Quite undaunted by the great crowd of Curaçaoans on shore, our jackies made a cable fast to the near-lying quay, by which means our big boats are pulled back and forth, to and from the ship. Those coming to us bring the sellers of baskets; and it is here, although forewarned and forearmed, that our basket mania again breaks forth in full force. First came the famous Curaçaoan nests of baskets, of which Charles Kingsley confesses to have been beguiled into buying; and, if so wise a man as he fell victim to the wiles of the Curaçaoan basket-woman, how much more readily would we weaker mortals become her prey? Then, ranged temptingly, along the dock stood rows of Curaçaoan hampers,—great, fine, coloured affairs, which we looked at, and looked at, and looked at, and didn’t buy. Then, beside the basket-women, were the men with fans and all sorts of straw weavings,—and then, oh! the work-boxes. Truly, you have seen them! Has not your grandmother stowed away in the dark attic somewhere an old mahogany box, inlaid with ivory and brass and coloured woods, with fascinating secret drawers and numerous lids for the hiding of her precious keepsakes and age-worn trinkets? Such a box is one of the chaste memories of my childhood,—Grandmother’s mahogany box, with the inlaid lid and the musty odour of bygone years. When we found these same dear old boxes away down in Curaçao, the worn, hingeless, forsaken chest in the attic arose into a new dignity—into the dignity of a noble family lineage. So I have found at last its habitat, and these bright and gleaming creations are great-great—and no end to great—grandchildren of my far-away, lonely relic in the attic. But sentiment has to give way to reason, and we shake our heads at the box-man and the hamper-woman, who, nevertheless, follow us up to the bridge from the Otra-Banda shore over the canal, whence they watch dejectedly while we pay bridge-toll and disappear across the canal into the narrow Dutch streets, where the high roofs seem ready to topple over upon us.
IV.
What a picture of Dutch colonial life comes to us in that short walk! The overreaching eaves all but touch. Old lanterns swing across the narrow way, wrought-iron sign-posts reach long arms out over our heads, the shop doors are wide open, and the keepers of the shops could readily shake hands across the way.
I wonder if there is any excuse at all for the fact that my preconceived ideas about Curaçao were wholly founded upon a very indistinct memory of a certain liquid of that name, said to be distilled upon this island from the wild sour orange? I expected to find this ambrosial nectar stacked in rows in every shop, in bottles, long and slim, chunky, dumpy, and round; in nice little flat bottles,—gifts for bachelor friends; in ornamented fancy bottles for envying housewives; in thick, pudgy, squatty bottles for gouty old uncles; in every conceivable shape and size I expected to find it.
Willemstad was not to be Willemstad—city, town, burg—it was to be an inhabited flask of curaçao, a kind of West Indian bubble blown from the lips of the Northeast Trades, sweet with the breath of wild orange. The man with the bottles was to be a more subtle tempter than the hamper-woman, and—but it didn’t happen that way at all. It turned out very differently.
I, for one, did not see a single bottle of any shape or form in the whole town, but the men must have found some, for just before sailing a box was brought in, labelled “Curaçao,” and I surmised it was liqueur, but I didn’t open the box. Truly I did not!
Some of us cynically argued that the liqueur was all sent in from somewhere else and palmed off as a native product; others clung to the home-production fancy, and yet neither one was altogether wrong, for the famous liqueur is made both in Holland and in this little Dutch colony away off in the New World; at any rate this is its birthplace and home.
But the gold filigree, for which the islanders are famous, was true to our expectations. We are drawn up the shut-in street by the magnetism of a crowd which is gathering about a shop-door, and filling the tiny place fairly to suffocation with eager buyers of gold rings and pins, and all sorts of trinkets.