The Encantadas, or the Enchanted Islands E-book
Author: Herman Melville
Genre: Literature
1854
ENCANTADAS
by Herman Melville
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
Sketch First
THE ISLES AT LARGE
-"That may not be, said then the ferryman,
Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne;
For those same islands seeming now and than,
Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,
But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne
In the wide waters; therefore are they hight
The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne;
For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight
Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;
For whosoever once hath fastened
His foot thereon may never it secure
But wandreth evermore uncertain and unsure."
"Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
That still for carrion carcasses doth crave;
On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
Shrieking his baleful note, which ever drave
Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl,
And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl."
TAKE five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an
outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the
vacant lot the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect
of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct
volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might after
a penal conflagration.
It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness,
furnish a parallel to this group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old
cities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough;
but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity,
they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence,
even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times
inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less
unpleasurable feelings.
And as for solitariness, the great forests of the north, the expanses
of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice fields, are the profoundest of
solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides
and seasons mitigates their terror, because, though unvisited by men,
those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar
stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day,
the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.
But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that
which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is that to
them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows.
Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring;
while, already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little
more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles rain
never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they
are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercy
upon me," the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and send
Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my
tongue, for I am tormented in this flame."
Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It
is deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow that the jackal should
den in the wastes of weedy Babylon, but the Encantadas refuse to harbor
even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little
but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders,
snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the iguana.
No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a
hiss.
On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more
ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry
bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep
fissures of calcined rock and treacherously masking them, or a parched
growth of distorted cactus trees.
In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly, clinker-
bound; tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like the dross of an
iron furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here and there, into which a
ceaseless sea pours a fury of foam, overhanging them with a swirl of
gray, haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming flights of unearthly
birds heightening the dismal din. However calm the sea without, there is
no rest for these swells and those rocks; they lash and are lashed, even
when the outer ocean is most at peace with itself. On the oppressive,
clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator,
the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white
whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore,
present a most Plutonian sight. In no world but a fallen one could such
lands exist.
Those parts of the strand free from the marks of fire stretch away in
wide level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and there
decayed bits of sugar cane, bamboos, and coconuts, washed upon this
other and darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward and
southward, all the way from Paradise to Tartarus, while mixed with the
relics of distant beauty you will sometimes see fragments of charred
wood and moldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will anyone be surprised at
meeting these last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddy
throughout nearly all the wide channels of the entire group. The
capriciousness of the tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea.
Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and every way unreliable, and so
given to perplexing calms, as at the Encantadas. Nigh a month has been
spent by a ship going from one isle to another, though but ninety miles
between; for owing to the force of the current, the boats employed to
tow barely suffice to keep the craft from sweeping upon the cliffs, but
do nothing towards accelerating her voyage. Sometimes it is impossible
for a vessel from afar to fetch up with the group itself, unless large
allowances for prospective leeway have been made ere its coming in
sight. And yet, at other times, there is a mysterious indraft, which
irresistibly draws a passing vessel among the isles, though not bound to
them.
True, at one period, as to some extent at the present day, large
fleets of whalemen cruised for spermaceti upon what some seamen call the
Enchanted Ground. But this, as in due place will be described, was off
the great outer isle of Albemarle, away from the intricacies of the
smaller isles, where there is plenty of sea room, and hence to that
vicinity the above remarks do not altogether apply, though even there
the current runs at times with singular force, shifting, too, with as
singular a caprice.
Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail
for a great distance round about the total group, and are so strong and
irregular as to change a vessel's course against the helm, though
sailing at the rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference in
the reckonings of navigators produced by these causes, along with the
light and variable winds, long nourished a persuasion that there existed
two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of the Encantadas, about
a hundred leagues apart. Such was the idea of their earlier visitors,
the Buccaneers; and as late as 1750 the charts of that part of the
Pacific accorded with the strange delusion. And this apparent
fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles was most
probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada, or
Enchanted Group.
But not uninfluenced by their character, as they now confessedly
exist, the modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of
this name might have in part originated in that air of spellbound
desertness which so significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better
suggest the aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from
ruddiness into ashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.
However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they
themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same:
fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.
Nor would the appellation "enchanted" seem misapplied in still another
sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these wilds-
whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name, Gallipagos-
concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a
superstition not more frightful than grotesque. They earnestly believe
that all wicked sea officers, more especially commodores and captains,
are at death (and in some cases before death) transformed into
tortoises, thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary
lords of Asphaltum.
Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by
the woebegone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by the
tortoises. For, apart from their strictly physical features, there is
something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures.
Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so
suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful
longevity does not fail to enhance the impression.
Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing in
enchantments can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now, when
leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among the
Adirondack Mountains, far from the influences of towns and
proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature; when at such times
I sit me down in the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by
prostrate trunks of blasted pines, and recall, as in a dream, my other
and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles, and
remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks
protruded from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld the vitreous
inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep ruts by ages and ages of
the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of scanty water; I can
hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have indeed slept upon
evilly enchanted ground.
Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy,
that I know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical
delusion concerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social
merriment, and especially at revels held by candlelight in old-fashioned
mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an
angular and spacious room, making them put on a look of haunted
undergrowth of lonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades
by my fixed gaze and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see,
slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling
along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with "Memento ****
*" burning in live letters upon his back.
Sketch Second
TWO SIDES TO A TORTOISE
"Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,
Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects
From her most cunning hand escaped bee;
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee.
Ne wonder if these do a man appall;
For all that here at home we dreadfull hold
Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall
Compared to the creatures in these isles' entrall.
Fear naught, then said the palmer, well avized,
For these same monsters are not there indeed,
But are into these fearful shapes disguized.
And lifting up his vertuous staffe on high,
Then all that dreadful armie fast gan flye
Into great Zethy's bosom, where they hidden lye."
In view of the description given, may one be gay upon the Encantadas?
Yes: that is, find one the gaiety, and he will be gay. And, indeed,
sackcloth and ashes as they are, the isles are not perhaps unmitigated
gloom. For while no spectator can deny their claims to a most solemn and
superstitious consideration, no more than my firmest resolutions can
decline to behold the specter-tortoise when emerging from its shadowy
recess; yet even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the
back, still possesses a bright side; its calipee or breastplate being
sometimes of a faint yellowish or golden tinge. Moreover, everyone knows
that tortoises as well as turtle are of such a make that if you but put
them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides without the
possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into view the
other. But after you have done this, and because you have done this, you
should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright,
keep it turned up perpetually if you can, but be honest, and don't deny
the black. Neither should he who cannot turn the tortoise from its
natural position so as to hide the darker and expose his livelier
aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun, for that cause declare
the creature to be one total inky blot. The tortoise is both black and
bright. But let us to particulars.
Some months before my first stepping ashore upon the group, my ship
was cruising in its close vicinity. One noon we found ourselves off the
South Head of Albemarle, and not very far from the land. Partly by way
of freak, and partly by way of spying out so strange a country, a boat's
crew was sent ashore, with orders to see all they could, and, besides,
bring back whatever tortoises they could conveniently transport.
It was after sunset when the adventurers returned. I looked down over
the ship's high side as if looking down over the curb of a well, and
dimly saw the damp boat deep in the sea with some unwonted weight. Ropes
were dropped over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking
tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly
of the seed of earth. We had been broad upon the waters for five long
months, a period amply sufficient to make all things of the land wear a
fabulous hue to the dreamy mind. Had three Spanish custom-house officers
boarded us then it is not unlikely that I should have curiously stared
at them, felt of them, and stroked them, much as savages serve civilized
guests. But instead of three custom-house officers, behold these really
wondrous tortoises- none of your schoolboy mud turtles, but black as
widower's weeds, heavy as chests of plate, with vast shells medallioned
and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have
breasted a battle, shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss,
and slimy with the spray of the sea. These mystic creatures, suddenly
translated by night from unutterable solitudes to our peopled deck,
affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They seemed newly crawled
forth from beneath the foundations of the world. Yea, they seemed the
identical tortoises whereon the Hindu plants this total sphere. With a
lantern I inspected them more closely. Such worshipful venerableness of
aspect! Such furry greenness mantling the rude peelings and healing the
fissures of their shattered shells. I no more saw three tortoises. They
expanded- became transfigured. I seemed to see three Roman Coliseums in
magnificent decay.
Ye oldest inhabitants of this or any other isle, said I, pray, give me
the freedom of your three-walled towns.
The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that of age:
dateless, indefinite endurance. And in fact that any other creature can
live and breathe as long as the tortoise of the Encantadas, I will not
readily believe. Not to hint of their known capacity of sustaining life
while going without food for an entire year, consider that impregnable
armor of their living mail. What other bodily being possesses such a
citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time?
As, lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancient
scars of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marly
mountains of the isle- scars strangely widened, swollen, half
obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of
very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the
bird tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible
creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct.
As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow weary
draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck.
Their stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went
aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just
before the mid-watch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering ram
against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth
and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the
victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical,
enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation
of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in
their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long
abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and
so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging
impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.
Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other
tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks- buckets, blocks,
and coils of rigging- and at times in the act of crawling over them
would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these
draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they
came: an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly
into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with
inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward
monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as
blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously that not only did
toadstools and all fungus things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty
moss sprouted upon their backs. With them I lost myself in volcanic
mazes, brushed away endless boughs of rotting thickets, till finally in
a dream I found myself sitting cross-legged upon the foremost, a Brahmin
similarly mounted upon either side, forming a tripod of foreheads which
upheld the universal cope.
Such was the wild nightmare begot by my first impression of the
Encantadas tortoise. But next evening, strange to say, I sat down with
my shipmates and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks and tortoise
stews; and, supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty
concave shells into three fanciful soup tureens, and polished the three
flat yellowish calipees into three gorgeous salvers.
Sketch Third
ROCK RODONDO
"For they this hight the Rock of vile Reproach,
A dangerous and dreadful place,
To which nor fish nor fowl did once approach,
But yelling meaws with sea-gulls hoars and bace
And cormoyrants with birds of ravenous race,
Which still sit waiting on that dreadful clift."
"With that the rolling sea resounding soft
In his big base them fitly answered,
And on the Rock, the waves breaking aloft,
A solemn meane unto them measured."
"Then he the boteman bad row easily,
And let him heare some part of that rare melody."
"Suddeinly an innumerable flight
Of harmeful fowles about them fluttering cride,
And with their wicked wings them oft did smight
And sore annoyed, groping in that griesly night."
"Even all the nation of unfortunate
And fatal birds about them flocked were."
To go up into a high stone tower is not only a very fine thing in
itself, but the very best mode of gaining a comprehensive view of the
region round about. It is all the better if this tower stand solitary
and alone, like that mysterious Newport one, or else be sole survivor of
some perished castle.
Now, with reference to the Enchanted Isles, we are fortunately
supplied with just such a noble point of observation in a remarkable
rock, from its peculiar figure called of old by the Spaniards, Rock
Rodondo, or Round Rock. Some two hundred and fifty feet high, rising
straight from the sea ten miles from land, with the whole mountainous
group to the south and east, Rock Rodondo occupies, on a large scale,
very much the position which the famous Campanile or detached Bell Tower
of St. Mark does with respect to the tangled group of hoary edifices
around it.
Ere ascending, however, to gaze abroad upon the Encantadas, this sea
tower itself claims attention. It is visible at the distance of thirty
miles, and, fully participating in that enchantment which pervades the
group, when first seen afar invariably is mistaken for a sail. Four
leagues away, of a golden, hazy noon, it seems some Spanish admiral's
ship, stacked up with glittering canvas. Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho! from
all three masts. But coming nigh, the enchanted frigate is transformed
apace into a craggy keep.
My first visit to the spot was made in the gray of the morning. With a
view of fishing, we had lowered three boats, and, pulling some two miles
from our vessel, found ourselves just before dawn of day close under the
moon-shadow of Rodondo. Its aspect was heightened, and yet softened, by
the strange double twilight of the hour. The great full moon burnt in
the low west like a half-spent beacon, casting a soft mellow tinge upon
the sea like that cast by a waning fire of embers upon a midnight
hearth; while along the entire east the invisible sun sent pallid
intimations of his coming. The wind was light, the waves languid; the
stars twinkled with a faint effulgence; all nature seemed supine with
the long night-watch, and half-suspended in jaded expectation of the
sun. This was the critical hour to catch Rodondo in his perfect mood.
The twilight was just enough to reveal every striking point, without
tearing away the dim investiture of wonder.
From a broken, stairlike base, washed as the steps of a water palace
by the waves, the tower rose in entablatures of strata to a shaven
summit. These uniform layers, which compose the mass, form its most
peculiar feature. For at their lines of junction they project flatly
into encircling shelves, from top to bottom, rising one above another in
graduated series. And as the eaves of any old barn or abbey are alive
with swallows, so were all these rocky ledges with unnumbered seafowl.
Eaves upon eaves, and nests upon nests. Here and there were long
birdlime streaks of a ghostly white staining the tower from sea to air,
readily accounting for its saillike look afar. All would have been
bewitchingly quiescent were it not for the demoniac din created by the
birds. Not only were the eaves rustling with them, but they flew densely
overhead, spreading themselves into a winged and continually shifting
canopy. The tower is the resort of aquatic birds for hundreds of leagues
around. To the north, to the east, to the west, stretches nothing but
eternal ocean; so that the man-of-war hawk coming from the coasts of
North America, Polynesia, or Peru, makes his first land at Rodondo. And
yet, though Rodondo be terra firma, no land bird ever lighted on it.
Fancy a red robin or a canary there! What a falling into the hands of
the Philistines when the poor warbler should be surrounded by such
locust-flights of strong bandit birds, with long bills cruel as daggers.
I know not where one can better study the natural history of strange
seafowl than at Rodondo. It is the aviary of Ocean. Birds light here
which never touched mast or tree; hermit-birds, which ever fly alone;
cloud-birds, familiar with unpierced zones of air.
Let us first glance low down to the lowermost shelf of all, which is
the widest, too, and but a little space from high-water mark. What
outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical,
they stand all round the rock like sculptured caryatides, supporting the
next range of eaves above. Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen, their
bills short, their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their
sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor
fowl is the penguin; as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor
Lent; without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet
discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed
possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in
none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if
ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at
the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased
sea-story of Rodondo.
But look, what are yon woebegone regiments drawn up on the next shelf
above? what rank and file of large strange fowl? what sea Friars of
Orders Gray? Pelicans. Their elongated bills, and heavy leathern pouches
suspended thereto, give them the most lugubrious expression. A pensive
race, they stand for hours together without motion. Their dull, ashy
plumage imparts an aspect as if they had been powdered over with
cinders. A penitential bird, indeed, fitly haunting the shores of the
clinkered Encantadas, whereon tormented Job himself might have well sat
down and scraped himself with potsherds.
Higher up now we mark the gony, or gray albatross, anomalously so
called, an unsightly, unpoetic bird, unlike its storied kinsman, which
is the snow-white ghost of the haunted Capes of Hope and Horn.
As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the
tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and
speckled haglets, jays, sea hens, sperm-whale birds, gulls of all
varieties- thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in
senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly
in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken
sounds his continual challenge and alarm. That this mysterious
hummingbird of ocean- which, had it but brilliancy of hue, might, from
its evanescent liveliness, be almost called its butterfly, yet whose
chirrup under the stern is ominous to mariners as to the peasant the
death-tick sounding from behind the chimney jamb- should have its
special haunt at the Encantadas, contributes, in the seaman's mind, not
a little to their dreary spell.
As day advances the dissonant din augments. With ear-splitting cries
the wild birds celebrate their matins. Each moment, flights push from
the tower and join the aerial choir hovering overhead, while their
places below are supplied by darting myriads. But down through all this
discord of commotion I hear clear, silver, buglelike notes unbrokenly
falling, like oblique lines of swift-slanting rain in a cascading
shower. I gaze far up, and behold a snow-white angelic thing with one
long, lancelike feather thrust out behind. It is the bright, inspiriting
chanticleer of ocean, the beauteous bird, from its bestirring whistle of
musical invocation fitly styled the "boatswain's mate."
The winged, life-clouding Rodondo had its full counterpart in the
finny hosts which people the waters at its base. Below the water line,
the rock seemed one honeycomb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine
lurking places for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange, many
exceedingly beautiful, and would have well graced the costliest glass
globes in which goldfish are kept for a show. Nothing was more striking
than the complete novelty of many individuals of this multitude. Here
hues were seen as yet unpainted, and figures which are unengraved.
To show the multitude, avidity, and nameless fearlessness and tameness
of these fish, let me say that often, marking through clear spaces of
water- temporarily made so by the concentric dartings of the fish above
the surface- certain larger and less unwary wights which swam slow and
deep, our anglers would cautiously essay to drop their lines down to
these last. But in vain; there was no passing the uppermost zone. No
sooner did the hook touch the sea, than a hundred infatuates contended
for the honor of capture. Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized
confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust,
while they do not understand, human nature.
But the dawn is now fairly day. Band after band, the seafowl sail away
to forage the deep for their food. The tower is left solitary, save the
fish-caves at its base. Its birdlime gleams in the golden rays like the
whitewash of a tall lighthouse, or the lofty sails of a cruiser. This
moment, doubtless, while we know it to be a dead desert rock, other
voyagers are taking oaths it is a glad populous ship.
But ropes now, and let us ascend. Yet soft, this is not so easy.
Sketch Fourth
A PISGAH VIEW FROM THE ROCK
"That done, he leads him to the highest mount,
From whence, far off he unto him did show:"-
If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take the following prescription.
Go three voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest
frigate that floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the
guides who conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many more
respectively to a rope-dancer, an Indian juggler, and a chamois. This
done, come and be rewarded by the view from our tower. How we get there,
we alone know. If we sought to tell others, what the wiser were they?
Suffice it that here at the summit you and I stand. Does any balloonist,
does the outlook man in the moon, take a broader view of space? Much
thus, one fancies, looks the universe from Milton's celestial
battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky. Here Daniel Boone would have
dwelt content.
Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted
Isles. Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south. You see
nothing; but permit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of
certain interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower's
base, we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole.
We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the east some six
hundred miles, lies the continent, this Rock being just about on the
parallel of Quito.
Observe another thing here. We are at one of three uninhabited
clusters, which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main,
sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South
America. In a peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American
character of country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the
westward, not one partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or
Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan
Fernandez and Massafuero. Of the first, it needs not here to speak. The
second lie a little above the Southern Tropic, lofty, inhospitable, and
uninhabitable rocks, one of which, presenting two round hummocks
connected by a low reef, exactly resembles a huge double-headed shot.
The last lie in the latitude of 33 degrees, high, wild and cloven. Juan
Fernandez is sufficiently famous without further description. Massafuero
is a Spanish name, expressive of the fact that the isle so called lies
more without, that is, further off the main than its neighbor Juan.
This isle Massafuero has a very imposing aspect at a distance of eight
or ten miles. Approached in one direction, in cloudy weather, its great
overhanging height and rugged contour, and more especially a peculiar
slope of its broad summits, give it much the air of a vast iceberg
drifting in tremendous poise. Its sides are split with dark cavernous
recesses, as an old cathedral with its gloomy lateral chapels. Drawing
nigh one of these gorges from sea, after a long voyage, and beholding
some tatterdemalion outlaw, staff in hand, descending its steep rocks
toward you, conveys a very queer emotion to a lover of the picturesque.
On fishing parties from ships, at various times, I have chanced to
visit each of these groups. The impression they give to the stranger
pulling close up in his boat under their grim cliffs is that surely he
must be their first discoverer, such, for the most part, is the
unimpaired... silence and solitude. And here, by the way, the mode in
which these isles were really first lighted upon by Europeans is not
unworthy of mention, especially as what is about to be said likewise
applies to the original discovery of our Encantadas.
Prior to the year 1563, the voyages made by Spanish ships from Peru to
Chile were full of difficulty. Along this coast, the winds from the
south most generally prevail, and it had been an invariable custom to
keep close in with the land, from a superstitious conceit on the part of
the Spaniards that were they to lose sight of it the eternal trade wind
would waft them into unending waters, from whence would be no return.
Here, involved among tortuous capes and headlands, shoals and reefs,
beating, too, against a continual head wind, often light and sometimes
for days and weeks sunk into utter calm, the provincial vessels in many
cases suffered the extremest hardships in passages which at the present
day seem to have been incredibly protracted. There is on record in some
collections of nautical disasters an account of one of these ships,
which, starting on a voyage whose duration was estimated at ten days,
spent four months at sea, and indeed never again entered harbor, for in
the end she was cast away. Singular to tell, this craft never
encountered a gale, but was the vexed sport of malicious calms and
currents. Thrice, out of provisions, she put back to an intermediate
port and started afresh, but only yet again to return. Frequent fogs
enveloped her, so that no observation could be had of her place, and
once, when all hands were joyously anticipating sight of their
destination, lo! the vapors lifted and disclosed the mountains from
which they had taken their first departure. In the like deceptive vapors
she at last struck upon a reef, whence ensued a long series of
calamities too sad to detail.
It was the famous pilot Juan Fernandez, immortalized by the island
named after him, who put an end to these coasting tribulations, by
boldly venturing the experiment- as De Gama did before him with respect
to Europe- of standing broad out from land. Here he found the winds
favorable for getting to the south, and by running westward till beyond
the influences of the trades, he regained the coast without difficulty;
making the passage which, though in a high degree circuitous, proved far
more expeditious than the nominally direct one. Now it was upon these
new tracks, and about the year 1670, or thereabouts, that the Enchanted
Isles, and the rest of the sentinel groups, as they may be called, were
discovered. Though I know of no account as to whether any of them were
found inhabited or no, it may be reasonably concluded that they have
been immemorial solitudes. But let us return to Rodondo.
Southwest from our tower lies all Polynesia, hundreds of leagues away;
but straight west, on the precise line of his parallel, no land rises
till your keel is beached upon the Kingsmills, a nice little sail of,
say, 5,000 miles.
Having thus by such distant references- with Rodondo the only possible
ones- settled our relative place on the sea, let us consider objects not
quite so remote. Behold the grim and charred Enchanted Isles. This
nearest crater-shaped headland is part of Albemarle, the largest of the
group, being some sixty miles or more long, and fifteen broad. Did you
ever lay eye on the real genuine Equator? Have you ever, in the largest
sense, toed the Line? Well, that identical crater-shaped headland there,
all yellow lava, is cut by the Equator exactly as a knife cuts straight
through the center of a pumpkin pie. If you could only see so far, just
to one side of that same headland, across yon low dikey ground, you
would catch sight of the isle of Narborough, the loftiest land of the
cluster; no soil whatever, one seamed clinker from top to bottom,
abounding in black caves like smithies, its metallic shore ringing under
foot like plates of iron, its central volcanoes standing grouped like a
gigantic chimney stack.
Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors after a quite curious fashion.
A familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood:
Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and the middle transverse
limb is Narborough, and all the rest is Albemarle. Volcanic Narborough
lies in the black jaws of Albemarle like a wolf's red tongue in his open
mouth.
If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in
round numbers, the statistics, according to the most reliable estimates
made upon the spot:
Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . none
Anteaters . . . . . . . . . . . . unknown
Man-haters . . . . . . . . . . . . unknown
Lizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000
Snakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000
Spiders . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000,000
Salamanders. . . . . . . . . . . . unknown
Devils . . . . . . . . . . . . . unknown
Making a clean total of. . . . . . . 11,000,000
exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters,
and salamanders.
Albemarle opens his mouth towards the setting sun. His distended jaws
form a great bay, which Narborough, his tongue, divides into halves, one
whereof is called Weather Bay, the other Lee Bay; while the volcanic
promontories, terminating his coasts are styled South Head and North
Head. I note this because these bays are famous in the annals of the
sperm whale fishery. The whales come here at certain seasons to calve.
When ships first cruised hereabouts, I am told, they used to blockade
the entrance of Lee Bay, when, their boats going round by Weather Bay,
passed through Narborough channel, and so had the leviathans very neatly
in a pen.
The day after we took fish at the base of this Round Tower, we had a
fine wind, and, shooting round the north headland, suddenly descried a
fleet of full thirty sail, all beating to windward like a squadron in
line. A brave sight as ever man saw. A most harmonious concord of
rushing keels. Their thirty kelsons hummed like thirty harp strings, and
looked as straight whilst they left their parallel traces on the sea.
But there proved too many hunters for the game. The fleet broke up, and
went their separate ways out of sight, leaving my own ship and two trim
gentlemen of London. These last, finding no luck either, likewise
vanished, and Lee Bay, with all its appurtenances, and without a rival,
devolved to us.
The way of cruising here is this. You keep hovering about the entrance
of the bay, in one beat and out the next. But at times- not always, as
in other parts of the group- a race horse of a current sweeps right
across its mouth. So, with all sails set, you carefully ply your tacks.
How often, standing at the foremast head at sunrise, with our patient
prow pointed in between these isles, did I gaze upon that land, not of
cakes, but of clinkers, not of streams of sparkling water, but arrested
torrents of tormented lava.
As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough presents its side in
one dark craggy mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet, at
which point it hoods itself in heavy clouds, whose lowest level fold is
as clearly defined against the rocks as the snow line against the Andes.
There is dire mischief going on in that upper dark. There toil the
demons of fire, who, at intervals, irradiate the nights with a strange
spectral illumination for miles and miles around, but unaccompanied by
any further demonstration, or else suddenly announce themselves by
terrific concussions and the full drama of a volcanic eruption. The
blacker that cloud by day, the more may you look for light by night.
Often whalemen have found themselves cruising nigh that burning mountain
when all aglow with a ballroom blaze. Or, rather, glassworks, you may
call this same vitreous isle of Narborough, with its tall chimney
stacks.
Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we cannot see all the other
isles, but it is a good place from which to point out where they lie.
Yonder, though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant dusky ridge. It is
Abington Isle, one of the most northerly of the group, so solitary,
remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man's Land seen off our northern
shore. I doubt whether two human beings ever touched upon that spot. So
far as yon Abington Isle is concerned, Adam and his billions of
posterity remain uncreated.
Ranging south of Abington, and quite out of sight behind the long
spine of Albemarle, lies James's Isle, so called by the early Buccaneers
after the luckless Stuart, Duke of York. Observe here, by the way, that,
excepting the isles particularized in comparatively recent times, and
which mostly received the names of famous admirals, the Encantadas were
first christened by the Spaniards; but these Spanish names were
generally effaced on English charts by the subsequent christenings of
the Buccaneers, who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, called
them after English noblemen and kings. Of these loyal freebooters and
the things which associate their name with the Encantadas, we shall hear
anon. Nay, for one little item, immediately; for between James's Isle
and Albemarle lies a fantastic islet, strangely known as "Cowley's
Enchanted Isle." But, as all the group is deemed enchanted, the reason
must be given for the spell within a spell involved by this particular
designation. The name was bestowed by that excellent Buccaneer himself,
on his first visit here. Speaking in his published voyages of this spot,
he says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's Enchanted Isle, for, we
having had a sight of it upon several points of the compass, it appeared
always in so many different forms; sometimes like a ruined
fortification; upon another point like a great city," etc. No wonder
though, that among the Encantadas all sorts of ocular deceptions and
mirages should be met.
That Cowley linked his name with this self-transforming and bemocking
isle suggests the possibility that it conveyed to him some meditative
image of himself. At least, as is not impossible, if he were any
relative of the mildly thoughtful and self-upbraiding poet Cowley, who
lived about his time, the conceit might seem not unwarranted; for that
sort of thing evinced in the naming of this isle runs in the blood, and
may be seen in pirates as in poets.
Still south of James's Isle lie Jervis Isle, Duncan Isle, Crossman's
Isle, Brattle Isle, Wood's Isle, Chatham Isle, and various lesser isles,
for the most part an archipelago of aridities, without inhabitant,
history, or hope of either in all time to come. But not far from these
are rather notable isles- Barrington, Charles's, Norfolk, and Hood's.
Succeeding chapters will reveal some ground for their notability.
Sketch Fifth
THE FRIGATE, AND SHIP FLYAWAY
"Looking far forth into the ocean wide,
A goodly ship with banners bravely dight,
And flag in her top-gallant I espide,
Through the main sea making her merry flight."
Ere quitting Rodondo, it must not be omitted that here, in 1813, the
U.S. frigate Essex, Captain David Porter, came near leaving her
bones. Lying becalmed one morning with a strong current setting her
rapidly towards the rock, a strange sail was descried, which- not out of
keeping with alleged enchantments of the neighborhood- seemed to be
staggering under a violent wind, while the frigate lay lifeless as if
spellbound. But a light air springing up, all sail was made by the
frigate in chase of the enemy, as supposed- he being deemed an English
whaleship- but the rapidity of the current was so great that soon all
sight was lost of him, and, at meridian, the Essex, spite of her
drags, was driven so close under the foam-lashed cliffs of Rodondo that,
for a time, all hands gave her up. A smart breeze, however, at last
helped her off, though the escape was so critical as to seem almost
miraculous.
Thus saved from destruction herself, she now made use of that
salvation to destroy the other vessel, if possible. Renewing the chase
in the direction in which the stranger had disappeared, sight was caught
of him the following morning. Upon being descried he hoisted American
colors and stood away from the Essex. A calm ensued, when, still
confident that the stranger was an Englishman, Porter dispatched a
cutter, not to board the enemy, but drive back his boats engaged in
towing him. The cutter succeeded. Cutters were subsequently sent to
capture him, the stranger now showing English colors in place of
American. But, when the frigate's boats were within a short distance of
their hoped-for prize, another sudden breeze sprang up; the stranger,
under all sail, bore off to the westward, and, ere night, was hull down
ahead of the Essex, which, all this time, lay perfectly becalmed.
This enigmatic craft- American in the morning, and English in the
evening, her sails full of wind in a calm- was never again beheld. An
enchanted ship, no doubt. So, at least, the sailors swore.
This cruise of the Essex in the Pacific during the war of 1812,
is, perhaps, the strangest and most stirring to be found in the history
of the American navy. She captured the furthest wandering vessels,
visited the remotest seas and isles; long hovered in the charmed
vicinity of the enchanted group, and, finally, valiantly gave up the
ghost fighting two English frigates in the harbor of Valparaiso. Mention
is made of her here for the same reason that the Buccaneers will
likewise receive record: because, like them, by long cruising among the
isles, tortoise-hunting upon their shores, and generally exploring them,
for these and other reasons, the Essex is peculiarly associated with
the Encantadas.
Here be it said that you have but three eyewitness authorities worth
mentioning touching the Enchanted Isles: Cowley, the Buccaneer (1684);
Colnet, the whaling-ground explorer (1798); Porter, the post captain
(1813). Other than these you have but barren, bootless allusions from
some few passing voyagers or compilers.
Sketch Sixth
BARRINGTON ISLE AND THE BUCCANEERS
"Let us all servile base subjection scorn,
And as we be sons of the earth so wide,
Let us our father's heritage divide,
And challenge to ourselves our portions dew
Of all the patrimony, which a few
Now hold on hugger-mugger in their hand."
"Lords of the world, and so will wander free,
Whereso us listeth, uncontroll'd of any."
"How bravely now we live, how jocund, how near the first inheritance,
without fear, how free from little troubles!"
Near two centuries ago Barrington Isle was the resort of that famous
wing of the West Indian Buccaneers, which, upon their repulse from the
Cuban waters, crossing the Isthmus of Darien, ravaged the Pacific side
of the Spanish colonies, and, with the regularity and timing of a modern
mail, waylaid the royal treasure ships plying between Manila and
Acapulco. After the toils of piratic war, here they came to say their
prayers, enjoy their free-and-easies, count their crackers from the
cask, their doubloons from the keg, and measure their silks of Asia with
long Toledos for their yardsticks.
As a secure retreat, an undiscoverable hiding place, no spot in those
days could have been better fitted. In the center of a vast and silent
sea but very little traversed, surrounded by islands whose inhospitable
aspect might well drive away the chance navigator and yet within a few
days' sail of the opulent countries which they made their prey, the
unmolested Buccaneers found here that tranquillity which they fiercely
denied to every civilized harbor in that part of the world. Here, after
stress of weather, or a temporary drubbing at the hands of their
vindictive foes, or in swift flight with golden booty, those old
marauders came, and lay snugly out of all harm's reach. But not only was
the place a harbor of safety, and a bower of ease, but for utility in
other things it was most admirable.
Barrington Isle is, in many respects, singularly adapted to careening,
refitting, refreshing, and other seamen's purposes. Not only has it good
water, and good anchorage, well sheltered from all winds by the high
land of Albemarle, but it is the least unproductive isle of the group.
Tortoises good for food, trees good for fuel, and long grass good for
bedding, abound here, and there are pretty natural walks, and several
landscapes to be seen. Indeed, though in its locality belonging to the
Enchanted group, Barrington Isle is so unlike most of its neighbors that
it would hardly seem of kin to them.
"I once landed on its western side," says a sentimental voyager long
ago, "where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath
groves of trees- not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or
peach trees, to be sure- but, for all that, after long seafaring, very
beautiful to walk under, even though they supplied no fruit. And here,
in calm spaces at the heads of glades, and on the shaded tops of slopes
commanding the most quiet scenery- what do you think I saw? Seats which
might have served Brahmins and presidents of peace societies. Fine old
ruins of what had once been symmetric lounges of stone and turf, they
bore every mark both of artificialness and age, and were, undoubtedly,
made by the Buccaneers. One had been a long sofa with back and arms,
just such a sofa as the poet Gray might have loved to throw himself
upon, his Crebillon in hand.
"Though they sometimes tarried here for months at a time, and used the
spot for a storing place for spare spars, sails, and casks, yet it is
highly improbable that the Buccaneers ever erected dwelling houses upon
the isle. They never were here except their ships remained, and they
would most likely have slept on board. I mention this because I cannot
avoid the thought that it is hard to impute the construction of these
romantic seats to any other motive than one of pure peacefulness and
kindly fellowship with nature. That the Buccaneers perpetrated the
greatest outrages is very true, that some of them were mere cut-throats
is not to be denied; but we know that here and there among their host
was a Dampier, a Wafer, and a Cowley, and likewise other men, whose
worst reproach was their desperate fortunes- whom persecution, or
adversity, or secret and unavengeable wrongs, had driven from Christian
society to seek the melancholy solitude or the guilty adventures of the
sea. At any rate, long as those ruins of seats on Barrington remain, the
most singular monuments are furnished to the fact that all of the
Buccaneers were not unmitigated monsters.
"But during my ramble on the isle I was not long in discovering other
tokens of things quite in accordance with those wild traits, popularly,
and no doubt truly enough, imputed to the freebooters at large. Had I
picked up old sails and rusty hoops I would only have thought of the
ship's carpenter and cooper. But I found old cutlasses and daggers
reduced to mere threads of rust, which, doubtless, had stuck between
Spanish ribs ere now. These were signs of the murderer and robber; the
reveler likewise had left his trace. Mixed with shells, fragments of
broken jars were lying here and there, high up upon the beach. They were
precisely like the jars now used upon the Spanish coast for the wine and
pisco spirits of that country.
"With a rusty dagger fragment in one hand, and a bit of a wine jar in
another, I sat me down on the ruinous green sofa I have spoken of and
bethought me long and deeply of these same Buccaneers. Could it be
possible that they robbed and murdered one day, reveled the next, and
rested themselves by turning meditative philosophers, rural poets, and
seat-builders on the third? Not very improbable, after all. For consider
the vacillations of a man. Still, strange as it may seem, I must also
abide by the more charitable thought, namely, that among these
adventurers were some gentlemanly, companionable souls, capable of
genuine tranquillity and virtue."
Sketch Seventh
CHARLES'S ISLE AND THE DOG-KING
So with outragious cry,
A thousand villeins round about him swarmed
Out of the rocks and caves adjoining nye;
Vile caitive wretches, ragged, rude, deformed;
All threatning death, all in straunge manner armed;
Some with unweldy clubs, some with long speares,
Some rusty knives, some staves in fier warmd.
We will not be of any occupation,
Let such vile vassals, born to base vocation,
Drudge in the world, and for their living droyle,
Which have no wit to live withouten toyle.
Southwest of Barrington lies Charles's Isle. And hereby hangs a
history which I gathered long ago from a shipmate learned in all the
lore of outlandish life.
During the successful revolt of the Spanish provinces from Old Spain,
there fought on behalf of Peru a certain Creole adventurer from Cuba,
who, by his bravery and good fortune, at length advanced himself to high
rank in the patriot army. The war being ended, Peru found itself like
many valorous gentlemen, free and independent enough, but with few shot
in the locker. In other words, Peru had not wherewithal to pay off its
troops. But the Creole- I forget his name- volunteered to take his pay
in lands. So they told him he might have his pick of the Enchanted
Isles, which were then, as they still remain, the nominal appanage of
Peru. The soldier straightway embarks thither, explores the group,
returns to Callao, and says he will take a deed of Charles's Isle.
Moreover, this deed must stipulate that thenceforth Charles's Isle is
not only the sole property of the Creole, but is forever free of Peru,
even as Peru of Spain. To be short, this adventurer procures himself to
be made in effect Supreme Lord of the Island, one of the princes of the
powers of the earth. *001
He now sends forth a proclamation inviting subjects to his as yet
unpopulated kingdom. Some eighty souls, men and women, respond, and
being provided by their leader with necessaries, and tools of various
sorts, together with a few cattle and goats, take ship for the promised
land, the last arrival on board, prior to sailing, being the Creole
himself, accompanied, strange to say, by a disciplined cavalry company
of large grim dogs. These, it was observed on the passage, refusing to
consort with the emigrants, remained aristocratically grouped around
their master on the elevated quarter-deck, casting disdainful glances
forward upon the inferior rabble there, much as, from the ramparts, the
soldiers of a garrison, thrown into a conquered town, eye the inglorious
citizen-mob over which they are set to watch.
Now Charles's Isle not only resembles Barrington Isle in being much
more inhabitable than other parts of the group, but it is double the
size of Barrington, say forty or fifty miles in circuit.
Safely debarked at last, the company, under direction of their lord
and patron, forthwith proceeded to build their capital city. They make
considerable advance in the way of walls of clinkers, and lava floors,
nicely sanded with cinders. On the least barren hills they pasture their
cattle, while the goats, adventurers by nature, explore the far inland
solitudes for a scanty livelihood of lofty herbage. Meantime, abundance
of fish and tortoises supply their other wants.
The disorders incident to settling all primitive regions in the
present case were heightened by the peculiarly untoward character of
many of the pilgrims. His Majesty was forced at last to proclaim martial
law and actually hunted and shot with his own hand several of his
rebellious subjects, who, with most questionable intentions, had
clandestinely encamped in the interior, whence they stole by night, to
prowl barefooted on tiptoe round the precincts of the lava palace. It is
to be remarked, however, that prior to such stern proceedings, the more
reliable men had been judiciously picked out for an infantry bodyguard,
subordinate to the cavalry bodyguard of dogs. But the state of politics
in this unhappy nation may be somewhat imagined from the circumstance
that all who were not of the bodyguard were downright plotters and
malignant traitors. At length the death penalty was tacitly abolished,
owing to the timely thought that, were strict sportsman's justice to be
dispensed among such subjects, ere long the Nimrod King would have
little or no remaining game to shoot. The human part of the lifeguard
was now disbanded and set to work cultivating the soil and raising
potatoes, the regular army now solely consisting of the dog-regiment.
These, as I have heard, were of a singularly ferocious character, though
by severe training rendered docile to their master. Armed to the teeth,
the Creole now goes in state, surrounded by his canine janizaries, whose
terrific bayings prove quite as serviceable as bayonets in keeping down
the surgings of revolt.
But the census of the isle, sadly lessened by the dispensation of
justice, and not materially recruited by matrimony, began to fill his
mind with sad mistrust. Some way the population must be increased. Now,
from its possessing a little water, and its comparative pleasantness of
aspect, Charles's Isle at this period was occasionally visited by
foreign whalers. These His Majesty had always levied upon for port
charges, thereby contributing to his revenue. But now he had additional
designs. By insidious arts he, from time to time, cajoles certain
sailors to desert their ships and enlist beneath his banner. Soon as
missed, their captains crave permission to go and hunt them up.
Whereupon His Majesty first hides them very carefully away, and then
freely permits the search. In consequence, the delinquents are never
found, and the ships retire without them.
Thus, by a two-edged policy of this crafty monarch, foreign nations
were crippled in the number of their subjects, and his own were greatly
multiplied. He particularly petted these renegade strangers. But alas
for the deep-laid schemes of ambitious princes, and alas for the vanity
of glory. As the foreign-born Pretorians, unwisely introduced into the
Roman state, and still more unwisely made favorites of the emperors, at
last insulted and overturned the throne, even so these lawless mariners,
with all the rest of the bodyguard and all the populace, broke out into
a terrible mutiny, and defied their master. He marched against them with
all his dogs. A deadly battle ensued upon the beach. It raged for three
hours, the dogs fighting with determined valor, and the sailors reckless
of everything but victory. Three men and thirteen dogs were left dead
upon the field, many on both sides were wounded, and the king was forced
to fly with the remainder of his canine regiment. The enemy pursued,
stoning the dogs with their master into the wilderness of the interior.
Discontinuing the pursuit, the victors returned to the village on the
shore, stove the spirit casks, and proclaimed a republic. The dead men
were interred with the honor of war, and the dead dogs ignominiously
thrown into the sea. At last, forced by stress of suffering, the
fugitive Creole came down from the hills and offered to treat for peace.
But the rebels refused it on any other terms than his unconditional
banishment. Accordingly, the next ship that arrived carried away the ex-
king to Peru.
The history of the king of Charles's Island furnishes another
illustration of the difficulty of colonizing barren islands with
unprincipled pilgrims.
Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in
Peru, which afforded him a safe asylum in his calamity, watched every
arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the
republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to
royalty. Doubtless he deemed the republic but a miserable experiment
which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated
themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American. Nay,
it was no democracy at all, but a permanent riotocracy, which
gloried in having no law but lawlessness. Great inducements being
offered to deserters, their ranks were swelled by accessions of scamps
from every ship which touched their shores. Charles's Island was
proclaimed the asylum of the oppressed of all navies. Each runaway tar
was hailed as a martyr in the cause of freedom, and became immediately
installed a ragged citizen of this universal nation. In vain the
captains of absconding seamen strove to regain them. Their new
compatriots were ready to give any number of ornamental eyes in their
behalf. They had few cannon, but their fists were not to be trifled
with. So at last it came to pass that no vessels acquainted with the
character of that country durst touch there, however sorely in want of
refreshment. It became anathema- a sea Alsatia- the unassailed lurking
place of all sorts of desperadoes, who in the name of liberty did just
what they pleased. They continually fluctuated in their numbers.
Sailors, deserting ships at other islands, or in boats at sea anywhere
in that vicinity, steered for Charles's Isle as to their sure home of
refuge; while, sated with the life of the isle, numbers from time to
time crossed the water to the neighboring ones and there presenting
themselves to strange captains as shipwrecked seamen often succeeded in
getting on board vessels bound to the Spanish coast, and having a
compassionate purse made up for them on landing there.
One warm night during my first visit to the group, our ship was
floating along in languid stillness when someone on the forecastle
shouted "Light ho!" We looked and saw a beacon burning on some obscure
land off the beam. Our third mate was not intimate with this part of the
world. Going to the captain he said, "Sir, shall I put off in a boat?
These must be shipwrecked men."
The captain laughed rather grimly, as, shaking his fist towards the
beacon, he rapped out an oath, and said, "No, no, you precious rascals,
you don't juggle one of my boats ashore this blessed night. You do well,
you thieves- you do benevolently to hoist a light yonder as on a
dangerous shoal. It tempts no wise man to pull off and see what's the
matter, but bids him steer small and keep off shore- that is Charles's
Island; brace up, Mr. Mate, and keep the light astern."
Sketch Eighth
NORFOLK ISLE AND THE CHOLA WIDOW
"At last they in an island did espy
A seemly woman sitting by the shore,
That with great sorrow and sad agony
Seemed some great misfortune to deplore,
And loud to them for succor called evermore."
"Black his eye as the midnight sky,
White his neck as the driven snow,
Red his cheek as the morning light;-
Cold he lies in the ground below.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bedys,
All under the cactus tree."
"Each lonely scene shall thee restore,
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Belov'd till life can charm no more,
And mourned till Pity's self be dead."
Far to the northeast of Charles's Isle, sequestered from the rest,
lies Norfolk Isle, and, however insignificant to most voyagers, to me,
through sympathy, that lone island has become a spot made sacred by the
strangest trials of humanity.
It was my first visit to the Encantadas. Two days had been spent
ashore in hunting tortoises. There was not time to capture many, so on
the third afternoon we loosed our sails. We were just in the act of
getting under way, the uprooted anchor yet suspended and invisibly
swaying beneath the wave, as the good ship gradually turned her heel to
leave the isle behind, when the seaman who heaved with me at the
windlass paused suddenly and directed my attention to something moving
on the land, not along the beach, but somewhat back, fluttering from a
height.
In view of the sequel of this little story, be it here narrated how it
came to pass that an object which partly from its being so small was
quite lost to every other man on board, still caught the eye of my
handspike companion. The rest of the crew, myself included, merely stood
up to our spikes in heaving, whereas, unwontedly exhilarated, at every
turn of the ponderous windlass, my belted comrade leaped atop of it,
with might and main giving a downward, thewy, perpendicular heave, his
raised eye bent in cheery animation upon the slowly receding shore.
Being high lifted above all others was the reason he perceived the
object, otherwise unperceivable; and this elevation of his eye was owing
to the elevation of his spirits; and this again- for truth must out- to
a dram of Peruvian pisco, in guerdon for some kindness done, secretly
administered to him that morning by our mulatto steward. Now, certainly,
pisco does a deal of mischief in the world; yet seeing that, in the
present case, it was the means, though indirect, of rescuing a human
being from the most dreadful fate, must we not also needs admit that
sometimes pisco does a deal of good?
Glancing across the water in the direction pointed out, I saw some
white thing hanging from an inland rock, perhaps half a mile from the
sea.
"It is a bird, a white-winged bird, perhaps a- no; it is- it is a
handkerchief!"
"Aye, a handkerchief!" echoed my comrade, and with a louder shout
apprised the captain.
Quickly now- like the running out and training of a great gun- the
long cabin spyglass was thrust through the mizzen-rigging from the high
platform of the poop, whereupon a human figure was plainly seen upon the
inland rock, eagerly waving towards us what seemed to be the
handkerchief.
Our captain was a prompt, good fellow. Dropping the glass, he lustily
ran forward, ordering the anchor to be dropped again, hands to stand by
a boat, and lower away.
In a half-hour's time the swift boat returned. It went with six and
came with seven; and the seventh was a woman.
It is not artistic heartlessness, but I wish I could but draw in
crayons, for this woman was a most touching sight, and crayons, tracing
softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the
dark-damasked Chola widow.
Her story was soon told, and though given in her own strange language
was as quickly understood, for our captain, from long trading on the
Chilean coast, was well versed in the Spanish. A Chola, or half-breed
Indian woman, of Payta in Peru, three years gone by, with her young new-
wedded husband Felipe, of pure Castilian blood, and her one only Indian
brother, Truxill, Hunilla had taken passage on the main in a French
whaler, commanded by a joyous man, which vessel, bound to the cruising
grounds beyond the Enchanted Isles, proposed passing close by their
vicinity. The object of the little party was to procure tortoise oil, a
fluid which for its great purity and delicacy is held in high estimation
where-ever known, and it is well known all along this part of the
Pacific coast. With a chest of clothes, tools, cooking utensils, a rude
apparatus for trying out the oil, some casks of biscuit, and other
things, not omitting two favorite dogs, of which faithful animal all the
Cholos are very fond, Hunilla and her companions were safely landed at
their chosen place; the Frenchman, according to the contract made ere
sailing, engaged to take them off upon returning from a four months'
cruise in the westward seas, which interval the three adventurers deemed
quite sufficient for their purposes.
On the isle's lone beach they paid him in silver for their passage
out, the stranger having declined to carry them at all except upon that
condition; though willing to take every means to insure the due
fulfillment of his promise. Felipe had striven hard to have this payment
put off to the period of the ship's return. But in vain. Still they
thought they had, in another way, ample pledge of the good faith of the
Frenchman. It was arranged that the expenses of the passage home should
not be payable in silver, but in tortoises- one hundred tortoises ready
captured to the returning captain's hand. These the Cholos meant to
secure after their own work was done, against the probable time of the
Frenchman's coming back, and no doubt in prospect already felt, that in
those hundred tortoises- now somewhere ranging the isle's interior- they
possessed one hundred hostages. Enough: the vessel sailed; the gazing
three on shore answered the loud glee of the singing crew; and, ere
evening, the French craft was hull down in the distant sea, its masts
three faintest lines which quickly faded from Hunilla's eye.
The stranger had given a blithesome promise, and anchored it with
oaths, but oaths and anchors equally will drag; naught else abides on
fickle earth but unkept promises of joy. Contrary winds from out
unstable skies, or contrary moods of his more varying mind, or shipwreck
and sudden death in solitary waves- whatever was the cause, the blithe
stranger never was seen again.
Yet, however dire a calamity was here in store, misgivings of it ere
due time never disturbed the Cholos' busy mind, now all intent upon the
toilsome matter which had brought them hither. Nay, by swift doom coming
like the thief at night, ere seven weeks went by, two of the little
party were removed from all anxieties of land or sea. No more they
sought to gaze with feverish fear, or still more feverish hope, beyond
the present's horizon line, but into the furthest future their own
silent spirits sailed. By persevering labor beneath that burning sun,
Felipe and Truxill had brought down to their hut many scores of
tortoises, and tried out the oil, when, elated with their good success,
and to reward themselves for such hard work, they, too hastily, made a
catamaran, or Indian raft, much used on the Spanish main, and merrily
started on a fishing trip, just without a long reef with many jagged
gaps, running parallel with the shore, about half a mile from it. By
some bad tide or hap, or natural negligence of joyfulness (for though
they could not be heard, yet by their gestures they seemed singing at
the time) forced in deep water against that iron bar, the ill-made
catamaran was overset, and came all to pieces, when, dashed by broad-
chested swells between their broken logs and the sharp teeth of the
reef, both adventurers perished before Hunilla's eyes.
Before Hunilla's eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed
before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a
rude bower among the withered thickets crowning a lofty cliff, a little
back from the beach. The thickets were so disposed that in looking upon
the sea at large she peered out from among the branches as from the
lattice of a high balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better
to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had
withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an
oval frame, through which the bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted
one. And there the invisible painter painted to her view the wave-tossed
and disjointed raft, its once level logs slantingly upheaved, as raking
masts, and the four struggling arms undistinguishable among them, and
then all subsided into smooth-flowing creamy waters, slowly drifting the
splintered wreck, while, first and last, no sound of any sort was heard.
Death in a silent picture, a dream of the eye, such vanishing shapes as
the mirage shows.
So instant was the scene, so trancelike its mild pictorial effect, so
distant from her blasted bower and her common sense of things, that
Hunilla gazed and gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail. But as good to
sit thus dumb, in stupor staring on that dumb show, for all that
otherwise might be done. With half a mile of sea between, how could her
two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones? The distance long, the
time one sand. After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the
thunderbolt? Felipe's body was washed ashore, but Truxill's never came,
only his gay, braided hat of golden straw- that same sunflower thing he
waved to her, pushing from the strand- and now, to the last gallant, it
still saluted her. But Felipe's body floated to the marge, with one arm
encirclingly outstretched. Lockjawed in grim death, the lover-husband
softly clasped his bride, true to her even in death's dream. Ah, heaven,
when man thus keeps his faith, wilt thou be faithless who created the
faithful one? But they cannot break faith who never plighted it.
It needs not to be said what nameless misery now wrapped the lonely
widow. In telling her own story she passed this almost entirely over,
simply recounting the event. Construe the comment of her features as you
might, from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was
herself the heroine of her tale. But not thus did she defraud us of our
tears. All hearts bled that grief could be so brave.
She but showed us her soul's lid, and the strange ciphers thereon
engraved; all within, with pride's timidity, was withheld. Yet was there
one exception. Holding out her small olive hand before her captain, she
said in mild and slowest Spanish, "Senor, I buried him," then
paused, struggled as against the writhed coilings of a snake, and,
cringing suddenly, leaped up, repeating in impassioned pain, "I buried
him, my life, my soul!"
Doubtless it was by half-unconscious, automatic motions of her hands,
that this heavy-hearted one performed the final office for Felipe, and
planted a rude cross of withered sticks- no green ones might be had- at
the head of that lonely grave, where rested now in lasting uncomplaint
and quiet haven he whom untranquil seas had overthrown.
But some dull sense of another body that should be interred, of
another cross that should hallow another grave- unmade as yet- some dull
anxiety and pain touching her undiscovered brother, now haunted the
oppressed Hunilla. Her hands fresh from the burial earth, she slowly
went back to the beach, with unshaped purposes wandering there, her
spellbound eye bent upon the incessant waves. But they bore nothing to
her but a dirge, which maddened her to think that murderers should
mourn. As time went by, and these things came less dreamingly to her
mind, the strong persuasions of her Romish faith, which sets peculiar
store by consecrated urns, prompted her to resume in waking earnest that
pious search which had but been begun as in somnambulism. Day after day,
week after week, she trod the cindery beach, till at length a double
motive edged every eager glance. With equal longing she now looked for
the living and the dead, the brother and the captain, alike vanished,
never to return. Little accurate note of time had Hunilla taken under
such emotions as were hers, and little, outside herself, served for
calendar or dial. As to poor Crusoe in the selfsame sea, no saint's bell
pealed forth the lapse of week or month; each day went by unchallenged;
no chanticleer announced those sultry dawns, no lowing herds those
poisonous nights. All wonted and steadily recurring sounds, human, or
humanized by sweet fellowship with man, but one stirred that torrid
trance- the cry of dogs; save which naught but the rolling sea invaded
it, an all-pervading monotone, and to the widow that was the least loved
voice she could have heard.
No wonder that, as her thoughts now wandered to the unreturning ship
and were she back again, the hope against hope so struggled in her so
that at length she desperately said, "Not yet, not yet; my foolish heart
runs on too fast." So she forced patience for some further weeks. But to
those whom earth's sure indraft draws, patience or impatience is still
the same.
Hunilla now sought to settle precisely in her mind, to an hour, how
long it was since the ship had sailed, and then, with the same
precision, how long a space remained to pass. But this proved
impossible. What present day or month it was she could not say. Time was
her labyrinth, in which Hunilla was entirely lost.
And now follows-
Against my own purposes a pause descends upon me here. One knows not
whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy
to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it be good to
blazon such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale
forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those
whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not
books, should be forbid. But in all things man sows upon the wind, which
bloweth just there whither it listeth; for ill or good, man cannot know.
Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.
When Hunilla-
Dire sight it is to see some silken beast long dally with a golden
lizard ere she devour. More terrible to see how feline Fate will
sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it
repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp
this catlike thing, sporting with the heart of him who reads, for if he
feel not he reads in vain.
-"The ship sails this day, today," at last said Hunilla to herself;
"this gives me certain time to stand on; without certainty I go mad. In
loose ignorance I have hoped and hoped; now in firm knowledge I will but
wait. Now I live and no longer perish in bewilderings. Holy Virgin, aid
me! Thou wilt waft back the ship. Oh, past length of weary weeks- all to
be dragged over- to buy the certainty of today, I freely give ye, though
I tear ye from me!"
As mariners, tossed in tempest on some desolate ledge, patch them a
boat out of the remnants of their vessel's wreck, and launch it in the
selfsame waves, see here Hunilla, this lone shipwrecked soul, out of
treachery invoking trust. Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee,
not in the laureled victor, but in this vanquished one.
Truly Hunilla leaned upon a reed, a real one- no metaphor; a real
Eastern reed. A piece of hollow cane, drifted from unknown isles, and
found upon the beach, its once jagged ends rubbed smoothly even as by
sandpaper, its golden glazing gone. Long ground between the sea and
land, upper and nether stone, the unvarnished substance was filed bare,
and wore another polish now, one with itself, the polish of its agony.
Circular lines at intervals cut all round this surface, divided it into
six panels of unequal length. In the first were scored the days, each
tenth one marked by a longer and deeper notch; the second was scored for
the number of seafowl eggs for sustenance, picked out from the rocky
nests; the third, how many fish had been caught from the shore; the
fourth, how many small tortoises found inland; the fifth, how many days
of sun; the sixth, of clouds; which last, of the two, was the greater
one. Long night of busy numbering, misery's mathematics, to weary her
too-wakeful soul to sleep; yet sleep for that was none.
The panel of the days was deeply worn- the long tenth notches half
effaced, as alphabets of the blind. Ten thousand times the longing widow
had traced her finger over the bamboo- dull flute, which, played on,
gave no sound- as if counting birds flown by in air would hasten
tortoises creeping through the woods.
After the one hundred and eightieth day no further mark was seen; that
last one was the faintest, as the first the deepest.
"There were more days," said our captain; "Many, many more; why did
you not go on and notch them, too, Hunilla?"
"Senor, ask me not."
"And meantime, did no other vessel pass the isle?"
"Nay, senor,- but-"
"You do not speak; but what, Hunilla?"
"Ask me not, senor."
"You saw ships pass, far away; you waved to them; they passed on- was
that it, Hunilla?"
"Senor, be it as you say."
Braced against her woe, Hunilla would not, durst not, trust the
weakness of her tongue. Then when our captain asked whether any
whaleboats had-
But no, I will not file this thing complete for scoffing souls to
quote, and call it firm proof upon their side. The half shall here
remain untold. Those two unnamed events which befell Hunilla on this
isle, let them abide between her and her God. In nature, as in law, it
may be libelous to speak some truths.
Still, how it was that, although our vessel had lain three days
anchored nigh the isle, its one human tenant should not have discovered
us till just upon the point of sailing, never to revisit so lone and far
a spot, this needs explaining ere the sequel come.
The place where the French captain had landed the little party was on
the further and opposite end of the isle. There too it was that they had
afterwards built their hut. Nor did the widow in her solitude desert the
spot where her loved ones had dwelt with her, and where the dearest of
the twain now slept his last long sleep, and all her plaints awaked him
not, and he of husbands the most faithful during life.
Now, high broken land rises between the opposite extremities of the
isle. A ship anchored at one side is invisible from the other. Neither
is the isle so small but a considerable company might wander for days
through the wilderness of one side and never be seen, or their halloos
heard, by any stranger holding aloof on the other. Hence Hunilla, who
naturally associated the possible coming of ships with her own part of
the isle, might to the end have remained quite ignorant of the presence
of our vessel, were it not for a mysterious presentiment, borne to her,
so our mariners averred, by this isle's enchanted air. Nor did the
widow's answer undo the thought.
"How did you come to cross the isle this morning, then, Hunilla?" said
our captain.
"Senor, something came flitting by me. It touched my cheek, my
heart, senor."
"What do you say, Hunilla?"
"I have said, senor, something came through the air."
It was a narrow chance. For when in crossing the isle Hunilla gained
the high land in the center, she must then for the first have perceived
our masts, and also marked that their sails were being loosed, perhaps
even heard the echoing chorus of the windlass song. The strange ship was
about to sail, and she behind. With all haste she now descends the
height on the hither side, but soon loses sight of the ship among the
sunken jungles at the mountain's base. She struggles on through the
withered branches, which seek at every step to bar her path, till she
comes to the isolated rock, still some way from the water. This she
climbs, to reassure herself. The ship is still in plainest sight. But
now, worn out with overtension, Hunilla all but faints; she fears to
step down from her giddy perch; she is fain to pause, there where she
is, and as a last resort catches the turban from her head, unfurls and
waves it over the jungles towards us.
During the telling of her story the mariners formed a voiceless circle
round Hunilla and the captain, and when at length the word was given to
man the fastest boat, and pull round to the isle's thither side, to
bring away Hunilla's chest and the tortoise oil, such alacrity of both
cheery and sad obedience seldom before was seen. Little ado was made.
Already the anchor had been recommitted to the bottom, and the ship
swung calmly to it.
But Hunilla insisted upon accompanying the boat as indispensable pilot
to her hidden hut. So being refreshed with the best the steward could
supply, she started with us. Nor did ever any wife of the most famous
admiral, in her husband's barge, receive more silent reverence of
respect than poor Hunilla from this boat's crew.
Rounding many a vitreous cape and bluff, in two hours' time we shot
inside the fatal reef, wound into a secret cove, looked up along a green
many-gabled lava wall, and saw the island's solitary dwelling.
It hung upon an impending cliff, sheltered on two sides by tangled
thickets, and half-screened from view in front by juttings of the rude
stairway, which climbed the precipice from the sea. Built of canes, it
was thatched with long, mildewed grass. It seemed an abandoned hayrick,
whose haymakers were now no more. The roof inclined but one way, the
eaves coming to within two feet of the ground. And here was a simple
apparatus to collect the dews, or rather doubly-distilled and finest
winnowed rains, which, in mercy or in mockery, the night skies sometimes
drop upon these blighted Encantadas. All along beneath the eaves a
spotted sheet, quite weather-stained, was spread, pinned to short,
upright stakes, set in the shallow sand. A small clinker, thrown into
the cloth, weighed its middle down, thereby straining all moisture into
a calabash placed below. This vessel supplied each drop of water ever
drunk upon the isle by the Cholos. Hunilla told us the calabash would
sometimes, but not often, be half filled overnight. It held six quarts,
perhaps. "But," said she, "we were used to thirst. At sandy Payta, where
I live, no shower from heaven ever fell; all the water there is brought
on mules from the inland vales."
Tied among the thickets were some twenty moaning tortoises, supplying
Hunilla's lonely larder, while hundreds of vast tableted black bucklers,
like displaced, shattered tombstones of dark slate, were also scattered
round. These were the skeleton backs of those great tortoises from which
Felipe and Truxill had made their precious oil. Several large calabashes
and two goodly kegs were filled with it. In a pot near by were the caked
crusts of a quantity which had been permitted to evaporate. "They meant
to have strained it off next day," said Hunilla, as she turned aside.
I forgot to mention the most singular sight of all, though the first
that greeted us after landing.
Some ten small, soft-haired, ringleted dogs, of a beautiful breed
peculiar to Peru, set up a concert of glad welcomings when we gained the
beach, which was responded to by Hunilla. Some of these dogs had, since
her widowhood, been born upon the isle, the progeny of the two brought
from Payta. Owing to the jagged steeps and pitfalls, tortuous thickets,
sunken clefts, and perilous intricacies of all sorts in the interior,
Hunilla, admonished by the loss of one favorite among them, never
allowed these delicate creatures to follow her in her occasional birds'-
nests climbs and other wanderings; so that, through long habituation,
they offered not to follow when that morning she crossed the land, and
her own soul was then too full of other things to heed their lingering
behind. Yet, all along she had so clung to them that, besides what
moisture they lapped up at early daybreak from the small scoop holes
among the adjacent rocks, she had shared the dew of her calabash among
them; never laying by any considerable store against those prolonged and
utter droughts which, in some disastrous seasons, warp these isles.
Having pointed out, at our desire, what few things she would like
transported to the ship- her chest, the oil, not omitting the live
tortoises which she intended for a grateful present to our captain- we
immediately set to work, carrying them to the boat down the long,
sloping stair of deeply shadowed rock. While my comrades were thus
employed, I looked and Hunilla had disappeared.
It was not curiosity alone, but, it seems to me, something different
mingled with it which prompted me to drop my tortoise and once more gaze
slowly around. I remembered the husband buried by Hunilla's hands. A
narrow pathway led into a dense part of the thickets. Following it
through many mazes, I came out upon a small, round, open space, deeply
chambered there.
The mound rose in the middle; a bare heap of finest sand, like that
unverdured heap found at the bottom of an hourglass run out. At its head
stood the cross of withered sticks, the dry, peeled bark still fraying
from it, its transverse limb tied up with rope and forlornly adroop in
the silent air.
Hunilla was partly prostrate upon the grave, her dark head bowed, and
lost in her long, loosened Indian hair, her hands extended to the cross-
foot with a little brass crucifix clasped between- a crucifix worn
featureless, like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain. She did
not see me, and I made no noise, but slid aside and left the spot.
A few moments ere all was ready for our going, she reappeared among
us. I looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which
seemed strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A
Spanish and an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride's
height in vain abased to proneness on the rack; nature's pride subduing
nature's torture.
Like pages the small and silken dogs surrounded her, as she slowly
descended towards the beach. She caught the two most eager creatures in
her arms: "Mia Teeta! Mia Tomoteeta!" and, fondling them, inquired how
many could we take on board.
The mate commanded the boat's crew- not a hard-hearted man, but his
way of life had been such that in most things, even in the smallest,
simple utility was his leading motive.
"We cannot take them all, Hunilla; our supplies are short; the winds
are unreliable; we may be a good many days going to Tombez. So take
those you have, Hunilla, but no more."
She was in the boat; the oarsmen, too, were seated; all save one, who
stood ready to push off and then spring himself. With the sagacity of
their race, the dogs now seemed aware that they were in the very instant
of being deserted upon a barren strand. The gunwales of the boat were
high; its prow- presented inland- was lifted; so, owing to the water,
which they seemed instinctively to shun, the dogs could not well leap
into the little craft. But their busy paws hard scraped the prow, as it
had been some farmer's door shutting them out from shelter in a winter
storm. A clamorous agony of alarm. They did not howl, or whine; they all
but spoke.
"Push off! Give way!" cried the mate. The boat gave one heavy drag and
lurch, and next moment shot swiftly from the beach, turned on her heel,
and sped. The dogs ran howling along the water's marge, now pausing to
gaze at the flying boat, then motioning as if to leap in chase, but
mysteriously withheld themselves, and again ran howling along the beach.
Had they been human beings, hardly would they have more vividly inspired
the sense of desolation. The oars were plied as confederate feathers of
two wings. No one spoke. I looked back upon the beach, and then upon
Hunilla, but her face was set in a stern dusky calm. The dogs crouching
in her lap vainly licked her rigid hands. She never looked behind her,
but sat motionless till we turned a promontory of the coast and lost all
sights and sounds astern. She seemed as one who, having experienced the
sharpest of mortal pangs, was henceforth content to have all lesser
heartstrings riven, one by one. To Hunilla, pain seemed so necessary
that pain in other beings, though by love and sympathy made her own, was
unrepiningly to be borne. A heart of yearning in a frame of steel. A
heart of earthy yearning, frozen by the frost which falleth from the
sky.
The sequel is soon told. After a long passage, vexed by calms and
baffling winds, we made the little port of Tombez in Peru, there to
recruit the ship. Payta was not very distant. Our captain sold the
tortoise oil to a Tombez merchant, and adding to the silver a
contribution from all hands, gave it to our silent passenger, who knew
not what the mariners had done.
The last seen of lone Hunilla she was passing into Payta town, riding
upon a small gray ass; and before her on the ass's shoulders, she eyed
the jointed workings of the beast's armorial cross.
Sketch Ninth
HOOD'S ISLE AND THE HERMIT OBERLUS
"That darkesome glen they enter, where they find
That cursed man low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesly lockes long grouen and unbound,
Disordered hong about his shoulders round,
And hid his face, through which his hollow eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into the jawes, as he did never dine.
His garments nought but many ragged clouts,
With thornes together pind and patched reads,
The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts."
Southeast of Crossman's Isle lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded
Isle, and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of
dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It
might fitly have been styled Charon's.
It received its name from a wild white creature who spent many years
here, in the person of a European bringing into this savage region
qualities more diabolical than are to be found among any of the
surrounding cannibals.
About half a century ago, Oberlus deserted at the above-named island,
then, as now, a solitude. He built himself a den of lava and clinkers,
about a mile from the Landing, subsequently called after him, in a vale,
or expanded gulch, containing here and there among the rocks about two
acres of soil capable of rude cultivation, the only place on the isle
not too blasted for that purpose. Here he succeeded in raising a sort of
degenerate potatoes and pumpkins, which from time to time he exchanged
with needy whalemen passing, for spirits or dollars.
His appearance, from all accounts, was that of the victim of some
malignant sorceress; he seemed to have drunk of Circe's cup; beastlike;
rags insufficient to hide his nakedness; his befreckled skin blistered
by continual exposure to the sun; nose flat; countenance contorted,
heavy, earthy; hair and beard unshorn, profuse, and of fiery red. He
struck strangers much as if he were a volcanic creature thrown up by the
same convulsion which exploded into sight the isle. All bepatched and
coiled asleep in his lonely lava den among the mountains, he looked,
they say, as a heaped drift of withered leaves, torn from autumn trees,
and so left in some hidden nook by the whirling halt for an instant of a
fierce night wind, which then ruthlessly sweeps on, somewhere else to
repeat the capricious act. It is also reported to have been the
strangest sight, this same Oberlus, of a sultry, cloudy morning, hidden
under his shocking old black tarpaulin hat, hoeing potatoes among the
lava. So warped and crooked was his strange nature that the very handle
of his hoe seemed gradually to have shrunk and twisted in his grasp,
being a wretched bent stick, elbowed more like a savage's war sickle
than a civilized hoe handle. It was his mysterious custom upon a first
encounter with a stranger ever to present his back, possibly because
that was his better side, since it revealed the least. If the encounter
chanced in his garden, as it sometimes did- the new-landed strangers
going from the seaside straight through the gorge, to hunt up the queer
greengrocer reported doing business here- Oberlus for a time hoed on,
unmindful of all greeting, jovial or bland; as the curious stranger
would turn to face him, the recluse, hoe in hand, as diligently would
avert himself, bowed over, and sullenly revolving round his murphy hill.
Thus far for hoeing. When planting, his whole aspect and all his
gestures were so malevolently and uselessly sinister and secret that he
seemed rather in act of dropping poison into wells than potatoes into
soil. But among his lesser and more harmless marvels was an idea he ever
had that his visitors came equally as well led by longings to behold the
mighty hermit Oberlus in his royal state of solitude as simply to obtain
potatoes, or find whatever company might be upon a barren isle. It seems
incredible that such a being should possess such vanity, a misanthrope
be conceited; but he really had his notion, and, upon the strength of
it, often gave himself amusing airs to captains. But after all this is
somewhat of a piece with the well-known eccentricity of some convicts,
proud of that very hatefulness which makes them notorious. At other
times, another unaccountable whim would seize him, and he would long
dodge advancing strangers round the clinkered corners of his hut;
sometimes, like a stealthy bear, he would slink through the withered
thickets up the mountains and refuse to see the human face.
Except his occasional visitors from the sea, for a long period the
only companions of Oberlus were the crawling tortoises, and he seemed
more than degraded to their level, having no desires for a time beyond
theirs, unless it were for the stupor brought on by drunkenness. But,
sufficiently debased as he appeared, there yet lurked in him, only
awaiting occasion for discovery, a still further proneness. Indeed, the
sole superiority of Oberlus over the tortoises was his possession of a
larger capacity of degradation, and, along with that, something like an
intelligent will to it. Moreover, what is about to be revealed perhaps
will show that selfish ambition, or the love of rule for its own sake,
far from being the peculiar infirmity of noble minds, is shared by
beings which have no mind at all. No creatures are so selfishly
tyrannical as some brutes, as anyone who has observed the tenants of the
pasture must occasionally have observed.
"This island's mine by Sycorax my mother," said Oberlus to himself,
glaring round upon his haggard solitude. By some means, barter or theft-
for in those days ships at intervals still kept touching at his Landing-
he obtained an old musket, with a few charges of powder and ball.
Possessed of arms, he was stimulated to enterprise, as a tiger that
first feels the coming of its claws. The long habit of sole dominion
over every object round him, his almost unbroken solitude, his never
encountering humanity except on terms of misanthropic independence or
mercantile craftiness, and even such encounters being comparatively but
rare- all this must have gradually nourished in him a vast idea of his
own importance, together with a pure animal sort of scorn for all the
rest of the universe.
The unfortunate Creole who enjoyed his brief term of royalty at
Charles's Isle was perhaps in some degree influenced by not unworthy
motives, such as prompt other adventurous spirits to lead colonists into
distant regions and assume political pre-eminence over them. His summary
execution of many of his Peruvians is quite pardonable, considering the
desperate characters he had to deal with, while his offering canine
battle to the banded rebels seems under the circumstances altogether
just. But for this King Oberlus and what shortly follows, no shade of
palliation can be given. He acted out of mere delight in tyranny and
cruelty, by virtue of a quality in him inherited from Sycorax his
mother. Armed now with that shocking blunderbuss, strong in the thought
of being master of that horrid isle, he panted for a chance to prove his
potency upon the first specimen of humanity which should fall
unbefriended into his hands.
Nor was he long without it. One day he spied a boat upon the beach,
with one man, a Negro, standing by it. Some distance off was a ship, and
Oberlus immediately knew how matters stood. The vessel had put in for
wood, and the boat's crew had gone into the thickets for it. From a
convenient spot he kept watch of the boat, till presently a straggling
company appeared loaded with billets. Throwing these on the beach, they
again went into the thickets, while the Negro proceeded to load the
boat.
Oberlus now makes all haste and accosts the Negro, who, aghast at
seeing any living being inhabiting such a solitude, and especially so
horrific a one, immediately falls into a panic, not at all lessened by
the ursine suavity of Oberlus, who begs the favor of assisting him in
his labors. The Negro stands with several billets on his shoulder, in
act of shouldering others, and Oberlus, with a short cord concealed in
his bosom, kindly proceeds to lift those other billets to their place.
In so doing, he persists in keeping behind the Negro, who, rightly
suspicious of this, in vain dodges about to gain the front of Oberlus;
but Oberlus dodges also, till at last, weary of this bootless attempt at
treachery, or fearful of being surprised by the remainder of the party,
Oberlus runs off a little space to a bush, and, fetching his
blunderbuss, savagely commands the Negro to desist work and follow him.
He refuses. Whereupon, presenting his piece, Oberlus snaps at him.
Luckily the blunderbuss misses fire, but by this time, frightened out of
his wits, the Negro, upon a second intrepid summons, drops his billets,
surrenders at discretion, and follows on. By a narrow defile familiar to
him, Oberlus speedily removes out of sight of the water.
On their way up the mountains, he exultingly informs the Negro that
henceforth he is to work for him and be his slave, and that his
treatment would entirely depend on his future conduct. But Oberlus,
deceived by the first impulsive cowardice of the black, in an evil
moment slackens his vigilance. Passing through a narrow way, and
perceiving his leader quite off his guard, the Negro, powerful fellow,
suddenly grasps him in his arms, throws him down, wrests his musketoon
from him, ties his hands with the monster's own cord, shoulders him, and
returns with him down to the boat. When the rest of the party arrive,
Oberlus is carried on board the ship. This proved an Englishman, and a
smuggler, a sort of craft not apt to be overcharitable. Oberlus is
severely whipped, then handcuffed, taken ashore, and compelled to make
known his habitation and produce his property. His potatoes, pumpkins,
and tortoises, with a pile of dollars he had hoarded from his mercantile
operations, were secured on the spot. But while the too vindictive
smugglers were busy destroying his hut and garden, Oberlus makes his
escape into the mountains, and conceals himself there in impenetrable
recesses, only known to himself, till the ship sails, when he ventures
back, and by means of an old file which he sticks into a tree, contrives
to free himself from his handcuffs.
Brooding among the ruins of his hut, and the desolate clinkers and
extinct volcanoes of this outcast isle, the insulted misanthrope now
meditates a signal revenge upon humanity, but conceals his purposes.
Vessels still touch the Landing at times, and by-and-by Oberlus is
enabled to supply them with some vegetables.
Warned by his former failure in kidnaping strangers, he now pursues a
quite different plan. When seamen come ashore, he makes up to them like
a free-and-easy comrade, invites them to his hut, and with whatever
affability his redhaired grimness may assume, entreats them to drink his
liquor and be merry. But his guests need little pressing, and so, soon
as rendered insensible, are tied hand and foot, and, pitched among the
clinkers, are there concealed till the ship departs, when, finding
themselves entirely dependent upon Oberlus, alarmed at his changed
demeanor, his savage threats, and above all, that shocking blunderbuss,
they willingly enlist under him, becoming his humble slaves, and Oberlus
the most incredible of tyrants. So much so that two or three perish
beneath his initiating process. He sets the remainder- four of them- to
breaking the caked soil, transporting upon their backs loads of loamy
earth, scooped up in moist clefts among the mountains; keeps them on the
roughest fare; presents his piece at the slightest hint of insurrection;
and in all respects converts them into reptiles at his feet- plebeian
garter snakes to this Lord Anaconda.
At last Oberlus contrives to stock his arsenal with four rusty
cutlasses and an added supply of powder and ball intended for his
blunderbuss. Remitting in good part the labor of his slaves, he now
approves himself a man, or rather devil, of great abilities in the way
of cajoling or coercing others into acquiescence with his own ulterior
designs, however at first abhorrent to them. But indeed, prepared for
almost any eventual evil by their previous lawless life, as a sort of
ranging cowboys of the sea, which had dissolved within them the whole
moral man so that they were ready to concrete in the first offered mold
of baseness now; rotted down from manhood by their hopeless misery on
the isle, wonted to cringe in all things to their lord, himself the
worst of slaves, these wretches were now become wholly corrupted to his
hands. He used them as creatures of an inferior race; in short, he
gaffles his four animals and makes murderers of them, out of cowards
fitly manufacturing bravos.
Now, sword or dagger, human arms are but artificial claws and fangs,
tied on like false spurs to the fighting cock. So, we repeat, Oberlus,
tsar of the isle, gaffles his four subjects; that is, with intent of
glory, puts four rusty cutlasses into their hands. Like any other
autocrat, he had a noble army now.
It might be thought a servile war would hereupon ensue. Arms in the
hands of trodden slaves? how indiscreet of Emperor Oberlus! Nay, they
had but cutlasses- sad old scythes enough- he a blunderbuss, which by
its blind scatterings of all sorts of boulders, clinkers, and other
scoria would annihilate all four mutineers, like four pigeons at one
shot. Besides, at first he did not sleep in his accustomed hut; every
lurid sunset, for a time, he might have been seen wending his way among
the riven mountains, there to secrete himself till dawn in some
sulphurous pitfall, undiscoverable to his gang; but finding this at last
too troublesome, he now each evening tied his slaves hand and foot, hid
the cutlasses, and thrusting them into his barracks, shut to the door,
and, lying down before it, beneath a rude shed lately added, slept out
the night, blunderbuss in hand.
It is supposed that not content with daily parading over a cindery
solitude at the head of his fine army, Oberlus now meditated the most
active mischief, his probable object being to surprise some passing ship
touching at his dominions, massacre the crew, and run away with her to
parts unknown. While these plans were simmering in his head, two ships
touch in company at the isle, on the opposite side to his, when his
designs undergo a sudden change.
The ships are in want of vegetables, which Oberlus promises in great
abundance, provided they send their boats round to his Landing, so that
the crews may bring the vegetables from his garden, informing the two
captains, at the same time, that his rascals- slaves and soldiers- had
become so abominably lazy and good-for-nothing of late, that he could
not make them work by ordinary inducements, and did not have the heart
to be severe with them.
The arrangement was agreed to, and the boats were sent and hauled upon
the beach. The crews went to the lava hut, but to their surprise nobody
was there. After waiting till their patience was exhausted, they
returned to the shore, when lo, some stranger- not the Good Samaritan
either- seems to have very recently passed that way. Three of the boats
were broken in a thousand pieces, and the fourth was missing. By hard
toil over the mountains and through the clinkers, some of the strangers
succeeded in returning to that side of the isle where the ships lay,
when fresh boats are sent to the relief of the rest of the hapless
party.
However amazed at the treachery of Oberlus, the two captains, afraid
of new and still more mysterious atrocities- and indeed, half imputing
such strange events to the enchantments associated with these isles-
perceive no security but in instant flight, leaving Oberlus and his army
in quiet possession of the stolen boat.
On the eve of sailing they put a letter in a keg, giving the Pacific
Ocean intelligence of the affair, and moored the keg in the bay. Some
time subsequent, the keg was opened by another captain chancing to
anchor there, but not until after he had dispatched a boat round to
Oberlus's Landing. As may be readily surmised, he felt no little
inquietude till the boat's return, when another letter was handed him,
giving Oberlus's version of the affair. This precious document had been
found pinned half-mildewed to the clinker wall of the sulphurous and
deserted hut. It ran as follows: showing that Oberlus was at least an
accomplished writer, and no mere boor, and what is more, was capable of
the most tristful eloquence.
"Sir: I am the most unfortunate ill-treated gentleman that lives. I am
a patriot, exiled from my country by the cruel hand of tyranny.
"Banished to these Enchanted Isles, I have again and again besought
captains of ships to sell me a boat, but always have been refused,
though I offered the handsomest prices in Mexican dollars. At length an
opportunity presented of possessing myself of one, and I did not let it
slip.
"I have been long endeavoring, by hard labor and much solitary
suffering, to accumulate something to make myself comfortable in a
virtuous though unhappy old age; but at various times have been robbed
and beaten by men professing to be Christians.
"Today I sail from the Enchanted group in the |
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