Plotting in Pirate Seas

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

The following day, having seen his friend the planter off on the homeward bound mail steamer, Stuart prepared for his visit to the famous Pitch Lake, though the planter had warned him that he would be disappointed.

Going by railway to Fernando, Stuart took a small steamer to La Brea, the shipping point for the asphalt, a town, which, by reason of its association with pitch, has a strange and unnatural air. The beach is covered with pieces of pitch, encrusted with sand and stones, worn by the water into the most grotesque shapes and forming so many resting-places for hundreds of pelicans. Some of these blocks of hardened asphalt had been polished by the sea until they shone like jewels of jet as large as a table, others, fringed with green seaweed, gave the shore an uncanny appearance of a sea-beach not of this earth. Unlike the universally white towns of the West Indies, La Brea is black. The impress of pitch is everywhere. The pier is caked with the pitch, the pavements are pitch, and, on the only street in the town as Stuart passed, he saw a black child, sitting on a black boulder of pitch, and playing with a black doll made of pitch.

Taking a negro boy as a guide, Stuart started for the famous deposit of asphalt, about one mile inland. The countryside leading thither was not absolutely barren, but it was scrawny and dismal. A coarse sand alternated with chunks of black asphalt. A few trees managed to find a foothold here and there, and there was sparse vegetation in patches.

There was nothing exciting, nothing momentous in the approach to the lake. Nor was there anything startling in the sight of the lake itself.

Although previously warned, Stuart could not repress an exclamation of disappointed surprise at his first view of this famous lake, the greatest deposit of natural asphalt in the world.

A circular depression, so slight that it was hard for the boy to realize that it was a depression at all, had, toward its center, a smaller flat, 115 acres in extent. There were no flames, no sulphurous steam, no smoke, no bubbling whirls of viscid matter, nothing exciting whatever. The stretch before him resembled nothing so much as mud-flat with the tide out. The dried-up bed of a large park pond, with a small island or two of green shrubbery, and some very scrawny palms around the edge would exactly represent the famous Pitch Lake of Trinidad.

Arriving at the edge, Stuart stepped on the lake with the utmost precaution, for he had read that the lake was both warm and liquid. Both were true. But the warmth was only slight, and the liquidity was so dense that, when a piece of pitch was taken out, it took several hours for the slow-moving mass to fill up the hole.

"The sensation that walking upon this substance gave," writes Treves, "was no other than that of treading upon the flank of some immense beast, some Titanic mammoth lying prostrate in a swamp. The surface was black, it was dry and minutely wrinkled like an elephant's skin, it was blood-warm, it was soft and yielded to the tread precisely as one would suppose that an acre of solid flesh would yield. The general impression was heightened by certain surface creases, where the hide seemed to be turned in as in the folds behind an elephant's ears. These skin furrows were filled with water, as if the collapsed animal was perspiring.

"The heat of the air was great, the light was almost blinding, while the shimmer upon the baked surface, added to the swaying of one's feet in soft places, gave rise to the idea that the mighty beast was still breathing, and that its many-acred flank actually moved."

The task of taking the pitch out of this lake, Stuart found to be as prosaic as the lake itself. Laborers, with picks, broke off large pieces—which showed a dull blue cleavage—while other laborers lifted the pieces on their heads—the material is light—and carried them to trucks, running on a little railroad on the surface of the lake, and pulled by a cable line.