ON THE CARIBBEAN SEA
THE steamerBreakwaterlay at the end of a muddy fruit-wharf a mile down the levee.
She was listed to sail that morning for Central-American ports, and we were going with her in search of warm weather and other unusual things. When we left New York the streets were lined with frozen barricades of snow, upon which the new brooms of a still newer administration had made so little impression that people were using them as an excuse for being late for dinners; and at Washington, while the snow had disappeared, it was still bitterly cold. And now even as far south as New Orleans we were shivering in our great-coats, and the newspapers were telling of a man who, the night before, had been found frozen to death in the streets. It seemed as though we were to keep on going south, forever seeking warmth, only to find that Nature at every point of lower latitudehad paid us the compliment of changing her season to spite us.
So the first question we asked when we came over the side of theBreakwaterwas not when we should first see land, but when we should reach warm weather.
There were four of us, counting Charlwood, young Somerset’s servant. There was Henry Somers Somerset, who has travelled greater distances for a boy still under age than any other one of his much-travelled countrymen that I have ever met. He has covered as many miles in the last four years as would make five trips around the world, and he came with me for the fun of it, and in what proved the vain hope of big game. The third was Lloyd Griscom, of Philadelphia, and later of London, where he has been attaché at our embassy during the present administration. He had been ordered south by his doctor, and only joined us the day before we sailed.
We sat shivering under the awning on the upper deck, and watched the levees drop away on either side as we pushed down the last ninety miles of the Mississippi River. Church spires and the roofs of houses showed from the low-lying grounds behind the dikes, and gave us the impression that we were riding on an elevated road. The great river steamers, with paddle-wheels astern and high double smoke-stacks, thatwere associated in our minds with pictures of the war and those in our school geographies, passed us, pouring out heavy volumes of black smoke, on their way to St. Louis, and on each bank we recognized, also from pictures, magnolia-trees and the ugly cotton-gins and the rows of negroes’ quarters like the men’s barracks in a fort.
At six o’clock, when we had reached the Gulf, the sun sank a blood-red disk into great desolate bayous of long grass and dreary stretches of vacant water. Dead trees with hanging gray moss and mistletoe on their bare branches reared themselves out of the swamps like gallows-trees or giant sign-posts pointing the road to nowhere; and the herons, perched by dozens on their limbs or moving heavily across the sky with harsh, melancholy cries, were the only signs of life. On each side of the muddy Mississippi the waste swamp-land stretched as far as the eye could reach, and every blade of the long grass and of the stunted willows and every post of the dikes stood out black against the red sky as vividly as though it were lit by a great conflagration, and the stagnant pools and stretches of water showed one moment like flashing lakes of fire, and the next, as the light left them, turned into mirrors of ink. It was a scene of the most awful and beautiful desolation, and the silence, save for the steady breathing of the steamer’s engine, was the silence of the Nile at night.
For the next three days we dropped due south as the map lies from the delta of the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean Sea. It was moonlight by night, and sun and blue water by day, and the decks kept level, and the vessel was clean.
Our fellow-passengers were banana-planters and engineers going to Panama and Bluefields, and we asked them many questions concerning rates of exchange and the rainy season and distances and means of transportation, to which they gave answers as opposite as can only come from people who have lived together in the same place for the greater part of their lives.
Land, when it came, appeared in the shape of little islands that floated in mid-air above the horizon like the tops of trees, without trunks to support them, or low-lying clouds. They formed the skirmish-line of Yucatan, the northern spur of Central America, and seemed from our decks as innocent as the Jersey sand-hills, but were, the pilot told us, inhabited by wild Indians who massacre people who are so unfortunate as to be shipwrecked there, and who will not pay taxes to Mexico. But the little we saw of their savagery was when we passed within a ship’s length of a ruined temple to the Sun, standing conspicuously on a jutting point of land, with pillars as regular and heavily cut as some of those on the Parthenon. It was interestingto find such a monument a few days out from New Orleans.
Islands of palms on one side and blue mountains on the other, and water as green as corroded copper, took the place of the white sand-banks of Yucatan, and on the third day out we had passed the Mexican state and steamed in towards the coast of British Honduras, and its chief seaport and capital, Belize.
British Honduras was formerly owned by Spain, as was all of Central America, and was, on account of its bays and islands, a picturesque refuge for English and other pirates. In the seventeenth century English logwood-cutters visited the place and obtained a footing, which has been extended since by concessions and by conquest, so that the place is now a British dependency. It forms a little slice of land between Yucatan and Guatemala, one hundred and seventy-four miles in its greatest length, and running sixty-eight miles inland.
Belize is a pretty village of six thousand people, living in low, broad-roofed bungalows, lying white and cool-looking in the border of waving cocoanut-trees and tall, graceful palms. It was not necessary to tell us that Belize would be the last civilized city we should see until we reached the capital of Spanish Honduras. A British colony is always civilized; it is always the same, no matter in what latitude it may be, and it is alwaysdistinctly British. Every one knows that an Englishman takes his atmosphere with him wherever he goes, but the truth of it never impressed me so much as it did at Belize. There were not more than two hundred English men and women in the place, and yet, in the two halves of two days that I was there I seemed to see everything characteristic of an Englishman in his native land. There were a few concessions made to the country and to the huge native population, who are British subjects themselves; but the colony, in spite of its surroundings, was just as individually English as is the shilling that the ship’s steward pulls out of his pocket with a handful of the queer coin that he has picked up at the ports of a half-dozen Spanish republics. They may be of all sizes and designs, and of varying degrees of a value, or the lack of it, which changes from day to day, but the English shilling, with the queen’s profile on one side and its simple “one shilling” on the other, is worth just as much at that moment and at that distance from home as it would be were you handing it to a hansom-cab driver in Piccadilly. And we were not at all surprised to find that the black native police wore the familiar blue-and-white-striped cuff of the London bobby, and the district-attorney a mortar-board cap and gown, and the colonial bishop gaiters and an apron.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE
It was quite in keeping, also, that the advertisements on the boardings should announce and give equal prominence to a “Sunday-school treat” and a boxing-match between men of H.M.S.Pelican, and that the officers of that man-of-war should be playing cricket with a local eleven under the full tropical sun, and that the chairs in the Council-room and Government House should be of heavy leather stamped V.R., with a crown above the initials. An American official in as hot a climate, being more adaptable, would have had bamboo chairs with large, open-work backs, or would have even supplied the council with rocking-chairs.
Lightfoot agreed to take us ashore at a quarter of a dollar apiece. He had a large open sail-boat, and everybody called him Lightfoot and seemed to know him intimately, so we called him Lightfoot too. He was very black, and light-hearted at least, and spoke English with the soft, hesitating gentleness that marks the speech of all these natives. It was Sunday on land, and Sunday in an English colony is observed exactly as it should be, and so the natives were in heavily starched white clothes, and were all apparently going somewhere to church in rigid rows of five or six. But there were some black soldiers of the West India Regiment in smart Zouave uniforms and turbans that furnished us with local color, and we pursued one of them for some time admiringly, until he become nervous and beat a retreat to the barracks.
SIR ALFRED MOLONEY(Central Figure)
Somerset had a letter from his ambassador in Washington to Sir Alfred Moloney, K.C.M.G., the governor of British Honduras, and as we hoped it would get us all an invitation to dinner, we urged him to present it at once. Four days of the ship’s steward’s bountiful dinners, served at four o’clock in the afternoon, had made us anxious for a change both in the hour and thediet. The governor’s house at Belize is a very large building, fronting the bay, with one of the finest views from and most refreshing breezes on its veranda that a man could hope to find on a warm day, and there is a proud and haughty sentry at each corner of the grounds and at the main entrance. A fine view of blue waters beyond a green turf terrace covered with cannon and lawn-tennis courts, and four sentries marching up and down in the hot sun, ought to make any man, so it seems to me, content to sit on his porch in the shade and feel glad that he is a governor.
Somerset passed the first sentry with safety, and we sat down on the grass by the side of the road opposite to await developments, and were distressed to observe him make directly for the kitchen, with the ambassador’s letter held firmly in his hand. So we stood up and shouted to him to go the other way, and he became embarrassed, and continued to march up and down the gravel walk with much indecision, and as if he could not make up his mind where he wanted to go, like the grenadiers in front of St. James’s Palace. It happened that his excellency was out, so Somerset left our cards and his letter, and we walked off through the green, well-kept streets and wondered at the parrots and the chained monkeys and the Anglicized little negro girls in white cotton stockings and with Sunday-schoolbooks under their arms. All the show-places of interest were closed on that day, so, after an ineffectual attempt to force our way into the jail, which we mistook for a monastery, we walked back through an avenue of cocoanut-palms to the International Hotel for dinner.
NATIVE CONSTABULARY, BELIZE
We had agreed that as it was our first dinner on shore, it should be a long and excellent one, with several kinds of wine. The International Hotel is a large one, with four stories, and a balcony on each floor; and after wandering over the first three of these in the dark we came upon a lonely woman with three crying children, who told us with reproving firmness that in Belize the dinner-hour is at four in the afternoon, and that no one should expect a dinner at seven. We were naturally cast down at this rebuff, and even more so when her husband appeared out of the night and informed us that keeping a hotel did not pay—at least, that it did not pay him—and that he could not give us anything to drink because he had not renewed his license, and even if he had a license he would not sell us anything on Sunday. He had a touch of malaria, he said, and took a gloomy view of life in consequence, and our anxiety to dine well seemed, in contrast, unfeeling and impertinent. But we praised the beauty of the three children, and did not set him right when he mistook us for officers from the English gunboats in the harbor, and for one ofthese reasons he finally gave us a cold dinner by the light of a smoking lamp, and made us a present of a bottle of stout, for which he later refused any money. We would have enjoyed our dinner at Belize in spite of our disappointment had not an orderly arrived in hot search after Somerset, and borne him away to dine at Government House, where Griscom and I pictured him, as we continued eating our cold chicken and beans, dining at her majesty’s expense, with fine linen and champagne, and probably ice. Lightfoot took us back to the boat in mournful silence, and we spent the rest of the evening on the quarter-deck telling each other of the most important people with whom we had ever dined, and had nearly succeeded in re-establishing our self-esteem, when Somerset dashed up in a man-of-war’s launch glittering with brass and union-jacks, and left it with much ringing of electric bells and saluting and genial farewells from admirals and midshipmen in gold-lace, with whom he seemed to be on a most familiar and friendly footing. This was the final straw, and we held him struggling over the ship’s side, and threatened to drop him to the sharks unless he promised never to so desert us again. And discipline was only restored when he assured us that he was the bearer of an invitation from the governor to both breakfast and luncheon the following morning. The governor apologized the next day for the informalityof the manner in which he had sent us the invitation, so I thought it best not to tell him that it had been delivered by a young man while dangling by his ankles from the side of the ship, with one hand holding his helmet and the other clutching at the rail of the gangway.
There is much to be said of Belize, for in its way it was one of the prettiest ports at which we touched, and its cleanliness and order, while they were not picturesque or foreign to us then, were in so great contrast to the ports we visited later as to make them most remarkable. It was interesting to see the responsibilities and the labor of government apportioned out so carefully and discreetly, and to find commissioners of roads, and then district commissioners, and under them inspectors, and to hear of boards of education and boards of justice, each doing its appointed work in this miniature government, and all responsible to the representative of the big government across the sea. And it was reassuring to read in the blue-books of the colony that the health of the port has improved enormously during the last three years.
MAIN STREET, BELIZE
Monday showed an almost entirely different Belize from the one we had seen on the day before. Shops were open and busy, and the markets were piled high with yellow oranges and bananas and strange fruits, presided over by negresses in rich-colored robes and turbans, andsmoking fat cigars. There was a show of justice also in a parade of prisoners, who, in spite of their handcuffs, were very anxious to halt long enough to be photographed, and there was a great bustle along the wharves, where huge rafts of logwood and mahogany floated far into the water. The governor showed us through his botanical station, in which he has collected food-giving products from over all the world, and plants that absorb the malaria in the air, and he hinted at the social life of Belize as well, tempting us with a ball and dinners to the officers of the men-of-war; but theBreakwaterwould not wait for such frivolities, so we said farewell to Belize and her kindly governor, and thereafter walked under strange flags, and were met at every step with the despotic little rules and safeguards which mark unstable governments.
Livingston was like a village on the coast of East Africa in comparison with Belize. It is the chief seaport of Guatemala on the Atlantic side, and Guatemala is the furthest advanced of all the Central-American republics; but her civilization lies on the Pacific side, and does not extend so far as her eastern boundary.
NATIVE WOMEN AT LIVINGSTON
There are two opposite features of landscape in the tropics which are always found together—the royal palm, which is one of the most beautiful of things, and the corrugated zinc-roof custom-house, which is one of the ugliest. Nature never appears so extravagant or so luxurious as she does in these hot latitudes; but just as soon as she has fashioned a harbor after her own liking, and set it off at her best so that it is a haven of delight to those who approach it from the sea, civilized man comes along and hammers square walls of zinc together and spoils the beauty of the place forever. The natives, whodo not care for customs dues, help nature out with thatch-roofed huts and walls of adobe or yellow cane, or add curved red tiles to the more pretentious houses, and so fill out the picture. But the “gringo,” or the man from the interior, is in a hurry, and wants something that will withstand earthquakes and cyclones, and so wherever you go you can tell that he has been there before you by his architecture of zinc.
When you turn your back on the custom-house at Livingston and the rows of wooden shops with open fronts, you mount the hill upon which the town stands, and there you will find no houses but those which have been created out of the mud and the trees of the place itself. There are no streets to the village nor doors to the houses; they are all exactly alike, and the bare mud floor of one is as unindividual, except for the number of naked children crawling upon it, as is any of the others. The sun and the rain are apparently free to come and go as they like, and every one seems to live in the back of the house, under the thatched roof which shades the clay ovens. Most of the natives were coal-black, and the women, in spite of the earth floors below and the earth walls round about them, were clean, and wore white gowns that trailed from far down their arms, leaving the chest and shoulders bare. They were a very simple, friendly lot of people, and rail from all parts of the settlementto be photographed, and brought us flowers from their gardens, for which they refused money.
We had our first view of the Central-American soldier at Livingston, and, in spite of all we had heard, he surprised us very much. The oldest of those whom we saw was eighteen years, and the youngest soldiers were about nine. They wore blue jean uniforms, ornamented with white tape, and the uniforms differed in shade according to the number of times they had been washed. These young men carried their muskets half-way up the barrel, or by the bayonet, dragging the stock on the ground.
General Barrios, the young President of Guatemala, has some very smart soldiers at the capital, and dresses them in German uniforms, which is a compliment he pays to the young German emperor, for whom he has a great admiration; but his discipline does not extend so far as the Caribbean Sea.
THE GUATEMALLECAN ARMY AT LIVINGSTON
The river Dulce goes in from Livingston, and we were told it was one of the things in Central America we ought to see, as its palisades were more beautiful than those of the Rhine. The man who told us this said he spoke from hearsay, and that he had never been on the Rhine, but that he knew a gentleman who had. You can well believe that it is very beautiful from what you can see of its mouth, where it flows into the Caribbean between great dark banks ashigh as the palisades opposite Dobbs Ferry, and covered with thick, impenetrable green.
BARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS
Port Barrios, to which one comes in a few hours, is at one end of a railroad, and surrounded by all the desecration that such an improvement on nature implies, in the form of zinc depots, piles of railroad-ties, and rusty locomotives. The town consists of a single row of native huts along the coast, terminating in a hospital. Every house is papered throughout with copies of the New YorkPolice Gazette, which must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on the habits and virtues of his cousins in NorthAmerica. Most of our passengers left the ship here, and we met them, while she was taking on bananas, wandering about the place with blank faces, or smiling grimly at the fate which condemned them and their blue-prints and transits to a place where all nature was beautiful and only civilized man was discontented.
We lay at Barrios until late at night, wandering round the deserted decks, or watching the sharks sliding through the phosphorus and the lights burning in the huts along the shore. At midnight we weighed anchor, and in the morning steamed into Puerto Cortez, the chief port of Spanish Honduras, where the first part of our journey ended, and where we exchanged the ship’s deck for the Mexican saddle, and hardtack for tortillas.