CHAPTER XIII
IN AND ABOUT OUR VIRGIN ISLANDS
“It’s all I can do to keep from barking at you,” said a passenger on the Virginia, as he crawled on hands and knees from one of the four kennels that decorate her afterdeck. As a matter of fact, we all did a certain amount of growling before the voyage was over. Yet the four of us who had won the kennels were lucky dogs compared to the unfortunate dozen or more who had to snatch what sleep they could curled up on the bare deck or in a single sour-smelling cabin below, where neither color, sex nor seasickness knew any distinction.
The weakest link in the shipping chain down the West Indies is that between our own possessions. Once a week a little schooner that was built to defend America’s yachting championship, but which never reached the finals, raises its wings in San Juan harbor and, the winds willing, drops a flock of disgruntled passengers, the United States mails, and an assorted cargo in St. Thomas and St. Croix in time to return for a similar venture seven days later. Congressional committees, of course, have their battleships, and the white-uniformed governors of our Virgin Islands their commodious steam-yacht; but the mere garden variety of tax-paying citizen has the privilege of tossing about for several days on the Virginia, subsisting on such food as he has had the foresight to bring with him, and drinking such lukewarm water as he can coax from the schooner’s cask.
It is nearly fifty miles from Porto Rico to St. Thomas. All day long our racing yacht crawled along the coast, San Juan and the island’s culminating peak, El Yunque, equally immovable on the horizon, while the half-grown crew alternated between pumping water from the hold and playfully disobeying the orders of the forceless old mulatto captain. Nine at night found us opposite Fajardo light—more than an hour by automobile from our starting-point! While the crew slept, without so much as posting a lookout, a boy of thirteen sat at the wheel, and the kennel-less passengers tossed restlessly on their chosen deck spots. A half-grown pig—the only traveler on board whose ticket specified ship’s food—wandered disconsolately fore and aft, now and then demanding admission to one or another of the four “cabins.” No doubt he recognized them as built for his own, rather than the human, species.
The new church of Guayama, Porto Rico
A Porto Rican ex-soldier working as road peon. He gathers the grass with a wooden hook and cuts it with a small sickle
Porto Rican tobacco fields