Dearest E——,— Since I last wrote to you I have been actually engaged in
receiving and returning visits; for even to this ultima thule of all
civilisation do these polite usages extend. I have been called upon by
several families residing in and about Darien, and rowed over in due form
to acknowledge the honor. How shall I describe Darien to you? The
abomination of desolation is but a poor type of its forlorn appearance,
as, half buried in sand, its straggling, tumble-down wooden houses peer
over the muddy bank of the thick slimy river. The whole town lies in a bed
of sand—side walks, or mid walks, there be none distinct from each other;
at every step I took my feet were ankle deep in the soil, and I had cause
to rejoice that I was booted for the occasion. Our worthy doctor, whose
lady I was going to visit, did nothing but regret that I had not allowed
him to provide me a carriage, though the distance between his house and
the landing is not a quarter of a mile. The magnitude of the exertion
seemed to fill him with amazement, and he over and over again repeated how
impossible it would be to prevail on any of the ladies there to take such
a walk. The houses
seemed scattered about here and there, apparently
without any design, and looked, for the most part, either unfinished or
ruinous. One feature of the scene alone recalled the villages of New
England—the magnificent oaks, which seemed to add to the meanness and
insignificance of the human dwellings they overshadowed by their enormous
size and grotesque forms. They reminded me of the elms of Newhaven and
Stockbridge. They are quite as large, and more picturesque, from their
sombre foliage and the infinite variety of their forms—a beauty wanting
in the New England elm, which invariably rises and spreads in a way which,
though the most graceful in the world, at length palls on the capricious
human eye, which seeks, above all other beauties, variety. Our doctor’s
wife is a New England woman; how can she live here? She had the fair eyes
and hair and fresh complexion of your part of the country, and its dearly
beloved snuffle, which seemed actually dearly beloved when I heard it down
here. She gave me some violets and narcissus, already blossoming
profusely—in January—and expressed, like her husband, a thousand regrets
at my having walked so far.
A transaction of the most amusing nature occurred to-day with regard to
the resources of the Darien Bank, and the mode of carrying on business in
that liberal and enlightened institution, the funds of which I should
think quite incalculable—impalpable, certainly, they appeared by our
experience this morning.
The river, as we came home, was covered with Ocone boxes. It is well for
them they are so shallow-bottomed, for we rasped sand all the way home
through the cut, and in the shallows of the river.
I have been over the rice-mill, under the guidance of the overseer and
head-man Frank, and have been made acquainted with the whole process of
threshing the rice, which is extremely curious; and here I may again
mention
another statement of Miss Martineau’s, which I am told is, and I
should suppose from what I see here must be, a mistake. She states that
the chaff of the husks of the rice is used as a manure for the fields;
whereas the people have to-day assured me that it is of so hard, stony,
and untractable a nature, as to be literally good for nothing. Here I know
it is thrown away by cart-loads into the river, where its only use appears
to be to act like ground bait, and attract a vast quantity of small fish
to its vicinity. The number of hands employed in this threshing-mill is
very considerable, and the whole establishment, comprising the fires and
boilers and machinery of a powerful steam engine, are all under negro
superintendence and direction. After this survey, I occupied myself with
my infant plantation of evergreens round the dyke, in the midst of which
interesting pursuit I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. B——, a
neighboring planter, who came to transact some business with Mr. ——
about rice which he had sent to our mill to have threshed, and the price
to be paid for such threshing. The negroes have presented a petition
to-day that they may be allowed to have a ball in honor of our arrival,
which demand has been acceded to, and furious preparations are being set
on foot.
On visiting the Infirmary to-day, I was extremely pleased with the
increased cleanliness and order observable in all the rooms. Two little
filthy children, however, seemed to be still under the ancien regime of
non-ablution; but upon my saying to the old nurse Molly, in whose ward
they were, ‘Why, Molly, I don’t believe you have bathed those children
to-day,’ she answered, with infinite dignity, ‘Missis no b‘lieve me wash
um piccaninny! and yet she tress me wid all um niggar when ‘em sick.’ The
injured innocence and lofty conscious integrity of this speech silenced
and abashed me; and yet I can’t help it, but I don’t believe to this
present hour that those children
had had any experience of water, at least
not washing water, since they first came into the world.
I rowed over to Darien again, to make some purchases, yesterday; and
enquiring the price of various articles, could not but wonder to find
them at least three times as dear as in your northern villages. The
profits of these southern shopkeepers (who, for the most part, are
thoroughbred Yankees, with the true Yankee propensity to trade, no matter
on how dirty a counter, or in what manner of wares) are enormous. The
prices they ask for everything, from colored calicoes for negro dresses
to pianofortes (one of which, for curiosity sake, I enquired the value
of), are fabulous, and such as none but the laziest and most reckless
people in the world would consent to afford. On our return we found the
water in the cut so extremely low that we were obliged to push the boat
through it, and did not accomplish it without difficulty. The banks of
this canal, when they are thus laid bare, present a singular appearance
enough,—two walls of solid mud, through which matted, twisted, twined,
and tangled, like the natural veins of wood, runs an everlasting net of
indestructible roots, the thousand toes of huge cypress feet. The trees
have been cut down long ago from the soil, but these fangs remain in the
earth without decaying for an incredible space of time. This long
endurance of immersion is one of the valuable properties of these cypress
roots; but though excellent binding stuff for the sides of a canal, they
must be pernicious growth in any land used for cultivation that requires
deep tillage. On entering the Altamaha, we found the tide so low that we
were much obstructed by the sand banks, which, but for their constant
shifting, would presently take entire possession of this noble stream,
and render it utterly impassable from shore to shore, as it already is in
several parts of the channel at certain seasons of the tide. On landing,
I was seized hold of by a hideous old negress, named Sinda, who had come
to pay me a visit, and of whom Mr. —— told me a strange anecdote. She
passed at one time for a prophetess among her fellow slaves on the
plantation, and had acquired such an ascendancy over them that, having
given out, after the fashion of Mr. Miller, that the world was to come to
an end at a certain time, and that not a very remote one, the belief in
her assertion took such possession of the people on the estate, that they
refused to work; and the rice and cotton fields were threatened with an
indefinite fallow, in consequence of this strike on the part of the
cultivators. Mr. K——, who was then overseer of the property, perceived
the impossibility of arguing, remonstrating, or even flogging this solemn
panic out of the minds of the slaves. The great final emancipation which
they believed at hand had stripped even the lash of its prevailing
authority, and the terrors of an overseer for once were as nothing, in
the terrible expectation of the advent of the universal Judge of men.
They were utterly impracticable—so, like a very shrewd man as he was, he
acquiesced in their determination not to work; but he expressed to them
his belief that Sinda was mistaken, and he warned her that if, at the
appointed time, it proved so, she would be severely punished. I do not
know whether he confided to the slaves what he thought likely to be the
result if she was in the right; but poor Sinda was in the wrong. Her day
of judgment came indeed, and a severe one it proved, for Mr. K—— had
her tremendously flogged, and her end of things ended much like Mr.
Miller’s; but whereas he escaped unhanged, in spite of his atrocious
practices upon the fanaticism and credulity of his country people, the
spirit of false prophecy was mercilessly scourged out of her, and the
faith of her people of course reverted from her to the omnipotent lash
again. Think what a dream that must have been
while it lasted, for those
infinitely oppressed people,—freedom without entering it by the grim
gate of death, brought down to them at once by the second coming of
Christ, whose first advent has left them yet so far from it! Farewell; it
makes me giddy to think of having been a slave while that delusion
lasted, and after it vanished.
