Gan-Eden: or, Pictures of Cuba E-Book

William Henry Hurlbert

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

William Henry Hurlbert (1827-1895) was an American journalist and possible author of “The Diary of a Public man,” published in the North American Review in 1879. Although a Southerner by birth and first trained as a Unitarian minister, he worked thirty years writing for or editing newspapers, including as editorial writer for The New York Times, and later at the New York World. Later in life he also wrote about his travels in Europe. The book, “Gan-Eden: or, Pictures of Cuba,” attributed to him, is said to recount travels during his youth in Cuba. In the preface, the author says: “The title “Pictures of Cuba,” indicates my intention in composing this volume. I have not attempted to write a history, or a gazette of Cuba. I have only sought to reproduce the sights and thoughts which passed before the eyes, and through the mind of one whose interest in Cuba is by no means recent, and what tried to see and to think for himself. Many mistakes of detail, I must have made. I have done my best to avoid them, but my chief wish has been, to preserve the aroma of those general impressions, which are the best things that an unscientific traveller has to offer to an exacting public.”

Leseprobe

Gan-Eden

Or, Pictures of Cuba

William Henry Hurlbert

Originally published in 1854 by John P. Jewett and Company, Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington. New York, Sheldon, Lamport and Blakeman.

Modern Edition © 2022 by Full Well Ventures

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Created with Vellum

To my friend Mrs. F.W.S., in the name of one whose memory is linked with the sweetest and the saddest recollections of my Cuban journey, this book is dedicated.

The place was called Gan-Eden, the Garden of Delight; and it belonged to the Caliph Haroun-Al-Raschid, who, when his heart was contracted, used to come to that garden and sit there; so his heart became dilated, and his anxiety ceased.

Noureddin and the Fair Persian.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

L’Envoi

Preface

In calling Cuba a “Garden of Delight,” I only express the sum of those bright memories, of a genial nature, and of more genial human friends, which I brought away from the tropics.

The title “Pictures of Cuba,” indicates my intention in composing this volume. I have not attempted to write a history, or a gazetteer of Cuba. I have only sought to reproduce the sights and thoughts which passed before the eyes, and through the mind of one whose interest in Cuba is by no means recent, and who tried to see and to think for himself. Many mistakes of detail, I must have made. I have done my best to avoid them, but my chief wish has been, to preserve the aroma of those general impressions, which are the best things that an unscientific traveler has to offer to an exciting public. The considerate reader, to whom I shall be fortunate enough to convey any distincter notions of the sweet, sad South, I am sure, will pardon the prominence which the plan of the book necessarily gives to the first personal pronoun.

It is proper to say here, that something of the substance of these pages has already appeared in the form of letters addressed to the National Era, and that Chapter XIV has been altered and condensed from an article published in the North American Review, for January, 1849.

ChapterOne

“New-born delights.”

Keats.

There are names which affect us like a delicious poem or a glowing picture. When young Hassan heard his father talking with the merchants from Cairo about Egypt and her Nile, his heart dilated with pleasurable pain, and he found no rest till he sallied forth from the western gate of Mosel across the Syrian sands. Only with reading over the names on a map of Italy or of England, we can warm a winter’s hour, and cover the barest walls with such landscapes as never Claude or Constable, Tintoret or Turner put upon the canvas. The name of Cuba leaves a ring of doubloons on the ear, a flavor of guava on the lips.

Cuba has no history. One sublime figure alone does that magic word summon up before us, a figure how sublime! A shape of rewarded greatness, — of triumphant patience, — a grand heroic figure, motionless upon the rude prow of a low caravel, with sad eyes brightening in an awful joy, as that new world, borne about so long within his throbbing brain, slowly rises, a visible reality, from the bosom of the calm blue sea!

Before Columbus all human history in Cuba is a blank, after him it is all blood and business. Yet is that fair island a land of sirens to those who know it not; to those who have wandered there, a land of the lotus. I have heard young men talk regretfully of Havana while lounging along the brilliant Boulevards of Paris, and a venerable merchant, as chary of his emotions as of his endorsements, once said to me, with a light of youth in his old gray eyes, that his arrival in Cuba gave him the most vivid idea he ever had of the passage from this world to the next. What wonder that this should be so? The northern Anglo-American sails from his “stern and rock-bound coast,” racked in body upon the swiftly revolving wheels of a climatic torture, the pains of which are the more intense, that he cannot anticipate where or when they will recur, — racked in spirit by the vexatious excitements of the most distracting and unjoyous life men have ever led. He finds in tropical Spanish America a Kingdom of Cockaigne.

—“a place

Blest by Heaven’s especial grace,

….. A pleasant shore,

Where a sweet clim is breathed from a land

Of fragrance, quietness, and trees and flowers,

Full of calm joy it is, as we of grief,

Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth.”

Within three days’ sail of our southern ports, lie scenes than which India itself offers nothing more thoroughly strange to our eyes. The world of nature is strange. The eye seeks in vain the many-branching small-leaved forests of the Continent. They are replaced by taller, more leafy, more graceful tribes of the vegetable kingdom, — the grains and the grasses of our cornfields and our ponds, shooting up, mighty arborescent giants overhead. The rich and dainty flowers, whose acquaintance we made as the delicately nurtured belles of the aristocratic New England hothouse, flaunt upon us, rude and healthy hoydens, from every hedge and roadside. New lights are in the firmament, strange constellations shining with a planetary splendor in these new, more magnificent heavens. There, most beautiful of all the signs God hath set in the skies, flames the Southern Cross, the Christian constellation, the symbol of the new hopes and the new life revealed to Christendom in that later age when first it greeted European eyes. Strangely, among the new tenants of the upper world, shows the familiar brightness of Orion and of the Pleiades, and the great Northern Bear seems a wanderer like ourselves, gazing on the splendid southern stars as the rude Gothic heroes and fierce Vikinger gazed of old upon the gorgeous pageantries of Rome and of Byzantium. The very crescent moon has changed, the huntress Diana has bartered her bow for a golden boat, in which she floats Cleopatra-like, and careless of the chase, through the luxurious purple skies. Not less strange in appearance than the moon, are the waters which she sways. The ocean rolls around the volcanic and coralline rocks, a tide more “deeply darkly beautifully blue” than is ever seen upon our northern coasts, more blue even than the glorious blue waters of the Mediterranean. These waters which are very deep close in shore, for the shores of northern Cuba are generally steep and sudden, are transparent and pellucid as the crystal of Lake George, and leaning over the bows of the ship you may see far down below you a whole submarine landscape of queer and enormous plants, populous with all manner of lazy conservatives, — huge turtles not less grave and aldermanic in appearance than their transatlantic human foes, — star-fishes content throughout their lives to be the admiration of their own Little Pedlingtons; lazzaroni conchs to whom Heaven has granted what alone the lazzarone of Naples considers wanting to his bless, “that food should have legs and crawl to him;” for lying on his back, the happy conch, with feelers indolently stretched along the tide, takes toll of all slight living things that pass that way. How cool and inviting seem to the sun-burned, soul-weary voyager those silent watery realms, unvexed by merman or by mermaid, “a dream of idleness in groves Elysian!”

Not alone are the eyes refreshed with new sighs on land and sea; the air is full of winged jewels, the groves and cane fields glancing by day with the prismatic colors of thousands of Coleoptera, and brilliant broad-winged butterflies, and glittering by night with the electrical splendors of the famous cucullos, those torch-bearing aerial watchmen, those living emeralds, whose effulgence no gem of the mineral world can rival. Nay, the very air itself is a novelty to northern lungs in which the senses take not less delight than in aught of sight or sound that rejoices them. Breathing, which is perhaps the greatest inconvenience of life in our intemperate zone, becomes its chief and cheapest luxury in Cuba. One finds it more easy to surrender his barbarian faith in the forms of matter, and accepts more submissively the gospel of gas, when he finds how effectively and sweetly the mere atmosphere of the tropics can attune the dissonant chords of his substantial mortal body. Those bland airs steal over the system, curdled by our uneasy atmosphere, with a soothing influence such as the companionship of the serene and the noble exerts upon hearts snatched from the society of the vexatious, the passionate, and the querulous. It is so strange and so pleasant to trust in the skies as one trusts in one’s friend! Our northern Aurora is a mere Armida, — nay, she is a very Pale, and when, lulled by her seducing smiles, we lay our trusting heads upon her lap, she rewards our confidence with a nail smartly driven through the temples! The Cuban morning, faithful as Fiordelisa, crowns us

“Con gioia e con diletto

Senza aver tema o di guerra sospetto.”

Here it is almost as unsafe to count upon a pleasant tomorrow in the country as to speculate upon the chances of a Cape Horn voyage, or a presidential nomination. In Cuba, a man may arrange periodical picnics for his grandchildren yet unborn. Of course in such a land nobody talks of the weather, excepting raw foreigners, and the comparative dulness of large social gatherings in Havana may perhaps be due in part to the impossibility of introducing this agreeable and fruitful topic, to which we owe so much of the easy and brilliant conversation that abounds in our own saloons.

If God's world in Cuba, the world of nature, as Columbus and Ojeda found it there three centuries ago, is thus strange to the children of the temperate zones, man's world, the world of arts and manners, as the successors of Columbus and Ojeda have reared it, is not less striking and strange. The northern voyager, as his steamer glides into the huge tub-shaped harbor of Havana, gazes with astonishment on a scene which revives his visions or his memories of the far Levant. Our Anglo-Saxon has so appropriated to itself the American name; the “young giant of the West,” so yearns to crown his head with the Arctic Circle and to bathe his feet in the southern sea, that most of us think little of those bygone days, when the Indies were but the pantry and the strong-box of the Catholic kings, when the Caribbean was a Spanish lake, when the man who sailed from London a trader was hung in Panama a pirate, and the old Gothic monarchy talked as confidently of its manifest rights as does young America now of its manifest destiny. So it seems to us, that to have reached this stately panorama of Havana, we must have traversed many miles of longitude instead of a few degrees of latitude. On the left hand rise fortifications massive as those of Malta or Gibraltar, wrought into the dark grey rocks of the Morro, sweeping along the many-hued hillsides of the Cabañas, glittering throughout their lengthening lines with the white uniforms and shining bayonets of the sentinels who guard the proud flag of Spain, that gorgeous banner of blood and of gold, which symbolizes so well the career and the character of the pedlar knights, or knightly peddlers, who conquered the Indies for Castile and Leon.

On the right, stretch irregular masses of parti-colored buildings, blue, pink, white, green, yellow, overtopped at intervals by some massive church tower or graceful tufted palm tree. Queer-looking boats, emancipated gondolas, shameless sisters of the veiled Venetian nuns, and brilliant as butterflies, dart in and out along the crowded quays. Half-naked negroes are riding fractious horses into the sluggish water, and a confused incessant buzz, like that which rises from vociferous Naples to the ear of the lonely traveller dreaming among the orange groves of lofty San Elmo, comes faintly from the shore. You land, penetrate the mysteries of the city, and still the wonder grows. You call a coach, and find only an odd-looking gig with shafts sixteen feet long, and wheels six yards in circumference, driven by a negro postilion, three parts jack-boots and one part silver-laced jacket. Into this singular vehicle you fling yourself, and find that to the gig of your dear native land, this tropical gig is as the pine-apple is to the pearmain, so luxurious, so cradling, so provocative of bland indifference to all worldly cares! You reach your inn, and find it in appearance a Moorish palace, — in general discomfort a German boarding house, in expense a Bond street hotel. You find that you are to live on two meals a day; a breakfast that begins with eggs and rice, is sustained by fried pork and Catalan wine, and ends with coffee and cigars; a dinner, every dish of which is a voyage of discovery. You are to sleep on what most resembles a square drum-head of Jullien dimensions, without mattress or coverlets, in a room with a red-tiled floor, and with windows in which the utter want of glass is compensated for by the presence of innumerable iron bars. Boots is a native African, an ex-cannibal for aught you know, wonderfully tattooed, and the laundress an athletic young negress who smokes authentic long nines.

You walk out through streets narrow as those of Pompeii, past shops open to the ground like those of Naples, and shaded with heavy awnings that often sweep across the street. Every thing is patent to your gaze and nobody seems to be aware of the fact. Only now and then you pass some vast pile of yellow stone, stately as the palaces of Genoa, and catch through the great archway a glimpse of courtyards, fountain-cooled and palm-shaded, that suggest dreams of Eastern seclusion and invisible beauty. You dream on this fine dream, for in all your walk you meet no female form save of the Pariah class, unless, perchance, you stumble on some fair foreigner, at sight of whose bonnet the incurious native deigns to look up from his business in doors, or his lounge in the shade, with a sudden stare and a half-pitying smile, which provoke you to wonder that you had ever ceased to feel how fearful a thing the bonnet of civilization is. Water carriers, balancing their jars, mules half hidden from the eye by fresh bundles of green fodder, borne on either side, large cream-colored oxen, superb as the mild-eyed monsters of Lombardy, pulling primeval carts by means of yokes fastened in front of the horns, crowd up the narrow streets. And through them all the frequent calesero, swinging in his heavy saddle, steers the clumsy length of his quitrin with careless certain skill.

The signs of the shops startle you, for if you are to take them au pied de la lettre, all the retail business of Havana is in the hands of saints, goddesses, and heroes, of birds, beasts, and beauties. St. Dominic deals in healing drugs, St. Anthony boldly handles laces, muslins, and ribbons, Diana dispenses sweets to all the dandies of the town, the Empress Eugenia meekly measures tapes, and the blessed Sun himself has really "proved a micher," and cheats in cosmetics. The greater merchants, like the burghers of the middle ages, often occupy with their families the elegant upper floors of the building which in its first stories serves them for a warehouse.

Not less mediaeval is the confusion of quarters. Next door to the begrimed hovel of a dealer in coal, rises the palatial home of the opulent marquis; St. Giles and St. James elbow each other.

Have we not passed the pillars of Hercules, and shall we not "look the blue straits over," for the heights of Morocco?