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Updated: June 22, 2025
The glory of the sunny, tropical world was upon the ship and upon the sea; it crept into the blood of every man, and the sweet summer weather gave confidence to their minds. It was a day which only those who know tropical and semitropical seas can understand. It had the sense of soaking luxury.
Large shrubs of beautiful semitropical plants made tangled heaps of purple, scarlet and white blossoms on every side; the large creamy bells of the datura drooped toward the reddish earth; thorny shrubs of that odd bluish-green peculiar to Australian foliage grew side by side with the sombre-leaved myrtle.
They came now and then to little clearings, in which the peons raised many kinds of tropical and semitropical plants, bananas, pineapples, plantains, oranges, cocoa-nuts, mangoes, olives and numerous others. In some places the fruit grew wild, and they helped themselves to it. Twice they asked at huts for the customary food made of Indian corn, and on both occasions it was given to them.
It sometimes forms wonderful shells, an inch or more in diameter, in which as many as a thousand chambers succeed each other, in spiral order, from the centre. The beds containing it are found from the Pyrenees to Japan. That this vast warm ocean, stretching southward over a large part of what is now the Sahara, should give a semitropical aspect even to Central Europe and Asia is not surprising.
The sugar-beet, grown in temperate climates, and the sugar-cane, native in tropical and semitropical regions, are the only two sources of sugar large enough to be of more than local importance. Before the war, 93 per cent of the entire world crop of beet-sugar was grown in Europe.
Val could feel Ricky's hand quiver against his. Charity had made them both see and feel what she wanted them to. They weren't in the peaceful sunlight on the terrace of Pirate's Haven; they were miles farther south in the dark land of Haiti, the Haiti of more than a hundred years ago. Before them was a semitropical forest from which at any moment might crawl death.
Sugar-cane is grown in tropical and semitropical countries all over the globe. Cuba leads in the amount produced, and consumes only a small fraction of her production herself. Java, too, is a large exporter. India raises millions of tons but has to import some to fill all her needs.
These enumerated commodities were products of the southern and semitropical plantations: "Sugars, Tobacco, Cotton-wool, Indicoes, Ginger, Fustick or other dyeing wood." To benefit British merchants still more directly by making England the staple not only of plantation products but also of all commodities of all countries, the Act of 1663 was passed by Parliament.
Those things come overpoweringly and take a man, down in places like that semitropical and lonely and lawless, with long, empty days and moonlit nights. Perhaps he told Mrs. Whitney; he never got very far, I am sure. She was a wonderful woman but she loved him, I think. You can tell those things, you know; a gesture, an unavoidable look, a silence.
As for Lilla, her world lay in the past; and all this semitropical luxuriance of nature, enriched and complicated by an insatiable mankind, was lost in such mistiness as had risen round her in childhood when her world had seemed to lie in the future.
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