SPANISH AMERICA

THE SOUTH AMERICAN SERIES

Demy 8vo, cloth.

1. CHILE. By G. F. Scott Elliott, F.R.G.S. With an Introduction by Martin Hume, a Map, and 39 Illustrations. (4th Impression.)

2. PERU. By C. Reginald Enock, F.R.G.S. With an Introduction by Martin Hume, a Map, and 72 Illustrations. (3rd Impression.)

3. MEXICO. By C. Reginald Enock, F.R.G.S. With an Introduction by Martin Hume, a Map, and 64 Illustrations. (3rd Impression.)

4. ARGENTINA. By W. A. Hirst. With an Introduction by Martin Hume, a Map, and 64 Illustrations. (4th Impression.)

5. BRAZIL. By Pierre Denis. With a Historical Chapter by Bernard Miall, a Map, and 36 Illustrations. (2nd Impression.)

6. URUGUAY. By W. H. Koebel. With a Map and 55 Illustrations.

7. GUIANA: British, French, and Dutch. By James Rodway. With a Map and 36 Illustrations.

8. VENEZUELA. By Leonard V. Dalton, B.Sc. (Lond.), F.G.S., F.R.G.S. With a Map and 36 Illustrations. (2nd Impression.)

9. LATIN AMERICA: Its Rise and Progress. By F. Garcia Calderon. With a Preface by Raymond Poincaré, President of France, a Map, and 34 Illustrations. (2nd Impression.)

10. COLOMBIA. By Phanor James Eder, A.B., LL.B. With 2 Maps and 40 Illustrations. (2nd Impression.)

11. ECUADOR. By C. Reginald Enock, F.R.G.S.

12. BOLIVIA. By Paul Walle. With 62 Illustrations and 4 Maps.

13. PARAGUAY. By W. H. Koebel.

14. CENTRAL AMERICA. By W. H. Koebel.

"The output of the books upon Latin America has in recent years been very large, a proof doubtless of the increasing interest that is felt in the subject. Of these the South American Series edited by Mr. Martin Hume is the most noteworthy."—Times.

"Mr. Unwin is doing good service to commercial men and investors by the production of his 'South American Series.'"—Saturday Review.

"Those who wish to gain some idea of the march of progress in these countries cannot do better than study the admirable 'South American Series.'"—Chamber of Commerce Journal.

COLON: STATUE REPRESENTING COLUMBUS PROTECTING THE INDIANS.

Vol. I. Frontispiece.

SPANISH AMERICA

ITS ROMANCE, REALITY
AND FUTURE

BY
C. R. ENOCK, C.E., F.R.G.S.
AUTHOR OF "THE ANDES AND THE AMAZON," "PERU,"
"MEXICO," "ECUADOR," ETC.

WITH 25 ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. I

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1920

(All rights reserved)

[PREFACE]

The purpose of this work is twofold—to afford a broad survey of the Latin American countries, with the colour and interest which so strongly characterizes this half of the New World; and to offer in some degree a detailed study of the region as concerns what (elsewhere) I have ventured to term a "science of humanity" or science of corporate life, whose main factors are topographical, occupational or industrial, and ethical or ethical-economic. New responsibilities are arising in our dealings and contact with foreign lands, especially those whose social affairs are still backward. We must beware how we regard the folk of such lands mainly as hewers of wood and drawers of water, or absorbents of exported goods or producers of dividends, or their lands as mainly reservoirs of raw material. Elemental forces are at work in the world to-day, which only justice and constructive intelligence can control. The English-speaking peoples have wide interests and consequent responsibilities in these lands: matters which are discussed in the final chapter.

As will be seen, I have embodied many descriptive passages in this book from the various authors of the South American Series, to which the present work is in a measure auxiliary.

C. R. E.

Froxfield, Hants, England.
May 1920.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[SPANISH AMERICA]

[CHAPTER I]

A RECONNAISSANCE

AND SOME INFORMAL GEOGRAPHY

Who has not felt at some time the lure of Spanish America, the attraction of those half-mysterious lands—Peru or Panama, Mexico or Brazil, and all that galaxy of far-off States, with the remains of their ancient civilization and their picturesque modern setting—beneath the equatorial sun, beyond the Western sea? They drew us in our youth, were it but in the pages of Prescott, when with Cortes and Pizarro the Aztec and Inca Empires lay before us; they draw us even in maturer years.

Yonder lies the Spanish Main, glittering in the sun as when we sailed it first—in that long-foundered pirate craft of boyhood; there stretch the tropic shores of wild Guiana; there the great Andes rears its towering crests, and over golden sands the Orinoco and the Amazon pour down their mighty floods; whilst, in slumberous and mysterious majesty beyond, wide as the sea of Time, the vast Pacific echoes on its boundless shores. And for those, who would seek the true El Dorado of the West the great Sixteenth Century has not closed yet, nor ever will; the days of ocean-chivalry are not dead, the Elizabethan mariners come and go, for their voyages have no end within those spacious days of history.

Spanish America, in fact, is enshrouded in an atmosphere of romance and interest which time does not easily dispel, and remains a land of adventure and enterprise. Its sunny shores, its picturesque folk with their still semi-mediaeval life, despite their advancing civilization—the great untravelled spaces, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, and all they contain, the lure and profit of commerce and of trafficking—all these are matters we cannot separate from the New World as peopled by Spain and Portugal.

It is, moreover, peculiarly a world of its own, born in an impressionable period, indelibly stamped with the strong individualism of the Iberian people who overcame it, and it remains apart, refusing the hegemony of the commercialistic age—a circumstance for which we may be grateful, in a sense. Its future is on the lap of the unknown, offering always the unexpected: geography has everywhere separated it from the Old World; temperament keeps the seclusion.

Whatever be our errand in this new world—erroneously termed "new," for it is old, and had its folk, its Toltecs and pre-Incas, in the apogee of their ancient culture developed a shipbuilding as they did a temple-building art, they might have come sailing around the world and found us here in Britain still "painted savages"; whatever, I say, be our errand there, we shall not understand Spanish America and its people, just as they will never understand us, the people of Anglo-Saxon race. The gulf between us is as deep as the Atlantic, as wide as the Pacific. The incomprehensible Spaniard has added himself to the unfathomable Indian, the red-brown man who sprang from the rugged soil of America (perhaps from some remote Mongolian ancestry), who, inscrutable as a dweller of the moon, is still sullen and secretive as he was and well might be—after the rapine which followed on the white man's keel and sail upon his shores four centuries ago; the white conqueror, who in his adventurous greed destroyed the Egypt and the Chaldea of America and trampled their autochthonous civilization in the dust.

And as to the Spaniards, it is their strong individualism which presents a marked attraction here, though one which may not generally have been put into words: the individualism of nations founded upon historical and geographical bases, as has already been said. We approach here, not a mere United States of Spanish America, not a confederation of vast municipalities or provinces whose borders are imaginary parallels or meridians, but a series of independent nations, each stamped with its own character, bearing its own indelible and romantic name, whose frontiers are rivers and mountain ranges.

Is there any virtue in these things? In the day when prosaic commercialism, when megalomania and money so sway us, there is a refreshing atmosphere about the refusal to conglomerate of these picturesque communities, whose names fall pleasingly on our ears. Yet there are penalties too. Rugged and difficult of approach—the vulgar gaze may not easily rest upon them by the mere passport of a tourist's ticket—as are these vast territories of forest, desert and Cordillera, Nature, though grand and spacious, is ill at ease, and the mood might seem to be impressed upon the people of the land that neither is there peace for them. For they have soaked their land with the blood of their own sons, and we might at times despair of self-government here.

But we need not despair. The malady is but part of one that afflicts the whole world, whose cure awaits the turning of the next page of human evolution—a page which can be turned whenever slothful humanity desires to do it.

Spanish America is really one of the most interesting fields of travel in the world, even if it does not make great pretension of its attractions. From the point of view of the holiday-maker it has remained undeveloped. The traveller who requires luxuriance of travel, of hotel and pleasure-resort, such as the playgrounds of Europe afford, will not find such here, except perhaps in a few of the more advanced cities. It is a continent which, despite its four centuries of discovery, has so far done little more than present its edge to the forces—and pleasures—of modern life. Nature is in her wildest moods: it is an unfinished world; mankind is still plastic. The mountain trail and the horse are more in evidence than the railway and the motor-car; the fonda rather than the hotel. Here, moreover, Don Quixote de la Mancha has taken up his abode, and we may find him often, to our pleasure if we like his company, as some of us do.

But let us dismount. Here are beautiful cities too. A sensitive and developing people, the Spanish American folk would resent any aspersion of their civilization. They have all the machinery of culture to their hand. Here the Parisian toilette rubs shoulders in their streets and plazas with the blanketed and sandalled Indian; the man of fashion and the man of the Stone Age walk the same pavement. Here in these pleasing towns—some of them marvels of beauty, some of them in an atmosphere of perpetual spring, some miles above the sea—are palaces of justice, art and science. Here are republican kings and plutocrats, rich with the product of the field and mine, here are palms and music, homes of highly cultured folk, speaking their soft Castilian: shops stored with all the luxury of Europe or the United States. Here are streets of quaint colonial architecture, and courteous hosts and hostesses, and damsels of startling beauty in all the elegance of the mode.

Here, too, are smooth-tongued lawyer statesmen, dominating (as they always do) the Senatorial Councils. It is true that from time to time there are disturbing elements when rude soldier-politicians break in upon the doctor-politicians with the clatter of a mule-battery, on the pavement, and the sword takes the place of the bauble; it is true that the walls of the streets are pitted here and there with bullet marks, from some whiff of grapeshot, and that there are stains of blood upon the pavements; and it is true that against the white walls of justice, science, art and oratory stands silhouetted the figure of the poor Indian, or peon, who slinks humilde amid the palms and music—doffing his hat as he passes the Cathedral precincts—and that the veneer of civilization, torn aside, reveals at times both the cultured and the uncultured savage.

Here, too, congregate the merchants and traffickers of all the world, Old and New, from all the four corners of the earth to buy and sell. Here is the Frenchman with his emporium of finery, the Spaniard with his groceries, or the Italian with his wares, the Arab with his little shop, the Chinaman with his laundry (and his peculiar affinity with the Indian, perhaps of the same mother-race), the German with his hardware, drugs and cheap jewellery and much besides; the English or American with every commodity, and in addition his mining schemes and railways and steamers, or his municipal stocks and bonds. For Spanish America is now a peculiarly attractive Mecca of the international merchant and pedlar, who does it services both good and ill.

Here, in this financial and business field, the Englishman has been predominant (though that predominance may not always be, for he is closely pressed now and must not muddle on).

England, indeed, soon conquered a world commercially which she bungled in overcoming in conquest. She early scorned Columbus, or would not help him; at Cartagena, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Ayres, and elsewhere, her admirals and generals seem to have failed, and she secured but a couple of small footholds on the continent and some rich islands off its coast. Perhaps it was destiny; perhaps we would not now have it otherwise, and the Spanish American civilization develops more interestingly alone. But interesting too would have been a British Indian Empire in America, perhaps with possibilities and results of value to the world.

But, despite all this, the British name here stands high, and heaven grant it always may.

Not for all her past misdeeds, nor the present defects arising from them, shall we forget the gifts that Spain has made to the New World. To-day it might indeed be said that some of the main problems of colonial empires are but beginning (as witness Egypt and India under British rule). Spain made nations, even it they afterwards fell from her by misgovernment or from natural causes. She implanted her religion, literature, culture, language, architecture over hundreds of thousands of miles of forbidding desert and Cordillera, as we shall see in these pages. Over a zone of the earth's territory seven thousand miles long, from the Mexican border with the United States, throughout the twenty Republics of Central and South America, to the tapering end of Chile, the Spanish language is the medium of communication, a language-area vaster than any in the world.

And Portugal, the patron of great voyagers and explorers, has left her mark and language upon her half of the New World, the old empire of Brazil, with a population greater than that of all her neighbours combined. Less dominating than the Spaniard in the long run—for Portugal has always said of herself that she could conquer but not colonize—Portugal has left her own Iberian culture in Latin America.

Here, indeed, are the elements of life in the making, of a civilization whose life is before it rather than behind it; often picturesque, often sombre, always, as we have said, a world of its own, and possessed of its own peculiar attractiveness.

Some rather serious doubts have assailed my mind in regard to the succeeding portion of this chapter, as to how far the weighty matters of geography and travel-description may be treated informally. Dare we "speak disrespectfully of the Equator," or too lightly tread over Cancer or Capricorn?

But the home-returned traveller knows that treatment of geography and travel is generally informal—not to say casual—especially among our good English folk, and at dinner, where white shirt-fronts do gleam, and feminine elegance is displayed, he may have to answer somewhat elemental questions upon the whereabouts of this or that land, region, or locality he has visited, or upon the nature and customs of its particular inhabitants.

Nor is this confined to Society chatter alone at such pleasant moments. In the London Board Room perhaps some stout and comfortable director of possibly half a dozen companies whose operations are of no meanly distributed geographical range may ask where such and such a country is, with most complacent ignorance of maps and globes; perhaps, also, in a few words doing what it was long since said we could not do, "drawing up an indictment against a whole nation," for doubtless weighty (financial) reasons of his own. As to the general public, it goes on its way careless of where places are—except that, by reason of the Great War, it has grown accustomed to looking at the maps so beneficially inserted in the columns of our daily Press, and strives to hold the balance between kilometres and miles.

The foregoing lack of familiarity with the round world and they that dwell therein is especially true of the lands of Spanish America (or Latin America, to use that more cumbrous but more accurate term). "Where in the world is Ecuador, or Costa Rica, or Paraguay?" some one may impatiently exclaim if we mention that we were held up by quarantine in Guayaquil on account of yellow fever, or other incident of other spot. "Where is Bolivia?" is another not infrequent query, but generally made in ignorance of its first and classical utterance, it is reputed, in the anecdote relating to Lord Palmerston and the President—many years ago—of that Republic.

Some think Mexico is in South America, and, no doubt drawing their ideas from their or their parents' study of Prescott in the Victorian age, ask if the Mexicans really wear feathers and carry knives. The position of Peru puzzles many good folk, although it is generally believed to be somewhere in South America, which of course is right. Chile, again; where does it lie? Did not some one once describe Chile—if you look at the map—as a country two thousand miles long and two inches wide? Again, striving to give an idea of the vast length of Chile, one writer of the country has graphically remarked that you may conceive it as a "long, narrow trough of which one end could be placed at Queenstown and the other near New York, but along which luggage could not be rolled." No offence is here meant to the enterprising people of that land, who resisted so stoutly the pretensions of their neighbours of Argentina in order that this narrow width might not be pared down still closer, a contention finally ended by the arbitration of King Edward of Britain.

For both Argentina and Brazil seem to have been bent, at one time or another, on carrying out the principle that to him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, for both of them sprawl—geographically that is—across the South American Continent and crowd their smaller neighbours into its margins or corners, if crowding be possible here. As for Brazil, it must have more political frontiers, one imagines, than any other nation in the world.

AVENIDA CENTRAL, RIO DE JANEIRO.

Vol. I. To face p. 20.

The traveller sometimes finds it necessary to explain that Colombia has nothing to do with British Columbia. It is a republic quite unassociated with our Imperial outpost of British Columbia. As for Venezuela, only those who have been there can ever be expected to know where it is, notwithstanding that it is the part of South America nearest to Europe and was that first sighted by Columbus. The Guianas are rightly associated by many with Demerara sugar, but Demerara, it has to be mentioned, is not the whole of British Guiana, and there are in addition French and Dutch Guiana. British Guiana and British Honduras—which latter, let us remark, is not in South but in Central America (location to be explained later)—are the only foothold of the British Empire on the mainland of Spanish America. Guiana, moreover, has nothing to do with Guinea, in Africa, or New Guinea, in Asia. Few people at home know where these places are or who lives there or what they do. As to the first-named, it is interesting to see that a deputation has recently arrived from the colony in the Mother Country, to remind that parent of her offspring's existence.

Both these small places—they are as large as England—are perhaps among the most backward portions of the Empire. It is not their fault, or not alone. It is largely due to the stupidity or lack of interest of the Home Government. It is also due, in general terms, to the stupidity and ignorance of British folk in general, who take little interest in their possessions overseas, and who from one point of view do not deserve to have them. The tropical colonies of Britain, and among them are these of South and Central America—not to mention the magnificent heritage of the West Indies, which of course are geographically part of America—are most valuable charges, most essential elements of the national food supply. They are at least geographical larders, and it is time they were much more fully developed and cared for.

It is well to recollect, moreover, politically, that Britain has scarcely given an efficient object-lesson of development, social and economic, to the backward States of Spanish America in her control of these two Crown Colonies.

But we digress. If the geography of the South American States is nebulous to the ordinary person at home, how much more so is that of Central America? In the first place, it may be asked, where or what is Central America? Many well-informed people do not know. North America and South America are easily realizable as geographical entities, but where can a third America exist? Central America is not the centre of the South American Continent, as some well-meaning people think, but is that part of America lying between the two continents, and includes no less than six independent Republics, together with British Honduras. The Panama Canal cuts through it; the Tehuantepec and other railways cross it. Thus when we are asked where is Costa Rica or Nicaragua or Salvador, Honduras or Panama, where perhaps the latest revolution has just broken out, or the Government have just repudiated a loan, or managed to pay an instalment of the interest due upon a loan, we may reply in Central America.

And Paraguay—ah, Paraguay! Where is it? And Hayti, too?

Many people in England have relatives in Spanish American countries, and it is interesting to be able to inform them where the particular localities are situated, and how to get there, also the distances approximately places are apart. "I have a cousin who is Chargé d'Affaires in Revolutia," says a lady at a reception. "I do trust he has not been injured by that terrible South American earthquake we saw in the paper this morning." We are able to assure the lady that the earthquake was in San Volcania, at least two thousand miles from the enterprising Republic where her relative carried on his doubtless invaluable diplomatic duties. "Have you ever been in —— (we will call it Santa Andina)?" says a stout, bald-headed gentleman, who looks like a company promoter (and we afterwards found that he was such), referring to a well-known Spanish American capital, adding that he thought of going there, and had heard that no great difficulties attended the journey. He thought oil concessions were to be obtained there. When he learned that you take a river steamer, then a train, then a canoe, then a steamer again, and lastly a mule, his wanderlust seemed somewhat to abate. The story of the lady who had a relative in New York, and hoped he would call one morning on the brother of another person present who lived in Buenos Ayres has often been told, but I am inclined to regard it as far-fetched. The point is that the lady, knowing that both places were in America, imagined they must be in easy daily radius of each other.

The traveller who knows Spanish America and speaks the Spanish language—which language is a veritable delight when you know it—will often wish that English people would set out to acquire at least a slight knowledge of the pronunciation of Spanish words and place-names. He does not like to hear, for example, Buenos Ayres spoken of as "Boners' Airs," or Callao as "Cally-oh"! And the pronunciation of señor as "seenyor" is most offensive. Again, why will the English Press persist in depriving "señor" and the Spanish letter "ñ" generally of its ~, or in using Don where Señor should be used (as is done even in The Times), or in the rendering of the Spanish (or its Italian or French equivalent) Viva! as "long live." It does not mean "long live," but "live" or "may he live," and is generally followed by que viva! "Let him live." It would be better translated as "Hurrah for So-and-So." However, the Press does not generally treat Spanish America very seriously. There is an opéra bouffe element.

The Spanish language is perhaps the most beautiful and pleasing in the world, when we take into account its virility and brevity. It says what it means at once, and every letter, except the aspirate, in every word is pronounced. It is a simple language, easily learned. It is spoken over an enormous part of the earth's surface, and there is little variation between the Spanish of Castile and that of Spanish America.

When we converse—in their own language—with the educated Spanish American folk, we find them full of wise saws and modern instances. They are shrewd and philosophical, and the Spanish language abounds with proverbs and aphorisms applicable to the things of everyday life. They are born statesmen and lawyers and orators. They go back to the remote classics for their similes. All this is very delightful in its way, and the Englishman, after a course of years of it will come home and think his own countrymen rather stupid and unimaginative; that is if his own common sense does not balance their own more solid qualities against the more surface attainments. What he wishes is that the one race might partake more of the qualities of the other, and vice versa. Oratory and theory cannot replace practical politics and justice, but we miss the amenities.

Mucha tinta y poca justicia!

so says the Spanish American (or the Spaniard), referring to the national power of document-compiling and red tape; that is to say: "Much ink and little justice."

Nor yet can the most delightful spirit of hospitality make amends for the insufferable defects of the fonda and the inn, and

De tu casa a la ajena
Sal con la barriga llena!

is the soundest advice in Latin America to the traveller in the interior, or, as one would say, "From your own to a stranger's home, go forth with a well-filled belly."

The Spanish American people, as we have remarked, are of a poetical and sentimental temperament, given to oratory, and they produce many poets, many of which, however, would, if criticism is harsh, be termed versifiers. They are fond of what might be termed descriptive embroidery; what, indeed, one of their own race has termed desarollos lyricos ("lyric developments"). Love verses are an absorbing theme, and their small magazines overflow therewith, and even the daily Press does not disdain such. It might be said that versifying in Spanish in matters amorous may be facile, because amores (love), flores (flowers), olores (perfume), and dolores (grief) all rhyme! One cynical Spanish American poet, however, has propounded the following, descriptive of the social and natural ambient:

Flores sin olor
Hombres sin honor
Mujeres sin pudor!

That is to say: "Flowers without perfume, men without honour, women without modesty." It is true that the flowers in the New World here sometimes lacks perfume, where we might have expected to find such, and that at times men and women lack the cardinal virtues, but the same could be said anywhere, and is merely an epigram.

The verse-making of the young poets is often erotic and neurotic, addressed to the object of undying affection, or to the shades of night, or the cruelty of destiny—which tears lovers apart or carries them off to early graves. In this connexion Byron is well regarded (but let us say nothing derogatory of Byron) and Shakespeare appreciated.

However, it is to be recollected that these are rather symptoms of youth in a nation, and if the more blasé and practical Briton—and the still more practical and less poetical North American—finds their verse hackneyed (if he be able to read it, which is not frequently the case), this sentiment has its valuable psychical attribute. The English, indeed, are regarded by the Spanish American as of a romantic temperament, or of having a reputation for romance, and this is possibly due in part to Byron.

But let it not be forgotten that there are famous Latin American poets, to which space here forbids even the barest justice to be done.

The Spanish Americans are great panegyrists, moreover. The most extraordinary adulations of public personages are made and published, such as it might be supposed would cause the object thereof to blush. The late President Diaz of Mexico was always to his admirers—or those who hoped to gain something by his adulation, and this it is not necessarily unkind to say is often the motive of the panegyric—a "great star in a Pleiades or constellation of the first magnitude," and similar matters are found in all the republics. A stroke of ordinary policy becomes thus "un acto de importancia transcendental," which sufficiently translates itself; and so forth.

Of course, it is the case that the Spanish language lends itself peculiarly to "lyric developments"; it is expressive and sonorous, and even the uneducated person has in it a far wider range of thought and expression than has the apparently unimaginative and tongue-tied Briton, or American of Anglo-Saxon speech. Upon this theme we might greatly enlarge, but we must refrain.

As I have already remarked, the general conception of the Spanish American people by English folk is a vague one. To such questions or remarks as: "Are they mostly Indians?" or "I suppose they are not mainly niggers, or at least half black?" in brief terms, the reply is that the Spanish American people are a blend of the aboriginal Indian race—which possessed an early civilization of its own in certain districts, as in Mexico and Peru, and has many valuable qualities—and of the Spaniard, or in Brazil of the Portuguese. They are not "half-breeds" now. We might as well, in a sense, call the English half-breeds, because we are a mixture of Celt and Saxon and Norman.

The "Indians" of Mexico and Peru—they are, of course, not Indian at all in reality, that was an error of Columbus—had, before the Spaniards destroyed it, a fine culture of their own and practised the most beautiful arts. As to the modern culture, or that of the upper strata, it surprises good cultured English folk to learn that in matters of serious culture, knowledge and social etiquette, and knowledge of the world, they themselves would have difficulty in holding their own. The world, or outlook, of the educated man or woman of Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or any other of these States, is a wider one than that of the British middle-class folk: that great respectable body of persons so closely engaged upon their own affairs.

Some writers have deplored the separate autonomy or absence of "unification" of the Latin American States. They would like to see a "United States of South America" or a Federation of Central America.

But this largely arises, perhaps, from the peculiar ideas of hegemony which the last and present century brought to being. We were to have vast empires. Weaker nations were to be controlled by stronger. There were to be great commercial units. Is this advisable, or will it be possible? The condition of the world after the Great War would seem to indicate the negative. It would seem to show that small nations have their own destiny to work out.

As regards Spanish America, its different States are, in general, better in being separated. Both geographical conditions and those of temperament support this. These States, or their capitals and centres of population, are generally divided by Nature from each other, often by tremendous barriers of mountain chains, rivers or impenetrable forests. How could a single or centralized government be set up to control either their home or foreign policy? Where would it be, and how would it operate?

It might be said that similar topographical conditions obtain in the case of the United States, Canada, or Australia, which prefer to live as federations. But the natural geographical barriers of Spanish America are, in reality, much more formidable. Again, the present multiplicity of states, each with its complement of president and state officers, gives opportunity for more intensive political training, more pleasing social life and a greater general opportunity for partaking in government by the people than does a centralized government.

Let us thus refrain from judging too hastily or too harshly the Spanish American people. Their temperament, their environment is different from ours. They have not chosen or been able to follow the more prosaic, more useful life of England or North America in the commercial age. They had not our inventive, our mechanical gifts. Under their warmer skies idealism played a stronger part. They could not agree to live together unless idealistic conditions were to dominate them—conditions which were impossible of course, and they never were able to oil the wheels of life with that spirit of compromise which providence—if it be a providential gift—gave to us. Moreover, they have a dreadful history of oppression behind them, and the dead-weight of a great Indian bulk of folk who were ruined by the arrogant Spaniards, who despised them without a cause.

Rather let us see that they are endowed with many gifts, and that a different phase of world-development and civilization may give these people an opportunity to display their best qualities, of overcoming their serious errors.

The thoughtful traveller will find matter of interest in Spanish America wherever he journeys, in the delightful place-names he encounters, which a little trouble will enable him to pronounce, and often whose pleasing origin some study will permit him to understand. Here are no duplications of "Paris," "Berlin," "London"; no monstrosities of "Copperville," "Petroleumville," "Irontown," and so forth, such as in Anglo America, the United States and Canada, the developers of that part of America in some cases hastily assigned to their places of settlement or industry, either through lack of or laziness of search for original topographical nomenclature. Here in Spanish America its old and rightful folk had given poetical baptism to their localities. Such were often the abiding places of deities or spirits. Yonder mountain, for example, was "the home of the wind god" of the Quechuas; yonder point the "place of the meeting of the waters" of the Aztecs, or the "field of the fruitful," or the "forest of the dark spirits"; and thus is imprinted upon them for all time the poetic fancy of their founders. There rises the "snow-forehead" of the Andes, there is the "cañyon of a thousand ripples," there is the "pompa of the Holy Saints." The names flow liquidly from the lips of the Indian, perhaps our harsher tongues can ill articulate them in comparison.

Moreover, let us remark the wealth of topographical nomenclature, both in the native languages of Mexico and Peru, and all the sisterhood of states, and in the later Spanish tongue. Every hill, hill-slope, stream, wood, plain, valley, desert, every kind of hill, feature and topographical change of form is designated.

The present chapter, it is seen, is, in some small degree, designed to prime the intending traveller to Spanish America—or, if not the traveller, the person athirst for information concerning the region—with such geographical detail as he or she may assimilate without mental indigestion. In accordance with this purpose we may consider a few figures, which are indispensable if we are to gather any intelligent idea of extent and distance.

There are twenty independent republics of Spanish, or rather Latin America, ranging from the enormous Brazil, with an area of three and a quarter million square miles, down to little Salvador, with only seven thousand two hundred and twenty-five square miles. Among these twenty States we include Hayti and Santo Domingo, places which, although often mentioned with a smile when independent republics are spoken of, are nevertheless worthy of geographical respect.

THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: STONE STELÆ AT QUIRIGUA, CENTRAL AMERICA.

Vol. I. To face p. 32.

Between these great extremes of area mentioned above we have such countries as Argentina, with over a million square miles, and Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, with from nearly to over seven hundred thousand square miles, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile, with from over four to under three hundred thousand, Ecuador and Uruguay with half and a third those areas, and the remaining nine States of from about seventy thousand square miles down to about a tenth thereof.

The total area thus covered of this very diversified part of the earth's surface is about eight and a quarter million square miles, with a total population in the neighbourhood of eighty million souls.

It is of interest further to recollect that Brazil is larger than the United States or Canada, or larger than Europe without Russia. Even the little but progressive country of Uruguay, crowded by Brazil and Argentina into a corner of the Atlantic coast, is much larger than England.[1]

It is to be recollected that the areas given to these countries themselves in some cases include territory claimed by their immediate neighbours, for there are unsettled boundaries and frontiers, especially in the Amazon Valley. They must be regarded as only approximate.

The same remark holds good with regard to the population of these States. Exact enumeration is impossible, for the reasons both that the inhabitants are often enormously scattered over vast territories and that they often refuse to be numbered, or escape the census, fearing that they are to be taxed, or pressed into military service against their will, which latter condition has been a curse of Spanish America all through its history.

Much of our earlier knowledge of Northern South America and Mexico was due to Humboldt, the famous German savant and traveller. He was born in Berlin in 1769, but it would appear that Berlin was certainly not his "spiritual home." Paris was the only centre congenial to him, and he settled there in 1808, after his travels, in order to be able to secure the needful scientific co-operation for the publication of the results of his work. "The French capital he had long regarded as his true home. There he found not only scientific sympathy, but the social stimulus which his vigorous and healthy mind eagerly craved. He was equally in his element as the lion of the salons and as the savant of the institute and the observatory. The provincialism of his native city was odious to him. He never ceased to rail against the bigotry without religion, aestheticism without culture, and philosophy without common sense, which he found dominant on the banks of the Spree. He sought relief from this 'nebulous atmosphere' in Paris."[2]

It was by an accident that Humboldt directed his steps to Spanish America, for he had hoped, with Bonpland, to join Bonaparte in Egypt, but in Madrid he determined to make Spanish America the scene of his explorations. He explored the Orinoco, crossed the frozen Cordillera to Quito, investigated the mighty avenue of the Ecuadorian volcanoes—the farm he occupied still exists at their foot—and did much else in South America and in Mexico, geological, archæological, and botanical.

The foregoing glimpse of Berlin which Humboldt's view of his native city affords is not without interest to-day, when the savagery of the German character—a curious development of that earlier obscure philosophy—has been brought so prominently before the world and has brought Germany to moral ruin, and what is in part financial ruin and the loss of her colonies.

As has been said, methods of travel here are less inviting to the ordinary tourist than the well-prepared fields of the Old World. Its hotels—apart, perhaps, from a few here and there—are primitive, its railways are conducted for commercial purposes, there are no planned centres of delight and ease. No roads traverse the countryside whereon the motor-tourist may spend his hours. Between the primitive mule-trail or the bypath which the simple Indian has found sufficient for his purposes since the world began, and the railway, there is no via media. The coaching days of England never had their counterpart in Spanish America. The caballero, the horseman-gentleman, transplanted from old Spain, and all he represented embodied, and still embodies, the philosophy of the road. Here no one may walk the countryside, except the necessitous Indian. The dust would smother him, the naked rocks would cut his feet, he would lose caste for being on foot. No "local" botanist, antiquarian, nature-lover sallies forth from Spanish-American villages. The country squire is unknown, the landed estate is a hacienda, a hive of peones, dependent body and soul on the will of their masters. There are no week-end cottages; the "picnic," though its English name is not unknown, is a rare event. Sport, where it exists, is an institution engrafted from abroad.

Woman here is much enclosed in the seclusion of her home, save when she ventures to the temple and the priestly Mass, or to well-chaperoned and formal events—she dare not traverse the road alone, and, it may be said, with sufficient reason! The Spanish American youth, with his patent leather shoes and breadth of cuff and collar, loves not to leave the easy pavements of his towns, or their bars and cafés, for the unknown world beyond, whose beginning is the squalid Indian quarter which fringes the place around—unless indeed he may have turned revolutionist, a phase which does not usually take place much before middle age, when the Latin American generally takes on his serious political habit. Then indeed he must take to the road, unless a fortunate golpe de estado[3] shall complete the uprising within the city plaza.

The inland method of travel is the horse or mule: the saddle. Unfortunately the horse is not very happy here. In the Day of Judgment, if the beasts of the field ever bear witness against man, the horse will have a severe indictment to bring against the Spanish American people. He and his relative the mule have nowhere perhaps been so dreadfully ill-treated as in these lands of mountains and deserts. In Mexico we see him ridden to death by the callous vaquero; his thin and starving body passing like a swift shadow across the wilderness under the stimulus of enormous spurs. Or he is gored to death in the bull-ring. In South America he climbs, with enormous loads, the dizzy ridges of the Andes, under the blows and curses of the arriero, and, stumbling over the precipice, finds rest at times a thousand feet below, where his mummified carcass remains a warning to his kind. Or he passes his life on high uplands where pasture is unknown: his fodder a little dry straw.

The fact is that the Spanish American lands, in great part, did not seem fitted by nature for the equine race, and there was no horse in America before the Europeans introduced the animal there. There was nothing but the llama, the friend of the Indian, which is not ridden, but bears a small burden. The Indian himself at first displayed great terror of the horse (especially with an armoured Iberian on its back). He himself was accustomed to carrying his burdens. When he was told to take a horse he said: "No, horses get tired; we do not." When a Spaniard rode across the Isthmus of Panama upon a jackass he met some Indians, and the animal brayed, and the Indians fell down in terror and offered up their gold ornaments!

Yet the Latin Americans are perhaps the most expert of horsemen, and train and manage their steeds as no one else can.

Spanish America is not a land for the huntsman, not a land of big game. Its zoology is stinted. The lion and the tiger are represented only by some almost insignificant felines, and the other huge quadrupeds of the sportsman's rifle came not to being in the New World, or deserted it by now fallen land bridges before their skilled tormentor appeared upon the earth. There is, relatively, but little game, and the traveller who might think to subsist upon it in his passage through the wilds will do well to ponder the experience of the early Conquistadores, some of which have been set down briefly in these pages.

Thus far the picture of travel here. There are phases on the other side to be considered. It is the explorer, the pioneer, who will find material for his desires in these lands. The geographer, the antiquarian, the naturalist, the ethnologist has before him a field which is the equal of any region, and the engineer, that most practical and valuable of travellers, has work before him in this score of independent states whose magnitude has, so far, no limit.

[CHAPTER II]

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin American States.[4]

The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course, inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent. Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached, which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the contrary.

On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those of Cathay—the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for China, the great Asiatic coast—stretched one sea, the Western Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India could be reached.

These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin, and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain—women having more imagination than men—in three small vessels, and made his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas.

These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long retained.

As a result of this discovery, a controversy arose between Spain and Portugal, for, in 1454, the Pope had given the Portuguese—by what right he himself doubtless best knew—exclusive control of exploration and conquest on the road to the Indies, although his Bull had in view only the eastern route. Now, however, "spheres of influence" might easily clash. The two Powers repaired again to the Pope, successor of the former, and he, drawing a line across the map of the world from north to south, in a position west of the Azores a hundred leagues, awarded Spain everything that might lie beyond it. The Pope was a Spaniard. The Portuguese did not think the award fair. (It might have been mentioned that the Portuguese King, his "especial friend," had treacherously endeavoured to forestall Columbus by dispatching a caravel on his proposed route secretly, instead of helping him, a futile errand, however.) They protested, and by common consent the line was shifted to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, corresponding to-day to the 50th degree of longitude.

Such a line cuts South America across the mouth of the Amazon, and the Spaniards claimed the right to exclude all other people and all trade but their own from beyond this line.

The subsequent conquest and discovery of America embodies some of the most romantic and stirring episodes in history. In his last voyage Columbus explored the West Indies and reached South America, landing at the mouth of the Orinoco, and he sailed along the coast of the Caribbean and Central America to Nombre de Dios—"Name of God"—near Colon. Henry VII of England—who had declined to help Columbus—now kindly permitted John Cabot to sail, in 1499, who discovered Newfoundland and did other valuable exploits. Hispaniola was the first Spanish Settlement, on the Island of Hayti, and this spread to the mainland. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien and Panama and beheld the "South Sea," as described in our chapter upon Central America. The insistent hope of a "strait" or passage through these lands, giving a way to the Spice Islands of the Indies, was now given up, and when Magellan, in 1520, passed through the strait which bears his name, and sailed across the Pacific, it was understood that a vast continent and a vast ocean divided the world from Asia here, a new world, and that lying mainly within the sphere of influence which the Pope had so generously assigned to Spain.

With regard to this obsession of Colombus that westward lay the shortest route to India, and the insistent idea of a strait, have not these been materialized in the Panama Canal, and are not these ancient mariners vindicated to-day?

The New World now belonged to Spain. Perhaps the first purpose of the Spaniards was trade with the Indies, but their main object was that of gold, to be gained by slave labour. They could not themselves work in the tropics, even if they had had any desire for manual labour, which they had not. However, they began to introduce European plants and animals into Cuba and Hispaniola, a service which was of enormous value later to America, which possessed but a meagre range of staple food products and no beasts of burden or bovines. But gold—that was what they wanted. The shallow deposits of the island were soon exhausted, as were the poor willing Indians, killed off by forced labour. The barbarous treatment of the aborigines of the New World by the Spaniards—and the Portuguese—is one of the most dreadful blots on the history of America, indeed of the world.

The easily gotten gold being exhausted, it was necessary to go farther afield. The Darien Settlement was transferred to Panama, the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico were explored by Cordova and Grijalva, from Cuba, and in 1519 the great Conquest of Mexico was entered upon by Cortes.

So far the Spaniards had found little difficulty in subduing the Indians to their will, the inoffensive islanders, and Caribs, which latter became almost exterminated. The Indian folk of these islands were generally a simple and credible race, who at first looked upon the white man as a demi-god, but these simple children of the soil were treated with utmost callousness and barbarity. There is an example in the treatment of the natives of Watling Island in the Bahamas, which, as before remarked, was the first point in the New World trodden by Columbus. Of this land and its folk the explorer wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella: "These beautiful islands excel all other lands. The natives love their neighbours as themselves, their faces are always smiling, their conversation is the sweetest imaginable, and they are so gentle and affectionate that I swear to your Highness there is no better people in the world." But what was the lot of these folk? The Spaniards wanted further labour in the mines of Hispaniola, and to get these natives there they, trading on a characteristic love of the people for their ancestors and departed relatives, promised to convey them to the heavenly shores, where these were imagined as dwelling; and so, treacherously getting them on board the ships, they were taken away to the mines, where it is said 40,000 perished under starvation and the lash.

The natives of Mexico were people of a different stamp. The Aztecs were pueblo or town Indians, highly organized as soldiers, skilled in arts and crafts, with a developed civilization and certain intellectuality. They were highland folk, the Mexican plateau lying at seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, protected by mountain fastnesses. It was, in fact, an empire of the New World such as, in some respects, might compare with those ancient semi-barbaric empires of the Old World, in times more ancient. Its conquest by Cortes was an affair of great enterprise and toil, entailing heavy loss and suffering on the part of the Spaniards, and at one time their defeat, from which only a superhuman rally saved them, at the Battle of Otumba. There was one specially weak point about the Aztec rule. It was a hegemony, exercised over various other Mexican races, who hated Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, and his people. Cortes was skilful enough to take advantage of this flaw in the Mexican armour, to fan the jealousies of the subject tribes, and enlist them to march against Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mexico. These allied Indians, when the place fell, themselves committed the most unheard-of barbarities on the Aztec population, such as shocked the Spaniards, who were unable to restrain them.

The Conquest of Mexico was effected by 1521, and the success, the romance, the adventure, and the objects of gold and silver sent by Cortes to Spain, and the loot of the soldiers, fired the imagination of the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Darien to other quests. The settlers at Panama had heard of another empire where gold was to be had for the taking, perhaps richer and greater even than that of the Aztecs. This was Peru, and Francisco Pizarro and Diego Amalgro set sail from Panama to explore and conquer that unknown region along the sunset shores of America to the south.

This adventure too was an arduous one, not by reason of the opposition of savage natives, for the Incas of Peru were a gentle and philosophical people, animated by a remarkable social system, and they offered little resistance to the white men and the formidable men-animals, or horsemen, and their guns. It was famine that assailed Pizarro and his followers, and insufficient support. Also he, like Cortes, had to contend with the jealousies and double-dealing of the Spanish Governor of the Indies. As for Peru, its coast was barren, as it is to-day, and only after surmounting the dreadful fastness of the Andes, amid the inclement climate of a region twelve to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, was the Inca Empire reached and subdued. Here lay Cuzco, the Mecca of Peru, and Cajamarca, a more northern capital. The stores of gold recovered seem to have filled these Spaniards' expectations, and great renown was the result of this conquest, which was completed by 1533.

These exploits were followed by a period of strife among the Spaniards, and Pizarro was murdered, after founding Lima, the capital of Peru. But in 1536 the regions lying between Peru and Panama, which to-day we know as Ecuador and Colombia, were explored and conquered, the first by Sebastian de Benalcazar, the second by Jimenez de Quesada. Here were dwelling other advanced people or tribes. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, had been the home of the Shiris, a cultured people who were overthrown by the Incas before the Spanish advent. The city was joined to Cuzco, eleven hundred miles to the south, by the famous Inca roads, one along the Cordillera, the other along the coast. Some early Spanish historian delighted to speak of these roads as equal to those of the Romans, but this was an exaggeration. Colombia was the culture-area of the Chibchas. The Spaniards had heard of a further great empire, a rich El Dorado, in this region, and encouraged by the ease with which Pizarro had conquered Peru, they made their way up the Magdalena River from the Caribbean Sea. A pleasing land and much gold was encountered, after severe hardships, the people being of some considerable degree of civilization, although not of the status of the Aztec or the Inca. The richest plums, in fact, had fallen. Quesada named this region New Granada, with its capital at Bogota.

There still remained the conquest of the huge territory south of Peru, known as Chile, and this, attempted by Almagro in 1537, was carried out by Pedro de Valdivia, who, however, was checked by the redoubtable Araucanian Indians. These form one of the chief admixtures of the Chileans to-day, a hardy and enterprising nation, in contrast with the Peruvians of a more sentimental temperament, with a basis of the Quichua Indians of the Incas. Terrible excesses were committed upon the Indians on these expeditions. A terrible end was visited upon the Spanish leader by the Indians. "You have come for gold," said the savage chief who captured him. "You shall have your fill." And he caused molten burning gold to be poured into his mouth. Then he was cut to pieces with sharpened oyster shells.

From the Southern Andes, the Spaniards, in the following years, descended to the great plains which now form the republics of the River Plate, Argentine, Uruguay and Paraguay. The exploration of Brazil had been begun in 1510, and the region was traversed by Orellana in his descent of the Amazon from Quito, and it was gradually settled by the Portuguese.

The lands lying between Panama and Mexico, which to-day form the Central American States, Guatemala, Costa Rica and others, were conquered after the fall of Mexico. Here were evidences of a splendid past, in the beautiful temples of sculptured stone found in their forests and deserts, ruins even then abandoned. These remains astounded Europe, when they were first revealed.

Thus did all this enormous region of Latin America, from tropical Mexico—indeed, from California—to the frigid extremity of Patagonia, fall into the possession of Spain and Portugal. In some respects it is a dreadful history. The Spaniards overthrew civilizations in Mexico and Peru which in many respects were superior to their own, civilizations that had developed marvellously without the resources that the Old World commanded, for there was neither ox nor horse, nor even iron nor gunpowder. The Spaniards destroyed everything that these people had done. For centuries unknown they had evolved their arts and crafts and laws; laws, in the case of the Incas of Peru, far more beneficial and democratic than anything Europe had produced at that period, and millions of these people were most ruthlessly destroyed.

To read the accounts of the happenings of those times is enough to break one's heart. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of this vast territory—of which not an acre now belongs to Spain—the spirit of the Indian has so far remained faithful that there is not a single statue raised to Cortes or Pizarro. Columbus, of course, is commemorated by his monuments in every capital.

These great New World territories, by virtue of the papal Bull, were held as the peculiar property of the Sovereign. The Spanish possessions were divided into two "kingdoms," the Kingdom of New Spain, consisting of Mexico and all lands to and including Venezuela, and New Castile, later called Peru. This last viceroyalty was found unwieldy, and New Granada and the River Plate regions were constituted apart under viceroys. The administrative powers of these functionaries were very great, but they were held in some control by the Laws of the Indies: measures passed for native protection. Even the frightful dominance of the Inquisition did not extend to the Indians, who were regarded as merely catechumens. Queen Isabella of Spain, by whose imagination and aid discovery of the New World had been rendered possible, would not permit—and her memory should be revered for it—the enslavement of the Indians, if she could prevent it, and when Columbus returned home with a cargo of natives, whom he proposed to sell as slaves, Isabella interfered. Let them be set at liberty, she said, and sent back to their homes. Columbus has in general been represented as a protector of the Indians, and must not necessarily be judged in the light of this incident.

In the general condemnation of Spain at that period, these facts should be recollected. It was declared by the home government that the Indians were to enjoy the privilege of free subjects, and that their native princes were to be upheld in their authority. Censure was frequently visited upon the conquerors and governors of Mexico and Peru, from home, for their displacement or execution of these, as any who will study Spanish colonial history may see. Some modern writers, in their democratic zeal, have overlooked this. The declaration was opposed by the colonists, as well as the colonial authorities, and indeed by the clergy. Some compulsion was necessary, of course, if civilization was to make its way among the Indians, for they were often loath to work, and stood sullenly aloof from the white race. The System of Repartimientos and Encomiendas—the assigning of bodies of Indians to the industrial charge of colonists—was well meant, but the greed of the colonists and their callous habit as regarded human life offset these influences.

Another side of the question also presents itself. Under Philip II, the colonies were governed not so much in their own interests, as for the enrichment of Spain and its predominance. He yearned to injure Protestant England, and the colonists were taxed and goaded to produce wealth, and their interests sacrificed in the furtherance of this end. Those into whose hands the unfortunate Indians had been delivered body and soul, drove the unfortunates into the mines, branded them on the face, flogged them to death, chucked their miserable carcasses aside, when they fell from exhaustion, a prey to the dogs.

We know what these things led to. England and other European nations refused to recognize the exclusive control of the American continents by the Peninsula Powers, and hardy buccaneers and privateers streamed forth to dispute Spanish pretensions. Drake intercepted the stream of gold with which Philip was enabled to equip his armadas and thus performed a marked strategic service for England.

Moreover, such pretensions would never have been respected, especially under the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The restrictions upon colonial trade by Spain were, we see further, an element in the downfall of the empire. The natural development of South America was seriously hindered. All trade must come via Panama, and anything opposed to Spanish interests was suppressed. The growing trade between Acapulco and China was suppressed; Hidalgo's vineyard in Mexico was destroyed by the Spanish authorities because Spain alone must grow grapes. "Learn to be silent and obey, and not to discuss politics," ran the proclamation of a Mexican viceroy, near the end of the eighteenth century.

When—unlawfully—the throne of Spain came to be occupied with kings having French sympathies, these short-sighted methods were modified. Audiencias or law courts, of which, from the reign of Philip IV there were eleven, in Santo Domingo, Mexico, Panama, Lima, Guatemala, Guadalajara, Bogota, La Plata, Chile, and Buenos Ayres, acted as counsel to the Governors, with civil and criminal jurisdiction. Appeal could be had to the Council of the Indies, that great colonial body at Seville. For centuries the history of Spanish America is made up of the deeds and misdeeds of the viceroys.

The political and commercial control of the colonies was thus entirely in the hands of the Crown. The territories were expected to send quantities of gold and other precious metals home to Spain with regularity, and indeed Spain later became a mere sieve into which this treasure from the Indies was poured. They were also bound to send raw material and to take all their manufactured goods from the Mother Country.

It must be recollected that the ill-treatment meted out to the natives of these lands was mainly the work of the Spanish settlers. They generally both despised the Indians, and wished to enrich themselves from their labours. They were, for the man of Iberian race, inferior creatures, to be used at his will, and the forced labour in the mines was a cause of the reduction of the population. Questions have been raised by historians as to whether the dreadful treatment of the American native by the Spaniard was worse than that meted out to him by the Anglo-Saxon settlers in North America. There have been grave abuses in the latter field. The Indians in Spanish America, however, numbered many millions, as against a few hundred thousand elsewhere. The Spanish Crown and Government certainly did not countenance the excesses carried on by the colonists, but strove to protect the Indians.

As for the English colonies in America, they enjoyed a greater measure of self-government and had taken firm root under more prosaic but more fruitful form. The same policy, however, on the part of the Mother Country was enacted in commercial matters; that trade should consist almost exclusively of exchange of colonial raw material for English manufactured articles. French colonies in America were less noteworthy or prosperous, but they played their part in history, for the fall of French control in North America was in reality the beginning of independence for all colonies in the New World; as did the ideas of the French philosophers, which found a ready soil in the Spanish American folk. The establishment of the United States was but the precursor to the establishment of the numerous Latin American States. The Spanish Government saw its danger, but was too apathetic to move. However, some reforms were introduced, and it may be said that Spanish America was well governed at the time of revolution, and was prosperous.

But it has been said that "across the face of all human reform are written the words 'too late,'" and this is in effect what happened in Spanish America. The French Revolution, and the defeat of British expeditions to Buenos Ayres by the colonists in 1806 and 1807 had their effect. The struggle for Independence lasted from 1810 to 1826, until the flag of Spain was entirely ousted from the vast territory of Spanish America, upon which she had stamped her individuality, language, laws and all else, with much that was splendid and enduring, and much that in the future development of the world may have a value so far scarcely apparent.

The dark pictures of misrule of the century of republican life of the twenty Latin Republics are interspersed with pages of a more pleasing nature, but it is a chequered history, whose end we cannot yet foresee.

Among elements making for disorder and bloodshed in Spanish America, religion has played a prominent part. Many States developed bitter antagonism between clerical and non-clerical parties. Some would overthrow the Church and the all-pervading priestly power; others would uphold it, whether out of pious conviction, whether because it was a convenient party upon which to hang their own pretensions and ambitions. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Central America, Chile—in fact, all have as part of their history the deadly struggles between these factions. To-day this very fierceness has flamed out, in the main, to be succeeded by a thinly veiled materialism. What more can be expected of a hemisphere which was cursed by the Inquisition?

In many instances the "reform" parties of these States having triumphed by force of arms, confiscates all Church property—and this often was enormous—which was handed to secular and public purposes, or enriched the pockets of politicians. In Mexico, where at one time it was not safe to pass along the street unless seeming to be muttering a prayer, the power of the Church was entirely overthrown, and convents, monasteries and other religious establishments were forbidden to exist. In Ecuador similar things were brought about, accompanied by massacre and other dreadful deeds. But it would be unjust to pick out any state as over-prominent in these acts.

The Church, in large degree, brought these troubles upon itself. It sought for too much power, spiritual and temporal. The priests exploited the superstition and needs of the poor, of the Indian, and themselves often lived immoral and corrupt lives. But let us do it justice. It protected the poor and oppressed often against the grinding exactions of the civil authorities; its vicars often exposed themselves in humane works. Often priests dashed in with upraised crucifix to save the victims of dreadful passionate and sanguinary revolutions, and themselves were torn to pieces. Often the devout fathers spent their lives in the most desolate and savage regions of the untamed wilderness, seeking by their piety and devotion to better the lives of the poor Indians, the poor, ignorant children of the mountain and the forest.

The Roman Catholic religion ingrafted itself with wonderful strength upon the mind of the aboriginal of Spanish America. In some respects it seemed a development of his own earlier superstitious culture, and became blended with it. Tawdry images held for them and their miserable lives the hope of eternal joy, of reprieve of sin, of comfort in misery, and to-day we cannot enter a simple church of the remote villages in those boundless Cordilleras and deserts without stumbling over the prostrate forms, bent upon the earthern floors, of poor, black-clothed Indian women passing their silent hour in supplication and orisons. Men are not there: the women, as ever, seem to link the material and the spiritual. May heaven succour these poor Indian women-folk, and bring them a happier destiny yet.

A glance now at the earlier cultures of these lands and the earlier religions of their people.

Who, upon beholding the beautiful ruined structures of the early folk of America—for by America here we mean Spanish America, where alone these vestiges are found—in the decaying sculptured walls of their temples, or the massive stories of their fortresses and palaces, or of the strange pyramids they raised, has not felt his conception of the New World undergo a change? Nay, do we even study the printed page which sets them forth, not having had the privilege of journeying to where they stand, wrapped in the silence of the jungle or stark upon the rocky ranges of the hills, we feel that here is a page in the book of mankind whose turning opens to us a vista little dreamt of.

The story of those strange old cultures of Mexico and Peru has always fascinated us: the Aztec and the Inca stand forth from the dry lore of archæology with a peculiar charm, which we may not have felt even in contemplating the more wonderful and ancient cultures of the Old World. For here we feel that the intellect and art of man sprang unaided from the dust, to write his pathetic story in the stones of a continent unvisited by the Jehovah of the Israelites, unknown to history, unblessed of Christianity, unrecorded and obscure. Here the reaction of man from his environment came forth from no recorded Eden; no tree of knowledge, of good and evil, opened his eyes; no Abraham here walked with God, no Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar brought visions and dreams to these more sombre pages, and no divine wisdom seemed to shed its light within these sculptured walls.

There is the credit due to early America, to the ability of her autochthonous cultures, even if they formed no permanent link in the chain of human development, but were too early cut off and faded away like the untimely fruit of a woman, that at least man rose here, in accordance with the divine mandate, arose from the dust, and if he did but build him "fanes of fruitless prayer" to strange idols and savage deities, he had that in common with the majority of the cultures of the Old World of Asia, Africa and India, where men raised temples of the utmost beauty to shelter the most inane rites or bloody religions.

Before Mitla and Palenque or Teotihuacan and Tiahuanako let us mark the skill which carved these intricate walls or raised their terraces and monoliths, the greater wonder because all that has descended from those skilled craftsmen of a bygone age on the American soil are the stolid Indian, incapable of squaring stone to stone, ignorant of the bronze chisel, degenerate and fallen. The skill and imagination which would have done credit to the Greeks or the Chaldeans lies buried in the dust, nor is likely yet to be resuscitated.

We have spoken of Teotihuacan—the name means in the ancient tongue of Mexico the "house of God"—and this, the great pyramid of the sun, the work of the shadowy Toltecs, may be seen by the traveller to-day who, taking steamer and train, will convey himself to the high plateau of Mexico, a few miles north of the capital. It is a structure of stone and rubble seven hundred feet upon its broadest side and two hundred feet high, and, anciently, upon its summit stood the golden image of Tonatiuah, whose breastplate flashed back the rays of the rising sun, what time the attendant priests chanted their savage refrain upon the terraces beneath. Restored by the Government of the Republic under President Diaz, the great monument stands up much the same as it did in days of yore. How many centuries have beaten upon it we can scarcely conjecture. It was in ruins when the defeated Cortes and his Spaniards, after the dreadful experience of the Noche Triste, the sorrowful night passed beneath its shadow and wept thereunder for his fallen comrades and his ruined enterprise.

If little we know of Teotihuacan, what shall be said of Mitla, whose mysterious halls and corridors, scarcely defaced by time, arise from the sands of Oaxaca.

And the builders of these temples, have they produced no songs of beauty, no enduring psalms? Had their dreadful religious rites nothing in common with the idea of a true Providence? Hear the psalm of Nezahual-Coyotl, the Solomon of Mexico. This is what he sang:

Truly the gods which I adore—
The idols of stone and wood,
They speak not nor do they feel,
Neither could they fashion the beauty of the heavens,
Nor yet that of the earth and the streams,
Nor of the trees and the plants which beautify it.
Some powerful, hidden and unknown God—
He must be the Creator of the Universe,
He alone can console me in my affliction.
He alone can still the bitter anguish of this heart.

So spake Nezahual-Coyotl, in what has been termed the Golden Age of Texcoco, whose historians, arts and poets were in their time renowned among the nations of Anahuac, on the high Mexican Plateau. This person was a philosopher and a poet, but the writings of the period—the picture-writings—were perversely destroyed by Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico after the Conquest—an irremediable loss.

Hear also the Inca prayer to the Creator, as chanted by the priests and nobles of Peru:

Oh Creator: Thou art without equal unto the ends of the earth! Thou who givest life and strength to mankind, saying, let this be a man and let this be a woman. And as thou sayest, so thou givest life, and vouchsafest that man shall live in health and peace, and free from danger. Thou who dwellest in the heights of heaven, in the thunder and in the storm-clouds, hear us. Grant us eternal life and have us in thy keeping.

THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: RUINS OF MITLA, MEXICO.

Vol. I. To face p. 60.

This last is from the Rites and Laws of the Incas.[5] It is but one of many similar prayers, which, as regards sentiment and language, might be taken from the Bible and Church Service.

These prayers to the Unknown God, written by the early people of America, cut off from any contact with the Old World, would seem to show that man, in the reaction from his environment, inevitably develops within him the conception of a supreme deity.

It now remains for us to choose how we shall approach the Spanish American lands. Shall we cross the Spanish Main, and land where Cortes did at Vera Cruz, the city of the True Cross, and so enter Mexico? Or shall we, still crossing the American Mediterranean, land on the Isthmus of Panama and thence, as Pizarro did, voyage along the great Pacific coast to mysterious Peru? Or shall we take steamer to the River Plate, that more prosaic route to the lands of corn and cattle? Or shall we go round the Horn? Perhaps the middle course is best, and, at the isthmus, we will first explore Central America.

Then we may say with the poet Keats:

Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold
... Or like stout Cortes ... and all his men
Gazed on the Pacific ... silent upon a peak in Darien.

Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see.

[CHAPTER III]

CENTRAL AMERICA

GUATEMALA, HONDURAS, BRITISH HONDURAS, NICARAGUA, SALVADOR, COSTA RICA, PANAMA

On Michaelmas Day, in the year 1513, a Spanish adventurer, surrounded by his followers—they had sailed from Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo, on an expedition of discovery—found himself on the high ridge of the land called Darien. His eyes, seeking the horizon, fell, not on an endless expanse of mountain and forest, such as here might have been expected to stretch away into the unknown solitudes, but upon the sheen of waters. A smothered exclamation fell from his lips. "El Mar!" ("the Sea!") he cried, and he and his followers remained a space in the silence of astonishment.

The Spaniard was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. It was one of the most dramatic of geographical discoveries. They had but traversed an isthmus, where they had expected a continent—to-day the Isthmus of Panama. They had discovered an ocean; they realized in that moment much that before had been a mystery.

Descending to the shore and wading deep into the waters, Balboa drew his sword, and waving it thereover took possession of that ocean and whatsoever shores it might wash for the King of Spain, naming it the "South Seas," for, from the curvature of the isthmus, he was looking towards the south, having crossed from the north.

Thus was the great Pacific Ocean first beheld by the white man, as far as history records.

We have already seen that Balboa's exploit preceded the Conquest of Mexico. The land of the Aztecs, like that of Peru, was undreamed of, but the discovery of both followed, as did the passage of the Magellan Strait by the explorer whose name it bears, and who first crossed the Pacific, and from its gentle and favouring gales gave it its name.

The discoverer of the isthmus and the great ocean was a hidalgo, and had been Governor of a province, but to escape his creditors in Hispaniola—according to one account—he concealed himself in a barrel on board ship, and so began his voyage. Balboa, pressing into his service a train of Indians, many of whom, it is said, died under the lash in the task, caused the timbers of two vessels to be dragged across the rugged neck of land and launched upon the South Sea, bent upon the discovery of Peru, which, later, Andagoya attempted, but which, however, the fates had reserved for Pizarro. Balboa was afterwards treacherously done to death by Pedrarias Davila, one of the most ruthless of the Spanish adventurers of that time.

Thus did the inhabitants of this region we are now to traverse have their foretaste of the white man's overlordship—a foretaste of the dreadful lot which fate had in store for them, the simple folk of Central America, who, with their ancient culture and beautiful arts, akin in some respects to those of the Aztec and the Inca, were almost stamped out under Pedro de Alvarado, who invaded Guatemala in 1522, and his successors of the early Colonial period.

Seven different States or entities to-day comprise this zone of territory of Central America, washed on the one hand by the Caribbean and on the other by the Pacific, whose people dwell in one of the most beautiful and interesting part of the earth's surface—Guatemala, with its coffee plantations and lavish fruits, Honduras of the rugged surface, and British Honduras, Nicaragua with its great lake, Costa Rica, the one-time "Rich Coast," Salvador, most populous and advanced of all, Panama, the land of the famous Canal.

We may be permitted a brief glance at the ancient inhabitants of this portion of America, prior to the advent of the Spaniards.

As in the case of North America, in Mexico: and South America, in Peru and Colombia, so in Central America was there a ruling caste or culture. Here it was that of the Quiches, a people of Maya stock.

These people were most numerous in Western Guatemala, and at the time of the Conquest the most powerful inhabitants of Central America. The sacred book of the Quiches, known as the Popol Vuh, embodies a mythological cosmogony, in which is a Creation story and an account of a Flood, after the manner of that of the Old Testament. (The Quiches are not to be confounded with the Quechuas of Peru.) Their capital was Utatlan, near where stands the modern Santa Cruz Quiche, and the place was cleverly fortified. Their system of government was an elaborate one, as was their religion. Indeed, the student remarks with surprise how far these early peoples had gone in the development of social polity and economic order. The Quiches, like the Aztecs, kept historical records in picture-writing. The Incas, we may remark in passing, of Peru, kept their histories by means of the quipos, a mnemonic system of knotted and coloured cords.

The Sun God was the chief deity, but there were many lesser objects of adoration. But the religion was of a high order in some respects, although the Spanish priests, after the Conquest, strove to hide the fact, and, indeed, there was wholesale destruction throughout Spanish America of native records and objects, whether it were of the beautiful picture-writings and scrolls of Mexico and Central America, whether the pillars of stone by which the early Peruvian priests skilfully determined the solstices. The jealous priestcraft of the Roman Catholic religion could not tolerate anything that showed ingenuity or knowledge by their pagan predecessors, and all these things they considered, or affected to consider, "things of the devil," and destroyed them wherever possible. The marvel is that so much has remained, for the benefit of the archæologist to-day.

The religion of the Quiches, like that of the Mexicans, contained horrible practices involving human sacrifices. This was probably absent in Peru. Repulsive as it was, we may question whether it was as cruel as the dreadful tortures of the Inquisition, such as rendered Mexico and Lima and other places in the New World centres of horror, until the time of Independence, when the infuriated populace destroyed the Inquisitional centres.

We have previously remarked that Columbus sailed along the Atlantic coast of Central America, that of Honduras and Costa Rica, and it was here that, seeing the ornaments of gold on the swarthy bodies of the natives, the voyagers' imagination was freshly aroused to the possibilities of conquest. But the natives of this region were not necessarily as docile as those of Hispaniola and the Antilles. They mustered on the shore, leaping from the dark forests as the strange sails of the Spaniards hove in sight, communicating rapidly with each tribe by those peculiar methods they employed, and made the air resound with the beatings and blasts of their war-drums and bugle-shells, brandishing their clubs and swords of palm-wood.

Columbus, however, did not generally employ harsh methods against the natives. He is regarded rather as their protector, and a beautiful monument at Colon represents him as sheltering an Indian who timorously looks up for protection—a contrast, as remarked elsewhere, with the lack of monuments in Spanish America to Cortes and Pizarro. However, under Bartholomé Columbus, the brother of Christopher, great animosity was aroused on the part of the Indians in the settlement at Veragua, resulting in the death of the Spanish colonists.

One of the most tragic episodes after the Conquest of Mexico was the expedition of Cortes to Central America, following on the expedition he had sent into Guatemala under Pedro de Alvarado. There had been a desperate fight between Alvarado's band and the redoubtable Quiches of Utatlan, and it was only due to the fortunate circumstance of dissension among the different predominant tribes that the Conquest of Guatemala was so readily carried out. Thus was history, as in Mexico and indeed in Peru, brought about also in Central America—fall under dissension, a house divided against itself.

In Honduras Cortes committed a foul deed. Suspecting, or pretending to suspect, Guahtemoc, the son of Montezuma—who after the fall of Mexico accompanied the conquerors to Central America—of some treacherous design, Cortes had the unfortunate young Aztec hanged head downwards from a tree. It will be recollected that Guahtemoc was the author of the saying, well known in Mexico, of "Am I, think you, upon some bed of roses?" when, whilst the Spaniards were roasting his feet in order to make him reveal the whereabouts of the Aztec treasure, he replied to his companions who were also being tortured and were groaning in agony, and who asked if he too suffered. This scene is depicted on a beautiful sculptured monument in the city of Mexico—the statue to Guahtemoc, in the Paseo de la Reforma.

In the early colonial government of Central America the capital was set up by Alvarado in the chief town of Guatemala. The scenery of the region is striking. Great volcanoes overhang the countryside, and these have at times wrought terrible havoc here, and still do so. In fact, the history of the city of Guatemala is a record of successive destruction and re-establishment, probably unique in the history of any land, due to the dreadful forces of Nature, seismic, tectonic and volcanic, exerted upon this unrestful point of the earth's surface.

We may glance briefly at some of these catastrophes. They show the trials which the inhabitants of this part of the world are called upon to bear.

The first city was established by Alvarado in 1527, on the banks of the Rio Pensativo, at the foot of the Agua volcano, but in 1541 this unfriendly mountain threw from its crater a deluge of water that, carrying rocks with it, rushed down the mountain side and bore upon the doomed city, whose destruction was lighted by the terrible fire which simultaneously burst from the angry peak.

Afterwards the surviving inhabitants removed their city to another site, and for twenty years made solemn annual pilgrimages to the Ciudad Vieja, as the former place came to be called—the old town about a league from the new. This flourished greatly and became the most populous place in Central America, with more than a hundred churches and convents, devoutly administered after the fashion of the Catholic priesthood and pious folk of the Spanish American lands.

But this progress and piety failed to give security from acts of Nature. After being many times threatened, this beautifully built town, in the midst of the most romantic scenery, was destroyed by a dreadful earthquake in 1773—earthquake to which was added the horrors of eruption from the volcano Fuego (or "Fire"), which overlooks it. In vain the people confessed their sins in the open street, in vain priests and people weepingly carried procession of the saints and saintly relics from church to church. The very pavements rose up against them with the undulations of the earthquake; the very heavens rained down showers of stones and ashes upon them, obscuring even the light of the volcano, and morning dawned upon a ruined and broken city with its people crushed beneath the walls of their own dwellings.

The city was moved again twenty-seven miles away, and became the seat of government in 1779—the third attempt, though whether it will be the last remains to be seen, for but a short time ago we heard of serious earthquakes in the district. Lofty mountains rise on every side, with deep ravines on the edge of the tablelands upon which the city stands. The houses have been kept of one story, as a measure of security. The general beauty and prosperity of Guatemala city has earned for it the name of the Paris of Central America. We may reach it by the railway which, starting from Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast, winds upwards to the elevation of 5,000 feet, which is that of the plateau on which it stands, 190 miles from the sea, and continues for a further 75 miles to San José on the Pacific.

THE CATHEDRAL, GUATEMALA.

Vol I. To face p. 70.

Guatemala is a land rich in natural resources, with fruitful plains and valleys, and the peculiar volcanic constituents of the soil are specially favourable for the production of coffee, which has been the source of considerable wealth. There are vast plains and extensive lakes, and innumerable rivers and streams. Many valuable kinds of wood exist in the forests, and such products as cocoa, sugar-cane, tobacco, bananas, and oranges, with other less common kinds are plentiful. There are some small deposits of gold and other precious and commoner metals. The climate is excellent, except on the coast.

But this fruitfulness and bounty of Nature is not conducive necessarily to peace among the people of the land. Rather the restlessness of Nature, as evinced by earthquake unrest, is reflected in the politics and general economy of the Republic. The colonial civilization, which was marked by the destruction of the Indians and their more or less beneficent old civilization, and the enslavement of many tribes, with total extermination in some cases, was succeeded by a republic in which pretenders and dictators strove with each other, less to advance the interests of the country than to satisfy their own ambitions and fill their own pockets. There were, too, constant embroilments with the neighbouring States, and bloody local wars. Some of the presidents, however, did endeavour, side by side with their other activities, to promote education and commerce, and to improve the means of transport and communication—ever a vital matter in Spanish America, with its rugged soil and vast extent.

We find in Guatemala many remains of the ancient folk, in beautifully carved stelæ, in innumerable idols recovered from the soil, and in the native arts, which, evincing the dexterity and love of beauty of the aboriginal, have happily survived both the destructive force of the Hispanic domination and, so far, the equally destructive forces of modern commercialism, which ousts their industries with imported goods.

In Quetzaltenango, the ancient "Town of the Green Feather"—the Quetzal was the sacred bird of the Quiches—we shall specially remark the native aptitudes in their quaint and pleasing handicrafts. If these quiet and peaceful folk—for the natives themselves are peaceful enough—are from time to time disturbed by the subterranean roarings which precede earthquake shocks in the hills and the tidal waves upon the coast, they soon forget these manifestations of Nature, which, after all, are less destructive than those due to the political ambition and ruthless cruelties of mankind itself.

The characteristics, natural and human, which we have remarked in the northern part of Central America, as represented by the Republic of Guatemala, are found in varying degree in the sister States extending to the south. The general topography of the isthmian region which Central America embodies is that of a long backbone of mountainous highlands extending from Tehuantepec for eight hundred miles to the South American mainland. The physiography of the region, however, is associated with that of the Antilles rather than the northern and southern land masses, and its belts of volcanoes correspond to those of the West Indies.

In earlier geological times the region probably consisted of isolated stretches of land and mountains, and before man appeared upon the earth there may have been not one but several isthmian "canals" or apertures, with the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific intermixing therein. Alternately rising and sinking—as evidenced by the "drowned" Valley of the Chagres, on the site of the Panama Canal, the land took on its present form, in which, however, it may be that final stability is not yet reached. It is fervently to be hoped, however, that the particular belt traversed by the Panama Canal will remain immune from any earth movements, for that great work of human ingenuity, carried out at such enormous cost, might otherwise be rendered useless in a single instant.

Panama, however, forms the extreme south of Central America, and we must cast a glance at the sequence of States below Guatemala.

Honduras is a land of considerable area, but among the most backward portions of the region. The efforts of its Government to encourage economic and commercial development have not been very well sustained and successful, and there are only two towns in the Republic of any size, one of which is the ancient capital Tegucigalpa, picturesquely situated upon its river in an amphitheatre of the hills, for Honduras is essentially a land of mountains and depths, as its name signifies. The great grassy plain of Comayagua, however, which extends across the country, upon which great herds of cattle feed, redeems the land from too broken a condition. The city of Comayagua was in earlier times the capital, but it was ruined by the wars of the Central American Federation, when, after an endeavour to establish some form of political unification quarrels set in.

This little-known Republic has a long frontage upon the Atlantic side, but only a few miles on the Pacific, which, however, affords it an outlet of corresponding importance at the picturesque seaport of Amapala, on the beautiful Bay of Fonseca. Indeed, this condition, of straddling a continent, as it were, is one enjoyed by all the Central American States, with the exception of Salvador, which lies between the Pacific and the backbone of the highlands. Otherwise, Honduras is unfortunate in its means of communication: its railways are few and short; its roads are difficult of construction over the broken topography, and in the absence of national funds and private enterprise; and an attempt made of recent years to inaugurate services of motor-cars did not meet with success. However, a railway across from sea to sea should be of national value, and the wealth of the country, both agricultural and mineral, may become more intensively developed.

The name of Honduras is almost a byword for revolution, which occurs with marked regularity.

The colony or possession of British Honduras lies in a commanding position between its neighbours of Guatemala and Mexico on the west and north, facing, on the Atlantic Ocean—under its local name here of the Caribbean Sea—towards the important island of Jamaica, some 600 miles away.

Belize, as this foothold of the British Empire is otherwise termed, is about the size of Wales, and not unhealthy in comparison with the other British possessions of tropical America. It is well endowed with a wide variety of natural resources and potentialities, but it cannot be said that its economic progress is commensurate with its position. One of the neglected offspring of Britain, it is, like Demerara, an example of British national and governmental supineness. It might have been supposed that a people such as those of the United Kingdom, urgently requiring for their teeming millions of folk the things in foodstuffs and material that the Tropics produce—things of the grocer's shop and the store cupboard—would have demanded a more vigorous administration and development of this piece of national property, but it is doubtful if one in a hundred would know where or what British Honduras is.

We cannot here dwell at length upon its possibilities and attractions. Approaching the capital, Belize, from the sea, we pass the green islands that fringe the coast, and extending along the banks of the river we see the high roofs and wide verandas of the houses and remark the coco-palm's grateful shade. Often an invigorating breeze blows from the sea, the same gales that crisp the surf at Colon, which the traveller will inevitably note, and this and the high tides wash the fever-bearing mangrove swamps and marshes, rendering them less unhealthy than otherwise would be the case. The inhabitants are grateful for these tonic breezes from the east upon this coastal belt.

This belt gives place in the interior to savannas, pasture lands and forests of useful timber, which latter is cut for export; and beyond are the Cockscomb Mountains, the birthplace of numerous streams.

In this interior region of British Honduras there lie the remains of an ancient culture area, ruins of buildings such as we see in Yucatan, the adjacent part of Mexico, and in Guatemala on the west. They appear to show the existence of a larger population in pre-Colombian times—part of that undoubtedly clever and industrious ancient folk of Central America who have so entirely disappeared.

To the buccaneers of the Spanish Main the colony largely owes its origin, and to the logwood cutters. The coloured folk here are some of the most expert woodmen in the world, and we see the results of their labour in the rafts of timber—pine, cedar and dyewood—being piloted down the flood of the Belize River. These people are descendants of the buccaneers, people of European blood forming part of the population, the majority of which is composed of a mixture, the descendants of negro slaves, Indian and white settlers. There is, of course, a small purely white class, official, colonial and commercial, under colony government from Britain.

The natural products here most in evidence are the timbers, together with bananas and other characteristic fruits, and coconuts, rubber, coffee, cotton and fibre-producing plants; and gold and other minerals are found and worked in small degree.

It might perhaps be said that a description of British Honduras is out of place in a book such as the present, treating of Spanish America. But geographical considerations would not thus be denied. Further, this little outpost of the British Empire, if it should always remain such, cannot fail to influence, and to be influenced by, the Spanish American civilization around it. It might under better development accomplish much good in this respect, if the policy of drift were abandoned. A North American traveller who had journeyed across the Central American Republics and had been badgered unceasingly by revolutionary strife there, and by customs-house officers and others of the bureaucracy of those States, once exclaimed that the only peaceful moment of his journey was when he at length entered the confines of a portion of "that hated British monarchy"—British Honduras! This may have been an exaggeration, but held something of truth.

The little Republic of Salvador, as already remarked, lies upon the Pacific side of this interesting isthmian region of Central America, but, small in size, it is the most thickly populated and perhaps the most prosperous and advanced of all this group of States. Its capital, San Salvador, may be regarded as a fine example of Spanish American culture, and, with its buildings and institutions, would compare more than favourably with a European or North American town. The climate and general character of the uplands upon which it is situated, and the social atmosphere of the place, are pleasing.

But the Pacific littoral is of that low and monotonous character characteristic of the western slope of much of Central America, and as a consequence the ports are often difficult of access through shoal water and heavy surf. The interior is gained either from La Libertad or Acajutla, by railway to the capital, ascending to 2,000 feet above the sea.

The Republic shares with Honduras and Nicaragua the beautiful Bay of Fonseca, but this beauty is characteristically associated with natural terrors, for not far inland arises the dreaded San Miguel volcano, one of the worst burning mountains of Central America, ever threatening the life of the capital. Upon this bay lies La Union, the chief port of Salvador.

The Republic prides itself, and not unjustly, upon the freedom of its life politically. But it is by no means immune from the inevitable factional strife of Central America, the ambition of dictators and the evils brought about by such corruption of self-government. However, many foreigners carry on successful businesses in the capital.

The population tends to increase with some rapidity, and we shall remark the much smaller proportion of Indians found here; the bulk of the people, the Ladinos, being a mixture of white and Indian, distributed throughout a number of pleasing secondary towns, and, in the country districts, are engaged in the production of coffee, sugar, tobacco and other characteristic resources; whilst the hills afford them those minerals with which the region in general is dowered, with some mining establishments, which, as usual, are controlled by foreigners.

The economic life of Salvador is too greatly dependent upon European markets and financial centres; upon the export of coffee thereto; upon the elevation or depression of such markets—a condition, of course, common to many Spanish American States, but which a better-ordered regimen will seek to rectify.

We might wander long through the beautiful scenery of Salvador, enjoying the grand and imposing aspect of its volcanoes, the beauty of its valleys and streams, for this part of Central America is famed, or rather should be famed, for the beauty of the landscape. Quaint towns and curious products, the quiet and in some respects pleasant life of its folk, the budding industries, and a certain promise for the future leave a pleasant impression upon the mind of the traveller in this little State facing the broad Pacific.

Of the Republic of Nicaragua, which we may approach either from the Atlantic or the Pacific, and which is the largest of this group of States, many dismal descriptions have been given. It is described as economically and in civic conditions the most backward. Yet some of its towns are fine places. Leon was described as a splendid city by travellers in 1665, and about that period the very active buccaneer Dampier gathered rich booty from it. Granada, founded by Cordova in 1523, was also one of the richest cities in Central America, and it, too, gave up its toll of booty to the corsairs. The Cathedral of Leon is one of the most noteworthy, massive and ornate of the great stone temples with which the Spaniards endowed the New World, typical of the colonial architecture which redeems these centres of life from the prosaic vulgarity of some other lands.

THE CITY OF GUATEMALA.

Vol. I. To face p. 80.

We may visit these towns from the line of railway which runs from Corinto, the chief seaport on the Pacific coast.

The capital of the Republic, the city of Managua, is of less interesting character, and was, in a measure, raised to that position in order to put an end to the rivalry between Leon and Granada, both of which claimed metropolitan predominance. It is situated upon the great lake of Nicaragua, the most prominent topographical feature of this part of Central America, and which, it will be recollected, was at one time destined to form part of the waterway of a proposed trans-isthmian canal in place of that of Panama.

This great lake valley and its adjacent highlands form the most plentifully inhabited part of Nicaragua, as the Spanish colonial development seized first upon its more fertile soil, watered by the lake and streams. This civilization entered the country from the Pacific side, from which we remark the grim and distant ramparts of the Central American Cordillera, with its volcanoes intervening between the western versant and littoral, and the low, monotonous and swampy region of the east, and the Mosquito Coast bordering upon the Atlantic. The Pacific coast here is bold and rocky, with a headland enclosing the Bay of Fonseca in Nicaraguan territory.

Through the Cordillera flows the San Juan River, draining this low eastern slope, and here lay the route of the projected Nicaraguan Canal, whose abandonment caused bitter disappointment to the people of the Republic.

In places in this wild land we remark the remains of the pre-Colombian folk, who have left vestiges of their temples and other structures, and thus we realize once more how a chain of temple and palace-building folk in ancient times was carried down the length of the continents from Mexico to Peru.

If too gloomy a description of the eastern side of Nicaragua has been given, this must be tempered by noting that it possesses certain natural advantages which may render it one of the most valuable districts, from an economic point of view, in the whole of Central America. Its rivers may be navigated by ocean-going steamers, and in the Bluefields district the industry of banana production and shipment has risen to very considerable importance.

The name of Nicaragua comes from that powerful native chief, Nicoya, who, when the Spaniards first arrived, received Davila, their leader, in a friendly spirit, and accepted Christian baptism at the hands of the Roman Catholic priests. But the Spaniards overran the country; those who invaded it from the east clashing with their own countrymen who came in from the west, and Nicaragua's fine Indian chief—pathetic page of native history—could not conserve here anything of independence for the rightful owners of the soil.

The Spanish rulers of this unhappy land were a dreadful band, of which it has been recorded that "the first had been a murderer, the second a murderer and a rebel, the third murdered the second, the fourth was a forger, the fifth a murderer and a rebel!"

In time the Indians revolted against intolerable oppression, and, later, rebellion after rebellion took place against the Mother Country. After Independence, the Wars of the Confederation constantly deluged the soil with blood, and the political government of the State was distinguished by a continuous series of military or civil revolts, during which the land was impoverished, debased and ruined, and from whose effects it has never recovered so far.

Yet Nicaragua is rich in natural products, agricultural, forestal and mineral.

Famous in local history is the name of the North American filibuster, William Walker, who for a space became president, and the doings of this man and his band are stirringly adventurous. The traveller will also recollect the long British Protectorate over the Mosquito Coast.

But few remember that Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, nearly met his death from fever in Nicaragua. The great sailor, sent to report upon the prospect of a canal, stated his intention of occupying Lake Nicaragua, which in his opinion was "the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America," whose possession would permanently sunder Spanish America into two parts. But Nature was against it. Nelson and his force ascended the river to the lake and successfully attacked the Spanish force. He was wounded by a cannon shot, fired by a sixteen-year-old girl, wife of a Spanish officer, and the maid was rewarded for the act by her people.

Of Nelson's army of two hundred men all but ten perished of fever, and left their bones in the soil of Nicaragua.

In the adjoining States of Costa Rica and Panama we are approaching the narrowing, curving form of the isthmus, whose topography culminates in the famous neck of land which joins the twin continents of America together, and which has been severed to give access between the world's greatest oceans, in the great Canal.

Whence the name of Costa Rica? Their eyes ever sharp to the glint of gold, the Spaniards who approached Central America from the sea immediately remarked that the swarthy forms of the Indians were decorated with trinkets of yellow metal. The savages wore earrings of gold, which dangled invitingly from their scared countenances when the bearded and armoured white warriors approached, and there was little ceremony in the transference of ownership. "This is a rich coast! This is Costa Rica!" the Spaniards exclaimed.

Indeed, it was part of the old culture area of Chiriqui, whose folk were clever producers of native jewellery in gold and precious stones. Pedro de Alvarado called the whole region, including Salvador, Cuscatan, the native Mexican name, meaning "Land of precious stones, of treasures and abundance." But here in Costa Rica the greedy Iberians found disappointingly little gold, except for these trinkets. This region was the limit of the Maya civilization.

To-day Costa Rica is a flourishing little State, with fertile soil and bright sunshine, with many luscious fruits, with food in plenty, famous for its splendid coffee, special product of the volcanic earth: a land of small peasant owners, upon which is founded some political stability and civic prosperity, an example to other Spanish American States, where oligarchies monopolize the countryside, and the labourer dwells in peonage.

The Pacific coast here displays as we approach it, bold headlands and broad bays, among them the Gulf of Nicoya, the home of that pious-minded Indian chief, who, as before described, gave his name to the adjoining State of Nicaragua. Studded with richly wooded islands, and famous for its purple-yielding murex (the beautiful ancient dye of the whelk), its pearls and mother-of-pearl, is this bay, from which, leaving our steamer at the port of Punta Arenas, we may ascend by railway to the pleasing capital of San José de Costa Rica, on a plateau between the Cordillera at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet above the ocean.

Here we are in a well-advanced city, the amenities of whose public life are creditable to Central America. The line runs on and descends to Puerto Limon, on the Atlantic, thus crossing the isthmus.

But, like its neighbours, Costa Rica stands perennially in awe of the volcanoes which top the summit of the Cordillera. Turialba, ever hot and angry, and Poas are among these, pouring forth smoke and vapour.

Let us take our stand a moment on Irazu, 11,000 feet above the sea—we may reach it on horseback—higher than the summit of the Pyrenees, and looking east and west remark the vast horizons which unfold below: on the one hand we see the gleaming waters of the Atlantic, on the other those of the Pacific, whilst, between, the whole expanse of the country unfolds. Here, indeed, may the inhabitant of Costa Rica cast a glance over the whole domain of his patria, and let fancy wander over the realms of ocean towards Europe and Asia.

Costa Rica was peopled largely by Spaniards from Galicia, but the bulk of the folk are to-day Ladinos or Mestizos, and, where the native tribes have not been exterminated, there are Indians still in complete savagery. The land is one of the healthiest in the region we are treading, and its products of fruits and foods, of timber, tortoise-shell, rubber, cedar, mahogany, ebony, and great stores of bananas, give to the land a further claim to the name of the Rich Coast.

And now our vessel floats upon the beautiful Bay of Panama, studded with verdant isles, and if perchance it be the sunset hour the flashing colour of the sky may light up the towers of the old colonial city near its shore, a romantic haven, whose memories of Drake and of the cruel Morgan, of Nuñez de Balboa, of Pizarro, and all that gallery of bygone adventurers who made the history of the New World upon these tropic shores. The sun does not rise, however, in the Bay of Panama, but sets, for the curvature of the isthmus has disoriented us, at Panama.

A COFFEE ESTABLISHMENT IN CENTRAL AMERICA.

Vol. I. To face p. 86.

This independent Republic of Panama threw off its allegiance to Colombia, whose heritage the isthmus was, in a grandiloquent manifesto after the—alleged—machinations of the Americans, who, wearied of the dilatory tactics of the parent State, laid hands on the isthmus to carry out their cherished plan of making the Canal. "Just as a son withdraws from his paternal roof, so the isthmian people, in adopting the destiny they have chosen, do so with grief, but in compliance with the supreme and inevitable duty the country owes to itself. Upon separating from our brethren of Colombia, we do so without hatred and without joy." So ran the manifesto.

But the people of Bogata, of Colombia, consider that an unspeakable outrage was perpetuated upon them, and regard the United States and its then President, Roosevelt, as its author—an outrage which time will take long to heal.

We shall see something of the doings of the immortal Drake in our journey down the great Pacific coast of South America, undertaken in another chapter.

The Panama Isthmus was to Drake a vantage point, from which he viewed a promised land. After his attack on Nombre de Dios, a fugitive slave—a cimarron—conducted him and his followers to the summit of the isthmian hills. There lay before Drake the gleaming waters of the vast Pacific, as they had lain before Balboa. Drake fell on his knees. He prayed to sail those waters in an English ship. It was partly his destined work of "Singeing the King of Spain's beard." Back to England he went. The commission which Queen Elizabeth had given him to sail the Spanish Main had been honourably accomplished, even if the Spaniards at Cartagena and elsewhere did not so regard it. The queen must extend the charter to the Pacific. She did it, and Drake's exploits there and return home westwards are among the most thrilling annals of those "spacious days."

Hear a tale now of Morgan the buccaneer, and Panama, and the dreadful things that befel that city. Young Morgan, born in Wales, kidnapped for a sailor in the streets of Bristol, also sailed the Spanish Main. Drake was a gentleman; Morgan seems to have been a bloody-minded corsair. At thirty-three years of age he sacked Porto Bello, committing frightful cruelties and excesses. But at Panama he surpassed himself. Yet praise must be given him for his bravery and resource.

Ascending the Chagres River from Colon in boats, with a dreadful struggle over the hills, Morgan and his men, like Drake and Balboa, beheld the Pacific beyond. Whether he prayed for success or not history does not record. But there lay the rich city of Panama. It must be taken. It was defended by hundreds of Spaniards. But Morgan had taken Chagres and killed three hundred Spaniards there, and double his own number at Panama did not daunt him. Down they went to Panama. The enterprise was a tough one, but the result may be seen to-day in the massive ruins of the old city, a sight for sightseers, buried in the jungle some miles from the present city. For within a few hours the buccaneers attacked and slew its defenders and burned the place with fire, leaving but an empty shell, having robbed it of its treasure, excepting that which an escaping plate ship bore safely from his clutches.

It has been said in extenuation of Morgan's doings here that the place was in reality burned by the Indians and the slaves, who were animated by the most bitter hatred of the Spaniards, and were quite ready to assist the Englishmen.

The isthmus resounded for more than a century with the tramp of mules bearing gold and silver from the Pacific plate ships; the treasures of Peru, of Bolivia, the pearls of Nicoya and the isles, the gold and silver stripped from the Inca temples, the silver bars from Potosi, the silver mountain of the Andes. Along that dreadful trail the mule-trains groaned their way. It was a rough road for horsemen.

The trail became, as time went on, one of the world's greatest trade routes, under the development of the Spanish Colonies. We have seen how the great Nelson hoped to split these colonies in two by establishing a "Gibraltar" on Lake Nicaragua. A toll of human life has been paid upon this rugged path for every human movement over it. Has it not been said that for every sleeper in the first Panama railway a human being died in the terrors of construction? If it is not true, it is true that of the eight hundred Chinamen who left the Flowery Kingdom to build the line—labourers who knew nothing of the horrors that awaited them in this fever death-bed—many committed suicide. Crowds of labouring peasantry from Ireland found here, too, a more emerald grave, and hordes of negroes filled up with their poor bodies any vacant tombs.

Punishment fell upon this railway, for, according to an American writer, it degenerated until its rails "became nothing but two streaks of rust."

Another tale of Darien the fateful: Listen, ye sons of Scotia, to the story of one William Paterson, and his New Edinburgh. Not content with having founded the Bank of England, Paterson must fight the great East India Company, and with another enterprising "interloper" he got over-subscribed, a company with a capital of £600,000, and set sail for the isthmus "amid the tears and prayers" of half Scotland. The new settlement was "to hold the key of the world's commerce." "Universal free trade" with all the world was to be maintained; all differences of race and religion were to be annulled in this Utopia. Death, fever, loss, the attacks of the Spaniards and complete disaster—such was the answer of Fate to their enterprise, and of the two thousand trustful souls who left the Clyde in the closing year of the seventeenth century for this desired haven of the Spanish Main, a few hundreds alone returned to tell the tale.

Paterson's idea was in reality that of a great empire-builder. It was a magnificent scheme, and only lacked the element of success. England might have possessed another India, and in the New World. The Scotch were fully alive to the position, but the English were stupid, and lost an enormous opportunity.