Part 7

There do not seem to be very many men killed in these revolutions, but the ruin they bring to the country while they last, and which continues after they are over, while the “outs” are getting up another revolution, is so serious that any sort of continued prosperity or progress is impossible. Native merchants will not order goods that may never reach them, and neither do the gringos care to make contracts with men who in six months may not only be out of office, but out of the country as well. Sometimes a revolution takes place, and half of the people of the country will not know of it until it has been put down or has succeeded; and again the revolution may spread to every boundary, and all the men at work on the high-roads and in the mines or on the plantations must stop work and turn to soldiering, and pack-mules are seized, the mail-carriers stopped, plantations are devastated, and forced loans are imposed upon those who live in cities, so that every one suffers more or less through every change of executive. During the last revolution Tegucigalpa was besieged for six months, and was not captured until most of the public buildings had been torn open by cannon from the hills around the town, and the dwelling-houses still show where bullets marked the mud and plaster of the walls or buried themselves in the wood-work. The dining-room of our hotel was ventilated by such openings, and we used to amuse ourselves by tracing the course of the bullets from the hole they had made at one side of the room to their resting-place in the other. The native Honduranian is not energetic, and, except in the palace, there has been but little effort made by the victors to cover up the traces of their bombardment. Every one we met had a different experience to relate, and pointed out where he was sitting when a particular hole appeared in the plaster before him, or at which street corner a shell fell and burst at his feet.

It follows, of course, that a government which is created by force of arms, and which holds itself in place by the same power of authority, cannot be a very just or a very liberal one, even if its members are honest, and the choice of a majority of the people, and properly in office in spite of the fact that they fought to get there, and not on account of it. Bonilla was undoubtedly at one time elected President of Honduras, although he did not gain the presidential chair until after he had thrown his country into war and had invaded it at the head of troops from the rival republic of Nicaragua.

The Central-American cannot understand that when a bad man is elected to office legally it is better in the long-run that he should serve out his full term than that a better man should drive him out and defy the constitution. 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. They speak of a man as a “good revolutionist” just as we would speak of some one being a good pianist, or a good shot, or a good executive officer. It is a recognized calling, and the children grow up into fighters; and even those who have lived abroad, and who should have learned better, begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return to their old environment.

In each company of soldiers in Honduras there are two or three little boys in uniform who act as couriers and messengers, and who are able, on account of their slight figure, to penetrate where a man would be seen and shot. One of the officers in the revolution of 1894 told me he had sent six of these boys, one after another, with despatches across an open plain which was being raked by the rifles of the enemy. And as each boy was killed as he crawled through the sage-brush the other boys begged of their colonel to let them be the next to go, jumping up and down around him and snapping their fingers like school-boys who want to attract the attention of their teacher.

In the same revolution a young man of great promise and many acquirements, who had just returned from the States with two degrees from Columbia College, and who should have lived to turn his education to account in his own country, was killed with a rifle in his hand the third day after his arrival from New York. In that city he would probably have submitted cheerfully to any imposition of the law, and would have taken it quite as a matter of course had he been arrested for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding a bicycle at night without a lamp; but as soon as this graduate of Columbia smelled the powder floating on his native air he loaded a rifle, and sat out all day on the porch of his house taking chance shots at the revolutionists on the hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his brilliant career forever. The pity of it is that so much good energy should be wasted in obtaining such poor results, for nothing better ever seems to follow these revolutions. There is only a new form of dictatorship, which varies only in the extent of its revenge and in the punishments it metes out to its late opponents, but which must be, if it hopes to remain in power, a dictatorship and an autocracy.

The republics of Central America are republics in name only, and the movements of a stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are as closely watched as though he were a newspaper correspondent in Siberia. I often had to sign the names of our party twice in one day for the benefit of police and customs officers, and we never entered a hotel or boarded a steamer or disembarked from one that we were not carefully checked and receipted for exactly as though we were boxes of merchandise or registered letters. Even the natives cannot walk the street after nightfall without being challenged by sentries, and the collection of letters we received from alcaldes and comandantes and governors and presidents certifying to our being reputable citizens is large enough to paper the side of a wall. 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; it does not matter which, so long as it leaves the Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital of Costa Rica there is a statue of the Republic in the form of a young woman standing with her foot on the neck of General Walker, the American filibuster. We had planned to go to the capital for the express purpose of tearing that statue down some night, or blowing it up; so it is perhaps just as well for us that we could not get there; but it would have been a very good thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other man of force, had put his foot on the neck of every republic in Central America and turned it to some account.

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.

There is no more interesting question of the present day than that of what is to be done with the world’s land which is lying unimproved; whether it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its value. 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 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 lakes of Nicaragua are ready to furnish a passageway which should save two months of sailing around the Horn, and only forty-eight miles of swamp-land at Panama separate the two greatest bodies of water on the earth’s surface. Nature has done so much that there is little left for man to do, but it will have to be some other man than a native-born Central-American who is to do it.

We had our private audience with President Bonilla in time, and found him a most courteous and interesting young man. He is only thirty-six years of age, which probably makes him the youngest president in the world, and he carries on his watch-chain a bullet which was cut out of his arm during the last revolution. He showed us over the palace, and pointed out where he had shot holes in it, and entertained us most hospitably. The other members of the cabinet were equally kind, making us many presents, and offering Griscom a consul-generalship abroad, and consulates to Somerset and myself, but we said we would be ambassadors or nothing; so they offered to make us generals in the next revolution, and we accepted that responsible position with alacrity, knowing that not even the regiments to which we were accredited could force us again into Honduras.

Before we departed the president paid us a very doubtful compliment in asking us to ride with him. We supposed it was well meant, but we still have secret misgivings that it was a plot to rid himself of us and of the vice-president at the same time. When his secretary came to tell us that Dr. Bonilla would be glad to have us ride with him at five that afternoon, I recalled the fact that all the horses I had seen in Honduras were but little larger than an ordinary donkey, and quite as depressed and spiritless. So I accepted with alacrity. The other two men, being cross-country riders, and entitled to wear the gold buttons of various hunt clubs on their waistcoats, accepted as a matter of course. But when we reached the palace we saw seven or eight horses in the patio, none under sixteen hands high, and each engaged in dragging two or three grooms about the yard, and swinging them clear of the brick tiles as easily as a sailor swings a lead. The president explained to us that these were a choice lot of six stallions which he had just imported from Chili, and that three of them had never worn a saddle before that morning.

He gave one of these to Griscom and another one to the vice-president, for reasons best known to himself, and the third to Somerset. Griscom’s animal had an idea that it was better to go backward like a crab than to advance, so he backed in circles around the courtyard, while Somerset’s horse seemed best to enjoy rearing himself on his hind-legs, with the idea of rubbing Somerset off against the wall; and the vice-president’s horse did everything that a horse can do, and a great many things that I should not have supposed a horse could do, had I not seen it. I put my beast’s nose into a corner of the wall where he could not witness the circus performance going on behind him, and I watched the president’s brute turning round and round and round until it made me dizzy. We strangers confessed later that we were all thinking of exactly the same thing, which was that, no matter how many of our bones were shattered, we must not let these natives think they could ride any better than any chance American or Englishman, and it was only a matter of national pride that kept us in our saddles. The vice-president’s horse finally threw him into the doorway and rolled on him, and it required five of his officers to pull the horse away and set him on his feet again. The vice-president had not left his saddle for an instant, and if he handles his men in the field as he handled that horse, it is not surprising that he wins many battles.

Not wishing to have us all killed, and seeing that it was useless to attempt to kill the vice-president in that way, Dr. Bonilla sent word to the band to omit their customary salute, and so we passed out in grateful silence between breathless rows of soldiers and musicians and several hundreds of people who had never seen a life-sized horse before. We rode at a slow pace, on account of the vice-president’s bruises, while the president pointed out the different points from which he had attacked the capital. He was not accompanied by any guard on this ride, and informed us that he was the first president who had dared go abroad without one. He seemed to trust rather to the good-will of the _pueblo_, to whom he plays, and to whom he bowed much more frequently than to the people of the richer class. It was amusing to see the more prominent men of the place raise their hats to the president, and the young girls in the suburbs nodding casually and without embarrassment to the man. Before he set out on his ride he stuck a gold-plated revolver in his hip-pocket, which was to take the place of the guard of honor of former presidents, and to protect him in case of an attempt at assassination. It suggested that there are other heads besides those that wear a crown which rest uneasy.

It was a nervous ride, and Griscom’s horse added to the excitement by trying to back him over a precipice, and he was only saved from going down one thousand yards to the roofs of the city below by several of the others dragging at the horse’s bridle. When, after an hour, we found ourselves once more within sight of the palace, we covertly smiled at one another, and are now content never to associate with presidents again unless we walk.

We left Tegucigalpa a few days later with a generous escort, including all the consuls, and José Guiteris, the assistant secretary of state, and nearly all of the foreign residents. We made such a formidable showing as we raced through the streets that it suggested an uprising, and we cried, “Viva Guiteris!” to make the people think there was a new revolution in his favor. We shouted with the most loyal enthusiasm, but it only served to make Guiteris extremely unhappy, and he occupied himself in considering how he could best explain to Bonilla that the demonstration was merely an expression of our idea of humor. Twelve miles out we all stopped and backed the mules up side by side, and everybody shook hands with everybody else, and there were many promises to write, and to forward all manner of things, and assurances of eternal remembrance and friendship, and then the Guiteris revolutionists galloped back, firing parting salutes with their revolvers, and we fell into line again with a nod of satisfaction at being once more on the road.[B]

We never expected any conveniences or comforts on the road, and so we were never disappointed, and were much happier and more contented in consequence than at the capital, where the name promised so much and the place furnished so little. We found that it was not the luxuries of life that we sighed after, but the mere conveniences--those things to which we had become so much accustomed that we never supposed there were places where they did not exist. A chair with a back, for example, was one of the things we most wanted. We had never imagined, until we went to Honduras, that chairs grew without backs; but after we had ridden ten hours, and were so tired that each man found himself easing his spinal column by leaning forward with his hands on the pommel of his saddle, we wanted something more than a three-legged stool when we alighted for the night.

Our ride to the Pacific coast was a repetition of the ride to the capital, except that, as there was a full moon, we slept in the middle of the day and rode later in the night. During this nocturnal journey we met many pilgrims going to the festivals. They were all mounted on mules, and seemed a very merry and jovial company. Sometimes there were as many as fifty in one party, and we came across them picnicking in the shade by day, or jogging along in the moonlight in a cloud of white dust, or a cloud of white foam as they forded the broad river and their donkeys splashed and slipped in the rapids. The nights were very beautiful and cool, and the silence under the clear blue sky and white stars was like the silence of the plains. The moon turned the trail a pale white, and made the trees on either side of it alive with shadows that seemed to play hide-and-seek with us, and the stumps and rocks moved and gesticulated with life, until we drew up even with them, when they were transformed once more into wood and stone.

It was on the third day out from the capital, while we were picking our way down the side of a mountain, that Jeffs pointed to what looked like a lake of silver lying between two great hills, and we knew that we had crossed the continent, and so raised our hats and saluted the Pacific Ocean. A day later, after a long, rapid ride over a level plain where the trail was so broad that we could ride four abreast, we came to San Lorenzo, a little cluster of huts at the edge of the ocean. The settlement was still awake, for a mule train of silver had just arrived from the San Rosario mines, and the ruddy glare of pine knots was flashing through the chinks in the bamboo walls of the huts, and making yellow splashes of color in the soft white light of the moon. We swung ourselves out of the saddles for the last time, and gave the little mules a farewell pat and many thanks, to which they made no response whatsoever.

Five hours later we left the continent for the island of Amapala, the chief seaport of the Pacific side of Honduras, and our ride was at an end. We left San Lorenzo at two in the morning, but we did not reach Amapala, although it was but fifteen miles out to sea, until four the next afternoon. We were passengers in a long, open boat, and slept stretched on our blankets at the bottom, while four natives pulled at long sweeps. There were eight cross-seats, and a man sat on every other one. A log of wood in which steps had been cut was bound to each empty seat, and it was up this that the rower walked, as though he meant to stand up on the seat to which it was tied, but he would always change his mind and sink back again, bracing his left leg on the seat and his right leg on the log, and dragging the oar through the water with the weight of his body as he sank backwards. I lay on the ribs of the boat below them and watched them through the night, rising and falling with a slight toss of the head as they sank back, and with their brown naked bodies outlined against the sky-line. They were so silent and their movements so regular that they seemed like statues cut in bronze. By ten the next morning they became so far animated as to say that they were tired and hungry, and would we allow them to rest on a little island that lay half a mile off our bow? We were very glad to rest ourselves, and to get out of the sun and the glare of the sea, and to stretch our cramped limbs: so we beached the boat in a little bay, and frightened off thousands of gulls, which rose screaming in the air, and which were apparently the only inhabitants.

The galley-slaves took sticks of driftwood and scattered over the rocks, turning back the seaweed with their hands, and hacking at the base of the rocks with their improvised hammers. We found that they were foraging for oysters; and as we had nothing but a tin of sardines and two biscuits among five of us, and had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, we followed their example, and chipped the oysters off with the butts of our revolvers, and found them cool and coppery, like English oysters, and most refreshing. It was such a lonely little island that we could quite imagine we were cast away upon it, and began to play we were Robinson Crusoe, and took off our boots and went in wading, paddling around in the water after mussels and crabs until we were chased to shore by a huge shark. Then every one went to sleep in the sand until late in the afternoon, when a breeze sprang up, and a boatman carried us out on his shoulders, and we dashed off gayly under full sail to the isle of Amapala, where we bade good-bye to Colonel Jeffs and to the Republic of Honduras.

We had crossed the continent at a point where it was but little broader than the distance from Boston to New York, a trip of five hours by train, but which had taken us twenty-two days.

AT CORINTO

EVERY now and again each of us, either through his own choice or by force of circumstance, drops out of step with the rest of the world, and retires from it into the isolation of a sick-room, or to the loneliness of the deck of an ocean steamer, and for some short time the world somehow manages to roll on without him.

He is like a man who falls out of line in a regiment to fasten his shoelace or to fill his canteen, and who hears over his shoulder the hurrying tramp of his comrades, who are leaving him farther and farther behind, so that he has to run briskly before he can catch up with them and take his proper place once more in the procession.

I shall always consider the ten days we spent at Corinto, on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, while we waited for the steamer to take us south to Panama, as so many days of non-existence, as so much time given to the mere exercise of living, when we were no more of this world than are the prisoners in the salt-mines of Siberia, or the keepers of light-houses scattered over sunny seas, or the men who tend toll-gates on empty country lanes. And so when I read in the newspapers last fall that three British ships of war were anchored in the harbor of Corinto, with their guns loaded to the muzzles with ultimatums and no one knows what else besides, and that they meant to levy on the customs dues of that sunny little village, it was as much of a shock to me as it would be to the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow were they told that that particular spot was wanted as a site for a World’s Fair.

For no ships of any sort, certainly no ships of war, ever came to Corinto while we occupied the only balcony of its only hotel. Indeed, that was why we were there, and had they come we would have gone with them, no matter to what port they were bound, even to the uttermost parts of the earth.

We had come to Corinto from the little island of Amapala, which lies seventy-five miles farther up the coast, and which guards the only port of entry to Honduras on the Pacific seaboard. It is supposed to belong to the Republic of Honduras, but it is in reality the property of Rossner Brothers, who sell everything from German machetes to German music-boxes, and who could, if they wanted it, purchase the entire Republic of Honduras in the morning, and make a present of it to the Kaiser in the course of the afternoon. You have only to change the name of Rossner Brothers to the San Rosario Mining Company, to the Pacific Mail, to Errman Brothers, to the Panama Railroad Company, and you will identify the actual rulers of one or of several of the republics of Central America.