VOYAGE AND APPROACH.
On the 22d of November, 1855, a small company of us—three gentlemen and two ladies—left New York harbor in the schooner Louisa Dyer, of 150 tons burden, bound to the island of Jamaica. By nightfall we had lost sight of the last faint trace of New Jersey soil. New Jersey is sometimes jocularly said to be out of the Union; but on that day the two of us who were leaving our native land for the first time, entertained no doubt of its solidarity with that country of which it afforded us the last glimpse. By morning we found our small and incommodious vessel fairly on her way through the stormy November Atlantic, toiling painfully over the broad convexity of the planet, like a plodding insect, toward the regions of the sun. After a voyage of fifteen days, wrestling with all manner of baffling winds, and with storms attended, I suppose, with some danger, though, from a happy incapacity of apprehending peril at sea till it is over, I suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that 'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the mass of its gloomy might.
Very pleasant was it to us, nevertheless, when the softening airs and the steady set of the breeze showed us that we had come into the latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now gave the charm of happy, graceful life to our weary voyage out of the tempestuous north. And when at last we saw land, although it appeared only in the shape of the two small islands mentioned above, which seem to be little more than coral reefs covered with a scanty carpet of yellowish grass, yet the few distant cocoanut trees upon them threw even over their barrenness that tropical charm which to those who first feel it seems rather to belong to another planet than to this dull one upon which we were born.
Passing through the narrow channel between the two islands which formed thus the portal of our entrance into the Caribbean, we found ourselves fairly afloat upon the waters of that brilliant sea, which the Spaniards, three centuries and a half before, had traversed with greater astonishment, but not with more delight. Everything now conspired to raise our spirits. The soft air, reminding us by contrast of the winter we had left behind, the deep blue sky, answered by waves of an intenser blue below, whose gentle ripples, unlike the stormy Atlantic surges which we had escaped, only came up to bear us kindly on, and the knowledge that we were but two days' sail from the fair island to which some were returning, and which two of us were about to make our home for an indefinite future, all made us now a very different set from the dull, anxious, seasick group that the Atlantic had lately been boxing about at his pleasure.
Before making Jamaica, however, we came in sight of the negro empire of Hayti, and ran along for a day under its northern coast.
We saw swelling hills, covered on their tops with woods, and sloping down to the shore, but were too far distant to distinguish very plainly any sign of human habitation. By nightfall we had sunk the land, but were astonished in the morning to see looming through the air, at an immense distance, a mountain, which in height seemed more like one of the Andes than any summit that Hayti could afford. Its actual height, I presume, may not have been less than 8,000 feet, but in my memory it shows like Chimborazo.
It was now Saturday, the 8th of December. We held our way westward across the hundred miles of sea that separate Hayti from Jamaica. All eyes were now turned to discover the first glimpse of our expected island home. At last, about the middle of the afternoon, we remarked on the western horizon the distant blot of indigo that showed us where it lay. Another twenty-four hours would pass before we should land, but that distant patch of mountain blue seemed to have brought us to land already. Heavy rain clouds coming up, hid it from us again, but gave ample compensation in the sunset that followed, one of the two grand sunsets of my life. The other was in Andover, Mass., which, is justly celebrated for the beauty of its sunsets. There the banks of white cloud, lying along the west, glowed with an inner radiance, that led the eye and the mind back into the very depths of heaven. Here, on the other hand, an unimaginable wealth of color was poured out on the very face of the sky. The whole western heaven, to the zenith, was one mingled melting mass of gorgeous dyes, rendered the more magnificent by the heavy lead-colored rain clouds which occupied all the rest of the sky.
The inward, spiritual magnificence of that northern sunset, and the unreserved splendor of this southern one, were in correspondence with the different tone which runs throughout nature in each of the two regions.
After sunset hues and rain cloud had both given way to the brilliant night sky of that latitude, we seated ourselves, seven in number, captain and mate included, on the extensive quarter deck of not less than seven feet from cabin house to stern bulwarks, for a final game of 'Twenty Questions;' when our hitherto so amiable friend, the Caribbean, suddenly flung a spiteful wave right over the quarter upon us, and put a very unexpected extinguisher on our pastime. The ladies, who were reclining on the deck, came in for the chief share of the compliment, and were in some danger of an indiscriminate swash down the cabin gangway; but the mate gallantly picked up one, and her husband the other, and saved them from all mischief but the drenching. This sudden interruption of amicable relations with the powers of the wave was followed up by a night of unmerciful rocking, to which, as we had now come under the lee of the land, was added a sweltering heat. I can stand as much heat as any man, but for once I found the cabin too much of a blackhole even for me, and after tossing most of the night in alternate correspondence and contradiction to the pitching of the vessel, I got up and went on deck, to see if a nap were any more feasible there. I found most of our company already recumbent in this starry bedchamber. After awhile admiring the unaccustomed brilliancy of the old familiar constellations of our northern sky, augmented by the effulgent host which our approach to the equator had brought into view, among all which Venus shone like a young moon, I fell asleep also, and we slumbered in concert, until awakened by the streaks of dawn. Soon the sun rose with a serene magnificence, well according with the day of holy rest and cheerful expectation which lay before us. The white haze upon the sky rolled away from the blue, and gathered itself into fleecy masses, which stood like pillars around the seaward horizon, brightening with a cheerful tempered light, until, as the sun grew higher, they dissolved away. Meanwhile, on the landward side of our vessel—which had rounded Morant Point in the night, and was now gliding smoothly on—lay in near view the mountains of Jamaica. Coming from the southeast quarter of the island, we were passing under them where they are highest. They rose, seemingly almost from the water's edge, to the height of seven and eight thousand feet, their towering masses broken into gigantic wrinkles and corrugations, whose fantastic unevenness was subdued into harmony by the softening veil of yellowish green darkening above, which clothed them to their tops. Between their base and the sea actually lies one of the most richly cultivated districts of the island, the Plaintain Garden River district. But we were too far out to distinguish much of it; and what little we did see is in my memory absorbed in the image of the verdant giants which rose behind.
In the forenoon our pilot came on board, a comfortable, self-possessed black man, who toward sunset brought us off the Palisades. This is the name of the narrow spit of land which forms the outer wall of the magnificent harbor of Kingston. Upon it is situated the naval station of Port Royal, the principal rendezvous of the British fleet in the West Indies. Here is that exquisitely comfortable naval hospital, with its long ranges of green jalousies, excluding the blazing light and admitting the sea breeze, in which the officers and crew of our ship Susquehanna were cared for with such generous hospitality a few years ago, when attacked by yellow fever. The heartburnings of the present may be somewhat lessened by reflecting on some of these mutual offices of kindness in the past.