Far Tortuga
Authors: Peter Matthiessen
“This novel is Matthiessen at his best—a masterfully spun yarn, a little other-worldly, a dreamlike momentum.… Like everything of his, it’s also a deep declaration of love for the planet.”
—
THOMAS PYNCHON
“One of the best books of the year.”
—
The New York Times
“Unique … original … enormously haunting.”
—
WILLIAM STYRON
“Without question the most poetic and original novel of the season.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“It exudes a magnificent and paradoxical radiance.”
—
Saturday Review
“An example of what the novel of the future will undoubtedly become—a highly charged vision of life that makes tremors run along our spine.”
—
Cleveland Press
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
Men’s Lives
Partisans
Race Rock
Raditzer
Vintage Books Edition, January 1988
Copyright © 1975 by Peter Matthiessen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., in 1975, and in paperback, as a Vintage Contemporaries Book, by Vintage Books, in 1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthiessen, Peter.
Far Tortuga.
I. Title.
[PS3563.A8584F3 1988] 813’54 87-40154
eISBN: 978-0-307-81969-7
v3.1
FOR MARIA
This book required and received unusual care and attention from all involved in it, and I am very grateful to such friends as Judy Gimblett for expert typing of the interminable drafts; Candida Donadio, the book’s agent, for her fearless advocacy in the marketplace; copy editor Lynn Strong for her concern, patience and unfailing intuition; and Kenneth Miyamoto, the book’s designer, whose fine work speaks here for itself.
Especially I wish to thank my editor, adversary and long-time friend, Joe Fox; we have been through hell together.
Death, Thou comest
When I had Thee least in mind.
—
Everyman
In terms of distance from the nearest land, the most isolated point in the Caribbean is a group of ocean islands south of Cuba. On a voyage north from Panama to Hispaniola, according to the journal kept in 1503 by Ferdinand Columbus, “we were in sight of two very small and low islands, full of tortoises, as was all the sea about, insomuch that they look’d like little rocks, for which reason those islands were called Tortugas.” Later, these islands were confused with Far Tortuga, called
Misteriosa
by the Spanish, a remote cay on the outer banks off Nicaragua that is not to be found on modern charts; Far Tortuga may have worn away in hurricane, leaving only submerged reef, but it seems more likely that this cay was a mere dream and legend of the turtle men
.
Eventually, Columbus’ islands became known as the Caimans, Caymanos, and Cayman Islands, from the Carib
caiman,
or “crocodilian.” (Sir William Dampier, who visited Grand Cayman in 1675–76, mentions the presence of crocodiles on the surface at West Bay.) In the late seventeenth century, the Caymans were a common ground for sea rovers of all nations, who came there mainly for
tortugas;
these green sea turtles, which could be kept alive on deck, supplied fresh provender for the pillage of the Caribbean
.
Apart from their turtles, the barren islands were considered worthless, and no country bothered to claim them until 1655, when England seized Jamaica from Spain. The British regarded the turtle cays as outposts of the larger island, and acquired them officially in 1670 by the provisions of the Treaty of Madrid. In this same year, the Spanish of Cuba burned twenty wood huts at “Caimanos” in an effort to suppress its raffish settlement of castaways, freebooters and deserters from the British army in Jamaica; these punitive raids, which continued for a century, have never been forgiven to this day
.
In 1677, Dutch pirates taking water in the islands left behind a few blacks seized from a French slaving ship burned at Haiti, and some of these Africans mixed with the whites to form the ancestral population. By the time the first true settlers arrived at Grand Cayman, in the early eighteenth century, the green turtles were so depleted that ships no longer came to hunt them, and the Caymanians themselves were
scouring the south coast of Cuba and the islands called Jardines de la Reina, where the turtle fishery was eked out with brigandage. Apparently they had retained their “turbulent disposition,” for as late as 1798, Grand Cayman was called a “pirate’s nest” by the Cubans, who appealed to Madrid to wipe it off the earth: “The islet is inhabited by a handful of lawless men who bear the name and carry on the trade of fisher-folk, but who are in reality nothing more than sea-robbers. The island constitutes their lair, and it is the place where they hide their ill-gotten gains.” The pirate Neale Walker frequented the island, and Edward Thatch, the notorious “Blackbeard,” once “took a small turtler” at Grand Cayman, though what fate is implied by “took” is not recorded. Without question it was a ruffianly place. As Bunce observes in Sir Walter Scott’s
The Pirate:
“Is he dead? It is a more serious question here than it would be on the Grand Caymains … where a brace or two of fellows may be shot in the morning and no more heard of, or asked about them than if they were so many wood pigeons.”
In the nineteenth century, the only marked change in island customs was the reduction of piracy to the “wrecking business”—luring ships onto the reefs, premature salvage and the like—and the transfer of the turtle fishery from south Cuba to the Miskito Cays off Nicaragua, with a resultant occupation by Caymanians not only of that coast but of the remote cays from Old Providence, a Colombian possession, north to the Bay Islands of Honduras. Miskito Indians, who were expert turtle fishermen, were conscripted for the crews (Dampier had taken a Miskito harpooner on his voyage to the Celebes) and there occurred a small reverse migration of these Indians to Grand Cayman: even today, in the faces of the turtle men, a strain of Indian is quite apparent. But contact with the outside world was small, and declined still further as the nineteenth century came to an end. The Caymans lay across the trade winds, near old sailing routes, but with the advent of steam and swift straight courses, the passing ship was rarely more than a faint smudge on the encircling horizon
.
Daybreak.
At Windward Passage, four hundred miles due east, the sun is rising. Wind east-northeast, thirty-eight knots, with gusts to forty-five: a gale.
Black waves, wind-feathered. White birds, dark birds.
The trade winds freshen at first light, and the sea rises in long ridges, rolling west.
Sunrise at longitude 76, 19 degrees north latitude.
Sunrise at longitude 77.
Sunrise at the lesser Caymans. Horizon rises from horizon. To the westward, Grand Cayman is gray; its high cumulus, visible to migrant birds a hundred miles away, is a gray-pink.
The sun, coming hard around the world: the island rises from the sea, sinks, rises, holds.
Daybreak at Gun Bay Village, at East End. Parted, the Antilles Current caroms on the reef. The new light turns the sea from black to blue, the surf from gray to white, the hulks high on the reef from rust to black.
Sunrise at Old Isaacs (Isaac Bawden, deserter, first known settler; dates obscure). The sun kindles the thatch of hip-roofed cottages, built at East End since early days. Sand road, white pickets, periwinkle; white sand yards bordered with pink conchs.
Cock crow.
Wind and cloud sail down the island, east to west. A sweet warm wind comes, sucking faint damp from the parched cactus and palmetto.
Sunrise in trackless Ally Land. New light strikes the blue spines of an iguana. Its chewing slows. Starting from its hole, a land crab pauses, then withdraws; a grain of earth rolls down into the hole.
Sunrise at Old Man, on the north coast. Blue shacks with dark shutters, closed.
Sunrise at Meagre Bay and Bodden Town, on the white road of coral marl that trails along the emerald sounds of the south shore. Fringing the sounds is the long reef, and beyond the reef, cold deep blues of the abyss.
Sunrise at Kitty Clover Land.
Sunrise at Newlands and Careening Place and Booby Cay.
Sunrise at Savanna. A lone dog on the road, stiff-legged. Poinsettia and jasmine, low white walls.
Green parrots cross the sunburst to the mango trees. Light polishes gray-silver cabin sides, glows in the bolls of the wild cotton, shines the dun flanks of a silken cow in pastures of rough guinea grass; a gumbo limbo tree, catching up sun in red translucent peels of shedding bark, glows on black burned-over ground between gray jutting bones of ocean limestone.
New sun on a vermilion fence. Breadfruit and tamarind.
Cock crow.
Sunrise at Spotts Bay and Matilda Pond. In a woman’s tongue tree, the dawn wind passes and racketing pods fall still.