Part 10

The prisoner did not want his wife to know what had happened, and so sent her word that important legal business would detain him at the office, and that his dinner was to be brought to him there. The rope by which he was to escape was smuggled past the soldiers under the napkin which covered this dinner. It was then seven o’clock and nearly dark, and as our rebel friend feared our presence might excite suspicion, he asked us to go away, and requested us to return in half an hour. It would then be quite dark, and the attempt to escape could be made with greater safety.

But the alcalde during our absence spoiled what might have been an excellent story by rushing in and carrying the diplomat off to jail. When we returned we found the office locked and guarded, and as we walked away, in doubt as to whether he had escaped or had been arrested, we found that the soldiers were following us. As this continued throughout the evening we went across the isthmus the next morning to Colon, the same soldiers accompanying us on our way.

The ship of war _Atlanta_ was at Colon, and as we had met her officers at Puerto Cortez, in Honduras, we went on board and asked them to see that we were not shot against church walls or hung. They were exceedingly amused, and promised us ample protection, and though we did not need it on that occasion, I was impressed with the comforting sense that comes to a traveller from the States when he knows that one of our White Squadron is rolling at anchor in the harbor. And later, when Griscom caught the Chagres fever, we had every reason to be grateful for the presence in the harbor of the _Atlanta_, as her officers, led by Dr. Bartolette and his assistant surgeon, Mr. Moore, helped him through his sickness, visiting him daily with the greatest kindness and good-will.

Colon did not impress us very favorably. It is a large town of wooden houses, with a floating population of Jamaica negroes and a few Chinese. The houses built for the engineers of the canal stretch out along a point at either side of a double row of magnificent palms, which terminate at the residence intended for De Lesseps. It is now falling into decay. In front of it, facing the sea, is a statue of Columbus protecting the Republic of Colombia, represented by an Indian girl, who is crouching under his outstretched arm. This monument was presented to the United States of Colombia by the Empress Eugenie, and the statue is, in its fallen state, with its pedestal shattered by the many storms and time, significant of the fallen fortunes of that great lady herself. If Columbus could have protected Colombia from the French as he is in the French statue protecting her from all the world, she would now be the richest and most important of Central-American republics.

Colon seems to be owned entirely by the Panama Railroad Company, a monopoly that conducts its affairs with even more disregard for the public than do other monopolies in better-known localities. The company makes use of the seaport as a freight-yard, and its locomotives run the length of the town throughout the entire day, blowing continually on their whistles and ringing their bells, so that there is little peace for the just or the unjust. We were exceedingly relieved when the doctors agreed that Griscom was ready to put to sea again, and we were able to turn from the scene of the great scandal and its fever fields to the mountains of Venezuela, and of Caracas in particular.

THE PARIS OF SOUTH AMERICA

SHOVED off by itself in a corner of Central Park on the top of a wooded hill, where only the people who live in the high apartment-houses at Eighty-first Street can see it, is an equestrian statue. It is odd, bizarre, and inartistic, and suggests in size and pose that equestrian statue to General Jackson which mounts guard before the White House in Washington. It shows a chocolate-cream soldier mastering with one hand a rearing rocking-horse, and with the other pointing his sword towards an imaginary enemy.

Sometimes a “sparrow” policeman saunters up the hill and looks at the statue with unenlightened eyes, and sometimes a nurse-maid seeks its secluded site, and sits on the pedestal below it while the children of this free republic play unconcernedly in its shadow. On the base of this big statue is carved the name of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela.

Down on the northeastern coast of South America, in Caracas, the capital of the United States of Venezuela, there is a pretty little plaza, called the Plaza Washington. It is not at all an important plaza; it is not floored for hundreds of yards with rare mosaics like the Plaza de Bolivar, nor lit by swinging electric lights, and the president’s band never plays there. But it has a fresh prettiness and restfulness all its own, and the narrow gravel paths are clean and trim, and the grass grows rich and high, and the branches of the trees touch and interlace and form a green roof over all, except in the very centre, where there stands open to the blue sky a statue of Washington, calm, dignified, beneficent, and paternal. It is Washington the statesman, not the soldier. The sun of the tropics beats down upon his shoulders; the palms rustle and whisper pleasantly above his head. From the barred windows of the yellow and blue and pink houses that line the little plaza dark-eyed, dark-skinned women look out sleepily, but understandingly, at the grave face of the North American Bolivar; and even the policeman, with his red blanket and Winchester carbine, comprehends when the gringos stop and take off their hats and make a low bow to the father of their country in his pleasant place of exile.

Other governments than those of the United States of America and the United States of Venezuela have put up statues to their great men in foreign capitals, but the careers of Washington and Bolivar bear so striking a resemblance, and the histories of the two countries of which they are the respective fathers are so much alike, that they might be written in parallel columns. And so it seems especially appropriate that these monuments to these patriots should stand in each of the two continents on either side of the dividing states of Central America.

It will offend no true Venezuelan to-day if it be said of his country that the most interesting man in it is a dead one, for he will allow no one to go further than himself in his admiration for Bolivar; and he has done so much to keep his memory fresh by circulating portraits of him on every coin and stamp of the country, by placing his statue at every corner, and by hanging his picture in every house, that he cannot blame the visitor if his strongest impression of Venezuela is of the young man who began at thirty-three to liberate five republics, and who conquered a territory more than one-third as great as the whole of Europe.

In 1811 Venezuela declared her independence of the mother-country of Spain, and her great men put this declaration in writing and signed it, and the room in which it was signed is still kept sacred, as is the room where our declaration was signed in Independence Hall. But the two men who were to make these declarations worth something more than the parchment upon which they were written were not among the signers. 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.

Their difficulties were the same and their aim was the same, but the character of the two men were absolutely and entirely different, for Bolivar was reckless, impatient of advice, and even foolhardy. What Washington was we know.

The South-American came of a distinguished Spanish family, and had been educated as a courtier and as a soldier in the mother-country, though his heart remained always with his own people, and he was among the first to take up arms to set them free. Unless you have seen the country through which he led his men, and have measured the mountains he climbed with his few followers, it is quite impossible to understand the immensity of the task he accomplished. Even to-day a fast steamer cannot reach Callao from Panama under seven days, and yet Bolivar made the same distance and on foot, starting from the South Atlantic, and continuing on across the continent to the Pacific side, and then on down the coast into Peru, living on his way upon roots and berries, sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket, riding on muleback or climbing the steep trail on foot, and freeing on his way Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and finally Peru, the home of the Incas.

The history of this campaign is one too glorious and rich in incident and color to be crowded into a few pages, and the character of its chief actor too varied, and his rise and fall too dramatic, to be dismissed, as it must be here, in a few paragraphs. 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.

It is difficult to find out, even in his own country, why the Venezuelans, after heaping Bolivar with honors and elevating him to the place of a god, should have turned against him, and driven him into exile at Santa Marta. Some will tell you that he tried to make himself dictator over the countries which he had freed; others say that it was because he had refused to be a dictator that the popular feeling went against him, and that when the people in the madness of their new-found freedom cried, “Thou hast rid us of kings; be thou king,” he showed them their folly, and sought his old home, and died there before the reaction came, which was to sweep him back once more and forever into the place of the popular hero of South America.

It was sixteen years after his death that a hero-worshipping friend was brave enough to commission an artist to design a statue to his memory. On the neck of this statue the artist hung the representation of a miniature in the shape of a medallion, which had been given to Bolivar by the family of Washington. On the reverse was a lock of Washington’s hair and the inscription, “This portrait of the founder of liberty in North America is presented by his adopted son to him who has acquired equal glory in South America.”

Some one asked why the artist had stripped from the breast of Bolivar all of the other medals and stars that had been given him by different countries in the hour of his triumph, and the artist answered that he had done as his patron and the friend of Bolivar thought would best please his hero. And ever after that it was decreed that every bust or statue or engraving of the Liberator should show him with this portrait of Washington hanging by a ribbon about his neck; and so you will see in the National Portrait Gallery that while the coats of his lieutenants glitter with orders and crosses, Bolivar’s bears this medal only. It was his greatest pride, and he considered it his chief glory. And the manner of its bestowal was curiously appropriate. In 1824 General Lafayette returned to this country as the guest of the nation, and a banquet was given to him by Congress, at which the memory of Washington and the deeds of his French lieutenant were honored again and again. It was while the enthusiasm and rejoicings of this celebration were at their height that Henry Clay rose in his place and asked the six hundred Americans before him to remember that while they were enjoying the benefits of free institutions founded by the bravery and patriotism of their fore-fathers, their cousins and neighbors in the southern continent were struggling to obtain that same independence.

“No nation, no generous Lafayette,” he cried, “has come to their aid; alone and without help they have sustained their glorious cause, trusting to its justice, and with the assistance only of their bravery, their deserts, and their Andes--and one man, Simon Bolivar, the Washington of South America.”

And you can imagine the six hundred Americans jumping to their feet and cheering the name of the young soldier, and the French marquis eagerly asking that he might be the one to send him some token of their sympathy and admiration. Lafayette forwarded the portrait of Washington to Bolivar, who valued it so highly that the people who loved him valued the man he worshipped; and to-day you will see in Caracas streets and squares and houses named after Washington, and portraits of Washington crossing the Delaware, and Washington on horseback, and Washington at Mount Vernon, hanging in almost every shop and café in the capital. And the next time you ride in Central Park you might turn your bicycle, or tell the man on the box to turn the horses, into that little curtain of trees, and around the hill where the odd-looking statue stands, and see if you cannot feel some sort of sympathy and pay some tribute to this young man who loved like a hero, and who fought like a hero, with the fierceness of the tropical sun above him, and whose inspiration was the calm, grave parent of your own country.

Bolivar’s country is the republic of South America that stands nearest to New York, and when people come to know more concerning it, I am sure they will take to visiting it and its capital, the “Paris of South America,” in the winter months, as they now go to southern Europe or to the Mediterranean.

There are many reasons for their doing so. In the first place, it can be reached in less than six days, and it is the only part of South America to which one can go without first crossing the Isthmus of Panama and then taking a long trip down the western coast, or sailing for nearly a month along the eastern coast; and it is a wonderfully beautiful country, and its cities of Caracas and Valencia are typical of the best South-American cities. 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.

La Guayra is the chief seaport of Venezuela. It lies at the edge of a chain of great mountains, where they come down to wet their feet in the ocean, and Caracas, the capital, is stowed away three thousand feet higher up behind these mountains, and could only be bombarded in time of war by shells that would rise like rockets and drop on the other side of the mountains, and so cover a distance quite nine miles away from the vessel that fired them. Above La Guayra, on the hill, is a little fortress which was once the residence of the Spanish governor when Venezuela was a colony of Spain. It is of interest now chiefly because Charles Kingsley describes it in _Westward Ho!_ as the fortress in which the Rose of Devon was imprisoned. Past this fortress, and up over the mountains to the capital, are a mule-trail and an ancient wagon-road and a modern railway.

It is a very remarkable railroad; its tracks cling to the perpendicular surface of the mountain like the tiny tendrils of a vine on a stone-wall, and the trains creep and crawl along the edge of its precipices, or twist themselves into the shape of a horseshoe magnet, so that the engineer on the locomotive can look directly across a bottomless chasm into the windows of the last car. 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. But nowhere else in the world have I seen such magnificent and noble mountains running into so beautiful and green a plain, and beyond that the great blue stretches of the sea. When you look down from the car-platform you see first, stretching three thousand feet below you, the great green ribs of the mountain and its valleys and waterways leading into a plain covered with thousands and thousands of royal palms, set so far apart that you can distinguish every broad leaf and the full length of the white trunk. Among these are the red-roofed and yellow villages, and beyond them again the white line of breakers disappearing and reappearing against the blue as though some one were wiping out a chalk-line and drawing it in again, and then the great ocean weltering in the heat and stretching as far as the eye can see, and touching a sky so like it in color that the two are joined in a curtain of blue on which the ships seem to lie flat, like painted pictures on a wall.

You pass through clouds on your way up that leave the trees and rocks along the track damp and shining as after a heavy dew, and at some places you can peer through them from the steps of the car down a straight fall of three thousand 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.

Venezuela, after our experiences of Central America, was like a return to civilization after months on the alkali plains of Texas. We found Caracas to be a Spanish-American city of the first class, with a suggestion of the boulevards, and Venezuela a country that possessed a history of her own, and an Academy of wise men and artists, and a Pantheon for her heroes. I suppose we should have known that this was so before we visited Venezuela; but as we did not, we felt as though we were discovering a new country for ourselves. It was interesting to find statues of men of whom none of us had ever heard, and who were distinguished for something else than military successes, men who had made discoveries in science and medicine, and who had written learned books; to find the latest devices for comfort of a civilized community, and with them the records of a fierce struggle for independence, a long period of disorganization, where the Church had the master-hand, and then a rapid advance in the habits and customs of enlightened nations. There are the most curious combinations and contrasts, showing on one side a pride of country and an eagerness to emulate the customs of stable governments, and on the other evidences of the Southern hot-blooded temperament and dislike of restraint.

On the corner of the principal plaza stands the cathedral, with a tower. Ten soldiers took refuge in this tower four years ago, during the last revolution, and they made so determined a fight from that point of vantage that in order to dislodge them it was found necessary to build a fire in the tower and smoke them out with the fumes of sulphur. These ten soldiers were the last to make a stand within the city, and when they fell, from the top of the tower, smothered to death, the revolution was at an end. This incident of warfare is of value when you contrast the thing done with its environment, and know that next to the cathedral-tower are confectionery-shops such as you find on Regent Street or upper Broadway, that electric lights surround the cathedral, and that tram-cars run past it on rails sunk below the surface of the roadway and over a better street than any to be found in New York city.

Even without acquaintances among the people of the capital there are enough public show-places in Caracas to entertain a stranger for a fortnight. It is pleasure enough to walk the long, narrow streets under brilliantly colored awnings, between high one- and two-story houses, painted in blues and pinks and greens, and with overhanging red-tiled roofs and projecting iron balconies and open iron-barred windows, through which you gain glimpses beyond of cool interiors and beautiful courts and gardens filled with odd-looking plants around a splashing fountain.

The ladies of Caracas seem to spend much of their time sitting at these windows, and are always there in the late afternoons, when they dress themselves and arrange their hair for the evening, and put a little powder on their faces, and take their places in the cushioned window-seats as though they were in their box at the opera. And though they are within a few inches of the passers-by on the pavement, they can look through them and past them, and are as oblivious of their presence as though they were invisible. In the streets are strings of mules carrying bags of coffee or buried beneath bales of fodder, and jostled by open fiacres, with magnificent coachmen on the box-seat in top-boots and gold trimmings to their hats and coats, and many soldiers, on foot and mounted, hurrying along at a quick step in companies, or strolling leisurely alone. They wear blue uniforms with scarlet trousers and facings, and the president’s body-guard are in white duck and high black boots, and are mounted on magnificent horses.

There are three great buildings in Caracas--the Federal Palace, the Opera-house, and the Pantheon, which was formerly a church, and which has been changed into a receiving-vault and a memorial for the great men of the country. Here, after three journeys, the bones of Bolivar now rest. The most interesting of these buildings is the Federal Palace. It is formed around a great square filled with flowers and fountains, and lit with swinging electric lights. It is the handsomest building in Caracas, and within its four sides are the chambers of the upper and lower branches of the legislature, the offices of the different departments of state, and the reception-hall of the president, in which is the National Portrait Gallery. The palace is light and unsubstantial-looking, like a canvas palace in a theatre, and suggests the casino at a French watering-place. It is painted in imitation of stone, and the statues are either of plaster-of-paris or of wood, painted white to represent marble. But the theatrical effect is in keeping with the colored walls and open fronts of the other buildings of the city, and is not out of place in this city of such dramatic incidents.