In addition to the family house, the Negro quarters, and the sugar house, there is a range of stone buildings, ending with a kitchen, occupied by the engineer, the mayoral, the boyero, and the mayordomo, who have an old Negro woman to cook for them, and another to wait on them. There is also another row of stone buildings, comprising the storehouse, the penitentiary, the hospital, and the lying-in room. The penitentiary, I have described. The hospital and lying-in room are airy, well ventilated, and suitable for their purposes. Neither of them had any tenants today. In the centre of the group of buildings, is a high frame, on which hangs the great bell of the plantation. This rings the Negroes up in the morning, and in at night, and sounds the hours for meals. It calls all in, on any special occasion, and is used for an alarm to the neighboring plantations, rung long and loud, in case of fire in the cane fields, or other occasions for calling in aid.
After dinner, today, a volante, with two horses, and a postilion in bright jacket and buckled boots and large silver spurs, the harness well-besprinkled with silver, drove to the door, and an elderly gentleman alighted and came to the house, attired with scrupulous nicety of white cravat and dress coat, and with the manners of the ancien régime. This is M. Bourgeoise, the owner of the neighboring large plantation, Santa Catalina, one of the few cafetals remaining in this part of the island. He is too old, and too much attached to his plantation, to change it to a sugar estate; and he is too rich to need the change. He, too, was a refugee from the insurrection of St. Domingo, but older than M. C⸺. Not being able to escape, he was compelled to serve as aid decamp to Jacques Dessalines. He has a good deal to say about the insurrection and its results, of a great part of which he was an eye witness. The sight of him brought vividly to mind the high career and sad fate of the just and brave Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the brilliant successes, and fickle, cruel rule, of Dessalines—when French marshals were outmanoeuvred by Negro generals, and pitched battles were won by Negroes and mulattoes against European armies.
This gentleman had driven over in the hope of seeing his friend and neighbor, Mr. C⸺ the elder. He remained with us for some time, sitting under the veranda, the silvered volante and its black horses and black postilion standing under the trees. He invited us to visit his plantation, which I was desirous to do, as a cafetal is a rarity now.
My third day at La Ariadne, is much like the preceding days: the early rising, the coffee and fruit, the walk, visits to the mill, the fields, the garden, and the quarters, breakfast, rest indoors with reading and writing, dinner, out of doors again, and the evening under the veranda, with conversations on subjects now so interesting to me. These conversations, and what I had learned from other persons, open to me new causes for interest and sympathy with my younger host. Born in South Carolina, he has secured his rights of birth, and is a citizen of the United States, though all his pecuniary interests and family affections are in Cuba. He went to Paris at the age of nine, and remained there until he was nineteen, devoting the ten years to thorough courses of study in the best schools. He has spent much time in Boston, and has been at sea, to China, India, and the Pacific and California—was wrecked in the Boston ship Mary Ellen, on a coral reef in the India seas, taken captive, restored, and brought back to Boston in another ship, whence he sailed for California. There he had a long and checkered experience, was wounded in the battle with the Indians who killed Lieut. Dale and defeated his party, was engaged in scientific surveys, topographical and geological, took the fever of the South Coast at a remote place, was reported dead, and came to his mother’s door, at the spot where we are talking this evening, so weak and sunken that his brothers did not know him, thinking it happiness enough if he could reach his home, to die in his mother’s arms. But home and its cherishings, and revived moral force, restored him, and now, active and strong again, when, in consequence of the marriage of his brothers and sisters, and the departure of neighbors, the family leave their home of thirty-five years for the city, he becomes the acting master, the administrador of the estate, and makes the old house his bachelor’s hall.
An education in Europe or the United States must tend to free the youth of Cuba from the besetting fault of untravelled plantation masters. They are in no danger of thinking their plantations and Cuba the world, or any great part of it. In such cases, I should think the danger might be rather the other way—rather that of disgust and discouragement at the narrowness of the field, the entire want of a career set before them—a career of any kind, literary, scientific, political, or military. The choice is between expatriation, and contentment in the position of a secluded cultivator of sugar by slave labor, with occasional opportunities of intercourse with the world and of foreign travel, with no other
