NEW ORLEANS, 1877–1886
AT THE GATE OF THE TROPICS
The New Orleans Levee—First Impression of the City—The French Market—A Monster Cotton Press—“Pere Antoine’s Date Palm.”
NEW ORLEANS, November 19.
EIGHTEEN miles of levee! London, with all the gloomy vastness of her docks, and her “river of the ten thousand masts,” can offer no spectacle of traffic so picturesquely attractive and so varied in its attraction.
In the center of this enormous crescent line of wharves and piers lie the great Sugar and Cotton Landings, with their millions of tons of freight newly unshipped, their swarms of swarthy stevedores, their innumerable wagons and beasts of burden. Above the line of depot and storehouse roofs, stretching southward, rises the rolling smoke of the cotton-press furnaces. Facing the Sugar Landing, stretching northward, extend a line of immense sugar sheds, with roofs picturesquely-peaked, Sierra-wise. Below, along the wooden levee, a hundred river boats have landed without jostling, and the smoky breath of innumerable chimneys floats, upward eddying, into the overarching blue. Here one sees a comely steamer from the Ohio lying at the landing, still panting, after its long run of a thousand miles; there a vast Mississippi boat lies groaning, with her cargo of seven thousand bales, awaiting relief by a legion of ’longshoremen. At intervals other vessels arrive, some, like mountains of floating cotton, their white sides hidden by brown ramparts of bales built up to the smokestacks; some deeply freighted with the sweet produce of the cane-fields. Black tugs rush noisily hither and thither, like ugly water-goblins seeking strong work to do; and brightly-painted luggers, from the lower coasts,—from the oyster beds and the fruit tree groves—skim over the wrinkled water, some bearing fragrant freight of golden oranges, and pomegranates, and bananas richly ripe; some bringing fishy dainties from the sea. Ocean steamers are resting their leviathan sides at the Southern piers, and either way, along the far-curving lines of wharves, deep-sea ships lie silently marshaled, their pale wings folded in motionless rest. There are barks and brigs, schooners and brigantines, frigates and merchantmen, of all tonnages—ships of light and graceful build, from the Spanish Main; deep-bellied steamers, with East Indian names, that have been to Calcutta and Bombay; strong-bodied vessels from Norway and all the Scandinavian ports; tight-looking packets from English ports; traders under German, Dutch, Italian, French and Spanish flags; barks from the Mediterranean; shapely craft from West Indian harbors. They seem envoys of the world’s commerce in sunny session at the Gate of the Tropics! Look either way along the river with a strong glass!—the fringe of masts and yards appears infinitely extended; the distant spars become blended together in a darkly outlined thicket of sharply-pointed strokes and thread, cutting the blue at all angles; further and further yet, the fringe seems but a fringe of needle points and fine cobweb lines; and, at last, only the points remain visible, the lines having wholly vanished.
—It is not an easy thing to describe one’s first impression of New Orleans; for while it actually resembles no other city upon the face of the earth, yet it recalls vague memories of a hundred cities. It owns suggestions of towns in Italy, and in Spain, of cities in England and in Germany, of seaports in the Mediterranean, and of seaports in the tropics. Canal street, with its grand breadth and imposing facades, gives one recollections of London and Oxford street and Regent street; there are memories of Havre and Marseilles to be obtained from the Old French Quarter; there are buildings in Jackson Square which remind one of Spanish-American travel. I fancy that the power of fascination which New Orleans exercises upon foreigners is due no less to this peculiar characteristic than to the tropical beauty of the city itself. Whencesoever the traveler may have come, he may find in the Crescent City some memory of his home—some recollection of his Fatherland—some remembrance of something he loves.
New Orleans is especially a city of verandas, piazzas, porches and balconies; and the stranger is liable to be impressed with this fact immediately upon leaving the levee. All the streets in the business portion of the city are shaded with broad piazzas of wood and iron, which cover the whole sidewalk; and on the main streets, such as Canal, side awnings of canvas are also used, so that during the hottest portion of the day the sun can not cause discomfort to pedestrians from any possible direction. The front and also the back windows of most private houses have balconies at every story up to the roof; and in the old French quarter these are often multiplied and superimposed in the most picturesque way;—you see them right under the angle of gable ends, jutting out from queer corners, in a fashion half medieval. They are often hung with large pieces of cloth or carpet, or stuffs brightly dyed, especially above the French dry goods stores; and thus draped the effect is quite odd and pleasing. I find much to gratify an artist’s eye in this quaint, curious, crooked French quarter, with its narrow streets and its houses painted in light tints of yellow, green, and sometimes even blue. Neutral tints are common; but there are a great many buildings that can not have been painted for years, and which look neglected and dilapidated as well as antiquated. Solid wooden shutters, painted a bright grass-green, and relieved by walls painted chocolate color, or tinted yellow, have a pretty effect, and suggest many memories of old France. Few houses in the quarter are without them.
A stranger can not avoid being also impressed with the solid character of the streets here throughout the business portion of the city. They are raised like causeways, and are usually either level with the sidewalks or above them, being separated from the curb by gutters of great depth and breadth. The street pavement consists mostly of square blocks of stone set diamond-wise; and this pavement is almost everlasting. It is very handsome and clean looking, and I am told that no other pavement can resist the wear and tear of the cotton traffic or the undermining effect of the rains which loosen bowlders and roll them from their beds.
Most of the finer public buildings must have been erected at a time when expense was the least consideration in the construction of an edifice. They are generously and beautifully built; yet it is sad to see that many of them are falling into decay. Especially is this the case in regard to the old St. Louis Hotel—now the State House—with its splendid dome, frescoed by Casanova, and its grand halls. To repair it would now require an outlay of hundreds of thousands. It has been outraged in a manner worthy of Vandals; soldiers have been barracked in it; mold and damp have written prophecies of ruin within it. Hither it was that the great planters of the South dwelt in the old days when they visited New Orleans, and under their rich patronage the hotel prospered well, till the wars swept away their wealth, and, for a time at least, ruined New Orleans. I doubt if any of the great hotels here are now doing well.
The St. Charles, with its noble Greek facade, is the handsomest of these. From the entrance of the rotunda looking outward and upward at the vast Corinthian columns, with their snowy fluted shafts and rich capitals, their antique lines of beauty, their harmonious relation to each other, the sight is magnificent. I find a number of noble Greek facades in the city; the City Hall, the Methodist Church, on Carondelet street, and other structures I might name, are beautiful, and seem to illumine the streets with their white splendor. This elegant, gracious architecture appears adapted to this sky and this sunny clime; and, indeed it was under almost such a sky and such a sun that the Greek architecture was born.
But, after all, the glory of the city is in her Southern homes and gardens. I can not do justice to their beauty. The streets broaden there; the side-paths are bordered with verdant sod as soft and thick as velvet, and overshadowed with magnolias; the houses, mostly built in Renaissance style, are embowered in fruit-bearing trees and evergreen gardens, where statues and fountains gleam through thick shrubbery, cunningly trimmed into fantastic forms. Orange and fig trees; bananas and palms; magnolias and myrtles; cypresses and cedars; broad leaved, monstrous-flowering plants in antique urns; herbs with leaves shaped like ancient Greek sword-blades, and edged with yellow; shrubs exotically luxuriant, bearing blossoms of curious form and equatorial brilliancy of color; and flowers so rich of hue, so sweet, so fragrant, that they vary the varied green with a thousand tints, and make the tepid air odorous with drowsy perfume. And you can walk through this paradise hour after hour, mile after mile; and the air only becomes yet more fragrant and the orange trees more heavily freighted with golden fruit, and the gardens more and more beautiful, as you proceed southwardly.
Color and light and bright contrasts,—those warmly picturesque effects which artists seek to study in tropical climes, may be studied in perfection at the French Market. The markets of London are less brightly clean and neatly arranged; the markets of Paris are less picturesque. It consists of a succession of huge buildings, extending for nearly a quarter of a mile, and covering an area of about four squares. Oh, the contrasts of color, the tropical picturesqueness of a morning market-scene here; the seductiveness of the succulent fruits; the brilliancy of the brightly dyed stuffs in the hosiery and notion booths; the truly French taste exhibited in the arrangements of vegetables, and fowls and fruits and fish; the costumes of the quadroon girls; the Indian squaws selling droll trinkets; the blue jackets from the ships of all Nations; the red-shirted fishermen from the luggers; the Spaniards, Mexicans, Italians, Englishmen, Portuguese, Greeks, Frenchmen, Acadians, Creoles! One may see almost everything, and buy almost anything in the French market; and he must have a hard heart or an empty pocket who can always withstand the softly syllabled request of some bright-eyed Creole girl to buy something that he does not want.
You never smell an unpleasant odor in the French market; there is nothing to offend the nostrils, nothing to displease the eye. You inhale the fragrance of fruits and flowers—such fruit, such flowers!—you breathe the odor of delicious coffee from the lunch booths. What coffee it is, too—Oriental in strength and fragrance, but clear as wine. Oranges are selling at ten cents a dozen; bananas “five for a picayune;” and mountains of them are coming in from the Picayune landing, where all the luggers lie. Here are huge fruits that resemble oranges, but are nearly eight inches in diameter; pomegranates piled up in blushing pyramids; red bananas from Spanish America arranged in towers; figs, ripe and green; fresh dates; pale green grapes in giant clusters; apples rosy enough to have tempted rosy Eve; citrons and lemons; cocoanuts and pecans and pine-apples; and strange-looking fruits peculiar to the tropics. Here are flowers of a hundred kinds, in pots, in boxes, in nosegays, in bouquets, in bunches for the button-hole. Here are boots and shoes, silks and muslins, handkerchiefs and hosiery, cutlery and delf-ware, porcelain and crockery, tin-ware and plated-ware, dry goods of all varieties, and shirts of all dyes. I can not attempt to give any idea of the vegetable market, with its green and brown and purplish and ruddy mountains of fresh stock; or the admirably clean meat market, with the polite French butchers in white caps and aprons; or the bread stalls, where are piled up rolls as white as milk and sweet as cream; or the poultry market, with its questionable luxuries. The fish market has a glass roof, and all the rainbow tints of the fresh fish come out well on a bright day. Here are hills of shrimps and pyramids of oysters, and enormous baskets of live crabs, wherein hideous claw-battles are incessant. But one can not see, much less describe, all the sights of the French market in a month. It is a perpetual exhibition of industry—a museum of the Curiosities of Marketing.
NOVEMBER 20.
I have just witnessed a terrible exhibition of the power of machinery. Friends had advised me to visit the huge cotton press at the Cotton Landing, and I spent several hours in watching its operation. Excepting, perhaps, some of the monster cotton presses of India, it is said to be the most powerful in the world; but the East Indian presses box the cotton instead of baling it, with enormous loss of time. This “Champion” press at the New Orleans Levee weighs, with all its attachments, upwards of three thousand tons, and exerts the enormous pressure of four million pounds upon the bales placed in it. When I first arrived at the gate of the building where the machinery is placed, they were loading the newly pressed bales upon drays—bales much smaller than the ordinary plantation bales. I was considerably surprised to see three or four negroes straining with all their might to roll one of these bales; but I was not then aware that each of the packages of cotton before me weighed upward of one thousand pounds. They were really double—two bales pressed into one, and bound with twelve ties instead of six, and were being packed thus for shipment upon the vessel Western Empire for foreign parts. One of the gentlemen connected with the office kindly measured a double bale for me, with an ingenious instrument especially made for such measurements. It proved to be less than two feet through its thickest diameter—considerably less than most ordinary single bales.
The spectacle of this colossal press in motion is really terrific. It is like a nightmare of iron and brass. It does not press downward, but upward. It is not a press as we understand the term generally, but an enormous mouth of metal which seizes the bale and crushes it in its teeth. The machine did not give me the idea of a machine, it seemed rather some vast, black genie, buried up to his neck in the earth by the will of Soliman, the pre-Adamite Sultan.
Fancy a monstrous head of living iron and brass, fifty feet high from its junction with the ground, having pointed gaps in its face like gothic eyes, a mouth five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw to the mastodon in the upper jaw. The lower jaw alone moves, as in living beings, and it is worked by two vast iron tendons, long and thick and solid as church pillars. The surface of this lower jaw is equivalent to six square feet.
The more I looked at the thing, the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,—the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved.
Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a low roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to a level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The titan muscles contracted, and the jaw closed, silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened—down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches. Positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaws remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible, yawning heads which formed the gates of the teocallis at Palenque, and through whose awful jaws the sacrificial victims passed.
I noticed that the iron tie-bands which had been passed through the teeth were not fastened by hand. No hand could pull them tight enough to resist the internal pressure of the captive bale. They were fastened by very powerful steel levers, called “pullers,” which slid along a bar, and by which the bands were pulled so tight that all the “slack” (or at least nearly all) is taken out of the bale, and the bands cut deeply into the cotton. With the “pullers” the strain upon the bands becomes two thousand pounds to each band, a peculiar tie-grip being invented to insure against breaking. The levers pull both ends of the band at the same time with the same tension.
It seemed to me evidently less than a minute from the time of feeding the machine until the bale was rolled out, flat as a pillow, and hard as the hardest wood. It still remained only five inches thick at the sides, but the internal pressure bent out the bands ovally so that the bale became about a foot thick in the center. Yet the reduction seemed magical. I am told this machine presses upwards of six hundred bales a day. Afterwards I saw in the yard near by about a thousand bales thus pressed, standing balanced on end, and at a distance they looked rather like mattresses than bales, with their edges turned toward the spectator. I saw “floats” arrive at the gate with plantation bales piled upon them, one tier above another, fifteen bales being the legal load for a float; and I saw them drive off to the levee with their freight repressed, neatly packed in one tier with room to spare. Perhaps I could not give you a better idea of the power of this machine than by stating the fact that not long ago, during a test exhibition, it compressed a bale of good cotton to a density of eighty pounds per cubic foot! Considerable discussion has been held on the question whether such tremendous pressure does not injure the cotton fiber; and experiments have been made both at Liverpool and New Orleans with a view to ascertaining the actual result to the cotton. I am informed that as yet microscopical investigation has shown no injury whatever to the fiber.
—Do you remember that charming little story, “Pere Antoine’s Date-Palm,” written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with “Marjorie Daw” and other tales?
Pere Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy he had conceived a strong friendship for a fellow student of about his own age, who, in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman, graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Pere Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed from the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to take care of.
The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them.
So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the wild reef, until there came upon her that strange home-sickness which is death; and still dreaming of the beautiful palms, she gradually passed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Pere Antoine near his own home.
By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully, there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown from the heart of the dead child.
So the years passed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest’s home and the palm tree, trying to push Pere Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled up gold upon his door-steps and he laughed at them; they went to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying, he passed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down that palm tree loses the land that it grows upon.
“And there it stands,” says the Poet, “in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamored. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!”
Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in seeking it. I visited the neighborhood of the old Place d’Armes—now Jackson Square—and could find no trace of it; then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among the groves of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the names. Then I found many date palms. Some were quite young, with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell and asked if that was Pere Antoine’s date-palm. Alas! nobody had ever heard of the Pere Antoine.
Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest whether they had ever heard of the Pere Antoine. And they answered me that they knew him not, after having searched the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish cathedral.
Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a garden on St. Charles street, so graceful that I felt the full beauty of Solomon’s simile as I had never felt it before: “Thy stature is like to a palm-tree.” I rang the bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged.
At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing, he said, in New Orleans street, near the French Cathedral, and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave of some Turk or Moor,—perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers or Tunis—who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was buried on its moist shores. But it was not at all like the other palm trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a date palm. It was a real Oriental palm: yea, in sooth, such a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love songs.
“I said, I will go up to the palm tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof.”
I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the center of a dingy wood-shed, on the north side of Orleans street, towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it bearing the name “M. Michel.” I walked in and went up to the palm tree. A laborer was sawing wood in the back shed, and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage door, and a beautiful Creole woman opened it.
“May I ask, Madame, whether this palm tree was truly planted by the Pere Antoine?”
“Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan was buried under that tree—or the son of a Sultan. And there are also some who say that a priest planted it.”
“Was it the Pere Antoine, Madame?”
“I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen any other palm tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It flowers every year, with beautiful yellow blossoms the color of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit,—a kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told they make oil from the fruit of such palms.”
I though it looked so sad, that beautiful tree, in the dusty wood-yard with no living green thing near it. As its bright verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine and friendless in a strange land. “Oh, c’est bien gracieux,” murmured the handsome Creole lady.
“Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if he cuts down the tree?”
“Mais oui! But the proprietors of the ground have always respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!”
Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that when the French troops first arrived in this part of the country they noticed that tree. “Why,” I exclaimed, “that must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!” “It was in 1679, I believe,” he answered. As for the Pere Antoine, he had never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a romance which was beautiful.
Cincinnati Commercial, November 26, 1877