Richard Harding Davis

“ The Central-Americans are like a gang of semi-barbarians in a beautifully furnished house, of which they can understand neither its possibilities of comfort nor its use. They are the dogs in the manger among nations. Nature has given to their country great pasture-lands, wonderful forests of rare woods and fruits, treasures of silver and gold and iron, and soil rich enough to supply [148] the world with coffee, and it only waits for an honest effort to make it the natural highway of traffic from every portion of the globe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so great was our desire to reach the capital before nightfall that we left the broader trail and scrambled down the side of the last mountain, dragging our mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city did not look inviting as we viewed it from above. It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded by five hills that rose straight into the air, and that seemed to have been placed there for the special [129] purpose of revolutionists, in order that they might the more exactly drop shot into the town at their feet. ”

“ The other inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and irritable with boredom. There are long, dark, cool shops of general merchandise, and a great cathedral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at night and people circle in two rings, one going to the right and one going to the left, and there is the government palace and a big penitentiary, a university and a cemetery. But there is no color nor ornamentation nor light nor life nor bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people talking and calling to one another across the narrow streets of the place by day or serenading by night. ”

“ The view from this train, while it pants and puffs on its way to the capital, is the most beautiful combination of sea and plain and mountain that I have ever seen. There are higher mountains and more beautiful, perhaps, but they run into a brown prairie or into a green plain; and there are as beautiful views of the ocean, only you have to see them from the level of the ocean itself, or from a chalk-cliff with the downs behind you and the white sand at your feet. ”

“ When you have climbed to the top of the mountain, you see below you on the other side the beautiful valley in which lies the city of Caracas, cut up evenly by well-kept streets, and diversified by the towers of churches and public buildings and open plazas, with the white houses and gardens of the coffee-planters lying beyond the city at the base of the mountains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, who [21] do 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. ”

“ Their work was still to come, and it was much the same kind of work, and carried on in much the same spirit of indomitable energy under the most cruel difficulties, and with a few undrilled troops against an army of veterans. It was marked by brilliant and sudden marches and glorious victories; and where Washington suffered in the snows of Valley Forge, or pushed his way through the floating ice of the Delaware, young Bolivar marched under fierce tropical suns, and cut his path through jungle and swamp-lands, and over the almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Andes. ”

“ Central 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. ”

“ Those were great days, and there were thousands of men where there are now a score, and a line of light and deviltry ran from the canal’s mouth for miles back to the city, where it blazed into a great fire of dissolute pleasure and excitement. In those days men were making fortunes in a night, and by ways as dark as night—by furnishing machinery that could not even be put together, by supplying blocks of granite that cost more in freight than bars of silver, by kidnapping workmen for the swamps, and by the simple methods of false accounts and credits. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now its round pebbles and sandy soil make it a valley of burning heat, into which the sun beats without the intervening shadows of trees or mountains to save the traveller from the fierceness of its rays.
We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that part of the plain which we traversed after our night’s rest at the capital the most trying ten miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the rear of a long funeral procession, in which the men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted in the burning sand. ”

“ The only time in Central America when our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and when we felt as free to walk abroad as though we were on the streets of New York, was when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were in any of these disorganized military camps called free republics.
The Central-American citizen is no more fit for a republican form of government than he is for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States or by another power ”

“ I have camped in our West, where all you need is a blanket to lie upon and another to wrap around you, and a saddle for a pillow, and where, with a smouldering fire at your feet, you can sleep without thought of insects. But there is nothing green that grows in Honduras that is not saturated and alive with bugs, and all manner of things that creep and crawl and sting and bite. ”

“ But every American who loves a hero and who loves a lover—and Bolivar was very much of both, and perhaps too much of the latter—should read the life of this young man who freed a country rich in brave men, who made some of these who were much his senior in years his lieutenants, and who, after risking his life upon many battle-fields and escaping several attempts at assassination, died at last deserted except by a few friends, and with a heart broken by the ingratitude of the people he had led out of captivity. ”

“ Well, I’ve got a story now that’s better than any you’ll find lying around here in New York. You want to go to a little bay called Puerto Cortez, on the eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America, and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery there. It used to be the biggest gambling concern in the world, but now it’s been banished to a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-trees, and from there it reaches out all over the United States, and sucks in thousands and thousands of victims like a great octopus. ”

“ The atmosphere was [121] without a particle of moisture, and the trail quivered and swam in the heat; if you placed your hand on the leather pommel of your saddle it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and ten minutes after we had dipped our helmets in water they were baked as dry as when they had first come from the shop. The rays of the sun seemed to beat up at you from below as well as from above, and we gasped and panted as we rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though the sun was something alive and active that struck at us as we passed by. ”

“ Away from the coasts, where there is fever, Central America is a wonderful country, rich and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but its people make it a nuisance and an affront to other nations, and its parcel of independent little states, with the pomp of power and none of its dignity, are and will continue to be a constant danger to the peace which should exist between two great powers. ”

“ If he could be brought to comprehend that when the constitution says the president must serve four years that means four years, and not merely until some one is strong enough to overthrow him, it might make him more careful as to whom he elected to office in the first place. But the value of stability in government is something they cannot be made to understand. It is not in their power to see it, and the desire for change and revolution is born in the blood. ”

“ There was something almost pathetic to me in the sight of this great, arrogant gambling scheme, that had in its day brought the good name of a state into disrepute, that had boasted of the prices it paid for the honor of men, and that had robbed a whole nation willing to be robbed, spinning its wheel in a back room in a hot, half-barbarous country, and to an audience of gaping Indians and unwashed Honduranian generals. Sooner than fall as low as that it would seem to be better to fall altogether ”

“ There are some beautiful drives around Caracas, out in the country among the coffee plantations, and one to a public garden that overlooks the city, upon which President Crespo has spent much thought and money. But the most beautiful feature of Caracas, and one that no person who has visited that place will ever forget, is the range of mountains above it, which no president can improve. ”

“ The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a sacrifice of life but little greater than these fifty miles of swamp-land between North and South America have seen, and certainly they saw no such inglorious defeats, without a banner flying or a comrade cheering, or the roar of musketry and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in the unequal battle. ”

“ When they have no table, the people use a shelf or the stump of a tree upon which to place emblematic figures, which are almost always china dolls, with no original religious significance, but which they have dressed in little scraps of tinsel and silk, and which they have surrounded with sardine-tins and empty bottles and pictures from the lids of cigar-boxes. Everything that has color is cherished, and every traveller who passes adds unconsciously to their stock of ornaments in the wrappings of the boxes which he casts away behind him. ”

“ When you have seen them you have an intelligent idea of what the others are like; and when you read about revolutions in Rio Janeiro, or Valparaiso, or Buenos Ayres, you will have in your mind’s eye the background for all of these dramatic uprisings, and you will feel superior to other people who do not know that the republic of Venezuela is larger than France, Spain, and Portugal together, and that the inhabitants of this great territory are less in number than those of New York city. ”

“ The boys of the university are taken very seriously by the people of Caracas, as are all boys in that country, where a child is listened to, if he be a male child, with as much grave politeness as though it were a veteran who was speaking. The effect is not good, and the boys, especially of the university, grow to believe that they are very important factors in the affairs of the state, when, as a matter of fact, they are only the cat’s-paws of clever politicians, who use them whenever they want a demonstration and do not wish to appear in it themselves. ”

“ Sometimes this high-road of commerce was cut through the living rock in steps as even and sharp as those in front of a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue, and so narrow that we had to draw up our knees to keep them from being scratched and cut on the rough walls of the passageway, and again it led through jungle so dense that if one wandered three yards from the trail he could not have found his way back again ”

“ I do not know of a place that will so well repay a visit as Caracas, or a country that is so well worth exploring as Venezuela. To a sportsman [269] it is a paradise. You can shoot deer within six miles of the Opera-house, and in six hours beyond Macuto you can kill panther, and as many wild boars as you wish. No country in South America is richer in such natural products as cocoa, coffee, and sugar-cane. And in the interior there is a vast undiscovered and untouched territory waiting for the mining engineer, the professional hunter, and the breeder of cattle. ”