Letters of a Traveller Part 5

"Twelve years ago," said an acquaintance of mine, "when I first visited St. Augustine, it was a fine old Spanish town. A large proportion of the houses, which you now see roofed like barns, were then flat-roofed, they were all of sh.e.l.l-rock, and these modern wooden buildings were not yet erected. That old fort, which they are now repairing, to fit it for receiving a garrison, was a sort of ruin, for the outworks had partly fallen, and it stood unoccupied by the military, a venerable monument of the Spanish dominion. But the orange-groves were the ornament and wealth of St. Augustine, and their produce maintained the inhabitants in comfort.

Orange-trees, of the size and height of the pear-tree, often rising higher than the roofs of the houses, embowered the town in perpetual verdure.

They stood so close in the groves that they excluded the sun and the atmosphere was at all times aromatic with their leaves and fruit, and in spring the fragrance of the flowers was almost oppressive."

These groves have now lost their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance--an insect of the _coccus_ family, with a kind of sh.e.l.l on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean, stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and destroying the upper branches. The trunks are now putting out new sprouts and new leaves, but there is no hope of fruit for this year at least.

The old fort of St. Mark, now called Fort Marion, a foolish change of name, is a n.o.ble work, frowning over the Matanzas, which flows between St.

Augustine and the island of St. Anastasia, and it is worth making a long journey to see. No record remains of its original construction, but it is supposed to have been erected about a hundred and fifty years since, and the sh.e.l.l-rock of which it is built is dark with time. We saw where it had been struck with cannon-b.a.l.l.s, which, instead of splitting the rock, became imbedded and clogged among the loosened fragments of sh.e.l.l. This rock is, therefore, one of the best materials for a fortification in the world. We were taken into the ancient prisons of the fort--dungeons, one of which was dimly lighted by a grated window, and another entirely without light; and by the flame of a torch we were shown the half-obliterated inscriptions scrawled on the walls long ago by prisoners.

But in another corner of the fort, we were taken to look at two secret cells, which were discovered a few years since, in consequence of the sinking of the earth over a narrow apartment between them. These cells are deep under ground, vaulted overhead, and without windows. In one of them a wooden machine was found, which some supposed might have been a rack, and in the other a quant.i.ty of human bones. The doors of these cells had been walled up and concealed with stucco, before the fort pa.s.sed into the hands of the Americans.

"If the Inquisition," said the gentleman who accompanied us, "was established in Florida, as it was in the other American colonies of Spain, these were its secret chambers."

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and in the morning I attended the services in the Catholic church. One of the ceremonies was that of p.r.o.nouncing the benediction over a large pile of leaves of the cabbage-palm, or palmetto, gathered in the woods. After the blessing had been p.r.o.nounced, the priest called upon the congregation to come and receive them. The men came forward first, in the order of their age, and then the women; and as the congregation consisted mostly of the descendants of Minorcans, Greeks, and Spaniards, I had a good opportunity of observing their personal appearance. The younger portion of the congregation had, in general, expressive countenances. Their forms, it appeared to me, were generally slighter than those of our people; and if the cheeks of the young women were dark, they had regular features and brilliant eyes, and finely formed hands. There is spirit, also, in this cla.s.s, for one of them has since been pointed out to me in the streets, as having drawn a dirk upon a young officer who presumed upon some improper freedoms of behavior.

The services were closed by a plain and sensible discourse in English, from the priest, Mr. Rampon, a worthy and useful French ecclesiastic, on the obligation of temperance; for the temperance reform has penetrated even hither, and cold water is all the rage. I went again, the other evening, into the same church, and heard a person declaiming, in a language which, at first, I took to be Minorcan, for I could make nothing else of it. After listening for a few minutes, I found that it was a Frenchman preaching in Spanish, with a French mode of p.r.o.nunciation which was odd enough. I asked one of the old Spanish inhabitants how he was edified by this discourse, and he acknowledged that he understood about an eighth part of it.

I have much more to write about this place, but must reserve it for another letter.

Letter XIV.

St. Augustine.

St. Augustine, _April 24, 1843_

You can not be in St. Augustine a day without hearing some of its inhabitants speak of its agreeable climate. During the sixteen days of my residence here, the weather has certainly been as delightful as I could imagine. We have the temperature of early June, as June is known in New York. The mornings are sometimes a little sultry, but after two or three hours, a fresh breeze comes in from the sea, sweeping through the broad piazzas and breathing in at the windows. At this season it comes laden with the fragrance of the flowers of the Pride of India, and sometimes of the orange-tree, and sometimes brings the scent of roses, now in full bloom. The nights are gratefully cool, and I have been told, by a person who has lived here many years, that there are very few nights in the summer when you can sleep without a blanket.

An acquaintance of mine, an invalid, who has tried various climates and has kept up a kind of running fight with Death for many years, retreating from country to country as he pursued, declares to me that the winter climate of St. Augustine is to be preferred to that of any part of Europe, even that of Sicily, and that it is better than the climate of the West Indies. He finds it genial and equable, at the same time that it is not enfeebling. The summer heats are prevented from being intense by the sea-breeze, of which I have spoken. I have looked over the work of Dr.

Forry on the climate of the United States, and have been surprised to see the uniformity of climate which he ascribes to Key West. As appears by the observations he has collected, the seasons at that place glide into each other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer, reaches that extreme which is felt in higher lat.i.tudes of the American continent. The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. I do not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; it would be more so if the softness of its atmosphere and the beauty and serenity of its seasons were generally known. Nor should it be supposed that accommodations for persons in delicate health are wanting; they are in fact becoming better with every year, as the demand for them increases.

Among the acquaintances whom I have made here, I remember many who, having come hither for the benefit of their health, are detained for life by the amenity of the climate. "It seems to me," said an intelligent gentleman of this cla.s.s, the other day, "as if I could not exist out of Florida. When I go to the north, I feel most sensibly the severe extremes of the weather; the climate of Charleston itself, appears harsh to me."

Here at St. Augustine we have occasional frosts in the winter, but at Tampa Bay, on the western sh.o.r.e of the peninsula, no further from this place than from New York to Albany, the dew is never congealed on the gra.s.s, nor is a snow-flake ever seen floating in the air. Those who have pa.s.sed the winter in that place, speak with a kind of rapture of the benignity of the climate. In that country grow the cocoa and the banana, and other productions of the West Indies. Persons who have explored Florida to the south of this, during the past winter, speak of having refreshed themselves with melons in January, growing where they had been self-sown, and of having seen the sugar-cane where it had been planted by the Indians, towering uncropped, almost to the height of the forest trees.

I must tell you, however, what was said to me by a person who had pa.s.sed a considerable time in Florida, and had journeyed, as he told me, in the southern as well as the northern part of the peninsula, "That the climate is mild and agreeable," said he, "I admit, but the annoyance to which you are exposed from insects, counterbalances all the enjoyment of the climate. You are bitten by mosquitoes and gallinippers, driven mad by clouds of sand-flies, and stung by scorpions and centipedes. It is not safe to go to bed in southern Florida without looking between the sheets, to see if there be not a scorpion waiting to be your bed-fellow, nor to put on a garment that has been hanging up in your room, without turning it wrong side out, to see if a scorpion has not found a lodging in it." I have not, however, been incommoded at St. Augustine with these "varmint,"

as they call them at the south. Only the sand-flies, a small black midge, I have sometimes found a little importunate, when walking out in a very calm evening.

Of the salubrity of East Florida I must speak less positively, although it is certain that in St. Augustine emigrants from the north enjoy good health. The owners of the plantations in the neighborhood, prefer to pa.s.s the hot season in this city, not caring to trust their const.i.tutions to the experiment of a summer residence in the country. Of course they are settled on the richest soils, and these are the least healthy. The pine barrens are safer; when not interspersed with marshes, the sandy lands that bear the pine are esteemed healthy all over the south. Yet there are plantations on the St. John's where emigrants from the north reside throughout the year. The opinion seems everywhere to prevail, and I believe there is good reason for it, that Florida, notwithstanding its low and level surface, is much more healthy than the low country of South Carolina and Georgia.

The other day I went out with a friend to a sugar plantation in the neighborhood of St. Augustine. As we rode into the inclosure we breathed the fragrance of young orange-trees in flower, the glossy leaves of which, green at all seasons, were trembling in the wind. A troop of negro children were at play at a little distance from the cabins, and one of them ran along with us to show us a grove of sour oranges which we were looking for. He pointed us to a copse in the middle of a field, to which we proceeded. The trees, which were of considerable size, were full of flowers, and the golden fruit was thick on the branches, and lay scattered on the ground below. I gathered a few of the oranges, and found them almost as acid as the lemon. We stopped to look at the buildings in which the sugar was manufactured. In one of them was the mill where the cane was crushed with iron rollers, in another stood the huge cauldrons, one after another, in which the juice was boiled down to the proper consistence; in another were barrels of sugar, of syrup--a favorite article of consumption in this city--of mola.s.ses, and a kind of spirits resembling Jamaica rum, distilled from the refuse of the mola.s.ses. The proprietor was absent, but three negroes, well-clad young men, of a very respectable appearance and intelligent physiognomy, one of whom was a distiller, were occupied about the buildings, and showed them to us. Near by in the open air lay a pile of sugar cane, of the ribbon variety, striped with red and white, which had been plucked up by the roots, and reserved for planting. The negroes of St. Augustine are a good-looking specimen of the race, and have the appearance of being very well treated. You rarely see a negro in ragged clothing, and the colored children, though slaves, are often dressed with great neatness. In the colored people whom I saw in the Catholic church, I remarked a more agreeable, open, and gentle physiognomy than I have been accustomed to see in that cla.s.s. The Spanish race blends more kindly with the African, than does the English, and produces handsomer men and women.

I have been to see the quarries of coquina, or sh.e.l.l-rock, on the island of St. Anastasia, which lies between St. Augustine and the main ocean. We landed on the island, and after a walk of some distance on a sandy road through the thick shrubs, we arrived at some huts built of a frame-work of poles thatched with the radiated leaves of the dwarf palmetto, which had a very picturesque appearance. Here we found a circular hollow in the earth, the place of an old excavation, now shaded with red-cedars, and the palmetto-royal bristling with long pointed leaves, which bent over and embowered it, and at the bottom was a spring within a square curb of stone, where we refreshed ourselves with a draught of cold water. The quarries were at a little distance from this. The rock lies in the ridges, a little below the surface, forming a stratum of no great depth. The blocks are cut out with crowbars thrust into the rock. It is of a delicate cream color, and is composed of mere sh.e.l.ls and fragments of sh.e.l.ls, apparently cemented by the fresh water percolating through them and depositing calcareous matter brought from the sh.e.l.ls above. Whenever there is any mixture of sand with the sh.e.l.ls, rock is not formed.

Of this material the old fort of St. Mark and the greater part of the city are built. It is said to become harder when exposed to the air and the rain, but to disintegrate when frequently moistened with sea-water. Large blocks were lying on the sh.o.r.e ready to be conveyed to the fort, which is undergoing repairs. It is some consolation to know that this fine old work will undergo as little change in the original plan as is consistent with the modern improvements in fortification. Lieutenant Benham, who has the charge of the repairs, has strong antiquarian tastes, and will preserve as much as possible of its original aspect. It must lose its battlements, however, its fine mural crown. Battlements are now obsolete, except when they are of no use, as on the roofs of churches and Gothic cottages.

In another part of the same island, which we visited afterward, is a dwelling-house situated amid orange-groves. Closely planted rows of the sour orange, the native tree of the country, intersect and shelter orchards of the sweet orange, the lemon, and the lime. The trees were all young, having been planted since the great frost of 1835, and many of them still show the ravages of the gale of last October, which stripped them of their leaves.

"Come this way," said a friend who accompanied me. He forced a pa.s.sage through a tall hedge of the sour orange, and we found ourselves in a little fragrant inclosure, in the midst of which was a tomb, formed of the artificial stone of which I have heretofore spoken. It was the resting-place of the former proprietor, who sleeps in this little circle of perpetual verdure. It bore no inscription. Not far from this spot, I was shown the root of an ancient palm-tree, the species that produces the date, which formerly towered over the island, and served as a sea-mark to vessels approaching the sh.o.r.e. Some of the accounts of St. Augustine speak of dates as among its fruits; but I believe that only the male tree of the date-palm has been introduced into the country.

On our return to the city, in crossing the Matanzas sound, so named probably from some sanguinary battle with the aborigines on its sh.o.r.es; we pa.s.sed two Minorcans in a boat, taking home fuel from the island. These people are a mild, harmless race, of civil manners and abstemious habits.

Mingled with them are many Greek families, with names that denote their origin, such as Geopoli, Cercopoli, &c., and with a cast of features equally expressive of their descent. The Minorcan language, the dialect of Mahon, _el Mahones_, as they call it, is spoken by more than half of the inhabitants who remained here when the country was ceded to the United States, and all of them, I believe, speak Spanish besides. Their children, however, are growing up in disuse of these languages, and in another generation the last traces of the majestic speech of Castile, will have been effaced from a country which the Spaniards held for more than two hundred years.

Some old customs which the Minorcans brought with them from their native country are still kept up. On the evening before Easter Sunday, about eleven o'clock, I heard the sound of a serenade in the streets. Going out, I found a party of young men, with instruments of music, grouped about the window of one of the dwellings, singing a hymn in honor of the Virgin in the Mahonese dialect. They began, as I was told, with tapping on the shutter. An answering knock within had told them that their visit was welcome, and they immediately began the serenade. If no reply had been heard they would have pa.s.sed on to another dwelling. I give the hymn as it was kindly taken down for me in writing by a native of St. Augustine. I presume this is the first time that it has been put in print, but I fear the copy has several corruptions, occasioned by the unskillfulness of the copyist. The letter _e_, which I have put in italics, represents the guttural French _e_, or perhaps more nearly the sound of _u_ in the word but. The _sh_ of our language is represented by _sc_ followed by an _i_ or an _e_; the _g_ both hard and soft has the same sound as in our language.

Disciarem lu dol, Cantarem anb' alagria, Y n'arem a da Las pascuas a Maria.

O Maria!

Sant Grabiel, Qui portaba la anbasciada; Des nostre rey del cel Estarau vos prenada.

Ya omiliada, Tu o vais aqui serventa, Fia del Deu contenta, Para fe lo que el vol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Y a milla nit, Pariguero vos regina; A un Deu infinit, Dintra una establina.

Y a millo dia, Que los Angles van cantant Pau y abondant De la gloria de Deu sol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Y a Libalam, Alla la terra santa, Nu nat Jesus, Anb' alagria tanta.

Infant pet.i.t Que tot lu mon salvaria; Y ningu y bastaria, Nu mes un Deu tot sol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Cuant d'Orien lus Tres reys la stralla veran, Deu omnipotent, Adora lo vingaran.

Un present inferan, De mil encens y or, A lu beneit Seno, Que conesce cual se vol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Tot fu gayant Para c.u.mpli lu prumas; Y lu Esperit sant De un angel fan gramas.

Gran foc ences, Que crama lu curagia; Deu nos da lenguagia, Para fe lo que Deu vol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Cuant trespasa De quest mon nostra Senora, Al cel s'empugia Sun fil la matescia ora.

O emperadora, Que del cel sou eligida!

Lu rosa florida, Me resplanden que un sol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c.

Y el tercer giorn Que Jesus resunta, Deu y Aboroma, Que la mort triumfa.

De alli se balla Para perldra Lucife, An tot a seu peuda, Que de nostro ser el sol.

Disciarem lu dol, &c[1]

After this hymn, the following stanzas, soliciting the customary gift of cakes or eggs, are sung:

Ce set sois que vain cantant, Regina celastial!

Dunus pan y alagria, Y bonas festas tingau.

Yo vos dou sus bonas festas, Danaus dines de sus nous; Sempre tarem lus mans llestas Para recibi un grapat de ous.

Y el giorn de pascua florida Alagramos y giuntament; As qui es mort par darnos vida Ya viu gloriosament.

Aquesta casa esta empedrada, Bien halla que la empedro; Sun amo de aquesta casa Baldria duna un do.