TRAVELS IN THE CIBAO
There are two railroads in Santo Domingo, confined to the Cibao, or
northern half of the Republic, which by their united efforts connect
Santiago with the sea in both directions. The more diminutive of them is
the Ferrocarril Central Dominicano, covering the hundred kilometers
between Moca and Puerto Plata, on the north coast, with the ancient city
of the Gentlemen about two thirds of the way inland. It is government
owned, but takes its orders from an American manager. It burns soft
coal, as the traveler will soon discover to his regret, and, unlike most
lines south of the Rio Grande, it has only one class. The result is that
the single little passenger train which makes the round trip three times
a week and keeps the Sabbath contains a motley throng of voyagers. I say
“contains” with hesitation, for that is somewhat straining the truth.
The bare statement that its gauge is six inches short of a yard should
be sufficient hint to the imaginative reader to indicate the disparity
between travelers and cars. In fact, any but the shortest knees are
prone to become hopelessly entangled with those of one’s companion or in
the rattan seat-back ahead, and the fully developed man who would view
the passing landscape must needs force his head down somewhere near the
pit of his stomach. The train has its virtues, however, for all that.
The more than indefinite periods it tarries at each succeeding station
give the seeker after local color ample opportunity to make the thorough
acquaintance of every town and its inhabitants, particularly as it is
the custom of the latter to gather en masse along the platforms.
We made up a party of four for the journey. “Big George,” his sonnets
safely despatched to his clamoring publisher, was sadly needed to stifle
a feud between his two native subordinates in the northern port; the
rumor of an illicit still in the same locality had been enough to send
“Mac” racing to the station. We wormed our way into one of the two
passenger coaches with mixed feelings. For Rachel it was commodious
enough. After years of experience with the cramped and weak-jointed
furniture of Latin-America I should naturally not be so lacking in
foresight as to choose—or be chosen by—a wife who required an undue
amount of space. “Mac” and I, too, had been booted about this celestial
footstool long enough to accept a certain degree of packing without
protest. But if “Big George” stuck doggedly to the platform and gazed
pensively along the roofs of the cars ahead to where the wool-pated
fireman and engineer were struggling to contain themselves within the
same cab, it was not for the sole purpose of gathering inspiration for
new sonnets from the fronds of the passing palm trees.
However, I was near forgetting to bring “Mac” in for his formal
introduction, and there is no better time to redeem my promise than
while we are tearing along at eight miles an hour over a region we have
already viewed by Ford. Top sergeant of a troop of American cavalry that
won laurels in the Spanish-American war, he had chosen to remain behind
in Porto Rico when his “hitch” was ended. There he helped to set our new
possession to rights and took unto himself the foundation of a family.
With the establishment of American control of customs in Santo Domingo
in 1907 he was the first of our fellow-countrymen to accept the
dangerous task of patrolling the Haitian-Dominican frontier. Many a
party of smugglers did he rout single-handed; times without number he
was surrounded by bandits, or threatened with such fate as only the
outlaws of savage Haiti and their Dominican confederates can inflict
upon helpless white men falling into their hands. “Mac” made it his
business never to be helpless. His trusty rifle lost none of the
accuracy it had learned on the target-range; the tactics of
self-preservation and the will to command he had gained in his long
military schooling stood him in increasing good stead. Even when he was
shot from ambush and marked for life with two great spreading scars
beneath his shirt, he did not lose his soldierly poise, but wreaked a
memorable vengeance on his foes before he dragged himself back to
safety. “Mac” does not boast of these things; indeed, he rarely speaks
of them, except as a background of his witty stories of border control
in the old days. But his colleagues of those merry by-gone times still
tell of his fearless exploits.
[Illustration: Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose revolution
finally caused American intervention in Santo Domingo]
[Illustration: A bread seller of Santo Domingo]
[Illustration: The church within a church of Moca]
[Illustration: The “holy place” of Santo Domingo on top of the Santo
Cerro where Columbus planted a cross]
Beyond Navarrete, where the railroad begins to part company with the
highway from the west, the train took to climbing in great leisurely
curves higher and higher into the northern range of hills. Royal palms
stood like markers for steep vistas of denser, but less lofty,
vegetation; scattered houses of simple tropical construction squatting
here and there on little cleared spaces—cleared even of grass, which the
Spanish-American seems ever to abhor—broke the otherwise green and
full-wooded landscape. Worn out rails did duty as telegraph poles; the
power line that brings Santiago its electric light from Puerto Plata
smiled at our pigmy efforts to keep up with it. Higher still the railway
banks were lined with the miserable _yagua_ and jungle-rubbish shacks of
Haitian squatters. An editorial in the least pathetic of Santiago’s
daily handbills masquerading under the name of newspapers had protested
the very day before against this “constant influx of undesirable
immigration.” Indeed, the American governor had recently been prevailed
upon to issue a decree tending to curtail the increase in this sort of
population.
Under this new decree all natives of other West Indian islands resident
within the Dominican Republic must register within four months and be
prepared to leave if their presence is deemed undesirable; those who
seek admission in the future must have in their possession at least
fifty dollars. “Santo Domingo for the Dominicans” is the slogan of those
who have gained the governor’s ear. If they are to have immigration, let
it be Caucasian, preferably from Latin Europe. This demand sounds well
enough in print, but is sadly out of gear with the facts. The Dominican
Republic covers two-thirds of the ancient island of Quisqueya, which has
an area equal to that of Maine or Ireland. Its more than 28,000 square
miles, four times the size of Connecticut and richer in undeveloped
resources than any other region of the West Indies, is inhabited by a
population scarcely equal to that of Buffalo. Nearly two-thirds of those
inhabitants are of the weaker sex; moreover a large percentage of the
males are too proud or too habitually fatigued to indulge in manual
labor, which is the most crying need of the country. Caucasian settlers
would cause it to contribute its fair share to the world’s bread-basket,
were there any known means of attracting them. But as there seems to be
none, its virgin fields must await the importation of labor from its
overcrowded island neighbors, particularly from that land of half its
size and three times its population which is separated from it only by a
knee-deep frontier. Yet what Haitian laborer boasts a fortune of fifty
dollars? A black plutocrat of that grade would remain at home to end his
days in ease in his jungle palace or finance a revolution. The Dominican
is not unjustified in wishing to keep his land free from the semi-savage
hordes beyond the Massacre, but a hungry world will not long endure the
sight of one of its richest garden spots lying virtually fallow.
Beyond a tunnel at the summit of the line, 1600 feet above the sea, the
passengers poured pellmell into a station restaurant. Its long general
table was sagging under a half-dozen styles of meat and all the known
native vegetables and fruits. But woe betide the traveler who clung to
the dignity of good breeding! For he would infallibly be found clamoring
in vain for something with which to decorate his second plate when the
warning screech of the toy locomotive announced that it was prepared to
undertake new feats.
The Atlantic slope of the little mountain range was more unbrokenly
green than the interior valley behind, for it has first choice of the
rains that sweep in from the northeast. Coffee, corn, shaded patches of
cacao, and the giant leaves of the banana clothed the steep hillsides.
Cattle grazed here and there beneath the dense foliage. About the Perez
sugar-mill horn-yoked oxen butted along the bottomless roads massive
two-wheeled carts piled high with cane. Several of the wiser passengers,
a woman or two among them, had sought more commodious quarters in the
“baggage car” ahead, an open box car in which one might pick a steamer
chair or some little less comfortable seat from the luggage piled
helter-skelter against the two end walls. “Big George” invaded the roof
above, where some of us felt impelled to follow, lest his sonnetical
abstraction cause him to be left hanging from the telegraph wire that
sagged low across the line at frequent intervals. This free-and-easy,
take-care-of-yourself-because-we-don’t-intend-to manner of operating
public utilities is one of the chief charms of the American tropics.
At La Sabana, with its majestic ceiba tree framing the jumping-off place
ahead, we halted to change engines. The ten per cent grade down to the
coast had led to the recent introduction of powerful Shea locomotives to
take the place of the former rack-rails that lay in tumbled heaps along
the edge of the constantly encroaching vegetation. Wrecks of cars, like
helpless upturned turtles, rusting away beneath their growing shrouds of
greenery below the embankment of several sharp curves, suggested why the
change had been made. Trees and bushes completely covered with ivy-like
growths as with green clothing hung out in the blazing sunshine to dry
lined the way. The wide-spread view of the foam-edged coast of the blue
Atlantic, with the red roofs of Puerto Plata peering through the trees,
shrank and faded away as we reached the narrow plain, across which we
jolted for ten minutes more through sugar, mango, and banana-bearing
fields before the passengers disentangled themselves on the edge of the
sea.
The port was somewhat larger, more sanitary and more enterprising than
we had expected. Cacao, sugar, and tobacco were being run on mule-drawn
hand-cars out to a waiting steamer, though, strictly speaking, the open
roadstead can scarcely be called a harbor. The town was pretty, shaded
in its outer portions by cocoanut and other seaside tropical trees, and
with all the usual Spanish-American features. A church completely
covered with sheet iron walled one side of the delightful little plaza,
about which were the customary open clubs, one of them occupied by
American marines, whose rag-time phonographs and similar pastimes
ladened the evening breezes more than all the others. The cemetery on
the edge of the sloping hills was agreeably decorated with bushes of
velvety, dark red leaves, but I remember it rather because of the name
of a marine sergeant on the bulkhead of one of those curious Spanish
rows of bureau-drawer graves set into the massive outer wall. Strange
final resting-place of an American boy! Nor was he of this new
generation of “leather-necks” that has settled down to make Santo
Domingo behave itself; he had been left there early in the century,
probably from some passing ship. The familiar time-battered carriages
with their jangling bells rumbled languidly through the streets; a match
factory that lights all the cigars of the revolutionary republic jostled
for space among the dwellings; swarms of mosquitoes drove us to take
early refuge within our bed-shielding _mosquiteros_; American bugle
calls broke now and then on the soft night air, and a large generous
bullet-hole gave the final national touch to our weak-showered, tubless
hotel bathroom.
* * * * *
Our longer trip eastward from Santiago happily coincided with the
monthly inspection tours of their district by “Mac” and “Big George.”
The run to Moca through a rich, floor-flat valley spreading far away to
the southward gave new evidence of the fertility of Santo Domingo.
Bananas and cacao, maize and yuca in the same fields, now and then a
coffee plantation, constituted the chief cultivation. Tobacco was being
transplanted here and there. Frequent villages were hidden away in the
greenery; nowhere was there any evidence of such abject poverty as that
of Haiti. A section of the new national highway which, under American
incentive, is destined some day to connect Monte Cristi with the far-off
capital, followed the railway, but its black loam surface, hardened into
enormous cracks and ruts since the end of the last rainy season, made it
too venturesome a risk even for the courageous Ford. A long viaduct
lifted the train across what Spanish-Americans call a river, and a
moment later we had come to the end of the government railroad.
Moca, famous for its coffee, which is so often taken to be of Arabic
origin, is rated a “white town,” because of a slightly increased
percentage of pure, or nearly pure, descendants of Castilians. Thanks to
the coffee-clad foot-hills to the north and the broad, fertile plain to
the south and east, it is wealthy above the average, and rumor has it
that much gold might be dug up from its back gardens and patios. There
is special reason for this, for like its neighbor, Salcedo, it has ever
been a center of revolutionists, bandits, and political intrigues. Two
presidents have been assassinated in its streets; its hatred of
Americans is as deadly as it dares to be under a firm marine commander.
An excellent, cement-paved, up-to-date market contrasts with the dusty
open spaces, with their squatting, ragged negresses, in Haiti. What was
designed to be an imposing stone church, however, has never reached
anything like completion. Not long ago the resident padre had the happy
thought of instituting a lottery to swell the contributions from his
tardy parishioners, and two glaringly new square cement towers are the
result of the inspiration. But time moves more swiftly than the best
devised schemes; as the towers rise, the already aged stone walls go
crumbling away, and the real place of worship consists merely of a
ragged thatched roof on stilts covering only a fraction of the
half-walled inclosure.
The Ferrocarril de Samaná y Santiago, neither of which towns it actually
reaches, connects at Moca with the government line and runs to the port
of Sanchez on the east coast, with short branches to La Vega and San
Francisco de Macoris. It is popularly known as the “Scotch line,” is
some thirty years old and still equipped with the original rolling
stock, but has a meter gauge, more commodious and better ventilated
cars, a more easily riding roadbed, a daily service in both directions
except on Sunday, and makes slightly better speed than its rival. The
short run to La Vega, with a change of cars at Las Cabullas, is along
the same rich valley. Founded by Columbus himself in a slightly
different locality, this center of a splendidly fertile cacao and
agricultural district is a near replica of Moca, all but surrounded by
the river Camú. Rich black mud, as is fitting in a region producing the
chocolate-yielding pods, slackens the footsteps of visitor and resident
alike in all but the few blocks bordering on the plaza though all its
streets were once paved with stone by a Haitian governor. “Mac” found
interest in its distilleries, shops, and revenue office; “Big George”
made use of those seven-league legs to set the property valuation of the
town in one short day, but our own curiosity centered about the “Holy
Hill” and the ruins of the original settlement. To tell the truth the
latter does not give the traveler’s imagination much to build upon. A
few miles from the modern town, along a stone-surfaced section of that
national highway-to-be, are the remnants of a few stone walls, a low
ancient fortress or two, and slabs of good old Spanish mortar that has
outlived the flat, pale-red bricks it once held together, all hidden
away in the hot and humid wilderness of a badly tended cacao plantation.
The great place of pilgrimage of the region, indeed, the most venerated
spot in all Santo Domingo, is the Santo Cerro, a plump hill surmounted
by a massive stone church, a mile or so nearer the town. Now and again
some faithful believer still comes from a distant corner of the republic
and climbs the long stony slope on his knees, though such medieval piety
has all but died out even in Santo Domingo. The church at the summit is
in the special keeping of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, whose
miraculous cures are reputed to have no superior anywhere in the
Catholic world. A town of superstitious invalids clusters about the
entrance to the inclosure in wretched thatched huts; on certain days of
the year the sacred hilltop is crowded with the more modern type of
pilgrim, who not infrequently comes by carriage or motor.
The story runs—and up to a certain point at least it is historically
accurate—that Columbus and his men had camped on the hill, when they
beheld swarming up from the vega below a great horde of Indians, bent on
their immediate destruction. The discoverer was equal to the occasion.
Ordering his men to cut a branch from an immense _níspero_ tree beneath
which he had been resting, he fashioned it into a crude cross, and
planted it before the advancing enemy. “Then,” as the cautious old
Italian padre who to-day replaces his illustrious fellow-countryman put
it, “I was not present, so I cannot vouch for it, but _they say_”—that
the Virgin of Las Mercedes appeared in the sky above and saved the day
for the conquistadores. At any rate the Indians were repulsed, and the
Spaniards at once set about building La Vega, old La Vega, that is, at
the foot of the hill.
The church of pilgrimage is modern, marking the site of the ancient one
that was erected over the improvised cross. It, too, is liberally marked
with patched bullet-holes, for Dominican revolutionists have no
compunction in using even a sacro-sacred edifice as a barricade. Inside,
in addition to the richly garbed doll over the altar and the usual gaudy
bric-a-brac of such places, there is a square hole in the marble
pavement of the principal chapel, filled with yellowish soil. This
purports to be the exact spot on which Columbus erected the cross, and
the healing properties of the earth within it depend only on the faith
of the seeker after health—and certain other indispensable little
formalities which are inseparable from all supernatural cures. Pious
Dominicans step into the _santo hoyo_ barefooted, muttering _promesas_,
or promises of reward to the attendant Virgin if their health is
restored, and even those who decline to uncover their pedal infirmities
in so public a place carry off a pinch or a handful of the sacred earth.
Yet the “holy hole” is not the deep well one would fancy four centuries
of such excavation must have left it. If anything it is slightly above
the level of the ground outside the church. For no matter how much of
the yellow soil is carried off during the day, morning always finds the
hole filled again by some “miracle”—which somehow brings up visions of a
poor old native peon wandering about in the darkest hours of the night
with a sack and a shovel.
The original _níspero_ stood for more than four hundred years in the
identical spot where Columbus found it. Not until the month of May
before our visit did it at length fall down—“_por descuido_; for lack of
care,” as the present padre put it, sadly. But the pious old Italian has
planted in its place a “son” of the historical tree,—a twig that already
shows a will to fill the footsteps of its “father”—and from the wood of
the latter he has made a boxful of little crosses which he gives away
“to true believers as sacred relics; to others as souvenirs”—though
there is nothing to hinder the recipient of either class from dropping
into the padre’s bloodless hand a little remembrance “for my poor.”
Even though Columbus had never climbed it nor “miracles” been performed
upon it, the holy hilltop would be a place worth coming far to see, or
at least to look from. The wonderful floor-flat Vega Real, the most
splendid plain in Santo Domingo, if not in the West Indies, is spread
out below it in all its entirety. Dense green, palm-dotted above its sea
of vegetation, even its cultivated places patches of unbroken greenery,
with Moca, Salcedo, far-off “Macoris,” and half a dozen other towns
plainly visible, a sparkling river gleaming here and there, walled in
the vast distance by ranges that rise to pine-clad heights, there are
few more extensive, verdant, or entrancing sights in the world than this
still more than half virgin vale. Compared with it in any respect the
far-famed valley of Yumurí in Cuba is of slight importance.
* * * * *
Several hours’ ride across this world’s garden of the future, with a
change to, and later from, the main line, brought us at nightfall to San
Francisco de Macoris. Unlike nearly every other town of Santo Domingo,
this one is of modern origin, a mere stripling of less than a century of
existence. It lies where the Vega Real begins to slope upward toward the
northern range, with extensive cacao estates of rather indolent habits
hidden away among the foot-hills behind it. A flat town of tin roofs,
its outskirts concealed beneath tropical trees, it offers nothing of
special interest to the mere traveler.
A nine-day fiesta in honor of Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia, which had
broken out with an uproarious beating of discordant church bells, tinny
drums, and home-made fireworks during our day in La Vega raged
throughout all our stay in “Macoris.” All the population capable of
setting one foot before the other joined in the religious processions
that frequently wended their funereal way through the half-cobbled
streets. We found amusement, too, in a local courtroom, where justice
was dispensed by a common-sense old judge in an informal, unbiased way
that seemed strange in a Latin-American atmosphere, particularly so in a
country where a bare five years before most decisions went to the
highest bidder. The improvement suggested that Santo Domingo could be a
success so long as some overwhelming power holds it steady by appointing
the better class of officials and keeping an exacting eye constantly
upon them. A third point of interest which no visitor to the Macoris of
the north should neglect is a chat with “old man Castillo.” Born in
1834, his mind still extremely active, this grandson of old Spain has
been one of the chief sources of information to the wiser Marine
commanders of the district. His personal reminiscences of Haitian rule,
how as a boy he marvelled at the high hats and gorgeous but often
ludicrously patched uniforms of the black troops from the west, make a
colorful picture worth beholding, even were he not the only surviving
general of the war, contemporary with our own struggle between the north
and the south, that brought the final expulsion of Spanish rule from
Santo Domingo. His summing up of the present status of the revolutionary
republic is that of nearly all the conservative, thoughtful element of
the population. For twenty years he had been convinced that intervention
would be for the future good of the country; for at least ten he had
ardently desired it; he would consider it a national misfortune to have
it withdrawn before a new generation has been thoroughly cured of the
empleomania and unruliness which had become the curse of Dominican life.
Mistakes had been made by the forces of occupation, rather by
subordinates than by the higher command, but the whole list of them, he
was convinced, had been easier to bear than the least of their
constantly recurring revolutions.
The engine that had dragged us up to the edge of the vega had not
sufficiently recovered from its exertions to venture down again, and the
locomotive from the main line was forced to delay its appointed task to
come and get us. It is typical of the easy-going charm of the tropics
that the engineer of the day before had profanely declined to exchange
his coal-fed steed for that of his colleague from the east, despite
telegraphic orders from the master of transportation, duly and
officially transmitted through the station agent, hence our not
unprecedented delay. Beyond the junction of La Jina the densely green
vega changed gradually to broad, brown savannahs not unlike our own
Western prairies. These slowly gave place again to _mata_, uncultivated
half-wilderness with flat open spaces. Pimentel, a considerable town at
which travelers to the more important one of Cotui changed from car
seats to saddles, was followed by Villa Riva on the Yuma, the largest
river in the West Indies and navigable for small schooners. The
landscape grew still more open, with immense trees casting here and
there the round shadows of noonday and cacao beans drying on rude raised
platforms or on leaf-mats spread frankly upon the ground before every
_bohío_, or thatch and palm-trunk dwelling. Royal palm trees stretched
in close but broken formation across the flatlands and on up over a high
ridge like the soldiers of an arboreal army in disordered rout. Then the
train rumbled out across a swampy region where the flanges of the rails
were frequently covered by the brackish water and the exhausted engine
stumbled into Sanchez only three hours late.
Strewn along the base of a rocky wooded ridge on the inner curve of the
great horseshoe bay of Samaná, Sanchez is not much to look at despite
its considerable importance, from a Dominican point of view, as the
chief northeastern port and the headquarters of the “Scotch line.”
Several large sheet-iron warehouses and a long wooden pier sprinkled
with cacao beans and the plentiful cinders of a switch engine are its
chief features. Since the virtual repeal of the export tax on cacao,
with “Big George” and the new real estate taxation to take its place,
its activity has somewhat increased.
Like many another corner of Santo Domingo, mosquito- and gnat-bitten
Sanchez would be a dreary spot indeed but for the presence of our little
force of occupation. The natives themselves recognise this, as their
constant appeals for medical attention from the uninvited strangers
demonstrate. With the possible exception of the capital, the republic is
so scantily supplied with physicians that the navy doctors who have the
health of the marines in their keeping are permitted to engage in civil
practice. Even in Santiago, with its 20,000 inhabitants, the great
majority of the population had hitherto no other remedy for their varied
ailments than the sticking of a green leaf on each temple. The bright
youth of the country saw no reason to submit to the arduous training
incident to the medical profession when the study of revolutionary
tactics promised so much quicker results. Small wonder the poor ignorant
populace, knowing no better course to take, repair in their illness to
the Santo Cerro, there to smear themselves with holy dirt in the ardent
hope of improvement; and it may be that the simple priests who abet them
in those absurd antics are not so rascally as they seem from our loftier
point of view, for they too may in their ignorance be more or less
sincere believers in this nonsense.
* * * * *
Sanchez saw, though it may not have noted, the breaking up of our
congenial quartet. “Mac” had received orders to proceed overland through
the bandit-famed province of Seibo to the capital, and accepted my
protection and guidance on the journey. That region being a “restricted
district” for women, Rachel was forced to submit to the tender mercies
of the Clyde Line; while “Big George,” whether through devotion to duty,
a disparity between his own length and that of his salary, or for a
newly developed fear of personal violence, herewith takes his final
leave of this unvarnished tale.
Three hours in an open motor-boat manned by Marines, close along an
evergreen shore stretching in a low, cocoanut-clad ridge that died away
on the eastern horizon, brought the surviving pair of us to Samaná.
Tumbled up the slope of the same ridge, with a harbor sheltered by
several densely wooded islets, the town was more pleasing than the
busier Sanchez. Great patches of the surrounding cocoanut forest were
brown with the ravages of a parasitical disease that attacks leaves,
branches, and fruit not only of these, but of the cacao plants of the
region. Saddle-oxen, once common throughout both divisions of the
ancient Quisqueya, ambled through the streets, their heads raised at a
disdainful angle by the reins attached to their nose-rings. The soft
soil and the frequent rains of the Samaná peninsula account for their
survival here in spite of the ascending price of beef and leather. This,
too, was a town of bullet-holes, for revolutionists have frequently
found its isolation and its custom-house particularly to their liking.
It is a rare house that cannot show a scar or two, and both the
sheet-iron Methodist churches are patched like the garments of a Haitian
pauper.
The existence of two such anomalies in a single town of Catholic Santo
Domingo calls the attention to the most interesting feature of Samaná,
an American negro colony of some two thousand members scattered about
the peninsula. Nearly a century ago, when the black troops from beyond
the Massacre had overrun the entire island, the Haitian king, president,
or emperor, as he happened at the moment to be called, opened
negotiations with an abolition society in the United States with the
hope of attracting immigration. Several shiploads of blacks, all
Northern negroes who had escaped or bought their freedom, responded to
the invitation. Most of them came from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New
Jersey; one of the towns of the peninsula is still known as Bucks County
in memory of the exiles from that part of the first-named state. Numbers
of the new-comers foiled the purpose of the Haitian ruler by quickly
dying of tropical diseases; a very few found their way back to the
United States. The survivors settled down on the five acres of land each
that had been granted them, the Haitians having frankly ignored all
other promises.
Their descendants of the fourth or fifth generation are proud to this
day of their “American” origin. They hail one in the streets of Samaná
and lose no time in establishing their special identity, in a naïve,
respectful manner that has all but disappeared among their brethren in
our own land. Scattered over all the Samaná peninsula, some of them have
been absorbed by the Dominicans, but a considerable colony has never
inter-married with the natives and still retains the speech and customs
their ancestors brought with them. The majority are farmers, moderately
well-to-do, living miles out in the country and only now and then riding
to town on horse- or ox-back. Unlike most of their neighbors they do not
live in concubinage, but are married in their own churches. They are not
liked by the Dominicans, who seem to resent their superior education and
customs, though all admit that they are good citizens and good workers,
though not fighters, as Americans on custom border control soon
discovered. Bigger men both physically and mentally than the natives,
they live in what seem real homes compared with the miserable dirt-floor
huts of the Dominicans of the same color. Wherever a glimpse through a
doorway shows comfort, cleanliness, and a shelf of books one is almost
sure to find English spoken. It is a remarkably pure English, too, for a
tongue that has been cut off from its source for nearly a century, far
superior to that of the British West Indies, though with certain
peculiarities of negro accent. With rare exceptions the “Americans” do
not mix in politics, though they were frequently forced to fight on one
side or the other during the revolutions, because neutrals, abhorred
like a vacuum, lost both liberty and property no matter which side won.
In such times no protection was given non-combatants, except to
foreigners, and the “American” negroes of Samaná are legally Dominicans
despite their protests. One cannot but be proud of the strength of
American influence, of the compliment to our civilization which is
implied by the insistence of these exiles on keeping a sort of separate
nationality, by the strong tendency toward good citizenship they have
maintained through all their generations.
In a little parsonage on the edge of town lives the Rev. James, pastor
of the A. M. E. church, and temporarily in charge also of the Wesleyan
place of worship, locally known as St. Peter’s. His bishop, curiously
enough, lives in Detroit. Pastor James is a full-blooded negro whose
male ancestors have been ministers for generations. Sent to the Northern
States for his final schooling, like many children of the colony, he
worked his way through Beloit College. His wide fund of information on
all subjects would make many of our own ministers seem narrow by
comparison; yet he has little of that curious mixture of humility and
arrogance which is so common among educated negroes. Even in such minor
details as refraining from the use of tobacco his personal habits are a
contrast to the often licentious lives of Dominican priests. In his
fairly voluminous library so rare in Santo Domingo, such books as “Up
from Slavery,” “Negro Aspirations,” and many other tomes, magazines, and
encyclopedias of a serious—and what is more, not merely religious—nature
attract the eye.
Each of the churches has some three hundred members, many of whom ride
in from miles around on Sundays. Inside the bullet-riddled edifices the
un-Catholic pews, the mottoes in English over the pulpits, the
old-fashioned organs all add to the American atmosphere. A third church
is maintained in the region, and the colony has several schools of its
own. Among the best American influences the colonists have retained is
the un-Dominican tendency to help themselves and not depend upon the
government in such matters. Complete segregation of sexes, from the
youngest pupils to the teachers, has been adopted in these schools,
where both Spanish and English are taught. Unlike Haiti, Santo Domingo
grants such institutions no government aid. The pastor receives half his
salary from mission funds from the United States, and the other half not
at all, because local contributions are eaten up by educational
requirements.
The Rev. James has a fund of stories, more amusing to the hearer than to
the teller, for those who care to listen. During one of the last
revolutions, for instance, the town was attacked during services, and
the congregation, putting more faith in self-help than in supernatural
aid, stopped in the middle of a prayer to cut a hole through the church
floor, and remained on the ground beneath until Monday morning. The
colony, in the opinion of its pastor, is eager to have American
occupation continue, or at least to have the United States take
possession of the bay of Samaná, as it has that of Guantánamo in Cuba,
that forces may be close at hand to curb revolutions. Influential
Dominicans, he is convinced, prefer the present status, with the
exception, of course, of the politicians, and even the rank and file are
beginning to see the error of their former ways and to wish peace,
security, and no more destruction of their farms and herds more than
complete national independence. On the whole it is remarkable how this
colony has maintained its customs intact through all the long years
since its establishment. Once given a good start the negro seems to
endure the deteriorating influences of the tropics better than the white
man. The Rev. James, four generations removed from the temperate zone,
is far more of a credit to civilization than many a Caucasian who has
lived a mere twenty years in equatorial lands.
Samaná has a French, or, more exactly, a Haitian colony dating back to
the same period, hence many of its inhabitants speak English, Spanish,
and “creole.” This portion of the population, living chiefly in the far
outskirts, is as much inferior to the Dominicans as the latter are to
the “Americans.” Neapolitans and “Turks” monopolize most of the
commerce, and as usual do no productive labor. Coffee was formerly grown
in some quantity on the peninsula, but cacao was planted in its place
when the latter began to command high prices. Now that the blight has
attacked this and there is hardly enough of the former produced for
local use, exports are slight. Bananas could be grown in abundance;
oranges are so plentiful that the town boys play marbles with them, but
there is no market, or rather no transportation for such bulky products,
which are sold only in small quantities to passing ships for their own
use.
Among the sights of the town is a fine new cockpit as carefully planned
as our metropolitan theaters. It resembles a tiny bull-ring, the
fighting space surrounded by upright boards painted a bright red, a
comfortable gallery rising about the outer circle, ringside boxes
furnished with good cane chairs saving the élite the annoyance of mixing
with the collarless rank and file. Cozy little dens for the fighting
cocks open directly into the ring; a bright new thatched roof shades
spectators and feathered gladiators alike; an outer wall of yagua rises
just high enough to give the breeze free play, yet at the same time to
prevent the tallest citizen from seeing the contest without paying his
_peseta_ at the neat little ticket window. The “American” residents roll
pious eyes at the mention of this nefarious sport. Not merely do they
consider it beneath them to attend such exhibitions, but look upon them
as a particularly sinful way of losing caste, since they are always held
on the “holy Sabbath.”
* * * * *
We sailed across the bay on the mailboat _Nereida_, a wretched little
single-masted derelict no larger than an average lifeboat. Though its
bottom was already heaped with broken rock ballast, an incredible load
of American patent medicine, of flour, rum, soap, cigarettes, sprouted
onions, cottonseed oil, and sundry odds and ends was tumbled into it
before the mails finally put in an appearance an hour after sailing
time. Nine passengers and a crew of two, all negroes except “Mac” and
myself, crowded the frequently sea-washed deck. What our fate would have
been had one of the sudden squalls for which West Indian waters are
noted overtaken us it was all too easy to imagine.
A steady wind on the beam carried us diagonally across the gulf in the
general direction of our destination without the necessity of tacking.
The shore we were leaving was the scene of the first bloodshed between
Columbus and the aborigines of the New World, the forerunner of
countless massacres. The bay was once offered to the United States by a
Dominican president, but a single congressman caused us to decline the
honor. Tiny fishing boats with palm-leaf sails ventured a few miles out
from the land, then abandoned to us the seascape, which remained
unbroken until we neared the southern shore well on in the afternoon.
Constant quarrels between the two halves of the crew on the advisability
of tacking or not tacking enlivened all our snail-like, zigzag course
along the face of the land, and black night had come before we climbed
over the water-soaked cargo to the drunken pier of Jovero.
A gawky village of some six hundred inhabitants, boasting only one
two-story house, this out-of-the-world place was quickly thrown into a
furore of curiosity over its unexpected white visitors. Even the
commander of the _guardia_ detachment was a native lieutenant; the most
nearly Caucasian resident was the town treasurer, a young “Turk” from
Tripoli, in the back of whose more than general store we were finally
served a much needed meal. With three thousand persons in the region
only two copies of a weekly newspaper, according to the post master,
brought them the world’s news, and that was a pathetic little sheet from
across the bay. No wonder false rumors have a free field in such a
community. Cattle, pigs, cacao, and an unseasoned tobacco sold in
mouldy-scented rolls six feet long, called _andullos_, made up the
scanty exports of the district. Barely one per cent. of its territory is
under cultivation, for like all the province of Seibo bandits still
harass it long after the rest of the republic has been pacified.
Under superior orders the native lieutenant assigned a sergeant and
eleven men of the _guardia_ to accompany us through the bandit haunts
beyond. As they lined up for final inspection they were spick and span
out of all parallel in my tropical experience, from newly ironed
breeches to oiled rifles; ten minutes later they were marching knee-deep
through a river in the well-polished shoes they would gladly have left
behind had American discipline permitted it. Their own fault, I mused,
for they might have spent some of their ample garrison leisure in
building a bridge; but I soon withdrew the mental criticism. A single
bridge would not much have improved that route. It consisted of a wide
cleared space through the mountainous forest, and nothing more—rather
less, in fact, for in many places neither the stumps or the huge felled
trunks had been removed. Streams succeeded one another in swift
succession; the almost constant rains of this region had made the steep
slopes precarious toboggans of red mud, where they were not corduroyed
with _camclones_, slippery ridges of earth with deep troughs of muddy
water between them. Here and there the guards were forced to climb a
slimy bank virtually on their hands and knees; in other places the mud
clung to their feet in hundred-weight; with the densest vegetation on
either hand cutting off all suggestion of breeze, the sweat dripped from
them in streams. Within half an hour the bedraggled, soaked,
mud-plastered rifle-bearers staggering before and behind us along the
trail showed slight resemblance indeed to the perfectly starched and
polished young men who had been drawn up for the lieutenant’s
inspection.
“Mac” and I on our sorry mounts were not much better off. It was
beginning to be apparent why one can get from Santiago to New York more
easily and in less time than to the Dominican capital. The ex-“top,” as
a high government official, had been given Jovero’s best mule, but it
would be easy to imagine a better one. My own steed had long since
become a candidate for the glue factory and his suffering air had
already riddled my conscience before a shifting of the saddle-cloth
disclosed an open sore on his back larger than my two hands. Santo
Domingo needs such a law as that with which we cured the Canal Zone of
this heartless Latin-American custom of working their animals in a
mutilated condition. But what could one do under the circumstances but
urge on the suffering beast? We had come too far for me to turn back in
the faint hope of getting another mount; it was as necessary to reach
Seibo as it was not to leave “Mac” in the lurch, and even had I taken to
my feet along with the mud-caked guards the abandoned animal would have
been almost certain to fall into the still less compassionate hands of
the bandits.
Precautions against the latter now began to be taken in earnest. We were
approaching a labyrinth of sharp gullies and high hills which had always
been a favorite lurking-place of the outlaws. Any turn of the now narrow
trail would have made a splendid ambush. Drenching showers at frequent
intervals made it easy for the ruffians to sneak up through the bush
unheard; the heavy humidity of a tropical rainy season deadens sounds
even when the sun shines. The sergeant arranged his men in skirmish
formation, with strict orders not to “bunch up” under any circumstances.
A barefoot native on horseback, who had overtaken us soon after our
departure from Jovero, was forbidden to ride ahead of the party. We had
no means of knowing whether his assertion that he had hastened to join
us for safety’s sake, after waiting a fortnight for a chance to make the
journey, was truth or pretense. These preparations concluded, we moved
forward ready for instant battle.
Nothing of the kind occurred. I might have known it would not; there is
no greater Jonah on earth than I for scaring off adventure. Trails worn
deeper than a horseman’s head and so narrow as to rub our elbows offered
attackers comparative immunity; the dense jungle might easily have
concealed a score of men within a yard or two on either side of us; the
steepness of the mountain-top, forcing us to dismount and drag our
weary, stumbling animals behind us, left us scant breath to spend in
physical combat, yet nothing but the deep, oppressive silence of a
tropical wilderness enlivened our laborious progress. By the time the
summit was reached we were ready to believe that the bandits of Seibo
were a myth. An unbroken expanse of vegetation, dark green everywhere,
spread away to the limitless southern horizon. Yet the rains ceased
abruptly at the crest of the range, and the trail that carried us
swiftly downward was as dry as the Sahara.
The sergeant gradually relaxed his vigilance and let his men once more
straggle along at will, though he watched closely the rare travelers who
began to appear. Several of the guards, I found, as we grouped together
again for a rest, spoke to one another in Samaná English rather than
Spanish. When I gave a cheering word in the latter tongue to a ragged
native civilian who had plodded at my horse’s heels since the beginning
of the journey, he glanced up at me with an expression of
incomprehension and asked the guard behind him to interpret my remark.
He was Canadian born, had been seven years in the sugar fields of Cuba
without learning a word of Spanish, and had been robbed by Haitian
_cacos_ of everything except his tattered hat, shirt and trousers.
“Nobody told me there were that kind of people in that country,” he
explained, plaintively, “I never thought such things of people of _my_
color.” The wisdom gained from that unexpected experience developed a
precaution that had held him nearly three weeks in Jovero awaiting a
safe opportunity to proceed to the sugar district of southeastern Santo
Domingo.
[Illustration: A Dominican switch engine]
[Illustration: A Dominican hearse]
[Illustration: American Marines on the march]
[Illustration: A riding horse of Samaná]
We were soon down on the flatlands again, but it was a long time before
the first signs of cultivation broke the dreary wilderness. This was a
cacao _canuco_, or tiny plantation, overgrown with brush and weeds and
with the scarred ruins of a hut in one corner of it. More of them lined
the way for mile after mile, all abandoned for the past three years,
fear of the bandits making it impossible even to pick the pods that
ripened, rotted, and fell beneath the trees. These endless gardens
choked with weeds made this wonderfully fertile valley seem doubly
pitiful in its uncultivated immensity. The guards, who, after the
fashion of their kind, had made no provision whatever against a long
day’s hunger, climbed the rotting stick fences and picked half-green
bananas and _papayas_, or _lechosas_, as the Dominican calls them, from
the untended plantations. At length huts still standing began to appear,
then inhabited ones, occupied almost exclusively by women, showed that
we were approaching the safety zone. The creak of guinea hens, like
rusty hinges, commenced to break the silence; goats took to capering out
of our way; better dressed people of both sexes gradually put in an
appearance, crowing cocks challenged one another in ever increasing
number, and at sunset the again road-wide trail became the main street
of the town of Seibo.
The capital of a province without so much as the pretense of a hotel is
a rarity even in backward Santo Domingo. Nothing but the most miserable
of thatched huts, with three human nests on legs in one tiny room, and a
back-yard reed kitchen attended by a ragged old negro crone, offers
accommodation to unbefriended strangers in Seibo. It is perhaps the most
out-of-the-way, astonished-at-strangers, unacquainted-with-the-world
town of any size that can be found in the West Indies. Though a large
detachment of marines camp at its bandit-threatened door, it showed
unbounded surprise to see American civilians. Groups of almost foppishly
dressed men lounged about its streets, yet the town itself was little
short of filthy. A curious old domed church, some of it built four
hundred years ago, its original color faded to a spotted pale-blue, and
its aged square tower surmounted by a marine wireless apparatus, is the
only building of importance. From the top of this, or the one other
place in town where one can go upstairs, Seibo is seen to be surrounded
by low hills, everywhere wooded, without a hut outside its compact mass,
its skirts drawn up like those of a nervous old maid in constant dread
of mice. The inevitable fortress that gives Haitian and Dominican
villages a likeness to the castle-crowned towns of medieval Italy
watches over it from a near-by knoll and houses its _guardia_ garrison.
Built almost entirely of wood, the low houses of the better class are
roofed with sheet-iron, the poorer with palm-leaf thatch. It has no
plaza but merely a stony plowed rectangle of unoccupied ground in its
center. The public school has no doors between its rooms, hence is a
constant uproar of teachers and classes shouting against one another.
Seibo bears the reputation of being always “agin’ the gover’ment,” and
it is not strange that we found its people somewhat more surly toward
Americans than those of the Cibao.
That did not hinder them from obeying “Mac’s” official commands with
fitting alacrity, however, whether they were a hint to shop-keepers to
display their licenses as the law required or a whisper to his local
subordinates to correct their methods. The slip-shod ways of native rule
cannot long endure where an exacting American official drops in
unexpectedly every now and then to inspect things down to the slightest
detail. Such close-rein methods are indispensable to the proper
functioning of revenue laws in Santo Domingo. Your Latin-American can
seldom rise to the point of impersonal application of governmental
decrees; with him it is always a personal matter between official and
inhabitant. Checked up in the courteous yet firm manner which “Mac” had
learned by long contact with this race, his subordinates had a curious
resemblance to backward schoolboys whom a teacher holds up to scratch by
frequent kindly assistance with a threat of the switch behind it. The
government of occupation has done everything possible to remove
temptation from both inspected and inspector in internal revenue
matters. Every distillery, for instance, is so constructed that the
owner may watch his product behind iron bars as it runs from still to
receptacle, yet not a drop can he extract without calling upon the
inspector to produce his keys. By such contrivances Santo Domingo is
being gradually weaned away from the irregularities that were long the
curse of its financial legislation.
An invitation from the major in command caused us to change with
alacrity on our second day in Seibo from the “hotel” to a tent in the
marine camp on the edge of town, with a far-reaching view, an unfailing
breeze, and a “swimming hole” in the river below. Here, by dint of
spending most of the day insisting, by offering twice the local rate for
good mounts, by promising a peon “guide” a week’s pay for a day’s work,
by seeing that the horses were within the marine corral before going to
bed, and by being generally and strictly from Missouri, we succeeded in
getting off the next morning at five. The air was damp and fresh. For
the first time in five years I beheld the Southern Cross I had once
known like the features of an old friend. Endless forests with a level
roadway cut through them shut us in all through the morning, only a few
_canucos_ breaking the perspective of sheer forest walls. As in Haiti,
the peasants of Seibo live back out of sight from the main trails, for
fear of bandits, as the vicinity of some of our railroads is still
shunned out of dread of marauding tramps. At another large marine camp
we left the roadway and sagging telegraph wire to La Romana and struck
due southward along a half-cleared trail that after an hour or more
brought us out upon the sun-toasted advance guard of the cane-fields of
the south. Amid the stumps and logs of immense tropical trees, black
with the recent burning, baby sugar-cane was already turning bright
green the broad expanse of newly felled forest. Negroes almost without
exception from the French or British West Indies were adding row after
row of the virgin fields to the sugar supply of a hungry world. Farther
on, beyond another strip of forest soon due for the same fate, came
immense stretches of full-sized cane, then toiling groups of
cane-cutters, huge creaking cane-carts, finally a railroad that scorns
to carry anything but cane, and by ten we had brought up at the _batey_
of Diego, our mounted “guide” straggling in far behind us.
Many of the workmen of the surrounding “colonies” had gone on strike
that morning. The Dominican delegate to the recent labor conference in
Washington had brought back with him this new method of bringing to
terms the “wicked American and Cuban capitalists who would starve us
while carrying off our national wealth.” It was noticeable, however,
that only a small fraction of the idle groups crowding the _batey_ were
natives of the country; the great majority of them grumbled in the
easy-going drawl of the British negro. Small wonder the arguments of the
Spanish-speaking manager who harangued them from the door of the office
fell chiefly on uncomprehending ears. Besides, though their own
arguments were simpler, they were not easily refuted. “Wi’ rice
twenty-fi’ cent a pound an’ sugah eighteen cent in Macoris town what y’u
go’n’ a do, mahn, what y’u go’n’ a do? An’ de washer lady she ax you a
shilling fo’ to wash a shirt! How us can cut a caht-load o’ canes fo’
seventy cent? Better fo’ we if us detain we at home.”
Leaving manager and strikers to settle their differences without our
assistance we climbed to the top of a car-load of cane and were soon
creaking away across the slightly rolling country. A train so long that
it had to be cut in two at the first suggestion of a grade squirmed away
before us like a great green snake. The land became one vast expanse of
sugar-cane, broken only by the clustered buildings of the _bateys_ and
dotted here and there by a royal palm or ceiba, which the woodsmen had
not had the heart to fell. Branch railroads, like the ribs of a leaf,
brought the product of all this down to the main line, whence it poured
into the capacious maw of the Central Santa Fé, the tall chimneys of
which appeared toward sunset, backed far off by a slightly yellowish
Caribbean.
San Pedro de Macoris on the southern coast is a more important town than
its near namesake of the Cibao, yet it is disappointing for all its
size. With a certain amount of modern bustle, more city features than we
had seen since Santiago, a fair percentage of full white inhabitants,
and a rather “cocky” air, it exists chiefly because of a bottle-shaped
harbor with a dangerously narrow entrance between reefs, while its docks
are largely manned by British negroes.
We finally found passengers enough to afford the trip by automobile from
Macoris to the capital. With the single exception of the Haitian journey
to Las Cahobas, I have never known of a worse road being actually
covered by automobile. Sandy or stony beyond words, a constant
succession of rocks, stumps, scrub trees, sun-baked mud-holes, without a
yard of smooth going, it was in fact no road at all, but so often had
travelers followed the same general direction that a kind of route had
grown up of itself. Several times we came to temporary grief; once we
ran into a tree and smashed a case of Cuban rum that had been tied on
the running-board, and as the chauffeur felt impelled to “save” as much
of the precious stuff as possible, his driving was far from impeccable
during the rest of the journey. One after another we bounced through
such towns as La Yeguada, Hato Viejo, Santa Isabela, all spread out
carelessly on the flat, dry, prairie-like country peculiar to the coral
formation of southern Santo Domingo. In one place the mud was so deep
that we were forced to turn aside for a few yards into the private
property of a Cuban ex-general, who occupies a wattled hut with his
illegitimate brood of mulattoes. This wily individual, in spite of the
fact that he draws a generous monthly pension through a foreign bank in
the capital, has placed a guard at his gate and collects two dollars
from every passing automobile. Then came more sugarcane, another large
mill with its creaking ox-carts and striking negroes, and from San
Isidro on sixteen kilometers of excellent highway to Duarte, a suburb of
the capital, and across the Ozama river into Santo Domingo City. The
American governor of the republic had recently made the official
announcement that sixty per cent. of the great national highway from the
capital to Monte Cristi was already completed! He could scarcely have
taken his own words seriously had he been privileged to follow us in the
opposite direction.