But to most strangers Trinidad has little meaning except as the home of the “asphalt lake.” Strictly speaking, it is neither the one nor the other, being rather a pitch deposit, but it would be foolish to quibble over mere words. It is sufficient to know that the spot furnishes most of the asphalt for the western hemisphere.
To reach it one must return to San Fernando by train and continue by government steamer. This frequently flees before the ebbing tide and anchors far out in the shallow, yellowish gulf until its passengers have been rowed aboard, then turns southwest along a flat, uninteresting coast. The pea-soup-colored sea swarms with jelly-fish that resemble huge acorns in shape and color and on which whales come to feed at certain seasons. Among them floats another species with long tendrils, a mere touch of which leaves a sharply stinging sensation for hours afterward. The steamer touches at half a dozen villages down the long southern prong of Trinidad, rounding the point twice a week to Icacos, reputed the largest cocoanut plantation in the world. It is owned by an old Corsican who “came out” in his youth as a porter, and who, in the words of the captain, “is of no class at all,” yet he has a mansion in Port of Spain, several daughters married to French counts, and so much money “he doesn’t know arithmetic enough to count it.”
But our interests are in the first port of call out of San Fernando. A bit beyond the reddish town of La Brea (the Spanish word for pitch) a very long pier with an ocean steamer at the far end of it and iron buckets flying back and forth between it and the land, like a procession of sea-gulls feeding their young, juts out into the gulf. Not so many years ago all the population of this spot, called Brighton, lived on the pier, the shore being famous for a fever that brought almost certain death within two days. This completely disappeared, however, when American concessionists turned the jungle into pasture land. The air is full of pelicans, clumsily diving for fish or awaiting their turn for a seat on the protruding jib boom of a wrecked schooner, along which others sat as tightly crowded together as subway passengers in the evening rush-hour.
Trinidad has many Hindu temples
Very much of a lodge
At the “Asphalt Lake”
