The Lake of Pitch

The Lake of Pitch by Esther Singleton

"The Lake of Pitch" is Esther Singleton's compilation piece drawing on Charles Kingsley's firsthand account of visiting the Pitch Lake at La Brea, Trinidad, weaving natural observation, colonial history, and indigenous myth into a layered descriptive narrative. The account opens with the narrator's approach by boat to the pitch-blackened shore of La Brea, where the very beach, reefs, and tidal pools are composed of asphalt. A mulatto police officer — praised as an exemplary product of colonial discipline — guides the party safely to shore. The surrounding settlement is rendered in striking detail: wooden houses on stilts to allow air circulation, soil that is half pitch and half earth, slowly shifting under tropical heat, causing buildings to tilt and sink. Despite this unstable ground, the soil is fertile, producing celebrated pineapples and the dye-plant Bixa orellana (arnotta), whose waxy seeds color both European cheeses and the bodies of indigenous peoples of the Spanish Main. The party ascends a gradual slope toward the lake itself, passing through increasingly pitch-saturated terrain that resembles an English fen transplanted to the tropics. The narrator describes the pitch as a "black glacier," perpetually creeping downhill under the thermal expansion and contraction of the tropical sun. Cresting the final rise, they encounter the lake — unexpectedly situated atop an elevated plateau rather than a depression — a vast, glittering black expanse intersected by clear water channels teeming with small fish and water-beetles. The surface is composed of countless rounded asphalt bosses pressed together like the caps of mushrooms, their seams filled with water. The smell, a combination of sulphuretted hydrogen and heat-amplified asphalt, drives the party quickly across the lake and onto the far shore. There, the contrast is absolute: the hellish pitch lake gives way immediately to a cathedral grove of Moriche fan-palms, their sixty-foot trunks rising like columns, their interlocked fronds forming a canopied roof compared favorably to the finest Gothic architecture. The narrator reflects that it is fortunate Dante had never seen this lake, for its visual properties — the black, slowly swallowing pitch beneath pitiless tropical sun, set against a paradise of cool shade just beyond — would have furnished the poet with imagery far more viscerally horrible than anything he invented. The piece then pivots to history. The narrator quotes the chronicle of Las Casas to recount the atrocity committed by Juan Bono, a Spanish slaver dispatched from Santo Domingo to capture indigenous people from Trinidad. The Arawaks and Guaraons of the island, described as mild, trusting, and hospitable, welcomed Bono and his fifty or sixty men, offering to build them housing. Under the pretense of community, Bono had a large bell-shaped house constructed, assembled the entire native population inside it under false pretenses, and massacred them. This episode stands as the narrative's moral center: a meditation on the destruction of an innocent people who, the narrator insists, deserved a far nobler fate. The account closes with an indigenous myth, relayed by a near-centenarian half-caste Indian named Señor Trinidada to the historian Mr. Joseph some decades earlier. According to the legend, the Pitch Lake occupies the site of a former Chayma village. The Chaymas lived prosperously beside the sea, surrounded by flamingoes, horned screamers, and above all, clouds of hummingbirds — which, in their belief system, were the souls of dead Indians transformed into living jewels. The Chaymas, heedless of this sacred identity, killed the hummingbirds carelessly, offending the Good Spirit. One morning, the Guaraons passing by found the village vanished, replaced by the Lake of Pitch. The narrator closes with the observation that a people capable of generating such a myth were worthy of a far better destiny than the one colonialism assigned them.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1906 · Genre: Travel Narrative, Natural History Essay, Descriptive Prose · 2,364 words

First lines

(_TRINIDAD_) / CHARLES KINGSLEY

This Pitch Lake should be counted among the wonders of the world; for it is, certainly, tolerably big. It covers ninety-nine acres, and contains millions of tons of so-called pitch.

Genres

Tags

travel literature · geography · Caribbean · Trinidad · natural wonders · asphalt lake · exploration · adventure · descriptive prose · nature writing · volcanic landscapes · colonial-era travel

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The Lake of Pitch is listed on Textopian as an article by Esther Singleton, dated 1906 CE.

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