‘gay green,
Thou smiling Nature’s universal robe!’
Landing upon the island, you find a thin strip of bright yellow sand separating the sea from a curtain of vegetation, which forms a continuous wall. In some parts madrepore rock, looped and caverned by the tide, and covered with weeds and testaceæ, whose congeners are fossilized in the stone, rises abruptly a few feet above the wave. At other places a dense growth of tangled mangrove jungle exposes during the ebb a sheet of black and sticky mire, into which man sinks knee-deep. The regularity of the outline is broken by low projecting spits and by lagoons and backwaters, which bite deep into the land. Their pestilential, fatal exhalations veil the low grounds with a perpetual haze, and the excess of carbon is favourable to vegetable as it is deleterious to animal life.
Passing over the modern sea-beach, with its coarse grasses, creepers, and wild flowers—mostly the Ipomæa—and backed by towering trees, cocoas, mangos, and figs, we often observe in the interior distinct traces of an old elevation, marked by lines of water-worn pebbles and by coarse gravels overlying greasy blue clay. This is the home of the copal. Beyond it the land rises imperceptibly, and breaks into curves, swells, and small ravines, rain-cut and bush-grown, sometimes 40 feet deep. The soil is now a retentive red or yellow argile, based upon a detritus of coralline, hardened, where pressed, into the semblance of limestone, or upon a friable sand-stone-grit of quartz and silex. The humus of the richest vegetable substance, and excited by the excess of humidity and heat, produces in abundance maize, millet, and various panicums; tomatoes and naturalized vegetables, muhogo (the cassava), and Palma Christi; coffee, cotton, and sugar-cane; clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon trees; foreign fruits, like the Brazilian Cajú, the passion-flower and the pine-apple; the Chinese Leechi; bananas and guavas, the Raphia and the cocoa, twin queens of the palms; limes and lemons, oranges and shaddocks, the tall tamarind, the graceful Areca, the grotesque calabash and Jack-tree, colossal sycamores and mangos, whose domes of densest verdure, often 60 feet high and bending, fruit-laden, to the earth, make our chesnuts, when in fullest dress, look half-naked and in rags.
The uplands, especially in the western part of the island, are laid out in Máshámha or plantations, whose regular lines of untrimmed clove-trees are divided by broad sunny avenues. Here and there are depressions in the soil, where heavy rains slowly sinking have nursed a tangled growth of reeds and rushes, sedge and water-grass. About the Mohayra and the Búbúbú—the principal of the ποταμοι πλειστοι of the Periplus—mere surface-drains, choked with fat juncaceæ and with sugar-cane growing wild, there is a black soil of prodigious fertility, whose produce may, so to speak, be seen to grow. This sounds like exaggeration; but I well remember, at Hyderabad, in Sind, that during the inundation of the Indus we could perceive in the morning that the maize had lengthened during the night, and the same is the case with certain ‘toadstools’ and fungi in the Brazil.
Upon this waste of rank vegetation the sun darts an oppressive and malignant beam. In the driest season the ‘mangrove heaviness’ of the western coast and the cadaverous fœtor announce miasma; after the rains the landscape is redolent of disease and death.
The cottages of small proprietors and slaves strew the farms. They are huts of wattle and rufous loamy dab, to which large unbaked bricks of red clay are sometimes preferred. The usual cajan pent-roof forms deep dark eaves, propped by untrimmed palm-boles. These dwellings are unwholesome, because none boast of a second storey; they are not even built upon piles, and thus their sole defence against the surrounding malaria is the shrubbery planted by nature’s hand. Sickness seems generally, both in the island and on the continent, to follow turning up fresh soil, and the highlands are often more subject to miasma than the lowlands.
The lines of communication consist of mere footpaths, instead of the broad roads required for the ventilation of the country. When the produce of the land is valuable the lanes are lined with cactus, milk-bush (euphorbia), and succulent plants, whose foliage shines with metallic lustre. Set in little ridges, the hedge-rows of pine-apple, with its large pink and crimson fruit, passing, when ripe, into a reddish-yellow, form a picturesque and pleasant fence. At a distance from the town the paths become rough and solitary. Nearer, they are well beaten by negroes of both sexes and all ages, carrying fuel or baskets of fruit upon their heads, or bringing water from the wells, or loitering under shady trees to cheapen the cocoa-nut, manioc, and broiled fish, offered by squatting negresses for their refection.
Section 2.
Meteorological Notes—The Double Seasons, &c.