one day in january i climbed to the housetop to get a view of another of the fine sunsets of this land of flowers. the landscape was a strip of clear gulf water, a strip of sylvan coast, a tranquil company of shell and coral keys, and a gloriously colored sky without a threatening cloud. all the winds were hushed and the calm of the heavens was as profound as that of the palmy islands and their encircling waters. as i gazed from one to another of the palm-crowned keys enclosed by the sunset-colored dome, my eyes chanced to rest upon the fluttering sails of a yankee schooner that was threading the tortuous channel in the coral reef leading to the harbor of cedar keys. “there,” thought i, “perhaps i may sail in that pretty white moth.” she proved to be the schooner island belle.
one day soon after her arrival i went over the key to the harbor, for i was now strong enough to walk. some of her crew were ashore after water. i waited until their casks were filled, and went with them to the vessel in their boat. ascertained that she was ready to sail with her cargo of lumber for cuba. i engaged passage on her for twenty-five dollars, and asked her sharp-visaged captain when he would sail. “just as soon,” said he, “as we get a north wind. we have had northers enough when we did not want them, and now we have this dying breath from the south.”
hurrying back to the house, i gathered my plants, took leave of my kind friends, and went aboard, and soon, as if to calm the captain’s complaints, boreas came foaming loud and strong. the little craft was quickly trimmed and snugged, her inviting sails spread open, and away she dashed to her ocean home like an exulting war-horse to the battle. islet after islet speedily grew dim and sank beneath the horizon. deeper became the blue of the water, and in a few hours all of florida vanished.
this excursion on the sea, the first one after twenty years in the woods, was of course exceedingly interesting, and i was full of hope, glad to be once more on my journey to the south. boreas increased in power and the island belle appeared to glory in her speed and managed her full-spread wings as gracefully as a sea-bird. in less than a day our norther increased in strength to the storm point. deeper and wider became the valleys, and yet higher the hills of the round plain of water. the flying jib and gaff topsails were lowered and mainsails close-reefed, and our deck was white with broken wave-tops.
“you had better go below,” said the captain. “the gulf stream, opposed by this wind, is raising a heavy sea and you will be sick. no landsman can stand this long.” i replied that i hoped the storm would be as violent as his ship could bear, that i enjoyed the scenery of such a sea so much that it was impossible to be sick, that i had long waited in the woods for just such a storm, and that, now that the precious thing had come, i would remain on deck and enjoy it. “well,” said he, “if you can stand this, you are the first landsman i ever saw that could.”
i remained on deck, holding on by a rope to keep from being washed overboard, and watched the behavior of the belle as she dared nobly on; but my attention was mostly directed among the glorious fields of foam-topped waves. the wind had a mysterious voice and carried nothing now of the songs of birds or of the rustling of palms and fragrant vines. its burden was gathered from a stormy expanse of crested waves and briny tangles. i could see no striving in those magnificent wave-motions, no raging; all the storm was apparently inspired with nature’s beauty and harmony. every wave was obedient and harmonious as the smoothest ripple of a forest lake, and after dark all the water was phosphorescent like silver fire, a glorious sight.
our luminous storm was all too short for me. cuba’s rock-waves loomed above the white waters early in the morning. the sailors, accustomed to detect the faintest land line, pointed out well-known guiding harbor-marks back of the morro castle long before i could see them through the flying spray. we sailed landward for several hours, the misty shore becoming gradually more earthlike. a flock of white-plumaged ships was departing from the havana harbor, or, like us, seeking to enter it. no sooner had our little schooner flapped her sails in the lee of the castle than she was boarded by a swarm of daintily dressed officials who were good-naturedly and good-gesturedly making all sorts of inquiries, while our busy captain, paying little attention to them, was giving orders to his crew.
the neck of the harbor is narrow and it is seldom possible to sail in to appointed anchorage without the aid of a steam tug. our captain wished to save his money, but after much profitless tacking was compelled to take the proffered aid of steam, when we soon reached our quiet mid-harbor quarters and dropped anchor among ships of every size from every sea.
i was still four or five hundred yards from land and could determine no plant in sight excepting the long arched leaf banners of the banana and the palm, which made a brave show on the morro hill. when we were approaching the land, i observed that in some places it was distinctly yellow and i wondered while we were yet some miles distant whether the color belonged to the ground or to sheets of flowers. from our harbor home i could now see that the color was plant-gold. on one side of the harbor was a city of these yellow plants; on the other, a city of yellow stucco houses, narrowly and confusedly congregated.
“do you want to go ashore?” said the captain to me. “yes,” i replied, “but i wish to go to the plant side of the harbor.” “oh, well,” he said, “come with me now. there are some fine squares and gardens in the city, full of all sorts of trees and flowers. enjoy these to-day, and some other day we will all go over the morro hill with you and gather shells. all kinds of shells are over there; but these yellow slopes that you see are covered only with weeds.”
we jumped into the boat and a couple of sailors pulled us to the thronged, noisy wharf. it was sunday afternoon,[9] the noisiest day of a havana week. cathedral bells and prayers in the forenoon, theaters and bull-fight bells and bellowings in the afternoon! lowly whispered prayers to the saints and the virgin, followed by shouts of praise or reproach to bulls and matadors! i made free with fine oranges and bananas and many other fruits. pineapple i had never seen before. wandered about the narrow streets, stunned with the babel of strange sounds and sights; went gazing, also, among the gorgeously flowered garden squares, and then waited among some boxed merchandise until our captain, detained by business, arrived. was glad to escape to our little schooner belle again, weary and heavy laden with excitement and tempting fruits.
[9] doubtless january 12, 1868.
as night came on, a thousand lights starred the great town. i was now in one of my happy dreamlands, the fairest of west india islands. but how, i wondered, shall i be able to escape from this great city confusion? how shall i reach nature in this delectable land? consulting my map, i longed to climb the central mountain range of the island and trace it through all its forests and valleys and over its summit peaks, a distance of seven or eight hundred miles. but alas! though out of florida swamps, fever was yet weighing me down, and a mile of city walking was quite exhausting. the weather too was oppressively warm and sultry.
january 16. during the few days since our arrival the sun usually has risen unclouded, pouring down pure gold, rich and dense, for one or two hours. then islandlike masses of white-edged cumuli suddenly appeared, grew to storm size, and in a few minutes discharged rain in tepid plashing bucketfuls, accompanied with high wind. this was followed by a short space of calm, half-cloudy sky, delightfully fragrant with flowers, and again the air would become hot, thick, and sultry.
this weather, as may readily be perceived, was severe to one so weak and feverish, and after a dozen trials of strength over the morro hill and along the coast northward for shells and flowers, i was sadly compelled to see that no enthusiasm could enable me to walk to the interior. so i was obliged to limit my researches to within ten or twelve miles of havana. captain parsons offered his ship as my headquarters and my weakness prevented me from spending a single night ashore.
the daily programme for nearly all the month that i spent here was about as follows: after breakfast a sailor rowed me ashore on the north side of the harbor. a few minutes’ walk took me past the morro castle and out of sight of the town on a broad cactus common, about as solitary and untrodden as the tangles of florida. here i zigzagged and gathered prizes among unnumbered plants and shells along the shore, stopping to press the plant specimens and to rest in the shade of vine-heaps and bushes until sundown. the happy hours stole away until i had to return to the schooner. either i was seen by the sailors who usually came for me, or i hired a boat to take me back. arrived, i reached up my press and a big handful of flowers, and with a little help climbed up the side of my floating home.
refreshed with supper and rest, i recounted my adventures in the vine tangles, cactus thickets, sunflower swamps and along the shore among the breakers. my flower specimens, also, and pocketfuls of shells and corals had to be reviewed. next followed a cool, dreamy hour on deck amid the lights of the town and the various vessels coming and departing.
many strange sounds were heard: the vociferous, unsmotherable bells, the heavy thundering of cannon from the castle, and the shouts of the sentinels in measured time. combined they made the most incessant sharp-angled mass of noise that i ever was doomed to hear. nine or ten o’clock found me in a small bunk with the harbor wavelets tinkling outside close to my ear. the hours of sleep were filled with dreams of heavy heat, of fruitless efforts for the disentanglement of vines, or of running from curling breakers back to the morro, etc. thus my days and nights went on.
occasionally i was persuaded by the captain to go ashore in the evening on his side of the harbor, accompanied perhaps by two or three other captains. after landing and telling the sailors when to call for us, we hired a carriage and drove to the upper end of the city, to a fine public square adorned with shady walks and magnificent plants. a brass band in imposing uniform played the characteristic lance-noted martial airs of the spanish. evening is the fashionable hour for aristocratic drives about the streets and squares, the only time that is delightfully cool. i never saw elsewhere people so neatly and becomingly dressed. the proud best-family cubans may fairly be called beautiful, are under- rather than over-sized, with features exquisitely moulded, and set off with silks and broadcloth in excellent taste. strange that their amusements should be so coarse. bull-fighting, brain-splitting bell-ringing, and the most piercing artificial music appeal to their taste.
the rank and wealth of havana nobility, when out driving, seems to be indicated by the distance of their horses from the body of the carriage. the higher the rank, the longer the shafts of the carriage, and the clumsier and more ponderous are the wheels, which are not unlike those of a cannon-cart. a few of these carriages have shafts twenty-five feet in length, and the brilliant-liveried negro driver on the lead horse, twenty or thirty feet in advance of the horse in the shafts, is beyond calling distance of his master.
havana abounds in public squares, which in all my random strolls throughout the big town i found to be well watered, well cared for, well planted, and full of exceedingly showy and interesting plants, rare even amid the exhaustless luxuriance of cuba. these squares also contained fine marble statuary and were furnished with seats in the shadiest places. many of the walks were paved instead of graveled.
the streets of havana are crooked, labyrinthic, and exceedingly narrow. the sidewalks are only about a foot wide. a traveler experiences delightful relief when, heated and wearied by rains through the breadth of the dingy yellow town, dodging a way through crowds of men and mules and lumbering carts and carriages, he at length finds shelter in the spacious, dustless, cool, flowery squares; still more when, emerging from all the din and darkness of these lanelike streets, he suddenly finds himself out in the middle of the harbor, inhaling full-drawn breaths of the sea breezes.
the interior of the better houses which came under my observation struck me with the profusion of dumpy, ill-proportioned pillars at the entrances and in the halls, and with the spacious open-fielded appearance of their enclosed square house-gardens or courts. cubans in general appear to me superfinely polished, polite, and agreeable in society, but in their treatment of animals they are cruel. i saw more downright brutal cruelty to mules and horses during the few weeks i stayed there than in my whole life elsewhere. live chickens and hogs are tied in bunches by the legs and carried to market thus, slung on a mule. in their general treatment of all sorts of animals they seem to have no thought for them beyond cold-blooded, selfish interest.
in tropical regions it is easy to build towns, but it is difficult to subdue their armed and united plant inhabitants, and to clear fields and make them blossom with breadstuff. the plant people of temperate regions, feeble, unarmed, unallied, disappear under the trampling feet of flocks, herds, and man, leaving their homes to enslavable plants which follow the will of man and furnish him with food. but the armed and united plants of the tropics hold their rightful kingdom plantfully, nor, since the first appearance of lord man, have they ever suffered defeat.
a large number of cuba’s wild plants circle closely about havana. in five minutes’ walk from the wharf i could reach the undisturbed settlements of nature. the field of the greater portion of my rambling researches was a strip of rocky common, silent and unfrequented by anybody save an occasional beggar at nature’s door asking a few roots and seeds. this natural strip extended ten miles along the coast northward, with but few large-sized trees and bushes, but rich in magnificent vines, cacti-composites, leguminous plants, grasses, etc. the wild flowers of this seaside field are a happy band, closely joined in splendid array. the trees shine with blossoms and with light reflected from the leaves. the individuality of the vines is lost in trackless, interlacing, twisting, overheaping union.
our american “south” is rich in flowery vines. in some districts almost every tree is crowned with them, aiding each other in grace and beauty. indiana, kentucky, and tennessee have the grapevine in predominant numbers and development. farther south dwell the greenbriers and countless leguminous vines. a vine common among the florida islets, perhaps belonging to the dogbane family, over-runs live-oaks and palmettos, with frequently more than a hundred stems twisted into one cable. yet in no section of the south are there such complicated and such gorgeously flowered vine-tangles as flourish in armed safety in the hot and humid wild gardens of cuba.
the longest and the shortest vine that i found in cuba were both leguminous. i have said that the harbor side of the morro hill is clothed with tall yellow-flowered composites through which it is difficult to pass. but there are smooth, velvety, lawnlike patches in these composit? forests. coming suddenly upon one of these open places, i stopped to admire its greenness and smoothness, when i observed a sprinkling of large papilionaceous blossoms among the short green grass. the long composites that bordered this little lawn were entwined and almost smothered with vines which bore similar corollas in tropic abundance.
i at once decided that these sprinkled flowers had been blown off the encompassing tangles and had been kept fresh by dew and by spray from the sea. but, on stooping to pick one of them up, i was surprised to find that it was attached to mother earth by a short, prostrate, slender hair of a vine stem, bearing, besides the one large blossom, a pair or two of linear leaves. the flower weighed more than stem, root, and leaves combined. thus, in a land of creeping and twining giants, we find also this charming, diminutive simplicity—the vine reduced to its lowest terms.
the longest vine, prostrate and untwined like its little neighbor, covers patches of several hundred square yards with its countless branches and close growth of upright, trifoliate, smooth green leaves. the flowers are as plain and unshowy in size and color as those of the sweet peas of gardens. the seeds are large and satiny. the whole plant is noble in its motions and features, covering the ground with a depth of unconfused leafage which i have never seen equaled by any other plant. the extent of leaf-surface is greater, i think, than that of a large kentucky oak. it grows, as far as my observation has reached, only upon shores, in a soil composed of broken shells and corals, and extends exactly to the water-line of the highest-reaching waves. the same plant is abundant in florida.
the cacti form an important part of the plant population of my ramble ground. they are various as the vines, consisting now of a diminutive joint or two hid in the weeds, now rising into bushy trees, wide-topped, with trunks a foot in diameter, and with glossy, dark-green joints that reflect light like the silex-varnished palms. they are planted for fences, together with the spanish bayonet and agave.
in one of my first walks i was laboriously scrambling among some low rocks gathering ferns and vines, when i was startled by finding my face close to a great snake, whose body was disposed carelessly like a castaway rope among the weeds and stones. after escaping and coming to my senses, i discovered that the snake was a member of the vegetable kingdom, capable of no dangerous amount of locomotion, but possessed of many a fang, and prostrate as though under the curse of eden, “upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat.”
one day, after luxuriating in the riches of my morro pasture, and pressing many new specimens, i went down to the bank of brilliant wave-washed shells to rest awhile in their beauty, and to watch the breakers that a powerful norther was heaving in splendid rank along the coral boundary. i gathered pocketfuls of shells, mostly small but fine in color and form, and bits of rosy coral. then i amused myself by noting the varying colors of the waves and the different forms of their curved and blossoming crests. while thus alone and free it was interesting to learn the richly varied songs, or what we mortals call the roar, of expiring breakers. i compared their variation with the different distances to which the broken wave-water reached landward in its farthest-flung foam-wreaths, and endeavored to form some idea of the one great song sounding forever all around the white-blooming shores of the world.
rising from my shell seat, i watched a wave leaping from the deep and coming far up the beveled strand to bloom and die in a mass of white. then i followed the spent waters in their return to the blue deep, wading in their spangled, decaying fragments until chased back up the bank by the coming of another wave. while thus playing half studiously, i discovered in the rough, beaten deathbed of the wave a little plant with closed flowers. it was crouching in a hollow of the brown wave-washed rock, and one by one the chanting, dying waves rolled over it. the tips of its delicate pink petals peered above the clasping green calyx. “surely,” said i, as i stooped over it for a moment, before the oncoming of another wave, “surely you cannot be living here! you must have been blown from some warm bank, and rolled into this little hollow crack like a dead shell.” but, running back after every retiring wave, i found that its roots were wedged into a shallow wrinkle of the coral rock, and that this wave-beaten chink was indeed its dwelling-place.
i had oftentimes admired the adaptation displayed in the structure of the stately dulse and other seaweeds, but never thought to find a highbred flowering plant dwelling amid waves in the stormy, roaring domain of the sea. this little plant has smooth globular leaves, fleshy and translucent like beads, but green like those of other land plants. the flower is about five eighths of an inch in diameter, rose-purple, opening in calm weather, when deserted by the waves. in general appearance it is like a small portulaca. the strand, as far as i walked it, was luxuriantly fringed with woody composit?, two or three feet in height, their tops purple and golden with a profusion of flowers. among these i discovered a small bush whose yellow flowers were ideal; all the parts were present regularly alternate and in fives, and all separate, a plain harmony.
when a page is written over but once it may be easily read; but if it be written over and over with characters of every size and style, it soon becomes unreadable, although not a single confused meaningless mark or thought may occur among all the written characters to mar its perfection. our limited powers are similarly perplexed and overtaxed in reading the inexhaustible pages of nature, for they are written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence. there is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. all together form the one grand palimpsest of the world.
one of the most common plants of my pasture was the agave. it is sometimes used for fencing. one day, in looking back from the top of the morro hill, as i was returning to the island belle, i chanced to observe two poplar-like trees about twenty-five feet in height. they were growing in a dense patch of cactus and vine-knotted sunflowers. i was anxious to see anything so homelike as a poplar, and so made haste towards the two strange trees, making a way through the cactus and sunflower jungle that protected them. i was surprised to find that what i took to be poplars were agaves in flower, the first i had seen. they were almost out of flower, and fast becoming wilted at the approach of death. bulbs were scattered about, and a good many still remained on the branches, which gave it a fruited appearance.
the stem of the agave seems enormous in size when one considers that it is the growth of a few weeks. this plant is said to make a mighty effort to flower and mature its seeds and then to die of exhaustion. now there is not, so far as i have seen, a mighty effort or the need of one, in wild nature. she accomplishes her ends without unquiet effort, and perhaps there is nothing more mighty in the development of the flower-stem of the agave than in the development of a grass panicle.
havana has a fine botanical garden. i spent pleasant hours in its magnificent flowery arbors and around its shady fountains. there is a palm avenue which is considered wonderfully stately and beautiful, fifty palms in two straight lines, each rigidly perpendicular. the smooth round shafts, slightly thicker in the middle, appear to be productions of the lathe, rather than vegetable stems. the fifty arched crowns, inimitably balanced, blaze in the sunshine like heaps of stars that have fallen from the skies. the stems were about sixty or seventy feet in height, the crowns about fifteen feet in diameter.
along a stream-bank were tall, waving bamboos, leafy as willows, and infinitely graceful in wind gestures. there was one species of palm, with immense bipinnate leaves and leaflets fringed, jagged, and one-sided, like those of adiantum. hundreds of the most gorgeous-flowered plants, some of them large trees, belonging to the leguminos?. compared with what i have before seen in artificial flower-gardens, this is past comparison the grandest. it is a perfect metropolis of the brightest and most exuberant of garden plants, watered by handsome fountains, while graveled and finely bordered walks slant and curve in all directions, and in all kinds of fanciful playground styles, more like the fairy gardens of the arabian nights than any ordinary man-made pleasure-ground.
in havana i saw the strongest and the ugliest negroes that i have met in my whole walk. the stevedores of the havana wharf are muscled in true giant style, enabling them to tumble and toss ponderous casks and boxes of sugar weighing hundreds of pounds as if they were empty. i heard our own brawny sailors, after watching them at work a few minutes, express unbounded admiration of their strength, and wish that their hard outbulging muscles were for sale. the countenances of some of the negro orange-selling dames express a devout good-natured ugliness that i never could have conceived any arrangement of flesh and blood to be capable of. besides oranges they sold pineapples, bananas, and lottery tickets.
