Mayagüez is slowly rebuilding; of reinforced concrete now, or at least of wood. Little damage was done on that October morning to wooden structures, which is one of the reasons that the crowded hovels along the sea front have none of the deserted air of the city proper. A still more potent reason is that this class of inhabitants had nowhere else to go. By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government property, for sixty feet back of the water’s edge. As a consequence, what would in our own land be the choicest residential section is everywhere covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their miserable little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of driftwood, and yagua or palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at all, with picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers.
One can climb quickly into the hills from Mayagüez, with a wonderful view of the bay, the half-ruined city, with its old gray-red tile roofs, rare now in Porto Rico, and seas of cane stretching from the coast to the foot-hills, which spring abruptly into mountains, little huts strewn everywhere over their crinkled and warty surface as far as the eye can see.
Its three principal cities by no means exhaust the list of important towns in Porto Rico. Indeed the number and the surprising size of them cannot but strike the traveler, the extent even of those in the interior astounding the recent visitor to Cuba. There is Arecibo, for instance, a baking-hot, dusty place on a knoll at the edge of the sea, with no real harbor, but a splendid beach—given over to naked urchins and foraging pigs—and a railroad station that avoids the town by a mile or more, as if it were suffering from the plague. San Germán, founded by Diego Columbus in 1512, destroyed times without number by pirates, Indians, all the European rivals of Spain, and even by mosquitos, which forced its founders to rebuild in a new spot, has moved hither and yon about the southwestern corner of the island until it is a wonder its own inhabitants can find it by night. Or there is Cabo Rojo, where hats of more open weave than the Panama are made of the cogolla palm-leaf of the palmetto family.
Yauco, a bit farther east, is striking chiefly for the variegated haystack of poor man’s hovels resembling beehives, that are heaped up the steep hillside in its outskirt and seen from afar off in either direction. Guayama is proud, and justly so, of its bulking new church, which is so up-to-date that it is fitted with Pullman-car soap-spouts for the saving of holy water. Maunabo, among its cane-fields, lies out of reach of buccaneer cannon, hurricanes, and tidal waves, like so many of the “coast” towns of old Borinquen, and does its seaside business through a “Playa” of the same name. It still holds green the memory of the stern but playful young American school-master who first taught its present generation to salute the Stars and Stripes, but though it boasts a faultless cement building now in place of the hovel that posed as escuela pública in those pioneer days, it seems not to have learned the American doctrine of quick expansion as well as some of its fellows.
Beyond Maunabo the highway climbs through huts and rocks that look strangely alike as they lie tossed far up the spur of the central range, then past enormous granite boulders that suggest reclining elephants, and out upon an incredible expanse of cane, with pretty Yabucoa planted in its center and Porto Rico’s dependent islands of Vieques and Culebra breaking the endless vista of sea to the southward. Humacao and Naguabo have several corners worthy a painter’s sketchbook, and soon the coast-line swings us northward again to sugar-choked Fajardo, with its four belching smokestacks, and leaves us no choice but to cease our journeyings by land or return to San Juan. There we may dash across or around the bay to Bayamón, a “whale of a town and a bad one,” in the words of the police chief, but also the site of the “City of Puerto Rico” that afterward changed its name and location and became the present capital. Of the towns that dot the mountainous interior the traveler should not miss Caguas and Cayey, Coamo and Comerio, Barranquitas and Juana Diaz, Lares and Utuado, and a half-dozen others that are no mere villages, including Aibonito (Ai! Bonito!—Ah! Pretty!) set more than two thousand feet aloft, and famed for its fresas, which in Porto Rico means a fruit that grows on a thorny bush beside the little streams of high altitudes, that looks like a cross between a luscious strawberry and a mammoth raspberry and tastes like neither.
But it is high time now to descend to Coamo Springs for the one unfailingly hot bath in the West Indies—when one can induce the servants to produce the key to it.
Some eighty years ago a man was riding over the breakneck trail from Coamo to Ponce to pay a bill—there is a fishy smell to that last detail, but let it pass—when he lost his way and stumbled by accident upon a hot spring. Making inquiries, he found that the region belonged to a druggist in the southern metropolis and that his own broad acres bounded the property on the left. He called on the druggist and after the lengthy preliminaries incident to any Spanish-American deal, offered to sell his own land to the apothecary.
“It’s of no use to me,” he explained, “and as you have the adjoining land—and—and”
“Why,” cried the druggist, “my own finca is not worth a peseta to me! Why on earth should I be buying yours also?”