Letters of a Traveller Part 6

Furmagiada, o empanada, Cucutta o flao; Cual se vol cosa me grada, Sol que no me digas que no[2].

The shutters are then opened by the people within, and a supply of cheese-cakes, or other pastry, or eggs, is dropped into a bag carried by one of the party, who acknowledge the gift in the following lines, and then depart:

Aquesta casa esta empedrada, Empedrada de cuatro vens; Sun amo de aquesta casa, _Es_ omo de compliment[3].

If nothing is given, the last line reads thus:

No _es_ omo de compliment.

Letter XV.

A Voyage from St. Augustine to Savannah.

Savannah, _April_ 28, 1843.

On the morning of the 24th, we took leave of our good friends in St.

Augustine, and embarked in the steamer for Savannah. Never were softer or more genial airs breathed out of the heavens than those which played around us as we ploughed the waters of the Matanzas Sound, pa.s.sing under the dark walls of the old fort, and leaving it behind us, stood for the pa.s.sage to the main ocean.

It is a common saying in St. Augustine, that "Florida is the best poor man's country in the world," and, truly, I believe that those who live on the sh.o.r.es of this sound find it so. Its green waters teem with life, and produce abundance of the finest fish,

"------ of sh.e.l.l or fin, And exquisitest name."

Clams are dug up on the pure sands along the beach, where the fishermen drag their boats ash.o.r.e, and wherever the salt water dashes, there is an oyster, if he can find aught upon which to anchor his habitation. Along the edge of the marshes, next to the water, you see a row--a wall I should rather say--of oysters, apparently sprouting one out of another, as high as the tide flows. They are called here, though I do not know why, ratoon oysters. The abundance of fish solves the problem which has puzzled many, how the Minorcan population of St. Augustine live, now that their orange-trees, upon which they formerly depended, are unproductive.

In the steamboat were two or three persons who had visited Florida with a view of purchasing land. Now that the Indian war is ended, colonization has revived, and people are thronging into the country to take advantage of the law which a.s.signs a hundred and sixty acres to every actual settler. In another year, the influx of population will probably be still greater, though the confusion and uncertainty which exists in regard to the t.i.tle of the lands, will somewhat obstruct the settlement of the country. Before the Spanish government ceded it to the United States, they made numerous grants to individuals, intended to cover all the best land of the territory. Many of the lands granted have never been surveyed, and their situation and limits are very uncertain. The settler, therefore, if he is not very careful, may find his farm overlaid by an old Spanish claim.

I have said that the war is ended. Although the Seminole chief, Sam Jones, and about seventy of his people remain, the country is in profound peace from one end to the other, and you may traverse the parts most distant from the white settlements without the least danger or molestation from the Indians. "How is it," I asked one day of a gentleman who had long resided in St. Augustine, "that, after what has happened, you can think it safe to let these people remain?"

"It is perfectly safe," he answered. "Sam Jones professes, and I believe truly, to have had less to do with the murders which have been committed than the other chiefs, though it is certain that Dr. Perrine, whose death we so much lament, was shot at Indian Key by his men. Besides, he has a quarrel with one of the Seminole chiefs, whose relative he has killed, and if he were to follow them to their new country, he would certainly be put to death. It is his interest, therefore, to propitiate the favor of the whites by the most unexceptionable behavior, for his life depends upon being allowed to remain.

"There is yet another reason, which you will understand from what I am about to say. Before the war broke out, the Indians of this country, those very men who suddenly became so bloodthirsty and so formidable, were a quiet and inoffensive race, badly treated for the most part by the whites, and pa.s.sively submitting to ill treatment without any appearance of feeling or spirit. When they at length resolved upon war, they concealed their families in the islands of the Everglades, whither they supposed the whites would never be able to follow them. Their rule of warfare was this, never to endanger the life of one of their warriors for the sake of gaining the greatest advantage over their enemies; they struck only when they felt themselves in perfect safety. If they saw an opportunity of destroying twenty white men by the sacrifice of a single Indian, the whites were allowed to escape. Acting on this principle, if their retreat had been as inaccessible as they supposed it, they would have kept up the warfare until they had driven the whites out of the territory.

"When, however, General Worth introduced a new method of prosecuting the war, following up the Indians with a close and perpetual pursuit, chasing them into their great shallow lake, the Everglades, and to its most secret islands, they saw at once that they were conquered. They saw that further hostilities were hopeless, and returned to their former submissive and quiet demeanor.

"It is well, perhaps," added my friend in a kind of postscript, "that a few Indians should remain in Florida. They are the best hunters of runaway slaves in the world, and may save us from a Maroon war."

The Indian name of the Everglades, I am told, signifies Gra.s.s-water, a term which well expresses its appearance. It is a vast lake, broader by thousands of acres in a wet than in a dry season, and so shallow that the gra.s.s everywhere grows from the bottom and overtops its surface The bottom is of hard sand, so firm that it can be forded almost everywhere on horseback, and here and there are deep channels which the traveller crosses by swimming his horse.

General Worth's success in quelling the insurrection of the Seminoles, has made him very popular in Florida, where the energy and sagacity with which the closing campaign of the war was conducted are spoken of in the highest terms. He has lately fixed his head-quarters at St Augustine.

In the afternoon, our steamer put in between two sandy points of land and we arrived at St Mary's, formerly a buccaneer settlement, but now so zealous for good order that our captain told us the inhabitants objected to his taking in wood for his steamboat on Sunday. The place is full of groves of the orange and lime--young trees which have grown up since 1835, and which, not having suffered, like those of St. Augustine, by the gale, I found beautifully luxuriant. In this place, it was my fate to experience the plague of sand-flies. Clouds of them came into the steamboat alighting on our faces and hands and stinging wherever they alighted. The little creatures got into our hair and into our eyes, and crawled up our sleeves and down our necks, giving us no rest, until late in the night the vessel left the wharf and stood out into the river, where the current of air swept most of our tormentors away.

The next morning, as we were threading the narrow channels by which the inland pa.s.sage is made from St. Mary's to Savannah, we saw, from time to time, alligators basking on the banks. Some of our fellow-pa.s.sengers took rifles and shot at them as we went by. The smaller ones were often killed, the larger generally took the rifle-b.a.l.l.s upon their impenetrable backs, and walked, apparently unhurt, into the water. One of these monstrous creatures I saw receive his death-wound, having been fired at twice, the b.a.l.l.s probably entering at the eyes. In his agony he dashed swiftly through the water for a little distance, and turning rushed with equal rapidity in the opposite direction, the strokes of his strong arms throwing half his length above the surface. The next moment he had turned over and lay lifeless, with his great claws upward. A sallow-complexioned man from Burke county, in Georgia, who spoke a kind of negro dialect, was one of the most active in this sport, and often said to the bystanders. "I hit the 'gator that time, I did." We pa.s.sed where two of these huge reptiles were lying on the bank among the rank sedges, one of them with his head towards us. A rifle-ball from the steamer, struck the ground just before his face, and he immediately made for the water, dragging, with his awkward legs, a huge body of about fifteen feet in length. A shower of b.a.l.l.s fell about him as he reached the river, but he paddled along with as little apparent concern as the steamboat we were in.

The tail of the alligator is said to be no bad eating, and the negroes are fond of it. I have heard, however, that the wife of a South Carolina cracker once declared her dislike of it in the following terms:

"c.o.o.n and collards is pretty good fixins, but 'gator and turnips I can't go, no how."

Collards, you will understand, are a kind of cabbage. In this country, you will often hear of long collards, a favorite dish of the planter.

Among the marksmen who were engaged in shooting alligators, were two or three expert chewers of the Indian weed--frank and careless spitters--who had never been disciplined by the fear of woman into any hypocritical concealment of their talent, or unmanly reserve in its exhibition. I perceived, from a remark which one of them let fall, that somehow they connected this accomplishment with high breeding. He was speaking of four negroes who were hanged in Georgia on a charge of murdering their owner.

"One of them," said he, "was innocent. They made no confession, but held up their heads, chawed their tobacco, and spit about like any gentlemen."

You have here the last of my letters from the south. Savannah, which I left wearing almost a wintry aspect, is now in the full verdure of summer.

The locust-trees are in blossom; the water-oaks, which were shedding their winter foliage, are now thick with young and glossy leaves; the Pride of India is ready to burst into flower, and the gardens are full of roses in bloom.

Letter XVI.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.

Addison County, Vermont, _July_ 10, 1843.

I do not recollect that I ever heard the ca.n.a.l connecting the Hudson with Lake Champlain praised for its beauty, yet it is actually beautiful--that part of it at least which lies between Dunham's Basin and the lake, a distance of twenty-one miles, for of the rest I can not speak. To form the ca.n.a.l, two or three streams have been diverted a little from their original course, and led along a certain level in the valley through which they flowed to pour themselves into Champlain. In order to keep this level, a perpetually winding course has been taken, never, even for a few rods, approaching a straight line. On one side is the path beaten by the feet of the horses who drag the boats, but the other is an irregular bank, covered sometimes with gra.s.s and sometimes with shrubs or trees, and sometimes steep with rocks. I was delighted, on my journey to this place, to exchange a seat in a stage-coach, driven over the sandy and dusty road north of Saratoga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top of the ca.n.a.l-packet. The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of shrubs in flower. A ca.n.a.l, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the most apparently natural meanders. Goldsmith could find no more picturesque epithet for the ca.n.a.ls of Holland, than "slow;"

"The slow ca.n.a.l, the yellow blossomed vale--"

but if the ca.n.a.ls of that country had been like this, I am sure he would have known how to say something better for them. On the left bank, gra.s.sed over to the water's edge, I saw ripe strawberries peeping out among the clover, and shortly afterward a young man belonging to the packet leaped on board from the other side with a large basket of very fine strawberries. "I gathered them," said he "down in the swamp; the swamp is full of them." We had them afterward with our tea.

Proceeding still further, the scenery became more bold. Steep hills rose by the side of the ca.n.a.l, with farm-houses scattered at their feet; we pa.s.sed close to perpendicular precipices, and rocky shelves sprouting with shrubs, and under impending woods. At length, a steep broad mountain rose before us, its sides shaded with scattered trees and streaked with long horizontal lines of rock, and at its foot a cl.u.s.ter of white houses. This was Whitehall; and here the waters of the ca.n.a.l plunge noisily through a rocky gorge into the deep basin which holds the long and narrow Lake Champlain.

There was a young man on board who spoke English imperfectly, and whose accent I could not with certainty refer to any country or language with which I was acquainted. As we landed, he leaped on sh.o.r.e, and was surrounded at once by half a dozen persons chattering Canadian French. The French population of Canada has scattered itself along the sh.o.r.es of Lake Champlain for a third of the distance between the northern boundary of this state and the city of New York, and since the late troubles in Canada, more numerously than ever. In the hotel where I pa.s.sed the night, most of the servants seemed to be emigrants from Canada.

Speaking of foreigners reminds me of an incident which occurred on the road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham's Basin. As the public coach stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just resuming their journey. The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty years of age; the mother a buxom dame; the children, some six or seven, of various ages, with flaxen hair, light-blue eyes, and broad ruddy cheeks.

"They are Irish," said one of my fellow-pa.s.sengers. I maintained on the contrary that they were Americans. "Git ap," said the man to his horses, p.r.o.nouncing the last word very long. "Git ap; go 'lang." My antagonist in the dispute immediately acknowledged that I was right, for "git ap," and "go 'lang" could never have been uttered with such purity of accent by an Irishman. We learned on inquiry that they were emigrants from the neighborhood, proceeding to the Western Ca.n.a.l, to take pa.s.sage for Michigan, where the residence of a year or two will probably take somewhat from the florid ruddiness of their complexions.

I looked down into the basin which contains the waters of the Champlain, lying considerably below the level on which Whitehall is built, and could not help thinking that it was scooped to contain a wider and deeper collection of waters. Craggy mountains, standing one behind the other, surround it on all sides, from whose feet it seems as if the water had retired; and here and there, are marshy recesses between the hills, which might once have been the bays of the lake. The Burlington, one of the model steamboats for the whole world, which navigates the Champlain, was lying moored below. My journey, however, was to be by land.

At seven o'clock in the morning we set out from Whitehall, in a strong wagon, to cross the mountainous country lying east of the lake. "Git ap,"

said our good-natured driver to his cattle, and we climbed and descended one rugged hill after another, pa.s.sing by cottages which we were told were inhabited by Canadian French. We had a pa.s.senger from Ess.e.x county, on the west side of the lake, a lady who, in her enthusiastic love of a mountainous country, seemed to wish that the hills were higher; and another from the prairies of the western states, who, accustomed for many years to the easy and noiseless gliding of carriages over the smooth summer roads of that region, could hardly restrain herself from exclaiming at every step against the ruggedness of the country, and the roughness of the ways. A third pa.s.senger was an emigrant from Vermont to Chatauque county, in the state of New York, who was now returning on a visit to his native county, the hills of Vermont, and who entertained us by singing some stanzas of what he called the Michigan song, much in vogue, as he said, in these parts before he emigrated, eight years ago. Here is a sample:

"They talk about Vermont, They say no state's like that: 'Tis true the girls are handsome, The cattle too are fat.

But who amongst its mountains Of cold and ice would stay, When he can buy paraira In Michigan-_i-a_?"

By "paraira" you must understand prairie. "It is a most splendid song,"

continued the singer. "It touches off one state after another.

Connecticut, for example:"