Columbus and the 'Alice Mabel'
NOT without some rapturous anxiety on the part of her one passenger, the Alice Mabel worked her way between the breakers on Steventon bar, and was at sea again.
The sun rose, the clouds beyond the cays turned salmon-color with a wisp of rainbow risen up among them, the billows toppled, the sails cracked, and Cook, hovering near, was obviously obsessed with thoughts of breakfast. ‘Can’t set the table, eh, Cook?’ said the Captain.
‘No, sir,’ said Cook. ‘Too rough.’
‘Well, bring your things back here,’ said the Captain. ‘Put the dishes in a pan, and put the pan on the floor as low as you can get it, and let the Chief know that breakfast is ready.’
The ham and the hominy soon appeared, the coffee cups, the big black pot, and the little strainer; the Chief, too, his hair brushed down in morning neatness. And while the world dropped from under us, or boosted us sky-high, or reeled dizzily about our heads, the Captain on one knee said grace, and we ate.
Grace was the regular thing on that Bahamian mail boat. Usually the Captain said it, but sometimes he would ask the Chief, a young man, to bless the table. They both knew how — two Abaco men, from Hope Town, which is a seafaring and God-fearing place. Thus, though the Alice Mabel had neither style, comfort, nor speed, she could not be said to be graceless. One of the things I liked about her best (and before the trip was done I was truly attached to her) was this homelike grace-saying.
But there are graces and graces. On the return voyage we had two Anglican priests aboard, going to Nassau synod; they said grace for us, crossing themselves and rattling off the formula with practised dispatch. It was very nice to have the hominy blessed by professionals, I suppose, but the Lord (if He is anything like me) must have wished with a sigh for something fresher. The Captain’s grace was what I liked; it gave the food more sweetness, and in an unexpected way linked up the humdrum mail trip of the Alice Mabel with the first marine doings in the Bahamas.
Columbus was a prayerful man, though (it being still the day of one undivided Church) only an amateur, officially. On his second voyage he had a professional cleric with him, to give weight to the devotions; but on the first, when God’s help must have been more passionately wanted, it was plain mariners’ prayers that were offered night and morning. When at last, from the New World’s first blue anchorages, the ‘Salve Regina’ joyfully was raised, sailors sang it; for all the twang of their rough husky voices, the islanders listening on the shore thought they heard music made by Men from Heaven.
Where the anchorages were, that idyllic first week in the Bahamas, is not exactly known, at least not by me. The settled opinion is, however, that Columbus’s first landing was on San Salvador, the outmost though not the eastmost of the islands. From San Salvador he departed southward in a zigzag course that led away through the Crooked Island Passage. His journal of these zigzags, hurrying in excitement from island to island, is not easy to follow on a chart; but Captain Becher of the Royal Navy, wrinkling his brow over the problem eighty years ago, decided that one zig took him into Exuma Sound. At Exuma Harbor it was, he decided, that the fleet first took on water in quantity after the long voyage.
I should like to think this a true guess. With its cays, white bluff, and wind-bent trees, it looks a fit setting for History. Here too, to come to our own unmomentous story, the Alice Mabel dropped her anchor, the townspeople proved friendly, and sailors’ grace ushered in the supper.
True enough, I also saw Long Island, where it is sure Columbus touched. Our outmost stopping place was Simms, on that island, a country road at the plain’s sea edge, with a few hip-roofed houses and solemn shut-up churches scattered along it, and trees and cornfields planted in the porous rock. With its long shore, endless road, and distant long low hills, it seemed not the scene of History, but of a dateless quiescence. Its rôle, in fact, as the Captain pointed out while we were bringing in the mail, is astronomical rather than earthly. It lies precisely on the Tropic. When the sun comes to Simms, and can look down Mrs. Simms’s well, he turns south again, and goes back to the Amazon.
We too turned back there, with the settlement’s two weeks’ accumulation of mail aboard. The wind and the High Church clerics were with us now; we came back to Nassau flying. But the struggling journey out suited me better. It had more of the sea and the islands in it, thanks to its day difficulties, peaceful night anchorages, and its slowness.
As far as Steventon, I had had a fellow passenger. He was a Simms of Simms, a mechanic going back from Nassau to make a proposal of marriage to his girl.
Simms was a real Conch or islander, who did n’t feel comfortable with his shoes laced. His broad silver-palm hat turned up in front when he looked into the wind, and when he looked off to sea a slow satisfaction came into his face, because boats and blue brine had been so much a part of his life from its beginning. But his opinion of the Alice Mabel will not bear repeating here. In the billows of Exuma Sound she made two miles an hour, which was worse than standing still to a man with a proposal pent up in his bosom. True, the delay was of some use to him. He gargled or sucked lozenges to sweeten his voice. Thanks to a current fit of hoarseness, his most frivolous remark sounded like the croak of an oracle at the bottom of a cave, and he felt this should be cured for the good of the business he had in hand.
But at Steventon his patience blew up. Spitting out a curse together with the last lozenge, he took his bicycle ashore, and rode over hill and dale to our next stop, to get the Old Nick out of his legs. It was night, but moonlight, and he got to George Town sixteen hours before we did, in spite of the gates to open and cows to shy rocks at that cumbered the limestone road.
His hoarseness was no better when we met again, but he was improved in meekness. Besides, he had been given a bag of fine tomatoes by a farmer, and another of bananas, which cheered him. I too, in George Town, was befriended by a lively colored man, who loaded a small boy with guavas, okra, pawpaws, and green lettuce, and sent him with me to the wharf. The Captain had picked up two loaves of bread, fresh-baked by the constable’s wife. We dined well at anchor that night; there was something besides hominy to say grace over.
And afterwards when the moon was up again, hustling through the whiffy white clouds that drove across the sky, and the glassy water rustled under our black hull, Simms soothed his throat with tangerine juice, sugar, and rum, in which medication the Chief and I willingly shared. The Captain, a teetotaler, sat with us, smoking a cigar, spinning yarns of hurricanes — of which the tough Alice Mabel had weathered several — and cracking Bible jokes. Though it was an agony to his gullet, these jests set Simms to laughing. ‘Cap’n Carey,’ he would wheeze, kicking his heels joyfully against the wheelbox, ‘you ’re the jokiest old fellow I’se knowed in all my days!’
In fact we were much at home there, anchored out of the wind. My companions, all Conchs of old families, knew these cays and bright blue channels like the pockets of a much-worn pair of pants. Ashore in the settlements they knew everybody, black and white. Simms was always hailing relatives. When the Captain set up his parasol on wharf or beach, to distribute parcels, it was like the home-coming of a benign potentate.
Since confidence is catching, I, the stranger, felt the world to be homelike too, in Exuma Harbor. I too had some friends ashore. In my brain was the comfortable recollection of my colored benefactor’s garden, and of his whitewashed house, with conch shells in a pink ring around it, where I had been made so welcome. While he was off gathering the pawpaws, his sister, who had lived in the lighthouse on Cay Lobos, told me of happenings in that stillremoter place: how ships would sometimes come so close you could see the people wave their handkerchiefs, or hear their called greetings. She was a merry girl, with a clear tuneful voice; the grace of her gestures, and the bright way her pigtails nodded, made everything she said seem pretty. But old Columbus, anchored off that shore, with his sailors fast asleep around him after their prayers, must have peered out at its lightlessness with troubled eyes.
He found the Bahamas beautiful, to be sure. Almost any land would have looked good after the anxiety of the voyage. Moreover, he was a Mediterranean, used to the rocky, not really verdant, shores of the classic sea. If the English sailor or the Irishman in his crews had written the journal, its entries might not have given these limestone cays the name of so green a paradise: to the Northerner their greenery is olive and silver for the most part. The parrots and flamingos, however, were the admiration of everybody. The people, the brown islanders, for innocence, gentleness, and good nature, were beyond praise.
But he had embarked not to find Arcady, but the Orient. He had a letter to deliver to the Great Khan! His mind, one of the least mean in the annals of the race, delighted in the simplicity of island goodness, but he was man of the world enough to know that descriptions of a society more charming than its own would not satisfy Spain. The riches of the heathen Orient were what he had come for, to reward his backers, and (his own share, this was to be) to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. He had spent the best years of his life plaguing the courts of Europe to send him on his voyage, to establish commerce to finance a new Crusade: now here he was, with the gout beginning to cripple his joints, and found the people naked. They swam to the ships with balls of cotton to barter. It was their sole commodity. How many balls of Bahamian cotton would it take to deliver the Holy City?
Columbus did not waste paper on the foolish computation, but with morning sang the ‘Salve’ devoutly and sailed away for Cuba, of which he had begun to hear. There it was he should find the peacock porcelain towers and glittering thrones of gold told of by Marco Polo!
With our morning, no less fair, the Alice Mabel pulled up anchor, and, turning her nose toward a long-familiar port, toiled away over well-charted waters. The Captain’s prayer led up to no cruise into the unknown, but a breakfast of plain ham and hominy. Nowhere in China, however, for all its towers and thrones, could old Columbus have seen such peacock-glittering colors as those of the sea we rode over that day, just going about our business.