"Paul, the Physician, to Cristobal Colombo, greeting. I
perceive your magnificent and great desire to find a way to
where the spices grow."
"And thus leade they their lyves in fullfilling the holy
hunger of golde. But the more they fill their handes with
finding, the more increaseth their covetous desire."
--_Decades in the New Worlde._
I wanted to go from Seville to Cadiz by water. I longed to sail by the
"Silver Road" in the wake of the silver fleets. The little artist, as
befitted her youth, preferred a Manila shawl to that historic
pilgrimage. So I proposed to make this trifling trip alone.
Don Jose was shocked. Merriest and most indulgent of hosts, he was
inclined at this point to play the tyrant. If I must see Cadiz, well
and good. He would take me to the morning express and put me under
charge of the conductor. At Utrera, an hour farther on, his son would
come to the train and see that all was well. At _Puerto de Santa
Maria_, another hour distant, I should be met by a trusted friend of
the family, who would transfer me to another train and another
conductor, and so speed me for my third hour to Cadiz, where I should
be greeted by a relative of mine hostess and conveyed in safety to his
home.
I appreciated the kindness involved in this very Andalusian
programme, but otherwise it did not appeal to me. That was not the way
Columbus went, nor Cortes. And much as I delighted in the Alhambra,
and the Mosque of Cordova, and the Alcazar of Seville, I did not feel
called upon to bow a New England bonnet beneath the Moorish yoke.
Thus Don Jose and I found ourselves quietly engaged in an
Hispano-American contest. He heartily disapproved of my going, even by
train. "_Una senora sola!_ It is not the custom in Andalusia." His
plan of campaign consisted in deferring the arrangements from day to
day. "_Manana!_" Whenever I attempted to set a time for departure he
blandly assented, and presently projected some irresistibly attractive
excursion for that very date. His household were all with him. His
wife had not been able to procure the particular _dulces_
indispensable to a traveller's luncheon. Even my faithless comrade,
draped in her flower-garden shawl, practised the steps of a
_seguidilla_ to the rattle of the castanets and laughed at my defeats.
At last, grown desperate, I suavely announced at the Sunday dinner
table that I was going to Cadiz that week. My host said, "_Bueno!_"
and my hostess, "_Muy bien!_" But there was no surrender in their
tones. On Monday, instead of writing the requisite notes to these
relays of protectors along the route, Don Jose took us himself, on a
mimic steamboat, for a judicious distance down the Guadalquivir.
Tuesday he put me off with Roman ruins, and Wednesday with a private
gallery of Murillos. By Thursday I grew insistent, and, with shrug and
sigh, he finally consented to my going by train on Friday. I still
urged the boat, but he heaped up a thousand difficulties. There wasn't
any; it would be overcrowded; I should be seasick; the boat would
arrive, wherever it might arrive, too late for my train, whatever my
train might be. Compromise is always becoming, and I agreed to take
the nine o'clock express in the morning.
After the extended Spanish farewells, for to kiss on both cheeks and
be kissed on both cheeks down a long feminine line, mother, daughters,
and maid-servants, is no hasty ceremony, I sallied forth at half-past
eight with Don Jose in attendance. He called a cab, but in Spain the
cabbies are men and brothers, and this one, on learning our
destination, declared that the train did not start until half-past
nine and it was much better for a lady to wait _en casa_ than at the
depot. This additional guardianship goaded me to active remonstrance.
Why not take the cab for the hour and look up a procession on our way
to the station? There are always processions in Seville. This appealed
to both the pleasure-loving Spaniards, and we drove into the palmy
_Plaza de San Fernando_, where an array of military bands was
serenading some civic dignitary.
The music was of the best, and we fell in with the large and varied
retinue that escorted the musicians to the palace of the archbishop.
As they were rousing him from his reverend slumbers with _La Marcha de
Cadiz_, I caught a twinkle in Don Jose's eye. Did he hope to keep me
chasing after those bands all the forenoon? I awakened the cabman,
whom the music had lulled into the easy Andalusian doze, and we
clattered off to the station. Of all silent and forsaken places! I
looked suspiciously at Don Jose, whose swarthy countenance wore an
overdone expression of innocent surprise. A solitary official
sauntered out.
"Good morning, senor! Is the express gone?" asked the driver.
"Good morning, senor! There isn't any express to-day," was the reply.
"The express runs only Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays."
"What a pity," cooed Don Jose, contentedly. "You will have to wait
till to-morrow."
"Yes, you can go to-morrow," indulgently added the driver, and the
official chimed sweetly in, "_Manana por la manana!_"
"But is there no other train to-day?" I asked.
The official admitted that there was one at three o'clock. Don Jose
gave him a reproachful glance.
"But you do not want to go by train," said my ingenious host. "Perhaps
to-morrow you can go by steamboat."
"Perhaps I can go by steamboat now," I returned, seizing my
opportunity. "When does that boat start?"
Nobody knew. I asked the cabman to drive us to the Golden Tower, off
which sea-going vessels usually anchor. Don Jose fell back in his
seat, exhausted.
The cabman drove so fast, for Seville, that we ran into a donkey and
made a paralyzed beggar jump, but we reached the river in time to see
a small steamer just in the act of swinging loose from the pier. In
the excitement of the moment Don Jose forgot everything save the
necessity of properly presenting me to the captain, and I, for my
part, was absorbed in the ecstasy of sailing from the foot of the
Golden Tower along the Silver Road.
It was not until a rod of water lay between boat and wharf that the
captain shouted to Don Jose, who struck an attitude of utter
consternation, that this craft went only to Bonanza, and no
connection could be made from there to Cadiz until the following
afternoon. And I, mindful of the austere dignity that befitted these
critical circumstances, could not even laugh.
It was a dirty little boat, with a malodorous cargo of fish, and for
passengers two soldiers, two peasants, and a commercial traveller. But
what of that? I was sailing on a treasure ship of the Indies, one of
those lofty galleons of Spain, "rowed by thrice one hundred slaves and
gay with streamers, banners, music," that had delivered at the Golden
Tower her tribute from the hoard of the Incas, and was proudly bearing
back to the open roads of Cadiz.
We dropped down past a noble line of deep-sea merchantmen, from
Marseilles, Hamburg, and far-away ports of Norway and Sweden. We
passed fishing boats casting their nets, and met a stately Spanish
bark, the _Calderon_. On the shores we caught glimpses of orange grove
and olive orchard, lines of osiers and white poplars, and we paused at
the little town of Coria, famous for its earthen jars, to land one of
our peasants, while a jolly priest, whose plain black garb was
relieved by a vermilion parasol, tossed down cigars to his friends
among the sailors.
Then our galleon pursued her course into the flat and desolate regions
of the _marismas_. These great salt marshes of the Guadalquivir,
scarcely more than a bog in winter, serve as pasture for herds of
hardy sheep and for those droves of mighty bulls bred in Andalusia to
die in the arenas of all Spain. For long stretches the green bank
would be lined with the glorious creatures, standing like ebony
statues deep amid the reeds, some entirely black, and many black with
slight markings of white. The Guadalquivir intersects in triple
channel this unpeopled waste, concerning whose profusion of plant life
and animal life English hunters tell strange tales. They report flocks
of rosy flamingoes, three hundred or five hundred in a column,
"glinting in the sunshine like a pink cloud," and muddy islets studded
thick with colonies of flamingo nests. Most wonderful of all, the
camel, that ancient and serious beast of burden, a figure pertaining
in all imaginations to the arid, sandy desert, keeps holiday in these
huge swamps. It seems that, in 1829, a herd of camels was brought into
the province of Cadiz, from the Canaries, for transport service in
road-building and the like, and for trial in agriculture. But the
peculiar distaste of horses for these humpy monsters spoiled the
scheme, and the camels, increased to some eighty in number, took
merrily to the marshes, where, in defiance of all caravan tradition,
they thrive in aquatic liberty. The fascination of this wilderness
reached even the dingy steamer deck. Gulls, ducks, and all manner of
wild fowl flashed in the sunshine, which often made the winding river,
as tawny as our James, sparkle like liquid gold.
If only it had been gold indeed, and had kept the traceries of the
Roman keels that have traversed it, the Vandal swords whose red it has
washed away, the Moorish faces it has mirrored, the Spanish--
"_Usted come?_"
It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl of _puchero_, but
no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with
that thin, keen sword one may see in the Madrid _Armeria_. This was a
barefooted cabin boy, in blue linen blouse and patched blue trousers,
with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an
orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown
face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but
I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, shores,
and herds and chatting with the _simpatico_ sailor, who, taking his
cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights,
which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even
his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This
child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the
fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over
his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of
coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the
whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial
traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for
emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of
neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope
and plunged them into the pot of _garbanzos_, to which he added beans,
cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young
discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the
deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back
and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging
one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel.
"Will you eat?" he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of
stranger eyes.
"Many thanks! May it profit yourself!"
I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixed phrases of
Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of
courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more
indigestible goodies.
"Did you ever hear of Columbus?" I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes
together, leaning on the rail.
"No, senora," he replied, with another blush, "I have heard of
nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I
am good for nothing more."
And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like
trumpets up and down the Guadalquivir, have come at last!
We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often
turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said,
_buen muchacho_, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself.
The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up
in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh
breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full
of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly
in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to
be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers
over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the
oratory of the commercial traveller.
"No fighting for me!" this hero was declaiming. "In strenuous times
like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his
country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the
poet says, to die for the _patria_, but to live for the _patria_ is,
in my opinion, just as glorious."
"And more comfortable," grunted one of the soldiers, while the other
gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had
been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the
little white port of Bonanza.
As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a
prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that
Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the
first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles
from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lucar de Barrameda in Magellan's
own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair
in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden
wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped
shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with
Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a
torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to
the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark.
"And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?" was my final
query.
"Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the
cemetery," he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule
that was sulkily jerking us along.
"Please let me get out and walk," I entreated. "You may keep the
valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as
that mule."
"Now, don't!" he begged, with even intenser pathos. "Strangers always
want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at
me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in
Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer."
I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not
refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit.
Notwithstanding Don Jose's dark predictions, this was the only trial
of the trip. To realize to the full the honesty, kindliness, and
dignity of the everyday Spaniard, one needs to turn off from the
sight-seer's route. On the beaten tourist track are exorbitant hotels,
greedy guides, cheating merchants, troops of beggars--everywhere "the
itching palm." But here in San Lucar, for instance, where I had to
spend twenty-four hours at a genuine Spanish _fonda_, the proprietor
took no advantage of the facts that I was a foreigner, a woman, and
practically a prisoner in the place until the Saturday afternoon train
went out, but gave me excellent accommodations, most respectful and
considerate treatment, and the lowest hotel bill that I had seen in
Spain.
San Lucar has, in early Spanish literature, a very ill name for
roguery, but, so far as my brief experience went, Boston could not
have been safer and would not have been so genial. I strayed, for
instance, into a modest little shop to buy a cake of soap, which its
owner declined to sell, insisting that I ought to have a choicer
variety than his, and sending his son, a lad of sixteen, to point me
out more fashionable counters. This youth showed me the sights of the
pleasant seashore town, with its tiers of closely grated windows
standing out from the white fronts of the houses, and its sturdy
packhorses and orange-laden donkeys streaming along the rough stone
streets, and when, at the inn door, I hesitatingly offered him a piece
of silver, doffed his cap with smiling ease, and said he did not take
pay for a pleasure.
Once off the regular lines of travel, however, speed is out of the
question. I might have gone from Seville to Cadiz in three hours;
thanks to historic enthusiasms, it took me nearer three days. After
escaping from San Lucar, I had to pass four hours in Jerez, another
whitewashed, palm-planted town, whose famous sherry has made it the
third city in Spain for wealth. The thing to do at Jerez is to visit
the great _bodegas_ and taste the rich white liquors treasured in
those monster casks, which bear all manner of names, from Christ and
His twelve disciples to Napoleon the Great; but mindful, in the light
of Don Jose's admonitions, that the weak feminine estate is "as water
unto wine," I contented myself with seeing the strange storage basin
of the mountain aqueduct--an immense, immaculate cellar, where endless
vistas of low stone arches stretch away in the silent dusk above the
glimmer of a ghostly lake.
The train for Cadiz must needs be two hours late this particular
evening, but my cabman drove me to approved shops for the purchase of
bread and fruit, and then, of his own motion, drew up our modest
equipage in a shady nook opposite the villa of the English consul,
that I might enjoy my Arcadian repast with a secure mind. Jehu
accepted, after due protestations, a share of the viands, and
reciprocated the attention by buying me a glass of water at the
nearest stand, much amused at my continued preference for Jerez water
over Jerez wine.
One of the Jerez wine merchants, German by birth, shared the railway
carriage with me for a while, and after the social wont of Continental
travel fell to discussing the war. "The Spaniards deserved to be
beaten," he declared, "but the Yankees didn't deserve to beat. They
were conceited enough before, heaven knows, and now they expect all
Europe to black their shoddy shoes. Your own country was a bit to
blame in blocking every effort to keep them in their place."
I felt it time to explain that I was not English, but American. Much
disconcerted, he did his best to make amends.
"I wouldn't have said that for the world if I had known you were an
American--but it's every syllable true."
He thought over this remark in silence for a moment, his Teutonic
spirit sorely strained between kindliness and honesty, and tried
again.
"I would like to say something good about the United States, I would
indeed,--if there was anything to say."
It seemed to occur to him, after a little, that even this apology left
something to be desired, and he brightened up.
"Wouldn't you like some roses? They sell them here at this station.
There comes a boy now with a nice, big bunch. One _peseta_! I think
that's too dear, don't you?"