Far Tortuga

“This novel is Matthiessen at his best—a masterfully spun yarn, a little other-worldly, a dreamlike momentum.… Like everything of his, it’s also a deep declaration of love for the planet.”

—
THOMAS PYNCHON

“One of the best books of the year.”

—
The New York Times

“Unique … original … enormously haunting.”

—
WILLIAM STYRON

“Without question the most poetic and original novel of the season.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“It exudes a magnificent and paradoxical radiance.”

—
Saturday Review

“An example of what the novel of the future will undoubtedly become—a highly charged vision of life that makes tremors run along our spine.”

—
Cleveland Press

Vintage Books Edition, January 1988

Copyright © 1975 by Peter Matthiessen

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., in 1975, and in paperback, as a Vintage Contemporaries Book, by Vintage Books, in 1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthiessen, Peter.
Far Tortuga.
I. Title.
[PS3563.A8584F3 1988] 813’54 87-40154
eISBN: 978-0-307-81969-7

v3.1

FOR MARIA

In terms of distance from the nearest land, the most isolated point in the Caribbean is a group of ocean islands south of Cuba. On a voyage north from Panama to Hispaniola, according to the journal kept in 1503 by Ferdinand Columbus, “we were in sight of two very small and low islands, full of tortoises, as was all the sea about, insomuch that they look’d like little rocks, for which reason those islands were called Tortugas.” Later, these islands were confused with Far Tortuga, called
Misteriosa
by the Spanish, a remote cay on the outer banks off Nicaragua that is not to be found on modern charts; Far Tortuga may have worn away in hurricane, leaving only submerged reef, but it seems more likely that this cay was a mere dream and legend of the turtle men
.

Eventually, Columbus’ islands became known as the Caimans, Caymanos, and Cayman Islands, from the Carib
caiman,
or “crocodilian.” (Sir William Dampier, who visited Grand Cayman in 1675–76, mentions the presence of crocodiles on the surface at West Bay.) In the late seventeenth century, the Caymans were a common ground for sea rovers of all nations, who came there mainly for
tortugas;
these green sea turtles, which could be kept alive on deck, supplied fresh provender for the pillage of the Caribbean
.

Apart from their turtles, the barren islands were considered worthless, and no country bothered to claim them until 1655, when England seized Jamaica from Spain. The British regarded the turtle cays as outposts of the larger island, and acquired them officially in 1670 by the provisions of the Treaty of Madrid. In this same year, the Spanish of Cuba burned twenty wood huts at “Caimanos” in an effort to suppress its raffish settlement of castaways, freebooters and deserters from the British army in Jamaica; these punitive raids, which continued for a century, have never been forgiven to this day
.

In 1677, Dutch pirates taking water in the islands left behind a few blacks seized from a French slaving ship burned at Haiti, and some of these Africans mixed with the whites to form the ancestral population. By the time the first true settlers arrived at Grand Cayman, in the early eighteenth century, the green turtles were so depleted that ships no longer came to hunt them, and the Caymanians themselves were
scouring the south coast of Cuba and the islands called Jardines de la Reina, where the turtle fishery was eked out with brigandage. Apparently they had retained their “turbulent disposition,” for as late as 1798, Grand Cayman was called a “pirate’s nest” by the Cubans, who appealed to Madrid to wipe it off the earth: “The islet is inhabited by a handful of lawless men who bear the name and carry on the trade of fisher-folk, but who are in reality nothing more than sea-robbers. The island constitutes their lair, and it is the place where they hide their ill-gotten gains.” The pirate Neale Walker frequented the island, and Edward Thatch, the notorious “Blackbeard,” once “took a small turtler” at Grand Cayman, though what fate is implied by “took” is not recorded. Without question it was a ruffianly place. As Bunce observes in Sir Walter Scott’s
The Pirate:
“Is he dead? It is a more serious question here than it would be on the Grand Caymains … where a brace or two of fellows may be shot in the morning and no more heard of, or asked about them than if they were so many wood pigeons.”

In the nineteenth century, the only marked change in island customs was the reduction of piracy to the “wrecking business”—luring ships onto the reefs, premature salvage and the like—and the transfer of the turtle fishery from south Cuba to the Miskito Cays off Nicaragua, with a resultant occupation by Caymanians not only of that coast but of the remote cays from Old Providence, a Colombian possession, north to the Bay Islands of Honduras. Miskito Indians, who were expert turtle fishermen, were conscripted for the crews (Dampier had taken a Miskito harpooner on his voyage to the Celebes) and there occurred a small reverse migration of these Indians to Grand Cayman: even today, in the faces of the turtle men, a strain of Indian is quite apparent. But contact with the outside world was small, and declined still further as the nineteenth century came to an end. The Caymans lay across the trade winds, near old sailing routes, but with the advent of steam and swift straight courses, the passing ship was rarely more than a faint smudge on the encircling horizon
.

Cover

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Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

About the Author

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