POINT SESENTA
(Note: All that is left of Point Sesenta—presumably so called from the sixty (sesenta) trees—is a reef known as Fisher’s Reef, on the north shore of Trinity Bay. The story of the Point was told to me by Captain James Armstrong, just as it had been told to him by an old Indian chief whose tribe used to visit the bay shore many, many years before the Republic.)
The mocking birds sang in the sixty trees,
And Inez walked in their shadow;
The soft winds came laughing from southern seas,
And the bay seemed a green-waved meadow;
But a wealth of song, and of wind and water,
Requites not the love of an Indio’s daughter.
Don Miguel’s pastures lay far and wide,
His herds by peons were tended,
But all he possessed was as naught beside
Fair Inez so young and splendid.
Still his heart was sore, for the winds kept saying:
“The trees sesenta are graying, graying.”
Inez the fair walked ’neath the moss-grown trees,
By the side of her gray-grown lover;
And oft times she dreamed that o’er many seas
He had come like a brave young rover;
But when for sight of him her dark eyes gleamed
They met dim eyes in a face deep seamed.
Then out of the north came a viking ship,
With a viking young and brawny;
A snare for love was his tender grip,
And a net were his locks so tawny.
Wherever man goes over hill and hollow,
There a woman loving him dares to follow.
Ah, that is the tale told in every zone,
A story told over and over.
Don Miguel one morning found Inez flown,
And the ship, and the bold young rover.
And the winds were hushed, and the trees unshaken,
And the birds had fled, their nests forsaken.
The boatmen passing beheld the trees,
Saw how they all were dying;
The winds grew fierce and angered the seas,
And the flurrying sands went flying,
Until Point Sesenta was quite departed,
And left but a name and a place uncharted.
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