New Lands

I

I AM on my way back to New York after a month spent on a yacht in the West Indies. Such a trip may suggest any one of several general impressions: strolling about spacious decks watching distant palms in the moonlight and listening to the strains of soft music while one endeavors to decide whether to while away an evening at bridge or to give way to the well-known languor of the tropics and doze quietly off. Or there might come to mind a succession of Baedekered islands, each checked off with satisfaction as having been thoroughly ‘done’ in the few allotted hours: Martinique, Statue-of-the-Empress-Josephine (double-starred); Antigua, discovered-by-Columbus-in-1493; chief places of interest, AnglicanChurch-and-cemetery, Public Gardens, Lepers’ Hospital, Rat Island, EnglishHarbor-with-dockyard-where-Nelsonrefitted-his-fleet (double-starred), Valley-of-Petrifactions, etc., etc., etc.

There is a third method, which we chose. We visited eight islands, half of which are hardly known by name to the outside world: Grenada, Union, Mayero, St. Lucia, Martinique, Antigua, Barbuda, and Saba. And fortunate it is for the steamship companies that their passengers do not know the beauty, the unspoiled, dramatic, spectacular qualities of the untouristed volcanoes which lift themselves between the regular points of call.

A yacht is usually an ultra-complex structure which is of vital interest only to those who know a very great deal or a very little about her. I have lived on one of the most elaborate and have gazed with ignorance-infested awe at the great engines and the incomprehensible gyroscope, which is a sort of centrifugal-oil-upon-water. And I have been filled with pride at being allowed to break the law of the bridge and elbow the captain in his chart room. Then again it has been my privilege to take an old three-island freighter, and, by building a laboratory upon her and changing the title of passengers to ‘guests’ and rechristening her Arctums, to have seen my name in Lloyd’s Register as owner of the fifth largest yacht in the world. But I have experienced little more intimacy with the actual navigation and seamanship than with the almost equally complex culinary management of a hotel of which I might be temporarily a guest.

The moment I set foot on the deck of the Antares I felt at home. It was not a floating palace, but a floating home. Edwin Chance, her captain and owner, had spent years in thinking her out, but for general form and structure he had gone to the hardiest seamen in the world. Technically she is a Diesel ketch, actually a glorified Gloucester fisherman, with all the strength and sailing qualities and safeness that implies.

On this veriest chip upon the water, one hundred and five feet long by twenty-two wide, fourteen of us lived and slept and ate and read and thought, comfortable in every respect. I even found a vibrationless spot where, in a rough sea, by squatting around and over my microscope like Gandhi with his spinning wheel, I could detect the cusps on the minute teeth of flying fish. We passed great ocean liners which were shipping seas and rolling most uncomfortably, while we, whose lines and length were exquisitely and mathematically moulded to the measurable waves, were as dry as if on land, and our brains refused to record the movement as unpleasant or remember it as disagreeable.

One of the most amazing things about this trip of five weeks and over four thousand miles was its reasonable cost. Five weeks in Europe would have been more expensive. I had always supposed that even the smallest yachts cost unthinkable sums to run; but here we had only fuel oil at ten cents a mile, the wages of a crew of five, food, harbor dues — all coming to well under fifteen hundred dollars.

Colonel and Mrs. Chance were fortunate in their two capable sons, who apparently had been born on the bridge and weaned on salt water. Seamanship, navigation, the wireless in all of its most intricate phases — of these they were thorough masters, and they took us into and out of awkward anchorages and threaded wicked reefs from which we were warned by all local pilots. At Bermuda we set the gyrocompass for Sombrero, and three and a half days and eight hundred-odd miles later someone had to shift its direction to keep us from piling up on the rocks of that island. Yet never was vigilance relaxed, and our several undergraduates divided the day and night watches between them — watches relieved by radio concerts from Schenectady to Argentina and by sumptuous midnight raids on the refrigerators — relieved but never relaxed.

For a month we never failed to record and plot the nightly weather reports in all clarity and detail, for we were within the temporal danger zone of hurricanes. But in all this time we did not record or regret a single fact of politics, finance, disarmaments, or mayhem. At the end of one weather report Henry or Britt had typed, sleepily and with complete lack of interest, ‘The Damocritic Conwesion in Shicago has nomisaded Prraghos,’ and we were quite content.

It was a joy to see the enthusiastic trio seize upon the Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Arcturus, stop them in their courses, reduce them to fractions and symbols, plot us somewhere within a tiny triangle, and finally, with a twist of a pencil point, place us exactly upon the chart, while from the deck one saw only waves exactly like those of yesterday and to-morrow.

II

At three o’clock one morning I climbed the companionway and looked upon the dying crescent of a moon set in gorgeous mountain ranges of tradewind clouds, the very same moon which, only two weeks before, I had seen, in its youthful crescent, sink behind the crags of Ord in the Mojave Desert. Venus, low in the sky, was so brilliant that it cast strong lights and shadows on sails and deck. As I stretched out upon the hatch a flying fish skimmed close to my face, clearing the whole vessel, and before I had time to wonder about this a magnificent shooting star dropped comet-wise, apparently from the very heart of Venus. As if, indeed, it had been torn from the planet, Venus diaphragmed down to a low magnitude star — a faint mist sweeping across its face. That day at high noon I had borrowed a sextant and, bracing my feet, had seen at last on the little mirror a pale dot bobbing about, — Venus high overhead, — plucked regardless from its diurnal invisibility, and forced to show us our position on the face of the waters.

Peculiarly appropriate seemed the name of our little yacht when, day after day, I perceived that our isolation, our disregard of all outside human affairs, had given us a very real cosmic identity; we seemed to be the centre of all things, reaching out ocular threads to the sun, stars, and planets, audible ones to distant harmonies, and rollicking through the heart of calms and wind. I had a certain conviction that all things were passing astern — the Southern Cross rising at our bow, the North Star sinking aft, days and nights and hours moving past, not settling down.

I was supposed to be still convalescent, but the last hints of weakness went with the first appearance of sargassum weed, which I pitched aboard by the bushel, salvaging my old friends the little frog and pipe and trigger fish. Flying fish were gathered from the deck every morning, and I had the good fortune to find five species among the first six specimens. One of these was new to science, with a single black barbel as long as the whole fish. I named it in honor of the yacht.

Swiftly we passed in review all the Windward and Leeward Islands, from Sombrero until we came to anchor in the harbor of the most southern — Grenada. As usual, I was excited by the tropical foliage and depressed by the insular lack of bird and insect life. Our most vivid memory of this harbor is of watching the fish-eating bats swooping and dipping into the circle of light cast by the bulb at the tip of the boat boom. With incredible swiftness they appeared out of the darkness, troubled the water, and vanished. The human eye could detect no detail of these visitations except that the bat struck the water in a somewhat upright position, so that the capture of the small surface fish was by means of the large, strong hind feet, much as an osprey would strike. There was no hint of scooping them up with the posterior part of the interfemoral webbing.

In a day or two we were laundered, watered, provisioned, and permissioned for adventures among the Grenadines, for I had long wanted to visit these little sharps and flats of volcanic tips which were strewn between Grenada and St. Vincent. Their very names pass beyond the significance of geography to the time of Caribs and buccaneers — Bequia, Mistique, Marquis, Kick-em-Jenny, Carriacou, Frigate, Les Taintes, Mayero, Batovia, Adam, and Isle de Caille. We were unanimous about Mayero, for it was surrounded with coral reefs, with an ideal anchorage in the shelter of Horseshoe and World’s End Reefs. This dot of an island was under the jurisdiction of the revenue officer of Union Island, to whom we must first make our manners.

III

In three hours after leaving Grenada we dropped anchor in the lee of the unromantically named Union Island, in Chatham Bay, and except for exigencies of time and home and duties we should be there still. A thousand-foot range rose majestically up from the crescent beach before us, covered with rich verdure and without a house in sight; swooping pelicans and gulls, leaping fish and dolphins; a great eternal silence; cool breezes actually laden with strong spicy odors just as in the storybooks-—all these combined to make this one of the loveliest and most desirable of anchorages.

When we landed on the sandy beach, we were greeted courteously by a group of unbelievably ragged black urchins who said they lived on the other side of the mountain, and asked if we were in trouble, for in their minds nothing but necessity could possibly have brought us to their island.

The only mention of Union Island in our Antares library was a delightful paragraph by Davis concerning its geology, and I learned that by skillful use of adjectives and adverbs a geological description can have the charm and vitality of any biological account. ‘Grenada,’he says, ‘is a highly and relatively young volcanic island,’while the smaller and older Grenadines are ‘well-subdued volcanic residuals.’ The subdued forms of Union Island, Taken in connection with its pronounced embayments and immature headland cliffs, suggest that it was first subjected to erosion for a long period, then moderately submerged and embayed and immaturely cliffed.’ So we came to prefer the name of Subdued Island, especially appropriate after the raucous beggars and automobile horns of Grenada.

Every part of the island provided adventure or beauty, or both. At the northern horn of our crescent bay we discovered a minute, detached rocky island about one hundred feet long which, in this particular archipelagic scale, might be called a Grenadillissima. The first time I rowed past it I christened it Medusa Islet, for its rocky summit was covered with a pure culture of night-blooming cereus whose horrid creeping stems hung down on all sides like myriad, tangled, spiny serpent locks. These were even parted in the middle, and at the southern end were massed in a snarl like a psyche of the inferno. A single tree fought with the cereus for light and air, and in its branches nested a colony of yellowcrowned night herons.

Something drew me strongly to a little bay to the north of Medusa, and here, two fathoms down, in the clear water, we found a perfect reef for diving — paths of smooth white sand meandering about mounds ablaze with yellow sea fans, purple plumes, and towering strata of great, antlered elkhorn coral. Through and about these swam a multitude of friends and strangers. Parrots and wrasse and demoiselles floated in intimate fashion close to our helmets as in Bermuda and the Galapagos, and in the distance a quartette of great tarpons swept along — tarpons which refused to look upon any kind of bait or lure.

With only a foot rise of tide, pools along the shore were unknown, so we had to try to capture the rare young rock dwellers, in which we were especially interested, with hand nets or glass prisons. These methods, as usual, were only moderately successful, when suddenly Colonel Chance had an idea born of pure genius. He got the hand pump from the launch, removed the strainer, reversed the hose, and inserted a glass tube. Wading near shore and watching through the water glass, we would bring the open end of the tube as near as possible to a desired fish, and then roar out the command, ‘Stuk!’ The operator at the other end of the pump would pull upward with all his might, and, when the indrawn water was squirted out into the bucket, there would be the rare specimen, in perfect condition, but vastly bewildered with his maelstromic experience. So a new type of submarine lethal weapon was added to our arsenal of traps, nets, hooks, grains, copper sulphate, and dynamite.

With Gloria Hollister I climbed to the summit of the island one day to get a panorama photograph of the bay, when we stumbled upon an old cannon lying half hidden upon an ancient rock platform. An aged Negro approached, courteous and well-spoken. He was Emmanuel Stuart, and he called to his shy wife and daughter, Estrella and Priscilla, to come and shake our hand and make us welcome in their cassava field. I asked about the little cannon and he told me its story thus: —

‘My father was a slave, and in old, old days a ship called the Alabama often came unexpectedly to the island and picked up all the fishermen offshore in their boats and carried them off into slavery. This got so bad that at last they write to Queen Victoria and he send small battleship and they build fort and set cannon, and next time Alabama come, they fire and drive him off. Soon the small battleship track Alabama and catch him up at Sail Rock. Then a cannon shot break mast and they take and tow him into Grenada.’

I asked if the Alabama was not an American ship, and Emmanuel was obviously embarrassed; unwilling to smirch any pride I might have in my national history, he replied, ‘No, I think he Portugee.’

We talked a while longer, delighted with the friendly eagerness to please which inspired his conversation, and then made our way quickly down the steep bushy slopes, past a group of tethered goats, to the dory. There, waiting for us, showing no signs of haste, was little ebony Priscilla with a dish of two dozen turtle eggs just dug from the sand. Sixpence bought the eggs, plus two dimples and an amazing gleam of teeth; and, in answer to the question of how to cook the eggs, she answered, ‘Boil and bust ’em,’ which we ultimately did and found them delicious.

It seemed too good to be true, when we went around to the tiny village on the opposite side of the island, to find that our revenue officer was named Edgerton Sardine. His last word was to wish us good fishing.

IV

While we were anchored in the magic little bay of Chatham I came on deck very early each morning and watched the awakening of life in this crescent cosmos. Fish activities in the early morning begin through the large end of the field glass. Dawn is breathless, and, although behind me lies the whole expanse of the Caribbean, yet as I look eastward I seem to be floating in the centre of an étang in a wide crater, with slopes of Union Island rising steeply from the water on three sides. The sun is climbing up the hither, hidden slope of the range, while all my side is in deep shadow. Like the chachalacas in the South American jungles, some bird sends out a weird call from halfway up the mountain, ‘Lickify-cah’-caw! Lickity-cah’-caw! ’

Now and then near the Antares a silvery sliver appears, and, looking over the side, I see a thousand thousand little forms darting about — the silversides are feeding. For just a little while the world seems at rest and peace. A dozen laughing gulls are sitting on a jagged rock and preening themselves; high up in air a small flock of brown pelicans are playing at eagles, soaring about, circling with no smallest motion of wings.

Suddenly a sound like nothing but itself comes to my ear — a gentle, slithering, liquid swish — and I look down in time to see the first shower of silversides, a living wave raised not by wind but by fear. Again a leaping forth of ten thousand and one, and others besides myself notice it. The laughing gulls spurn their rock and all take wing together, one of them bursting into a rollicking peal of gull laughter. The unbelievably complicated day of life and death, war and peace, love and fear, of Chatham Bay has begun.

By the increasing crescent waves here and there in the bay we know that the big fish are on the move and are hungry, and at each spasm of silvery motes the gulls dash down and splatter among them. Often the birds are just too late and the silversides dive, only to reappear at one side or the other as they are hard pressed by submarine foes. Without warning, a meteor fails near the boat, sending up a cloud of spray, and from the half-submerged amorphous mass there emerges a pelican, rocking in its own wake and straining gallons of water out of its distended pouch. Finally it flings up its head and, with contortions innumerable, swallows its catch. Now and then a flicker of light shows where a silverside is escaping in the overflow, and the gulls know of these occasional holes in the net, and not infrequently I see a gull perched on top of the pelican’s head eagerly waiting for a piscine crumb. Whether the pelican does not mind this balancing feat, or whether a pouchful of water and fish requires all his attention, I could not determine. Certain it is that a trio of brown pelicans can do infinitely more execution than a whole flock of hovering gulls.

A mob of sooty terns swings past, fresh from the open sea, knowing exactly what they want and how to get it. There is no awkward fluttering for them, but at the next break of living fish twenty arrows hit the surface and twenty beaks hold twenty silversides. Then the master of all fishers arrives. The silversides are beneath his notice, but their commotion is a sign language not to be mistaken. An osprey appears high in air, circles the Antares, and drops with all his force of wing plus sheer gravity.

Like an overladen plane he lifts slowly from the smother of foam, beating the water at first with his wings, and then winning clear with a great twisting mackerel in his talons. At masthead height he shifts his prey to head on, but at two hundred feet all his labor has gone for naught, for three tropical robbers have materialized from the upper sky and they beset the fish hawk with a speed and agility which nothing can withstand. Three frigate birds or man-o’-war hawks (blood brothers to the pelicans, but oh, how different!) threaten and swoop and harass until the osprey opens his talons and the fish drops free. Without apparent haste, almost nonchalantly, one of the black frigates lets itself go, and with a twisted flap of one angular wing curves up beneath the mackerel and with exquisite precision daintily seizes it in mid-air. With angry screams the osprey soars to invisibility in the blue Caribbean sky.

Then comes my turn, and where the fish hawk failed I succeed. Seated in the rear of the launch, we quarter the outer bay near Medusa Islet, and the last link in the morning’s fishing is forged when my rod is almost jerked from its socket and the line goes whizzing out. So terrific is the fight, and for a time so even the odds, that Colonel Chance is moved to remark that it seems as if I were not fishing so much as the great mackerel was Beebeing. It came to gaff at last — a gorgeous kingfish which had been feeding on the silversides.

After we had taken cero, barracuda, tunny, and bonito and were on our way back, I saw that in my conceit I had overlooked the really important final act. From the open sea there poured into the southern part of the bay an army of several hundred great dolphins, rolling and leaping and feeding, and from now on the silversides were safe, for the mightiest of fish flee before these masters of the water: the cycle was complete, from the microscopic copepods and inchling silversides to this legion of eight-foot mammals.

V

Martinique was like an old friend in a new dress, for we dropped anchor at ten in the morning of Bastille Day with forty-eight hours of continuous fête in full swing — color, noise, and absinthe as only French colonials can combine them. From a half-hundred inimitable memories one stands out as the most amusing. It was the last of a series of horse races. The horses were terrible crocks, but, since all were terrible crocks, it was exciting. This last was called a donkey race, but the contestants were two tall, rangy mules and a diminutive burro. The little donkey of course fell far behind at once, but on the farther side of the track the two mules stopped and began to kick each other, while a swarm of natives who had bet heavily ran across to push and pull their respective choices into action again. One mule at last took the bit in his teeth, laid back his ears, and tore around the track for the second time. But he failed ever to return. He must have straightened out his course, and for all we know is still galloping madly toward Mont Pelée.

The second mule found so many distractions along the way that the burro caught up with and passed him, and came down the home stretch cheered by the entire population. When he reached our grandstand we gave him such an ovation that he stopped in mid-track, raised his ears in excited interest in our direction, and refused every effort on the part of his jockey with whip, rein, and spur to get him past the winning post. Finally he heard sounds of hoofs behind, and he turned and with reconcentrated interest watched the mule approach, pass, and win at an amble, when of his own accord he consented, also at an amble, to take second place. The frenzied agony of the betters, who saw nothing amusing in all this, made it perfect comedy.

The last two islands which we visited were the climax of the whole trip, but they each deserve an essay to themselves. Here is only a staccato outline — the high points of memory: —

Barbuda — a weird, flat island of seventy square miles, surrounded by most dangerous reefs, the only landmark a squat, loopholed tower of ancient, unknown origin. At the foot of this we land in surf on a beach of ten billion minute, exquisite pink shells, which give out a tinkling singing in the wind and a warm sunset sheen even on cloudy days. Dwarf butterflies and tarantula hawks crowd the one road which leads to the one village — Codrington — three miles away. If we are lucky as we walk along, we may hear the grunts of wild boars, the cackling of guinea fowl, or even disturb a fallow deer stag in its form, for the Codrington family, many generations ago, stocked Barbuda as a game preserve.

Toward us comes a group of magnificent Negro woodcutters, six feet three and four, with shoulders and muscles of heavy-weight fighters, but gentle of voice and courteous of manner. They are the results of the breeding for superslaves which the Codringtons carried on for generations, bringing the finest types of black men and women to the island and breeding them for size, bone, and sinew. The village is a surprise, for many of the native huts are conical and thatched, and surrounded by wattled compounds to keep out the wild animals, exactly as one sees them in Africa.

Our impressions end with the perfect hospitality of the British Agent, whose tales of the legends and the equally strange realities of this utterly isolated islet tempt one to spend many months here. On the wall is a largescale map of Barbuda with a dense mass of black dots all around the coast. A closer examination reveals this swarm of dots as wrecked vessels, each labeled with its name, cargo, and toll of drowned men. Small wonder that for many years the Barbudians found wrecking to be much more profitable than agriculture or cattle raising. As we leave the Agent’s home and stop to pat the ancient hound outstretched upon the steps, we are told it is the ‘island dog,’maintained, for no remembered reason, at the expense of the British Government, the custom harking back for many generations.

VI

Saba (for no reason whatever, Sayba, not Sahba) is pointed out to all the passengers to the West Indies. But to them it is as inaccessible as the sea bottom over which they are passing. For no steamers touch there, and the single volcanic peak rising abruptly from the waves offers no harbor, wharf, beach, or anchorage. We go ashore in a dory, slithering up through the surf to a temporary hold on large black pebbles, and then rush the boat up out of the way of the next roller.

Pleasant half-Dutch boys greet us, and we wait for the customs officer, who finally comes riding down the eight hundred steps on a pony. We climb and climb and climb, view after view opening and closing behind us, until at last we turn a mighty spur and find ourselves on the bottom of the island crater, with the tiny capital spread out before us — the village of Bottom.

It is like nothing else in the world; its charm is wholly its own; narrow high-walled lanes or streets (there is not a wheel or a cart in the island), red and white houses, spick-and-span as if from a Christmas morning’s toy village; shy women offering delicate lacework for ‘anything you like to give’; the pleasant Episcopal rector, eager for real conversation, whose diminutive house shelters a marvelous collection of brasses, three brown doves, a black cat, and a green parrot. The adjoining church, which had once been a barn, and the cemetery might be translated direct from a typical English village.

I sit in the cool dim fight and read the memorials on the walls. Each tells its own story of the perils of fife of these people. Following is one, revealing the toll of life taken by a single storm: —

The Governor and his charming wife change our status within a few minutes from visiting strangers to friends. They love the island and apparently their only regret is that high lobs on their tennis court are inadvisable, since the ball might go down a quarter mile into the sea. Even in our three hours’ visit we destroy many silly myths which have grown up around this fairy isle of five square miles, but we find that the men actually do build most excellent boats up to eighteen feet in the lofty crater, in Bottom; boats which are subsequently carried down the hundreds of steps on the shoulders of a score of sturdy natives.

We steam regretfully away, and in answer to many dimly waving handkerchiefs we send up three good-bye notes from our siren — whose vibrations echo back and forth among the giant cliffs of the peak. As the afternoon sun lights up the greens and grays and illumines the mists swirling about the uttermost summit, a great Pan-American plane comes into view and steers her course directly above the crater of Saba. I wonder which are the happier: the passengers in this ultra-product of man’s mechanical mind, eating up the miles almost a quarter as fast as the speed of sound itself; the host of restless passengers in the steamers, frantically eager to get somewhere as quickly as possible, too often wholly unable to appreciate what they see when they get there; or, on the other hand, the people of Bottom tending their strawberry patches, embroidering their fine linen, fashioning their sturdy boats, singing the old, old hymns in their little church — and watching the sunrises and sunsets which, for themselves and for every other human being, tick off the allotted spans of life in this glorious world.