TOUCAN, OR PREACHER BIRD
The most common of the larger birds was the toucan, the most extraordinary degenerate in the whole animal kingdom, not even excepting man. It has a nose as long as its body. Pluck out its feathers and you can not tell which is the degenerate part, the enormously developed, six-inch bill or the comparatively puny, six-inch body. The bill is certainly the best developed of the two and capable of giving the body the best possible chance of gathering food and surviving where other species might die out. Perhaps this adaptability for feeding itself accounted for the great number we saw in comparison with the smaller number of others of any one kind. But how the bird manages to escape indigestion is certainly a mystery. One mouthful ought to replete it beyond recovery. The color of the bill is a softly blended mixture of red, yellow, blue and green, and the body a gaudy combination of the same. The bird is called by the natives the “preacher bird” because it owes its reputation to the development of its mouth; and one variety has a black body like a preacher. But I myself would have called it the “fashion bird” because it resembles a woman of fashion; for it attracts attention from a distance by the enormity of its headgear, and when the body arrives you are confronted with a bunch of beautiful frills and feathers, a “thing of beauty and a joy forever.”
But Doctor Senn was out for alligators, for something that could not fly away and get lost in the jungle after it was killed, and he would have sat on the sharp edge of the awning with his feet in midair for a week rather than miss the big game. He did thus sit for four hours, and was finally rewarded. After traversing eight miles of wilderness, we came to the river and steamed upstream a few miles, enjoying extended views of hill and valley; and on our way back spied the alligator. He was lying on his stomach basking in the sun, which had come out after the rain and which was drying off his back and Doctor Senn’s legs. He looked immense, sprawled out at the water’s edge in an attitude of the greatest reptilian comfort and content, as if seeming to say, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Doctor Senn took in the situation and scratched his back.
As we were several hundred feet away, it was impossible to say just where the bullet struck. The alligator knew, however, and was satisfied with one scratch, for he flopped into the water and disappeared as if he had been shot and we left him for dead. It occurred to me that there were three things an alligator hunter has to contend with, viz., first, to find his game; next, to kill it, and, last, to get it. But for these difficulties I might enjoy alligator hunting myself.
As we glided back late in the afternoon through the still waters of the artificial forest channel, closely hemmed in on either side by the mysterious solitude of omnipotent Nature, and which was now silent and strewn with the dead reminders of Doctor Senn’s fell ambition, it seemed to me that these two excursions to the banana plantations would have saved my trip to the tropics from failure even if the congress had not served as the fulfillment of a joyous scientific duty. Nothing else had come up to my expectations, except bad weather, seasickness and the $25,000 barrel. Now I had had my reward and felt that traveling in the tropics surpassed all other travel in the world—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Staying at home is the only thing that beats it in either respect. Any fool can travel in the tropics but it takes a wise man, or a poor man, to stay at home. Blessed are the wise, and the poor.
However, there have been wise men who went to Panama; but they came back again. Work was made for the white man in the North and probably for the negro in the temperate South, but no work was intended to be done by any one in tropical regions, unless he goes up on a high mountain to do it. The Northerner, by centuries of practice, has acquired immunity from the bad effects of work in temperate climates, but this immunity soon wears out when he goes to the tropics, just as the immunity from the bad effects of loafing wears off when the native of the tropics comes North. The bad effects of work are endemic in the tropics and are only kept from becoming epidemic by the small amount of work done. I hope that the new canal officials and engineers will be soldiers and will, like our army officers already stationed at Panama, prove an exception to human nature and will become immune to the laws of human nature and do some work on the ground, and that they will live long enough.[4]
[4] The above was written before the president undertook to construct the canal through the agency of army officers and thus removes all doubt about the wisdom of his course. The work is now being done for the benefit of the United States instead of for the benefit of engineers and contractors. The adoption of this course was a happy thought of a great administration.
CHAPTER IV
From Bad to Worse
Out of Provisions—Shopping for Wet Goods in the Dark—Mud and Rain—Artistic Imitation of Jamaica Cigars—Smoking for Fair Weather—A Stoic Doctor—Ingratitude—A Model Roommate—A $1,200 Bill for False Labels—Spoiling a Good Article with a Poor Price—Prepared to Fast—The Greatest Mathematician and Gravest Philosopher of Modern Times—Rough Weather—A Ladies’ Man—In Protected Waters—All on Deck—A Sudden Arrival—An Unsuccessful Attempt—A Rolling Ship Gathers no Stoics—A Charge on a Steamer Chair—Washing the Deck with White Rock Water—Female Sympathy—A Dispute between Two Old Friends—A Broken Chair—A Retreat—An Immune from Seasickness—Rough Again—The Breakfast Habit—Eating and Rolling—A Mixed-up Breakfast—Being Rammed and Trod upon—Too much Hughes—Pope and Jordan—The Apotheosis of Calmness—Philosophy out of Place—Struck by a Norther—A Night of Pandemonium—Distressed Doctors—A Doctor’s Appetite—A Doctor in Distress—Getting Dressed Successfully—Losing Time to Avoid Being Wrecked.