Thursday, 12th.—We are glad of this opportunity to know a thoroughly English ship-captain, officers, crew, custom, and discipline. Nothing can be better fitted to inspire confidence than the fresh, honest, intelligent face of Captain B——, with his rough sailor dress, and manners whose bluffness cannot conceal the completely affable and well-bred gentleman under them.
The passengers are so few that we are beginning to know them all. Various miscellaneous gentlemen of as many different nations; three or four Spanish ladies and gentlemen, some with children and servants; captain’s daughter and ourselves, complete the list. One of the Spaniards, who is to leave wife and eldest son in New York while he goes with the youngest son, a poor little sea-sick thing, to Germany, to school, speaks English and French with some fluency, while—a not unfrequent occurrence in Cuban families—the wife knows and cares only for Spanish. He has been pronouncing difficult Spanish words to me while his pretty wife laughs kindly at my attempts and helps him in his self-appointed task. So what with this novel sociality and a summer sea as beautiful and almost as calm as the sky, we get, instead of sea-sickness, delicious sleep and rare gusto for this English roast beef; instead of enervation, health that waxes with every hour.
Evening.—Nothing could be more enchanting than this air and sunshine, this bright crystal sea, this gently-moving ship, this entire voyage. A few low reefs and coral islands are becoming visible with our glasses; also many vessels lying quietly here and there,—wreckers I am told, which do a most flourishing business in these regions; indeed I learn that wrecking is the chief and all-absorbing occupation of Nassau, for which we are bound.
If genuine storms and honest ignorance of these dangerous passages do not supply a sufficient number of wrecks to satisfy the gambling tastes of the wreckers, and of the merchants who make fortunes by their spoils, it is found easy enough to make bargains with unprincipled captains, by which, for a certain sum, a wreck can be achieved at a given time with unfailing certainty. This is so managed that captain and wreckers shall make a comfortable little speculation of the affair and nobody lose anything except the all unsuspicious insurance company or the innocent owners of the vessel.
Nassau, New Providence, Royal Victoria Hotel, April 13th.—After being rocked gently to sleep, and then sung into deep slumbers all night by these pure-voiced ocean nurses, I was awakened this morning by the firing of guns announcing our entrance in the bay of Nassau. This city is to be our destiny for the next month, at the end of which the next regular steamer goes north. It is thought prudent to graduate in this way the change from the heat of Havana to the probable cold of New York.
We hung on deck to reconnoitre this little item of our future, and to find ourselves anchored in the brightest, lightest possible pea-green water, through which the clean, beautiful bottom is so clearly revealed, that the numerous swarming boats seem to be floating in an atmosphere only a little more dense and colored than the delicious nectar we are breathing.
While waiting for the inevitable custom-house officer, we lean over the deck railing to watch this phantom loveliness, and the boatmen that are urging us in English that sounds as droll as did the Spanish at first in Havana, to buy their wares. These consist of the only exports of the island,—sponges, bananas, pineapples; some of the larger boats have the bottoms covered with living turtles, others are half full of huge conch shells, or varieties of smaller shells arranged regularly in partitional boxes.
Presently the captain comes and points out the just arrived custom-house officer, a regal-looking negro, dressed in uniform. While B—— goes with him to examine the luggage, the captain shows us the white pilot-boat from which one of his men was knocked overboard on the last voyage, by the rough waves in this bay. The negroes who were rowing him fled in affright: before help could arrive he had gone down for the last time, and was never seen again. But a few days after, a shark was caught and killed, and safely in his stomach lay the man’s hand, immediately recognizable by the sleeve and cuff; beside it lay a goat’s head and horns, and various other trophies of a shark’s victories.
But now we must go: the boat waits for us here, and the hotel carriage on shore. A farewell with our Spanish friends, by whose cards I find, as I have before been informed, that the husband and wife in Cuba have distinctly different names; the name on the card of one gives you no clue to name or address of the other.
An English carriage brought us up the English road, past the English faces to the English-built hotel here on the hill, overlooking the English town, the bright bay, and outstretched ocean that owe allegiance to Her Majesty. Even the hotel belongs to the British government.