about nine o’clock in the morning. The fashionable get up about eight
o’clock, drink a cup of coffee, eat a roll, go to mass, saunter down to
the bath, and return in time to dress for breakfast, the most elaborate
meal of the day, which is served about eleven o’clock. The menu offers
soup, fish, game, steaks, sweetmeats, and wine. Then the people loll
around till dinner, which comes after five o’clock in the afternoon, and
is a repetition of the breakfast, except that roasts are served instead
of steaks. After dinner everybody goes to the grand promenade along the
beach. The band plays, the ladies are gayly dressed, the gentlemen twirl
their canes, admire their small feet in the moonlight, and chatter like
a lot of magpies. The promenading and gossiping are kept up until
midnight, except twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, when there is
dancing at the hotel or at some one of the private residences. The
season lasts from October, when the rainy period ends, until April, when
it begins; but families from Caracas and other cities seldom remain at
Macuto more than three or four weeks. The charge at the hotel is four
dollars per day--about three dollars and a quarter in American money. If
some one would build a first-class American hotel here, and provide the
comforts that are found in the States, it would be a paying investment;
and I would not wonder if a subsidy would be paid by the Government.
[Illustration: CHOCOLATE IN THE ROUGH.]
The coffee plantations, or _quintas_, as they are called, extend from
the coast far up into the mountains, and are very prolific. The people
here claim to raise the best coffee in the world; and it is a singular
fact asserted by the exporters that only the poorer grades go to the
United States, while all of the better quality is sent to France and
Germany. Just why this is so no one explains, further than repeating the
remark so often made that the Americans do not like good coffee.
[Illustration: SEPARATING THE COCOA-BEANS.]
Another curious fact is that chocolate costs more here than it does in
New York--here where it is grown and manufactured, for very little of
the genuine article is sold in our market. When the cocoa-beans are
thoroughly dried in the sun they are shipped in gunny sacks to market,
where the chocolate manufacturer gets hold of them. He grinds them into
a fine powder of a gray color that looks like Graham flour, mixes it
with the pure juice of the sugar-cane, called _papillon_, and flavors
the mixture with the juice of the vanilla-bean. After being boiled for a
certain length of time, this is poured into moulds and allowed to
harden, when it becomes the chocolate of commerce. The Caracas
chocolate, as all the product of Venezuela is termed, is considered the
best in the world. It costs sixty-five cents per pound at the factories
there, but can be purchased for forty-five or fifty cents a pound in
New York. The best cocoa-beans are forty cents a pound here, but the
Yankee manufacturer has a way of increasing their weight and reducing
their value by adulteration. Pipe-clay is cheap and heavy, and it is
supposed to be harmless. It weighs five times as much as cocoa, and as
the profit in lager-beer is in the foam, so is the profit in chocolate
in the pipe-clay, or whatever substance it may be mixed with.
Puerto Cabello and Maracaibo are the two great exporting markets of
Venezuela, from which the greater part of the coffee and chocolate is
shipped. The former place is famous for being one of the most
unhealthful in the world, and the bay upon which it is situated is
called Golfe Triste (the gulf of tears), because of the terrible
scourges which are born in its miasmas. The bottom of the bay is said to
be literally covered with the bones of those who have been heaved
overboard for the lack of a better place to bury them. The ghost of that
most famous of all freebooters, Sir Francis Drake, haunts the place, for
he died here of yellow-fever, and his body lies in a leaden coffin
thirty fathoms deep in the sea. The place is called Puerto Cabello (the
port of the hair), on the pretence that ships are so safe in its harbors
that they might be tied to their moorings with a single hair. This is
something of an exaggeration, but nevertheless the harbor is the best on
the Spanish Main, and has such abrupt banks that a vessel can be run up
against the shore anywhere to take her cargo.
Off the coast of Puerto Cabello lies the island of Curaçoa, the
quaintest, most novel, and altogether most interesting place on the
Spanish Main. It is a fragment of Amsterdam, set upon a coral rock in
the middle of the sea. It has always been a colony of Holland, with all
the picturesque quaintness, stupidity, and wooden-shoe-oddity of the
fatherland. Leaving the tropic scenes of Spanish America at bedtime and
waking up in Holland in the morning makes you feel like one of Plato’s
troglodytes, who were raised in a cavern and then suddenly dropped into
the world. You cannot quite allay the feeling that something has been
done to you; the appearance of things has changed so suddenly and
completely that you do not feel quite right about it.
[Illustration: PUERTO CABELLO.]
Curaçoa looks like a toy town built by a child of uncommonly incoherent
mind, by taking blocks out of a box and setting them up in irregular
rows regardless of size, shape, or color. The general effect is a
nightmare of gable-ends and dormer-windows painted a bright yellow.
Immense warehouses with great gaping doors and windows stand beside
quaint little Dutch cottages surrounded by beautiful gardens, and stores
several stories high, of the most elaborate architecture, rise beside
low structures as flat fronted and as square cornered as a dry-goods box
with a Dutch oven on top of it. Quaint dormer-windows stare at you from
the most unexpected places; hideous yellow towers, like the legs of some
petrified monster sticking up into the air, meet your view in all
directions; and great prison-like fortresses, with port-holes like the
eyes of needles, and ponderous doors lapping over like the covers of a
banker’s ledger, appear with surprising frequency. The streets are
narrow, crooked, and rough. They begin in the most unreasonable places
and go nowhere. Some of them start broadly, but wind around like the
track of a serpent, growing narrower and narrower until they suddenly
end, like the edge of a wedge, against a stone wall.
Curaçoa is a great place for business, although it is so quiet and
sleepy that one might think the whole town had taken a dose of laudanum.
It is the distributing point of a large amount of commerce, a harbor of
refuge for vessels in distress, the haven of political exiles from South
America, and the hotbed of conspiracies and revolutions against
neighboring republics.
South of Curaçoa is Maracaibo, with its curious lake, in which are towns
built upon stilts, that give the name of Venezuela, or Little Venice, to
this land. The explorers, like tourists of modern times, were given to
tracing resemblances in America to what they were familiar with in
Europe, and they imagined these huts rising on piles above the water
looked like the city of canals and gondolas. But there is no more
resemblance to Venice than to Chicago, and the name of Venezuela, like
that of the continent, is a falsehood which the world has allowed to
stand uncontradicted.
QUITO.
THE CAPITAL OF ECUADOR.
On the west coast of South America is found the perfection of
sea-travel--fine ships, fair weather, and a still sea. Although one
floats under, or rather over, the equator, the atmosphere is cool, the
breezes delicious, and the water as smooth as a duck-pond. The Pacific
Navigation Company is a British institution, founded by an American, Mr.
William Wheelwright, of New York, which has been sending vessels from
Panama to Liverpool, through the Straits of Magellan, for over forty
years, and has not only a monopoly of transportation on the coast, but
subsidies from the British Government and the various South American
States whose ports it enters. It charges enormous rates for freight and
passengers, the tariff from Valparaiso being forty dollars per ton for
freight and two hundred and ninety-seven dollars per head for passengers
for a distance about as great as from New York to Liverpool; but the
company gives its patrons the best the country affords, and until the
recent steam greyhounds were turned out to race across the ocean, had
the finest and largest ships afloat. One set of vessels run from Panama
to Valparaiso, where a change is made to another set, built for heavy
seas, which go through the Straits of Magellan, via Rio de Janeiro, to
Liverpool.
Those which ply along the west coast from Panama southward are built for
fair weather and tropical seas, with open decks and airy state-rooms,
through which the breezes bring refreshing coolness. Such vessels would
not live long in the Atlantic nor in the Caribbean Sea, but find no
heavy weather
[Illustration: ALONG THE COAST.]
on the Pacific, where the wind is “never strong enough to ruffle the fur
on a cat’s back,” as the sailors say, and ships sail in a perpetual
calm. The trip to Chili, however, is long and tiresome, lasting
twenty-five days. Less than half the time is spent at sea, as there are
thirty-eight ports at which the vessels, under the company’s contracts,
are obliged to call. Guayaquil, the commercial metropolis of Ecuador,
and next to Callao, Peru, and Valparaiso, Chili, the most important
place on the coast, is the first stopping-place, four days from Panama.
Although the westernmost city of South America, Guayaquil has about the
same longitude as Washington, and is only two degrees south of the
equator. It is sixty miles from the sea, on a river which looks like the
Mississippi at New Orleans, and stretches along the low banks for more
than two miles.
One’s first impression, if he arrives at night, is that the ship has
anchored in front of a South American Paris, so brilliant are the
terraces of gas-lamps, rising one after the other, as the town slopes up
towards the mountains. When morning dawns the deception is renewed, and
one has a picture of Venice before him, with long lines of white
buildings, whose curtained balconies look down upon gayly clad men and
women floating upon the river in quaint-looking, narrow gondolas and
broad-bosomed rafts. Unless he is warned in time, the traveller meets
with a sudden and disgusting surprise upon disembarking, for the
gondolas are nothing but “dug-outs” bringing pineapples and bananas from
up the river; the rafts are balsam-logs lashed together with vines, and
the houses are dilapidated skeletons of bamboo, whitewashed, which look
as if they had been erected by an architectural lunatic, and would
tumble into the river with the first gust of wind. The streets are dirty
and have a repulsive smell, and the half-naked Indians which throng them
are continually scratching their bodies for fleas and their heads for
lice. Half the filth that festers under the tropic sun in Guayaquil
would breed a sudden pestilence in New York or Chicago, yet the
inhabitants say it is a healthy city, where yellow-fever or cholera
never comes.
A narrow-gauge street railway, or _tramvia_, as they call it, reaches
from the docks a couple of miles to the edge of the city, and upon its
cars the products of the plantations are brought to the docks and loaded
by lighters upon outgoing vessels. Like all Spanish ports, this one has
no wharfage, but ships of whatever tonnage have to anchor in the river a
mile or so from shore, and release or receive freight upon barges, which
are towed, not by tugs, for there is not such a thing in all that
region, but by oarsmen in a row-boat. Passengers have to reach the
steamers in a similar way.
When we arrived there we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of
boatmen, who clambered up the sides of the vessel, screaming with all
the strength of their lungs the merits of their boats. Their
vociferousness and persistency would make the Niagara Falls hackmen
green with jealousy; and the fact that most of them were bare up to
their thighs, and entirely shirtless, made the scene picturesque,
although somewhat alarming to a timid person. The costume of the Ecuador
boatmen is equivalent to a pair of cotton bathing-trunks, and they are
as much at home in the water as in their canoes.
[Illustration: THE RIVER AT GUAYAQUIL.]
With twenty-five or thirty of these naked black men surrounding him,
shoving and pushing one another, screaming, gesticulating, and
performing a war-dance of the most extraordinary description, a timid
man is apt to be deceived by appearances, and imagine that he has fallen
into the hands of a tribe of hungry cannibals, instead of a party of
innocent Sambos who wish to promote his welfare. As soon as these
maniacs discovered we were Americans, they were smart enough to
introduce into the bedlam as much of our mother-tongue as they could
command, making the scene all the more amusing. One big fellow, black as
midnight, with only about half a yard of muslin and a dilapidated panama
hat to protect his person from the elements, jumped up and down, yelling
at the top of his lungs, “Me Americano! me Americano! Me been to
Baltimoore!” Becoming interested in the fellow, we learned that he had
been a sailor on a Spanish man-of-war which several years ago visited
that city.
Among the crowd of howling dervises was a pleasant-looking fellow with a
whole pair of pantaloons and a linen duster on. He was not so noisy as
the rest, and could speak a little English. Taking him aside, I told him
how large our party was, and where we wanted to go. He agreed to take us
and our luggage ashore for two dollars, and was at once engaged;
whereupon, instead of going off and minding their own business, the
crowd began to abuse Pepe--for that, he said, was his name--and the rest
of us in the most violent manner; and when the baggage was brought up
they seized upon it, and each man attempted to carry a piece into his
own boat. But the mate of the steamer was equal to the occasion, and
laid about him with so much energy that the deck was soon cleared.
The street railway only extends to the limits of the city, but a short
walk beyond it gives one a glimpse of the rural tropics. At one end of
the main street, which runs along the river front, is a fortress-crowned
hill, from the summit of which a charming view of the surrounding
country can be obtained, but the better plan is to take a carriage and
drive out a few miles. The road is rough and dusty, but passes among
cocoa-nut groves and sugar plantations, through forests fairly blazing
with the wondrous passion-flower, so scarlet as to make the trees look
like living fire; with pineapple-plants and banana-trees bending under
the enormous loads of fruit they carry. The rickety old carriage passed
along until our senses were almost bewildered by visions none of us had
ever seen. Nowhere can one find a more beautiful scene of tropical
vegetation in its full glory, and no artist ever mingled colors that
could convey an adequate idea of nature’s gorgeousness here.
The most beautiful thing in the tropics is a young palm-tree. The old
ones are more graceful than any of our foliage plants, but they all show
signs of decay. The young ones, so supple as to bend before the winds,
are the ideal of grace and loveliness, as picturesque in repose as they
are in motion. The long, spreading leaves, of a vivid green, bend and
sway with the breeze, and nod in the sunlight with a beauty which cannot
be described.
[Illustration: THE RIVER ABOVE GUAYAQUIL.]
There is considerable business done in Guayaquil, and some of the
merchants carry stocks of imported goods valued at half a million
dollars, with an annual trade of double that amount. It is the only town
in Ecuador worth speaking of in a commercial point of view, and its
tradesmen do the entire wholesale business of that republic. The
shipments of cocoa, rubber, hides, coffee, ivory, nuts, and cinchona
(quinine) bark amount to about $6,000,000 a year, and the imports, the
President of Ecuador told us, amount annually to $10,000,000. There is
no way to ascertain the truth of his Excellency’s statements, as the
Government keeps no statistics of its commerce, and he admitted that it
was only an estimate based upon the amount of duties collected; but one
may be allowed to doubt that a country like Ecuador, the most backward,
ignorant, and impoverished in all America, can purchase for many years
in succession twice as much as it sells.
[Illustration: AN AVERAGE DWELLING.]
Founded in 1535 by one of the lieutenants of Pizarro, Guayaquil has been
the market for five hundred miles of coast ever since, but now it is
almost destitute of native capital, nearly all the merchants being
foreigners, mostly English and German, with one or two from the United
States. It is the only place in Ecuador in which modern civilization
exists; the rest of the country is a century behind the times. Since its
foundation Guayaquil has been burned several times, and often plundered
by pirates; now its commercial condition seems secure from all dangers
except revolutions, which are epidemic in Ecuador. In fact, the country
would feel queer without one. Earthquakes are frequent, but the elastic
bamboo houses only shiver--they never fall. To the torch of the
revolutionist, however, they are like tinder, and the blocks that have
been burned over testify to its effectiveness as a weapon of
destruction.
[Illustration: GUAYAQUIL.]
Over the entrances to the houses are tin signs, each of which represents
the flag of the country of which the dweller within is a citizen; and
upon these signs are painted warnings to revolutionary looters or
incendiaries--“This is the property of a citizen of Great Britain;” or,
“This is the property of a citizen of Germany;” or, “This is the
property of a citizen of the United States”--and the robber and
torch-bearer are expected to respect them as such, but seldom do.
Bolivar freed Ecuador from the Spanish yoke, as he did Colombia,
Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru, and it was one of the five States which
formed the United States of Colombia under his presidency; but the
priests had such a hold upon the people that liberty could not live in
an atmosphere they polluted, and the country lapsed into a state of
anarchy which has continued ever since. The struggle has been between
the progressive element and the priests, and the latter have usually
triumphed. It is the only country in America in which the Romish Church
survives as the Spaniards left it. In other countries popish influence
has been destroyed, and the rule which prevails everywhere--that the
less a people are under the control of that Church the greater their
prosperity, enlightenment, and progress--is illustrated in Ecuador with
striking force.
[Illustration: A PERSON OF INFLUENCE.]
One-fourth of all the property in Ecuador belongs to the bishop. There
is a Catholic church for every one hundred and fifty inhabitants: of the
population of the country ten per cent. are priests, monks, or nuns; and
two hundred and seventy-two of the three hundred and sixty-five days of
the year are observed as feast or fast days.
The priests control the Government in all its branches, dictate its laws
and govern their enforcement, and rule the country as absolutely as if
the Pope were its king. As a result seventy-five per cent. of the
children born are illegitimate. There is not a penitentiary, house of
correction, reformatory, or benevolent institution outside of Quito and
Guayaquil; there is not a railroad or stage-coach in the entire country,
and until recently there was not a telegraph wire. Laborers get from two
to ten dollars a month, and men are paid two dollars and a quarter for
carrying one hundred pounds of merchandise on their backs two hundred
and eighty-five miles. There is not a wagon in the republic outside of
Guayaquil, and not a road over which a wagon could pass. The people know
nothing but what the priests tell them; they have no amusements but
cock-fights and bullfights; no literature; no mail-routes, except from
Guayaquil to the capital (Quito), and nothing is common among the masses
that was not in use by them two hundred years ago. If one-tenth of the
money that has been expended in building monasteries had been devoted to
the construction of cartroads, Ecuador, which is naturally rich, would
be one of the most wealthy nations, in proportion to its area, on the
globe.
[Illustration: A FAMILY CIRCLE.]
There once was a steam railroad in Ecuador. During the time when Henry
Meiggs was creating such an excitement by the improvements he was making
in the transportation facilities of Peru, the contagion spread to
Ecuador, and some ambitious English capitalists attempted to lay a road
from Guayaquil to the interior. A track seventeen miles long was built,
which represents the railway system of Ecuador in all the geographies,
gazetteers, and books of statistics; but no wheels ever passed over this
track, and the tropical vegetation has grown so luxuriantly about the
place where it lies that it would now be difficult to find it. Last year
a telegraph line was built connecting Guayaquil with Quito, the highest
city in the world; but there is only one wire, and this is practically
useless, as not more than seven days out of the month can a message be
sent over it. The people chop down the poles for firewood, and cut out
pieces of the wire to repair broken harness whenever they feel so
disposed. Then it often takes a week for the line-man to find the break,
and another week to repair it. In the Government telegraph office I saw
an operator with a ball and chain attached to his leg--a convict who had
been sent back to his post because no one else could be found to work
the instrument. A young lady took the message and the money. There is a
cable belonging to a New York company connecting Guayaquil with the
outside world, but rates are extremely high, the tariff to the United
States being three dollars a word, and to other places in proportion.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT GUAYAQUIL, BUILT OF BAMBOO.]
Although almost directly under the equator, the temperature of Guayaquil
seldom rises above ninety, and after two o’clock in the day it is always
as cool as a pleasant summer morning in New England. A fresh breeze
called the _chandny_ blows over the ice-capped mountains, and brings
health to a city which would otherwise be uninhabitable. On clear
afternoons Mount Chimborazo, or “Chimbo” as they call it for short,
until recently supposed to be the highest in the hemisphere, can be
seen--white, jagged, and silently impressive--against the clear sky.
[Illustration: A COMMERCIAL THOROUGHFARE.]
The road to Quito is a mountain-path around the base of Chimbo,
traversed only on foot or mule-back, and then only during six months of
the year; for in the rainy season it is impassable, except to
experienced mountaineers.
During the rainy seasons the recent President, Don Jesus
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S PALACE.]
Maria Caamaño, resided in Guayaquil, in a barracks guarded by soldiers,
where he could watch the collection of customs and see to the
suppression of revolutions. He was the representative of the Church
party, and the people of the interior were loyal to him; but the liberal
element, which mostly exists on the coast, where a knowledge of the
world has come, was in a perpetual state of revolt, and required
constant attention. A fortress overlooking the town of Guayaquil, and a
gun-boat in the harbor, keep the people in subjection. We called upon
the President at his headquarters, and found him swinging in a hammock
and smoking a cigarette. He is a man of slight frame, with noticeably
small hands and feet, which he appeared quite anxious should not escape
our observation. He has a pleasant and intelligent face, but seemed to
be bewildered when we drew him into conversation about the commerce of
his country. He was educated in Europe, and has the reputation of being
a man of culture, although the abject tool of the priests.
[Illustration: THE OUTSKIRTS OF GUAYAQUIL.]