As the nineteenth century, so rich in invention, discovery, and stirring activity in the great States to the north, drew to a close, a chance visitor to this battle-scarred, mediaeval city would have found her asleep amid the dreams of her former greatness. Approaching from the harbor, especially if he arrived in the early hours of morning, his eyes would have met a view of exquisite beauty. Seen thus, great moss-grown structures rise from within the lofty encircling walls, with many a tower and gilded dome glittering in the clear sunlight and standing out in sharp relief against the green background of forest-plumed hills and towering mountains. The abysmal blue of the untainted tropical sky overhead contrasts sharply with the red-tiled roofs and dazzling white exteriors of the 86 buildings beneath; and the vivid tints, mingling with the iridescence of the scarcely rippling waters of the harbor, blend into a color scheme of rarest loveliness in the clear atmosphere which seems to magnify all distant objects and intensify every hue.
A closer approach to the citadel which lies within the landlocked harbor reveals in detail the features of the stupendous walls which guard this key to Spain’s former treasure house. Their immensity and their marvelous construction bear witness to the genius of her famous military engineers, and evoke the same admiration as do the great temples and monuments of ancient Egypt. These grim walls, in places sixty feet through, and pierced by numerous gates, are frequently widened into broad esplanades, and set here and there with bastions and watch towers to command strategic points. At the north end of the city they expand into an elaborately fortified citadel, within which are enormous fresh water tanks, formerly supplied by the rains, and made necessary by the absence of springs so near the coast. Within the walls at various points one finds the now abandoned barracks, storerooms, and echoing dungeons, the latter in the days of the stirring past too often pressed into service by the Holy Inquisition. Underground tunnels, still intact, lead from the walls to the Cathedral, the crumbling fortress of San Felipe de Barajas, and the deserted convent on the summit of La Popa. Time-defying, grim, dramatic reliques of an age forever past, breathing poetry and romance from every crevice––still in fancy echoing from moldering tower and scarred bulwark the clank of sabre, the tread of armored steed, and the shouts of exulting Conquistadores––aye, their ghostly echoes sinking in the fragrant air of night into soft whispers, which bear to the tropical moon dark hints of ancient tragedies enacted within these dim keeps and gloom-shrouded tunnels!
The pass of Boca Grande––“large mouth”––through which Drake’s band of marauders sailed triumphantly in the latter part of the sixteenth century, was formerly the usual entrance to the city’s magnificent harbor. But its wide, deep channel, only two miles from the city walls, afforded too easy access to undesirable visitors in the heyday of freebooters; and the harassed Cartagenians, wearied of the innumerable piratical attacks which this broad entrance constantly invited, undertook to fill it up. This they accomplished after years of heroic effort and an enormous expenditure of money, leaving the harbor only the slender, tortuous entrance of Boca Chica––“little mouth”––dangerous to incoming vessels because of the almost torrential flow of the tide through it, but much more readily 87 defended. The two castles of San Fernando and San Josè, frowning structures of stone dominating this entrance, have long since fallen into disuse, but are still admirably preserved. Beneath the former, and extending far below the surface of the water, is the old Bastile of the Inquisition, occasionally pressed into requisition now to house recalcitrant politicians, and where no great effort of the imagination is required still to hear the groans of the tortured and the sighs of the condemned, awaiting in chains and san benitos the approaching auto da fé.
But the greater distance from the present entrance of the harbor to the city walls affords the visitor a longer period in which to enjoy the charming panorama which seems to drift slowly out to meet him as he stands entranced before it. The spell of romance and chivalry is upon him long ere he disembarks; and once through the great gateway of the citadel itself, he yields easily to the ineluctable charm which seems to hover in the balmy air of this once proud city. Everywhere are evidences of ancient grandeur, mingling with memories of enormous wealth and violent scenes of strife. The narrow, winding streets, characteristic of oriental cities; the Moorish architecture displayed in the grandiose palaces and churches; the grated, unglazed windows, through which still peep timid señoritas, as in the romantic days of yore; the gaily painted balconies, over which bepowdered doncellas lean to pass the day’s gossip in the liquid tongue of Cervantes, all transport one in thought to the chivalrous past, when this picturesque survival of Spain’s power in America was indeed the very Queen of the western world and the proud boast of the haughty monarchs of Castile.
Nor was the city more dear to the Spanish King than to the spiritual Sovereign who sat on Peter’s throne. The Holy See strove to make Cartagena the chief ecclesiastical center of the New World; and churches, monasteries, colleges, and convents flourished there as luxuriantly as the tropical vegetation. The city was early elevated to a bishopric. A magnificent Cathedral was soon erected, followed by other churches and buildings to house ecclesiastical orders, including the Jesuit college, the University, the women’s seminary, and the homes for religious orders of both sexes. The same lavish expenditure of labor and wealth was bestowed upon the religious structures as on the walls and fortifications. The Cathedral and the church of San Juan de Dios, the latter the most conspicuous structure in the city, with its double towers and its immense monastery adjoining, became the special recipients of the liberal outpourings of a community rich not only in material wealth, but in culture and refinement as well. The latter church in particular 88 was the object of veneration of the patrons of America’s only Saint, the beneficent Pedro Claver, whose whitened bones now repose in a wonderful glass coffin bound with strips of gold beneath its magnificent marble altar. In the central plaza of the city still stands the building erected to house the Holy Inquisition, so well preserved that it yet serves as a dwelling. Adjacent to it, and lining the plaza, are spacious colonial edifices, once the homes of wealth and culture, each shaded by graceful palms and each enclosing its inner garden, or patio, where tropical plants and aromatic shrubs riot in richest color and fragrance throughout the year.
In the halcyon days of Cartagena’s greatness, when, under the protection of the powerful mother-country, her commerce extended to the confines of the known world, her streets and markets presented a scene of industry and activity wholly foreign to her in these latter days of her decadence. From her port the rich traffic which once centered in this thriving city moved, in constantly swelling volume, in every direction. In her marts were formulated those audacious plans which later took shape in ever-memorable expeditions up the Magdalena and Cauca rivers in search of gold, or to establish new colonies and extend the city’s sphere of influence. From her gates were launched those projects which had for their object the discovery of the mysterious regions where rivers were said to flow over sands of pure gold and silver, or the kingdom of El Dorado, where native potentates sprinkled their bodies with gold dust before bathing in the streams sacred to their deities. From this city the bold Quesada set out on the exploits of discovery and conquest which opened to the world the rich plateau of Bogotá, and ranked him among the greatest of the Conquistadores. In those days a canal had been cut through the swamps and dense coast lowlands to the majestic Magdalena river, some sixty-five miles distant, where a riverine town was founded and given the name of Calamar, the name Pedro de Heredia had first bestowed upon Cartagena. Through this dique the city’s merchant vessels passed to the great arterial stream beyond, and thence some thousand miles south into the heart of the rich and little known regions of upper Colombia. To-day, like the grass-grown streets of the ancient city, this canal, choked with weeds and débris, is but a green and turbid pool, but yet a reminder of the faded glory of the famous old town which played such a dramatic rôle in that age of desperate courage.
In the finished town of Cartagena Spain’s dreams of imperial pomp and magnificence were externalized. In her history the tragedy of the New World drama has been preserved. To-day, sunk in decadence, surrounded by the old mediaeval flavor, and 89 steeped in the romance of an age of chivalry forever past, her muniments and donjons, her gray, crenelated walls and time-defying structures continue to express that dogged tenacity of belief and stern defiance of unorthodox opinion which for two hundred years maintained the Inquisition within her gates and sacrificed her fair sons and daughters to an undemonstrable creed. The heavy air of ecclesiasticism still hangs over her. The priests and monks who accompanied every sanguinary expedition of the Conquistadores, ready at all times to absolve any desperado who might slay a harmless Indian in the name of Christ, have their successors to-day in the astute and untiring sons of Rome, who conserve the interests of Holy Church within these battered walls and guard their portals against the entrance of radical thought. Heredia had scarcely founded the city when King Philip sent it a Bishop. And less than a decade later the Cathedral, which to-day stands as the center of the episcopal See, was begun.
The Cathedral, though less imposing than the church of San Juan de Dios, is a fine example of the ecclesiastical architecture of the colonial era. Occupying a central position in the city, its ever-open doors invite rich and poor alike, citizen and stranger, to enter and linger in the refreshing atmosphere within, where the subdued light and cool shadows of the great nave and chapels afford a grateful respite from the glare and heat of the streets without. Massive in exterior appearance, and not beautiful within, the Cathedral nevertheless exhibits a construction which is at once broad, simple and harmonious. The nave is more than usually wide between its main piers, and its rounded arches are lofty and well proportioned. Excellent portraits of former Bishops adorn its white walls, and narrow rectangular windows at frequent intervals admit a dim, mellow light through their dark panes. Before one of these windows––apparently with no thought of incongruity in the exhibition of such a gruesome object attached to a Christian church––there has been affixed an iron grating, said to have served the Holy Inquisition as a gridiron on which to roast its heretical victims. Within, an ambulatory, supported on the first tier of arches, affords a walk along either side of the nave, and leads to the winding stairway of the bell tower. At one end of this ambulatory, its entrance commanding a full view of the nave and the capilla mayor, with its exquisitely carved marble altar, is located the Bishop’s sanctum. It was here that the young Spanish priest, Josè de Rincón, stood before the Bishop of Cartagena on the certain midday to which reference was made in the opening chapter of this recital, and received with dull ears the ecclesiastical order which removed him still farther from the world and 90 doomed him to a living burial in the crumbling town of Simití, in the wilderness of forgotten Guamocó.