The first land we sight after the Jersey coast has faded away is Watling Island, in the Bahamas. Everybody looks at it eagerly—a long, low-lying coast with a slender lighthouse, a fishing village and the wreck of a square rigged vessel plainly visible—for this is believed to be the first land sighted by Columbus. Of that there is some debate, but there is always debate on shipboard and any event that will furnish a topic is welcome. Everything about the ship now has turned tropical. The shady deck becomes popular, and the 240 pound ship’s doctor in immaculate white linen with the cutest little shell jacket after the Royal Navy pattern becomes a subject for wonder and admiration.
Antilla, the first stopping place on the way south, is a cluster of houses on a spacious bay on the northern side of Cuba, connected with Santiago and Havana. Doubtless some day it may become a notable shipping point, and indeed the shores of the bay are dotted with great sugar houses and carpeted with fields of shimmering green cane. But today only a lighter load of timber and a few tropical products are shipped—that is if we except a bunch of tourists who have come this far on the way to Colon by rail and the short sea trip from Florida to Cuba. Most of them were in doubt whether they had improved upon the discomfort of four rough days at sea by electing twenty-four hours of rough riding on the Cuban railway instead.
SPORTS ON SHIPBOARD
THE “ORUBA”
Past the quarantine station which, with its red-topped hospital, looks like a seashore resort, we steam, and the boat’s prow is again turned southward. Jamaica, our next port of call, is thirty-six hours away, and at last we have placid blue water from which the flying fish break in little clouds, and a breeze suggestive of the isles of spice. The ship’s company which two days back was largely content with cots, and the innumerable worthless remedies for seasickness, always recommended by people who don’t get sick, now pines for exercise and entertainment. Young men normally sane, bestride an horizontal boom and belabor each other with pillows until one or both fall to the hospitable mattress below. Other youths, greatly encouraged by the plaudits of fair ones, permit themselves to be trussed up like fowls exposed for sale, and, with ungainly hops and lurches, bunt into each other until one is toppled to the deck. The human cockfight brings loud applause which attains its apogee when some spectator at the critical moment with a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo displays an egg. A ship in the tropics is the truest of playgrounds. We are beginning to feel the content of just living which characterizes the native of the tropics. Indeed when the deck is cleared and waxed, and the weather cloths and colored lights brought forth for the ball, most of the men who left New York full of energy find themselves too languid to participate. I don’t know whether the Royal Mail exacts of its officers an aptitude for the dance, but their trim white uniforms were always much in evidence when the two-step was in progress.
BOG WALK, JAMAICA
There are no bogs along this beautiful drive. The name was originally “Bocas del Agua,” and has been corrupted to its present form
Early on the second day out from Cuba a heavy gray mass showed clear on the horizon to the southwest. It is reported by the historians that when Queen Isabella once asked Columbus what Jamaica looked like he crumpled up a sheet of stiff paper in his palm, then partly smoothing it displayed it to the Queen. The illustration was apt. Nowhere does a more crinkly island rise from the sea. Up to a height of 7000 feet and more the mountains rise sheer from the sea with only here and there the narrowest strip of white beach at the base. For the most part the tropical foliage comes unthinned down to the water. In early morn the crests of the hills are draped with clouds, and from the valleys betwixt them masses of white mist come rolling out as the rays of the sun heat the atmosphere. For forty miles or so you steam along this coast with scarce an acre of level land between the mountains and the deep until in the distance you descry the hollow in which Kingston lies embedded. A low lying sand bar runs parallel to the shore and perhaps a mile out, forming the barrier for the harbor which is indeed a noble bay well fit to shelter navies. But the barrier, though but a few feet above high water now, is sinking gradually, and the future of Kingston’s harbor is somewhat distressing. Once this low sandbar bore the most riotous and wicked town of history, for here stood Port Royal to which flocked the pirates and buccaneers of the Spanish Main, with their booty—doubloons, pieces of eight, beauteous Spanish señoritas and all the other attractive plunder with which the dime novels of our youth made us familiar. A right merry spot was Port Royal in those days and a pistol bullet or a swift stab in the back, though common enough, only halted the merriment for one man at a time. But fire purged Port Royal, and the pleasant pursuit of piracy began to fall into disrepute. Instead of treating the gallants who sailed under the Jolly Roger as gentlemen adventurers, civilized governments began to hang them—England being the last to countenance them in making Henry Morgan, wildest of the reckless lot, a baronet, and appointed him governor of Jamaica. Now Port Royal has shrunken to a fishing village, bordering upon the abandoned British naval station at the very harbor’s mouth.
