At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

As we went to bathe we heard again, in perfect calm, the same mysterious booming sound, and were assured by those who ought to have known, that it came from under the water, and was most probably made by none other than the famous musical or drum fish; of whom one had heard, and hardly believed, much in past years.

Mr. Joseph, author of the History of Trinidad from which I have so often quoted, reports that the first time he heard this singular fish was on board a schooner, at anchor off Chaguaramas.

‘Immediately under the vessel I heard a deep and not unpleasant sound, similar to those one might imagine to proceed from a thousand Æolian harps; this ceased, and deep twanging notes succeeded; these gradually swelled into an uninterrupted stream of singular sounds like the booming of a number of Chinese gongs under the water; to these succeeded notes that had a faint resemblance to a wild chorus of a hundred human voices singing out of tune in deep bass.’

‘In White’s Voyage to Cochin China,’ adds Mr. Joseph, ‘there is as good a description of this, or a similar submarine concert, as mere words can convey: this the voyager heard in the Eastern seas.  He was told the singers were a flat kind of fish; he, however, did not see them.’

‘Might not this fish,’ he asks, ‘or one resembling it in vocal qualities, have given rise to the fable of the Sirens?’

It might, certainly, if the fact be true.  Moreover, Mr. Joseph does not seem to be aware that the old Spanish Conquistadores had a myth that music was to be heard in this very Gulf of Paria, and that at certain seasons the Nymphs and Tritons assembled therein, and with ravishing strains sang their watery loves.  The story of the music has been usually treated as a sailor’s fable, and the Sirens and Tritons supposed to be mere stupid manatis, or sea-cows, coming in as they do still now and then to browse on mangrove shoots and turtle-grass: 73 but if the story of the music be true, the myth may have had a double root.

Meanwhile I see Hardwicke’s Science Gossip for March gives an extract from a letter of M. O. de Thoron, communicated by him to the Académie des Sciences, December 1861, which confirms Mr. Joseph’s story.  He asserts that in the Bay of Pailon, in Esmeraldos, Ecuador, i.e. on the Pacific Coast, and also up more than one of the rivers, he has heard a similar sound, attributed by the natives to a fish which they call ‘The Siren,’ or ‘Musico.’  At first, he says, he thought it was produced by a fly, or hornet of extraordinary size; but afterwards, having advanced a little farther, he heard a multitude of different voices, which harmonised together, imitating a church organ to great perfection.  The good people of Trinidad believe that the fish which makes this noise is the trumpet-fish, or Fistularia—a beast strange enough in shape to be credited with strange actions: but ichthyologists say positively no: that the noise (at least along the coast of the United States) is made by a Pogonias, a fish somewhat like a great bearded perch, and cousin of the Maigre of the Mediterranean, which is accused of making a similar purring or grunting noise, which can be heard from a depth of one hundred and twenty feet, and guides the fishermen to their whereabouts.

How the noise is made is a question.  Cuvier was of opinion that it was made by the air-bladder, though he could not explain how: but the truth, if truth it be, seems stranger still.  These fish, it seems, have strong bony palates and throat-teeth for crushing shells and crabs, and make this wonderful noise simply by grinding their teeth together.

I vouch for nothing, save that I heard this strange humming more than once.  As for the cause of it, I can only say, as was said of yore, that ‘I hold it for rashness to determine aught amid such fertility of Nature’s wonders.’

One afternoon we made an attempt on the other Guacharo cave, which lies in the cliff on the landward side of the Monos Boca.  But, alas! the wind had chopped a little to the northward; a swell was rolling in through the Boca; and when we got within twenty yards of the low-browed arch our crew lay on their oars and held a consultation, of which there could but be one result.  They being white gentlemen, and not Negroes, could trust themselves and each other, and were ready, as I know well, to ‘dare all that became a man.’  But every now and then a swell rolled in high enough to have cracked our sculls against the top, and out again deep enough to have staved the boat against the rocks.  If we went to wreck, the current was setting strongly out to sea; and the Boca was haunted by sharks, and (according to the late Colonel Hamilton Smith) by a worse monster still, namely, the giant ray, 74 which goes by the name of devil-fish on the Carolina shores.  He saw, he says, one of these monsters rise in this very Boca, at a sailor who had fallen overboard, cover him with one of his broad wings, and sweep him down into the depths.  And, on the whole, if Guacharos are precious, so is life.  So, like Gyges of old, we ‘elected to survive,’ and rowed away with wistful eyes, determining to get Guacharos—a determination which was never carried out—from one of the limestone caverns of the northern mountains.

And now it may be asked, and reasonably enough, what Guacharos 75 are; and why five English gentlemen and a canny Scots coastguardman should think it worth while to imperil their lives to obtain them.

I cannot answer better than by giving Humboldt’s account of the Cave of Caripe, on the Spanish main hard by, where he discovered them, or rather described them to civilised Europe, for the first time:—

‘The Cueva del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock.  The entrance is towards the south, and forms a vault eighty feet broad and seventy-two feet high.  This elevation is but a fifth less than the colonnade of the Louvre.  The rock that surmounts the grotto is covered with trees of gigantic height.  The Mammee-tree and the Genipa, with large and shining leaves, raise their branches vertically towards the sky; while those of the Courbaril and the Erythrina form, as they extend themselves, a thick vault of verdure.  Plants of the family of Pothos with succulent stems, Oxalises, and Orchideæ of a singular construction, rise in the driest clefts of the rocks; while creeping plants waving in the winds are interwoven in festoons before the opening of the cavern.  We distinguished in these festoons a Bignonia of a violet blue, the purple Dolichos, and, for the first time, that magnificent Solandra, the orange flower of which has a fleshy tube more than four inches long.  The entrances of grottoes, like the view of cascades, derive their principal charm from the situation, more or less majestic, in which they are placed, and which in some sort determines the character of the landscape.  What a contrast between the Cueva of Caripe and those caverns of the north crowned with oaks and gloomy larch-trees!

‘But this luxury of vegetation embellishes not only the outside of the vault, it appears even in the vestibule of the grotto.  We saw with astonishment plantain-leaved Heliconias, eighteen feet high, the Praga palm-trees, and arborescent Arums follow the banks of the river, even to those subterranean places.  The vegetation continues in the Cave of Caripe, as in the deep crevices of the Andes, half excluded from the light of day; and does not disappear till, advancing in the interior, we reach thirty or forty paces from the entrance. . . .

‘The Guacharo quits the cavern at nightfall, especially when the moon shines.  It is almost the only frugivorous nocturnal bird that is yet known; the conformation of its feet sufficiently shows that it does not hunt like our owls.  It feeds on very hard fruits, as the Nutcracker and the Pyrrhocorax.  The latter nestles also in clefts of rocks, and is known under the name of night-crow.  The Indians assured us that the Guacharo does not pursue either the lamellicorn insects, or those phalænæ which serve as food to the goat-suckers.  It is sufficient to compare the beaks of the Guacharo and goat-sucker to conjecture how much their manners must differ.  It is difficult to form an idea of the horrible noise occasioned by thousands of these birds in the dark part of the cavern, and which can only be compared to the croaking of our crows, which in the pine forests of the north live in society, and construct their nests upon trees the tops of which touch each other.  The shrill and piercing cries of the Guacharos strike upon the vaults of the rocks, and are repeated by the echo in the depth of the cavern.  The Indians showed us the nests of these birds by fixing torches to the end of a long pole.  These nests were fifty or sixty feet high above our heads, in holes in the shape of funnels, with which the roof of the grotto is pierced like a sieve.  The noise increased as we advanced, and the birds were affrighted by the light of the torches of copal.  When this noise ceased a few minutes around us we heard at a distance the plaintive cries of the birds roosting in other ramifications of the cavern.  It seemed as if these bands answered each other alternately.

‘The Indians enter into the Cueva del Guacharo once a year, near midsummer, armed with poles, by means of which they destroy the greater part of the nests.  At this season several thousands of birds are killed; and the old ones, as if to defend their brood, hover over the heads of the Indians, uttering terrible cries.  The young, which fall to the ground, are opened on the spot.  Their peritoneum is extremely loaded with fat, and a layer of fat reaches from the abdomen to the anus, forming a kind of cushion between the legs of the bird.  This quantity of fat in frugivorous animals, not exposed to the light, and exerting very little muscular motion, reminds us of what has been long since observed in the fattening of geese and oxen.  It is well known how favourable darkness and repose are to this process.  The nocturnal birds of Europe are lean, because, instead of feeding on fruits, like the Guacharo, they live on the scanty produce of their prey.  At the period which is commonly called at Caripe the “oil harvest,” the Indians build huts with palm-leaves near the entrance, and even in the porch of the cavern.  Of these we still saw some remains.  There, with a fire of brushwood, they melt in pots of clay the fat of the young birds just killed.  This fat is known by the name of butter or oil (manteca or aceite) of the Guacharo.  It is half liquid, transparent without smell, and so pure that it may be kept above a year without becoming rancid.  At the convent of Caripe no other oil is used in the kitchen of the monks but that of the cavern; and we never observed that it gave the aliments a disagreeable taste or smell.

‘Young Guacharos have been sent to the port or Cumana, and lived there several days without taking any nourishment, the seeds offered to them not suiting their taste.  When the crops and gizzards of the young birds are opened in the cavern, they are found to contain all sorts of hard and dry fruits, which furnish, under the singular name of Guacharo seed (semilla del Guacharo), a very celebrated remedy against intermittent fevers.  The old birds carry these seeds to their young.  They are carefully collected and sent to the sick at Cariaco, and other places of the low regions, where fevers are prevalent. . . .

‘The natives connect mystic ideas with this cave, inhabited by nocturnal birds; they believe that the souls of their ancestors sojourn in the deep recesses of the cavern.  “Man,” say they, “should avoid places which are enlightened neither by the sun” (Zis) “nor by the moon” (Nuna).  To go and join the Guacharos is to rejoin their fathers, is to die.  The magicians (piaches) and the poisoners (imorons) perform their nocturnal tricks at the entrance of the cavern, to conjure the chief of the evil spirits (ivorokiamo).  Thus in every climate the first fictions of nations resemble each other, those especially which relate to two principles governing the world, the abode of souls after death, the happiness of the virtuous, and the punishment of the guilty.  The most different and barbarous languages present a certain number of images which are the same, because they have their source in the nature of our intellect and our sensations.  Darkness is everywhere connected with the idea of death.  The Grotto of Caripe is the Tartarus of the Greeks; and the Guacharos, which hover over the rivulet, uttering plaintive cries, remind us of the Stygian birds. . . .

‘The missionaries, with all their authority, could not prevail on the Indians to penetrate farther into the cavern.  As the vault grew lower, the cries of the Guacharos became more shrill.  We were obliged to yield to the pusillanimity of our guides, and trace back our steps.  The appearance of the cavern was indeed very uniform.  We find that a bishop of St. Thomas of Guiana had gone farther than ourselves.  He had measured nearly two thousand five hundred feet from the mouth to the spot where he stopped, though the cavern reached farther.  The remembrance or this fact was preserved in the convent of Caripe, without the exact period being noted.  The bishop had provided himself with great torches of white wax of Castille.  We had torches composed only of the bark of trees and native resin.  The thick smoke which issues from these torches, in a narrow subterranean passage, hurts the eyes and obstructs the respiration.

‘We followed the course of the torrent to go out of the cavern.  Before our eyes were dazzled by the light of day, we saw, without the grotto, the water of the river sparkling amid the foliage of the trees that concealed it.  It was like a picture placed in the distance, and to which the mouth of the cavern served as a frame.  Having at length reached the entrance, and seated ourselves on the banks of the rivulet, we rested after our fatigue.  We were glad to be beyond the hoarse cries of the birds, and to leave a place where darkness does not offer even the charm of silence and tranquillity.  We could scarcely persuade ourselves that the name of the Grotto of Caripe had hitherto remained unknown in Europe.  The Guacharos alone would have been sufficient to render it celebrated.  These nocturnal birds have been nowhere yet discovered except in the mountains of Caripe and Cumanacoa.’

So much from the great master, who was not aware (never having visited Trinidad) that the Guacharo was well known there under the name of Diablotin.  But his account of Caripe was fully corroborated by my host, who had gone there last year, and, by the help of the magnesium light, had penetrated farther into the cave than either the bishop or Humboldt.  He had brought home also several Guacharos from the Trinidad caves, all of which died on the passage, for want, seemingly, of the oily nuts on which they feed.  A live Guacharo has, as yet, never been seen in Europe; and to get one safe to the Zoological Gardens, as well as to get one or two corpses for the Cambridge Museum, was our hope—a hope still, alas! unfulfilled.  A nest, however, of the Guacharo has been brought to England by my host since my departure; a round lump of mud, of the size and shape of a large cheese, with a shallow depression on the top, in which the eggs are laid.  A list of the seeds found in the stomachs of Guacharos by my friend Mr. Prestoe of the Botanical Gardens, Port of Spain, will be found in an Appendix.

We rowed away, toward our island paradise.  But instead of going straight home, we turned into a deep cove called Ance Maurice—all coves in the French islands are called Ances—where was something to be seen, and not to be forgotten again.  We grated in, over a shallow bottom of pebbles interspersed with gray lumps of coral pulp, and of Botrylli, azure, crimson, and all the hues of the flower-garden; and landed on the bank of a mangrove swamp, bored everywhere with the holes of land-crabs.  One glance showed how these swamps are formed: by that want of tide which is the curse of the West Indies.

At every valley mouth the beating of the waves tends all the year round to throw up a bank of sand and shingle, damming the land-water back to form a lagoon.  This might indeed empty itself during the floods of the rainy season; but during the dry season it must remain a stagnant pond, filling gradually with festering vegetable matter from the hills, beer-coloured, and as hideous to look at as it is to smell.  Were there a tide, as in England, of from ten to twenty feet, that swamp would be drained twice a day to nearly that depth; and healthy vegetation, as in England, establish itself down to the very beach.  A tide of a foot or eighteen inches only, as is too common in the West Indies, will only drain the swamp to that depth; and probably, if there be any strong pebble-bearing surf outside, not at all.  So there it all lies, festering in the sun, and cooking poison day and night; while the mangroves and graceful white roseaux 76 (tall canes) kindly do their best to lessen the mischief, by rooting in the slush, and absorbing the poison with their leaves.  A white man, sleeping one night on the edge of that pestilential little triangle, half an acre in size, would be in danger of catching a fever and ague, which would make a weaker man of him for the rest of his life.  And yet so thoroughly fitted for the climate is the Negro, that not ten yards from the edge of the mud stood a comfortable negro-house, with stout healthy folk therein, evidently well to do in the world, to judge from the poultry, and the fruit-trees and provision-ground which stretched up the glen.

Through the provision-ground we struggled up, among weeds as high as our shoulders; so that it was difficult, as usual, to distinguish garden from forest.  But no matter to the black owner.  The weeds were probably of only six weeks’ growth; and when they got so high that he actually could not find his tanias 77 among them, he would take cutlass and hoe, and make a lazy raid upon them, or rather upon a quarter of them, certain of two facts; that in six weeks more they would be all as high as ever; and that if they were, it did not matter; for so fertile is the soil, so genial the climate, that he would get in spite of them more crop off the ground than he needed.  ‘Pity the poor weeds.  Is there not room enough in the world for them and for us?’ seems the Negro’s motto.  But he knows his own business well enough, and can exert himself when he really needs to do so; and if the weeds harmed him seriously he would make short work with them.  Still this soil, and this climate, put a premium on bad farming, as they do on much else that is bad.

Up we pushed along the narrow path, past curious spiral flags 78 just throwing out their heads of delicate white or purple flower, and under the shade of great Balisiers or wild plantains, 79 with leaves six or eight feet long; and many another curious plant unknown to me; and then through a little copse, of which we had to beware, for it was all black Roseau 80—a sort of dwarf palm some fifteen feet high, whose stems are covered with black steel needles, which, on being touched, run right through your finger, or your hand, if you press hard enough, and then break off; on which you cut them out if you can.  If you cannot, they are apt, like needles, to make voyages about among the muscles, and reappear at some unexpected spot, causing serious harm.  Of all the vegetable pests of the forest, none, not even the croc-chien, is so ugly a neighbour as certain varieties of black Roseau.

All this while—I fear I may be prolix: but one must write as one walked, stopping every moment to seize something new, and longing for as many pairs of eyes as a spider—all this while, I say, we heard the roar of the trade-surf growing louder and louder in front; and pushing cautiously through the Roseau, found ourselves on a cliff thirty feet high, and on the other side of the island.

Now it was plain how the Bocas had been made; for here was one making.

Before us seethed a shallow horse-shoe bay, almost a lake, some two hundred yards across inside, but far narrower at the mouth.  Into it, between two lofty points of hard rock, worn into caves and pillars and natural arches, the trade-surf came raging in from the north, hurling columns of foam right and left, and then whirling round and round beneath us upon a narrow shore of black sand with such fury that one seemed to see the land torn away by each wave.  The cliffs, some thirty feet high where we stood, rose to some hundred at the mouth, in intense black and copper and olive shadows, with one bright green tree in front of a cave’s mouth, on which, it seemed, the sun had never shone; while a thousand feet overhead were glimpses of the wooded mountain-tops, with tender slanting lights, for the sun was growing low, through blue-gray mist on copse and lawn high above.  A huge dark-headed Balata, 81 like a storm-torn Scotch pine, crowned the left-hand cliff; two or three young Fan-palms, 82 just ready to topple headlong, the right-hand one; and beyond all, through the great gateway gleamed, as elsewhere, the foam-flecked hazy blue of the Caribbean Sea.

We stood spellbound for a minute at the sudden change of scene and of feeling.  From the still choking blazing steam of the leeward glen, we had stepped in a moment into coolness and darkness, pervaded by the delicious rush of the north-eastern wind; into a hidden sanctuary of Nature where one would have liked to build, and live and die: had not a second glance warned us that to die was the easiest of the three.  For the whole cliff was falling daily into the sea, and it was hardly safe to venture to the beach for fear of falling stones and earth.

Down, however, we went, by a natural ladder of Matapalo roots, and saw at once how the cove was being formed.  The rocks are probably Silurian; and if so, of quite immeasurable antiquity.  But instead of being hard, as Silurian rocks are wont to be, they are mere loose beds of dark sand and shale, yellow with sulphur, or black with carbonaceous matter, amid which strange flakes and nodules of white quartz lie loose, ready to drop out at the blow of every wave.  The strata, too, sloped upward and outward toward the sea, which is therefore able to undermine them perpetually; and thus the searching surge, having once formed an entrance in the cliff face, between what are now the two outer points, has had nought to do but to gnaw inward; and will gnaw, till the Isle of Monos is cut sheer in two, and the ‘Ance Biscayen,’ as the wonderful little bay is called, will join itself to the Ance Maurice and the Gulf of Paria.  In two or three generations hence the little palm-wood will have fallen into the sea.  In two or three more the negro house and garden and the mangrove swamp will be gone likewise: and in their place the trade-surf will be battering into the Gulf of Paria from the Northern Sea, through just such a mountain chasm as we saw at Huevos; and a new Boca will have been opened.

But not, understand, a deep and navigable one, as long as the land retains its present level.  To make that, there must be a general subsidence of the land and sea bottom around.  For surf, when eating into land, gnaws to little deeper than low-water mark: no deeper, probably, than the bottoms of the troughs between the waves.  Its tendency is—as one may see along the Ramsgate cliffs—to pare the land away into a flat plain, just covered by a shallow sea.  No surf or currents could nave carved out the smaller Bocas to a depth of between twenty and eighty fathoms; much less the great Boca of the Dragon’s Mouth, between Chacachacarra and the Spanish Main, to a depth of more than seventy fathoms.  They are sunken mountain passes, whose sides have been since carved into upright cliffs by the gnawing of the sea; and, as Mr. Wall well observes, 83 ‘the situation of the Bocas is in a depression of the range, perhaps of the highest antiquity.’

We wandered along the beach, looking up at a cliff clothed, wherever it was not actually falling away, with richest verdure down to the water’s edge; but in general utterly bare, falling away too fast to give root-hold to any plant.  We lay down on the black sand, and gazed, and gazed, and picked up quartz crystals fallen from above, and wondered how the cove had got its name.  Had some old Biscayan whaler, from Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz, wandered into these seas in search of fish, when, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, he and his fellows had killed out all the Right Whales of the Bay of Biscay?  And had he, missing the Bocas, been wrecked and perished, as he may well have done, against those awful walls?  At last we turned to re-ascend—for the tide was rising—after our leader had congratulated us on being, perhaps, the only white men who had ever seen Ance Biscayen—a congratulation which was premature; for, as we went to climb up the Matapalo-root ladder, we were stopped by several pairs of legs coming down it, which belonged, it seemed, to a bathing party of pleasant French people, ‘marooning’ (as picnicking is called here) on the island; and after them descended the yellow frock of a Dominican monk, who, when landed, was discovered to be an old friend, now working hard among the Roman Catholic Negroes of Port of Spain.