• CAMP NOTES.*
Mo' of Mr. Boyle's Camp Notes have already been published in Chambers's Journal—a fact which ought to have been stated in the preface or on the title-page of this volume—but they are very welcome in their collective form, and potent to charm the imagination far away from actual surroundings to the forest, the jungle, the savannah, the company of wild-wood creatures, and of the men, wilder and deadlier still, of the Central and Southern American continent. This is a picturesque book, full of the inde- finable, and yet keenly enjoyable humour which Mr. Boyle describes as the outcome of American free selection from the phenomena of the universe, as garnish and illustration for the American's talk. It is not only a new world of adventure and exploration that has been acquired of late years, but a new language in which to relate its wonders, a language full of force and fun, dry, quaint, occa- sionally shocking, but so piquant and characteristic that it touches the fancy as nothing else can. Beasley, the big Missourian, tells snake stories beside a camp-fire on the Mosquito shore, of the most delightfully blood-curdling description, interspersed with bits of description and casual remarks which make one laugh sud- denly out loud, as European remarks have long lost the power of making one laugh. And then comes Frazer, of Greytown, with his contribution, which he premises " ain't quite so scarin' as Pike County's, but pretty risin' to the system," and it is a story of how he was lost in the kingdom of Rajah Brooke, while wandering along thp foot of the mountain with " a kind of mad squatter, who was growing a big thing in cocoa-nuts and conaiquint dung- beetles," and a boatman, " a good sort, named S' Ali, one of them wild Sulumen who live on general plunder, and thrive in face o' the Ten Commandments ;" and how the boatman was fascinated by a python, and became " amok." The story is a horrid one, though most ludicrous ; but here is the picture that precedes it one of scores which bring the great forests before us :- " We were travelling through Campong' jungle, as they call it there, old, clear wood, where there ain't much game, nor aught else but tree- trunks. They're powerful pretty, as you say, Beasley, these woods of Mosquito and San Juan, they're right down gay and happy-looking, with their flowers an' painted birds, and butterflies an' living creturs. But there's a something about them Eastern forests that we can't live aginat nohow. The trees there are bigger in girt an' taller, and their great branches so shut out the sun, that 'twist time an' eternity naught has ever lived beneath 'em. Hundreds of yards round, you may throw your eye down long dim avenues of tree-trunks, an' not a leaf nor a green thing in sight, unless, maybe, a ruff of fern, or a long trailing orchid, or a pile of monkey-cups growing side by side like tea-cups on a tray. A man might go mad easy in them 'Campongs,' I should guess. It's right down lonely to go through them by yourself, and the Lord have care and mercy on yer if yer lose the trail. No oretur lives in them, neither bird, nor beast, nor reptile. There is never a sound to be heard. The party goes silently along, Indian fashion, like as S dim procession of ghosts winding among the trees. Just the crackling of a stick in the oozy black soil under-foot makes one start out. It's a right down solemn thing, I tell yer, boys, is a Campong West of the Straits."
Incidentally throughout these stories, which are genuine stories, however, not social essays in disguise, we get wonderful glimpses of the former state of society "down West," and the exceedingly,barl time the " Greasers" or Creole population had. The first passage across Nicaragua to California, before the Transit Company existed, is sketched in a few suggestive sentences. "It's lively now, aoine-r times," says the narrator by the camp fire, " but the San Juan is like the river of the New Jerusalembeside of what it once was. Half the party was slims down in the horrors, and the other half was np in the same ; from one minute to another, a. man, could not call his life his own ; every pistol was filed in the lock, so that it nigh went off by looking at it ! The fighting was right-down free:, we lost three men between Greytown and Castillo." "Alt," asks Mr. Boyle, "was there no attempt to keep ordep? „The natives must have suffered badly in those wild times." "The Greasers daren't say much now-a-days, I guess, when the miners are on the river, an' they were even higher-handed in the days before Walker. Besides, your high moral Queen of England undertook the police business of the San Juan, at that time, an' a happy mess she made of it! There was one policeman at Grey- town to keep order among a thousand San Francisco rowdies, and that lonely official was allure down with fever. The English seemed to think their eternal Union Jack was a warrant to dis- count the Millennium I" Then comes a terrible story of how a man was lost in a jungle, and found at last, within two hundred yards of the fort he had strayed from, after seventeen days. There are finely pathetic passages of a homely kind in this story, strange, minute bits of description of the forest wonders,— one in particular, of how a bright-eyed squirrel sat in a great fern, and looked lovingly at the starving man, then sprang away like a
• Camp Yates. By Frederick Boyle. London: Chapman and Hall.
bird, and the man was " too weak even to curse ; and a grim touch of realism at the end,—" The ants had eat off my finger-ends, an' My ears, an' as to the flies, look here ! A man might shudder at that, I think, even though he were bred for a city lawyer and had married young. It's a ghastly thing to be eaten alive by insects, but never a man living was nearer to that end than I."—" Ah " said Frazer, " the Pumas 'd a finished you off in a kerslash if you'd been fit to eat."
In no book of travel within our recollection is there a finer description of an earthquake and its wide-spread horror than Frazer's story of "that burst of Cosequina's in San Salvador " ; in 1835, when the voice of the mountain was heard after a thousand years' silence, in such a thunderous roar that bird and beast fell dead with the sound alone, and great cliffs pitched into the sea ; when the roar was heard two thousand miles around, spreading fear and perplexity, and the ashes fell in a radius of four thousand feet, and at San Francisco lay two feet thick on the roof of the cathedral. The terror, and the darkness, and the awful noise which struck all living creatures with dumbness, the wholesale death, and far-spreading ruin, are all made terribly vivid, and then comes the homely ending, the natural thoughts so naturally spoken, with the quaint dash of drollery in them which is the chief characteristic of these Camp Notes.' Mr. Boyle has asked whether Cosequina has been quiet since 1835 :-
"Well, it's behaved like a decent sort of powder-cask ever since. The fuse has been allure burning and spitting, but it's never bursted up much; an' yer see, there's a big consumption of power in such a blow as that I've been telling of, an' I guess the old machine wants to recuperate a while. But as I take it, there ain't one acre of these lands which can be called right down safe against wind an' weather, like old Massoorab. Those lake shores, they say, have been still since the con- quest,—that is, they aren't had an earthquake above once a week on an,average; but what's the warning of them shakings an' terrors in Granada a month agono ? Natuf don't mostly toss about this big airth just for sport an' idleness ; there's a meaning, an' a reason, an' a secret hi every movement she makes. Eighty earthquakes in twenty-four hours—there was all that on the 11th of January, 1865—aren't just sent to scare a pile of Nicaraguan Greasers. Guess Natur' don't make much count of Greasers, no more than other big folks. Four corn har- vests a year, mind yer, an' every other crop according, is a big promise; sun and rain just when you want them looks eternally like 'Re.' But there's one thing as we think needful that one can't discount in these lovely lands—the soil's as rich as Indian territory in Sonora, the climate no man could better, though he worked it by machine ; but the earth itself—the rocks, an' rivers, and mountains—who'll hold them still for us little folks to sweat on?"
"Us little folks !" The phrase is the refrain of all these stories, in which the grandeur, the variety, the majesty, the ancientness, the inexorable might of Nature are perpetually opposed to the littleness of man, to his brief span of life, and feeble powers, even in their utmost and most lawless development. A few of them are merely " rowdy," such as " Indios Bravos Prospecting " and " Phil Death of Santa Marta," and these, though both droll and dramatic, are not at all equal to the others, in which the reader is brought inte'the jangle in many lands, made acquainted with numerous types• of savage life, introduced to charming animals of numerous kinds, enchanted with the wonderful beauty, and awed by the hidden solemnity of the great forests and the mighty rivers, made to go dovrn into the windings of terrible Egyptian excavations, among the countless mummies of the crocodile gods ; or to follow the trail of-armed Indians, and the track of the American lion and tiger ; to assist at dark and mysterious orgies of Obi-worship ; and to trace, with breathless curiosity, the fortunes'of a deadly swimming-race between a man and an alligator which is one of the most terrible of these " Camp Notes," and is made one of the most -ludicrous by the interpolated interruptions. The chapter which will 'dwell longest in the reader's memory is one in which he is invited to linger by the writer's side in a great savannah of Central America, strewn with ruins of a race extinct, hieroglyphs of a language dead, awfid memorials of a lost superstition, weapons and ornaments long since forgotten. The `author takes his seat upon a stone which, hundreds of years ago, when the warlike mountaineers of Chontales marched against the invaders in their puny citadel of Granada, was a great statue thirteen feet high. " That broken cairn on .which it lies was a stately pyramid, crowned with a dozen figures, and this the chief. These shattered lips never lacked their crimson smear when the tribe assembled to worship ; the chain of severed fingers often encircled this breast, on which is traced a Maltese Cross." Then he proceeds to watch the life of the jungle through the hours of dreamy silence, of that "living, murmuring stillness only felt in American forests, less solemn, but infinitely more beautiful than those of the other tropic." He draws a whole gallery of pictures, of which we can give but one:—
"Hotter and hotter, wave upon wave, the sultry beams poured down, and all living things sought refuge in the shade. The forest-fiies, large as humble-bees, and venomous as scorpions, ceased to balance them- selves in sunny crevices of the leaves, and harassed me no more. • The glossy black crickets swarmed no longer over my body, but thought- fully stared me out of countenance from the shadow of a stick or leaf. The ugly spiders, vast, and yellow, and spiky, dread of all travellers and hacienderos, sank deeper and deeper in their holes along the forest verge, until naught could be seen of them save their straining claws round the edge. Small flies alone, the bright-winged jewels of Mos- quito, resisted the drowsiness of the hour. They hung glittering in the sun-rays, they whizzed to and fro, they danced together in mid-air, buzzing and murmuring softly the while. So still was the forest, and dreamy and beautiful beyond all utterance, that no glance upwards was needed to recognise that crisis of tho tropic day, the hoar between two and three in the afternoon."
Under the title of " Savages I have known," Mr. Boyle gives us some powerful and picturesque sketches. The best, because the . most horrid, is that of the greatest ahikari of Sardinia, a mon- ster in comparison with whom that pattern savage, Gasing, of Borneo, who wore his stomach fitted into a nickel-silver dish-cover on state occasions, was quite a man for an afternoon tea-party.
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