5
The time came for me to move on from an extremely interesting island. I wished a passage to Vera Cruz or Jamaica or Colon, but the chance of small vessels sailing adventitiously seemed to determine my way. I went to Puerto Plata and thence to Santiago de Cuba, of Cortes' memory, city of which he was Mayor, city which provided much of the capital for his adventure to Mexico.
Here is Puerto Plata, on the northern shore of Santo Domingo, the Spanish-speaking part; Puerto Plata, the Plate port, a fine ocean harbor where no doubt rested often the treasure ships of the Plate Fleet. Here is the place, one of the places, but where—where are the galleons of Spain?
There stands the British steamer Teviot, loading tons of cigar tobacco for Marseilles, all astir with British sailors, while up at her masthead three green parrots are pecking at one another and conversing, or edging off along the taut ropes. Over beyond is the Yankee freighter Dorothy, attended by waist-naked Negroes and barges of fruit. A streaming smoke on the horizon and a long-distance hooting tells of an incoming hulk of the reappearing Hamburg-Amerika line. Two little Norwegian tramps have been and gone. The fast American mail steamer from New York will come gliding in to-morrow. Spanish cripples creep abroad the ships in the harbor to show their sores, their withered legs and arms; Spanish negro peddlers squat on the stone pier with bunches of mangoes, pineapples, and coconuts. The town grasshoppers come pottering along with their wooden boxes to black the boots of sailors, and all the English they know is "Wahn a shine?"
But the tall galleons and the flashing faces of Castile have vanished away like a mirage, like something unreal, that never was. So I sit in the port and wait. None of the ships will take me the way I want to go. The quickest and cheapest way to Mexico is, after all, via New York, I am told. And that is disconcerting. The galleons have all been sunk, and now one must go via New York.
But patience conquers civilization. A little Spanish boat at length appeared, a mere toy beside its neighbors in the harbor, but going in the same old way of Spanish ships, owned by a Cuban company, commercial as the rest, bearing no banner of Castile over the ocean, and yet Spanish enough, Spanish of to-day.
On this I made a romantic voyage to Cuba. I realized for a moment once more the glamour of the days of the Discoverers and the piratical pioneers. The sea was like velvet; the hazy mountains were of ineffable grandeur; the ship scarcely moved, yet went on, went on, and the flying-fish, silver and gleaming, raced us as she circuited and curved and planed o'er the ocean.
I voyaged with Fabio Fiallo, the poet and patriot of Santo Domingo, and he poured into my ears the story of his country's wrongs. He had with him a fierce-looking peasant from the interior, Cuyo Baez, who took off his shirt to show me the rose-red efflorescences and brutal channels on his body where red-hot irons had been applied to him by torturers.
It was like an inverted picture from Kingsley's Westward Ho, and for a moment I could fancy I saw a British sailor victim of the Spanish Inquisition. I looked at the fierce, unforgiving, taciturn Cuyo, and then at the fine cultured face of Fiallo. How it would have stirred the blood if Cuyo had been Anglo-Saxon and had been thus treated by Spaniards! For our noble rage has an ignoble appetite—it feeds on atrocities, must have atrocities. But here was a Spaniard, alleged to have been tortured with hot irons by one of us, by an Anglo-Saxon. It was incredible.
Fabio Fiallo looked down into the depths of the tranquil sea and meditated, as if he were looking for the Spanish ships and Spaniards down below, and their banners and their crosses and the spoils of the Indies. He could not see them. He could only see the sharks following the boat.
The sailors came out with pistols and began shooting at sharks. For when one shark gets killed the others feed on it and cease following the ship for a while. But it does not disturb the poet, nor the imperturbable Baez. They are thinking of all that is Spanish, hating all that is American, and they are sailing over the sea to stir up the Cubans and eventually to stir up Washington. Cuyo Baez will show his mutilated body to many, and whether he was actually tortured by Anglo-Saxon or by one of Spanish blood, he inevitably will rouse passion and malice against the starry banner of the North.
The ship glides on, leaves Haiti, crosses the Windward Passage, labors through a long noontide over little waves, and in the afternoon comes "unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon." And I went up into the peak of the prow of the ship and it ceased to be on a Cuban merchant-man. I had raised one of the lost galleons, and behind me were no moderns but the clamorous, audacious mariners of the first days of the New World.
The treasure ship drifts westward on a merely dimpled sea, and in the evening comes to the shelter of Cape Maysi. The sun sets in a lake of fire, and we traverse shadows of cloudlets instead of waves; and the shadows are blue and then peacock blue with black circulating lines, like cobra's eyes, and then blood red, and then red gelatine and then green. And from where in the mountains the sun made a lake of fire, a marvelous red brilliance has been enkindled and great black radii shoot outward across bands of red glowing burning color. It is a dreadful and grandiose scene, the surface of the sea so calm and yet possessed of fast-wandering, circulating, wallowing color reflections—the place of actual sunset meanwhile, far o'er the waves, made gigantic and romantic by the great black spokes of a wheel that is rolling through illimitable fires.
And the treasure ship in the enchanted twilight goes on, goes on, with all the pulse of Castile behind it.