Several hours’ ride across this world’s garden of the future, with a change to, and later from, the main line, brought us at nightfall to San Francisco de Macoris. Unlike nearly every other town of Santo Domingo, this one is of modern origin, a mere stripling of less than a century of existence. It lies where the Vega Real begins to slope upward toward the northern range, with extensive cacao estates of rather indolent habits hidden away among the foot-hills behind it. A flat town of tin roofs, its outskirts concealed beneath tropical trees, it offers nothing of special interest to the mere traveler.
A nine-day fiesta in honor of Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia, which had broken out with an uproarious beating of discordant church bells, tinny drums, and home-made fireworks during our day in La Vega raged throughout all our stay in “Macoris.” All the population capable of setting one foot before the other joined in the religious processions that frequently wended their funereal way through the half-cobbled streets. We found amusement, too, in a local courtroom, where justice was dispensed by a common-sense old judge in an informal, unbiased way that seemed strange in a Latin-American atmosphere, particularly so in a country where a bare five years before most decisions went to the highest bidder. The improvement suggested that Santo Domingo could be a success so long as some overwhelming power holds it steady by appointing the better class of officials and keeping an exacting eye constantly upon them. A third point of interest which no visitor to the Macoris of the north should neglect is a chat with “old man Castillo.” Born in 1834, his mind still extremely active, this grandson of old Spain has been one of the chief sources of information to the wiser Marine commanders of the district. His personal reminiscences of Haitian rule, how as a boy he marvelled at the high hats and gorgeous but often ludicrously patched uniforms of the black troops from the west, make a colorful picture worth beholding, even were he not the only surviving general of the war, contemporary with our own struggle between the north and the south, that brought the final expulsion of Spanish rule from Santo Domingo. His summing up of the present status of the revolutionary republic is that of nearly all the conservative, thoughtful element of the population. For twenty years he had been convinced that intervention would be for the future good of the country; for at least ten he had ardently desired it; he would consider it a national misfortune to have it withdrawn before a new generation has been thoroughly cured of the empleomania and unruliness which had become the curse of Dominican life. Mistakes had been made by the forces of occupation, rather by subordinates than by the higher command, but the whole list of them, he was convinced, had been easier to bear than the least of their constantly recurring revolutions.
The engine that had dragged us up to the edge of the vega had not sufficiently recovered from its exertions to venture down again, and the locomotive from the main line was forced to delay its appointed task to come and get us. It is typical of the easy-going charm of the tropics that the engineer of the day before had profanely declined to exchange his coal-fed steed for that of his colleague from the east, despite telegraphic orders from the master of transportation, duly and officially transmitted through the station agent, hence our not unprecedented delay. Beyond the junction of La Jina the densely green vega changed gradually to broad, brown savannahs not unlike our own Western prairies. These slowly gave place again to mata, uncultivated half-wilderness with flat open spaces. Pimentel, a considerable town at which travelers to the more important one of Cotui changed from car seats to saddles, was followed by Villa Riva on the Yuma, the largest river in the West Indies and navigable for small schooners. The landscape grew still more open, with immense trees casting here and there the round shadows of noonday and cacao beans drying on rude raised platforms or on leaf-mats spread frankly upon the ground before every bohío, or thatch and palm-trunk dwelling. Royal palm trees stretched in close but broken formation across the flatlands and on up over a high ridge like the soldiers of an arboreal army in disordered rout. Then the train rumbled out across a swampy region where the flanges of the rails were frequently covered by the brackish water and the exhausted engine stumbled into Sanchez only three hours late.
Strewn along the base of a rocky wooded ridge on the inner curve of the great horseshoe bay of Samaná, Sanchez is not much to look at despite its considerable importance, from a Dominican point of view, as the chief northeastern port and the headquarters of the “Scotch line.” Several large sheet-iron warehouses and a long wooden pier sprinkled with cacao beans and the plentiful cinders of a switch engine are its chief features. Since the virtual repeal of the export tax on cacao, with “Big George” and the new real estate taxation to take its place, its activity has somewhat increased.
Like many another corner of Santo Domingo, mosquito- and gnat-bitten Sanchez would be a dreary spot indeed but for the presence of our little force of occupation. The natives themselves recognise this, as their constant appeals for medical attention from the uninvited strangers demonstrate. With the possible exception of the capital, the republic is so scantily supplied with physicians that the navy doctors who have the health of the marines in their keeping are permitted to engage in civil practice. Even in Santiago, with its 20,000 inhabitants, the great majority of the population had hitherto no other remedy for their varied ailments than the sticking of a green leaf on each temple. The bright youth of the country saw no reason to submit to the arduous training incident to the medical profession when the study of revolutionary tactics promised so much quicker results. Small wonder the poor ignorant populace, knowing no better course to take, repair in their illness to the Santo Cerro, there to smear themselves with holy dirt in the ardent hope of improvement; and it may be that the simple priests who abet them in those absurd antics are not so rascally as they seem from our loftier point of view, for they too may in their ignorance be more or less sincere believers in this nonsense.
Sanchez saw, though it may not have noted, the breaking up of our congenial quartet. “Mac” had received orders to proceed overland through the bandit-famed province of Seibo to the capital, and accepted my protection and guidance on the journey. That region being a “restricted district” for women, Rachel was forced to submit to the tender mercies of the Clyde Line; while “Big George,” whether through devotion to duty, a disparity between his own length and that of his salary, or for a newly developed fear of personal violence, herewith takes his final leave of this unvarnished tale.
Three hours in an open motor-boat manned by Marines, close along an evergreen shore stretching in a low, cocoanut-clad ridge that died away on the eastern horizon, brought the surviving pair of us to Samaná. Tumbled up the slope of the same ridge, with a harbor sheltered by several densely wooded islets, the town was more pleasing than the busier Sanchez. Great patches of the surrounding cocoanut forest were brown with the ravages of a parasitical disease that attacks leaves, branches, and fruit not only of these, but of the cacao plants of the region. Saddle-oxen, once common throughout both divisions of the ancient Quisqueya, ambled through the streets, their heads raised at a disdainful angle by the reins attached to their nose-rings. The soft soil and the frequent rains of the Samaná peninsula account for their survival here in spite of the ascending price of beef and leather. This, too, was a town of bullet-holes, for revolutionists have frequently found its isolation and its custom-house particularly to their liking. It is a rare house that cannot show a scar or two, and both the sheet-iron Methodist churches are patched like the garments of a Haitian pauper.
The existence of two such anomalies in a single town of Catholic Santo Domingo calls the attention to the most interesting feature of Samaná, an American negro colony of some two thousand members scattered about the peninsula. Nearly a century ago, when the black troops from beyond the Massacre had overrun the entire island, the Haitian king, president, or emperor, as he happened at the moment to be called, opened negotiations with an abolition society in the United States with the hope of attracting immigration. Several shiploads of blacks, all Northern negroes who had escaped or bought their freedom, responded to the invitation. Most of them came from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey; one of the towns of the peninsula is still known as Bucks County in memory of the exiles from that part of the first-named state. Numbers of the new-comers foiled the purpose of the Haitian ruler by quickly dying of tropical diseases; a very few found their way back to the United States. The survivors settled down on the five acres of land each that had been granted them, the Haitians having frankly ignored all other promises.