CHAPTER IXTRAVELS IN THE CIBAO

The Plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its American bullet hole

Railroading in Santo Domingo

The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago

Dominican guardias

With the tenth mishap, lightless and patchless, we lost the final remnants of patience and forced our sorry steed to hobble along on three feet. The road had a pleasant little way of eluding us when least expected, and a dozen times within the next hour we brought up against the forest wall, finding our way again only by the sense of touch. Then at last appeared a flicker of light. But it was only the hamlet on the bank of the River Yaque, across which we must be ferried on what looked in the darkness like the top of a soap-box. Fortunately it takes little to float a Ford. Our crippled charger staggered up the steep bank beyond this principal stream of northern Santo Domingo, and a half hour later we rattled into the considerable town of Monte Cristi.

Its streets were as wide as the hilltop roadway behind us, but like it they had only reached the first stage of development. Worst of all we were forced to run the full length of nearly every one of them in the vain quest of some suggestion of hostelry. Our predicament would have been one to bring salt tears to the most hardened eyes but for the saving grace of all the island of Santo Domingo—our own people in uniform. Barely had we discovered the commander-in-chief of Monte Cristi, a Marine captain bearing the name of one of our early and illustrious Presidents, than he broke all records in hospitality within our own experience by turning his entire house over to us. We were never more firmly convinced of the wisdom of American intervention in Santo Domingo than at the end of that explosive day.

The otherwise dark and deserted town was gathered in its best starched attire in the place where any Spanish-American town would naturally be on a Sunday evening—in the central plaza. This, to begin with, was strikingly unlike the bare open squares of Haiti, with their unfailing tribune-and-palm-tree “patrie.” First of all, it was well paved, an assertion that could not be made of any other spot in town. An elaborate iron fence surrounded it, comfortable benches were ranged about it, trees and flowering shrubs shaded it by day and decorated it by night, the only public lights in town cast an unwonted brilliancy upon the promenading populace, circling slowly round andround the square, the two sexes in opposite directions, their voices and footsteps half drowning the not too successful efforts of a group of misfitted males in the center of the plaza to produce musical sounds. It was as typically Spanish a scene as the deserted barrenplace, with the weird beating of tomtoms floating across it, is indigenous to the republic of Haiti.

It was not until morning, however, that we caught full sight of the chief feature of the plaza and the pride of Monte Cristi. By daylight a monument we had only vaguely sensed in the night stood forth in all its dubious beauty. In the center of the now deserted plaza rose a near replica of the Eiffel Tower, its open-work steel frame crowned by a large four-faced clock some fifty feet above our dizzy heads. Well might the Monte Cristians pride themselves on a feature quite unique among the plazas of the world.

From this clock tower hangs a tale that is too suggestive of Dominican character to be passed over in silence. Some years ago, before the intrusive Americans came to put an end to the national sport, a candidate for the Dominican Congress came parading his candidacy about the far corners of the country. In each town he promised, in return for their aid in seating him in the august assembly, that the citizens should have federal funds for whatever was most lacking to their civic happiness. Monte Cristi, being farthest from the cynical capital of any community in Santo Domingo, took the politician seriously. The town put its curly heads together and decided that what it most wanted was—not a real school building to take the place of the rented hut in which its children fail to learn the rudiments of the three R’s, nor yet pavements for some of the sandhills that are disguised under the name of streets. What it felt the need of more than anything else was a town clock that would cast envy on all its rivals for many miles around. The politician approved the choice so thoroughly that he advised the opening of negotiations for its purchase at once, without waiting for the mere formality of congressional sanction. In due time the monstrosity was erected. But for some reason the newly elected congressman’s influence with his fellow-members was not so paramount as his faithful supporters had been led to believe. Some of them still contend that he did actually introduce a resolution to provide the noble and patriotic pueblo of Monte Cristi with a prime necessity in the shape of a community time-piece; if so the bill died in committee, unattended by priest or physician. For months Monte Cristi bombarded the far-off capital with doleful petitions, until at length,with the sudden coming of the Americans, congress itself succumbed, and the two thousand or so good citizens of the hapless town found themselves face to face with a document—bearing a foreign place of issue at that, caramba!—reading succinctly:

“To one clock and tower, Dr........$16,000Please Remit”

“To one clock and tower, Dr........$16,000

Please Remit”

To cap the climax, the ridiculous Americans who had taken in charge the revenues of the country brought with them the absurd doctrine that municipalities should pay their bills. Years have passed since the successful politician visited the northwest corner of the country, yet Monte Cristi is only beginning to crawl from beneath its appalling clock tower, financially speaking, and to catch its breath again after relief from so oppressive a burden. Small wonder that her sand-hill streets are unpaved and that her children still crowd into a rented hovel to glean the rudiments of learning.

But the history of the famous clock tower does not end there. Those who glance at the top-heavy structure from the south are struck by a jagged hole just above the face of the dial, midway between the XII and the I. It is so obviously a bullet-hole that the observer could not fail to show surprise were it not that bullet-holes are as universal in Santo Domingo as fighting cocks. Thereby hangs another tale.

In the early days of American occupation the choice of commanders of theGuardia Nacionaldetachment in Monte Cristi was not always happy. It was natural, too, that a group of marine officers, bubbling over with youth, sentenced to pass month after month in a somnolent Dominican village, should have found it difficult to devise fitting amusement for their long leisure hours. Pastimes naturally reduced themselves to the exchange of poker chips and the consumption of certain beverages supposedly taboo in all American circles and doubly so in the Marine Corps. The power of Dominican joy-water to produce hilarity is far-famed. It came to be the custom of the winning card player to express his exuberance by drawing his automatic and firing several shots over his head. This means of expression would have been startling enough to the disarmed Dominicans had the games been played in the open air with the sun above the horizon. But the rendezvous was naturally within doors, usually in the dwelling of the commander, and the climax was commonly reached at an hour when all reputable natives were wrapped in slumber. The sheet-iron roof that sheltered us during our night in Monte Cristi corroborated thetestimony of the inhabitants that they had frequently sprung from their beds convinced that yet another revolution was upon them.

One night a difference of opinion arose among the players as to the hour that should be set for the cashing in of chips. The commander offered to settle the problem in an equitable manner. Stepping to the door, he raised his automatic toward the famous $16,000 clock and fired. The decision was made; the game ended at twelve:thirty. It is not particularly strange under the circumstances that the inhabitants of Monte Cristi are not extraordinarily fond of Americans or of marine occupation.

The mail coach—in real life the inevitable Ford—left Monte Cristi the morning after our arrival, obviating the necessity of wiring to Santiago for a private car. The fare was within reason, as such things go in the West Indies—sixteen dollars for a journey of some eighty miles—and despite the pessimistic prophecies of our host we had the back seat to ourselves the entire distance. Our driver, of dull-brown hue, was of the same quick, nervous temperament as his Cuban cousins, and scurried away at thirty miles an hour over “roads” which few American chauffeurs would venture along at ten. Yet he was surprisingly successful in avoiding undue jolts; so often had he driven this incredibly rough-and-tumble route that he knew exactly when and where to slow up for each dryarroyo, to dodge protruding boulders or dangerous sand beds, to drop from one level to another without cracking a spring or an axle. The machine was innocent of muffler, hence it needed no horn, and as an official conveyance it yielded the road to no one, except the few placid carts whose safety lay in their massiveness.

Many miles of the journey were sandy barren wastes producing only dismal thorn-bristling dwarf forests. Every now and then we dodged from one wide caricature of a road to another still more choppy and rock-strewn; occasionally we found a mile or two of tolerable highway. The scarcity of travelers was in striking contrast to Haiti. The few people we met were never on foot, but in clumsy carts or astride gaunt, but hardy, little horses. Houses of woven palm-leaves, on bare, reddish, hard soil sheltered the poorer inhabitants; the better-to-do built their dwellings of split palm trunks that had the appearance of clapboards. Villages were rare, and isolated houses wholly lacking. Outdoor mud ovens on stilts, with rude thatched roofs over them, adorned nearly every back or side yard. At each village we halted before a roughly constructed post office to exchange mailbags with a postmaster who inthe majority of cases showed no visible negro strain. Pure white inhabitants were frequent in the larger pueblos; full-blooded African types extremely rare. Santo Domingo has been called a mulatto country; we found it more nearly a land of quadroons.

What even the sparse population lived on was not apparent, for almost nowhere were people working in the fields, and the towns seemed to be chiefly inhabited by fairly well-dressed loafers, or at best by lolling shop-keepers. Probably they existed by selling things to one another. The stocks of the over-numerous shops were amply supplied with bottled goods, but with comparatively little else, and that chiefly tinned food from the United States. No old sugar kettles, no ruined French estates, no negro women in broad straw hats or slippers flapping with the gait of their donkeys, no improvised markets or clamoring beggars along the way—none of the familiar things of Haiti were in evidence, except the fighting cocks. Such horsemen as we passed rode in well upholstered saddles, doubly softened by the Spanish-Americanpellon, or shaggy saddle rug. The women accompanying them clung uncomfortably to clumsy side-saddles, and were dressed in far more style than their Haitian prototypes, pink gowns being most in favor, and in place of the loose slippers the majority wore shoes elaborate enough to satisfy a New York shop-girl. Cemeteries at the edge of each town were forests of wooden crosses, contrasting with the coffin-shaped cement tombs of Haiti.

Guayovin, a town of considerable size and noted for its revolutionary history, the scattered hamlet of Laguna Salada, the larger village of Esperanza, one pueblo after another was the same blurred vista of wide, sandy streets, of open shop fronts and gaping inhabitants. We soon detected a surly attitude toward Americans, a sullen, passive resentment that recalled the attitude of Colombia as I had known it eight years before. There was more superficial courtesy than in our own brusk and hurried land; the Dominican, like all our neighbors to the southward, cultivates an exterior polish. But with the exception of a few who went out of their way to demonstrate their pro-American sentiments, to express themselves as far more pleased with foreign occupation than with the continual threat of revolution, the attitude of silent protest was everywhere in the air.

At the end of fifty kilometers, in which we had forded only one pathetic little stream, the landscape changed somewhat for the better, though at the same time the “road” became even more atrocious. Hitherto the only beauty in the scene had been a pretty little floweringcactus bush, like an inverted candelabra, and the soft velvety colors of the barren brown vistas. Now the thorny vegetation, the chaparral, and the cactus gave way to clumps of bamboo, to towering palms, and other trees of full stature, while corn and beans began to clothe the still deadly-dry soil. High hills had arisen close on the left, higher ones farther off to the right; then ahead appeared beautiful labyrinths of deep-blue mountains, range after range piled up one behind the other in amphitheatrical formation, culminating in the cloud-coiffed peak of Tino, some ten thousand feet above the sea and the highest point in the West Indies.

Navarrete, strung along the beginning of an excellent highway that was to continue, except for two unfinished bridges, to Santiago, boasted real houses, some of palm trunks, most of them of genuine lumber with more corrugated iron than thatched roofs, some of their walls of faded pink, green, or yellow, many of them frankly unpainted. A considerable commercial activity occupied its inhabitants. Beyond, the country grew still greener, with groves of royal palms waving their ostrich plumes with the dignified leisureliness of the tropics, and the highway began to undulate, or, as it seemed to us behind our over-eager chauffeur, to pitch and roll, over low foot-hills. We picked up a rusty little railroad on the left, farther on a power line and a dozen telegraph wires striding over hill and dale, raced at illegal speed through Villa Gonzalez, and entered a still more verdant region of vegetable gardens in fertile black soil. Then all at once we topped a rise from which spread out all the splendid green valley of Yaque, Santiago de los Caballeros piled up a sloping high ground a couple of miles away, with mountains that had grown to imposing height still far distant to the right. A truck-load of marines, monopolizing the right of way in the innocently obstructive manner we had often seen in France, blocked our progress for a time; then we swung past the inevitable shaded plaza of all Spanish-American towns, and drew up with a snort at the Santiago post office just as the cathedral clock was striking the hour of three.

Before we had time even to set foot in Santiago we were greeted by my old friend “Lieutenant Long” of Canal Zone police fame, who had already put the town in a proper mood for our reception. Since the days when we had pursued felons together along the ten-mile strip of Panamanian jungle the erstwhile lieutenant, now more fittingly known as “Big George,” had added steadily to his laurels as a good and trueservant of mankind. From the defelonized banks of the canal to the command of the sleuths of Porto Rico had been a natural step, and when he had detected everything worth detecting in our West Indian isle, and fathered a company of the 17th Infantry during the late international misunderstanding, “Big George” accepted the Augean task of initiating the Dominicans into the mysteries of their new American-sired land tax.

Considerably more than four hundred years ago, when the redskin north of the Rio Grande had yet to scalp his initial pale face, there was founded in the fertile valley of the Yaque the first of the many Santiagos that to-day dot the map of more than half the western hemisphere. Thirty Spanish gentlemen, as the word was understood in those roistering days,hidalgoswho had followed on the heels of Columbus, were the original settlers, and because of their noble birth they were permitted by royal decree to call their new home by the name it still officially bears,—Santiago de los Caballeros. Although the present inhabitants of the aristocratic old town by no means all boast themselves “gentlemen” either in theconquistadoror the modern sense of the term, some of the leading families can trace their ancestry in unbroken line from those old Spanish hidalgos. Many of these descendants of fifteenth century grandees still retain the armor, swords, and other quaint warlike gear of their ancestors. A few have even kept their Caucasian blood pure through all the generations and frequent disasters of that long four hundred years, but the vast majority of them give greater or less evidence of African graftings on the family tree. The Cibao, as the northern half of Santo Domingo is called, is the region in which the Spaniards first found in any quantity the gold they came a-seeking, and gentlemanly Santiago has ever been its principal city. Twice destroyed by earthquakes, like so many cities of the West Indies, sacked by pirates and invaders more times than it cares to remember, it has persisted through all its mishaps.

But in spite of its flying start Santiago has by no means kept pace with many a parvenu in the New World. Barely can it muster twenty thousand inhabitants, and in progress and industry it has drifted but slowly down the stream of time. Revolutions have been its chief setback, for the innumerable civil wars that have decimated the population of the republic ever since it asserted its freedom from the Spanish crown have almost invariably centered about the city of caballeros. A hundred Spanish-American towns can duplicate its every feature. About the invariable central plaza, with its shaded benches, diagonalwalks, and evening promenaders, stand the bulking, weather-peeled cathedral with its constantly thumping, tin-voiced bells, thecasa consistorialwhere the municipal council dawdles through its weekly meetings, the wide open yet exclusive clubs, and the residences of the most ancient families, their lower stories occupied by shops and cafés. In contrast to this proudly kept square the wide, right-angled streets that radiate from it are either congenitally innocent of paving or littered with the remnants of what may long ago have been cobbled driveways. As in all Spanish-America the lack of civic team-work is shown in the sidewalks; which are high, low, ludicrously narrow, or lacking entirely, according to the personal whim of each householder, and rather family porches than public rights of way. Its houses, mostly of one story, never higher than two, are something more than half of wood, the remainder being adobe or baked-mud structures that some time in the remote past had their façades daubed with whitewash or scantily painted in various bright colors. The cathedral, the municipal building, many a private residence, our very hotel room were speckled with bullet-holes more or less diligently patched, corroborating the verbal evidence of Santiago’s revolutionary activities. There is a faint reminder of the Moors in the tendency for each trade to monopolize one street to the exclusion of the others. A dozen barbershops may be found in a single block, cafés cluster together, drygoods shops with their languid male clerks shoulder one another with a certain degree of leisurely, unindividualistic aggressiveness. Farther out, the unkempt streets dwindle away between lop-shouldered little huts that seem to need the supporting mutual assistance shared by their neighbors nearer the center of town.

There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince, loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking their pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of vision. Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded Santiago in force. The inevitable venders of lottery tickets, which in Santo Domingo are of municipal rather than national issue and resemble the handbills of some itinerant family of barn-stormers, pester the passer-by every few yards with spurious promises of sudden fortune. In the cathedral the visitor finds himself face to face at every step with admonitions that women must have their heads covered and that worshipers shall not spit on the floor. The first command is universally recognized,if only by the spreading of a handkerchief over the frizzled tresses, but the latter is by no means so faithfully obeyed. If there is anything whatever individualistic about St. James of the Gentlemen that distinguishes it from its countless cousins below the Rio Grande, it is the stars and stripes that wave above the ancient fortress overlooking the placid River Yaque, and the groups of American marines who come now and then striding down its untended streets.

The averagesantiagueñoreaches the dignity of clothes somewhat late in life. Naked black or brown babies adorn every block, the sight of a plump boy of five taking his constitutional dressed in a pair of sandals, a bright red hat, and a magnificent expression of unconcern attracts the attention of no one except strangers. Girls show the prudery of their sex somewhat earlier in life, but many a boy learns to smoke cigarettes, and even long black cigars, before he submits to the inconvenience of his first garment. It may be this sartorial freedom of his earlier life that makes the Santiago male prone to sport a costume that belies his years. Youths of sixteen, eighteen, and some one might easily suspect of being twenty, display an expanse of brown legs between their tight knee-breeches and short socks that makes their precocious tendency to frequent cafés, consume fiery drinks and man-size cigars, andenamorar las muchachasdoubly striking. They are intelligent youths, on the whole, compared with their Haitian neighbors, with a quick wit to catch a political argument or the mysteries of a mechanical contrivance, though they have the tendency of all their mixed race to slow down in their mental processes soon after reaching what with us would be early manhood.La juventudof Santo Domingo is beginning to look with slightly less scorn upon the use of the hands as a means of livelihood, an improvement which may be largely credited to American occupation, not so much through precept and example as by the reduction in political sinecures and the institution of genuine examinations for candidates to government office.

In character, as in physical aspect, Santiago is true to type. The outward forms of politeness are diligently cultivated; actual, physical consideration for the comfort or convenience of others is conspicuous by its scarcity. The same man who raises his hat to and shakes hands with his neighbor ten times a day shows no hesitancy in maintaining any species of nuisance, from a bevy of fighting cocks to a braying jackass, against the peace and happiness of that same neighbor, nor in hugging a house-wall when it is his place to take to the gutter. A haughtiness of demeanor, an over-developed personal pride that itwould be difficult to find real reason for, burden all except the most poverty-stricken class. Amid the medley of tints that make up the population the casual observer might conclude that the existence of a color-line would be out of the question in Santiago. As he dips beneath the surface, however, he finds a very decided one, nay, several, dividing the population not into two, but into three or four social strata, though the lines of demarkation are neither as distinct nor as adamant as with us. Thus one of the tile-floored clubs on the central plaza, the chair-forested parlor of which stands ostensibly wide open, admits no member whose ancestry has not been unbrokenly Caucasian, while another across the square welcomes neither pure whites nor full-blooded Africans. An amusing feature of this club exclusiveness is that the first society, after what is said to have been violent debate, declined to admit American members, as a protest against “the unwarranted interference by superior force in our national affairs.” In retaliation, or rather, in supreme indifference to this attitude, the forces of occupation have acquired the premises next door and take no back seat to the Dominicans in the matter of exclusiveness. It may be the merest coincidence that whenever a dance is given in the American clubrooms a still more blatant orchestra, seated close up against the thin partition between the two social rendezvous, furnishes the inspiration for a similar recreation.

The principal business of Santiago, if one may judge by the frequent warehouse doors from which issues the acrid smell of sweating tobacco, is the buying and selling of the narcotic weed. It comes in great bales, wrapped inyagua, or the thick, leathern leaf-stem of the royal palm, of which each tree sheds one a month and which is turned to such a variety of uses throughout the West Indies. Women and boys are constantly picking these bales apart and strewing their contents about in various heaps, to just what purpose is not apparent to the layman, for they always end by bundling them up again in the self-sameyagua, in which dusky draymen carry them off once more to parts unknown. A considerable amount of the stuff is consumed locally, however, for Santiago boasts one large cigar factory and a number of small ones, ranging down to one-room hovels in which the daily output could probably be contained within two boxes—were it not the custom in Santo Domingo simply to tie them in bundles.

The smoker must conduct himself with circumspection in American-governed Santo Domingo. Each and every cigar is wrapped round not only with the usual banded trademark, but also with a revenue stamp. Now beware that you do not indulge that all but universalAmerican habit of removing the band before lighting the cigar. In Santo Domingo it is unlawful to withdraw this proof of legal origin until the weed has been “partially consumed,” and the official expert ruling on that phrase is that the clipping off of the consumer’s end does not constitute even partial consumption, which only the burning of a certain portion of the customarily, opposite extremity, accomplishes. Furthermore, when at last you do venture to remove the decoration, do not on any account fail to mutilate it beyond all semblance to its original state. If you are detected in the perpetration of either of the unlawful acts above specified, no power can save you from falling into the hands of “Mac,” who sits in the same office with “Big George”—whenever one or both of them are not pursuing similar malefactors in another corner of the Cibao—facing the charge of unlawfully, wilfully, and maliciously violating Article 12 of the Internal Revenue Law of the sovereign República Dominicana, and there is no more certain road to the prisoner’s dock.

But I am getting ahead of my story. “Mac” will make his official entry all in due season. What I started to explain was why one may frequently behold an elephantine Dominican market woman, often with a brood of piccaninnies half concealed in the folds of her ample skirt, parading down the street with the air of a New York clubman in spite of the bushel or two of yams or plantains on her head, puffing haughtily at a cigar the band of which falsely suggests that she has recently squandered a dollar bill with her tobacconist. Indeed, many an over-cautious Dominican avoids all possibility of falling into the net by smoking serenely on through band, stamp, and all, which, to tell the truth, does not particularly depreciate the aroma of the average native cigar.

There is sound basis for Article 12. In the good old days when there were no battalions of marines to interfere with the national sport of Santo Domingo the stamp tax was already in force, and the consumption of cigars was almost what it is to-day; yet for some occult reason it scarcely produced a tenth of its present revenue. First of all there were the “chivo” cigars,—chivomeaning not merely goat but something corresponding to our word “graft” in the Spanish West Indies—which never made any pretense of bearing a stamp. Some of them were made secretly; a veritable pillar of the social structure of Santo Domingo was discovered to be operating a clandestine cigar-factory long after the Americans took up this particular bit of the white man’s burden. Others were privately placed on the market bylegitimate manufacturers, who supplied a certain percentage of legal stock also. A third scheme was to fill the pockets of the native inspector with a choice brand and advise him to forget the matter; still another alternative was to buy the stamps at a bargain from some revenue official who was hard pressed for ready cash. But the favorite means of avoiding contributions to the wily politicians in the capital was simplicity itself. A cigar-maker purchased a hundred revenue stamps and wrapped them about his first hundred cigars. His retailer, who might be himself, his wife, his cousin, or at least hiscompadre, greeted the purchaser with a smiling countenance. “Cigars? Why certainly. Try these.Cómo va la señora hoy?Y los niños?Curious exhibition that fourth pair of cocks gave on Sunday,verdad?” Bargains are not struck hastily in Santo Domingo. By the time the transaction was completed the retailer had ample opportunity idly to slip the bands off the cigars and drop them into his counter drawer. The purchaser made no protest, even if he noticed the manipulation, for he was buying cigars, not revenue stamps. It is vouched for that the same band saw continual service in the old days for a year or two. But it is a careless smoker to-day who ventures to thrust a cigar into his pocket without making sure that its proof of legality is intact.

“Big George” arranged that we should spend the first Sunday after our arrival in the most typical Dominican style of celebration,—the partaking oflechón asado. His choice of scene for the celebration, too, was particularly happy. An hour’s easy jog from town—easy because the saddle-horses of Santo Domingo, like those of Cuba, are all “gaited,” that is, gifted with a singlefoot pace that makes them as comfortable seats as any rocking-chair—brought us to the estate of Jaragua, the exact site of the first founding of Santiago by the Castilianhidalgos. It was the first earthquake that caused them to transfer it from this heart of the valley to the bluff overlooking the Yaque. The ruins of an old brick-and-stone church, of a water reservoir or community bath, and long lines of stones embedded in the ground marking the remnants of cobbled streets and house walls, are half covered with the brush and jungle-grass of a modern hog farm. Magnificent royal palms rise from what were once private family nooks; immense tropical trees spread over former parlors more charming roofs than their original coverings of thatch; the pigs frequently root up ancient coins that may long ago have jingled in Columbus’ own pocket.

Under the dense, capacious shade of a fatherly old mango-tree sat anegro peon, slowly turning round and round over a fire of specially chosen, aromatic fagots a suckling pig, orlechón, spitted on a long bamboo pole. In the outdoor kitchen of the rambling, one-story, tile-roofed, delightful old Spanish country house a group of ebony servants of both sexes and all ages were preparing a dozen other native dishes the mere aroma of which made a hungry man withdraw to leeward and await the summons with what patience he could muster. Our host and his family, with just enough African tinge to their ancestry to make their hair curl, hurried hither and yon, striving to minister to our already perfect comfort. There is no more genuine hospitality than that of the higher classhacendadosof rural Latin-America, once they have cast aside the mixture of shyness and rather oppressive dignity in which they commonly wrap themselves before strangers.

In due leisurely season the chief victim of the day’s feast, his mahogany skin crackling from the recent ordeal, bathed in his own tender juices, was slid down the bamboo pole to a giant platter and given the place of honor on the family board. Flanked on all sides by the results of the kitchen industry,—heaping plates of steamed yuca, mashed yams bristling with native peppers, boiled calabash, plumpboniatos, golden Spanish chick-peas, even a Brobdingnagian beefsteak—and these in turn by the now thoroughly congenial hosts and guests, a barefoot, wide-eyed servant behind every other chair, the celebration began. Spanish wines which one would never have credited with finding their way to this far-off corner of the New World turned the big bucolic tumblers red and golden in perhaps too rapid succession. Dominican tales of the olden times, American pleasantries reclothed in rattling Castilian, reminiscences of Haitian occupation from the still bright-eyed grandmother, all rose in a babel of hilarity that floated away through the immense open doorways on the delightful trade winds that sweep constantly over the West Indies. But alas for the brevity of human appetite! Long before the center of attraction had lost his resemblance to the eager little rooter of the day before, while the Gargantuan beefsteak still sat intact, eyeing the circle with a neglected air, one after another of the sated convivialists was beckoning away with a scornful gesture of disinterest the candied and spiced papaya which the servants were bent on setting before him. What, too, shall I say of the dastardly conduct of “Big George?” For with his help thelechón, nay, even the neglected beefsteak, might have been reduced to more seemly proportions before they were abandoned to the eager fingers of the gleaming-toothed denizens of the kitchen. The painful truth is thatthe defelonizer of Porto Rico, the erstwhile dread of Canal Zone criminals, the man who had so often given a “summary” to a hapless member of the 17th Infantry for being a moment late at reveille, was absent without leave. Even “Mac,” with his whole family of little Mackites, their chubby faces giving a touch of old Erin to this Dominican landscape, had arrived on the scene at the crucial moment. What excuse, then, can one fabricate for an unhampered bachelor whose seven-league legs might have covered the paltry distance between new and old Santiago in a twinkling, yet who had chosen to desert his bidden guests in the heart of a bandit-infested island? Can even poetic license pardon a man, particularly a man who dents the lintels of half the doors he passes through, who remains at home to write sonnets when he might be partaking oflechón asado?Certainly the admission of such irrelevant testimony as the fact that the horse furnished him by an unobserving Dominican was not capable of lifting clear of the ground the seven-league legs already stigmatized cannot rank even as extenuating circumstances.

CHAPTER IXTRAVELS 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 solacking 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.

Gen. Deciderio Arias, now a cigar maker, whose revolution finally caused American intervention in Santo Domingo

A bread seller of Santo Domingo

The church within a church of Moca

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 miserableyaguaand 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-shieldingmosquiteros; 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 immensenísperotree 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, butthey 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 revolutionistshave 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 thesanto hoyobarefooted, mutteringpromesas, 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 originalnísperostood 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 inthe 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 forthe 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 tomata, 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 everybohío, 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 oncacao, 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 plantsof 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 thatthey 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 ofthe 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 hispesetaat 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.”

Back to Index Next