Chapter: THE ENCANTADAS; OR, ENCHANTED ISLES. SKETCH FIRST.

THE ISLES AT LARGE.

  --"That may not be, said then the ferryman,
  Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne;
  For those same islands seeming now and than,
  Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,
  But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne
  In the wide waters; therefore are they hight
  The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne;
  For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight
  Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;
  For whosoever once hath fastened
  His foot thereon may never it secure
  But wandreth evermore uncertein and unsure."

       *       *       *       *       *

  "Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
  That still for carrion carcasses doth crave;
  On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
  Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave
  Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl,
  And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl."


Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an
outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and
the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general
aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct
volcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, after
a penal conflagration.

It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness,
furnish a parallel to this group. Abandoned cemeteries of long ago, old
cities by piecemeal tumbling to their ruin, these are melancholy enough;
but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity,
they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence,
even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times
inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less
unpleasurable feelings.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses of
unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest of
solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides
and seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men,
those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar
stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day,
the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which
exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them
change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by
the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while
already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more
upon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain
never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they
are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercy
upon me," the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and send
Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my
tongue, for I am tormented in this flame."

Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It
is deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal should
den in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harbor
even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little
but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders,
snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the _aguano_.
No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a
hiss.

On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more
ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry
bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep
fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched
growth of distorted cactus trees.

In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly,
clinker-bound; tumbled masses of blackish or greenish stuff like the
dross of an iron-furnace, forming dark clefts and caves here and there,
into which a ceaseless sea pours a fury of foam; overhanging them with a
swirl of gray, haggard mist, amidst which sail screaming flights of
unearthly birds heightening the dismal din. However calm the sea
without, there is no rest for these swells and those rocks; they lash
and are lashed, even when the outer ocean is most at peace with, itself.
On the oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of
the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise
themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous
places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight. In no world but a
fallen one could such lands exist.

Those parts of the strand free from the marks of fire, stretch away in
wide level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and there
decayed bits of sugar-cane, bamboos, and cocoanuts, washed upon this
other and darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward and
southward; all the way from Paradise to Tartarus; while mixed with the
relics of distant beauty you will sometimes see fragments of charred
wood and mouldering ribs of wrecks. Neither will any one be surprised at
meeting these last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddy
throughout nearly all the wide channels of the entire group. The
capriciousness of the tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea.
Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and every way unreliable, and so
given to perplexing calms, as at the Encantadas. Nigh a month has been
spent by a ship going from one isle to another, though but ninety miles
between; for owing to the force of the current, the boats employed to
tow barely suffice to keep the craft from sweeping upon the cliffs, but
do nothing towards accelerating her voyage. Sometimes it is impossible
for a vessel from afar to fetch up with the group itself, unless large
allowances for prospective lee-way have been made ere its coming in
sight. And yet, at other times, there is a mysterious indraft, which
irresistibly draws a passing vessel among the isles, though not bound to
them.

True, at one period, as to some extent at the present day, large fleets
of whalemen cruised for spermaceti upon what some seamen call the
Enchanted Ground. But this, as in due place will be described, was off
the great outer isle of Albemarle, away from the intricacies of the
smaller isles, where there is plenty of sea-room; and hence, to that
vicinity, the above remarks do not altogether apply; though even there
the current runs at times with singular force, shifting, too, with as
singular a caprice.

Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail for
a great distance round about the total group, and are so strong and
irregular as to change a vessel's course against the helm, though
sailing at the rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference in
the reckonings of navigators, produced by these causes, along with the
light and variable winds, long nourished a persuasion, that there
existed two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of the
Encantadas, about a hundred leagues apart. Such was the idea of their
earlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as late as 1750, the charts of
that part of the Pacific accorded with the strange delusion. And this
apparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles was
most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada,
or Enchanted Group.

But not uninfluenced by their character, as they now confessedly exist,
the modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of this
name might have in part originated in that air of spell-bound desertness
which so significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better suggest the
aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into
ashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they
themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same:
fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.

Nor would the appellation, enchanted, seem misapplied in still another
sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these
wilds--whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name,
Gallipagos--concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long
cherished a superstition, not more frightful than grotesque. They
earnestly believe that all wicked sea-officers, more especially
commodores and captains, are at death (and, in some cases, before death)
transformed into tortoises; thenceforth dwelling upon these hot
aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.

Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by the
woe-begone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by the
tortoises. For, apart from their strictly physical features, there is
something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures.
Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so
suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful
longevity does not fail to enhance the impression.

Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing in
enchantments, can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now,
when leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among the
Adirondack Mountains, far from the influences of towns and
proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature; when at such times
I sit me down in the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by
prostrate trunks of blasted pines and recall, as in a dream, my other
and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles; and
remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks
protruded from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld the
vitreous inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep ruts by ages and
ages of the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of scanty
water; I can hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have indeed
slept upon evilly enchanted ground.

Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy, that
I know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusion
concerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social merriment, and
especially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions, so
that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular and
spacious room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth of
lonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze
and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from
those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the
ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with "Memento * * * * *" burning in live
letters upon his back.

       *       *       *       *       *

 The story starts off with a quote from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene about dangerous islands that are dark, doleful, dreary, and other things beginning with "d". The story proper begins with a discussion of the Enchanted Isles, or Encantadas, known in English as the Galapagos. The islands were made by volcanos, and they are...well, dark, doleful and dreary, Shmoop supposes. Melville says the islands are even more awful and desolate than other isolated places, because they're at the equator, where nothing changes. There aren't even jackals on the Galapagos; that's how forlorn it is. There are just reptiles. It's all volcanic rock and wasteland. Not a vacation spot The ocean currents are nasty too, which makes it hard to get from island to island. There's a superstition that reptiles are transformed wicked sea-officers. Would being a turtle really be so bad? Turtles seem pretty content, really.... That is Shmoop's opinion there. Melville thinks turtles look sad. Melville says sometimes now at home he imagines himself back in those brutal islands. This is sort of like "The Piazza," but with turtles instead of Marianna. The turtles work better.

