Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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When the steamer stops at some little port, or even single settlement, the negro boats come alongside with luscious fruit and vegetables—bananas and green oranges; the sweet sop, a fruit which looks like a strawberry, and is as big as an orange; the custard-apples—the pulp of which, those who have read “Tom Cringle’s Log” will remember, is fancied to have an unpleasant resemblance to brains; the avocado, or alligator-pears, otherwise called “midshipman’s butter,” which are eaten with pepper and salt; scarlet capsicums, green and orange cocoa-nuts, roots of yam, and cush-cush, help to make up baskets as varied in colour as the gaudy gowns and turbans of the women. Neither must the junks of sugar-cane be omitted, which the “coloured” gentlemen and ladies delight to gnaw, walking, sitting, and standing; increasing thereby the size of their lips, and breaking out, often enough, their upper front teeth. Rude health is in their faces; their cheeks literally shine with fatness.

But in this happy archipelago there are drawbacks: in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, 5,000 persons lost their lives in the one town of Point-à-Pitre alone. The Souffrière volcano, 5,000 feet high, rears many a peak to the skies, and shows an ugly and uncertain humour, smoking and flaming. The writer so often quoted gives a wonderfully beautiful description of this mountain and its surroundings. “As the sun rose, level lights of golden green streamed round the peak, right and left, over the downs; but only for a while. As the sky-clouds vanished in his blazing rays, earth-clouds rolled up from the valleys behind, wreathed and weltered about the great black teeth of the crater, and then sinking among them and below them, shrouded the whole cone in purple darkness for the day; while in the foreground blazed in the sunshine broad slopes of cane-field; below them again the town (the port of Basse Terre), with handsome houses, and old-fashioned churches and convents, dating possibly from the seventeenth century, embowered in mangoes, tamarinds, and palmistes; and along the beach, a market beneath a row of trees, with canoes drawn up to be unladen, and gay dresses of every hue. The surf whispered softly on the beach. The cheerful murmur of voices came off the shore, and above it, the tinkling of some little bell, calling good folks to early mass. A cheery, brilliant picture as man could wish to see, but marred by two ugly elements. A mile away on the low northern cliff, marked with many a cross, was the lonely cholera cemetery, a remembrance of the fearful pestilence which, a few years since, swept away thousands of the people: and above frowned that black giant, now asleep: but for how long?”