In addition to this fortress of the buccaneers, Samana Bay has much in the way of beauty and attraction; and having roamed and delved and dug over the little isle to our hearts’ content we hoisted anchor and cruised about the shores of this great lake-like arm of the sea.
A few miles beyond Cayo Levantado, and nestling at the foot of the green hills on the bay’s northern shores, is the town of Samana, or, to give it its full name, Santa Barbara de Samana; which is charmingly pretty—from a distance. As a town there is little to it, once one steps ashore. It is neither over-clean nor attractive, and it can boast of nothing in the way of old or impressive buildings. It is, however, unique, inasmuch as the negroes who dwell therein and in the vicinity nearly all speak English, being, to use their own quaint phrase, “of American abstraction,” descendants of blacks from the Southern States brought out as laborers when Samana was leased to an American company many years ago. While far more ambitious and industrious than the other natives, they [[207]]do not by any means make the most of the rich and fertile land whereon they dwell. Never in any part of the tropics have I seen or tasted such enormous and delicious pineapples as are grown here; and wonderful navel oranges, that equal and even excel the much-praised California fruit, go begging at a few cents a hundred.
Farther up the bay—at the very head of it, in fact—and bounded at its western end by a vast mangrove swamp, is the ramshackle, dirty little town of Sanchez, a miserable hole, which, withal, is of vast importance, as it is the tide-water terminus of the railway to the great interior table-land or Vega Real and the cities of La Vega and Santiago.
On the southern side of the bay is wild, uninhabited, heavily forested land, rising in hills and ridges to the mighty bulwarks of the mountains, with their summits nearly two miles above the sea, and sloping eastward to the grassy savannas of the Seybo district. Here at the borders of the low land is Caña Honda Bay (a lovely landlocked body of water surrounded by vast mangrove swamps that are the haunt of countless water-fowl and manatees), whence a road, so called, leads inland toward the savannas and the southern coast of Santo Domingo. All about the entrance to Caña Honda Bay are odd conical limestone hills, resembling [[208]]strikingly the conventional mountains on ancient maps, and in each and every one there is a cavern. Some of these caves are enormous, penetrating the hills for miles and wondrously hung with stalactites and paved with stalagmites; others are small. Some have entrances high and dry on land, others can be entered only by means of boats, and the mouths of many of them are completely submerged.
TRADE WIND CAY
The Gibraltar of the Buccaneers
PORTO RICO
A “piragua,” the craft in which the buccaneers first captured Spanish ships