To-day, however, one travels from the coast to the Cibao by railway, and takes the train at Puerto Plata, a delightfully situated port which the Vigilant passed the second day after leaving the Mona Passage and heading westward along the coast. Puerto Plata is beautiful from the sea, with its red-roofed buildings half hidden by palms at the base of the towering green cone of Plata Mountain; and in reality the town is by far the cleanest and most attractive in the republic. Its harbor is excellent, being almost landlocked, but the water shoals so gradually that despite a long pier jutting from the waterfront of the town into the bay the drays and trucks are compelled to drive out until the mules and horses are belly-deep in the water, in order to load or unload the boats.
It was off Puerto Plata that a vast treasure in bullion was recovered many years ago—one of the few authentic cases of the actual finding of ancient treasure in the West Indies. This happened in the latter part of the eighteenth century when Captain [[214]]William Phipps of Salem,—a worthy mariner with a love of romance and one-time governor of Massachusetts,—became imbued with the idea of recovering treasure-trove from a galleon which, in endeavoring to escape from the buccaneers, had been sunk off Puerto Plata. In those days, even as to-day, sunken treasure appealed to many otherwise hard-headed and practical men, and Captain Phipps found backers who provided the ships and wherewithal for his expedition. Apparently his information as to the location of the old wreck was somewhat hazy, and after a deal of search he had about given up in despair when one of his divers brought up a lump of coral growing upon an oddly squarish and heavy object. Knocking off the incrustation, the captain found an ingot of silver, and ere tempestuous weather came on several tons of bullion, together with gold and jewels,—in all amounting to over one and a half million dollars,—had been dragged from the depths of the sea and safely stowed under hatches.
Had the worthy Phipps been content with a comfortable fortune, he could have spent his declining years in a snug little home in Salem, where, surrounded by his grandchildren, he might have spun many a yarn of his treasure-hunt. But he was too avaricious, and, anxious to secure the last bit of [[215]]treasure that might still lie among the corals of Silver Shoals, he spent his share of the salvaged bullion in outfitting another expedition. Unfortunately a storm came up, his ship was wrecked, and Phipps barely escaped with his life and came home as poor as when he had first started treasure-seeking.
A few miles beyond Puerto Plata, completely hidden in the interminable green jungle and with nothing to distinguish it from any other of the thousands of little coves that indent the coast, is the site of the first European settlement in the New World. Isabella, Columbus named it in honor of the queen who made his discoveries possible, and here in December, 1493, he built, on his second voyage to the New World, a tiny fort, erected a few houses, and left a handful of men. Near here the Dons found the first gold they had seen in a natural state in the lands they had discovered, the flakes of precious metal adhering with sand to the water-casks which the sailors filled at a near-by stream. This, with the Indians’ information that they obtained all their gold from inland, convinced Columbus that untold wealth was to be had for the asking, so to speak; and, planting his little town of Isabella, he sailed away, expecting to return the following year to find the settlers surrounded with chests and bags [[216]]full of the yellow metal. Instead, when he returned, he found most of them dead and buried, the settlement destroyed, and no gold. Maltreatment of the natives had brought swift vengeance upon the Spaniards; fever and the climate had aided the red men, and Isabella had passed out of existence. It was never rebuilt, and all that remains of this first town in America are a few crumbling, jungle-grown walls.
Beyond Isabella the green and luxuriant verdure gives way to barren hills and cactus-covered plains, until the frowning, red-cliffed headland of El Morro is passed, with the miserable, mosquito-infested mud-hole of a town known as Monte Cristo. Just beyond this God-forsaken spot we left the waters of the Dominican Republic behind, and, entering the territorial waters of Haiti, rushed westward toward the great bulk of Tortuga, the birthplace of the buccaneers.
Larger than any of the Lesser Antilles, Tortuga stretches its mass of wooded hills and mountains for nearly twenty-five miles, with a width of three miles. It is an impenetrable jungle for the most part, almost uninhabited, but it was once the greatest of all the resorts of the buccaneers and the home of the most notorious pirates of history.
ST. BARTS
Mending nets where the buccaneers divided loot
