And now let us go down to near the mouth of the Father of Waters, to “Barra Tarra Land” or Barren Land, as it was called of old by Cervantes, in the kingdom of Sancho Panza. Strange how little the great men of the old world knew of this new world! In one of his plays Shakespeare speaks of ships from Mexico; in another he means to mention the Bermudas. Burns speaks of a Newfoundland dog as
“Whelped in a country far abroad
Where boatmen gang to fish for cod,”
and Byron gets in a whole lot about Daniel Boone; but as a rule we were ignored.
Barra Tarra, so called, is the very richest part of this globe. It must have been rich always, rich as the delta of the Nile; but now, with the fertility of more than a dozen States dumped along there annually, it is rich as cream is rich.
The fish, fowl, oysters of Barra Tarra—ah, the oysters! No oysters in the world like these for flavor, size and sweetness. They are so enormous in size that—but let me illustrate their size by an anecdote of the war.
A Yankee captain, hungry and worn out hewing his way with his sword from Chicago to the sea, as General Logan had put it, sat down in a French restaurant in New Orleans, and while waiting for a plate of the famous Barra Tarra raw oysters, saw that a French creole sitting at the same little side table was turning over and over with his fork a solitary and most tempting oyster of enormous size, eyeing it ruefully.
“Why don’t you eat him?”
“By gar! I find him too big for me. You like?”
“Certainly. Not too big for me. See this!” and snatching the fork from the Frenchman the oyster was gone at a gulp.