University of Virginia Library

This is but a simple description of the appearance of the sky for several minutes during a storm which happened on the island where the verses of the text were written, either in the year 1823 or 1824. I lay under a transparent mosquito-net, listening to the pleasing noise made by the trees and shrubs around the principal dwelling of the Cafétal San Patricio, and watching the flashes of lightning that darted through the green blinds of an unglazed win dow. It was about midnight when the loudness of the thunderpeals increased, and the flashes became more continued than any I had ever seen. A crash was soon heard from without, and the whole room seemed deluged, as it were, with flame.

Thinking the building on fire, I arose, and succeeded in waking a negress, who still slept soundly by the door of my apartment. Going into the hall, and getting a window opened which looked into a broad piazza, I was surprised to see it occupied by those fierce dogs which were accustomed to be let loose at ten or eleven o'clock at night, in order that they might prowl about till sunrise, and guard the plantation. They had sought shelter from the elements: and, as they ran in a distressed manner from one side of the piazza to the other, it seemed as if they moved in fire; for the whole firmament continued to be, at long intervals, like a vast sea of light. Some glazed windows on the slant roof of the building were torn from their hinges, and whirled over the secaderos; and the rain then descended in cataracts.

The sun rose brightly next morning; and the scene, though rather sad, was delightful. The Bermuda grass-plats were strewn with leaves, twigs, and broken flowers: and numbers of those black birds which the Spanish inhabitants of the island call judeos were hovering over a dark clump of bamboos which had been torn up by the roots, and uttering the most piteous cries; for many of them were unable to find again their nests, constructed amidst the almost impervious foliage of those vast and beautiful reeds which now lay prostrate.

The palm thatching was torn from some of the out-houses of San Patricio. One mansion on a neighboring estate, belonging to Don José Martinez, was taken by the tempest from an insecure foundation, and set in another place. One estate, several leagues distant, and near a river, was deluged. But no human lives, that I heard of, were lost.