 | SKETCH FOURTH. The piazza tales |  |
4. SKETCH FOURTH.
—“That done, he leads him to the highest mount,
From whence, far off he unto him did show:”—
If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take
the following prescription. Go three voyages
round the world as a main-royal-man
of the tallest frigate that floats; then serve a
year or two apprenticeship to the guides who
conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe;
and as many more respectively to a ropedancer,
an Indian juggler, and a chamois. This
done, come and be rewarded by the view from
our tower. How we get there, we alone know.
If we sought to tell others, what the wiser
were they? Suffice it, that here at the summit
you and I stand. Does any balloonist,
does the outlooking man in the moon, take a
broader view of space? Much thus, one
fancies, looks the universe from Milton's celestial
battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky.
Here Daniel Boone would have dwelt
content.
Never heed for the present yonder Burnt
District of the Enchanted Isles. Look edge-ways,
as it were, past them, to the south. You
see nothing; but permit me to point out the
direction, if not the place, of certain interesting
objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this
tower's base, we behold unscrolling itself
towards the Antarctic Pole.
We stand now ten miles from the Equator.
Yonder, to the East, some six hundred miles,
lies the continent; this Rock being just about
on the parallel of Quito.
Observe another thing here. We are at
one of three uninhabited clusters, which, at
pretty nearly uniform distances from the main,
sentinel, at long intervals from each other, the
entire coast of South America. In a peculiar
manner, also, they terminate the South American
character of country. Of the unnumbered
Polynesian chains to the westward, not one
partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or
Gallipagos, the isles of St. Felix and St. Ambrose,
the isles Juan Fernandez and Massafuero.
Of the first, it needs not here to speak. The
second lie a little above the Southern Tropic;
one of which, presenting two round hummocks
connected by a low reef, exactly resembles a
huge double-headed shot. The last lie in the
latitude of 33°; high, wild and cloven. Juan
Fernandez is sufficiently famous without further
description. Massafuero is a Spanish name,
expressive of the fact, that the isle so called lies
more without, that is, further off the main than
its neighbor Juan. This isle Massafuero has a
very imposing aspect at a distance of eight or
ten miles. Approached in one direction, in
cloudy weather, its great overhanging height
and rugged contour, and more especially a
peculiar slope of its broad summits, give it
much the air of a vast iceberg drifting in tremendous
poise. Its sides are split with dark
cavernous recesses, as an old cathedral with its
gloomy lateral chapels. Drawing nigh one of
these gorges from sea, after a long voyage, and
beholding some tatterdemalion outlaw, staff in
hand, descending its steep rocks toward you,
conveys a very queer emotion to a lover of
the picturesque.
On fishing parties from ships, at various
groups. The impression they give to the
stranger pulling close up in his boat under
their grim cliffs is, that surely he must be their
first discoverer, such, for the most part, is the
unimpaired..... silence and solitude. And
here, by the way, the mode in which these
isles were really first lighted upon by Europeans
is not unworthy of mention, especially as
what is about to be said, likewise applies to the
original discovery of our Encantadas.
Prior to the year 1563, the voyages made by
Spanish ships from Peru to Chili, were full of
difficulty. Along this coast, the winds from
the South most generally prevail; and it had
been an invariable custom to keep close in
with the land, from a superstitious conceit on
the part of the Spaniards, that were they to
lose sight of it, the eternal trade-wind would
waft them into unending waters, from whence
would be no return. Here, involved among
tortuous capes and headlands, shoals and
reefs, beating, too, against a continual head
wind, often light, and sometimes for days and
weeks sunk into utter calm, the provincial vessels,
hardships, in passages, which at the present
day seem to have been incredibly protracted.
There is on record in some collections of nautical
disasters, an account of one of these ships,
which, starting on a voyage whose duration
was estimated at ten days, spent four months
at sea, and indeed never again entered harbor,
for in the end she was cast away. Singular to
tell, this craft never encountered a gale, but
was the vexed sport of malicious calms and
currents. Thrice, out of provisions, she put
back to an intermediate port, and started
afresh, but only yet again to return. Frequent
fogs enveloped her; so that no observation
could be had of her place, and once, when all
hands were joyously anticipating sight of their
destination, lo! the vapors lifted and disclosed
the mountains from which they had taken their
first departure. In the like deceptive vapors
she at last struck upon a reef, whence ensued
a long series of calamities too sad to
detail.
It was the famous pilot, Juan Fernandez,
immortalized by the island named after him,
by boldly venturing the experiment—as De
Gama did before him with respect to Europe
—of standing broad out from land. Here he
found the winds favorable for getting to the
South, and by running westward till beyond
the influences of the trades, he regained the
coast without difficulty; making the passage
which, though in a high degree circuitous,
proved far more expeditious than the nominally
direct one. Now it was upon these new
tracks, and about the year 1670, or thereabouts,
that the Enchanted Isles, and the rest of the
sentinel groups, as they may be called, were
discovered. Though I know of no account as
to whether any of them were found inhabited or
no, it may be reasonably concluded that they
have been immemorial solitudes. But let us
return to Rodondo.
Southwest from our tower lies all Polynesia,
hundreds of leagues away; but straight
west, on the precise line of his parallel, no
land rises till your keel is beached upon the
Kingsmills, a nice little sail of, say 5000 miles.
Having thus by such distant references—
our relative place on the sea, let us consider
objects not quite so remote. Behold the grim
and charred Enchanted Isles. This nearest
crater-shaped headland is part of Albemarle,
the largest of the group, being some sixty miles
or more long, and fifteen broad. Did you ever
lay eye on the real genuine Equator? Have
you ever, in the largest sense, toed the Line?
Well, that identical crater-shaped headland
there, all yellow lava, is cut by the Equator
exactly as a knife cuts straight through the
centre of a pumpkin pie. If you could only see
so far, just to one side of that same headland,
across yon low dikey ground, you would catch
sight of the isle of Narborough, the loftiest land
of the cluster; no soil whatever; one seamed
clinker from top to bottom; abounding in
black caves like smithies; its metallic shore
ringing under foot like plates of iron; its central
volcanoes standing grouped like a gigantic
chimney-stack.
Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors
after a quite curious fashion. A familar diagram
will illustrate this strange neighborhood:
E
Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and
the middle transverse limb is Narborough, and
all the rest is Albemarle. Volcanic Narborough
lies in the black jaws of Albemarle like
a wolf's red tongue in his open mouth.
If now you desire the population of Albemarle,
I will give you, in round numbers, the
statistics, according to the most reliable estimates
made upon the spot:
| Men, | none. |
| Ant-eaters, | unknown. |
| Man-haters, | unknown. |
| Lizards, | 500,000. |
| Snakes, | 500,000. |
| Spiders, | 10,000,000. |
| Salamanders, | unknown. |
| Devils, | unknown. |
| Making a clean total of | 11,000,000, |
exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends,
ant-eaters, man-haters, and salamanders.
Albemarle opens his mouth towards the setting
sun. His distended jaws form a great bay,
which Narborough, his tongue, divides into
halves, one whereof is called Weather Bay, the
other Lee Bay; while the volcanic promontories,
terminating his coasts, are styled South
these bays are famous in the annals of the
Sperm Whale Fishery. The whales come here
at certain seasons to calve. When ships first
cruised hereabouts, I am told, they used to
blockade the entrance of Lee Bay, when their
boats going round by Weather Bay, passed
through Narborough channel, and so had the
Leviathans very neatly in a pen.
The day after we took fish at the base of
this Round Tower, we had a fine wind, and
shooting round the north headland, suddenly
descried a fleet of full thirty sail, all beating to
windward like a squadron in line. A brave
sight as ever man saw. A most harmonious
concord of rushing keels. Their thirty kelsons
hummed like thirty harp-strings, and looked as
straight whilst they left their parallel traces on
the sea. But there proved too many hunters
for the game. The fleet broke up, and went
their separate ways out of sight, leaving my
own ship and two trim gentlemen of London.
These last, finding no luck either, likewise
vanished; and Lee Bay, with all its appurtenances,
and without a rival, devolved to us.
The way of cruising here is this. You keep
hovering about the entrance of the bay, in one
beat and out the next. But at times—not
always, as in other parts of the group—a racehorse
of a current sweeps right across its
mouth. So, with all sails set, you carefully
ply your tacks. How often, standing at the
foremast head at sunrise, with our patient prow
pointed in between these isles, did I gaze upon
that land, not of cakes, but of clinkers, not of
streams of sparkling water, but arrested torrents
of tormented lava.
As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough
presents its side in one dark craggy
mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet,
at which point it hoods itself in heavy clouds,
whose lowest level fold is as clearly defined
against the rocks as the snow-line against the
Andes. There is dire mischief going on in
that upper dark. There toil the demons of
fire, who, at intervals, irradiate the nights with
a strange spectral illumination for miles and
miles around, but unaccompanied by any further
demonstration; or else, suddenly announce
themselves by terrific concussions, and the full
that cloud by day, the more may you look for
light by night. Often whalemen have found
themselves cruising nigh that burning mountain
when all aglow with a ball-room blaze. Or,
rather, glass-works, you may call this same
vitreous isle of Narborough, with its tall chimney-stacks.
Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we
cannot see all the other isles, but it is a good
place from which to point out where they lie.
Yonder, though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant
dusky ridge. It is Abington Isle, one of
the most northerly of the group; so solitary,
remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man's Land
seen off our northern shore. I doubt whether
two human beings ever touched upon that
spot. So far as yon Abington Isle is concerned,
Adam and his billions of posterity remain uncreated.
Ranging south of Abington, and quite out
of sight behind the long spine of Albemarle,
lies James's Isle, so called by the early Buccaneers
after the luckless Stuart, Duke of York.
Observe here, by the way, that, excepting the
times, and which mostly received the names
of famous Admirals, the Encantadas were first
christened by the Spaniards; but these Spanish
names were generally effaced on English charts
by the subsequent christenings of the Buccaneers,
who, in the middle of the seventeenth
century, called them after English noblemen
and kings. Of these loyal freebooters and the
things which associate their name with the
Encantadas, we shall hear anon. Nay, for one
little item, immediately; for between James's
Isle and Albemarle, lies a fantastic islet,
strangely known as “Cowley's Enchanted
Isle.” But, as all the group is deemed enchanted,
the reason must be given for the spell
within a spell involved by this particular designation.
The name was bestowed by that excellent
Buccaneer himself, on his first visit
here. Speaking in his published voyages of
this spot, he says—“My fancy led me to call it
Cowley's Enchanted Isle, for, we having had a
sight of it upon several points of the compass,
it appeared always in so many different forms;
sometimes like a ruined fortification; upon
wonder though, that among the Encantadas all
sorts of ocular deceptions and mirages should
be met.
That Cowley linked his name with this self-transforming
and bemocking isle, suggests the
possibility that it conveyed to him some meditative
image of himself. At least, as is not impossible,
if he were any relative of the mildly-thoughtful
and self-upbraiding poet Cowley,
who lived about his time, the conceit might
seem unwarranted; for that sort of thing
evinced in the naming of this isle runs in the
blood, and may be seen in pirates as in poets.
Still south of James's Isle lie Jervis Isle,
Duncan Isle, Crossman's Isle, Brattle Isle,
Wood's Isle, Chatham Isle, and various lesser
isles, for the most part an archipelago of aridities,
without inhabitant, history, or hope of
either in all time to come. But not far from
these are rather notable isles—Barrington,
Charles's, Norfolk, and Hood's. Succeeding
chapters will reveal some ground for their notability.
| SKETCH FOURTH. The piazza tales | |