London, April to September 1822
THE SAVAGES of Florida tell of an island in the middle of a lake inhabited by the most beautiful women on earth. Many times the Muskogees have tried to conquer it; but this Eden flees before their canoes: a natural emblem of those chimeras that retreat before our desires.
This land also contained a Fountain of Youth. But who would want to live his life over again?
These fables very nearly took on a kind of reality in my eyes. At a moment when we least expected it, we saw a flotilla of canoes come out of a bay, some by oar, and others by sail. They landed on our island. All in all, there were two Creek families, one Seminole and the other Muskogee, among whom there were a few Cherokees and “Burnt-woods.” I was struck by the elegance of these savages, who did not at all resemble the savages of Canada.
Seminole and Muskogee men are quite tall, but, by an extraordinary contrast, their mothers, wives, and daughters are the smallest race of women known in America.
The Indian women who landed near us, of mixed Cherokee and Castilian blood, were tall of stature. Two of them resembled creoles from Santo Domingo or Mauritius, but they were yellow and delicate like the women of the Ganges. These two Floridians, paternal cousins, served me as models: the one for Atala and the other for Céluta. They surpassed the portraits that I made of them only in that variable and fugitive truth of nature, that physiognomy of race and climate which I could not render. There was something indefinable in their oval faces; their shadowy complexions that one seemed to see through a light, orange mist; their soft black hair; their long eyes half concealed beneath satin lids that opened ever so slowly; in short, in the double seductions of the Indian and the Spaniard.
The meeting with our hosts slowed our gait a bit: our trading agents began asking about horses, and it was decided that we should go set up camp in sight of the studs.
The plain around our camp was covered with bulls, cows, horses, bison, buffalo, cranes, turkeys, and pelicans: these birds mottled the green background of the savannah with streaks of white, black, and pink.
A multitude of passions stirred our traders and our huntsmen to action: not passions of rank, education, or prejudice, but natural passions, full and absolute, making straight for their object, with no witnesses but a fallen tree in the depths of an unknown forest, an unmapped valley, or a nameless river. Relations between the Spaniards and the Creek women formed the background of most adventures, and the “Burntwoods” play a principal role in all of these romances. One story was legendary: that of an eau-de-vie merchant seduced and ruined by a “painted woman” (a courtesan). Men used to sing this story, put into Seminole verse under the title of Tabamica, as they made their way through the forests.* Kidnapped in their turn by the settlers, the Indian women soon die forsaken in Pensacola: their misfortunes went to swell the Romanceros, and to be set alongside the sad songs of Ximena.[2]
*I have given the words in my Travels in America. (Geneva, 1832)