III
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.