to civilization and the knowledge that the greater part of our journey
was at an end made us forget the discomforts and hardships which we had
endured without the consolation of excitement that comes with danger,
or the comforting thought that we were accomplishing anything in the
meantime. We had been complaining of this during the day to Jeffs, and
saying that had we gone to the coast of East Africa we could not have
been more uncomfortable nor run greater risks from fever, but that
there we would have met with big game, and we would have visited the
most picturesque instead of the least interesting of all countries.
These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick upon us, which was
meant in a kindly spirit, and by which he intended to furnish us with a
moment’s excitement, and to make us believe that we had been in touch
with danger. There are occasional brigands in Central America, and
their favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a few miles of
Tegucigalpa, along the trail from the eastern coast over which we were
then passing. We had been warned of these men, and it occurred to Jeffs
that as we complained of lack of excitement in our trip, it would be
a thoughtful kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon our march.
So he left us still bathing at the water-fall, and telling us that he
would push on to engage quarters for the night, rode some distance
ahead and secreted himself behind a huge rock on one side of a narrow
cañon. He first placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his hat on
another bush, so as to make it appear that there were several men with
him. His idea was that when he challenged us we would see the dim
figures in the moonlight and remember the brigands, and that we were
in their stalking-ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly as
possible, well satisfied that we had at last met with a real adventure.
We reached his ambuscade about seven. Somerset was riding in advance,
reciting “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” while we were correcting him
when he went wrong, and gazing unconcernedly and happily at the cool
moonlight as it came through the trees, when we were suddenly startled
by a yell and an order to halt, in Spanish, and a rapid fusillade of
pistol-shots. We could distinguish nothing but what was apparently
the figures of three men crouching on the hill-side and the flashes of
their revolvers, so we all fell off our mules and began banging away at
them with our rifles, while the mules scampered off down the mountain.
This was not as Jeffs had planned it, and he had to rearrange matters
very rapidly. Bullets were cutting away twigs all over the hill-side
and splashing on the rock behind which he was now lying, and though he
might have known we could not hit him, he was afraid of a stray bullet.
So he yelled at us in English, and called us by name, until we finally
discovered we had been grossly deceived and imposed upon, and that our
adventure was a very unsatisfactory practical joke for all concerned.
It took us a long time to round up the mules, and we reached our
sleeping-place in grim silence, and with our desire for danger still
unsatisfied.
[Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF TEGUCIGALPA]
The last leagues that separated us the next morning from Tegucigalpa
seemed, of course, the longest in the entire journey. And so great
was our desire to reach the capital before nightfall that we left
the broader trail and scrambled down the side of the last mountain,
dragging our mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and
rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city did not look inviting
as we viewed it from above. It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded
by five hills that rose straight into the air, and that seemed to
have been placed there for the special purpose of revolutionists,
in order that they might the more exactly drop shot into the town at
their feet. The hills were bare of verdure, and the landscape about
the capital made each of us think of the country about Jerusalem. As
none of us had ever seen Jerusalem, we foregathered and argued why this
should be so, and decided that it was on account of the round rocks
lying apart from one another, and low, bushy trees, and the red soil,
and the flat roofs of the houses.
[Illustration: THE BANK OF HONDURAS]
The telegraph wire which extends across Honduras, swinging from trees
and piercing long stretches of palm and jungle, had warned the foreign
residents of the coming of Jeffs, and some of them rode out to make
us welcome. Their greeting, and the sight of paved streets, and the
passing of a band of music and a guard of soldiers in shoes and real
uniform, seemed to promise much entertainment and possible comfort.
But the hotel was a rude shock. We had sent word that we were coming,
and we had looked forward eagerly to our first night in a level bed
under clean linen; but when we arrived we were offered the choice
of a room just vacated by a very ill man, who had left all of his
medicines behind him, so that the place was unpleasantly suggestive of
a hospital, or a very small room, in which there were three cots, and
a layer of dirt over all so thick that I wrote my name with the finger
of my riding-glove on the centre-table. The son of the proprietor saw
this, and, being a kindly person and well disposed, dipped his arm in
water and proceeded to rub it over the top of the table, using his
sleeve as a wash-rag. So after that we gave up expecting anything
pleasant, and were in consequence delightfully surprised when we came
upon anything that savored of civilization.
Tegucigalpa has an annex which lies on the opposite side of the river,
and which is to the capital what Brooklyn is to New York. The river is
not very wide nor very deep, and its course is impeded by broad, flat
rocks. The washer-women of the two towns stand beside these all day
knee-deep in the eddies and beat the stones with their twisted clubs
of linen, so that their echo sounds above the roar of the river like
the banging of shutters in the wind or the reports of pistols. This
is the only suggestion of energy that the town furnishes. The other
inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and irritable with boredom.
There are long, dark, cool shops of general merchandise, and a great
cathedral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at night and people
circle in two rings, one going to the right and one going to the left,
and there is the government palace and a big penitentiary, a university
and a cemetery. But there is no color nor ornamentation nor light
nor life nor bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people talking and
calling to one another across the narrow streets of the place by day or
serenading by night. Every one seems to go to bed at nine o’clock, and
after that hour the city is as silent as its great graveyard, except
when the boy policemen mark the hour with their whistles or the street
dogs meet to fight.
[Illustration: STATUE OF MORAZAN]
The most interesting thing about the capital is the fact to which I
have already alluded, that everything in it and pertaining to it that
was not dug from the ground or fashioned from trees was carried to it
on the backs of mules. The letter-boxes on the street corners had once
been United States letter-boxes, and had later swung across the backs
of donkeys. The gas-lamps and the iron railings of the parks, the few
statues and busts in the public places, reached Tegucigalpa by the same
means, and the great equestrian statue of Morazan the Liberator, in the
plaza, was cast in Italy, and had been brought to Tegucigalpa in pieces
before it was put together like a puzzle and placed in its present
position to mark a glorious and victorious immortality. These things
were not interesting in themselves, but it was interesting that they
were there at all.
On the second day after our arrival the vice-president, Luis Bonilla,
who bears the same last name but is no near relation to President
Bonilla, took the oath of office, and we saw the ceremony with the
barefooted public in the reception-room of the palace. The hall was
hung with lace curtains and papered with imitation marble, and the
walls were decorated with crayon portraits of Honduranian presidents.
Bogran was not among them, nor was Morazan. The former was missing
because it was due to him that young Bonilla had been counted out
when he first ran for the presidency three years ago, when he was
thirty-three years old, and the portrait of the Liberator was
being reframed, because Bonilla’s followers six months before had
unintentionally shot holes through it when they were besieging the
capital. The ceremony of swearing in the vice-president did not last
long, and what impressed us most about it was the youth of the members
of the cabinet and of the Supreme Court who delivered the oath of
office. They belonged distinctly to the politician class as one sees
it at home, and were young men of eloquent speech and elegant manners,
in frock-coats and white ties. We came to know most of the president’s
followers later, and found them hospitable to a degree, although
they seemed hardly old enough or serious enough to hold place in the
government of a republic, even so small a one as Honduras. What was
most admirable about each of them was that he had fought and bled to
obtain the office he held. That is hardly a better reason for giving
out clerkships and cabinet portfolios than the reasons which obtain
with us for distributing the spoils of office, but you cannot help
feeling more respect for the man who has marched by the side of his
leader through swamps and through jungle, who has starved on rice, who
has slept in the bushes, and fought with a musket in his hand in open
places, than for the fat and sleek gentlemen who keep open bar at the
headquarters of their party organization, who organize marching clubs,
and who by promises or by cash secure a certain amount of influence and
a certain number of votes.
[Illustration: P. Bonilla]
They risk nothing but their money, and if their man fails to get in,
their money is all they lose; but the Central-American politician has
to show the faith that is in him by going out on the mountain-side
and hacking his way to office with a naked machete in his hand, and
if _his_ leader fails, he loses his life, with his back to a church
wall, and looking into the eyes of a firing squad, or he digs his own
grave by the side of the road, and stands at one end of it, covered
with clay and sweat, and with the fear of death upon him, and takes
his last look at the hot sun and the palms and the blue mountains,
with the buzzards wheeling about him, and then shuts his eyes, and is
toppled over into the grave, with a half-dozen bullets in his chest and
stomach. That is what I should like to see happen to about half of our
professional politicians at home. Then the other half might understand
that holding a public office is a very serious business, and is not
merely meant to furnish them with a livelihood and with places for
their wives’ relations.
[Illustration: GENERAL LUIS BOGRAN, EX-PRESIDENT]
I saw several churches and cathedrals in Honduras with a row of
bullet-holes in the front wall, about as high from the ground as a
man’s chest, and an open grave by the road-side, which had been dug
by the man who was to have occupied it. The sight gave us a vivid
impression of the uncertainties of government in Central America.
The man who dug this particular grave had been captured, with two
companions, while they were hastening to rejoin their friends of
the government party. His companions in misery were faint-hearted
creatures, and thought it mattered but little, so long as they had to
die, in what fashion they were buried. So they scooped out a few feet
of earth with the tools their captors gave them, and stood up in the
hollows they had made, and were shot back into them, dead; but the
third man declared that he was not going to let his body lie so near
the surface of the earth that the mules could kick his bones and the
next heavy freshet wash them away. He accordingly dug leisurely and
carefully to the depth of six feet, smoothing the sides and sharpening
the corners, and while he was thus engaged at the bottom of the hole he
heard yells and shots above him, and when he poked his head up over the
edge of the grave he saw his own troops running down the mountain-side,
and his enemies disappearing before them. He is still alive, and
frequently rides by the hole in the road-side on his way to the
capital. The story illustrates the advisability of doing what every one
has to do in this world, even up to the very last minute, in a thorough
and painstaking manner.
There do not seem to be very many men killed in these revolutions,
but the ruin they bring to the country while they last, and which
continues after they are over, while the “outs” are getting up another
revolution, is so serious that any sort of continued prosperity or
progress is impossible. Native merchants will not order goods that may
never reach them, and neither do the gringos care to make contracts
with men who in six months may not only be out of office, but out of
the country as well. Sometimes a revolution takes place, and half
of the people of the country will not know of it until it has been
put down or has succeeded; and again the revolution may spread to
every boundary, and all the men at work on the high-roads and in the
mines or on the plantations must stop work and turn to soldiering,
and pack-mules are seized, the mail-carriers stopped, plantations
are devastated, and forced loans are imposed upon those who live in
cities, so that every one suffers more or less through every change
of executive. During the last revolution Tegucigalpa was besieged for
six months, and was not captured until most of the public buildings
had been torn open by cannon from the hills around the town, and the
dwelling-houses still show where bullets marked the mud and plaster of
the walls or buried themselves in the wood-work. The dining-room of our
hotel was ventilated by such openings, and we used to amuse ourselves
by tracing the course of the bullets from the hole they had made at
one side of the room to their resting-place in the other. The native
Honduranian is not energetic, and, except in the palace, there has been
but little effort made by the victors to cover up the traces of their
bombardment. Every one we met had a different experience to relate, and
pointed out where he was sitting when a particular hole appeared in the
plaster before him, or at which street corner a shell fell and burst at
his feet.
[Illustration: BARRACKS AT TEGUCIGALPA AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE
REVOLUTIONISTS]
It follows, of course, that a government which is created by force of
arms, and which holds itself in place by the same power of authority,
cannot be a very just or a very liberal one, even if its members are
honest, and the choice of a majority of the people, and properly in
office in spite of the fact that they fought to get there, and not on
account of it. Bonilla was undoubtedly at one time elected President of
Honduras, although he did not gain the presidential chair until after
he had thrown his country into war and had invaded it at the head of
troops from the rival republic of Nicaragua.
The Central-American cannot understand that when a bad man is
elected to office legally it is better in the long-run that he should
serve out his full term than that a better man should drive him out and
defy the constitution. If he could be brought to comprehend that when
the constitution says the president must serve four years that means
four years, and not merely until some one is strong enough to overthrow
him, it might make him more careful as to whom he elected to office in
the first place. But the value of stability in government is something
they cannot be made to understand. It is not in their power to see it,
and the desire for change and revolution is born in the blood. They
speak of a man as a “good revolutionist” just as we would speak of some
one being a good pianist, or a good shot, or a good executive officer.
It is a recognized calling, and the children grow up into fighters;
and even those who have lived abroad, and who should have learned
better, begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return to their old
environment.
In each company of soldiers in Honduras there are two or three little
boys in uniform who act as couriers and messengers, and who are able,
on account of their slight figure, to penetrate where a man would be
seen and shot. One of the officers in the revolution of 1894 told me he
had sent six of these boys, one after another, with despatches across
an open plain which was being raked by the rifles of the enemy. And as
each boy was killed as he crawled through the sage-brush the other boys
begged of their colonel to let them be the next to go, jumping up and
down around him and snapping their fingers like school-boys who want to
attract the attention of their teacher.
In the same revolution a young man of great promise and many
acquirements, who had just returned from the States with two degrees
from Columbia College, and who should have lived to turn his education
to account in his own country, was killed with a rifle in his hand
the third day after his arrival from New York. In that city he would
probably have submitted cheerfully to any imposition of the law, and
would have taken it quite as a matter of course had he been arrested
for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding a bicycle at night without
a lamp; but as soon as this graduate of Columbia smelled the powder
floating on his native air he loaded a rifle, and sat out all day on
the porch of his house taking chance shots at the revolutionists on
the hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his brilliant career
forever. The pity of it is that so much good energy should be wasted in
obtaining such poor results, for nothing better ever seems to follow
these revolutions. There is only a new form of dictatorship, which
varies only in the extent of its revenge and in the punishments it
metes out to its late opponents, but which must be, if it hopes to
remain in power, a dictatorship and an autocracy.
[Illustration: MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS]
The republics of Central America are republics in name only, and
the movements of a stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are
as closely watched as though he were a newspaper correspondent in
Siberia. I often had to sign the names of our party twice in one day
for the benefit of police and customs officers, and we never entered
a hotel or boarded a steamer or disembarked from one that we were not
carefully checked and receipted for exactly as though we were boxes of
merchandise or registered letters. Even the natives cannot walk the
street after nightfall without being challenged by sentries, and the
collection of letters we received from alcaldes and comandantes and
governors and presidents certifying to our being reputable citizens
is large enough to paper the side of a wall. The only time in Central
America when our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and when we felt as
free to walk abroad as though we were on the streets of New York, was
when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution
of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were in any of these
disorganized military camps called free republics.
The Central-American citizen is no more fit for a republican form of
government than he is for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to
have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States
or by another power; it does not matter which, so long as it leaves the
Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital of Costa Rica there is a
statue of the Republic in the form of a young woman standing with her
foot on the neck of General Walker, the American filibuster. We had
planned to go to the capital for the express purpose of tearing that
statue down some night, or blowing it up; so it is perhaps just as well
for us that we could not get there; but it would have been a very good
thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other man of force, had put his
foot on the neck of every republic in Central America and turned it to
some account.
Away from the coasts, where there is fever, Central America is a
wonderful country, rich and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but
its people make it a nuisance and an affront to other nations, and its
parcel of independent little states, with the pomp of power and none of
its dignity, are and will continue to be a constant danger to the peace
which should exist between two great powers.
There is no more interesting question of the present day than that of
what is to be done with the world’s land which is lying unimproved;
whether it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to
account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its
value. The Central-Americans are like a gang of semi-barbarians in a
beautifully furnished house, of which they can understand neither its
possibilities of comfort nor its use. They are the dogs in the manger
among nations. Nature has given to their country great pasture-lands,
wonderful forests of rare woods and fruits, treasures of silver and
gold and iron, and soil rich enough to supply the world with coffee,
and it only waits for an honest effort to make it the natural highway
of traffic from every portion of the globe. The lakes of Nicaragua are
ready to furnish a passageway which should save two months of sailing
around the Horn, and only forty-eight miles of swamp-land at Panama
separate the two greatest bodies of water on the earth’s surface.
Nature has done so much that there is little left for man to do, but it
will have to be some other man than a native-born Central-American who
is to do it.
We had our private audience with President Bonilla in time, and found
him a most courteous and interesting young man. He is only thirty-six
years of age, which probably makes him the youngest president in the
world, and he carries on his watch-chain a bullet which was cut out
of his arm during the last revolution. He showed us over the palace,
and pointed out where he had shot holes in it, and entertained us most
hospitably. The other members of the cabinet were equally kind, making
us many presents, and offering Griscom a consul-generalship abroad, and
consulates to Somerset and myself, but we said we would be ambassadors
or nothing; so they offered to make us generals in the next revolution,
and we accepted that responsible position with alacrity, knowing that
not even the regiments to which we were accredited could force us again
into Honduras.
Before we departed the president paid us a very doubtful compliment
in asking us to ride with him. We supposed it was well meant, but we
still have secret misgivings that it was a plot to rid himself of us
and of the vice-president at the same time. When his secretary came
to tell us that Dr. Bonilla would be glad to have us ride with him at
five that afternoon, I recalled the fact that all the horses I had
seen in Honduras were but little larger than an ordinary donkey, and
quite as depressed and spiritless. So I accepted with alacrity. The
other two men, being cross-country riders, and entitled to wear the
gold buttons of various hunt clubs on their waistcoats, accepted as a
matter of course. But when we reached the palace we saw seven or eight
horses in the patio, none under sixteen hands high, and each engaged in
dragging two or three grooms about the yard, and swinging them clear
of the brick tiles as easily as a sailor swings a lead. The president
explained to us that these were a choice lot of six stallions which he
had just imported from Chili, and that three of them had never worn a
saddle before that morning.