Isthmiana/The Bay

The Bay
The residents of Panama think no more of the slight fevers of the country, than we do of a severe cold or influenza. You call to pay morning compliments to a lady with whom you have had a passage of arms at the ball of the evening before, and are told quietly that she teine calenturas (has the fever), and is not visible. In a day or two she reappears, undimmed. The fevers of the gentlemen only come on, like colds at a college, when they have unpleasant duties to perform.

Northern constitutions are more impressionable. They melt like an iceberg under the equator. After my second calentura and concomitant quinine, my head felt like a prizefighter’s which has been in chancery. I determined to recruit in a furlough of a fortnight. A couple of friends were going somewhere up the Isthmus. I agreed to join them. We were to take canoe that evening at the turn of the tide. I hastily tumbled together my traps, and borrowing a hammock, and trusting to fortune for want of a friend, was soon ready on the Playa Grande, near the smooth, broad sands of the north beach.

A traveller arriving from the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, with eyes wide open to stare, as Balboa did, at the Pacific, stares wider, when he finds it at Panama to the east instead of the west; and as he sees the sun come up over the softly-glowing bay, he fancies that Pboebus must have been making a night of it, the night before, among the “glorious Apollers,” and turned out of the wrong side of his bed. He is half persuaded that, after all the toils of his trans-Isthmian travel, he has only wandered about as one does in the labyrinths of a tropical forest, and has been brought back to the shores of the tumultuous, keel-vexed, practical Atlantic, instead of looking out upon the sea that washes the shores of Inde and Cathay, the ocean of imagination and hope. So unexpected, also, is the turn of the coast, that, in order to go north to California, you must steer almost due south for a hundred miles. The points of the compass are as much reversed as social position in the golddiggings.

But as ex post facto narratives are doubtless unconstitutional in Yankee literature, let me proceed regularly; and while I am waiting for the tide to rise its twenty-three feet, and cover the conchological mud and crustaceous reef of the Bay, let me speak of the Bay, — this beautiful Bay of the tropics! How often at night, awakened by the tap of Marcellino at my door with the news of a steamer at hand, have I embarked and hastened out upon the water. It would be perhaps an hour before day, but still night, — a night of clear, soft, yet brilliant star light; and there the stars do not glitter with the steely sharpness of a northern sky, but glow; they do not snap out a lively twinkle, but slowly flicker and sway; their light grows upon the eye, as the light of a revolving lighthouse across a stretch of sea. The cool night-breeze would be breathing over the water, freshening as the dawn came on. Wreaths of mist were floating away on the mainland and clinging to the mountainous points of the bay, where perhaps too a black rain-cloud lay lowering. For each climate are its own atmospheric beauties. Nowhere but in England and the Low Countries should you study effects of sunlight through mist and rain-clouds. There is no purple in the world like the purple of Hymettus. Never but at a Florentine sunset can you touch light made tangible, and grasp it, and bathe in it, and be upborne by it. Nowhere else can you see that veil of palpitating azure that flows down after sunset to the Lake of Geneva from the summit of the Jura, the inmost spirit of light making the very peaks transparent. The snow cones of Oregon rise against a background of blue unequalled in depth and brilliancy. In the tropics, and most exquisite at Panama, before sunrise and after sunset there spreads upward from the horizon a violet flush, full of soft glow, vivid with suppressed light.

It is pleasant to look down upon anything or anybody; and the lower one has been, the more delightful becomes the consciousness of present elevation. The age of balloons and bird’s-eye views will develop human vanity to an insufferable degree. But some of our pleasures from looking down have a different origin. A view like this was only meant to be seen from a certain height; it lacks picturesqueness and the necessary features of foreground scenery; it is panoramic in its nature. We will draw it along slowly before the eyes of the reader, interspersing the representation with remarks à la Banvard. Land and water are the chief objects we behold; land oscillating and undulating into hills covered with deep, rich verdure of the tropics, and water blue and clear, with its waves marked only by shifting color, that shoots over the smooth seeming surface, — the ανηριθμον γελασμα of the ocean. The land is the Isthmus of Panama, a narrow bank between two worlds of sea, — one of the obstacles; the water is the Pacific, the ocean of material wealth combined with romance. But though a wild nature still rules undisturbed over the greater portion of the scene before us, yet man has thrust his so-called civilization upon the scene, and that rusty spot that disturbs the purity of the view is one of his beauty-destroying abodes. Those shabby, tiled buildings, those dirty church-spires, and huts like ant-hills surrounding, are Panama,— while a suburb more important than the parent city is represented by a few black spots upon the water, capacious edifices, that move to and fro with the surplus population of the town. At present the small peninsula upon which the town is built is washed by the tide; but when it has fallen, an unsightly reef spreads out on every side, much blasphemed by people who, under a vertical sun and with excoriated feet, walk over its worm-eaten surface. The town is, as we have said, situated upon a small point which terminates in the old Cyclopean sea-wall of the town, where there is a strong bastion, still mounted with some magnificent bronze guns, and serving after parching days as a delicious cool evening promenade for the people. This is Las Bovedas, or the Battery, which deserves a separate essay, so largely does it enter into the list of Panama pleasures and Panama occupations. Away to the north of the town sweeps in a beautiful crescent a smooth, white sand-beach, terminating in a wooded, rocky point, that looks back into the town. A few huts straggle along this, near the town, sheltered by a grove of cocoanut-trees, which serve as parasols or umbrellas, and, while their occasional droppings keep down the super abundant infant population, they at the same time accustom the more warlike to the dangers of a bombardment. Farther along the beach a species of tree grows close down upon the sand, a hedge protecting the land from the sea, but its verdure is traitorous; these are the poisonous manzanilla, the Upas, which our school-boy eloquence so much employed. Beyond the wooded point, another cove, though not so perfect in its form, commences; and here, overgrown with trees and weeds, and partially covered with the quick-forming rock of the country, are the scanty ruins that mark the site of old Panama, the city of that bold, adventurous spirit whose type was Pizarro, and suggested by the very sound of his name. Back of this, and between our view-point and the site of the old town, spread broad savannas, carpeted, like a park, with soft, close-shaven turf; the cattle of a thousand hills graze quietly over its undisturbed surface, and, when the sun blazes, can take refuge in some of the rich groves or close thickets of tropical shrubbery which are picturesquely scattered over its surface, or follow the scanty water-courses. Smooth and carefully kept, like the fair meadows of an English landscape, appear these natural grazing-farms; and respectable enclosed countries, with their walls and hedges and ditches, can offer no pleasure like a free gallop, this way and that, over the plains, when the cool breeze of evening is flowing down over the hills, and every breath bears healing. These llanos lead back to a confused collection of hills, small and conical, like, as a practical friend remarks, the mounds of a potato-patch, and thickly wooded to the top. Their look is as if a sea of land, tossed into irregular waves by a general irruption of diverse winds, had been suddenly petrified. The scene is new and individual.

As the boat made its way to the steamer, the sun, rising, would bring into view the golden crescent of the north beach, with its grove of graceful palms, and its background of dark, wooded hills. The solitary tower that marks the site of old Panama would show itself clearly against the dense vegetation that has enveloped the once famous city. The large islands drew up boldly against the bright horizon, and the small were green resting-places for the eye looking oceanward. The bastions and towers of the town have grown into a Mediterranean variety of outline, and the dark cloud that seemed to overhang it has resolved itself into Ancon Hill. In sharp contrast to the repose of the landscape is the scene on the deck of the steamer. The natives surround her with a flotilla of boats, to make prisoner every disembarking Californian with his plunder. These, squalid and brigand-like, hurry with the recompense of all their toils in view. Boxes of gold-dust are shoved about as of no value. There is confusion and objurgation. But the rising tide warns me that I must defer any further description of the Bay, and return to my journey.