Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel by
steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enter
the Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre, the most familiar
island of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of its
great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the stationary
White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleakly
uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and sinewy weeds
waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying
things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.
Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the
light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above
which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches
swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete
cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustation of oyster shells....
Around all the gray circling of a shark-haunted sea...
Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flames
like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in one
wild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny grasses all covered
with something like husks,--wheat-colored husks,--large, flat, and
disposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to
present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale
husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and
seal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change
into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes
and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther
off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ... a whirling
flower-drift of sleepy butterflies!
Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle: primitively a
wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained, diked, and cultivated
by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as a
bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed its own;--the
cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramways
wind to the smooth beach;--the plantation-residences have been
converted into rustic hotels, and the negro-quarters remodelled into
villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with its
imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous
lanes of oleander.
its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, Grande
Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness is
exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is reiterated by most of
the other islands,--Caillou, Cassetete, Calumet, Wine Island, the twin
Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the gray
pelican,--all of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wiry
grasses, prairie-cane, and scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Ile
Derniere),--well worthy a long visit in other years, in spite of its
remoteness, is now a ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying
nearly forty miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far more
populated a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated island
of the group, but also the most fashionable watering-place of the
aristocratic South;--to-day it is visited by fishermen only, at long
intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled that of
Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much similar, although
finer: a charming village of cottages facing the Gulf near the western
end. The hotel itself was a massive two-story construction of timber,
containing many apartments, together with a large dining-room and
dancing-hall. In rear of the hotel was a bayou, where passengers
landed--"Village Bayou" it is still called by seamen;--but the deep
channel which now cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not
exist while the village remained. The sea tore it out in one
night--the same night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into
the Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of
those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame houses
and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there
after the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the
fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the island in twain has ever
remained a mystery ...