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Title: Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America
Author: Davis, Richard Harding
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America" ***
AND CENTRAL AMERICA ***
[Illustration: FORDING THE CHAMELICON RIVER]
THREE GRINGOS IN VENEZUELA
AND
CENTRAL AMERICA
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896
BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
_Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental._
ABOUT PARIS. $1 25.
THE PRINCESS ALINE. $1 25.
OUR ENGLISH COUSINS. $1 25.
THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. $1 25.
THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW. $1 25.
THE EXILES, AND OTHER STORIES. $1 50.
VAN BIBBER, AND OTHERS. $1 00. (Paper, 60 cents.)
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
MY FRIENDS
H. SOMERS SOMERSET
AND
LLOYD GRISCOM
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA 1
THE EXILED LOTTERY 27
IN HONDURAS 56
AT CORINTO 160
ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 193
THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA 221
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FORDING THE CHAMELICON RIVER _Frontispiece_
MAP OF VENEZUELA AND CENTRAL AMERICA, SHOWING
THE ROUTE OF THE “THREE GRINGOS” xiii
GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE 7
SIR ALFRED MOLONEY 10
NATIVE CONSTABULARY, BELIZE 13
MAIN STREET, BELIZE 17
NATIVE WOMEN OF LIVINGSTON 20
GUATEMALLECAN ARMY AT LIVINGSTON 23
BARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS 25
THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING 35
THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS 51
OUR NAVAL ATTACHÉ 57
OUR MILITARY ATTACHÉ 60
A STRETCH OF CENTRAL-AMERICAN RAILWAY 62
THE THREE GRINGOS 64
SETTING OUT FROM SAN PEDRO SULA 67
THE HIGHLANDS OF HONDURAS 71
SOMERSET 74
A DRAWER OF WATER 77
NATIVE METHOD OF DRYING COFFEE 85
IN A CENTRAL-AMERICAN FOREST 89
ON THE TRAIL TO SANTA BARBARA 97
A HALT AT TRINIDAD 101
GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN 105
OUR PACK-TRAIN AT SANTA BARBARA 107
A VILLAGE IN THE INTERIOR 114
BRIDGE CONNECTING TEGUCIGALPA WITH ITS SUBURB 123
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TEGUCIGALPA 127
THE BANK OF HONDURAS 129
STATUE OF MORAZAN 132
P. BONILLA 135
GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN, EX-PRESIDENT 138
BARRACKS OF TEGUCIGALPA AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE
REVOLUTIONISTS 141
MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS 145
ON THE WAY TO CORINTO 155
PRINCIPAL HOTEL AND PRINCIPAL HOUSE AT CORINTO 162
HARBOR OF CORINTO 175
THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE AT MANAGUA 179
PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA 183
MAP OF THE WORLD SHOWING CHANGES IN TRADE
ROUTES AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE NICARAGUA
CANAL 191
DREDGES IN THE CANAL 195
THE BAY OF PANAMA 199
PANAMA CANAL ON THE PACIFIC SIDE 203
HUTS OF WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL 206
THE TOP OF A DREDGE 209
STREET SCENE IN PANAMA 213
THE CANAL IN THE INTERIOR 217
STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, CARACAS 223
STATUE OF WASHINGTON DECORATED WITH FLORAL
WREATHS BY THE VENEZUELANS 227
DECORATION OF THE STATUE OF BOLIVAR AT CARACAS,
VENEZUELA, DECEMBER 18, 1895, BY AMERICAN
RESIDENTS 231
SIMON BOLIVAR 234
VIEW OF LA GUAYRA 235
THE RAILROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN 239
COURT-YARD OF A HOUSE IN CARACAS 243
THE MARKET OF CARACAS 247
VIEW OF CARACAS _Facing_ 250
PRESIDENT CRESPO, OF VENEZUELA 251
LEGISLATIVE BUILDING, CARACAS 253
THE PRESIDENT’S BODY-GUARD OF COWBOYS 255
BAPTIZING INDIANS AT A VENEZUELA STATION ON THE
CUYUNI RIVER 259
A TYPICAL HUNTING-PARTY IN VENEZUELA 263
A CLEARING IN THE COUNTRY 267
THE CUYUNI RIVER 271
VENEZUELAN STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER 274
ENGLISH STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER 275
DR. PEDRO EZEQUIEL ROJAS 277
MAP EXPLAINING VENEZUELAN BOUNDARY DISPUTE 278
THE CITY OF CARACAS 279
[Illustration: MAP OF VENEZUELA AND CENTRAL AMERICA, SHOWING THE ROUTE
OF THE “THREE GRINGOS”]
ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA
THE steamer _Breakwater_ lay at the end of a muddy fruit-wharf a mile
down the levee.
She was listed to sail that morning for Central-American ports, and we
were going with her in search of warm weather and other unusual things.
When we left New York the streets were lined with frozen barricades of
snow, upon which the new brooms of a still newer administration had
made so little impression that people were using them as an excuse
for being late for dinners; and at Washington, while the snow had
disappeared, it was still bitterly cold. And now even as far south as
New Orleans we were shivering in our great-coats, and the newspapers
were telling of a man who, the night before, had been found frozen to
death in the streets. It seemed as though we were to keep on going
south, forever seeking warmth, only to find that Nature at every point
of lower latitude had paid us the compliment of changing her season to
spite us.
So the first question we asked when we came over the side of the
_Breakwater_ was not when we should first see land, but when we should
reach warm weather.
There were four of us, counting Charlwood, young Somerset’s servant.
There was Henry Somers Somerset, who has travelled greater distances
for a boy still under age than any other one of his much-travelled
countrymen that I have ever met. He has covered as many miles in the
last four years as would make five trips around the world, and he
came with me for the fun of it, and in what proved the vain hope of
big game. The third was Lloyd Griscom, of Philadelphia, and later of
London, where he has been attaché at our embassy during the present
administration. He had been ordered south by his doctor, and only
joined us the day before we sailed.
We sat shivering under the awning on the upper deck, and watched the
levees drop away on either side as we pushed down the last ninety
miles of the Mississippi River. Church spires and the roofs of houses
showed from the low-lying grounds behind the dikes, and gave us the
impression that we were riding on an elevated road. The great river
steamers, with paddle-wheels astern and high double smoke-stacks, that
were associated in our minds with pictures of the war and those in
our school geographies, passed us, pouring out heavy volumes of black
smoke, on their way to St. Louis, and on each bank we recognized, also
from pictures, magnolia-trees and the ugly cotton-gins and the rows of
negroes’ quarters like the men’s barracks in a fort.
At six o’clock, when we had reached the Gulf, the sun sank a blood-red
disk into great desolate bayous of long grass and dreary stretches of
vacant water. Dead trees with hanging gray moss and mistletoe on their
bare branches reared themselves out of the swamps like gallows-trees
or giant sign-posts pointing the road to nowhere; and the herons,
perched by dozens on their limbs or moving heavily across the sky
with harsh, melancholy cries, were the only signs of life. On each
side of the muddy Mississippi the waste swamp-land stretched as far
as the eye could reach, and every blade of the long grass and of the
stunted willows and every post of the dikes stood out black against
the red sky as vividly as though it were lit by a great conflagration,
and the stagnant pools and stretches of water showed one moment like
flashing lakes of fire, and the next, as the light left them, turned
into mirrors of ink. It was a scene of the most awful and beautiful
desolation, and the silence, save for the steady breathing of the
steamer’s engine, was the silence of the Nile at night.
For the next three days we dropped due south as the map lies from the
delta of the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean
Sea. It was moonlight by night, and sun and blue water by day, and the
decks kept level, and the vessel was clean.
Our fellow-passengers were banana-planters and engineers going to
Panama and Bluefields, and we asked them many questions concerning
rates of exchange and the rainy season and distances and means of
transportation, to which they gave answers as opposite as can only come
from people who have lived together in the same place for the greater
part of their lives.
Land, when it came, appeared in the shape of little islands that
floated in mid-air above the horizon like the tops of trees, without
trunks to support them, or low-lying clouds. They formed the
skirmish-line of Yucatan, the northern spur of Central America, and
seemed from our decks as innocent as the Jersey sand-hills, but were,
the pilot told us, inhabited by wild Indians who massacre people who
are so unfortunate as to be shipwrecked there, and who will not pay
taxes to Mexico. But the little we saw of their savagery was when we
passed within a ship’s length of a ruined temple to the Sun, standing
conspicuously on a jutting point of land, with pillars as regular and
heavily cut as some of those on the Parthenon. It was interesting to
find such a monument a few days out from New Orleans.
Islands of palms on one side and blue mountains on the other, and water
as green as corroded copper, took the place of the white sand-banks of
Yucatan, and on the third day out we had passed the Mexican state and
steamed in towards the coast of British Honduras, and its chief seaport
and capital, Belize.
British Honduras was formerly owned by Spain, as was all of Central
America, and was, on account of its bays and islands, a picturesque
refuge for English and other pirates. In the seventeenth century
English logwood-cutters visited the place and obtained a footing, which
has been extended since by concessions and by conquest, so that the
place is now a British dependency. It forms a little slice of land
between Yucatan and Guatemala, one hundred and seventy-four miles in
its greatest length, and running sixty-eight miles inland.
Belize is a pretty village of six thousand people, living in low,
broad-roofed bungalows, lying white and cool-looking in the border of
waving cocoanut-trees and tall, graceful palms. It was not necessary
to tell us that Belize would be the last civilized city we should see
until we reached the capital of Spanish Honduras. A British colony is
always civilized; it is always the same, no matter in what latitude
it may be, and it is always distinctly British. Every one knows that
an Englishman takes his atmosphere with him wherever he goes, but the
truth of it never impressed me so much as it did at Belize. There were
not more than two hundred English men and women in the place, and
yet, in the two halves of two days that I was there I seemed to see
everything characteristic of an Englishman in his native land. There
were a few concessions made to the country and to the huge native
population, who are British subjects themselves; but the colony, in
spite of its surroundings, was just as individually English as is
the shilling that the ship’s steward pulls out of his pocket with a
handful of the queer coin that he has picked up at the ports of a
half-dozen Spanish republics. They may be of all sizes and designs,
and of varying degrees of a value, or the lack of it, which changes
from day to day, but the English shilling, with the queen’s profile
on one side and its simple “one shilling” on the other, is worth just
as much at that moment and at that distance from home as it would
be were you handing it to a hansom-cab driver in Piccadilly. And we
were not at all surprised to find that the black native police wore
the familiar blue-and-white-striped cuff of the London bobby, and
the district-attorney a mortar-board cap and gown, and the colonial
bishop gaiters and an apron.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE]
It was quite in keeping, also, that the advertisements on the
boardings should announce and give equal prominence to a “Sunday-school
treat” and a boxing-match between men of H.M.S. _Pelican_, and that
the officers of that man-of-war should be playing cricket with a
local eleven under the full tropical sun, and that the chairs in the
Council-room and Government House should be of heavy leather stamped
V.R., with a crown above the initials. An American official in as hot
a climate, being more adaptable, would have had bamboo chairs with
large, open-work backs, or would have even supplied the council with
rocking-chairs.
Lightfoot agreed to take us ashore at a quarter of a dollar apiece.
He had a large open sail-boat, and everybody called him Lightfoot and
seemed to know him intimately, so we called him Lightfoot too. He
was very black, and light-hearted at least, and spoke English with
the soft, hesitating gentleness that marks the speech of all these
natives. It was Sunday on land, and Sunday in an English colony is
observed exactly as it should be, and so the natives were in heavily
starched white clothes, and were all apparently going somewhere to
church in rigid rows of five or six. But there were some black soldiers
of the West India Regiment in smart Zouave uniforms and turbans that
furnished us with local color, and we pursued one of them for some time
admiringly, until he become nervous and beat a retreat to the barracks.
[Illustration: SIR ALFRED MOLONEY
(Central Figure)]
Somerset had a letter from his ambassador in Washington to Sir Alfred
Moloney, K.C.M.G., the governor of British Honduras, and as we hoped it
would get us all an invitation to dinner, we urged him to present it at
once. Four days of the ship’s steward’s bountiful dinners, served at
four o’clock in the afternoon, had made us anxious for a change both in
the hour and the diet. The governor’s house at Belize is a very large
building, fronting the bay, with one of the finest views from and most
refreshing breezes on its veranda that a man could hope to find on a
warm day, and there is a proud and haughty sentry at each corner of the
grounds and at the main entrance. A fine view of blue waters beyond a
green turf terrace covered with cannon and lawn-tennis courts, and four
sentries marching up and down in the hot sun, ought to make any man, so
it seems to me, content to sit on his porch in the shade and feel glad
that he is a governor.
Somerset passed the first sentry with safety, and we sat down on the
grass by the side of the road opposite to await developments, and were
distressed to observe him make directly for the kitchen, with the
ambassador’s letter held firmly in his hand. So we stood up and shouted
to him to go the other way, and he became embarrassed, and continued to
march up and down the gravel walk with much indecision, and as if he
could not make up his mind where he wanted to go, like the grenadiers
in front of St. James’s Palace. It happened that his excellency was
out, so Somerset left our cards and his letter, and we walked off
through the green, well-kept streets and wondered at the parrots and
the chained monkeys and the Anglicized little negro girls in white
cotton stockings and with Sunday-school books under their arms. All
the show-places of interest were closed on that day, so, after an
ineffectual attempt to force our way into the jail, which we mistook
for a monastery, we walked back through an avenue of cocoanut-palms to
the International Hotel for dinner.
[Illustration: NATIVE CONSTABULARY, BELIZE]
We had agreed that as it was our first dinner on shore, it should be a
long and excellent one, with several kinds of wine. The International
Hotel is a large one, with four stories, and a balcony on each floor;
and after wandering over the first three of these in the dark we came
upon a lonely woman with three crying children, who told us with
reproving firmness that in Belize the dinner-hour is at four in the
afternoon, and that no one should expect a dinner at seven. We were
naturally cast down at this rebuff, and even more so when her husband
appeared out of the night and informed us that keeping a hotel did
not pay--at least, that it did not pay him--and that he could not
give us anything to drink because he had not renewed his license, and
even if he had a license he would not sell us anything on Sunday.
He had a touch of malaria, he said, and took a gloomy view of life
in consequence, and our anxiety to dine well seemed, in contrast,
unfeeling and impertinent. But we praised the beauty of the three
children, and did not set him right when he mistook us for officers
from the English gunboats in the harbor, and for one of these
reasons he finally gave us a cold dinner by the light of a smoking
lamp, and made us a present of a bottle of stout, for which he later
refused any money. We would have enjoyed our dinner at Belize in spite
of our disappointment had not an orderly arrived in hot search after
Somerset, and borne him away to dine at Government House, where Griscom
and I pictured him, as we continued eating our cold chicken and beans,
dining at her majesty’s expense, with fine linen and champagne, and
probably ice. Lightfoot took us back to the boat in mournful silence,
and we spent the rest of the evening on the quarter-deck telling
each other of the most important people with whom we had ever dined,
and had nearly succeeded in re-establishing our self-esteem, when
Somerset dashed up in a man-of-war’s launch glittering with brass
and union-jacks, and left it with much ringing of electric bells
and saluting and genial farewells from admirals and midshipmen in
gold-lace, with whom he seemed to be on a most familiar and friendly
footing. This was the final straw, and we held him struggling over
the ship’s side, and threatened to drop him to the sharks unless he
promised never to so desert us again. And discipline was only restored
when he assured us that he was the bearer of an invitation from the
governor to both breakfast and luncheon the following morning. The
governor apologized the next day for the informality of the manner in
which he had sent us the invitation, so I thought it best not to tell
him that it had been delivered by a young man while dangling by his
ankles from the side of the ship, with one hand holding his helmet and
the other clutching at the rail of the gangway.
There is much to be said of Belize, for in its way it was one of the
prettiest ports at which we touched, and its cleanliness and order,
while they were not picturesque or foreign to us then, were in so great
contrast to the ports we visited later as to make them most remarkable.
It was interesting to see the responsibilities and the labor of
government apportioned out so carefully and discreetly, and to find
commissioners of roads, and then district commissioners, and under them
inspectors, and to hear of boards of education and boards of justice,
each doing its appointed work in this miniature government, and all
responsible to the representative of the big government across the sea.
And it was reassuring to read in the blue-books of the colony that the
health of the port has improved enormously during the last three years.
[Illustration: MAIN STREET, BELIZE]
Monday showed an almost entirely different Belize from the one we had
seen on the day before. Shops were open and busy, and the markets were
piled high with yellow oranges and bananas and strange fruits, presided
over by negresses in rich-colored robes and turbans, and smoking
fat cigars. There was a show of justice also in a parade of prisoners,
who, in spite of their handcuffs, were very anxious to halt long enough
to be photographed, and there was a great bustle along the wharves,
where huge rafts of logwood and mahogany floated far into the water.
The governor showed us through his botanical station, in which he has
collected food-giving products from over all the world, and plants
that absorb the malaria in the air, and he hinted at the social life
of Belize as well, tempting us with a ball and dinners to the officers
of the men-of-war; but the _Breakwater_ would not wait for such
frivolities, so we said farewell to Belize and her kindly governor,
and thereafter walked under strange flags, and were met at every step
with the despotic little rules and safeguards which mark unstable
governments.
Livingston was like a village on the coast of East Africa in comparison
with Belize. It is the chief seaport of Guatemala on the Atlantic side,
and Guatemala is the furthest advanced of all the Central-American
republics; but her civilization lies on the Pacific side, and does not
extend so far as her eastern boundary.
[Illustration: NATIVE WOMEN AT LIVINGSTON]
There are two opposite features of landscape in the tropics which
are always found together--the royal palm, which is one of the most
beautiful of things, and the corrugated zinc-roof custom-house, which
is one of the ugliest. Nature never appears so extravagant or so
luxurious as she does in these hot latitudes; but just as soon as she
has fashioned a harbor after her own liking, and set it off at her best
so that it is a haven of delight to those who approach it from the sea,
civilized man comes along and hammers square walls of zinc together and
spoils the beauty of the place forever. The natives, who do not care
for customs dues, help nature out with thatch-roofed huts and walls of
adobe or yellow cane, or add curved red tiles to the more pretentious
houses, and so fill out the picture. But the “gringo,” or the man from
the interior, is in a hurry, and wants something that will withstand
earthquakes and cyclones, and so wherever you go you can tell that he
has been there before you by his architecture of zinc.
When you turn your back on the custom-house at Livingston and the rows
of wooden shops with open fronts, you mount the hill upon which the
town stands, and there you will find no houses but those which have
been created out of the mud and the trees of the place itself. There
are no streets to the village nor doors to the houses; they are all
exactly alike, and the bare mud floor of one is as unindividual, except
for the number of naked children crawling upon it, as is any of the
others. The sun and the rain are apparently free to come and go as they
like, and every one seems to live in the back of the house, under the
thatched roof which shades the clay ovens. Most of the natives were
coal-black, and the women, in spite of the earth floors below and the
earth walls round about them, were clean, and wore white gowns that
trailed from far down their arms, leaving the chest and shoulders bare.
They were a very simple, friendly lot of people, and rail from all
parts of the settlement to be photographed, and brought us flowers
from their gardens, for which they refused money.
We had our first view of the Central-American soldier at Livingston,
and, in spite of all we had heard, he surprised us very much. The
oldest of those whom we saw was eighteen years, and the youngest
soldiers were about nine. They wore blue jean uniforms, ornamented with
white tape, and the uniforms differed in shade according to the number
of times they had been washed. These young men carried their muskets
half-way up the barrel, or by the bayonet, dragging the stock on the
ground.
General Barrios, the young President of Guatemala, has some very smart
soldiers at the capital, and dresses them in German uniforms, which
is a compliment he pays to the young German emperor, for whom he has
a great admiration; but his discipline does not extend so far as the
Caribbean Sea.
[Illustration: THE GUATEMALLECAN ARMY AT LIVINGSTON]
The river Dulce goes in from Livingston, and we were told it was one of
the things in Central America we ought to see, as its palisades were
more beautiful than those of the Rhine. The man who told us this said
he spoke from hearsay, and that he had never been on the Rhine, but
that he knew a gentleman who had. You can well believe that it is very
beautiful from what you can see of its mouth, where it flows into the
Caribbean between great dark banks as high as the palisades opposite
Dobbs Ferry, and covered with thick, impenetrable green.
[Illustration: BARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS]
Port Barrios, to which one comes in a few hours, is at one end of
a railroad, and surrounded by all the desecration that such an
improvement on nature implies, in the form of zinc depots, piles of
railroad-ties, and rusty locomotives. The town consists of a single
row of native huts along the coast, terminating in a hospital. Every
house is papered throughout with copies of the New York _Police
Gazette_, which must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on the habits
and virtues of his cousins in North America. Most of our passengers
left the ship here, and we met them, while she was taking on bananas,
wandering about the place with blank faces, or smiling grimly at the
fate which condemned them and their blue-prints and transits to a place
where all nature was beautiful and only civilized man was discontented.
We lay at Barrios until late at night, wandering round the deserted
decks, or watching the sharks sliding through the phosphorus and the
lights burning in the huts along the shore. At midnight we weighed
anchor, and in the morning steamed into Puerto Cortez, the chief port
of Spanish Honduras, where the first part of our journey ended, and
where we exchanged the ship’s deck for the Mexican saddle, and hardtack
for tortillas.
THE EXILED LOTTERY
TWO years ago, while I was passing through Texas, I asked a young man
in the smoking-car if he happened to know where I could find the United
States troops, who were at that time riding somewhere along the borders
of Texas and Mexico, and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza
revolution.
The young man did not show that he was either amused or surprised at
the abruptness of the question, but answered me promptly, as a matter
of course, and with minute detail. “You want to go to San Antonio,” he
said, “and take the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary, and then
change to the freight that leaves once a day to Corpus Christi, and
get off at Pena station. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can hire
a horse there and ride to the San Rosario Ranch. Captain Hardie is at
Rosario with Troop G, Third Cavalry. They call him the Riding Captain,
and if any one can show you all there is to see in this Garza outfit,
he can.”
The locomotive whistle sounded at that moment, the train bumped itself
into a full stop at a station, and the young man rose. “Good-day,” he
said, smiling pleasantly; “I get off here.”
He was such an authoritative young man, and he had spoken in so
explicit a manner, that I did as he had directed; and if the story that
followed was not interesting, the fault was mine, and not that of my
chance adviser.
* * * * *
A few months ago I was dining alone in Delmonico’s, when the same young
man passed out through the room, and stopped on his way beside my table.
“Do you remember me?” he said. “I met you once in a smoking-car in
Texas. Well, I’ve got a story now that’s better than any you’ll find
lying around here in New York. You want to go to a little bay called
Puerto Cortez, on the eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America,
and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery there. It used to be
the biggest gambling concern in the world, but now it’s been banished
to a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-trees, and from there
it reaches out all over the United States, and sucks in thousands and
thousands of victims like a great octopus. You want to go there and
write a story about it. Good-night,” he added; then he nodded again,
with a smile, and walked across the room and disappeared into Broadway.
When a man that you have met once in a smoking-car interrupts you
between courses to suggest that you are wasting your time in New York,
and that you ought to go to a coral reef in Central America and write
a story of an outlawed lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it
does not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least, so much that I
went back to my rooms at once, and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the
map; and later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-plots in
Madison Square turned into piled-up islands of snow, surrounded by seas
of slippery asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went South to
investigate the exiled lottery. That is how this chapter and this book
came to be written.
Every one who goes to any theatre in the United States may have read
among the advertisements on the programme an oddly worded one which
begins, “Conrad! Conrad! Conrad!” and which goes on to say that--
“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery
Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the
Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay
St. Louis, Miss.
“Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as
well as all business communications, to
“PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras,
“Care Central America Express,
“FORT TAMPA CITY,
“FLORIDA, U. S. A.”
You have probably read this advertisement often, and enjoyed the
naïve manner in which Mr. Conrad asks for correspondence on different
subjects, especially on that relating to “all business communications,”
and how at the same time he has so described his whereabouts that no
letters so addressed would ever reach his far-away home in Puerto
Cortez, but would be promptly stopped at Tampa, as he means that they
should.
After my anonymous friend had told me of Puerto Cortez, I read of it
on the programme with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became to
me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of a certain dark significance,
and of possible adventure. I remembered all that the lottery had been
before the days of its banishment, and all that it had dared to be
when, as a corporation legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it
had put its chain and collar upon legislatures and senators, judges and
editors, when it had silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit
by great gifts of money to charities and hospitals, so giving out in
a lump sum with one hand what it had taken from the people in dollars
and half-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold, with the other.
I remembered when its trade-mark, in open-faced type, “La. S. L.,” was
as familiar in every newspaper in the United States as were the names
of the papers themselves, when it had not been excommunicated by the
postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real purpose under a
carefully worded paragraph in theatrical programmes or on “dodgers” or
handbills that had an existence of a moment before they were swept out
into the street, and which, as they were not sent through mails, were
not worthy the notice of the federal government.
It was not so very long ago that it requires any effort to remember it.
It is only a few years since the lottery held its drawings freely and
with much pomp and circumstance in the Charles Theatre, and Generals
Beauregard and Early presided at these ceremonies, selling the names
they had made glorious in a lost cause to help a cause which was, for
the lottery people at least, distinctly a winning one. For in those
days the state lottery cleared above all expenses seven million dollars
a year, and Generals Beauregard and Early drew incomes from it much
larger than the government paid to the judges of the Supreme Court and
the members of the cabinet who finally declared against the company and
drove it into exile.
There had been many efforts made to kill it in the past, and the state
lottery was called “the national disgrace” and “the modern slavery,”
and Louisiana was spoken of as a blot on the map of our country, as was
Utah when polygamy flourished within her boundaries and defied the laws
of the federal government. The final rally against the lottery occurred
in 1890, when the lease of the company expired, and the directors
applied to the legislature for a renewal. At that time it was paying
out but very little and taking in fabulous sums; how much it really
made will probably never be told, but its gains were probably no more
exaggerated by its enemies than was the amount of its expenses by the
company itself. Its outlay for advertising, for instance, which must
have been one of its chief expenses, was only forty thousand dollars
a year, which is a little more than a firm of soap manufacturers pay
for their advertising for the same length of time; and it is rather
discouraging to remember that for a share of this bribe every newspaper
in the city of New Orleans and in the State of Louisiana, with a few
notable exceptions, became an organ of the lottery, and said nothing
concerning it but what was good. To this sum may be added the salaries
of its officers, the money paid out in prizes, the cost of printing
and mailing the tickets, and the sum of forty thousand dollars paid
annually to the State of Louisiana. This tribute was considered
as quite sufficient when the lottery was first started, and while
it struggled for ten years to make a living; but in 1890, when its
continued existence was threatened, the company found it could very
well afford to offer the state not forty thousand, but a million
dollars a year, which gives a faint idea of what its net earnings must
have been. As a matter of fact, in those palmy times when there were
daily drawings, the lottery received on some days as many as eighteen
to twenty thousand letters, with orders for tickets enclosed which
averaged five dollars a letter.
It was Postmaster-general Wanamaker who put a stop to all this by
refusing to allow any printed matter concerning the lottery to pass
outside of the State of Louisiana, which decision, when it came, proved
to be the order of exile to the greatest gambling concern of modern
times.
The lottery, of course, fought this decision in the courts, and the
case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, and was
upheld, and from that time no letter addressed to the lottery in this
country, or known to contain matter referring to the lottery, and no
newspaper advertising it, can pass through the mails. This ruling
was known before the vote on the renewal of the lease came up in the
Legislature of Louisiana, and the lottery people say that, knowing that
they could not, under these new restrictions, afford to pay the sum
of one million dollars a year, they ceased their efforts to pass the
bill granting a renewal of their lease, and let it go without a fight.
This may or may not be true, but in any event the bill did not pass,
and the greatest lottery of all times was without a place in which to
spin its wheel, without a charter or a home, and was cut off from the
most obvious means of communication with its hundreds of thousands of
supporters. But though it was excommunicated, outlawed, and exiled, it
was not beaten; it still retained agents all over the country, and it
still held its customers, who were only waiting to throw their money
into its lap, and still hoping that the next drawing would bring the
grand prize.
For some long time the lottery was driven about from pillar to post,
and knocked eagerly here and there for admittance, seeking a home and
resting-place. It was not at first successful. The first rebuff came
from Mexico, where it had proposed to move its plant, but the Mexican
government was greedy, and wanted too large a sum for itself, or, what
is more likely, did not want so well-organized a rival to threaten the
earnings of her own national lottery. Then the republics of Colombia
and Nicaragua were each tempted with the honor of giving a name to the
new company, but each declined that distinction, and so it finally came
begging to Honduras, the least advanced of all of the Central-American
republics, and the most heavily burdened with debt.
[Illustration: THE EXILED LOTTERY BUILDING]
Honduras agreed to receive the exile, and to give it her name and
protection for the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year and twenty
per cent. of its gross earnings. It would seem that this to a country
that has not paid the interest on her national debt for twelve years
was a very advantageous bargain; but as four presidents and as many
revolutions and governments have appeared and disappeared in the
two years in which the lottery people have received their charter
in Honduras, the benefit of the arrangement to them has not been an
obvious one, and it was not until two years ago that the first drawing
of the lottery was held at Puerto Cortez. The company celebrated this
occasion with a pitiful imitation of its former pomp and ceremony, and
there was much feasting and speech-making, and a special train was run
from the interior to bring important natives to the ceremonies. But
the train fell off the track four times, and was just a day late in
consequence. The young man who had charge of the train told me this,
and he also added that he did not believe in lotteries.
During these two years, when representatives of the company were taking
rides of nine days each to the capital to overcome the objections
of the new presidents who had sprung into office while these same
representatives had been making their return trip to the coast, others
were seeking a foothold for the company in the United States. The need
of this was obvious and imperative. The necessity which had been forced
upon them of holding the drawings out of this country, and of giving up
the old name and trade-mark, was serious enough, though it had been
partially overcome. It did not matter where they spun their wheel; but
if the company expected to live, there must be some place where it
could receive its mail and distribute its tickets other than the hot
little Honduranian port, locked against all comers by quarantine for
six months of the year, and only to be reached during the other six by
a mail that arrives once every eight days.
The lottery could not entirely overcome this difficulty, of course,
but through the aid of the express companies of this country it was
able to effect a substitute, and through this cumbersome and expensive
method of transportation its managers endeavored to carry on the
business which in the days when the post-office helped them had brought
them in twenty thousand letters in twenty-four hours. They selected
for their base of operations in the United States the port of Tampa,
in the State of Florida--that refuge of prize-fighters and home of
unhappy Englishmen who have invested in the swamp-lands there, under
the delusion that they were buying town sites and orange plantations,
and which masquerades as a winter resort with a thermometer that not
infrequently falls below freezing. So Tampa became their home; and
though the legislature of that state proved incorruptible, so the
lottery people themselves tell me, there was at least an understanding
between them and those in authority that the express company was not
to be disturbed, and that no other lottery was to have a footing in
Florida for many years to come.
If Puerto Cortez proved interesting when it was only a name on a
theatre programme, you may understand to what importance it grew when
it could not be found on the map of any steamship company in New York,
and when no paper of that city advertised dates of sailing to that
port. For the first time Low’s Exchange failed me and asked for time,
and the ubiquitous Cook & Sons threw up their hands, and offered in
desperation and as a substitute a comfortable trip to upper Burmah or
to Mozambique, protesting that Central America was beyond even their
finding out. Even the Maritime Exchange confessed to a much more
intimate knowledge of the west coast of China than of the little group
of republics which lies only a three or four days’ journey from the
city of New Orleans. So I was forced to haunt the shipping-offices of
Bowling Green for days together, and convinced myself while so engaged
that that is the only way properly to pursue the study of geography,
and I advise every one to try it, and submit the idea respectfully
to instructors of youth. For you will find that by the time you have
interviewed fifty shipping-clerks, and learned from them where they
can set you down and pick you up and exchange you to a fruit-vessel
or coasting steamer, you will have obtained an idea of foreign ports
and distances which can never be gathered from flat maps or little
revolving globes. I finally discovered that there was a line running
from New York and another from New Orleans, the fastest steamer of
which latter line, as I learned afterwards, was subsidized by the
lottery people. They use it every month to take their representatives
and clerks to Puerto Cortez, when, after they have held the monthly
drawing, they steam back again to New Orleans or Tampa, carrying with
them the list of winning numbers and the prizes.
It was in the boat of this latter line that we finally awoke one
morning to find her anchored in the harbor of Puerto Cortez.
The harbor is a very large one and a very safe one. It is encircled
by mountains on the sea-side, and by almost impenetrable swamps and
jungles on the other. Close around the waters of the bay are bunches
and rows of the cocoanut palm, and a village of mud huts covered
with thatch. There is also a tin custom-house, which includes the
railroad-office and a comandancia, and this and the jail or barracks
of rotting whitewashed boards, and the half-dozen houses of one story
belonging to consuls and shipping agents, are the only other frame
buildings in the place save one. That is a large mansion with broad
verandas, painted in colors, and set in a carefully designed garden of
rare plants and manaca palms. Two poles are planted in the garden, one
flying the blue-and-white flag of Honduras, the other with the stripes
and stars of the United States. This is the home of the exiled lottery.
It is the most pretentious building and the cleanest in the whole
republic of Honduras, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific slope.
I confess that I was foolish enough to regard this house of magnificent
exterior, as I viewed it from the wharf, as seriously as a general
observes the ramparts and defences of the enemy before making his
advance. I had taken a nine days’ journey with the single purpose of
seeing and getting at the truth concerning this particular building,
and whether I was now to be viewed with suspicion and treated as an
intruder, whether my object would be guessed at once and I should be
forced to wait on the beach for the next steamer, or whether I would be
received with kindness which came from ignorance of my intentions, I
could not tell. And while I considered, a black Jamaica negro decided
my movements for me. There was a hotel, he answered, doubtfully, but he
thought it would be better, if Mr. Barross would let me in, to try for
a room in the Lottery Building.
“Mr. Barross sometimes takes boarders,” he said, “and the Lottery
Building is a fine house, sir--finest house this side Mexico city.” He
added, encouragingly, that he spoke English “very good,” and that he
had been in London.
Sitting on the wide porch of the Lottery Building was a dark-faced,
distinguished-looking little man, a creole apparently, with white hair
and white goatee. He rose and bowed as I came up through the garden
and inquired of him if he was the manager of the lottery, Mr. Barross,
and if he could give me food and shelter. The gentleman answered
that he was Mr. Barross, and that he could and would do as I asked,
and appealed with hospitable warmth to a tall, handsome woman, with
beautiful white hair, to support him in his invitation. Mrs. Barross
assented kindly, and directed her servants to place a rocking-chair in
the shade, and requested me to be seated in it; luncheon, she assured
me, would be ready in a half-hour, and she hoped that the voyage south
had been a pleasant one.
And so within five minutes after arriving in the mysterious harbor of
Puerto Cortez I found myself at home under the roof of the outlawed
lottery, and being particularly well treated by its representative, and
feeling particularly uncomfortable in consequence. I was heartily sorry
that I had not gone to the hotel. And so, after I had been in my room,
I took pains to ascertain exactly what my position in the house might
be, and whether or not, apart from the courtesy of Mr. Barross and
his wife, for which no one could make return, I was on the same free
footing that I would have been in a hotel. I was assured that I was
regarded as a transient boarder, and that I was a patron rather than a
guest; but as I did not yet feel at ease, I took courage, and explained
to Mr. Barross that I was not a coffee-planter or a capitalist looking
for a concession from the government, but that I was in Honduras to
write of what I found there. Mr. Barross answered that he knew already
why I was there from the New Orleans papers which had arrived in the
boat with me, and seemed rather pleased than otherwise to have me about
the house. This set my mind at rest, and though it may not possibly be
of the least interest to the reader, it is of great importance to me
that the same reader should understand that all which I write here of
the lottery was told to me by the lottery people themselves, with the
full knowledge that I was going to publish it. And later, when I had
the pleasure of meeting Mr. Duprez, the late editor of the _States_, in
New Orleans, and then in Tegucigalpa, as representative of the lottery,
I warned him in the presence of several of our friends to be careful,
as I would probably make use of all he told me. To which he agreed,
and continued answering questions for the rest of the evening. I may
also add that I have taken care to verify the figures used here, for
the reason that the lottery people are at such an obvious disadvantage
in not being allowed by law to reply to what is said of them, nor
to correct any mistake in any statements that may be made to their
disadvantage.
I had never visited a hotel or a country-house as curious as the
one presided over by Mr. Barross. It was entirely original in its
decoration, unique in its sources of entertainment, and its business
office, unlike most business offices, possessed a peculiar fascination.
The stationery for the use of the patrons, and on which I wrote to
innocent friends in the North, bore the letter-head of the Honduras
Lottery Company; the pictures on the walls were framed groups of
lottery tickets purchased in the past by Mr. Barross, which had _not_
drawn prizes; and the safe in which the guest might place his valuables
contained a large canvas-bag sealed with red wax, and holding in prizes
for the next drawing seventy-five thousand dollars.
Wherever you turned were evidences of the peculiar business that was
being carried on under the roof that sheltered you, and outside in
the garden stood another building, containing the printing-presses on
which the lists of winning numbers were struck off before they were
distributed broadcast about the world. But of more interest than all
else was the long, sunshiny, empty room running the full length of the
house, in which, on a platform at one end, were two immense wheels,
one of glass and brass, and as transparent as a bowl of goldfish, and
the other closely draped in a heavy canvas hood laced and strapped
around it, and holding sealed and locked within its great bowels one
hundred thousand paper tickets in one hundred thousand rubber tubes.
In this atmosphere and with these surroundings my host and hostess
lived their life of quiet conventional comfort--a life full of the
lesser interests of every day, and lighted for others by their most
gracious and kindly courtesy and hospitable good-will. When I sat at
their table I was always conscious of the great wheels, showing through
the open door from the room beyond like skeletons in a closet; but it
was not so with my host, whose chief concern might be that our glasses
should be filled, nor with my hostess, who presided at the head of the
table--which means more than sitting there--with that dignity and charm
which is peculiar to a Southern woman, and which made dining with her
an affair of state, and not one of appetite.
I had come to see the working of a great gambling scheme, and I had
anticipated that there might be some difficulty put in the way of
my doing so; but if the lottery plant had been a cider-press in an
orchard I could not have been more welcome to examine and to study it
and to take it to pieces. It was not so much that they had nothing
to conceal, or that now, while they are fighting for existence, they
would rather risk being abused than not being mentioned at all. For
they can fight abuse; they have had to do that for a long time. It is
silence and oblivion that they fear now; the silence that means they
are forgotten, that their arrogant glory has departed, that they are
only a memory. They can fight those who fight them, but they cannot
fight with people who, if they think of them at all, think of them as
already dead and buried. It was neither of these reasons that gave me
free admittance to the workings of the lottery; it was simply that to
Mr. and Mrs. Barross the lottery was a religion; it was the greatest
charitable organization of the age, and the purest philanthropist of
modern times could not have more thoroughly believed in his good works
than did Mrs. Barross believe that noble and generous benefits were
being bestowed on mankind at every turn of the great wheel in her back
parlor.
This showed itself in the admiration which she shares with her husband
for the gentlemen of the company, and their coming once a month is an
event of great moment to Mrs. Barross, who must find it dull sometimes,
in spite of the great cool house, with its many rooms and broad
porches, and gorgeous silk hangings over the beds, and the clean linen,
and airy, sunlit dining-room. She is much more interested in telling
the news that the gentlemen brought down with them when they last came
than in the result of the drawing, and she recalls the compliments
they paid her garden, but she cannot remember the number that drew the
capital prize. It was interesting to find this big gambling scheme in
the hands of two such simple, kindly people, and to see how commonplace
it was to them, how much a matter of routine and of habit. They sang
its praises if you wished to talk of it, but they were more deeply
interested in the lesser affairs of their own household. And at one
time we ceased discussing it to help try on the baby’s new boots that
had just arrived on the steamer, and patted them on the place where the
heel should have been to drive them on the extremities of two waving
fat legs. We all admired the tassels which hung from them, and which
the baby tried to pull off and put in his mouth. They were bronze boots
with black buttons, and the first the baby had ever worn, and the event
filled the home of the exiled lottery with intense excitement.
In the cool of the afternoon Mr. Barross sat on the broad porch rocking
himself in a big bentwood chair and talked of the civil war, in which
he had taken an active part, with that enthusiasm and detail with which
only a Southerner speaks of it, not knowing that to this generation in
the North it is history, and something of which one reads in books,
and is not a topic of conversation of as fresh interest as the fall
of Tammany or the Venezuela boundary dispute. And as we listened we
watched Mrs. Barross moving about among her flowers with a sunshade
above her white hair and holding her train in her hand, stopping to cut
away a dead branch or to pluck a rose or to turn a bud away from the
leaves so that it might feel the sun.
And inside, young Barross was going over the letters which had arrived
with the morning’s steamer, emptying out the money that came with
them on the table, filing them away, and noting them as carefully and
as methodically as a bank clerk, and sealing up in return the little
green and yellow tickets that were to go out all over the world, and
which had been paid for by clerks on small salaries, laboring-men of
large families, idle good-for-nothings, visionaries, born gamblers
and ne’er-do-wells, and that multitude of others of this world who
want something for nothing, and who trust that a turn of luck will
accomplish for them what they are too listless and faint-hearted and
lazy ever to accomplish for themselves. It would be an excellent thing
for each of these gamblers if he could look in at the great wheel at
Puerto Cortez, and see just what one hundred thousand tickets look
like, and what chance his one atom of a ticket has of forcing its way
to the top of that great mass at the exact moment that the capital
prize rises to the surface in the other wheel. He could have seen it
in the old days at the Charles Theatre, and he is as free as is any
one to see it to-day at Puerto Cortez; but I should think it would be
unfortunate for the lottery if any of its customers became too thorough
a student of the doctrine of chances.
The room in which the drawings are held is about forty feet long, well
lighted by many long, wide windows, and with the stage upon which
the wheels stand blocking one end. It is unfurnished, except for the
chairs and benches, upon which the natives or any chance or intentional
visitors are welcome to sit and to watch the drawing. The larger wheel,
which holds, when all the tickets are sold, the hopes of one hundred
thousand people, is about six feet in diameter, with sides of heavy
glass, bound together by a wooden tire two feet wide. This tire or rim
is made of staves, formed like those of a hogshead, and in it is a
door a foot square. After the tickets have been placed in their little
rubber jackets and shovelled into the wheel, this door is locked with
a padlock, and strips of paper are pasted across it and sealed at each
end, and so it remains until the next drawing. One hundred thousand
tickets in rubber tubes an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide take
up a great deal of space, and make such an appreciable difference
in the weight of the wheel that it requires the efforts of two men
pulling on the handles at either side to even budge it. Another man and
myself were quite satisfied when we had put our shoulders to it and
had succeeded in turning it a foot or two. But it was interesting to
watch the little black tubes with even that slow start go slipping and
sliding down over the others, leaving the greater mass undisturbed and
packed together at the bottom as a wave sweeps back the upper layer of
pebbles on a beach. This wheel was manufactured by Jackson & Sharp, of
Wilmington, Delaware. The other wheel is much smaller, and holds the
prizes. It was made by John Robinson, of Baltimore.
Whenever there is a drawing, General W. L. Cabell, of Texas, and
Colonel C. J. Villere, of Louisiana, who have taken the places of the
late General Beauregard and of the late General Early, take their stand
at different wheels, General Cabell at the large and Colonel Villere at
the one holding the prizes. They open the doors which they had sealed
up a month previous, and into each wheel a little Indian girl puts her
hand and draws out a tube. The tube holding the ticket is handed to
General Cabell, and the one holding the prize won is given to Colonel
Villere, and they read the numbers aloud and the amount won six times,
three times in Spanish and three times in English, on the principle
probably of the man in the play who had only one line, and who spoke
that twice, “so that the audience will know I am saying it.”
The two tickets are then handed to young Barross, who fastens them
together with a rubber band and throws them into a basket for further
reference. Three clerks with duplicate books keep tally of the numbers
and of the prizes won. The drawing begins generally at six in the
morning and lasts until ten, and then, everybody having been made rich,
the philanthropists and generals and colonels and Indian girls--and,
let us hope, the men who turned the wheel--go in to breakfast.
So far as I could see, the drawings are conducted with fairness.
But with only 3434 prizes and 100,000 tickets the chances are so
infinitesimal and the advantage to the company so enormous that honesty
in manipulating the wheel ceases to be a virtue, and becomes the
lottery’s only advertisement.
[Illustration: THE IGUANAS OF HONDURAS]
But what is most interesting about the lottery at present is not
whether it is or it is not conducted fairly, but that it should exist
at all; that its promoters should be willing to drag out such an
existence at such a price and in so fallen a state. This becomes all
the more remarkable because the men who control the lottery belong to a
class which, as a rule, cares for the good opinion of its fellows, and
is willing to sacrifice much to retain it. But the lottery people do
not seem anxious for the good opinion of any one, and they have made
such vast sums of money in the past, and they have made it so easily,
that they cannot release their hold on the geese that are laying the
golden eggs for them, even though they find themselves exiled and
excommunicated by their own countrymen. If they were thimble-riggers
or Confidence men in need of money their persistence would not
appear so remarkable, but these gentlemen of the lottery are men of
enormous wealth, their daughters are in what is called society in New
Orleans and in New York, their sons are at the universities, and they
themselves belong to those clubs most difficult of access. One would
think that they had reached that point when they could say “we are rich
enough now, and we can afford to spend the remainder of our lives in
making ourselves respectable.” Becky Sharp is authority for the fact
that it is easy to be respectable on as little as five hundred pounds a
year, but these gentlemen, having many hundreds of thousands of pounds,
are not even willing to make the effort. Two years ago, when, according
to their own account, they were losing forty thousand dollars a month,
and which, after all, is only what they once cleared in a day, and
when they were being driven out of one country after another, like the
cholera or any other disease, it seems strange that it never occurred
to them to stop fighting, and to get into a better business while there
was yet time.
Even the keeper of a roulette wheel has too much self-respect to
continue turning when there is only one man playing against the table,
and in comparison with him the scramble of the lottery company after
the Honduranian tin dollar, and the scant savings of servant-girls and
of brakesmen and negro barbers in the United States, is to me the most
curious feature of this once great enterprise.
What a contrast it makes with those other days, when the Charles
Theatre was filled from boxes to gallery with the “flower of Southern
chivalry and beauty,” when the band played, and the major-generals
proclaimed the result of the drawings. It is hard to take the lottery
seriously, for the day when it was worthy of abuse has passed away.
And, indeed, there are few men or measures so important as to deserve
abuse, while there is no measure if it be for good so insignificant
that it is not deserving the exertion of a good word or a line of
praise and gratitude.
And only the emotion one can feel for the lottery now is the pity which
you might have experienced for William M. Tweed when, as a fugitive
from justice, he sat on the beach at Santiago de Cuba and watched a
naked fisherman catch his breakfast for him beyond the first line of
breakers, or that you might feel for Monte Carlo were it to be exiled
to a fever-stricken island off the swampy coast of West Africa, or, to
pay the lottery a very high compliment indeed, that which you give to
that noble adventurer exiled to the Isle of Elba.
There was something almost pathetic to me in the sight of this great,
arrogant gambling scheme, that had in its day brought the good name
of a state into disrepute, that had boasted of the prices it paid for
the honor of men, and that had robbed a whole nation willing to be
robbed, spinning its wheel in a back room in a hot, half-barbarous
country, and to an audience of gaping Indians and unwashed Honduranian
generals. Sooner than fall as low as that it would seem to be better to
fall altogether; to own that you are beaten, that the color has gone
against you too often, and, like that honorable gambler and gentleman,
Mr. John Oakhurst, who “struck a streak of bad luck, about the middle
of February, 1864,” to put a pistol to your head, and go down as
arrogantly and defiantly as you had lived.[A]
IN HONDURAS
I
TEGUCIGALPA is the odd name of the capital of the republic of Honduras,
the least advanced of the republics of Central or South America.
Somerset had learned that there were no means of getting to this
capital from either the Pacific Ocean on one side or from the Caribbean
Sea on the other except on muleback, and we argued that while there
were many mining-camps and military outposts and ranches situated a
nine days’ ride from civilization, capitals at such a distance were
rare, and for that reason might prove entertaining. Capitals at the
mouths of great rivers and at the junction of many railway systems we
knew, but a capital hidden away behind almost inaccessible mountains,
like a monastery of the Greek Church, we had never seen. A door-mat in
the front hall of a house is useful, and may even be ornamental, though
it is never interesting; but if the door-mat be hidden away in the
third-story back room it instantly assumes an importance and a value
which it never could have attained in its proper sphere of usefulness.
[Illustration: OUR NAVAL ATTACHÉ]
Our ideas as to the characteristics of Honduras were very vague, and it
is possible that we might never have seen Tegucigalpa had it not been
for Colonel Charles Jeffs, whom we found apparently waiting for us
at Puerto Cortez, and who, we still believe, had been stationed there
by some guardian spirit to guide us in safety across the continent.
Colonel Jeffs is a young American mining engineer from Minneapolis,
and has lived in Honduras for the past eleven years. Some time ago
he assisted Bogran, when that general was president, in one of the
revolutions against him, and was made a colonel in consequence. So we
called him our military attaché, and Griscom our naval attaché, because
he was an officer of the Naval Brigade of Pennsylvania. Jeffs we found
at Puerto Cortez. It was there that he first made himself known to us
by telling our porters they had no right to rob us merely because we
were gringos, and so saved us some dollars. He made us understand at
the same time that it was as gringos, or foreigners, we were thereafter
to be designated and disliked. We had no agreement with Jeffs, nor
even what might be called an understanding. He had, as I have said,
been intended by Providence to convey us across Honduras, and every
one concerned in the outfit seemed to accept that act of kindly fate
without question. We told him we were going to the capital, and were
on pleasure bent, and he said he had business at the capital himself,
and would like a few days’ shooting on the way, so we asked him to come
with us and act as guide, philosopher, and friend, and he said, “The
train starts at eight to-morrow morning for San Pedro Sula, where I
will hire the mules.” And so it was settled, and we went off to get our
things out of the custom-house with a sense of perfect confidence in
our new acquaintance and of delightful freedom from all responsibility.
And though, perhaps, it is not always best to put the entire charge of
an excursion through an unknown country into the hands of the first
kindly stranger whom you see sitting on a hotel porch on landing,
we found that it worked admirably, and we depended on our military
attaché so completely that we never pulled a cinch-strap or interviewed
an ex-president without first asking his permission. I wish every
traveller as kindly a guide and as good a friend.
[Illustration: OUR MILITARY ATTACHÉ]
The train to San Pedro Sula was made up of a rusty engine and three
little cars, with no glass in the windows, and with seats too wide
for one person, and not at all large enough for two. The natives made
a great expedition of this journey, and piled the cramped seats with
bananas and tortillas and old bottles filled with drinking-water. We
carried no luncheons ourselves, but we had the greater advantage of
them in that we were enjoying for the first time the most beautiful
stretch of tropical swamp-land and jungle that we came across during
our entire trip through Honduras. Sometimes the train moved through
tunnels of palms as straight and as regular as the elms leading to an
English country-house, and again through jungles where they grew in
the most wonderful riot and disorder, so that their branches swept in
through the car-windows and brushed the cinders from the roof. The
jungle spread out within a few feet of the track on either side, and we
peered into an impenetrable net-work of vines and creepers and mammoth
ferns and cacti and giant trees covered with orchids, and so tall that
one could only see their tops by looking up at them from the rear
platform.
The railroad journey from Puerto Cortez to San Pedro Sula lasts four
hours, but the distance is only thirty-seven miles. This was, until
a short time ago, when the line was extended by a New York company,
the only thirty-seven miles of railroad track in Honduras, and as it
has given to the country a foreign debt of $27,992,850, the interest
on which has not been paid since 1872, it would seem to be quite
enough. About thirty years ago an interoceanic railroad was projected
from Puerto Cortez to the Pacific coast, a distance of one hundred
and forty-eight miles, but the railroad turned out to be a colossal
swindle, and the government was left with this debt on its hands, an
army of despoiled stockholders to satisfy, and only thirty-seven miles
of bad road for itself. The road was to have been paid for at a certain
rate per mile, and the men who mapped it out made it in consequence
twice as long as it need to have been, and its curves and grades and
turns would cause an honest engineer to weep with disapproval.
[Illustration: A STRETCH OF CENTRAL-AMERICAN RAILWAY]
The grades are in some places very steep, and as the engine was not as
young as it had been, two negro boys and a box of sand were placed
on the cow-catcher, and whenever the necessity of stopping the train
was immediate, or when it was going downhill too quickly, they would
lean forward and pour this sand on the rails. As soon as Griscom and
Somerset discovered these assistant engineers they bribed them to give
up their places to them, and after the first station we all sat for
the remainder of the journey on the cow-catcher. It was a beautiful
and exhilarating ride, and suggested tobogganing, or those thrilling
little railroads on trestles at Coney Island and at the fêtes around
Paris. It was even more interesting, because we could see each rusty
rail rise as the wheel touched its nearer end as though it meant to fly
up in our faces, and when the wheel was too quick for it and forced it
down again, it contented itself by spreading out half a foot or so to
one side, which was most alarming. And the interest rose even higher at
times when a stray steer would appear on the rails at the end of the
tunnel of palms, as at the end of a telescope, and we saw it growing
rapidly larger and larger as the train swept down upon it. It always
lurched off to one side before any one was killed, but not until there
had been much ringing of bells and blowing of whistles, and, on our
part, some inward debate as to whether we had better jump and abandon
the train to its fate, or die at our post with our hands full of sand.
We lay idly at San Pedro Sula for four days, while Jeffs hurried about
collecting mules and provisions. When we arrived we insisted on setting
forth that same evening, but the place put its spell upon us gently but
firmly, and when we awoke on the third day and found we were no nearer
to starting than at the moment of our arrival, Jeffs’s perplexities
began to be something of a bore, and we told him to put things off to
the morrow, as did every one else.
[Illustration: THE THREE GRINGOS]
San Pedro Sula lay in peaceful isolation in a sunny valley at the
base of great mountains, and from the upper porch of our hotel, that
had been built when the railroad was expected to continue on across
the continent, we could see above the palms in the garden the clouds
moving from one mountain-top to another, or lying packed like drifts
of snow in the hollows between. We used to sit for hours on this porch
in absolute idleness, watching Jeffs hurrying in and out below with
infinite pity, while we listened to the palms rustling and whispering
as they bent and courtesied before us, and saw the sunshine turn
the mountains a light green, like dry moss, or leave half of them
dark and sombre when a cloud passed in between. It was a clean, lazy
little place of many clay huts, with gardens back of them filled with
banana-palms and wide-reaching trees, which were one mass of brilliant
crimson flowers. In the centre of the town was a grass-grown plaza
where the barefooted and ragged boy-soldiers went through leisurely
evolutions, and the mules and cows gazed at them from the other end.
Our hotel was leased by an American woman, who was making an
unappreciated fight against dirt and insects, and the height of whose
ambition was to get back to Brooklyn and take in light sewing and
educate her two very young daughters. Her husband had died in the
interior, and his portrait hung in the dining-room of the hotel. She
used to talk about him while she was waiting at dinner, and of what a
well-read and able man he had been. She would grow so interested in
her stories that the dinner would turn cold while she stood gazing at
the picture and shaking her head at it. We became very much interested
in the husband, and used to look up over our shoulders at his portrait
with respectful attention, as though he were present. His widow did
not like Honduranians; and though she might have made enough money to
take her home, had she consented to accept them as boarders, she would
only receive gringos at her hotel, which she herself swept and scrubbed
when she was not cooking the dinner and making the beds. She had saved
eight dollars of the sum necessary to convey her and her children home,
and to educate them when they got there; and as American travellers
in Honduras are few, and as most of them ask you for money to help
them to God’s country, I am afraid her chance of seeing the Brooklyn
Bridge is very doubtful.
[Illustration: SETTING OUT FROM SAN PEDRO SULA]
We contributed to her fund, and bought her a bundle of lottery tickets,
which we told her were the means of making money easily; and I should
like to add that she won the grand prize, and lived happily on Brooklyn
Heights ever after; but when we saw the list at Panama, her numbers
were not on it, and so, I fear, she is still keeping the only clean
hotel in Honduras, which is something more difficult to accomplish and
a much more public-spirited thing to do than to win a grand prize in
a lottery.
We left San Pedro Sula on a Sunday morning, with a train of eleven
mules; five to carry our luggage and the other six for ourselves,
Jeffs, Charlwood, Somerset’s servant, and Emilio, our chief moso, or
muleteer. There were two other mosos, who walked the entire distance,
and in bull-hide sandals at that, guarding and driving the pack-mules,
and who were generally able to catch up with us an hour or so after
we had halted for the night. I do not know which was the worst of the
mosos, although Emilio seems to have been first choice with all of us.
We agreed, after it was all over, that we did not so much regret not
having killed them as that they could not know how frequently they had
been near to sudden and awful death.
The people of Honduras, where all the travelling is done on mule or
horseback, have a pretty custom of riding out to meet a friend when
he is known to be coming to town, and of accompanying him when he
departs. This latter ceremony always made me feel as though I were an
undesirable citizen who was being conveyed outside of the city limits
by a Vigilance Committee; but it is very well meant, and a man in
Honduras measures his popularity by the number of friends who come
forth to greet him on his arrival, or who speed him on his way when
he sets forth again. We were accompanied out of San Pedro Sula by the
consular agent, the able American manager of the thirty-seven miles of
railroad, and his youthful baggage-master, a young gentleman whom I had
formerly known in the States.
Our escort left us at the end of a few miles, at the foot of the
mountains, and we began the ascent alone. From that time on until we
reached the Pacific Ocean we moved at the rate of three miles an hour,
or some nine leagues a day, as distances are measured in Honduras, ten
hours being a day’s journey. Our mules were not at all the animals
that we know as mules in the States, but rather overgrown donkeys
or burros, and not much stouter than those in the streets of Cairo,
whether it be the Street in Cairo of Chicago, or the one that runs in
front of Shepheard’s Hotel. They were patient, plucky, and wonderfully
sure-footed little creatures, and so careful of their own legs and
necks that, after the first few hours, we ceased to feel any anxiety
about our own, and left the entire charge of the matter to them.
[Illustration: THE HIGHLANDS OF HONDURAS]
[Illustration: SOMERSET]
I think we were all a little startled at sight of the trail we were
expected to follow, but if we were we did not say so--at least, not
before Jeffs. It led almost directly up the face of the mountain, along
little ledges and pathways cut in the solid rock, and at times was so
slightly marked that we could not see it five yards ahead of us.
On that first day, during which the trail was always leading upward,
the mules did not once put down any one of their four little feet
without first testing the spot upon which it was to rest. This made our
progress slow, but it gave one a sense of security, which the angle
and attitude of the body of the man in front did much to dissipate.
I do not know the name of the mountains over which we passed, nor do
I know the name of any mountain in Honduras, except those which we
named ourselves, for the reason that there is not much in Honduras
except mountains, and it would be as difficult to give a name to each
of her many peaks as to christen every town site on a Western prairie.
When the greater part of all the earth of a country stands on edge in
the air, it would be invidious to designate any one particular hill
or chain of hills. A Honduranian deputy once crumpled up a page of
letter-paper in his hand and dropped it on the desk before him. “That,”
he said, “is an outline map of Honduras.”
We rode in single file, with Jeffs in front, followed by Somerset, with
Griscom and myself next, and Charlwood, the best and most faithful of
servants, bringing up the rear. The pack-mules, as I have said, were
two hours farther back, and we could sometimes see them over the edge
of a precipice crawling along a thousand feet below and behind us.
It seemed an unsociable way for friends to travel through a strange
country, and I supposed that in an hour or so we would come to a
broader trail and pull up abreast and exchange tobacco pouches and
grow better acquainted. But we never came to that broad trail until we
had travelled sixteen days, and had left Tegucigalpa behind us, and
in the foreground of all the pictures I have in my mind of Honduras
there is always a row of men’s backs and shoulders and bobbing helmets
disappearing down a slippery path of rock, or rising above the edge of
a mountain and outlined against a blazing blue sky. We were generally
near enough to one another to talk if we spoke in a loud voice or
turned in the saddle, though sometimes we rode silently, and merely
raised an arm to point at a beautiful valley below or at a strange bird
on a tree, and kept it rigid until the man behind said, “Yes, I see,”
when it dropped, like a semaphore signal after the train has passed.
Early in the afternoon of the day of our setting forth we saw for the
last time the thatched roofs of San Pedro Sula, like a bare spot in the
great green plain hundreds of feet below us, and then we passed through
the clouds we had watched from the town itself, and bade the eastern
coast of Honduras a final farewell.
The trail we followed was so rough and uncertain that at first I
conceived a very poor opinion of the Honduranians for not having
improved it, but as we continued scrambling upward I admired them for
moving about at all under such conditions. After all, we who had chosen
to take this road through curiosity had certainly no right to complain
of what was to the natives their only means of communication with the
Atlantic seaboard. It is interesting to think of a country absolutely
and entirely dependent on such thoroughfares for every necessity of
life. For whether it be a postal card or a piano, or a bale of cotton,
or a box of matches, it must be brought to Tegucigalpa on the back
of a mule or on the shoulders of a man, who must slip and slide and
scramble either over this trail or the one on the western coast.
Sometimes this high-road of commerce was cut through the living rock
in steps as even and sharp as those in front of a brownstone house on
Fifth Avenue, and so narrow that we had to draw up our knees to keep
them from being scratched and cut on the rough walls of the passageway,
and again it led through jungle so dense that if one wandered three
yards from the trail he could not have found his way back again; but
this danger was not imminent, as no one could go that far from the
trail without having first hacked and cut his way there.
It was not always so difficult; at times we came out into bare open
spaces, and rode up the dry bed of a mountain stream, and felt the full
force of the sun, or again it led along a ledge of rock two feet wide
at the edge of a precipice, and we were fanned with cool, damp breaths
from the pit a thousand feet below, where the sun had never penetrated,
and where the moss and fern of centuries grew in a thick, dark tangle.
[Illustration: A DRAWER OF WATER]
We stopped for our first meal at a bare place on the top of a mountain,
where there were a half-dozen mud huts. Jeffs went from one to another
of these and collected a few eggs, and hired a woman to cook them
and to make us some coffee. We added tinned things and bread to this
luncheon, which, as there were no benches, we ate seated on the
ground, kicking at the dogs and pigs and chickens, that snatched in a
most familiar manner at the food in our hands. In Honduras there are
so few hotels that travellers are entirely dependent for food and for
a place in which to sleep upon the people who live along the trail,
who are apparently quite hardened to having their homes invaded by
strangers, and their larders levied upon at any hour of the day or
night.
Even in the larger towns and so-called cities we slept in private
houses, and on the solitary occasion when we were directed to a hotel
we found a bare room with a pile of canvas cots heaped in one corner,
to which we were told to help ourselves. There was a real hotel,
and a very bad one, at the capital, where we fared much worse than
we had often done in the interior; but with these two exceptions we
were dependent for shelter during our entire trip across Honduras
upon the people of the country. Sometimes they sent us to sleep in
the town-hall, which was a large hut with a mud floor, and furnished
with a blackboard and a row of-benches, and sometimes with stocks for
prisoners; for it served as a school or prison or hotel, according to
the needs of the occasion.
We were equally dependent upon the natives for our food. We carried
breakfast bacon and condensed milk and sardines and bread with us, and
to these we were generally able to add, at least once a day, coffee
and eggs and beans. The national bread is the tortilla. It is made of
cornmeal, patted into the shape of a buckwheat cake between the palms
of the hands, and then baked. They were generally given to us cold,
in a huge pile, and were burned on both sides, but untouched by heat
in the centre. The coffee was always excellent, as it should have
been, for the Honduranian coffee is as fine as any grown in Central
America, and we never had too much of it; but of eggs and black beans
there was no end. The black-bean habit in Honduras is very general;
they gave them to us three times a day, sometimes cold and sometimes
hot, sometimes with bacon and sometimes alone. They were frequently
served to us in the shape of sandwiches between tortillas, and again
in the form of pudding with chopped-up goat’s meat. At first, and
when they were served hot, I used to think them delicious. That seems
very long ago now. When I was at Johnstown at the time of the flood,
there was a soda cracker, with jam inside, which was served out to
the correspondents in place of bread; and even now, if it became a
question of my having to subsist on those crackers, and the black
beans of Central America, or starve, I am sure I should starve, and by
preference.
We were naturally embarrassed at first when we walked into strange
huts; but the owners seemed to take such invasions with apathy and as
a matter of course, and were neither glad to see us when we came, nor
relieved when we departed. They asked various prices for what they gave
us--about twice as much as they would have asked a native for the same
service; at least, so Jeffs told us; but as our bill never amounted
to more than fifty cents apiece for supper, lodging, and a breakfast
the next morning, they cannot be said to have robbed us. While the
woman at the first place at which we stopped boiled the eggs, her
husband industriously whittled a lot of sharp little sticks, which he
distributed among us, and the use of which we could not imagine, until
we were told we were expected to spike holes in the eggs with them,
and then suck out the meat. We did not make a success of this, and our
prejudice against eating eggs after that fashion was such that we were
particular to ask to have them fried during the rest of our trip. This
was the only occasion when I saw a Honduranian husband help his wife to
work.
After our breakfast on the top of the mountain, we began its descent
on the other side. This was much harder on the mules than the climbing
had been, and they stepped even more slowly, and so gave us many
opportunities to look out over the tops of trees and observe with some
misgivings the efforts of the man in front to balance the mule by lying
flat on its hind-quarters. The temptation at such times to sit upright
and see into what depths you were going next was very great. We struck
a level trail about six in the evening, and the mules were so delighted
at this that they started off of their own accord at a gallop, and
were further encouraged by our calling them by the names of different
Spanish generals. This inspired them to such a degree that we had to
change their names to Bob Ingersoll or Senator Hill, or others to the
same effect, at which they grew discouraged and drooped perceptibly.
We slept that night at a ranch called La Pieta, belonging to Dr. Miguel
Pazo, where we experimented for the first time with our hammocks, and
tried to grow accustomed to going to bed under the eyes of a large
household of Indian maidens, mosos, and cowboys. There are men who will
tell you that they like to sleep in a hammock, just as there are men
who will tell you that they like the sea best when it is rough, and
that they are happiest when the ship is throwing them against the sides
and superstructure, and when they cannot sit still without bracing
their legs against tables and stanchions. I always want to ask such men
if they would prefer land in a state of perpetual earthquake, or in its
normal condition of steadiness, and I have always been delighted to
hear sea-captains declare themselves best pleased with a level keel,
and the chance it gives them to go about their work without having to
hang on to hand-rails. And I had a feeling of equal satisfaction when
I saw as many sailors as could find room sleeping on the hard deck
of a man-of-war at Colon, in preference to suspending themselves in
hammocks, which were swinging empty over their heads. The hammock keeps
a man at an angle of forty-five degrees, with the weight of both his
legs and his body on the base of the spinal column, which gets no rest
in consequence.
The hammock is, however, almost universally used in Honduras, and is
a necessity there on account of the insects and ants and other beasts
that climb up the legs of cots and inhabit the land. But the cots of
bull-hide stretched on ropes are, in spite of the insects, greatly to
be preferred; they are at least flat, and one can lie on them without
having his legs three feet higher than his head. Their manufacture
is very simple. When a steer is killed its hide is pegged out on the
ground, and left where the dogs can eat what flesh still adheres to it;
and when it has been cleaned after this fashion and the sun has dried
it, ropes of rawhide are run through its edges, and it is bound to a
wooden frame with the hairy side up. It makes a cool, hard bed. In the
poorer huts the hides are given to the children at night, and spread
directly on the earth floor. During the day the same hides are used to
hold the coffee, which is piled high upon them and placed in the sun to
dry.
We left La Pieta early the next morning, in the bright sunlight,
but instead of climbing laboriously into the sombre mountains of
the day before, we trotted briskly along a level path between sunny
fields and delicate plants, and trees with a pale-green foliage,
and covered with the most beautiful white-and-purple flowers. There
were hundreds of doves in the air, and in the bushes many birds of
brilliant blue-and-black or orange-and-scarlet plumage, and one of
more sober colors with two long white tail-feathers and a white crest,
like a macaw that had turned Quaker. None of these showed the least
inclination to disturb himself as we approached. An hour after our
setting forth we plunged into a forest of manacca-palms, through which
we rode the rest of the morning. This was the most beautiful and
wonderful experience of our journey. The manacca-palm differs from the
cocoanut or royal palm in that its branches seem to rise directly from
the earth, and not to sprout, as do the others, from the top of a tall
trunk. Each branch has a single stem, and the leaf spreads and falls
from either side of this, cut into even blades, like a giant fern.
[Illustration: NATIVE METHOD OF DRYING COFFEE]
There is a plant that looks like the manacca-palm at home which you
see in flower-pots in the corners of drawing-rooms at weddings, and
consequently when we saw the real manacca-palm the effect was
curious. It did not seem as though they were monster specimens of
these little plants in the States, but as though we had grown smaller.
We felt dwarfed, as though we had come across a rose-bush as large
as a tree. The branches of these palms were sixty feet high, and
occasionally six feet broad, and bent and swayed and interlaced in the
most graceful and exquisite confusion. Every blade trembled in the air,
and for hours we heard no other sound save their perpetual murmur and
rustle. Not even the hoofs of our mules gave a sound, for they trod
on the dead leaves of centuries. The palms made a natural archway for
us, and the leaves hung like a portière across the path, and you would
see the man riding in front raise his arm and push the long blades
to either side, and disappear as they fell again into place behind
him. It was like a scene on the tropical island of a pantomime, where
everything is exaggerated both in size and in beauty. It made you think
of a giant aquarium or conservatory which had been long neglected.
At every hundred yards or so there were giant trees with smooth
gray trunks, as even and regular as marble, and with roots like
flying-buttresses, a foot in thickness, and reaching from ten to
fifteen feet up from the ground. If these flanges had been covered
over, a man on muleback could have taken refuge between them. Some
of the trunks of these trees were covered with intricate lace-work
of a parasite which twisted in and out, and which looked as though
thousands of snakes were crawling over the white surface of the tree;
they were so much like snakes that one passed beneath them with an
uneasy shrug. Hundreds of orchids clung to the branches of the trees,
and from these stouter limbs to the more pliable branches of the palms
below white-faced monkeys sprang and swung from tree to tree, running
along the branches until they bent with the weight like a trout-rod,
and sprang upright again with a sweep and rush as the monkeys leaped
off chattering into the depths of the forest. We rode through this
enchanted wilderness of wavering sunlight and damp, green shadows for
the greater part of the day, and came out finally into a broad, open
plain, cut up by little bubbling streams, flashing brilliantly in the
sun. It was like an awakening from a strange and beautiful nightmare.
[Illustration: IN A CENTRAL-AMERICAN FOREST]
In the early part of the afternoon we arrived at another one of the
farm-houses belonging to young Dr. Pazo, and at which he and his
brother happened to be stopping. We had ridden out of our way there
in the hopes of obtaining a few days’ shooting, and the place seemed
to promise much sport. The Chamelicon River, filled with fish and
alligators, ran within fifty yards of the house; and great forests, in
which there were bear and deer and wild-pig, stretched around it
and beyond it on every side. The house itself was like almost every
other native hut in Honduras. They are all built very much alike, with
no attempt at ornamentation within, or landscape-gardening without,
although nature has furnished the most beautiful of plants and trees
close on every side for just such a purpose. The walls of a Honduranian
hut are made of mud packed round a skeleton of interwoven rods; the
floor is of the naked earth, and the roof is thatched with the branches
of palms. After the house is finished, all of the green stuff growing
around and about it is cleared away for fifty yards or so, leaving
an open place of bare and barren mud. This is not decorative, but it
helps in some measure to keep the insects which cling to every green
thing away from the house. A kitchen of similarly interlaced rods and
twigs, but without the clay, and covered with just such layers of palm
leaves, stands on the bare place near the house, or leans against one
side of it. This is where the tortillas are patted and baked, and the
rice and beans are boiled, and the raw meat of an occasional goat or
pig is hung to dry and smoke over the fire. The oven in the kitchen is
made of baked clay, and you seldom see any cooking utensils or dishes
that have not been manufactured from the trees near the house or the
earth beneath it. The water for drinking and cooking is kept in round
jars of red clay, which stand in rings of twisted twigs to keep them
upright, and the drinking-vessels are the halves of gourds, and the
ladles are whole gourds, with the branch on which they grew still
adhering to them, to serve as a handle.
The furnishing of the house shows the same dependence upon nature; the
beds are either grass hammocks or the rawhide that I have described,
and there are no chairs and few benches, the people preferring
apparently to eat sitting on their haunches to taking the trouble
necessary to make a chair. Everything they eat, of which there is very
little variety, grows just beyond the cleared place around the hut,
and can be had at the cost of the little energy necessary to bring it
in-doors. When a kid or a pig or a steer is killed, the owner goes out
to the nearest peak and blows a blast on a cow’s horn, and those within
hearing who wish fresh meat hurry across the mountain to purchase it.
As there is no ice from one end of Honduras to the other, meat has to
be eaten the day it is killed.
This is not the life of the Honduranians who live in the large towns or
so-called cities, where there are varying approaches to the comfort of
civilized countries, but of the country people with whom we had chiefly
to do. It is as near an approach to the condition of primitive man as
one can find on this continent.
But bare and poor as are the houses, which are bare not because the
people are poor, but because they are indolent, there is almost
invariably some corner of the hut set aside and ornamented as an altar,
or some part of the wall covered with pictures of a religious meaning.
When they have no table, the people use a shelf or the stump of a
tree upon which to place emblematic figures, which are almost always
china dolls, with no original religious significance, but which they
have dressed in little scraps of tinsel and silk, and which they have
surrounded with sardine-tins and empty bottles and pictures from the
lids of cigar-boxes. Everything that has color is cherished, and every
traveller who passes adds unconsciously to their stock of ornaments in
the wrappings of the boxes which he casts away behind him. Sometimes
the pictures they use for ornamentation are not half so odd as the
fact that they ever should have reached such a wilderness. We were
frequently startled by the sight of colored lithographs of theatrical
stars, advertising the fact that they were playing under the direction
of such and such a manager, and patent-medicine advertisements and
wood-cuts from illustrated papers, some of them twenty and thirty years
old, which were pinned to the mud walls and reverenced as gravely as
though they had been pictures of the Holy Family by a Raphael or a
Murillo.
In one hut we found a life-size colored lithograph of a woman whom,
it so happened, we all knew, which was being used to advertise a
sewing-machine. We were so pleased at meeting a familiar face so far
from home that we bowed to it very politely, and took off our hats, at
which the woman of the house, mistaking our deference, placed it over
the altar, fearing that she had been entertaining an angel unawares.
The house of Dr. Pazo, where we were most hospitably entertained, was
similar to those that I have described. It was not his home, but what
we would call a hunting-box or a ranch. While we were at luncheon he
told a boy to see if there were any alligators in sight, in exactly
the same tone with which he might have told a servant to find out if
the lawn-tennis net were in place. The boy returned to say that there
were five within a hundred yards of the house. So, after we had as
usual patiently waited for Griscom to finish his coffee, we went out
on the bank and fired at the unhappy alligators for the remainder of
the afternoon. It did not seem to hurt them very much, and certainly
did us a great deal of good. To kill an alligator it is necessary to
hit it back of the fore-leg, or to break its spine where it joins the
tail; and as it floats with only its eyes and a half-inch of its nose
exposed, it is difficult to reach either of these vital spots. When the
alligator is on a bank, and you attempt to crawl up on it along the
opposite bank, the birds make such a noise, either on its account or on
their own, that it takes alarm, and rolls over into the water with an
abruptness you would hardly expect from so large a body.
On our second day at Dr. Pazo’s ranch we divided into two parties, and
scoured the wilderness for ten miles around after game. One party was
armed with shot-guns, and brought back macaws of wonderful plumage,
wild turkeys, and quail in abundance; the others, scorning anything
but big game, carried rifles, and, as a result, returned as they set
forth, only with fewer cartridges. It was most unfortunate that the
only thing worth shooting came to me. It was a wild-cat with a long
tail, who patiently waited for us in an open place with a calm and
curious expression of countenance. I think I was more surprised than he
was, and even after I had thrown up the ground under his white belly he
stopped and turned again to look at me in a hurt and reproachful manner
before he bounded gracefully out of sight into the underbrush. We also
saw a small bear, but he escaped in the same manner, without waiting
to be fired upon, and as we had no dogs to send after him, we gave up
looking for more, and went back to pot at alligators. There were some
excellent hunting-dogs on the ranch, but the Pazo brothers had killed a
steer the night we arrived, and had given most of it to the dogs, so
that in the morning they were naturally in no mood for hunting.
There was an old grandfather of an alligator whom Somerset and I had
repeatedly disturbed in his slumbers. He liked to take his siestas on
a little island entirely surrounded by rapids, and we used to shoot at
him from the opposite bank of the river. He was about thirteen feet
long, and the agility with which he would flop over into the calm
little bay, which stretched out from the point on which he slept, was
as remarkable as it was disappointing. He was still asleep at his
old stand when we returned from our unsuccessful shooting tour, so
we decided to swim the rapids and crawl up on him across his little
island and attack him from the flank and rear. It reminded me somewhat
of the taking of Lungtenpen on a small scale. On that occasion, if I
remember correctly, the raw recruits were uniformed only in Martinis
and cartridge-belts; but we decided to carry our boots as well, because
the alligator’s island was covered with sharp stones and briers, and
the sand was very hot, and, moreover, we had but vague ideas about the
customs of alligators, and were not sure as to whether he might not
chase us. We thought we would look very silly running around a little
island pursued by a long crocodile and treading on sharp hot stones in
our bare feet.
[Illustration: ON THE TRAIL TO SANTA BARBARA]
So each of us took his boots in one hand and a repeating-rifle in the
other, and with his money-belt firmly wrapped around his neck, plunged
into the rapids and started to ford the river. They were exceedingly
swift rapids, and made you feel as though you were swinging round a
sharp corner on a cable-car with no strap by which to take hold. The
only times I could stop at all was when I jammed my feet in between two
stones at the bed of the river, and was so held in a vise, while the
rest of my body swayed about in the current and my boots scooped up
the water. When I wanted to go farther I would stick my toes between
two more rocks, and so gradually worked my way across, but I could
see nothing of Somerset, and decided that he had been drowned, and
went off to avenge him on the alligator. It took me some time to get
my bruised and bleeding toes into the wet boots, during which time I
kept continually looking over my shoulder to see if the alligator were
going to make a land attack, and surprise me instead of my surprising
him. I knew he was very near me, for the island smelled as strongly of
musk as a cigar-shop smells of tobacco; but when I crawled up on him
he was still on his point of sand, and sound asleep. I had a very good
chance at seventy yards, but I was greedy, and wanted to come closer,
and as I was crawling along, gathering thorns and briers by the way,
I startled about fifty birds, and the alligator flopped over again,
and left nothing behind him but a few tracks on the land and a muddy
streak in the water. It was a great deal of trouble for a very little
of alligator; but I was more or less consoled on my return to find that
Somerset was still alive, and seated on the same bank from which we had
both started, though at a point fifty yards farther down-stream. He was
engaged in counting out damp Bank-of-England notes on his bare knee,
and blowing occasional blasts down the barrel of his rifle, which had
dragged him and itself to the bottom of the river before the current
tossed them both back on the shore.
[Illustration: A HALT AT TRINIDAD]
The two days of rest at the ranch of Dr. Pazo had an enervating effect
upon our mules, and they moved along so slowly on the day following
that we had to feel our way through the night for several hours before
we came to the hut where we were to sleep. Griscom and I had lost
ourselves on the mountain-side, and did not overtake the others until
long after they had settled themselves in the compound. They had been
too tired when they reached it to do anything more after falling off
their mules, and we found them stretched on the ground in the light of
a couple of fluttering pine torches, with cameras and saddle-bags and
carbines scattered recklessly about, and the mules walking over them
in the darkness. A fire in the oven shone through the chinks in the
kitchen wall, and showed the woman of the house stirring something
in a caldron with one hand and holding her sleeping child on her hip
with the other, while the daughters moved in and out of the shadow,
carrying jars on their heads and bundles of fodder for the animals. It
looked like a gypsy encampment. We sent Emilio back with a bunch of
pine torches to find the pack-mules, and we could see his lighted torch
blazing far up the trail that we had just descended, and lighting the
rocks and trees on either side of him.
There was only room for one of us to sleep inside the hut that night,
and as Griscom had a cold, that privilege was given to him; but it
availed him little, for when he seated himself on the edge of the
bull-hide cot and began to pull off his boots, five ghostly feminine
figures sat upright in their hammocks and studied his preparations with
the most innocent but embarrassing curiosity. So, after waiting some
little time for them to go to sleep again, he gave up any thought of
making himself more comfortable, and slept in his boots and spurs.
We passed through the pretty village of Trinidad early the next
morning, and arrived at nightfall at the larger town of Santa Barbara,
where the sound of our mules’ hoofs pattering over the paved streets
and the smell of smoking street lamps came to us with as much of a
shock as does the sight of land after a week at sea. Santa Barbara, in
spite of its pavements, was not a great metropolis, and, owing to its
isolation, the advent of five strangers was so much of an event that
the children of the town followed us, cheering and jeering as though
we were a circus procession; they blocked the house in which we took
refuge, on every side, so that the native policemen had to be stationed
at our windows to wave them away. On the following morning we called
to pay our respects on General Louis Bogran, who has been President of
Honduras for eight years and an exile for two. He died a few months
after our visit. He was a very handsome man, with a fine presence, and
with great dignity of manner, and he gave us an audience exactly as
though he were a dethroned monarch and we loyal subjects come to pay
him homage in his loneliness. I asked him what he regarded as the best
work of his administration, and after thinking awhile he answered,
“Peace for eight years,” which was rather happy, when you consider
that in the three years since he had left office there have been four
presidents and two long and serious revolutions, and when we were in
the capital the people seemed to think it was about time to begin on
another.
[Illustration: GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN]
We left Santa Barbara early the next morning, and rode over a few more
mountains to the town of Seguaca, where the village priest was holding
a festival, and where the natives for many miles around had gathered in
consequence. There did not seem to be much of interest going on when we
arrived, for the people of the town and the visitors within her gates
deserted the booths and followed us in a long procession down the
single street, and invaded the house where we lunched.
Our host on this occasion set a table for us in the centre of his
largest room, and the population moved in through the doors and
windows, and seated themselves cross-legged in rows ten and fifteen
deep on the earth floor at our feet, and regarded us gravely and in
absolute silence. Those who could not find standing-room inside stood
on the window-sills and blocked the doorways, and the women were given
places of honor on tables and beds. It was somewhat embarrassing,
and we felt as though we ought to offer something more unusual than
the mere exercise of eating in order to justify such interest; so
we attempted various parlor tricks, without appearing to notice the
presence of an audience, and pretended to swallow the eggs whole, and
made knives and forks disappear in the air, and drew silver dollars
from the legs of the table, continuing our luncheon in the meantime
in a self-possessed and polite manner, as though such eccentricities
were our hourly habit. We could see the audience, out of the corner of
our eyes, leaning forward with their eyes and mouths wide open, and
were so encouraged that we called up some of the boys and drew watches
and dollars out of their heads, after which they retired into corners
and ransacked their scantily clad persons for more. It was rather an
expensive exhibition, for when we set forth again they all laid
claim to the dollars of which they considered they had been robbed.
[Illustration: OUR PACK-TRAIN AT SANTA BARBARA]
The men of the place, according to their courteous custom, followed
us out of the town for a few miles, and then we all shook hands and
exchanged cigars and cigarettes, and separated with many compliments
and expressions of high esteem.
The trail from Seguaca to our next resting-place led through pine
forests and over layers of pine-needles that had been accumulating for
years. It was a very warm, dry afternoon, and the air was filled with
the odor of the pines, and when we came to one of the many mountain
streams we disobeyed Jeffs and stopped to bathe in it, and let it carry
us down the side of the mountain with the speed of a toboggan. We had
been told that bathing at any time was extremely dangerous in Honduras,
and especially so in the afternoon; but we always bathed in the
afternoon, and looked forward to the half-hour spent in one of these
roaring rapids as the best part of the day. Of all our recollections
of Honduras, they are certainly the pleasantest. The water was almost
icily cold, and fell with a rush and a heavy downpour in little
water-falls, or between great crevices in the solid rocks, leaping and
bubbling and flashing in the sun, or else sweeping in swift eddies in
the compass of deep, shadowy pools. We used to imprison ourselves
between two rocks and let a fall of water strike us from the distance
of several feet on our head and shoulders, or tear past and around us,
so that in five minutes the soreness and stiffness of the day’s ride
were rubbed out of us as completely as though we had been massaged at
a Turkish bath, and the fact that we were always bruised and black and
blue when we came out could not break us of this habit. It was probably
because we were new to the country that we suffered no great harm;
for Jeffs, who was an old inhabitant, and who had joined us in this
particular stream for the first time, came out looking twenty years
older, and in an hour his teeth were chattering with chills or clinched
with fever, and his pulse was jumping at one hundred and three. We were
then exactly six days’ hard riding from any civilized place, and though
we gave him quinine and whiskey and put him into his hammock as soon
as we reached a hut, the evening is not a cheerful one to remember. It
would not have been a cheerful evening under any circumstances, for we
shared the hut with the largest and most varied collection of human
beings, animals, and insects that I have ever seen gathered into so
small a place.
I took an account of stock before I turned in, and found that there
were three dogs, eleven cats, seven children, five men, not including
five of us, three women, and a dozen chickens, all sleeping, or trying
to sleep, in the same room, under the one roof. And when I gave up
attempting to sleep and wandered out into the night, I stepped on the
pigs, and startled three or four calves that had been sleeping under
the porch and that lunged up out of the darkness. We were always asking
Jeffs why we slept in such places, instead of swinging our hammocks
under the trees and camping out decently and in order, and his answer
was that while there were insects enough in-doors, they were virtually
an extinct species when compared to the number one would meet in the
open air.
I have camped in our West, where all you need is a blanket to lie upon
and another to wrap around you, and a saddle for a pillow, and where,
with a smouldering fire at your feet, you can sleep without thought
of insects. But there is nothing green that grows in Honduras that is
not saturated and alive with bugs, and all manner of things that creep
and crawl and sting and bite. It transcends mere discomfort; it is an
absolute curse to the country, and to every one in it, and it would
be as absurd to write of Honduras without dwelling on the insects, as
of the west coast of Africa without speaking of the fever. You cannot
sit on the grass or on a fallen tree, or walk under an upright one or
through the bushes, without hundreds of some sort of animal or other
attaching themselves to your clothing or to your person. And if you
get down from your mule to take a shot at something in the bushes and
walk but twenty feet into them, you have to be beaten with brushes and
rods when you come out again as vigorously as though you were a dusty
carpet. There will be sometimes as many as a hundred insects under one
leaf; and after they have once laid their claws upon you, your life is
a mockery, and you feel at night as though you were sleeping in a bed
with red pepper. The mules have even a harder time of it; for, as if
they did not suffer enough in the day, they are in constant danger at
night from vampires, which fasten themselves to the neck and suck out
the blood, leaving them so weak that often when we came to saddle them
in the morning they would stagger and almost fall. Sometimes the side
of their head and shoulders would be wet with their own blood. I never
heard of a vampire attacking a man in that country, but the fact that
they are in the air does not make one sleep any the sounder.
In the morning after our night with the varied collection of men and
animals we put back again to the direct trail to Tegucigalpa, from
which place we were still distant a seven days’ ride.
II
We swung our hammocks on the sixth night out in the municipal building
of Tabla Ve; but there was little sleep. Towards morning the night
turned bitterly cold, and the dampness rose from the earthen floor of
the hut like a breath from the open door of a refrigerator, and kept us
shivering in spite of sweaters and rubber blankets. Above, the moon and
stars shone brilliantly in a clear sky, but down in the valley in which
the village lay, a mist as thick as the white smoke of a locomotive
rose out of the ground to the level of the house-tops, and hid Tabla
Ve as completely as though it were at the bottom of a lake. The dogs
of the village moved through the mist, howling dismally, and meeting
to fight with a sudden sharp tumult of yells that made us start up in
our hammocks and stare at each other sleepily, while Jeffs rambled on,
muttering and moaning in his fever. It was not a pleasant night, and we
rode up the mountain-side out of the mist the next morning unrefreshed,
but satisfied to be once more in the sunlight. They had told us at
Tabla Ve that there was to be a bull-baiting that same afternoon at
the village of Seguatepec, fifteen miles over the mountain, where a
priest was holding a church festival. So we left Jeffs to push along
with the mozos, and by riding as fast as the mules could go, we reached
Seguatepec by four in the afternoon.
[Illustration: A VILLAGE IN THE INTERIOR]
It was a bright, clean town, sitting pertly on the flat top of a hill
that fell away from it evenly on every side. It had a little church and
a little plaza, and the church was so vastly superior to every other
house in the place--as was the case in every village through which we
passed--as to make one suppose that it had been built by one race of
people and the houses by another. The plaza was shut in on two of its
sides by a barrier seven rails high, held together by ox-hide ropes.
This barrier, with the houses fronting the plaza on its two other
sides, formed the arena in which the bull was to be set at liberty.
All of the windows and a few of the doors of the houses were barred,
and the open places between were filled up by ramparts of logs. There
was no grand-stand, but every one contributed a bench or a table from
his own house, and the women seated themselves on these, while the men
and boys perched on the upper rail of the barricade. The occasion was
a memorable one, and all the houses were hung with strips of colored
linen, and the women wore their brilliant silk shawls, and a band of
fifteen boys, none of whom could have been over sixteen years of age,
played a weird overture to the desperate business of the afternoon.
It was a somewhat primitive and informal bull-fight, and it began with
their lassoing the bull by his horns and hoofs, and dragging him head
first against the barricade. With a dozen men pulling on the lariat
around the horns from the outside of the ring, and two more twisting
his tail on the inside, he was at such an uncomfortable disadvantage
that it was easy for them to harness him in a net-work of lariats,
and for a bold rider to seat himself on his back. The bold rider wore
spurs on his bare feet, and, with his toes stuck in the ropes around
the bull’s body, he grasped the same ropes with one hand, and with the
other hand behind him held on to the bull’s tail as a man holds the
tiller of a boat. When the man felt himself firmly fixed, and the bull
had been poked into a very bad temper with spears and sharp sticks, the
lariat around his horns was cut, and he started up and off on a frantic
gallop, bucking as vigorously as a Texas pony, and trying to gore the
man clinging to his back with backward tosses of his horns.
There was no regular toreador, and any one who desired to sacrifice
himself to make a Saguatepecan holiday was at liberty to do so; and
as a half-dozen men so sought distinction, and as the bull charged
at anything on two legs, the excitement was intense. He moved very
quickly for so huge an animal in spite of his heavy handicap, and, with
the exception of one man with a red flag and a spirit of daring not
entirely due to natural causes, no one cared to go very near him. So
he pawed up and down the ring, tossing and bucking and making himself
as disagreeable to the man on his back as he possibly could. It struck
me that it would be a distinctly sporting act to photograph a bull
while he was charging head on at the photographer, and it occurred to
Somerset and Griscom at about the same time that it would be pleasant
to confront a very mad bull while he was careering about with a man
twisting his tail. So we all dropped into the arena at about the same
moment, from different sides, and as we were gringos, our appearance
was hailed with laughter and yells of encouragement. The gentleman on
the bull seemed to be able to control him more or less by twisting his
tail to one side or the other, and as soon as he heard the shouts that
welcomed us he endeavored to direct the bull’s entire attention to my
two young friends. Griscom and Somerset are six feet high, even without
riding-boots and pith helmets, and with them they were so conspicuous
that the bull was properly incensed, and made them hurl themselves over
the barricade in such haste that they struck the ground on the other
side at about the same instant that he butted the rails, and with about
the same amount of force.
Shrieks and yells of delight rose from the natives at this delightful
spectacle, and it was generally understood that we had been engaged
to perform in our odd costumes for their special amusement, and the
village priest attained genuine popularity for this novel feature. The
bull-baiting continued for some time, and as I kept the camera in my
own hands, there is no documentary evidence to show that any one ran
away but Griscom and Somerset. Friendly doors were opened to us by
those natives whose houses formed part of the arena, and it was amusing
to see the toreadors popping in and out of them, like the little man
and woman on the barometer who come out when it rains and go in when
the sun shines, and _vice versa_.
On those frequent occasions when the bull charged the barricade, the
entire line of men and boys on its topmost rail would go over backward,
and disappear completely until the disappointed bull had charged madly
off in another direction. Once he knocked half of a mud-house away in
his efforts to follow a man through a doorway, and again a window-sill,
over which a toreador had dived head first like a harlequin in a
pantomime, caved in under the force of his attack. Fresh bulls followed
the first, and the boy musicians maddened them still further by the
most hideous noises, which only ceased when the bulls charged the fence
upon which the musicians sat, and which they vacated precipitately,
each taking up the tune where he had left off when his feet struck the
ground. There was a grand ball that night, to which we did not go, but
we lay awake listening to the fifteen boy musicians until two in the
morning. It was an odd, eyrie sort of music, in which the pipings of
the reed instruments predominated. But it was very beautiful, and very
much like the music of the Hungarian gypsies in making little thrills
chase up and down over one’s nervous system.
The next morning Jeffs had shaken off his fever, and, once more
reunited, we trotted on over heavily wooded hills, where we found no
water until late in the afternoon, when we came upon a broad stream,
and surprised a number of young girls in bathing, who retreated
leisurely as we came clattering down to the ford. Bathing in mid-stream
is a popular amusement in Honduras, and is conducted without any false
sense of modesty; and judging from the number of times we came upon
women so engaged, it seems to be the chief occupation of their day.
That night we slept in Comyagua, the second largest city in the
republic. It was originally selected as the site for a capital, and
situated accordingly at exactly even distances from the Pacific Ocean
and the Caribbean Sea. We found it a dull and desolate place of many
one-story houses, with iron-barred windows, and a great, bare, dusty
plaza, faced by a huge cathedral. Commerce seemed to have passed it
by, and the sixty thousand inhabitants who occupied it in the days of
the Spaniards have dwindled down to ten. The place is as completely
cut off from civilization as an island in the Pacific Ocean. The plain
upon which Comyagua stands stretches for many miles, and the nature of
the stones and pebbles on its surface would seem to show that it was
once the bottom of a great lake. Now its round pebbles and sandy soil
make it a valley of burning heat, into which the sun beats without the
intervening shadows of trees or mountains to save the traveller from
the fierceness of its rays.
We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that part of the plain which
we traversed after our night’s rest at the capital the most trying ten
miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the rear of a long funeral
procession, in which the men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted
in the burning sand. They were marching to a burial-ground out in
the plain, and they were carrying the coffin on their shoulders, and
bearing before it a life-sized figure of the Virgin and many flaring
candles that burned yellow in the glaring sunlight.
From Comyagua the trail led for many miles through heavy sand, in which
nothing seemed to grow but gigantic cacti of a sickly light green that
twisted themselves in jointed angles fifteen to twenty feet in the air
above us, and century-plants with flowers of a vivid yellow, and tall,
leafless bushes bristling with thorns. The mountains lay on either
side, and formed the valley through which we rode, two dark-green
barriers against a blazing sky, but for miles before and behind us
there was nothing to rest the eye from the glare of the sand. The
atmosphere was without a particle of moisture, and the trail quivered
and swam in the heat; if you placed your hand on the leather pommel
of your saddle it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and ten
minutes after we had dipped our helmets in water they were baked as dry
as when they had first come from the shop. The rays of the sun seemed
to beat up at you from below as well as from above, and we gasped and
panted as we rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though the sun was
something alive and active that struck at us as we passed by. If you
dared to look up at the sky its brilliancy blinded you as though some
one had flashed a mirror in your eyes.
We lunched at a village of ten huts planted defiantly in the open
plain, and as little protected from the sun as a row of bricks in a
brick-yard, but by lying between two of them we found a draught of
hot air and shade, and so rested for an hour. Our trail after that
led over a mile or two of red hematite ore, which suggested a ride
in a rolling-mill with the roof taken away, and with the sun beating
into the four walls, and the air filled with iron-dust. Two hours
later we came to a cañon of white chalk, in which the government had
cut stepping-places for the hoofs of the mules. The white glare in
this valley was absolutely blinding, and the atmosphere was that of a
lime-kiln. We showed several colors after this ride, with layers of
sand and clay, and particles of red ore and powdering of white chalk
over all; but by five o’clock we reached the mountains once more, and
found a cool stream dashing into little water-falls and shaded by great
trees, where the air was scented by the odor of pine-needles and the
damp, spongy breath of moss and fern.
[Illustration: BRIDGE CONNECTING TEGUCIGALPA WITH ITS SUBURB]
We were now within two days of Tegucigalpa, and the sense of nearness
to civilization and the knowledge that the greater part of our journey
was at an end made us forget the discomforts and hardships which we had
endured without the consolation of excitement that comes with danger,
or the comforting thought that we were accomplishing anything in the
meantime. We had been complaining of this during the day to Jeffs, and
saying that had we gone to the coast of East Africa we could not have
been more uncomfortable nor run greater risks from fever, but that
there we would have met with big game, and we would have visited the
most picturesque instead of the least interesting of all countries.
These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick upon us, which was
meant in a kindly spirit, and by which he intended to furnish us with a
moment’s excitement, and to make us believe that we had been in touch
with danger. There are occasional brigands in Central America, and
their favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a few miles of
Tegucigalpa, along the trail from the eastern coast over which we were
then passing. We had been warned of these men, and it occurred to Jeffs
that as we complained of lack of excitement in our trip, it would be
a thoughtful kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon our march.
So he left us still bathing at the water-fall, and telling us that he
would push on to engage quarters for the night, rode some distance
ahead and secreted himself behind a huge rock on one side of a narrow
cañon. He first placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his hat on
another bush, so as to make it appear that there were several men with
him. His idea was that when he challenged us we would see the dim
figures in the moonlight and remember the brigands, and that we were
in their stalking-ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly as
possible, well satisfied that we had at last met with a real adventure.
We reached his ambuscade about seven. Somerset was riding in advance,
reciting “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” while we were correcting him
when he went wrong, and gazing unconcernedly and happily at the cool
moonlight as it came through the trees, when we were suddenly startled
by a yell and an order to halt, in Spanish, and a rapid fusillade of
pistol-shots. We could distinguish nothing but what was apparently
the figures of three men crouching on the hill-side and the flashes of
their revolvers, so we all fell off our mules and began banging away at
them with our rifles, while the mules scampered off down the mountain.
This was not as Jeffs had planned it, and he had to rearrange matters
very rapidly. Bullets were cutting away twigs all over the hill-side
and splashing on the rock behind which he was now lying, and though he
might have known we could not hit him, he was afraid of a stray bullet.
So he yelled at us in English, and called us by name, until we finally
discovered we had been grossly deceived and imposed upon, and that our
adventure was a very unsatisfactory practical joke for all concerned.
It took us a long time to round up the mules, and we reached our
sleeping-place in grim silence, and with our desire for danger still
unsatisfied.
[Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TEGUCIGALPA]
The last leagues that separated us the next morning from Tegucigalpa
seemed, of course, the longest in the entire journey. And so great
was our desire to reach the capital before nightfall that we left
the broader trail and scrambled down the side of the last mountain,
dragging our mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and
rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city did not look inviting
as we viewed it from above. It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded
by five hills that rose straight into the air, and that seemed to
have been placed there for the special purpose of revolutionists,
in order that they might the more exactly drop shot into the town at
their feet. The hills were bare of verdure, and the landscape about
the capital made each of us think of the country about Jerusalem. As
none of us had ever seen Jerusalem, we foregathered and argued why this
should be so, and decided that it was on account of the round rocks
lying apart from one another, and low, bushy trees, and the red soil,
and the flat roofs of the houses.
[Illustration: THE BANK OF HONDURAS]
The telegraph wire which extends across Honduras, swinging from trees
and piercing long stretches of palm and jungle, had warned the foreign
residents of the coming of Jeffs, and some of them rode out to make
us welcome. Their greeting, and the sight of paved streets, and the
passing of a band of music and a guard of soldiers in shoes and real
uniform, seemed to promise much entertainment and possible comfort.
But the hotel was a rude shock. We had sent word that we were coming,
and we had looked forward eagerly to our first night in a level bed
under clean linen; but when we arrived we were offered the choice
of a room just vacated by a very ill man, who had left all of his
medicines behind him, so that the place was unpleasantly suggestive of
a hospital, or a very small room, in which there were three cots, and
a layer of dirt over all so thick that I wrote my name with the finger
of my riding-glove on the centre-table. The son of the proprietor saw
this, and, being a kindly person and well disposed, dipped his arm in
water and proceeded to rub it over the top of the table, using his
sleeve as a wash-rag. So after that we gave up expecting anything
pleasant, and were in consequence delightfully surprised when we came
upon anything that savored of civilization.
Tegucigalpa has an annex which lies on the opposite side of the river,
and which is to the capital what Brooklyn is to New York. The river is
not very wide nor very deep, and its course is impeded by broad, flat
rocks. The washer-women of the two towns stand beside these all day
knee-deep in the eddies and beat the stones with their twisted clubs
of linen, so that their echo sounds above the roar of the river like
the banging of shutters in the wind or the reports of pistols. This
is the only suggestion of energy that the town furnishes. The other
inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and irritable with boredom.
There are long, dark, cool shops of general merchandise, and a great
cathedral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at night and people
circle in two rings, one going to the right and one going to the left,
and there is the government palace and a big penitentiary, a university
and a cemetery. But there is no color nor ornamentation nor light
nor life nor bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people talking and
calling to one another across the narrow streets of the place by day or
serenading by night. Every one seems to go to bed at nine o’clock, and
after that hour the city is as silent as its great graveyard, except
when the boy policemen mark the hour with their whistles or the street
dogs meet to fight.
[Illustration: STATUE OF MORAZAN]
The most interesting thing about the capital is the fact to which I
have already alluded, that everything in it and pertaining to it that
was not dug from the ground or fashioned from trees was carried to it
on the backs of mules. The letter-boxes on the street corners had once
been United States letter-boxes, and had later swung across the backs
of donkeys. The gas-lamps and the iron railings of the parks, the few
statues and busts in the public places, reached Tegucigalpa by the same
means, and the great equestrian statue of Morazan the Liberator, in the
plaza, was cast in Italy, and had been brought to Tegucigalpa in pieces
before it was put together like a puzzle and placed in its present
position to mark a glorious and victorious immortality. These things
were not interesting in themselves, but it was interesting that they
were there at all.
On the second day after our arrival the vice-president, Luis Bonilla,
who bears the same last name but is no near relation to President
Bonilla, took the oath of office, and we saw the ceremony with the
barefooted public in the reception-room of the palace. The hall was
hung with lace curtains and papered with imitation marble, and the
walls were decorated with crayon portraits of Honduranian presidents.
Bogran was not among them, nor was Morazan. The former was missing
because it was due to him that young Bonilla had been counted out
when he first ran for the presidency three years ago, when he was
thirty-three years old, and the portrait of the Liberator was
being reframed, because Bonilla’s followers six months before had
unintentionally shot holes through it when they were besieging the
capital. The ceremony of swearing in the vice-president did not last
long, and what impressed us most about it was the youth of the members
of the cabinet and of the Supreme Court who delivered the oath of
office. They belonged distinctly to the politician class as one sees
it at home, and were young men of eloquent speech and elegant manners,
in frock-coats and white ties. We came to know most of the president’s
followers later, and found them hospitable to a degree, although
they seemed hardly old enough or serious enough to hold place in the
government of a republic, even so small a one as Honduras. What was
most admirable about each of them was that he had fought and bled to
obtain the office he held. That is hardly a better reason for giving
out clerkships and cabinet portfolios than the reasons which obtain
with us for distributing the spoils of office, but you cannot help
feeling more respect for the man who has marched by the side of his
leader through swamps and through jungle, who has starved on rice, who
has slept in the bushes, and fought with a musket in his hand in open
places, than for the fat and sleek gentlemen who keep open bar at the
headquarters of their party organization, who organize marching clubs,
and who by promises or by cash secure a certain amount of influence and
a certain number of votes.
[Illustration: P. Bonilla]
They risk nothing but their money, and if their man fails to get in,
their money is all they lose; but the Central-American politician has
to show the faith that is in him by going out on the mountain-side
and hacking his way to office with a naked machete in his hand, and
if _his_ leader fails, he loses his life, with his back to a church
wall, and looking into the eyes of a firing squad, or he digs his own
grave by the side of the road, and stands at one end of it, covered
with clay and sweat, and with the fear of death upon him, and takes
his last look at the hot sun and the palms and the blue mountains,
with the buzzards wheeling about him, and then shuts his eyes, and is
toppled over into the grave, with a half-dozen bullets in his chest and
stomach. That is what I should like to see happen to about half of our
professional politicians at home. Then the other half might understand
that holding a public office is a very serious business, and is not
merely meant to furnish them with a livelihood and with places for
their wives’ relations.
[Illustration: GENERAL LUIS BOGRAN, EX-PRESIDENT]
I saw several churches and cathedrals in Honduras with a row of
bullet-holes in the front wall, about as high from the ground as a
man’s chest, and an open grave by the road-side, which had been dug
by the man who was to have occupied it. The sight gave us a vivid
impression of the uncertainties of government in Central America.
The man who dug this particular grave had been captured, with two
companions, while they were hastening to rejoin their friends of
the government party. His companions in misery were faint-hearted
creatures, and thought it mattered but little, so long as they had to
die, in what fashion they were buried. So they scooped out a few feet
of earth with the tools their captors gave them, and stood up in the
hollows they had made, and were shot back into them, dead; but the
third man declared that he was not going to let his body lie so near
the surface of the earth that the mules could kick his bones and the
next heavy freshet wash them away. He accordingly dug leisurely and
carefully to the depth of six feet, smoothing the sides and sharpening
the corners, and while he was thus engaged at the bottom of the hole he
heard yells and shots above him, and when he poked his head up over the
edge of the grave he saw his own troops running down the mountain-side,
and his enemies disappearing before them. He is still alive, and
frequently rides by the hole in the road-side on his way to the
capital. The story illustrates the advisability of doing what every one
has to do in this world, even up to the very last minute, in a thorough
and painstaking manner.
There do not seem to be very many men killed in these revolutions,
but the ruin they bring to the country while they last, and which
continues after they are over, while the “outs” are getting up another
revolution, is so serious that any sort of continued prosperity or
progress is impossible. Native merchants will not order goods that may
never reach them, and neither do the gringos care to make contracts
with men who in six months may not only be out of office, but out of
the country as well. Sometimes a revolution takes place, and half
of the people of the country will not know of it until it has been
put down or has succeeded; and again the revolution may spread to
every boundary, and all the men at work on the high-roads and in the
mines or on the plantations must stop work and turn to soldiering,
and pack-mules are seized, the mail-carriers stopped, plantations
are devastated, and forced loans are imposed upon those who live in
cities, so that every one suffers more or less through every change
of executive. During the last revolution Tegucigalpa was besieged for
six months, and was not captured until most of the public buildings
had been torn open by cannon from the hills around the town, and the
dwelling-houses still show where bullets marked the mud and plaster of
the walls or buried themselves in the wood-work. The dining-room of our
hotel was ventilated by such openings, and we used to amuse ourselves
by tracing the course of the bullets from the hole they had made at
one side of the room to their resting-place in the other. The native
Honduranian is not energetic, and, except in the palace, there has been
but little effort made by the victors to cover up the traces of their
bombardment. Every one we met had a different experience to relate, and
pointed out where he was sitting when a particular hole appeared in the
plaster before him, or at which street corner a shell fell and burst at
his feet.
[Illustration: BARRACKS AT TEGUCIGALPA AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE
REVOLUTIONISTS]
It follows, of course, that a government which is created by force of
arms, and which holds itself in place by the same power of authority,
cannot be a very just or a very liberal one, even if its members are
honest, and the choice of a majority of the people, and properly in
office in spite of the fact that they fought to get there, and not on
account of it. Bonilla was undoubtedly at one time elected President of
Honduras, although he did not gain the presidential chair until after
he had thrown his country into war and had invaded it at the head of
troops from the rival republic of Nicaragua.
The Central-American cannot understand that when a bad man is
elected to office legally it is better in the long-run that he should
serve out his full term than that a better man should drive him out and
defy the constitution. If he could be brought to comprehend that when
the constitution says the president must serve four years that means
four years, and not merely until some one is strong enough to overthrow
him, it might make him more careful as to whom he elected to office in
the first place. But the value of stability in government is something
they cannot be made to understand. It is not in their power to see it,
and the desire for change and revolution is born in the blood. They
speak of a man as a “good revolutionist” just as we would speak of some
one being a good pianist, or a good shot, or a good executive officer.
It is a recognized calling, and the children grow up into fighters;
and even those who have lived abroad, and who should have learned
better, begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return to their old
environment.
In each company of soldiers in Honduras there are two or three little
boys in uniform who act as couriers and messengers, and who are able,
on account of their slight figure, to penetrate where a man would be
seen and shot. One of the officers in the revolution of 1894 told me he
had sent six of these boys, one after another, with despatches across
an open plain which was being raked by the rifles of the enemy. And as
each boy was killed as he crawled through the sage-brush the other boys
begged of their colonel to let them be the next to go, jumping up and
down around him and snapping their fingers like school-boys who want to
attract the attention of their teacher.
In the same revolution a young man of great promise and many
acquirements, who had just returned from the States with two degrees
from Columbia College, and who should have lived to turn his education
to account in his own country, was killed with a rifle in his hand
the third day after his arrival from New York. In that city he would
probably have submitted cheerfully to any imposition of the law, and
would have taken it quite as a matter of course had he been arrested
for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding a bicycle at night without
a lamp; but as soon as this graduate of Columbia smelled the powder
floating on his native air he loaded a rifle, and sat out all day on
the porch of his house taking chance shots at the revolutionists on
the hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his brilliant career
forever. The pity of it is that so much good energy should be wasted in
obtaining such poor results, for nothing better ever seems to follow
these revolutions. There is only a new form of dictatorship, which
varies only in the extent of its revenge and in the punishments it
metes out to its late opponents, but which must be, if it hopes to
remain in power, a dictatorship and an autocracy.
[Illustration: MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS]
The republics of Central America are republics in name only, and
the movements of a stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are
as closely watched as though he were a newspaper correspondent in
Siberia. I often had to sign the names of our party twice in one day
for the benefit of police and customs officers, and we never entered
a hotel or boarded a steamer or disembarked from one that we were not
carefully checked and receipted for exactly as though we were boxes of
merchandise or registered letters. Even the natives cannot walk the
street after nightfall without being challenged by sentries, and the
collection of letters we received from alcaldes and comandantes and
governors and presidents certifying to our being reputable citizens
is large enough to paper the side of a wall. The only time in Central
America when our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and when we felt as
free to walk abroad as though we were on the streets of New York, was
when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution
of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were in any of these
disorganized military camps called free republics.
The Central-American citizen is no more fit for a republican form of
government than he is for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to
have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States
or by another power; it does not matter which, so long as it leaves the
Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital of Costa Rica there is a
statue of the Republic in the form of a young woman standing with her
foot on the neck of General Walker, the American filibuster. We had
planned to go to the capital for the express purpose of tearing that
statue down some night, or blowing it up; so it is perhaps just as well
for us that we could not get there; but it would have been a very good
thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other man of force, had put his
foot on the neck of every republic in Central America and turned it to
some account.
Away from the coasts, where there is fever, Central America is a
wonderful country, rich and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but
its people make it a nuisance and an affront to other nations, and its
parcel of independent little states, with the pomp of power and none of
its dignity, are and will continue to be a constant danger to the peace
which should exist between two great powers.
There is no more interesting question of the present day than that of
what is to be done with the world’s land which is lying unimproved;
whether it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to
account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its
value. The Central-Americans are like a gang of semi-barbarians in a
beautifully furnished house, of which they can understand neither its
possibilities of comfort nor its use. They are the dogs in the manger
among nations. Nature has given to their country great pasture-lands,
wonderful forests of rare woods and fruits, treasures of silver and
gold and iron, and soil rich enough to supply the world with coffee,
and it only waits for an honest effort to make it the natural highway
of traffic from every portion of the globe. The lakes of Nicaragua are
ready to furnish a passageway which should save two months of sailing
around the Horn, and only forty-eight miles of swamp-land at Panama
separate the two greatest bodies of water on the earth’s surface.
Nature has done so much that there is little left for man to do, but it
will have to be some other man than a native-born Central-American who
is to do it.
We had our private audience with President Bonilla in time, and found
him a most courteous and interesting young man. He is only thirty-six
years of age, which probably makes him the youngest president in the
world, and he carries on his watch-chain a bullet which was cut out
of his arm during the last revolution. He showed us over the palace,
and pointed out where he had shot holes in it, and entertained us most
hospitably. The other members of the cabinet were equally kind, making
us many presents, and offering Griscom a consul-generalship abroad, and
consulates to Somerset and myself, but we said we would be ambassadors
or nothing; so they offered to make us generals in the next revolution,
and we accepted that responsible position with alacrity, knowing that
not even the regiments to which we were accredited could force us again
into Honduras.
Before we departed the president paid us a very doubtful compliment
in asking us to ride with him. We supposed it was well meant, but we
still have secret misgivings that it was a plot to rid himself of us
and of the vice-president at the same time. When his secretary came
to tell us that Dr. Bonilla would be glad to have us ride with him at
five that afternoon, I recalled the fact that all the horses I had
seen in Honduras were but little larger than an ordinary donkey, and
quite as depressed and spiritless. So I accepted with alacrity. The
other two men, being cross-country riders, and entitled to wear the
gold buttons of various hunt clubs on their waistcoats, accepted as a
matter of course. But when we reached the palace we saw seven or eight
horses in the patio, none under sixteen hands high, and each engaged in
dragging two or three grooms about the yard, and swinging them clear
of the brick tiles as easily as a sailor swings a lead. The president
explained to us that these were a choice lot of six stallions which he
had just imported from Chili, and that three of them had never worn a
saddle before that morning.
He gave one of these to Griscom and another one to the vice-president,
for reasons best known to himself, and the third to Somerset. Griscom’s
animal had an idea that it was better to go backward like a crab than
to advance, so he backed in circles around the courtyard, while
Somerset’s horse seemed best to enjoy rearing himself on his hind-legs,
with the idea of rubbing Somerset off against the wall; and the
vice-president’s horse did everything that a horse can do, and a great
many things that I should not have supposed a horse could do, had I not
seen it. I put my beast’s nose into a corner of the wall where he could
not witness the circus performance going on behind him, and I watched
the president’s brute turning round and round and round until it made
me dizzy. We strangers confessed later that we were all thinking of
exactly the same thing, which was that, no matter how many of our bones
were shattered, we must not let these natives think they could ride any
better than any chance American or Englishman, and it was only a matter
of national pride that kept us in our saddles. The vice-president’s
horse finally threw him into the doorway and rolled on him, and it
required five of his officers to pull the horse away and set him on his
feet again. The vice-president had not left his saddle for an instant,
and if he handles his men in the field as he handled that horse, it is
not surprising that he wins many battles.
Not wishing to have us all killed, and seeing that it was useless to
attempt to kill the vice-president in that way, Dr. Bonilla sent word
to the band to omit their customary salute, and so we passed out in
grateful silence between breathless rows of soldiers and musicians
and several hundreds of people who had never seen a life-sized horse
before. We rode at a slow pace, on account of the vice-president’s
bruises, while the president pointed out the different points from
which he had attacked the capital. He was not accompanied by any
guard on this ride, and informed us that he was the first president
who had dared go abroad without one. He seemed to trust rather to the
good-will of the _pueblo_, to whom he plays, and to whom he bowed
much more frequently than to the people of the richer class. It was
amusing to see the more prominent men of the place raise their hats
to the president, and the young girls in the suburbs nodding casually
and without embarrassment to the man. Before he set out on his ride he
stuck a gold-plated revolver in his hip-pocket, which was to take the
place of the guard of honor of former presidents, and to protect him in
case of an attempt at assassination. It suggested that there are other
heads besides those that wear a crown which rest uneasy.
It was a nervous ride, and Griscom’s horse added to the excitement by
trying to back him over a precipice, and he was only saved from going
down one thousand yards to the roofs of the city below by several of
the others dragging at the horse’s bridle. When, after an hour, we
found ourselves once more within sight of the palace, we covertly
smiled at one another, and are now content never to associate with
presidents again unless we walk.
We left Tegucigalpa a few days later with a generous escort, including
all the consuls, and José Guiteris, the assistant secretary of state,
and nearly all of the foreign residents. We made such a formidable
showing as we raced through the streets that it suggested an uprising,
and we cried, “Viva Guiteris!” to make the people think there was
a new revolution in his favor. We shouted with the most loyal
enthusiasm, but it only served to make Guiteris extremely unhappy,
and he occupied himself in considering how he could best explain to
Bonilla that the demonstration was merely an expression of our idea of
humor. Twelve miles out we all stopped and backed the mules up side
by side, and everybody shook hands with everybody else, and there
were many promises to write, and to forward all manner of things, and
assurances of eternal remembrance and friendship, and then the Guiteris
revolutionists galloped back, firing parting salutes with their
revolvers, and we fell into line again with a nod of satisfaction at
being once more on the road.[B]
We never expected any conveniences or comforts on the road, and so we
were never disappointed, and were much happier and more contented in
consequence than at the capital, where the name promised so much and
the place furnished so little. We found that it was not the luxuries
of life that we sighed after, but the mere conveniences--those things
to which we had become so much accustomed that we never supposed there
were places where they did not exist. A chair with a back, for example,
was one of the things we most wanted. We had never imagined, until we
went to Honduras, that chairs grew without backs; but after we had
ridden ten hours, and were so tired that each man found himself easing
his spinal column by leaning forward with his hands on the pommel of
his saddle, we wanted something more than a three-legged stool when we
alighted for the night.
Our ride to the Pacific coast was a repetition of the ride to the
capital, except that, as there was a full moon, we slept in the middle
of the day and rode later in the night. During this nocturnal journey
we met many pilgrims going to the festivals. They were all mounted on
mules, and seemed a very merry and jovial company. Sometimes there were
as many as fifty in one party, and we came across them picnicking in
the shade by day, or jogging along in the moonlight in a cloud of white
dust, or a cloud of white foam as they forded the broad river and
their donkeys splashed and slipped in the rapids. The nights were very
beautiful and cool, and the silence under the clear blue sky and white
stars was like the silence of the plains. The moon turned the trail a
pale white, and made the trees on either side of it alive with shadows
that seemed to play hide-and-seek with us, and the stumps and rocks
moved and gesticulated with life, until we drew up even with them, when
they were transformed once more into wood and stone.
[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO CORINTO]
It was on the third day out from the capital, while we were picking
our way down the side of a mountain, that Jeffs pointed to what looked
like a lake of silver lying between two great hills, and we knew that
we had crossed the continent, and so raised our hats and saluted the
Pacific Ocean. A day later, after a long, rapid ride over a level plain
where the trail was so broad that we could ride four abreast, we came
to San Lorenzo, a little cluster of huts at the edge of the ocean. The
settlement was still awake, for a mule train of silver had just arrived
from the San Rosario mines, and the ruddy glare of pine knots was
flashing through the chinks in the bamboo walls of the huts, and making
yellow splashes of color in the soft white light of the moon. We swung
ourselves out of the saddles for the last time, and gave the little
mules a farewell pat and many thanks, to which they made no response
whatsoever.
Five hours later we left the continent for the island of Amapala, the
chief seaport of the Pacific side of Honduras, and our ride was at an
end. We left San Lorenzo at two in the morning, but we did not reach
Amapala, although it was but fifteen miles out to sea, until four the
next afternoon. We were passengers in a long, open boat, and slept
stretched on our blankets at the bottom, while four natives pulled at
long sweeps. There were eight cross-seats, and a man sat on every other
one. A log of wood in which steps had been cut was bound to each empty
seat, and it was up this that the rower walked, as though he meant to
stand up on the seat to which it was tied, but he would always change
his mind and sink back again, bracing his left leg on the seat and his
right leg on the log, and dragging the oar through the water with the
weight of his body as he sank backwards. I lay on the ribs of the boat
below them and watched them through the night, rising and falling with
a slight toss of the head as they sank back, and with their brown naked
bodies outlined against the sky-line. They were so silent and their
movements so regular that they seemed like statues cut in bronze. By
ten the next morning they became so far animated as to say that they
were tired and hungry, and would we allow them to rest on a little
island that lay half a mile off our bow? We were very glad to rest
ourselves, and to get out of the sun and the glare of the sea, and to
stretch our cramped limbs: so we beached the boat in a little bay, and
frightened off thousands of gulls, which rose screaming in the air, and
which were apparently the only inhabitants.
The galley-slaves took sticks of driftwood and scattered over the
rocks, turning back the seaweed with their hands, and hacking at the
base of the rocks with their improvised hammers. We found that they
were foraging for oysters; and as we had nothing but a tin of sardines
and two biscuits among five of us, and had had nothing to eat for
twenty-four hours, we followed their example, and chipped the oysters
off with the butts of our revolvers, and found them cool and coppery,
like English oysters, and most refreshing. It was such a lonely little
island that we could quite imagine we were cast away upon it, and began
to play we were Robinson Crusoe, and took off our boots and went in
wading, paddling around in the water after mussels and crabs until we
were chased to shore by a huge shark. Then every one went to sleep in
the sand until late in the afternoon, when a breeze sprang up, and a
boatman carried us out on his shoulders, and we dashed off gayly under
full sail to the isle of Amapala, where we bade good-bye to Colonel
Jeffs and to the Republic of Honduras.
We had crossed the continent at a point where it was but little broader
than the distance from Boston to New York, a trip of five hours by
train, but which had taken us twenty-two days.
AT CORINTO
EVERY now and again each of us, either through his own choice or by
force of circumstance, drops out of step with the rest of the world,
and retires from it into the isolation of a sick-room, or to the
loneliness of the deck of an ocean steamer, and for some short time the
world somehow manages to roll on without him.
He is like a man who falls out of line in a regiment to fasten his
shoelace or to fill his canteen, and who hears over his shoulder the
hurrying tramp of his comrades, who are leaving him farther and farther
behind, so that he has to run briskly before he can catch up with them
and take his proper place once more in the procession.
I shall always consider the ten days we spent at Corinto, on the
Pacific side of Nicaragua, while we waited for the steamer to take us
south to Panama, as so many days of non-existence, as so much time
given to the mere exercise of living, when we were no more of this
world than are the prisoners in the salt-mines of Siberia, or the
keepers of light-houses scattered over sunny seas, or the men who tend
toll-gates on empty country lanes. And so when I read in the newspapers
last fall that three British ships of war were anchored in the harbor
of Corinto, with their guns loaded to the muzzles with ultimatums and
no one knows what else besides, and that they meant to levy on the
customs dues of that sunny little village, it was as much of a shock to
me as it would be to the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow were they told
that that particular spot was wanted as a site for a World’s Fair.
For no ships of any sort, certainly no ships of war, ever came to
Corinto while we occupied the only balcony of its only hotel. Indeed,
that was why we were there, and had they come we would have gone with
them, no matter to what port they were bound, even to the uttermost
parts of the earth.
We had come to Corinto from the little island of Amapala, which lies
seventy-five miles farther up the coast, and which guards the only
port of entry to Honduras on the Pacific seaboard. It is supposed to
belong to the Republic of Honduras, but it is in reality the property
of Rossner Brothers, who sell everything from German machetes to German
music-boxes, and who could, if they wanted it, purchase the entire
Republic of Honduras in the morning, and make a present of it to the
Kaiser in the course of the afternoon. You have only to change the name
of Rossner Brothers to the San Rosario Mining Company, to the Pacific
Mail, to Errman Brothers, to the Panama Railroad Company, and you will
identify the actual rulers of one or of several of the republics of
Central America.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL HOTEL AND PRINCIPAL HOUSE AT CORINTO]
It is very well for President Zelaya, or Barrios, or Vasquez, or
whatever his name may happen to be this month, to write to the New
York _Herald_ and tell the people of the United States what the
revolution in his country means. It does no harm; no one in the United
States reads the letter, except the foreign editor who translates it,
and no one in his own country ever sees it, but it makes him happy in
thinking he is persuading some one that he governs in his own way. As
a matter of fact he does not. His country, no matter what her name may
be, is ruled by a firm of coffee-merchants in New York city, or by a
German railroad company, or by a line of coasting steamers, or by a
great trading-house, with headquarters in Berlin or London or Bordeaux.
If the president wants money he borrows it from the trading-house;
if he wants arms, or his soldiers need blankets, the trading-house
supplies them. No one remembers now who was President of Peru when
Henry Meiggs was alive, and to-day William L. Grace is a better name on
letters of introduction to Chili and Peru than that of a secretary of
state.
When we were in Nicaragua, one little English banking-house was
fighting the minister of finance and the minister of foreign affairs
and the president and the entire government, and while the notes issued
by the bank were accepted at their face value, those of the government
were taken only in the presence of a policeman or a soldier, who was
there to see that you did take it. You find this condition of affairs
all through Central America, and you are not long in a republic before
you learn which merchant or which bank or which railroad company
controls it, and you soon grow to look upon a mule loaded with boxes
bearing the trade-mark of a certain business-house with more respect
than upon a soldier who wears the linen ribbon of the government. For
you know that at a word the soldier will tear the ribbon from his
straw sombrero and replace it with another upon which is printed “Viva
Dr. Somebody Else,” while the trade-mark of the business-house will
continue as long as English and German merchandise is carried across
the sea in ships. And it will also continue as long as Great Britain
and Germany and the United States are represented by consuls and
consular agents who are at the same time the partners of the leading
business firms in the seaport over which their consular jurisdiction
extends. For few Central-American republics are going to take away a
consul’s exequatur as long as they owe him in his unofficial capacity
for a large loan of money; and the merchant, on the other hand, knows
that he is not going to suffer from the imposition of a forced loan,
nor see his mules seized, as long as the tin sign with the American
eagle screaming upon it is tacked above the brass business plate of his
warehouse.
There was a merchant in Tegucigalpa named Santos Soto--he is there
still, I believe--and about a year ago President Vasquez told him he
needed a loan of ten thousand dollars to assist him in his struggle
against Bonilla; and as Soto was making sixty thousand dollars a year
in the country, he suggested that he had better lend it promptly. Soto
refused, and was locked in the cartel, where it was explained to him
that for every day he delayed in giving the money the amount demanded
of him would be increased one thousand dollars. As he still refused, he
was chained to an iron ball and led out to sweep the streets in front
of his shop, which extends on both sides of the principal thoroughfare
of the capital. He is an old man, and the sight of the chief merchant
in Tegucigalpa sweeping up the dust in front of his own block of stores
had a most salutary effect upon the other merchants, who promptly
loaned the sums demanded of them, taking rebates on customs dues in
exchange--with one exception. This merchant owned a jewelry store,
and was at the same time the English consular agent. He did not sweep
the streets, nor did he contribute to the forced loan. He values in
consequence his tin sign, which is not worth much as a work of art, at
about ten thousand dollars.
There is much that might be written of consular agents in Central
America that would differ widely from the reports written by
themselves and published by the State Department. The most interesting
thing about them, to my mind, is the fact that none of them ever seem
to represent a country which they have ever seen, and that they are
always citizens of another country to which they are anxious to return.
I find that after Americans, Germans make the best American consular
agents, and Englishmen the best German consular agents, while French
consular agents would be more useful to their countrymen if they could
speak French as well as they do Spanish. Sometimes, as in the case of
the consular agent at Corinto, you find a native of Italy representing
both Great Britain and the United States. A whole comic opera could be
written on the difficulties of a Nicaraguan acting as an English and
American consul, with three British men-of-war in the harbor levying on
the customs dues of his native land, and an American squadron hastening
from Panama to see that their English cousins did not gather in a few
islands by mistake.
If he called on the British admiral, and received his seven-gun salute,
would it constitute a breach of international etiquette if he were
rowed over to the American admiral and received seven guns from him;
and as a native of Nicaragua could he see the customs dues, which
comprise the government’s chief source of revenue, going into the
pockets of one country which he so proudly serves without complaining
to the other country which he serves with equal satisfaction? Every
now and then you come across a real American consul who was born in
America, and who serves the United States with ability, dignity,
and self-respect, so that you are glad you are both Americans. Of
this class we found General Allen Thomas at La Guayra, who was later
promoted and made United States minister at Caracas, Mr. Alger at
Puerto Cortez, Mr. Little at Tegucigalpa, and Colonel Bird at Caracas.
We found that the firm of Rossner Brothers had in their employ the
American and English consular agents, and these gentlemen endeared
themselves to us by assisting at our escape from their island in an
open boat. They did not tell us, however, that Fonseca Bay was one of
the most treacherous stretches of water on the admiralty charts; but
that was, probably, because they were merchants and not sailors.
Amapala was the hottest place I ever visited. It did not grow warm as
the day wore on, but began briskly at sunrise by nailing the mercury at
fever-heat, and continued boiling and broiling until ten at night. By
one the next morning the roof over your head and the bed-linen beneath
you had sufficiently cooled for you to sleep, and from that on until
five there was a fair imitation of night.
There was but one cool spot in Amapala; it was a point of land that
the inhabitants had rather tactlessly selected as a dumping-ground
for the refuse of the town, and which was only visited by pigs and
buzzards. This point of land ran out into the bay, and there had once
been an attempt made to turn it into a public park, of which nothing
now remains but a statue to Morazan, the Liberator of Honduras. The
statue stood on a pedestal of four broad steps, surrounded by an iron
railing, the gates of which had fallen from their hinges, and lay
scattered over the piles of dust and débris under which the park is
buried. At each corner of the railing there were beautiful macaws which
had once been painted in brilliant reds and greens and yellows, and
which we tried to carry off one night, until we found that they also
were made of iron. We would have preferred the statue of Morazan as a
souvenir, but that we doubted its identity. Morazan was a smooth-faced
man with a bushy head of hair, and this statue showed him with long
side-whiskers and a bald head, and in the uniform of an English
admiral. It was probably the rejected work of some English sculptor,
and had been obtained, no doubt, at a moderate price, and as very few
remember Morazan to-day it answers its purpose excellently well. We
became very much attached to it, and used to burn incense to it in the
form of many Honduranian cigars, which sell at two cents apiece.
When night came on, and the billiard-room had grown so hot that the
cues slipped in our hands, and the tantalizing sight of an American
ice-cooler, which had never held ice since it left San Francisco,
had driven us out into the night, we would group ourselves at the
base of this statue to Morazan, and throw rocks at the buzzards and
pigs, and let the only breeze that dares to pass over Amapala bring
our temperature down to normal. We should have plotted a revolution
by rights, for the scene was set for such a purpose, and no one in
the town accounted in any other way for our climbing the broken iron
railing nightly, and remaining on the steps of the pedestal until two
the next morning.
Amapala, I suppose, was used to heat, and could sleep with the
thermometer at ninety, and did not mind the pigs or the buzzards, and
if we did plot to convert Honduras into a monarchy and make Somerset
king, no one heard us but the English edition of Morazan smiling
blandly down upon us like a floor-walker at the Army and Navy Stores,
with his hand on his heart and an occasional buzzard soaring like
Poe’s raven above his marble forehead. The moonlight turned him into a
figure of snow, and the great palms above bent and waved and shivered
unceasingly, and the sea beat on the rocks at our feet.
It was an interesting place of rendezvous, but we tired of a town that
grew cool only after midnight, and in which the fever stalked abroad
by day. So we chartered a small boat, and provisioned it, and enlisted
a crew of pirates, and set sail one morning for Corinto, seventy-five
miles farther south. There was no steamer expected at Corinto at any
earlier date than at Amapala, but in the nature of things one had to
touch there some time, and there was a legend to which we had listened
with doubt and longing to the effect that at Corinto there was an
ice-machine, and though we found later that the ice-machines always
broke on the day we arrived in port, we preferred the chance of finding
Fonseca Bay in a peaceful state to yellow-fever at Amapala. It was an
exciting voyage. I would now, being more wise, choose the yellow-fever,
but we did not know any better then. There was no deck to the boat, and
it was not wide enough for one to lie lengthwise from side to side, and
too crowded to permit of our stretching our bodies fore and aft. So
we rolled about on top of one another, and were far too miserable to
either apologize or swear when we bumped into a man’s ribs or sat on
his head.
We started with a very fine breeze dead astern, and the boat leaped
and plunged and rolled all night, and we were hurled against the sides
and thumped by rolling trunks, and travelling-bags, and gun-cases, and
boxes of broken apollinaris bottles. The stone-breaker in a quarry
would have soothed us in comparison. And when the sun rose fully
equipped at four in the morning the wind died away absolutely, and we
rose and sank all day on the great swell of the Pacific Ocean. The boat
was painted a bright red inside and out, and the sun turned this open
red bowl into an oven of heat. It made even our white flannels burn
when they touched the skin like a shirt of horse-hair. As far as we
could look on every side the ocean lay like a sea of quicksilver, and
the dome of the sky glittered with heat. The red paint on the sides
bubbled and cracked, and even the native boatmen cowered under the
cross-seats with their elbows folded on their knees and their faces
buried in their arms; and we had not the heart to tell them to use the
oars, even if we had known how. At noon the chief pirate crawled over
the other bodies and rigged up the sail so that it threw a shadow over
mine, and I lay under this awning and read Barrie’s _Lady Nicotine_,
while the type danced up and down in waving lines like the letters
in a typewriter. I am sure it was only the necessity which that book
impressed upon me of holding on to life until I could smoke the Arcadia
mixture that kept me from dropping overboard and being cremated in the
ocean below.
We sighted the light-house of Corinto at last, and hailed the white
custom-house and the palms and the blue cottages of the port with a
feeble cheer.
The people came down to the shore and crowded around her bow as we
beached her in front of the custom-house, and a man asked us anxiously
in English, “What ship has been wrecked?” And we explained that we were
not survivors of a shipwreck, but of a possible conflagration, and
wanted ice.
And then, when we fell over the side bruised and sleepy, and burning
with thirst, and with everything still dancing before our eyes, they
refused to give us ice until we grew cooler, and sent out in the
meanwhile to the _comandancia_ in search of some one who could identify
us as escaped revolutionists. They took our guns away from us as a
precaution, but they could have had half our kingdom for all we cared,
for the wonderful legend proved true, and at last we got the ice in
large, thick glasses, with ginger ale and lemon juice and apollinaris
water trickling through it, and there was frost on the sides of the
glasses, and a glimpse of still more ice wrapped up in smoking blankets
in the refrigerator--ice that we had not tasted for many days of riding
in the hot sun and through steaming swamp-lands, and which we had last
seen treated with contempt and contumely, knocked about at the bow of
a tug-boat in the North River, and tramped upon by many muddy feet
on Fifth Avenue. None of us will ever touch ice hereafter without
handling it with the same respect and consideration that we would show
to a precious stone.
The busybodies of Corinto who had decided from the manner of our
arrival that we had been forced to leave Honduras for the country’s
good, finally found a native who identified me as a filibuster he
had met during the last revolution at Leon. As that was bringing it
rather near home, Griscom went after Mr. Palaccio, the Italian who
serves both England and the United States as consular agent. We showed
him a rare collection of autographs of secretaries, ambassadors,
and prime-ministers, and informed him that we intended taking four
state-rooms on the steamer of the line he represented at that port.
This convinced him of the necessity of keeping us out of jail until
the boat arrived, and he satisfied the local authorities as to our
respectability, and that we had better clothes in our trunks.
Corinto is the best harbor on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, but the
town is not as large as the importance of the port would suggest. It
consists of three blocks of two-story houses, facing the harbor fifty
feet back from the water’s edge, with a sandy street between each block
of buildings. There are about a thousand inhabitants, and a foreign
population which varies from five residents to a dozen transient
visitors and stewards on steamer days. The natives are chiefly
occupied in exporting coffee and receiving the imported goods for the
interior, and the principal amusement of the foreign colony is bathing
or playing billiards. It has a whist club of four members. The fifth
foreign resident acts as a substitute in the event of any one of the
four players chancing to have another engagement, but as there is no
one with whom he could have an engagement, the substitute is seldom
called upon. He told me he had been sitting by and smoking and watching
the others play whist for a month now, and hoping that one of them
would have a sunstroke.
[Illustration: HARBOR OF CORINTO]
We left Corinto the next morning and took the train to Lake Managua,
where we were to connect with a steamer which crosses the lake to the
capital. It was a beautiful ride, and for some distance ran along
the sea-shore, where the ocean rolled up the beach in great waves,
breaking in showers of foam upon the rocks. Then we crossed lagoons and
swamps on trestles, and passed pretty thatched villages, and saw many
beautiful women and girls selling candy and sugar-cane at the stations.
They wore gowns that left the neck and shoulders bare, and wrapped
themselves in silk shawls of solid colors, which they kept continually
loosening and rearranging, tossing the ends coquettishly from one
shoulder to the other, or drawing them closely about the figure, or
like a cowl over the head. This silk shawl is the most characteristic
part of the wardrobe of the native women of Central America. It is as
inevitable as the mantilla of their richer sisters, and it is generally
the only bit of splendor they possess. A group of them on a feast-day
or Sunday, when they come marching towards you with green, purple,
blue, or yellow shawls, makes a very striking picture.
These women of the pueblo in Honduras and Nicaragua were better-looking
than the women of the lower classes of any country I have ever visited.
They were individually more beautiful, and the proportion of beautiful
women was greater. A woman there is accustomed from her childhood to
carry heavy burdens on her head, and this gives to all of them an erect
carriage and a fearless uplifting of the head when they walk or stand.
They have never known a tight dress or a tight shoe, and they move as
easily and as gracefully as an antelope. Their hair is very rich and
heavy, and they oil it and comb it and braid it from morning to night,
wearing it parted in the middle, and drawn tightly back over the ears,
and piled upon the head in heavy braids. Their complexion is a light
brown, and their eyes have the sad look which one sees in the eyes of
a deer or a dog, and which is not so much the sign of any sorrow as
of the lack of intelligence. The women of the upper classes are like
most Spanish-American women, badly and over dressed in a gown fashioned
after some forgotten Parisian mode, with powder over their faces, and
with their hair frizzled and curled in ridiculous profusion. They are a
very sorry contrast to a woman of the people, such as you see standing
in the doorways of the mud huts, or advancing towards you along the
trail with an earthen jar on her shoulder, straight of limb, and with a
firm, fine lower jaw, a low, broad forehead, and shy, sad eyes.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE AT MANAGUA]
Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a most dismal city, built on
a plain of sun-dried earth, with houses of sun-dried earth, plazas
and parks and streets of sun-dried earth, and a mantle of dust over
all. Even the stores that have been painted in colors and hung with
balconies have a depressed, dirty, and discouraged air. The streets are
as full of ruts and furrows as a country road, the trees in the plaza
are lifeless, and their leaves shed dust instead of dew, and the people
seem to have taken on the tone of their surroundings, and very much
more of the dust than seems absolutely necessary. We were there only
two days, and felt when we left as though we had been camping out on a
baseball diamond; and we were sure that had we remained any longer we
should have turned into living statues of clay when the sun shone, and
of mud when it rained.
There was no American minister or consul at Managua at the time of our
visit, but the English consul took very good care of us, and acted as
our interpreter when we called upon the president. Relations between
the consul and President Zelaya were somewhat strained at that time,
and though we knew this we told the consul to tell the president how
much he was admired by the American people for having taken the stand
he did against the English on the Mosquito Coast question, and that
we hoped he would see that the British obtained no foothold near our
canal. At which the English consul would hesitate and grin unhappily,
and remark, in a hurried aside, “I’ll be hanged if I’ll translate
that.” So we continued inventing other pleasant speeches derogatory
to Britons and British influence in Nicaragua until Somerset and his
consul protested vigorously, and the president saw what we were doing
and began to enjoy the consul’s embarrassment and laughed, and the
consul laughed with him, and they made up their quarrel--for the time
being, at least.
Zelaya said, among other things, that if there were no other argument
in favor of the Nicaragua Canal than that it would enable the United
States to move her ships of war quickly from ocean to ocean, instead of
being forced as she is now to make them take the long journey around
Cape Horn, it would be of inestimable benefit. He also said that the
only real objection that had been made in the United States to the
canal came from those interested in the transcontinental railroads, who
saw in its completion the destruction of their freight traffic.
He seemed to be a very able man, and more a man of the world than
Bonilla, the President of Honduras, and much older in many ways. He was
apparently somewhat of a philosopher, and believed, or said he did,
in the survival of the fittest as applied to the occupation of his
country. He welcomed the gringos, he said, and if they were better able
to rule Nicaragua than her own people, he would accept that fact as
inevitable and make way before them.
[Illustration: PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA]
We returned to Corinto after wallowing in the dust-bins of Managua as
joyfully as though it were a home, and we were so anxious to reach the
ocean again that we left Granada and Leon, which are, so we are told,
much more attractive than the capital, out of our route.
Corinto was bright and green and sunny, and the waters of the
big harbor before it danced and flashed by day and radiated with
phosphorescent fire by night. It was distinctly a place where it would
occur to one to write up the back pages of his diary, but it was
interesting at least in showing us the life of the exiles in these hot,
far-away seaports among a strange people.
There was but one hotel, which happened to be a very good one with
a very bad proprietor, who, I trust, will come some day to an untimely
death at the end of one of his own billiard-cues. The hotel was built
round a patio filled with palms and ramparts of empty bottles from
the bar, covered with dust, and bearing the name of every brewer and
wine-grower in Europe. The sleeping-rooms were on the second floor, and
looked on the patio on one side and upon a wide covered veranda which
faced the harbor on the other. The five resident gringos in Corinto
lived at the hotel, and sat all day on this veranda swinging in their
hammocks and swapping six-months-old magazines and tattered novels.
Reading-matter assumed an importance in Corinto it had never attained
before, and we read all the serial stories, of which there was never
more than the fourth or sixth instalment, and the scientific articles
on the Fall of the Rupee in India, or the Most Recent Developments in
Electricity, and delighted in the advertisements of seeds and bicycles
and baking-powders.
The top of our veranda was swept by a row of plane-trees that grew in
the sandy soil of the beach below us, and under the shade of which
were gathered all the idle ones of the port. There were among them
thieving ships’ stewards who had been marooned from passing vessels,
ne’er-do-wells from the interior who were “combing the beach” and
looking for work, but not so diligently that they had seen the coffee
plantations on their tramp down to the coast, and who begged for money
to take them back to “God’s country,” or to the fever hospital at
Panama. With them were natives, sailors from the rolling tug-boat they
called a ship of war, and barefooted soldiers from the cartel, and
longshoremen with over-developed chests and muscles, who toil mightily
on steamer days and sleep and eat for the ten days between as a reward.
All of these idlers gathered in the shade around the women who sold
sweet drinks and sticks of pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public
characters of the place and the centre of all the gossip of the
town, and presided over their tables with great dignity in freshly
ironed frocks and brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and very
clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders, and their hair always
shone with cocoanut oil, and was wonderfully braided and set off with
flowers stuck coquettishly over one ear. The men used to sit around
them in groups on the bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the
boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the only import. And sometimes
a small boy would buy a stick of candy or command the mixture of a
drink, and the woman would fuss over her carved gourds, and rinse and
rub them and mix queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that she
spun between the palms of her hands. We would all watch the operation
with great interest, the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon
the balcony, and regard the small boy while he drank the concoction
with envy.
The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and gaping knot-holes
through which the legs of our chairs would sink suddenly, and which
we could use on those occasions when we wanted to drop penknives and
pencils and water on the heads of those passing below. Our companions
in idleness were the German agents of the trading-houses and young
Englishmen down from the mines to shake off a touch of fever, and
two Americans who were taking a phonograph through Central America.
Their names were Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will always
remember them as the only Americans we met who were taking money out of
Central America and not bringing it there to lose it.
Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two up the beach in the hot
sun for the sake of a quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was
delightful in itself, and which was rendered especially interesting by
our having to share the surf with large man-eating sharks. When they
came, which they were sure to do ten minutes after we had arrived, we
generally gave them our share.
The phonograph men and our party did not believe in sharks; so we
would venture out some distance, leaving the Englishmen and the
Germans standing like sandpipers where the water was hardly up to their
ankles, and keeping an anxious lookout for us and themselves. Had the
sharks attempted to attack us from the land, they would have afforded
excellent protection. When they all yelled at once and ran back up
the beach into the bushes, we knew that they thought we had been in
long enough, and we came out, and made as much noise as we could while
doing so. But there would be invariably one man left behind--one man
who had walked out farther than the others, and who, owing to the roar
of the surf, could not hear our shrieks of terror. It was exciting to
watch him from the beach diving and splashing happily by himself, and
shaking the water out of his ears and hair, blissfully unconscious of
the deserted waste of waters about him and of the sharp, black fin that
shot like a torpedo from wave to wave. We would watch him as he turned
to speak to the man who the moment before had been splashing and diving
on his right, and, missing him, turn to the other side, and then whirl
about and see us all dancing frantically up and down in a row along the
beach, beckoning and screaming and waving our arms. We could observe
even at that distance his damp hair rising on his head and his eyes
starting out of their sockets as he dug his toes into the sand and
pushed back the water with his arms, and worked his head and shoulders
and every muscle in his whole body as though he were fighting his way
through a mob of men. The water seemed very opaque at such times, and
the current appeared to have turned seaward, and the distance from
shore looked as though it were increasing at every step.
When night came to Corinto we would sit out on the wharf in front of
the hotel and watch the fish darting through the phosphorescent waters
and marking their passage with a trail of fire, or we would heave a log
into it and see the sparks fly just as though we had thrown it upon a
smouldering fire. One night one of the men was obliging enough to go
into it for our benefit, and swam under water, sweeping great circles
with his arms and legs. He was outlined as clearly in the inky depths
below as though he wore a suit of spangles. Sometimes a shark or some
other big fish drove a shoal of little fish towards the shore, and
they would turn the whole surface of the water into half-circles of
light as they took leap after leap for safety. Later in the evening we
would go back to the veranda and listen to our friends the phonograph
impresarios play duets on the banjo and guitar, and in return for the
songs of the natives they had picked up in their wanderings we would
sing to them those popular measures which had arisen into notice since
they had left civilization.
This was our life at Corinto for ten idle days, until at last the
steamer arrived, and the passengers came on shore to stretch their
legs and buy souvenirs, and the ship’s steward bustled about in search
of fresh vegetables, and the lighters plied heavily between the shore
and the ship’s side, piled high with odorous sacks of coffee. And then
Morse and Brackett started with their phonograph through Costa Rica,
and we continued on to Panama, leaving the five foreign residents of
Corinto to the uninterrupted enjoyment of their whist, and richer and
happier through our coming in an inaccurate knowledge of the first
verse and tune of “Tommy Atkins,” which they shouted at us defiantly as
they pulled back from the steamer’s side to their quiet haven of exile.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE WORLD SHOWING CHANGE IN TRADE ROUTES AFTER
THE COMPLETION OF THE NICARAGUA CANAL]
ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
IF Ulysses in his wanderings had attempted to cross the Isthmus of
Panama his account of the adventure would not have been filled with
engineering reports or health statistics, nor would it have dwelt
with horror on the irregularities of the canal company. He would have
treated the isthmus in language full of imagination, and would have
delivered his tale in the form of an allegory. He would have told
how on such a voyage his ship came upon a strip of land joining two
great continents and separating two great oceans; how he had found
this isthmus guarded by a wicked dragon that exhaled poison with every
breath, and that lay in wait, buried in its swamps and jungles, for
sailors and travellers, who withered away and died as soon as they
put foot upon the shore. But that he, warned in time by the sight of
thousands of men’s bones whitening on the beach, hoisted all sail and
stood out to sea.
It is quite as easy to believe a story like that as to believe the
truth: that for the last century a narrow strip of swamp-land has
blocked the progress of the world; that it has joined the peoples of
two continents without permitting them to use it as a thoroughfare;
that it has stopped the meeting of two great oceans and the shipping
of the world, and that it has killed with its fever half of those who
came to do battle against it. There is something almost uncanny in the
manner in which this strip of mud and water has resisted the advance of
man, as though there really were some evil genius of the place lurking
in the morasses and brooding over the waters, throwing out its poison
like a serpent, noiselessly and suddenly, meeting the last arrival at
the very moment of his setting foot upon the wharf, arrogant in health
and hope and ambition, and leaving him with clinched teeth and raving
with madness before the sun sets.
[Illustration: DREDGES IN THE CANAL]
It is like the old Minotaur and his yearly tribute of Greek maidens,
with the difference that now it is the lives of men that are
sacrificed, and men who are chosen from every nation of the world,
speaking every language, believing in every religion; and to-day the
end of each is marked by a wooden plank in the Catholic Cemetery, in
the Hebrew Cemetery, in the French Cemetery, in the English Cemetery,
in the American Cemetery, for there are acres and acres of
cemeteries and thousands and thousands of wooden head-stones, to which
the evil spirit of the isthmus points mockingly, and says, “These are
your failures.”
The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a sacrifice of life but
little greater than these fifty miles of swamp-land between North and
South America have seen, and certainly they saw no such inglorious
defeats, without a banner flying or a comrade cheering, or the roar
of musketry and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in the
unequal battle. Those who died striving to save the Holy Land from
the unspeakable Turk were comforted by the promise of a glorious
immortality, and it must have been gratifying in itself to have been
described as a Crusader, and to have worn the red cross upon one’s
shoulder. And, in any event, a man who would not fight for his religion
or his country without promises or pensions is hardly worthy of
consideration. But these young soldiers of the transit and sailors of
the dredging-scow had no promises or sentiment to inspire them; they
were not fighting for the boundaries of their country, but redeeming
a bit of No Man’s Land; not doing battle for their God, but merely
digging a canal. And it must strike every one that those of them who
fell doing their duty in the sickly yellow mist of Panama and along the
gloomy stretches of the Chagres River deserve a better monument to
their memories than the wooden slabs in the cemeteries.
It is strange that not only nature, but man also, should have selected
the same little spot on the earth’s surface in which to show to the
world exactly how disagreeable and unpleasant they can make themselves
when they choose. It seems almost as though the isthmus were unholy
ground, and that there was a curse upon it. Some one should invent a
legend to explain this, and tell how one of the priests who came over
with Columbus put the ban of the Church upon the land for some affront
by its people to the voyagers, and so placed it under a curse forever.
For those whom the fever did not kill the canal company robbed, and
the ruin that came to the peasants of France was as irredeemable as
the ravages of the fever, and the scandal that spattered almost every
public man in Paris exposed rottenness and corruption as far advanced
as that in the green-coated pools along the Rio Grande.
[Illustration: THE BAY OF PANAMA]
Ruins are always interesting, but the ruins of Panama fill one only
with melancholy and disgust, and the relics of this gigantic swindle
can only inspire you with a contempt for yourself and your fellow-men,
and you blush at the evidences of barefaced rascality about you. And
even the honest efforts of those who are now in charge, and who are
trying to save what remains, and once more to build up confidence in
the canal, reminded me of the town councillors of Johnstown who met in
a freight depot to decide what was to be done with the town and those
of its inhabitants that had not been swept out of existence.
There are forty-eight miles of railroad across the isthmus, stretching
from the town of Panama on the Pacific side to that of Colon--or
Aspinwall, as it was formerly called--on the Caribbean Sea. The canal
starts a little north of the town of Panama, in the mouth of the Rio
Grande River, and runs along on one side or the other of the railroad
to the port of Colon. The Chagres River starts about the middle of the
isthmus, and follows the route of the canal in an easterly direction,
until it empties itself into the Caribbean Sea a little north of Colon.
The town of Panama, as you approach it from the bay, reminds you of
an Italian seaport, owing to the balconies which overhang the water
and the colored house-fronts and projecting red roofs. As seen from
the inside, the town is like any other Spanish-American city of the
second class. There are fiacres that rattle and roll through the clean
but narrow streets behind undersized ponies that always move at a
gallop; there are cool, dark shops open to the streets, and hundreds
of negroes and Chinese coolies, and a handsome plaza, and some very
large municipal buildings of five stories, which appeared to us, after
our experience with a dead level of one-story huts, to tower as high
as the Auditorium. Panama, as a town, and considered by itself, and
not in connection with the canal, reminded me of a Western county-seat
after the boom had left it. There appeared to be nothing going forward
and nothing to do. The men sat at the cafés during the day and talked
of the past, and went to a club at night. We saw nothing of the women,
but they seem to have a greater degree of freedom than their sisters in
other parts of Spanish America, owing, no doubt, to the cosmopolitan
nature of the inhabitants of Panama.
[Illustration: PANAMA CANAL ON THE PACIFIC SIDE]
But the city, and the people in it, interest you chiefly because of
the canal; and even the ruins of the Spanish occupation, and the tales
of buccaneers and of bloody battles and buried treasure, cannot touch
you so nearly as do the great, pretentious building of the company and
the stories of De Lesseps’ visit, and the ceremonies and feastings and
celebrations which inaugurated the greatest failure of modern times.
The new director of the canal company put a tug at our disposal,
and sent us orders that permitted us to see as much of the canal as
has been completed from the Pacific side. But before presenting our
orders we drove out from the city one afternoon and began a personally
conducted inspection of the machine-shops.
We had read of the pathetic spectacle presented by thousands of
dollars’ worth of locomotive engines and machinery lying rotting and
rusting in the swamps, and as it had interested us when we had read of
it, we were naturally even more anxious to see it with our own eyes.
We, however, did not see any machinery rusting, nor any locomotives
lying half buried in the mud. All the locomotives that we saw were
raised from the ground on ties and protected with a wooden shed, and
had been painted and oiled and cared for as they would have been in
the Baldwin Locomotive Works. We found the same state of things in the
great machine-works, and though none of us knew a turning-lathe from a
sewing-machine, we could at least understand that certain wheels should
make other wheels move if everything was in working order, and so we
made the wheels go round, and punched holes in sheets of iron with
steel rods, and pierced plates, and scraped iron bars, and climbed to
shelves twenty and thirty feet from the floor, only to find that each
bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was as sharp and covered as
thick with oil as though it had been in use that morning.
This was not as interesting as it would have been had we seen what
the other writers who have visited the isthmus saw. And it would have
given me a better chance for descriptive writing had I found the ruins
of gigantic dredging-machines buried in the morasses, and millions of
dollars’ worth of delicate machinery blistering and rusting under the
palm-trees; but, as a rule, it is better to describe things just as you
saw them, and not as it is the fashion to see them, even though your
way be not so picturesque.
As a matter of fact, the care the company was taking of its machinery
and its fleet of dredging-scows and locomotives struck me as being much
more pathetic than the sight of the same instruments would have been
had we found them abandoned to the elements and the mud. For it was
like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and polishing his buttons
after his army had been routed and killed, and he had lost everything,
including honor.
[Illustration: HUTS OF WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL]
There was a little village of whitewashed huts on the southern bank of
the Rio Grande, where the men lived who take care of the fleet and the
machine-shop, and it was as carefully kept and as clean as a graveyard.
Before the crash came the quarters of the men used to ring with their
yells at night, and the music of guitars and banjos came from the open
doors of cafés and drinking-booths, and a pistol-shot meant no more
than a momentary punctuation of the night’s pleasure. Those were great
days, and there were thousands of men where there are now a score, and
a line of light and deviltry ran from the canal’s mouth for miles back
to the city, where it blazed into a great fire of dissolute pleasure
and excitement. In those days men were making fortunes in a night,
and by ways as dark as night--by furnishing machinery that could not
even be put together, by supplying blocks of granite that cost more in
freight than bars of silver, by kidnapping workmen for the swamps, and
by the simple methods of false accounts and credits. And while some
were growing rich, others were living with the fear of sudden death
before their eyes, and drinking the native rum that they might forget
it, and throwing their wages away on the roulette-tables, and eating
and drinking and making merry in the fear that they might die on the
morrow.
Mr. Wells, an American engineer, was in charge of the company’s
flotilla, and waited for us at the wharf.
“I saw you investigating our engines,” he said. “That’s all right.
Only tell the truth about what you see, and we won’t mind.”
We stood on the bow of the tug and sped up the length of the canal
between great dredging-machines that towered as high above us as the
bridge of an ocean liner, and that weighed apparently as much as a
battle-ship. The decks of some of them were split with the heat, and
there were shutters missing from the cabin windows, but the monster
machinery was intact, and the wood-work was freshly painted and
scrubbed. They reminded me of a line of old ships of war at rest in
some navy-yard. They represent in money value, even as they are to-day,
five million francs. Beyond them on either side stretched low green
bushes, through which the Rio Grande bent and twisted, and beyond the
bushes were high hills and the Pacific Ocean, into which the sun set,
leaving us cold and depressed.
[Illustration: THE TOP OF A DREDGE]
Except for the bubbling of the water under our bow there was not a
sound to disturb the silence that hung above the narrow canal and the
green bushes that rose from a bed of water. I thought of the entrance
of the Suez Canal, as I had seen it at Port Said and at Ismaïlia,
with great P. & O. steamers passing down its length, and troop-ships
showing hundreds of white helmets above the sides, and tramp steamers
and sailing-vessels flying every flag, and compared it and its
scenes of life and movement with this dreary waste before us, with the
idle dredges rearing their iron girders to the sky, the engineers’
sign-posts half smothered in the water and the mud, and with a naked
fisherman paddling noiselessly down the canal with his eyes fixed on
the water, his hollowed log canoe the only floating vessel in what
should have been the highway of the world.
There were about eight hundred men in all working along the whole
length of the canal while we were there, instead of the twelve thousand
that once made the place hum with activity. But the work the twelve
thousand accomplished remains, and the stranger is surprised to find
that there is so much of it and that it is so well done. It looks to
his ignorant eyes as though only a little more energy and a greater
amount of honesty would be necessary to open the canal to traffic; but
experts will tell him that one hundred million dollars will have to be
expended and seven or eight years of honest work done before that ditch
can be dug and France hold a Kiel celebration of her own.
But before that happens every citizen of the United States should help
to open the Nicaragua Canal to the world under the protection and the
virtual ownership of his own country.
Our stay in Panama was shortened somewhat on account of our having
taken too great an interest in the freedom of a young lawyer and
diplomat, who was arrested while we were there, charged with being one
of the leaders of the revolution.
[Illustration: STREET SCENE IN PANAMA]
He was an acquaintance of Lloyd Griscom’s, who took an interest in
the young rebel because they had both been in the diplomatic service
abroad. One afternoon, while Griscom and the lawyer were sitting
together in the office of the latter, five soldiers entered the place
and ordered the suspected revolutionist to accompany them to the
cartel. As he happened to know something of the law, he protested that
they must first show him a warrant, and while two of them went out
for the warrant and the others kept watch in the outer office Griscom
mapped out a plan of escape. The lawyer’s office hung over the Bay of
Panama, and Griscom’s idea was that he should, under the protection of
the darkness, slip down a rope from the window to a small boat below
and be rowed out to the _Barracouta_, of the Pacific Mail Company’s
line, which was listed to sail that same evening up the coast. The
friends of the rebel were sent for, and with their assistance Griscom
made every preparation for the young rebel’s escape, and then came to
the hotel and informed Somerset and myself of what he had done, and
asked us to aid in what was to follow. We knew nothing of the rights
or the wrongs of the revolutionists, but we considered that a man
who was going down a rope into a small boat while three soldiers sat
waiting for him in an outer room was performing a sporting act that
called for our active sympathy. So we followed Griscom to his friend’s
office, and, having passed the soldiers, were ushered into his presence
and introduced to him and his friends.
He was a little man, but was not at all alarmed, nor did he pose or
exhibit any braggadocio, as a man of weaker calibre might have done
under the circumstances. When we offered to hold the rope for him, or
to block up the doors so that the soldiers might not see what was going
forward, he thanked us with such grateful politeness that he made me
feel rather ashamed of myself; for my interest in the matter up to that
point had not been a very serious or a high one. Indeed, I did not even
know the gentleman’s name. But as we did not know the names of the
government people against whom he was plotting either, we felt that we
could not be accused of partiality.
The prisoner did not want his wife to know what had happened, and so
sent her word that important legal business would detain him at the
office, and that his dinner was to be brought to him there. The rope by
which he was to escape was smuggled past the soldiers under the napkin
which covered this dinner. It was then seven o’clock and nearly dark,
and as our rebel friend feared our presence might excite suspicion,
he asked us to go away, and requested us to return in half an hour. It
would then be quite dark, and the attempt to escape could be made with
greater safety.
But the alcalde during our absence spoiled what might have been an
excellent story by rushing in and carrying the diplomat off to jail.
When we returned we found the office locked and guarded, and as
we walked away, in doubt as to whether he had escaped or had been
arrested, we found that the soldiers were following us. As this
continued throughout the evening we went across the isthmus the next
morning to Colon, the same soldiers accompanying us on our way.
[Illustration: THE CANAL IN THE INTERIOR]
The ship of war _Atlanta_ was at Colon, and as we had met her officers
at Puerto Cortez, in Honduras, we went on board and asked them to
see that we were not shot against church walls or hung. They were
exceedingly amused, and promised us ample protection, and though we did
not need it on that occasion, I was impressed with the comforting sense
that comes to a traveller from the States when he knows that one of
our White Squadron is rolling at anchor in the harbor. And later, when
Griscom caught the Chagres fever, we had every reason to be grateful
for the presence in the harbor of the _Atlanta_, as her officers, led
by Dr. Bartolette and his assistant surgeon, Mr. Moore, helped him
through his sickness, visiting him daily with the greatest kindness and
good-will.
Colon did not impress us very favorably. It is a large town of wooden
houses, with a floating population of Jamaica negroes and a few
Chinese. The houses built for the engineers of the canal stretch out
along a point at either side of a double row of magnificent palms,
which terminate at the residence intended for De Lesseps. It is now
falling into decay. In front of it, facing the sea, is a statue of
Columbus protecting the Republic of Colombia, represented by an Indian
girl, who is crouching under his outstretched arm. This monument was
presented to the United States of Colombia by the Empress Eugenie, and
the statue is, in its fallen state, with its pedestal shattered by
the many storms and time, significant of the fallen fortunes of that
great lady herself. If Columbus could have protected Colombia from the
French as he is in the French statue protecting her from all the world,
she would now be the richest and most important of Central-American
republics.
Colon seems to be owned entirely by the Panama Railroad Company, a
monopoly that conducts its affairs with even more disregard for the
public than do other monopolies in better-known localities. The company
makes use of the seaport as a freight-yard, and its locomotives run
the length of the town throughout the entire day, blowing continually
on their whistles and ringing their bells, so that there is little
peace for the just or the unjust. We were exceedingly relieved when the
doctors agreed that Griscom was ready to put to sea again, and we were
able to turn from the scene of the great scandal and its fever fields
to the mountains of Venezuela, and of Caracas in particular.
THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA
SHOVED off by itself in a corner of Central Park on the top of a wooded
hill, where only the people who live in the high apartment-houses at
Eighty-first Street can see it, is an equestrian statue. It is odd,
bizarre, and inartistic, and suggests in size and pose that equestrian
statue to General Jackson which mounts guard before the White House in
Washington. It shows a chocolate-cream soldier mastering with one hand
a rearing rocking-horse, and with the other pointing his sword towards
an imaginary enemy.
Sometimes a “sparrow” policeman saunters up the hill and looks at the
statue with unenlightened eyes, and sometimes a nurse-maid seeks its
secluded site, and sits on the pedestal below it while the children of
this free republic play unconcernedly in its shadow. On the base of
this big statue is carved the name of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of
Venezuela.
Down on the northeastern coast of South America, in Caracas, the
capital of the United States of Venezuela, there is a pretty little
plaza, called the Plaza Washington. It is not at all an important
plaza; it is not floored for hundreds of yards with rare mosaics like
the Plaza de Bolivar, nor lit by swinging electric lights, and the
president’s band never plays there. But it has a fresh prettiness
and restfulness all its own, and the narrow gravel paths are clean
and trim, and the grass grows rich and high, and the branches of the
trees touch and interlace and form a green roof over all, except in
the very centre, where there stands open to the blue sky a statue of
Washington, calm, dignified, beneficent, and paternal. It is Washington
the statesman, not the soldier. The sun of the tropics beats down upon
his shoulders; the palms rustle and whisper pleasantly above his head.
From the barred windows of the yellow and blue and pink houses that
line the little plaza dark-eyed, dark-skinned women look out sleepily,
but understandingly, at the grave face of the North American Bolivar;
and even the policeman, with his red blanket and Winchester carbine,
comprehends when the gringos stop and take off their hats and make a
low bow to the father of their country in his pleasant place of exile.
[Illustration: STATUE OF SIMON BOLIVAR, CARACAS]
Other governments than those of the United States of America and the
United States of Venezuela have put up statues to their great men
in foreign capitals, but the careers of Washington and Bolivar bear so
striking a resemblance, and the histories of the two countries of which
they are the respective fathers are so much alike, that they might be
written in parallel columns. And so it seems especially appropriate
that these monuments to these patriots should stand in each of the two
continents on either side of the dividing states of Central America.
It will offend no true Venezuelan to-day if it be said of his country
that the most interesting man in it is a dead one, for he will allow no
one to go further than himself in his admiration for Bolivar; and he
has done so much to keep his memory fresh by circulating portraits of
him on every coin and stamp of the country, by placing his statue at
every corner, and by hanging his picture in every house, that he cannot
blame the visitor if his strongest impression of Venezuela is of the
young man who began at thirty-three to liberate five republics, and
who conquered a territory more than one-third as great as the whole of
Europe.
In 1811 Venezuela declared her independence of the mother-country of
Spain, and her great men put this declaration in writing and signed it,
and the room in which it was signed is still kept sacred, as is the
room where our declaration was signed in Independence Hall. But the
two men who were to make these declarations worth something more than
the parchment upon which they were written were not among the signers.
Their work was still to come, and it was much the same kind of work,
and carried on in much the same spirit of indomitable energy under
the most cruel difficulties, and with a few undrilled troops against
an army of veterans. It was marked by brilliant and sudden marches
and glorious victories; and where Washington suffered in the snows
of Valley Forge, or pushed his way through the floating ice of the
Delaware, young Bolivar marched under fierce tropical suns, and cut his
path through jungle and swamp-lands, and over the almost impenetrable
fastnesses of the Andes.
[Illustration: STATUE OF WASHINGTON DECORATED WITH FLORAL WREATHS BY
THE VENEZUELANS]
Their difficulties were the same and their aim was the same, but the
character of the two men were absolutely and entirely different, for
Bolivar was reckless, impatient of advice, and even foolhardy. What
Washington was we know.
The South-American came of a distinguished Spanish family, and had
been educated as a courtier and as a soldier in the mother-country,
though his heart remained always with his own people, and he was among
the first to take up arms to set them free. Unless you have seen the
country through which he led his men, and have measured the mountains
he climbed with his few followers, it is quite impossible to
understand the immensity of the task he accomplished. Even to-day a
fast steamer cannot reach Callao from Panama under seven days, and yet
Bolivar made the same distance and on foot, starting from the South
Atlantic, and continuing on across the continent to the Pacific side,
and then on down the coast into Peru, living on his way upon roots
and berries, sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket, riding on
muleback or climbing the steep trail on foot, and freeing on his way
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and finally Peru, the home of
the Incas.
The history of this campaign is one too glorious and rich in incident
and color to be crowded into a few pages, and the character of its
chief actor too varied, and his rise and fall too dramatic, to be
dismissed, as it must be here, in a few paragraphs. But every American
who loves a hero and who loves a lover--and Bolivar was very much of
both, and perhaps too much of the latter--should read the life of this
young man who freed a country rich in brave men, who made some of these
who were much his senior in years his lieutenants, and who, after
risking his life upon many battle-fields and escaping several attempts
at assassination, died at last deserted except by a few friends, and
with a heart broken by the ingratitude of the people he had led out of
captivity.
It is difficult to find out, even in his own country, why the
Venezuelans, after heaping Bolivar with honors and elevating him to the
place of a god, should have turned against him, and driven him into
exile at Santa Marta. Some will tell you that he tried to make himself
dictator over the countries which he had freed; others say that it was
because he had refused to be a dictator that the popular feeling went
against him, and that when the people in the madness of their new-found
freedom cried, “Thou hast rid us of kings; be thou king,” he showed
them their folly, and sought his old home, and died there before the
reaction came, which was to sweep him back once more and forever into
the place of the popular hero of South America.
[Illustration: DECORATION OF THE STATUE OF BOLIVAR AT CARACAS,
VENEZUELA, DECEMBER 18, 1895, BY AMERICAN RESIDENTS]
It was sixteen years after his death that a hero-worshipping friend was
brave enough to commission an artist to design a statue to his memory.
On the neck of this statue the artist hung the representation of a
miniature in the shape of a medallion, which had been given to Bolivar
by the family of Washington. On the reverse was a lock of Washington’s
hair and the inscription, “This portrait of the founder of liberty in
North America is presented by his adopted son to him who has acquired
equal glory in South America.”
Some one asked why the artist had stripped from the breast of Bolivar
all of the other medals and stars that had been given him by
different countries in the hour of his triumph, and the artist answered
that he had done as his patron and the friend of Bolivar thought would
best please his hero. And ever after that it was decreed that every
bust or statue or engraving of the Liberator should show him with this
portrait of Washington hanging by a ribbon about his neck; and so you
will see in the National Portrait Gallery that while the coats of his
lieutenants glitter with orders and crosses, Bolivar’s bears this
medal only. It was his greatest pride, and he considered it his chief
glory. And the manner of its bestowal was curiously appropriate. In
1824 General Lafayette returned to this country as the guest of the
nation, and a banquet was given to him by Congress, at which the memory
of Washington and the deeds of his French lieutenant were honored
again and again. It was while the enthusiasm and rejoicings of this
celebration were at their height that Henry Clay rose in his place and
asked the six hundred Americans before him to remember that while they
were enjoying the benefits of free institutions founded by the bravery
and patriotism of their fore-fathers, their cousins and neighbors in
the southern continent were struggling to obtain that same independence.
[Illustration: SIMON BOLIVAR]
“No nation, no generous Lafayette,” he cried, “has come to their
aid; alone and without help they have sustained their glorious cause,
trusting to its justice, and with the assistance only of their bravery,
their deserts, and their Andes--and one man, Simon Bolivar, the
Washington of South America.”
[Illustration: VIEW OF LA GUAYRA]
And you can imagine the six hundred Americans jumping to their feet
and cheering the name of the young soldier, and the French marquis
eagerly asking that he might be the one to send him some token of their
sympathy and admiration. Lafayette forwarded the portrait of Washington
to Bolivar, who valued it so highly that the people who loved him
valued the man he worshipped; and to-day you will see in Caracas
streets and squares and houses named after Washington, and portraits
of Washington crossing the Delaware, and Washington on horseback, and
Washington at Mount Vernon, hanging in almost every shop and café in
the capital. And the next time you ride in Central Park you might turn
your bicycle, or tell the man on the box to turn the horses, into that
little curtain of trees, and around the hill where the odd-looking
statue stands, and see if you cannot feel some sort of sympathy and pay
some tribute to this young man who loved like a hero, and who fought
like a hero, with the fierceness of the tropical sun above him, and
whose inspiration was the calm, grave parent of your own country.
Bolivar’s country is the republic of South America that stands nearest
to New York, and when people come to know more concerning it, I am sure
they will take to visiting it and its capital, the “Paris of South
America,” in the winter months, as they now go to southern Europe or to
the Mediterranean.
There are many reasons for their doing so. In the first place, it can
be reached in less than six days, and it is the only part of South
America to which one can go without first crossing the Isthmus of
Panama and then taking a long trip down the western coast, or sailing
for nearly a month along the eastern coast; and it is a wonderfully
beautiful country, and its cities of Caracas and Valencia are typical
of the best South-American cities. When you have seen them you have
an intelligent idea of what the others are like; and when you read
about revolutions in Rio Janeiro, or Valparaiso, or Buenos Ayres, you
will have in your mind’s eye the background for all of these dramatic
uprisings, and you will feel superior to other people who do not know
that the republic of Venezuela is larger than France, Spain, and
Portugal together, and that the inhabitants of this great territory are
less in number than those of New York city.
[Illustration: THE RAILROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN]
La Guayra is the chief seaport of Venezuela. It lies at the edge of a
chain of great mountains, where they come down to wet their feet in the
ocean, and Caracas, the capital, is stowed away three thousand feet
higher up behind these mountains, and could only be bombarded in time
of war by shells that would rise like rockets and drop on the other
side of the mountains, and so cover a distance quite nine miles away
from the vessel that fired them. Above La Guayra, on the hill, is a
little fortress which was once the residence of the Spanish governor
when Venezuela was a colony of Spain. It is of interest now chiefly
because Charles Kingsley describes it in _Westward Ho!_ as the fortress
in which the Rose of Devon was imprisoned. Past this fortress, and up
over the mountains to the capital, are a mule-trail and an ancient
wagon-road and a modern railway.
It is a very remarkable railroad; its tracks cling to the perpendicular
surface of the mountain like the tiny tendrils of a vine on a
stone-wall, and the trains creep and crawl along the edge of its
precipices, or twist themselves into the shape of a horseshoe magnet,
so that the engineer on the locomotive can look directly across a
bottomless chasm into the windows of the last car. The view from this
train, while it pants and puffs on its way to the capital, is the most
beautiful combination of sea and plain and mountain that I have ever
seen. There are higher mountains and more beautiful, perhaps, but
they run into a brown prairie or into a green plain; and there are as
beautiful views of the ocean, only you have to see them from the level
of the ocean itself, or from a chalk-cliff with the downs behind you
and the white sand at your feet. But nowhere else in the world have I
seen such magnificent and noble mountains running into so beautiful and
green a plain, and beyond that the great blue stretches of the sea.
When you look down from the car-platform you see first, stretching
three thousand feet below you, the great green ribs of the mountain and
its valleys and waterways leading into a plain covered with thousands
and thousands of royal palms, set so far apart that you can distinguish
every broad leaf and the full length of the white trunk. Among these
are the red-roofed and yellow villages, and beyond them again the white
line of breakers disappearing and reappearing against the blue as
though some one were wiping out a chalk-line and drawing it in again,
and then the great ocean weltering in the heat and stretching as far as
the eye can see, and touching a sky so like it in color that the two
are joined in a curtain of blue on which the ships seem to lie flat,
like painted pictures on a wall.
[Illustration: COURT-YARD OF A HOUSE IN CARACAS]
You pass through clouds on your way up that leave the trees and
rocks along the track damp and shining as after a heavy dew, and
at some places you can peer through them from the steps of the car
down a straight fall of three thousand feet. When you have climbed
to the top of the mountain, you see below you on the other side the
beautiful valley in which lies the city of Caracas, cut up evenly by
well-kept streets, and diversified by the towers of churches and public
buildings and open plazas, with the white houses and gardens of the
coffee-planters lying beyond the city at the base of the mountains.
Venezuela, after our experiences of Central America, was like a
return to civilization after months on the alkali plains of Texas. We
found Caracas to be a Spanish-American city of the first class, with a
suggestion of the boulevards, and Venezuela a country that possessed
a history of her own, and an Academy of wise men and artists, and a
Pantheon for her heroes. I suppose we should have known that this was
so before we visited Venezuela; but as we did not, we felt as though
we were discovering a new country for ourselves. It was interesting to
find statues of men of whom none of us had ever heard, and who were
distinguished for something else than military successes, men who had
made discoveries in science and medicine, and who had written learned
books; to find the latest devices for comfort of a civilized community,
and with them the records of a fierce struggle for independence, a long
period of disorganization, where the Church had the master-hand, and
then a rapid advance in the habits and customs of enlightened nations.
There are the most curious combinations and contrasts, showing on
one side a pride of country and an eagerness to emulate the customs
of stable governments, and on the other evidences of the Southern
hot-blooded temperament and dislike of restraint.
On the corner of the principal plaza stands the cathedral, with a
tower. Ten soldiers took refuge in this tower four years ago, during
the last revolution, and they made so determined a fight from that
point of vantage that in order to dislodge them it was found necessary
to build a fire in the tower and smoke them out with the fumes of
sulphur. These ten soldiers were the last to make a stand within the
city, and when they fell, from the top of the tower, smothered to
death, the revolution was at an end. This incident of warfare is of
value when you contrast the thing done with its environment, and know
that next to the cathedral-tower are confectionery-shops such as you
find on Regent Street or upper Broadway, that electric lights surround
the cathedral, and that tram-cars run past it on rails sunk below the
surface of the roadway and over a better street than any to be found in
New York city.
[Illustration: THE MARKET OF CARACAS]
Even without acquaintances among the people of the capital there are
enough public show-places in Caracas to entertain a stranger for a
fortnight. It is pleasure enough to walk the long, narrow streets under
brilliantly colored awnings, between high one- and two-story houses,
painted in blues and pinks and greens, and with overhanging red-tiled
roofs and projecting iron balconies and open iron-barred windows,
through which you gain glimpses beyond of cool interiors and beautiful
courts and gardens filled with odd-looking plants around a splashing
fountain.
The ladies of Caracas seem to spend much of their time sitting at
these windows, and are always there in the late afternoons, when they
dress themselves and arrange their hair for the evening, and put a
little powder on their faces, and take their places in the cushioned
window-seats as though they were in their box at the opera. And though
they are within a few inches of the passers-by on the pavement, they
can look through them and past them, and are as oblivious of their
presence as though they were invisible. In the streets are strings of
mules carrying bags of coffee or buried beneath bales of fodder, and
jostled by open fiacres, with magnificent coachmen on the box-seat
in top-boots and gold trimmings to their hats and coats, and many
soldiers, on foot and mounted, hurrying along at a quick step in
companies, or strolling leisurely alone. They wear blue uniforms with
scarlet trousers and facings, and the president’s body-guard are in
white duck and high black boots, and are mounted on magnificent horses.
[Illustration: VIEW OF CARACAS]
There are three great buildings in Caracas--the Federal Palace, the
Opera-house, and the Pantheon, which was formerly a church, and which
has been changed into a receiving-vault and a memorial for the great
men of the country. Here, after three journeys, the bones of Bolivar
now rest. The most interesting of these buildings is the Federal
Palace. It is formed around a great square filled with flowers and
fountains, and lit with swinging electric lights. It is the handsomest
building in Caracas, and within its four sides are the chambers of
the upper and lower branches of the legislature, the offices of
the different departments of state, and the reception-hall of the
president, in which is the National Portrait Gallery. The palace is
light and unsubstantial-looking, like a canvas palace in a theatre,
and suggests the casino at a French watering-place. It is painted in
imitation of stone, and the statues are either of plaster-of-paris or
of wood, painted white to represent marble. But the theatrical effect
is in keeping with the colored walls and open fronts of the other
buildings of the city, and is not out of place in this city of such
dramatic incidents.
[Illustration: PRESIDENT CRESPO, OF VENEZUELA]
The portraits in the state-room of the palace immortalize the
features of fierce-looking, dark-faced generals, with old-fashioned
high-standing collars of gold-braid, and green uniforms. Strange and
unfamiliar names are printed beneath these portraits, and appear
again painted in gold letters on a roll of honor which hangs from the
ceiling, and which faces a list of the famous battles for independence.
High on this roll of honor are the names “General O’Leary” and “Colonel
Fergurson,” and among the portraits are the faces of two blue-eyed,
red-haired young men, with fair skin and broad chests and shoulders,
one wearing the close-clipped whiskers of the last of the
Georges, and the other the long Dundreary whiskers of the Crimean wars.
Whether the Irish general and the English colonel gave their swords
for the sake of the cause of independence or fought for the love of
fighting, I do not know, but they won the love of the Spanish-Americans
by the service they rendered, no matter what their motives may have
been for serving. Many people tell you proudly that they are descended
from “O’Leari,” and the names of the two foreigners are as conspicuous
on pedestals and tablets of honor as are their smiling blue eyes
and red cheeks among the thin-visaged, dark-skinned faces of their
brothers-in-arms.
[Illustration: LEGISLATIVE BUILDING, CARACAS]
At one end of the room is an immense painting of a battle, and the
other is blocked by as large a picture showing Bolivar dictating to
members of Congress, who have apparently ridden out into the field to
meet him, and are holding an impromptu session beneath the palm leaves
of an Indian hut. The dome of the chamber, which latter is two hundred
feet in length, is covered with an immense panorama, excellently well
done, showing the last of the battles of the Venezuelans against
the Spaniards, in which the figures are life-size and the action
most spirited, and the effect of color distinctly decorative. These
paintings in the National Gallery would lead you to suppose that there
was nothing but battles in the history of Venezuela, and that her
great men were all soldiers, but the talent of the artists who have
painted these scenes and the actors in them corrects the idea. Among
these artists are Arturo Michelena, who has exhibited at the World’s
Fair, and frequently at the French Salon, from which institution he has
received a prize, M. Tovar y Tovar, A. Herrea Toro, and Cristobal Rojas.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S BODY-GUARD OF COWBOYS]
It was that “Illustrious American, Guzman Blanco,” one of the
numerous presidents of Venezuela, and probably the best known, who
was responsible for most of the public buildings of the capital.
These were originally either convents or monasteries, which he
converted, after his war with the Church, into the Federal Palace, the
Opera-house, and a university. Each of these structures covers so much
valuable ground, and is situated so advantageously in the very heart
of the city, that one gets a very good idea of how powerful the Church
element must have been before Guzman overthrew it.
He was a peculiar man, apparently, and possessed of much force and
of a progressive spirit, combined with an overmastering vanity. The
city was at its gayest under his régime, and he encouraged the arts
and sciences by creating various bodies of learned men, by furnishing
the nucleus for a national museum, by subsidizing the Opera-house,
and by granting concessions to foreign companies which were of quite
too generous a nature to hold good, and which now greatly encumber
and embarrass his successors. But while he was president, and before
he went to live in luxurious exile on the Avenue Kléber, which seems
to be the resting-place of all South-American presidents, he did much
to make the country prosperous and its capital attractive, and he was
determined that the people should know that he was the individual who
accomplished these things. With this object he had fifteen statues
erected to himself in different parts of the city, and more tablets
than one can count. Each statue bore an inscription telling that it
was erected to that “Illustrious American, Guzman Blanco,” and every
new bridge and road and public building bore a label to say that it was
Guzman Blanco who was responsible for its existence. The idea of a man
erecting statues to himself struck the South-American mind as extremely
humorous, and one night all the statues were sawed off at the ankles,
and to-day there is not one to be seen, and only raw places in the
walls to show where the memorial tablets hung. But you cannot wipe out
history by pulling down columns or effacing inscriptions, and Guzman
Blanco undoubtedly did do much for his country, even though at the same
time he was doing a great deal for Guzman Blanco.
[Illustration: BAPTIZING INDIANS AT A VENEZUELAN STATION AT THE CUYUNI
RIVER]
Guzman was followed in rapid succession by three or four other
presidents and dictators, who filled their pockets with millions
and then fled the country, only waiting until their money was first
safely out of it. Then General Crespo, who had started his revolution
with seven men, finally overthrew the government’s forces, and was
elected president, and has remained in office ever since. To set
forth with seven followers to make yourself president of a country as
large as France, Portugal, and Spain together requires a great deal
of confidence and courage. General Crespo is a fighter, and possesses
both. It was either he or one of his generals--the story is told
of both--who, when he wanted arms for his cowboys, bade them take off
their shirts and grease their bodies and rush through the camp of the
enemy in search of them. He told them to hold their left hands out
as they ran, and whenever their fingers slipped on a greased body
they were to pass it by, but when they touched a man wearing a shirt
they were to cut him down with their machetes. In this fashion three
hundred of his plainsmen routed two thousand of the regular troops,
and captured all of their rifles and ammunition. The idea that when
you want arms the enemy is the best person from whom to take them is
excellent logic, and that charge of the half-naked men, armed only with
their knives, through the sleeping camp is Homeric in its magnificence.
Crespo is more at home when fighting in the field than in the
council-chamber of the Yellow House, which is the White House of the
republic; but that may be because he prefers fighting to governing,
and a man generally does best what he likes best to do. He is as
simple in his habits to-day as when he was on the march with his seven
revolutionists, and goes to bed at eight in the evening, and is deep in
public business by four the next morning; many an unhappy minister has
been called to an audience at sunrise. The president neither smokes nor
drinks; he is grave and dignified, with that dignity which enormous
size gives, and his greatest pleasure is to take a holiday and visit
his ranch, where he watches the round-up of his cattle and gallops
over his thousands of acres. He is the idol of the cowboys, and has a
body-guard composed of some of the men of this class. I suppose they
are very much like our own cowboys, but the citizens of the capital
look upon them as the Parisians regarded Napoleon’s Mamelukes, and tell
you in perfect sincerity that when they charge at night their eyes
flash fire in a truly terrifying manner.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL HUNTING-PARTY IN VENEZUELA]
I saw the president but once, and then but for a few moments. He was
at the Yellow House and holding a public reception, to which every one
was admitted with a freedom that betokened absolute democracy. When my
turn came he talked awhile through Colonel Bird, our consul, but there
was no chance for me to gain any idea of him except that he was very
polite, as are all Venezuelans, and very large. They tell a story of
him which illustrates his character. He was riding past the university
when a group of students hooted and jeered at him, not because of his
politics, but because of his origin. A policeman standing by, aroused
to indignation by this insult to the president, fired his revolver into
the crowd. Crespo at once ordered the man’s arrest for shooting at a
citizen with no sufficient provocation, and rode on his way without
even giving a glance at his tormentors. The incident seemed to show
that he was too big a man to allow the law to be broken even in his own
defence, or, at least, big enough not to mind the taunts of ill-bred
children.
The boys of the university are taken very seriously by the people of
Caracas, as are all boys in that country, where a child is listened
to, if he be a male child, with as much grave politeness as though
it were a veteran who was speaking. The effect is not good, and the
boys, especially of the university, grow to believe that they are very
important factors in the affairs of the state, when, as a matter of
fact, they are only the cat’s-paws of clever politicians, who use them
whenever they want a demonstration and do not wish to appear in it
themselves. So these boys are sent forth shouting into the streets, and
half the people cheer them on, and the children themselves think they
are patriots or liberators, or something equally important.
I obtained a rather low opinion of them because they stoned an
unfortunate American photographer who was taking pictures in the
quadrangles, and because I was so far interested in them as to get
a friend of mine to translate for me the sentences and verses they
had written over the walls of their college. The verses were of a
political character, but so indecent that the interpreter was much
embarrassed; the single sentences were attacks, anonymous, of course,
on fellow-students. As the students of the University of Venezuela step
directly from college life into public life, their training is of some
interest and importance. And I am sure that the Venezuelan fathers
would do much better by their sons if they would cease to speak of
the university in awe-stricken tones as “the hot-bed of liberty,” but
would rather take away the boys’ revolvers and teach them football,
and thrash them soundly whenever they caught them soiling the walls of
their alma mater with nasty verses.
[Illustration: A CLEARING IN THE COUNTRY]
There are some beautiful drives around Caracas, out in the country
among the coffee plantations, and one to a public garden that overlooks
the city, upon which President Crespo has spent much thought and money.
But the most beautiful feature of Caracas, and one that no person who
has visited that place will ever forget, is the range of mountains
above it, which no president can improve. They are smooth and bare
of trees and of a light-green color, except in the waterways, where
there are lines of darker green, and the clouds change their aspect
continually, covering them with shadows or floating over them from
valley to valley, and hovering above a high peak like the white smoke
of a volcano.
I do not know of a place that will so well repay a visit as Caracas,
or a country that is so well worth exploring as Venezuela. To a
sportsman it is a paradise. You can shoot deer within six miles of
the Opera-house, and in six hours beyond Macuto you can kill panther,
and as many wild boars as you wish. No country in South America is
richer in such natural products as cocoa, coffee, and sugar-cane. And
in the interior there is a vast undiscovered and untouched territory
waiting for the mining engineer, the professional hunter, and the
breeder of cattle.
The government of Venezuela at the time of our visit to Caracas
was greatly troubled on account of her boundary dispute with Great
Britain, and her own somewhat hasty action in sending three foreign
ministers out of the country for daring to criticise her tardiness in
paying foreign debts and her neglect in not holding to the terms of
concessions. These difficulties, the latter of which were entirely of
her own making, were interesting to us as Americans, because the talk
on all sides showed that in the event of a serious trouble with any
foreign power Venezuela looked confidently to the United States for
aid. Now, since President Cleveland’s so-called “war” message has been
written, she is naturally even more liable to go much further than
she would dare go if she did not think the United States was back of
her. Her belief in the sympathy of our government is also based on
many friendly acts in the past: on the facts that General Miranda, the
soldier who preceded Bolivar, and who was a friend of Hamilton, Fox,
and Lafayette, first learned to hope for the independence of South
America during the battle for independence in our own country; that
when the revolution began, in 1810, it was from the United States that
Venezuela received her first war material; that two years later, when
the earthquake of 1812 destroyed twenty thousand people, the United
States Congress sent many ship-loads of flour to the survivors of the
disaster; and that as late as 1888 our Congress again showed its good
feeling by authorizing the secretary of the navy to return to Venezuela
on a ship of war the body of General Paez, who died in exile in New
York city, and by appointing a committee of congressmen and senators to
represent the government at his public funeral.
[Illustration: THE CUYUNI RIVER
With View of the English Station that was sacked by Venezuelan Troops,
and from which Inspector Barnes was taken Prisoner]
All of these expressions of good-will in the past count for something
as signs that the United States may be relied upon in the future, but
it is a question whether she will be willing to go as far as Venezuela
expects her to go. Venezuela’s hope of aid, and her conviction, which
is shared by all the Central-American republics, that the United
States is going to help her and them in the hour of need, is based
upon what they believe to be the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine
as we understand it is a very different thing from the Monroe Doctrine
as they understand it; and while their reading of it is not so
important as long as we know what it means and enforce it, there is
danger nevertheless in their way of looking at it, for, according
to their point of view, the Monroe Doctrine is expected to cover a
multitude of their sins. President Monroe said that we should “consider
any attempt on the part of foreign powers to extend their system to any
portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety, and
that we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing
those governments that had declared their independence, or controlling
in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other
light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition to the
United States.”
He did not say that if a Central-American republic banished a British
consul, or if Venezuela told the foreign ministers to leave the country
on the next steamer, that the United States would back them up with
force of arms.
[Illustration: VENEZUELAN STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER
The Barracks and House in which the English Police were confined]
Admiral Meade’s squadron touched at La Guayra while we were at the
capital, the squadron visiting the port at that time in obedience
to the schedule already laid out for it in Washington some months
previous, just as a theatrical company plays a week’s stand at the
time and at the place arranged for it in advance by its agent, but
the Venezuelans did not consider this, and believed that the squadron
had been sent there to intimidate the British and to frighten the
French and German men-of-war which were then expected in port to convey
their dismissed ministers back to their own countries. One of the
most intelligent men that I met in Caracas, and one closely connected
with the Foreign Office, told me he had been to La Guayra to see our
squadron, and that the admiral had placed his ships of war in the
harbor in such a position that at a word he could blow the French and
German boats out of the water. I suggested to one Venezuelan that there
were other ways of dismissing foreign ministers than that of telling
them to pack up and get out of the country in a week, and that I did
not think the Monroe Doctrine meant that South-American republics could
affront foreign nations with impunity. He answered me by saying that
the United States had aided Mexico when Maximilian tried to found an
empire in that country, and he could not see that the cases were not
exactly similar.
[Illustration: ENGLISH STATION ON THE CUYUNI RIVER
Inspector Barnes, Chief of the English Police who were captured by the
Venezuelan troops, is seated on the steps]
They will, however, probably understand better what the Monroe Doctrine
really is before their boundary dispute with Great Britain is settled,
and Great Britain will probably know more about it also, for it is
possible that there never was a case when the United States needed
to watch her English cousins more closely than in this international
dispute over the boundary-line between Venezuela and British Guiana.
If England succeeds it means a loss to Venezuela of a territory as
large as the State of New York, and of gold deposits which are believed
to be the richest in South America, and, what is more important, it
means the entire control by the English of the mouth and four hundred
miles of the Orinoco River. The question is one of historical records
and maps, and nothing else. Great Britain fell heir to the rights
formerly possessed by Holland. Venezuela obtained by conquest the lands
formerly owned by Spain. The problem to be solved is to find what were
the possessions of Holland and Spain, and so settle what is to-day
the territory of England and Venezuela. Year after year Great Britain
has pushed her way westward, until she has advanced her claims over a
territory of forty thousand square miles, and has included Barima Point
at the entrance to the Orinoco. She has refused positively, through
Lord Salisbury, to recede or to arbitrate, and it is impossible for any
one at this writing to foretell what the outcome will be. If the Monroe
Doctrine does not apply in this case, it has never meant anything in
the past, and will not mean much in the future.
[Illustration: DR. PEDRO EZEQUIEL ROJAS
Minister of Foreign Affairs]
[Illustration: MAP EXPLAINING VENEZUELAN BOUNDARY DISPUTE]
Personally, although the original Monroe Doctrine distinctly designates
“this hemisphere,” and not merely this continent, I cannot think the
principle of this doctrine should be applied in this instance. For if
it does apply, it could be extended to other disputes much farther
south, and we might have every republic in South America calling on
us for aid in matters which could in no possible way affect either the
honor or the prosperity of our country.
[Illustration: THE CITY OF CARACAS]
In any event the Monroe Doctrine is distinctly a selfish one, so far,
at least, as all rules for self-preservation must be selfish, and I
should prefer to think that we are interfering in behalf of Venezuela,
not because we ourselves are threatened by the encroachments of Great
Britain, but because we cannot stand by and see a weak power put upon
by one of the greatest. It may be true, as the foreign powers have
pointed out, that the aggressions of Great Britain are none of our
business, but as we have made them our business, it concerns no one
except Great Britain and ourselves, and now having failed to avoid the
entrance to a quarrel, and being in, we must bear ourselves so that the
enemy may beware of us, and see that we issue forth again with honor,
and without having stooped to the sin of war.
Caracas was the last city we visited on our tour, and perhaps it is
just as well that this was so, for had we gone there in the first place
we might have been in Caracas still. It is easy to understand why it
is attractive. While you were slipping on icy pavements and drinking
in pneumonia and the grippe, and while the air was filled with flying
particles of ice and snow, and the fog-bound tugs on the East River
were shrieking and screeching to each other all through the night,
we were sitting out-of-doors in the Plaza de Bolivar, looking up at
the big statue on its black marble pedestal, under the shade of green
palms and in the moonlight, with a band of fifty pieces playing Spanish
music, and hundreds of officers in gold uniforms, and pretty women
with no covering to their heads but a lace mantilla, circling past in
an endless chain of color and laughter and movement. Back of us beyond
the trees the cafés sent out through their open fronts the noise of
tinkling glasses and the click of the billiard-balls and a flood of
colored light, and beyond us on the other side rose the towers and
broad façade of the cathedral, white and ghostly in the moonlight, and
with a single light swinging in the darkness through the open door.
In the opinion of three foreigners, Caracas deserves her title of
the Paris of South America; and there was only one other title that
appealed to us more as we saw the shores of La Guayra sink into the
ocean behind us and her cloud-wrapped mountains disappear, and that, it
is not necessary to explain, was “the Paris of North America,” which
stretches from Bowling Green to High Bridge.
THE END
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FOOTNOTES:
[A] Since this was written, Professor S. H. Woodbridge, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been successful in having a
bill passed which hinders the lottery still further by closing to it
apparently every avenue of advertisement and correspondence.
The lottery people in consequence are at present negotiating with the
government of Venezuela, and have offered it fifty thousand dollars a
year and a share of the earnings for its protection.
[B] Guiteris died a few months after our visit.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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