CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

by Lafcadio Hearn
"But Nature whistled with all her winds,

Did as she pleased, and went her way."
---Emerson

To my friend
Dr. Rodolfo Matas of New Orleans

The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
I.

Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass
through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding

waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please;
but the trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some

one of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for
bayou-travel, which usually receive passengers at a point not far

from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street, hard by the
sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of

steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts
against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But

the miniaturesteamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf
never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river,

slips into some canal-mouth, labors along the artificialchannel
awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free

way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps
thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of

drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at
long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating

machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued,
you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre

mazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary
with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of

fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides
again into canal or bayou,--from bayou or canal once more into

lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away
from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of

breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like
thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of

reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surging in
stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appalling

chorus of frogs! ....
Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all

day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue
open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be

fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For
the sake of passengers, she travels by day only; but there are

other vessels which make the journey also by night--threading the
bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering by the

North Star,--sometimes feeling the way with poles in the white
season of fogs,--sometimes, again, steering by that Star of

Evening which in our sky glows like another moon, and drops over
the silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire.

Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you
into thin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminous

color;--bayous open into broad passes;--lakes link themselves
with sea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,--keen, cool,

and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins to
swing,--rocking to the great living pulse of the tides. And

gazing from the deck around you, with no forest walls to break
the view, it will seem to you that the low land must have once

been rent asunder by the sea, and strewn about the Gulf in
fantastic tatters....

Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an
oasis emerging,--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the

rounded foliage of evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the
shining flood also kindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets,

each with its beach-girdle of dazzling sand and shells,
yellow-white,--and all radiant with semi-tropical foliage, myrtle

and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows
curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where

dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malay fishermen, who
speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own

Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the
Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to

inspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy
bronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them....

Further seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some
queer camp of wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform

that stands above the water upon a thousand piles;--over the
miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white

sign-board painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform
is used for drying fish in the sun; and the fantastic characters

of the sign, literally translated, mean: "Heap--Shrimp--Plenty."
... And finally all the land melts down into desolations of

sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by the
melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that

sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea
touches the bass keys of his mighty organ....

II.
Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel

by steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain
to enter the Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre, the most

familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as
because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the

stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is
bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and

sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with
drift and decaying things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.

Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of
the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber,

above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort,
whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half

choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with
incrustation of oyster shells.... Around all the gray circling of

a shark-haunted sea...
Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven

flames like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are
flying in one wild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny

grasses all covered with something like husks,--wheat-colored
husks,--large, flat, and disposed evenly along the lee-side of

each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the
wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to

display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with
arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into

wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your
eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle

down farther off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ...
a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies!

Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle:
primitively a wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained,

diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar
chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed

its own;--the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains,
over which tramways wind to the smooth beach;--the

plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and
the negro-quarters remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for

the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak,
its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander.

its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile,
Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its

loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is
reiterated by most of the other islands,--Caillou, Cassetete,

Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the
many islets haunted by the gray pelican,--all of which are little