I had rigged my hammock between the foremost and aftermost hoops of the toldo, and as I was fatigued and sleepy, and it was now getting late, I desired to betake myself to rest; so I was just flirting with a piece of ham, preparatory to the cold grog, when I again felt a similar thump and rattle against the side of the canoe. There was a small aperture in the palm thatch, right opposite to where I was sitting, on the outside of which I now heard a rustling noise, and presently a long snout was thrust through, and into the canoe, which kept opening and shutting with a sharp rattling noise. It was more like two long splinters of mud-covered and half-decayed timber, than anything I can compare it to; but as the lower jaw was opened, like a pair of Brobdignag scissors, a formidable row of teeth was unmasked, the snout from the tip to the eyes being nearly three feet long. The scene at this moment was exceedingly good, as seen by the light of a small, bright, silver lamp, fed with spirits of wine, that I always travelled with, which hung from one of the hoops of the toldo. First, there was our friend Peter Mangrove, cowering in a corner under the afterpart of the awning, covered up with a blanket and shaking, as if with an ague-fit, with the patron peering over his shoulder, no less alarmed. Sneezer, the dog, was sitting on end, with his black nose resting on the table, waiting patiently for his crumbs; and the black boatmen were forward in the bow of the canoe, jabbering, and laughing, and munching, as they clustered round a sparkling fire. When I first saw the apparition of the diabolical-looking snout, I was in a manner fascinated, and could neither speak nor move. Mangrove and the patron were also paralysed with fear, and the others did not see it; so Sneezer was the only creature amongst us, aware of the danger, who seemed to have his wits about him, for the instant he noticed it, he calmly lifted his nose off the table, and gave a short startled bark, and then crouched and drew himself back as if in act to spring, glancing his eyes from the monstrous jaws to my face, and nuzzling and whining with a laughing expression, and giving a small yelp now and then, and again riveting his eyes with intense earnestness on the alligator, telling me as plainly as if he had spoken it—”If you choose, master, I will attack it as in duty bound, but really such a customer is not at all in my way.” And not only did he say this, but he showed his intellect was clear, and no way warped through fear, for he now stood on his hind legs, and, holding on the hammock with his forepaws, he thrust his snout below the pillow, and pulled out one of my pistols, which always garnished the head of my bed on such expeditions as the present.
My presence of mind returned at witnessing the courage and sagacity of my noble dog. I seized the loaded pistol, and as by this time the eyes of the alligator were inside of the toldo, I clapped the muzzle to the larboard one and fired. The creature jerked back so suddenly and convulsively, that part of the toldo was torn away: and as the dead monster fell off, the canoe rolled as if in a seaway. My crew shouted “Que es esto?” Peter Mangrove cheered; Sneezer barked and yelled at a glorious rate, and could scarcely be held in the canoe; and looking overboard, we saw the monster, twelve feet long at least, upturn his white belly to the rising moon, struggle for a moment with his short paws, and after a solitary heavy lash of his scaly tail, he floated away astern of us, dead and still. To proceed: poor Peter Mangrove, whose nerves were consumedly shaken by this interlude, was seized during the night with a roasting fever, brought on in a great measure, I believe, by fear, at finding himself so far out of his latitude; and that he had grievous doubts as to the issue of our voyage, and as to where we were bound for, was abundantly evident. I dosed him most copiously with salt water, a very cooling medicine, and no lack of it at hand.
We weighed at grey dawn, on the morning of the 15th, and at 11 o’clock A.M. arrived at Chagres, a more miserable place, were that credible, even than Porto-Bello. The eastern side of the harbour is formed by a small promontory that runs out into the sea about five hundred yards, with a bright little bay to windward; while a long muddy mangrove-covered pit forms the right-hand bank as you enter the mouth or estuary of the river Chagres on the west. The easternmost bluff is a narrow saddle, with a fort erected on the extreme point facing the sea, which, so far as situation is concerned, is, or ought to be, impregnable; the rock being precipitous on three faces, while it is cut off to landward by a deep dry ditch, about thirty feet wide, across which a movable drawbridge is let down, and this compartment of the defences is all very regular, with scarp and counterscarp, covered-way, and glacis. The brass guns mounted on the castle were numerous and beautiful, but everything was in miserable disrepair; several of the guns, for instance, had settled down bodily on the platform, having fallen through the crushed rotten carriages. I found an efficient garrison in this stronghold of three old negroes, who had not even a musket of any kind, but the commandant was not in the castle when I paid my visit; however, one of the invincibles undertook to pilot me to El Señor Torre’s house, where his honour was dining. The best house in the place this was, by the by, although only a thatched hut; and here I found his Excellency the Commandant, a little shrivelled insignificant-looking creature. He was about sitting down to his dinner, of which he invited me to partake, alongside of El Señor Torre, who was neither more nor less than a reputable negro; and as I was very hungry, I contrived to do justice to the first dish, but my stomach was grievously offended at the second, which seemed to me to be a compound of garlic, brick-dust, and train-oil, so that I was glad to hurry on board of my canoe, to settle all with a little good madeira.
At 4 P.M. I proceeded up the river, which is here about a hundred yards across, and very deep; it rolls sluggishly along through a low swampy country, covered to the water’s edge with thick sedges and underwood, below which the water stagnates, and generates myriads of mosquitoes and other troublesome insects, and sends up whole clouds of noxious vapours, redolent of yellow fever and ague and cramps, and all manner of comfortable things.
At 10 P.M. we anchored by a grapnel in the stream, and I set Peter Mangrove forthwith to officiate in his new capacity of cook, and really he made a deuced good one. I then slung my hammock under the toldo, and, lighting a slow match at the end of it forwards to smoke away the mosquitoes—having previously covered the aftermost end with a mat—I wrapped myself in my cloak and turned in to take my snooze. We weighed again about two in the morning. As the day dawned the dull grey steamy clouds settled down on us once more, while the rain fell in a regular waterspout. It was anything but a cheering prospect to look along the dreary vistas of the dull brimful Lethe-like stream, with nothing to be seen but the heavy lowering sky above, the red swollen water beneath, and the gigantic trees high towering overhead, and growing close to the water’s edge, laced together with black snake-like withes, while the jungle was thick and impervious, and actually grew down into the water, for beach, or shore, or cleared bank, there was none—all water and underwood, except where a soft slimy steaming black bank of mud hove its shining back from out the dead waters near the shore, with one or more monstrous alligators sleeping on it, like dirty rotten logs of wood, scarcely deigning to lift their abominable long snouts to look at us as we passed, or to raise their scaly tails, with the black mud sticking to the scales in great lumps—oh! horrible—most horrible! But the creatures, although no beauties certainly, are harmless after all. For instance, I never heard a well-authenticated case of their attacking a human being hereabouts; pigs and fowls they do tithe, however, like any parson. I don’t mean to say that they would not make free with a little fat dumpling of a piccaniny, if he were thrown to them, but they seem to have no ferocious propensities. I shot one of them; he was about twelve feet long; the bullet entered in the joints of the mail, below the shoulder of the forepaw, where the hide was tender; but if you fire at them with the scale—that is, with the monster looking at you—a musket-ball will glance. I have often in this my Log spoken of the Brobdignag lizards, the guanas. I brought down one this day, about three feet long, and found it, notwithstanding its dragon-like appearance, very good eating. At 11 A.M., on the 18th, we arrived a
t the village of Cruzes, the point where the river ceases to be navigable for canoes, and from whence you take horse, or rather mule, for Panama. For about fifteen or twenty miles below Cruzes the river becomes rapid, and full of shoals, when the oars are laid aside, and the canoes are propelled by long poles.
The Town, as it is called, is a poor miserable place, composed chiefly of negro huts; however, a Spanish trader of the name of Villaverde, who had come over in the Wave as a passenger, and had preceded me in a lighter canoe, and to whom I had shown some kindness, now repaid it as far as lay in his power.
He lodged me for the night, and hired mules for me to proceed to Panama in the morning; so I slung my hammock in an old Spanish soldier’s house, who keeps a kind of posada, and was called by my friend Villaverde at daydawn, whose object was, not to tell me to get ready for my journey, but to ask me if I would go and bathe before starting. Rather a rum sort of request, it struck me; nevertheless, a purification, after the many disagreeables I had endured, could not come amiss; and slipping on my trousers, and casting my cloak on my shoulders, away we trudged to a very beautiful spot, about a mile above Cruzes, where, to my surprise, I found a score of Crusaños, all ploutering in the water, puffing and blowing and shouting. “Now an alligator might pick and choose,” thought I; however, no one seemed in the least afraid, so I dashed amongst them. Presently, about pistol-shot from us, a group of females appeared. “Come,” thought I, “rather too much for a modest young man this too,” and deuce take me, as I am a gentleman, if the whole bevy did not disrobe in cold blood, and squatter, naked as their mother Eve was in the garden of Eden, before she took to the herbage, right into the middle of the stream, skirling and laughing, as if not even a male mosquito had been within twenty miles. However, my neighbour took no notice of them; it seemed all a matter of course. But let that pass. About 8 o’clock A.M. I got under weigh, with Peter Mangrove, on two good stout mules, and a black guide running before me with a long stick, with which he sprang over the sloughs and stones in the road with great agility; I would have backed him against many a passable hunter, to do four miles over a close country in a steeple-chase.
Panama is distant from Cruzes about seven leagues. The road is somewhat like what the Highland ones must have been before General Wade took them in hand, and only passable for mules; indeed, in many places where it has been hewn out of the rock in zigzags on the face of the hill, it is scarcely passable for two persons meeting. But the scenery on each side is very beautiful, as it winds, for the most part, amongst steep rocks, overshadowed by magnificent trees, amongst which birds of all sizes, and of the most beautiful plumage, are perpetually glancing; while a monkey, every here and there, would sit grimacing and chattering and scratching himself in the cleft of a tree.
I should think, judging from my barometer—but I may have made an inaccurate calculation, and I have not Humboldt by me—that the ridge of the highest is fifteen hundred feet above the level of the ocean, so that it would be next to impossible to join the two seas at this point by a canal with water in it. However, I expect to see a Joint Stock Company set agoing some fine day yet, for the purpose of cutting it—that is, when the national capital next accumulates (and Lord knows when that will be) to a plethora, and people’s purses become so distended that they require bleeding.
After travelling about twenty miles, the scene gradually opens, and one begins to dream about Vasco Nuñez and the enthusiastic first explorers of the Isthmus; but my first view of the Pacific was through a drenching shower of rain, that wet me to the skin, and rather kept my imagination under; for this said imagination of mine is like a barn-door chuckey, brisk and crouse enough when the sun shines, and the sky is blue, and plenty of grub at hand; but I can’t write poetry when I am cauld and hungry and drooked. Still, when I caught my first glimpse of the distant Pacific, I felt that, even through a miserable drizzle, it was a noble prospect.
As you proceed, you occasionally pass through small open savannahs, which become larger, and the clear spaces wider, until the forest you have been travelling under gradually breaks into beautiful clumps of trees, like those in a gentleman’s park, and every here and there a placid clear piece of water spreads out, full of pond turtle, which I believe to be one and the same with the tortoise and eels—the latter of which, by the by, are very sociable creatures— for in the clear moonlight nights, with the bright sparkling dew on the short moist grass, they frequently travel from one pond to another, wriggling along the grass like snakes. I have myself found them fifty yards from the water; but whether the errand was love or war, or merely to drink tea with some of the slippery young females in the next pool, and then return again, the deponent sayeth not.
As you approach the town the open spaces, before mentioned, become more frequent, until at length you gain a rising-ground about three miles from Panama, where, as the sun again shone out, the view became truly enchanting.
There lay the town of Panama, built on a small tongue of land jutting into the Pacific, surrounded by walls, which might have been a formidable defence once; but I wish my promotion depended on my rattling the old bricks and stones about their ears, with one single frigate, if I could only get near enough; but in the impossibility of this lies the strength of the place, as the water shoals so gradually that the tide retires nearly a mile and a half from the walls, rising, I consider, near eighteen feet at the springs; while, on the opposite side of the isthmus, at Chagres for instance, there is scarcely any at all, the Gulf stream neutralising it almost entirely.
On the right hand a hill overhangs the town, rising precipitously to the height of a thousand feet or thereabouts, on the extreme pinnacle of which is erected a signal station, called the Vigia, which, at the instant I saw it, was telegraphing to some craft out at sea. As for the city, to assume our friend Mr Bang’s mode of description, it was shaped like a tadpole, the body representing the city, and the suburb the tail; or a stewpan, the city and its fortifications being the pan, while the handle, tending obliquely towards us, was the Raval or long street, extending savannahward, without the walls. At the distance from which we viewed it, the red-tiled houses, cathedral with its towers, and the numerous monasteries and nunneries, seemed girt in with a white ribbon; while a series of black spots here and there denoted the cannon on the batteries. To the left of the town there was a whole flotilla of small craft, brigs, schooners, and vegetable boats; while farther out at sea, beyond the fortifications, three large ships rode at anchor; and beyond them again, the beautiful group of islands lying about five miles off the town, appeared to float on and were reflected in, the calm glass-like expanse of the Pacific, like emeralds chased in silver, while the ocean itself, towards the horizon, seemed to rise up like a scene in a theatre, or a burnished bright silver wall, growing more and more blue and hazy and indistinct as it ascended, until it melted into the cloudless heaven, so that no one could tell where water and sky met.
“Thou glorious mirror,
……in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime.
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible.”
While a sperm-whale every now and then rose between us and the islands, and spouted up a high double jet into the air, like a blast of steam, and then, with a heavy flounder of his broad tail, slowly sank again; and a boat here and there glided athwart the scene, and a sleepy sail arose, with a slow motion and a fitful rattle and a greasy cheep, on the mast of some vessel getting all ready to weigh; while small floating trails of blue smoke were streaming away astern from the tiny cabooses of the craft at anchor, and a mournful distant “Yo, heave oh!” came booming past us on the light air; and the everlasting tinkle of the convent bells sounded cheerily, and the lowing of the kine around us called up old associations in my bosom, as I looked forth on the glorious spectacle from beneath a magnificent bower of o
range-trees and shaddocks, while all manner of wild-flowers blossomed and bloomed around us.
We arrived at Panama about 3 P.M., covered to the eyes with mud, and after some little difficulty I found out Señor Hombrecillo Justo’s house, who received me very kindly. Next morning I waited on the Governor, made my bow, and told him my errand. He was abundantly civil, professing himself ready to serve me in any way, and promising to give me the earliest intelligence of the arrival of the Bandera. I then returned to mine host’s, to whom I had strong letters of introduction from some Kingston friends.
I soon found that I had landed amongst a family of originals. Mine host was a little thin withered body, with a face that might have vied with the monkey whom the council of Aberdeen took for a sugar-planter. He wore his own grey hair in a long greasy queue, and his costume, when I first saw him, was white cotton stockings, white jane small-clothes and waistcoat, and a little light-blue silk coat; he wore large solid gold buckles in his shoes, and knee-buckles of the same. His voice was small and squeaking and when heated in argument, or crossed by any member of his family—and he was very touchy—it became so shrill and indistinct that it pierced the ear without being in the least intelligible. In those paroxysms he did not walk, but sprung from place to place like a grasshopper with unlooked-for agility, avoiding the chairs and tables and other movables with great dexterity. I often thought he would have broken whatever came in his way; but although his erratic orbit was small, he performed his evolutions with great precision and security. His general temper, however, was very kind, humane, and good-humoured, and he seldom remained long under the influence of passion. His character, both as a man and a merchant, was, unimpeachable, and indeed proverbial in the place. His better half appeared to be some years older, and also a good deal of an original. She was a little short thick woman; but stout as she was when I had the honour of an embrace, she must have been once much stouter, for her skin appeared, from the colour and texture, to have come to her at secondhand, and to have originally belonged to a much larger person, for it bagged and hung in flaps about her jowls and bosom like an ill-cut maintopsail which sits clumsily about the clews. I think I could have reefed her with advantage below the chin.
Tom Cringle's Log Page 61