Following the Equator, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Complete


Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of
Mauritius, and that one didn't happen. I refer to the romantic sojourn
of Paul and Virginia here. It was that story that made Mauritius known
to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical
position of it to nobody.

A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table. It was a
vellum fan painted with the shipwreck, and was "one of Virginia's wedding
gifts."

April 18. This is the only country in the world where the stranger is
not asked "How do you like this place?" This is indeed a large
distinction. Here the citizen does the talking about the country
himself; the stranger is not asked to help. You get all sorts of
information. From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was
made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.
Another one tells you that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief
villages, Port Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection;
that nobody lives in Port Louis except upon compulsion, and that Curepipe
is the wettest and rainiest place in the world. An English citizen said:

"In the early part of this century Mauritius was used by the French
as a basis from which to operate against England's Indian
merchantmen; so England captured the island and also the neighbor,
Bourbon, to stop that annoyance. England gave Bourbon back; the
government in London did not want any more possessions in the West
Indies. If the government had had a better quality of geography in
stock it would not have wasted Bourbon in that foolish way. A big
war will temporarily shut up the Suez Canal some day and the English
ships will have to go to India around the Cape of Good Hope again;
then England will have to have Bourbon and will take it.

"Mauritius was a crown colony until 20 years ago, with a governor
appointed by the Crown and assisted by a Council appointed by
himself; but Pope Hennessey came out as Governor then, and he worked
hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded. So
now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of
legislation they vote together and in the French interest, not the
English. The English population is very slender; it has not votes
enough to elect a legislator. Half a dozen rich French families
elect the legislature. Pope Hennessey was an Irishman, a Catholic,
a Home Ruler, M.P., a hater of England and the English, a very
troublesome person and a serious incumbrance at Westminster; so it
was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope
that something would happen to him. But nothing did. The first
experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. He
proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to
encounter. The next experiment was here. The dark scheme failed
again. It was an off-season and there was nothing but measles here
at the time. Pope Hennessey's health was not affected. He worked
with the French and for the French and against the English, and he
made the English very tired and the French very happy, and lived to
have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed. His
memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the French.

"It is a land of extraordinary quarantines. They quarantine a ship
for anything or for nothing; quarantine her for 20 and even 30 days.
They once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the
smallpox when he was a boy. That and because he was English.

"The population is very small; small to insignificance. The
majority is East Indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of
the slaves of the French times); then French; then English. There
was an American, but he is dead or mislaid. The mongrels are the
result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white,
quadroon and white, octoroon and white. And so there is every shade
of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel,
molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white,
new-ivory white, fish-belly white--this latter the leprous complexion
frequent with the Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates.

"You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now
would you? But it is so. The most of them have never been out of
the island, and haven't read much or studied much, and they think
the world consists of three principal countries--Judaea, France, and
Mauritius; so they are very proud of belonging to one of the three
grand divisions of the globe. They think that Russia and Germany
are in England, and that England does not amount to much. They have
heard vaguely about the United States and the equator, but they
think both of them are monarchies. They think Mount Peter Botte is
the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a
picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and
say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the
forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe
look so fine and prickly.

"There is not much trade in books. The newspapers educate and
entertain the people. Mainly the latter. They have two pages of
large-print reading-matter-one of them English, the other French.
The English page is a translation of the French one. The typography
is super-extra primitive--in this quality it has not its equal
anywhere. There is no proof-reader now; he is dead.

"Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island
lost in the wastes of the Indian Ocean? Oh, Madagascar. They
discuss Madagascar and France. That is the bulk. Then they chock
up the rest with advice to the Government. Also, slurs upon the
English administration. The papers are all owned and edited by
creoles--French.

"The language of the country is French. Everybody speaks it--has
to. You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois
spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform complexions--or you
can't get along.

"This was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and
still makes the best sugar in the world; but first the Suez Canal severed
it from the world and left it out in the cold and next the beetroot sugar
helped by bounties, captured the European markets. Sugar is the life of
Mauritius, and it is losing its grip. Its downward course was checked by
the depreciation of the rupee--for the planter pays wages in rupees but
sells his crop for gold--and the insurrection in Cuba and paralyzation of
the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift;
but the outlook has nothing permanently favorable about it. It takes a
year to mature the canes--on the high ground three and six months longer
--and there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the
profit out of the crop. In recent times a cyclone took the whole crop,
as you may say; and the island never saw a finer one. Some of the
noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties. A dozen of
them are investments of English capital; and the companies that own them
are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half
the money they put in. You know, in these days, when a country begins to
introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back
on it. Look at Bengal; look at Ceylon. Well, they've begun to introduce
the tea culture, here.

"Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No
other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed
to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on
it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the
greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius, and the only one."




CHAPTER LXIII.

The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only
nine lives.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

April 20.--The cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled hundreds of people;
it was accompanied by a deluge of rain, which drowned Port Louis and
produced a water famine. Quite true; for it burst the reservoir and the
water-pipes; and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was
much distress from want of water.

This is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand
the damp. Only one match in 16 will light.

The roads are hard and smooth; some of the compounds are spacious, some
of the bungalows commodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo
hedges, trim and green and beautiful; and there are azalea hedges, too,
both the white and the red; I never saw that before.

As to healthiness: I translate from to-day's (April 20) Merchants' and
Planters' Gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, "Carminge,"
concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen:

"Sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius; I
believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more
easily than among us. The least indisposition becomes a mortal
malady; a simple headache develops into meningitis; a cold into
pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a
guest in our home."

This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the
weather was day before yesterday.

One is clever pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as I
can see. This is pleasantly different from India.

April 22. To such as believe that the quaint product called French
civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of New Guinea
and the like, the snatching of Madagascar and the laying on of French
civilization there will be fully justified. But why did the English
allow the French to have Madagascar? Did she respect a theft of a couple
of centuries ago? Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's
territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several
cabinets the several political establishments of the world are
clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is
to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as
opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political
establishments in the earth--including America, of course--consist of
pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant,
and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not
stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America,
the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines
for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and
re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to
work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily
accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other.
In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen
several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries
ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom,
and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are
as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for
raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden
Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's
lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment
after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the
original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure
tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of
Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry
on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash.
She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along
the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a
hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and
Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day
land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy.
Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and
the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has
been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had
bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the
old game again--to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast
slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary
and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain
formalities neglected--no signs up, "Keep off the grass,"
"Trespassers-forbidden," etc.--and she stepped in with a cold calm smile
and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly
out of the country.

There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a
maxim: Get your formalities right--never mind about the moralities.

It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the
case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by
neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have
snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she
could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French
civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late.

The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All
the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to
the Christian governments of Europe. I am not sorry, but glad. This
coming fate might have been a calamity to those savage peoples two
hundred years ago; but now it will in some cases be a benefaction. The
sooner the seizure is consummated, the better for the savages.

The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression
will give place to peace and order and the reign of law. When one
considers what India was under her Hindoo and Mohammedan rulers, and what
she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and the
protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the
most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the
establishment of British supremacy there. The savage lands of the world
are to pass to alien possession, their peoples to the mercies of alien
rulers. Let us hope and believe that they will all benefit by the
change.

April 23. "The first year they gather shells; the second year they
gather shells and drink; the third year they do not gather shells." (Said
of immigrants to Mauritius.)

Population 375,000. 120 sugar factories.

Population 1851, 185,000. The increase is due mainly to the introduction
of Indian coolies. They now apparently form the great majority of the
population. They are admirable breeders; their homes are always hazy
with children. Great savers of money. A British officer told me that in
India he paid his servant 10 rupees a month, and he had 11 cousins,
uncles, parents, etc., dependent upon him, and he supported them on his
wages. These thrifty coolies are said to be acquiring land a trifle at a
time, and cultivating it; and may own the island by and by.

The Indian women do very hard labor [for wages of (1/2 rupee) for twelve
hours' work.] They carry mats of sugar on their heads (70 pounds) all
day lading ships, for half a rupee, and work at gardening all day for
less.

The camaron is a fresh water creature like a cray-fish. It is regarded
here as the world's chiefest delicacy--and certainly it is good. Guards
patrol the streams to prevent poaching it. A fine of Rs.200 or 300
(they say) for poaching. Bait is thrown in the water; the camaron goes
for it; the fisher drops his loop in and works it around and about the
camaron he has selected, till he gets it over its tail; then there's a
jerk or something to certify the camaron that it is his turn now; he
suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his person and
draws it taut, and his days are ended.

Another dish, called palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes
like green almonds; is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm
tree 12 to 20 years old--for it is the pith.

Another dish--looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed--is a
preparation of the deadly nightshade. Good enough.

The monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the toy mountains,
and they flock down nights and raid the sugar-fields. Also on other
estates they come down and destroy a sort of bean-crop--just for fun,
apparently--tear off the pods and throw them down.

The cyclone of 1892 tore down two great blocks of stone buildings in the
center of Port Louis--the chief architectural feature-and left the
uncomely and apparently frail blocks standing. Everywhere in its track
it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. The
men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country
getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity; and the rain deluging
them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring.
This for an hour or so. Then a lull and sunshine; many ventured out of
safe shelter; then suddenly here it came again from the opposite point
and renewed and completed the devastation. It is said the Chinese fed
the sufferers for days on free rice.

Whole streets in Port Louis were laid flat--wrecked. During a minute and
a half the wind blew 123 miles an hour; no official record made after
that, when it may have reached 150. It cut down an obelisk. It carried
an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors.
They now use four-two forward, two astern. Common report says it killed
1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of the
central calm--people did not know the barometer was still going down
--then suddenly all perdition broke loose again while people were rushing
around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded. The noise was
comparable to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and
cannon, and these are feeble in comparison.

What there is of Mauritius is beautiful. You have undulating wide
expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye;
and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of
vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with
graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you
have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking
through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the
pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains,
some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little
vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of
sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.

That is Mauritius; and pretty enough. The details are few, the massed
result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a
Sunday landscape. Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance,
are wanting. There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to
speak. Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.
Mauritius is a garden and a park combined. It affects one's emotions as
parks and gardens affect them. The surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are
pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not
stirred. Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which
haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the
sky--these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see
visions and dream dreams.

The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter
of tropical islands. I would add another story to Mauna Loa's 16,000
feet if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and
forbidding and snowy; and I would make the volcano spout its lava-floods
out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these
non-essentials I have no corrections to suggest. I hope these will be
attended to; I do not wish to have to speak of it again.




CHAPTER LXIV.

When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do:
throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the
quickest.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas. She is
thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground. She
has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect
that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed--she has
imperfect beds. Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good
ones. In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly
edited, from the beginning. The selection of the beds is given to some
hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a
frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia. Nothing
is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so
difficult to make. Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no
ship ever does or ever did. In Noah's Ark the beds were simply
scandalous. Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of
modification or another till the next flood.

8 A.M. Passing Isle de Bourbon. Broken-up sky-line of volcanic
mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost much to repair them,
and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are.

It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest. It is no proper
rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders,
and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and
lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and
letters. And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use--voyage too
short, sea too rough. The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the
long stretches of time are the healing thing.

May 2, AM. A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in
these weeks of lonely voyaging. We are now in the Mozambique Channel,
between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa
Bay.

Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a
spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a
man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting
despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and
fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began
impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem. As simply
as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story,
uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his
grizzled head. The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his
tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part
of it. There was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving
to reflect that he was one of a myriad, scattered over every part of the
globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the
twenty-four--those awake doing it while the others slept--those
impressive bars forever floating up out of the various climes, never
silent and never lacking reverent listeners.

All that I remember about Madagascar is that Thackeray's little Billie
went up to the top of the mast and there knelt him upon his knee, saying,
"I see

"Jerusalem and Madagascar,
And North and South Amerikee."

May 3. Sunday. Fifteen or twenty Africanders who will end their voyage
to-day and strike for their several homes from Delagoa Bay to-morrow, sat
up singing on the afterdeck in the moonlight till 3 A.M. Good fun and
wholesome. And the songs were clean songs, and some of them were
hallowed by tender associations. Finally, in a pause, a man asked, "Have
you heard about the fellow that kept a diary crossing the Atlantic?"
It was a discord, a wet blanket. The men were not in the mood for
humorous dirt. The songs had carried them to their homes, and in spirit
they sat by those far hearthstones, and saw faces and heard voices other
than those that were about them. And so this disposition to drag in an
old indecent anecdote got no welcome; nobody answered. The poor man
hadn't wit enough to see that he had blundered, but asked his question
again. Again there was no response. It was embarrassing for him. In
his confusion he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing--began the
anecdote. Began it in a deep and hostile stillness, where had been such
life and stir and warm comradeship before. He delivered himself of the
brief details of the diary's first day, and did it with some confidence
and a fair degree of eagerness. It fell flat. There was an awkward
pause. The two rows of men sat like statues. There was no movement, no
sound. He had to go on; there was no other way, at least none that an
animal of his calibre could think of. At the close of each day's diary,
the same dismal silence followed. When at last he finished his tale and
sprung the indelicate surprise which is wont to fetch a crash of
laughter, not a ripple of sound resulted. It was as if the tale had been
told to dead men. After what seemed a long, long time, somebody sighed,
somebody else stirred in his seat; presently, the men dropped into a low
murmur of confidential talk, each with his neighbor, and the incident was
closed. There were indications that that man was fond of his anecdote;
that it was his pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his
reputation-maker. But he will never tell it again. No doubt he will
think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped; and then he will
see a picture, and always the same picture--the double rank of dead men;
the vacant deck stretching away in dimming perspective beyond them, the
wide desert of smooth sea all abroad; the rim of the moon spying from
behind a rag of black cloud; the remote top of the mizzenmast shearing a
zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space; and this
soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in the midst of it
and told his poor little tale and felt so lonesome when he got through.