or, Enchanted Isles
by Herman Melville
SKETCH FOURTH.
A PISGAH VIEW FROM THE ROCK. ––
”That done, he leads him to the highest mount, From whence, far off he unto him did show:”–
If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take the following prescription. Gothree voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest frigatethat floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the guides whoconduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many morerespectively to a rope-dancer, an Indian juggler, and a chamois. Thisdone, come and be rewarded by the view from our tower. How we get there,we alone know. If we sought to tell others, what the wiser were they?Suffice it, that here at the summit you and I stand. Does anyballoonist, does the outlooking man in the moon, take a broader view ofspace? Much thus, one fancies, looks the universe from Milton’scelestial battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky. Here Daniel Boonewould have dwelt content.
Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted Isles.Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south. You see nothing; butpermit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of certaininteresting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower’s base,we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole.
We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the East, some sixhundred miles, lies the continent; this Rock being just about on theparallel of Quito.
Observe another thing here. We are at one of three uninhabited clusters,which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, atlong intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In apeculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character ofcountry. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not onepartakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles ofSt. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan-Fernandez and Massafuero. Ofthe first, it needs not here to speak. The second lie a little above theSouthern Tropic; lofty, inhospitable, and uninhabitable rocks, one ofwhich, presenting two round hummocks connected by a low reef, exactlyresembles a huge double-headed shot. The last lie in the latitude of33; high, wild and cloven. Juan Fernandez is sufficiently famouswithout further description. Massafuero is a Spanish name, expressive ofthe fact, that the isle so called lies _more without_, that is, furtheroff the main than its neighbor Juan. This isle Massafuero has a veryimposing aspect at a distance of eight or ten miles. Approached in onedirection, in cloudy weather, its great overhanging height and ruggedcontour, and more especially a peculiar slope of its broad summits, giveit much the air of a vast iceberg drifting in tremendous poise. Itssides are split with dark cavernous recesses, as an old cathedral withits gloomy lateral chapels. Drawing nigh one of these gorges from sea,after a long voyage, and beholding some tatterdemalion outlaw, staff inhand, descending its steep rocks toward you, conveys a very queeremotion to a lover of the picturesque.
On fishing parties from ships, at various times, I have chanced tovisit each of these groups. The impression they give to the strangerpulling close up in his boat under their grim cliffs is, that surely hemust be their first discoverer, such, for the most part, is theunimpaired … silence and solitude. And here, by the way, the mode inwhich these isles were really first lighted upon by Europeans is notunworthy of mention, especially as what is about to be said, likewiseapplies to the original discovery of our Encantadas.
Prior to the year 1563, the voyages made by Spanish ships from Peru toChili, were full of difficulty. Along this coast, the winds from theSouth most generally prevail; and it had been an invariable custom tokeep close in with the land, from a superstitious conceit on the part ofthe Spaniards, that were they to lose sight of it, the eternaltrade-wind would waft them into unending waters, from whence would be noreturn. Here, involved among tortuous capes and headlands, shoals andreefs, beating, too, against a continual head wind, often light, andsometimes for days and weeks sunk into utter calm, the provincialvessels, in many cases, suffered the extremest hardships, in passages,which at the present day seem to have been incredibly protracted. Thereis on record in some collections of nautical disasters, an account ofone of these ships, which, starting on a voyage whose duration wasestimated at ten days, spent four months at sea, and indeed never againentered harbor, for in the end she was cast away. Singular to tell, thiscraft never encountered a gale, but was the vexed sport of maliciouscalms and currents. Thrice, out of provisions, she put back to anintermediate port, and started afresh, but only yet again to return.Frequent fogs enveloped her; so that no observation could be had of herplace, and once, when all hands were joyously anticipating sight oftheir destination, lo! the vapors lifted and disclosed the mountainsfrom which they had taken their first departure. In the like deceptivevapors she at last struck upon a reef, whence ensued a long series ofcalamities too sad to detail.
It was the famous pilot, Juan Fernandez, immortalized by the islandnamed after him, who put an end to these coasting tribulations, byboldly venturing the experiment–as De Gama did before him with respectto Europe–of standing broad out from land. Here he found the windsfavorable for getting to the South, and by running westward till beyondthe influences of the trades, he regained the coast without difficulty;making the passage which, though in a high degree circuitous, proved farmore expeditious than the nominally direct one. Now it was upon thesenew tracks, and about the year 1670, or thereabouts, that the EnchantedIsles, and the rest of the sentinel groups, as they may be called, werediscovered. Though I know of no account as to whether any of them werefound inhabited or no, it may be reasonably concluded that they havebeen immemorial solitudes. But let us return to Redondo.
Southwest from our tower lies all Polynesia, hundreds of leagues away;but straight west, on the precise line of his parallel, no land risestill your keel is beached upon the Kingsmills, a nice little sail of,say 5000 miles.
Having thus by such distant references–with Rodondo the only possibleones–settled our relative place on the sea, let us consider objects notquite so remote. Behold the grim and charred Enchanted Isles. Thisnearest crater-shaped headland is part of Albemarle, the largest of thegroup, being some sixty miles or more long, and fifteen broad. Did youever lay eye on the real genuine Equator? Have you ever, in the largestsense, toed the Line? Well, that identical crater-shaped headland there,all yellow lava, is cut by the Equator exactly as a knife cuts straightthrough the centre of a pumpkin pie. If you could only see so far, justto one side of that same headland, across yon low dikey ground, youwould catch sight of the isle of Narborough, the loftiest land of thecluster; no soil whatever; one seamed clinker from top to bottom;abounding in black caves like smithies; its metallic shore ringing underfoot like plates of iron; its central volcanoes standing grouped like agigantic chimney-stack.
Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors after a quite curious fashion. Afamiliar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood:
Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and the middle transverse limbis Narborough, and all the rest is Albemarle. Volcanic Narborough liesin the black jaws of Albemarle like a wolf’s red tongue in his openmonth.
If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in roundnumbers, the statistics, according to the most reliable estimates madeupon the spot:Men, none.Ant-eaters, unknown.Man-haters, unknown.Lizards, 500,000.Snakes, 500,000.Spiders, 10,000,000.Salamanders, unknown.Devils, do.Making a clean total of 11,000,000,exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, andsalamanders.
Albemarle opens his mouth towards the setting sun. His distended jawsform a great bay, which Narborough, his tongue, divides into halves, onewhereof is called Weather Bay, the other Lee Bay; while the volcanicpromontories, terminating his coasts, are styled South Head and NorthHead. I note this, because these bays are famous in the annals of theSperm Whale Fishery. The whales come here at certain seasons to calve.When ships first cruised hereabouts, I am told, they used to blockadethe entrance of Lee Bay, when their boats going round by Weather Bay,passed through Narborough channel, and so had the Leviathans very neatlyin a pen.
The day after we took fish at the base of this Round Tower, we had afine wind, and shooting round the north headland, suddenly descried afleet of full thirty sail, all beating to windward like a squadron inline. A brave sight as ever man saw. A most harmonious concord ofrushing keels. Their thirty kelsons hummed like thirty harp-strings, andlooked as straight whilst they left their parallel traces on the sea.But there proved too many hunters for the game. The fleet broke up, andwent their separate ways out of sight, leaving my own ship and two trimgentlemen of London. These last, finding no luck either, likewisevanished; and Lee Bay, with all its appurtenances, and without a rival,devolved to us.
The way of cruising here is this. You keep hovering about the entranceof the bay, in one beat and out the next. But at times–not always, asin other parts of the group–a racehorse of a current sweeps rightacross its mouth. So, with all sails set, you carefully ply your tacks.How often, standing at the foremast head at sunrise, with our patientprow pointed in between these isles, did I gaze upon that land, not ofcakes, but of clinkers, not of streams of sparkling water, but arrestedtorrents of tormented lava.
As the ship runs in from the open sea, Narborough presents its side inone dark craggy mass, soaring up some five or six thousand feet, atwhich point it hoods itself in heavy clouds, whose lowest level fold isas clearly defined against the rocks as the snow-line against the Andes.There is dire mischief going on in that upper dark. There toil thedemons of fire, who, at intervals, irradiate the nights with a strangespectral illumination for miles and miles around, but unaccompanied byany further demonstration; or else, suddenly announce themselves byterrific concussions, and the full drama of a volcanic eruption. Theblacker that cloud by day, the more may you look for light by night.Often whalemen have found themselves cruising nigh that burning mountainwhen all aglow with a ball-room blaze. Or, rather, glass-works, you maycall this same vitreous isle of Narborough, with its tallchimney-stacks.
Where we still stand, here on Rodondo, we cannot see all the otherisles, but it is a good place from which to point out where they lie.Yonder, though, to the E.N.E., I mark a distant dusky ridge. It isAbington Isle, one of the most northerly of the group; so solitary,remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man’s Land seen off our northernshore. I doubt whether two human beings ever touched upon that spot. Sofar as yon Abington Isle is concerned, Adam and his billions ofposterity remain uncreated.
Ranging south of Abington, and quite out of sight behind the long spineof Albemarle, lies James’s Isle, so called by the early Buccaneers afterthe luckless Stuart, Duke of York. Observe here, by the way, that,excepting the isles particularized in comparatively recent times, andwhich mostly received the names of famous Admirals, the Encantadas werefirst christened by the Spaniards; but these Spanish names weregenerally effaced on English charts by the subsequent christenings ofthe Buccaneers, who, in the middle of the seventeenth century, calledthem after English noblemen and kings. Of these loyal freebooters andthe things which associate their name with the Encantadas, we shall hearanon. Nay, for one little item, immediately; for between James’s Isleand Albemarle, lies a fantastic islet, strangely known as “Cowley’sEnchanted Isle.” But, as all the group is deemed enchanted, the reasonmust be given for the spell within a spell involved by this particulardesignation. The name was bestowed by that excellent Buccaneer himself,on his first visit here. Speaking in his published voyages of this spot,he says–”My fancy led me to call it Cowley’s Enchanted Isle, for, wehaving had a sight of it upon several points of the compass, it appearedalways in so many different forms; sometimes like a ruinedfortification; upon another point like a great city,” etc. No wonderthough, that among the Encantadas all sorts of ocular deceptions andmirages should be met.
That Cowley linked his name with this self-transforming and bemockingisle, suggests the possibility that it conveyed to him some meditativeimage of himself. At least, as is not impossible, if he were anyrelative of the mildly-thoughtful and self-upbraiding poet Cowley, wholived about his time, the conceit might seem unwarranted; for that sortof thing evinced in the naming of this isle runs in the blood, and maybe seen in pirates as in poets.
Still south of James’s Isle lie Jervis Isle, Duncan Isle, Grossman’sIsle, Brattle Isle, Wood’s Isle, Chatham Isle, and various lesser isles,for the most part an archipelago of aridities, without inhabitant,history, or hope of either in all time to come. But not far from theseare rather notable isles–Barrington, Charles’s, Norfolk, and Hood’s.Succeeding chapters will reveal some ground for their notability.
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