La Brea - The Lake Of Pitch

( Originally Published 1905 )

A gulph profound as that Serbonian bog, Betwixt Damatia and Cassius old, Where armies whole have sunk.

—Milton.

TRINIDAD is the most southerly of the West Indian Islands and absolutely the hottest place I was ever in. It lies across the delta of the Orinoco River and is separated from South America by the Gulf of Paria. From the Caribbean Sea we entered the Dragon's Mouth and at daylight steamed into the harbour of Port of Spain, the capital of the island. The city claims a population of sixty thousand, and is saved from pestilence by torrential storms of rain and colonies of vultures, or Johnny-crows, which are protected by law, and dispute with mongrel curs the offal of the back-yards and streets. It was 94° where I sat on the balcony of the hotel, called, by way of mockery, I suppose, the Ice House. My object in coming to Trinidad was to see the f amous Lake of Pitch and I joined a group of Venezuelan rebel officers who were leaving for the lake the morning after my arrival.

The lake is thirty-six miles from this city, near to San Fernando, a prosperous town of seven thousand souls. As our party arranged to go overland, we instructed our negro driver to wait for us on the mountain road, and we began the ascent of the volcanic hill on foot.

Our path carried us through a wilderness of tropical vegetation, a riotous outpouring of primeval nature. Tall cane-l.ke manacque palms, forest nymphs, the russet and golden-hued melostromes, and the round-headed mango trees bowered the foot-hills. Higher up, the face of the mountain was robed in exquisite ferns, delicate creepers and vines clinging in festoons to trunks and branches of giant sequiae, whose bark is an excellent tonic and febrifuge, and a good substitute for quinine. On our right and left stretched away to illimitable distances forests of mahogany, rosewood, lignum vita, satinwood, and logwood. Higher up is the pimento, which yields us the aromatic allspice, the palma christi, the parent of our castor oil, and the trumpet tree, from the wood of which the negro carves his flute.

The ascent of the mountain taxed our endurance severely. "An angle of forty-five degrees" is an expression commonly used in conversation to indicate any sort of an incline somewhat out of level. As a matter of fact a slope of ten or fifteen degrees is anything but easy. We carried a clinometer, and its markings recorded slopes of fifteen and forty-two degrees. At last we gained the mountain road from which the view was entrancing. Between us and the sea lay the alluvial plain or " intervals," as they say in New Brunswick, deposited by a spur of the Orinoco, and by other rivers which flow into the Gulf of Paria. Fringing the shore mile upon mile stretched the cocoanut palms, and the mangrove swamps. Ships of many nations lay at anchor in the bay, taking in and discharging cargoes.

Trinidad is only twenty-six miles from Venezuela, and as the republic was painfully slow in meeting the interest on its European bonds, Europe, or a part of Europe, came in person to collect, accompanied by gunboats, battleships, and cruisers. Six of the warships were now riding at anchor in the bay, which was in constant agitation, caused by the steam launches, naphtha dories and mooches-au feu carrying cablegrams, messages and dispatches to and from Port of Spain. To our left, between Paria and Trinidad, an outward bound sailing ship was passing through the " Jaws of the Dragon," while a little to our right the " Serpent's Mouth," was open between the Orinoco and the island to admit the Dahome, of the Pickford and Black line, to Port of Spain.

On our road to San Fernando, we passed through groves of bread-fruit-trees, oranges, mangoes and papaws. The road was hedged with varieties of the hibiscus, blazing with crimson, pink and fawn colours. Tropical nature is ever bountiful and generous to prodigality, and let a man be what he will he cannot withhold his admiration of the wonderful creations of God that are here all around him in luxuriant profusion.

As we drew near to San Fernando, the plantain and banana plantations added to the wealth and beauty of the landscape. The plantain must be cooked before eating, but the banana is always eaten in the raw. The banana flowers and fruits, but never seeds, and is propagated by clippings. It goes back to remote times. Alexander's officers conversed with the sages of India, seated in its shade and partaking of its delicious fruit, hence the name sapientum given the plant, which also bears the title of Musa, the fair daughter of Jupiter. The banana is of Malay origin. How did it find its way to South America ? The feet of birds have carried seeds thousands of miles, while the cocoanut has floated everywhere in the great ocean currents. But the banana has no seeds, nor has it a casing like the cocoanut to bear it on the ocean waves. Is it possible that in prehistoric days it was brought by man to this continent, and that after all is said and written, Lemuria may have existed and the lost Atlantis been a reality ?

The suburbs of San Fernando are charming to the eye and fair to look upon. Here on a gentleman's lawn was the largest ceiba I have yet seen in the West Indies. This is the silk cotton tree, consecrated to Jumbi by the blacks from immemorial times, the temple of Obeah, and the sacred tree of equatorial Africa. The ceiba, full grown, has a spread of from forty to sixty yards, and is shaped like a huge umbrella. Its massive and buttressed trunk throws out enormous branches, whose boughs coil, twist and intertwine so closely that they form a protective covering from which is pendant every fantastic variety of parasite. Fond as the Trinidad negro is of money you could not bribe him to wound even the bark of the ceiba. To cut it down would be impious and portend misfortune. James Anthony Froude said that he was told by a Jamaica police officer that if a ceiba had to be removed the men who used the axe were liberally dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil. In San Fernando I saw for the first time the deadly coral snake, whose beauty tempts innocent children to fondle it.

At last we stood on the banks of La Brea, the famous Lake of Pitch, a horror-haunted stygian of unsounded depths, a mummified lake shunned by the Carib Indians, who believed it to be the abode of lost souls and evil spirits.

In the account given in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, of the battle of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah with the neighbouring princes, fought in the valley of Siddim, it is recorded that "the woodland vale had many slime pits," or fountains of bitumen. The land abounded in petroleum and asphaltum. It was used by Noah in tarring the gopher planks with which the ark was constructed, by the builders of the Tower of Babel, for " they had slime instead of mortar," and in the construction of the walls of Babylon, and no doubt contributed materially to the construction of the cities of the plains. Herodotus mentions the great amount of bitumen he saw in the valley of the Jordan around the shores of the Dead Sea. It was gathered by the boatmen and became a valuable article of commerce. In this valley were pockets of bituminous stone—a species of manjack, or New Brunswick albertite, with which the builders of the chapel of " St. John in the Wilderness" lined the interior of the sacred edifice. If Moses deemed these bituminous wells of sufficient importance to entitle them to a place in Holy Writ what would be his emotions if he gazed upon a lake of this extraordinary substance ?

On the extremity of this sea-washed island is the greatest deposit of bitumen, or pitch, of which there is any record. How many thousands of years it antedates the Noachic deluge we know not. It may have existed from the birth of time. For fifty years it has yielded immense quantities of asphaltum to Europe and America, and yet there is no appreciable diminution of its bulk or lowering of its shore line. No lead has ever sounded its gloomy depths, and no mathematician has ever been able to measure its contents. Black as Erubian night it reposes in horrible majesty, its surface unruffled by the winds and undisturbed by the hurricane. It rests now, as it always has, in its black winding-sheet, silent and dismal, a lake of death framed in terrifying solitude. Before the daring Spaniard explored its banks it was a desolation of loneliness, over which for untold time the silence of isolation brooded, and on its sinister face nothing that breathed dared to venture. The Arrawak and the Guaraon Indians shunned it as the abode of demons, and from afar looked upon it with awe and superstitious fear. Such is La Brea, a gruesome spectacle, an inferno answering to Job's description of the abode of lost souls, "ubi nullus ordo sed sempiternus horror regnat," a huge unfinished mountain of coal stopped in transit by some frightful cataclysm, or arrested in development by one of nature's awful forces. Its surroundings are like those of the Dead Sea in the days of Abraham, " a land of brimstone and of burning, which is not sown, nor beareth, nor has any grass growing thereon."

Out of this lake Raleigh dug the pitch to caulk his vessel when he came to Trinidad in quest of the elusive El Dorado. Geologists rave over it, disagree, shake their heads, and come away. At one time in the earth's age it was a paradise of vegetation, throwing one back to the carboniferous period when huge oil-bearing plants and monster gum trees were stored in the earth's great warehouse, when God was preparing the earth for the coming of man. La Brea, during the rainy season, solidifies on its surface, but returns again to its liquid state when the sun shines. It is a pitch farm of one hundred acres of a mixture of slime and bitumen which is liberating, during the day, carbonic acids and carbureted hydrogen. The generated heat causes a slow decomposition and resolves at times into petroleum and sulphurated hydrogen. Scattered around on its banks and shores are silurian rocks of immeasurable age, beds of dark sand and shale, yellow with sulphur or black with carbonaceous matter.

On the eastern side of this mountain-wonder is a pit which throws out asphaltum with violent explosives, accompanied with smoke and flames, and on the west at Punta de la Brea is another vent surrounded by small cones of slime and bitumen. Natural gas pours out of fissures and crevices as through half-inch pipes. It is said that this gas is carbureted hydrogen produced by decomposition of lignite or of some carboniferous stratum.