So there is an allegory for you, worthy of John Bunyan.
Next morning we got the breeze again, when we bore away for Santiago de Cuba, and arrived off the Moro Castle on the fifth evening at sunset, after leaving Port Royal harbour. The Spaniards, in their better days, were a kind of coral worms; wherever they planted their colonies, they immediately set to covering themselves in with stone and mortar; applying their own entire energies, and the whole strength of their Indian captives, first to the erection of a fort; their second object (postponed to the other only through absolute necessity) being then to build a temple to their God. Gradually vast fabrics appeared, where before there was nothing but one eternal forest, or a howling wilderness; and although it does come over one, when looking at the splendid moles, and firm-built bastions, and stupendous churches of the New World—the latter surpassing, or at the lest equalling in magnificence and grandeur those of Old Spain herself—that they are all cemented by the blood and sweat of millions of gentle Indians, of whose harmless existence in many quarters, they remain the only monuments, still it is a melancholy reflection to look back and picture to one’s self what Spain was, and to compare her, in her high and palmy state, with what she is now—to compare her present condition even with what she was when, as a young midshipman, I first visited her glorious Transatlantic colonies.
Until the Peninsula was overrun by the French, Buenos Ayres, La Guayra, Porto Cavello, Maracaibo, Santa Martha, and that stronghold of the west, the key of the Isthmus of Darien, Cartagena de las Indias, with Porto Bello, and Vera Cruz, on the Atlantic shores of South America, were all prosperous and happy—“Llenas de plata;” and on the Western coast, Valparaiso, Lima, Panama, and San Bias, were thriving and increasing in population and wealth. England, through her colonies, was at that time driving a lucrative trade with all of them; but the demon of change was abroad, blown thither by the pestilent breath of European liberalism. What a vineyard for Abbe Sieyes to have laboured in! Every Capitania would have become a purchaser of one of his cut and dried constitutions. Indeed he could not have turned them out of hand fast enough. The enlightened few, in these countries, were as a drop in the bucket to the unenlightened many; and although no doubt there were numbers of the former who were well-meaning men, yet they were one and all guilty of that prime political blunder, in common with our Whig friends at home, of expecting a set of semi-barbarians to see the beauty of, and to conform to, their newfangled codes of free institutions, for which they were as ready as I am to die at this present moment. Bolivar, in his early fever of patriotism, made the same mistake, although his shrewd mind, in his later career, saw that a despotism, pure or impure—I will not qualify it—was your only government for the savages he had at one time dignified with the name of fellow-patriots. But he came to this wholesome conclusion too late; he tried backs it is true, but it would not do; the fiend had been unchained, and at length hunted him broken hearted into his grave.
But the men of mind tell us, that those countries are now going through the political fermentation, which by and by will clear, when the sediment will be deposited, and the different ranks will each take their acknowledged and undisputed stations in society; and the United States are once and again quoted against we of the adverse faction, as If there were the most remote analogy between their population, originally composed of all the cleverest scoundrels of Europe, and the barbarians of Spanish America, where a few master spirits, all old Spaniards, did indeed for a season stick fiery off from the dark mass of savages amongst whom their lot was cast, like stars in a moonless night, but only to suffer a speedy eclipse from the clouds and storm which they themselves had set in motion. We shall see. The scum as yet is uppermost, and does not seem likely to subside, but it may boil over. In Cuba, however, all was at the time quiet, and still is, I believe, prosperous, and that too without having come through this said blessed political fermentation.
During the night we stood off and on under easy sail, and next morning, when the day broke, with a strong breeze and a fresh shower, we were about two miles off the Moro Castle, at the entrance of Santiago de Cuba.
I went aloft to look round me. The sea-breeze blew strong, until it reached within half a mile of the shore, where it stopped short, shooting in cat’s-paws occasionally into the smooth belt of water beyond, where the long unbroken swell rolled like molten silver in the rising sun, without a ripple on its surface, until it dashed its gigantic undulations against the face of the precipitous cliffs on the shore, and flew up in smoke. The entrance to the harbour is very narrow, and looked from my perch like a zig-zag chasm in the rock, inlaid at the bottom with polished blue steel; so clear, and cahn, and pellucid was the still water, wherein the frowning rocks, and magnificent trees on the banks, and the white Moro, rising with its grinning tiers of cannon, battery above battery, were reflected veluti in speculum, as if it had been in a mirror.
We had shortened sail, and fired a gun, and the signal for a pilot was flying, when the Captain hailed me. “Does the sea breeze blow into the harbour yet, Mr Cringle?”
“Not yet, sir; but it is creeping in fast.”
“Very well. Let me know when we can run in. Mr Yerk, back the main topsail, and heave the ship to.”
Presently the pilot canoe, with the Spanish flag flying in the stem, came alongside; and the pilot, a tall brown man, a Moreno, as the Spaniards say, came on board. He wore a glazed cocked hat, rather an out-of-the-way finish to his figure, which was rigged in a simple Osnaburg shirt, and pair of trowsers. He came on the quarterdeck, and made his bow to the captain with all the ease in the world, wished him a good morning, and taking his place by the quartermaster at the conn, he took charge of the ship. “Senor,” quoth he to me, “is de harbour blow up yet? I mean, you see de viento walking into him?—de terral—dat is land-wind—has he cease?”