[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._
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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.