The once proud Adrea of the New York Yacht Club is a schooner of almost a hundred tons, and still preserves some of her aristocratic features despite the lowly state to which she has fallen under her new name of L’Indépendance. Time was when the fleet of the Black Republic boasted more than twice its present strength; but the larger half of it was sold one day to the “slave trade,” as they still call the carrying of negro laborers to the sugar-mills of Cuba, and on the two masts of L’Indépendance has fallen the entire burden of preserving the Haitian freedom of the seas.
Eleven wild men, all of them, except one yellow fellow for contrast, blacker than the shades of a rainy-season midnight, made up her crew, and the deep-blue and maroon flag of sovereign Haiti flew at her stern. But there was a lighter tint superimposed upon this dark background both of flag and crew. The former bore the white shield which announces a white man in command, and her three officers, averaging the advanced age of twenty-five, were as Caucasian as a New England village. In real life they were a bo’s’n of the American Navy and two enlisted men of our far-flung Marine Corps, hailing from such quaint corners of the world as Cape Cod, Toledo, and Indianapolis; but in that topsyturvy fairy-world of the West Indies they were all first lieutenants of the “Gendarmérie d’Haïti.”
By noon of a midsummer day in December L’Indépendance was rolling across the Windward Passage in a way out of all proportion to her importance or to the mere playfulness of the Caribbean waves. When morning broke, the two horns of Haiti loomed far to the rear on each horizon, and we had already covered some two thirds of our journey.
But not so fast, lest the inexperienced reader get too hasty and optimistic a notion of wind-wafted travel. A schooner is a most romantic means of conveyance—when there is something to fill her sails. I can imagine no greater punishment for American impatience than to be sentenced to lie aimlessly tossing through the hereafter in tropical doldrums where even the fish scorn to bite. Evidently the winds within the gaping jaws of Haiti are as erratic as the untamable race that peoples its mountainous shores.
However, let us avoid exaggeration. We did move every now and then, sometimes in the right direction, occasionally at a spanking pace that sent the blue waters foaming in two white furrows along our bows. Yet the mountainous ridges on either hand crept past with incredible leisureliness. All through the second night the tramp of hurrying bare feet and the stentorian “French” of the officers sounded about the deck cots we had preferred to the still luxurious cabins below—and by sunrise we had covered nearly twenty miles since sunset! Gonave Island, with its alligator snout, floated on our starboard all that day with a persistency which suggested we were towing it along with us. Brown and seeming almost bare at this distance, it showed no other signs of life than a few languid patches of smoke, which the mulatto cabin-boy explained as “Burn ’em off an’ then make ’em grow.” It was well that he had picked up a fair command of English somewhere, for the mere fact that we both prided ourselves on the fluency of our French did not help us in any appreciable degree to carry on conversation with the black crew. The youthful officers, with that quick adaptability which we like to think of as American, had mastered their new calling even to the extent of acquiring that strange series of noises which is dignified in the French West Indies with the name of “creole,” but it would never have been recognized even as a foster-child on Parisian boulevards.
The mountainous northern peninsula on our port grew slightly more variegated under an afternoon sun that gave the incredibly blue landlocked sea the suggestion of an over-indigoed tub on wash-day. The peninsula was brown, for the most part, with a wrinkled and folded surface that seemed to fall sheer from the unbroken summit into the placid blue gulf, and only here and there gleamed a little patch of green. Yet it must have been less precipitous than it seemed, for we made out through our glasses more than one clustered village along the hair-line where sea and mountains met, and now and then a fishing smack crawling along it put in at some invisible cove.
Before the third day waned, our goal, Port au Prince, was dimly to be seen with the same assistance, a tiny, whitish, triangular speck which seemed to stand upright at the base of the hazy mountain-wall stretching across the world ahead. The wind, too, took on a new life, but it blew squarely in our faces, as if bent on refusing us admittance to our destination. The shore we were seeking receded into the dusk, and the men of endless patience which sailing-vessels seem to breed settled down to battle through another night, with little hope of doing more than avoid retreat. We were rewarded, however, with another of those marvelous West Indian sunsets which only a super-artist could hope to picture. Ragged handsful of clouds, like the scattered fleece of the golden-brown vicuña, hung motionless against the background of a pink-and-blue streaked sky, which faded through all possible shades to the blackening indigo of the once more limitless sea.
How long the winds might have prolonged our journey there is no knowing. Out of the black night behind us there appeared what seemed a pulsating star, which gradually grew to unstar-like size and brilliancy. Excitement broke out among the three white mariners. One of them snatched an electric lamp and flashed a few letters of the Morse code into the darkness. They were answered by similar winkings on the arc of the approaching star. This shifted its course and bore down upon us. The captain caught up a megaphone and bellowed into the howling wind. The answer came back in no celestial tongue, but in a strangely familiar and earthly dialect: “Hello! That you, Louie? Tow? Sure. Got a line, or shall I pass you one?” A search-light suddenly revealed the navy of Haiti like a theatrical star in the center of the tossing stage; a submarine-chaser snorted alongside us with American brevity; our sails dropped with a run, and a few moments later we were scudding through the waves into the very teeth of the gale. When I awoke from my next nap, L’Indépendance was asleep at anchor in a placid little cove.
Port au Prince is not, as it appears from far out in the bay, heaped up at the base of a mountain-wall, but stretches leisurely up a gentle, but constant slope that turns mountainous well behind the city. Off and on through the night we had heard the muffled beating of tomtoms, or some equally artistic instrument, and occasionally a care-free burst of laughter, that could come only from negro throats, had floated to us across the water. The first rays of day showed us a stone’s-throw from a shore which the swift tropical dawn disclosed as far denser in greenery than a Cuban coast. The city lay three miles away across the curving bay. Two slender wireless poles and the stack of a more distant sugar-mill stood out against the mountain-range behind, while all else still hovered in the haze of night. Then bit by bit, almost swiftly, the details of the town began to appear, like a photographic plate in the developer. A cream-colored, two-towered cathedral usurped the center of the picture; whitish, box-like houses spotted the slope irregularly all about it, and the completed development showed scores of little hovels scattered through the dense greenery far up the hillsides and along the curving shore. Then all at once a bugle sounded, an American bugle playing the old familiar reveille, and full day popped forth as suddenly as if the strident notes had summoned the world to activity.