I had a pleasant drive into the country, over fine English roads, Macadamized with volcanic stone by chain gangs. Our fancy-turbaned Lascar driver kept up the while a noise like that of our swamp-sparrows, to encourage his horses. We saw the large fields of sugar-cane, rustling in their deep green, with here and there the tall white chimneys of a sugar-house, or the painted roofs of the chateaus of the Creole, who live very luxuriously, rising in the midst of the promising crops, whose aggregate yield it was thought would be one hundred and sixty millions of pounds of sugar. The foliage that encroaches on the roadside with its luxuriance, or stretches way back to the base of the steep volcanic hills in sight, says “Tropical, tropical;” “the acacia waves her yellow hair,” you have the wide-spreading banyan, the tall rough barked cocoa, the cabbage-tree—its branches interlocked, the banana, the plantain, the ever-graceful palm,— each one of its leaves large enough to make a fan; and then too the traveller’s tree, which on being tapped, affords the weary and athirst a substitute for water. Underneath this mass of rank green, you notice the straight-stemmed aloe with its graceful top-knot, and in the hedges that porcupine plant, the cactus, whose prickly leaf and long thorn, prevent the hump-backed, or Hindoo cattle of the country from getting in the fields of green cane. Then the birds are beautiful to see: the pure white boatswain, the noisy little paroquet, the black frigate bird, and the pretty little cardinal with his feather cowl.
The morning scene along the roads is at all times animated. With his proverbial industry, in rope-harness, one John Chinaman is pulling and another John Chinaman is pushing, heavy burdens in a small wagon; or, footing it in a trot to the town, with his bamboo-baskets strapped on shoulder, goes the chicken-merchant with his juvenile Shanghaes. Walking past you in groups, their hands clasped one with another, or stretched on their back, the rays of the sun kept off by the shady branches of the palm, or sitting under a roof made of its leaves, having his head shaved, or the hairs of his moustache plucked out here and there, to make the outline more graceful, is the semi-denuded and meat-hating Lascar.
This is a very small picture.
I visited the village of “Pamplemouses,” where is situated the church—as the delightful story, hath it —in which worshipped the mother of Paul and the mother of Virginia. Not far from this building, in the grounds of a resident, placed on either side of an artificial lake containing red and gold fish, are two square cemented pedestals, surmounted by rude urns, entirely overgrown with the pretty “Pride of Barbadoes.” These are the tombs of Paul and Virginia—so said the good old lady who accompanied us to the sentimental spot, and called our attention to the fact that they were drowned, when these cocoa, palm, and camphor trees around, were not so large as now. Mauritius being an English colony, of course we paid a shilling. Some sentimental Laura Matilda perhaps “in tears and white muslin,” has striven for affectionate immortality, by writing on the tomb of Virginia, in a rather masculine hand, her name; and also lets admiring gazers know, that when she is “to hum,” she is in Massachusetts.
Next you have a view of Tomb Bay, where the young unfortunate went to her death by shipwreck, and after thinking about the height of the breakers, and the hardness of the coral reef, you soothe the fervid mood by a stroll through one of the most attractive botanical gardens that the whole East presents. The sun poured down his hottest rays, but the lofty and strange trees that meet above your head, as a Gothic archway, afford shade, and the great moisture produced under foot, by this exclusion of the sun, brings up a thick green moss, so you walk on a thick velvet carpet, while on both sides of you, rivulets of clear water run gurgling all the time. Whether there was ever such people as the two little loving recipients of morality, Paul and Virginia, or not, or that the Saint Giran was ever wrecked, it is a beautiful spot apart from the story.
But there is reality as well as romance in the Isle of France; the present owner, John Bull, supplies it. On the iron gateway under which you pass, in landing, is “Victoria Regina,” and Victoria Regina levies heavy taxes on the planters. A walk on the esplanade shows you a fence of half-buried cannon—the trophies of the English when they captured the island from the French. In front of the house of the governor, who gets ten thousand dollars more salary than our president, red-coats continually mount guard. Policemen throng the streets in the same uniform I saw in Canada, and in the barrack is quartered a fine regiment of fusiliers to keep the people in subjection.
The island, like others in the Indian ocean, has suffered from hurricanes; the cane may be most promising in the field, but destroyed before garnered. The most violent hurricane they ever had, piled three hundred houses of Port Louis in ruins, and stranded thirty ships in its harbor.
The Portuguese, the discoverers of the island, called it Cerni; the Dutch who came afterward, “Mauritius,” after Prince Maurice of Holland; and the French, Isle of France. In the Champ de Mars, a fine open plain, where the regimental bands play, the troops drill, and the pretty Creole women take their evening drives and promenades, I noticed a very tasteful tomb of a French governor, Malartie, which was finished by the munificence of Sir William Gomm, an English governor.
Four days after our arrival, being the anniversary of the birthday of the Father of our Country, our ship was appropriately dressed with our national ensign, and at mid-day we fired a salute of twenty-one guns, in which the English man-of-war, the “Styx,” which had reached port, would have joined us, but an order from the admiralty forbids the firing of salutes by their national vessels unless their battery reaches a certain number of guns.
We reached Mauritius just in time to enjoy its pleasant fruits, consisting of the pine-apple, the banana, the plantain, the mangoe, and the alligator pear, which could be plentifully obtained from the fruit boats that flocked around the ship; and then, too, before breakfast, we drained the cocoa’s milky bowl.