I gave myself up to the delicious novelty, and that sense of absolute independence which only a complete separation from the moving world can inspire, and passed the entire day in a trance of dreamy delight. I subsequently passed many similar days, but this stands out in the long perspective, as one of unalloyed happiness. “’Twas worth ten years of common life,” and neither age nor suffering can efface its bright impress from the crowded tablet of my memory!
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, when we reached the northern extremity of the lagoon, at a place called the Haulover, from the circumstance that, to avoid going outside in the open sea, it is customary for the natives to drag their canoes across the narrow neck of sand which separates Bluefields from the next northern or Pearl Kay Lagoon. Occasionally, after long and heavy winds from the eastward, the waters are forced into the lagoons, so as to overflow the belt of land which divides them, when the navigation is uninterrupted.
In order to be able to renew our voyage early next morning, our few effects and stores were carried across the portage, over which our united strength was sufficient to drag the dory, without difficulty. All this was done with prompt alacrity on the part of Antonio and the Poyer boy, who would not allow me to exert myself in the slightest. The transit was effected in less than an hour, and then we proceeded to make our camp for the night, on the beach. Our little sail, supported over the canoe by poles, answered the purpose of a tent. And as for food, without going fifty yards from our fire, I shot half a dozen curlews, which, when broiled, are certainly a passable bird. Meanwhile, the Poyer boy, carefully wading in the lagoon, with a light spear, had struck several fish, of varieties known as snook and grouper; and Antonio had collected a bag full of oysters, of which there appeared to be vast banks, covered only by a foot or two of water. They were not pearl oysters, as might be inferred from the name of the lagoon, but similar to those found on our own shores, except smaller, and growing in clusters of ten or a dozen each. Eaten with that relishing sauce, known among travelers as “hunger sauce,” I found them something more than excellent,—they were delicious.
While I opened oysters, by way of helping myself to my princely first course, the Indians busied themselves with the fish and birds. I watched their proceedings with no little interest, and as their mode of baking fish has never been set forth in the cookery books, I give it for the benefit of the gastronomic world in general, which, I take it, is not above learning a good thing, even from a Poyer Indian boy. A hole having been dug in the sand, it was filled with dry branches, which were set on fire. In a few minutes the fire subsided in a bed of glowing coals. The largest of the fish, a grouper, weighing perhaps five pounds, had been cleaned and stuffed with pieces of the smaller fish, a few oysters, some sliced plantains, and some slips of the bark of the pimento or pepper-tree. Duly sprinkled with salt, it was carefully wrapped in the broad green leaves of the plantain, and the coals raked open, put in the centre of the glowing embers, with which it was rapidly covered. Half an hour afterward, by which time I began to believe it had been reduced to ashes, the bed was raked open again and the fish taken out. The outer leaves of the wrapper were burned, but the inner folds were entire, and when they were unrolled, like the cerements of a mummy, they revealed the fish, “cooked to a charm,” and preserving all the rich juices absorbed in the flesh, which would have been carried off by the heat, in the ordinary modes of cooking. I afterward adopted the same process with nearly every variety of large game, and found it, like patent medicines, of “universal application.” Commend me to a young waree “done brown” in like manner, as a dish fit for a king. But of that anon.
By and by the night came on, but not as it comes in our northern latitudes. Night, under the tropics, falls like a curtain. The sun goes down with a glow, intense, but brief. There are no soft and lingering twilight adieus, and stars lighting up one by one. They come, a laughing group, trooping over the skies, like bright-eyed children relieved from school. Reflected in the lagoon, they seemed to chase each other in amorous play, printing sparkling kisses on each other’s luminous lips. The low shores, lined with the heavy-foliaged mangroves, looked like a frame of massive, antique carving, around the vast mirror of the lagoon, across whose surface streamed a silvery shaft of light from the evening star, palpitating like a young bride, low in the horizon. Then there were whispered “voices of the night,” the drowsy winds talking themselves to sleep among the trees, and the little ripples of the lagoon pattering with liquid feet along the sandy shore. The distant monotonous beatings of the sea, and an occasional sullen plunge of some marine animal, which served to open momentarily the eyelids drooping in slumbrous sympathy with the scene—these were the elements which entranced me during the long, delicious hours of my first evening, alone with Nature, on the Mosquito Shore!
My dreams that night so blended themselves with the reality, that I could not now separate them if I would, and to this day I hardly know if I slept at all. So completely did my soul go out, and melt, and harmonize itself with the scene, that I began to comprehend the Oriental doctrine of emanations and absorptions, which teaches that, as the body of man springs from the earth, and after a brief space, mingles again with it; so his soul, part of the Great Spirit of the Universe, flutters away like a dove from its nest, only to return, after a weary flight, to fold its wings and once more melt away in Nature’s immortal heart, an uncreated and eternal essence.
Before the dawn of day, the ever-watchful Antonio had prepared the indispensable cup of coffee, which is the tropical specific against the malignant night-damps; and the first rays of the sun shot over the trees only to fall on our sail, bellying with the fresh and invigorating sea-breeze. We laid our course for the mouth of a river called Wawashaan (hwas or wass, in the dialect of the interior, signifying water), which enters the lagoon, about twenty miles to the northward of the Haulover. Here we were told there was a settlement, which I determined to visit. As the day advanced, the breeze subsided, and we made slow progress. So we paddled to the shore of one of the numerous islands in the lagoon, to avoid the hot sun and await the freshening of the breeze in the afternoon. The island on which we landed appeared to be higher than any of the others, and was moreover rendered doubly attractive by a number of tall cocoa-nut palms, that clustered near the beach. We ran our boat ashore in a little cove, where there were traces of fires, and other indications that it was a favorite stopping-place with the natives. A narrow trail led inward to the palm-trees. Leaving the Poyer boy with the canoe, Antonio and myself followed the blind path, and soon came to an open space covered with plantain-trees, now much choked with bushes, but heavily laden with fruit. The palms, too, were clustering with nuts, of which we could not, of course, neglect to take in a supply. Near the trees we found the foundations of a house, after the European plan, and, not far from it, one or two rough grave-stones, on which inscriptions had been rudely traced; but they were now too much obliterated to be read. I could only make out the figure of a cross on one of them, and the name “San Andres,” which is an island off the coast, where it is probable the occupant of this lonely grave was born.
To obtain the cocoa-nuts, which otherwise could only have been got at by cutting down and destroying the trees, Antonio prepared to climb after them. He had brought a kind of sack of coarse netting, which he tied about his neck. He next cut a long section of one of the numerous tough vines which abound in the tropics, with which he commenced braiding a large hoop around one of the trees. After this was done, he slipped it over his head and down to his waist, gave it a few trials of strength, and then began his ascent, literally walking up the tree. It was a curious feat, and worth a description. Leaning back in this hoop, he planted his feet firmly against the trunk, clinging to which, first with one hand, and then with the other, he worked up the hoop, taking a step with every upward movement. Nothing loth to exhibit his skill, in a minute he was sixty feet from the ground, leaning back securely in his hoop, and filling his sack with the nuts. This done, he swung his load over his shoulders, grasped the tree in his arms, let the hoop fall, and slid rapidly to the ground. The whole occupied less time than I have consumed in writing an account of it.
CLIMBING AFTER COCOAS.