A LONG, LONG WAY TO COSTA RICA
I
I set out overland--through the Nicaraguan Canal--for Costa Rica.
From Managua the railway carried me to Granada, on the shores of the
largest lake between Michigan and Titicaca. At the end of a long wharf
the weekly steamer was balancing itself upon its prow and waving its
stern in the air, lashed by a gale that piled the combers one upon
another until the pond resembled a young ocean.
It was a squatty vessel, condemned back in the days of Zelaya, but
still running. It contained several bullet holes from the revolution
that overthrew the dictator. When attacked, it had been so crowded with
government troops that most of them could not fire upon the enemy,
wherefore they had relieved their emotions by shooting upward through
the decks.
Embarking passengers were looking forward to seasickness. The
Latin-Americans always enjoy this malady, even when the sea is calm.
Upon going aboard a ship, the womenfolk especially prepare for it
by hanging upon the cabin wall a picture of “Our Lady of Voyagings,”
reciting the rosary, sniffing the smelling salts, lying down upon the
berth, turning green, and suffering miserably long before the ship
leaves port. Such behavior seems to be regarded as essential to the
gentle feminine character, and I sometimes suspect that any lady who
failed to show the proper symptoms during a voyage would be regarded as
just a trifle masculine.
On this trip they all had excellent excuse. The boat rocked and
pitched frantically at its moorings. When we finally steamed off, our
course lay broadside to the waves, and the vessel dipped one gunwale
after the other, soaking the steerage passengers on the lower deck,
and sprinkling those above. They huddled together in a dejected,
uncomfortable mass of humanity, groaning “Ay! Ay! Ay!” and obtaining
therefrom about as much relief as Anglo-Saxons find in “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Lake Nicaragua is a hundred miles long by forty wide. Since it was a
twenty-four hour journey, much agony was enjoyed by all.
II
I landed the next morning at San Carlos, at the mouth of the San Juan
River. There was nothing of interest here except an ancient Spanish
fortress and J. C. Kennedy.
“They built the fortress back in 1600-and-something, or maybe it was
1700-and-something,” explained the latter. “I know it was just before I
came here.”
Mr. Kennedy, a little white-haired Irish-American, who now owned a
shoe-shop and pegged away himself for exercise, had twice been chased
out of Nicaragua by the old tyrant, Zelaya.
“But I don’t know as I blame him so much,” he said. “I had a factory
making ammunition for the revolutionists.”
III
From San Carlos the San Juan River led eastward toward the Caribbean.
Once seriously considered by the American government as a possible
site for the canal finally constructed at Panama, it was at present so
shallow that only small launches could navigate it.
One was now waiting, with a scow lashed to its side.
I sailed with it at midnight, along with some forty other passengers,
mostly women and children, all of us tightly packed into whatever
spaces remained among the bags, boxes, and bales of a heavy cargo.
There was neither comfort nor privacy. The Latin-Americans, with
characteristic vanity, had all embarked in their very best clothes. Now
that they had parted from their friends, and wished to change into
garments better suited to a long voyage, they faced a disconcerting
problem.
The women cried out: “Gentlemen, please look the other way!”
A host of infants whined and fretted. Every one turned and twisted
about in an effort to find a position conducive to sleep, until the
launch suggested a cheese alive with squirming maggots.
I retired to the lighter, and discovering a sheltered nook among the
sacks of beans, rolled up in my blanket. There was a splendid moon
overhead. The black jungle, illumined now and then with patches of
misty gray, slid past in mysterious procession. At times I would awaken
as the motor stopped and the native boatmen climbed over me to guide
us with long poles through rippling shallows. Sometimes the claw-like
branches of a half-submerged tree came racing at us, as though shooting
upstream to seize us; there would be much frantic shouting, and furious
work with the guiding-poles as we dodged it; then I would settle back
to another nap, lulled by the music of swift waters, and pitying the
other passengers huddled in cramped discomfort aboard the launch.
[Illustration: FOR THREE DAYS THE BOATMEN POLED THE LAUNCH THROUGH
SHALLOWS FRAMED IN RANK GREEN JUNGLE]
But the pity was premature. Without warning the heavens opened up, and
poured down a perfect deluge of chilling rain, and I found myself the
only passenger not under a roof and with no space left under the
awning. I had not known that every season was rainy season on the San
Juan. And the deluge fell intermittently throughout the night. Drawing
the blanket over my head, I burrowed down between two bean-sacks, where
presently a boatman rushing across the scow with his pole gave a leap
and planted both bare feet in my face.
“Pardon, _señor_, but you looked like part of the cargo!”
In the morning we docked at Puerto Castillo, a string of aged wooden
shanties bordering the river, shrouded in an unceasing drizzle of mist.
There were some especially dangerous rapids here, and the women were
landed while the rest of us charged downstream through boiling foam.
Our launch bumped and grated over the rocks as we plunged through the
shallow falls, but the current swept us on, and we came finally into
deeper pools below, where the women, straggling along the shore-trail,
rejoined us, and crawled over one another as each sought to find her
own baggage among the mixture of sacks, bundles, baskets and boxes, and
to extract therefrom the ingredients for breakfast.
Each passenger foraged for himself. For three days we chugged
downstream through rank green jungle with bits of fog clinging to its
edges, through shallows and rapids, through drizzling showers. Every
one had taken the precaution to bring food, which we ate without
cooking. Now and then, if we stopped at a thatched hut, a native woman
could be persuaded to boil coffee, but it was seldom that we stopped
long enough. With both sexes packed tightly into an open launch for
many hours at a time, there was necessary a complete abandonment of
the modesties which civilized society regards as imperative. When
passengers complained, the captain agreed with them sympathetically,
in the fatalistic fashion of these people, as though he felt that the
discomfort were something to be deplored, but not to be remedied.
The captain was in reality a “Colonel” by title. Several of the men
passengers were “Generals.” Most Nicaraguans of any social standing
have a military title of some sort, earned in a long-past revolution.
Two or three of the women were the wives of government officials
stationed in Bluefields or other isolated east coast towns, and were
ladies of refinement. But contiguity was productive of democracy, and
both ladies and Generals joined the _peons_ in lamentation of common
misery.
The life of the party was a stout woman with a _machete_ in the bosom
of her voluminous soiled shirtwaist. Her seven children were constantly
tumbling about over the other passengers to the annoyance of every one,
and her admonitions that she would cut their throats if they did not
sit still, illustrated by a waving of the _machete_, had little effect
upon them. On the lake steamer, she had led the mournful chorus of
“Ay! Ay! Ay!” but she was now in good spirits and prepared at all times
to conduct the conversation.
Her favorite theme was her romances.
“The oldest boy--he of the curly hair--was the son of Juanito, the
blacksmith. And that one--the dark one--is the child of Pedro, the
little Indian at San Carlos.”
She had left the blacksmith, it seems, because he caught her at
flirtation, and failed to chastise the other man. He had simply taken
_her_ home, and beaten _her_. She had not minded this, for it was
justified. But he should have beaten the other man, too. Did we not
think so? And who could love such a coward?
We stopped on our third night at a little thatched farmhouse. While the
women remained aboard the launch, reciting their rosaries in unison,
as was their nightly custom throughout the voyage, the men adjourned
to a narrow sandspit, opened a jug of rum, and took turns riding a
young bull, which, despite its youth, contrived to toss most of them
into the river. Thereafter we gathered at the farmhouse, where some one
produced guitar and mandolin, and we all danced with the farmer’s three
daughters. There was some question in my mind as to whether a gentleman
about to dance with a barefoot partner should remove his own shoes. The
book of etiquette, as I recalled it, had not covered this point. But,
considering that the boards were full of splinters which might have
been painful to any but the calloused sole of a native, I decided to
forgo the courtesy. When the boatmen and passengers discovered that I
could play a few pieces of their own music on the mandolin, they hailed
me as “Paisano”--“fellow-countryman”--and thereafter called me by that
name. These Nicaraguans were prejudiced against _gringos_, but like
all Latin-Americans, were eager to be friendly with any individual who
showed an interest in themselves.
One of the Generals could speak English. His hobby was collecting the
pictures of short-skirted movie-actresses that came with each package
of the cigarettes I smoked.
“Those American girl are some nifty girl, eh? All the time I am
in the Nueva York I go always to the dance-hall to shake the--the
what-do-you-call-it?--the wicked hip. And so mooch I like the scenic
railway at the Coney Island--the one that go all the time through the
dark tunnel! Some classy burg, that Nueva York!”
When the rain ceased momentarily, the men would ascend to the roof
of the launch, among the crates of squawking chickens that formed
the bulk of the cargo, and from that point of vantage would shoot at
the alligators lying half-submerged along the mud-flats. The caymans
were sluggish creatures. On the Amazon and other rivers, I have seen
much larger monsters disappear with the crack of a rifle. Here they
merely lumbered with awkward dignity toward the water. The boatmen
showed no fear of them. When we struck a sandbar, as we did at two-hour
intervals, the crew would leap overboard to shove us loose, and
sometimes would plod all over the river to find the deeper channels.
If this were ever to become an interoceanic canal, it would require
infinite dredging. Yet, should traffic outgrow the Panama waterway,
this will be the site of another road. The mountain chain which soars
aloft throughout Central America subsides at this point. Lake Nicaragua
is only a hundred and ten feet above sea level, and from it another
river empties into the Pacific just as the San Juan empties into the
Caribbean. The principal disadvantage of a canal here would be its
length. Any surveyor or engineer, making the journey as I made it,
would swear that the San Juan was longer than the Mississippi.
IV
It was a relief when, after three days of it, we turned aside into
a narrow channel, and pushed our way through lily-pads to the
weather-stained city of San Juan del Norte, otherwise known as
Greytown, our Caribbean terminus.
It was merely the typical East coast town, however--low, swampy,
stinking, and generally unattractive--with black complexions
prevailing. The Nicaraguan _commandante_ was Spanish. All other
officials were negroes. A customs’ inspector of West Indian descent, as
immaculate in white linen uniform as only a colored official can be,
directed me to a lodging house, and I set out to find it, hiking along
a grass-grown embankment lined with rickety wooden shacks roofed with
discolored tin, each house set upon piles above a pool of filth, and
reached by a wobbly board-walk.
[Illustration: GREYTOWN WAS A TYPICAL EAST COAST PORT--LOW, SWAMPY AND
UNATTRACTIVE--WITH BLACK COMPLEXIONS PREVAILING]
Once upon a time--when this whole shore from Costa Rica to Guatemala
was a part of the British “Mosquito kingdom,” of which British
Honduras is the only remnant--this was a thriving city. Walker, the
Filibuster, made it his base of supplies. In the days of the gold rush
to California, Nicaragua was one of the favorite cross-continental
routes. In those times, as the residents of to-day expressed it,
“Greytown was Greytown.” Now it was only Greytown. Prosperity had fled.
The inhabitants lived, as tropical natives so frequently live, without
visible occupation. A visitor, especially a _gringo_, was a curiosity.
The entire population--descendants of Great Britain’s former negro
empire--rushed to the doorways to stare. Buxom wenches climbed upon
their window-sills with a mountainous display of anatomy to ask one
another in Jamaican English:
“Who the mon is? Who the mon is?”
I found the lodging house, but it was closed.
“Dey all go off for a lark,” advised a neighbor.
But eventually I found another hotel, kept by a Nicaraguan, who was
quite amazed at the sight of a prospective guest. He had one large
room, laden with canvas cots, and already occupied by a blind negro
with the stupid countenance of a half-wit, who proved upon further
acquaintance to be the town celebrity.
He was a musician. When some one led him downstairs and placed a
mandolin in his hands, he played it as I had never dreamed the
instrument could be played. He was a true genius. If his accompanist
gave the wrong chord upon the guitar, he would fly into a rage.
When, as a joke, some one told him that I played better than he, his
indignation knew no limit. His eyelids snapped open and shut, exposing
empty sockets, and he screamed like a maniac. He refused positively to
play another piece so long as I was present. Thereafter he seemed to
sense my return, even when I tiptoed into the room, and would cease
abruptly to demand in Spanish:
“Has that _gringo_ come back?”
But he warmed toward me when mediators informed him that I wished to
take his picture. All Greytown was eager to be photographed. Seeing
my camera, the blacks would call out, “Draw me portrait, sah?” There
were many old colored men here who could recall the days when Greytown
flourished. They were very dignified and formal, as befits a patriarch,
and with the peculiar vanity of the oldest living resident everywhere,
each was extremely proud that he hadn’t had sufficient ambition to
move out of one place for sixty or seventy years. They now spent most
of their time sitting about the rum shops, waiting for some one to buy
them a drink.
As I passed one such shop--and it seemed to be about the one kind of
shop in the city--a group of my former associates from the launch
journey greeted me with an overjoyed, “_Paisano!_” and called me
inside, assuring the colony of patriarchs, “This _gringo_ is a good
fellow! He’s our _paisano_! He’s one of us!” With that recommendation
the darkies accepted me as an equal. Theirs was the elaborate
phraseology of the Jamaican:
“When I first see he,” they said, “I presumption that he be American.”
And to me, “Am I not conclusive, sah, that you be a traveler, and that
you will embrace the primary opportunity to emigrate from this region?”
My former associates were rather tipsy with rum, and all were eager
to show me the sights of the city. The only point of interest they
could think of, however, was the chapel across the way. It had fallen
greatly into disrepair, since the Church of England is a more favored
institution on the East Coast, but it contained a well-molded image of
the Saviour. Some local artist evidently had done the work, for the
complexion of the image was a rich chocolate brown. The natives looked
upon Him with astonishment.
“_Carramba!_” exclaimed one. “He’s as dark as ourselves! He’s our
_paisano_!”
V
A motor-schooner was about to leave for Costa Rica.
Its skipper was a Cayman Islander--a hard-faced ruffian with a
whiskey-shaded mustache, who might have passed for a white man were
it not for his Jamaican speech. Its crew was composed of semi-naked
blacks. But all of them understood seamanship, which was fortunate, for
the passing of the Red Bar, at the mouth of the San Juan, is fraught
with danger.
We crept out through a winding channel. Giant combers, sweeping across
the low sandspit, caught us broadside, and turned the little craft
until the gunwale dipped water. Again and again they piled us against
the opposite bank, while great sheets of spray broke over us and
sizzled through the rigging.
The skipper, braced against the wheel, shouted orders that flew to
leeward with the screaming wind. The blacks, seemingly unmindful of
their peril, leaned their weight upon their poles as they struggled
to pry us loose, while a dozen sharks cruised hungrily below. Natives
affirm that the sea-tigers gather about each passing ship, and are
seldom disappointed. There were moments when it appeared that they
might enjoy their accustomed banquet. But at last we were safe, and
climbing up the mountainous waves toward the open sea, while the
boatmen raised lusty voices in a chantey of the old-time pirates. And
with a stiff breeze filling out sails, we scudded southward toward
Costa Rica, the most charming land in the world.
VI
Five years earlier I had visited Costa Rica--after my flight from
Mexico--and it was good to see it again.
We threaded our way among the reefs of Limón harbor, toward a sickle
of white beach fringed with graceful coco-palms. In the distance rose
lofty mountains, verdant with forest and jungle, towering up and up
toward the filmy white clouds. Over it all was the bluest of skies.
This was the land which admiring Spaniards, years ago, christened “Rich
Coast,” and no country has ever been more aptly named.
Limón itself was merely an average East Coast port--a city of
rickety wooden houses behind a large banana wharf, with a population
of Jamaican blacks imported by the Fruit Company, which owns this
Caribbean shore. But the railway--incidentally a Fruit Company
possession, and one of the three most famous scenic routes in Latin
America--carried me inland through an ever-changing panorama of cane
fields, banana plantation, thatched villages, and untrammeled jungle,
through forests of magnificent big trees festooned with moss and vine,
through rugged gulches beside a foaming river, up mountain sides where
the stream dropped to a mere white ribbon far below, along winding
cliffs that looked out upon endless vistas of waving palm tops, up
into the exhilarating coolness of the altitudes, among rolling hills
of luxuriant coffee plantation, past the red-tiled roofs of ancient
Cartago, and down again into a fertile valley dotted with little farms,
into San José, the most delightful capital in Central America--a city
of quaint Spanish architecture, yet with every modern comfort--a quiet,
peaceful city slumbering beneath a warm sun that never burns--a city
with the loveliest climate, the most attractive _plazas_, and the most
beautiful women in the world. Every town of any note in Latin America
claims these superlatives as its own. Every traveler I have met joins
me in awarding them to San José.
[Illustration: SAN JOSÉ CONTAINS THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PLAZAS, AND THE
MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD]
VII
Costa Rica is not only the most charming country in Central America,
but usually the best-behaved.
So stable is its government that land upon the Costa Rican side of the
San Juan River is far more valuable than the same sort of property on
the Nicaraguan side.
It is one of the few countries south of the Rio Grande which can elect
a new president without shooting the old one. Its leading families are
so interrelated that the chief executiveship is largely a household
affair. As a general rule, they take turns at it. Now and then, when
they do quarrel about it, each family separates, half of it taking one
side and half the other, so that everybody always wins. And whoever
gains the office rules ordinarily with consideration for the rest of
the populace.
In many recent years there has been but one period of rough-house in
its ordinarily tranquil history. It was my fortune, on my first visit
to the republic, to arrive just in time to witness its conclusion--the
conclusion of such a series of events as might have sprung from the
pages of a novel by Richard Harding Davis. I landed at Puerto Limón
just in time to see Ex-President Federico Tinoco, the last of the
Central-American tyrants, walk across the dock between two lines of
fixed bayonets, and embark for Europe, carrying with him the national
treasury.
The story of Tinoco would be much more typical of Honduras than of
Costa Rica.
As in Tegucigalpa there were three contestants for the presidency in
the elections of 1919. No one of them gained an absolute majority.
Congress, forced to decide, bickered as Congresses will. The president
in office, scenting possible trouble, undertook to smooth the path of
his own favorite by building up a stronger army. At the head of it was
Federico Tinoco, a man of prominent family, himself little known in
Costa Rica except as a devotee of pleasure who spent most of his time
in Paris.
When the army was well organized, Tinoco cleared the whole situation
by capturing the palace and declaring _himself_ president. Thereupon
he reorganized Congress with his own personal friends, and was
constitutionally elected. There were rumors--as always in these
countries--that an American concession hunter financed the whole
_coup_. It is more probable that Tinoco’s family influenced the move.
[Illustration: A MACHINE-GUN TOWER BUILT BY THE TYRANT TINOCO]
Federico, the Dictator, was himself a weak, timid, vacillating man. The
real power behind the throne was a younger brother, Joaquín, who became
the Secretary of War. Young, cultured, charming, the handsomest man in
a nation of handsome men, Joaquín was a striking figure everywhere.
Magnetic beyond description, he could, in a five-minute conversation,
bring his worst enemy to his own point of view. He had traveled
throughout the world, had been received in the most exclusive salons of
many European capitals, and spoke fluently several languages. He could
outride, outwrestle, outbox, outfence, and outswim any youth in the
Republic. At philandering he was supreme. Now and then some outraged
husband challenged him to a duel, but Joaquín could outshoot them all.
When there were murmurs against the high-handed methods by which the
Tinocos had attained office, he announced in Congress:
“If any citizen disapproves of it, he can meet me man to man with
revolvers.”
Secure in his power, Joaquín led the life of a young prince. He
designed strikingly beautiful uniforms for himself. He gave many
gay parties. He himself never drank, but there was always plenty of
champagne for his friends. He made costly presents to his women, and
not content with the local beauties, he imported occasional high-class
courtesans from overseas.
His extravagances proved a drain upon the national treasury. When
President Federico protested, Joaquín quickly overruled him. And
Federico, despite his desire to execute honestly the duties into
which family ambition had forced him, proceeded to tax the country
exorbitantly. When the _peons_ had no money left, he took their oxen.
He confiscated the beasts under pretense of using them for the army,
but sold them to cattlemen in the West Indies. The reserves in the
local banks he seized to pay the interest on the national debt. At
length, he commenced to sell some of the art treasures in the national
theater.
It was his one remaining hope to secure a foreign loan. Before
capitalists would listen to his pleas, however, he must secure the
recognition of the American government. In his efforts to win the
favor of Washington, he used every possible device. He extended every
courtesy to American citizens. He joined the United States in declaring
war on Germany. He offered our War Department the use of Costa Rican
territory in the fortification of the Canal Zone.
His stumbling block was Benjamin F. Chase, American Consul in San José.
In the absence of a Minister, Mr. Chase was reporting to Washington
the current political history of Costa Rica. Being a stubborn sort of
Yankee, he was reporting the truth, even though the Tinocos tried to
make a pet of him. Having failed to bribe the Consul, according to
rumors afloat at the time, the Dictator is said to have hired another
_gringo_ to shoot him. Several of the more loyal Americans formed
themselves into a guard at the Consulate, and the Consul continued to
send home unfavorable reports on the Tinoco régime.
All Costa Rica murmured its discontent at the increasing taxation.
Revolutions commenced to brew. In the suppression of the uprisings,
Joaquín introduced a reign of terror. His spies were everywhere.
Political opponents were thrown into old-fashioned wooden stocks and
exhibited in public. The prisons were filled. According to reports,
prisoners were frequently beaten with iron rods, and sometimes hung up
by the thumbs. Many of the stories have the exaggerated ring of the
yarns told about Cabrera in Guatemala. They include those of a man
burned in oil, of gold teeth being extracted and resold to dentists,
and of a private swimming pool where Joaquín, after depriving his
prisoners of water for forty-eight hours, would march them out to see
him diving and swimming in gallons of it.
The leading revolutionist, Don Julio Acosta, had a force of two hundred
men on the Nicaraguan border, but Joaquín’s army numbered about
ten thousand. The revolutionists had neither arms nor ammunition.
Washington, following its traditional policy of selling weapons only
to constitutionally elected presidents, whether they were crooks or
not, refused to sell to Don Julio, insisting that he work out his own
salvation.
Indirectly, it was Tinoco’s large army that caused his own destruction.
Knowing that all Costa Rica hated him, he had strengthened it with
soldiers of fortune from Nicaragua and Honduras, of the type who
gravitate wherever there is trouble. They must be paid. All other
government employees could wait. The school teachers, in protest, left
their schools, and marched through the streets with their pupils.
Emboldened by their example, the letter carriers and the street
cleaners followed. When the police sought to disperse them, the women
cried:
“We are your friends! We are protesting against the cutting of your
salaries to pay foreign soldiers!”
And the police stood back, while all San José surged through the
streets, shouting, “Down with the Tinocos!” Joaquín at the time was
absent from the city. Hearing of the disturbance, he hastened back,
and led his troops in person, riding fearlessly into the mob. Some of
the women and children were forced into the American Consulate, and
surged upstairs to the balcony. A young boy attempted a speech. Tinoco
soldiers drew their rifles and fired. The crowd fled back inside the
building, leaving Consul Chase alone on the balcony. Eleven bullet
holes dented the stucco behind him, but he was not harmed.
This was the beginning of the end. Joaquín quickly pacified the city,
for no one dared to face him. But--the Old-Timers suspect--a little
note came down from Washington. Federico, the nominal Dictator, made
plans for an exit. He handed his resignation to the Vice-President,
who appointed him “Ambassador-at-Large” to Europe, with a salary of
$100,000 a year, payable in advance. All of his cohorts received
similar appointments--by a procedure which, if unethical, was quite
proper according to international law--until their salaries exhausted
what little cash remained in the country.
Joaquín, the real Dictator, had no intention of fleeing with them.
Whatever might be said of him, he was no coward. He meant to fight to
the end. But the end came unexpectedly. He was strolling nonchalantly
down the street one evening when a man saluted him. Always military,
Joaquín snapped his own hand to his hat-brim. He did not observe
that the other man had saluted with the left hand, or that the right
concealed a revolver. As Joaquín’s fingers touched the hat-brim, the
man shot him. Then he turned and ran up the street, blazing into the
air, and shouting:
“Joaquín is dead! Costa Rica lives!”
The elder Tinoco was at home in the castle when the news reached him.
Seizing the telephone, he called up the prison.
“Shoot every political prisoner!” he ordered.
But with the death of Joaquín a change had come over the Republic. It
was Joaquín the people feared, and not Federico. The order was not
obeyed. Surrounded by foreign soldiers of fortune, the ex-Dictator
emerged from the castle only to attend his brother’s funeral. Then, in
a heavily-guarded train, he fled to Puerto Limón, and sailed for Europe.
As was my usual fortune in Latin-American travel, I arrived just in
time to hear the shouting. And all Costa Rica _was_ shouting. When I
drew any young man aside to ask who it was that shot Joaquín, he would
glance hastily about to see that he was not overheard. Then he would
whisper:
“Sh! Don’t tell any one! _I_ did it!”
But Joaquín had his mourners. Every day several young ladies would
visit his grave to deck it with flowers, each glaring jealously at the
others who loved his memory.
VIII
This story, it should be emphasized again, is not typical of Costa
Rica. Although the second smallest of the Central-American republics,
it is the most progressive.
Fortune favored it in the beginning by giving it few gold mines
to attract to its shores the swashbuckling adventurer whose blood
to-day keeps so many of the neighboring countries in turmoil. It is
essentially a country of coffee and bananas, and so fertile that wooden
railway ties and telegraph poles are popularly reputed to take root and
grow. It was settled not by _conquistadores_ bent upon enslaving the
Indian, but by Gallegos, the hardest-working farmers of Spain, who,
instead of mating with the aborigines, followed the example of our own
Puritan forefathers by exterminating them. To-day, when one passes
the black fringe of the Caribbean coast, one finds neither the Indian
population of Guatemala nor the mixed-breed population of the other
countries, but a race eighty per cent. Spanish, even among the lowly
_peons_.
Not being troubled by recurrent civil war, Costa Rica has made
progress. It is not an astounding country, for most of its 23,000
square miles of territory are still clad with jungle, and its
population of 400,000 people live mostly in one mountain district,
where the four principal cities are connected by a wagon road not
more than thirty miles in length. But its people, for the most part,
own their own farms, and are contented. Education is of a higher
standard than in the other countries. There is railway connection with
either coast. It is such a healthful land that Canal Zone doctors
always recommend it to convalescents. It has a national theater which
equals in its interior decoration any theater in the United States.
Yet it remains quaint, and picturesque, and Spanish--charming and
delightful--so thoroughly charming and delightful that the author,
after living there for a month on two different visits, discovers no
further observations in his notebook.
[Illustration: IN ITS INTERIOR DECORATION THE COSTA RICAN NATIONAL
THEATER EQUALS ANY THEATER IN THE UNITED STATES]
IX
To be fair to these countries, no story of revolution is altogether
typical of any of them.
Life even in Mexico or Honduras is normally tranquil. Bloodshed and
comic opera are not the rule, but the exception. If all of these
republics have their turbulent moments, they quickly recover.
After the flight of Tinoco, Costa Rica settled quickly into its
accustomed routine. Through the narrow Moorish streets the oxen plodded
slowly behind the driver’s goad-pole, their noses to the ground, their
massive shoulders swaying from side to side. In the coffee fields
outside the capital the _peons_ laughed and chatted as they filled
their baskets with red berries. In the _plaza_ the military band played
on Sunday evenings, while youths and maidens strolled beneath the
palm trees. And the same moon that smiled upon Mexico peeped over the
low flat roofs, while the plaintive notes of the _gendarme’s_ whistle
echoed through the quiet city with its benediction of “All’s well.”