AT CORINTO
EVERY now and again each of us, either through his own choice or by force of circumstance, drops out of step with the rest of the world, and retires from it into the isolation of a sick-room, or to the loneliness of the deck of an ocean steamer, and for some short time the world somehow manages to roll on without him.
He is like a man who falls out of line in a regiment to fasten his shoelace or to fill his canteen, and who hears over his shoulder the hurrying tramp of his comrades, who are leaving him farther and farther behind, so that he has to run briskly before he can catch up with them and take his proper place once more in the procession.
I shall always consider the ten days we spent at Corinto, on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, while we waited for the steamer to take us south to Panama, as so many days of non-existence,as so much time given to the mere exercise of living, when we were no more of this world than are the prisoners in the salt-mines of Siberia, or the keepers of light-houses scattered over sunny seas, or the men who tend toll-gates on empty country lanes. And so when I read in the newspapers last fall that three British ships of war were anchored in the harbor of Corinto, with their guns loaded to the muzzles with ultimatums and no one knows what else besides, and that they meant to levy on the customs dues of that sunny little village, it was as much of a shock to me as it would be to the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow were they told that that particular spot was wanted as a site for a World’s Fair.
For no ships of any sort, certainly no ships of war, ever came to Corinto while we occupied the only balcony of its only hotel. Indeed, that was why we were there, and had they come we would have gone with them, no matter to what port they were bound, even to the uttermost parts of the earth.
We had come to Corinto from the little island of Amapala, which lies seventy-five miles farther up the coast, and which guards the only port of entry to Honduras on the Pacific seaboard. It is supposed to belong to the Republic of Honduras, but it is in reality the property of Rossner Brothers, who sell everything from German machetes to German music-boxes, and who could,if they wanted it, purchase the entire Republic of Honduras in the morning, and make a present of it to the Kaiser in the course of the afternoon. You have only to change the name of Rossner Brothers to the San Rosario Mining Company, to the Pacific Mail, to Errman Brothers, to the Panama Railroad Company, and you will identify the actual rulers of one or of several of the republics of Central America.
PRINCIPAL HOTEL AND PRINCIPAL HOUSE AT CORINTO
It is very well for President Zelaya, or Barrios, or Vasquez, or whatever his name may happen to be this month, to write to the New YorkHeraldand tell the people of the United States what the revolution in his country means. It does no harm; no one in the United States reads the letter, except the foreign editor who translates it, and no one in his own country ever sees it, but it makes him happy in thinking he is persuading some one that he governs in his own way. As a matter of fact he does not. His country, no matter what her name may be, is ruled by a firm of coffee-merchants in New York city, or by a German railroad company, or by a line of coasting steamers, or by a great trading-house, with headquarters in Berlin or London or Bordeaux. If the president wants money he borrows it from the trading-house; if he wants arms, or his soldiers need blankets, the trading-house supplies them. No one remembers now who was President of Peru when Henry Meiggs was alive, and to-day William L. Grace is a better name on letters of introduction to Chili and Peru than that of a secretary of state.
When we were in Nicaragua, one little English banking-house was fighting the minister of finance and the minister of foreign affairs and the president and the entire government, and while the notes issued by the bank were accepted at their face value, those of the government were taken only in the presence of a policeman or a soldier, who was there to see that you did take it. You find this condition of affairs all throughCentral America, and you are not long in a republic before you learn which merchant or which bank or which railroad company controls it, and you soon grow to look upon a mule loaded with boxes bearing the trade-mark of a certain business-house with more respect than upon a soldier who wears the linen ribbon of the government. For you know that at a word the soldier will tear the ribbon from his straw sombrero and replace it with another upon which is printed “Viva Dr. Somebody Else,” while the trade-mark of the business-house will continue as long as English and German merchandise is carried across the sea in ships. And it will also continue as long as Great Britain and Germany and the United States are represented by consuls and consular agents who are at the same time the partners of the leading business firms in the seaport over which their consular jurisdiction extends. For few Central-American republics are going to take away a consul’s exequatur as long as they owe him in his unofficial capacity for a large loan of money; and the merchant, on the other hand, knows that he is not going to suffer from the imposition of a forced loan, nor see his mules seized, as long as the tin sign with the American eagle screaming upon it is tacked above the brass business plate of his warehouse.
There was a merchant in Tegucigalpa namedSantos Soto—he is there still, I believe—and about a year ago President Vasquez told him he needed a loan of ten thousand dollars to assist him in his struggle against Bonilla; and as Soto was making sixty thousand dollars a year in the country, he suggested that he had better lend it promptly. Soto refused, and was locked in the cartel, where it was explained to him that for every day he delayed in giving the money the amount demanded of him would be increased one thousand dollars. As he still refused, he was chained to an iron ball and led out to sweep the streets in front of his shop, which extends on both sides of the principal thoroughfare of the capital. He is an old man, and the sight of the chief merchant in Tegucigalpa sweeping up the dust in front of his own block of stores had a most salutary effect upon the other merchants, who promptly loaned the sums demanded of them, taking rebates on customs dues in exchange—with one exception. This merchant owned a jewelry store, and was at the same time the English consular agent. He did not sweep the streets, nor did he contribute to the forced loan. He values in consequence his tin sign, which is not worth much as a work of art, at about ten thousand dollars.
There is much that might be written of consular agents in Central America that would differ widely from the reports written by themselvesand published by the State Department. The most interesting thing about them, to my mind, is the fact that none of them ever seem to represent a country which they have ever seen, and that they are always citizens of another country to which they are anxious to return. I find that after Americans, Germans make the best American consular agents, and Englishmen the best German consular agents, while French consular agents would be more useful to their countrymen if they could speak French as well as they do Spanish. Sometimes, as in the case of the consular agent at Corinto, you find a native of Italy representing both Great Britain and the United States. A whole comic opera could be written on the difficulties of a Nicaraguan acting as an English and American consul, with three British men-of-war in the harbor levying on the customs dues of his native land, and an American squadron hastening from Panama to see that their English cousins did not gather in a few islands by mistake.
If he called on the British admiral, and received his seven-gun salute, would it constitute a breach of international etiquette if he were rowed over to the American admiral and received seven guns from him; and as a native of Nicaragua could he see the customs dues, which comprise the government’s chief source of revenue, going into the pockets of one country which heso proudly serves without complaining to the other country which he serves with equal satisfaction? Every now and then you come across a real American consul who was born in America, and who serves the United States with ability, dignity, and self-respect, so that you are glad you are both Americans. Of this class we found General Allen Thomas at La Guayra, who was later promoted and made United States minister at Caracas, Mr. Alger at Puerto Cortez, Mr. Little at Tegucigalpa, and Colonel Bird at Caracas.
We found that the firm of Rossner Brothers had in their employ the American and English consular agents, and these gentlemen endeared themselves to us by assisting at our escape from their island in an open boat. They did not tell us, however, that Fonseca Bay was one of the most treacherous stretches of water on the admiralty charts; but that was, probably, because they were merchants and not sailors.
Amapala was the hottest place I ever visited. It did not grow warm as the day wore on, but began briskly at sunrise by nailing the mercury at fever-heat, and continued boiling and broiling until ten at night. By one the next morning the roof over your head and the bed-linen beneath you had sufficiently cooled for you to sleep, and from that on until five there was a fair imitation of night.
There was but one cool spot in Amapala; itwas a point of land that the inhabitants had rather tactlessly selected as a dumping-ground for the refuse of the town, and which was only visited by pigs and buzzards. This point of land ran out into the bay, and there had once been an attempt made to turn it into a public park, of which nothing now remains but a statue to Morazan, the Liberator of Honduras. The statue stood on a pedestal of four broad steps, surrounded by an iron railing, the gates of which had fallen from their hinges, and lay scattered over the piles of dust and débris under which the park is buried. At each corner of the railing there were beautiful macaws which had once been painted in brilliant reds and greens and yellows, and which we tried to carry off one night, until we found that they also were made of iron. We would have preferred the statue of Morazan as a souvenir, but that we doubted its identity. Morazan was a smooth-faced man with a bushy head of hair, and this statue showed him with long side-whiskers and a bald head, and in the uniform of an English admiral. It was probably the rejected work of some English sculptor, and had been obtained, no doubt, at a moderate price, and as very few remember Morazan to-day it answers its purpose excellently well. We became very much attached to it, and used to burn incense to it in the form of many Honduranian cigars, which sell at two cents apiece.
When night came on, and the billiard-room had grown so hot that the cues slipped in our hands, and the tantalizing sight of an American ice-cooler, which had never held ice since it left San Francisco, had driven us out into the night, we would group ourselves at the base of this statue to Morazan, and throw rocks at the buzzards and pigs, and let the only breeze that dares to pass over Amapala bring our temperature down to normal. We should have plotted a revolution by rights, for the scene was set for such a purpose, and no one in the town accounted in any other way for our climbing the broken iron railing nightly, and remaining on the steps of the pedestal until two the next morning.
Amapala, I suppose, was used to heat, and could sleep with the thermometer at ninety, and did not mind the pigs or the buzzards, and if we did plot to convert Honduras into a monarchy and make Somerset king, no one heard us but the English edition of Morazan smiling blandly down upon us like a floor-walker at the Army and Navy Stores, with his hand on his heart and an occasional buzzard soaring like Poe’s raven above his marble forehead. The moonlight turned him into a figure of snow, and the great palms above bent and waved and shivered unceasingly, and the sea beat on the rocks at our feet.
It was an interesting place of rendezvous, butwe tired of a town that grew cool only after midnight, and in which the fever stalked abroad by day. So we chartered a small boat, and provisioned it, and enlisted a crew of pirates, and set sail one morning for Corinto, seventy-five miles farther south. There was no steamer expected at Corinto at any earlier date than at Amapala, but in the nature of things one had to touch there some time, and there was a legend to which we had listened with doubt and longing to the effect that at Corinto there was an ice-machine, and though we found later that the ice-machines always broke on the day we arrived in port, we preferred the chance of finding Fonseca Bay in a peaceful state to yellow-fever at Amapala. It was an exciting voyage. I would now, being more wise, choose the yellow-fever, but we did not know any better then. There was no deck to the boat, and it was not wide enough for one to lie lengthwise from side to side, and too crowded to permit of our stretching our bodies fore and aft. So we rolled about on top of one another, and were far too miserable to either apologize or swear when we bumped into a man’s ribs or sat on his head.
We started with a very fine breeze dead astern, and the boat leaped and plunged and rolled all night, and we were hurled against the sides and thumped by rolling trunks, and travelling-bags, and gun-cases, and boxes of broken apollinarisbottles. The stone-breaker in a quarry would have soothed us in comparison. And when the sun rose fully equipped at four in the morning the wind died away absolutely, and we rose and sank all day on the great swell of the Pacific Ocean. The boat was painted a bright red inside and out, and the sun turned this open red bowl into an oven of heat. It made even our white flannels burn when they touched the skin like a shirt of horse-hair. As far as we could look on every side the ocean lay like a sea of quicksilver, and the dome of the sky glittered with heat. The red paint on the sides bubbled and cracked, and even the native boatmen cowered under the cross-seats with their elbows folded on their knees and their faces buried in their arms; and we had not the heart to tell them to use the oars, even if we had known how. At noon the chief pirate crawled over the other bodies and rigged up the sail so that it threw a shadow over mine, and I lay under this awning and read Barrie’sLady Nicotine, while the type danced up and down in waving lines like the letters in a typewriter. I am sure it was only the necessity which that book impressed upon me of holding on to life until I could smoke the Arcadia mixture that kept me from dropping overboard and being cremated in the ocean below.
We sighted the light-house of Corinto at last, and hailed the white custom-house and the palmsand the blue cottages of the port with a feeble cheer.
The people came down to the shore and crowded around her bow as we beached her in front of the custom-house, and a man asked us anxiously in English, “What ship has been wrecked?” And we explained that we were not survivors of a shipwreck, but of a possible conflagration, and wanted ice.
And then, when we fell over the side bruised and sleepy, and burning with thirst, and with everything still dancing before our eyes, they refused to give us ice until we grew cooler, and sent out in the meanwhile to thecomandanciain search of some one who could identify us as escaped revolutionists. They took our guns away from us as a precaution, but they could have had half our kingdom for all we cared, for the wonderful legend proved true, and at last we got the ice in large, thick glasses, with ginger ale and lemon juice and apollinaris water trickling through it, and there was frost on the sides of the glasses, and a glimpse of still more ice wrapped up in smoking blankets in the refrigerator—ice that we had not tasted for many days of riding in the hot sun and through steaming swamp-lands, and which we had last seen treated with contempt and contumely, knocked about at the bow of a tug-boat in the North River, and tramped upon by many muddy feet on Fifth Avenue.None of us will ever touch ice hereafter without handling it with the same respect and consideration that we would show to a precious stone.
The busybodies of Corinto who had decided from the manner of our arrival that we had been forced to leave Honduras for the country’s good, finally found a native who identified me as a filibuster he had met during the last revolution at Leon. As that was bringing it rather near home, Griscom went after Mr. Palaccio, the Italian who serves both England and the United States as consular agent. We showed him a rare collection of autographs of secretaries, ambassadors, and prime-ministers, and informed him that we intended taking four state-rooms on the steamer of the line he represented at that port. This convinced him of the necessity of keeping us out of jail until the boat arrived, and he satisfied the local authorities as to our respectability, and that we had better clothes in our trunks.
Corinto is the best harbor on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, but the town is not as large as the importance of the port would suggest. It consists of three blocks of two-story houses, facing the harbor fifty feet back from the water’s edge, with a sandy street between each block of buildings. There are about a thousand inhabitants, and a foreign population which varies from five residents to a dozen transient visitors and stewardson steamer days. The natives are chiefly occupied in exporting coffee and receiving the imported goods for the interior, and the principal amusement of the foreign colony is bathing or playing billiards. It has a whist club of four members. The fifth foreign resident acts as a substitute in the event of any one of the four players chancing to have another engagement, but as there is no one with whom he could have an engagement, the substitute is seldom called upon. He told me he had been sitting by and smoking and watching the others play whist for a month now, and hoping that one of them would have a sunstroke.
HARBOR OF CORINTO
We left Corinto the next morning and took the train to Lake Managua, where we were to connect with a steamer which crosses the lake to the capital. It was a beautiful ride, and for some distance ran along the sea-shore, where the ocean rolled up the beach in great waves, breaking in showers of foam upon the rocks. Then we crossed lagoons and swamps on trestles, and passed pretty thatched villages, and saw many beautiful women and girls selling candy and sugar-cane at the stations. They wore gowns that left the neck and shoulders bare, and wrapped themselves in silk shawls of solid colors, which they kept continually loosening and rearranging, tossing the ends coquettishly from one shoulder to the other, or drawingthem closely about the figure, or like a cowl over the head. This silk shawl is the most characteristic part of the wardrobe of the native women of Central America. It is as inevitable as the mantilla of their richer sisters, and it is generally the only bit of splendor they possess. A group of them on a feast-day or Sunday, when they come marching towards you with green, purple, blue, or yellow shawls, makes a very striking picture.
These women of the pueblo in Honduras and Nicaragua were better-looking than the women of the lower classes of any country I have ever visited. They were individually more beautiful, and the proportion of beautiful women was greater. A woman there is accustomed from her childhood to carry heavy burdens on her head, and this gives to all of them an erect carriage and a fearless uplifting of the head when they walk or stand. They have never known a tight dress or a tight shoe, and they move as easily and as gracefully as an antelope. Their hair is very rich and heavy, and they oil it and comb it and braid it from morning to night, wearing it parted in the middle, and drawn tightly back over the ears, and piled upon the head in heavy braids. Their complexion is a light brown, and their eyes have the sad look which one sees in the eyes of a deer or a dog, and which is not so much the sign of any sorrow as of the lack of intelligence.The women of the upper classes are like most Spanish-American women, badly and over dressed in a gown fashioned after some forgotten Parisian mode, with powder over their faces, and with their hair frizzled and curled in ridiculous profusion. They are a very sorry contrast to a woman of the people, such as you see standing in the doorways of the mud huts, or advancing towards you along the trail with an earthen jar on her shoulder, straight of limb, and with a firm, fine lower jaw, a low, broad forehead, and shy, sad eyes.
THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE AT MANAGUA
Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a most dismal city, built on a plain of sun-dried earth, with houses of sun-dried earth, plazas and parks and streets of sun-dried earth, and a mantle of dust over all. Even the stores that have been painted in colors and hung with balconies have a depressed, dirty, and discouraged air. The streets are as full of ruts and furrows as a country road, the trees in the plaza are lifeless, and their leaves shed dust instead of dew, and the people seem to have taken on the tone of their surroundings, and very much more of the dust than seems absolutely necessary. We were there only two days, and felt when we left as though we had been camping out on a baseball diamond; and we were sure that had we remained any longer we should have turned into living statues of clay when the sun shone, and of mud when it rained.
There was no American minister or consul at Managua at the time of our visit, but the English consul took very good care of us, and acted as our interpreter when we called upon the president. Relations between the consul and President Zelaya were somewhat strained at that time, and though we knew this we told the consul to tell the president how much he was admired by the American people for having taken the stand he did against the English on the Mosquito Coast question, and that we hoped he would see that the British obtained no foothold near our canal. At which the English consul would hesitate and grin unhappily, and remark, in a hurried aside, “I’ll be hanged if I’ll translate that.” So we continued inventing other pleasant speeches derogatory to Britons and British influence in Nicaragua until Somerset and his consul protested vigorously, and the president saw what we were doing and began to enjoy the consul’s embarrassment and laughed, and the consul laughed with him, and they made up their quarrel—for the time being, at least.
Zelaya said, among other things, that if there were no other argument in favor of the Nicaragua Canal than that it would enable the United States to move her ships of war quickly from ocean to ocean, instead of being forced as she is now to make them take the long journey around Cape Horn, it would be of inestimable benefit. He alsosaid that the only real objection that had been made in the United States to the canal came from those interested in the transcontinental railroads, who saw in its completion the destruction of their freight traffic.
He seemed to be a very able man, and more a man of the world than Bonilla, the President of Honduras, and much older in many ways. He was apparently somewhat of a philosopher, and believed, or said he did, in the survival of the fittest as applied to the occupation of his country. He welcomed the gringos, he said, and if they were better able to rule Nicaragua than her own people, he would accept that fact as inevitable and make way before them.
PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA
We returned to Corinto after wallowing in the dust-bins of Managua as joyfully as though it were a home, and we were so anxious to reach the ocean again that we left Granada and Leon, which are, so we are told, much more attractive than the capital, out of our route.
Corinto was bright and green and sunny, and the waters of the big harbor before it danced and flashed by day and radiated with phosphorescent fire by night. It was distinctly a place where it would occur to one to write up the back pages of his diary, but it was interesting at least in showing us the life of the exiles in these hot, far-away seaports among a strange people.
There was but one hotel, which happened to bea very good one with a very bad proprietor, who, I trust, will come some day to an untimely death at the end of one of his own billiard-cues. The hotel was built round a patio filled with palms and ramparts of empty bottles from the bar, covered with dust, and bearing the name of every brewer and wine-grower in Europe. The sleeping-rooms were on the second floor, and looked on the patio on one side and upon a wide covered veranda which faced the harbor on the other. The five resident gringos in Corinto lived at the hotel, and sat all day on this veranda swinging in their hammocks and swapping six-months-old magazines and tattered novels. Reading-matter assumed an importance in Corinto it had never attained before, and we read all the serial stories, of which there was never more than the fourth or sixth instalment, and the scientific articles on the Fall of the Rupee in India, or the Most Recent Developments in Electricity, and delighted in the advertisements of seeds and bicycles and baking-powders.
The top of our veranda was swept by a row of plane-trees that grew in the sandy soil of the beach below us, and under the shade of which were gathered all the idle ones of the port. There were among them thieving ships’ stewards who had been marooned from passing vessels, ne’er-do-wells from the interior who were “combing the beach” and looking for work, but not sodiligently that they had seen the coffee plantations on their tramp down to the coast, and who begged for money to take them back to “God’s country,” or to the fever hospital at Panama. With them were natives, sailors from the rolling tug-boat they called a ship of war, and barefooted soldiers from the cartel, and longshoremen with over-developed chests and muscles, who toil mightily on steamer days and sleep and eat for the ten days between as a reward.
All of these idlers gathered in the shade around the women who sold sweet drinks and sticks of pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public characters of the place and the centre of all the gossip of the town, and presided over their tables with great dignity in freshly ironed frocks and brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and very clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders, and their hair always shone with cocoanut oil, and was wonderfully braided and set off with flowers stuck coquettishly over one ear. The men used to sit around them in groups on the bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the only import. And sometimes a small boy would buy a stick of candy or command the mixture of a drink, and the woman would fuss over her carved gourds, and rinse and rub them and mix queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that she spun between the palms of her hands. Wewould all watch the operation with great interest, the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon the balcony, and regard the small boy while he drank the concoction with envy.
The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and gaping knot-holes through which the legs of our chairs would sink suddenly, and which we could use on those occasions when we wanted to drop penknives and pencils and water on the heads of those passing below. Our companions in idleness were the German agents of the trading-houses and young Englishmen down from the mines to shake off a touch of fever, and two Americans who were taking a phonograph through Central America. Their names were Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will always remember them as the only Americans we met who were taking money out of Central America and not bringing it there to lose it.
Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two up the beach in the hot sun for the sake of a quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was delightful in itself, and which was rendered especially interesting by our having to share the surf with large man-eating sharks. When they came, which they were sure to do ten minutes after we had arrived, we generally gave them our share.
The phonograph men and our party did not believe in sharks; so we would venture out somedistance, leaving the Englishmen and the Germans standing like sandpipers where the water was hardly up to their ankles, and keeping an anxious lookout for us and themselves. Had the sharks attempted to attack us from the land, they would have afforded excellent protection. When they all yelled at once and ran back up the beach into the bushes, we knew that they thought we had been in long enough, and we came out, and made as much noise as we could while doing so. But there would be invariably one man left behind—one man who had walked out farther than the others, and who, owing to the roar of the surf, could not hear our shrieks of terror. It was exciting to watch him from the beach diving and splashing happily by himself, and shaking the water out of his ears and hair, blissfully unconscious of the deserted waste of waters about him and of the sharp, black fin that shot like a torpedo from wave to wave. We would watch him as he turned to speak to the man who the moment before had been splashing and diving on his right, and, missing him, turn to the other side, and then whirl about and see us all dancing frantically up and down in a row along the beach, beckoning and screaming and waving our arms. We could observe even at that distance his damp hair rising on his head and his eyes starting out of their sockets as he dug his toes into the sand and pushedback the water with his arms, and worked his head and shoulders and every muscle in his whole body as though he were fighting his way through a mob of men. The water seemed very opaque at such times, and the current appeared to have turned seaward, and the distance from shore looked as though it were increasing at every step.
When night came to Corinto we would sit out on the wharf in front of the hotel and watch the fish darting through the phosphorescent waters and marking their passage with a trail of fire, or we would heave a log into it and see the sparks fly just as though we had thrown it upon a smouldering fire. One night one of the men was obliging enough to go into it for our benefit, and swam under water, sweeping great circles with his arms and legs. He was outlined as clearly in the inky depths below as though he wore a suit of spangles. Sometimes a shark or some other big fish drove a shoal of little fish towards the shore, and they would turn the whole surface of the water into half-circles of light as they took leap after leap for safety. Later in the evening we would go back to the veranda and listen to our friends the phonograph impresarios play duets on the banjo and guitar, and in return for the songs of the natives they had picked up in their wanderings we would sing to them those popular measures which hadarisen into notice since they had left civilization.
This was our life at Corinto for ten idle days, until at last the steamer arrived, and the passengers came on shore to stretch their legs and buy souvenirs, and the ship’s steward bustled about in search of fresh vegetables, and the lighters plied heavily between the shore and the ship’s side, piled high with odorous sacks of coffee. And then Morse and Brackett started with their phonograph through Costa Rica, and we continued on to Panama, leaving the five foreign residents of Corinto to the uninterrupted enjoyment of their whist, and richer and happier through our coming in an inaccurate knowledge of the first verse and tune of “Tommy Atkins,” which they shouted at us defiantly as they pulled back from the steamer’s side to their quiet haven of exile.
MAP OF THE WORLD SHOWING CHANGE IN TRADE ROUTES AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE NICARAGUA CANAL