As the tropical rains, though generally confined only to part of the year, and then only to a few hours of the day, fall in so much greater abundance than under our constantly drooping skies, it may naturally be supposed that the single showers must be proportionally violent. Descending in streams so close and so dense that the level ground, unable to absorb it sufficiently fast, is covered with a sheet of water, the rain rushes down the hill-sides in a volume that wears channels in the surface. For hours together the noise of the torrent, as it beats upon the trees and bursts upon the roofs, occasions an uproar that drowns the ordinary voice and renders sleep impossible. In Bombay nearly nine inches of rain have been known to fall in one day, and twelve inches in Calcutta, or nearly half the mean annual quantity of rain on the east coast of England. During one single storm which Castelnau witnessed at Pebas, on the Amazon, there fell not less than thirty inches of rain—nearly as much as the annual supply of our west coast. The hollow trunk of an enormous tree in an exposed situation gave the French traveller the means of accurate measurement.
As in the equatorial regions the atmospherical precipitations are far more considerable than in the temperate zones, so also their storms rage with a violence unknown in our climes. In the Indian and Chinese Seas these convulsions of nature generally take place at the change of the monsoons; in the West Indies, at the beginning and at the end of the rainy seasons. The tornado which devastated the Island of Guadeloupe on the 25th July, 1846, blew down buildings constructed of solid stone, and tore the guns of a battery from their carriages; another, which raged some years back in the Mauritius, demolished a church and drove thirty-two vessels on the strand. On the Beagle’s arrival in Port Louis, after her long and arduous surveying voyage, a fleet of crippled vessels, the victims of a recent hurricane, might have been seen making their way into the harbour—some dismasted, others kept afloat with difficulty, firing guns of distress or giving other signs of their helpless condition. ‘On the now tranquil surface of the harbour lay a group of shattered vessels, presenting the appearance of floating wrecks. In almost all, the bulwarks, boats, and everything on deck, had been swept away; some, that were towed in, had lost all their masts; others, more or less of their spars; one had her poop and all its cabins swept away; many had four or five feet of water in the hold, and the clank of the pumps was still kept up by the weary crew.’[1]
Such are the terrible effects of the tornados and cyclones of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans; but the storms of the miscalled Pacific are no less furious and destructive. A hurricane, which on the 15th of April, 1845, burst over Pitcairn Island, washed all the fertile mould from the rocks, and, uprooting 300 cocoa-nut trees, cast them into the sea. Every fishing-boat on the island was destroyed, and thousands of fruit-bearing bananas were swept away.
The celebrated missionary, John Williams,[2] describes a similar catastrophe which befell the beautiful island of Rarotonga on the 23rd of December, 1831. The chapels, school-houses, mission-houses, and nearly all the dwellings of the natives, no less than a thousand in number, were levelled to the ground. Every particle of food on the island was destroyed. Of the thousands of banana or plantain trees which had covered and adorned the land, scarcely one was left standing, either on the plains, in the valleys, or upon the mountains. Stately trees, that had withstood the storms of ages, were laid prostrate on the ground, and thrown upon each other in the wildest confusion; while even of those that were still standing, many were left without a branch, and all perfectly leafless. So great and so general was the destruction, that no spot escaped; for the gale, veering gradually round the island, did most effectually its devastating work.
Though the tropical storms are thus frequently a scourge, they are often productive of no less signal benefits. Many a murderous epidemic has suddenly ceased after one of these natural convulsions, and myriads of insects, the destroyers of the planter’s hopes, are swept away by the fierce tornado. Besides, if the equatorial hurricanes are far more furious than our storms, a more luxurious vegetation effaces their vestiges in a shorter time. Thus Nature teaches us that a preponderance of good is frequently concealed behind the paroxysms of her apparently unbridled rage.
SAVANNAH ON FIRE.
CHAPTER II.
THE LLANOS.
Their Aspect in the Dry Season—Vegetable Sources—Land Spouts—Effects of the Mirage—A Savannah on Fire—Opening of the Rainy Season—Miraculous Changes—Exuberance of Animal and Vegetable Life—Conflict between Horses and Electrical Eels—Beauty of the Llanos at the Termination of the Rainy Season—The Mauritia Palm.