The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

This Santa Martha is a wretched village—a city it is there called—at which we, with intense cruelty, maintain a British Consul, and a British post-office. There is a cathedral there of the old Spanish order, with the choir removed from the altar down towards the western door; and there is, I was informed, a bishop. But neither bishop nor cathedral were in any way remarkable. There is there a governor of the province, some small tradesman, who seemed to exercise very few governing functions. It may almost be said that no trade exists in the place, which seemed indeed to be nearly dead. A few black or nearly black children run about the streets in a state almost of nudity; and there are shops, from the extremities of which, as I was told, crinoline and hats laden with bugles may be extracted.

"Every one of my predecessors here died of fever," said the Consul to me, in a tone of triumph. What could a man say to him on so terribly mortal a subject? "And my wife has been down in fever thirteen times!" Heavens, what a life! That is, as long as it is life.

I rode some four or five miles into the country to visit the house in which Bolivar died. It is a deserted little country villa or chateau, called San Pedro, standing in a farm-yard, and now containing no other furniture than a marble bust of the Dictator, with a few wretchedly coloured French prints with cracked glass plates. The bust is not a bad one, and seems to have a solemn and sad meaning in its melancholy face, standing there in its solitary niche in the very room in which the would-be liberator died.

For Bolivar had grand ideas of freedom, though doubtless he had grand ideas also of personal power and pre-eminence; as has been the case with most of those who have moved or professed to move in the vanguard of liberty. To free mankind from all injurious thraldom is the aspiration of such men; but who ever thought that obedience to himself was a thraldom that could be injurious?

And here in this house, on the 17th December, 1830, Bolivar died, broken-hearted, owing his shelter to charity, and relieved in his last wants by the hands of strangers to his country. When the breath was out of him and he was well dead, so that on such a matter he himself could probably have no strong wish in any direction, they took away his body, of course with all honour, to the district that gave him birth, and that could afford to be proud of him now that he was dead;—into Venezuela and reburied him at Caracas. But dying poverty and funeral honours have been the fate of great men in other countries besides Columbia.

"And why did you come to visit such a region as this?" asked Bolivar, when dying, of a Frenchman to whom in his last days he was indebted for much. "For freedom," said the Frenchman. "For freedom!" said Bolivar. "Then let me tell you that you have missed your mark altogether; you could hardly have turned in a worse direction."

Our ride from Santa Martha to the house had been altogether between bushes, among which we saw but small signs of cultivation. Round the house I saw none. On my return I learnt that the place was the property of a rich man who possessed a large estate in its vicinity. "But will nothing grow there?" I asked. "Grow there! yes; anything would grow there. Some years since the whole district was covered with sugar-canes." But since the emancipation in 1851 it had become impossible to procure labour; men could not be got to work; and so bush had grown up, and the earth gave none of her increase; except indeed where half-caste Indians squatted here and there, and made provision grounds.

I then went on to Cartagena. This is a much better town than Santa Martha, though even this is in its decadence. It was once a flourishing city, great in commerce and strong in war. It was taken by the English, not however without signal reverses on our part, and by the special valour—so the story goes—of certain sailors who dragged a single gun to the summit of a high abrupt hill called the "Papa," which commands the town. If the thermometer stood in those days as high at Cartagena as it does now, pretty nearly through the whole of the year, those sailors ought to have had the Victoria cross. But these deeds were done long years ago, in the time of Drake and his followers; and Victoria crosses were then chiefly kept for the officers.

The harbour at Cartagena is singularly circumstanced. There are two entrances to it, one some ten miles from the city and the other close to it. This nearer aperture was blocked up by the Spaniards, who sank ships across the mouth; and it has never been used or usable since. The present entrance is very strongly fortified. The fortifications are still there, bristling down to the water's edge; or they would bristle, were it not that all the guns have been sold for the value of the brass metal.

Cartagena was hotter even than Santa Martha; but the place is by no means so desolate and death-like. The shops there are open to the streets, as shops are in other towns. Men and women may occasionally be seen about the square; and there is a trade,—in poultry if in nothing else.