CHAPTER XVI
A LONG, LONG WAY TO COSTA RICA
I set out overland—through the Nicaraguan Canal—for Costa Rica.
From Managua the railway carried me to Granada, on the shores of the largest lake between Michigan and Titicaca. At the end of a long wharf the weekly steamer was balancing itself upon its prow and waving its stern in the air, lashed by a gale that piled the combers one upon another until the pond resembled a young ocean.
It was a squatty vessel, condemned back in the days of Zelaya, but still running. It contained several bullet holes from the revolution that overthrew the dictator. When attacked, it had been so crowded with government troops that most of them could not fire upon the enemy, wherefore they had relieved their emotions by shooting upward through the decks.
Embarking passengers were looking forward to seasickness. The Latin-Americans always enjoy this malady, even when the sea is calm. Upon going aboard a ship, the womenfolk especially prepare for it by hanging upon the cabin wall a picture of “Our Lady of Voyagings,” reciting the rosary, sniffing the smelling salts, lying down upon the berth, turning green, and suffering miserably long before the ship leaves port. Such behavior seems to be regarded as essential to the gentle feminine character, and I sometimes suspect that any lady who failed to show the proper symptoms during a voyage would be regarded as just a trifle masculine.
On this trip they all had excellent excuse. The boat rocked and pitched frantically at its moorings. When we finally steamed off, our course lay broadside to the waves, and the vessel dipped one gunwale after the other, soaking the steerage passengers on the lower deck, and sprinkling those above. They huddled together in a dejected, uncomfortable mass of humanity, groaning “Ay! Ay! Ay!” and obtaining therefrom about as much relief as Anglo-Saxons find in “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Lake Nicaragua is a hundred miles long by forty wide. Since it was a twenty-four hour journey, much agony was enjoyed by all.
I landed the next morning at San Carlos, at the mouth of the San Juan River. There was nothing of interest here except an ancient Spanish fortress and J. C. Kennedy.
“They built the fortress back in 1600-and-something, or maybe it was 1700-and-something,” explained the latter. “I know it was just before I came here.”
Mr. Kennedy, a little white-haired Irish-American, who now owned a shoe-shop and pegged away himself for exercise, had twice been chased out of Nicaragua by the old tyrant, Zelaya.
“But I don’t know as I blame him so much,” he said. “I had a factory making ammunition for the revolutionists.”
From San Carlos the San Juan River led eastward toward the Caribbean. Once seriously considered by the American government as a possible site for the canal finally constructed at Panama, it was at present so shallow that only small launches could navigate it.
One was now waiting, with a scow lashed to its side.
I sailed with it at midnight, along with some forty other passengers, mostly women and children, all of us tightly packed into whatever spaces remained among the bags, boxes, and bales of a heavy cargo. There was neither comfort nor privacy. The Latin-Americans, with characteristic vanity, had all embarked in their very best clothes. Now that they had parted from their friends, and wished to change into garments better suited to a long voyage, they faced a disconcerting problem.
The women cried out: “Gentlemen, please look the other way!”
A host of infants whined and fretted. Every one turned and twisted about in an effort to find a position conducive to sleep, until the launch suggested a cheese alive with squirming maggots.
I retired to the lighter, and discovering a sheltered nook among the sacks of beans, rolled up in my blanket. There was a splendid moon overhead. The black jungle, illumined now and then with patches of misty gray, slid past in mysterious procession. At times I would awaken as the motor stopped and the native boatmen climbed over me to guide us with long poles through rippling shallows. Sometimes the claw-like branches of a half-submerged tree came racing at us, as though shooting upstream to seize us; there would be much frantic shouting, and furious work with the guiding-poles as we dodged it; then I would settle back to another nap, lulled by the music of swift waters, and pitying the other passengers huddled in cramped discomfort aboard the launch.
FOR THREE DAYS THE BOATMEN POLED THE LAUNCH THROUGH SHALLOWS FRAMED IN RANK GREEN JUNGLE
But the pity was premature. Without warning the heavens opened up, and poured down a perfect deluge of chilling rain, and I found myself the only passenger not under a roof and with no space left under the awning. I had not known that every season was rainy season on the San Juan. And the deluge fell intermittently throughout the night. Drawing the blanket over my head, I burrowed down between two bean-sacks, where presently a boatman rushing across the scow with his pole gave a leap and planted both bare feet in my face.
“Pardon, señor, but you looked like part of the cargo!”
In the morning we docked at Puerto Castillo, a string of aged wooden shanties bordering the river, shrouded in an unceasing drizzle of mist. There were some especially dangerous rapids here, and the women were landed while the rest of us charged downstream through boiling foam. Our launch bumped and grated over the rocks as we plunged through the shallow falls, but the current swept us on, and we came finally into deeper pools below, where the women, straggling along the shore-trail, rejoined us, and crawled over one another as each sought to find her own baggage among the mixture of sacks, bundles, baskets and boxes, and to extract therefrom the ingredients for breakfast.
Each passenger foraged for himself. For three days we chugged downstream through rank green jungle with bits of fog clinging to its edges, through shallows and rapids, through drizzling showers. Every one had taken the precaution to bring food, which we ate without cooking. Now and then, if we stopped at a thatched hut, a native woman could be persuaded to boil coffee, but it was seldom that we stopped long enough. With both sexes packed tightly into an open launch for many hours at a time, there was necessary a complete abandonment of the modesties which civilized society regards as imperative. When passengers complained, the captain agreed with them sympathetically, in the fatalistic fashion of these people, as though he felt that the discomfort were something to be deplored, but not to be remedied.
The captain was in reality a “Colonel” by title. Several of the men passengers were “Generals.” Most Nicaraguans of any social standing have a military title of some sort, earned in a long-past revolution. Two or three of the women were the wives of government officials stationed in Bluefields or other isolated east coast towns, and were ladies of refinement. But contiguity was productive of democracy, and both ladies and Generals joined the peons in lamentation of common misery.
The life of the party was a stout woman with a machete in the bosom of her voluminous soiled shirtwaist. Her seven children were constantly tumbling about over the other passengers to the annoyance of every one, and her admonitions that she would cut their throats if they did not sit still, illustrated by a waving of the machete, had little effect upon them. On the lake steamer, she had led the mournful chorus of “Ay! Ay! Ay!” but she was now in good spirits and prepared at all times to conduct the conversation.
Her favorite theme was her romances.
“The oldest boy—he of the curly hair—was the son of Juanito, the blacksmith. And that one—the dark one—is the child of Pedro, the little Indian at San Carlos.”
She had left the blacksmith, it seems, because he caught her at flirtation, and failed to chastise the other man. He had simply taken her home, and beaten her. She had not minded this, for it was justified. But he should have beaten the other man, too. Did we not think so? And who could love such a coward?
We stopped on our third night at a little thatched farmhouse. While the women remained aboard the launch, reciting their rosaries in unison, as was their nightly custom throughout the voyage, the men adjourned to a narrow sandspit, opened a jug of rum, and took turns riding a young bull, which, despite its youth, contrived to toss most of them into the river. Thereafter we gathered at the farmhouse, where some one produced guitar and mandolin, and we all danced with the farmer’s three daughters. There was some question in my mind as to whether a gentleman about to dance with a barefoot partner should remove his own shoes. The book of etiquette, as I recalled it, had not covered this point. But, considering that the boards were full of splinters which might have been painful to any but the calloused sole of a native, I decided to forgo the courtesy. When the boatmen and passengers discovered that I could play a few pieces of their own music on the mandolin, they hailed me as “Paisano”—“fellow-countryman”—and thereafter called me by that name. These Nicaraguans were prejudiced against gringos, but like all Latin-Americans, were eager to be friendly with any individual who showed an interest in themselves.
One of the Generals could speak English. His hobby was collecting the pictures of short-skirted movie-actresses that came with each package of the cigarettes I smoked.
“Those American girl are some nifty girl, eh? All the time I am in the Nueva York I go always to the dance-hall to shake the—the what-do-you-call-it?—the wicked hip. And so mooch I like the scenic railway at the Coney Island—the one that go all the time through the dark tunnel! Some classy burg, that Nueva York!”
When the rain ceased momentarily, the men would ascend to the roof of the launch, among the crates of squawking chickens that formed the bulk of the cargo, and from that point of vantage would shoot at the alligators lying half-submerged along the mud-flats. The caymans were sluggish creatures. On the Amazon and other rivers, I have seen much larger monsters disappear with the crack of a rifle. Here they merely lumbered with awkward dignity toward the water. The boatmen showed no fear of them. When we struck a sandbar, as we did at two-hour intervals, the crew would leap overboard to shove us loose, and sometimes would plod all over the river to find the deeper channels.
If this were ever to become an interoceanic canal, it would require infinite dredging. Yet, should traffic outgrow the Panama waterway, this will be the site of another road. The mountain chain which soars aloft throughout Central America subsides at this point. Lake Nicaragua is only a hundred and ten feet above sea level, and from it another river empties into the Pacific just as the San Juan empties into the Caribbean. The principal disadvantage of a canal here would be its length. Any surveyor or engineer, making the journey as I made it, would swear that the San Juan was longer than the Mississippi.
It was a relief when, after three days of it, we turned aside into a narrow channel, and pushed our way through lily-pads to the weather-stained city of San Juan del Norte, otherwise known as Greytown, our Caribbean terminus.
It was merely the typical East coast town, however—low, swampy, stinking, and generally unattractive—with black complexions prevailing. The Nicaraguan commandante was Spanish. All other officials were negroes. A customs’ inspector of West Indian descent, as immaculate in white linen uniform as only a colored official can be, directed me to a lodging house, and I set out to find it, hiking along a grass-grown embankment lined with rickety wooden shacks roofed with discolored tin, each house set upon piles above a pool of filth, and reached by a wobbly board-walk.
GREYTOWN WAS A TYPICAL EAST COAST PORT—LOW, SWAMPY AND UNATTRACTIVE—WITH BLACK COMPLEXIONS PREVAILING
Once upon a time—when this whole shore from Costa Rica to Guatemala was a part of the British “Mosquito kingdom,” of which British Honduras is the only remnant—this was a thriving city. Walker, the Filibuster, made it his base of supplies. In the days of the gold rush to California, Nicaragua was one of the favorite cross-continental routes. In those times, as the residents of to-day expressed it, “Greytown was Greytown.” Now it was only Greytown. Prosperity had fled. The inhabitants lived, as tropical natives so frequently live, without visible occupation. A visitor, especially a gringo, was a curiosity. The entire population—descendants of Great Britain’s former negro empire—rushed to the doorways to stare. Buxom wenches climbed upon their window-sills with a mountainous display of anatomy to ask one another in Jamaican English:
“Who the mon is? Who the mon is?”
I found the lodging house, but it was closed.
“Dey all go off for a lark,” advised a neighbor.
But eventually I found another hotel, kept by a Nicaraguan, who was quite amazed at the sight of a prospective guest. He had one large room, laden with canvas cots, and already occupied by a blind negro with the stupid countenance of a half-wit, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the town celebrity.
He was a musician. When some one led him downstairs and placed a mandolin in his hands, he played it as I had never dreamed the instrument could be played. He was a true genius. If his accompanist gave the wrong chord upon the guitar, he would fly into a rage. When, as a joke, some one told him that I played better than he, his indignation knew no limit. His eyelids snapped open and shut, exposing empty sockets, and he screamed like a maniac. He refused positively to play another piece so long as I was present. Thereafter he seemed to sense my return, even when I tiptoed into the room, and would cease abruptly to demand in Spanish:
“Has that gringo come back?”
But he warmed toward me when mediators informed him that I wished to take his picture. All Greytown was eager to be photographed. Seeing my camera, the blacks would call out, “Draw me portrait, sah?” There were many old colored men here who could recall the days when Greytown flourished. They were very dignified and formal, as befits a patriarch, and with the peculiar vanity of the oldest living resident everywhere, each was extremely proud that he hadn’t had sufficient ambition to move out of one place for sixty or seventy years. They now spent most of their time sitting about the rum shops, waiting for some one to buy them a drink.
As I passed one such shop—and it seemed to be about the one kind of shop in the city—a group of my former associates from the launch journey greeted me with an overjoyed, “Paisano!” and called me inside, assuring the colony of patriarchs, “This gringo is a good fellow! He’s our paisano! He’s one of us!” With that recommendation the darkies accepted me as an equal. Theirs was the elaborate phraseology of the Jamaican:
“When I first see he,” they said, “I presumption that he be American.” And to me, “Am I not conclusive, sah, that you be a traveler, and that you will embrace the primary opportunity to emigrate from this region?”
My former associates were rather tipsy with rum, and all were eager to show me the sights of the city. The only point of interest they could think of, however, was the chapel across the way. It had fallen greatly into disrepair, since the Church of England is a more favored institution on the East Coast, but it contained a well-molded image of the Saviour. Some local artist evidently had done the work, for the complexion of the image was a rich chocolate brown. The natives looked upon Him with astonishment.
“Carramba!” exclaimed one. “He’s as dark as ourselves! He’s our paisano!”
A motor-schooner was about to leave for Costa Rica.
Its skipper was a Cayman Islander—a hard-faced ruffian with a whiskey-shaded mustache, who might have passed for a white man were it not for his Jamaican speech. Its crew was composed of semi-naked blacks. But all of them understood seamanship, which was fortunate, for the passing of the Red Bar, at the mouth of the San Juan, is fraught with danger.
We crept out through a winding channel. Giant combers, sweeping across the low sandspit, caught us broadside, and turned the little craft until the gunwale dipped water. Again and again they piled us against the opposite bank, while great sheets of spray broke over us and sizzled through the rigging.
The skipper, braced against the wheel, shouted orders that flew to leeward with the screaming wind. The blacks, seemingly unmindful of their peril, leaned their weight upon their poles as they struggled to pry us loose, while a dozen sharks cruised hungrily below. Natives affirm that the sea-tigers gather about each passing ship, and are seldom disappointed. There were moments when it appeared that they might enjoy their accustomed banquet. But at last we were safe, and climbing up the mountainous waves toward the open sea, while the boatmen raised lusty voices in a chantey of the old-time pirates. And with a stiff breeze filling out sails, we scudded southward toward Costa Rica, the most charming land in the world.
Five years earlier I had visited Costa Rica—after my flight from Mexico—and it was good to see it again.
We threaded our way among the reefs of Limón harbor, toward a sickle of white beach fringed with graceful coco-palms. In the distance rose lofty mountains, verdant with forest and jungle, towering up and up toward the filmy white clouds. Over it all was the bluest of skies. This was the land which admiring Spaniards, years ago, christened “Rich Coast,” and no country has ever been more aptly named.
Limón itself was merely an average East Coast port—a city of rickety wooden houses behind a large banana wharf, with a population of Jamaican blacks imported by the Fruit Company, which owns this Caribbean shore. But the railway—incidentally a Fruit Company possession, and one of the three most famous scenic routes in Latin America—carried me inland through an ever-changing panorama of cane fields, banana plantation, thatched villages, and untrammeled jungle, through forests of magnificent big trees festooned with moss and vine, through rugged gulches beside a foaming river, up mountain sides where the stream dropped to a mere white ribbon far below, along winding cliffs that looked out upon endless vistas of waving palm tops, up into the exhilarating coolness of the altitudes, among rolling hills of luxuriant coffee plantation, past the red-tiled roofs of ancient Cartago, and down again into a fertile valley dotted with little farms, into San José, the most delightful capital in Central America—a city of quaint Spanish architecture, yet with every modern comfort—a quiet, peaceful city slumbering beneath a warm sun that never burns—a city with the loveliest climate, the most attractive plazas, and the most beautiful women in the world. Every town of any note in Latin America claims these superlatives as its own. Every traveler I have met joins me in awarding them to San José.
SAN JOSÉ CONTAINS THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PLAZAS, AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD
Costa Rica is not only the most charming country in Central America, but usually the best-behaved.
So stable is its government that land upon the Costa Rican side of the San Juan River is far more valuable than the same sort of property on the Nicaraguan side.
It is one of the few countries south of the Rio Grande which can elect a new president without shooting the old one. Its leading families are so interrelated that the chief executiveship is largely a household affair. As a general rule, they take turns at it. Now and then, when they do quarrel about it, each family separates, half of it taking one side and half the other, so that everybody always wins. And whoever gains the office rules ordinarily with consideration for the rest of the populace.
In many recent years there has been but one period of rough-house in its ordinarily tranquil history. It was my fortune, on my first visit to the republic, to arrive just in time to witness its conclusion—the conclusion of such a series of events as might have sprung from the pages of a novel by Richard Harding Davis. I landed at Puerto Limón just in time to see Ex-President Federico Tinoco, the last of the Central-American tyrants, walk across the dock between two lines of fixed bayonets, and embark for Europe, carrying with him the national treasury.
The story of Tinoco would be much more typical of Honduras than of Costa Rica.
As in Tegucigalpa there were three contestants for the presidency in the elections of 1919. No one of them gained an absolute majority. Congress, forced to decide, bickered as Congresses will. The president in office, scenting possible trouble, undertook to smooth the path of his own favorite by building up a stronger army. At the head of it was Federico Tinoco, a man of prominent family, himself little known in Costa Rica except as a devotee of pleasure who spent most of his time in Paris.
When the army was well organized, Tinoco cleared the whole situation by capturing the palace and declaring himself president. Thereupon he reorganized Congress with his own personal friends, and was constitutionally elected. There were rumors—as always in these countries—that an American concession hunter financed the whole coup. It is more probable that Tinoco’s family influenced the move.
A MACHINE-GUN TOWER BUILT BY THE TYRANT TINOCO
Federico, the Dictator, was himself a weak, timid, vacillating man. The real power behind the throne was a younger brother, Joaquín, who became the Secretary of War. Young, cultured, charming, the handsomest man in a nation of handsome men, Joaquín was a striking figure everywhere. Magnetic beyond description, he could, in a five-minute conversation, bring his worst enemy to his own point of view. He had traveled throughout the world, had been received in the most exclusive salons of many European capitals, and spoke fluently several languages. He could outride, outwrestle, outbox, outfence, and outswim any youth in the Republic. At philandering he was supreme. Now and then some outraged husband challenged him to a duel, but Joaquín could outshoot them all. When there were murmurs against the high-handed methods by which the Tinocos had attained office, he announced in Congress:
“If any citizen disapproves of it, he can meet me man to man with revolvers.”
Secure in his power, Joaquín led the life of a young prince. He designed strikingly beautiful uniforms for himself. He gave many gay parties. He himself never drank, but there was always plenty of champagne for his friends. He made costly presents to his women, and not content with the local beauties, he imported occasional high-class courtesans from overseas.
His extravagances proved a drain upon the national treasury. When President Federico protested, Joaquín quickly overruled him. And Federico, despite his desire to execute honestly the duties into which family ambition had forced him, proceeded to tax the country exorbitantly. When the peons had no money left, he took their oxen. He confiscated the beasts under pretense of using them for the army, but sold them to cattlemen in the West Indies. The reserves in the local banks he seized to pay the interest on the national debt. At length, he commenced to sell some of the art treasures in the national theater.
It was his one remaining hope to secure a foreign loan. Before capitalists would listen to his pleas, however, he must secure the recognition of the American government. In his efforts to win the favor of Washington, he used every possible device. He extended every courtesy to American citizens. He joined the United States in declaring war on Germany. He offered our War Department the use of Costa Rican territory in the fortification of the Canal Zone.
His stumbling block was Benjamin F. Chase, American Consul in San José. In the absence of a Minister, Mr. Chase was reporting to Washington the current political history of Costa Rica. Being a stubborn sort of Yankee, he was reporting the truth, even though the Tinocos tried to make a pet of him. Having failed to bribe the Consul, according to rumors afloat at the time, the Dictator is said to have hired another gringo to shoot him. Several of the more loyal Americans formed themselves into a guard at the Consulate, and the Consul continued to send home unfavorable reports on the Tinoco régime.
All Costa Rica murmured its discontent at the increasing taxation. Revolutions commenced to brew. In the suppression of the uprisings, Joaquín introduced a reign of terror. His spies were everywhere. Political opponents were thrown into old-fashioned wooden stocks and exhibited in public. The prisons were filled. According to reports, prisoners were frequently beaten with iron rods, and sometimes hung up by the thumbs. Many of the stories have the exaggerated ring of the yarns told about Cabrera in Guatemala. They include those of a man burned in oil, of gold teeth being extracted and resold to dentists, and of a private swimming pool where Joaquín, after depriving his prisoners of water for forty-eight hours, would march them out to see him diving and swimming in gallons of it.
The leading revolutionist, Don Julio Acosta, had a force of two hundred men on the Nicaraguan border, but Joaquín’s army numbered about ten thousand. The revolutionists had neither arms nor ammunition. Washington, following its traditional policy of selling weapons only to constitutionally elected presidents, whether they were crooks or not, refused to sell to Don Julio, insisting that he work out his own salvation.
Indirectly, it was Tinoco’s large army that caused his own destruction. Knowing that all Costa Rica hated him, he had strengthened it with soldiers of fortune from Nicaragua and Honduras, of the type who gravitate wherever there is trouble. They must be paid. All other government employees could wait. The school teachers, in protest, left their schools, and marched through the streets with their pupils. Emboldened by their example, the letter carriers and the street cleaners followed. When the police sought to disperse them, the women cried:
“We are your friends! We are protesting against the cutting of your salaries to pay foreign soldiers!”
And the police stood back, while all San José surged through the streets, shouting, “Down with the Tinocos!” Joaquín at the time was absent from the city. Hearing of the disturbance, he hastened back, and led his troops in person, riding fearlessly into the mob. Some of the women and children were forced into the American Consulate, and surged upstairs to the balcony. A young boy attempted a speech. Tinoco soldiers drew their rifles and fired. The crowd fled back inside the building, leaving Consul Chase alone on the balcony. Eleven bullet holes dented the stucco behind him, but he was not harmed.
This was the beginning of the end. Joaquín quickly pacified the city, for no one dared to face him. But—the Old-Timers suspect—a little note came down from Washington. Federico, the nominal Dictator, made plans for an exit. He handed his resignation to the Vice-President, who appointed him “Ambassador-at-Large” to Europe, with a salary of $100,000 a year, payable in advance. All of his cohorts received similar appointments—by a procedure which, if unethical, was quite proper according to international law—until their salaries exhausted what little cash remained in the country.
Joaquín, the real Dictator, had no intention of fleeing with them. Whatever might be said of him, he was no coward. He meant to fight to the end. But the end came unexpectedly. He was strolling nonchalantly down the street one evening when a man saluted him. Always military, Joaquín snapped his own hand to his hat-brim. He did not observe that the other man had saluted with the left hand, or that the right concealed a revolver. As Joaquín’s fingers touched the hat-brim, the man shot him. Then he turned and ran up the street, blazing into the air, and shouting:
“Joaquín is dead! Costa Rica lives!”
The elder Tinoco was at home in the castle when the news reached him. Seizing the telephone, he called up the prison.
“Shoot every political prisoner!” he ordered.
But with the death of Joaquín a change had come over the Republic. It was Joaquín the people feared, and not Federico. The order was not obeyed. Surrounded by foreign soldiers of fortune, the ex-Dictator emerged from the castle only to attend his brother’s funeral. Then, in a heavily-guarded train, he fled to Puerto Limón, and sailed for Europe.
As was my usual fortune in Latin-American travel, I arrived just in time to hear the shouting. And all Costa Rica was shouting. When I drew any young man aside to ask who it was that shot Joaquín, he would glance hastily about to see that he was not overheard. Then he would whisper:
“Sh! Don’t tell any one! I did it!”
But Joaquín had his mourners. Every day several young ladies would visit his grave to deck it with flowers, each glaring jealously at the others who loved his memory.
This story, it should be emphasized again, is not typical of Costa Rica. Although the second smallest of the Central-American republics, it is the most progressive.
Fortune favored it in the beginnin