beached her in front of the custom-house, and a man asked us anxiously
in English, “What ship has been wrecked?” And we explained that we were
not survivors of a shipwreck, but of a possible conflagration, and
wanted ice.
And then, when we fell over the side bruised and sleepy, and burning
with thirst, and with everything still dancing before our eyes, they
refused to give us ice until we grew cooler, and sent out in the
meanwhile to the _comandancia_ in search of some one who could identify
us as escaped revolutionists. They took our guns away from us as a
precaution, but they could have had half our kingdom for all we cared,
for the wonderful legend proved true, and at last we got the ice in
large, thick glasses, with ginger ale and lemon juice and apollinaris
water trickling through it, and there was frost on the sides of the
glasses, and a glimpse of still more ice wrapped up in smoking blankets
in the refrigerator--ice that we had not tasted for many days of riding
in the hot sun and through steaming swamp-lands, and which we had last
seen treated with contempt and contumely, knocked about at the bow of
a tug-boat in the North River, and tramped upon by many muddy feet
on Fifth Avenue. None of us will ever touch ice hereafter without
handling it with the same respect and consideration that we would show
to a precious stone.
The busybodies of Corinto who had decided from the manner of our
arrival that we had been forced to leave Honduras for the country’s
good, finally found a native who identified me as a filibuster he
had met during the last revolution at Leon. As that was bringing it
rather near home, Griscom went after Mr. Palaccio, the Italian who
serves both England and the United States as consular agent. We showed
him a rare collection of autographs of secretaries, ambassadors,
and prime-ministers, and informed him that we intended taking four
state-rooms on the steamer of the line he represented at that port.
This convinced him of the necessity of keeping us out of jail until
the boat arrived, and he satisfied the local authorities as to our
respectability, and that we had better clothes in our trunks.
Corinto is the best harbor on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, but the
town is not as large as the importance of the port would suggest. It
consists of three blocks of two-story houses, facing the harbor fifty
feet back from the water’s edge, with a sandy street between each block
of buildings. There are about a thousand inhabitants, and a foreign
population which varies from five residents to a dozen transient
visitors and stewards on steamer days. The natives are chiefly
occupied in exporting coffee and receiving the imported goods for the
interior, and the principal amusement of the foreign colony is bathing
or playing billiards. It has a whist club of four members. The fifth
foreign resident acts as a substitute in the event of any one of the
four players chancing to have another engagement, but as there is no
one with whom he could have an engagement, the substitute is seldom
called upon. He told me he had been sitting by and smoking and watching
the others play whist for a month now, and hoping that one of them
would have a sunstroke.
[Illustration: HARBOR OF CORINTO]
We left Corinto the next morning and took the train to Lake Managua,
where we were to connect with a steamer which crosses the lake to the
capital. It was a beautiful ride, and for some distance ran along
the sea-shore, where the ocean rolled up the beach in great waves,
breaking in showers of foam upon the rocks. Then we crossed lagoons and
swamps on trestles, and passed pretty thatched villages, and saw many
beautiful women and girls selling candy and sugar-cane at the stations.
They wore gowns that left the neck and shoulders bare, and wrapped
themselves in silk shawls of solid colors, which they kept continually
loosening and rearranging, tossing the ends coquettishly from one
shoulder to the other, or drawing them closely about the figure, or
like a cowl over the head. This silk shawl is the most characteristic
part of the wardrobe of the native women of Central America. It is as
inevitable as the mantilla of their richer sisters, and it is generally
the only bit of splendor they possess. A group of them on a feast-day
or Sunday, when they come marching towards you with green, purple,
blue, or yellow shawls, makes a very striking picture.
These women of the pueblo in Honduras and Nicaragua were better-looking
than the women of the lower classes of any country I have ever visited.
They were individually more beautiful, and the proportion of beautiful
women was greater. A woman there is accustomed from her childhood to
carry heavy burdens on her head, and this gives to all of them an erect
carriage and a fearless uplifting of the head when they walk or stand.
They have never known a tight dress or a tight shoe, and they move as
easily and as gracefully as an antelope. Their hair is very rich and
heavy, and they oil it and comb it and braid it from morning to night,
wearing it parted in the middle, and drawn tightly back over the ears,
and piled upon the head in heavy braids. Their complexion is a light
brown, and their eyes have the sad look which one sees in the eyes of
a deer or a dog, and which is not so much the sign of any sorrow as
of the lack of intelligence. The women of the upper classes are like
most Spanish-American women, badly and over dressed in a gown fashioned
after some forgotten Parisian mode, with powder over their faces, and
with their hair frizzled and curled in ridiculous profusion. They are a
very sorry contrast to a woman of the people, such as you see standing
in the doorways of the mud huts, or advancing towards you along the
trail with an earthen jar on her shoulder, straight of limb, and with a
firm, fine lower jaw, a low, broad forehead, and shy, sad eyes.
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE AT MANAGUA]
Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a most dismal city, built on
a plain of sun-dried earth, with houses of sun-dried earth, plazas
and parks and streets of sun-dried earth, and a mantle of dust over
all. Even the stores that have been painted in colors and hung with
balconies have a depressed, dirty, and discouraged air. The streets are
as full of ruts and furrows as a country road, the trees in the plaza
are lifeless, and their leaves shed dust instead of dew, and the people
seem to have taken on the tone of their surroundings, and very much
more of the dust than seems absolutely necessary. We were there only
two days, and felt when we left as though we had been camping out on a
baseball diamond; and we were sure that had we remained any longer we
should have turned into living statues of clay when the sun shone, and
of mud when it rained.
There was no American minister or consul at Managua at the time of our
visit, but the English consul took very good care of us, and acted as
our interpreter when we called upon the president. Relations between
the consul and President Zelaya were somewhat strained at that time,
and though we knew this we told the consul to tell the president how
much he was admired by the American people for having taken the stand
he did against the English on the Mosquito Coast question, and that
we hoped he would see that the British obtained no foothold near our
canal. At which the English consul would hesitate and grin unhappily,
and remark, in a hurried aside, “I’ll be hanged if I’ll translate
that.” So we continued inventing other pleasant speeches derogatory
to Britons and British influence in Nicaragua until Somerset and his
consul protested vigorously, and the president saw what we were doing
and began to enjoy the consul’s embarrassment and laughed, and the
consul laughed with him, and they made up their quarrel--for the time
being, at least.
Zelaya said, among other things, that if there were no other argument
in favor of the Nicaragua Canal than that it would enable the United
States to move her ships of war quickly from ocean to ocean, instead of
being forced as she is now to make them take the long journey around
Cape Horn, it would be of inestimable benefit. He also said that the
only real objection that had been made in the United States to the
canal came from those interested in the transcontinental railroads, who
saw in its completion the destruction of their freight traffic.
He seemed to be a very able man, and more a man of the world than
Bonilla, the President of Honduras, and much older in many ways. He was
apparently somewhat of a philosopher, and believed, or said he did,
in the survival of the fittest as applied to the occupation of his
country. He welcomed the gringos, he said, and if they were better able
to rule Nicaragua than her own people, he would accept that fact as
inevitable and make way before them.
[Illustration: PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA]
We returned to Corinto after wallowing in the dust-bins of Managua as
joyfully as though it were a home, and we were so anxious to reach the
ocean again that we left Granada and Leon, which are, so we are told,
much more attractive than the capital, out of our route.
Corinto was bright and green and sunny, and the waters of the
big harbor before it danced and flashed by day and radiated with
phosphorescent fire by night. It was distinctly a place where it would
occur to one to write up the back pages of his diary, but it was
interesting at least in showing us the life of the exiles in these hot,
far-away seaports among a strange people.
There was but one hotel, which happened to be a very good one with
a very bad proprietor, who, I trust, will come some day to an untimely
death at the end of one of his own billiard-cues. The hotel was built
round a patio filled with palms and ramparts of empty bottles from
the bar, covered with dust, and bearing the name of every brewer and
wine-grower in Europe. The sleeping-rooms were on the second floor, and
looked on the patio on one side and upon a wide covered veranda which
faced the harbor on the other. The five resident gringos in Corinto
lived at the hotel, and sat all day on this veranda swinging in their
hammocks and swapping six-months-old magazines and tattered novels.
Reading-matter assumed an importance in Corinto it had never attained
before, and we read all the serial stories, of which there was never
more than the fourth or sixth instalment, and the scientific articles
on the Fall of the Rupee in India, or the Most Recent Developments in
Electricity, and delighted in the advertisements of seeds and bicycles
and baking-powders.
The top of our veranda was swept by a row of plane-trees that grew in
the sandy soil of the beach below us, and under the shade of which
were gathered all the idle ones of the port. There were among them
thieving ships’ stewards who had been marooned from passing vessels,
ne’er-do-wells from the interior who were “combing the beach” and
looking for work, but not so diligently that they had seen the coffee
plantations on their tramp down to the coast, and who begged for money
to take them back to “God’s country,” or to the fever hospital at
Panama. With them were natives, sailors from the rolling tug-boat they
called a ship of war, and barefooted soldiers from the cartel, and
longshoremen with over-developed chests and muscles, who toil mightily
on steamer days and sleep and eat for the ten days between as a reward.
All of these idlers gathered in the shade around the women who sold
sweet drinks and sticks of pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public
characters of the place and the centre of all the gossip of the
town, and presided over their tables with great dignity in freshly
ironed frocks and brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and very
clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders, and their hair always
shone with cocoanut oil, and was wonderfully braided and set off with
flowers stuck coquettishly over one ear. The men used to sit around
them in groups on the bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the
boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the only import. And sometimes
a small boy would buy a stick of candy or command the mixture of a
drink, and the woman would fuss over her carved gourds, and rinse and
rub them and mix queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that she
spun between the palms of her hands. We would all watch the operation
with great interest, the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon
the balcony, and regard the small boy while he drank the concoction
with envy.
The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and gaping knot-holes
through which the legs of our chairs would sink suddenly, and which
we could use on those occasions when we wanted to drop penknives and
pencils and water on the heads of those passing below. Our companions
in idleness were the German agents of the trading-houses and young
Englishmen down from the mines to shake off a touch of fever, and
two Americans who were taking a phonograph through Central America.
Their names were Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will always
remember them as the only Americans we met who were taking money out of
Central America and not bringing it there to lose it.
Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two up the beach in the hot
sun for the sake of a quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was
delightful in itself, and which was rendered especially interesting by
our having to share the surf with large man-eating sharks. When they
came, which they were sure to do ten minutes after we had arrived, we
generally gave them our share.
The phonograph men and our party did not believe in sharks; so we
would venture out some distance, leaving the Englishmen and the
Germans standing like sandpipers where the water was hardly up to their
ankles, and keeping an anxious lookout for us and themselves. Had the
sharks attempted to attack us from the land, they would have afforded
excellent protection. When they all yelled at once and ran back up
the beach into the bushes, we knew that they thought we had been in
long enough, and we came out, and made as much noise as we could while
doing so. But there would be invariably one man left behind--one man
who had walked out farther than the others, and who, owing to the roar
of the surf, could not hear our shrieks of terror. It was exciting to
watch him from the beach diving and splashing happily by himself, and
shaking the water out of his ears and hair, blissfully unconscious of
the deserted waste of waters about him and of the sharp, black fin that
shot like a torpedo from wave to wave. We would watch him as he turned
to speak to the man who the moment before had been splashing and diving
on his right, and, missing him, turn to the other side, and then whirl
about and see us all dancing frantically up and down in a row along the
beach, beckoning and screaming and waving our arms. We could observe
even at that distance his damp hair rising on his head and his eyes
starting out of their sockets as he dug his toes into the sand and
pushed back the water with his arms, and worked his head and shoulders
and every muscle in his whole body as though he were fighting his way
through a mob of men. The water seemed very opaque at such times, and
the current appeared to have turned seaward, and the distance from
shore looked as though it were increasing at every step.
When night came to Corinto we would sit out on the wharf in front of
the hotel and watch the fish darting through the phosphorescent waters
and marking their passage with a trail of fire, or we would heave a log
into it and see the sparks fly just as though we had thrown it upon a
smouldering fire. One night one of the men was obliging enough to go
into it for our benefit, and swam under water, sweeping great circles
with his arms and legs. He was outlined as clearly in the inky depths
below as though he wore a suit of spangles. Sometimes a shark or some
other big fish drove a shoal of little fish towards the shore, and
they would turn the whole surface of the water into half-circles of
light as they took leap after leap for safety. Later in the evening we
would go back to the veranda and listen to our friends the phonograph
impresarios play duets on the banjo and guitar, and in return for the
songs of the natives they had picked up in their wanderings we would
sing to them those popular measures which had arisen into notice since
they had left civilization.
This was our life at Corinto for ten idle days, until at last the
steamer arrived, and the passengers came on shore to stretch their
legs and buy souvenirs, and the ship’s steward bustled about in search
of fresh vegetables, and the lighters plied heavily between the shore
and the ship’s side, piled high with odorous sacks of coffee. And then
Morse and Brackett started with their phonograph through Costa Rica,
and we continued on to Panama, leaving the five foreign residents of
Corinto to the uninterrupted enjoyment of their whist, and richer and
happier through our coming in an inaccurate knowledge of the first
verse and tune of “Tommy Atkins,” which they shouted at us defiantly as
they pulled back from the steamer’s side to their quiet haven of exile.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE WORLD SHOWING CHANGE IN TRADE ROUTES AFTER
THE COMPLETION OF THE NICARAGUA CANAL]
ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
IF Ulysses in his wanderings had attempted to cross the Isthmus of
Panama his account of the adventure would not have been filled with
engineering reports or health statistics, nor would it have dwelt
with horror on the irregularities of the canal company. He would have
treated the isthmus in language full of imagination, and would have
delivered his tale in the form of an allegory. He would have told
how on such a voyage his ship came upon a strip of land joining two
great continents and separating two great oceans; how he had found
this isthmus guarded by a wicked dragon that exhaled poison with every
breath, and that lay in wait, buried in its swamps and jungles, for
sailors and travellers, who withered away and died as soon as they
put foot upon the shore. But that he, warned in time by the sight of
thousands of men’s bones whitening on the beach, hoisted all sail and
stood out to sea.
It is quite as easy to believe a story like that as to believe the
truth: that for the last century a narrow strip of swamp-land has
blocked the progress of the world; that it has joined the peoples of
two continents without permitting them to use it as a thoroughfare;
that it has stopped the meeting of two great oceans and the shipping
of the world, and that it has killed with its fever half of those who
came to do battle against it. There is something almost uncanny in the
manner in which this strip of mud and water has resisted the advance of
man, as though there really were some evil genius of the place lurking
in the morasses and brooding over the waters, throwing out its poison
like a serpent, noiselessly and suddenly, meeting the last arrival at
the very moment of his setting foot upon the wharf, arrogant in health
and hope and ambition, and leaving him with clinched teeth and raving
with madness before the sun sets.
[Illustration: DREDGES IN THE CANAL]
It is like the old Minotaur and his yearly tribute of Greek maidens,
with the difference that now it is the lives of men that are
sacrificed, and men who are chosen from every nation of the world,
speaking every language, believing in every religion; and to-day the
end of each is marked by a wooden plank in the Catholic Cemetery, in
the Hebrew Cemetery, in the French Cemetery, in the English Cemetery,
in the American Cemetery, for there are acres and acres of
cemeteries and thousands and thousands of wooden head-stones, to which
the evil spirit of the isthmus points mockingly, and says, “These are
your failures.”
The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a sacrifice of life but
little greater than these fifty miles of swamp-land between North and
South America have seen, and certainly they saw no such inglorious
defeats, without a banner flying or a comrade cheering, or the roar
of musketry and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in the
unequal battle. Those who died striving to save the Holy Land from
the unspeakable Turk were comforted by the promise of a glorious
immortality, and it must have been gratifying in itself to have been
described as a Crusader, and to have worn the red cross upon one’s
shoulder. And, in any event, a man who would not fight for his religion
or his country without promises or pensions is hardly worthy of
consideration. But these young soldiers of the transit and sailors of
the dredging-scow had no promises or sentiment to inspire them; they
were not fighting for the boundaries of their country, but redeeming
a bit of No Man’s Land; not doing battle for their God, but merely
digging a canal. And it must strike every one that those of them who
fell doing their duty in the sickly yellow mist of Panama and along the
gloomy stretches of the Chagres River deserve a better monument to
their memories than the wooden slabs in the cemeteries.
It is strange that not only nature, but man also, should have selected
the same little spot on the earth’s surface in which to show to the
world exactly how disagreeable and unpleasant they can make themselves
when they choose. It seems almost as though the isthmus were unholy
ground, and that there was a curse upon it. Some one should invent a
legend to explain this, and tell how one of the priests who came over
with Columbus put the ban of the Church upon the land for some affront
by its people to the voyagers, and so placed it under a curse forever.
For those whom the fever did not kill the canal company robbed, and
the ruin that came to the peasants of France was as irredeemable as
the ravages of the fever, and the scandal that spattered almost every
public man in Paris exposed rottenness and corruption as far advanced
as that in the green-coated pools along the Rio Grande.
[Illustration: THE BAY OF PANAMA]
Ruins are always interesting, but the ruins of Panama fill one only
with melancholy and disgust, and the relics of this gigantic swindle
can only inspire you with a contempt for yourself and your fellow-men,
and you blush at the evidences of barefaced rascality about you. And
even the honest efforts of those who are now in charge, and who are
trying to save what remains, and once more to build up confidence in
the canal, reminded me of the town councillors of Johnstown who met in
a freight depot to decide what was to be done with the town and those
of its inhabitants that had not been swept out of existence.
There are forty-eight miles of railroad across the isthmus, stretching
from the town of Panama on the Pacific side to that of Colon--or
Aspinwall, as it was formerly called--on the Caribbean Sea. The canal
starts a little north of the town of Panama, in the mouth of the Rio
Grande River, and runs along on one side or the other of the railroad
to the port of Colon. The Chagres River starts about the middle of the
isthmus, and follows the route of the canal in an easterly direction,
until it empties itself into the Caribbean Sea a little north of Colon.
The town of Panama, as you approach it from the bay, reminds you of
an Italian seaport, owing to the balconies which overhang the water
and the colored house-fronts and projecting red roofs. As seen from
the inside, the town is like any other Spanish-American city of the
second class. There are fiacres that rattle and roll through the clean
but narrow streets behind undersized ponies that always move at a
gallop; there are cool, dark shops open to the streets, and hundreds
of negroes and Chinese coolies, and a handsome plaza, and some very
large municipal buildings of five stories, which appeared to us, after
our experience with a dead level of one-story huts, to tower as high
as the Auditorium. Panama, as a town, and considered by itself, and
not in connection with the canal, reminded me of a Western county-seat
after the boom had left it. There appeared to be nothing going forward
and nothing to do. The men sat at the cafés during the day and talked
of the past, and went to a club at night. We saw nothing of the women,
but they seem to have a greater degree of freedom than their sisters in
other parts of Spanish America, owing, no doubt, to the cosmopolitan
nature of the inhabitants of Panama.