AMERICAN SYMPATHY--I TAKE AN HOTEL IN CRUCES--MY
CUSTOMERS--LOLA MONTES--MISS HAYES AND THE
BISHOP--GAMBLING IN CRUCES--QUARRELS AMONGST THE
TRAVELLERS--NEW GRANADA MILITARY--THE THIEVES OF
CRUCES--A NARROW ESCAPE.
When it became known that their "yellow doctress" had the cholera, I
must do the people of Cruces the justice to say that they gave her
plenty of sympathy, and would have shown their regard for her more
actively, had there been any occasion. Indeed, when I most wanted
quiet, it was difficult to keep out the sympathising Americans and
sorrowing natives who came to inquire after me; and who, not content
with making their inquiries, and leaving their offerings of blankets,
flannel, etc., must see with their own eyes what chance the yellow
woman had of recovery. The rickety door of my little room could never
be kept shut for many minutes together. A visitor would open it
silently, poke his long face in with an expression of sympathy that
almost made me laugh in spite of my pain, draw it out again, between
the narrowest possible opening, as if he were anxious to admit as
little air as he could; while another would come in bodily, and after
looking at me curiously and inquisitively, as he would eye a horse or
nigger he had some thoughts of making a bid for, would help to carpet
my room, with the result perhaps of his meditations, and saying,
gravely, "Air you better, Aunty Seacole, now? Isn't there a something
we can du for you, ma'am?" would as gravely give place to another and
another yet, until I was almost inclined to throw something at them,
or call them bad names, like the Scotch king does the ghosts in the
play.[A] But, fortunately, the attack was a very mild one, and by the
next day all danger had gone by, although I still felt weak and
exhausted.
After a few weeks, the first force of the cholera was spent, and
although it lingered with us, as though loath to leave so fine a
resting-place, for some months, it no longer gave us much alarm; and
before long, life went on as briskly and selfishly as ever with the
Cruces survivors, and the terrible past was conveniently forgotten.
Perhaps it is so everywhere; but the haste with which the Cruces
people buried their memory seemed indecent. Old houses found new
masters; the mules new drivers; the great Spaniard chose another
pretty woman, and had a grand, poor, dirty wedding, and was married by
the same lazy black priest who had buried his wife, dead a few months
back; and very likely they would all have hastened as quickly to
forget their doctress, had circumstances permitted them: but every now
and then one of them sickened and died of the old complaint; and the
reputation I had established founded for me a considerable practice.
The Americans in the place gladly retained me as their medical
attendant, and in one way or other gave me plenty to do; but, in
addition to this, I determined to follow my original scheme of keeping
an hotel in Cruces.
Right opposite my brother's Independent Hotel there was a place to let
which it was considered I could adapt to my purpose. It was a mere
tumble-down hut, with wattled sides, and a rotten thatched roof,
containing two rooms, one small enough to serve as a bedroom. For this
charming residence--very openly situated, and well ventilated--twenty
pounds a month was considered a fair and by no means exorbitant rent.
And yet I was glad to take possession of it; and in a few days had
hung its rude walls with calico of gayest colour in stripes, with an
exuberance of fringes, frills, and bows (the Americans love show
dearly), and prepared it to accommodate fifty dinner guests. I had
determined that it should be simply a _table d'hote_, and that I would
receive no lodgers. Once, and once only, I relaxed this rule in favour
of two American women, who sent me to sleep by a lengthy quarrel of
words, woke me in the night to witness its crisis in a fisticuff
_duello_, and left in the morning, after having taken a fancy to some
of my moveables which were most easily removeable. I had on my staff
my black servant Mac, the little girl I have before alluded to, and a
native cook. I had had many opportunities of seeing how my brother
conducted his business; and adopted his tariff of charges. For an
ordinary dinner my charge was four shillings; eggs and chickens were,
as I have before said, distinct luxuries, and fetched high prices.
Four crowds generally passed through Cruces every month. In these were
to be found passengers to and from Chili, Peru, and Lima, as well as
California and America. The distance from Cruces to Panama was not
great--only twenty miles, in fact; but the journey, from the want of
roads and the roughness of the country, was a most fatiguing one. In
some parts--as I found when I made the journey, in company with my
brother--it was almost impassable; and for more than half the
distance, three miles an hour was considered splendid progress. The
great majority of the travellers were rough, rude men, of dirty,
quarrelsome habits; the others were more civilized and more dangerous.
And it was not long before I grew very tired of life in Cruces,
although I made money rapidly, and pressed my brother to return to
Kingston. Poor fellow! it would have been well for him had he done so;
for he stayed only to find a grave on the Isthmus of Panama.
The company at my _table d'hote_ was not over select; and it was often
very difficult for an unprotected female to manage them, although I
always did my best to put them in good humour. Among other comforts, I
used to hire a black barber, for the rather large consideration of two
pounds, to shave my male guests. You can scarcely conceive the
pleasure and comfort an American feels in a clean chin; and I believe
my barber attracted considerable custom to the British Hotel at
Cruces. I had a little out-house erected for his especial convenience;
and there, well provided with towels, and armed with plenty of razors,
a brush of extraordinary size, and a foaming sea of lather, Jose
shaved the new-comers. The rivalry to get within reach of his huge
brush was very great; and the threats used by the neglected, when the
grinning black was considered guilty of any interested partiality,
were of the fiercest description.
This duty over, they and their coarser female companions--many of them
well known to us, for they travelled backwards and forwards across the
Isthmus, hanging on to the foolish gold-finders--attacked the dinner,
very often with great lack of decency. It was no use giving them
carving-knives and forks, for very often they laid their own down to
insert a dirty hairy hand into a full dish; while the floor soon bore
evidences of the great national American habit of expectoration. Very
often quarrels would arise during the progress of dinner; and more
than once I thought the knives, which they nearly swallowed at every
mouthful, would have been turned against one another. It was, I always
thought, extremely fortunate that the reckless men rarely stimulated
their excitable passions with strong drink. Tea and coffee were the
common beverages of the Americans; Englishmen, and men of other
nations, being generally distinguishable by their demand for wine and
spirits. But the Yankee's capacity for swilling tea and coffee was
prodigious. I saw one man drink ten cups of coffee; and finding his
appetite still unsatisfied, I ran across to my brother for advice.
There was a merry twinkle in his eyes as he whispered, "I always put
in a good spoonful of salt after the sixth cup. It chokes them off
admirably."
It was no easy thing to avoid being robbed and cheated by the less
scrupulous travellers; although I think it was only the 'cutest Yankee
who stood any fair chance of outwitting me. I remember an instance of
the biter bit, which I will narrate, hoping it may make my reader
laugh as heartily as its recollection makes me. He was a tall, thin
Yankee, with a furtive glance of the eyes, and an amazing appetite,
which he seemed nothing loath to indulge: his appetite for eggs
especially seemed unbounded. Now, I have more than once said how
expensive eggs were; and this day they happened to be eightpence
apiece. Our plan was to charge every diner according to the number of
shells found upon his plate. Now, I noticed how eagerly my thin guest
attacked my eggs, and marvelled somewhat at the scanty pile of shells
before him. My suspicions once excited, I soon fathomed my Yankee
friend's dodge. As soon as he had devoured the eggs, he conveyed
furtively the shells beneath the table, and distributed them
impartially at the feet of his companions. I gave my little black maid
a piece of chalk, and instructions; and creeping under the table, she
counted the scattered shells, and chalked the number on the tail of
his coat. And when he came up to pay his score, he gave up his number
of eggs in a loud voice; and when I contradicted him, and referred to
the coat-_tale_ in corroboration of _my_ score, there was a general
laugh against him. But there was a nasty expression in his cat-like
eyes, and an unpleasant allusion to mine, which were not agreeable,
and dissuaded me from playing any more practical jokes upon the
Yankees.
I followed my brother's example closely, and forbade all gambling in
my hotel. But I got some idea of its fruits from the cases brought to
me for surgical treatment from the faro and monte tables. Gambling at
Cruces, and on the Isthmus generally, was a business by which money
was wormed out of the gold-seekers and gold-finders. No attempt was
made to render it attractive, as I have seen done elsewhere. The
gambling-house was often plainer than our hotels; and but for the
green tables, with their piles of money and gold-dust, watched over by
a well-armed determined banker, and the eager gamblers around, you
would not know that you were in the vicinity of a spot which the
English at home designate by a very decided and extreme name. A Dr.
Casey--everybody familiar with the Americans knows their fondness for
titles--owned the most favoured table in Cruces; and this, although he
was known to be a reckless and unscrupulous villain. Most of them knew
that he had been hunted out of San Francisco; and at that time--years
before the Vigilance Committee commenced their labours of
purification--a man too bad for that city must have been a prodigy of
crime: and yet, and although he was violent-tempered, and had a knack
of referring the slightest dispute to his revolver, his table was
always crowded; probably because--the greatest rogues have some good
qualities--he was honest in his way, and played fairly.
Occasionally some distinguished passengers passed on the upward and
downward tides of rascality and ruffianism, that swept periodically
through Cruces. Came one day, Lola Montes, in the full zenith of her
evil fame, bound for California, with a strange suite. A good-looking,
bold woman, with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing; dressed
ostentatiously in perfect male attire, with shirt-collar turned down
over a velvet lapelled coat, richly worked shirt-front, black hat,
French unmentionables, and natty, polished boots with spurs. She
carried in her hand a handsome riding-whip, which she could use as
well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an
impertinent American, presuming--perhaps not unnaturally--upon her
reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and as
a lesson received a cut across his face that must have marked him for
some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and was glad
when the wretched woman rode off on the following morning. A very
different notoriety followed her at some interval of time--Miss
Catherine Hayes, on her successful singing tour, who disappointed us
all by refusing to sing at Cruces; and after her came an English
bishop from Australia, who need have been a member of the church
militant to secure his pretty wife from the host of admirers she had
gained during her day's journey from Panama.
Very quarrelsome were the majority of the crowds, holding life cheap,
as all bad men strangely do--equally prepared to take or lose it upon
the slightest provocation. Few tales of horror in Panama could be
questioned on the ground of improbability. Not less partial were many
of the natives of Cruces to the use of the knife; preferring, by the
way, to administer sly stabs in the back, when no one was by to see
the dastard blow dealt. Terribly bullied by the Americans were the
boatmen and muleteers, who were reviled, shot, and stabbed by these
free and independent filibusters, who would fain whop all creation
abroad as they do their slaves at home. Whenever any Englishmen were
present, and in a position to interfere with success, this bullying
was checked; and they found, instead of the poor Spanish Indians,
foemen worthy of their steel or lead. I must do them credit to say,
that they were never loath to fight any one that desired that passing
excitement, and thought little of ending their journey of life
abruptly at the wretched wayside town of Cruces. It very often
happened so, and over many a hasty head and ready hand have I seen the
sod roughly pressed down, their hot hearts stilled suddenly in some
senseless quarrel. And so in time I grew to have some considerable
experience in the treatment of knife and gun-shot wounds.
One night I heard a great noise outside my window, and on rising found
a poor boatman moaning piteously, and in a strange jumble of many
languages begging me to help him. At first I was afraid to open the
door, on account of the noisy mob which soon joined him, for villainy
was very shrewd at Cruces; but at last I admitted him, and found that
the poor wretch's ears had been cruelly split by some hasty citizen of
the United States. I stitched them up as well as I could, and silenced
his cries. And at any time, if you happened to be near the river when
a crowd were arriving or departing, your ears would be regaled with a
choice chorus of threats, of which ear-splitting, eye-gouging,
cow-hiding, and the application of revolvers were the mildest. Against
the negroes, of whom there were many in the Isthmus, and who almost
invariably filled the municipal offices, and took the lead in every
way, the Yankees had a strong prejudice; but it was wonderful to see
how freedom and equality elevate men, and the same negro who perhaps
in Tennessee would have cowered like a beaten child or dog beneath an
American's uplifted hand, would face him boldly here, and by equal
courage and superior physical strength cow his old oppressor.
When more than ordinary squabbles occurred in the street or at the
gambling-tables, the assistance of the soldier-police of New Granada
was called in, and the affair sometimes assumed the character of a
regular skirmish. The soldiers--I wish I could speak better of
them--were a dirty, cowardly, indolent set, more prone to use their
knives than their legitimate arms, and bore old rusty muskets, and
very often marched unshod. Their officers were in outward appearance a
few shades superior to the men they commanded, but, as respects
military proficiency, were their equals. Add to this description of
their _personnel_ the well-known fact, that you might commit the
grossest injustice, and could obtain the simplest justice only by
lavish bribery, and you may form some idea of our military protectors.
Very practised and skilful in thieving were the native population of
Cruces--I speak of the majority, and except the negroes--always more
inclined to do a dishonest night's labour at great risk, than an
honest day's work for fair wages; for justice was always administered
strictly to the poor natives--it was only the foreigners who could
evade it or purchase exemption. Punishment was severe; and in extreme
cases the convicts were sent to Carthagena, there to suffer
imprisonment of a terrible character. Indeed, from what I heard of the
New Granada prisons, I thought no other country could match them, and
continued to think so until I read how the ingenuity in cruelty of his
Majesty the King of Naples put the torturers of the New Granada
Republic to the blush.
I generally avoided claiming the protection of the law whilst on the
Isthmus, for I found it was--as is the case in civilized England from
other causes--rather an expensive luxury. Once only I took a thief
caught in the act before the alcalde, and claimed the administration
of justice. The court-house was a low bamboo shed, before which some
dirty Spanish-Indian soldiers were lounging; and inside, the alcalde,
a negro, was reclining in a dirty hammock, smoking coolly, hearing
evidence, and pronouncing judgment upon the wretched culprits, who
were trembling before his dusky majesty. I had attended him while
suffering from an attack of cholera, and directly he saw me he rose
from his hammock, and received me in a ceremonious, grand manner, and
gave orders that coffee should be brought to me. He had a very pretty
white wife, who joined us; and then the alcalde politely offered me a
_cigarito_--having declined which, he listened to my statement with
great attention. All this, however, did not prevent my leaving the
necessary fee in furtherance of justice, nor his accepting it. Its
consequence was, that the thief, instead of being punished as a
criminal, was ordered to pay me the value of the stolen goods; which,
after weeks of hesitation and delay, she eventually did, in pearls,
combs, and other curiosities.
Whenever an American was arrested by the New Granada authorities,
justice had a hard struggle for the mastery, and rarely obtained it.
Once I was present at the court-house, when an American was brought in
heavily ironed, charged with having committed a highway robbery--if I
may use the term where there were no roads--on some travellers from
Chili. Around the frightened soldiers swelled an angry crowd of
brother Americans, abusing and threatening the authorities in no
measured terms, all of them indignant that a nigger should presume to
judge one of their countrymen. At last their violence so roused the
sleepy alcalde, that he positively threw himself from his hammock,
laid down his cigarito, and gave such very determined orders to his
soldiers that he succeeded in checking the riot. Then, with an air of
decision that puzzled everybody, he addressed the crowd, declaring
angrily, that since the Americans came the country had known no peace,
that robberies and crimes of every sort had increased, and ending by
expressing his determination to make strangers respect the laws of the
Republic, and to retain the prisoner; and if found guilty, punish him
as he deserved. The Americans seemed too astonished at the audacity of
the black man, who dared thus to beard them, to offer any resistance;
but I believe that the prisoner was allowed ultimately to escape.
I once had a narrow escape from the thieves of Cruces. I had been down
to Chagres for some stores, and returning, late in the evening, too
tired to put away my packages, had retired to rest at once. My little
maid, who was not so fatigued as I was, and slept more lightly, woke
me in the night to listen to a noise in the thatch, at the further end
of the store; but I was so accustomed to hear the half-starved mules
of Cruces munching my thatch, that I listened lazily for a few
minutes, and then went unsuspiciously into another heavy sleep. I do
not know how long it was before I was again awoke by the child's loud
screams and cries of "Hombro--landro;" and sure enough, by the light
of the dying fire, I saw a fellow stealing away with my dress, in the
pocket of which was my purse. I was about to rush forward, when the
fire gleamed on a villainous-looking knife in his hand; so I stood
still, and screamed loudly, hoping to arouse my brother over the way.
For a moment the thief seemed inclined to silence me, and had taken a
few steps forward, when I took up an old rusty horse-pistol which my
brother had given me that I might look determined, and snatching down
the can of ground coffee, proceeded to prime it, still screaming as
loudly as my strong lungs would permit, until the rascal turned tail
and stole away through the roof. The thieves usually buried their
spoil like dogs, as they were; but this fellow had only time to hide
it behind a bush, where it was found on the following morning, and
claimed by me.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Mrs. Seacole very likely refers to Macbeth. But it was the witches
he abused.--Ed.