CHAPTER I.
VOYAGE AND APPROACH.
On the 22d of November, 1855, a small company of us—three gentlemen and two ladies—left New York harbor in the schooner Louisa Dyer, of 150 tons burden, bound to the island of Jamaica. By nightfall we had lost sight of the last faint trace of New Jersey soil. New Jersey is sometimes jocularly said to be out of the Union; but on that day the two of us who were leaving our native land for the first time, entertained no doubt of its solidarity with that country of which it afforded us the last glimpse. By morning we found our small and incommodious vessel fairly on her way through the stormy November Atlantic, toiling painfully over the broad convexity of the planet, like a plodding insect, toward the regions of the sun. After a voyage of fifteen days, wrestling with all manner of baffling winds, and with storms attended, I suppose, with some danger, though, from a happy incapacity of apprehending peril at sea till it is over, I suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that 'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the mass of its gloomy might.
Very pleasant was it to us, nevertheless, when the softening airs and the steady set of the breeze showed us that we had come into the latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now gave the charm of happy, graceful life to our weary voyage out of the tempestuous north. And when at last we saw land, although it appeared only in the shape of the two small islands mentioned above, which seem to be little more than coral reefs covered with a scanty carpet of yellowish grass, yet the few distant cocoanut trees upon them threw even over their barrenness that tropical charm which to those who first feel it seems rather to belong to another planet than to this dull one upon which we were born.
Passing through the narrow channel between the two islands which formed thus the portal of our entrance into the Caribbean, we found ourselves fairly afloat upon the waters of that brilliant sea, which the Spaniards, three centuries and a half before, had traversed with greater astonishment, but not with more delight. Everything now conspired to raise our spirits. The soft air, reminding us by contrast of the winter we had left behind, the deep blue sky, answered by waves of an intenser blue below, whose gentle ripples, unlike the stormy Atlantic surges which we had escaped, only came up to bear us kindly on, and the knowledge that we were but two days' sail from the fair island to which some were returning, and which two of us were about to make our home for an indefinite future, all made us now a very different set from the dull, anxious, seasick group that the Atlantic had lately been boxing about at his pleasure.
Before making Jamaica, however, we came in sight of the negro empire of Hayti, and ran along for a day under its northern coast.
We saw swelling hills, covered on their tops with woods, and sloping down to the shore, but were too far distant to distinguish very plainly any sign of human habitation. By nightfall we had sunk the land, but were astonished in the morning to see looming through the air, at an immense distance, a mountain, which in height seemed more like one of the Andes than any summit that Hayti could afford. Its actual height, I presume, may not have been less than 8,000 feet, but in my memory it shows like Chimborazo.
It was now Saturday, the 8th of December. We held our way westward across the hundred miles of sea that separate Hayti from Jamaica. All eyes were now turned to discover the first glimpse of our expected island home. At last, about the middle of the afternoon, we remarked on the western horizon the distant blot of indigo that showed us where it lay. Another twenty-four hours would pass before we should land, but that distant patch of mountain blue seemed to have brought us to land already. Heavy rain clouds coming up, hid it from us again, but gave ample compensation in the sunset that followed, one of the two grand sunsets of my life. The other was in Andover, Mass., which, is justly celebrated for the beauty of its sunsets. There the banks of white cloud, lying along the west, glowed with an inner radiance, that led the eye and the mind back into the very depths of heaven. Here, on the other hand, an unimaginable wealth of color was poured out on the very face of the sky. The whole western heaven, to the zenith, was one mingled melting mass of gorgeous dyes, rendered the more magnificent by the heavy lead-colored rain clouds which occupied all the rest of the sky.
The inward, spiritual magnificence of that northern sunset, and the unreserved splendor of this southern one, were in correspondence with the different tone which runs throughout nature in each of the two regions.
After sunset hues and rain cloud had both given way to the brilliant night sky of that latitude, we seated ourselves, seven in number, captain and mate included, on the extensive quarter deck of not less than seven feet from cabin house to stern bulwarks, for a final game of 'Twenty Questions;' when our hitherto so amiable friend, the Caribbean, suddenly flung a spiteful wave right over the quarter upon us, and put a very unexpected extinguisher on our pastime. The ladies, who were reclining on the deck, came in for the chief share of the compliment, and were in some danger of an indiscriminate swash down the cabin gangway; but the mate gallantly picked up one, and her husband the other, and saved them from all mischief but the drenching. This sudden interruption of amicable relations with the powers of the wave was followed up by a night of unmerciful rocking, to which, as we had now come under the lee of the land, was added a sweltering heat. I can stand as much heat as any man, but for once I found the cabin too much of a blackhole even for me, and after tossing most of the night in alternate correspondence and contradiction to the pitching of the vessel, I got up and went on deck, to see if a nap were any more feasible there. I found most of our company already recumbent in this starry bedchamber. After awhile admiring the unaccustomed brilliancy of the old familiar constellations of our northern sky, augmented by the effulgent host which our approach to the equator had brought into view, among all which Venus shone like a young moon, I fell asleep also, and we slumbered in concert, until awakened by the streaks of dawn. Soon the sun rose with a serene magnificence, well according with the day of holy rest and cheerful expectation which lay before us. The white haze upon the sky rolled away from the blue, and gathered itself into fleecy masses, which stood like pillars around the seaward horizon, brightening with a cheerful tempered light, until, as the sun grew higher, they dissolved away. Meanwhile, on the landward side of our vessel—which had rounded Morant Point in the night, and was now gliding smoothly on—lay in near view the mountains of Jamaica. Coming from the southeast quarter of the island, we were passing under them where they are highest. They rose, seemingly almost from the water's edge, to the height of seven and eight thousand feet, their towering masses broken into gigantic wrinkles and corrugations, whose fantastic unevenness was subdued into harmony by the softening veil of yellowish green darkening above, which clothed them to their tops. Between their base and the sea actually lies one of the most richly cultivated districts of the island, the Plaintain Garden River district. But we were too far out to distinguish much of it; and what little we did see is in my memory absorbed in the image of the verdant giants which rose behind.
In the forenoon our pilot came on board, a comfortable, self-possessed black man, who toward sunset brought us off the Palisades. This is the name of the narrow spit of land which forms the outer wall of the magnificent harbor of Kingston. Upon it is situated the naval station of Port Royal, the principal rendezvous of the British fleet in the West Indies. Here is that exquisitely comfortable naval hospital, with its long ranges of green jalousies, excluding the blazing light and admitting the sea breeze, in which the officers and crew of our ship Susquehanna were cared for with such generous hospitality a few years ago, when attacked by yellow fever. The heartburnings of the present may be somewhat lessened by reflecting on some of these mutual offices of kindness in the past.
Around the naval station clusters a poor village of perhaps fifteen hundred souls, the miserable remnant of the once splendid city of Port Royal, whose sudden fate I shall relate hereafter.
We rounded the point of the Palisades—which is marked by some unfortunate cocoanut trees, which, having vainly struggled with the sea breeze to maintain the elegant stateliness of their race, have long since given up the contest, and resigned themselves to being stunted and broken into the appearance of magnified splint brooms planted upside down—and found ourselves at last in our desired haven, Kingston harbor. It is a broad and sheltered basin, fully entitled, I understand, to the standard encomium of a harbor of the first rank, namely, that it will float the united navies of the world. Due provision has been made by three strong forts near the entrance that the navies aforesaid shall not enter until the time of such auspicious union. An intelligent correspondent of the Herald states his opinion that no ship and no number of ships could force an entrance under the converging fire of the forts, which bears upon the channel at a point where the least divergence would land a ship upon a dangerous shoal.
Kingston is on the inside of the harbor, six miles across from Port Royal. The city itself lies low, but as we approached it, just as the sun had set, the mountains which rise behind it, a few miles distant, to the height of three and five thousand feet, appeared to close around it in a sublime amphitheatre of massive verdure. High up on the side of the mountains we distinguished a white speck, which we were told was the military cantonment of Newcastle, situated 4,400 feet above the sea, chosen for the English soldiers on account of its salubrity. Formerly the annual mortality among European soldiers in the island was 130 in 1,000, but since the Government has been careful to quarter them as much as possible in these elevated sites, it has diminished to 34 in 1,000.
At last our vessel came to anchor at the wharf. We took a kind leave of the pleasant-tempered captain and crew, who had been shut up with us in the little craft during our seventeen days' tossing, and gave a farewell of especial warmth to the fatherly mate, whose rough exterior covered the warm heart of a seaman and the delicate feelings of a native gentleman.
When we landed, the short tropical twilight was fast fading into night, but light enough remained to show us into what a new world we had come. The gloomy, prisonlike warehouses, the long rows of verandas before the dwellings, the dusky throngs in the streets, the unintelligible patois that came to our ears on every side, occasional glimpses of strange vegetation, and, above all, the overpowering heat in December, all gave us to feel that we were at last in that tropical world, every aspect of which is so unlike our northern life.
After a hospitable reception from Mr. Whitehorne, the principal of the Nuco Institute, I went up to the rooms of the American Mission, and, ensconcing myself behind the mosquito curtains, proceeded to make critical observations upon the buzzings outside, to satisfy myself whether an insular range fed up these tormentors to the formidable vigor of their continental brethren. Concluding from their timid pipings that they were by no means an enemy so much to be dreaded—a conclusion which subsequent experience happily confirmed—I fell asleep.