The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

I went with a fishing party down the coast to Matanzas, an abandoned fort of the early Spanish days, and passed there the most impressive open-air night in my recollection. We camped on the beach, and my shelter was a gauze mosquito netting stretched over four poles, about three feet high, driven in the sand, and as wide as high, and my bed was the sea sand, no covering being required. Through the gauze the sea breeze blew gently; on one side of the long, narrow beach the great Atlantic breakers roared a monotonous bass, and on the other there came from the lagoon the many-toned murmur of a thousand bird voices, some familiar and some strange, whooping of cranes and chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been routed out and had changed his feeding-ground. Around me on the sand ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head, skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they found an intoxication in dancing over my head. The gnats sang their monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.

It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John's River. At nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life. It was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding society never forced itself on the attention. The lazy social virtues had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface. The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro was a more important and better appreciated element of social life than in the North. The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far worse than cheating one of his own class. The old scoundrel was the reproach of the whole community; but no more formal indictment of the system of slavery, as established in the United States, is required than the fact that a former master could recall to slavery an emancipated slave family, the head of which had paid in hard cash for himself, his wife, and all his children, because his free papers had been burned, in a fire of which, moreover, the neighbors accused the former owner of being the incendiary. While those papers were in existence the negro could legally sue and be sued; but without them he had no more legal rights than a dog. The life which honest people lived in that primitive community was Arcadian, and it is probable that even in Arcadia they had slaves. Certainly, in my experience of living in many countries and under various systems, I have not found that the most primitive system secures the largest personal liberty; rather the contrary.

I returned to my painting with the early summer, and, when the season came, to the organization of the Club and the inauguration of its club-house and grounds. It was certainly the most beautiful site I have ever seen in the Adirondack country,—virgin forest, save where the trappers or hunters had cut wood for their camp-fires, the tall pines standing in their long ranks along the shores of a little lake that lay in the middle of the estate, encircled by mountains, except on one side, where the lake found its outlet; and the mountains were cloaked to their summits in primeval woods. In a little valley where a crystal spring sent its water down to the lake, and a grove of deciduous trees gave high and airy shelter, I pitched the camp,—a repetition slightly enlarged of that on Follansbee Pond. As usual I preceded the Club party, accompanied by S.G. Ward and his son, and also the son of Emerson, to prepare the ground. The solitude of the locality may be judged from the first hunt. We had arrived late in the day, and had no food except the bread we took with us, and the next morning we had to kill our breakfast before we could eat it. I took Mr. Ward and the boys in my boat and paddled down to the foot of the lake, where was a wide beach, on which we found a two-year-old buck grazing. I paddled to within fifty yards of him, and, though I found that my rifle would not go off and had to change it for another, with considerable movement, the deer took no notice of us, and I dropped him in his tracks with a feeling of compunction only overcome by the fact that we had no breakfast if he went away. So peaceful was our realm! I have often paddled within easy shot of a deer on other waters, but only by remaining motionless when he was looking round, for the movement of a hand would send him flying in panic; but this poor deer might have been reared in Eden.

The meeting of the Club that year was a most successful one; and when it was over, and I was left alone to my painting, I selected a subject in which, for the first time, I introduced a dramatic element. I supposed that a hunter and a buck had had a hand-to-horn fight, and, during it, had fallen together over a ledge of rocks, at the bottom of which both lay dead. A perpendicular ledge of granite, about twenty feet high, mosses and ferns clinging in its crevices, overhanging a level space covered with a heavy growth of luxuriant fern, furnished the background. There I laid the first large buck I killed, and painted him with extreme care, and then painted my guide with his arms locked in the antlers of the deer. The hour was the late afternoon, when the red sunlight slanted through the trees and fell in broken masses on the face of the cliff, catching the leaves here and there in its path. All this was painted carefully from the scene, with as much of the details of the forest as the time permitted, on a canvas twenty-five by thirty inches, on which I worked about two months, till the lake began to freeze and the snow fell. The thermometer was about zero Fahrenheit before I broke off, early in November.

I never enjoyed so entirely the forest life as that autumn. I had laid a line of sable traps for miles through the woods, and caught several "prime" sable which I intended as a present to my fiancée, and the long walks over the line in the absolute silence of the great forest, the snowfall, and the gorgeous autumn were more fascinating than ever before. The bears left their tracks around me, and several pumas made themselves heard, but of wolves, which I had heard in other parts of the woods, I heard none. Returning in the gloaming from my traps, one day, I heard at a distance a wailing cry like that of a woman in distress, to which I replied by hallooing at the top of my voice. After a few minutes I heard the cry again, approaching me, and again responded. The cry continued, still nearer and nearer, but slow in its approach; and, wondering why so slow, I finally fired my rifle three times rapidly, which is the conventional signal for help, and at the same time a reply to the call for help; and it was only when this evoked no further call that I remembered that the cry was that of a puma.

As usual I lived alone, save for the weekly visit of my guide bringing me bread and my post. It was with the greatest reluctance that I obeyed the necessity to return to the state of civilization, and took leave of that most charming retreat of the natural man from the artificial life. That was my last serious experience of woodland life. The uneasy and thriftless spirit which drove me out, like the possessed of the Scripture, to wander in strange places at times, again drove me that winter to England, putting, as it happened, against my intention or prevision, an end to the American period of my life.

CHAPTER XVI

ENGLAND AGAIN

I have generally been happy at sea; and when not so, it has been from reasons apart from the sea itself,—preoccupations which kept me insensible to the old charm, or mental troubles which made me insensible to everything beside them. On this voyage I had the company of an old friend of the days of "The Crayon," one of our most thoughtful and successful portrait painters, George Fuller, and a young friend of his, a Mr. Ames. We sailed just before Christmas, in an old sailing ship of about eight hundred tons burthen; for, unless time is of importance, I prefer a sailing ship to a steamer, and one pleasant companion is worth a shipload of commonplace fellow-voyagers. A stiff westerly blow caught us off Sandy Hook, and never left us till we were halfway across the Atlantic, increasing in violence every day, until it gave me, what I had always longed for, but never seen, a first-class gale on the open ocean.

I had said to the captain (one of the old sort of Cape Cod sailors, still a young man, however) that I wanted to see a real gale; and one day, after we had been out nearly a week, he called me up on deck, saying, "You wanted to see a gale, and now you may see it; for unless you get into a tornado you will never see anything worse than this." I went on deck, obliged to hold firmly to the rails or some part of the rigging, for the wind was such as to have carried me overboard if I had attempted to stand alone on the quarter-deck. We were running with the wind dead abaft, under a reefed fore-topsail and a storm jib, everything else having been taken in the night before. The studding-sail boom of the foreyard, which had been carelessly left out, had been broken off short in the earing, from the pressure of the wind on the bare spar. The roaring of the wind through the rigging was such as only one who has heard it can conceive.