30th December 1869.
My Dear-----, We are actually settled in a West Indian country-
house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and
strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take
in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion,
food of every conceivable variety. The whole day long new objects
and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams
as well as in waking thoughts. Amid such a confusion, to describe
this place as a whole is as yet impossible. It must suffice if you
find in this letter a sketch or two--not worthy to be called a
study--of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my
bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least,
that we were verily in the Tropics.
You look out--would that you did look in fact!--over the low sill.
The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of
broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and
one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin. But there the
kindred ends. A few green weeds, looking just like English ones,
peep up through the gravel. Weeds, all over the world, are mostly
like each other; poor, thin, pale in leaf, small and meagre in stem
and flower: meaner forms which fill up for good, and sometimes,
too, for harm, the gaps left by Nature's aristocracy of grander and,
in these Tropics, more tyrannous and destroying forms. So like home
weeds they look: but pick one, and you find it unlike anything at
home. That one happens to be, as you may see by its little green
mouse-tails, a pepper-weed, {77} first cousin to the great black
pepper-bush in the gardens near by, with the berries of which you
may burn your mouth gratis.
So it is, you would find, with every weed in the little cleared
dell, some fifteen feet deep, beyond the gravel. You could not--I
certainly cannot--guess at the name, seldom at the family, of a
single plant. But I am going on too fast. What are those sticks of
wood which keep the gravel bank up? Veritable bamboos; and a
bamboo-pipe, too, is carrying the trickling cool water into the bath
close by. Surely we are in the Tropics. You hear a sudden rattle,
as of boards and brown paper, overhead, and find that it is the
clashing of the huge leaves of a young fan palm, {78a} growing not
ten feet from the window. It has no stem as yet; and the lower
leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so
that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to
each other by natural matting: but overhead they range out nobly in
leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this
is but a baby, a three years' old thing. Surely, again, we are in
the Tropics. Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm
leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut.
Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green
fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber,
furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is,
plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle. Surely,
again, we are in the Tropics. Beyond it, again, blaze great orange
and yellow flowers, with long stamens, and pistil curving upwards
out of them. They belong to a twining, scrambling bush, with
finely-pinnated mimosa leaves. That is the 'Flower-fence,' {78b} so
often heard of in past years; and round it hurries to and fro a
great orange butterfly, larger seemingly than any English kind.
Next to it is a row of Hibiscus shrubs, with broad crimson flowers;
then a row of young Screw-pines, {78c} from the East Indian Islands,
like spiral pine-apple plants twenty feet high standing on stilts.
Yes: surely we are in the Tropics. Over the low roof (for the
cottage is all of one storey) of purple and brown and white
shingles, baking in the sun, rises a tall tree, which looks (as so
many do here) like a walnut, but is not one. It is the 'Poui' of
the Indians, {78d} and will be covered shortly with brilliant
saffron flowers.
I turn my chair and look into the weedy dell. The ground on the
opposite slope (slopes are, you must remember, here as steep as
house-roofs, the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a
grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts. That is the famous
Guinea-grass {78e} which, introduced from Africa, has spread over
the whole West Indies. Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle
young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and 'Felon' printed on the
back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of
a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between us
and them are growing along the edge of the gutter, veritable pine-
apples in the open air, and a low green tree just like an apple,
which is a Guava; and a tall stick, thirty feet high, with a flat
top of gigantic curly horse-chestnut leaves, which is a Trumpet-
tree. {79a} There are hundreds of them in the mountains round: but
most of them dead, from the intense drought and fires of last year.
Beyond it, again, is a round-headed tree, looking like a huge
Portugal laurel, covered with racemes of purple buds. That is an
'Angelim'; {79b} when full-grown, one of the finest timbers in the
world. And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the
rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are
palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a
young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern. The old
ones have straight gray stems, often prickly enough, and thickened
in the middle; gray last year's leaves hanging down; and feathering
round the top, a circular plume of pale green leaves, like those of
a coconut. But these are not cocos. The last year's leaves of the
coco are rich yellow, and its stem is curved. These are groo-groos;
{79c} they stand as fresh proofs that we are indeed in the Tropics,
and as 'a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.'
For it is a joy for ever, a sight never to be forgotten, to have
once seen palms, breaking through and, as it were, defying the soft
rounded forms of the broad-leaved vegetation by the stern grace of
their simple lines; the immovable pillar-stem looking the more
immovable beneath the toss and lash and flicker of the long leaves,
as they awake out of their sunlit sleep, and rage impatiently for a
while before the mountain gusts, and fall asleep again. Like a
Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room, sharp cut, cold, virginal;
shaming, by the grandeur of mere form, the voluptuousness of mere
colour, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm in the
forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved. Look at the
drawings of the Oreodoxa-avenue at Rio, in M. Agassiz's charming
book. Would that you could see actually such avenues, even from the
sea, as we have seen them in St. Vincent and Guadaloupe: but look
at the mere pictures of them in that book, and you will sympathise,
surely, with our new palm-worship.
And lastly, what is that giant tree which almost fills the centre of
the glen, towering with upright but branching limbs, and huge crown,
thinly leaved, double the height of all the trees around? An ash?
Something like an ash in growth; but when you look at it through the
glasses (indispensable in the tropic forest), you see that the
foliage is more like that of the yellow horse-chestnut. And no
British ash, not even the Altyre giants, ever reached to half that
bulk. It is a Silk-cotton tree; a Ceiba {79d}--say, rather, the
Ceiba of the glen; for these glens have a habit of holding each one
great Ceiba, which has taken its stand at the upper end, just where
the mountain-spurs run together in an amphitheatre; and being
favoured (it may be supposed) by the special richness of the down-
washed soil at that spot, grows to one of those vast air-gardens of
creepers and parasites of which we have so often read and dreamed.
Such a one is this: but we will not go up to it now. This sketch
shall be completed by the background of green and gray, fading aloft
into tender cobalt: the background of mountain, ribbed and gullied
into sharpest slopes by the tropic rains, yet showing, even where
steepest, never a face of rock, or a crag peeping through the trees.
Up to the sky-line, a thousand feet aloft, all is green; and that,
instead of being, as in Europe, stone or moor, is jagged and
feathered with gigantic trees. How rich! you would say. Yet these
West Indians only mourn over its desolation and disfigurement; and
point to the sheets of gray stems, which hang like mist along the
upper slopes. They look to us, on this 30th of December, only as
April signs that the woodlands have not quite burst into full leaf.
But to the inhabitants they are tokens of those fearful fires which
raged over the island during the long drought of this summer; when
the forests were burning for a whole month, and this house scarcely
saved; when whole cane-fields, mills, dwelling-houses, went up as
tinder and flame in a moment, and the smoky haze from the burning
island spread far out to sea. And yet where the fire passed six
months ago, all is now a fresh impenetrable undergrowth of green;
creepers covering the land, climbing up and shrouding the charred
stumps; young palms, like Prince of Wales's feathers, breaking up,
six or eight feet high, among a wilderness of sensitive plants,
scarlet-flowered dwarf Balisiers, {81a} climbing fern, {81b}
convolvuluses of every hue, and an endless variety of outlandish
leaves, over which flutter troops of butterflies. How the seeds of
the plants and the eggs of the insects have been preserved, who can
tell? But there their children are, in myriads; and ere a
generation has passed, every dead gray stem will have disappeared
before the ants and beetles and great wood-boring bees who rumble
round in blue-black armour; the young plants will have grown into
great trees beneath the immeasurable vital force which pours all the
year round from the blazing sun above, and all be as it was once
more. In verity we are in the Tropics, where the so-called 'powers
of nature' are in perpetual health and strength, and as much
stronger and swifter, for good and evil, than in our chilly clime,
as is the young man in the heat of youth compared with the old man
shivering to his grave. Think over that last simile. If you think
of it in the light which physiology gives, you will find that it is
not merely a simile, but a true analogy; another manifestation of a
great physical law.
Thus much for the view at the back--a chance scene, without the
least pretensions to what average people would call beauty of
landscape. But oh that we could show you the view in front! The
lawn with its flowering shrubs, tiny specimens of which we admire in
hothouses at home; the grass as green (for it is now the end of the
rainy season) as that of England in May, winding away into the cool
shade of strange evergreens; the yellow coconut palms on the nearest
spur of hill throwing back the tender-blue of the higher mountains;
the huge central group of trees--Saman, {81c} Sandbox, {81d} and
Fig, with the bright ostrich plumes of a climbing palm towering
through the mimosa-like foliage of the Saman; and Erythrinas {81e}
(Bois immortelles, as they call them here), their all but leafless
boughs now blazing against the blue sky with vermilion flowers,
trees of red coral sixty feet in height. Ah that we could show you
the avenue on the right, composed of palms from every quarter of the
Tropics--palms with smooth stems, or with prickly ones, with fan
leaves, feather leaves, leaves (as in the wine-palm {82a}) like
Venus's hair fern; some, again, like the Cocorite, {82b} almost
stemless, rising in a huge ostrich plume which tosses in the land
breeze, till the long stiff leaflets seem to whirl like the spokes
of a green glass wheel. Ah that we could wander with you through
the Botanic Garden beyond, amid fruits and flowers brought together
from all the lands of the perpetual summer; or even give you,
through the great arches of the bamboo clumps, as they creak and
rattle sadly in the wind, and the Bauhinias, like tall and ancient
whitethorns, which shade the road, one glance of the flat green
Savannah, with its herds of kine, beyond which lies, buried in
flowering trees, and backed by mountain woods, the city of Port of
Spain. One glance, too, under the boughs of the great Cotton-tree
at the gate, at the still sleeping sea, with one tall coolie ship at
anchor, seen above green cane-fields and coolie gardens, gay with
yellow Croton and purple Dracaena, and crimson Poinsettia, and the
grand leaves of the grandest of all plants, the Banana, food of
paradise. Or, again, far away to the extreme right, between the
flat tops of the great Saman-avenue at the barracks and the wooded
mountain-spurs which rush down into the sea, the islands of the
Bocas floating in the shining water, and beyond them, a cloud among
the clouds, the peak of a mighty mountain, with one white tuft of
mist upon its top. Ah that we could show you but that, and tell you
that you were looking at the 'Spanish Main'; at South America
itself, at the last point of the Venezuelan Cordillera, and the
hills where jaguars lie. If you could but see what we see daily; if
you could see with us the strange combination of rich and luscious
beauty, with vastness and repose, you would understand, and excuse,
the tendency to somewhat grandiose language which tempts perpetually
those who try to describe the Tropics, and know well that they can
only fail.
In presence of such forms and such colouring as this, one becomes
painfully sensible of the poverty of words, and the futility,
therefore, of all word-painting; of the inability, too, of the
senses to discern and define objects of such vast variety; of our
aesthetic barbarism, in fact, which has no choice of epithets save
between such as 'great,' and 'vast,' and 'gigantic'; between such as
'beautiful,' and 'lovely,' and 'exquisite,' and so forth; which are,
after all, intellectually only one stage higher than the half-brute
Wah! wah! with which the savage grunts his astonishment--call it not
admiration; epithets which are not, perhaps, intellectually as high
as the 'God is great' of the Mussulman, who is wise enough not to
attempt any analysis either of Nature or of his feelings about her;
and wise enough also (not having the fear of Spinoza before his
eyes) to 'in omni ignoto confugere ad Deum'--in presence of the
unknown to take refuge in God.
To describe to you, therefore, the Botanic Garden (in which the
cottage stands) would take a week's work of words, which would
convey no images to your mind. Let it be enough to say, that our
favourite haunt in all the gardens is a little dry valley, beneath
the loftiest group of trees. At its entrance rises a great
Tamarind, and a still greater Saman; both have leaves like a Mimosa-
-as the engraving shows. Up its trunk a Cereus has reared itself,
for some thirty feet at least; a climbing Seguine {83a} twines up it
with leaves like 'lords and ladies'; but the glory of the tree is
that climbing palm, the feathers of which we saw crowning it from a
distance. Up into the highest branches and down again, and up again
into the lower branches, and rolling along the ground in curves as
that of a Boa bedecked with huge ferns and prickly spikes, six feet
and more long each, the Rattan {83b} hangs in mid-air, one hardly
sees how, beautiful and wonderful, beyond what clumsy words can
tell. Beneath the great trees (for here great trees grow freely
beneath greater trees, and beneath greater trees again, delighting
in the shade) is a group of young Mangosteens, {83c} looking, to
describe the unknown by the known, like walnuts with leaflets eight
inches long, their boughs clustered with yellow and green sour
fruit; and beyond them stretches up the lawn a dense grove of
nutmegs, like Portugal laurels, hung about with olive-yellow apples.
Here and there a nutmeg-apple has split, and shows within the
delicate crimson caul of mace; or the nutmegs, the mace still
clinging round them, lie scattered on the grass. Under the
perpetual shade of the evergreens haunt Heliconias and other
delicate butterflies, who seem to dread the blaze outside, and
flutter gently from leaf to leaf, their colouring--which is usually
black with markings of orange, crimson, or blue--coming into
strongest contrast with the uniform green of leaf and grass. This
is our favourite spot for entomologising, when the sun outside
altogether forbids the least exertion. Turn, with us--alas! only in
fancy--out of the grove into a neighbouring path, between tea-
shrubs, looking like privets with large myrtle flowers, and young
clove-trees, covered with the groups of green buds which are the
cloves of commerce; and among fruit-trees from every part of the
Tropics, with the names of which I will not burden you. Glance at
that beautiful and most poisonous shrub, which we found wild at St.
Thomas's. {84} Glance, too--but, again why burden you with names
which you will not recollect, much more with descriptions which do
not describe? Look, though, down that Allspice avenue, at the clear
warm light which is reflected off the smooth yellow ever-peeling
stems; and then, if you can fix your eye steadily on any object,
where all are equally new and strange, look at this stately tree. A
bough has been broken off high up, and from the wounded spot two
plants are already contending. One is a parasitic Orchis; the other
a parasite of a more dangerous family. It looks like a straggling
Magnolia, some two feet high. In fifty years it will be a stately
tree. Look at the single long straight air-root which it is letting
down by the side of the tree bole. That root, if left, will be the
destroyer of the whole tree. It will touch the earth, take root
below, send out side-fibres above, call down younger roots to help
it, till the whole bole, clasped and stifled in their embraces, dies
and rots out, and the Matapalo (or Scotch attorney, {85a} as it is
rudely called here) stands alone on stilted roots, and board walls
of young wood, slowly coalescing into one great trunk; master of the
soil once owned by the patron on whose vitals he has fed: a
treacherous tyrant; and yet, like many another treacherous tyrant,
beautiful to see, with his shining evergreen foliage, and grand
labyrinth of smooth roots, standing high in air, or dangling from
the boughs in search of soil below; and last, but not least, his
Magnolia-like flowers, rosy or snowy-white, and green egg-shaped
fruits.
Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you
must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson
roses, full of long silky crimson stamens: and then try--as we do
daily in vain--to recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things
which you have seen.
One look round at the smaller wild animals and flowers. Butterflies
swarm round us, of every hue. Beetles, you may remark, are few;
they do not run in swarms about these arid paths as they do at home.
But the wasps and bees, black and brown, are innumerable. That huge
bee in steel-blue armour, booming straight at you--whom some one
compared to the Lord Mayor's man in armour turned into a cherub, and
broken loose--(get out of his way, for he is absorbed in business)--
is probably a wood-borer, {85c} of whose work you may read in Mr.
Wood's Homes without Hands. That long black wasp, commonly called a
Jack Spaniard, builds pensile paper nests under every roof and shed.
Watch, now, this more delicate brown wasp, probably one of the
Pelopoei of whom we have read in Mr. Gosse's Naturalist in Jamaica
and Mr. Bates's Travels on the Amazons. She has made under a shelf
a mud nest of three long cells, and filled them one by one with
small spiders, and the precious egg which, when hatched, is to feed
on them. One hundred and eight spiders we have counted in a single
nest like this; and the wasp, much of the same shape as the Jack
Spaniard, but smaller, works, unlike him, alone, or at least only
with her husband's help. The long mud nest is built upright, often
in the angle of a doorpost or panel; and always added to, and
entered from, below. With a joyful hum she flies back to it all day
long with her pellets of mud, and spreads them out with her mouth
into pointed arches, one laid on the other, making one side of the
arch out of each pellet, and singing low but cheerily over her work.
As she works downward, she parts off the tube of the nest with
horizontal floors of a finer and harder mud, and inside each storey
places some five spiders, and among them the precious egg, or eggs,
which is to feed on them when hatched. If we open the uppermost
chamber, we shall find every vestige of the spiders gone, and the
cavity filled (and, strange to say, exactly filled) by a brown-
coated wasp-pupa, enveloped in a fine silken shroud. In the chamber
below, perhaps, we shall find the grub full-grown, and finishing his
last spicier; and so on, down six or eight storeys, till the lowest
holds nothing but spiders, packed close, but not yet sealed up.
These spiders, be it remembered, are not dead. By some strange
craft, the wasp knows exactly where to pierce them with her sting,
so as to stupefy, but not to kill, just as the sand-wasps of our
banks at home stupefy the large weevils which they store in their
burrows as food for their grubs.
There are wasps too, here, who make pretty little jar-shaped nests,
round, with a neatly lined round lip. Paper-nests, too, more like
those of our tree-wasps at home, hang from the trees in the woods.
Ants' nests, too, hang sometimes from the stronger boughs, looking
like huge hard lumps of clay. And, once at least, we have found
silken nests of butterflies or moths, containing many chrysalids
each. Meanwhile, dismiss from your mind the stories of insect
plagues. If good care is taken to close the mosquito curtains at
night, the flies about the house are not nearly as troublesome as we
have often found the midges in Scotland. As for snakes, we have
seen none; centipedes are, certainly, apt to get into the bath, but
can be fished out dead, and thrown to the chickens. The wasps and
bees do not sting, or in any wise interfere with our comfort, save
by building on the books. The only ants who come into the house are
the minute, harmless, and most useful 'crazy ants,' who run up and
down wildly all day, till they find some eatable thing, an atom of
bread or a disabled cockroach, of which last, by the by, we have
seen hardly any here. They then prove themselves in their sound
senses by uniting to carry off their prey, some pulling, some
pushing, with a steady combination of effort which puts to shame an
average negro crew. And these are all we have to fear, unless it be
now and then a huge spider, which it is not the fashion here to
kill, as they feed on flies. So comfort yourself with the thought
that, as regards insect pests, we are quite as comfortable as in an
country-house, and infinitely more comfortable than in English
country-house, and infinitely more comfortable than in a Scotch
shooting lodge, let alone an Alpine chalet.
Lizards run about the walks in plenty, about the same size is the
green lizard of the South of Europe, but of more sober colours. The
parasol ants--of whom I could tell you much, save that you will read
far more than I can tell you in half a dozen books at home--walk in
triumphal processions, each with a bit of green leaf borne over its
head, and probably, when you look closely, with a little ant or two
riding on it, and getting a lift home after work on their stronger
sister's back--and these are all the monsters which you are likely
to meet.
Would that there were more birds to be seen and heard! But of late
years the free Negro, like the French peasant during the first half
of this century, has held it to be one of the indefeasible rights of
a free man to carry a rusty gun, and to shoot every winged thing.
He has been tempted, too, by orders from London shops for gaudy
birds--humming-birds especially. And when a single house, it is
said, advertises for 20,000 bird-skins at a time, no wonder if birds
grow scarce; and no wonder, too, if the wholesale destruction of
these insect-killers should avenge itself by a plague of vermin,
caterpillars, and grubs innumerable. Already the turf of the
Savannah or public park, close by, is being destroyed by hordes of
mole-crickets, strange to say, almost exactly like those of our old
English meadows; and unless something is done to save the birds, the
cane and other crops will surely suffer in their turn. A gun-
licence would be, it seems, both unpopular and easily evaded in a
wild forest country. A heavy export tax on bird-skins has been
proposed. May it soon be laid on, and the vegetable wealth of the
island saved, at the expense of a little less useless finery in
young ladies' hats.
So we shall see and hear but few birds round Port of Spain, save the
black vultures {87a}--Corbeaux, as they call them here; and the
black 'tick birds,' {87b} a little larger than our English
blackbird, with a long tail and a thick-hooked bill, who perform for
the cattle here the same friendly office as is performed by
starlings at home. Privileged creatures, they cluster about on
rails and shrubs within ten feet of the passer, while overhead in
the tree-tops the 'Qu'est ce qu'il dit,' {87c} a brown and yellow
bird, who seems almost equally privileged and insolent, inquires
perpetually what you say. Besides these, swallows of various kinds,
little wrens, {87d} almost exactly like our English ones, and night-
hawking goat-suckers, few birds are seen. But, unseen, in the
depths of every wood, a songster breaks out ever and anon in notes
equal for purity and liveliness to those of our English thrush, and
belies the vulgar calumny that tropic birds, lest they should grow
too proud of their gay feathers, are denied the gift of song.
One look, lastly, at the animals which live, either in cages or at
liberty, about the house. The queen of all the pets is a black and
gray spider monkey {88} from Guiana--consisting of a tail which has
developed, at one end, a body about twice as big as a hare's; four
arms (call them not legs), of which the front ones have no thumbs,
nor rudiments of thumbs; and a head of black hair, brushed forward
over the foolish, kindly, greedy, sad face, with its wide,
suspicious, beseeching eyes, and mouth which, as in all these
American monkeys, as far as we have seen, can have no expression,
not even that of sensuality, because it has no lips. Others have
described the spider monkey as four legs and a tail, tied in a knot
in the middle: but the tail is, without doubt, the most important
of the five limbs. Wherever the monkey goes, whatever she does, the
tail is the standing-point, or rather hanging-point. It takes one
turn at least round something or other, provisionally, and in case
it should be wanted; often, as she swings, every other limb hangs in
the most ridiculous repose, and the tail alone supports. Sometimes
it carries, by way of ornament, a bunch of flowers or a live kitten.
Sometimes it is curled round the neck, or carried over the head in
the hands, out of harm's way; or when she comes silently up behind
you, puts her cold hand in yours, and walks by your side like a
child, she steadies herself by taking a half-turn of her tail round
your wrist. Her relative Jack, of whom hereafter, walks about
carrying his chain, to ease his neck, in a loop of his tail. The
spider monkey's easiest attitude in walking, and in running also,
is, strangely, upright, like a human being: but as for her antics,
nothing could represent them to you, save a series of photographs,
and those instantaneous ones; for they change, every moment, not by
starts, but with a deliberate ease which would be grace in anything
less horribly ugly, into postures such as Callot or Breughel never
fancied for the ugliest imps who ever tormented St. Anthony. All
absurd efforts of agility which you ever saw at a seance of the
Hylobates Lar Club at Cambridge are quiet and clumsy compared to the
rope-dancing which goes on in the boughs of the Poui tree, or, to
their great detriment, of the Bougainvillea and the Gardenia on the
lawn. But with all this, Spider is the gentlest, most obedient, and
most domestic of beasts. Her creed is, that yellow bananas are the
summum bonum; and that she must not come into the dining-room, or
even into the verandah; whither, nevertheless, she slips, in fear
and trembling, every morning, to steal the little green parrot's
breakfast out of his cage, or the baby's milk, or fruit off the
side-board; in which case she makes her appearance suddenly and
silently, sitting on the threshold like a distorted fiend; and
begins scratching herself, looking at everything except the fruit,
and pretending total absence of mind, till the proper moment comes
for unwinding her lengthy ugliness, and making a snatch at the
table. Poor weak-headed thing, full of foolish cunning; always
doing wrong, and knowing that it is wrong, but quite unable to
resist temptation; and then profuse in futile explanations,
gesticulations, mouthings of an 'Oh!--oh!--oh!' so pitiably human,
that you can only punish her by laughing at her, which she does not
at all like. One cannot resist the fancy, while watching her,
either that she was once a human being, or that she is trying to
become one. But, at present, she has more than one habit to learn,
or to recollect, ere she become as fit for human society as the dog
or the cat. {89} Her friends are, every human being who will take
notice of her, and a beautiful little Guazupita, or native deer, a
little larger than a roe, with great black melting eyes, and a heart
as soft as its eyes, who comes to lick one's hand; believes in
bananas as firmly as the monkey; and when she can get no hand to
lick, licks the hairy monkey for mere love's sake, and lets it ride
on her back, and kicks it off, and lets it get on again and take a
half-turn of its tail round her neck, and throttle her with its
arms, and pull her nose out of the way when a banana is coming: and
all out of pure love; for the two have never been introduced to each
other by man; and the intimacy between them, like that famous one
between the horse and the hen, is of Nature's own making up.
Very different from the spider monkey in temper is her cousin Jack,
who sits, sullen and unrepentant, at the end of a long chain, having
an ugly liking for the calves of passers-by, and ugly teeth to
employ on them. Sad at heart he is, and testifies his sadness
sometimes by standing bolt upright, with his long arms in postures
oratorio, almost prophetic, or, when duly pitied and moaned to,
lying down on his side, covering his hairy eyes with one hairy arm,
and weeping and sobbing bitterly. He seems, speaking
scientifically, to be some sort of Mycetes or Howler, from the flat
globular throat, which indicates the great development of the hyoid
bone; but, happily for the sleep of the neighbourhood, he never
utters in captivity any sound beyond a chuckle; and he is supposed,
by some here, from his burly thick-set figure, vast breadth between
the ears, short neck, and general cast of countenance, to have been,
in a prior state of existence, a man and a brother--and that by no
means of negro blood--who has gained, in this his purgatorial stage
of existence, nothing save a well-earned tail. At all events, more
than one of us was impressed, at the first sight, with the
conviction that we had seen him before.
Poor Jack! and it is come to this: and all from the indulgence of
his five senses, plus 'the sixth sense of vanity.' His only
recreation save eating is being led about by the mulatto turnkey,
the one human being with whom he, dimly understanding what is fit
for him, will at all consort; and having wild pines thrown down to
him from the Poui tree above by the spider monkey, whose gambols he
watches with pardonable envy. Like the great Mr. Barry Lyndon (the
acutest sketch of human nature dear Thackeray ever made), he cannot
understand why the world is so unjust and foolish as to have taken a
prejudice against him. After all, he is nothing but a strong nasty
brute; and his only reason for being here is that he is a new and
undescribed species, never seen before, and, it is to be hoped,
never to be seen again.
In a cage near by (for there is quite a little menagerie here) are
three small Sapajous, {90} two of which belong to the island; as
abject and selfish as monkeys usually are, and as uninteresting;
save for the plain signs which they give of being actuated by more
than instinct,--by a 'reasoning' power exactly like in kind, though
not equal in degree, to that of man. If, as people are now too much
induced to believe, the brain makes the man, and not some higher
Reason connected intimately with the Moral Sense, which will endure
after the brain has turned to dust; if to foresee consequences from
experience, and to adapt means to ends, be the highest efforts of
the intellect: then who can deny that the Sapajou proves himself a
man and a brother, plus a tail, when he puts out a lighted cigar-end
before he chews it, by dipping it into the water-pan; and that he
may, therefore, by long and steady calculations about the
conveniences of virtue and inconveniences of vice, gradually cure
himself and his children of those evil passions which are defined as
'the works of the flesh,' and rise to the supremest heights of
justice, benevolence, and purity? We, who have been brought up in
an older, and as we were taught to think, a more rational creed, may
not be able yet to allow our imaginations so daringly hopeful a
range: but the world travels fast, and seems travelling on into
some such theory just now; leaving behind, as antiquated bigots,
those who dare still to believe in the eternal and immutable essence
of Goodness, and in the divine origin of man, created in the
likeness of God, that he might be perfect even as his Father in
heaven is perfect.
But to return to the animals. The cage next to the monkeys holds a
more pleasant beast; a Toucan out of the primeval forest, as
gorgeous in colour as he is ridiculous in shape. His general
plumage is black, set off by a snow-white gorget fringed with
crimson; crimson and green tail coverts, and a crimson and green
beak, with blue cere about his face and throat. His enormous and
weak bill seems made for the purpose of swallowing bananas whole;
how he feeds himself with it in the forest it is difficult to guess:
and when he hops up and down on his great clattering feet--two toes
turned forward, and two back--twisting head and beak right and left
(for he cannot see well straight before him) to see whence the
bananas are coming; or when again, after gorging a couple, he sits
gulping and winking, digesting them in serene satisfaction, he is as
good a specimen as can be seen of the ludicrous--dare I say the
intentionally ludicrous?--element in nature.
Next to him is a Kinkajou; {91a} a beautiful little furry bear--or
racoon--who has found it necessary for his welfare in this world of
trees to grow a long prehensile tail, as the monkeys of the New
World have done. He sleeps by day; save when woke up to eat a
banana, or to scoop the inside out of an egg with his long lithe
tongue: but by night he remembers his forest-life, and performs
strange dances by the hour together, availing himself not only of
his tail, which he uses just as the spider monkey does, but of his
hind feet, which he can turn completely round at will, till the
claws point forward like those of a bat. But with him, too, the
tail is the sheet-anchor, by which he can hold on, and bring all his
four feet to bear on his food. So it is with the little Ant-eater,
{91b} who must needs climb here to feed on the tree ants. So it is,
too, with the Tree Porcupine, {91c} or Coendou, who (in strange
contrast to the well-known classic Porcupine of the rocks of
Southern Europe) climbs trees after leaves, and swings about like
the monkeys. For the life of animals in the primeval forest is, as
one glance would show you, principally arboreal. The flowers, the
birds, the insects, are all a hundred feet over your head as you
walk along in the all but lifeless shade; and half an hour therein
would make you feel how true was Mr. Wallace's simile--that a walk
in the tropic forest was like one in an empty cathedral while the
service was being celebrated upon the roof.
In the next two cages, however, are animals who need no prehensile
tails; for they are cats, furnished with those far more useful and
potent engines, retractile claws; a form of beast at which the
thoughtful man will never look without wonder; so unique, so
strange, and yet as perfect, that it suits every circumstance of
every clime; as does that equally unique form the dragon-fly. We
found the dragon-flies here, to our surprise, exactly similar to,
and as abundant as, the dragon-flies at home, and remembering that
there were dragon-flies of exactly the same type ages and ages ago,
in the days of the OEningen and Solenhofen slates, said--Here is
indeed a perfect work of God, which, as far as man can see, has
needed no improvement (if such an expression be allowable)
throughout epochs in which the whole shape of continents and seas,
and the whole climate of the planet, has changed again and again.
The cats are: an ocelot, a beautiful spotted and striped fiend, who
hisses like a snake; a young jaguar, a clumsy, happy kitten, about
as big as a pug dog, with a puny kitten's tail, who plays with the
spider monkey, and only shows by the fast-increasing bulk of his
square lumbering head, that in six months he will be ready to eat
the monkey, and in twelve to eat the keeper.
There are strange birds, too. One, whom you may see in the
Zoological Gardens, like a plover with a straight beak and bittern's
plumage, from 'The Main,' whose business is to walk about the table
at meals uttering sad metallic noises and catching flies. His name
is Sun-bird, {93a} 'Sun-fowlo' of the Surinam Negroes, according to
dear old Stedman, 'because, when it extends its wings, which it
often does, there appears on the interior part of each wing a most
beautiful representation of the sun. This bird,' he continues very
truly, 'might be styled the perpetual motion, its body making a
continual movement, and its tail keeping time like the pendulum of a
clock.' {93b} A game-bird, olive, with a bare red throat, also from
The Main, called a Chacaracha, {93c} who is impudently brave, and
considers the house his own; and a great black Curassow, {93d} also
from The Main, who patronises the turkeys and guinea-fowl; stalks in
dignity before them; and when they do not obey, enforces his
authority by pecking them to death. There is thus plenty of
amusement here, and instruction too, for those to whom the ways of
dumb animals during life are more interesting than their stuffed
skins after death.
But there is the signal-gun, announcing the arrival of the Mail from
home. And till it departs again there will be no time to add to
this hasty, but not unfaithful, sketch of first impressions in a
tropic island.