Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 31 – Bidwell · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 31Chapter 30
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 31
Chapter 30
BidwellEnglish
"HAPPINESS AND I SHAKE HANDS FOR A TIME."
Cuba! What a productive and fertile island it is, with its charming climate and lovely scenery! But, as in so many of the green spots of this world, man has blasted and spoiled all that indulgent nature has lavished here. From the days of Columbus the story of Cuba has been one of wholesale murder of natives, of revolutions--later of insurrections, and deadly civil strife, which have ruined whole provinces once covered with large sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations.
Slavery now, as in all her past Christian history, is everywhere. Previous to 1861 40,000 slaves were yearly imported in slave ships into the harbor of Havana.
Perhaps all men are cruel when they are absolute masters of the lives and fortunes of their fellows and amenable to none for their acts. Certainly the white Cubans, as a rule, are cruel masters in all their dealings with their slaves.
Probably to-day, certainly in 1873, most of the large plantations witnessed scenes of cruelty never surpassed in the long annals of human servitude.
During my stay I was invited to visit many plantations, but visits to two were enough for me, there being too many signs on the surface of the brutality that lay beneath. I could easily give cases that I saw or heard of, but refrain from doing so here.
One day's stay in Cuba convinced us we could spend a month very happily on the island, and, discovering that Don Fernando, the proprietor of the hotel, had a furnished house in a lovely situation to let, we resolved to remain, renting the house for a month at a fixed rate per day. This rate included the ten servants--slaves--in the house, he to furnish good horses and everything except wine. The service proved good, and the cooking exquisite. This was rather expensive, but certainly a handy kind of housekeeping, taking all worry and household cares from my wife's shoulders.
There were a large number of American visitors on the island, lovers of and seekers after sunshine and warmth, which they found in abundance while swinging in hammocks under the palm or cocoanut trees, or in strolling along the white strand, with its innumerable sunny coves, while the Winter storms and blizzards were raging in the Northern States. Here we formed many pleasant acquaintances, and, throwing off much of the reserve maintained during the voyage, we mingled freely in the nice but gossipy society which winters there.
Our house was on a lovely slope in full view of the Gulf of Mexico, and in the midst of what was more like a tropical plantation than a garden.
I made the acquaintance of Gen. Torbert, our Consul, and was introduced by him to the Spanish officials, including the colonel of police. I assiduously cultivated the acquaintance of the latter, and frequently had him out to the house to dinner and lunch, and felt pretty confident that if any telegrams came about me he would certainly bring them to me at once for an explanation. Even if my presence became known, and telegraphic orders for my arrest should arrive, no speedy action would be taken and ample time given me to escape. In all the assemblies, picnics and balls I was gratified to find my wife very much sought after and admired. It was well she had a few happy days; enough misery lay not far ahead.
In the mean time I had no word from my friends in London. In fact, they did not know where I was. When I bade them good-bye at Calais they told me not to inform them of my destination until I had got there, and then to do so through some relative.
Every day I watched the New York papers to see if there had been any explosion in London, but the silence of the press told me my friends were having an amazing success, and we might expect two or three months more to elapse before there would be any discovery.
We had been some weeks in Havana.
It was well into the month of February when one day, being in my hammock on the veranda, with my wife sitting near me, my servant rode up with the papers, and, handing me the New York Herald, I leisurely opened it, while chatting with my wife, but could not suppress an exclamation when my eyes fell upon an Associated Press dispatch from London, in staring headlines. They read:
AMAZING FRAUD UPON THE BANK OF
ENGLAND!
MILLIONS LOST!
GREAT EXCITEMENT IN LONDON!
L5,000 REWARD FOR THE ARREST OF THE
AMERICAN PERPETRATOR, F. A. WARREN.
"London, Feb. 14, 1873.
"An amazing fraud has been perpetrated upon the Bank of England by a young American who gave the name of Frederick Albert Warren. The loss of the bank is reported to be from three to ten millions, and it is rumored that many London banks have been victimized to enormous amounts. The greatest excitement prevails in the city, and the forgery, for such it is, is the one topic of conversation on the Exchange and in the street. The police are completely at fault, although a young man named Noyes, who was Warren's clerk, has been arrested, but it is believed that he is a dupe.
"The bank has offered a reward of L5,000 for information leading to the arrest of Warren or any confederate."
I took a long walk on the beach to think over the situation. I was alarmed over the arrest of Noyes, which I knew ought not to have occurred if the proper precautions had been taken, but I concluded that at the worst his arrest only meant for him a brief incarceration.
I knew that no human power and no fear could ever make him betray us. Two things never entered my calculations at all; that is, that my right name would ever transpire, or that George and Mac would ever, by any possibility, be brought into question for the fraud.
So I came back from my walk with my plans outlined. It was to remain quietly where we were for a fortnight longer, then take the steamer to Vera Cruz, go to the City of Mexico and there buy an estate, as I had originally proposed. Then, after a few months, leave my wife there and travel incog. through Northern Mexico and Texas, meet Mac and George and afterward return to Mexico.
Not a soul in all Europe knew I was in Cuba, and so long as my name did not transpire I was as safe in Cuba as if in the desert.
Consequently I determined to go on in the same way since our landing. In the mean while I would watch the papers, and if any signs of danger appeared I could take instant measures for my safety.
As the days passed the cable dispatches appearing in the papers increased in volume, and the papers everywhere had editorials, which, as a rule, were humorous or sarcastic, poking fun at the Britishers in general and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in particular. Then the comic papers took it up, and from week to week published cartoons intended to be funny.
One of the funniest of these came out in one of the New York comics, which appeared after the mail arrived from London with the particulars of the simplicity of the bank officials in their dealings with the mysterious F. A. Warren. This full-page cartoon represented a young dude, seated on a mule, riding down a steep declivity.
At the bottom the devil stood, holding in the fingers of his extended hands a quantity of thousand-pound bank notes tempting Warren, and John Bull stood behind the mule, belaboring it with an umbrella and driving Warren down to the devil.
I tried to keep the papers from my wife, but one day she came home from a visit with a flushed face and eager to talk, and began telling me about some daring countryman of mine "who had the audacity to rob the Bank of England," and "who ought to have a whipping." On several occasions Americans there asked my opinion as to who the party could be.
I always told them he was some clever young scamp, with plenty of money of his own, who did it for the excitement of the thing and from a wish to take a rise out of John Bull.
The next French steamer for Mexico was advertised to land at Havana for passengers and mails for Vera Cruz in a few days, and I determined to sail by her. Soon after my arrival I had formed the acquaintance of a wealthy young countryman of mine from Savannah by the name of Gray. We soon became fast friends, and I had him out to dinner nearly every day. He had a warm friend in Senor Andrez, a rich young Cuban planter, and had accepted an invitation to visit his coffee plantation in the Isle of Pines, the largest of all that immense body of islets and keys of the south coast of Cuba in the Carribean Sea, one of the loveliest tropical isles imaginable, and Gray insisted upon my making one of the party.
It was proposed to spend a week on the island, and to take three days in going and coming. But if I went then I would be unable to sail on the steamer of the 25th, and would have to wait another week.
One day Gray brought Senor Andrez to dinner, along with a common friend, a Senor Alvarez. All three joined in imploring me to make one of the party, promising sport as novel as good; said the wild boars were plentiful; that we would have two days' shark fishing, turning turtles and hunting their eggs, and could vary it by a slave hunt, the jungle and some of the smaller islands being "full of runaways," and as they were by law wild beasts we might be lucky enough to shoot a few of them--shoot, not capture, as the planters knew that a runaway slave who had tasted the joys of freedom if caught was useless as a slave. So, as a matter of sport, as well as a warning to other slaves, they organized yearly hunts to bag a score or two. But so great is the depravity of the human heart that these wretches, in their desperate wickedness, objected to being shot, and at times were guilty of the enormity of shooting back again. History records how, on certain occasions, they did so with such good effect that the hunted became hunters; but these were rare events.
After long urging I consented. At the time there were only two short railways in all Cuba. We were to cross the island to the south coast, and there embark for the Isle of Pines in a boat owned by our host, which would be in waiting. The railway would take us to the little hamlet of San Felipe, some forty miles south, and there we were to take horses to the seaport town of Cajio. We were to start on Saturday, two days ahead. My wife did not relish my going, and I disliked it more than she did, but for totally different reasons. Mine were that, as a matter of prudence, I ought to recall my consent and remain in Havana until steamer day, and then sail without fail to Mexico. But fearing the ridicule of my friends, I went, persuading myself that there could be no danger and that everything in London was buried in so dense a fog bank that the detectives would struggle in vain to find a way out of it or any clue to our identity.
Had I known of the clever work of the Pinkerton brothers in London and the discoveries in Paris I should have been ill at ease; but had I known that Capt. John Curtin--then a member of the Pinkerton staff in New York, but now (1895.) of San Francisco--had with perfectly marvelous intuition and rare detective skill let daylight into the whole plot, and had reported to his chief that whenever F. A. Warren was discovered he would prove to be Austin Bidwell; I say if I had known this, instead of going off on a ten days' pleasure jaunt into an isolated corner of the world I should have taken instant flight, leaving Cuba, not by the usual modes of departure, but by sailing boat, and alone, for one of the Mexican ports.
Capt. Curtin had been detailed to work on the New York end of the case, to look for clues. It seemed a hopeless task. He is a warm friend of mine now, after twenty years, and has long forgiven me for the bullet I lodged in him in 1873. A few years after arresting me in the West Indies he went to San Francisco and started a private inquiry office of his own at 328 Montgomery street. When, after twenty years' incarceration, I arrived there one lovely May in 1892, he was waiting for me at the ferry, and gave me warm greetings, and as hearty congratulations, too, as any man could give another; then introduced me to his friends everywhere, and, in fact, from the hour of my arrival until my departure, three months afterward, was never tired of doing me a service and forwarding my business, so that by his kind offices I made a great success out of what, by reason of the great financial depression, might otherwise have proved a failure. But as Capt. Curtin, after effecting my arrest, having recovered from his wound, was one of the four who took me to England, I will wait until a later chapter to tell how it was he discovered my name and located me in Cuba.
On Saturday morning our party of four, accompanied by a following of black fellows and half a dozen dogs, set out by train. Before reaching San Felipe our bones had a shaking. The roadbed was execrable, the trucks of the cars were without springs, and to me it seemed as if we must leave the rails at any moment.
In Havana we regarded Don Andrez as a good fellow, but upon our arrival at San Felipe he had grown into a man of importance. When we came to Cajio he had grown into a person of distinction, and at the island he had swollen into a local Caesar. At San Felipe, a mere hamlet, horses were waiting for us and mules for the baggage, but before setting out we went to a nearby hacienda and sat down to what was simply the best lunch of which I ever partook.
The town was chiefly remarkable for the number of its fighting cocks. At the hacienda there were dozens, each in its separate compartment--regarded the same as horses and game dogs are in England and America--and half the black boys we met were carrying game birds.
At last, starting for Cajio, the road soon degenerated into a mere track, which led through some barren hills with scanty growths of a species of oak without underbrush, and here and there a sprinkling of cacti, and in the lower reaches between the hills grew dense green walls of Spanish bayonet.
We were crossing Cuba at its narrowest part, and from San Felipe to Cajio was only some thirty miles. After fifteen miles we came into the fertile coast belt and passed a number of deserted sugar plantations where tropic vegetation was trying to cover up the work of ruin wrought by man. Residences and sugar houses destroyed by fire were very much in evidence. To my surprise I learned that bodies of insurgents--who then held and had held for six years nearly the entire eastern province of Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Principe, and part of the extreme western province of Pinar del Rio--had only a few weeks before landed by night at the port La Playa de Batabano, fifteen miles away, and with the cry of "Free Cuba and death to the Spaniard!" had blotted out the town and then marched into the heart of the country, burning houses, killing the whites and calling upon the slaves to join them in freeing Cuba. Many did, and terrible were their excesses, and terribly did they pay for these. The Spanish soldiers and loyal Cuban volunteers closed in upon them, and at the little hamlet of San Marcos, where we halted and examined the too evident signs of the battle and massacre that followed, they made their last stand, but were no match for their well-armed and disciplined foes. After a desperate struggle they were overpowered, and every surviving soul was butchered by the infuriated soldiers. It was better so. Had they been spared it would have only been for the moment, for by official decree of the Captain-General of Cuba, indorsed by the Madrid Government, every inhabitant within the insurrectionary line, without regard to age or sex, was doomed to death without form of trial.
At San Marcos we made a halt to view the scene of the fight and examined the heaps of ashes where the fires were kindled which consumed the bodies of the slain. Two or three were my countrymen. At the time it was quite the thing for venturesome Americans to go and join the rebels and help the fight for "Cuba libre." For some years every few days notices would appear in the press about some Americans having been shot for joining or attempting to join the rebels. This went on until the affair of the steamer Virginus, when her crew and passengers, to the number of 150, were shot, the steamer having been captured close to the shore and about to land men and guns. Then our Government awoke and forbade Spanish officials to shoot Americans without trial.
As I stood there curiously examining the marks of the conflict, or examining some part of an unconsumed bone, I little thought that in a very few days I myself would be a fugitive, creeping through jungles and over tropic plains, seeking to join the comrades of the men on whose ashes I was then treading, to aid their fight for free Cuba.
Perhaps my subsequent fate made me ponder over my happy life in Cuba, and compare the horrible misery of my prison life, with its hardships and degrading detail, with the brightness of those days, when love, obedience, wealth and luxury were mine.
But in those long years, when in their gloom and depression I was fighting to keep off insanity by ignoring the dreadful present and dwelling on the past, no incident of all my life on the island haunted me more than this at San Marcos. Every detail was photographed on my brain, and as I recalled that blackened spot strewn with ashes soddened by tropical rains, soon to be all the greener for the fertilizing tragedy, many a thousand times I said, "Would to God my ashes were mingled with the dead there."
Soon after leaving San Marcos, striking into the jungle, the road became so narrow that we had to go single file. I found the silence of the tropical forest impressive, and think it had its effect on us all--even the negroes and dogs moved on, making no sound. Although novel scenes, yet I was glad when 5 o'clock came and we emerged from the jungle on to the coast road. It was sandy, but well traveled. Another mile and we were in Cajio, and the Caribbean, blue and lovely as a dream, lay spread before us, with hundreds of palm crowned islets and coral bays, all with sandy beaches of dazzling whiteness.
Senor Andrez had a house here, and as they had notice of our coming everything was prepared for our reception. Entering the house, we were served with black coffee and thin rice cakes fried. Gray and I wanted a swim before supper in the waters, which looked very tempting, but it would have been a breach of etiquette to indulge then--and, by the way, there is a strange repugnance to water inherent in the Spanish nature, there being no bathhouses in Spain, they say, and I believe it. Gray and I, during the next few days, were in and out of the water at all hours, but could never persuade any one else to try the experiment of a swim in the warm water of the Caribbean. At the house, or when out in boats, we frequently invited some of the company to join us in a plunge, but none ever accepted the invitation. We are told on good authority that "our virtues depend on the interpretation of the times," and one might add "on the interpretation of our nation." The Anglo-Saxon loves soap and water and plenty of it; the Spaniard does not. But this contrast may mean nothing in our favor; there may be a reason for it, racial probably, but possibly climatic.
Supper came, and it was a treat. Gray and I noted that in suitability of material to the purpose intended, and in cookery, it excelled anything in our experience. Cafe Riche and Tortoni's were not in it. We were curious to see the cook. She was ordered in for our inspection, a sober, sad-faced negress, angular, bony, and, strangely enough, knew only a few words of Spanish, her language being some African dialect, Africa being her natal place, as it, indeed, was of most of the slaves.
What views of life, what views of the Christian world most of these slaves must have! Torn from their homes, leaving their slaughtered family on the ashes of their homes, and carried off to toil and wear out the only life nature will ever give them--for what? To toil amid hunger and abuse too foul to name in order that the Christian robber may have gold to gratify his desire.
She was evidently alarmed over the summons--it might mean anything--she was unused to the coin of compliment; but we gave it freely, however, and the next morning each of us did better, and when departing placed a sovereign in her hand and made Senor Andrez promise to be good to her.
Our host grew his own tobacco and made his own cigars. These were famous even in Havana, and Gray and I enjoyed them that evening. A number of grass-woven hammocks were swung under a roof in front of the house. It was delightful lying there watching the phosphorescent waves rippling or breaking on the beach under the light of a full moon and listening to the chatter or the songs of the black fellows who swarmed around while smoking cigars worth the smoking. The negro children, shrill-voiced and loud, were very much in evidence.
The air was delightful, and following the custom of the country we slept in the hammocks without undressing.
The next morning, under a sunrise sky, which in its glowing colors looked like the New Jerusalem, Gray and I made a break for the glorious water that rippled on the beach. What a swim we had! We were the only humans visible. All other unfeathered bipeds were asleep, and we varied our bath by wandering around the beach in a state of nature, viewing things generally, but a turtle pond held us fascinated. Stakes had been driven down inclosing a space, and upward of twenty great turtles were prisoners, waiting apparently with the greatest of patience to be devoured--that being, so far as I can see, the ultimate destination of all life--that huge procession to the stomach. The rocks tell us that it began a good while ago, and it has kept up with crowded ranks ever since. When the missionary landing in Fiji anxiously inquired of the boss cannibal gentleman where his predecessor might be sojourning, he was promptly informed that he had "gone into the interior." To "go into the interior" is the decree fate writes in her book of doom and copies on the birth certificate of all the breathers of the world.
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 32
