STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES.
The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula
into the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the
land as the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional
spring, the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the
deeper foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of
flower in phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their
fellowship and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine
world. Even the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is
realized in the salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of
the submerged vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the
tepid waters of the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and
to sight, the diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside
spring in the mid-sea fountain.
As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar
characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable
quality, so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts
of the neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out
three hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a
less volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow
(Trichecus muriatus); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla
are rivers which, like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a
full head—lost rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the
marine world, and south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba),
a river-fountain throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water
on a liquid stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the
Caribbean Sea. Its impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary
crafts; and, to add to its recognizable characteristics, in its pure
waters is to be found the sea-cow—found there and in Manatee
Bay and Spring alone. To the geologist such rivers are not mysteries.
The lower strata of the limestone formation are hollowed out into
vast cavernous channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever
the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the
conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge
to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into
fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet
unrecognizable in the sublime horror of great darkness.
It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its
arborescent and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and
phaenogamous beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful
creatures must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings
and the wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the
serene sea about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the
splendors of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible
from the surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant
floor the filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually
flecked with sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular
clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which
surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider
scope of vision. But the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or
the magic glory of the prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the
loveliness of color and the play of light and shadow. The structures,
the work of astraea, madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a
singular resemblance to fabrications of the architect. One massive
dome or archway, a hundred feet in diameter, rises to the surface.
Its front is carved in elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae,
looking like the fret-and flower-work that covers Saracenic
architecture. Looking through this into the violet ambuscade, the eye
falls upon colonnades, light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that
seem to support the paly-golden,
lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple, spreading every
way in vault and colonnade, on which religious enthusiasm or barbaric
royalty has worked with a reckless waste of art and labor. Nor is it
the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it seems to be a temple
built of many-colored glass. To understand the magnificence of the
wonderful structure, the reader must have in mind the laws affecting
light in transmission through water—the frangibility of the
rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion, reflection,
interference and accidental and complementary color. He must
recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae or
fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters
it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing
steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid
beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading
a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.
But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its
loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are
to be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and
all over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you
please to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds
recall the Chaemerops serrulata of the adjacent shore. The
ament, so to speak, of the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of
the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in
fascicles and corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the
radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees,
covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains
gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the
ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere1
But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas:
among others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of
its coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in
submarine diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a
purpose certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to
use his own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden
chariot-wheels," lost in that famous pursuit. Is it possible, in
the nature of things, for such an expedition to be made by any but an
American? It takes a strong Bible faith, allied to a simple but
strong self-confidence, to start a man on such an adventure. The
curious transforming magic of the sea had its effect on the Arab
dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having settled on the exact
spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled to return almost
immediately, and was brought to the surface in open-eyed wonder. With
all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he swore positively to the
finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the jewelry of Pharaoh's
household. He was so earnest and so exact in the matter of the golden
wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the captain dryly asked
if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a moist throne and
keeping court with the fishes, he none the less had the line attached
and drew up—the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon, transformed under
water, but plain and ugly enough above.
"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a
palace of the djins, howadji."
Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the
defunct Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and
discoveries. He saw there the Xenia elongata, a shrub-like
coral distinguished for the beauty of its colors, having stellar
tentacles, rose-colored, blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and
looking like flowers of living jewelry; another with a long cue, like
a tress of hair, and others of allied beauty.
The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in
jewelry, but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the
organism. The animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in the sun
and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous substance
is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color and the
arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and corymbs,
gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and changes
in the light
Like colors of a shell,
That keep the hue and polish of the wave.
Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in
Exodus. The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery
the natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of
the strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a
shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had
borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged
mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were.
Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it
made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry
foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend the
possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road.
Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the
American's observation. Smith's Bible Dictionary
discusses learnedly the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae
eruthra thalassa] in the Septuagint. The Dictionary surmises
that the name was derived from the red western mountains, red coral
zoophytes, etc., and appears to give little weight to the real and
natural reason which came under our American's notice. On one
occasion the diver observed, while under sea, that the curious
wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous golden floor like
Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose
themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet
curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an
angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the
thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple,
the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the
venous hue of deoxidized life-currents.
The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at
first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon
this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye
could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian
sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with
a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an
elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant
flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The
surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust
layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white
glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of
the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It
was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty
of the ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which
under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny
bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious
coloring-matter in tiny tubes.
This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas.
The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the
ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living
green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly
curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange
electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures
are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere
chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The Photocaris lights a
flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks,
increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The
living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow
light its microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a
beauty of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex
are elaborately wrought in
microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the
deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield
carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise
them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The
Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their
heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin
polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of
greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated
electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of
their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and
their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life
God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of
the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of
huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite
and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his
little zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from
the remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.
As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical
seas, so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea,
Black Sea and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at
least, to microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is
very similar in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf,
and there is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of
submarine adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory
sketch.
About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden
chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English
docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more
tedious by delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for
bullion and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans,
who are forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged
bullion and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are
forbidden to buy or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in
its iniquities or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the
return cargo. From Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to
Hong-Kong, where they drop anchor in the offing, and by a special
custom the cargo is sold and paid for in sycee silver before
disfreighting, and the bullion is in the safe of the huge smuggler,
although the opium has not yet been removed. The Chinese restrictive
laws are very severe; but when we note that ninety thousand gallons
of confiscated whisky were seized in godly Massachusetts in one year,
we can infer the difficulties in the Maine law of the Celestials. The
custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a Chinese junk, to draw up beside
the English contrabandist and transfer the cargo in the outer
harbor.
It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not
with the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits
on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening
and the confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift
red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the
rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire.
High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and
the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with
splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over
its own reflection. There is a reddish glow in the western horizon
over Hong-Kong, a fainter glimmer west by south over Macao, and
farther west and north the reflected glories of the sacred city of
Canton. The three make a semicircular crescent, like a great floating
moon, on the horizon. A coral islet juts out between the cities under
which the huge smuggler affects to play "I spy"—only
affects, for she does not care for the authorities she bribes nor the
laws she despises.
But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy
cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the
after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They
handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer, like a country girl for a
run up to town. Men are swarming about the yards and rigging. That is
not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes, the hong merchants,
agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India opium is covered with
petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined with hides and covered
with gunny; and these cases are locked in by stays, spars and
bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and confusion alow and
aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks and under hatches.
The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee silver, for the
Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation as of the
importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and angry. In
a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily around
the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and gains of a
year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence she
will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in
her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a
great iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the
unwieldy Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping
pasteboard; tears her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and
cindery fiery mouth, and growls over her wreck. And the sodden,
stupefied merchantman, as if drunk with opium, goes yelling and
staggering with her sleepy drugs to the bottom, and stays there,
sycee silver and all.
From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the
Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae
could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal,
looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to
the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving,
and given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing
and the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering
their way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver
lay safe and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American
proposed to have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay—the
coral insect, which was using it in its architectural designs, and
the hungry quicksand. Worst of all, the American could not find it.
They hid the bulky vessel in hills of sand, and after two months'
labor in submarine armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a
coolie," said a resident China merchant, and he did.
Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities—one
inland, narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea,
floating on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town
never go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they
are first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and
wreckers. They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel
in broad daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for
protection. They will defy a sentry on shipboard—steal his ship
from under him while he is wondering what he is set to guard. They
are all expert divers, as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their
own ugly little hovels. Such a native was found, and for a dollar
spotted the submerged vessel in her matrix of sand and coral.
"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he
will steal the line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler
again."
But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was
necessary to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had
the necessary skill. When the American consented to lost time and
defeat the cyclone threw another spoil in his way. The East like the
West Indies is the brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils,
like a lasso thrown wide and large, go twisting north by west. It
caught a French frigate in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the
coral reefs, and the hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of
those seas. But she was found, and the petard, like a huge axe
wielded by a giant's arms, cut into her treasure-house and
rescued it. The American's expenses for a journey round the world
were paid.
I have heard a sufficiently incredible story of a man submerged in
a Chinese junk and under water twelve hours, yet taken out alive. A
Chinese junk is the nightmare of marine architecture. It is owned in
partnership by a company, but there is this difference from an
ordinary charter-party. Each man owns his share or allotment of the
vessel, and it is divided off into actual compartments or boxes made
water-proof; and each one of these pigeon-holes the hong or merchant
owns and stocks to suit himself. All open out upon the upper deck,
and are battened down—sometimes with a glass skylight if used
as a chamber. The structure in junk form is the thing's proper
registry, since any departure from the ancient model would subject
her to heavy taxation as an alien vessel.2 It is a very
effectual mode of preventing any improvement in shipbuilding among
the Chinese.
One of these clumsy arks went on the rocks in a typhoon, and was
covered over her deck, leaving, however, the projecting skylight on
or near a level with the surface. The hong was in this cuddy-hole,
frantic between personal loss and personal peril. Suddenly there was
a jar and a crash, and the sea beat over her. Fortunately, the
skylight was closed water-tight, but, unfortunately, some of the
spars and rigging blocked up the exit, even if he had dared the
venture. The bolts of the sea barred him in.
But Chinese wreckers and Chinese thieves are on the alert. Wattai,
or some such queer piratical Celestial with devilish propensities,
went for the spoil, settling the salvage by arithmetic of his own.
The wreck was removed from the skylight, and under the water, in that
dense chamber, stagnant with mephitic air, the bruised, stupefied
hong was found.
As is apparent from a previous example, the tendency of the
sea-sand to absorb and conceal a sunken vessel is one of those
difficulties that beset the explorer. But for that the recovery of
treasure would be more frequent, the profession or business more
lucrative. The number of vessels sunk annually, we learn from
Lloyd's statistics, is one hundred thousand tons to the English
commercial marine; and out of 551 vessels lost to the royal navy, 391
were sunk. Sir Charles Lyell estimates that there might be collected
in the sea more evidences of man's art and industry than exist at
any one time on the surface of the earth. But while the sea
preserves, it hides. An example of the kind occurred in the wreck of
the Golden Gate, a California steamer heavy with bullion. It occurred
during the war, and the only expert diver within reach was an
expatriated rebel. He had been a man of fortune, but, venturing too
rashly in the Confederacy, he lost by confiscation and perhaps
persecution. However, he was the man for the insurance companies, and
a treaty was concluded, allowing him sixty per cent. salvage.
The vessel had gone down in tide water. The persistent sea had
rocked and rocked it, and washed the tenacious quicksands about it,
and finally concealed it. The search for it was long and tedious, and
once given up or nearly given up. But as the disappointed diver was
preparing to ascend his foot touched something firm, which proved to
be a part of the wooden frame of the ship.
But even when found the difficulties had only begun. The
tenacious, elastic sand defied all tools or leverage: no petard could
blast so fickle and treacherous a substance. Wit and ingenuity can
devise where ordinary art or engineering has failed. The diver took a
lesson from the neighboring gold-miner, whose hydrostatic pump
chisels away the mountain-side to lay bare the mother quartz. Fitted
with such an engine, he swept the silted sand from the deck of the
prize, and dug it out of the elastic matrix after the fashion of
Macduff's birth.
By a great misfortune, incipient jealousies and the eager spirit
of covetousness now showed themselves. It was at first whispered, and
then asseverated, that if the bullion was once recovered the rebel
might whistle for his sixty per cent. salvage. It was a bitter, bad
time—a time of mistrust
and suspicion—and the plan of defrauding the diver was only too
feasible. He would be involved in a suit with a wealthy company at a
time when prejudice, if not the form of law, regarded him as having
forfeited a citizen's right. It placed him in a difficult
position—more difficult because he could get no safe assurance,
and was evidently suspected and watched. The diver concluded that his
only way to secure his sixty per cent. salvage was to take it.
So it was that, with something of the feelings of the
resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of
the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver.
They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and
moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank
to throw off the black envelope of fog and cloud. The black,
oleaginous water seemed to slope from the muffled oar in a gluey,
shining wave, and the heavy ripple at the bow of their boat parted in
a long, adhesive roll, sloping away, but not breaking into froth or
glisten of electric fire. The air and the sea seemed brooding in a
heavy, hopeless misery, and the strange sense of plundering, not the
living, but the dead, as if the sunken vessel was a huge coffin, was
upon them. With that cautious sense of superstitious dread choking
their muttered whispers, they reached the spot and prepared to
descend. The task of sinking through that pitchy consistence, into
the intricacy of that black, coffin-like hold, among the drowned
corpses, to do a deed of doubtful right, must have intensified the
horror of great darkness and that sublimity of silence that in the
under-sea peoples the void shadows with horrible existences and fills
the concave with voices. But it was done; and with trembling
eagerness the weighty ingots, the unalloyed bars, were safely
shipped, loading down the boat. Then louder and louder came the dash
of oars. For a few moments they felt the way with muffled stroke into
the shrouding shadows. But practiced ears caught the softened roll in
the rollocks, and keen eyes marked the shadowy boat in the deepening
gloom. It must be the skilled oar and adroit steering that saves them
now, but not far away lie the long shadows of the shelving coast and
its black-bearded forest. The swing of the oars became bold, open and
exciting, and angry challenges passed. But the burden of the heavy
gold fought against them, like the giant's harp calling Master!
Master! on the shoulders of flying Jack of the Bean-stalk. The light,
trim craft of the pursuers edged upon them, and the shadow of an
angry struggle in the pitchy, reeking night gloomed over them.
"No, no," said the leader: "no bloodshed for the
cursed stuff! Here, give me a lift;" and with a heave and plunge
the massy rouleaux splashed into the water, and the boat rose lighter
with an easier conscience. The sea shut close-fisted over its own,
while the pursuing boat paused and eddied about it, as if held to the
treasure by invisible, impalpable strands. The pursuit was abandoned,
and the betrayed or treacherous diver escaped. But busy rumor reports
that he returned at leisure to the spot, and that the bullion of the
Golden Gate went to replenish the forfeited fortune of the bold
ex-rebel. Believe as you like, good reader.
The sea-sand, in its industrious zeal in covering up memorials of
man's art and industry, is often curiously assisted by the
zoophytes and vegetation of the ocean, as well as guarded in its
labor by abnormal monsters of piscine creation. An example of this
occurred in an amusing venture after Lafitte's gold. While the
Gulf coast of Western Louisiana is fortified, in its immature
terre tremblante, by the coral reefs and islets, it has the
appearance of having been torn into ragged edges by the hydrostatic
pressure of the Gulf Stream. On one of these little islets or keys,
hard by Caillon Bay, the rumor went that the buccaneer had sunk a
Spanish galleon laden with pieces of eight and ingots of despoiled
Mexico. The people thereabout are a simple, credulous race of Spanish
Creoles, speaking no English, keeping the saints' days, and
watching the salt-pans of the more energetic but scarcely more thrifty Americans with curious
wonder. They chanced in their broken tongue to commit the story of
the treasure to a diver of an equally simple faith, who set about
putting it to more practical use than to gild an hour with an old
legend. They told how the spook of the Spanish captain haunted the
wreck, and that the gold was guarded by a dragon in the shape of a
monstrous horned and mottled frog, or some other devil of the sea, to
which the diver did seriously incline, but not to make him give up
the undertaking. He prudently, however, consulted with an old Indian
witch, and so received the devil's good word, and piously got a
bottle of holy water from the priest, and thus was well fenced in
above and below.
But his coadjutors were inexperienced, and perhaps his own courage
was of that saccharine character that gets oozy and slushy in moist
perils. When descending with his leaded boots on the dark green
outline of sea mosses that in the clear Gulf invested the vessel in a
verdurous coat, by some mistake he was let down with a slip, and went
hurtling through the rotten planks, losing his holy water and sending
his witch's wand—well, to its original owner. He crushed
through, and the infinite dust of infusoriae and diatomaceae choked
his vision. The Teredo navalis, whose labors are so
destructive in southern seas, had perforated the old hulk, and
converted the vessel into a spongy mass of wood, clay and lime.
Innumerable algae and curious fungi of the sea, hydroids,
delicate-frost formed emerald plumuluria and campanuluna, bryozoa,
mollusks, barnacles and varieties of coral had used it as a
builder's quarry and granary. As the geologist finds atom by atom
of an organism converted into a stony counterfeit, these busy
existences had preserved the vessel's shape, but converted the
woody fibre to their own uses. He could see nothing at first but a
mixture of green and ochreous dust, through which tiny electric fires
went quivering and shaking. In the confusion he lost the signal line,
and had no way of making his condition known. Plunging about as the
sea dust began to settle, and already more intent on finding the
life-line and getting out of that than of securing Lafitte's
gold, he observed some spectators not pleasant to look upon. A
lobster or a crab is much pleasanter upon the table than in the sea,
and there were other things he knew, and some he believed, might not
take his hasty visit pleasantly. There was the horseshoe-fish with
ugly strings hanging from his base, disagreeable arachnides, strange
star fish and their parasites, and, curiously, a large wolfish fish
that had built a nest and was watching it and him—watching him
with no agreeable or timid expression in its angry eyes. He was just
expecting Victor Hugo's devil fish to complete his horror when a
sudden, sharp, bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel
or marine torpedo. This was a real and sensible danger, and as he
struggled to ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the spongy
substance gave way, the treacherous quicksand, with its smooth,
tenacious throat-clutch, slid down and caught him. The danger was
real and imminent, when his companions above, observing the slide,
drew him up. And that, I believe, was the first and last attempt to
levv on Lafitte's gold.
But the experience of Pharaoh and the danger of our rambling
wrecker are not the only instances of the wall of waters or the
destruction it causes. Nine days after a storm in the Gulf, a
traveler, finding his way from the salt-pans of Western Louisiana,
took a little fishing-craft. There was that fresh purity in the air
and the sea which follows the bursting of the elements. The numerous
"bays" and keys that indent the shore looked fresher and
brighter, and there was that repentant beauty in Nature which aims to
soothe us into forgetfulness of its recent angry passions. The
white-winged sea-birds flew about, and tall water-fowl stood silently
over their shadows like a picture above and below. The water sparkled
with salt freshness, and the roving winds sat in the shoulder of the
sail, resting and riding to port.
The little bark slipped along the shores and shallows, and in and
out by key and inlet, seeing its shadow on the pure white sand that
seemed so near its keel. The last vestige of the storm was gone, and
the little Gulf-world seemed fresher and gladder for it. The tropical
green grasses and water-plants hung their long, linear, hairlike
sheaths in graceful curves, and patches of willow-palm and palmetto,
in many an intricate curve and involution, made a labyrinth of
verdure. The wild loveliness of the numerous slips and channels,
where never a boat seemed to have sailed since the Indian's
water-logged canoe was tossed on the shadowy banks, was enhanced by
the vision of distant ships, their sails even with the water, or
broken by the white buildings of a sleepy plantation in its bower of
fig and olive and tall moss-clustered pines.
Suddenly the traveler fancied he heard a cry, but the fishermen
said No—it was the scream of water-fowl or the shrill call of
an eagle far above dropping down from the blue zenith; and they
sailed on. Again he heard the distant cry, and was told of the
panther in the bush and wild birds that drummed and called with
almost human intonation; and they sailed on again. But again the
mysterious, troubled cry arose from the labyrinth of green, and the
traveler entreated them to go in quest of it. The fishers had their
freight for the market—delay would deteriorate its value; but
the anxious traveler bade them put about and he would bear the
loss.
It was well they did. There, in the dense coverts of the
sea-swamps, amid the brackish water-growths and grasses, they found a
man and woman, ragged, torn, starved. For nine days they had had no
food but the soft pith of the palmetto, coarse mussels or scant
poison-berries, their bed the damp morass, and their drink the
brackish water; and they told the wild and terrible story of Last
Island.
Last Island was the Saratoga and Long Branch of the South, the
southern-most watering-place in the Gulf. Situated on a fertile coral
island enriched by innumerable flocks of wild-fowl, art had brought
its wealth of fruit and flower to perfection. The cocoanut-palm,
date-palm and orange orchards contrasted their rich foliage in the
sunshine with the pineapple, banana and the rich soft turf of the
mesquit-grass. The air was fragrant with magnolia and orange bloom,
the gardens glittering with the burning beauty of tropical flower,
jessamine thickets and voluptuous grape arbors, the golden wine-like
sun pouring an intoxicating balm over it; graceful white cottages
festooned with vines, with curving chalet or Chinese roofs colored
red; pinnacled arbors and shadowy retreats of espaliers pretty as a
coral grove; and a fair shining hotel in the midst, with arcades and
porches and galleries--the very dream of ease and luxury, as delicate
and trim as if made of cut paper in many forms of prettiness. Here
was the nabob's retreat; in this balmy garden of delight all that
luxury, art and voluptuous desire could hint or hope for was
collected; and nothing harsh or poor or rugged jarred the fullness of
its luxurious ease.
Ten nights before its fragrant atmosphere was broken into
beautiful ripples by the clang and harmony of dancing music. It was
the night of the "hop." The hotel was crowded. Yachts and
pleasure-vessels pretty as the petals of a flower tossed on the
water, or as graceful shells banked the shores; and the steamer at
twilight came breathing short, excited breaths with the last relay,
for it was the height of the summer season. In their light, airy
dresses, as the music swam and sung, bright-eyed girls floated in
graceful waltzes down the voluptuous waves of sound, and the gleam of
light and color was like a butterflies' ball. The queenly,
luscious night sank deeper, and lovers strolled in lamp-lighted
arcades, and dreamed and hoped of life like that, the fairy existence
of love and peace; and so till, tired of play, sleep and rest came in
the small hours.
Hush! All at once came the storm, not, as in northern latitudes,
with premonitory murmur and fretting, lashing itself by slow degrees
into white heat and rain, but the storm of the tropics, carrying the sea on its broad, angry
shoulders, till, reaching the verdurous, love-clustered little isle,
it flung the bulk of waters with all its huge, brawny force right
upon the cut-paper prettinesses, and broke them into sand and
splinters. Of all those pretty children with blue and with opalescent
eyes, arrayed like flowers of the field; of all those lovers dreaming
of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages among figs and olives;
of all the vigorous manhood and ripe womanhood, with all the skill
and courage of successful life in them,—not a tithe was saved.
The ghastly maw of the waters covered them and swallowed them. A few
sprang, among crashing timbers, on a floor laden with impetuous
water—the many perhaps never waked at all, or woke to but one
short prayer. The few who were saved hardly knew how they were
saved—the many who died never knew how they were slain or
drowned.
It has twice been my fortune in life to see such a storm, and to
know its sudden destruction: once, to see a low, broad, shelving
farm-house disappear to the ground timbers before my eyes, as if its
substance had vanished into air, while great globes of electric fire
burst down and sunk into the ground; once, to see a pine forest of
centuries' growth cut down as grass by the mower's scythe. I
do not think it possible to see a third and survive, and I do not
wish my soul to be whirled away in the vortex of such a storm.
At noon or later, after the ruin of Last Island, a gentleman of a
name renowned in South-western story found himself clinging to a bush
in the wild waters, lashed by the long whips of branches, half dead
with fatigue and fear. For a time the hurly-burly blinded and hid
everything, and the long roll rocked and tore at him in desperate
endeavor to wrench loose his bleeding fingers. The impulse of the
wind and storm at such a time is as of a solid body, and there is a
look of solidity in the very appearance of the magnificent force. But
as it abated he thought he heard a faint cry, and looking around he
saw a poor girl in the ribbons of her night-dress clinging to a
branch, and slipping from her feeble hold. Tired as he was, and wild
and dangerous as the attempt might be, he did not dare to leave her
to perish. Choosing his time in a lull, he struck out to the bush,
and reached it just as her ebbing strength gave way. He took her in
his sturdy arms, and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both
to their strange anchorage. Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she
was, in the sweet, delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the
raven tresses clothed in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of
last night's hop. He cheered and encouraged her, pointing out
that the storm was abating, had abated. It could not be long until
search-boats came, and while he had strength to live she should share
it. It proved true. Generous and hardy fishers and ships had come at
once to the scene of disaster, and were busy picking up the few
spared by wind and wave. They found the two clinging together and to
that slight bush, and took them off, wrapping them in ready, rough
fishermen's coats. The reader can see the end of that story. A
meeting so appointed had its predestined end in a love-match. So we
leave it and them: the rest of their lives belongs to them, not to
us.
The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his
wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together.
When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the
wife, I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only
valued his life and hers at a few dollars—not enough to
compensate the traveler for the loss incurred as demurrage to the
fishermen.
Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling
fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is
as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in
the cataclysm of that dreadful night—bones which now waste to
whiteness on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the
under-sea.
WILL WALLACE HARNEY.
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