now the thrill is shared by none other, if I must
stand alone at the rail watching the bow dip to the first swell outside
the harbor, I am yet glad to be one of the ants which has escaped from
the turmoil of the great nest, to drift for a while on this tossing
leaf.
At the earnest of winter--whether biting frost or flurry of
snowflakes--a woodchuck mounts his little moraine of trampled earth,
looks about upon the saddening world, disapproves, and descends to his
long winter's sleep. An exact parallel may be observed in the average
passenger. As the close perspective of home, of streets, of terrestrial
society slips away, and his timid eyes gaze upon the unwonted sight of a
horizon--a level horizon unobstructed by any obstacles of man's
devising, mental and physical activity desert him: he hibernates. He
swathes himself, larva-like--in many wrappings, and encases himself in
the angular cocoons furnished for the purpose at one dollar each by the
deck steward; or he haunts the smoking room, and under the stimulus of
unaccustomed beverages enters into arguments at levels of intelligence
and logic which would hardly tax the powers of Pithecanthropus or a
Bushman.
From the moment of sailing I am always impressed with the amusing
terrestrial instincts of most human beings. They leave their fellows and
the very wharf itself with regret, and no sooner are they surrounded by
old ocean than their desires fly ahead to the day of freedom from this
transitory aquatic prison. En route, every thought, every worry, every
hope is centripetal. The littlenesses of ship life are magnified to
subjects of vital importance, and so perennial and enthusiastic are
these discussions that it seems as if the neighbor's accent, the daily
dessert, the sempiternal post-mortem of the bridge game, the home life
of the stewardess, must contain elements of greatness and goodness. With
a few phonograph records it would not be a difficult matter to dictate
in advance a satisfactory part in the average conversation at the
Captain's table. The subjects, almost without exception, are capable of
prediction, the remarks and points of view may be anticipated.
Occasionally a passenger detaches his mind from the ship and its doings
long enough to take note of something happening beyond the rail--some
cosmic phenomenon which he indicates with unerring finger as a beautiful
sunset, frequently reassuring himself of our recognition by a careful
enumeration of his conception of the colors. Or a school of dolphins
undulates through two mediums, and is announced, in a commendably
Adam-like, but quite inaccurate spirit, as porpoises or young whales.
Mercury, setting laggardly in the west, is gilded anew by our informant
as a lightship, or some phare off Cape Imagination. We shall draw a veil
or go below, when an "average citizen" begins to expound the stars and
constellations.
All this is only amusing, and with the limited interest in the ship and
the trip which the usual passenger permits himself, he still derives an
amazing amount of pleasure from it all. It is a wonderful child-like
joy, whether of convincingly misnaming stars, enthusiastically playing
an atrocious game of shuffle-board, or estimating the ship's log with
methods of cunning mathematical accuracy, but hopeless financial
results. All these things I have done and shall doubtless continue to do
on future voyages, but there is an additional joy of striving to break
with precedent, to concentrate on the alluring possibilities of new
experiences, new discoveries, on board ship.
If the vessel is an oasis in a desert, or in a "waste of waters" as is
usually announced at table about the second or third day out, then I am
a true Arab, or, to follow more closely the dinner simile, a Jonah of
sorts, for my interest is so much more with the said waste, or the
things in it and above it, than with my swathed, hibernating fellow
mortals.
Precedent on board ship is not easily to be broken, and much depends on
the personality of the Captain. If he has dipped into little-known
places all over the world with which you are familiar, or if you show
appreciation of a Captain's point of view, the battle is won. A few
remarks about the difficulty of navigation of Nippon's Inland Sea, a
rebuke of some thoughtless idiot at table who hopes for a storm; such
things soon draw forth casual inquiries on his side, and when a Captain
begins to ask questions, the freedom of the chart-room is yours, and
your unheard-of requests which only a naturalist could invent or desire,
will not fail of fulfilment.
I am off on a voyage of two weeks to British Guiana and I begin to
ponder the solution of my first problem. The vessel plows along at a
ten-knot rate, through waters teeming with interesting life and stopping
at islands where every moment ashore is of thrilling scientific
possibility. By what means can I achieve the impossible and study the
life of this great ocean as we slip rapidly through it--an ocean so
all-encompassing, yet to a passenger, so inaccessible.
Day after day I scan the surface for momentary glimpses of cetaceans,
and the air for passing sea birds. Even the rigging, at certain seasons,
is worth watching as a resting place for migrating birds. The extreme
bow is one of the best points of vantage, but the spot of all spots for
an observer is the appropriately named crow's nest, high up on the
foremast. You have indeed won the Captain over to your bizarre
activities when he accords permission to climb the swaying ratlines and
heave yourself into that wonderful place. It is tame enough when
compared with piloting a plane among the clouds, but it presents an
enormous expanse of ocean compared with the humble deck view. Here you
can follow the small whales or blackfish down and down long after they
have sounded; with your binoculars you can see every detail of the great
floating turtles. And when the sun sinks in glory which is terrible in
its grandeur, you may let it fill your senses with wordless ecstasy,
without fear of interpretive interruption. Save for the other matchstick
mast and the spider-web ratlines, the horizon is unbroken.
Many years ago I spent a night in the torch of the Statue of Liberty and
each time I dozed, the twenty odd inch arch through which the lofty
structure swayed, awoke me again and again, being changed, behind one's
closed lids, into a single motion, apparently that of a gradually
accelerated fall to earth. In the crow's nest, when the ship is rolling,
I can often conjure up the same feeling when my eyes are shut, but now I
react to a new stimulus and instinctively reach for a steering rod, as
the sensation is that of a wing slip, consequent upon too slow progress
of an aeroplane.
Among the luggage which I take on board is invariably a large,
eight-pronged, iron grapple, with a long coil of rope. These the
stewards eye askance when they place them in my cabin, and hold
whispered consultations as to their possible use. It is by no accident
or chance that before the third day I have won the attention and a
certain amount of interest of the Captain and have obtained permission
to put his vessel to a novel use. About the fourth day, from the upper
deck or the ship's bow, I begin to see floating patches of
seaweed--gulfweed or sargasso as it is called. For the most part this
appears as single stems or in small rounded heads, awash with the
surface. But as we proceed southward larger masses appear, and then,
with my assistant, I get my crude apparatus ready. We fasten one end of
the coil of rope to the rail of the lowest open deck forward, and then I
mount the rail, securing a good grip with legs and feet. As a cowboy on
a fractious horse gathers the loops of his lariat for the throw, so I
estimate my distance and balance myself for the propitious moment. Now
if not before, the audience gathers. It is flattering to see how quickly
my performance will empty the smoking room, put an end to bridge games
and fill the deck chairs with deserted, outspread yellow-backs. As
dangerous rival attractions, I admit only boat-drill and the dinner
gong!
My whole object is of course to secure as much as possible of the
sargasso weed together with its strange inhabitants, and to this end I
have tramped the decks of steamers with the patience of the pedestrian
of Chillon. I have learned the exact portions of the vessels where the
strain is the least, and where the water, outflung from the bow is
redrawn most closely to the vessel's side. I have had overheavy grapples
dragged from my hand and barely escaped following the lost instrument. I
have seen too-light irons skip along the surface, touching only the high
spots of the waves. As one drops one's aerial bomb well in advance of
the object aimed at, so I have had to learn to adjust the advance of my
cast to the speed of the ship.
I make throw after throw in vain, and my audience is beginning to jeer
and to threaten to return to the unfinished no trumps, or the final
chapter of "The Lure of Love." Near the water level as I am, I can yet
see ahead a big 'slick' of golden brown, and I wait. But the bow dips
farther and farther away and I almost give up hope. Then I look up
appealingly to the bridge and catch a twinkle in the Captain's eye. Even
as I look he motions to the wheelman and the second succeeding dip of
the bow slews it nearer the aquatic golden field. Still more it swings
to starboard and at last crashes down into the very heart of the dense
mass of weed. The frothing water alongside is thick with the tangle of
floating vegetation, and it is impossible to miss. I throw and lean far
over, dragging the grapple until its arms are packed full. Then with all
my strength I draw up, hand over hand, leaning far out so it will not
bang against the side, and dump the dripping mass on the deck. My helper
instantly frees the prongs and I make a second cast and get another rich
haul before the last of the field of weed drifts astern and tarnishes
the emerald foam of the propeller churned wake.
For a few minutes there is wild excitement. My audience dances and
shouts with enthusiasm from the upper rails, members of the crew appear
and help me pursue agile crabs and flopping fish about the deck. Even
the surly old mate roars down news of another batch of weed ahead, and I
curb my curiosity and again mount my precarious roost.
In the course of several days I acquire a wonderful sunburn,
considerable accuracy in flinging my octodont, and finally a series of
tumblers of very interesting specimens, which furnish me with many new
facts, and my fellow passengers with the means to kill much of that
embarrassing concomitant of ocean voyages--time.
An amazing amount of fiction and nonsense has been written about the
sargasso weed, but the truth is actually more unbelievable. Though we
see it in such immense patches, and although for days the ocean may be
flecked with the scattered heads of the weed, yet it is no more at home
in mid-ocean than the falling leaves in autumn may claim as their place
of abode, the breeze which whirls them about, or the moss upon which at
last they come to rest. Along the coast of Central America the sargasso
weed grows, clinging, as is the way with seaweeds, to coral and rock and
shell, and flowering and fruiting after its lowly fashion. The
berry-like bladders with which the stems are strung, are filled with gas
and enable the plants to maintain their position regardless of the state
of the tide. Vast quantities are torn away by the waves and drift out to
sea and these stray masses are what we see on every trip south, and
which, caught in the great mid-ocean eddy, form the so-called Sargasso
Sea. Just as the unfailing fall of dead leaves has brought about a
forest loving clique of brown and russet colored small folk--frogs,
crickets, lizards, birds and mammals which spend much of their life
hiding beneath or living upon the brown dead leaves, so this
never-ending drift of weed has evolved about it a little world of life,
a microcosmos of great intimacy, striving by imitation of frond and
berry and color to avoid some of the host of enemies forever on the
lookout.
It is possible to place a bit of weed in a tumbler of salt water and
have a dozen people examine it without seeing anything but a yellowish
brown frond with many long, narrow leaves and a number of berry-like
structures. Here and there are patches of thin ivory-white shells--tiny
whorls glued closely to the surface of the leaves. Yet on this same
small piece of weed there may be several good-sized crabs, slug-like
creatures, shrimps and a fish two or three inches in length. Until they
move, the eye is powerless to detach them. No two are alike; the little
frog-fish is mottled and striped, with many small flabby filaments, and
apparently ragged fins, with curious hand-like fore limbs which clutch
the fronds closely. The pipe-fish and sea-horses are draped and ragged,
and splashed with yellow and brown, the slugs are simply flaccid stems
or leaves, and the crabs are beyond belief, living bits of weed. Some
are clear yellow, others are mottled, others again have white enameled
spots like the small masses of tiny shells. The little shrimps are mere
ghosts of life, transparent, yielding to every movement of the
water--altogether marvelous. Then there are other beings, blue like the
sea, white like the foam, or translucent bits of disembodied organs.
This is all absorbingly wonderful, but the unreality of this little
world's existence, the remembrance of its instability is always
present, and the tragedy of the immediate future looms large.
The weed along the coast is honest growth, with promise of permanence.
The great floating Sargasso Sea is permanent only in appearance, and
when finally the big masses drift, with all their lesser, attendant
freight into the gulf stream, then life becomes a sham. There can be no
more fruiting or sustained development of gas-filled berries. No eggs of
fish or crabs will hatch, no new generation of sea-horses or mollusks
appear among the stems. Bravely the fronds float along, day by day the
hundred little lives breathe and feed and cling to their drifting home.
But soon the gas berries decay and the fronds sink lower and lower. As
the current flows northward, and the water becomes colder the crabs move
less rapidly, the fish nibble less eagerly at the bits of passing food.
Soon a sea-horse lets go and falls slowly downward, to be snapped up at
once or to sink steadily into the eternal dusk and black night of deeper
fathoms. Soon the plant follows and like all its chilled pensioners,
dies. The supply from the Sargasso Sea seems unfailing, but one's
sympathies are touched by these little assemblages, so teeming with the
hope of life, all doomed by the current which is at once their support,
their breath and their kismet.
But all these creatures, interesting as they are, form but a tithe of
the life existing around and beneath the ship. Night after night I lean
over the bow and watch the phosphorescence flare and flash beneath the
surface, the disturbance of the steamer's approach springing a myriad of
these floating mines, whose explosions, gentler than those of human
make, merely vibrate into a splendor of visibility. How to capture these
tiny beings which the eye can scarcely resolve is a matter far more
difficult than the netting of the seaweed. I try to plan, then give it
up. I walk restlessly over the vessel, seeking some method. But, as is
often the case, nature had fairly to force the solution upon me. Thoreau
says somewhere, "A trout in the milk is pretty good circumstantial
evidence," and in similar guise I saw the light. Early one morning I was
paddling in my salt-water bath, thinking of the coming week when I
should be able to dive into island harbors from the deck, when I sat up
suddenly at the sight of a tiny fish disporting himself with me in the
tub. At least I needed no further hint, and as I scooped up the little
being my plan was made. By exhaustive inquiry among the feminine portion
of the passengers I obtained possession of a small square of a very
fine-meshed fabric something like bolting cloth. In the evening, with
the assurance of a small monetary liaison with the bath steward, I tied
this bit of cloth over the salt-water nozzle and carefully set the
faucet so that a dribble of water trickled forth. In the morning the
cloth strainer contained a small blob of grayish jelly. This I dropped
into a tumbler and saw the water cloud with an opalescent mist of a
myriad motes and I knew that my plan was successful. No matter how
tempestuous the sea, or at what speed the ship throbbed through the
water, I would always be able to gather any amount of the wonderful
floating life of the ocean--the phosphorescent plankton--for my
microscope. Again, aside from my own edification, I was able to give
some thrills to my fellow passengers, and I have had twenty or more
lined up for a squint at the weird things of the open sea. In spite of
my reassurances, there was reported to be less enthusiasm for the daily
bath, and much suspicious inspection of the clear ocean tub water as a
result of glimpses of the concentrated cosmos in my tumblers.
I can recall many similar diversions and discoveries of new
possibilities of life on board ship, but one brings memories of especial
delight. Next to the crow's nest the bow is, for me, the place of
greatest joy--the spot where each moment one's eyes reach forward into a
trackless, unexplored field of view; a heaving, translucent No Man's
Land, fraught with potentialities such as sea-serpents. Long had I
pondered the possibility of getting nearer the fascinating bit of
unbroken water just ahead. At last a scheme unfolded itself, but not
until a following trip when I had made all preparations did I venture to
ask permission of the Captain. For I knew better than to wish to add
anything to the responsibility of this official. When he had become used
to my eccentric use of the deck and the bath tubs, I unfolded my new
plan, and thanks to my preparation, met with no opposition. I had a
waistcoat made of stout leather straps, with a heavy ring behind to
which I attached a strong rope. This tethered to the rail, in the
extreme bow, enabled me to swarm safely down until I reached the flukes
of the great anchor. Seating myself comfortably, I lashed my leather
straps fast, and was ready for work with glass or net or camera. Of
course this was possible only on comparatively calm days, but when the
sea was mirror-like, with only the low, heaving swells bending its
surface, and the flying fish flushed before us in schools, then I had
days of good sport.
This novel method of anchor perching led indirectly to the solution of a
very different puzzle. I had been thinking and talking of the congested
turmoil of the great city far below the horizon to the north. Looking
back on a year in its midst, memory, aroused by present contrasts,
registered sham, insincerity, deceit, illusion, veneer as dominant notes
in civilization. In an argument one evening I had held that deceit or
illusion was not of necessity evil, nor when unconsciously self-imposed,
even reprehensible.
The next day I instanced a rather apt example. Our very knowledge, our
mental mastery leads us to false sensory assertions, which become so
universal that they develop into apparent truisms. Only by a distinct
effort may we summon them to consciousness and correctly orient them.
It is not without a wrench that we set aside the evidence of our senses
and realize the proof which physics offers. We watch the glorious
"sunset" and to disillusion our minds require to repeat again and again
that it is the earth which is heaving upward, the horizon which is
eclipsing the sun and the sky of day. I once persuaded a group of
passengers to speak only of the evening's "earth-rise" and in three or
four days this term had become reasonable, and almost lost its
strangeness.
One finds numerous examples of these sensory deceits at sea; our senses
are at fault in every direction. The wind flutters the fins of the
flying fish and we think they actually fly. The tropic sea, under the
palest of green skies, is saturated ultramarine, save where the
propellers churn it to pea-green, yet in our bath the water is clear and
colorless.
My most interesting oceanic illusion, was a personal one, a result of
memory. I looked about the ship and felt that this at least was wholly
sincere; it was made to fulfil every function and it achieved its
destiny day by day, finally and completely. I had never sailed on a
vessel of this name before, the "Yamaro," and yet at certain moments an
oblique glance brought a flash of memory, of a familiar hatchway, a rail
which fitted snugly under one's elbows, a stretch of open deck which
seemed too much of a known path for these few days' acquaintance. As I
talked with the Trinidad negro lookout on the forward deck, I saw a
brass coolie plate roll out of the galley, and I wondered. There were
only negroes among the crew. Then one day I donned my leather waistcoat
and climbed down to my anchor flukes, and my mystery was solved. In
clear new letters the name of the vessel appeared along the side of the
bow above me, but a second glance showed me something else: a palimpsest
of old corroded sites of four letters, painted out, which once had sent
their message to so many inquiring eyes: Pegu.
Long ago, on trips of unalloyed happiness, I had traveled between
Colombo and Rangoon on this selfsame steamer, which now, caught in some
unusual stress of distant demand of war, had with her sister ships been
taken from her route in the Far East and settled to her new routine.
So even the ship beneath me was not what she had seemed, and yet her
deceit and illusion were harmless, wholly without guile, and I began to
wonder whether my unfriendly thoughts of the great city behind me were
quite fair.
The carven Wodens and Bruennhildes who guarded the fortunes of old Viking
ships, watched the icy Arctic waters forever cleft beneath them and felt
the sting of flying splinters of ice; the figureheads of Gloucester
merchantmen of old, with wind blown draperies and pious hands, counted
the daily and monthly growth of barnacles, and noted the lengthening of
the green fronds on the hull below. One day I lay in the great arms of
an anchor, beneath a prosaic bow; myself the only figurehead, peering
gargoyle-wise over the new-painted steel. Far below, in place of wooden
virgin or muscled Neptune, there appeared only four numbers, 2, 3, 4 and
25. Even these, however, yielded to imagination when I remembered that
the light cargo which made them visible was due to the need of sugar by
soldiers in far distant trenches.
The great unlovely bow rose and reached forward and settled until, as I
lay face downward, our speed seemed increased many fold. And I wondered
if the set wooden expression which always marked the figurehead ladies
and gods had not its origin in the hypnotic joy of forever watching the
molten cobalt crash into alabaster, this to emerald, then to merge again
into the blue which is a hue born of depth and space and not of pigment.
And now I forgot the plunging bow beneath and the schools of toy
biplanes, the strange little grasshopper-like fish which burst from the
ultramarine, unstained, full-finned and banked sharply outward for their
brief span of flight. I looked up and saw pale-green shallows, a thread
of silver surf and the rounded mountains of a tropical island. And I
frowned with impatience--something that more reliable figureheads never
did--for the island, teeming with interest, with exciting birds, and
fascinating people, had been spoiled for me. Force of circumstance had
shuffled me inextricably into a pack (I use the simile advisedly) of
insufferable tourists. Effeminate men, childish women and spoiled
children diluted or wholly eclipsed every possible scene. The obvious
was made blatant, the superficial was imagined subtle, the glories of
silent appreciation were shattered by garrulous nothings. At the thought
of such fellow countrymen I hid my face and strived with all my might to
obliterate the remembrance. Soothed by the rise and thrust of the great
ship's bow and the intermittent roar of the steel-born breaker beneath,
I rested motionless.
When at last I roused, it was with a start at the altered scene. It
seemed as if my thought--Buddha-powerful--had actually wrought the magic
of widespread change. The alabaster breaker was there, but oxidized,
dulled; the cobalt had become gray-black, and by the same alchemy the
emerald shallows were reset with a mosaic of age-dimmed jade. Most of
all was the island changed. From strand to cloud-capped peak, the tone
was purple. In high lights it hued to dull silver-gray, in the shadows
it deadened to utter black. Rugged and sheer Mont Pelee drew upwards,
its head in cloud, its feet in the sea--the shadow-gray sea. My eye
strove to penetrate the cloud and picked from its heart a thread of
black among the gray lava, which, dropping downward, enlarged to a
ribbon and then to a gully. In ugly angles and sharp, unreasonable bends
it zigzagged down the shoulder of the great cinderous mountain. Before I
realized it my gully became a gorge and ended at the edge of the dark
waters, as black and as mysterious as it had begun.
Idly, I lay and watched the silver shuttle of coral-shattered foam
weaving the warp and woof of the rising tide along the whole length of
shore. This seemed the only bit of land in the whole world. Was it the
first--or the last--to appear above the waters? It might have been
either, until, suddenly I saw a movement among what I had taken for
huge, crater-spewed boulders, but which I now knew for the weathered
remains of a city. From between two walls of this city of the dead came
slowly into view the last human being in the world--or so the
surroundings suggested. Yet a second glance belied this, for her mission
was fraught with hope. Even at this distance I could discern her stately
carriage, swinging and free, her black countenance and her heavy burden.
At the very edge of the water she stopped, lifted down the basket piled
with black volcanic debris and emptied it. She stood up, looked
steadily out at the passing steamer and vanished among the shadows of
the ruins. It was startlingly like the first grain of sand which an ant
brings out after a passing heel has crushed its nest. But however vivid
the simile, the dominant thought was hope. At least one ant had faith in
a new ant-nest of the future, and the somber picture of the negress, her
basket of black lava poured into the equally black waters, was suddenly
framed in high relief by the thought of a new St. Pierre. The great
mountain still rumbled and smoked. One at least believed in a home in
its very shadows.
But the end was not yet. The island had been for me unhappily visited;
its passing had been a sudden, wonderfully dynamic vision. And now I
shut my eyes again to strive to interpret and to fix indelibly in mind
this vision and all the network of thoughts it wove. Again the roar from
below and the gentle rise and forward surge calmed and rested me. And
the thought of the unhappy morning was become dim and carried no
resentment.
Ten minutes later I looked up again and found all changed--no ruthless,
startling shift of values, but a subtle, all-wonderful transformation.
Pelee should still have loomed high, the craters and gullys were but a
short distance away and indeed all were faintly discernible. A faint
veil of azure had intervened. There was no wind, it had neither drifted
in from the sea nor frayed from the edges of the dense cloud which
enveloped the peak. So evanescent, so delicate was this still-born haze
that the crater cloud was only softened, not eclipsed. From the strong
sweep and stroke and virile outline of a Brangwyn or the gnomesque
possibilities of a Rackham, the great mountain softened to the ethereal
air castle of a Parrish. Between winks, as imperceptibly as the coming
of twilight to a cloudless sky, the vision changed to a veritable Isle
of Death. This seemed too evanescent, too ethereally fragile to endure,
and yet for moment after moment it held and held--and then the
mountain--which was yet but the shadow of a mountain--this itself
dissolved, and over the gently heaving sea, were neither lava flows nor
cinders, gorges nor ruins, but only a faint pearly-white mist,
translucent, permeable, floating softly between sea and sky. Martinique
had vanished--had dissolved--there was no longer any land above the
waters.
Dusk settled quickly and the vision remained unbroken. All my sensory
relations with the world seemed inverted. My actual contact with the
island had passed into happy forgetfulness; the coastal vision was more
vivid and real, and now, the essence of memory, the vital, tangible
retrospect was forever bound up in the final vanishing, the very
evaporation of this island--lapped by the sea--the sea which tomorrow's
sun would fill with the glorious hue of sapphires--the sapphires of
Kashmir.
III
ISLANDS
With thrice seven-league boots one could stride from the coast of the
United States and with a dozen steps reach British Guiana dry-shod. From
an aviator's seat, the chain of West Indies, Windward and Leeward
Islands curves gracefully southwards, like stepping-stones across a
Japanese stream. If, corresponding to this annihilation of space, we
could abbreviate minutes, hours and days as in a moving-picture film, we
might have the edifying spectacle of our steamer's trip reduced to a
succession of loops, ricochetting from island after island, as a stone
skips along the surface of the water, sliding along those dotted lines
which are so characteristic a feature of coasts in our school
geographies, and coming to rest at last with a splash in the muddy
current off the Georgetown stelling.
Our steamer is preferable to the seven-league trip, for we thereby omit
the big, cumbersome West Indies. It is a curious fact that any land
projecting above the surface of the water is interesting and exciting in
inverse ratio to its size. The endless New Jersey shore moves one not at
all, while the single volcanic cone of Nevis brings thrills and
emotions; Cuba is wearisome as one steams slowly past headland after
headland, while Sombrero--a veritable oceanic speck of dust--stimulates
the imagination to the highest pitch. It seems as if our Ego enlarges as
our immediate terrestrial cosmos diminishes. In studying the birds of
the endless jungles of the South American continent my interest never
flags, yet it never quite attains the _n_th power of enthusiasm which
accompanies the thought of the possibility of locating every nest on St.
Thomas. This love of small islands must savor of the joy of possible
completeness in achievement, plus a king's sensations, plus some of
those of Adam!
Any guide book will give the area, population, amusements, best hotels
(or the least objectionable ones), summary of history and the more
important exports. But no one has ever attempted to tell of the soul of
these islands--or even of the individuality of each, which is very
real and very distinct. Some day this will be done, and the telling will
be very wonderful, and will use up most of the superlatives in our
language. For my part I may only search my memory for some little
unimportant scene which lives again when the name of the island is
spoken--and string these at random on pages, like the chains of little
scarlet and black sea-beans which glisten in the fingers of the
negresses, held up in hope of sale from their leaky boats, rocking on
the liquid emerald around the steamer.
ST. THOMAS, OR HOW I WAS TAUGHT TO CATCH LIZARDS BY A DANISH
FLAPPER.--Nearly a week had passed since we began to exchange a sleety
winter for the velvety tropics, to traverse the latitude spectrum of
ocean from drab-gray to living turquoise. As on every trip, it was early
morning when the long undulating profile of St. Thomas reared itself
lazily from the sea, and almost at once, flocks of great-winged
booby-gannets began to wheel and veer around the ship, banking in a way
to make an aviator's blood leap.