Part 2
The season for cutting the mahogany usually commences about the month of August. The gangs of labourers employed in this work consist of from twenty to fifty each, but few exceed the latter number. They are composed of slaves and free persons, without any comparative distinction of rank, and it very frequently occurs that the conductor of such work, here styled the Captain, is a slave. Each gang has also one person belonging to it termed the Huntsman. He is generally selected from the most intelligent of his fellows, and his chief occupation is to search the woods, or, as it is called, _the bush_, to find labour for the whole. Accordingly, about the beginning of August, the huntsman is despatched on his important mission. He cuts his way through the thickest of the woods to some elevated situation, and climbs the tallest tree he finds, from which he minutely surveys the surrounding country. At this season the leaves of the mahogany tree are invariably of a yellow reddish hue, and an eye accustomed to this kind of exercise, can, at a great distance, discern the places where the wood is most abundant. He now descends, and to such places his steps are directed; and, without compass, or other guide than what observation has imprinted on his recollection, he never fails to reach the exact point at which he aims. On some occasions no ordinary stratagem is necessary to be resorted to, by the huntsman, to prevent others from availing themselves of the advantage of his discoveries; for, if his steps be traced by those who may be engaged in the same pursuit, which is a very common thing, all his ingenuity must be exerted to beguile them from the true scent. In this, however, he is not always successful, being followed by those who are entirely aware of all the arts he may use, and whose eyes are so quick that the lightest turn of a leaf, or the faintest impression of the foot, is unerringly perceived. The treasure being, however, reached by one party or another, the next operation is the felling of a sufficient number of trees to employ the gang during the season. The mahogany tree is commonly cut about ten or twelve feet from the ground, a stage being erected for the axe-man employed in levelling it. The trunk of the tree, from the dimensions of the wood it furnishes, is deemed the most valuable; but, for ornamental purposes, the limbs, or branches, are generally preferred.
A sufficient number of trees being felled to occupy the gang during the season, they commence cutting the roads upon which they are to be transported. This may fairly be estimated at two-thirds of the labour and expense of mahogany cutting. Each mahogany work forms in itself a small village on the bank of a river,--the choice of situation being always regulated by the proximity of such river to the mahogany intended as the object of future operations.
After completing the establishment of a sufficient number of huts for the accommodation of the workmen, a main road is opened from the settlement, in a direction as near as possible to the centre of the body of trees so felled, into which branch-roads are afterwards introduced, the ground through which the roads are to run being yet a mass of dense forest, both of high trees and underwood. The labourers commence by clearing away the underwood with cutlasses. This labour is usually performed by task-work, of one hundred yards, each man, per day. The underwood being removed, the larger trees are then cut down by the axe, as even with the ground as possible, the task being also at this work one hundred yards per day to each labourer. The hard woods growing here, on failure of the axe, are removed by the application of fire. The trunks of these trees, although many of them are valuable, such as bullet-tree, ironwood, redwood, and sapodilla, are thrown away as useless, unless they happen to be adjacent to some creek or small river, which may intersect the road. In that case they are applied to the construction of bridges, which are frequently of considerable size, and require great labour to make them of sufficient strength to bear such immense loads as are brought over them.
If the mahogany trees are much dispersed or scattered, the labour and extent of road-cutting is, of course, greatly increased. It not unfrequently occurs that miles of road and many bridges are made to a single tree, that may ultimately yield but one log. When roads are cleared of brush-wood, they still require the labour of hoes, pick-axes, and sledge hammers to level down the hillocks, to break the rocks, and to cut such of the remaining stumps as might impede the wheels that are hereafter to pass over them.
The roads being now in a state of readiness, which may generally be effected by the month of December, the cross cutting, as it is technically called, commences. This is merely dividing crosswise, by means of saws, each mahogany tree into logs, according to their length; and it often occurs, that while some are but long enough for one log, others, on the contrary, will admit of four or five being cut from the same trunk or stem. The chief guide for dividing the trees into logs is the necessity for equalizing the loads the cattle have to draw. Consequently, as the tree increases in thickness, the logs are reduced in length. This, however, does not altogether obviate the irregularity of the loads, and a supply of oxen are constantly kept in readiness to add to the usual number, according to the weight of the log. This becomes unavoidable, from the very great difference of size of the mahogany trees, the logs taken from one tree being about 300 cubic feet, while those from the next may be as many thousand. The largest log ever cut in Honduras was of the following dimensions:--Length, 17 feet; breadth, 57 inches; depth, 64 inches; measuring 5,168 superficial feet, or 15 tons weight.
The sawing being now completed, the logs are reduced, by means of the axe, from the round or natural form, into the square. The month of March is now reached, when all the preparation before described is, or ought to be, completed; when the dry season, or time of drawing down the logs from the place of their growth, commences. This process can only be carried on in the months of April and May; the ground, during all the rest of the year, being too soft to admit of a heavily laden truck to pass over it without sinking. It is now necessary that not a moment should be lost in drawing out the wood to the river.
A gang of forty men is generally capable of working six trucks. Each truck requires seven pair of oxen and two drivers; sixteen to cut food for the cattle, and twelve to load or put the logs on the carriages. From the intense heat of the sun, the cattle, especially, would be unable to work during its influence; and, consequently, the loading and carriage of the timber is performed in the night. The logs are placed upon the trucks by means of a temporary platform laid from the edge of the truck to a sufficient distance upon the ground, so as to make an inclined plane, upon which the log is gradually pushed up by bodily labour, without any further mechanical aid.
The operations of loading and carrying are thus principally performed during the hours of darkness. The torches employed are pieces of wood split from the trunk of the pitch-pine. The river-side is generally reached by the wearied drivers and cattle before the sun is at its highest power; and the logs, marked with the owner’s initials, are thrown into the river.
About the end of May the periodical rains again commence; the torrents of water discharged from the clouds are so great as to render the roads impassable in the course of a few hours, when all trucking ceases. About the middle of June the rivers are swollen to an immense height. The logs then float down a distance of two hundred miles, being followed by the gang in pitpans (a kind of flat-bottomed canoe), to disengage them from the branches of the overhanging trees, until they are stopped by a boom placed in some situation convenient to the mouth of the river. Each gang then separates its own cutting, by the marks on the ends of the logs, and forms them into large rafts; in which state they are brought down to the wharves of the proprietors, where they are taken out of the water, and undergo a second process of the axe, to make the surface smooth. The ends, which frequently get split and rent by being dashed against rocks in the river by the force of the current, are also sawed off. They are now ready for shipping.
The ships clearing out from Belize, the principal port of Honduras, with their valuable freight of mahogany, either come direct to England, or take their cargo to some free warehousing port of the British possessions in the West Indies or America.
We must describe the beautiful process of cutting mahogany logs into veneers, before we have reached the point when the skill of the cabinet-maker is employed to produce a mahogany table. This shall be done in an early number.
[Illustration: Trucking Mahogany.]
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WHAT IS EDUCATION?
This may seem a very simple question, and very easily answered; but many who think so, would really be very much at a loss to answer it correctly. Every man, in a free country, wants three sorts of education:--one, to fit him for his own particular trade or calling,--this is professional education;--another, to teach him his duties as a man and a citizen,--this is moral and political education;--and a third, to fit him for his higher relations, as God’s creature, designed for immortality,--this is religious education. Now, in point of fact, that is most useful to a man which tends most to his happiness; a thing so plain, that it seems foolish to state it. Yet people constantly take the word “useful” in another sense, and mean by it, not what tends most to a man’s happiness, but what tends most to get money for him; and therefore they call professional education a very useful thing: but the time which is spent in general education, whether moral or religious, they are apt to grudge as thrown away, especially if it interferes with the other education, to which they confine the name of “useful;” that is, the education which enables a man to gain his livelihood. Yet we might all be excellent in our several trades and professions, and still be very ignorant, very miserable, and very wicked. We might do pretty well just while we were at work on our business; but no man is at work always. There is a time which we spend with our families; a time which we spend with our friends and neighbours; and a very important time which we spend with ourselves. If we know not how to pass these times well, we are very contemptible and worthless _men_, though we may be very excellent lawyers, surgeons, chemists, engineers, mechanics, labourers, or whatever else may be our particular employment. Now, what enables us to pass these times well, and our times of business also, is not our _professional_ education, but our _general_ one. It is the education which all need equally--namely, that which teaches a man, in the first place, his duty to God and his neighbour; which trains him to good principles and good temper; to think of others, and not only of himself. It is that education which teaches him, in the next place, his duties as a citizen--to obey the laws always, but to try to get them made as perfect as possible; to understand that a good and just government cannot consult the interests of one particular class of calling, in preference to another, but must see what is for the good of the whole; that every interest, and every order of men, must give and take; and that if each were to insist upon having everything its own way, there would be nothing but the wildest confusion, or the merest tyranny. And because a great part of all that goes wrong in public or private life arises from ignorance and bad reasoning, all that teaches us, in the third place, to reason justly, and puts us on our guard against the common tricks of unfair writers and talkers, or the confusions of such as are puzzle-headed, is a most valuable part of a man’s education, and one of which he will find the benefit whenever he has occasion to open his mouth to speak, or his ears to hear. And, finally, all that makes a man’s mind more active, and the ideas which enter it nobler and more beautiful, is a great addition to his happiness whenever he is alone, and to the pleasure which others derive from his company when he is in society. Therefore it is most _useful_ to learn to love and understand what is _beautiful_, whether in the works of God, or in those of man; whether in the flowers and fields, and rocks and woods, and rivers, and sea and sky; or in fine buildings, or fine pictures, or fine music; and in the noble thoughts and glorious images of poetry. This is the education which will make a man and a people good, and wise, and happy. Give this,--and the ends of professional education can never be altogether lost; for good sense and good principle will ensure a man’s knowing his particular business; but knowledge of his business, on the other hand, will not ensure _them_; and not only are sense and goodness the rarest and most profitable qualities with which any man can enter upon life now, but they are articles of which there never can be a glut: no competition or over-production will lessen their value; but the more of them that we can succeed in manufacturing, so much the higher will be their price, because there will be more to understand and to love them.
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_Honesty is the best Policy._--Irritated one day at the bad faith of Madame Jay, Mirabeau said to her in my presence, “Madam Jay, if probity did not exist, we ought to invent it, as the best means of getting rich.”--_Dumont_
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THE WEEK.
[Illustration: The Rev. John Wesley.]
June 17.--The birth-day of JOHN WESLEY, the celebrated founder of the more numerous division of the English Methodists. He was the second son of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire, where he was born in the year 1703. Although his father was a man of considerable literary attainments, being known to the public as the author of various works in verse, it was to his mother, a woman of a much more zealous and active character than her husband, that Wesley was chiefly indebted for his early education, and probably also for the seeds of many of his distinguished mental habits.
After receiving a very systematic elementary tuition from his mother, John Wesley was sent to the Charterhouse, from whence he removed at the usual time to Christ-church College, Oxford. Here he distinguished himself greatly by his diligence and success as a student, showing from the first, in the distribution of his time, the same punctual and persevering regard to method by means of which he mainly achieved all the greater objects of his life. The reading of some religious works, and especially of ‘Law’s Serious Call,’ awakened in him a strong spirit of religious fervour; and he formed that association with a number of his college acquaintances of similar views and feelings, to which, from the punctilious regularity of the members in their devotions and general demeanour, the epithet of “methodists” was given as a name of reproach by the wags of the university. As has happened in other cases, the objects of the intended satire were much too earnest in the views they had adopted to feel or to regard any point of ridicule which it might be supposed to possess, and frankly adopted the nick-name thus bestowed upon them by their opponents, as their proper designation. Among their number, besides Wesley, was the afterwards equally celebrated George Whitfield.
We cannot here attempt to pursue minutely the remainder of the course of Wesley’s busy life, or to trace the rise of that extensive fabric of ecclesiastical policy of which he was the founder. Suffice it to say, that having commenced his public labours as a religious teacher in the newly-formed colony of Georgia, in America, in the year 1735, he pursued from this time a course of almost constant journeying, preaching, and writing, till within a week of his death, on the 2d of March, 1791, in the eighty-eighth year of his age. During the greater part of this long period he rarely preached less than twice, and often four or five times a day; while, besides presiding with the most minute superintendence over all the public affairs of the large and rapidly growing community which acknowledged him as its head, and transacting a great deal of private business, he found time to send to the press a succession of works, which, in the collected edition, amount to between thirty and forty volumes. Mr. Southey, who has made the life of this extraordinary man one of the most interesting books in the language, has given us the following account of the manner in which he contrived to get through all this occupation. “Leisure and I,” said Wesley, “have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live, if my health is so long indulged to me.” This resolution was made in the prime of life, and never was resolution more punctually observed. “Lord, let me not live to be useless!” was the prayer which he uttered after seeing one whom he had long known as an active and useful magistrate, reduced by age to be “a picture of human nature in disgrace, feeble in body and mind, slow of speech and understanding.” He was favoured with a constitution vigorous beyond that of ordinary men, and with an activity of spirit which is even rarer than his singular felicity of health and strength. Ten thousand cares of various kinds, he said, were no more weight or burthen to his mind than ten thousand hairs were to his head.... His manner of life was the most favourable that could have been devised for longevity. He rose early, and lay down at night with nothing to keep him waking, or trouble him in sleep. His mind was always in a pleasurable and wholesome state of activity; he was temperate in his diet, and lived in perpetual locomotion. And frequent change of air is, perhaps, of all things, that which most conduces to joyous health and long life. The time which Mr. Wesley spent in travelling was not lost. “History, poetry, and philosophy,” said he, “I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times.” He used to throw the reins on his horse’s neck, and in this way he rode, in the course of his life, above a hundred thousand miles, without any accident of sufficient magnitude to make him sensible of the danger which he incurred.
June 21.--_The Longest Day._--On this day there is an interval of sixteen hours and thirty-four minutes between the rising and the setting of the sun, which interval is longer than on any other day in the year. Up to this point, from the 21st December (the shortest day), the days have steadily increased in length; from this point they will steadily decrease. We may more properly, at some future time, explain in a series of papers some of the more remarkable phenomena of the changes of seasons. At present we shall call our reader’s attention to the moral reflections which the recurrence of “The Longest Day” suggests, by re-printing a few stanzas of a poem by Mr. Wordsworth on this subject:--
Summer ebbs;--each day that follows Is a reflux from on high, Tending to the darksome hollows Where the frosts of winter lie.
He who governs the creation, In his providence assign’d Such a gradual declination To the life of human kind.
Yet we mark it not;--fruits redden, Fresh flowers blow, as flowers have blown, And the heart is loth to deaden Hopes that she so long hath known.
Be thou wiser, youthful Maiden! And when thy decline shall come, Let not flowers, or boughs fruit-laden, Hide the knowledge of thy doom.
Now, even now, ere wrapp’d in slumber. Fix thine eyes upon the sea That absorbs time, space, and number; Look towards eternity!
Follow thou the flowing river, On whose breast are thither borne All deceived, and each deceiver, Through the gates of night and morn;
Through the year’s successive portals; Through the bounds which many a star Marks, not mindless of frail mortals, When his light returns from far.
Thus when Thou with Time hast travell’d Tow’rds the mighty gulf of things, And the mazy stream unravell’d With thy best imaginings;
Think, if thou on beauty leanest, Think how pitiful that stay, Did not virtue give the meanest Charms superior to decay.
Duty, like a strict preceptor, Sometimes frowns, or seems to frown; Choose her thistle for thy sceptre, While thy brow youth’s roses crown.
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GENIUS AND INDUSTRY.
Whilst we believe that education is the greatest gift that can be conferred on a human creature, we are not sanguine enough to expect that its more general diffusion will increase the number of men of genius. There is a perversity in human nature which makes us relax our efforts at the moment when they might be rewarded with the most splendid success. It does not follow that a shepherd-boy, who passes his long day on the side of a hill, and who acquires the principles of mechanics, or forms for himself a plan of the stars, shall make proportionate advancement if full opportunity of study be afforded to him.
Nor does it follow that a young man who teaches himself to read by the light of a shop window in the street, shall become a learned man when admitted to libraries and encouraged by applause.
We do not think the illustration a correct one, which represents the scholar as like the weary traveller who plods on contentedly through woods and over irregular ground which conceal the prospect, and who faints when he has ascended to the top of the hill and sees the whole extent of the road before him.
The truth seems rather to be, that energy of mind, like strength of body, must be acquired by exercise, and that the consciousness of desert in encountering difficulties, must be felt to enable us to accomplish any great work. Sir Joshua Reynolds has happily expressed this:--
“It is not uncommon to see young artists, whilst they are struggling with every obstacle in their way, exert themselves with such success as to outstrip competitors possessed of every means of improvement. The promising expectation which was formed on so much being done with so little means, has recommended them to a patron, who has supplied them with every convenience of study; from that time their industry and eagerness of pursuit have forsaken them; they stand still and see others rush on before them.