Isthmiana/The Boat

The Boat
The sun had gone down perpendicularly, and, after the soft, pure, purple twilight, hasty night was approaching, as a tremulous motion of the canoe and a gentle plash of the waves warned us it was time to start. The Padron waked, and, calling his hombre passengers, who poco tiempo came on board, got his clearance by going ashore in the still atmosphere, with a candle in his hand, and buying a bottle of chicha. All men of Spanish lineage are named José. All the Josés now sprang into the water, and lifted the canoe from its bed in the mud. Just then a puff of evening breeze swept down from Ancon Hill through the rustling palms, and Josés, taken by surprise, were obliged to swim for it sputteringly, and come on board with Tritonian drippings.

As we glided away, out burst from the other boats a full chorus of Billingsgate adieu. Spanish, the language of devoted tenderness, is likewise a medium for the vilest vituperation. Our crew received and returned assurances of distinguished consideration as lavishly as diplomates; and as hit or retort told, the quiet bay resounded with inextinguishable laughter. Gradually all these sounds died away in the distance. Panama became the ghost of a city, over which Ancon Hill hung darkly brooding. We rustled softly along in silence, except when another marketboat, passing, exchanged flying shots or a broad side. The Padron was a man of few words; he reserved his fire until it would tell, and then poured in a stunner, laughing suppressedly until the canoe shook. Presently my companion turned in, and I remained with the night.

The canoes that do the coast market trade of Panama are made mostly in Darien, hollowed by tool and fire from the trunks of enormous tropical trees. Ours, a fair type of the class, was about forty feet long, seven beam, round bottom, and very little keel; she consequently rolled like a hollow log, as she was. She carried two stumpy masts, with ragged square-sails and a small foretopsail. This last kept the Padron in a very uncomfortable state; but, as one of the most distinguished mariners of the Bay, he considered it due to his pre-eminence to carry it as a broad pennant. Such boats make voyages of more than one hundred miles up and down the coast, and bring to Panama pigs, turkeys, chickens, eggs, rice, maize, plantains, pumpkins, yams, olives, potatoes, candles, cocoanuts, chica, cheese, &c. They carry a considerable number of native passengers, going up to sell their own stuff. Picturesque craft themselves, their arrival makes the beach near the market-place lively and picturesque as a sea-shore of Claude. When selling of eggs and oranges becomes the sole business of a life, it is dignified, and I have seen from the Panama market-women, classically “demi vetues de ces plis transparents qui collent aux statues,” melodramatic action that would have done honor to Rachel in Lucrece.

The night was the perfection of a night of the tropics, softly brilliant. It seemed as if the glowing sunlight of the day had penetrated the earth, had been garnered up, and was now diffused through the chastened air, like the tender memory of a dazzling passion. Consecrate to love should be such nights; so I remained idly dipping my hand in the water as we unconsciously glided along. Presently a circle of fair forms closed around me, as the nymphs about Rinaldo in the enchanted grove. Each bore the scarcely recognized lineaments of some well-known face. One detached herself from the throng and laid her hand upon my shoulder. As she approached, a masculine hardness grew over her delicate features, the graceful floating of her sylph-like robe resolved itself into a conventional attire, a black beard covered the bloom of her cheeks; she whispered, “Señor, the boat has no gunwale; you will fall overboard if you go to sleep.” “Thank you, Padron,” said I, starting up and looking into the crib where I had seen my companions disappear, as pigeons into a dove-cot. We three had hired the whole cabin; it was on deck, about two feet and a half high. My two comrades, taking comfort while I took romance, had stowed themselves fore and aft, leaving only a very narrow space athwartship for me. How I got into my place is a secret with me and the manufacturers of india-rubber springs; and how I slept, the journals of the guests of Procrustes will explain. So, then, the earliest of morning saw me on deck, looking at the new scenes around me. White sheep are said to eat more than black ones because there are more of them, and as sunrise does not enter into the daily experience of the civilized world, it is generally conceded to be rather an inferior, sleepy sort of a display. If I had been under the dominion of this popular fallacy, this sunrise would have given a new view of the subject.

Thanks to a fresh night-breeze, we had made lively progress during my torpidity, and were still bowling along finely with a shore wind on the quarter. The foretopsail was still the trial of the Padron’s life. The island-mountain of Taboga was far behind us. Melones, where I had once vainly brought all my gastronomical knowledge to bear to make my first pelican palatable, was a mere line upon the horizon. Otoque was dim to seaward. We lay opposite the lofty, bold sierra of the Morro di Chame. Beyond stretched a yellow line of beach, to be traversed on our return journey by land. We were perhaps eight miles from shore; but in the clearness of the dawn an exquisite, partially wooded slope was revealed, rising gently to the high main ridge of the Isthmus. There were no stars in the sky, but the same violet flush, unknown to the cold North, was spreading upward to the zenith. There is no temptation for Aurora to dilly-dally in the tropics. She finds the saffron-bed of Tithonus too warm in the warm morning. She will hasten to draw up coolness from the dim thickets of the swamp-forest, to catch a handful of fresh snow from the summits of the Cordillera.

Presently up comes a great round glare of a sun, and the fresh wind, unwilling to become a sirocco, flees away before him.

Jollity among the natives had awakened with the dawn. Happy in the bliss of only one garment and no toilette to make, they had devoted the time we waste in such employ to the cultivation of their social faculties. Fragments of jokes and droning songs had come past the perilous foretopsail, perilous no longer. Now their jollity was over; the sun was upon them; they baked in silence, or occasionally only spluttered a little, like an unwilling oyster roasting.

Fortunately I was provided with that resource of a listless traveller, a novel of Alexandre Dumas. All that blasting day, as we lay under the shade of the mainsail, utterly becalmed except in temper, the boat quivered with my laughter as I followed the wanderings of “Les Trois Mousquetaires.”

All that day we lay pinned by the rays of the vertical sun. We might have supposed that our canoe had sprouted, like a sea-plant, and sent downward its long roots to the bottom of the sea. The Padron had forgotten the foretopsail, and in a dull slumber let the tiller carry him about at its wabbling will.

There was no sign of life; whales, usually so abundant, refused to come to the surface, lest their breath, heated to explosion, might not find speedy enough exit through its escape-pipe; the sharks were off, as usual, after the California steamer; they have acquired a taste for Yankees. Occasionally a bird flew past us, panting for the woods.

What my companions did all the day I know not. I have some indistinct recollection of their frying slices of ham on the palms of their hands, and I am quite sure that I heard a sound of boiling as one applied an orange to his highly tanned lips.

It is warm on the desert of Sahara; it is warm in the cañons of California; it is warm in the snows of Alpine passes in August; it is warm on the sands of the Great Salt Lake Valley; it is warm, very warm at the Newport ball; a Strasburg goose has a warm time, — so did John Rogers. But if you wish to know what the word Hot means, — if you wish to experience the sensation of having every drop of your blood baked into brick-dust, — be becalmed in a bungo in the Bay of Panama.

As for me, the supernatural coolness of my heroes somewhat assisted me, and I managed to survive, though I have appreciated much better, ever since, the curse of Kehama.

With evening freshened the breeze and recommenced our life. The natives, as happy a set. as the coast Indians of North America, eat their simple fare of plantains and yams with laugh and joke. They are happy in few wants. The Padron was an excellent specimen of his race, a fine, honest, clear-eyed fellow, with delicate features. The crew were active, lithe chaps, well put together, muscular, though without any of that exaggerated development that marks the arm of a wood-chopper or the calf of a danseuse. The character of these Isthmians has been much belied by travellers. The great rascals of the Isthmus are mostly foreigners, renegades from the West Indies and coasts of South America; here they find a harvest. The people of a thoroughfare country undoubtedly always deteriorate, and the transit to California has had a bad effect on the natives. Money is lavished among them; they have few artificial wants to supply, and, having no other way of spending, consequently consume it in riotous living. Personally I have never met with anything but civility, and even kindness; their easy dilatoriness must be treated philosophically. Of course the poco tiempo style of management does not suit a Yankee. His interests are all-important to himself, and, accustomed to make all obstacles yield, he is annoyed and exasperated to find that there are people who, when they have enough for the moment, are contented. It is not indolence, but sound philosophy, in a cargadore or an arriero of Panama, knowing that in two days he can earn enough money for a week’s support, to give up work, and take the satisfaction in life that nature marked out for him. He need not wait till old age for repose. He has no conventional wants. It is not his place in life to become a tool of civilization, of a civilization unknown and uncared for; he need not spend an existence in toil that the proletariat of distant France may eat brown-bread; that the vine-dressers of the Rhine may live; that a certain number of carpenters and masons may earn two dollars a day in building his warehouses and mansions; and that squads of the potato-fed may stretch him a thousand miles of railroad. It is all very well to say, “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”; but to whom is it better? To the delicately nurtured, to the cared-for of fortune, the fruges consumere natus, but not to the ignorant, the forgotten, — no, not forgotten, — the intentionally crushed peasant, brutalized beyond barbarism by the selfishness of systems, of societies, not founded upon the theory of equal rights to all. Nature is kind to all in the tropics.

The night passed very much as the previous one had done. Profiting by my experience, however, I managed to bestow myself a little more conveniently, and the heat had shrunk us all so that we packed better.

The admirable compensations of Nature are nowhere more perfectly perceived than in a tropical night. The day may have been “remorseless,” but the night is a kind restorer. It is not only a change to the senses, not merely a different temperature, not merely that the crushed air revives, and the atmospheric particles which have been bullied by the staring sun into a shrinking isolation, now awake to sociality and glad circulation, rushing here and there like children released. But there is also a spiritual effect in the tropical night; the repose of Nature speaks peace to the soul. The dreamy starlight and still more dreamy moonlight are balm to the bothered.

All that night, With a breeze that was “as mild as it was strong, and as strong as it was mild,” we sailed along, and sunrise next morning found us off the mouth of the River de Los Santos, waiting for the tide to take us over the bar.