CHAPTER XII.
HENRY VIVIAN TRIES TO DO HIS DUTY
It is now necessary to be occupied directly with Daniel, and those brief days before the Peabody met her fate.
From Tobago she returned to Barbados with a small cargo of turtle and cocoanuts; then she sailed directly to the Northern Lesser Antilles, and reached her next and last port, St Pierre, in Martinique.
But we are concerned with earlier events affecting young Sweetland, and these may best be chronicled by setting down the opening passages of a second letter that he began to write to his wife at Scarborough, the little port of Tobago. This communication was never completed, but it covers a period of fifteen days in the life of the writer, and when he put it aside to finish on another occasion he little dreamed that he would see the sheet no more.
“My own dear heart” wrote he—“Here’s the old tub at Tobago with steam in her rotten boilers again! Talk about volcanoes and suchlike! ’Tis us aboard the Peabody that be on a volcano, not the shore folks. This here’s a very fine island, and I’ve had a merry time when I could get ashore. They laugh at me, because I be gathering together such a lot of queer things for you. God He knows if you’ll ever get ’em and hang ’em round the walls to home, but if you do, I lay you’ll be mazed with wonder. There’s a huge river by name of Orinoco that pours out of the mainland of South America, and it brings to these shores all manner of queer seeds and shells and suchlike, including coral and coraline, like stone fans, all very beautiful for ornaments. I tramp along when off duty and fill my pockets, and say every minute, ‘My stars, won’t Minnie like that!’ or ‘These here will make a necklace almost so pretty as pearls, for her neck!’ There be little silver-like shells here, all curly. I’ve got scores; and the niggers say as there be real pink pearls to be got; but I doubt it, ’cause if there was, why don’t somebody with plenty of time get ’em? Sometimes the cocoanuts will fall with a bang just while you be under the palms. I near had my head knocked off by a whacker t’other day; then I forced a hole in his monkey face (for they be all like monkeys one end) and drank the milk and shared the creamy inside with a hungry dog as chanced to be passing that way. As for adventures, I had one with a hoss would make ’em laugh to home. I calls it a hoss, but never you seed such a lop-sided bag o’ bones. But ’twas something to have un between my legs, and I made un gallop a bit, much to his surprise, afore I’d done with un. A nigger boy went with me to get any queer things as might happen by the way, and I rode into the island to see a river where they say there be alligators. The hoss was called ‘Nap,’ and the nigger went by the name of Peter. And a very fine time us had of it at first. The road led up and up through palms and tamarinds and mangoes, and a million trees I’d never seed or heard of. Frangipani made the air sweet to the nose. It grows in stars ’pon great naked boughs, and they make scent of it. Then there was bindweeds, like we get to home but larger, all crawled all over the hedges, with yellow and purple flowers to ’em. And everywhere in the blazing woods was flowers and seeds, and berries and cocoa trees, which be just like them advertisements in the shop windows to Moreton of Cadbury’s Cocoa! The pods hang on the trees all purple and gold. I got seeds and berries for you, and having a little shotgun as Bradley lent me, I killed a few birds and one sun-bird as be like a splash of fire on the wing, and a green humming-bird or two. My hoss he loafed along, thinking of anything but his business, but he was eating out of the hedge all the while, and sometimes ’twas a fight between us which should get to something first. As to alligators, I never seed the tail of one; but lizards was there by the million, and iguanas too. They be very big chaps and pretty eating when you can catch ’em, so Bradley says. The lizards be all colours of the rainbow and all sizes, from a tadpole to a squirrel. In the trees was all manner of hothouse things a-blazing away and quite at home, and on the hill-sides grew wild plantain, wild indigo, guinea-grass, cotton, cashew trees (cashews be nuts), cabbage palms, and all manner of other fine things, with the humming-birds and butterflies looking like flowers blowed out of the trees. Then, as for the stream, it bustled along for all the world like a Dartmoor brook, and the sound of it among the stones was like a word from home. But instead of the heather and whortleberries and fern, there was all foreigners ’pon the bank, and instead of a Moorman coming along with a nitch of reeds or a cart of peat I found a lot of black gals washing linen in the stream.
“‘Well, my dears, have ’e seed any alligators upalong?’ I axed ’em; and they said, ‘No, massa sailor, we no see no alligators.’
“I had a row with the hoss coming back and was much surprised to find he’d got devil enough in him to run away. Of course I held on, and ’twas rather amusing except for all the things he jerked out of my pockets. ’Peared to me that he galloped on one side and trotted on t’other. When he runned away he was going about three miles an hour. Afore that I never seed the funeral as wouldn’t have catched him up and passed him. He got me down to the wharf; then his gear all carried away and I falled off with the saddle on top of me.
“’Tis pretty eating here, and we have tree oysters, if you’ll believe it, that grow on the roots of trees in the salt creeks. Also snapper-fish, yams, gourd soup, muscovy ducks, cocoanut pudding, guava cheese, and many other tidy things.