Reader, take down your map, and, starting at the now well-known Isthmus
of Panama, run your finger northward along the coast of the Pacific,
until, in latitude 13° north, it shall rest on a fine body of water, or
rather the "counterfeit presentment" thereof, which projects far into
the land, and is designated as the Bay of Fonseca. If your map be of
sufficient scale and moderately exact, you will find represented there
two gigantic volcanoes, standing like warders at the entrance of this
magnificent bay. That on the south is called Coseguina, memorable for
its fearful eruption in 1835; that on the north is named Conchagua or
Amapala, taller than Coseguina, but long extinct, and covered to its
top with verdure. It is remarkable for its regularity of outline and
the narrowness of its apex. On this apex, a mere sugar-loaf crown, are
a _vigía_ or look-out station, and a signal-staff, whence the approach
of vessels is telegraphed to the port of La Union, at the base of the
volcano. A rude hut, half-buried in the earth, and loaded down with
heavy stones, to prevent it from being blown clean away, or sent
rattling down the slopes of the mountain, is occupied by the look-out
man,--an old Indian muffled up to his nose; for it is often bitter cold
at this elevation, and there is no wood wherewith to make a fire. Were
it not for that jar or _tinaja_ of _aguardiente_ which the old man
keeps so snugly in the corner of his burrow, he would have withered up
long ago, like the mummies of the Great Saint Bernard.
But I am not going to work up the old man of the _vigía_; for he was of
little consequence on the 10th day of April, 1853, except as a
wondering spectator on the top of Conchagua, in a group consisting of
an ex-minister of the United States, an officer of the American navy,
and an artist from the good city of New York, to whose ready pencil a
grateful country owes many of the illustrations of tropical scenery
which have of late years lent their interest to popular periodicals and
books of adventure. I might have added to this enumeration the tall,
dark figure of Dolores, servant and guide; but Dolores, with a good
sense which never deserted him, had no sooner disencumbered his
shoulders of his load of provisions, than he bestowed himself in the
burrow, out of the wind, and possibly not far from the _aguardiente_.
The utilitarian reader will ask, at once, the motive of this gathering
on the top of the volcano of Conchagua, five thousand feet above the
sea, wearily attained at no small expenditure of effort and
perspiration. Was it love of adventure merely? ambition to do something
whereof to brag about to admiring aunts or country cousins? Hardly. The
beauty of the wonderful panorama which spreads before the group of
strangers is too much neglected, their instruments are too carefully
adjusted and noted, and their consultations are far too earnest and
protracted, to admit of either supposition. The old man of the _vigía_,
as I have said, was a wondering spectator. He wondered why the eyes of
the strangers, glasses as well as eyes, and theodolites as well as
glasses, should all be directed across the bay, across the level
grounds beyond it, far away to the blue line of the Cordilleras,
cutting the clear sky with their serrated outline. He does not observe
that deep notch in the great backbone of the continent, as regular as
the cleft which the pioneer makes in felling a forest-tree; nor does he
observe that the breeze which ripples the waters at the foot of the
volcano is the north wind sweeping all the way from the Bay of Honduras
through that break in the mountain range, which everywhere else, as far
as the eye can reach, presents a high, unbroken barrier to its passage
to the Pacific. Yet it is simply to determine the bearings of that
notch in the Cordilleras, to fix the positions of the leading features
of the intervening country, and to verify the latitude and longitude of
the old man's flag-staff itself, as a point of departure for future
explorations, that the group of strangers is gathered on the top of
Conchagua.
And now, O reader, run your finger due north from the Bay of Fonseca,
straight to the Bay of Honduras, and it will pass, in a figurative way,
through the notch I have described, and through the pass of which we
were in search. You will see, if your map be accurate, that in or near
that pass two large rivers have their rise; one, the Humuya, flows
almost due north into the Atlantic, and the other, the Goascoran,
nearly due south into the Pacific,--together constituting, with the
plain of Comayagua, a great transverse valley extending across the
continent from sea to sea. Through this valley, commencing at Port
Cortés, on the north, and terminating on the Bay of Fonseca on the
south, American enterprise and English capital have combined to
construct a railway, designed to afford a new, if not a shorter and
better route of transit across the continent, between New York and San
Francisco, and between Great Britain and Australia.
But when we stood on the top of Conchagua, on the 10th day of April,
1853, the existence of a pass through the mountains, as well as of that
great transverse valley of which I have spoken, was only inferentially
known. In fact, the whole interior of Honduras was unexplored; its
geography was not understood; its scenery had never been described; its
towns and cities were scarcely known even by name; and its people lived
in almost as profound a seclusion from the world at large as the
dwellers on the banks of the Niger and the Zambezi. It is not, however,
to bore you, O reader, with all the details of our surveys, nor to
bother you with statistics, that I write; for, verily, are not these all
set down in a book? But it is rather to amuse you with the incidents of
our explorations, our quaint encounters with a quaint people of still
quainter manners and habits and with ideas quainter than all, and to
present you with a picture of a country and a society interesting equally
in themselves and from their strong contrasts with our own,--I say, it is
rather with these objects that I invite you, O reader, to join our little
party, and participate in the manifold adventures of "HUNTING A PASS."