A Sojourn in Cuba
One day in January I climbed to the housetop to get a view of another
of the fine sunsets of this land of flowers. The landscape was a strip
of clear Gulf water, a strip of sylvan coast, a tranquil company of
shell and coral keys, and a gloriously colored sky without a
threatening cloud. All the winds were hushed and the calm of the
heavens was as profound as that of the palmy islands and their
encircling waters. As I gazed from one to another of the palm-crowned
keys enclosed by the sunset-colored dome, my eyes chanced to rest upon
the fluttering sails of a Yankee schooner that was threading the
tortuous channel in the coral reef leading to the harbor of Cedar Keys.
“There,” thought I, “perhaps I may sail in that pretty white moth.” she
proved to be the schooner Island Belle.
One day soon after her arrival I went over the key to the harbor, for I
was now strong enough to walk. Some of her crew were ashore after
water. I waited until their casks were filled, and went with them to
the vessel in their boat. Ascertained that she was ready to sail with
her cargo of lumber for Cuba. I engaged passage on her for twenty-five
dollars, and asked her sharp-visaged captain when he would sail. “Just
as soon,” said he, “as we get a north wind. We have had northers enough
when we did not want them, and now we have this dying breath from the
south.”
Hurrying back to the house, I gathered my plants, took leave of my kind
friends, and went aboard, and soon, as if to calm the captain’s
complaints, Boreas came foaming loud and strong. The little craft was
quickly trimmed and snugged, her inviting sails spread open, and away
she dashed to her ocean home like an exulting war-horse to the battle.
Islet after islet speedily grew dim and sank beneath the horizon.
Deeper became the blue of the water, and in a few hours all of Florida
vanished.
This excursion on the sea, the first one after twenty years in the
woods, was of course exceedingly interesting, and I was full of hope,
glad to be once more on my journey to the South. Boreas increased in
power and the Island Belle appeared to glory in her speed and managed
her full-spread wings as gracefully as a sea-bird. In less than a day
our norther increased in strength to the storm point. Deeper and wider
became the valleys, and yet higher the hills of the round plain of
water. The flying jib and gaff topsails were lowered and mainsails
close-reefed, and our deck was white with broken wave-tops.
“You had better go below,” said the captain. “The Gulf Stream, opposed
by this wind, is raising a heavy sea and you will be sick. No landsman
can stand this long.” I replied that I hoped the storm would be as
violent as his ship could bear, that I enjoyed the scenery of such a
sea so much that it was impossible to be sick, that I had long waited
in the woods for just such a storm, and that, now that the precious
thing had come, I would remain on deck and enjoy it. “Well,” said he,
“if you can stand this, you are the first landsman I ever saw that
could.”
I remained on deck, holding on by a rope to keep from being washed
overboard, and watched the behavior of the Belle as she dared nobly on;
but my attention was mostly directed among the glorious fields of
foam-topped waves. The wind had a mysterious voice and carried nothing
now of the songs of birds or of the rustling of palms and fragrant
vines. Its burden was gathered from a stormy expanse of crested waves
and briny tangles. I could see no striving in those magnificent
wave-motions, no raging; all the storm was apparently inspired with
nature’s beauty and harmony. Every wave was obedient and harmonious as
the smoothest ripple of a forest lake, and after dark all the water was
phosphorescent like silver fire, a glorious sight.
Our luminous storm was all too short for me. Cuba’s rock-waves loomed
above the white waters early in the morning. The sailors, accustomed to
detect the faintest land line, pointed out well-known guiding
harbor-marks back of the Morro Castle long before I could see them
through the flying spray. We sailed landward for several hours, the
misty shore becoming gradually more earthlike. A flock of
white-plumaged ships was departing from the Havana harbor, or, like us,
seeking to enter it. No sooner had our little schooner flapped her
sails in the lee of the Castle than she was boarded by a swarm of
daintily dressed officials who were good-naturedly and good-gesturedly
making all sorts of inquiries, while our busy captain, paying little
attention to them, was giving orders to his crew.
The neck of the harbor is narrow and it is seldom possible to sail in
to appointed anchorage without the aid of a steam tug. Our captain
wished to save his money, but after much profitless tacking was
compelled to take the proffered aid of steam, when we soon reached our
quiet mid-harbor quarters and dropped anchor among ships of every size
from every sea.
I was still four or five hundred yards from land and could determine no
plant in sight excepting the long arched leaf banners of the banana and
the palm, which made a brave show on the Morro Hill. When we were
approaching the land, I observed that in some places it was distinctly
yellow and I wondered while we were yet some miles distant whether the
color belonged to the ground or to sheets of flowers. From our harbor
home I could now see that the color was plant-gold. On one side of the
harbor was a city of these yellow plants; on the other, a city of
yellow stucco houses, narrowly and confusedly congregated.
“Do you want to go ashore?” said the captain to me. “Yes,” I replied,
“but I wish to go to the plant side of the harbor.” “Oh, well,” he
said, “come with me now. There are some fine squares and gardens in the
city, full of all sorts of trees and flowers. Enjoy these to-day, and
some other day we will all go over the Morro Hill with you and gather
shells. All kinds of shells are over there; but these yellow slopes
that you see are covered only with weeds.”
We jumped into the boat and a couple of sailors pulled us to the
thronged, noisy wharf. It was Sunday afternoon,[9] the noisiest day of
a Havana week. Cathedral bells and prayers in the forenoon, theaters
and bull-fight bells and bellowings in the afternoon! Lowly whispered
prayers to the saints and the Virgin, followed by shouts of praise or
reproach to bulls and matadors! I made free with fine oranges and
bananas and many other fruits. Pineapple I had never seen before.
Wandered about the narrow streets, stunned with the babel of strange
sounds and sights; went gazing, also, among the gorgeously flowered
garden squares, and then waited among some boxed merchandise until our
captain, detained by business, arrived. Was glad to escape to our
little schooner Belle again, weary and heavy laden with excitement and
tempting fruits.
[9] Doubtless January 12, 1868.
As night came on, a thousand lights starred the great town. I was now
in one of my happy dreamlands, the fairest of West India islands. But
how, I wondered, shall I be able to escape from this great city
confusion? How shall I reach nature in this delectable land? Consulting
my map, I longed to climb the central mountain range of the island and
trace it through all its forests and valleys and over its summit peaks,
a distance of seven or eight hundred miles. But alas! though out of
Florida swamps, fever was yet weighing me down, and a mile of city
walking was quite exhausting. The weather too was oppressively warm and
sultry.
_January 16_. During the few days since our arrival the sun usually has
risen unclouded, pouring down pure gold, rich and dense, for one or two
hours. Then islandlike masses of white-edged cumuli suddenly appeared,
grew to storm size, and in a few minutes discharged rain in tepid
plashing bucketfuls, accompanied with high wind. This was followed by a
short space of calm, half-cloudy sky, delightfully fragrant with
flowers, and again the air would become hot, thick, and sultry.
This weather, as may readily be perceived, was severe to one so weak
and feverish, and after a dozen trials of strength over the Morro Hill
and along the coast northward for shells and flowers, I was sadly
compelled to see that no enthusiasm could enable me to walk to the
interior. So I was obliged to limit my researches to within ten or
twelve miles of Havana. Captain Parsons offered his ship as my
headquarters and my weakness prevented me from spending a single night
ashore.
The daily programme for nearly all the month that I spent here was
about as follows: After breakfast a sailor rowed me ashore on the north
side of the harbor. A few minutes’ walk took me past the Morro Castle
and out of sight of the town on a broad cactus common, about as
solitary and untrodden as the tangles of Florida. Here I zigzagged and
gathered prizes among unnumbered plants and shells along the shore,
stopping to press the plant specimens and to rest in the shade of
vine-heaps and bushes until sundown. The happy hours stole away until I
had to return to the schooner. Either I was seen by the sailors who
usually came for me, or I hired a boat to take me back. Arrived, I
reached up my press and a big handful of flowers, and with a little
help climbed up the side of my floating home.
Refreshed with supper and rest, I recounted my adventures in the vine
tangles, cactus thickets, sunflower swamps and along the shore among
the breakers. My flower specimens, also, and pocketfuls of shells and
corals had to be reviewed. Next followed a cool, dreamy hour on deck
amid the lights of the town and the various vessels coming and
departing.
Many strange sounds were heard: the vociferous, unsmotherable bells,
the heavy thundering of cannon from the Castle, and the shouts of the
sentinels in measured time. Combined they made the most incessant
sharp-angled mass of noise that I ever was doomed to hear. Nine or ten
o’clock found me in a small bunk with the harbor wavelets tinkling
outside close to my ear. The hours of sleep were filled with dreams of
heavy heat, of fruitless efforts for the disentanglement of vines, or
of running from curling breakers back to the Morro, etc. Thus my days
and nights went on.
Occasionally I was persuaded by the captain to go ashore in the evening
on his side of the harbor, accompanied perhaps by two or three other
captains. After landing and telling the sailors when to call for us, we
hired a carriage and drove to the upper end of the city, to a fine
public square adorned with shady walks and magnificent plants. A brass
band in imposing uniform played the characteristic lance-noted martial
airs of the Spanish. Evening is the fashionable hour for aristocratic
drives about the streets and squares, the only time that is
delightfully cool. I never saw elsewhere people so neatly and
becomingly dressed. The proud best-family Cubans may fairly be called
beautiful, are under- rather than over-sized, with features exquisitely
moulded, and set off with silks and broadcloth in excellent taste.
Strange that their amusements should be so coarse. Bull-fighting,
brain-splitting bell-ringing, and the most piercing artificial music
appeal to their taste.
The rank and wealth of Havana nobility, when out driving, seems to be
indicated by the distance of their horses from the body of the
carriage. The higher the rank, the longer the shafts of the carriage,
and the clumsier and more ponderous are the wheels, which are not
unlike those of a cannon-cart. A few of these carriages have shafts
twenty-five feet in length, and the brilliant-liveried negro driver on
the lead horse, twenty or thirty feet in advance of the horse in the
shafts, is beyond calling distance of his master.
Havana abounds in public squares, which in all my random strolls
throughout the big town I found to be well watered, well cared for,
well planted, and full of exceedingly showy and interesting plants,
rare even amid the exhaustless luxuriance of Cuba. These squares also
contained fine marble statuary and were furnished with seats in the
shadiest places. Many of the walks were paved instead of graveled.
The streets of Havana are crooked, labyrinthic, and exceedingly narrow.
The sidewalks are only about a foot wide. A traveler experiences
delightful relief when, heated and wearied by rains through the breadth
of the dingy yellow town, dodging a way through crowds of men and mules
and lumbering carts and carriages, he at length finds shelter in the
spacious, dustless, cool, flowery squares; still more when, emerging
from all the din and darkness of these lanelike streets, he suddenly
finds himself out in the middle of the harbor, inhaling full-drawn
breaths of the sea breezes.
The interior of the better houses which came under my observation
struck me with the profusion of dumpy, ill-proportioned pillars at the
entrances and in the halls, and with the spacious open-fielded
appearance of their enclosed square house-gardens or courts. Cubans in
general appear to me superfinely polished, polite, and agreeable in
society, but in their treatment of animals they are cruel. I saw more
downright brutal cruelty to mules and horses during the few weeks I
stayed there than in my whole life elsewhere. Live chickens and hogs
are tied in bunches by the legs and carried to market thus, slung on a
mule. In their general treatment of all sorts of animals they seem to
have no thought for them beyond cold-blooded, selfish interest.
In tropical regions it is easy to build towns, but it is difficult to
subdue their armed and united plant inhabitants, and to clear fields
and make them blossom with breadstuff. The plant people of temperate
regions, feeble, unarmed, unallied, disappear under the trampling feet
of flocks, herds, and man, leaving their homes to enslavable plants
which follow the will of man and furnish him with food. But the armed
and united plants of the tropics hold their rightful kingdom
plantfully, nor, since the first appearance of Lord Man, have they ever
suffered defeat.
A large number of Cuba’s wild plants circle closely about Havana. In
five minutes’ walk from the wharf I could reach the undisturbed
settlements of Nature. The field of the greater portion of my rambling
researches was a strip of rocky common, silent and unfrequented by
anybody save an occasional beggar at Nature’s door asking a few roots
and seeds. This natural strip extended ten miles along the coast
northward, with but few large-sized trees and bushes, but rich in
magnificent vines, cacti-composites, leguminous plants, grasses, etc.
The wild flowers of this seaside field are a happy band, closely joined
in splendid array. The trees shine with blossoms and with light
reflected from the leaves. The individuality of the vines is lost in
trackless, interlacing, twisting, overheaping union.
Our American “South” is rich in flowery vines. In some districts almost
every tree is crowned with them, aiding each other in grace and beauty.
Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee have the grapevine in predominant
numbers and development. Farther south dwell the greenbriers and
countless leguminous vines. A vine common among the Florida islets,
perhaps belonging to the dogbane family, over-runs live-oaks and
palmettos, with frequently more than a hundred stems twisted into one
cable. Yet in no section of the South are there such complicated and
such gorgeously flowered vine-tangles as flourish in armed safety in
the hot and humid wild gardens of Cuba.
The longest and the shortest vine that I found in Cuba were both
leguminous. I have said that the harbor side of the Morro Hill is
clothed with tall yellow-flowered composites through which it is
difficult to pass. But there are smooth, velvety, lawnlike patches in
these _Compositæ_ forests. Coming suddenly upon one of these open
places, I stopped to admire its greenness and smoothness, when I
observed a sprinkling of large papilionaceous blossoms among the short
green grass. The long composites that bordered this little lawn were
entwined and almost smothered with vines which bore similar corollas in
tropic abundance.
I at once decided that these sprinkled flowers had been blown off the
encompassing tangles and had been kept fresh by dew and by spray from
the sea. But, on stooping to pick one of them up, I was surprised to
find that it was attached to Mother Earth by a short, prostrate,
slender hair of a vine stem, bearing, besides the one large blossom, a
pair or two of linear leaves. The flower weighed more than stem, root,
and leaves combined. Thus, in a land of creeping and twining giants, we
find also this charming, diminutive simplicity—the vine reduced to its
lowest terms.
The longest vine, prostrate and untwined like its little neighbor,
covers patches of several hundred square yards with its countless
branches and close growth of upright, trifoliate, smooth green leaves.
The flowers are as plain and unshowy in size and color as those of the
sweet peas of gardens. The seeds are large and satiny. The whole plant
is noble in its motions and features, covering the ground with a depth
of unconfused leafage which I have never seen equaled by any other
plant. The extent of leaf-surface is greater, I think, than that of a
large Kentucky oak. It grows, as far as my observation has reached,
only upon shores, in a soil composed of broken shells and corals, and
extends exactly to the water-line of the highest-reaching waves. The
same plant is abundant in Florida.
The cacti form an important part of the plant population of my ramble
ground. They are various as the vines, consisting now of a diminutive
joint or two hid in the weeds, now rising into bushy trees,
wide-topped, with trunks a foot in diameter, and with glossy,
dark-green joints that reflect light like the silex-varnished palms.
They are planted for fences, together with the Spanish bayonet and
agave.
In one of my first walks I was laboriously scrambling among some low
rocks gathering ferns and vines, when I was startled by finding my face
close to a great snake, whose body was disposed carelessly like a
castaway rope among the weeds and stones. After escaping and coming to
my senses, I discovered that the snake was a member of the vegetable
kingdom, capable of no dangerous amount of locomotion, but possessed of
many a fang, and prostrate as though under the curse of Eden, “Upon thy
belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat.”
One day, after luxuriating in the riches of my Morro pasture, and
pressing many new specimens, I went down to the bank of brilliant
wave-washed shells to rest awhile in their beauty, and to watch the
breakers that a powerful norther was heaving in splendid rank along the
coral boundary. I gathered pocketfuls of shells, mostly small but fine
in color and form, and bits of rosy coral. Then I amused myself by
noting the varying colors of the waves and the different forms of their
curved and blossoming crests. While thus alone and free it was
interesting to learn the richly varied songs, or what we mortals call
the roar, of expiring breakers. I compared their variation with the
different distances to which the broken wave-water reached landward in
its farthest-flung foam-wreaths, and endeavored to form some idea of
the one great song sounding forever all around the white-blooming
shores of the world.
Rising from my shell seat, I watched a wave leaping from the deep and
coming far up the beveled strand to bloom and die in a mass of white.
Then I followed the spent waters in their return to the blue deep,
wading in their spangled, decaying fragments until chased back up the
bank by the coming of another wave. While thus playing half studiously,
I discovered in the rough, beaten deathbed of the wave a little plant
with closed flowers. It was crouching in a hollow of the brown
wave-washed rock, and one by one the chanting, dying waves rolled over
it. The tips of its delicate pink petals peered above the clasping
green calyx. “Surely,” said I, as I stooped over it for a moment,
before the oncoming of another wave, “surely you cannot be living here!
You must have been blown from some warm bank, and rolled into this
little hollow crack like a dead shell.” But, running back after every
retiring wave, I found that its roots were wedged into a shallow
wrinkle of the coral rock, and that this wave-beaten chink was indeed
its dwelling-place.
I had oftentimes admired the adaptation displayed in the structure of
the stately dulse and other seaweeds, but never thought to find a
highbred flowering plant dwelling amid waves in the stormy, roaring
domain of the sea. This little plant has smooth globular leaves, fleshy
and translucent like beads, but green like those of other land plants.
The flower is about five eighths of an inch in diameter, rose-purple,
opening in calm weather, when deserted by the waves. In general
appearance it is like a small portulaca. The strand, as far as I walked
it, was luxuriantly fringed with woody _Compositæ_, two or three feet
in height, their tops purple and golden with a profusion of flowers.
Among these I discovered a small bush whose yellow flowers were ideal;
all the parts were present regularly alternate and in fives, and all
separate, a plain harmony.
When a page is written over but once it may be easily read; but if it
be written over and over with characters of every size and style, it
soon becomes unreadable, although not a single confused meaningless
mark or thought may occur among all the written characters to mar its
perfection. Our limited powers are similarly perplexed and overtaxed in
reading the inexhaustible pages of nature, for they are written over
and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and
color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a
sentence. There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative
fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together
form the one grand palimpsest of the world.
One of the most common plants of my pasture was the agave. It is
sometimes used for fencing. One day, in looking back from the top of
the Morro Hill, as I was returning to the Island Belle, I chanced to
observe two poplar-like trees about twenty-five feet in height. They
were growing in a dense patch of cactus and vine-knotted sunflowers. I
was anxious to see anything so homelike as a poplar, and so made haste
towards the two strange trees, making a way through the cactus and
sunflower jungle that protected them. I was surprised to find that what
I took to be poplars were agaves in flower, the first I had seen. They
were almost out of flower, and fast becoming wilted at the approach of
death. Bulbs were scattered about, and a good many still remained on
the branches, which gave it a fruited appearance.
The stem of the agave seems enormous in size when one considers that it
is the growth of a few weeks. This plant is said to make a mighty
effort to flower and mature its seeds and then to die of exhaustion.
Now there is not, so far as I have seen, a mighty effort or the need of
one, in wild Nature. She accomplishes her ends without unquiet effort,
and perhaps there is nothing more mighty in the development of the
flower-stem of the agave than in the development of a grass panicle.
Havana has a fine botanical garden. I spent pleasant hours in its
magnificent flowery arbors and around its shady fountains. There is a
palm avenue which is considered wonderfully stately and beautiful,
fifty palms in two straight lines, each rigidly perpendicular. The
smooth round shafts, slightly thicker in the middle, appear to be
productions of the lathe, rather than vegetable stems. The fifty arched
crowns, inimitably balanced, blaze in the sunshine like heaps of stars
that have fallen from the skies. The stems were about sixty or seventy
feet in height, the crowns about fifteen feet in diameter.
Along a stream-bank were tall, waving bamboos, leafy as willows, and
infinitely graceful in wind gestures. There was one species of palm,
with immense bipinnate leaves and leaflets fringed, jagged, and
one-sided, like those of _Adiantum_. Hundreds of the most
gorgeous-flowered plants, some of them large trees, belonging to the
_Leguminosæ_. Compared with what I have before seen in artificial
flower-gardens, this is past comparison the grandest. It is a perfect
metropolis of the brightest and most exuberant of garden plants,
watered by handsome fountains, while graveled and finely bordered walks
slant and curve in all directions, and in all kinds of fanciful
playground styles, more like the fairy gardens of the Arabian Nights
than any ordinary man-made pleasure-ground.
In Havana I saw the strongest and the ugliest negroes that I have met
in my whole walk. The stevedores of the Havana wharf are muscled in
true giant style, enabling them to tumble and toss ponderous casks and
boxes of sugar weighing hundreds of pounds as if they were empty. I
heard our own brawny sailors, after watching them at work a few
minutes, express unbounded admiration of their strength, and wish that
their hard outbulging muscles were for sale. The countenances of some
of the negro orange-selling dames express a devout good-natured
ugliness that I never could have conceived any arrangement of flesh and
blood to be capable of. Besides oranges they sold pineapples, bananas,
and lottery tickets.