Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a
strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You can
journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the trip may be made
much more rapidly and agreeably on some one of those light, narrow
steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive
passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street,
hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking
of steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts
against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But the
miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf never
lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into
some canal-mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and then
leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a league
of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you through
the immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green
level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some
irrigating machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be
pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre
mazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary with
the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods.
Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or
bayou,--from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimes
the swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes of
reedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles
to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of
billions of reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surging
in stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appalling
chorus of frogs! ....
Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all day
the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue open water
below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be fortunate enough to enter
the Gulf about the time of sunset. For the sake of passengers, she
travels by day only; but there are other vessels which make the journey
also by night--threading the bayou-labyrinths winter and summer:
sometimes steering by the North Star,--sometimes feeling the way with
poles in the white season of fogs,--sometimes, again, steering by that
Star of Evening which in our sky glows like another moon, and drops
over the silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire.
Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you into
thin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminous
color;--bayous open into broad passes;--lakes link themselves with
sea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,--keen, cool, and full of
light. For the first time the vessel begins to swing,--rocking to the
great living pulse of the tides. And gazing from the deck around you,
with no forest walls to break the view, it will seem to you that the
low land must have once been rent asunder by the sea, and strewn about
the Gulf in fantastic tatters....
Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an oasis
emerging,--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the rounded foliage
of evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the shining flood also
kindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets, each with its beach-girdle
of dazzling sand and shells, yellow-white,--and all radiant with
semi-tropical foliage, myrtle and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under
their emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts are
drowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malay
fishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as
their own Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of
the Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to
inspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy
bronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them.... Further
seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some queer camp of
wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform that stands above
the water upon a thousand piles;--over the miniature wharf you can
scarcely fail to observe a white sign-board painted with crimson
ideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in the sun; and
the fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean:
"Heap--Shrimp--Plenty." ... And finally all the land melts down into
desolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by
the melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that
sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea
touches the bass keys of his mighty organ....