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1Author:  Dana Richard Henry 1815-1882Add
 Title:  To Cuba and Back  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: Saturday, the twelfth day of February, 1859, is a dull, dark day in New York, with visitations of snow-squalls, as the United States Mail Steamer Cahawba swings at her pier, at the foot of Robinson-street—a pier crowded with drays and drivers, and a street of mud, snow and ice, and poor habitations. The steamer is to sail at one p.m.; and, by half-past twelve, her decks are full, and the mud and snow of the pier are well trodden by men and horses. Coaches drive down furiously, and nervous passengers put their heads out to see if the steamer is off before her time; and on the decks, and in the gangways, inexperienced passengers run against everybody, and mistake the engineer for the steward, and come up the same stairs they go down, without knowing it. In the dreary snow, the newspaper venders cry the papers, and the book venders thrust yellow covers into your face—" Reading for the voyage, sir—five hundred pages, close print!" And that being rejected, they reverse the process of the Sibyl,—with "Here's another, sir, one thousand pages, double columns." The great beam of the engine moves slowly up and down, and the black hull sways at its fasts. A motley group are the passengers. Shivering Cubans, exotics that have taken slight root in the hot-houses of the Fifth Avenue, are to brave a few days of sleet and cold at sea, for the palm-trees and mangoes, the cocoas and orange-trees, they will be sitting under in six days, at farthest. There are Yankee shipmasters going out to join their "cotton wagons" at New Orleans and Mobile; merchants pursuing a commerce that knows no rest and no locality; confirmed invalids advised to go to Cuba to die under mosquito-nets and be buried in a Potter's Field; and other invalids wisely enough avoiding our March winds; and here and there a mere vacation-maker, like myself.
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