“The dead—the honored dead are here—
For whom, behind the sable bier,
Through many a long-forgotten year,
Forgotten crowds have come,
With solemn step and falling tear,
Bearing their brethren home.
“Beneath these boughs, athwart this grass,
I see a dark and moving mass,
Like Banquo’s shades across the glass,
By wizard hands displayed;
Stand back, and let these hearses pass,
Along the trampled glade.”
The Convent of St. Dominic being situated in the southern part of the old city, in the angle formed by the river Ozama, and the sea, observe what a delightful sea-breeze meets us, as we emerge from the ruined refectory. Let us pause a while, to lift our hats, from our heated brows, and refresh ourselves, while we listen to the unceasing roar of the surf, as it beats against the rocky cliff below, and throws its spray half-way to our feet. What a charming view we have of the sea, as it lies in its blue expanse, dotted here and there with a sail; and of the coasts of the island east and west of us—those blackened, rock-bound shores that seem hoary with age, and so much in unison with the train of thought we have been pursuing.
There are but three crafts anchored in the roadstead, where formerly fleets used to lie. Of two of these, we have already spoken. The third is the Alabama. There is a little current setting out of the river, and she lies, in consequence, broadside to the sea, which is setting in to the beach. She is rolling gently to this sea, displaying every now and then, bright streaks of the copper on her bottom. She is full of men, and a strange flag is flying from her peak—not only strange to the dead generations of whom we have been speaking, but new even to our own times and history. It is the flag of a nation which has just risen above the horizon, and is but repeating the history of the world. The oppressed has struggled against the oppressor since time began. The struggle is going on still. It will go on forever, for the nature of man will always be the same. The cockatrice’s egg has been hatched, and swarms of the Puritan have come forth to overrun the fair fields of the South that they may possess them; just as the wild Germans overran the plains of Italy centuries before.
But away with such thoughts for the present. We came on shore to get rid of them. They madden the brain, and quicken the pulse. The little craft, with the strange flag, has borne her captain hither, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the great discoverer, whose history may be written in a single couplet.
“A Castilla, y Leon
Nuevo Mundo, dio Colon.”
On her way hither, her keel has crossed the very track of the three little vessels from Palos—two of them mere open caravels—that first ventured across the vast Atlantic; and now her commander is standing where the great admiral himself once stood—on the very theatre of his early glory. And alas! for Spain, on the theatre of his shame, or rather of her shame, too; for there stands the fortress still, in which are exhibited to the curious spectator the rings in the solid masonry of the wall, to which Columbus was chained!
A short walk will take us to the ruins of the palace of Diego Columbus. We must ascend the river a few hundred yards. Here it is, a little below the port of the present day. When built it stood alone, and we may remember that the townspeople complained of it, on this account—saying that it was intended as a fortress, to keep them in subjection. It is now surrounded, as you see, by the ruins of many houses. If you have read Oviedo’s description of it, you are disappointed in its appearance; for that historian tells us, that “no man in Spain had a house to compare with it.” Its form is that of two quadrangles connected by a colonnade, but it, by no means, comes up to the modern idea of a palace. The roof has entirely disappeared, and the quadrangles are mere shells filled with the accumulating debris of centuries, amid which large forest-trees have taken root and are flourishing. It was built of solid and substantial blocks of stone, and in any other country but the tropics, would have scarcely shown signs of age in three centuries. But here the fierce rays of a perpendicular sun, the torrents of rain in the wet season, and the occasional hurricanes and earthquakes, that desolate and destroy everything in their path, soon beat down the stanchest buildings—the very blocks of granite being disintegrated, by the alternate rain and sunshine, and crumbling away beneath their influence. It is situated on a rising ground, commanding a fine view of the sea, and the surrounding country. It is surrounded by walls and battlements, but the most imposing feature about it, must have been the approach to it from the city—the visitor passing through a wide avenue of shade-trees, and gaining admission to it by a majestic flight of stone steps. The shade-trees have disappeared, and the stone steps have been removed to be worked up into other buildings.
We have called this house, the palace of Diego Columbus, but it must have been constructed either by his father, the admiral, or his uncle Bartholomew, the Adelantado, as we read that when Diego came out, after his father’s death, to assume the viceroyalty, he found it ready built at his hand. Its blackened walls and dirt-filled saloons, now in the midst of a squalid purlieu of the modern city, must have witnessed many a scene of revelry in its day, as Oviedo tells us, that when the young admiral was restored to the honors and command of his father, he brought out to his new government, with him, some of the most elegant young women of Spain, as a sort of maids of honor to his own beautiful young wife—the marriage portions of all of whom he undertook to provide. And that in due time these young women were all happily bestowed upon gallant knights and wealthy planters.
There, now, reader, we have taken a stroll through the classical old city of St. Domingo—a piece of good fortune, which falls to the lot of very few. Its romantic history seems to have been forgotten; it has fallen into the hands of a mongrel race of blacks and whites, and is rarely visited for any other purpose than that of trade. The negro and the mulatto in this oldest of American cities are thought rather more of than the white man, and the Yankee skipper finds in it, a congenial mart, in which to vend his cheese and his codfish, and distribute his tracts—political and moral—and put forth his patent medicines!
We did not get under way, the next morning, until eight o’clock, as the supplies from the butchers and fruiterers could not be gotten on board at an earlier hour. Bartelli came off from the market, loaded as usual, bringing with him a bunch of wild pigeons, very similar to those found in our forests, and some excellent cigars. The flavor of the latter is not quite equal to those of the Havana, but they are mild and pleasant smokers. He brought off, also, a specimen of the Haytian paper money, worth five cents on the dollar. Like the American greenback, it is the offshoot of revolution and political corruption.