CHAPTER XVII
HOW THEY CAME TO BARBADOS, AND FOUND NO MEN THEREIN
"The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark."
COLERIDGE.
Land! land! land! Yes, there it was, far away to the south and west,beside the setting sun, a long blue bar between the crimson sea andgolden sky. Land at last, with fresh streams, and cooling fruits, andfree room for cramped and scurvy-weakened limbs. And there, too, mightbe gold, and gems, and all the wealth of Ind. Who knew? Why not? The oldworld of fact and prose lay thousands of miles behind them, and beforethem and around them was the realm of wonder and fable, of boundlesshope and possibility. Sick men crawled up out of their stiflinghammocks; strong men fell on their knees and gave God thanks; and alleyes and hands were stretched eagerly toward the far blue cloud, fadingas the sun sank down, yet rising higher and broader as the ship rushedon before the rich trade-wind, which whispered lovingly round browand sail, "I am the faithful friend of those who dare!" "Blow freshly,freshlier yet, thou good trade-wind, of whom it is written that He makesthe winds His angels, ministering breaths to the heirs of His salvation.Blow freshlier yet, and save, if not me from death, yet her from worsethan death. Blow on, and land me at her feet, to call the lost lambhome, and die!"
So murmured Frank to himself, as with straining eyes he gazed upon thatfirst outlier of the New World which held his all. His cheeks were thinand wasted, and the hectic spot on each glowed crimson in the crimsonlight of the setting sun. A few minutes more, and the rainbows of theWest were gone; emerald and topaz, amethyst and ruby, had faded intosilver-gray; and overhead, through the dark sapphire depths, the Moonand Venus reigned above the sea.
"That should be Barbados, your worship," said Drew, the master; "unlessmy reckoning is far out, which, Heaven knows, it has no right to be,after such a passage, and God be praised."
"Barbados? I never heard of it."
"Very like, sir: but Yeo and I were here with Captain Drake, and I washere after, too, with poor Captain Barlow; and there is good harborageto the south and west of it, I remember."
"And neither Spaniard, cannibal, or other evil beast," said Yeo. "A verygarden of the Lord, sir, hid away in the seas, for an inheritance tothose who love Him. I heard Captain Drake talk of planting it, if everhe had a chance."
"I recollect now," said Amyas, "some talk between him and poor SirHumphrey about an island here. Would God he had gone thither instead ofto Newfoundland!"
"Nay, then," said Yeo, "he is in bliss now with the Lord; and you wouldnot have kept him from that, sir?"
"He would have waited as willingly as he went, if he could have servedhis queen thereby. But what say you, my masters? How can we do betterthan to spend a few days here, to get our sick round, before we make theMain, and set to our work?"
All approved the counsel except Frank, who was silent.
"Come, fellow-adventurer," said Cary, "we must have your voice too."
"To my impatience, Will," said he, aside in a low voice, "there is butone place on earth, and I am all day longing for wings to fly thither:but the counsel is right. I approve it."
So the verdict was announced, and received with a hearty cheer by thecrew; and long before morning they had run along the southern shore ofthe island, and were feeling their way into the bay where Bridgetown nowstands. All eyes were eagerly fixed on the low wooded hills which sleptin the moonlight, spangled by fireflies, with a million dancing stars;all nostrils drank greedily the fragrant air, which swept from the land,laden with the scent of a thousand flowers; all ears welcomed, as agrateful change from the monotonous whisper and lap of the water, thehum of insects, the snore of the tree-toads, the plaintive notes of theshore-fowl, which fill a tropic night with noisy life.
At last she stopped; at last the cable rattled through the hawsehole;and then, careless of the chance of lurking Spaniard or Carib, aninstinctive cheer burst from every throat. Poor fellows! Amyas had muchado to prevent them going on shore at once, dark as it was, by remindingthem that it wanted but two hours of day.
"Never were two such long hours," said one young lad, fidgeting up anddown.
"You never were in the Inquisition," said Yeo, "or you'd know better howslow time can run. Stand you still, and give God thanks you're where youare."
"I say, Gunner, be there goold to that island?"
"Never heard of none; and so much the better for it," said Yeo, dryly.
"But, I say, Gunner," said a poor scurvy-stricken cripple, licking hislips, "be there oranges and limmons there?"
"Not of my seeing; but plenty of good fruit down to the beach, thank theLord. There comes the dawn at last."
Up flushed the rose, up rushed the sun, and the level rays glittered onthe smooth stems of the palm-trees, and threw rainbows across the foamupon the coral-reefs, and gilded lonely uplands far away, where nowstands many a stately country-seat and busy engine-house. Long lines ofpelicans went clanging out to sea; the hum of the insects hushed, and athousand birds burst into jubilant song; a thin blue mist crept upwardtoward the inner downs, and vanished, leaving them to quiver in theburning glare; the land-breeze, which had blown fresh out to sea allnight, died away into glassy calm, and the tropic day was begun.
The sick were lifted over the side, and landed boat-load after boat-loadon the beach, to stretch themselves in the shade of the palms; and inhalf-an-hour the whole crew were scattered on the shore, except somedozen worthy men, who had volunteered to keep watch and ward on boardtill noon.
And now the first instinctive cry of nature was for fruit! fruit! fruit!The poor lame wretches crawled from place to place plucking greedily theviolet grapes of the creeping shore vine, and staining their mouthsand blistering their lips with the prickly pears, in spite of Yeo'sentreaties and warnings against the thorns. Some of the healthy beganhewing down cocoa-nut trees to get at the nuts, doing little thereby butblunt their hatchets; till Yeo and Drew, having mustered half-a-dozenreasonable men, went off inland, and returned in an hour laden with thedainties of that primeval orchard,--with acid junipa-apples, lusciousguavas, and crowned ananas, queen of all the fruits, which they hadfound by hundreds on the broiling ledges of the low tufa-cliffs;and then all, sitting on the sandy turf, defiant of galliwasps andjackspaniards, and all the weapons of the insect host, partook of theequal banquet, while old blue land-crabs sat in their house-doors andbrandished their fists in defiance at the invaders, and solemn cranesstood in the water on the shoals with their heads on one side, andmeditated how long it was since they had seen bipeds without feathersbreaking the solitude of their isle.
And Frank wandered up and down, silent, but rather in wonder thanin sadness, while great Amyas walked after him, his mouth fullof junipa-apples, and enacted the part of showman, with a sort ofpatronizing air, as one who had seen the wonders already, and was abovebeing astonished at them.
"New, new; everything new!" said Frank, meditatively. "Oh, awfulfeeling! All things changed around us, even to the tiniest fly andflower; yet we the same, the same forever!"
Amyas, to whom such utterances were altogether sibylline andunintelligible, answered by:
"Look, Frank, that's a colibri. You 've heard of colibris?"
Frank looked at the living gem, which hung, loud humming, over somefantastic bloom, and then dashed away, seemingly to call its mate, andwhirred and danced with it round and round the flower-starred bushes,flashing fresh rainbows at every shifting of the lights.
Frank watched solemnly awhile, and then:
"Qualis Natura formatrix, si talis formata? Oh my God, how fair must beThy real world, if even Thy phantoms are so fair!"
"Phantoms?" asked Amyas, uneasily. "That's no ghost, Frank, but a jollylittle honey-sucker, with a wee wife, and children no bigger than peas,but yet solid greedy little fellows enough, I'll warrant."
"Not phantoms in thy sense, good fellow, but in the sense of those whoknow the worthlessness of all below."
"
I'll tell you what, brother Frank, you are a great deal wiser than me,I know; but I can't abide to see you turn up your nose as it were atGod's good earth. See now, God made all these things; and never a man,perhaps, set eyes on them till fifty years agone; and yet they were aspretty as they are now, ever since the making of the world. And whydo you think God could have put them here, then, but to pleaseHimself"--and Amyas took off his hat--"with the sight of them? Now, Isay, brother Frank, what's good enough to please God, is good enough toplease you and me."
"Your rebuke is just, dear old simple-hearted fellow; and God forgiveme, if with all my learning, which has brought me no profit, and mylongings, which have brought me no peace, I presume at moments, sinnerthat I am, to be more dainty than the Lord Himself. He walked inParadise among the trees of the garden, Amyas; and so will we, andbe content with what He sends. Why should we long for the next world,before we are fit even for this one?"
"And in the meanwhile," said Amyas, "this earth's quite good enough, atleast here in Barbados."
"Do you believe," asked Frank, trying to turn his own thoughts, "inthose tales of the Spaniards, that the Sirens and Tritons are heardsinging in these seas?"
"I can't tell. There's more fish in the water than ever came out of it,and more wonders in the world, I'll warrant, than we ever dreamt of; butI was never in these parts before; and in the South Sea, I must say, Inever came across any, though Yeo says he has heard fair music at nightup in the Gulf, far away from land."
"The Spaniards report that at certain seasons choirs of these nymphsassemble in the sea, and with ravishing music sing their watery loves.It may be so. For Nature, which has peopled the land with rationalsouls, may not have left the sea altogether barren of them; above all,when we remember that the ocean is as it were the very fount of allfertility, and its slime (as the most learned hold with Thales ofMiletus) that prima materia out of which all things were one by oneconcocted. Therefore, the ancients feigned wisely that Venus, the motherof all living things, whereby they designed the plastic force of nature,was born of the sea-foam, and rising from the deep, floated ashore uponthe isles of Greece."
"I don't know what plastic force is; but I wish I had had the luck to beby when the pretty poppet came up: however, the nearest thing I ever sawto that was maidens swimming alongside of us when we were in the SouthSeas, and would have come aboard, too; but Drake sent them all off againfor a lot of naughty packs, and I verily believe they were no better.Look at the butterflies, now! Don't you wish you were a boy again, andnot too proud to go catching them in your cap?"
And so the two wandered on together through the glorious tropic woods,and then returned to the beach to find the sick already grown cheerful,and many who that morning could not stir from their hammocks, pacing upand down, and gaining strength with every step.
"Well done, lads!" cried Amyas, "keep a cheerful mind. We will have themusic ashore after dinner, for want of mermaids to sing to us, and thosethat can dance may."
And so those four days were spent; and the men, like schoolboys ona holiday, gave themselves up to simple merriment, not forgetting,however, to wash the clothes, take in fresh water, and store up agood supply of such fruit as seemed likely to keep; until, tired withfruitless rambles after gold, which they expected to find in every bush,in spite of Yeo's warnings that none had been heard of on the island,they were fain to lounge about, full-grown babies, picking up shells andsea-fans to take home to their sweethearts, smoking agoutis out of thehollow trees, with shout and laughter, and tormenting every living thingthey could come near, till not a land-crab dare look out of his hole, oran armadillo unroll himself, till they were safe out of the bay, andoff again to the westward, unconscious pioneers of all the wealth, andcommerce, and beauty, and science which has in later centuries made thatlovely isle the richest gem of all the tropic seas.