Part 22

Cartagena, “The Heroic City,” from its very beginning was the objective of every expedition undertaken to wrest from Spain her rich domain in the Indies; its fortifications stood as a perpetual challenge to the freebooters who pillaged the Spanish Main in the days of the galleons. This challenge was accepted more than once to Cartagena’s heavy cost. Sir Henry Morgan, Robert Vaal, Martin Cote, Du Casse, Sieur des Pointes, and Sir Francis Drake sacked the town, and later it was the object of the most important attack made against Spain in the new world prior to the nineteenth century, when, in 1741, the English Admiral Vernon undertook his memorable campaign on the Caribbean. He assembled at Jamaica 29 ships of the line and nearly 100 transports, carrying a total force of 27,000 soldiers and sailors. His siege of Cartagena began on the 4th of March and lasted two months, and was attended by enormous losses. The event is peculiarly interesting to North Americans because of the fact that the land forces, under General Wentworth, contained a contingent drawn from the thirteen English colonies in North America, and that the commander of this contingent was Colonel Lawrence Washington, elder brother of the immortal George. It was through admiration for Admiral Vernon’s brilliant but unsuccessful action that Washington gave to his Virginia estate the name of Mount Vernon.

“Cartagena de Indias,” as the old kings of Spain loved to call their “very royal and loyal city,” ranks third in point of age in the new world, and still retains more of its early characteristics than any of the others. Its antiquity is everywhere in evidence. Like the battlements and castles at its entrance, the city seems to have been built of the yellow-white coral laid in concrete, which seems to be indestructible. If one could fly over it in an airship, and look down upon its closely massed, red-tiled houses, and, beyond, upon the deep green of the country-side, with the exquisite blue effects of the Caribbean and the tropic sky, the city would seem gemlike in its romantic beauty. The narrow streets of rough stone are overhung at frequent intervals with the protruding windows and balconies familiar to visitors in Lima and others of the older Spanish cities, yet there is an individuality about the houses here that is far more fascinating, and facing the parks are many fine examples of the old churches and convents which constitute the distinctive architecture of the colonial régime. Surrounding these buildings are luxuriant gardens, presenting a riot of color, in which the peculiarly refreshing green of the hot countries predominates.

Among the many substantial dwellings occupied by the wealthy is one that was the seat of the terrible Inquisition which sat here from 1610 until 1821. San Felipe de Barajas, an old castle and fort lying on a low hill overlooking the city, is full of interesting underground passages, as are many of the fortifications, and although utterly abandoned and falling into decay, is still a forceful and grim reminder of the mediæval period of storm and stress. On the top of another hill, called “La Popa,” lying back of the town, still stands the ancient convent of Santa Candelaria, serving as a landmark to mariners passing that way, its white or light yellow buildings being visible for many miles out at sea. Here the visitor is shown where a buccaneer amused himself on the occasion of one of the raids by hurling the nuns over the edge of the perpendicular cliff on which the convent stands.

Cartagena in the old days surpassed Mexico, Lima, Panamá, and Havana in importance, and stood forth as the commercial giant of Spain in America; it represented, as did no other American city, the pomp and magnificence of her sixteenth and seventeenth century imperialism. Now all this is past; even as the natural gateway for Colombia’s productiveness, she has lost her position, the North American-built railroad connecting the port with the Magdalena River, at Calamar, having proved powerless to restore even a small measure of her prestige against the rising commercial importance of Puerto Colombia and Barranquilla. The latter port has now become the _entrepôt_ of commerce with the interior by the great waterway of the Magdalena.

On the desolate stretch of Colombia’s Pacific coast there is but one city of importance, Buenaventura. This is the busy exchange that taps the fertile region of the upper Atrato basin, and when the Panamá Canal shall have been opened should spring into greater importance along with the other ports of the West Coast. In the interior Colombia possesses many cities of considerable size, ranging from thirty to sixty thousand inhabitants, which are centers for the mining and agricultural districts—Pamplona in the mountains near the Venezuela frontier, Bucarmanga, a little to the west, Mompóz, near the confluence of the Cauca and Magdalena, once a port on the latter river but now, owing to the erratic wanderings of that stream, twenty miles east of it, Medellín, in the Cauca valley; Popayán and Pasto near the head waters of that river, and La Plata on the other side of the Central Cordillera.

The Hon. John Barrett and Hon. William L. Scruggs, both former Ministers of the United States at Bogotá, have written extensively of Colombia’s commercial possibilities and predict great strides for the hermit republic. “Colombia,” writes Mr. Barrett, “is a wonderland of opportunity. Measured by the standards of other countries it can be said without exaggeration that the Republic of Colombia, in proportion to area and population, is the richest of all in the variety and extent of undeveloped resources, fullest in promise for future growth and reward to mankind.” “Colombia,” he continues, “is at our very doors; it is nearer to the principal ports of the United States than any other South American country, and yet we have done little to study her internal wealth or to take part in her foreign commerce.” The country is only nine hundred and fifty miles away from us; from Cartagena to Tampa, Florida, the distance is less than from New York to St. Louis. The foreign trade of Colombia last year amounted to $26,000,000, in which the United States participated to the extent of only $11,000,000.

Mr. Scruggs says in closing his interesting work on Colombia: “Such is the country as nature has made it—picturesque, beautiful, and exceedingly rich and varied in undeveloped resources. As yet man has done very little for it, the greater part being still unbroken wilderness.... The commercial possibilities of the country are almost incalculable; and the time is probably not very remote when the fact will be more fully realized by the great commercial powers of the world.”

XI

VENEZUELA

At the end of his “swing around the circle” of South American countries (having begun with Brazil), the traveler comes to Venezuela—the huge republic that bulges out into the northernmost nub of the continent, where the terminal ranges of the Andes turn eastward to meet the great Guiana Highlands and form those high-flung ramparts that protect the fertile, low-lying Amazon plains from the Atlantic. This black, mountainous front runs along the Caribbean coast line for some fifteen hundred miles, broken at intervals, however, where the lovely blue of the tropical sea sweeps inland to meet the bright green of some great river basin.

Southward, Venezuela spreads down over an irregularly shaped territory extending from twelve degrees north latitude to the equator. Her varied topography, too, produces almost every change of climate, from the cold of the mountains—some of whose peaks reach high enough to earn the title of _nevada_—down through the temperate zone of the _llanos_, or rolling plains that slope off into the great Orinoco basins, where wheat, corn, and cattle abound, and the country’s great staples, coffee, cotton, and tobacco are grown, to the hot Orinoco jungles that trail off to the south, where rubber and cacao trees luxuriate without cultivation, and sugar cane, oranges, fruits, and pineapples thrive in the clearings. More than half of Venezuela’s territory may be ignored from the commercial standpoint of to-day, for it is either Alaskan or Amazonian in character and can be reserved for later needs of the human family if, as Humboldt prophesied, the Amazon valley should become the feeding ground of mankind.

No description has ever done justice to the beauties of Venezuela’s landscape of mountain and valley and mighty rivers, of warm green pastures and blue skies, and the mystic shimmering white of an occasional snow-capped peak. The country that so appeals to the traveler’s interest is nearly six hundred thousand square miles in area, and could include within its confines the States of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. Its mountainous coast saw the beginning of the European invasion of the new world. Columbus, Vespucci, and Ojeda touched here. Ojeda gave the country its name. When, on his way west from the Orinoco, he rounded Cape San Roman and turned into the Gulf of Maracaibo, he saw Indian villages composed of houses built on piles in the water along the shores, which suggested something of a resemblance to Venice, and he called the place Venezuela (Little Venice); and soon the whole coast, and eventually the country beyond, became so known—a region larger than all Italy and Spain combined. This coast and the white-walled cities nestling in the heights among the magnificent trees formed the storied Spanish Main.

Cumaná, in the middle east, is the oldest European settlement in South America; it was in its old church that Las Casas preached—the saintly priest who was the Indian’s ablest champion in the early days of Spanish devastation, but who, with regret be it said, is reputed also to have been the father of African slavery in the new world, for it was he, so the chroniclers say, who suggested that negroes be imported to labor in the fields and mines and relieve the Indians of a burden they were both temperamentally and physically unfitted to bear. Venezuela was the birthplace of the resistance to Spain’s oppression of her colonies, and of Miranda, Bolívar, Sucré, and the fiery young patriot, Yáñez—the men who led the van of that resistance. Through her land flows one of the world’s greatest rivers, the Orinoco, with its four thousand miles of navigable waters. The vast productiveness of the country and its stores of mineral wealth are sufficient to sustain twenty times its present population of two millions and a half. And, finally, Venezuela is nearer to us than any other country in South America.

A most agreeable route for the traveler leaving Colombian ports for Venezuela is by the steamers which zigzag around the Caribbean Sea for ten days or more on the way to Europe, and touch at many of the once famous old ports before reaching La Guayra, the sea gateway to Caracas. Immediately after leaving Colombian waters and rounding the Guajira peninsula, the ship enters the great Gulf of Maracaibo, one hundred and fifty miles in extent from east to west, and sixty miles from north to south. Passing along in through a narrow strait, the almost equally large Lake of Maracaibo swells out before the traveler. This great body of water drains an extensive basin lying between two terminal spurs of the Andes—the Sierra de Parija and the Sierra Mérida—and into it flow many rivers having their source in the surrounding mountains. Inside, on the east bank of the strait, lies the city of Maracaibo, now one of the most important centers on the north coast, for here is shipped the produce of the vast fertile region of western Venezuela—coffee, cacao, tobacco, castor beans, hardwood timber, and dyewoods. Much of the produce of the eastern slope of Colombia also finds its way to Europe and the States through this port; fully half of what is known in our markets as “Maracaibo coffee” is really a Colombian product.

The tropical scenery of the plains sloping down to the lake, and the mountains, with their suggestion of snowy freshness, make the setting of this port one of the most interesting on the continent. A dozen or more of the peaks in the Mérida range are snow-capped, and two of them—Concha and Coluna—rise to a height of over fifteen thousand feet. Years ago a passing visitor to Maracaibo, mistaking the discomforts of the humidity and heat for general dissolution, pronounced the place “the graveyard of Europeans.” Such hasty judgment is a great injustice, for the rate of mortality here is less than in many of the other tropical ports.

Rounding the eastern enclosure of the Gulf, the Paraguana peninsula, the traveler comes upon the quaint old town of Coro, founded in 1527, and one of the very first of the European settlements. It was this town that the governor, sent out by the Germans to whom the King of Spain at first leased the country, made his capital, and from which he undertook his disastrous expeditions in search of El Dorado. Afterward, until 1576, it was the seat of Spain’s government of the colony, and is now the capital of the State of Falcón. Here, also, Miranda made his first resistance to Spanish misrule at the beginning of the revolutionary war. Coro is but a few miles south of the Dutch Island of Curaçao, that most picturesque fragment of Amsterdam perched on a coral rock.

Sweeping out eastward over the sea, as if in continuation of the Mérida range, is the Cordillera de la Silla (the “Saddle Range”), which terminates abruptly at Cape Codera. Midway between this cape and Coro, lies the important seaboard city of Puerto Cabello. Its environment is not only remarkably attractive—like an oasis to the traveler who has sailed along the bleak coast range for many hours—but it is to-day one of the finest harbors in the world, as it was in the days of the early navigators, who said of it that “a vessel is safe here, anchored by a single hair (_cabello_).” The city is connected by rail, over the Silla Cordillera, with the prosperous little city of Valencia, some fifty miles distant, and thence, by waters of Lake Valencia, with Cura and other important inland towns which are commercial centers of a large part of the region that slopes inland from the coast range. Puerto Cabello is, therefore, the export depot of the States of Carabobo, Lara, and Zamora, three of the most productive commonwealths of the Venezuelan federal union. It was once a rendezvous of the buccaneers and, later, the scene of General Páez’s astonishing night attack on the Royalist forces during the revolution, when, with his small command, he forced the surrender of General Calzada’s entire army. To-day the city has a population of about ten thousand, and many modern improvements—electricity, water supply, well-paved streets, and a number of attractive new buildings, that harmonize, however, with the fine old plazas and colonial residences.

Eastward, some sixty-five miles toward Cape Codera, and halfway the length of the Silla range, the traveler sights the great peak of Picacho rising from the water’s edge to a height of over seven thousand feet. Along this promontory, on a narrow strip of beach, are scattered groups of sixteenth century houses, white and red-topped for the most part; some of them nestle inland in coves of the mountains or look over the blue Caribbean from shelves of the cliffs above. This is La Guayra, the seaport of the republic’s capital. High above, overhanging the business center of the town, stands the ancient and picturesque Spanish fortress of early colonial days, and just below, on another bench of rock, is the old bull ring. Overlooking all, on a high bluff, are the ruins of the old castle which was the residence of the Captain-General during the Spanish régime. To those who have enjoyed Kingsley’s great historical novel, “Westward Ho!” the old ruins will have a romantic interest, for it was from the walls of this fortress-castle that Amyas Leigh escaped after his vain attempt to rescue the Rose of Devon.

Baron von Humboldt said that there is but one place in the world that can rival La Guayra in the splendor of its setting—Santa Cruz de Teneriffe, which points one of the Canary Islands off the Moroccan coast. La Guayra is now all business, but not business of the feverish, bustling kind, as the visitor will find, after an entire morning spent in passing from one leisurely official to another in the effort to enter the country. The port usually serves the traveler merely as a landing place on his way to Caracas. If for any reason, however, he should prefer to delay his visit to the capital, he would do well to run up the coast some three miles east of the port city, to the pleasant little watering place, Macuto, the resort of the leisure class of the near-by capital.

Caracas is but seven miles inland from the port as the crow flies, but the actual distance by rail is twenty-two miles. The steep, winding road was started by American enterprise, and at a cost of over $100,000 per mile. It is now controlled by Englishmen, and so great is the traffic, that the little line never fails to be busy. For two hours the train zigzags up the perilous ascent to a height of three thousand feet before it turns sharply around a dizzy precipice and enters the beautiful valley of Caracas. Until this turn is made the traveler is rarely ever shut off from the gorgeous blue of the Caribbean. So superb is the constantly changing view, that he will feel more than repaid for the sensations of giddiness that may assail him as the train swings around the many curves on the route, and the yawning chasms overlooked from the car windows are but added beauties to the scene, instead of death traps, for so excellent is the construction and so efficient the management that there has never been an accident along the entire length.

Caracas is usually much on the visitor’s mind during the days of his approach. His mental picture doubtless will have been colored from some newspaper cut of a dirty, tatterdemalion crew, entitled “The President’s Body Guard,” or by some equally deceptive idea of chaotic civic affairs. But he will by this time have learned, from his visits to other Venezuelan centers, that this charming and progressive country has been greatly maligned by our North American press. He will be entirely reassured the instant the train comes to a stop and he descends at the clean, pleasant little station and, in cab or trolley car, enters the fine old Spanish metropolis, rich in creature comforts, dignity, history, and civic pride. The population of the city now exceeds 70,000, in which there is but a very small percentage of citizens of foreign birth.

Unquestionably Caracas is one of the most delightful places of residence in the world. It lies in a valley three thousand feet up from the sea, on either side of which towers a range of mountains, one about seven, the other nine thousand feet. The tropical heat is tempered to a springlike mildness by the high altitude, and the luxuriant fertility resulting from the misty rains wafted down from the mountains, make of the city and its environs a garden of astonishing beauty. One old gentleman, retired from the British diplomatic service after many years in Caracas, preferred to end his days here, where, he said, it was “but a step to Paradise.”

The city is laid out in the usual Spanish colonial scheme—in streets running at right angles to each other, forming blocks of nearly uniform size. Prior to the liberation from Spain, the streets bore names expressive of the dominant influence of religion—names that seem strange to us now: _Encarnación del Hijo de Dios_ (Incarnation of the Son of God), _Dulce Nombre de Jesus_ (Sweet Name of Jesus), _Presentación del Niño Jesus en el Templo_ (Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple), _Huido á Egypto_ (Flight to Egypt), and many others of like import—a custom prevalent in most of the ancient cities of Spain and her colonies, and one which still prevails in Cuba. Fronting on the narrow, paveless streets are the plastered, red-tiled houses found in all North Andean cities; behind the bars the pretty Venezuelan girls look out from their cloistered seclusion with the same wistfulness that is noted in Bogotá and Lima.

The House of Congress is on the road to everywhere; inside it the decorations and frescoes are exceptionally fine, and perpetuate many of the principal events in the life of the nation. Miraflores, the appropriately named home of Venezuela’s president, is open to visitors at certain hours. In the Pantéon, to the north of the city, repose the remains of Bolívar in a superb tomb of Parian marble. Upon it stands a statue of the Liberator, wrapped in his military cloak—a noble and dignified figure. In front of the cathedral is the broad Plaza Bolívar, in the center of which, amidst a profusion of tropical plants, rises the equestrian statue of the nation’s hero. Another may be seen in Bolívar Park, on which front several federal buildings; the coins bear Bolívar’s name, and the largest state of the Union, as well as its capital, Ciudad Bolívar, is similarly honored—everywhere throughout the republic his name is revered as is Washington’s with us. In the museum of the University, in a room kept sacred as the “Holiest of Holies,” are displayed the Liberator’s clothing, saddle, boots, and spurs, and many relics intimately connected with his brilliant career. Among them is a portrait of Washington, sent him by Custis, bearing the inscription, “This picture of the Liberator of North America is sent by his adopted son to him who acquired equal glory in South America.”

The white group of buildings of the Vargas Hospital, on the heights near the city, presents a beautiful picture against the mountains in the background. This is one of the most extensive and best equipped in America—either North or South. In the Academía de Bellas Artes are displayed the works of Michelena, a son of Caracas, whose paintings have obtained an international reputation, and many other pictures by native artists from which one may get a good idea of the great scenic beauty of Venezuela.

Although there are no active volcanoes in Venezuela, the country has been subject to many destructive earthquakes, notably in 1812, when Caracas was nearly destroyed at a cost of some twelve thousand lives. As a consequence of the constant presence of this menace, the buildings of the capital are almost uniformly of one story. From the Monte Calvario, on the outskirts of the city, the general aspect is flat and monotonous, but a walk through the broader avenues and the fifteen or more parks and plazas, gives to the visitor vistas of foliage and flowers that leave on his mind the impression of a lovely garden.

The capital is connected by railway with Puerto Cabello, via Lake Valencia. This is the attractive scenic route that is made a part of the Caribbean excursions offered by the steamship lines each winter. The road passes through indescribably beautiful mountains and _llanos_—alternating wooded slopes and meadows, and richly productive fields of maize and wheat. Frequent stops are made at the stations of important plantations or the busy centers of this great agricultural region: La Victoria, San Mateo, and Valencia, the last-named a modernized city of forty thousand inhabitants and the capital of the State of Carabobo, one hundred and thirty-seven miles from Caracas.