Part 2

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 settlement to 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 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 as high as the palisades opposite Dobbs Ferry, and covered with thick, impenetrable green.

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 York _Police Gazette_, which must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on the habits and virtues of his cousins in North America. 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.

THE EXILED LOTTERY

TWO years ago, while I was passing through Texas, I asked a young man in the smoking-car if he happened to know where I could find the United States troops, who were at that time riding somewhere along the borders of Texas and Mexico, and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza revolution.

The young man did not show that he was either amused or surprised at the abruptness of the question, but answered me promptly, as a matter of course, and with minute detail. “You want to go to San Antonio,” he said, “and take the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary, and then change to the freight that leaves once a day to Corpus Christi, and get off at Pena station. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can hire a horse there and ride to the San Rosario Ranch. Captain Hardie is at Rosario with Troop G, Third Cavalry. They call him the Riding Captain, and if any one can show you all there is to see in this Garza outfit, he can.”

The locomotive whistle sounded at that moment, the train bumped itself into a full stop at a station, and the young man rose. “Good-day,” he said, smiling pleasantly; “I get off here.”

He was such an authoritative young man, and he had spoken in so explicit a manner, that I did as he had directed; and if the story that followed was not interesting, the fault was mine, and not that of my chance adviser.

* * * * *

A few months ago I was dining alone in Delmonico’s, when the same young man passed out through the room, and stopped on his way beside my table.

“Do you remember me?” he said. “I met you once in a smoking-car in Texas. 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. You want to go there and write a story about it. Good-night,” he added; then he nodded again, with a smile, and walked across the room and disappeared into Broadway.

When a man that you have met once in a smoking-car interrupts you between courses to suggest that you are wasting your time in New York, and that you ought to go to a coral reef in Central America and write a story of an outlawed lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it does not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least, so much that I went back to my rooms at once, and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the map; and later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-plots in Madison Square turned into piled-up islands of snow, surrounded by seas of slippery asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went South to investigate the exiled lottery. That is how this chapter and this book came to be written.

Every one who goes to any theatre in the United States may have read among the advertisements on the programme an oddly worded one which begins, “Conrad! Conrad! Conrad!” and which goes on to say that--

“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis, Miss.

“Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to

“PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras, “Care Central America Express, “FORT TAMPA CITY, “FLORIDA, U. S. A.”

You have probably read this advertisement often, and enjoyed the naïve manner in which Mr. Conrad asks for correspondence on different subjects, especially on that relating to “all business communications,” and how at the same time he has so described his whereabouts that no letters so addressed would ever reach his far-away home in Puerto Cortez, but would be promptly stopped at Tampa, as he means that they should.

After my anonymous friend had told me of Puerto Cortez, I read of it on the programme with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became to me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of a certain dark significance, and of possible adventure. I remembered all that the lottery had been before the days of its banishment, and all that it had dared to be when, as a corporation legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it had put its chain and collar upon legislatures and senators, judges and editors, when it had silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit by great gifts of money to charities and hospitals, so giving out in a lump sum with one hand what it had taken from the people in dollars and half-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold, with the other. I remembered when its trade-mark, in open-faced type, “La. S. L.,” was as familiar in every newspaper in the United States as were the names of the papers themselves, when it had not been excommunicated by the postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real purpose under a carefully worded paragraph in theatrical programmes or on “dodgers” or handbills that had an existence of a moment before they were swept out into the street, and which, as they were not sent through mails, were not worthy the notice of the federal government.

It was not so very long ago that it requires any effort to remember it. It is only a few years since the lottery held its drawings freely and with much pomp and circumstance in the Charles Theatre, and Generals Beauregard and Early presided at these ceremonies, selling the names they had made glorious in a lost cause to help a cause which was, for the lottery people at least, distinctly a winning one. For in those days the state lottery cleared above all expenses seven million dollars a year, and Generals Beauregard and Early drew incomes from it much larger than the government paid to the judges of the Supreme Court and the members of the cabinet who finally declared against the company and drove it into exile.

There had been many efforts made to kill it in the past, and the state lottery was called “the national disgrace” and “the modern slavery,” and Louisiana was spoken of as a blot on the map of our country, as was Utah when polygamy flourished within her boundaries and defied the laws of the federal government. The final rally against the lottery occurred in 1890, when the lease of the company expired, and the directors applied to the legislature for a renewal. At that time it was paying out but very little and taking in fabulous sums; how much it really made will probably never be told, but its gains were probably no more exaggerated by its enemies than was the amount of its expenses by the company itself. Its outlay for advertising, for instance, which must have been one of its chief expenses, was only forty thousand dollars a year, which is a little more than a firm of soap manufacturers pay for their advertising for the same length of time; and it is rather discouraging to remember that for a share of this bribe every newspaper in the city of New Orleans and in the State of Louisiana, with a few notable exceptions, became an organ of the lottery, and said nothing concerning it but what was good. To this sum may be added the salaries of its officers, the money paid out in prizes, the cost of printing and mailing the tickets, and the sum of forty thousand dollars paid annually to the State of Louisiana. This tribute was considered as quite sufficient when the lottery was first started, and while it struggled for ten years to make a living; but in 1890, when its continued existence was threatened, the company found it could very well afford to offer the state not forty thousand, but a million dollars a year, which gives a faint idea of what its net earnings must have been. As a matter of fact, in those palmy times when there were daily drawings, the lottery received on some days as many as eighteen to twenty thousand letters, with orders for tickets enclosed which averaged five dollars a letter.

It was Postmaster-general Wanamaker who put a stop to all this by refusing to allow any printed matter concerning the lottery to pass outside of the State of Louisiana, which decision, when it came, proved to be the order of exile to the greatest gambling concern of modern times.

The lottery, of course, fought this decision in the courts, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, and was upheld, and from that time no letter addressed to the lottery in this country, or known to contain matter referring to the lottery, and no newspaper advertising it, can pass through the mails. This ruling was known before the vote on the renewal of the lease came up in the Legislature of Louisiana, and the lottery people say that, knowing that they could not, under these new restrictions, afford to pay the sum of one million dollars a year, they ceased their efforts to pass the bill granting a renewal of their lease, and let it go without a fight. This may or may not be true, but in any event the bill did not pass, and the greatest lottery of all times was without a place in which to spin its wheel, without a charter or a home, and was cut off from the most obvious means of communication with its hundreds of thousands of supporters. But though it was excommunicated, outlawed, and exiled, it was not beaten; it still retained agents all over the country, and it still held its customers, who were only waiting to throw their money into its lap, and still hoping that the next drawing would bring the grand prize.

For some long time the lottery was driven about from pillar to post, and knocked eagerly here and there for admittance, seeking a home and resting-place. It was not at first successful. The first rebuff came from Mexico, where it had proposed to move its plant, but the Mexican government was greedy, and wanted too large a sum for itself, or, what is more likely, did not want so well-organized a rival to threaten the earnings of her own national lottery. Then the republics of Colombia and Nicaragua were each tempted with the honor of giving a name to the new company, but each declined that distinction, and so it finally came begging to Honduras, the least advanced of all of the Central-American republics, and the most heavily burdened with debt.

Honduras agreed to receive the exile, and to give it her name and protection for the sum of twenty thousand dollars a year and twenty per cent. of its gross earnings. It would seem that this to a country that has not paid the interest on her national debt for twelve years was a very advantageous bargain; but as four presidents and as many revolutions and governments have appeared and disappeared in the two years in which the lottery people have received their charter in Honduras, the benefit of the arrangement to them has not been an obvious one, and it was not until two years ago that the first drawing of the lottery was held at Puerto Cortez. The company celebrated this occasion with a pitiful imitation of its former pomp and ceremony, and there was much feasting and speech-making, and a special train was run from the interior to bring important natives to the ceremonies. But the train fell off the track four times, and was just a day late in consequence. The young man who had charge of the train told me this, and he also added that he did not believe in lotteries.

During these two years, when representatives of the company were taking rides of nine days each to the capital to overcome the objections of the new presidents who had sprung into office while these same representatives had been making their return trip to the coast, others were seeking a foothold for the company in the United States. The need of this was obvious and imperative. The necessity which had been forced upon them of holding the drawings out of this country, and of giving up the old name and trade-mark, was serious enough, though it had been partially overcome. It did not matter where they spun their wheel; but if the company expected to live, there must be some place where it could receive its mail and distribute its tickets other than the hot little Honduranian port, locked against all comers by quarantine for six months of the year, and only to be reached during the other six by a mail that arrives once every eight days.

The lottery could not entirely overcome this difficulty, of course, but through the aid of the express companies of this country it was able to effect a substitute, and through this cumbersome and expensive method of transportation its managers endeavored to carry on the business which in the days when the post-office helped them had brought them in twenty thousand letters in twenty-four hours. They selected for their base of operations in the United States the port of Tampa, in the State of Florida--that refuge of prize-fighters and home of unhappy Englishmen who have invested in the swamp-lands there, under the delusion that they were buying town sites and orange plantations, and which masquerades as a winter resort with a thermometer that not infrequently falls below freezing. So Tampa became their home; and though the legislature of that state proved incorruptible, so the lottery people themselves tell me, there was at least an understanding between them and those in authority that the express company was not to be disturbed, and that no other lottery was to have a footing in Florida for many years to come.

If Puerto Cortez proved interesting when it was only a name on a theatre programme, you may understand to what importance it grew when it could not be found on the map of any steamship company in New York, and when no paper of that city advertised dates of sailing to that port. For the first time Low’s Exchange failed me and asked for time, and the ubiquitous Cook & Sons threw up their hands, and offered in desperation and as a substitute a comfortable trip to upper Burmah or to Mozambique, protesting that Central America was beyond even their finding out. Even the Maritime Exchange confessed to a much more intimate knowledge of the west coast of China than of the little group of republics which lies only a three or four days’ journey from the city of New Orleans. So I was forced to haunt the shipping-offices of Bowling Green for days together, and convinced myself while so engaged that that is the only way properly to pursue the study of geography, and I advise every one to try it, and submit the idea respectfully to instructors of youth. For you will find that by the time you have interviewed fifty shipping-clerks, and learned from them where they can set you down and pick you up and exchange you to a fruit-vessel or coasting steamer, you will have obtained an idea of foreign ports and distances which can never be gathered from flat maps or little revolving globes. I finally discovered that there was a line running from New York and another from New Orleans, the fastest steamer of which latter line, as I learned afterwards, was subsidized by the lottery people. They use it every month to take their representatives and clerks to Puerto Cortez, when, after they have held the monthly drawing, they steam back again to New Orleans or Tampa, carrying with them the list of winning numbers and the prizes.

It was in the boat of this latter line that we finally awoke one morning to find her anchored in the harbor of Puerto Cortez.

The harbor is a very large one and a very safe one. It is encircled by mountains on the sea-side, and by almost impenetrable swamps and jungles on the other. Close around the waters of the bay are bunches and rows of the cocoanut palm, and a village of mud huts covered with thatch. There is also a tin custom-house, which includes the railroad-office and a comandancia, and this and the jail or barracks of rotting whitewashed boards, and the half-dozen houses of one story belonging to consuls and shipping agents, are the only other frame buildings in the place save one. That is a large mansion with broad verandas, painted in colors, and set in a carefully designed garden of rare plants and manaca palms. Two poles are planted in the garden, one flying the blue-and-white flag of Honduras, the other with the stripes and stars of the United States. This is the home of the exiled lottery. It is the most pretentious building and the cleanest in the whole republic of Honduras, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific slope.

I confess that I was foolish enough to regard this house of magnificent exterior, as I viewed it from the wharf, as seriously as a general observes the ramparts and defences of the enemy before making his advance. I had taken a nine days’ journey with the single purpose of seeing and getting at the truth concerning this particular building, and whether I was now to be viewed with suspicion and treated as an intruder, whether my object would be guessed at once and I should be forced to wait on the beach for the next steamer, or whether I would be received with kindness which came from ignorance of my intentions, I could not tell. And while I considered, a black Jamaica negro decided my movements for me. There was a hotel, he answered, doubtfully, but he thought it would be better, if Mr. Barross would let me in, to try for a room in the Lottery Building.

“Mr. Barross sometimes takes boarders,” he said, “and the Lottery Building is a fine house, sir--finest house this side Mexico city.” He added, encouragingly, that he spoke English “very good,” and that he had been in London.

Sitting on the wide porch of the Lottery Building was a dark-faced, distinguished-looking little man, a creole apparently, with white hair and white goatee. He rose and bowed as I came up through the garden and inquired of him if he was the manager of the lottery, Mr. Barross, and if he could give me food and shelter. The gentleman answered that he was Mr. Barross, and that he could and would do as I asked, and appealed with hospitable warmth to a tall, handsome woman, with beautiful white hair, to support him in his invitation. Mrs. Barross assented kindly, and directed her servants to place a rocking-chair in the shade, and requested me to be seated in it; luncheon, she assured me, would be ready in a half-hour, and she hoped that the voyage south had been a pleasant one.