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Title: Working North from Patagonia - Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through - Southern and Eastern South America
Author: Franck, Harry Alverson
Language: English
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WORKING NORTH
FROM PATAGONIA
[Illustration: Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana]
WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA
BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, EARNED ON THE WAY, THROUGH SOUTHERN
AND EASTERN SOUTH AMERICA
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around
the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,”
“Roaming Through the West Indies,”
“Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc.,
etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, WITH A
MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a
continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through
Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my “Vagabonding Down the Andes.”
The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible
until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where
the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed
since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered
are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American
society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war
brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a
tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting
in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most
manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the
most part what they were when the journey was made.
Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of
including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however,
are almost indispensable; without them not only would there be a
considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious
circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this
volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no
English equivalent; because the nearest English word would be at best a
poor translation; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest,
for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or
for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at
least the first time it is introduced; the pronunciation requires little
more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter;
and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of
slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the
understanding, of those sentences in which they occur.
HARRY A. FRANCK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS 3
II ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES 24
III FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS 38
IV OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE 64
V CHILEAN LANDSCAPES 82
VI HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY 111
VII BUMPING UP TO RIO 138
VIII AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO 173
IX BRAZIL PAST AND PRESENT 193
X MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS 215
XI STRANDED IN RIO 242
XII A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL 270
XIII ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT 295
XIV WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES 315
XV NORTHWARD TO BAHIA 342
XVI EASTERNMOST AMERICA 372
XVII THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL 399
XVIII TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON 430
XIX UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA 456
XX STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN 502
XXI ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS 554
XXII THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA 610
ILLUSTRATIONS
Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American
consul general 32
The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires 32
A Patagonian landscape 33
The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio
Negro of southern Argentine 33
A rural policeman of the Argentine 48
My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the
_Argentino_ calls a “soolky” 48
A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and
some of its inhabitants 49
A family of Santiago del Estero 49
A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand 64
Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_
of southeastern South America 64
The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with
snow 65
A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of
May 65
At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the
Andes” in a bleak and arid setting 80
The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile 80
On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in
among the boulders 81
The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the
summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a
fertile valley 81
The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have
women conductors 96
Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit
less picturesque than Valparaiso 96
The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile 97
Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South
American cities built of wood, even the streets being
paved with planks 97
Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb 112
A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern
Chile 112
A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo 113
A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at
the loss of his life’s companion 113
A rural railway station in Uruguay 128
The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat
Hills) district 128
“Pirirín” and his cowboys at an _estancia_ round-up in
northern Uruguay 129
Freighting across the gentle rolling plains of the
“Purple Land” 129
A _gaucho_ of Uruguay 132
A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia 133
An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the
blood-red mud of his native heath 133
The parasol pine-trees of southern Brazil 140
Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande
do Sul 140
A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of
us and made our train half an hour late 141
A cowboy of southern Brazil 141
The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo 160
Santos, the Brazilian coffee port 160
A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in
Nictheroy 161
The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock
hills 161
An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo 176
Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose 176
The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the
National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on
the left, a shack-built hilltop 177
A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio
Branco 224
A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive
noise-producer 224
The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the
Brazilian capital 225
The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a
distinctive whistle 240
The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil 240
The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to
Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha 241
At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth
charged with the advertising painted his own portrait
of Edison. He may be made out leaning affectionately
on the right shoulder of his masterpiece 288
The central praça of Campinas 288
Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church
above the town 289
Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is
surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations 289
Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former
Brazilian president 304
Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes 305
The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello
Horizonte, are decorated with paintings 305
Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are
found some of its gold and diamonds 320
A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina 320
In the diamond fields of Brazil 321
Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them 321
Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a
tiny edition of picturesque Rio 352
Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João” 352
Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements 353
A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore 353
The site on which Bahia was founded 368
Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a
steam laundry of Bahia 368
Taking a jack-fruit to market 369
The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil 372
The waterworks of a Brazilian city of some 15,000
inhabitants 372
A Brazilian laundry 373
Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival 373
The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay 380
Another Brazilian milkman 380
Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times 381
A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor
gasoline 381
Ladies of Pernambuco 384
A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper 384
Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk
and a dancing girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos
behind the drummer 385
The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of
downtown Recife 400
In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most
important crop 400
Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink 401
Wherever a train halts long enough in Brazil the
passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee 401
The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made
entirely of palm leaves 416
Transportation in the interior of Brazil is
primitive—and noisy 416
Our advertising matter parading the streets of a
Brazilian town off the main trail of travel 417
The _carnauba_ palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility
as well as its beauty 417
Rural policemen of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of
the region 432
From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street
car 433
A street of São Luis de Maranhão 433
My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every
station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky
negroes with nothing on their minds but a couple of
trunks 448
Dolce far niente between shows in Pará 448
The cathedral of Pará 449
Pará has been called the “City of beautiful Trees” 449
Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in
Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of
varicolored sails, a veritable fog rising from it
under the equatorial sun 464
Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native,
the other imported from India to improve the native
stock 464
A family dispute on the Amazon 465
The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both
Brazilians of the north 465
An Amazonian landscape 480
A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is
round 480
An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and
Manaos, and the Brazilian flag 481
A lace maker on the Amazon 496
The Municipal Theater of Manaos 496
Here and there our _batelão_ stopped to pick up a few
balls of rubber 497
Now and then we halted to land something at one of the
isolated huts along the Rio Branco 497
Our _batelão_ loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals
on the banks 500
The captain of my last Brazilian _batelão_, and his wife 500
Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along
the Rio Branco 501
Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open
campo of the upper Rio Branco 508
I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana
in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on
the further bank of the Mahú 508
Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme
edge of British Guiana 509
Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers 509
Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage
might not have got across what had been trickling
streams a few days before 512
We impressed an Indian father and son into service as
carriers 512
Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points 513
An Indian village along the Rupununi 513
The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills,
and paddled us down the Rupununi 528
Two of my second crew of paddlers 528
One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout 529
“Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo 529
We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old
dugout 532
“Harris” and his wife at one of their evening campfires 533
Battling with the Essequibo 533
More trouble on the Essequibo 540
High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana 540
Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea 541
The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne
have soft jobs and often wear shoes 541
A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a
negro boss 560
Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the
negroes of the French possessions in America 560
The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the
vultures 561
In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is
cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves 561
A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread 576
Homeward bound from market 576
French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne 577
White French convicts who would like to go to France,
rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who
would rather stay at home 577
Along the road in Dutch Guiana 580
A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana 580
A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native
headdress 581
A lady of Paramaribo 581
Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of
the Far East 588
Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_
plantation in Dutch Guiana 588
Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their
native musical instruments 589
Wash-day in Dutch Guiana 589
An East Indian woman of Surinam 592
A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations 592
A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana 593
Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in
which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of
rubber 593
A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections
of the railroad to the interior 596
A Bush negro family on its travels. Less than half the
dugout is shown 596
A Bush negro watching me photograph our engine 597
A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush negroes,
returning from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor
of Surinam, with his “commission” from Queen
Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and
footsore valet 597
The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana,
with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the
background 604
An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from
Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam
plantation in order to kill the ants that would
destroy it 604
Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will
eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and
cocoa 605
A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana 608
Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday
before one of their barrack villages 608
Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on
the Orinoco 609
The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela 609
An Indian family of eastern Venezuela 612
Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears
on his travels 612
A Venezuelan landscape 613
Hammock-makers at home 620
The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable
by rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning
before the dew has dried 620
Lopez buying hammocks 621
We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to
quench our raging thirst 621
Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a
fellow-traveler 624
Dinner time in rural Venezuela 624
Lopez enters his native village in style 625
The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family 628
Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city
waterworks 628
A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital 629
The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of
Caracas 629
A bread-seller of Caracas 636
The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the
“Washington of South America” 636
A street in Caracas 637
The Municipal Theater of Caracas 637
WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA
CHAPTER I
THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS
In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to
the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious
friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an
American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from
Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a
discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a
rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was
sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé
called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man”
brought me into daily contact with all classes of _Porteños_, as natives
of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in
their own habitat.
Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in
a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city
south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor
will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to
produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to
recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis
of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the
majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors
of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine
capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still
persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was
the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago,
and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a
true one.
A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a
Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River
Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real
harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats
far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep
into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving
that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to
extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name
of _calles_. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from
one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season
even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still
living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about
which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their
horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few
public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses;
wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless
night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither
water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage
heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet
disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most
part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease
bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures
of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but
little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly
provincial, conservative and fanatical.
Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider
themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the
outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore,
that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest
Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin
cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling
Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of
its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some
of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its
endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a
semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to
believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding
artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in
existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions
of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the
teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules
languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción.
The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the
cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity.
The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its
unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of
modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was
a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that
posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to
accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in
a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum
demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more
congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan
Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for
nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other
of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a
walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now
mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience,
according to the mood or the haste of the victim.
The _Porteño_ has made various bold attacks upon this problem of
congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a
half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings
in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo,
somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the
Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate _Casa Rosada_,
or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which
resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national
capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of
insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day,
and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway
to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront
to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic
which refuses to risk itself in the constricted _calles_ of the downtown
labyrinth.
Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old
town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon
an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by
the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city
where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires.
There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or
more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and
a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander
for hours without crossing the same ground twice.
Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is
quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with
unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it
has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far
aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a
city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and
one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it
has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and
stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems
among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance
it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an
average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an
ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level.
Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its
general aspect.
On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other
great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical
garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old
established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and
there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed
conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly
all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems
more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles
Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention
certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the
_Porteño_ and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly
all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is
he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all
South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more
or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good _argentinos_. The
artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost
subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the
guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps.
City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not
fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires
rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic
improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to
the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a
decade from the burden of taxes.
It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its
personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated
railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of
flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious
enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in
the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction;
all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and
busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that
they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its
seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back
platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that
you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to
move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within
call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly
impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your
insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin
courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or,
if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are
beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing
it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the
congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by
the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.
I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway.
Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the
upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo”
operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once,
two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the
surface lines it belongs to the _Tranvías Anglo-Argentina_, a British
corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six
per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which
time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality.
The _argentino_ is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of
driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and
resources.
The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the
mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same,
news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the
white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and
automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,”
changed to “_Echad 10 centavos_,” which is significant of the difference
in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South
America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the
tenth of a _peso_ normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s
impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain
to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first _tren subterraneo_.
The _Porteño_ believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the
word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms
of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching
his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial
traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding
himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the
dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man
who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial
transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and
returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized
remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared
instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking
through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still
another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has
carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another
ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a
_billete suplementario_ before he is granted his freedom. There are no
express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors
soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other
hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club
easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by
disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the
coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of
any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous
opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in
getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,”
but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the
old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate
farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be
the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by
inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and
station employees.
Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and
every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of
those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night
with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to
call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are
compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully
three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which
often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might
guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places;
Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of
the races that have amalgamated to form the modern _Porteño_; one would
naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant
living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of
Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded
and narrow ones down town. Though the _Porteño_ has inherited the
Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house,
neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor
the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air
of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs
between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.
The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and
the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the
thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of
hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South
American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the
appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another
year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of
civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing
out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region.
There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of
the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are
scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the _conventillos_, or
single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost
unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and
brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great
people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure
through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to
conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again.
Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native _argentino_ in
Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there
are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea.
The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its
human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot
find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild _gauchos_ from the pampa,
the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that
troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past
century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city
of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine
capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to
the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who
came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate
number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population
of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The
long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain
to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the
local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian
fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the
United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be
learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern
republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at
home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder
Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of
his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’
free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with
the communal _abrazo_ as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is
easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more
and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for
the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the
Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as
it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is
winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like
migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money
earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more.
The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native
speech of “B. A.” and the _boína_ of the Basques is so common a
headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there
are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in
the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team.
Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are
numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish
players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find
new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior.
It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly
a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before
the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a
whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States
has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five.
Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in
the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the
Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its
social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the
Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business
columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English,
Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long
Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third
or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their
family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én”
and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands
in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names
who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish
brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth
of Latin gesticulation.
To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national
politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not
self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the
world, by the way—it is ruled by an _intendente_ appointed by the
national executive. But its influence on the national life is more
potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more
“influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of
the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon
itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is
something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old
families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and
to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege
to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant
electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities
of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well
governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are
actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the
case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the
distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of
“graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs,
our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a
nation.
It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United
States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of
citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free
and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for
instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for
two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means
room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it
necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the
necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of
fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was
already in force long before the European war. The _argentino_, however,
goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not
serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward
the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in
continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity,
issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This
document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in
the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the
simpler _cédula de identidad_ for non-citizens. The temporary resident,
and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little
volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its
absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the
attention of the police, the one who can produce his _libreto_ is far
less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has
an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call
one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better
off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither
vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without
displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified
biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The
_argentinos_ have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps
any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must
often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and
_cédula_ are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged
public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed
away under the number inscribed on his _libreto_, and where courteous
attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he
requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public.
In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the
citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to
time his military and civic record.
But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document
indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law
had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will
of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted
repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would
wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries,
Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each
polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather
than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos
Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four
officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the
vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in
groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain
considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously
about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the
_Porteño_ stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty.
The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested
permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his
military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they
permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on
the proper line of his _libreto_. This latter formality is of such
importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent
omission. For the new law in the Argentine _requires_ each citizen to
vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill
or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the
citizen whose _libreto_ does not show, at the next revision by
authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine.
The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any
“crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos
Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at
least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote
provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing
the _cacique_, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and
sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable
evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who
lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands
need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one
South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny.
The _argentino_ is in no such breathless haste as the American to know
the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning
carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the
principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of
the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring
congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the
ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day
to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the
still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified.
It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of
citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost
no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of
_sufragistas_ did make a demonstration in the capital on election day,
sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners,
flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau
were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took
the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty
and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the
police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the
new law against electioneering on the day of balloting.
Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the
election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which
I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so
palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries
that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in
the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign
resident remains an _estranjero_ all his days; even his native-born
children are apt to be called “_hijo de inglés, de italiano, de
alemán_”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the
cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps
Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of
giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of
completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second
generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up
their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian
than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If
any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as
something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes.
During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist
who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his
life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a
group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly
over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a
challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as
were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our
national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or
Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been
an _americano_.
The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much
the same feeling toward the _madre patria_ as the average American has
toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the
past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful.
The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the
slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood
for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing
butt of Spanish drama. The _Porteño_ never says he speaks Spanish,
though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England;
even in his school books he calls it the _idioma nacional_.
But the _argentino_ is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or
not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other
blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental
Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified
type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost
wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and
with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much
the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by
anything suggestive of manual labor. No _Porteño_ of standing would
dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the
Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great
_estancias_ cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they
instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as
well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the
Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there
is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes,
and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and
the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on
the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far
less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.
The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated
pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of
labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish
the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old
families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily
peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view
to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the
afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more
than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in
the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully
creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the
bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree
angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf
of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating
suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much
silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting
patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove,
with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its
wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is
carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant
carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair,
blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to
buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown
with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane
grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand,
complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face
cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic
pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when
its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are
ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver
cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette,
summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his
cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays
the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to
the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey
Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune
may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather,
their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few
minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting
to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches.
[Illustration: SOUTH AMERICA]
Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the
scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of
the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences
have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still
hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard
_costumbre_. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles
up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United
States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be
seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old
maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies
plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion,
as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the
occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model
in a corset-shop window.
The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the
males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the
shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle
Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in
frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely
another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks
back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious
shops,—jewelers, _modistes_, _tailleurs de luxe_. But Florida is more
than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has
been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can
be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday
night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up
to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade
in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the
few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San
Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems
to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio
Grande. But the day came when the narrow _callejón_ could no longer
contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual
admiration party, and the _intendente_ solved the problem by closing the
street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is
still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon,
given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours,
though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be
_novios_; but the principal daily _corso_ is now made on foot, and
admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough
in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their
particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does
that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos
Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses
which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions.
The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the
subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers
between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with
the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their
wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment.
Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close
inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them
could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses
so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to
let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would
risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a
flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in
these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the
admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is
conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical
foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the
opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by
recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of
the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy”
is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have
lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful
enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé
hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as
truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in
extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it
has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no
other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring
recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company
south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever
Argentine waters are navigable.
The gaudy ostentation of this _nouveau riche_ city of Latin-Iberian
origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the
principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall,
as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit
smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns
with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets
between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all
too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in
life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors.
They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or
pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps
leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded
by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels
with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks.
Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the
dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a
museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous
manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name
of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some
cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in
the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from
the transaction, for the Recoleta is _the_ cemetery of Buenos Aires,
absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it,
and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or
seats on the stock exchange.
“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs
an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed
race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the
Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the
part of the _argentinos_ to deceive themselves into believing that they
attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of
their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish
infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to
Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the
Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery
maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de
_Beneficencia_ Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get
something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only
maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and
frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official
games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán.
The gambling at Palermo is on the _pari mutuel_, or pooled bets system.
That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually
everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is
announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as
many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks
suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—_Ganador_ (Winner) and
_Placé_. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to
which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for
itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets.
Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns
that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of
those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth
the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo,
but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s
choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be
paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows.
The _Porteños_ seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track,
for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion,
confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and
their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand,
called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on
days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms
of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the
privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the
betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many
canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the
Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen _Porteño_ fashion at its
gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use
of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the
latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper
seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the
other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata,
stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and
point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support
the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world,
and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one
overlook the fact that if the average _argentino_ were denied the
privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would
find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains
a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets.
Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share.
The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances,
ranging from the opera to a circus and a _frontón_ given over to the
Basque game of _pelota_—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous
“movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular
taste running to flippant one-act Spanish _zarzuelas_ or to the maudlin
and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills
are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue,
for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog
dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded,
since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving
native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by
its rarity.
Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense.
Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along
Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris.
Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the
streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is
struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own
metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it
is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by
their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them
one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an
insinuating look from the waiter. The _Porteño_, like the southern
European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of
liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any
other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often
presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the
_lecherías_ at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening
to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price.
The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of
course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance
makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first
addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark
without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and
perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular
air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex,
and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not
been unknown in the municipal courts.
“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to
September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine
Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy _estancieros_
who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded
loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of
the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and
crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as
the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word _campo_,
calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more
breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los
Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we
would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present
generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A
temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in
the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and
the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily
penetrating, just as the _pampero_, the suffocating norther of the
summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His
winter season is so short that the average _argentino_ makes little or
no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more
from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and
custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public
buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with
artificial warmth.
A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from
some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality.
The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo,
a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on
the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the
section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires,
with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the
city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most
squalid vice. In _Porteño_ speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the
equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles
of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond
American imagination.
In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The
_argentino_ looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the
American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly
reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice
may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less
openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time
of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not
only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half
the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are
represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine
girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the
national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last
means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory
female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there
are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and
the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only,
department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on
the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question.
Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous
and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way,
shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous
immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of
school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics
which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection
of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their
elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example
which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral
attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could
advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be
the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly
flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm;
like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking
contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable.
CHAPTER II
ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES
In my daily rounds as “errand boy” I soon discovered that the _Porteño_
is not a particularly pleasant man with whom to do business. To begin
with, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his own importance, of that of
his city as the greatest, or at least soon to be greatest, city on the
footstool, and seems constantly burdened with the dread of not
succeeding in impressing those importances upon all visitors. There is
as great an air of concentrated self-sufficiency in Buenos Aires as in
New York, a similar self-complacency, the same disdainfulness of
anything from the insignificant bit of backwoods outside the city
limits, a frank attitude of disbelief in the possibility of ever
learning anything from those uncouth persons who have the misfortune not
to be _Porteños_, and with it all a provincialism scarcely to be equaled
off the Island of Manhattan. But the _Porteño_ has less reason to boast
of efficiency in his business methods than has his prototype of the
North. From the American point of view he is decidedly slow. The
telephone, for instance, has never been developed into a real aid to
business in Buenos Aires. The service is incredibly deficient, not
simply sometimes imperfect, but deficient in the sense which that word
has to those who have lived and attempted to telephone in Paris. At the
time of my erranding there were seven thousand telephone subscribers in
Buenos Aires—with a population rapidly approaching two million; and it
was so impossible to be added to the list that persons surrendering
their instrument had only to mention that fact in the “Want” columns of
a newspaper to sell at a price equal to the bonus paid for an opera box
the privilege of being the next to rent it. Yet once the telephone is
in, one’s troubles have only begun. Most _Porteño_ business men prefer
to do without one and go in person to see their professional
adversaries. In fact the atrociousness of the telephone service was the
chief raison d’être of my position in the consulate.
Having squirmed and shouldered one’s way through the narrow human
streams of the business district to the door of the building sought,
there begins the serious problem of reaching the desired individual. The
elevator service, in the few cases where there is one, is on a par with
the telephone. Nor is it reassuring to the timid, for on the
ground-floor cage there is almost certain to be a conspicuous sign to
the effect that, “As there exists a stairway, persons riding in the
elevator do so at their own peril.” Buenos Aires has not quite shaken
off the suspicion of a diabolical nature in all such new-fangled
contraptions. A man was killed by an elevator in an office building
during my days in the capital; when I chanced to pass the place nearly
two weeks later, the entire elevator-shaft had been gutted by municipal
order and three policemen were still stationed at the foot of it,
apparently to prevent anyone from climbing the shaft instead of using
the stairway.
Arrived at the proper floor, you find yourself face to face with the
greatest difficulty of all. From that moment you must wage pitched
battle, for the inevitable door-keepers are insolent beyond measure,
though sometimes with a veneer of Latin-American-style courtesy, and so
numerous that to pass them is like running a gantlet. To get as far as
the subsecretary’s subsecretary is often a strenuous day’s work. It
makes no difference how important your errand may be. These stupid
Cerebuses see no distinction whatever between the official spokesman of
the august _Consul General de los Estados Unidos de Norte América_ and a
book agent. Nor will foresight help you. For the great man inside is
invariably behind his schedule, scores of other applicants are sure to
be lined up in the anteroom, and though you have an appointment with him
for two, you are more likely than not to be still waiting at four. This
waiting in the anteroom is so customary in the Argentine that
_antesalar_ has become an accepted verb of the _idioma nacional_. Public
officials, from ministers to the lowest class of secretary, have mobs
before their doors during all their office hours, but instead of
increasing the latter until they cover the work to be done, or hurrying
things up in order to receive all applicants, they come late, fritter
away much of their time in non-essentials, and leave early, so that most
of the crowd has the pleasure of coming again the next day, and the
next. Doctors and dentists are particularly remiss in this form of
inefficiency. They, by the way, charge an admission fee, that must be
paid to the door-keeper before the patient can get in, and which has no
bearing on the regular charges “for professional services.”
The reason for this stagnation in the anteroom becomes apparent when you
at last step across the magic threshold. The American business man
presses a button as soon as he has heard you, and the thing is done at
once; the _argentino_ hems and haws, spends considerable time on
drawing-room courtesies and formalities, murmurs, “Ah-er-why-sí,
señor-er, come around to-morrow at three,” though it would be quite as
easy to make his decision at once. Most _Porteño_ business men with whom
I came in contact seemed to keep their minds on ice, or in a safety
vault somewhere, and to require time to go and consult them—for no one
who knows the Latin-American can even suspect that they wished to talk
the matter over with their wives. The saddest part of the whole story is
that when you come around mañana at three, the man either will not be
there or will be conferring with those who have appointments from twelve
to one, and will not have given your question an instant’s thought since
his door closed behind you.
There is a certain English and German influence in “B. A.” business
houses, and a corresponding native influence on the rather numerous
English and German business men in the city which makes them almost as
prone to procrastination as the _Porteño_. Five o’clock tea is served in
all offices, including congress and newspaper rooms. Of late years this
is often really tea, rather than _mate_, though black coffee and
liqueurs are still found on most portable sideboards. A British air of
deliberation pervades the commercial caste, though the pressure of
competition and high cost of living is gradually having its effect, both
in the increased pace of business and the lengthening of office hours,
which, if they begin late and are broken by tea-time, often last until
seven or even eight in the evening. “B. A.” still retains, however, a
few of those features which visiting Americans below the Rio Grande are
wont in their exasperation to dub “Spig.” There is the post-office, for
instance. It is as unsafe to assume common sense on the part of Buenos
Aires postal officials as of those in the most backward parts of South
America. Red tape, indifference, languor, and stupidity flourish almost
as vigorously in the _correo principal_ in the Casa Rosada as at the
crest of the Andes. You will probably find your letters filed under the
name “Esquire,” if your correspondents affect that medieval title; if
you wish to buy a stamp, the customary way is to go to one of the
tobacco-shops obliged to keep them, and buy it at a premium. Those who
insist on getting their stamps at the legal price must travel long
distances to the post office and shove and jostle their way through a
throng of Italians bent on sending home a part of their wages, to reach
at last a wholly inadequate hole in the wall behind which the female
clerks are deeply engrossed in gossip.
There is a reminder of some of our own overambitious towns in the
_argentino’s_ eagerness to boost population, as if there were some
virtue in mere figures, even though those be false. The national census
was taken during my sojourn in the republic—all in a single day by the
way, which was declared a holiday—and the method of computing the
population was not one to cause it to shrink. Long beforehand walls and
windows were covered with so many placards resembling those of a
vaudeville performance that the cynical observer might easily have been
justified in supposing that the printers had a special influence with
the government. On the day set not only was every foreigner included,
even though he happened only to be spending a few hours in crossing the
country, but orders were issued to count, through the consuls, all
_argentinos_ living abroad and all persons of whatever nationality at
the moment under the Argentine flag, whether on the high seas or on
steamers far up the Paraná and Uruguay rivers quite outside the national
jurisdiction. I was counted at my hotel, filling in a blank under the
eye of the Italian proprietor, though I had only the day before returned
from a foreign country and was on the point of leaving for another. The
enumerators received ten _centavos_ for each person enumerated, which
naturally did not tend toward a decrease of population, that sum being
paid by the government—though it turned out later that in many backwoods
districts it had also been collected from the enumerated. Placards were
then posted ordering any person within the republic who had not been
counted on the date set to come to town and present himself before the
Census Commission. These intensive methods resulted eventually in the
announcement that 1,490,675 persons were living in Buenos Aires on the
day in question.
If there chanced to be no “outside work” for the moment to keep me
scurrying through the avalanche of taxicabs, or no “office boy” duties
about the consulate, there was always plenty of recreation to be found
in watching the assorted humanity that filed in and out of the outer
office. Now a penniless sailor would drift in, to address the
work-swamped vice consul in such words as, “General, I ayn’t goin’ t’
tell you no stories, ’cause you’re a bright man an’ you’d ketch me up at
it an’ make a fool out o’ me. Only, I took just that one drink, general,
just that one drink, an’ they shanghaied me an’ ’ere I am an’ I ’as a
family in the States, general, s’welp me Gawd, general, an’ what am I
goin’ t’ do ...” and so on, until to my multitudinous duties was added
that of bouncer. Or perhaps a clean, neatly dressed young American,
perpetual outdoors in his face, would step up with, “I come from Texas,
that’s where my paw an’ maw lives, an’ I come down here to raise hawgs
an’ I thought I’d come in an’ tell you I was in the country an’ now
where can I get the best land to raise hawgs on an’ ...” another task
for the overworked “office boy.” If it was one of those rare days when
this continual procession of human quandaries was broken, I had only to
reach at random into the files to pull out a written one:
Buenos Aires, April 25,
To the Consol of the U. S. A.
HON. SIR:
I am reading now the news of the war (it was the time of our sending
marines to Vera Cruz) and the call at the arms to volunteers. If you
remember, about 7 or 8 month ago, I have writen to you from Rosario,
offering my blood for your Republica. Not answer have I received
about. Now if you like to take in consideration this letter, I wish
to start for the war and to be incorporated in the volunteer’s
corps. This is not a strange offering. I am Italiaman and I cannot
to forget the time passed in the U. S. A. and the generous heart of
the Americaman when my country was troubled by the sismic movements.
I live in New York six year, left the North America three year
before, and am desiring now to see and live in that blessed country.
Here has the hungry, and indeed to die starved in the streets. I
wish better to die for the North American states. I love your land
more than my country and severals of the Italiamen living in the
States, believe me, Sir, will be incorporated for the war. I would
to be at present in New York, not here: I well know that the
international respects forbidden to answer me about, but I have not
money in this poor country, and for that I can’t to start at my
expenses. If you like to give me a passage, I am ready to start
rightaway, and not body shall know my resolution.
Hoping in your favorable answer, I am glad to be,
Yours respectfully,
MIKE ALBANESE.
Nor does Buenos Aires take a back seat to New York in the amusement the
stroller may find in its streets. There was the incident of Easter
Sunday, for instance. I went to church, but there was no special music,
only a cluster of priests in barbarically resplendent robes going
through some sort of silent service, so I drifted out again. There was
not even the parade of new spring hats to which to look forward, for
spring was still far off in Buenos Aires. In fact, the oppressive heat
of early March in which I had arrived had only begun to give way to a
refreshing coolness. The early autumn skies were brilliant, leaves had
scarcely begun to turn color. I bought a copy of _La Prensa_, tucked it
under an arm, and went strolling lazily up Rivadavia beyond Calle
Callao, the Forty-Second street of “B. A.,” flanking the gleaming new
congress building. Mounted policemen in rich uniforms, with horsetail
helmets and the white gloves of holidays, here and there decorated the
landscape. For some time I sauntered dreamily on at random, a trifle
bored by the monotony of life, for I had already been more than a month
in Buenos Aires and had tasted most of the excitement it has to offer.
I was half aware of crossing the broad Plaza Once de Setembro, still
covered with earth from the digging of the new subway. Finally, up in
the 2700 block, a man standing on a corner asked me if I could tell him
where Dr. Martinez lived. I replied that I was a stranger in those
parts. So was he. That was fairly evident to the naked eye, for he was
decidedly countrified in appearance and actions, though he was clean and
well dressed. He had just come up from Bahía Blanca, he said, and when
he got off the train in the station, he had met one of those men with a
_huascar_, a rope, over one shoulder and a number on his cap—a
_changador_, or porter, I explained—who asked him if he wanted his
baggage carried. He did, and gave the man his _maleta_ and also the slip
of paper with the address of Dr. Martinez on it. Then the _changador_
said it was customary to pay in advance, and as he had no change he gave
him a ten-peso bill and told him to bring back the small money.
The poor fellow was so evidently a simple, good-hearted countryman who
had never been in a large city before that I could not but admire, as
well as pity, his unsuspecting nature. Of course the _changador_ had
disappeared with the valise, the ten pesos, _and_ the address; and as
the _campesino_ did not even know the doctor’s first name, things looked
rather dark for him, for Martinez rivals Smith in directories and
telephone books. Still, it was no concern of mine, so after giving him
my sympathy and advising him to report the matter to the police, just
for form’s sake, I turned to go on.
Just then another man passed us at a brisk pace and the poor countryman
appealed to him for advice. The newcomer was quite evidently a
_Porteño_, a man under thirty, good-looking, with the frank and open
countenance one recognizes at once as belonging to an honest man. His
appearance was that of a clerk or small merchant. Knowing the countryman
was in good hands, I turned away again.
But he called me back, apparently feeling more secure with me nearby.
Then he told the newcomer of his hard luck. Naturally the latter was as
sorry as I was. He expressed his sympathy and started on, but the
countryman begged not to be abandoned in his trouble. The newcomer
yielded good-naturedly to the whim of the yokel and we fell into
conversation.
“You are English?” remarked the townsman, casually, but before I could
answer, the countryman said with an air of finality, “No, he is German,”
and as it was easier to let it go at that than to bother to correct him,
I nodded. We strolled along for a block, puzzling over the sad
predicament of the countryman. At length the _Porteño_ asked pardon for
butting into any man’s private affairs, but, “Did this changador get
away with any of your money in the grip, too?”
“Ah, no; there I am lucky!” cried the estanciero. “Just before the train
got into the station I opened the _maleta_ and took out this roll of
billetes; it is seven thousand pesos”—in the utmost innocence the fellow
drew out the roll, large as a man’s forearm, a hundred-peso bill in
plain sight on top. I was about to protest when the other man did so,
crying:
“But, my dear sir! Do you know me? Or do you know this gentleman? Then
don’t you know better than to flash seven thousand pesos around in the
public streets? Why, if we were not respectable men we might tell you we
knew where this Dr. Martinez lives and then lead you into any old corner
and give you a _puñalado_ and....”
“Oh, I can tell you are honest men,” replied the countryman, with a
childlike smile, at which the other turned to me with:
“You see these country people live so simply and honestly at home they
never dream of the dangers of the cities.”
“Yes,” I replied. Then to the countryman, “But one mustn’t always judge
people by their faces,” for it was evidently up to me to say something
of a harsh nature to the simple rustic.
“Exactly,” said the _Porteño_; “we can see a man’s face but not his
heart.”
Still the countryman seemed to prefer to trust to his own judgment of
physiognomy and implored us to help him find this Dr. Martinez, saying
that if it was a matter of giving us ten or twenty pesos each for our
trouble he would be glad to do so. The _Porteño_ forestalled my protest
by saying we were not that sort of men but that we would be glad to give
him any assistance possible, out of charity. So we set out along a side
street, telling the countryman to walk ahead.
“What do you think of that poor fellow?” said the _Porteño_; “and what
if he had fallen in with some dishonest shyster instead of us? Say, you
know I think the man is ill and....”
“Oh, _señor_,” he called to him, “you won’t think I am prying into your
private affairs, but is it some medical matter you want to see this Dr.
Martinez about? Because if it is, you know there are so many fakes
posing as doctors here in the city....”
“No, no; it is not for a medical matter at all,” returned the
countryman; “it is merely a family affair,” and he went on again. But
before long he turned back and to my astonishment there were tears
visible on his cheeks.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is true I do not know you, but I have seen and
talked with you and I am sure you are honest men, not the kind who would
outwit a poor countryman who knows nothing of the city and its ways. So
I am going to tell you just how things stand so you can advise me what
to do.
“My father and I own a big estancia down near Bahía Blanca. We are very
well-to-do—you will excuse my mentioning that—though we do not know much
of cities and their ways. Some time ago a man living on our estancia
died. He was thought to be a beggar, but when we came to disinfect his
hut what was our surprise to find inside his old mattress seven thousand
pesos in these little round gringo gold pieces....”
“Ah, he means English sovereigns,” put in the _Porteño_.
“Father was going to turn this over to the authorities,” the countryman
went on, “but our lawyer laughed at the idea, as the fellow had no heirs
and the authorities would only stick it into their own pockets. And as
the man had lived and died on our estancia, surely no one was more
entitled to the money than father. So he put it away in his strong
boxes—though, to be sure, it was a small amount to us and we never
needed it. Well, a few weeks ago my poor papá”—here he wiped away a
tear—“was riding along when his horse ran into a _cerco de alambre de
púas_. But perhaps you city gentlemen do not know what a _cerco de
alambre de púas_ is?”
“Oh, yes,” we both cried, and the _Porteño_ added, “it is that wire with
sharp points on it that you use out in the country to keep the cattle or
horses in a field.”
“Well, my poor father rode into one of those fences and his face was so
cut and torn that it has all turned black on that side, and the doctor
came and told us it was scurvy or cancer or some of those awful diseases
with a long name, and that poor papá would never get well.”
When he had blown his nose the campesino went on, and one could not help
pitying the poor chap, trying to hide his grief, for the people of South
America certainly have much family affection, especially those from the
country:
“The doctor told us to call the priest, so I went and got Father Acosta,
our old family padre, who baptized me, and when he confessed father, he
found out about the seven thousand pesos. Well, he said at once that
father could not go to heaven with that on his conscience. So he told me
to take the money and come to Buenos Aires at once—for of course there
is no hope now of finding any of the beggar’s heirs—to see this Dr.
Martinez and, giving him two thousand pesos for his poor patients, as a
sort of commission, to have him take the other five thousand and send
half of it to some church to say masses for the repose of that poor
aviator who was killed the other day, and the other half to some good
hospital, to be used for the poor and those with bad hands and feet....”
“Ah, he means cripples,” put in the _Porteño_; “that’s what we call that
kind of poor people here in the city,” smiling upon our simple
companion. Naturally we two had looked at each other frequently during
this tale, for it scarcely seemed possible that even a _campesino_ from
the utmost pampa could be so unsophisticated. Now, was it a question of
the priest and this Dr. Martinez being confederates, or was the priest
as simple as the other yokels?
“If you don’t mind another personal question,” said the _Porteño_, “do
you know this Dr. Martinez?”
“Ah, no, but he has his name in the paper, in _La Prensa_.”
“My dear señor!” gasped the townsman. “Why, don’t you know that either
I, who am no doctor, or this gentleman, whom I think I am right in
saying is none either, can pay a newspaper sixty or eighty centavos to
put in an announcement that we are doctors, or anything else? Why, my
poor compatriot, a newspaper is merely a beast of burden that carries
anything you put upon it.”
“But,” gasped the countryman, “don’t the editors know people before they
put in their notices?”
“Poor simpleton,” murmured the _Porteño_. “Now, I must be getting on,
for I have friends coming to see me, but I’ll tell you what I should do
in your case. I should go to some of the largest and most respectable
commercial houses here in the city and turn this matter over to them,
taking their receipt and....”
“Ah, señores,” cried the countryman, almost in tears, “this is purely a
matter between my father and his conscience. I would not have it become
public under any circumstances; and besides, my poor father is so sick
that I must take the evening train back to Bahía Blanca at all odds.
And—excuse me, gentlemen, for mentioning it, but I have an infirmity—and
where can I go and sit down for a few minutes? Here on the sidewalk?”
[Illustration: In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American
consul general]
[Illustration: The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires]
[Illustration: A Patagonian landscape]
[Illustration: The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio
Negro of southern Argentine]
“Válgame Diós, no!” cried the _Porteño_, catching him by a sleeve, “not
in the street, or you will have a crowd gathered around you. I’ll tell
you what you can do. Go down that way a block and you’ll find a saloon.
Go in and buy a drink of something and ask them where you can sit down
to drink it.”
The countryman left us, and the _Porteño_ took advantage of the
opportunity to talk things over with me.
“It is evident that the simple fellow is in great danger of being done
by this Dr. Martinez, or somebody else, for how do we know he will not
take and keep the whole seven thousand? Now I am an honest man, and I
believe you are, too; are you not? Then it is our duty to take care that
this money gets where it belongs. You surely must know some German
church here in town where they can say masses for that poor aviator. We
can go and give the priest twenty-five hundred; and then there are
plenty of good hospitals, the German, the English, and so forth, where
they will accept and use for the poor the other twenty-five hundred. And
then we will not only have seen that the money goes where it was
intended, but there will be a _linda_, a pretty little commission of two
thousand pesos to divide between us. Can I depend on you to help me save
this poor fellow and his money?”
I was, of course, considerably surprised at such a proposition from a
man apparently so straightforward, and for the first time felt it my
duty to stay in the case until I had seen the money properly disposed
of; the equivalent of three thousand dollars was no sum to see scattered
among sharpers. So I nodded, and when the countryman came back, the
_Porteño_ explained to him:
“Now, my friend, you do not know this Dr. Martinez. How do we know he
will not take the money and spend it on himself, on dissipation, in
short, to talk plainly between men, on _francesas_?”
“_Francesas_?” cried the countryman, with a puzzled air.
“Yes, on bad women, on those who sell their love,” explained the
_Porteño_; “we call them _francesas_ here in the city because so many of
them come from France.”
“Ah, yes, I have heard there are such women in the cities, poor things,”
said the farmer. “Also, it is only too true that this doctor may not be
honest. But tell me, gentlemen, what am I to do? My poor papá dying down
there in Bahía Blanca and——” again the poor fellow was weeping and it
was lucky we were on a small side street behind the Once station or we
should soon have had a crowd about us.
“Now, you do know us,” went on the _Porteño_, “even if only for a short
time, and I propose that you turn this money over to us, let us place
the five thousand in churches and hospitals we know of, and then divide
the two thousand between us as our commission for our trouble, which we
would surely be as much entitled to as Dr. Martinez, whom no one knows.”
To my astonishment the simple countryman jumped at the idea, either
because he was too unsophisticated to suspect anyone, or too anxious to
get back to his sick father to give any thought to the possibilities of
fraud.
“Only, it is a commission of two thousand _between_ you,” he specified,
“not for each.”
“Surely, surely, we know that,” answered the _Porteño_.
We continued our stroll down the back street. The countryman, quite
evidently relieved to have the matter off his mind, reached for the
seven thousand pesos. Then an idea seemed to strike him, as if all our
talk about the dangers of the city had at last awakened a bit of
suspicion in his breast. He left the roll in his pocket and said
smilingly ingenuously:
“But, señores—you will excuse my suggesting such a thing—but before I
turn this seven thousand over to you—and I shall place it in the hands
of _this_ gentleman” (indicating me) “since I met him first, and you
will give me a paper with your names saying you will use the money as my
poor father desires—but just so I can say to him when I get back that I
turned the commission over to two honest gentlemen, who will carry it
out, I—you will excuse me, gentlemen, I am sure, if I speak frankly—I
just want you to show me in some way that you are not indigent persons.
In short—you will pardon me, señores—but just so my poor father can die
in peace”—here he wiped another large tear from his wind-and-sun-burned
cheek—“I wish to be able to tell him that you are persons of enough
wealth so that you will not need to spend this money on yourselves, just
some little proof, gentlemen.”
“Surely, most just and wise,” cried the _Porteño_, “and I am certainly
not the man to be unwilling to show you that I am a respectable person.
Of course I am not carrying about with me any such large sum as _you_
have, but if it is a matter of a thousand or so pesos, I never go about
without that amount on my person.”
Here he pulled back his coat a bit and displayed a smaller roll of
bills, though with the extreme circumspection of the city-bred man. The
countryman seemed entirely satisfied with this proof of honesty and,
shaking hands with the other most heartily, assured him that he had
every confidence in him. Then he turned his simple face questioningly
upon me.
I could not, of course, being a mere vagabonding “errand boy,” make any
display of wealth. But it seemed so eminently my duty to keep an eye on
the _Porteño_ until the countryman’s money had come into indisputably
honest hands that I determined to invent myself a small fortune with
which to keep my standing in the case. I drew out the nine pesos and
some change in my pocket with an apologetic countenance and addressed my
companions:
“I’m sorry not to be able to show at once that I am a person of means,
but I am so well aware of the dangers of large cities that I never carry
with me more than enough for the day’s expenses, and of course you are
not interested in seeing this tiny amount,” which I then put back into
my pocket.
“But you must have money somewhere,” asked the _Porteño_, anxiously,
“just enough to show this gentleman we can be trusted to carry out his
commission? Come over here a moment. You will excuse us for a minute,
won’t you?” he added, addressing the _campesino_.
“Yes, but señores,” cried the latter, almost in tears, “you are not
going to talk about anything to my hurt?”
“On the contrary, it is entirely for your good,” answered the townsman.
“Just excuse us a moment until we arrange this matter to your
satisfaction.”
The two of us crossed the street, where the _Porteño_ asked me again if
I could not show I had money.
“Why, yes,” I lied, determined now at all costs not to let him take
unfair advantage of the incredibly simple _estanciero_, “I have money in
the—er—the German bank and in the German consulate. But how can I get it
out, to-day being Sunday? Of course, if the bank-book would be
sufficient proof for our friend, I could hurry home and get that.”
“Where do you live?”
“Tucumán 1671.”
“Well, now, how could we arrange?” puzzled the townsman. “You could go
and get the bank-book. Or shall I go with you? No, it will be better for
me to stay here with our friend, for with seven thousand pesos in his
pocket, which anyone might take away from him—but you could run home and
get the bank-book, and that perhaps would keep him interested until
to-morrow, when the banks open—for of course, being a man from the
pampa, he won’t know that a bank-book is proof of having money—and
to-morrow you could get the money out and.... How much money have you in
the bank?”
“I can’t say exactly,” I answered, ostensibly cudgeling my brains to
remember, “perhaps a little over six thousand pesos.”
“Ah, that’s fine,” said the _Porteño_, his eyes shining, “because that,
with what I have, will just about equal the seven thousand our friend
has, and give him full confidence.” We turned back toward the
countryman.
“Of course,” went on my companion, bringing his lips close to my ear,
“when we get that seven thousand—and I know you are not the sort of man
who will beat me out of my share just because it is going to be put into
_your_ hands. Are you?” When I shook my head he grasped my hand and
shook it fervently. “When we get that seven thousand it won’t much
matter whether the priest and the hospital—you understand me, as man to
man, don’t you?”
I gave him a wise look as we rejoined the countryman, who was nursing
his feet as if city pavements were already blistering them. When we told
him that if he wished to see my six thousand—for, as we expected, he had
little knowledge of, or faith in, bank-books—he would have to stay over
until the next day, he protested, naturally, that he must take the
evening train, his poor father being likely to die at any moment. But he
was apparently as tractable as he was simple, for when it was all
explained to him, that I would go home at once and be back within half
an hour, or forty minutes at the most, with my bank-book, that then we
would all three spend the afternoon and night together somewhere until
the banks opened in the morning, he admitted that that was probably the
best way out of it, that “papá” always had had a strong constitution
after all, that the money _must_ be properly placed before he returned
home, and after drawing out and looking at the roll of seven thousand
again and asking if we wanted him to count it to show that it was really
that amount, to which the _Porteño_ hastily protested and begged him to
get it back into his pocket as soon as possible, he agreed to our plan.
I was to catch a car home at once, get my bank-book, and return to them
on that same corner.
There being no car in sight, I set off at a swift pace along the tram
line. As I looked around to see if the car was coming, the two waved to
me to come back. I rejoined them, and the countryman again begged me not
to say a word to anyone about the matter, since it was entirely a
problem between his father and his conscience. I quieted his almost
tearful fears by assuring him that I lived all alone, that I had
scarcely a friend in Buenos Aires, and that I was naturally of a most
taciturn disposition. As I turned away again, the townsman took a few
steps after me and murmured in my ear, “If you will bring along your
rings and jewels, too, that will help to win his confidence.” I assured
him I would bring every piece of jewelry I possessed, and hurried off
once more down the street car line.
A couple of blocks beyond, where the street curved and hid my friends
from view, I turned a corner. A man who seemed to have been peering out
from behind it asked me if I knew “those two persons.”
“No,” I answered, “we were merely passing the time of day.”
“But don’t you know _esos son ladrones_—those are thieves!” he cried.
“Señor,” I replied, “my very best thanks for your kind warning, but I
discovered that about half an hour ago.”
Whereupon I continued for where I had started—to keep an engagement with
a fellow-countryman at the afternoon races in Palermo, a rendezvous I
had for a time feared I should have to miss unless I cut short my very
entertaining Easter morning with the bunco steerers.
CHAPTER III
FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS
The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry
away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national
capital in the world so far in advance of, so out of proportion to its
nation as is the great city on what the English called the “Plate.” We
of the northern hemisphere are not accustomed to cities which _are_
their countries to the extent that Buenos Aires is the Argentine.
American editors and publicists expressed astonishment, and in some
cases misgiving, when our latest census showed that one tenth the
population of the United States dwells in its three largest cities. Of
all the people inhabiting the Argentine Republic virtually one fourth
live in the capital.
The contrast between this and the great background of pampas is
incredible; Buenos Aires is far more closely allied to Paris or Rome
than to the broad country over which it rules. There are several reasons
for this disparity, besides the general South American tendency to dress
up the capital like an only son and trust that the rest of the country
will pass unnoticed, like a flock of poor relatives or servants. The two
principal crops of the Argentine, cattle and wheat, do not require a
compact rural population. Being the chief port as well as the metropolis
and capital, Buenos Aires has first choice of those who cross the sea
seeking new occupations and homes. It sucks the life blood from the
constant stream of immigration, leaving the “camp” a sparsely settled
expanse of boundless plain and the other cities mere provincial towns,
sometimes pleasant places to live in, but wholly devoid of metropolitan
features. Buenos Aires is as large as Philadelphia; the second city of
the Argentine is smaller than Akron, Ohio.
Numerous efforts have been made to bring about a better balance. The
government offers the immigrant free transportation to any part of the
country. Down on the Paseos of Colon and Julio, beneath the arcades of
which Spanish and Armenian petty merchants, cheap Italian restaurants,
and den-like second-hand shops make first appeal to the thin purse of
the newly arrived fortune seeker, the broad brick pillars are covered
with the enticements of employment agencies,—a _cuadrilla_ of such a
size wanted for railroad work three hundred miles west; so many laborers
needed on an _estancia_ in a distant province, free fare, nominal
fee—just such signs as may be seen on the corner of Madison and Canal
Streets in Chicago and in a score of our western cities. The wages
offered are from twenty to thirty per cent. lower than for the same
grade of labor in the United States at the same period, and the cost of
meals somewhat higher. But it is something more than this that causes
the majority of immigrants to pause and read and wander on in quest of
some occupation financially less attractive in or near the capital.
Possibly it is a subconscious dread of the horizonless pampas which
stretch away into the unknown beyond the city; some attribute it to the
now happily decreasing autocracy of grafting rural officials and the
lack of government protection in districts out of touch with the
capital. Or it may be nothing more than the world-wide tendency to
congregate in cities. The fact remains that Buenos Aires is congested
with the very laborers who are sadly needed on the great undeveloped
plains of the interior.
A railroad map of the Argentine is a striking illustration of this
concentration of population. As all roads once led to Rome, so do all
railway lines of the Argentine converge upon Buenos Aires. Tracks
radiate from the capital in every direction in which there is Argentine
territory, a dense network which suggests on a larger scale the railroad
yards of our great centers of transportation. No other city of the land
is more than a way station compared with the all-absorbing capital.
There is probably no country in the world in which it is easier to lay
rails, though it is sometimes difficult to keep them above the surface.
With the beginning of its real exploitation, therefore, new lines sprang
up almost overnight. As in the United States beyond the Alleghenies,
railroads came in most cases before highways; for though Spaniards
settled in the Argentine four centuries ago, the scattered _estancieros_
and their peons were content to ride their horses across the open
plains, and the modern movement is as yet scarcely a generation old.
There are many regions where the railroad is to this day the only real
route; those who do not use it drive or ride at will across the
trackless pampas, with thistles or waving brown grass threshing their
wheels or their horses’ knees. To-day there are railways not only from
Buenos Aires to every town of the adjoining provinces, but to Bolivia
and Paraguay on the north, to Chile on the west, and Patagonia in the
South. Long palatial trains roll out of the capital in every direction,
entire trains bound for cities of which the average American has never
heard the name, the destination announced by placards on the sides of
the cars as in Europe—and as it should be in the United States.
With the exception of a minor French line or two, and some rather
unimportant government roads of narrow gauge, all the railways of the
Argentine are English, very English, in fact, with British managers and
chiefs of departments, engines without bells, and with the nerve-racking
screech of European locomotives, to say nothing of the British “staff”
system which forces even “limited” trains to slow down at every station
enough for the engineer to snatch the sort of iron scepter which is his
authority for entering another section. The rolling stock, however, is
more nearly American in appearance. The freight cars are large, the
passenger coaches—of two classes—are built on a modified American plan,
without compartments. Both in comfort and speed the main Argentine lines
rival our own, though there are fewer through expresses which maintain
what we would call a high rate throughout their runs. For one thing the
government assesses a fine against those trains which are more than a
little late without palpable excuse, and it is natural that the
companies so arrange their schedules as to make such punishment
unlikely, with the result that many trains have a tendency to wait at
stations for the time-table to catch up with them. Nor, with the
exception of the through lines to the neighboring republics, do most of
the tracks forming that great network out of Buenos Aires fetch up
anywhere in particular. Nearly all of them have the air of pausing in
doubt on the edge of the great expanses they set out to explore, with
the result that while the provinces bordering Buenos Aires are so
thickly strewn with tracks that the map suggests there is not room to
set down a foot between them, there are enormous tracts of territory in
the central and western portions of the country wholly untouched by
modern transportation. Life slows down on these many arteries of travel,
too, in exact proportion to the distance from the heart from which all
the Argentine is nourished. But there are indications in most cases that
the pause at nowhere is only temporary, that presently the lines will
summon up breath and courage to push on across the still trackless
pampas.
The great drawback to travel in the Argentine is the cost, both in time
and money. Distances are so great, places of any importance so far
apart, that while fares are not much higher than in the United States,
it takes many hours and many pesos to get anywhere worth going. Towns
which look but a cannon-shot apart on the map may be reached only by
several hours of travel, saddened by the despairing flatness and
monotony of the desolate pampas, where there is rarely a tree to give a
pleasing touch of shade, no spot of green to attract and rest the eyes,
a landscape as uninviting as an unfurnished apartment.
In my double capacity of consular protégé and prospective “booster,”
however, I was furnished with general passes by all the important
railways, and time is no object to a mere wanderer. But for this
official recognition of my unstable temperament I should probably have
seen little of the Argentine, for even the man who has tramped the
length of the Andes would scarcely have the patience to face on foot the
endless horizon of the pampas; and “hoboing” has never been properly
developed on Argentine railways. Rarely had I been given temporary carte
blanche on almost every train in the country when, as a second stroke of
fortune, consular business turned up which took me into various sections
of the “camp” without cutting me off from my modest official income. I
hastened to lay in a supply of heavy garments, for the first trip was to
be south, and the end of April had brought an autumn chill even in
Buenos Aires, over which birds were flying northward in great V-shaped
flocks.
A general pass is more than a saving of money; it gives train officials
an exalted notion of the holder’s importance, and it permits him to jump
off anywhere on the spur of the moment. Yet for many miles south I saw
nothing worthy of a stop. When one has already visited La Plata, capital
of the Province of Buenos Aires, a short hour below the metropolis and
noted for its university and its rows of venerable eucalyptus trees,
there remains little to attract the eye in the flat expanse of that
province as it unrolls hour after hour on any of the lines of the “Great
Southern.” Several dairies, which maintain their own _lecherías_
throughout the federal capital, punctuate the first miles; otherwise the
landscape is a mere reminder of our own western prairies. Here is the
same scanty grass and clumps of bushes resembling sagebrush, the same
flat plain with its horizon barely rising and falling perceptibly with
the motion of the train. The only unfamiliar note is the ostrich,
scattered groups of which go scuttling away like huge ungainly chickens
as the express disturbs them at their feeding. At least we should call
this Argentine curiosity an ostrich, though science distinguishes it
from a similar species in the Old World under the name of _rhea
darwini_, and to the natives it is a _ñandú_. Time was when tawny
horsemen pursued these great birds across the pampas, entangling their
legs in the _bolas_, two or three ropes ending in as many heavy balls,
which they swung over their heads as they rode; but that is seen no
more. Even the waving plains of grass, across which the nomadic Indian
roamed and the gaucho careered lassooing wild cattle, are gone. Wheat
fields, bare with the finished harvest in this autumn season, alternate
with short brown grass, cropped by the cattle which everywhere dot the
landscape for hour after monotonous hour.
The gaucho, with his long, sharp _facón_ stuck through his belt, who
lighted his _fogón_ out on the open pampa to prepare his _asado con
cuero_, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning
beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in
his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather
seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon,
usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a
night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered
remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show
the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners
were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners
of the country.
Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a
hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at
monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly
and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of
men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen
of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups
gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily
halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more
pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the
unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In
these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, _mestizos_
with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines,
yet with a stronger hint of European origin.
Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains
had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often
flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were
knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an
experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and
there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a
sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or
liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby,
it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English
sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from
the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen,
sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending
passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in
clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of
England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to
town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town
was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an
unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary
stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s
notice.
The chief characteristic of Argentine towns is their roominess. The
space they cover is several times that of Andean cities of equal
population. Though the houses often toe the street in the Arab-Spanish
fashion, they are frequently far apart and the streets are wider than
even Buenos Aires would care to have in her most congested section. No
doubt each hamlet has a secret hint that it is soon to become a great
city, and lays its plans accordingly. Next to their spaciousness and the
dreary plainness of their architecture, these towns of the pampas strike
the experienced South American traveler by the scarcity of their
churches. The largest of them seldom shows more than a single steeple;
many seem to have no places of worship whatever. Nowhere is there that
suggestion common to the atmosphere of the languid cities of the Andes
of a present world so unpromising that life can most advantageously be
spent in preparation for the next.
The “Great Southern” carried me so far into the south that only by
straining my neck could I see the Southern Cross, a tilted, less
striking constellation now than when I had first made it out in far-off
Central America by standing on tiptoe and peering over the horizon. The
journey might almost better be made by night than by day, for Argentine
sleeping-cars are comfortable and the dreary, unfurnished landscape is
almost oppressive. The only natural features to arouse a flicker of
interest are some rock hills near Tandil, duplicated farther on in
another little rocky range known as the Sierra de la Ventana. In the
first of these Buenos Aires quarries some of the stone for its building
and paving, the rest being brought across the Plata from Uruguay. Few
large countries have been more neglected than the Argentine in the
matter of natural resources, other than agricultural. Its rare deposits
of stone are far distant from where the material is needed, it has no
precious minerals, almost no forests, even the coal used on its
railroads must be brought from abroad. Yet it would gladly be rid of
some of its stone. Through much of the south it is hampered by a
_tosca_, a shelf of limestone a few feet below the surface, which
neither water nor the long roots of the alfalfa can penetrate. In the
more tropical north, particularly along the Paraná, the _alfalfales_
produce luxuriantly for twenty years and more without renewal. In the
south the calerous soil makes vigorous pastures on which fatten
succulent beef and mutton, highly prized by the _frigorí ficos_; but the
frequent droughts are disastrous in the thin soil regions, and at such
times endless trains carry the sheep and “horned cattle,” as the local
distinction has it, a thousand miles north to feed in the Córdoba hills.
The plain which seems never to have an end converges at last, like all
the railroads to the south, in Bahía Blanca. This bustling port and
considerable city, with its immense grain elevators and its facilities
for transferring half the produce of the Argentine from trains to ships,
is the work of a generation. It is nearly a century now since the
federal government sent soldiers to establish in the vicinity of this
great bay a line of defense against the Indians of Patagonia, but the
town itself took on importance only toward the end of the last century.
From a cluster of huts among the sand-dunes it sprang to the size of
Duluth, to which it bears a resemblance in occupation, point of view,
and paucity of historical background. The Argentine is third or fourth
among the wheat producing countries of the world, and of later years
Bahía Blanca, natural focal point of all the great southern pampas, has
outstripped even Buenos Aires as a grain port, to say nothing of the
frozen meat from its immense _frigorí ficos_. Of all the cities of the
Argentine it is the most nearly autonomous, for though La Plata remains
the provincial capital, the overwhelming commercial importance of Bahía
Blanca has given it a self-assertiveness that threatens some day to make
it the capital of a newly formed province.
A long vestibuled train carried us on into northern Patagonia, better
known now in the Argentine as the territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and
Santa Cruz. I say “us” because I had been joined by a former assistant
secretary of agriculture of our own land, recently attached as an
adviser to the similar Argentine bureau. He was as profoundly ignorant
of Spanish as I of agricultural matters, and our companionship proved of
mutual advantage. All that night we rumbled south and west, halting now
and then at little pampa stations, if we were to believe the time-table.
For we were both snugly ensconced in our berths, the ex-secretary doubly
so, since nature had provided him with a more than imposing bulk—until
the breaking of a rail over a wash-out bounced us out of them.
Sleeping-cars are as customary in the Argentine as in our own land of
long distances, and more comfortable. At the height of the season at Mar
del Plata as many as a hundred sleepers a night make the journey between
that watering-place and Buenos Aires. The normal Argentine railroad
gauge is nearly ten inches wider than our own, which is one of the
reasons why the _dormitorios_ seem so much more roomy than a Pullman. As
in the international expresses of Europe, these have a corridor along
one side of the car, from which open two-berth staterooms, with doors
that lock and individual toilet facilities. The cross-car berths, one
soon discovers, are easier to sleep in than our lengthwise couches, and
the _dormitorios_ do away with what Latin-Americans consider, not
entirely without reason, our “shockingly indecent” system of forcing
strangers, of either sex, to sleep in the same compartment, shielded
only by a curtain.
The unconvertible cabins, preferable by night, become mere cells by day,
however, and drive most of the passengers to sit in the dining cars.
Here the waiters, like the _dormitorio_ porters, are white, with
king’s-bed-chamber manners; and the six course meals are moderate in
price and usually excellent—except the dessert, the ubiquitous,
unfailing, never-varying _dulce de membrillo_, a stone-hard quince jelly
which brings to a sad end virtually every public repast in the
Argentine. The trains are not heated; instead there are thick doormats
under each seat, and it is a rare traveler in the south between April
and October who does not carry with him a blanket bound with a
shawl-strap.
The mud-bespattered countrymen at the stations that appeared with the
dull autumn daylight seemed to be largely Spanish in origin, some still
wearing _boínas_ and other reminders of Europe that looked out of
keeping with the soil-caked saddle horses awaiting them behind the
railroad buildings. Most of them appeared to have ridden in to buy
lottery tickets, or to find which tickets had won in the latest drawing;
the raucous-voiced train-boys sold more to these modern gauchos than on
the train, especially the list of winning numbers at ten centavos. The
thought came to us that even if there are no other reprehensible
features to a national lottery, the habit it breeds among workmen of
spending their time hoping for a prize a week, instead of pitching in
and earning a weekly prize, is at least sufficient to condemn it.
My companion was making the trip for the purpose of studying the soil. A
splendid chance he had to do so with most of it under water! The
distribution of rain seems to be poorly managed in the Argentine. If the
country is not suffering from drought, it is apt to be complaining of
floods, or, in the warmer and more fertile north, of the locusts, which
sometimes sweep in from the wilderness of the Chaco in such clouds that
the project has seriously been considered of erecting an enormous net,
supported perhaps by balloons, to stop them.
We brought up late that afternoon in the frontier town of Neuquén, in
the national territory of the same name. A _garçon_ corseted into a
tuxedo served us dinner, for so they dared call it, in a rambling
one-story wooden hotel scattered over the block nearest the station, the
only thing worth considering on the bill of fare being “bife” (beefee)
or, as the waiter more exactly put it, “asado de vaca,” requiring the
teeth of a stone-crusher and the digestion of a _ñandú_. There is
something of the atmosphere of our own frontier towns in those of the
Argentine, but not the same studied roughness of character, no display
of shooting-irons. The tamest of our western cowboys would probably have
shot on sight those prancing, tuxedoed waiters and sent the proprietor
to join them for the atrociousness of his meals. Just what would have
been his reaction to the beds to which we were afterward assigned—sky
blue and pink landscapes so gorgeously painted on foot and headboards
that we thought it was dawn every time we woke up—is more than I can
guess.
The line which the “Great Southern” hopes soon to push over the Andes to
join the railways of Chile in the vicinity of Temuco ran no trains
beyond Neuquén on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our
picturesque beds, but as pass-holders we had no great difficulty in
foisting ourselves upon a young English superintendent westward bound on
an inspection tour. In his track automobile we screamed away across the
bleak pampas of Patagonia, a hundred and twenty miles and back to
Zapala, the vast monotonous plain steadily rising to an elevation of
seven thousand feet and bringing us almost to the foot of the great
snow-bound range of the Andes forming the Chilean border. The air was
cool, dry, and bracing even down at Neuquén; at Zapala the
winter-and-mountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not only to
wonder at but to protest volubly against the strange strain of
puritanism which had invaded even this distant corner of the Argentine
and made it a felony for the frontier shopkeeper to sell anything
stronger than beer on Sundays. Forty years ago all this region was an
unproductive waste across which roamed half-naked Indians, _boleando_
the _ñandúes_ for their sustenance and living in _toldos_, easily
transportable skin tents like those of certain tribes of Arab Bedouins.
To-day we were not even armed. Nowhere was there a remnant of those
“Patagones,” people of footprints so large that the southern end of
South America was named for them. The young Argentine general who was
once assigned the task of clearing northern Patagonia of the nomadic,
bandit-like aborigines had done his work with such Spanish thoroughness
that the entire tribe was annihilated, their chiefs dying as prisoners
on the island of Martín García. The government paid the expenses of this
expedition by dividing among the officers (not, be it noted, the
soldiers) the hundred million acres of land it added to the national
domain, and by selling the rest of it in enormous tracts at such
magnificent prices as three cents an acre. To-day intelligent
_argentinos_ are figuratively kicking themselves that they did not issue
government bonds instead and save this immense territory for the
homesteaders who would now gladly settle upon it.
To tell the truth the region did not look like one for which men would
die of home-sickness,—dry and bushy, like parts of Texas or northern
Mexico, with chaparral and bristling clumps of stunted growth bunched
out here and there across a plain that struck one as essentially arid
for all the pools of water left by the unprecedented rain. My
authoritative companion assured us, however, that it had every sign of
great fertility, though requiring irrigation on a large scale, a
beginning of which has already been made in the vicinity of the Rio
Negro. Yet only a rude and solitary nature surrounded us on all the
journey, the same flat monotony, dotted here and there with flocks of
sheep guarded by lonely half-Indian or Gallego shepherds, which
stretches all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
Flocks of pheasants flew up every little while as we screamed past them;
the hoarse cry of the _chajás_, a species of wild turkey, alternated
with the piercing call of the little _teru-teru_. Only at rare intervals
did a scattered flock of sheep or an isolated makeshift _rancho_ with a
saddled horse behind it give a human touch to the monotonous desolation.
Where the foothills of the Andes began to send us undulating over great
smooth ridges, like a bark rocked by a distant storm at sea, there
appeared wagon caravans bound for Chile, still days away over the lofty
pass ahead. Gradually the great snow-thatched wall of the Andes, endless
to the north and south, rose to shut off all the horizon before us,
wind-rent clouds dashing themselves to shreds against it. Yet here in
the temperate south the snow and ice-fields seemed less striking, much
less beautiful than when towering above the sun-flooded tropics.
On our return to Buenos Aires we stopped at an agricultural station near
the town of Rio Negro, where irrigation was already showing results.
Baled alfalfa lay in quantities at the stations; large vineyards, much
as they looked out of place in this landscape-less region, were
producing well. There being no passenger train to rescue us, we got
telegraphic permission to take the first east-bound freight. Before the
delay became unduly monotonous a train rose over the flat horizon and
rolled in upon us. We made our way along the thirty-odd cars loaded with
sheep to what in our own land would have been a comfortable caboose—and
climbed into an ordinary box-car that had all too evidently been
recently and often used for the transportation of coal. There was not
even an improvised seat in it; trainmen and the sheep care-takers sat on
the bare floor with their backs against the sooty wall and bumped along
like penniless and unresourceful hoboes. I would have given several
pesos to have heard the remarks of an American brakeman who could have
looked in upon his Argentine fellows as we jolted across the apparently
level plains with the bitter chill of the pampas settling down upon us.
We gladly dropped off at Darwin, where we hired next morning what the
_argentino_ calls a “soolkee” and drove to the island of Choele-Choel,
with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry. This thirteen
square leagues of fertile loam soil between two branches of the Rio
Negro is one of the most prosperous communities in southern Argentine,
with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in the wet
season, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been
peopled. My companion, weary perhaps of talking through an interpreter,
was particularly eager to see what remnants remained of a Welsh colony
once established here. We drove zigzagging along the wide checkerboard
earth roads between endless wire fences behind which many men were
plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows. Once we
paused to talk with one Villanova, political boss of the island, but
when my companion brought up the subject nearest his heart, the man
instantly showed opposition to the establishment of agricultural
schools.
[Illustration: A rural policeman of the Argentine]
[Illustration: My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the
_Argentino_ calls a “soolky”.]
[Illustration: A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some
of its inhabitants]
[Illustration: A family of Santiago del Estero]
“We have no middle class in the Argentine,” he explained, “and we do not
want one. We want only absentee landlords—or at least we have no way of
getting rid of them—and laborers, men who actually work and produce.
Agricultural schools would give us a class too proud of their schooling
to work, and at the same time without property. The distinction between
the man who toils and the man who owns is wide in the Argentine, but it
would be no improvement to fill in the gulf with a lot of haughty,
penniless drones.”
My companion had all but given up hope of using his native tongue
directly when there was pointed out to us a farm said to be owned by a
Welshman. But only his lanky daughter of sixteen was at home. The
ex-secretary addressed her eagerly; here at last he would get first-hand
information. The girl shifted from one undeveloped shank to the other,
backed away toward the unpainted frame farmhouse from which she had
emerged, struggling to answer a question in English, then turning to me,
she burst forth, all suggestion of embarrassment gone, in rapid-fire
Spanish:
“You see I was born in the Chubut, and English is only my third tongue,
for Spanish is my native language and father and mother always speak
Welsh at home and I almost never hear English and ...”
My companion bowed his head in resignation and turned our weary horse
back across the island toward the ferry.
The chill of autumn gradually disappeared from the air as the fastest
train in South America dashed in less than five hours, with only one
three-minute stop to change engines, from Buenos Aires to Rosario, two
hundred miles northwest of the federal capital. The rich-green immensity
of the well cultivated fields bordering the River Paraná were a contrast
to the bleak, bare, brown prairies of the south, and the gang-plow,
up-to-date methods of our great West were everywhere in evidence. In the
seat behind me two men were assuring each other that “the lands of this
region are worth ten times those of the interior,” and it was easy to
believe them. The rich black loam soil that came to light behind the
plows is said to produce two crops of splendid potatoes annually without
the use of fertilizer and with no change in crops for twenty years.
Though the day was warm and sunny, the cars remained hermetically sealed
throughout the journey, for the _argentino_ is true to type in his dread
of a breath of fresh air. Scarcely a glimpse of the River Paraná did we
catch, though we skirted it all the way to Rosario.
This second city of the republic has been called the Chicago of the
Argentine. It is more nearly the Omaha or Atlanta, not merely in size
but in the material prosperity, and the appearance and point of view
that go with it, which its position as a river port open to large ocean
steamers and as the natural outlet of all the fertile provinces of
northern Argentine has given it. Like Buenos Aires it has almost no
factory chimneys to emphasize its air of activity, which concentrates in
the vicinity of the wharves. A stroll through its busy, citified streets
is worth the exertion, or, better still, a round of its electric car
lines; but one would no more expect to find the picturesque and the
legendary past in Rosario than in Newark. Large and prosperous as it has
grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its
energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of
several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the
bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital
in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect.
I slipped on up the Paraná to have a look at this capital which the
Rosarians so universally tongue-lash. A splendidly fertile, softly
rolling, velvety-green country, with dark-red cattle standing in groups
here and there to give contrast, was the chief impression left by a
journey of several hundred kilometers through the province of Santa Fé.
Yet for some reason the city of the same name, though barely a hundred
miles north of Rosario, was humidly hot and swarming with flies, its
atmosphere that of an ambitionless town of the tropics content to dawdle
through life on what the frequent influxes of politicians bring it. Far
across the river, which here spreads out into an immense lagoon, lay
hazy white on a distant knoll the city of Paraná, capital of the
province of Entre Rios, between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, which
unite at length to form the Plata.
Another floor-flat, fertile plain, with many ranchos and villages, with
“soolkees” jogging along the broad earth roads between wheat and alfalfa
fields and pastures dotted with fat cattle and plump sheep until the
eyes tired of seeing them, marked the trip westward from Santa Fé. Here,
to all appearances, was the best farming land imaginable, though one
could easily imagine better farming. Crowds of shaggy yet
prosperous-looking countrymen gathered at every station. The alfalfales
were still deep-green, though it was already becoming late autumn;
golden ears of corn of a size that even Kansas would envy were being
husked from the standing stalks and heaped to overflowing into huge
_trojes_, stack-shaped bins made of split palm-trunks or other open-work
material.
I came at length to one of the oldest and most famous of Argentine
towns, a yellow-white city in a shallow valley, with an almost Oriental
aspect, and backed by hills—and hills alone are noteworthy enough to
bring a city fame in the Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only
rugged section of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out
of it to the west. Among these ranges, sometimes called, with the
exaggeration natural to young nations, the “Argentine Switzerland,” are
many summer hotels and colonies, strange as it may seem to go north for
the summer in the south temperate zone.
Córdoba, the geographical center of the Argentine Republic, is centuries
old, with more traditions, more respect for age, than Buenos Aires, with
many reminders of old Spain and of the conservative, time-marked towns
of the Andes. In Córdoba it is easy to imagine the atmosphere of the
federal capital of a century ago. There is still a considerable
“colonial” atmosphere; respect for old customs still survives; age
counts, which is rare in the Argentine, a country like our own full of
youth and confidence in the future, and the corresponding impatience
with the past, with precedent. Peru had already been conquered and
settled when Córdoba was made a halfway station between the unimportant
river-landing called Buenos Aires and the gold mines of the former Inca
Empire, and it was founded by Spanish nobles of a better class than the
adventurers who followed Pizarro on his bloody expedition. Many of the
families of Córdoba boast themselves descendants of those hidalgos,
though to most _argentinos_ ancestry seems as unimportant, compared with
the present, as it does to the average American. The Córdobans, like the
ancient families of the Andes, look down upon newly won wealth as
something infinitely inferior to shabby gentility, though the latter has
been refurbished of late years by increasing incomes from the
neighboring estates. The _Porteño_ has little sympathy for the Córdoban
attitude toward life. He pokes fun at the conservative old city, calling
it the “Mecca” of the Argentine because of the pilgrims who come at
certain seasons of the year to worship its bejeweled saints; he asserts
that its ostensibly “high-brow” people “buy books but do not read them.”
The Córdoban retaliates by rating Córdoba, and perhaps Salta, the only
“aristocratic” towns in the Argentine, and has kept the old Spanish
disdain of commerce, which is naturally a disdain of Buenos Aires.
The conservative old families do not, of course, accept newcomers
easily. There is a strong race, as well as class, prejudice. Up to half
a century ago no student was admitted to the university unless he could
show irrefutable proof of “pure” blood, that is, of unbroken European
ancestry. That rule might be in force to this day but for the strong
hand of the federal government. The famous university, founded in 1605
by the Jesuits, and ranking with that of Lima as the oldest in America,
is outwardly an inconspicuous two-story building, though there are
artistic old paintings and cedar-of-Tucumán carvings inside that are
worth seeing. The students who attend it are, however, by no means
unobtrusive, though they do not seem to give quite such exclusive
attention to the color of their gloves and the brand of their perfumes
as do their prototypes in the federal capital. It is natural, too, that
such a community should retain an air of piety. Its ancient moss-grown
cathedral, likewise of Jesuit construction, with a far-famed tower, is
but one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand
inhabitants. Priests and monks give it by their number and
conspicuousness an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its
scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral, its lack of church towers,
and its rare priests. In Córdoba there are even beggar monks who make
regular tours of the province, reminiscent of medieval Spain. The church
and its functionaries own many fine estancias, for pilgrims have always
come in numbers, and society is pious to the point of fanaticism. If one
may believe the _Porteño_, the conservatism and fanaticism of Córdoba
would be worse than it is had not the central government sent to the
university a number of German Protestant professors, who have had some
influence on the community, not so much in Germanizing as in breaking
down ancient prejudices.
Among the amusing old customs that remain are some that lend a touch of
the picturesque to offset a certain tendency toward the modern. Cows are
still driven through the streets, attended by their calves, and are
milked before each client’s door; the conservative Córdoban will have
none of this new-fangled notion of having his milk brought in bottles,
in which there may be a percentage of water. Here there is still the
weekly band concert and plaza promenade, with the two sexes marching in
opposite directions; here the duenna is in her glory and prospective
husbands whisper their assertions through iron-grilled windows. The
_gente del pueblo_, or rank-and-file citizens, nearly all with a
considerable proportion of that Indian blood almost unknown in Buenos
Aires, live in adobe thatched houses in the outskirts and have the
appearance, as well as repute, of little industry, with the Andean
tendency to work only a few days a week since foreign industry has
raised their wages to a point where frequent vacations are possible.
Cactus and donkeys add a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt
section, over which floats now and then a subtle breath of the tropics.
Córdoba in its shallow valley, veiled by thick banks of white mist, was
more beautiful on the morning I left than when more plainly seen. As our
train rose above it to the vast level pampa the city disappeared, but
all along the western horizon lay its famous mountains, a long ridge,
saw-like in places, turning indigo blue when the sun went down on a
brilliant day. On the other side of the train still lay the monotonous,
flat, low Argentine pampa, without hedges, ditches, almost without
trees, the roads mere wide spaces reserved for travel. The law requires
that federal roads be fifty meters broad, but in this land of unlimited
space and little stone no law can keep them from being impassable
sloughs in the rainy season and rivers of dust in the dry. Even here
were many enormous _estancias_, single estates of half a million acres,
which the train took hours to cross, though they are small compared with
some in the frontier country of the south. Here are _estancieros_ who
have the impression that the sun rises and sets on their property—which
is not without its influence on their characters and especially on those
of their children. In the “good old days,” which were not so long ago in
the Argentine, persons with money, political influence, or a military
record could acquire vast tracts of territory at trifling cost, and up
to the present generation these landed proprietors, among them most of
the old families of Córdoba, were virtually monarchs of all they
surveyed. Now the government, once so prodigal with its land, is
beginning to see the error of its ways, and is forming the habit of
talking in terms of square kilometers instead of square leagues, as well
as favoring bona fide settlers, though it still does not require those
who buy public lands at a song to settle upon and improve them.
Perhaps once each half hour did a more pretentious _estancia_ house,
surrounded by its thin grove of precious eucalyptus, break the monotony
of flat plain and makeshift _ranchos_. It is the scarcity of trees no
doubt that makes birds so rare in the Argentine. The two-compartment,
oven-shaped mud nests of the _hornero_ on the crosspieces of the
telegraph poles were almost the only signs of them, except of course the
occasional _ñandúes_ loping away across the pampa. The more and more
open-work reed shacks began to suggest almost perpetual summer. Then all
at once I ceased feeling the increasing heat, suddenly put down my
window, and a moment later was hurrying into a sweater. For a _pampero_
had blown up from the south, and seemed bent on penetrating to the
marrow of my bones.
When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable
change of landscape met the eye. The “rápido” was crawling into Santiago
del Estero, and I seemed to have been transported overnight from the
rich green fields of the Paraná back to the dreary Andes, or, more
exactly, to the coastlands of Peru or Bolivia. Founded in the middle of
the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a
little farther on, and forms in the rainy season large _esteros_, or
brackish backwaters and lagoons, “St. James of the Swamp” still suffers
intensely for lack of water. It is unfortunate that nature does not
divide her rains more evenly in the Argentine. Farther south only the
tops of the fence posts were protruding from the flood in some places;
here the country seemed to be habitually dying of thirst.
The main line of the “Central Argentine” does not run into Santiago, but
operates a little branch from La Banda (“Across the River”), because of
the treachery of the wide, shifty, sandy stream on which it lies. To-day
the railroad has a great iron bridge some two miles long, successor to
the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just
protruding from the sandy bed along the way. The company asserts that it
spends more to keep up its road into Santiago than it gets back from
that city in traffic, but its concession requires it to maintain contact
with what is reputed the most “native” capital of province still left in
the Argentine. Center of what is said to be the least fertile section of
the country, it remains, for a time at least, to the part-Indian race
which the South American calls native, the ambitionless _cholo_ or
_mestizo_, with his Mohammedan indifference to the future, his inertia
before modern progress. In other words, Santiago is an example of how
immigration is driving the native town as it is the native individual
into the most distant and poorest corners of the Argentine.
The town is built of crude bricks or baked mud, the only material
available, and except in the center it is a disintegrated collection of
huts with ugly high fronts and the air of never having reached maturity
in growth, though they have long since in age. It has few paved streets
and no street-cars, though it is overrun by a veritable plague of those
noisy, impudent hackmen who swarm in rural and provincial Argentine and
over whom the police seem to have neither influence nor authority. A
dead-dry, yellow prairie grass spreads wherever the ground is not
frankly sterile; chaparral and other desert brush grows even within the
town. Its thatched _ranchos_ of reeds, to be found anywhere a few blocks
back of the central plaza, are overrun with goats, pigs, cur dogs, and
naked children, like the most backward towns of the Andes. Here are to
be found the _choclo_, _locro_, _chicha_, and other corn products common
to the Andean cuisine, the same thin sheets of sun-dried beef, the
swarming _gente del pueblo_ so common to Peru and Ecuador, so unknown in
Buenos Aires. The popular speech is again the Quichua of the Incas,
Santiago being the only Argentine town of any size where it has
survived, though it is a Quichua as different from that of Cuzco as the
Italian of Florence is from that of Naples. Most of the children and
many of the adults go barefooted, a rare custom in the Argentine;
virtually all citizens have the incorrigible Latin-American habit of
stopping all talk to gaze open-mouthed at a passing stranger, entire
groups of men on the street corners turning their heads to stare after
him until one feels genuine misgiving lest they permanently dislocate
their ostrich necks.
There are reminders, too, of the gypsy section of Granada or Seville,
hints of Luxor or Assuan in Upper Egypt, as well as of the somnolent
towns in the half-tropical valleys of the Andes. The thatched mud huts
are surrounded with cactus hedges on which the family wash hangs drying;
everything is coated with the fine white dust of the unpaved streets,
through which the half-Indian women wade almost ankle deep, their
slattern skirts sweeping it into clouds behind them. Now and then there
passes one of these _chola_ females leading through the dust-river a
donkey bestridden by a girl of the same race and drawing by two ropes
tied to knobs in its ends a rolling barrel of water, the
chocolate-colored river water on which the town seems chiefly to
subsist. A dry, cracked soil under an ardent sun, thin animals eating
greedily at poor tufts of scanty vegetation, cactus used as field fences
as well as inclosing the miserable _ranchos_, cactus with twisted trunks
that look like enormous snakes about to strike, immense cactus
candelabras of ten or fifteen branches, a few poor chickens picking at
the sterile soil about the _ranchos_ by day and roosting by night in the
rare scraggly trees, scores of hungry-looking goats browsing on nothing,
yet somehow keeping energy enough to gambol about a scene usually devoid
of any form of unnecessary activity, a few almost leafless scrub trees
on which hang rags of raw meat sun-drying into _charqui_, or, as they
call it in southeastern South America, _tasajo_—these make up the
background of almost any picture of Santiago. Against this stand out in
slight relief bronzed _cholos_ loafing in the shade of the huts, pigs
and children disputing the same dreary playgrounds, men shirtless or in
shirt sleeves, with rather lifeless, inexpressive brown features, women
dressed in shapeless thin cotton gowns of brilliant colors—apple-green,
pink, shrieking red—their rarely washed faces surmounted by masses of
coarse, thick, straight black hair knotted carelessly together at the
neck, little girls carrying naked babies almost as large as themselves,
nearly all holding in one hand the dried-gourd bowl of _mate_ heated
over a fagot fire in the open air, sucking it eagerly yet languidly
through the straw-shaped metal _bombilla_. A completely naked gamin of
five gallops about astride a stick, his slightly older and no more
expensively attired brother doing the like on a scrubby horse without
saddle or bridle, both scattering the pigs, dogs, and chickens at every
turn. From the hut doors or the midst of such families seated _al
fresco_ and taking their _mate_ from a single bowl that circulates round
and round the group come languid calls of “Ché Maria!” “Ché compadre!”
“Ché Gringa!” “Ché” is the popular nickname of affection or familiarity
in southern South America, corresponding roughly to our once widespread
pseudonym “kid.”
I had the customary _santiagueño_ pleasure of rising at an unearthly
hour to catch the morning train to La Banda, only to find there that the
“mixed” daily from Buenos Aires into the sugar-fields of the far north
was seven hours late. Over the way stood a hotel poetically named “El
Dia de Nosotros,” but that day was evidently past, for the place was
irrevocably closed, and it was only by a streak of luck that long after
my customary breakfast hour I got from an uninviting street stand a cup
of what purported to be black coffee. During the delay I fell into
conversation with two young Austrians who had been all the way up to
Salta in quest of fortune. The best chance for work they had found was
at cutting sugar-cane at terms under which no one but the most expert
could earn more than two pesos a day. Much as it resembles our own land
in some ways, the Argentine does not give one the impression of being
any such Eldorado for the newcomer whose stock in trade consists solely
of two brawny arms.
The _mixto_ crawled in at last, covered with a thick blanket of fine
dust. At the station of Araoz, on the boundary line between the
provinces of Santiago and Tucumán, the sterile, bushy country suddenly
gave way to sugar-cane, vast fields, veritable prairies of cane, not the
little patches of light-green that dot and decorate many an Andean
landscape, but prosaic, heavily productive stretches as unromantic as
Iowa cornfields, spreading as far as the eye could see in any direction.
Cutting had begun, for it was late April, and all the way to Tucumán the
dull, sullen rumble of the massive rollers was as incessant as the
pungent smell of molasses in the air, while everywhere great brick
stacks rose from the flat green landscape, belching forth their heavy
clouds of smoke on the hazy, humid atmosphere.
Tucumán, my farthest north in the Argentine, in a latitude similar to
that of southern Florida, was once under the Inca, though the casual
observer would scarcely suspect of any such past this bustling modern
Argentine town and capital of the smallest yet most prosperous province
of the republic. It is a town that lives, breathes, and dreams sugar,
accepting proudly the national nickname of the “City of Sugar.” A
checkerboard place, some of its wide streets paved with wooden blocks,
its houses of the old Spanish one-story style, yet often seventy or
eighty meters deep, with two flowery patios hidden away behind the bare,
though gaily smeared, façades, it has mildly the “feel” of the tropics
intermingled with its considerable modern activity. Electric tramways
and lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of
the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley wires. In
the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees laden with ripe
fruit, pepper-trees, palms, and cactus, not to mention a highly
unsuccessful marble statue of Liberty, holding in her hands the links of
her broken chains as if they were considerably too hot for comfort.
About this never-failing civic focus are the government buildings, the
cathedral, the bishop’s palace, and several pretentious clubs, though
the entire circuit brings to view no architecture of interest. In one of
several other squares there is a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the
Spaniards in this vicinity in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of
Mercies,” whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalísimo of
his armies. Near the central plaza, surrounded with an almost religious
atmosphere, is Independence Hall, in which was signed what amounts to
Argentine’s Declaration of Independence. It is a little adobe structure,
long and low, like many of the poor men’s _ranchos_ scattered about the
pampas, carefully whitewashed, with a restored wooden roof and other
improvements to make it look new and unnatural, after the approved
Latin-American style of disguising what it is feared may be taken for
the commonplace. All this is covered by a large modern concrete building
in charge of a _chinita_, who is theoretically always on hand to admit
visitors who desire to see the two good bronze reliefs, the medals, the
portraits of the signers of the declaration, to sit down in the
century-old presidential chair long enough for a snapshot, and to add
their autographs to the register locked away in the former presidential
desk, in approved tourist fashion. From Tucumán one can make out the dim
blue outline of the lower Andes to the west, and in clear sunny weather
the snow peaks of Bolivia stand out distinctly to the north. Indeed, it
is within the district embracing Tucumán and Santiago del Estero that
Argentine life begins to shade imperceptibly into the Bolivian or
Andean.
Virtually the entire province of Tucumán is covered with sugar-cane and
orange groves. The rivalry between these two products has been acute for
decades, now one, now the other usurping the center of the stage. Toward
the end of the last century the northern part of the republic “went
sugar crazy” and burned whole forests of orange-trees in order to plant
cane. The result was a year of overproduction, the only period in which
the Argentine exported sugar, though she should easily be able to supply
half South America. On the contrary she habitually imports sugar, her
own in many cases, for the crude sugar shipped to Europe is often the
very sugar which was served in tissue-wrapped lumps in nearly every
restaurant and _lechería_ of Buenos Aires long before that sanitary
provision was thought of in the United States. But then, so does the
Argentine import garlic, and onions, peppers, _garbanzos_ (the Spanish
chickpeas of which she is still so fond), cheese, and millions of
“fresh” eggs, not only from Uruguay across the river but from Spain and
Portugal across the sea, though all these commodities might easily be
produced at home. Sugar pays what we would consider a heavy internal
duty, which is reputed to be one of the causes why there are so few
national refineries. In her one year of overproduction Tucumán province
gave the country nearly twice the sugar it could consume. The terrified
planters banded together to build up the export trade, got a bounty from
the federal government, which was later forbidden by the Brussels
convention, and forced the provincial government to pass a law limiting
sugar plantations. In carrying this out the _tucumanos_, who had burned
forests of orange-trees a few years before to plant cane, now burned
square leagues of cane-fields that were producing too generously. The
government indemnified the men who fired their fields and furnished them
free seeds of corn, wheat, and barley with which to replant them. But in
time the pendulum swung back again and to-day the province has little
interest in anything but sugar.
Tucumán retains none of the primitive methods by which cane is turned
into brown lumps of _panela_ or _chancaca_ on the little plantations
scattered through the Andes. Some sixty immense _engenios_ grind
incessantly during the rather short but exceedingly busy season. The
capacity of many of these mills is large, though they work less than
those of Cuba. These, and the often enormous estates about them, are in
most cases owned by English or other foreign firms, the American being
most conspicuous by his absence. Not only are we unrepresented in
ownership but in the machinery used, which is with rare exceptions
British, French, Belgian, and German, for the _argentino_ seems to have
an instinct which draws him toward Europe and causes him to avoid all
unnecessary contact with what he calls the “North American.” It is not
that he fears the “Collosus of the North,” like so many of the smaller,
bad-boy republics nearer the Gulf of Mexico, rather is he firmly
convinced that his country is as powerful and self-sufficient as our
own, but he is inclined by temperament and custom to turn his eyes
eastward rather than northward.
In this busy season of the Argentine autumn and winter Tucumán province
is a hive of activity. Thousands of workmen of many races are scattered
among the horseman-high plants which stretch to the horizon in every
direction, slashing off the canes at the ground, clearing them of leaves
and useless top with a few quick swings of the machete, and tossing them
with graceful easy gesture upon piles often several meters away. Along
the wide and soft dirt roads which cut into squares the dense jungles of
cane, there is a constant stream of cumbersome two-wheeled carts,
usually drawn by five mules, the _meztizo_ driver in his ragged garments
and soiled, broad-brimmed hat astride the off hind animal, as they
strain toward the points of concentration. There the load is weighed and
lifted in a single bundle by huge cranes which are the only American
contribution to the average estate, and dropped into the cars of the
private railroads that crisscross all the province, or directly into the
carriers that feed the three sets of mammoth inexorable rollers. The
_bagasa_ left over from the crushing is burned at once in the mill
engines, along with the wood brought in from constantly increasing
distances; the _mosta_, or saccharine residue so poor and dirty that it
will not produce even the lowest of the three grades of unrefined sugar,
is turned into alcohol. Every important factory has a village clustered
about it, a community complete from bakers to priest. Field workers have
an unalienable right to the two finest canes they cut or load during the
day, and at dusk long broken lines of them may be seen returning from
the fields carrying their poles over one shoulder, like homeward bound
fishermen, or seated on the ground, machete in hand, peeling the cane
and cutting it into sections, to thrust these in their mouths, crush and
suck them, and spit them out upon the earth about them.
No traveler with a bit of time to spare should leave the Argentine
without visiting her chief “holy place,” presided over by _La Virgen de
Luján_. If we are to believe all we are told, it is this patron saint
who has made the Argentine the prosperous, happy land it is to-day. To
her groups of pious women, headed by the archbishop, made pilgrimage
from Buenos Aires when the bill of the new socialist deputies threatened
to become a divorce law; to her the country turns when it gets too much,
or too little, rain; here the Irish-Argentinos gather en masse on St.
Patrick’s day.
Genuine pilgrims are expected to fast on the day they visit Luján.
We—for a friend made the journey with me—came nearly carrying out this
requirement in spite of ourselves, having missed the train we planned to
take and unwisely set out on foot without waiting for the next. For once
outside the city limits, it is a long way from Buenos Aires to the next
shop or restaurant. Luján is something more than forty miles west of the
capital, the usual “boliche” town of the pampas and a slough of mud in
this autumn season, the unfinished dull-red brick “basilica” bulking
high above it and visible many miles away. The legend, which still finds
a surprisingly large number of believers in the Argentine, runs that in
the time of the Spanish dominion a community of Spanish monks set out
with great ceremony to transport a statue of the Virgin from Buenos
Aires to Peru. Arrived at the hamlet of Luján, the cart in which it was
being carried stopped. Nothing could induce it to move on. No doubt it
was the rainy season and there was excellent reason for its
immovability, but the good monks concluded that the Virgin was
expressing a desire to remain where she was, and her wishes were
respected. A small chapel was erected and her cult perpetuated. When
immigration increased and swarms of devout Italians, not to mention the
Spanish and Irish, began to settle in the vicinity and make frequent
pilgrimages to the shrine, the bishop in charge took it as an indication
that the powers of a better world wished the Virgin to be housed in a
building befitting her increasing popularity. He undertook the erection,
from popular subscriptions, of a “Gothic cathedral” which should be the
most imposing in the Argentine, though this, to be sure, is not saying
much. It was planned to spend six million pesos, half of which are
already gone, and as soon as the walls had been raised the bishop
insisted on opening the building, which perhaps is why there is so
little suggestion of Gothic about the bare brick, towerless,
façade-less, on the whole dismal structure.
Though we might be willing to fast, when there was no choice in the
matter, not all the patron saints on the globe could have forced us to
wallow through the mile or more of black mud between the station and the
“basilica.” For that matter, we noted that even the pious pilgrims who
had arrived with us in their gleaming patent-leather shoes climbed
unhesitatingly into the comfortable, if tiny, horsecar, and that not one
of them gave a suggestion of dropping off to finish the journey on his
knees, or even on foot. We were no less astounded, if secretly more
pleased, to find that one of the rascals keeping the restaurants tucked
away among the many _santerías_, shops in which are sold tin “saints”
which _los fieles_ may carry home to perform their cures by hand, was
willing to jeopardize our future salvation by providing us, before we
had consummated the object of every visit to Luján, with as much of a
repast as one learns to hope for in an Argentine “boliche” town.
Inside the unfinished but already richly decorated “basilica” the
curved-stone back of the altar and the stairway rising above it was
already carved with the names of those who credited the Virgin with
curing them of incurable ailments. There were other less conspicuous
places for similar testimonials from those with less mesmerism over the
root of evil. About the altar were gathered groups of pilgrims engaged
in the preliminary formalities of the faithful who come seeking aid.
Peasants still wearing the garb of Lombardy or Piedmont, and no doubt
come to ask the Virgin for a little less rain and a better price for
their corn, that they might buy the coveted piece of land next their own
or send more money to the old people they had left behind in Italy,
mingled with richly garbed _Porteñas_ who were praying perhaps for
motherhood or the welfare of a lover.
“But where is the statue?” asked my impious companion of a young priest
who was marching back and forth committing to memory some password to
heaven.
“Why—er,” gasped the startled ecclesiastic, “do you mean the Blessed
Virgin?”
“Yes,” returned my companion, carelessly.
“Follow those broad curving stairs and you will find our Blessed Lady of
Luján in that little room above the altar,” replied the horrified youth,
crossing himself fervently.
Above we found a single worshipper, a working woman dressed in the most
nearly whole and spotless gown she possessed, kneeling on the marble
floor, to which she bowed her forehead now and then, her eyes fixed on a
doll some two feet high overdressed in heavy gilded robes and covered
with bracelets, necklaces and girdles of false pearls and diamonds—for
the real ones, worth a king’s ransom, are deposited in a safety vault in
Buenos Aires and are used only on the anniversary of the Virgin’s halt
in Luján. Back of the woman her son of five was climbing high up the
iron grill surrounding the chapel, in his own particular effort to reach
heaven. I lifted him down before he broke his neck, whereupon he sidled
over to the lunch-basket the pair had brought with them and, keeping a
weather eye on his devout parent, stealthily drew out a quart bottle of
wine wrapped in a newspaper. Setting his teeth in the protruding cork,
he tugged at it for some time, like a puppy at a root, drew it at last,
and with an eye still on his mother, deep in her communing with the
Virgin, gulped down nearly half a liter, re-corked the bottle, and
slipped it back into its place.
On the way down we halted to speak with a well-dressed warden, who
assured us that he had personally known of “thousands of supernatural
cures” performed by the Virgin of Luján.
“Why,” he cried, growing more specific, “I have known many rich ladies
to come out here from Buenos Aires on crutches, make a promise to our
Blessed Virgin and go back home and—and by and by _they would send out
the crutches_ as proof of being cured, and perhaps a diamond necklace to
show their gratitude to Our Lady. There is no ailment that Our Lady
cannot cure.”
“Curious,” I mused, “but as I came in I noticed just outside the gates
four beggars,—a blind woman, a one-legged man, a man without legs, and a
paralytic.”
“Ah, _esa_ gente! _That_ class of people!” cried the warden, with a
world of disgust in his voice and a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders.
CHAPTER IV
OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE
It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest
bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me
outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked
consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my
exertions in running errands and eluding _Porteño_ prices, the day
seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The
“International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital
three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the
continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the
“International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into
the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and
ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific,
thirty-six hours after bidding the _Porteños_ farewell.
On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless
and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church
spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American
windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train
made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed.
At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the
cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over
the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an
ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of
sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight
of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the
pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes
dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops
of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were
huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy
islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and
adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown
verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the
churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of
activity. Even the _ñandúes_ seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat.
[Illustration: A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand]
[Illustration: Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_
of southeastern South America]
[Illustration: The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with
snow]
[Illustration: A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of
May]
Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often
above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing
the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue
grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous
_estancia_, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of
the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine
government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became
so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving
little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of
productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get
these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering
prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special
inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the
“Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some
of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce
something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride
in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of
manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income
is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming,
or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those
portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting
this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy
_estancieros_ donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but
room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a
village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it.
A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously
wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the
country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find
the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a
history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no
stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it
was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the
only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet
the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless
dens of the Indians and _cholos_ of the Andes. It was Sunday, and
especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns
to _hacer el corso_, to parade back and forth, at the station at
train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts,
powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms
interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic
fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms
and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As
attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant
groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform
throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to
descend and make his way across it.
For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except
occasional flocks of _ñandúes_ cantering away like awkward schoolgirls.
About every _boliche_, country store and liquor shop, were groups of
shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals
prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their
front feet together. _Bombachas_, the bloomer-like nether garments of
the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern _gauchos_. A few of
these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly
hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a
generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day,
washing it down with copious draughts of boiling _mate_. Vegetables are
as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the
employees, only the _mayordomos_ and the pen-driving class missing, who
gather daily about the _asado_ provided by the _estanciero_, still live
almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack _galletas_
from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true _gaucho_
blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them,
galloped about some of these smaller towns, _boleando_ cats and dogs
with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or
woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole
future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that
means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost
numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the
stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy,
independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from
enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style
of _argentino_ as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated
_gaucho_ of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a
body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from
trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else
along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the
police.
Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of
the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles
inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific,
though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat
ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city
is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of
magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with
ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour
down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention,
and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees
bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an
extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business
buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish
style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one
only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few
buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations,
with columned façades and _corredores_ paved with colored marble
_dalles_, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still
remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the
entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the
ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church
or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against
high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the
summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush
or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the _mendocinos_ are only
beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses
are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it
rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or
washing them out to a leprous gray.
Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style
of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the
streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so
that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and
fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom,
if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard.
Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in
the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its _cancha de bochas_,
a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are
electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo
our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important
Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric
light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to
this rule.
The modern _argentino_ is not only a transplanted European, but in most
cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration
is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As
in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration
bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which
strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus
there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in
the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the
purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish
colonial days, but the native _bombachas_ are no more familiar sights
than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short
blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven
features of the hardy Spanish peasant and _arriero_.
Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal
capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing
political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized
government more nearly like that of France than that in the United
States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only
within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer
but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from
Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes
the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has
nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government,
often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first
suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a
suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of
nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to
their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has
it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they
lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize
over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected
directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly
unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They
are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets
after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he
does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If
the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into
jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the
prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone
after dark at the end of the month.
I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An
official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already
fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner
predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in
particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine
agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more
patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land.
Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law
requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the
national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover
when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by
rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked
that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets,
shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the
month.
In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals
lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their
chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than
they would have cloth _alpargatas_. Scores of police, dozens of firemen,
still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South
America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and
high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached
a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians
seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the
governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding
pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is
not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent
an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with
attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did
not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required
kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for
Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical
attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te
Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in
cloistered Bogotá.
The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of
police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of
citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple,
surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke
up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city
park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look
gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other
transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over
all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The
crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake
nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a
solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first
outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The
entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit
of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared
a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the
Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops
early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the
most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half
starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then
an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the
monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is
worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue
of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all
the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an
enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze
condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a
provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had
from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless
sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains,
which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits
of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to
describe.
Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the
afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we
low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few
poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better
carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally
private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded
cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the
carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and
farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only
occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad
ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit.
Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets,
directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was
there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the
conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago
with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took
care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on
that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their
wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty
army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen
upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the
national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in _boínas_ and
_alpargatas_ and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in
the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot.
Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of
drunkenness did I see during the day.
As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks
and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet
also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony,
ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump
type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being
physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon
after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out
of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive,
and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles
gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were
having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful
orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the
foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still
wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to
be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number
by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to
stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying
musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a
firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening,
though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were
gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots,
and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those
who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the
ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian
voices with more power than polish.
The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza
province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One
train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which
it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same
trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out
against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I
had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like
a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all
but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great
peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and
everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between
some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only
by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little
natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and
insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were
introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over
from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught
and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly
in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day
the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza
furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over
at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces
along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the
railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew
grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the
greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe.
Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are
insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along
the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low
in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best
of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give
the trees proper care.
I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not
seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de
Bergerac” kept running through my head, “_Regardez les feuilles, comme
elles tombent_.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender
yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless
brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn
standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed
far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering
forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental
looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown
errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes,
shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and
bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping
willow or an _alfalfal_ showing the advantages of irrigation gave a
contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before
his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a
fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up
the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the
vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads
away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a
fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape.
I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in
this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept
upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the
day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the
discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the
“International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about
in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been
permitted to board the little narrow-gauge _transandino_ train, so tiny
in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas
that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s
fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open
church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent
intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No
doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has
no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a
desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel
the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping
through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent
scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly,
without respect either for nature or my own inclinations.
The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene
lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its
grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned
away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost
imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose
rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes,
gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation.
The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed
foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains
that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order,
like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their
tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries
of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this
region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny
scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient
knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness
only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely
a foot high.
Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by
the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever
higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the
plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep,
narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of
colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but
which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie
with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its
hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape
that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had
disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren
as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the
cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the
deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard
heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable
surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But
this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs
shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of
valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows
still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a
certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of
nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One
seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter
absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the
oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only
by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its
narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars
behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort
of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse
them.
Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare _casuchas_,
huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked
away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of
the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against
the dreaded _temporales_, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At
the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River
has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of
Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed
small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán,
with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because
there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to
believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western
hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in
streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier
peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence.
As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp,
coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the
traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my
cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and
walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me
hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and
the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales
of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and
be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other
side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there
was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There,
at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and
the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was
almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting
on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less
than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had
disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the
world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates
make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more
crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the _argentino’s_
liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the
talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a
cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman.
As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak
and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young
Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los
Andes, where the _transandino_ joins the government railways of Chile.
The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it
their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and
went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost
alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet
above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height,
an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even
near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was
decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand
feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians,
in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching
to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent
dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian
stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the
trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside
world.
With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning
incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier
hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it
was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery
mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first
room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to
lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have
done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired
to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable
wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and
peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads
piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was
near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard
above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows
of the unsheltered wood structure.
At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white
crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was
really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the
landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for
the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see
the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of
the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers
of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December
and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and
was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took
what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and,
picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren,
rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above.
For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock,
all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with
every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the
molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has
struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of
high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion.
Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I
must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing
a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was
nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to
another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In
many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it
came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands
upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to
carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would
gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut”
informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was
difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and
ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole
without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice
than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the
cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by
eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a
well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced
in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me.
I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day
struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out
by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge
between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international
boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the
famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the
mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost
miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure
itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope
will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size
and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting.
Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and
set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was
drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft
that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had
cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was
forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the
very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua
and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point
where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain.
It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into
Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it
down the swift and insecure slope.
Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful
in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the
glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was
comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little
narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had
already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a
work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed
or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on
revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however,
dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese
features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that
they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last
a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a
short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the
fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the
world. They were _rotos_ indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial
Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it
has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or
features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air
of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who
lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink.
There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down
which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the
range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of
feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty
avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and
suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who
built the more difficult Chilean half of the _transandino_. The station
of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at
sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream
below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my
Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled
from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely
fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more
than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that
had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and
mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little
village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had
heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but
this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the
same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from
grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had
grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes.
Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp
limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently
a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying
all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of
burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it
through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my
ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the
railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and
foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over
which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the
revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room
under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of
rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and
endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost
only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman
had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was
an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown
world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her
horizon.
By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing
autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with
yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one
looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the
rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it
rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus
which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red
tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were
being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves
out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and
half-Indian _arrieros_ on foot grew up along the broad highway following
the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few
reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but
perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad,
well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later
afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of
Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of
the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage
awaiting me.
[Illustration: At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the
Andes” in a bleak and arid setting]
[Illustration: The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile]
[Illustration: On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in
among the boulders]
[Illustration: The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the
summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley]
The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the
night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed
at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of
the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, _roto_ Chile, whether in the
crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found
in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of
the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep
soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be
rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station
where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in
ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights
flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and
we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be
one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile.
CHAPTER V
CHILEAN LANDSCAPES
Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café
open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour
preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My
second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at
the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be
no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and
the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest
type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar
with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less
oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more
shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the
Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like
that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.
This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all
Chile. The _roto_ who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of
the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train,
who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country.
With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel.
The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty
holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house
fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or
repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic
feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors
of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great
difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another
shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos
Aires.
The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern
Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly
account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once
of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social
standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks
of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial
builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of
losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained
an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of _cités_ or
_conventillos_, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind
alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving
off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded,
unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished
from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.
The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more
important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza
de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material
being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many
half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there
where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far
outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals
of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and
modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of
“saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no
distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable
than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous,
doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either
architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public
structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral;
the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list
of imposing buildings. Long _galerías_, roofed passages that are
virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though
its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with
sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios
than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings,
and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none
whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social
standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River
Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of
all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a
laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of
that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare
house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.
Of late years many of these old families have found that they can
materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower
stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always
slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been
almost wholly obliterated. Under the _portales_ of a palatial, red-brick
building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories
once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty
little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands,
uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the
Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South
America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy
little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are
sold the favorite dishes of the _gente de medio pelo_, the ragged
masses,—_mote molido_ (boiled and mashed ripe corn); _mote con
huesillos_ (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the
thick, greasy soup known as _cazuela_. The half-trained tailors, to whom
no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense
well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing
throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women
commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively _mujeres de manto_,
dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about
their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of
color adding to the general gloom of the town.
In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do
class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of
the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce,
drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking
ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often
gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza.
The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of
velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the
_alpargatas_, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called
_hojotas_ common to the _roto_ class. Some of these countrymen come
riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden
closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently
with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who
are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the
morning hideous with their deliveries.
It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion
of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky
hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of
perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may
be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above
the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all,
have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag
rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to
behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every
direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old
churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if
that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity
to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two
thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of
Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in
the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand
as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the
main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging
horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal
scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never
uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly
rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few
kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has
broken the ice of _costumbre_, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier
classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps
indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great
ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their
single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early
and often to tuberculosis.
Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any
noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory
chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy,
soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural
haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet
shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a
drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required
by the human system that I recall having run across in South
America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified
himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny
Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary
light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to
be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both
Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic
doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be
married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the
wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away
in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by
prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries
there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few
months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having
a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to
the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a
Protestant church _is_ a church, even in Chile.
Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger
hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much
the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San
Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a
gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense
sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is
offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising
“Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and
as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they
wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by
threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is
protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile
is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.
Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually
open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be
taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of
the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of
two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the
monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two
immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a
pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward,
the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or
both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing
at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the
glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass,
readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of
course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for
a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a
lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and
Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the
_intellectuales_ of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat,
lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out
after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long
and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the
great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from
Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any
other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his
fellow-_intellectuales_, for it would have been attacking one of their
most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he
argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was
not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the
unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object
of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence
from the more humble origin.
There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of _futres_,
_bomberos_, and _rotos_. The first are well-dressed street-corner
loafers; the _bomberos_ are volunteer firemen, and the _rotos_ form the
ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The
latter, said never to be without the _corvo_, an ugly curved knife, with
which they are quick to _tripear_, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an
adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous,
but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood.
Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of
the _Mercurio_ office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter
to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers
than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named
Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and
almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and
slouches are the rule among the female division of the _roto_ class, and
Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the
Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign
born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests
such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen,
and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually
welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in
evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast
characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them
decidedly from the people of eastern South America.
Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still
noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful
owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which
the ostensibly free-voting _roto_ has little real hand. The “best
families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and
in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or
from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is
frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the
ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public
building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the
voter must be able to read and write, and any _roto_ whom the landlords
do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On
the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more
common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible
politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising
from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast
upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages
given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the
frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and
histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is
often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly
democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in
the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic
patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes
striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the _roto_ not only free of
speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his _corvo_, but ready to
fight for himself in more modern ways.
“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will
be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution.
The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their
incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country.
You have something of that problem in the United States, but the
proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible
compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of
the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”
Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still
retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the
upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago
grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One
of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic
families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up
in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their
trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of
being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable.
One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to
the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside
Santiago in a decade.
History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the
energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no
exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not
rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a
world monopoly of nitrate, or _salitre_, as the Chilean calls it, the
only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty
on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which
is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some
town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero
to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the
“saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the
treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the
request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen
deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic
pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the
greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to
take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton,
who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the
time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,”
insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and
Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”
The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for
agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the
Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under
ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious
enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading
impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket
statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no
such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to
the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an
exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he,
and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and
artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less
active and has less initiative than the more European _argentino_.
Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The
latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and
the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live
in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at
the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books,
because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup
fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in
newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older
native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate
arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the
contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the
instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the
suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show
that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The
country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere _ranchos_ to modern
several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw
more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America,
and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater
prevalence of wooden structures.
The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the
_bomberos_ to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire
departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is
appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are
open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males
of Santiago’s “best families” become _bomberos_ because it is considered
one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored
ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a
fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and
all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to
don their splendid _bombero_ uniforms, without which, naturally, it
would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always
include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the _bomberos_
arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of
being both true and courteous.
There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other
convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the _bomberos_.
The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if
it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on
conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as
the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the
ranks are filled almost entirely with _rotos_ or the poorer classes. The
Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray
Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the
commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the
World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great
contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian
population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian
temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its
more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only
the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are
frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world
seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first
time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life
recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the
Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling
for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best,
or at least the second best, navy in South America.
Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among
their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the
Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had
communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between
mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of
illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted
with a _turno_, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard
barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the
_turno_ given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their
agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions.
Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are
housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day
taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely
the fault of the _roto_ class. None but the civil marriage is now legal
in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the
poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to
get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the
church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to
have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he
is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money.
Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in
the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or
die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.”
German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted
to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only
makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but
frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the
church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though
this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like,
even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the
proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against
these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans,
is more noted for criticism than for effective action.
Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until
two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the
political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate
“functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain
the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing.
Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most
beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this
distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean
women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety
black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they
were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at
least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce
and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly
deserted, except by the stolid _pacos_ wrapped in their heavy black
uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag
on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish,
usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven
around the eternal triangle; now and then a _zarzuela_ company succeeds
in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems
as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone),
or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to
avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic
efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these
mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or
wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that
they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the
winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian
than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a
Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better
suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus
of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out
toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude.
Among the poorer classes the _zamacueca_, the native dance of Chile,
popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman,
each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if
alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and
a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of _chicha
de manzana_ or _de uva_, which roughly correspond to our cider and
grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed
class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not
often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the
side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in
competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred
meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which
she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune
without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the
winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is
better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many
“chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives
the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the
“s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of
its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where
Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first
president of the University of Chile.
I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of
Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since
become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom
dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars
of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a
boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to
man’s estate. The boy is the _conductor_, which in Spanish means the
motorman, and the woman _cobrador_, or collector. Far from inspiring the
protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their
income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some
unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance
that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to
accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the
dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member
of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance
enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to
be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her
head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin
stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female
conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the
working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away
an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car
behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan
are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for
they certainly are not on the cars.
Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that
the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten
centavos; up on the _impériale_ they pay five, which at the commonly
prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively.
Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or
the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The
white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the
closed car rather than go up on the _impériale_, which is not only
preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes
the upper story forbidden ground for the _gente decente_. As a
Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and
widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top:
“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than
inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in
Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk,
nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up
there with the _rotos_. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to
ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he
goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon
me in droves.”
The Chilean _peso_ is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New
York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South
American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as
doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or
silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day
before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs
the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a _peso
fuerte_,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a
“strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has
decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is
nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its
national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in
need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No
wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is
gambling enough to suit anyone.
With the exception of a few private, narrow-gauge lines in the nitrate
and coal fields, the railroads of Chile are government owned. A state
line now runs the length of the country, connecting its southernmost
port on the mainland with its most northern province, and even with the
capital of Bolivia. In the fertile, well-inhabited southern half of the
country the railroads, like the more important ones of the Argentine,
have the broad Spanish gauge, and down to where the population begins to
thin out the trains are long and frequent. The “Longitudinal,” running
for hundreds of miles northward from the latitude of the _transandino_
through dreary deserts a bare meter wide, carries neither through
passengers nor freight. The former would probably die of monotony or
thirst on the way; the latter would be valuable indeed after paying the
breath-taking freight rates. It is far quicker, more pleasant, and
cheaper to take, or to send by, the steamers along the coast, and the
real raison d’être of the “Longitudinal” is Chile’s determination to
keep the two provinces she took from Peru.
On the whole, the railroads of Chile are a sad commentary on government
ownership. There are probably more employees to the mile on Chilean
railroads than on any other system in the world, not because the Chilean
is a particularly poor workman, but because politicians foist upon the
helpless public carriers so many needy but influential constituents. Yet
both roadbeds and rolling stock of this overmanned system are
astonishingly _descuidado_,—uncared for, dust-covered, unwashed, loose,
broken, out of order, inadequate, with whole train-loads of perishable
goods rotting in transit, and frequent wrecks. It is common rumor that
the government pays twice the market price for all railway supplies,
thanks to the carelessness and the grafting tendencies of the personnel,
while every year finds the railroads with a million or more deficit. How
carelessly the trains are operated is suggested, too, by the
extraordinary prevalence of missing legs in Chile. It seemed as if one
could scarcely look out a train window without seeing someone crutching
along beside the track, to say nothing of those entirely legless, as if
the railroad habitually ran amuck among the population.
Started by Meiggs, the fleeing Californian who carried the locomotive to
the highlands of Peru, and continued by a deserter from an American
sailing ship, the Chilean railroads were built chiefly by American
capital, as well as by American engineers. They still bear many
reminders of that origin. The passenger-trains have comfortable American
day coaches, made in St. Louis; the sleeping-cars are real Pullmans;
even the freight-cars closely resemble our own. The engines, though
supplied with bells, are more often of British or German origin, or from
the government shops near Valparaiso. There are three classes, or, more
exactly, five, for the prices and service on the express trains are
different from the corresponding ones on the _mixtos_. Except that in
the former one is more certain of having an entire seat to oneself,
there is little difference between first and second class. Fares are
comparatively low even in these; on the lengthwise wooden benches of
third class they are cheaper than hoboing. Trunks, however, pay almost
as high as their weight in passenger, there being no free-baggage
allowance. The assertion is frequently heard in Chile that third class
is a disadvantage to the country, because the low price makes it too
easy for the _roto_ masses to move about. A rule that might not be amiss
in our own land is that the engineer who jerks a train either in coming
into or leaving a station is subject to a fine, if not to dismissal—but
of course the Brotherhood would never permit any such interference with
their long-established privileges. The trainboy nuisance, here known as
a _cantinero_, with the accent on the beer, is in full evidence. Though
the night trains carry Pullmans, there are no diners, because
concessions have been given at various stations to men of political
influence to run dining-rooms and the trains must stop there long enough
to contribute the customary rake-off. The monopolists are less given to
brigandage than they might be, however, and of late there has been
inaugurated a system of sealed lunches at three pesos, including a
half-bottle of wine. Moreover, it is a rare station that does not have a
crowd of female food-vendors, especially well-stocked with fruit in the
autumn season.
[Illustration: The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have
women conductors]
[Illustration: Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit
less picturesque than Valparaiso]
[Illustration: The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile]
[Illustration: Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South
American cities built of wood, even the streets being paved with planks]
The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one
hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the
train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way
through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent
magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out
hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to
Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the
Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts
leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures
bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great
estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his
administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of
every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north,
the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and
turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief
source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but
once since entering South America two years before burst out in full
ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected
bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s
most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so
close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad,
and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis
and second city of the country.
Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of
South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in
layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it
stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that
surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled
masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have
climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there
is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following
the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town,
under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy,
two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a
small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops
of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business
houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the
earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs
steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble
of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique
feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise
dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since
the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are
English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at
opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles,
though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten
centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious
persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several
stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs
to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city
spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular
bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and
small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash
unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales
sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous
project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead
with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so
far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no
visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures
of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and
more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though
nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña
del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of
Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up
the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited
country.
The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood.
Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found
wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive
landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving
or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least
important among them. Along the docks the _roto_ stevedore works
barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town
rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets
its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow
at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in
this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact
with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in
watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a
street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights
of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns
inland and climbs back up into the Andes.
From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped
southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a
feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley,
distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more
fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams
pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness,
stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where
the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season
vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling
country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky,
the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the
jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line
painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the
horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of
closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with
a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the
rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen
grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs,
shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a
hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the
Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow.
Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks,
more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the
general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were
many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their
shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the
ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here,
especially among the _huasos_, as the _gaucho_ is known in Chile, and
this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the
individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed
numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with
cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which
prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped
north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing
their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there
was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is
like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here
following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea.
At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale
fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well
stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only
land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red
_copihüe_, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom
growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women
were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of
more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over
many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with
earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called _guayruros_ with
which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are
supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the
ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple
and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them
bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab
farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously
un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages
decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in
arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might
easily have mistaken them for raisins.
We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few
shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped
off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far
too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance.
The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of
the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here,
as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its
resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets
of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away
its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were
announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not
promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal
a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been
raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through
which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a
bed—and not much of a bed at that.
In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it
had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the
traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as
good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as
a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of
“hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest,
and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average
of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be
mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected
makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate
purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always
charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells
for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being
prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost
several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not.
The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has
had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it;
or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that
the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite
side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the
first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the
man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels
even though he spends some half of his time on trains.
It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when
I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats
and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have
fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a
climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is
healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a
prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the
shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it
northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and
suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many
rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The _huaso_ was everywhere busy
with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as
those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable
eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar
was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent.
I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly
pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district
with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills,
even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru.
Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the
usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen
dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A
splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning
point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with
grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest.
A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet
spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the
plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many
Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous.
Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the
hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came
out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have
sumptuous mansions and large estates—_quintas_ they are called in
Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue
boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy
architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the
south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the
few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country
on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for
this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly
productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the
beauties of the landscape in this vicinity.
Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national
naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across
and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the
inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills
climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts
scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable
shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of
islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered
this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are
descended from the deserting sailors they left behind.
In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades,
evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many
tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days
as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the
alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he
asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no
American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows
more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to
which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly
grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade
Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural
machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But
the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the
customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy
prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had
recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a
binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently
because direct importation would have called official attention to the
plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had
recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the
United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly,
however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more
closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though
Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined
to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and
gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The
Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart,
according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven
the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy
landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings
to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was
also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running
down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among
the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public
drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground
efforts.”
Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its
fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may
be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end,
is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the
plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never
able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home
of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our
own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north.
The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s
authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from
the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican
government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call
themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was
not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had
done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were
at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally
taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white
settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out
soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you
did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve,
matter-of-fact way.
The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long
before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor
so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or
missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more
worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United
States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward,
everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We
moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible
for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a
bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of
plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared.
Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a
cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an
angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the
bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay
the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month
before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow,
wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly
back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few
women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it,
followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the
hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even
in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the
mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in
transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we
were off again.
I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land
from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most
interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the
Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its
mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist
rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so,
broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin,
due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of
the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two
braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads,
this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The
mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a
true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the
waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were
bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of
the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all
the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated
features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work
among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still
home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or
near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats,
and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken
wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off
stiff straw hats of the summer-time _futres_ of Temuco; and May is not
the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian
settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the
Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings
and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on
their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across
chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that
custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across
tropical Bolivia.
The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the
Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that
the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying,
like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is
not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the
white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the
warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no
means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco.
As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their
most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among
whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else,
though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of
sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and
Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first
time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my
chosen pictures.
Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the
better-to-do used _suecos_, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation
patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that
industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid
wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called
streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows
all day, must end each night with a raging headache.
Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long
stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of
Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded
stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling
hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this
more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s
sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was
able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the
Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians
in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are
now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and
several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the
Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious
settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the
region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European
colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity.
The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were
simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent
to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were
placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against
possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number
of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them.
When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south
for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade
Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty _pesos fuertes_ (in those days
nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds,
visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that
time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to
the Andes, was ready for the colonists.
All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers
of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of
wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small
clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains,
the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered
inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all
frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far
north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the
afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car,
watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate
zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down.
In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was
merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name,
which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia,
a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with
reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against
the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his
efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly
all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South
American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent.
Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of
luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might
easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or
Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling
for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of
wood.
Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with
the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the
day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign
countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of
Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot.
The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the
exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would
have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent.
Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every
possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks
drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were
covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings
that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood
tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either
because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards
are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of
mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been
intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with
mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between
the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To
enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns
of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to
address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent.
Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern
Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south,
and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of
the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia
some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory
advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between
these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been
rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains
and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks
Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist,
exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries
into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes
ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry,
he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as
an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a _cuento alemán_—a “German yarn.”
Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site
of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section.
Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth,
wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and
Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost
all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the
railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing
traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one
passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving
also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely
European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage,
yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how
they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile,
“since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail
fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched
over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but
rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps
and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here
only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the
land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I
came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile.
Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and
capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into
islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by
Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three
or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a
style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an
immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly
overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region
is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants,
while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken.
Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in
the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to
producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy
ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of
misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large
island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still
producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms
of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after
the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old
Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood.
I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and
shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas
and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled
with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps,
always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed
the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the
Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping
across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the
“Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and,
having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a
latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and
turned tail and fled back into the warmer north.
At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The
precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San
Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,”
which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few
passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely
alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth
or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged _roto_ such as might have been
picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private
parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways
of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars,
and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a
question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned
in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me
in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper
mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his
advice to me to “lose care.”
Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my
door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and
heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a
mellifluous voice:
“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I
overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a
Chilean _roto_, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge
had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on
again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I
hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the
breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time;
for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and
the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September.
CHAPTER VI
HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY
One cold June evening, with more than a hundred days and eight hundred
miles of travel in Chile and the Argentine behind me, I took final leave
of Buenos Aires—not without regret, for all its ostentatious
artificialities. Or it may be that my sorrow was at parting from the
good friends with whom I had been wont to gather toward sunset in the
café across from the consulate for a “cocktail San Martin,” one of whom
now volunteered to see me as far as Montevideo just across the river—a
hundred and twenty miles away. Out the Paseo de Colón the Dársena Sud
was ablaze with the lights of the several competing steamers, equal to
the best on our Great Lakes, which nightly cross the mouth of the Plata.
For the two cities are closely related. In summer _Porteños_ flee to
Montevideo’s beaches; in winter the white lights of Buenos Aires attract
many Uruguayans; the year round business men hurry back and forth.
Aboard the _Viena_ of the Mihanovich Line I watched the South American
metropolis shrink to a thin row of lights strewn unbrokenly for many
miles along the edge of the horizon, like illuminated needle-points
where sea and sky had been sewed together. Wide and shallow, exposed
here to all the raging winds from the south, the Paraná Guazú (“River
like a Sea”) often shows itself worthy of its aboriginal name in this
winter season. I did not wake, however, until the red sun was rising
over Montevideo and her Cerro and we were gliding up to a capacious
wharf.
It was fitting that my sight-seeing should begin with the little rocky
hill surmounted by an old Spanish fortress which is the first and last
landmark of the traveling Uruguayan. To the Cerro, barely five hundred
feet high, yet standing conspicuously above all the rest of the
surrounding world, Montevideo owes both its name and its situation. When
the Portuguese navigator Magalhães, whom we call Magellan, sailed up
what he hoped might prove a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
a sailor on lookout, catching sight of this little eminence, cried out,
“Monte vid’ eu! I see a hill!” On it was built the first fort against
the Charrúa Indians, and its value both as a place of refuge and as a
stone quarry made it natural that the chief town of the region should
have grown up about it. The part the Cerro has since played in Uruguayan
history is out of all keeping with its insignificant size; the poems
that have been written about it are as legion as the legends which hover
over it. It holds chief place in the national coat-of-arms and in the
hearts of homesick sons of Uruguay. Never in all the rebellions and
revolutions since its discovery has the Cerro been taken by force of
arms; never will the people of Montevideo tire of telling haughty
_Porteños_ that Buenos Aires has nothing like it.
From its summit all Montevideo may be seen in picturesque detail and
far-spread entirety, the point where the Plata, deep brown to the last,
for all its sea-like width, meets the Atlantic and flows away with it
over the horizon, then, swinging round the circle, the faintly
undulating plains, broken here and there by low purplish hillocks, of
the “Purple Land.” It is a pity that the Cerro, certainly not
impregnable as a fortress, has not been made a place of residence, or,
better still, transformed into such a park as Santa Lucía of Santiago.
The fashionable section of Montevideo, however, has moved in the other
direction, leaving the famous hill, with its garrison-sheltering old
Spanish fort and its lighthouse, to squatters’ shanties, rubbish heaps,
and capering goats, not to mention the insistent odors of a neighboring
_saladero_ where cattle are reduced to salt beef.
In many ways the Uruguayan capital is the most attractive city of South
America; as a place to live in, contrasted with a place in which to make
a living, it is superior to many American cities. There is a peculiar
quality of restfulness about it unknown to its large and excited rival
across the Plata, something distinctive which easily makes up for the
handicap of being so near a world metropolis as to be overshadowed by
it. For another thing, it is nearer the mouth of the river, making it a
true ocean port and the most nearly a seaside resort of any national
capital in Spanish-America. Built on a series of rocky knolls, roughly
suggesting the fingers of a rude hand, the charm of its location is
enhanced by undulations that recall by contrast the deadly flatness of
Buenos Aires. The old town, all that existed two generations ago, is
crowded compactly together in true Spanish fashion on what might be
called the forefinger, though it had unlimited space to spread landward.
On this rocky peninsula the cross streets are narrow and fall into the
sea at either end, for here it is but eight or ten short blocks from the
Plata to the Atlantic. On one side is an improved harbor with steamers
of many nationalities, on the other is a bay lined with splendid
beaches. Like that of its great neighbor, the harbor of Montevideo
requires frequent dredging, and its problem is quite the contrary of
that in Valparaiso and other bottomless west-coast ports.
[Illustration: Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb]
[Illustration: A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern
Chile]
[Illustration: A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo]
[Illustration: A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at
the loss of his life’s companion]
Along with its seascape, this situation gives the city a very
exhilarating air, especially in the winter season. Then it is often
penetratingly cold, and frequently so windy that not only the most
securely fastened hat but the hair beneath it threatens to abandon the
wearer. On the day of my landing a windstorm caused several deaths and
much property damage. Among other things it took the sheet-iron roof off
a building in which four fishermen had taken refuge and as these ran
away the roof followed and fell upon them. In the third story of the
frame hotel that housed me I often woke from a dream of being rocked in
a ship at sea, and Punta Brava in a far corner of Montevideo’s suburbs
was rightly named indeed on windy days. Fierce thunderstorms also marked
my stay in the capital, some of them accompanied by the mightiest of
flashes and crashes, during which water fell in such torrents that one
could scarcely see across a narrow street—tropical storms they might
have been called, had it not kept right on raining long after it had
done raging.
Uruguay claims 1,400,000 inhabitants, of whom all but the million are
said to live in the capital, though the lack of a definite census makes
guessing a popular pastime. But the city is much larger in extent than
this number would imply. One can ride for hours on the lines of its two
excellent tramway companies without once leaving town. Even in the older
sections Montevideo is substantially and handsomely built, with many
good modern monuments. Only a few old landmarks are left, such as the
purely Spanish cathedral on the Plaza de la Constitución, for Uruguay
seems to consider her first demand for independence in 1808 the
beginning of her history and makes no effort to preserve the memories of
her colonial or pre-colombian days. For all that, the capital has
retained a considerable atmosphere of old Spain, a distinctly
seventeenth-century echo, along with her South American style of
up-to-datedness. The best houses along the fine avenues are generally in
colonial style, an almost Moorish one-story building, with lofty
ceilings and space-devouring patios. Especially in the roomy suburbs do
the dwellings stop abruptly at one story, so abruptly sometimes as to
suggest that ruin, or at least a laborer’s strike, has suddenly befallen
the owner. The real reason is probably because it would be hard to marry
off one’s daughters if their “dragons” had to begin their wooing by
shouting up to the second or third floor windows.
Iron-work grilles are universal, and many house-doors have brass-lined
peepholes through which the resident can see whether the man knocking is
worth admitting. Gardens with subtropical plants are numerous and
promenades under palm-trees by no means unusual. Especially along the
edge of the sea there are over-ornate _quintas_, alternating with
washerwoman shanties; but there is little oppressive poverty in
Montevideo, and at the same time little of the conspicuous plutocracy so
familiar across the river, a lack of contrast which adds, perhaps, to
the monotony of many a street vista. Poor _ranchos_ are by no means rare
in the farther outskirts, but these are open-air and almost clean slums
compared with the congested sections of our own large cities. Out beyond
the older town are park improvements on an extensive scale. The Prado,
with its great Rose Gardens, said to include hundreds of varieties,
though but few were in bloom among the dead leaves of June, is worth
coming far to see. Here real hills break the monotony of the landward
vista and make artificial, over-polished Palermo with its deadly
flatness seem disagreeable by contrast. The tale goes that a group of
wealthy _Porteños_ once set on foot a movement to buy one of Uruguay’s
hills, carry it across the river, and set it up in one of their own
plazas. No doubt they could have reimbursed themselves by charging
admission and rights of ascension, but like many ambitious
Latin-American plans this one died prematurely.
In general Uruguayans are well-dressed, and comfortably well-to-do, if
one may judge from appearances; compared with _roto_ Chile the capital
is immaculate. “Beachcombers” are rare in this only important port of
the country and beggars are seldom seen, though there is a plague of
petty vendors. It had been like landing on a hostile shore to make our
way through the amazingly impudent mob of hoarse-voiced cabmen,
newsboys, hotel touts, lottery-ticket vendors, vagrants, pickpockets,
useless policemen, and idle citizens into the tranquil waters of a
Sunday morning in the Uruguayan capital; but this common waterfront
experience did not last long. There is something extremely pleasant
about most of the modest, unpretentious _Fluvenses_, as the people of
Montevideo call themselves, a term we might translate as “rivereens.”
They have, as a rule, a natural politeness, a frank and open simplicity
all but unknown across the river, a leisurely, contemplative philosophy
that will not be broken down even by the material prosperity of a
country that is making perhaps the most intelligent use of its situation
and resources of all the republics of Latin-America. It is said that the
Uruguayan came mainly from the Basque provinces and the Canary Islands,
while the _argentino_ is chiefly of southern Spanish origin; that the
former brought with him and still retains a sturdier, less facile, but
more dependable, more thoroughgoing character. Those of wide commercial
experience in the continent say that the Uruguayan is the most honest
man south of Panama; every foreign resident I questioned rated Uruguay
as the most lovable country in South America—and as a rule foreign
residents do not see the best side first. Personally, I found the
Uruguayan more sincere, less selfish, somewhat more solid and at the
same time more of an impulsive idealist than his materialistic neighbors
across the Plata. His country is far enough south to escape the
indolence of the tropics, far enough north to make life itself seem of
equal importance with making a living. With every natural advantage of
the Argentine, except the doubtful one of size, and a more frugal and
industrious population not greatly modified by recent immigration,
Uruguay is still peopled by a kind of colonial Spaniard, somewhat
improved by the breezy, generous quality of his New World domain.
To those who approach it from the south, where they are almost unknown,
negroes are noticeable in Montevideo and become more so as one proceeds
northward through the country. No doubt they drift down from Brazil and,
finding the wide Plata an obstacle, seldom reach its southern shores.
Yet they are so few, and slavery is so slightly connected with them in
the Uruguayan mind, that there is scarcely a “color-line.” The daughter
of a former Uruguayan minister to Washington told me she had always
informed inquiring Americans that there were no negroes in Uruguay, and
had only discovered her error upon her return with a sharpened color
sense. In Uruguay people are often called by nicknames of color, ample
proof that there is no sensitiveness about the hue of the skin. These
popular terms, usually preceded by the affectionate “Ché” of
southeastern South America, run all the gamut of tints,—“Hola, Ché
morocha.” “Diga, Ché trigueña!” “Cómo va, Ché negrito?” It is a common
experience of visiting Anglo-Saxons to hear themselves addressed by
familiar persons as “Ché rubio,” literally “red-head,” as a
complimentary distinction from the universally black-haired natives. The
latter, particularly the women, are almost always of plump form and
comely face, whatever their color, with few of the cadaverous types so
numerous in the north temperate zone. Uruguayan women, by the way, are
perhaps a trifle more Moorish in their family life than those of Buenos
Aires, but they are not wholly unaware of the “advanced” atmosphere of
their environment.
Buenos Aires has long had the reputation of being the most expensive
city on earth, probably because it is large enough to be famous, for
certainly its neighbor Montevideo is still less of a poor man’s
paradise. For one thing, the difference in basic coins favors the
Uruguayan profiteer. Many things which cost an Argentine peso in Buenos
Aires cost an Uruguayan peso, or two and a half times as much, in
Montevideo. It is highly to the credit of Uruguay, and a constant source
of pride to her citizens, that her dollar is the only one in the world
normally worth more than our own; but it is painful for the visitor to
be forced to purchase at so high a price pesos that will seldom buy what
a quarter should. In hotel charges, public conveyances, laundries,
lottery-tickets, and other necessities of life the Uruguayan dollar
seems to go little farther than that of the Argentine, and certainly it
has nothing like the purchasing power of our own. Not only are there
substantial coins in circulation, instead of more or less ragged scraps
of paper redeemable only in the imagination, or coins so debased that
only a careless speaker would refer to them as silver, but any gold coin
is legal tender in Uruguay. Throw down an English sovereign in the
smallest shop in the most isolated corner of the republic and it is
instantly accepted at a fixed value. An American $10 gold piece passed
without argument as $9.66 Uruguayan, though our dollar bill was rated at
only ninety _centésimos_ before the war. I chanced to be in a _pulpería_
far out in the interior of Uruguay when the shopkeeper asked the large
estate owner of the vicinity to take a hundred pesos to the capital for
him. By and by the _pulpero_ returned from a back room with a small
handful of gold and a bit of paper on which he had figured out the sum
he wished to send. He handed the _estanciero_ several English
sovereigns, some German 20-mark pieces, a Brazilian gold coin, an
American half-eagle, two French napoleons, and the rest of the sum in
Uruguayan paper, silver, and nickel. There was no argument whatever as
to the “exchange” on the foreign coins; each had its fixed value
anywhere in Uruguay. It was something like what a universal coinage will
be when the world grows honest and intelligent enough to establish
one—though of course our bankers would not allow any such system to
become universal, even did the perversity of human nature make it
possible. This ready exchange, and the possibility of turning Uruguayan
paper into gold upon demand, are among the reasons which make the
Uruguayan dollar normally the most valuable in the world.
Down on one of its beaches the city of Montevideo runs a sumptuous hotel
and an official Monte Carlo. Here it brings ambassadors and
“distinguished visitors” for afternoon tea or formal banquets, gives
balls, keeps an immense staff of liveried menials at public expense the
year round, and during the season takes money away from the wealthy
“sports” from across the river with an efficiency not exceeded anywhere
along the Riviera. More than one passing observer has found this an
excellent means of taxing the rich for the benefit of the poor, since
the profits of the Casino go into the municipal treasury. As much can
scarcely be said for the lottery run by the federal government, with its
incessant appeal to the gambling instincts of all classes of the
population. The tickets assert that “the lottery is run for the Hospital
de Caridad and its profits are destined for exclusively beneficent
ends,” but the statement rings as hollow as many similar attempts on the
part of Latin-America to coax itself to believe that there is something
good in an essentially vicious institution.
Music and drama flourish during the winter in Montevideo; uncounted
cinemas perpetrate their piffle in and out of season. An excellent
Italian dramatic company, headed by the emotional actress Lyda Borelli,
sometimes, and probably not unjustly, called the successor of Duse, was
playing at the “Solis” during my visit—and bringing out in pitiless
contrast the insufferable barnstormers usually seen on the South
American stage. The opera season is in August, when that half of stars
and troupe who do not cross to Santiago de Chile are on their way back
from Buenos Aires to New York or Europe. Orchestra seats are then at
least $12 each and boxes from $80 up, but as one _must_ have a box for
the season or be rated a social nonentity, there are sad rumors of
_Fluvense_ families scrimping all the rest of the year in order to buy
their opera tickets. Naturally this makes them somewhat exacting and
capable of giving an unpleasant reception to singers tired out at the
end of a long season. Caruso himself has been roundly hissed in
Montevideo. Plays and the opera begin at twenty-one o’clock. As in Italy
and Brazil, and more recently in the Argentine, the law requires the use
of the excellent twenty-four-hour system in all public buildings, and
many a private timepiece has followed suit. The decree was new and
throughout the city were many pasted-over signs such as:
Museum open from 12 to _16_ o’clock.
Somewhere in South America I met a Dane who contended that a small
country, like a man of modest wealth, is better off than a great nation.
Uruguay bears out the statement. We have been accustomed to speak of the
“A.B.C.” countries of South America as having the only stable and
progressive governments in that continent. Only its slight size, as
compared with its gigantic neighbors, has caused Uruguay to be
overlooked in the formation of that list. As its near neighbor and
relative, Paraguay, is perhaps at the bottom of the scale
governmentally, so Uruguay, by its national spirit, its energetic
character, and its advanced legislation is probably at the top, more
nearly fulfilling the requirements of an independent state than any
other nation south of the United States. Certainly it is superior to
both Chile and Brazil in everything but size, and it is doubtful whether
even the Argentine is governed with more intelligence and general
honesty. Once as troublesome a state as any in Latin-America, Uruguay
has settled down and developed her natural resources until she is noted
for her financial stability, and revolutions are memories of earlier
generations. Were she a large country, instead of being merely a choice
morsel of land smaller than some counties of Texas, there is little
doubt that she would stand at least as high as any of her neighbors—or
would size, always an obstacle to good government in Latin-America,
bring her down from her high level?
Uruguay has not always been a small country, nor for that matter a
country at all. In the olden days the _Banda Oriental_, or “Eastern
Bank,” of the River Uruguay was a province of the viceroyalty of Buenos
Aires. To this day the official name of the country is “La República
Oriental del Uruguay,” and the people still call themselves “Orientals.”
In 1800 the whole “Eastern Bank” had but 40,000 inhabitants, of whom
15,000 lived in Montevideo. When Napoleon overran Spain and the
viceroyalty of Buenos Aires revolted, the _Banda Oriental_ remained
loyal, thus opening the first breach between the two sections of the
colony. Not long afterward the “grito de libertad” sounded in the
interior of the province, and the man who was destined to become the
national hero of Uruguay, the “First Oriental,” the “Protector of the
Oriental Provinces,” soon took the head of the revolt.
José Gervasio Artigas was a mere _estanciero_ of the “Eastern Bank”
until he took up soldiering, some time before the “cry of liberty.” In
1811 he left the Spanish army and fled to Buenos Aires, but soon became
an advocate of complete Uruguayan independence, a patriot or a traitor,
according to the side of the Plata on which the speaker lives. Having
won their freedom from Spain, the _argentinos_ were finally defeated by
the “Oriental” general, Rivera, and Artigas became ruler not only of the
present Uruguay but of the now Argentine provinces of Entre Rios,
Corrientes, Santa Fé, and Córdoba, these having formed the “Federal
League” in opposition to the Buenos Aires Directory. To read Uruguayan
school-books, “the Tucumán congress was secretly working to establish a
monarchy on the Plata, and our five provinces sent no delegates.” One by
one, however, the other provinces returned to the new mother country,
only the “Eastern Bank” persisting in its isolation and demand for
complete autonomy. Meanwhile Artigas was in exile—and at one time was
offered a pension by the United States—but finally, in 1825, a band of
“Orientals” besieged Montevideo and Uruguay declared her full
independence.
The Uruguayan flag remains the same as that of the Argentine, with a
golden sun superimposed. The revolutions of 1863 and 1870, each two
years long, are the only serious disturbances that have occurred in the
“República Oriental” since its independence, and with those exceptions
the country has steadily advanced in health and prosperity. Its
government is more centralized than our own, more like that of the
Argentine, the congress being elected by popular vote in the
departments, but the executives of the latter being appointed by the
federal government. _Argentinos_ speak of Uruguay with a kind of forced
condescension, as of a member of the family temporarily estranged from
the rest, or as a land of no great importance yet one worthy of again
being a province of what they consider the greatest country on the
globe, and they pretend at least to think that the great development of
the Argentine will in time inevitably bring back to the fold this one
lost lamb. But the “Orientals” consider their government superior and
show no tendency to make the change.
Uruguay’s reputation as perhaps the most progressive republic in South
America is largely based on her advanced legislation, most of it
fathered by a recent president. Under his guidance stern minimum wage
and maximum hour laws have been enacted, and many doctrines of the
milder radicals have been put into modified practice. The legislators
forbade bull-fights, cock-fights, and prize-fights in one breath.
Uruguay is the only country in South America with a divorce law, and the
church has been shorn of the militant power it still has in most of
Spanish-America. Montevideo bids fair to become the Reno of the
continent, as well as its only summer-resort capital. Dissatisfied
husbands or wives move over from Buenos Aires; Spanish and Italian
actors look forward to their Uruguayan engagement as an opportunity to
air their conjugal grievances—though they are not “aired” in the
American yellow-journal sense, for here divorce is strictly an affair
between the parties concerned and the judge and lawyers, rarely being so
much as mentioned even in the back pages of a provincial newspaper.
Priests are comparatively rare sights in the _Banda Oriental_; religious
festivals and public processions have been abolished, and the influence
of the church on the government reduced to a minimum. Montevideo is the
seat of an archbishop, but he exists only on paper, for the party in
power is not friendly to the clergy and the papal appointment must be
confirmed by congress. There are, to be sure, many crude superstitions
left, especially among the poorer classes and in the rural districts,
but they give Rome no such income as it derives from similar sources in
the rest of the continent. Several Protestant churches have been built
in Montevideo, and all faiths enjoy a freedom that would seem astounding
on the West Coast. Indeed, comparative indifference to sect lines makes
it an ordinary experience for Protestant ministers traveling in rural
districts to be asked by persons professing themselves devout Catholics
to baptize their children. “For one thing,” as one such rustic put it,
“it is cheaper than when the priest does it.” It may seem a matter of
slight importance to those who have never known the suffering inflicted
by the infernal din of hand-beaten clappers against disguised kettles in
the church towers of the Andes that on the evening of my first day in
Uruguay real church bells, of a musical tone I had almost forgotten,
were ringing in a way that must have been genuine music to the
ocean-battered old windjammer just creeping into the harbor. Far off in
the autumn twilight the sound was still carried softly to my ears by the
wind before which gray clouds were scurrying like a battalion in broken
ranks of defeat, toward the western sky, stained blood-red by the
already dead sun.
Politically the Uruguayans are _blancos_ or _colorados_, “whites” or
“reds.” It is a splendid distinction. For one thing, the parties can
print their arguments and their lists of candidates in posters of their
own color and even the stranger has no difficulty in deciding which side
is speaking. Townsmen can announce their political affiliation by
wearing a red or a white cravat, or a bit of ribbon in their lapels;
countrymen, by the color of their neckerchiefs. There is contrast enough
between the two colors to obscure the lack of any other real difference
between the two parties. In theory the “reds” are “advanced” and the
“whites” more conservative. Evidently there are no neutrals in Uruguayan
politics; everyone is either “red” or “white” from the cradle, not
because Uruguayans take a greater interest in political matters than
average republican societies, but because it is bad form, and lonesome,
to be outside the ranks; and men who do not vote are fined. How an
Uruguayan becomes attached to this or that party is a mystery; almost
none of them can give any real reason for their affiliation. Evidently,
like “Topsy,” they are “jes’ born” in their natural colors.
It is now fifteen years since the “reds” came to power on the heels of
Uruguay’s last revolution. Possession is nine points, even in so
progressive a corner of Latin-America, and the “whites” have been the
“outs” from that day to this. Yet one often hears _blancos_ speak of
“when we start our new revolution,” for it seems to be taken for granted
that the “whites” will come back some day with bullets, and virtually
every man in the country is prepared to fight on short notice for one
side or the other. Roughly speaking, “big business,” large estate
owners, and the church, in other words the predatory classes, are
“whites,” though neckcloths of that color are by no means rare on the
peons and _gauchos_ of the more backward country districts. The leader
of the “reds,” now a private citizen merely because the constitution
does not permit the same man to be president twice in succession, has
often been described as “a mixture of idealist and predatory
politician,” but he knows the secret of imposing his will upon the
government and is generally credited with most of Uruguay’s progressive
legislation. For all his efforts and many real results, however, there
is still much that is rotten in the Republic of Uruguay. The most
advanced laws are of doubtful use when they are administered by the
bandits in office who still flourish throughout the rural districts. In
contrast with the brave modern theories of government is the practice in
such things as permitting scores of the lowest forms of brothels to
flourish in the very heart of the capital. I cannot recall a more
disgusting public sight in the western hemisphere than the long rows of
female wrecks in scant attire who solicit at the doors of several
streets radiating from the Anglican church, while veritable mobs of men
and youths march back and forth to “look ’em over,” amid laughter,
ribald witticisms, and worse.
Contrary to the usual custom in South America, there is no military
conscription in Uruguay; recruits are enticed by posters covered with
glowing promises. Yet for all the “advanced” principles of equality
reputed to reign in the little republic, its army is largely made up of
the poorer and more ignorant element of the population. It is not a
dangerous military force, but it is very useful to the party in power
not only in preserving law and order but for discouraging “white”
revolutions. Whether or not only “reds” are recruited, or whether those
placed on the government payroll automatically become “reds,” whether
indeed youths in the political-ridden interior do not have redness
thrust upon them, is a question not to be determined during a brief
visit. As to the “national navy” of Uruguay, it consists, if my
semi-official informant is trustworthy, of one gunboat, two cruisers,
four steamers, and a transport, all of which, when they are not absent
on one of the frequent “official missions” that make life in the
Uruguayan navy just one festival after another, may be seen anchored in
the harbor of Montevideo, their eyes turned rather toward the “whites”
on shore than toward foreign foes.
I traveled fifteen hundred miles on the network of the _Ferrocarril
Central_ of Uruguay. This and the equally British “Midland” reach all
towns of importance in the republic, though they still by no means cover
it thoroughly. Railway travel in South America is seldom as luxurious as
in the United States, but in the dwarf republic both cars and service
are, on the whole, excellent; the trains are so much more comfortable
than many of the towns through which they run that it is not strange
that scores of the inhabitants come down to sit in them as long as they
remain. There are few accidents, the trains are seldom late, though not
particularly swift, and while fares are high there are frequent
low-priced excursions, announced on handbills as in our own land. The
English-made cars are on a modified American plan, some of the
first-class coaches having leather-upholstered divans as large as beds,
even second-class boasting little tables between the seats for those who
care to lunch or play cards. Between the two classes at opposite ends of
the train there is usually a compartment with kitchen stove and pantry
that serves as a combination café and dining-car, a generous dinner
costing a _peso_, wine, or “cork rights” from those who bring their
liquor with them, extra. Sleeping-cars, journeying on both lines in
order to find distance enough for an all-night trip, run from Montevideo
to Paysandú and Salto, on the shores of the River Uruguay bounding on
the west the republic of the “Eastern Bank.” Compared with Chile,
railroading in Uruguay is palatial and immaculate, though even here the
only heating arrangements for bitter June days are doormats between the
seats, and the only really serious criticism to be made is against the
bad habit, common throughout South America, of starting the trains at
some unearthly hour in the morning.
I took the shortest line first and, rambling at moderate speed across a
somewhat rolling country more fertile in appearance than the Argentine,
brought up at Minas. A broad stone highway, here and there disintegrated
by the heavy rains, led the mile or more from the station to the town,
an overgrown village in a lap of low rocky hills monotonously like any
other Uruguayan or Argentine town of its size, with a two-towered church
and a few rows of one-story buildings toeing wide, bottomless streets.
As in the Argentine, there are no cities in Uruguay that compare with
the capital; the present department capitals were originally forts
against the Indians and the Portuguese around which people gathered for
protection, and few of them have cause to grow to importance.
The second journey carried me into the northwestern corner of the
country. As far as Las Piedras, a suburban town twenty miles from the
capital, there are a score of daily trains in either direction.
Street-cars come here also, the place being noted for a granite monument
topped by a golden winged Victory commemorating a battle for
independence in 1811, from the terrace of which Montevideo’s
fortress-crowned Cerro still stands conspicuously above all the rest of
the visible world. Then this chief “Oriental” landmark disappears and to
the comparative cosmopolitanism of the federal district succeeds the
bucolic calm of the _campaña_, as the pampa is called in Uruguay. The
absence of trees alone gives this a mournful aspect. The “Oriental” has
tried half-heartedly to make up for the natural lack of woods by
planting imported eucalyptus and poplar, at least about his country
dwellings, but nowhere do these reach the dignity of a forest. Uruguay
has less excuse for poor roads than the Argentine, for if it has as much
rain and even heavier soil, it has an abundance of stone, rare in the
land across the Plata. Yet though several stone highways leave the
capital with the best of intentions, they soon degenerate into sloughs
seldom navigable in the wet winter season. Most Uruguayan roads are
merely strips of open _campaña_, the legal twenty-two meters wide,
flanked by wire fences, or occasionally by cactus hedges. Estates a few
miles off the railroads have no chance of getting produce to market
during a large portion of the year; yet the prosperity of the country
depends almost entirely on the exporting of foodstuffs.
Fertile rolling _lomas_, with now and then a solitary _ombú_ spreading
its arms to the wind on the summit, made up most of the landscape, a
scene not greatly different from, yet infinitely more pleasing than, the
dead flatness of Argentine pampas. The _ombú_ is the national tree of
Uruguay, of majestic size and always standing in striking isolation on
the crest of a _loma_, because, according to the poet, it loves to
overlook and laugh at the silly world, though the botanist explains that
it is planted by birds dropping single seeds in their flight and reaches
maturity only on hillocks out of reach of stagnant water. Beyond Mal
Abrigo, rightly named “Bad Shelter,” granite rocks thrust themselves
here and there through the soil; for long stretches coarse brown
_espartillo_ grass covered the country like a blanket. This and the
abundant thistles often ruin the black loam underneath, but the average
“Oriental” _estanciero_ abhors agriculture, preferring to give his
rather indolent attention to cattle and sheep, for he considers planting
fit only for Indians, peons, and immigrant _chacreros_. Nor is the lot
of these Basque, Spanish, or Italian small farmers always happy, even
though they hold their plots of earth on fairly generous terms, for
locusts have been known to destroy a year’s labor in a few hours. There
were a few riding gang-plows, however, drawn by eight or ten oxen, and
many primitive wooden plows behind a pair or two of them. Sleek cattle,
and horses of better stock than the average in South America, grazed
along the hollows and hillsides; now and then an ostrich of the pampas,
occasionally a whole flock of them, legged it away across the rolling
_campaña_. Though most of the country people lived in thatched huts made
of the rich loam soil, sometimes laid together with a clapboard effect
and oozing streaks of mud at this season, both sexes were well and
cleanly dressed.
The railroad wound around every _loma_, refusing to take more than the
slightest grades. Now and then we climbed ever so little up the flanks
of such a knoll and discovered to vast depths of haze-blue horizon a
plump, rolling country of purplish hue, dotted with dark little clumps
of eucalyptus, from each of which peered a low farmhouse and
occasionally a Cervantes windmill for the grinding of grain. There were
many such _estancia_ houses, yet they were all far apart in the
immensity of the little Republic of the Eastern Bank. Why most stations
were so far from the towns they served, in this level country, was a
mystery. The towns themselves varied but slightly in appearance,—a
scattered collection of one-story buildings, in most cases covered with
a stucco that had at some time been painted or whitewashed, a
_pulpería_, or general store, sacred chiefly to the dispensing of strong
drink, and, radiating from it, wide roads plowed into knee-deep sloughs
of black earth. A few sulkies and huge two-wheeled carts, an occasional
country wagon with four immense wheels, from which produce was leisurely
being loaded into freight-cars set aside by the local switch engine—to
wit, a yoke of oxen—some real estate and auction signs offering the
chance of a life-time, completed the background of the picture. In the
foreground the inevitable gang of shouting, mud-bespattered hackmen was
almost lost in the throng of wind-and-sun-browned men in bloomer-like
trousers. Peons smoked their eternal cigarettes; _gauchos_ shod in low
_alpargatas_ or high, soft, wrinkled leather boots, a white or a red
kerchief floating about their necks, the short, stocky riding whip known
as a _rebenque_ hanging from a wrist, lounged about the door of the
_pulpería_, to posts before which were tied trail-spattered horses
saddled with several layers of sheepskins. An incredibly motley
collection of dogs; a majestic policeman in full uniform and helmet
above his voluminous _bombachas_, looking essentially peaceful for all
the sword dangling at his side; a few men and youths, bare-legged to the
knee, wading about with cheerful faces, as if the rainy season were at
worst a temporary inconvenience more than offset by the long months of
fine weather, added their picturesque bit to the gathering. Every
movement and gesture showed these people to be of quicker intelligence
than the dwellers in the high Andes. Few women were seen either on
trains or at stations, except at the smaller towns, where there were
sometimes groups of them, wholly white with few exceptions, but wearing
earrings worthy the daughters of African chieftains. At each halt the
station-master in his best clothes, looking busier and more important
than a prime minister on coronation day, stood watch in hand, the
bell-rope in the other, waiting for the time-table to catch up with us;
the town notables looked on, half-anxiously, half-benignly, as if they
considered themselves very indulgent in allowing the train to run
through their bailiwick and felt deeply the responsibility involved;
boys of assorted sizes, barefoot and shod, wormed their way in and out
of the throng staring at everything with wondering eyes; a few comely
girls sauntered about to see and be seen, and friends and relatives took
the hundredth last embrace amid much chatter and mutual thumping of
backs. Then all at once the station-master gives the bell three sharp
taps, as much as to say, “I mean it, and I am not a man to be trifled
with,” and as the train gets slowly under way some town hero grasps the
opportunity to show his fearlessness by catching it on the fly, and
dropping off again half a car-length beyond with a triumphant, sheepish
grin on his sun-browned countenance.
Two days later the sun, rising huge and red over my left shoulder,
painted a brilliant pink the rounded _lomas_ flanking the Y-shaped line
to Treinta y Tres (also written “33”) and to Melo, far to the northeast
of Montevideo, then spread a pale crimson tint over all the gently
rolling world. Fluffy lambs turned tail and fled as we approached, the
watchdog, true to his calling even unto death, charging the train
against all odds and putting it to ignominious flight. Here and there
lay a whitening skeleton, the animal’s skull sometimes stuck up
conspicuously on the top of a fence-post. There is no unsettled
_despoblado_ in Uruguay, no deserts or haunts of wild Indians, but there
is still much land put to little or no use and not a few remains of the
destruction wrought during the civil war that ended in 1852. Rare,
indeed, is the standing structure in the rural districts that was not
built since that time.
At a small station we were joined by a youth of twenty, pure Caucasian
of race, of the class corresponding to our “hired man.” His long, wavy,
jet-black, carefully oiled hair contrasted strangely with his
complexion, very white under the tan; his eyes were light-brown, as was
also the labial eyebrow he now and then affectionately stroked. He wore
a raven black suit, the coat short and tight-fitting, the trousers, or
_bombachas_, huge as grainsacks, disappearing in great folds into
calfskin half-boots. A black felt hat of the squared shape once popular
at our colleges was held in place by a narrow black ribbon tied
coquettishly under his chin. The bit of his speckless shirt that could
be seen was light green; above it was a rubber collar and a
cream-colored cravat adorned with a “gold” scarfpin; on the third finger
of his left hand he wore a plain gold band; about his neck floated a
huge, snow-white, near-silk kerchief, and a foreign gold coin hung from
the long gilded watch-chain looped ostentatiously all the way across his
chest. About his waist he wore a leather belt six inches wide, with
several buttoned pockets or compartments in which he kept money,
tickets, tobacco, and other small possessions, and from the back of
which, barely out of sight, hung his revolver. A poncho of faint
pink-white, as specklessly clean as all the rest of his garments, and
thrown with studied _abandon_ over one shoulder, completed his outfit.
He rode first-class, and having produced his ticket with a millionaire
gesture meant to overawe the modest _guarda_ whose duty it was to gather
it, he strode into the dining-car with great ostentation and called for
a drink. With the same air of unbounded wealth he paid his reckoning,
flung a generous tip to the waiter, who probably got more in a week than
this at best low-salaried farm-hand in a month, and strutted back to his
seat. It was evident that he was not traveling far, or he would have
sneaked into the second-class coach in his old clothes. At each station
he got off to parade haughtily up and down the platform, casting peacock
glances at the dark-tinted _criolla_ girls who embroidered it. I
approached him at one such stop and asked permission to take his
picture. He refused in very decided and startled terms. I felt that his
“no” was not final, however, and scarcely a mile more lay behind us
before he came wandering up with a companion and sat down beside me. Why
did I want his picture? Would it cost anything? How many copies of it
would I give him? Well, if it was true, as I claimed, that they could
not be finished on the spot—and why not?—I could of course send them to
him? Gradually he reached the opposite extreme of begging me to take his
picture. His companion having suggested that it might be published
“_allá en Europa_,” he kept his delight down to becoming _gaucho_
dignity with difficulty, and before we descended to take the picture at
the station where he left the train, after a short and evidently his
only railway journey in months, he was assuring me that I might publish
it “over there in Europe, in ‘Fray Mocho’ of Buenos Aires” (which the
raucous-voiced trainboy incessantly offered for sale) “or anywhere
else.” Only when the train had gone on without him did I discover that
he was a _blanco_ fleeing from arrest in his own department for the
killing of a rural official in some political squabble, a fact that
seemed to be common knowledge among my fellow-passengers and which must
have made a bit startling my sudden request to photograph him.
The Cerro lighthouse was still flashing through the dense black night
when, late in June, on the shortest day of the year, I took the
tri-weekly train for Brazil. By the time the edge of darkness was tinted
pink by a cloudless day which gradually spread upward from the horizon,
we were already halting at country stations where thickly wrapped
rustics who had driven miles in their bulky two-wheeled carts, a lantern
set on either side of them in a sort of wooden niche raised aloft on a
stick, were unloading battered cans of milk. Durazno, a good-sized
department capital strewn over a low knoll and terminating in a church,
was so flooded by the River Yi at its feet that its parks, alameda, and
“futbol” field were completely under water and many poor _ranchos_ stood
immersed to their ears. The names of the stations were often
suggestive,—Carda, Sarandí, Molles, all named for indigenous trees, so
striking is one of them in this almost treeless landscape. From Rio
Negro, another of the department capitals which pass in close succession
on this line, the “Midland” railway paralleled our own for a dozen miles
before striking off over the brown lomas toward Paysandú. Well on in the
afternoon the smoothly rolling country broke up into the little rocky
gorge of a small stream lined with bushy trees. It was probably not five
hundred feet anywhere from the bottom of the brook to the top of the
rock-faced hill, but this was such unusual scenery to “Orientals” that I
had been hearing since hours before of the extraordinary beauty of this
natural phenomenon, and all prepared to drink their fill of it from the
windows of the train. It was named Valle Eden, but times seem to have
changed in that ideal spot, for a policeman in mammoth _bombachas_ stood
on the station platform, and of Eve there was not so much as a fig-leaf
to be seen.
I had ridden the sun clear around his short winter half-circle when I
descended at Tacuarembó. The town had a hint of tropical ways,—women
going languidly down to the little sandy river with bundles of clothing
on their heads, the streets running out into grassy lanes scattered with
carelessly built ranchos. Features, which had grown more and more Indian
all day along the way and in the second-class coaches, here sometimes
suggested more aboriginal than Caucasian blood. Here, too, there had
been much rain, and the very bricks had sprouted green on the humid,
unsunned south ends of the houses. The shortness of the days was
emphasized by the discovery that I was back in candle-land again, where
there was nothing to do in the evening but stroll the streets or go to
bed.
[Illustration: A rural railway station in Uruguay]
[Illustration: The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat
Hills) district]
[Illustration: “Pirirín” and his cowboys at an _estancia_ round-up in
northern Uruguay]
[Illustration: Freighting across the gently rolling plains of the
“Purple Land”]
I had been reading the Uruguayan epic “Tabaré” for hours next morning,
and possessing my soul in such patience as one acquires in
Latin-America, when I learned by chance that a _mucamo_, as they call a
_mozo_ in Uruguay, had been waiting in the hotel patio below and asking
for me every few minutes since the night before, the servants having
been too indolent to bring me word. With the better part of a day lost I
rode away on a stout, gray-white horse of rocking-chair canter. The
muddy or flooded road curved and turned and rose and fell, always
seeking the moderate height of the succeeding ridges and here and there
crossing gently rounded _cuchillas_. The _mucamo_ on his piebald was
outwardly a most unprepossessing creature, but he was a helpful, cheery
fellow, in great contrast to the usual surly workman of southern South
America, and though only sixteen and scarcely able to read, he was by no
means dull-witted. Apparently there was not a bird, a flower, or an
animal which he did not know intimately, and he was supernaturally quick
in catching sight or sound of them. The _hornero_, a little brown bird
that makes its ovenlike nest on fence-posts, the branches of trees, and
the crosspieces of telegraph-poles, was there in force; the _cotorra_, a
species of noisy paroqueet, was almost as numerous. The _chingolo_,
resembling a sparrow, sits on the backs of grazing cattle and lives on
the _garrapatas_, or ticks, that burrow into the animal’s hide. The
_bien-te-veo_ (“I spy you”), a yellow bird with a whistling call
suggesting that of a happy child playing hide-and-seek, frequently
glided past; the startled cry of the _teru-teru_ rose as we advanced,
disturbing it. The latter is called the “sentinel bird” and is so
certain to give warning of anything approaching that even soldiers have
found it a useful ally. Dark-gray with white wings and a slight crest,
it resembles a lapwing with a cry not unlike that of our “killdeer.” The
_bien-te-veo_ and the _teru-teru_ live in perfect immunity because of a
local superstition similar to the one sailors have for the albatross.
The woodpecker of Uruguay is called _carpintero_, because he works in
wood; the _viuda_ (widow), a little white bird with a black head, is so
called, my companion explained to me in all innocence, because she
produces her brood regularly each year without ever being seen with a
male. A little dark-brown bird called the _barranquero_ builds nests
like the homes of our ancient cliff-dwellers, in the sides of
_barrancas_, or sand-banks. Among the many small birds, songsters,
screamers, and disciples of silence, which eddied about us, one of the
most conspicuous was the _cardenal_, gray with white under the wings,
its whole head covered with a bright-red liberty cap. A large bird
resembling the stork my companion called “Juan Grande”; others call it
the _chajá_, because of the jeering half-laugh it is always uttering. It
lives on the edges of swamps, though it cannot swim. A big brown
_carancho_, a hawk-like bird living on carrion, circled above us with
the ordinary South American scavenger buzzard, here called simply
_cuervo_, or crow. There is good shooting of a local partridge in
Uruguay, the open season being from April to September. At plowing time
the gulls come in great numbers to feast on the fat grubs. The dainty
crested Uruguayan sparrow has all but been driven out by the English
variety, introduced, if the local legend can be believed, by an
immigrant who let a cageful of them fly rather than pay duty on them.
Thus we rode hour after hour over the rolling _lomas_ and _cuchillas_.
The ground was here and there speckled with _macachines_, daisy-like
little flowers of a wild plant that produces a species of tiny sweet
potato. The _mucamo_ had never heard of the Castilian tongue; what he
spoke was the “lingua oriental.” It was, to be sure, by no means pure
Spanish, but a Spaniard would have had no difficulty in understanding
him.
At the door of an estancia house with all the comforts reasonably to be
expected in so isolated a location I was met by “Pirirín,” son of a
former minister to London and Washington, and brother of a well-known
Uruguayan writer. His English was as fluent as my own, with just a trace
of something to show that it was not his native tongue. An old woman at
once brought us _mate_, and we sucked alternately at the protruding tube
each time she refilled the gourd with hot water. The sun soon set across
the rich loam country, which was here and there being turned up by
plodding oxen, and threw into relief the three _cerros chatos_,
flat-topped hills that give the region its nickname and which suggest
that the level of the country was once much higher before it was washed
away into the sea by heavy rains that even now gave earth and sky such
striking colors.
The wealth and prosperity of the native _estanciero_ of Uruguay is
rarely indicated by the size or dignity of his _estancia_ house. As in
the Argentine and Chile, many estates are owned by men living in the
capital, if not in Europe, each in charge of a _gerente_, or
overseer-manager. Small as Uruguay is—by South American standards it
seems tiny, even though it is almost as large as New England—many of its
estancias are immense, especially in these northern departments. There
has been much chatter by politicians about limiting the size of estates
and setting up immigrants in the place of absentee owners, but so far it
has chiefly ended in political chatter. The average Uruguayan estancia
house is not particularly well adapted to the climate, at least during
the winter months. A little clump of poplars or eucalyptus, occasionally
a solitary _ombú_, invariably marks the site of the main dwelling. Not a
few men of comparative wealth pig it out on their own immense estates,
scorning modern improvements, cut off by impassable roads from markets
and all the outside world several months a year, refusing to subscribe
to the rural telephone, depending for their news on private postmen
hired by groups of their fellows. A few estate owners, especially those
who have lived abroad, demand moderate comfort, whether for themselves
or their managers, though even “Pirirín” was content with more primitive
conditions than many a small American farmer would endure.
It is quickly evident and freely admitted that the average estancia in
Uruguay is loose of morals. _Estancieros_ frankly state that it is
better if the cook is old and unattractive. It seems to be the rule
rather than the exception, for _estancia_ washerwomen and others of
their class to present the estate with a score of children by members of
the owning family and perhaps by several of the peons as well. Among
this class marriage is unpopular and generally considered superfluous.
There is much noise about Uruguay’s “advanced” theories of social
improvement, yet the law forces, and _costumbre_ expects, no help from
the father in the support of his illegitimate children. If he chooses to
acknowledge them and aid in their up-bringing, he is credited with an
unusually charitable disposition. The woman, on her side, takes her
condition as a matter of course. She will admit with perfect equanimity
that she is not certain just who is father of this child or that and
pointing out one of a half dozen playing about the _estancia_ backyard
she will say laughingly, yet with a hint of seriousness and pride, “Ah,
sí, _el_ tiene papá;” that is, he is one of her children whose father
has recognized him. Yet these women are as punctilious in general
courtesy and the outward forms of behavior as their proud _patrón_ or
the hidalgo-mannered peons.
Next day “Pirirín” and I rode away in the Sunday morning sunshine across
the immense estate, the _teru-terus_ screaming a warning ahead of us
wherever we went. In and about a _bañado_, a swamp full of razor-edged
wild grass that cut the fingers at the slightest touch, we saw specimens
of the three principal indigenous animals of Uruguay,—the _carpincho_,
_nutria_, and _mulita_. The first, large as an Irish terrier, is
grayish-brown in color, with an unattractive face sloping back from nose
to ears, squirrel-like teeth, and legs suggestive of the kangaroo.
Amphibious and sometimes called the river hog, he looks like a cross
between a pig and a rabbit, or as if he had wished to be a deer but had
found the undertaking so difficult that he had given it up and taken to
the water and to rooting instead. On the edges of Uruguayan streams
there are many happy little families of the beaver-like nutria, an
aquatic animal large as a cat, with long thick fur and a rat-like tail.
Playful as a young rabbit, the nutria is quick of hearing and swift of
action, taking to the water at once when disturbed and leaving only its
nostrils above the surface; yet when cornered it is savage, as many a
dog has learned to his sorrow. When the _pulperos_, or country
shopkeepers, of Uruguay found that nutria skins brought a high price
from the furriers of Europe and the United States they set the
countrymen to killing them off regardless of age, sex, or season,
ruining many of the skins by their clumsy handling and all but
exterminating the species. The _mulita_, also called _tatu_, is a timid,
helpless little animal of the iguana family, half-lizard, half-turtle,
with a scaly, shield-like covering that suggests medieval armor, and
which, dug out of its hole and roasted over a fagot-fire, furnishes a
repast fit for kings.
The flora was also striking, for all the absence of forests and large
growths. The _sina-sina_ is a small tree with dozens of trunks growing
from the same root, willow-like leaves, and large thorns that clutch and
tear at anything that ventures within reach of it. A waterside bush
called the _curupí_ contains a poison that the Charrúa Indians formerly
used for tipping their arrows. The _sarandí_, a bush growing on the
banks of streams with its feet always in the water; the _madreselva_, or
honeysuckle; the _chilca_, a thinly scattered bush scarcely two feet
high, and the _guayacán_, a bushy plant with beautiful white flowers in
season, were the most common landscape decorations. Thousands of
_macachines_ covered the ground, white flowers with now and then a touch
of yellow or velvety dark-red.
The gauchos of the estate had been ordered to _rodear_, to round up a
large herd of cattle, and soon we came upon them riding round and round
several hundred on the crest of a hillock. On the backs of some of the
animals _chingolos_ still sat serenely picking away at the _garrapatas_
or the flesh left bare by them. The latter are the chief pest of an
otherwise almost perfect ranching country, for thousands of these
aggressive ticks burrow into the hide of the animals and suck their
blood so incessantly that great numbers of cattle die of anemia or
fever. All but the more backward estates now have a big trough-like bath
through which the cattle are driven several times a year as a protection
against _garrapatas_, but even so it is one peon’s sole duty to ride
over the estate each day to _curear_, or skin the animals that have
died, carry the skin home, and stake it out in the sun to dry.
[Illustration: A _gaucho_ of Uruguay]
[Illustration: A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia]
[Illustration: An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the
blood-red mud of his native heath]
More than two hours of riding brought us to the _almacén_ or _pulpería_,
the general store that is to be found on or near every large _estancia_
in Uruguay. As the day was Sunday scores of gauchos with that
half-bashful, laconic, yet self-reliant air common to their class,
ranging all the way from half-Indian to pure white in race, with here
and there the African features bequeathed by some Brazilian who had
wandered over the nearby border, silently rode up on their shaggy ponies
one after another out of the treeless immensity and, throwing the reins
of the animal over a fence-post beside many others drowsing in the sun,
stalked noiselessly into the dense shade of the acacia and eucalyptus
trees about the _pulpería_, then into the store itself. Most of them
were in full regalia of _recado_, _pellones_, shapeless felt hat, shaggy
whiskers and poncho. With few exceptions the “Oriental” gaucho still
clings to _bombachas_ or _chiripá_, the ballooning folds of which
disappear in moccasin-like alpargatas, or into the wrinkled calfskin
boots still called _botas de potro_, though the custom that gave them
their name has long since become too expensive to be continued. These
“colt boots” were formerly obtained by killing a colt, unless one could
be found already dead, removing the skin from two legs without cutting
it open, thrusting the gaucho foot into it, and letting it shape itself
to its new wearer. A short leather whip hanging from his leather-brown
wrist, a poncho with a long fringe, immense spurs so cruel that the
ready wit of the pampa has dubbed them “_nazarinas_,” a gay waistcoat,
and last of all a flowing neckcloth, the last word of dandyism in “camp”
life, complete his personal wardrobe. It is against the law to carry
arms in Uruguay, yet every gaucho or peon has his _cuchillo_ in his
belt, or carries a revolver if he considers himself above the knife
stage. Every horseman, too, must have his _recado_, that complication of
gear so astonishing to the foreigner, so efficient in use, with which
the rural South American loads down his mount. An ox-hide covers the
horse from withers to crupper, to keep his sweat from the rider’s gear;
a saddle similar to that used on pack animals, high-peaked fore and aft,
is set astride this, and both hide and saddle are cinched to the horse
by a strong girth fastened by thongs passed through a ringbolt. On the
bridle, saddle, and whip is brightly shining silver, over the
saddle-quilts and blankets are piled one above the other, the top cover
being a saddlecloth of decorated black sheepskin or a hairy _pellón_ of
soft, cool, tough leather, and outside all this is passed a very broad
girth of fine tough webbing to hold it in place. With his _recado_ and
poncho the experienced gaucho has bedding, coverings, sun-awning,
shelter from the heaviest rain, and all the protection needed to keep
him safe and sound on his pampa wanderings.
As they entered the _pulpería_ the newcomers greeted every
fellow-gaucho, though some two score were already gathered, with that
limp handshake peculiar to the rural districts of South America, rarely
speaking more than two or three words, and these so low as to be barely
audible, apparently because of the presence of “Pirirín” and myself. The
rules of caste were amazing in a country supposed to be far advanced in
democracy. Though the gaucho, in common with most of the human family,
considers himself the equal, if not the superior, of any man on earth,
he retains many of the manners of colonial days. “Pirirín” and I, as
lords of the visible universe and representatives of the wealth and
knowledge of the great outside world, had entered the _pulpería_ by the
family door and were given the choicest seats—on the best American
oil-boxes available—behind the counter. The sophisticated-rustic
_pulpero_ greeted us each with a handshake, somewhat weak, to be sure,
because that is the only way his class ever shakes hands, but raising
his hat each time, while we did not so much as touch ours. To have done
so would have been to lower both the _pulpero’s_ and the by-standing
gauchos’ opinion of us. Then he turned and greeted his gaucho customers
with an air nicely balanced between the friendly and the superior,
offering each of them a finger end, they raising their hats and he not
so much as touching his.
Yet these slender, wiry countrymen, carrying themselves like
self-reliant freemen, with a natural ease of bearing and a courtesy in
which simplicity and punctilio are nicely blended, take the stranger
entirely on his merits and give and expect the same courtesy as the
wealthy _estanciero_. If the newcomer shows a friendly spirit, his title
soon advances from “Señor”—or “Mister,” in honor of his foreign origin,
be he French, Spanish, Italian, English, or American—to the use of his
first name, and he will be known as “Don Carlos,” “Don Enrique,” or
whatever it may be, to the end of his stay. Later, if he is well liked,
he may even be addressed as “Ché,” that curious term of familiarity and
affection universally used among friends in Uruguay. It is not a Spanish
word, but seems to have been borrowed from the Guaraní tongue, in which
it means “mine,” and probably by extension “my friend.” To be called
“Ché” by the Uruguayan gaucho is proof of being accepted as a full and
friendly equal.
In theory the _pulpero_ establishes himself out on the campaña only to
sell tobacco, _mate_, strong drink, and tinned goods from abroad; in
practice these country storekeepers have other and far more important
sources of income. They are usurers, speculators in land and stock,
above all exploiters of the gaucho’s gambling instinct. Thanks perhaps
to the greater or less amount of Spanish blood in his veins he will
accept a wager on anything, be it only on the weather, on a child’s
toys, on which way a cow will run, on how far away a bird will alight,
or on whether _sol ó número_ (“sun or number,” corresponding to our
“heads or tails”) will fall uppermost at the flipping of a coin. This
makes him easy prey to the _pulpero_, who is usually a Spaniard, Basque,
Italian, or “Turk,” and an unconscionable rogue without any other ideal
than the amassing of a fortune, yet who somehow grows rich at the
expense of the peons and gauchos, instead of meeting the violent death
from the quick-tempered _hijo del país_ who despises yet fears him.
The gauchos were originally called “gauderios,” that is, lazy,
good-for-nothing rascals. To-day that word is an exaggeration, for they
have a certain merit of industry and simple honesty. There is
considerable vendetta among them, gambling rows and love affairs
especially, much of which goes unpunished, particularly if the
perpetrator is a “red” and his victim a “white.” Punishment for
fence-cutting or sheep-stealing is surer: as in our own West in earlier
days the loss of a man is largely his own affair, while the loss of a
flock of sheep or a drove of cattle is serious. To make matters worse,
the country _comisarios_, or policemen, are often subsidized by certain
_estancieros_ to the disadvantage of others, and the _juez de paz_ is
quite likely to be a rogue, in either of which cases the friends of
“justice” usually get off and their enemies get punished.
According to “Pirirín,” the average gaucho is an incorrigible wanderer.
Paid but ten or fifteen pesos a month “and found,” and satisfied with
quarters which most workmen in civilized lands would refuse with scorn,
he is given to capricious changes of abode and is likely to throw a leg
over his faithful horse at the least provocation. Among these incurable
pampa wanderers there are not a few “poor whites,” often with
considerable Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, its origin lost in their
Spanicized names. Hospitality is the first of the virtues of the
_estanciero_, and any genial horseback tramp who turns up may remain on
the _estancia_ unmolested for a day, a week, or a month, as the spirit
moves him. There was a suggestion of our own cowboys among the group
that finally overflowed the _pulpería_, though the gauchos were less
given to noisy horseplay and had far more dignity and courtesy. Some of
them could read without having to spell out the words, and while
“Orientals” in the mass are not a nation of readers and there is
considerable illiteracy, these countrymen were much more in touch with
the world’s affairs than the same class in the countries of the West
Coast.
The gaucho may still occasionally be heard thrumming a guitar and
wailing his sad, Moorish, genuinely Oriental songs, invariably
sentimental and deeply melancholy, with never a comic touch, like a
lineal descendant of the wandering troubadour of the Middle Ages or the
street-singers of the Mohammedan East. When he is not making music or
love, he is sucking _mate_ and talking horses. He has more than a score
of words for his equine companion, running through every gamut of color,
behavior, and pace. His obsession for this topic of conversation is
natural, for he has an instinctive horror of going on foot and the horse
is to the resident of the pampas what the ship is to the sailor; without
it he is hopelessly stranded. Yet his interest is entirely of a
utilitarian nature. He is racially incapable of any such affection for
his mount as causes other races to spare it unnecessary suffering; if he
coddles it at all it is merely for the selfish motive of his own safety
or convenience. Among the picturesque types of the campaña and the pampa
is the _domador_, the professional horse-breaker. His customary fee is
five pesos a head, “with living,” and his methods are true to his
Spanish blood. Instead of being broken early, the colts are allowed to
run wild until they are four or five years old; then a drove of them is
rounded up in a corral and the victims suddenly lassooed one by one and
thrown to the ground. With half a dozen peons pulling on the rope about
his neck until he is all but strangled, his legs are tied and a halter
is put on and attached to a tree, where the animal is left to strain
until he is exhausted, often hurting himself more or less permanently.
Then his tongue and lower jaw are fastened in a painful noose that
forces him to follow the peon, who rides away, jerking at the rope.
Finally, when the weary and frightened animal is trembling in every
limb, the brave domador mounts him and, with a horseman on either side
to protect him, and pulling savagely at the colt’s sore mouth, the
_potro_ is galloped until he is completely worn out. It used to be
beneath gaucho dignity to ride a mare, and to this day no
self-respecting _domador_ of the old school will consent to tame one.
Sometimes the female of the species draws carts, with her colt running
alongside, but on the larger _estancias_ she is allowed to roam at large
all her days.
In the evening, with the gauchos departed and the _pulpería_ officially
closed to the public, we added our bonfire to the sixteen others in
honor of St. Peter and St. Paul, which we could count around the
horizon, and gathered about the table with the _pulpero’s_ family to
play “lottery,” a two-cent gambling card game. It was long after
midnight when “Pirirín” shook off the combined fascination of this and
the _pulpero’s_ amenable daughter. From my cot behind the _pulpería_
counter I saw the day dawn rosy red, but clouds and a south wind
promised rain before my companion roused himself. We got into an _araña_
(spider), a two-wheeled cart which did somewhat resemble that
web-weaving insect, and rocked and bumped away across the untracked
campaña behind two half-wild young horses. Never was there a let-up from
howling at and lashing the reeking animals all the rest of the morning,
an English education not having cured “Pirirín” of the thoughtless
cruelty bequeathed by his Spanish blood. Through gullies in which we
were showered with mud, up and down hill at top speed we raced, until
the trembling horses were so weary that we were forced to hitch on in
front of them the one the _mucamo_ was riding. In Tacuarembó this owner,
or at least prospective owner, of thousands of acres and cattle went to
the cheapest hotel and slept on an ancient and broken cot in the same
room with two rough and dirty plowmen, while I caught the evening train
for the Brazilian border.
CHAPTER VII
BUMPING UP TO RIO
Upon the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and
sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance,
situated in both the smallest and the largest countries of South
America. When the traveler descends from the “Uruguay Central” he finds
it is named for Colonel Rivera, the Custer of Uruguay, who made the last
stand against the Charrúa Indians and was killed by them in 1832. But as
he goes strolling along the main street, gazing idly into the shop
windows, he notes all at once that the signs in them have changed in
words and prices, that even the street has an entirely different name,
for instead of the Calle Principal it has become the Rua Sete de
Setembro, and suddenly he awakens to the fact that instead of taking a
stroll in the town of Rivera, in the República Oriental del Uruguay, as
he fancied, he has wandered into Santa Anna do Livramento in the state
of Rio Grande do Sul in the United States of Brazil.
There is no getting away from the saints even when the tongue and
nationality and even the color of the population changes, for the
Portuguese adventurers who settled the mighty paunch of South America
were quite as eager for celestial blessings on their more or less
nefarious enterprises as were their fellow scamps and contemporaries,
the Spanish conquistadores. But the stray traveler in question is sure
to find that another atmosphere has suddenly grown up about him.
Barracks swarming with muscular black soldiers, wearing long cloaks, in
spite of the semi-tropical weather, as nearly wrong side out as
possible, in order to display the brilliant red with which they are
lined, give a belligerent aspect to this warmer and mightier land.
Negroes and piccaninnies and the unpainted makeshift shacks that
commonly go with them are scattered over all the landscape; oxen with
the yokes on their necks rather than in front of their horns testify to
the change from Spanish custom; instead of the pretty little plaza with
its well-kept promenades, its comfortable benches, and its well-tended
flower plots that forms the center of Rivera or any other
Spanish-American town that has the slightest personal pride, there is a
_praça_, muddy, untended, seatless, and unadorned. The sun, too, has
begun to bite again in a way unfamiliar in the countries in southern and
temperate South America.
Rivera and Santa Anna do Livramento are physically a single town. The
international boundary runs through the center of a football field in
which boys in Brazil pursue a ball set in motion in Uruguay, and climbs
up over a knoll on the top of which sits a stone boundary post, the two
countries rolling away together over plump hills densely green in color,
except where the enamel of nature has been chipped off to disclose a
reddish sandy soil. Surely Brazil, stretching for thirty-seven degrees
of latitude from Uruguay to the Guianas, a distance as far as from Key
West to the top of Labrador, with a width of nearly as many degrees of
longitude from Pernambuco to the Andes and covering more space than the
continental United States, is large enough so that its inhabitants need
not have crowded their huts to the very edge of the boundary line in
this fashion, as if they were fleeing from oppressive rulers, or were
determined that little Uruguay shall not thrust her authority an inch
farther north.
I went over into Brazil early in the day, it being barely three blocks
from my “Gran Hotel Nuevo,” which was neither grand, new, nor, strictly
speaking, a hotel. But when the sockless manager-owner of the main
hostelry of Sant’ Anna asked me two thousand something or other for the
privilege of lying on a hilly cot not unlike a dog’s nest in a musty
hole already occupied by several other guests, I concluded to remain in
Uruguay as long as possible. In Montevideo a cablegram had advised me to
make myself known to the Brazilian railway officials at the frontier and
learn something to my advantage. I could not shake off a vague
uneasiness at entering with slight funds a country of which I had heard
many a disagreeable tale and where I expected to undergo the unpleasant
experience of not understanding the language. Yet when at length I found
the station-master of the “Compagnie Auxiliaire,” in a red cap but, I
was relieved to note, a white skin, we talked for some time of the
general pass with sleeping-car accommodations which the discerning
general manager of the railways of southern Brazil seemed bent on
thrusting upon me, before I realized that he was speaking Portuguese and
I Spanish, and understanding each other perfectly.
It is 2058 miles by rail from Montevideo to Rio de Janeiro, and the cost
of this overland trip to the average traveler with a trunk or two and a
moderate appetite would be about $150. One may leave the Uruguayan
capital on Monday, for instance, by one of the three weekly trains, and
arrive in the Brazilian capital on the following Saturday, spending only
one night motionless on the way—if one is contented to be a mere tourist
rather than a traveler and is not overburdened with baggage. For this
must be carried the mile or more over the frontier, at which it is
examined by a band of stupid and discourteous negroes, who seem to
delight in putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of the
well-to-do traveler. Not being included in that category, my own day’s
halt in Rivera was entirely by choice; but for those more in haste than
curious for a glimpse of Brazilian life it is cheaper, faster, and more
comfortable to make the journey by sea.
The daily train northward leaves Santa Anna at 7:35, which is seven by
Uruguayan time, and I was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour for
midwinter June to find the world weighed down under a dense,
bone-soaking blanket of fog. The street lamps of both countries, judging
daylight by the calendar rather than by the facts, kept going out just
half a block ahead of me as I stumbled through the impenetrable gloom,
the streets by no means improving at the frontier. I might have crossed
this without formality had I not chosen to wake the negro guard from a
sound sleep in his kiosk and insist upon his doing his duty. One would
fancy that an official stationed five feet from a Spanish-speaking
country would pick up a few words of that language, yet these
customhouse negroes professed not to understand a word of Spanish, no
matter how much it sounded like their native Portuguese. At length, with
a growl for having been disturbed, the swarthy guardian waved a hand at
me in a bored, tropical way, drew his resplendent cloak about him again,
and stretched out once more on his wooden bench.
It was a long mile of slippery mud and warm humidity to the station,
where black night still reigned and where yet another African official
came to _revisar_ my baggage, for much contraband passes this frontier
in both directions. Finally something resembling daybreak forced its
reluctant way through the gray mass that hung over and crept into
everything, and our narrow-gauge half-freight took to bumping
uncertainly northward. What a change from the clean, comfortable,
equal-to-anywhere trains of Uruguay! Even our “primeiro,” with its two
seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, was as untidy,
unmended, slovenly as the government railways of Chile, and every mile
forward seemed to bring one that much nearer the heart of happy-go-lucky
Latin-America.
[Illustration: The parasol pine trees of southern Brazil]
[Illustration: Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande
do Sul]
[Illustration: A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of
us and made our train half an hour late]
[Illustration: A cowboy of southern Brazil]
I wrapped myself in all the garments I possessed, regretting that I
owned no overcoat, as we shivered jerkily onward across a wild, shaggy,
mist-heavy country inhabited only by cattle and with no stopping-place
all the morning, except Rosario, entitled to consider itself a town. I
fell to reading a Porto Alegre newspaper of a day or two before, for as
I could usually guess the meaning of the spoken tongue, so I could read
Portuguese, like a man skating over thin ice—as long as I kept swiftly
going all was well, but if I stopped to examine a word closely, I was
lost. Brazilians would have you believe that Portuguese is a purer form
of the tongue from which Spanish is descended; Spanish-speaking South
Americans assert that Portuguese is a degenerate dialect of their own
noble language and even go so far as to refer to it privately as “lingua
de macacos,” of which phrase the last word is the Portuguese term for
monkey. Thanks to my long familiarity with their tongue I found myself
siding with the Castilian branch of the family.
On the printed page it was hard to treat this new tongue with due
seriousness. I found myself unable to shake off the impression that the
writer had never learned to spell, or at least had not been able to
force his learning upon the printer. The stuff looked as if the latter
had “pied” the form, and then had not had time to find all the letters
again or have the proof corrected. Thus cattle, instead of being
_ganado_, as it should be, was merely _gado_; _general_ had shrunk to
_geral_, and to make matters worse still more letters were dropped in
forming the plural, so that such monstrosities as _geraes_ and
_automobeis_ shrieked at the reader in every line. Fancy calling tea
_chá_; think of writing _esmola_ when you mean _limosna_! It suggested
dialect invented by a small Spanish boy so angry he “wouldn’t play any
more,” and who had taken to horribly mispronouncing and absurdly
misspelling the tongue of himself and his playmates, yet who had not
originality enough to form a really new language. And what a treacherous
language! The short, simple, everyday words were the very ones most apt
to be entirely different; thus _dos_ was no longer “two” but “of the”;
“two” was now _dois_ in the masculine and _duas_ in the feminine, and
there was still a _dous_—the plural form, I suppose. A _trapiche_ was no
longer a primitive sugarmill, but a warehouse; a cigar had become a mere
_charuto_. The Portuguese seemed to avoid the letter “l” as zealously as
do the Japanese, replacing it by “r”—_la plaza_ had been deformed into
_a praça_, _el plato_ had become _o prato_. Where they were not doubling
the “n,” contrary to all rules of Castilian spelling, they were leaving
it out entirely, and one was asked to admire the silvery rays of _a
lua_! A man had been brought before a judge because he had seen fit to
_espancar_ his wife, yet the context showed that it was no case of the
application of the corrective slipper. I was reading along as smoothly
and calmly as in English when all at once the headline “Esposição
International de Borrachas em Londres” struck my eye. Válgame Diós! An
International Exposition of Drunken Women! Seven thousand miles away,
too! And why in London, rather than in Glasgow? That particular headline
would have cost me much mental anguish had I not had the foresight in
Montevideo to buy a “Portuguez-Hespanhol” pocket vocabulary. And what,
of all things, should _borracha_ be, in this absurd, mispronounced
dialect, but _rubber_, and no drunken woman at all, thus depriving the
article at once of all interest!
The chief trouble with written Portuguese is that it has never been
operated on for appendicitis. Parts that have long since ceased to
function have not been cut off, as in the close-cropped Spanish, and
such words as _simples_, _fructa_, and the like retain their useless
unpronounced letters until the written word is almost as absurdly unlike
the spoken one as in English. Yet the tongue of Brazil has at least the
advantage that it is in some ways easier to pronounce than Spanish. The
guttural Castilian j, for example, over which the foreign tongue almost
invariably stumbles, is missing, and while few Americans can say _jefe_
in the Spanish fashion they can all give it the Portuguese sound
“shefe”; and if _mejor_ taxes the Anglo-Saxon palate, _melhor_ is
perfectly easy. Moreover, life is a constant holiday in Portuguese.
_Domingo_ and _sabbado_ are days of rest under any name; but it seems
unwise to mislead a naturally indolent people into thinking that every
day is a “feast day” by calling Monday “second festival,” Tuesday “third
festival” and so on, forcing the stranger to do some finger and toe
counting to find that _quarta-feira_, or “fourth festival,” was none
other than this very Wednesday so foggily hanging about us. To hear the
kinky-haired trainman tell me in a long series of mispronunciations that
if I chose to let this one go on without me I could get another train at
“twenty:thirty-two on fifth feast-day” required some nimble mental
exertion to figure out that the lunatic was trying to say 8:32 P. M. on
Thursday.
The line out of Santa Anna is really a branch of the long and important
one from Uruguayana on the Uruguay River, dividing Brazil from the
Argentine, to the large “lagoon towns” of Pelotas and Rio Grande on the
Atlantic. About noon we tumbled out of our rattling conveyance at
Cacequy and took another train, on the line to Porto Alegre, capital of
the enormous “estado gaucho,” or “cowboy state,” southernmost of Brazil
and larger than all Uruguay. It rambled in and about low hills, with an
excellent grazing country spread out to the horizon on every hand, and
at four—beg pardon, sixteen o’clock—set us down at the considerable town
of Santa Maria on a knoll among wooded hills, the junction where those
bound for the capital of the state must take leave of those on their way
to the capital of the republic. I was privileged to occupy room No. 1 in
the chief hotel of the town, which was no doubt a high honor. But as it
chanced to be between the front door of the building and the cobbled
entrance corridor, with either window or door opening directly on crowds
of impudent newsboys, lottery vendors, and servants, it was not unlike
being between the devil—or at least a swarm of his progeny—and the deep
sea. Indeed, it quickly became evident that Brazilian hotels of the
interior would prove no better than those in the three southern
countries of South America, where the traveler is expected to pay a
fortune for the privilege of tossing out the night on a hilly cot and
where the meals never vary an iota,—beginning unfailingly with
_fiambre_, or thin slices of cold meat, and hurrying through several
dishes of hot meat, down to the inevitable _dulce de membrillo_, a hard
quince jelly which is the sad ending of all meals at the lower end of
South America. Nowhere does the Latin-American’s lack of initiative show
more clearly than in the kitchen. To increase my gloom, the French
proprietress, whose every glance caused my thin pocketbook to writhe
with fear, manipulated the items so cleverly that, though placards on
the walls announced the rate as seven _milreis_ a day, and I was there
only from sunset until a little after sunrise, she handed me a bill for
13,500 _reis_!
Luckily I had already weathered the first shock of the traveler who
comes rudely in contact with the Brazilian money system, but I paid
miser-faced old madame in a daze, and retired to a quiet corner to
figure up the exact extent of the disaster that had befallen me. On due
reflection it proved to be not quite so overwhelming as it had sounded.
Even when they are reduced to real money Brazilian prices are not mild,
but they are by no means so utterly insane as they sound. The monetary
unit is the _real_, in theory only, for no such coin exists, and in
practice only the plural _reis_ is used, the real unit being the
_milreis_, one thousand _reis_. For years the _milreis_ had remained at
the fixed value of fifteen to the English pound. In larger
transactions—and most transactions are large in Brazil—the unit is the
_conto_, one million _reis_, about $325. Gold is never seen in
circulation. Between the _milreis_ and the _conto_ there are paper
notes, usually printed in New York; silver coins from five hundred to
two thousand _reis_, and nickel pieces of four, two, and one hundred
complete the list in common circulation. Lastly, lest the unwarned
stranger be led astray by appearances, the Brazilian places his dollar
sign after the _milreis_ and before the _reis_, so that 3$250 means the
normal equivalent of an American dollar, and the man who pays $500 for a
newspaper or a small glass of iced cane-juice does not feel that he has
been unusually extravagant—at least if he has lived long enough in
Brazil to get the local point of view.
A pair of German peasants sat in a corner of the second-class coach when
we pulled out of Santa Maria. Theirs were the same honest, wrinkled,
hard-working, unimaginative faces one sees in rural Germany. The woman,
with a kerchief over her head and her bare feet thrust into low
slippers, was as devoid of feminine coquettishness as of desire for
adornment, a picture of the plodding, toilsome helpmate of the
thoroughly Teuton farmer at her side. Yet I found that they had never
been outside the southernmost state of Brazil, though they spoke German
with far more ease than they did Portuguese, and their appearance would
not have attracted the slightest attention in the very heart of Germany.
The three fertile southern states of Brazil are on an elevated plateau
that makes them excellent cereal and fruit regions well suited as a
permanent habitation of the white race. All that portion of Brazil below
Rio de Janeiro is of comparatively recent settlement. During the
colonial period Portuguese energy was directed almost exclusively to the
semi-tropical and tropical regions of the north, to Bahia and
Pernambuco, where rich tobacco and sugar plantations could be worked
with slave labor, or to the gold and diamond lands of the interior, with
their special attractions to impatient fortune hunters. The splendid
pasture lands of the temperate zone were scorned by these eager
adventurers; maps printed as late as 1865 bear across all these southern
provinces the words “unknown and inhabited by wild Indians.”
The Germans, to be sure, had begun to appear before that. Barely had the
exiled emperor of Portugal settled down in 1808, to rule his immense
overseas domain when he set about filling in its waste spaces by an
immigration policy that is to this day continued by the states
themselves. Not only Dom João but his successors, the two Dom Pedros,
turned to Switzerland and Germany for the hardy settlers needed to tame
this south-temperate wilderness. The first official German colony in
Brazil was founded in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and for
twenty-five years Teutonic settlers were established at many different
points, chiefly in the three southernmost states, in some cases as far
north as Minas Geraes. But in 1859 the German government forbade
emigration to Brazil. The original settlers are therefore long since
dead and the present inhabitants are of the third or fourth generation,
born in Brazil, and with little more than a traditional feeling for the
Fatherland. Yet it is a peculiarity of South American civilization that
it does not impose itself upon European immigration to any such degree
as does that of the United States. Ask the man whose father, or even
grandfather, emigrated from Germany to Brazil what his nationality is
and he is almost certain to reply, without any consciousness of the
strangeness of his answer, “Ich bin Deutsch.” If the German has remained
a German in Brazil, it is perhaps as much the fault of the Brazilian
environment as by his own choice. There are cities in the southern
states of Brazil so German that men and women born in them speak not a
word of Portuguese. This is particularly frequent in the district about
Porto Alegre and in the “lagoon country” between there and the Uruguayan
boundary. Joinville, in Santa Catharina, named for a German prince who
married the daughter of an emperor of Brazil, is so German that the
Portuguese tongue attracts attention in the streets, as it does in
several other of the thirteen colonies founded before the ban was placed
on German emigration. Even the inhabitants who speak Portuguese do so
with difficulty and with a strong Teutonic accent. The school teachers
of these former colonies are subsidized German pastors; the German
element is so strong as often to elect a German state president—the
states of Brazil have presidents rather than governors. For several
years all office holders in Santa Catharina, with the exception of the
Federal Court, appointed in Rio, were Germans, and the anomaly of
Brazilian government reports written by men who scarcely knew the
language of the country in which they ruled was by no means unusual.
It is estimated that there are now about a million descendants of
Germans in the three or four southern states of Brazil, a territory
approximately as large as our “solid south” east of the Mississippi.
Their adopted country was liberal to the early settlers, allotting 175
acres of land to each immigrant, though this has been much reduced in
individual cases by speculative abuses. Not until 1896 was the German
edict against migration to Brazil removed, and by that time the southern
states had attracted new settlers, particularly from Italy. The state of
São Paulo, for instance, has built up her great coffee industry and
factory production chiefly on Italian immigration. The Germans are said
always to seek the lower lands and the river bottoms, raising especially
pigs and vegetables, while the Italians plant the high ridges farther
back from the sea with corn and grapes, with the result that such towns
as Garabaldi and Novo Hamburgo, Blumenau and Angelina, are but a
cannon-shot apart.
Where the great Lagoa dos Patos opens to the sea at the town of Rio
Grande, on sandy, onion-growing flats that follow two hundred miles of
shifting sand dunes from Imbituba southward, is a hot, often sand-beaten
point once ruled by powerful British firms. It is nearly a hundred miles
up this “inland sea” to the capital of the state, with 200,000
inhabitants, which with the large town of Pelotas is the great port of
embarkation of the _xarque_, as the _tasajo_, or thick dried beef, of
the Argentine is called in Brazil. One by one the German traders crowded
out their competitors in this region; with the docile population of the
“lagoon cities” racially friendly to them they established a virtual
German monopoly of German commercial and financial houses in coöperation
with German shipping. Where the German ruled there was no room for any
other European or American, not even for Brazilian industry, and in each
of these coastal cities of southern Brazil a great German firm was
supreme dictator before the World War, which was not the least of the
many causes of that war. What advantages these uncrowned rulers of their
million unsophisticated and often unconscious subjects might have taken
in establishing themselves and their Fatherland more firmly in Brazil if
the world conflict had ended differently is of course now a purely
academic question.
The lines of southern Brazil could scarcely be made a real railroad in
the American sense without complete rebuilding, for they constantly
squirm and twist and wind their way over the lightly rolling country,
seeking always the higher levels and never by any chance running for a
yard straight forward. One of the trainmen asserted that if a cow got in
the way of the surveyors who laid out the line, they moved the transit
rather than exert themselves to go and drive her away. Less facetious
officials explained that the engines are so weak that anything steeper
than a one per cent. grade was avoided in the building, and that this
was done on contract by Brazilians and by the mile. From the car-windows
we had frequent views of the engineer and the fireman in their cab; we
darted from side to side so often that, it would have been easy to
imagine the little engine in terror of the many wide-horned cattle
scattered over the rolling landscape. The brakes were frequently called
upon to keep us from running over the time-table; stations or crossings
were so rare that the whistle was uncomfortably startling; at the rare
places where we did officially stop an extended argument usually arose
between the station master in his red cap and the trainmen in their blue
ones as to when it would be fitting and advisable to jolt onward.
Beyond the large town of Passo Fundo appeared, first singly, then in
roomy clusters, the splendid _pinheiro araucarai_, the slender yet
sturdy Brazilian pine-tree, erect and entirely free from branches to the
very top, from which these suddenly spread thickly out at right angles
to the trunk. The parasol-pine makes excellent lumber, being lighter yet
stronger than our northern pine, but above all it beautifies the
landscape. The rare small clumps of it in the hollows became more and
more numerous until, at Erechim, we found ourselves in an entire forest
of parasol-pines, with an atmosphere strikingly like our northern lumber
woods. The weather had grown so warm that in the middle of the day it
was uncomfortable to sit in the unshaded car window, and creepers and
lianas were beginning to appear in the semi-tropical forests, silent but
for the song of the tree-toad.
I descended at the station of Erebango to spend the “Fourth” with a
fellow-countryman in charge of the construction of a branch railway
through the Jewish “Colonia Quatro Irmãos.” At the station was gathered
a group of Semitic immigrants just arrived from Europe, still in the
same heavy garb and wool caps in which they had left their wintry home.
We boarded the constructor’s “motor gallego,” a hand-car pumped by four
lusty Galicians, and struck out in company with the Jewish manager of
the colony. Each Jew was given upon arrival a piece of land and some
stock, the latter to be paid for after he got his start. For an hour we
pumped our way through semi-tropical forest, here and there broken by
clearings scattered with light-colored wooden houses, to come out upon a
more open rolling country suggestive of Uruguay but with clumps of the
beautiful parasol-pine in the hollows. Then I was furnished a horse and
rode away over the ridges, visiting a score of Jewish families. It being
Saturday, they were dressed in their Sabbath best, some of them, who had
lived in the United States, as overdressed as Irish “hired girls” going
to mass. Men, women, and children were gathered in large groups drinking
_schnaps_, and several of the men, in low-crowned derbies, grew
confidential and told me they wished they were back in “Heshter
Schtreet.” I spoke German to their Yiddish, as I did Spanish to my
peon’s Portuguese, and not only carried on conversation easily but
several times acted as interpreter. The little unpainted houses were
tolerably clean, with cheap lace curtains; and schoolhouses were being
built. But though some of them had been here for months, there was
little evidence of any work being done by the colonists themselves. One
got the impression that they preferred to live on the charity of the
association and its wealthy European sponsors rather than indulge in
physical exertion under the semi-tropical sun, and one wondered if it
was possible to make a farmer out of the Jew, whether the colonists were
not merely waiting for a town to grow up, that they might go and sell
things to one another. The railway company of southern Brazil, which is
British-American, as well as the Brazilian Government, is favoring such
immigration, but a casual glimpse of the colony did not suggest that
this was the best means of bringing the fertile waste places of the
republic into productive activity.
The tri-weekly train picked me up two days later, the privacy of my
narrow-gauge _dormitorio_ being again unbroken. Hour after hour we
rambled on in leisurely tropical fashion. The water tanks were not at
the stations but wherever streams gave a supply, thereby increasing the
number of stops. Once a horse got on the track and ran for seven miles
ahead of the tooting little engine, refusing to leave the rails even
when the fireman got off and threw imported coal at it while the train
crept on after him. To have run into the animal would probably have
spilled our toy locomotive down the embankment of red earth. Finally a
group of Polish men and women gathered on the track ahead and forced the
weary beast to take to the _matta_, the jungled wilderness that shut us
in. At another stop the station-master, a pale blond who spoke German
but who sold tickets like a Latin-American, would not give the engineer
the signal to start until he had sent a boy to drive his ducks out from
under the engine where they were lolling in the shade. The number of
curs prowling about the stations made it easy to believe a joker’s
assertion that the dogs know the train schedule and line up along the
track in proper time and place for their tri-weekly banquet from the
dining-car. Here was the most costly part of the line, built by American
engineers, many bridges and viaducts lifting it across deep wooded
gullies with wonderful vistas of tree-tops, the dark green of the
_pinheiro_ still predominating in the sky-line.
At Marcellino Ramos a big bridge carried us across the River Uruguay,
which not only rises in Brazil but forms the boundary between its two
southernmost states. Through trains had been operated on this line for
less than a year. Before that the overland traveler from Montevideo to
Rio had to stop six times overnight on the way and had often to be poled
across dangerous rivers. Then one crossed the Uruguay at Marcellino
Ramos in the darkness on a crazy launch operated by a crazier Brazilian
who let go the steering-wheel to roll cigarettes and who generally
succeeded in drowning some of the baggage, if not the passengers. The
launch landed its cargo at the foot of a steep muddy slope more than a
hundred feet high, at the top of which travelers fought for the
privilege of paying a fortune for a plank to lie on and for such stuff
as the predatory keeper of what he miscalled a hotel saw fit to provide
for stifling their appetites.
Here we left the enormous “_gaucho_ state” behind and struck off across
the narrow state of Santa Catharina, through which we followed the
placid Rio do Peixe, or Fish River, for a hundred and sixty-five miles,
passing several waterfalls. The wooded _serra_ of Santa Catharina rose
slightly into the sky, and on all sides the world was thickly clothed
with jungle, though there were occasional small clearings with clusters
of crude new shanties. In places the palm grew close beside the
parasol-pine. Groups of ponies under clumsy native saddles were tied to
posts or wooden rails before the _armazem_ inside which their owners
were drinking away their Sunday. Blonds predominated at the rare
stations, tow-heads covered by kerchiefs peered from every doorway of
the houses, with their concave shingled roofs. Most of them seemed to be
Poles, and as all the way from Santa Maria northward the soil had been a
rich dark-red, domestic animals, children, and the garments of the
peasants themselves were dyed in that hue. Some of the dwellings were
like the plans of old Nuremburg brought to the tropics and set down in
the midst of the wilderness. There is a great difference between living
conditions in this region, where land is rarely more than five dollars
an acre, and Illinois, for example, with its schools, roads, and
community interests, yet settlers found much the same pioneer conditions
as this in Illinois when land was five dollars an acre there, and in
addition winters of snow and ice.
In my sleeper, which had not had another passenger since it began its
journey at the Uruguayan boundary, the porter seemed to be hurt that
anyone should intrude upon his privacy. But if there was room to spare
in my car, the second-class coaches were sufficiently packed to make up
for it. Brazilian railway rules require that persons without shoes or
coats shall not ride first-class, hence it may have been something more
than price that made the wooden-benched cars so popular. Even the
first-class passenger-list had grown more and more shady and there was
something absorbing in the sight of pure white waiters serving and
kow-towing to mulattoes and part-Indians in the swaying dining-car. To
strangers, or at least to “gringos,” the waiters always brought the
change in 200-reis nickel pieces and in silver milreis, which look
almost exactly alike, carefully laid face down on the plate in the hope
that a natural error would increase their tips.
I was aware of our being frequently stalled on some slight grade during
the night, yet when I finally awoke, to a cold clear sunrise, we had
crossed the River Iguassú into the state of Paraná, with an
intertropical vegetation and many _serrarías_, or sawmills. Nearly all
the morning we passed what I at first took to be small wild orange
trees, some ten feet high and set in rows and trimmed, with very dark
green leaves not unlike those of the elm in shape. Toward noon I learned
that this was the _herva matte_, known to us as “Paraguayan tea,” and
the most important product of the states of Santa Catharina and Paraná,
as cattle are of Rio Grande do Sul and coffee of São Paulo. The
gathering season was now at hand, but had not begun because the woods
were full of revolutionists, an argument between the two _matte_-growing
states having given a good excuse to several hundred bandits whom the
pusillanimous central government showed no ability to cope with during
all my stay in Brazil.
The _herva matte_ is an evergreen shrub of the holly family, averaging
twelve feet in height, which has its habitat exclusively in the
temperate regions of eastern South America at an elevation of from
fifteen hundred to three thousand feet. In Paraná alone it is
distributed over 150,000 square kilometers, and it is found in six other
states, as well as in Paraguay and northeastern Argentine. It grows
wild, and the only cultivation it needs is the cutting away of the
jungle about it. Each bush produces annually some two hundred pounds of
leaves and branch-ends, which are reduced to about half that amount in
the “factory.” Here the sacks of dried leaves and sticks that come in
from the _sertão_ go through a stamping-mill that beats them almost to a
powder, after which the product is wrapped in hundred-pound lots in wet,
hairy cowhides that shrink as they dry until the bundle is stone-hard.
Great numbers of these deceptive looking bales may be seen at the
warehouses and stations in the _matte_ states.
The descendants of the conquistadores acquired the _matte_ habit from
the Guaraní Indians, and it has become not merely an antidote for an
excessive meat diet but a social custom all the way from the
coffee-fields of Brazil to Patagonia. In former years _herva matte_ was
called “Jesuits’ tea,” for the same reason that quinine was introduced
to Europe as “Jesuits’ bark,” because the disciples of Loyola first
taught the Indian to gather it for trade purposes. About it has grown up
a complete system of etiquette and throughout all rural southeastern
South America the _matte_ bowl is the cup of greeting and of farewell;
not to offer it to a visitor, even a total stranger, upon his arrival,
is as serious an offense as for the visitor to refuse it. The bowl is a
dry, hollow gourd about the size and shape of a large pear, into the
open top of which is thrust a reed or a metal _bombilla_. Through this
each person sucks the somewhat bitter brew as the gourd passes from hand
to hand around the circle, amid aimless gossip in keeping with the
mañana temperament of the drinkers, every third or fourth person handing
it back to the servant—who is not infrequently the taciturn woman of the
house herself—silently waiting with a patience possible only among
Latin-Americans or real Orientals to proceed to the kitchen and refill
the gourd with boiling water. _Matte_ is cheaper than tea, for though
more leaves are needed for an infusion, they can be several times
re-steeped without loss in flavor and strength. Narcotic in its
influence, it has none of the after-effects of tea or coffee, but has on
the contrary many medicinal properties, being a blood purifier, tonic,
laxative, febrifuge, and stimulant to the digestive organs. The per
capita consumption of _matte_ in the state of Paraná is ten pounds a
year, vast quantities being exported; but, strangely enough, it has
never made its way outside South America, though foreigners who have
lived there come to demand it as loudly as the natives.
The stations were usually mere stops at the foot of knolls on which were
larger or smaller clearings and a few paintless new shanties among the
scanty trees and charred logs that marked the beginning of man’s
hand-to-hand struggle with the rampant wilderness. Line after line of
the dark green parasol-pine-trees lay one behind the other to where they
grew blue-black on the far horizon. The increasing density of the jungle
was but one of many signs that we were gradually approaching the real
tropics. Each night the sun sank blood-red into the boundless _sertão_,
the symmetrical pine-trees standing out against the still faintly
blushing sky after all else had turned black, the moon a silver blotch
through the rising mist, out of which the sunrise broke each morning and
spread swiftly across the still trackless wilderness.
One afternoon there appeared along a densely green tree-topped ridge in
the midst of rolling half-prairie the reddish-white town of Ponta
Grossa. Here the railway broke its rule and carried the train up to the
place, instead of leaving the climbing to the passengers themselves.
Vast brown vistas opened up as we rose to the level of the town,
picturesque with those brick-and-mud buildings and tile roofs which
appear so quickly wherever forest and lumber die out. Somewhere I had
acquired a letter of introduction to a merchant in Ponta Grossa. I found
him a lady-like little old man with evidences of some Indian ancestry,
who had traveled in Europe and was in close touch with the affairs of
the outside world, courteous and cultured, yet who still clung to the
Moorish-Iberian custom of considering his home a harem. For though I
should much rather have had a glimpse of Brazilian family life, he
permitted me to dine at the hotel and then insisted on spending
thousands of _reis_ for a carriage in which to drive me about town. No
Turkish seraglio is more jealous of its privacy than the average
Brazilian household; the brief explanation that “there are women there”
is considered ample excuse for any apparent lack of hospitality to men.
When we had visited the sawmills, the _matte_ “factory,” and the
waterworks-to-be of Ponta Grossa, my outdoor host insisted on driving me
down to the train, asserting that the scant half-mile was too far to
walk, and saw me off even to the extent of buying a platform ticket and
dismissing me with an embrace and a basket of tangerines from his own
garden.
This time I had taken the branch line that runs a hundred and twenty
miles eastward to Curityba, capital of the state of Paraná, with an
elevation of nearly three thousand feet. It had all the earmarks of an
up-to-date city,—electric-lights and clanging street-cars, automobiles
and uniformed policemen, a large brewery to emphasize the German
element, though other Europeans were more conspicuous. Shops and offices
opened late, the dusting being barely commenced by nine, while schools,
as everywhere in Brazil, began at ten-thirty, a splendid training in
indolence for after life. It is often asserted that the predominance of
the white race is some day assured in southern Brazil, that all the
country below São Paulo bids fair to become a land of blonds. It will
scarcely be a pure white race, however, though the mixture that is
constantly going on makes it difficult to guess what the final amalgam
will be. Curityba certainly had no color-line prejudices. Here a
coal-black negro girl and a rosy-cheeked young Swedish woman lolled in a
doorway gossiping and laughing together like bosom companions; a Pole
with a negro wife showed off his mulatto children as if he were proud of
their quaint mahogany complexions; tow-headed Polish brides on the arm
of jet-black grooms stared proudly out upon the passer-by from the
windows of photograph galleries. Attractive blond girls of twenty
strolled the streets in bare legs and slippers as nonchalantly as the
slovenly race among whom they had been thrown; women from eastern
Europe, their heads covered with kerchiefs and driving little wagonettes
filled with country produce, halted to pass the time of day with African
street loafers; once I passed a girls’ school in which a teacher who was
almost an albino had an arm thrown affectionately about another who
would have been invisible against a blackboard.
Nearly half of Brazil consists of an immense plateau between two and
three thousand feet above sea-level, falling abruptly into the Atlantic
and gradually flattening away northwestward into the great Amazon basin.
Though it is somewhat larger than the United States without its
dependencies, Brazil has almost no mountains except an insignificant
range along the coast, and almost no lakes. Many of its rivers rise very
near the Atlantic, but instead of breaking through the low coast range
they flow inland, those in the southern part of the country finally
emptying into the Plata and those beyond the divide into the Amazon.
The branch line to Curityba descends from this plateau to Paranaguá on
the coast, the first-class coach bringing up the rear of a daily
afternoon train as mixed as the passengers it carried. We creaked
laboriously through heavy forests toward a fantastic mountain sky-line
far to the east, some of the vistas as striking as if we had been
approaching the Andes. Headlong streams and panoramas of tangled hills
awakened the vagabond spirit within and tempted me to cast aside ease
and respectability and plunge into the wilderness out of sight and sound
of jangling civilization. For a time we followed a rivulet, our little
wood-burning Baldwin spitting showers of sparks and cinders back upon
us; then all at once there opened out down a great gorge the first vista
since I had crossed the Andes from Chile of what might unhesitatingly be
called scenery. Far below lay a vast, rolling, heavily wooded, almost
mountainous world, little white towns here and there contrasting with
the distance-blue of the greenness, while farther off faintly seen
lagoons were backed by other densely blue-black hills.
Suddenly the stream we had been following dropped headlong down a great
face of rock at a speed we dared not follow, breaking itself into white
cascades that repeated themselves a score of times before it disappeared
in the chartless wilderness. The train crawled cautiously along the edge
of precipices, circling slowly in vast curves in and out of the wooded
mountain that grew ever higher above us. Through tunnels and
rock-cuttings, across viaducts and lofty iron bridges, around
constricted loops where the train seemed to be pursuing its own tail,
like a frolicsome puppy, along stone-faced bottomless precipices we
pursued our descent, with the infinite caution of extremely old people.
A softness crept into the breeze; the feminine breath of the tropics
caressed our cheeks; the intense respiration of the jungle took to
droning in our ears. The vast, blue, wooded world far below, with its
white towns, its mirroring lagoons, its mysterious hazy recesses,
gradually yet imperceptibly climbed to meet us, while the breakneck
cliffs grew up beside us into sheer walls that seemed utterly
unscalable. It surely needed a man of vision to stare up at that
precipitous mountainside and decide that he could climb it with a
railroad.
The short but decided descent of three thousand feet ended at length in
the somber, velvety valleys of Paranaguá, and the train calmed down from
its nervous tension into a mood more in keeping with the indolent,
tropical-wooded, sea-level world. It had suddenly become stickily warm.
Clothing that had often felt too thin on the plateau above grew
incredibly heavy, and as final proof that we had entered the real
tropics there fell upon us a sudden languid indifference to progress,
and we loitered about each station doing nothing for an unconscionable
length of time. Old women and boys, dressed in a few odd scraps of
garments wandered about with baskets of oranges, tangerines, and
bananas, but acted as if it were not of the slightest importance to them
whether the stuff was sold or not, as the baby did not need a new pair
of shoes anyway and it would be much less of a bore if school did not
keep at all. What a different philosophy of life the tropics bring even
to the man from temperate climes, and how quickly! Up on the plateau I
had become almost gloomy over a hole that had begun to appear in the
sole of a shoe; down here it seemed of so slight importance that all
memory of it quickly drifted out of my mind. There came a sunset like a
dozen pots of assorted paints kicked over by a mule, and dense, humid,
tropical night settled swiftly down upon us like an impenetrable pall.
Paranaguá, a typical tropical seaport, is not on the sea at all but on
the narrow neck of one of those many lagoons stretching along the coast
of southern Brazil. For some time I wandered about town, barely able to
see the next footstep before me in the clinging, crape-like darkness. I
had a letter to a once well-known New York newspaper correspondent who
had reformed and gone to raising bananas, but he was not in town, and
though I talked with him by telephone I did not deliver the missive. For
it would have required twenty-four hours of travel by launch, canoe, and
ox-cart to reach the plantation where he was holding open house for the
vice president of the state and other solemnities, my evening clothes
had long since been misplaced and ... and anyway what’s the use of doing
anything in the tropics? It is so much easier to let things drift along
until it is too late. Finally, in the back room of a café, I ran across
several American residents engaged in the universal tropical pastime of
mixing whiskey with soda water. One of them headed the electric light
and bathtub syndicate of Paranaguá, neither of which improvements on
primitive society seemed to require his exclusive attention, for he had
time to cultivate genuine hospitality. Much talk, whiskey, soda, and
local beer had been consumed, however, before I managed to get in a hint
containing the word food. The Americans led me to the thoroughly
tropical establishment of a “Turk” who had once graced the United States
with his presence and who had there learned to concoct real ham and
eggs—with the slight exception of not soaking the salt out of the ham
and of frying the eggs to a frazzle. Here the consumption of words
continued until it was discovered that all the hotels, which were
unspeakable places anyway, had closed, and that I would do much better
to put up with the hospitable bathtub man. We waded through the dense
humid night, not to mention many acres of loose sand and veritable
streams of dew, to the outskirts of the sand-and-woods scattered town,
where I was soon introduced to an enormous double bed in the plantation
house of slave days which my fellow-countryman was guarding for the
absentee owner.
Seen by daylight, Paranaguá has a very ancient stone customhouse, now a
barracks and once a Jesuit monastery, with the customary tradition of an
underground passage from it to an island a few miles out in the shallow
lagoon. There was one statue in town, a bronze bust among magnificent
royal palm-trees of “our dear Professor Sulano, who taught us all we
know and died in 1904, erected by his grateful pupils.” My own memory is
treacherous, but will some bright pupil kindly name the American cities
which have busts of the high school principal in front of the municipal
group? Dugout canoes full of oranges were drawn up on the beach, and
fish of every imaginable size, shape, and variety were offered for sale.
The population was of that mongrel sort that I was due to find
throughout Brazil wherever European colonists have not appeared in any
great number. It was not until ten that the sun had drunk up the vast
banks of cheese-thick mists that hang often over this corner of the
world, and then the humidity remained to help the despotic red sun that
burst upon us emphasize the advantage of a bathing-suit over customary
garb. Yet even the American residents insisted on wearing full Broadway
dress of heavy black suits with vests, topped with derbies! To appear in
less, they explained, would be to disgrace their native land and to lose
all dignity in the eyes of the natives, though such garb was probably
one of the reasons why they seemed so lifeless and could under no
provocation be enticed into the crushing sunshine.
By mid-afternoon the train began to wind itself back up to the Brazilian
plateau, the air taking on a refreshing coolness the moment we began to
climb. Next morning, when I was pulled out of bed in Curityba in time to
catch the 5:30 train back to the main line, on which a broken nap in an
uncomfortable seat was chiefly dreams about icebergs, I would have given
anything within reason for one of those scorned hours in Paranaguá. At
every station where we stopped for more than an instant all passengers
tumbled off to partake of coffee. For a woman or man of the vicinity was
sure to have a table in the shade of the station, with many little white
cups that were filled with thick black coffee as the travelers deluged
upon them. The Brazilian who is not permitted to drop off at least once
an hour and drink from one to four such cups at a _tostão_ (a hundred
reis) each, and rush back to the train again as the warning bell rings,
would feel that he was being cheated of his birthright.
My next stop was at a houseless siding just south of the boundary line
of São Paulo state. Here is the “Fazenda Morongava,” where the railway
and its attendant corporation runs a model ranch in charge of a Texas
Scotchman, a central point of the ten million acres it owns in Brazil
and Bolivia. An official telegram had ordered the conductor to set me
down there, when I discovered that the private car hitched on behind us
was filled with guests of the company, and was due to be sidetracked at
the same spot. It was after midnight that I awoke to hear the porter
carrying out his instructions to tell the switchman to show me up to the
_fazenda_ buildings, more than a mile away over rocky hills—and to note
with dismay that my newly appointed guide had a wooden leg! But a huge
form loomed up out of the brightly moonlighted night and I was soon
rolling away over the hills with a Colorado cattleman in a two-wheeled
gig toward a huge farmhouse built half a century ago in slave times and
now surrounded by several other and more modern buildings.
The private-car party was already scattered over the landscape from
breakfast-room to champion-pig sty when I awoke, to be at once invited
to wage battle with a genuine American breakfast ranging all the way
from honest-to-goodness bacon, made on the _fazenda_, but unknown in
Brazil at large, down to hot cakes. Unfortunately I had so long before
lost both the habit and the opportunity of battling with American
breakfasts that I was quickly floored, in spite of being cheered on by
the genuine American housewife in charge. But my lack of endurance was
fully made up for by the last of the private-car party to leave the
table, a man who had been sent down by a Chicago packing-house to start
a similar establishment in São Paulo. In all my travels I have never met
his equal at mixing the flesh of “hawgs” with eggs and hot biscuits and
butter and coffee and hot cakes, whether the feat be considered from the
point of view of quantity or speed. During his championship exhibition
he bemoaned the fact that, though he was barely forty, he had suffered
greatly in walking up the hill from the car that morning, and for the
life of him he could not understand how he had become so fat, since as a
farm boy twenty years before he had been “lean as a rail.”
In addition to this exhibit our “house party” included a French chairman
of the board of directors of the railways of southern Brazil, who had
run over for nine days to learn all about them before going to Persia on
a similar mission. Besides his staff, several uncatalogued hangers-on,
and the family of the manager, there was the American ranch personnel,
ranging from the fat and jolly _fazenda_ doctor who drove constantly
about the estate in a sulky behind racing mules, to a score of boss
cowboys who shocked the Europeans and Brazilians by addressing everyone,
be he manager, packing-house expert, or chairman of the board of
directors, in exactly the same manner,—“What, ain’t you fellers been
down to the barn yet? Y’ ought ’a shake a leg an’ see them there new
heifers we jes’ got in.” Now and then we caught a fleeting glimpse of
the real servant body, the native laborers, cattle herders, and gauchos,
who “knew their place” in the European-Brazilian sense and whom the
manager had cured of the time-honored custom of alternating three
working days a week with four days of drunken festivity by “firing” on a
moment’s notice and establishing the fixed rule that “if there’s to be
any dhrinkin’ on this ranch, I’ll do it myself.” The peons and native
cowboys were paid from fifty to a hundred thousand reis a month, and
“found,” and with local prohibition in force and gambling scowled
upon—to their mind inexplicable “gringo” idiosyncrasies—they were often
hard put to it to get rid of their money.
Not being overwhelmingly interested in “hawgs,” I accepted the
invitation of a boss cowboy and rode nearly all day among the hillside
pastures. The degenerate tropical animal under it was not exactly my
idea of the noun equus, but the Texas saddle was all a saddle should be,
and a great improvement on others I had bestridden in South America. The
cattle included crosses between native cows and zebu bulls, which had
turned out lanky and of poor butcher’s quality, though they withstood
the heat and ticks better than pedigree stock. We saw several fleet
deer, visited a great canyon with a waterfall, the striking of which on
a ledge of rock hundreds of feet below gave an intermittent sound like
that of a compound engine puffing up a stiff grade, and had a native
dinner, at an isolated American cowboy’s shack, of rice, black beans,
and _farinha_ (a coarse meal made of ground mandioca, used to stiffen
soups or eaten dry all over Brazil), topped off by coffee and hot
biscuits. Magnificent panoramas rolling away into blue distances opened
out as we jogged up and down over the great folds of earth. Though it
was midwinter, it was so only in name, and the climate could scarcely
have been improved upon. The hottest that had ever been recorded here
was 84 degrees, and 70 was the lowest of a winter day, while the fresh
cool nights required a blanket the year round.
The Americans, from the manager down, were agreed that all the land of
southern Brazil was of excellent fertility. It was better where there
was timber, but the _campo_, which the natives will not try to cultivate
because it does not yield immediate results, will also produce in
abundance almost any temperate or semi-tropical crop, if it is worked a
year or two to let the air into it and is sufficiently manured to offset
the two per cent. of iron which makes the soil so red. Not the least of
the advantages over the floor-flat pampas, from the grazier’s point of
view, was the rolling character of the ground. With hollows and ravines
there were no floods, yet always water, so that the cattle did not wear
themselves out in the dry season by wandering in search of it. Thousands
of head of stock were born, raised, and driven to slaughter in the same
hollow, the country being often not even wire-fenced. All were
enthusiastic over southern Brazil as a land of promise for white
colonists with youth, health, a little patience, who were willing to
earn their living from the soil instead of “sponging” on others, after
the fashion of the natives; and all considered the Argentine
overestimated, just now in the limelight, but with no such great future
before it as southern Brazil.
I continued my journey in the private-car of my fellow-guests, which was
picked up by the tri-weekly train some time during the second night.
When the sun again rose above the horizon, we found ourselves in the
richest and most famous state of Brazil, the coffee-growing land of São
Paulo. Our coach had been hooked on directly behind the engine, ahead of
the baggage-car, so that we had to get off to reach the
dining-car—whereby hangs a tale. The “hawg” man and I reached there
together, without his interpreter, whose place I had to take and explain
at great length why any man, least of all one whose façade quaked as he
walked, could not be satisfied with small cakes and coffee, like
reasonable human beings, instead of demanding eggs and _toucinho_—which
means bacon in a Portuguese dictionary but salt pork in a Brazilian
mind—and getting into a rage because there was none of the latter on
board and commanding a large steak in its place. Then, as if that were
not trouble enough, my famished ward proved himself a poor traveler in
Brazil by complaining vociferously just because one poor little fly got
cooked with his eggs. It may have been my fault, too; for I had not yet
grown accustomed to the Spanish letter “l” becoming an “r” in
Portuguese, and no doubt, speaking with a Castilian accent, I
inadvertently ordered flied eggs.
Sorocaba was the largest town of the day’s journey, and with it the
cruder rural section, the rude wooden houses of new colonists, and the
parasol pine-trees largely disappeared, while palms increased. Nowhere
from Montevideo northward had I seen an acre of sterile land, though
certainly not one-tenth of what I had seen was under cultivation. On a
pole before each house now was a white banner with the likeness of a
saint, which had hung there since St. Peter’s Day a fortnight before.
The railroad made a complete circle around São Roque in its deep lap of
hills, and gradually, in mid-afternoon, there grew up a constant
succession of villages. We passed groups of unquestionably city people,
and presently São Paulo itself burst upon us, far away and strewn up
along, over, and about a dry and treeless ridge. Then it disappeared
again for quite a time, while the villages changed to urban scenes,
streets began to take on names, electric-cars to spin along beside us,
endless lines of light-colored houses of concrete with red-tile roofs
appeared, and at last we came to a halt in a great glass-vaulted modern
station in the second city of Brazil—second, that is, in population, for
it is first in energy and industry, capital of the most progressive
state of the union and the first real city on the main line north of
Montevideo.
Swinging my trunk under one arm, I set out to find a lodging in keeping
with my sadly depleted pocketbook. The first part of that task was in no
way difficult. Of all the cities of the earth, as far as I know it,
perhaps only Paris has more hotels, _pensões_, and lodging-houses per
capita than São Paulo. There seemed to be at least one for every
half-dozen possible guests. In all but the best of them there were two
or more beds in each room, as if they some day expected to have a
veritable flood of clients; but this prospective congestion mattered
little, for they rarely had anyone to share the room, though they
doubled the bill if one asked to have a room alone. When it came to
considering these accommodations on the score of cost, however, the task
of a man with a flattened pocketbook was serious, for the prices in the
poorest “doss-house” were appalling. Democracy and popular education,
even their pale reflections, seem to bring with them the cult of the
white collar, which grows more fervent as one approaches the equator;
hence scores of muscular Spanish and Portuguese immigrants had opened
hotels in São Paulo who should have been out planting corn or hoeing
coffee. Competition is not always a benefit. The hotels of São Paulo
were atrocious in price and poor in quality precisely because there was
so much competition, scores of hotel-keepers, each with runners, touts,
and a host of hangers-on, trying to make a fortune in six months out of
the three or four guests a week which fate sent them, that they might
return to end their days at ease in the land of their birth. For it was
not the native _Paulistas_ who ran the countless hostelries of all
classes, but easy-fortune seekers from overseas.
[Illustration: The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo]
[Illustration: Santos, the Brazilian coffee port]
[Illustration: A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in
Nictheroy]
[Illustration: The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock
hills]
The English writer Southey, who wrote a six-volume history of Brazil,
complained of the “tremendous ascents” and the thinness of the air on
the plateau of São Paulo—with its elevation of nearly 2,500 feet!
Certainly the man who has rambled about the Andes feels only gratitude
for that altitude, which lifts him above the sweltering heat of the
coastlands. Even to the casual observer, however, there seems no other
fitting reason for founding a city at this particular spot, and one is
quickly driven to printed authority to account for such taste. In 1554
the Jesuit, José de Anchietta, had gone to the town of Piratinanga to
establish a school, but being dissatisfied with that village, he ordered
its inhabitants, in the dogmatic Jesuit manner of those good old days,
to remove to a site on the Tieté. Now the Tieté is scarcely a brook,
rising on the Brazilian plateau near the Atlantic and flowing away
across country to the Paraná, finally to join the Plata and pour its
scanty waters into the South Atlantic. There are a dozen real rivers to
the north and south of this insignificant stream and a hundred sites
that would have seemed better suited to the good padre’s purpose, but
the Jesuit insisted and at length the people of Piratinanga obeyed his
command; and because the town that was destined to grow to be the
industrial capital and the railway center of Brazil was founded on June
25, it was named St. Paul in honor of that day’s saint.
One must get some little way out of São Paulo to appreciate its
situation clearly. Built on plump low hills in a rolling, treeless
country, rather dry and reddish of soil, the nature of the ground gives
splendid views of the town from many points of vantage, and in tramping
about its environs one finds every now and then the reddish,
light-colored city spread out in almost its entirety below or above him.
In a general sense the city and the region about it would be called
flat, yet in detail it is by no means so. The character of its site
gives São Paulo an intricate network of streets, with viaducts over
great gullies and street-cars passing above and under one another. The
great Viaducto do Chá stands so high above the great ravine through the
center of town that it is a favorite place of threatened suicide among
lovesick youths.
Its unexpected position as capital and metropolis of the world’s
greatest coffee-producing state has given this once bucolic country town
so extraordinary a growth that the Cidade of the nineteenth century is
now merely the central tangle of streets in the heart of town. From this
nucleus run splendid avenues lined with a bushy species of shade-trees,
and residence sections with dwellings of coffee kings, ranging all the
way from sumptuous comfort to magnificent and palatial eyesores, spread
away across town in various directions. São Paulo has more than half a
million inhabitants, a municipal theater for opera, drama, and concerts
scarcely second to any in the western hemisphere, and an up-and-coming
manner which quickly establishes its claim to equality with modern
cities of the temperate zone. The “Light and Power Company” runs an
excellent service of open street-cars and gives the city a nightly
brilliancy that is not often reached in cities of its size. Its
immaculate policemen carry speckless white clubs, thrust into leather
scabbards except when directing traffic. No one has ever known them to
strike a man with a club, but they are at least awe-inspiring
representatives of law and order.
The extraordinary activity of São Paulo is plainly due to its European
immigrants,—Portuguese, Spanish, especially Italian. Whether it is
because they come from the northern part of the peninsula, where sterner
characters grow, or that they feel peculiarly at home in the Brazilian
environment, the Italians of São Paulo stand noticeably high in the
community. Many of the important business houses, some of the
professions, and much of the wealth is in their hands; among the rather
insignificant-looking hybrid Brazilians they are conspicuous for their
better physique and greater energy. Modern and energetic though it is,
however, São Paulo swarms with non-producers. At the stations crowds of
able-bodied _carregadores_, paying a high municipal license and waiting
most of the day in vain for an errand, try to recoup themselves by
demanding a thousand reis or more for carrying the traveler’s bag across
the street. The city has so many shops and hawkers and peddlers that one
might easily fancy it in a densely populated country, rather than in one
where land is everywhere suffering for cultivation. Countless little
liquor shops are run by grasping individuals without initiative, anyone
with cash or credit enough to buy a dozen bottles of liquor seeming to
choose this high road to opulence. Vendors of tickets for both the
national and state lotteries make day and night hideous with their
uproar and crowd the principal streets with their booths; hordes of
silk-clad, bejeweled French and Jewish adventuresses roll luxuriantly to
and fro every afternoon in their automobiles.
The principal place of meeting for the rank and file is the _Jardim da
Luz_, a “popular” park retreat of the German beer-garden style, well
crowded of an evening, especially when a municipal or military band
plays. Here, too, vendors of strong and weak drink are ubiquitous, their
tables in the open air, their prices posted on the trees, yet demanding
500 reis for a glass of sweetened water, with the waiter still to be
satisfied. Everyone moves with an almost tropical leisure, though there
are evenings in this July midwinter when autumn garments are not out of
place and not a few young fops affect overcoats. Yet São Paulo is, on
the whole, a less showy town than one expects. Foreigners are so usual
in any gathering that one attracts little notice. Though perhaps a
majority of such a “popular” crowd is of the physically insignificant,
negroid mixture common to much of Brazil, in the strolling throng may be
seen every nationality from tow-headed Norwegian girls—about whom there
are suggestions of the effects of a tropical climate and environment in
slackening social morals among any race—to a Japanese out on the edge of
the night, with a far-away-across-the-Pacific look in his
cynical-inscrutable eyes out of all keeping with his commonplace
“European” garb.
Every stroll beyond the city limits well repaid the dusty exertion.
Evidently the year’s shipment of rain, like so many carelessly billed
supplies from the North, had been carried past its destination, for the
region about São Paulo was deadly dry at a season when it should have
been verdant, and the newspapers reported the churches of Buenos Aires
filled day and night with people praying that the celestial waterworks
might be shut off. The cloud effects on the Brazilian plateau are so
striking that São Paulo was perhaps more beautiful on a gray day than on
a bright one when the glare brought out something of squalor. Out at
Ypiranga on the bank of a tiny stream, where Emperor Pedro I gave the
“cry of independence” that eventually shook Brazil free from Portugal,
there is a remarkably good museum full of a wealth of historical
material,—mementoes of the aboriginal inhabitants, splendid collections
of the fauna of Brazil, hundreds of _borboletas_, or butterflies, of
which the country has an incredible variety in size and color,
innumerable species of _beija-flores_ (“kiss-flowers,” or
humming-birds), many _pica-paos_ (“pick-sticks,” which are none other
than woodpeckers); strange specimens of the vulture family known as João
Velho (“Old John”).
Or the five-mile tramp out to Penha is no waste of time. The road passes
through many market gardens of black soil in the bottomlands. Along the
way are Italian husbandmen with wide heavy mattocks, Sicilian
stocking-caps like the chorus of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on their heads,
Egyptian water-dips on poles with American oil-cans as buckets, Gallego
ox-carts with solid wooden wheels and axles that shriek along the
highway, much cabbage and lettuce, a few potatoes, grapes, baskets of
strawberries almost the year round. Pack-mules and the raucous cry of
muleteers plodding soft-footed in the dust behind them, one person to
each milk-can of a gallon or two, carrying it on his head to town, there
to sell it by the cupful—no wonder milk costs its weight in silver—and
much more may be seen spread out across the reddish landscape bounded by
the low rolling hills, light-wooded in places and distance-blue in
color, of the coast range. The town of Penha is pitched on the summit of
a knoll with a striking view of São Paulo, five miles away, and a shrine
to which the pious flock in great numbers. Inside the otherwise
uninteresting church is an ornate Virgin who is credited with miraculous
cures, and her chamber overflows with evidences of gratitude from her
devotees,—hundreds of pictures by native “artists,” atrocious
photographs of accidents posed for after they had taken place, that the
miraculously rescued victim might carry out the promise made in the heat
of fear to the Virgin, the latter always represented somewhere in the
upper right-hand corner of the picture in the act of saving the devotee
from appalling sudden death in the very nick of time. Here a fat man is
being snatched from beneath the wheels of a heavy truck, there a baby is
shown safely deposited on the fender of a street-car, or a countryman
falling from his horse is landing upright with divine assistance. Far
more numerous than these pictorial atrocities, however, are the wax
imitations of all parts of the body. A sign on the wall announced that
“only things that are decent may be shown in the miracle room,” but
words have not the same meanings in different climes and races, and
little was left to the imagination, though no doubt the rule cuts down
appreciably the material evidences of cures. How widespread is
superstition and the fostering of it even in the progressive state of
São Paulo is shown by the fact that a month fills the room to
overflowing. During the few minutes I was there a man brought a wax
foot, a buxom young woman a breast, and a mulatto crone a hand which no
doubt was meant to represent one of her own, though it was snow-white
except where she had painted a red streak across the back to indicate
the portion she wished, or had already had, cured. But the Virgin of
Penha draws no color-line, for her own complexion is by no means
strictly Caucasian, and her quadroon swarthiness no doubt gives the
average of her devotees a comfortable feeling of racial propinquity.
Most famous, perhaps, of all the sights in and about São Paulo is the
“Instituto Butantan,” known among the English-speaking residents as the
“snake farm.” A mile walk out beyond the Pinheiros car-line brings one
to this important and well-conducted establishment, first started by
private initiative but now receiving government aid. On the crest of a
knoll are several concrete buildings and about them scores of
snake-houses, half-spherical cement structures some four feet high
inclosed in sections by low walls and moats, where thousands of snakes
lie basking in the sun. By Brazilian law any public carrier must
transport free of charge from its place of capture to the “snake farm”
of São Paulo any new species of snake discovered. There are one hundred
and eighty known species of reptile in Brazil—the Portuguese word for
snake, by the way, is _cobra_—of which ten are known to be venomous; in
other words when a snake appears even in Brazil there is only one chance
in eighteen that his bite is harmful, and the odds are eighteen to one
that he is just a harmless fellow who wants to cuddle up in your lap for
company. But the venomous ones are venomous indeed. There is the deadly
_cascavel_, or rattlesnake, the _jararaca_, worst of all the _jararaca
de rabo branco_, the _jararaca_ with a white tail. Aside from its mere
museum or “zoo” function, the “Instituto Butantan” has two very
practical purposes. Three serums are made here for snakebites and sent
to all parts of the republic, remedies that have saved the life of many
a _sertanejo_ dwelling in wilderness isolation back in the _sertões_ of
Brazil, where an ignorant pill-peddler, who calls himself “_doutor_,”
but whose training as a physician is largely imaginary, sometimes
appears not more than once or twice a year. The venomous snakes are
required to furnish their own antidote. A uniformed negro attendant
springs over the low wall and moat into an inclosure of dangerous
snakes, pins one to the ground with a sort of iron cane, picks it up by
the throat with his bare hands, and forces it to spit its yellowish
venom into a piece of cheesecloth drawn tight over the opening of a
glass receptacle. Healthy young mules are inoculated with this, and the
serum produced in much the same way as smallpox vaccine.
The second purpose of the institute is to breed and distribute the
_mussurama_. This is a native black snake sometimes reaching eight feet
in length, entirely harmless to man but which feeds exclusively on other
snakes, venomous ones by preference. Within the moats that inclose this
species are many others which only repeated assurance would convince the
novice are not dangerous. The non-venomous snakes are in general larger
than the others, and may also be distinguished by the lack of any
special tail, being, as it were, all of one piece. If the employees of
the institute, from the scientists in charge of serum-making to the
negro snake-herders, are to be believed, there are other differences:
the harmless snakes lay eggs, while the others produce their young
alive; the former must be fed, and the latter have never been caught
taking nourishment since the institute was started. Some of the harmless
_cobras_ attain considerable size, though by no means any such as they
do in popular jungle tales. The largest in captivity at São Paulo was a
species of constrictor about sixteen feet long and as large around as a
rain-pipe. They vary widely, too, in habits. The _sucurý_ is huge,
clumsy, and sluggish; a large brown snake in the same inclosure was
almost lightning-like in its movements, snapping at the flap of the
attendant’s trousers and returning to the attack with incredible
swiftness as often as the latter threw him away with his crooked iron
stick. Like so many really harmless creatures he is evidently given his
vicious temper to make up for the lack of any real defense. This reptile
is said to follow for miles any creature that angers it, and though its
bite is harmless, only a man with long experience or iron nerve could
resist taking to his heels when this personification of speed and anger
dashes upon him with its great jaws wide open. All such species,
however, are mere souvenirs of the _sertão_, of no other use than to
keep company for the _mussurama_, great numbers of which are sent to the
snake-infested areas of Brazil as rapidly as they attain mature size.
On my second or third visit, after I had won his gratitude with my
kodak, the chief snake-herder arranged a special snake-eating contest.
Into a moated compound of _mussuramas_ he threw a _jararaca de rabo
branco_, the most deadly snake of Brazil. Far from pouncing upon the
newcomer, the black cannibals gave it no attention whatever. The
attendant stepped over the wall and introduced the visitor to his hosts
one by one. The first turned up his nose at it, which drew forth the
information that this one had eaten only a week before and was not yet
hungry. The second had not dined for at least a fortnight. No sooner had
the _jararaca_ been tossed near him than he sprang forward and wound
himself about the other so rapidly that the eye could not follow the
individual movements, kinking and knotting him in an intricate
entanglement in which only their difference in color distinguished one
slimy body from the other. The two snakes were almost of a size, about
three feet long. The _jararaca_ writhed in agony, opened his huge mouth
with its two ugly looking fangs on the upper jaw, and struck hard into
the black body of his opponent, the yellow venom running down over his
scales. The only response of the oppressor was to increase the
entanglement until the head of the _jararaca_ was confined in a coil, as
his own was protected within the folds of his own body.
For more than twenty minutes after his first sudden movements the
_mussurama_ scarcely moved a scale. I began to think he had gone to
sleep again. Then gradually, imperceptibly, almost as slowly as the
minute-hand of a clock moves, he withdrew his own head from the coil
that had protected it, looked cautiously about to see whether danger
threatened, then moving one muscle at a time, with the patience of a
professional wrestler, he worked his frog-mouth sidewise slowly along
the body of the _jararaca_ until he reached the neck. Pulling the head
carefully out of its confining coil, he crushed it flat by slow pressure
of his powerful mouth. Only then did he appear satisfied and at ease.
Disentangling himself, he began to swallow the _jararaca_ head first,
working his way along it in successive bites at about the speed with
which a lady might put on the finger of a new glove, now and then
wriggling his body to increase its capacity. Once he stopped, rolled a
bit, and took a long breath, then went steadily on until the white tail
of the _jararaca_, looking for a moment like a long tongue of his own,
disappeared entirely, perhaps four minutes from the time the swallowing
had begun, and the snake that was left where two had been before crawled
lazily away to his cement house for a fortnight’s sleep.
I remained for some time in São Paulo not only because it proved to be a
city worth exploring, but because I had come to the end of my railroad
passes, and unless I could discover a new source of supply I faced the
painful and unusual experience of having to pay my fare. To tell the
truth, so weary had I become of train riding and respectability that I
found myself planning to slip into my oldest clothes, pick up a
fellow-beachcomber, and take to the road for the three hundred and
twenty miles left to Rio. But short samples convinced me that such a
walk would not prove entirely a pleasure jaunt and railway passes
evidently do not grow on São Paulo bushes. I was forced, therefore, to
fall back on my own slender funds. There is frequent and comfortable
service from São Paulo to Rio four times a day in twelve hours by day or
night on the government railway, but a more pleasant as well as cheaper
route appeared to be that by way of Santos and an ocean steamer;
moreover, it seemed more fitting to enter the far-famed harbor of the
Brazilian capital by the harbor’s mouth than to sneak in at the back
door by the government railway.
An excellent express of the British “São Paulo Railway Company” left the
industrial capital at eight in the morning and raced thirty of the fifty
miles to Santos across level country in less than an hour. Then we
halted at Alto da Serra for the inevitable coffee and a new engine. This
was small and inclosed within a sort of car with glass-protected
observation platform, for almost the only work required of it was to
hook us, two cars at a time, to a cable running on large upright wheels
between the rails, two small trains counterbalancing each other at
opposite ends of the cable making little motive power necessary. Just
beyond was the _abertura_, the “opening” or jumping-off place, where the
world suddenly spread out far below, some of it visible, some hidden by
vast banks of mist slowly melting under the torrid sun. The cable let us
down more than two thousand feet in a very few miles, the descending and
ascending trains passing each other automatically on a switch halfway
down. The road was so swift that the buildings along the way seemed
sharply tilted uphill, but though the valley was densely wooded with
scrub growth, it was only a narrow one, so that while the engineering
feat may be as remarkable, the scenery was by no means equal to the
descent to Paranaguá. It took as long to lower us to Piassagüera in its
banana-fields, only eight miles without stops, as it had to cover the
thirty miles with several halts from São Paulo to the opening of the
range. This road, over which virtually all the coffee grown in Brazil
starts to the outside world, is reputed to be one of the richest
concessions on earth, though its charter restricts its net profits to a
certain percentage of the invested capital, the rest going to the
government. The company has always had great difficulty in devising ways
and means to spend its surplus earnings and keep them from falling into
the public coffers. It is rumored that all the switch-lamps are
silver-plated. The latest plan of the harassed directors is to electrify
the road, but to the casual observer this would seem exceedingly unwise,
for heavy coffee trains coasting down the hill might store up
electricity enough to run the entire road, and with no more coal to buy
at the breath-taking price of that commodity in Brazil the problem of
spending their surplus would become hopeless.
Santos is even older than São Paulo, having been founded by Thomé de
Souza two years earlier. Not so long ago it was a pesthole, noted
especially for its yellow fever. Those unpleasant days are forever gone,
though it is still not a health resort and many of its people prefer to
live in São Paulo and come down daily on business. If it was not always
raining in torrents during my stay there, at least it was overhung by a
soggy, humid heat that had nothing in common with the cool, clear
atmosphere of São Paulo. Such air as arises in Santos drags its way
sluggishly through the streets, and there was a heavy, blue-mood
temperament about the place quite unlike the larger city up the hill.
This languid, gloomy mood pervaded even the club in which a group of
Americans sit all day long, day after day, “mopping up booze,”
exchanging the chips that pass in the night, and buying coffee. The last
is their appointed task, but it is a light one. Every now and then a
dealer or a native messenger comes in with a name, a price, and one or
two other hieroglyphics scratched on a slip of paper; one of the buyers
lays aside his cards long enough to “o.k.” it, and the deed is done.
Santos exports a million dollars’ worth of produce to the United States
each year, “about one hundred per cent. of which is coffee.” When one
compares the retail price of this commodity in the American market with
what the planters of São Paulo state get for it, the wonder arises as to
where the difference goes. Some of it, of course, goes to the
world-weary men who spend their days exchanging chips at the club in
Santos; transportation takes its full share; a high ad valorem export
tax goes to the federal government; a similar impost of five francs a
sack goes to the State of São Paulo; the municipalities through which it
passes do not allow themselves to be forgotten; the European builders of
the port improvements exact their generous pound of flesh; and “official
charges” thrust out a curved palm at every step, so that whoever drinks
coffee helps generously to support the plethora of mulatto politicians
of Brazil. Yet even then the State of São Paulo is not satisfied with
the price paid for its principal product and in order that this may fall
no lower prohibitive taxes now make it impossible to lay out new coffee
plantations within the state.
In all the business section of Santos there are pungently scented
warehouses in which coffee is picked over by hand by women and children
whose knowledge of sanitary principles is embryonic; while down at the
wharves the coffee-porters give the town a picturesque touch. Long lines
of European laborers, dressed in undershirt, cotton trousers, a cloth
belt, and a tight skull-cap, all more or less ragged, discolored and
soaked with sweat, trot from train to warehouse or from warehouse to
ship, each with a sack of coffee set up on his neck, moving with a jerk
of the hips and keeping the rest of the body quite rigid. Their manners
are gayer than one might expect of men constantly bearing such burdens.
The law requires that each sack weigh exactly sixty kilograms, about 132
pounds, that the state may levy its tax without difficulty; and the men
are paid sixty reis for every sack they carry. In the slave days of
thirty years and more ago this coffee-carrying was done by African
chattels, trotting in unison to the time of their melancholy-boisterous
native melodies. Now there is not a drop of African blood among the
carriers, though there were not a few haughty negroes in uniform sitting
in the shade superintending the job and down on a tiny cruiser nearby
all the sailors were of that race. The Portuguese have driven out the
negro carriers by their greater strength and diligence, but they in turn
are being superseded by modern improvements.
“Brazil is no good any more,” grumbled a sweat-soaked son of Lisbon with
whom I spoke. “It is forbidden now to carry two sacks at a time, and
these great carrier-belts they are putting in, as well as the
auto-trucks, are robbing us of our livelihood.”
Santos has now grown almost wholly around a steep, rocky hill that was
once on its outskirts, spreading in wide, right-angled streets lined by
pretentious light-colored dwellings to the seashore, with several large
bathing-season hotels and many fine beaches along the scalloped coast.
Up at the top of this hill in the center of the flat modern town is an
ancient place of pilgrimage known as the “Santuario de Nossa Senhora de
Monte Serrat,” overflowing, like that of Penha, with wax imitations of
cures. Prices were distressingly high in Santos. Bananas, which overload
the landscape about the town, cost 600 reis each in any restaurant; and
all else was in proportion. No doubt milk must be sold at 32 cents a
quart in a town where the milkmen drive about in luxurious go-carts,
dressed as if on their way to a wedding. But such things are painful to
the wanderer who has already begun to doubt his ability to pay his way
home from the next port, particularly when he finds that for once there
is no steamer bound thither for several days, and that the fare for the
overnight sea-trip is half as much as that to Europe.
It was too late to change my plans and make the journey to Rio by rail,
however, and I made the best of the delay by joining a Sunday excursion
to Guarajá, a beach with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that was being “boomed” a
few miles out through the wilderness. A little steamer carried us from
the Santos docks to a station across the harbor, from which a tiny steam
railroad runs off through the jungle. The benches were hard, the toy
engine incessantly spat smoke, cinders, and fire back upon us, and a
woman of the laboring class was jammed into close, popular-excursion
contact with me throughout the journey. But the beach of Guarajá was
fine and hard, and the day brilliant and clear. Chalets, bandstands, and
all the Palm Beach paraphernalia recalled the season of six to eight
weeks during which coffee kings and their mistresses hold high revel and
yield the promoters a good year’s profit on their investment. Natives,
both men and women, had here and there rolled up their trousers or the
feminine counterpart and gone wading, but evidently it was not
considered the proper season to swim, for all the heat of midwinter
July, or else the community had the customary South American fear of
“wetting the body all over.” Gringos may always take their own risks,
however, and by dint of long inquiry I found I could get an ill-fitting
bathing-suit and the key to a bathhouse, all for a mere 2000 reis, and I
went in alone.
It was the first time I had been in or upon the sea since entering South
America way up on the gulf of Panama more than two years before. I
plunged in and was soon diving under the combers and enjoying myself
hugely, when I suddenly found that I could not touch bottom, and that
the more I tried the less I touched. This would not have mattered had I
not realized by some indefinable sense that I was not only in an ebbing
tide but that I was caught in an undertow which was dragging me swiftly
seaward. The buildings and the excursionists on the shore were growing
slowly but steadily smaller. I waved an arm above the water and
attracted the attention of a group of men, but it was evident by their
indecisive actions that they were “Spigs” and that no help would come
from that quarter, though they might be of use in testifying before the
coroner’s jury. Among the Sunday crowd on the shore and the hotel
veranda arose more stir than I had yet caused anywhere in Brazil, and
the bathhouse attendant who had taken the 2000 reis away from me rushed
down to the spray’s edge frantically waving his arms. For the next
twenty minutes or so I had visions of navigating the high seas without a
ship, but as I did not confine myself during that time to smiling at the
vision, but took to performing superhuman feats of swimming, I was
suddenly surprised, not to say relieved, to feel my feet strike sand,
and what might have been a coroner’s inquest turned out to be nothing
but a lesson for the foolhardy. When I returned to dress, the attendant
said that he had forgotten to tell me that certain parts of this beach
had a very dangerous undertow. Posthumous information was to be expected
of a Brazilian; but when the American of Santos who had suggested my
spending the Sunday at Guarajá replied to my mention of the entirely
personal incident, while we were lunching at the Sportsman Café next
day—at his expense—with “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that is the most
dangerous beach in South America, hardly a Sunday passes without someone
drowning there,” I could not but thank him fervently for his kind
warning.
The steamer of the Spanish line owned by the Jesuits spent most of
Tuesday in “leaving within five minutes,” during which the passengers
all but succumbed to uproar, congestion, and perspiration. I found
myself packed into a tiny two-berth cabin with two other travelers whom
I should not naturally have chosen as companions; nowhere was there a
spot clean and large enough on which to sit down. Once a _refresco_, a
glass of sickly sweetened water, was served to us as a special favor
just before we choked to death, and finally about five in the afternoon
we let go the wharf, made a nearly complete circle with the “river” on
which Santos is located, and dipping our flag to its last fort, were
soon out on the high seas, the roll of which I had almost forgotten.
CHAPTER VIII
AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO
I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned
fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the
sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a
moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along
the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly
over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a
long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of
great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the
scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest
spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of
the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the
disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes.
The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was
walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer
rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had
not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze
of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest
vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue
background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many
striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched
in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was
strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid
form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the
form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the _morros_ which
everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them
crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the
green background.
But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is
still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at
a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a
turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the
_Minas Geraes_ that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and
finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been
rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from
a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring
boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to
the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of
them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever
profit the ships pick up on the high seas.
I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I
decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or
Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to
occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible
among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon
and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute
for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like
abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext.
This and the _feijão_, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with
now and then a bit of _xarque_, dried or salted beef, added to give it
distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such
rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink
furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical
Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring
advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily
colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as
our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening
upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had
not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the
snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over
everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing
bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite
from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which
are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets.
My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two
inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we
had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not
sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as
only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond
the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic
activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off
toward dawn it was only to dream madly.
The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the
streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by
the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast
served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the
town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony
window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though
these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented
furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was
evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For
that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a
German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it
mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in
the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São
Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it.
The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad
Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of
the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new
main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida
de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length,
it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the
types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval
congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and
in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so
inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery
could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through
the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it
still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans
were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in
place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary
buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a
passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long
running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe
Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly
at the end of the vista.
There are many things of interest in downtown Rio, but of them all
perhaps the Avenida Rio Branco is the most enticing. Stroll where one
will on either side of it, to the Arsenal, the Ministries, the palace
where the last emperor of the western hemisphere had his official
residence up to little more than thirty years ago, to the heavy and not
particularly striking cathedral, one is sure to drift unconsciously back
and take again to wandering aimlessly along in the human stream that
surges as incessantly through the Avenida as if the populace were still
enjoying the novelty of moving freely where their ancestors could not
pass. The only other street in old Rio that has anything like the same
fascination is the narrow Rua Ouvidor, as it is still known in popular
speech, though the city fathers long since decreed that it shall be
called the Rua Moreira Cesar. This is to Rio what the Calle Florida is
to Buenos Aires, not merely a populous street but a popular institution.
Along it are the most brilliant shops, in it may be seen the most
exclusive residents of Rio greeting one another with the elaborate and
leisurely formality of their class. Level paved from wall to wall, it is
in reality a broad sidewalk, for here wheeled vehicles may not enter at
any hour whatever. Yet even the enticing windows and the now and then
attractive shoppers of the Rua Ouvidor do not often keep the stroller
long from wandering once more out into the Avenida.
For all its width it is not easy to walk along the Avenida. What might
be called “sidewalk manners” are atrocious throughout South America; in
Rio they are at their worst. This is not because the _Fluminenses_—for
these, too, call themselves “rivereens,” though they are far from any
real river—are especially inconsiderate, but because they are tropical
idlers with no fixed habit of mind, and instead of picking a
straightforward course down the broad avenue they wander back and forth
across one’s path in all sorts of erratic diagonals. The pace of life
slows down noticeably in twelve degrees of latitude, and street crowds
are not only slower but much more stagnant in Rio than in Buenos Aires.
In time the direct and hurrying northerner comes to realize that the
Avenida is not designed to be merely a passageway from somewhere to
somewhere else. It _is_ somewhere itself, a lounging-place, a locality
in which to show off at one’s best, a splendid site for café chairs and
tables. By late afternoon it is often so blocked that passage along it
is a constant struggle; in the evening clumps of seated coffee sippers
and groups of gossiping men fill the broad sidewalks almost to
impassability.
[Illustration: An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo]
[Illustration: Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose]
[Illustration: The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the
National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on the left, a
shack-built hilltop]
These sidewalks of the Avenida were evidently laid with the connivance
of shoemakers. Most of them are mosaics of black and white broken stone
in striking designs and fantastic patterns, here geometrical, there in
the form of flowers, with horsey figures before the Jockey Club,
nautical things before the Naval Club, all of striking effect when seen,
for instance, from the upper windows of the _Jornal do Commercio_
building, but particularly deadly on shoe leather. An architect might
have much to say of the score of splendid structures that flank the
avenue. Some are merely business houses; farther seaward, beyond two
great hotels, are clustered the sumptuous Municipal Theater, the School
of Fine Arts, and the National Library; set a little back from the
street are the Supreme Tribunal and the Municipal Council until the
Avenida breaks out at length into the Beira Mar beside the Palacio
Monröe in its little park. This last marble and granite edifice was
carried back from our St. Louis Exposition and set up chiefly as a
show-place and an ultra-formal gathering-hall, but the Chamber of
Deputies has been meeting there since their old firetrap on the Praça da
República took to falling about their ears. Beyond it lie the blue
waters of the oval bay, across which, always in full view from anywhere
on the avenue, stands the _Pão d’Assucar_, like a rearing monolith, the
thread-like cable that now and then carries a car to or from its summit
plainly visible in the clear tropical sunshine.
However, it is not these more formal things but rather the continual
interweaving of curious and motley types, the air of unworried tropical
indolence that pervades the throng, the brilliance of the night lights
that draw the idler again and again to the chief artery of downtown Rio.
Particularly after the hour of siesta does the capital exchange the
extreme négligée of the household for its most resplendent garb and
sally forth to stroll the Avenida, the women with curiously
expressionless faces, as if they would prove themselves deaf to the
audibly flattering male groups that grow larger and larger until by
sunset the sidewalks become a great salon rather than places of
locomotion. Foreigners and those who have lost the spirit of Rio and
must hurry may take a taxi. These pour so continually past, day and
night, that to cross the Avenida is a perilous undertaking at any hour,
for the personal politeness of the _Fluminense_ does not extend to his
automobiles, and the chances of being run down, particularly by empty
machines cruising for fares, are excellent. Nor is it worth while for
the lone pedestrian to protest, for the odds are against him. Both
private automobiles and those for hire carry two chauffeurs, usually in
white uniforms, less often unquestionably of that complexion, their
faces studies in haughtiness as they gaze down upon the plebeian
foot-going multitude. The extra man is known colloquially as the
“secretary,” and the custom is said to have arisen from the fact that
before the law required meters taxis charged all the traffic would bear
and it often took two men to collect from recalcitrant customers. But
its persistence suggests that there are other reasons, among them the
Brazilian love of sinecures, the terror which solitary labor causes to
the tropical temperament, the pleasure of having a congenial friend
always hanging about, the excess of population over jobs, the real
chauffeur’s need of someone to crank his car, light his cigarette, and
keep an eye on the police, most of all, perhaps, the Brazilian love of
_fazendo fita_. Literally _fazendo fita_ means “making a film,” but by
extension it has come to signify posing for the moving-picture camera,
hence, in the slang of Rio, “showing off.” It is a rare Brazilian who is
not given to acting for the movies in this sense. Watch a traffic
policeman, in his resplendent uniform and white gloves, and you will
find that he is much more seriously bent on displaying his manly form
and graceful deportment to a supposedly admiring audience than on
keeping his street corner clear. Go up to any man with a gold cable
swung across his chest and ask gently, “O s’nhor tem a hora?” and he is
almost as apt as not to reply with a mumbled, “Ah-er-I cannot tell you
the time,” meanwhile grasping first one end of the chain, then the
other, as if he were striving to convince even himself that he has a
watch somewhere attached to it.
It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the
surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the
shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of
the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable
that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours.
From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the
place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one
suspects that the _Fluminense_ is more energetic at play than in
productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into
short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the
Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block
without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables
on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street,
silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before
one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of
one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the
cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a _tostão_, a
nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty _tasa_, wanders on down the
street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks.
But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter,
the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day
warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern
_dolce far niente_ that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the
wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the
night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more
brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city
fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even
Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent
streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the
Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the
opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues,
punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound
of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their
papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar
to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital.
Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded
_morros_—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and
which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid
granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high
into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is
commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if
the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces
between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those
valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere
into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped
back into them, or, if the _morros_ set sheer rock faces against the
intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses
lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond.
Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was
backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head,
like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the
“Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving;
hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon
puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the
admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the
bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the
“Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon.
“Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of
Rio.
It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital
succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks.
Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one
to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local
editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars,
“as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing
about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had
never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that
sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off
the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid
than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode
along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in
withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a
chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of
Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every
view.
I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western
hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along
the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days
when it is _brava_. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe
Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the
foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to
pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the
city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent,
to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its
quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the
Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine
Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on
the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by
passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another
arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic
“Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean
front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue
for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential
section of the Brazilian capital.
The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as
if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace
along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor
with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there
are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as
sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among
the _morros_ and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into
almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration
flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is
not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly
extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with
a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they
operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is
also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to
another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system”
imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are
lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and
_morros_, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore
all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege
of swimming home.
What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the
“Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of
Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had
long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman,
and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me
any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some
time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a _fiscal segreto_ of the
system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn
in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my
room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was
decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay
for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until
I sailed my chief problems were solved.
The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida
Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its
journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was
furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any
of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as
inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor
showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other
of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the
oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North
American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone
traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop
to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and
less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had
been given free transportation.
I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the
Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The
company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the
abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars
introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale
to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for
them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were
dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the
Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a
consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables.
The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on
the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden
Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride
across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are
all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is
allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those
not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being
second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of
the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are
also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in
Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians.
Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street
lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by
crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the
swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they
consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those
exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and
the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person
to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not
always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South
America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay
in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car.
I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are
superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to
business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of
its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my
duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault
with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for
there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the
annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned
motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this
result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in
wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements
to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to
protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in
which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of
Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in
their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have
we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian
capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a
chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare,
dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid
personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor.
Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that
three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to,
make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that
carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray
my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the
capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for
which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa
Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical
flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all
Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has
been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date
palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more
beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the
sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it
the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first
European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to
which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of
trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds
that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they
fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus
turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who
cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of
nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the
picture. It grows in the courtyards of _cortiços_, those one-story
tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying
mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows
up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and
the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of
impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from
between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried
a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and
climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in
regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable
jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny
man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of
the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful
embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it,
sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he
came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every
street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the
interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright
colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns,
and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling
imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of
Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels
of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs,
bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle
sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills,
like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength
and energy.
My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings
dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside
little _praças_, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds,
that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets
which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable
wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every
conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up
gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some
seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably
into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the
imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are
many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is
sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded
together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an
hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of
jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin _matta_ almost in
the heart of the city limits.
Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite
hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make
up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its
mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short
square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through
suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was
Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not
with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while
from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing
scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz
e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens
scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was
particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip
in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of
acquiring a bathing-suit.
Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital
has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or
climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair
of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida
Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation
of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the
Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar
and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as
suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that
he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even
the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines
within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he
must frequently strike out afoot and climb.
For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her _morros_, those rock
hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise
everywhere above the general level. The _Carioca_—the inhabitant
of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more
formal term _Fluminense_—hates physical exertion such as the
climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high
demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous
villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but
the upper flanks and summits of the _morros_ are left to the
discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build
their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry
goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal
palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels,
inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock
laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual
loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal
Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift
dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably
along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent
walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns
within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in
quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose
inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with
even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from
the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through
the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of
other lands may well envy.
These scores of _morros_ rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many
shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar
Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which
the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older
part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries
turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of
the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of
negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what
were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the
city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the
_morros_,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white
trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop
inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the
equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these
slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the
top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in
Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his
physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her
hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her _gente de tamanco_, wearers
of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual
footwear of the poorer sockless _Cariocas_. The falsetto scrape of
_tamancos_ on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of
the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and
its sky-piercing _palmeiras imperiaes_.
It was dusty on the _morros_ at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was
suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the
worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants
were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on
their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down
on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds
in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild
animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of
choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the
hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity,
about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the
Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the
_morro_ dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from
the same spot the supply for all the city.
The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the
ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil
and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the
mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb,
its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive
tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like
so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of
the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the
city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running
through an old file of the _Jornal do Commercio_ at the National Library
I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among
many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we
all take refuge,” the following item:
This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American
names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar,
arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so
frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a
concession for a line of bonds to that locality.
The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a
clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of
the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car
bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with
complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living
up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it
in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a
heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to
peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would
find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly
what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top
of the “Sugar Loaf.”
Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the
harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon
the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of
Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the
ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the
tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive
rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more
gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky
like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this
point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them.
There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the
coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the
most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the
company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station
visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly
pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the
station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is
similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end
ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead
of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two
cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at
nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock
hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out
to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our
nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across
the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged
considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of
the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea.
At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far
out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy,
the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time
of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem
solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling
across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of
the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the
trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the
Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to
rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João
faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite,
midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage,
and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the
entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of
Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here
and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as
directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an
airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants
of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the
two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of
clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish
dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast
spreading city, strewn in and out among its _morros_ until it resembles
some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable
softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all
known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches
and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed
celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and
another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes,
until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very
warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and
all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some
fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else
is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence
blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would
attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of
Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in
person.
Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more
striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar
Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted
by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A
little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old
Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing
high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle,
winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas
Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old
mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical
exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit.
But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he
who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself
the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the
mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems
tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense,
jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down
to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population
into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut
through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of
vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from
a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time.
From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the
summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all
the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about
him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all
spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a
flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in
sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems
close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks
bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the
beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company
is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other
things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down
again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful
corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles
through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary
to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches.
Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage
points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his
superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within
the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300
above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be
reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four
hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be
taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and
its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too
easy accessibility.
A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the
hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an
automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the
cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as
unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny
thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana,
pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy
endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care
for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now
and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a
mere _tapera_ now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely
into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the
fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but
the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest
piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the
Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever
bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam
far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often
abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its
edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as
an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to
be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as
the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their
plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like
trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped
valley.
But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car
out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town
in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to
a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name
as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at
least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred
feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical
verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the
average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward
through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to
immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail
grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it
breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs,
between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the
summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the
otherwise unbroken vegetation.
Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado,
for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range
beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive
federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over
chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and
“Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the
“Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in
the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree,
all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in
plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen
from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the
earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading
away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together.
CHAPTER IX
BRAZIL, PAST AND PRESENT
The Spaniard Pinzón had already sighted what is to-day Brazil when, in
1500, Pedro Alves Cabral, whom Portugal had sent out to get her share of
this new world, accidentally discovered land at some point on the
present Brazilian coast. He named it “Vera Cruz,” which not long
afterward was changed to “Santa Cruz.” But neither name endured, for the
only importance of the country during the first century and more after
its discovery was its exportation of the fire-colored wood of a bright
red tree which found favor in the old world for decorative purposes.
This the Arabs called “bakkam,” or “burning wood,” a term which became
in Latin _bresilium_, in French _braise_, and in Spanish and Portuguese
_brazil_, and gradually the “land of the _brazil_ tree” came to be known
simply as Brazil.
The first white settler in Brazil of whom there is any authentic record
was Diogo Alvarez Correa, a Portuguese sailor whose ship was wrecked
near the present site of Bahia. His companions are said to have been
killed by the aborigines, but Diogo won their interest or fear by means
of a long implement he carried which belched fire at a magic word from
its owner and brought death upon anyone at whom he pointed it. The
Indians named this extraordinary being “Caramurú,” which in their
language meant something like “producer of lightning” or “sudden death,”
and welcomed him into their tribe. Diogo made the most of his
opportunities and had already established a considerable colony of
half-breed children when he passed on to new explorations in another
world. His good work was continued by fitting successors, since, to put
it in the simple words of a Brazilian historian, “the first arrivals
found no difficulty in procuring companions among the Indian women, as
the latter had a peculiar ambition to possess children by a race of men
whom they _at first_ deemed demigods.” Thus the landing-place of
“Caramurú” came in time to be the capital of all Brazil.
Meanwhile João Ramalho had established the village of Piratinanga,
destined afterward to move its site and become São Paulo, and de Souza
began the present Santos by building the fort of São Vicente, while in
the north Olinda and Recife were showing the rivalry which has
culminated in the city now called Pernambuco. In 1516 Solis drifted into
a harbor which he named “River of January,” evidently so incensed at its
lack of length or at the heat of Brazil’s most torrid month as to refuse
to give it one of the customary saints’ names. His mistake was not
discovered until de Souza explored the bay sixteen years later and found
it no river at all. The French soon began to make settlements along the
coast and Durand de Villegaignon of the French navy, sent out by
Coligny, took possession of the island in Rio harbor which still bears
his name; but the Portuguese Mem da Sá at length drove him out and
clinched the expulsion by founding a fortress and thatched village on
the mainland, which he named, in honor of the day’s saint, “São
Sebastião.” Soon this became a worthy rival of Bahia and Olinda and by
the end of the sixteenth century it was recognized as the capital of the
southern part of Portugal’s possessions in the new world.
For a time these promised to remain less extensive than they finally
became. The French founded a settlement called St. Louis on the island
of Maranhão off the north coast of Brazil and gave evidence of a desire
to conquer more territory. In 1624 the Dutch formed a “West India
Company” and took the capital, Bahia, which was recovered by the
Spaniards two years later, both Portugal and Brazil being under Spanish
dominion for sixty years at that period. In 1630 the Dutch took
Pernambuco and all Brazil north of the River São Francisco, and had high
hopes of annexing the entire country. By 1661 luck had turned, however,
and a treaty gave the enormous tract now known as Brazil to Portugal for
the payment of eight million florins to the Dutch and allowing them free
commerce in everything except the principal export, the fiery _brazil_
wood. At the end of the seventeenth century this valuable product was
cast in the shade by the discovery of gold in the interior of the
country.
When the Conde da Cunha was sent out by Pombal as viceroy in 1763 he was
instructed to move his capital from Bahia to São Sebastião on the “River
of January,” the latter having become more important because of its
proximity to the mines of Minas Geraes and to the River Plata, where
fighting with the Spaniards was frequent. About the same time the coffee
berry was introduced into the hitherto unimportant state of São Paulo,
noted until then chiefly for the energy and ferocity of the
cattle-raising _Paulistas_ in the stealing and enslaving of Indians from
the adjacent Spanish colonies. Great numbers of negro slaves had been
introduced into the country, particularly in that paunch-like portion of
it jutting farthest out into the Atlantic toward Africa and where the
planting of sugar-cane made a large supply of labor necessary. Soon
after the coming of da Cunha the further introduction of negroes into
Portuguese territory was forbidden, but the decree was never seriously
enforced, and the natural increase of the bondsmen, abetted by such
customs as freeing any female slave who produced six children, caused in
time the preponderance of African blood.
When Rio de Janeiro was made the national capital of Brazil in 1763 it
had some thirty thousand inhabitants. Nor did it increase greatly during
the half century that followed. Its chief growth and development dates
from the arrival of the court in 1808. João VI of Portugal, driven out
of his own land by Napoleon, fled on a British ship “with all the
valuables he could lay hands on,” after the way of kings, and landed in
Bahia, soon afterward moving on to Rio and setting up his court under
the title of “King of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarve.” He opened the
country to foreign commerce, imported the royal palm, and carried out
certain reforms in the formerly colonial government. The way having been
cleared for him, he returned to Portugal in 1821, leaving his son behind
as regent. On September 7th of the following year this son declared
Brazil independent and proclaimed himself emperor under the title of
Pedro I. He was soon succeeded, however, by his infant son, Pedro II,
whose reign of half a century was punctuated by a three years’ war
against Rosas, the tyrant of the Argentine, and by the war of 1864 in
which Brazil joined the Argentine and Uruguay against the despot Lopez
of Paraguay. This second conflict cost the country thousands of men and
£63,000,000 in money—which, by the way, has not yet been paid—but it
established the free navigation of the Paraguay River and put Rio de
Janeiro into communication with the great wilderness province of Matto
Grosso.
During the reign of Pedro II there had been much criticism of the
country’s anachronistic custom of negro slavery. This culminated in 1888
in a decree of emancipation signed by the Princess Isabel, who was
acting as regent during her father’s illness. By this time the Frenchman
Comte had won many Brazilian disciples for his “positivist” philosophy,
and certain other factions were showing a growing enmity to the
monarchy. These elements and the leading planters, disgruntled at the
loss of their slaves even though they were reimbursed for them from the
public funds, formed a republican party. Finally the church, according
to a native writer, “seeing which side was going to win, withdrew her
weight from the crown and threw it into the other side of the balance,”
and on November 15th, 1889, Brazil was declared a republic.
Like the abolition of slavery the year before, the change was entirely
without bloodshed. The ostensible leader of the revolt was “Deodoro the
tarimbeiro” (_tarimba_ being the cot of a private soldier), a bluff old
military commander who had the army behind him; but the real head of the
movement was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, who owed his given
name to his father’s admiration for a certain French writer. Constant
was a Positivist, as were several others of the leading republicans, and
many hints of Comte’s religion, if it may be so called, crept into the
new government. To a Positivist was given the task of designing a new
national flag, so that the banner of republican Brazil is not merely
green, Comte’s chosen color, but bears the words, from the Positivist
motto, “Ordem e Progresso”—to which the northern visitor feels
frequently impelled to add, “e Paciencia.” Unnecessary violence,
however, is contrary to the Positivist creed, and the former opponents
of the new régime did not suffer the fate so frequent in South American
revolutions. Harmless old Dom Pedro II was put aboard a ship in the
harbor with his family, his retainers, and his personal possessions, and
“the bird of the sea opened its white wings and flew away to the
continent whence kings and emperors came.”
The Brazilian constitution of 1891 is an almost exact copy of that of
the United States, and under it and the half dozen presidents who have
succeeded Deodoro, Brazil has prospered as well as could perhaps be
expected of a tropical and temperamental, young and gigantic country.
Barely a year after the adoption of the constitution a revolution broke
out in the southernmost state and the Republic of Brazil came near dying
in its infancy. But with the ending of civil war and the beginning of
reconstruction under Moraes, this setback was regained, and the frequent
threats of secession of both the north and the south have thus far come
to naught. During this same term a boundary dispute between the
Argentine and Brazil was arbitrated by the United States, and in 1898
the present frontier between French Guiana and the state of Pará was
established, leaving Brazil as nearly at peace with her neighbors as is
reasonable in South America. Her credit abroad was helped by the burning
of her old paper money; under an energetic _Paulista_ president railroad
construction was greatly increased at the beginning of the present
century; Rio was largely torn down and rebuilt, and the vast country was
knitted more closely together. To-day an “unofficial compilation”
credits Brazil with 30,553,509 inhabitants, and though the skeptical may
be inclined to question that final 9, there is no doubt that it is
second only to the United States in population in the western
hemisphere, with Mexico a lagging third and the Argentine a badly
outdistanced fourth. The population of the Federal District, which
includes little more than the capital, is estimated at 1,130,080, “based
on a count of houses and crediting each residence with ten inhabitants”;
which is perhaps a fair enough guess, for Brazilian families are seldom
small—and it would of course be hot and uncomfortable work, as well as
an intrusion upon “personal liberty,” really to take a census in Brazil
or its capital.
As late as 1850, according to an old chronicle, “the habits of the rich
of Rio de Janeiro were distressing and those of the lower orders
abominably filthy. Monks swarmed in every street and were at once
sluggards and libertines. The ladies of that time usually lolled about
the house barefoot and bare-legged, listening to the gossip and scandal
gathered by their favorite body-women.” Even at the beginning of the
present century Rio was far from being what it is to-day. The narrow
cobbled streets were worse than unclean, dawdling mule-cars constituted
the only urban transportation, and yellow fever victims were often so
numerous that there were not coffins enough to go round. Those obliged
to come to Rio made their wills and got absolution for their sins before
undertaking the journey. In 1889, when the monarchy was overthrown, it
was seriously contemplated moving the capital away from Rio because of
the constant scourge of “Yellow Jack.” In fact, the constitution fixes
the capital of the republic in its geographical center at a selected
spot in the wilderness of the state of Goyaz, and a syndicate offered to
build everything from a new presidential palace to the necessary
railroads, if given a ninety-year concession and monopoly; but like so
many well-reasoned schemes this one ran foul of many unreasonable but
immovable facts and has never advanced beyond the theory stage.
Once a hotbed of the most deadly tropical diseases, Rio was sanitated by
a native doctor at the cost of years of incessant labor that would have
disheartened any ordinary man, until to-day it is as free from yellow
fever and its kindred forms of sudden death as New York and has as low a
death rate as any large city in the tropics. The doctor began his
struggle in 1903, by act of congress, organizing a sanitary police
charged with clearing away all stagnant water within the city limits,
whether in streets, parks, gardens, rain-pipes, gutters, sewers, or—most
astonishing of all in a Latin-American country—even inside private
houses. This policy, together with the building of new docks and avenues
in the congested lower city, and the tearing down of many infected old
houses, virtually did away with the breeding-places of the deadly
stegomyia mosquito. Deaths from yellow fever dropped from thousands to
hundreds in one year, to tens in the next, and to none long before the
end of the decade. To this day the sanitary police strictly enforce
their regulations, though the man who framed them has gone to repeat his
work in the states bordering on the Amazon, and no dwelling can be
rented or reoccupied, be it a negro hovel or a palace, until the owner
has an official certificate of disinfection.
Among the thirty million people imputed to the country, even in the
fraction thereof credited to Rio, there is every possible combination of
African and Caucasian blood, with but slight trace of the aboriginal
Indian and only a sprinkling of other races. Brazil is indeed a true
melting-pot, far more so than the United States, for it mixes not merely
all the European nationalities entrusted to it, but crosses with perfect
nonchalance the most diametrically opposite races. In theory at least,
in most outward manifestations, the Brazilians are one great family,
with virtual equality of opportunity, quite irrespective of color or
previous condition of servitude. The haziness of the color-line in
Brazil is little short of astounding to an American; one cannot but
wonder at the lack of color prejudice. Negroes were held as slaves
throughout the republic up to little more than thirty years ago;
thousands if not millions of former slaves are still alive, and the
tendency of humanity to look down upon those forced to do manual labor
is certainly as strong in Brazil as anywhere on earth. In England,
France, or Germany there is little color prejudice because the stigma of
forced manual labor was never attached to any particular color of skin,
and because the population has not come frequently enough in contact
with the African race to feel the disrespect for it which is the basis
of our own color-line. But neither of these motives are lacking in
Brazil. Is color prejudice so slight there because the Spaniard and the
Portuguese, mixed with the Moors, often by force, during their conquest
of the Iberian peninsula, have lost the color _feeling_, at least for
centuries? One has only to see a young Portuguese immigrant to Brazil
openly fondling a black girl amid the ribald laughter of his companions
quite as our own young rowdies dally with girls of their own class at
summer picnics or ward-healers’ dances to understand the widespread
mixture of races in South America. Though the actual importation of
African slaves into Brazil ceased some eighty years ago, and immigration
since then has been almost entirely from Europe, it has been chiefly
from the more ignorant and backward countries of southern Europe, where
the color-line is at most embryonic. The Portuguese man and the negro
woman get along very well domestically in Brazil; even the Portuguese
woman joins forces with a black man without feeling that she has in any
way lowered herself or her race. The number of young half-breeds
sprawling about the poorer houses of the immigrant sections or standing
in the doorways of Portuguese shops in the serene nudity of bronze
figures shows how general is this point of view.
There are other causes for this lack of racial friction in Brazil.
Slavery seems to have been less harsh and cruel than in the United
States. With but slight color prejudice or feeling even among the
Portuguese who formed the great majority of the owning class, the
relation of the Brazilian slave to his master was more in the nature of
a hired servant. The slaves belonged to the same church, they observed
the same feast days, there were cases where they even married into the
master’s family. There was a species of local autonomy in the matter of
slavery, slaves being held in any province where it was locally legal
and profitable; nor must we lose sight of the fact that there was no
statehood problem to agitate and increase the differences of opinion on
the subject, no fear that each new territory admitted to the union would
disturb the political balance of power in the federal capital. Thus when
the question of abolition arose it did not divide the country into two
sharply defined camps, with the resultant generations of enmity that it
bred in our own land.
Not long after our Civil War the agitation for the freeing of the slaves
began in Brazil. There, strangely enough, it came from the north, the
more tropical section of the country, partly no doubt because the
Amazonian regions, settled long after the sugar-growing lands of
Pernambuco and Bahia where intensive labor was needed, found white
immigration and their part-Indian population sufficient for their
immediate needs. At length a bill was passed by congress and signed by
the Princess Isabel making free any child thenceforth born of a slave,
and paving the way to the law of 1888 abolishing slavery entirely. The
latter was “premature” according to some Brazilians even of to-day, who
point to the many ruined plantations within fifty miles of Rio as proof
of their contention; it was undoubtedly one of the motives of the
revolution which drove monarchy from the western hemisphere in the
following year. But the fact that what cost us four years of savage
warfare was accomplished in Brazil almost by common consent, without the
shedding of a drop of blood, left the “color question” far less acute
than in the United States. There is a saying in Brazil that slavery was
buried under flowers, and as a result there is no hatred either between
sections of the country or between the races that inhabit it; with no
deep national or sectional wounds to heal a fraternal relationship
quickly grew up, so that to-day blacks and whites celebrate Emancipation
Day together in much the same spirit which we do our Fourth of July.
In popular intercourse the color of a man’s skin is of little more
importance in Brazil than the color of his hair. Indeed, it is
commonplace to hear people referring to their varying tints in much the
same amused and friendly spirit in which our débutantes might speak of a
sunburn, and there is no offense whatever in nicknames of color. The
Brazilian, in fact, does not recognize a negro when he sees one. Ask him
how many of the thirty millions are of that race and he will probably
reply, “Oh, eight hundred thousand to a million.” From his point of view
that is true. There is no all-inclusive word “negro” or “nigger” in the
Brazilian language. To use the term _negro_ or _preto_ is merely to say
“black,” and it may be that there are not more than a million full
blacks in Brazil. But there are many millions with more or less African
blood in their veins, for whom the native language has a score of
designations all nicely graded according to the tint of the complexion.
There is a difference between the full negro and the mulatto in Brazil
which does not exist in the United States; like the Eurasian of India
the latter considers himself more closely allied to the whites, and acts
accordingly. Thus it is impossible to put the question to a Brazilian as
it can be put to an American. After traveling in every state of Brazil,
however, I have no hesitancy in asserting that two-thirds of the
population would have to ride in “Jim Crow” cars in our southern states.
The question of the mixture of races is unusually interesting in Brazil,
especially as many Brazilians seriously believe that their freedom of
interbreeding is producing a new type of humanity, under the combined
influences of climate, immigration, and the fusion of many stocks by no
means all Caucasian, that can endure the heat of the tropics and at the
same time retain some of the energy and initiative of the temperate
zones. All sentiment or repugnance aside, it is possible that the
catholic cross-breeding sanctioned by the Iberian creed may prove
economically more profitable to tropical America than the Anglo-Saxon’s
instinctive aversion to fusion with the colored races. Yet humanly, it
seems to the outsider, the results are not so promising; it looks less
as if Brazil were solving the color question than as if color were
dissolving Brazil. The citizen produced by the intermixture of
Portuguese with negroes is not visibly an improvement on the parent
stocks. The mulattoes or quadroons are often brighter, quicker of
intelligence, than either the ox-like Portuguese or the full-blooded
Africans; but it is widely agreed, even in Brazil, that they have
neither the moral nor physical stamina, that they take on most of the
faults, and retain few of the virtues of their ancestors.
In Rio de Janeiro evidence of this general interbreeding confronts the
visitor at every step, in all classes of society, far more so than in
São Paulo and the other southern states, where the flowing tide of
Italian and other European immigration has given Caucasian blood the
ascendency. Even at his best the average Brazilian is not prepossessing
in appearance; in Rio’s most élite gatherings a fine face is a rarity;
in her street crowds even a passable one is sufficient motive for an
exclamation. Every shade of color, of negroid type and features are
indiscriminately mixed together, while poor and insignificant physique,
bad teeth, and kindred signs of degeneracy are almost universal. There
is something disagreeable about mingling with the throng in Brazil;
surrounded on all sides by miscegenation, the visitor develops a
subconscious fear that his own blood will inadvertently get a negro
strain in it. But by the time he has been a month or two in the country,
especially if this has been preceded by a year or more in the rest of
South America, he scarcely notices the under-sizedness, the lack of
robustness, the patent weakness of character in a Brazilian crowd. He
needs an occasional shock of contrast to bring his sense of comparison
back to normal. The insignificance of the prevailing type is quickly
thrown into clear relief when a pair of burly clear-skinned Scandinavian
seamen from one of the ships down at the docks come shouldering their
way through a native crowd averaging a head shorter than they.
Yet the equality of mankind irrespective of color is probably in a way
as good for the white man in Brazil as it is advantageous to the negro.
It saves him from presuming on his own importance simply because he
happens to be white, as not infrequently occurs in our own land. Perhaps
it is because the Brazilian negro does not himself consciously draw the
color-line, because he is instinctively courteous, gives one half the
sidewalk like a _cavalheiro_, yet does not obsequiously shrink before a
white man, that he arouses less dislike—or whatever it is—than the
American negro; or it may simply be that one’s feelings change with
one’s environment.
Yet at bottom there is a real color-line in Brazil, though the casual
visitor may never discover it. Evidence of it must be pieced together
out of hints that turn up from time to time. Azevedo’s novel “O Mulato,”
the reader finds, hinges on the secret color prejudices of north Brazil.
One runs across a paragraph tucked away in a back corner of a newspaper:
DISAGREEABLE INCIDENT
It is reported that the intelligent
and cultured son of a state senator
of Bahia was refused admission to
our national military academy for
the mere motive that he is black.
I have more than once had a Brazilian of that pale darkness of
complexion common to those who have lived for generations in the tropics
draw back a sleeve to convince me that the color of his hands and face
is climatic rather than racial, at the same time asserting almost in a
whisper that the “aristocratic old families” of Brazil are just as proud
of their Caucasian blood, and fully as determined that it shall not be
sullied with African, as are “os Americanos do Norte.” But positive
proof that there is no illegitimate strain in their veins is so rare,
and pure-blooded families are so greatly in the majority, that they
usually keep their color prejudices to themselves. It does not pay to
express such sentiments openly in a land largely in the hands of
negroes, or at least of those of negro blood, where the government
averages the mulatto tint, where the army which accomplished the change
from monarchy to republic is still powerful and overwhelmingly African
in its enlisted personnel.
The constitution and the law-making and executive bodies of Brazil are
similar to those of the United States, more so, in fact, than in any
other country of South America. Here, too, there are states rather than
provinces; those states are largely autonomous, even less closely
federated than our own and vastly less so than the provinces of
Spanish-America, which are governed mainly from the national capitals.
In so far as any real one exists, the division between the two main
political parties in Brazil is the line separating those who wish a more
centralized government from those who wish the present semi-freedom of
the states to continue, if not to be increased. It is the contention of
the latter that state autonomy permits a fuller development of
independent activity, which in the end is of advantage to the entire
federation. The other side points to the frequent threats of
secession—now of Rio Grande do Sul because it feels it is neglected and
exploited by the central government, now of industrial São Paulo,
prosperous Pernambuco, or self-sufficient Amazonia as a protest against
supporting and being hampered by the throng of official loafers in the
federal capital, now of the north from the south for mere
incompatability of temperament—as proof that the existing loose bonds
are perilous to the future of the republic. As in all Latin-America,
however, political parties are much more a matter of personalities, of
rallying about some particular leader rather than about a given set of
principles, and except in minor details there is no visible difference
between the two principal divisions. To put it more concisely, in the
words of a frank politician: “Party lines? Well, you see Brazil is like
a great banquet table, heaped with all manner of food and delicacies.
There is not room for everyone at it, so those of us who are seated are
on one side, and those who are constantly trying to crowd into our
places form the other party.”
An American long resident in Brazil asserted that the future of the
country is in the hands of the _fazendeiros_ of the interior,
industrious, tenacious, totally different from the city dwellers, a law
unto themselves, original because they have no precedents. However true
this may be, one soon realizes that Rio is mainly a port and a point of
distribution, living on the “rake-off” from the business passing through
its hands, and that such productive activity as exists is chiefly due to
foreign residents. The “upper class” Brazilian at least has inherited
his Portuguese forefather’s distaste for work and his preference for a
government sinecure; thanks perhaps to the climate, he is even more
strongly of that inclination than his ancestors. Almost every native of
social pretensions one meets in Rio is on the government payroll, and
the city swarms with clerks and bureaucrats. The centuries during which
the mineral wealth of Brazil poured into the public coffers of Portugal,
and from them into the pockets of politicians and court favorites, bred
the notion, still widely prevalent in all Latin-America, that “the
government” is a great reservoir of supply for those who know how to tap
it, rather than a servant of the general population. To the latter, on
the contrary, it is something in the nature of a powerful foreign enemy,
with which the average citizen has nothing to do if he can possibly
avoid it, except to trick or rob it when he gets a chance, yet which he
expects to do miracles unaided, as if it were some kind of god—mixed
with devil.
It has often been said that the Argentine, Uruguay, and to a certain
extent Chile are more progressive than the rest of South America because
they are ruled by whites. In her highest offices Brazil, too, usually
has men of Caucasian race; but the great mass of citizens being more or
less African—though two years’ residence suffices for voting rights—the
country is really under a mulatto government. Even immigration is at
present unable to better this matter, because white newcomers are
numerically and linguistically so weak that they have little say in the
government and their efforts merely make the country richer and give the
worthless native more chance to engage in politics. Swarms of part-negro
parasites, what might be called the sterile class, are incessantly on
the trail of the producer, constantly preying on productive industry,
and supernaturally clever in devising schemes to appropriate the lion’s
share of their earnings. It seems to be a fixed policy of Brazilian
government to lie low until a head raises itself industriously above the
horizon—then “swat” it! Its motto evidently is, “The moment you find a
golden egg, hunt up the goose and choke it to death.” Brazilian taxes
make those of other lands seem mere financial pin-pricks. To begin with,
there is a “protective” tariff so intricate that it requires an expert
_despachante_ to deal with it, and so high that those are rare imports
that do not at least double their prices at the customhouse. Then there
is the omnipresent “consumption impost.” Scarcely a thing can be offered
for sale until it has a federal revenue stamp affixed to it. If you buy
a hat you find a document pasted inside showing that the government has
already levied 2$000 upon the sale; a 4$000 umbrella has a $500 stamp
wound round the top of the rod; every pair of shoes has a stamp stuck on
the inside of one of the heels—for some reason they have not yet thought
of selling each shoe separately. Almost nothing is without its revenue
stamp; and, be it noted, the stamp must be affixed _before_ the goods
are offered for sale, so that a merchant may have hundreds of dollars
tied up in revenue stamps on his shelves for years, even if he does not
lose their value entirely by the articles proving unsalable. There is a
“consumption” tax on every box of matches, over the cork of every
bottled beverage, be it imported wine or local mineral or soda-water.
Tooth-paste is considered a luxury, as by most legislators, and pays a
high impost accordingly; there is a stamp on every receipt or bank
check, on every lottery, railway, steamer, or theater ticket, on every
birth, marriage, or burial certificate; there are taxes until your head
aches and your pocketbook writhes with agony, _impostos_ until only the
foolish would think of trying to save money, since it is sure to be
taken away as soon as the government hears of it. A cynical editor
complained that there is no tax on revolutions and that “French women”
are allowed to go unstamped.
But this is only the beginning—and these things, by the way, are no
aftermath of the World War, but were in force long before the
war-impoverished world at large had thought of them. State and municipal
taxes are as ubiquitous, and iniquitous, as those of the federal
government. Among the few ways in which the Brazilians who overthrew the
monarchy did not copy the American constitution was in not decreeing
free trade between the states, with the result that politicians who
cannot fatten on federal imposts may feed on state import and export
duties. Many a state taxes everything taken in or out of it; at least
one even taxes the citizens who go outside the state to work. The beans
of Rio Grande do Sul, where they are sometimes a drug on the market,
cannot be sent to hungry states because the growers cannot pay the high
export and import taxes between them and their market. Many a Brazilian
city imports its potatoes from Portugal, at luxury prices, while pigs
are feeding on those grown just beyond a nearby state boundary. If you
buy a bottle of beer or mineral water, you will probably find a federal,
a state, and a municipal tax-stamp on it. Every merchant down to the
last street-hawker, every newsboy or lottery-vendor, wears or otherwise
displays a license to do business.
The politicians are constantly on the lookout for some new form of
taxation, but as they have the same scarcity of original ideas in this
matter as in others, the ancestry of most of their schemes can be traced
back to Europe or North America. Thus they copied the “protective”
tariff of the United States, though there are few native industries to
“protect,” not only because it was an easy way to raise revenue but
because it gave many openings for political henchmen. They were just
beginning to hear of the income tax at the time of my visit and to plan
legislation accordingly. The more sources of easy money of this kind the
government discovers, the worse it seems to be for the country, not only
in cramping existing industry but by drawing more of the population away
from production into the sterile ranks of the seekers after government
sinecures. Thanks partly to Iberian custom, partly to the power of the
second greatest class of non-producers—absentee owners of big
estates—there is little or no land or real estate tax, except in the
cities, and in consequence many squatters and few clear titles. But this
is about the only form of financial oppression the swarthy rulers have
overlooked, and now and then they show outcroppings of originality that
resemble genius. When the outbreak of war in Europe sharpened their wits
they had the happy thought, among others of like nature, of charging
duty on foreign newspapers arriving by mail and of recharging full
foreign postage on prepaid letters from abroad that were forwarded from
one town to another within the republic, or even within the same state.
Postal Union rules to the contrary notwithstanding. Brazil once ran a
post office savings bank, but after taking in millions from the poorer
class of the community this suspended payment, and to-day a government
bank-book with 5,000$000 credited in it cannot be sold for two-fifths
that amount. During the war one could buy a postal order in any city of
Brazil, but if the addressee attempted to cash it he was informed that
there was no money on hand for such purposes. More than that, if your
correspondent returned the unpayable order to you, your own post office
would laugh at the idea of giving you back the money. Furthermore, if
you received a postal order payable, say, in São Paulo, and presented it
at the same time that you bought another order on the issuing office,
the tar-brushed clerk would calmly rake in your money with one hand and
thrust your order back with the other with the information that the post
office had no funds on hand to pay it.
If all or even a large proportion of the income from this hydra-headed
revenue system reached the public coffers and passed out from them in
proper channels of public improvement, there would be less cause for
complaint on the part of the taxpayers. But not only is a great amount
of it diverted to the pockets of politicians and their sycophants, even
before it becomes a part of the public funds, by such simple expedients
as bribery of those whose duty it is to collect them, but the outlets
from the public coffers are many and devious, not a few ending in
unexplored swamps and morasses. Nor does this well-known and widely
commented-upon state of affairs arouse to action the despoiled majority.
Bursts of popular indignation take other forms in Brazil. Everyone seems
to endure robbery unprotestingly and await his chance to recoup in
similar manner. Were all Brazilians honest, it would work out to about
the same division of property in the end—and save them much mental
exertion. We have no lack of political corruption in the United States,
but here at least it is sometimes unearthed and punished. In Brazil the
political grafter is immune, both because Portuguese training has made
his machinations seem a matter of course and because the “outs” do not
propose to establish a troublesome precedent by auditing the actions of
those temporarily in power.
The Brazilians are inclined to be spendthrifts individually and
nationally. Both the public and the private attitude is suggestive of
the prodigal son of an indulgent father of unlimited wealth. Fortunes
made quickly and easily in slave times have in most instances long since
been squandered; the families who more recently grew rich from cattle,
sugar, or coffee have in many cases already gambled and rioted their
wealth away. Neither the individual nor the nation is content to live
within its income. The politicians periodically coax a loan from foreign
capitalists, spend it in riotous living, and when the interest comes due
seek to place a “refunding loan,” to borrow money to pay the interest on
the money they have borrowed. Financially Brazil had reached a critical
stage before the beginning of the World War, not only the federal
government owing a colossal foreign debt, but nearly every state and
municipality staggering into bankruptcy. The government had issued
enormous quantities of paper money bearing the statement “The National
Treasury promises to pay the bearer 10$”—or some other sum; yet take a
ragged, illegible bill to the treasury and you would probably be told,
“Well, you have the 10$ there, haven’t you?” and thus the paper
continued in circulation until it wore out and disappeared and the
government issued more at the total cost of the cheap material and the
printing. Soon after the outbreak of the war all foreign banks in Brazil
refused to lend the government any more money, whereupon the politicians
authorized the issue of 150,000,000$000 in gold; that is, as it was
explained later on in tiny type on them, notes _payable_ in gold, though
everyone in Brazil knew that even those already outstanding could not be
redeemed. A saving clause at the end of the decree read, “If when these
notes come due the government has not the gold on hand to pay them, then
it may redeem them in paper.” Such was the mulatto government’s idea of
“meeting the present world’s crisis.”
Of a piece with their other schemes are the federal and at least two
state lotteries supported by the population mainly for the advantage of
the politicians. There are persons who contend that a lottery supplies a
harmless outlet for a natural craving for excitement, at a moderate cost
to the individual and with a benefit to the state that operates it. With
the Latin-American the intoxication of the lottery is said to take the
place of alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. All this may be more
or less true, but at least the state loses much activity of its
day-dreaming citizens, while the bureaucracy and the politicians are
fattening on the profits. Lottery drawings succeed one another with
feverish frequency in Brazil—the powers that be see to that, whatever
other duties they may be forced to neglect. The streets of every large
city swarm with ragged urchins and brazen-voiced touts who press tickets
upon the passer-by at every turn, each guaranteeing that his is the
winning number. Every block in the business section has its _cambistas_
lying in wait in their ticket-decorated shops; besides the veritable
pest of street vendors pursuing their victims into the most secret
corners, there are _cambios_ all over the country and perambulating
ticket-hawkers canvassing even the rural districts. Everyone “plays the
lottery.” The young lady on her way home from church stops to buy a
ticket, or at least a “piece” of ticket, as innocently as she would a
ribbon; school children enter their classrooms loudly discussing the
merits of the various numbers they have chosen; the number of persons
losing sleep, or going to sleep on the job, figuring up what they will
do with the hundred thousand reis they are always sure of winning is
beyond computation. The lottery cannot but add to the natural tendency
of the Latin-American to put it off until to-morrow, for if it is not
done to-day perhaps he will win the grand prize this evening and never
have to do it at all. Brazil had long been struggling to get a loan from
Europe, but when the war gave capitalists a chance to lend their money
nearer home at higher rates and with better security the Brazilians were
naturally left out in the cold. Editors complained that when France
offered government bonds her citizens rushed forward and subscribed the
amount several times over in one day, while Brazil could not get any
response whatever from her own people. Yet not a scrivener among them
noted that if the Brazilian government could get at a fair rate of
interest on a legitimate investment a fraction of the enormous sums her
people pay into the state and national lotteries every week there would
have been no need to go abroad seeking a “refunding loan.”
Brazil won her political independence a century ago, but economically
she is more dependent on the outside world to-day than in 1822. In
colonial times wheat was grown in all the half dozen southernmost
states; now the big flour-mills of Rio are fed entirely from the
Argentine. Brazil is so dependent on her imports, so self-insufficient,
importing even the food products she could so easily grow or the most
insignificant manufactured articles which she could readily produce,
even though she almost wholly lacks coal deposits, that any disturbance
of shipping throws her into a panic. Natives refuse to develop the
resources of the country, out of indolence, lack of confidence or
initiative, or because they prefer to squander their capital in fast
living; yet when the “gringo” comes in and starts an industry the native
either steps up with a title to the property showing that he inherited
it direct from Adam, or, if he cannot take it away from the newcomer in
that way, he taxes all the profits into his own pockets. The war forced
Brazil to develop some of her own resources, to produce for herself many
of the things she had always bought from abroad on credit; it compelled
a considerable agricultural development and reduced the number of
shopkeepers. Yet the country has already slumped back again into the old
rut, and to-day, as before the war, her imports are nearly three times
her exports and she is keeping her nose above water only by such
stop-gaps as “refunding loans.”
By no means all Brazilians are pleased with the change from a monarchy
to a republic. There is still a large and influential monarchical party,
composed partly of the wealthier class and those who have always
remained monarchists, partly of citizens who have become disgusted with
the squabbling and graft of mulatto democracy, or who, on economic and
political grounds, have grown dissatisfied with the republican régime
and are convinced that the salvation of Brazil lies in the restoration
of the old form of government. It is rare and usually a mistake,
however, to back water in life, and the imitative faculty of the
Brazilian makes it all the more unlikely that the former régime will
return, unless a failure of democracy the world over makes it à la mode
to bring about such a change.
There was, of course, corruption under the monarchy, but one need not
inquire long in Rio to find a man ready to admit that the pall of
mulatto politicians and bureaucrats which hangs over republican Brazil
is more burdensome than ever were the grasping Portuguese courtiers of a
century ago. At least the latter were limited in number and had
occasionally a _cavalheiro_ pride that sometimes resembled decency, and
old Pedro II in particular, whose habit it was to keep a little personal
note-book in which to jot down any lapse from honesty by a public
official and to startle the man and his sponsors by bringing up the
matter when it came time to reappoint him, is generally admitted to have
ruled honestly and generously. But though the revolution of 1889 was in
reality only another detail of the world-wide movement of the last
century or two for bringing the ruling power down from a select and
wealthy class to the uncultured masses, the triumphant proletariat does
not appear to have greatly gained by the change. It is natural that the
masses, like the foreign firms struggling to keep their heads above
water in the form of innumerable taxes and the constant hampering of
meddlesome officials, should begin to wonder whether Brazil is not
mainly suffering from too much government, whether after all there is
not something, perhaps, in the contention of anarchists that the best
thing to do with over-corpulent governments is to take them out into the
woods and shoot them through the head, as something more burdensome than
useful.
One brilliant November day, perorates a Brazilian editor, a few
hundred soldiers, enthused by a lucid patriot, destroyed the last
American throne amid rousing cries of “Long live the Republic!” And
from city to city, from hamlet to hamlet, these words rang through
all Brazil. But now, barely a generation later, our armed force is
mainly used to suppress personal liberties, the tendency being
constantly toward dictatorships; education of the people is given
much less attention than is demanded in a democracy, and we are
overrun with a devouring swarm of politicians who have lost all
idealism and who scarcely occupy themselves with anything but their
personal interests, unscrupulously exploiting the public coffers.
The tendency toward dictatorships and the use of autocratic power to
cover corruption and aid partizanship was visible even to the naked eye
of the casual visitor. At the time I reached Brazil it was ruled over,
ostensibly at least, by a nephew of Deodoro, the first president. Never,
perhaps, had an administration been so cordially hated. “Dudú,” as the
populace called the president, that being his eighteen-year-old wife’s
pet name for him, was hated not only for himself but as a tool of the
“odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul, chief of the “P. R. C.”
or Republican Conservative Party, and for some years the national boss
of Brazil. When “Dudú” became president, the popular idol and fiery
orator, Ruy Barbosa, only survivor of those who overthrew the monarchy,
senator also and leader of the “P. R. L.” or Republican Liberal Party,
had been the opposing candidate and, according at least to the Liberal
newspapers, had been elected by an overwhelming popular vote. To be
elected, however, does not always mean to take office in Latin-America,
and the combined machinations of the “odious gaucho” and the army, in
which “Dudú” was a field marshal, had reversed the verdict.
To hold his own against the popular clamor the Marshal had used methods
taken from his own military profession, terminating finally in the
declaration of a “state of siege” in the federal capital and that of the
state of Rio de Janeiro, Nictheroy across the bay, and in the state of
Ceará in the far north. On the surface this did not mean any noted
suppression in the freedom of life. But if one happened to be a
political opponent of the party in power, or a newspaper publisher, the
sense of oppression was distinct. Under the sheltering wings of martial
law no articles could be published until they had been submitted to a
government censor, whose strictness made impossible the slightest
adverse criticism of the powers that were. The suspension of the right
of habeas corpus made it possible for “Dudú” to have scores of men
thrown into dungeons out on the islands in Guanabara Bay merely because
he or some of his followers did not like their political complexions. If
the friends or families of the victims happened to find out what had
become of them and got a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme
Court—according to the constitution a mandatory order of release—the
government answered, “We are in a state of siege and the constitution is
not working.” It would be hard to compute the full advantage of this
little ruse to the ruling politicians, and the grafting that went on
under cover of such protection may easily be imagined. When the decree
was finally revoked, on the eve of a new administration, the suppressed
news that flooded the papers was little less astounding than the swarms
of political prisoners whom government launches brought back to the
capital after months of imprisonment without any charge ever having been
preferred against them.
Outwardly, of course, the forms of republican government were regularly
carried out during all this period. Several times I dropped into the
Monroe Palace to watch the House of Deputies meet, report no quorum, and
adjourn. Once I went to the Senate, looking down upon that august body
from a miserable little stuffy gallery resembling that of a cheap
theater, where “any person decently dressed and not armed” had the
constitutional right of admittance—unless the state of siege was invoked
against him. Brazil’s most famous orator, late unsuccessful candidate
for the presidency and the idol of the _povo_, or collarless masses, was
whining through some childish jokes and puns on the alleged bad grammar
of a bill destined to establish a new public holiday—as if Brazil did
not already have enough of them, with her sixty-five days a year on
which “commercial obligations do not mature.” It was evident, too, that
the speaker had by no means gotten over his peevishness at not becoming
president, for his speech was turgid with personalities and full of
innuendos against “Dudú” and his fellow scoundrels. To see the leisurely
air with which the senate enjoyed this pastime one might have supposed
that no more serious duties faced the wearers of the toga.
Brazil is the only republic in South America that has trial by jury,
hence her courts much more nearly resemble our own than they do those of
Spanish-America. I attended a trial for murder one afternoon. Whatever
other faults they may have, the courts of Brazil cannot be charged with
unduly drawing out a trial, once it is begun. The judge called names
from a panel of jurors, and as each man stepped forward the _promotor_,
or prosecuting attorney, and the lawyer for the defense looked him up
and down much as a tailor might a client and said “_Recuso_” (I refuse)
or “_Aceito_” (I accept) without so much as speaking to the man or
giving any reasons for their action. Evidently they were expected to
guess his acceptability as a juror from his outward appearance. Those
accepted took their seats, and in less than ten minutes the jury of
seven was chosen and the trial had begun. There are juries of three
sizes in Brazil, always with an odd number of members, and these do not
need to reach a unanimous decision. A simple majority is decisive,
though the larger the majority for conviction the heavier the penalty
for the crime. Brazilian jurors get no pay, but they are fined if they
fail to answer to their names when called.
A paper was passed among the seven jurors, each of whom wrote his name
on it; but they took no oath, except that a clerk handed rapidly around
among them a glass frame inside which was the sentence in large letters,
“I promise to do my duty well and faithfully,” and on this each laid his
right hand in silence. There are so many Positivists, free thinkers,
fetish worshippers, Mohammedans, and other non-Christian sects in Brazil
that the Bible and “so-help-me-God” oath would be even more out of place
than in our own metropolis. Then the clerk of the court, who had neither
eyes, voice, nor physique, but was a mere living skeleton humped over a
pair of trebly-thick glasses, moaned for nearly an hour through the
entire proceedings in a lower court the year before. The prisoner was a
youthful _Carioca_, of white race and of the small shopkeeper or hawker
type. Throughout the trial everyone addressed him in a gentle, kindly
manner. He stated that he was twenty-one, but had only been twenty when
arrested, which the _promotor_ whispered to me was merely a ruse to get
the benefit of being a minor. More than a year before he had shot a man
of his own age in a downtown street, with premeditation, he naïvely
admitted. According to the degree of murder proved he might be sentenced
to twelve, twenty, or thirty years. There is no death penalty in Brazil,
nor will the Brazilian government extradite a refugee who may be
punished with more than thirty years’ imprisonment in the land from
which he fled, unless that country agrees not to execute him or exceed
that limit of punishment.
At length the _promotor_, who might easily have passed for an American
lawyer in any of our courtrooms—until he opened his mouth—began an
address in the thinnest, weakest, most worn-out voice imaginable—a
common weakness among Brazilians and especially _Cariocas_, thanks
perhaps to the climate—mumbling something about a “villainous
premeditated crime” several times before he took his seat. During the
next few hours he and the attorney for the defense, the latter in a wire
cage across the room, quarreled back and forth, rather good-naturedly as
far as outward appearances went, the judge very rarely interfering. It
was hotter in the courtroom than in any possible place of punishment to
which the accused might be sent, in this life or the next, and the
entire throng, from the judge to the last negro loafer in the far
corner, was constantly mopping its face. Not a woman was included in the
gathering. After the first formalities were over the trial moved forward
in almost uncanny American fashion, but with what in our own land would
have seemed dizzy speed, for it was finished, with the verdict given and
a sentence of six years imposed, by one o’clock the next morning.
Brazilian judges are reputed not often to be open to actual
bribery, but to be overrun with sentimentalism, nepotism, that
do-anything-for-a-friend or for a friend’s friend, that lack of moral
courage necessary to act with full justice when a personal element is
involved, which is a crying weakness in all Latin-American countries.
Striking evidences of this were frequently coming to the attention, more
often in the interior than in Rio itself. A politician in a city farther
north, for instance, killed a man of little standing, and went at once
to report the matter to his bosom friend, the circuit judge. “All
right,” the judge was reported to have replied. “Your sentence is one
day’s imprisonment—in my house,” and when a warrant for the assassin’s
arrest finally reached him, the judge marked it “Judgment given and
sentence served,” and sent it to be filed in the archives. Aside from
this weakness, the courts of Brazil seem to be fair; if anything they
are too lenient. Not a few Brazilians contend that the jury system is
not suited to the temperament of the nation, because it requires a
sterner attitude toward human frailty than they can attain. In fact, the
extreme leniency of juries is but another manifestation of the
liberty-license point of view of Brazil, the same weakness that spares
the rod and spoils the child. There were almost daily examples of this
attitude of irresponsibility, emotionalism, undue compassion, as if the
jurors considered a thief or an assassin at worst a poor unfortunate and
were thinking that the day may quite likely come when they will find
themselves in the same boat. A baker of a certain large city asked a
member of the Chamber of Deputies, to whom he had been supplying bread
for months without any suggestion of payment, to settle his bill. Being
of foreign birth, the baker may not have known that openly to dun a
Brazilian is so great an insult as to be dangerous. The deputy shot him
through the heart, and the jury found it “justifiable homicide.” A
_Carioca_ boy of fifteen, who had been in jail for a year charged with
murder, was tried during my stay in the capital. The whole trial took
place between one and twelve P. M., and the accused was found guilty of
“imprudence” and sentenced to fifteen days in prison. A well-known
citizen of Rio was assassinated on January 5 under revolting
circumstances. The case finally came to trial on the afternoon of
December 29; the court took a recess from seven to eight for dinner; at
11:20 the jury retired, and at 12:20 there was brought in a verdict
sentencing the accused to ten years’ imprisonment. Innumerable examples
might be cited, all showing extraordinary sloth in bringing criminals to
trial, lightning speed in dealing with them when at last they are
arraigned, and a mistaken soft-heartedness in punishing them. On the
other hand, the state may, and sometimes does, appeal a case and convict
a man acquitted by an earlier verdict.
CHAPTER X
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS
The mixture of races gives Rio a society very different from that of
Buenos Aires; its elements are more distinct, more complex, more
primitive, much less European. Probably it is the African blood in his
veins even more than his Latin ancestry which gives the _Carioca_ the
emotionalism and the unexpected violences that often carry the
individual or the population to excesses. The Brazilian character may be
said to consist of Latin sensibility tinged with the African traits of
superstition, fatalism, slovenliness, indiscipline, a certain
happy-go-lucky cheerfulness, and an almost total lack of initiative; and
to these the country owes most of its social and economic afflictions.
It would be unreasonable to expect high things of it. The Portuguese
were the cheapest race in western Europe, who won their place in history
simply because they happen to live on the sea, and in the New World they
mixed indiscriminately and in a purely animal way with the lowest form
of humanity. The negro gave the Portuguese more imagination and a better
adaptability to the tropics, perhaps an increase of cheerfulness; but
with these came other qualities that do not make for improvement. Though
he is often quick of intelligence, the _Brazileiro_ seldom shows
continuity of effort or any other sturdiness of character; he is
exceedingly susceptible to flattery and highly incensed at any mention
of the faults which he himself sometimes recognizes. Weather appears to
make a difference in man’s disposition, and the climate of Rio does not
seem to breed what we call “crankiness.” Outwardly the _Carioca_ is
usually good-humored and obliging, with less gruffness than the
_Porteño_. Yet it is evidently not best for a man to be too greatly
favored by nature; not only does it make him more indolent, but he seems
on the whole to be less happy than in countries where the struggle for
livelihood demands continuous and gruelling labor. Though individually
and superficially they may be cheerful, the general air of a group of
Brazilians is melancholy; as a character in a native novel of standing
puts it, “they always seem to be discussing a funeral”—“or pornographic
secrets,” adds another. There are more suicides per capita in Rio than
in almost any other city in the world, and the finer the weather the
more there seem to be reported each morning.
That the Brazilian is superficially courteous and in his way kindly
there is no doubt; yet few traces of these qualities are to be found far
beneath the surface. Even if he protests, he does so in soft language;
_palavras grossieras_ under any provocation are considered exceedingly
bad form in any but the lowest classes. Yet there is a distinct
suggestion of decadence in this very softness of speech, and one comes
to long occasionally for the vigor and manliness of the doubled fist. As
fathers the Brazilians have few equals, in all truth, for almost no
other race on earth shows more indiscriminate diligence in peopling it.
But it is an excellency of quantity rather than of quality. They are
good husbands in the Brazilian sense, so long as the woman is content to
remain at home and raise children while her lord and master is
cultivating similar gardens elsewhere. Divorces are practically unknown
because the general sentiment of the country is still Catholic, for all
the prevalence of other theologies and philosophies, because the
Brazilians have something of the French point of view that the family is
primarily a business partnership not to be broken up for such light
reasons as lack of love or illicit intercourse, and because the country
has no divorce law. Married sons often live with their parents because
they are too proud or too lazy to go out and work—though there is a
strong family affection among all Latin-Americans, in the long run the
principal result of this particular custom is bad for the race. That the
rod is spared, often to the detriment of the child, especially of the
boys, there is no doubt; one finds proofs of it every hour of the day in
Brazil. The average Brazilian is an excellent illustration of the fact
that mankind must be disciplined, that even children cannot always be
ruled by love any more than they can be fed only on sweets, and the
sparing of the rod has had a very large and by no means always
beneficial effect on the male adults.
Indeed, there is far too much liberty, too much laissez faire—or _deixa
fazer_, to use the native tongue—in Brazil, as in Spanish and Portuguese
life everywhere. No one in the country seems to recognize that liberty
may easily slop over into license, that the liberty of one may go so far
as to interfere with and even wholly annul that of many others. No doubt
democratic liberty should allow street-hawkers to howl the night as well
as the day hideous, or let a merry soul pound a tuneless piano until
three in the morning. To the newly republicanized Brazilians a law
forbidding the interspersing of brothels through every residential
district would no doubt be “a despotic interference with our sacred
constitutional rights as citizens and equals,” as it would be to compel
the hundreds of boys selling newspapers in the streets of Rio to learn
some trade or calling, that later they may find some better way to earn
a living than by hawking or thieving. But it is the Brazilian, as it is
generally the South American, way never to correct anyone or anything
unless it is absolutely unavoidable, until a confirmed democrat comes to
wonder whether the human race must always have kings or dictators to
rule over it rather than ever learning to rule itself. Then one recalls
that Brazil has been a democracy, even nominally, only since 1889, and
it is not so strange that she has not yet come to see that there may be
a seamy side even to liberty.
Though they are constantly asking for credit abroad, either collectively
or as individuals, Brazilians trust one another even more rarely than do
the average of Latin-Americans. Everywhere are little hints of lack of
confidence. The cash system is widely prevalent, which does not merely
mean paying the moment the work is done, but often before it will be
undertaken, lest the client change his mind or prove insolvent. Thus one
pays a dentist before he fills a tooth, the doctor before he will remove
an appendix, and a photographer before he will undertake to print one’s
films. The mail boxes of Rio are automatic, for instance; the mailman
must shove a locked bag under them before they will disgorge their
contents, and both box and bag lock themselves as he pulls the latter
out again, so that he never sees a letter, much less gets his sticky
fingers on it. A judge of Rio stated publicly, when a jury let off a
palpable offender, that ninety-five per cent. of the fires in Brazil
were set by the owners or their hired agents in order to get the
insurance, but that “there are so many artists at this crime who
exercise their profession with such admirable perfection that few are
ever convicted, however convinced the judge and the public may be of
their guilt.” His Honor was, of course, incensed at a specific failure
to convict, and perhaps exaggerated somewhat, but there are evidences
that he had not greatly overstepped the truth.
There is no more futile occupation on earth than trying to save money in
Rio de Janeiro. It melts away like ice under an equatorial sun; in fact,
money is of such slight value in Brazil that it seems foolish to try to
keep it. Do so and you are more likely than not to find that it has
grown even more worthless next morning in exchange for those things of
real value which man needs; that you have saved the cash only to lose
the credit. Prices were decidedly higher in Rio than in Buenos Aires, or
even in Montevideo. A small glass of not very good beer cost 800 reis; a
green cocoanut, that finest of tropical thirst-quenchers, growing in
superabundance along all the 5000-mile coast-line of Brazil, was
considered a bargain at the equivalent of a quarter—and a tip to the man
who opened it. The smallest bottle of native mineral water of
unquestionable antecedents cost at least a milreis, and thirst lurks on
every corner in sun-blazing Rio. Ordinary water? Certainly; if one cares
to flirt with the undertaker. Everything else was in proportion to this
most necessary source of expense. In the _Seccos e Molhados_, “Drys and
Wets,” as Brazil calls her grocery or provision shops, potatoes sold at
six hundred and more reis a kilogram; butter imported from Denmark into
this enormous country of splendid grazing lands was a luxury far beyond
the reach of any but the affluent. With the smallest coin in circulation
worth more than three cents, it was not to be expected that prices would
be cut fine. Moreover, there is the tendency of _fazendo fita_. A
Brazilian is ashamed to admit that his money is limited. He has the
reputation, and prides himself on it, of being a “good spender,” but
this is not so much due to his scorn for money as compared with the
better things that money will buy as it is to the fear of being thought
less well-off than his fellows. Commerce is largely carried on in
public, and the purchaser is thereby forced to pay more for dread of
being seen making a fuss. He is afraid to ask the price of a thing
before buying, or to protest against exorbitance, lest the by-standers
think money matters to him—the ally of the tip-seeker the world over. À
la carte restaurants in Rio almost invariably leave the price-space on
their menus blank and bring a check bearing only the sum total, knowing
that the average client will not have the hardihood to ask for a bill of
particulars. Even a Brazilian workman never protests against commercial
exploitation, never refuses to take a thing after he has asked for it,
but pays whatever is demanded as if it were a pleasure to do so.
Even in the matter of prices a community gets about what it demands, and
this national lack of protest has lifted the cost of living in Brazilian
cities into the realm of the absurd. Prices of almost anything are out
of all reason; the people seem to have formed the habit of paying high
to cover the heavy import and other duties and the grafting of their
officials, and to expect everything to be marked up in the same
proportion. It seems to be more or less a matter of pride with them that
they pay more than other people. Third-class fare from Portugal to Rio
was 55$000; the return trip on the same ships cost 105$000. The attitude
of the entire population seems to be graft and let graft pay through the
nose because you can make someone else do likewise. The average
Brazilian does not look as hard at a 32-cent milreis as most Americans
do at a dime, or Europeans at a copper. Rio is one place where Americans
can realize how the European, earning his money with more difficulty
than we do, feels when he first comes into contact with our prices.
Numerous proofs may be found that the Brazilian is rather an imitator
than an initiator. He seldom has a worthwhile idea of his own, but he is
supernaturally quick to grasp those of anyone else. A year or more
before my arrival a Portuguese opened a _caldo de canna_ shop in
aristocratic Rua Ouvidor. He set up a small cane-press, stood a bundle
of choice sugarcanes at the door, laid in a supply of ice, and waited
for customers. They soon came, for nowhere does a novelty take more
quickly than in Rio. Picking out their own cane as they entered, the
clients caused it to be run through the press, the juice straining down
through chopped ice, with the result that for a _tostão_ they had a
pleasant and refreshing drink. Within a fortnight of the establishment
of this entirely new industry fifteen other persons, all Brazilians, had
opened _caldo de canna_ shops in the three short blocks of that narrow,
vehicle-less shopping street, buying out the former occupants at any
price—with the inevitable result that within a month the entire clan,
including the originator, were bankrupt. To-day, when the stroller is
thirsty yet has no desire to consume alcohol, he can get a glass of iced
cane-juice only in a few shops which make this a side-line of their
regular business. This is one of hundreds of similar incidents in the
commercial life of Rio, and suggestive in general of Brazilian business
ethics.
A Brazilian proverb has it that “A cauda do demonio e de rendas” (the
devil’s tail is made of lace). Whatever the scientific exactness of that
assertion, there is no doubt that the _Brazileiro_ is early, often, and
usually successfully tempted by what are sometimes vulgarly called
“skirts.” The same may be said of all Latin-America, but in Brazil the
undisguised prevalence of irregular polygamy probably reaches its
zenith. Rigid, yet provocative, seclusion of the women, thanks to
Moorish influence, the former teaching of the Jesuits, to the instinct
for self-preservation of the women themselves, is perhaps as much the
cause of this condition as the natural polygamous tendency of the males.
Being an accepted convention of society that freedom of social
intercourse between men and women is certain to lead to more intimate
relations at the first opportunity, the women of the better class are
inclosed within an impregnable wall of Oriental seclusion, and their
contact with men is almost wholly confined to those of their own family
circle. Even the French find Brazilian family life unreasonably
circumspect. Under such conditions there can, of course, be little
social or intellectual activity, little real human intercourse, and it
is not surprising that the eager and romantic young men who find it
impossible to meet girls of their own class without a cynical chaperon
hanging constantly at their heels should fall easy prey to the darker
skinned and more accessible members of the sex, or to the imported
demimondaines who flourish in all the larger cities.
Naturally fecund, and of strong maternal instincts, the Brazilian woman
unquestioningly accepts the tenet that her place is strictly in the
home. Marriage does not bring her any appreciable increase in freedom
over her closely chaperoned days of virginity. But while she is expected
to conduct herself so circumspectly that not a breath of scandal shall
ever sully the honor of her fidalgo lord and master, the husband loses
none of his bachelor liberty. The average _Carioca_ can, and, above the
laboring class at least, usually does, keep a mistress, and not only
loses nothing of public esteem, but little of that of his own women. In
fact, the politician, the man of big business, of wealth, or of social
pretensions, is somewhat looked down upon if he does not maintain an
extra household or two; failure to do so is a fit subject for jesting
among his friends and acquaintances. The subsidized companions of this
class are almost always European, usually French, and preferably blond;
rarely are they native born, for the white and better class Brazilians
guard their daughters too closely to make possible any irregular
approach, and to take a “woman of color” would seem to the wealthy
Brazilian like buying poor native perfume when he can get, and all his
friends use, the best French product.
But it is not so much the existence of this state of affairs as the
perfect frankness with which it is admitted and carried on that astounds
the Anglo-Saxon stranger in Brazil. Even the French have never attained
the openness and lack of hypocrisy in the sex relationship which has
been reached by the Brazilian. Not merely does unattached youth sow its
wild oats with perfect indifference to public knowledge; heads of old
and respected families cultivate the same crop with intensive,
experienced care, quite as openly. The Brazilian who would be ready to
challenge to a duel the stranger who spoke to one of the women of his
family often brings them to social events, to the races, to a patriotic
celebration, and, after installing them in a place of vantage, goes to
sit with his overdressed French mistress, as like as not within plain
sight of his family, apparently without incurring any censure or even
protest from his wife and children and certainly none from society.
The means of acquiring a mistress of proper antecedents are varied. The
wealthy and traveled Brazilian brings her home with him from Paris, or
entrusts the commission to his friends. There is no difficulty whatever
about it, no inquisitive federal authorities, no inquiring protective
societies, “not even duty to pay, though that is our chief import,” as a
cynical editor put it. If neither of these means are available, and the
postal service is incapable of bringing him a prize, the seeker after
companionship may advertise in the public prints. Even the staid old
_Jornal do Commercio_, modeled on and in many ways resembling the
_London Times_, does not hesitate to run dozens of such “want ads” every
day of the year:
A WELL-CONDUCTED GENTLEMAN
Educated and serious, but with few
social relations in the city, wishes
to meet a pretty and like-minded
girl, in order to protect her
secretly. Letters to this newspaper
under the name “Xip.”
PROTECTION
A serious youth, married,
independent, in the flower of his
years, without children, wishes to
make an arrangement with a girl or
widow of good appearance who will
accept a monthly pe
ADVANTAGEOUS OPPORTUNITY
A distinguished youth who is not
ugly, who dresses well and has a
permanent income, wishes to meet a
pretty girl of poor family who is in
need of protection, demanding merely
that she be not more than twenty
years old, that she be white, or at
least light-gray (_parda_), in
color, elegant, of good education,
and _sympathica_. He guarantees a
good standard of living, and it
might be that in the future he would
even marry her, a thing which he
cannot do now because the laws of
the country forbid it. It will be
better to send photographs. Letters
to João da Silveira at Poste
Restante.
Nearly all advertisers emphasize their seriousness and demand it in
return, and the word “protection” appears in almost every notice. Nor is
the weaker sex backward in appealing for protectors:
PROTECTION
A girl of fine manners and
bringing-up, aged 18, elegant,
serious, and well educated, will
accept the protection of a
_cavalheiro_ of the same qualities,
with wealth.
GIRL OF DISTINGUISHED APPEARANCE
needs the urgent assistance of a
gentleman of position, distinction,
and good resources, who will furnish
a house for her and give her a
monthly pension of 500$000. Letters
to “Velda” in care of this
newspaper.
Naturally those of less individual lack of morals do not overlook the
opportunity of bringing themselves to notice in these columns, often
expressing themselves in French rather than Portuguese, not for the sake
of secrecy but because those who read French are more apt to belong to
the wealthier and better-conducted class to which the imported
aristocrats of the easy life appeal:
JEUNE PARISIENNE
arrivant d’Europe, chez Madame
Margot, Rua D. José de Barros, n.
31.
MLLES. AIDA and CARMEN
advise their friends and comrades
that they have removed from 97
Ypiranga street to 42 Maio, where
they have established themselves.
Telephone 4,406.
YOUNG FRENCH GIRL
18 years, fresh and gay, arriving
from Reims, wishes to make the
acquaintance of several gentlemen
curious to talk over news of the war
and Prussian behaviour. Letters to
Mlle. H—— B—— in care of this
newspaper.
In addition to all these more or less individual appeals, there is, of
course, a plethora of “_mulheres da vida_”—“women of the life,” as they
are called in Brazil, “who,” complains a lone pulchritudinous editorial
voice, “are gradually invading all the arteries of the city.” This class
has almost completely usurped the first half mile or more of dwellings
along the Beira Mar, facing the bay and one of the most gorgeous views
in the western hemisphere; yet the citizens of Rio think no more of
protesting against this invasion than of striving to hinder the usurpers
from drumming up trade from dusk until daylight by repeated trips along
the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” I am not of those who
believe implicitly in our American custom of playing ostrich and
concealing our heads in the sand of Mrs. Grundy’s garden, but there is
such a thing as overdoing frankness, of making temptation too
accessible, of chloroforming public opinion out of its legitimate
consciousness; and the ways of Rio and the average Brazilian city do not
indicate that perfect candor is any improvement over our own secretive
and hypocritical treatment of the same subject.
There are other and more amusing things to be found among the “want ads”
of Rio newspapers. Beggars frequently run appeals for assistance:
POOR BLIND WOMAN
Francisca de Barros of Ceará, blind
in both eyes, crippled in one hand,
ill, and without resources, begs an
alms of all good charitable souls,
whom the good God will recompense.
It may be sent in care of this
paper.
BY THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST!
A lady who is ill and unable to
work, with a medical certificate to
prove it, a tubercular daughter, and
without resources to sustain
herself, suffering from the greatest
necessities, comes to beg of
charitable persons, by the Sacred
Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, an alms for her sustenance,
which God will recompense to all.
Rua Senhor de Mattosinhos 43.
If all such beggars were actually ailing or incapacitated, it would be
less surprising to find respectable newspapers running their
advertisements. But it has often been amply demonstrated that many of
them are the most brazen frauds. The editors of the same sheets which
run these alms-seeking petitions admit editorially that “Mendicants of
the aristocratic variety, who live well, eat well, and except at work
dress well, may be found in any street of the city going from door to
door, imperiously clapping their hands to call the attention of the
residents.” At a fixed stop of all “Botanical Garden” cars a young woman
of slight African taint and rumpled garments, with several children
quite evidently borrowed for the occasion and frequently changed,
canvassed every car, always with profitable results; yet at her home in
the outskirts of Ipanema she dressed and lived like an heiress. There
are deserving cases, or at least unfortunate ones, among Rio’s indigent
army, but the church and Iberian custom have trained the _Cariocas_ to
accept begging as natural, inevitable, and in no way reprehensible, and
the medieval conception of charity, that the bestowing of largess on
able-bodied loafers is to lay up favor in heaven, causes the giver to
lose little thought on the worthiness of the case so long as the
heavenly bookkeepers duly record his action.
The announcements of “Spiritualist Somnambulists,” who can “diagnose the
future in time to permit applicants to change theirs before it is too
late,” are legion. One man ran permanently this long-winded assertion:
CURE BY GOD
The undersigned offers to cure
anyone of any ailment, cases that
are despaired of preferred, by the
laying on of hands, from eight in
the morning to eight at night, by a
special power given him by the
Almighty, and by prayer to the
invisible divine beings, the only
requirement being that those who
present themselves shall not be
under the care of nor taking any
medicine prescribed by, a physician,
and that they have faith in the
brilliant future of the divinely
gifted undersigned.
Apparently he had no connection with the disciples of a similar panacea
in our own country.
The more customary “want ads” of our own land, of persons seeking or
sought for work, are given a curious twist in Brazil for lack of the
succinct word “wanted,” which is replaced by _aluga_, really meaning
“rents.” Thus: “Aluga-se uma menina—there rents itself a girl to do
housework.”
[Illustration: A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio
Branco]
[Illustration: A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive
noise-producer]
[Illustration: The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the
Brazilian capital]
Not the least curious of the contents of Rio newspapers are the illicit
gambling advertisements. The state and federal lotteries are legal and
may advertise as freely as the _cambistas_ who sell the tickets on the
streets may howl day and night hideous with spurious promises of easy
fortune, but these official games reduce competition as much as possible
by legal enactments. Some twenty years ago the director of the Rio Zoo
began putting up daily on the gate a picture of one of the animals
inside, in order to attract visitors to the establishment. A bright
individual recognized this as a brilliant opportunity to start a new
gambling scheme. He took the director into his confidence, gradually
drew crowds to the gate, and the illicit lottery that resulted
flourishes to this day. It is called “O Bicho,” a word meaning literally
“worm,” but which in Brazilian slang applies to all animals, reptiles,
birds, and even vermin. Twenty-five different “bichos” are used in the
underground lottery of Rio, and every day the newspapers carry the
notice: “O Bicho—For to-morrow ...,” followed merely by tiny pictures
of, perhaps, a snake, a rabbit, and a bear. The game is against the law,
yet even the chief of police plays it, and newspapers cannot be enjoined
from publishing the announcements, because no jury has ever been
officially convinced that they are not merely enigmas for amusing
children.
Two points of superiority Brazilian newspapers have over our own—they
are not besmeared with the alleged “funny pages” of paint-pot
cartoonists, nor do they “feature” divorce cases or any other form of
marital misdemeanor, possibly because domestic infidelity is too
commonplace to be “news.” On the other hand, they pander to that
ultra-morbid streak in the Brazilian temperament which African blood
seems to give it. Large front-page photographs of the victims of suicide
or revolting crimes are the joy of _Carioca_ editors and readers, the
“action of the crime” being posed for in all its gruesome details by
models if pictures of the real characters are not available.
Speaking of crimes, there is a good police system in Rio, with several
excellent departments and a detective bureau that makes use of the
latest European science in the detection and capture of criminals. The
prevalence of warnings against “batadores de carteiras,” or pickpockets,
is a thermometer of the criminal element. This class is so numerous as
to have a thieves’ slang of its own, called “caló” by those who use it,
or, in the pamphlet vocabulary published by the police department,
“_Giria dos Gatunos Cariocas_.” Many of the expressions in this criminal
dialect of Rio would be Greek even to the man whose native tongue is
Portuguese, though a few of them are localisms in more general use. Not
a few of the words in the pamphlet grew familiar to my ear before I left
Brazil. I learned that “Noah’s Ark” is a pawnshop; to “perform an
autopsy” is to go through the pockets of a person fallen in the street;
“to strike thirty-one” is to die; a “bond” (in the legitimate language a
street-car) is a group of persons; to travel “by Italian bond” is to go
on foot; a policeman is a “button” or a “cloud”; a mounted policeman is
“a four-footed cardinal,” and “convent” means the Penitentiary. To “give
charity” is to kill a person while robbing him; to “disinfect the zone”
is to disappear from a given haunt; a patrol-wagon is either a “merry
widow” or a “chicken coop”; a “nose” is a person (“He came with three
noses”), the real nose being a “smoke-box.” A “soft” is a mattress; a
lawyer, a “talking-machine”; “synagogue” stands for head, and “Big Papa”
means the President of Brazil. Naturally money has many pseudonyms among
the class that is always seeking to lay illegal hands upon it, among
them “wind,” “light,” and “arame” (literally, brass or wire). The
expression “falta arame” (brass is lacking) is widespread. A ragged
youth frequently sidles up to the passer-by, rubbing his stomach and
asserting, “Falta arame pa’ matar o bicho” (literally, “money is lacking
to kill the worm”); what he really means to say is that he needs money
to stop the gnawings of hunger.
It is a common human trait for those somewhat loose in their morals to
be doubly stern in outward manners. The Brazilian, even of the more
haughty class, is inclined to be lax at home, though in public outward
appearance is everything to him. One showy suit of clothes for street
and social wear seems to leave the average _Carioca_ willing to spend
the rest of his life in his underclothes. It is no unusual experience
when calling upon a man to be asked on some pretext to wait until he has
put on his outer garments; while among the women the wrapper habit
extends from the highest to the lowest ranks of society. The tropical
heat partly accounts for this sartorial laxity, but in many ways it
typifies the national habit of mind. At home the Brazilian, particularly
of the fair sex, can sit for hours in that utterly blank-minded idleness
of the Oriental; only when they come out to stroll the Avenida or the
Ouvidor late in the afternoon do most of the women put on real clothes
and dress their hair. Among the humbler class, the negroes and poor
whites of the _morros_ and the narrow valleys between them, or of the
one-story tenement houses known as _cortiços_, there is but slight sense
of privacy and much of the family dishabillé and domestic activities are
freely exhibited to the public gaze.
Outside his home circle, however, the Brazilian is more than exacting in
such matters. In public a man must not only be fully dressed, but is
somewhat looked down upon if he indulges in any of those lighter garbs
of the “Palm Beach” variety that seem so in keeping with the Brazilian
climate. Especially if he is a politician, a business man, a member of
high society, or has a desire to attain to any of these categories, must
he wear a heavy dark suit and under no circumstances leave off his
waistcoat. To be without a coat is a criminal offense in many cities; in
the smallest village that has any personal pride, even among many people
living in the wilderness of the _sertão_, it is atrociously bad form.
The man riding with a negro functionary in the far interior of the
country must cling to his coat if he would not make his companion an
enemy for life. One of our recent presidents still has a low rating in
certain parts of interior Brazil because he entered a mud village of
unwashed, illiterate, largely illegitimate mulattoes in his
shirt-sleeves. When several of his party landed in Bahia they were met
by a courteous policeman and told either to go back to the ship and get
their coats or buy new ones in the shops. Yet in that very city hundreds
of men habitually wear no shirt or other garment under an often
wide-open coat. More remarkable still, while a man in his shirt-sleeves
is denied admittance to some of the most sorry establishments, it is
entirely comme il faut for him to come down to the early morning meal in
the best hotels in his pajamas. The negro captain of a little steamer
far up in Matto Grosso sent word to an American prospector of my
acquaintance, who appeared on deck in the latest model of soft shirt,
with belt and cravat, that he must not leave his cabin without his coat,
yet the majority of the native passengers were lounging about in
carelessly buttoned pajamas and kimonos, sockless slippers, the women
with their hair down their backs. During my first days in the country a
Brazilian aviator made the first non-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio,
breaking all South American records for speed and distance. The
newspapers shouted with glee at this splendid feat by a “son of the
country,” yet one and all commented in caustic editorials on his
shocking bad taste in leaving his coat behind and landing at Rio in his
shirt sleeves. The street-cars of Rio and every other city of size have
at least two classes. The fares are not greatly different, but unless a
man is wearing coat, collar, necktie, real shoes—not _tamancos_, or any
other form of sandal—_and socks_, he must ride second-class. Nor may he
carry with him in the higher form of public conveyance anything larger
than a portfolio.
Rio gives the impression of being overcrowded. With emancipation the
ex-slaves flocked into town in quest of an easier livelihood than that
on the plantations, and immigration streams clog here. The swarms of
beggars, criminals, prostitutes, hawkers, adult newsboys, two drivers
for each automobile, the crowds frequently seen struggling for jobs, to
say nothing of the plethora of government functionaries, suggest an
oversupply of human beings. More than once in strolling along the
wharves I came upon a hundred men fighting for work where twenty were
needed to coal or stevedore a ship, often standing up to their knees in
sea-water along the Caes Pharoux battling for a seat in the tender
waiting to carry the score to their labors. Nor were they “bums” either,
but muscular, honest workmen, nearly all of the Caucasian race; while
just across the way indolent mulatto government employees lolled in the
shade of the customhouse as if they had settled down for life and need
never again exert themselves. A “pull” with the foreman who chooses the
workmen for a given job is usually essential to being taken on, and he
naturally expects his “rake-off.” One day a riot broke out among these
wharf laborers; two “fiscals” of the stevedores’ union were killed by
members who claimed they had been discriminated against; and the
newspapers treated the matter as if it were a frequent occurrence.
Not the least picturesque of the many strange types of Rio are her
street vendors, who pass all day long in almost constant procession. The
Brazilian woman is not fond of shopping, or at least of going to market.
She has the Moorish custom of keeping to the house; she feels most
comfortable in négligé, and public appearance requires elaborate full
dress; nor does the blazing sunshine invite to unnecessary exertion.
This tendency to stay home, and the excess of men over jobs, has given
rise to innumerable street-hawkers, who go from door to door, selling
both the necessities and the luxuries of life. In the early morning,
often before sunrise in the winter months of July or August, one is
often awakened by a cry of “_Verdura! Verdureiro!_” and looks out to see
the “vegetable-man” jogging along under a load of green-stuff that would
break an ordinary man’s back. Then barely has one dropped off again
before there comes a bellow of “_Vassoura! Vassoureiro!
’asooooreeeeiro!_” from the brush-and-broom man, who marches by all but
lost under an arsenal of potential cleanliness, with a side-line of
baskets and woven baby-chairs to complete his concealment. Meanwhile
from down the street comes the increasing wail of “_’llinha! Gallinha
Gorda!_ (Chicken! Fat Chicken!),” and past the iron grilled window
shuffles a barefoot man with two large baskets at the ends of a pole
over his shoulder, or on the back of a horse or mule, offering
housewives their day’s roast or broiler. In Rio people always buy their
chickens on the hoof and avoid the risks of cold storage. Then comes the
“_Peixe! Camarão!_” man, whom we might call the fish-and-shrimp seller,
pausing here and there to cut up a fish on one of the round board covers
of his two flat baskets. He disappears earlier in the day than the
others, however, for seafood exposed after nine or ten in the morning to
the unshaded heat of Rio is likely to make a greater appeal to the
purchaser’s olfactory than to his optic nerves.
Not all hawkers cry their wares. Some have, instead, their own special
noise-makers. The cake-and-sweetmeat man, with his large glass-sided
showcase on top of his head, strides along, blowing a whistle that looks
like half a dozen cartridge shells of varying size stuck together, or
like the conventional Pan’s Pipes, and the shrilly musical sound these
emit causes every child within hearing to canvass its pockets, parents,
or friends for a _tostão_. When a customer appears the cake-man squats
from under his load, depositing it on the pair of crossed sicks in the
shape of a saw-horse that he carries under one arm, and the bargaining
begins. The tin-man goes by, carrying a great stack of pots and pans and
calling attention to his existence by shaking a frying-pan fitted with a
clapper. The scissors-grinder stops every few yards to bring every nerve
to the top of the teeth by running an iron hoop over his emery-wheel, in
the hope of attracting trade. The man who sells plants and flowers comes
along, incessantly and regularly beating with a light stick the side of
the blooming box on his head. The seller of _azucarillas_, the ephemeral
sweets of Spain, is as familiar a figure as in the Iberian peninsula;
the “ice cream” merchant marches about with what looks like an oxygen or
gas cylinder on his back, playing a steel triangle to call attention to
his little gambling wheel, guaranteed to teach children to gamble early
in life by taking a chance on his effervescent delicacies. A few vendors
have a limited district, with grouped customers, especially the
bread-man who, with his great basket on his head and the stool to hold
it under one arm, has only to station himself in the _pateo_, or
courtyard, of a _cortiço_ to be surrounded by a clamoring throng,
children snatching the long loaves faster than their parents can buy
them and rushing excitedly into their one- or two-room homes with the
bread hugged tightly against their soiled chests. But the majority tramp
all day long, some treading the hot cobbles in bare feet, some wearing
the noiseless _alpargatas_ of Spain and Portugal, many scraping along
the cement pavements in wooden _tamancos_, invading every nook and
corner of the city and punctuating the whole day long with their cries
and signals. With rare exceptions they are Portuguese or Spanish—it
would be beneath the dignity of a native Brazilian to carry things about
in the hot sunshine; but the clothing trade is almost entirely in the
hands of “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrian, who peddles his
wares in every corner of the great republic in which the human race
sprouts. In Rio this perambulating clothing-shop announces himself by
slapping together two lath-like sticks, making a noise similar to, yet
entirely distinct from, that of the plant-and-flowers man. From daylight
until dark he plods, to wander back to his noisome little den when night
settles down without a slap left in his arm. During his first year or
two he carries his goods on his back, and looks at a distance like a
walking department store. But by the second year he has usually scrimped
enough to buy an elaborately decorated chest of drawers and to hire a
youthful or newly-arrived fellow-countryman to carry it, while he
wanders along with nothing to do but slap his sticks together and engage
in the long-winded bargaining which is unavoidable in any financial
dealing with the Brazilian housewives peeping out through their window
gratings. But the “Turk” is a more clever bargainer than the best of
them, and within three or four years he is almost certain to have
advanced to the ownership of a little pushcart and by the end of five
years it is a strange mishap if he has not set up a shop, become a local
nabob, and driven native competitors entirely out of his district.
This does not by any means exhaust the list of vendors who add their
noises to the general hubbub of Rio. No one who has spent a week there
could forget the _cambistas_, the lottery-ticket sellers of all ages and
both sexes who invade the inmost privacy with their raucous howls, or
the never-ending cries of newsboys, some of whom spread their wares on
the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Central, while others race in and
out of the narrow streets on either side of it. Nor should one overlook,
even if it were possible, the creaking of enormous carts, their two
wheels twelve feet or more in diameter, with which an immense log or a
granite boulder is transported through the streets to the accompaniment
of hoarse-voiced cursing of the mule-driver in charge.
If one grows weary of wandering Rio’s sun-bathed and colorful avenues
and _ruas_, there are indoor places worth seeing. The National Library,
for instance, is a magnificent building, at least in its material and
inanimate aspects. The human element is somewhat less perfect. The
president himself could not take a book out of the library; everyone
knows he would be sure to keep it or hock it. Being scribbled by hand,
the card catalogue is by no means easily legible; it is set so near the
floor that the reader of American height all but breaks his back in
reaching it, and there are so many authors of the same name that to hunt
up a given one is a serious task. Then there is a splendid Brazilian
system, evidently imported from Portugal or some still less respectable
region, under which directories, biographies, and the like are always
arranged in alphabetical order according to the _first_ name.
Let us suppose that the only Brazilian opera of any importance, “O
Guaraní,” is soon to be given in the Municipal Theater, and that you
wish to know something about the man who wrote it. The announcement
mentions that his name is Gomes. You enter the sumptuous hall of the
library, hat in hand, wait for the negro attendant and his white bosom
companion to stop gossiping and give you a hat check, then you climb to
the next floor and, doubled up like a jackknife, claw through the
catalogue until you get the serial number of a biographical dictionary
in many volumes, containing the life story of the “Most Illustrious
Brazilians”—of whom there seem to be millions. Having filled out a
“bulletin” explaining which book you wish to consult, giving author,
title, the date, the “number of the set,” the “indication of the
catalogue,” your own name, address, and other detailed personal
information back to the fourth generation, you enter the sumptuous
reading-room. Or, more exactly, you wait patiently at the door thereof
until you are handed a _senha_, a slip of paper which gives you the
right to enter and—if you can still produce it—to exit. That in hand,
you choose a seat and write the number of it on the “bulletin,” hand
this to the gossiping tar-brushed attendant, and go and sit down. The
attendant finishes his gossip, looks at the slip, and carefully puts it
under a book on his desk. By and by he ends another gossip, picks up the
book, is astonished to find a slip under it, reads it carefully, and
puts it under another book on another part of the desk. Meanwhile you
cannot go to look up the books you might want to read at some future
date, because you cannot leave the reading-room without giving up your
senha with the attendant’s “o.k.” on it. You cannot bring along a book
of your own to read meantime, because any Brazilian knows that you would
bring some worthless pamphlet and manage to exchange it for a valuable
library volume. There is nothing to do but sleep, or study the
scattering of fellow-sufferers in the reading-room, where you are sure
to be struck by the absence of women. An old maid did enter the library
one day while I was there, but she was stared at so steadily that
neither she nor the men in the room did any reading.
Finally, if this happens to be your lucky day, it may occur to the
attendant to put your book-slip into the automatic tube at his elbow and
send it off to the stacks. When the employees at that end of the tube
get through discussing politics or the lottery and send the book back by
automatic carrier, along with the “bulletin” signed by the man who
“executed the request,” a negro attendant wanders over to your seat with
it. Then you quickly discover that though the huge volume is devoted to
everything from “Gl” to “Gy” there is not a single Gomes in it. This
rather surprises you, since Gomes is as widespread in Brazil as Smith in
the United States or Cohen in New York, and at least one of that name
must have been illustrious at least in the Brazilian sense. But by this
time it is four-thirty, and the library takes a recess at five—that is,
everyone is ejected and the doors locked by that hour—so you give it up.
Next day you discover quite by accident, your eyes having fallen upon a
frieze at the “Theatro Phenix,” that the musician’s name was _Carlos_
Gomes. As soon as the library opens—at ten in theory and about ten-forty
in fact—you hasten back and go through the same tape-wound misery again
to get the fourth volume of illustrious Brazilians, and wallow for hours
through pages upon pages of “Carlos” without finding a single one of
them answering to the name of Gomes. Days afterward, when the opera has
come and gone, a _Carioca_ acquaintance casually remarks that the man
who wrote it was _Antonio_ Carlos Gomes, but that he never used the
first name! Back to the library to flounder once more in the ubiquitous
red tape, and late that evening you grasp the “A” volume of illustrious
Brazilians and finally at nine-thirty—Eureka! “Antonio Carlos Gomes,
Paulista, musician, born in Campinas, and ...” and just then you are
“put into the eye of the street,” for the library closes at ten and no
Brazilian official is so absurd as to let the closing hour catch him
still in the act of closing. Wandering homeward or out along the Avenida
you muse on how convenient it would be if strangers in our Congressional
Library had to look up the 28th president of the United States under the
name “Thomas.”
Though at least two-thirds of the people of Brazil do not read or
write—more than half because they cannot and the rest because they have
no occasion or no desire to do so—Brazilians of the small “upper” class
are more cultured in the narrow, bookish sense of the word than the
average American of similar rating. “Everyone” knows everyone else in
this restricted little circle in Rio, and they retain many of the
old-fashioned opinions and manners of the days when the capital was
called “the court” and was overrun by the locust swarm of courtiers from
the old world. Embracing is still the knightly form of greeting between
males in this higher _Fluminense_ society, where it is the custom for a
man to kiss a lady’s hand—or glove—upon being presented, and in which
young men often give their fathers similar marks of recognition in
returning from or departing on a journey of any length. Many of this
caste are still monarchists, at least at heart, though they usually find
it to their advantage outwardly to acquiesce in, or even to show
enthusiasm for, the new form of government.
I attended several “social functions” in Rio—always from a discreet
distance, “_a mocidade_,” which is the same foppish muster of youthful
“intellectuals” that is known as “_la juventud_” in Spanish-America or
“la jeunesse dorée” in France, was trying to establish a “Little
Theater” for the exclusive use of the élite, “with a view to
rehabilitating our histrionic art, so debilitated to-day.” Now and then
they perpetrated amateur plays which fortunately were not exposed to the
scorn of the general public. One afternoon they arranged a “literary
program” for the purpose of raising a monument to Arthur Azevedo,
Brazilian dramatist and writer of clever but salacious short stories. It
began at four in the handsome new “Theatro Phenix,” usually sacred to
the “movies,” and actually got started shortly before five. Being
primarily a social event, there were only four of us up in the gallery.
On the stage below, two young men in ultra-correct afternoon dress,
creased to the minute, displayed themselves to a select female audience
in recitations from Arthur’s stories (edited) and plays, with
extravagant and unnatural gestures. A self-confident lady who was just
recovering from being young, moaned through half a mile of something in
French—what this had to do with the glory of Arthur I did not catch,
high up under the eaves, unless it was meant to show how well the élite
of Rio have copied Parisian manners—and finally there was given a
one-act play by the same monumental author, which might have been very
funny had the acoustics of the house permitted us gallery slaves to
catch more than the reflected mirth of the audience. Through it all a
dozen of “our greatest literary geniuses” pranced about the stage before
the admiring audience on one excuse or another, while two photographers
toiled assiduously taking flashlights from all possible angles of the
correctly creased afternoon trousers.
Still another day found me at a soirée musicale in the old “Theatro
Lyrico,” back of its newer and more aristocratic municipal successor.
This rather breathless old barn was the principal theater of Brazil
under the monarchy, and still retains unchanged the imperial loge, a
whole furnished apartment in Louis Philippe style. There was only a
slight negro strain in the audience, but the orchestra of fifty pieces
ran the whole gamut of human complexions. The recital by a pianist still
in her teens easily made up for all the tedium I had undergone in
attending other “social functions” in the Brazilian capital. As
Senhorita Guiomar Novaes has since won high praise in our own land and
in Europe, I am pleased to find in my notes on that day’s performance
the prophecy, “Here at least is one Brazilian who will prove of world
caliber.”
One of the points that distinguish Brazil from Spanish-America is its
divergencies of religion. Here, too, the church got in on the ground
floor. As early as 1590 the Benedictine monks founded a monastery on the
summit of the Morro São Bento; soon afterward the Capucines established
themselves on top of the Morro do Castello, and in general the churchmen
showed great predilection for the high places of Rio, perhaps to get
that much farther away from the wicked world. For centuries Rome ruled
Brazil with her customary profitable sternness. Scarcely two centuries
ago Protestants attempting to spread their propaganda in the country
were roughly treated, and priests publicly burned in the _praças_ of
Bahia and other cities the Bibles and tracts offered by American and
other colporteurs. To this day and in the cathedral of Rio itself one
may find evidences of medieval fanaticism—women of the poorer class
making the circuit of the church on their knees, or kissing everything
in sight, including floor, walls, and all the wounds of a life-size
plaster-of-Paris crucifix under a thin shroud. A few of the hilltops,
too, are still sacred to the cloistered life, but the church has lost
much of its monopoly and is much less militant and omnipresent than on
the West Coast. It is the custom of Brazilian men, even in street-cars
or trains going full speed, to raise their hats, often in unison, when
they pass a funeral or a cemetery; but the same reverence in passing a
church door is by no means so general, and is usually confined to the
part-negro portion of the population. Indeed, it is almost unusual to
meet a priest, monk, or nun in the streets of Rio, and politically the
church is almost an outcast.
Yet the capital pulsates with many religions. The transplanted faiths
of the many races that make up the modern _Carioca_ are so numerous
that, if we may believe a native writer, “every street has a different
temple and every man a different belief.” There are several sects of
African fetish worshippers, Methodists, Maronites, Baptists,
Physiolatras, Presbyterians, Satanists or worshippers of the devil,
Congregationalists, “Drinkers of Blood,” “Brothers,” Adventists, Jews,
followers of the “black mass,” Swedenborg disciples of the New
Jerusalem, exorcists, literary pagans, _sacerdotistas_ of the future,
descendants of the Queen of Sheba, worshipers of the sea, and
defenders of many other exotic dogmas, not to mention a large building
back of the Avenida Central occupied by the “A.C.M.” (_Associação
Christão de Moços_), in other words, the Y.M.C.A. As far away as the
Uruguayan border I had heard an unfrocked priest lecture on one of the
newer faiths of Brazil and was astonished to hear the loud and general
applause whenever he made a thrust at the fanaticism or immorality of
South American priesthood. Up in the Andes he would have proceeded
along that tack in public for about two minutes before having a
pressing engagement with the undertaker. In Santa Maria my
astonishment was as great when I passed an imposing Protestant stone
church on one of the principal streets and heard the minister—speaking
his Portuguese with a thick German accent—openly preaching his
particular doctrine to a large Brazilian congregation. Freedom of
worship reigned indeed; in that morning’s newspaper there was a
complaint from a town not far away that it could get no mail from
Friday until Monday, because its postmaster was an “_Adventista do 7º
Dia_!”
The cult of the sea is found chiefly among the colonies of fishermen
scattered about Guanabara Bay. Some of these will under no circumstances
leave the sea or its beaches. Their children swim at two and go fishing
with the adults at ten. The moon enters considerably into their
fanaticism, and their veneration for and fear of the “Mother of Water”
is inferior only to their dread of the police, before whom, or in the
presence of non-conformists, they pretend to be strict Catholics.
One-fifth of all the spiritualist propaganda in the world is published
in Brazil, according to a native who made an investigation of the
question. This superstition is so widespread that men high in government
and business circles have been known to refuse to take a street car
which the rabble has left empty because “it is full of bad spirits.”
Synagogues are numerous in Rio, for there is a large Jewish colony,
running through all the gamut of society as well as of commerce, and
widely varying in orthodoxy and religious rites. There are rich Jews in
business along the Avenida who spend their winters “playing the markets”
and their summers up in Petropolis. In the less showy streets live
swarms of poor Armenian, Moroccan, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, French,
English, German, Arabian, and even African Jews, all engaged in their
customary occupation of buying and selling something or other. About the
Praça Tiradentes and in its radiating _ruas_ seethe Jewish women of the
streets and their male companions and exploiters, the _caftenes_, from
all the ghettoes of Europe.
There are said to be more than eighty thousand Syrians in Brazil, of
whom by no means all wander through the streets slapping together a pair
of sticks. Down about the Rua da Alfandega and the lower point of the
city “Turks” own important business houses; in the colony are clever
craftsmen and even a few doctors, politicians, and journalists. More
than half the Brazilian Syrians are Maronite Christians from the
Lebanon; the rest are orthodox Mohammedans of somewhat lower social
strata, who earn their primitive livelihood as _carregadores_, carriers
of mankind’s material burdens, as shop-servants, and as petty peddlers.
Though many of these “Turks” find the difference in language a great
barrier to their native loquacity as bargainers, their qualities are
near enough those of the Brazilians to cause them to fit quickly into
their environment.
Mohammedanism is not confined to the Syrians in the religious medley
that characterizes the capital of Brazil. Thousands of former slaves are
more or less followers of the Prophet of Medina, though barely aware of
it themselves. The negroes shipped out to Brazil in the olden days were
from many little nations scattered through the far interior of Africa;
hence their religions were as varied as their tongues. But just as the
general language of that continent, the _cubá_, suffices for simple
conversation throughout Africa or among the blacks of Rio, so the negro
religions practiced in the Brazilian capital may be roughly divided into
two general classes. The _alufás_ are more or less Mohammedan, with a
background of African superstitions; the _orixás_ are a still more
primitive sect upon which the influence of the prophet was never
brought. Outwardly, of course, nearly all the blacks are good Catholics,
but their saints and gods have been crossed with those of the church
until it is a wise negro who knows an African from a Catholic deity.
Then, too, the unadulterated fetish worship imported with the slaves
still persists, and Obeah and voodoo practices sometimes give evidence
of their existence. According to a reputable native writer there are in
the everyday crowd that surges through the Avenida, medicine men,
magicians, voodoo chiefs, _feiticeiros_ who will agree to mix a love
philter or to bring misfortune upon an enemy by mumbling an incantation
over a concoction of rat tails, cat’s head, finger and toe nails, and
the innocent passer-by would never dream what absurd African rites are
taking place behind more than one commonplace façade. There are “holy
men” living in the very heart of Rio surrounded by a swarm of
servant-women with whom they live in polygamy as in the wilds of the
black continent, yet many of whom dress for public appearance quite like
their Christian fellow-countrymen, play “bicho,” and die leaving to
their heirs many contos of reis. Negro Brazilians who know French and
even English, who have been educated abroad and have in some cases
become senators, or presidents of states, “men to whom I lift my hat and
with whom I shake hands,” in the words of the native investigator, still
cling secretly to the old African superstitions. There are rich
Brazilians who send their sons to Africa to study the religions of their
forefathers, and traffic between Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco and several
West African ports is heavy.
Most conspicuous of the non-Catholic sects of Brazil, thanks less to
their numbers than to their political power and high intelligence, are
the Positivists. Auguste Comte, a Parisian mathematician who spent part
of his life in an insane asylum and the rest in penning voluminous
explanations of a “positive philosophy” which even the mathematical mind
seems to find difficulty in comprehending, suffered the customary fate
of the prophet in his own country. “Paris,” according to his Brazilian
disciples, “was not prepared for so advanced a doctrine.” In most other
countries he won only scattered followers—George Eliot and her lover
were among them—but in Brazil his doctrine not only survives but seems
likely to increase its standing before it goes the way of other ’isms.
Positivist propaganda began in Brazil during our Civil War, but was some
time in getting a footing. Finally the “Littréists” Miguel Lemos and
Teixeira Mendes became converts, the former becoming the head of the
sect in Brazil and the latter—now his successor—his chief lieutenant.
But it was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães who raised Positivism
to a political force, first teaching it more or less secretly in the
Military School and combining with it the demand for a republican form
of government until, in 1889, the sect joined with the army in
overthrowing the monarchy. The Brazilian Positivists credit themselves
with establishing the republic, separating the church from the state,
reforming the teaching and criminal codes, and many lesser
accomplishments.
Strictly speaking Positivism does not pretend to be a religion but
merely a “philosophy of life.” Yet it bears many reminders of the
Puritanical and reforming sects so numerous in our own land. Positivists
advocated the abolition of slaves; they are opposed to the lottery; they
demanded an easier form of civil marriage in the hope of cutting down
illegitimate unions—in other words, they combine religion and morals,
which are so completely divorced in the ruling church of South America.
They are popularly reputed to be opposed to the use of coffee or tobacco
and to take that “blue law” view of life into which our Puritan virus
shows frequent tendencies to degenerate, but this they claim to be mere
ridicule or counter-propaganda of their enemies.
I arranged by a “want ad” to exchange English for Portuguese lessons
with a well-educated native of Rio, who turned out to be a government
functionary and a Positivist. Possibly the most striking thing about him
was his almost Protestant moral code, contrasted with his genuinely
Brazilian tolerance in practice. He saw nothing reprehensible in
cheating the public out of more than half the time and effort which they
paid him to deliver; he asserted that he and Brazilians in general
believed their wives certain to betray them if given the opportunity,
and refused to credit my statement that the average American husband
does not consider eternal vigilance the price of his domestic honor. Yet
often in the same breath he pronounced some Positivist precept that
would fit snugly into the code of our sternest sects.
I accompanied my student-tutor one Sunday morning to the principal
weekly service at the Positivist _Apostulado_, or “Temple of Humanity”
in the Rua Benjamin Constant. It is an imposing building in the style of
a Greek temple, said to be copied from the Panthéon of Paris. On the
façade is the Positivist motto in large bronze letters:
O Amor por Principio
E a Ordem por Baze
O Progresso por Fim.
Inside, the almost luxurious edifice, “sea-green in color, as if one
were bathed in hope, and with the high ceiling essential to lofty
thoughts,” still somewhat resembles a Catholic church. Around the walls
of the nave are fourteen “chapels” containing as many busts, each
representing one of the “saints” of Positivism and an abstract idea.
They are Moses—Initial Theocracy; Homer—Ancient Poetry;
Aristotle—Ancient Philosophy; Archimedes—Science; Cæsar—Military
Civilization; St. Paul—Catholicism; Charlemagne—Feudal Civilization;
Guttenberg—Modern Invention; Dante—Modern Epic; Shakespeare—Drama;
Descartes—Modern Philosophy; Frederick the Great—Modern Politics;
Bichat—Modern Science, and lastly, Eloïse, or Feminine Sanctification.
It would be easy, of course, to quarrel with the Positivists on several
of their choices as world leaders, were they of a quarrelsome
disposition. These personages also give their names to the fourteen
months of the Positivist calendar, which begins with the French
Revolution. Among the decorations are the “flags of the five
nations”—Brazil, China, Turkey, Chile and Haiti! Only two South American
countries are represented because “these are unfortunately the only ones
in which the Positivist faith as yet counts fervid adepts.” China wins
place as the “most vast nation of the Orient;” Turkey as the “most
cultured people of the East” (!), and Haiti is admitted “in honor of the
greatest of negroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture,” whose portrait is the only
non-Caucasian face among the many about the walls. There are of men of
all ages and nations, whom the Positivists consider of world
importance,—Camões, Lavoisier, Cervantes, St. Gall, Cromwell, and many
others, the only American among them being an atrocious chromo print of
Washington. Higher still, in decorative letters and the simplified
spelling of Positivist Portuguese, are scattered the words,—Space,
Industry, Architecture, Painting, Earth, Music, Poetry, Politics,
Proletariat, Priesthood, Monotheism, Astrology, Family, Humanity,
Patriotism, Fetishism, Polytheism, Woman, Morality, Sociology, Biology,
Soil, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Logic. Above what, for want of a
better name, might be called the altar or the main chapel, runs the
inscription:
“Vergine Madre Amen te plus quam me nec me nisi propter te.”
No Catholic church was ever more crowded with images than the “Temple of
Humanity.” In fact, the more closely one looked the more did certain
forms and beliefs of Catholicism peer through the outward modern mantle
of Positivism, as if either the founder or his disciples had not been
able to divest themselves entirely of their inherited faith. The most
Catholic _beata_ in South America could scarcely have shown greater
reverence for the sacred pictures, graven images, and “relics of the
faith” with which the temple was crowded. Above the “pulpit” was a bust
of Comte on a column, its upper portion covered with green cloth
embroidered with white silk “by one of our young female proselytes.”
Portraits of Comte and his mistress, Clothilde de Vaux—both painted in
China and depicting them with almond eyes—hung in the main chapel, where
there were also paintings of each of them on the death bed. Pictures of
the Bastille, of Dante and Beatrice, of the Sistine Madonna surmounted
by a cross, “because she was an ardent Catholic,” were among the many
which a roving eye gradually discovered. Most astonishing of all was the
likeness of “Humanity,” a virgin figure with the features of Clothilde
de Vaux, dressed as a bride, with a green band at her waist and holding
in her arms a pretty boy who grasped a handful of daisies and pansies,
the Positivist flowers, and gazed up into the woman’s face, the whole
patently inspired by the Catholic madonnas which it closely resembled.
In the background were the Panthéon and Père Lachaise cemetery, where
Comte is buried.
Like all religions, the new creed already tended to harden into set
forms, the failure to carry out which was evidently a more grievous sin
than the disobeying of the general principles of the order. Their
veneration of pictures of the dead was almost medieval; the railing of
the tomb of Clothilde had been brought from Paris and as much fuss was
made over it as ever devout peasants did over the shin-bone of a saint;
“first sacraments” were administered in the temple; “the faithful” were
urged to visit the “sacred places of Positivism;” they had a substitute
for crossing oneself, “a sacred formula of our faith in which it is
customary for all believers to stand up out of respect for Our Master.”
There was even a hint of Mohammedanism, a mark in the cement floor of
the porch under the pillars indicating the direction of Paris—the
thought of Paris as a sacred city was a trifle startling—“toward which
all Positivistic Temples should have their principal axes.”
[Illustration: The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a distinctive
whistle]
[Illustration: The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil]
[Illustration: The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to
Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha]
In the basement of the temple was a printing plant from which issues a
constant stream of Positivist pamphlets, books, biographies of Benjamin
Constant, and similar forms of propaganda. Here, too, is the original
flag of republican Brazil, painted in crude colors on pasteboard by
order of Teixeira Mendes. The story of its designing is not without
interest. Having been assigned the task by the leaders of the
revolution, the present head of the Positivists of Brazil determined to
keep the general form of the existing national banner. João VI had given
the kingdom a coat-of-arms set in a golden sphere on a blue background.
Mendes changed the blue to green, basic color of the Positivist banner
and meant also to symbolize the tropical vegetation of the land, as the
yellow sphere does the gold in its soil. Then he called in an
astronomer, and taking the twenty principal stars of the southern
firmament at noon of November 15, 1889, to represent the twenty states
of Brazil, he placed nineteen below the equator-like band across the
golden sphere, and one above it to indicate that part of the country
north of the equator, or of the Amazon. The sphere was inclined on the
horizon according to the latitude of Rio, the tobacco and coffee on the
old royal coat-of-arms were removed, as “mere commercial things not fit
for a place on the national banner,” and along the equatorial band was
run a line from the Positivist motto.
The women of the congregation sat on a platform in front of the “altar”
rail, the men down in the body of the “church.” Women should love
Positivism, according to its disciples, for it dignifies, venerates, and
raises them to their due elevation. The “3rd of Guttenberg” on which the
temple was dedicated is also the “Feast of Woman” day, on which
Positivists celebrate the “transformation of the cult of the Catholic
Virgin into the cult of Humanity.” Teixeira Mendes, long the head of the
sect in Brazil, sat in the “pulpit” beneath the bust of Comte and
“preached,” if his un-sermon-like remarks uttered in a weak, thin voice
barely heard through an immense white mustache may be so called. His
diminutive form was covered by a dark robe, with a green cord about the
neck and embroidered with the Positivist flowers. The “sermon”
emphasized the Positivist conception of the “virgin mother” as combining
the two great qualities of the feminine type,—purity and tenderness.
Like many other religions, this modern creed clings to the legend of a
virgin mother. As the gathering marched out to the tune of the
“Marseillaise,” I asked my cicerone to explain the frequent recurrence
of the “virgin mother” motif in temple and sermon. He replied that it
was the Positivist belief that humanity would gradually be educated up
to the point where “woman will be able to reproduce alone, without the
necessity of ‘sin’ with man!”
CHAPTER XI
STRANDED IN RIO
I had long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South
American wanderings. Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great
interest within me; a glimpse of Brazil, with possibly a glance at
Venezuela on my way home, to complete my acquaintance with the former
Spanish colonies, seemed a fitting conclusion of a journey that had
already stretched out into almost three years. When I had “fiscalized”
the “Botanical Garden” street-car line for nearly a fortnight,
therefore, and seen the chief sights of the Brazilian capital, I began
to think of looking into the question of getting back to the United
States.
Contrary to my earlier expectations, it would not be necessary to sign
on as a sailor or stoke my way across the equator. With my unanticipated
salary of six thousand a day and by dint of long experience in
sidestepping high prices, I had succeeded in clinging to the equivalent
of a hundred dollars from my consular earnings, as a reserve fund for
this last emergency. With that munificent sum on hand, I might even
scorn the long-familiar steerage and treat myself to a second-class
passage on any of the steamers sailing frequently from Rio to New York.
Unfortunately I had not been keeping my ear to the ground. Years of
care-free wandering in those sections of the earth where life is simple
and in which man learns to depend chiefly on himself had caused me to
overlook certain characteristics of the more complicated world I was
rejoining. There even a vagabond is only to a limited degree a free
agent. The reserve fund I had unexpectedly saved from the maw of
Brazilian profiteers was in paper milreis and as one had been able for
more than a decade to turn 300$000 into twenty English gold sovereigns
at will, I had neglected to do so at once. On the bright “winter”
morning of Saturday, the first of August, I strolled out of my modest
hotel and along the Avenida Central with my habitual air of a care-free
man of unlimited leisure—almost instantly to recognize that there was
something strange in the wind. Before the offices of the _Jornal do
Commercio_ and the _Jornal do Brazil_ were gathered seething crowds,
eagerly spelling out the voluminous bulletins in their windows. I paused
to read with them. Some one, it seemed, had kicked over the balance of
power in Europe and France and Russia had decided to try to give Germany
the trouncing for which she had so long been spoiling.
The news came to me out of a tropically clear sky. I did recall having
glanced at a brief newspaper paragraph somewhere during my journey
northward from Uruguay, to the effect that some prince of Austria and
his consort had been killed at a Serbian town of which I had never
heard; but I had known other assassinations of Europeans of high degree
to blow over without a war resulting. Squabbling was always going on in
the Balkans anyway. Pessimists had it that there was going to be a long
and a real war; in common with all other wise men of the period I smiled
condescendingly at the silly notion.
Yet here were very decided rumors of war. Maps were already appearing in
the windows of newspaper offices, with scores of black and red-headed
pins on them to show the advance of the various armies. The flurry might
not amount to much, but it was high time I turned my paper milreis into
real money, bought my ticket, and got out of this temperamental country
before something serious really did happen. I strolled on and dropped
into one of the countless “exchange” booths that flourish in and about
the Avenida Central. Handing out my three hundred thousand reis I
requested the man inside to hand me back twenty gold sovereigns. He
looked at me scornfully, pointed to a small paragraph in the newspaper
under my elbow, and went on painting a sign on a piece of cardboard.
Perusing these I learned the astounding news that the milreis, which had
been rated fifteen to the English sovereign as far back as men with
average memories could recall, had dropped overnight to _twenty-three_
to the pound! In other words of the same profane nature, my hundred
dollars had dwindled in a few hours, merely on the strength of a bit of
news from squabbling Europe, to about seventy. I refused to be “done” in
that fashion. It was merely the old familiar trick of bankers who were
taking advantage of a temporary scare to rob the garden variety of
mankind of our hard-won earnings. In a day or so honesty, or at least
competition, would prevail, and my three hundred milreis would be worth
more nearly their honest value again. I re-pocketed them and decided to
wait until the exchange moderated—and two days later my seventy dollars
was worth less than sixty!
It may seem ridiculous that a man with three hundred thousand in his
pocket should worry—at least to those who do not know Brazil, her
currency, her prices, and her profiteers. But I began to feel uneasy.
Not merely was the money I had by superhuman efforts saved to carry me
home calmly melting away in my pocket without even being touched, but
before long touching became unavoidable. In less time than would have
seemed possible a third of my miserable bills had disappeared. Even if I
got away at once, I should have to go straight home without stopping at
Venezuela, and if I did not hurry I should not get home at all. I raced
to the steamship offices—only to get a new shock. Not only had the value
of my money been cut in two, and a third of it used up, but the price of
steamship tickets had suddenly and mysteriously doubled, and only
English gold was accepted. If I could have jumped upon a steamer that
day, I could still have paid for a third-class passage. But there was no
boat due for three days, and there were good chances that this would be
several days late!
The air was full of war-bred excitement. Before it was announced that
England had declared war, the British cruiser that had been lying in the
harbor for nearly a week with her fires up was out stopping and
searching all traffic along the coast. Several ships flying the German
flag were anxiously awaiting orders in the bay, little realizing that
their last voyage under that banner was over. Another German vessel
forcibly put ashore fifty Russian steerage passengers who had embarked
in Buenos Aires with all their savings, generously giving them back
one-third the money they had paid for passage to Europe. Detachments of
rifle-bearing Brazilian policemen patrolled the wharves to preserve
order between the various nationalities. The German consul general had
ordered all Germans on the reserve list in Brazil to report to the
nearest consulate prepared to sail for home. German reservists poured
into the capital from the southern states until it was only by climbing
over a score or so of them that I could reach my room, into which two of
them had been thrust. A standing client of the hotel, a business man of
some standing and education, presumed upon our slight acquaintance to
insist one evening that I walk out with him. As we stood before the
bulletin-blinded window of the _Jornal do Brazil_ with its pin-spotted
map of Europe, my companion gloated loudly over each piece of news:
“In two veeks ve are in Parees! I go mineself to-morrow morning to offer
me to der gonsul. Oh, py Gott, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral, ven only
Eng-lant stop noytral!”
Unfortunately, from the German point of view, England did not “stop
noytral,” and a few days later the German reservists began drifting back
to the _fazendas_ and _chacaras_ from which they had been called.
A twelve-day holiday was declared by the government, so that even those
who had money in the banks were as badly off as I, and as the value of
the milreis went steadily downward, prices went skyrocketing. Day after
day I invaded every steamship office in Rio, without distinction as to
race, color, or customary rascality. I took captive every ship’s captain
who ventured ashore, offering to do anything for my passage from
shoveling coal to parading the poop with his wife’s pet poodle. Nothing
doing! Even if a ship did now and then lift anchor and sneak away in the
general direction of the United States, there were crowds of would-be
passengers with vastly more influence, and far more mesmerism over the
root of evil, than I, who were quite as willing to do anything within
the pale of respectability to reach “God’s country.” I might, of course,
have cabled home for passage money. There were one or two persons in my
native land who probably had both the wealth and the confidence required
to answer properly to such an appeal. But I had long since made it a
point of honor that when I got myself in a hole I should get out again
without screaming for a rope.
Psychologists as well as mere world roustabouts will probably admit that
the more nearly penniless a man is the more ready is he to “take a
chance.” His condition cannot be worse, and it may suddenly become much
better. A vagabond evidently is subject to the same laws as more
respectable members of society. At any rate, with only a few milreis
left, I grew bold and instead of squeezing the last loaf of bread out of
them, I squandered them for lottery tickets. On the following Saturday
there was to be a “drawing extraordinary,” with the first prize nothing
less than a hundred million reis! With that amount I might even buy a
steamer for the trip home; besides, I had long wished to know how it
feels to be a multimillionaire. Even in real money and at normal
exchange a hundred million reis reached the respectable sum of $325,000,
and though Brazilian shin-plasters had dropped to half their pre-war
value, though every “piece” of ticket must pay a commission to the
vendor and must bear the ubiquitous “consumption” tax in the form of a
stamp, though the government takes five per cent. of all winnings and
loads down the lucky ticket-holder with so many other stamps, taxes, and
grafts that it requires a lawyer to dig him from under them, there would
still remain the price of the bridal suite on any steamer plying the
east coast of South America.
A crowd of mainly collarless and rather vacant-faced men and women, who
for many years had been chasing that will o’ the wisp called the winning
number by buying a “piece” of ticket whenever possible, were already
gathered in and about the frontless shop down behind the main
post-office of Rio when I reached it. No small number of them were
plainly so carried away by visions of what they were going to do with
their winnings that they had played hooky and jeopardized their real
source of income. Even I felt the subtle breath of hope, fed mainly on
ardent desire, that swept through the sour-scented throng as the
formalities began. Five little girls in spotless white, but of several
shades of color—as if the officials in charge had sought to have every
complexion of their clients represented—stood behind as many whirligigs
fitted with the figures from 0 to 9. Every twenty seconds the girls gave
these a simultaneous whirl, and when they stopped the number indicated
by the five figures visible to the audience was called out by an
official in the front row. Then another girl thrust a hand into a
globe-shaped urn and, with averted face, drew out a wooden marble on
which was engraved the conventional signs for a sum of money. That
represented the amount of the prize for the number just whirled, and,
like it, was called out and then written down three times on as many
printed slips by dozens of men and boys seated around the walls of the
room, some of them government officials, some representatives of the
various lottery agencies.
There are at least fifty prizes at each drawing, ranging all the way
from about the price of a ticket, the occasional winning of which keeps
the disgruntled clients from abandoning the game, up to the capital
prize. The deadly sameness of the process made the formality a soporific
which, combined with the tropical heat and the fetid breath of the
multitude, soon left me drowsily leaning against my compact neighbors.
Time and again some insignificant prize was announced and set down by
the scribes around the walls, until I began sleepily to wonder if the
hundred million ball had inadvertently been left out of the urn. When
the “_cem contos de reis_” was at last droned out by the wooden-voiced
announcer in the same bored, monotonous tone with which he had so often
mentioned the equivalent of a dollar, my thoughts were wool-gathering
and it was not until a flutter went through the crowd that I recognized
the significance of the announcement. I glanced at the ticket in my
hand, then at the number on the whirligigs. Protector of the Penniless!
They were the same—at least the first three numbers on them were! An
African-pated blockhead of unusual height blotted the last two of those
on the platform out of my field of vision. I shouldered him aside,
treading under foot a few immediate by-standers. The surge of pleasure
that was mounting my spine turned to angry disgust. The last two figures
were not even near enough my own to give me the “approximation” prize.
With my usual carelessness and stupidity I had bought the wrong ticket,
and the glamor of being a multimillionaire faded to the real but
familiar experience of being “dead broke” in a foreign land. My
disappointment was evidently widespread, for the tightly packed throng
began instantly to melt away like molasses from a broken jug, so that by
the time I reached the street there were hundreds of other glum-faced
individuals shuffling off in both directions. Only then did I realize
that the _cambio_ in which I had spent my last milreis was quite
fittingly named “_Sonho do Ouro_”—the “Golden Dream.”
But at least, if one must be stranded, there were few finer spots than
Rio to be stranded in. I returned to my sight-seeing duties on the
street-cars, and, by dint of outwitting the German proprietor of my
hotel that evening, managed to save enough of that day’s six thousand to
run an appeal next morning in the two principal newspapers of the
capital. In all frankness it should have been lachrymose, but I had long
since learned that a bold and boastful manner, with a facetious tinge,
is more likely to bring real results:
American Writer and Explorer,
university graduate, widely traveled
but still young, knowing fluently
Spanish, French, and German, and
understanding Portuguese and
Italian, being marooned here by the
present situation, will accept
temporarily any reasonable
employment, in Rio or the interior,
of sufficient interest to pass the
time.
With no available means of moving on, I had time for anything—except to
be bored.
That very evening I came within an ace of getting employment without
even waiting for replies to my printed appeal—or at least I came as near
it as did the suitor who would have been accepted but for the slight
matter of the answer being “no” instead of “yes.” The first Brazilian
singer ever heard in grand opera in Brazil was announced to appear at
the Municipal Theater, and with that splendid sense of propriety for
which the Latin-American is noted he had chosen, or been chosen, to make
his début before his admiring fellow-countrymen as the hero of Puccini’s
“Girl of the Golden West.” The ticket speculators were out in full force
when I scuffed my way down the mosaic-paved Avenida, but their
machinations were naturally of little interest to a man who could not
rub two coppers together. What had won my attention was rather a rumor
that a group of stage cowboys was needed, and as my worst enemy could
not have failed to admit that I came more nearly looking that part than
anyone else wandering the streets of Rio, here was my opportunity to
behold at close range the Brazilian misconception of the American wild
west and its bloodthirsty denizens; besides, the two milreis paid to
“supers” looked good to me. A veritable mob of loafers, rowdies, and
_gatunos_ surged back and forth in the narrow street behind the theater,
sweeping down upon the fist-less old “master of supers” as often as he
ventured outside the stage door. Several times he fled in dismay, but at
length, when the opera was about to begin and the marshaling of cowboys
was imperative, he ventured forth with the air of a man who is taking
his life in his hands and began letting his selections be thrust upon
him. I footballed my way through the crowd that was swinging to and fro
with his every footstep and offered my services. My wide-brimmed felt
hat alone should have won me a place. The harried functionary glanced at
me, mumbled something to the effect that I did not in the least fit the
part, and finally retreated within the stage door, followed by a motley
collection of spindle-shanked _Carioca_ street loafers who would have
made an ideal background to a melodrama set in a tar-brushed
Whitechapel.
Hardly was my last milreis gone when exchange improved and Brazilian
money came halfway back to normal. The inevitable profiteer had already
grasped his opportunity, scattered groups of _populares_ took to mobbing
the shops that had most flagrantly boosted food prices, and though even
the courts did not function, because of the twelve-day holiday, the
government was finally compelled to take advantage of the state of siege
to punish a few of the most heartless offenders and publish a list of
prices which could not be exceeded without loss of license and possible
imprisonment. But the ways of the Brazilian are devious, and no great
improvement was accomplished. The semi-military police, their rifles
loaded with ball cartridges, patrolled not only those parts of town in
which the various European nationalities might meet, but wherever
disgruntled bands of the _povo_ were likely to gather. It would probably
not have been difficult to start a revolution in Brazil during those
eventful days.
Meanwhile, not an answer did I get to my stirring call for employment,
except an offer to become a combination door-keeper and office-boy,
which I did not consider interesting enough even to pass the time. It
was after three of a blazing afternoon that I rode out in my official
capacity to Ipanema, where I had found behind a mass of rocks a little
cove in which no bathing-suit was needed. There was a marvelous private
beach, and a rock-walled dressing-room where only a stray negro wench
might see me if she chose to look, but from which I could see the tips
of the Corcovado and the “Sugar Loaf,” and, across the turquoise bay,
silhouetted at this hour against the sun side of the sky, box-shaped
Gavea, hazy blue with distance.
I had ridden halfway back to town when I looked up from reading one of
Brazil’s epics and caught sight of the back of a head that looked
familiar. The hat above it and the coat below I had certainly never seen
before, and I could make out little of the face, but that little merely
increased my conviction. By the time we had passed the tunnel I decided
to make sure and, moving up close behind the man, I pronounced a name in
a mild voice that would probably not have attracted attention if it were
not the right one. The man turned around quickly, then thrust out a
hand. As I had suspected, he was Raymond Linton, not only a
fellow-countryman but a fellow-statesman, whom I had last seen in Buenos
Aires.
A year before, Linton had acquired the Spanish-American concession for
Edison’s recently invented “Kinetophone,” or “talking moving-pictures,”
and, having played before all the uncrowned heads of Peru, Chile,
Uruguay, and the Argentine, was still operating two separate outfits of
this theatrical novelty in the last two of those countries. The
entertainment had taken so well in Spanish-America that he had purchased
the rights for Brazil also, and, having left Buenos Aires on the last
day of July, little suspecting what the world had in store for itself,
he was planning to start a third outfit in Rio de Janeiro.
“But I’m in tough luck,” said Linton, after our preliminary greetings
and immediate personal history had ended.
“How come?” I asked, rather idly, to tell the truth, for my thoughts
were still chiefly on my own predicament.
“You remember my B. A. manager?” he replied. “Splendid fellow and just
the man I needed to handle the proposition up here in Brazil as soon as
I get it started. But he is a Frenchman, and the day after I sailed he
was called home to join the army. So now I’ve got to rush back to B. A.
to keep that end going, and I have a brand new outfit, with special
films in Portuguese and a man fresh from the Edison plant, landing
to-day from the States. This man knows all the mechanical and electrical
part of the job to perfection, but he probably never heard of the
Portuguese language and couldn’t tell a Brazilian from an honest man. So
I am mighty hard up for someone to take charge up here, and I don’t know
where on earth I’ll find another fellow like the Frenchman.
“By Jove!” he went on a moment later, as the street-car swung out upon
the Beira Mar, “I wish you felt like staying down here six months or so
longer. I’d make you a proposition.”
“For instance?” I asked, merely out of idle curiosity. “I will not spend
another month in South America under any circumstances, but I may have
to in spite of myself.”
“If I could get a man who knows the South American from spats to
hair-oil as well as you should after three years down here,” went on
Linton with great earnestness, “I’d offer him a salary and a percentage,
guaranteeing that he would not get less than——” naming a considerably
larger sum than I had ever been paid as a respectable member of
society—“a month, with all his actual traveling expenses, first class,
all arrangements to be in U. S. currency, to take charge of the
Brazilian end of this business and play in every city of over fifteen
thousand population in the country—there are about fifty of them—and
cover the whole republic, coast and interior, from the Uruguayan border
clear up to where the Amazon begins to run down off the Andes. It would
mean about six months’ playing the principal towns, and after that the
man could take the thing around for another half year to the smaller
places, and by the time he got through he’d know Brazil better than
Edison knows electricity.”
“Mighty interesting proposition,” I remarked, as the street-car drew up
at its destination beside the Largo da Carioca, “and I hope you find the
man you need. I have a serious problem on my hands, too, and that is how
to get back to the U. S. A. early enough this fall to join in an
important coon hunt.”
For I did not for a moment seriously consider the offer as made to me,
or at least as acceptable. I had already been three times as long in
South America as I had expected to be when I first set out to explore
the traces of the old Inca highway between Quito and Cuzco. I was
decidedly “fed up” with “Spigs” and all their ways; too long a time
outside the United States atmosphere is not good for the mind one wishes
to keep American, just as too long a time in the tropics is injurious to
the body one would keep robust. Moreover, never having seriously tested
it, I was not at all certain I had the charlatanism indispensable to any
success in the realms of “practical business”—and there was still a
possibility that I might get aboard something or other northward bound.
Next day I took to pursuing ships and skippers with renewed energy. But
the town was swarming with stranded Americans willing and able to pay
any sum that could be mentioned in one breath for the privilege of
sleeping in a stokehole of anything bound for the United States. That
afternoon I dropped in on Linton at his hotel and entertained him with a
hypothetical question.
“Suppose,” I said in my most casual tone, “suppose such a man as you are
looking for would sign a contract for only six months, that he wanted
his salary to start at once, instead of the first of September, and that
on the day he signed he would need an advance of about five hundred
thousand—er—reis to get a proper movie-magnate silk hat and diamond
solitaire, what would be your private remarks when you reached the
bathroom?”
“If he had your experience with South Americans, for instance,” came the
prompt reply, “I’d have the contract ready within half an hour.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied. “I just wanted to know, from a
sociological point of view.”
Whereupon I set out once more and went over all the steamship offices
and captains’ favorite bar-rooms with a fine-toothed comb, only to be
more than ever convinced that my native land had lost all desire ever to
see me again. So, late that evening, having paused at the edge of the
impassable sea to shake a fist at the northern horizon, I stopped at
Linton’s hotel to sign the contract he had just drawn up. By its terms I
was to take full charge of the tour of the Kinetophone in Brazil,
playing the entire country, except the states south of São Paulo that I
had already seen, ending up on the Amazon six months later, and
receiving my first month’s salary at once—as soon as the banks opened.
Early next morning a messenger from the steamship-office I had most
often pestered brought me word that if I would report at once I could
sign on a ship sailing that evening for Pensacola, Florida; and later in
the day I was offered a chance to go to New Orleans as a deck-hand. But
then, it would have been a long walk from either of those ports to the
place I called home.
During the remaining half of August I did little but spend my first
month’s salary, chiefly among the tailors of Rio, at prices which made
the advertisements in the New York papers look enticing. Linton had
arranged his Buenos Aires business to run on without him until we could
give the customary special performance before the president of the
republic. This he hoped would be within a week, but he had reckoned
without Brazilian red tape. The “outfit” arrived the day after I signed
the contract,—eight large pieces of what looked like the baggage of a
barn-storming company, and Wayne Tuthill of Long Island and the Edison
factory. “Tut,” as it was natural he should be quickly dubbed, was a
tall, handsome, ingenuous lad of twenty-four, of that clean-cut,
clean-minded type of American youth which makes the libertine _juventud_
of South America stand out in such striking contrast. He had never
before been outside the United States—which I rated an asset—but had
been the unhesitating choice of the company when Linton wired for their
best practical electrician and operator who would accept a year’s
contract.
On the following day I bade farewell to my little inside room in the
German hotel down in the raw-coffee scented heart of Rio, and moved into
a new home with what their “want ad” in the _Jornal do Brasil_ described
as a “family of all respectability.” There were hundreds of private
families only too glad to patch out their income by taking in a “serious
cavalheiro” as a paying guest. My new quarters were on the Praia de
Botafogo, in the district out beyond the tiny _praça_ and statue of José
de Alencar. From my easy-chair I could look out across the bay at one
end of the harbor and, though a headland cut off the “Sugar Loaf,” I had
a splendid view of all the long, fantastic sky-line of Rio, now
silhouetted against the sun-lighted clouds, now standing out in the
brilliant sunshine as if barely a stone’s throw away. The room had a
southern exposure, too, which is important in Rio, especially toward the
end of August with summer coming on. True, there were a few drawbacks. I
had to take board as well as lodging, though I was by no means sure that
a glimpse into Brazilian family life would offset the heaviness of
Brazilian family food. There were good electric lights, but no carpets
or rugs, virtually unknown in Brazil, and not a suggestion either of
bookshelf or wastebasket, while the table was a tiny thing implying that
at most the occupant might have now and then to write a perfumed lover’s
note.
Though it was some time before we got our show started, or even got the
outfit ashore, we were a busy trio. First and foremost there was the
Herculean problem of getting the thing through the customs. This was no
such simple matter as going down to the ugly little green _Alfandega_
building on the water front, opening the boxes, paying our duty, and
taking them away. Things are not done in that breathless manner in
Brazil. Knowing that it costs more to get a moving-picture film into
Brazil than to buy it in Europe or the United States, we were prepared
to be held up by the mulatto footpads masquerading as a government, if
only they would have it over with at once and let us go our way with
whatever we might have left. What we needed first of all, it seemed, was
a _despachante_, a native customs broker, familiar with all the ins and
outs of the laws on import duties—and an expert in circumventing them.
But could we not attend to this matter ourselves, seeing there were
three of us in the prime of life, two speaking Spanish and one more or
less Portuguese, and with nothing else whatever to do? We could not. We
must have the services of a regular _despachante_—just why, we learned
all in due season. The broker, however, did not rob us of occupation; in
fact, we were still permitted to do almost all the work. We spent
several hours one day hunting out our boxes amid an orderless jumble of
many ship-loads of warehoused merchandise and wrestling them out into
plain sight. The rest of the afternoon we wasted in coaxing the swarm of
supercilious officials who lolled about the place to examine them. They
paid us not the slightest attention, until our _despachante_ came to
vouch for our existence. Then one of them “examined” the eight boxes by
gingerly lifting half of the wooden cover of one of them, glancing at
the unopened inner tin casing, and ordering the covers nailed down
again. This, however, was only a preliminary formality, and while our
broker prepared for the next moves in their regular, deliberate order,
we contained ourselves in such patience as we possessed.
Meanwhile we learned many interesting details about Brazilian customs
laws and those who enforce them. Portland cement, we found, pays duty on
gross weight. More than half the barrels of such a shipment had been
broken in transit, or by the wharf stevedores who landed it, and all
vestige of cement had been lost. The customs men carefully gathered the
scattered barrel-staves together, weighed them, and charged the assignee
duty on them as cement! Regular merchants in Rio have a _despachante_,
we learned, who does all the customs business of his client at a fixed
rate of twelve milreis a box, large or small. If he succeeds in avoiding
any part of the duty due, the merchant pays him half that amount as a
reward. Thus there arrives a box of twenty pairs of shoes, on which the
duty would be sixty dollars. The _despachante_ arranges with some of his
friends in the customhouse to let the box in for twenty dollars, and the
assignee pays that amount in duty and gives the broker, in addition to
his customary twelve milreis, one half of the forty dollars saved. The
Brazilians have no word for bribery; they use the expression _comer_ (to
eat). A merchant who has been forced to pay full legal duty on a bill of
goods asks his _despachante_ anxiously, referring to the strict new
customs official who passed on it, “_Elle já come?_” To which, perhaps,
comes the sad answer, “_Não, ainda não come_” (He doesn’t eat—yet). A
few weeks later the merchant sends the honest man a few bottles of
perfumery or some equally welcome present. If he sends them back, he is
not yet “ripe.” But at length word goes round, “_Já come_” (Now he
eats), and the merchants whose goods pass through his hands heave a sigh
of relief.
“When your shipment arrives,” a foreigner long engaged in business in
Rio explained, “and the duty is large, say twenty or thirty contos, you
go to the customhouse yourself and say to the _conferente_, ‘I shall be
in my office from three to four to-morrow.’ Then you go away. The
_conferente_ is the official examiner; his assistant, who opens and
closes the boxes and does the other manual labor, is called his “fiel”
(faithful one). You cannot be a successful merchant in Rio without being
on friendly terms with your _conferente_ and his “fiel.” When his work
ends, at three, he drops in to see you before he goes home, and the
matter is fixed up to the satisfaction of both parties. If you try to
fight the system you are up against it. Only half the articles that come
into Brazil are on the tariff schedule, and if a _conferente_ has it in
for you he will decide that your declaration is made out wrong, no
matter how you make it out, and will fine you for trying to flimflam the
government—and a certain percentage of all fines go to the man who
discovers the ‘irregularity.’ Then before goods leave the customhouse
they must have the government consumption-tax stamps on them, and there
is another fine chance to ‘eat.’ The man who was at the head of the
stamp-selling down there for thirty-two years was recently retired on a
pension and written up in the papers as ‘a life-long and faithful
servant of the Republic’; yet ever since I have lived here he could be
‘fixed’ at from one fourth to one half the legal price of the stamps.
The young fellow who now has his job doesn’t ‘eat’ yet, so all the
merchants are cursing him, and his fellow-officials accuse him of
_fazendo fita_—of showing off. But word is going round now that he is
beginning to ‘eat’.”
Beautiful scenery evidently does not beautify character. The dishonest
officials cannot plead the excuse of necessity, for their legal income
is high. Inspectors get three contos, _conferentes_ eight hundred to a
thousand milreis a month, which surely is generous to men who work only
from eleven to three, with much “tolerance” as to absences during that
time and at least sixty-five legal holidays a year. “Tariff
legislation,” says an outspoken Brazilian publicist, “more than any
other one thing, has been the source of the corruption that has rotted
public service, and in the growth of the sinister privileges fostered by
the ‘protective’ system there is almost sole responsibility for the
widespread perversion of ideals.”
It took a full week to get our outfit through the customs, and it would
have taken longer had nature not gifted me with an impatience capable of
developing into profanity. Both our _despachante_ and the endless
gantlet of scornful officials which our case was forced to run were firm
believers in the efficacy of “amanhã”—which is our old friend “mañana”
of Spanish-America. How many sheets there were of laboriously
hand-written documents, signed every which way by scores of insufferable
loafers in the crowded _Alfandega_, in the intervals between smoking
cigarettes, gossiping with friends, scowling with a haughty air upon
whoever dared insist on attracting their attention, I have no means of
computing. Typewriting is illegal in government business in Brazil, as
in most of Latin-America; too many old fogies who know only how to
scratch with a pen would have to be dispensed with to make way for such
an innovation, and they are the backbone of political parties. In the
end Linton had to deposit $700, which it was solemnly promised would be
returned to him when the outfit was taken out of the country.
Officially, the American dollar is worth 3$120 in Brazil. I immediately
reduced the $700 to milreis at that rate, and Linton prepared to pay it.
But, we were informed, the government accepts its own money only at
4$120 to the dollar! More figuring resulted in the discovery that we
must entrust the Brazilian government with nearly three contos.
Thirty-five per cent. of this deposit must be in gold. I began to
compute this percentage by dividing by 4$120. The broker smiled at me as
at an amusing child. When the milreis is figured _back_ into gold, he
explained, the dollar must be taken at 2$120. In other words, a
Brazilian government official can demonstrate before your very eyes that
thirty-five per cent. of seven hundred dollars is $480!
On the day after our outfit had at last been admitted to practice in
Brazil, and the _despachante’s_ seemingly exorbitant demands had been
satisfied, one of us happened to be in his office when in dropped the
bewhiskered old fossil who had “examined” our stuff. He was cheery and
gay now, all dressed up, his sour and haughty official manner wholly
gone, and he greeted everyone in the office like old and esteemed
friends. After the first embrace or two he and the _despachante_ sat
down on opposite sides of the latter’s work table, their hands met once
under it, then the fossil rose and went away with a satisfied smile
scattered among his untrimmed whiskers and a hand lingering
affectionately about one pocket.
Our next task was to hire a lawyer to get the trademark “Kinetophone”
registered in Brazil in the name of the Edison Company. This matter is
of prime importance to anyone introducing a new invention into the land
of “amanhã.” It is not that the Brazilians are so inventive that they
can readily imitate new contrivances; on the contrary, their mechanical
genius is close to zero. But if he seldom invents or initiates, the
“Brazie” is not lazy in the sense of complete indolence. He has the
gambling instinct as well as the tropical desire to get through life as
easily as possible, and laborious trickery seems to him a lesser effort
than work. Being quick to appropriate the ideas of others, he is much
given to stealing trademarks.
To tell the truth, the Argentine is worse than Brazil in this respect.
There is a regular band of rascals in Buenos Aires who do nothing but
steal and register foreign trademarks, while in Rio the traffic is at
least unorganized. The laws of both countries give the first person to
deposit a trademark in the national archives the sole right to use it.
The mark may have belonged for half a century to an American or a
European company; it suffices for some _argentino_ or Brazilian to get
it registered in his own name to prevent the legitimate owner from using
it in that country without paying the thief blackmail. One of this
gentry reads in a newspaper or a catalogue of some new foreign invention
with a catchy name, rushes to register it as his own, and then lies in
wait for the real owner. Even a trademark of the French government
tobacco monopoly was stolen by an _argentino_ and France was forced to
pay him a handsome sum to get it back. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires,
Linton had found the Kinetophone already registered. But as the native
whose eye had been attracted by the word had not understood what it
represented, he had registered it as the name of a _lechería_, or
milk-shop! Nevertheless Linton was compelled to pay him several hundred
pesos for the privilege of using the word in his advertising or even in
the theater, for the moment he put up a poster or ran a film and record
in which the word “kinetophone” appeared, he could have been arrested
and his outfit confiscated. It costs only 120$000, including lawyer’s
fees, to have a trademark registered in Brazil, yet Americans have been
blackmailed out of as much as 30,000$000 for neglecting to do so in
time.
It turned out that the Kinetophone had been overlooked by Brazilian
tricksters, but we had to wait three days to make sure of this before we
dared publicly use the name. Meanwhile we had visited incognito the
fifty cinemas then running in Rio, with a view to classifying them for
future purposes; we had offered the “A. C. M.” a benefit performance
later for the privilege of trying out our apparatus in their hall, and
had set out in trio to make our first contract.
The chief moving-picture man of Brazil, with a string of cinemas in Rio
and São Paulo and connections elsewhere, was a Spanish ex-bootblack.
Like his colleagues and rivals, he informed us that it was not customary
in Brazil to pay a fixed sum for such a novelty as we had to offer, that
he “never risked a cent,” but that he would be willing to talk to us on
a percentage basis. Then we found that the ex-bootblack had Missouri
blood in his veins—perhaps because he had once driven mules—and that he
would not believe in the drawing powers of Edison’s new invention until
he had been shown. We had no misgivings as to our ability to show him,
so we went out along the Mangue Canal, with its mirrored double row of
royal palms on either bank, and rented for a day the old open-work
wooden “Theatro Polytheama,” where we gave the doubting Thomases of the
“movie” world, and a throng of newspaper men and “influential citizens,”
a convincing private exhibition.
Next day we signed a “fifty-fifty” contract with the ex-bootblack to
play for sixty days in his establishments in Rio, São Paulo and
vicinity. By that time it was already September 7th, the first of
Brazil’s two Independence Days, and “Tut” and I had taken up our abode
on the Praia do Flamengo in the district called Larangeiras, or
“Orange-trees.” It was nearer town than my former room; moreover, while
I am duly exhilarated by the beauties of nature, no amount of scenery
will make up for a constant diet of black beans and dry rice, surrounded
on four sides by a constantly caterwauling Brazilian family dressed in
soiled underwear or grease-spotted kimonos. As a matter of fact I lost
nothing even of scenery by the change. We had a marvelous view of the
“Sugar Loaf,” of all the great bay and its islands, of Nictheroy and the
hazy outline of farther Brazil beyond. With our feet on our own railing
we could see the steamers that might be bringing us news from home come
slipping in at the harbor’s mouth, or watch a blood-red sunset on the
cloud billows across the bay. We were four doors from the President’s
palace of Cattete, and in the morning we could stroll across the Beira
Mar in our bathing-suits to dive off the president’s private wharf and
swim out to the little warship he always kept ready for the day when
motives of health should force him to leave Brazil in a hurry. Men,
women and children, with a towel over their shoulders, were familiar
morning sights all along the Beira Mar—the women, of course, chiefly of
foreign origin, for no real Brazilian lady would ever dream of
bathing—at least in semi-public. Swimming was allowed along Rio’s
magnificent driveway until nine in the morning, and some bathers were to
be seen now and then at other hours, for, as the resplendent black
policeman on our corner told us, while he watched several of them pass.
“Oh, yes, they do bathe after nine, but it is against the law.”
Finally, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, the fourteenth of
September, we gave the first public exhibition in Brazil of the
Kinetophone—and before midnight we had given eleven of them. We had
opened in the “Cinema Pathé” on the Avenida Central, in many ways the
proudest and most fashionable motion-picture house not only of that
sumptuous thoroughfare but of all Brazil; but our début was not attended
with the customary formality. For a week Linton had been cooling his
heels in the anteroom of the Cattete Palace, hoping to have the
honor—and incidentally the prestige and publicity—of giving the
president of the republic a private exhibition before disclosing the
virtues of the new invention to the general public. But those were busy
times in government circles, for, in addition to his manifold political
troubles, the president had recently acquired an eighteen-year-old wife,
so that at length we were forced to start without his blessing and the
customary send-off of important novelties in Latin-American countries.
By this time the World War was on in earnest and Brazil was loudly
complaining of “_A Crise_,” or hard times; yet when our first day at the
“Cinema Pathé” was ended, we found that the box-office had taken in
considerably more than three million—reis! Even in real money that was
better than a thousand dollars.
That very night Linton fled to Buenos Aires, leaving behind a document
making me the “Brazilian concessionary” of the Kinetophone, and the
weight of the whole enterprise fell abruptly on my shoulders. My first
duty was to get our share of the opening day’s receipts. High noon
having been agreed upon as the time to divide the previous day’s
earnings, I called at that hour upon the general manager for Rio of the
“Companhia Brazileira,” to get our half of the three million in
cash—Brazilian cash, unfortunately—and carried it to the British bank.
That was a daily formality thereafter, for while we had all due respect
for the Brazilian and his business methods, we adopted the same
viewpoint in dealing with him as the Scotchman who, asked for a
recommendation by a retiring clerk, wrote:
“This is to certify that Sandy McCabe has worked for me the past twelve
years. Regarding his honesty I can say nothing, as I never trusted him.”
The Kinetophone consists of a series of films projected from a booth
like an ordinary motion-picture film, and of a large electrically
operated phonograph, with six-minute records, set on the stage or behind
the screen and synchronized with the film by means of tiny stout black
cords running over pulleys attached to the walls or the ceiling of the
intervening room. As ours could not be thrown from the same projecting
machine as the voiceless films, the usual process was to set up our
special apparatus in the same booth with the other, if there was room,
cutting a second opening in the front of this to “shoot through;”
otherwise we required a special booth to be built for us alongside the
regular one. Our outfit consisted of fifteen films and their
corresponding phonograph records. First of all, on every program was an
explanation of the new invention and a demonstration of its power to
reproduce all kinds of sounds, a film specially made to order in
Portuguese, with the flag of Brazil, the president’s picture, and other
patriotism-stirring decorations in the background. The only other film
in the native tongue was a dialogue called the “Transformation of
Faust,” in which two Portuguese youths, who had somehow been enticed out
to the Edison factory, ranted for six minutes through a portion of
Goethe’s masterpiece. But there were extracts from five popular Italian
operas and three Spanish numbers, all of which took well with
Brazilians, and though the remainder were in English, they were musical
and comical enough to win interest irrespective of language.
The Kinetophone requires two operators, one in the booth and the other
at the phonograph. Thus I was not only manager, auditor and
“concessionary,” but obliged to run the stage end of the performance.
Fortunately we did not furnish the entire program, our part of the bill
consisting of the “Portuguese Lecture” and two other numbers, filling
one-third of the hour constituting a “section” and leaving the rest of
it to ordinary films or whatever form of entertainment the local manager
chose to supply. Every hour, therefore, from one in the afternoon to
eleven at night, seven days a week, I had to be on hand to put on the
first of our records, jump out to the edge of the audience and signal to
“Tut” in his special booth, spring back again and touch off the
phonograph at exactly the right instant, repeat this with the other two
records, thrust these back into their special trunk, lock it—and spend
the next forty minutes, other duties willing, as I saw fit. Never during
those eleven hours a day did I dare go far enough away from the theater
to get a real let-up from responsibility. The most I could do was to
snatch a lunch or stroll down to one end or the other of the Avenida, to
see the ships depart or, on windy days, to watch the sea pitching over
the sea-wall of the Beira Mar, wetting even the autobusses—and then
hurry back again for our part of the next “section.”
Besides running the films, “Tut” had to rewind them after each
performance, so that his leisure time was ten minutes less to the
“section” than mine. I soon found that he was not only a highly
efficient operator, but that he had just those qualities needed to make
a long companionship agreeable. Honest and genuine as gold coin in war
time, easy-going, optimistic, unexcitable, wholly ignorant of foreign
languages, temperaments, or customs, yet pleasant with all races and
conditions of men, he was an ideal team-mate, having large quantities of
that patience so much needed in tropical and Latin lands, and of which I
have so scanty a supply. Thanks to “Tut,” the Brazilians got better
Kinetophone performances than most Americans have heard. The novelty did
not take particularly well in the United States, though for no fault of
its inventor. The essential and all important thing with the Kinetophone
is perfect synchronization. If the character on the screen speaks or
sings exactly as he opens his mouth, the illusion is remarkable; let
there be the slightest interval between the sound and the lip movements
and the thing becomes ludicrous. When the invention was first shown in
the United States there was perfect synchronization, and a consequent
rush of orders for machines and operators. There being no supply of the
latter on hand, they had to be trained in a hurry. Many were ill
prepared for their duties, with the result that when they were hurriedly
sent out on the road they frequently gave distressing performances.
Gradually, therefore, the invention was withdrawn, with the promise to
perfect it further and make it “fool proof,” so that by the time Linton
had taken the concession for Brazil, “Tut,” the expert who had trained
others, was available and the new form of entertainment made a much
bigger “hit” in Brazil than in the land of its origin.
I had only one serious fault to find with “Tut,” one that added
materially to those of my managerial duties which had to do with keeping
on pleasant terms with the somewhat sour manager of the “Cinema Pathé.”
Less fond than I of strolling the downtown streets during our breathing
spells, “Tut” usually spent them with an American novel or magazine in
the unoccupied second-story anteroom of the theater. There the “Pathé”
had stored its extra chairs, and from them “Tut” was wont to choose a
seat, place it at the edge of the stone balustrade of the balcony, where
he could look down upon the crowd surging up and down the Avenida, and
pass his time in reading. But the chairs, as is usual in South America,
were of the frail variety, and “Tut,” a generous six feet in height and
by no means diaphanous in weight, had the customary American habit of
propping his feet on a level with his head—with the result that at more
or less regular intervals “crash!” would go a chair. On the day when the
manager, his eyes bloodshot with rage, requested me to visit the
second-story anteroom with him, during “Tut’s” absence, the wrecks of
eleven chairs were piled in one corner of it. After that I never had the
audacity to go up and investigate, but crashing sounds were still heard
during the half hour devoted to the silent films.
The “Companhia Brazileira” advertized extensively, and the Kinetophone
was well patronized from the start. Brazilians take readily to
novelties, especially if they can be made the fashion, and our audiences
of the second day included both priests and “women of the life,” which
is a sure sign of popular success in Brazil. As our doubled entrance fee
of two milreis was high for those times of depression, also perhaps
because the “Cinema Pathé” was considered a gathering place of the
élite, we entertained only the well dressed, or, perhaps I should say,
the overdressed. They were blasé, artificial audiences, never under any
circumstances applauding or giving any sign of approval; they always
gave me the impression of saying, “Oh, rather interesting, you know, as
a novelty, but I could do much better myself if I cared to take the time
from my love-making and risk soiling my spats and my long, slender,
do-nothing fingers.” But as they continued to bring us as our share of
the receipts more than a conto of reis a day, it was evident that they
found the performance pleasing.
The moving picture might be a real educating influence on the
imaginative and emotional Brazilians, were it not that those who
manipulate this business see fit to put their faith in an intellectual
bilge-water which gives chiefly false notions of life in the world
beyond their horizon. The same “Penny Dreadfuls” in film, concocted of
saccharine sentimentality, custard-pie “comedy,” and a goodly seasoning
of the criminal and the pornographic, that add to the weariness of life
elsewhere, are the rule in the Brazilian capital. Here even the élite,
or at least the well-dressed, flock to see them. This is partly due to
the lowly state of the legitimate stage in Brazil and the atrocious
performances given by nearly all the “actors” who seek their fortunes in
South America. Though some Latin-American playwrights, and a few of the
players, have done things worth while, the stage depends almost entirely
upon “talent” imported from Europe, entertainers of Spanish (or, for
Brazil, of Portuguese) origin, with the crudest notions of histrionic
art, or superannuated discards from the French or Italian stage, mixed
with youthful hopefuls who have crossed the Atlantic to try it on the
dog. These misplaced porters and chambermaids, mere lay figures dressed
to represent certain characters, romp about the stage in their natural
rôles, their eyes wandering in quest of friends in the audience, whom
they give semi-surreptitious greetings and seek to charm by “grandstand
plays,” making the while the mechanical motions they have been taught
and automatically repeating what they are told to say by the prompter.
It is strange that the often artistic Latin races will endure the
prompter, instead of insisting that actors learn their parts. It is a
rare experience to find a place in the house where one can hear the play
and not hear the prompter snarling the lines five words ahead, so that
any semi-intelligent person in the audience could repeat them after him
more effectually than do most of the louts behind the footlights. As is
the case with literature, the theater in South America is mainly
designed to appeal to the male. Respectable women are rarely seen at the
average playhouse, not merely avoiding the “casino” with its “specially
imported blond artistes” of not too adamantine morals, but even what
corresponds to our vaudeville, where the audience sits smoking with its
hat on and the boxes are graced by demimondaines. In fact, the stage and
respectability have no connecting link in the Latin-American mind. All
over South America, and especially in Brazil, “actress” is synonymous
with less complimentary terms; nor is it possible to convince a
Brazilian that such is not universally the case elsewhere. Rarely
anything better than stupid and salacious appeals to men, it is small
wonder that the living drama has been nearly ousted from South America
by the cinema, with its easily transportable, international form of
entertainment.
The motion-picture having come after all the business part of Rio was
built, there was no room to erect “movie palaces” which have elsewhere
followed in the train of Edison’s most prostituted invention. All the
cinemas along the Avenida Central are former shops, without much space
except in depth, and as the temperature quickly rises when such a place
is crowded, the screen often consists of a curtain across what used to
be the wide-open shop door, so that one on the sidewalk may peep in and
see the audience and even the orchestra, though he can see nothing of
the projected pictures within an inch of his nose. Alongside the “movie”
house proper another ex-shop of similar size is generally used as a
waiting-room. Here are luxurious upholstered seats, much better than
those facing the screen, and some such extraordinary attraction as a
“feminine orchestra specially contracted in Europe.” For the
waiting-room is of great importance in Rio. It takes the place in a way
of a central plaza and promenade where the two sexes can come and admire
one another, and it is often thronged immediately after the closing of
the door to the theater proper, by people who know quite well they must
sit there a full hour before the “section” ends. In fact, young fops
sometimes come in and remain an hour or two ogling the feminine charms
in the waiting-room and then go out again without so much as having
glanced at the show inside. In contrast, many cinemas have
“second-class” entrances, without waiting-room and with seats
uncomfortably near the screen, where the sockless and collarless are
admitted at reduced prices.
It does not require long contact with them to discover that Latin films
are best for Latins, for both audience and actors have a mutual language
of gestures and facial expressions. The lack of this makes American
films seem slow, labored, and stupid, not only to Latins, but to the
American who has been living for some time among them. It is a strange
paradox that the most _doing_ people on the earth are the slowest in
telling a story in pantomime or on the screen. What a French or an
Italian actress will convey in full, sharply and clearly, by a shrug of
her shoulders or a flip of her hand, the most advertised American “movie
star” will get across much more crudely and indistinctly only by
spending two or three minutes of pantomimic labor, assisted by two or
three long “titles.” The war quickly forced the “Companhia Brazileira,”
as it did most of its rivals, to use American films; but neither
impresarios nor their clients had anything but harsh words for the
“awkward stupidity” and the pretended Puritanic point of view of those
makeshift programs—with one exception, Brazilian audiences would sit up
all night watching our “wild west” films in which there was rough
riding. Curious little differences in customs and point of view come to
light in watching an American film through South American eyes. For
instance, there is probably not a motion-picture director in the United
States who knows that to permit a supposedly refined character in a film
to lick a postage stamp is to destroy all illusion in a Latin-American
audience. Down there not even the lowest of the educated class ever
dreams of sealing or stamping a letter in that fashion. An American film
depicting the misadventures of a “dude” or “sissy” was entirely lost
upon the Brazilian audiences, because to them the hero was exactly their
idea of what a man should be, and they plainly rated him the most
“cultured” American they had ever met. Bit by bit one discovers scores
of such slight and insignificant differences, which sum up to great
differences and become another stone in that stout barrier between the
Latin and the Anglo-Saxon divisions of the western hemisphere.
On Thursday came the customary mid-weekly change of bill, and we were
thankful for a new program after hearing the old one more than thirty
times. Also the “music,” which the cinema orchestra ground out
incessantly during every moment when we were not giving our part of the
show, changed, though hardly for the better. We were a godsend to the
musicians of that orchestra, especially to the player of the bass-viol.
Hitherto they had been required to play unbrokenly from one in the
afternoon until nearly midnight; our advent gave them ten or eleven
twenty-minute respites during that time. This they usually spent lolling
around the room behind the screen, about the phonograph and our trunks,
where they frequently fell asleep. Particularly the anemic quadroon who
manipulated the largest stringed instrument seemed never to catch up on
his sleep. Barely did our part of the program begin than he stretched
out in such comfort as he could find in the improvised green-room and
went soundly to sleep, so soundly that no noise under heaven could wake
him—save one. When it came time for them to return, his companions would
shout at him, jostle him, sometimes even yank him erect; nothing had the
slightest effect on his somnolence. But the instant the first strains of
their never-varying “music” were heard in the orchestra pit outside, the
sleeper would awake with a flash, make one spring through the door, and
be automatically scraping off his part with the others by the time they
had reached the second or third note.
Sunday is the big theater or “movie” day in Brazil, for then the
families of the “four hundred” turn out in full force. On our seventh
day they were standing knee-deep in the waiting-room most of the
afternoon and early evening. The congestion increased that part of my
duties which had to do with auditing, for the head of a family often
paused to shake hands effusively with the door-keeper, after which the
entire family poured boldly in, and it became my business to find out
whether there had been anything concealed in the effusive hand, and if
not, why the box-office had been so cavalierly slighted.
One afternoon the Senhor Presidente da Republica came to honor the
fourth performance of the day with his patronage, and to give us the
official blessing without which we had been forced to open. A corps of
policemen was sent first to hang about the door for nearly two
hours—giving passers-by the impression that the place had been
“pinched.” There followed a throng of generals, admirals, and
un-admirables in full uniform, who waited in line for “His Excellency.”
The president came at length in an open carriage, his girl wife beside
him, two haughty personalities in gold lace opposite them, and a company
of lancers on horseback trotting along the Avenida beside them. The
waiting line fawned upon the leathery-skinned chief of state, bowed over
the hand of his wife, then the whole throng surrounded the loving pair
and, pushing the humble door-keeper scornfully aside, swarmed into the
cinema without a suggestion of offering to pay the entrance fee. Luckily
the doors were not high enough to admit the lancers, who trotted away
with the red of their uniforms gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. It
was my first experience with the official “deadheads” of Brazil, but by
no means my last.
We quickly found, too, that the official gathering was bad for business.
Surely any American theater holding 510 persons would fill up when the
President of the Republic and his suite were gracing it with their
presence! Yet here there was only a scattering of paying audience as
long as the “deadheads” remained, which, thanks perhaps to a film
showing them in the recent Independence Day parade, was until they had
heard the entire program once and the Kinetophone twice. The president,
it seemed, was hated not only for his political iniquities, but the
élite looked down upon him for marrying a girl little more than
one-fourth his own age and letting her make the national presidency the
background for her social climbing; and to enter the theater while the
president and his retainers were there was to risk losing both one’s
political and social standing as a high class Brazilian.
It soon got on our nerves to know that we were the only persons, alive
or dead, in the whole expanse of Brazil who could operate the
Kinetophone, that if anything happened to either of us it meant a ruined
performance, our income cut off, and an unamused Rio élite. Let one of
us fail to be on the dot ten times a day and the thing would have been
ruined, for the _Carioca_ is nothing if not critical and of so little
patience that, had we missed a single performance, word would have gone
out at once that the “novelty” at the “Cinema Pathé” had failed. I
decided, therefore, during our second week to get and break in a native
assistant, and next morning the two principal dailies contained this
appealing announcement:
_Preciza-se de um operador de
cinema, jovem, sem familia, com ao
menos dois annos de experiencia,
sabendo bem a electricidade e algo
de inglez._
I intended to be particularly insistent on those points of youth,
“without family,” and “something of English,” but I soon found that we
would be lucky even to get the other and indispensable requirements of
cinema experience and a knowledge of electricity. In Buenos Aires mobs
had besieged Linton’s hotel in answer to a similar announcement; in New
York it would probably have brought out the police reserves. Yet hardly
half a dozen applicants turned up at the Praia do Flamengo after our
morning swim, languidly to inquire our desires. The first was a stupid
looking negro who did not seem to fulfill any of the requirements; the
second was a shifty-eyed mulatto with no physique—badly needed for the
one-night stands ahead; the third was quite visibly impossible. I
engaged the fourth man to appear. Carlos Oliva was about “Tut’s” age,
which did not hinder him from already having a wife and four children.
But then, so do all Brazilians, legitimately or otherwise. He was a
_Paulista_, that is, born in São Paulo, though of Italian parents, a
practiced mechanic and experienced operator of ordinary “movie” films,
and he looked intelligent. To be sure he spoke no English, but that vain
hope had died early and it became evident that “Tut” would have to learn
enough Portuguese to get along when it came time for me to go ahead of
the show to make bookings.
I had gradually been acquiring a better command of that tongue myself,
and now made use of it to draw up a formidable contract tying Carlos
hand and foot. Though I was forced to pay him the equivalent of a
hundred dollars a month and traveling expenses, I required him to stay
with the Kinetophone until the tour of Brazil was completed, not to
exceed one year. On every “second feast day” after the first month he
was to get four-fifths of his pay, the rest to remain in the hands of
the “Linton South American Company” until the tour was finished, when
the balance was to be paid him in a lump sum, together with his fare
back to Rio. If he left before that time, both the balance and the
transportation were forfeited, for we did not propose to spend weeks
training a man only to have him leave us at the first whim or better
offer—though the latter contingency was not likely. Lastly, he was not
to engage in any other occupation while with us, he could be discharged
upon a week’s notice if he proved unsatisfactory, with balance and fare
paid, and he was required never to show or explain to others the
workings of the Kinetophone, nor disclose knowledge of anything
connected with our company which he might learn directly or indirectly.
With all these clauses duly included and the document signed in
duplicate, I fancied even a Brazilian could find no means of leaving us
in the lurch. Little had I suspected, when I was tramping the streets of
Rio six weeks before, carrying all my worldly possessions wrapped in a
square yard of cloth, that I should soon be strutting down the Avenida
Central as one of her captains of industry, laying down the law to mere
mortals, and shouldering my way daily through her narrow downtown
streets to deposit a large sum of money.
About the time Carlos joined us I found myself in new and wholly
unexpected trouble—silver trouble. It scarcely seems possible that
anyone could protest at getting too much silver, but many strange things
happen in Brazil. There is no Brazilian gold, except in theory; and its
paper does not suffice for small transactions. One day the Rio manager
of the “Companhia Brazileira” met me at our usual noonday conference
with the announcement that he would have to pay me a part of our
percentage in silver. I saw no reason why he should not, other than the
trouble of carrying it a few blocks to the bank, and accepted 200$000 in
paper-wrapped rolls. But when I dropped these down before the receiver’s
window, he declined to accept them. I fancied the tropical heat had
suddenly affected his sanity, and went in to see one of the English
“clarks.” From him I learned that it was only too true; the banks of Rio
_do not_ accept silver! I had heard of South American bankers doing all
kinds of tricks, but I had never before known one to refuse money. I
tried several other banks of various nationalities with the same result;
they all accepted only silver enough to make up odd multiples of ten
milreis. The English manager of the British bank, who had lived so long
in Brazil that he had lost some of the incommunicativeness of his race,
took the trouble to explain the enigma to me. The year before, the agent
of a German firm had arranged with certain Brazilian officials to issue
a new coinage and the firm had flooded the country, about the capital,
with shining new silver 500, 1000, and 2000 reis pieces. But silver is
legal tender in Brazil only up to two milreis; therefore, when it
suddenly became plentiful, the banks could not accept any great amount
of it because they had no outlet and would have had to build new vaults
to hold the stuff. At the cinema door we naturally took in much _prata_,
so that even after making change a donkey-load of it remained to be
divided each noonday. I could not buy drafts with it on New York; the
government would not receive it—nor its own paper money in most
transactions, for that matter; being “made in Germany” it was hardly
worth melting up. The one rift in the silver clouds was that merchants
were so anxious for trade during this period of depression that they
would accept any kind of money in any amount if only people would buy.
We paid Carlos in silver and we spent silver ourselves whenever we had
to spend. What we could not get rid of in that way I could only sell at
a four per cent. loss, and as I was already paying 5$000 a dollar for
drafts, I finally took to dropping pounds of silver into our trunks.
But the worst was still to come. Commerce was suddenly swamped under a
flood of nickel! Its “refunding loan” having failed, Brazil was hard put
to it to find money for current expenses, and disgorged anything that
could be found lying about the federal treasury. If the government
refused to take its own silver and nickel, it did not by any means
refuse to pay it out. The lower and less influential officials were
paid, when at all, in rolls of silver, those without any political pull
whatever in nickel, and there were cases of being paid in _vintems_, the
obsolete copper coins of twenty reis each which may be seen in use only
among beggars and negro street hawkers. On government pay-days, ever
more rare now as time went on, one might see a government bookkeeper or
a school teacher come in to buy a long-needed bar of soap and a flashy
new shirt, lugging in both hands, like dumbbells, great lumps of
paper-wrapped silver, nickel, and even copper.
It was not until September 25 that I could risk letting Carlos run the
stage end of the show, even under my immediate supervision, but he
learned with reasonable speed and three days later I spent the afternoon
climbing Tijuca and turned up at the cinema after eight, much relieved
to find that nothing had gone awry. “Tut,” however, was forced to stick
close to his booth during all performances as long as we remained in
Rio.
Then came the end of the month, the figuring up of accounts, and the
startling discovery that I was a millionaire! In a single week I had
earned more than I had spent since entering Brazil three months before,
and my salary and commission for the month, little more than half of
which we had been playing, summed up to 1,250,000 reis! What it would
have been under normal conditions, when Brazilians were able to maintain
to the full their reputation as “good spenders,” only the mathematically
minded can compute. Now that I had my first million, by all the rules of
Wall Street I should have had no difficulty in rapidly joining the
multimillionaire class. However, when I found that at the prevailing
rate of exchange my earnings amounted to barely three hundred dollars,
and when I added the knowledge that a five-cent handkerchief sold for
1$500, that it cost 600 reis to have a collar badly laundered, and that
rather a thin letter mailed to the United States required the equivalent
of twenty-five cents in stamps, I realized that I was in no immediate
danger of descending into the pitiable class of the idle rich.
CHAPTER XII
A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL
Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first
morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable
old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and
lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so
plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean
Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at
the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly
possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of
Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention.
But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large
trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling
about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for
the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256
reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into
the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for
though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge
in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in
human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian
railways than can his equally heavy trunk.
There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the
“Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated
by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of
railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was
therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system
as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that
government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of
trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to
fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated.
Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving
Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train
of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in
transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and
its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it,
government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at
will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to
the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in
the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four
men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher
officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous
than the passengers.
Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it
can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our
contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the
Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would
have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been
overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have
things prepared for our _estrea_ when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next
morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on
the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant
procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the
private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway
maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing
from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a
small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that
brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley
sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the
coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means
covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy,
sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails
along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the
humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed
away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and
there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil
imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making
the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São
Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter
the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of
their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for
long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute.
It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature
for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since
the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating
more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary
from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the
native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not
grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country
powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired
and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants,
sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention
to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on
the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins
which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth
gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a
bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion
of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from
the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a
long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded
troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for
want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and
ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The
unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life,
seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to
shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple
with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a
great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew
almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed
Luz station.
São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the
drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war
had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen
without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few
newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had
broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a
guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a
native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the
_amigo_ could no longer pay their rent. The very _cafés concertos_ in
which rich _fazendeiros_ from the coffee-growing interior had been wont
to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were
succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a
sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the
weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was
rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana
plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the
“industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The _Paulista_ had not
yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land
with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial
enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the
wealthy and powerful nations of the earth.
Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the
effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though
not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a
mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro
element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a
century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain
than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the
business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains
of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida
Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in
common with the motley _Carioca_ than with the people of southwestern
Europe.
“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been
disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had
not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of
the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never
believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to
our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several
days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of
his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising,
which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential
citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the
city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having
brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and
dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the
band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they
coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town,
joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to
workmen of Italian antecedents.
The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city,
and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead
of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to
shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five
combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that
those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the
other two and because Brazilians will not stand for _sopa requentada_
(reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São
Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only
two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night,
with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that
the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able
to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our
income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten
performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with
boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take
its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however,
the _Paulistas_ were quite like the _Cariocas_. Their favorite in the
“movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the
fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was
difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show
a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an
occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its
pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not
all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have
them translated.
Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our
contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at
flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and
banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something
unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the
Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the
age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “_só
trez dias_ (only three days)”—after which it would move to another
theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so
conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But
though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and
insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water
when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this
dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil
that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I
hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job,
to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of
advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly
approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an
unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I
determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking
two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I
had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the
painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the
commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did
eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation
loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two
boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last
cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin
excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even
the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during
the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back
into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war,
and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that
the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect
“um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their
side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things
worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so
scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every
three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and
did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before
the war.
All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing
compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called
for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the
carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for
entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without
number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be
ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house,
admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many
men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took
their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can
fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual
passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly
engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his
personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to
show it, like a _popular_, or a common fellow, or to have his right
questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the
business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and
not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which
would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he
thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his
whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an
elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of
the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have
to answer next day to contempt of court!
We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do
beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by
“influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an
acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an
authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it,
is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a
person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the
glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much
that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not
serious to the official and influential class; it was _fazendo fita_,
showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air
of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated,
upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person
of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the
full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a
newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the
ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro
youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest
because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference
with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please,
senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of
the _delegado_, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag
of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native
clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the
day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for
himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the
short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to
many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others
will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a
result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have
season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the
desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money.
A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even
three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well
that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single
ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the
door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great
indignation, says:
“Why do _they_ pay admission, little bits of children like that?”
“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than
firmness.
“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten _tostões_ with me for my
own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon
the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go
right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath
and he will lose even the “_dez tostões_” she has paid for her own
ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like
her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face.
We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to
keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in
them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us
during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the
rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us
in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the
house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the
receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper,
from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in
without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that
community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us
one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats
each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to
them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the
door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless
thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no
decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following
night the police closed the performance.
At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name
on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to
pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on
attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one
night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number
when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the
score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the
pictures from the rear.
I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of
much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot
manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people,
without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It
meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more
energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost
considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns
in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and
fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only
society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains
in the country, and he may as well make the best of it.
Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the
“deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in _fazendo fita_. A
fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or
men well known in the community might come the first night with their
families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the
parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled
mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for
it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to
display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens.
However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me.
The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think
of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position
as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to
calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with
deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In
“movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day
even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly
addressed me by that title, I protested.
“But you have a bachelor’s degree, haven’t you?” he asked, in some
surprise.
“Yes, I believe so, if I haven’t lost it somewhere along the road,
but——”
“Then you are a doctor in Brazil,” he replied, “for the bachelor’s
degree carries with it that title in this country.”
“Dr.” Franck I remained, therefore, as long as I continued to manage the
Kinetophone.
With matinées only on Sundays, I found plenty of time for my favorite
sport of tramping the countryside. One afternoon I strolled at random
out beyond the low, dry, reddish cliffs at the edge of town and struck
off in the direction of São Caetano. Great banks of white clouds lay
piled into the sky on all sides, and the dead-dry, almost burning
stretch of rolling country was half-hidden under a haze of red dust. I
passed several suburban beer-halls, each with its “Giocce di Bocce,” or
Italian nine-pin earth court behind it, and wandered on along more red
roads, the light-colored houses scattered over the rolling country
showing up in front and disappearing behind me in the thick, dust-laden
atmosphere as in a fog. Gradually I came to realize that almost a
procession of men, women and children was bound in the same direction,
some tramping the dusty road on weary, blistered feet, others lolling at
their ease in carriages and automobiles. Not a few of the latter were
expensive private cars with chauffeurs in livery.
For nearly an hour I followed the same direction. Then all at once,
topping a slight ridge, I came upon all the concourse that had gone
before—automobiles, carriages, and pedestrians—gathered in a broad bare
space on the brow of a treeless, thirsty hill. Down below the throng was
a small tile-roofed hut with two bar fences so arranged before it that
only one person at a time of the crowd that was jammed up against it
could enter and bend over a sort of counter across the open door to talk
with a man inside. Each ended the interview by handing the man a ten, or
more, milreis note and passed out through a gap between fence and hut.
Though the entire assortment of Brazilian complexions was to be found in
the throng, many were full whites, blond European immigrants as well as
women in silks and diamonds, dandies in gloves, spats and canes—and
every mother’s son and daughter of them talked with bated breath while
they waited their turn to approach the counter. When this came, the men
reverently raised their hats, the women gave a species of curtsey and in
many cases kissed the man’s hand, then conversed with him for two or
three minutes in an undertone, which could not but have been heard by
those crowded nearest to the speaker. Then they paid the fee and passed
on, with as contrite and sanctified a look on their faces as if they had
just ended a private conference with St. Peter. Each carried away a
mammoth visiting card bearing the name Vicente Rodriguez Viera, and at
the exit a shaggy countryman halted each by thrusting forth photographs
of the man behind the counter, which each hastened to buy with a meek
and grateful countenance, as if by divine command.
Inside the hut was an electric push-button which, like the back door,
connected with a rambling lot of _fazenda_ buildings, and near at hand
was a large liquor emporium and two restaurants of a crude,
frontier-like variety. I was preparing to sample the attractions of the
latter when the man behind the counter suddenly rose and strolled toward
the farmhouse in the rear, leaving the perspiring crowd—automobiles,
diamonds and all—to await his sweet will about returning. He was a big
bulk of a countryman, plainly a _caboclo_, or copper-colored native
Brazilian of considerable Indian and probably some negro blood, with a
great bushy black beard. Dressed in an uncreased, broad-brimmed felt
hat, a heavy, dark suit, and black riding-boots, he wore also a colored
handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck, a conspicuous watch-chain
and charm across his slightly prominent abdomen, and huge brass rings on
seven of his fingers considerably enhancing his general air of cheap
vulgarity. His face was puffy under the eyes and had a “foxy” expression
that no one of a modicum of experience with the human race could have
mistaken for anything than what it was,—proof of cunning rascality.
As the fellow was returning to the hut I approached the vendor of
photographs and asked who the man was. His ally gave me a look of
mingled astonishment and disgust for my ignorance and explained that the
noble being was a _curandeiro_, or a “curer.”
“You mean a physician?” I suggested.
“No, senhor, not a doctor; a _curandeiro_.”
“Does he give medicine?”
“None whatever.”
“Does he cure by laying on hands?”
“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture.
After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month,
and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are
cured. He is a _caboclo legitimo_” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and
has been here eight years.”
The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him
to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work
kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had
been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign
announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what
the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or
curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed
to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures
were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to
consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they
laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious
crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a
Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que
desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to
squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back
again to normal.”
We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the
scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra
Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by
mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was
little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass
was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and
half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses.
The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our
cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly
half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held
up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of
November was the _Dia dos Finados_, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day
sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention
flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere
theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it”
by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this
forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew
wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!”
But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof,
sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In
several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were
obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was
set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the
back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought
a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture”
with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed
out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this
time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the
curtain and the performance.
It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our
engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an
old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find
out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for
the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different
thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out
for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings,
not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who
did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show.
I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of
Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling
coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely
strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big
yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the
electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I
visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that
the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the
town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing
fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the _prefeitura_. I introduced
myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the
Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that
it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it
stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to
Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo
to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never
dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly
flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so
remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a
hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São
Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the
margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum,
especially in such hard times.
I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt
almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to
make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me
to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed
more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the
“Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light,
license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely
be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It
then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a
contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a
small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts.
I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were
then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of
the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect
to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the
privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from
São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up
duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising
matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next
train north.
It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling
coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a
_tigre_, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed
myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my
professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino
Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and
dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse,
and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale.
The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance,
and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to
rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with
almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon
engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old
programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and
Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and
as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted
stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the
comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might
devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in
Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition
the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I
proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a
night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if
I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that
now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him.
No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was
adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to
double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much
gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled
with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total
receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he
was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance,
we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger
Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this
concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays
were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our
sections.
My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first
day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal
theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had
been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead.
It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,”
write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for
Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but
I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for
frail humanity to be.
After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look
Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of
considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and
most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a
few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge
had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on
earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here
growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes.
That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the
mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated
Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in
hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the
center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique,
overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of
musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a
special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the
pianist, Guiomar Novaes.
The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of
sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that
about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been
because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the
Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely
unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a
gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small
country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a
fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for
large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are
scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite
the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a
century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony
to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress,
looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern
states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of
a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived
in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant
church which he had been mainly instrumental in building.
In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states
emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the
federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first
tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and
several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he
had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew
as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the
Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family
during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older
generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,”
as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon
after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers,
free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going
to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called
Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East
Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any
of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery,
the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders
of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans
were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the
resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the
majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these
conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more
prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up
to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought
about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their
color-line.
Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably
have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United
States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain
the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern
plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of
the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the
overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the
colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards
of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was
surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my
guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies
were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their
pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a
Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our
language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United
States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their
English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in
almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average
of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about
it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese
with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes
Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred
that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on
English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was
said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another
demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her
immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.
When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all
that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through
eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit
another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern
mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and
keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English
vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not
always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner
which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is
the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony
introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in
Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their
way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much
cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and
they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving
their attention chiefly to corn and beans.
It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland
to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has
undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has
probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the
State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as
anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer
than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average,
and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the
state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I
passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to
Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay
river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well
developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much
less forest than the imagination pictures.
As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad
service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard,
monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high
with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations
without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the
engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it
necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got
into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the
smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of
smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the
narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape
grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such
tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an
hour or more.
São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among
rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were
plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of _carregadores_,
baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell
your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the
politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again
by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices.
Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers
growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and
expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their
families for a week.
In the best room available at the best hotel I could scarcely turn
around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on
the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me.
The weather was volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten
minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the
valley through wide streets reeking in blood-red mud and up to the
“Theatro São Carlos,” the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed,
in spite of the prevarications of his negro servants. As usual he was
one of the pillars of the town, of that aristocratic flimsiness of the
man who has never done any real work for generations back, and his air
said plainly that he knew he could outwit any simpleton of a foreigner.
I set my first demands high, therefore, in order to give him the
satisfaction of feeling that he had driven a close bargain when he at
length agreed to as much as I had expected and ten per cent. more than I
would have accepted under compulsion. I got his name signed to duplicate
contracts while he was still under the influence of my hypnotic eye and
was giving him instructions, in the guise of information, on advertising
and the arrangement of programs, when he remarked casually:
“Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as
anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which
I have heard such splendid reports.”
“Why—er—it may be that he will not be able to get here,” I stammered.
“You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married
man and—and——”
How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become
was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the
contract for two days at the “Theatro São Carlos.”
[Illustration: At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth
charged with the advertising painted his own portrait of Edison. He may
be made out leaning affectionately on the right shoulder of his
masterpiece]
[Illustration: The central praça of Campinas]
[Illustration: Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church
above the town]
[Illustration: Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is
surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations]
The town of Araraquara proved to be of about the same size and activity
as São Carlos, and especially well off in public buildings somewhat out
of proportion with its general appearance. Clustered in the center,
about the large, red-earth praça, was the church, an old sheet-iron
playhouse, an ambitious Municipal Theater, closed as usual, a large and
well-arranged cinema bearing the unescapable name “Polytheama,” and,
across the street in a red lot of its own, an ambitious new two-story
building labeled in English the “Araraquara College.” I took a turn
through several of the wide, irregular, red-smeared streets to make sure
that the place was worth playing, then found that the man I sought was
also manager of the largest store in town, next door to his playhouse.
He proved to be a short, unshaven young Italian who had not been long in
Brazil, which accounted for his being so good-hearted and easy-going
that I had no difficulty in taking sixty-five per cent. away from him
for Saturday and Sunday night performances. I might have had as large a
share of the special Sunday children’s matinée, but as what had become a
custom required him to distribute candy and toys to the children, I took
pity on him and split that part even.
One of my fellow-countrymen was head of the college. His most noticeable
characteristics were as a smoker of corn-husk wrapped cigarettes and as
an authority on the history of Brazil. He had long been a teacher and
would have preferred to spend his summer vacations in the land of his
forefathers; but these came in December and January, when it is cold in
the United States, and it would take nearly the two months to reach and
return from there, while he could cross to Lisbon in twelve days and
spend most of his vacation comfortably tramping about southern Europe.
His Brazilian wife and two bilingual daughters were almost American in
point of view, though by no means in appearance. The boys of Brazil, the
head master asserted, are more tractable than American boys, also more
superficial, learning more easily but forgetting much more quickly—a
statement frequently heard from American educators throughout South
America. That they were tractable was quickly evident, for when a native
teacher sent to show me over the establishment called a boy away from a
football game—rugby is popular even with workmen on coffee estates in
São Paulo State—he trotted meekly off to do an errand without a hint of
resentment. There were half a dozen American boys in the school, all
Brazilian born of men from our South, and not merely had they taken on
many of the characteristics of their companions, but they had washed-out
complexions and no suggestion of that “scrappiness” familiar on our own
playgrounds. This pastiness of skin is general among the sons of
northerners born in Brazil and quite different from the color of the
blonde descendants of Portuguese in whom the Goth crops out.
Morally the head master had been thoroughly Brazilianized. He had grown
tolerant of the many little things which are not quite as they should
be, having lost the familiar American longing to reform the world and
fallen into many of the lesser vices and easy-going customs of Brazil.
He had, however, introduced coëducation into his school, against the
advice of the natives, because he believed it necessary to proper sex
development, and now the families that had been most strongly against it
sent their children to the college. In the afternoon we drove by
automobile to the professor’s fruit-farm, which a former slave was paid
75$ a month to keep in order. Two of his piccaninnies followed us around
like pet raccoons, constantly holding plates of fruit within our reach,
and the atmosphere of the place was much what it must have been in our
South before the war when the “mastah” visited one of his plantations.
On our return we met an American farmer from far out in the country. He
had come to Brazil twenty years before, when already an adult, but he
spoke English with considerable difficulty and a distinct accent, though
his Portuguese was by no means perfect.
Beyond the River Mogy Guassú, the first I had crossed since leaving São
Paulo, I changed from the “Paulista” railway system to the winding and
narrow-gauge “Mogyana.” We passed many fields of charred stumps,
suggesting how _matta_ was cleared for the planting of coffee. The rare
towns were monotonously alike, dull-white walls and red-tile roofs of
the same shade as the soil, which turned all light-colored animals,
including the children who played in it and the men who worked in it, a
pinkish hue. This red soil is the terror of housewives in São Paulo
State, especially in the dry season, when it sifts thickly over
everything and clings tenaciously to every exposed surface. Soon we were
completely surrounded by coffee fields, _sertões_ of coffee, a world
absolutely shut in by coffee bushes, which actually brushed the sides of
the train and stretched away, endless and straight and unerring as the
files of a well-trained army, up and down over hill and dale, with never
the slightest break in alignment, into the dense-blue horizon for mile
after swift mile.
One plantation through which we traveled for more than an hour has
2,500,000 bushes; an English corporation owns an unbroken sixteen
kilometers of coffee trees, crisscrossed by a private railway. Down in
the hollow of each _fazenda_, or section of plantation, were long rows
of whitewashed, tile-roofed huts, all run together into one or two
buildings, sometimes with a church attached. These were the homes of the
_colonos_, or coffee workmen, once negro slaves, now chiefly Italians,
though I caught glimpses of a number of Japanese, the women still in
their native dress and carrying their babies on their backs by bands
across the breast. Some years ago a few ship-loads of Japanese were sent
to Brazil, landing in Santos, and most of them came so directly into the
back country, and are so nearly segregated there, that even their racial
tendency for imitation has not caused them to throw off home customs.
Here and there, too, were groups of European immigrants still in the
costumes of their homelands in the year, in some cases distant, when
they left them. Italian colonization succeeded negro slavery closely in
São Paulo State, which owes its prosperity and its leadership in the
world’s coffee production mainly to these newcomers. In addition to
their living quarters and modest wages, the _colonos_ are usually given
a piece of ground on which to plant corn, black beans, and mandioca for
their own use, and sometimes permission to graze a few head of stock.
One of the chief troubles of the coffee _fazendeiro_, however, is the
tendency of Italian _colonos_ to abandon the sun-drenched fields as soon
as they get a bit of money together and go to town to engage in some
minor form of business.
Coffee blossoms and berries are often found on the same bush at the same
time, and there are seven grades of the product, according to the time
in which it is picked. The regular harvest is from May to July or
August. Then the ground under the bushes is carefully swept, if it is
smooth, or is spread with cloth, and the berries are scraped from the
branches with one motion of the hand, sparing as many leaves as
possible, after which all is swept together and sent to great drying
platforms that look not unlike concrete tennis courts. The _colonos_
labor on the piece-work system, each family being responsible for a
given number of plants and the picking being paid by the liter. The
berries are planted some eight feet apart in both directions, making
straight rows from four angles. It is better to set out young plants
from a nursery, but this is too slow a process for large plantations.
Some of the land was formerly treeless campo, but a large part, and the
most fertile, has been cleared of dense _matta_ in the crude and
wasteful way of pioneer communities, leaving only here and there a
majestic tropical tree topping a ridge. The plant begins to produce in
about four years, and has been known to continue to the age of a hundred
and thirty, growing up from the stump as often as it is cut down. An
ordinarily good tree will produce twenty-five quarts of berries, which
in their maturity considerably resemble small cherries, the two coffee
beans inside requiring continual attention before they are finally dried
and sorted and disappear in sixty-kilogram sacks in the direction of
Santos and the outside world.
The plants were brought to Brazil from French Guiana long ago, and
coffee-growing was a paying business in the State of São Paulo “until
the government heard of it.” The number of non-producers who get a
finger into the coffee cup before it reaches the actual consumer is
beyond belief. Taxes begin with so much per thousand “feet” of plants,
and continue incessantly until the product reaches the retail market.
Transportation from the field to Santos is ordinarily two or three times
as much as from Santos to New York, and a sack for which the grower
received ten dollars the grocer in the United States has been known to
sell for forty-five, even in the days before the World War produced so
many experts in profiteering. It is often asserted that the coffee
_fazendeiro_ makes more profit out of renting the bottom lands, where
the danger of frost makes the planting of coffee inadvisable, as
_chacaras_, or small market gardens, or from the catch crops that can be
planted between the rows after picking-time, than from his many times
more acres of coffee-trees. Throttling taxes are his greatest trial, and
the prophecy is frequently heard that this growing habit of Brazilian
government will eventually ruin the great coffee industry of São Paulo.
At sunset we coasted down into Riberão Preto, fourth city of the state,
in the bottom of a great shallow bowl of earth lined uninterruptedly
with coffee bushes as far as the eye could reach. In the pink glow of
evening a _carregador_ put me and my baggage into a carriage before I
had time to express any personal desires on the subject, and I was
driven through the Saturday night activities of a lively, rather
frontier-like town to the chief hotel. What the other half dozen in town
must have been I dread to imagine, for this resembled nothing so much as
a dingy, careless, unadorned, lack-comfort style of barn, suggesting
that I was getting back again into the real South America, away from the
fringe of near-civilization on the coast. It was seething with
travelers, salesmen, an Italian theatrical company, servants, dogs, and
innumerable caged parrots, and I was assigned another of those
intolerable ground-floor rooms opening directly on the street that are
unescapable in the one-story towns of interior Brazil. Nor had I had
time to test the one comfort of such establishments, the shower bath,
when a jangling bell demanded that all guests come to supper at once, on
penalty of going without it entirely.
It would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. As in
Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until _almoço_,
or “breakfast,” between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset
by _jantar_. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in everything but
quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This _carne verde_
(“green” meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it
from _xarque_ or _carne secca_, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar
in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of
which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station
restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat
are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where
each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To
save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually
cold before they reach the ultimate consumer. There is a great paucity
of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely
reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every
table a glass jar of what looks like coarse yellow salt, but which
proves to be _farinha_, flour made of the mandioca or _yuca_ that is
served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout
Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry.
The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar,
which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment. By
night a servant sleeps just inside the front door, leaving room between
it and his cot for the belated guest to squeeze through; in the daytime
the _pateo_ is an uproar of unguided servants and ill-bred children. If
you ask to have your bread brushed off after the waiter has dropped it
on the floor you are henceforth known as “that curious gringo”; if you
prefer your coffee or soup made without having an unwashed cook
frequently dip in her spoon to taste the progress and toss the residue
back into the pot, there is just one way to get it—by bringing your own
cook with you. In your room the mirror is certain to be placed at about
the height of the average American’s belt buckle, so that to shave
requires either kneeling on the floor or sitting on something, usually
not to be found, about the size of a soapbox. Hot water being unknown,
shaving becomes an ordeal equal to trying to shut out the sight of a
mulatto across the table inhaling a mammoth all-meat meal with such boa
constrictor ease that he needs only to give the tail of an occasional
extra large mouthful an affectionate pat with his knife as it goes down.
Whatever he lacks in other ways the typical Brazilian hotel-keeper makes
up for in prices. He is rarely a native, and you can scarcely expect a
European to come over and set up hotels in the wilderness of South
America out of mere love for his fellow-man. Usually his only interest
is to make as much as possible as soon as possible and hurry back to his
native land. Not merely are the rates high, but it is the almost
invariable custom to manipulate the items in such a way that a stay of
twenty-four hours becomes at least two days. Personally, I early adopted
the habit of handing the proprietor the amount called for by his posted
daily rate and assuring him that I would look on with great interest
while he collected more than that; but the native Brazilian has the
notion that he loses caste if he protests at any price charged him, so
that the foreigner’s refusal to be fleeced is sure to make him
conspicuous, even if it does not cause his fellow-guests to rate him a
freak and a nuisance.
Nearly every street of Riberão Preto runs out into red earth, a
tenacious soil that is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop
and dwelling, until the whole town takes on a reddish tinge. Near the
center of town, at the lowest spot of the hollow in which it is built,
there is a perpetual frog chorus, and from the outskirts coffee-fields
stretch up out of the great shallow bowl and away over endless horizons.
The Italian company announced its début on the evening after my arrival
by shooting off fireworks, one advertising scheme that had not occurred
to me. There were so many cinemas in town that I had to spend real money
to visit several of them before I was competent to decide which one
would best answer our purposes. All those of importance, it turned out,
from the municipal “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” covering a whole block in the
center of town, down through the inevitable “Polytheama” to the
loose-mannered “Casino,” flowing with liquor and aging French
adventuresses, were in the hands of a hard-headed Spaniard of long
Brazilian experience, so that I considered myself fortunate to get his
name at the bottom of a contract giving us fifty-five per cent. of the
gross receipts during a six-day engagement.
CHAPTER XIII
ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT
We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto
on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town
of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and
grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills,
like water seeking an outlet or a lost person wholly undecided which way
to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State
of Minas Geraes, which at once showed itself less developed, more dry
and sandy, with an increasing number of wooded valleys and ridges. There
was some coffee here, too, but cared for in a half-hearted way compared
with the great plantations of São Paulo. We passed a large gang of
Japanese workmen, and many zebus or humped cattle, both in the fields
and working as oxen. The ride was not only too dirty and dusty to be
pleasant, but sparks from our wood-fired engine poured in at the open
windows until, for all my dodging and brushing, a dozen holes were
burned in my still comparatively new movie-magnate garb. One station
stood 3400 feet above sea-level, and we all but shook ourselves and the
cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, at an elevation of
2500, just as day was escaping over beyond the mountains.
The place was smaller and less progressive than I had imagined, with
certainly not more than ten thousand inhabitants, instead of the 25,000
credited to it by the “Handbook of Brazil.” I was not over-anxious to
make a contract with the one pathetic little cinema in town, at least
until I had seen what lay beyond and decided whether it would be worth
while to come this far inland. The manager, a clerk in the local
drugstore, was more than eager to present so extraordinary an attraction
to his fellow-townsmen, but fares and baggage rates would have cut
deeply into our profits and I refused to sign without a guarantee of a
conto for two days’ performances. He offered 800$ and would undoubtedly
have given almost any percentage, but I held out for the million reis
until we finally parted good friends but not business associates.
Somehow I had always thought of Minas Geraes as rocky, arid, dry, and
cold, something like upper Peru; the mere name “General Mines” had a
hard and chilly sound to it. But long before noon in Uberaba, high as it
was, I was reminded that it is well north of Rio and almost tropical.
There was an old air about the town, partly because the humidity causes
grass, bushes, and even trees to grow on and about the churches and
other loose-jointed buildings of stone and porous bricks, but also
because Minas is a much older state than São Paulo, overrun by miners
long before the agricultural riches of its neighbor were scratched.
We were off again at one behind the same old narrow-gauge wood burner,
through a rolling, bushy country, and scattered with huge ant-hills,
mildly similar to the Bolivian Chaco. The only real town along the way
was Uberabinha, squatting in the bottom of a sandy and shallow valley,
inhabited by barefoot and red-earth smeared people whose only place of
entertainment seemed to be the double-towered church bulking above the
general hut level. Night was falling when we pulled into Araguary at the
end of the “Mogyana” railway. The tidal wave of baggage-carriers and
hotel touts was only less in size than those farther south, but for once
I escaped them entirely by putting my valise on the head of a negro boy
and wading through the mud with him to a _pensão_ run by an old woman.
The room was really a mud cave, the mattress filled with corn-husks, and
I was reduced to candle-light for the first time in Brazil. But the
special chicken supper was a great relief from the avalanche of meat,
surrounded by wolfing natives, that would have been my lot at a hotel,
and, best of all, the _pensão_ was just across the way from the first
station of the “Goyaz Railway,” on which I was to depart at dawn.
It was pitch dark, with frequent heavy showers, when I set out to wander
incognito through the town. The weak electric-lights along its
mud-and-grass streets and praças suggested fireflies or
will-o’-the-wisps flitting about through the thick, black night. There
was, to be sure, a dentist, who was also owner, editor and printer of
the local paper, and the town undertaker—and the tombstones behind the
lips of many of the inhabitants hinted that he mixed the three
professions.
I came more or less near requiring his services in his least popular
capacity. As we were drawing into the station the mob of porters and
hackmen had given me their special attention, one negro in particular
thrusting his uninviting face through the car-window and pawing me with
his long unwashed hands in that half-affectionate, half-wheedling way of
his class and profession throughout Brazil, at the same time offering
his undesired services some seventy-five times at the top of his voice.
When I could endure him no longer, I rapped him over the knuckles with
the handle of my umbrella. Now a blow, however light and for whatever
provocation, is a shocking indignity in Brazil, only to be properly
wiped out in blood. I was not long, therefore, in recognizing the fellow
again when, during my stroll about town, he suddenly bobbed up
noiselessly out of the night and, after bawling a mouthful of vile
language after me, slipped away again with the information that he would
fix me yet. I gave him no more attention than one usually does a
half-drunken negro in tropical lands, and had entirely forgotten the
incident when I boarded another tottering little train next morning. All
at once a sound caused me to look up from my reading in the first-class
car I was sharing with one other passenger, to see the same negro
advancing swiftly down the aisle toward me, grasping a long and
sinister-looking knife. It was my luck to be unarmed for the first time
in Brazil that I had needed a weapon, having left my revolver with “Tut”
as a protection for the money he might take in. Even my umbrella, which
would not have been wholly useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, was in
the rack above me, and to rise and grasp it might suggest fear. I sat
where I was, therefore, with my feet drawn up on the opposite seat,
where they could shoot out quickly if danger became really imminent, and
stared at the fellow with the unwinking eye of the professional
lion-tamer. Whether it was this or his lack of any other intention than
to retrieve his reputation among his fellows and salve his injured
feelings by a threatening gesture, he confined himself to flourishing
the knife, advancing several times with rolling eyes almost to within
reach of my feet, and then backing away again. Finally he retreated
toward the door with an expression ludicrously like that of a whipped
animal, while I rose and walked leisurely down upon him with the same
fixed stare until he stepped to the ground. During it all neither train
nor local authorities made any attempt to come to my assistance, and I
carried away the impression that I should not have gotten out of
Araguary in a hurry had circumstances forced me to shoot a man of the
same color as the majority of the population.
We tossed and creaked along all the morning to cover the seventy miles
of the little bankrupt line that penetrates the south-westernmost corner
of the great interior State of Goyaz. The bustling modern civilization
of São Paulo and the coast had gradually petered out to nothing more
than two telegraph wires jumping from pole to crooked pole across a more
or less rolling wilderness of bushy forest, _pura matta_, as the
Brazilians call uncleared country, in a voice almost of terror. Here and
there were vast, heavily wooded basins around the edge of which we
slowly circled, fighting wood-burner sparks with one eye while taking in
the slight scenery with the other. There was a bit of coffee-growing and
a bit of lumber was being cut, but as a whole the region was completely
undeveloped and unexploited. A flaming purple tree here and there broke
the rolling, bushy, brown monotony. The scant population was a sort of
semi-wild outcast of civilization, wedded to dirt and inconvenience,
living in open-work pole houses covered with aged thatched roofs that
resembled dilapidated and sun-faded straw hats. The men wore wide belts,
with many silver, or imitation silver, ornaments and with half a dozen
leather compartments in them for their money and other small
possessions. In a pocket of their thin cotton coats even our local
fellow-passengers carried the dried covering of an ear of corn, and when
they wished to smoke, which was almost incessantly, they pulled off a
corn-husk, shaped it with a knife, rolled it up and put it behind an
ear, cut off a bit of tobacco from a twist plug, crushed it between
their palms, and rolled a corn-husk cigarette.
At eight we rumbled across the River Paranahyba into the State of Goyaz.
At the same time we crossed the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and the
climate should have been warm and humid; but as all this vast tableland
averages 2500 feet above sea-level, it had distinctly the atmosphere of
the temperate zones. There were a few cattle, less well-bred than those
of Minas. At Goyandira, a few scattered huts beside a small stream, we
were given time to gorge the customary Brazilian meal on a table already
crowded with dishes when we arrived, and at eleven we drew up at
Catalão, last outpost of civilization in this direction, and a
personified End of the Railroad.
It was evident at a glance that I need not consider Catalão from a
business standpoint. Though from a distance it had looked like quite a
town, it was merely a village of a scanty thousand inhabitants scattered
along a small creek, with mangos trodden underfoot, its houses built of
mud plastered on sticks and then whitewashed. Compared even with the
_Mineiros_ over the nearby state border, the _Goyanos_ were
backwoodsmen; beside the energetic, up-to-date _Paulistas_ they had the
vacant expression of ruminating cattle. About the town an almost
treeless world, rather dry for lack of rain, stretched endlessly away in
every direction. When the midday heat had somewhat abated—for there was
nothing cold about Catalão, for all its altitude—I climbed to a barren
hillock topped by an old ruined church in which scores of black rooks
had built their nests and from which bushy and rolling Goyaz spread away
like a lightly broken sea. The view was so vast that one could see the
curve of the earth, the blue haze ever thickening until it grew almost
opaque on a horizon so distant that it seemed raised well above the
general level. The line of this was quite distinct for its entire sweep,
yet it joined almost imperceptibly a sky heaped and piled with irregular
masses of white clouds that cast their broken, fantastic shadows
everywhere across the spreading plains, yet did not conceal overhead the
sky of mother-of-pearl tint. Below, the village, like a capricious waif
that has come here far from nowhere out of mere spite or unsociability,
made itself as comfortable as possible in its shallow hollow among
dark-green masses of mango-trees. Roads, just born rather than made,
straggled out of it in all directions, soon to be lost in the green and
haze-blue immensity, as if man had dared venture only a little way out
into the unpeopled universe, vast and trackless as the sea. A few
venturesome _fazenda_ houses peered forth from their mango groves a mile
or two from the town, but these did not noticeably break the uninhabited
and virgin world, the _sertão_ or _matta_, which mere mention of “the
plains of Goyaz” calls up in the imagination. It was a distinct pleasure
to be again entirely beyond the hubbub of cities, beyond the reach even
of the ubiquitous trolley, with the world below deadly silent but for
the occasional far distant, yet piercing scream of an ox-cart creeping
imperceptibly along one of the languid, haphazard, straggling trails
that appeared from somewhere out in the wilderness. They sounded like
factory whistles, these distant _carros de boi_, with their solid wooden
wheels and total innocence of grease on their turning axles, the scream
of which—_chiar_, the Brazilians call it, aping the sound—ceased at
length abruptly before the principal shop, run by a “Turk,” where the
eight or ten oxen, steered by a driver who prodded them in the neck with
a goad lying over his shoulder without so much as glancing back, and
whom they followed unerringly, fell into the spirit of the scene, the
silence broken now only by the occasional sharp, vexed note of a worried
rook and the somnolent humming of flies. The End of the Railroad means
far away and quiet, indeed, in these seething modern days. Before long
we may not be able to find it at all; yet one feels at times impelled to
come to such ends of the road and climb to a high place overlooking the
world, there to sit and unravel the tangled threads of life into some
semblance of order again before descending to plunge once more headlong
into the fray.
The worst of coming 710 miles up-country from Santos—and the time it had
taken made it seem ten times that—was that I must spend as long, without
even the reward of new sights and experiences, to come down again. The
same glorified way-freight carried us southward in the morning, and for
once it was crowded. Not only were there all my fellow-guests at the
run-down hovel owned by a “Turk” who had lived so long in Brazil that he
seemed to prefer Portuguese to his native Arabic, all of whom had spent
the night playing some noisy form of poker, but a new fork of the
railroad was being opened that day to Roncador (“Snorer,” it would be in
English), and everyone in Catalão who owned shoes had been invited to
ride out and help inaugurate. In consequence our tiny two-car train was
so densely packed with well-meaning but unpleasing mortals of all ages,
sexes, sizes and colors that we mere ticket-holders were crowded out of
seats and forced to stand on the swaying platforms as far as the
junction of Goyandyra. There we had to go without “breakfast,” because
the inaugurators assaulted the limited table supplies in such force that
passengers could not get within grabbing distance. It was perhaps as
well, for hunger is slight suffering compared with watching at close
range the contortions of such a throng stoking away whole knife-lengths
of those viands which they did not spill on the earth floor.
Below Uberaba the “Mogyana” branches, giving me new territory all the
way back to Campinas. Most of it looked unpromising for our purposes,
until nightfall brought me to Franca, only three hours north of Riberão
Preto and the terminus of a daily express. Here were two cinemas, side
by side on the central praça. I drifted into one of them and handed my
card to the owner-manager. When the crowd at last gave us a chance to
talk it over, I set my remarks to the tune of “Oh, this is an
unimportant, far-away little place and I don’t believe we will bother
with it.” The result was that I soon had the man all but on his knees to
have us come. He offered to rent the theater for ten per cent. of the
total receipts, and when I declined the trouble of staging the affair
ourselves, he begged me to let him do everything and take as our share
seventy per cent. of the proceeds. At last I had equalled that fabulous
Chilean contract! Indeed, had I been born with a mean disposition I
fancy I could have made that pillar of Franca do anything, short of
presenting me with his playhouse, to keep me outside the doors of his
hated rival.
I was gone again at sunrise and know naught of Franca, except what may
be seen at night and one added bit of information. It has a match
factory in which a huge stock of an article that the region still
imports from the outside world is locked up by government order because
the owners cannot raise the seven contos in twenty-reis stamps needed to
decorate the boxes before they can be placed on the market. Only once
during that day’s journey did I halt. At Cascavel, fittingly named
Rattlesnake, I took a branch line into the cool, grassy uplands of the
“Brazilian Switzerland” and spent the night in Poços de Caldas. This is
far-famed throughout the country as a watering-place at a goodly
elevation for Brazil, with sulphurous hot springs much frequented by
well-to-do natives during the season. But that was over; the
barracks-like hotel with its monasterial cells of rooms had only a
scattering of guests, and there was no visible reason why the
Kinetophone should journey to a spot that had fallen upon such lean
days. Half a day south I might have taken a direct line from Mogy Mirim
to Rio, but it was eleven days since I had heard our artists sing or
learned how things were faring with my two companions without a tongue
between them. I hurried on, therefore, to Campinas in time to be refused
admittance to our first performance at the “Rink”—until the youthful
manager, catching sight of me, thrust the door-keeper aside with
extended hand.
I found “Tut” and Carlos conversing freely together in a language that
was not Portuguese and certainly was not English. In Jundiahy they had
carried out my first contract so well in the face of rainy weather,
toboggan streets of uncobbled red mud, and a reputation as a “poor show
town,” as to win high praise, while even here in such a metropolis as
Campinas they showed every evidence of being able to give their
performance, watch the doors and at least count the “deadheads,” and
collect our share of the money without my assistance. The manager of the
“Rink” had lived up to his promise in the matter of advertising, and had
sent a street-car carrying a band and entirely covered with posters and
the likeness of Edison over every trolley-line in town. Yet our
audiences were not all they should have been on Brazil’s second
Independence Day, whether by reason of the possibility of a political
upheaval at the change of the national administration, that musical
Campinas was too “high-brow” for what Edison had to offer, or, as we
suspected, because city, state and nation were beginning to feel
seriously the pinch of the “brutal hard times.”
On the morning after our Campinas engagement the show and I again parted
company. While the former sped away up the broad-gauge “Paulista” to São
Carlos and points beyond, I took the slow and narrow “Mogyana” back the
way I had come, intending to catch the noon train westward from Mogy
Mirim toward Rio. But the pleading of a compatriot slightly altered my
plans. In Campinas we had made the acquaintance of a man from New York
and Jerusalem who was misusing his racial talents in strenuous efforts
to refute, in the interests of an American insurance company, the
Brazilian argument of “But why should I have my life insured and leave
my wife a lot of money to spend on some other man when I die?” Ideas,
specially those with a $ attached, sprouted overnight in the fertile
brain of my misplaced fellow-countryman, and bright and early that
Thursday morning he came running down to the station with a new one. He
had suddenly seen a chance to retrieve recent bad fortune by hiring the
Kinetophone outright at the conto for two nights which I had set as the
fixed price for small towns and taking it out to his old stamping-ground
of Amparo, where he proposed to enlist the services of his bosom
companions, the priests, nuns, and other Biblical influences of the
town, into selling tickets beforehand on the church-festival plan. I am
always ready to let a man make money, especially if he makes some for me
at the same time, so we dropped off at Jaguary and took the branch to
Amparo.
It was an unusually pleasing little town for Brazil, with all its
streets paved in stone blocks, several pretty little parks, and spread
along so narrow a valley that one could fancy the beans from its
coffee-clad hills rolling right down into the central praça ready for
roasting. But, like all the State of São Paulo, Amparo had unwisely put
all its eggs in one basket—the coffee basket—and whereas ten milreis an
_arroba_ is considered by coffee-growers only a fair price, Brazil’s
chief export was then selling for 3$500! Hence the town was “muito
ruim,” cold, stony dead from the theatrical point of view, and, though
there was a nice little theater with cozy seats and plenty of boxes for
the “excellentissimas familias,” the impresario had lost his nerve
completely. When my friend and guide gently mentioned 600$ a night as
the bargain of a life-time, the manager all but swallowed his neck, then
recovered sufficiently to say that a Portuguese company of the type most
beloved in Brazil had given a first-night the week before, after an
uproar of advertising, and had taken in just 25$! I immediately lost all
desire to bring the Kinetophone to Amparo, though my friend from
Manhattan and the Holy Land, with the admirable buoyancy of his race,
went up to the convent school to talk it over with the mother superior,
and saw his efforts crowned with success—to the extent of an invitation
to dinner.
From Mogy Mirim a shaky little train carried me westward through more
wilderness than coffee, past the lively little town of Itapira roofing a
slight hill, to a helter-skelter village called Sapucahy, where it
unloaded us on a platform, bag, baggage, and bathrobes, and backed away.
As frail a train backed in from the other direction and loaded us up
again, all the Brazilian travelers paying _carregadores_ to set their
bags down from the windows and up again, and after more than an hour of
fuss and frustration we creaked on. The yellow creek of Sapucahy, it
transpired, was the boundary between São Paulo, where the “Mogyana’s”
concession ended, and the State of Minas Geraes, where we had been taken
in charge by the “Rede Sul Mineira,” a branch of the “Brazilian Federal
Railways.”
The land was somewhat swampy now, more wild and unsettled, with parasol
pine-trees beside slender, undeveloped palms with thin tufts of
disheveled foliage. The town of Ouro Fino (“Fine Gold”) was a small,
off-the-main-line sort of place, but here the daily train got in at five
at night and did not leave until five in the morning, so whatever we
might make would be money in pocket. After supper I set out on the steep
hillside up which the town is built and down which run red mud streets,
and at length found at his club—_the_ club, in fact—the manager of the
local theater, a tar-brushed youth of aristocratic manners, or at least
gestures, who naturally accepted and signed without argument the
contract I handed him. Upon my return to the hotel I found the
dingy-looking room I had left an hour before gay with speckless white
bedclothes and fancy mosquito canopy, evidently in honor of the large
theatrical troupe which rumor already had it would soon be following in
my wake. Our train stood all night just outside my window, giving me,
perhaps, too great a feeling of security, for I was all but left behind.
It was already pulling out toward a faint crack in the darkness when I
scrambled on board, breakfastless and not fully dressed, and with the
privilege of paying a fifty per cent. fine on my ticket for not having
bought it at the station.
Long piles of wood for the locomotives stood along the way through a
wilderness inhabited by “poor white trash” in rags smeared with red
earth, who crowded to the doors of their thatched huts as we passed. For
some time we followed the Sapucahy, swollen red with floods that gave a
picturesque appearance to the hilly village of Itajubá on its banks.
This was a friendly little town where everyone spoke to strangers, after
the pleasant manner of back-country districts, but though it has an
important engineering school, it is little more than a grass-grown
hamlet, with a populous cemetery conveniently situated on a hill close
above it, so that all the inhabitants can drink to their ancestors.
Itajubá was just then the object of a general interest out of all
keeping with its size. Just next door to the “Cinema Edison” in which I
arranged for our appearance was the modest home of the new president of
Brazil. There he had lived most of his life—even since his election on
March first, though he was “Dudú’s” vice-president and required by the
constitution to preside over the senate—and he had left less than a week
before for his inauguration.
The train next set me down at Caxambú, another of the watering-places on
the irregular line across southwestern Minas, where the rolling country
from the Plata northward begins to break up almost into mountains and
produces a stratum of hot and cold mineral springs. Huge hotels
accommodate those who come to “take the waters” in Caxambú, as in Poços
de Caidas not far distant, and a mineral water that sells all over
Brazil at a milreis or more a small bottle is here as free as the air.
The largely negro and barefoot local population comes in a constant
stream, carrying every species of receptacle, to a low spot in the
center of town in which the water bubbles up incessantly, and where all
manner of paupers and loafers sit under the feathery plumes of waving
bamboos, drinking in turn out of a broken bottle.
[Illustration: Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former
Brazilian president]
[Illustration: Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes]
[Illustration: The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello
Horizonte, are decorated with paintings]
The same ancient, dirty, German-made cars that had bounced me into
Caxambú bounced me out again in the afternoon, and all the rest of the
day I bumped along at the tail end of a way-freight that seemed
constantly on the point of falling to pieces as it thundered in and out
of the hills on a warped and unrepaired old track. To the north the
earth lay piled high into the heavens, for Minas has some real
mountains. Swift tropical darkness fell, and we went banging on into the
night, our old wood-burner leaving a trail of fireworks behind us that
gave it the suggestion of some fire-spitting dragon of medieval legend,
and yanking us at last into Cruceiro. Next morning I took the direct
line from São Paulo to Rio, and it was pleasant indeed to ride once more
on a broad-gauge, roomy, coal-burning train. Rain had given the country
an aspect quite different from that of two months before, but nothing
could disguise the lesser industry and progress toward civilization in
the State of Rio de Janeiro than in that of São Paulo. Rezende, the
first town over the boundary, proved to be a village posing as a city, a
ragged, barefoot place, overrun with dust and squalor, with ambitionless
loafers and negro good-for-nothings. Professionally, too, it was a
shock; far from finding it worthy of a Kinetophone performance, we could
not have given a dog-fight there to advantage.
The slightly fertile country began at length to tip downward and we
descended through long tunnels between vast opening vistas cut off at
some distance by a great blanket of fog coming up from the sea. At Belem
there was already an atmosphere of Rio, still some thirty miles away,
with frequent towns and suburban service from there on, though we halted
only at Cascadura and drew up at length in the familiar scent and hubbub
of the capital. _Carregadores_ snatched my belongings without so much as
“by your leave” and bundled me into a taxi—which reminds me that inside
my unlocked valise, that had been tossed about and left lying in all
manner of places since leaving Campinas, there were a million and a half
reis of our earnings in Brazilian bills. One’s possessions are so much
safer under such circumstances in South America than in the United
States that what would seem criminal carelessness in the north becomes a
common habit.
It was like getting home again to hear the newsboys bawling “_A Rua!_”
“_A Noite!_” “_Ultimas Noticias!_” in the guttural throat-growl peculiar
to Rio, to be accosted by the same old lottery-ticket vendors, the same
street-car conductors, to see the same “women of the life” strolling the
Avenida and riding invitingly back and forth on the first section of the
“Botanical Garden Line.” There was almost a monotony of familiar faces,
so accustomed had I been for years to always seeing new and strange
ones. The “Sugar Loaf,” hump-shouldered Corcovado, topsail Gavea, lofty
Tijuca, and all the rest still looked serenely down upon the human ants’
nests at their feet with the immutability of nature’s masterpieces.
Yet Rio was different than I had first known it. Had I left it for good
and all when I had expected, I should have had a better impression, but
a false one; I should have known only the winter Rio, which is
magnificent and has little in common with Rio of the summer-time.
Statisticians assure us that, thanks to the trade winds and its greater
proximity to the ocean, Brazil’s metropolis falls several degrees short
of Buenos Aires in the most infernal months of the year, but it is
doubtful whether anyone except the thermometer recognizes the advantage.
In late November it lay sweltering under a lead-heavy blanket of heat
that drenched one at the slightest exertion, mental, moral, or physical.
No sooner did one put on a collar than it melted about the neck—and not
only is a fresh white collar indispensable in Rio, but they cost sixty
cents each and twelve cents a washing, and rarely outlive more than four
journeys to the beat-’em-on-a-rock style of Brazilian laundries.
There was less evidence, however, than I expected of the rioting that
had marked the change of administration a few days before,—a few broken
windows between the office of _O Paiz_, chief journalistic supporter of
“Dudú,” and our first Brazilian playhouse, a bullet-mark in a stone or
brick wall here and there to recall the battling hordes that had surged
up and down the Avenida. The trouble had started on the eve of the
inauguration of the man from Itajubá. Among “Dudú’s” Machiavellian bag
of tricks was a company of government bouncers and strong-arm men under
command of a ruffian known as Lieutenant Pulcherio. On Saturday night,
in the last hours of the detested régime, the lieutenant and his
fellow-officers were discussing their glorious past over a quiet
whiskey-and-soda in the Hotel Avenida bar when a group of the
_populares_ they had so long oppressed stopped to mention what they
thought of them. The political protegees replied to this vile affront to
their noble caste by firing on and attacking with swords the mainly
weaponless _populares_, and among other gallant deeds worthy of their
past killed a negro newsboy of twelve. The _povo_, however, for once
vulgarly resisted their noble superiors by laying hands on bricks and
cobblestones and weltering back and forth across the Largo da Carioca
and the Avenida, managing in the process to prepare the beloved
Lieutenant Pulcherio for funeral.
Early the next morning the opposition newspapers were already pouring
out their pent-up spleen on the head of the outgoing president,
resurrecting censored articles and deluging the disappearing
administration with vituperation. The names they called the “odious
gaucho” were scarcely fit to print; those applied to “Dudú” sometimes
had the genius of intense exasperation. There were columns of such
gentle remarks as:
The four years now terminating mark
the blackest, the most nefast page
in our history, the most painful
calamity with which Providence has
flagellated us since Brazil was
Brazil. During the administration of
the analphabetic sergeant who got
possession of the chief power by
knavery and the imposition of the
barracks, justice was disrespected
and reviled, immorality created
rights of citizenship, robbery and
corruption ruled unrestrained. There
has not been a day since the
inauguration of this unpleasant
mediocrity, degenerate nephew of our
great Deodoro, that the President of
the Republic and his auxiliaries did
not go back on their plighted word,
in which there was not registered a
new political infamy, in which we
did not hear of a new crime or a new
immorality. Praise God, this
terrible four years of darkness is
ended!
The inauguration took place in the early afternoon of Sunday, the
fifteenth of November, anniversary of the day on which the republic was
declared. In Brazil this ceremony is as simple as the swearing in of a
juror. The incoming president takes the oath privately, signs his name,
bids farewell to his predecessor, and the thing is done. On this
occasion things moved even more swiftly. The instant the other had taken
his place, “Dudú” sprang into an automobile, even forgetting in his
haste to embrace the new president, according to time-honored Brazilian
custom—of thirty years’ standing—and fled to the protection of
Petropolis and his youthful consort. He had good precedent for his
eagerness; other retiring presidents of Brazil have done likewise. When
Campos Salles left the presidency in 1902 he was stoned by the populace,
yet all Brazilians agree that he was by no means as corrupt or poor a
president as the “unpleasant mediocrity” who was just then fleeing.
It quickly began to be apparent, however, that perhaps “these terrible
four years of darkness” were not entirely ended. The new president was
considered an honest and, within Brazilian limits, a democratic man, but
he was evidently not quite strong enough to throw off the domination of
the national boss, the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul.
It was partly due to this feeling of disappointment, partly to the
increased wrath caused by publication of censored articles left over
from “Dudú’s” reign, reciting unbelievable official thievery and
corruption, and to the release of great bands of political prisoners
from dungeons in the islands of the bay, where they had been sent
without trial or even accusation, that serious riots again broke out
soon after my return to the capital. This time the fuss was started by
students from the schools of medicine, law, and the like, who decided to
“bury” the ex-president. Something like burning in effigy, this was
considered a great insult not only to the former executive in person but
to the army which he, as a field marshal, represented. The army general
in command of the police brigade of the federal district went out to
stop the outrage. The students were already parading the streets with a
gaudily gilded “coffin” and using the offensive nicknames of “Dudú” and
“Rainha Mãe,” when the brigade was set in motion. Before it could
accomplish its purpose, orders came from the newly appointed minister of
justice to let the students go on with their _brincadeira_ (child’s
play), whereupon the general in command rode back to the ministry and
resigned—knowing he was to be dismissed next day anyway. Meanwhile the
students had been joined by an immense mob of _populares_, mainly
barefooted out-of-works and men of the porter, street-sweeper and hawker
type, who marched back and forth through the business section and at
length broke out in attacks on “Dudú” sympathizers or beneficiaries,
which resulted in several deaths. When night fell a regiment of cavalry,
another of infantry, and all the police of the federal district were
protecting the palace of Cattete and that of Gaunabara, in which the new
president had chosen to make his home. Nictheroy, across the bay, also
was seething; even São Paulo threatened to join the revolt, to avenge
the insult of having been offered the most unimportant post in the
cabinet, with oily words about being the “agricultural state par
excellence.” But the new government, like the old, had too firm an ally
in the army for a revolution, with no other support than the weaponless
_populares_, to be successful. Gradually the rioting died away, though
by no means the criticism of the new administration, and Brazil settled
down to another four years not unlike those that had just been so
fittingly brought to a close, but which were to be marked a few months
later by the assassination of the “odious gaucho.”
Though they were empty, I did not feel like again taking our old rooms
out on the Praia do Flamengo. They seemed hot and stuffy; the very
waters of the bay felt tepid; even the president’s palace of Cattete
next door had been abandoned in favor of the newer and more sumptuous
one of Guanabara. I hunted Leme and Copacabana over in vain for quarters
overlooking one of those peerless beaches where the air from the open
ocean might make life endurable, but the houses along the shore belong
to the well-to-do, who do not have to take roomers even in “brutal hard
times.” During my search I accidentally dropped into the Cinema
Copacabana, a pleasant little place in one of the most prosperous
sections of town. The slow-witted Portuguese who announced himself the
owner and manager soon proved to be merely the hen-pecked consort of the
real director. But the place promised well, if properly managed, and I
finally signed it for five days—and fled to Petropolis for Thanksgiving.
Out at the Praia Formosa—which is no more a beach than it is beautiful—I
found a mob of drenched and wilted people fighting about a tiny,
discolored hole in the station wall, of the height of the average man’s
knees, for the privilege of buying tickets to the “summer capital.” For
though there were many daily trains, even when train schedules were
being reduced all over Brazil because of the war-created difficulty of
importing coal, there were thousands of regular commuters and few places
left for the poorer _Cariocas_ who scraped together enough for a
round-trip ticket or two during the season. Most of the commuters had
their permanent seats, with their names and their business or rank
posted on the backs of them, and the mere traveler had to wander through
several cars before he could find a place, like a stranger seeking a pew
in a fashionable church.
The Leopoldina Railway between Rio and Petropolis is the oldest in
Brazil, having been opened to the foot of the range in 1854 so that
Emperor Pedro II could flee from hot weather and yellow fever in the
summer months. We raced without interruption across a low, jungled plain
until the mountains grew up impassable above us. Formerly this region
was well cultivated, but man was unequal to the grim struggle with
nature, especially after the emancipation of the only race that could
cope with the swampy, matted jungle, and to-day the ruins of many a
plantation house lie buried beneath the invading bush, while the few
hovels with their little fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled
wilderness. Yet we sped through many suburban villages shaded with
palm-trees and adorned with immense tumbled rocks. On top of one of
these, high above the surrounding landscape, sat the two-spired church
of Penha, a famous place of pilgrimage. A few peasants were plowing and
loading cut grass upon carts drawn by zebu-sired oxen. Puffs of white
clouds, like exploded shells, hung here and there above the brilliant
horizon. The three-cows advertisement of a well-known malted milk
company suddenly loomed up against the background of jungle, its
Portuguese words making it doubly fantastic in this exotic setting. Here
and there we passed section gangs poling themselves homeward in their
unpumpable hand-cars with long bamboo staffs, like Dutch canal boats.
The first-class seats, cane-covered in respect for the climate, were
divided by an extra arm in the middle, obviating personal contact, which
is the way train seats should be, no matter what fat men or honeymooning
couples may prefer. Many of my fellow-travelers were as much worth
watching as the scenes along the way. Here a man as black as a
beachcomber’s hopes of signing on in Singapore leaned back in pompous
full-dress in his placarded seat, acting like the millionaire president
of some great corporation as he pored over the contents of his elaborate
leather portfolio. I would have given the price of a Brazilian meal to
have seen the couple across the aisle from me suddenly transported to
one of our “Jim Crow” states. He was a self-important mountain of a man,
as white as you or I; she, just as self-important, dressed in rich
plumes and Paris fashions, hideous with diamonds and other glittering
pebbles, was about one-third negro. One poor woman farther on had only
ten fingers, two ears, and as many wrists—her skirts covered her ankles,
strangely enough—on which to wear her jewelry, though she had made the
most of her meager opportunities by putting three or four rings on each
finger. Still farther along an old woman in mourning had bits of black
cloth sewed over her earrings. A nice jet nose ring about two inches in
diameter would have been so much more original, and as becoming, and
would have made conspicuous one’s poignant grief even to those who might
miss so commonplace an adornment as earrings.
There came a stretch of swamp and uninhabited lowland, thick with
bulrushes, then heavily wooded hills grew up before us and we came to a
halt at the edge of the plain. A little engine, built like a kangaroo,
took charge of two of our cars and shoved them up the steep mountainside
on a rackrail track. Now we were buried in narrow cuttings, now gazing
upon magnificent panoramas that opened out through dense woods. There
overhung the line many tremendous boulders, on one of which, large as a
house, some wag had written in red paint, “_Va com esta_” (Take this
along with you). The vegetation presently became sodden wet; the
incessant singing of the jungle, scarcely noticed until it stopped, died
away and vast views opened out on what we had left behind. Flooded with
the rays of a full moon, the far-off range of mountains cut a jagged
line across the sky. It grew cooler every minute; the air became
clearer, and as the oppression of wilting heat wore away a drowsiness
came upon us. At Alto da Serra, some 2500 feet above but barely a mile
farther on than the station at the foot of the range, civilization began
again, with all its pleasant and unpleasant concomitants.
Petropolis, fashionable resort of the wealthy _Cariocas_, national
legislators and foreign diplomats, lies snugly ensconced among the cool
hills, a charming assemblage of villas peering forth from tropical
gardens. The former emperor for which it is named made the town to order
by importing three thousand German and Swiss settlers in 1845, as
examples of cleanliness and industry to his own people. Formerly the
entire government came here during the summer months, but when the
mosquito and his playmate, yellow fever, were routed, most of the native
officials went back to the city, though the diplomats remain, pleasantly
cut off from the rough world of practical politics, which seems far away
indeed, instead of merely an hour and a half distant by Brazil’s best
train service. There is a suggestion of a German watering-place about
Petropolis, with its bizarre little residences, its trim streets lined
by bamboo hedges, its roses, hydrangeas and honeysuckle, its
“kiss-flowers” gathering honey from the fuchsia-trees. The Teutonic type
has persisted in spite of interbreeding and comparative isolation from
the fatherland in a strong Brazilian environment, and up to the
beginning of the war there were still German schools in Petropolis. A
spotless room in one of its quiet summer hostelries is a relief after
months of Brazilian hotel squalor and uproar; or, if one’s income is
limited, there are cheap and pleasant rooms to be had with the German
inn-keepers.
But Petropolis is tropical enough to be unpleasantly warm on a summer
noonday, and among her honeysuckle are horrid hairy spiders as large as
belt-buckles, with perhaps a deadly bite. Like Rio, the town spreads up
many narrowing valleys, fresh green Cascatinha with its weaving-mill
beside a rivulet sliding down a sloping rock and breaking in little
cascades at the bottom, or the restful tree-lined banks of canals
meandering away through the wooded hills. Through the gap by which the
railway creeps up to the plateau may be dimly made out all the Carioca
range and, faintly, the well-known form of the Pão d’Assucar. There is a
vast panorama of Guanabara Bay and all its islands, but Rio is only
hazily suggested, and nearer views of it are much more striking. Another
world on quite another plane spreads out below, careless, happy-go-lucky
negro huts straggling up the wooded valleys as high as they can easily
climb, the soothing sound of mountain brooks, playfully taking little
rocky tumbles here and there without much hurt, joining the birds in
making a kind of sylvan music.
Pedro II still sits out here in a little palm-topped square under the
filtered sunlight or the summer moon, his book closed over a finger, the
tails of his Prince Albert falling on either side of his armchair, his
congress gaiters fitting the ease of his posture, gazing benignly forth
from his great black shovel beard with the studious, half-dreamy look of
the man who hated action. He is by no means our preconceived notion of
an emperor, but a dreamy, easy-going, democratic aristocrat who seems
eminently in his place here in this quiet village far from the rumble of
the world and the heat and labors of the day below. Small wonder he was
the last emperor of this turbulent, pushing western hemisphere. “A great
Brazilian,” they had called him in celebrating his birthday a few days
before, “who gave happiness to his people during almost half a century.”
“Dudú,” looking most comfortable and contented with life, was driving
about the quiet streets of Petropolis with his girl wife behind a pair
of prancing iron-gray horses and a liveried driver frozen in stone. As
in all towns where kings and presidents are regular residents, no one
paid him the slightest attention, though the same pair would no doubt at
that moment have brought the business, and perhaps the peace, of Rio to
a standstill.
There was a nice little up-to-date cinema just outside my window that
would have been an ideal place for us to have made several hundred
dollars—if only we had come to Brazil when the world was still going
round. For the moment it was inhabited by a Portuguese barn-storming
company, and the manager had not only lost heart over the “brutal
crisis,” but had so extraordinarily good an opinion of himself and his
establishment that nothing would induce him to offer us more than forty
per cent. I would not have made a contract at that rate with St. Peter
for a series of performances on the Golden Stairs, and as the only other
cinema in town was small and unimportant, and run by an Italian too
artless to do business with to advantage, there was nothing left but to
fold up my arguments and say good-day.
I came down to Rio to see the show come in, but got a scare instead, for
it did not appear, and we were due to open in Copacabana the following
night. They turned up that evening, however, with a tale to tell. When
they reached Ouro Fino for the Saturday engagement, they found that
bandits had torn up the railway between there and Itajubá, evidently out
of spite against the new president. “Tut” had been equal to the
occasion, however, for though they could not fulfill the Itajubá
contract—the only one we ever failed to carry out—they did not lose the
date, but played a second time in Ouro Fino to a good Sunday house. Then
they had returned to São Paulo, catching the night train and paying a
fortune of 400$ to get themselves and the outfit back to Rio in time,
though nothing like what they would have had to pay had not the
baggage-man mistaken them for “artists” and the trunks for their
wardrobe and stage costumes. Otherwise all had gone smoothly with them,
except for one flattering error on the part of a charming young society
lady of Franca. That town had been placarded, as usual, with our large
three-sheet posters of Edison, and it was natural that “Tut’s” six feet
and more of height should have drawn the attention of the susceptible
sex as he sauntered about the streets. That evening the young lady in
question was heard remarking to her escort, “Isn’t it strange that
Senhor Edison looks so old in his pictures when he is really so young
and handsome?”
During our stay in it, the American flag was somewhat overworked in
Copacabana, there being one over our cinema door and another in a sand
lot a block away in which a battered and paintless one-ring American
circus had recently opened. Not often, I wager, have American showmen
directly competed so far from home. We soon made friends with the animal
trainer, whose ten years of knocking about Brazil had brought out into
sharper relief his native Iowa dialect and point of view. Among his
collection of moth-eaten animals in rusty old cages were two of savage
disposition. The hyena had several times bitten him, but “Frank,” the
tiger, which sprang at anyone who came within ten feet of the cage, was
the only one really to be feared.
“Once,” said the exiled Iowan, holding up the ring finger of his left
hand, which was curled up in a half-circle, “I was doing my act at a
burg up in Minas when ‘Frank’ made a swipe at me with one paw. Lucky she
didn’t get all her claws in, or it would have been good-by hand, but she
happened to get just one claw into the inside of this finger at the
base. She pulled, and I was so scared I guess I pulled too, and she
peeled the whole inside of the finger off the bone—tendons, nerves,
veins and all. I hid that hand behind me so the audience couldn’t see
the blood, or ‘Frank’ smell it, whelted her a few, and finished the act.
I couldn’t go out, for the animals would have followed me into the
audience; I had to finish the act and let them go out the regular way,
like they’ve been trained. Then I wrapped up my hand in a towel and
hiked over to a drug store and he threw a whole bottle of iodine into
it, and then they called in one of these here native doctors and he
chopped around in it and did it up in pasteboard, which of course bent,
so that he had to chop into it every day or so and near killed me, and
finally it twisted into this shape and stayed there. And that guy had
the nerve to charge me a hundred and fifty mil! After the first dressing
I went over to a bar and had a whole glass of rye whiskey and then about
a quart of this nigger rum they call _cachaza_ on top of it—but hell, I
didn’t feel it any more’n milk, and for four nights I never got a wink
of sleep. I was afraid to drink anything for fear of making it worse,
but finally I says, ‘Oh, to hell with it! I’m going to have a sleep,’
and I went out and got drunk—God, I never got so drunk before in my
life! And then I went home and slept a whole night and a day. But it
sure does make a man sick at his stomach to get caught by an animal.”
“Tut” and I had taken a room—my seventh residence in Rio—out at the end
of the tunnel in Leme—so called because a rock shaped like a _leme_, or
rudder, juts out into the ocean at the end of the beach. By this time
Christmas was drawing near and shops were everywhere offering
“_brinquedos á granel_” (playthings by the bushel), and the rains had
come on in earnest. Rio was suffering so severely from the “brutal
crisis” that people in the cinema business had lost their nerve
completely, and it began to look as if the show would catch up with me
before I could make a new contract. For several days I dashed about in
pouring rain before I finally succeeded in running to earth in the bosom
of his own family—which is very bad business form in Brazil—a man with a
string of theaters in Rio, Nictheroy, and the two largest towns of Minas
Geraes. I quickly got his name signed to a sixteen-day contract and,
relieved of the fear of having the show run over me, settled down to
take life easy again.
CHAPTER XIV
WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES
On December 13th our alarm-clock having gone astray and being evidently
unreplaceable in Brazil, where time means so little, I sat up all night
in order to rout “Tut” out at four and send him off to the station,
following him next day up on the cool and comfortable plateau to the
second town of Minas Geraes. Juiz de Fora lies in a deep lap of wooded
hills, with a conspicuous monument and statue of “Christo Redemptor” on
a little parked hilltop high above yet close to the city, and revealing
its site from afar off. Fir trees, masses of roses of all colors, and
other flora of the temperate zone add to stretches of densely green
grass, so unlike the gravel or paved squares almost universal in South
America, in making the town a pleasant place of sojourn. The country
round about is very rolling and without a suggestion of the tropics, but
its coffee is unfortunately small, poor, and ill-tended, grown
completely over in places with weeds and creepers; and as the town
depends almost entirely on this product, it had a squeeze-penny mood
that was not natural to Brazil. Like many another Brazilian town, its
name is of simple origin. A _juiz de fora_, or “outside judge,” went
about the country on a regular circuit in colonial days, holding court
in various places, of which the present town was the most distant, not
from Rio, which had no official standing in the olden times, but from
the ancient capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto.
It was toward Ouro Preto that I continued a day or two later, pausing in
one town to make a contract with the local saloon-keeper, in another to
find a cinema about the size of a box-car tight closed and the owner off
traveling; in a third that turned out to be a mud village without
electricity, even had I been willing to risk dragging our outfit through
the atrocious streets to its toy theater. It was in the last that I
boarded the northbound train an hour before it arrived, which is not
what the Chileans call a “German tale,” but an everyday fact. For there
the government railway, which comes that far with a gauge even wider
than our own, suddenly changes to a meter in width, and I had already
grown weary of sitting in the train I was waiting for when it rolled in
and, transferring its contents to its narrower self, rambled on across
the cool plateau.
Besides our cloth-mounted three-sheets, I had had printed several
thousand posters and window-cards, and the towns of Brazil blossomed
with Edison behind me. Then there were great bundles of _avulsos_, or
handbills, of many colors, to be strewn among the eager populace when
the show actually arrived. Except for the printer’s errors, which were
legion, these new masterly appeals were all my own handiwork, as were
the articles on the life of Edison which sprang up in the newspapers
along my route, for I had at last almost tamed the mis-jointed
Portuguese language. By the time our tour was finished Brazil would
certainly have known the story of Edison far better than he knows it
himself, had he not already been the best-known American in South
America—with the possible exception of Franklin, whom thousands took to
be his contemporary, often asking if the two great inventors sometimes
worked together and were on good terms socially, or whether they raged
with jealousy over each other’s achievements.
There were many tunnels on the way to Ouro Preto, and much winding among
deep-green hills, the soil still reddish, but showing little
cultivation. All this region is at least 3000 feet above sea-level,
where corn feels more at home than bananas or even coffee. Herds of
cream-colored cattle of part zebu ancestry roamed the broken, grassy
countryside. It was a dull, showery day, and the wet green trees clung
to the hillsides like the plumage of birds, while everywhere the palms
stood with disheveled hair. We made several stops on the branch line
eastward from Burnier, just why I do not know, and at length halted at
an isolated building with the information that we had reached Ouro
Preto.
On the train I had chanced to mention my business to one of several
local celebrities in heavy overcoats, who quickly shouted the
information to all within hearing, so that when I disembarked the negro
hotel runners were already calling me “Doctor Franck.” One of them piled
my baggage on his head and we set out on foot into the night, for Ouro
Preto, I quickly discovered, is so steep that vehicles have never become
acclimated there. As we panted upward past great sheer-cut bluffs,
scattered lights gradually disclosed the town, piled and tumbled far
above and below us, the round cobblestones of its precipitous streets
worn so icy smooth by many generations of bare and shod feet that my own
showed a continuous desire to lag behind me. In a hotel as old as Vasco
da Gama, and about as dilapidated, I was shown with ceremonial courtesy
into an enormous front room with a “matrimonial” bed wider than the
street outside, the springs of which I quickly discovered to be solid
planks. Recalling my courteous colored companion, I gave him five
minutes in which to find me a real bed. We wandered much longer than
that through a labyrinth of rooms and anterooms—the latter all with
narrow bedsteads, suggesting the old slave days when each traveler
brought with him a servant to sleep outside his door—before we found a
_cama de arame_, or “bed of wire,” in another vast chamber, with a
window looking out across what seemed to be a bottomless gorge to
patches of small, window-shaped lights climbing high into the sky.
I went out for a stroll, climbing cobbled streets so sheer that a
foot-slip would have landed me in quite another part of town, passing
buildings so old and quaint and medieval that in spite of the modern
lights Edison has bequeathed the place I expected some old Portuguese
viceroy in his cloak and sword and plumed hat to step out of any dark
passageway followed by his slaves and retainers and preceded by his
link-boys. I had all but forgotten the “feel” of old South American
mountain towns, with their something peculiarly their own, and could
easily have fancied myself back in the Andes again. Indeed, I was only
beginning to realize the charm of those old Andean pueblos, barely
guessed when one is physically lost in their squalor, yet fascinating
from a distance of time and space, every twist and turn and descent and
rise of their streets a lurking mystery, like a winding mountain road,
cool and silent—especially silent, in the absence of all wheeled
traffic.
Ouro Preto means “black gold.” The hills and young mountains lying in
tumbled heaps about the town are honeycombed with abandoned mines, as
the town itself is said to be with secret subterranean passageways. Not
even Ayacucho in the Andes is so overrun with churches. Only an accurate
man could throw a stone without hitting one, most of them of light
colored rock, beautified with age, bulking far above the few little old
houses apportioned to each, both by their size and by their places of
vantage on some eminence or mountain nose. Evidently whenever they
killed a slave or committed some particularly dastardly crime the old
Portuguese adventurers salved their consciences or quieted their
superstitions by building a church. Between them the little old houses
straggle in double rows far up every steep valley that has room for
them, here connected by very old stone bridges over narrow, yet deep,
gorge streams, with time-crumbled stone benches along them, there
refusing to follow when the cobbled street suddenly lets go and falls
headlong with many a racking twist into another abyss.
In general, the old capital of the mining province is built along both
sides of a small swift stream, which spills down through town with a
musical sound, picking up some of its garbage on the way. Old colonial
ruins, built in the leisurely, plentiful, massive fashion of long ago,
still bear coats-of-arms and cut-stone Portuguese emblems, some
half-hidden behind masses of white roses or climbing flowers. Old
fountains of variegated colors, very broken, much weather- and
time-faded, still have tiny streams trickling forth from the stone
mouths of human heads or strange creatures unknown to natural history;
scores of quaint old balconies, mysterious corners, and queer porticos
jut out over streets or abysses. There was evidently no building plan
except that imposed by nature. Each householder built on his few feet of
space at any height and slope he chose, so that although the buildings
nearly all cling close together for mutual support, they present most
fantastic combinations, each with its red-tile roof faded from bright to
drab according to its age and situation.
In the main praça up at the top of the town, which is rectangular and
square-cobbled and singularly quiet, is a statue of “Tiradentes” high up
on a slim granite pedestal, his hair wild, his shirt open, his wrists
weighted down with chains. This nickname of “Pull Teeth” was given a
sergeant who, way back in 1792, started the first revolution for
Brazilian independence, but who was captured, executed, and his head
hung up in an iron cage in this same praça. There is a School of Mines,
the principal if not the only one in Brazil, in an old viceregal palace
that was later the seat of the state government until that honor was
taken away from Ouro Preto. The Indians of Minas could not or would not
be enslaved, and the workmen required in the mines were brought from
Africa early and often. I do not recall a mountain town anywhere with so
large a percentage of African blood, though it is not now, of course,
pure African, for the old Portuguese settlers were not slow to dilute it
with their own, and with the exception of a very few of the proud old
families of Minas, who have overridden their environment and kept their
veins free from the taint of slaves, there are not many of full white
race. In the morning the inhabitants straggle home from the outdoor
butcher-shop, carrying strips of raw meat by a grass string run through
them; in the later afternoon the frequent clash of jogging horse-shoes
on the irregular cobblestones calls attention to some young blood come
prancing by the window of his desire, peering out from her window-ledge
over the otherwise silent and almost deserted street.
As to my own job, I did not even have to go out to look for contracts,
for as I sat reading the newspapers and recovering from a Brazilian
lunch, there came slinking in upon me the local pharmacist and owner of
the “Cinema Brazil.” He had heard that I had come, and why, and as he
was eager to outdo his one rival in town, he—ah—er—he, too, had come. If
we played in Ouro Preto it meant four important days—Christmas, followed
by a Saturday and Sunday, and a Monday also, for the trains did not run
on that day. The only entertainment in town, my visitor rambled on, in
his eagerness to attract us, was that provided by two old Italian “women
of the life,” who offered a song and dance nightly at the other cinema.
At a town eight kilometers away there were many “Englishmen” employed in
the gold mines, who would be delighted to come in and see their
fellow-countryman Edison—what, he was not coming himself?—well then, his
invention. No doubt _Senhor Edisón_ did not think poor old Ouro Preto
worth visiting, now that it was no longer the capital, but it had many
wonders even for a great inventor, if one really knew where to look for
them. By this time I had handed him our printed contract, through which
he carefully spelled his way, while I read several columns of newspaper.
Then he brought me back to Brazil with, “Ah yes, very good,
only—er—sixty per cent. is a very large percentage and——” At which point
I broke in with “Why, I ought to charge you eighty per cent. for being
way off here on a branch line, in a town without even wheeled vehicles!”
Whereupon he shuddered and begged me to figure to myself that he had not
said a word and, reaching for the contract, he signed it on the dotted
line.
Rain was pouring and the night was still black when I followed my
baggage down the steep cobbled road to the station. There I discovered,
in a sudden flash of genius, why all Brazilian trains start at daylight
and stop at dark; it is not because they are afraid to go home in the
dark, but so that the languid employees will not have to light the
car-lamps. Even the government night expresses rarely have more than a
firefly of a gas-lamp or a couple of flickering oil-wicks in the end of
each coach. Brazilians are not a nation of readers, and do not demand
decent lights, though there is nothing to prove they would get them if
they did. The print-loving stranger is often warned that it is dangerous
to the health to read during, or just before, or until long after meals,
which may be true, but the Brazilians themselves are living proof that
it is still worse never to read at all. In most stations there are
waiting-rooms only for women, and not a spot for the mere male to sit on
unless he boards the train itself, which is also the favorite
lounging-place of scores of the local population who have no intention
of traveling on it. Here an affectionate crowd was embracing and
fondling one another after the Brazilian fashion and gradually filling a
tightly closed car in which it was not easy to breathe. It is really
foolish, too, to ride first-class on the trains of the interior, for it
means little more than paying double price, when the single is bad
enough, for the privilege of sitting in a cane seat at one end of a car,
instead of in a wooden one at the other. However, a few kind words may
unhesitatingly be said for the railways of Brazil. One may leave all he
possesses in a train seat and not only will no one touch it, but his
fellow-travelers will stand for hours rather than disturb the smallest
parcel left to hold a place. Nor is the baggage-smasher indigenous to
Brazil. Several pieces of our outfit were delicate, yet during a year’s
travel by every known means of conveyance except aëroplane through
nearly every state of Brazil, it was never seriously injured—though on
its return to my beloved native land it was badly damaged between New
York and the Edison factory, an hour away.
[Illustration: Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are found
some of its gold and diamonds]
[Illustration: A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina]
[Illustration: In the diamond field of Brazil]
[Illustration: Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them]
Beyond the old town of Sabará, where the first of the gold that was to
make Minas Geraes famous and Portugal wealthy was discovered in 1698, we
turned westward and a few moments later sighted through bedraggled
palm-trees the glaring new town of Bello Horizonte. No doubt it was to
escape the labor of propelling themselves about the precipitous streets
of Ouro Preto that led the calfless legislators of Minas Geraes to
dethrone the time-honored old capital at the beginning of the present
century and move the government to a hitherto uninhabited spot, justly
called “Beautiful Horizon.” The site chosen on which to build to order
this new capital is a broad shallow lap of rolling country, a bare,
treeless landscape which abets the light-colored new buildings in
producing a constant uncomfortable glare. It is strange that they did
not choose a place with water, a lake or at least a river, which may be
found even in the lofty State of Minas. As it is, there is only an
insignificant creek creeping through town and an artificial pond in the
center of an unfinished park in which the water is so red that even the
swans paddling disconsolately about in it have a reddish hue. The
designers have all the details of a complete city in mind; the
difficulty is to carry out their well laid plans and produce one. For
Bello Horizonte is visible proof that it takes more than houses,
streets, and inhabitants to make a city. Its public buildings are large
and plentiful. Whitewashed houses with bright new red-tile roofs lie
scattered far and wide over the rolling landscape. Wide park streets
with electric tramways stretch out in every direction in a wheel-shaped
system evidently copied from Washington. But the broad avenues are still
unpaved, unpacked stretches of red mud, resembling newly plowed potato
patches, and one soon recognizes that they run nowhere, that they are an
exotic, forced growth which men are still chopping farther back into the
red flesh of the virgin, scrub-grown hills. A few have stretches of
broad cement sidewalks lined with trees, but they are trees still in
their swaddling clothes of protecting frames, or at best are half-grown
and unfamiliar with their duty of giving shade and beauty and
restfulness. Such grass as exists grows in scattered tufts over bare
earth, in no way resembling sod. Though the houses are new, many of them
are set in the beginnings of walled bush and flower gardens, with steep
outside stairways leading to the real residence in the second story and
having fanciful paintings of such scenes as Rio’s Beira Mar on the walls
under the porches. They have an alien, unsatisfying appearance which
suggests that it is better to let even towns grow up of themselves than
to force them by hothouse methods. There are, of course, some advantages
in a city, especially in a capital, built to order, but though
modernity’s gain over medievalism is in some ways shown, Bello Horizonte
lacks not only the charm of old Ouro Preto but even the air and spirit
of a city. The whole place feels like a house one has moved into while
it is still building over his head.
While they were about it, one wonders they did not build in stone,
instead of adobe bricks and plaster. The impression that everything is
built only for a temporary halt, by people who, like Arabian nomads,
expect to move on again to-morrow, pervades all modern America, in sharp
contrast to Europe and the ancient American Indian civilizations. But at
least there are as yet no slums, unless one counts as such the large
clusters of small new houses that were almost huts scattered through the
several shallow valleys spreading out from the town. It is curious how a
city draws houses about it like a magnet even when there seems to be
nothing for the inhabitants to do but take in one another’s washing—or
do one another’s governing. Though it offers free sites to any industry
that will establish itself there, only the scream of a single small
weaving mill is heard in Bello Horizonte. The city produces nothing
except government for the state, and the man who comes into personal
contact with that soon realizes that it “costs expensive” and is none
too good governing at that. More fuss is made over the state president
than over our own national executive. Negro soldiers in khaki and bright
red caps guard his “palace” and great high-walled garden, parading back
and forth day and night before all government buildings with fixed
bayonets, not because there is any real danger—except to the unwary
pedestrian who might run into the pointed blade of some sleepy guard—but
because all Latin-America loves to make a show of deadly weapons even in
time of peace. The population had the bland, sophisticated air of people
already trained to city life elsewhere, like transplanted flora from
other gardens of varied kind and situation. Strangers attract far less
attention than in even larger interior towns, because here all are more
or less strangers and the inhabitants have not lived long enough
together to form that sort of closed corporation of old established
towns, which not only makes a new and unfamiliar face an object of
curiosity, but arouses a kind of distrust and annoyance among the native
inhabitants.
The show reached Bello Horizonte before me and had done a good Saturday
and Sunday business, but “Tut” reported that all records for “deadheads”
were being broken. The manager was a bullet-headed mulatto—whose name,
by the way, was Americo Vespuccio—and who did not have the moral courage
needed to cope with the swarms of official beggars which infest a state
capital. When the doors opened on Monday night I was lolling incognito
nearby. The ticket-taker was a mulatto girl of about fourteen who thrust
out her hand whenever anyone walked in, taking the ticket if there
happened to be one to take, but paying no attention to the fact that as
often as not there was none. Not only were there many people with
monthly passes and permanent free tickets, but the negro management,
being afraid of anyone with authority, real or pretended, had given
everyone capable of manufacturing a shadow of excuse the conviction that
he had the right to enter without payment. In the first few minutes I
saw seventy persons enter without tickets, exclusive of the house
employees and men in uniform. Then I burst into the manager’s office and
informed him that he was going to pay us our percentage for every person
who had not, and did not thereafter, pay an admission fee. He turned an
ashy gray and begged me to take full charge at the door. I discharged
the mulatto girl on the spot, made a ticket-box of my hand-grip by
cutting a slot in it—hitherto ticket-takers had stuffed the tickets into
their pockets or any other convenient receptacle—and proceeded to shock
the good people of “Beautiful Horizon.”
An elaborately dressed man in a frock coat, accompanied by two women
glittering with diamonds, pushed haughtily past.
“Your ticket, senhor?” I smiled, in my most ceremonial Portuguese.
“I never pay admission,” the man replied haughtily.
“And why don’t you?” I retorted, which wholly unprecedented question so
dazed him that without a word he went back to the wicket and bought
three tickets. The same incident was repeated dozens of times that
evening.
Another favorite trick was for a man to enter with one or two women and
purchase tickets only for them.
“Where is yours, senhor?”
“_Eu volto_” (I am coming back) was the unvarying reply, by which the
speaker meant to imply that he was merely going to escort the ladies to
their seats and come right out again, but in almost every case he
remained an hour or more until the “Kinetophone” number had been run and
came slinking out with the air of having kept eyes and ears tight closed
during the performance.
No doubt many of the well-dressed, haughty individuals I sent to the
box-office were state senators and the like, but what of it? We were
paying heavily to support them, paying every time we moved from one town
to another, every time we gave a performance, every time we left or
entered a state, in addition to what we had paid to enter the country,
every time we drew a check, or put up a poster, or inserted an
advertisement, and even in my most charitable mood I could not see why
we should give free entertainment to any government official who was not
there in line of duty.
During the second section a chinless, pomaded popinjay in full evening
dress, with an own-the-earth air, pushed scornfully past when I asked
for his ticket. I stepped in his way, repeated my question, and finally
laid a hand lightly on his arm, whereupon the manager, frightened to a
kind of grayish pink, came running forward to assure me “It’s all
right.”
“But who is he?” I insisted.
“I’ll tell you later,” whispered the trembling mulatto.
The chinless individual, who turned out to be the _delegado_,
corresponding to our chief of police, remained only a few minutes, all
the while plainly boiling with rage. As he came out he stopped before
me—the rush having ceased I was seated—and in a voice and manner that no
doubt scared ordinary people to death, he growled:
“Before you ever grasp anyone by the arm again you want to know who he
IS!”
“Senhor,” I replied, without rising, which is a shocking insult even to
the most petty Brazilian official, “I want to know who everyone is, and
any man who is a cavalheiro will tell who he is under such circumstances
in any civilized country, and until I know who he is I’ll catch him by
the arm or by any other part of the anatomy that is handy.”
He went out, fuming at the nostrils, leaving me wondering if he would
send a subordinate to place me under arrest, but abuse of authority had
become so rampant that I would have been willing to explore the interior
of a Brazilian prison to bring the matter to a head. When the
performance was ended I cornered the manager in his office and forced
him to pay us our share for every “deadhead” I had counted, and though
he and his equally dusky assistant hastened to assure me that my demands
were wholly justified and that they did not stop officials and ladies
“because they did not have the courage of Americans,” there was
something in their manner that told me they would have taken supreme
delight in knifing me in the back. That evening I turned my papers,
valuables, and revolver over to “Tut,” in order to be prepared for the
probable next move of the _delegado_. But he must have suffered a change
of heart, for thereafter even soldiers and policemen in uniform had
orders to pay admission unless they were on duty and wearing their
sidearms to prove it. Thenceforward every resident of Bello Horizonte
who entered the “Cinema Commercio” either handed in a ticket or gave
proof of his right to free admission, whether he was president, senator
or state dog-catcher. When we had broken all records for the time and
place, I ran the second section of the show myself, just to keep in
practice against the day when I must become a motion picture operator,
and went to bed leaving orders to be called at dawn. By this time “Tut”
spoke considerable Portuguese—though, having learned it mainly from
Carlos, he had many of the errors of grammar and pronunciation of
Brazil’s laboring class—so that I left on my next advance trip with less
misgiving.
Nowadays you can go to famous old Diamantina by rail. The world is
building so many railways that there will soon be no place left for
those who prefer travel to train-riding. I had little hope that the
diamond town would prove worth the time and expense necessary to bring
the Kinetophone to it, but I had a personal desire to see it, and also,
though I could not get exact information on the subject, the map
suggested that I might be able to cross on muleback from Diamantina to
Victoria and thereby save myself a long and roundabout trip.
The rain had let up at last, though sullenly, like a despot forced out
of power. All that day there came the frequent cry of “_chiero de panno
queimado!_” (smell of burned cloth), whereupon everyone jumped up and
shook himself—everyone, that is, except the advance-agent of the
Kinetophone, who had ridden behind Brazilian wood-burners often enough
to know how to dress for the occasion. Our “express” not only stopped
but was sidetracked at every station, and every time it gave a sign of
coming to a halt the passengers sprang up as one man, crying “_A tomar
café!_” and poured out upon the platform, to return growling if even a
dog-kennel of a station miles from nowhere was not prepared to serve
them their incessant beverage. “Tut” used to say that the Brazilians
drank so much coffee that their minds went to dregs. It is a curious
paradox, too, that the Brazilian, often an unprincipled rogue in
business, never dreams of cheating the coffee-man out of his _tostão_,
even if he has to exert himself to hunt him up and pay it before
scrambling aboard again as the warning-bell rings.
Beyond Sete Lagoas the country began to flatten out, with patches of
corn in new clearings, then more and more heavy brush and only the
red-earth railway cutting and a wire fence on either side. Curvello, the
largest town of the day, was almost a city, but so largely made up of
negro huts that it probably would not have paid us to make it a
professional visit. The traveler never ceases to wonder how all Brazil
came to swarm so with negroes; all the ships of Christendom could not
have brought so many from Africa, and the original slaves must have
multiplied like guinea-pigs. In the afternoon I got reckless and bought
an apple, which only cost me a milreis—but then, it was a very small
apple. Far up here in the interior prices seemed to be easing off a bit,
but this was largely offset by the lack of small change. In contrast to
Rio, there was almost no silver or nickel, which made an excellent
excuse for plundering the traveler of a few _tostões_ every time he
approached a ticket-window, and forcing him to accept dirty old bills
often patched together out of six or seven pieces that were completely
illegible.
It would have been sunset, had there been one, by the time we pulled
into Curralinho, whence a branch line carries a two-car train three
times a week to Diamantina. I believe I was the only first-class
traveler with a ticket next day, one having a kilometer-book and the
rest government passes or uniforms. There was not a woman on board,
though one man with a government pass had with him a boy of seven who,
the conductor weakly declared, should pay half fare; but he did not
insist and let the matter slide in the customary Brazilian way. No
wonder the Belgian syndicate which built this line and another starting
toward Diamantina from Victoria hovers on the verge of bankruptcy,
though my own ticket cost 14$800, plus 1$600 for the federal government
and 1$600 for the State of Minas, or $5.80 for ninety-five miles of
uncomfortable travel.
Except in spots the country was almost _sertão_, a bushy wilderness with
here and there long piles of wood for the engines. We crossed the Rio
das Velhas, flowing northward and inland, carrying red earth in solution
and pieces it had torn away from the forests through which it had
commandeered passage. There were some cattle and here and there a patch
of bananas in a hollow with a hut or two, but the rest was a desolation
of black rock, which proved to be white inside where the railroad
builders had broken into it. Rare patches of corn were the only visible
cultivation; between scattered collections of miserable adobe huts there
appeared to be no travel; the listless part-negroes lolling their lives
contentedly away in their kennels seemed to raise nothing but children
and, not being cannibals, it was a mystery what they lived on. Slowly
and painfully we climbed to the top of a great ridge, a wild country of
barren rocks heaped up into hills that were almost mountains, drear and
treeless as the landscape of Cerro de Pasco. No wonder the men who
wandered up here seeking their fortunes thought the bright pebbles they
picked up worth keeping, if only to break the melancholy monotony.
Beyond a miserable collection of huts where those of robust nerves ate
“breakfast,” we passed the highest railway point in Brazil, 4,600 feet
above sea-level, whence vast reaches of dreary country, broken as a
frozen sea, spread to the horizon in all directions. The last station
before Diamantina looked like a town in Judea, so ugly was the
desolation that surrounded it, and across this one gazed as vainly for
the city which the map proclaimed near at hand as one may stare for a
glimpse of La Paz from the plains of Bolivia high above it.
Ten years before, one traveled on muleback all the way from Sabará to
reach the heart of Brazil’s diamond-bearing territory, and only this
same year had the inaugural train reached Diamantina, amid hilarious
rejoicing of its population. In the few months that had passed since,
the inhabitants had not lost the sense of wonder which the tri-weekly
arrival of the puffing monster on wheels gave them, and though it was
Christmas Day, nearly the whole town had climbed to the station to greet
us. For climb they must. A youth of decided African lineage took my bag
and we stepped over the edge of the uninhabited plateau, to find a town
heaped up directly below us, all visible roads and trails pitching
swiftly down into it. The medieval streets were rough-paved in misshapen
cobbles, with a kind of sidewalk of naturally flat stones running down
the center. The town was labyrinthian, its narrow blocks of every
possible form between the narrower streets, built to fit the lay of the
land, spilling down on the farther side into a deep valley and backed on
all sides by a rough and savage landscape of blackish hue as far as the
eye could see. It was as picturesque as Ouro Preto, which it seemed to
equal in age, though it had been somewhat less elaborately built than
the old state capital, and its churches were fewer, smaller, and more
insignificant. The fact that here also there were no vehicles may be one
of the reasons why the population seemed so healthy and active—climbing
to the station alone proved that—in spite of their decidedly
preponderating negro blood.
The railroad had not yet brought them long enough into contact with the
outside world to spoil the simple people of Diamantina. They seemed to
live together like a great affectionate family, soft-mannered and little
given to quarreling, even the street boys treating one another like
French diplomats. No doubt it was their negro blood, perhaps also the
adventurous happy-go-lucky, take-a-chance character natural to a mining
community, that gave them their considerable gaiety. There was no
evidence of anything but kindliness and good-feeling among the barefoot
women who stopped to gossip with water-jars set jauntily on their
heads—real jars, too, for Diamantina is so far away from the world that
American oil tins have not yet come to usurp the place of picturesque
native pottery. As final high praise, my hotel host asserted that the
town is so different from the rest of Brazil that a man can occasionally
visit a family with unmarried daughters without bringing them into
disrepute among public gossips. It is, indeed, a Brazilian Utopia!
I was Diamantina’s star guest during my stay, having the main room in
the main hotel looking out on the main praça. The latter was small and
three-cornered, paved with cobbles back in the days of Shakespeare, and
had in its center a bust of a native of Diamantina who was Minister of
Viaçao when President Peçanha was coaxed into signing the decree giving
the Belgians the concession for their railroad. But then, Brazil is the
land of busts, and the man who does not succeed in getting at least one
of himself tucked away in some praça is not much of a buster. My huge
front room, next to the homelike hotel parlor with many chairs and a
cane divan all dressed up in lace coats, was fully twenty feet square,
its immense French windows reaching to a floor made of great hand-cut
planks fastened by handmade spikes with heads an inch square—or in
diameter, according as the blacksmith happened to shape them—and so
glass-smooth and warped and twisted that in places one had to brace
one’s legs to keep from sliding downhill along it. The house seemed
older than the surrounding hills, but there is so much of the new and
crude in Brazil that the old cannot but be greatly relished. As a matter
of fact Diamantina does not deserve a public hostelry, for nearly all
its visitors have the South American habit of stopping with friends or
relatives, and for all its electric lights and spring beds, and moderate
charges, the hotel had only a couple of paying guests.
The adventurous _bandeirantes_ of São Paulo first penetrated this region
looking for gold. A considerable amount of it was found in the muddy
stream at the foot of the present town, and early in the seventeenth
century the adventurers founded the village of Tijuca, which took its
name from a nearby swamp. In olden times gold dust and tiny nuggets were
used as money throughout the region, and there were scales in every
shop. Gold seems to be found almost anywhere in the region, and
placer-mining is the natural occupation of all its inhabitants. When
electric-light poles were put up by a syndicate at Boa Vista, in order
to give Diamantina as light by night what the company uses as power
during the day, the children carried off the earth dug up from the holes
to wash out the gold. After a heavy rain tiny particles of gold are
picked up in the gutters of Diamantina and along the edge of the little
stream below it. So here at last is a place where you can really pick up
gold in the streets, yet the people are poorer and more ragged than
those who live by planting beans.
It was while searching for gold that the miners of Tijuca came across
many bright, half-transparent pebbles that were plainly of no use to
them, but the largest of which they gave to their children or used as
counters in their own card games. There were a bushel or more of them in
such use in the village and its vicinity when a new priest arrived from
Portugal. In his first game of cards the pious padre noticed the
peculiar poker chips that everyone produced by the handful. He let the
information leak out that he thought them very pretty, and would be
pleased to have them as keepsakes. They were quite worthless, of course,
to his new parishioners, and if his innocent sacerdotal eye was caught
by their transparent brightness, they saw no reason why they should not
humor his whim, and at the same time gain in favor with the Church, by
giving him such of the worthless little baubles as he did not win at
cards. Thus he gathered together half a bushel or more of the pebbles,
and suddenly disappeared in the general direction of Amsterdam, dropping
a hint in Rio on the way.
Word soon reached the Portuguese crown of this new form of riches in its
overseas possessions. It turned out that the range of hills from well
south of the present town of Diamantina to far up in Bahia, a tract of
more than four hundred square leagues, was diamond-bearing land. Indeed,
if one may believe local conviction, the finest diamonds in existence
come from Minas Geraes, and the world’s most famous black diamonds from
Bahia State a bit farther north.
Diamonds were first discovered in India and for centuries came only from
there. When they were found in Brazil, thousands of the stones were sold
as Indian diamonds not only because buyers were prejudiced, but because
the Portuguese government had forbidden private mining on penalty of
death, and the contrabandists were forced to reach their market by way
of India. The village of Tijuca became a flourishing center, far as it
was from the outside world, and for all the stern government régime set
over the region. In 1734 Portugal sent out an “Intendente Geral dos
Diamantes,” with absolute power to enforce the government monopoly. His
palace still exists in a garden near the top of the town, with the
remains of an artificial lake on which he kept a sailboat to show the
people of what came gradually to be known as Diamantina how he had
crossed the sea. The crown forbade individual mining and gave the job to
contractors, who worked six hundred slaves and paid 220–240$ yearly per
slave for the privilege, yet who made fortunes even though all large
diamonds and twenty per cent. of all finds went to the crown. Population
multiplied and Diamantina became a center of riches and luxury. Contrary
to the case in the rest of Brazil, many broken noblemen and men of
education came here to mend their fortunes, and the colony, and
eventually all the province of Minas Geraes, became a focus of
“civilization,” as that word was understood in those days,—much powdered
hair, knee-breeches, beauty patches, minuets—and swarms of miserable
slaves. It may be that the courtesy of the poor Africanized inhabitants
of to-day is but a hold-over from those times of elaborate etiquette.
Amazing tales are still told in Diamantina of its golden days. It was
evidently the custom of the government viceroys to imprison the
contractors as soon as they got rich and “roll” them penniless. One
official is reputed to have made every guest a present of a cluster of
diamonds. The _Grupo Escolar_, or school building, across the street
from my hotel was once the residence of a great diamond buyer, and when
the building was made into a school some years ago a score or more of
skeletons were found tumbled together in the bottom of a secret shaft.
This revived the legend that the buyer had a chair set on a trapdoor,
and when a man came in with a large “parcel” of contraband diamonds he
was asked to sit down and make himself at home while the buyer looked
over the stones—and brought up at the bottom of the shaft.
In 1771 the famous Pombal sent out the “green book,” with fifty-four
despotic articles that nearly depopulated the district, but in 1800 the
régime softened, and finally, in 1832, the government monopoly was
abolished. Since then mining has been more or less intermittent.
Diamonds reached their highest price during the war with Paraguay, at
the end of which, in 1867, the stones were found in South Africa, a blow
from which the industry in Brazil has never recovered. For while it is
claimed in Diamantina that Brazilian diamonds average much higher than
those from the Cape, the African mines now produce at least eighty per
cent. of the world’s supply and with more modern methods and widespread
propaganda completely control the market. Abolition was the final straw,
and in five years exportations of diamonds from Diamantina dropped from
2,500 to 300 annually.
Unlike those of South Africa, the diamonds of Brazil are found on or
near the surface. In a few places quartz is broken open in the search,
but in general they are taken loose in the gravel of the alluvial
deposits by the simpler process of placer mining. The fact that enormous
tracts of territory were worked over by the Portuguese does not mean
that they took out fabulous amounts, according to modern local
authorities, because they had to feed their slaves anyway and it was to
their advantage to keep them working, even if the finds were few.
To-day, though there are some syndicates and large companies, most of
them are completely paralyzed and such work as is done is mainly by
individual natives. The company troubles seem to be due to lack of a
good mining law—natives may wash for diamonds anywhere, even on company
claims—the insecurity of titles, the prohibitive cost of transportation
for machinery, high tariffs, low rate of exchange, the constant war of
South Africans against South American diamonds, and finally the
“salting” of mines by fake promoters, coupled with carelessness of
foreign stockholders in sending out experts to examine the ground before
accepting even an honest promoter’s word for it. Thus fortunes have been
lost in the Brazilian diamond fields, notwithstanding the fact that
diamonds continue to be steadily picked up in them.
The largest diamond ever found in Brazil was the “Star of the South,”
found at Agua Suja (Dirty Water), on the line to Catalão. This weighed
about the same as the famous Kohinoor diamond,—300 carats. The stones
are usually found in the beds of rivers, larger near the source, and
smaller farther down, for they wear off in traveling, and in sand,
earth, and common gravel, usually with gold. Rough diamonds generally
have no brilliancy, looking merely like white, half-transparent pebbles,
though any child of Diamantina is said to be able to recognize one at a
glance. There is really nothing more prosaic than diamond gathering, and
the resemblance is slight between those who hunt for and those who wear
them. None of the improved methods of South Africa have been introduced
into Brazil, not even the hand screen or the “grease board,” and the
negroes still use the _batea_, or wooden bowl in the shape of a hand
basin, in washing for both diamonds and gold. When he has chosen his
spot beside some stream the negro sets up a _baca_, a kind of topless
soapbox with one end knocked out, about six inches above the surface of
the water and fills it with gravel. Then with the _batea_ he scoops up
water and throws it with a peculiar flip on the gravel, washing it from
side to side until the loose stuff runs off and leaves only the pebbles.
These are then spread out and gone over carefully by hand, the diamonds
being readily detected by the experienced eye, particularly since,
unlike the other stones, they cannot be wet and for that reason stand
out brilliantly from the rest. In fact, in Spanish and Portuguese they
are as often called _brillantes_ as _diamantes_. With the war and the
sudden drop in the diamond market that came with it the people of
Diamantina largely left off hunting for diamonds and began the more
paying occupations of planting corn and gathering firewood.
On the Sunday afternoon following Christmas, the rain having at last
ceased, I went out for a walk. An hour’s climb, in which I did not
suffer from heat, brought me to a cross on the culminating point of the
great mass of gray-black rock of ragged formation across the valley and
small stream in which many a diamond has been picked up and much gold
washed. Here is a full view of the town, stacked up on the green and
fertile side of the long valley and spilling like coagulated grease down
into it, scattered groups of eucalyptus trees and its general greenness
in great contrast to the rockiness of all the rest of the vast and
jagged encircling landscape. The gothic church of Coração de Jesus and
the tree-girdled seminary stand somewhat above the rest of the orderless
heap, and one realizes that the railroad does indeed come in at the top
of the town, for its station is so high that here it cannot be seen
above the edge of the plateau on which it sits. Diamantina is a great
trading post of the interior, and down in the center of town there is a
species of Arab khan, a roof on posts where shaggy sun-, rain-, and
road-marked muleteers with long, ugly _facas_ in their belts pile their
saddle-blankets and goods and cook over campfires. The old, old highway
unravels down across the broken rocky hills, descends into the valley,
stops a while at the khan, and having gathered its forces together once
more into a compact trail, marches across and out of the valley again
and away over the bleak horizon.
It was in the middle of this public trail that I came upon two negroes
in quest of gold washed down by the recent rains. While one dug up
wooden bowls of earth and gravel, the other stood knee-deep in a muddy,
dammed-up pool and, filling his _batea_ with the earth brought by the
other and letting water into it, whirled it about until the heavy matter
went to the bottom. Then he scraped off by hand the top layer,
continuing the process until within ten minutes he had left about a
quart of heavy black earth. This he dumped with more of the same in a
white sand-nest he had made on the bank of the little stream crossing
the trail. Like most of his fellow-townsmen he was talkative and ready
to explain his affairs to a stranger. He had washed for gold after a
rain ever since he was a boy, getting from two to four milreis worth
every time, and where there is gold there are sure to be diamonds,
especially the “chapeu de palha” (“straw hat”), which he explained to be
a very flat diamond making much show with little weight. Though both he
and his companion were shoeless and had been from infancy, ragged,
illiterate and half toothless, they were far from ignorant on some
points, especially of words used in the diamond industry, which they
spoke with a curious negro mispronunciation mixed with slang.
In riding about the vicinity on other days I came upon several gangs of
a score of negroes each, bare-legged and ragged, hoeing at an average
wage of eighty cents a day in banks of red earth through which a rainy
season stream had been turned. This they keep up as long as the rains
last, rarely seeing a diamond, which wash along through the artificial
gorge with the other gravel and come to rest on a sandy flat place
beyond. Then the men are set to “batting the _baca_,” until the sand is
washed away and the diamonds recovered by the same crude methods used in
the first days of the colony. One question almost sure to be asked by
the layman is how workmen are kept from stealing the diamonds. Theft, it
is explained, is by no means so easy to accomplish as would appear at
first glance. In the first place, it takes on the average a cartload of
sand and gravel to yield a one-quarter carat diamond. By the time the
negro has washed a load down to about two bushels an overseer has an eye
on him and watches him until the process is finished. It is rare for a
diamond to appear suddenly on the surface during the preliminary
washing, when the negro might snatch it, and even if he did he would
have a hard time selling it. If ever a native of Diamantina has stolen a
diamond, even as a boy, he is blackballed in the community for the rest
of his life. It is a long way to anywhere else, even since the advent of
the railroad, so that thieving of the town’s chief product is extremely
unusual. Men from far off up country come in with thousands of dollars’
worth of diamonds or black carbons on a pack mule, which lags far behind
with its negro driver. Everyone along the way knows what it carries, yet
for decades no driver has run away nor anyone “framed” a holdup.
In town, gold and precious stones are handled with a casual carelessness
only equalled by the Bank of England. A local jewelry shop, famous in
the trade the world over, looks like a miserable little tinker’s den,
where a dozen men and boys, all with more or less African blood, work at
dirty old worn and smoked benches. About them is a wilderness of junk
where cigarette butts, gold nuggets, old iron tools, gold wire, and
worthless odds and ends lie scattered and tumbled together with diamonds
of all sizes, cut and uncut, old tin tobacco-boxes containing fortunes
in diamonds and precious stones of several species wrapped in dirty bits
of paper. Gold coins of the former Empire as well as new British
sovereigns waiting to be melted up for local use can scarcely be
distinguished from the dusty rubbish on the tables; drawers filled with
the ragged money of to-day stand half-open; a tiny show-window—recently
put in as a concession to modern ideas—has a six-carat diamond stuck
against the glass with several smaller ones about it, day and night; a
can that originally held soap but now full of emeralds, amethysts,
topazes, and half a dozen other precious stones found in the region was
kicking about the floor. Yet there was no sign of lock or key, except
that used to fasten the outer door at night. The owner only came now and
then during the day, and amid this disordered jumble of wealth his dozen
workmen and boys toiled from seven in the morning until sometimes nine
at night at ludicrous wages without a loss ever having been reported.
Down in the valley near the town there is a native diamond-cutting
establishment, a capacious old barn of a building with the immense
rough-hewn beams of olden times and two long double rows of “wheels” run
by water-power on which the stones are “cut.” Strictly speaking, a
diamond is not “cut” at all; it is ground—_lapidar_ or “stoning” they
call it in Brazil. Disks of the best grade steel, about a foot in
diameter, move round and round at a moderate rate of speed. Rough
diamonds are first chipped off by hand to the general shape desired;
then they are set into a bed of lead and solder so that one facet may be
ground down, after which they are removed at a forge, resoldered, and
ground on another facet. The “wheels” must be polished down and filed in
slight ridges every two or three weeks, a task that takes about one day,
and they are rented at 12$ a month to the individual _lapidarios_, both
men and women, largely of negro blood, who work for themselves, either
“cutting” diamonds for others or speculating with such as they can buy
themselves. A day is the average time consumed here in “cutting” a
one-carat diamond, at a cost of about 7$, the chips and diamond dust
left over bringing the ordinary income up to 65$ a week.
Diamond buyers of all nationalities journey to Diamantina, and the town
expressed surprise and often incredulity to hear that I had not come to
purchase a few “parcels” for speculation. “Everyone” buys diamonds, yet
no one pays the state export tax on them, if one may believe local
opinion. This would have to be paid if the stones were sent out legally
by express, but when a buyer has collected a “parcel”—in Portuguese it
is _partida_—he finds some man bound for Rio and says to him, “If it
isn’t too much trouble just hand this little package to —— and Co.,”
thereby defrauding both the railroad and the politicians. The men who
deal in diamonds in the place of their origin no more wear them than do
the men who dig them. Old buyers who have handled the precious stones
all their lives are not only plainly dressed but have none of the
tendency toward personal adornment so widespread among Brazilians. Two
American diamond-men I met had huge blacksmith hands on which a ring
would have looked absurd, and the only diamonds one sees in Diamantina
are those offered for sale in “parcels” or show-windows, or those worn
by an occasional tenderfoot.
Newcomers have sometimes been deceived by this state of affairs. A few
years ago there arrived in Diamantina a German with a conviction of his
own wisdom and superiority over common mortals, who, with an air
implying that the thought had never occurred to anyone else, let it leak
out that he was buying diamonds. An old negro wandered up to the hotel
in an aged shirt and trousers, a ragged hat, and bare feet, and
shuffling in a halting, diffident way into the German’s room, told him
that he did not know what the two diamonds he carried wrapped in a scrap
of paper were worth, but that he would sell them cheap. The German paid
him about half the market price for them and asked him if he had any
more, adding with a wink that any transactions they might make would be
kept a secret. The poor old negro said he thought he could find a few
more about his hut or in the river or among his friends, and for a month
or six weeks he continued to slouch into the hotel, until he had sold
the wise German about a pint of diamonds for a mere song of fourteen or
fifteen _contos_, say $5,000. Then the Teuton, highly pleased with
himself, packed up and took the down train from Curvello, smuggling his
untold riches out of the state without paying the export duty—and
discovered when he reached Rio that every one of the fine diamonds the
poor ignorant old negro had sold him so cheaply were what are known in
the trade as “fourths,” or worse, full of knots and gnarls as a
century-old olive tree and worth at most some 50c a carat for cutting
glass. A bit later, the poor innocent old negro having occasion to go
down to the capital and talk with the senator whose political boss he
was in Diamantina, blew into Rio in the frock-coat and patent leathers
he wears when not doing business with gullible strangers, with a real
six-carat diamond dazzling from his little finger and two or three more
shouting from his shirt front and, meeting the worldly-wise German on
the Avenida, raised his fifty-dollar imported Panama hat with true
Brazilian courtesy, and invited him to come in and have a drink for old
times’ sake.
One evening my hospitable host of the hotel dragged me over to the
cinema he owned, where I found a crowded house come to see what to
Diamantina was a brand new romance of their own color, called “A Cabana
do Pae Thomaz,” in other words, “The Cabin of Uncle Tom.” It was all too
evident, however, that there was nothing to be gained by bringing our
show so far inland, for the negroes had little to spend and the railway
charges are naturally high to those who can find no excuse for not
paying them. Meanwhile I had opened negotiations for a journey on
horseback, or even on foot, across to the railhead of the line out of
Victoria, which would have brought me out well up the coast on my
journey north. A native _camarada_ familiar with the trail offered to
rent me a horse or a mule for the journey, with saddle and spurs, for 3$
a day. This seemed reasonable. It would make the trip across come to
about 20$? Yes, but it takes _two_ animals. Why’s that? You must have a
guide, or at least a man to bring back the horses. Ah, then that makes
6$ a day instead of 3$? Yes—ah—and then of course you must pay the man.
How much? Oh, 3$ a day, the same as the other animals. Ah, then that
makes 9$ a day, and seven days would be.... No, say ten days. But why
ten days? Because in this season that is the least you can depend on. In
other words the trip would cost me 90$, nine times ten? No, it would be
nine times twenty, or 180$. Eh, what twenty days? Why, the man and the
horses would have to come back, wouldn’t they? _Sacramento_, I suppose
so, unless I could chloroform them when I got there. So then 180$ would
cover _all_ the expenses? All, completely all—er—that is, of course, you
would have to feed the animals and the man on the trip, and it might be
much more than ten days, and—er.... And no doubt there would be a tip to
the man and the animals, and perhaps a third horse needed when he caught
sight of my valise, and of course the government officials here and
along the way would come in for their customary graft, and there would
be the stamp-tax on each horseshoe, unless they were mule-shoes, in
which case no doubt it would be doubled, and a tax on each bray the
“burros” might emit en route, and—whereupon I gave him a warm handshake
and bade him good night, saying I would think it over and wire him from
Bagdad in 1946, and thus eventually got him out of the room. In short, I
had come to understand at last why people travel by rail in Brazil, even
though their bones are racked on the warped and twisted roadbeds, their
movie-magnate garments turned into sieves by burning cinders from the
straining locomotives, and there is a tax on every corner of a railway
ticket.
All Diamantina was down—I mean up—to see us off, just as they are at the
same early hour three times a week. The distance-blue piles of earth lay
heaped up into considerable hills where a clearer atmosphere disclosed
wider horizons, hung on all sides with fantastic heaps of clouds, that
increased the sense of being on the top of the world. On the several
days’ trip southward I met a strange man, a _juiz de dereito_, or
district judge, from Serro back in the hills, who refused to ride on a
government pass or to accept one for his son, whom he was taking to the
medical school in Rio, declaring that there was “much abuse” in such
matters by government officials! At Burnier, where we changed to the
broad gauge, I got a berth to the capital. Though the car was the
familiar American Pullman, the slovenly government employees had
discarded most of the small conveniences. The aisle was as carpetless as
the floors of Brazil, the berth net had long since been turned into a
hammock for the brakeman’s baby, the mattress was thin and hard as a
Brazilian wooden bed, and the sleep I did not get as we creaked and
jounced through the endless low hills explained why sleeping cars and
night trains are not more popular in the mammoth republic of South
America.
When I returned from the washroom next morning, “Tut” stood dressing
beside the opposite berth. They had played in Palmyra the evening before
and managed to pack up in time to catch the night train. Carlos had had
his hat stolen in the preceding town and “Tut” had been bitten by a dog
while walking out to pay his respects to the English-speaking miners
near Ouro Preto; otherwise things had gone well—except for one other
personal mishap to “Tut.” While buying his ticket for the sleeper he
noted that the berths were divided into “_leitos inferiores_” and
“_leitos superiores_.” Now why should he take an inferior berth when he
had been working hard, and Linton paid the bill anyway? He took a _leito
superior_. Unfortunately, in the matter of berths, the Portuguese word
_superior_ means “upper”!
By seven the day was already brilliant and hot, for we were down off the
great plateau I was never to climb again, and the familiar suburbs of
Rio were rumbling past. I dropped off as we drew into the yards, knowing
from experience how long a process it is to get into the station, and
diving out through a hole in the railway wall, I hurried away up the Rua
Mattoso to the home of our theater contractor. He surprised me by saying
that times had grown so “brutally hard” in Rio, to say nothing of the
brutal heat of midsummer, that it would not be worth while to play there
at all, but that we could finish our sixteen days with him at his
theater in Nictheroy.
The ferry that carried us across the bay was crowded with newspaper men
and photographers, and the gunboat _Sergipe_ lay close off the state
capital with its guns trained on the public buildings. Inquiry disclosed
the fact that there was not a new mutiny, but that a revolution was
expected in Nictheroy during the day.
Nilo Peçanha, son of a former president of Brazil, had been elected
president of the State of Rio de Janeiro for the term to begin with the
new year; but, as so often happens in South America, the opposition
party still in power was determined to give the office to their own
defeated candidate. This was one Lieutenant Sodré, an army man of
similar caliber to the celebrated “Dudu” and having the same backing.
With the aid of the outgoing state president he had “acquired” arms and
ammunition from the federal stores in Nictheroy and was preparing to
take office by force, having picked up large numbers of _Carioca_ crooks
and gunmen and scattered them among the various cities of the state to
stifle opposition. Peçanha, on the other hand, had applied to the
Supreme Court for a habeas corpus, giving him the office that was being
stolen from him, and after considerable dodging and hesitation the
national president had decided to lend federal armed force to uphold the
Supreme Court decision in favor of Peçanha.
Mere orders from the federal government mean little in the life of a
Brazilian state, however, and Nictheroy was seething on the brink of
anarchy when we landed. Sodré, it seemed, had had himself sworn in as
president by the state assembly early that morning and had sent word to
that effect to the president of Brazil. He could not gain admission to
the state presidential palace, but with the support of the state police
and the outgoing authorities he did take over the presidential offices.
Then suddenly, some three hours later, a cry of “Viva Peçanha!” had
resounded through the police barracks, the policemen had taken it up
and, headed by two sergeants, threatened to kill the officers unless
they joined in also, and the entire state police force on which the
rebel had depended swung over to the other side, looted the stolen
ammunition, and took to rushing about town shouting and firing in the
air.
This was the condition in which we found the state capital. The firemen
had joined the police, and auto-trucks crammed full of excited shouting
negroes and half-negroes in uniform were rushing about town at top
speed, all but overturning at every corner. The lower classes, having
likewise filled themselves with cheap _cachaza_, had joined the general
uproar of noise, irresponsibility, and probable violence, and the
streets were swarming with _populares_ shouting “Viva Peçanha!” “Viva o
Salvador do Povo!” and similar nonsense in maudlin drunken voices, while
Sodré sent hurriedly to the national president demanding “guarantees”
for his personal safety.
Residence in South America, however, teaches one that revolutions are by
no means so dangerous on the spot as they are in the armchairs of those
who are reading about them afar off, and we serenely continued our
preparations for the evening performance. Desultory shooting, street
brawls, and the surging of masses of drunken _populares_ continued
throughout the day and for several days thereafter, while the shouting,
shooting truckloads of police and firemen continued dizzily to round
corners, each time more nearly resembling the drunken brute into which
the tropical languor of negro militarism is apt to degenerate in times
of crisis or popular excitement. But it was, on the whole, a
good-natured rather than a blood-thirsting brute, and though what Brazil
calls “persons of most responsibility” kept out of sight, we common
mortals, including not a few women, walked about town attending to our
business as usual. Once a ragged, drunken mulatto _popular_ came into
the _leitería_ in which I was quenching my thirst with a glass of
ice-cold milk, walked bellowing and reeling past me and two men at
another table up to a little messenger-boy of fourteen, and ordered him
to shout “Viva Peçanha!” The proprietor dared not protest, for the
police were all drunk and the _povo_ more than likely to take the
ragamuffin’s part; but when the latter finally staggered out again the
shopkeeper raised his hands to heaven and demanded to know why the
fellow had picked on the boy and not, for instance, pointing at me, on
“_o senhor_ over there.”
The “Cinema Eden” was right on the waterfront, though the only paradise
in sight was the view of Rio piled up into massive banks of white clouds
across the emerald bay and the marvelous sunset and steel-blue dusk
which spread over its unique, nature-made sky-line as we opened our
doors. The near-revolution was still surging through the streets, though
a few sober soldiers of the regiment of federal troops that had been
landed were riding about town in street-cars, with ball-loaded muskets
ready for action. Peçanha had been sworn in that afternoon, surrounded
by a swarm of other perspiring politicians in wintry frock-coats and
silk hats, but the national president had concluded to avoid any
responsibility in the matter by calling a special session of congress to
decide between the rival candidates, instead of carrying out the
decision of the Supreme Court—“which,” perorated Ruy Barboso, “is what
our constitution orders and what is practiced in the United States,” two
equally convincing final arguments. Though we were the only theater open
the house was not crowded. “Persons of most responsibility” preferred to
remain at home, and the _populares_ were plainly in most cases without
the price of admission, even had the revolution not promised a more
exciting show outside. I took charge of the door in person, not at all
certain but that the _povo_ might try to force itself in en masse. Once,
during our part of the program, a mighty explosion shook the town like
an earthquake and shooting sounded under our very windows; but as the
stampede for the door started I barricaded the immense exit and “Tut”
went on calmly running an amusing film known as “College Days,” and
before it was ended the volatile audience had quieted down again. The
explosion, it turned out, was of a great deposit of powder on one of the
many islands in the bay, nearly twenty miles away.
Our receipts for the first section were so poor that we cut out the
second and went home for a moonlight dip in the sea just outside our
waterfront rooms in the charming residential district of Nictheroy. But
it was the last day of the year, with a crushing heat after the splendid
air of the plateau, and the soft wind that was now sweeping across the
bay drew me back for a last glimpse of Rio in the throes of New Year’s
Eve. The city lay a vast irregular heap of lights, here in dense
clusters, there strung out along the invisible lower hills, all cut
sharp off at the bottom by the endless row of them along the Beira Mar.
The Avenida was densely crowded, and getting more so. Newspapers had
erected booths covered with artificial flowers and colored lights,
several police, fire department, and military bands were scattered along
the great white avenue, and a constant, unbroken procession of
automobiles crept up one side and down the other, pretty girls perched
on the backs of the seats and on the furled covers, all filled with the
“respectable families” whose plump and physically attractive ladies are
rarely seen in the streets after dark on any other day in the year. I
was caught where the confetti fell thickest, but there was little
rowdyism and no unpleasant din, though paper ribbons spun across the
lighted sea of faces and perfumed water was squirted into them in that
good-natured and outwardly courteous way with which the Latin-American
softens the perpetration of his most hilarious, carnival-time tricks.
CHAPTER XV
NORTHWARD TO BAHIA
More than five months had passed since my first arrival in Rio when, in
the first days of the new year, I actually started on my homeward way
again. The train from Nictheroy northward left at dawn, after the
unfailing Brazilian habit, and I caught a last glimpse of sunrise over
Rio and its bay before they passed finally from my sight. The mountains
of the cool plateau lay blue-gray along the horizon all that day’s ride
through the singing jungle. The flat _littoral_ was considerably
inhabited, but chiefly with thatched mud-and-reed huts, contrasted only
now and then by a massive, dignified old _fazenda_-house standing, like
some poor but still proud aristocrat, on a commanding knoll above broad
reaches of flat corn, cane, or pasture lands, broken by frequent marshes
grown full of the omnipresent vegetation. At the stations negro boys
highly contented with life sold melons, bananas, mangos, red figs, the
acidulous, parrot-beaked _cajú_, and little native birds in tiny
home-made cages. The scream and groan of crude cane-carts in the fields
or along the dust-thick roads could sometimes be heard above the roar of
the train. Rain had been frequent here during the past weeks, but it had
ceased abruptly at Christmas and the implacable sun had already wiped
out all evidence of moisture. At Macahé we came down to the edge of the
sea again, stretching away emerald-blue and mirror-smooth to the end of
space, then turning inland once more across a sand-blown region, we
descended at Campos, 176 miles north of Nictheroy.
This second city of the State of Rio de Janeiro is an old and somewhat
dilapidated town well spread out on the _campo_, or sea-flat open
country, for which it is named, with a few aged church-towers peering on
tiptoe over the broad cane-fields that surround it. Scattered imperial
palms slightly shade it, and the widest river I had so far seen in
Brazil gives it a light-craft connection with the sea. Neither its mule
cars nor its medieval “Hotel Amazonas,” with a single _banho de chuva_,
or “rain bath,” are fit subjects for unbounded praise, but at least its
chief cinema manager cut short my professional labors by signing on the
dotted line as soon as it was pointed out to him. I left the contract
and instructions to “Tut” with the hotel runner, to be handed to the
tallest man who arrived by train the next Wednesday, and fled on into
the north by the same conveyance by which I had arrived the day before.
The difference between this British-owned line and the
government-operated “Central” was as wide as that between discipline and
license, yet even on this the ticket-offices were miserable little holes
in the wall, barely thigh-high; the sellers always opened as late, and
worked as slowly and stupidly as possible, and it was only by crouching
like an ape and fighting those struggling about the ticket-hole with
trickery, stealth, and bad manners that the traveler could get a chance
to buy the exorbitant-priced tickets and escape paying fifty per cent.
excess on the train. Kilometer-books are sold in Brazil, but they must
be taken to the ticket-window to be stamped and audited and registered
and signed each time the holder wishes to board a train, hence nothing
is to be gained by using them. The shadowy, saw-shaped range on our left
followed us all the blazing, sand-blown day, tantalizing us with
suggestions of cool upland valleys and meadows watered by clear, cold
streams. As the sun crawled round and peered in at my side of the car
the heat grew unendurable, in spite of the electric fans which recalled
the government lines by contrast, and the dust-filled air all but
refused to enter the nostrils. The insignificant stations were crowded
with the curious enjoying their chief daily diversion, but they were
silent and listless beneath the appalling heat.
In his “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin speaks of seeing South American
ant-hills twelve feet high. I had set this down to the exuberance of
youth, but suddenly, not far north of Campos, we came upon great fields
of them, like eruptions on the face of nature, mounds eight, ten,
perhaps even twelve feet high, but here grass-grown, instead of
presenting the solid clay, cement-like surface familiar elsewhere. The
sandy condition of the soil evidently made it possible only to pile them
up in this oval form, so sharply contrasting with the usual sugar-loaf
shape of those made of clay. In mid-afternoon the flat, baking,
sea-level _littoral_ gave way to rolling, then hilly country, and we had
climbed to a height of several hundred meters when we passed from the
little State of Rio de Janeiro into the equally tiny one of Espirito
Santo, for here the great plateau of central Brazil forces its way clear
down to the edge of the sea. Time was when the State of Rio was
enormous, but bit by bit, during the eighteenth century, there was
lopped off from it the much larger states of São Paulo, Minas Geraes,
Goyaz, and finally Matto Grosso, until to-day the population within its
limits—which do not include the federal district and national capital—is
estimated at little more than one fifth that of the old mining province,
vastly less than that of São Paulo and Bahia, and with Rio Grande do Sul
and Pernambuco also outdistancing it.
Coffee-clad hills and a reddish soil gave Espirito Santo a slight
resemblance to São Paulo, though most of it was dense-green with heavy
timber, through which a howling wind-and-rain storm came raging toward
sunset. We halted for the night in Cachoeira do Itapemirim, so called
for the _cachoeira_, or rapids over a series of rocks in the Itapemirim,
the sound of which deadened our footfalls all the way from the station
to the “Hotel Toledo” on the tiny main square. It was little more than a
barefoot village in the bush, but the show would be forced to spend a
night there—nay, two nights, for it would arrive on Saturday—and I soon
added to my collection the signature of the “Turk” who, in addition to a
little cloth-shop and billiard-and-liquor-room, owned a miniature cinema
jutting far out over the rocky river.
Relieved of the feeling that the show was treading on my heels, I let
the morning train go on without me and settled down to make up the sleep
I was in arrears. Four or five hours slumber out of each twenty-four may
be all very well for an Edison, but commonplace mortals require more.
Not only was the hotel as quiet and bucolic as the town itself, but it
had “beds of wire”; both heat and mosquitoes were conspicuous by their
absence; the never-ceasing music of the _cachoeira_ was calming to the
nerves, and if I ever did wake up there were horses to hire for a jaunt
through the surrounding country. Moreover, the town and vicinity were
the scene of one of Brazil’s most famous novels, “Chanaan” by Graça
Aranha of the Brazilian Academy, and just then Minister to The
Hague—though the town itself was supremely ignorant of its celebrity the
world round in the dozen languages into which the tale has been
translated. Even the local editor had never heard of it, though he did
know the author, “because I am _obliged_ to know all Brazilian
diplomats.”
The animal that was intrusted to me for a modest consideration next
afternoon could scarcely have been called a horse, though it resembled
even less any other known quadruped, as the wooden frame thinly covered
with leather and hung with two iron rings into which I could barely
insert the ends of my toes must perhaps be called a saddle for want of a
more exact term. By dint of reducing my right arm to paralysis I
succeeded in forcing the torpid brute up and down the few streets of the
village and out one of the roads that wander off as trails through the
plump, dense-wooded hills about it. But it would have been as speedy and
far more comfortable to have walked, or better still, perhaps, not to
have gone at all, for we were overtaken and imprisoned by one of those
raging storms for which this region seems famous. Immense banks of
snow-white clouds far off on the horizon completely encircled us when we
set out, yet so benign was their appearance that I scarcely noticed
them, except as a detail of the charming landscape, until suddenly they
swept in from all sides at express speed, getting blacker and ever
blacker, until the entire sky was wiped out and the sullen growls of
thunder grew to violent outbursts of anger that deafened the ears like
an artillery barrage, while the wind tore at the trees and bamboo groves
as if it would uproot not only them but the sheer stone “sugar-loaf”
near which the storm had found us. With the help of two negro boys on
muleback and the butt of my heavy native whip I urged the equine
caricature into a lame and ludicrous gallop and reached the edge of town
before I was wholly drenched, taking refuge in a half-finished building.
A negro boy sleeping on a narrow plank high above the still unboarded
floor said he was not ill; evidently he was just lying there to let the
day get by so that he could sleep through the night and then take a good
rest to-morrow. I could only get the head of the alleged horse under
shelter, but it was evident that he had stood out in many worse storms
than mere wind and rain; and there I squatted for three mortal hours,
chiding myself for not having put a bit of reading matter in my pocket.
I might have read the negro boy, I suppose, but he looked like a primer,
just such a crude and simple volume as makes up the whole human library
of Cachoeira do Itapemirim.
Another all-day train-ride of little more than a hundred miles brought
me to Victoria, capital of the State of Holy Ghost, or, more exactly, to
a little backwoods station on the opposite side of the long narrow arm
of the sea on which the capital is situated. So placid was this, and so
cool the weather after a heavy rain, that I had to taste it as we were
being rowed across before I could believe that we were down at sea-level
again. It was an easy-going, less aggressive capital than those farther
south, and its prices were so nearly reasonable that I grew bold and
marched into the new and showy four-story “Palace Hotel” on the
waterfront. The “brutal crisis” had dealt Victoria an almost deadly
blow. There was not a show in town, except a free cinema in the liquor
emporium of the little French electric tramway company that sends its
cars wandering along the waterfront for miles in both directions. On one
of these I gradually worked my way out to the home of the “colonel” who
owned the imposing theater—and found that he had passed me on the way
in. I hurried back to town—if that verb may be used in the same sentence
with Victoria’s street-car service—and found that the “colonel” had gone
out home again. But by sternly overcoming adverse fate and the
fatalistic indifference of those accustomed to hang around the theater I
finally had him hunted up, a heavy, middle-aged, over-courteous mulatto,
as was also his manager and, for that matter, almost every conspicuous
citizen in town. Having impressed upon them the extraordinary good
fortune that was soon to descend upon Victoria, I went home to dinner,
telling them to think it over. Their theater, like two former cinemas in
town, had been closed since the first month of the war; they had so
completely lost heart that they were not even having films shipped to
them any more, and felt that it would be impossible to get up a show. I
assured them that wherever the Kinetophone landed there must be a show,
and within half an hour had them worked up to such enthusiasm that
instead of accepting my suggestion that we play Monday and Tuesday and
sail for Bahia on Wednesday, they were imploring me to book for a solid
week.
This having been done, the manager and I made polite and diplomatic
calls on the editors of Victoria’s two pitiful little dailies of four
foolscap pages each, more than half taken up with advertising and the
rest with large-type “news” consisting mainly of birthday greetings to
“our most influential citizens.” Neither of the apathetic
pseudo-journalists caught even a hint of the news value of Edison’s part
in the affair, but they did waste many words in giving a full account of
the “delightful courtesy” which “Dr. Franck,” and the distinguished and
much-titled fellow-citizen who brought him, had shown in visiting them.
Victoria was one of the old settlements of the Portuguese crown when
what afterward came to be known as Brazil was given out in _capitanias_,
having been founded nearly four centuries ago on the island of São
Antonio. It may have 15,000 inhabitants in all the coves and corners of
rocks among which it is scattered, but it is essentially an unimportant,
if picturesque, village. The nucleus of the town is well inland along
the narrow, river-like little roadstead, with a yellow presidential
palace and some other buildings of size, but it is made up chiefly of
one-story buildings quickly running down to huts. There are a few coffee
houses that export, and a few stores that supply the interior, but for
the most part Victoria lives on government salaries—when conditions are
such that these can be paid. How backward it is may be guessed from the
fact that negro coffee-porters have not yet been driven out by whites,
and that it is the outpost of the reign of hammocks which covers all
northern Brazil, at least half the population seeming to spend their
days swinging back and forth inside the baked mud kennels they call
home. An ancient fort in ruins and the clustered sanctuary of Nossa
Senhora da Penha in a striking site on the summit of a stone hill, with
the usual collection of wax and pictured proofs of miracles that have
been wrought here since 1769, are the main sights of interest. For the
ocean is not visible until one has walked—or, if time is no object,
taken the tramway—for miles out through little groves of plump,
rosy-cheeked mangos and along the single street from which most of
Victoria sprawls and scrambles up the rocky, half-wooded hills along her
waterway to her huts perched among huge, blackish granite rocks. Then,
when the calm, boatless sea and the labyrinthian harbor entrance bursts
forth at last from the long, narrow, yellow beach out to which the cars
eventually stagger, there is not a glimpse left of the town itself,
hidden away among its wet-green hills.
“Tut,” Carlos, and the show arrived on time and were eventually coaxed
through the red tape that entangles any state capital and loaded into
the _canoa_, or mammoth log turned into a boat, of the German who
reigned in Victoria as the American Consul. This was gradually rowed,
not directly to the theater, but to the “American’s” wharf, where we
were forced to hire a wagon and lose an hour to cover the hundred yards
remaining. We were installed, however, in time to give the two sections
as advertised—though the managers were so skeptical of my solemn promise
that they would certainly have postponed the opening date had I not been
on the ground to forbid it—and were deluged by such a mob of
pleasure-seekers that we had to close the doors and hold hundreds of
them back until the second section.
Next day the agent of a local steamship line came to the theater and
measured all our trunks, arranging to send the whole outfit to Bahia the
following Monday for about one-tenth what train-travel had led us to
expect. For I had come at last to a break in the railroads up the east
coast of South America and was forced to take to the sea for the first
time since Hays and I had entered the continent at Cartagena, Colombia,
two and a half years before. On Wednesday “Tut” and I took our last
Victorian stroll—the negro boys along the way halting open-mouthed and
gazing up and down him to see where he was spliced—and in the afternoon
I boarded the _Maranhão_ of the Lloyd-Brazileiro and settled down in my
cabin. I had dropped into a Brazilian novel of colonial days and
completely forgotten the life of the harbor and the little capital that
was still crawling slowly on about us, when I was suddenly astonished to
see standing before me the owner and manager of the theater. Those two
stodgy, bashful, rather artless mulattoes had hired a boat and taken the
time and trouble to come out on board to bid me the good-by, which I, in
my American incivility, had completely forgotten. One after the other
they gave me the fraternal South American embrace of a handshake and an
affectionate patting on the back with the left hand, assuring me that
the show would be run with as great care and our percentage as honestly
computed as if I were there in person, that they would see to it that my
entire “company” boarded the Monday steamer, and bade me be sure to stop
and see them if ever I came that way again. The most steel-rimmed
color-line could not but be joggled by such Brazilian amiability.
On the second morning thereafter, with no other incident than being
halted and examined by British cruisers hidden among the Abrolhos
Islands in Brazilian waters, the _Maranhão_ slipped smoothly into the
immense Bay of All Saints, specks of white sails dotting its blue
immensity, distant land with low hills gradually spreading along all the
port horizon, and when I chanced to look up again the City of São
Salvador da Bahia was gazing down upon us from the ridge along which it
stretches for mile after hazy mile.
“Colonel” Ruben Pinheiro Guimarães was manager of the principal
playhouse in Bahia. The ancient “São João,” imperial theater when
Portuguese viceroys ruled Brazil, still kept much of its stateliness in
spite of being rather unkempt and disreputable after more than a century
of constant use. In situation it takes second place to no other in the
world, sitting out on the nose of the upper city, where to step off its
esplanade would be to fall hundreds of feet down to the business section
below, and gazing away across the bay to the utmost limits of the ocean
horizon. Ruben, a _Paulista_ of unbroken Portuguese ancestry, had the
reputation of being somewhat related in business matters to the eel
family; but there is a certain pleasure in flirting with possible fraud,
as with any other kind of danger. It was not until eight at night,
however, that I got his name signed to a “split-even” contract for
twenty-five days, fifteen of them in the theaters of Bahia and ten in
towns about the bay.
Unfortunately São Salvador da Bahia was not an ideal place to settle
down. For one thing, it had a new style in hotels. Elsewhere in Brazil
they had been questionable, here they were not in the least so, for not
one of them pretended to be anything but what it was,—full of frousy
females who had not even the virtue of being young or good-looking, hags
on the last rung of the ladder that leads from concubinage in Europe
through street-walking in Rio down to the gutter of pandering to the
chiefly African rouées of Bahia. Even as hotels they were the worst
imaginable, yet high-priced at that, and with adventurous women from
foreign parts assigned to every other room and constantly hanging out
the windows one had the edifying sensation of living in a brothel.
The hotel I was finally compelled to endure looked out across the
marvelous bay, upon the “São João,” and down the wide stone-paved street
leading from the upper to the lower town. Up this snorted huge
motor-trucks loaded with meat from the abattoirs, straining automobiles,
and an unending procession of those citizens of Bahia who found it
cheaper to walk than to squander the _tostão_ it costs to be lifted from
the lower to the upper level. Great quantities of freight also ascended
or descended on foot. A trunk or two, with perhaps a valise on top,
often came noiselessly marching up the steep street on negro heads;
bedsteads, bird-cages, bureaus and all other forms of furniture, fruit
in baskets or without, bunches of bananas laid flat on a frizzled pate,
chickens with their legs tied and panting in the roasting sun, every
known and nameable article that cannot cave in an African skull moved by
what is still the cheapest form of transportation in Bahia, even in this
century of steam and electricity.
The former capital and oldest city of Brazil takes its popular name—the
official and correct one is São Salvador—from the immense bay on which
it is situated—the bay which from anywhere in the upper town stretches
away in deepest indigo-blue, everywhere dotted with specks of white
sails, to the low ridges of hills, faint with distance, that all but
surround it. In some ways it has a finer setting than that of Rio,
though it is not so strikingly, so dramatically, beautiful, and the old
capital has the advantage over the new that almost constant trade winds
sweep across it. Bahia is built in two stories, that at sea-level being
at most a few blocks deep and often thinning down to a single row of
buildings. “O Commercio” the _Bahianos_ call this lower part, and it is
almost exclusively a business section, perhaps the only spot in South
America that resembles lower New York in being silent and uninhabited at
night, with only a few watchmen and belated pedestrians treading the
dimly gas-lighted streets.
The upper town is reached either by a hard climb up the stone-paved
roadway, by an American elevator of sixteen-person capacity, or by a
steeply inclined cable railway with single cars. Hotels, stores,
theaters, almost everything except the wharves, wholesale business, and
the main market-place, are on the upper level. Nearly every building
dates back to colonial days and many of the old houses are in splendid
situations, perched on the edge of the ridge at the very base of which
lies the immense bay. But they are taken up almost entirely by the
descendants of slaves, with the accumulated uncleanliness of
generations, and the white minority of Bahia has been driven to the
often less attractive suburbs. The upper and main part of the town is
built chiefly on two ridges, facing the sea and the bay respectively and
in many places falling sheer into them. On their tops the ridges are
thickly inhabited, and the streets crisscross in an effort to conform to
the irregular lay of the land, but every now and then they disappear
through wooded lanes into hilly virgin forests with innumerable huge
trees,—the mammoth _aguacate_, thickly hung with alligator-pears, the
intense green dome-shaped mango, most perfect shade-tree of the tropics,
and here and there palm-trees standing haughtily above all else—for the
rolling ridges are often broken with deep valleys in which negro huts
congregate.
It would be beneath the dignity, as well as contrary to the languid
temperament, of Bahia to take a census, but at the popular Brazilian
pastime of guessing statistics the city professes to have about one
third of a million inhabitants; there is no question that it is the
third city in size in Brazil. Of that number certainly eight out of ten
are negroes, a majority of them full-blooded, with all the traits their
ancestors brought with them from the African bush, plus the faults of
their Portuguese-Brazilian neighbors. Except for the two or three élite
sections, such as that along the summit of the second ridge, there is
scarcely a corner of Bahia in which one cannot stroll an hour or more
and never see any but a black face—with the single exception that even
in the most African quarters the shops are almost invariably kept by
Portuguese, pasty-white of complexion, whether because of the sedentary
indoor lives they lead or because of the contrast to the sea of blacks
about them. One soon comes to know every white face in Bahia, even those
with Caucasian ancestry enough to be individually distinguishable, so
frequently does one notice them in the business streets, theaters,
street-cars, and more pretentious cafés.
More slaves were brought to the province of Bahia than to any other of
Brazil, not only because the planting of sugar and tobacco required much
labor but because this part of Portuguese America was earliest settled.
The original settlers from overseas were too proud to work; the negroes
they brought over to work for them were emancipated and also refused to
work, crowding into town to live on what they could pick up between
their incessant native dances and church festivals, so that we have the
edifying spectacle of an immense state, possessing unlimited natural
resources, virtually bankrupt. It is said that the old colonial life,
the old-time somnolence, Brazil as she was in the olden days, is still
best seen in Bahia. If so, I am glad that my Brazilian journey came at a
later date. Compared with the old capital, Rio seems little more than a
quadroon city, and few negroes among many whites is plainly better for
the negro than to be surrounded on all sides by bad examples of his own
race.
The negroes are so numerous and so sluggish in their movements that
unless one would be jostled at every turn one can travel the streets
only by stepping out of their way. They lie on every corner and in every
gutter; they loll, blocking the streets, in every shaded spot, on every
threshold—wearing a few rags, yet often with a crude native cigar
protruding from their thick lips, irrespective of sex, for Bahia is
Brazil’s tobacco center and “fumo” is cheap—negroes, negroes everywhere,
until they swim in black specks before the eyes when one closes them. It
is another amusing example of the pseudo-civilization of South America
that in the upper town the police will stop any man in full comfortable
dress of summer who wears no coat, while negroes and even a few poor
whites parade anywhere in a ragged, unbuttoned jacket without the
suggestion of shirt or undershirt beneath it and barely enough
suggestion of trousers to save them from complete nudity.
The negroes of Bahia speak Portuguese much as those of our southern
states do English. In their mouths _noite_ becomes “noitche,” _muito_ is
“muitcho,” _senhor_ is “’nhor,” and “’nha” may mean either _senhora_ or
_senhoras_. How much of his Latin garrulousness the negro has caught
from living with that race and how much his ancestors brought him from
the Dark Continent is an interesting question. I do not believe the
native African chatters with such a flow of words and gestures as are to
be seen in any black gathering in Bahia. The cheerfulness and hilarious
gaiety for which the race is noted stands out clearly in the general
temperament of the old capital; while the _Carioca_ is the gloomiest and
most suicidal of Brazilians, the _Bahiano_ rarely shows either tendency.
Down in the swarming market-place in the lower town powerful negroes of
both sexes—the most splendid physical specimens in Brazil are the
blacks—lie languidly about, hoping to sell a few cents’ worth of
something,—pineapples, melons, mangos, sapotes, lemons, huge
alligator-pears at a cent each, the blushing _cajú_, the _jaca_, or
jack-fruit, which grows to watermelon size on the trunks of trees and
has a white meat so coarse that it is eaten only by negroes; bread-nuts
and bread-fruit, bananas, rosaries of what seem to be shelled but
unroasted peanuts, small oranges, green in color—for though there are
fine big seedless ones in Bahia this was not the season for them—and
every other known fruit of tropical America, except a few native only to
the Amazon region. Here one may have a _coco molle gelado_, in other
words, iced milk of green cocoanut, than which there is no better way of
quenching tropical thirst; here one may even find a man who, as a last
resort against starvation, will almost be willing to work, at least to
the extent of carrying away on his head anything less than a grand piano
or the heavier makes of automobiles. Many copper coins, virtually
unknown in the rest of Brazil, are used in the markets of
Bahia,—_vintems_ and double _vintems_, or twenty and forty-reis
pieces—and the negroes still make their computations in the old colonial
terms. In _Bahiano_ market dialect a _meia-pataca_ is 180 reis and a
_pataca_ twice that, though there are no actual coins of those
denominations. Nickel, in one hundred reis pieces and higher, is too
valuable for most negro transactions. As they say in Bahia, with a black
it is “_vintem pa’ cachaza, vintem pa’ farinha, e prompto!_” (a copper
for rum, a copper for mandioca meal, and enough!) He will not work again
until he must have more _cachaza_ and _farinha_. Whenever any real work
is required, such as the digging of sewers, paving of streets, or laying
of street car tracks, gangs of white Europeans have to be shipped in to
do it.
[Illustration: Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a
tiny edition of picturesque Rio]
[Illustration: Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João”]
[Illustration: Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements]
[Illustration: A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore]
Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade
and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by
day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes
that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for
the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man
to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause
bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? The languid
picturesqueness of Bahia is best personified in the typical _Bahiana_,
black or near-black in color, wearing many bracelets and similar
ornaments of tin and wire, sometimes gilded, her immense hips heavy with
bulky skirts only a trifle less gay in color than her waist, shawl, and
turban, placidly smoking a big native cigar and carrying on her head a
small stool or a tiny table, legs-up like a helpless turtle, with
perhaps a closed umbrella lying flat on top of that, on her way to squat
on the one and lean on or raise the other in church or market. If she
has only a single banana with her, the _Bahiana_ will carry it on her
head rather than by hand. I have seen the ancient anecdote of the
negro-girl servant given a letter to post, who put it on her head and
laid a stone on top to keep it from blowing away, duplicated in the
streets of Bahia. Racial languor, however, gives way to passionate
activity when some black troubadour takes to thrumming his guitar and
singing _modinhas_ and _chorados_. These popular ballads of Brazil,
especially of Bahia and Pernambuco, mixtures of the _moda_ and _fado_ of
Portugal and of the tribal rites of savage Africa, are childish in
thought and monotonous of rhythm, weird, languishing, half-wild songs,
often improvised by the unlettered troubadours and accompanied by
sensual dances and strange African movements of the body into which the
whole negro throng gradually merges, discarding all remnants of their
second-hand civilization.
With such an electorate it is scarcely to be expected that Bahia should
swarm with honest politicians. Indeed, it is frankly admitted that
elections there are so corrupt that few bother to go to the polls and
take part in what the native papers refer to as “our electoral farce,”
knowing that the votes cast have nothing whatever to do with the result,
which the government in power fixes beforehand. Graft and misgovernment
are acknowledged to be worse than in Rio. Yet on the surface there is
the usual Latin-American polish. The scavengers of Bahia had not been
paid a cent in months, yet the municipality was building a “palace” in
which a single staircase cost 400,000$000! A year before my arrival a
delegation from the Boston Chamber of Commerce had landed at Bahia on a
water-edge tour of South America, were brought ashore in a magnificent
launch “at the city’s expense,” and treated with such tropical
generosity that their letters to home newspapers bubbled over with
praises of the wonderful hospitality of Bahia. Agostinho Manoel de
Jesus, owner of the launch in which they had landed, was still going
daily to the city treasury asking in vain for his money.
Bahia was said to be the only place left in Brazil where bubonic plague
and yellow fever still persisted. It could hardly be otherwise with rats
running up and down every pipe, with every opening, corner, or slightly
out of the way place covered with accumulated filth, and with sanitary
arrangements almost everywhere in the old town quite beyond the
descriptive powers of Boccaccio. In contrast, great placards and posters
everywhere, bearing the heading “Directoria Geral de Saude Pública”
(General Directory of Public Health) strive to carry out the bluff that
the town boasts a system of sanitation. Even the highest priced hotel
would be instantly condemned in any civilized city; the conditions in
which the vast majority of the population live are beyond any
imagination. During the preceding April thirty-five members of the
foreign colony, almost one third of it and including the English pastor,
had died of yellow fever, which was expected to begin again with the
rains. Yet my hotel furnished no mosquito net and I awoke each morning
bitten in a dozen places—and any Brazilian will tell you that only white
foreigners take yellow fever. In compensation only natives, and chiefly
negroes, die of the equally prevalent bubonic plague. The federal
government offered to send to Bahia the man who disinfected Rio, but the
state government haughtily replied that they were quite capable of
cleaning up the place themselves, and meanwhile sudden death continues
to flourish.
On my first Sunday in Bahia one of her innumerable _festas_ was at its
height, that of “Nosso Senhor do Bomfim,” a miracle-producing shrine of
great popularity among the negroes. On Saturday night the street cars in
that direction were so crowded that I could not even hang on. Bands of
negroes carrying Japanese lanterns, singing, beating drums, tamborines,
and tin cans, marched in almost constant procession past my window down
to the lower city and on out to Bomfim, a section of town three miles
away around the harbor, the electric-lighted façade of its miracle
church standing forth from the night like a monument to the ignorance,
squalor, and hunger of Bahia. From midnight on the throngs were even
thicker, frequently waking me with their maudlin din, for the festival
of Bomfim is especially an all-night affair, with much drinking and
worse. On Sunday afternoon I went out to the scene of the festivities.
There were thirty persons in the street-car, of whom two were white. On
the climb up the hill to the church the way was flanked by two unbroken
rows of beggars, lame, halt, blind, twisted, deformed, degenerate
monstrosities, idiots of all degrees and every percentage of African
blood, every imaginable horror in human form, and just plain nigger
loafers, all holding out their hands, or whatever they had left in place
of them, in constant appeal.
The church itself was so packed that I could only enter by climbing the
stairs to a small side-gallery and look down upon an unbroken sea of
black faces, wrapt up in what sounded like a medieval Catholic service
translated into African voodooism. Among the schemes concocted by the
swarming priests of Bahia is one that shows the suggestion of
originality. At the huge church and monastery of São Antonio the
faithful can buy, at a milreis each, special stamps designed by the
priests, with which to write to St. Anthony in Heaven, and be assured of
a direct answer from him—through his priestly agents on earth, of
course—on any subject.
“Lots of churches in Bahia,” I remarked conversationally to the white
_Bahiano_ beside whom I stood watching the riot of gambling, drinking,
and indecency about the home of “miracles.”
“Oh, not out here,” he apologized. “Here there is only Nosso Senhor do
Bomfim, and São Antonio,” and Sao This and Sao That, naming a dozen or
more as he pointed them out roundabout. “This is only a little corner
suburb of our great city, but in Bahia itself there _are_ churches.”
It is a popular saying in Bahia that there is one church for every day
in the year, an exaggeration probably, but there are scores of massive
old colonial ones, not to mention monasteries full of fat, loafing
monks, on all the best commanding heights and taking up perhaps half the
city’s space. While some are fallen in ruins and are melting away from
the physical impossibility of keeping up so many, even now this
ignorant, poverty-stricken city was building several more, the latest to
cost three thousand contos—though not thirty per cent of the
contributors can read. In contrast, the schools of Bahia are horrible
little dens over butcher-shops and saloons and brothels, with forty or
fifty children packed into rooms that would not be comfortable for ten,
without any arrangements whatever for their bodily requirements. Even at
that, if every school in the city were packed to suffocation from dawn
until dark, not one third the children of school age could attend them.
The public library in this capital of an enormous and potentially rich
state, in a town of one third of a million inhabitants, reported that
“632 books or works of reference were consulted during the year.” Yet
fear or superstition caused every newspaper in town to print long
editorials praising the “beautiful festa of Bomfim” and the honor it did
to “Him whom it honored,” while the drunken debauchery was still going
on.
By the Wednesday after my arrival “Colonel” Ruben, who, whatever his
faults, knew the art of advertising, had the fronts of all street-cars
and every blank wall in town plastered with Kinetophone posters mostly
of his own concoction, announcing to his fellow-citizens that on _Quarta
Feria_—Fourth Festival, to wit: Thursday—would open the Greatest
Cinematographic Occurrence of the Ages; The Eighth Marvel! Surprising!
Stupendous!! Phenomenal!!! The Discovery of the Year. Man no longer
dies! Edison has immortalized him! And at Popular Prices!! Everyone to
the SAO JOAO!!! When a brilliant sun woke me before seven on that
epochal morning, there was no sign of a steamer in all the blue expanse
of All Saints’ Bay. I shaved and was just starting for the “rain bath,”
however, when I caught sight of one nearing harbor. I still had time to
dress, drink the thimbleful of black coffee they call a breakfast in
Brazil, and descend to the wharves before the craft tied up there, with
“Tut” and Carlos hanging over the rail. I brought them up to my hotel,
for as all those in Bahia were equally disreputable it was as well to be
together for mutual protection, but it took us until noon to unravel the
red tape necessary to get our trunks ashore, quite as if we had been
landing from a foreign country.
For all his reputation, “Colonel” Ruben was an engaging fellow, and
though I made it plain to him that I would not trust him out of my
sight, he took it good-naturedly and assured me he welcomed all the
“fiscalization” I could give him.
“I notice you don’t trust people to any great extent yourself,” I
smiled, thinking to let him down easy.
“Trust!” cried Ruben, with a serio-comic gesture, “I trust my own
teeth—and they bite my tongue!”
I took him at his word and, having designed a rubber stamp, made him
produce packets of the four kinds of tickets used, ran them through a
consecutive enumerator, and stamped them all. He who has never tried to
stamp 1500 tickets an hour by hand will not realize what a daily task I
had laid out for myself merely for the satisfaction of giving Ruben and
his satellites proper “fiscalization.” These stamped tickets I handed
each night to the ticket-seller and at least one and sometimes all three
of us stood at the door ready to protest if anyone entered without a
stamped ticket, as well as to see that all went into the locked box
beside the door-keeper. After the show all unsold tickets were turned
over to me, the treasurer gave me a copy of the official _borderaux_, or
statement of tickets sold and the amount of money taken in, I unlocked
the door-boxes and carried home their contents to check him up, and one
half the day’s receipts in ragged Brazilian cash went into my pocket
before I could be budged out of the “São João” office.
I unmasked one trickster at the very first performance. Being still
stranger enough to most of the “São João” force to pass incognito, I
wandered up the dingy back stairs to the _gallinheiro_ (chicken roost),
as “nigger heaven” is called in Brazil, and found that the negro at the
door was accepting money in lieu of tickets. It was not that the money
was not quite as good, if anything it was a trifle less flimsy, but
somehow it could not be forced into the ticket-box at the taker’s elbow.
He resigned from Ruben’s staff less than a minute later.
Long before the first session ended we had closed the inner doors and
the lobby was threatening to overflow. For the first time in Brazil I
had permitted other “special attractions” to be offered with our own;
that is, in addition to the ordinary films Ruben had engaged two stray
Italian females who howled through several spasms of what they and most
of the audience seemed to think was music. As they had been hired before
our contract was made, and their wages were nothing out of our pockets,
I could only reasonably demand that the Kinetophone remain the
head-liner. The blacks of Bahia, we soon discovered, have not yet
reached even the moving-picture stage of development, rum, dances, and
church festivals being their high-water mark in recreation, and not ten
per cent. of our paid audiences were negroes, in a town where fully
three fourths of the population is of that race. But our audiences were
large for all that, because the lighter minority came again and again to
see the chief novelty that had reached Bahia in several seasons. Even
this near-white class, however, was not conspicuous for its
prepossessing appearance, and the calm, steadfast, efficient face of
Edison, gazing out from our posters through these throngs of indolent,
ambitionless mortals, insignificant of physique and racially entangled,
gave a striking contrast, typical of the two continents of the New
World.
Our first Sunday, in particular, was a busy day. It is the custom all
over Brazil for the “excellentissimas familias” to go to the “movies” on
Sunday afternoon or evening, and the habit is so fixed that they prefer
to pack in to the point of drowning in their own perspiration, even at
double prices, rather than see a better show on a week day. For managers
naturally take advantage of this fad and offer their poorest
attractions—just as Ruben withdrew his “imported artists” on this
day—knowing they will fill their houses anyway. If only we could have
taken Sunday with us, movable, transportable, and played on that day in
every town, we would have made as great a fortune as if the World War
had never cast the pall of a “brutal crisis” over Brazil.
By one in the afternoon I was at the theater door in impresario
full-dress and managerial smile, greeting the considerable crowd that
came to the matinée, and disrupting the plans of those who had hoped to
drag five or six children by in the shadow of their skirts or trousers.
Then, with scarcely time for a meat-laden Brazilian supper in our
disreputable hotel across the street, I came back to the most crowded
theater I had seen in months. By 7:30 we had already closed the inner
doors and the élite of Bahia continued to stack up in the lobby until
that, too, had overflowed long before the first session ended. We were
compelled to send policemen in to eject the first audience, and when the
house had been emptied and the gates opened again, it flooded full from
floor to “paradise” five stories up as quickly as a lock at Panama does
with water. Even then all could not crowd in, and we herded them up once
more in preparation for a third session, which, though not beginning
until after ten, was also packed. Nothing so warms the cockles of a
manager’s heart as to watch an unbroken sea of flushed and eager faces
following his entertainment. By this time I had met most of the high
society of Bahia, all her white and near-white “best families,” with now
and then some physically very attractive girls among them, having
marched at least once past my eagle eye. That night I carried off more
money than had fallen to our lot since our first days in Rio and São
Paulo.
Though silver was conspicuous by its scarcity in Bahia, there were other
troubles attached to the handling of money. Those familiar only with the
quick and convenient methods of American banks can have little
conception of the difficulties of banking in South America. No two banks
in any city in Brazil, for instance, would accept one another’s checks;
worse still, two branches of the same bank in neighboring cities would
not transfer funds of their depositors without all the formalities and
expense involved in such transactions between foreign countries. Where
there is no mutual confidence there can be no credit system, and instead
of giving or receiving a check, one must carry a roll of cash, like a
professional gambler or a manipulator of politicians. By the time I had
four contos laid away in a British bank, exchange had bounded skyward
again, and it would only have been to waste what little Linton was
making to buy drafts as that rate; yet the bank refused to transfer our
account to their own institution in Rio or Pernambuco, except at a high
commission. When the day came for us to move northward again I was
forced to draw out our earnings in ragged bills of tiny denominations
and carry them with me.
Of “deadheads” and official mendicants the “São João” had its full
share. Ruben sent ten tickets a day to police headquarters, but those
who came on duty gave these tickets to friends and bootblacks and negro
relatives, and thrust their way in on the strength of their uniform or
badge. We were overrun with grafters filling seats and using up programs
for which honest people would have been willing to pay money, while a
dozen of the best boxes were permanently allocated to state and
municipal officials and powerful politicians. When I protested to
“Colonel” Ruben, I learned another interesting little fact,—he was
forced to be kind to politicians because, thanks to his political pull,
he got this great four-tier theater, built by the government in viceroy
days and now belonging to the State of Bahia, rent free! As to the
police, he confided to me that he had to be lenient with them in order
that they might not be too harsh with him when he offered shows of the
“_sem roupa_” or undress variety.
For all the resentment of frustrated “deadheads” and the attitude of
Bahia’s newspapers, which at first gave five lines to Edison’s invention
and full pages to the religious debauch of Bomfim, the success of the
Kinetophone forced the five or six dailies to give our engagement
increasing attention. They were all rather pitiful sheets, and in a town
where at least three-fourths of the population never reads it would have
seemed highly advisable to have combined them into one good newspaper.
That of course would have been impossible, because of Latin-America’s
lack of team-work and mutual confidence, as well as the demand of each
political faction for its own organ of propaganda. One day there
appeared in the best of these sorry journals a long and learned article
by a Brazilian purist who, though flattering to the invention and the
inventor, asserted that it should be called “Cinephonio” rather than
“Kinetophone.” I was feeling in good Portuguese form by this time, and
having leisure enough to dig back through the layers of philology to
ancient Greece, I sent in an equally long and learned answer that
decidedly surprised editor, contributor, and reading public, accustomed
only to the type of American business man who is utterly ignorant of,
and wholly uninterested in, the native tongue. Comments on this
controversy and its astonishing dénouement drifted to my ears from our
throngs for more than a week afterward.
Such experiences as this emphasized the unwisdom of the habit of many
American firms of sending the same “drummer” to cover both Brazil and
Spanish-America. Brazilians have a rivalry toward Argentinos which
amounts to hatred; they consider the Castilian tongue particularly the
language of the Argentine and at least pretend to regard it as a
corruption of their own, of which they are unreasonably proud. Hence the
traveling-man who addresses them in Spanish is more apt to arouse
resentment than commercial interest. If he cannot speak Portuguese, he
will do better to stick to English, using an interpreter when necessary,
or take a chance on his French, which most educated Brazilians
understand more or less, rather than deliberately to incense them by
using the tongue of their rivals and implying its importance over their
own.
We had now reached a latitude where it is doubly wise for the white man
to exercise regularly, and the daily walk that had always been a custom
I now made a stern requirement. Complaints against sluggish livers were
almost universal in the small foreign colony, but I noted that they
invariably went with large liquor bills and a scorn of pedestrianism,
even in its mildest forms. Personally, though it was unquestionably hot
and perspiration flowed at the least physical exertion, I found the
climate of Bahia agreeing splendidly with me, and a few miles of brisk
walking, followed by a refreshing “rain bath,” became a pleasure to
which to look forward. “Tut” could frequently be coaxed to go with me,
but his Brazilian training made Carlos prefer to loaf about the theater
and watch the rehearsing of dancing girls, in the face of my warning
that he was now in a different land than his cool and temperate São
Paulo. There were fine points to Carlos; one often caught a suggestion
that in some such stern environment as the United States he would have
turned out a man of parts, but the error of his parents in turning south
instead of north across the Atlantic made his struggle with environment
a pitched battle, with the odds against him.
There are endless wooded hills and valleys in Bahia, with old forts on
every projecting angle of the city, on both the bay and the ocean side,
which recall the days when São Salvador was the proud capital of Brazil,
unworried by the suspicion of a future rival. Out beyond the élite
section along the Rua Victoria, past the old church said to stand on the
very site in which the city was founded, a nose of land jutting out into
the sea and swept by unfailing breezes was shaded by an aged fort and
lighthouse that made its sloping greensward or quaint stone benches the
most ideal place in South America to spend an afternoon lolling over a
book. If one felt more energetic, there were amusing characters among
the curious wicker fish-traps down on the beach below. Often I walked
all morning long entirely within the city limits through dense
uninhabited jungle, following soft earth roads down through great
valleys with clusters of negro cabins, and shops of the equally
superstitious Portuguese with whom they trade, bearing such names as “Fé
em Deus,” “Esperanç aem Deus,” “Todo com Deus,” the householders lolling
in the shade beneath them and letting _Deus_ do the rest. Here the motto
seemed to be “God helps those who wave a flag with His name on it.” It
was almost a relief to run across such frankly cynical shop-names as “A
Protectora da Probeza” (The Protector of Poverty).
Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent
by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to
split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the
state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on
along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with
negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon
when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate
watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited
blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of
such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain
foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit
together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner
bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles,
for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long
beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at
which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and
mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the
spot for a mere _tostão_, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly
damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must
take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two
classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible
sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the
first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or
collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into
the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone
wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never
offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on.
A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of
Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many
this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the
trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the
inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more
material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once
more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by
replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of
chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries
which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore,
“women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath
of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I
visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled
“linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the
boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native
washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn
for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure
that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among
goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled
than when it departed.
About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual
station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to
lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at
once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the
baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling
expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I
promised to think this over.
Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his
former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been
designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a
good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a
great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a
foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben
had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever
met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it
was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was
making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well
watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is
likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as
are more sincere individuals.
I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the
world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and
after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract
at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made
it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a
corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it
made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and
left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had
led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he
needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I
got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become
manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the
triangular vacant lot near the “São João”!
“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.”
We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come
back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward.
On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into
the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance
of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio
Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white
residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in
Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys
of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all
heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few
“deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or
police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved
three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron
wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade
wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the
brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking
and singing blocks away.
Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen
consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of
scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da
Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious
festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that
negroes celebrating church _festas_ do not spend money on cinemas. I
went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the
“purification” attached to the town’s name.
One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay,
leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at
high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the _festa_. It was hot
under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could
have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We
stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones
along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in
hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that
deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their
proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We
picked up _festa_-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one
out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry.
Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of
those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford
the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior
Brazil.
By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a
grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on
commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable
huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river
that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story
agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in
apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long
causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were
waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis,
which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only
foreigner and person of wealth among the _festa_-bound horde, and no
doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double
fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains.
He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more
populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be
hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town,
stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is
inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags.
Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady
spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing
nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and
living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a
river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this
stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim
comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it
would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the
town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate
“office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a _vintem_
for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries,
dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the
vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at
once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too
indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the
_festa_, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing
and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town
notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of
the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!”
The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens
in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating
the _véspera_. About the _matrix_, or main church, surged immense
throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the
drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were
forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children
from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo
Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only
coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of
cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and
three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the
proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by
gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA”
in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band
blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside
the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly
dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face,
mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures
of Catholicism and African fetish worship.
All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the
“Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public
hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped
the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I
was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no
means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from
the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms.
High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It
was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and
corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a
tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not
_really_ leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better
prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two,
on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed,
rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled
along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were
told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa
Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up
the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by
rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long
cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed
across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where
one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed.
Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel
steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from
the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain
bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of
the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold
watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings,
a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This
paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from
Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance _sem
roupa_—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit
of the _matutos_, or “country gawks,” of the interior.
A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow
inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually
narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the
Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of
the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old
_fazenda_-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and
there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore
two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by
more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe”
and lived on their exports of _fumo_ and _charutos_ (tobacco and
cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back
in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed,
winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of
São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected
by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids
over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town
its name.
As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and
the aggressive boatmen, _carregadores_, and touts fighting for business.
Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one
seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow
who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the
hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire
Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a
rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry
“canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the
river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira.
Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets
of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily
from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile,
and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the
Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after
eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel”
of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the
unexpected scantiness of our “company.”
Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting,
swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the
boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin
wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to
remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I
might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes”
in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to
Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights,
without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly
side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do
Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state.
There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but
almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our
advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of
_taboletas_, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys
beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because
the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played
to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”!
Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut
the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed
necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89
paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they
seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their
ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of
civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a
life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the
world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church
festivals appeals to them.
I took advantage of the Sunday train to visit Feira do Sant’ Anna,
thirty miles up-country. This line was built back in the seventies, yet
the names of Hugh Wilson and other Americans still appear on various
bridges and viaducts. The train climbed for half an hour, and still we
could look down upon the twin towns close below, but once up on top of
the flat, rather dry and sandy, plateau it raced along at decent
Brazilian speed. The slender branches of the mandioca were numerous, and
here I saw my first tobacco-fields in Brazil. At one station a mile from
the town it served saddle-horses were waiting for the men and enormous,
bungling, two-wheeled mule-carts with wicker armchairs in them for the
women. It would have been dreadful if one of the white-collar class had
been forced to walk that mile along the smooth, dry, cool summer road.
For it was pleasant and breezy up here, though the elevation was not
great; even at summer midday one could walk comfortably in the sun
bareheaded—provided one could walk anywhere comfortably. My preconceived
notions of this region proved entirely false. I had expected dense
jungle and forest, and humid, leaden heat; on the contrary, it was not
only dry and cool, but almost bare of vegetation.
Feira do Sant’ Anna, so named for the great cattle-fairs that were held
here on St. Ann’s day, is less than a century old, a one-story town
sitting out unsheltered on a dry, sandy, plain. Two streets wider than
Broadway cross at right angles in the center of town, and are fully
paved with cobblestones and lined with small bushy shade trees. On
Monday market-days these are thronged with countrymen and women from a
hundred miles around. To-day a cockfight under a big tree on the
outskirts seemed to be the only activity. Two roosters without
artificial spurs, but with bloody heads and necks, entirely featherless
in spots, pecked at each other eternally, while bullet-headed negroes
and mulattoes stood around them betting—if they still had any
coppers—one owner or the other occasionally picking up his bird,
spraying a mouthful of rum-and-water on its head and neck, and setting
them at it again, until one fell from utter exhaustion and the other,
wabbling drunkenly on his bloody feet, uttered a feeble crow of victory.
Wells with good American force-pumps marked the town a rare one for
interior South America, where the inhabitants generally drink from some
nearby creek or mud-hole; but drought had left little at the bottoms
even of the wells, and this scant supply negro boys were delivering to
various parts of town in casks on mule or donkey-back, a blue enameled
government license on the forehead of each four-footed animal.
[Illustration: The site on which Bahia was founded]
[Illustration: Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a
steam-laundry of Bahia]
[Illustration: Taking a jack-fruit to market]
When we got back to Bahia on February 10 a brand new hotel had been
opened on the space left between Ruben’s present theater and the
invisible one I had the opportunity of some day managing. It was a
five-story, flat-iron _placete_ on the height of the city, the highest
building in Bahia, or, indeed, in the state, and was the wonder of the
region. The only elevator in the paunch of South America, except the
outdoor one between the lower and higher city, ran all the way up it,
but when “Tut” and I entered, it refused at first to work, whereupon I
stepped out again to get something I had forgotten.
“Oh, don’t be afraid!” cried the servant, himself ashy with fear, who
was attempting to manipulate it, “it won’t fall.”
On the fifth floor, spoken of with a catch of the breath in Bahia, we
had a pleasant little room with a vast outlook over city and ocean—and
as it was starting in to acquire a reputation, the place was strictly a
hotel and not a brothel. Materially it was a great relief from what we
had been enduring for weeks past, and the unwonted sensation of living
in well-nigh civilized surroundings again was welcome, but a hotel,
after all, takes its tone from its guests and servants, and these being
_Bahianos_, it was doubtful whether so expensive an establishment would
be able to keep its head above water. Speaking of water, the
shower-baths were extra, as usual in Brazil, but when I confided to the
manager that I would move out again next day, he hastened to assure me
that no one would notice when I bathed.
Street-cars and walls were again flaunting Kinetophone advertisements
inviting everyone to come and see the “marvel of the age.” But it was
“reheated soup” in Bahia now, and out at Itapagipe, where we had played
three nights to crowded houses only a week before, the Latin enthusiasm
had effervesced and we had only a straggling audience. If only we had
had some new numbers, say a couple of Caruso! The second night was
worse, with our share only 36$, and the owner refused to give a show at
all on the next and last night, saying the few days before carnival were
the worst in the year in the theatrical business, as everyone with a
_tostão_ was keeping it to buy masks, confetti, and scented water.
Carnival costumes and the silly soprano speech that goes with them were
already beginning to appear in the streets, and by noon on Sunday
negroes and half-negroes in fantastic make-up were everywhere. Most of
the “São João” employees were drunk or excited or parading the streets
by the time we opened for the matinée, and as I could watch the door as
well from there, I sat down behind the wicket and became ticket-seller.
Few ticket-offices in the world can compare with that of the old “São
João” in situation, under the deep colonial porch, open to all the trade
winds of the blue Atlantic, golden-bathed by day and silver-lighted by
night, lying a few hundred feet below and stretching away unbrokenly to
the coast of Africa.
Masked figures came, asking for tickets in the falsetto they hoped would
disguise their voices, as well as the usual haughty, tar-brushed class
in the full dress of public appearance. I quickly acquired the
professional ticket-seller’s “snappy” language and could toss out a
handful of change or a concise bit of information quite as scornfully as
the most experienced station-agent in my native land. Not a great many
spectators entered that afternoon, however, for which I did not blame
them. Why pay to go inside a musty old theater when the brilliant summer
day outside is full of free entertainments? Only two weeks before there
had been a similar celebration, but there is a constant string of this
expensive tomfoolery the year round in Bahia. The amount spent on
trolley-car and automobile floats alone would have built a good
school-house, to say nothing of the bands of music, costumes, and
playthings. Scores of automobiles filled with fantastically garbed men
and girls crawled through the streets, while thousands afoot were
arrayed in wild and generally ugly and orderless fantasy, with masks or
head-pieces equal to Bottom the Weaver. It was evident that the paraders
were mainly from the lower classes and had little originality of ideas
in designing costumes. Nearly everyone’s slight sense of humor prompted
him to pose as the opposite of what he was in real life; every negro who
could afford it wore a rosy-cheeked mask and white gloves; many of the
few whites had blacked up or donned negro masks, and perhaps half the
men were made up as women, while there was a perfect rage, particularly
among the part-negro girls, to appear in male attire, their hips
bursting through their otherwise loosely flapping nether garments.
“Ladies of the life” took advantage of the spirit of the day and sat
bare-legged in their balconies over the main streets, the police, of
course, never interfering, since correction or suppression are unusual
and unpopular in South America. We cancelled the third “section” that
night and joined the throng parading the streets amid cloud-bursts of
confetti, rivers of scented water, and maudlin uproar, and after looking
in at a popular ball that had many suggestions of a witch dance in the
heart of Africa I went home for my last night’s sleep in São Salvador da
Bahia.
CHAPTER XVI
EASTERNMOST AMERICA
The new contract with “Colonel” Ruben permitted me to absent myself from
the show and travel when and where I saw fit, he to pay my
transportation only by the most direct routes between the towns in which
the Kinetophone appeared. My faith in Ruben was always limited and my
preference for land over sea travel notorious, hence I decided to strike
off up-country a few days before the date set for us to sail for Maceió,
not only to indulge my incurable wanderlust but to prepare for any
sudden collapse of our sixty-day contract.
“Chemins de Fer Fédéraux de l’Est Bréslienne” seemed as top-heavy a name
for the narrow grass-grown track up the coast as the mammoth stacks made
the little old locomotives. Its tiny cars were designed for the use of
women rather than men, for the seats, instead of facing the open windows
and the world outside, stared into mirrors set in the car walls. We
ground away along the water, past Bomfim, topped by its white “miracle”
church, past Itapagipe beyond the widening water with its little sailing
dugout ferries, crept timidly across the long and aged wooden trestle
over this innermost arm of the bay, and at length lost Bahia to view
just a month from the moment I had first set eyes upon it.
There were a dozen stops at languid little cocoanut villages along the
fringe of the inner bay before the water gave way to dry and bushy
pasture-land at Agoa Cumprida. Most of the passengers changed there for
Santo Amaro, and for the rest of the journey we had more room than
company, which is usually an advantage in Brazil. Heaps of charcoal,
burned from the scrub trees that abound in this fairly fertile but dry
and little cultivated region, lay at most of the stations, at all of
which throngs of men, women, and boys strove to sell dusty fruit and
home-made cakes to the apathetic passengers. The dust lay thick upon us
also when we drew up at noon in Alagoinhas, eighty miles north. That
day’s train was bound up-country to Joazeiro on the São Francisco river,
and it would be twenty-four hours before I could continue along the
coast.
[Illustration: The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil]
[Illustration: The waterworks in a Brazilian city of some 15,000
inhabitants]
[Illustration: A Brazilian laundry]
[Illustration: Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival]
Some chap with a tendency for exaggeration has said that the night has a
thousand eyes; but that is nothing compared to almost any interior
village of South America when a white stranger comes strolling through
it. To walk the length of a street of Alagoinhas was like trying to
stare down some mammoth, bovine, fixedly gaping face, until a sensitive
man could scarcely have refrained from screaming, “For Heaven’s sake go
and do something, or at least draw in your stupid faces!” Spattered over
a lap of broken country and half-hidden in cocoanut and palm groves, it
would be difficult to decide how many of the 15,000 inhabitants it
claims actually dwell in it, were it not their unfailing custom to line
up to be counted. There was not a street in town, which is well inland
and at a slight elevation, but merely wide sloughs of sand between the
monotonous rows of houses; yet I was astonished to find two large and
well-kept cinemas. This, it turned out, was due to a local feud. Two
brothers who owned the “Cinema Popular” had been bosom friends of the
richest man in town, until they, too, bought an automobile. This so
enraged the rich man that he attempted to get even by building another
“movie” house in the hope of putting the brothers out of business. So
far he had not succeeded, and was all the less likely to do so after I
had signed a contract with the brothers for five nights at the
“Popular.” Ruben might take the show to Maceió and Pernambuco as he had
promised, but I did not propose to be caught napping, and if he did, the
Alagoinhas contract would be good in June or July when the Kinetophone
returned without me.
Another car so loose-jointed that the walls constantly creaked and
swayed toiled all the afternoon and into the night to carry a scattering
of passengers to Barracão, another name for Nowhere. It consisted merely
of several huts and a tile-roofed building in which all passengers by
rail from Bahia to Aracajú, or vice versa, must spend the night. The
engine, whistling up about a cord of wood, awakened us long before
daylight and at least an hour earlier than was necessary, for I was
already sitting in our six o’clock train when the other pulled out
Bahia-ward at five. The same seat, the same conductor, and the same
swaying walls as the day before made one feel like a trans-Siberian
traveler, though the 278 miles the train worries through in two days is
scarcely a Siberian distance. The salt-tainted breath of the Atlantic
slashed us now and then in the faces as we rumbled along, for we were
not far inland now. It was gently rolling country, of gray rather than
red soil, producing next to nothing, with here and there some bananas
and mandioca, and long unbroken stretches of scrub jungle. The _tucú_, a
grape-like fruit growing on a palm tree and so thick of skin and large
of stone that there is only a bit of sweetish dampness between them, was
sold at the rare stations.
Soon we crossed an iron bridge and what might have been a river had it
tried harder, into the State of Sergipe, the smallest of Brazil. This
and the little larger State of Alagoas are sliced out of the respective
states of Bahia and Pernambuco down near the mouth of the São Francisco,
which divides them. It is not apparent why they need be separate
states—but then, a foreigner ignorant of local conditions no doubt
wonders in looking at a map of our own country why a little nubbin of
land down at the end of Connecticut must have its own name, capital, and
government, or why both those bits of territory should not join
Massachusetts. The state lines of Brazil follow largely the old colonial
divisions, some natural but more of them artificial, set by the Pope or
the King of Portugal. Of the twenty Brazilian states, nine or ten have
aboriginal Indian names. It is another evidence of the higher value of
time to the American that we have an abbreviation for each of our
states, while the Brazilian has none. North and South American
incompatability of temperament is perhaps nowhere more definitely
demonstrated than in the attitude of the two races toward time. Brevity,
conciseness, and promptitude rank almost as bad manners among
Latin-Americans, whose editorial writers often break forth in
dissertations on “punctuality, that virtue of kings and bad custom of
Anglo-Saxons. Enthusiasts for liberty, we cannot admit that a man shall
be the slave of his watch. Life proves that punctuality is an excellent
virtue for a machine, but a grave defect for a man.”
In the blazing afternoon we came down off the interior plateau, ever
lower to the northward, here reminiscent of southern Texas or northern
Mexico in its aridity, its scattered, thorny, scrub plant life, its
occasional adobe huts, to a flat sea-level _littoral_ that was almost
entirely a dreary waste of snow-white sand, rarely punctuated with
cactus and a few other waterless bushes. Aracajú, capital of the State
of Sergipe, is set in this nearly desert landscape. The large room with
a mosquito-net canopied bed in which I was soon installed in the “Hotel
International” was the best the town had to offer befriended strangers.
Like all the rest of Aracajú, it was on the ground floor, looking out on
a quiet garden of deep sand, and was as airy as the exhaust from a
hot-air furnace. I had already taken it when my eye fell upon a notice
to the effect that for lack of water guests would not be allowed to
bathe for three days. By shouting until the whole hotel force was
gathered about me, and offering to make them all candidates for hospital
treatment, I was conducted, as a special favor to another of those
half-mad “gringos,” into a special “rain bath” for ladies, and freed
myself at last from the soil of Bahia. Then, having induced the landlord
to change the wooden-floored bed for one “of wire,” though he could not
understand why anyone should consider this an improvement, I relaxed and
sallied forth to see what Aracajú had to offer.
Sergipe, it seems, was a part of Bahia until nearly the end of the
colonial period, when it proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the
capital at São Cristovam, a straggling town some twenty miles back along
the railway by which I had come. But that was a league from a harbor,
and the government at length moved to an Indian village on the edge of
this cucumber-shaped bay. _Ara_ is a Tupi Indian word for plenty, and
_cajú_ is the Brazilian name for a fruit that thrives in such
semi-desert regions as the _littoral_ of Sergipe. This is shaped like a
small plump pear, with a smooth silky skin of saffron or brilliant red
color, which grows upside down on a tree not unlike the apple in
appearance, and is particularly conspicuous for the fact that the seed,
shaped like a parrot’s beak, gray in color, and containing a nut that is
delicious when roasted, grows entirely outside the fruit itself,
protruding from its larger end. The meat is white, exceedingly acid, and
sure death alike to thirst and the dye-stuff of garments. There were
barely a dozen Indian fishermen’s huts at Aracajú when it became the
capital in 1855; hence it has an appearance of newness rather than age,
and only two churches—quite sufficient, to be sure, but a great contrast
to Bahia. There is nothing particularly individual about the place, its
“palaces,” houses, or people, who are sufficient for all the Lord meant
them to be in this world and very few of whom are going to the next, if
I may judge by the size of the congregation and the priestly remarks
thereon at early mass the morning after my arrival.
The predominating type of _aracajuano_ is the gray or brown _mestiço_,
and a mixed race is rarely prepossessing in appearance. There are few
full negroes, even fewer pure whites, but every known mixture of the
two, no small number of _mamelucos_, or crosses between Indians and
Europeans, and too many _bodes_ (literally male goats) as the offspring
of Indian and negro are clandestinely called. The cucumber-shaped bay is
really the River Sery-gipe, a name said to mean the abode of a kind of
shrimp which abounds here, and has a troublesome moving sandbar at its
mouth, with less than four meters depth at low tide, making Aracajú the
only Brazilian coast capital which transatlantic steamers cannot enter.
One may see the waves breaking on this bar from almost any point in
town, but the open sea is in view only from the top of the cathedral or
the crest of the highest sand-dunes. Half the coast of Sergipe is made
up of this snow-white sand, in dunes that move with the wind, immense
heaps of the purest white sand covering whole blocks and rising a
hundred feet or more high within two minutes’ stroll of the main hotel.
All but a very few of the streets are ankle-deep in sand, as are the
palm-trees. These few are paved with large flat rocks fitted together in
all manner of irregular patterns. The “bonds” were still operated by
mule-power. There is a pleasing central _praça_, facing the waterfront
and backed by a little garden with a vista of the cathedral through
royal palms, pleasing perhaps because its bit of green lawn is in such
welcome contrast to the glaring sandy brightness elsewhere, but marred
by the statue of some local hero who, according to this monument,
stepped out of somewhere wearing a frock-coat and waving a most properly
creased soft felt hat, crying, “I am going to die for my country!” If he
could see it now he might regret his heroism.
In full sunlight at midday I could have used my umbrella to advantage as
a parasol, if some miserable son of a Brazilian had not stolen it in
Victoria. But he who never walks in tropical sunshine will never enjoy
to the full sitting in the shade, and at least the nights were cool and
breezy. The only thing to grow profane over was that the steamer which
was to carry me to Maceió had not even left Bahia, “because everybody
there is busy with the carnival.” This meant at least three days
squatting among the sand heaps, and perhaps not reaching Maceió until
after the show did, since that was to travel by direct steamer. Worse
still, I had read all the Brazilian novels in my bag, and Aracajú was
not the kind of place to support a bookstore. There was nothing left but
walking, and that soon palls in a sun-glazed town closely surrounded on
all sides by shoe-filling sand-dunes.
This dreary and unproductive soil stretches from five to ten miles
inland for the whole length of the state, with a broad strip of stony,
rolling, clay soil back of that, on which sugar and cotton, tobacco and
_farinha_ are produced in moderate quantity, while the western half of
the state is _sertão_, in which graze scattered herds of cattle. There
is a large weaving-mill in the capital, said to be the best in Brazil,
but still capable of improvement. During my strolls I came upon the
slaughter-house one afternoon and found scores of children showing great
glee at the struggles of the cattle as the blood poured from their
throats until they dropped in their own gore. Such was evidently the
chief education to be had by youthful Aracajú. Here, as in the other
tobacco producing state, Bahia, most of the negro women smoked pipes.
The lazy scrape of _tamancos_ was suggestive not only of the indolence
but of the moral looseness of the place. Though one might have had the
companionship of comely mulatto and quadroon girls for less than the
asking, I sought in vain for a person of even the rudiments of
intelligence with whom to pass the time, and was forced to take refuge
in the state public library instead. Even this was no monument of
learning, though several _sergipanos_ have won Brazilian fame as men of
letters. The building itself lacked nothing in elaborateness, but the
books were those least needed and only half a dozen youths drifted in
daily to read the newspapers and the silly “comic” weeklies from Rio.
Here, however, I learned that “there are two kinds of climate in the
State of Sergipe—hot and humid on the coast and hot and dry in the
interior,” and that the bronze gentleman in the frock-coat and Parisian
hat in the main praça was a “politician, a poet, and a great orator” who
tried to start a revolution here in 1906 and was quite naturally shot
full of holes by federal soldiers. No one can blame him, however, for
wanting to start something in Aracajú; his foolishness lay in the fact
that he seemed to think it was possible.
A two-line cable or two a week, usually on trivial matters and more
likely than not denied a few days later, constituted Sergipe’s
connection with the outside world. No doubt I needed the experience to
realize how dreary life is in these miserable little capitals when one
cannot hurry on as soon as the first interest and novelty has worn off.
The total lack of inspiration, of good example, of anything approaching
an ideal, could not but have killed any originality or ambition, even
had one of these half-breed youths been born with one or the other.
There was no goal in life. Even I felt that in my few days there; how
must it have been with a person born there and suspecting no other life
on the globe? A man may advance under his own gasoline, but unless he
has someone to crank him up he is very apt to die about where he began.
Few of us are equipped with self-starters.
Such reflections as these made me wonder sometimes whether the moving
picture, for all its imperfections and dangers and false view of life,
for all the peculiar inanity and childishness inherent in its dramas, is
not doing as much as anything to give the masses of South America,
particularly of the interior, at least a knowledge of better personal
habits, even if not higher aspirations. Much as this remarkable
invention has been prostituted by cheap mortals, it is an incredible
boon to communities so far from civilization that they never get more of
the great outside world than the films bring them. If you lived in some
sleepy little village in a remote corner of South America, far from
theaters or any other living form of life and thought, you would find
the daily round exceedingly dull, you would passionately crave some
variety, some entertainment, even mildly intellectual, or not at all so,
something to take you for an hour out of the dreary village routine of a
life-time and bring you in touch, if ever so slightly and momentarily,
with the great moving outside world. Thus you would welcome with
considerable enthusiasm even a bad “movie”—unless generations of this
life had so sunk you in sloth that you resented any attempt to drag you
out of it.
But though the “Cinema Rio Branco,” otherwise the state-owned “Theatro
Carlos Gomes,” in the next block was free to me, I found that at best a
stupid way for a man from the outside world to spend his time. Some of
that on my hands I had whiled away by booking the Kinetophone for three
to seven days on its return trip to Rio, we—or rather, they, for by that
time I should be far distant—to wire the manager at least five days
before their arrival. Thus I proposed to make a string of contracts for
“Tut’s” return trip, and leave my duty doubly done when I doffed my
movie-magnate hat up on the Amazon.
One morning I was rowed across the river, or harbor, in a dugout and
tramped for hours in the sand-carpeted forest of cocoanut-palms on the
Ilha dos Coqueiros. It was market-day in the town, and boatloads of the
nuts were coming across to compete with other native products from
farther up the river. The wind was sighing through the cocoanut fronds,
and I discovered that there are windfalls among cocoanuts also, for
there were so many large green ones under the trees that I had only to
stop and drink as often as I got thirsty. Numbers of them rot around the
edge of the stem and fall, and if they are not soon picked up, the decay
penetrates the shell and the nut spills its milk in the sand, leaving
only the husk to be used as fuel or roofing. Even here one was reminded
of the human race. The high trees of aristocratic arrogance ordinarily
had only half a dozen nuts, while the sturdy, ugly, short and squatty
ones bore from fifty to a hundred in tight clusters at the hub from
which the leaves radiate in all directions. A group of inhabitants
scattered along the near side of the island lived in cocoanut
husk-and-leaf huts and produced, besides their staple, which grows
itself, mandioca, melons, and children, all equally weedy and
ill-tended. Everyone above the age of ten or twelve seemed to have his
dugout log, a paddle, a square sail, and a trailing-board, all guarded
in his hut when not in use, and a bright-eyed bronze boy of part Indian
ancestry sailed me back across the harbor in a snapping sea breeze.
The dugouts and fishermen’s sailboats that always stretch along the
waterfront of Aracajú had been augmented by a steamer, the long-awaited
_Ilheos_ of the “Companhia Bahiana de Navegação,” which had at last
drifted over the sandbar at the harbor’s mouth. I hastened to the
company’s office, only to be struck in the eye by a sign headed “23 á 6
horas,” in other words, it being then Saturday, the _Ilheos_ would not
sail until _Tuesday_ morning! By that time the Kinetophone would long
since have left Maceió, even if good “Colonel” Ruben did not run away
with the whole concern during my prolonged absence. If only the sea had
frozen over I could have walked it in far less time than there was still
to wait, for it was only 105 miles to Maceió. But it would have been
many times that in this sand, and there was no other way of covering the
only break in railway travel—except the one between Victoria and
Bahia—along the whole eastern coast of South America.
The trouble was, it turned out, that Aracajú had next day to inaugurate
a new bishop, the first “son of Sergipe” ever to rise to that honor, and
of course Monday would be needed to recover from the celebration. The
archbishop of Bahia, the bishop of Maceió, and a swarm of lesser wearers
of the black robe had come to add dignity to the occasion, and, when I
came to think of it, of course it was they who were holding up the
steamer. Eight on Sunday morning found me at the _egreja matrix_, or
mother church, mingling with many pious negroes ready to give the new
bishop a proper send-off. But the edifice was already filled to about
seven times its capacity with people chiefly of color, and I withdrew
hastily to windward and a park bench. By Monday afternoon recovery from
the inauguration set in, and I ventured to buy my steamer-ticket, took
my last wade in the sands of Aracajú, and went on board for the night.
The bishop of Alagoas had the next cabin to my own and we slept with our
heads against opposite sides of the same half-inch partition. But I
suppose it was because I had no little purple dunce-cap to wear over my
bald spot that the dusky ladies of Aracajú did not come, glistening with
jewels embedded in their well-fed forms, to kiss _me_ good-night—on the
hand.
We began to move at four in the morning, and I went out to watch by the
light of half a moon and the Southern Cross our exit from one of the
most difficult ports in South America. Barely had we crossed the bar
when our sea-going tug began to rock like a canoe, and not only the
bishop but even as old a seadog as I took no interest in the ten o’clock
“breakfast.” The _Ilheos_ claimed to have twin screws, but they must
have been turning in opposite directions, for we made far less speed
than the coast swells that rolled us about like an empty bottle. The
shore was made up almost entirely of dreary wastes of white sand,
sometimes in broad flat stretches, sometimes drifted up into dunes. At
times a suggestion of forest appeared far back of this, but there were
few if any signs of habitation.
About noon the water about us turned from deep blue to a muddy red, a
great streak of which thrust itself out into the ocean from the outlet
of the River São Francisco. We turned into this across a broad sandbar
and found it a mile or more wide, though frequently split up by islands,
long, flat, and green. This river, largest between the Plata and the
Amazon, rises far to the south, near the old capital of Minas Geraes,
and has about the same volume of water as the Hudson. Thatched villages
and small cities line its banks for hundreds of miles and side-wheel
river steamers mount it in two sections, to Pirapora, in Minas Geraes,
terminus of the “Central Railway of Brazil.” We stopped at several
villages near the mouth, then pushed on inland. The rolling had ceased
and the bishop was out now parading the deck behind a big black cigar.
The shores were sandy and nearly flat, with palm-trees, some sugar-cane,
and a considerable population of more or less negroes. At length the
town of Villa Nova, two centuries old for all its name, appeared on the
nose of a bluff, and beyond, on the right-hand or Alagoas bank, the city
of Penedo, not unlike a smaller Bahia in situation, with several bulking
old churches and here and there a majestic imperial palm-tree rising
above all else.
We dropped anchor before Villa Nova, with its several textile mills, and
were soon completely hemmed in by cargo barges, though not before I had
slipped across to Penedo, from which we were to sail at four in the
morning. Considering the time it had taken to get there, it was hard to
believe that this was only forty-five miles north of Aracajú! Before the
town lay one of the side-wheel river steamers, and many “chatties,”
barges, and sailboats, not to mention countless dugout canoes, which ply
the lower São Francisco to the falls of Paulo Affonso, two hundred miles
up and “greater than Niagara,” according to my fellow-passengers. Here
and there groups of women were dipping up water and washing garments, in
the same spots. All the dwellers along its shore drink the muddy São
Francisco, _nature_, or at best filtered through a porous stone. No one
is ever seen swimming in these parts, either in river or sea.
[Illustration: The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay]
[Illustration: Another Brazilian milkman]
[Illustration: Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times]
[Illustration: A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor
gasoline]
I was surprised to find a large number of white people in Penedo, though
mulattoes were in the majority. There was some Indian blood, shown
chiefly in high cheek-bones and wide faces, and as usual there was a big
jail full of happy singing negroes. Full-white brats rolling stark naked
in the mud suggested one of the unfortunate effects of living in a
mainly negro country. Some streets climbed laboriously past overgrown
old churches with Portuguese crowns cut in stone on them, past
projecting balconies that carried the mind back to viceregal days, to
the grass-grown central praça high up on the ridge, overlooking a long
stretch of the red-brown river. It was the affair of a moment to
convince the owner of the “Theatro Sete de Setembro,” alias “Cinema
Ideal,” that the Kinetophone should halt here for three days on its
return trip. He was the big man of the town, with a dozen separate
enterprises, and when a score of persons crowded around us in his
drugstore to listen to our conversation and read over his shoulder
whatever I showed him, we agreed to leave the signing of the contract
for the next day on board the _Ilheos_, on which he, too, was to take
passage.
Anarchy reigned about the decks all night, sailors, stokers, and
visiting parties from shore keeping up a constant hubbub until we got
under way about dawn. A couple of hours sleep as we descended the river
were cut short as we struck the open sea, for though this looked calm
and smooth as a frog pond, the _Ilheos_ rolled like a log and soon took
on the aspect of a phantom ship, with everyone lying like dead wherever
misfortune overtook them. The dreary sandy coast was sometimes broken by
spurs of the low, flat, wooded plateau that stretches all along this
region farther inland. At two in the afternoon we sighted Maceió and its
port of Jaraguá, a smaller city far out on a point of land, with a reef
protecting a scallop in the coast but no real harbor. In one of the
score of sailboats that rushed out to meet us I was astonished to see
Carlos and later “Tut,” whom I supposed already in Pernambuco. They had
lost Wednesday and Thursday of the week before in getting here, had
played four days to tolerable business, and had lost the night just past
in waiting for the boat they now expected to take at any moment.
I took “Tut’s” room at the “Hotel Petropolis,” a massive, one-story
building on a sort of terrace that caught a hit of breeze and on the
sides of which were painted letters several feet high announcing it the
“Only Place in Maceió without Mosquitoes.” It had little of anything
else, for that matter, except good mosquito-nets over the beds to keep
out the mosquitoes it did not have. By dark the “Lloyd-Brazileiro”
steamer _Bahia_ arrived, and “Tut” and Carlos and Ruben’s mulatto
sub-manager sailed away, while I went over to the theater in which they
had played and contracted not only for three days on their return trip,
but for five days in Parahyba, capital of the state north of Pernambuco.
How hard Maceió had been hit by the prevailing hard times was suggested
on every hand, not only in out-of-works and light cinema receipts, but
by such posted information as:
NOTICE
On this date our telephone was disconnected from the respective
Company until our further orders, in view of the brutal crisis which
at the present time atrophies everything and everyone.
Maceió, January 1, 1915. João Ramos e Cia.
The capital of Alagoas, however, proved to be more of a city than it
looks from a distance. Most of it lies in a pocket between the sea and a
ridge, a large, almost land-locked bay running far in behind it. Mainly
three-story buildings lined the well-paved streets in the business
section, and new American street-cars of the electric “Companhia
Alagoana de Trilhos Urbanos” covered several pleasant suburbs. No
sooner, however, does one return to a region of railways and street cars
than missing arms and legs begin to appear. The people of Maceió were
visibly of higher class than those of the State of Bahia, though by no
means beyond possible improvement. Even the outskirt huts were
whitewashed and often noticeably clean, and women and children, and even
men, in many cases wore spotless white garments. Heaps of cotton bales
at the railway station and on the wharves reminded one of our own South,
but though there was ample evidence of African ancestry, there were
almost no full-blooded negroes among the population. The percentage of
white and near-white inhabitants was striking after Bahia; but here,
too, were the familiar north-Brazil concomitants of huge churches and
tiny one-room schools. Mangos and bread-fruit dropped in the central
praça, amid the myriad remains of tropical bugs lured to death by its
blazing electric-lights.
My only personal acquaintance with the élite of Maceió was due to
professional duties. When the show arrived, “Tut” had discovered that
the local electricity was of a freak type,—100 volts and 100 cycles,
whatever that means—a sort of non-union electricity evidently, for all
our phonograph motors refused to work with it. The English engineer at
the power-house figured out on paper that all would be well, but as the
“juice” is not turned on in Maceió until 6 P. M., his error was
discovered only when the audience was storming the doors on the opening
night. While the manager strove to keep the house amused with ordinary
films, “Tut” and Carlos raced about town and at last found in a café a
little electric fan. They borrowed the motor that operated it, but this
had to be cleaned and oiled before it would take up its new task, so
that it was nine o’clock before our part of the show was given; and as
Maceió usually goes to bed by eight, Ruben had to give back much of the
money, and the bungled _estrea_ injured business during the rest of our
stay. It turned out that the café and the fan belonged, sub rosa, to one
Dr. Armando Vedigal, a well-to-do lawyer and member of one of Maceió’s
“best families.” True to his race, as well as to his calling, this
gentleman, finding he had someone in a tight place, proceeded to squeeze
him. He demanded 100$ for the use of the motor for four nights, of at
most thirty minutes each. The whole fan costs six to eight dollars new
in the United States, and perhaps 35$ in Brazil; and as its perfection
was mainly due to Edison, it amounted almost to renting an apparatus for
two hours’ use to the inventor thereof at three times its original cost.
“Tut” had left the payment to me. Unfortunately I could not ignore it,
as I should have preferred, because the lawyer was a political power and
would have made it unpleasant for the owner of the theater unless his
“rake-off” was forthcoming, so the only American thing to do was to pay
what he demanded. I determined, however, to have at least the
satisfaction of expressing our gratitude to the fellow in person, and
after considerable insisting I was shown the way to his house. It was an
ostentatious one enclosed in a large private garden in the best part of
town and filled with those things into which persons of wealth and
“social standing” the world round turn the proceeds of such clever
“strokes of business.” The great man received me with a dignity
befitting his lofty station, and invited me into his chair-forested
parlor. He had the dainty aristocratic fingers, hands, and form of those
who, for generations back, have taken good care not to let their muscles
develop, lest someone suspect them of having once earned a dollar by
vulgar work, and he was dressed in the very proper heavy, black, full
frock-coat dress of his class, even on the equator.
I began by expressing our thanks for the use of the motor, to which he
instantly replied, “Ah, to be sure, I was _so_ delighted to be able to
serve you, and—and——”
He was plainly waiting for me to encourage him with, “Yes, that was _so_
kind of you” and a gentle pat on the shoulder, instead of the swift kick
farther down which he so richly deserved. I bowed, and took to
expressing in the most polished Portuguese I could summon my admiration
for a man who had the nerve to demand several times the price of a
machine for such a brief use of it. I had intended to work him up slowly
to the point where my remarks would feel like the threshing of nettles
on a bare skin, but the men of northern Brazil are dynamic with pride
and quick to flare up at any suggested slight, so that I had barely
reached the word _roubar_ (rob), first of a long and culminative list
with a sting, when he bounded into the air and asked if I really knew
the meaning of that word in Portuguese. I assured him that I did, and
the action, too, in any land or clime, whereupon he demanded in a
neighbor-waking voice whether I had come to call him a thief in his own
house. When I informed him that I had come for that express purpose, he
bellowed, “_Rua!_ Off with you! Out of my sight,” at the same time
hastening to pick my hat off the rack and hand it to me. I was going
anyway, now that he had caught my hint, but I did not propose to let his
wrath hasten matters. As I stepped leisurely out upon the veranda he
slammed the door and informed me in the bellow of a mad bull that he
would “pay me back”—not the 100$ unfortunately—“the first time he met me
on the street—to-morrow!”
“Why not to-day?” I queried, for it was barely dusk and there were
street-cars, if it was beneath his dignity to walk.
This redoubled his fury. “_Era uma fita_”—it was a regular movie, as the
Brazilians say, to see him giving an impersonation of a fire-eater for
the benefit of his wife and children, and shouting. “Let me at him! Let
me eat him!” while his wife and three small sons clung to his arms,
legs, and other appendages, screaming the Brazilian form of, “Don’t kill
him, Pa! Oh, don’t shoot him, for my sake!” He allowed the pistol he had
caught up to be wrested from his hand, but the howls and screams of the
whole family could still be heard when I turned the next corner—and I
was not running at that.
[Illustration: Ladies of Pernambuco]
[Illustration: A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper]
[Illustration: Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk
and a dancing-girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos behind the
drummer]
It was playing with fire, of course, not because these hot-headed
northerners are particularly brave, but because of the disadvantage
which a stranger and a foreigner would have in any contest with a
powerful local politician. Had he shot me, it would probably not have
been difficult for him to “fix it” to escape punishment, whereas the
reverse would almost certainly have meant many years in an unpleasant
climate. I was too exasperated to consider these things at the time,
however, and having returned to the mosquito-less hotel and strapped on
my revolver, I spent the evening hanging about the cinema, the town
billiard-room, and the other nightly gathering-places where a
“gentleman” with such a debt might come to pay it; but the lawyer’s
strength must have been unequal to that of his frenzied wife and
children, for I saw no more of him during my stay in Maceió.
The “G.W.B.R.,” or Great Western of Brazil Railway, is English, which
accounts for its being so called, though it runs from Maceió to Natal
through the easternmost part of the four easternmost states in the
western hemisphere. On the first day of the month in which I arrived
daily service had been inaugurated between Maceió and Pernambuco, but
lack of coal was making it impossible to keep this up and the line was
soon to go back to the old schedule of three trains a week. In other
words, I had accidentally chosen just the time to spare myself another
day in the capital of Alagoas. The train that left at dawn on the
225-mile run was long and heavy, with all reasonable comforts and many
minor evidences of English management, among them the habit of being on
time. This line is a part of the 786 miles leased for sixty years to the
British corporation by the government, and the contract reads that no
rental shall be paid for it until the gross income for all of them
exceeds 6,200$ per kilometer, after which ten per cent. of the receipts
shall be paid into the public treasury. The result is a problem similar
to that on the line from São Paulo to Santos. One million pounds
sterling was spent to improve the leased lines, but even that would not
have been enough had the company not been so fortunate, as the chairman
of the stockholders in London told them, as to have had a partial
failure of crops along their lines that year and to have been thereby
saved from contributing £36,000 to the government! The largest expense
of the company is for coal and its largest income from the hauling of
sugar, with second-class passengers next, according to an item in the
official report headed “Passenger and Live Stock Transportation.” No
doubt it would be hard to separate the two in Brazil.
The line to Pernambuco ran well inland through a dry and dusty but
fertile land, varying from rolling to big rounded hills, among which the
train wandered back and forth seeking an outlet. In places it was
somewhat forested, or seemed recently to have been cleared; but most of
it was thickly inhabited, compared with almost any other part of Brazil.
Big _engenhos_, or sugar mills, often punctuated the landscape with
tall, smoke-belching stacks; immense fields of sugar cane were
everywhere being harvested, and though it was February, workmen were
hoeing with big clumsy _enxadas_ cane-sprouts in the same plots in which
mature cane was being cut. Most of the canes came from the fields tied
in two bundles on the backs of horses, to be dumped in heaps at the
stations and then carefully corded on the railway cars. At least half
the stations had a long train of red and yellow cane loaded or loading
on the sidetrack, and our way was frequently blocked by similar trains
bound for Recife. These and the many large _engenhos_, the little
private railways on the _fazendas_, with their screeching English or
Belgian dwarf locomotives, and the evidence of movement and industry
everywhere, gave one the feeling of having once more reached a land of
ambition. Pernambuco is Brazil’s greatest sugar-producing state. Thanks
to this fact and to an unusually honest government, it enjoys a
prosperity second only to that of São Paulo, and possibly of Rio Grande
do Sul, in the entire republic. Cotton and mandioca also are important
crops, often growing together, and bales of the former lay piled up at
many stations. Everything, the cane-fields, the sugar-mills, the large
old plantation-houses in choice locations and guarded by half a dozen
majestic royal palms, even the swarms of beggars at the stations—gave
the impression of an old and long-established community.
It was a constant surprise to find it cooler up on this slight plateau
than in the sugar-fields of Tucumán, twenty-five degrees nearer the
South Pole, and I never could reconcile myself to the total absence of
jungle. Both these conditions were evidently due to the same cause,—the
constant strong trade winds that sweep across all this paunch of South
America and blow the rains, without which jungle cannot grow even on the
equator, farther inland. Water was so scarce that there were only
shallow mud-holes for the rare cattle, and all the region appeared
sorely in need of irrigation. As in Egypt, the dry soil or the glaring
sun seemed to produce blindness, and there were many sightless wretches
among the beggars that swarmed every station. Indeed, the sugar-cane,
the cotton, the lack of moisture in air and soil, the very _engenhos_,
carried the mind back to the land of the Nile. Mendicants in the last
stages of every loathsome disease thrust their ailments, their frightful
faces, their leprous finger-stumps upon one wherever the train halted.
All the people of this region,—beggars, bootblacks, or politicians—have
the habit of touching, patting, pawing one over to attract attention,
and it was only by constant vigilance that I could keep myself free from
often noisome personal contacts. Then, in that liberty-is-license South
American way, swarms of ragged urchins and shiftless men poured into the
cars at every station, fingering the spout of the empty water-can,
squatting in the vacant seats, thrusting their attentions upon the
passengers, stark naked children, with navels protruding several inches
from their rounded stomachs, scampered in and out of every opening, no
attempt whatever being made by trainmen or station police to reduce this
annoying anarchy. Many beggars and tramps used a sugar-cane as a
staff—perhaps as a sort of last straw against starvation.
I do not believe in charity, or at least in promiscuous giving, but the
Brazilian does, and every one of the beggars who flock about the
stations throughout northern Brazil seems to get something for his
trouble. Some of them were frankly Africans, but there were others whose
negro blood showed only in their love of sucking a sugar-cane, the most
work for the least gain of any labor on earth. Even the prosperous
cities are not free from this eleemosynary multitude. When the
archbishop of Pernambuco returned to his palace after the inauguration
of the “son of Sergipe,” he found 235 beggars waiting at his door. The
Brazilian no doubt feels that to give alms through an institution would
be to pay most of it into the capacious pockets of its managers or
sponsors, whereas if he gives himself, he knows that the gift actually
reaches the needy person—if, indeed, he is needy. Also, he is more apt
than not to be superstitious and to fancy that if he does not give, his
own affairs will not prosper; most of all, he is constantly at his old
pastime of “fazendo fita”—showing off. Hence impudent, able-bodied
beggars are a pest to society and to the travelers’ peace throughout the
country, particularly in the blazing north.
A brilliant moon waiting at the edge of the stage to do its turn even
before that of the unclouded sun was finished, gave us a continuous
performance, with the lighting never dimmed. As we neared Recife there
was less cultivation, and beyond Cabo White flat sand and miserable huts
took the place of the rolling, fertile, well-housed country—though even
here there was not the squalor of Bahia. A desert of sand, an almost
unpeopled wilderness had surrounded us for some time before the low
lights of Recife began to spring up across the level moon-bathed
landscape, and the sandy and swampy land of the Brazilian _littoral_
continued until our train rumbled out upon the very beach of the
moon-silvered Atlantic.
It was already 7:40, and there was no time to be lost if I was to take
up my professional duties that evening. About noon we had met the
up-train with the day’s newspapers and I had caught up with the world
and its doings again. Pernambuco has the best journals north of Rio, one
of which claims to be the oldest in Latin-America, and I had been
delighted to find in several of the most important dailies half-page
Kinetophone advertisements, and in all of them articles to the effect
that “Edison’s new marvel” had opened the night before with all three
sessions crowded to capacity by delighted audiences. But newspaper
stories and facts often have little in common. I sprang into the first
automobile to offer its services and, after a jouncing over cobblestones
that felt like being tossed in a blanket, was set down at the “Hotel
Recife.” This was said to be the best in town—which was certainly
slanderous language toward the others. Razor and shower-bath having
transformed me from a dust-bin discard to the personification of Beau
Brummel on a tropical excursion, I raced away to the “Theatro Moderno.”
There I was agreeably surprised. Ruben met me with the fraternal embrace
at the door of a large new theater, perhaps the most sumptuous in which
we had played in Brazil; the receipts the night before had been the best
in weeks, and crowds were even then clamoring for admission. The
sugar-prosperity of Pernambuco, abetted rather than injured by the World
War, combined with plentiful advertising in newspaper displays and
articles, in posters and handbills, and by the gyrations through the
streets of two _bonecos_, or dolls, ten feet high, had done the trick.
The fact that the _bonecos_ represented a friar and a dancing-girl
respectively, and that their public promenading was accompanied by
antics which a more circumspect people would have considered highly
indecent, seemed to have been an advantage rather than otherwise in
Pernambuco.
“Tut” had found the hotels so uninviting that he was sleeping in his
hammock on the stage of the theater. Our first move, therefore, was to
investigate what all foreign residents assured us was the best
stopping-place in Recife,—a _pensão_ kept by a European woman known as
the “Baroness.” It was out in the suburb of Magdalena, twenty minutes by
electric tramway from the center of town—except that passengers lost
more time than that in walking across a condemned bridge which would not
carry the cars. The _pension_ consisted of several buildings, one large
and pretentious, the rest simple and of one story, scattered about a big
enclosed yard shaded by many magnificent tropical trees and looking out
behind on one of the many arms of the sea which divide Recife into
separate sections. We took a large room together, opening directly on
the garden, with a mammoth tree over our very door. There were some
drawbacks—no electric lights, for instance, that improvement not yet
having reached Pernambuco in public form, though a few places had a
private plant. Also the “garden” was deep in sand, for lawns are unknown
in this part of the world. But a high fence, as well as dogs and
servants, made it possible to leave our doors wide open night and day to
the ever-cooling trade wind, and there was a quiet homelikeness as well
as cleanliness about the place that made us feel as if we had suddenly
left dirty, noisy, quarrelsome Brazil behind.
The “Baroness” had the advantage of good servants from German steamers
interned in Pernambuco, the nearest port of refuge for many of those in
the South Atlantic when the war broke out. In fact, all Pernambuco was
fortunate in having about five hundred men of similar antecedents to
serve it that winter. The excellent band of the _Cap Vilano_, for
instance, made not only the most energetic but the best music in North
Brazil at the “Café Chic,” just around the corner from our theater—at
the equivalent of a dollar a night to each of the musicians. The war had
brought Recife other things. Its sugar and cotton having kept it from
succumbing to the “brutal crisis” that flagellated the rest of Brazil,
it had the reputation of being the best-to-do city in the country.
Consequently, adventuresses of all nationalities had come up in droves
from dead Rio and impoverished São Paulo, and Recife had more high class
members of the profession that needs no training than most cities of
five times its population.
Though we often hear of it, there is really no city of Pernambuco. What
we call by that name is properly designated by one almost unknown to
foreigners. Pernambuco is an old Indian word that is only correctly
applied to the entire state, but it has long been the custom not only of
seafaring men and all foreigners, but of the Brazilians themselves not
resident within the state, to call its capital Pernambuco. Its real name
is Recife, and the story of its founding is not without interest. In
1531 Pedro Lopez Pereira established on the only hill in this vicinity a
town which was called Olinda, and which in time became a very
aristocratic center. But though it had a beautiful site on the open
ocean, Olinda had no port, and boats could only land behind the
_recife_, or reef, some miles farther south. On Christmas day of 1598
Jeronymo de Albuquerque formally gave the name Recife to the cluster of
trading posts that had grown up there, and built the fortress by which
the city is still, at least in theory, defended. The settlers at the
“Reef” were almost entirely Portuguese merchants, whom the aristocrats
of the proud residential town of Olinda called “mascates”—peddlers or
hawkers. The rivalry and ill-feeling between the two towns grew apace.
The colonial nobility of Olinda, resenting any interference from their
lowborn neighbors, wished to form an independent republic on the style
of Venice, and the quarrel finally developed into what is known in
Brazilian history as the “War of the Mascates.” Naturally the
“peddlers,” having nearly all the material advantages, had the best of
it; new authorities arriving from Portugal ended the struggle, and
Recife became the city, port, and capital of the region, leaving Olinda,
small and isolated on its hill, still proud of its aristocratic origin,
but a mere suburb of the modern city.
Unlike Bahia, Recife had no ridge to build on; hence it is deadly flat,
with only Olinda five miles to the northwest rising above the
featureless landscape, though far behind the city one may make out the
wooded hills that merge gradually into the flat-topped _chapadas_ of the
_sertão_ of the interior. It stands on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta
where two rivers, neither of them of much importance, meet, and the
compact old town, with the wharves, banks, and most of the business
houses, is really on an island, protected now not only by the natural
reef, but by a long breakwater behind which ships anchor. There is no
bay; hence steamers which do not enter the inner port must in rough
weather land their passengers in a “chair” running on a cable from the
breakwater. Many a traveler to South America remembers nothing of
Pernambuco except that hair-raising landing.
As Bahia is a city of hills and wooded ridges, so Pernambuco is one of
waterways and bridges. The so-called River Capibaribe runs, or at least
ebbs and flows, through town, and there are a score of natural canals,
estuaries, and mud sloughs filling and emptying with each tide, while
hundreds of dwellers in thatched huts of the suburbs have the advantages
of Venice in so far as a chance to pole themselves about on their rude
rafts goes. Marshy salt water comes in and around the city at every
tide, and the rivers, coves, or quagmires to be crossed in a journey
through it are numerous—doubly so since several of its many bridges have
been condemned for vehicular traffic. Palm trees, chiefly of the
cocoanut family, grow everywhere, and between its waterways the city of
bridges is noted for its dry and sandy soil; hence one can scarcely
stray from the paved streets without wading either in water, mud, or
sand.
Properly speaking, Recife is the older section of the town, out near the
reef, and given over mainly to business. The modern city covers several
times more territory than that, including country-like outskirts of such
suggestive names as Capunga, Afflictos, and Sertãozinho among its
suburbs. There is Afogados (Drowned Man) out past the Five Points
station on the beach, a big suburb of mud and thatched huts among swamp
bushes and a network of tidewater, with lanes of mud that snap like the
cracking of a Sicilian whip when the tide is out and the tropical sun
blazing down upon them. In other directions, still within the city
limits, are miles of old estates and aged plantation-houses living out
their dotage under magnificent royal palms. To get about this broken up
city there were big new English and American street-cars, so new that
passengers were not yet permitted to put their feet on the seats. It was
less than a year since the old mule-cars for which Pernambuco was long
famous, had been superseded—in the outskirt of Torre they might still be
seen—and ragamuffins who had never heard the word “bond” in its ordinary
significance made frequent use of it in its Brazilian sense. The new
company was pushing its lines in every direction and already the tramway
was advertising itself as ready to furnish electric-light to business
houses along its lines. Thus, though one had the sense of treading on
the heels of modernity in Pernambuco, in all northern Brazil, the
pre-invention age always succeeded in eluding one and escaping just over
the edge of the horizon.
Besides its brand new electric street-car system and the three lines of
the “Great Western” leaving it in as many directions, Recife has five
amusing little railroads, “toy locomotives hitched to a string of
baby-carriages,” as “Tut” called them, which do a volume of noisy,
dirty, dusty business to the north and northeast of the city. For many
years these ancient contrivances of an English company were the only
urban traffic in and about Recife. One crowds into a tenement-house of a
station, wages pitched battle about a knee-high hole in the wall to buy
a ticket, enters an ancient closed wooden box on wheels suggestive of
what trains must have been in the days of Charlemagne, amalgamates with
variegated Brazilians on a hard, misshapen wooden seat, and waits. When
one has waited long enough to run down to “B.A.” and back, there come
ten or twelve ear-splitting screeches and back-breaking jolts, and the
train is off for some other “station” fifty yards away, with a deluge of
smoke, soot, and cinders which penetrate to the utmost recesses of one’s
person. For a long hour the contrivance screams its sooty way through
endless dusty streets in which the irreconcilable tropical sunlight of
February strikes one full in the face like the fist of an enemy, and at
the end of that time the weary traveler may descend five or even six,
miles away, at Olinda, or at some of the plantation-town suburbs shaded
by many trees, yet dreary with their sand in place of grass. There are
two such lines to Olinda, out past Santo Amaro with its British cemetery
and across a broad swamp by a causeway; but the company claims that the
concession is no longer worth the holding since the coming of electric
competition. No doubt _Pernambucanos_ considered these medieval trains a
wonderful innovation and convenience when they first appeared, but it is
more pleasant now to depend on electricity—or to walk.
I waded for miles barefoot along the beach to Olinda one day. Palm-trees
edged the curve of the shore with their inimitable plumage, streaking
the staring white sunlight with slender shadows. Thatched huts along the
beach, with all the Atlantic and its breezes spread out before them,
suggested where many a well-to-do family of Recife spends its summers.
An old wreck here and there protruded from the surface of the sea,
relics of some collision with the easternmost point of the New World.
Olinda piled high on its hill amid palm-trees and many huge old
churches, takes on the air of both, of age and reverence and the regal
dignity of the royal palm. Its many old buildings are clustered rather
closely together; it seems still to scorn business as thoroughly as in
the olden days, and to spend most of its time gazing across the swampy
flatlands at its materialistic rival, or out upon the blue sea which is
so rarely seen from Recife.
The city we call Pernambuco claims 200,000 inhabitants, and of these
perhaps one in three could pass as white. Even in the huts lining the
water or mud labyrinths of the outskirts whites are numerous, though
often as trashy as the negroes. It is surprising that as one nears the
equator in Brazil the proportion of Caucasian blood increases, but it is
easily explained. All that part of South America which thrusts itself
halfway across the sea to Africa had many slaves, but Bahia not only
grew a crop which required more labor, but, its port being then the
national capital, it had the advantage of fame, as well as its great bay
as a safe landing-place. The result is that while Bahia is a negro town,
Pernambuco is a city of mulattoes, with a mixture of types that can only
be differentiated by the rich color-terminology of Brazil. On the whole,
the _Recifense_ is a more pleasant individual than the blacker, more
slovenly, more impudent _Bahiano_. Like most of the people of North
Brazil, he talks in a kind of singsong, ending almost every sentence
with _não_ (no) or _ouvioú?_ (did you hear?). There are few really
masculine voices in Brazil, and the persistent cackle of poor, cracked
trebles, chattering constantly at high speed about nothing, eventually
gets on the nerves, unless one has been spared that troublesome
equipment. The chief business of the city is still that of the
“mascates,” in a larger sense,—the exporting of sugar and cotton and the
importing of things needed by the growers of sugar and cotton, with the
usual large proportion of the benefits sticking to the fingers of the
fortunately placed middlemen. _Carregadores de assucar_, or sugar
porters, wearing a sort of football head-mask over their hats, are among
the most familiar sights of the old city, and the pungent odor of crude
sugar strikes one in the face everywhere in the wharf and warehouse
section. The sugar comes from the _engenhos_ in crude, dark-brown form;
the tropical heat causes it to ooze out until not only the bags but the
half-naked negroes who handle them are dripping and smeared with
molasses from top to bottom. When the rotting bag bursts entirely the
contents is spread out in the sun and barefoot negroes are sent to wade
ankle-deep back and forth in it, until it is dry enough to be shoveled
up again.
There are not so many churches per capita in Recife as in Bahia, but
they are by no means scarce, while the schools are if anything
worse,—miserable little one-den huts hanging on the edges of mud-holes
or salt-water marshes, according to the state of the tide. The president
of Pernambuco asserted in his annual message that the state schools
could not afford to import from the United States the school furniture
needed, because of the high tax imposed upon it by the federal
government! Of higher institutions, of course, there is no such scarcity
as in the elemental grades. The Gymnasio Pernambucano, or High School of
Pernambuco, where are promulgated the bachelor degrees that make men
“doctors,” and not much else, is a large conspicuous building next that
of the state congress—and it had 69 pupils. Of the Faculdade de Dereito,
or Law School, similar remarks may be made. In the old business section
of Recife especially the condition of streets and buildings left much to
be desired, but under the energetic and honest new president promising
progress was already beginning to be made.
On Saturday night our share of the receipts had been more than a conto
and toward midnight on Sunday I carried home a roll of ragged Brazilian
bills large enough to choke a rain-pipe. I was somewhat surprised,
therefore, that the “bust-up” came as early as the following Wednesday.
I knew it would come sooner or later, but I had expected to be able to
stave it off a week or more longer. When “Colonel” Ruben turned up that
night, we had already been reduced to “reheated soup.” This, coupled
with the fact that he had loudly and widely advertised “Six Days Only!”
and had now decided to stay five more, had greatly reduced our
audiences. Ruben took one look at the house during the first section,
suddenly decided that he had received a cable from his wife requiring
his immediate return to Bahia, and disappeared in that direction so
swiftly that I have never seen him since. Up to the last he had insisted
daily, if not hourly, that I must return when my contract with Linton
expired and become manager of his theater-to-be. He departed owing me a
paltry 83$ as our share of that evening’s receipts, but he left on my
hands not only the “Theatro Moderno” until the following Sunday at a
rental of 300$ daily, two dusky young gentlemen whom he had brought with
him from Bahia as his assistants, and the unpaid bills for several
half-page advertisements in the local papers, but so many other
creditors that he saw fit to embark at daylight from an unusual place.
Still, this was little compared with what he might have done, and
probably we had made more money with his experienced assistance than we
should have made alone. I, too, might have run away, had I cared to
leave Americans in general and Edison in particular in such repute as
Ruben enjoys to this day in Pernambuco. Instead, I spent a breathless
Thursday preparing to meet the new conditions that had been forced upon
us. We were certain to lose money that night and the next, but by
special advertising and improved programs I hoped to make it up on
Saturday and Sunday. We still had the two _calungos_, or ten-foot monk
and dancing-girl figures on men’s legs, for though one of Ruben’s
creditors had attached these, he allowed us to use them until our
departure. I sent them out with drums and handbills, not only through
the town, but to all its suburbs and outskirts, including even
aristocratic Olinda. In short, for the first time I was a full-fledged
theatrical manager, renting, advertising, managing, auditing, running
the whole show—even mechanically, too, for that night “Tut” got a touch
of some tropical ill and had to be sent home—and, unfortunately, paying
the bills. For in spite of all our efforts Saturday night left us with
the balance slightly on the side of expenditures. I had already begun,
however, to prepare the territory ahead. J. A. Vinhães, Junior, a
_Carioca_ engaged in the film-furnishing business in North Brazil, had
offered to take over Ruben’s contract and extend it to the Amazon. He
was an unusually honest-looking, energetic young man, good company and
experienced, as well as widely known in “movie” circles, and before the
week was ended he had sailed away toward Pará, and possibly Manaos, as
our self-paid advance agent.
My troubles apparently ended, “Tut” and I were sitting at “breakfast”
Sunday morning in proper best-boarding-house-in-town style when the
waiter suddenly handed me several letters from Linton, bearing neither
stamps nor signs of post-office handling. They had been written on board
ship on the way north from Buenos Aires, and announced that, the
Kinetophone having ended its labors in the Argentine, Linton was on his
way home, as soon as he could find a wife he had left in Rio, with the
two Spanish-speaking outfits. With the letters he forwarded some new
posters and Turco Morandi, formerly manager of one of the largest
theaters in “B.A.,” lately advance agent for the Argentine Kinetophone,
and noted for his double-width, steel-riveted honesty. It was he who had
brought the letters to Pernambuco, and about noon he appeared in person,
dressed in the latest Jockey Club style, and announced himself as the
new manager of the Kinetophone in Brazil.
There was nothing niggardly about Linton. My six months being up, he
offered to let me turn over the job at once, take the first boat either
to Manaos or to the United States at his expense, draw my salary up to
the time the show started south again, collect traveling expenses from
Manaos back to the mouth of the Amazon, and promised to pay me later
whatever might be due on my commission basis. “Tut” was to get a
percentage of the receipts for taking charge of the show, and to make
such use of Morandi, to whom Linton had already advanced a considerable
sum, as he saw fit. When they ran out of audiences in the North, the
three were to take the show back down the coast, playing in the smaller
towns until Linton himself returned to pick them up.
Had there been any evidence that my labors had been unsatisfactory, I
should have vanished forthwith. But the letters expressed satisfaction,
and Linton was not a man to indulge in flattery. Moreover, I wished to
see the rest of Brazil, and I did not want to see it as a foot-loose
tourist. I much preferred to go on to Manaos as manager of the
Kinetophone, with all the prestige thereunto appertaining, to be forced
to mix with all kinds of people, to be mistaken now and then for Edison
himself. Besides, I could not take advantage of Linton’s extraordinary
generosity. Instead of needing another man we could easily have gotten
along with one less, for “Tut,” who was some little inventor himself,
had improved upon Edison by wiring the phonograph in such a way that it
could be touched off from the booth, and any fool could be taught in a
few minutes to put on and take off the records. Then there was Vinhães,
already on his way. If Morandi had arrived a few days earlier, I might
have sent him on ahead instead, or left him with the show and played
advance agent myself. Worst of all, however, Linton, as almost any
American would have done under the circumstances, had chosen the worst
possible man to send to Brazil. Morandi not only spoke Spanish, but was
an _argentino_, and if there is one thing Brazilians resent more than
being spoken to in Castilian it is to hear it spoken with the accent of
their greatest national rivals. In the end I coaxed the fashionable
newcomer to go away somewhere and lose himself, while I spent what I had
looked forward to as a pleasant Sunday afternoon wondering who I could
get to drown him.
For the first time in Brazil I had to cut out the Sunday matinée and
announced an evening performance given over entirely to the
Kinetophone—six numbers in each section, with a ten-minute interval in
which to change audiences. This meant double labor for “Tut” and Carlos,
but it would save us 50$ for the rent of ordinary films, 10$ for a
native operator, and should prove a great drawing card. It did.
Unfortunately I had set the opening at the early hour of six, and the
coming of Morandi caused both “Tut” and me to forget the change.
Accustomed to arrive at the theater at 6:30 and have half an hour of
ordinary films before our turn came, we sauntered down town as usual,
and, as we stepped off the street-car, what should greet our astonished
ears but the notes of one of our numbers known as the “Musical
Blacksmiths.” It was like hearing one’s own voice issuing from the lips
of a stranger. Never in all Brazil had a Kinetophone number been given
without either “Tut” or myself in attendance. We dashed into the
theater—and found Carlos calmly running the show! The audience had taken
to stamping and giving other evidences of impatience, and the plucky
_Paulista_, having taught a native how to put on the records, had
started the performance. I raised his salary forthwith.
In our three sections that night we took in considerably more than a
million, recouping all our losses, and it was a double pleasure not to
have to split the receipts with Ruben. But there was that dashed
_argentino_ to spoil the effect of our efforts. Luckily, he was already
complaining of the “insupportable” heat and complete loss of appetite,
while kind, if unknown, friends had filled him full of tales of yellow
fever and the plague, so that he had come to me almost with tears in his
eyes and called my attention to the wife and five children he had left
in Buenos Aires. It took us the better part of Monday and Tuesday, and
cost nearly half a million reis to pay his debts, release him from the
slimy tentacles of the customhouse, and set him on his way with a ticket
to Rio, but the relief was worth the exertion.
By this time we had moved over to the “Polytheama,” an open-air theater
in which I had arranged to play three nights at popular prices. I took
advantage of this breathing-spell to run out into the interior of the
state, not to the end of the line, for that would have meant two days
absence and missing a performance, but as far as Bezerros, where the
daily train meets itself coming back. The branch runs due west from
Recife, and by starting at seven and getting back at five, with constant
traveling, I covered 72 miles and return!
Jaboatão on its knoll was buzzing with energy where the shops of the
combined railways had concentrated. Hills shrouded in blue veils began
to appear as soon as we had crossed the sandy coast strip. Farther
inland it grew rolling, everywhere dreary, dry, and bushy, with many
tunnels and long iron viaducts. Cotton was growing here and there in the
arid soil, but it was scant and small, with one bush where in our
southern states there would have been eight or ten. This region of rare
reed-and-mud huts bore slight resemblance to that along the line from
Maceió northward, with its endless trains of cane, its crowded
population, and mammoth old fazenda houses. Negro blood was noticeably
less as we left the coast, for slaves were imported chiefly by
sugar-planters and were not needed, nor, indeed, useful, in the grazing
regions. There were said to be many cattle in the state, but they must
have been farther inland, where there was still something to drink.
Passengers had to carry water with them, for neither trains nor stations
furnished it. Yet only two years before this region had complained of
heavy rains! Even the dining-car service of the lines to the north and
south of Recife was lacking, because some petty politician of the
interior had a contract with the government to furnish passengers an
alleged meal at one of the stations, and the English who have taken the
line over are compelled, during the sixty years of their lease, to stop
every train there for twenty minutes.
At the “Polytheama” that night we had a remarkably good audience, many
evidently having put off coming, Brazilian fashion, until the last
performance. When we had torn down the show and packed up, “Tut” went
home and Carlos to wherever he slept, and after a shower-bath under a
spigot, I swung “Tut’s” hammock between two pillars of the open-air
theater. This was to be almost my first actual traveling with the show,
and it was time I tried out what my companions had been enduring for
months. It is many years since I have waked with that curious sensation
of wondering where I am, so that I had no difficulty in orienting myself
when there came a beating on the cinema door at daybreak. One of the
carters I had hired to take our stuff to the station had arrived with
one of those tiny, ancient, two-wheeled carts of North Brazil in which
the misplacing of a bag of flour suspends the horse in the air. His
companion did not turn up until an hour later, after the other had
dragged all the trunks to the door, and it was perilously near
train-time when I at last sent them hurrying across the cobblestones to
the Brum station way over in old Recife. By the time the usual hubbub
and quarreling, grafting and exorbitant charges, coaxing and assisting
the insufficient and lazy railway employees to get our outfit on board
was ended, I was congratulating myself on my foresight in having
arranged for another man to pay our traveling expenses. There was 12$500
duty to pay for taking our trunks out of the state, a similar amount for
importing them into the next state north, express charges about equal to
first-class tickets for each trunk, and while the fares were not
high—five dollars for nearly three hundred miles—the twenty per cent.
surcharges of the federal and state governments respectively on the
tickets made the final total a considerable sum.
CHAPTER XVII
THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL
It was four in the afternoon when we sighted Parahyba, capital of the
state of the same name, on its ridge beside a river of similar
designation which we had been following for several hours. We were met
by a considerable delegation, including the Danish manager of the
“Cinema Rio Branco,” a young chap whom Vinhães had left behind to look
after his interests, and the German owner of the “Pensão Allemã,” whom
some unauthorized friend from Recife had told to prepare rooms for us.
As the only other hotel-keeper in town admitted, evidently under the
impression that it was a recommendation, that half his rooms were given
over to unprotected women, I allowed our personal baggage to be carried
away by the solicitous German, while three little carts dragged the rest
uphill to the cinema. By the time our apparatus was set up and the
tickets stamped, perspiration was oozing from our shoes. I raced back to
the _pensão_ to get rid of two days’ dust and whiskers, and by the time
I appeared again the house was packed to the roof. But as it held only
four hundred, and the president of the state had thrust himself in with
half a dozen generously painted females, and a score of other
“influential citizens” had followed his example, it was evident that we
were not going to win an independent fortune in Parahyba. To make things
worse, “Tut” had failed to try out the apparatus before the doors were
opened, and our first number flashed on the screen without a sound to
accompany it! The phonograph had suffered some slight injury during the
rough journey and refused to speak. To my astonishment a great howl of
satisfaction went up from the audience, followed by a constant series of
cat-calls until the loose screw had been found and the trouble remedied.
It was not merely, as I first suspected, that sense of being greater
than the inventor whose invention fails to work which had delighted
these lineal descendants of African tree-climbers, but the pleasure of
what might be called the anti-Kinetophonists at being able to say, even
momentarily, “I told you so!” Formation of petty cliques is one of the
chief pastimes in these dawdling old towns off the track of world
travel, and Parahyba had divided, without our knowledge, for and against
us almost at the moment we descended from the train. Those who sided
with the disgruntled hotel-keeper joined the friends of the rival cinema
in an effort to boycott us, with the result that, though we did not know
it until next day, by the time the show had been set up all Parahyba had
been assured that both the Kinetophone and this “gringo” Edison were
humbugs of the first water, and that those who came to see it would be
wasting their money. The instant destruction of this theory as soon as
the phonograph had been readjusted confounded the opposition, but the
atmosphere of ill-will, and of doubt, always engendered among the
volatile Brazilians by the slightest mishap on an opening night, could
be felt as long as we remained in the town.
Parahyba was founded in 1585 by Martín Leitão—his name, by the way,
means suckling pig—eighteen miles from the mouth of the river of the
same name. This region was once abundant in the _pau brazil_ for which
the country was named, but to-day its principal product is cotton, bales
of which were exchanging places with barrels of Minneapolis flour in the
freight-cars behind the station. Most of the town’s estimated 30,000
inhabitants appeared to be loafing government employees. They were a
melancholy lot, on the whole, to whom life was evidently as joyless as
to the Puritan, crushed under the weight of existence and always
struggling to repress the desire to live gladly. “These tropical
people,” said a Dane who had lived long among them, “have none of the
joy of living, none of the chest-expansion of pleasure at confronting
life which is common to northern peoples. Such enjoyment as they have is
made up almost exclusively of the constant stimulating of the sexual
instinct. They have no feeling for what we people of the North call a
“home,” and never really found one. They have a wildly romantic idea of
marriage, which means to them nothing but physical gratification, and,
their sensual instincts satisfied, they continue to live together merely
out of custom, following the line of least resistance. There is not a
man in town, from president to porter, who does not keep at least one
other woman besides his wife, if he can by hook or crook afford it.”
[Illustration: The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of
downtown Recife]
[Illustration: In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most
important crop]
[Illustration: Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink]
[Illustration: Wherever a Brazilian train halts long enough the
passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee]
“Whatever the economic condition of the colony,” boasts the History of
Parahyba, “it never failed to bequeath plenty of churches to posterity.”
The town terminates in a bulking old religious edifice, and is
generously supplied with others throughout its length. Of breadth it has
little, for it falls quickly away on either side of its ridge into cacao
groves or vast reaches of bluish swamp-like bushes, half covered at high
tide. The dead hot streets of noonday were like those of an abandoned
city; stepping from the sunshine into the shade was like dropping an
enormous weight off one’s head and shoulders. Most of the thirty
thousand live in mud huts with palm-leaf roofs and doors, the earth for
floor, and the omnipresent hammock for chair, bed, and favorite
occupation. The central praça has a hint of grass, by great effort and
much carrying of water, and glorious royal palms stand high above it.
But beautiful as it is, the royal palm does not take high rank as a
shade tree. Elsewhere the streets, like Kipling’s railroad, soon run out
to sand-heaps. An hour’s swift walk from the new power-house at the end
of the made-in-Germany tram line brings one, through hot sandy jungle,
heavily wooded in places, to the open sea, where the well-to-do
_Parahybanos_ go in “summer” by a little railroad that did not operate
in this wintry season. Small steamers can reach Parahyba at high tide,
though few ever do so. Its port is Cabedello at the mouth of the river,
the fortress of which, like most of Brazil north of Rio, fell several
times into the hands of Holland, the name of the town being once changed
by Maurice of Nassau to “Margarida” in honor of his mother.
It is only 130 miles by rail from Parahyba to Natal, capital of the next
state north, but it takes more than twenty-four hours to cover them. For
some distance the route is the same as that back to Recife; then at
Entroncamento, which is Portuguese for Junction, another branch starts
north, striking well inland, like the other lines of the “G.W.B.R.” The
yellow-green _cajueiro_, rugged as an olive-tree, was often the only
vegetation that broke the dreary sand landscape. Evidently the constant
trade winds that were so welcome to the sun-scorched skin are deadly to
the soil, blowing far to the south and west the rains it needs so badly.
White men living in northeastern Brazil complain that eyes grow weak
early in life from the constant glare. Even bread dries up in this
moistureless, heated air almost between the cutting and the raising to
the lips. Here and there were patches of cotton, in saffron-colored
blossom, planted in small quantity and only by the poorer classes, for
those who keep account of profit and loss do not find it worth the
trouble. Yet one carried away the impression that, properly irrigated
and inhabited by an energetic people, this thirsty paunch of South
America should be able to feed all the armies of Europe. Grazing,
however, is the main industry on the larger estates. In North Brazil the
word _fazenda_ loses the significance of “plantation” that it has to the
south and means cattle ranch, of which there are great numbers farther
inland. Such plantations as are cultivated are usually in the hands of a
_morador_, literally a “dweller,” who runs the place to suit himself and
sells the crop to the owner at a fixed price agreed upon between them.
There are few absentee owners in this settled eastern part of the
region, however, even the “best families” spending much of the year on
their estates and only a few months in their town house in the capital.
The more-or-less negro laborers are paid from 500 to 1000 reis a day,
with ground on which to build their mud and palm-leaf huts; but it is
probably as much as they earn, and there is no approach to slavery or
peonage, for the obsequiousness of the working class, so striking to the
American traveler in most of South America, has no exponents in Brazil.
A moderate range of hills gradually grew up on our left, and we rose
high enough above the general dead-level to look across immense reaches
of Brazil, bushy and faintly rolling, flooded with sun to the ghost of
the far-off range. As usual, there was not a drop of water on the train,
which would not have been so bad if anything to drink had been sold
along the line. But there were not even oranges, and dining-cars do not
run above Parahyba. Well on in the afternoon we halted at a station with
a large earthenware crock of water, lukewarm and of swampy odor, on the
platform. The first man to drink from the single tin can hanging beside
it dropped it into the vessel, whereupon the next travel-stained mulatto
rolled up a sleeve and plunged in a yellow arm to the elbow. The natives
saw nothing amiss in this, and the rest of us were forced to drink
anyway, for we were on the verge of choking to death.
Toward sunset we drew up, in a bushy half-desert, at the town of
Guarabira, recently renamed Independencia, but a change which the
populace had refused to adopt, perhaps because they found the new name
sarcastic. Here all trains, from north or south, stop overnight, so that
the so-called hotels, lacking more of the indispensable requirements of
public hostelries than the stay-at-home could imagine possible, were
crowded beyond their capacity, though on four nights a week they are
empty. There was a good cinema in Independencia, which plays only on the
three train-nights and on Sundays. The owner had gone down to Parahyba
to see the Kinetophone and had come back with me, coaxing me all the way
to give him a two-day contract. Instead, I signed for one day on the
return trip, for this time the show was to sail directly from Cabedello
to Ceará, picking me up at Natal.
By six next morning the same crowd of us, all men, were riding on into
the north by the same train. Toward eight we crossed the arbitrary
boundary into Rio Grande do Norte, grinding on through unbroken miles of
the same bushy wilderness. Every town of half a dozen huts sent its
quota of beggars down to meet the train, so that the begging line that
had begun at Maceió was never broken. The “Great Western of Brazil”
could add materially to its revenue by a tax on station mendicants.
Before ten we stopped at a partly whitewashed collection of desert huts
for _jantar_, first of Brazil’s two daily meals. The first-class
passengers charged madly across the sand to one of the huts, where a
long table was set for some thirty guests. Each “washed” his hands in
the single pan of yellow water, wiped them on the one towel, and fell to
with a mighty noise upon the immense plates of fish, roast pork, beef in
all its forms, rice, _farofa_, and chicken which, already cold,
garnished the table. To wash down this stalwart provender there was
nauseating lukewarm water, or equally tepid and unpalatable beer, at
prices only within the reach of the wealthy. As we ate, the whistle of
our train kept blowing, as if the contrivance were about to dash away
again, and having gulped down the dinner ostrich fashion, we rushed back
on board and gradually crawled on into the north.
Beyond, we rose slightly, and there opened out a vista of flat valley
with some fertility. Bananas and green cocoanuts were offered for sale
at some of the stations, from nearly all of which great baskets of
mangos were shipped. Here the chief features of a landscape uninspiring
as a decapitated palm-tree were fields of mandioca, their willow-like
bushes from one to ten feet high. The tuberous root of this plant is
peeled and the poison washed or squeezed out, after which it is turned
into one of the several flours or meals that stand in jars on every
Brazilian table. If it is simply cooked, fermented, and dried, the
result is _farinha secca_, white, bran-like mandioca flour; a more
elaborate process, including grating under water, gives the yellow
_farinha d’agoa_, which seems to be the favorite. A coarser form of the
same product is called _farofa_, and during the cooking there are
precipitated the gum-like grains we call tapioca. _Taquira_, a species
of alcohol, is also produced from mandioca. _Farinha_ or _farofa_ are to
the Brazilians what potatoes are to the Irish. Whole boatfuls of it in
leaf-and-creeper baskets may be seen loading or unloading at every coast
town, and the native who could not reach out and get a spoonful—or a
handful—of this, his favorite fodder, with which to thicken his soup or
stew or to eat dry, would consider his dinner a total failure.
The wearisome desert country broke up frankly into sand-dunes as we
neared the coast again, and through these and a bit of arid vegetation
we rumbled into Natal, not only the end of the “Great Western of Brazil
Railway,” but the jumping-off place of those traveling north, for here
South America turns sharply to the westward. A little line, staggering
under the name of “Estrada de Ferro Central do Rio Grande do Norte,”
does start from across the harbor and wander a few hours and about as
many miles out into the country, but it soon returns, as if terrified at
the thought of losing itself in the choking wilderness. There would be
no choice henceforth but to take to the sea. The Brazilian Government
has long contemplated extending its principal line from Pirapora on the
São Francisco to Pará, which would make it the “Central Railway of
Brazil” indeed; but even had this nebulous project already been carried
out, I should not have chosen that route, for while scenery is all very
well in its way, the great bulk of Brazil’s estimated thirty millions of
people live along her seaboard.
Raul de Freitas Walker, a more than ordinarily endurable young
Brazilian, agent for the “Companhia Cinematographica Brazileira” with
which we had signed our first contract, agreed to share with me the only
room available in the “International Annex,” another of the alleged
“hotels” of North Brazil. It was a garret room, in which Freitas
occupied the hammock and I the bed, and the best that can be said of it
is that it had first choice right off the ocean of the constant trade
winds bound inland on their drought provoking errands. Its scant
half-inch partitions made the pastimes of my fellow-guests and the
mulatto girls, who accosted one everywhere with an inviting air, quite
free from privacy, but there was no choice between enduring them and
going out to sleep in the sand on the beach. The maternal grandfather of
Freitas was English; hence his silent last name, which he pronounced,
when forced to do so, “Vahl-kar.” His British blood had not saved him
from being a true Brazilian, and on the second day he left me with
vociferous regrets and moved over to a cheaper one-story hotel, not to
save money but “so I won’t have to climb stairs.”
Natal is rather a pleasing town, for all its aridity. Considering the
difficulties it has to struggle against in the form of heat, sand, and
the usual tropical drawbacks, it is almost worthy of praise. Though they
are knee-deep in sand wherever they are not paved, its streets are wide,
and there are several large public gardens marked by the indolent
swaying of flexible palm-trees. Government buildings, and a few private
ones, are far from being eyesores. If the electric-lights are weak, they
are at least widespread, and electric tramcars carry one in any
direction, notably to the top of a great sand ridge called Petropolis,
from which there is a far-reaching view of curving beach edged with
leaning cocoanut-palms, of the reef that gave Natal its site, and the
old fort at the narrow entrance to the bottle-like little harbor.
Perhaps there are 12,000 inhabitants, if one counts all the mud huts
scattered about the sand-blown outskirts—for in places the sand is
drifted completely over the rails of the tram-line that stretches on
over the rolling sandhills to nowhere.
At one of the two cinemas our poster portrait of Edison was already
displayed, though it would be at least two months before the show could
play there. Pará beer, reminding me that the end of Brazil was
approaching, was sold in the cafés and hotels, but it seemed to enjoy
less popularity than a mineral water from Wisconsin, widely consumed by
Brazilians. Local drugstores advertised an “Específico contra Cançaço”
(Specific against Tiredness) which should have won its inventor a
fortune in Brazil alone. Many otherwise pretty girls—if one could
overlook a cocoa tint—lost their rating for lack of good teeth.
Politicians in heavy black frock-suits, waiting in the broiling sun for
others of their clan, made it a pleasure to know that there are some
places where politicians must do penance for their sins. Social
formality refused to take climate into account, and at the gate of the
sandy cemetery, hot as the most approved purgatory, male visitors were
requested to remove their hats! Sharp-cut masses of black shade
alternating with patches of blinding glare, a parrot trying to pick the
red spots off a ten of diamonds as the only sign of life in a long
noonday street-vista, contrasted with the shrieking far into the night
of sidewalk groups—for Brazilians of the north cannot discuss the
simplest subjects without howling, dancing, and waving their hands in
their excitement—complete the picture of Natal.
St. Patrick’s Day in the morning dawned hotter than I had ever known it
before. As I looked out across sandhills and ocean toward the soft
summer sunrise, I made out the steamer _Pará_ of the “Lloyd-Brazileiro”
already at anchor a stone’s-throw from the shore. It was just too far
off to make out whether “Tut” and the show were on board, and after
waiting in vain for them to come ashore I slipped into my oldest
garments and set out on a last tramp through Natal’s ankle-deep sand in
an effort to reduce the surplus energy that is so troublesome on
shipboard. There was no danger of being left behind, for the _Pará_ was
bottled up in the harbor until high tide at two in the afternoon. Groups
of passengers came ashore, but I began to fear that my “company” had
been left behind. Soon after noon he of the unpronounceable grandfather
and I, not to mention a new steamer-chair, now that I must take to the
sea, were rowed out to the _Pará_, on which I found to my amazement that
not only Carlos and the agent of Vinhães but even “Tut” had squatted all
day without once going ashore!
The exit from Natal harbor is as difficult as the oldest seadog would
care to attempt in a large steamer. The long jagged reef has only one
break in it, and just inside that there is a series of sharp and mainly
submerged rocks. A ship of any size, therefore, must make a right-angle
turn in almost her own length, through an opening barely her own width
by which at low tide there is scarcely exit for a rowboat. The rusted
boiler and ribs of a steamer piled up close beside the entrance showed
that the passage has not always been as successful as ours, and there
was a general sigh of relief and a settling down to deck-chair ease as
the _Pará_ took to pulsating steadily across a smooth blue sea toward
the setting sun.
The coast of Brazil resembles Broadway,—a main thoroughfare along which,
if one travel it long enough, many faces become familiar. There were
half a dozen men on the _Pará_ whom even I, accustomed to crawl along
the land wherever possible, instead of following the broad sea route of
Brazilian travel, had seen before somewhere—along the Avenida of Rio, at
some theater in São Paulo, on the streets of Bahia or Pernambuco. If I
had ever wondered during my dust-laden, cinder-bitten, oft-broken
journey from the Rio Grande of the South to the far different one of the
North how Brazilian ladies or the more finnicky of their male
contemporaries travel from one city to another, here was the answer.
They take to the sea, either in one of the foreign ships that ply up and
down the coast or in the sometimes no less luxurious steamers of their
own national line.
The “Lloyd-Brazileiro,” like the “Central Railway,” is operated by the
Brazilian Government, and is thereby subject to many of the same
misfortunes. If one can believe a fourth of the tales that float up and
down the coast, the national temperament is as much at home on the
rolling main as on Brazilian soil. Rumor has it—and verification is
often thrust upon the traveler who is in the habit of leaving his
berth—that the line has three times as many employees as are
required,—needy friends of politicians ranging all the way from
pantry-boys without potatoes to peel to captains and managers with
nothing to command or direct. “Deadheads” are notoriously so numerous
that any Brazilian who pays his fare runs the risk of losing caste among
his clever friends. Congressmen and the like not only travel on
government boats free of charge as a legal right, but carry with them
whole Brazilian families, from upholstered mama and her dusky maid down
through the whole stairway of children and their servants to the pet
poodles and shrieking parrots. Even the mere citizen who plans to take
to the sea is said to have no difficulty in obtaining his ticket without
the troublesome formalities of the pocketbook route—provided, of course,
that his political affiliations are suitable. Those are only foolish
travelers, native or foreign, scandal has it, who pay, even to New York,
more than the fare in the class next below the one in which they wish to
make the journey, for it is a simple matter to “fix it up” after they
get on board. The “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamers carry livestock and fowls
as food on their journeys. When a ship arrives in Pará or Manaos, the
story runs, the steward sells those that are left—and an hour later he
goes ashore and buys back the same animals for the return trip,
naturally not at the same price at which they were sold. The line has
always been noted for its generous yearly deficit. In 1914 the
government tried to sell it, but there was not a single bid. Private
owners knew the insuperable obstacles to discharging or refusing to
carry free the swarms of political favorites and putting the boats on a
paying basis.
On board, however, few evidences of these things meet the naked eye.
Outward propriety, from scandal-less grafting to frock-coat and spats,
is a fixed Brazilian characteristic. The _Pará_ was one of the large new
ships of the line, British made, and even government ownership had not
yet succeeded in ruining it. In the sumptuous music-room reigned the air
of a salon gathering in high society, the nearest approach to luxury
which many a Brazilian ever gets. I sat late into the moonlighted
evening, broken by music and attempts thereat, idly comparing and
checking off the pretty girls who flitted in and out among the rather
pompous gathering. There were a few who, could one have extracted what
they had in place of them and inserted brains, would have made quite
passable domestic ornaments—for the few years until they were overtaken
by that fatal faded fatness that comes so early upon South American
women.
At ten next morning the boundless sea was broken on the port bow by a
long white strip of sand, behind which gradually grew up a shadowy range
of almost mountains. By noon, but long after the midday meal, we dropped
anchor before Ceará, capital of the state of the same name, a flat and
sandy town, with the usual churches and palm-trees rising above it, as
did two dimly seen clusters of hills against the fathomless horizon.
Ceará is the worst landing-place on the coast of Brazil, being no port
at all but merely a sandy shore, marked by a lighthouse far out on the
end of a tongue of sand and open to all the winds from off the North
Atlantic. What it might be in bad weather was not hard to guess, for
even with the slight swell of a calm and cloudless day the scores of
heavy rowboats and freight barges that came out a mile or more to meet
us rolled and pitched like capering schoolboys. That we would be ducked
in getting ashore was taken for granted, that being a common disaster in
the port of Ceará; my fears were rather for our outfit, which seemed
several times on the point of being hopelessly smashed or dropped
overboard before we got it lowered into one of the toy barges. Even
passengers have been lost here, and the rusted carcass of an old steamer
lay piled up on the beach. At the shore end the landing facilities were
even worse. A high and flimsy wooden wharf thrust itself far out to
barge depth where, with the boat rising and falling twenty feet or more
with every swell, half a dozen languid negroes, tugging at the extreme
end of an often too-short rope and liable, in their Brazilian apathy, to
let go at any moment, slowly hoisted our travel-battered old maroon
trunks upon it. To have dropped almost any one of them would have meant
the immediate canceling of the Kinetophone tour of Brazil.
As things were landed on the wharf, negroes put the lighter articles on
their heads and straggled ashore—not, of course, without mishaps. One
haughty lady, returning from Rio or Paris, had among her belongings six
huge pasteboard boxes, which she or her maid had carelessly tied shut,
and which an equally careless negro tried to carry off all at once
without securing them. He had taken three steps when the roaring sea
wind picked two boxes off his head, opened them, and tossed the latest
creation in head-gear and feathers into the sea, a fate from which
another dream in pink and froth was saved only by being stepped on by a
barefoot but unusually quick-witted negro. They would not have been
cheap hats anywhere, and in Brazil they certainly would have cost four
times as much. The owner having already gone ashore before the mishap
occurred, the negro waded out into the surf and rescued the feathered
contraption, which he put back into the box and delivered as if nothing
had happened, getting his pay and fading from the landscape before
milady opened the box to prepare for the gala first performance of a new
invention at the municipal-state theater that evening.
It took us four hours to get all our outfit from the ship to the
theater. Vinhães, however, had everything prepared for an immediate
_estrea_ under conditions that promised excellent results. By
manipulating certain political filaments he had obtained the “Theatro
José d’Alencar,” named for Brazil’s greatest novelist and the most
famous “son” of Ceará. It is government owned and the most important one
in northeastern Brazil, generally closed except when some second-rate
Caruso or a European dramatic company comes to give Fortaleza the
sensation of being the center of the universe. The nominal sum of 130$
covered the salaries of the countless government employees attached to
the place, though there was no knowing how many permanent passes Vinhães
had issued for the five days he had advertised. His posters, articles,
and newspaper displays had penetrated to the last hut in town; and he
had even had special tickets printed, the stamping of which, in addition
to the thousand and one other things essential to a proper début, left
us little time to loiter between the landing and a hurried supper.
Our time, taken from the ship and Rio, was twenty minutes later than
that of the town, so that when I returned to the theater at sunset
Vinhães greeted me halfway across the square with the tightly pursed
lips and the closely compressed fingers of the upraised right hand
which, in Brazil’s complete language of gestures, meant a densely packed
house. It was, and more than that the crowded audience was getting
vociferous in its demands for the show to begin, that they might judge
for themselves this new wonder. Despite all these favoring circumstances
our opening came near resulting in disaster. The state theater was not
equipped as a moving-picture house. Vinhães had hired the only available
lantern in town and arranged with a local operator to run the ordinary
films he had himself brought along. But the operator had not recovered
from the celebration made possible by the advance he had demanded on his
wages, and the lantern was so aged and the lens so worthless that barely
the outline of the pictures reached the screen. Protest was rapidly
developing into uproar when I saved the day by ordering the ordinary
films run through our special machine. This was contrary to my contract
with Vinhães and something we had never done before; but I waived that
clause for once and agreed to have “Tut” and Carlos run the whole show,
provided Vinhães paid them 10$ a night each for their extra labor. Thus
their salaries were in a twinkling raised high above my own, while to me
was left the brunt of fighting the crowd at the door.
It may be that his sudden and unexpected good luck turned Carlos’ head.
It was now trebly important for the Kinetophone to do its best,—the
ordinary films had been a disappointment, the house was crowded with an
audience which would carry good or bad word of our performance to every
corner of the city, nay, of all Ceará, and the state president himself
sat in the center of the regal central box, surrounded by all the most
influential members of the political and social world. I had chosen our
program with care, the introductory film to be followed by a portion of
“Il Trovatore,” a well-sung number which always delighted the higher
class of Brazilian audiences. As the title flashed on the screen a
murmur of satisfaction rippled across the house. The president
readjusted the broad red ribbon across his paunch and settled down for
what he plainly expected to be a treat. On the screen a romantic figure,
dressed in the elaborate garb of the days of knights and troubadours,
advanced with the supreme grace of medieval heroes, at least as it has
been brought down to us by Italian tenors, and with a princely gesture
opened his mouth and—and in the nasal twang of an untraveled native of
rural Indiana said, “Gentlemen, be seated!” Carlos had put on the record
that went with our minstrel show!
All disasters, however, save death, may be more or less redeemed by hard
work, good luck, and so splendid an apparatus as a well-operated
Kinetophone, and before our performance was over the audience had
advanced from resentment to enthusiasm, had even burst forth in loud
applause, a social faux pas almost unknown at a cinema in Brazil.
Chuckles of delight and flattering words could still be heard under the
murmuring, silver-flecked palm-trees when “Tut” piloted me to a gay café
on the main praça and showed his gratitude by squandering a considerable
amount of his extra ten milreis for two small portions of what North
Brazil thinks is ice-cream. _Cearenses_ went out of their way to assure
us that we had brought the finest music that had ever been heard in the
state and the best theatrical performance that had ever been given at
such modest prices. Had we come two or three years before, more than one
of them asserted, we might have charged seven times as much and packed
the house at every one of the ten performances we would be obliged to
give.
Vinhães had arranged for us in the “Pensão Bitú,” the “only hotel” in
Ceará, as there is only one within even the Brazilian pale of
respectability in all these northern capitals. Considering what it might
have been, it was almost good, with a constant sea breeze sweeping
through our long and narrow room, which almost made us forget that we
were within four degrees of the equator. Rumor had it that deaths from
yellow fever were frequent in Fortaleza, and though we saw no
mosquitoes, “Tut” and I were careful to tuck in the canopied
mosquito-nets over our beds. Carlos, across the hall, scorned such
refinements, or else it was natural Brazilian carelessness that made him
sleep, stark naked, as comes to be the custom of both native and
foreigner, and without any protection from possible flying death.
As in the case of Pernambuco, the capital of Ceará is best known to the
outside world by the name of the state, only in the interior of which it
takes universally its correct title of Fortaleza. The old fort which
gives it this name still forms a part of the public promenade near the
“only” hotel, and to this day old cannon point bravely out to sea from
its several dry, grassy levels. The City of the Fort is one of the most
important towns of North Brazil, a comparatively new city, for all its
antiquity, rebuilt since the destructive drought of 1845. Situated
directly on the sea, without so much as a creek to give its rowboats
refuge, it has all the maritime advantages, except a port. Its soil is
sandy, almost Sahara-like in its aridity, and though it has some ten
praças shaded by _castanheiros_, mangos, palms, and other magnificent
tropical trees, its vegetation is dependent on the almost constant care
of man. The city water is abominable, even after being filtered, and
wise foreign travelers—there seem to be no foreign residents—and
Brazilians from the south quench a thirst which cannot but be frequent
in this climate with mineral water or native beer, or by melting the
plentiful product of the local ice factory.
More American windmills than in any town of similar size in the United
States rise above the monotonous level of Ceará. It is almost entirely
of one story, for its people know the terrors of earthquakes and have
little faith in their loose, sandy soil. The private buildings of two
stories could probably be counted on the fingers, though several
churches in the old Portuguese style of architecture and some rather
pretentious government edifices bulk above the general mass. Where its
right-angled and often wide streets are not paved in rough, unshaped
cobblestones it is impossible to walk with any degree of pleasure
because of the sand. The landscape reminds one of the driest regions of
Arizona, an Arizona of perpetual July, and it is hard to understand how
the human race lives here—or why. Yet there is a picturesqueness, a
pleasing something about Fortaleza that makes it more interesting than
all but the half a dozen most striking Brazilian cities. Its windows are
covered with wooden blinds hinged at the top, and from these and the
doors peer upon the passer-by a constant double row of people, except
during the midday siesta. It is a curious custom of Fortaleza to have
water-spouts of tin or zinc projecting from the low flat eaves well out
into the street, just far enough to deluge the pedestrian whenever it
does rain; and these are always in the form of a conventional alligator,
serpent, or dragon, the spout of even the poorest house ending in an
open-mouthed monster, the teeth, tin tongue, toothed fin on top, and the
smooth one on the bottom never lacking. Vistas of these may be seen for
a kilometer or more down almost any street. The variegated bright colors
of the house façades are all that break the monotonous symmetry of the
fixed architecture, for originality does not seem to be a North
Brazilian characteristic. Many doors open so directly upon the scanty or
entirely missing sidewalks that they thrust pedestrians off them—which
serves them right for not realizing that sidewalks are meant here to be
family verandas rather than public passageways.
Ceará is famous for its hammocks—_redes_, or nets, they call them in
Portuguese, for lack of an exact word. They are woven of cotton grown in
the state—by hand still in the _sertão_, though by machinery in town
factories—and great heaps of them lie for sale in the most nearly
picturesque market-place in Brazil. This is a large square in the center
of town, partly roofed over, and here, too, sit women selling home-made
lace, which constitutes perhaps the second most important industry of
the state. The hammock is the favorite bed of the _Cearense_, and his
lounge, cradle, and easy-chair; wherever the visitor enters, a hammock
offers him its lap. In and about among vendors and buyers, and down the
white-hot streets, wander blind beggars led by a sheep, often wearing
several bells to announce its coming. Many women and children, and some
men, wear about their necks a little black hand made of ebony, as a
protection against the evil eye. The leisurely traveler from the south
is struck by the scarcity of African blood; a full negro is almost never
seen and the prevailing mixture is Indian with white. The flat head of
the _Cearense_ is legendary, and the average complexion is a
half-burnished copper. Their own citizens admit that four fifths of the
people of Ceará are _mestiços_ with a greater or less percentage of
aboriginal blood, and this gives them an individuality among their
largely African fellow-countrymen, with many of the characteristics of
the South Americans of the Andean regions. In place of the hilarious
indifference of blacker Brazil, they face life with the rather
melancholy fatalism of the New World aborigines.
In their native dances, such as the _samba_, the _Cearenses_ display
tumultuous passions and an ardent temperament in great contrast to their
quiet everyday manner, and the scent of a merry-making throng of
sweating, rarely washed people of the _mestiço_ rank and file has a
suggestion of that of a den of wild animals, mixed with the odor of
home-made perfume. Politics is always a seething pot, and the bickerings
of parties ever on the verge of bursting forth in violence. The
_Cearense_ is easily recognizable elsewhere in Brazil by his speech, the
peculiar accent of the region, especially in the country districts,
consisting of raising the tone of the last unaccented syllable in each
phrase, giving a sort of singsong rhythm and an upturned ending to each
sentence, like the flip of the tail of a playful fish. Fortaleza,
however, prides itself on its modernity and worldly-wiseness, and feels
little but scorn for the uncouth, singsongy _mattuto_ or _sertanejo_ of
the interior, startled out of his wits by his first encounter with such
extraordinary manifestations of civilization as an automobile or one of
the ancient but recently electrified street-cars of the state capital.
On Sunday evening people poured in upon us so rapidly that I had to
stand like a buttress in the middle of the stream, just inside the door,
and split it into two channels so that our ticket-takers could do their
duty. There was one unexpected step just above me, and not too much
light, so that some fifty or sixty of the ladies of Ceará fell into my
arms during the course of the evening. It would be exaggeration to say
that the majority of them were worth embracing, though now and then a
real gem appeared among the gravel—just the ones whose footing was
surest. As our theater belonged to the state, of course every third
cousin of a grandniece of a government employee expected to march in at
will. Vinhães had arranged with the chief authorities that we were to
donate four _loges_, as many upper boxes, and thirty-five seats, and
also let in those wearing uniforms. But there is no such thing as
satisfying the “deadhead” appetite of Brazilians. Officials, from state
president down to government bootblack, would not be hampered by
presenting passes; if I dared to halt a flashily dressed courtesan, the
head door-keeper came rushing up to draw me aside and warn me that it
was fatal to open strife with that class, as their political influence
was all-powerful. I left it mainly to Vinhães to curb the voracity of
his own countrymen, but even he found the task impossible. As
“deadheads” multiplied, he donned his most resplendent black garb and
called upon the _delegado_ of police, offering to send as many free
passes as he needed, if only he would not allow plain-clothes men to
come in without them. The _delegado_ assured him that three would be
sufficient. He sent six for good measure—and that night almost the first
man to arrive was one who showed a document proving that he was a
plain-clothes man and insisted on bringing three friends in with him.
Vinhães opposed him with un-Brazilian firmness. The man went away, and
soon afterward the _delegado_ and his be-diamonded wife entered,
whereupon Vinhães caused him to state within hearing of all the
door-keepers that only those with passes were to be admitted. Barely had
the illustrious couple disappeared within when a boy policeman, wearing
the white uniform which takes the place on Sundays of the week-day
khaki, marched up to Vinhães and told him that he was under arrest and
must report at once to the _delegacia, on order of the delegado_! He
refused to go. The policeman returned to the station and came back with
still more urgent orders. Again Vinhães declined to obey, and as the
police were about to use force he stepped inside and entered the box of
the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—to learn that the _delegado_ knew
nothing whatever of the order purported to have been given out by him,
which had been signed in his name by his _escribano_ on complaint of the
latter’s friend, the disgruntled plain-clothes man. Thereupon the boy
policeman took to marching to and fro, assuring everyone that he was
wholly innocent in the matter, and all the policemen on duty gathered in
a compact group and spent the rest of the evening chattering and waving
their arms excitedly over their heads. Sad fate it must be to live
permanently the life of the helpless native in this land of political
pull.
The State of Ceará has long been notorious for its _seccas_, or deadly
droughts. Of the four or five states in the so-called “dry zone” of
Northern Brazil it is the most harshly treated by the moisture-sponging
trade winds. An all-wise native editor has it that “in Ceará there has
always been less lack of water than of instruction and practical
knowledge of the most rudimentary notions of agronomy.” A simple hot-air
pump would do wonders, he contends, for wood is plentiful; and even
crude windmills with cloth sails have been known to make garden spots of
the driest parts of the state. All this may be true enough, but the
traveler in primitive South America never ceases to marvel at the
improvidence of wilderness people, which often costs them so dearly.
High as he stands in some respects among his fellow-Brazilians, the
_Cearense_ has not the energy and initiative needed to overcome his one
great natural disadvantage—at least as a people, and even the editor
admits that individuals could do nothing, since to supply themselves
with a special source of water would merely be to have all their
neighbors camp upon them in dry weather. Hence the state continues to
endure periodical drought and famine with Indian fatalism, dying off,
emigrating to the Amazonian region, or awaiting a change in the weather,
“_como Deus quere_—whatever God wishes.”
They call 1877 “O Anno da Fome”—“The Year of Famine”—in Ceará, but there
have been others nearly as deadly. When the never-ceasing winds from the
Atlantic refuse to bring rain with them, or carry it too far into the
interior, the trees grow bare, covering the ground with their leaves, as
in lands where winter reigns; the naked beds of rivers tantalize
thirsting man and beast—the maps of Ceará divide its streams between
“perennial” and “non-perennial”—even the hardy roots of the mandioca dry
up, and there is nothing left but flight or death. In the worst years
human skeletons have been strewn along the trails from the interior to
Fortaleza; and even in the capital sufficient aid has often been
unobtainable, so that plagues have added to the misery of the hordes of
refugees, and people have died so continuously that there has been
neither time nor energy to bury them. Those wealthy enough to die in
their hammocks are carried off in them; the corpses of others are tied
hands and feet to a pole and borne to some sandy hollow beyond the town,
over which hover clouds of gorged and somnolent vultures. Many of the
starving become earth-eaters, which may postpone but not alleviate their
fate. The more enterprising abandon what to them is their native land
and take up life anew along the Amazon, enduring as best they can the
gloomy heavens and months of constant rains which make that region so
different from their own cloudless land.
The opening up of the Amazon basin, and the consequent enormous increase
in the production of rubber, was largely due to the droughts in Ceará.
Nomad by atavism through his Indian ancestors, the irregularities of the
season and the impossibility of counting on a certain to-morrow has made
the _Cearense_ more so, and it is a rare spot that has been inhabited by
the same family for generations. First they went to the rubber-fields
singly, then in bands, and finally in whole ship-loads, contracted and
shipped by regular recruiting agents. In the Amazonian wilderness they
may die of fevers or other dread ailments, but at home they are sure to
die of drought, so in years of extreme dryness the risk is worth taking.
If they live through all the dangers of the wilderness along the
“Sea-River” and escape the onslaughts of the swarms of touts and harlots
of all colors and nationalities who prey upon descending
rubber-gatherers at Manaos and Pará, their return to Ceará is much like
that of an Italian immigrant from America to his native village. So rare
and so important, in fact, is the native of Ceará who returns from the
rubber-fields to his dry but beloved home that a special term has been
coined for him; they call him a _paroara_—one who has been beyond Pará.
This year the drought threatened to be as bad as the fearful one of
1877; worse, in fact, for then at least there was good old Emperor
Peter, whose statue in the praça just outside our window testified to
Ceará’s gratitude for his timely assistance; then money was plentiful
instead of all Brazil being wrung dry by a financial crisis, and there
was the final resort of the rubber-fields, which now returning
_paroaras_ were reporting useless because of the low price of that
commodity. Already tales of wholesale starvation were coming from the
vicinity of Cratheus, and cattle were dying by hundreds throughout the
interior, leaving nothing but their hides to recoup the owners for their
labor and investment. True, there was an imposing government department
in Fortaleza known as the “Inspectory of Works against the Droughts,”
but the country people knew only too well that this was mainly a means
for political rascals to make hay out of their sufferings.
[Illustration: The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made entirely
of palm leaves]
[Illustration: Transportation in the interior of Brazil is primitive—and
noisy]
[Illustration: Our advertising matter parading the streets of a
Brazilian town off the main trail of world travel]
[Illustration: The _carnauba_ palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility
as well as its beauty]
From Fortaleza what was originally called the “Estrada de Ferro de
Baturité,” but which had recently changed its nationality and become the
“Brazil North Eastern Railways, Ltd.,” runs far into the interior of the
state. A journey to the end of the line and return, however, takes from
Thursday morning to Sunday night, and I did not dream I could absent
myself so long until I discovered the unimportance of Maranguape. This
nearest important town of the interior was a mere eighteen miles away,
and as ten days must be passed between steamers, it seemed the best
place to spend our evenings after Fortaleza had had its fill of the
Kinetophone. There was more green along the way than the constant cry of
“_secca medonha_” (horrible drought) had led us to expect, but it was
largely in trees and bushes, with grass almost wholly lacking. Beside
the track lay scattered expensive iron pipes from abroad that were some
day to bring sufficient water to the capital, if they did not rust away
first. These, we learned, represented another of Brazil’s government
scandals. State officials had been given a hundred and fifty thousand
contos ($50,000,000) by recent legislation with which to bring Fortaleza
a suitable water supply. They found it necessary to spend a year or more
in Europe before finally ordering pipe specially cast, with the name
“Ceará” embossed on each length of it. When thousands of these had been
tossed upon the beach at the capital and scattered for fifty miles or
more along the railroad, the politicians reported that the money had
given out, and Fortaleza continues to drink such water as it can dig out
of its own sand-holes by hand or by windmill.
An hour out we began to draw near the clusters of hills we had seen from
the sea. A little branch line circled the base of them and at length
brought us to Maranguape, spread a bit up the lower skirts of the range.
It proved to be a sleepy village, fairly large, for it lay scattered for
long distances in both directions, but of that grass-grown temperament
which promised little reward for our efforts. The promise was only too
exactly fulfilled. The sound of shod footsteps was so rare in Maranguape
that everyone hurried to the doors whenever we passed, leaving behind us
a long trail of motionless, open-mouthed faces, and we were surrounded
and hemmed in by curious ragamuffins and innumerable children—the one
unfailing crop of Ceará, wet or dry—until we were forced to use violence
to get room to move; yet few families had energy enough to come across
the street to see what was unquestionably the greatest novelty, if not
the best show, that had ever come to Maranguape. Even while our
performance was at its height, however, the town remained squatted in
family groups before its doors, cracking the same aged jokes, exchanging
the same petty, malicious gossip, indulging in the same banal
pseudo-courtesies as their great-grandfathers did and as their
great-grandchildren probably will. One fellow to whom, curious to get
the local point of view, I put a question, replied, “_Eu quero primeiro
ouvir o bicho roncar_—I want to hear the beast snore first; then if it
is good I’ll come to-morrow.” It was hard to believe that Maranguape was
the birthplace even of Rodolpho Theophilo, a pharmacist who has written
several readable, if amateurish, novels on life in drought-stricken
Ceará. Our total receipts that evening amounted, at the current
exchange, to seventeen dollars!
There was reported to be a hotel by a waterfall half an hour’s walk up
the hillside. “Tut,” Carlos and Vinhães trudged there after our
miniature audience had been hustled out, but I preferred to stay near
the railway station. There was not even a restaurant in the town proper,
and I could only get a lump of stale bread in one shop, an ancient can
of American sardines in another, and wash them down with “cajú wine,” a
concoction which the seller assured me was “magnificent,” but which
outdid the strongest medicine I had ever taken. I swung my hammock in
the cinema, the manager having induced the owner to permit me to open
one barred window to save me from drowning in my own perspiration, and
brought a _moringa_ of water to save me from death by thirst.
Dawn found me on my way back to the main line to catch the weekly train
to the end of it. A narrow-shouldered locomotive dragged the four
freight and six passenger cars made in Delaware away from the little
heap of hills into what might best be called a jungle, though there were
few large trees and no really dense vegetation. The leaves were
everywhere shriveled or curled together, as if striving to protect from
the malignant sun their last suggestion of moisture. The dry air was so
clear that the arch of heaven seemed higher and the horizon more vast
than I had ever known them before, and the light falling from this
greater height of cloudless sky struck the ground with doubly blinding
clarity and seemed to spray out in all directions, like falling water. A
few stagnant puddles in the depressions of the land were all that
remained of the long-forgotten rains. Of vegetation the most striking,
and at the same time the most numerous, were the _carnauba_ palms for
which Ceará is famous. The _carnauba_ is much smaller than the royal
palm, of girlish slenderness, its leaves, shaped like those of our
palm-leaf fans, arranged in symmetrical sphere shape as carefully as the
netted hair of a modest young lady. There is nothing of the careless,
lop-shouldered cocoanut nor of the haughty majesty of the _palma
imperial_ about the _carnauba_; rather is it chic and dainty. The royal
palm is a regal lady always proudly garbed in rich plumes, but of no
great worth, except ornamentally. The cocoanut palm is a slouchy,
disheveled wench given to hanging about negro huts and tropical beaches,
producing only water and a bit of copra, sufficient to save herself from
destruction. The _carnauba_, on the other hand, is not only a modest and
pretty, but a very useful, young lady, who stays at home and attends to
business, no matter what the provocation to go down to the beach and
play with the sea breezes. She is as typical of the _Cearense_ landscape
as the parasol pine-tree is of the southernmost states of Brazil.
The _carnauba_ is useful from crown to toe; like a certain animal
familiar to our stockyards, nothing but its murmur is devoid of utility.
Among other things, it was of fibers and wax from the _carnauba_ that
were made the first phonograph records and some of the first electric
light filaments. This wax is one of the important exports of the state
and of its railroad. The leaves are taken inside a closed hut and
threshed until the wax falls in white powder, which is then swept up and
reaches us in many forms, from seals to shoe-polish. From it the natives
make their candles, almost the only form of light used in the interior.
Exported in more ambitious quantity, the wax alone would enrich and
occupy half the people of Ceará. From the roots of the _carnauba_ is
made a purgative, and a kind of _farinha_ of inestimable value in times
of famine. The leaves are woven into hats, mats, baskets, brooms, and
the roofs of houses; from them comes the palm-leaf fan with which we are
familiar. Fibers useful for many purposes are taken from the inside of
the trunk, the iron-hard wood of which serves many purposes, ranging
from musical instruments to water-pipes. The pulp of the fruit has an
agreeable taste, as does the seed, after being roasted. From the latter
comes a saccharine substance similar to sago. When small it serves as
food, and it may be turned into wine or vinegar. Lastly, the seeds are
used as _birros_, knobs to which native lace-makers tie the ends of
their threads, and the clickity-click of these may be heard all over
northern Brazil.
Unfortunately the drought was beginning to choke even this paragon of
usefulness, and some of the lower leaves had turned sear and brown,
breaking the perfect symmetry of the sphere. Sometimes the only
representative of plant life that survives the _seccas_ is the
_joazeiro_, a dense-green, haystack-shaped tree, the leaves and branches
of which are cut and fed to cattle as a last resort. The leaves of this
tree fall, still green, in September, and new ones immediately take
their place. There is another tree of Ceará that furnishes a natural
soap, but its oily stench is so offensive that until some means is found
of neutralizing this, only the poorest people will use it.
The manager of the Ceará railway was an English F.R.G.S. who had not
lost his energy during long tropical residence, and we made good
Brazilian time in spite of a heavy train and the war-time necessity of
making steam of wood rather than coal. A few isolated houses were
scattered up the low, thick-wooded ridges, and towns were almost
frequent. Torrid as it was under the unclouded sun, the more pretentious
natives wore clothing as dark and heavy as we of the North in April or
October. Coffee was available at every station, but little else could be
had, sometimes mangos and oranges, or hot milk served at scandalous
prices by old women little less distressing in appearance than the
beggars. There was a constant procession at every station of lame, halt,
blind, and especially the unwashed, rubbing their unsoaped hands along
the window-sills and imploring “a charity, for the love of God and our
Lady Mary and by the saints in Heaven!” Others of these unfortunates
marched through the aisles of the cars, so that one was beset on all
sides by offensive caressing hands. Those who, for some reason, could
not reach us, were almost as annoying with their “Psio!” as Brazilians
spell their ubiquitous hiss to attract attention. How weary one grows of
this short, shrill, nerve-startling “Psio!” here and “Psio!” there,
everywhere, all day long and far into the night, up and down the whole
country!
Baturité, once terminus of the line to which it gave its name, is a town
of some size, sitting placidly among low foothills. Some of these small
isolated ranges are high enough to snatch a little moisture from the
passing trade winds and turban themselves in clouds that gave them a
mantle of green, but such slight patches were of little use to the
thirsty state as a whole. All the region, both rolling plains and hills,
had a soft velvety-brown color, everywhere besprinkled with stocky
_joazeiro_ trees. Many of these were already being cropped to feed the
starving cattle. Here and there smaller trees of deep-striking roots had
retained their color, but most of the vegetation was bare and leafless
as our own in midwinter, the landscape growing more and more oppressive
as we proceeded inland. Early in the afternoon rugged granite hills
began to break the horizon until, at Quixadá, there were great rows of
them. Solid masses of granite heaped up into big hills stood in
soldierly formation for miles along the track, like a guard of honor,
magnificent heaps sufficient to build all the edifices the world could
need for a century.
Quixadá means in the aboriginal Tupi “lean cow,” and there were a few
such animals there to bear out the appellation. A mule-car staggered
away to somewhere up in the rock hills. Granite, piled in fantastic
ridges and forming most striking sky-lines, followed us for a long
distance. Everywhere was dead-bare ground, without even a sprig of
grass, and the air was so devoid of moisture that it dried up the
nostrils, so clear that one could see plainly the slightest markings on
the granite heaps far away on the otherwise flat horizon and marvel that
the train took so incredibly long to reach them. We rumbled frequently
over bone-dry creeks and rivulets; once we crossed a huge four-span iron
bridge over a river not only without water but even without moisture.
Yet if the _Cearenses_ lack rivers in times of drought, it is probably
because they let them all flow madly away to the sea after the rains,
instead of damming them up and using the water for irrigation. All day
there was scarcely a sign of cultivation, and very few cattle or even
skeletons of them. No doubt they were farther back among the hills,
where mud-holes still existed. A cotton tree of moderate size seemed to
grow wild, but it, too, had succumbed to the general fate and we ground
monotonously on through a sun-flooded landscape of bare bushes not
unlike the chaparral of Texas.
Quixeramobim bore slight resemblance to its aboriginal meaning of “fat
cow,” and the land beyond was still more dreary. Exclamations of “secca
medonha!” rose within the car whenever we passed a family—men, women and
children, gaunt, ragged, sun-bleached and jungle-travel-worn—tramping
north with all their miserable possessions, consisting mostly of
blackened pots and pans on their heads. They were off after water, of
course, since their own mud-hole had dried up, and might be forced to
tramp all the way to the coast, or even go on to the Amazon, before they
could again find means of grubbing out a livelihood. Long stretches of
country as deadly as an elderly rattlesnake exhausted our weary eyes,
and the train, as if it, too, were worn out by twelve hours of this
dreary monotony, at length halted for the night in Senador Pompeu.
We were at once mobbed by a throng of self-styled hotel-keepers and
baggage-carrying ragamuffins, and I was soon imprisoned in an interior
room without ceiling in which there was not even a bed, but only three
hammocks hanging listlessly from hooks in the mud walls. I threw these
outside and put up my own, then set out for a stroll. The Southern Cross
and Great Dipper were exactly at the same height. The surrounding
landscape consisted chiefly of dried-up cotton bushes, and the trade
wind howled across it as if we were still on the seacoast, instead of
nearly two hundred miles inland. A night-school of ragged urchins was in
full swing in one of the mud huts, but it was run much like a crap game.
Here everyone, from hotel proprietor to street gamins, called me
“doctor,” possibly because I still wore the resemblance to a white
collar. What a mongrel race they were! If one were picking a team of
men, they would be harder to match in color than horses. Nor was there
any connection between color and social position. A ragged blond farmer
might be seen cringing and baring his head before a pompous black
politician—though for the most part negroes were scarce and lowly.
Around a long, loose-jointed, wooden table my fellow-passengers wolfed
the never-varying Brazilian meal as only Brazilians can, shoveling it up
in great knifefuls and racing away to begin an all-night uproar of
gambling and prattle.
It would not feel natural to go on a railway journey in Brazil without
getting up in the middle of the night to catch a five o’clock train.
When we rumbled away it was still pitch dark, and as the old kerosene
lamp in the car blew out I fell asleep again. From daylight on there
were many piles of wood for the engines along the way, and the white
bones of cattle lay scattered through the brown brush. Here and there a
few rib-racked animals were eating leaves. Men in brown leather hats,
each twisted and warped by sun, rain, wind, and individual use into a
distinctive shape, appeared at the rare stations. The flat land grew
almost swampy, with now and then a hint of green, and at 10:30, with
only a scattering of passengers left, we drew up at Iguatú, 265 miles
from the coast, and the end of the line. Iguatú is completely beyond the
land of beds. The room I got in a sort of miniature caravansary was
furnished with two hooks, and nothing more. To these I managed to add a
table and chair, with a _moringa_ of what passed for drinking-water; and
there was a shower-bath available whenever one could coax a man to lug a
can of water up a ladder and fill another, perforated and suspended from
the roof. Midday was no time to stroll in such a climate. I swung my
hammock and fell to reading by the light of a glassless window that
looked out upon a white-hot world in which the sheer sunshine fell like
molten iron on every unsheltered thing.
I was back again below the sixth parallel of longitude, for to go inland
from the capital of Ceará means journeying south rather than west. The
town was flat, with the usual sandy praça, a windmill in its center, and
tile-roofed mud huts scattered in every direction. One really could not
feel much sympathy for a people who depend for water, for life itself,
on a few mud-holes that may dry up at any time. Clothing is considered
merely an adornment in Iguatú, and children in sun-proof hides were
playing everywhere in the sand. The people prided themselves on being
_caboclos_, or native Brazilians for generations back, and though there
were a few blonds scattered among them, the great majority were of part
Indian blood, with negro mixtures, but no full-blooded Africans. The
treacherous, surly _cabra_, as the Brazilian calls the cross between
Indian and negro, when none of that class is listening, was in
considerable evidence. There was a childlike simplicity about the
inhabitants which recalled those of Diamantina, though here the
preponderance of Indian blood made the general indifference a matter of
fatalism rather than racial cheerfulness. Many of the inhabitants had an
indistinct notion that England, London, Europe, and New York were all
different names for the same place—a place in which was being waged the
great war of which they had heard rumors. One man asked me in great
earnestness whether it was true, as some visitor had once asserted
without winning credence, that “there are places in the world where it
is so cold you have to wear garments on your hands,” In this region
patriotism is a matter of separate mud-holes. A makeshift waiter to whom
I was attempting to make some kindly remark about Iguatú interrupted me
with, “Eu não son filho d’aqui, não, s’nho’—I am not a son of here but
of ——,” naming some other mud town identical with this one but which to
him was as Rome is to Oshkosh.
There were many picturesque countrymen about the market-place.
Goat-skins and cowhides are the most important commerce here, especially
with the drought killing great numbers of cattle, and _caboclos_, burned
a velvety brown by the blazing sunshine, rode in with a few sun-dried
cowhides and sold them for what the merchants chose to give, which
seemed to be three _vintems_ a kilogram, or less than a cent a pound.
Every possible thing is made of leather in this land where starving
cattle make it so plentiful—ropes, boxes, curtains, hats, even clothing.
Nearly all the men wore hats some two feet in diameter, most of them
made of leather, the cheaper ones merely of cowhide, which twists into
uncouth shapes with long exposure to the elements, the better ones of
sheep- or deer-skin. The others were woven from the _carnauba_ leaf,
looking much like the coarsest of our farmers’ straw hats.
I had concluded to buy the largest hat to be found in the shops when I
caught sight of an unusually fine one on the head of a powerful and
handsome young native in the crowd that was watching me from the street.
When I had overcome the mixture of pride and bashfulness in which nearly
all _caboclos_ wrap themselves, I learned that his name was João Barboso
de Lera, and that the hat had been made to his special order by an old
woman expert living some ten miles away. It was most elaborately
decorated, and it was evident that its possession raised the wearer high
above the rank and file of his fellow-townsmen. His hat is to the
youthful _Cearense_ of the interior what spats and silk cravats are to
the urban Latin-American. João, however, may have been in financial
straits, for when I hinted in a mild and easily repudiated voice my
willingness to buy his head-gear, he astonished me by accepting at once.
It had cost him twelve milreis and was almost new; he thought ten would
now be a fair price for it. I concealed my delight as we walked together
to my lodging, where João deposited the hat on my table, crumpled up in
his hand the bill I handed him, and wishing me, with a friendly but
diffident smile, a joyful future, strode away bareheaded through the
gruelling sunshine.
Later I learned that he was a _valoroso_, almost a bandit, who had “shot
up” a neighboring town only a few days before and had several
assassinations to his discredit. The hat is of cowhide, covered with
fancifully patterned sheepskin, weighs almost two pounds and measures
two feet from tip to tip, though the crown is little larger than a
skull-cap. How the natives endure these under a cloudless tropical sun
is beyond northern conception, but the _Cearense_ countryman considers
them the only adequate protection. Whole suits of leather are also worn
in this region, tight trousers for riding, a short coat, and a sort of
apron from neck to crotch in lieu of waistcoat, the whole ordinarily
costing less than ten dollars. Whether or not the wearer overtaken by
rain, followed by another space of the blazing sun, is removed from this
garb by a taxidermist is another of the unsolved mysteries of the
picturesque state of Ceará.
At Iguatú tobacco was sold in black rolls as large as a ship’s hawser,
being wound round a stick in ropes thirty or forty yards long and sewed
up in leather for muleback transportation. A kind of sedan chair on a
mule, with canvas or leather curtains and fitted inside with cushions
and all the comforts of home, is still used by the few wealthier women
obliged to travel. The railway goes on quite a distance into the
interior, but though there was a big two-span iron bridge near town
across a mud gully that might be a river, traffic has been abandoned
beyond Iguatú. The track southward was wrinkled and twisted out of all
possible use as a railroad, and great heaps of rails which the company
had hoped some day to lay all the way to the frontier of the state, and
perhaps beyond, were rapidly rusting away in the ruthless climate.
The chief cause of this railway stagnation was Padre Cicero and his
_cangaceiros_. Father Cicero is one of the chief celebrities of Brazil,
his name being known from the Uruguayan to the Venezuelan boundaries.
Thirty-two leagues beyond Iguatú is the town of Crato, of some
importance industrially, and three leagues east of this lies Joazeiro,
said to have more inhabitants than Fortaleza, though they are nearly all
fanatical followers of their local saint, living in mud huts and all
more or less of African blood. Here Padre Cicero, a saint in the purely
Catholic sense of the word, reigns supreme. He is an old man, past his
three score and ten, a native of Crato, who took orders in the seminary
of Bahia and became parish priest of Joazeiro. The conviction of some
woman that he had cured her of an ailment by miracle gave him the by no
means original idea of establishing a shrine with a “miraculous Virgin.”
Credulous fools were not lacking, and Joazeiro soon became the most
famous place of pilgrimage in North Brazil, at least among the lower
classes. Three large churches were built, and so persistently did people
flock thither and settle down within immediate reach of miraculous
assistance that Padre Cicero soon became too powerful to be handled by
the state government. His picture occupies the saint’s place in all the
country houses of the region, and he was said to have more than ten
thousand followers, variously called _cangaceiros_ and _jagunços_, whom
he could use either as workmen or as a sort of outlaw force to impress
his will upon the region. The trade winds which dry up the northern part
of the state begin to drop their moisture in the vicinity of Crato and
Joazeiro, making them green and fertile and giving the outlaw priest an
added advantage. Several expeditions have been sent against him and he
has been a prisoner in Fortaleza, Rio, and Rome, but always returns to
power. Suspended by the Church, he is said to live up to the papal order
by merely confessing and baptizing, without saying mass or otherwise
conducting himself as a full-fledged priest. Those of a friendly turn of
mind toward him assert that Father Cicero is a “good and pious man, a
strict Catholic, who is doing his duty as he sees it and who has no
other fault than too great a liking for money.”
There is always talk of this or that part of Brazil seceding; Ceará has
already partly done so, thanks to the power of Padre Cicero. He is
really the ruler of an autonomous state, from whom even the _delegado_
and other government officials take their orders. For years the roads of
southern Ceará have been unsafe, for his followers have robbed and
killed with impunity, torturing and mutilating natives who oppose or
give evidence against them, levying on political opponents, the rich,
and merchants, though they have seldom ventured to trouble foreigners.
They call themselves “_romeiros_” (pilgrims or crusaders), and the
federal government has no more been able to conquer them than to put
down the quarrel between the States of Paraná and Santa Catharina. Padre
Cicero deposed the president of Ceará, and when a regiment of federal
troops was sent to put down his “jagunços” they were treated as brothers
by the fanatics and threw their weight against the state authorities.
Like Rio and Nictheroy, the state was declared in a state of siege by
“Dudú,” but those who know their way about the political labyrinth of
Brazil claim that the soldiers ostensibly sent to put down the
bandits—and who did more robbing and killing than the outlaws they came
to suppress—had secret orders from the national boss, the “odious
gaucho,” to aid the cause of the priestly despot. However that may be,
Padre Cicero continues in full command of the region, all commerce of
which is in his hands. He has surrounded Joazeiro with a high granite
wall and smuggled in overland from Santos quantities of arms and
ammunition, among them several cannon. He is notorious among Brazilian
priests for his reputation of living up to his vows of chastity, though
the rumor persists that this is due to physical drawbacks which have
finally developed into his present mania for power and wealth. Old and
feeble now, he had an Italian secretary and a complete staff, including
a treasurer, and was said to do nothing but play saint and strengthen
the belief of his followers that upon his death he will immediately
appear among them again in another form. This last would seem to be a
golden opportunity for an experienced actor with the proper
qualifications and ample courage.
The entire ragged, leather-hatted town of Iguatú was down to see us off
the next noon, wriggling the fingers of a crooked hand in friendly
farewell, as is the Brazilian fashion. They are a simple, good-hearted,
superstitious people, looking outwardly like fierce bandits, yet really
childlike in their harmlessness, unless they are led astray by
fanaticism or designing superiors. We had to struggle for seats because
the thirty-four country people whom the government was assisting to go
to the rubber-fields of the Amazon, rather than have them die at home of
the drought, overflowed from the second-class car into the first. Many
of these were pure white under their tan, but a more animal-like lot of
human beings could scarcely be found in an ostensibly civilized country.
Ragged, dirty, sun-scorched, prematurely aged by the rough life-struggle
with their ungenerous soil and climate, their personal habits were as
frankly natural and un-selfconscious as those of the four-footed
animals. Children, ranging from the just-born to the already
demoralized, rolled about the car floor, while men and women alike
constantly passed from mouth to mouth bottles of miserable native
_cachaza_ and crude pipes, both sexes generously decorating the floor
with their expectoration—a rare thing in South America. All this would
have been more nearly endurable had they had any notion of their own
drawbacks, but they were as convinced of their own equality, if not
superiority, as are most untutored people—a semi-wild tribe lacking the
virtues of real savages.
Everywhere the talk was of rain, to the _Cearense_ the most important
phenomenon of nature. Even the women knew cloud possibilities and
studied the horizon constantly for signs of storm. They ended their more
forceful sentences not with “if God wishes,” but “_se chover_—if it
rains.” A man bound for the Amazon was holding one of the many babies
when it played upon him that practical joke for which babies of all
races and social standings are noted. “_Menina!_” he cried, “_Parece que
a secca não ‘sta’ tão grande aqui, não!_—Girl! It looks as if the
drought were not so great here, eh!”
In fact, the drought was broken that very night. We had halted again at
Senador Pompeu—where the _sertanejos_ refused to pay more than a milreis
each for hotel accommodations and slept out in consequence—and I had at
last fallen asleep in spite of the incessant rumpus of my fellow-guests
when I was awakened by a heavy downpour. With daylight the domes and
sugar-loaves and heaps of granite hills among which the train picked its
way stood forth ghost-like through a blue rainy-season air with an
appearance quite different from that under a blazing sun. Heavy showers
continued throughout the day, and as the last rain had fallen ten months
before, joy was freely manifesting itself. Everywhere people were
congratulating one another, showing perfect contentment whether they
were forced to keep under shelter or to wade about in the downpour,
talking of nothing but the rain, the sound of which on his roof is to
the _Cearense_ the sweetest of music. It was remarkable how nature, too,
responded to the change. I could not have chosen a better four days in
which to make the trip to Iguatú, for these had given me both the
drought and the resurrection. The whole region, dry, brown, and
shriveled three days before, was already a sea of bright green. Leaves
opened up overnight as they do only in a month or six weeks in the
temperate zone, giving the effect of seeing midwinter followed by late
spring in a single day, a jungle magic reminding one of the Hindu
tricksters who seem to make plants grow in an hour from seed to bloom
before the eyes. Rivers bone-dry on Thursday were considerable streams
on Sunday, with natives wading like happy children in water where they
had shuffled the day before in dry sand. No wonder these poor, misguided
people of the jungle lose heart when their world dries up, and become
suddenly like another race when the clouds again come to their rescue.
All day long joyful cries of “Eil-a chuva!” (There’s the rain!) sounded
whenever a new shower burst upon us. Life at best is rigorous in this
climate, under the life-giving but sometimes death-dealing sun, and only
the hardy or the helpless would have remained here to endure it. No
wonder the _Cearense_ who can by hook or crook do so becomes a lawyer
without idealism or a shopkeeper without human pity. The aspect of
nature changed so magically that it was hard to judge what this light,
half-sandy soil might be able to do under proper rainfall or irrigation,
so that my first conclusion that northeastern Brazil was doomed to
remain a thinly populated semi-desert may have been too hasty. Between
showers the breeze gently moved the fans of the palm-trees, the
_graúnas_, or singing blackbirds of North Brazil, flitting in and out
among the _carnaubas_. At Baturité all the Amazon-bound travelers old
enough to own a few coppers bought mangos and quickly made the car look
like a bathroom by their furious attacks on a fruit that has been fitly
described by a disappointed tourist as tasting “like a paint-brush
soaked in turpentine.” As the negro blood and light sand marking the
coast strip announced our approach to Fortaleza, I turned to the
brakeman on the back platform with a fervent, “Well, we are getting back
where we can sleep in beds again.” He gazed at me with a
puzzled-astonished air that caused me to put a question. I had forgotten
the native _Cearense’s_ devotion to the hammock; the brakeman had slept
in a bed once in his life—when he had a broken leg.
I had installed myself again in the “Pensão Bitú” and was just starting
for the theater when I was held up by another downpour. When I finally
entered the “Cinema Rio Branco” I found it almost empty; but it would
scarcely have been fair to curse the first rain that had troubled us
since early January in Victoria, especially one which meant almost the
difference between life and death to thousands of our fellow-men. We had
done poor business during my absence, due mainly to the fact that the
ten-day engagement forced upon us by the steamer schedule was too long
for Ceará. At Maranguape my three companions had lived in an old
hammock-hotel up in the hills where a natural spring furnished splendid
swimming, and where there was no charge for rooms, but merely for meals.
On Friday the performance was a “Benefit for the Santa Casa de
Misericordia,” or nun’s hospital, for which I had sold our part of the
show at 300$ to Vinhães, who in his turn had contracted with the nuns to
furnish everything for 500$. But when it was all over the religious
ladies had refused to pay, so that in the end Vinhães was the loser. I
relieved “Tut” by running the second session myself to a handful of
people, while the rain drumming on our sheet-iron roof all but drowned
out the phonograph, and pocketed one eleventh as much as I had the
Sunday before in this gamble known as the show business.
My last duties in Ceará were mainly of a personal nature, for to Vinhães
fell the task of buying the tickets and getting the outfit on board. The
_Brasil_ arrived about noon and we were down at the wharf by two, only
to have our leisurely boatmen nearly cause us to miss the steamer and
squat in the sand another ten days. The whistle had long since blown and
the sailing-hour was well past before we even started out from the
wharf. Then we lost our rudder, which was rescued by a negro rower who
sprang overboard and was washed up on the beach with it, while the heavy
boat with all our possessions, not to mention the four of us, threatened
at any moment to capsize. There followed a long struggle between time
and white-capped swells, with the lazy negro oarsmen as referees, and we
were off at the very moment that the last of our trunks went into the
hold.
CHAPTER XVIII
TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON
When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the
same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not
sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orleans in quest of adventure, and
before another chance came he met an old Spanish wanderer who advised
him by all means to remain in the United States. It would probably be
difficult to write on one page what humanity owes that unknown Spaniard.
Later, when his inventions had begun to make him world famous, the
former trainboy sent a man to search all the Amazon region for materials
to be used in his experiments—and it was our privilege to take the
finished product back to the land which the inventor himself had never
reached in person.
The _Brasil_ is one of the three smaller and older boats of the
government line—which is the reason we had much more space in our two
staterooms and considerably better attendance, for these boats are not
popular with “deadhead” politicians and their families. The cabin
passenger list was made up of the usual conglomeration of every human
color, nationality, social and moral standing, from priests to several
of the most repulsive old adventuresses—treated outwardly with complete
equality even by mothers of corruptible daughters—from clean-cut young
Englishmen to licentious, shifty-eyed Brazilian mulattoes. But the real
sight was the steerage quarters on the three decks in the nose of the
ship. Here men, women, and children—the thirty-four latest refugees from
the interior among them—bound for the rubber-fields were so packed
together that individual movement was impossible. Such a network of
hammocks—above, across, under, over one another, the bottom of one
sleeper resting on the belly of his neighbor below, scantily clad women
crisscrossing men who had discarded all but a single short garment—as
one could not have believed possible filled all the space, disputing it
with the animals and fowls the ship carried as food. Sheep and pigs
wandered among the no less frankly natural passengers; six zebu bulls on
their way to improve the native stock at the mouth of the Amazon
occupied stalls in the midst of the turmoil. One venturesome fellow had
as a last resort hung his hammock from the roof above these animals, so
that whenever one of them moved he was lifted hammock and all. There was
a very exact description of the scene in the _Cearense_ novel “O
Paroara” with which I was whiling away my time, and as that was
published sixteen years before, conditions have evidently long been the
same.
Early in the afternoon of the second day we picked up a pilot along the
sandy coast and went over a sandbar into the wide bay of Tutoya, port of
the State of Piauhy, only a little point of which touches the sea. I had
at one time planned to go up the Parnahyba River to Therezina, the
capital, but inquiry proved that this would not be financially
advantageous, so that I contented myself with this brief glimpse of the
state. Many _Piauhyenses_ came on board from the _montarias_, or
ludicrous native rowboats in which they were transferred from the
_giaolas_ (literally “bird-cage,” but “river steamer” in Amazonian
parlance) that were waiting to carry passengers back up the river, and
we had at least a vicarious acquaintance with them.
When I awoke at dawn we were already close to the winking lighthouse
known among British mariners as “Maranham,” and soon afterward there
appeared a town rather prettily situated on a low ridge. We anchored far
out, and it was more than an hour before sailboats brought the
authorities to examine us, but that was a small matter to a man with a
deck-chair and a passable novel. In fact, there was no hurry about going
ashore, for five days would probably suffice to exploit the interest of
São Luiz in the Kinetophone, and the rest of the State of Maranhão was
virtually inaccessible. More than that, when the local manager came on
board through the dingy gray water to pay us his respects he reminded me
that this was Wednesday of Holy Week and that it would be foolish to
spoil the effect of our _estrea_ by attempting to compete with the
priests before Saturday.
In 1612 a Frenchman named La Ravadière founded on an island near the
mouth of the Amazon a city which he called Saint Louis in honor of King
Louis XIII. Two years later the Portuguese drove out the French and the
city became the capital of the province of Maranhão—aboriginal name of
the Amazon—which then included all northern Brazil from Ceará to the
Andes. The island, which is small, is known as Ilha de São Luiz, and the
city is officially São Luiz do Maranhão, though, like most capitals
along this coast, it is better known to the outside world by the name of
the state. Its harbor is shallow, with much tide, so that when one
lands, by launch, rowboat, and finally a negro’s shoulders, the whole
raging sea seems beneath one, and six hours later the place is a
sand-field, with steamers sitting high and dry and barefoot crab-hunters
wandering about on it, as if someone had pulled the cork out of the
bottom of the ocean.
A huge old fort and stone wall face the harbor, and from the
landing-place a stone-paved street lined by carefully trimmed,
haycock-shaped trees slants swiftly up to the venerable cathedral and
the main square, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above. Situated on a
low, but narrow and broken, ridge, its streets stumble rather steeply up
and down in places, and the town is so compact that, once ended, these
passageways break off instantly into dense-green and almost trackless
jungle, except the single Rua Grande, which goes on across the island.
Perhaps it is due to its situation that São Luiz is cooler than its two
degrees from the equator would suggest, though here the constant trade
winds die down, thereby saving the region from the glaring aridity which
characterizes all that part of the continent to the eastward. In fact,
somewhere between Ceará and Maranhão is the dividing line between that
scantily wooded semi-desert and the humid, dense jungle of the Amazon
basin. In many ways São Luiz is the most pleasant little capital along
the coast of North Brazil, and not the least of its charms is the
pleasure of again seeing grass and trees in all the green profusion of
tropical lands. Here one begins to feel that equatorial humidity which
leaves even the clothing damp and sticky; by night strange creatures
singing in the prolific vegetation mark São Luiz as the beginning of the
great Amazonia.
[Illustration: Rural policeman of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of
the region]
[Illustration: From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street
car]
[Illustration: A street of São Luis de Maranhão]
In Brazil it is the custom to interview newspapers rather than to wait
to be interviewed, and immediately upon landing the local manager hired
an automobile in which all of us engaged in the “necessary courtesy” of
calling upon all the editors. Some of them were men of real culture and
widely informed, their full Caucasian complexions burned that coppery
red of those who have lived for generations near the equator. Even the
local cinema manager, who had never been off the little island of São
Luiz, spoke faultless French and would not have been out of place in the
best society of old Europe. A few, on the other hand, had traveled
rather widely, and these were even more inclined than the others to be
dogmatic in their editorial wisdom. One vivacious young editor of rather
forceful and unusually attractive face for Brazil, who looked like a
white man browned up for a minstrel show, who might have been a strong
character and a pleasant, handsome fellow had not some wanton ancestor
casually added a bit of negro blood to his veins and given him the
egotistical volubility, the instability, and the surliness of the
_mestiço_, had no sooner been presented to us than he began talking like
a whirlwind about the United States, neither desiring nor expecting to
have his opinions in any way questioned, his attitude that of a judge
who means to be kindly but who regards his judgments as final. In answer
to one question which I managed to thrust between his closely cemented
words he casually remarked that, though he knew most of Brazil and had
been several times to Europe, he had never visited the United States,
adding in his turbulent flow of speech that he had fear rather than a
desire to do so “because there life is so intense.” In the next sentence
he was assuring, and convincing, his native hearers that the “Collosus
of the North” was purely scientific and commercial, without the
slightest conception of or interest in anything artistic—and then
suddenly he broke forth upon the negro question.
Next to Bahia. Maranhão has the greatest percentage of African blood of
all the states of Brazil; hence this was a natural topic. It usually is
between educated Brazilians and traveling Americans. The editor’s
opinions on the subject were those of many of his class, long since
familiar to us. There were 900,000 negroes in Brazil, he dogmatized, in
other words about three per cent. of the population(!), who were rapidly
being absorbed and would soon disappear, whereas in the United States
twelve per cent. of the population were negroes, who, being forced to
resist the attitude of the whites, would remain a race apart and a
constant and growing menace. In two or three centuries, he prophesied,
there would be only negroes left in the United States, because they
“reproduce like flies and lie in the shade and live to be a hundred,
while the white men are wearing themselves out by their absurdly intense
living.” _Ergo_, Brazil had been far more fortunate and wise in her
handling of the negro problem than her great neighbor of the North.
It was the same old argument, the rock on which the bulk of Brazilian
and American opinion on this subject always splits. In Brazil the negro
is physically stronger and better fitted to the climate than the whites;
in the United States, as a whole, the reverse is the case. This, and
certain other differences overlooked by most Brazilians, keep the
argument from becoming clean-cut. Yet is the negro, or at least the
part-negro, the best type that can permanently prosper under Brazilian
conditions? No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes that
the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing
for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements
either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can
some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the
tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black”
through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a
kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the
two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? The first is the
Brazilian, the second the American point of view, and the gulf between
them is not easily bridged.
That night we gave a special performance for the press, which was
attended by about forty representatives of São Luiz’ four daily
journals. This and the ceremonial visits were probably worth the
trouble, for the papers next day were equally enthusiastic about the
Kinetophone and its “highly cultured” sponsors, whose names, titles, and
previous condition of servitude they gave in full down to the latest
count of Carlos’ children. Indeed, we became the subject of the chief
editorials, even in the face of religious competition. The most famous
living wielder of a quill in Maranhão took us amiably to task for using
the full name of the inventor on our advertising matter, contending—in
his paper’s two most prominent columns—that it was an indignity to style
“Thomaz A. Edison, like any commonplace mortal, a man whose Godlike
gifts to the world had made him to all mankind for all time the one and
only EDISON.” Naturally such publicity hurt our feelings.
But the result of all this could not be known for three days, Thursday
and Friday being so holy that even churches could not ring their
bells—for which we gave fervent thanks, well knowing that the respite
would be soundly broken on Easter Sunday. The “only one” in town was the
“Hotel Central,” a big colonial two-story building directly across from
the cathedral, and the French proprietor set a table and attended to
business like a Frenchman, instead of being off down the street
gossiping. “Tut” and I had a suite of two rooms shut off from most of
the uproar of the rest of the house, our living-room immense, with three
balconied double windows larger than doors looking down upon the
tree-lined promenade and a part of the sea—when the tide was in. Our
huge four-poster bed, as well as the smaller one we took turns in
occupying, was carefully mosquito-netted, for only white foreigners are
said to be subject to yellow fever. There were hammock-hooks, never
lacking in North Brazil, in all the walls. Of the mahogany tables,
marble-topped bureaus, full-length pier glass in which to admire
ourselves, the big cane settee, the comfortable roomy cane
rocking-chairs, and the score of minor convenient articles of furniture
I will say no more, lest there be a sudden exodus to São Luiz do
Maranhão. To be sure, the shower-bath now and then ran dry, but there
were really only two drawbacks to the “Hotel Central,”—its kerosene
lamps and its “artistas.” Evidently there was no escaping these
self-styled “actresses” who distribute themselves throughout the hotels
of North Brazil, though the old Frenchman assured us that he had always
refused to take them in until the war-bred crisis made their admission
“necessary.”
Being so old a city, São Luiz has a finished aspect quite different from
many others of more recent origin. It is completely paved in square
cobblestones, with very much arched roadways, and all its narrow
sidewalks of flat stones, polished by many generations of feet, are so
slanting that one must take care if he would not, as I all but did more
than once, spill himself wrong end up in the middle of the street. We
had at last outstripped civilization, in its more modern manifestations.
All the way up the coast each state capital had put in electric
street-cars and similar contrivances within a year or so—that is, long
since I had entered South America. Here we had beaten invention to it,
and there was genuine pleasure in seeing drowsy old easy-going mule-cars
again—though we never bothered to wait for them. São Luiz, too, still
lights itself with matches, though that does not mean, as it would
almost certainly in the Andes, that reading is considered bad form. In
fact, it is called the Athens of Brazil, and quite justly, for all the
rest of the country has scarcely produced as excellent a list of
literary men. Graça Aranha, Coelho Netto, the three Azevedo brothers,
João Lisboa, the historian, Manuel Mendes, who turned Virgil and Homer
into widely famed Portuguese verse, Teixeira Mendes, head of Brazilian
Positivists, and Gonsalves Dias, the national poet, are but a few of the
famous sons of Maranhão. Of them all, the most beloved, not merely in
São Luiz but in all Brazil, is Dias, born of a Portuguese shopkeeper of
the interior and his negro slave, and done to death by sharks when the
frail craft on which he was returning from Europe with an incurable
ailment came to grief within sight of the lighthouse on his native
shores. Those who are familiar enough with both tongues to be able to
form a judgment, and who have no national prejudices to overcome, assert
that as a poet the impulsive, licentious Brazilian mulatto was several
rungs higher up the ladder than our own Longfellow. There is a Praça
Gonsalves Dias in São Luiz, and in the center of it, at the top of a
tall column high up among his beloved palm-trees and the singing
_sabiás_ he immortalized in his best known poem, is the poet’s statue,
non-committal as to complexion in its white stone (or plaster) and
giving him the appearance of a wavy-haired Shakespeare. Not far from
this statue, overtopping everything else and giving an aëroplane view of
all the city, is an old shot-tower, of the kind used in former days for
the making of bullets with the aid of gravitation. Dogs are
distressingly numerous, and the charcoal over which the _Maranhenses_
cook in little braziers is carried about town and sold in small baskets
hanging six or eight high at either end of bamboo poles. It is a busy
town every five days, when a steamer comes from Pará or the south;
otherwise it drifts along at a contented, mule-tram pace.
On Thursday evening we stepped across to the cathedral and saw the
ceremony of the “Washing of the Feet.” The bishop, in full purple and
attended by a throng of assistants and acolytes, without music and with
very little light as a sign of mourning, marched along a raised bench
where twelve beggars had taken seats hours before. Several of them were
blind and all of them diseased, and they had been dressed in white
cotton gowns which partly concealed their natural rags. The bishop
placed a silver basin under a foot of each in turn, spilled three drops
of water on it, dabbed them with a napkin, then stooped and kissed the
unsterilized extremity almost fervently, though with something in his
intelligent, clean-cut face which suggested that he did not particularly
enjoy this part of his ecclesiastical duties. Each beggar was given a
loaf of French bread, a copper coin worth nearly a cent, and what looked
like a folded nightshirt, to all of which he clung with both hands as if
expecting the densely packed throng of the faithful, virtually all of
whom could point back to African ancestry, to snatch the gifts away from
him. That night the same class engaged in the annual “hanging of Judas,”
and when morning dawned effigies of the traitor of Gethsemane, in most
fanciful and multicolored garments, swung by the neck from a score of
improvised gibbets.
One of the best known residents of Maranhão is a hardy American who came
down twenty years before to set up in Caixas the first cotton-mill in
North Brazil—though cotton had been grown there for more than a century.
There he married, became a power in the cattle and mining industries,
and established a line of river-steamers to that principal town of the
interior. Brazil, as he put it, is an easy country in which to make a
living, but a hard one in which to make a fortune. Once real wealth
begins to show its face, the native politicians see to it that it does
not become too swollen. Cattle are the principal product of the state,
but a sack of salt costing two or three milreis in São Luiz to begin
with, reached the incredible price of 24$ in the interior. All Brazil,
in his opinion, would prove fitted for the white man, once the more
temperate south was filled up; but as yet only the two hundredth part of
the republic was under cultivation.
We opened on Saturday night after the longest period of idleness since
the Kinetophone had made its bow to Brazil. It was perhaps the
combination of good advertising, after-Lent reaction, and the fact that
São Luiz gets few good entertainments that brought greater crowds than
we could accommodate. Our performance, too, pleased more than usual
there, thanks among other things to excellent acoustic properties and to
a few lines in our introductory number from “O Canto do Sabiá,” best
known poem of Gonsalves Dias. The result was that as often as we chose
to open it we filled the house so tightly that I could barely squeeze in
myself. Unfortunately the remodeled shop held only four hundred, but on
the other hand it was the best managed theater we had seen in Brazil,
with “deadheads” almost unknown and the smallest child paying admission.
On Sunday we gave a matinée and three evening performances, packing the
place so full that we had to call upon the police to restrain those who
could not legally be admitted. We took up the tickets inside, as in a
street-car, and needed no door-keepers during the performance, for no
man, with or without a ticket, could have forced his way into that
sardine-box. The street outside was blocked with those waiting to get
into the next _sessão_, the sidewalks lined with chairs filled with
fancily dressed women of the “best families.” That day’s income was
larger than we had had since our first Sunday in Pernambuco, and a
cablegram carried the news of our popularity to the newspapers of Pará.
There is only one place to take a walk of any length in São Luiz. The
Rua Grande turns into a passable road and goes on across the island, but
all other streets soon end in swamp or jungle. I tramped out of town one
morning and returned that afternoon, having covered fifteen of the
twenty miles of island road and return. It was a joy to walk on real
earth again after months of wading in sand, and to be surrounded on
either hand by a great green wall, instead of a glaring half-desert. On
the other hand, the dull skies of the Amazon region were already getting
on my nerves, as they do on those who abandon the almost unbroken blue
sky and sunshine of the eastern coast. Yet on the whole Brazil has a
remarkably even climate for so enormous a stretch of territory, and it
was not much warmer here than in Santa Anna on the Uruguayan border.
Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, however, and here
was the real, humid, densely jungled tropics of the imagination at last.
Bamboos waved their titanic plumes above me; a tree ablaze with scarlet
blossoms flashed forth from the dense verdure; the _fructa-pão_, which
furnishes its vegetable bread to the poorer classes all the way from
Bahia northward, here produced far more abundantly than man required.
Palms ranged from those of fern-like delicacy to the _coco-babassú_,
shaped like a gigantic feather-duster stood on end and producing a bunch
six feet long of red nuts as large as our walnuts. These contain a
kernel of cocoanut meat rich in oil, which was just beginning to be
exported to Europe, and unlimited quantities of which could be had for
the picking and cracking. Butterflies celebrating their nuptials
enlivened the landscape with the flutter of their iridescent
multicolored wings; here and there the _sabiá_, first cousin to our
northern robin, sang his familiar song; once or twice I fancied I heard
the _mãe da lua_ (mother of the moon), the nightingale of Brazil.
Anil was the largest of several small towns along the way, with a
mule-car running the length of it on what used to be a little railroad.
A railway also runs across the island, or at least the rusty rails do,
hoping some day to reach the mainland by a bridge and continue to
Caixas, whence a line already operates to Therezina, capital of the next
state east. Several genuine tropical downpours forced me to seek such
shelter as was available, and the day was done before I returned to São
Luiz. There are many delightful things in the tropics, but none of them
equal the soft dusk of evening. Like most fine things, it is short and
fleeting, no two minutes alike, and barely a few moments seemed to pass
between the last livid rays of the sun, as it veiled itself behind the
light band of clouds along the horizon, and the falling of moonlight in
flecks of silver through the limply drooping fronds of the palm-trees,
stencilled in silhouette against the iridescent sky of a tropical night.
It was almost a full year since my last real walk, but no one in São
Luiz felt more contented with life than I that evening. Yet my tramp was
the only topic of conversation at the cinema, and a newspaper referred
editorially next day to the “incredible energy and endurance of our
distinguished North American visitor,” who could cover thirty miles of
Amazonian ground on his own feet in a single day!
It might have been better for Carlos, too, if he had combatted the
climate of the torrid North with pedestrianism. For some time he had
been losing his _Paulista_ energy, and with it his interest in life. On
the morning after my walk I met him strolling languidly along the main
street, looking more disconsolate and colorless than I had ever seen him
before; but those are common symptoms in the tropics and I thought
little more about it until he failed to join us at dinner that evening.
We found him in bed in his room across the hall, with a raging fever.
The best recommended physician of São Luiz having arrived, I hurried
away to the theater, where both Carlos’ work and my own awaited me.
That night he was neither able to talk nor, apparently, to recognize me.
The native leech had diagnosed his ailment all the way from malaria to
bubonic plague, and had finally settled upon intestinal grippe. Whatever
it was, Carlos was a sick man, and when morning came without any sign of
improvement, I set about arranging to get him into a hospital. There
were two in São Luiz,—the “Beneficencia Portugueza” and the “Santa Casa
da Misericordia.” For several reasons I chose the second. By this time
the invalid could scarcely raise his head, or express himself, except by
monosyllabic gurgles and the rolling of his bloodshot eyes; yet it was a
labor of hours to coax any of his fellow-countrymen to help untangle the
red tape that blocked his immediate entrance to the hospital. A colonel
connected with the cinema at length agreed to go with me to the doctor
whose duty it was to issue tickets of admission, but he insisted on
having an automobile at 10$ an hour with which to cover the four short
blocks of stone-paved street. When the doctor and the colonel had run
through all the gamut of Latin-American salutations, down to the fourth
generation and the family cat, a great many questions were asked me
before Carlos was finally accepted as a patient, as if it were an
extraordinary favor, though the “Santa Casa” was in theory open to all.
Then, a bit of rain coming up, the colonel began talking politics and
remained for more than an hour, through three more showers. When we
finally entered our waiting automobile it was out of gasoline! I raced
back to the hotel, impressed two carriers and a hammock into service,
and got our ailing companion at last into the hands of the nuns just at
nightfall.
As the time was drawing near when we must move on, I appointed the most
responsible man in town unofficial guardian for Carlos and turned over
to him, against ample receipts, his back pay, his salary to the end of
the month, and his fare back to Rio. This should have sufficed amply to
pay his hospital bills and carry him home with something to spare, and I
had no authority to give him more. Next morning we discovered that
Carlos had taken with him our duplicate set of keys, and “Tut” went up
to the hospital to get them. The nun-nurse had them in safe-keeping and
would not turn them over without Carlos’ permission. He could not talk,
but after staring at “Tut” for a long time he faintly nodded. After
still longer effort they succeeded in getting, in faintly whispered
monosyllables, the address of his family in São Paulo. As “Tut” was
leaving, a doctor bustled cheerily into the ward and casually informed
him that Carlos had yellow fever.
The indifferent way in which São Luiz took such things gave one a creepy
feeling that life was held cheaply in those parts. When Carlos’
condition was mentioned to patrons of the cinema that evening they said,
between yawns, “Ja estã liquidado—Oh, he is finished all right,” and
went in to weep at some silly film drama and to giggle at Kinetophone
humor. I insisted on remaining optimistic. Had we not heard a hundred
times that native Brazilians never die of yellow fever, that its
fatalities are confined to white foreigners? In other words, while “Tut”
and I were constant prospective candidates for an Amazonian cemetery, a
man born in São Paulo, accustomed all his life to Brazilian conditions,
should be in no great danger. I was still telling myself these things
when word reached us that Carlos was dead.
By this time we were already on our way to Pará, for ten-day steamers
and theatrical engagements wait for no man. When three men have lived
more closely together than brothers for more than half a year the loss
of one of them is an astonishingly heavy subtraction, one which we felt
all the way from the longer time it took the two of us to tear down the
show and send it on board the _Ceará_, to all those little daily
reminders of the loss of a familiar companion. Of course, when we came
to think it over, natives do die of yellow fever; but as those living in
the regions where it flourishes have either died of it, or recovered
from it, in childhood, the survivors are immune and the effect is as if
the disease were fatal only to Caucasian visitors. Besides, Carlos, born
of Italian parents on the cool Brazilian plateau more than twenty
degrees to the south, was virtually a foreigner up here on the steaming
equator. The period of incubation being longer than the time we had
spent in São Luiz, it was probably the mosquitoes of Ceará that had been
his undoing.
We refitted the phonograph with “Tut’s” automatic starting device, which
had fallen into disrepair, so that North Brazil might continue to be
amused as long as one of us survived. For our troupe, at least, would
perform while anyone remained to turn the crank. There were frail young
ladies in it, and very few who were acclimated to tropical travel; yet
they appeared night after night without changing a hair, doing exactly
as good work as when they left New York, playing fully as well to a
scattering audience on a sweltering afternoon as to a packed house on a
cool evening, never disturbing us with a display of mood or temperament,
never showing the slightest impairment from the climate, the soggy
Brazilian food, the thousand little tropical and Latin-American
annoyances, and never dying of yellow fever. More than once I woke up
dreaming that they were subject to all the ills of living men and women,
or sweated through a nightmare of trying to transport them all in a
small boat, or house them all in a ten-room hotel already half occupied
by persons with whom respectable Americans should not come in contact.
A broad light streak on the ocean ahead announced our approach to the
mouth of the Amazon, the “river-sea,” as the Brazilians often call it,
discoloring the deep-blue Atlantic as far as the eye could reach. Later
the water turned a muddy brown and we began to see the smoke from the
Pará power-house across the flat featureless landscape. Monotonous dense
greenery soon surrounded us, flat, impenetrable forests spreading from
the very edge of the river to infinity on either hand. Everywhere the
vast stream was dotted with sailboats, their lateen sails all dyed some
single bright color,—blue, saffron, red, faded pink. Then flat wooded
islands scattered all about appeared, and finally an opening in the flat
landscape disclosed the low City of Pará, still so far away as to be
almost indistinguishable, and before we could steam up to it swift
tropical darkness had fallen.
We dropped anchor for the night before its long row of lights, the
passengers whiling away the evening with music and dancing, no one
apparently sorry to save a hotel-bill out in the cool breezes of the
quiet river. We were so close to the town that we could hear the night
life under the trees in the central praça and see the electric
street-cars go frequently slipping past. It may have been the sight of
the cathedral, bulking forth out of the night above the rest of the
city, that turned the group of Brazilian men gathered on the after
saloon deck to a discussion of religion—though it was not a particularly
religious discussion. In fact, the crux of every one of a score of
anecdotes was the grafting of priests, and the men one and all agreed
that the ecclesiastics were even more diligent and clever at it than
politicians; but they all took care that the women on board should hear
none of their stories.
A steward called us at daybreak, escaping before I could get hold of the
revolver in the bottom of my valise. A fog half concealed the city,
gradually disclosing, as the equatorial sun burned it away, long rows of
docks and warehouses, the “new” town floor-flat, with a water-tower
standing above the rest, and a fish-market swarming with sailboats and
clamoring people, the old city rising slightly on a knoll topped by the
cathedral. It was more than two hours later that the port doctor came on
board to examine us. As I replied “All right” to the steward who came to
tell me to report, and continued reading in my steamer-chair without
hearing from him again, I fancy it must have been a thorough
examination. The sunshine was falling in streams of molten lead when we
finally hoisted our mud-hook and pulled up to a dock—for the first time
since we had landed in Bahia. A large crowd, astonishingly European in
origin, was gathered along the quay, giving little or no attention to
the heavy showers that every now and then broke forth from a half
cloudless sky.
Vinhães was on hand, with a dozen newspapers containing large
Kinetophone displays, and together we went down into the hubbub of the
hold, through the chaotic network of third-class hammocks, to fight to
have our baggage landed in time for an evening performance. A few ports
back our phonograph had nearly been put out of business by a careless
drayman, and since then I had been taking no chances, though I had to
dog the steps of two negroes, ordered to carry it by the handles, to
keep them from putting it on their heads. In up-to-date Pará, however,
we had only to have it placed in a large and luxurious taxicab and drive
away with it to the “Bar Paraense.” This half-open theater out in the
Nazareth section of town was somewhat more distant from the center than
we should have preferred; but it was the best Vinhães had been able to
get. The labor of setting up emphasized the loss of Carlos, especially
as this was one of those big ramshackle buildings we now and then came
across where it took a score of pulleys to carry our synchronizing cord
from the booth to the phonograph. But at least we returned to
comfortable quarters when our labors were over. The “Café da Paz” was as
well run under its Swiss maître d’hôtel as a high-class European
hostelry with several tropical improvements, and as it was owned by the
same cultured and upright copper-tinted gentleman who had a half
interest in the “Bar Paraense,” the cost of our excellent accommodation
was less than we had paid in some unspeakable hovels. To be sure, hard
times had given several rapid young ladies admission even here, but they
were not on our airy third story, with its huge blind-shaded windows and
its view of all Pará. In the halcyon days of rubber, ended barely two
years before, the “Café da Paz” was the best hotel in North Brazil,
where a small room alone cost more than we were paying now for full
accommodation and where one paid 2$ for a place at table and at least as
much for each dish ordered.
“Tut” and I had come on the same ticket from Maranhão. In the list of
passengers published in that evening’s papers we appeared as “Wayne
Tuthill and 1 child.” At dinner we were handed an order from the
sanitary department of the State of Pará, commanding “Wayne Tuthill e
Harrey” to appear at the yellow fever section for examination. It was
evident from the document that only one person was meant by this
Latin-American style of double-barreled name; but out of some mixture of
curiosity and honesty I took it upon myself next morning to point out
the error. For my pains I, too, was commanded to appear at three every
afternoon for the next thirteen days, under penalty of fine and
imprisonment. I protested that I could not regulate my life in any such
bourgeois fashion, and being taken before the head doctor, I informed
him that it was my habit and intention to wander about the state during
my stay in Pará. So effective was my command of Brazilian super-courtesy
by this time that he replied in the same vein, saying all foreigners
coming from either Ceará or Manaos, where yellow fever had broken out,
were put under observation, but that in my case it would be sufficient
if I would report at any time between seven and five on those days when
I happened to be in town.
Strictly speaking, there is no city of Pará, nor is it on the Amazon. In
1615 Castello Branco left Maranhão and founded on the spot where the old
castle of Pará now stands a village at the junction of the Guajará and
Guamá rivers. Both of these are a part of the Amazon system, but they
are separated from the mouth of the river proper by the enormous island
of Marajó, considerably larger than the Republic of Portugal. The
Tupinamba Indians who inhabited the spot were friendly to the newcomers,
and as he had left Maranhão on Christmas Day, Branco named the town
Nossa Senhora de Belém (Our Lady of Bethlehem); and Belém the capital of
the state of Pará is officially and locally to this day. Just two
centuries later “Grão Pará” definitely separated from the _capitania_ of
Maranhão and became a province, a province of slight importance then, in
spite of its enormous size and unlimited tropical forests. In 1852 a
_Paraense_ sent the first steamer up the Amazon, but it was not until
1867 that the world’s greatest river was opened to foreign navigation.
Ten years later the most famous drought in the history of Ceará sent
thousands of _Cearenses_ to open up the great rubber-fields of Grão-Pará
and Amazonas, from which the great riches of Belém and Manaos resulted.
Pará is distinctly a maritime city, though it is ninety miles from the
ocean. With the exception of a short government line to Bragança on the
coast to the west, constructed in 1877, one cannot go anywhere from it
except by boat. It is almost less a Brazilian than a European city, with
little brotherhood for the rest of the republic. In the newspapers of
Pará “America” means New York, which can be reached from there in two or
three days less time than are required for a journey to Rio. It was not
until we had met some fellow-countrymen who had been treading Broadway
ten days before, long after the returning senator of Pará who landed
with us had sailed from the national capital, that we realized why the
eyes of Pará are fixed on the north and east rather than upon the great
country to the south to which it governmentally belongs.
Pará is an exotic growth, a bit of Parisian civilization isolated in an
enormous wilderness, which encroaches so constantly upon it that the
European air of the center of town quickly disappears in grass-grown
alleyways of swamp and jungle. The heavy rains cause this grass to grow
with tropical luxuriance and rapidity, so that there are many wide
streets laid out between unbroken rows of buildings that are nothing but
deep green lawns with a cow-path or two straggling along them. Densest
jungle may be found a short stroll from the central praça, and wild
Indians, living as they did centuries ago, are only a few hours distant.
It is an unfinished city of pompous, got-rich-quick fronts and ragged
rears, with only the old town on its knoll, and the few principal
streets of the new town paved in stone blocks. The rest is much as
nature left it, and while one may find almost anything in this little
culture-importing heart of the city which can be had in the centers of
civilization, a short walk brings one to isolated houses on stilts and
uninhabited clearings through the jungle in which men, driving carts
drawn by one bull, wade to their thighs cutting and loading grass.
Scarcely a rifle-shot from shops offering the latest Parisian creations
one must depend, even for life, on the strength and agility of primitive
man.
Pará has been called the “City of Trees.” Corinthian columns of royal
palms wave their elegant heads in every direction, mammoth tropical
growths of which we of the North do not even know the name shade the
squares and praças; the important streets and avenues are lined with
shade trees, in nearly every case the mango, with whitened trunks as a
protection against tropical plagues and trimmed to a few main branches,
instead of being left to its natural appearance of a deep-green
haystack. There is a wealth of tropical vegetation in parks and gardens,
terminating with the Bosque Rodrigues Alves in the outskirts, a sample
of the real Amazonia, dense wild forest where humidity and semi-darkness
reign and great trees stand on tiptoe straining their necks in the
struggle for air and light above the solid roof of vegetation. Yet the
considerable market gardens on the edges of town, tended by Portuguese
and other white laborers, show what European immigration can and might
do against this prolific militancy of unbridled nature.
In contrast to the surrounding primeval wilderness, there is a
suggestion of the _vieux port_ of Marseilles in the Ver-o-peso
(See-the-weight), the old rectangular landing-place, so named because in
the time of the monarchy fish brought to town were weighed there and
assessed a government tax. It is still the chief port for small vessels,
and may be found almost any morning packed with sailing ships, their
many colored sails giving the scene an effectiveness usually lacking in
the monotonously green aspect of equatorial Brazil. These gather from
all directions, bringing the products of the adjacent mainland, the
Island of Marajó opposite, and of the waters between, and carrying back
to the towns and hamlets scattered along either side of this false mouth
of the Amazon the products of civilization, ranging from French perfume
to manufactured ice. Along the quay of the Ver-o-peso and for some
distance back is the public market, filled with many Amazonian products
unknown in northern climes. First and foremost is the _pirarucú_, a fat,
reddish-brown fish sometimes called the “cod of the Amazon,” so huge
that each scale is nearly two inches across, less often eaten fresh than
salted and boxed in great slabs and shipped to every community along the
river. _Pirarucú_ is the beef of the Amazonian regions, as _farinha_ is
its bread. Turtle flesh is also in great favor, and butter made from the
turtle eggs is the most common in the Pará market. Oil of _capivara_, or
river-hog, of tapir, and even of alligator furnish the _Paraenses_ their
emulsions. The state taxes every fisherman, and the federal government
takes its toll of every turtle, _pirarucú_, or bottle of oil he brings
in. _Castanhas_, or chestnuts, as what we call the “Brazil nut” is known
at home, are to be found in great heaps; these and cacao constitute the
principal products of Grão Pará, with one world-famous exception. There
are scores of such local commodities as _cheiro de mulata_, which might
be translated as “scent of mulatto-girl,” ground up bark sold in little
packages and sprinkled in the frizzled tresses of the purchasers, both
as a perfume and to bring good luck. Of native fruits wholly unknown in
the temperate zones there are no end,—the _mamão_, better known by the
Spanish-American name of _papaya_; the _graviola_, with big green scales
and a cream-like interior similar to the _chirimoya_ of Andean valleys;
the _cupuassú_, with an apple taste; the _barcury_, _maracajú_,
_mangaba_, _muruxy_, _taxperebá_, and many others, less often used as
table fruits than as flavoring to sorbets or ice cream, or what a local
café-keeper stronger on mixing than on spelling advertises as
“cookstails.” The _maxixe_, by the way, which has reached the North in
the form of a Brazilian rag-time dance elaborated from Portuguese and
African originals by the negroes of Pernambuco and Bahia, is in its
legitimate sense an Amazonian pepper. Above all, there is the _assahy_,
the small fruit of a palm-tree not unlike the date in appearance, from
which a non-alcoholic _refresco_ is made, reddish in color and drunk
with _farinha_. This is so great a favorite among _Paraenses_ that they
have a saying:
_Quem vai para Pará para;_ Whoever goes to Pará stops;
_Quem toma assahy fica._ Whoever drinks _assahy_ remains.
Rubber, the second national industry of Brazil, is of course the life of
Pará, which is the reason the city had lost most of its old-time energy.
Not only was the rubber market in a chaotic state on account of the
World War, but the Amazon was just beginning to feel seriously the
competition of the planted rubber-fields of Ceylon, where, in contrast
to the high prices of Amazonia, the cost of living is perhaps the lowest
in the world. Warehouses that two years before could not hold the rubber
that poured in upon them now had a few dozen of the big balls scattered
about their huge floors. There they were being cut up—giving them a
striking resemblance to dried meat—to make sure the rubber-gatherer had
not included a few stones or a low-grade near-rubber called _caucho_ and
packed in heavy boxes of native wood for export. All Amazonia, from the
laborers who tap the trees to the speculators and explorers and their
long train of hangers-on, was feeling the change acutely.
Vinhães never recovered from his astonishment at the difference between
this Pará and the one he had known on previous trips. In the good old
days of only a few months back Pará was sure it would soon outstrip
Paris, so that it had many public and private buildings out of all
keeping with its present condition, sumptuous three-story structures
marked “Municipal School” on the outside that were mere dusty ruins
within, pretentious mansions sitting out wet and lonely, knee-deep in
grass, on an imaginary avenue. Then throngs of humanity, all leaving
money behind them, poured in and out of the gateway to the Amazon.
To-day, with her chief commerce languishing in the throes of death, Pará
was provincial again—a stranger attracted attention and everyone knew
everyone else. Even now there were few beggars, thanks, perhaps, both to
habit and to the scarcity of negro blood, but in the days of prosperity,
we were assured, almost any barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ had a conto
or two in his pocket. The “Theatro da Paz,” built in the time of the
monarchy more than thirty years before, and the most sumptuous in Brazil
until the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo were constructed, had
not been opened in months. On its façade still hung the remnants of
advertising of one of the favorite entertainments of the old
money-flowing days:
_Theatro Da Paz
Setembro, 1912_
A Grande Revista Paraense
BORRACHO FALSA
(false rubber)
It had indeed played them false.
A negro is almost conspicuous in Pará, and it is a question whether
there are not more _caboclos_, that is, Indian mixtures, than mulattoes.
Not merely did the exploiting of the Amazonian region begin late in the
life of the monarchy, but the northern part of Brazil freed its slaves
before the national decree of emancipation was promulgated. The city
itself rivals the southernmost states as a European Brazil. White men,
from English merchants to barefoot Portuguese laborers, their olive
skins seeming strangely pale in the blazing sunshine, make up almost a
majority of the population. It is a dressy, formal community for all
that, and notwithstanding the heat of a sea-level city on the equator.
Politicians in wintry garb, their high silk hats tilted against the sun
ever so slightly, an umbrella grasped in their sweat-dripping hands, may
be seen making their way to the palace, on the roof-tree of which
vultures are languidly preening themselves. Now and then these
overdressed gentlemen cast a wise but circumspect eye upon the
_mameluco_ and mulatto women passing with bundles on their heads, moving
their hips slightly yet conspicuously, filling the air with their
personal odor mingled with that of the _cheiro de mulata_ sprinkled in
their hair, their thin low waists showing coppery or brown skins that
are more suggestive than nudity. On Sunday afternoons an automobile
parade speeds up and down the Estrada de Nazareth, the men stiffly
correct in attire down to wintry woolen spats, the women—but these are
most apt to be European adventuresses who have seen better and younger
days, who spend their evenings on the stage of the “Moulin Rouge,” but
who now sit in pompous bourgeois correctness in their open taxis, ever
buoyed up by the hope of attracting the husband of some bejeweled
resident along this finest of Pará’s avenues, a hope in which they are
frequently not disappointed. It is characteristic of the Brazilian point
of view that not only do the legitimate ladies of these sumptuous
residences lean on their powdered elbows at the windows studying in
detail their possible rivals, but that they see nothing amiss in joining
the procession, so long as they have a close male relative along to
protect them from scandalous tongues.
There is an old bullring in Pará, but it has long been used only as a
school. The two churches in Brazil at all worth seeing are the
Candalaria of Rio and the Sé, or cathedral, of Belém. The latter is
imposing in structure and situation and has several artistic pictures.
Catholicism, however, by no means has everything its own way in the
metropolis of the Amazon. For one thing, there are said to be eight
Masonic lodges, with a membership of nearly eighty per cent. of the male
population. Electricity and gasoline have almost entirely taken the
place of the screaming ox-carts so familiar there not many years ago.
The “Pará Electric Railways and Lighting Company” had already given the
city good British service for six years. The cars, unlike those in the
rest of Brazil, have a center aisle, probably because the incessant
rains would make the crawling under side-curtains an unendurable
nuisance. If anything, the division into classes is more marked than in
Rio itself. The man with a missing sock or collar pays almost the same
fare as his fully dressed fellow and rides in exactly the same kind of
car, except that on the outside it is branded with the word “Segunda.” A
famous American ornithologist, who knows more of the interior of Brazil
and its bird life than all Brazil’s thirty millions, had been standing
on a corner signaling in vain to car after car to carry him and a
suitcase full of feathered trophies out to the Museo Goeldi when it
became my pleasure to explain to him the Brazilian system of “baggage”
street-cars.
[Illustration: My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every
station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky negroes with
nothing on their mind but a couple of trunks]
[Illustration: Dolce fare niente between shows in Pará]
[Illustration: The cathedral of Pará]
[Illustration: Pará has been called the “City of Beautiful Trees”]
Among many forms of “_fazendo fita_,” it is the custom among the élite
of Brazil for the man whom the conductor reaches first to pay the fares
of all his friends ahead or behind him in a street-car. It is what the
French call a _beau geste_, but there are times when it has its
drawbacks, especially in times of “brutal crises” and a slump in the
rubber market. I rode out one day on the longest street-car line in
Pará, past the dense Bosque screaming with parrakeet's and flickering
with _beija-flores_, not to mention the large insane asylum and
poorhouse, to visit the Liceo of Souza. With me were the professors of
botany, horticulture, and agriculture from that institution. On the way
I pointed out a magnificent tree which is certain to attract the
attention of any foreigner making that journey, and asked to what
species it belonged. The three professors looked at one another with
puzzled faces, introduced a new topic of conversation in the hope that I
might forget my curiosity, and finding me not to be put off so easily,
one of them replied, with the air of a sage handing out a gem of wisdom,
“E-e uma arvore silvestre—it is a _wild_ tree!” No doubt they thought I
took it for a hothouse plant. But it was an episode of my return trip,
alone with the professor of botany, which made the journey worth while.
As we rumbled along, halting frequently to pick up passengers, I noted
that he grew more and more gloomy and taciturn. Not until the conductor
arrived from the rear, however, and my companion handed him the
equivalent of more than half a dollar in fares, did I suspect the cause
of his sadness. The fare-collector, it seemed, though the matter was not
mentioned by word of mouth, had put off collection so long that more
than a dozen of the professor’s friends and acquaintances had boarded
the car, and then the stupid fellow had begun his duties with the back
seats, where the professor had fancied himself safe. The result was that
common courtesy required him to pay the fares of nearly everyone in the
car—and Brazilian professors are little less generously supplied with
this world’s goods than their fellows elsewhere. One by one, as the
conductor reached them and refused their proffered coin with a word of
explanation, the men ahead turned around and thanked their benefactor
with as elaborate a bow as the backs of street-car seats permit, to each
of which my companion replied with a sweeping gesture of the right hand
suggesting intense pleasure and unlimited largess. But the street-cars
of Pará, as in most of Brazil, run on the European zone system, and
there were four or five separate sections to be paid before we reached
the center of the city. We were just starting from the second
junction-point when the professor suddenly clutched at me and dived off
the car. I might have been puzzled, had I not noted the extreme yet
casual care with which he examined the next car for possible
acquaintances before we boarded it—well up toward the front.
“You should never divide an ox-hide until you kill the ox,” say the
_caboclos_ of Brazil. Vinhães and I had fully expected to make a small
fortune in Pará, but we had reckoned without two serious drawbacks,—the
“rubber crisis” and the climate. Rain, rivers, and trade winds unite to
make the city cooler than its situation warrants. Death by sunstroke is
unknown—in all Brazil, for that matter—and by night it was at times
almost uncomfortably cold. But the rain which had treated us so kindly
for months broke all known records during our engagement in Belém. It
was during a raging downpour that the copper-tinted half-owner of the
“Bar Paraense” and I drove about in a luxurious taxicab paying our “duty
calls” on the editors of the six or eight local newspapers, and it was
in a continuation of the same deluge that we opened that evening, taking
in more than a conto merely because ours was a novelty for which we
could charge double admission. We remained cheerful, however, because
everyone assured us that every three days of rain were sure to be
followed by three dry days. For that matter, it was asserted that the
daily shower came always at a fixed hour in the afternoon, so exactly
that people made their appointments “before or after the rain,” without
troubling to refer to the clock. All this may be true, but if so, ours
was an off year. If there was any one thing we could not be certain of,
it was whether or not we could venture out at any hour of the day or
night without risking a drenching; and of the twelve nights we played in
Pará it rained continuously and in veritable cataracts exactly a dozen.
Luckily, all _Paraenses_ are not afraid of water or we should have been
forced to close our doors. The people themselves at length admitted that
they had never seen it rain so incessantly. No wonder _paroaras_ find
the contrast between the low, heavy skies of Amazonia and the lofty,
brilliant ones of Ceará so saddening; even we, from the often wintry
North, found the constant downpour, broken only by momentary splotches
of steaming sunshine, getting on our nerves. The trees of the praças and
avenues seemed to scrape with their upper branches the swollen black
clouds which marched slowly over us in closed squadrons day after day.
Nowhere in Brazil did the iniquitous “deadhead” flourish so abundantly
as in Pará. Two boxes and a row of orchestra seats of the “Bar Paraense”
belonged to the brewery which furnished the liquid refreshments; similar
accommodations were reserved permanently for the families of the
_empreza_, or management: as many belonged to the chief of police—though
he always assigned his rights to friends, and forced his way in with as
many as he chose to bring with him; every “authority,” municipal, state,
and federal, from the president to the most lowly clerk, was accustomed
to walk in without being challenged; the six moth-eaten little
newspapers were given a dozen seats a night, and these having been sold
or given away, any loafer or boy who chose to state that he was a
newspaper-man must be let in, under penalty of possible scurrilous
attacks in the next edition; scores of unkempt part-negroes appeared
nightly with a card stating they were detectives; insolent half-African
policemen in uniform not only forced their way in, but habitually
dragged a turmoil of friends or progeny with them; it had long been the
custom to count the average Brazilian family of parents and six children
as three adults, though each child expected to occupy a full seat; the
“artists,” “advertisers on the curtain,” “electrical inspectors,”
“volunteer firemen,” and what not who expected to get in on one excuse
or another were without number. Every _Paraense_ of any African ancestry
seemed to be on the police force, even the chief being distinctly
tar-brushed, and to have no other duty than to attend Kinetophone
performances. More than once I counted forty policemen in uniform in an
audience of less than ten times that number, not to mention more
“authorities” and other forms of grafters than I could estimate. Truly,
a government is often a useless as well as an expensive luxury. Though
policemen and higher officials always swarmed, we never got a suggestion
of assistance from them. One night a crowd of ridiculously garbed
students who were celebrating the reopening of the academy after the six
months’ annual vacation forced their way in some forty strong, yet not
one of the hundred official “deadheads” in the house raised a whisper.
On another occasion I had the doors closed during our part of the
entertainment in order that the audience should not be disturbed by
late-comers. In the middle of a number the chief of police arrived and
demanded that he and a group of friends be admitted at once, on penalty
of everyone of us being placed under arrest. There was the same staid
attitude on the part of the grafting politicians from the palace and the
_urubús_ that lazily preen their feathers on the roof of it after a
rain—scenting from afar any chance of gorging themselves and circling
around it in their black carrion-crowlike garb, pretending whenever they
are observed that they do not wish to feed and strolling nonchalantly
off, only to hurry back as soon as they are free from observation.
A long article appeared in the chief Pará newspaper one morning
“proving” that a Brazilian youth invented the Kinetophone in 1908! I
should have wired Edison; he would have been astonished. I was not,
however, for I had read even more amazing things in Brazil. According to
the “Dictionary of Famous Brazilians,” a _Paraense_ invented both the
balloon and the flying-machine—that is, he got as far as Paris on a
government subvention to “perfect his great invention” and had a bully
time among the _grisettes_, though he never rose bodily above the
ground. The same work of many volumes, as well as the “History of
Parahyba” taught in the schools of that state, is authority for the
statement that the typewriter was invented by a _Parahybano_ priest
named Francisco João de Azevedo. As he was already editing the first
newspaper of North Brazil in 1826, the typewriter must be an older
machine than we suspect. “Blessed be he who bloweth his own horn, lest
it be not blown,” said Mark Twain. Nearly every state of Brazil gets out
an elaborate volume, resembling our high school or college annuals,
praising itself to the skies and including pictures not only of its many
more or less imaginary industries, but portraits of all its “influential
citizens”—who can afford it.
The “Estrada de Ferro de Bragança” operates a 16-mile commuters’ branch
out along the shore of the river-mouth to Pinheiro, as well as a main
line of more than a hundred miles to the town for which it is named.
Though it is state property, the federal government imposes a federal
tax of twenty per cent. on its tickets, and, being Brazilian, its daily
train starts at the crack of dawn. This was the old overland route from
São Luiz to its offspring, Pará, yet the train made rare and short
stops, for there was little but endless bush and genuine tropical jungle
during the whole nine hours’ run. Here and there were patches of corn,
but the scattered inhabitants along the way were mainly engaged in the
production of children. The latter were habitually stark naked; the
women dressed in two thin cotton garments covering them from neck to
bare heels; men naked to the waist lounged in huts that were mere stick
skeletons smeared with mud, sometimes slipping on a jacket, without
buttoning it, when they came outside. Personally, I prefer the frank
loin-cloth of the East Indian.
In Bragança itself, as along the way, the scarcity of African, and the
prevalence of Caucasian, blood was surprising, with Indian mixtures in
considerable evidence. The _vigario_, or parish priest, with whom I had
some conversation on this and kindred subjects, asserted that the
_caboclo_, or part-Indian native, was in general lazier and more
worthless than the negro mixtures; but this I had found by no means the
usual Brazilian opinion. Everything is relative, and this native of
sleepy Parahyba considered the people of Amazonia “incredibly indolent.”
Bragança boasts as well as shows its age, having won the title of
_villa_ a century ago. There are electric-lights, but most of the
streets are grass-grown and the jungle jostles the town on every side.
It was once called Souza de Caeté, from the river in which it washes its
clothes and along which fishermen and crabmen, carrying baskets full of
squirming _carangreijos_, plod in barefoot contentment.
A hovel, masquerading as the “Pensão da Mulata,” had all its rooms
occupied—several times each, in fact—but was sure it could accommodate
me, for what was the hanging of one more hammock? The place was too
mulatto-ish even for my adventurous taste, however, and by appealing to
the station agent I was taken to a shop kept by a Gallego and his
Andalucian wife, who furnished food and hammock-hooks to “persons of a
certain class,” into which I evidently fell, for I got a room in which
only a bed was lacking and was served a tolerable supper. My hosts did
not run a _hotel_, they explained, because to do so they would have to
hang out a sign and pay a heavy government license and tax. With only
the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock to cover me, I slept little from
midnight on because of the cold, abetted by frequent deluges. The
Gallego had given many solemn promises to wake me, but had shown no
signs of carrying them out up to the time I was dressed and ready to
push off. A fine pickle I should have been in had I missed the only
train for four days. My bill having been paid the night before, I
stepped noiselessly out the window and let them sleep on, hurrying
through the fading light and the swampy streets to the station. At least
there was the satisfaction of knowing that I would never have to catch
another Brazilian train. That night, after a mere thirty-five hours’
absence, I found my shoes, valise, even the band of my hat covered with
green mold in my airy room at the “Café da Paz.”
The end of my engagement with the Kinetophone was nearer than I had
expected. After several communications to the man who held the
theatrical monopoly of Manaos, Vinhães had at last received a cable in
code which we deciphered as “Nous réfusons toute proposition.” Very
Parisian, of course, and definite in any language. The fact was,
according to every test we could give by absent treatment, that Manaos
was deader than Pará. The latter has at least its shipping and its
supplying of the interior, but the exotic city of the Amazonian
wilderness depends for its existence almost solely on rubber.
The rivalry between the two cities of the Amazon has always been acute,
and Pará was chuckling with tales of its rival’s come-down in the world.
Manaos, the _Paraenses_ asserted, always copied their improvements, and
would ruin itself rather than admit it was not Pará’s equal. When Pará
formed a zoo, Manaos immediately followed suit. Then rubber fell and the
zoo-keeper came to the state minister in charge and said, “_S’nho’,
falta comida pa’ os bichos_.” “No food for the animals, eh? Well, I tell
you what you do. Listen”—but the story is worth the telling only in the
language of the scornful, sarcastic _Paraenses_—“_Olhe, vocé mata tal
bicho e da á comer aos outros, ouvioú_.” “_Sim, s’nho’_,” replied the
zoo-keeper, and he went away and killed such and such an animal and fed
it to the others, even as he had been ordered. A day or two later he
came back with the same story, and went home to apply the same solution.
This was repeated for weeks, until only the jaguar was left. The
minister stared at the zoo-keeper for a long time when he came to report
this state of affairs, and scratched his head in perplexity. Then, a
brilliant idea suddenly striking him, he cried: “_Olhe, então vocé solta
o tal onça!_” Whereupon the keeper bowed his head and went back to turn
the jaguar loose, even as the minister had commanded, and thus ended the
Manaos zoo. That of Pará was bidding fair to suffer a like, if more
humane fate, for all the facetiousness of the _Paraenses_ at the expense
of their poverty-stricken brethren up the river. Two years now the
ragged, barefoot employees of the Pará zoo had been mainly dependent
upon the charity of the Austrian women in charge of it, and there was
even then a man sitting across the table from us who had come down to
carry the most valuable of its birds and mammals back to the Bronx.
April 21st, national holiday of Brazil in honor of the drawing and
quartering of Tiradentes, is now doubly famous as the exact date on
which I last ran a Kinetophone show. I have said that it rained every
night during our Pará engagement, but that afternoon the sun beat down
with equatorial fury. In the sheet-iron booth under the sheet-iron roof
the sweat streamed down into my eyes until I could not make out the
projection on the canvas, and the crank rubbed the skin off the inside
of several fingers. That night, in honor of the occasion, I put on a
“GREAT DOUBLE PROGRAM” so that nearly all my old film-friends came out
upon the screen to do their turns and give me a chance to bid them
farewell. The next afternoon “Tut” and I went out and pulled down the
show, and the travel-worn trunks disappeared forever from my sight as
they were rowed out to the _Ceará_, now on her return voyage. Because
she was taking with her also the state senator and the archbishop of
Pará, the military band and great mobs of _populares_ came down to the
wharf, giving us the sensation of making a holiday of our parting when
“Tut” stepped into a rowboat and slipped away into the humid night
toward the port-holes reflected on the placid bosom of the river.
With him went Vinhães, one Brazilian whom I had found strictly honorable
in all his dealings. Naturally, as our engagement in Pará was over, the
rains had abruptly ceased. Turned out upon the world alone again for the
first time since I had joined Linton in Rio more than eight months
before, I wandered idly along the streets, wondering what on earth I
could do to pass the evening. Almost unconsciously my steps carried me
back to the “Bar Paraense,” but there was only a pitiful audience of
twenty or so, and most of those sat in the second-class seats watching
an inexcusable mess of screen rubbish. I took refuge in my room and
whiled away the time making a final report on our tour. Out of 221 days,
we had played 196, losing the rest in traveling or holidays, giving 40
matinées, or 236 performances of an average of nearly three sessions
each. We had appeared in 49 theaters in 29 towns of 11 states, and had
failed on only one contract,—that at Itajubá, where a disrupted railroad
had forced us to remain an extra day in Ouro Fino. Our total income had
been 54,665,000 reis, of which my own share had been 6,882,000. Though
it was months later before I again had news of my adventurous ward, the
Kinetophone maintained its high American reputation to the end.
Beginning in Natal, “Tut” not only fulfilled all the contracts I had
arranged for his return trip, but carried the “eighth marvel” clear down
to Rio Grande do Sul—a remarkable feat in view of the fact that he made
the rest of the tour entirely alone, training local talent in each town
to put on and take off the phonograph records. That _tour de force_ made
me wonder if, after all, my own services had been mainly ornamental.
CHAPTER XIX
UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA
It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now
that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America.
Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and
to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my
Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the
untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half
years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is
to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary
route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one
which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that
journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos.
On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains
of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a
_gaiola_, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and
struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in
less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge
the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and
individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and
give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers
never suspect. The _Andirá_ was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two
decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge
glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and
scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long
dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy
four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the
boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow
one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian
dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the
head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places
to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small,
the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with
a network of redes in all colors.
“_Todo é à vontade, senhores_,” said the captain, “_Aqui nada está
prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo_;” and with nothing
prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and
slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during
the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow
water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing
a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the
foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost
its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a
light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into
nothingness.
Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the
left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of
Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too,
seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many
slender palms which I took to be the _carnauba_, though they turned out
to be the _burity_. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the
island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story
farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from
the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden
_tamancos_ wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad,
strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop,
an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where
the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it
stood a large _cachaza_-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into
rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on
the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the _Andirá_. A group of
reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the
grassy yard beyond the distillery.
The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with
great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous
for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only
for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out.
Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place,
improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of
zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand
head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his
heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the
climate easily, but is indifferent to the _carrapatos_, or ticks, and
all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone
are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle,
bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood,
furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a
draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great
_plaga_ left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When
the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving
alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail,
unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’
strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also
once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with
cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that
had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than
$6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of
the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He
ate anything, according to the _fazendeiro_—sugar-cane, _melgaço_, or
crushed pulp, bread, _farinha_, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but,
continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best,
which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers
shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past
discover their most cherished wares.
The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and
had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely
maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much
eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for
word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará.
But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does
when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of
way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed
that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their
politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers
rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to
improve things.
At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river.
I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of
exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was
but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of
calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The
Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they
did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the
hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip
of a month or more on one of these _gaiolas_ without a page of reading
matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not
but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those
weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of
coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the
whole night hideous with their card games.
We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of _fazendas_ to pick up
sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the
Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between
Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more
than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the
exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the
boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic
reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the
virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound
giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below
the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and
there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or
hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent
soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally
new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed
Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little
island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with
great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their _ubás_, long, slender,
dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the
forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves
by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds
and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the
men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then
crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some
of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner,
appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard
anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators,
_parainhas_, and a dozen other _bichos_. Woods, trees, _ubás_, houses,
even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no
walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and
all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No
doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the
case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the
endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting
on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the
end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory
not easily lost.
It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film
unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the
differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a
life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian
wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square
yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the
unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds
and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the
rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to
the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still
lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day
geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the
lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin.
Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron _barracão_, and
then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being
that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made
in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he
ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat
was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the
prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was
suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as
much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the
time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf
here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it
another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with
Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to
take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization
exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the
fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the
supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its
inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for
instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the
one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk.
We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our
morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand.
Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native
yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny
“jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew
and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with
life. Neither the captain nor his _immediato_, a pleasing, well-mannered
man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to
assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so
often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of
patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results
as when nothing is left to individual judgment.
Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he
had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed
the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in
most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the
wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of
magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by
the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding
sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the
dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará,
yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant
luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a
wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one
seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even
as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night,
when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded
depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics,
mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was
as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims.
On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or
ridges, and as these always give footing for _castanhas_ along the
Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron
warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on
a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is
never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on
slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the
rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds.
In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a
husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing
over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of
breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but
puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only
waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to
open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to
thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man
of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of
“Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the
_castanhaes_, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual _pándego_, or
“blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever
called _sezões_, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women,
and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut”
season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest
of the year. _Caboclos_ in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece
of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level
full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for
the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in
Portuguese (_pá_), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same
implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they
shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their
destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed
about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest,
well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth
about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than
five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and
at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are
not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp,
sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be
expected.
One afternoon the captain came back on board with a _sapucaia_, a larger
and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer
than the _castanha_ and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the
tall, graceful, arm-waving _castanheiro_. Unlike the familiar species,
this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the
ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall
out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce
again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the
_sapucaia_ unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several
times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a
squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a _tampa_, or
tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts
are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are
thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped
like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the
_castanha de macaco_, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though
it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible
qualities.
Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman
with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks,
the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably
trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the _Andirá’s_ run,
near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a
Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large _seringal_, or
rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who
lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either
ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages
drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his
credit. Then one day some workers on the _seringal_ came to the house
and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are
going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife
and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the
trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered
about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least
doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of
paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or
had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly
explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly
well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one
had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off
the _seringal_ by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up
the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new
manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one
appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever
or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed
interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in
exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of
sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital,
all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the
failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have
been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of
nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no
doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other
tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre.
A contrasting type was our _seringueiro_, or owner of a rubber-field far
up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and
undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and
he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns,
whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see
that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for
money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the
Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery,
or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled
wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost
without realizing that he was doing anything amiss.
At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how
we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle
trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches
of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make
out none of the _giboyas_ (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular
fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the
procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter
were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting
trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man,
dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness,
you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor,
and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come.
Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if
nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in
the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights,
slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats
similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across
tropical Bolivia, and here called _puims_, gave us occasional annoyance,
though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon
residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American
phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were
forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had
to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me.
[Illustration: Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in
Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of varicolored sails, a
veritable fog rising from it under the equatorial sun]
[Illustration: Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native,
the other imported from India to improve the native stock]
[Illustration: A family dispute on the Amazon]
[Illustration: The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both Brazilians
of the north]
On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the
mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the
morning we crossed the river and entered first the _paraná_ and then the
_igarapé_ of Alenquer. A _paraná_, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow
arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an _igarapé_ is
a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran
between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost
snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank,
but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in
front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from
Santarem to Obidos and never see this _igarapé_. We slid almost into the
dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the
flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time
of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer,
a typical small town of Amazonia.
There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of
the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot,
grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more
comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the
Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa
Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest
of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks
tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta,
the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like
patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative
wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country
roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low,
wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest
about Alenquer.
I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size
and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more
negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less
color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin.
School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even
from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the
principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent
looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state
school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be
graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so
we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who
fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept
dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had
been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and
higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid
anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the
lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of
families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same
pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they
have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was
mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American
furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful
rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered.
Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention
and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as
the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January
15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils
were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the _castanhaes_
from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school
fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the
attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but
law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except
those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly
enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because
girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so
common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a
bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s
twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and
his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried,
was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of
wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls
often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are
many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes.
The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two
hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends.
The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the _Andirá_
belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a
generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of
the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we
stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a
_fazenda_ house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could
have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the
smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease
and grace suggesting that the _montaría_ has a mind and a will of its
own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door
neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant
on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained
several hours, while the negro-_caboclo_ crew of half a dozen carried
the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these _gaiolas_
usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a
luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and
dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The
last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine
_jararaca_ of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under
them.
About dawn we emerged from the _paraná_ upon the “sea-river” again, with
a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in
some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the
house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two
energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing
well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many
settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often
found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick
fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer
birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and
heavy shade of the _cacaoaes_, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with
decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across,
grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a
very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which
are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the
Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended
and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns
into _vinho de cacao_, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so
harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the
seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped
to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our
cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles
for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be
resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle
for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be
unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death
from fever to spend a week in the _castanhaes_ that they were never
gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along
the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation
with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by
the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao
harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of
time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon
traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “_Num mez ’stou lá—ou
dois_—In a month I’ll be there—or two.”
It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the
Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile
apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the
other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went
ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the
slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a
city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses
tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this
climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about
the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on
the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime
sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the
jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the
creaking of a few tropical crickets.
I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a
cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight,
and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian
method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them
up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their
horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and
eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing
to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing
away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower
deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and
where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food
or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average
of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their
destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the
rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten
o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating
islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way
to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout
canoe or some other species of _montaria_ creeping along the extreme
lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their
stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling
desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and
would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies.
These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity
itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the
North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it
comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag!
The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the _pirarucú_, a mammoth
species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet
in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is
harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is
a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known
to make a _pirarucú_ tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of
the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped
from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike
that in taste. _Pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_ make up most Amazonian
meals, as they did on board the _Andirá_. We landed boxes of this staff
of life even at towns where the _pirarucú_ abounds, the lazy inhabitants
preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves.
The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the
_peixe-boi_, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling
calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its
nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste.
We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it,
stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily
on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the
boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man,
“_Ha um passageiro para Manaos!_” The captain, who seemed to know
everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and
shouted back, “_O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?_” And that night
we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá.
One day the talk on board ran to _garzas_, the bird that furnishes what
we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them,
said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of
feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the
back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about
a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in
proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a
pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred
dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that
sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos,
say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the
United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of _garzas_, “giving
the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after
musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not
because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the
species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off.
He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is
not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big _garzal_
with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and
every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting
some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only
once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an
aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a
system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several
feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers,
however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the
case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of
exertions to supply her demands, for real _garza_-hunting is no child’s
play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have
himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the
Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year
later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his
struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in
question from the decks of the _Andirá_, tall, slender, graceful, and
generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house
dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$
a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the _municipio_ collects 6$
an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally
elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians
skim off most of the cream.”
On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly
green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts.
This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had
cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand,
and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not
one fortieth that amount. From it a _fiscal_ of the State of Pará came
on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which
must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the
two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the
territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the
Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons,
thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and
bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “_Provavelmente estaba com o
miolo molle_” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the
passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on
a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there
was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to
make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female
warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he
could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins.
That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so
that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and
only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained.
The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch
of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here
spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned
shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which
ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes
Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped
in upon several _caboclo_ families and found them instantly friendly,
though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word,
most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a
hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed
Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks,
swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour,
though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine.
One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude
lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time
making lace with a great rattling of _birros_.
Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of
these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle
curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about
them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small
wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view.
Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that
perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be
overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the
future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little
backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century,
with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes
life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony,
as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing
anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the
world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the
value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production,
taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab,
uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of
Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton.
We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another
_gaiola_ of our line, the _Indio do Brazil_, so named, strangely enough,
not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the
State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into
my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in
the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and
smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces
of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that
we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located
the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip
as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated
regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on
board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There
were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in
the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a _paraná_ as
straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the
weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle!
In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense
vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest _fazenda_ we had yet
seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees,
the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them.
The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the
cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an
unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised,
therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many
Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the
Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he
had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were
growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of
Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to
Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives
and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above
to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among
them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The
captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being
sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the
opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current
number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his
case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the
dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of
fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was
an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies.
The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in
hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight,
pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them,
similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that
they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who
could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck
passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him
to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier
could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing.
The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and
asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “_Não s’nho’_,” the man replied,
crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about
given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably
in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery
friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping
himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt.
The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet
black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that
the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely
into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak.
It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed
and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering
as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all
the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to
believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are
common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a
farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The
rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came
out of a _paraná_ upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see
across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain
decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the
mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the
main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had
seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from
where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense
width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together,
the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black”
of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to
reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a
long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the
population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream.
More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of
dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin
forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a
poor _caboclo_ was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately
ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let
go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form
under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as
domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the
“Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and
only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for
floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for
some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the
bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a
climate. But the _caboclos_ of the Amazon pay little attention to rain,
water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and
female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as
in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut
up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the
black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor,
with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we
drew nearer, the _chacaras_ and “summer-houses” of rich _Manaoenses_
appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could
escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of
the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a
densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through
the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another,
looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the
yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else
except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in
this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval
castle in mid-ocean.
Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open
undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck
resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk
waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond
scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his
fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike
the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow
between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many
buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half
a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in
an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth
directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials
soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners
with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days.
There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from
Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be
satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least
three for every passenger landing and which without exception were
manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced
the captain, the _immediato_, and a few fellow-passengers—male
only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer
journey still ahead of them.
Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the
Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city
more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land
it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than
Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there
was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with
a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot
thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of
feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and
constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot
hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by
the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of
rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces
of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it
had _igarapés_, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green
water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid
ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable
mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center
of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of
the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a
few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation
of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty
wilderness that surrounds it.
Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber
had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of
disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the
Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized
said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than
to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to
utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the
poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the
depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house
than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners”
that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a
village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest
state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of
formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling
without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far.
The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy
body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a
considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting
to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years
before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful
fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe
them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in
pushing on to be disillusioned in person.
Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost
the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot
water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did
it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers
were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone
back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to
stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was
no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more
cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for
the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one
thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram
of beef cost a _milreis_ in the market, or even less after the day
warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks
that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of
workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant
table across the street one cost five times that; a _mamão_ selling for
300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the
Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business
themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was
demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained
away hungry in the darker corners of their homes.
Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are
the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all
manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or
Italian for the most part. The _boínas_ of the Pyrenees are frequently
seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male
and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of
olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge
earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly
at home in any Spanish _pueblo_ or Galician mountain village. Many of
the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the
vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking
clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most
standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white
foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated
young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so
physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes
wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the
British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by
climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the
tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,”
asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion,
on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition;
bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at
least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands.
Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one
may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is
English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand
track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from
far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará,
and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his
acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has
always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the
coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of
little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common
to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out
whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the
receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the
conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich,
and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager
thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity,
the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for
each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in
vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working
perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less
potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the
universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore,
gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month
the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize
100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare _Manaoense_ who does not
demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays.
The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly
worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship
which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free
beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those
who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the
man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst,
a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was
nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the
ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely
enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to
compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from
Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a
glass of beer.
Of other amusements and pastimes there were still a few automobiles for
hire and a rare surviving café chantant, or—well, when the semimonthly
steamer from Rio came in with the list of prizes in the national lottery
a government band sat before the lottery agency and played all the
morning, while firecrackers were exploded and the lottery winnings were
paid. That was the Manaos idea of industry and “combatting the present
grave crisis.” The zoo was gone, of course, and the imposing state
theater, the _azulejo_ dome of which rose high above all else except the
cathedral tower, had not been opened for more than two years and was a
dried-mud ruin within. It was not as in the “good old days” when a
_carregador_ got a fortune for carrying a _seringueiro’s_ trunk across
the praça, and spent it to hear imported opera sung in the proud theater
at the top of the knoll. There were still dramatic companies direct from
Europe, changing every night as they made the rounds of the three
theaters under one ownership—but they came on reels that fit into a
lantern. The plot of the story they told was never a mystery; it
consisted succinctly of the adventures of two men and a woman or, in
contrast, of two women and a man. These original and refreshing themes,
presented nightly under a new title and disguised in a new near-Parisian
costumes, continued to attract such stray coins as still remained in
Manaos, not to mention those to whom there are no earthly barriers. I
had often told myself that what Brazilian theaters needed was a
turnstile at the entrance, and was surprised to find that the cinemas of
Manaos had exactly that thing. But system and strictness lead haunted
lives in Brazil. I stood at the door of the principal cinema one evening
and counted just as large a percentage of “deadheads” as even the
Kinetophone had ever attracted. For instead of having a register on the
turnstile and requiring the door-keeper to turn in a ticket for every
click of the stile or pay the price of one, he was allowed to use his
own judgment as to who should go in free—and the judgment of a Brazilian
door-tender! In short, Manaos was entirely an exotic city, which even
the few _caboclos_ and Indians paddling down to market in their canoes
do not tinge with the local color and things native to Amazonia.
I had come up the Amazon with the faint hope of being able to make my
way overland from Manaos to the capital of British Guiana. Such a trip
should be wild enough to allay any craving for the wilderness for some
time to come, and even if one could scarcely call plunging along jungle
trails taking to the open road, the effect would be about the same. Even
in Manaos, however, no one knew whether or not it was possible to reach
Georgetown by land. Launches and _batelões_, a species of Amazonian
barge, sometimes went up the Rio Branco to the frontiers of Brazil to
bring down cattle, but they could go only at the height of the rainy
season, when the Rio Branco was flooded, and the last one had made the
trip in August, nearly nine months before.
“He who has no dog goes hunting with the cat,” the Brazilians say, so I
turned my attention to the possibility of making the journey through my
own exertions. That, too, it seemed, was out of the question. Even had I
bought a canoe and hired a crew, it would have required at least two
months of constant, laborious paddling to bring me to the Guianese
frontier; and as to walking, that would have been as impossible in this
Amazonian wilderness as on the open sea. My hopes had reached their
lowest ebb when word reached my ears that heavy rains in the interior
were rapidly raising the Rio Branco, and that if they continued, the
first _batelão_ of the season would set out for what is known as the
Brazilian Guyana on May 25. I settled down to endure with as much
patience as I could muster a wait of half a month, and in all likelihood
more, in such a climate and surroundings.
[Illustration: An Amazonian landscape]
[Illustration: A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is
round]
[Illustration: An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and
Manaos, and the Brazilian flag]
On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the
barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to
look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said
that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would
I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common
fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of
course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for
though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May
25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever
heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw
anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went
over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun
had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the
warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the _Macuxy_ was
still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in
disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the _armazen_
to verify the chalked figures. _Não, senhor_, the launch would leave
that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to
sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for
weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without
them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the
least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking
at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the
newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring
down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely
endured as a necessary evil.
It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last
Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away
from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream
and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved
streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the
“Launch _Macuxy_ leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but
I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the _batelão_
hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow,
with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were
piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs,
chickens, _rancho_, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class
passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on
board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for
the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the
first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These
had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other
odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and
changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three
fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side
of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table,
a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was
usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was
piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny
partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two
places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath
by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the
lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower
was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but
it would _amanhã_.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and
threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is
generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.
We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen
men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to
the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally
across the _batelão_ from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and
spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our
side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and
cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug _Macuxy_, constantly
puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and
furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that
the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy _batelão_ alongside, as
is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put
on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is
the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through
all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the
settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down
rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.
All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without
seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a
constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes
from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so
deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of
their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from
which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory,
retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no
visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of
both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with
an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then
there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water,
though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous
in the Amazon proper.
There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their
own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were
rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s
edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s
run, the Indian and _caboclo_ crew tossing it stick by stick from one to
another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and
therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the
captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as
loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging
in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from
35$ to 60$ a thousand.
Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous
_pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_, with wine and condensed milk for those
who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three
or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in
Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some
time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy
required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time
everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to
hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather
than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew
their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no
country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the
people and the climate than Brazil.
Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing
of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there
and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I
had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a
thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had
for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive
piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock
protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or
some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know
what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it
to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the
densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a
snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for
someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no
answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By
and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a
canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule
inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the
man boarded us, and we were off again.
Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above
Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to
Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north.
This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish
tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro
to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil,
Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth
to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was
astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these
slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean
flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the
Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to
European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.
It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America,
has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not
until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made
entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door
in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants
had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land
where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six
feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men
wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown.
As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve
backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew
ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man
carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank,
eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud
that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to
furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them
helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles
will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left
upright and wet now and then with fresh water.
About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants,
and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a
hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been
gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in
distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The
_cabra_, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us
bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There
are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called _borracha_,
is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a
much coarser and cheaper stuff called _caucho_, as full of holes as
Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All
dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the _caucho_
tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty
kilograms of _caucho_, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your
rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the
many links from producer to consumer the _borracha_ has been replaced by
_caucho_.
There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable
abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most
of the region the _bugres_, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation
difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the
first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before.
The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put
on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer
stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the
bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since
leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and
perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest.
Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two
or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white
men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in
1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years
later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though
half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to
have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most
represents most places marked on the map.
But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no
lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was
Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose
mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood
up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many
months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to
the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region,
and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession
must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only
in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English
with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to
conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial
interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his
calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for
him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was
a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest
species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a
passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas
to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was
always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle
filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that
he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of
his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on
some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.
Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle,
pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of
the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for
growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them
unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but
contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive
selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos
was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in
Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance.
Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio
Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much
traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he
looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old
age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own
importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as
the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the
simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave
those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate
embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the
hat-off greeting of some _caboclo_ far below his own caste. All the best
things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the
choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one
with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always
loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs,
special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could
get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant
selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on
the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and
like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the
jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living
constantly among dependents.
There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board,
one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank
to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated
_fazendeiros_ of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom
and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less
important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the
Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the
aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been
staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat
seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men.
They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable
monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance,
superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the
woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion
brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance,
even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have
been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone
else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and
separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly
crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the
rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could
avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little
“bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after
which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room.
Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other
from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of
the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of
Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the
less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and
Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind
them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every
native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to
avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same
class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.
The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation,
though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter
of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was
a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black
eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than
her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every
morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in
the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they
were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were
companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean,
selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for
everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching
the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed
the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians.
This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing
the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of
the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on
earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good
man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse
childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.
That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian
steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of
his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three
Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime,
who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on
a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean
garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class
passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly
negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as
best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the
upper world.
The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded
tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more
blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish
springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of
primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at
a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from
Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American
sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had
come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad
into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched
American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed
half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a
weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper,
which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now
well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped
slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting
so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.
At dawn of May 25 we found ourselves anchored at Caracarahy, four
hundred and sixty miles above Manaos, with the first open camp I had
seen in Amazonia, its tufts of bunch-grass quite green, and the joyful
sight of a _serra_, or range of hills, dimly visible to the north. Yet
the campo broke easily into dense woods in any direction. There were a
few scattered _barracões_, or thatched warehouses, and three or four
huts of natives. The place exists merely because there are falls above,
this being the beginning of rising and rocky country, around which all
goods must be transshipped. Here were twenty-four kilometers of
_cachoeiras_, or rock rapids, which may be passed in three ways,—in high
water by the Furo de Cojubím, a _paraná_ or natural canal flanking the
falls, but which in the dry season is a mere succession of mud-holes;
secondly, in certain seasons by dragging freight in small boats up over
the rock falls; lastly, by a _picada_, or trail cut through the dense
forest. I went ashore with the bug-catcher while the captain
investigated. On the boat we had rarely felt a mosquito or any other
form of insect pest, but the moment we landed we were in swarms of them,
especially annoying tiny flies. Later we were to find that the grassy
campo was alive with _mucuims_, an all but invisible red bug especially
active in dew-wet grass, which conceals itself in the pores of the legs
and sets them to itching fiercely a few hours afterward, keeping it up
for days.
We returned on board, to hear the bad news that the early rains had
slackened and that it would be impossible now for the smaller boat that
was following us to pass through the canal and carry us on up the river.
The water must be six feet higher, and as Colonel Bento Brazil put it
laconically, “We may have to wait a month or two, or it may fill up from
one day to another.” There were big cattle pens here, and cowboys who
tended the cattle in shipment as they grazed on the campo before being
jerked aboard the _batelões_ and carried off to Manaos, which is reached
in high water on the down-trip in forty-eight hours. Late that evening
the captain began filling our barge with the maltreated brutes, which,
after a hard drive across the country, were swung by a winch cable about
their horns from the shore corral to the boat, often breaking a rib as
they struck it and now and then a leg as they were lowered into the
hold. No wonder Amazon beefsteaks are tough! Cattle for the Manaos
slaughter-house are almost the only down traffic from this Rio Branco
region, which produces little else, being high open campo and almost the
only place in the entire State of Amazonas that can do so to advantage.
Here they sold for from 60$ to 100$ a head, and in the rainy season can
be transported to Manaos for about 60$. In the middle of the seventeenth
century the Portuguese established cattle-breeding stations here, so
that even to-day the great territory drained by the Rio Branco is known
as the “Fazenda National” and is federal property.
Even here there was no definite information as to whether one could cut
across through British Guiana. All I learned was that, if I could reach
Boa Vista, there were two or three ways of making toward the estate of
an Englishman over the boundary, but even he seemed to be more closely
in touch with Brazil and Manaos than with Georgetown. In the morning
there appeared on board a lively little man native to the region, whom
everyone called “Antonino.” He was dressed in slippers and the modified
pajamas all males find most convenient in Amazonia, had not shaved for
two or three weeks, and had the general appearance of a backwoodsman
with a little plot and a few cattle of his own, who might be able to
write his name with difficulty. In reality, he was the owner of a large
_fazenda_ far up the river on the edge of British Guiana, the boundary
being a stream at his front door. Beneath his lack of shave he knew
Europe well, though little of Brazil, and had an astonishing knowledge
on a wide variety of subjects. What was still more important, he was
going to walk or wade the twenty-four kilometers around the _cachoeira_
next morning to his own barge-launch waiting above the falls to take him
back to his ranch. I bequeathed my steamer-chair to Captain Santos,
packed my valise to the screaming point, with even my private papers and
twenty pounds in gold, and handed it over to a pair of Antonino’s Indian
employees in a canoe half-roofed with thatch, who rowed away into the
evening toward the falls.
Next morning I was disappointed to find that Antonino had hired
“horses,” as they called the wabbly, starved, and degenerate descendants
of those noble beasts that awaited us, eaten by vampire bats and beaten
stupid by their unconsciously cruel Indian-Portuguese owners. I should
much rather have walked, the cruelty of getting astride such miserable
animals aside, for my greatest immediate desire was physical exercise. A
broad-faced, independent Indian “guide” set off with us across open,
bunch-grass country, everywhere lively with birds, the long
scissors-tailed _tesoura_ most conspicuous among them. Mammoth ant-hills
stood higher than horsemen above the thin, tufty grass. Soon we entered
a wide road cut through a dense forest by the state government, at a
cost to taxpayers of 2000 contos! Yet it had never been more than a poor
clearing with a barbed wire fence on either side, and now it was half
grown up to jungle again. In the mass, an Amazon forest is deadly
monotonous; in detail there was an incredible mixture of species, with
the same plant rarely half a dozen times in the same spot, and all
showing a striking adaptability to environment. The great trees stood
always erect, as if striving, like good soldiers, to touch with the
crown of the head an imaginary object above them, spreading out at the
top like a parasol to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible,
wasting no branches farther down, where the sunshine never penetrates.
There were many rivulets and mud-holes, with a jungle not unlike that of
tropical Bolivia, except that the growth was thicker and greener, with
more beautiful palms. Antonino, who had chosen the best animal, got out
of sight ahead, the Indian urging me to hurry; but as I saw no need for
that, I spared my wreck of a horse. Suddenly, toward noon, we heard a
distant boat-whistle, followed by half a dozen shots from a revolver.
The Indian redoubled his urging and I strove in vain to give my
miserable steed new life. Then more whistles sounded, and the Indian
said dejectedly, “There, the launch is gone.”
“Impossible,” I answered. “As it belongs to Antonino it must wait for
him.”
But we soon came upon the horse Antonino had ridden, tied to the
rail-fence of a cattle-corral in the woods, and I concluded that my new
companion had proved a true Amazonian in thinking of himself alone.
After taking down several fences and putting them up again, we came out
on a little nose of land above the river—and found Antonino looking
hopelessly away up it.
It turned out that Antonino, loving to boast, like most Latin-Americans,
really had not the slightest ownership in the boat we had hoped to
catch, and here we were apparently stranded at the Bocca da Estrada,
with one small, ragged, thatched roof on poles under which to wait for
days, if not weeks. Anyway, the baggage we had sent by canoe had not
arrived. Antonino professed to think that the launch had stopped just a
few miles up the river to overhaul its engines, but this sounded like
another bluff to save his face. I quenched my thirst with a dozen
gourd-cups of yellow river water, squeezing into it the juice of wild
lemons, swung my hammock, and prepared for whatever might be
forthcoming. It is fatal to lose one’s temper in Amazonia. A chunk of
cow that had been torn off the still palpitating animal that morning had
swung unwrapped from the Indian’s saddle during all the sixteen miles.
This we washed, spitted, and thrust into a fire. From it we slashed
slabs still oozing blood with the Indian’s _terçado_, as Brazilians call
a machete, and these being too tough to bite, we cut off each mouthful
below the lips with the huge knife in approved South American cowboy
fashion, after dipping them in coarse rock-salt, tossed handfuls of dry
_farinha d’agoa_ into our mouths with it, and washed it all down with
river-water tempered with the fruit of the wild lemon tree that shaded
our ragged roof. Our total resources were not enough for three meals,
and how long we might have to wait no man knew. To add to the pleasure
of the situation, we had struck a veritable colony of _puims_, as the
Bolivian _jejene_, or tiny gnat of bulldog bite, is called in Amazonia,
which quickly brought back memories of the tattooed skin with which had
I emerged upon the Paraguay sixteen months before.
But, strange to say, Antonino had partly told the truth. About three
o’clock the canoe arrived with our baggage and two sweat-dripping
Indians, and we piled in the rest of our belongings and started on up
the stream as if we really believed the tale that the launch was waiting
not far above. I wished to add to our speed by paddling, but there were
only three _pás_, and the Indians laughed at the thought of a civilized
man doing so. In all Amazonia, with labor so badly needed, the man above
the laboring class suffers most of all for physical exercise, and the
development of the region is under the tremendous handicap of the
ancient Iberian caste system. The Indians surely shoveled water behind
them, however, though even so we made little headway against the swift
current. If one of us spoke to them, they instantly stopped paddling to
listen; hence motionless silence was our only salvation.
Then all at once we rounded a point, and there, sure enough, was the
craft we were pursuing, barely a mile ahead. We quickly lost it to view
again, and I waited anxiously until another bend disclosed it barely a
stone’s throw away and tied to the bank! I should have been less worried
had I known that it would not move an inch forward for another
twenty-four hours.
We found her a battered old German launch attached to the most ancient
wreck of a barge that I had ever seen afloat. They were anchored to a
tree before the only dwelling in the vicinity, the home of a part-Indian
family of countless children and innumerable hangers-on, who lived in a
clearing with several primitive thatched huts. Among them was a youth
who had been blind from birth, yet who went anywhere in the vicinity,
through the dense forest or across the river in a dugout log, and did
the same work as the rest of the men, even to splitting wood in his bare
feet. Even here in the far wilderness the women were Moorish in their
attitude. When a little gasoline launch, with two thatched barges on
either side all but concealing it, arrived after a twenty-four hour trip
around the falls with a crowd of men and women packed like sardines,
these all came ashore for a full breath and to straighten out their
kinks. Barely once did they speak to us men, yet when they were ready to
leave, every woman and girl of the party went entirely around the
circle, limply shaking hands with each of us, though we were nearly all
total strangers. This courtesy is always expected in the far reaches of
Amazonia, and if the traveler chances upon a party of thirty or forty,
it takes an hour or more to get away.
Near the house was a fine specimen of the _japuim_ tree, hundreds of
oriole-like nests of the _japuim-oro-pendula_ hanging from its branches.
They are a noisy bird with a surprising vocabulary, black with white
wings having yellow spots, and yellow from the hips down, so to speak,
with a black end to the tail, and a long, whitish beak. Their nests are
cleverly woven, with the entrance near the top, and every morning the
birds clean them out as carefully as any New England housewife. The
_japuim_ has a saucy, noisy half-cry, half-whistle with which it keeps
up a constant hubbub from daylight until dark. But the most striking of
its habits is its love of company. It does not live in single nests,
like our northern oriole, but hangs scores and even hundreds of them
from the same tree, though there may be countless others without a nest
for miles roundabout. They choose trees near houses, perhaps because the
human inhabitants and their dogs scare off monkeys, snakes, bats, and
other creatures that might do them harm, and like apartment dwellers in
our large cities, they live so close together that the arrival or
departure of one bird shakes up a dozen or more of his neighbors.
We were to have left early next morning, but this was Brazil and we
finally crawled away at four in the afternoon. The _batelão_ was a
floating sty. The hold, directly under the rotten-board deck on which we
lived and where every step was precarious, sloshed with bilge-water
having a strong scent of livestock, and everything made a transatlantic
cattle-boat seem incredibly luxurious by comparison. I dipped my water
direct from the river, but the crew bailed bilge-water out of the bottom
of the barge, and then filled the drinking-water jar with the same
bucket without even rinsing it. I had grown faint with hunger before a
tiny cup of black coffee came to poison and deceive the stomach, and not
a mouthful of food did we get until three in the afternoon. Passengers
are not taken on these boats, though the man who presents himself will
not be put off; but he has no rights and can make no demands. We ate,
standing up at a dirty little workbench on the launch, some beef and
_farinha_ cooked and served by an Indian boy with a rotting forefinger
that suggested leprosy or something worse, and who had never heard the
word “wash.” There were three tin plates on board, which we took turns
in using. Bread is considered an extravagance along the Amazon, and I
had seen none since the first day out of Manaos. Potatoes are as unknown
as cleanliness. I would have given considerable to see a moving-picture
of a germ-theorist dropping dead at sight of us.
In such predicaments moderation is the only hope; eat and drink no more
than is absolutely necessary, and do not worry. My legs itched and
tingled from the _mucuims_ of two days before; indeed, our whole skins
were tattooed with all manner of abrasions, but there was nothing to do
but play Indian and smile at anything. With perfect weather one enjoyed
life, for all its drawbacks, and there was a certain satisfaction in
knowing that everyone else on board was as badly off, which is more
conducive to contentment than living on cattle-boat fare with the scent
of first-cabin mushroom steaks in the air. Still, active rather than
passive hardships would have been preferable.
The captain was a full-blooded Indian with filed teeth. Many aborigines
and part-breeds along the Amazon, some of them “civilized” and living in
the larger towns, file their front teeth to points. A native dentist
told me that this was not due to superstition, but because it keeps them
from decaying and saves people from one of the curses of wild
places—toothache. While I do not recommend the custom, I was frequently
assured, both by Amazonian dentists and the natives themselves, that a
filed tooth never spoils. An Indian who spoke Portuguese, and who was so
familiar with modern progress that he made no objection to my
photographing him and his wife with their pointed fangs displayed, said
that the work had been done when he was twelve, with a three-cornered
file—though the wilder tribes chip them off—that the only hurt was a few
days’ dull ache, and that the only purpose of the custom was to save the
teeth and at the same time be able to cope with the tough “green”
beefsteaks of Amazonia.
The owner of the barge, who sat _chupando canna_—“sucking” sugar-cane it
was, indeed—by the light of a brilliant full moon, tried to force his
cabin upon me; but I declined extra favors and swung my hammock with the
others on the lower deck over the sloshing cattle-water. In the
moonlight the mirror-clear river reflected every hump and turn of the
banks far ahead. When I finally fell into a doze in spite of the
constant hubbub on launch or barge, someone woke me and told me to take
my hammock away while the crew loaded wood, which they did for some
hours. Like a magnet, we seemed to pick up everything along the river
and drag it with us. When daylight came we were towing the launch of a
rival, which appeared to have broken down, our own clumsy old barge with
some three feet of odorous water in its hold, two very large boats,
roofed, and with tons of cargo, a dead gasoline launch, two large and
heavily laden rowboats, two empty rowboats, four canoes, and perhaps
seventy-five persons all told, some of whom had waited half a year to
get this trip up the river. To say that we made speed against the swift
current would be exaggerating.
We stopped for wood again during the day and I had my first swim in
Amazonia, for here the danger of _pirainhas_ was said not to be great.
This savage small fish, having double rows of teeth of razor edge with
which it tears the flesh even of man, is the horror of the swimmer in
nearly all the waters of the Amazon basin. Let the skin show the
suggestion of a wound, and whole schools of these bloodthirsty creatures
dart forward to the attack with lightning-like rapidity. The river
remained wide, but was now very shallow, and much of the year it is
almost completely dry. On the morning of May 28 we sighted the first
town since leaving Manaos. This was Boa Vista, founded forty years ago
on the left-hand bank of the river, where the dense forests begin to die
out into open campo. Its red-tiled roofs and other colors gave a
striking and welcome contrast after an unbroken week of watching the
monotonous unrolling of jungle-forested banks. There were perhaps forty
houses and huts, including a church in ruins, three shops, two dentists,
one of whom was also the pharmacist, and the self-complacent air of a
backwoods metropolis. Boa Vista is the “capital” of the cattle plains of
northernmost Brazil, and as such has an importance out of all keeping
with its size, like many another insignificant town in a boundless
wilderness. Yet it had the profound melancholy, the mournful
tranquillity that is the ordinary existence of _sertanejo_ populations,
where nearly every individual is true to his relaxed and indolent
environment. There was, however, really a “boa vista” for this region, a
far-reaching view across the river and the grassy plains to ranges of
hills purple-blue with distance.
For some days Antonino had been suffering from some violent throat
infection, and he was now speechless. Everyone advised him to stay in
Boa Vista, where at least there was a pharmacy and a dentist, if no
doctor—and the next boat, I recalled, would probably be at least a month
behind. I kept silence, however, rather than let my own convenience
tempt me to advise him; but after everyone else had tried their turn at
wheedling him to remain, he refused, and having had his throat sprayed,
we were off once more. In the brilliant moonlight that night we passed,
high up on a low hill, the snow-white chapel of the monks of São Bento,
and below it on the river stood Fort São Joaquim. The old fortress was
built by the Portuguese in 1775 to keep the Spaniards to the north and
west from stealing Portuguese territory. It is now in ruins, but there
was still a “garrison” of a dozen men living in thatched huts about it.
This was the junction of the Parima and the Takutú Rivers, which form
the Rio Branco. We turned into the latter and struggled on. The last of
our tows had dropped off at Boa Vista, and of passengers, there remained
only Antonino, his servant, and myself. In the morning we were skirting
the broad acres of the Fazenda Nacional. Across it, near the Venezuelan
boundary, was the legendary Lago Dourado and Manoa del Dorado, said to
have been built by Peruvians before the Conquest, where everything was
reputed to be made of pure gold. Even Walter Raleigh took the existence
of fabulous Manoa seriously, and planned an expedition to find and
conquer it. To this day, however, it has not been discovered. The Manoas
were the most numerous and valiant tribe in the Rio Branco region, but
they grew weak under missionary civilization and retreated to British
territory, though they left descendants in all the Amazon basin. It is
the boast of many of the “best families” of the Rio Branco Valley that
they are of the true aristocracy because some of their ancestors were
Manoas.
[Illustration: A lace maker on the Amazon]
[Illustration: The Municipal Theater of Manaos]
[Illustration: Here and there our _batelão_ stopped to pick up a few
balls of rubber]
[Illustration: Now and then we halted to land something at one of the
isolated huts along the Rio Branco]
If there had been water enough, the launch would have taken us on up the
Takutú to Antonino’s door, but we were lucky to be able to push on to
the home of the captain before the water ran out. From the shallow
Takutú we turned into the narrow Surumú, with barely sufficient water to
float us. This the English once claimed as the frontier, but the King of
Italy, as arbitrator, set it farther east. The thinly wooded banks grew
ever closer together, and in mid-morning we grounded the launch—the old
wreck of a _batelão_, had been left before the estate of its owner near
the mouth of the branch—at the captain’s _fazenda_, “Carnauba.” In the
baked-mud house we were welcomed by his good-hearted, if diffident and
laconic, part-Indian wife and family. I asked the captain how much I
owed him for my passage, at which he showed great surprise and after
long reflection remarked that he thought twenty milreis would be
generous. This was distinctly reasonable for Brazil, and especially in
Amazonia, where the higher you go and the poorer accommodations become,
the more exorbitant are apt to be the charges. Money is not the common
medium of exchange thus far up-country, where favors are usually
returned by some species of barter. Thus Antonino was welcome to ride
free because he often shipped cattle by this launch and _batelão_, and
the man who offers money is looked upon somewhat as a “tenderfoot” is on
our western plains.
Eager to stretch my legs, I would have pushed on without delay. But
Brazil is Brazil, even on its edges, and haste was difficult. First
coffee must be served; then came talk enough to settle the terms of a
treaty of peace, after which we finally packed all but the most
indispensable of our baggage and sent it away by canoe with Antonino’s
servant, who must descend again to the Takutú and paddle his way up it.
By this time “breakfast” was ready, and we sat down to a heavy Brazilian
meal of several kinds of meat, chicken included, and _farinha_ wet in
broth, ending with the unescapable black coffee. Then the nearest
neighbor, from several miles away, dropped in, and the chatter went on
while we lolled in _capechanas_ sipping more black coffee. This was my
first acquaintance with the typical seat of the region, a short hammock
made of dried cowhides and used not as a bed by night, for which it
would lack comfort and size, but as a lounging-place by day. There were
six of these _capechanas_ swinging under the veranda. Cowhide is so
plentiful in these parts that stiffened ones are often set upright as
walls or partitions. There was not a chair in the house, though there
were two American sewing-machines and a rusty American phonograph with a
hundred records, both so long maltreated that every song sounded like
the squawking of the same hen in a slightly different key. The most
prized product of the outside world seemed to be kerosene, used in
everything from launch-engines to lamps, and always eagerly sought. A
ten-gallon box of two cans cost 25$, say seven dollars, and for several
months a year it is not obtainable at any price.
First we were to start at ten, then at noon; now we must wait until the
sun was lower. A dozen horses were rounded up in the corral, where two
were lassooed, and for once it looked as if I were to have a real mount.
But the captain insisted on having him tried out first, and after
fiercely bucking and rearing for some time, he took the Indian peon on
his back for a gallop which he ended suddenly by throwing the rider over
his head into a shallow pool, breaking the ancient weather-rotted
leather of both saddle and bridle—which was lucky, for otherwise we
might never have recovered them. I was quite willing to try my luck, if
they would catch him again, but the captain insisted on choosing a
substitute, which turned out to be another of those equine rats it
seemed always my fate to ride in South America. Notwithstanding his
unpromising appearance, however, I was no sooner astride him than he
gave a splendid plea for admission to a Wild West show, bucking, jumping
up into the air and coming down stiff-legged on all fours, kicking,
rearing, and finally taking the cowhide “bit” in his teeth and galloping
wildly away across the bushy campo. For a time I was undecided whether
to stay on his back or catapult over his head, but decided that the
ground was hard and that the honor of my race depended on my performance
before those Amazonian gauchos. Somehow, therefore, even with the kodak
over my shoulder thumping me in the back at every jump, I kept aboard
and returned to the house, which astounded the natives so profoundly as
to imply that every other “gringo” of their acquaintance had toppled
limply off at the first jump.
Even when I got him quieted down, the animal was so ticklish that if a
foot or a bush touched him, he instantly went through the impersonation
of a bronco all over again, so that a dozen times that afternoon I had
the same sport. Antonino in time caught up with me and we rode on
together across a great plain, with scrub trees here and there, many
clusters of the _burity_ palm from the fan-like fronds of which all
roofs of the region are made, and countless _tepecuim_, conical
ant-hills from six to ten feet high. The range of hills, which I now
knew to be the Kanuku Mountains in British Guiana, stood out blue, yet
clear, against the far eastern horizon when, about five o’clock, we
stopped at the “Fazenda Maravilha” on a bank of the Takutú River. It was
a “marvel” only in its own estimation, though the part-Indian owners
showed all the hospitality of the region by not only serving the
ceremonious black coffee, but by insisting that we remain for the
evening meal. Here, also, there were leather hammocks, and a sadly
abused phonograph which did its best to entertain us. We were off again
at dusk, meaning to take advantage of the full moon; but the clouds were
thick, and even after it appeared we saw little of it. Before it rose we
stumbled upon what Antonino called a “_maloca_,” a cluster of huts built
and intermittently inhabited by more or less wild Indians. In the
darkness between two of the shanties we found a pair of Indian youths,
dressed in the remnants of cotton shirts and trousers and lying in their
only other possession,—old hammocks swung from posts under the
projecting eaves. They belonged to the Macuxy (pronounced “ma-coo-shée”)
tribe scattered through the hills of the three countries about the
source of the Rio Branco. My companion wanted them to go back to
“Maravilha” and help row his canoe and baggage home next day, and the
argument he was forced to put up resembled that of a spellbinder seeking
votes. In words of one syllable—for they understood little
Portuguese—and with such reasoning as one might offer a child of six, he
told them at least a dozen times that he would pay them two days’ wages,
either in food or money, and that they might be on their way again the
following evening. Though they admitted that they had not eaten that
day, that they had no water, and asked for tobacco, their unvarying
reply was an indifferent monosyllable, and it was only after half an
hour of pleading that they gave a grunted promise to roll up their
hammocks as soon as the moon was high and be in “Maravilha” in time to
start up the river at dawn.
Soon we came to a muddy _igarapé_ that our animals refused for a long
time to cross, and finally, toward what was perhaps midnight, the
barking of a pack of curs drew our attention to a hut and corral and
announced us to their unwashed owner. He invited us to swing our
hammocks inside, gave us each a nibble of miserable native cheese, and
eventually, a discussion of the news of the day having been exhausted,
let us fall asleep. The chief item of interest which Antonino had
brought with him was that a youth known to himself and our host had
resorted to the plan, still usual in those parts, of stealing a woman,
but who this time happened to be a widow. The hut-owner refused to
believe it, saying in a surly grunt that “of course Pedro is old enough
now to hunt him a woman, but whoever heard of stealing a _widow_!” The
scorn in his tone is inexpressible in words. Long before daylight we
saddled again, drank a glass of foaming milk still warm from the corral,
and struck out across bushy campo, rather sandy and very dry. An unusual
danger on these great savannahs is that wild horses, especially
stallions, roaming the plains attack mounted animals, sometimes biting
mouthfuls out of them, if not out of the rider. Several pursued us, and
one big black brute would not give up his nefarious project until I had
fired my revolver over his head. About seven we came upon another hut,
where the usual limp handshakes and mutual inquiries as to the health of
families—for, of course, Antonino knew everyone in the region—was
followed by the exchange of local gossip until coffee had been made and
served. An hour later there was a similar halt at a similar hut. Life in
Brazil is just one black coffee after another. Here there was a branch
of the Takutú, to be crossed in a canoe, swimming our horses and
re-saddling them, after which a long and fairly swift trot brought us at
last to the home of Antonino.
It was by no means as sumptuous a place as his choice of language had
led me to picture, but at least it was more comfortable than the mud hut
in which we had spent part of the night. There was a large thatched and
once whitewashed adobe house standing forth on a big bare spot at the
top of a slight bluff above the Takutú, and three or four smaller huts
and a corral, all of which, with several hundred dry and sandy acres
about them, Antonino had inherited six years before from his
mother-in-law. The site was on the extreme edge of Brazil, where the
Takutú makes an almost complete turn and the Mahú flows into it, and it
would have been easy to throw a stone from Antonino’s door over onto
British territory. I had looked upon my companion as almost a youth, yet
his wife, younger than he, was already old and gray, and his daughter of
thirteen was in the physical prime of life and visibly longing for a
husband. These, a son, and Antonino’s brother, dying of tuberculosis,
made up the household, though there was the usual swarm of Indian or
half-Indian servants.
[Illustration: Our _batelão_ loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals
on the banks]
[Illustration: The captain of my last Brazilian _batelão_, and his wife]
[Illustration: Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along
the Rio Branco]
After a swim in the boundary and a mammoth, though rough, dinner, I was
led to the “chaletsinha,” a small mud-and-thatched hut reserved for
visitors, for even here it would have been scandalous to lodge a male
friend in the same house with one’s women folk. The floor was of
unleveled earth and there were a dozen hammock-hooks, between two of
which I napped for a couple of hours. Meanwhile the fifteen-year old son
had been sent over into British Guiana to summon the “Americano.” Ever
since I first met him Antonino had insisted that a _compatriota_ of mine
lived just across the boundary from his _fazenda_, but I had so often
found in South America that men reputed to be my compatriots turned out
to be Italians, Syrians, negroes, or something else as un-American, that
I had given little attention, and no faith, to his assertion. My
surprise, as well as my delight, was all the greater, therefore, when
there suddenly walked in upon me a magnificently built, handsome type of
outdoor American in the early prime of life and the visible pink of
condition, his ruddy health in striking contrast to the chalky faces of
the indoor Brazilians. He was Ben Hart from South Dakota, who had gone
first to Panama, then to the Madeira-Mamoré, later had prospected for
gold around Sorata, and finally had come to British Guiana eight months
before with an American partner to start a cattle ranch. The partner had
an English wife, however, and when the war broke out he had gone to
London to enlist and left Hart alone. I was the first “white man” he had
seen in half a year, and though he could not assure me that I could
reach Georgetown, never having been there himself, he did “hope I would
come over and stay a few weeks with him.”
On the last day of May we walked a couple of kilometers over bushy campo
and dried bogs to a fringe of woods on the edge of the Mahú, across
which Hart hallooed to his Indian boys about a newly thatched hut
visible on the opposite bank. They soon appeared in an aged dugout, the
gunwales of which were under water, but with boards nailed above them, a
precarious craft that would have filled in ten minutes; but luckily the
trip lasted only three. Thus I was removed bag and baggage from Brazil
eleven months to a day from the time I had entered it from Uruguay. That
day I was firmly convinced that nothing short of penal servitude would
ever again get me back into the mammoth land of the imperial palm and
political corruption; but time cures most lacerations of the skin and
nothing is so disagreeable at a distance as it is close at hand. The
Brazilian bubbles over with faults. As my old friend, Professor Ross,
puts it, “he much prefers the lollipops of compliment to the pungent
olive of truth”; yet there is something fascinating about both him and
his gigantic, wasted national domain. Long after his grafting
politicians and his un-trounced men and boys have become the dimmest of
memories, his magnificent palms, swaying beneath peerless skies, his
incomparable capital and the songs of his _sabiás_ remain vividly etched
in a crowded recollection; and when, on a dark and dreary winter day in
the Puritan-weighted North, I read again some of the swinging,
color-flashing lyrics of Casimiro d’Abreu, nothing but the Portuguese
word _saudade_ expresses the longing that comes over me to behold again
those marvelous days and luminous nights of which he sings.
CHAPTER XX
STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN
Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed
the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a
river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were
crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie,
and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for
there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built
it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian
boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the
approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of
brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of
palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up
the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which
his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead,
were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs,
even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip
every night, though _pirainhas_ abounded and an alligator had recently
eaten Hart’s best dog.
He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain
improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his
cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned
into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate _farinha_,
however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of
life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it
original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his
Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a
gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when
everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and
buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest
was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all
that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and
eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit
was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of
cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month.
Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the
house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the
British call what the rest of South America knows as _campo_ or _pampa_,
in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level.
Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of
pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of
a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an
American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while
the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the
hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and
ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and _farinha_,
neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call
home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some
distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth
which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children
of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys
were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would
turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and
doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and
it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for
visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in
this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian
servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of
the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get
help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen
_vaqueiros_, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the
house, and to these Hart furnished _farinha_ and paid two milreis a day,
not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves
as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and
barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he
had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and
he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back
room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with
me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never
occurred to him to take money with him. The _vaqueiros_, of course,
killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show
that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his
“siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their
conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now
and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to
both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented
certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew
what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They
had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to
pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and
the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious
“Goot neety” on the way to their _barracão_. Their general attitude was
about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed
unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way
affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a
few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased
to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man.
More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is
high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to
sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of
fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of
three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit,
one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all
the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian
_fazendeiros_ had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in
addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over
which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by
barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire
boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats,
belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in
gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock
on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go
to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did
not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as
prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth
that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted
to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but
animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle
and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of
cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a
surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before
him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty
yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart
highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and
added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as
“Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred
yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might
be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so
reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it
might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child
waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what
he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep
up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was
almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a
_fazendeiro_ with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive
such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and
get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He
followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American
generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of
boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his
back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an
entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him
let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five
thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of
the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was
provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was
lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a
trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had
postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on
condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it
a government railway.
Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back
door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal.
Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South
American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340
miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to
any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest
and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was
even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the
fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls
and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States
had been five months on the way.
The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between
the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its
narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner
Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the
logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been
planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we
compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be
within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant
companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several
hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a
tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs
checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to
Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the
most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought
back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river,
lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched
with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in
the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier
formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in
all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive
them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to
the barges from Manaos.
We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride
to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be
in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often
turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off
the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with
Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as
packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay
horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the
English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to
leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was
fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again.
Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub
forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied
by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled
Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance,
the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro
from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser
crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good
a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely
populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection.
When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains
with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men,
if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman
abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down
with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the
“Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock.
“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō
hammock out dere. _I’se_ here now.”
The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor,
complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week
before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying
the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word
drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American,
however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of
fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just
left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight
when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find
that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian
village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil,
for the “Sha’k” could not read or write.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Hart, riding up to the hut.
“Ah don’ know what dat got t’do wid yō,” answered the “Sha’k.”
“You black ——!” said Hart. “I asked you what are you doing here.”
“Don’ yō curse me!” screamed the negro, in the bold terms of the British
“object” the world over, though already a bit tremulous from the
seriousness of his situation.
Hart was by nature anything but a belligerent man, but his future in the
colony depended on the evidence he gave at the start of being able to
take care of himself. He sprang from his horse, drew his heavy revolver,
and rapped the “Ocean Shark” over the head with the butt of it. Then he
thrust the weapon back into its holster and waded into the negro in
approved mining-camp style, rapidly changing his color from black to
red, and ended by giving him ten minutes to pack his traps and remove
his battered face forever from that corner of British Guiana. During
that time the Indians who formed the negro’s band ran back and forth
“just like ants” collecting his belongings, and every time his
“secretary” had to pass the American he took off his hat, ducked as if
to dodge a blow, and said, “Yessir! Yessir!” Soon the whole caravan was
on the move and the “Ocean Shark” had never been seen in this region
since, though fanciful tales continue to drift in of the “free city” he
and his obsequious followers have founded in another corner of the
colony.
At two in the afternoon we reached the Manarí Creek and found it too
deep to cross on horseback, though when Hart had passed that way a week
before it had not been knee-deep. That is the greatest difficulty of the
overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown; one can only get up the Rio
Branco in the rainy season, which is the very time when the savannahs
are flooded and virtually impassable. Luckily I am fairly tall, and Hart
was taller. We unloaded, stripped, and carried everything, including the
saddles, across on our heads, the water just reaching my nostrils. Then
we gave the horses a bath, for which they seemed grateful, went through
all the loading process again, and rode on, the crossing having cost us
more than an hour. There were more bogs and creeks, but all were
passable, and we had only to stop occasionally to adjust the pack. All
the time we kept drawing nearer the Kanuku Mountains, now a long blue
range across the southern horizon. We had to pass around the end of this
to get to Melville’s, which was almost due south, though I was supposed
to be traveling north.
[Illustration: Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open
campo of the upper Rio Branco]
[Illustration: I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana
in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on the further bank of
the Mahú]
[Illustration: Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme edge
of British Guiana]
[Illustration: Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers]
It was five o’clock when we reached the first inhabited house, that of a
Brazilian family on a bank of the Takutú. The usual formalities included
insistence that we wait for coffee, and as Hart did not care to risk
making an enemy, we complied. These people assured us that all the
_igarapés_ were so swollen from the recent rains that it would be
impossible to get to Melville’s at this season. Not far beyond we came
to a stream which Hart had easily forded the week before. I drove my
horse in, expecting the water to come at most to his belly, when the
animal suddenly dropped and took to swimming, with the water about my
waist. There was no way of getting our pack-animal across without
ruining everything. We returned to the Brazilian hut, and while I took
such measures as my soaking and that of the saddle-gear demanded, Hart
stripped, tied his clothes around his head with a strap under his chin
to hold them, and swam the _igarapé_ to an Indian hovel where he
arranged for a canoe and two paddlers. These dropped down the stream to
us, and having hobbled the horses and put the saddles astride a pole
always provided for such purposes under the eaves of rural Brazilian
huts, we and the Indians lugged our baggage to the canoe and finally set
out in pitch darkness to paddle up the river to what Hart called the
“padre’s house.”
Like the one in which I had entered the colony, the canoe was a leaky
old dugout with rotting boards nailed along the sunken gunwale, through
which water gushed almost in streams. I had to hug the two bags on the
seat beside me and at the same time bail water incessantly, while the
Indian boys shoveled water at the bow and Hart made a poor job of
steering in the stern, because it was impossible to tell the shadows
from the tops of the trees under water near the bank, which we were
compelled to follow closely in order to make any progress against the
swift current. Even there and with the utmost effort we made barely a
mile an hour, and every loss of a stroke for any reason left us so much
farther down stream. The Takutú was about four times as deep as when I
had last left it, and was now a real river. Several times I was nearly
knocked off, bags and all, by unexpected branches of trees; then
suddenly I discovered that the boat was filling faster than I could bail
it out, the water quickly reaching my ankles and then my calves. It
wouldn’t matter so much to Hart, who had brought only a few tramping
necessities, but it was only a question of a very short time before all
my South American possessions, including even my money in the valise,
would be at the bottom of the Takutú, while I struggled ashore in my
heavy brogans with only my hat and my reputation. I shouted to the
Indians, who looked around and saw the water which they, being high in
the bow, had not felt, and by sheer luck they managed in the darkness to
tear a way through tree-tops and bushes to a spot on the bank with bare
land enough to hold our baggage. Here we found that a snag had kicked a
large hole in the stern of the rotten old craft and that water was
pouring in as from a faucet. This repaired as best we could, we bailed
out the boat and pushed on. For what seemed hours we fought against the
current and bailed incessantly before a faint light far away in the
night announced that we were approaching the mission. We could not seem
to bring the light nearer, but finally managed to land in the mouth of a
tributary, and, tearing through the jungle and stumbling over stony
ground in the black night, lugging our baggage, we at last ended at nine
o’clock the “easy four hours’ ride” from Hart’s ranch by entering the
mission of an English Jesuit, Father Ignatius Cary-Elwess.
It was a big, two-story, thatched building on the bank of the upper
Takutú, just across from Brazil. Indian men and boys, chiefly in
loin-cloths, though some wore a shirt and some the remnants of trousers,
swarmed about the place with perfect freedom, as the “padre” seemed to
have an easy-going way that had weakened his control over them. He was a
small, wiry man of middle age, dressed in an old soutane, quite English,
yet also quite Jesuit, which made a curious combination. Eleven years
before he had come out entirely alone and lived in their huts with the
Indians, under exactly the same conditions as they, until he had learned
the Macuxy tongue—at least as well as the average Englishman ever learns
a foreign language. He knew no Portuguese, and the naked Indian youths
spoke an amusing mixture of English and Macuxy, the former chiefly
represented by “Fader, yes,” with which all statements began, usually
continuing in the native tongue. The priest was “one of the boys” in the
stories he told, but he often drifted away into dreams. After nearly
four years in Latin-America it seemed strange to hear the English names
of things I had only known in Spanish, Portuguese, or Quichua,—“bush”
for _sertão_, “Savannah” for _pampa_ or _campo_, “’gator” for _jacaré_.
It was sixty-three days since the padre had last heard a word of the
world’s news, and the long time which elapsed before our generous supper
was ready we spent in bringing him up to date, getting out of our soaked
garments, oiling our revolvers, and swinging our hammocks.
When I rose in the early morning a cold wind was blowing across the open
country. About the mission building was a cluster of huts for the
converts, and many cattle were grazing nearby—for the good padre did not
neglect the practical things of life. He was already saying mass before
an outdoor altar set in the side of a mud house, assisted in his
formalities by otherwise naked Indian acolytes in red robes. A creek
near the mission, which one could generally step across, was so swollen
that we had to borrow a canoe, and the top branches of high trees just
peered out of the water. We soon came to another—whereupon Hart decided
that we were sure to lose the horses if we tried to continue the trip
with them. The only animal which can endure travel under such conditions
is man, and we concluded to resort to the only means of locomotion left
us. When we returned to the mission, the padre, who had been a famous
athlete in his younger days, left off a cricket game he was playing in
his flowing soutane with the Indian boys, and went with me to find us
Indian carriers. His rule was too lenient, however, and the day drifted
on without anyone offering to go. He would not order anyone to do so, as
most of the Indians had come for some Catholic celebration and the padre
felt that they could not be spared. “Anyway,” he mused, “by far the best
carriers are the women—women”—his eyes fell suddenly on Hart,
conspicuously masculine in his splendid frame and perfect
condition—“we—er—well, I’ll send for the chief and see if he can’t get
you two _men_”—the accent on the last word was probably unconscious.
It was afternoon before a father and his son were finally prevailed upon
to make the one-day journey to the next village, and at two we were off
across country. The man, about thirty-five in years, but already old for
his race, was as ill-fitted for his task as the average white man of
sixty, and was constantly being favored by his son of eighteen, in the
prime of life. We were soon stripping to wade a stream neck-deep,
clothes, revolver, kodak, and other odds and ends on our heads, and had
barely dressed again when we came to a swamp of such extent that we
swung our shoes over our shoulders for the rest of the day. It was stony
here and there, but more often swampy, with bogs in which we sank to the
knees and several streams waist or chest deep; but the water was
lukewarm and the going almost pleasant, though we envied the Indians
their natural leather soles. That evening we reached an Indian hut made
entirely of palm-leaves, and swung our hammocks from poles with the
family. Our carriers chattered long in the native tongue with our
otherwise taciturn hosts, using the word “fader” in nearly every
sentence. We made our own tea and ate our own _farinha_ and rather green
bananas, to which the Indians added a square foot or more of mandioca
bread, here called “cassava.” Gnats made life miserable for me, but Hart
and the Indians took turns snoring all night, while the wife of our host
stood or squatted in a far corner of the hut, stirring the fagot fire
every half hour or so, darkness evidently being a cause for fear, and
gently punching her fat husband every time his snoring grew uproarious.
Not only the men and children, but cur dogs and fowls slept in the
comfortable hammocks; but either it is immoral, by their tribal laws,
for a woman to lie down while there is a stranger in the house, or it is
the admirable custom for the woman to sit up all night and keep her
lord’s fire burning. Yet there is a vast difference in the comfort of
life between these tropical Indians and those of the Andes, a difference
due mainly to one thing,—the hammock. Their floors may be as hard and as
filthy, even as cold at times, but swinging above it in a soft,
native-woven hammock is like living in another sphere. The hammock is
the most important thing in the life of the Indian of this region, as,
indeed, of all residents. He is conceived in a hammock, born in a
hammock; a hammock is his chair, sofa, and place of siesta, it is his
bridal bed and his death bed, and usually it is his shroud, for it is
the custom to bury him in the hammock in which he dies. If he travels in
light marching order, the Indian may leave everything else behind,
except his loin-cloth, but he carries his hammock.
Rain fell heavily most of the night, and we did not once put on our
shoes during the next day. Our feet were under water certainly half the
time. Barely had we started when we had to wade a deep, muddy creek,
followed by a long swamp; and similar experiences continued in swift
succession. The vast savannah was dotted with scrub trees, but there was
no sign of life except occasional birds. The Kanuku Mountains,
everywhere heavily wooded and blue with the mist and rain that always
hangs about them, drew slowly nearer on our left. This region might be
dubbed the “Land of Uncertainty,” for one never knew what might be
waiting a mile ahead, whether we would have to come all the way back,
after struggling through most of the trip, because of some impassable
obstacle. Particularly the Suwara-auru, a branch of the Takutú which
foams down from the Kanuku range, was likely to prove such a barrier.
[Illustration: Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage
might not have got across what had been trickling streams a few days
before]
[Illustration: We impressed an Indian father and son into service as
carriers]
[Illustration: Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points]
[Illustration: An Indian village along the Rupununi]
We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the
roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my
kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if
we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with
old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and
promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the
Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was
in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in
some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of
hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical
sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be
screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the
Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of
a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet
the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves,
and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We
made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of _farinha_, which
would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of
shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal,
washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in
unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of
them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser,
and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay
Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water,
water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts
worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet.
With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the
notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur
of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest
in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself
often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week
later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a
mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees
everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry
season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current
hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under
almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such
baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to
Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided.
The gorge promised to be at its worst that day, for most of the streams
we had passed were near their high-water mark. Yet the Suwara-auru was
not. When we finally came to it I shouted above the storm to ask Hart if
this almost placid stream, which barely reached the lower branches of
the trees, was the mighty obstacle about which I had been hearing for
days. But such is the tenacity of a bad reputation that my companion,
never attempting to cross it as we had many others, tore his way
upstream with great difficulty, gashing his feet and tearing his
clothing in his fight with the jungle, to a half-submerged tree-trunk
that offered a possible but precarious crossing. Meanwhile I, skeptic
from birth, had thrown off revolver and kodak, waded in—and crossed with
the water barely to my armpits! Before Hart could fight his way back I
had taken the Indian youth over twice, with all my belongings on his
head, though he was so much shorter that the water came to his nostrils
and I had to walk close to him on the downstream side to keep him and,
what was more important, my possessions from being washed away. Then,
with my help, he carried his father’s load across, and the old man
managed to cross “empty.” Through it all it kept raining as I had never
seen it rain before, except once in the jungles of the Far East. Perhaps
the most surprising part of the whole episode was the much greater fear
of the elements shown by these children of the wilderness than was our
own. The superiority of savages in struggles with nature, as compared
with civilized man, is all very well in popular novels, but my own
experience has been that in real life the balance tips the other way.
Evidently the sources of the Suwara-auru were so far up in the mountains
that it did not respond to the rains as quickly as the other streams;
and a day or two later it might have been quite as impassable as it is
by reputation.
On the opposite bank was an immense rock with a sheer side up which we
could never have pulled the horses, even had we succeeded in getting
that far with them. Yet their loss on the trail would not have made Hart
any poorer, for when he returned one had died of snake-bite and the
other had injured itself so badly that it had to be killed. We coaxed
the worn and frightened Indians under their packs again and pushed on in
the drenching roar. For an hour or more we plunged on through dense
forest; then, as the nose of the mountain we were flanking receded, the
rain decreased and at length subsided almost to a drizzle, though the
rest of the day was bathed in successive showers. Having flanked the
range, our trail now turned more to the east and came out on swampy
scrub savannah again. All day it had been barely a foot wide, and so
seldom was it traveled, even by animals, perhaps not in months by a
human being, as to be almost invisible, except where it was deep enough
to be filled with water. But that was not the worst of it. Lack of
travel had let the long, sharp prairie-grass grow out over the path from
both sides so as almost to cover it, and the saw- and razor-edges of
this cut and gashed my bare feet until the tops of them were a
mosquito-net of bleeding scratches.
We expected to get a welcome and a plentiful meal that evening in
“George’s Village,” a small settlement since the oldest foreign resident
could remember, of which “George” was the Indian chief. Life itself
depended on the food and supplies we were to get there. Our feelings may
easily be imagined, therefore, when we came in sight of the village and
found it only half a dozen patches of charred timbers and broken pots,
even the heavy red-wood uprights that would not burn having been cut
down. It turned out that “George” had recently died, though news is so
sluggish in this region that few knew it. In much of tropical South
America it is the custom, upon the death of a chief, to burn down his
house, or even the whole village, after burying him in and under the
hammock in which he has died, and then to abandon the locality to escape
the “evil spirit” that has killed him. For no Indian of these regions
ever dies a natural death. He is always killed by some supernatural
spirit. “Did the spirit hurt him much?” the civilized man will ask the
Indian informant. “Why, he broke every bone in his body,” the Indian
will answer—no doubt because of the limpness of the corpse.
Miles farther on, across another thigh-wearying swamp, we sighted a
cluster of huts, and our spirits rose, only to fall again, for these,
too, had been abandoned, though not burned. There were half a dozen of
them, including two large ones of oval shape made entirely of thatch
palm, except the rounded ends, which had been plastered with mud. I
arrived with a tooth-rattling chill, but our Indians had faded away
behind us and we had no dry clothing. I stripped naked and rubbed down
with my wet garments, that being at least preferable to standing in them
in the penetrating chill of evening. We forced the door of the largest
hut, which was no great task, and found it a single room large enough
for fifty men, but chiefly full of emptiness. The only things left were
some cracked water-gourds and a few woven palm-leaf fire-fans, scattered
over a broad expanse of hard, uneven earth floor. When the carriers at
last arrived, we built a fagot fire inside, swung our hammocks, and made
tea of swamp- and rain-water with which to wash down our dry _farinha_,
wondering the while what we would live on ahead. The old man was
shivering with fever, and we feared he would not last much longer, even
if both did not refuse to go any farther. They swung their hammocks side
by side at some distance from ours and built another fire between them,
which the youth kept going all night. Whenever they had occasion to go
outside they went only in close company, like children afraid of the
dark. The hut had no windows, and both doors were closed against
insects, night air, and evil spirits. Yet the mosquitoes and gnats were
so numerous that I used my _mosquitero_ for the first time since buying
it in Manaos. Also the tiny _mucuim_, or “red bug,” crawled up from the
floor and bit our legs fiercely.
The moment I saw the darkness begin to gray through the many lapses in
the grass wall I tumbled out and aroused the others. Hart and I had tea
and dry _farinha_, but the carriers only the latter, for they did not
“know” tea and preferred to breakfast on mandioca meal alone. Our great
difficulty now was to get them not to abandon us. They had agreed to
carry our stuff only to “George’s Village,” and now insisted on
returning. They were at the outskirts of the Macuxy tribe, and to go
farther was to run the risk that their enemies, the Wapushanas, would
“blow on them”—not in the Bowery sense, but in correct English—and
thereby cast a spell over or an evil spirit into them which would cause
them to die soon after they reached home. It is likely that the
superstition comes from the former custom of using blow-guns with
poisoned arrows. The Wapushanas take up all the southern end of British
Guiana and once fiercely warred against the neighboring tribes; and
though they rarely resort to violence now, the younger generation, being
meek and unwarlike, thanks largely to the man we were trying to reach,
the ancient enmities remain and members of one tribe rarely enter the
territory of the other for fear of being “blown on.” We had the one
weapon of refusing to pay them anything if they left us in the lurch,
which was not a particularly powerful one. Luckily, the youth had made
one trip to Manaos and had not only learned enough Portuguese so that I
could talk to him, but had dulled the edge of his superstitions, which
eventually brought him on our side against his father. But all this
would have been inadequate without the most powerful aid of all, the
white man’s will-power, which, when brought into conflict with that of
the aborigines, will almost always win out, if one has patience. For
will-power, whether over fear or in argument, is rarely strong among
savages.
Having lost two hours in discussion, therefore, our caravan got under
way again, Hart and I, knowing a long and hungry day was before us,
setting a sharp pace. Swamps began again at once, and more than half the
day’s walk was under water, from ankle- to chest-deep. In time this
weighed so heavily on the thighs and the small of the back that they
ached severely. The razor-like prairie-grass was almost incessant, even
under water, and a tiny twig, thorny and sharp as a keyhole saw, hung
everywhere across the faint path. In consequence, the tops of my feet
were virtually flayed and every step was more painful than the last. Yet
we could not have worn our shoes, for that would have been to lift some
twenty pounds of water with every step. Rain began again almost as soon
as we started, and kept up all the morning. The worry about my baggage
was constant, for in it was nearly all I possessed, including twenty
pounds in gold, and the will-power by which we had forced the Indians to
continue might lose its strength, once they were out of our sight. Yet
they could or would not keep up with us. If we waited for them, they
grew slower and slower; if we took our own pace, we were soon out of
sight of them, and I at least expected them to drop the stuff in the
trail and flee from the “blowing” Wapushanas. Yet as between having to
sleep out here on the flooded savannahs without food and losing a few
paltry possessions, there was only one choice. So after several delays
on a day when delay might be serious, until we caught another glimpse of
two specks crawling along across the vast, scrub-wooded plains behind,
as hard to see as an animal of protective coloring, we strode
unhesitatingly on. By and by we came to some of the undulations of the
Kanukus, hard and stony ridges that were torture to our feet, yet these
were now so swollen that it would have been worse torture to put on our
shoes. Down in a rocky hollow called the “Point of the Mountains” we
managed to build a fire of wet wood, but waited in vain for our Indians.
When we felt sure for the tenth time that they had abandoned us, they
came snailing over the rise behind us and dropped down as if utterly
exhausted. We divided with them the handful of _farinha_ left, and took
a long time to coax them to their feet again. Swamps disagreeably
alternated with stony patches. A hill in the blue distance was still
three miles short of our goal. The sun came out for the first time in
three days and quickly added sunburn and stiffness to our other
troubles. The country was faintly rolling in places, and on the tops of
slight ridges between lake-like swamps we glanced back, but though our
carriers had disappeared from the landscape, we dared not halt. Hart
assured me they would not abandon the stuff, and that if they did, it
would sit safely on the trail, even in the unlikely event of anyone else
traveling this route at this season, until other Indians were sent for
it; but I had not so high a faith in human virtue.
In mid-afternoon we sighted the Rupununi, a branch of the Essequibo
River that is the chief outlet to the coast; but Melville lived ten
miles upstream, and the trail was almost completely lost on these deeply
flooded savannahs. This greatly increased the chances of losing our
baggage, for the carriers, being in enemy territory where they had never
ventured before, could only guess at the road, while their fear of being
“blown on” would be greatly increased by our absence. We struggled on
through swamps and rocky spurs of hills, straining our thighs and backs
against water made doubly burdensome in many places by bogs and mud. I
seemed to be lifting a ton with every step, yet we were forced to make
wide detours. Several times I reached what I thought was the point of
exhaustion, yet kept on by force of will, that determination which
Indians and other primitive peoples lack in comparison with the white
man, because it is allied to reason. Toward sunset we came upon the
first footprints we had seen in two days, during which the only signs of
life had been the birds and a scattered herd of half-wild cattle. A line
of trees ahead showed the edge of the Rupununi, which we could not pass,
even in a boat, if we arrived there after dark. Just at dusk we reached
an Indian hut on the bank, and even before we asked for it a woman
brought us a bowl of _farinha_ wet with cold water, which we gulped down
like starved savages. This quickly put new kick into our legs. But there
was no boat on this side of the river, now miles wide and covering a
large forest. An Indian youth climbed to the top of a tree and hallooed
a peculiar musical call and the most pleasant sound I had heard in a
long time was a faint answering hail. I fired my revolver to suggest the
presence of white men, and by and by, after we had several times given
up hope, there grew out of the night the peculiar thump-thump of paddles
against a boat, common to all Amazonia, and then the voices of the
paddlers fighting against the forest. At last there crept out of the
flooded tree-tops a large canoe manned by four Indians, with a negro boy
of West Indian speech in the stern. His was the first native English I
had heard in the colony. We had crossed the divide between the Brazilian
and the Guianese river systems.
The paddlers were a long hour fighting the trees and recrossing the
swift river, born barely thirty miles above in the high forest and
rising and falling many feet in a single day; but we were finally
welcomed by Commissioner Melville in the best house I had seen since
leaving Manaos, and I dropped into my first “Berbice chair,” joyfully
stretching my weary legs out on the long folding arms of it. Two-story
houses are rare sights in these parts, but here was one with good
hardwood floors and all reasonable conveniences, of open bungalow build
and covered with “shacks”—that is, un-tapered singles split with a
“cutlass,” or machete—the servant quarters, kitchen, dining- and
store-rooms below, and a real white-man’s home above. We were loaned dry
clothing and given a mammoth supper, which left me highly contented with
life, even though all I had left in South America was a soaked revolver
and kodak and thirty pounds in five-pound bank-notes in an oilcloth
pouch about my neck. I painted my feet with iodine, but could not wash
them, though they were grimy and black as those of any Indian who had
never known shoes. Then we swung our hammocks in the “guest-house,” a
bungalow on stilts a few yards from the main building, and were heard no
more until late the next morning.
All that day I hobbled about barefoot, as was every person in the
region. To my astonishment and delight our Indians walked in toward noon
with our baggage, though most of it was dripping, and even my
indispensable kodak-tank, made of flimsy materials evidently stuck
together with flour paste, after the hasty American manner, had fallen
apart and warped out of shape. The bank-notes about my neck had been
soaked, too, and had run with color until they were all but illegible. I
spread them out in the sun to dry with the rest of my belongings, much
more pleased to have water-soaked possessions than none at all. To the
Indians I gave a gold sovereign, an exceedingly high reward for the
region, where the white settlers pay native carriers three or four
shillings for such a trip; but my generosity did them little good, for
Melville’s half-Indian son took the coin, to which the Indians seemed to
attach little value, and gave them each five yards of cotton cloth for
it. The unadvised traveler cannot know until he gets there that what he
should have brought to interior British Guiana is not money but goods.
Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well
educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to
British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he
had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often
unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He
spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even
among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white
woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with
authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only
seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his
children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had
been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the
oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as
Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West
Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of
three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an
improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position
to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential
difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously
had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a
sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to
as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place
below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal.
Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent
most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to
seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to
improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his
interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an
added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman
does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects,
considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently
gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound,
thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and
all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from
photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation
seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as
soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at
once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at
his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was
plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in
London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors,
Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown
assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his
dogmatism was rarely oppressive.
A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all
“blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of
arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as _pirainha_. The arrows
were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the _carúa_ palm, were
pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw,
made poisonous with _urali_, and notched in such a way that the point
broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used
again. _Urali_, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the
nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung
action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be
kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not
result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by
rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the
arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating
all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had
broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old
Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the
chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under
this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either
Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a
village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a
confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who
thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of
Melville.
The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this
authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively,
with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a
generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with
little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The
Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an
example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked
in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a
conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the
other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing
himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The
religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They
believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all
their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even
in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They
call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the
constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is
then in the ascendancy.
When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years
before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain
concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the
Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire
in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy
chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases
in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could
name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one
of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and
overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far
interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The
latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College
of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned
natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked
what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all
the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of
the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest
peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered
across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima,
highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a
vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of
trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated.
Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river,
which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours
before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed
ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside
with such rapidity.
We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a
cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him
orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive
to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a
great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked
government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana.
When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft,
however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only
boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with
the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides,
through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a
tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a
lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I
was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with
them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of
the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal
formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony
and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I
had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that
they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana,
and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In
reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an
official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities,
had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and
examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a
revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no
doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and
finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me
several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the
dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.”
All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but
must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of
which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt
between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged
himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of _farinha_, a
can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled
on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered
with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the
world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go
directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a
judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of
being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to
go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really
nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them.
Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much
swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over
what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and
waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through
which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us
as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and
our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow.
There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips
of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we
stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk
home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the
first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable
amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in
the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and
commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all
the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to
nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not
enough to drive off the clouds of _puims_ or _jejenes_, here simply
called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible
pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward.
Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate.
We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then
glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing
except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to
look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no
means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with
little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of
land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however,
finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle
was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say
nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift,
rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a
fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of
beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably
never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been
landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken
forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among
the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found
ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was
no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid
wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we
see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were
constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or
submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it
contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea.
Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the
black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the
bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as
the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear
of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched
at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the
flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of
getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on
down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by
trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the
fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense
branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were
certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some
refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to
strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of
several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream.
Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour
dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out,
swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed
to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the
tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was
far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me
and splendid chances of falling out among _pirainhas_, if not
alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a
hundred feet or more aloft.
The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted
out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an
awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is
none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short
blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some
little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys,
black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted
that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a
hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to
add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of
gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the
tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an
instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour.
There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have
been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the
water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact.
As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get
something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to
death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not
pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves
ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and
streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It
was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao.
It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist
stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum”
sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives,
but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to
light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep
with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can
scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We
fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some
hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had
very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the
river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to
restore my warmth.
All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and,
broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the
rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a
group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less
clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they
had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and
preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy
one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about
them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in
fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of
some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As
a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price;
but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a
milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the
meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects,
shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of
swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were
now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into
savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side
stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped
from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that
set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past
in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys
again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying
as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless
forest the night before.
The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of
England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a
most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this
second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a
little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent
woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through
the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman
I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu
nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions,
had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings,
with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in
defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in
spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an
Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being
quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed
in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into
his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that
I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not
go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of
course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.”
We swung our hammocks under a new thatched roof over a split-palm floor
on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into
whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little
distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so
troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean
Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow,
where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many
cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also
given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the
predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism
in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning
personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath
of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild
commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did
not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their
mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to
writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its
grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English;
but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward
counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other
hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he
had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what
it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with
negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their
greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a
thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be
done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that
they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back
into the ways of their ancestors.
Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked
about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as
well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were
concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as
rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and
the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing
he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that
five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a
fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from
Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come
up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box,
well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go
down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail
Train.
[Illustration: The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills,
and paddled us down to Rupununi]
[Illustration: Two of my second crew of paddlers]
[Illustration: One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout]
[Illustration: “Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo]
It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl
under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not
been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The
Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red
breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this
seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs,
full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca,
they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness
people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are
patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting
are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated
throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of
the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude.
When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next
opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious
mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question
“Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean
Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took
the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West
Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as
“sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat,
which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for
the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve
paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with
dry _farinha_, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on.
During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point
of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here,
though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees.
Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the
boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two
boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling
appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as
possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous
scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort.
Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled
considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the
Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold
their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster
and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than
usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured
stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did
very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough.
“Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a
scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like
circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely
ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers
were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,”
with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But
under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each
wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout
white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were
indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not
to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men.
I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred
to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make
sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off
again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken
even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the
occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in
the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much
sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys
went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the
clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began
again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have
been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes
while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a
place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense
darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my
hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good
clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own
hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce
them to make themselves nets.
I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose
English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one
another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh
word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat
and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and
were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical
dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that
pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in
the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black
birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little
singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a
heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable
kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes”
galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of
the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big
dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of
life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The
river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and
our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from
sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had
burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect
which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the
nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are
cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or
whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could
not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a
site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where
the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my
net while supper was cooking.
Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very
little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest
walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed
the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian
family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible
clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale.
They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated
between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal
ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to
ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on
such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild
places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook
dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the
first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving
Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut,
or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or
three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched
roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead
bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often
they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the
fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller
apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women
confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and
ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of
everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery.
It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of
forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building
with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was
“The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the
only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are
professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We
halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes,
just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo.
[Illustration: We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old
dugout]
[Illustration: “Harris” and his wife at one of their evening camp fires]
[Illustration: Battling with the Essequibo]
The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter,
was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and
Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all
three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the
stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation.
I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians
should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The
place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that
utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it
hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a
supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in
such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese
closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the
dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When
breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had
been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by
the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut
out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in
British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this
one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven
retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause
even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be
thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too
comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed
room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight
gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it,
the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch
beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready
for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if
fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to
suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I
moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing
astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide
open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After
I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour
looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing
all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to
listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced
clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks,
perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness.
I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and
actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long
before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across
the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and
everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for
anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his
invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or
keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but
because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused
them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the
neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the
resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his
own individuality.
Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies
to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who
gather a cheap rubber similar to the _caucho_ of Brazil. “Balata” boats
had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no
one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty
in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the
Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over,
as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead
of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is
a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s
trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain
seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My
host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the
price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks;
and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came
back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It
was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going
over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.
Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the
trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as
well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of
American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been
drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not
seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as
the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the
law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom
there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of
the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the
Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to
it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off”
year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their
gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to
working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with
legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a
larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several
hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who
would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in
which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic
position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.
We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys
augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to
Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All
five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great
forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move,
and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of
rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch
the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again.
We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong,
good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal
color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on
legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving
the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot
pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the
interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working
this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English,
which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest
remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed
a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but
silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is
wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward
antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an
elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old
and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his
next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later,
lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris”
wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put
forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to
name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at
that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not
know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars
would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if
she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are
downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been
digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on
her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her
forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs.
Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might
have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles
and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely
concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far
above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The
missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and
their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men,
but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.
Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while
“Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and
stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots,
washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into
the open end of a snake-like _matapi_, or press made of woven flat
fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a
weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is
deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but,
being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then
dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava
bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like
sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though
similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach
than the bran-like _farinha_ of Brazil.
Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely
price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even
including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a
dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we
struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had
brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that
the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The
Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not
going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the
convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to
them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would
pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up
trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the
missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their
thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I
was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no
doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a
boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of
the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward
incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if
these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all
the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it
would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have
given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in
their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic
conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning
with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to
furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and
to advance him five dollars upon his arrival.
All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts,
purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at
peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age,
coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral
pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually
cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the
huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those
about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for
them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I
called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might
use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when
you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to
cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own
appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most
important ally.
The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was
chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as
well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the
unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he
agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a
justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed
them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you
see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on;
after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river.
But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset,
having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided
to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch
protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more
cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt
respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of
my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the
storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children.
But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more
paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not
let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who
never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed
with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed
authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the
air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one
of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the
kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I
found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the
rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or
forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a
pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish,
two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to
mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris”
and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on
all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on
full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a
bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound
note, instead of in gold.
When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears
struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so
_interested_ in this trip. But I can’t go.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to
Georgetown.”
“How much will that be?”
“$2.08, second-class, sir.”
“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have
earned that much?”
“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”
“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you
to that extent to get back home?”
“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into
his more habitual speech.
This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of
what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid
negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the
perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.
These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the
natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the
rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a
loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven
years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in
Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store.
Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the
former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts
and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were
48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they
must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices,
because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown
and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see
that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future
wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This
is a very large member of the _sapote_ family, the bark of which the
“bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps
thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and
cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough,
yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or
nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run
into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half
inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in
making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its
circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six
inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear
through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five
years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata”
concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that
are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as
well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.
Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and
mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes
build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women
with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap
resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon
and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of
the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This
hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and
folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and
the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds
of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the
river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds
of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170.
Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he
has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is
sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no
wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for
his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by
lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately
earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years,
he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short
time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to
town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months
to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out
his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at
two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a
day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for
loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more
enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the
“bullet-tree.”
In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot,
many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small
tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region
carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from
neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own,
saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new
boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my
astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s
decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This
might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of
the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short
rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the
wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to
load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I
protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My
delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required
that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on,
each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be
drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the
fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load,
though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official
capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and
that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already
excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were
considerably increased.
[Illustration: More trouble on the Essequibo]
[Illustration: High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana]
[Illustration: Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea]
[Illustration: The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne have
soft jobs and often wear shoes]
My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure.
The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained
in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one
would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have
bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said,
“By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle,
unless you can lend him one.”
“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial
Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and
I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!”
Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the
size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by
special messenger.
So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three
now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey
and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the
tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between
them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It
seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight
were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the
laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and
at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide.
In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as
the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of
British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with
the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that
constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a
time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so
after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we
came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less
safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.
We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along
steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his
lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to
pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long
and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s
pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the
monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was
the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my
lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a
skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly
ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her
knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and
three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt
ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and
she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was
strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her
husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she
knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of
her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their
better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering
their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized
husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock
while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen
a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and
baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to
“communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed
couples.
We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke
it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris”
and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and
superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive
rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was
“more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was
“most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though
both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could
induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they
never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could
possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or
to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right,
sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out
what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by
carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of
the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they
could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to
hear.
Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any
news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in
Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah
sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he
winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced
that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word
“negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and
spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such
assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more
examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the
blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white
men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do
the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in
the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and
position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.
A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it
split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks
protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids
beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad,
and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a
“scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a
time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of
trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above
another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First
they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it,
putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey
called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social
scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and
boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me
the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a
respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from
the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians
themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate
fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the
three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the
caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the
wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death
with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped
whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was
cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at
attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a
mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had
finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with
the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must
always call _me_ when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have
kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault,
that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from
Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I
must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a
manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of
Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon
style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which
incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation
over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the
Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness
just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with
himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of
the Brazilian mulatto or _cabra_ and the Englishness of these Guianese
negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners
were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people
and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.
Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town,
though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed
anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the
fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians
did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The
fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so
moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of
brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many
another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who
had never set foot in the wilds. Our _farinha_ had run out, more’s the
pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling;
and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the
same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great
advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.
Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a
“scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get
out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the
shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do
likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the
rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the
second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I
strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by
mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots,
as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with
room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any
two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height,
some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight
far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at
frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in
the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour
when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence
of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a
cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled
with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming,
mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying
to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little
sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many
Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of
isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation,
in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.
Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason
we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon
the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of
polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A
cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the
growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it
drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning
aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we
passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which
tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of
monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant
crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The
river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large
in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the
wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that
one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of
huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as
immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.
We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low
gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his
wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or
was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled
all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey
disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract,
sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a _falls_!” The emphasis on the
last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several
feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran,
constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming
to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way
hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain
a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of
all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from
submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they
did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so,
for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very
middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say
good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in
the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as
the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an
hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river
split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth
and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn
back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of
course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine;
for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless,
foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness,
with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a
life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at
last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information
that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days
farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get
down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic
center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.
“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure
enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless
procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most
magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which
“Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried
the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to
Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an
American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and
therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of
the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across
from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and,
having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he
wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until
half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then
in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many
collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know
nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often
unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the
belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth
of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve
his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a
German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do
other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him.
The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there,
though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most
of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported
serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some
thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row
a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.
“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in,
an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”
The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the
sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during
which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and
cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging
down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the
boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore,
always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily
I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I
shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving
“fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their
teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians”
has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we
guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour,
and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of
water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which
there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of
which Langrey chanted as we approached them:
It’s go’n’ drownded me,
An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’,
EE-tah-nah-meeee!
For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through
the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls,
and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when
we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the
woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we
finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed
the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in
one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of
wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I
had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the
expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to
know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme
vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much
trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times
thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian
who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best
accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was
augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out
to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian
jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to
Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and
though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the
eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid,
yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me
of sleep.
Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from
the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting
the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my
three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of
the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to
the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding
the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing
water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian
voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five
seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was
luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed
savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most
unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with
any three average American boys of the same age, who would have
considered such a trip a lark.
To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected.
During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad
rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods,
we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata”
companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve,
under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes
sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town
clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness.
The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on
the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro
under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently
new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’
drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than
upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad,
placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata”
camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from
me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer,
would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of
thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut
considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville.
Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the
end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into
the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the
sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching
away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over
again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy
at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent
of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages
behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other
world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a
hint of news from it.
Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally
preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that
even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and
“cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own
complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,”
interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as
“t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a
deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to
have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as
two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more
comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks
it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in
anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from
Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly
more both in time and money.
Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred
feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their
width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by
Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along
in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have
viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed
Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in
British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the
ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that
came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen
was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs
daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but
“Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to
“go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of
our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful
to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for
nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I
should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the
placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the
afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts
surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real
meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three
days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the
star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man,
but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived
without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity
as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are
the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door.
A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car
rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the
charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines
pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber.
Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream
compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and
barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the
mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British
Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the
capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is
completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The
colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it,
and the counties took their names from them. The _Lady Longden_, a
river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness
travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most
of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared,
though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides
the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their
childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so
Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely
could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves
(here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from
their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born
in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly
as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer
strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest
cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken
around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak
Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who
carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down
Chinamen lying about the “stellings.”
For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns
breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of
bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an
unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the
Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few
miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back
in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick
up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu
coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of
these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as
sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some
were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had
undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of
green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not
float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the
center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen
more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in
British Guiana.
The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less
inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of
the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since
leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack
of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated
continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten
miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and
yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden
shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually
turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown
burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it
seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a
plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to
it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the
past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the
picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness.
As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed
so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief
that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and
one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay
several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a
negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the
color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came
to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail.
Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a
chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned
on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman”
desired hot water.
“_Hot_ water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence.
“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant.
Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of
Anglo-Saxon civilization.
CHAPTER XXI
ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS
The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two
leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing
up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so
soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation
between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent
enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen
of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white
toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive
than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves,
unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when
there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks,
with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted
with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the
more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly
belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very
deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people,
rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of
Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few
passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the
commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again
from their monthly excursion to the outside world.
Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock
called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather
insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already
yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to
draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with
the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed
crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight
prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced _apaches_ from
Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his
shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies,
already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what
seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by
trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the
Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal
palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch
could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by
impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be
set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing
jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had
not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we,
too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own,
including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could
not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony.
I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but
the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go
back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find
anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed
at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not
Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone
and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave
the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans
came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our
cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore
among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly
disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with
unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap.
Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip
of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have
turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound;
there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so
that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows
are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two
decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors
is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so
that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect.
Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or
importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean,
and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span
surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter.
Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed
with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are
frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the
native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or
marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species.
Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man
with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro
boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave
me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a
miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by
negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted
that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible
person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to
be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of
ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a
century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide
assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town,
whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in
the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central
_Place des Palmistes_ unless I could find better than this. There were
“Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed
anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro
woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome
stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one
could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European
style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered
with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy,
worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls,
bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without
knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with
paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities,
and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down
or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked
clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the
Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under
things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real
cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be
mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them,
it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the
bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it.
Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of
rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various
mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to
throw out when a new one was indispensable.
The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all
sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over
oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be
between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the
request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the
hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an
old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a
dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the
incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was
a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never
talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression
that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to
bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of
the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and
colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always
distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear,
rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every
day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on
a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the
gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as
umbrellas, but worn as hats.
The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true
before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the
exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and
_libérés_, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so
eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official
one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to
the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or
less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset
and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to
thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and
influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class
assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be
lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but
forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose
upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over
them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and
equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty
colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent
air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily
newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with
advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of
negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored
aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a
patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I
might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best,
considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly
there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang
to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been
borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro
wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room,
including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss.
The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to
be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial
French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red
tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a
post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails
rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no
bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid
tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open
only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then.
Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate
fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of
statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place
makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their
calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose
passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in
general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full
control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by
influence and example.
Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were
putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go
and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer
who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so
that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to
Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of
her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it
has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and
a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of
centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that
at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is
high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five
francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky”
(which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the
illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say
coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used
interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France.
I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like
board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local
talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had
gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was
nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain
finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with
the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro
ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as
haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress,
as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing
in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was
hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see
dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men
of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black.
The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent
left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely
eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried
herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she
played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure
of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes,
it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene,
with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand
lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the
ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth
in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French
residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind
at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been
given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never
before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of
Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the
French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that
would not have been tolerated in an American community.
The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition
financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or
less successful attempts were made during the next half century to
establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she
did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the
claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present
insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists
stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established
African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but
no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and
only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The
slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and
later the Directorate, sent out _déportés_ to take their place; but with
Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to
1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken
by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.”
Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French
America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French
congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the
colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since.
Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built
themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca
and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of
quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared
to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of
agriculture in French Guiana.
[Illustration: A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a
negro boss]
[Illustration: Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the
negroes of the French possessions in America]
[Illustration: The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the
vultures]
[Illustration: In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is
cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves]
In 1891 the Czar of Russia established the boundary between French and
Dutch Guiana at the Maroni and Awa Rivers, and in 1900 the Swiss
president named the Ayapoc as the frontier of Brazil, leaving the French
about one fourth the territory they had claimed. At that, they have no
definite conception of its extent, most of it being virgin forest
unexplored by civilized man. Though in theory it runs far back to the
plateau and watershed of Tumac-Humac, France has no real hold over more
than a comparatively narrow strip of coast. The colony claims 30,000
inhabitants, virtually all of whom live within cannon-shot of the sea.
Alcohol has done for the aborigines, except a degenerate tribe called
the Galibis back in the interior, estimated by the latest census as 534
in number, and there are some three thousand “boschs” or “bonis,” wild
negroes descended from runaway slaves. The few towns besides Cayenne are
insignificant, and in most cases have scarcely half as many inhabitants
as a century ago. In those days of plentiful slave labor there were
sugar plantations, spice trees, and prosperous estates along all the
coast from the Ayapoc to the Maroni, and many ships carried to France
sugar, rum, cacao, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Then there were more than
20,000 field laborers alone; to-day there are barely two thousand
loafing tillers of the soil scattered about the colony, and agriculture
in French Guiana is a blank. Once many cattle were introduced; now there
are none left and even milk for babies comes from the North in tin cans.
As a native editor puts it, “A country placed on a burning soil, swampy
and unhealthful, where paludic fevers, plague, and elephantiasis abound,
needs the patience of the Hollander to become such a prosperous colony
as our neighbor on the west.” Ambitious projects for opening up the
country have been formed, but there has been much promise and little
accomplishment. Sixty kilometers of French highways stretch out in all
directions from Cayenne, passing simple dwellings and careless gardens
peering forth from the bush; but these are the only roads passable the
year round and soon die out in the untamed wilderness. Even what were
good roads a century ago have in many cases become mere paths, or have
completely grown up to jungle again. The native inhabitants are content
to live on cassava—which now suffers severely from a big red ant called
the _fourmi-manioc_—and foreign capital shuns a Latin government and a
penal colony; indeed, the negro inhabitants complain that the coming of
the convicts ruined their “invaluable” country, though it would still be
prosperous “if there were any arms to do the work,” they add, at the
same time completely overlooking the idle arms hanging on either side of
each of them.
Cayenne is known in France as the “dry guillotine.” In the middle of the
last century, soon after the abolition of slavery, some French idealist,
or practical joker, thought of a plan to kill two birds with one stone.
Cayenne needed laborers; France was overrun with criminals. Jean Jacques
Rousseau had asserted that “Every man was born good; it is society which
inculcates in him the germ of all his vices and defects, and as he is
also essentially corrigible, he must be offered means to redeem
himself.” The betterment and regeneration of criminals by work was the
panacea of the day, and this idea, “more or less modified,” inspired the
establishment, in 1854, of the present penitentiary system. It is not
likely that the hard-headed, materialistic statesmen of France took the
prattle of theorists seriously; but it opened up to them a possible way
out of certain troublesome perplexities. In 1851, therefore, the French
president issued a decree prescribing the “use of convicts in the
progress of French colonization,” and appointed a committee to decide to
which colony six thousand _forçats_ in the crowded _bagnes_ of Toulon,
Brest, and Rochefort should be sent. Guyane was chosen, with “Devil’s
Island” as a landing-place, and the following year volunteers were
called for among the inmates of those institutions. More than three
thousand offered to go to Cayenne—and soon deeply regretted it. Way down
under its superficial buncombe the chief purpose of the plan, of course,
was to give the government a means of getting rid of its radical enemies
and all those whose presence at home greatly worried the ruling powers,
and to-day old J. J. Rousseau would be delighted to see how man,
essentially good, is regenerated and recovers his manly dignity at
Cayenne.
During the second year of the plan, volunteers became insufficient, and
new decrees ordered all individuals sentenced to hard labor or
reclusion, or criminals of African or Asiatic origin, to be sent to
Guiana and used in “les traxaux les plus pénibles” of the colony and its
public works. This last clause, at least, has been manfully carried out.
At the same time a penal colony was established in Algeria, but the
latter proved too strong to have its protests unheeded and the onus was
transferred to New Caledonia. The first law of deportation was for not
less than five and not more than ten years. Causes for such a fate
included conviction of belonging to a secret society. Then New Caledonia
was limited to those prisoners of European race sentenced to less than
eight years. All others, of longer terms or of the negro or Arab race,
as well as all _rélégués_ and recidivists, were to be sent to Cayenne.
Of late years New Caledonia has become less and less popular with French
judges, so that to-day the cream of the criminality of France, as well
as of her other colonies, comes to end its days in French Guiana.
For years different convict camps were established within the colony,
and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would
not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same
fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200
arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal
stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big
stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne
are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners
and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all
the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the
rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white
men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of
them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude.
A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray
and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money
after these churches were declared state property; another once high up
in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own
nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their
clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not
assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in
exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest
canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude
straw hat woven of the _awara_ palm-leaf, working at the same digging of
sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public
streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted
_apaches_ from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former
habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing
tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort
of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in
bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and
the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed
appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the
Parisian _apache_ or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt
with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a
clothes-pole.
The _déportés_ are divided into three classes,—_transportés_, merely
sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; _rélégués_,
serving life sentences; and _libérés_, former convicts free to live
where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers
make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any
one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most
miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are
no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in
charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch
Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned
to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of
from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any
man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even
if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after
serving a like term as _libéré_ and earning his own passage money
honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one
considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French
cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence
under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges
in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes,
it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there
are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the
notorious case of Dreyfus.
Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without
shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his
mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference
between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I
was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn
and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the
case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive
minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes
made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard
labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking _rélégué_
was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my
visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the
administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with
the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the
man sentenced to _travaux forcés_, imagined by the law of 1854, has
become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated
themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place
where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and
temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an
occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life
anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The
officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their
treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it
is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many
splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for
their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners,
unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the
hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a
way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the
story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what
society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the
particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months
or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken
land far from their beloved France.
I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but
even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict
of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to
reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins,
without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money,
without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the
thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who
deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine
yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming
temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public
funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to
dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city
beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison
rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the
whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most
degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often
under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the
primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince
them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two
Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men
doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put
them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among
the French is notorious.
Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners
were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire
them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day
each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome
and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between
departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays
the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than
the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident
in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their
meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and
other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the
end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer
workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an
expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore,
still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro
freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire
_libérés_, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well.
Though he cannot leave the colony, the _libéré_ can go where he chooses
within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his
sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat,
clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to
report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an
avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years
or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony.
Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least
after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European
race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics,
or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These
are invariably _libérés_, some of whom have formed alliances with such
females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro
trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the
_libéré_ has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty
years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees
strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking
with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters
of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or
decency during their bestial imprisonment, _libérés_ not only work at
odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the
sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the
negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming
from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of
them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit
new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at
least have something to eat again.
Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since
1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony
remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to
eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped;
many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while
great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and
virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense
jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being
mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they
have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to
take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel
might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible
and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not
infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in
Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in
theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they
make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their
old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony,
particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now
as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of _moco-moco_ stems, and a canoe
made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners
to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are
free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the
Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely,
or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but
dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward.
It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the
“camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly
since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French
Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws
nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I
had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who
had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire
to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them
who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed
him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s
least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern
“principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried
refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big
keys, he led us into the prison in person.
It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of
the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here
they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc
twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their
wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France.
There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen
well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could
afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner
turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and
“stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an
_infirmérie_ where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking
place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics,
from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they
are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of
courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always
addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed,
officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts;
not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly
the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret
identification system, and the prisoners a secret _argot_, or slang,
which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and
incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to
grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which
increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a
book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their
present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have
never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous
phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the
monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of
Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison.
The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small
barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are
confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men
from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no
concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of
simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four
parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two
feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that
even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of
sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was
allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag
the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice
such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the
cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly
replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to
turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your
hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated
wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and
force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was
not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to
shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.”
In another room were a few trinkets, odds and ends, and covers of
various origins for some of the canvas-strip beds. The “principal”
explained that this was the room of trusties and turnkeys, several of
whom were then standing at attention before him. Then, still pretending
to give me information, but raising his voice to a bellow, he screamed,
“Yes, these we allow a few extra privileges, and they are even greater
pigs than the others—_Oui, ils sont les plus cochons de tous!_” There
was not much visible sign of an opportunity to be anything else. I not
only saw no bath anywhere within the “camp,” but no place where a
prisoner could so much as wash his hands. Nothing but absolute brute
necessities were recognized, and even then everything was of the crudest
and coarsest.
“And do you treat educated men and those who have formerly lived in
clean surroundings the same as you do the recidivists and the apaches?”
I asked.
“Bah!” cried the captain, with his nastiest sneer, though maintaining
his attitude of overdrawn courtesy toward me. “After a few days they
become just like the others and you never see the slightest difference.”
Come to think it over, I suppose they would.
The prisoners get up at five o’clock, have coffee, and go to work at
6:30. A “breakfast” of thin soup, one vegetable, half a kilo of bread
_de deuxieme qualité_, and what is supposed to be 250 grams of meat
before it is cooked, but which boils down to about half that, is served
at 10:30. Three hours later the famished convicts are marched out into
the blazing sunshine again to complete their eight hours of daily toil.
At night they get a slab of bread and a kind of vegetable hash, duly
weighed on dirty scales. It is impossible that any grown man doing
manual labor should not be habitually ravenous on such a diet. Not only
was the stuff of the coarsest grade imaginable, and unsavory as food
carelessly cooked in great bulk always is, but it was handled by guards,
visitors, and any other chance passer-by exactly as one might handle the
food of a dog, perhaps dropped underfoot and then tossed back into the
pan, from which it may be doled out to a man who a year or two before
ate in the best restaurants of Paris.
An old chapel, now full of cells, was a place of punishment for minor
infractions of the rules, the inmates of which slept on boards and were
given bread and water two days out of three. In another building were
the _cachots_, or dungeons proper, stone rooms about four by six feet in
size, with very low ceilings, solid doors, and only a hole some ten
inches in diameter for ventilation. Here recaptured men awaiting trial
were kept in solitary confinement, with a plank for bed, worn concave
during many years of occupation, a block of wood as pillow, and bread
and water one day out of three. For those who aroused still greater
wrath among their guards there were cells in which a man could neither
stand up nor lie down, and other underground horrors worthy of the
Inquisition. I am not one of those who believe in making prison life a
perpetual ball-game; but there are limits to the brutality which man
should permit himself toward his fellow-man. After all, it did not look
as if Hugo’s famous novel had done much to mitigate the lot of French
prisoners. Things may have been alleviated in France itself, but in this
tropical Hades there has certainly been no improvement over the _bagnes_
of Toulon of a century ago.
“Look at that dog!” cried the commander, as the occupant of one of these
ovens rose to his feet when we entered. Then, with all the sarcasm he
could throw into his voice, “_Vous êtes content, hein?_” The officials
all seemed to try to impress me with the fact that they had a
particularly dangerous and incorrigible lot of wild animals in their
charge, and looked for applause at their ability to keep them under
control by such methods as savage brutality and by taking every
advantage of the helpless wretches to taunt them. Yet no owner of wild
animals would have dreamed of keeping them in such airless, crowded and
starved conditions. There was a den of _rélégués_, for instance,
ex-convicts who had violated their parole as _libérés_ and were awaiting
trial—nearly all white Frenchmen and as fine a collection of hopeless,
helpless, careless, don’t-give-a-damn toughs as it has ever been my
privilege to see. The atmosphere was exactly that of a den of savage
beasts who considered all the outside world their implacable enemies and
were ready to rend and tear anyone who was so careless as to come within
reach without a weapon with which to cow them. There were between thirty
and forty in each of the 12 by 16-foot rooms, and by no means space on
the two wooden platforms, resembling those in the _aisles de nuit_ of
French cities, for all to lie down at once.
To add to the joy of their lot, the prisoners are constantly robbed of
their legal rations to fill the pockets of the officials and guards.
There is a saying that officers arrive in Cayenne with half a trunk and
leave with six. In theory, the men are entitled to wine, tobacco, and
reading matter; practically, they never see any of those things unless
they manage to get them from outside. At Albina, across from the chief
penal station on the Dutch boundary, wine is always for sale at a song.
The Indians or “boschs” who bring in an escaped prisoner get two of the
five dollars paid by the French Government, the prison officials
pocketing the rest. There is always an advantage in killing off
prisoners, for their names are still kept on the books and the officials
still draw their ration money, as they do that of un-captured fugitives.
It has often been proved quite possible for a guard at least passively
to bring about a prisoner’s death, merely for the few cents a day he can
pocket for his rations. Naturally there is much underground favoritism,
and the prisoner with money or powerful friends outside can usually get
away. The guard is not only amenable to a bribe, but glad to have
another dead man on his ration books. Such escapes are generally
engineered from over the Dutch border. An expert American cracksman,
well known to our police, “did a job” in Paris a few years ago and was
sent to Cayenne; few who have been there will blame the perfectly
respectable Americans of Paramaribo for helping him to escape. The
German who attempted to get Morocco to revolt against French rule
escaped while I was in the Guianas, and there were very persistent
rumors to the effect that the German Moravian missionaries in Dutch
Guiana knew quite well how it happened.
The prisoners themselves sometimes help their oppressors in the matter
of ration money, for they have secret societies of bloodthirsty
tendencies and private enmities are often settled while the prison camp
lies in restless slumber. Sometimes it is merely a quick stab upward in
the darkness through a stretched-canvas bed; sometimes a ring is formed
by the other prisoners, and the two opponents, each armed with a knife
and attended by a second who has no other right than to give his man
another knife if his own is knocked from his hand, go at it, with no
quarter asked or given. The guards will not risk their lives—and their
probable “rake-off”—by entering and attempting to stop the fight in the
dark, and when one combatant is killed he is left to lie where he has
fallen until morning, when everyone in the room assures the
investigating official that he slept soundly all night long. Death
naturally has few terrors for these convicts, and it is impossible to
punish them more than they are already being punished; hence there is no
motive to restrain themselves. In short, Cayenne definitely proves the
existence of a hell, though its geographical location does not exactly
tally with the notions of old-fashioned theologians.
It took all day to get back on board the _Antilles_, silhouetted far out
on the horizon beside the lighthouse of “Lost Child” Rock. For, with
typical Latin disorder, the sailing was postponed as often as it was
announced. At the customhouse outgoing baggage was examined by slovenly
but pompous negroes as thoroughly as if it were being landed, mainly
because it is illegal to take gold out of the colony. A rowboat carried
us out to a small steamer which could not touch shore. Another brought
out that month’s contingent of conscripts, in blue-jean uniforms and the
familiar French army cap, their shining new cups, canteens, and the like
hanging about them. With few exceptions they were negro youths, pale
under their jet-black skins; and it was difficult to decide which looked
the sadder—the white prisoner boatmen from France who had to stay
behind, or the black “freemen” soldiers of Cayenne who had to go. Among
them was a French priest already gray and heavily bearded, still in full
priestly garb, but with a soldier’s kit and cap hanging over one
shoulder. All the afternoon the Gallic chaos reigned, until at last we
neared the _Antilles_ and were transferred to her again in rowboats, the
soldiers descending into the third class and the canvas-clad convicts,
who had come on board carrying the bags and bundles of negro passengers
and the officers, meekly descending the gangway again, their manhood
evidently so completely shattered that they dared not even attempt to
stow themselves away. We were off about six; and as I looked back upon
the dim, flat land dying away in the sunset, there came to mind an old
slab of wood that had been removed from a prisoner’s grave to the museum
of Cayenne, on which one can still make out the epitaph, crudely carved
by some fellow-convict:
Qu’ avons nous besoin de savoir ton nom?
N’étais-tu pas comme nous un compagnon d’exil?
Dors en paix, maintenant que tes cendres réposent,
Nouveaux exilés, nous vous souvenons
Et t’offrons nos regrets.
A bientôt.
Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed
down near a lightship marked _Suriname Rivier_ to take on a pilot who
looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two
hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story
wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved
shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or
Cayenne. The _Antilles_ manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were
free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the
outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not
allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run
away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to
the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed,
almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and
government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as
ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to
Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one
began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering
over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by
the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a
beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights.
Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward
cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even
those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that
moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though
less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore
gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the
two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was
evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched
up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving
the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched
grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has
produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental
Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly
both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two
Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently
suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent
physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly
attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In
the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had
seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest
of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms
with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese
from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress
and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women
and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many
Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one
of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red
perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were
there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and
the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore
unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat
and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore
starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under
the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap
and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the
throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews
are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in
the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry
chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the
colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white
Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese
and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or
Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro,
especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most
lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most
ardently sensual.
The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners,
chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great
liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from
Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the
Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of
Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually
exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North
America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the
trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam
slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always
been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese
coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the
whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began
importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of
Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially,
the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians,
whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to
keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name
is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work
to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan
asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a
friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran
schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and
Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of
town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold
service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the
dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy
fatalists.
On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church
in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the
worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the
impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the
church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd
had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months
in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his
sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was
merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should
know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch
Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women
separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the
minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church
were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other
important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The
majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at
least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all
the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the
gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a
noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches
habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to
the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went
to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches.
All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas
evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood
and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really
black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other
hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from
the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty
blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes
seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as
possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of
service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns,
which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing
audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether
because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not
apparent. The _Predikant_, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day
air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four
sermons—_four_, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed
ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old
white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand
boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints
of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy.
The Reformed and the Lutheran churches of Paramaribo alternate in their
Sunday night services, in order that competition shall not cut down
still lower their congregations. From the church the crowd went, almost
intact, to the “Kino,” as the “movies” are called in Surinam. The
paternal government burdens these—there are three, all owned by
Jews—with many stern rules. The films must be run by hand, not by motor;
since the hard times incident to the World War only two performances a
week were allowed; the show must be over by 10:30; and so on, until one
became amply convinced that it was no happy-go-lucky Latin government
that ruled over these sedate African Dutchmen. But there are limits to
suppression. To me, fresh from Brazil and the blasé, drawing-room
silence which prevails in its cinemas, the most striking part of this
performance was the almost constant howling and screaming of the largely
negro audience, now cheering on the doll-faced hero, now shrieking
threats at the top-hatted villain.
[Illustration: A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread]
[Illustration: Homeward bound from market]
[Illustration: French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne]
[Illustration: White French convicts who would like to go to France,
rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who would rather stay at
home]
Down at the market-place along the water front there was an incredible
mixture of races, tongues, and customs each morning. Dirty, almost-naked
Hindu beggars slunk in and out among buyers and sellers; Javanese paused
to squander the single copper left from their gambling, and plodded
noiselessly on in their bare feet, munching the mouthful it yielded;
Chinese women, still in the cotton trousers of their homeland, but
already wearing the gay starched bandana of their adopted country,
bargained with a squatting Madrasee or a pig-tailed Mohammedan from
northwestern India over a handful of green plantains. But most numerous
of all were guffawing negro women, almost invariably carrying something
on their heads, be it only a bottle of Dutch rum sitting bolt upright.
The negroes, especially of the younger generation, to whom labor bears
the stigma of the lowly Javanese or Hindu, consider themselves a kind of
aristocracy in this conglomerate society. The negro girl working in a
shop and dressing in modern finery is too nice to carry her own bundle;
she is followed by her mother in the old native dress, bearing her
daughter’s burden. A negro youth whom an American resident hired as a
fireman on his launch appeared in a red tie and patent leather shoes,
followed by his mother and his grandmother, carrying his baggage on
their heads.
It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table.
Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but
it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where
nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of
a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness,
we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we
descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon
“tea” that was a meal in itself, and _Koud Avondeten_—“cold evening
eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once
upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage
compartments, but those glorious days are gone.
Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been
tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every
educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the
street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to
know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of
all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called
“taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes
in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: {_Niet
Drinkbaar_ / _No boen vo dringi_} All higher government officials speak
English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in
Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of
finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played
cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one
of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a
frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official
presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies
of the minister translated into English.
One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were
on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of
a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France,
but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had
been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of
the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen
in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid
faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with
good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular
table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief
justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a
case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the
similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All
five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads
of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the
coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen
Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was
summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court
spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted
by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by
law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered
back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired
of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed,
he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the
clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as
to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the
interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know
was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch
before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes
another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French
as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that
tongue was eminently West Indian.
The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the
governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the
mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the
people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally
gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence
Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for
political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they
serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a
pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such
circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never
acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying
a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest
in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs,
though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors
the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives
themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest
complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge
of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as
easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few
charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives,
especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never
tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their
contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity
a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got
an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years;
therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no
wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public
building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated,
but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with
electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that
there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the
former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a
friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to
Holland.
Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American
corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the
Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The
country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots
uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums
had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation
of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many
others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under
him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or
Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one
for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast
belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the
cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps
the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to
combat it.
The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the
landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English,
Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely
enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many
kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six
hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and
some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped
from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping
incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid
heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!”
“Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good
mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation
shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with
small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the
waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after
which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large
as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style,
quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into
balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after
which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber,
called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an
important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to
clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war
and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia
in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff
had been piled up for cordwood.
[Illustration: Along the road in Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native
headdress]
[Illustration: A lady of Paramaribo]
The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading
the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will
do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen.
The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a
population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town
and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a
five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced
to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this
brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who
wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden
for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five
years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor
five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any
medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each
laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the
government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or
more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a
nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child
twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the
children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a
teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds
for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified
diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes
to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have
been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired
from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total
loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he
can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss
in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men,
though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a
day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay
them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day.
Though their original cost is somewhat less, East Indian coolies, whom
the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty
years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British
subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain
at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but
live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth,
as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and
superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot
be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits,
but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other
troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their
caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels,
or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it
away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their
peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their
enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more
effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated
people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by
disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year
which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and
a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a
complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his
crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked.
I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese
laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s
wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the
amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to
whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost
as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently
happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the
Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in
games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose
jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped
about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and
reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the
other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it
like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent
short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other
penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find
each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The
Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots.
They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any
slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly
chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time
before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with
the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to
the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife
in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The
manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter
would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband
attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and
both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but
severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never
able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out
the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese,
however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are
virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them
to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to
borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The
man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the
night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him
a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he
sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to
hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more
or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the
whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help,
but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful
housekeepers.
When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become
independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five
years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here
that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to
settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly
being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he
does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the
Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and
gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of
his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow,
his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary
and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that
in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more,
receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening
to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away!
Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races
in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the
British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes
are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail
fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare
exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the
stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner
speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers
have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal
government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge
the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly
what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the
inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for
examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of
flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw
Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store
rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China.
The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that
even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more
reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the
father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross
between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom
worthy of the least confidence.
There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to
mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the
price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road
of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of
fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on
hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and
lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every
Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of
the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing
more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned
to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated
huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility,
even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying
short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of
everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every
bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their
junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of
these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty
or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is
passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the
hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of
“pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by
law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called
because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come
knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or
anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted
one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was
more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it,
or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or
express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white
men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of
its soil in time proved permanently injurious.
In the afternoon we came to the Suriname River again, here far narrower,
but swift and deep. The buttresses of a bridge had been built, but the
few remaining passengers crossed in a cable-car, like that to the top of
the “Sugar Loaf” in Rio, a hundred feet or more above the water.
Naturally, a weekly schedule that requires two trains and a cable
station to make its run must charge fabulous passenger and freight
rates. We spent more than an hour getting our cargo—largely oil products
and flour from the United States—into the little three-car train on the
other side; then the conductor put on a new kind of cap, and we were off
again. Here the soil was reddish and looked more fertile, and we seemed
to have risen to a slight savannah with a cooler wind, though for the
most part we were surrounded by the same monotonous jungle that had
hemmed me in almost incessantly for weeks past. But here it was
enlivened by what to me was the most interesting of the many races that
inhabit the Guianas,—the _Boschneger_, or “Bush Negroes.”
In the early history of the colony her African slaves, said to have come
from more warlike tribes than most of those brought to the New World,
revolted and, but for the help of the Caribs and a patched-up truce,
would undoubtedly have driven the white planters into the sea. In
British Guiana they were eventually conquered and driven out. The Dutch,
on the other hand, made peace with them, not only acknowledging their
independence, but promising to pay them tribute, which they do to this
day. The descendants of these black insurgents, unlike the “maroons” of
Jamaica, have gone completely back to savagery and live like wild
Indians, or like their ancestors in the African bush, wearing only a
loin-cloth, dwelling in grass huts, eating cassava and other jungle
products, and talking a corruption of Dutch and several other languages
with which they have come in contact, which the Dutch themselves cannot
understand. It is estimated that there are eight thousand of these wild
negroes in Dutch Guiana, divided into three principal tribes, Saramacca,
Becoe, and Djoeka, each ruled over by its “gran man” (“a” always as in
“far”), and its tribal elders, while several thousand more, known as
“bonis,” inhabit French Guiana.
A few of these black children of nature had appeared before we crossed
the Suriname; now they burst forth frequently from the surrounding bush.
The only evidence of humanity, except the railroad, was an occasional
sheet-iron station building; yet we halted now and then where the dark
mouth of a path broke the dense wall of forest-jungle on either side to
unload rice, flour, and oil for the placer miners and “balata bleeders”
back in the bush. In some places wild negroes had come down to act as
carriers. They were splendid physical specimens, tall and more
magnificently built than any race I had yet seen in South America, fit
to arouse the envy of any white Sandow—except that, being paddlers of
dugouts rather than walkers, their shoulders and arms were overdeveloped
in proportion to their legs. Erect and haughty as Indians, without a
hint of the servility we commonly associate with negroes, they were
proof that the African who has returned to his natural state in the
wilderness is preferable to the negro who has reverted to his natural
state in the cesspools of cities and the rags of civilization. Though
noticeably smaller, the women and girls—naked except from waist to
thighs—who came down to peer out of the forest and see the train pass
were equally fine specimens of the human animal, the young ones with
plump, protruding breasts, shapely waists, and more often than not a
naked baby astride one hip. The men had earrings, bracelets, rings even
on their forefingers, charms of shells and the like about the ankles,
and so many adornments, in contrast to the females, as to suggest that
they forcibly took them away from their weaker sisters. Such cloth as
they wore was of gayest color and crazy-quilt pattern; their short hair
was done up in “Topsy” braids sticking out in all directions and tied
with many-colored ribbons; about arms and legs, just below the knees and
above the elbows, they wore tight rings or cords, evidently believing,
like the Indians of Amazonia, that these protect them from the ravenous
_piranha_; and the abdomens of both men and women were tattooed, or,
more exactly, pricked into relief figures resembling countless black
warts. More superstitious than the wild Indians, and just wise enough to
know a kodak by sight, they were not to be caught unawares for a
“por-trait´,” as the word remains even in “taki-taki.”
Dam is most succinctly described by adding an “n” and an exclamation
point. It consists of the end of the railroad line, which some day in
the distant future hopes to go on to the Brazilian border. The only
white men left since crossing the river were the little Dutch engineer
and myself. I went with him and the rest of the train crew to a clean,
well-screened little bungalow, where we pooled our lunches, but the
assertion of the dusky conductor, whose English was “picked up,” that he
was “snorking too much” proved only too true, and I soon carried my
hammock out into the night. After some search I swung it from the
switch-post to the back end of our first-class car, diagonally across
the track, and turned in again. There was, of course, the danger that
another train might dash around the curve into me, but as the company
would have had to order it made in Holland, carry it piecemeal across
the river by cable, set it up, and run the thirty miles from the cable
station, the risk was not great.
At least there was a fine collection of “Bush Negroes” in Dam. A hundred
or more of them, including whole families among whom there was not cloth
enough for a single garment, had come down the river, which here forms a
rocky falls, to carry back into the bush in their canoes the supplies
brought by the weekly train, and they had hung their hammocks under a
long sheet-iron roof on poles provided by the government. All of them
had the air of being as ready to fight as Indians on the war-path; yet
they were childish in many ways, too, jumping upon the train every time
it moved a foot in switching and acting in general like boys of ten.
They were the exact antithesis of Indians in showing, rather than
hiding, their feelings, and had all the African’s gaiety and boisterous
laughter. In their encampment now feebly lighted by weird torches, they
were indulging in music, chatter, and apparently in dancing, until one
might have fancied oneself in the heart of Africa. They seemed to be
more contented with their lot than the Indians, as if they still had
memories of the slave days of their ancestors and realized that much
more fully what freedom means.
On the return trip we picked up much gold. At every station, and at some
mere stops, negroes, clothed and usually English-speaking, handed the
conductor small packages wrapped in scraps of paper, but sealed with a
red seal, the name of the owner crudely written on each. I soon learned
that these contained gold-dust, and for every one of them the conductor
had to make out a report, which the negro certified with a seal he
carried, after which the conductor put the package in his tin box. Some
of them weighed several pounds. Before we were halfway in the conductor
had more than $12,000 worth of gold, for all of which he was
responsible, though he received not a cent extra for the trouble above
his scanty wage of thirty dollars a month and a gulden as expense money
on each trip. No wonder he said something about “one hand washing the
other” and gave me no receipt for the fare I paid from Dam back to the
cable-station.
When we came to Kwakoegron every person on the train had to get off to
be searched for gold. All passengers and employees, carrying their
hand-baggage, were herded into a big chicken-wire cage, where they were
examined one by one by black policemen. Personally, whether out of
respect for my nationality or because I looked too simple to think of
smuggling, the officer who stepped with me into one of the alcove
closets opening off the enclosure was satisfied with patting my pockets
and making me open my kodak; but many travelers are compelled to strip
naked while black policemen examine even the seams of their garments.
There is a negress on hand for similar examinations of her own sex, and
several times I heard of an English woman resident who, having once been
caught smuggling gold, was forced to strip every time she passed through
Kwakoegron on her way to town. Even minor surgical operations are
sometimes performed on suspects, not always without results. Not merely
the passengers and their bags, but the entire train from end to end was
examined with meticulous care. Gold has been discovered hidden away in
every imaginable place on the cars, even stuck on the trucks or inside
the wheels. The packages in charge of the conductor are also examined,
and if a seal is found broken he is held in jail until it is proved that
none of the gold is missing. The negro policemen get a percentage and
promotion for finding stolen gold, or for detecting attempts to smuggle
it, and are said to be so proud of their jobs that they seldom succumb
to temptation.
[Illustration: Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of
the Far East]
[Illustration: Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_
plantation in Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their
native musical instruments]
[Illustration: Wash-day in Dutch Guiana]
The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of
the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven
per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the
method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is
scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be
sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings
after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the
packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined,
and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his
gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it
to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle
the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said
for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana,
merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it.
Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates.
I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam.
Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the
Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch
Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The
government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring
them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state
and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for
example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no
schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the
Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly
they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro.
All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of
their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost
invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended
from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have
traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their
ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The
men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters.
Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to
town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet
long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different
patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas,
and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy
prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women
are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a
conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the
latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies,
his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day
the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so
called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own
strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven.
They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and
Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or
curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very
suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them
staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum
or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been
subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws,
punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government
interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush
Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to
his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians
returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the
river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his
village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves
farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of
the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government
was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing
no intention of doing anything about it.
The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as
they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of
French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes
or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an
outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the
“gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but
bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his
chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and
receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty
between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some
trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush
Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the
capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers,
but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about
their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit
of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in
Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a
whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the
wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to
one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on
condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair,
evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer
backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and
probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him
than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out,
offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put
in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued
indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical
comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed
myself out of Dutch quarters.
“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first
motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind
his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and
“packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the
“taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they
use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their
clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests,
is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that
have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered
history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a
childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my
privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the
wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the
congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a
similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on
alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language,
though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared
from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from
the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against
the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their
Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to
change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set
aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My
host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led
to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a
hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the
sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we
call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be
married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked
in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved
sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving
heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap,
and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the
church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long
service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the
mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to
time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of
sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church
expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at
stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect
used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which
is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the
“Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native
tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given
German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi”
might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in
understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are
simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and
“Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the
“taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one
bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but
“father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for
“child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish
_pequeño_ or the Portuguese _pequeno_. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the
“a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in
vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike
minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a
group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express
themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means
“good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character;
“Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have
made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25:
[Illustration: An East Indian woman of Surinam]
[Illustration: A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations]
[Illustration: A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana]
[Illustration: Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in
which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of rubber]
Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki:
Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben
habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe
ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben
habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem
kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina.
Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught
crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth
in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang
forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently
the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the
faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble
of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language.
A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the
second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more
inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was
a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood,
stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms
and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded
streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of
both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be
empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep
out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the
river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes
and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a
battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first
cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September.
The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or
merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden
heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green
stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal
palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing
the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they
were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red
stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid
air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these
iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that
before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to
load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few
English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom
complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over
the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie,
where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and
retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal
tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate.
Here a white _déporté_ who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a
burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather
than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists,
send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of
Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu
fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut
out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could
see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I
passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the
children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they
reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were
dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful _gamalong_ floating by
on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had
already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the
slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding
them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam
had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable
of producing a hundred fold what it does now.
The launch _Ella_ finally left for Springlands, across the boundary,
with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed
in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the
yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded
shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of
distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew
toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were
eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed
in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous
British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality
about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an
Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but
carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a
document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in
Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I
should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward
along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie
boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came
to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed
out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile
called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in
this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable
negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the
track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the
road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty
minutes ahead of its schedule.
To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday
and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday.
Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but
to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted
mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British
manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of
fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in
getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was
in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the
blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the
laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half
holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in
hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer
Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the
streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of
link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures,
speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but
to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the
goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those
in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies
lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in
makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking
irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of
which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday
morning.
An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,”
to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along
a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the
country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old
negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before
she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter,
and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps
to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road
all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and
negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had
shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a
thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from
Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a
thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and
shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with
bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging
but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my
progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats
and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway
itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles,
countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South
America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the
pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of
Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089
inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety
per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its
British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed
even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least
one can telegraph anywhere.
[Illustration: A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections of
the railroad to the interior]
[Illustration: A Bush Negro family on its travels. Less than half the
dugout is shown]
[Illustration: A Bush Negro watching me photograph our engine]
[Illustration: A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush Negroes, returning
from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor of Surinam, with his
“commission” from Queen Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and
footsore valet]
Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British
Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark
from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite
greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South
America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a
glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep
from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on
almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their
real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with
such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not
that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an
advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African
chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous
travelers.
Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue
tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had
almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every
description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on
Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger
ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the
proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly
ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit
Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with
thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like
road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink
from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of
whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks;
but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I
stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent
of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a
draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze
from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I
could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of
it.
Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it
no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring
of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate,
“’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.”
“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which
extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a
cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally
became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It
seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal
we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of
nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it,
topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day
did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for
the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he
asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too
much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the
whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors.
“Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence.
“Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’
you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we
use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to
whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?”
meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su
gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most
imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and
excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn
demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many
detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law,
and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was
still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a
half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his
mongrel race.
The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered
huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough
sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From
mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the
landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and
there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting
to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched
together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in
them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a
patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time.
This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient
laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness,
stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for
themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in
Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long,
green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with,
“Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of
the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions
as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West
Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment
seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole.
I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate
of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were
the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing
bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on
legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married
employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered
away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter
of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman,
and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly
named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been
allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an
hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down.
Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face
when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation,
as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already
grasping him by the throat.
“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I
had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was
delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after
all.
Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar
plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage.
It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of
strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in
which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid
actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door,
and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving
to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense
and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the
piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed
children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess
without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager
himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in
life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such
occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of
the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he
descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog.
But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight.
Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what
they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to
risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways
until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was
not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him
that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and
once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent
to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably
good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his
generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that
of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a
tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though
explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see
the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal
business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town,
they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter
entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was
evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be
cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates.
I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along
the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun
was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the
head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’
barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be
allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as
soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I
would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared
in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no
way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took
far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable
person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a
judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject,
“By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The
head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at
length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial
history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour,
whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish
mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a
“swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush,
the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of
rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being
over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs,
where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age,
were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause.
Here we “swizzled” several times more, and then went in a body to a
dining-room on the ground floor under the manager’s house, where
fourteen of us sat down to dinner about a large table. The deputy
manager was at the head and the head overseer at the foot; the rules of
caste, of course, did not make it possible for them to eat with the
manager. It was not a luxurious meal, though plentiful and most formal.
During the course of it a ledger in which the manager, or his secretary,
had written out each man’s orders for the next day passed from hand to
hand. To an American, the rather faint and easily satisfied ambitions of
these not particularly prepossessing young men was striking. They gave
an impression of intellects of modest horse-power rarely speeded up into
high gear, with slight interests or knowledge outside their routine work
of bossing coolies in the fields, in which each had his particular task
or section, without opportunity, or apparently desire, for personal
initiative. Some of them might, indeed, almost have been suspected of
light-mindedness, except on the one point of keeping up the good old
English forms, prejudices, and social superstitions. Nearly all of them
had come out on three-year contracts. If they remained five years, they
got a six months’ trip home—at the company’s expense if and when they
returned; after ten years as overseers the more clean-cut ones might
become head overseers, and years later, deputy manager. Then, if the
latter made no slips on the glabrous British social ladder, he might
finally, in twenty or twenty-five years, work himself up into managerial
timber, a rank at which there are few openings compared with the number
who come out as overseers. The fixed rules of behavior were surprisingly
paradoxical. The overseer might, and it was tacitly implied that he
commonly did, “keep” a native woman—Hindus seemed to be
preferred—without jeopardizing his ascent, so long as he made no public
display of the fact; but he must not, of course, be without a dinner
jacket and evening dress, or ride second-class, or do any of those other
things which a Britisher of his class “simply doesn’t do, don’t you
know.” Yet this distant and uncertain goal seemed quite sufficient
incentive for these half-hearted chaps, many of them younger members of
“best families” and “public school” men, to whom the vision of perhaps
some day becoming manager of an estate, dwelling in the big bungalow
amid servants and secretaries and with stern authority over everything
in his immediate vicinity, seemed the nearest to paradise on earth to
which men of their class could aspire. In keeping with their general
point of view was the calm assurance, almost worthy of a Latin-American,
with which they waited for “the government” to win the war, without ever
dreaming of personally losing a meal or missing a “swizzle.” Contrasted
with the strenuous exertions of the young Germans I had seen trying to
get home from Brazil, the manner of these rather inane young gentlemen
toward a conflict that was just then going heavily against them, yet of
which they seemed almost as supremely indifferent and ignorant as of
geography, was astonishing.
The overseers get up at five o’clock, meet for “coffee” and instructions
from the manager, and at seven ride off on mules to their tasks,
generally an hour or two from the plantation center. Here they spend a
couple of hours superintending coolies, who for the most part work by
the “task,” and ride back for tiffin, or breakfast, at eleven. They are
out again at one o’clock, five days a week, and home soon after four, to
have tea and play tennis, or to prepare for the coming gymkhana, the
estate horse-races. There was a commodious billiard-room in the
barracks, though apparently no shower-bath. No doubt each man kept his
own private tub in captivity. All evening the head overseer was most
formally obliging, but seemed in constant fear of my contravening the
manager’s orders in some “cute Yankee” manner.
I was awakened at dawn by the Hindu “boy”—who was past forty—bringing me
“coffee”—which was tea ruined by the addition of milk and sugar—and two
diaphanous slices of bread. The autobus was not due for some hours, so I
abandoned the contested territory as soon as possible and rambled away
along the diked highway. There was somewhat less travel than the day
before, but the shops were open. So cool and constant was the sea breeze
that I did not have occasion to take off my coat during the whole
fifteen miles, everywhere flanked by canebrake. Men in flowing robes or
mere loin-cloths, with caste marks on their foreheads, coolie women with
arms laden with silver bracelets, their thin and silky, though not
always newly laundered, draperies wrapped gracefully about them, little
Oriental temples standing out against the flat horizon, all carried the
mind back to another land halfway around the globe. There was an amazing
contrast between the lithe, slender Hindus in their loose garb, some of
the younger girls almost beautiful, if one could overlook their
nose-rings and a certain hereditary dread of soap, and the gross,
rowdyish, tinsel-minded negresses. Yet though the East Indian was once
civilized and the negro never has been, the result is in some ways
astonishingly the same.
Coolies were “plowing” old cane-fields with pitchforks, their women, up
to their waists in slime and water, were cleaning out trenches and
irrigation ditches or turning up brush laid over newly sprouted shoots
of cane. This lasted until ten in the morning, when a procession
starting from the fields merged together and wended its way toward the
center of the estate, the Hindus disappearing in long communal,
barracks-like structures, the negroes squatting down to breakfast in the
shade of their makeshift hovels. The latter were greatly in the
minority, for they are prone to work a week and loaf two, or go to town
to squander their earnings in gay garments and automobile rides at the
height of the cutting season, and planters prefer the more dependable
race. The first laborers brought over after the freeing of the slaves
were Portuguese from the Madeira Islands. Then came the Chinese,
generally without a repatriation clause in their contracts, so that they
gradually drifted into shopkeeping, and to-day a few of them are among
the big business men of the colony. Finally the great reservoir of
British India was tapped, the coolies, male and female, coming out at
government and plantation expense, indentured for five years and
entitled to free passage home again. Many preferred to take a premium
and remain, some to rehire, some to plant their own plots, a few to
become men of importance, especially money-lenders with all the popular
traits of the Jew. There is no question that the Hindu coolie is better
off in British Guiana than he is at home, and that those born here are
in a much more favorable condition; yet the call of the fatherland is
strong in all races, and many return, taking with them enough to live in
what to them is comfort. Considerably more than half the population of
the colony are East Indians, but very recently all existing indentures
were cancelled, the Indian Government having forbidden the signing of
new ones some time before, and a scheme is now being worked out for
Hindu immigration and colonization.
During all my walk I did not see a white man, except the sheltered ones
at the estate. Many of the signs along the way were worth reading. “Dr.
Moses Fraser, Dentist and Veterinary Surgeon” made it unnecessary to ask
the “doctor’s” color. Ah Sing, Kandra Babu, and Percival Stuart
Brathwaite kept shop side by side, the importance of their
establishments decreasing in the order named. The autobus, resembling
those along New York’s Riverside Drive, passed me on its outward trip;
but if this packing above and below was typical, I preferred to walk.
Here were the same silly caste rules as in the street-cars of Chile, and
though it was infinitely finer on top, Englishmen had to swelter inside,
because the imperiale was second-class and therefore given over to
negroes and occasional Hindus. There were marsh birds by hundreds along
the flooded flatlands, flocks of pinkish flamingoes now and then rising
in flight. Before noon I had drifted into New Amsterdam, also known by
the name of the county of which it is the seat, Berbice, second city of
British Guiana and not much of a city at that. A chiefly negro
population, though with many Hindus, completely swamped the rare whites,
living in entirely shingled wooden bungalows amid luxuriant yards of
palms and mango-trees.
From New Amsterdam there is a daily ferry and train to Georgetown, sixty
miles away. To take the one across the River Berbice, distinctly wider
than the Hudson at its mouth, in time to catch the other, meant early
rising. For a time there was much bush along the track, the stations
generally being mere stopping-places. Bananas, cassava, corn, and
cocoanuts were the chief products. Then came Hindu men and women up to
their knees in reeking mud, which discolors their ragged nether
garments, setting out rice plants or kneading the soil about them. At
Abary a group of Americans had established a big rice plantation and
begun to work it by modern methods, but they were already in sad
straits. The old-fashioned coolie hand-labor seems to be the only one
offering sure returns. Here and there were rice-fields that had gone
back to pasture, the light and dark grasses still showing where the
paddy-dikes had been. As we neared Georgetown the rice plantations of
independent East Indians became numerous, with oxen as well as men and
women wading along in them, while the houses and sleek cattle showed
prosperity, however biblical might be their methods of husbandry.
[Illustration: The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana,
with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the background]
[Illustration: An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from
Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam plantation in order to
kill the ants that would destroy it]
[Illustration: Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will
eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and cocoa]
The settled portion of British Guiana extends from the west bank of the
Essequibo River to the east bank of the Corentyne, two hundred miles
distant, with a few islands at the mouth of the Essequibo and some ten
miles up the Berbice and Demerara Rivers. Of the hundred thousand acres
under cultivation—an area in proportion to the entire colony as is his
forefinger to a human being—eighty per cent. is planted in sugar. A
century ago the cultivation of cotton, coffee, and cacao gave way to
this, and even alternating of crops is unknown. Year after year, often
for half a century, sugar-cane has been produced on the same ground.
Behind the plantations, which rarely extend more than three miles from
the shore, the soil is a kind of peat, with here and there an island of
sand. In front is the seashore or river, with its protection of almost
impenetrable mangrove roots, then a dike with openings in it for
irrigation ditches, the great wheel-operated gates of which are opened
to let the water run out at low tide, but closed against the sea or
river at their height, for salt on the land is fatal. Back of this dam
is the public road, kept up at the expense of the plantation and, with
the two canals beside it, constituting a second dike. Here is a
mile-wide strip of land that is used as pasture, for the sugarmill, the
manager’s house, overseers’ quarters, laborers’ villages, behind which,
with a third dike, a draining engine, perhaps a little railway, and the
“kokers,” or sluices to let out surplus water, are the interminable
cane-fields, protected from the rainy season floods of the higher and
uncultivated interior by a “back dam.” Canals are everywhere used for
transportation—as well as irrigation—in iron punts drawn by mules. The
secrecy which hangs like a pall over all of the estates, however, I
never succeeded in penetrating. Perhaps it was merely to prevent some
“clever Yankee” from learning how cane is turned into sugar!
Nickerie was once washed away by the sea, and Georgetown is saved from a
like fate by a massive sea-wall. Down here where one must look up at the
ocean the only way to fill a hole is by digging another, and there can
be no real sewer-system where sewage would only float back into the city
at high tide. Various systems are used for getting rid of Georgetown’s
waste matter, none of them entirely satisfactory. Its water is brought
in from the savannahs by the Lahama Canal, but this is yellow with
vegetable matter and cannot be used for cooking, drinking, or even
laundry purposes. Every building of any importance has a rain-water
tank, some larger than those along our railroads, and as there is little
dust or smoke in the city, water thus stored is clear and of good taste.
Yet for all her natural handicaps, Georgetown is a comfortable and
sightly city of wide, well-shaded streets, often with a canal flanked by
rows of trees in the center, and broad green lawns so inviting after
years of grassless Latin-America that I was tempted to sit on each of
them in turn. From the sea-wall to the last negro shacks of the town is
a distance of some two miles, with ample elbow-room and light wooden
structures that make poor fire risks.
The city swarmed with hulking, ragged negroes leaning serenely against
the many posters bearing the appeal “Your King and your Country need
you. Enlist now!” In fact, it is unpleasant, at least for a white woman,
to walk down Water Street among scores of ragged black loafers who seem
to take pains to put themselves in one’s way. On the other hand, there
are cheap public carriages, which, I suppose, would be the British reply
to such a criticism. With plantains and eddoes plentiful, the mass of
negroes are of lazier temperament than their ancestors, the slaves, who
were forced to acquire the habit of work. They have so much power in the
colony, however, that the man who must live there permanently cannot
keep clear of them, and the visitor who inadvertently touches or even
threatens some impudent lounger may be “summoned” and fined. It should
be noted that in British colonies it is not so much the color-line as
the caste-line which divides society. A man drops out of the highest
class by having African blood in his veins, but so he does even when he
is pure white for many other reasons, such as poverty or violation of
any of the Englishman’s punctilios of social etiquette. Hindus are less
in evidence in the capital than on plantations; Indians one almost never
sees there. Every possible mixture of white, negro, Chinese, and East
Indian may be found in the average crowd, however, though as a whole
this has an Anglo-Saxon demeanor. Most of the pure whites are pale and
thin, the women angular; even the young men are sallow from lack of
exercise, manual labor being impossible and the principal
gathering-place a “swizzle” club. The death rate is decreasing, but was
still more than twice that of New York, thanks partly to the fact that
even the English doctors in many cases still believed that “this
mosquito theory is a lot of bally Yankee rot, don’t you know.”
The white population, exclusive of the Portuguese, who are not strictly
so, own about three-fourths of the property, and the Portuguese much of
the rest. Besides Chinese and unnaturalized Indians, there are 172,000
Hindus, nearly all of whom are alien or property-less non-voters. This
leaves the few negroes owning property as the real rulers, to a limited
degree, of the colony. In financial matters, including taxation, this is
largely autonomous. The governor is sent out from England and is one of
eight appointed members of the legislative Court of Policy; but there
are also eight elective members, and the governor has the deciding vote
only in case of a tie. Those who have had occasion to deal with it
complain that the government is smothered in red tape. “If you wish to
address the head of your department,” a man certainly in a position to
know put it, “you write a letter to the next man above you, he adds a
note and sends it on to the next, and so on up ten, or a dozen, or a
score of rungs of the official ladder, and the answer comes down again
the same way, so that when you get it back you buy a trunk and pack the
stuff away and save it to read during your vacation.”
But there are excellences in British government which offset some of its
precedent- and caste-loving stupidities. I went one day with the deputy
head of the Department of Lands and Mines, who is also “Protector of the
Indians,” to the recently established “Aboriginal Indian Depot.” The
aborigines are a simple, good-natured people whose chief fault is a
liking for rum, and not only do none of them live in town, but they
cannot cope with urban dangers during their rare visits there.
Principally by the use of liquor, laws to the contrary notwithstanding,
the riffraff of Georgetown made it their business to rob the Indian men
and lead the Indian women astray whenever they came to town; now the
visitors have an official refuge, surrounded by a sheet-iron wall, which
no outsider may enter without formal permission. There are one long and
two short rooms extending the length of the building, and the Indians
had swung their indispensable, home-woven hammocks side by side, just as
they do in their own wilderness shelters. The large room was for
ordinary Indian men, one of the smaller ones for married couples, and
the third for “captains,” certified river-pilots, and other personages
of importance—for your Englishman never forgets caste, even among
aboriginal tribes. Here any Indian has the right, and is expected, to
come and stay, free of expense, while in Georgetown, buying his own food
and cooking it himself in a simple kitchen behind the building. The
Depot was erected with funds accruing from “balata” gathered by the
Indians, one-third of which is turned into the colonial treasury and the
rest into an Indian reserve fund for just such purposes.
Not only in her grassy lawns and wooden houses, her stern morality and
her altruistic treatment of the aborigines, does Georgetown remind the
Anglo-Saxon wanderer that the differences between his own and
Latin-American civilization are many, significant as well as trivial.
Here he will find again that love of nature, or of outdoors, which is so
slight in the rest of South America. By seven in the morning even the
well-to-do are parading the sea-wall. Though there is no lack of
carriages and automobiles, all classes go much on foot—the mere sight of
well-dressed people habitually walking seems strange to the man more
familiar with the rest of the continent. Latin-Americans of that class
may stroll up and down a fashionable promenade of a block or two at a
certain hour of the evening, but it will be rather to indulge in mutual
admiration than for exercise. Here one will see again, with a start of
surprise, white women not only abroad at an early hour, but pushing
baby-carriages. In all the rest of South America it would be unseemly
for a lady to pass her threshold in the morning, except to go to church
and possibly to shop, or to be fully dressed and powdered before
mid-afternoon, and even if she knew of the existence of perambulators,
she certainly would not condescend to propel one herself. Another
English touch is the sight of all classes riding bicycles, from the
negro postman to dainty, veiled young white ladies—conduct which would
be instantly ruinous to any feminine reputation elsewhere on the
continent. People no longer hiss to attract attention; one is no longer
a sight to be stared at from one end of the street to the other; no
human wrecks come pestering one to buy sudden fortune in the form of a
dirty rag of a lottery ticket; money is worth its face value again and
is accepted at that rate without question—even though the newcomer may
get hopelessly entangled in a confusion of reckonings in shillings,
dollars, cents, and pence. It is true that traffic turns to the left and
that audiences sit stiff and motionless as wooden images at band
concerts, but this little patch of England in South America has fine big
school buildings, instead of droning choruses of children packed
together in noisome old hovels. Where there are many negroes there are
apt to be beggars, but they are by no means so numerous and certainly
not so pestiferous in Demerara as in Brazil. The street-cars are not
divided into classes, and one may ride irrespective of the shape or
condition of one’s collar; though castes are recognized in a different
way, for the negro-Hindu motormen and conductors, speaking what is
fondly supposed in the West Indies to be English, have a different
vocabulary for each class. To a black fellow-laborer they say in a
kindly, familiar tone, “Get off, mahn; heah yo street;” to a negro
market-woman, impatiently, “All right, get on, ef yo goin’!” but to a
white man of any standing, in a totally different tone and timbre, “Oh,
yes, sir; this street, sir; all right, thank you, sir.”
[Illustration: A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana]
[Illustration: Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday
before one of their barrack villages]
[Illustration: Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on
the Orinoco]
[Illustration: The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela]
Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees,
Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of
these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman
has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come
to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their
descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South
America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the
“pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef,
mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up
during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native
peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective
but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the
unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map
as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness
and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from
Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of
a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left
standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown.
In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the
automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to
come in the not far distant future.
CHAPTER XXII
THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA
Men have been known to make their way directly from British Guiana to
Venezuela; but the effects of the World War were widespread and only by
taking an ocean liner to Trinidad and transferring to an Orinoco
river-steamer could I begin the next and last stage of my South American
journey, a tramp across the Land of Bolívar—and Castro. By an
extraordinary stroke of luck the _Apure_ of the “Compañia Venezolana
Costeira y Fluvial” was returning that very day, after a month of
repairs in Port-of-Spain, to her regular run on the upper Orinoco, so
that in less time than it takes properly to fulfill the protracted
consular formalities required of those entering Venezuela I was on my
way as the only passenger across the Bocas in just such a frail,
two-story, side-wheel craft as that by which Hays and I had crawled up
the Magdalena into South America three years before.
There was little new along the lower Orinoco to one who had seen every
large river of the continent. Here and there a canoe paddled by naked
Indians nearly as light as a sunburned white man crept along the lower
fringe of one or the other mighty forest wall. A few huts, mostly
abandoned, on the right-hand bank we almost constantly hugged, with now
and then a cornfield chopped out of the forest, were the only other
evidences of humanity. Where we stopped for firewood, groups of Indian
men and women, some of them wearing clothes and all of them showing in
their degenerate, vicious faces evidence of having made the acquaintance
of what we proudly call civilization, lounged in the edge of the jungle
watching our slightest movements. Their huts were only four poles
holding up a thatch roof, but every person had his own hammock, covered
by a _mosquitero_ reaching to the ground. Gradually hills closed in on
us, low, thickly wooded, with great granite outcroppings. Two old yellow
forts appeared, the one on the higher hill already a ruin, the other
flying the yellow, blue, and red flag of Venezuela, with quite a village
of huts below it for the half-Indian soldiers in khaki and their
slattern women. These “Castillos de Guayana” were built by the Spaniards
to protect the entrance to the Orinoco, and it is mainly pride which
causes their feebler descendants to keep up the fiction. For the
authority of Caracas is little more than theoretical in that half of
Venezuela called Guayana which lay hidden in densest wilderness on our
left.
As we neared Ciudad Bolívar, white-winged boats more comfortable than
the wall-less dwellings along shore, each with a huge number painted on
its sails, came down the light-brown river among the small floating
islands it had torn off far above. The typically “Spig” city lay piled
up over a knoll on the southern bank, scattered portions of it spilling
over the rolling and marshy country roundabout. A few feet from shore we
were ordered to halt and await a “visit,” and it was hours later that
the languid, futile formalities were ended. The chief excitement in town
was “the dike,” a great wall built to keep back the water from the
flooded campos, now leaking until the great lagoon which always forms at
the foot of the town during the rainy season was driving out the
dwellers in the lower fringe of huts. Half the city had come out to see
prisoners from the _cárcel_, under even more evil-eyed soldiers from the
_cuartel_, strive to stop the leaks by letting cowhides over the side of
the wall and tamping apathetically here and there with their clumsy
tools. But it is the Venezuelan custom for jailers to steal most of the
rations to which their charges are entitled, and the prisoners were in
no condition to accomplish their task, even had they had any incentive
to do so. I was startled to hear a voice behind me say, “I fear we all
go’n’ get de wash-out, sah.”
At least it gave one a sense of not being entirely cut off from the more
orderly world to hear English-speaking negroes in the streets of Ciudad
Bolívar, and their presence made other foreigners less subject to
constant open-mouthed scrutiny. Hackmen, chauffeurs, nurse-girls, and
servants in general were commonly Guianese or West Indian negroes, so
that my native tongue often sounded in my ears. The rest of the
population was that of almost all Spanish-American cities,—few pure
whites and fewer full Indians, but every possible mixture of the two,
with a goodly dash of African blood thrown in to complete the
catastrophe.
Whatever beauty Ciudad Bolívar has is indoors. No green lawns or
flower-gardens cheer the eye of the passer-by, though now and then a
glimpse through a doorway along the deadly line of dirty stucco walls
reveals a patio filled with blossoms and tropical shrubbery, with
perhaps a fountain. Even inside is no patch of Eden. Parrots, as well as
all domestic fowls, contest the average patio with dogs, pigs, naked
urchins, and adults. It is in conformity with his other cruelties to
dumb brutes, his total lack of compassion, that the keeping of caged
animals is an inherent trait of the South American. Back of the city
lies an extensive swamp from which come great numbers of mosquitoes, the
same swamp that the people were struggling so energetically to have
their jailbirds hold in check. It is often hot by day, but at night a
cool breeze sweeps in from the broad Orinoco and the town casts off its
torpor. Lights spring up, gaudily dressed and heavily powdered women
lean on their elbows behind the heavy wooden window-bars, the band plays
along the waterfront Alameda, the streets are filled with a roving crowd
of carnal-minded men and boys, and Ciudad Bolívar seems for a space
almost a wide-awake city.
The Venezuelans refused to take my proposed walk across the country
seriously, so that it was doubly difficult to get trustworthy
information. The llanos were said to be flooded at that season, and the
overland journey to Caracas was reputed to be 180 leagues, a mere 540
miles! I dared not send myself forth on any such unnecessary stroll as
that, for I had solemnly sworn to be home at all costs within four years
of my departure, and it was already the end of July. But at least I
could tramp straight across to the Atlantic, and find swifter means of
transportation to La Guayra and Caracas. There were worse stories of the
dangers of a lone “gringo” wandering through Venezuela than in any other
South American country. Revolutionists had for months infested the very
territory in which I proposed to risk my life—but I remembered the tale
of the Venezuelan colonel sent with his regiment to wage battle over the
range, who came hurrying back at the head of his troops, to report, “My
general, just over the summit we met two drunken Americans, and they
would not let us pass!” Besides, the war in Europe had made it difficult
for bandits and revolutionists to get arms and ammunition. “But at
least,” cried the natives, “you must have a mule and a saddle!” and a
kind man offered to sell me such an outfit, “all ready to mount”—for a
thousand _bolívares_! True, a _bolívar_ is no more than a franc, but a
thousand of them was more than I was depending upon to set me down in
one of our north central states.
[Illustration: An Indian family at eastern Venezuela]
[Illustration: Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears
on his travels]
[Illustration: A Venezuelan landscape]
I was reduced, therefore, to my usual common denominator,—engaging my
own instincts as guide and hiring my own feet to carry myself and my
belongings. A certain reduction of the latter was imperative. The most
effective accomplishment in that respect was the trading of my heavy
Ceará hammock—though it was like dismissing an old friend, for I had
slept in it since long before Carlos died—for one made of _curagua_ by
the Indians of the Orinoco. This was a mere grass net, being woven of
the fibrous leaf of a small wild plant related to the pineapple; but it
weighed only forty ounces, ropes and all, and is capable of holding me
comfortably in its lap to this day. As I was taking leave of the
native-born American consul, my attention was drawn to great blocks of
yellowish stuff in his warehouse that were sewed up in sacking and
stenciled for shipment to the United States. It turned out to be chicle,
the milky juice of the _sapodilla_ tree, which flourishes along the
Orinoco, boiled down and dried for use in the one land that appreciates
so doubtful a luxury. The consul gave me a piece, very light in weight
and of the size of my fist, and the wisest thing I did in Venezuela was
not to throw it away—not simply because it was pure chewing-gum, lacking
only the sweetish flavor, but because it saved me many a thirsty hour in
my tramp across the arid country.
The Orinoco sweeps swiftly past Ciudad Bolívar, formerly called
Angostura—the “Narrows”—a big rounded rock breasting the current in
midstream. I crossed it in one of the little sailboats with numbered
sails, speeding along before a stiff breeze that seemed to whip us
swiftly forward, until a glance at the shores showed that we were really
moving backward downstream, so swift was the current. Only gradually did
we make the opposite bank, and it took nearly an hour to pole our way
back to Soledad, just across from where we had started. One could
scarcely blame this hamlet, justly named Solitude, if it looked
unwashed; only the day before a boy of twelve had stepped into the river
for a bath and an alligator had walked off with him for its Sunday
dinner. Still, the place had children to spare. Staggering ashore under
my bagful of assorted junk, I at once struck out along the “camino
real,” a mere trail which first climbed to a slight plateau with a view
back on Ciudad Bolívar, then broke into thinly scrub-wooded pampa or
sandy llanos covered with tuft-grass as far as the eye could see. As the
“royal road” showed a constant tendency to split up into many paths that
lost themselves in the heavy grass, I had to trust mainly to compass and
instinct. At noon I stopped at a mud-hole fringed with cattle-tracks to
eat a square yard of cassava-bread washed down with handfuls of muddy
water. The sweat poured off me in streams under my big, awkward burden,
and it soon became apparent that I must still further reduce my load.
Then and there I gave my leather leggings to a passing half-Indian
horseman, who, to prove his aboriginal blood, did not so much as thank
me. Three Indians in hats, loin-cloths and pieces of jackets, with an
old rifle each, loping noiselessly past, aroused my envy.
The sun was still troublesome when I came to a miserable village of half
a dozen mud-and-thatch ruins, before which ragged men sat in deep
silence, now and then heaving a long sigh and relapsing again into
silence. I coaxed one of them to row me across the La Piña River, and
plodded on. What time it was when I reached a ranch called “El Orticero”
I cannot say, for the crystal and minute-hand of my aged tin watch had
succumbed to the day’s struggle, and the rest of the contraption
functioned only intermittently. I pressed it upon my old but artless
host, and a chicken died in consequence. But the fowl was evidently both
young and slender, for the entire dinner consisted of a thin soup with a
few scraps of chicken in it and a bowl of milk. No wonder these people
have no energy; this to them was a gala meal.
The considerable wait from dawn to sunrise was scarcely worth the small
cup of black coffee, or rather, _guarapo_, which the brewing of last
night’s coffee grounds yielded. Passing the cow-yard as I set out,
however, I got a bowl of foaming milk with which to wash down another
shaving of cassava. In the middle of the morning a strong fever came
upon me, forcing me to lie down in scrubby shade on the sand and
tuft-grass for an hour or more. When I could endure my raging thirst no
longer, I crawled to my feet and stumbled on across the blazing, choking
semi-desert in a for a long time vain quest for water. At last I came
upon a red-hot sandy bed, along which crawled a stream half an inch deep
where I scooped out a hole and, when it had somewhat cleared, inhaled in
one breath a good quart of the lukewarm water. A reasonable man,
recognizing the trip I had laid out for myself as a mere “stunt,” would
have given up and returned to Ciudad Bolívar and Trinidad; but I was
born bull-headed. I staggered on, and at length sighted a countryman’s
thatched hut—an _hato_, they call it in Venezuela—where I was welcomed
with bucolic but genuine hospitality and motioned to a seat on a
whitened horse-skull. I swung my hammock instead. When this had reduced
my weariness, I took up the imperative question of doing the same for my
pack, absolutely refusing to stagger farther under such a load in such a
climate. I threw aside my heavy shoes, thereby taking the weight of the
low city ones off my shoulders, following them with a pair of wintry
trousers and a workingman’s shirt I had seldom worn. The shoes and
several odds and ends I bequeathed to the woman of the _hato_, for her
absent husband; the trousers and shirt went to a visiting neighbor, who
promised to guide me in the morning to the next hamlet. I threw away the
tin cans that protected my exposed kodak films, all but the quinine I
should need for the next fortnight, almost all my other medicines,
two-thirds of my soap, most of my ink in the bottle I had carried from
Quito, and I even cut in two my tube of dental paste. The woman and her
visitor accepted all these things with labial thanks, but my strongest
hints produced nothing to appease my appetite. The sun was casting its
rays in upon me under the thatch roof before we sat down before a little
plate of fried mango, a kind of armadillo stew, and little bowls of
coffee—well enough, but just one-tenth as much as I could have eaten
myself.
“_Por aquí son la gente muy amigos al interés_,” said my ungrammatical
guide, when the woman was out of hearing; “Here people are friends of
their own interest. If you had no money to buy food, or if you had not
given her all those fine things, you would not even have got this, but
might have starved before her eyes.”
The truth is that the country people of Venezuela have almost nothing to
eat themselves, much less anything to share. They have not the energy to
grow much of anything, no one has the energy to bring things to sell
from town; and under such a blistering sun I do not know that I blame
them. More disheartening still is the government of unenlightened
tyrants under which they live. This woman and her husband—their story is
typical of thousands—once had more than a hundred head of cattle, and
other possessions in proportion. Came Castro with his fellow-rascals and
stole or ate the whole herd. One has little inspiration to pile up
possessions by rude labor under a tropical sun for the advantage of the
next passing band of ruffians. These poor, sequestered people in their
tucked away _hatos_ were typical of all the campo, with its stories of
oppression, tyranny, treachery, and stark brutality, all told in a
gentle, uncomplaining voice and manner, avoiding any direct reference to
the chief tyrant, as if even the palm-trees had ears, and replying to
all pertinent questions with that helpless, hopeless, irresponsible,
non-committal “_Quién sabe?_”
Somewhat reduced in load, though still overburdened, I set out again
next morning. A tiny cup of black coffee was what I was expected to
start on, but I managed to beg two half-ripe mangos. In my light shoes
and reduced pack I spun along splendidly—so long as I had any road to
spin on. Just there was the rub. Don Augustín, the _hato_ visitor, had
left with me, carrying the shirt and trousers I had given him to guide
me to the next hamlet. But when, some four or five miles on, we had come
upon an Indian hut and bought two _patillas_, a kind of watermelon, for
ten cents, he announced that he was going a league westward to his own
house to get his hammock, and that I was to go “straight ahead” along
the road he pointed out, until he caught up with me. Both he and the
“Caribes,” as Venezuela calls the aborigines of this region, assured me
that I could not possibly go astray—yet I had not covered two hundred
yards of that sandy, coarse-grassed pampa before another “road” led off,
just such a narrow path as the one I was on. Then came fork after fork
in swift succession, until I was involved in a network, an absolute
labyrinth of trails, any one of which was as likely to be the “royal
road” as any other. I took one after another, only to have the path
dwindle and fade from under my feet in the high grass and be gone.
Several led to the charred remains of an Indian hut; one finally brought
me out before such a hovel still standing, where half a dozen Indian
women, all but stark naked, squatted and lolled on the earth floor,
three of them suckling cadaverous and filthy brats, and all languidly
engaged in scratching their leathery bare skins. They spoke little or no
Spanish, but seemed to imply that I should take a road down into a
valley. I took it, lost it, again found pieces of it, or some other
path, lost those, brought up in a stream that soaked me to the thighs,
and seeing worse ahead, as well as evidence that this was not the right
direction, I scrambled my way back to the Indian women. But they were
just as naked and ignorant as ever. I gave up, though it was still
morning and I was anxious to push on, and swung my hammock under a roof
on poles beside such road as there was, got into pajamas so that I could
spread my dripping garments in the sun, snatching them in again for
several light showers and hoped against hope that some one with human
intelligence would come along and give me information.
Hope having died and my clothing being nearly dry, I harnessed up again
and went back once more to the Indian hut. This time the man was there.
He gave me in fluent Spanish verbose directions concerning a “road”
alleged to lead directly to “El Descanso,” which was close by, without a
chance of my missing it. Simple as his directions sounded to the fellow
himself, I offered him money to take me there; but he replied that he
was a consumptive with fever—and he looked it. Within a quarter of a
mile that “direct” road forked into at least twenty similar paths, every
one of which looked as direct as the others. Catching sight of a hut
down in a valley, I made for it through sticky mud—and found it open and
quite evidently inhabited, but with only a squalling infant in a hammock
within sound of my voice. I waded back to more trails upon trails across
swamps and through tangled undergrowth, saw another hut on a hill,
climbed to it and found it abandoned, saw another across a swampy valley
and struck out for that. This time it was a large house or collection of
houses with solid mud walls, instead of mere reeds, the shaggy thatched
roof “banged” at the doorways, and other signs of affluence and
intelligent information—but every door was padlocked.
There was no use making any more blind guesses. I swung my hammock under
a tree at the gate, where another ass tied to a post was already dozing,
resolved to stay until my luck changed. For what seemed hours I hovered
on the brink of starvation, when there appeared across the rolling,
weed-grown country what looked like a horseman on a mule. Illusion! It
was only a boy on a jackass. He knew nothing of roads, but he did bring
me the information that I was even then at “El Descanso,” the very place
I had been seeking, and that the people who lived there would be back
“soon.” Also he sold me three mangos, but I had not even a knife, and to
rob a mango of its substance with a small pair of scissors and one’s
teeth is as harrowing as not to be able to find a drop of water after
the ordeal is over. Also in such a climate it is a fine fruit for those
who wish to die young. But at least I was passing the most blistering
hours of the day in breezy shade in a spot appropriately named “The
Rest.”
It must have been four o’clock, and for two hours I had been enjoying a
fever, not the burning one of the day before, but the languid kind one
almost luxuriates in so long as one can lie still. Not a sound had there
been in all this time except the lazy sighing of the breeze in the
scattered shrubs and an occasional protest from the other hungry donkey.
Then all at once I heard a woman or a boy shout within twenty feet of
me; but when I sat up and called back there was no answer. I had
wandered twice around the house, and the call had been several times
repeated, before I discovered that it came from the family parrot,
perched on the ridge of the roof. Again and again it hallooed across
hill and swamp, in exactly the tone and voice of a South American
country woman, telling some one in clear, impeccable Spanish to come
home at once, that some one was there, and more to the same effect. At
last an answering voice, and then several came faintly across the
valley, sounding steadily nearer, and finally two girls, one already
married, shuffled up in _alpargatas_ and the shapeless loose calico
dresses of their class. The older one seemed resentful, and the younger
frightened, at sight of a man, even out under their gate-tree, and as I
was just then enjoying another wave of fever, I continued to wait,
hoping they would be followed by some one of my own sex. When it began
to grow dark, however, I went to ask the older girl if she could cook me
something. No, there was not a mouthful of anything in the house. Well,
how much for a chicken? Forty cents. I gave it, and lay in my hammock
for another interminable hour. Then she came to ask if cheese would not
do! I told her in a voice one does not customarily use to ladies that I
had paid for chicken, and she shuffled away again; and long after dark
she brought the cooked fowl intact, broth and all, with a bowl of goat’s
milk. But by this time fever had routed my appetite and I could not
drink more than half the broth and a bit of milk, so I wrapped the
chicken in a paper and hung it from a rafter of the empty sheep-pen
without walls, to which I retired rather than keep the timid maidens up
all night by staying in the house.
The girls had no knowledge that roads ever ran anywhere, and were even
more grouchy and uncompassionate the next morning when I wheedled
another bowl of milk and struck off at random. Troubles never come
singly, and when I took down the chicken I looked forward to feasting
upon later in the day I found that a colony of ants had anticipated me,
and there was barely a scrap of meat left. As it was plainly up to me to
get somewhere, I took the first of several trails leading down into the
valley in a general northerly direction. It showed a few burro-tracks
for a way, but gradually split up into ever dwindling paths, all of
which ended sooner or later in _morichales_, those great bog swamps
filled with every difficulty and danger from entangled roots to
alligators, and densely shaded by the _moriche_ palms from which
Venezuela makes her hammocks. It would be easier to get through a stone
wall. At length I tried a path leading almost southwest, determined to
get around the swamp by a flanking movement, but I barely saved myself
from dropping into a sinkhole of quicksands. Back on dry land again, I
kept to the highlands for miles, at times plodding in exactly the
opposite direction from that in which I was bound, now and then wading a
patch of marsh and finally, crossing the stream near its outlet from the
_morichal_, arriving famished at a hut almost within gunshot of “El
Descanso.” Here the family of the boy who had sold me the mangos the day
before was engaged in the favorite Venezuelan occupation of lying in
hammocks, but the woman had more than the racial average of humanity and
intelligence and for the sum of ten cents she placed before me four
fried eggs, than which nothing had tasted better as far back as I could
remember. Then they directed me to San Pedro, and by some strange luck I
managed to keep the right one of the labyrinth of paths across the
deadly still, sandy prairie, with its coarse, uninviting grass and ugly
scrub trees, to a kind of country store, where two tiny stale biscuits
and a mashed-corn loaf, called _arepa_, gave me the strength to push on.
Getting careful directions, I set off for Tabaro, and nothing could have
been easier than to find my way across this flat, hot plain, utterly
waterless, so that all the way to that cluster of huts I subsisted on
three small lemons. But I might have known that this easy going was only
a lull before the storm. They sent a boy a little way from Tabaro to put
me on the right road, “which goes straight, straight, without a chance
to lose your way, and anyway you can follow the tracks of this horse,
which just left for there.” Follow his Satanic Majesty! There is not a
human being, unless he knew it already, who could have distinguished
that path from a hundred and fifty others, of cows, horses, mules, and
everything else that goes on four legs in Venezuela. I took the one that
looked most promising, landed in a _morichal_, pulled off my shoes and
waded for some distance in black mud, tore through more tangled
undergrowth, and found myself only at the beginning of the real
struggle. Removing my trousers in the hope of saving enough of them to
escape arrest if ever I struggled my way back to civilization, I
attacked the swamp and jungle with all the force I had left, cutting my
feet and legs, gashing hands and even my face, sinking to my waist in
the slough, watching the sun rapidly setting on a night that I was not
only doomed to spend out of doors without food, but evidently immersed
in mud and without water to drink. Then all at once I burst out upon the
brink of a large, swift river. I had already heard of it, but was
supposed to come upon it at an _hato_ called “El Cardón” and be set
across in the owner’s canoe. There was no sign of human existence, much
less of a farmhouse, and the river was plainly too swift to swim with my
load, even if it were not full of alligators. Besides, the most
important thing just then was rest, for I was weak from fever and lack
of food.
The red sun sank behind the tree-tops to the east—no, if I could have
gotten my bearings right, I believe it would have proved the west. I
hung my hammock between two scrubs, bathed on the bank of the river,
drank several handfuls of it for supper, and rolled in. To add to the
pleasure of the situation the one book I happened to have with me opened
to a chapter entitled “The English Cuisine!” Being absolutely devoid of
shelter, I had dragged a few fallen _moriche_ leaves together and made a
tiny lean-to beside me under which to shield my scanty possessions. It
was in keeping with my luck in this thirteenth Latin-American country in
which I had traveled that for the first night since I had reached
Venezuela it should rain. I was awakened first by some wild beast nearly
as large as a yearling calf, which dashed out of the undergrowth,
uttered a strange cry at sight of my hammock, and sprang in one leap
directly over me and into the stream with a great splash. I emptied my
revolver after it, but it quickly disappeared. By the time I had hunted
cartridges in the dark and loaded again—for some other heavy animal
seemed to be prowling about in the brush—it began to sprinkle, with
lightning flashes, and then it turned to a real rain. I adopted the
Amazonian means of keeping dry, stripped naked, rolled clothes and
hammock into a bundle I could thrust under the improvised shelter, and
sat down upon the unprotected corner of my stuff and let it rain.
Luckily, it did not continue long, and within half an hour I had rolled
up in my hammock again.
[Illustration: Hammock-makers at home]
[Illustration: The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable by
rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning before the dew has
dried]
[Illustration: Lopez buying hammocks]
[Illustration: We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to
quench our raging thirst]
When next I woke, in a breeze so cool that I put on my daytime clothing
over my pajamas, the stars were shining. But this was base deception,
for I was awakened later by a veritable downpour, without even time to
strip, and could only huddle over my belongings and keep as much water
off them as possible. Soon afterward dawn came and the next problem
after getting my wet mess together was to decide whether to go up or
down stream. Nowhere was there a sign that man had ever before been in
those parts. I chose upstream, and quickly plunged again into another
_morichal_, such a jungle and swamp, filled with the odor of rotting
vegetation, as only wild men or lost ones attempt to fight their way
through. Plants with sharks’ teeth, sabre cacti with hook-shaped horns
and needle points along the edge, upright sprays of vegetable bayonets,
grappled and pierced clothes and skin. Through this mass I tore and
waded barefoot for perhaps two hours, by no means certain there was any
end to it; but finally, with legs and feet a patchwork of cuts and
scratches, and my shirt in rags, I came out upon another vast,
tuft-grass and sandy prairie. On these immense scrub-wooded plains,
crisscrossed in every direction by narrow cow-paths, but rarely by human
trails, a man might wander until he choked or starved. I followed one
path several miles until it died a lingering death, then fearful of
losing even water I returned to the river, which here almost doubled
upon itself. I tried another path and had wandered at random for I know
not how long when my eye was caught by a thatched roof an immense
distance away at right angles. I dragged my sore feet—they were so
swollen I could not put on my shoes—for miles through the cutting
prairie grass—only to find an abandoned and ruined hut! I was about to
return to the river in despair when I caught sight of another hovel on a
knoll a mile away. At first this also appeared abandoned, but as there
were several chickens about it, evidently it was inhabited, a fact
verified by finding still warm the ends of fagots over which breakfast
had been cooked. Lifting the woven-grass door of that half of the house
with walls, I found two hammocks and a few simple utensils inside, but
not a sign of anything edible, except the chickens, and I had no
matches. There was not even water, and I had to take a big earthenware
jar down to a swampy stream a quarter of a mile away and carry it back
on my head. Then I swung my hammock, got into pajamas, and hung out
everything to dry, determined to stay there until doomsday rather than
strike out into the foodless unknown wastes again. I slept. A shower
woke me just in time to snatch in my clothes. They had been hung out
once more and I was again asleep when, about midday, I was awakened by a
rustling of the grass door outside which I hung, and looked up to find a
woman of the same dirty, grouchy, uncompassionate type of all those
parts. I asked her where I was, and was delighted to learn, even from so
sour an individual, that I was barely a league distant from the _hato_ I
had been trying to reach. The female was returning there at once, and I
could “follow her footprints.” There was no getting her to wait a minute
while I dressed and packed, and well I knew my ability to lose her
footprints within the first hundred yards. I did just that, and should
have been as badly off as ever, had not a half-negro with two babies
appeared on a horse, followed by his woman and older daughter on foot,
likewise bound for “El Cardón.” We waded two swamps, cutting up what was
left of my feet, and when I stopped within sight of the _hato_ to wash
them in a stream, another sudden shower left me dripping at every pore.
“El Cardón” was a collection of several mud houses in the center of a
large ranch. As usual, the owner was not at home, and the slatternly,
filthy, moralless female in charge seemed to take pleasure in my
condition. Though the place swarmed with chickens and several other
potential forms of food, her stock answer to my repeated offers to pay
well for one was that lie I had so often heard in the Andes—“_Son
ajenos_—they belong to someone else.” “Well, sell me _anything_ to eat,”
I urged, with as much calm dignity as I could muster under the
circumstances.
“I am not the owner,” she invariably replied, “and I cannot.”
She could, of course, for she was in full charge of the establishment,
but these part-Indian people of rural South America probably would enjoy
nothing more than to see a man die of starvation in their noisome
dooryards. It is the same spirit which makes the Spaniard shriek with
delight over a disemboweled horse at his bull-fights. It cost me a
struggle even to get water. Here the man with whom I had arrived took a
hand, and at last he got her to open the main room, the only one that
was not filled with fowls, dogs, babies, and pigs rolling in their own
filth, which soon invaded that also. It was a cement-floored place with
only the thatched roof for ceiling, photographs of the owner and his
relatives in all sorts of unnatural postures and some silly English
lithographs of about 1840 scattered around the half-washed walls.
Finally, at least three hours later, this same man induced the stubborn
female to serve me a dish of beans and rice with some scraps of pork in
it, such as she fed twice daily to the peons.
As the next place was eighteen miles away, by a “road” I was almost
certain to lose, I was stranded until I could by hook or crook get a
guide and food for the journey. I had several times bathed my bleeding
feet and legs in the only disinfectant available, kerosene, which added
to the combined ache of my countless lacerations, while to complete my
superficial misery, swamps, sun, and perspiration had opened anew the
half-healed tropical ulcers and the wound above one elbow where an
English bulldog had bitten me when I had had the audacity to attempt to
deliver a letter of introduction on a sugar estate in British Guiana. At
length a man theoretically in command of the establishment arrived and
after a long argument I was half-promised a guide for mañana—if I would
pay him sixty cents, that is, three days’ wages at the local scale. Then
the woman whose hut I had invaded, returning “donde mí,” as the rural
Venezuelan calls his own house, accepted forty cents for a chicken which
she might or might not send for me to turn over to the unsympathetic
female, who might or might not be induced to cook it. The fowl came,
however, and died at sunset, so that it was long after dark when it
reached me smothered in rice and none too well done, though I had
difficulty in keeping enough of it for the next day’s journey. Another
_capataz_, with as little authority as the other over those supposedly
under his orders, appeared and, with two peons, hung his hammock from
the beams of the family parlor in which I sat. For some two hours they
swung back and forth thrumming rude guitars and singing improvised
couplets. Illiterate and ignorant as they were, they could alternate
unhesitatingly with two-line rhymes on some local subject of the
day—such as myself:
“Y un blanco ha llega-a-a-o
Con los piés maltrata-a-a-o.”
These were almost always spiced with some indecent reference to women,
about such remarks as two stallions might make to each other in a
discussion of mares, if they had speech—no, they would be more
dignified. “_Nosotros somos unos brutos_,” said one of the youths, who
at least had a glimmering of his own ignorance, rare in those parts; but
his use of the word “brute” was not what I would have given it. The
peons came twice after I had retired, posing at least as authorized
go-betweens, to ask whether I wished the unspeakable female to share my
hammock with me, a favor which she frankly took turns in showering upon
all the men above the age of fifteen on the place.
The usual farmyard chorus announced dawn long before it arrived, and
even when it did come I could not strike off alone and unbreakfasted.
But two hours passed before the surly female brought me a cup of black
coffee, and I was about to start alone, whatever the risk, when a negro
named Ambrosio turned up and offered to go with me for forty cents.
Guides are cheap enough, if only you can get them. The female had stolen
more than half the chicken I had left in her charge, leaving me burdened
only with three pieces of it. I overcame Ambrosio’s natural tendency to
put it off until mañana and we struck down across the hot plain to the
river, which we crossed in an old _curial_ attached to a wire stretching
from bank to bank, Ambrosio carrying me ashore on his shoulders—at my
suggestion—to save me the time and trouble of removing and replacing my
shoes. I also bluffed him into carrying the larger part of my bundle.
Luckily, I had not started alone; I certainly should have lost the way
again. So did Ambrosio, for that matter, though like a true
Latin-American his version of it was “se ha perdi’o el camino—the road
has lost itself.” He was an experienced _vaqueano_, however, and
striking across the rolling, loose sand, with some sidestepping he
landed me at noon in La Canoa.
This was a village of several large huts on a one-wire telegraph line,
the principal one being occupied by the part-negro family of the
telegraph operator. Almost a real meal was prepared for me while I swung
in my hammock above the earth floor of the _sala_, or “sitting-room.”
The toothless old lady with whom I whiled away the delay said it was bad
enough to live in a region where one could get nothing to eat, but “the
worst is that when somebody dies, you can’t even buy candles!” I agreed
with her. A wide, main-traveled trail, always within sight of the
telegraph wire, lay before me, but there were twelve miles to be covered
without a drop of water. I had three small green lemons, however, and
set my fastest pace until I reached the clear river near the end of the
journey, halting to drink it half dry before bathing and strolling up to
three miserable huts on a knoll above.
Here a part-Indian youth named Lopez, with two asses and a mulatto boy
assistant, had also stopped for the night on a journey in my direction,
and as there were thirty miles without water ahead, I made myself
_simpático_ in the hope that we might join forces. Neither for love nor
money could anything be bought here, except sugar-cane and miserable
cassava-bread. I consider my digestive apparatus above the average in
enduring hardships, but I felt it was entitled to something better than
cold fried sawdust that evening. This ridiculous notion aroused the
mirth of the natives, who gathered around me prophesying disaster while
I tried the effect of boiling a few sheets of the cassava-bread into a
kind of hot pudding. They were right. The stuff tasted like wet calico
and an hour later I was attacked with the worst case of seasickness I
have ever suffered, which lasted nearly all night, the earlier part of
it gladdened by the natives standing about me doubled up with shrieking
laughter.
[Illustration: Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a
fellow-traveler]
[Illustration: Dinner time in rural Venezuela]
[Illustration: Lopez enters his native village in style]
My breakfast consisted of sucking a sugar-cane. These people, though not
exactly savages, have the same improvidence and indolence, not to
mention heartlessness, and are so lazy that they will sit half-starved
or kill themselves early by the rubbish they put into their stomachs,
rather than go out and plant something. They were so lazy that there was
not a drop of water in any one of the three huts until some two hours
after the first complaint of thirst was heard; they live so literally
from hand to mouth that no sooner do they get a bean or a grain of corn
than they eat it raw. Let anything in edible form appear, and there is a
rush of dogs, pigs, chickens, and goats to dispute it with their human
companions; give them meat, and they will sit up all night to cook and
devour it, never beginning their preparations for the next meal until
everything, down to the last water-jar, is empty.
Lopez offered to put my bundle on one of his donkeys, whether in the
hope of running away with it or from kindness mingled with the
expectation of a tip I did not decide until some time afterward. With
half the morning already gone, we were off at last, under a blistering
sun, everything I owned, including my money and proof of identity, on
the burro’s back, except my kodak, revolver, and a small bottle of
water. We had gone a league when Lopez decided to turn aside to the
_hato_ “La Peña,” as far off our line of march, and, still carrying the
bottle of water, I arrived at the same river from which I had dipped it
up and had to shed shoes and trousers to cross it. Here we squatted for
hours in an earth-floored farmhouse belonging to a man who boasted
possession of thousands of acres, yet who dressed in rags and in whose
house there was scarcely a day’s rations. No wonder people living as
they do in rural Venezuela are only too glad to start a revolution, if
only in the hope of perhaps getting something to eat.
About noon I discovered that we were waiting while an ass that was for
sale could be found. Whichever way I guessed on this trip, I was wrong.
I had thought that by joining Lopez my progress would be increased;
already it looked as if quite the opposite were the case. At last the
burro was found; then he must be caught; then he proved _malucho_, which
means almost anything in Venezuela, wild, twisted, wrong, mad, not right
in any way. Then there ensued a long Oriental argument about the price,
which was finally settled at eighty _bolívares_ ($16.17). Next Lopez
must have a document of sale on a sheet out of my note-book and written
with my pen—because there was evidently not another one in the region;
then he must undo his pack and take out money enough in silver to pay
the price, after it had been counted half a dozen times on both sides,
and three times by me as confirmation, and finally, at a fine hour to
start on a twenty-seven mile tramp across a desert without water, food,
or shelter, we were off.
For the first few miles it took the combined exertions of the three of
us to initiate the new donkey, who was young, large, and strong, so that
by the time we were well out of reach of the river again, our tongues
were protruding with thirst. Then we plodded unbrokenly on, hour after
hour across a tinder-dry desert of coarse tuft-grass and scraggly trees,
slightly rolling in great waves, the “road” a dozen untrodden paths
hidden in a grass that tore viciously at our feet. Unless we found a
_pozo_, or hole in the ground, well off the trail at about mid-distance,
by spying an extra insulator on the single telegraph-wire that kept more
or less beside us, we would come upon no water during the whole
twenty-seven miles. I allowed myself two swallows from my bottle at the
end of the first blazing half-hour, and as many at regular intervals
thereafter, having to share my scanty supply with Lopez. With the
typical improvidence of his race he had brought none with him, but being
a true Latin-American, he expected to be protected by those who had
provided themselves. By good luck, rather than for any other reason, we
did catch sight of the white knob on the wire midway between two poles,
and after long search found in the immensity of the desert an irregular
hole in the ground where water is said to be always clear and good. My
bottle filled again, but with my maltreated feet shrinking at every
step, we plodded on toward the next water, fifteen miles away. During
the last five of them I chewed chicle incessantly, and without it would
probably have been capable of drinking the blood of my companions. At
last, with dusk settling down, we sighted a good-sized house on a ridge,
but as this was a telegraph office, Lopez did not wish to approach it,
having the lower-class Venezuelan’s dread of coming into unnecessary
contact with the government in any form.
We hobbled on until dark, when I caught sight of a hut some distance off
the trail and forced my tortured feet to carry me to it. It proved to be
the most miserable human dwelling I had yet seen, inhabited by a
yellow-negro male and female without a possession in the world worth a
dollar. There was not a scrap of anything to eat, no light, and not even
a roof over most of the house. But casually, during the course of the
fixed formalities of greeting, the man mentioned that back at the
“office” where Lopez had refused to stop the weekly steer had just been
killed! It was the first time since leaving Ciudad Bolívar that there
had been a possibility of buying meat. I offered the mulatto a cash
reward to go back and get me two _bolívares_ worth, an offer which he
accepted with what passes in Venezuela for alacrity, first showing me on
the way his “well”—two small holes in the ground on the edge of a
_morichal_. There I sat and poured gallons of water on my aching feet,
at the same time drinking my fill. Hobbling back to the hut, I had the
woman put on the kettle at once, and the water was hot when the man
arrived, strangely enough bringing what was probably the whole forty
cents’ worth—a great slab of beef nearly two feet long. Unnecessary
delay being painful, I myself cut it up and soon had it stewing.
Meanwhile I sent our colored friend to a neighboring hut to buy
_papelón_, which proved to be my old companion _chancaca_, _panela_,
_rapadura_, or crude sugar of solid form, in a new disguise. By the time
he returned I was drinking beef broth, to the astonishment of all
beholders, for these foolish people, who are always on the verge of
starvation and ready to eat the most inedible rubbish, boil their beef
and then throw away the broth! They seem, too, to prefer their miserable
cassava to meat, though in this case the family was still devouring
their share of the feast when I turned in at what must have been near
midnight of a day that I only then recalled had been Sunday.
The most persistent of roosters, a few feet away from me, began his
false report about three and kept it up unbrokenly until daylight really
broke. This time we loaded the big new donkey, but the sun was well up
before we had found and captured the other two. The old canvas cover of
Lopez’ pack showed faintly the words “U. S. Mail,” but this would have
meant nothing to him, even had I called attention to it, for geography
is a closed subject to the rural Venezuelan. Those to whom I mentioned
that I came from the United States were sure to make some such remark
as, “Ah, United States of Venezuela?”—evidently thinking those two parts
of the same country. Lopez asked me one day, in an unusual fit of
curiosity, whether the money he had been using all his life was not
minted in my country, because it said “Estados Unidos de Venezuela” on
each coin. He was typical of the soul of the common people of that
misruled “republic,” harassed by fate, the government, the climate, the
difficulty of making the most meager living, and his faint, almost
unconscious longing for light, scarcely daring to mention his views on
politics even to a footsore foreigner, so dreaded are the tyrants whose
names are spoken by this class, if at all, only in whispers. Outwardly
many of their manners and opinions are ludicrous, but one comes to learn
that these little brown people have their own ego under their
comic-opera looks and actions.
At the very next house we stopped for an hour while Lopez bargained for
_chinchorros_, his trade being that of _chinchorrero_, or buyer of the
grass hammocks that serve as beds to most Venezuelans. Vespucci found
the Indians of the Orinoco sleeping in the tops of trees, at least in
flood time, and named the country “Little Venice.” Their descendants
still sleep in tree-tops, though now woven into hammocks. _Chinchorros_
are made of the tender center leaf of the _moriche_ palm, which men and
boys climb as material is needed, turning it over to the weavers, who
almost invariably are women. It is either a fact or a persistent
superstition that the finer grade of hammocks can only be woven by women
and in the early morning or late evening when the dew gives the air a
proper humidity; so at those hours one may come upon a girl or matron at
almost any hut in this region diligently rolling the split palm-leaves
into twine against her bare leg, for which there is believed to be no
effective substitute. Whether both delusions have not been deliberately
nurtured by the men for their own advantage is at least a reasonable
question.
The heavier and cheaper grades of hammock, however, can be made under
less picturesque conditions, hence are astonishingly low in price. At
two neighboring huts Lopez bought a dozen for the equivalent of $7.70,
but the sun was high before they had been paid for and loaded. He hoped
to sell them in Barcelona on the north coast for about $10, also the
recruit donkey for a similar advance over its cost. A few miles beyond
we crossed by a narrow pass another great _morichal_ and the River
Tigre, where we swam and drank our fill in spite of the prevalence of
alligators, for another waterless nine leagues lay before us. In such
situations endurance depends mainly on the power of detaching oneself
from one’s surroundings, and I found that by picturing to myself in
detail the approaching arrival home to which I had so long looked
forward, I could banish even raging thirst into the dim background. Thus
I managed to plod fully half the distance on my tortured feet before
opening my bottle of water. We set the swiftest pace of which we were
capable in order to have the ordeal over as soon as possible, but bit by
bit the water and then the few small green lemons we had picked up at
the last house were consumed, and still the shimmering, withered desert
crept up over the horizon. To save my soles from the gridirons of
purgatory I could not increase my pace in proportion to my raging
thirst. The sun beat down from sheer overhead, began its decline, peered
in under my hat-brim, and still the painful, choking, unbroken plodding
continued. Lopez judged the hour by his shadow, and I by a toss of the
head till the sunlight struck my eyes, a gesture that had become second
nature during my long tramp through South America. Yet there was a
fascination about traveling with these primitive _llaneros_, enduring
all their hardships, entering bit by bit into their taciturn inner
selves, to find them, after all, different, yet strangely like the
generality of mankind.
[Illustration: The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family]
[Illustration: Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city
waterworks]
[Illustration: A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital]
[Illustration: The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of
Caracas]
At last there appeared, far ahead, a slight ridge, at the base of which
Lopez promised the River Guanipa. As we neared it two horsemen, the only
fellow-travelers we had seen in days, called to my companions from under
some scraggly trees, but I had not their aboriginal endurance in the
matter of thirst and stalked on until I could throw myself face down at
the edge of the river. We had intended to push on to Cantaura, eight
leagues farther, but it was already mid-afternoon, we were sore and
weary, and there was unlimited water close at hand. Moreover, the
horsemen, with whom I found Lopez hobnobbing when I hobbled back,
reported that a “revolution” was raging in Cantaura.
The day before, three hundred bandits, or patriots, according to the
political affiliations of the speaker, had taken captive the local
government, looted the shops, and were now camped on the edge of town.
It was admitted that they were unlikely to molest foreigners; the
ordinary citizen, in fact, is little affected by such “revolutions,”
carried on by a small part of the population and disturbing the general
stream of life less than do our presidential elections. But there was a
possibility that the band might need hammocks, or even wish to add to
their ranks so lusty a youth as Lopez. We therefore swung our
_chinchorros_ under the scrub trees, which gave time not only for a swim
but for a general laundering and, most important of all, a chance to
nurse my lacerated feet. Our new companions were white enough to pass
for Americans, yet they were as ignorant of anything outside their
immediate environment as jungle savages. They did not know, for
instance, that water separated their country from the warring “towns,”
as they called them, of Europe—which they took to be a single small
country from which came all “gringos,” or white foreigners. To them the
great war of which they had heard faint rumors was merely another
“revolution” similar to the one in the nearby village; yet it was plain
that, for all these frequent uprisings instigated by ambitious leaders,
the Venezuelan country people were as peace-loving as they are, like
Spanish peasants, intelligent even though illiterate.
With water at hand and a cool breeze sweeping across the sandy plains, I
looked forward to a comfortable night at last. But it was the first one
in Venezuela when mosquitoes and gnats made me regret abandoning my
_mosquitero_; moreover, Lopez, having decided to push on at midnight,
spent the interval incessantly chattering with his new friends, the
conversation consisting mainly of a similar but much stronger expletive
than “Caramba!” At midnight he decided to go later, when the stars came
out, and renewed the profane prattle; then we could not find one of the
donkeys, and I got at last a little sleep. When I awoke the stars had
abandoned the sky and the birds in the trees were beginning to twitter.
There was a classical sunrise that morning, for the rays streamed out
fan-shape on the clouds, as from the throne of God in old religious
paintings, no doubt modeled from this very phenomenon of nature. Long
after this was dissipated, we were still wandering the countryside,
looking for the lost donkey. When at last we were off, I had not
finished redressing my tender feet after fording the river before we got
a “_palo d’agua_,” a sudden heavy shower that drenched us through and
through. In the unladylike words of my companions something or other was
always “_echando una vaina_,” which is the nearest Venezuelan equivalent
to “raising hell.”
We marched four leagues in sand and cutting grass, with muddy pools to
wade here and there, all very slowly because a sick donkey was unable to
keep a fast pace, even though “stark naked.” I arrived, therefore, at a
sluggish river in time to swim and get dressed again before the others
overtook me; but here Lopez left his negro assistant to bring in the
ailing burro, and we covered at our old pace the four leagues remaining.
The country changed completely from sandy _llano_ to stony hills, in
which a well-marked road cut zigzags. Worn, hot, and hungry, we came in
the early afternoon to Cantaura, a flat, quadrangular, silent town in
sand and weeds, of several thousand inhabitants. There were five by
seven solid blocks of mud houses, every corner one a shop with the
counter aslant it and scanty custom or stock-in-trade. It was an
incredibly languid town, much given to the crime of bringing into the
world children who could not be properly cared for, so that no woman who
could by hook or crook have an infant in arms was without one, and they
swarmed everywhere in spite of a naturally, perhaps fortunately, high
death rate. In fact, it was incredible how many human beings were
vegetating here, doing nothing but a little apathetic shopkeeping and
hammock-making, with the silence and inertia of the grave over
everything.
All sorts of odds and ends of humanity were tucked away in the
rambling old adobe houses, in one of which we at once made ourselves
at home, tethering the donkeys in a patio filled with weeds and bush,
and swinging our hammocks in the monasterial old _corredor_
surrounding it. Here we gave the slatternly woman of the house thirty
cents with which to buy beef and rice and make us a stew, she no more
thinking of charging us for the cooking than for room to hang our
_chinchorros_. Eggs were three for five cents; a large corn biscuit,
or _pan de arepa_, was one cent; “wheat bread,” as a tiny, dry ring of
baked flour of the size and shape of a bracelet was called, cost
something more than that; native cheese, _papelón_, even milk, though
probably from goats and certainly boiled, could be had by persons of
wealth. It was not long after our arrival, therefore, that Lopez and I
might have been seen squatting beside a makeshift table, eating in a
Lord-knows-when-I’ll-get-another-meal manner, with a crowd of dirty
women and children hovering about us and the kitchen, waiting to
snatch any scraps we might leave. One of the former passed the time by
feeding black coffee to a hollow-eyed baby some eight months old.
These people disregard the most commonplace principles of health,
wealth, and marriage—though certainly not with impunity. The town had
no water supply except a sluggish creek two miles away, to which I had
been forced to hobble even to wash my hands. Asses brought two small
barrels of it to a house for five cents, but even they were lazy, and
many people had no such sum, so that not only do the people almost
never wash, but a thirsty man must often canvass several families
before he gets a drink of water in which newly dug potatoes appear to
have been soaked. Like the political atrocities which long experience
has made seem unavoidable, these torpid people endured these things
without complaint or the thought of a possible remedy.
The “revolution” two days before had been much less serious than the
telegraph, a strictly government organ, had reported to the outside
world. It was the first anniversary of the organizing of a revolt
against the national tyrant by a man highly favored in this region by
all except the political powers. That date had to be celebrated by a
“gesture” that would be heard even in Caracas; besides, the
revolutionists were hungry. On the other hand, they did not wish to
antagonize the generally friendly metropolis of Cantaura. The three
hundred, therefore, had camped nearby and sent a delegation of thirty
men into the town, to take the _gobernador_ prisoner—merely as a sign of
disdain to the hated tyrant who had appointed him, for that evening he
was released at his own _hato_. No shot had been fired, all food had
been paid for, and nothing stolen. It is not the revolutionists whom the
people of the _llanos_ fear, but the government soldiers, who enter
houses, attack women, and carry off anything that takes their fancy. In
Venezuela the government picks up men of the lower classes wherever it
can find them and impresses them into the army. It is not only the
favorite depository for criminals, but fully two thirds of their thirty
cents a day is stolen from the soldiers by those higher up, hence,
though they are rarely men enough to revolt against their oppressors,
they are quick to pass their misfortunes on to the population. In this
case, as in many others, the knightly deportment of the revolutionary
leader was not matched by the tyrant in power, for less than a fortnight
later he and a score of his staff were given no quarter when the
government troops surrounded them.
Lopez bought four dozen more hammocks in Cantaura, and I a bag of food
to share with him in return for the privilege of loading it on one of
his donkeys, though the favor would have been granted me in any case,
for I had gradually found that there was a moderately kind heart beneath
the taciturn, part-Indian exterior of the _chinchorrero_. An older man
in the selfsame two-piece cotton garments, peaked hat of coarsest straw,
and bare feet thrust into cowhide sandals, had joined us, making our
party four men and as many donkeys. We plunged at once into a country
quite different from that I had so far seen, becoming involved in a
series of foothills which gradually rose higher and higher until the
ranges seemed to be climbing pellmell one over another in a vain effort
to escape some unseen terror. They were covered with thick woods, and at
first the well-marked trail of hard earth promised comfortable, shady
going; but soon that other curse of the foot-traveler descended in
torrents that almost made the drought of bygone days seem preferable.
Pounds of mud clung to every step; the earth grasped the heels of my low
shoes as in a clamp, requiring the full force of each leg to set it
before the other. I dared not drop behind; luckily, the others could not
go much faster than I, their only advantage being that they could wash
their bare feet or sandals in any stream without stopping, while I must
carry the mud on.
Toward noon the country opened out once more, with fewer woods and lower
hills, and we were dry again by the time we finished the day’s toil at a
weed-hidden village. The next night’s stopping-place was, I believe, the
most horrible in all South America. Two old huts covered with ancient
reeds and completely surrounded, inside and out, with every filth of man
and beast, were inhabited by a fully white and well formed man, who
stumped about on legs completely hidden under many layers of the foulest
contamination. This had invaded everything, including the slatternly
blond mother and her half-dozen of what seemed beneath the mire to be
tow-headed children, the whole family rapidly going blind from some
disease resembling ophthalmia. Yet they seemed to have no inkling of
their abominations. The man chattered politics as if he might at any
moment be called to the presidency and handed me a foul liquid as if it
were the finest drinking water. The next day was laborious, though not
thirsty, Lopez leading the way along single-file paths and short cuts
over hill and dale through dense low woods. Now and then we broke out
upon a hot, bare stretch, where my companions sometimes threw themselves
face-down to drink liquid mud from some hollow in the ground. During the
afternoon the “road” was full of loose rocks of all sizes, which
tortured my maltreated feet almost beyond endurance. We reached the mud
village of Caripe before sunset, but Lopez had relatives farther on, so
we followed the “camino real” and a telegraph wire for several more
toilsome, up-and-down miles, the hammock-buyer now and then repeating a
cheerful, “We are almost at the door of the house.” Presently we left
the main trail and plunged off into the wet, black, silent night,
through hilly woods and head-high weeds, through knee-deep mud-holes and
past frog-chanting lagoons, to come at last upon two miserable huts
swarming with gaunt and savage curs and harboring vociferous, unwashed
people without number. They gave me scant greeting, and when I insisted
on having something hot to eat for the first time in three days, Lopez
explained that my stomach was “delicate.” By admitting this calumny I
obtained a soup made of two eggs, after which seven of us men swung our
hammocks in the open-pole kitchen. Water was so scarce that I had to
wait until all the others were audibly asleep before filching two tiny
canfuls from the mouldy kitchen jar to pour on my burning, itching feet
and legs.
Being now only four leagues from his native El Pilar, Lopez left his
hammocks and asses to be brought in by the others, and saddling the new
donkey, which he had reduced in a week from a fine animal to a wreck,
and putting on a five-dollar velour sombrero for which he had spent in
Ciudad Bolívar his earnings on the trip before he earned them, he rode
away through the wet, early morning woods almost faster than I could
limp along behind him. But his plan of making a triumphal entry into his
native town met with poor success. The trail was so rough and rocky, so
up and down and hot and endless, that the animal all but dropped, and
Lopez had to get off and drive him. Such was his haste to get home that
I should certainly have been left far behind had he not every little
while met a friend on a donkey or a horse and paused to give him the
limp greeting customary to the region and to exchange the latest local
gossip. The invariable term of endearment was “chico,” rather than the
“ché” of the southern end of the continent, and to every man he met
during this last part of the journey Lopez gave the mild _abrazo_ of
rural Venezuelans, who do not shake hands, but stand at arm’s length and
touch each other on the shoulder. Finally we got into a pocket of
heavily wooded, low hills, everywhere choked with weeds, though there
were some cornfields, the ears broken half off and left hanging to
ripen. When it appeared at last amid such surroundings, El Pilar proved
to be the usual collection of ancient and decrepit mud huts set in a
tangle of jungle and weeds. Just at the edge of town Lopez mounted, and
with his new velour hat set at a rakish angle and his bare feet armed
with cruel spurs, to say nothing of the cudgel in his hand, he forced
the gaunt and worn-out donkey to prance into town like an army charger.
But again his plans came to grief. For the misused brute, not being
accustomed to the roar and hubbub of towns, effectually balked, and for
a hot and sweaty half hour the returning hammock-buyer had the
ignominious task of beating, pushing, dragging, and cudgeling the animal
through the gaping village to his own house. I meanwhile being reduced
to the necessity of carrying my own bundle.
During the journey Lopez had never failed to raise his ragged straw hat
whenever he passed any of those crude shrines that mark the last
resting-place of those of his fellow-travelers who have succumbed to the
perils of the _llanos_ trails; and he had been diligent in keeping in
constant sight a charm in the form of an embroidered red heart worn
about his neck. Now it was evident that he had reached home and that
danger was over, for he hung the charm carelessly on the adobe wall, and
passed the local cemetery without so much as noticing it, though his
parents and grandparents lay buried there. He lived with several sisters
and a brother in the usual mud hut opening on a baked mud yard, with an
open-pole kitchen in which even stray pigs were not considered out of
place; but at least his sisters were quiet and outwardly cleanly, almost
attractive, and when Lopez, with a princely gesture, threw a peso down
before them and commanded “a huge hot meal,” such as he had learned
would win my approval, they obeyed his orders almost with alacrity.
Meanwhile I went up into the woods to a stream that had left pools of
clear water among rocks, and sitting down with a calabash, poured it
over me like a Hindu performing his sacred ablutions at Benares. I was
probably more soiled and ragged than I had ever been in a long career of
vagabondage, but at least this promised to be the last South American
mud village in which I should ever sleep. When I had put on my newly
washed pajamas and hobbled back to the house, a great chicken-stew
awaited us. Lopez and I made entirely away with it, together with a kind
of baked squash and several _arepas_; and when it casually leaked out
that eggs cost one cent each in El Pilar, I produced a _bolívar_ with
the request to get me twenty of them, half of which I shared with Lopez,
while ordering the rest prepared for supper and breakfast. When, in
addition to all this, we did away with a whole watermelon, the wonder of
the family and the village was complete. Having taught the hammock-buyer
the meaning of a real meal, I assumed for a moment the unaccustomed rôle
of missionary and strove to show his relatives why their customary diet,
with its miserable coarse cassava and stone-cold _arepas_, was not
conducive to longevity.
“Now I am a dozen years older than Lopez,” I began.
“Impossible!” interrupted his sisters, looking from his face to mine.
“Yet both his father and mother, like the fathers and mothers of many
countrymen of Venezuela as young as he, have been dead and gone for
years.”
“And yours?” inquired the girls.
“Still quite young and lively, thank you,” I replied; “and my
grandfather....”
“What—your _grand_father!” cried the astounded family of El Pilar.
The peep of dawn saw me bidding Lopez farewell—and promising to send him
dozens of the many photographs the family had insisted on my taking, or
pretending to take, of them. I led the sun by more than an hour into the
jungle valley through which a stony and mountainous trail lifted me to a
summit, where, across wave after wave of blue wooded hills, appeared the
Caribbean, as a signal that I had at last walked South America off the
map. Huts were fairly thick among hills that grew ever lower and then
less stony, the way several times following the gravelly beds of dry
streams, until at last it broke out upon a perfectly level flat country
of cactus and dry, thorny bush. Here there was for a long time total
silence, except for the wail of the mourning dove, so characteristic a
sound in this sort of landscape. Then abruptly, without warning, I
emerged upon an absolute desert, bare and sandy looking as the Sahara.
Instead of the deep sand I expected, however, the soil proved to be
mud-flats, now dried and checkered in the sun, and good smooth going,
with a telegraph wire for guide—though a bit of rain would have made it
almost impassable. Soon I was surprised to hear the roar of breakers,
and when I was high enough to look over a sort of natural sand dike,
there lay the whole blue Caribbean, with what I had taken for another
range of hills rising out of it in the form of rocky islands—and,
confound my luck if, hull-down on the horizon and spitting black smoke
scornfully back at me, there was not a steamer racing in full speed in
the direction of La Guayra!
The mud-flats alternated now and then with deep sand or patches of
thorny bush and cactus, a most miserable setting for what I at last made
out to be the church-towers of Barcelona, fifth or sixth city of
Venezuela, with some 15,000 apathetic inhabitants. But as if fate would
give me one last slap before we parted, an arm of the sea appeared when
I was almost inside the city and drove me and the trail miles back into
the thirsty bush, scrambling through cactus, springing across mud-holes,
forever limping painfully onward. Then at last I emerged upon a cement
sidewalk on an otherwise dirty, tumble-down, earth-floored town of flat
gridiron formation, inhabited by a ragged and uninteresting population
conspicuously Latin-American in all its manifestations, even to
striking, upon the appearance of a stranger, an attitude in which to
enjoy so rare a sight at ease and to the full as long as he remained
visible.
[Illustration: A bread-seller of Caracas]
[Illustration: The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the
“Washington of South America”]
[Illustration: A street in Caracas]
[Illustration: The Municipal Theater of Caracas]
It was evident that my luck, if I ever had any, had completely deserted
me. Six hours before my arrival, the lonely little train of Barcelona
had left for Huanta, whence the steamship _Manzanares_ would have set me
down in La Guayra the next morning at a cost of thirteen _bolívares_.
Now, thanks to that half day of loafing in El Pilar, I might wait two or
three weeks for another steamer. There were, to be sure, small
freight-carrying sailboats advertised to leave from time to time; but
their agents in Barcelona seemed to have little interest in passengers,
particularly a mere “gringo.” For two days I pursued captains of such
craft from rosy dawn to the last note of the evening concert in the
central plaza, with no other gain than the rather sullen information
that there might be a boat leaving mañana. Meanwhile my slender funds
were going for corn-bread, and my patience was oozing away in the
monotony of the sand-paved, donkey-gaited mud town where not even a book
was to be had. Then one morning the captain of the sailboat _Josefita_
agreed to let me sit on his deck from Huanta to La Guayra for only twice
the steamer fare, and I bumped away in the ridiculous little train to a
port consisting mainly of mud huts, cocoanut-trees, and an elaborate
stone customhouse. Here a long formality and the payment of half a dozen
government fees were required for a “permission to embark”—from one
miserable port to another of the same country—and I was ready to intrust
my future existence to the equally capricious ocean winds and Venezuelan
temperament.
The _Josefita_ was a large covered rowboat with a sail, on which was
painted in huge figures the number required by Venezuelan law on all
such craft. The captain took on a few extra beans for the benefit of his
solitary passenger; but I played safe by filling my own sack with
corn-buns, native cheese, and _papelón_, and by some stroke of luck I
picked up a Spanish translation of Paul de Kock with which to pass the
time. Besides the captain and myself there were four ragged sailors,
neither old nor young, and, strangely enough, wholly free from African
taint. We were loaded with a few hundred native cheeses in banana-leaf
wrappings when we began crawling across the bay to take on mineral water
at Lajita. A rocky, half-perpendicular coast with scanty tufts of green
vegetation sloped down into the blue Caribbean in which I trailed my
rapidly healing feet. At four o’clock we drifted up to a beach and a
thatched village that we seemed to have passed by train that morning,
where we anchored while the captain and half the crew rowed ashore.
There they were gone for hours, evidently helping nature run down the
mineral water, for toward sunset there came from the land the sound of
boxes being nailed up. Meanwhile nature had produced considerable water
on her own account in a long series of thunder-showers that fell with an
abrupt whispering sound all around the boat. Most of this delay I spent
swimming over the side, trusting to my eyes to detect in time any
sharp-toothed danger in the clear, azure sea, then retired to the tiny
cockpit, where the so-called cook brought me a plate of plain rice and,
evidently as a special concession to first-class passengers, the front
end of a boiled fish.
When the sun burned out again through the mists, we were speeding along
in a spanking breeze after a night in which a heavy sea had tossed us
constantly back and forth on the stone-hard deck, shipping water to soak
us wherever the rain had not done so already. Lest we might have dozed
in spite of all this, the ragamuffin at the wheel had broken forth every
five minutes in a howling wail of extemporized “song” which was meant to
encourage the wind and perhaps to scare off the evil spirits that ride
the darkness. The wind soon died, however, and at noon we were still
flapping with idle canvas in a calm, unbroken sea. The book I had picked
up was too silly for words; my five companions were utterly devoid of
human interest; our miserable fare, concocted by a “cook” who did not
know enough to boil water, was strongly scented with kerosene; and most
of the day was spent in a dispute between the captain and the singing
sailor, who, it seemed, could not read the compass and had taken us far
out to sea, when our safety depended on keeping within sight of land.
The crew had almost nothing to do but tack two or three times a day, and
spent the rest of the time sleeping on the bare deck, except the cook
and steersmen, who were lazily engaged at their tasks most of the time.
The sea, of the deepest possible blue, as if all the indigo trees of the
tropics had spilled their product into it, rose and sank in its endless
unrest without our advancing a yard. Well on in the afternoon a puffing
breeze developed, and on the far port horizon appeared a few stenciled
mountains. Gradually we drew near enough to see that they were clothed
with forest to the very sea’s edge. With anything like a fair wind we
could have made La Guayra that evening, but the breeze was genuinely
Venezuelan. At sunset a school of dolphins surrounded the boat so
closely as almost to graze its sides, and for an hour indulged in
athletic feats, like a crowd of schoolboys showing off, not only diving
entirely out of water so near that we could almost have put out a hand
and touched them, but giving themselves two, and even three, complete
whirling turns in the air, like somersaulting circus performers, before
falling back into the sea with a mighty splash.
Dawn found us crawling close along a shore of sheer bush-grown mountains
lost in low clouds, lame with constant rolling on the hard deck and
disgusted with the monotony of existence. With La Guayra almost in sight
at the far point of this range, called the Silla de Caracas, we tacked
all morning against a head wind without seeming to advance a foot along
the roaring rocky mountain wall. Life on the ocean wave may sound
romantic on paper, but in a dirty and hungry sailboat off the coast of
Venezuela it calls for other descriptive adjectives. No doubt I needed
this final, post-graduate course in patience before leaving a
patience-training continent. Once we anchored to keep from losing the
little we had gained, and all day and the following night we rolled and
tossed in the selfsame spot, the man at the rudder trying alternately to
charm the wind with his raucous voice and to scare it into motion with a
vociferous “_Viento sinvergüenza, caramba!_” Now and then during the
night the snapping of canvas and the rattling of blocks above gave the
sensation that we were really moving at last, but when morning broke we
were off the very rock beside which we had lain down the night before.
Gradually, however, the breeze increased with the rising sun, and we
began to move swiftly through the water; but so strong is the current
along this coast that we seemed to remain for hours opposite identically
the same peak of the Sierra de Avila. Then we rolled for hours within
plain sight of La Guayra in a sea as flat as if oil had been poured on
it, without even a man at the rudder, so hopeless was everyone on board.
I had nothing to read; there was not a foot of space in which to walk; I
could not swim because of sharks; there was not a person of intelligence
within sound of my voice; even our miserable food was virtually gone;
there was only a bit of filthy, lukewarm water, full of all sorts of
sediment, at the bottom of the barrel, and still we flopped motionless
on a windless sea under a grilling sun. I understood at last what it
means to get oneself into a boat.
By taking advantage of every faintest puff of breeze, our leather-faced
old salt coaxed us along during the afternoon, until a stiffening wind
overtook us at last and we slipped ever more rapidly along the great
mountain wall. Tiny villages here and there clung far up on little knobs
of land; great shadowy valleys and sun-defying corners; a town here and
there along the base, all seemed to bake in the tropical sun, and
certainly to sleep. By four o’clock La Guayra lay before us, its bathing
resort of Macuto just off our port beam; yet so Venezuelan was the wind
that we did not know whether we could reach harbor in time to be allowed
ashore. I might have landed and walked into town long since, were it not
illegal for passengers to enter Venezuela except at a regular port with
a customhouse. It is a splendid arrangement for politicians, but of
small advantage to becalmed or shipwrecked sailors. I shaved, however,
poured sea-water over my maltreated body, put on the only clothing I had
left after pitching my rags overboard, and presented the captain with
the old felt hat that had protected me from the sun in fourteen
countries. This last act may have induced his ally, the wind, to waft us
in behind the breakwater while the sun was still above the horizon.
However, being in port in Venezuela is not synonymous with going
ashore. Once at anchor, almost within springing distance of a stone
wharf, I had to wait while the captain went to report my existence and
set in motion all the formalities, including the payment of fees, that
were required exactly as if I had been landing from a foreign country.
To tell the truth, no sane person would be eager to get ashore in La
Guayra, unless it was in the hope of immediately going elsewhere. A
parched and thirsty town, in spite of the brilliant blue sea beating
at its feet, with rows of unattractive houses, all alike except in
slight variations of color, and even those in pastel shades lacking
vividness, strewn irregularly, singly, in groups, and in one larger
mass, up dull-red and sand-colored hills which piled precipitously
into the sky, it plainly had little attractiveness except as a
picturesque ensemble from a distance. Trails climbed straight up this
sheer mountain-wall, as if in haste to escape the hot and ugly town at
its feet, while a carriage-road and a railway set out more decorously
along the shore for the same destination,—Caracas.
A brass-tinted, supercilious official with a prejudice against shaving,
who was lolling beneath a regal awning, had himself rowed out at last to
ask me a score of absurd questions and set my answers down at length in
a book, after which he went ashore again to advise the government
whether or not I should be granted an “order of disembarkment”—without
which I must continue to sit out here in the blazing sun even though the
“_Caracas_ of Wilmington, Delaware,” across the harbor were about to
sail and I eager to take it. By and by a yellow negro rowed out to ask
if I had a visiting-card to prove my respectability, saying the
_prefectura_ was “making some question” about my landing. Another hour
passed, and at last a boat was sent to take me ashore, where I applied
at once to the collector of customs for the baggage I had intrusted to
the purser of the Dutch boat that had dropped me at Trinidad. Luckily,
the latter had carried out instructions, or I should scarcely have dared
venture up to Caracas. Meanwhile, one of the men who had rowed out for
me was dogging my footsteps with a want-a-tip air. He was, it turned
out, collector for the _corporación_, the foreign company that built the
docks of La Guayra, and which exacts forty cents for every passenger who
lands—or sixty, if he comes from a boat not tied up to the wharf. But
instead of collecting it in an office, or in an official way, he
followed me about like a bootblack and then tried to squeeze an extra
“commission” out of me on the ground that he had been forced to follow
me about.
This “corporation,” which is English, holds what is rated “one of the
finest grafts” in South America, having the right for ninety-nine years
to charge for every person, every pound of merchandise, every trunk,
valise, and even handbag, which embarks or disembarks in La Guayra, to
say nothing of heavy fees for every ship that enters the harbor. Yet so
overrun is it said to be with native employees forced upon it by
politicians that the “graft” is by no means so splendid as it sounds.
Venezuela is notoriously in the front rank of political corruption in
South America, and La Guayra is its greatest single fleecing-place. From
the instant he enters this chief port the stranger is hounded at every
turn by grasping, insolent officials and political favorites permitted
to indulge in the most absurd extortions, a spirit which pervades the
entire population down to the last impudent, rascally street-urchin.
Taxes, dues and customs duties have frankly been made not only as high
and onerous but as complicated as possible, in order to mulct the
taxpayer or importer to the advantage of swarming loafers in government
uniform. A most intricate system of fines and penalties is imposed, for
instance, by the customs regulations, for the slightest errors in
invoices. The collectors receive meager salaries, but the discoverer of
any “violation” of the elaborate statutes pockets one half the fine
imposed, with the result that there is an un-Venezuelan zeal in looking
for flaws, and fines are assessed even for the omission of commas, the
faulty use of semicolons, and for abbreviations.
One can scarcely blame a man forced to live in La Guayra, however, for
taking it out on his fellow-man. Piled up the sheer, arid mountain-wall
with only two streets on the level, and with the sun baking in upon it
all day, it feels like a gigantic oven; certainly it was the hottest
place I had ever seen in South America. Nor was it the stirring,
endurable heat, tempered by a constant breeze, of most of the continent,
but a sweltering, melting temperature that not only left me drenched
with perspiration within a minute after I had stepped ashore, but which
made it impossible even to write because one’s hands soaked the paper,
which set one to dripping before he sat down to early morning coffee.
Everyone in town had a wilted, unshaven, downcast air, as if hating
himself and the world at large for his uncomfortable existence. To add
to my disgust, it was Friday, and the penetrating stink of fish pervaded
every corner of the organized squalor, pursuing me even into the highest
room of the dirty negro _pension_ which posed as a hotel. The only
endurable place in town was a little piece of park and promenade along
the edge of the sea; but the bestial habits of the populace had sullied
even the ocean breezes.
The “Ferrocarril La Guaira á Caracas,” built in 1885 by an English
company, takes twenty-four miles to cover an actual distance of about
eight, with a fare of ten cents a mile and a train in each direction
twice a day. So often had I climbed by rail abruptly into the clouds in
South America that this was no new experience. Moreover, the climb is
much less lofty than several others, though there is much the same
sensation as one goes swiftly up from sea-level in vast curves around
the reddish desert hills, with an ever-opening vista of La Guayra and
its adjacent towns along the scalloped shore. Then the train squirms in
and out of Andean ranges, at times utterly barren, at others green, past
dizzy precipices and mighty valleys, the stone-faced cartload climbing
in vast turns in the same general direction. At the halfway station of
Zigzag we passed the down train, after which we rumbled quite a while
across a plateau country among mountain heights, until finally there
burst upon me the last South American capital—striking, but not to be
compared with the first view of several others.
Caracas has “some 11,000 houses and 80,000 inhabitants,” including its
suburbs, partly because the constant revolutions have driven the
population to the national capital for protection. A tyrant can do
things out on the lonely _llanos_ which he would not dare do in the
shadow of his own palace. Being but three thousand feet above sea-level,
it lacks many of the unique features of lofty Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz;
yet it is high enough to have a cool mountain air that quickly fills the
traveler in the tropics with new life. Seated in a mountain lap twelve
miles by three in size, the Sierra de Avila cuts it off from the sea and
high hills enclose it on all sides. The site is uneven, especially
toward the range, its upper part covered with forest, over which climb
the same direct trails one sees scrambling up the far more precipitous
mountain face from La Guayra. Here and there the town is broken up by
_quebradas_ and several small streams, of which the Guaire is almost a
river; yet Caracas in its lap of green hills is not itself hilly, but
merely undulating, its streets rolling leisurely away across town, with
a considerable slope from north to south, so that every shower washes
the city, and the tropical deluges to which it is sometimes subject make
rivers of the north-and-south streets. The Venezuelan capital has little
of the picturesqueness of several west-coast capitals. There are no
Indians with their distinctive dress, no paganish street-calls, no
quaint aboriginal customs. On the other hand, it is well put together,
with good pavements and sidewalks, instead of cobbled roads with
flagstones down the center, and has a more up-to-date air, as if closer
in touch with the world than the loftier cities to the west, and it is
at least a pretty city from whatever hillside one looks down upon it.
The houses are wrong side out, of course, after the Moorish-Spanish
fashion, the streets faced by ugly bare walls, with the flowery gardens
and the pretty girls within. It has by no means so many churches per
capita as some of its neighbors, though many priests are to be seen,
sometimes standing on the corners smoking cigarettes and “talking girls”
with their layman fellow-sports. The cathedral houses a fine painting,
unusual in South American churches, an enormous “Last Supper” by a
Venezuelan who died while engaged upon it, so that portions are merely
sketched. Beside the National Theater there is a bronze statue of
Washington, erected during the centenary of Bolívar in 1883. He has no
cause to feel lonely, even so far from home, for Caracas swarms with
national heroes—in statues, the only muscular, full-chested men in town,
unless one be misled by the splendid tailor-made shoulders in the plazas
and paseos. No other city of its size, evidently, was the birthplace of
so many great men. Nearly every other house bears a tablet announcing it
as the scene of the first squall of “Generalisimo” Fulano or of “the
great genius” Solano. Not all of these, however, are mere local
celebrities; two simple old houses bear the tablets of Andrés Bello, the
grammarian, whose fame reached to Chile and to Spain, and of Simón
Bolívar, “the Liberator.”
Somehow, when one has been out of it for a time, the Latin-American
atmosphere is almost pleasing—when one is in a mood for it. Here I found
myself enjoying again the hoarse screams of lottery-ticket vendors, the
cries of milk-dealers on horseback, their cans dangling beneath their
legs, the bread-man with his red, white and blue barrel on either side
of the horse he rides, the countless little shops where refugees,
huddling under the protection of the capital, strive to make both ends
meet by trying to sell something, content at least to be no longer at
the mercy of government as well as revolutionists out on the little
farms that have long since gone back to jungle. Caracas rises and begins
business later than La Guayra, where the heat of noonday makes a siesta
imperative; it is a bit less foppish than Bogotá or Quito, perhaps
because of its greater proximity to the world. Here, too, are ragged men
and boys who soften their incessant appeals by using a diminutive “Tiene
usted un fosforito?” “Dame un centavito, caballero?” “Regálame un
regalito, quiere?” It is easier to comply now and then with such
requests in a city where prices have not leaped skyward, as in most of
the world. At the “Hotel Filadelfia” my room and food cost four
_bolívares_ (almost eighty cents) a day. True, I found my hammock more
comfortable than the bed, though the nights were somewhat chilly in it;
and the impudence, indolence, and indifference of the _caraqueño_
servant is notorious. Ask anyone, from manager to the kitchen-boy, to do
something, and the reply was almost certain to be a sullen, “That’s not
my work,” nor would they ever deign to pass the word on to whosoever’s
work it was. Evidently they belonged to a union. As in Ecuador, hotel
guests were forbidden to talk politics.
Some of the principal streets were lined with gambling houses of all
classes, from two-cent-ante workmen’s places to sumptuous parlors with
pianos playing and the doors wide open to all, even to a penurious
“gringo” who came only to watch the heavy-eyed croupiers and the other
curious night types who make their living by coin manipulation. Though
“the cheapest thing in Caracas is women,” they are seldom seen on the
streets. Illegitimacy, like illiteracy, is more prevalent than its
opposite, but it is not the Spanish-American way to flaunt social vices.
American influence is more in evidence than in any other South American
country; Caracas is the only city on that continent where I saw native
boys playing baseball. Germans control much of the commerce and the
longest railway in the country, from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, but with
these exceptions the English hold most large enterprises, including
electric-lights, telephones, and street-cars, and are reputed to be
clever in keeping out American competition.
Like Santiago de Chile, Caracas has a limited number of “best families,”
who form the “aristocracy” and to some extent an oligarchy, though
intermarriage has produced among them some of the ills of European
royalty. There are good-looking, not a few pretty, and even occasionally
beautiful women in this class, though the casual visitor sees them only
behind the bars of their windows or promenading in carriages and
automobiles around El Paraiso across the Guaire on Sunday afternoons,
and at the evening band concerts in the Plaza Bolívar. On the whole,
this so-called higher class is more corrupt and worthless than the
workers, especially those of the _llanos_, who at least are laborious
and long-suffering, even though ignorant, superstitious, and often
victims of the same erotic influences as the rich and educated. It is
natural that the political power in Venezuela should have been wrested
from this weak “aristocracy” by hardier types from the interior.
The most notorious of these, the chief founder of that military
dictatorship which to this day holds Venezuela in a tighter grip than
any other country in South America, was Castro. Charles II of England
would have felt at home with this fallen tyrant, a degenerate who made
use of his power and government riches to corrupt the maidenhood of his
native land. His subordinates, especially the governor of the federal
district, were chosen less for their ability as rulers than for their
success in coaxing young girls to visit the tyrant in a house across the
Guaire, where he carried on his amours almost publicly. In those days
Caracas was overrun with saucy little presidential mistresses in short
skirts. Force, or anything else likely to lead to public scandal,
however, was not included among Castro’s amorous weapons—for there was a
Señora Castro before whose wrath the highest authorities of Venezuela
were wont to flee in dismay. The terror which Castro himself still
evokes among the masses of the country is such that his name to this day
is almost never openly spoken. In Ciudad Bolívar I sat one evening,
reading an exaggerated tale of the tyrant’s lust, a book proscribed in
Venezuela but stacked up in the book-stores of Trinidad, when the
hotel-keeper paused to ask in a trembling voice how I dared have such a
volume in my possession.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Ah, it is true,” he answered, turning away, “in the great United States
there are no tyrants to make a man fear his own shadow.”
Aside from his patent faults, however, Castro was a man of strength and
native ability; though this was offset by his provincial ignorance, a
misconception of the unknown outside world which led him to believe he
could easily thrash England, France and Germany combined, so that he
took pains to alienate foreign governments. It is an error into which
his successor has been careful not to fall.
General Juan Vicente Gomez is an _andino_, like Castro—that is, a man
from the mountainous part of the country near the Colombian border, with
considerable Indian blood and a primitive force that overwhelms the
soft-handed “aristocracy” of Caracas which once ruled the country. Like
Castro, he is ignorant, strong, coarse, and shrewd—fond of young women,
too, though with strength enough to put them into the background when
they interfere with more important matters. Years ago he mortgaged his
property to help Castro, but the latter treated him like a peon, even
after appointing him vice-president. Gomez, however, knew how to bide
his time. By 1908 his dissipations had left Castro no choice but to go
to the German baths or die, and he delegated his power to the obsequious
vice-president and went. A few days later Gomez set out at four in the
morning for a round of the military barracks, called out the commanders,
thrust a revolver into their ribs, and requested them henceforth to bear
in mind that he was president of Venezuela. This was his first
“election.” During his seven-year term he brought about some
improvements, particularly in roads and the army, not to mention
acquiring immense properties, while the exiled Castro was losing his to
former victims who were suing him in the Venezuelan courts. The
constitution stated that a president could not be elected to succeed
himself. Toward the end of his term, therefore, Gomez nominally
resigned, put in a temporary figurehead, and had congress “elect” him
again. At the same time he had a new constitution made in which there is
no mention of reëlections, with the understanding that it was to come
into force when he took the oath of office.
This he was to have done some months before, but, being a cautious man,
as well as preferring country life, “the elect”—never did I meet a
Venezuelan who dared mention him directly by name—remained on his own
ranches in Maracay, a hundred miles out along the German railway,
leaving one of the minor palaces occupied by a tool called “provisional
president.” Castro himself, however, never attained such absolute power
as the new tyrant, who puts recalcitrant congressmen in jail, personally
appoints state, municipal, and rural authorities, and in general smiles
benignly upon the helpless constitution. Not the least amusing contrasts
in Venezuela were the private opinions of its chief newspaper editors
and the slavish attitude of the sheets themselves, the entire front
pages of which were taken up day after day with photographs of the
“President-Elect of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Army” in
this or that daily occupation, followed, to the total exclusion of any
real news, by obsequious telegrams from his henchmen in all parts of the
country, from misinformed foreigners or foreign governments, often from
imaginary sources, congratulating him and his countrymen that “the
greatest man of the century has again been chosen as their leader by the
great and free Venezuelan people.” Even over-altruistic or subsidized
American periodicals with a South American circulation frequently hold
up the present tyrant of Venezuela as an example of the progressive
constitutional ruler. Many of the best people of that country would
prefer even American intervention to the illiterate tyranny which makes
it dangerous to speak their real thoughts above a whisper; but there is
a strict censorship, and Gomez, wiser than Castro, professes great
friendship for all great foreign powers, particularly the overshadowing
“Colossus of the North.”
In the long run a people probably gets about as good a government as it
deserves, and a stern dictator, on the style of Diaz of Mexico, is
perhaps the ruler best suited to Venezuela. But from our more
enlightened point of view such rule would not seem to promise social
improvement. The country is bled white to keep up the army and several
other presidential hobbies, to the exclusion of schools and other forms
of progress. Every cigarette-paper bears a printed government stamp
alleging that it pays duty in benefit of “Instrucción Pública,” a source
yielding more than a million dollars a year; yet it is years since the
students of the University of Caracas struck because Gomez spent the
legal income of the schools on the army, and at last accounts it had not
yet been reopened. The dictator himself can read, but not write, except
to sign his name. Every morning at four he was at his desk in Maracay,
the business of the day laid out before him,—first his private affairs,
next his hobby, the army, then politics and the country in general.
According to a genuine authority on the subject, he laboriously spells
out all the correspondence himself, then calls in a shrewd and trusted
uncle, a man too old to have ambitions to succeed him, and together they
concoct the replies. The present government of Venezuela is truly a
family government. General José Vicente Gomez, the son whom the dictator
is evidently grooming to be his ultimate successor, is Inspector General
of the Army; General Juan Gomez is governor of the federal district;
Colonel Alí Gomez is second vice-president; two other sons are
presidents of states—the dictator, by the way, is a bachelor—and so on
through the family. Like many another Venezuelan of numerous
descendants, “the elect” never married; but of his scores of children by
many different women he has legitimized the few most promising and
lifted them to his own level—a practical, man-governed form of survival
of the fittest.
With the white mists still clinging to Caracas and its sierra, I
strolled out one morning along the “Highway of the West” through the
flat, rich vega to Dos Caminos and Antimano, where the German railway
breaks out of the lap of hills and squirms away to Valencia and Puerto
Cabello. A private way through deep woods with coffee bushes brought me
to the little country home of Manuel Diaz Rodríguez, and at the same
time reminded me that all is not tyranny, sloth, and hopelessness in the
mistreated Land of the Orinoco. For here, amid stretches of light-green
sugar-cane that seems destined ultimately to bring material prosperity
to the country, lives one of South America’s greatest contributors to
modern Spanish literature.
I had planned to say farewell to South America by walking up through the
“Puerta de Caracas” and over the mountain range to La Guayra. But on the
last evening a tropical deluge roared down upon the capital, and I dared
not tempt fate to prevent me from reaching home within four years of my
departure on my Latin-American pilgrimage. The last day of August dawned
brilliant and cool. In my pocket was a ticket to Broadway and just
enough ragged Venezuelan money to carry me down the mountain and through
the swarming grafters of La Guayra to the steamer. Cheery with the
thought of home-coming, I lugged my own baggage—to the disdainful
astonishment of the Venezuelan crowd—out onto the platform and stowed it
away under a second-class bench. I had no sooner stepped back into the
waiting-room, however, than a gaunt and coppery _caraqueño_ slowly
mounted a chair in front of a blackboard over the ticket-office, and
with nerve-racking deliberation began to write, in a schoolboy hand
which required some ten seconds for each stroke and fully fifteen
minutes for the entire announcement:
_NOTICE_
_On account of landslides there will
be no morning train. Notice will be
given if the afternoon train
descends._
I had felt it in my bones! Fate did not purpose that I should ever
escape from this unattractive continent! This was the first train that
had failed to run in eight months, and of course it must be the very one
I had depended on to get me down in time for the steamer. It was too
late to walk—and with my baggage I could not run. Automobiles, quick to
scent trouble, were already raising their price for the trip from $20 to
$30 and $40. At last I found a Ford that would carry me and two other
Americans down for a hundred _bolívares_—which was about ninety more
than we owned among us. But by some stroke of fortune a thoroughly human
minister had been accredited to Caracas by our enigmatical State
Department. I regret to report that we routed him out of bed, and ten
minutes later were dashing full-tilt along the pool-filled and broken
highway to the coast. On the outskirts of the capital there were
innumerable lethargic donkey trains to dodge and pass. Then we were
twisting and turning along the mountain road, with thousands of feet of
loose shale piled sheer above and sudden death falling away directly
below us. The heavy rain had brought down rocks larger than dog-kennels,
and in places had heaped up loose stones and earth until the road was
practically blocked. At one such spot a big, aristocratic automobile
stood eyeing in despair a sharp V-shaped turn it could not make. Our
unpretentious conveyance scampered up on the slide, slipped to the very
edge of the deadly abyss, then climbed down upon solid road again and
sped on. Higher and higher climbed the serpentine _carretera_,
constantly whirling around turns where the slightest slip of the
mechanism or of the doubtful nerves of our very Venezuelan chauffeur
would have ended our journeyings for all time, tearing blindly around
sharp-angled curves with a bare six inches between us and instant death,
and that six inches likely to be treacherous sliding shale. Far up among
the reddish barren hills we passed the summit, then began to descend by
the same perilous highway, where we seemed ever and anon to be riding
off into the bluish void of infinity, suddenly coming cut on a view of
the coast and indigo sea far below us, and for a long time thereafter
winding and twisting incessantly downward, with no certainty that all
our efforts had not been in vain. Then all at once La Guayra appeared,
and out along the breakwater still lay the steamer, tiny as a rowboat
from this height, but plainly in no mood to move until we had time to
comply with the irksome Venezuelan formalities and scramble on board.
But it was a painful anticlimax to the life I had led in South America
to be rescued at the last by a Ford!
Of several hours’ struggle with swarming official and unofficial
grafters, with strutting negroes in uniform and “generals” who signed
with the only word they could write my permission to depart from their
fetid land, of the final cupidities of the “corporation,” I will say
nothing, lest I again be betrayed into language unbefitting a homeward
journey. Suffice it that at last I clambered dripping wet up the
gangway, at the foot of which an ill-bred youth in a Venezuelan uniform
snatched the “permission to embark” in pursuit of which I had spent
perspiring hours, and soon black night had blotted out from my sight the
variegated but not soon to be forgotten continent of South America.
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Changed “flies of an army” to “files of an army” on p. 73.
2. Changed “With out feet” to “With our feet” on p. 258.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors.
4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Working North from Patagonia - Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through - Southern and Eastern South America" ***
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