University of Virginia Library

1. SKETCH FIRST.

Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders
dumped here and there in an outside city lot;

imagine some of them magnified into mountains,
and the vacant lot the sea; and you will
have a fit idea of the general aspect of the
Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group
rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles; looking
much as the world at large might, after a
penal conflagration.

It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth
can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this
group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old
cities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin,
these are melancholy enough; but, like all
else which has but once been associated with
humanity, they still awaken in us some thoughts
of sympathy, however sad. Hence, even the
Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions
it may at times inspire, does not fail to touch
in the pilgrim some of his less unpleasurable
feelings.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of
the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters,
the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest of
solitudes to a human observer; still the magic
of their changeable tides and seasons mitigates
their terror; because, though unvisited by

men, those forests are visited by the May; the
remotest seas reflect familiar stars even as Lake
Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar
day, the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully
as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of
the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation
above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to
them change never comes; neither the change
of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the Equator,
they know not autumn, and they know not
spring; while already reduced to the lees of
fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them.
The showers refresh the deserts; but in these
isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds
left withering in the sun, they are cracked by
an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky.
“Have mercy upon me,” the wailing spirit of
the Encantadas seems to cry, “and send Lazarus
that he may dip the tip of his finger in
water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented
in this flame.”

Another feature in these isles is their emphatic
uninhabitableness. It is deemed a fit
type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal

should den in the wastes of weedy Babylon;
but the Encantadas refuse to harbor even the
outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown
them. Little but reptile life is here found:
tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and
that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the
aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard;
the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

On most of the isles where vegetation is
found at all, it is more ungrateful than the
blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of
wiry bushes, without fruit and without a
name, springing up among deep fissures of calcined
rock, and treacherously masking them;
or a parched growth of distorted cactus trees.

In many places the coast is rock-bound, or,
more properly, clinker-bound; tumbled masses
of blackish or greenish stuff like the dross of an
iron-furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here
and there, into which a ceaseless sea pours a
fury of foam; overhanging them with a swirl
of gray, haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming
flights of unearthly birds heightening the
dismal din. However calm the sea without,
there is no rest for these swells and those

rocks; they lash and are lashed, even when
the outer ocean is most at peace with itself.
On the oppressive, clouded days, such as are
peculiar to this part of the watery Equator,
the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise
themselves among white whirlpools and breakers
in detached and perilous places off the
shore, present a most Plutonian sight. In
no world but a fallen one could such lands
exist.

Those parts of the strand free from the
marks of fire, stretch away in wide level
beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with
here and there decayed bits of sugar-cane,
bamboos, and cocoanuts, washed upon this
other and darker world from the charming
palm isles to the westward and southward; all
the way from Paradise to Tartarus; while
mixed with the relics of distant beauty you
will sometimes see fragments of charred wood
and mouldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will
any one be surprised at meeting these last,
after observing the conflicting currents which
eddy throughout nearly all the wide channels
of the entire group. The capriciousness of the

tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea.
Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and
every way unreliable, and so given to perplexing
calms, as at the Encantadas. Nigh a
month has been spent by a ship going from one
isle to another, though but ninety miles between;
for owing to the force of the current,
the boats employed to tow barely suffice to
keep the craft from sweeping upon the cliffs,
but do nothing towards accelerating her voyage.
Sometimes it is impossible for a vessel
from afar to fetch up with the group itself, unless
large allowances for prospective lee-way
have been made ere its coming in sight. And
yet, at other times, there is a mysterious indraft,
which irresistibly draws a passing vessel
among the isles, though not bound to them.

True, at one period, as to some extent at the
present day, large fleets of whalemen cruised
for spermaceti upon what some seamen call
the Enchanted Ground. But this, as in due
place will be described, was off the great outer
isle of Albemarle, away from the intricacies of
the smaller isles, where there is plenty of searoom;
and hence, to that vicinity, the above

remarks do not altogether apply; though even
there the current runs at times with singular
force, shifting, too, with as singular a caprice.

Indeed, there are seasons when currents
quite unaccountable prevail for a great distance
round about the total group, and are so
strong and irregular as to change a vessel's
course against the helm, though sailing at the
rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference
in the reckonings of navigators, produced
by these causes, along with the light and variable
winds, long nourished a persuasion, that
there existed two distinct clusters of isles in
the parallel of the Encantadas, about a hundred
leagues apart. Such was the idea of
their earlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as
late as 1750, the charts of that part of the
Pacific accorded with the strange delusion.
And this apparent fleetingness and unreality of
the locality of the isles was most probably one
reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada,
or Enchanted Group.

But not uninfluenced by their character, as
they now confessedly exist, the modern voyager
will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal

of this name might have in part originated
in that air of spell-bound desertness
which so significantly invests the isles. Nothing
can better suggest the aspect of once
living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness
into ashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching,
seem these isles.

However wavering their place may seem by
reason of the currents, they themselves, at
least to one upon the shore, appear invariably
the same: fixed, cast, glued into the very body
of cadaverous death.

Nor would the appellation, enchanted, seem
misapplied in still another sense. For concerning
the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these
wilds—whose presence gives the group its
second Spanish name, Gallipagos—concerning
the tortoises found here, most mariners have
long cherished a superstition, not more frightful
than grotesque. They earnestly believe
that all wicked sea-officers, more especially
commodores and captains, are at death (and, in
some cases, before death) transformed into tortoises;
thenceforth dwelling upon these hot
aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.

Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought
was originally inspired by the woe-begone
landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps,
by the tortoises. For, apart from their
strictly physical features, there is something
strangely self-condemned in the appearance of
these creatures. Lasting sorrow and penal
hopelessness are in no animal form so suppliantly
expressed as in theirs; while the thought
of their wonderful longevity does not fail to
enhance the impression.

Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of
absurdly believing in enchantments, can I restrain
the admission that sometimes, even now,
when leaving the crowded city to wander out
July and August among the Adriondack Mountains,
far from the influences of towns and proportionally
nigh to the mysterious ones of
nature; when at such times I sit me down in
the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge,
surrounded by prostrate trunks of blasted pines
and recall, as in a dream, my other and far-distant
rovings in the baked heart of the charmed
isles; and remember the sudden glimpses of
dusky shells, and long languid necks protruded

from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld
the vitreous inland rocks worn down and
grooved into deep ruts by ages and ages of the
slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of
scanty water; I can hardly resist the feeling
that in my time I have indeed slept upon evilly
enchanted ground.

Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or
the magic of my fancy, that I know not whether
I am not the occasional victim of optical
delusion concerning the Gallipagos. For, often
in scenes of social merriment, and especially at
revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned
mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the
further recesses of an angular and spacious
room, making them put on a look of haunted
undergrowth of lonely woods, I have drawn
the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze
and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to
see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes,
and heavily crawling along the floor, the
ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with “Memento
* * * * * *” burning in live letters upon his
back.