Panama to Patagonia

A Mountain Bridge

Panama to Patagonia

The Isthmian Canal

And the West Coast Countries of South America

By

Charles M. Pepper

Author of “Tomorrow in Cuba”

With Maps and Illustrations

Chicago

A. C. McClurg & Co.

1906

Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1906

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

Published March 24, 1906

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

TO

My Wife

KITTIE ROSE PEPPER

AND TO

My Daughter

NORITA ROSE PEPPER

COMRADES IN MANY TRAVELS

PREFACE

MY purpose in this work is to consider and describe the effect of the Panama Canal on the West Coast countries of South America from the year 1905. At this period its construction by the United States may be said to have begun. If my own deep conviction that this influence makes powerfully for their industrial development and their political stability be an illusion, the pages which follow may afford the disbelievers grounds for pointing out wrong premises or false conclusions. “We doubt” long has been the dogma of the North American and the European in everything relating to the permanency of progress in the Spanish-American Republics. “I believe” is yet only the creed of the individual. A huge material fact obtruding itself may secure a listening ear from the doubters. The Canal obtrudes.

The severely practical Northern mind finds itself in a brain-fog with reference to the Southern Continent. Speculative reasoning regarding new forces of civilization does not appeal to it. It wants the concrete circumstances. Now the Canal is not an abstraction. The industrial and commercial energies which it wakens are not abstractions. The interoceanic waterway is a national undertaking, but it shows the way to individual enterprise. More than the gates of chance are opened to American youth. They are the gates of opportunity. Consequently the need of knowledge.

The number of recent books relating to the history of South America seems to indicate a demand for this knowledge in its primary form. They open the path for a volume which may be limited more strictly to industrial, fiscal, and political information. For that reason, while not overlooking the historical element in the institutions and governmental systems, I have not thought it necessary to consider them chronologically from the colonial epoch or even from the era of independence.

The effort to divorce economic and social forces from places and peoples in order to analyze a principle usually is so barren that I have not attempted it. Places have their significance, and people are the human material. Customs and institutions are only understood properly in their environment. So many excellent descriptive works have been written about South America that I have sought to subordinate these features; yet since the information applies to localities something about them could not entirely be omitted. Moreover, I have that abounding faith which leads me to look forward to the time when the engineering marvels of the Canal construction may prove enough of a magnet to draw thither the travelled American who would know what his country is doing and who, once on the Isthmus, will be likely to continue down the West Coast with a view to determining the relative attractions of the noble Andes and the Alps. Yet I have made no attempt to preserve the form of continuous narrative. The treatment of the subject does not demand it.

To South American friends who may be offended at the frankness or the bluntness of the views expressed, a word may be communicated. The confidences extended me while on an official mission widened my own vision of the aspirations of their public men. At the same time they conveyed the idea that the economic evolution to which all look forward will come more swiftly if reactionary tendencies are combated more openly and aggressively. Opinions on the policy of the United States being uttered with freedom, I have not thought it necessary to adopt the apologetic attitude in regard to other Republics. In seeking the constructive elements in the national life and character of the South American countries, it has been with the undisguised hope that the contact and the impact of North American character may be a reciprocal influence.

Acknowledgment of material for the general map, which amplifies that of the permanent Pan-American Railway Committee, is due its chairman, Hon. H. G. Davis, whose faith in the future relation of the United States to the other American countries is an example to the generation which will share the benefits both of the Canal and of railroad construction.

C. M. P.

Washington, D. C.
January, 1906.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

PANAMA TO PATAGONIA

CHAPTER I

ECONOMIC EFFECT OF THE CANAL

Philosophic Spanish-American View—Henry Clay’s Mistaken Population Prophecy—The Andes Not a Canal Limitation—Intercontinental Railway Spurs—Argentina and the Amazon as Feeders—Centres of Cereal Production—Crude Rubber—Atlantic and Pacific Traffic—Growth of West Coast Commerce—North and South Trade-wave—Distances via Panama, Cape Horn, and the Straits of Magellan—Waterway Tolls and Coal Consumption—Ecuador and Peru—Bolivia and Chile—Isthmian Railroad Rates—Value of United States Sanitary Authority—American Element in New Industrial Life.

THE effect of the Panama Canal on the West Coast industrial development and the reciprocal influence of this South American progress on the waterway are economic facts. The citizen of the United States who would know the subject in a wider range than the mere gratification of his patriotic impulses and his national pride, should turn to the study of commercial geography, the potential political economy of unexploited natural resources. The European statesman, jealously watchful of trade conditions in the New World and the causes which modify them, will follow these channels without suggestion.

Whether the digging of the Canal take ten, fifteen, or twenty years, does not affect its industrial value. The Spanish-American, with his inherited inertia and his lack of initiative, in waiting for to-morrow would be content if the work consumed half a century. What Humboldt prophesied of the Southern Continent as the seat of future civilization, what Agassiz predicted of the Andean and the Amazon populations, he is sure now will be realized. He even reverts to his favorite method of comparing the square miles of Belgium with the square miles of his own South American country, whichever one it may be, and exhibits the latter’s possibilities for the human race by explaining the number of people it can sustain when it shall have as many inhabitants to the square mile as has Belgium. Yet while he believes that the destiny of the Southern Continent is at the threshold of realization, Yankee impatience only would amuse him. Since the interoceanic waterway and all its benefits are to be, what matter a few years? Time, says the Castilian proverb, is the element. This philosophic Latin view may serve as a curb to fault-finding if the construction work on the Canal seems to halt while the engineering obstacles are studied and experiments are made in order to determine the best means to overcome them.

But though the Spanish-American, who is of the race that controls the West Coast countries of South America, is patient in his waiting for ultimate results, he does not fail to grasp the immediate effect. All the processes of the economic evolution unroll before his mental vision. For Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, the standard already has been set, and the goal towards which they must work has been fixed. Their national policies and their commercial and industrial growth at once come under the stimulus of the waterway. “The Panama Canal,” said the leader of public thought in one of the Republics, “will precipitate our commercial evolution.” It is the spring from which will gush the streams of immigration.

MAP OF THE UNITED STATES
AND OTHER AMERICAN COUNTRIES
SHOWING THE CHIEF OCEAN AND RAIL TRANSPORTATION ROUTES
1906

[See larger version]

In the present volume I shall have little to say of Colombia, for though the Isthmus of Panama is the reception-room of that country, the Canal is to be considered jointly with relation to the Caribbean and the Pacific shores. I include Bolivia because, while as a political division it is not ocean-bordering, geographically it is a Pacific coast country on account of its outlet through Chilean and Peruvian seaports.

Population in South America is not marked by periods of phenomenal increase. Henry Clay, in his generous pleas for the recognition of the struggling Republics, was led in the warmth of his imagination to foresee the day when they would have 72,000,000 and we would have 40,000,000 inhabitants. The population of the United States was then less than 10,000,000. Clay spoke when the resources of the Louisiana Purchase were still distrusted by many conservative public men, and long before Daniel Webster had delivered his celebrated philippic against the Oregon region as a worthless area of deserts and shifting sands. Mindful of the slow growth in the Southern Hemisphere, I make no predictions of sudden leaps, but merely seek to indicate what proportion of the present and future inhabitants comes within the sphere of the Canal.

The population of western Colombia and of Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia is approximately 11,000,000, dwelling chiefly along the seacoast. It has been assumed that only this long slope of almost continuous mountain wall from Panama to Patagonia is subject to the direct influence of the Canal, and that the barrier of the Andes makes all the rest of the South American continent dependent on Atlantic outlets. The assumption is presumptuous. It is based on an unflattering lack of geographical knowledge and on a complete ignorance of political and economic conditions.

The primary mistake is in considering the Coast Cordilleras as the principal chain. The great rampart of the Andes in places is hundreds of miles across. Productive plains and fertile valleys lie on the western side of the Continental Divide as well as on the Atlantic slope. Besides, there are many bifurcations of these lofty ranges which must be pierced toward the Pacific. The mineral belt with its incalculable wealth, after centuries only partially exploited, has its basis of profitable production and export by means of the water transport of the Pacific. And greatest of all the facts is the certainty that railways will bore through the granite ramparts in a westerly direction. The central spine or backbone of the Intercontinental or Pan-American trunk line is not all a dream, and from its links spurs will shoot out toward the Pacific. It would have been as reasonable to imagine that the Rocky Mountains could forever shut in the region between them and the Sierra Nevadas, barring all outlet to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, as to suppose that the Pacific Ocean from Panama south is everlastingly restricted to the fringe of coast for its commerce. This is in the industrial sense and aside from the reasons of national polity which by railway enterprises on the part of the various governments are causing the Andes to disappear.

The grain fields and pastures of Argentina lie close to the Pacific. How close? Within less than 200 miles. The pampas of the western and northwestern provinces are from 500 to 1,200 miles distant from the Atlantic seaboard. The pressure of the agricultural population is westward. A generation—perhaps a decade—will bring it to the slopes of the Andes. The first railway to join the Atlantic and the Pacific, that from Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso, will be completed by means of a spiral tunnel long before vessels are propelled through the Canal.

But Valparaiso is far south, so far that, in the opinion of some authorities, it is the limit of the Canal radius. Let this be granted momentarily while the map is scanned. Place the thumb on the Chilean port of Caldera, 400 miles north of Valparaiso; the index finger on Tucuman, and the middle finger on Cordoba. The lines forking from these Argentine cities forecast the next chapter of railway expansion. Let it be known also that Nature, in kindly mood, has formed a saddle in the mountain range in this section, and that engineering surveys of routes through the depression are the basis of projects which only await a larger agricultural area under cultivation in order to become railway enterprises with an assured commercial basis. Both Cordoba and Tucuman will be in rail communication with the Pacific coast some years before the waterway is finished. Nor are these the only trans-Andine lines in prospect. They serve the purposes of illustration, so that a description of the others may be omitted. I cite the first two in order that it may be known there is an Argentine relation to the Canal, and a highly important one as to population and as to the exports and imports which are the foundation of maritime and rail traffic.

If this suggestion is new and strange, I follow it by a more startling proposition. As one result of the Panama Canal, a measure of Amazonian commerce will flow to and from the Pacific.

To begin with, there is the nearness. By several trans-Andine routes the navigable affluents of the Amazon are less than 300 miles from the coast. Steamships of 800 tons navigate as far as Yurimaguas on the Huallaga River, which was the historic route of the Spaniards over the Continental Divide. Steam vessels also go up the Marañon from Iquitos, 425 miles to the Falls of Manserriche, which by several practicable railway routes are within less than 400 miles of the Bay of Paita. Minor Peruvian ports below Paita are able to offset its shipping advantages by shorter trails. Not more than 225 miles of difficult railway construction are necessary to open to a large section of the vast Amazon region the commerce of Callao, Peru’s chief port.

In relation to the Amazon as a feeder, it has to be recognized that the Andes form a greater obstacle than in Argentina, and that the river basins will be populated much more slowly and never so densely as the Argentine pampas and sierras. But the mighty stream is within the sphere of the Canal, as I shall have occasion to explain more fully in subsequent chapters. For the present purpose a single illustration, perhaps fanciful, will answer.

It may seem a far cry from the 200,000 telephones used by the farmers of Indiana, the trolleys which tangle their way through that State, and the automobiles and bicycles which traverse the country roads, to the gum forests of South America. But the world’s hunger for crude rubber is a growing one. Bicycles, the infinite variety of motors, electric lighting, and telephones, all demand more of this article; and the 55,000 tons, which was substantially the world’s production in 1905, is insufficient for future needs. This increasing demand will stimulate the rubber production of an extensive region in northeastern Peru, and Peru has imperative reasons of national policy for wanting to turn that traffic down her own rivers, and across and over the Andes to the Pacific, instead of letting it flow out through Brazilian territory. Iquitos, the centre of this commerce, is 2,300 miles up the Amazon from Para, and Para is 3,000 miles from New York, a total of 5,300 miles by the all-water route. By river and future rail Iquitos is, at the furthest, 800 miles from Paita, and Paita, via Panama, is a little short of 3,100 miles from New York; so that the total distance is less than 4,000 miles. New Orleans by the isthmian route is within 3,300 miles of the Peruvian rubber metropolis.

Instead of the Pacific commerce being limited to the seashore strip after the Panama Canal is dug, the view which receives attention in South America is the probable influence of the waterway in diverting traffic from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Trade may not be turned upstream, and commerce is slow to leave established lines of transportation, but trade-waves are not so fixed as isothermal lines. They may show variations until the current finds its natural course to the newer markets created.

I do not mean from this to infer that the aggregate commerce of the Atlantic coast countries of South America will be lessened by the Panama Canal. Tropical Brazil, for an indefinite period, will continue to supply the bulk of the coffee consumed, and the maritime movement will follow the existing courses of navigation. Temperate Brazil, the Argentine Republic, and Uruguay will develop as the granary and the grazing-ground of the world in proportion as the United States consumes its own wheat and beef. Their exports increase with the widening of the market for these staple products. Political economists and crop statisticians have been slow to perceive that the extension of the area of agricultural cultivation and the growth of population in this great cereal region depend more on the ability of Europe to take the surplus grain, beef, and mutton than on the demands for home consumption. Public men, especially in the Argentine Republic, in their measures for encouraging immigration also have neglected to take into account this overshadowing economic factor. But it explains why during certain periods immigration has been almost stationary, while at other periods the incoming of settlers for the field and farm has been a rushing one. As a natural balance, therefore, for the diversion of traffic to the Pacific coast through the agency of the artificial waterway, the Atlantic slope has the certainty of steadily growing exports of agricultural products.

As regards Argentina, the coming railways to the Pacific, of which I have made mention, mean that a quantity of the cereals, wool, and hides will find their outlet by these routes; and a larger volume of the exchange for them—farm tools, cottons and woollens, mineral oils, and miscellaneous merchandise—will obtain the cheaper and shorter transit through the Canal and down the West Coast. Thus, without damage to the Atlantic commerce, the Pacific coast traffic will form a larger proportion in the total of South American commerce than in the past. This is especially true with reference to the United States. The trade-wave north and south may be accounted one of the phenomena of international intercourse. It is not tidal, but a brief comparison shows its growing volume. In 1894 Argentina took from the United States goods to the value of $4,863,000, and sent in return products worth $3,497,000. In 1904 the exports were $10,751,000, and the imports $20,702,000, and in the following year they were increasing.

The commercial relation of the West Coast countries may better be exhibited by tabulation in the following form:

Here, within the extremes of the eleven years, is an increase in the foreign commerce between the West Coast countries named and the United States from $8,467,000 to $26,235,000 as measured by the annual volume. The growth continued in the subsequent twelvemonth. It is a forcible illustration of the north and south trade-wave movement. Under the further stimulus of the Canal for industrial development and commercial growth the contribution to traffic for the waterway will be not inconsiderable.

Swamp Section of the Canal—The Atlantic Entrance to the Canal—Scene on the Chagres River

An analysis of the West Coast foreign commerce for a given year shows it to have exceeded $211,000,000, with a rising tendency. The intercoast trade, which is included under the foreign head, may be placed at $11,000,000 to $12,000,000. There is left, therefore, approximately $200,000,000 of international traffic for Europe and the United States.

If the international traffic were to remain stationary, the amount that would be diverted from the Cape Horn or the Magellan route through the Canal would be important, but the overshadowing element in the waterway as an economic factor is the certainty of an increase in the foreign trade. The marked feature of the West Coast countries in recent years is the growth in consumptive capacity as shown by the imports, for the increase in population has not been large. Oriental trade may be diverted from other channels through the Canal, but western South American commerce may look for growth in volume on account of internal development of the countries which are tributary to it. In this view it may be doubted whether the estimate that 75 per cent of the Canal traffic will be between ports north of the same parallels of latitude will prove correct. The north and south trade-waves may be watched for an indication of the proportion of waterway freight that will go south, keeping in mind that New York is almost on a direct line north of the western South American ports.

These West Coast markets may be studied with reference to the shortening of distance. We may take the fact that from Colon to New York is 1,981 miles, and from Colon to New Orleans 1,380 miles; add the 48 miles of future waterway and then make our comparisons of the ports along the coast—Guayaquil, Callao, Valparaiso—with the distance through the Straits of Magellan or around Cape Horn. We also may figure on the national policy of the United States, which will not be to treat the Canal as strictly a commercial proposition. The fixing of the toll rates is not near enough to furnish the basis of definite calculation any more than is the possibility of estimating the total prospective tonnage each year, though the guesses have ranged from 300,000 to 10,500,000 tons.

The steamers which ply between New York, Hamburg, or Liverpool and the Pacific coast ports vary from 3,000 to 6,500 tons. That hardly may be taken as the measure of carrying capacity of the major part of the vessels which will pass through the Canal, but on such a basis the estimate may be made of the saving in coal consumption, and the radius within which it will be cheaper to use the Canal than to double Cape Horn or thread the difficult and dangerous passage through the Straits. For New Orleans, Mobile, and the other Gulf ports, the element of distance is not comparative, because heretofore no direct maritime movement between them and the West Coast of South America has been maintained. With the waterway once open the whole Mississippi Valley becomes the beneficiary. Nor does the talk of carrying coal and other cargoes from Pittsburg through Panama to Patagonia without breaking bulk appear fantastic.

Variations in the steamers’ courses are responsible for the differences in the tables of distances usually given, but they are not important.[1] The relation in nautical miles of the chief shipping-ports on the West Coast to trade centres may be set forth as follows:

1 See [Appendix] for tables of the Hydrographic Office of the United States Navy.

This brings Valparaiso within 5,100 miles of New York by way of Panama; but with the omission of all the intervening ports except Iquique, Callao, and Guayaquil, it would be less than 5,000 miles. By way of the Straits the distance from Valparaiso is usually accounted 9,000 miles, touching at Montevideo and the Brazilian ports. When the Straits are avoided and Cape Horn is doubled, from the Cape to Pernambuco is 3,468 miles, and from Pernambuco to New York 3,696 miles. Either by the Straits or around the Cape the total is almost twice the distance via Panama.

Colon is 4,720 miles from Liverpool, and the relative advantages of the West Coast ports between Valparaiso and Panama may be calculated in the proportion of their respective distances. From Valparaiso to Liverpool via Panama is 7,600 to 7,800 miles according to the vessel’s schedule of wayports on the Pacific. From Valparaiso to Liverpool, through the Straits of Magellan, is 9,800 miles, touching at the Falkland Islands, and about 300 miles shorter by omitting them.

For Hamburg the saving in distance by the isthmian route may be placed at 2,400 miles. Proceeding north from Valparaiso, the loss by Cape Horn is in inverse proportion. Fifteen hundred miles north of Valparaiso is the central Peruvian port of Callao, which therefore has 3,000 miles’ gain in distance by Panama to Hamburg instead of by Cape Horn.

I have given these general figures before reciting details on the maritime commerce of the various countries. They show how the economic value of the Canal to them is primarily a question of subtraction,—the difference between the coal needed on the longer sea voyage and the Canal tolls. But the question of the return cargo also enters into the calculation and is distinctly in favor of the waterway, as is also that of the duration of maritime insurance.

No statistics are available which show the commerce of the western departments of Colombia; and the unsettled state of that country for years past gives no index of what its potential traffic may be. But the valley of Cauca in its variety of agricultural and mineral resources is a kingdom in itself. It is a future commercial feeder to the Canal.

The foreign trade of Ecuador amounted in the latest available year to $19,000,000.[2] Substantially all of it constitutes what might be called light freight, and a part of it now goes across the Isthmus by transshipment. Yet the portion which follows the longer route around Cape Horn or through the Straits is not small. The traffic flows through Guayaquil as in a single stream. Guayaquil, by way of Panama, is 2,864 miles from New York and 2,263 miles from New Orleans; by the Cape Horn route it is 11,470 miles to New York. The entire foreign commerce of Ecuador in the future is for the Panama Canal, except the excess which follows up the coast to San Francisco and beyond.

2 Statistics obtained by New York Chamber of Commerce for 1904.

The foreign commerce of Peru may be placed above $40,000,000 annually.[3] The bulk of the traffic is now via the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn. From Callao to New York, by way of Cape Horn, is 10,700 miles. By way of Panama it is 3,600 miles, only a little longer than from New York to San Francisco or from New York to Mexico City by the transcontinental railroad lines. In reference to Peru, it also is to be noted that the heaviest exports are from the ports north of Callao. Sugar is the largest marine freight in quantity, and this comes from Salaverry and other ports fully 500 miles north. Much of this raw sugar is now carried around Cape Horn, though some of it is left at the Chilean ports to be refined for the West Coast consumption. When the Canal is opened, with the exception of this Chilean traffic, all the raw sugar of Peru will be shipped through it to New Orleans, New York, or Liverpool.

3 Estimated on the basis of the calendar year 1904, when the total was $41,000,000, according to the report of the British Consul General.

Through the port of Mollendo, 360 miles south of Callao, come the ores, the metals, and the wools, both of southern Peru and of Bolivia. Some of the minerals may continue their course around the Horn, and also the guano which Peru in the future may export, but not all of these cargoes will find the longer route cheaper. All the wools will take the shorter route. Some wool is sent up the coast and transshipped across the Isthmus by the railways. This method is also followed in the shipment to Liverpool of some of the raw cotton raised in southern Peru. The whole of this light freight is traffic for the interoceanic waterway.

Bolivian commerce finds its outlet and inlet, chiefly through Chilean and Peruvian seaports, to the amount of $18,000,000 a year. Small as this is, the bulk of it follows the Cape Horn and Magellan routes, though some of the European merchandise is imported on the Atlantic slope through Argentina. The silver and copper ores are transported principally through the port of Antofagasta, which is 650 miles north of Valparaiso. For the mineral freights, Canal tolls may neutralize the advantage of the shortened distance via Panama to Liverpool, or may not compensate for the lessened coal consumption. But whether they do or not, the general merchandise from England and from Germany, not being bulky, will have the shorter course and probably the cheaper one on the return voyage through the Canal.

But Antofagasta, though of growing importance, is not likely to be indefinitely the chief port of export for Bolivia. The building of a railway from the great central plateau to Arica makes it certain that the copper output of Bolivia, much of the tin, and part of the silver product in time will be shipped through that port, while it will be a natural inlet for imported merchandise. Arica is so close to Mollendo—only 233 miles—that with regard to distances it may be considered on the same basis. The mineral and other internal developments, which are to fix the industrial status of Bolivia and which I shall have occasion to discuss in subsequent chapters, have a very direct relation to the facilities that will be afforded by the isthmian waterway.

Formerly it was thought that Chile would be seriously harmed by the Panama Canal. In the commercial sense this supposition does not bear scrutiny. Chile’s foreign trade is approximately $130,000,000 annually, with a tendency to reach $150,000,000. By far the heaviest proportion of this commerce is the shipments of the nitrates of soda or saltpetre fertilizers. Iquique is the principal shipping-point. The sailing-ships are the cheapest carriers for these bulky cargoes, and tolls based on tonnage may make it unprofitable to transport a large portion of them through the interoceanic channel. There is also the other consideration that the vessels which bring coal to the Chilean ports from Australia and from Newcastle secure their return cargoes of nitrates. These fertilizers being a natural monopoly, Chile will have the benefit of the industry, and the Panama Canal in no way can lessen this traffic. In its permanent effect the waterway can have little influence on the nitrates, because the deposits will be worked out not many years after its completion. Within a third of a century, or forty years at the furthest, the exhaustion of the saltpetre beds will have begun, and the cargoes of fertilizers will be lessening before that time.[4] In any aspect of the broad future of the Canal and its effect on the West Coast, the nitrates of Chile need not be considered as an influencing factor.

4 See [Chapter XIV], Nitrate of Soda.

But it may be said that until the interoceanic canal is actually open these subjects are too remote to call for immediate consideration. This view does not hold when analysis is made of the swift recognition of its effect by South American countries. There are present-day influences which are clear enough to be taken into account.

For the entire West Coast there is at once a beneficial result in having the Canal an enterprise of the United States government. This is the equal treatment which must be accorded all the steamship companies in transshipping freight over the Panama Railway. The line was operated in the interest of the transcontinental railroads to prevent competition. Under this arrangement little regard was shown for the traffic from the coast south of Panama. The result of the control of the isthmian railway line by the transcontinental roads was against encouraging the steamship lines to seek to increase their freight between Valparaiso and the intervening ports to Panama for transshipment, because the Panama Railway exacted what it pleased.[5] With the stock of the company vested in the United States, hereafter all traffic agreements must be made on the basis of equality. This is a very important factor in the tendency of the West Coast countries to mould their national policies for industrial development and commercial expansion. It enables them to enjoy some of the benefits of the Canal without waiting for its completion. It means more shipping from the year 1906 on.

5 In the memorial presented in 1905 to the United States government by the diplomatic representatives of various South American Republics, asking for fair treatment in Panama railroad rates, these statements were made:

It may be calculated that the most distant ports of our respective Republics are from New York, 4,500 miles, via Panama. From those same ports to New York there is a distance of over 11,000 miles, via Magellan; and, nevertheless, the transportation by this last route and the transportation by steamer from our ports to Europe, are on an average from 25 to 30 per cent cheaper than our commerce with New York via Panama.

The Peruvian sugar pays, by the Isthmus, 30 shillings sterling a ton, and 23 shillings sterling a ton via Magellan.

The cacao of Guayaquil, via Panama, pays to Europe from 52 to 58 shillings a ton, and to New York 65 to 68 shillings a ton.

From Hamburg shipments of rice from India are constantly being made to Ecuador, via Panama, at the rate of from 30 to 33 shillings sterling per ton of 2,240 pounds, or, say, from $7.50 to $8 per ton; while the same article from New York pays at the rate of $0.60 per 100 pounds, or, say, $13.20 per ton,—an overcharge of almost 75 per cent. Twelve coal-oil stoves, which in New York, free-on-board, cost from $45 to $48, pay on the coast of Ecuador and of Peru 30 and 37½ cents, respectively, per cubic foot, or, say, $19.20 to $21, which represents 42.66 per cent upon the cost price. The same article bought in Germany would pay a freight of from $6.40 to $6.75.

An international good also comes from the presence of the United States on the Isthmus in the capacity of a sanitary authority. It will not be hampered, as at home, by state quarantine systems. The example of what it is doing at Panama will be of immense benefit to all the ports south to Valparaiso. Its resources and its assistance will be at the disposal of the various governments which may seek its aid. With them power is centralized, and they will be able to coöperate effectually. The International Sanitary Bureau, with headquarters in Washington, for which provision was made by the Pan-American Conference held in Mexico, may become a vital force through this means. Epidemics and plagues, of which the most malignant is the yellow fever, may never be entirely wiped out, but that their area can be restricted and their ravages infinitely lessened will be demonstrated by a few years’ experience. Commerce will be immensely the gainer, and the trade of the West Coast may look for a steady and natural growth in proportion as the epidemic diseases of the seaports are controlled.

Abandoned Machinery

The influence of the gold standard of Panama will be helpful to commerce, though it will not in itself cause the several Republics which are on a silver or a paper basis to change to gold. But they will be benefited by being neighbors to financial stability. Uniformity of exchange will be promoted, and the inconveniences of travellers will be lessened. The fact that the currency of the United States is legal tender in the Panama Republic will help merchants and shippers at home, who heretofore have had to make their transactions entirely on the basis of the English pound sterling or the French franc.

In an outline of the general subject some attention should be paid to the inevitable overflow of energy and capital after they once become engaged in building the waterway and in supplementary projects. No one who understands the constructive American character doubts that the capitalists and contractors enlisted in the work will fare forth to seek other fields. It happens that coincident with the beginning of the Canal construction by the United States, the West Coast countries are entering upon definite policies of harbor and municipal improvements and other forms of public works, including railway building. There is also the new era of the mines. The industrial impulse is one of the immediate economic effects of the Canal. It appeals to the American spirit. It will find a quickening response. In subsequent chapters I therefore venture to indicate its field of activity, with such suggestions as may be of practical worth.

CHAPTER II

TRAVEL HINTS

Adopting Local Customs—Value of the Spanish Language—Knowledge of People Obtained through Their Speech—English in Trade—Serviceable Clothing in Different Climates—Moderation in Diet—Coffee at its True Worth—Wines and Mineral Waters—Native Dishes—Tropical Fruits—Aguacate and Cheremoya Palatal Luxuries—Hotels and Hotel-keepers—Baggage Afloat and Ashore—Outfits for the Andes: Food and Animals—West Coast Quarantines—Money Mediums—The Common Maladies and How to Treat Them

TO live as they live; to travel as they travel;—that is about all there is to living and travelling in South America and on the Isthmus.

All the customs will not be adopted by Northerners, nor all the habits followed. More comfort will be demanded and more cleanliness. But the general fact holds that the people living in any country have acquired by experience the knowledge of what is required by climatic and other conditions in regard to food, drink, dress, shelter, and recreation. There is reason for all things, even for the adobe tomb dwellings of the aboriginal Indians of Bolivia, or the mid-day siesta of the busy merchant of Panama.

First of all, it is desirable to know the language. Spanish is the idiom of South America, with the exception of Brazil. At the outset let me say that the chance traveller who wants to go down the coast or even take an occasional trip into the interior can get along with his stock of English. In all the seaport towns are English-speaking persons, merchants or others. On the ships English is as common as Spanish, and in some of the obscurest places the tongue of Chaucer may be heard. In one of the most out-of-the-way and utterly forsaken little holes on the coast, I found the local official who was sovereign there teaching his boy arithmetic in English. He had been both in England and in the United States, and while his own prospects now were bounded by the horizon of the cove and the drear brown mountain cliffs that shut it in, he was determined that his son should have a wider future. There are also many young South Americans who have been educated in the United States and some of whom are met at almost inaccessible points in the interior.

I state this so that no one who contemplates a journey may be turned away from it by any supposed difficulty in getting along through inability to speak the prevailing idiom. He can do very well. Yet with all his faculties of observation alert he will miss much through his ignorance of the readiest mode of conveying and receiving thought. To know any country it is necessary to know the people, and the people are only known through the medium of their speech. Their customs are better understood, their limitations are appreciated, and their strivings for something better, if they have any, are interpreted sympathetically. The paramount local topic becomes a living theme into which the visitor can enter understandingly and add to his stock of knowledge.

Let me say, also, that wherever trade is, there is the English language, and as commerce grows it will spread. The terse English business letter is the admiration of the Latin-American merchant. Yet there is no wilder notion than that trade will advance itself without the knowledge of the language of the country into which it is pushing. Many native mercantile houses have English-speaking clerks, or occasionally a member of the firm knows the idiom. But the commercial traveller from the United States who does not speak Spanish never will compete with his German rival who talks trade in all known tongues.

This, in brief, is the commercial situation as to the English language. The business man who waits for Spanish America to come within its sphere as the world language, will not achieve success in this generation.

For those who look forward to a future in South America, either in trade or in industrial enterprises, there is only one word of advice to be given: that is, to learn Spanish and to learn it at once. Diffident as the North American is about foreign tongues and badly as he speaks any language except his own, there is little reason why his self-distrust or his contempt for other nationalities should keep him from acquiring Spanish. “It is pronounced as written and is written as pronounced.” Colloquially it is the easiest of tongues to master. Since every letter is sounded and is always pronounced the same, there is no trouble with the syllables and there are no such difficult sounds as the German umlaut or the French “en.” The high-sounding expressions, while they seem very formal and complicated, are quickly acquired, and the habit of thinking of the greetings of the day and similar commonplace topics in the strange tongue comes more easily than is imagined. With practice any fairly persistent person can get enough of Spanish to avoid the cumbersome process of thinking in English and then translating his thoughts. A vocabulary of 2,000 words is an ample one for the purposes of every-day life.

The oaths need not be learned. The English expletives are expressive enough not to need translation, and they lack the suggestive obscenity of the Spanish objurgations. It is good to learn “Caramba!” in all the tones and inflections and to stop there.

The phrase-book may be studied without ridicule, and every opportunity be taken for putting its precepts to the test. I do not mean from this to indicate that a thorough knowledge of Spanish can be gained in such manner, or that the Yankee ever will master the noble and stately literary language of Cervantes, Calderon, and Lope de Vega. He will not need to use the literary language. If he have a chance to secure his first training in Bogota or Lima, that will be an unusual advantage, for it is in those capitals that the purest Spanish of the New World is spoken. But this is not necessary, and if it be his misfortune to learn the rudiments through an uneducated Chilean or Argentine source, even that harsh and choppy Spanish will be understood. By all this I mean the practical tool of the tongue in common use, and not the melodious Castilian that may be desirable in polite society.

It is a very decided advantage to know enough of the written language to read the newspapers, an occasional book by a native author, the steamship schedules, the railway time-tables, the proclamations and official decrees, and the advertising posters. All serve their purpose to the man who has business or who would be in touch with his surroundings. It is true that in the interior the Indian tribes adhere to their own dialects and the majority of South American Indians do not understand Spanish. But the officials everywhere speak it, and in the Indian villages there is a head man, or cacique, who knows the idiom of the master race. If they are not familiar with Spanish, the sounds of English are even more strange to them.

Dress for sea voyages is easily determined, but clothing for land and sea is a more difficult question. My own experience, and I think it is the experience of other travellers, has been that woollens are the most serviceable in all climates. In the cold regions they are essential. In the tropics, when loosely woven, they are comfortable. Where the pure wool is disagreeable to the wearer, a mixture of cotton in the garment may serve. Flannels are the best protection against an overheated body and quick changes of temperature. These hints apply to all places, all times, and all conditions.

For the rest, although the Anglo-Saxon newcomer sometimes assumes otherwise, the people of all the West Coast cities are civilized and accustomed to the usages of polite society. Men wear the conventional dress suit, or traje de etiqueta, on formal occasions. The six o’clock rule does not hold in Spanish-American countries. Official functions, weddings, and similar social gatherings call for the dress suit as early as ten o’clock in the morning. But the visitor in this matter may consult his own convenience to some extent, regardless of local customs. The professional classes, doctors and lawyers especially, have a habit of upholding their dignity by wearing the tall hat and the frock coat in the hottest seasons. It is rather a tradition than a requirement of good breeding. The traveller may ignore it without losing social caste.

In the matter of eating and drinking moderation is a rule which slowly impresses itself on foreigners. As to drinking, the Englishman on the West Coast has not yet learned temperance. He absorbs vast quantities of brandy and soda, or of whiskey and water, with the soda or water always in infinitesimal amounts. He has his excuse for it,—the loneliness of his exile, the climate, and so forth. But he also has a counter-irritant for the drink habit in his fondness for the manly outdoor sports which he practises as regularly as at home.

French wines may be procured anywhere in South America, but it is not always well to trust the labels. A fair native wine is made in Peru, and Chile produces an unusually good article. If the quality of the claret is not quite equal to Medoc, it is good enough for any one except a connoisseur. English ales also are to be had, and of recent years bottled St. Louis or Milwaukee beer can be obtained at all the larger places. I have found St. Louis beer up in the Cerro de Pasco mining regions of Peru. All of the countries have local breweries, but Americans do not like the brew.

Mineral waters, which are to be had everywhere, in time come to pall on the palate. They may be alternated with the wines or other beverages satisfactorily. There is a native drink called chicha, a distillation of corn fermented in lye, which is refreshing and strengthening and tastes like fresh cider. The subjects of the Incas refreshed the Spanish conquerors with this drink. It is celebrated in song,—“O nectar sabroso.” Yet a word of warning—to enjoy chicha a second time and other times, make no inquiry and take no thought of how it is prepared. Always imbibe it from a gourd.

The aboriginal thirst of the Indians and also of the mestizos, or half-breeds, is for raw alcohol. This thirst is satisfied by the aguardiente, or cane rum. It demoralizes the native population, and is a curse with which the governments are unable to cope. When the rum cannot be obtained, some other form of alcoholic spirits is provided.

The Continental custom as to meals obtains both in the tropical parts of the West Coast and in the colder climates, as in Bolivia and Chile. There is simply breakfast, or the mid-day meal, and dinner. In the morning coffee and rolls—or with most of the Spanish-Americans, coffee and cigarettes—are the sole refreshment which is expected to carry one through till noon. Americans, however, usually procure fruit and eggs. Coffee-making and coffee-drinking are arts unknown to the Yankee. Travel in South America is a liberal and much-needed education in this respect.

The almuerzo, or mid-day breakfast, is fully as substantial a meal as the six or seven o’clock dinner. Both begin with soup and fish, the best of the latter being the corbina. At the breakfast eggs invariably are served, and usually rice. The latter is prepared as a vegetable with rare art, retaining the form and whiteness of the grain. Meat courses, beginning with the fowl, follow in procession, and a salad always may be had.

The Spaniard and his descendants in South America approach roast pig as reverently as Charles Lamb did. For them it is a poem. A very good dish transplanted from Spain is called the puchero, and is something like a New England boiled dinner, having a variety of vegetables cooked with the meats which are its foundation.

In the interior, where reliance has to be had on the Indian population, the standard dish is the chupé, though it bears different names. This is a rich soup, highly seasoned by dried red peppers, with plenty of vegetables, and with a meat stock as the basis. Sometimes the meat is the vicuña or llama, sometimes goat, sometimes mutton, and once in a while beef. It is wholesome and satisfying. The only caution to be observed is not to see its preparation by the Indian women.

Two luxuries among the fruits of the tropics make oranges, bananas, and pineapples seem commonplace. These are the alligator pear and the cheremoya. The Northern appetite cloys at the preserved sweets which the tropical palate demands, but it never loses the enjoyment of these fruits. The alligator pear (Guanabanus Persea) in the West Indies and in Mexico goes by the name of aguacate or avocat. In South America it is called the palta. It is eaten as a salad, and French genius never concocted a delicacy equal to this natural appetizer.

Banana Grove

Pineapple Garden

The aguacate looks like a small squash rather than a pear. It has a kernel, or hard stone, as big as the fist. The flanks are laid open, the stone removed, and the fruit is ready to serve in its own dressing. Some prefer it with just a pinch of salt. Others add a touch of pepper. Many like a little vinegar with the salt and pepper, and a few even prefer a regular French dressing with oil, though that is apt to spoil the natural flavor. Epicures like it with sugar and lemon juice. The aguacate is one of the undisguised palatal blessings of the tropics and the semi-tropics. It should be sought after and insisted on at every occasion. The imported fruit loses the poetic savor. The most careful packing and tenderest care cannot preserve its delicate taste. I tried it once in bringing some from Honolulu to San Francisco. They looked well, but something was lacking in the taste. A similar experience between Jamaica and New York was the reward for my efforts. I was convinced after these experiments that the aguacate is one of the real luxuries which it pays to go abroad in order to enjoy. Young persons who travel will be interested in knowing that it is said to germinate the tender sentiment.

The cheremoya is not unlike the pawpaw of the temperate climates. The fibre is harder and not so juicy. But the fruit is very rich, so rich that the palate does not crave much. A mouthful lingers like the dream of the poet. The cheremoya is called the anona in Cuba. Several varieties of it differ from one another only in the delicacy and richness of the flavor. Cracked ice is the complement of the fruit. They should be introduced to each other an hour before serving.

A delusion which the adventuring North American should get rid of is that no decent hotels are found on the West Coast and in the interior. Everywhere are passable ones and in some of the cities exceptionally good ones. In the ordinary coast towns they are not much more than stopping-places, yet almost invariably an excellent breakfast or dinner can be obtained. As to the lodging conveniences the old Spanish tradition still obtains that a place to sleep in is all that is called for, and clean linen and similar comforts should not be demanded by the traveller who is moving on. But even in this respect improvements are being made.

Most of the hotel-keepers are of foreign nationality,—French, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards. It is rare to find anything of a higher grade than an inn kept by a native. The best hotels are those under the control of the Frenchmen, and when a choice is to be made they should be given the preference, for there is not only good eating but cleanliness and some consideration for the conveniences of life. A Frenchman keeps the hotel at La Paz in Bolivia, and it is a good one. Another passably fair house of entertainment in the same place is kept by a Russian. At the mining-town of Oruro a North American of German descent provides excellent accommodations. In the remote town of Tupiza in the fastnesses of the Andes, where of all places one would hardly look for a foreigner, I found a Slav hotel-keeper and a decent kind of a resting-place. The proprietor was from one of the Danubian provinces. In Lima a very well appointed hotel is managed by an Italian. In Santiago the best one is under the control of a Frenchman.

In the interior palatial inns are not to be expected, though a young French mining engineer who came out telegraphed along the Andes trail which he was to follow to have room with bath reserved for him. The telegram is still shown. Such inns as exist are called tambos. Even in the poorest of these, while the lodging is wretched, a good meal usually can be had.

The practice obtains nearly everywhere of charging separately for the lodging, but in some of the larger cities the hotels now are conducted on the American plan. The visitor is apt to be puzzled by the annexes. Naturally he assumes that the annexes to a hotel are part of it, but usually they are separate and under a distinct management. In Valparaiso there are a Hotel Colon and a Hotel Colon Annex, a block or two apart and altogether different. In Santiago are the Hotel Oddo and the Annex to the Oddo, and so on. This causes confusion, and the traveller should make inquiry in advance so as to know where he is going. While the sanitary conveniences in most of the hotels are poor, improvements are being made, and there is something of an approach to the demands of civilization.

A simple rule as to baggage holds good. Take as little as practicable and pack it as conveniently as possible. That means a good deal of loose luggage; but since trunks are charged by weight and very few of the railroads make any allowance for free baggage, it is desirable to have one’s belongings arranged so that they can be piled up around him. One soon becomes accustomed to this and to providing himself with an armful of rugs and blankets.

Railroad fares are about one-third less than in the United States. The accommodations are not luxurious, but they are fair. Night trips are unknown. Chile is the only country on the West Coast which provides a through night train with a sleeper. This is on the line between Santiago and Talca.

An addition to the regular expense of travel is that for embarkation and disembarkation. It is not covered in the steamship ticket, and since, with few exceptions, in the different ports the vessels do not go to wharves of their own or put their passengers ashore in lighters, each makes his choice of the small boats and pays the bill. These charges are not high, yet in the course of a long voyage they mount up, and it always is desirable to make the bargain with the boatman in advance.

For travel in the Andine regions it is necessary to provide one’s own outfit. For those who have to go about much it is not practicable to have their own pack and riding animals, though occasionally a mining engineer will keep a pair of horses or mules and transport them from place to place. Usually the mules and burros, or donkeys, have to be hired. In every case it is advantageous to own the montura, or saddle, and other accoutrements, with especial regard to the capacity of the saddle-bags. Though in the United States the McClellan is the favorite for hard travelling, Americans engaged in mining or in exploration work in the Andes prefer the Mexican saddle. A mining company in southern Peru after various trials discarded everything except Mexican saddles, and had these made especially in San Francisco. In my own experience I found them the most comfortable.

The petacas, or leather trunks, are used by all the South Americans. These are small, and a pair of them balance nicely on either side of the pack animal. Yet during a long mountain journey I managed to transport an ordinary trunk. The Andean mule is bred in northern Argentina. It is not the society pet that is its cousin of the United States Army, and it will carry a burden of two hundred pounds in the upper altitudes.

A supply of canned goods and similar provisions is essential, for it is not possible to rely solely on such wayfaring entertainment as may be had at the Indian huts, even when the trip is short enough to keep within the limits of human habitation. Charqui, or jerked beef, is the mainstay of the stomach for a long journey, but dried mutton sometimes may be had, and is less likely to become unpalatable. Chuni, the dried and frozen potato which nourishes the Bolivian Indians, has nutritive virtues, but palatability is not one of them.

The chief problem in mountain travelling is fodder for the animal rather than food for the man. In the valleys and part way up the punas, or table-lands, fresh alfalfa may be had. But in the higher sierras this is lacking, and it is necessary to carry a stock of barley. In some places where barley can be raised it runs to straw and does not mature into the grain, so that the local supply is not to be depended on.

A hammock is useful in the forest regions. A tent and other camping outfit are sometimes desirable, yet where it is possible to keep within the range of population it is better to risk shelter in the Indian huts, the traveller carrying his own blankets or sleeping-bag. A Western frontiersman or miner has little difficulty in outfitting for the Andean regions.

The quarantine is one of the serious annoyances of travel on the West Coast, though the interruption which it causes often is exaggerated. At times one may have to postpone a landing or a departure because of the restriction, and in that case there is nothing to be done but go on to the next open port and wait in patience. The regulations of the different governments are similar, though they are not always enforced with discretion and common-sense. Yet they are no more severe than the regulations of New Orleans or other Southern ports of the United States. Their purpose of self-protection is justifiable. The objection is that the application of the measures taken is unreasonable. The steamship companies insist on the exaction of charging the passengers an extra sum for the time in which the vessel is held in quarantine.

So many sorts of money are in circulation that it is impossible for the traveller not to lose through exchange. The United States dollar is known well enough, but it has not yet made its way down the coast sufficiently to insure being taken for its full worth. Letters of credit and bank drafts would better be in English money, for the banks and exchange houses insist on counting the $5 gold piece as equal only to the pound sterling, or $4.85. It will take some years for the full result of the Panama money system to be felt on the West Coast, though ultimately that will help to extend the use of United States currency.

A calculation is made every quarter by the United States Mint of the value of the coins representing the monetary units of the various Latin-American countries. This serves as an index of values, though in actual transactions it cannot always be insisted upon. The universal coin on the West Coast is the Peruvian sol, equal to 48½ cents gold. It is the size of the American silver dollar. Since Peru has the gold standard and coins a Peruvian pound called the inca, exactly the weight and fineness of the English pound sterling, there is no fluctuation. Ten soles make a pound. For local purposes along the coast the Peruvian sol is therefore the best medium of exchange.

I have left for separate consideration the subject of the diseases incident to West Coast travel and residence. Their mention frightens. Why, I do not know.

Pneumonia and typhoid in the temperate climates cause greater ravages than tropical diseases in their field, nor is malaria in its manifold manifestations limited to a given area. Fever and ague in the United States, calentura in the West Indies, terciana in the forest regions of the Andes,—it all is essentially the breakbone fever. Quinine and calomel remain the tonic preventives. Tropical dysentery is to be guarded against by common-sense in diet. The social vices bring their inexorable penalty more swiftly than in the North, but their remedy is the moral prophylactic. Yellow fever, since the demonstration of the mosquito as the active agent in its propagation, is losing its terrors, but its avoidance comes under the sphere of epidemic quarantines rather than of individual measures. The exceptional conditions which will prevail on the Isthmus during the Canal construction and the exceptional means adopted to combat disease are not to be taken as representative of the West Coast. Yet the benefit of this experience will be great. But whether along the coast, on the plateaus of the Andes, or in the tropical valleys, one general rule is more valuable than a medicine chest. It is that of a healthy, fearless mind which does not magnify ordinary ailments and which keeps its poise in the shadow of more serious illness.

CHAPTER III

THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA

Canal Entrance—Colon in Architectural Transformation—Unchanging Climate—Historic Waterway Routes—Columbus and the Early Explorers—Darien and San Blas—East and West Directions—Life along the Railway—Chagres River and Culebra Cut—Three Panamas—Pacific Mouth of the Canal—Functions of the Republic—Natural Resources—Agriculture and Timber—Road-building—United States Authority on the Zone—Labor and Laborers—Misleading Comparisons with Cuba—The First Year’s Experience.

WHEN the Caribbean is restive, restless is the voyager. After tossing in misery one April night I peered through the port-hole of the steamer’s cabin at what seemed a cluster of swinging lanterns dipping into the sea. They were the lights of Colon. The vessel was riding at anchor to await the morning hour when the approach to the quays could be made.

Daybreak unfolded through the mist, disclosing green foliage ridges and broken forest-clad hills sloping to a shallow bowl. This circular basin is the island of Manzanillo. The town lies as in the bottom of a saucer. Colon is not a harbor in the usual sense, for the curving Bay of Limon which it fringes is an open roadstead. The improvements by the United States will make it a commercial haven.

For all the years to come the blue horizon will be swept by the eager eye of the traveller for the Canal entrance. Seen from the ship’s deck, it is like the smooth surface of a sluggish river, broad and open. The artistic instinct of the French engineers found expression even in the prosaic work of earth excavation. They planted a village in the midst of cocoanut groves, and the palm-thatched cottages charm the eye. The bronze group of Columbus and the Indian, Empress Eugenie’s gift, allegorical of the enlightenment of the New World, may be seen through glasses, while the showy residence built for De Lesseps is discerned.

The De Lesseps House, Colon

Little is noted of the town till the wharves are approached. There is a group of warehouses, a glimpse of railroad yards, a conglomeration of frame houses with peaked roofs and outside balconies and stairways, and then swamps, marshes, and hills beyond. The great transatlantic liners stretched along the docks are far more imposing than the port town itself.

Ashore, the frame structures give an impression of all that is temporary and unsubstantial. Some have been streaked with deep indigo blue, but the sun and the salt air have worn the pigment to a faded azure. Colon has little that is typically and traditionally Spanish, because when the insurgents burned it in 1885 they left only a few brick and mortar buildings. The town which then sprang up was built with economy in view, though pine lumber was not very cheap. The newer city which gradually will replace the aggregation of shanties will be more substantial and more like a permanent seaport. The Gothic brownstone church in which the Jamaica negroes and the whites who profess the Anglican form of faith worship, is the one edifice in Colon that in the transformation should be allowed to remain.

The cocoanut grove in front of the hotel, facing the Caribbean, is a pretty bit of landscape, and the statue erected to William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stephens, and Henry Chauncey, associates in the building of the Panama Railroad, if not a monument of taste, at least serves a praiseworthy purpose as a tribute to indomitable American enterprise. Ornate homes, tropical in the extreme, line the sea-front, but the residence district is a very limited one and will remain so until the swamp is filled in and the marshes cleared away. Colon may be regarded as in the process of hygienic architectural transition, and its lack of attractiveness need not be deplored. The work of reconstruction would be immensely facilitated if another fire could sweep across the marshes and leave nothing but the brownstone church, the hotel, and the wharves.

Caribbean Cocoa Palms

Colon is the most typically cosmopolitan place upon the Isthmus, and will continue so until the world’s commerce begins to flow through the waterway. Then the city of Panama will share with it in this respect. But Panama does not have in so full a degree the European mixture as Colon, for the crews of the transatlantic vessels seldom get across to the Pacific port. In all the mingling of tongues in Colon—German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, dialect Indian, Greek, Swedish, and many varieties of English—nothing is so mellow and so distressing in whining intonation as the broad cockney accent of the Jamaica blacks.

The work accomplished by the Panama Railroad Company, hygienically and otherwise, serves as a basis for the physical regeneration of Colon which must accompany the Canal construction. Its provisions for its employees, its hospitals, and its general sanitary regulations were so well conceived and carried out that their value as an example and a precedent is very great. The engineering problem is comparatively simple. It is to raise the level of the island of Manzanillo, and then to provide sanitary conveniences and enforce hygienic principles both for the community and for the individual. The question of water supply is one of gathering the plentiful showers of heaven in cisterns and distilling them. A system of waterworks which will bring pure water from the springs of the Cordillera is not impracticable.

Colon is hot and humid. Its climate cannot be modified by artificial devices. During the dry season, which is from April to July, the mean temperature is nearly 90° Fahrenheit in the shade, while in the sun it is 110°. The humidity is about 77 per cent. In the rainy season the mean temperature is 85°, and the humidity varies from 86 per cent to complete saturation. The annual rainfall is seldom less than 125 inches. A man six feet in stature standing on the shoulders of another man of equal height, would just about be able to keep his shoulders above water if the two were placed in a reservoir which would catch and hold the entire rainfall of the year. But in spite of heat and humidity and precipitated moisture, existence can be made passably comfortable.

As the traveller takes his way across the Isthmus, he may wish also to view in retrospect the waterways that have been conceived in the brains of men who were ahead of their times, and the paths of trade and travel that have been followed; for now, in the presence of actual construction along a determined course, these pioneer routes quickly fade into oblivion.

The projects have been many. They were to unlock the key of the universe and to throw open a gateway to the Pacific. Columbus explored the Mosquito coast in search of the passage to the Indies, and thought he had found another Ganges, though the strait which he sought was obstinate in hiding itself. He planned colonies at the Gulf of Uraba, or Darien. Balboa and his companions, among whom was Pizarro, from near the same place, 200 miles east of the Chagres, hewed their way through tropical forest jungle and over mountains till they reached the summit of Piuri, from which they saw the Pacific and named the ocean inlet San Miguel Bay in honor of St. Michael. A few years later Balboa had “the little boats” carried over this path from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Long afterward, more than a century and a half, Sir John Morgan led his loyal buccaneers in Balboa’s footprints to the bloody sacking of the opulent city of Panama.

But the early Spaniards found a shorter route for their traffic. At different periods the Chagres was followed from its mouth till within twenty miles of Panama, and then the jungle was pierced by paths. Yet this was not the camino real, or king’s highway. That royal road was a cobble-paved mule trail from Portobello, twenty miles east of what is now Colon, to Santes on the upper Chagres, and thence to Panama. This is the route over which the traffic passed for two centuries. The land trails could be tested. The canal courses could only be dreamed or projected in the imagination.

Of the three interoceanic routes which have become historic, the early explorers, Spanish and Portuguese, thought most of the Darien or Caledonian cross-cut channel. It was to start north of the Gulf of Darien, near the bay which afterward became known as Caledonian Bay, and follow a general direction southwest to the Pacific. Señor Don Angel Savedro, one of the first petitioners to Charles V for an interoceanic waterway, had this general direction in his mind. This was the route advocated by the Scotch banker, William Patterson, in his broad scheme for Great Britain to save control of the Antilles, by seizing Havana, acquiring the Isthmus, and constructing an isthmian canal in order to carry the blessings of commerce and civilization to the Sandwich Islands.

During the nineteenth century the Darien general route was no less earnestly advocated than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the mythical low level had many believers. Frederick M. Kelley, the New York banker, who gave fortune and a life’s ambition to the project of an interoceanic waterway, also based his hopes on the Darien route. It required the explorations of Commander Selfridge and subsequent American expeditions, as well as the investigations of Reclus and Wyse for the French company, to dissipate the unfounded hopes regarding Darien.

The San Blas route, being the shortest, should have had more advocates, for it is only thirty-one miles across from ocean to ocean, but the solid mountain wall of the Cordillera discouraged most of the early explorers. Its merits and demerits were made familiar to the public through the discussions in Congress.

It was of the upper Chagres route that the intrepid Frenchman, Champlain, whose voyage to the West Indies and the Isthmus in 1602 seems to be historically established, wrote: “At Panama is a little river which rises in the mountains and descends to Porte Bello, which river is four leagues from Panama ... and being embarked on the said river there are but eighteen leagues to Porte Bello. One may judge that if the four leagues of land which there are from Panama to this river were cut through, one might pass from the South Sea to the ocean on the other side and thus shorten the route by more than 1,500 leagues; and from Panama to the Straits of Magellan would be an island, and from Panama to the Newfoundlands would be another island, so that the whole of America would be in two islands.”

The Raspadura channel, by which the Jesuit Fathers were said to have made the passage from ocean to ocean in canoes with a very short portage, lacks historical verification.

The Chagres route was included in the broad vision of the future which Lopez de Guevara had in the middle of the sixteenth century. The realization of his dreams may be for the twenty-fifth century. He proposed the union of the two oceans by three canals opening in three points,—the Chagres in Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec.

Before following the jungle-screened railway line or tracing the course of the Canal with its luxurious border of tropical vegetation, it is desirable to clear away geographical confusion. The Isthmus of Panama extends almost directly east and west. It is the contour of the two continents as formed by a neck not simply awry but completely twisted,—in popular language, a gooseneck. The entire West Coast of South America, except a slight bulge near the Equator, lies east of the longitude of Cleveland, Ohio. Panama City is about on the north and south line with Pittsburg. It is southeast of Colon, and the general direction of the Canal from the Atlantic entrance, therefore, will be southeast.

GENERAL PLAN OF THE PANAMA CANAL
From the plans of the Panama Canal Company

[See larger version]

The route selected by the French engineers, and which with some variation will be continued by the United States, does not need detailed description. The course of the Canal can be observed in the railroad journey to Gatun, where the first view is had of the defiant Chagres fed by its twenty-one tributaries. I have seen the Chagres a tame, sleeping brook, losing itself in the tropical jungle or the narrow gorges, and again have looked on it when it was a wild, resistless torrent. The engineering problems never can be fully appreciated until one has seen the Chagres sweeping on in its conquering career.

Native customs and the mixed life of Canal construction are seen at the stations along the railway. Every village has its collection of parrots and monkeys. The sights differ from the scenes in other parts of the Isthmus, because of this intermingling of foreigners, largely Chinese and Jamaican. But the inhabitants are so markedly of the local type that they may be easily distinguished from the foreign mixture. The aboriginal Indian race, of which there are various branches, forms a third of the inhabitants. The Panameñan is about three-fourths Indian blood and one-fourth Spanish, although farther away from the Canal Zone a very strong negro element exists, due to the introduction of African slavery by the early Spaniards. The natives, from their familiarity with the jungles and their ability to withstand the hardships of the climate and the exposure, are useful principally to the exploring parties and the pioneering expeditions. They are too indolent for the actual work of excavation.

The Culebra Cut is not seen to full advantage from the railway, yet a fair idea may be obtained of the task involved in cutting the spine of the Cordillera or the Continental Divide at this the lowest depression, 272 feet. The excavation and removal of the material from this section is said to be the controlling factor in the Canal construction. The valley with the city of Panama huddled at the foot of Mt. Ancon, and Taboga Isle in the bay, are seen to advantage from Culebra.

There are three Panamas. One is primitive Panama, in jungle-covered ruins, a few miles from the present port. This was the city whose opulence was the envy of the world until its treasures awakened the greed of Morgan and his fellow freebooters and became their spoil. Then the new town was built and fortified. It is gloriously mediæval with all its Spanish and Moorish buildings, its cluster of emerald rocks in the bay, its high tides and its mixed nationalities, with little Italy and modernized China side by side. But the present Panama attracts only at a distance, and will be attractive only at a distance until modern sanitation can be installed and some of its picturesqueness be destroyed in the interests of public and private hygiene.

Rivalry exists between Panama and Colon over their relative climatic attractions. Panama is much drier than the Caribbean seaport, the annual rainfall usually being not more than 70 inches and the humidity of the atmosphere not so great. But 90° Fahrenheit in the shade is the average mean temperature, and the humidity is penetrating enough to serve all practical purposes of discomfort.

The new Panama is at La Boca, the Pacific mouth of the Canal. This is the railway terminus, and it is there the United States authorities created the port of Ancon and then abandoned the plan of collecting customs duties in competition with the Isthmian Republic. Wharves are located there, and for shipping the place offers some advantages over the port of Panama. The present Panama with its population of 25,000 is congested. Its old buildings are overcrowded. They are solid, substantial, and will last for centuries yet; but the natural movement of population, especially in view of the enormous rents demanded in Panama, will be to seek the new city which will grow up as a frame town with elements of stability. Much business is certain to drift to the Canal mouth, some of it in American hands. The mercantile community in the days when Colombia controlled the Isthmus was anything but Colombian. It was West Indian, Italian, Chinese, German, French, American, and English. It is the same to-day and will be the same to-morrow.

The United States is the paramount authority on the Isthmus, the control of the Canal Zone making it such, and its duty to itself and its responsibility to the world could be discharged in no other way. Yet there is also the government of the Republic of Panama,—a protected commonwealth. All that needs to be understood is Article I of the Hay-Varilla Treaty. This says that the United States guarantees and will maintain the independence of the Republic of Panama.

In its political relations the Spanish term may be adopted, and the Republic may be said to be “in function” within the sphere of the United States. I omit particulars of the governmental system in order to examine the industrial resources and prospects. Details of administration are unnecessary, because the authority exercised by the American officials in the Canal Zone, and the supervising power over sanitation in Colon and Panama, take the subject out of its local limitations. The liberality shown by President Roosevelt’s administration in adjusting the jurisdiction of the United States on the broad lines laid down by Secretary Taft, left the Panama government free to work out its commercial and industrial growth through its own measures and to the full extent of its own abilities as a commonwealth. A full account of fiscal policy may be omitted, with the general statement that international traffic in transit as taxed by port dues is not subjected to heavy burdens, while the imposts on domestic trade are not severe. While a tariff in the protective sense may not be said to exist, the system of ad valorem valuations secures a customs revenue which places all merchandise under tribute. Internal taxation has many forms, modelled, as it is, after the Spanish system. In addition the income from the $10,000,000 received from the United States assures that the government will continue to be a “going” concern, in practical operation as well as in legal phraseology.

For the student of political institutions the interest is in the moulding of the inheritance of Spanish laws and Spanish administrative system to American models and the influence of an environment so pronounced as the American control of the Canal Zone. The evolution of the civic spirit, instead of being under the shadow of an unfriendly Power, is in the sunshine of a big genial Republic.

In its soil of decayed vegetation the Isthmus, with an area equal to the State of Indiana, has natural wealth enough for the subsistence of a continent. But it is tropical natural wealth, much of which exists under conditions unfavorable for development. Timber exploitation may one day open the longitudinal path eastward from the Canal Zone through the health-destroying jungles to the Gulf of Darien. Mahogany and others of the precious hardwoods offer the temptation. But the trail will be blazed slowly, a score or so of miles each decade. The mineral deposits also lie to the east. They will aid in the conquering of this hitherto unconquered region, yet gradually.

The territory which will be developed most rapidly is that lying principally west of the Canal Zone and extending to the limits of Costa Rica. Tropical agriculture in the hands of natives of the temperate countries is entirely practicable in this region, much of which has a climate markedly superior to the belt lying between Colon and Panama in the valleys of the Chagres and the Grand Rivers. The fruit industry, and in particular banana culture, has made rapid strides, but its possibilities are only in their beginning. Coffee cultivation was becoming a profitable business until the political disturbances ruined it. The revival may be expected within the five years necessary to bring the trees to the point of commercial production. Ivory nuts, rubber, and the infinite variety of minor tropical products will be stimulated by the market that will be opened. In the extreme west along the Pacific slope, where grazing has been enough of an agricultural industry to create the flourishing town of David, an enduring basis will be given to the live-stock industry.

But none of this agricultural growth can precede the building of roads. These are totally lacking in the interior. The Panama government made sensible provision out of its first revenues for this form of internal improvement, and the policy may be looked upon as a continuous one. The railroad line of development will be from Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic slope to David on the Pacific coast. Bocas del Toro will reach the Canal Zone by a railway through the banana-producing lands, and David in time may be connected with Panama.

In the general sense the prosperity of the Isthmus for many years depends more on the excavation work and on the international commerce than on its internal resources. It is this which will swell the trade of $2,000,000 or $2,500,000 annually to greater figures. Yet the waterway is the sure harbinger of the exploitation of the productive founts. The Canal community and the Canal construction are the potent economic factors.

When all is said, the Zone is the thing. The laws administered may not in their entirety be American laws, but they are such in spirit. Actually, the Canal Zone is a semi-military camp. It must continue such for purposes of sanitation and law and order during the entire period of Canal construction. What follows is the establishment of a colony within the Republic of Panama, yet not of it. This colony, which includes laborers, civilian officials, occasional detachments of marines, and a police force, is not apt at any time greatly to exceed 25,000 persons. The early estimates of the very large number of laborers who would be required were reduced when the engineers began to make closer study of the degree to which improved machinery could be used in the excavation and other work. It will be a conglomerate mass,—Jamaican and other West Indian negroes, Chinese coolies, Mexican and Central American peons, possibly a few American blacks, Italian railway workers, and similar elements. In spite of all scepticism and detraction, the Jamaica and Barbadoes negroes will do the bulk of the work on the Canal. They did the most of what was accomplished by the French company. They built the railroads along the unhealthy coast of Costa Rica. They have shown the greatest adaptability to the climate and the best capacity for hard labor. The Panama Canal will be the monumental contribution of the despised black race to civilization.

Panama Natives from the Swamp Country

Panama Natives from the Mountains

Aside from determining the engineering conditions of the Canal, which I have no purpose of discussing in this volume, the most important functions of the United States on the Isthmus are in regulating sanitation and hygiene. This regulation could not be restricted merely to the inhabitants of the Canal Zone, for to guard them against epidemics Colon and Panama had to be protected.

I never shared the enthusiasm over the rose-colored comparisons of the region lying between Colon and Panama with Havana and Cuba. Measures of hygiene, public sanitation, and even individual cleanliness will be secured on the Canal Zone and in the seaport cities. This will be valuable in decreasing the danger from yellow fever, bubonic plague, or other epidemics. And it also may be assumed that the strict supervision given by the medical officers will in a measure serve as a preventive against dysentery and enteric diseases, which are common to the tropics and especially so to the moist lands. But the Canal Zone topographically is vastly different from the island of Cuba. The Atlantic Ocean sweeps across Cuba. Every day of the year a healthful breeze is felt in the great central belt of that island. This not only purifies the northern coast, but it also invigorates the interior region, and its effect is felt even on the south coast. But in the Canal belt are the dead calms of the Pacific on one side and the limited area of the Caribbean winds on the other side. The Atlantic breezes are lost in the marshes before they reach the ridge of the Cordillera, while the zephyr which sometimes springs up in the Bay of Panama rarely extends as far as the Culebra Cut. When the Canal is completed, it will not serve as a tube through which the breezes of one ocean will whistle to the other ocean.

I write these opinions without the purpose of opening a controversy with enthusiastic scientists, medical officers, or meteorologists, but merely as a statement of climatic conditions which cannot be changed by the agency of man. There is the peculiar configuration of the Cordillera that causes the moist blankets to hang over the Isthmus and precipitates the enormous quantities of rain. Cuba has its wet season during certain months, but these rains are normal phenomena and are not supercharged with disease.

Miasma must result from the excavation of the decayed vegetation of a thousand years which constitutes the waterway line with the exception of the Culebra Cut, and yet the central belt of the Isthmus has enough of pernicious malaria even with the earth undisturbed. Experiences at Havana and elsewhere will be utilized, and the mosquito, if not exterminated, will have its harmfulness curbed. Whatever can be accomplished by artificial means to combat disease-breeding Nature will be accomplished, and no doubt need be felt regarding the efficiency of the sanitary corps as organized under the Canal Commission. But when all is not simply said but done, it comes to this: the inherent unhealthy conditions of the Canal Zone will be reduced to a minimum. The climate will not be conquered. What may happen will be to reconcile it to the presence of a larger number of inhabitants than the region heretofore has had.

For those who will dwell and work on the Isthmus the suggestions of the sanitary corps are so complete that I can add nothing except to advise to follow these instructions and to take a vacation either to the healthful mountains of Costa Rica or down the Pacific coast or back home as often as possible. The population which will be living in the Canal Zone for the next twenty years in relation to health is to be taken in the mass, and the experiences of a few individuals who have been able to regulate their own occupations with a special view to conserving their strength are not to be accepted as applying to thousands of other individuals. Nor is the result of a few months’ life on the Isthmus in its effect on the human energies to be accepted as the index of what may be expected after several years, during which the mental and the physical faculties are concentrated on one task.

The lessons of the first year’s experience are easily learned. In the beginning was the buoyant, hopeful American temperament which goes straight forward to the task and, once determined that it shall be done, takes no note of obstacles. The Canal never would be built if the spirit of pessimism obtained at the outset. Optimism is always better in a great national undertaking. A large number of cheerful and confident Americans flocked to the Isthmus to fill positions in the engineering, the clerical, the sanitary departments and on the railroad. That there were confusion and cross-purposes in administration and complaint of red tape was not important. Actually the Washington authorities cut far more of the red tape than ordinarily can be done safely in government enterprises. But within a few months loud complaints were heard about low wages, the high cost of living, the long hours of labor, and the lack of recreation and amusement. Then the discouraged employees began to come home. They were of two classes. Many of the early home-comers were the adventurous fellows who had gone to Panama wanting a new experience and having had it more rapidly than they had anticipated, returned to spread the discontent. There was the other, and perhaps the more numerous, class who had gone in good faith, expecting to find conditions as to health and personal comfort similar to the United States, and intending to stay. It is likely, too, that both classes, working as they were for the government, expected easier conditions than would obtain in private employment.

The unvarying tendency of the returning employees was to discredit the glowing official and semi-official reports which had been made, and the promises held out of immunity from even the common ailments, including lassitude and homesickness. Then came the yellow fever epidemic of the Summer of 1905 and the long period during which the health authorities were baffled in locating the focus of infection. There was also the disagreeable evidence that pernicious malaria had had time to work havoc in many strong constitutions. The picture of the panic-stricken groups struggling to get away from Colon with every vessel may have been a little overdrawn, but that the feeling throughout the Isthmus was one of illy suppressed and contagious terror was undeniable. Yet to those experienced in tropical diseases the mortality was not an excessive one, nor were the general health conditions bad, allowance being made for surroundings. The permanent hospital records and vital statistics unquestionably will show that wonders were really worked under a scientific and systematic sanitation and provisions for conserving the health of employees. But the medical officials in their spirit of hopefulness had predicted freedom from the inevitable diseases of the Isthmus of Panama, and the failure of their prophecies caused the disappointing results to be exaggerated.

Ruins at Panama

Generally, during the first year the United States suffered from too much expert opinion and advice regarding engineering and administrative work of the Canal and too little practical application to the task in hand. This was not true of the sanitary authorities, who worked harmoniously and effectively. If only they had been more conservative in their original statements, it would have been better for their reputations as prophets of health. It always is to be remembered that ditch-digging in the most humid and rainiest section of the tropics cannot be made an entirely healthful occupation, and as fast as the subsoil is turned up by the steam-shovel the earth’s resentment at being disturbed will make itself felt. The procurement of the permanent class of employees and laborers with the physical stamina and the moral fibre which the work of Canal construction requires, is necessarily an evolution and not the creation of a single year. But that class will be evolved, and the undertaking will go forward.

My own point of view is twofold. The Canal insures the industrial development of the Isthmus of Panama along the lines of tropical agriculture. It creates an international commerce and it adds to the domestic trade. It will secure an increased permanent population to replace the army of construction when the work of excavation shall be completed. This is the certainty in relation to the resources and the people. It will be good for Panama. But there is a wider good which is not local. For ten or twenty years the Canal will be a training-school in which to test and strengthen the constructive energy of the American character. Nowhere will the initiative faculty make greater demands on the individual. For those “who die victorious” the tribute of Time will be the completed Canal. For those who live the task will be from year to year out of their abundant experience to help on the industrial development of adjacent lands, among them the West Coast countries. And that is the civilization which will sweep from the Atlantic through the Canal and down the Pacific.

CHAPTER IV

A GLIMPSE OF ECUADOR

Tranquil Ship Life—Dissolving View of Panama Bay—The Comforting Antarctic Current—Seeking Cotopaxi and Chimborazo—Up the Guayas River—Activity in Guayaquil Harbor—Old and New Town—Shipping via The Isthmus and Cape Horn—Chocolate and Rubber Exports—Railway toward Quito—A Charming Capital—Cuenca’s Industries—Cereals in the Inter-Andine Region—Forest District—Minerals in the South—Population—Galapagos Islands—Political Equilibrium—National Finances.

SHIP life along coast from Panama south is dreamful, placid, nerve-soothing.

“This South Sea,” wrote the Augustine Friar Calancha, in his chronicle of the early Spanish voyagers, “is called the Pacific because, in comparison with the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, its storms are less violent and fewer and its calm is more tranquil. It is also called the sea of drunkards because a drunken man might navigate in it. Both oceans and ships are ruled over by five beautiful stars in the form of a cross, in a happy prognostic of holy domination over sea and land—at the sight of which the devil even when most enraged retreats and leaves all in tranquillity.” This is surely a happy description of the quiet ocean and a devout poet’s image of the Southern Cross.

The steamers are commodious floating Summer homes. The smooth waters of the Pacific make it possible to have a type of vessel that would be impracticable for transatlantic voyages. Deck cabins, a dining-saloon on the upper deck, and ample room are properties of them all. Some of the steamers are twin screw, though such enterprise hardly was demanded by the traffic and this type is not so comfortable as the single screw. From Panama to Valparaiso, 3,100 miles by the stops, there is rarely enough of a ripple to send the most sensitive traveller below with symptoms of sea-sickness.

The voyage is a marine trip along a great winding Continental street, with stops at many corners and turns up many lanes. Up and down the coast means putting into innumerable wayports. This makes them more or less acquainted with one another, and one coast community feels an interest in what is happening in a neighbor port a thousand miles away. The vessels bring the gossip,—usually of trade, of the value of the last cargo, of quarantine, of troubles with the native longshoremen, of disputes with the minor officials, and of political events or the latest revolution. The through freight is not yet sufficient for the big steamers to omit the minor landings and make quick time, which could be done if Guayaquil, Callao, and Valparaiso were the only ports touched. This should be a matter of eight or ten days from Panama to Valparaiso, whereas now it takes from twenty-one to twenty-three days. The time will be shorter when the through traffic developed by the Panama Canal has had a chance to grow.

As the steamer threads its way out into the ocean through Panama Bay, the vista is of cone-shaped, vivid green-clad volcanic mountains rising sheer out of the water. On a disappearing view they look like gopher mounds on the prairies. At sunset the sky is of indigo-blue and the waters are a maroon expanse, but the next night the great copper disk in the west burnishes the liquid plain, which seethes at its embrace.

For two days the voyage is apt to be disagreeably hot, though the air rarely becomes so stifling that the deck cabins have to be abandoned. The weather is decently comfortable in the daytime. The nights may be choking, but this does not last long. The third day the equatorial line is crossed, not very far out at sea yet out of sight of land. The Humboldt, or Antarctic, current is met as it sweeps up from Cape Horn, and its refreshing coolness is enjoyed for the remainder of the voyage. The only unpleasant feature is that during the season from April to August the fogs which hang over the mainland charge the atmosphere with too much moisture, and there is no relief by their precipitation into rain; yet the discomfort from this cause is not serious.

Only the small coasting-vessels put into the minor Colombian and Ecuadorian ports. On the Pacific side Colombia has but one shipping-point of consequence—Buenaventura, where the bay bends in a deep inlet. It is the gateway to the immensely rich country of the Cauca and of the overland route by Cali and the mountain passes through the Cordilleras to Bogota.

“It is a strange thing,” says my Lord Francis Bacon, “that in sea voyages where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries.” But down the West Coast, after crossing the equatorial line, much more than sky and sea is to be seen and the diary-maker need not be furtive in his occupation. On the larger steamers one is always straining the eyes for Ecuador’s famous volcanoes, Cotopaxi and Chimborazo. They are not often visible from the sea, though Cotopaxi is sometimes to be discerned. One evening I thought I caught a glimpse of one of these giant summits. It was towards sunset. Off shore was a seeming range of peaked clouds, then through a pink mist a sloping green and brown profile disclosed itself; after that bolder conical elevations, a dim fringe of them, and finally an unmistakable crown. “It is Monte Cristo,” the ship’s mate told me. “We are in the Bay of Caracas.” The chalk-like surface was of sheer cliffs sliced as by a knife and with a fleece spreading alongside half-way up to the summit. “Snow?” “Oh, no; only the surf.”

We are not more than ten miles off shore, but Monte Cristo dominates as though it were one of the colossal volcanoes. The vapors close in, the ribbons of gold in the western sky unroll themselves and are lost. It is night, and our last chance of seeing Cotopaxi is gone.

The voyage up the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Guayas River gives a vista of conical and pinnacled hills of living green, sparkling in their verdure like raindrops on the leaves when the sun comes out after a thunder shower. The gulf narrows, and the point is rounded at the island of Puna, which is the Ecuadorian customs and quarantine port. There are bathing-houses and pretty Summer or Winter homes,—we do not know which, for we realize that under the Equator there are no seasons. Beyond Puna the river is hardly more than half a mile across from one low bank to the opposite low bank. These are bordered with algaroba trees and cocoanut palms. There are open pastures and some neat houses, with ridges of mountains in the background, brown and green. The borders of the river are pleasant, but the miasma seems to hang over the land like a steaming blanket, and one gets the impression of malaria,—which impression is a correct one.

Lower Guayaquil is first seen, then the sloping part of the city proper. The big rectangular building in the saddle of the hills, the most prominent of all the structures, is the famous hospital,—a comforting reflection for strangers who have heard of Guayaquil’s yellow fever record and are told grewsome tales of the epidemics. Fewer than eight cases in the hospital count as a cipher, and ships get a clean bill of health. The profile of peaks back of the town apparently is not very high, and the valleys open gently between them. A closer view of the city from the ship’s deck shows that it is not such a bad sort of tropical port. Church spires and domes are many, and some very handsome buildings are discernible.

The Waterfront at Guayaquil

The harbor is full of maritime life. Pointed shoe-like canoes and sail-boats are constantly shooting around, while farther down the river are the balsas, or house rafts, with their tenants, including men and women, children, poultry, pigs, and other accessories. The timbers of these house rafts are from a native wood of the cork variety, said to be unsinkable. Apparently the living occupants of the rafts also are of cork, tumbling off into the water and bobbing about just as easily. I did not hear of any of them, even the smallest, being drowned. I noted the old American river-boat patterns, and could imagine myself on the Mississippi or the Ohio, except that this craft is even more blunt as to outline and more tub-like than anything that ever floated down from Pittsburg or St. Paul.

The crooked old part of the city is attractive in its picturesqueness, and is inviting at a distance. The newer section is so regular as to be uninteresting. The Guayaquil climate is trying to foreigners, though many of them manage to acclimate themselves. The mean temperature is 81° Fahrenheit. The extremes in the shade are 90° and 65°. During two or three days in the harbor it seemed to me that there was but one extreme and that the maximum.

The city, in addition to its commerce, has a number of local industries which include sugar-mills, breweries and distilleries, tanneries, foundries, saw-mills, and shipbuilding and repair shops. Besides the balsas small vessels built of the native timber are constructed in Guayaquil.

Guayaquil is a city of 60,000 inhabitants, the most populous port south of San Francisco, with the exception of Valparaiso. About 300 foreign vessels, with a tonnage varying from 360,000 to 375,000, enter and clear the port every year. The coasting commerce employs a considerable number of small vessels,—2,000, whose tonnage aggregates from 22,000 to 23,000. The relation of the port to a waterway across the Isthmus appears very clearly from the statement of the distances, which may be repeated. From Guayaquil to New York around Cape Horn is 11,470 miles, and the time required for the steam cargo vessels varies from 60 to 74 days. From Guayaquil to Panama is 835 miles, and to New York by this route it will be 2,864 miles, or to New Orleans 2,263 miles. The time now required, allowing for transshipment by the railway and the consequent unloading and reloading of the freight, varies from 14 to 20 days. With through water communication and the advantages which will justify supplying coal for faster trips, the time need not exceed eight or nine days. From Guayaquil to Liverpool via Cape Horn is 10,795 miles; to Havre, 10,577 miles; to Hamburg, 11,203 miles. The difference in maritime advantage is exhibited by the subtraction of the distance from Panama or Colon to those ports.

In years when no long-continued quarantine interrupts the commercial movement, the imports vary from $7,000,000 to $7,500,000, and the exports are $9,000,000 to $9,300,000. In 1904 the imports were $7,670,000, and the exports $11,642,000. Relatively, 90 per cent of the foreign commerce of Ecuador passes through Guayaquil. It is the entrepôt for the interior region and also for much of the coast. Esmeraldas in the north has a little foreign trade, and also Machala in the south. But their imports and exports hardly affect the volume of commerce that is concentrated in Guayaquil.

One-third of the world’s supply of cacao, or chocolate, is had from Ecuador, and this is measured by shipments through Guayaquil of 450,000 to 550,000 quintals, or 45,450,000 pounds to 55,550,000 pounds. In one year, of a total crop of 499,000 quintals, 456,000 were exported through this port. In a later year the value of the cacao exported was $7,624,000. A large section of the cacao-producing region is directly tributary to the city. The exportations of vegetable ivory—the tagua or ivory nut of commerce—vary from 39,000,000 pounds to 44,000,000 pounds annually, valued at from $600,000 to $750,000, according to the market price. In one very successful year the value was $1,100,000. For the last year given the exports of crude rubber reached 1,100,000 pounds, valued at $600,000. The United States takes 75 per cent and upwards of the rubber product. The coffee shipments were worth $500,000. There is also a considerable export trade in the various kinds of straw and felt hats which are manufactured in the interior. Hides are also an article of export.

Cacao Trees

The statistics of production and of the foreign trade are compiled by the Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce, a very progressive institution in a country that is not excessively enterprising in exhibiting the natural resources. From the figures supplied me by the Chamber, I found that the United States enjoyed a fair proportion of the Ecuador commerce. France takes the larger portion of the chocolate and coffee, but the United States furnishes Ecuador a market to the amount of $2,250,000 to $2,600,000 annually, and ships goods in about the same proportion. Germany received in one year about $2,150,000; Great Britain, $2,000,000. In the imports England has the advantage over all others in cottons and woollens. The heaviest item in the exports from the United States to Ecuador is provisions, which amount to $500,000 yearly. Petroleum, lumber, machinery, and hardware also find a market.

This United States trade and all the foreign commerce of Guayaquil are so essentially a Panama Canal traffic that their details do not call for analysis. In the increase of the future the largest proportion belongs to the United States.

The Wharf at Duran

The ambitious project of a railway to connect Guayaquil with Quito, the capital, was many years in assuming form, but the narrow-gauge line is creeping to Quito. The railway starts at Duran, on the bay across from Guayaquil, and runs eastward through a very rich agricultural plateau to Alausi, 80 miles distant, where it bends to the north. The tropical vegetation of foliage and weeds along the roadbed is so very luxuriant that the railway company has found it necessary to erect a plant midway in the hothouse belt for preparing and distributing, by a process of spraying, a solution composed of arsenic and nitre. By means of vats and steam-pipes the ingredients are boiled and dissolved into a strong solution, which is drawn off into a large tank, similar in construction to a regular railway water-tank, from which the spraying-car is filled. When the rainy season opens, the weed-killing plant begins its operations, spraying the roadbed at regular intervals. This is a very interesting feature of tropical railway operation.

Weed-killer Plant, Guayaquil and Quito Railway

Railway Spraying Cart

The road surmounted the greatest engineering difficulties when it reached Guamote, 115 miles from Guayaquil; and the mountain section was completed so that trains could be hoisted from the coast level to the Andine plateau, a sheer vertical distance of almost two miles. The railway will cheapen the traffic both for imported merchandise and for exports.

The corporation had an up-and-down financial history. The railway construction was begun, or rather a local line was continued, by Americans who secured the concession from the government of Ecuador, the money being furnished mainly by Glasgow and London capitalists. The Americans who held the concession had frequent difficulties, not only with the bondholders but with the contractors and the laborers. The work of excavation and grading was done by Jamaica negroes. The nation guaranteed the bonds of the railway, and by a somewhat subtle process the government debt was funded into these railway bonds which are a second mortgage on the customs duties. The obligations were issued as the respective sections of the railway were completed. Notwithstanding the frequent financial difficulties of the contractors and of the English bondholders, the government paid the interest, 6 per cent, regularly.

Quito is accounted by all travellers, in what relates to climate and picturesqueness, one of the most charming capitals in South America. It lies in the central plateau, at an elevation of 9,371 feet. Though an ancient and historic capital, it has been modernized by electricity. The city has a population of 80,000, and supports a variety of local industries, including flour-mills, woollen mills, potteries, sugar refineries, and small manufactories of Indian felt hats; yet it is chiefly interesting as the seat of government. Forty years ago a German-American, Frederick Hassaurek, who had represented the United States as Minister and Consul-General, wrote his impressions of Quito and its people,[6] and there has been little to add since then.

6 Four Years among the South Americans, by F. Hassaurek, Cincinnati, 1865.

One leaf from the Quito municipal records may be worth extracting. The Cabildo, or Council, under date of August 16, 1538, adopted this resolution:

“Since the arrival at Quito of a certain attorney, Bachiler Guevara, many suits have been stirred up whereby, as there was no other attorney in the town, many persons might lose their legal rights; and therefore the said Bachiler Guevara is forbidden to exercise his profession, or to give advice or his opinion on any controversy or matter of litigation, under penalty of 100 pesos for the first offence and one year’s banishment for the second offence.”

Cuenca, in southern Ecuador, is an important industrial and commercial centre. It has between 25,000 and 30,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a rich agricultural and stock-raising district. It is seeking a railway outlet to Machala on the coast; but in the course of years it will have railway communication with Quito, for the route is a natural one for commerce along the central plateau. This location is a link in the ultimate Pan-American Railway trunk line. From Cuenca to a junction with the railway already built from Duran beyond Guamote is less than 100 miles.

Misunderstanding of the topography of Ecuador causes the country’s resources to be underestimated. By many persons no account is taken of any section except the humid and productive coast lands. But there is the vastly productive inter-Andine region between the two chains of the Cordilleras. The transverse ranges between these two Cordilleras have the appearance of knots, and are generally described as the nudos. They do not offer insuperable obstacles to railway construction and other interior development, though ordinary roads are lacking.

All the cereals are grown in this central plateau lying under the torrid zone at an altitude of 10,000 feet. It is the growing of corn, wheat, and other grains at these heights which causes the Spanish writers, with their warm imaginations, to write so enthusiastically of cultivation in the clouds. The region offers great opportunities for stock-raising, and generally it may be said to be the field for future immigration and colonization. Public officials of Ecuador glow with enthusiasm over this section of their country. A cabinet minister, in his official report, thus poetically and prophetically voiced the national aspiration:

“Not much time will have passed when the inter-Andine railway, vanquishing all the obstacles which have halted our progressive march, will salute the wall of the Andes and come with the whistle of the locomotive to awaken the spirit, almost dead, of our mountain populations to the civilizing influence of industry and commerce, giving easy outlet to the richness of our fertile zones, and assuring us a broader life by placing us in immediate contact with the coast and bringing us nearer to the exterior at will, multiply the relations of common interest, break the yoke of preoccupations and routine custom to which we have submitted blindingly, and will stimulate us for work, and supply the deficiencies of our education.

“The line of iron and steel will traverse our climates and will go collecting in its train diverse productions, to bear them to our ports and deliver them to the commerce of the world. The struggle for subsistence will then be borne among the peoples of the interior, and from province to province will be established reciprocally the interchange beneficial to their respective provinces.”

The Montaña, or forest region lying on the eastern slope of the Andes and with its network of river basins stretching to the Amazon, is less exploited in the Ecuadorian than in the Peruvian territory. The rubber in these tropical forests will be secured in the process of time. The development of this region on the part of Ecuador is not remote. But there must be means of communication. The government, realizing this, decided to build a railway from Ambato, on the Guayaquil and Quito Railroad, 100 miles to the Curarey River, a branch of the Amazon with head-waters near Iquitos in Peru. This line will enable that district to export its rubber through Guayaquil instead of out through the Atlantic Ocean. The railway route lies east of the Andes.

Tobacco is grown in the north near the coast for home consumption. Sugar-cane is cultivated successfully on the nearer border of the Montaña and also nearer the coast, but it will be a long time before Ecuador exports sugar in appreciable quantities. This may be less true of cotton, which is becoming a national industry. A fine quality is grown in the northern districts, of which Ibarra is the centre, and the cotton tree thrives in other sections. The mills, which employ the cheap labor of the native Indian women, have proven successful, and they find a profitable home market, though it will be many years before Manchester is seriously hurt by their output.

The minerals of the country are principally in the southern zone, though there are rich placers in the rivers of the north. The southern province, of which Zaruma is the centre, in the last century was famous for its gold-mines, and it is still known as El Oro, or the gold country. In late years little has been done, though the quartz veins have been worked intermittently and in some of the streams gold-washing has been carried on. Minerals are abundant farther south in the district of which Loja is the centre. Some copper is found, and there are deposits of iron and anthracite coal, silver, and lead. The engineers who made the Intercontinental Railway survey were impressed with the richness of this district, but its development awaits the building of the links in the Pan-American railroad, for the lack of transport facilities under present conditions renders exploitation of the mines too costly to be attempted except with large capital.

In proportion to its size Ecuador, though sparsely populated, is as well inhabited as other South American countries. The population is very largely Indian, with the usual Spanish intermixture. The total number of inhabitants is 1,275,000. The whites and the mestizos, or mixed bloods, comprise about 25 per cent of the population. The central plateau easily could sustain an agricultural population of twice that number.

The volcanic Galapagos Islands, lying 600 to 700 miles west of the mainland, on the equatorial line, usually are considered an Ecuadorian asset. They are not, however, a source of revenue, and the 300 or 400 people who inhabit them are not likely to increase to a larger number. At different times the government has been willing to dispose of the islands under the form of a perpetual lease for coaling or naval stations. Tentative offers have been made in Europe, but European governments hardly would seek to lease them for naval purposes without ascertaining the wishes of the United States. Since the Monroe Doctrine as interpreted under President Roosevelt’s administration forbids military establishments of foreign Powers to be set up in the Southern Hemisphere, no European country is likely to come into their possession. Naval officers on various occasions have urged the purchase of the Galapagos group by the United States, but the high price at which they are held by Ecuador, or opposition in Washington, prevented a bargain. The last negotiation was by Secretary Blaine during the Harrison administration. With the authority of the United States established on the Canal Zone and with the Pearl Islands in Panama Bay under the same authority, the necessary naval base in the Pacific is secured, and no further suggestions for purchasing the Galapagos group are likely to be favored by public sentiment. The only ground would be that, through the control by the United States, European intrigues and, possibly, complications would be avoided.

Chile at different times has been credited with wanting to control the Galapagos Islands and establish a naval base at the Equator. Since the Chilean national policy is no longer one of unlimited naval expansion, it may be doubted whether that country now would care to undertake the expense of establishing and maintaining a station off Ecuador. But should Chile take this course, probably there would be no objection on the part of the United States, which, in the broad sense, as related to Europe, is a party in interest with Ecuador.

Of recent years Ecuador has maintained political equilibrium, if not absolute political stability. President Alfaro during his term was compelled to combat the reactionaries and the Church party, but his programme of Liberal measures was sustained. The greatest progress that has been made is toward financial stability. The money of the country was put on the gold basis, and that having been maintained for several years, the promise of its continuance is encouraging. The standard of coinage is the gold condor, equal to the English sovereign in weight and fineness. The common circulating medium is the silver sucre, ten of which constitute the condor, or the pound sterling. The sucre is equal to 48.66 cents. Paper money is circulated, but the outstanding issue is not very large. There are two banks of emission, each of which has a capital of 3,000,000 sucres. By the last report the total amount of bills emitted was 6,356,000 sucres.

The Ecuador banks do a profitable business in international exchange. The Guayaquil institutions regularly pay 14 and 15 per cent dividends. Their deposits in the period from 1898 to 1904 rose from 20,688,000 to 31,492,000 sucres.

CHAPTER V

PERUVIAN SHORE TOWNS

Pizarro’s Landing-Place at Tumbez—Last Sight of the Green Coast—Paita’s Spacious Bay—Lively Harbor Scenes—An Interesting and Sandy Town—Its Climatic and Other Legends—Future Amazon Gateway—Sugar and Rice Ports—Eten and Pacasmayo—Transcontinental Trail—Cajamarca—Chimbote’s Naval Advantages—Supe’s Attractions—Ancon’s Historic Treaty—Callao’s Excellent Harbor—Importance of the Shipping—Customs Collections—Pisco’s Varied Products—Rough Seas at Mollendo—Bolivian and Peruvian Commerce for the Canal.

WE steamed out of the Guayas River and into the Zambelli Channel for Tumbez by moonlight one evening. A hazy ridge lay directly in front of us, “Isla de Plata,” or little Silver Island, where the Spanish pirates buried their plunder. The gold and silver have not yet been found. So many treasure islands with the buried booty of the buccaneers lie off the Pacific coast that one does not have time to stop and exploit them all.

I always take a long look at Tumbez. There is not much to see,—a low crest of mountains somewhere inland; a long line of sandy beach bordered by mangroves and algaroba trees; a slit in the fringe of foliage, which is the mouth of the river; and a monotonous stretch of watery greenness. Back among the bushes, hidden, is the port. A few small sail-launches are hovering around, and after a time the port official comes out to the ship in one of them.

Tumbez is historic. Somewhere among these mangrove trees Pizarro and his hardy followers penetrated with their boat one day and began that wonderful march known as the Conquest of Peru. And Tumbez lies just over the line from Ecuador in what is still Peru and what was then the Empire of the Incas. Pizarro stretched his iron claws not only south to Cuzco but north to Quito. But I shall not recount history. Tumbez may be viewed to revive historic memories, but also it should claim a lingering look in order to keep alive a sense of the freshness of Nature. After it there is no green on the coast,—only rugged mountain masses, sand-hills, and towering snow-peaks. After Tumbez the coast chains of the Andes and the sublimity of Nature at rest, frowning but always majestic. Sometimes the brown cliffs with cavernous mouths rising sheer from the water, and then the plateau between this wall and the Coast Range. Oftener the sandy plain stretching from the shore to the lower flanks of the Cordilleras; beyond, the table-land; and then the lofty profiles of everlasting hills made loftier to the sight by the one range having another for its background.

The view of Paita after entering the expansive bay is a vision ranged by sand-hills. To the left are a hazy mountain, and a long reach of earth platforms, rocks, sand, and clay, rising longitudinally. To the right the land mounts to one level with torn sides like gravel viscera. The whole forms the rim of a bowl. The town hangs over the water’s edge like a drooping willow tree. The buildings are cream-colored.

The harbor is full of life. There are many small schooners and floats for loading cattle, sail rafts, and bobbing canoes with keg-like anchors. A cloud of whirling sea-gulls hangs over the bay seeking the spoils of the kitchen refuse. The captain of the port in brilliant uniform comes out with his crew in their white caps, blue blouses, and red trousers, as though they were manning a Roman emperor’s barge. The steamer is received, and then twoscore rowboats make for the vessel. The pirates board it. They are the fleteros, or boatmen, who must be braved and pacified at every port on the Pacific, for there is no other means of getting ashore. “A tierra, a tierra, Señor,—To land, to land, Sir,” they cry. One of them has you before you know it, and you are in the town.

Meantime the women pirates have swarmed over the ship. They have all kinds of wares for sale, clay drinking-vessels, knick-knacks, limes and other fruits, and the Panama hats, for the manufacture of which this district is celebrated. But we may leave them while we go ashore. There are a custom-house and government warehouse, good piers and wharves, and a passable hotel. A group of stocky soldiers, in part police and in part army, are in blue uniforms with heavy cartridge belts. All their faces are of the Indian type.

The life of Paita is seen in the market-place among the chattering women venders and their customers. All is animated, good-natured, obliging, but it is chiefly Indian with very little of the Spanish trace. The houses are of mortar, adobe, wild cane, or bamboo laths, some having mud roofs, and they are not bad dwellings. We go on a trip of exploration and find a really clean town—that is, as clean as a town can be that is swept by constant sand-storms—and evidences of good local administration. A hum like all the bees of the universe proves to be merely the murmur from the open school-room. There are two churches, one of cathedral architecture and a more modern one with a wooden steeple like a Congregational meeting-house in New England. In the plaza a forlorn but determined effort is made to coax Nature. Some palm blades are enclosed, and around the borders are scraggy carnations and scrub roses, while in the centre are Kansas sunflowers. Many of the dwellings also have climbing vines, dusty yet still green.

Paita is historic in the annals of the West Coast on account of the legends that have been grouped around it. Most of them relate to its dryness. The rain is said never to fall. This is not quite correct, but difficulty is experienced in finding when a shower may be expected. On my first visit after returning to the ship I casually mentioned at the dinner-table the information given me by an old inhabitant that it rained every seven years. The polite German merchant from Lima corrected me with an apology. “You didn’t quite understand the gentleman,” he said. “He told you that it hadn’t rained for seven years and they didn’t look for rain for another seven years.” After a while the Swiss drummer came aboard just in time for coffee. “Think of it,” he remarked, “it only rains in this place once in twenty-one years.” From later and reliable sources of information I learned that rainfall can be looked for with a reasonable degree of expectation about every fourteen years in the Piura desert, though the moisture sometimes dries before it reaches Paita and the coast. The mean annual temperature is 77° Fahrenheit.

One of the legendary libels which has clustered around Paita is that of the endless flock of goats. The basis of this legend is that the goats are driven down to the port to water, and by the time they get back in the foothills they are so thirsty they have to return, and thus the procession is continuous. Seeing a long flock of them filing through one of the town streets and waiting in vain for the rear-guard to pass, the legend does seem to have a basis in truth, but it is a perversion or exaggeration of facts.

Another libel is that the little dwarf palm which is seen at the top of the highest hill is not a palm at all, but only a slab of boards painted in imitation, so that the inhabitants may believe that a tree can grow in that soil. Actually it is a palm and not a painted post. Moreover, there are real trees. I found a group of the hardy pepper trees just back of the town, where the foothills branch off, and also some acacias, or thorn bushes.

But while it is libelled, Paita also accepts some of the stories which are circulated concerning it. One is that of the English consul or commercial agent who had lived there forty years. When his pension and retirement came, he went to his old home in England, announcing that he would spend his remaining days in the grassy downs where his boyhood had been passed and would be laid away in the green cemetery of his native village. In six months he was back in Paita, declaring that it was the only place in the world in which to live and die. In the course of nature the old gentleman passed away at a very advanced age, and was given the largest funeral that Paita ever had known.

Passing from these legends, Paita, which is now a town of 5,000 or 6,000 inhabitants, has a future as the emporium of northern Peru. It will be the Pacific gateway to the Panama Canal for the Amazon country. Its splendid sheltered bay, with all the facilities for docks and wharves and sea-room for the commercial fleets of a dozen nations, assures its future greatness. It once was the rendezvous of the Yankee whaling-fleets. The railroad runs 60 miles back to Piura, the largest interior city of northern Peru, which has a population of 15,000. Piura is the centre of the cotton-growing district, and with the extension of the irrigating systems the cotton product alone will give Paita a considerable commerce. The total of its imports and exports is between $1,400,000 and $1,500,000 annually. The certainty of the railway being extended as far as the Pongo, or Falls of Manserriche on the Marañon River 400 miles distant, is to be viewed as one means of diverting the rubber and other commerce of the Amazon from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The railway may be built before the Canal is completed.

Paita is the petroleum port. The oil fields lie between it and Tumbez at Talara. The Pennsylvania oil-drillers whom I met on two visits were graphically frank. They thought the petroleum possibilities were great, but they had a poor opinion of the English and French companies. The sulphur beds are near the Bay of Sechura, and are connected with the port of Bayovar by a railway thirty miles long.

A night out from Paita and the morning discloses a sandy shore with round bluffs. After traversing what seems a causeway, there are rocks with a salt crystalline surface. “Guano,” briefly says the experienced traveller, “the Lobos Islands.” “But where is the port of Eten?” “Eten is over there,” pointing to a shell-like side of the hill. A smashing surf is beating, and nothing can be seen but the outline of a pier. Finally heavy surf-boats with strong-armed crews to handle the long oars make their appearance. The passengers are disembarked by means of crane and basket and are hauled up to the pier by the same agency. Eten is the outlet for the sugar and rice of the Lambayeque region, and a railroad spur runs a few miles back in the interior to Ferrenafe. Its yearly commerce is $1,300,000. The Yuncas Indian dialect is spoken in this region. It antedates the Quichua, which was the language of the Inca tribes.

From Eten to Pacasmayo there is a low beach or no beach at all, with the mountains humped up at the foot of conical jagged peaks, beyond which are more peaks in regular order, the Coast Range of the Andes. Pacasmayo bathed in the sunlight and lying at the foot of a high mountain, presents a very pretty picture. The surf is heavy, but the caballitos, or grass canoes, of the natives, are at home in the tumbling waves, and the going ashore is not an unpleasant experience barring the ever present possibility of an upset. The jetty which aids commerce was built by an American company. Pacasmayo ships large quantities of sugar from the valleys beyond and also some rice and fruits. Its oranges are famous. I never saw so many sea-birds as are in this vicinity. The pelicans hang like clouds, and often they dash for the water like an inverted whirling pyramid. Porpoises are numerous, while some seals and whales are found in these waters.

Pacasmayo was the seaport for the transcontinental trail or route to the Amazon which was followed both by the natives and the early Spaniards. The road led over the Cordilleras to Yurimaguas on the Huallaga River. Various projects have been attempted for the purpose of securing through steam and river navigation. An American company has received liberal land grants and other concessions from the Peruvian government. The traffic is large enough to justify building a railway line from Cajamarca to connect with one of the existing coast spurs.

Cajamarca lies across the Continental Divide in the valley of the Marañon River. It is a town of 12,000 or 15,000 inhabitants, and is the centre of a large commerce. Freight rates by burros to the coast, the only present means of transportation, amount to $7 per ton. Historically Cajamarca has an attractiveness all its own. It was here that the usurping Inca emperor Atahualpa, who seized his brother Huascar’s birthright, hospitably received Pizarro, and, simple savage that he was, propounded the question which puzzled other untutored minds in other parts of the world during that epoch of discovery and conquest: By what right could the great man called the Pope give to the other great man called the King of Spain power and jurisdiction over land where he himself held no control?

Beyond Pacasmayo is the little sugar-loading port of Huanchaco. When the vessel puts in there, it is worth while going ashore and taking the diligencia (stage) or a horse across to Trujillo, for the road leads through a huaca, or ancient burial and treasure ground of the Incas. There is not much to see except the mud walls, but the short journey is a good introduction to the old civilization. Trujillo is a very pretty and active little place on a small river. The railroad runs down to Salaverry on the jutting slope of the mountain, the summit of which is marked by a cross. It is the fourth port of Peru in point of trade, the commerce being about $2,500,000 each twelvemonth. There is a cemetery which tourists seek in order to read the inscription, “Se prohibe pasar la muralla los botes—boats are forbidden to pass over the wall.” From this it may be understood that this graveyard sometimes is under water. From the sea Salaverry is an open roadstead nestling by a little cub of a mountain which crouches at the feet of a big mother mountain. All the time the towering peaks of the Andes are growing in grandeur.

Chimbote, the next port, as yet has little commercial importance, because the coal and other mineral wealth of the country back of it have not been developed. It has great prospects in the future, possibly as an American naval station, for the Peruvian government, it is understood, is anxious to grant the United States certain privileges there. It lies nearly midway between Panama and Valparaiso. The Bay of Ferrol, of which Chimbote is the port, is protected by a large number of islets. Its waters are always tranquil and seem more those of a lake in the interior than of the sea. The bay measures seven miles by five, and at all points offers anchorage of the first order. It is deep and a very large number of vessels of the heaviest tonnage could at all times find a shelter. Quays and wharves could easily be erected. The railway extends to Suchiman, a distance of thirty-two miles. It is to be prolonged to Recuay, and some day may form an important link in transcontinental communication to the affluents of the Amazon. The ruins of the Inca aqueduct at Chimbote possess an interest alike for tourists and for engineers.

Farther down the coast is the landing-place of Supe. I know Supe well. Five days were passed there once, not, the officials said, in quarantine, but simply under observation for the bubonic plague. The hamlet has artesian wells and a lighthouse, due to the public spirit of the planters. It ships cotton, sugar, cane rum, and rice. It also has a huaca. Several of my fellow-voyagers went ashore and dug in the graveyard. They came back with their finds,—pottery vessels looking suspiciously new and some of which, as they afterwards admitted, they bought from the natives. The visitor is allowed to dig up the pottery himself. The villagers are hospitable. They made no objection when the ship’s doctor unearthed a skeleton and left them a gratification, or hush money, for the privilege of carrying it off. His bribery was fruitless, for the captain of the Tucapel, complaining already of ill-luck and sailors’ superstitions, gave him the choice of dropping the skeleton overboard or of being dropped overboard himself.

Ancon is one of the minor ports sometimes utilized for commerce when Callao is under quarantine. When the fog rises, a perspective is disclosed of sandy mountains and of palm trees along the shore. The bay is a fine one. Seals and whales frequent it without disturbing the bathers, for Ancon is a resort to which all Lima comes by taking the railroad for thirty miles through the winding paths that penetrate and surmount the overlapping white sand-hills. Ancon is famous historically as the place in which the treaty of peace with Chile was signed when that victorious nation was exacting terms, and it is the Treaty of Ancon to which reference is so often made in the discussion of the still unsettled Tacna-Arica question.

To enter the port of Callao, the vessels follow a semicircular course around the rocks to get within the shelter of the island of San Lorenzo and the long sandy tongue of land. It is sometimes stated that the island of San Lorenzo was split off from the mainland by an earthquake, but geology gives no support to this assumption. Of recent years the government has initiated many improvements in the bay. One of the best is a fine new navy mole, and as the warships of all nations make Callao their frequent station, this improvement is appreciated. There are also the darsena, or system of wharves and piers, controlled by the government, and the floating iron dock which was constructed by a French company. This dock has a capacity of 5,000 tons. A new contract between the government and the company in 1905 relieved commerce of many burdens. Callao is a fine port. The plaza in the centre, with its blending of tropical trees and statuary, forms a refreshing picture. The custom house is the most pretentious building, but there are other tasteful structures. The population of Callao is 30,000, but in the daytime it seems to be larger, as many of the people doing business at the port live at Lima, which is only nine miles inland and is connected by an electric trolley and two steam railways. The foreign commercial colony is a large one. Much of its social life centres in the English Club.

All the commerce of central Peru passes through Callao. The shipping is extensive. Enterprising Chinese merchants have established a direct line to Hongkong via Panama, but the ships flying the English flag exceed all the other nations. Callao is visited annually by more than 1,000 coasting-vessels, steamers, and sailing-ships, with a cargo tonnage of 175,000 to 200,000 for discharge. England is first in the shipping, Chile next, and Germany third. The maritime movement is more active than at any port south of Panama except Valparaiso. With the completion of the Canal its commercial importance will be prodigiously enhanced. At present nearly half the trade of Peru pays tribute to its shipping, and the bulk of the revenues of the country are collected in its custom house. For the last year for which statistics are given, its foreign commerce amounted to $16,908,000 out of a total for the whole Republic of $37,058,000. The imports were about $13,000,000 and the exports $4,350,000. The coastwise traffic, in which foreign vessels are permitted to engage, centres in this port.

From Callao south are a large number of open roadsteads which hardly deserve to be called vessel landings, for they are entirely without harbor facilities. By means of lighters and small craft, freight and passengers are loaded and unloaded through the surf. Cerro de Azul means “blue hills,” but the place is not very blue except for ship-captains. It is a shipping-port for sugar and cattle which are driven in from the interior. Lomas is another wretched little place. Chala is an attractive coast village, chiefly a cattle-loading port. The region is noted for the production of the granadilla fruit. The granadilla is similar to the mandrake, or May apple.

Pisco is a thriving port, with an open bay sheltered by rocky islets. Among these are the Chinchas, or guano islands, which are yet capable of exploitation. The beach, with smooth rounded hills in the background, bends like a scythe. There is green vegetation, which is always grateful, and palm, olive, pine, and other trees. The beach is possible for bathing, but the sharks are too numerous to make it enjoyable.

The town lies about a mile back from the port, with which it is connected by a mule tramway. The commerce exceeds $1,100,000 yearly. A railroad runs from Pisco to Ica, forty miles. It follows a rich valley in which there are many fine haciendas, or plantations. The products are both tropical and temperate. They include cotton, sugar-cane, alfalfa, and corn. A big cotton field on the edge of the port looks like a small section of North Carolina. Pisco is noted especially for the vineyards, which extend to Ica and beyond. From these grapes is made the wine called Italia. It is enclosed in queer-looking oval-shaped earthen jars, some of them of enormous size. The best brandy that is to be had anywhere in South America takes its name from Pisco. It is a grape brandy. The pure article is superior to French cognac, but, alas! the art of adulteration has been learned, and the real distillation of the grape juice is not often procured.

The district around Pisco is famous for its variety of tropical fruits, including bananas and paltas, or alligator pears. The Pisco watermelons also are noted. In the markets of Lima they are what the Georgia watermelons are in the markets of New York. I never tasted finer ones. The whole of the surrounding country, when it can be watered, is of enormous fertility. A vast irrigation scheme has been projected for the region which extends south. There is a high range of blue-veiled, cloud-shrouded mountains, and then the plain of Noco, which spreads down to the gentle bluffs that overlap the sea. This plain parallels the coast as far as Tambo de Mora, and all of it is capable of irrigation. Tambo de Mora has some ancient tombs or burial-grounds and high mounds marked with crosses right on the edge of the village. Its shipments are cotton in bales, and liquors in casks and barrels.

Mollendo, which is the railway outlet of southern Peru and of northern and central Bolivia, is one of the three worst ports on the West Coast. Iquique and Antofagasta farther down dispute the claims, but it is impossible to see on what grounds. They are positive and comparative while Mollendo is simply superlatively worst. Seen from the sea, the town looks well enough, spreading on the flat slope of the hill, with its party-colored houses glistening in the sunlight. On a feast day or national holiday the many foreign flags flying indicate the presence of numerous consuls, which is a sure indication of commercial importance. It is the getting into the port through the open roadstead that is terrifying. There is a causeway, and in order to land it is necessary to pass through this rocky opening. Sometimes the vessels have to wait several days before they can transfer their cargo to the lighters.

View of Mollendo Harbor and Railway Yards

For voyagers there is only one way, and that is to risk life and the hope of further voyaging to the care of the strong-armed native rowers. Long practice has enabled them deftly to grab the passenger from the ship’s ladder and stow him or her in their craft. The manœuvres are repeated until all who are courageous enough are in the boat. Then it is a question of breasting the breakers. The first time I went ashore there were three Peruvian women aboard. One was an old lady who made the trip to Lima twice a year; the others were wives of local merchants. The dame began her “Ave Marias.” The younger women were less devout. Every moment they exclaimed, “Jesu Maria” and “Madre de Dios,” but in the tone of a man swearing. A huge breaker swept over the boat and gave us all a bath. Then the craft danced on the crest of the next one like a cork. The aged lady became more calm, though she continued to pray. Later, when we were safely ashore, she confided to me that she always was terrified till the first ducking, and after that she felt that the shore would be reached.

The sea is not always quite so bad, but it cannot be counted on two hours in succession to be what the natives call “consolodora.” By that they mean, not tranquil or consoling, but comparatively calm. “Comparatively” is the difference between a raging sea and a roaring surf.

Around the point from Mollendo is the Bay of Islay, calm, sheltered, and deep. It was once a place of importance. Now its population consists of a few fishermen. Everyone inquires why it was not made the port, to which one answer is that when the railroad was built the land-owners became exorbitant in their demands, and there was no way for the line to secure terminal facilities except by paying more than the road was worth. Another explanation is that the property-owners of Mollendo, by liberal subsidies and other inducements, persuaded the railway to stop at the causeway. Whatever the reason, Mollendo now has vested rights as a port, and the change could not be made to Islay without encountering the most strenuous opposition. Consequently it will not be made. Recognizing this, the government in 1905 undertook harbor improvements for Mollendo at an initial expense of $500,000.

Mollendo has a kind of double-jointed custom house, the first for imports into Peru, and the second for imports which are to be carried through Peruvian territory up to Bolivia. The exports which come from the interior are chiefly alpaca and other wool. The last year for which figures are given, these amounted to 71,000 Spanish quintals, or approximately 7,200,000 pounds. A considerable quantity of borax and minerals are exported and a small amount of coffee. The shipments of crude rubber amount to 500,000 pounds. Mollendo is second only to Callao in its exports and imports, the total commerce averaging $5,000,000 annually according to the figures of the Peruvian officials. When the Panama Canal is opened, the major portion of the shipments from this district, which are light freight, will have the benefit of competitive ocean rates through the waterway with the tolls added, or around Cape Horn without tolls but with heavier coal bills and longer time in transport. The traffic will tend toward Panama.

CHAPTER VI

LIMA AND THE CORDILLERAS