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IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
by
STEPHEN GRAHAM
Author of "Europe--Whither Bound?" "Tramping
with a Port in the Rockies," etc.
[Illustration: Logo]
D. Appleton and Company
New York :: :: MCMXXIII
Copyright. 1923. by
D. Appleton and Company
Printed in the United States of America
_To
The literary memory
of my friend
Wilfrid Ewart
Accidentally shot at Mexico City
Old Year's Night, 1922_
PREFACE
Having voyaged twice to America from British ports and once from
Copenhagen, I determined on my fourth visit to approach America from
Spain and try to follow Columbus's keel over the waters. This study of
the quest of El Dorado is mostly on the trail of the Spaniards. The
motive of the first explorers and pioneers was generally the quest of
gold. And even to-day most people who seek America do so to make money,
many to make a fortune. There is, therefore, a continuity through the
centuries of the quest of fortune.
My wife and I took Spanish ship from Cadiz in Spain to the Indies;
landing at Porto Rico, whence we visited in turn Haiti and Cuba. I
saw San Salvador, the first land Columbus found, and was also in the
Bahamas. We proceeded to New Orleans and then to Santa Fé in New
Mexico. I visited Panama, however, alone and climbed a peak in Darien,
to realize once more what it meant to Balboa when for the first time
his eyes lighted on the Southern Sea. After the Panama exposition I
was joined by Wilfrid Ewart and with him we followed out some of the
fantastic adventures of Coronado, and it took us to the famous Shaleco
Dance at the "center of the earth." With him my wife and I rode to
Jemez, and later we visited Mexico, where, unfortunately, Wilfrid Ewart
was killed by a stray shot on Old Year's night. In Mexico we followed
the trail of Cortes, visiting the places which are most memorable in
his conquest of Mexico. This took us to the ancient pyramids of the
Anahuac plateau and to the ruins and buried cities of the South.
Throughout the descriptions and interpretations, endeavor is made
to measure the quest for power and the quest of gold in all these
countries and territories. I have not visited the republics south of
Panama, but have confined myself to what an American general has called
"the necklace of the Caribbean"--the potential American dominion of
the future. The drive of events is making democratic America into an
empire. An imperial rôle is almost unavoidable. I have not, however,
thought it necessary either to criticize or approve imperialism. I have
made an Odyssey and I tell what I saw, not as Ulysses would have told
it, but as one of those who at many points was ready to eat the lotus
and not too mindful of Ithaca and home.
My thanks are due to the New York _Evening Post_, which published many
letters from far-off places, and to the _American Legion Weekly_,
which, under the title of "Panama and Pan-America," published my essay
on the Canal.
STEPHEN GRAHAM
CONTENTS
BOOK I
SPAIN
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN MADRID 3
II. EN ROUTE FOR CADIZ 21
BOOK II
THE INDIES
III. THE COLUMBUS JOURNEY 31
IV. PORTO RICO 40
V. SANTO DOMINGO AND HAITI 52
VI. CUBA 73
BOOK III
NEW MEXICO
VII. AT SANTA FE 87
VIII. COWBOYS 94
IX. INDIANS 104
X. MEXICANS OF NEW MEXICO 121
BOOK IV
PANAMA
XI. FROM NEW MEXICO TO THE ISTHMUS 131
XII. CLIMBING A PEAK IN DARIEN 135
XIII. REPUBLICS OF PANAMA AND NICARAGUA 157
XIV. THE CANAL 163
BOOK V
CIBOLA AND QUIVIRA
XV. PANAMA TO NEW YORK 179
XVI. AMERICA OF TO-DAY VIEWED FROM NEW YORK 186
XVII. ACROSS AMERICA NORTH TO SOUTH 202
XVIII. THE DANCE OF THE JEMEZ INDIANS 210
XIX. THE DANCE OF THE ZUNYI INDIANS 230
XX. DESCENT INTO THE GRAND CAÑON 250
XXI. GOOD-BY TO THE HORSES 260
BOOK VI
MEXICO
XXII. THE GOLD 265
XXIII. APPROACHING MEXICO FROM THE NORTH 269
XXIV. AT MONTEZUMA'S CAPITAL 281
XXV. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES 295
1. CORTES 295
2. VERA CRUZ 297
3. THE CITY OF JALAP 300
4. AT TLAXCALA 303
5. THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA 306
6. TEXOCHTITLAN 310
7. IN THE MARQUISATE OF OAXACA 314
8. UNDER THE GREAT TREE OF TULE 323
9. FROM THE RUINS OF MITLA 326
10. AD ASTRA 330
BOOK I
SPAIN
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
CHAPTER I
IN MADRID
1
I carried on my shoulder through the streets of Madrid Maria del
Carmen de Silva y Azlor de Aragon. She was too proud to admit that
she was tired, but was ready to accept the unexampled adventure of
being carried in that way. Beside us prattled her brother, Xavier de
Silva y Azlor de Aragon, called Chippy for short. They are beautiful,
evanescent-looking children, fairies rather than boy and girl, and
nothing like the swarthy barefooted urchins who beg of you, who want to
clean your boots, who want to sell you water, in every town of Spain.
They look as if they had been studied from paintings before they were
created. Velasquez painted them, and the children were created from
his model--as the shadelike figures of the pictures of El Greco are
reproduced in the ballet.
My mind went back to that morose figure of the history-book, Catherine
of Aragon--Spain always makes the mind go back. Here I carried Carmen
of Aragon on my shoulders, and it might be Henry the Eighth's first
Queen, reincarnate as a little child. It is part of the unfairness of
the history-book that we only see a woman like Catherine soured and
disillusioned and out of her national setting. She is only interesting
as the wife who caused the English Reformation, and the mother of Queen
Mary of the Smithfield fires. But she may have been some time a happy
little child like Carmen, beautiful and innocent, a face to put with
the Madonna, to look up at her with flowerlike adoration.
The uncle of the children is the present Duke of Alva, with the
wonderful name of James Fitz-James Stuart and the amusing supernumerary
title of Duke of Berwick, a tall and slender and haughty grandee who
lives a life remote from public haunt, remote enough to-day from the
page of history, the Low Countries and the scourge of heretics.
So Carmen of Aragon pinches my ears as we stoop to avoid awnings and
sun-screens, and she laughs like a Raphaelesque infant-love, and the
yellow parrots from upper windows scold us. Dark women, with nine-inch
or foot-long combs standing up from their back hair, and black veils
(mantillas) hanging over their heads instead of hats, stare at us and
smile. They survey me from my brown boots to my brown mustache, to
my red cheeks, to my blue eyes, and they recognize the brood of the
pirates. _Inglese, Inglese_, they whisper.
I have not often been taken for an Englishman, but the Spaniards have
no doubt. I may change my attire, I cannot change something. They have
seen my like before. Instinctively they don't altogether like me.
Instinctively I don't care too much for them, with their bull-like
heads and all their somber eyes. There's something in the air which
bids me think of thumbscrews. It may be the inherited bad conscience of
the Drakes and the Raleighs and the dogs who harried the Plate Fleet
four hundred years ago, or it may be the horror in the bones which the
association of Spain with human cruelty has bred in the mind.
We walk from the Puerto del Sol, the Harbor of the Sun,--has not every
city in Spain and in the Indies a Puerto del Sol?--a confluence of
streets and tramcars in the heart of the city, to a sort of baronial
mansion in a narrow street. And there live a community of dukes and
duchesses, marquises and marchionesses in suites of apartments. Though
not castellated the house is massive as a castle, all of stone, and
built sheer on the too narrow pavement of a narrow cobbled street. The
entrance is from a recess in the frontage of this stronghold, and as
you step inside you leave behind the street, its trams, its cries, and
enter the stillness of history.
The stone stairways and stately halls are hung with historical
paintings of the families and with the spoils of battles fought long
ago. Here is a great lamp clutched by a Saracen's hand. It was taken
after the battle of Lepanto. There, in cases, are great keys of the
gates of the cities of Bruges and Ghent, taken in the wars of the
sixteenth century. The gold, the jewels, come from the altars of Mexico
and the idols of the Indians. The intervening centuries do not speak.
Speaks only the great era of Spain.
The mind leaps from that romantic time back to ours, with those wars
and quarrels from which the Spain of to-day prefers to stand aloof.
The gold which men got in quest of El Dorado, the gold which they piled
on ships and guided past English and French pirates, gold which was the
royal fifth, gold of the Plate Fleet, gold that was private fortune,
the repairing of the splendor of the impoverished nobles of Castile,
has been melted down and become national treasure, or currency, or
personal adornment, or war-indemnity, or war-chest, or reparations.
Some of it has been in the Treasure Tower of Spandau, some is in the
vaults of Washington. All men have had their hands in it. Only a little
remains in Spain, gilding altar-screens, making showy merchants'
chains, weighing in the treasures of the Escurial. Rapacity for gold
killed Spain, we are told, and yet Spain has survived in a quiet,
old-fashioned, dignified mode of life, and cares less to-day for gold
than the rest of the nations.
That, however, concerns very little my Carmen of Aragon, who will pass
through life without ever knowing anything of reality, marrying some
prodigiously polite grandee and not a bluff and cantankerous English
Henry. She laughs, she imitates all I do or say, she walks away, and
Chippy takes one of my hands in his and leads me to his mother, quiet
and simple and pious and demure, all in dull black velvet. To-morrow I
shall go to the Palace and see the King and Queen and the grandees and
their ladies wait on twenty-four of the poor of Madrid.
2
You enter Spain through glass doors and see written up "Silence." You
open your guidebook and find you are looking at Exhibit A. I have been
told that Spain is like Russia, but there is this difference. Belief
in Russia will survive the decease of Russia by at least five hundred
years. _Something is coming out of Russia_: yes, but out of Spain--?
No one goes to Spain to see the future. Many go there to see the past,
sticking out as it were through the present. And so with me--to make
a sentimental journey and trail an idea geographically across the
world. I should like to see Columbus again, see him in the midst of
the courtiers and mocked by them, and see upon him the smile or frown
of Ferdinand and Isabella. My eyes would like to feast on the cloth of
gold of the grandees of Spain--go back four centuries and yet be in
to-day, and see as it were in a vision the gold of Old Spain and the
gold of the Indies, the beautiful bright gold that may be sacrificed
but must never be worshiped.
So I am pleased to go to the Royal Palace at Madrid on Maundy Thursday
and see the King and Queen and the Court in the gorgeous ceremony of
the washing and the feeding of the poor. Once every year it is done;
the Queen tends twelve poor women, the King tends twelve poor men. They
are usually all blind. It has been done for centuries. Ferdinand and
Isabella did it also, and Columbus must have watched them in his day,
saying of those who mocked him--"_They are the blind_; wash them and
feed them also."
As we stand in an interior court of the palace behind a row of
halberdiers in quilted coats the chime of eleven o'clock seems to
blend with Southern sunshine, and there breaks out from a hidden
orchestra mysterious Eastern music heralding the approach of to-day's
King and Queen. Searching, questing strains tell of mystery, of aching
loneliness and hidden loveliness--the haunting introit of Milpager's
"Jerusalem." Erect stand the stately halberdiers in their scarlet
coats, holding at arm's length their bright halberds of Toledo steel.
And along the corridors of the palace come carelessly and as it were
at random, in twos and threes, talking together, the Duke of Alva,
the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Duke of San Fernando, the Marquis of
Santa Cruz, the Marquis of Torrecilla, and other nobles, all dressed in
gold-embroidered coats and wearing orders and insignia and medals. They
are the grandees of to-day, and their faces peer out strangely from the
midst of their grandeur--peering out, as it were, from their family
trees, from time itself.
Come the King and the Queen, and the King is wearing the uniform of an
infantry captain, for this King is democratic, but over his shoulders
hangs the magnificent collar of the Order of the Knights of the Golden
Fleece. I wonder if the Emperor Charles Fifth, Cortes' Emperor,
instituting this order of the Golden Fleece, thought first of his
Spaniards as the Argonauts of the age, the youth of Spain aflame with a
vision of gold. The golden collar hung in a long V on the King's back
and seemed to have worked on it some noble history, reminding me there
in the midst of the crush of the palace, of that perfect Spencerian
verse,
Yt framèd was of precious ivory,
That seemed a work of admirable witt;
And therein all the famous history
Of Jason and Medea was ywritt;
Her mighty charms, her furious loving fitt;
His goodly conquest of the golden fleece;
His falsèd fayth, and love too lightly flitt;
The wondred Argo, which in venturous peece
First through the Euxine seas bore all the flower of Greece.
Columbus was a Jason of a later time, and there were many other Jasons
and would-be Jasons--Cortes, Pizarro, Balboa, Coronado.
The democratic King Alfonso wears his collar, however, with an easy
grace, and there is upon his visage a whimsical expression which
remains. The Queen looks more like a queen than he does a king. She is
wearing the diadem, and she walks like a queen in a picture, her long
cream veil of lace enveloping her, trailing downwards and backwards as
she walks. Her ladies are in luminous silks, with high combs in their
hair, and long lace mantillas like the Queen's, cream-colored, hanging
from their combs to the hems of their robes, giving them the mystery of
beauty which is part hidden and part revealed.
Following them go the diplomats of all nations, all differently
dressed in the full Court dress of their respective nationalities. And
they wear their stars and their ribbons, too. There goes the Chinese
Ambassador with embroidered golden dragons on his velvet coat; there
goes the American Ambassador in spotless lawn and glimmering white
tie. The French and the Italian ambassadors look like diplomats, men
with old secrets, profound players of human chess; even the English
Minister looks as if he knew more than he would ever say, but the
American is quite different, a new piece of cloth on a very old
garment, as it were upon Joseph's coveted coat of many colors. His
fresh, clean-shaven and young face surmounted on its stiff linen collar
may have been recruited to diplomacy, and quite likely was, from a
guileless Christian brotherhood. Though why turn the light upon him,
unless it is because the Power he represents is the power in the New
World which to-day affects most the liberties of the children of Spain
overseas. Their representatives are here also, of Mexico, of Nicaragua,
of Cuba, of Colombia. And here in state comes the "Patriarch de las
Indias" himself, and with him the Papal Legate to Spain, the leaders of
the Cortes, the Prime Minister, the Government.
All pass, and the halberdiers close up and the public follows, the
chosen public asked to witness the monarchs' charity. It is so arranged
that all take up their places in the chamber where the poor are
waiting, and then the King and Queen come in.
I stand away at the back and look through the veils and screens of
the hundreds of ladies' mantillas which hang from the high combs in
their hair. It is as if the scene were too gorgeous and had to be
viewed through a glass darkly. But yonder are the poor blind waiting in
stalls, twelve black-shawled old women waiting for the Queen, twelve
empty-eyed men in silk hats waiting for the King. In front of them all
stand golden ewers with water, and the ritual of washing commences. One
spot of water is dropped on each foot. One rub of the towel to each,
and then, stooping, the Queen kisses each woman's big toe; the King
kisses each man's big toe, too. Stately Queen Ena never changes her
devout expression, but democratic King Alfonso, who rules by smiles,
makes a comical face all the while.
Follows the feeding of them. All the grandees and their ladies take
part. The Queen takes the center on one side of the room, the King on
the other. Vast quantities of viands are brought from the kitchens
and pantries of the palace. Begins the Comida de los Pobres, and
every helping is enough to feed a family, and every helping is given
personally by King and Queen to the chosen poor.
The King smiles all the time, and eats bits of what he gives, and tries
to persuade the Archbishop to eat also and so break his fast, part of
the King's prevalent facetiousness and jollity. Did he not make a wry
face over kissing each old man's foot, as if it really were disgusting?
Does he not on purpose break up the solemnity by dropping round rolling
cheeses on the floor and letting oranges slip out of his hands? That
makes all feel happy, all except the blind. They see nothing; they do
not even eat; all that comes to them is taken away and packed into
hampers to be sent to their homes. Their happiness is deferred. It is
always so with the blind. They enjoy later what those who see enjoy in
anticipation. As the King and Queen moved to and fro in that gilded
crowd it seemed I saw Columbus there. He _saw_, and he gilded the
grandees in time with a deeper crust of gold.
3
Spain's positive contribution to civilization is a sense of human
dignity. This is shown in private life by elaborate manners and the
instinctive respect of man for man. Other nations used to have it; it
is a marked characteristic of Shakespearian drama, but revolutions have
removed it. In Spain there is a delicacy of approach to strangers and
even to friends which is unknown in the rest of the world. The bows,
the marked attentions, the gravity and stately style of the Spaniard
contrast remarkably with the self-enwrapped sufficiency of the Germans,
the unrestraint of the Americans, the humorous slap-dash of the English
and "devil take the hindmost" of the Scotch.
The Spanish houses too, with their noble portals, interior courts,
patios, fountains, bespeak a sense of dignity. It is not a country of
deal front doors and bottle-neck passages like England, nor of porches
and porch-swings like America, nor of doors on the street like France.
It is true that the interiors are devoid of fancy upholstery; there
is a bareness as of a castle, an asceticism which expresses itself in
straight-back chairs. But there will be flowers blooming and birds
singing--there will be a graciousness which is often missed in the
seemingly over-comfortable, over-hospitable interiors of English and
American houses.
Gravity goes so far with the Spaniard that he hardly will be seen
wearing tweeds. Loud attire is an offense. The Spaniard wears black
and seems to wear it out of general respect. The women, moreover, do
not flaunt their fashions in the churches or the streets. In Madrid
the reproach cannot be made that you cannot tell the _monde_ from the
_demi-monde_; the latter is always more indiscreetly dressed. The Queen
of Spain has no legs.
You still drive with horses in Madrid; it is more decorous than the
ill-mannered car bursting with speed even when going slowly. And the
rudeness of the klaxon and the tooting horn are distasteful to the
Spaniard. Behind fine horses, at ease, leisurely and graciously, there
it is true the women will show what Paris wears.
Then in the ways of men to women the Spaniard surely has the first
place for real politeness and regard. The French say _place aux dames_
but do not give it. The Englishman is gallant with women when they are
good looking or if they remind him of his mother. But the Spaniard's
politeness is invariable.
Doubtless the French at their best come nearest to the Spanish in
their respect for one another, just as the North-American Yankees are
furthest from them. The French are the most humane people in the world,
because the most tolerant; and ever so much less cruel in temperament
than the Spanish. But their _cochonnerie_, the ribaldry of their
burlesques, the wretched homes, the open and stinking conveniences of
the capital of civilization, decency forbids in Madrid.
4
With all that, however, let a _caveat_ be entered. The Spanish hold
something which is increasingly valuable in our modern human society
because it is all the while getting rarer--the gold of good manners.
That is true, and must remain after all adverse criticism of the race.
But the Spanish have a negative characteristic which through the
centuries has outraged the fellow-feelings of the rest of humanity, and
that is cruelty, a lust for torture.
The Auto de Fe, the ordeals of the Inquisition dungeons, these in the
past; the survival of the bull ring and the plaza de gallos, these
to-day and, remarked at all times, the Spanish inhumanity to horses,
seem to outweigh good manners. And the behavior of the crowd about
the bull ring--hideously burlesque and unrestrained, may perhaps have
marked the crowds who in Seville in the sixteenth century watched
brother men burn to death for the good of the Holy Father at Rome and
the greater glory of God.
Spain lovers have said to me, "Do not go to the bullfight!" But in
facing Spain as in facing any other country with some desire to know
it, not merely to be struck by it, one must face what is dark and
sinister as well as what is beautiful and annunciatory.
Hence a visit to the Square of the Bulls at Madrid on Easter Sunday,
and the King is there and the President of the Sport, and a vast
populace in sun and shade. Christ rose this morning; this afternoon
six bulls must die. He rose indeed. Fifty thousand church bells told
the world, lilies triumphant rose from bare boards in every home; we
and all the children ate eggs of peace. This afternoon--Easter has
gone--the populace will watch the bulls.
Next to me on the one hand sits a Japanese artist with a score of paper
fans. In front are Madonna-faced women with high yellow combs in the
crown of their hair and cream-colored lace hanging therefrom in an
exquisite effect. The Japanese has crayons and decorates his blank fans
rapidly. Group after group he sketches in on these fluttering fans, and
then the grand parade of toreadors in all their finery, and then the
picadors, and then the fighting. He is concentrated; he seems to feel
nothing, but when his twenty fans are done he gathers them together,
picks himself up, looks round him circumspectly, and departs.
I suppose bullfights are seldom described except in Spain and the
Latin-American countries. In these, the descriptions may exclude
all other news and cover whole issues of daily papers with colored
supplements as well. But for peoples other than Spanish there is
something that is intolerably cruel in the bullfight. It is even
thought a little compromising in a public person to have visited one. A
British Prime Minister on holiday in Andalusia indignantly denies that
he went to a bullfight. It would lose him votes in England. Yet Spain
is part of the civilized world and her conscience seems untroubled.
Great crowds flock to see them, and in Madrid or Seville on a Sunday
afternoon all the town is moving one way. Every city in Spain has its
permanent amphitheater for bullfighting, and you may see as many as ten
thousand spectators in the circles, tier upon tier, around the arena.
On no other occasion could one see as many Spaniards together. The
bullfight is for them a great national turnout.
The bulls, which have led a happy country existence up till now, are
waiting, each for his last gory twenty minutes. The picadors will prick
him, the staff will plant the banderillas in him, the matador will
endeavor to plunge a sword into his heart, the public will hiss or
clap, the asses will drag the stiff carcass around the arena and away.
A great door opens. Into the arena plunges a big black bull--"into this
universe and why not knowing." He is full of mad energy and bolts for
any red flag at any distance that his short sight will show him. The
elegant toreros save themselves by hiding behind screens or jumping
low walls. And while the bull stands thwarted and puzzled, in comes a
doleful procession from the wings. The picadors arrive--men with long
lances mounted on starved, jaded, spectral-looking horses. The horses
are blindfolded; they also have their vocal cords cut, and whatever
happens to them, dumb animals will be dumb. The men mounted on them
have strong wooden saddles with hooded stirrups and their legs are
cased in iron. The toreros with their red and blue capes, and the
attendants dressed in deep scarlet, try to lure the bull towards the
horses. They stand in front of them and then nimbly step out of the way
when the enraged bull charges at them. The picadors drive their lances
deep between the shoulders of the bull; the bull murders the horse,
lifts horse and rider in the air; the first picador saves himself. His
work is done. The second then comes forward, pricks the bull, and
has his horse disemboweled. The third does the same. The fourth horse
refuses to come into position to be butchered, and escapes with a
laceration. The time allotted to the picadors has run out, anyway. One
horse lies dead. The remaining horses are beaten till they rise, and
the picadors mount them again, though the entrails are hanging out of
them, and they ride them out of the arena.
The bull is bleeding. He is greatly enraged. He paws the ground like a
dog seeking a bone; he bellows, he charges here and there, and always
misses! But the toreros plunge colored darts into his back till he is
hanging in a clatter of them, and he cannot shake them out. Then comes
the matador, dressed like a gentleman, gold-embroidered, gallant, with
his hair in a tiny queue behind, with his blood-red cape, with his
straight flashing blade of Toledo. He faces the bull alone, and tempts
him and fools him. It is part of his art to perform various showy
tricks and deceits, jump the bull's back and the like. On these his
repute as a bullfighter depends. Then he must beguile the bull into a
convenient attitude for dispatching him in the right way. It is not
too easy. The impatient crowd, which bawls and guffaws and cries out
witticisms, now hisses and taunts the fighter and claps the bull when
the bull makes an aggressive onslaught. The matador must take a risk
and make an opportunity. Twice he essays; twice he loses his sword. New
swords are brought him. And at the third attempt he puts two feet of
steel into the life-blood of the bull.
The bull pauses, stares, still flourishes his horns, keeps his enemies
at a distance and then, beginning to lose consciousness, kneels down
on his front knees like a cow taking a rest in a meadow. The toreros
are all around him. He stares at them with glazing eyes. Then the
matador plucks out his sword and the bull rolls over dead. Trumpets
blow; out comes the troikas of asses, and one set is harnessed to the
dead horse and the other to the body of the bull. In the circles of the
amphitheater ten thousand voices are busily discussing it, but ere they
have got far in talk the arena has been cleared and all are hushed as
the great door opens and bull number two comes rushing on to die.
It makes a devastating impression on the heart of the Northerner; makes
you, for that afternoon at least, hate Spain. It is so depressing that
for days you cannot get over it. The horror of it haunts one as if one
somehow had learned that humanity had gone wrong and no life anywhere
was worth while.
Curiously enough, however, you meet Englishmen and Americans who have
been many times. I sat next to an Englishwoman who somehow had come to
enjoy the fight--thought the matadors so elegant, so wonderful, thought
they ran such a risk (and so they do), excused much on the ground that
the meat was sold cheap to feed the people of the slums.
And now some time has elapsed, and I can well understand it. Despite
all the horror and pain of it I also feel a persistent craving to go
again. There is a fatal fascination in this brutal sport. You want to
see those fearsome bulls killed; want to look on at death. The last
Englishman I met had been to twenty-two, yet at his first he was so ill
he had almost to be carried out. Cruelty, like other lusts, grows on
what it feeds on. Englishmen, though naturally they at first reject it,
can take pleasure in cruelty also.
5
On the Texan Border where under United States law bullfighting is
forbidden, the Spanish population still have mock bullfights at
religious festivals. In these you may see Sancho Panza mounted on a
turbulent ass as picador, and a lot of very broad farce. But there is
often a religious element; the matador coming forth as Christ, and
the bull, all in red, as Satan. A remarkable reversal of Christian
symbolism this--He who returned to Malchus the ear which Peter had
struck off will destroy evil with a sword! Still, it is only a game and
well in keeping with the spirit of Church-plays in olden times. The
parody of the bullfight is much happier than the fight itself.
A deficiency in Spanish character is humor. The Spaniard is very witty,
unusually apt at repartee, but he does not easily smile. This is
specially noticeable in the children. There is something of the morose
in them which does not readily dissolve in laughter or tears. Perhaps
this can be taken as a partial explanation of Spanish cruelty. They
have somber minds.
Of course one ought not to make the mistake of placing upon the
Spaniards the whole of our iniquity. There is no race that can show
a history devoid of cruelty. If the followers of Cortes burned the
soles of the feet of the last of the Aztec kings to find out where his
gold was hidden, did not the Barons of England do the same to the Jews
to furnish them with money for the Crusades; though the Inquisition
caused men and women to be burned to death for heresy in Seville are
not people to be found in Georgia ready to do the same to-day to
Negroes for a smaller offense? Is there a page in Spanish history which
shows more inhumanity to man than has been displayed in the Russian
Revolution?
The Spaniard is cruel, it is admitted, and he is cruel in ways which
are particularly obnoxious to the Anglo-Saxon who, when he sees a man
ill-treating a horse, is almost ready to rush in and kill the man. But
other peoples can be cruel also. That does not extenuate the Spaniard's
fault, but it is permitted to remark without offense, he is cruel, but
he has remarkably good manners; he has a greater sense of the dignity
of life.
CHAPTER II
EN ROUTE FOR CADIZ
Travelling by way of Rouen and Chartres to Burgos and Toledo, and by
way of Bordeaux to Cordoba and Cadiz prompts certain comparisons--Spain
is grander than France; France has more life.
The note of the Gothic is aspiration out of stone, but that of the
Moorish is barbaric splendor within stone. The asceticism of stone
reigns at Durham, at Rouen, and is somehow transfigured into the
loveliness of doves' plumage at Chartres, but in the Spanish cathedrals
speaks chiefly gold. It is the same at Burgos, gilded with some
of the first gold of Mexico, as it is at the cathedral of Toledo;
architecturally unremarkable but interiorly oppressed with riches. As
you enter by the old doors it is not so much into the presence of God
as into the power of the Church.
Spain is the most faithful son of the Church and France the most
reprobate. France, like the prodigal, may nevertheless be nearer to
salvation. France is germinative, and, if cynical, yet eternally
curious, whereas Spain is incurious. Spain does not want to know. She
is the last of the democracies of Europe to rebel. Probably the state
of society in Spain could not be defined as a democracy.
The great ports of Spain are, however, different in temperament from
the cities of the interior. Boisterous Bilbao in the north and
Barcelona in the south are insurgently democratic. In these is a
revolutionary movement pointing against Church and Monarchy. In these
there is an energy, a commercial hustle, a will to power, which reminds
one of the cities of Northern Italy.
Geographers, map-makers of Europe, seem very much at fault in the way
they print the names of Spanish towns. The faint print usually reserved
for villages is used for Santander and Bilbao. But these are great and
stirring cities with modern buildings which for beauty and strength
of design can be compared only with the architecture of the greater
cities of the United States. Again, how absurd it is to print Bayonne
and Biarritz in large type and indicate San Sebastian, their neighbor
across the Spanish frontier, in faint italics. San Sebastian is a
magnificent city and a most beautiful resort. You can see Spain there,
in the season, at its grandest.
But one would not have been surprised to find Toledo printed fine,
for there truly, famous though it be in history, we have an obscure,
unchanging seat of the past. Toledo is more truly Spain than is Bilbao
or Barcelona. It is the Spain that was. Toledo is a close-packed,
mountain-built city of winding, narrow, shady ways and high,
overhanging, ancient houses. It reminds one of the Saracen villages
high up on the cliffs above the sun-bathed Riviera. It was Moorish and
Jewish before it was Spanish, famous throughout the Middle Ages for its
steel. They try to sell you Toledo swords in a score of little shops
to-day. And, in the past, has not Toledo steel pushed its way through
the vitals of innumerable duelists? And Spanish mail, Spanish armor,
Spanish shields and Spanish swords have had an immense repute. It was
the southern counterpart of Swedish steel. But Solingen has gone on
and made domestic cutlery for the teeming populations of industrialism
whilst Toledo still makes swords. Toledo has no street-cars. Toledo has
no cinema. It has no Cable office. Its hotels, spacious and quaint,
have no rooms with bath, no room telephones. There are barber shops,
but the poles do not revolve. Nothing revolves.
There is a pack of some of the most persistent beggars I have seen.
Blasco Ibañez says they live on the English and American tourists who
visit the Cathedral, and he sneers at the tourists' stupidity and
credulity. But if the tourists ceased to come the beggars would not
cease to be. This beggary is a disgrace to a rich country like Spain.
That small boys should rush in to beg the sugar you have left over from
your morning cup of coffee is unseemly and out of keeping with the
otherwise stately ways of the people. In Spain thousands beg who could
quite well be earning a living, and the mendicancy of these defeats
the case of the paralyzed, the blind, the aged, from whom few would
otherwise turn away.
In Toledo, however, lurks the great Cathedral, like some strange, rare
monster of the past. It is horribly cramped, and seems to be trying
to hide its vast, aged form from modern gaze. There lies the dust of
kings, emperors, archbishops; undisturbed, unprovoked. It seems the low
notes of the organ should never swell to anything clamorous and new.
All is hushed as you walk around; gloom of unlighted centuries is upon
you.
From this to the blue sea, what a change! From this to the fresh and
breezy harbor of Cadiz. To Spain's window on to the New World, her most
romantic starting point in all her history.
It is a long journey! I prefer to go third class. It makes a tremendous
difference, for the carriages are always full, always emptying,
changing, filling again with Spanish humanity. The second- and
first-class coaches are more or less empty; empty also that curious
apartment called a "Berlin." There is a train _de luxe_ from Madrid
to Cadiz. In that, of course, you can travel in comfort and sleep at
night, sleep also by day, and pass the scenery and Spain as rapidly as
a millionaire could wish.
This train is called a "mixto," like the _smeshanny_ in Russia. When it
comes to a halt the engine-driver gets out. A man on an ass starts off
to tell the village that the train has come and that if any one wants
to catch it he had better begin packing. It doesn't matter where you
get to or when you get there. I took my first day's ticket to a name of
a place at random--Vadollano. The booking clerk bade me repeat it, and
then sold me the ticket. I occupied myself trying to imagine what sort
of a hotel I'd find there. The train commenced its uneasy retardation
onward, crawling upward over Spain. Dark but gentle-looking folk filled
the carriage, always saluting with a _buenos dias_ when they entered
and an _adios_ when they got out, and never starting to eat or drink
anything without offering all around to do the same. My wife and I
kept a nicely filled basket and a bottle of sherry, and we joined very
happily in the children's game of offering our food, knowing it would
be declined. We found, however, that two invitations to a glass of
sherry usually overcame the modesty of the peasants who, surprised and
pleasantly shocked at finding the wine to be of Xeres, seemed, upon
drinking it, to become our friends for life.
The men wore close-fitting black caps or those broad-brimmed,
box-topped hats that one associates with pictures of West Indian
planters. The women wore long earrings, commonly of tortoise-shell;
the men and the children wore many rings; they traveled with birds,
frequently bringing their canaries, of which they seemed very fond,
into the train with them. In came beggars, in came singers. A blind boy
sang folk-songs in a strange, wild tone, rather harsh at first hearing,
but growing on the ear. His melodies went from the guttural into the
minor, and touched one's heartstrings truly enough. Girls are wearing
flowers in their hair, and here comes a sight that reminds me well of
the Caucasus--a tight pig of wine. From out the little window we look
upon many vineyards, brown, stubbly, scarce shooting green though the
season is advanced. It is high land and bracing and yet also a wine
country. Men come in with wooden boxes and in these boxes are bungs
which they withdraw to drink from the hole.
How the people talk, as if there were springs in their mouths, and each
sentence was rapidly and mechanically let loose from the lips. No one
has any interest in the view from the window; the only interest is
human interest. However, we pass at points through bull farms, herds
of Andalusian bulls waiting for their testing for the bull ring or,
having been tested, waiting for that gory last half hour of torment and
red flags. The bulls always take the eyes of the people. They have an
enormous interest in them. One might almost say that the Spaniard had
got a reflection of the bull in his countenance now. The bull is his
national animal.
It was very dark by the time Vadollano was reached, for the train
was late. I got out and was followed by a half-naked beggar boy who
answered no questions, being so intent on begging. Outside the station
there seemed to be nobody and no town. I sought a shelter and could
find none. In dismay I returned to the station and found the ticket
checker of the train, and he advised me to take another ticket to
Baeza. The old train was waiting, had not budged, and would wait half
an hour more.
And so to Baeza and a mosquito cage bed in a hotel which smelt as
hotels smell when they are the worst. Next day we went on to beautiful
Cordoba. Here was a new vision of Spain, one less ascetic and fierce
than that of the North. The sun had driven out the somber. In Cordoba
with its white houses and fresh-blooming flowers, its beautiful gates
and doors and interior courts with palms and fountains, we had a vision
of beautiful living. The whole of Cordoba is like a precious work of
art. I suppose every one who learns to love it must be loath to leave
it.
But we are making for that window on to the New World, longing for
that new way to India--the new Spain. The train goes on along the
Guadalquiver valley through all the sherry vineyards growing green for
miles, the town of Xeres itself, and onward to Gibraltar and the end
of the world. And there at the end, far out on a loop of land on the
loveliness of the sea, was Cadiz, the city of Armadas and the going
and coming of the Plate Fleet, a city now of white houses, Spaniards,
cats of all kinds, and innumerable parrots who out-talk humanity on its
streets--of all that, but of few ships. I walk along the sea front on
that street that bears the proud name Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and I see
three ships, and among them the one that is waiting for me.
BOOK II
THE INDIES
CHAPTER III
THE COLUMBUS JOURNEY
1
We left the beautiful harbor of Cadiz, with its white houses and palm
trees and its daintily silhouetted towers and turrets, and the shores
unclasped the blue bay and we rode upon the billows of the ocean.
The ship was a Spaniard and all the people on it were Spanish or West
Indian, and the voyage we were making was the one Columbus made,
seeking a new way to India and coming upon the Indies. And the first
evening and every evening we pushed "our prows into the setting sun,"
not seeking, of course, but knowing, with the romance of the first
journey mostly forgotten.
The passengers are mostly Cubans, and they kiss their hands to tell me
what a fine place Cuba is, how perfect their capital. They put salt
in their _café au lait_, plaster salt on their sliced oranges before
eating them, and pour from the salad oil bottle on to every dish they
eat. Their children, with bare legs, black hair, gold earrings, run
about all day with little dogs on strings, and shout. There is no
dancing on the ship, no orchestra, but instead Mass three times a week
and the saloon made up as a chapel. The ladies are very big, if young,
and lie in deck chairs doing nothing. The men play dominoes and smoke
cigars.
We put in at Teneriffe and take on crates of onions for twenty-four
hours. Boys in boats beset us with canaries in cages, pups in sacks,
and fat, wise-looking parrots on perches. The reek of onions drives out
the stowaways from the hold. Onions litter the bottoms of the empty
barges, squashed onions disfigure our decks. Indeed, everybody and
everything smells of onions for two days.
The food is Spanish and of a sort the sailors of Columbus must have
known. All is cooked in olive oil, and I notice the Cubans and Porto
Ricans are not pleased if the plates do not gleam. Heaped-up plates
of rice and chicken, rice and little bits of rabbit, rice and bits of
beef come nearly every day, and Spanish omelettes and olive stew and
remarkable dishes of highly spiced fish covered with flaming pimento.
There is an excellent table wine of which there is an inexhaustible
supply and it is free as air, and there is a glass of sherry for every
one on Sunday evening. The Spaniards do well on this. Even little Maria
Luisa, aged ten, and Ysabel, aged eight, my two best friends, have
their wine and sherry and disperse with vigor the oily heaps of food.
One evening these precious little girls borrowed some matches--what
to do?--to finish smoking a fat Habana cigar which one of the men
passengers had left on deck!
The children talk to one another more by gestures than by words, and I
shall never forget how one of them, Palmyra, described a bullfight she
had seen at Barcelona and the horror of it, lowering her head between
her shoulders and looking out with gleaming eyes to imitate the bull,
jumping to indicate terror and assault, putting her little hand before
her eyes at the thought of the disemboweling of the horses, and showing
with a horrified twinkling of her fingers the impression of the flowing
of the blood. Bullfights are forbidden in Cuba, but these children had
been to Spain on a holiday and so had seen the national and traditional
festival for the first time.
In fifteen days on a little ship with two dozen passengers one
naturally learns a great deal. An English person is a rarity on such
a ship, and every one sought to engage me in conversation. They were
as much interested in Cristobal Colon and Ponce de Leon and Nuñez de
Balboa as I was, and had pictures of Columbus in their pocketbooks, and
thought how greatly he'd have been struck to be traveling on such a
boat as ours.
This one is a beautiful voyage, so serene, with blue skies every day
and a just-waving sea and a breeze behind the boat that wafts our smoke
ahead of it. It is delicious to sit up on the very nose of the vessel
and be a Columbus now. We are splashing it new, splashing it white, in
stars and white balls and darts of surprised foam. Green and yellow
seaweed sags up from the depths of the ocean and, like untraversed
liquid glass, the sea is ahead of us in curving lines, in natural wild
parallels to the sun. It is afternoon, the sun is going over and will
go under. He is drawing us on, and I could almost believe our steam
counts for naught. He is illuminating the wide empty ocean, and we
stare till we veritably see latitude and longitude upon it. We ascend,
we lift, we rive a way o'er the mirror in virginal v's of new frothing
foam. We are making for the center of the far horizon, the sun ahead of
us; we are making a new way to India; we are going to make West East.
2
Each still night we seem to pass through something, as it were through
mists and veils which are hiding something new. Each morning we rush on
to the decks whilst they are still wet and the Castilian sailors are
swabbing them. We peer with glasses over the virginal, fresh, foaming
blue. The sailors go. The sun dries the timbers. We partake of coffee
and smoke a sweet-scented Habana cigarette. The sailors return and
pull up white canvas awnings at the cracks and at the sides of which
glimmers blue of sky and brightness of sea. The children come out from
their cabins to play, tumbling over their pet dogs. All is happiness.
The men indulge in a new sport to while away the time--they try to
catch the fast-passing seaweed which lies in sponges and coils in
the limpid sea. While Columbus took heart of grace because of the
banks of seaweed his ship encountered, believing it a sign of the
proximity of land, we on our Spanish ship making in prosaic fashion
a bought-and-paid-for passage to the Indies, find the same seaweed a
means of fun. Four or five Cubans and Spaniards take a bottle and a
rope and a tangle of wire, and fish for seaweed from the bows. The
weather-side gets quite a little crowd upon it, for the crew also take
part in the joy of throwing out a bottle and wire to entangle floating
green tresses of sea-maidens or big floating sponges of their toilets.
Often the bottle flies through the air and often goes up the chorus of
disappointment as it hits a wave instead of a bank of weeds. But the
exultation is great when a tangle is caught and brought up on deck. It
is very pretty and hairlike, and the little children press it between
the pages of Ibañez' novels which form the only literature on board.
That which heartened Columbus diverted us.
Then we entered the tropics and slept in the hot noontides, waking
to clatter up on deck into the freshness of afternoon breezes. The
evenings were very beautiful, sunset always giving a pageant. One night
there came the most flaming and devastating sunset, descried beyond
perilous and mountainous clouds, and from the north all the way to the
west a grand processional mass of shadows was seen fleeing, like the
pageant of the world's vanities going to judgment. To us it was poetry,
but to Columbus and his companions it might well have suggested a
growing nearness to the actual place of doom, to where the sun actually
dipped down and went under the flat earth--a terrible thought, yet for
a daring spirit a haunting and alluring one also.
I suppose there came a point in Columbus' voyage when he might as well
keep on as turn back. Turning back became more terrible the longer
they kept on. And curiosity must have fed on itself and increased. At
any rate, it is still terrible to stand in the stern at night and look
back. There in the darkness lies the past like a book that is read, or
written, and a door that is shut. It breathes silence. The clamorous
Old World is far behind and cannot be heard.
We started with a young crescent moon, and she grew to the full with
us over the still ocean. The stars seemed to wave, and our mainmast
jagging to and fro seemed intent on sighting and taking aim at the
loveliness in the sky. We are escaping; we are going away; we are doing
what they did; we are shooting the moon.
All the Cubans and Porto Ricans and Haitians seem to take on more life,
become more vivacious. There is no mistaking it, they are nearing their
homes. They have been as homesick for the Indies as the mariners were
homesick for Spain. It's all in reverse order. "You'd like Habana--it's
bigger and better than Barcelona," I am told; "yes, better than Madrid."
The ship comes into more humid airs, and in the evening all the
passengers begin to croon Spanish songs. They are all together and
happy, men, women, and children, and they feel they are getting near
their blessed islands. It infects the crew, infects every one, like an
extra idleness, till we come at last one night to a balmy and dreaming
coast, where the coconut palms like cobweb dusters rise up to the
low clouds of the sky, and the full moon through the mists shines in
silver--from the waves to the shore. We are there at last. We have got
to the other side.
The ship goes still and hoots. We have our last supper together. There
is plenty of wine. "Drink deep," cry the Cuban passengers to those of
us who disembark at Porto Rico. "It is _ultimo vino_, your last glass
of wine."
"Porto Rico is not dry?"
"Oh, yes," say the Porto Ricans, mournfully. "You see, it belongs to
the United States. Cuba is only under supervision of America, but Porto
Rico belongs to her, and is dry."
"_Seca! Seca!_" they cry explanatorily in Spanish.
"Well, with the last glass, here's to Christopher Columbus, who
discovered the island. He made the bridge from Old Spain and
incidentally brought the first firewater too. All we who arrive, arrive
after him."
3
We enter the harbor of San Juan de Porto Rico and leisurely pass the
old stone castle on the rock and the Spanish fortifications. They
look to be several centuries older than they are and are not unlike
the weather-beaten ruins at the entrance to old ports on the east of
Scotland. They mounted Spanish guns but were without power to repel the
North American invader of 1898. The island was then wrested from Spain
and added territorially to the United States. Natives of Porto Rico are
now _ipso facto_ American citizens. It was novel to me to realize that
a whole population of American citizens was without English and that
many did not know George Washington from Abraham Lincoln.
The boat was hailed by the quarantine authorities and stopped. The
Spanish captain, the doctor, and the officers all seemed very nervous.
This was apparent to the American doctor and immigration officials,
who strove to keep them calm. There was nothing to worry over--the
inspection was only a formality. The crew and the passengers lined
up and showed their arms to be free from skin disease. The "aliens"
were vaccinated. The immigration officers were remarkably polite. They
brought copies of the New York _Times_ on board, and those who could
read English glanced at the news. They sat us one by one in front of
them and asked us all those funny questions--what is your nationality?
what is your race? are you a polygamist? do you believe in subverting
an existing government by force? have you ever been in jail? how much
money have you got? where is your final destination? are you booked
through? Imagine old Columbus being questioned by an immigration
officer--there's something humorous about it. And Spaniards, whose
forefathers manned the galleons of the Plate Fleet and lorded it on
land and sea, now pay, in addition to ten dollars for passport visa, a
head-tax of eight dollars ere they land. But all that is prose.
There is no poetry in it, as there is little poetry in the "White
Books" of the United States--"lies, damned lies and statistics," as we
say in England. The Americans are a light-hearted, humor-loving people,
but they are dull and forbidding as officials. The Spanish, even in an
old Spanish harbor, felt nervous.
At last the ship is free and moves upon the silken water towards the
palm trees and the white houses and the brigantines and schooners and
sailing boats beside the shore. Negroes all in white, with fat cigars
in their mouths, handle our luggage, and in ten minutes the passengers
are dispersed to hotels and to their homes.
CHAPTER IV
PORTO RICO
Porto Rico was discovered by Columbus in 1493, and he entered the port
of San Juan, naming it San Juan de Porto Rico--St. John of the Fine
Harbor--hence the name of the island itself--Porto Rico. The Indians
there were in a low state of civilization and showed little sign of
wealth. The island seems at first to have presented less interest than
its neighbors: Santo Domingo became the beloved of Columbus, Cuba
became the chief Spanish base for exploration and conquest. Porto
Rico enjoyed therefore comparative peace for sixteen years after its
fatal discovery. Then came Ponce de Leon, and after him plunderers
and pacificators with sword and hemp; killing, ravishing, enslaving.
The despoiling of the Indians of their gold and jewels was followed
by dispossession of their lands and then the capture of their persons
for the slave trade. Ships were fitted out in Cuba, with the sole
mercantile objective of capturing the Indians of the islands and
selling them into bondage.
Slaving may have proved profitable, but in the long run it was
unpractical. The Indians entirely disappeared, and at the beginning of
the seventeenth century were reported to Spain as extinct. There were
no longer enough servile hands to do the hard work. So in place of the
lost Indians the Spanish colonists felt forced to import Africans.
The Negro slaves throve under conditions which killed Indians; they
increased, and the Spaniards mixed their blood with them and bred from
them. Hence the large Negroid population of the Indies at this day.
The same happened in Darien, Panama, Costa Rica--Negroes largely
displaced Indians. In Mexico, however, Africans were not imported to
any extent, as the Indians, though rebellious, were in large numbers
and there were many tribes accustomed to slavery.
The Spaniards settled Porto Rico, and grew sugar and bananas which they
brought over from the Canaries, and tobacco which was indigenous. They
lived in a humdrum state, taxed, of course, interfered with a great
deal by Spanish governors, but generally enjoying the wealth and ease
of a luxuriant tropical island--thus for three centuries, when suddenly
all the Spanish colonies followed the example of the North American
_demarche_ and endeavored to throw off the yoke of the mother country.
Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador,
Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, all gained their
freedom before 1825. Porto Rico fought for three years and failed
(1821-1823). Spain remained in possession. Fifty years later slavery
was abolished. The free republics of Central America had abolished it
in 1824. However, in 1873 the Negroes of Porto Rico became free Spanish
subjects. In 1897 Porto Rico even obtained Home Rule under a Spanish
Governor-general. But next year came the war between the United States
and Spain, and Porto Rico was annexed.
Cuba had also failed in 1823, and for the rest of the century remained
disaffected. The Cuban is of a much more violent disposition than
the Porto Rican. Cuba has never been wholly in a state of peace and
contentedness since it was discovered. A widespread guerrilla warfare
lasted from 1868 to 1878, and in 1895 Maximo Gomez led another
revolutionary war. By that time, despite constant unrest, foreigners
had acquired considerable property in Cuba. There were American,
British, and French planters besides Spanish ones. Naturally, in a
state of civil war, as in Mexico during 1910-1920, there was much
damage done to foreign property. At this, the United States took
umbrage.
On February 15, 1898, the U. S. battleship _Maine_ blew up in the
harbor of Habana. The Spaniards say it blew up accidentally; the
American impression given in the American press was that the Spaniards,
to whom the presence of the vessel was thought to be distasteful, had
blown it up on purpose. Others think the Cubans blew it up to instigate
the war. On the other hand, some Cubans aver that the Americans
themselves blew it up--but that is not credible. Probably it was an
accident.
But this was the spectacular event which an emotional public needed,
like the hauling down of the Flag at Fort Sumter in 1861, like the
supposed onslaught of the Mexican Army upon the forces of General
Taylor in 1846, the sinking of the _Maine_ was just what was needed to
rouse the democracy of the North to war. An ultimatum was presented to
Spain.
Spain must make immediate peace in Cuba. Spain was very polite and
promised to do what she could. But the war feeling demanded more.
On April 19, 1898, the United States Congress voted that Cuba was
henceforth an independent state, and called upon Spain to give up Cuba.
Next day the Spanish Ambassador left Washington and there was war.
In the arbitrament of force Spain stood no chance. There were a few
months of one-sided warfare, and the honor of Spain was satisfied.
Spain faced her challenger, shots were exchanged, Spain was wounded and
retired from the field. Cuba was given liberty. Porto Rico was annexed.
Does one need to stress the annexation of Porto Rico? Is it worth while
inquiring whether the Porto Ricans should also have been given their
liberty? Perhaps not, generally speaking, as the government of States
and Empires goes on to-day. Porto Rico has only a million and a quarter
inhabitants, is only 3400 square miles in extent. But I stress the
annexation in this study because it seems specially important in the
development of the _power_ of the United States of North America.
The Spaniards took Porto Rico for greed. No tears need be shed over
them. The United States did not take it over from that motive. But it
was a step forward in her quest of power. The Castilian flag went
down--the flag of the quest for gold. The American flag went up--the
flag of the quest for power.
San Juan de Porto Rico is a gay and pretty little city, without crime,
without dirt, and without much poverty. Revolvers are not fired
promiscuously. Heaven's water-carts lay the dust each afternoon.
There is a luxurious American hotel, and Spanish ones which are less
luxurious. You eat to music, and can be fed in airy restaurants by
eager Italians. Babbitt orders his stacks of hot cakes and soft-boiled
eggs for breakfast; Francisco Morales sits down meekly to coffee and
a small roll. The well-fed, broad-faced business men of the States
walk with india rubber step--happy, tubby Texans, lordly lumps of
Louisiana. The tropic, which dries the Spaniard, does not reduce the
North American. The young men are clean-cut and handsome, but soon sag,
owing to lack of exercise and the habit of bathing in hot water instead
of cold. The Porto Rican is not so dependent on a car, eats less, and
certainly bathes less, be it in hot or cold. You know the ex-Spaniard
by his spare form and swarthy complexion. The Spanish sombrero is being
chased off the island by standard American hats; likewise the Spanish
shirt by the more expensive silk shirt of the American working man.
The blue overalls or "slops" of the laborer are also common. It is
difficult to buy an article of attire which is of local manufacture
and style; even Panama hats it appears have to be sent to New York and
reëxported. Inter-island trade is very scanty; once a month a small
Dutch cargo boat arrives from Jamaica, but it seems to bring very
little.
Characteristic of modern San Juan is the barber shop with its striped
pole revolving in glass case: there the Spaniards getting their hair
cut have their necks shaved also and a bareness left above the ears;
and having "gotten" a shave they get an American hot towel also pressed
upon their brows and temples.
Truly, as you stand on the quay and watch the ferry boats, modeled on
those of the Hudson River, go screaming across the harbor, you feel
there is some justification for the saying that San Juan is a miniature
New York.
One thing, however, it lacks, and that is an adequate number of
"shoe-shine parlors." Like the Bedouins who have a monopoly of the
visitors to the Sphinx, so a tribe exists in San Juan who hold the
blacking brush to the world. When an imperial race arrives there is
great competition among the natives as to who shall clean their boots.
The tribe especially swarms around the town square which, banked with
flora and shaded with luxuriant palms, might otherwise be a pleasant
place of rest. Even at night, after supper, when the town band is
playing to a flocking crowd under a dreaming moon, you are treated to a
sort of jazz interposition of "Shine! Shine! Shine!"
The voices of the street urchins and news venders have the same quality
of voice as those of Cadiz. Boy babies come forth from their mothers'
wombs howling "Demokratia." The stones of the high houses repeat
their cries. But there are no parrots shouting on the streets of San
Juan. There used to be, for Spanish sailors brought them. But in some
streets of Cadiz one might have thought there was a riot, what with
the news venders below and the parrots in the upper storys. Coming
direct from Cadiz one noticed many divergencies in the detail of life.
For instance, Cadiz had no cinemas; San Juan had five or six, showing
all the Californian stars. In Cadiz there were several theaters with
dancing and singing. In San Juan there was only one with a visiting
Spanish artist. In Cadiz no one rocks or swings on a veranda. In San
Juan, on the other hand, there are no bullfights. Most of what bound
the island to Spain has been now cut. Only a few educated people know
who is King of Spain.
Out in the country, however, life is more definitely Spanish and
American influence is less felt. The Negro life is greater there and
seems to relate neither to Spain nor to America. It hardly seems to
relate to Africa either.
The Negroes live in saffron- and marine-colored boxes little bigger
than bathrooms, and what they crowd into these cabins makes them like
Noah's arks with all the toy furniture and animals inside. You'll see
them stuck right in the midst of a swamp with thousands of land crabs
crawling on the tips of their claws and feeling in the air with their
portentous extra talons.
The mangoes hang their fruits like tassels. The palm trees rise up like
vast, lissom, feminine forms swathed to the waist and then bright naked
to their matted heads, where cluster their giant nuts. The banana
palms bask in solar radiance and hot mist; and last year's shabby sugar
plantation stretches for a mile of bashed canes and sprawling withered
leaves. And naked children improvise a throb of music with a tin can
band while others dance to it a natural shimmy shake.
Living among the colored folk are poor white Spanish Porto Ricans on
quite an equal basis, and their pale babies run about in the sun, too,
only they are not musical and do not dance. The grown girls, white and
black, are beautiful creatures, dazzling with their bright dresses,
their vitality, and their unthwarted curves. The Negro men are finer
than the Spanish ones, however, and naturally a long way simpler. I
never saw Negro men so happy and untroubled as here--the Negro without
a complex, without the blues.
Nearby goes the military high road, hard and straight, and along it
hoot America's cars. The little island is traversed by a whole series
of magnificent roads of great value from the point of view of war, but
now a happy means of touring the country. The automobile parade from
Packard to Ford goes past before your eyes, and beside private cars fly
strings of little motor buses, all packed with people. Each bus has a
name, and that adds greatly to the amusement of the road. Thus we have
"Coney Island," "Cristobal Colon," "Excuse my Dust," "Maria Luisa," and
a hundred more. These are worked by the Spanish-speaking people for
Spanish-speaking people. You will seldom meet an American in one. I
found afterwards in Colon and Mexico City, in Santo Domingo and Port
au Prince, and other places, these converted Ford trucks swarm, and are
a great if risky means of locomotion. The Porto Rican wagonettes are
if anything quieter in their demeanor than the Mexican ones. So they
scour the ways from ports and tobacco-towns, over the low ranges of
tree-covered sugar-loaf mountains, to other towns and ports and villas
and resorts. When far away on the verdure-covered hills they show where
the roads are by their turbulent dust.
You see almost the whole range of class life in Porto Rico from the
bottom to the broad top, from yellow wooden cabin to the latest type of
American home. For whites an American standard of life has been set.
Rich as the island is, and simple and remote, the artificial prices
of New York, nevertheless, range. Your room at the hotel, with bath
and telephone, will cost you from three to five dollars a day. You
will sit down to the characteristic breakfast of grapefruit, ham and
eggs, corn cakes, and coffee. Ice and water continually tinkles in
glasses. Yonder is the ice-cream soda bar. The suit pressers are all
busy keeping proper creases in the breeches of the islanders. American
men, wearing their white suits and linen collars, look smarter than the
Porto Ricans, and the women, if quieter in looks, at least keep to the
fashions.
Business of course is king. You feel that, at every turn, by the look
of the advertisements and the trend of the talk. Porto Rico hums as
it has never hummed before. It goes. It is a real live place. The
dominant spirit of the Anglo-Saxon has overcome the gentle, sluggish
conservatism of old Spain. Rich Porto Ricans, and there are many of
them, live in luxury, in beautiful villas with every possible means of
material happiness--books, baths, electric light, fans, tiled floors,
perfect mosquito nets, and the whitest sheets and the softest of
pillows. And the water is pure and the drains are good--thanks in great
part to a quarter of a century of ownership and exploitation by the U.
S. A.
The material benefit which has come to Porto Rico through annexation
is considerable. In 1901 she was included within the American tariff
union and all her products could enter American harbors duty free. She
entered the American postal unity. The American dollar became her unit
of currency. American traders taught Porto Rican middlemen how to make
money, and American planters from Louisiana showed the proper way to
raise sugar. The annual output of sugar has been increased to ten times
what it was in 1898.
On the other hand, there are material and political disadvantages.
Though Porto Rico has free trade with America she has it not with the
rest of the world. A high tariff excludes European goods. Spanish
America has profited immensely by cheap German wares. But the Fordney
tariff keeps them out of Porto Rico. Porto Rico pays excessively
for scores of articles and commodities which she could otherwise
import cheaply from France and Spain, to say nothing of England.
Prohibition of wines and spirits is said to have been achieved by local
option--but, if so, it was before the population was able to vote.
Trial by jury is not given in Porto Rico. Porto Ricans are citizens of
the U. S. A., by virtue of the Jones Act of 1917. They were enabled
to be conscripted for the Army. But they do not have the power to
vote. They are represented in the United States Congress only by a
Commissioner. They have no Senator. They have no part in electing the
President.
Now there has sprung up what may be called a Porto Rican Sinn Fein
movement, featured in a concerted attack on the Administration. Many
Americans now advocate "Statehood" for Porto Rico. But the Porto Ricans
clamor for independence. Porto Rico is in the anomalous condition
of belonging to the U. S. A. but is not a State nor governed by the
Constitution. She is a possession. And the general Spanish discontent
which rules in Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo outcrops in Porto Rico
also. Just as the popular song "Es mi hombre" which tires the ears in
Madrid has gone through these islands and is no doubt ravaging Mexico
and all the mainland, so the one insurgent Spanish emotion has infected
all the islanders. And, in Porto Rico, journalists in the newspapers
and street orators in the squares are flirting with the idea of a
revolt. The street politicians seemed very nervous when any one looking
like an American came near.
It is difficult to know what test to apply to the institutions of Porto
Rico where, for instance, trial by jury cannot be claimed. If the test
of Empire, the trouble would be hardly worth considering; but if the
test of Lincolnian democracy, the Porto Ricans have grievances which
could be removed. The removal would take little effort. The island is
well governed, and is civilized and prosperous. Given her independence
it is all too likely that her present happiness would fall away from
her.
CHAPTER V
SANTO DOMINGO AND HAITI
1
Over the sea in a tiny boat to the island of Haiti, and to the eastern
half of it which is called Santo Domingo. The voyage is still westward
and along the eighteenth parallel and not for long out of sight of
land, be it the northern shore of Porto Rico or the southern shore of
Santo Domingo. The sea reeks with warm exhalations, and in the turgid
water lurk sharks. Don't fall off the ship as she lurches and rolls and
you hold to the ropes--you may not be saved if you do.
Twenty-four hours brings you to the little tropic river where the
massed palm trees with their bushy heads peep forth out of the jungle
at the intruder. And we slush slowly along the banks through the heat
to a jaded-looking dock and some clammy warehouses, and behold, it is
the capital of the Dominican Republic; I suppose one of the meanest
and dirtiest capitals in the world. Yonder is the Government Building,
on which flies the white-crossed flag of the Republic and level with
it the Stars and Stripes of the United States. For the republic has
the brokers in. She borrowed heavily and unwisely, and then could not
pay--and so the customs were seized, and, with the customs, government
itself. Santo Domingo is now virtually an American possession and
part of the new empire which is springing into being and promising to
condition the future of the American people. On a little hill outside
the city is a training camp with its motto picked out in white stones
in an attractive pattern: "In time of Peace, prepare for War." And one
wakens in the morning to the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
played somewhere afar.
Down by that tropic little river stands the stump of Columbus's tree,
the actual tree to which the discoverer moored his ship when he came
in on that morning of the fifth of December, 1492, and was met by the
amazed tribesmen. Nine months ago it was a still living tree, and it
is part of the grievance of the Dominicans that the marines tried to
preserve it for all time by cutting it open and filling its hollow
center with cement. That killed it. But it is a mighty burly stump,
some fifteen feet high and of great girth. It sprawls rather, it has a
burly moving shoulder and a bearded aspect that suggests a sort of Rip
Van Winkle Christopher Columbus, enchanted for four hundred and thirty
years and now stepping ashore.
What a change for the old man to see! Those chiefs, those red men and
women who gave jewels for beads, all killed to the last child two
hundred years ago. Africans are in their place, smooth and black,
everywhere, as if they had come and conquered it. But they came as
slaves and then won their freedom from Spaniards and from Frenchmen.
Some speak Spanish, some speak bits of French. Further on, in Haiti all
speak French. Where are the bold Spaniards with their flashing eyes and
flashing blades, their wills, their lusts? Gone like the great trees of
the river side. Gone like the Indians. Gone like the French who came
after them. Mixed and married with the Negroes, or else gone soft and
gentle as Orientals.
"These strapping fellows, these giants in sand-colored clothes?"
Columbus might ask. "American soldiers," you would reply, and then
conduct the poor old wight to the Carnegie Library and the shelves
of the Encyclopedia Americana. It needs some explaining. Discovering
America was child's play compared with explaining to Columbus the rise
of the American Republic of the North.
Anyhow, here I am at the Hotel Inglaterra, and down below me is a bar
where there is "beer on ice" and the "best old rum," for Santo Domingo
has not been made dry, and there sit marines all in white and argue
it over their pots. The question is: "Do not the Haitians eat their
children at the age of five--not all of them, of course, but selected
kids at festivals? Do not the outlaws and brigands of Santo Domingo
need to be stamped out? Or again, Who has prior rights in the Panama
Canal? Do not British warships come through without paying dues while
American warships pay? Are not all vessels towed by electric mules
through the canal?" They bet millions of dollars, they bet their
adjectival shirts, because they know.
Outside is the city market place, where are sold live crabs and
tortoises on strings and mangoes and gourds and coconuts and
sugar-candy babies on wire. And black girls with coral ornaments and
vari-colored turbans or kerchiefs do the selling--while purchasers on
asses, on backs of calves, or walking with huge bundles on their heads,
go past. The black people laugh and shout. It doesn't seem to mean
much to them that they have no President and that their republic is in
abeyance. They do not bet on what is going to happen, and they do not
know. When you buy an orange for a cent they say to you _Grand merci_
and are ever so pleased. In the square is a fine statue of Cristobal
Colon, who points west by southwest to Latin America, bidding all men
still think of a new world. But I am forgetting. Did I not leave him in
the Library with the encyclopedia? Is it not there, on the shelf, that
he will find his true place, in a history that is past?
2
Though at first sight the population of the capital of the Dominican
Republic may strike the traveler as being wholly black, there are
nevertheless a number of persons of fairer complexion--the people of
the first families, the _aristokratia_. One or two of these are German.
These keep within their houses more than do the Negroes who trade and
traffic and gossip in market place and main street.
The island has a bad history. Columbus loved it as the first large
materialization of his dream of a beyond--a transatlantic land. But the
Spaniards raised Cain there, and the Negroes and French after them. The
Indians were killed off early, and the Spaniards were soon killing one
another. Bandits and pirates have lived there more securely than any
one else.
It was in 1697 that the French came in. Spain ceded half the island to
her. The French bred in rapidly with the colored people. The country
became known as Haiti, and French was the spoken tongue. French Negro
slaves in considerable numbers were imported. A hundred years later
the rest of the island was ceded to France. That was in the Napoleonic
era. England was at war with Spain, and in 1809 British warships stood
off the little tropic harbor and gave encouragement to an uprising of
Spanish colonists who proved successful in wresting the city from the
French. By the Treaty of Paris in 1814 French rule was confined to the
eastern part of the island--Haiti.
There came then speedily the great liberation movement of Latin America
(1821-1825). Santo Domingo was able to succeed where Porto Rico failed.
But hardly had the new republic proclaimed its independence when the
Negroes of Haiti descended upon it and broke it up. Haiti by that
time had also won independence. For nearly a quarter of a century the
Haitians remained in control of the whole island. In 1844 a Dominican
insurrection was successful, but there was no peace with Haiti, who
seems to have been always the stronger power. Santo Domingo was forced
to try to return to the bosom of Spain. In 1861 the president of the
republic became governor, and the republic joined Spain. Two years
later war against Spain was started and in 1865 the republic was
restored. In 1868 the republic tried to join the United States, but
America was not then willing. Insurrectionary movements followed one
another with rapidity till the Negro general Ulysses Heureux obtained
control of the country. He, it is said, pursued the policy later
adopted by Lenin in Russia of having all his enemies killed, but he
himself did not escape and was assassinated at last. It is said he ran
the republic very deeply into debt. One wonders why financiers should
have been willing to lend money to such a State. Some five millions
sterling were owing, later it became six and a half millions. There
was talk of foreign intervention. Some European power might have felt
entitled to seize the country.
American policy had, however, somewhat changed. In 1899 the United
States entered into possession of Porto Rico and into control of Cuba.
Santo Domingo was one half of the island that lay between. Rather than
see a foreign power installed, America decided to control Santo Domingo
also.
The republic was asked if she still required aid from Washington, and
the United States agreed to control the customs, organize receipts, pay
interest on debts and pension the government. This she has done very
effectively and remains in economic and military control to-day; Santo
Domingo with a constitution in suspended animation having become an
American Protectorate.
Apparently now most Dominicans would like the Americans to go, but they
have no power to make them. The Americans for their part can point
justifiably to the improved conditions on the island. If they went, the
human dogfight would begin anew. However, let us to the country!
3
I have heard it said in London that those who live in half-houses are
the aristocrats of the slums. The quaint expression may also be applied
to the colored folk who live in cabins. They are the black aristocracy
of the islands. It was in vain that I pitied the plight of the dwellers
in the marine- and saffron-colored dolls' houses of Porto Rico. The
real underdog of these parts does not pretend to any little wooden
hut. He lives gregariously in the bush like the larvae of the Lackey
Moth. He squats in the shadow and shine of tattered palm branches, he
is rustling with his family just beyond the green fans of the wild
bananas. In crossing the island of Haiti only two things share the
attention--the magnificence of untamed nature and the wildness of man.
Not that the men and women have relapsed to primitive savagery. They
are fully dressed, as fully as any one could care to be, and, except
for little children, seem to be afraid of nakedness. In Russia, in some
parts, you may see scores of men, women, and children promiscuously
naked upon a river bank; but the wild children of the sun of Haiti will
not even bathe in the sea unless discreetly covered. In the Africa
whence they came they wore little more than a _cache-sexe_, but the
slaves learned a decorum of dress from the Spaniard in the old Colonial
days and it has remained.
They are very civil too, and talk to you willingly in a French patois
or in a broad Spanish which is far from the Spanish of Madrid. But they
are poor, live largely on fruit, have none of the amenities of life,
and being exposed to the tropical heat, they are also exposed to the
exhalations of the jungle and to its insects. They are magnificent
specimens of the human race till disease touches them. What erect and
beautiful women, what positively Adamlike men! My eyes fed on many
pictures of human perfection. But alas for disease! Smallpox rages
among them. You see beautiful boys and girls the color of the mahogany
trees amongst which they live, but all blurred and shadow-marked as if
there were a fault in the tissue. And when one of them dies he is just
buried somewhere at the back, like a dog or a cat.
Little smallpox-stricken girls with the disease still on them come up
with bunches of bananas or mangoes for sale, their open faces looking
out from a hundred disease-eyes. It makes the heart ache, and also
prompts the thought--what a place for a medical missionary!
The island swarms with bandits. There is only one road across it and
that was opened only a month before. Its interior is extremely obscure,
unvisited, and uncontrolled. It offers in an otherwise unqualified way
a divine adventure for a young doctor willing to devote his life to
human beings.
Personally I do not believe the stories of moral depravity, the
cannibalism, which is said to have broken out among the people. They
are not so starved as that. They have not been exploited in the way
the people of the other islands have. Cubans will eat one another
before Haitians. But they get married without going to church, it is
true, and have children who remain unbaptized. Otherwise they are "good
Catholics," some of the best I have seen. There is no doubt about
it--the inside of a church, where there is a church, is one of the best
social scenes in Haiti. The women may often go in uncovered, and the
holy water bowl be dry, or the worshipers may not know when or how to
cross themselves--but the loveliness and simplicity of service are in
utter contrast to the world outside, to the jungle, and to the ordinary
ways of men and women.
You sit in a vast sky-blue church in the evening and watch the
children, with chaplets in their hair and garlands of flowers in their
hands, and listen to the Spanish singing. And girls all in white go
up to the Madonna with armfuls of flowers and, throwing their heads
and their breasts to her, yearn to her and gesticulate and perorate
and fling down their flower sacrifices and go. And the priest lights
the incense over the flower-heaped altar so that every blossom smokes
upwards to the Virgin's feet.
Oh, to live in that atmosphere always and be at peace! You realize the
sweet emotion, though you know that character and the world's reactions
forbid that you shall take it far.
I stayed at a pleasant city called Santiago of the Gentlemen.
The Americans call it Santiago of the Bandits, but it seemed to
be a brighter city than the capital, having more pretensions to
civilization. The steel mosquito gratings on the verandas of the hotel
were commendable. How can one enjoy one's days when the mosquitoes
chase you all night!
It would, however, be vain to seek in the island of Haiti the
comforts and conventions of Porto Rico. The United States is in
control, but it is proving more difficult to introduce new ways of
living. The mahogany-colored chambermaids of the hotel smoke heavy
black cigars as they work, and every time Yokine, who waits on me,
wants to light up afresh she makes an errand to my room for the
matches beside my candlestick. My bedroom is just a section of a
dormitory divided off by wooden partitions. The bed is surmounted by a
high-domed-mosquito-netting cage which is a room in itself once you are
inside.
There is no such thing as a "room with a bath" on the island. Round
the corner from the veranda is a mildewed douche which drops water on
your back in beneficent but not abundant trickles. It is not entirely
private and you should keep your eyes on two doors whilst you wash. And
there are sometimes other occupants beside yourself, to wit, the giant
Roach and his family. Father Roach is very fond of water, and when you
turn on the shower he also comes forth to share in the splash.
In other parts of the hotel the roaches are portentous. One tries to
find a likeness for them. They are like old-fashioned brown metal
trunks, a little reduced in size. The sideboard in the dining room
might be the grand terminal station of some city of the gnomes, and
drawn up outside it are a score of brown cabs, some waiting, some
moving.
Or if they are not cabs they are little brown pups. The waiters treat
them brutally, but I feed them from my plate and they make off with a
bit of bread or a quiver of Spanish omelette as readily as cat or dog.
I see little lizards also running up the dining-room wall. The most
interesting extra gentleman lodger, however, is the tropical spider.
He is not gigantic but gigantesque, as big as the palm of your hand;
speedy, audacious, voracious. He lives not in a web but on a wall, on
a series of walls, and no other spider dare stay on it with him for
a couple of minutes. Ah, here he comes, sprawling over the dusty map
of the island of Haiti hanging in the hall. A Dominican politician
smiles and points at him and would whisper something about the military
government of which he sees a symbol.
There is a steady malice against Americans, and as I am English the
other guests of the hotel open their hearts. They take pleasure in
scratching crosses on the figure of Liberty on the American money.
Their own money has largely disappeared, but a fine coin the size and
appearance of a silver dollar is now reckoned as only twenty cents.
They say it is intrinsically worth forty cents, and that an American
bank collected some millions of them, took them to New York, and sold
them at a large profit. There are two great banking institutions on the
island: one is American, the other is the Royal Bank of Canada. The
Dominicans assure me they place all their business with the Royal Bank.
They say that the dollar has impoverished them because it has raised
the cost of living so terribly. They retaliate by using the British
bank.
I imagine that may be so, as I pay forty cents for a half bottle of
very bad Hamburg beer. It could not have cost more than four cents in
Hamburg. The dinner is very simple, no French flourishes of cuisine, no
Spanish traditions either, but there is enough; three beef courses and
then guava jelly and coffee. And for this you pay at the same rate as
you would at Shepheards hotel in Cairo. Or you may pay more.
I am told by Dominicans that the republic in bondage is doing so well
that the 1908 bonds due in 1958 will probably be paid off in 1925, and
the 1918 bonds due in 1938 would be paid this year (1923). There is
a certain new artificial prosperity. It is due to the fact that the
inhabitants have been forced to think in dollars and cents, and cease
thinking in pesos and gramos. But the Dominican, it seems, will not
take the blessings of peace and prosperity into account when it is
balanced against political liberty.
I go out to the promenade of the town. I see the lonely American
soldiers sitting bored on the park seats, and not one of them with a
girl or a chum.
"No one will go with them," says a Dominican. "We don't feel anything
against them personally, we know they are only sent by their government
and have to obey. But we are against their government and always shall
be till they go."
This was spoken by one of the white Spanish aristocracy who are now
endeavoring to organize a passive boycott in the island.
Santiago of the Gentlemen is Santiago of the Ladies also. Behold a
remarkable festival takes place, which brings the ladies forth in all
their finery. The _fiesta_ is in honor of the new road which has joined
city with city. After four hundred years Santiago has been connected
with the Capital by a road. Up till May of this year there was only an
adventurous horseman's trail. But due to the bustling United States of
America the hundred and seventy kilometers between Santiago and the
city of Santo Domingo has been bridged. Henceforth it is undignified to
be seen on a horse--only the poor people, the blacks, the beggars, go
on horses. All people who are people go in Ford cars. The super-hooters
tear along the highway, and the sultry mango trees drooping with their
fruit look as if civilization were dawning on them at last. And the
snakes that would bask on the way have learned of a new fast-going
enemy that roars like a lion and bumps over them like an elephant and
yet flies past like an eagle.
The worthies of the city have issued the most grandiosely worded
invitations to the Capitalaños to a three days' general "at home,"
banquet, and ball. It is a good idea. Santiago is up in the fresher
air, a wind is always blowing. The mosquitoes are fewer, and the
nights are cool. Indeed, the ladies of the capital carry fur wraps in
the evening when the temperature drops to about 70°. Not that any one
walks anywhere by day. It is much too hot for that, and if I set off
for the river on foot they look at me from their cars and stare. Many
people wear green or yellow sun spectacles, which look quaint against a
dark complexion. The light is not, however, so glaring as in Egypt or
Central Asia, and the heat seems much easier to bear.
I have come to the conclusion that life on these tropical islands can
be very good all the year round. The heat does not devitalize one,
though something in the air seems to whisper that nothing in the whole
world is of any importance. Those who come to Santo Domingo soon feel
the "lure" and are ready to stay there forever. I watched the routine
of the American soldiers at the white and antique "Fortaleza de San
Luis," and the sentries standing languidly but happily, with their
bayonets smiling in the sun, and I saw the dreamy look in their eyes,
though they were not dreaming of home. Drink, however, seems to be
a strong temptation. I saw one never sober warrant officer who was
drinking himself to death; an educated man, who boasted comically
that he had been "exposed for two years to Cornell." America has not
enforced the Dry Law in Domingo nor in Haiti. She has not suggested it
in Cuba, though it holds in the zone of her territory in Panama and it
has been hinted at in Northern Mexico.
The _fiesta_, however, means but little to the garrison. It means
more to every one else than to them. Down below the earth bastion of
the fortress and the deep gun emplacements foams the broad and fresh
flowing Rio, and black and brown children are floating in it like
luscious fruits, and there are crimson-foliaged trees beside the broad
beach where scores of donkeys and ponies with panniers are waiting
for water. Every pannier holds two petrol cans, and when the cans are
filled the boys squat across them and beat the donkeys up the long
hill to the town, and then hawk the water from street to street. Thus
here, as in old Spain, water selling is a trade. And the ladies of
the capital need water to wash off the dust, and the boys make double
profits.
On all street corners the Dominican flag is flying, and a marvelous
unwanted animation has possession of the people. Bands are playing;
horns are being blown; halls are being festooned with flowers. Santiago
begins to look a gay resort. Toledo in Spain has no cinema, but
Santiago has two, with biseminal releases from New York and a fitting
fade away for "Blood and Sin." Santiago has its shady and pleasant
drinking saloons and "Eden" with its annex.
The male guests at night, wearing evening dress, or at least black
coats and white ties, all look very dapper. The grown women look
stupendous. Imagine them in strawberry pink, three times as stout as
a stout woman, and with loose girdles about imaginary waists. But the
young women, on the contrary, are slight, dainty, with latticed sleeves
and jeweled bird combs in their hair.
They will dance till they drop, no matter what the heat. It is
oppressive enough at eight, but the ball lasts till four in the
morning, beginning very quietly with waltzes and ending with sex
dances. At midnight the town orchestra gives way to a Cuban band which
beats a tom-tom for hours. In comes the drum like a storm and then
subsides, or it mounts upon the music like some big-cheeked black man
getting upon an elephant in front of an army, while on each side of
him are pagan heralds blowing dissonances on horns.
Next day after this orgy the faces of the women are a wreck, which no
powder or cosmetic will disguise. Yet one of them told me that she
belonged to a party club of thirty families where they took it in turn
to invite all the others. "At my house I have a hundred and fifty
guests, all day, all night," said she to me.
The _fiesta_, as in other Spanish countries, is a sort of national
institution.
4
I was not fortunate enough to be present at a fête on the French part
of the island--the Republic of Haiti--but I obtained the impression
that the Haitians are much wilder than the Dominicans. The Negroes
do not readily identify their needs, they are more ebullient, more
pious, and I should say more haunted by a prehistoric past than are the
Spaniards.
Nothing is more serene, more utterly sweet, than Mass as sung in the
great Cathedral at Port au Prince. But the scene outside the Cathedral
for a square mile is primitive in the extreme. It is like the low
suburbs of Nizhni Novgorod in Fair time, massed together and increased.
Port au Prince is built widely on a sun-bathed strand, and looks more
like a capital city than Santo Domingo. A few khaki-clad Americans
meet the eye, but the black population is too striking for one to
consider Americans long. It seems as if the peasantry swarms into the
city every day to market their produce. And what a peasantry! It
would be impossible to match them. They seem to have all the salient
characteristics of the southern French and of the Africans also. Their
old-world, alert, shrewd, rough-hewn faces, their wit and mirth, their
clamorous noisy French patois, their gay cottons and classical faces,
the frankly exposed bare breasts of the women, all these tell of a
people of force.
Unfortunately, owing to the calling of "dry" American ships, there
is a good deal of vice. Champagne is brought to the quay, and the
thirsty, indiscriminate passengers and crew knock the tops off the
bottles and pour it down their throats like lemonade. The concomitants
of drunkenness are all at hand. Possibly in no port in the world will
a man, will any man, receive such attentions from women, be he even a
somber-visaged missionary. The black girls swarm about you and fight
for you.
But this may be overlooked, though I am surprised the American
authorities tolerate it. Probably the soldiers like it. But Haiti is
sad because she is denied her liberty. The colored people all over the
world have a legitimate pride in their two independent States--Liberia
and Haiti. There is no reason why Haiti should not be left to govern
herself according to her lights and temperament, no reason except that
Haiti furnishes a new field for exploitation. It is a place in which a
good deal of money could be made if the population could be tamed.
But the people are too numerous and too fierce--they are in a way
indomitable. The French blood is vigorous in them. I venture to suggest
that Haiti is not a practical possession for an idealistic democracy.
The political conceptions on which America has grown will never be
adopted by the black French.
5
The time came for me to move on from an extremely interesting island.
I wished a passage to Vera Cruz or Jamaica or Colon, but the chance of
small vessels sailing adventitiously seemed to determine my way. I went
to Puerto Plata and thence to Santiago de Cuba, of Cortes' memory, city
of which he was Mayor, city which provided much of the capital for his
adventure to Mexico.
Here is Puerto Plata, on the northern shore of Santo Domingo, the
Spanish-speaking part; Puerto Plata, the Plate port, a fine ocean
harbor where no doubt rested often the treasure ships of the Plate
Fleet. Here is the place, one of the places, but where--where are the
galleons of Spain?
There stands the British steamer _Teviot_, loading tons of cigar
tobacco for Marseilles, all astir with British sailors, while up at her
masthead three green parrots are pecking at one another and conversing,
or edging off along the taut ropes. Over beyond is the Yankee freighter
_Dorothy_, attended by waist-naked Negroes and barges of fruit. A
streaming smoke on the horizon and a long-distance hooting tells of
an incoming hulk of the reappearing Hamburg-Amerika line. Two little
Norwegian tramps have been and gone. The fast American mail steamer
from New York will come gliding in to-morrow. Spanish cripples creep
abroad the ships in the harbor to show their sores, their withered legs
and arms; Spanish negro peddlers squat on the stone pier with bunches
of mangoes, pineapples, and coconuts. The town grasshoppers come
pottering along with their wooden boxes to black the boots of sailors,
and all the English they know is "Wahn a shine?"
But the tall galleons and the flashing faces of Castile have vanished
away like a mirage, like something unreal, that never was. So I sit in
the port and wait. None of the ships will take me the way I want to go.
The quickest and cheapest way to Mexico is, after all, via New York, I
am told. And that is disconcerting. The galleons have all been sunk,
and now one must go via New York.
But patience conquers civilization. A little Spanish boat at length
appeared, a mere toy beside its neighbors in the harbor, but going in
the same old way of Spanish ships, owned by a Cuban company, commercial
as the rest, bearing no banner of Castile over the ocean, and yet
Spanish enough, Spanish of to-day.
On this I made a romantic voyage to Cuba. I realized for a moment once
more the glamour of the days of the Discoverers and the piratical
pioneers. The sea was like velvet; the hazy mountains were of ineffable
grandeur; the ship scarcely moved, yet went on, went on, and the
flying-fish, silver and gleaming, raced us as she circuited and curved
and planed o'er the ocean.
I voyaged with Fabio Fiallo, the poet and patriot of Santo Domingo,
and he poured into my ears the story of his country's wrongs. He had
with him a fierce-looking peasant from the interior, Cuyo Baez, who
took off his shirt to show me the rose-red efflorescences and brutal
channels on his body where red-hot irons had been applied to him by
torturers.
It was like an inverted picture from Kingsley's _Westward Ho_, and for
a moment I could fancy I saw a British sailor victim of the Spanish
Inquisition. I looked at the fierce, unforgiving, taciturn Cuyo, and
then at the fine cultured face of Fiallo. How it would have stirred
the blood if Cuyo had been Anglo-Saxon and had been thus treated by
Spaniards! For our noble rage has an ignoble appetite--it feeds on
atrocities, must have atrocities. But here was a Spaniard, alleged to
have been tortured with hot irons by one of us, by an Anglo-Saxon. It
was incredible.
Fabio Fiallo looked down into the depths of the tranquil sea and
meditated, as if he were looking for the Spanish ships and Spaniards
down below, and their banners and their crosses and the spoils of the
Indies. He could not see them. He could only see the sharks following
the boat.
The sailors came out with pistols and began shooting at sharks. For
when one shark gets killed the others feed on it and cease following
the ship for a while. But it does not disturb the poet, nor the
imperturbable Baez. They are thinking of all that is Spanish, hating
all that is American, and they are sailing over the sea to stir up
the Cubans and eventually to stir up Washington. Cuyo Baez will show
his mutilated body to many, and whether he was actually tortured by
Anglo-Saxon or by one of Spanish blood, he inevitably will rouse
passion and malice against the starry banner of the North.
The ship glides on, leaves Haiti, crosses the Windward Passage, labors
through a long noontide over little waves, and in the afternoon comes
"unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon." And I went up
into the peak of the prow of the ship and it ceased to be on a Cuban
merchant-man. I had raised one of the lost galleons, and behind me were
no moderns but the clamorous, audacious mariners of the first days of
the New World.
The treasure ship drifts westward on a merely dimpled sea, and in the
evening comes to the shelter of Cape Maysi. The sun sets in a lake of
fire, and we traverse shadows of cloudlets instead of waves; and the
shadows are blue and then peacock blue with black circulating lines,
like cobra's eyes, and then blood red, and then red gelatine and then
green. And from where in the mountains the sun made a lake of fire, a
marvelous red brilliance has been enkindled and great black radii shoot
outward across bands of red glowing burning color. It is a dreadful
and grandiose scene, the surface of the sea so calm and yet possessed
of fast-wandering, circulating, wallowing color reflections--the place
of actual sunset meanwhile, far o'er the waves, made gigantic and
romantic by the great black spokes of a wheel that is rolling through
illimitable fires.
And the treasure ship in the enchanted twilight goes on, goes on, with
all the pulse of Castile behind it.
CHAPTER VI
CUBA
1
There must be twenty thousand mendicant venders of lottery tickets in
Cuba, from ragged urchins to reputable graybeards wearing straw hats
and carefully creased trousers. These friars of chance know no shame,
and are more persistent than bluebottles, coming to you five or six
times after having been sent off. They shout the number of their series
and whisk the red sheets in your face, knowing that you have no redress
against them--for they are in a way Government servants, or at least
Government commission agents. Every lottery ticket they sell helps the
national exchequer of the Republic of Cuba. People buy--they have not
the wills to stand out against such persistence. They vaguely hope to
draw a lucky number--though they may have deep doubts of the honesty of
the Administration.
But the quickest way to get rid of a lottery vender is to cry in a loud
voice: "_These are no good; these draw no prizes._" That scares them.
It is easy to buy a ticket for a lottery that has already been drawn.
Besides that, there are forgeries and "unlucky numbers."
If there are twenty thousand ticket venders there must be fifty
thousand bootblacks on the island. Such a passion for blacking your
boots! And then as many beggars. There are beggars of all ages, and as
plentiful as in Moscow, and more active than the Russians. From the
moment I arrived in Cuba, away in the east at Santiago, I was besieged
with people wanting money. It was astonishing. I was sailing to a dream
island, to "the little lazy isle where the trumpet orchids blow," to a
new world, to El Dorado, the golden one, to a verdant tropic land where
God and the sun and the benevolent, ever-freshening trade wind made
work almost unnecessary and poverty impossible--Cuba, called the Pearl
of the Antilles. And instead, I found a land made ugly and a people
destitute and desperate.
At the dock in Santiago de Cuba, torn to this side and to that by the
clamorous ragamuffins who wanted to carry my knapsack, and hung on to
by beggars and lottery venders at the same time, I plunged through
dusty and filthy streets to the Plaza of this breathless commercialized
city of which Cortes was first Mayor. Here stand two grandiose hotels,
one of them called the Hotel Venus, surely an amusing name for would-be
respectability. Both hotels are expensive. No provincialism of price
holds here--dinner costs you five dollars.
Cuba has a southern coast reminding one of the southern coast of
England where Santiago would be Southampton. Santiago is of great
strategic importance to the island, and its capitulation on July 17,
1898, ended the war with Spain. This southern coast faces Jamaica,
from which it is distant less than two hundred miles. Habana on the
northern coast is over five hundred miles distant and is reached
by a tenuous, rickety, narrow-gauge railway. It may be said that
this railway keeps to the worst of the island all the way--but that
is because the railroad is naturally the artery of cane transport.
Camaguey, about two hundred miles north-west of Santiago is the center
of an immense sugar-planting area, of which the ox teams drawing
cane trucks on caterpillar wheels through deep soft earth are most
characteristic. The sinister-looking progress of war "tanks" along the
alleys of the sugar plantations has a strange effect. Camaguey itself
is such that no educated person would live there except for a short
while, to make money. When you continue your journey to Santa Clara
there is a good deal of improvement and more of the Spanish dignity
of living. Habana, of course, is a well-shod city of pleasure of
remarkable brilliance. Habana does not feel to be Cuba. It is the Coney
Island of Key West, Florida.
2
Of course it is possible to see Cuba in a more pleasant light. There
is much glamour over Cuba if you half close your eyes. It is an ideal
place for a wicked elopement. The hero of the Hergesheimer novel
thither resorts. It is certainly the place for a good cigar. Cuba
has become a sportsman's island, the place _par excellence_ where an
American can get a drink. The characteristic sound of the towns is the
rattle of ice in the inverted metal tumblers where the cocktail is
coming to birth. The cocktail and the cigar are the first emblems of
Habana. Then comes the Cuban girl _sans peur_, and then the gamblers'
dice. Horse racing and boxing and cockfighting and betting and gambling
are tremendous human interests--stronger in the Cuban than in the
visiting American. Even the ice-cream venders carry dice boxes on their
barrows and will "shake you for one" as soon as sell you straight.
You can go back and forth to Florida, not like Ponce de Leon, but by
airplane in an hour or so. You read in the Habana _News_ how over at
Tampa the Floridians are trying to enforce even the blue law which
makes the blues compulsory on Sundays, and you realize what a contrast
the Cuban sporting resort affords.
Among many places of pleasure one stands out in my experience as both
novel and fascinating, and that is the Galatea Lawn Tennis Club, on the
Prado. Here is played all the evening and until late into the night a
game of human roulette.
Gay lights adorn a pleasantly painted wooden structure which possesses
a doorway but no windows, and a rapturous thundering Cuban band clamors
from the interior; men stroll in and out all the time as if it were a
drinking saloon, but there is nothing outside to indicate the nature of
the entertainment. "Probably a cabaret with screened rooms and suppers
and dancing girls," you surmise. But once inside you are aware that it
is nothing of the kind.
Instead, behold a closed asphalt tennis court and six beautiful girls
in white with racquets. They play, and on all four sides in tiers
and in the gallery above are men gloating upon the game. There is the
greatest animation. Up on its perch rattles the band. Down below, at a
series of counters, men are constantly buying tickets and going back to
their seats. Negroes are going about collecting money and talking to
men in the audience. The girls slash the balls, the bells on the top
of the net tinkle, the men cheer. And there does not appear to be one
woman among the spectators--they are all men. I turned to an American
and asked what was the interest. Was it a tennis tournament?
He laughed.
"It's a betting camp; that's all there is to it," he replied.
I took a seat.
The girls were named Margot, Justine, Esther, Norma, Tosca, Nena, and
their names in bright-colored letters gleamed on the scoring board.
Before each girl's name was a square of color to indicate her favor,
and this corresponded to the color of the ribbon girdle which each girl
wore on her white dress. Margot was blue, Justine was white, Esther was
red, Norma was green, Tosca was yellow, and Nena was brown.
Chalked on a panel of slate after each girl's name was the number of
dollars and cents laid on her winning. And electric star lights showed
the score, point by point.
I at once chose Margot as my favorite, not because of her play but
because of her style, her form, her glittering dark face. I imagine
most newcomers did the same. For I soon realized that though she did
not win she was a rapturous favorite of the men, who applauded every
good stroke she made and were almost ready to leap over the nets with
excitement when she was leading.
It was not the ordinary game of tennis, but one in which directly you
lost a point you returned to your seat and gave way to the next in
turn. The games were singles. Six points was the game. The scorer was
mounted at a table on which were electric buttons, and when a girl won
a point he pressed the corresponding button on the table and a star
light appeared opposite her name on the scoring board.
All the girls played well, but there was no winning or losing on
service. The ball had to be bounced first and then struck over the net
for the service. This precluded fast skidding services. After that the
play was quick and clever and very fascinating, for each girl had a
different style of play. And not one was so much better that you could
be sure she would not at last miss a stroke. Frequently three of the
girls would reach four points, and once all six stood level at four,
and three got to five before steady little Norma captured the sixth and
took all the dollars which had been bet on the others and shared them
with those who had bet on her.
It seemed to me there was a greater thrill and allurement than at a
roulette table. For the figures of chance were not of ivory, but living
and human. If you wished strongly enough you might make them win. But
what of the girls themselves in this camp of betting men--they were
always expressionless toward them. That was part of the fascination.
No girl showed by her face that she knew any one of them or was
interested in anything else but the game. And they never seem to tire,
and the courts are never empty and two girls are always playing. And
the drums and horns of the band are clashing, and the Negro bookies are
collecting the bets. Each man chooses his own little white goddess to
win--six Galateas and six hundred Pygmalions, the Galatea Lawn Tennis
Club.
3
Cuba is the largest and the richest of the West India islands, and has
attracted more colonists, more financial capital, and more attention
than the rest. It must be thought, however, that the Spaniards from
the first were ill-fitted to possess it. For from the time of the
crafty and mean Velasquez, who wrought for the ruin of Cortes, until
the Spanish-American war it is a pitiful history. Since that war the
history of Cuba has had a problematical aspect.
In 1898 the United States made war on Spain to free Cuba and give
her independence, not perhaps entirely grasping the fact that the
disorders of Cuba were as much due to bad Cuban citizens as to bad
Spanish governors. This, however, became rapidly clear to soldiers
and administrators, and Cuba has never been given complete liberty
and independence. Now and then, for a year or so, she has been given
freedom on a string, but that is all.
American troops occupied the island till 1902 and began the great
task of "cleaning it up." General Leonard Wood made his mark there
as Governor. The measure of his efficiency is the measure of his
unpopularity. There was a rumor this summer that he was returning, and
the newspapers almost came out with black edges. But he eliminated a
great deal of crime and also of disease during his régime.
In 1900 America prepared a constitution for Cuba, and chose the Cubans
who were to adopt it. The president was to be chosen by an electoral
college, the Senate by electoral colleges, and only the Congress by
direct personal vote. In this way much scope was left to an outside
power controlling the presidency. The constitution was adopted in 1900,
and next year the famous Platt amendment was dictated by the United
States and signed by the Cuban government.
The chief point of the amendment was that it forbade Cuba to enter
into alliance or make treaty with any foreign power if thereby her
independence were impaired; it granted to the United States certain
coaling stations on the island; and it reserved to the United States
the right to intervene in Cuban affairs at any time to protect life or
property.
This proved almost too much even for the pocket politicians of Cuba,
but they were unable to obtain any modification of the terms. A
favorable president negotiated a strong commercial treaty in 1903 but
the terms of the Platt amendment had caused a dissentient movement
which it was difficult to quell. The parties took to arms and the
pro-American president was forced to resign.
The constitution therefore had to be suspended. From 1906 to 1908 the
island was occupied by the United States army. Charles Magoon became
governor of Cuba.
Then the Cubans were given another chance, and in 1909 the Liberal,
Miguel Gomez, became president and the army was withdrawn. But almost
at once Gomez' political following broke up, half of it demanding the
withdrawal of the Platt amendment. There was much irregular fighting,
the United States army was held in readiness, and American political
influence was thrown on to the side of the Cuban Conservatives. Their
candidate for presidency was satisfactory and was elected in 1912.
The control of the country continued, with political storms. Cuba
entered the World War with the United States, voted a considerable
sum of money for it, and conscripted its adult male population. By
Christmas, 1918, if the war had lasted so long, there would have been a
Cuban army in the field. The Armistice was fortunate for Cuba.
After the war sugar maintained a high price, but the Cubans hoarded
their excellent crop and tried to hold up the world for a fortune.
But ignorance of world prices, tendencies, and powers of recuperation
misled the people. Even Americans failed to grasp the facts, and
thought prices could be kept up. In 1919 came the crash, when Cuba was
forced to sell her sugar at a peace-time price. The United States in
control declared a moratorium (January, 1920), and the poverty-stricken
country became blockaded by unsaleable American goods. Sixty million
dollars of American merchandise poured into Cuba, but the consignees,
not being able to meet the price, refused to accept delivery. That
merchandise in large quantity still choked the warehouses of the chief
ports in 1922. It has now been compulsorily evacuated and much of it is
to be seen in shops offered at a price which suggests bankrupt stock.
So at least in March, 1923, when I visited Habana again.
The planters and the middlemen were badly hit but, as ever, the chief
weight of the blow fell upon the laboring masses. Hence the poverty
and misery of Cuba enduring in 1923 despite a new rise in the price
of sugar. As regards the political situation, it is controlled by an
American General and a council of financial experts. Budget-estimates
of Cuba have to be initialed by the United States before they may be
passed. The United States government chooses who shall be president and
then makes sure that he is elected.
"Anyhow, our coming has done them all a lot of good," says an American
planter. "You should have seen the place before we came."
"Yes," said I. "That is what I am trying to see."
"But the Cuban," says a banker, "is a man you can do nothing with. He's
as crooked as a dog's hind leg."
"Look at them!" says another. "Thugs; rolling necks, low and brutal
brows, searing eyes that dry up any dew they pass over; vicious to
the last degree, shady, underhand, corrupt. They can't govern their
country. They murder one another on the least pretext. All of them
carry guns and knives."
There lies the way to an understanding of the predicament of the
Cubans and of the peoples of Latin America. Their ways are essentially
distasteful to the Anglo-Saxon. The blond Northerner feels a genuine
instinctive moral mandate to "clean up" these peoples. His conscience
is invulnerable--for his spoliatory business self is cased in the chain
mail of the moral mandate.
Though the Cuban is overtaxed and also smitten with the lottery
plague, the Government is ever in financial distress. Why? Not only
because of the failures of the markets but because the Treasury leaks
in many directions, and the republic will not live on its income, and
cannot find enough integrity to cover its activities. It is capable of
buying for three quarter of a million dollars the Santa Clara convent
which cost a quarter of a million a few months before governmental
purchase. State thrift is unknown. Public offices are means of personal
enrichment. The Government will constantly seek aid from America,
mortgaging its liberty to get it, year by year ever necessitating
the presence of American authority at Habana and upon occasion the
persuasive gleam of the bayonet.
Cuba is a protectorate.
BOOK III
NEW MEXICO
CHAPTER VII
AT SANTA FE
Judging the tropics in midsummer to be too tiring, I decided to
postpone our journey to Panama and Mexico until autumn and winter.
Balboa climbed that peak in Darien in September. That should be my
month for going there. So we went, for the rest of the summer, to
_La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe_, away in the Southern Rockies upon the
borderland of Mexico. That was no small journey from Habana--two days
in a fruit boat to New Orleans, then in a Gulf train to Houston and San
Antonio, half across the Texan desert to a point nearer the Pacific
than the Atlantic--burning El Paso where the street asphalt hisses
when the water cart comes round. Then up country to Albuquerque, of
which name, at least, there used to be Spanish dukes, the Dukes of
Albuquerque. Then sixty miles through scrub and sand to Santa Fe which
is some seven thousand feet up--about as high as Mexico City, though
nothing like so verdant a place.
Here we hired a mud house, to be polite, "adobe built" from the
Mexicans; three cool spacious rooms, a porch, a "corral." We bought
two horses, Billy and Buckskin, to whom I must say we became much
attached, so that it was a pity when the time came, after some months,
to part with them. I bought my Billy from a cowboy for thirty dollars.
"Shorty," who sold him to me, did not seem to think the transaction
complete till sealed with a drink. He had in a saddle pocket of
the horse he was riding a stout bottle of whisky, and, giving me a
ferocious wink he turned his horse into a lane and poured into a little
tin can a ration of what Uncle Sam forbids.
"I think he'll be a useful pony when he has had corn for a month," said
I.
"He's all right," said Shorty, wiping his lips. "You carnt kill 'im."
That turned out to be true, as far as I could judge. Billy proved to be
somewhat of an immortal. The adventures we had with these horses would
make a book in themselves.
One thing was rather disappointing; New Mexico is not such a horse
country as it was. Cross the border into Mexico proper, and every
man except the Tarahumare Indians and the lowest of the peons is
mounted. But on the American side Ford is surely conquering. It is more
respectable to have a car than a horse. The cowboys and the Mexicans
ride to their work, but pleasure is identified not with the horse, but
with a car. The cowgirl is almost extinct, and the only women riders
you see are visitors. In the Plaza at Santa Fe there is no longer any
place to tie up a horse. Motors hold all the space. You have to seek
out waste places in or about town, or else take the risk of tying to a
telegraph pole in the midst of the traffic. Billy nearly pulled down
several telegraph poles, and actually on one occasion broke his stout
leather reins.
Outside the city horsemen are common enough, cowboys and Mexican
farmers, and occasional mounted parties of polite Americans with hired
horses and guides.
Santa Fe is, or was, the home of an artistic and literary colony. It
is a health resort for people with lung disease, and it possesses an
excellently well equipped sanatorium. A large number of residents are
under doctor's orders. The driest air in America and a never failing
morning sun makes Santa Fe ideal for consumptives. There have been many
complete cures effected. The development of the place as a literary
colony started no doubt with the coming there for her health of
Alice Corbin from Chicago, one of the protagonists of the New Poetry
movement, a sponsor of Lindsay and Sandburg and many others who rose to
fame under the auspices of the _Poetry Magazine_. When she was "ordered
South" poetry moved with her. It was no doubt owing to Vachel Lindsay's
generous enthusiasm that we were tempted to go to Santa Fe. He saw in
the little city in the mountains unbounded possibilities.
So in coming to Santa Fe we not only met the mountains but a number of
writers and artists, amongst them my old acquaintance Witter Bynner
who once diverted five chapters of _Undiscovered Russia_ into verse
which someone else, later, put to music. Bynner had quit the world in
which he was somewhat of a king for a hermit's hut in the desert. Here
we met Elizabeth Sergeant who wrote up life in the neighborhood in
her amusing _Letters from a Mud House_; here as a visitor came William
Allen White. Over the mountains at Taos lived D. H. Lawrence. A visitor
also was Mrs. C. N. Williamson, gay and young despite her weeds and
the score of novels and stories she and her late husband had written.
The artists were as numerous, if more difficult to place, being rather
jealous of one another. My favorite question was: "Who do you think
is the greatest artist in Santa Fe?" But I never could get an answer
beyond a faint blush and a slight personal embarrassment.
At seven thousand feet, however, literary and artistic people are apt
to be very nervous, and those of poor health painfully so. There was
more pleasure to be had riding in the hills than at the afternoon
"teas" which were always being arranged. At these some beautifully
gowned millionaire's wife "poured," the young men simpered in their
well-ironed, ready-made clothes, the flappers, all curled and tinted,
were like wax works, and middle-aged artists with long hair sat in
corners musing on life like old frumps at a ball--very hard on them.
To one of these gatherings a literary man and his wife came riding in
one day. They walked in in sporting attire and the wife looked very
striking in a gay white jumper and riding breeches.
I got into trouble at Santa Fe being supposed to have said it was "a
shabby little town." Ladies whispered the blasphemy to one another at
tea. I am to be remembered by that phrase. But in truth I think it a
wonderful place and a wonderful district; something quite novel and
fresh in American life. The cowboys, the Indians, and the Mexicans,
make it very interesting. Its sun and air, its mountains, its horses,
give it a marvelous possibility. The shabbiness lies in certain little
things, such as the mean commercialism of the shops and the absence
of a popular market for dairy products, fruit and vegetables. This
is an Americanization of life. Every city of any size in Mexico has
its popular market which furnishes fresh food at a cheap price. But
_La Ciudad Real de Santa Fe_ lives on canned milk, canned tomatoes,
dried fruit, storage meat, coffee ground years ago in Chicago, eggs of
uncertain origin and age. Fruit harvests fall to the ground and rot
because they are plenty and the stores do not want the price reduced.
There is something artificial and unpleasant in living in New Mexico
on rations from Chicago. It militates against simple living, and it
should be of the essence of a literary colony in the mountains to live
simply. It raises a problem for Americans--how is one to escape from
the American standardization of life?
Albuquerque, sixty miles away and many times larger, is even more
artificial and standardized. Possibly El Paso on the frontier more
so still. El Paso is like Kansas City in small, and that is the more
remarkable as El Paso is as much in the desert as Luxor in Egypt or
Merv in Turkestan; perhaps more so than Merv, for the Rio Grande is not
to be compared to the Oxus River.
It prompts the thought that if America ever extended her territory
to Chihuahua, the next large city in Mexico going southward, then
Chihuahua also would become in a short time a replica of a hundred
cities in the North. There might then be said of Chihuahua what Carl
Sandburg said of Kalamazoo--
Kalamazoo, you ain't in a class by yourself;
I seen you before in a lot of places.
If you are nuts America is nuts.
However, at Santa Fe my wife and I lived a free and happy life in our
house of mud, and enjoyed the wild West, the "last West" as it has
been happily called, to the full. It is all pine scrub and sand for
another thousand feet up, loose sand and bowlders which have, however,
no terrors for the horses. Billy and Buck are surefooted as goats and
can be ridden up steep banks which English horses would merely regard
as walls. But neither horse will jump anything. After a thousand feet
you enter a region of tall pines and firs, and five hundred feet later
you reach aspens, grass, wild flowers, wild fruits. Most of the little
rain that falls seems to benefit the upper mountain region. Santa Fe
itself is in constant danger of drought. Water is very freely supplied
by the Water Company and the dwellers in the many villas let the hose
play on their lawns all day and all night, till suddenly there is a
warning note, the hose ceases, and the lawns wilt. There is perhaps too
much waste of the water of the little Santa Fe river on which Santa
Fe's reputation as an oasis depends. In a state of nature very few wild
flowers bloom down below. But in June and early July, like wild roses,
the cactus blossoms everywhere and its red flowers delight the eye.
The eyes crave and thirst for flowers and greenery.
A feature of the country is the _arroyo_ or dried-out river channel,
dead, stony, and sandy, which wanders along in an irregular course
as if it had once held a fair stream. Many of these have never known
living water. The river they represent is flowing underneath the sand,
and the channel is not truly a riverbed but a subsidence. In these
cases no grass will grow, there is not the slightest pasture, the only
green thing that flourishes is a deep-rooted yellow flowering weed of
the desert, a sort of sage brush, called locally _chimesa_. Riding
downward to the Rio Grande valley, the view opens grandly upon wide
sweeping desert country bounded by strange, wind-carved pyramids of
rock and little mountains wrought into fantastic shape. Vachel Lindsay,
who like many others deplores the name of the State--New Mexico--wanted
to call it "New Arabia" or "New Egypt" because of its natural pyramids,
its prehistoric ruins, its hieroglyphics and the sacred dances of the
Indians. But he felt also that it was first of all "Cowboy country"--it
was, or had become, America, and it is difficult to confound the new
with the old.
We met in Santa Fe Jack Thorp, sometimes called the Cowboy Poet,
because of his collection of cowboys' songs, and for several songs he
wrote himself--but a substantial man, bred with, and always living
with, horses and full of lore of the Border. It is no doubt due in part
to him that we went to the Cowboys' Reunion at Las Vegas which I here
describe.
CHAPTER VIII
COWBOYS
When Thorp took horses up to pasture we sometimes went also. That meant
a ten-mile ride up into the greener heights of the mountains, the
leaving of the horses in a roughly wired inclosure, a picnic lunch,
and then a ten-mile ride back in the evening. On these occasions Jack
would be in old weather-beaten _chaparreras_ (leg aprons of leather)
and there would be a ready coil of rope on the horn of his saddle. Five
or six loose horses would be driven ahead of us, and as like as not a
mare and foal. It was very pleasant, especially in the early morning.
Mrs. Thorp accompanied us, a clever, smiling, Irish woman, nicknamed
generally "Blarney." She added greatly to the general good humor, and
would say with an expression of much mirth, as we sallied all together
into some rough and bowlder-strewn defile--"Here we go, the last of
Teddy's bunch!"
Apparently Jack in his earlier days had known Roosevelt, played polo
with him, or it may be, sold him polo ponies. The great Theodore, New
Yorker as he was, made a great impression on the minds of the cowboys.
And again I suppose his make-up of cowboy and rough rider fired the
imagination of the East. You still have to be something of a cowboy to
be a real leader in America. Curious that the Republican President
should masquerade as one of the Wild West?
A great nation entirely composed of clerks is unthinkable. It must
have peasants, or highlanders, or cowboys, behind it; something of
the wild and primitive, something of romance. Therefore it is that
America clings to her conception of a glorious Wild West behind her
drab clerical East. The multitudes of New York men and women gloating
over Emerson Hough's _The Covered Wagon_ at the cinema is forever
characteristic of the East. It must have its real or imaginary covered
wagons in the background as a part of its romance.
Nevertheless the number of cowboys and cattle ranchers has greatly
decreased, driven back by farmers' wire. And the type is tamer than it
was. There are still great herds. You may see the chuck-wagon going
round, and meet many a wild-looking boy riding in full rig-out, but it
is not denied that the old-time color has faded.
Perhaps the last ground of the real cowboy is the Mexican border, hence
Las Vegas Reunion, which eclipses the show at 101 Ranch, Oklahoma,
and is only to be compared with the round-up at Pendleton, Oregon, or
Cheyenne in Wyoming. The spirit of the West still triumphs over the
spirit of the East at Las Vegas, where in one week the "flivver" is
routed by the horse, and no man who is worth his salt is seen wearing a
crease in his trousers.
War whoops and colored silks and silver-studded saddles and goat-wool
_chaparreras_ and daring faces and happy horses make up Las Vegas
during the days of the cowboys' gathering. Here comes Leonard Stroud
on Diamond, and little Buster, aged ten, on Shetland Joe. Here comes
the victor of the bronk riders, Buck Thompson, who will put the fear of
God into Peggy Hopkins and Orphan Boy and Anarchist.
Here comes a cowboy with no legs, yet mounted on a mettlesome black
steed and wearing a scarlet and gold shirt, full as a blouse. He is
a veteran of cowboys. The parade of the cowboys forms up, led by a
man in a dark chestnut shirt, with a belt full of cartridges and
an ivory-mounted revolver sticking out above his hip; with him the
chief judge of the riding and the races, carrying a purple and gold
bannerette. Here comes the brothers Neafus on race horses. Here come a
wonderful miscellany of riders, in turkey-red, in luminous purple, in
unfaded pink and exuberant green; rough-necks with rough hats, hairy
wrists, mighty shoulders and backs, rugged faces, and the sentimental,
guileless eyes of good sportsmen and daring fellows.
There are cowgirls as well as cowboys--trim, modest, light--the wives
and daughters of cowboys. Chief among them is Mayme Stroud, thin,
almost hipless, with a waist like a wedding ring, high brown sombrero
on her head, and hair hidden by voluminous red ribbons falling in big
bows under the broad shadowy brim of her hat.
Idaho Bill brings up the tail of the procession in a ramshackle Ford
car drawn by a horse. He is greatly encumbered by his camping outfit,
and he has in the car with him a black bear which he caught in Mexico
after it had killed his horse and badly bitten him. At least, so he
says, and he will raise his trouser to show you the scars. He has
buffalo horns tied to the radiator of the car; he wears his hair long,
has a green coat and boots of alligator hide. Every year he goes into
Mexico buying outlaw horses. Whenever he hears of a horse no Mexican
can ride, he buys it to bring North for the cowboys. And he drove up
this year a hundred or so of bucking horses. He is a sort of successor
of Cody--a picturesque figure and a fitting living symbol of the
flamboyant spirit of the West.
Some thousands of dollars have been subscribed as prizes for the
cowboys in their noble sports of bronk riding, bull dogging, steer
roping, relay racing, and the rest, and there are also scores of bets
by cowboys on themselves. Curious, is it not, that there are few
Mexican contestants and no Indians? The American cowboys can outride
and outdare all Mexicans, all Indians, and are not afraid of any man or
beast that breathes. As the legend of High Chin Bob narrates, if they
met a lion in the hills, they'd rope him; they'd hold him fast and not
let go of him till they'd dragged the spirit out of him.
"Ride 'em, cowboy!" "Hold 'em, cowboy!" cries one to another as the
wild horses scream with rage and rear and kick and buck and bolt with
the laughing boys on their backs.
Riding wild horses is the favorite sport of the cowboys, and the
untamed horse is a fearsome and beautiful beast. And he is not ill
treated. There is a great deal about the inclosure which reminds one
of the bull ring, but not its cruelty. The men take a chance of
death; the animals do not. In the bronk-riding competition the horse
is beguiled into a heavily timbered narrow pen where a slip-saddle
and halter are put on him without his knowing it. The rider gets down
gently on to his back from the wooden wall. Then when the president
gives the word "Turn him out!" a door swings free and out plunges the
horse. The cowboy beats him to the one side and to the other with his
felt hat, and spurs him forward, and the horse behaves like a mad
dromedary, makes double humps of his back, leaps right in air, and
turns about and about. When the cowboy has been on for one minute the
man in the brown shirt fires his revolver in the air and five or six
cowboys race to the rider to rescue him from the bolting, careening
horse. This is often the most exciting part of the event. It may
develop into a terrific race. Sometimes, before the rider can be lifted
from the wild horse to another cowboy's horse, or safely dismounted,
the bronco has crashed right through the wooden inclosure. That was
what happened to Buck Thompson, on Orphan Boy, and the wild horse got
rid of him on the fence as it pounded right through it.
The little town of Las Vegas, meaning The Meadows, was crowded with
visitors, some of them of an outlandish type that seldom strays from
home. One dame in a restaurant, dressed in the style of the early
nineties, asked us what part we came from. When I said "England" she
turned to her husband with--
"Lord's sake, what do you know about that?"
Then she turned to me and asked--
"Did you come all the way by car?"
The Secretary of the Reunion undertook to house most people who
came, and he sat at a desk with a telephone and kept the town awake
asking all and sundry for hospitality for visitors. This secretary, I
discovered afterwards, was a poet.
My wife and I were happily accommodated in a house where beside
ourselves were three very eager cowboys, and in the corral at the
back were their horses. We naturally were deeply interested in their
fortunes. The first day was not so good for them, but on the second
morning with the roping and bull dogging they shone. I think all three
won prizes.
I was very eager to see the bull dogging, which is a unique western
sport. Jack Thorp and his wife and the artist Penhallow Henderson,
who were with us at the round-up, were glowing in their pride in it,
and told some amusing stories in connection with it. The cowboys,
when they joined the Army, commonly said they were off to "bull dog
the Kaiser." Bull dogging started in Texas, and a Negro named Pickett
is sometimes reputed as the originator of the sport. Pickett one day
entered the bull ring at Juarez on the other side of the Mexican line
and interrupted a bull fight by bull dogging the bull.
Juarez is on the other side of the Rio Grande from El Paso. Americans
go back and forth all the while, and on Sundays many are not averse to
seeing a bull fight there. It is a rough-and-tumble city; the bull ring
is just a stone amphitheater.
One Sunday some years ago Pickett bull dogged the bull. He was at the
entrance to the ring with his horse, and he had had enough to drink.
A number of white cowboys, Texans, were about him, encouraging him,
and they wagered him to ride into the ring in the midst of the fight.
Then the humorous and loquacious Pickett, who was a famous character,
spurred his horse across the arena, got the bull a-running, and then,
overtaking him at a gallop, leapt from his saddle on to the bull's
horns. The impetus of the gallop he imparted to his wrists as he
twisted the horns and laid the fierce animal with a thud flat on his
flanks on the arena sand--to the uproarious cheers of the Americans
present and the prolonged, angry hisses of the Mexicans.
Well, that is bull dogging, the Wild West's substitute sport for the
Spanish _corrida_. I watched it and steer riding for hours in the
cattle ring of the cowboys, and I suppose it would be difficult to find
a sport with a greater thrill in it--to see a cowboy on a fine horse
going full tilt after a frightened steer that has got the start of
him--and how these clumsy animals can go it when once they think they
are being chased!--neck to neck, horse and bullock, dark mane and long
horn, dirt splashing upward as they go, cowboys looking on and laughing
and shouting, "Let go that horse--on'm, cowboy!" and then the leap in
air and the rider clutching the brown bovine neck or actually sitting
with one thigh across a madly plunging horn, and the bullock going on
with him, trailing him, wiping the ground with him for fifty yards or
more, if the cowboy has not been able to impart the momentum of the
galloping horse to the twist which he gives to the horns to bring the
animal down.
Each rider is timed, and the one who performs the feat in the shortest
time wins the prize. I saw it done in fifteen seconds--a turning over
of the bull with the rapidity of a pistol shot; the leap from the horse
and twist of horns and thud all consecutive. I saw it also done in two
minutes and thirty seconds, where the bull dogger, holding on to the
horns yet lying full length ahead of the bull, was rushed part way
round the arena like a toboggan.
And besides this risky thrilling fun there was steer riding, which is
also what might be called a part substitute for a bull fight. Riding
at full pace on a rushing steer is a violent sport--clown's fun after
the bull dogging. The bullocks are greatly enraged at being ridden, and
they flounder and blunder and toss imaginary bundles in air and glare
out of their eyes like searchlights while the wild boy above, with
chaps on his legs, waves his sombrero in air and gives forth Indian war
whoops all the while.
The great Western crowd laughs, so do the cowboys, so do the judges,
and even the many horses ranged on all sides seem to look on with
mirth. It hardly feels like this century--one thinks of medieval
jollity, but comparisons are misleading. Such fun is of all time. The
Athenians would have loved it. And bull dogging would have been a
greater diversion in the Roman Coliseum than the Christians and the
lions.
After the bull dogging there was roping of wild horses, saddling them
and riding them. The horses were let loose in the arena and each
cowboy had to catch his. As these had never been broken the excitement
can be imagined, excitement of the horses, of the would-be riders,
and of the crowd looking on. It was fully twenty minutes before even
one cowboy had saddled and bridled a horse--and he could not make the
animal go round the course.
Then we had a chuck-wagon race, wagons blundering round the course to
given points where they had to stop, horses had to be taken out of
shafts and put in imaginary corrals, rear flap of wagon to be let down,
a fire lit on the ground and a pot of coffee boiled.
Then a Roman race and a relay race. And Idaho Bill in his alligator
hide boots chewed his cigar all the while as if to him all the horses
belonged, and the president of the reunion galloped from point to point
of the arena judging the competitors in each race. And all the while a
brass band played "I'm Nobody's Darling" and kindred airs.
In the evenings after all these doings there were cowboy dances and a
rolling up and down Las Vegas' streets of a vaunting, leather-lined
crowd. Some still rode about on their horses, but most had taken their
steeds to their "corrals" and thrown them out their armfuls of green
alfalfa for the night. The legless cowboy in his crimson shirt still
rode his ebony horse and had evidently found liquor, for he rode into
the main entrance of Las Vegas' only fine hotel, clattered round the
stone hall and stood with his horse in the doorway of the main dining
room, asking in a stentorian voice for a roast beef sandwich. The
pallor in the faces of some Easterners who had "stopped off" on the
way to California was most apparent. "Why don't they phone the police?"
said one old man, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.
But the cowboy kept quite calm and, unloosing his rope, made a pass to
rope the old man and roped a young girl with chestnut hair instead. She
laughed, but was not a little alarmed, so the cowboy unloosed her and
lassoed the cashier at the desk instead, and then the hotel manager.
Then they brought him his beef sandwich, and with a splutter of hoofs
he rode out of the hotel into the gay streets again.
CHAPTER IX
INDIANS
The story of the Indians in America is the story of the weak in the
presence of the strong. Despite the ideals which reign in capitals
and cultural centers it is always the same with the main body of the
human race--the strong may pity the weak but they will not forbear
to use the advantage of their strength. There is little to choose
between Spaniards and English. There is little to choose between any
of the races; Belgians in the Congo, Portuguese in Brazil, Russians
in Turkestan; they have dispossessed, enslaved, expelled, destroyed,
without a mist upon their conscience. And it is difficult to think that
mankind has improved. If a new world were discovered to-day, if the
ocean delivered up a new continent, the first thought would be--_Is
there gold there?_ If we found people living on it, specimens would
be brought to be shown to prime ministers and exhibited in places of
amusement. And there would be a rush to that new world of gold seekers,
pirates, adventurers, and Imperial administrators.
So it may be pardoned if at this stage in American history one refuses
to wax indignant over how Spaniards and Anglo-Saxon forefathers of
present Americans behaved toward the natural possessors of the soil.
The justification for the rapine of America--or at least of North
America--is that it has been made into a "going concern." We believe in
our curious self-complacence that an American humanity with factories,
gilded by millionaires and mighty banks, towering heavenward in mighty
cities, is a greater glory to God than the life of Hiawatha and his
friends. We must confess that it seems so, and it is difficult to hear
the ancient whisper--_Where is thy brother Abel?_
The Indians, however, are not forgotten. They are more remembered now
that they are few. There comes a moment when the old race is mostly
underground, or tucked safely away in wildernesses, remote from
human ken, that the new race of conquerors becomes sentimental. It
has destroyed all that it adored, and now it adores all that it has
destroyed. It is so now in the United States, where the Indians have
become the pets of tourists and the theme of poets.
You have to travel far to meet the Indians, so the railway companies
have used the Indian as an advertisement, not only pictured but living.
For at Las Vegas station or at Albuquerque, and many others, do you
not see station Indians all bedizened, walking up and down before the
delighted traveler's eyes. The Indian has become part of the romance of
far travel.
The United States have left their own primitive past behind, and
emerged from the mud and the smells and the roughness of pioneer days.
All America treads paved sidewalks. All America goes in cars. All
America is in clean linen and good clothes. There is electric light,
sanitation. Baths have become more national than in Russia or Turkey.
America indeed leads civilization and leads it forward. So the distance
between the Indians and the citizens of the United States grows more
and more remarkable. The gap is a sort of Grand Cañon in itself, a
grand cañon in the continuity of human things.
The sentimental interest is therefore greatly intensified by the
spectacular one, the paradoxical one, of one people standing still
whilst all the rest of the world moves on, a people who refuse to budge
from what they were in 1492.
I suppose those Indians were most lucky whose habitat was more remote;
those who were furthest from the capital of New Spain; those who were
furthest from the centers of population in the United States. Probably
the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were in that position. That is why
they have survived so well. The deserts have been their protection.
An acquaintance, buying land near Ramah, New Mexico, found, when he
took over a new estate, that there was behind his ranch-house a whole
village of cliff dwellings. In a like manner when in 1848 America took
over the new territory which was the spoil of the Mexican War she found
she took with it the Pueblo Indians, living more or less untouched,
unmolested, as they had lived for centuries. Remote from Aztec power,
remote from Cortes' power, remote from Spanish power, remote from
the seat of power of the Mexican Empire, now remote also from modern
America and all that America means, the Pueblo Indians are still happy
in their traditional homes, worshipping raingods in the desert, dancing
ceremonial dances, dancing their sorrows and their ecstasies.
I was at the Indian pueblo of San Juan on St. John's Day. The Indians
and the Mexicans were holding a _fiesta_. Broadly beat the sun on
the mountainous deserts, on the wind-carved, pyramidal mountains and
strange rocks, on the sandy waste of the river bed, and on the mud huts
of the Indians.
Such a hubbub! The drums of the Indians are beating, throbbing; the
many feathers of the war bonnets are bobbing over the sombreros of the
dark-suited Mexican crowd which looks on. There is dancing. Let us
climb on to the roofs of the mud huts and look down on it.
The drums that they are beating are shaped like sections of tree
trunks, but adorned with rude swastikas. Indian warriors, all painted
and bedizened and armed, are dancing to the tune of the drum beats,
and beautiful women with long hair hanging down their backs, broad set
faces, slightly lifting feet in white curl-toe boots, are balancing
little feather-topped arrows in each hand.
The war chiefs' dance is a sort of war prance; an arrow-shooting
gesture, a spear-holding gesture! And as they dance they jingle their
belt bells and set earrings and rattles all atinkling. Their long
hair is done up in twin pellicules of fur, and hangs in long tails
over their shoulders--or it is inter-plaited with bright ribbons.
Their faces are painted in various ways. The leading man, carrying
a pink-melon-colored, scythe shaped banner, has black ladders on his
cheeks climbing to his yellow-circled eyes. Another man has a striped
face, stove black alternating with brightest orange; another has yellow
star-rays round his eyes and the ruddiest blood-red over the rest of
his face. One is painted top half yellow, lower half rose-red. Almost
all wear war bonnets, brown or fawn felt hats, or buckskin caps trimmed
with selected black and white feathers. All the feathers are white
tipped except those which have been dipped in the war paint. On one
warrior this headdress is adorned with small circular mirrors the size
of watch lids; they circle his face and gleam in the sun, but they also
continue downward at the bases of the long stream of feathers to his
ankles. For these feathery bonnets, starting as a broad crest to the
brows, finish only short of the ground--and how they dance in the wind
as their owners dance!
All the men carry weapons and shields--spears with bright ribbons,
imitation bayonets, revolvers, pistols, swords, bows and arrows. One,
having on his shield a blood-red star and crescent, slews in the air
with a great curved sword. Several are naked to the middle, but all are
powdered or dabbed with white paint. They have large feminine-looking
breasts, deep-cut navels, smooth skins and no hair. They perspire
profusely, and fan themselves occasionally with feathers. One almost
naked pagan has the stars and stripes for a loin cloth, and prances
about with a sham rifle. Occasionally the seminaked ones seem to obtain
furs from somewhere, and appear with their backs and bellies quite
covered up.
The drummers are older looking men, very stern in their expression.
They know nothing of tradition except its binding force. One of them
has a crown of fresh-cut stems of the cottonwood tree. They beat their
throbbing drum taps. They sing, they chant, they mumble--_mumble,
mumble, dum, dum, dum_--it is hardly a tune but a sensual appeal.
The men do the dance, plunging back and forth; the women throb and
quiver, with their broad-booted feet, and short, broad, brightly
enwrapped bodies, and wide, woodlike faces, and low, broad brows
framed in sharp-cut ebony hair. Their front hair is cut Egyptian-wise,
sphinx-wise, while down to where the waist should be behind hangs a
great cloud of untrimmed waving tresses. They quiver, the men prance.
All the dancers are in fours--the men and the women in alternate files,
thirty men and thirty women.
The men are the fighters; the women serve them with arrows. The men
prance in front of the women; the women are protected by them. The
women scarcely change their positions the whole time, but the men
diagonalize between files and prance forward in front of them, lifting
high their weapons and emitting curious little cries and yelps. As they
kill in the ritual they give the deathcry of the victims.
They dance six long dances, and after each, in a processional
bacchanalia, leave the scene of the dance, and with splendor of waving
color, file upward on ladders on to the roofs of the houses and
disappear through holes in the roof into the two kivas, or council
chambers of the men and of the women.
It is also a Mexican holiday, and near by goes a dilapidated
"merry-go-round," worked by hand by two men, with the wretchedest
burble of music, a torn canvas roof, and a flag. Somewhere, also, in
the background, a cowboy is riding a bucking bronco while dark-eyed
Mexican youth looks on.
But the mud huts of the Indians and the freshly made, green-branched
street shrines of St. John and the Madonna are the real background
of the _fiesta_. The last dance of the afternoon is danced bowingly
and worshipfully into a green alcove, where stands a little silver
and white Virgin, and an old Mexican is sitting beside her, playing
dreamily on a violin. In one respect at least the Indians are not as
they were. They have become Catholics. I am told that is merely a
polite acquiescence on their part, and though with their faces they bow
to the Madonna their hearts know her not.
In the course of the summer we rode to seven or eight Indian villages;
sometimes to dances, sometimes just to see the villages themselves
and the normal way of life in them. And we were much besought to buy
turquoise rings and bracelets and brightly woven saddle blankets and
rugs. Some visitors to Santa Fe bought great quantities of these
things, and one of the poets disported five or six large silver and
turquoise rings on his fingers and had more still in a drawer. Nearly
all the ladies of Santa Fe had waist belts adorned with silver conches.
The Indians work the same turquoise mines which have been theirs
immemorially, and they mine also silver, though I think not a little of
their silverware is now derived from molten dollars. Paper money seems
always inacceptable to the Indians. So one always carries a weight of
silver in one's pockets when traveling in these parts.
Each pueblo is a community and lives a communal life. Their land is
held in common, and is inalienable. I believe their title derives from
the King of Spain, legalized by the Mexican Republic and recognized by
the United States when they conquered the country. Much of the best
land, however, has been stolen from them. There are many squatters,
both English- and Spanish-speaking. In many places their water has
been diverted, and they have been left stranded on yellow sands.
They have never been able to defend themselves in civilized courts,
being incapable of grasping the procedure--and they have suffered
accordingly. All this summer and autumn there raged a campaign fostered
by the artists and literary colony in Santa Fe, for the protection of
the Indians and the institution of new works of irrigation to give them
back their lost water. Thanks to this campaign a spoliatory measure
which passed the United States Senate, commonly called the "Bursum
Bill," was recalled. The object of this Bill has been chiefly to give a
legal title to the squatters. There is a good deal of hope that, having
frustrated the passing of this bill, the Indian Committee of Santa
Fe will have been able to introduce into Congress a highly practical
measure which at the same time would help and protect the Indians,
benefit the squatters, and pay for itself. This is a bill for new
irrigation works and compensatory land grants to the Indians.
The great problem of living is that of water, and more than half the
Indian dances are prayers to a nature god for rain. The description
which I give here of our ride to Santo Domingo pueblo to their greatest
festival may give some suggestion of the desert and the Indians praying
for rain.
We rode down from the mountains with their green pastures to the
parched valleys and plateaus, and were told irrigation had ceased for
want of water. The river beds and channels and dykes were yellow and
dry and scorching. Rivers, instead of broadening out, grew less as they
flowed--attenuated. They became trickles, they became the mere wetness
of the tongue in the mouth, they disappeared.
Even the cactus has withered. The roselike cactus blossoms of the
higher mountains are no more. The fresh, green, spiny stalks are brown
and frightful in death. There is no grass for the horses, and the only
green things on the waste are rank, poisonous, deep-rooted weeds which
draw their sustenance from the moisture which is far below.
The bones of dead cattle tell a melancholy tale of thirst. Woe to the
herd of the cowboys who do not know where water is to be found. They
are driving their herds over vast distances--from California into Texas
or beyond; they are taking their time, feeding well as they go. Or
they ought to be feeding well. And the cowboy's mind-map of the world
is one of hidden springs and constant pastures. So they have driven the
herds upwards, even though that be out of their way. For there is no
water or pasture below.
Our horses would fain return. When we rest them at noon they trail
their reins after them and start homeward and are not easily captured.
We have found alkali water in the depths of an _arroyo_. The horses try
to drink it but lap up bitter sand instead. They quit trying to drink
it and lie down on it instead and try to roll in it.
We climb black, boulder-strewn cliffs and look painfully once more at
the bleached bones of cattle. We walk our horses all the afternoon over
a sun-blazing prairie toward a horizon that seems infinitely removed.
And we see in the distance the bright, gleaming wheel of a water
windmill, and the wheel is surely revolving. Though not our way, it
means water, and we will go to it.
We are soon on a cow trail, a goat trail, a human trail--all making for
the windmill. How gayly the wheel flashes in the sunlight. It is truly
a delight--a token of happiness. But, alas, when we get to it we find
the cisterns and the troughs all empty. The wheel is revolving, but
it is drawing forth no water. All is desolate. We dismount and sit on
the wall of the concrete reservoir, and the horses wonder why they are
there.
But up above us revolves the wheel, once descried afar, now over our
very heads and actual. And it cries as it revolves:
No waw ... ter--Hell!
Creak, cranger--
He ... ll,
No waw ... ter--
And all strewn around on the ground are discarded bottles and cans, and
a cross of new wood marks somebody's grave.
"No waw ... ter!" Well, on to the horses again. We'll be on the great
Rio to-morrow, far away, low down below this sun-cursed moor. The
horses will drink deep when we get there. And we shall join the Indians
who on the day of St. Dominic are going to intercede and dance for rain.
On the evening of the second day we rode into the mud-hut settlement of
the Indians of Santo Domingo and admired their large new church with
its external fresco of horses. The horse came to the Indians at the
same time as the Cross, and perhaps to them is as holy.
We rode along the broad street, three times as broad as New York's
Broadway, and hoof-marked and wheel-marked from wall to wall. The
squaws were ascending and descending ladders to go in or come out
at the doors which they have in their roofs. On strings along their
roof-taps chunks of meat were dessicating in the sunlight. But in front
of many houses were portals of green branches and boughs brought up
from the woods along the bank of the river.
The Indians neither saluted us nor welcomed us. But their dogs barked
at us and we passed on--away through their cornfields down to the Rio
Grande-the great river. And there we camped, where the rapid flood
rolls down from the Rockies, red with the color of Colorado.
It was the eve of the festival of St. Dominic. Indians in their covered
wagons were coming from all parts--Jemez Indians, Tesuque Indians,
Navajos ... Indians also on horseback, galloping along the opposite
bank of the river and plunging their horses to the ford. All night
long the moon among her clouds looked kindly down upon the river
and listened, as it were, to the galloping of the horsemen and the
crunching of the wheels of the wagons on the valley sand.
Indians encamped in the valley and let loose their horses, built fires
beside ours and fried their corn and broiled their coffee; gay men
and tittering squaws and wild-eyed little ones. Up in the settlement
the guests slept in the streets on the roadways, though all night
long music never ceased, nor the throb of the drums for the morning.
On the white mud church where the horses were painted on the outside
walls they lit seven flaming altars which blazed into the night sky.
It looked then like an Aztec pyramid lit for human sacrifice to
Quetzalcoatl--the god of the air. Perhaps to the Indians it was. Who
knows their minds?
As for us, we slept in the bush on the verge of the red-flowing waters,
and our horses neighed to one another and whinnied, the night long.
Next day, as on the night before, we swam in the river--its rapid
current flattering our achievement. It was red and warm and mighty,
rolling us in wave motion ten feet at a thrust. Yet it was weak. It
would be a strong Indian who would swim the Rio Grande when it is in
its strength. For it is then capable of washing away villages and towns
as it goes. Has not the old church and half the pueblo of Santo Domingo
been swept to limbo by the river?
Three beautiful youths come and sit by our camp fire and smile at
us--one is in a black velvet coat and with a crimson ribbon in his long
ebony hair--he is handsome and romantic as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Following him we ride up to Mass in the church of the painted horses,
and we find the pueblo arrayed in the many colors of gorgeous Indian
life. And on top of the _kiva_ or council chamber is a banner crowned
with a cluster of many-colored painted feathers. An Indian takes our
horses into his yard and we go into the church.
What was there more impressive than the service in Latin, completely in
Latin, with not a word of Spanish or of English! Or the Indians singing
the chorus of praise and serving at the altar! A giant, as it seems,
in terra cotta-colored coat and neatly tied, voluminous black hair
standing constantly at the altar steps.
Saint Dominic is waiting--he lies prone on the ground. St. Dominic
will be invoked at the Breaking of Bread; _Sanctus, sanctus_,
"Oh Santo Domingo, where art thou at this hour--we'll reach
thee." _Tinkle, tinkle_, goes the church bell, and then suddenly,
_dum-a-dum-dum-dum-keroah_, go the drums and horns of the Indians, and
_spludge, spludge_, they fire their rifles in air.
The bearers raise St. Dominic on high. He seems veritably to rise
from the dead as he gradually ascends above the worshipers' heads. He
is golden and patriarchal and benign, and they carry in front of him a
little gilt dog. _Domini canes_, the dogs of the Lord, the Dominicans
used to be called, and the pun has endured.
As St. Dominic is carried to every Indian house and byway of the gray
mud built pueblo the horns and the drums accompany him, and _spludge,
spludge_, goes the accompaniment of fired guns. And when all the
visiting has been done the figure is placed in the alcove of green
boughs--the street shrine before which two hundred Indians will dance a
prayer for rain.
And now onward all the day the Indians dance. First come the Koshare,
who represent the spirits of their ancestors. All but naked, they
are painted a dull gray--to look either like corpses or invisible as
ghosts. There are strange black bands and traceries on their limbs and
bodies, and their faces are painted to affright; they grimace, they
insinuate, they strike terror, and also they make mirth. They have corn
stalks in their hair, and sandals on their feet.
As for the rest they all wear their long hair hanging so that men
look like women, but the men have branches of green tassels on their
heads and the women wear green wooden crowns. The men have armlets of
green with pine twigs in them. The upper parts of their bodies are all
exposed, but are painted dark brown and seem as of stone. The men wear
fox skins hanging behind them, like tails. The drums beat, the men
incant, the Koshare wave their hands to heaven and make every gesture
that means falling rain.
The living dance in ranks, but the wild Koshare, the spirits of the
dead, dance in and out at will and seem to improvise all they do. They
lead the dance, they dominate. It becomes an orgy of marvelous beauty,
dimpling, dazzling; a great moving phantasmagoria. It is like the manes
of a hundred black horses plunging together on the prairie; it is like
running shadows and sunshine over mountain meadows of flowers. And all
the while the drums, and all the while the incantations--
Strangest of all is the body of earnest old men at one side, not
dancing, and yet somehow contributing to the dance. They are all
farmers. They want the rain for their crops. They are terribly intent.
They never cease turning from the heavens to the earth and back again
and making with their fingers the gesture of trickling water and
dropping rain, calling all the while something like--
"_Ukky-ukky-you-you, ukky-ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-yum-yum,
ukky-ukky-you-you!_"
How they want it to rain! There's no doubt of the sincerity of their
prayers.
The dance is in two sections; one represents Winter, the other
Summer. They dance separately and then come in together in one grand
bacchanalia, the Koshare exceeding themselves in yelling at visitors
and sightseers, booing into their faces and kicking their shins.
Little children come bringing loaves to place at the feet of St.
Dominic, who stands benignly in the silver and green shadowland of his
bower in the village street. He seems to be listening to something. He
is altogether remote from this time. He is thinking of something else,
trying to remember something. But be that so or no, little loaves have
been placed in front of him, and outside the shrine in an astonishing
frenzy the dance goes on.
The beautiful Indian girls, so young, so dark and jewel-like, lift all
their naked feet in perfect time, in a hypnotic time, and balance their
bodies, balance to the rhythm of the great dance with half-closed eyes.
The Rio Grande, away below, rolls on in red waves from Colorado to the
sea. The clouds that are above are merely messengers, fleet-footed
Mercuries whose message is not to be delivered here.
And yet, what is that which is forming away to the North; surely a
thundercloud. The mountains have stopped the clouds. It is raining. The
clouds are broadening and enveloping.
"_Ukky-ukky-you-you_," the old men clamor, and point back to
their crops. "_Ukky-ukky-yah-yah_" don't stop for a moment,
"_ukky-ukky-yum-yum_."
The Koshare become the spirits of the storm, making the most
astonishing leaps, and crying out and pulling the rain out of the
heavens toward them. The ardor of the dance redoubles and there is
no rest. And the heat, as of an oven, is not tempered by the breeze.
Suddenly glimmering white ribbons are pulled through the clouds and it
is lightning, a sign at least that the prayers are being heard.
These people know how to pray for rain. No idle "May it please Thee,
O Lord" sitting on plush, but a terrific dynamic appeal by one force
in nature to another. What wonder if year after year the Santo Domingo
dance brings rain!
But what a drama! It rakes one's soul. You are torn by it. Will it
rain, will it rain? See the dance, see the clouds approaching, see
the old men, see the waving fields of green flowering corn, see the
maidens like jewels, see the young men like princes, see the dreadful
and marvelous Koshare all gray and stove-black with masklike faces,
grimacing and simpering and yet somehow compelling! See the emblems
of Christ, see the Church, see the _Kiva_, white magic and black
magic, altogether, all toned up, all compelling, _throb-throb-throb,
dum-dum-dum, ukky-yah-yah, ukky-ukky-you-you_!
Ah it comes, yes, a spot, a wind-carried token of a storm somewhere
else, a black tooth-mark in the pueblo dust. See the Koshare drop to
it, lick it up with their tongues, dust and all, and cry, "More, more,
all hands to the sky, all hands to the earth, _ukky-ukky-you-you,
ukky-ukky-yah-yah_!"
But it does not rain. It rains all around; it will rain. Cool airs
creep in. The dance ends at last, and all who danced in it are
exhausted. Candles on long poles are lit. St. Dominic is raised again,
and he and the little gold dog are borne away to the church.
A bell rings quietly in the evening air and the streets begin to
empty--of all but Mexicans and Americans. In the distance you hear the
river rolling by, hear also the hoofs of the horses and the splashing
of those who are fording the Rio Grande homing into the night.
CHAPTER X
MEXICANS OF NEW MEXICO
New Mexico is the only Catholic State in the Union. Maryland has
the tradition of Catholicism, but New Mexico has the verisimilitude
of a Latin country in Europe. When, in 1848, it was annexed to the
United States, or, let us say, in 1850, when it was organized as a
territorial possession, or, in 1863, when it was reshaped,--it has had
many birthdays--it was entirely Spanish-speaking and Catholic. The
population now is five times as great as it was then. The Mexicans have
prospered and multiplied; the Texans have colonized the South and East.
State consciousness is remarkably undeveloped. Those of Texan origin
are proud of Texas. No Anglo-Saxon or German-American seems ready to
call himself a New Mexican. It is the Spanish-speaking people who are
the real New Mexicans--and they do not care to be confounded with real
Mexicans. The visitor, therefore, has a sense of being in a foreign
State and one decidedly Catholic.
The atmosphere is rather that of Spain than of Mexico. For Mexico has
been exposed to sixty-five years of anticlericalism wherein the Church
has been fought by the State, shorn of its possessions, and greatly
reduced in pride and power. It has meant much to the New Mexican that
his Church has not been humiliated. In Mexico also the strain of race
is much more mixed. Almost every Mexican has Indian blood, and the
onslaught on the power of the Church was obtained by her great Indian
President, Benito Juarez. The converted Indian is a much less faithful
son of the Church than the Castilian, and it may be that the spirit
of revolt in Mexico derives more from the aboriginal strain than from
the Spaniard. In what is now New Mexico, however, there has never
been much crossing with Indian blood. The Navajos, the Apaches, the
Zunyis, and the rest, were never subjugated in the way the Aztec tribes
were. Deserts lay between these races and the main bodies of armies;
their wealth was not enough to tempt great numbers of adventurers.
The Spaniards who settled were mostly peaceful colonists. They set
up churches, they built new villages, they tilled the soil or herded
cattle, and they were content to forget higher ambitions. They lived to
themselves.
There is now a remarkable difference between the Mexican proper and
the Mexican who has become a United States citizen. And that, although
New Mexico only became a State and was admitted to the Union in 1912.
It is not simply the moderation of the size of his sombrero and his
abandonment of tight breeches, nor the disappearing of the mantilla as
a headdress of the women. It seems first of all to be a difference in
soul. The faces of the Mexicans are furtive, restless; their round,
staring eyes tell of a primitive nature, simple, stupid, and violent.
The New Mexican is of a much calmer countenance; he is steady, he does
not fear his neighbors, he has civilized ambitions, and he does not
drink. As Mexico and the United States might be called the Jungle and
the Park, so the Mexican has the restlessness of wild nature, and the
New Mexican the calm of an ordered and domestic life.
Prohibition has doubtless had a beneficent effect in New Mexico,
but even before the "dry" régime the drinking of pulque had almost
died out. But pulque, the juice of the maguey cactus, is a curse of
Mexican life. In its effect it is more like a combination of alcohol
and cocaine, and has a highly destructive effect on nerve and mental
organism. Like tequila and mescal, the other cactus drinks, it is a
strong provoker of violent lusts and is reputed to have destroyed whole
civilizations before the Spaniards came. Legend tells of a virgin who
brought some of it to the eighth King of the Toltecs, who took both it
and her and had a "cactus-born" child, and all his people took to the
new drink and were then fallen upon by the Chichimecs and destroyed. It
was working havoc among the Aztecs in Cortes' time and is responsible
for much from then until now. But from that evil power the Mexican of
New Mexico is surely protected.
Blood is thicker than water, and it is therefore surprising that there
is so little sympathy between the New Mexicans and their kindred
over the Border. One must seek reasons not only in the better life
under American rule but in the sparsity of the Mexican population on
the other side of the line. There is no flood of people in Chihuahua
or Coahuila or Sonora ready to overflow into what is now American
territory. New Mexicans do not seem to have kith and kin on the other
side. They do not read Mexican papers or take an interest in Mexican
affairs. In the case of a new war with Mexico they would prove as
loyal as the bold Texans themselves. The word "gringo" is not on their
lips. They, for their part, show a marked dislike of being referred
to as Mexicans, and if they must be "hyphenates" they would rather be
called Spanish-Americans. They are proud of their citizenship, and are
imitators of Anglo-Saxon America so far as their natural conservatism
permits. They have fallen into the ways of American business, and
have seized upon American politics with great enthusiasm, canvassing
Republicans or Democrats with the same fervor as the most ardent
politicians of the North.
In their religious life, however, they are not inclined to change. The
piety of the State might be a pattern for the Church. The New Mexicans
preserve the religious solemnity of Burgos or Seville. All the villages
and little towns have beautifully kept churches. And the homes, mud
built as they are, are all adorned with sacred pictures. Here one may
see the remarkable "Santos"--pictures of Saints painted on wood, not
unlike some of the domestic ikons of the old Believers in Russia,
at least in their weird and strange conceptions of Godhead. Painted
without art, smudged on to wood, these Santos nevertheless convey the
deeply seated religiosity of a race.
In New Mexico there is not the extent of superstition that is to be
found in Old Mexico. That is because Indian converts have been fewer.
The Indians in Mexico have imported all manner of pagan ideas into
current piety. That is natural, because they possessed elaborate nature
rituals, fetish worships, diabolisms; and the missionaries seldom
denied practice or belief if they could change its name to Christianity
and induce the pagans to be baptized. But the Northern Spanish people
kept their religion fairly pure. One remarkable phenomenon, however, in
the State is the widespread prevalence of asceticism. Lent is observed
with a rigor unknown elsewhere in America. There are thousands of
people living in the mountains who practice self-flagellation and beat
their bare backs with cactus or with whips till they are streaming
with blood. They carry heavy crosses in procession. They even permit
themselves to be tied in crucificial attitude and hung on a cross till
they are exhausted. These are called the "Penitentes," apparently an
offshoot of the Third Order of St. Francis, which was inaugurated in
Mexico in the first year of Cortes' conquest. These are no longer
safely in the bosom of Mother Church, neither are they excommunicated
except by their own choice, but they are without priests, and practice
their rituals in windowless chapels called _moradas_. Of these there
are many on the mountain sides of the country near Santa Fe. The
Penitentes cannot be considered popular--and they for their part do
not ask the interest of outsiders. They are secretive, and some of
the Texans are all for "cleaning them up." There is no "hundred per
cent Americanism" in their practices, perhaps not one per cent, and I
doubt that they can long endure. They are likely to be forced into the
conventional orthodoxy of the Church within the century.
Santa Fe is in one way remarkable for its religious processions.
Open-air rituals, ceremonies, processions, are forbidden in Mexico
proper, and the monasteries and convents have mostly been dissolved.
A monk is a rarity in Chihuahua, but a common figure in New Mexico.
Sacred images repose in the churches in Old Mexico--but here nothing so
usual as to bring them out into the streets in grand parade! When they
carried out the little white De Vargas Madonna in memory of the succor
given to the Spanish troops in the seventeenth century in the recovery
of Santa Fe from the Indians who had risen, killed their priests, razed
their churches, and sacked the country--the procession may easily have
been a mile long. Brass bands, sacred banners, mounted candlesticks,
choir boys and clergy, knights of Columbus led by some one with a long,
bared sword. Indians wrapped in their blankets, squaws with black
hair hanging in a cloud to their waists, children carrying garlands
of flowers, Mexican men in their clumsy clothes, women in long array
of black,--such a procession is a memorable and moving sight. It has
a missionary power also, and draws converts who thirst for color and
emotion in the dullness of the Protestant sects.
I was urged by some Americans to think that Romanism without the Pope
might become the new religion of America, and that it might start its
great evangelism and revival from Santa Fe itself. Perhaps I am too
much of a European, but the idea of Romanism without a Pope seemed that
of a tree without a root. "I used to go to the church of the Paulist
Fathers in New York every day of my life," said Vachel Lindsay, who
comes of an ardent Free Church stock. "I am seventy per cent with them.
Get rid of their politics and the Pope, and I would be with them heart
and soul."
Possibly as America swung free of England and Mexico of Spain, and as
the whole of America to-day with its Monroe Doctrine has cut adrift
from European politics, so also its Catholicism might one day say--We
will build Rome afresh in the New World and put away the old Rome of
Europe as something which has been outlived. There might be a religious
war of Independence. The Roman adherence of the United States with its
Irish, its Poles, its Czechs, its Southern Germans, Austrians, and
Italians, and its Spanish-speaking peoples, is an enormous multitude.
They obtain an increasing hold upon the control of America, and they
are regarded at present by Protestants as an increasing danger. But
that is due, not so much to the religious expression of Romanism as to
what it implies politically.
Of course there is a very telling reproach to Catholicism, and that
is, that in Catholic countries one always finds what Protestants call
"backwardness." It is a common objection in New Mexico, where it is
difficult to get enough money to carry out an advanced educational
program, where natural ambition seems somehow thwarted by a satisfying
religion, where the men do not think that their women can have
opinions or use a vote, where ethical standards are low, and the
conscience seems to be encased in proof. Inter-marriage is regarded
with disfavor by Americans. Many are ready to say that these Spaniards
are not Americans, that they cannot be till they become Methodists
or Presbyterians and speak the language properly. Even those who
emotionally admire the processions and rituals go home to cool off
and become disparagingly critical of the people, as of foreigners.
For such, a trip over the Border into Old Mexico would be the best
medicine--that they might see how far New Mexico had progressed from
what it used to be when it was part of New Spain.
BOOK IV
PANAMA
CHAPTER XI
FROM NEW MEXICO TO THE ISTHMUS
From the dry, bracing, upper air of Santa Fe, where you may ride for
long without raising a moist particle on your brow, down to hot and
humid New Orleans, where, without stirring a muscle, you perspire at
all pores and your body flows away from you to the wide Mississippi;
it is a striking climatic transit--the latitude is much the same, a
difference of five degrees north, but there are seven thousand feet and
the desert behind you; water's-edge, the Mississippi Delta, and the
Gulf in front. From the pine sentinels of the mountains to the rank
heat of the sugar plantations and the rice!
New Orleans in summer is hotter than Panama itself. Visitors on
holiday from the American Panama territory complain of the heat, the
mosquitoes, and the dirt, but revel in the shops, the sweets, and the
Creole cooking.
"What is the most wonderful thing you saw in New Orleans?" I asked of a
schoolgirl on the boat going to the Isthmus.
"The ten-cent store," she answered without hesitation.
"And did you have pralines?"
"I'll say I did."
Our boat, which accommodated chiefly Americans returning from vacation
"back home," took five days over the serene blue Gulf of Mexico and
across the no less serene, unwavering Caribbean from the great southern
port to Colon. We passed the vague shadows of mountains in Yucatan;
we stopped at a tiny tropic island to pick up a banana merchant who
like Robinson Crusoe lived there with a good man Friday, a dog, and
many goats. Other ships passed slowly on our horizon, trailing their
smokes in the sky--many of them ships which had come through the Canal
steaming from Chile and Peru, or looping the new loop from Los Angeles
and the Pacific ports of Mexico--to New York. Passengers scanned each
in turn with their glasses and made surmises of identification. As when
at home they lived in the view of the slowly passing traffic of the
Canal they had got to know many ships, and of these they spoke as of a
sort of moving scenery of their home windows.
When the passing ship faded from the mind the passengers, and
especially the children, would return to clamorous games of deck
quoits. Rope rings on board and foam rings on the sea, foam rings and
the rising of fish. The flying fish leaped like living silver out of
the sparkling waters, and planed in air, and dipped and rose again in
long traveling curves, keeping pace as it seemed with the speed of the
ship.
All the passengers wore white and the ship itself was painted white.
Everything was white except the faces and the hands of the colored
stewards. They were mostly a dark mahogany. These black men, several of
whom were from Dutch Guiana, gave perfect service, and one of them,
my waiter, brought in every dish at dinner in a sort of cake walk
step, keeping time to the records which another sedulously watched and
changed whilst we ate.
The passengers, when they were not playing quoits, played cards. Their
only conversation was of ships and men in the Canal Zone, of life
they knew and others didn't, the sort of exclusive talk into which it
is difficult for an outsider to enter. Nevertheless I obtained much
useful information about the Isthmus and the jungle, though none could
tell me of Balboa, except that he must have climbed the hill called
Mount Balboa, up which picnic parties now go on Sundays to eat their
luncheon. That hill of course was only named in honor of Balboa, yet it
is strange how even denizens of the Zone will tell you it is the one he
climbed.
As for the jungle outside the ten-mile-wide strip of United States
territory, they told me many stories--of shooting expeditions, of men
who never came back, of men who were liars who said they had penetrated
into the interior. I learned for the first time of the "Forbidden
Country" which is held against all comers by the Indians whose
forefathers Balboa and his men fought and enslaved. I heard of the lost
treasures which lie in that country; sacred treasures of Indians, lost
treasures of the conquistadores, hidden loot of pirates of the Spanish
Main, almost all now guarded by supernatural powers and the ghosts of
those who once owned them.
The adventure of going into the jungle and climbing Balboa's peak
began to take on a more parlous hue.
"Why not go to it by aëroplane?" I was asked. "The Colombia aërial
post from Panama would take you without getting your feet wet." Quite
an idea! It must be a beautiful sight from an aëroplane--the two
oceans rolling gently towards one another, the attenuation of the two
continents to the Isthmus, and the silver thread of the Canal.
With such thoughts the last day was fraught, and when I carried my
knapsack out on the dry clean dock of Colon harbor, that quiet,
unflurrying, unflurried place, I was much amused by the difference
between a gilded imagining and bare reality. The Spanish Main is indeed
changed to-day where the Stars and Stripes flies over it. There are
perfect arrangements for the convenience of travelers--no haggling
porters, touts, sharps, money changers, no bewildering noise, no
excitement, but instead a laconic Customs officer chalking bags and
trunks, a gateway, and a few horse cabs ready to take you anywhere for
a shilling.
CHAPTER XII
CLIMBING A PEAK IN DARIEN
1
Columbus sought first a new way to India and glory for Spain, and then
his followers sought gold and gems. Spain made a rapid transit in Time.
For, as a young man has visions and the mature seek fame, so the old
and disillusioned turn cynically to gold as the only substance which in
the end will not disappoint its possessor.
Spain became old suddenly. Was it rapacity bred decay, or decay
rapacity? Even the Indians, who admired all else, laughed at the
Spanish lust for gold.
It was given to "the most faithful son of the Church" to discover
America; given to the conqueror of the Moors to despoil it. In a time
of growing heresy, word-of-mouth heresy, mathematical heresy, Spain
in action wrought out one of the greatest of heresies, proving by
discovery the existence of a new world.
Yet Spain reposed spiritually on a medieval faith, and the spirit of
protestantism rising at that time was the negation of that faith,
saying "No" to the sword of the Lord and the triumphs of the Saints.
And Spain could not partake of the new--for she had not that Teutonic
self-questioning about conscience that stirred the North. Scandals
did not scandalize Spain. And the pother about Indulgences was merely
disloyalty to God's vicegerent. Spain had no quest after Truth. It was
enough to apprehend the beautiful and the true. For the rest, she had
the blind faith of the Church. Hence the ferocity of the Inquisition;
hence, at a later time, the rise of the Jesuits ready to give their
undivided wills to St. Peter in charge for God.
New history mocked the old when Spain began to prove that the world was
round and that the little old sheepfold and pasture and Mediterranean
lake made only a particle of God's creation, and that the first fifteen
centuries of the Christian era had been blind to half the world.
Mankind was groping through the medieval forms toward a life more
unconfined. On the one hand, was the anchorite in his cell in the
wall of the Church; on the other, Columbus sailing to the West. The
navigator seemed a daring free thinker to his sailors, an impious
man who ought to be restrained. Nevertheless in a spirit of profound
religiosity Columbus and his crew found first land and named it San
Salvador--the Holy Savior.
Devout wonder, devouring curiosity, fantastic credulity, lust for
treasure, quickly followed one another in the Spanish mind. The vision
ruled in the heart of Columbus, glory rose in the eyes of the monarch
behind him, cupidity itched the fingers of the multitude. But the world
wondered; the Old World paused whilst a new idea entered it and a new
seed of life was sown.
Four voyages in sailing ships, tempestuous, troublesome, anxious,
with ever more credulous and violent crews--but Columbus clung to the
last to the hope of a new way East. How mysterious, how haunting and
pathetic, and yet visionary, the fumbling and nosing of Columbus's
vessels along the coasts of Panama and Darien in that last voyage of
his, sensing a place where a passage must be made. It is like the
trouble of Nature before sunrise, a thought before dawn.
2
San Salvador is a long strip of low-lying shore, a platform above the
sea, and at night a lighthouse beaming over the dark ocean. It is a
shore and it is a light. That is what it was then, "the other side,"
and the light of Salvation.
The story of the first islands, those bits of Paradise vouchsafed to
lost mariners, is pitiful and tragic; the story of the mainland, the
Spanish Main, is violent and sinful. Adam voluntarily banished himself
from Eden a second time. With the banners of the Church and the spirit
of Cain the discoverers set foot in the New World.
"In the Name of God let us remain here," cried the tempest-tossed
Diego de Nicuesa in 1507, when he found the quiet water of Nombre de
Dios Bay--"In the Name of God! In the Name of God! _Nombre de Dios!
Nombre de Dios!_" cried his followers. And there they made a colony
which endured and in time made the first base for the treasure fleet.
Balboa discovered the Pacific in 1513. In 1519, on the shore of the
other ocean, the city of Panama was founded. In 1520 Magellan rounded
Cape Horn. In 1521 he reached the Philippines where he was killed in
battle. But the survivors of his ships sailed on and reached, with no
small astonishment, the Cape of Good Hope, and then made Europe, thus
circumnavigating the world. Magellan called his ocean the Pacific. In
1521 Cortes got to the Pacific, crossing Mexico to Tehuantepec. In 1524
Pizarro set sail from Panama City to the conquest of Peru.
Then commenced the building of the Royal Road, the _Camino Real_,
through the jungle of Darien, for the safe transit of the treasure
caravans, and Spaniards enslaved Indians and made them hew a way with
knives and carry the blocks of stone, cobbling it a yard wide all the
way from Nombre de Dios to Panama itself.
Pearls and gold came from the South Seas, gold and silver ornaments,
gems of all kinds, and then gold and silver in massive bars. The
pack-trains led by the muleteers and guarded by men in armor toiled
through the dank hot jungle. There was built at Nombre de Dios a great
stone treasure-house where the spoils were heaped up or stacked to
wait the coming of the galleons. The Plate Fleet, bearing to Spain its
precious cargoes, became the astonishment of the ocean, firing the
thoughts of pirates and adventure-seekers--and, not least, England's
Elizabethan sailors. The Plate Fleet was harried; Nombre de Dios was
attacked; Nombre de Dios was burned. Nombre de Dios became known as
"the Spaniards' grave."
I sailed there in a little boat with a wizened old man, who was owner
and skipper and cook and sailor all in one. And as we rode over the
curling waves his talk was all of gold. There were a score of tatters
in the only pair of trousers he had in the world. I advanced him ten
dollars to buy provisions and oil for his little cooker. He wore a
twenty-year-old straw hat--he collected newspapers, which he seemed to
regard as precious in themselves. But he said "My God"--he was very
profane--"when I get some one to put capital into my mines I shall be
king." A cross between a German and a Panamanian Negro, he was at once
credulous and calculating. I could not convince him that I was not
seeking gold, or oil, or at least manganese. The German in him made
up his mind about me. I was made to correspond to the description of
my type in a Leipzig encyclopedia. The Negro in him was fantastically
imaginative regarding the treasures of the Spanish Main. He had sailed
for forty years, seeking gold, seeking treasure. Far from its being a
pestilential coast, Darien was Paradise. It was a health resort; there
were no mosquitoes.
"This land is Aden," he kept saying, filling me with mirth, for he
meant Eden all the time.
We passed, or were passed by, many schooners manned by Jamaicans,
proudly and superfluously flying British flags; and by San Blas Indians
in dugout canoes surmounted by the most rudimentary sails. We came
alongside and looked on the mean cargoes of coconuts and bananas and on
the Mongolian features of the untamable Indians. The same Indians whom
the Spaniards treated so ill have long since recaptured their country
and have established a feud with white man and black man. Nearly all
Darien to-day is called the "Forbidden Country," and no one who is not
an Indian dare remain there after nightfall. But the Indians come down
to the shore, or even set off in canoes, to trade fruit and monkeys
and parrots for--one thing mostly--powder. The Spanish priests tried
to teach them to pray to God. But the other Spaniards brought a more
convincing gospel of powder. My skipper evinced great contempt for
them, however. "They'll never be no use till put under ground," he
averred. "All this," he pointed to the entangled jungle of the shore,
"is white man's country. Only white men can do any good here."
We called at tropical islands, all gnarled rocks and upstarting palms,
places for pirates, places for loot. We called at inhabited islands,
trading islands with great general stores. On these were white men
making a fortune by intercepting the schooners and bartering fruit
with canned goods, tools, guns, cartridges. But the wild shore of the
mainland held the eyes.
Green hands of the jungle reached out from the tangles, as if all
the trees and shrubs were also savages locked in some orgy in which
the young and slender were being suffocated or trodden under foot.
Hands of despair were stretched outward to the sea. But when we came
into Nombre de Dios Bay the barbarity of the vegetable kingdom seemed
to have receded as age and depravity step back for innocence. The
gentlest of waves rippled forward on a fine half-round of sand. And
there might well have been many children playing on that long curve
of shell-strewn beach. It was peaceful. It was sun-bathed and blue and
gleaming--and it was empty. Even the two schooners and the three dugout
canoes were hidden from view by the breakwater and dam. A huddled
village with thatched roofs looked out from under isolated fringing
palms--like gray women with shawls about their ears. In the background,
a ruined church of stone.
Time stood still in the mind whilst I turned back the pages of the
chronicles and saw this bay of childhood and romance as the "Spaniards'
Grave." Here then lived Francis Drake in disguise watching how the
Spanish shipped the treasures of Peru on to the Plate Fleet. Nombre
de Dios was built in stone then, but you will search in vain for that
stone to-day unless it is in the structure of the church or in the road
way of the Treasure Trail.
"I have brought you to the mouth of the treasury of the world," cried
Drake when in 1592 he captured Nombre de Dios and led his seventy-three
English sailors to the stacks of bars of gold and silver there, so
heavy no man could take any of it away.
Even at the moment when El Dorado's gold confronted them, the Spaniards
rallied and Drake was shot in the thigh and his companions driven off.
But the English seaman returned several times and at last destroyed
the city so that it never recovered. Drake, after many adventures,
returned there to die. He ambushed the treasure-caravans, he waylaid
the Plate Fleet. With his little ship the _Golden Hind_ he captured the
great galleon called Cacafuego, he burned Santa Domingo, he fought the
Armada, he sailed round the world, he singed the King of Spain's beard.
He played at bowls in Devonshire part of the time. But it was Nombre de
Dios and the Spanish Main that held him at the last. For in a leaden
coffin his body lies there somewhere under the quiet sea.
The people who live in Nombre de Dios now are in themselves the ruins
of nations--Chinamen married to Negro women who are themselves partly
Spanish, partly Indian; Moslem traders from India living with Jamaican
girls who are half English; here lives a Polish-American trader with a
mulatto. And the children! They swarm, and are just savages. Even the
missionaries avoid them. Even the Catholicism to which nominally they
belong has no hold. Its church has no roof--and a Padre to brave the
mosquitoes is not there.
3
Neighbor to Nombre de Dios upon the Spanish Main is Puerto Bello, which
afterward became the anchorage of the Treasure Fleet. But Puerto Bello
also was destroyed and also by one of Albion's hateful isle, though
he was by no means a true hero of romance--Henry Morgan the pirate.
He blew it up; he marched with his crew, cutlass in hand, across the
Isthmus, and fired Panama too, or caused the Spaniards in defense to
fire it, thus wrecking the fairest city of its time in America, a city
of seven thousand cedar-wood houses, two hundred treasure houses, and
three score churches with golden altars, a city already of thirty
thousand souls. That was in 1671. He was rewarded by his King, after
he had bought a knighthood, and was made Governor of Jamaica; he had,
in fact, quite a modern career. They point his grave out to you as you
sail along the shore, and every half savage in Panama knows more of
him than of Drake or Balboa. And at Puerto Bello there has remained
untouched for two centuries the spectacular ruin which he wrought.
The rusty guns lie where they lay "the morning after," beside the
massive stone fortifications. Spiked, useless, and yet impressive in
idleness, it is surprising that they have not been taken away for use
as ornaments of some new city square, or at least for the value of the
metal that is in them.
Puerto Bello has a mixed Negroid population and many bamboo huts.
But it has also stone houses. It was once well laid out, and has
beautiful little stone bridges and pleasure seats. The fortified part
is extensive, and as one walked the ramparts, the only European, indeed
the only person about at all, once more Time as it were stopped in the
mind and one realized the night when the pirates came, and drunk and
idle the Spanish soldiers and dire the fate they met.
But I left behind me the thought of Morgan at the old portal of the
city where, scarcely molded over, stand the three crosses which mark
the place where for nearly two hundred years the treasure caravans came
regularly and made an end of their long, arduous, jungle journey, and
the priests gave blessing whilst enslaved Indian coolies toiled and
soldiers and sailors swore.
And the old, disused, cobbled roadway plunges through sedges under
the marsh and into the vegetation and darkness which has long since
swallowed it up.
From Puerto Bello Morgan crossed the isthmus; from Nombre de Dios
Drake crossed it and from "a goodlie and great high tree" looked on
the waters of the South Seas for the first time. Where exactly Balboa
crossed it no one knows. For no one has come that way again. But it
was certainly in what is now called the Forbidden Country, which the
Indians have long since recaptured and now hold by force of arms, to
the total exclusion of all who are not Indians.
4
It was in the Forbidden Country that William Paterson landed in 1698
with twelve hundred men, gentlemen of Scotland, clansmen, old soldiers,
traders, and uncovered on Darien's shore the banner of St. Andrew
blessed at Leith at parting. And they mounted fifty guns and called the
fort New St. Andrew, and proceeded to organize a trade road through the
jungle, a mere fifty miles to the other side, convinced that thereby
the trade of the world would begin to pass through their hands.
The expedition failed disastrously. It seems the Scotsmen were greatly
discouraged by King William the Third who loathed the Scots and ordered
his Governors at Jamaica and elsewhere to refuse them supplies. They
were strong enough to keep both Indians and Spanish off, but they
lacked adequate food and were soon sorely stricken with fever. Their
relief ship foundered off Cartagena. Paterson became temporarily
deranged, for which in my opinion he was much to blame, having no right
to go out of his mind whilst his responsibility was so great. Apathy
(or was it despair?) seized the Scots, and without realizing a doit
of their expectations they returned to Scotland. They had been eleven
months on the Spanish Main--and some they left behind will lie there
forever.
Though many died you will search in vain for Scottish graves. Only the
imagination, going back once more, may yield a whisper of the pipes
played on that desolate shore. They all sought gold; poet-discoverers,
Conquistadores, heroic sailors, dastardly pirates, Scottish
shareholders--El Dorado was their common goal. Even Balboa himself,
raising human eyes on the Pacific, was accompanied by those who "look
nowise but downward with a muck-rake in their hands."
Balboa had settled at Salvatierra in Haiti and sailed across to Santa
Maria de la Antigua on a shore of the Gulf of Darien and was joined to
a group of men whom he captained, making fantastic expeditions into
the interior in quest of a massive gold idol--It, The Golden One,
El Dorado--and they fought continuously the warlike Indian chiefs
and their retainers, generally making the conquered their allies and
seeking out another chief against whom the conquered Indians nursed
some grievance.
The Indians wore ornaments of gold, as they still do to-day, but they
placed no value on the metal itself until it had been fashioned to some
end. But the jewelry of which the Spaniards ravaged the tribes led
them to believe in some great source. Comagre gave Balboa four thousand
ounces and told him that on the other side of the mountains was a great
sea and cities and ships and wealth inexhaustible. And the explorer
pondered the matter in his heart and he said, "God has revealed the
secrets of this land to me only, and for this I shall never cease to
thank Him." An astonishing idea, that God, the spiritual genius behind
all creation, should be taking thought to reveal gold to thieves--and
yet it was sincerely held.
It was not exactly humor that the Spaniards lacked. When the first
jackass made his first hee-haw on American soil, appalling the Indians,
who appealed to know what this strange animal was wanting--a Spaniard
replied, "He is saying that we need more gold, still more gold; do you
understand?"
Material desire and the fever of exploration drove Balboa on, and with
a hundred and ninety followers in chain-mail he sailed from Antigua
to the lands of the subject chief Careta, whose daughter he espoused.
This was at the beginning of September, 1513. He traveled two days
along the shore to the domains of Ponca and then after a fortnight they
started inward to the heart of the jungle, cutting their way with their
swords, sweating under their armor, and in four days of unbelievable
difficulties they came to the foot of high, tree-clad slopes. There
they encountered Porque and the Indians of Quarequa. Porque they slew;
the Indians they dispersed; the gold they took. That was on the 24th
September, and on the next morning early, Balboa set off to climb
the mountain of the world, with his Spaniards behind him and Indian
guides ahead. There was with him also a priest and a lawyer and a dog.
The priest was for God, the lawyer for the King of Spain, and the dog
for himself. Little Lion, the bloodhound, held military rank and drew
rations, it is said. He was alleged to be worth any three men.
Where is Quarequa? No one knows. Perhaps it is even an invented name,
and the fight put in by the narrators to give feature to the story. How
many hours Balboa's party struggled from the Indian village to the top
of the Sierra has not been calculated. Did Balboa look upon the Pacific
at noon--or was it in the glamour of a later light. Possibly with his
Indians to lead him it was still morning. And it was still morning in
the soul--the morning of new life and light, the morning of discovery.
Balboa halted his party and then advanced alone and saw the sea.
5
Religious geography is part of the art of living. To come to each new
place on the chart called Earth, not in a spirit of mere jollity but
with some reverence, gives a richness to life. Whilst some seek gold,
others seek spiritual gold, the soul's possession, which is neither
sentimental nor unreal but is indeed the one _substance_ out of which
in the beginning all things were made.
The apology of a world traveler that he did not see the Pacific
before, from the heights of Tehuantepec, from the Golden Gate of
San Francisco, from the stone eminence of the new city of Panama--he
preferred to see it with Balboa's eyes, climbing a peak out of the
jungle and looking also, and in like manner for the first time, in that
way to perform a geographical rite in the world temple.
I traveled with Cecilie Lucarez and Victor Morales. One carried my pack
and a gun; the other with his long knife slashed the passage clear of
jungle growth. It was icy cold and burning hot at the same time, dank
and steaming; perspiration soaked even through the leather of one's
knee boots, but small cold airs crept out of the profound green shadow
on either hand, chilling for moments the very marrow. Underfoot were
innumerable water currents and mud and slime, and the giant trees above
us dripped water all the while. A grave-like coldness crept about
everywhere, and now and then a draught of air would lift my wet shirt
and make it flap against the skin. Yet it was burning hot.
The Spaniards plunged across the isthmus in chain mail; I was in my
shirt, my guides were without even a shirt. How the Conquistadores did
it in complete armor gives a measure of the physical endurance of these
men.
The ground is strewn with rotting yellow plums which have fleshy
centers and bittersweet taste; monkeys hang from the trees looking at
us, parrots innumerable flutter about the open spaces. And when we
come to open spaces, how painful the sun! I am dazzled by the gleaming
points of my eyelashes, eyes want to get right in, temples throb.
It is easier to cross the isthmus in January or February, the dry
season, but Balboa crossed it in the wet. It is his September, and
rains every day, as no doubt it did then. Up to the knees in soft mud,
up to the waist in water each day, and the feet all swollen and broken
by the treatment. The guides, with their bare feet and legs, seemed
able to take the floods more easily, and Morales in mid-stream of a
rushing torrent, with my knapsack balanced on his head and his gun on
top of that, whilst water foamed against his bare breast--is a sight
not easily forgotten. Apprehension of a lost knapsack stamped it on the
mind.
We rested in a jungle village. I sat on a clay floor with a wild monkey
on a string and noisy children and scarcely less noisy parrots. We were
regaled with Kola wine and grated coconut and oil and rice and bits of
fat pork and some of the ugliest preserves I have ever encountered.
It was the time of the rice crop, and rice in the husk was drying in
baskets in every little palm-leaf hut. Every hour the women took the
rice baskets and shook them to help dry out the grain. Next day an aged
Negro with grizzled wool led me on, and we found in the depths of the
thicket that which I could not follow from Nombre de Dios--part of the
_Camino Real_, now moss-covered and green, but unmistakable, a massive
cobbling of large stones with a lateral, upturned stone along the
edge for curb, just room for a panniered ass and no more, but now so
overgrown in places that even a monkey could not pass on it. Trees have
shot up and split the cobbling, the scrub has met over it, and for many
miles it climbs amid the mahogany trees high up into the mountains.
It would be worth while for some one to employ natives and spend a
month cutting clear and tracing this great treasure trail all the
way from coast to coast. For there must have been resting places and
perhaps even taverns upon it, and possibly a chapel half way.
The "Speakities," the colored people of the jungle, all believe in lost
treasure and are superstitious regarding the evil spirits which are
guarding it. Some have even bits of Spanish gold which have been found.
Indeed, true treasure trove is frequent--if the treasure be not great.
We made but slow progress in the jungle. Rainy weather and consequent
mud held us. I changed my guides three times. None cared to go far
from home. Two nights were spent in the scantiest shelter. Thousands
of flaming fireflies lit the floating mists which along the edge of
a jungle clearing looked like phantoms living in dark houses. The
wraiths were of unstable dimensions, now swelling to a bank of mist,
now tailing away to nothingness. But the fireflies lighted their
way--myriads of fireflies. I lay in all the clothes I possessed and in
my boots and wearing gloves, but still the mosquitoes bit. How combat a
foe that you actually take in with your breath!
Tongues of fire among white mists in intense darkness, howling of
monkeys, the creaking and wailing and prolonged noise of insects in the
trees, mosquitoes as noiseless and attentive as breath, the air not
vital, suffocating--of such were the nights. In a hotel you would turn
and turn, but something in the jungle constrains you to lie like one
dead all the night long, and that something also banishes thought.
There breaks out the throb of a native drum, one only, but you cannot
say where it comes from. It is far away, it is close at your ear--it
is wandering in the jungle. Who could be beating it, and why? But it
is no matter. Your eyes close. You fall into a light slumber and lie
dreamlessly--you cannot estimate how long. But suddenly horror breaks
upon your soul. You start up; you look around, you fall back in a cold
sweat. A roaring as of lions has torn through your consciousness. You
think a puma has found you, and then, as suddenly, you laugh and relax.
It is a pack of night-howling monkeys, beating their hairy breasts
high among the branches and howling like lost souls. A vague thought
enters the mind, the lost souls of those who murdered Indians for their
gold....
Morning comes and proves that each bad night was but a bad dream, a
nightmare and not God's creation. For even over the "white man's grave"
it is fresh, with fair rose colors in the sky.
The natives think that I am a _gringo_ surveyor planning a new road,
and are quite pleased. They have never heard of Balboa or of Drake,
or indeed of any one except Morgan. They think the _Camino Real_ was
built about fifty years ago. They know nothing. But I found them
extremely dignified and courteous. The women seemed especially modest
and discreet, and those stories of the Speakities selling their young
girls for a few dollars and of the Indians selling their children are
not true except of the people on the coast, those corrupted by traders.
The men and women are not "married," but then there are no priests.
Religion is nothing to them, but something of ethics is instinctive.
They are said to be poor workers. It is hard to tempt them out of the
jungle to do a day's work for pay. They do not want a victrola or
a five-foot shelf of books. A few bright cottons for the women and
powder for the men is all they ask. Money is scarce. In the depths of
the jungle Chinamen keep little stores with a daily turnover of about
twenty-five cents. An opened packet is a stock of cigarettes, and they
sell them one at a time. They will even sell a half of a cigarette--the
only people in the world who would undertake such a trade.
I wondered at the swarm of children of these Chinamen, begotten of
their black wives. "What will you do with them when you make your
fortune?" I asked one.
"The best boys I take with me to China--the rest I leave behind," he
said.
I found that in the native huts I never had to pay for hospitality. It
is true, however, that whole families enjoyed my provisions--gloated
over tinned milk, drank mug after mug of dense Nombre de Dios coffee,
ate chocolate as a wonderful novelty. In return, they would put in the
midst of the red mud floor a large pot of rice and pieces of smoked
fish and forest berries soaked in brine. They brought down branches of
fat, little, cream-colored bananas from the roof. A parrot would lift
itself by its beak on to my fingers whilst I ate, and in the same way
up my coat to my shoulder, calling and out-calling its mate who was
perched on an ox-limbed woman in colored overalls. In such a hut I met
Martinez, a man with no arms and only one eye. He had lost his members
dynamiting fish. Martinez had hooks tightly corded to the stumps of
his wrists, and had learned to do all that most of us can do with
hands--thus, he struck a match and lighted a cigarette, he shouldered
my knapsack, he lifted down an old gun from the wall, he slung it on
his back. Even using hooks for hands he was a good shot with a gun.
Martinez was by temperament a hunter, and was less interested in
getting me to the Pacific coast than in following trails of wild
beasts. He showed me a treesloth, hanging in the hammock of its own
body high up among the branches; showed me a boa coiled like a cable
and sleeping like a babe. That did not interest him. But the jaguar and
the puma were ever in his thoughts. We came upon the footprints of a
tiger, a _grande gato_, a perfect six spot in the mud. With bent back
and staring eye Martinez was for following it--and he gave me his long
knife. But I said "No."
"No carey?" he inquired, raising his brows. "No quiere?"
"No, Martinez; grande gato make nice meal you and me. Sabe, Martinez?"
I made signs to him, pointing down my throat.
"Ah, you no carey?" he rejoined sadly, and set his face toward the
sun. He threaded his way to an isolated hut surrounded by bog, where
lived a bachelor acquaintance more ready to follow up the trail of
the tiger. There we brewed coffee, and as I sat in the doorway sipping
it I saw fly past like a flame the most beautiful bird I had seen in
the jungle. The sportsmen missed it, but heavy as I was with clinging
mud I started up to follow it. I was tired enough of tramping, wet to
the waist, mud to the knees. I had fallen down several times. Armless
Martinez had offered to carry me across one or two morasses and
torrents and had actually raised me on his shoulders once, but I felt
him waver under me and took my two hundred pounds down from his back.
I was glad when we came once more upon a stretch of the _Camino Real_
and could actually walk upon it. We stepped steadily upward, and I
began to meditate climbing that "goodlie and high tree," for there were
many such starting out of the marsh and the scrub and going straight to
heaven. But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, coming out on the scarp of
a commanding ridge, I saw the ocean. I did not need to climb a tree.
From this ridge I also saw the Pacific, for the first time, far away, a
blue triangle of water beyond the hills and the forests and the ridges.
There was a wide and majestic view, and the great trees of the jungle
made a framework on either hand like the extended plumage of an eagle.
To my one-eyed guide it meant nothing, and he could not understand why
I paused in the way and called him back. But it was a great moment. A
warm current ran through my veins and something seemed to lighten heavy
boots. Wings came out from my heels and I stood on tiptoe and stared.
That phrase of Keats "a wild surmise" came very near to naming the
feeling of rapture. The eyes of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the eyes of
Francis Drake, the eyes of the one of the many! "It was all for this,"
I whispered.
Martinez restlessly waved his hooks and peered at me one-sidedly.
"Grande Oceano," said he reflectively, as we resumed our tramp--and
he led me to the sea. It was many hours, but they went easily, and we
came out to the shore in the peace of late evening, and there in a
little inn we drank _blanco seco_ and toasted Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and
Francis Drake, whom certainly the one-eyed man did not know. But I then
counted out silver dollars for Martinez and paid him off. And he was
pleased.
6
Balboa, it is said, knelt on the mountain alone, and then his comrades
came and planted a cross. And the pious chronicler avers that _Te Deum
Laudamus_ and _Te Dominum Confitemur_ were sung. The dog Leoncico
barked for joy. Balboa in a loud voice claimed all that was visible for
the King of Spain, and the lawyer whom they had brought along drew up
a deed which was signed by sixty-seven Spaniards--all that was left of
the original hundred and ninety.
Balboa then marched to the sea. Pizarro, one of his companions,
afterwards conqueror of Peru, was the first to reach the shore,
and with two others they entered an abandoned canoe, and were thus
the first white men to sail on the Pacific. Next day, Balboa took
possession of the Ocean for the King of Spain. He did not throw his
ring in the water, like the Doge of Venice taking possession of the
Adriatic, but, clad only in his shirt, he marched with twenty-six
of his comrades into the waves. In one hand he carried a banner of
Castile; in the other a naked sword. They stood around Balboa, Pizarro
and the rest, they made crosses of steel, they kissed one another's
sword hilts, they lowered the crimson banner to the water. It had been
morning on the mountains and was sunset on the sea--the light of vision
and then the many colors of glory sinking toward oblivion. With me also
there was some of the light of romance, in the glamour of the evening
on the shore of the Southern Sea.
CHAPTER XIII
REPUBLICS OF PANAMA AND NICARAGUA
1
From the Jungle to the Canal is almost as great a leap as to New York
itself--out of barbarism to the most advanced post of civilization, the
place where in all the world the Stars and Stripes wave most proudly.
President Roosevelt obtained almost as great prestige by the Canal of
Panama as Disraeli did by that of Suez. In England he would have had
more, but America ten years ago was not as sensible of the value of
an ocean key as she is now. Disraeli never needed to make speeches on
how he acquired the Suez Canal for the Empire, but Roosevelt tired
the platform echoes with "I started it," "I made sure of the Panama
Canal for the American people," "I let Congress talk, but the work of
construction went on." Roosevelt was ready to go down to fame as the
man who was responsible for the Canal. For he was by temperament a
strong Imperialist, and the Canal, he knew, must prove a great factor
in the future development of American commerce and in the increase of
American influence in Latin America. Roosevelt confirmed the Monroe
Doctrine in his political practice and by achieving the construction
of the Canal he gave the Doctrine an extension of application. He
reserved the commercial exploitation of America for the American
nations.
The circumstances of the acquirement by the United States of the
trans-isthmian strip of land ten miles wide, the Canal Zone, are of
minor importance to-day. The Colombian Government, to whom it belonged,
haggled long over terms, as usual with the Spanish peoples trying to
get as much out of the rich Yankees as they could. Colombia grossly
overdid it on this occasion, and in 1902 an insurrection was arranged
by the United States in that part of Colombia now called the Republic
of Panama. Roosevelt ordered the Fleet to prevent the landing of
Colombian soldiers. There was therefore no bloodshed. It was one of
the happiest of revolutions, and a new nation was at once recognized
by Washington--the Panamanian. A constitution and a government for the
Panamanian nation were soon obtained, and the long-desired treaty for
the acquisition of the Zone was signed.
The Panamanians, that is, the families of its "aristokratia," did well.
They received ten million dollars down and a rental of two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars beginning February, 1913. They have become
pensioners of the United States Government. What they do with the money
is not very clear. The Speakities in the jungle do not seem to share
in it; wages of police, firemen, postmen, and the like are said to be
greatly in arrear.
The Colombians, however, remained in sore dudgeon: not only had they
lost territory, but golden gain, and the rebels who had stolen the
territory were those who were receiving the dollars. The Government of
Colombia must have felt foolish. For it is they who would have had the
money. They sent North a General to seek redress. This General tried to
have the matter submitted to the Hague for arbitration. As Secretary
Hay saw, that would hardly have proved satisfactory to the United
States, and he refused.
The General then returned home and, despite failure, was elected
president. In 1909 he made a strong effort once more to obtain redress.
The United States then proved willing to do something to right the
wrong, and a treaty was drawn up whereby the Panama Republic should pay
Colombia a quarter of a million dollars annually. The paucity of this
amount so shocked the Colombians that they turned their president out
and the treaty was not signed.
In 1914 a new president of Colombia made a new attempt to get a
settlement with the United States, and sent his envoy, Urrutia, to
arrange a new treaty. This he did, but it was seven years before the
talking died down and in a modified form it was signed. It provided
for a twenty-five-million-dollar indemnity for "injuries," and an
amendment provided that five million should be paid within six months
of ratification. Colombia also was accorded special privileges in the
use of the Panama Canal and Railroad. In exchange, she recognized the
State of Panama. It was signed in December, 1921, and Colombia is now
once more on friendly terms with the United States.
The Republic of Panama, it seems to me, has little future. Its
habitable territory is scanty. In the interior are the Indians, who
refuse to recognize it. It could improve places like Puerto Bello and
Nombre de Dios--but it leaves that to the United States.
Article II of the treaty they signed provides that "the Republic of
Panama further grants to the United States in perpetuity the use,
occupation, and control of any other lands and waters outside the
Zone above described which may be necessary for the construction,
maintenance, operation, sanitation, or protection of the said Canal."
Whenever necessary, therefore, more territory can be added, should oil
be found or new harbors desired. The importance of the Panama Canal
lies not, however, in the jungle, which abuts it on both sides, but in
itself.
2
Though I did not visit Nicaragua in these journeyings I think some
notes on its position necessary to this study. It is the State next
but one north of Panama, and is separated by the small State of Costa
Rica. Though Nicaragua is broader than Panama from ocean to ocean, it
has always been considered as possessing an alternative territory for a
canal. This is owing to its large lake and existing waterways. British
capitalists have in time past considered the feasibility of financing
the construction of such a canal. The United States, bargaining with
France for the price of de Lesseps' handiwork at Panama, used the
idea of a Nicaraguan Canal as a persuader. It was used also with the
Colombians before the Panama revolution.
Nicaragua is, therefore, a State on which the eyes of America have
more frequently rested than on the remainder of the Central American
republics. She has felt constrained to advise and help her, lend her
money, and finally enter into virtual control.
In 1907 a war between Nicaragua and Honduras was settled by the
joint efforts of Roosevelt and Diaz. The President of Mexico, who
had succeeded in quelling the spirit of revolt in his own country,
was ready to help in making Central America safe for Democracy, and
under the auspices of his ideas a Central American Conference was held
in Washington, and a sort of League of Nations tribunal was set up.
Soon, however, fights broke out again, and Nicaragua started against
Salvador, her north-western neighbor (1909). The United States then
sent down the marines to hold the Nicaraguans in check.
Nicaragua was annoyed with the United States, but instead of showing
it in action appealed ingratiatingly for some advice and money help.
Next year the United States yielded a loan secured on her customs dues.
It is like the story of a fallen woman--a little indignant at being
ravished, she looks to the ravisher for advice and a little money. He
says, "You can earn a good deal under my protection. I will advance you
a small sum and take it back in dues upon your custom."
In 1914 Nicaragua was fourteen million dollars in debt and much
embarrassed. It was, therefore, not difficult for the United States
to drive a new bargain. In exchange for three million dollars, the
expenditure of which the United States would supervise, Nicaragua was
to grant to the said United States the exclusive right to construct
an inter-oceanic canal. This canal the United States naturally had
no intention of constructing. The significance of the deal is that
no other Power should be granted powers to construct a canal--no
competitor against the new Panama Canal. Besides this concession, by
the same treaty two small off-coast islands were leased to the United
States.
Nicaragua's debts to-day, internal and external, are greater than
ever. She buys all she needs in American markets. A controller sits
at the receipt of custom. She is indeed still a little annoyed, and
corresponds with the patriots of Domingo and Cuba. The Central American
nations, including Nicaragua, have however, concluded a new pact which
brings them nearer to unity than they have ever been hitherto. This is
based on the common ground of Latin sentiment, but its binding power
is that of the dollar and a mutual economic interest. The relationship
of these republics with the United States is friendly enough to be
called domination with consent of those dominated. It is a remarkable
contrast to the belligerency of Mexico. The Central American pact in
1923 came with a fanfare of drums heralding the Pan-American Conference
at Santiago de Chile.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CANAL
They tease the American children born in the Canal Zone and call them
"speakity babies," but the same children, when they grow up a little,
are proud of their birthplace and say--
"I'm a Calzone boy!"
"I'm a Calzone girl!"
And there's a crowd of them, a real new generation of imperial
Americans rising in health and pride from what was once jungle and
pestilence--the "white man's grave."
The Spanish Negro natives, now generally called "Spigs," are slow to
learn English, and to what they learn they commonly add the letter
"y" thus, "Me no carey for you." And their commonest remark to an
American is--"Me no speakity English." Hence "speakity babies" and
"Speakities"--the word has come to stay.
"Calzone," which vaguely suggests to the mind undergarments, is very
suitable to a swimming population and to those who live in a latitude
of steam and heat, but is after all only a derivative from "Canal
Zone." But "Calzone" also has perhaps entered the language.
The children of the Canal Zone are numerous. Almost the chief
characteristic of the ten-mile-wide strip of the territory is the
children. This is first of all due to God and the Government. The
United States Government has from the first encouraged the Canal
employees to marry; has given rent-free houses to married couples,
and generally made it more comfortable for a married man living there
with his wife than for the bachelor. The bachelor is always thinking
of vacations "back home"; the married man identifies home with the
place where he sees his wife and children. The Zone, therefore, is
practically settled by people who are at home.
That does not entirely account for the swarms of children. Families are
unusually large. There is room for children to kick about in; children
fill a larger place in the affections. And then, as a doctor explained
to me, "the American woman, tending rather to sterility in the North,
is much more fruitful in the Tropics."
"You cannot raise children in India," said he. "But we can in Panama.
Do but look around!"
The children are muscular, uncommonly active in wrestling and fighting
and leaping and swimming. They afford a surprising contrast to their
parents, who show some marks of climate. The children run and struggle
with one another and are not annoyed by their profuse perspiration. The
parents sit and watch the thousand beads of moisture forming on their
bare arms. The parents do not stir but to take a cab; the children
chase hoops and hop along with scooters. Certainly the children show
a surprising development--many of them learn to dive and swim at four
years old, but at nine years you'll sometimes see boys and girls with
limbs surprisingly hairy. Children also reach maturity earlier than
in the North, and perhaps this brilliant rising generation of Calzones
will be as pale and passive as the grown-ups by the time they are
thirty.
"There are men here who have missed many ships," I was told. They book
a berth, and then, when the time comes, forget; go to the Shipping
Company's office and exchange for a berth on the next ship, and then
forget again.
Most army and naval officers carry notebooks to aid their memories on
routine. Apathy, listlessness, no doubt, is the chief danger in Panama,
and that being a spiritual danger it is more to be regarded than the
material danger of disease. You notice the difference when you arrive
in Panama from the North. You stride, you rush, you soak out your
clothes with perspiration, you overtake everybody, you hustle the shop
keepers, drink a whole glass in a bar whilst your neighbor has merely
sipped. You are completely out of step. Then you pause and reflect; you
decide to slow down, and the heat does the rest; you are soon going as
slowly as any man who has missed ships.
Nevertheless the American flag does not wave listlessly. The Stars and
Stripes is no jungle flag. It is the flag of business, of hustle, of
enterprise. It will not droop in the tropics but lift to the trade.
Whilst the climate slows down the Anglo-Saxon American it can never
slow him down to the level of the Spanish-American. The Panamanians
and the "Spigs," the lighter and the darker Spaniards, breeds,
half-breeds, or forest-mongrels, have had all nationhood sweated out of
them. They claim no affiliations with Spain or with anything bigger
than themselves. But the Americans of the Zone are one with a hundred
million of kith and kin, one with the Union of forty-eight States, one
with their President and with the New York _Times_ and with the Army
which is always with them, and with the Navy which comes and goes.
The Calzone people are prouder of America than are most Americans who
live in the States themselves. They are like the British Colonials, the
Australians, the Jamaicans, and the rest, who are prouder of the Union
Jack than those who
... think their Empire still
Is the Bank and Holborn Hill.
Curiously enough, the United States is fast becoming a Mother Country,
and those who were originally colonists are becoming "home people"
having colonial kith and kin of their own.
The Stars and Stripes at the Panama Canal has become the flag of
Empire. It is the flag flying at the outposts of English-speaking
America. It is more rousing and significant there than anywhere else
at this time. It may droop at Washington; it may look ridiculous in
the hands of Mr. Babbitt; but at Panama it is the flag of America's
inevitable destiny, the flag of her sway and of the triumph of her
language, her character, and her business.
Even the mere commercial mind has grasped something of the significance
of the Panama Canal. It is the greatest advertisement of America in the
world. Its construction was a super-human task, and its achievement
shed a light of glory on those who carried it through. It is true
that the French started the work and failed, and that Ferdinand de
Lesseps and the French nation have grandiose monuments erected to them
in Panama City. Frenchmen say Lesseps failed for lack of capital, but
every one who has studied the work of the French there has understood
that the French could never have succeeded in cutting through the
Isthmus. It was not only capital the French lacked, but character and
imagination. America began her great national task in a spirit of human
kindness by a magnificent effort to save the health of the workers.
She made the Canal, but she overcame the forces of death first. She
overcame the idea of the white man's grave. She rolled away the stone
from the sepulchre.
What was one of the most pestilential swamps in the world is now
something like a health resort. Not only is the mosquito a rarity but
also the domestic fly. After a myriad flies and two Tanglefoots a
day, it was strange to arrive in an even hotter latitude and find no
flies. I was told, "If you find a mosquito in your room at the hotel,
telephone the office."
Not only are there no flies, but no smells, no decaying fruit. You
may be arrested if you drop a banana skin in the street. The Chinamen
and the "Spigs" and the Jamaicans who live in rows of double-story
frame buildings, the sort of ramshackle places always associated with
filthy living, have been terrorized into cleanly living. Hygiene has
been forced on them at the point of the bayonet. Even the red-light
streets are clean, and all those places of low pleasure designed to
empty the pockets of seamen are at least sterilized. The women are
also under control. The consequence is that the Panama Canal Zone is
now a remarkably safe and healthy place. In fact, a memorandum was sent
recently from Washington, part of an economy campaign, asking that the
expenses on sanitary work in the zone be cut down somewhat until the
death-rate reached that of the general average of the States.
American sanitary science has shown the world that any pest-hole can
be cleaned up. The sad fact is that few nations have the energy to
prosecute such a work of sanitation--Greeks at Salonika, Russians on
the Black Sea littoral, Negroes on the Gold Coast, Cubans at Habana.
America has a passion for "cleaning up." She is the self-constituted
universal cleanser, Babbitt _in excelsis_.
It cannot be denied, however, that the United States is the home
of graft. America has a long-time reputation for graft. Votes are
bought in blocks. Police, jurymen, judges know the meaning "In God we
trust; others pay cash." But, paradoxically enough, the standard of
American character is high. Compared with the personal character of
Mexicans, Panamanians, Cubans, it is lifted into an exalted sphere. The
Latin-Americans stand around waiting for cash--that is their curse, and
they are ready to sell rights, liberties, lands, children--everything
for cash down.
Truth to say, if America were so eaten up with graft as her reputation
says, the Panama Canal would never have been constructed. It was too
big a job to be carried through by people of debauched wills. It is a
monument of America's executive power, of her technical knowledge, and
of her readiness to use that knowledge and stake millions upon it.
Every foreign ship passing through the Canal bows to the Stars and
Stripes, and, though paying a money due, yet acknowledges a debt of
civilization to the American people. Engineers, captains, tourists,
crews, all obtain a new impression of America.
America ceases to be a land merely of canned goods, Yankee dialect,
and oil kings. Its flag comes nearer to the Union Jack as one
of world-civilizing power. The ships pass deliberately through
with processional slowness. Ever more ships, ever more diverse in
nationality. There is a great dignity about the traffic of the Canal,
like the stately manners of a bygone age. The ships represent their
nations, and come as guests through American waters. America is the
hostess of the world.
After all, that which is most respected in the world is visible
achievement. And whilst bad manners generally accompany sham strength
or actual weakness, good manners are enjoined by the sense of power. A
prophecy of more than two hundred years' standing made by the founder
of the Bank of England, hails the possessor of "these doors of the
seas" as the coming law givers of both oceans and the arbitrators of
the commercial world. The Panama Canal delivers Central and South
America to Wall Street, to the American commercial commonwealth, to the
American people.
Every month just now sees the traffic record broken. More and more
ships pass through. More and more business is being done. What will be
the normal average traffic--no one yet can tell. The Canal was opened
in the gloom of the war. There were slides of silt which closed it
again, and a war menace which overcast its importance at the time.
Its real significance has been overclouded, and all praise has been
underpraise. It must necessarily now shine forth more and more as one
of the maritime gates of the world, looked to from England, China,
Australia, from the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and from
all the islands of the South Seas. It automatically doubles the trade
of the Southern and Central American republics of the Pacific coast
with the United States. The latter can make up all European losses and
most deficiencies in raw materials by way of the Canal. Whilst the
American flag certainly waves less on European waters, it waves more on
the Pacific Ocean. Pan-Americanism, the dream of Stephen Douglas and
many others, is carried nearer to realization--the dream that America
should rule all the way from the Canadian Line to the Isthmus, without
question and without regret.
That the United States will ever rule South of the Equator seems
questionable. Such a rule belongs possibly to the next century but
one. But, for the time being, she has an economic hold even upon South
America. As regards Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the rest, she begins
to have a very strong control. Despite the noise of protest, there
is not much real patriotic stamina in the people of these countries.
They have less sense of nationhood than Austrians or Eskimos. Almost
everything can be bought from them for cash down. So they necessarily
go under the influence of American capital.
The Old World is greatly jealous of America's imperial march forward,
and will naturally follow the progress with much malignity. And the
Radicals and Liberal idealists within America have already raised a
cry which must yet sound much louder. Empire was never foreseen by the
fathers of the Republic. It is opposed to the historical conception of
American liberty. It makes the Declaration of Independence more out of
place than ever. But what is to be done? America, by her big business
and the system, is betrayed to an imperial destiny, and cannot help
herself. Her vast surplus of capital, her gold accumulations, must in
the human way of necessity find an outlet for use. The West has been
exploited. The Old World is distrusted. There remains inevitably and
obviously the South.
"Go South, young man!" is being substituted in the consciousness of the
American for the old cry of "Go West!"
The inwardness of the idea that Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermuda, and the
rest of the British island-possessions of the Indies should be assigned
to the United States in part payment of the war-debt, much talked of
before the Baldwin settlement of the debt question, is part of the new
American march to the South. The control of Cuba, Haiti, and Santo
Domingo is part of it. The sapping of Mexico and Nicaragua is part of
it. Without the Canal as an inalienable possession these things might
be overlooked, might indeed be gone back upon by America itself. But
a mere visit to the Canal is said to have power to change an American
Radical into a patriotic Expansionist. In fact, with regard to the
direction of policy and the achievement of national destiny, the
Radicals in America seem more negligible than the German Socialists
proved to be in 1914. They do not deserve the persecution they have
had. They live by the system and are carried along by the system, and
the system leads to imperial power.
It is urged, however, that Empire means War. It means bloodshed and
sorrow and despair for thousands in every decade of its history. That
is generally true. And yet America is remarkably free from enemies.
The Latin-Americans have a practice of hating Americans, calling
them "Gringoes," "Mejos," and the rest, but it is a weak hate easily
transmutable to respect and warm regard. There is nothing to fear
from it. Great Britain is of course a mercantile rival on the high
seas, but America and England are too much intermarried and too much
intertwined in business interests to fight a war. Moreover, we speak
the same language. Mutual abuse is merely partisanship, the slang of
the fanatics; and we are no more likely to fire on one another than
the Giants of New York and the Red Sox of Chicago. As regards the
Canal--that is a sort of strategic position Britain has historically
seized when she had a chance. But one thing is sure; Britain rejoices
in the fact that that water-way is in the hands of people who speak
English and have the standard Anglo-Saxon point of view. In the case
of a war, even with Japan, Great Britain would probably lend her aid
to the United States to keep the Canal open and to safeguard it from
destruction.
Japan remains as the only serious potential enemy on America's horizon.
And despite ill feeling and hot words one cannot but remember that
that horizon is several thousand miles away. There is a great stretch
of cooling water between the nominees for the next great fight. The
only real danger lies in the brains of some heady politician who at
some future date may decide on an aggressive war against Japan in her
own waters. Such a war might conceivably be fraught with disaster and
humiliation for the United States--for the vast Pacific will always aid
the side which is in defense.
In short, as far as America is concerned, Nature is on the side of
Peace. I foresee five hundred years of prosperity and peace, after
which, no doubt, America will weaken. The growth of the American Empire
is the greatest fact in the world to-day--more significant than the
decay of Europe. Russia, one must remember, is smashed, with her whole
nation down on a gypsy level of culture. Germany prostrate under the
heel of France nears the condition of Russia. France is self-centered
and contented with a Mediterranean empire. Britain marks time. Alone
America goes on. She stands now with her hundred million educated
population, with her vast wealth and serried ranks of millionaires,
with her unsurpassed technical equipment and industrial organization,
and she has an enormous appetite for power and zest for life. The
imagination ought to be given free play in thinking of the coming time.
Bearing in mind that America has finally and absolutely rejected
Bolshevism, Communism, and all other disjectory theories of government,
has, in fact, affirmed in absolute fashion the rights of property
and her loyalty to the capitalistic system, one can almost forecast
by mathematics the state of her wealth at any given date. What a
stupendous aggregation of material splendor! If in the last sixty years
America has risen from the Civil War level to what she is to-day, to
what will she rise in sixty years from now? To what will she rise in
six hundred years? The mind refuses to give the answer to the sum, but
instead whispers the lines--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet
Lest we forget!
It is so easy to forget.
How the soul of America will fare in all this I have not sought to
know. The soul abhorreth a golden treasure house, preferring greatly a
humble and a loving heart. America is one thing not answerable to God.
Americans will find themselves in America, as Romans found themselves
in Rome. Individually, now as ever, and like the rest of us, they will
have to find their personal way of Salvation.
One thing which the great World War seems to have revealed is that
we are physically subject to forces over which we have little or no
control. These forces are generally called economic, and are thought
to be academic and theoretic. That is a mistake. They are elemental
and primitive; Lloyd Georges and Wilsons do not divert them. On the
contrary, they themselves sweep statesmen away when the time comes--and
sweep other statesmen into power.
Such a force drives the American flag southward, and the cry is heard
"Go South!"
BOOK V
CIBOLA AND QUIVIRA