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The survey was made in 1798 by two very able engineers, Don Francisco and Don Felix Lemaur. The distance from the Havannah to Batabano is only eight and a half sea-leagues. The canal of Guines would be very useful for the transport of agricultural productions by steam-boats,* because its course would be in proximity with the best cultivated lands.
Our man had a laced jacket, black leather leggings, and a pair of silver spurs fastened upon his bare feet, which seemed at a little distance to have well polished boots on, they were so black and shiny. The railway which took us from Havana to Batabano had some striking peculiarities. For a part of the way the track passed between two walls of tropical jungle.
The projected canal of Guines will render Batabano an important point of communication between the island of Cuba and the coast of Venezuela. One great island only, of which the superficies is more than four times the dimensions of that of Martinique, with mountains crowned with majestic pines, rises amidst this labyrinth.
I was surprised that, at the noon observation, at 17 degrees 7 minutes of latitude, we yet perceived no change in the colour of the water. Spanish vessels going from Batabano or Trinidad de Cuba to Carthagena, usually pass over the bank of La Vibora, on its western side, at between fifteen and sixteen fathoms water.
Along the coast are numerous harbors, large and small, that are or, by dredging, could be made available for commercial purposes. Among these, on the north coast, from west to east, are Bahia Honda, Mariel, Havana, Matanzas, Nuevitas, Nipe Bay, and Baracoa. On the south, from east to west, are Guantanamo, Santiago, Manzanillo, Cienfuegos, and Batabano.
The bottom of the rock of Batabano is a sand composed of coral detritus; it nourishes sea-weeds which scarcely ever appear on the surface: the water, as I have already observed, is greenish; and the absence of the milky tint is, no doubt, owing to the perfect calm which pervades those regions.
To my surprise I learned that bodies of insurgents who then held and had held for six years nearly the entire eastern province of Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Principe, and part of the extreme western province of Pinar del Rio had only a few weeks before landed by night at the port La Playa de Batabano, fifteen miles away, and with the cry of "Free Cuba and death to the Spaniard!" had blotted out the town and then marched into the heart of the country, burning houses, killing the whites and calling upon the slaves to join them in freeing Cuba.
We slept on board the steamboat off the pier of Batabano, and the railway took us back to Havana next morning. On the 8th of March, we went on board the "Méjico" steamer, American-built, and retaining her American engineers, but in other respects converted into a Spanish vessel, and now lying in the harbour of Havana bound for Vera Cruz, touching at Sisal in Yucatan.
For some years after the American occupation, as before that experience, there was only a water-and-rail connection, or an all-water route, between the eastern and western sections of the island. The usual route from Havana to Santiago was by rail to Batabano or to Cienfuegos, and thence by steamer.
Except the places earlier mentioned, Jucaro, Trinidad and Cienfuegos, there are no southern ports to the west until Batabano is reached, immediately south of, and only a few miles from, the city of Havana. It is a shallow harbor, of no commercial importance.
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