Though it is in Dominican territory, La Romana is virtually American, a vast estate belonging to a great sugar company of Porto Rico. Thanks largely to it, sugar is the chief product of Santo Domingo. Here again was one of the huge centrals with which we had grown so familiar in Cuba, with its big-business atmosphere, its long rows of excellent dwellings built of light coral rock along the edge of the jagged coast, its own stores, clubs, movies, and its many miles of standard-gauge railroad. We rode about this all the next morning, past immense stretches of cane, most of it recently cut, through bateys of white wooden huts raised on stilts, sidetracked now and again by long trains of cane, hungry bees hovering about them, and finally out upon great tracts where the company is pushing back the forests and the bandits to make way for increased sugar production. La Romana embraces a quarter million acres, of which only 16,000 are under cane, immense as the fields already look. Three fourths of the estate is estimated good cane land, and the foothills make excellent pasture as fast as they are cleared. The felling of these great forests, with what would seem to the uninformed a wanton waste of lumber, has already altered the rainfall of the region. Formerly the rains were regular; this year not a drop fell in January, yet during the forty-eight hours of our visit in early February, the gauges registered more than five inches. The country women were everywhere paddling about under strips of yagua in lieu of umbrellas.
The company employs from 7500 to 9000 men, of whom a bare hundred are Americans, most of them dwelling in the great central batey. The rest are chiefly Haitians and Porto Ricans, with a large sprinkling of negroes from all the other West Indian islands. English, Porto Rican, and Dominican schools are maintained, the teachers of the two former being paid out of company funds. There are very few Dominican employees, the natives, though good ax-men, being usually “too Castilian to work for a living.” Wages range from an average of $1.20 a day for cane-cutters to $4 for mechanics, with twelve-hour shifts and a twenty per cent. bonus for all. The contrast between this productive region and the great virgin wilderness of most of Santo Domingo gave serious meaning to the parting words of the company punster, “What the Dominicans need most is to stop raising Cain and go to raising cane.”
We left La Romana and Santo Domingo on one of the two cane boats that ply nightly between this dependency and the mother country. She was the flat-bottomed steamer Glencadam from the Great Lakes, flying the British flag and captained by a quaint old Scotchman whose cabin far forward contained almost transatlantic accommodations. Once more I draw the curtain, however, on the merely personal matters of pitch and roll, greatly abetted in this case by the recent rains, which had made it impossible to gather more than half a cargo. The very canes themselves were showing a tendency to waltz before we had passed the mouth of the river and turned our nose toward Porto Rico, already lying cloud-like and phantasmal on the eastern horizon.
CHAPTER XI
OUR PORTO RICO
“When the queen asked for a description of the island,” says an old chronicle, “Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper and, tossing it upon the table, cried, ‘It looks just like that, your Majesty!’”
If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese made that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. Even the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown as one after another of the misnamed “West Indies” were pictured to her in the same concise fashion, and brushed off into the regal wastebasket. Fortunately, paper was cheaper in those days. Or was it? Perhaps it was the wrath born of seeing her last precious sheet turned into an island that soured the queen’s gratitude, and brought the doughty discoverer to dungeons and disgrace.
Questions of wanton waste aside, there could be no more exact description of Porto Rico. The ancient jest about quadrupling the area of a land by flattening it out all but loses its facetiousness when applied to our main West Indian colony. Barely a hundred miles long and forty wide, a celestial rolling-pin would give old Borinquen almost the vast extent of Santo Domingo. Its unbrokenly mountainous character makes any detailed description of its scenic beauties a waste of effort; it could be little more than a constant series of exclamations of delight.
For all its ruggedness, it is as easy to get about the island as it is difficult to cover the larger one to the westward. There is not a spot that cannot be reached from any other point between sunrise and sunset. A railroad encircles the western two thirds of the island, with trains by night as well as by day. When the Americans came, they found a splendidly engineered military road from coast to coast, with branches in several directions. If this sounds strange of a Spanish country, it must be accounted for not by civic pride or necessity, but in the vain hope of defending the island from armed invasion. To-day there are hundreds of miles of excellent highway covering Porto Rico with a network of quick transit that reaches all but the highest peaks of its central range. It is doubtful whether any state of our union can rival this detached bit of American territory in excellence and extent of roads, certainly not in the scenic splendor that so generally flanks them.
Ponce de Leon’s palace now flies the Stars and Stripes