The West Indies and the Spanish Main

by Anthony Trollope

With some of us the pillory was very bad, and I feared for a time that we should hardly have been able to mount again after breakfast. The place at which we were is called Atenas, and I must say in praise of this modern Athens, and of the three modern Athenian girls who waited on us, that their coffee, eggs, and grilled fowl were very good. The houses of these people are exceedingly dirty, their modes of living comfortless and slovenly in the extreme. But there seems to be no lack of food, and the food is by no means of a bad description. Along this road from Punta-arenas to San Jose we found it always supplied in large quantities and fairly cooked. The prices demanded for it were generally high. But then all prices are high; and it seems that, even among the poorer classes, small sums of money are not valued as with us. There is no copper coin. Half a rial, equal to about threepence, is the smallest piece in use. A handful of rials hardly seems to go further, or to be thought more of, than a handful of pence with us; and a dollar, eight rials, ranks hardly higher in estimation than a shilling does in England.

At last, by the gradual use of the coffee and eggs, and by the application, external and internal, of a limited amount of brandy, the outward and the inward men were recruited; and we once more found ourselves on the backs of our mules, prepared for another stage of equal duration. These evils always lessen as we become more accustomed to them, so that when we reached a place called Assumption, at which we were to rest for the night, we all gallantly informed the muleteer that we were prepared to do another stage. "Not so the mules," said the muleteer; and as his words were law, we prepared to spend the night at Assumption.

Our road hitherto had been rising nearly the whole way, and had been generally through a picturesque country. We ascended one long severe hill, severe that is as a road, though to a professed climber of mountains it would be as nothing. From the summit of this hill we had a magnificent view down to the Pacific, Again, at a sort of fortress through which we passed, and which must have been first placed there by the old Spaniards to guard the hill-passes, we found a very lovely landscape looking down into the valley. Here some show of a demand was made for passports; but we had none to exhibit, and no opposition was made to our progress. Except at these two places, the scenery, which was always more or less, pretty, was never remarkable. And even at the two points named there was nothing to equal the mountain scenery of many countries in Europe.

What struck me most was the constant traffic on the road or track over which we passed. I believe I may call it a road, for the produce of the country is brought down over it in bullock carts; and I think that in South Wales I have taken a gig over one very much of the same description. But it is extremely rude; and only fit for solid wooden wheels—circles, in fact, of timber—such as are used, and for the patient, slow step of the bullocks.

But during the morning and evening hours the strings of these bullock carts were incessant. They travel from four till ten, then rest till three or four, and again proceed for four or five hours in the cool of the evening. They are all laden with coffee, and the idea they give is, that the growth of that article in Costa Rica must be much more than sufficient to supply the whole world. For miles and miles we met them, almost without any interval. Coffee, coffee, coffee; coffee, coffee, coffee! It is grown in large quantities, I believe, only in the high lands of San José; and all that is exported is sent down to Punta-arenas, though by travelling this route it must either pass across the isthmus railway at a vast cost, or else be carried round the Horn. At present half goes one way and half the other. But not a grain is carried, as it should all be carried, direct to the Atlantic. When I come to speak of the road from San José to Greytown, the reason for this will be understood.

The bivouacs made on the roadside by the bullock drivers for their night and noon accommodation are very picturesque when seen filled by the animals. A piece of flat ground is selected by the roadside, about half an acre in size, and close to a river or some running water. Into this one or two hundred bullocks are taken, and then released from their carts. But they are kept yoked together to prevent their straying. Here they are fed exclusively on sugar-canes, which the men carry with them, and buy along the road. The drovers patiently cut the canes up with their knives, and the beasts patiently munch them. Neither the men nor the animals roar, as they would with us, or squabble for the use of the water-course, or curse their own ill luck or the good luck of their neighbours. Drivers and driven are alike orderly, patient, and slow, spending their lives in taking coffee down to Punta-arenas, and in cutting and munching thousands of sugar-canes.

We passed some of those establishments by moonlight, and they looked like large crowded fairs full of low small booths. The men, however, do not put up tents, but sleep out in their carts.

They told me that the soil in Costa Rica was very favourable to the sugar-cane, and I looked out to see some sugar among the coffee. But not a hogshead came that way. We saw patches of the cane growing by the roadside; but no more was produced than what sufficed for the use of the proprietor himself, and for such sale as the traffic on the road afforded. Indeed, I found that they do not make sugar, so called, in Costa Rica, but import what they use. The article fabricated is called by them "dulce." It comes from their hands in ugly round brown lumps, of the consistency of brick, looking, in truth, much more like a large brickbat than any possible saccharine arrangement. Nevertheless, the canes are fairly good, and the juice as sweet as that produced in first-rate sugar-growing soils.

It seemed that the only use made of this "dulce," excepting that of sweetening the coffee of the peasants, is for distillation. A spirit is made from it at San José, called by the generic name of aguardiente; and this doubtless would give considerable impulse to the growth of sugar-canes but for a little law made on the subject by the present President of the republic. The President himself is a cane-grower, and by this law it is enacted that the only person in Costa Rica entitled to supply the distillery with dulce shall be Don Juan Mora. Now, Don Juan Mora is the President.

Before I left the country I came across an American who was desirous of settling there with the view of producing cocoa. "Well," said I, "and what do you think of it?"