He was a fine-looking man, and though aged, had all the bearing of what he was, or I should say is—a grandee of Old Castile.
On returning to the Eugenie we found Antonio, the Cuban, working among the crew as lustily and actively as any man on board. Weston now offered him remuneration for the time he had been with us, with a hint that he might find a berth elsewhere; but our castaway evinced the greatest reluctance to leave the brig, and begged that he might be permitted to remain on board, as three of our best hands had been sent ashore sick to the hospital.
So short-sighted is man, that Captain Weston, despite the dislike of the crew, and the advice of Marc Hislop, ordered that the name of Antonio be entered on the ship's books as a foremast-man.
Three weeks after our arrival, the brig was careened to starboard, when clear of all the cargo, and had her copper scraped and cleaned, an operation which the constant rains of the season greatly retarded.
There was much in Cuba to feed an imaginative mind, and mine was full of the voyages, the daring adventures, and the vast discoveries of Columbus, with the exploits of the buccaneers, whose haunts were amid these wild, and, in those days, savage shores.
I thought of the gaily plumed and barbarously armed caciques whom Columbus had met in their fleet piroguas, or had encountered in the dense forests which clothe the Cuban mountains—forests, old, perhaps, as the days of the deluge—of the yellow-skinned women with their long, flowing black hair, and with plates of polished gold hanging at their ears and noses, of the fierce warriors streaked with sable war-paint, and armed with cane arrows shod with teeth or poisoned fish-bones, that fell harmless from the Spanish coats of mail; of the wild Caribs who devoured their prisoners—with whom a battle was but a precursor of a feast; and of the famous fighting women—the terrible Amazons of Guadaloupe.
I thought of the story of Columbus writing the narrative of his wonderful discoveries, his perils and adventures, on a roll of parchment, which he wrapped in oil-cloth covered over with wax, inclosed in a little cask, and then cast into the sea, with a prayer, and the hope that if he and his crew perished, this record of their achievements might be cast by the ocean on the shore of some Christian land.
As I sat by the sounding sea that rolled into the bay of Matanzas, what would I not have given to have seen the waves cast that old cask, covered with weeds and barnacles, at my feet!
But now the plodding steam-tug and the rusty merchant trader ploughed the waters of the bay, instead of the gilded Spanish caravels, or the long war-piroguas of the Indian warriors; and where they fought their bloodiest battles on the wooded shore, or in the green savanna, where the painted cacique and the mailed Castilian met hand to hand in mortal strife, the smoke of the steam-mill, grinding coffee, or boiling sugar, darkened the sky, and the songs of the negroes were heard as they hoed in the plantations, or in gangs of forty trucked mahogany logs, each drawn by eight sturdy oxen, to the sea.
And so, in a creek of the bay—the same place where the Dutch Admiral Heyn sunk the Spanish plate fleet—I was wont to sit dreamily for hours, with the murmur of the waves in my ears, with the buzz of insects, and the voice of the mocking-birds among the palmettoes, while watching the sails that glided past the headlands of the bay, on their way to the Bahama Channel, or the great Gulf of Florida.