[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE ORINOCO AND ITS TRIBUTARIES
High-resolution Map]
Down the Orinoco
in a Canoe
By
S. Pérez Triana
With an Introduction by
R. B. Cunninghame Graham
‘Que ejcura que ejtá la Noche!
La Noche! que ejcura ejtá!
Asi de ejcura ej la ausencia ...
Bogá, Negrito, bogá,
Bogá!’
Candelario Obeso
New York
Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Publishers
1902
PREFACE
‘Climas pasé, mudé constelaciones, golfos inavegables,
navegando.’—Ercilla: _La Araucana_.
To read a book to which a friend has asked you to write a preface is an
unusual—nay, even a pedantic—thing to do. It is customary for a
preface-monger to look contemptuously at the unopened bundle of his
friend’s proofs, and then to sit down and overflow you his opinions upon
things created, and those which the creator has left in chaos. I plead
guilty at once to eccentricity, which is worse than the sin of
witchcraft, for witchcraft at one time may have exposed one to the
chance of the stake; but eccentricity at all times has placed one
outside the pale of all right-thinking men. To wear a different hat,
waistcoat, or collar, from those affected by the Apollos who perambulate
our streets, to cut your hair too short, to wear it by the twentieth
fraction of an inch too long, is _scandalum magnatum_, and not to be
endured. So in confessing that I have read ‘Down the Orinoco in a
Canoe,’ not only in the original Spanish in which it first appeared, but
in its English dress, is to condemn myself out of my own mouth, to be
set down a pedant, perhaps a palterer with the truth, and at the best a
man so wedded to old customs that I might almost be a Socialist.
It is undoubtedly a far cry to Bogotá. Personally, more by good fortune
than by any effort of my own, I know with some degree of certainty where
the place is, and that it is not built upon the sea. My grandfather was
called upon to mediate between Bolivar and General Paez, and I believe
acquitted himself to the complete dissatisfaction of them both. Such is
the mediator’s meed.
The general public, of whom (or which) I wish to speak with all respect,
is generally, I take it, in the position of the American Secretary of
State to whom an office-seeker came with a request to be appointed the
United States Vice-Consul for the town of Bogotá. The request was duly
granted, and as the future Consul left the room the Secretary turned to
the author of this book, and said: ‘Triany, where in thunder is Bogoter,
any way?’ Still, Bogotá to-day is, without doubt, the greatest literary
centre south of Panama. Putting aside the floods of titubating verse
which, like a mental dysentery, afflict all members of the
Spanish-speaking race, in Bogotá more serious literary work is done
during a month than in the rest of the republics in a year. The
President himself, Don José Manuel Marroquin, during the intervals of
peace—which in the past have now and then prevailed in the republic over
which he rules—has found the time to write a book, ‘El Moro,’ in which
he draws the adventures of a horse. The book is written not without
literary skill, contains much lore of horsemanship, and is a veritable
mine of local customs; and for the moral of it—and surely Presidents,
though not anointed, as are Kings, must have a moral in all they write,
they do and say—it is enough to make a man incontinently go out and pawn
his spurs.
Thus, Bogotá, set in its plateau in Columbian wilds, is in a way a kind
of Chibcha Athens. There all men write, and poets rave and madden
through the land, and only wholesome necessary revolutions keep their
number down. Still, in the crowd of versifiers one or two, such as
Obeso, the negro poet, who, being denied all access to the lady of his
love—the colour line being strictly drawn in Bogotá, as well befits a
democratic government—brought out a paper once a week, entitled _Lectura
para ti_, have written verse above the average of Spanish rhyme. Others,
again, as Gregorio Gutierrez Gonzalez and Samuel Uribe Velazquez have
written well on local matters, and Juan de Dios Carasquilla has produced
a novel called ‘Frutos de mi Tierra,’ far better than the average
‘epoch-making’ work of circulating library and press.
Pérez Triana, son of an ex-President, and speaking English and Spanish
with equal fluency, is a true son of Bogotá, and writes as easily as
other people talk.
His book occurred in this wise. The usual biennial revolution having
placed his enemies in power, he found it requisite to leave the country
with all speed. The seaports being watched, he then determined, like
Fray Gaspar de Carbajal, to launch his boat upon the Orinoco, and, that
the parallel should be exact, write an account of all he saw upon the
way. Few books of travel which I have come across contain less details
of the traveller himself. Strangely enough, he rescued no one
single-handed from great odds. His strength and valour, and his
fertility of brain in times of peril, together with his patience, far
exceeding that of Indian fakirs, are not obtruded on the bewildered
reader, as is usual in like cases.
Though armed, and carrying on one occasion so much lethal stuff as to
resemble, as he says himself, a ‘wandering arsenal,’ he yet slew no one,
nor did he have those love adventures which happen readily to men in
foreign lands from whom a kitchen wench would turn in scorn in their own
native town: nothing of empire and little of patriotism is there in his
book. In fact, he says that those who are his countrymen are those who
have the same ideals as himself—a cursed theory which, if it once
obtained, would soon abolish Custom-houses, and render armies useless,
make navies all to be sold for scrap iron, and would leave hundreds of
patriotic sweaters without a platitude. What chiefly seems to have
appealed to this unusual traveller was the strangeness and beauty of the
long reaches on the interminable waterways, the brightness of the moon,
the thousand noises of the desert night, the brilliant birds,
kaleidoscopic fish, and the enchantment of a world remote from all that
to a really well-constituted modern mind makes life endurable. At times,
although I tremble as I write, it seems to me he doubts of things which
we all take on trust, such as the Stock Exchange. Even the army is not
sacred to this democrat, sprung from a shameless State in which there is
no King, and which, consequently, can never hope to contemplate a
Coronation show, for he retails a joke current in Columbia, but which, I
think, if duly followed up, might be encountered in Menander, or, at the
least, in Aristophanes. A Columbian Mayor of a town sent to the
President a hundred volunteers, with a request that all the ropes should
be returned. Jokes such as these cannot be helpful to a State; in fact,
a joke at all is to a serious man a rank impertinence, and if an author
wishes to obtain a place within the ranks of Anglo-Saxon literature, he
should not joke at all, or, if he does, joke about fat or thin men, bald
heads or sea-sickness, or on some subject which the great public mind
has set apart for wit. However, as a member of the Latin race, it cannot
reasonably be expected of him that at one bound he should attain unto
the fulness of our Anglo-Saxon grace.
The careful reader of this book may possibly be struck with the
different point of view from which a Latin looks at many questions which
to an Englishman are set immovably as the foundations of the world,
embedded in the putty of our prejudice.
For instance, on arriving at the open plains after a tedious journey
across mountain ranges and through forest paths, the thing that
interests the author most is that the land in the Columbian _llanos_ is
not held in many instances by individuals, but that so scant is
population that it is open to all those who choose to take it up. This
does not strike him as a folly or as affording room for speculation, but
simply as a fact which, on the whole, he seems rather to approve of, but
without enthusiasm, looking upon the matter as a curious generality, but
not inclining to refine or to reduce it to any theory in particular. A
state of mind almost impossible for Saxons (Anglo or Celtic), who, as a
general rule, seem quite incapable of looking at a proposition as a
whole, but must reduce it to its component parts.
The voyage in itself was memorable, for no one of the party seems to
have been the least the kind of man who generally ventures upon journeys
of the sort, and furthermore because, since the first conquerors went
down the river with the faith that in their case, if rightly used, might
have smoothed out all the mountain ranges in the world, no one except a
stray adventurer, or india-rubber trader, has followed in their steps.
Leal, the jaguar-hunter, who slew his tigers as I have seen them slain
in Paraguay, on foot, with a forked stick in one hand and in the other a
bamboo lance; the Indian guide Gatiño; and the young Venezuelan Governor
of a State, who, shut up in his house, fought to the death, his
mistress, an ex-ballet dancer, handing him up loaded guns, are to the
full as striking characters as I have met in any book of travels outside
the types that crowd the pages of the ‘Conquistadores’ of America. The
naked Indian in his canoe, before whose eyes the immeasurable wealth of
powder, looking-glasses, a red flannel shirt, and other treasures, rich
and rare to him, were spread, who yet had strength of mind to scorn them
all rather than pledge his liberty for two days’ paddling, is the kind
of Indian that merits such a chronicler as he has found. Long may he
paddle on the _caños_ and the _aguapeys_, and die, still crowned with
feathers and with liberty, as did his fathers, by some forgotten beach
or by some _morichal_, where parrots chatter and toucans flit through
the leaves, and hummingbirds hover like bees above the tropic flowers.
What most delights me in the book is that the author had no settled plan
by means of which he strove to square the circle of the globe.
‘We wandered,’ as he says, ‘with the definite aim of reaching the
Atlantic Ocean. Beyond that we did not venture to probe too deeply the
mysterious and wonderful manifestations of Nature, but took them as they
appeared to our limited means of vision and understanding, and sought
nothing beyond.’
A charming way to travel, and a wise, and if not profitable to commerce,
yet to literature, for books writ in the fashion of this brief record of
a trip through the great waterways of Venezuelan and Columbian wilds,
although perhaps not ‘epoch-making,’ yet live and flourish when the
smart travellers’ tales, bristling with paltry facts and futile figures,
which for a season were sea-serpents in the press, have long been pulped
to make the soles of ammunition boots.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
DOWN THE ORINOCO
IN A CANOE
CHAPTER I
The hour was about ten one evening in December, which in equatorial
Andine latitudes is a month of clear skies, cold winds, and starry
nights. The moon shone brilliantly, casting upon the ground shadows as
clear as those caused by a strong electric light. Truly, the local poet
who said that such nights as these might serve as days in other lands
was right.
We came out—three of us, Alex, Fermin and I—through an old Spanish
gateway, a rectangular structure of _adobes_, or sun-burnt bricks,
capped with a slanting roof of tiles, dark-reddish and moss-covered,
with a swinging gate of cross wooden beams, held together by iron bolts.
This was the gateway of the _hacienda_ of Boita, about thirty miles
north of the city of Bogotá, in the South American Republic of Colombia.
We passed into the open road, and turned our horses and our minds
northwards.
From south to north, as far as eyes could see, stretched the road, an
old Spanish causeway, bordered on either side by low-lying stone fences,
in front of which were ditches filled with water and covered with
vegetation.
The ground was hard with the consistency of baked clay. As no rain had
fallen for weeks, the dust was thick, and the horses’ hoofs rang like
hammer-strokes upon muffled or broken brass. We let the reins hang
loose, and the horses, knowing their way, started at a brisk canter.
Wrapped in thought and in our _ponchos_, we journeyed on.
No sound was audible; we seemed to be travelling through a deserted or
dead world; the neighbouring meadows, black beneath the moon, contrasted
with the grayish white line of the broad causeway. Now and then the
solitary houses, some close to the road, some far back, loomed up with
the magic-lantern effects of moonlight, and their white walls seemed
like huge tombstones in that lonely cemetery. Sometimes we crossed
bridges, under which the water lay motionless, as though enchanted by
the universal stillness; only a gentle breeze, causing ripples on the
neighbouring pools, made them glitter and revealed their presence. A cow
or a stray heifer would poise its head across the stone fence and watch
us with wondering moist eyes, whilst two tiny columns of condensed
breath rose from its nostrils.
Beyond, black and frowning, misshapen and mysterious, the huge boulders
of the Andes raised their vague outlines, forming a sort of irregular
circle, in some directions quite close to us, in others lost in the
darkness which the moon and the stars were too remote to overcome.
Indeed, that other local poet was also right in thinking that under the
brilliant moon those mountains looked like huge sepulchres, wherein are
stored the ashes of dead worlds upon which judgment had been passed.
And so we journeyed on.
Many travellers have observed that whenever a voyage of a certain nature
is undertaken—one that for some reason or other differs from the
ordinary transference of one’s self elsewhere, when through
circumstances beyond our control we know that the moment of starting
necessarily marks an epoch in our lives, even as the beginning of a
descent or an ascent from the summit or the foot of a mountain
necessarily marks a change in our motions—our thoughts fly backwards,
and not only cover the immediate time and space behind us, but, once
started, plunge, so to speak, with the rapidity inherent to them, into
the deepest recesses of our memory, so that, as our bodies are carried
forward, our minds revisit old scenes, we hold converse with old
friends, and the old-time world seems to live and throb again within our
hearts.
Unheeding the clatter of the horses’ hoofs, which was the only
perceptible noise, my mind flew across the few leagues that separated me
from my dear quaint old native town, cradled there to the south at the
foot of two hills, each crowned by a tiny church. I saw its streets
meeting at right angles, its two streams, dubbed rivers, parched with
thirst, crawling under the ancient arched Spanish bridges, its low
houses, with their enclosing _patios_ planted with roses and flowers
that bloom all the year round, with fountains murmuring in the midst,
and creepers covering the columns and the ceilings of the open
corridors, and then climbing out of sight; the numerous churches, each
one with its familiar legend; the convents—solid, spacious—turned into
barracks or public offices or colleges; the still old cells desecrated,
their dividing walls torn down so as to convert the space into large
halls, and, ruthless iconoclasm having carried away the statues of the
saints, no other trace of religion left but a stone cross, or a carved
saint’s face set too high above ground to be reached by irreverent
hands.
Yes, there was the little Church of Holy Humility—El Humilladero—an
_adobe_ structure, a mere hut, yet reverenced beyond words as being, so
tradition said, the first church built in the land. And not far from it
the Church of la Tercera and its convent, about which gruesome tales
were told. Its monks never slept on mattresses, and, as they felt death
approaching, would have themselves placed upon the ground to die close
to their Mother Earth; and one of them, it was said, for some
misdeameanour or possibly greater fault, had committed suicide, and
wandered headless—people had seen him—on dark and stormy nights through
the neighbouring street of the Arch, as it was called, though of the
arch nothing but the memory remained. And close to that convent of la
Tercera was the other one of the jolly Franciscan Fathers, four
beautiful _patios_ surrounded with broad cloisters, into which opened
over 600 cells, each provided, besides the sitting and sleeping room,
with a snug kitchen, old Moorish style, an open hearth for charcoal
fire, on which meats were roasted and earthenware saucepans simmered and
purred all day long, extracting the juice from beef, mutton, plantains,
mañoc, green corn, potatoes, and the other numerous vegetables of that
region, forming a most substantial broth, a peculiarly rich _pot-au-feu_
which enabled the reverend monks to recruit their strength and spirits
after the pious labours of the day; and with this came, it is said, a
copious supply of that beer, _chicha_, brewed from molasses and Indian
corn, strong and delicious—to those who like it. These reverend monks,
it is said, owned broad lands and numerous herds, and each had a lay
brother who looked after the material wants of his superior, and
received daily rations sufficient for ten or twenty men, so that a great
part of them was sold by the monks to the profane outside the cloister
walls. As the lay brother looked after all these worldly interests, he
enabled the monk to devote his whole time and attention to finding a
smooth path to heaven, not only for himself, but for as many others of
his fellow-creatures as he met.
But though of good cheer, they were not lacking in piety, nor were they
unable to withstand temptation. Their church was beautiful, all full of
gilt columns, carved woodwork, niches with statues of saints displaying
rich silks and gems and gold embroidery.
And though many of these things had disappeared in my day, and of the
monks only a few more vital spirits survived, downcast and forlorn,
lamenting the good old times, yet enough remained to give an idea of the
happier age.
A proof of the virtue of the monks was visible at the entrance of the
church looking on the main street, where the Evil One himself had
branded it, so to say, for the greater glory of God and the renown of
the convent.
It was whispered that Father Antonio, who combined profane
accomplishments with spiritual insight, skilled in playing the guitar,
not averse to a song or two, fond of cards for a friendly quiet game
with the Father Superior and two or three other plump, kind-hearted
brethren, where small sums were staked merely to give zest to the game,
discovered to his horror one night that the Evil One, possibly in memory
of his namesake (the monk’s, not the Evil One’s), had decided to tempt
his virtue, and appeared in his cell in the guise of a beautiful damsel.
Alas! the Evil One had reckoned without his host. Holy water was poured
upon him, the cross with the Redeemer nailed on it which lay handy was
taken up by Antonio, so that Beelzebub in his fright jumped out of the
window with such force that his cloven foot left its imprint upon the
granite slab outside the church, and this imprint I saw myself in my
very young years. Although many people continue to see it, I have grown
so short-sighted that, strive as I may, the stone now appears untouched
and like the others. But then these things will happen, and they
certainly should not lead us to doubt so pious a tradition.
And so all the old memories of the town kept passing before me. I saw a
living panorama, silent, bathed in mysterious light, moving slowly in
the background of the mind, large, infinite in its magnitude, with space
in it for men and buildings and mountains and rivers and broad plains
and leafy forests, and, what is more, with space in it for Time, the
boundless Time that contains all and everything.
Schooldays, holidays spent in the neighbouring towns and villages which
lie in the warmer valleys, my first voyage to a certain distance, and
then across the ocean—life, in fact, with its ebb and flow under various
suns and in different continents—all came back; but it were out of place
to give my reflections on them here.
Then, pausing for one moment as a bird alights on the mast of a ship
before launching forth into mid-ocean, my mind rested for an instant on
the old cemetery where so many loved ones slumbered. Alas! when we leave
the graves of those whom we have loved, not knowing when we shall again
kneel upon the sod that covers them, we feel that death itself has not
severed the link that bound us to those who were blood of our blood and
bone of our bone.