THE CRUISE OF THE FALCON?* WE hope we have exactly
hit the right time—when wealthy yachtsmen are overhauling their vessels and thinking of their plans for the coming autumn—for drawing their attention to this interesting and, if our judgment is worth anything, reliable account of a yachting tour along the Eastern coast of South America and up some of the tributaries of the La Plata ;
whence the journey was continued, on horseback, for several hundred miles, to the forgotten and almost deserted city of Tucuman—an old Spanish town of the Argentine Republic —at the foot of the Andes, and on the banks of the Rio Dulce. In common honesty, we must explain that this is not a tour to be compassed in a long vacation. It occupied our author twenty months. It was accomplished in a thirtyton yawl, and was beset with so many difficulties and dangers that all his volunteer crew—friends of his own—had gradually deserted him, before he finally left the Falcon' at Barbadoes with the last member of his original crew—his invaluable and faithful cook, who was too ill to proceed. Mr.
Knight is a very fair writer ; and in telling a story is as good as he is in sailing and commanding a yacht. His book is neither superficial nor tedious ; he has been neither scornful of what he has heard by the way, nor credulous ; and his pictures exaggerate neither the gloomy nor the pleasant aspects of his experience. Indeed if he had reported fewer refreshing drinks, and had been less redundant in gloating over the beauty of the damsels he encountered, we should not have had any seriour exception to take to his delightful book of travel, which is as pleasant reading for those who do their yachting by the fireside, as it is valuable for the veritable yachtsman.
But this is the sort of book that can speak for itself, and for which the appetite is whetted by extracts ; while the interest is not spoiled by lifting the curtain, here and there, on the adventures, as it is when a novel is in the case. We shall not apologise, therefore, for making considerable extracts. At Rosario Mr. Knight and his party left their yacht in the Parana, and made their way by land to Cordoba, Santiago, and Tucuman. We should think there must have been an almost ghostly feeling excited, after a long journey in the wilds, on suddenly coming upon the old world city of Cordoba, in the midst.of a wilderness which stretches up to its very walls, and "to the edge of its mediaeval streets and squares," and which yet has a cathedral, a university, and numerous churches. The great square of Alameda is thus described :—
" It is strictly old-world and Spanish ; a solemnity pervades the severe enclosure, deserted as it generally is, save for some silent stalking fraile with shovel hat, or black-draped chiila, well harmonising with the spot. This square is laid out with strictest mathematical regularity ; round it are the usual white, grated. windowed, one-storied houses, with no shop-windows gay with display of goods —lifeless, prison-like. A lake of water occupies the centre of the Alameda, in the middle of which is an island cut into some mathematical figure, with a bright white temple of Greek architecture on it. There is a cold, artificial, confined look about the whole place, that seems strikingly emblematic of the old life of the ecclesiastical stronghold, austere, working in a narrow groove, never looking beyond its own limited horizon of the cloister wall. Rowe of flue willows once bordered this lake, but during the tremendous hurricane that swept over Cordoba two years back, all these were uprooted. This must have been a fearful tempest, it bent double every heavy iron and brazen cross that tops the manifold steeples of this city of churches, and thus they still remain as we saw them, sloping all one way, a sign to the traveller of what a South-American pampero can do at times. This dreamy Alameda, so lonely and stern of aspect, that one would imagine it had never been awakened to any show of life, save by the excitement of some auto-da-fd of heathen Indians, does wake up in a languid sort of way once a day. Towards the late afternoon, when the shadows of the Sierras come down to tho City, and the southern cross with a myriad stars begins to illumine the delightful night of inland South America, the haughty Spanish beauties come forth in their carriages, and drive round and round the lake for three-quarters of an hoar or go, while a considerable crowd of chilies and others of the lower orders promenade on fcot, marvelling at the white beauty of the upper caste."
Between Cordoba and Tucuman the ride was wonderfully various. One day the party rode amongst gorgeous flowers, on another over hot sand, again through salt marshes or through a vegetation painfully sharp and prickly :—
" The colouring of the jungle seemed now of an almost unnatural brilliancy. Strange thorny shrubs, flowers, and capsicums, with leaves of all shapes and hues, thickly covered the ground, but nearly all were of a dazzling metallic lustre, some gleaming like blue steel, others like burnished yellow gold, or red copper, or still darker bronze. The snakes and birds and beetles, too, that fed on the acrid juices of these seemed to have acquired from them the same mineral sheen, so brightly flashed their gorgeous wings and scales. Glorious convolvuli, with large blossoms of various colours, wound luxuriantly over every bush."
Amongst these lovely plants, however, lurked one fatal to horses—the chuchu —of which we have an interesting and curious account ; and, as a sort of antidote to this picture, we are presented, a few pages further on, with that of the succulent oukli, the salvation of man and beast in these arid and waterless regions. One more plant we must mention, namely, the coco-leaf, of which Mr. Knight gives us a curious account, and of the effects—pleasant and dangerous—of the habit of chewing it. But we must leave the rare plants and birds and fish of those always strange, often wild, and often lovely regions; and we must pass unnoticed our traveller's descriptions of Santiago and Tucuman, and the cities of the Parana and Paraguay, with all the exquisite beauties of their shores and the dangerous sport in their neighbourhood. Nor have we space for the people and the politics of those lawless Republics, nor for the dangers and delays of river and ocean sailing, and much else that is well worth lingering over, for we must keep room for what seems to us the most strange and the wildest part of Mr. Knight's story, and that which contains the most exciting adventures—we mean his account of his landing on and explorations of the barren island of Trinidad. The difficulties of landing and embarking, of climbing out of the land-locked bays, and still more of climbing down again ; the disappointing search for water, which was nearly ending fatally ; the attacks of the angry sea-birds, and the danger of being eaten alive by
the bold and fearless land-crabs, make-np a mass of incident such as we only expect to find in sensational stories for boys. Mr. Knight thus describes this island, dreary and volcanic, save for the tree-ferns on the high inland plateau :—
"The lower slopes were formed of debris, loose stones of every size, that the slightest touch dislodged, so even this portion of the ascent was not unattended with danger. Above these steep inclines of rolling stones was an almost precipitous wall, hundreds of feet in height, of basaltic formation, rising in shattered regular-shaped columns similar to those of the Giant's Causeway. So many were the inequalities of surface offered to the climber's foot, that to ascend this would not have seemed an alarming feat to any one with a good head, were he sure of his foothold. But we soon found the mountain to be literally rotten. The columns were broken through at short intervals, and crumbled away when one grasped them. There was not one stone that was not loose and ready to topple down. Thine, after struggling up to a much greater height than prudence should have sanctioned, for we had some narrow shaves, we were compelled to give in, weary and disappointed, and confess that we had landed in vain, having fallen on a cove from which there was no escape in any direction, surrounded by impassable cliffs. As we discovered afterwards, this savage spot afforded a good specimen of the nature of the island.. Utterly barren mountains rose from a coral beach, mountains that were rotten—and the whole island is so—burnt and shaken to pieces by the fires and earthquakes of volcanic action. What struck us as remarkable was, that though in this cove there was no live vegetation of any kind, there were traces of an abundant extinct vegetation. The mountain-slopes were thickly covered with dead wood, wood, too, that had evidently long since been dead ; some of these leafless trunks were prostrate, some still stood up as they had grown ; many had evidently been trees of considerable size, bigger round than a man's body. They were rotten, brittle, and dry, and made glorious fuel. This wood was close-grained, of a red colour, and much twisted. When we afterwards discovered that over the whole of this extensive island, from the beach up to the summit of the highest mountain—at the bottom and on the slopes of every now barren ravine, on whose loose rolling stones no vegetation could possibly take root—these dead trees were strewed as closely as is possible for trees to grow ; and when we further perceived thut they all seemed to have died at one and the same time, as if plaguestruck, and that not ono single live specimen, young or old, was to be found anywhere, our amazement was increased. At one time Trinidad must have been one magnificent forest, presenting to passing vessels a far different appearance to that it now does, with its inhospitable and barren crags. The descriptions given in the Directory allude to those forests; therefore, whatever catastrophe it may have been that
killed-off all the vegetation of the island, it must have occurred within the memory of man."
It is not a pleasant conclusion to our notice of this interesting book, but we cannot omit the description of the horrible land-crabs of Trinidad ; and we trust our readers will forgive the horror for the sake of the picturesqueness :
" Bat the land-crabs certainly looked their part of goblin guardians of the approaches to the wicked magician's fastness. They were fearful as the firelight fell on their yellow cynical faces, fixed as that of the sphinx, but fixed in a horrid grin. Those who have observed this foulest species of crab will know my meaning. Smelling the fish we were cooking, they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of fish, which they devoured with crab-like slowness, yet perseverance. It is a ghastly sight, a landcrab at his dinner. A huge beast was standing a yard from me ; I gave him a portion of fish and watched him. He looked at me straight in the face with his outstarting eyes, and proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits of it to his month with one claw, as with a fork. But all this while he never looked at what he was doing; his face was fixed in one position, staring at me. And when I looked around, lo ! there were half a dozen others all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was nightmarish iu the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us, and would certainly have devoured as, had we not awoke, and did eat holes in our clothes. One of us had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep. Imagine a sailor cast alone on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a moment on account of these ferocious creatures. After a few days of an existence full of horror, he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in an hour by his foes. In all Dante's Inferno there is no more horrible a suggestion of punishment than this. As I was keeping watch over the others I threw a large stone at one of two great crabs that were approaching the sleepers. It broke through his armour and killed him. His death produced an effect on his companion that I little expected, and which, I confess, made me feel quite uncomfortable and nervous in my exhausted condition. The reptile stopped when his companion fell, a copious foam then poured from his month, and his two eyes started right out of his head, hanging on to the ends of two long strings or horns. When I saw this ghastly exhibition I did half believe for a time that I was in a land of magic, surrounded by more than earthly enemies. The foal birds luckily slept, so we had not to defend ourselves against their attacks as well, or I know not how we should have got through the night. As it was, the ever-crowding crabs produced an almost delirium-tremens sort of an effect on the imagination of a lonely watcher. But we managed to get through the night without affording them the unwonted luxury of a human supper."
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