The Great Quest / A romance of 1826, wherein are recorded the experiences of Josiah Woods of Topham, and of those others with whom he sailed for Cuba and the Gulf of Guinea

by Charles Boardman Hawes

In that canoe, which had already swiftly and silently disappeared among the mangroves, I had seen a white girl.

I cannot describe her to you now as she then appeared in the canoe, sitting in front of the great, black canoeman. It was long ago, and even at the time I was so startled, so amazed, that I saw only her white face and great dark eyes looking out at me from the shadowy recesses of the swamp.

I felt as if I had been set down suddenly in the midst of a fairy story. I strove against a sense of mystery and danger, a thousand vague terrors.

I cannot tell you what the girl looked like; yet, though I seem to deal in contradictions, I have never forgotten that white frightened face and those dark eyes, which had disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

Then, as the sails filled and the Adventure fell off and got steerage-way and slipped up the great, swift river, Matterson spun the wheel with his own hands this way and that.

At first the shores were low and sedgy and covered deeply with mangroves; but soon the river widened into a vast mirror, in which we saw reflected towering trees of numberless varieties, with a trailing network of vines and flowers, and from among the leaves, which were unbelievably large, spears of bamboo and cane protruded. As the wind at our backs drove us slowly up stream, notwithstanding the swifter current where we passed through the narrows, we saw plantains, bananas, oranges, lemons, and tall palms. Then between the trunks we saw fields of rice; and then, as we turned a bend where the river once more widened, we saw a settlement before us.

In the centre of a clearing stood low houses built of cane and thatched with grass, mud huts grouped here and there, and a large enclosure for some purpose of which I was ignorant. Could the girl I had seen in the swamp have come thither? On all sides people were running this way and that, some of them white, but most of them as black as midnight. So small did the settlement appear, and so sharply was each figure outlined, that it looked for all the world like a toy village in a shop window, or like such a tiny model of a foreign town as sailors sometimes bring home from distant ports.

As the anchor gripped the bed of the river, and the men, spraddling out on the footropes and leaning over the yards, clewed up the sails and hauled in the great folds of canvas, the Adventure brought up on her cable and lay with her head into the current.

Matterson and Gleazen who had ordered a boat launched and were standing in the gangway, now turned and called to Uncle Seth, who responded by walking toward them with as haughty a manner as if he were heart and soul in their councils and their plans. All three of them got into the boat and there talked for a while in undertones. Then they called Willie MacDougald to come tumbling after them, and all together they hastily went ashore, where I saw that a crowd had gathered to meet them; then the storm, which had so long been threatening, broke with a roar of wind and rain, and Arnold and I, going below, had the cabin for a time to ourselves.

Arnold sat down by the cabin table and looked around at ports and doors, and at the dueling swords on the bulkhead, and up at the skylight on which the storm was fiercely beating.