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Updated: May 20, 2025
Gigantic black canvas wings hung from his shoulders, and a huge wig of rope-yarn, with the hair falling to his waist, sat on his head. He was escorted unsteadily to a seat upon the trying-out furnace. "All who have to worship the king, come forth, an' stan' out!" yelled the man with the horn. This was greeted with cheers and blasts on the conch-shells.
Once a year, when the fruits ripened, they held the Green-Corn Dance, a religious festival that lasted eight days in the larger towns and four in the smaller. Then they fasted and feasted alternately. They drank out of conch-shells the Black Drink, a bitter beverage brewed from the crushed leaves of a small shrub.
She stooped quickly, took up one of the white conch-shells that bordered the walk, and, with an apologetic inclination of her head, held it to Dr. Archie's ear. "Listen, doctor. You hear something in there? You hear the sea; and yet the sea is very far from here. You have judgment, and you know that. But he is fooled. To him, it is the sea itself. A little thing is big to him."
As the canoe drew near, however, I saw that instead of her deck being crowded with tattooed, naked, and painted warriors, dancing, and shouting, and sounding conch-shells, all the people on board were well clothed, while in the after part stood a venerable-looking man with long white hair escaping from under his broad-brimmed hat, and by his side a young lady, both evidently Europeans.
The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs.
Huge baskets of luscious oranges, massive bunches of gold and green bananas, clusters of green cocoa-nuts, conch-shells full of chillies, fowls loudly protesting against their hard fate, gourds full of eggs, and a few vociferous swine all came tumbling on board in richest profusion, and, strangest thing of all, not a copper was asked in return.
The girls had strange outlandish names, which their father had brought home with him on his long voyages: Aina, Dolores, and Sjermanna! They wore heavy beads of red coral round their necks and in their ears. And about the garden lay gigantic conch-shells, in which one could hear the surging of the ocean, and tortoise-shells as big as a fifteen-pound loaf, and whole great lumps of coral.
They could not even get a boat over the bar, for there was a heavy cross sea breaking on it; and in the meantime here they were, trapped inside this river, the air resounding with dismal blasts of the natives' conch-shells, and the natives themselves dancing round and threatening to rush their position; while the bodies of Tristan and his little crew were to be seen floating down the stream, feasted upon by a screaming cloud of birds.
It was from such supplication that he was once roused by the blaze of a Suttee's funeral pyre, on which he found that the living widow had been consumed with the dead before he could interfere. He could hear the hideous drums and gongs and conch-shells of the temple to which Radhabullub had been removed.
Before we landed, we could see the white, shining streets and houses, just as calcareous as they could be; the black negroes; the pea-green water in the harbor; the tall cocoa-nut trees, and about five million conch-shells, lying at the edges of the docks. The colored people here live pretty much on the conch-fish, and when we heard that, it accounted for the shells.
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