C. Reginald Enock

“ A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing towns—some of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the sea—are palaces of justice, art and science. ”

“ To the foreign traveller, Central America might afford an extremely pleasing field of travel. There is a charm in the remains of the prehistoric American cultures, the carved walls of the old temples, the buried idols, the ancient industries. Restful and quaint are these little towns with the stamp of the Spanish Colonial architecture. Here man and Nature soon forget the bloodshed and the enmity of the torn and stained pages of history. The simple folk of the countryside are full of courtesy, the needs of life are cheap and plentiful, for the earth is bountiful. ”

“ Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is not without an atmosphere of interest and even romance. Remote and inaccessible as it has been until, in the last few decades, the railway united it with the outer world, Quito still conserves its character of a mountain capital, surrounded by lofty snow-clad volcanoes, whose names are bywords in geography. There are many large towns in the Andes, throughout Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Venezuela, but both by reason of its history and its topography the capital of Ecuador is among the most interesting. ”

“ Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilization—the great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of trafficking—all these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal. ”

“ Upon the seashore there is a band of mail-clad Spaniards, at their head a tall bearded man, spare of frame, but full of spirit, that spirit which dares the unknown and dares again, in spite of famine and privation. It is Pizarro, the famous conquistador, and in his hand is a drawn sword. There has been disaffection in the band, wrought of sufferings and disappointment in that desolate region. "Where is the gold we have been promised?" the malcontents exclaim. "What profit is there in fighting famine and miserable savages? Let us go back to Panama before we all perish!" ”

“ Approaching the capital, Belize, from the sea, we pass the green islands that fringe the coast, and extending along the banks of the river we see the high roofs and wide verandas of the houses and remark the coco-palm's grateful shade. Often an invigorating breeze blows from the sea, the same gales that crisp the surf at Colon, which the traveller will inevitably note, and this and the high tides wash the fever-bearing mangrove swamps and marshes, rendering them less unhealthy than otherwise would be the case. ”

“ But the more leisurely observer will not fail to find much that is interesting even here. The buildings are quaint; the air of mediaeval times which shrouds the grass-grown plaza and the half-ruined church, together with the strange garb of the Indians who slink through the streets, and the struggling evidences of modern civilization—in shop sign or municipal notice—are almost pathetic. Whatever it is, it is peaceful; the climate is bracing, the cost of living—to foreign eyes—nil; and do not the surrounding hills and valleys contain unknown possibilities of mineral and industrial wealth? ”

“ Away on the slopes and tablelands of the grim Cordillera the ancient palaces and temples of the bygone Incas look down, unknown, unvisited, save by those whom interest or chance may take that way. Once washed by the waves of Lake Titicaca—that most remarkable of lakes, 12,500 feet above the sea, yet whereon we may journey out of sight of land—lie the ruins of that strange temple of Tiahuanako, of unknown age, the most ancient handiwork of man in the New World. ”

“ In the day when prosaic commercialism, when megalomania and money so sway us, there is a refreshing atmosphere about the refusal to conglomerate of these picturesque communities, whose names fall pleasingly on our ears. Yet there are penalties too. Rugged and difficult of approach—the vulgar gaze may not easily rest upon them by the mere passport of a tourist's ticket—as are these vast territories of forest, desert and Cordillera, Nature, though grand and spacious, is ill at ease, and the mood might seem to be impressed upon the people of the land that neither is there peace for them. ”

“ And Portugal, the patron of great voyagers and explorers, has left her mark and language upon her half of the New World, the old empire of Brazil, with a population greater than that of all her neighbours combined. Less dominating than the Spaniard in the long run—for Portugal has always said of herself that she could conquer but not colonize—Portugal has left her own Iberian culture in Latin America.
Here, indeed, are the elements of life in the making, of a civilization whose life is before it rather than behind it ”

“ Those behind crowded on those in front; men and horses rolled into the lake; Spaniards and Tlascalans fell victims to the Aztecs, who crowded the water in their canoes and leapt upon the causeway; the shouts of vengeance and triumph of the savages resounded all along the dyke, silencing the muttered oath or prayer of the Christians huddled at the breach. Down went horse and man, artillery and treasure, until the bodies of Christians and Indians and horses, and bales of merchandise and chests of ammunition the breach was almost filled, and a portion of the fugitives passed over. ”

“ Railways are few and far between along this immense and little-travelled seaboard; food is scarce and life primitive.
But the stamp of Spain is over all, and there is an atmosphere—attenuated it may be—of the times of Don Quijote de la Mancha in its social regimen. We cannot withhold a tribute to Spain, in remarking how she stamped, for all time, her own characteristic culture throughout thousands of miles, east, north and south, of tropic seaboard and rugged Cordillera, upon this great continent. ”

“ Gold in abundance, surpassing the visions even of the Spaniards, was to be had for the digging or washing, but the Indians would only dig or wash the metal whilst a white man with a harquebus stood over them, and not always then. Poison and treachery were common to both sides, and cruelty surpassed itself. In one battle Valdivia cut off the hands and noses of hundreds of Indian prisoners and sent them back as an object lesson, and the Araucanians, with devilish irony, killed the Spaniards by pouring molten gold down their throats. ”

“ Peru has always appealed to the imagination by reason of its natural wealth, added to its mysteries and remoteness. Humboldt spoke of it as "a beggar sitting upon a heap of gold," an aphorism designed to convey the idea of undeveloped riches. There is scarcely any valuable or useful product of Nature in the mineral and vegetable world which we may not find in one or other of the wide zones of littoral, mountain and forest of this land; scarcely any potentiality of life is lacking among her people, could they but make their way to its enjoyment. ”

“ Do we approach the country from the north, by the railway lines from the United States border, we traverse deserts among the most dreadful of the New World, deserts yet with a certain cruel beauty of their own, where once the Apache roamed—cruellest and most horrible of all the world's savage folk. ”

“ Behold, then, a sterile coastline, beaten by never-ending surf, broken by rocky promontories, bird-covered perhaps, and seal-haunted, whence the distant roar of breaking rollers at times comes seaward, and, inland, a rising, undulating zone of desert and cañon, brown or tawny or purple in its shadows, stretching away mysteriously for perhaps a hundred miles to where it meets the solemn Cordillera, which, grey, faint and serrated, with no form save that of outline—the true test of distance—forms our horizon on the east. ”

“ Who, upon beholding the beautiful ruined structures of the early folk of America—for by America here we mean Spanish America, where alone these vestiges are found—in the decaying sculptured walls of their temples, or the massive stories of their fortresses and palaces, or of the strange pyramids they raised, has not felt his conception of the New World undergo a change? ”

“ To-day Costa Rica is a flourishing little State, with fertile soil and bright sunshine, with many luscious fruits, with food in plenty, famous for its splendid coffee, special product of the volcanic earth: a land of small peasant owners, upon which is founded some political stability and civic prosperity, an example to other Spanish American States, where oligarchies monopolize the countryside, and the labourer dwells in peonage. ”

“ The early history of Chile, if less picturesque than that of Peru, is full of incident—often dreadful—and doughty deeds. Bluff old Almagro it was who set his eyes upon Chile—Almagro, the partner of Francisco Pizarro, partners whose quarrels finally resulted in the death of both.
The Indians of Cuzco had told their conquerors of a land that lay beyond the desert and the mountains to the south, reaching no man knew whither; a land not a great empire, but one of many tribes, and so easily to be subdued, and, moreover, overflowing with gold and silver. ”

“ The Mexican native miner is, in his way, expert and active, and with rude appliances performs marvels in the work of ore extraction. Halt a moment by yonder pit in the rocky slope. Look down: a notched pole descends, upon which you would hesitate to venture, giving access to the workings beneath. Yet, in a moment, perhaps, a peon, bearing on his back an enormous load of rock in a hide or sack, will ascend from the bowels of the earth, panting and groaning—we shall hear the noise of his breathing before we see him. ”

“ CHAPTER V ALONG THE PACIFIC COAST IN COLOMBIA, ECUADOR AND PERU
An enormous horizon opens to the traveller who essays the voyage along the Pacific coast of South America, from Panama perhaps to the extremity of the continent; a voyage through every range of climate, from the Equator to the frigid south, past verdant tropic shores or barren desert, or beneath eternal snowfields; a voyage redolent of the early heroic history of the New World, with, to-day, a setting of the picturesque modern life of the old viceregal, one-time colonies of Spain. ”

“ The name of the Andes, to the traveller who has crossed the giddy passes and scaled the high peaks of this stupendous mountain chain, brings back sensations which are a blend of the pleasurable and the painful. In his retrospect the Cordillera—for such is its familiar name to the inhabitants of the land it traverses—bulks as a thing of varied and almost indescribable moods. It possesses that individuality—menacing, beautiful by turns—which no doubt is an attribute of all mountains, in the recollection of those who best know them. ”

“ The traveller who requires luxuriance of travel, of hotel and pleasure-resort, such as the playgrounds of Europe afford, will not find such here, except perhaps in a few of the more advanced cities. It is a continent which, despite its four centuries of discovery, has so far done little more than present its edge to [15] the forces—and pleasures—of modern life. Nature is in her wildest moods: it is an unfinished world; mankind is still plastic. The mountain trail and the horse are more in evidence than the railway and the motor-car ”

“ There is no country in the world which has so valuable a working class (with the possible exception of Japan and China) . They are descended from the Araucanian Indian and the Spanish Andalusian or the Basque. They are hardy, vigorous and excellent workmen, and their endurance and patience are almost Indian. Of their bravery and determination it is unnecessary to speak, for these qualities appear on every page of the stormy history of Chile. Generally, they are short, dark-eyed and black-haired people. They are intelligent, and quick to learn anything requiring handiness and craftsmanship. ”

“ The upper-class folk of Peru, as we behold them in their capital and other large towns, have the pleasing traits of courtesy and hospitality we are accustomed to associate with their race in marked degree. They are extremely eloquent, and aim at a high standard of civilization—that sensitive characteristic of the Spanish American. Their women have justly earned a world-wide reputation for their beauty and vivacity, their good breeding and culture, as well as their piety and high standard of family life. ”