Guayaquil shows symptoms of becoming a modern town. It has gas,
street-cars, ice-factories, and other improvements, all introduced by
citizens of the United States. The custom-house is built of pine from
Maine and corrugated iron from Pennsylvania, and a citizen of New York
erected it. An American company has a line of paddle-wheel steamers,
constructed in Baltimore, on the river, and the only gun-boat the
Government owns is a discarded merchant-ship which plied between New
York and Norfolk. Some of the houses, although built of split bamboo and
plaster, are very elegantly furnished, and the stores show fine stocks
of goods. But the rear portion of the city is so filthy that one has to
hold his nose as he passes through it. The people live in miserable dirt
hovels, and the buzzard is the only industrious biped to be seen.
[Illustration: A BUSINESS OF IMPORTANCE.]
There is no fresh water in town, but all that the people use is brought
on rafts from twenty miles up the river, and is peddled about the place
in casks carried upon the backs of donkeys or men. It looks very funny
to see the donkeys all wearing pantalettes--not, however, from motives
of modesty, as the native children go entirely naked, and the men and
women nearly so, but to protect their legs and bellies from the gadfly,
which bites fiercely here. Bread as well as water is peddled about the
town in the same way, and vegetables are brought down the river on rafts
and in dug-outs, which are hauled upon the beach in long rows, and
present a busy and interesting scene. Guayaquil is famous for the finest
pineapples in the world--great juicy fruits, as white as snow and as
sweet as honey. It is also famous for its hats and hammocks made of the
pita fibre from a sort of cactus. The well-known Panama hats are all
made in Guayaquil and the towns along that coast, but get their name
because Panama merchants formerly controlled the trade.
[Illustration: A PINEAPPLE FARM.]
One afternoon, at Guayaquil, I witnessed a singular ceremony, which is,
however, very common there. One of the churches had been destroyed by an
earthquake, and funds were needed to repair it. So the priest took the
image of the Virgin from the altar, and the holy sacrament, and carried
them about the city under a canopy, clad in his sacerdotal vestments. He
was preceded by a brass band, a number of boys carrying lighted candles
and swinging incense urns, and followed by a long procession of men,
women, and children. The assemblage passed up and down the principal
street, stopping in front of each house. While the band played, priests
with contribution plates entered the houses, soliciting subscriptions,
and the people in the procession kneeled in the dust and prayed that the
same might be given with liberality. Where money was obtained a blessing
was bestowed; where none was offered a curse was pronounced, with a
notice that a contribution was expected at once, or the curse would be
daily repeated.
[Illustration: A WATER MERCHANT.]
All imported goods are first brought to Guayaquil, and from that point
distributed. Those destined for Quito are conveyed by steamboat up the
rivers for a distance of sixty miles. From the termination of the
steamboat route the distance to Quito is two hundred and sixty miles,
making the
[Illustration: A FREIGHT TRAIN ON THE WAY.]
total distance from Guayaquil three hundred and twenty miles. Between
the upper end of the steamboat route and Quito all packages of
merchandise that do not weigh more than two hundred pounds are conveyed
on the backs of horses, mules, or donkeys. The average cost in United
States currency--in which all values are stated--is four dollars per one
hundred pounds between Guayaquil and Quito. Pianos, organs, safes,
carriage-bodies, large mirrors, and some other articles too heavy or too
bulky to be carried on a single horse are placed on a frame of bamboo
poles and carried on the shoulders of men the entire land portion of the
journey. A piano weighing about six hundred pounds can be carried by
twenty-four men in two divisions, one half serving as a relay to the
other half. Although labor is very low-priced, the man-carriage is quite
expensive. A cart-road, or railroad, both of which are feasible and
practicable, would greatly reduce the expense of transportation, and
would materially influence domestic manufactures, as well as the
introduction of foreign manufactured products. It seems almost
impossible that any American goods could, after undergoing such a
tremendous carriage, compete with native manufactures, however crude, in
Quito, and yet they do. Nearly all the furniture in use in that city is
brought from the United States in separate parts and put together on
arrival; and in that, the highest and oldest city in America, many
people sleep on Grand Rapids beds. The twelve breweries running in Quito
import their hops from the United States and Europe, and with railroad
facilities American beer, as well as hops, could be liberally sold in
Quito. American refined sugars are largely consumed, although the
native products are very good.
[Illustration: A PASSENGER TRAIN.]
Ecuador, with about one million inhabitants, has only forty-seven
post-offices, but they are so widely distributed that it requires a mail
carriage of 5389 miles to reach them all; seventy-two miles by canoes
and 5317 by horses and mules. About five hundred miles of the seaboard
service is also covered by foreign steamship mail service. Between Quito
and Guayaquil there are two mails each way per week by couriers--the
usual time one way, travelling day and night, being six days. Other
sections of the country are less favored by mail service, the receipt
and departure of mails ranging from once a week to once a month, as
people happen to be going.
During the year 1885 there were carried within the country 2,989,885
letters, and 50,700 letters were sent to foreign countries, eighty per
cent. of them being between Guayaquil and the neighboring towns. No
interior postage is charged on newspapers, whether of domestic or
foreign publication. Interior letter postage is five cents each
one-fourth ounce. The postage on letters to foreign countries is twelve
cents each half ounce and one cent per ounce on newspapers.
[Illustration: THE COMMON CARRIER.]
The social and political condition of Ecuador presents a picture of the
dark ages. There is not a newspaper printed outside of the city of
Guayaquil, and the only information the people have of what is going on
in the world is gained from the strangers who now and then visit the
country, and from a class of peddlers who make periodical trips,
traversing the whole hemisphere from Guatemala to Patagonia. These
peddlers are curious fellows, and there seems to be a regular
organization of them. They are like the old minstrels that we read of in
the novels of Sir Walter Scott. They practise medicine, sing songs, cure
diseased cattle, mend clocks, carry letters and messages from place to
place, and peddle such little articles as are used in the households of
the natives. It often takes them three or four years to make a round
trip, going invariably on foot, and carrying packs upon their backs.
When their stock is exhausted they replenish it at the nearest source of
supply, and are ever welcome visitors at the homes of the natives. This
internal trade does not amount to much in dollars and cents, but
supplies the lack of retail establishments and newspapers.
[Illustration: HOTEL ON THE ROUTE TO QUITO.]
The capital and the productive regions of Ecuador are accessible only by
a mule-path, which is impassable for six months in the year during the
rainy season, and in the dry season it requires eight or nine days to
traverse it, with no resting-places where a man can find a decent bed,
or food fit for human consumption. This is the only means of
communication between Quito and the outside world, except along the
mountains southward into Bolivia and Peru, where the Incas constructed
beautiful highways which the Spaniards have permitted to decay until
they are now practically useless. They were so well built, however, as
to stand the wear and tear of three centuries, and the slightest attempt
at repair would have kept them in order.
Although the journey from Guayaquil to Quito takes nine days, Garcia
Moreno, a former President of Ecuador, once made it in thirty-six
hours. He heard of a revolution, and springing upon his horse went to
the capital, had twenty-two conspirators shot, and was back at Guayaquil
in less than a week. Moreno was President for twelve years, and was one
of the fiercest and most cruel rulers South America has ever seen. He
shot men who would not take off their hats to him in the streets, and
had a drunken priest impaled in the principal plaza of Quito, as a
warning to the clergy to observe habits of sobriety or conceal their
intemperance. There was nothing too brutal for this man to do, and
nothing too sacred to escape his grasp. Yet he compelled Congress to
pass an act declaring that the republic of Ecuador “existed wholly and
alone devoted to the services of the Holy Church,” and forbidding the
importation of books and periodicals which did not receive the sanction
of the Jesuits. He divided his army into four divisions, called
respectively “The Division of the Blessed Virgin,” “The Division of the
Son of God,” “The Division of the Holy Ghost,” and “The Division of the
Body and Blood of Christ.” He made the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” the
national emblem, and called his bodyguard the “Holy Lancers of Santa
Maria.” He died in 1875 by assassination, and the country has been in a
state of political eruption ever since.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE MULES TO FEED.]
Although the road to Quito is over an almost untrodden wilderness, it
presents the grandest scenic panorama in the world. Directly beneath the
equator, surrounding the city whose origin is lost in the mist of
centuries, rise twenty volcanoes, presided over by the princely
Chimborazo, the lowest being 15,922 feet in height, and the highest
reaching an altitude of 22,500 feet. Three of these volcanoes are
active, five are dormant, and twelve extinct. Nowhere else on the
earth’s surface is such a cluster of peaks, such a grand assemblage of
giants. Eighteen of the twenty are covered with perpetual snow, and the
summits of eleven have never been reached by a living creature except
the condor, whose flight surpasses that of any other bird. At noon the
vertical sun throws a profusion of light upon the snow-crowned summits,
when they appear like a group of pyramids cut in spotless marble.
[Illustration: EN ROUTE TO THE SEA.]
Cotopaxi is the loftiest of active volcanoes, but it is slumbering now.
The only evidence of action is the frequent rumblings, which can be
heard for a hundred miles, and the cloud of smoke by day and the pillar
of fire by night, which constantly arises from a crater that is more
than three thousand feet beyond the reach of man. Many have attempted to
scale it, but the walls are so steep and the snow is so deep that ascent
is impossible even with scaling-ladders. On the south side of Cotopaxi
is a great rock, more than two
[Illustration: SOMEWHERE NEAR THE SUMMIT.]
thousand feet high, called the “Inca’s Head.” Tradition says that it was
once the summit of the volcano, and fell on the day when Atahaulpa was
strangled by the Spaniards. Those who have seen Vesuvius can judge of
the grandeur of Cotopaxi if they can imagine a volcano fifteen thousand
feet higher shooting forth its fire from a crest covered by three
thousand feet of snow, with a voice that has been heard six hundred
miles. And one can judge of the grandeur of the road to Quito if he can
imagine twenty of the highest mountains in America, three of them active
volcanoes, standing along the road from Washington to New York.
[Illustration: THE ALTAR.]
The city of Quito lies upon the breast of a very uncertain and
treacherous mother, the volcano Pichincha, which rises to an altitude of
sixteen thousand feet, or about four thousand five hundred feet above
the plaza. Since the Conquest the volcano has had three notable
eruptions--in 1575, 1587, and 1660, when the city was almost entirely
destroyed. In 1859 there was a severe earthquake followed by an
eruption, which, while it did not do much damage in the city itself,
caused great destruction and loss of life in the surrounding towns and
villages. In 1868 the great convulsion which extended along the entire
South Pacific coast was severely felt in Ecuador, where, it is stated,
seventy-two towns were destroyed and thirty thousand people killed.
[Illustration: A STREET IN QUITO.]
There was a great scare in Ecuador in the summer of 1868 because of the
violent eruption of the volcano Tunguragua, one of the largest in the
group, rising nearly two thousand feet above the line of perpetual
snow; but after a few days of agitation, in which immense masses of lava
and ashes were thrown out of the crater, the eruption subsided without
doing much damage.
[Illustration: WHERE PIZARRO FIRST LANDED.]
Here in these mountains, until the Spaniards came, in 1534, existed a
civilization that was old when Christ was crucified; a civilization
whose arts were equal to those of Egypt; which had temples four times
the size of the Capitol at Washington, from a single one of which the
Spaniards drew twenty-two thousand ounces of solid silver nails; whose
rulers had palaces from which the Spaniards gathered ninety thousand
ounces of gold and an unmeasured quantity of silver. Here was an empire
stretching from the equator to the antarctic circle, walled in by the
grandest groups of mountains in the world; whose people knew all the
arts of their time but those of war, and were conquered by two hundred
and thirteen men under the leadership of a Spanish swineherd who could
neither read nor write.
The age of Quito is unknown. The present city was built by the Spaniards
after the Conquest, but it stands upon the foundations of a city they
destroyed, which was older than the knowledge of men. The history of the
ancient place dates back only a few years before the arrival of the
Spaniards in the country; for they, ignorant men, interested in nothing
but plunder, destroyed every means by which its antiquity could have
been traced.
Ecuador was the scene of the first conquest. The Spaniards, under
Pizarro, landed first on the island of Puna, at the mouth of the harbor
of Guayaquil, and first stepped upon the main coast at Tumbez, in Peru,
a few miles southward. Here they found that the Incas, for the first
time in the history of that remarkable race, were at war. Huayna-Capac,
the greatest of the Incas, made Quito his capital, and there lived in a
splendor unsurpassed in ancient or modern times. At his death he divided
his kingdom into two parts, giving Atahualpa the northern half, and
Huscar what is now Bolivia and the southern part of Peru. The two
brothers went to war, and while they were engaged in it Pizarro came.
Everybody who has read Prescott’s fascinating volumes knows what
followed. With the aid of the Spaniards Atahualpa conquered his brother,
and then the Spaniards conquered him. When he lay a prisoner in the
hands of the guests he had treated so hospitably, he offered to fill his
prison with gold if they would release him. They agreed, and his willing
subjects brought the treasure; but the greedy Spaniards, always
treacherous, demanded more, and Atahualpa sent for it. Runners were
hurried all over the country, and the simple, unselfish people
surrendered all their wealth to save their king. But Pizarro became
tired of waiting for the treasure to come, and the men in charge of it,
being met by the news that Atahualpa had been strangled, buried the gold
and silver in the Llanganati, where the Spaniards have been searching
for it ever since.
No amount of persuasion, temptation, or torture could wring from the
Indians the secret of the buried gold. Two men of modern times are
supposed to have known its hidingplace. One of them, an Indian, became
mysteriously rich, and built the Church of San Francisco, in Quito. On
his deathbed he is said to have revealed to the priest who confessed him
that his wealth came from the hidden Inca treasure, but he died without
imparting the knowledge of its location.
[Illustration: EQUIPPED FOR THE ANDES.]
Another man, Valverde by name, a Spaniard, married an Inca woman, and is
supposed to have learned the secret from her, for he sprang from abject
poverty to the summit of wealth almost in a single night, “without
visible means of support.” Valverde, when he died, left as a legacy to
the King of Spain a guide to the buried treasure. Hundreds of fortunes
have been wasted, and hundreds of lives have been lost, in vain attempts
to follow Valverde’s directions. They are perfectly plain to a certain
point, where the trail ends, and cannot be followed farther because of a
deep ravine, which the credulous assert has been opened by an earthquake
since Valverde died. These searches have been prosecuted by the
Government as well as by private individuals; and if all the money that
has been spent in the search for Atahualpa’s ransom had been expended
on roads and other internal improvements, the country would be much
richer, and the people much more prosperous than they are.
The devotion of the Indians to the memory of their king, who was
strangled three hundred and fifty years ago, is very touching. When “the
last of the Incas” fell, he left his people in perpetual mourning, and
the women wear nothing but black to-day. It is a pathetic custom of the
race not to show upon their costumes the slightest hint of color. Over a
short black skirt they wear a sort of mantle, which resembles in its
appearance, as well as in its use, the _manta_ that is worn by the
ladies of Peru, and the _mantilla_ of Spain. It is drawn over their
foreheads and across their chins, and pinned between the shoulders. This
sombre costume gives them a nun-like appearance, which is heightened by
the stealthy, silent way in which they dart through the streets. The
cloth is woven on their own native looms, of the wool of the llama and
the vicuna, and is a soft, fine fabric.
While the Indians are under the despotic rule of the priests, and have
accepted the Catholic religion, three hundred and fifty years of
submission have not entirely divorced them from the ancient rites they
practised under their original civilization. Several times a year they
have feasts or celebrations to commemorate some event in the Inca
history. They never laugh, and scarcely ever smile; they have no songs
and no amusements; their only semblance to music is a mournful chant
which they give in unison at the feasts which are intended to keep alive
the memories of the Incas. They cling to the traditions and the customs
of their ancestors. They remember the ancient glory of their race, and
look to its restoration as the Aztecs of Mexico look for the coming of
Montezuma. They have relics which they guard with the most sacred care,
and two great secrets which no tortures at the hands of the Spaniards
have been able to wring from them. These are the art of tempering copper
so as to give it as keen and enduring an edge as steel, and the
burial-place of the Incarial treasures.
[Illustration: THE OLD INCA TRAIL.]
The Spaniards are the aristocracy, poor but proud--very proud. The mixed
race furnishes the mechanics and artisans; while the Indians till the
soil and do the drudgery. A cook gets two dollars a month in a
depreciated currency, but the employer is expected to board her entire
family. A laborer gets four or six dollars a month and boards himself,
except when he is fortunate to have a wife out at service. The Indians
never marry, because they cannot afford to do so. The law compels them
to pay the priest a fee of six dollars--more money than most of them can
ever accumulate. When a Spaniard marries, the fee is paid by
contributions from his relatives.
It is a peculiarity of the Indian that he will sell nothing at
wholesale, nor will he trade anywhere but in the marketplace, on the
spot where he and his forefathers have sold garden-truck for three
centuries. Although travellers on the highways meet whole armies of
Indians bearing upon their backs heavy burdens of vegetables and other
supplies, they can purchase nothing from them, as the native will not
sell his goods until he gets to the place where he is in the habit of
selling them. He will carry them ten miles, and dispose of them for less
than he was offered at home. An old woman was trudging along one day
with a heavy basket of pineapples and other fruits, and we tried to
relieve her of part of her load, offering ten cents for pineapples which
could be had for a quartillo, or two and a half cents, in market. She
was polite but firm, and declined to sell anything until she got to
town, although there was a weary, dusty journey of two leagues ahead of
her. The guide explained that she was suspicious of the high price we
offered, and imagined that pineapples must be very scarce in market, or
we would not pay so much on the road; but it is a common rule for them
to refuse to sell except at their regular stand. A gentleman who lives
some distance from town said that for the last four years he had been
trying to get the Indians, who passed every morning with packs of
alfalfa (the tropical clover), to sell him some at his gate, but they
invariably refused to do so; consequently he was compelled to go into
town to buy what was carried past his own door. Nor will the natives
sell at wholesale. They will give you a gourdful of potatoes for a penny
as often as you like, but will not sell their stock in a lump. They will
give you a dozen eggs for a real (ten cents), but will not sell you five
dozen for a dollar. This dogged adherence to custom cannot be accounted
for, except on the supposition that their suspicions are excited by an
attempt to depart from it.
In Ecuador there are no smaller coins than the quartillo, and change is
therefore made by the use of bread. On his way to market the purchaser
stops at the bakery and gets a dozen or twenty breakfast-rolls, which
cost about one cent each, and the market-women receive them and give
them as change for small purchases. If you buy a cent’s worth of
anything and offer a quartillo in payment, you get a breakfast-roll for
the balance due you. The landlord at the hotel requires you to pay your
board in advance, because he has no money to buy food and no credit with
the market-men; the muleteers ask for their fees before starting,
because their experience teaches them wisdom. There is scarcely a
building in the whole republic in process of construction or even
undergoing repairs. Death seems to have settled upon everything
artificial, but Nature is in her grandest glory.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL COUNTRY MANSION.]
Architecturally, Quito is not unlike other Spanish-American towns,
except that it is dirtier and a little more dilapidated. There is not
even an excuse for a hotel, and private hospitality is restricted by the
poverty of the people. Few people ever go there--only those who are
compelled--and the demand for a hotel is not sufficient to justify the
establishment of one. One-fourth of the entire city is covered with
convents, and every fourth person you meet is a priest, or a monk, or a
nun. There are monks in gray, monks in blue, monks in white, monks in
black, and orders that no one ever heard of before. There are all sorts
of priests, also, in all sorts of rigs, wearing the outlandish hats
which are seen elsewhere only upon the theatrical stage. Some of the
holy fathers look as if they had just been “making up” for a comic
opera, and the jolly or grim old fellows one sees in Vibert’s pictures
are found on almost every corner in Quito.
[Illustration: A WAYSIDE SHRINE.]