The Isle of Pines used to be the favourite resort of the pirates of the Spanish main; indeed there were no other inhabitants.  The creeks and rivers being lined with the densest vegetation, a few yards up the winding course of such a creek, they were lost in the forest, and a cruiser might pass within a few yards of their lurking-place, and see no traces of them.  Captain Kyd often came here, and stories of his buried treasures are still told among the inhabitants.  Now the island serves a double purpose; it is a place of resort for the Cubans, who come to rusticate and bathe, and it serves as a settlement for those free black inhabitants of Florida who chose to leave that country when it was given up to the United States.  One of these Floridanos accompanied us as our guide next day to the Banos de Santa Fe.

When we left the village we passed near the mangrove trees, which were growing not only near the water but in it, and like to spread their roots among the thick black slime which accumulates so fast in this country of rapid vegetable growth, and as rapid decomposition.  In Cuba, the mangoe is the abomination of the planters, for they supply the runaway slaves with food, upon which they have been known to subsist for months, whilst the mangroves give them shelter.  A little further inland we found the guava, a thick-spreading tree, with smooth green leaves.  From its fruit is made guava-jelly, but as yet it was not ripe enough to eat.

In the middle of the island we came upon marble-quarries.  They are hardly worked now; but when they were first established, a number of emancipados were employed there.  What emancipados are, it is worth while to explain.  They are Africans taken from captured slavers, and are set to work under government inspection for a limited number of years, on a footing something like that of the apprentices in Jamaica, in the interregnum between slavery and emancipation.  In Cuba it is remarked that the mortality among the emancipados is frightful.  They seldom outlive their years of probation.  The explanation of this piece of statistics is curious.  The fact is that every now and then, when an old man dies, they bury him as one of the emancipados, whose register is sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are told.

We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.  The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.  Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper patches nearer to the coast.  The hills were covered with the pine-trees from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side by side.