The high upper parlor opens upon a piazza commanding a noble and extensive view. While waiting here for my room,—its occupants go north in this steamer,—a quiet, elderly gentleman, with much blandness and benevolence in his not extraordinary face, entered, and sitting down by the table addressed some kind and casual remarks, evidently intended to make a stranger feel at home, while I, tired of this long silent sitting and waiting, was glad enough of any change. On going down stairs I found I had been conversing with ex-President P——, who has been here since January for the health of his invalid wife, and also possibly to find a place where he can escape being lionized, and enjoy the retired literary leisure of which he is fond.
At half-past two came dinner. It is so late in the season, that not more than a dozen guests are left. Turtle soup of nicest and freshest quality commenced the ceremony, turtle pie helped to continue it, so did turtle steak, otherwise you might imagine yourself at an ordinary American hotel except that beef and mutton, and ducks and chickens, appear in an excellent state of mummification, as if they had all died of a lingering consumption, and would severally assist us to follow their example. The climate of the tropics is ill-adapted to our domestic animals. We are told that the best American cows die here after a few months, even if brought in the fall. Still it is a question, if want of care, and a general shiftlessness in all matters of the sort, have not more sins of animal murder to answer for than this delicious climate. The residents confess as much. By the way, can you guess the proper, legitimate name of the natives of New Providence? Not, as they are sometimes called, “Bahamaites,” or “Nassauers,” or “West Indians,” but Conchs.
This evening our first drive; pleasant, but exhausting, I much fear; all that the island has of novelty or interest, measuring, as it does, only fourteen miles in length and eight in width. In the first place, it is not only founded upon a rock, but it is a rock; the debris of coral reefs up to within a few inches of the surface. This surface is clothed with a light soil, which in the country is clothed with a light verdure, mostly of shrubs, briers, and weeds, interspersed here and there with stray dwarfed palms and cocoas. Occasionally the curious cotton-tree is found, with wide patriarchal branches covered with delicate green leaves, or else with a long, large pod full of perfect cotton to all appearances, perhaps intents, but not purposes, for it is proved to be useless. The roots of this tree, doubtless for want of soil, grow very much out of the ground, living in the air almost as much as the branches. In the town and its suburbs, oranges, bananas, sabadillas, mangoes, etc., are cultivated extensively, giving the whole place from a distance the air of an inhabited garden.
The streets and roads are a phenomenon. Every one is of solid rock covered with some kind of cement most dazzling to the eyes in its whiteness; so much so, that strangers are advised to never go out without veils. I see many of the inhabitants wearing blue and green glasses. But no rain or drought can affect them; never mud, never dust; always as smooth and white and clean as the cement floors in the parlors of Havana.
I am more than anything else impressed with the quantity and quality of the negro element. There are, according to statistics, eight black to one white person, but in passing the streets you would suppose the pepper to be more than the rule, and the salt less than the exception. Bless me! how they bubble and swarm in every street, every corner, every alley, every hut; to each man two women, to each woman at least a dozen babies; and men, women, and children always idle, and intensely contented with their idleness; fat, and lusty, and happy, and good-for-nothing. I think no one can come from a slave country to this without acknowledging the obtrusive difference, the increased appearance of happiness; if jolly contentedness can be called so. And rapidly as they increase in the States, no colored fertility can match this, where babies are undoubtedly indigenous to the soil, cuticle though it is. Every way I turn I expect to see a head just budding from the ground, hands sprouting, wool germinating, or possibly a foot grown uppermost, with the rest of the dawning body just bursting from the ground, and like Milton’s hind, or calf, or some other quadruped in Eden, “pawing to get free.”
If I were to ask one of these bouncing negresses, as Willis did, what curiosity or product peculiar to the island I could find to carry home, I should unquestionably get the same answer,—except that his, being on the island of Martinique, was in French,—“Bien que les enfants. En voulez-vous?”
Saturday, April.—This evening a drive on the “Eastern Road,” the Paseo of Nassau.
I thought the air in Cuba unparalleled, but this is freer, purer; an always fresh and warm-enough seabreeze. It has a richness, roundness, completeness; it is not a thin, sharp, cutting melody, but a perfectly elaborated harmony. In what a gentle, healing affectionate way it possesses one, interpenetrating all the sensitive fevered fibres of the lungs like a blessing, or like a spirit full of blessings, bringing with it vitality, repose, and life!
In our drive we met all the beau monde of Nassau, the government officers and families, with their always English faces and figures, which are in strikingly redundant contrast with the consumptive Americans seated up and down our hotel table. One thing assures me that I am not in Spanish Cuba, with her tenacity for national customs and habits; a tenacity for which I, coming from the shifting fancies of Yankeedom, sincerely honor her. It is this: We are once more in a land of gloves and bonnets. How stiff are these London exported bonnets compared with those exquisitely graceful Spanish veils, or prettier hair-ornamented Spanish heads; and as for the gloves, I can now understand without surprise that when Cubans first saw foreigners wearing gloves they supposed them used to hide some frightful blemish or deformity.
Our drive lay along the shore of this extraordinary bay, with its long parallel lines of brightest, lightest blue and pea-green, contrasting with the dark ultramarine purples and browns of all hues and densities, sometimes shading into each other, again preserving themselves, in spite of all republican efforts of the wind, clearly distinct. The cause of this phenomenon, I am told, is still a disputed question among the scientific. On the other side of the bay are built the cottages of wreckers and fishermen, the latter including those who dive for sponges, many of which we saw lying about in immense heaps; also those who dive for conch shells, which are exported in large quantities to France to be used in various artistic manufactures. The shores are covered with superannuated and dilapidated conchs, bleaching in the sun and calcining in the waves.