A CONTRAST IN CIVILIZATIONS
There have been three capitals of Guatemala. Ciudad Vieja (“Old City”),
now a poor village with about three thousand Indian inhabitants, was
founded by Pedro de Alvarado soon after he took possession of the
country. He brought the best architects and workmen from Spain and
planned to make this the metropolis of the New World. For a time it was
the most magnificent city in the western hemisphere. But in 1541 it was
suddenly destroyed by a flood when the lake in the crater of the volcano
Agua (“Water”) broke through its banks.
The people then moved their capital two miles northeast and built
another fine city. Long before any white men came to live in what is now
the United States, the Guatemalan capital had tens of thousands of
inhabitants. There were palaces and cathedrals there when we had only
log cabins. Would you have imagined that in the heart of Central America
a great city existed at the time the Dutch bargained with the Indians
for the purchase of Manhattan Island?
The Spaniards had chosen a beautiful site, but nature again violently
protested. This time the great volcano Fuego (“Fire”), quite as properly
named as its destructive companion Agua, belched forth a flood of hot
lava and destroyed the second capital. This city, now called Guatemala
la Antigua (“the Ancient”), is famous for its ruins of great churches
and palaces, but it has a population of only about seven thousand,
mainly poor Indians. The volcanoes seem to be never satisfied, for the
old capital has been devastated again and again by other eruptions, as
well as by earthquakes, floods, and avalanches. It has also been visited
by terrible epidemics of disease.
In the same year that our Declaration of Independence was written, our
Central American neighbors built Guatemala la Nueva (“the New”), or
Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. This city they located twenty
miles from the second capital; but though it remains the capital, it
also has been very badly treated. Some superstitious persons think that
evil spirits live inside the earth and cause volcanoes and earthquakes.
One might readily imagine that such spirits wanted to drive everyone
away from that beautiful region about the foot of Agua and Fuego. Is it
not queer that people insist on living again in places where they have
been overtaken by disaster?
The present capital was to have been a copy of the old ones, but it has
never equaled, in magnificence or population, Guatemala la Antigua.
However, it has about 120,000 inhabitants and is the most important city
of Central America. It stands on a small plain about 4,900 feet above
sea level and seventy-two miles from San José, its port on the Pacific.
Wool, cotton, leather goods and earthenware are manufactured, and there
is quite an important commerce.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
A bird’s-eye view of Guatemala City. What a contrast this flat-roofed
town is to one of our skyscraper cities!
]
Guatemala City is laid out in a checkerboard of wide but poorly paved
streets. Most of its buildings are very low, because of the constant
danger of earthquakes. The houses are covered with stucco, gaily
painted. The main entrance door of a dwelling is often so large that a
smaller door is cut in it for common use. The big door is opened only to
admit the owner’s carriage or automobile, which goes through to the
stable or garage at the back or side of the _patio_. Brass and iron
knockers, beautifully wrought in the form of a human head or hand, take
the place of bells at many of the best houses, and the great doors
themselves are studded with iron or brass nails.
The shops which so often occupy the lower floor of a residence, instead
of being in “business blocks,” have no glass windows, but only a big
wide-open door. Goods are poorly displayed, and in most places prices
are not fixed, so that one must do much bargaining before buying. In the
public markets we see Indians who have walked many miles with
merchandise on which they will make but a few cents’ profit. Indian
women, in gaudy homespun garments, smoke big black cigars. Their heads
are covered with masses of blue-black hair, and their skin shines like
polished copper. The market, filled with the products of both tropical
and temperate climates, gives one some idea of the richness of the
country.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
The Cathedral in Guatemala City, damaged by the earthquake in 1917.
]
Even this third and present capital of Guatemala has been several times
destroyed. Indeed, it has been completely laid waste once since I first
saw it. For a month following Christmas Day, 1917, it was shaken by a
long series of earthquakes. Government buildings, schools, and hospitals
were destroyed or damaged, as were the National Institute, with its
laboratories, the museum, the meteorological observatory, the national
theater, the metropolitan cathedral and other churches. Many of the
buildings have been restored, but they have lost their old beauty as
examples of Spanish art. The residence section has moved farther out
into the country.
A Country inside Its Own Capital
So far as I know, Guatemala is the only country in the world of which
one can see every nook and cranny by merely going to its capital. How?
By means of a great relief map covering several acres, laid out inside
the Guatemala City race track. It is made of cement, plaster and stone.
There is a high platform on which one may walk clear around the map,
studying it in detail. Turning a crank causes water to flow through the
rivers, fill the lakes, and form the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Although I intended to see the rest of the real Guatemala, the map
showed me all of its physical characteristics. Every mountain, every
lake, river, valley, city, even the trail I intended to take out of the
country, was there. If I had flown 230 miles across the country, between
the two seacoasts, and from the Mexican border to Honduras and Salvador,
I could not have learned more about the make-up of Guatemala than I did
in my half-hour stroll around the relief map.
I could see that Guatemala is all mountains and high valleys, except for
two strips of lowland along the coasts. Its highland scenery entitles it
to be called the Switzerland of Central America. However, Switzerland is
often snow-covered, while Guatemala, wherever vegetation can grow, is
green all the year round. Among its mountains are twenty-eight
volcanoes, some of them as perfect cones as Fujiyama in Japan. As most
of these are still active, and many of them throw out lava and ashes
frequently, part of the country is very bare. On the big relief map I
could see the volcano that blew its head off in 1902, ruining the city
of Quezaltenango and covering valuable coffee lands several feet deep
with volcanic ash. I could locate all of Guatemala’s beautiful blue
lakes. Over there, nearest the Pacific, is Lake Atitlán, filling the
crater of an extinct volcano five thousand feet high, and almost in the
shadow of three very active cones. This lake is twenty-five miles long,
with eighteen green islands in it; and it is so deep that its bottom has
never been found. Eighteen miles from the capital is Lake Amatitlán;
along its shore and across part of it runs the railroad from the Pacific
coast.
[Illustration:
Inside the race track at Guatemala City is a big relief map of the
entire country. Every mountain peak, every stream, every trail is
shown. Water can be turned on to fill the rivers and lakes.
]
Through Guatemala
Although I obtained from the big relief map at Guatemala City a clear
idea of the lay of the land in the most important country of Central
America, the map, of course, did not show me the people and their ways,
and I was chiefly interested in these. So I took the train again a few
days later, this time toward the east. After crossing a range of
mountains, we started down toward the coast beside a racing river.
Rather than go on to Puerto Barríos, the chief port of Guatemala on the
Atlantic, I left the train sixty miles inland in order to visit one of
the former centers of Mayan civilization.
Great civilizations almost always spring up in valleys, and here in the
valley of the Motagua River the most advanced Indians in North America
had their home. The Mayas flourished for some fifteen hundred years,
beginning about the time of Christ. Quiriguá, the ruins of which I had
stopped to visit, was probably built in the fifth century and abandoned
more than a thousand years ago. No one knows why the Mayas left this
part of the country and moved northward into Yucatan. Earthquakes,
pestilence, human enemies, or even superstition may have driven them
out. Or they may simply have decided to move, though most people would
not have abandoned, without good reason, such splendid stone cities as
they left behind.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
At Quiriguá, Guatemala, is this strange example of the carving left by
the Mayas.
]
The ruins of Quiriguá, lost for centuries, were discovered in 1839 by
John Lloyd Stephens, an American. Later, when Americans built the
railway through Guatemala, great mounds and mammoth stone ruins were
found. But the largest uncovering of ruins was done by the United Fruit
Company in 1910. Where the Mayas once had a great city, there is now a
13,000-acre banana plantation. However, the company has left
seventy-five acres, on which are the best ruins, free from planting.
Fifteen of these acres have been cleared of jungle, but one who wishes
to visit all the ruins must chop his way through dense tropical
vegetation.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
A great stone left by the Mayas at Quiriguá.
]
Ants and decay have destroyed all the woodwork in the ancient Mayan
cities, not only at Quiriguá but at Cobán, at Copán in Honduras, and in
many parts of Salvador and Yucatan. The stonework remains, and recent
American expeditions have uncovered statues and curiously carved stones,
some of them enormous, and whole buildings that must have been very
splendid when new. Some of the carved stones you may see in American
museums. Half above and half below the ground are great monuments,
resembling those of Egypt, and bearing hieroglyphics that the
archeologists are still trying to read. Some of the stone-carved faces
look so much like the figures at Chinese imperial tombs that many people
think the Mayas were Tartars who made their way from Asia across Bering
Strait and down into Central America.
Like the Chinese, these Central Americans seem to have considered the
turtle sacred, and to have used it as an emblem of long life. One of the
largest monuments I saw at Quiriguá was a turtle eight feet high and
said to weigh twenty tons. It was completely covered with carvings and
hieroglyphics. Enough of the writing has been translated to show that
here was once a great city, with _plazas_, temples and palaces. Great
forests have overgrown the pyramids and mounds of the Mayas. As there is
no natural stone in this region they must have brought from a distance
the immense blocks of sandstone which they used. But how? Perhaps they
floated them down the Motagua River on rafts. Yet how did they lift them
to the places they now occupy?
At the height of their power the Mayas were as good architects and
builders as the Aztecs, and their calendar, cut in stone, was better
than the one in Mexico City. But about the fifteenth century they seem
to have begun to weaken, and their downfall was hastened by the Spanish
conquest. At first they fought stubbornly against the conquerors. But
the Mayas of to-day are docile, almost childish, only half civilized;
and they scarcely realize that their forefathers were once the most
advanced people on the North American continent.
“Bananaland”
I spent a night with the American overseers of one of the banana
plantations that cover the country between Quiriguá and the Atlantic.
Many miles of private railroads run through the region that was formerly
jungle-covered swamp, and from there millions of bunches of bananas go
to the United States and Europe. Nearly all the hot lowlands of Central
America grow bananas for us, most of the plantations belonging to
Americans. Shiploads of bananas leave Puerto Barríos and other
east-coast ports every week.
In the morning my hosts lent me a hand car having a seat, and two
muscular West Indian negroes pumped me for miles through “bananaland.”
This plantation of Quiriguá is one of the smallest in Guatemala, and
there are much larger ones in other countries, yet as far as I could see
were waving banana leaves, very green and very large, with here and
there a huge hardwood tree. Banana fruit grows not on a tree but on a
great plant having a fleshy rootstock or rhizome. Large buds or “eyes”
develop on the rootstock. What looks like a trunk is really a mass of
overlapping leaf-sheaths. Pieces of the rootstock are planted, and, if
these fail to sprout, shoots are cut and stuck in the ground to grow.
Only one bunch of bananas grows on a plant. It hangs over at the top,
about ten feet from the ground, and at first glance it looks as if it
were growing upside down. As a matter of fact the bunch is hung upside
down later on when displayed in fruit store or grocery, and we are used
to seeing it in that position.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
A fully developed bunch of bananas ready for harvesting.
]
A burly negro, carrying a long pole at the end of which is a knife,
nicks the plant, just below the middle of the “trunk”; the upper half
swings down and a helper severs the bunch with his machete. The fruit is
laid carefully on the ground, for if a single banana is bruised, the
whole bunch and perhaps many others around it will spoil before the
destination is reached. In a few minutes a train comes along, and each
bunch is laid on a cushion of leaves in one of the open cars. The men
know how many bunches will fill a car and how many carloads will fill a
ship, and they know, too, just when each bunch should be cut so as to
reach the American market in good condition. Bananas going to England
have to be cut earlier. At the wharf the fruit is carefully carried
aboard either on wide endless belts or on negroes’ heads. It is put in
the ice-cooled hold of the ship, which is kept at just the right
temperature.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
Bananas are carried to the railway by a steam tram which runs through
the plantation.
]
After the old stalk has been cut down, another banana plant grows up
rather quickly from it. Before long a big flower, usually purple in
color, appears at the top of the plant, and slowly the tiny bunch of
bananas beneath it grows to its full size and is ready, in its turn, to
be cut. A banana plantation is more or less perennial, though it takes
plenty of labor and watchfulness to keep it producing its best.
A _ripe_ banana is never seen in a banana plantation, unless someone has
been careless. If the bunches were not cut down and shipped before a
single banana turned yellow, the fruit would be completely decayed
before it reached us. Its flavor is best when it is cut from the tree in
a green condition and allowed to ripen slowly. The Central Americans fry
and bake bananas, especially the species called the plantain which is
never eaten until cooked. The natives dry bananas as we do grapes, they
grind them up for flour, and they even make banana wine and vinegar.
[Illustration:
United Fruit Company
A banana steamship is quickly loaded by use of machinery.
]
As nearly all plantation workers are negroes, and the bosses almost all
Americans or Englishmen, English is much oftener spoken than Spanish in
the banana lands of the Caribbean.