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Statistical and Documentary: Dana

The delightful volume of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., author of "Two Years Before the Mast," on his vacation voyage to Cuba and back, gives an account of sugar making, that belongs with the cane cultivation, and Mr. Dana's book has an imperishable beauty becoming the enchantment the Island weaves about the visitors who travel from climes of snow to climes of sun. Here is a picture of a Cuban garden, that will linger in the memory, like the balm of a breeze from the sea of the Caribs, or the flavor of fruit, surely the same grown in Eden, for the original Paradise must have been far in the Southland. "The garden contained a remarkable variety of trees, including some thrifty exotics. Here the mango, with its peach-like foliage, was bending on the ground with the weight of its ripening fruit; the alligator-pear was marvelously beautiful in its full blossom, suggesting, in form of color, the passion-flower; the soft, delicate foliage of the tamarind was like our sensitive plant; the banana trees were in full bearing, the deep green fruit (it is ripened and turns yellow off the tree), being in clusters of a hundred, more or less, tipped at the same time by a single, pendent, glutinous bud, nearly as large as a pineapple. The date palm, so suggestive of the far east, and the only one we had seen in Cuba, was represented by a choice specimen, imported in its youth. There was also the star-apple tree, remarkable for its uniform and graceful shape, full of the green fruit, with here and there a ripening specimen; so also, was the favorite zapota its rusty-coated fruit hanging in tempting abundance. From low, broad-spreading trees depended the grape fruit, as large as an infant's head and yellow as gold, while the orange, lime and lemon trees, bearing blossoms, green and ripe fruit all together, met the eye at every turn, and filled the garden with fragrance. The cocoanut palm, with its tall, straight stem and clustering fruit, dominated all the rest. Guava, fig, custard apple, and bread-fruit trees, all were in bearing. "Our hospitable host plucked freely of the choicest for the benefit of his chance visitors. was there ever such a fruit garden before, or elsewhere? It told of fertility of soil and deliciousness of climate, of care, judgment, and liberal expenditure, all of which combined had turned these half a dozen acres of land into a Gan Eden. Through this orchard of Hesperides, we were accompanied also by the proprietor's two lovely children, under nine years of age, with such wealth of promise in their large black eyes and sweet faces as to fix them on our memory with photographic fidelity. Before leaving the garden we returned with our intelligent host once more to examine his beautiful specimens of bananas, which, with its sister fruit, the plantain, forms so important a staple of fruit in Cuba and throughout all tropical regions. It seems that the female banana tree bears more fruit than the male, but not so large. The average clusters of the former comprise here about one hundred, but the latter rarely bears over sixty or seventy distinct specimens of the cucumber-shaped product. From the centre of its large, broad leaves, which gather at the top, when it has reached the height of twelve or fifteen feet, there springs forth a large purple bud ten inches long, shaped like a huge acorn, though more pointed. This cone hangs suspended from a strong stem, upon which a leaf unfolds, displaying a cluster of young fruit. As soon as these are large enough to support the heat of the sun and the chill of the rain, this sheltering leaf drops off, and another unfolds, exposing its little brood of fruit; and so the process goes on until six or eight rings of young bananas are started, forming, as we have said, bunches numbering from seventy to a hundred. The banana is a herbaceous plant, and after fruiting, its top dies; but it annually sprouts up again fresh from the roots. From the unripe fruit, dried in the sun, a palatable and nutritious flour is made." This from Ballou is something to dream of:"Nowhere on the face of the globe would well-directed, intelligent labor meet with a richer reward, nowhere would repose from labor be so sweet. The hour of rest here sinks upon the face of nature with a peculiar charm; the night breeze, in never failing regularity, comes with its gentle wing to fan the weary frame, and no danger lurks in its breath. It has free scope through the unglazed windows, and blowing fresh from the broad surface of the Mexican Gulf, it bears a goodly tonic to the system. Beautifully blue are the heavens and festally bright the stars of a tropical night, where familiar constellations greet us with brighter radiance and new ones charm the eye with their novelty. Pre-eminent in brilliancy among them is the Southern Cross, a galaxy of stars that never greets us in the North. At midnight its glittering framework stands erect. That solemn hour past, the cross declines. How glorious the night where such a heavenly sentinel indicates the watches! 'How often have we heard our guides exclaim in the savannas of Venezuela,' says Humboldt, 'or in the deserts extending from Lima to Truxill, "Midnight is past, the cross begins to bend."' Cuba is, indeed, a land of enchantment, where nature is beautiful and bountiful, and where mere existence is a luxury, but it requires the infusion of a sterner, a more self-reliant, self-denying and enterprising race to test its capabilities and to astonish the world with its productiveness." It is likely to occur to the race the people of the tropics call Yankees, that to occupy and possess the prodigal resources and the exceeding loveliness of Cuba, is the one peculiar luxuriance and delight the Americans of the great republic require for its symmetry and adornment, and to round out our commerce with the products of the torrid zone.

The poetry of Cuba, though the form is prose, is in "Gan-Eden; or, Pictures of Cuba."(Gan-Eden; or, Pictures of Cuba.' Boston: Published by John P. Jewett & Co.; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington; New York: Sheldon, Lamport & Blakeman, 1854.) The "Eden" is, in great part, yet a wilderness; its natural resources and native beauties yet untraveled. "Less than one-third," says the author, who denies us the pleasure of her name, "of the land in Cuba is being under cultivation; large regions are as little known as the interior of Asia. From every height which the traveler attains, he may descry a horizon teeming with wonder and with fancy, out of the ignorance and silence of whose purple mystery no voice has come these hundred years. There are forests-the refuge of the wild dog and the wilder man, the fierce Maroon, the black pioneer of doom, haunting the outskirts of a tyrannous civilization. There are mountains, unmeasured and ungauged, couching, it may be, above treasures which the vengeful Cemis hid from the greedy murderers of his mild worshippers. Much of the inhabited interior, too, is as little visited as the western slopes of the southern Alleghanies. The primitive method of traveling, and the antique hospitality of the rural regions, throw a charm of mediaeval unreality over scenes that may be really explored. "The magnificent vale of Mariel, fair as those outer realms of Paradise over which the eyes of Adam ranged from his 'heaven-kissing verdurous walls;' the romantic cliffs that mirror their wealth of flowers in the green glistening waters of the winding Canimar; the mighty steeps of the Loma de Indra, from whose heights the view sweeps to either ocean, and away to the dim blue hills of Jamaica; the endless, fragrant, palm-studded solitudes of the southwest; the picturesque ravines of the northeast, where young girls may be seen riding on the backs of oxen; the subterranean streams gushing suddenly into the moonlight from the blackness of the sumideros, or caverns, which honeycomb the surface of the Island; the hundred sequestered nooks, where still the guagire chants his rude improvisations, melodious and full of +meaning as the cries of a bellman, or the songs of a gondolier, and charms, in the skilful gymnastics of the zapateado, groups of soft-eyed girls, graceful as the palm-trees arching overhead; all these you reach over roads that transport you to the Middle Ages. "The great sugar estates lie in the Vueltra Arriba, the 'upper districts,' the region of the famous 'red earth.' The face of this region smiles with prosperity. In every direction the traveler rides astonished through a garden of plenty, equally impressed by the magnificent extent, and the profuse fertility of the estates, whose palm avenues, plantain orchards and cane fields, succeed each other in almost unbroken succession. So productive are the estates, and so steady is the demand for the planter's crop, that the great sugar planters are, in truth, princes of agriculture. Cholera, sweeping away troops of his slaves, the match of an envious, or the cigar of a careless montero kindling a flame that nothing can arrest, are alike powerless to interrupt seriously the prosperous career of an intelligent and enterprising hacendado. "The ruinous practice of absenteeism, which prepared for the British West Indies that sudden ruin, so often and so unjustly charged upon emancipation, is comparatively unknown in Cuba. "The proprietors generally pass a part of the year on their estates. The master's eye keeps watch over those admirable arrangements and tasteful decorations, which make a great sugar estate so delightful to the stranger. Particularly beautiful are the estates to which a cafetal is attached. The coffee culture was introduced by the French refugees from Hayti, men of taste and refinement, who, in laying out the grounds of their new homes, took thought for the beautiful as well as for the useful. The Spaniards generally (Garcilaso to the contrary notwithstanding), seem to have done but little for the advance of landscape gardening, and the glorious opportunities offered by Cuba to the art have been little improved excepting in the cafetals. Although Brazil has quite broken down the Cuban coffee trade, these coffee estates are still numerous in the Vueltra Arriba, where they are kept up on the French models, chiefly as ornaments to the sugar estates, vegetable farms, and homes for the younger or the decrepit negroes. "The imposing scale of the operations on a great ingenio, imparts a character of barbaric regal state to the life one leads there. The baracoon becomes a town, the planter a feudal lord, administrating hospitalities as lavish as the bounty of the climate and the soil. Living in such a region, one soon enters into the spirit of that eastern munificence and profusion which disdain limits and calculations. The singular number falls into disrepute. A kind of gorgeous superfluity seems only fit and becoming. Your thought is all 'of African and golden joys.' The luxurious seductions of the land persuade you into a charity towards men so superbly tempted. "Looking at them simply as an entertainment, the mills of these great sugar estates are not incongruous with the easy delight of the place. Everything is open and airy, and the processes of the beautiful steam machinery go on without the odors as without the noises that make most manufactories odious. In the centrifugal process of sugar making, the molasses passes into a large vat, by the side of which is a row of double cylinders, the outer one of solid metal, the inner of wire gauze. These cylinders revolve each on an axis attached by a horizontal wheel and band to a shaft which communicates with the central engine. The molasses is ladled out into the spaces between the external and internal cylinders, and the axes are set in motion at the rate of nineteen hundred revolutions a minute. For three minutes you see only a white indistinct whirling, then the motion is arrested; slowly and more slowly the cylinders revolve, then stop, and behold! the whole inner surface of the inner cylinder is covered with beautiful crystallizations of a light yellow sugar. Watching this ingenious process, I used to fancy that somewhat in this wise, might the nebulae of space be slowly fashioning into worlds. "But the cafetal is after all the great charm of these northern ingenios. One of the loveliest in the island, I spent a season, the brevity of which I shall always regret. Early in the inspiring morning, my friend Don used to summon me for a drive. A dozen negroes would appear to harness one little lively horse into a light American wagon, bought by my friend for the purpose of driving over the thirteen miles of sugar and coffee estates, on which he has made good, broad roads. A whole pack of dogs started off before us, yelping, leaping and darting in all directions, and then we dashed away at a brisk pace, through the seemingly endless cane fields. The heavy dew, glittering on the waves of green, gave them a soft brilliancy; the cloudless skies, the buoyant air, beguiled the way, till we drove into the cool shades of the plantaneria, or plantain grove, the unfailing adjunct of all estates in this land, where plantain and pork are as much the staff of life to the montero and the negro, as are beef and water to the guacho or bacon and greens to the Virginian. The plantain tree, though by no means lofty or imposing--looking, indeed, more like a seedy cabbage with long leaves or an overgrown flag than like a tree--still reaches the height of twenty feet or more, and its heavy, dark green leaves nodding over the ruddy ground, make a delightful shade, a sort of cool baptistery, from which you pass into the statelier sanctuaries of the cafetal. "There the full-leafed orange, thrifty, dark, glossy foliage of the mango, the tall elm-like aguacate, the cone-shaped mamey, cover the land on both sides as far as the eye can reach. Everywhere you see the light, shrubby outlines of the coffee plant springing up beneath the taller trees. Avenues, miles in length, lead to the different quarters of the estate, and formed, as they are, of the full exuberant mango, or the branching aguacate, planted alternately with the towering royal palm, become forest aisles of surpassing beauty. The height of the palms is immense, many of them rising more than a hundred and twenty feet in the air. Overtopping thus the other trees, their sweeping noble arches do not exclude the sunlight, which pours through the intervals as through the windows of a cathedral, and illuminates the green solemnity of the majestic colonnades. "The cottage of the cafetal was an elegantly proportioned little tropical mansion, cool, dark, floored with marble, wainscoted, and furnished with rich, deep-hued Indian woods. A garden, filled with heavy blooms of jasmine and roses, and the gorgeous purple Carolina, and a hundred drooping, odorous flowers, made the air faint with fragrance. A dense grove of orange trees near-by was lighted up through all its recesses by the glowing fruit. Oranges lay all about on the bright red earth, little naked negroes kicking aside, and satiated pigs disdainfully neglecting great luscious fruit, which the North would pile with pride upon salvers of silver and porcelain. Whenever we rode over to the cafetal, we always found lying on the marble tables of the saloon a heap of these superb oranges, with the morning still in their fragrance, or a huge golden pineapple. Pineapples, like poets, appear to the best advantage at home. The ripe orange from the tree has a delicate atmosphere of its own, but in substance is hardly better than a well-ripened orange from the fruiterer's shop. "The 'lush banana' is never allowed to ripen on the tree, as it falls out of its sheltering purple glove immediately on coming to maturity. "I have spoken of the exceeding beauty of the Cuban nights, and of the golden moon, which pours over the tropical landscape a flood of luxurious splendor, quite unimaginable by those who have but watched her climb the northern sky with a wan face, and with sad steps. Beneath the moon, too, and the stars, the night glances with living meteors. The cucullos are indeed inconceivably brilliant. 'Watchmen of the insects,' a lovely, quick-witted boy of four summers, the child of one of my friends, called these torchbearers when he first saw them; and flying in long lines, with their double lights, they do produce an effect similar to that of the long processions of the watch at Havana. "The light of the cucullo is really strong enough to serve as a candle. It is also very delicate, a fine green luminousness, precisely like the effulgence which emeralds shed upon a lovely neck. But the emeralds of inca or sultan may soon be counted, and these glories are showered indifferently into the verandah of the noble and the baracon of the slave. Children delight in them, keeping them shut up by forties and fifties in little cages of reeds. They are carefully washed at morning and night, and fed with sugar-cane (if fed with sugar the saccharine particles adhere to their legs, and they fall upon each other like Kilkenny cats), and in this way may be kept alive and shining for many days. They have been carried thus to New York, and set free in New York, to the great wonderment of the Gothamites. The nature of their light I do not know. But all the under part of the body is transparent, and the light appears to be under the cucullo's control, flashing and failing like the bottled up auroras of Prof L--at Cambridge. The calm eternal stars look hardly more divine than these mortal stars, that seem to cheat us poor moths out of our "Devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow." As a money winner the Cuban tobacco ranks next to sugar, and is famous throughout the world. Up to the year 1791 the "Commercial Company of Havana" delivered the tobacco of Cuba to the royal factories in Spain under contracts which were renewed from time to time with the government. The establishment of a government "Factoria de Tobacco" in Havana succeeded that company. The tobacco was classified as superior, medium, and inferior, and was received from the growers at fixed prices; in 1804 these were six, five, and two and a half dollars per arrobe [A Spanish unit of weight nominally a fourth part of a hundred weight, but with local variations from 25 to 32 pounds avoirdupois.] ($24, $20, and $10 per quintal) respectively. "By comparing the different prices with the quantity of each class of tobacco produced, we find that the 'Factoria' paid an average price of $16 per quintal for the leaf tobacco. With the expense of manufacture, the cigars cost the government seventy-five cents per pound; snuff, fine grain and good color, 42 3/4 cents, and common soft, or Seville, 18 3/4 cents a pound, in Havana. In good years, when the crop (the product of advances made by the 'Factoria' to poor cultivators) amounted to 350,000 arrobes of leaf, 128,000 arrobes were manufactured for Spain, 80,000 for Havana, 9,200 for Peru, 6,000 for Buenos Ayres, 2,240 for Mexico, and 1,100 for Caracas and Campeachy. "In order to make up the amount of 315,000 arrobes (for the crop loses ten per cent. of its weight, in loss and damage in the transportation and manufacture) we must suppose that 80,000 arrobes were consumed in the interior of the Island; that is, in the country, where the royal monopoly did not extend. The maintenance of 120 slaves and the expenses of manufacture did not exceed $12,000 yearly; but the salaries of the officers of the 'Factoria' amounted to $541,000. The value of the 128,000 arrobes of tobacco sent to Spain, in the abundant years, either in cigars, leaf or snuff, at the customary prices there, exceeded the sum of five million dollars. "It is surprising to see in the returns of exports from Havana (documents published by the Consulado) that the exports for 1816 were only 3,400 arrobes; for the year 1823, only 13,900 arrobes of leaf tobacco and 71,000 pounds of sugar, the value of which was estimated by the custom house at $281,000; and in 1825 only 70,302 pounds of cigars and 167,1000 pounds of leaf tobacco and strips; but we must remember that no branch of the contraband trade is more active than that in cigars. The tobacco of the Vuelta de Abajo is more celebrated, but large quantities are exported which are produced in the eastern part of the Island. The cultivation of tobacco has been one of the most uncertain branches of industry in Cuba. Trammeled by restrictions and exactions, it was confined almost entirely to the poorer classes of the population, who were enabled to raise a scanty and uncertain crop through the advances of capital made them by the 'Factoria.' After the suppression of this monopoly, it has had to contend with the more popular and profitable pursuits of coffee and sugar planting, which have successfully competed with it for the employment of the skill, capital, and labor of the Island." The Vuelta de Abajo owes its fine and universally esteemed quality of tobacco probably as much to the physical formation of the country as to any peculiar quality of its soil. Along the northern border of the district, where the best tobacco is grown, lies the high Sierra de los Organos, gathering, in rains upon its northern slopes, the moisture borne landward by the constantly prevailing trade winds, and this, with the effect of the surrounding heated waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, give to the region south of this ridge a character of climate peculiarly its own. It is in this region that Maceo's raids have been so ruinous to the industry. The hurricanes of Cuba can hardly be regarded as a resource or beauty, and they are not attractive, and picturesque is hardly the word. They received scant attention from Humboldt, who visited the Island in the beginning of the present century, since which only two hurricanes have been experienced there. The first of these occurred on the 4th and 5th of October, 1844. It began about ten o'clock on the evening of the 4th, and continued with great violence until daylight, when the point of greatest descent of the barometer, 28.27, was observed. From that time it subsided, and the torrents of rain began to cease, but the wind continued to blow with great violence until 10 A.M. This storm passed over all the zone of the country comprised between Bahia Honda and Sierra Morena on the north, and Galafre and Cienfuegos on the south side of Cuba. One hundred and fifty-eight vessels were wrecked in the harbors and on the coasts, and one hundred and one lives were lost. The crops suffered severely, and 2,546 houses were destroyed. The second hurricane occurred in the following year, and was more destructive than the preceding one. It began about midnight of the 10th of October, and increased in violence, with torrents of rain and spray, until 10:30 A.M. of the 11th, when the barometer had fallen to 27.06, the lowest point it has ever been known to touch in Cuba. Its ravages extended over nearly the same extent of country with that of 1844, but its greatest violence was confined to a circle of about 40 miles radius round Havana. Two hundred and twenty-six vessels were lost, 1,872 houses were blown down, 5,051 partially destroyed, and 114 persons perished.

During both of these hurricanes the wind veered to every point of the compass, and the salt spray was carried fifteen or twenty miles inland, blackening vegetation as though fire had passed over it.