Matagalpa.
Aguardiente.
Fermented liquors of the Indians.
The wine-palm.
Idleness of the Nicaraguans.
Pine and oak forests.
Mountain gorge.
Jinotega.
Native plough.
Descendants of the buccaneers.
San Rafael.
A mountain hut.
AT noon we arrived at Matagalpa, the capital of the province of the
same name. The town contains about three thousand inhabitants; the
province, or department, about thirty thousand. Matagalpa is built
close to the river, on a rocky surface, with stony knolls rising up
in some parts amongst the houses. It contains three churches, and
the usual large square or plaza. Around, the country appeared very
dry and barren, and there is scarcely any cultivation in the
immediate neighbourhood. We put up at one of the best houses in the
town. The family consisted of a stout lady about fifty and her
husband, their daughter and her husband, and an unmarried son. The
two younger men appeared to do nothing; the elder one had a
contract with the government to manufacture aguardiente for three
towns, and spent nearly all his time at a small hacienda, a league
distant, where he grew sugar-cane and maize, and distilled the
spirit.
There is a great deal of aguardiente, an inferior kind of rum, sold
throughout Nicaragua, and most of the Indians make it a point to
get drunk on their feast-days, but at other times are a sober race.
They do not owe the introduction of intemperance to the Spaniards,
though they can now obtain stronger liquor than in the old times,
as the ancient Indians do not appear to have known how to distil,
but they made several kinds of fermented liquors. In Mexico the
chief drink was "pulque," the fermented juice of the agave or
maguey plant. In Nicaragua "chicha," a kind of light beer, made
from maize, is still the favourite Indian beverage. On the warmer
plains, the wine-palm (Cocos butyracea) is grown. I saw many of
them near San Ubaldo. The wine is very simply prepared. The tree is
felled, and an oblong hole cut into it, just below the crown of
leaves. This hole is eight inches deep, passing nearly through the
trunk. It is about a foot long and four inches broad; and in this
hollow the juice of the tree immediately begins to collect,
scarcely any running out at the butt where it has been cut off.
This tendency of the sap to ascend is well shown in another plant,
the water liana. To get the water from this it must be cut first as
high as one can reach; then about a foot from the ground, and out
of a length of about seven feet, a pint of fine cool water will
run; but if cut at the bottom first, the sap will ascend so rapidly
that very little will be obtained. In three days after cutting the
wine-palm the hollow will be filled with a clear yellowish wine,
the fermented juice of the tree, and this will continue to secrete
daily for twenty days, during which the tree will have yielded some
gallons of wine. I was told that a very large grove of these trees
was cut down by the government near Granada, on account of the
excesses of the Indians, who used to assemble there on their
festivals, and get drunk on the palm-wine. The Indians of
Nicaragua, when the Spaniards first came amongst them, objected to
the preaching of the padres against intemperance. They said
"getting drunk did no man any harm."
The manufacture of aguardiente is a government monopoly, which is
farmed out to contractors. The contracts are always given to the
political supporters of the party in power.
There are many private illegal stills in the mountains. They are
generally amongst thick forest, near a small brook, with some dense
brushwood close at hand for the distiller to slip into if any
government officers should come up. One day, when rambling in the
woods near Santo Domingo, I came across one of these "sly grog"
manufactories. The apparatus was very simple. It consisted of two
of the common earthenware pots of the country, one on the top of
the other, the top one having had the bottom taken out and luted to
the lower one with clay. This was put on a fire with the fermented
liquor. The spirit condensed against the flat bottom of a tin dish
that covered the top vessel, and into which cold water was poured,
and fell in drops on to a board, that conducted it into a long
wooden tube, from which it dropped directly into bottles.
(PLATE 20. NATIVE STILL.)
Matagalpa does not rise above the dulness of other Nicaraguan
towns; and there is a stagnation about it, and utter absence of aim
or effort in the people, that are most distressing to a foreigner
used to the bustle, business, and diversions of European cities. A
few women washing in the river, or making tortillas or cigars in
the houses, was all I saw going on in the way of work. The men, as
usual, lolled about in hammocks, smoking incessantly. A few houses
were in process of building, or, rather, were standing half
finished. Now and then, a little is done to them; and so they take
months and years to finish; and men will show you, with the
greatest complacency, a half-built house on which nothing has been
done for two years, telling you they are so busy with it that they
cannot undertake anything else. There are no libraries, theatres,
nor concert-rooms: no public meetings nor lectures. Newspapers do
not circulate amongst the people, nor books of any kind. I never
saw a native reading, in the central provinces, excepting the
lawyers turning over their law books, or some of the functionaries
in the towns looking up the government gazette, or children at
their lessons. Night sets in at six o'clock. A single dim dip
candle is then lighted, in the better houses, set up high, so as to
shed a weak, flickering light over the whole room, not sufficient
to read by. The natives sit about and gossip till between eight and
nine, then lie down to sleep.
A single billiard-table, in a dimly-lighted room, at which three or
four play all the evening, until the closing hour, at nine, and a
dozen others sit round the walls on benches; a gambling room,
licensed by the government, where only the smallest sums are
staked; cock-fighting on Sundays; a feast day; and perhaps a
bull-fight once or twice a year; private gambling carried on to a
considerable extent by the higher classes, and aguardiente-drinking
by the lower, complete the list of Nicaraguan diversions.
On entering the Matagalpa district, we had found the roads dry and
dusty; and we now learnt that whilst at Santo Domingo the season
had been unusually wet, near Matagalpa it had been so dry that the
maize crops were suffering greatly from the drought. We had been
travelling nearly north-west, and were getting gradually further
and further away from the Atlantic, into a region where the
north-east trade wind, having to travel over a greater stretch of
land, gets drained of its moisture.
Our mules and horses were completely tired out; and we expected to
have been able, without difficulty, to hire fresh animals to take
us on to Ocotal in Segovia; but we were disappointed. We lost the
afternoon by depending upon a man who undertook to get us some. He
went away, saying he was going after them. Hour after hour passed,
and he did not return. We went to his house; and his wife told us
that he was getting the mules for us. Night set in, and still he
came not. At last, about nine o'clock, we found him at the
billiard-room. He said he thought, when he did not return, we would
take it for granted that he had not been able to find the mules. I
believe he had never been further than the billiard-saloon looking
for them. These people get through the days with such ennui and
difficulty, that they have no idea of people economising time. A
story is told about them which, whether true or not, illustrates
this. When the steamboats were first put on the Lake of Nicaragua,
the natives complained that they were charged as much as they were
in the bungos, although they got sometimes a week's sailing in the
latter, and only one day in the steamboat. We were in a dilemma
about mules. I wished to push on, as I found the journey was a
longer one than I expected when I set out; and it was important
that I should get back to the mines by the end of the month. At
last, our host offered us mules to take us as far as Jinotega,
charging us three times as much as was usual; and we determined to
go on there, and seek animals to continue our journey. We got our
own mules put into a good portrero of Para grass just below the
town, resisting our host's invitation to leave them with him,
fearing he might use them instead of feeding them. He had to send
out to his hacienda for the fresh ones; and although he promised
them at seven, it was ten o'clock the next day before they arrived;
and the delay in waiting for them quickened my appreciation of the
laziness and want of punctuality of the people of Matagalpa.
On leaving the town, we crossed the river, and ascended a range on
the other side. Here, for the first time, I got amongst pine trees
in the tropics; and they gave a very different aspect to the
country from what I had before seen. No brushwood grows under them,
and they stand apart at regular intervals, not shouldering each
other, as in the Atlantic forest, where the trees crowd together,
each trying to overtop its neighbour. No lianas hang from the
trees, and, excepting a few narrow-leaved Tillandsias, no epiphytes
nestle on the branches and trunks. Below, instead of shrubby palms,
large-leaved heliconias, and curious melastomae, the ground was
bare and brown from the fallen leaves of the pines, excepting that
in some places light grass had sprung up; in others the common
bracken-fern of Europe. All that I thought characteristic of a
tropical forest had disappeared; and the whistling of the wind
through the pine-tops, which I had not heard for years, carried me
back in imagination amongst the Canadian forests. The road was
rocky, and to the left rose mountains of nearly bare cliffs, up
which clung straggling pines, reaching to the summits, relieving,
but not concealing, their nakedness. Clumps of evergreen oaks were
the only other trees; and these, like the pines, grew in social
groups on the hills. In the valleys, the oaks and pines gave place
to a variety of trees and brushwood, different species of acacia
being the most abundant. Occasionally a tree-cactus appeared, its
curious flattened, kite-shaped joints, covered with prickles,
looking like great leaves, and its stem, formed of the same,
thickened at the bottom into a round filiform trunk, not differing
much from the trees around, but in the branches showing all the
gradations by which the flat constricted joints thicken out into
stems. In some parts, as we travelled on, we found the oak trees
and many of the pines completely draped with hanging festoons of
the grey moss-like Tillandsia usneoides, or "old man's beard." Not
a bough but had a great fringe hanging down, sometimes as much as
six feet long, like a grey veil swaying in the breeze, and giving
the trees a strange and venerable look. The ride was delightful
after the stagnation at Matagalpa: everything was fresh and new to
me. The aspect of the country, the trees, shrubs, and flowers, the
birds and insects, the aromatic perfume from the pines, claimed my
attention every minute.
After four hours' riding across the pine-clad ranges, we reached a
gorge leading up to the heights overlooking the valley of Jinotega.
The path was along the steep side of this gorge, often along the
side of a precipice, where a few logs were laid to prevent the
mules going over, but really increasing the danger, for they were
old and rotten. Large boulders, imbedded in dark-coloured earth,
lay on the steep slopes, and about these grew small herbaceous
ferns in the greatest variety and profusion--a very paradise for a
fern-collector. In some parts a light green maiden-hair fern
covered the ground with its beautifully tender foliage, reminding
me of shady banks in the north of England, covered with the equally
lovely oak-fern. Every few yards discovered some new species,
filling the mind with delight at their beauty and variety. In dryer
and more stony places, a pinnatifid club-moss stood up amongst the
stones in crisp tufts, like the parsley fern on mountain-sides at
home. A black and blue bird (Cyanocitta melanocyanea), about the
size of a jackdaw, flew in small noisy flocks; and I noticed a
beautiful trogon, with burnished green back, and rose-coloured
breast. The highest points of the ranges enclosing this ravine were
covered with pine trees (Pinus tenuifolia); lower down grew
evergreen oaks, and lower still a variety of small trees, shrubs,
and herbaceous plants, reaching to the dry bed of the brook.
(PLATE 21. NATIVE PLOUGH.)
After a steep and rocky ascent, we reached the top of the range,
and before us lay the upper end of the valley of Jinotega. Here it
was very narrow, hemmed in by rocky ranges capped with pine
forests. Descending the steep and rocky slope, we soon left the
pines and oaks above us, and came down on a narrow alluvial flat,
gradually widening out as we proceeded down the valley. On each
side of the road were fields of maize, suffering greatly from the
drought. The soil was a fine deep, dark loam, and for the first
time in Nicaragua I found they ploughed their land, and made
permanent fences. The plough was a primitive implement, not unlike
some of those still in use in parts of Spain. It was entirely of
wood, excepting that the point was shod with an iron plate. Many of
the fences were hedges, amongst which grew the lovely creeper
Antigonon leptopus, with festoons of pink and rose-coloured
flowers. The Indian and Mestizo girls bind it in their hair, and
call it "la vegessima," "the beautiful." It does not wither for
some time after being cut, and so is very suitable for garlands and
bouquets. It has been carried to Greytown and the West Indies; and
whenever it flourishes, it is a great favourite.
About a mile down the valley we reached the small town of Jinotega,
and put up at the estanco kept by a very polite and dignified
elderly gentleman, who, in the customary phrase of the country,
placed himself, his house, and all he possessed, at our service.
His wife, a bustling young woman, not more than half the age of her
husband, set to work at once to get our dinner ready. There were
several women-servants and many children about the house. It was
kept cleaner than is usual in Nicaragua, and I noticed in the yard
behind that some attempt at drainage had been made. Our host
appeared to be in comfortable circumstances. Outside the town he
had a small farm where he grew maize and wheat. He complained
greatly of the drought, and said it had never occurred before in
his recollection that the maize had failed in Jinotega for want of
rain. He found us a man who promised to supply us with mules or
horses to take us to Ocotal, but as they had to be brought up from
the "Campos" or plains he could not let us have them early, and it
was ten o'clock the next day before we started again.
Whilst waiting for the mules we strolled around the town. In the
centre most of the houses are substantially built and tiled; on the
outskirts there are small grass-thatched huts with high-pitched
roofs. Wheat, maize, potatoes, and beans are the principal things
grown. Many of the people have light sandy-coloured hair and blue
eyes, and I thought at first they might be the offspring of a
number of Americans that settled in Jinotega during the civil war
in the States, but afterwards abandoned the place. I found,
however, some elderly people with the same distinctive marks of
ancestry other than the Spaniards, Indians, or Negroes, and I am
inclined to believe that on the breaking up of the bands of
buccaneers by Morgan, at the end of the seventeenth century, many
of them found a refuge up the Rio Grande and Rio Wanks. They were
well acquainted with these rivers, and made many forays up them to
harry the Spanish settlements on the Pacific slope. In 1688 a body
of about three hundred French and English pirates abandoned their
ships in the Gulf of Fonseca, forced their way across the country,
and descended the Rio Wanks to the Atlantic. The fair-haired and
blue-eyed natives of Matagalpa and Segovia are probably the
descendants of the outlaws who made these provinces their highway
from one ocean to another.
Jinotega is pleasantly situated, and has many advantages over other
Nicaraguan towns. The climate is temperate and moderately dry, the
land very fertile. Pine trees on the surrounding ranges furnish
fuel and light. Pasture is abundant; for two miles below the town
the valley opens out into wide "campos" covered with grass, on
which a large number of horses, cattle, and mules are reared.
Our road lay down the valley. On the sides of the enclosing ranges
there were many cultivated patches, and we saw whole families, men,
women, and children, weeding amongst the maize. A few showers had
fallen during the night and given them some hopes of saving their
crops. We passed a village called Apanas and then struck across the
plains, and on the other side reached low flat-topped ranges
covered with small trees and brushwood, amongst which were many
clearings well fenced and planted with maize. Passing over an
undulating country, the hills covered with oak forests, the
lowlands well grassed, we reached about two o'clock San Rafael, a
small town that has used up all its houses in forming the plaza in
front of a barn-like church. As usual, the half-breed population
were sunk in idleness and poverty.
We stopped at one of the houses to get a drink of "tiste," and were
visited by a fussy little man who told us that he was secretary to
the judge and keeper of the "estanco," and in fact the ruling power
in the town, which he placed at our disposal. We, however, wanted
nothing but our "tiste" and to get some information about a cave we
had heard was in the neighbourhood. Our friend knew all about it,
and got a boy to show us the way for a couple of dimes. Under his
guidance we crossed a brook, and passing through a pine forest soon
reached the cave, which was on the side of the precipitous bank of
a small stream. It was only a small one, extending for about twenty
feet back, hollowed out of a sandy conglomerate, probably by the
action of the brook when it ran at a higher level. I dug a little
into the floor, but had not time to do much, and found nothing.
There were signs of its having been recently occupied, the walls
and roof were blackened with smoke, and numerous shells of the
common fresh-water melania were lying about. We were told that the
Indians when travelling used it, and that during the last
revolution the inhabitants of San Rafael hid their valuables in it,
though what they consisted of I am at a loss to say.
On leaving the cave our guide put us on the wrong road, and we did
not discover the mistake until we had travelled a couple of miles.
We then arrived at some huts in the pine forest, where we were told
that the road to Ocotal was half a mile distant, across a stream
and a high steep range opposite. We had either to return to San
Rafael to take the right road or to cross the range. The latter
looked rather formidable, but we determined to try it. It was very
steep and rocky, but amongst the pines there was no underwood, so,
after some stumbling and slipping, our beasts managed to scramble
to the top, and we soon after regained the road.
We now travelled over steep ranges, composed of great moraine-like
heaps of clay, with large angular boulders. Pine and oak trees
covered the heights, shrouded with long fringes and festoons of the
moss-like Tillandsia. Many epiphytes grew on the oaks, amongst
which the mottled yellow flower of an orchid hung down in spikes
six feet long.
Five miles after regaining the road we reached the top of a high
range of hills, and found a single hut on the summit. Night was
coming on, it was raining, and we were told that there was a very
bad road before us over mountains, and no other house for three
leagues. We determined to stay at the hut, although the prospect of
our night's entertainment was a most cheerless one. The hut was
about twenty feet square, with a small attached shed for a kitchen.
The floor was the natural earth, littered with corn husks and other
refuse. There was not a bit of furniture, excepting some rough
sleeping-places made of hides stretched over poles. There was not a
stool nor even a log of wood to sit down upon. In this miserable
hut dwelt three families, consisting of nine individuals; men,
women, and children.
The land around appeared to be poor. A patch of the forest in front
of the house, sloping down the side of a steep valley, had been
cleared, and planted with maize and wheat. We were told that there
were a few other houses down this valley. The people in the hut
seemed miserably poor. I said to Velasquez that they must have been
born on the settlement, as I could not imagine any one coming from
outside the mountains to live at such a spot, and on inquiry we
found that every one was a native, born within a mile of the hut.
It was perhaps bleaker than usual that evening, a continuous rain
was falling, and a high wind whistling through the pine-tops. Pigs,
dogs, and fowls were constantly in one's way, and the only cheering
sign was the bright blaze and fragrant smell of the burning pine
splinters. I asked one of the men if he preferred this place to
Jinotega, where the fertile slopes and grassy plains had so pleased
our eyes. He answered he did, the air was fresher and there was
less fever.
They made for us some tortillas, and we had tea with us. The only
ingenious thing about the place was a sort of stove, dome-shaped,
made of clay, with two holes through the top like a cooking-stove,
on which they put their earthenware cooking vessels. I turned into
my hammock early, with all my clothes and my boots on, and my coat
buttoned tightly round me, as the bleak wind found many a crevice
to whistle through, and the open network of the hammock, agreeable
enough in the warm lowlands, was too slight a protection against
the cold of the mountains. A few poles placed across the doorway
partially closed it, but some of the smallest pigs got through, and
were rooting and grunting amongst our baggage all night.
As soon as daylight broke next morning we were up, stiff, chilled,
and cramped, and got some hot coffee made, which warmed us a
little. We then had a better look round than we had had the night
before. It was a most desolate spot, with scarcely any grass; and a
poor half-starved horse came up to get a small feed of maize.
The people of the mountain regions of Europe cannot, if they would,
take up land in the fertile lowlands, as they are already occupied,
but in the central provinces of Nicaragua the greater part of the
land is unappropriated, and these people might, if they liked, make
their homesteads where, with one-half the labour they spend on
their barren mountain ridge, they might live in abundance. But they
have been born and bred where they live, and knowing how strong is
the force of custom and how attached the Indians are to their
homes, I do not wonder that they stay from generation to generation
on this bleak range. I can imagine that if removed to the lowlands
they would sigh for their mountain home, to smell the fragrance of
the pine trees, and to hear once more the wind whistling through
their branches. I have already noticed how the Indians cling
generation after generation to the same spot, even when a short
removal would be manifestly to their advantage. I fear there is a
more ignoble reason that has as much to do with this as their love
of home, their confirmed and innate laziness. They shrink from any
labour that they are not forced to undertake. As an instance, no
one during at least two generations that the house had been
occupied had brought in even a log of wood for a seat, and a table
would, I fancy, be beyond their wildest dreams of comfort. An
Avocado tree grew before their door, the only fruit tree to be
seen, and it was nearly destroyed by being deeply cut into. I asked
why they had injured it, and they said they fired at it as a
target, and, lead being scarce, they dug out the bullets with their
knives; yet within thirty paces of their hut there were plenty of
pine trees that would have done equally well as a target, but then
they would have had to walk a few yards from their door.
How was such a spot first chosen for settlement? All the names of
the places around are Indian, and probably in the old times when
there was continual warfare amongst the tribes, the remnants of
one, conquered and nearly extirpated, fled to the mountains, and
occupied a locality from necessity and for safety that they would
not otherwise have chosen. Afterwards when a new generation arose
they looked on the pine-clad hills as their home and birthright.