Vol. I. To face p. 96.
To the foreign traveller, Central America might afford an extremely pleasing field of travel. There is a charm in the remains of the prehistoric American cultures, the carved walls of the old temples, the buried idols, the ancient industries. Restful and quaint are these little towns with the stamp of the Spanish Colonial architecture. Here man and Nature soon forget the bloodshed and the enmity of the torn and stained pages of history. The simple folk of the countryside are full of courtesy, the needs of life are cheap and plentiful, for the earth is bountiful. All these are elements which impress themselves upon the mind of the traveller here.
This, then, is Central America, that region so slightly known to the world outside that, as elsewhere remarked, its very geographical position is often a matter of doubt. But, in the future—it may be distant—it cannot be doubted that, with its advantages, the region must play a more important part in the developing world.
Three Latin American island-Republics enclose the Caribbean Sea and Spanish Main to the north: those of Cuba, Hayti, and Santo Domingo, upon which, however, we cannot here dilate at length.
Nature has, in general, endowed these regions of the Antilles with great beauty, but man, in their past history, has made them the scene of the utmost cruelty, first by the Spaniards, in the ill-treatment and extermination of the gentle and harmless natives, and second, in the slave trade.
Cuba stretches its long, thin bulk from the Yucatan Strait, off the Mexican coast, and the line is continued by the Island of Hayti, containing the Republic of that name, the famous Hispaniola of the days of the Conquistadores, now a French-speaking negro State, and Santo Domingo, whose capital, the oldest settlement in the New World, founded in 1496, may be regarded as the most perfect example of a sixteenth-century Spanish town. Its cathedral contains the reputed burial place of Columbus.
No countries in the world excel these lands in the variety and richness of their tropical products, and in the beauty of their scenery. Havana, the handsome capital of Cuba, was the last stronghold of Spain in America, the Spanish flag flying there until the time of the war between Spain and the United States in 1899. The American attitude towards Cuba revealed the wisdom and generosity of the great Anglo-Saxon Republic.
Our way now lies to the north, into Mexico, that buffer-state between the Spanish American and the Anglo - American civilizations, which, upon its frontier, roll together but do not mingle.