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During this long expedition, we had made up our minds to seek, when opportunity offered, the hospitality of any Indian villages that might come in our road, and only when absolutely necessary to camp in the open air. About eleven, the heat became overpowering, and Lucien began to inquire about breakfast. We were just then passing through a plantation, I might almost say a forest of sugar-canes.
The fields were trodden down and their produce carried off. The sugar-canes were looted by elephants and camp-followers; the well-ropes stolen to serve as drag-ropes; and if any of the country-people attempted to defend their property, they were cruelly ill-treated. The force increased, too, as they advanced. The horse-keepers' wives with their children joined them, not knowing where else to go.
This country, the discoverer called La Australia del Espiritu Santo, in the latitude of 15 degrees 40 minutes south, and, as he reports, it abounds with gold, silver, pearl, nutmegs, mace, ginger, and sugar-canes, of an extraordinary size.
Among the former, none produced the fourth part of the sugar now made in the yngenios of second rank; it is consequently not the number of factories that can afford an accurate idea of the progress of that branch of agricultural industry. The first sugar-canes carefully planted on virgin soil yield a harvest during twenty to twenty-five years, after which they must be replanted every three years.
I remember that once arrived at Malmaison, my brother and I were masters to do as we pleased. The empress, who passionately loved flowers and conservatories, allowed us to cut her sugar-canes, that we might suck them, and she always told us to ask for anything we might want.
Their eyes were large pearl-oysters, and their mouths were marked with double rows of dogs' fangs, giving them a hideous appearance. When Cook returned the visit the King threw a superb cloak over his shoulders, and placed a crown of feathers on his head, spreading six other cloaks at his feet, of great beauty, while his attendants brought four hogs, sugar-canes, and cocoa-nuts.
The walls were constructed of reeds, the interstices being filled up with loam; and the roofs were covered with palm leaves. On one side of the house was a coffee plantation, and on the other some fields of maize, with fruit-trees growing round them. At a little distance, on some marshy ground, was a field of sugar-canes; and by the side of a brook a row of the useful banana.
While he lives it will never be possible to defeat my friend and old comrade: and he and I have both lived to see his island made threefold richer by that visitation which in all men's belief had clean destroyed it. This planting of vines and sugar-canes began in 1425, the same year in which the Infante gave me colonists for Porto Santo.
Camels laden with immense burdens of sugar-canes brushed the foot passengers almost off the narrow sideway; small boys, with large black eyes and small white takiyehs, darted in and out with brass trays piled high with little enamelled glass bowls.
We hailed that boat, and it came up beneath the cottonwoods, and I went aboard with the letters from Louisville, and on we went, down the river, past the great woods and the strange little towns, and the cotton-fields and the sugar-canes, and the moss hanging like banners from taller trees than this gum, to New Orleans.