As we approached land, the character of the place was indicated by the boats lying at anchor, and by those which clung, like a forlorn hope, to the rickety old piers along shore. They were the most dilapidated, nondescript lot of craft I have ever seen.
The “fort” at the harbour entrance was in a state of collapse, and about big enough to shelter a basket of babies. The Haïtien “man-of-war” anchored near the shore was an absurd old iron gunboat with rusty stacks and dishevelled rigging, painted in many colours and temporarily incapacitated because of leaky boilers and broken engines. The rest of the “Haïtien Navy,” i. e., another old rusty gunboat, was lying neglected and half sunken near by. The pier where we landed was so shattered by time and water that I had to pick my way very carefully in order to keep from falling through. On shore, we were at once surrounded by a mob of jabbering Haïtiens, speaking—well, it’s hard to say just what. It started out French and ended in an incomprehensible jargon, intelligible only to the delicate Haïtien ear. As we picked our way along the tumble-down pier, between piles of coral which had been recently removed from the shoal water near shore (in order that small boats could land at the piers), the tatterdemalion Haïtiens escorted us to the city, under a tumble-down archway, into tumble-down Port-au-Prince, to find waiting for us at the other side of this water gate an assortment of vehicles which I find it quite impossible to describe. They had had an earthquake in Port-au-Prince the preceding October, and those carriages looked as if they had passed through the whole shocking ordeal. The horses, not as high as my shoulder, were simply animated bones,—“articulated equine skeletons” somebody said—harnessed with ropes and strings and old scraps of leather, to what were once “carriages,” all of antiquated patterns,—anything from a cart to a carryall; and to the enormous Americans, who doubled up their precious knees in order to sit inside, they seemed like the veriest rattletraps for dolls. Off they moved, the whole wobblety procession, to the cracking of native whips and howls of the admiring vagabonds. The white dust blew about us, and the sun beat down upon our heads, and we were in the Tropics indeed. I do not know whether it was the result of seasickness, or what it was, but everything in Haïti looked crooked. Sister said that the Mother Goose “Crooked Man” must have come from Haïti, and I agreed with her.
III.
We preferred to walk up into the town,—not because we were more merciful than those who had wobbled and rattled and jiggled on before us, but because we thought it would be a little more Haïtien than if we drove. We might have taken the tram, but it was more fun to watch it hitch its precarious way along after its stuffy, rusty, leaky little “dummy” engine, down through the crooked streets, than to jerk along with it. The only sensible thing to do was just to stand there within the ruins of a one-time beautiful city and look about us. It was the worst, the forlornest, the most mind-forsaken place of which you can conceive. Earthquakes had cracked and tumbled down some of the best buildings, fire had destroyed many others, and the remains had been left as they had dropped, under the blistering sun, to crumble away into dust; and thronging in and through the ruins like black ants about their downtrodden dwelling, were swarms of rag-tag human beings whom I call such merely because no species of “missing link” has yet been recognised by our anthropologists.