Anahuac | Page 5

the Cubans, who come to
rusticate and bathe, and it serves as a settlement for those free black
inhabitants of Florida who chose to leave that country when it was
given up to the United States. One of these Floridanos accompanied us
as our guide next day to the Baños de Santa Fé.
When we left the village we passed near the mangrove trees, which
were growing not only near the water but in it, and like to spread their
roots among the thick black slime which accumulates so fast in this
country of rapid vegetable growth, and as rapid decomposition. In Cuba,
the mangoe is the abomination of the planters, for they supply the
runaway slaves with food, upon which they have been known to subsist
for months, whilst the mangroves give them shelter. A little further
inland we found the guava, a thick-spreading tree, with smooth green
leaves. From its fruit is made guava-jelly, but as yet it was not ripe
enough to eat.
In the middle of the island we came upon marble-quarries. They are

hardly worked now; but when they were first established, a number of
emancipados were employed there. What emancipados are, it is worth
while to explain. They are Africans taken from captured slavers, and
are set to work under government inspection for a limited number of
years, on a footing something like that of the apprentices in Jamaica, in
the interregnum between slavery and emancipation. In Cuba it is
remarked that the mortality among the emancipados is frightful. They
seldom outlive their years of probation. The explanation of this piece of
statistics is curious. The fact is that every now and then, when an old
man dies, they bury him as one of the emancipados, whose register is
sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to
work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are
told.
We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.
The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the
watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.
Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and
cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper
patches nearer to the coast. The hills were covered with the pine-trees
from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their
base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side
by side.
Where we came upon a stream, the change in the vegetation was
astonishing. It was a sudden transition from an English, plantation of fir
trees into the jungle of the tropics, full of Indian figs, palms, lancewood,
and great mahagua[1] trees, all knotted together by endless creepers
and parasites; while the parrots kept up a continual chattering and
screaming in the tree-tops. The moment we left the narrow strip of
tropical forest that lined the stream we were in the pine wood. Here the
first two or three feet of the trunks of the pine trees were scorched and
blackened by the flames of the tall dry savannah-grass, which grows
close round them, and catches fire several times every year. Through
the pine forest the conflagration spreads unobstructed, as in an
American prairie; but it only runs along the edge of the dense
river-vegetation, which it cannot penetrate.
The Baños de Santa Fé are situated in a cleared space among the fir
trees. The baths themselves are nothing but a cavity in the rock, into

which a stream, at a temperature of about 80°, continually flows. A
partition in the middle divides the ladies from the gentlemen, but
allows them to continue their conversation while they sit and splash in
their respective compartments.
The houses are even more quaint than the bathing-establishment. The
whole settlement consists of a square field surrounded by little houses,
each with its roof of palm leaves and indispensable verandah. Here the
Cubans come to stay for months, bathing, smoking cigarettes, flirting,
gossiping, playing cards, and strumming guitars; and they seemed to be
all agreed on one point, that it was a delightful existence. We left them
to their tranquil enjoyments, and rode back to Nueva Gerona.
Next morning we borrowed a gun from the engineer of the steamboat,
and I bought some powder and shot at a shop where they kept two
young alligators under the counter for the children to play with. The
creeks and lagoons of the island are full of them, and the negroes told
us that in a certain lake not far off there lived no less a personage than
"the crocodile king"--"_el rey de los crocodilos_;" but we had no time
to pay his majesty a visit. Two of the Floridan negroes rowed