Between the mainland, where a dreary haze hinted of the smoke of sleeping volcanoes in the rocky ridge of the peninsula of old California, and the string of isles, the brigantine was made secure by stem and stern.
The mainland was rugged, and apparently admirably abundant with vegetation.
There were giant palmettos tossing their feathery tops to every cat's-paw, in isolated clumps, among a verdant screen of varied trees.
Alas, for the trickiness of Dame Nature. That luxuriance was superficial, the verdancy that of worthless shrubs, cactus, and prickly pear, briar, vine and beach, plum, thorn apple and Dead Sea fruit. Behind that illusive foliage, sand, lava, stones, dust, formed the melancholy waste in which the scanty, wild creatures live in perpetual madness, induced by chronic thirst. Without irrigation, Lower California is an Arabia Petrae.
But as Gladsden had no intention to settle, he was content with the alluring, if deceptive, face of the country.
The first real annoyance was to find a small colony of Indian mongrels, painfully carrying on the re-raking up of the shells of the abandoned pearl fishery grounds. Their huts were picturesquely perched on rocks, the leafy roofs ornamented with gallinasos, fowls, more than half wild, which indolently hunted for food in the natural thatch of palm and brush. These born pearl fishers had been there so long, that they had laid out little gardens for ground and bush, fruit and vegetables, defended by live cactus. Above patches of sugarcane glowed the golden globes of orange and citron, amid deep green leaves.
As don Jorge Federico de Gladsden had come, not to scrape oyster shells, but to haul up a mass of pearls in a submerged box without desiring prying eyes to witness the operation, he allowed Benito to get the observers out of the way by simply hiring the whole settlement to go fishing at another point of the broken reef. From the brigantine they could be seen, without their being able to watch the peculiar fishing in which her crew were about to engage.
Fishing for pearls is a much more dangerous and difficult operation than is generally supposed.
Each of the several piraguas, or pirogues, or dugout canoes, as you please, had two men, stripped for diving, save an apology for bathing drawers, girded on by a rope. This retains to the left side a leather sheath for a heavy knife, not less than eighteen inches long and three fingers wide, sharp as a razor, intended to battle with the sharks and stripe backs, pez manta, a kind of galvanic ray of which the mere contact paralyses the victim.
The worst kind of shark, the tintorera, that is to say, "the dyer," promenades the Pacific where human beings congregate, and comes up the Gulf. One of the headlands on the east coast is named after this terror of the pearl divers. The tintorera owes its cognomen to a singular peculiarity, which reveals his presence providentially to afar off. Pores around his muzzle exude a luminous, gluey matter, which spreads over the entire body and gives him a glowworm like effulgence. Over and above this, the animal is next to blind, and consequently cannot go by sight alone to any point desirable. While, too, other sharks, to seize their prey, simply turn over on their sides, señor el Tintorera has to roll belly up completely.