“Amigos.”
“What is your errand?”
“We escort the convita of American visitors to San Cristoval.”
The sentinel seemed dissatisfied. Just then Señor Curriel, the fiery little Minister of War, rode up and gave the watchword. The sleepy soldier called his two companions from the guardhouse, and the three oddly equipped figures, dressed in seersucker, with palm-leaf hats, stood at attention as we clattered through the gateway and out to the bridle path that led to San Cristoval. The journey was full of small adventures; we were caught in a violent thunder storm and drenched to the skin, my saddle girth broke, my reins gave out and were replaced by a pair made from a clothesline borrowed at an estancia, where we halted for a few minutes. So much stands out clear, in the full limelight of memory; the rest of the trip is dim and shadowy. I remember that San Cristoval was a poor little place, with a miserable apology for a hotel where we ate; that we slept in hammocks in a native bohie, a hut made of palm wood and thatched with palm leaves; that we were enchanted with the beauty of the country, the friendliness of the people, and the glory of the tropical moonlight nights.
During Holy Week we haunted the old gray stone cathedral, where for centuries the body of Columbus had lain beneath the chancel. The ceremonies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday were full of interest, for I had never before been inside a Catholic church.
Shortly after our arrival, the Nantasket came to Santo Domingo, bringing Lieutenant DeLong and the other young officers whose acquaintance we had made on the Tybee. We gave a ball for the officers and the townspeople, the large rooms of the palace serving excellently for the festivities. The American officers danced with the pretty Dominican girls, who wore fireflies in their dark hair for jewels; for ribbons garlands of flowers twined about their waists and shoulders.
The day after the ball I experienced my first earthquake. It was a breathless afternoon, and I was taking the inevitable siesta. As I lay asleep under my mosquito bar, I heard a low rumbling sound, unlike anything I had ever known before. I recognized it as instinctively as the horses screaming in their stalls below. I sprang up and rushed to the open corridor to see the great stone columns shaking like palm trees in a wind. That night I saw visions; the figure of a nun stood for a moment at the foot of my bed, looked at me intently, then vanished. Her place was taken by a young soldier with a mass of blond hair blown back like a plume; he too looked hard at me, then melted from my sight; last I saw the face of a friend lying in her coffin. When the Tybee arrived with mails from home, she brought the news that this friend had died.
We said good-by to Santo Domingo very regretfully. We had fallen under the spell of the Antilles. There was something almost virginal about the island with its primeval forests of precious trees, mahogany, logwood, and many another whose name I have forgotten. The population was of the scantiest; whole tracts of forest land had never known a woodsman’s ax. There were very few foreigners. We had stumbled by chance upon this happy isle; it had no place in travelers’ tales or guidebooks; its silver sands knew no tourists. We had found a bit of Spain transplanted in the fifteenth century to an enchanted isle of the Caribbean Sea. The founder, Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, died here in 1515. Sixty years later the great English adventurer, Sir Francis Drake, sacked the city, which from that day to this, save for the inevitable revolutions and the perennial squabble with its big, black, half-savage neighbor, Hayti, has known a slumberous existence. The Spanish language has absorbed the dialects of the gentle natives, so dear to Columbus, and the Spanish blood has kept the mixed population from relapsing into the semi-barbarism of Hayti.
When I think of the people I knew there, the kindly Dominicans, the American planters, and business men thrown together in that remote corner of the world, one figure stands out, clear-cut and apart from all the rest,—George DeLong, the arctic explorer. He was a vigorous, ambitious man, full of discontent with the small chance of advancement the navy then offered. Dissatisfied with the slow promotion from rank to rank, he was already casting about for a chance to distinguish himself. The next year brought his opportunity. He obtained permission to join the arctic exploration expedition led by Captain Braine, in 1873, and proved himself so capable that in the year 1879, when James Gordon Bennett fitted out the ill-fated Jeannette for her trip to the arctic, DeLong was given command of the expedition. The cruise of the Jeannette is one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of arctic discovery. The ship sailed from San Francisco for a three years’ voyage, and proceeded to Cape Serdze Kamen in Siberia, whence she steamed northwards until beset by ice. For two years she drifted in the terrible ice pack, always farther and farther north, until she was crushed by the ice, and the party were forced as a forlorn hope to take to their sledges and make a long journey across Siberia. In the last extremity they took refuge in a cave, where DeLong and his fourteen men slowly starved to death. The story of every day’s trial is told in great detail in DeLong’s journals. The men died like heroes, dominated to the last by the courage and spiritual superiority of their leader. The story is a magnificent example of discipline and devotion to duty in the face of the most cruel suffering. When DeLong felt he was dying, with his last remaining strength he threw the precious journal in which he had made his last record over his head far into the interior of the cave, where it was protected, and found by the relief expedition he knew would be sent in search of him. They found him lying with his arm still above his head, his hand pointing to the journal that gave his story to the world and won for him that fame for which he had so hungered!
Before sailing for his first arctic trip DeLong came to see us at our house in South Boston. I still remember his enthusiasm for the adventure. What is the magnet that draws so many high-spirited, courageous men to the doom that still awaits the majority of arctic explorers, in spite of Nansen and Peary? I have talked with DeLong, Shackleton, Peary, and the Englishman, Leigh Smith, of their arctic experiences, and in each case have felt a certain quality they all possessed in common, something remote and stellar that seems to set them apart from their fellows and makes them, perhaps, sensitive to the steady pull of the polar magnet.