Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

American Marines on the march

A riding horse of Samaná

We were soon down on the flatlands again, but it was a long time before the first signs of cultivation broke the dreary wilderness. This was a cacao canuco, or tiny plantation, overgrown with brush and weeds and with the scarred ruins of a hut in one corner of it. More of them lined the way for mile after mile, all abandoned for the past three years, fear of the bandits making it impossible even to pick the pods that ripened, rotted, and fell beneath the trees. These endless gardens choked with weeds made this wonderfully fertile valley seem doubly pitiful in its uncultivated immensity. The guards, who, after the fashion of their kind, had made no provision whatever against a long day’s hunger, climbed the rotting stick fences and picked half-green bananas and papayas, or lechosas, as the Dominican calls them, from the untended plantations. At length huts still standing began to appear, then inhabited ones, occupied almost exclusively by women, showed that we were approaching the safety zone. The creak of guinea hens, like rusty hinges, commenced to break the silence; goats took to capering out of our way; better dressed people of both sexes gradually put in an appearance, crowing cocks challenged one another in ever increasing number, and at sunset the again road-wide trail became the main street of the town of Seibo.

The capital of a province without so much as the pretense of a hotel is a rarity even in backward Santo Domingo. Nothing but the most miserable of thatched huts, with three human nests on legs in one tiny room, and a back-yard reed kitchen attended by a ragged old negro crone, offers accommodation to unbefriended strangers in Seibo. It is perhaps the most out-of-the-way, astonished-at-strangers, unacquainted-with-the-world town of any size that can be found in the West Indies. Though a large detachment of marines camp at its bandit-threatened door, it showed unbounded surprise to see American civilians. Groups of almost foppishly dressed men lounged about its streets, yet the town itself was little short of filthy. A curious old domed church, some of it built four hundred years ago, its original color faded to a spotted pale-blue, and its aged square tower surmounted by a marine wireless apparatus, is the only building of importance. From the top of this, or the one other place in town where one can go upstairs, Seibo is seen to be surrounded by low hills, everywhere wooded, without a hut outside its compact mass, its skirts drawn up like those of a nervous old maid in constant dread of mice. The inevitable fortress that gives Haitian and Dominican villages a likeness to the castle-crowned towns of medieval Italy watches over it from a near-by knoll and houses its guardia garrison. Built almost entirely of wood, the low houses of the better class are roofed with sheet-iron, the poorer with palm-leaf thatch. It has no plaza but merely a stony plowed rectangle of unoccupied ground in its center. The public school has no doors between its rooms, hence is a constant uproar of teachers and classes shouting against one another. Seibo bears the reputation of being always “agin’ the gover’ment,” and it is not strange that we found its people somewhat more surly toward Americans than those of the Cibao.

That did not hinder them from obeying “Mac’s” official commands with fitting alacrity, however, whether they were a hint to shop-keepers to display their licenses as the law required or a whisper to his local subordinates to correct their methods. The slip-shod ways of native rule cannot long endure where an exacting American official drops in unexpectedly every now and then to inspect things down to the slightest detail. Such close-rein methods are indispensable to the proper functioning of revenue laws in Santo Domingo. Your Latin-American can seldom rise to the point of impersonal application of governmental decrees; with him it is always a personal matter between official and inhabitant. Checked up in the courteous yet firm manner which “Mac” had learned by long contact with this race, his subordinates had a curious resemblance to backward schoolboys whom a teacher holds up to scratch by frequent kindly assistance with a threat of the switch behind it. The government of occupation has done everything possible to remove temptation from both inspected and inspector in internal revenue matters. Every distillery, for instance, is so constructed that the owner may watch his product behind iron bars as it runs from still to receptacle, yet not a drop can he extract without calling upon the inspector to produce his keys. By such contrivances Santo Domingo is being gradually weaned away from the irregularities that were long the curse of its financial legislation.

An invitation from the major in command caused us to change with alacrity on our second day in Seibo from the “hotel” to a tent in the marine camp on the edge of town, with a far-reaching view, an unfailing breeze, and a “swimming hole” in the river below. Here, by dint of spending most of the day insisting, by offering twice the local rate for good mounts, by promising a peon “guide” a week’s pay for a day’s work, by seeing that the horses were within the marine corral before going to bed, and by being generally and strictly from Missouri, we succeeded in getting off the next morning at five. The air was damp and fresh. For the first time in five years I beheld the Southern Cross I had once known like the features of an old friend. Endless forests with a level roadway cut through them shut us in all through the morning, only a few canucos breaking the perspective of sheer forest walls. As in Haiti, the peasants of Seibo live back out of sight from the main trails, for fear of bandits, as the vicinity of some of our railroads is still shunned out of dread of marauding tramps. At another large marine camp we left the roadway and sagging telegraph wire to La Romana and struck due southward along a half-cleared trail that after an hour or more brought us out upon the sun-toasted advance guard of the cane-fields of the south. Amid the stumps and logs of immense tropical trees, black with the recent burning, baby sugar-cane was already turning bright green the broad expanse of newly felled forest. Negroes almost without exception from the French or British West Indies were adding row after row of the virgin fields to the sugar supply of a hungry world. Farther on, beyond another strip of forest soon due for the same fate, came immense stretches of full-sized cane, then toiling groups of cane-cutters, huge creaking cane-carts, finally a railroad that scorns to carry anything but cane, and by ten we had brought up at the batey of Diego, our mounted “guide” straggling in far behind us.

Many of the workmen of the surrounding “colonies” had gone on strike that morning. The Dominican delegate to the recent labor conference in Washington had brought back with him this new method of bringing to terms the “wicked American and Cuban capitalists who would starve us while carrying off our national wealth.” It was noticeable, however, that only a small fraction of the idle groups crowding the batey were natives of the country; the great majority of them grumbled in the easy-going drawl of the British negro. Small wonder the arguments of the Spanish-speaking manager who harangued them from the door of the office fell chiefly on uncomprehending ears. Besides, though their own arguments were simpler, they were not easily refuted. “Wi’ rice twenty-fi’ cent a pound an’ sugah eighteen cent in Macoris town what y’u go’n’ a do, mahn, what y’u go’n’ a do? An’ de washer lady she ax you a shilling fo’ to wash a shirt! How us can cut a caht-load o’ canes fo’ seventy cent? Better fo’ we if us detain we at home.”

Leaving manager and strikers to settle their differences without our assistance we climbed to the top of a car-load of cane and were soon creaking away across the slightly rolling country. A train so long that it had to be cut in two at the first suggestion of a grade squirmed away before us like a great green snake. The land became one vast expanse of sugar-cane, broken only by the clustered buildings of the bateys and dotted here and there by a royal palm or ceiba, which the woodsmen had not had the heart to fell. Branch railroads, like the ribs of a leaf, brought the product of all this down to the main line, whence it poured into the capacious maw of the Central Santa Fé, the tall chimneys of which appeared toward sunset, backed far off by a slightly yellowish Caribbean.

San Pedro de Macoris on the southern coast is a more important town than its near namesake of the Cibao, yet it is disappointing for all its size. With a certain amount of modern bustle, more city features than we had seen since Santiago, a fair percentage of full white inhabitants, and a rather “cocky” air, it exists chiefly because of a bottle-shaped harbor with a dangerously narrow entrance between reefs, while its docks are largely manned by British negroes.