Part 19

Guzman, when he was President, had a nephew of whom he was very fond, and who was made by him the commander-in-chief of the Venezuelan army. He was engaged to an American girl, whose parents lived in Caracas then, but now in Boston. For some reason the girl’s father and the President had a violent quarrel, and the former was notified that it would be to his welfare to leave the country. In these Spanish-American countries a man who values his life never awaits a second invitation of this sort, and the Boston gentleman, with his family, took the next steamer. They were accompanied to La Guayra by the young general, who made no secret of his sympathy with the father of his _fiancée_, and expressed his views of the President’s tyranny in a very emphatic manner. Guzman sent for the young man, and advised him to hold his tongue and let the girl go. The passionate lover gave his uncle some very plain words, which ended in his being offered a choice between his commission in the army and his North American sweetheart. He broke his sword over his knees, threw the severed blade at Guzman’s feet, and tore off his epaulettes. That night all the statues of Guzman fell down. It was discovered that the bronze had been sawed where the feet met the pedestals, and a rope used to tumble them over. Of course the young general was suspected, and he followed his girl to Boston to escape his uncle’s wrath. The romance ended in a marriage, as all good love stories do, and after residing in Boston the couple returned to Caracas, where they now live--she one of the most attractive and accomplished ladies in the city, and he an exporter of coffee and chocolate. Guzman has never forgiven him, and some of his friends think his life is not safe there, but he laughs at their timidity.

Guzman’s private residence is the finest in Venezuela, and a full-length portrait of James G. Blaine adorns his parlor. That apartment is very handsomely decorated and upholstered, the work having been done by artists imported from Paris; but there is such a vivid brilliancy in the frescoing, the fabrics, and the furniture that one wishes these tropical people who have so much money had a little more refinement of taste.

One of the most striking incidents in the career of this extraordinary man was his defiance of the Pope. To realize its full significance, it must be understood that Venezuela has always been a Catholic country; that there was not a Protestant church in the whole country; that Guzman was himself born and baptized a Catholic, and that under the Constitution the archbishop was a member of the National Council. Guzman first suppressed all the monasteries and nunneries of the country, and confiscated their property, which was converted into houses of useful education. Then, in 1876, he sent to Congress a message, in which he said:

“I have taken upon myself the responsibility of declaring the Church of Venezuela independent of the Roman Episcopate, and ask that you further order that parish priests shall be elected by the people, the bishop by the rector of the parish, and the archbishops by Congress, returning to the uses of the primitive Church founded by Jesus Christ and His apostles. Such a law will not only resolve the clerical question, but will be besides a grand example for the Christian Church of republican America, hindered in her march towards liberty, order, and progress by the policy, always retrograde, of the Roman Church, and the civilized world will see in this act the most characteristic and palpable sign of advance in the regeneration of Venezuela.

“GUZMAN BLANCO.”

To this the Congress replied:

“Faithful to our duties, faithful to our convictions, and faithful to the holy dogmas of the religion of Jesus Christ, of that great Being who conserved the world’s freedom with His blood, we do not hesitate to emancipate the Church of Venezuela from that Episcopacy which pretends, as an infallible and omnipotent power, to absorb from Rome the vitality of a free people, the beliefs of our consciences, and the noble aspirations and destinies which pertain to us as component parts of the great human family. Congress offers to your Excellency and will give you all the aid you seek to preserve the honor and the right of our nation, and announces now with patriotic pleasure that it has already begun to elaborate the law which your Excellency asks it to frame.”

This declaration of independence caused a great sensation in the Catholic Church, and excommunication was threatened to all who failed in their allegiance to the Vatican; but neither the Government nor the people were to be intimidated, and the Pope has since tried diplomatic measures to restore union with the Mother Church. There has been a nuncio there for several years, and he resides there still, but is making no progress.

Macuto is the Newport of Venezuela--the summer, or rather the winter resort of the wealthy and aristocratic, who find the temperature of Caracas trying upon their constitutions, and seek sea-air, sea-bathing, and flirtations under the palms. It is six miles from La Guayra, and is reached by a tramway, over which a little dummy engine goes shrieking every half hour, and by a broad boulevard which would furnish as delightful a drive as that upon the beach at Long Branch were it not for the dust, which is almost hub-deep, and nearly suffocates one. La Guayra, as I have stated, has the blissful reputation of being the hottest place on earth, shut in as it is by mountains on all sides but the west, and blistering not only in the direct heat but in that reflected from the rocks, which is a great deal more oppressive--a pocket which no air except the west wind, the hottest of all, can reach. But Macuto is around the corner, one might say--around a point of rocks, and upon a little peninsula that stretches out from the beach, where it can catch not only all the breezes that ruffle the sea, but the winds that come from the mountains, down a ravine through which flows a beautiful stream as cool as one in the Adirondacks.

It was Guzman Blanco, of course, who found out this little settlement of fishermen, built the seawall to protect the peninsula, made the boulevard from the city, built the railroad, brought plenty of fresh water from the mountains, and built bath-houses there; so that the people of La Guayra can in twelve minutes leave the hottest place on earth for one where the air is always fresh and cool, where yellow-fever never comes, and where a good salt-water bath can be had for the sum of six cents in Venezuela money.

The bathing arrangements are quite odd. The sharks are so numerous that it is dangerous to bathe in the surf, and nobody cares to have his legs bitten off; so a semicircular pen of piling has been erected, at government expense, reaching about a hundred feet into the sea. Through this piling the surf beats fiercely. The pen is divided in the centre by a high wall, one side being for the ladies and the other for the gentlemen. At the shore end is a miniature castle of stone, likewise divided into two rooms, with a row of benches around the wall, and hooks over them on which to hang clothes. Everybody bathes _au naturel_; bathing-dresses are unknown. You pay five cents for a ticket, and ten cents for a sheet, which is used as drapery and as a towel, and then undress. The attendant hands you the sheet when you are stripped, and, concealing your nakedness with that protection, you climb down the stone stair-way, hang your sheet over the railing, and plunge in. The water is glorious, warm and salty, so dense that it will almost bear you on the surface, and deep enough to swim and dive. When you have had enough of it, you climb up the stairs, seize your sheet and throw it around you, and sit on the bench until you are dry enough to resume your clothes. Some of the more modest ladies, or, they say, those who have no charms to display, wear in the water a sort of night-dress made of towelling, but the pretty ones wear nothing but smiles--not even a blush.

During the day everybody stays in-doors after the bathing-hour, which is about nine o’clock in the morning. The fashionable get up about eight o’clock, drink a cup of coffee, eat a roll, go to mass, saunter down to the bath, and return in time to dress for breakfast, the most elaborate meal of the day, which is served about eleven o’clock. The menu offers soup, fish, game, steaks, sweetmeats, and wine. Then the people loll around till dinner, which comes after five o’clock in the afternoon, and is a repetition of the breakfast, except that roasts are served instead of steaks. After dinner everybody goes to the grand promenade along the beach. The band plays, the ladies are gayly dressed, the gentlemen twirl their canes, admire their small feet in the moonlight, and chatter like a lot of magpies. The promenading and gossiping are kept up until midnight, except twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, when there is dancing at the hotel or at some one of the private residences. The season lasts from October, when the rainy period ends, until April, when it begins; but families from Caracas and other cities seldom remain at Macuto more than three or four weeks. The charge at the hotel is four dollars per day--about three dollars and a quarter in American money. If some one would build a first-class American hotel here, and provide the comforts that are found in the States, it would be a paying investment; and I would not wonder if a subsidy would be paid by the Government.

The coffee plantations, or _quintas_, as they are called, extend from the coast far up into the mountains, and are very prolific. The people here claim to raise the best coffee in the world; and it is a singular fact asserted by the exporters that only the poorer grades go to the United States, while all of the better quality is sent to France and Germany. Just why this is so no one explains, further than repeating the remark so often made that the Americans do not like good coffee.

Another curious fact is that chocolate costs more here than it does in New York--here where it is grown and manufactured, for very little of the genuine article is sold in our market. When the cocoa-beans are thoroughly dried in the sun they are shipped in gunny sacks to market, where the chocolate manufacturer gets hold of them. He grinds them into a fine powder of a gray color that looks like Graham flour, mixes it with the pure juice of the sugar-cane, called _papillon_, and flavors the mixture with the juice of the vanilla-bean. After being boiled for a certain length of time, this is poured into moulds and allowed to harden, when it becomes the chocolate of commerce. The Caracas chocolate, as all the product of Venezuela is termed, is considered the best in the world. It costs sixty-five cents per pound at the factories there, but can be purchased for forty-five or fifty cents a pound in New York. The best cocoa-beans are forty cents a pound here, but the Yankee manufacturer has a way of increasing their weight and reducing their value by adulteration. Pipe-clay is cheap and heavy, and it is supposed to be harmless. It weighs five times as much as cocoa, and as the profit in lager-beer is in the foam, so is the profit in chocolate in the pipe-clay, or whatever substance it may be mixed with.

Puerto Cabello and Maracaibo are the two great exporting markets of Venezuela, from which the greater part of the coffee and chocolate is shipped. The former place is famous for being one of the most unhealthful in the world, and the bay upon which it is situated is called Golfe Triste (the gulf of tears), because of the terrible scourges which are born in its miasmas. The bottom of the bay is said to be literally covered with the bones of those who have been heaved overboard for the lack of a better place to bury them. The ghost of that most famous of all freebooters, Sir Francis Drake, haunts the place, for he died here of yellow-fever, and his body lies in a leaden coffin thirty fathoms deep in the sea. The place is called Puerto Cabello (the port of the hair), on the pretence that ships are so safe in its harbors that they might be tied to their moorings with a single hair. This is something of an exaggeration, but nevertheless the harbor is the best on the Spanish Main, and has such abrupt banks that a vessel can be run up against the shore anywhere to take her cargo.

Off the coast of Puerto Cabello lies the island of Curaçoa, the quaintest, most novel, and altogether most interesting place on the Spanish Main. It is a fragment of Amsterdam, set upon a coral rock in the middle of the sea. It has always been a colony of Holland, with all the picturesque quaintness, stupidity, and wooden-shoe-oddity of the fatherland. Leaving the tropic scenes of Spanish America at bedtime and waking up in Holland in the morning makes you feel like one of Plato’s troglodytes, who were raised in a cavern and then suddenly dropped into the world. You cannot quite allay the feeling that something has been done to you; the appearance of things has changed so suddenly and completely that you do not feel quite right about it.

Curaçoa looks like a toy town built by a child of uncommonly incoherent mind, by taking blocks out of a box and setting them up in irregular rows regardless of size, shape, or color. The general effect is a nightmare of gable-ends and dormer-windows painted a bright yellow. Immense warehouses with great gaping doors and windows stand beside quaint little Dutch cottages surrounded by beautiful gardens, and stores several stories high, of the most elaborate architecture, rise beside low structures as flat fronted and as square cornered as a dry-goods box with a Dutch oven on top of it. Quaint dormer-windows stare at you from the most unexpected places; hideous yellow towers, like the legs of some petrified monster sticking up into the air, meet your view in all directions; and great prison-like fortresses, with port-holes like the eyes of needles, and ponderous doors lapping over like the covers of a banker’s ledger, appear with surprising frequency. The streets are narrow, crooked, and rough. They begin in the most unreasonable places and go nowhere. Some of them start broadly, but wind around like the track of a serpent, growing narrower and narrower until they suddenly end, like the edge of a wedge, against a stone wall.

Curaçoa is a great place for business, although it is so quiet and sleepy that one might think the whole town had taken a dose of laudanum. It is the distributing point of a large amount of commerce, a harbor of refuge for vessels in distress, the haven of political exiles from South America, and the hotbed of conspiracies and revolutions against neighboring republics.

South of Curaçoa is Maracaibo, with its curious lake, in which are towns built upon stilts, that give the name of Venezuela, or Little Venice, to this land. The explorers, like tourists of modern times, were given to tracing resemblances in America to what they were familiar with in Europe, and they imagined these huts rising on piles above the water looked like the city of canals and gondolas. But there is no more resemblance to Venice than to Chicago, and the name of Venezuela, like that of the continent, is a falsehood which the world has allowed to stand uncontradicted.

QUITO.

THE CAPITAL OF ECUADOR.

On the west coast of South America is found the perfection of sea-travel--fine ships, fair weather, and a still sea. Although one floats under, or rather over, the equator, the atmosphere is cool, the breezes delicious, and the water as smooth as a duck-pond. The Pacific Navigation Company is a British institution, founded by an American, Mr. William Wheelwright, of New York, which has been sending vessels from Panama to Liverpool, through the Straits of Magellan, for over forty years, and has not only a monopoly of transportation on the coast, but subsidies from the British Government and the various South American States whose ports it enters. It charges enormous rates for freight and passengers, the tariff from Valparaiso being forty dollars per ton for freight and two hundred and ninety-seven dollars per head for passengers for a distance about as great as from New York to Liverpool; but the company gives its patrons the best the country affords, and until the recent steam greyhounds were turned out to race across the ocean, had the finest and largest ships afloat. One set of vessels run from Panama to Valparaiso, where a change is made to another set, built for heavy seas, which go through the Straits of Magellan, via Rio de Janeiro, to Liverpool.

Those which ply along the west coast from Panama southward are built for fair weather and tropical seas, with open decks and airy state-rooms, through which the breezes bring refreshing coolness. Such vessels would not live long in the Atlantic nor in the Caribbean Sea, but find no heavy weather

on the Pacific, where the wind is “never strong enough to ruffle the fur on a cat’s back,” as the sailors say, and ships sail in a perpetual calm. The trip to Chili, however, is long and tiresome, lasting twenty-five days. Less than half the time is spent at sea, as there are thirty-eight ports at which the vessels, under the company’s contracts, are obliged to call. Guayaquil, the commercial metropolis of Ecuador, and next to Callao, Peru, and Valparaiso, Chili, the most important place on the coast, is the first stopping-place, four days from Panama. Although the westernmost city of South America, Guayaquil has about the same longitude as Washington, and is only two degrees south of the equator. It is sixty miles from the sea, on a river which looks like the Mississippi at New Orleans, and stretches along the low banks for more than two miles.

One’s first impression, if he arrives at night, is that the ship has anchored in front of a South American Paris, so brilliant are the terraces of gas-lamps, rising one after the other, as the town slopes up towards the mountains. When morning dawns the deception is renewed, and one has a picture of Venice before him, with long lines of white buildings, whose curtained balconies look down upon gayly clad men and women floating upon the river in quaint-looking, narrow gondolas and broad-bosomed rafts. Unless he is warned in time, the traveller meets with a sudden and disgusting surprise upon disembarking, for the gondolas are nothing but “dug-outs” bringing pineapples and bananas from up the river; the rafts are balsam-logs lashed together with vines, and the houses are dilapidated skeletons of bamboo, whitewashed, which look as if they had been erected by an architectural lunatic, and would tumble into the river with the first gust of wind. The streets are dirty and have a repulsive smell, and the half-naked Indians which throng them are continually scratching their bodies for fleas and their heads for lice. Half the filth that festers under the tropic sun in Guayaquil would breed a sudden pestilence in New York or Chicago, yet the inhabitants say it is a healthy city, where yellow-fever or cholera never comes.

A narrow-gauge street railway, or _tramvia_, as they call it, reaches from the docks a couple of miles to the edge of the city, and upon its cars the products of the plantations are brought to the docks and loaded by lighters upon outgoing vessels. Like all Spanish ports, this one has no wharfage, but ships of whatever tonnage have to anchor in the river a mile or so from shore, and release or receive freight upon barges, which are towed, not by tugs, for there is not such a thing in all that region, but by oarsmen in a row-boat. Passengers have to reach the steamers in a similar way.

When we arrived there we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of boatmen, who clambered up the sides of the vessel, screaming with all the strength of their lungs the merits of their boats. Their vociferousness and persistency would make the Niagara Falls hackmen green with jealousy; and the fact that most of them were bare up to their thighs, and entirely shirtless, made the scene picturesque, although somewhat alarming to a timid person. The costume of the Ecuador boatmen is equivalent to a pair of cotton bathing-trunks, and they are as much at home in the water as in their canoes.

With twenty-five or thirty of these naked black men surrounding him, shoving and pushing one another, screaming, gesticulating, and performing a war-dance of the most extraordinary description, a timid man is apt to be deceived by appearances, and imagine that he has fallen into the hands of a tribe of hungry cannibals, instead of a party of innocent Sambos who wish to promote his welfare. As soon as these maniacs discovered we were Americans, they were smart enough to introduce into the bedlam as much of our mother-tongue as they could command, making the scene all the more amusing. One big fellow, black as midnight, with only about half a yard of muslin and a dilapidated panama hat to protect his person from the elements, jumped up and down, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Me Americano! me Americano! Me been to Baltimoore!” Becoming interested in the fellow, we learned that he had been a sailor on a Spanish man-of-war which several years ago visited that city.

Among the crowd of howling dervises was a pleasant-looking fellow with a whole pair of pantaloons and a linen duster on. He was not so noisy as the rest, and could speak a little English. Taking him aside, I told him how large our party was, and where we wanted to go. He agreed to take us and our luggage ashore for two dollars, and was at once engaged; whereupon, instead of going off and minding their own business, the crowd began to abuse Pepe--for that, he said, was his name--and the rest of us in the most violent manner; and when the baggage was brought up they seized upon it, and each man attempted to carry a piece into his own boat. But the mate of the steamer was equal to the occasion, and laid about him with so much energy that the deck was soon cleared.

The street railway only extends to the limits of the city, but a short walk beyond it gives one a glimpse of the rural tropics. At one end of the main street, which runs along the river front, is a fortress-crowned hill, from the summit of which a charming view of the surrounding country can be obtained, but the better plan is to take a carriage and drive out a few miles. The road is rough and dusty, but passes among cocoa-nut groves and sugar plantations, through forests fairly blazing with the wondrous passion-flower, so scarlet as to make the trees look like living fire; with pineapple-plants and banana-trees bending under the enormous loads of fruit they carry. The rickety old carriage passed along until our senses were almost bewildered by visions none of us had ever seen. Nowhere can one find a more beautiful scene of tropical vegetation in its full glory, and no artist ever mingled colors that could convey an adequate idea of nature’s gorgeousness here.

The most beautiful thing in the tropics is a young palm-tree. The old ones are more graceful than any of our foliage plants, but they all show signs of decay. The young ones, so supple as to bend before the winds, are the ideal of grace and loveliness, as picturesque in repose as they are in motion. The long, spreading leaves, of a vivid green, bend and sway with the breeze, and nod in the sunlight with a beauty which cannot be described.