Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

WHEN THE END-LID WAS TAKEN OFF, THE BODIES OF EIGHT DEAD CHINAMEN WERE TAKEN OUT.

Much may be said in favor of the chicken coop method for there was one time, the purser related, that another purser in collecting the shillings used the fumigating boiler of the upper deck. Eight obstinate Chinamen were shoved in and the end-lid clamped on. An hour of a dark dungeon would be better than the airy chicken coop, argued the astute collector—for the chicken coop has been known to prove so alluring that Chinamen have begun serving on their second day’s shilling before they had paid the first—and he was pleased at the frantic scrabbling that sounded through the iron sides. Then it died down—ah, the sullen apathy of the race—and when the end-lid was taken off the bodies of eight dead Chinamen were taken out, suffocated. It was no end of trouble to that purser for he had to juggle with his passenger sheet and the various port officials so that the ship wouldn’t be held in quarantine and make the captain and owners peevish and thereby lose his job. Caramba, it was lucky they were Chinamen!

Slowly the forty-eight hours on the broiling river passed away. In the morning of its close we looked anxiously to the nearer shore for the sign of official life. Except for the straggling black pigs, all was lifeless beach and jungle. The hours passed. It was noon. We breakfasted at that late Latin hour irritably. Presently the placid captain sent a string of signals up the foremast. Still the creek, the strip of beach, and the jungle gave forth no signs of life other than the black pigs. More time passed and the captain had the whistle blown at intervals. No result. As a desperate measure he had the capstan turned—a bluff for it was free of the cable—but as the dismal clank of the pawls carried to shore, half a dozen figures scuttled down to the creek and tumbled into the official boat. A few minutes later it was at the companion ladder and the port doctor was mounting haughtily.

Why this uproar? The sanitary junta had been notified of our arrival—what could one more? A reply had been received this morning—or was it the day before?—that the sanitary junta was very busy, but would consider the quarantine of the Mapocho at a meeting this very night. In the meantime——! He spoke with a patient, restrained peevishness as to an unreasonable child.

The august sanitary junta sat augustly at Guayaquil. From this port doctor’s station to Guayaquil was some distance. To telegraph one made one’s report, then it was paddled across the muddy tide-water creek in a dugout; then it was carried on foot across the island—for this strip of beach and home of the straggling black pigs was but a portion of an island of some size—and then across more water in a dugout and there was a telegraph station! Naturally all this took time. The port boat put back and the captain returned to his quarters. From the stern again came the sickening pop of firecrackers where the Chilean crew resumed their fishing, hauling in a slender, stupid variety of catfish and then tossing it back with a well-timed firecracker thrust in its gaping throat.

We watched the shabby boat run on the beach and the port doctor disappear in the jungle path. The crew gathered up the oars when suddenly the doctor darted back, the crew tumbled into the boat, and in a flurry of ragged rowing they came splashing toward us. Hope revived—a release from the august sanitary junta! A biscuit toss off they stopped. The doctor rose in the sternsheets and grandly ordered us out of Ecuadorean waters; if we did not leave at once we would be fired upon—by what there was no intimation, it might have been a black pig from a bamboo catapult for there was nothing else in the way of artillery—but it sounded formal and terrible. So we left. And with us went five thousand packages of freight and ninety sacks of mail intended for Guayaquil, and the furious Ecuadorean passengers.

The Peruvians were complacent. “It is better for us,” they said, “than to have to put into that wretched Guayaquil. Had we touched that fever-infected port we would have had much trouble in the Peruvian ports. Now we have our clean bill of health from Panama.”

It was beautiful optimism. I took another look at the reeking hospital between decks and wondered if we could ever get into any port and, as I turned away, two wretched, tottering skeletons passed on their way to the open cargo port. They were convalescing. I hoped for the third.

Some time during the night we passed over to the Peruvian coast and anchored off Payta early the next morning. Two miles away a white thread of slow surf broke on a thin line of blazing yellow beach; beyond rose a low range of brown-and-yellow bluffs, the hot and arid fringe of the long dessert that edges the west coast of South America. Back from the edge of surf spraddled a shabby, sand-blown, flea-bitten town with only here and there a patch of gay red-tiled roof; nowhere a strip of green or frond of palm to relieve the arid deadliness of the brown-and-yellow hills.

Off shore—there was neither bay nor bight in the even line of surf—a deserted brigantine at anchor dipped slowly with the long Pacific swells, its yards and decks whited like a leper from the unmolested frigate-birds and sea fowl that made it home. Beyond, here and there, a patched sail of no particular size or shape was barely filled by the lightest of breezes; occasionally, as one crept past, the outfit developed into a raft on the after part of which was a rough platform of palm on which were housed the Indian fisherman and his crew or family. A few abandoned square tins—the well known export tins of Rockefeller—held the drinking water, an earthen pot their food, and on this flimsy contraption they would put out miles to sea. In beating to windward a loose board or piece from a packing case is poked through the crevices to act as centerboard.