Published September, 1917
A FOREWORD OF WARNING
A few years ago, when I began looking over the map of the world again, I chanced to have just been reading Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” and it was natural that my thoughts should turn to South America. My only plan, at the outset, was to follow, if possible, the old military highway of the Incas from Quito to Cuzco. Every traveler, however, knows the tendency of a journey to grow under one’s feet. This one grew with such tropical luxuriance that before it ended I had spent, not eight months, but four full years, and had covered not merely the ancient Inca Empire, but all the ten republics and three colonies of South America.
A considerable portion of this journey was made on foot. The reader may be moved to ask why. First of all, I formed the habit of walking early in life, developing an inability to depend on others in my movements. Then, too, the route lay through many regions in which no other animal than man can make his way for extended periods. Moreover, there was the question of caste. It is one of the drawbacks of South America that a white man cannot efface himself and be an unobserved observer, as on the highways of Europe. Social lines are so sharply drawn that he who would be received in frank equality by the peon, by the great mass of the population, must live and travel much as they do. Merely to ride a horse lifts him above the communality and sets a certain barrier, akin to race prejudice, between him and the foot-going hordes among whom my chief interest lay.
At best these lines of caste are a drag on observant travel in South America. The “gringo” can never get completely out of his social stratum. His very color betrays him. It is always “Goot mawning, Meestear,” too often with a silly, patronizing smile, from the “gente decente” class; among the rest his mere appearance makes him as conspicuous as a white man among West Indians. Never can he be an inconspicuous part of the crowd, as in Europe. To get in touch with the “common people” requires actually living in their huts and tramping their roads. The dilettante method of approaching them, “slumming,” will not do. The disadvantages of the primitive means of locomotion in wild regions, such as the Andes, are obvious. But the advantages of walking over more ordinary methods of travel are no less decided. Though the means be more laborious, the mind is far sharper for facts and impressions while on foot than when lolling half asleep on a horse or in a train. The mere pleasure of looking forward to his arrival, subconsciously building up before his mind’s eye a picture of his goal complete in every detail, not to mention that of looking back upon the journey from the comfort of his own armchair, is ample reward to any true victim of wanderlust. Thousands of men, supplied with all the comforts money can buy, roam the earth from top to bottom—and are supremely bored in the process. It is the struggle, the satisfaction of physical action, the accomplishment of something greatly desired and for a long time seemingly impossible, that brings real pleasure, that makes every step forward a satisfaction, every little success in the advance an enjoyment. For after all, real travel is real labor. He who journeys only so far as he can without exertion, who shirks the difficulties, will know no more of the real joy of travel than he who lives without toil, seeking pleasure only and finding but the cold, dead body thereof, without ever realizing the joy of life itself.
As in ancient times, so it is in the Andes to-day; distance cannot be covered without fatigue. On the other hand there is the compensation of knowing completely the country through which one passes, storing away in the mind a picture of each long-anticipated spot, indelible as long as life lasts. The Andean traveler will know the pleasures as well as the drawbacks of the journeys of earlier, more primitive days, the joy of evening hours, when suddenly, from the summit of the last toilsome ascent, he discovers, spread out in its smiling valley below, the peaceful village in which he is to take his night’s repose, or when he perceives from afar, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, the towers of the famous city so long sought,—hours of a vivid joy that few experiences can equal.
Thanks again to the barriers of caste, he who would really know the masses of Latin America should not only live with them, but should dress as plainly as they do. It is hard at best to get into more than superficial contact with the South American Indian, and to some extent his traits, like his blood, run through all classes. The upper-caste Latin American is by nature a masquerader; he treats a “distinguished stranger” as a real estate agent pilots a prospective buyer about the streets of some “New Berlin,” cleverly sidestepping the drawbacks; he shows his real self only when he is not on parade, before he learns that he is under observation, and claps on the mask he always has instantly at hand when he wishes to show “himself”; and he rates every man’s importance by the height of his collar and the color of his spats, cloaking himself in pretense accordingly. He who does not wish to know the truth about a Latin-American country should attire himself in a frock-coat, a silk hat, and appear with letters of introduction to the “people of importance.” His hosts will take him in regal style along two or three of the best streets and into the show-places, will gild every garbage-can that is likely to fall under his august eye, and will shield him from all the unpleasantnesses of life as carefully as the guardians of the princess in the fairy-tale. Hence the mere lack of ostentation, the mere appearance of being one of the negligible masses, goes far toward giving the unassigned wanderer a vast advantage in getting at the unmasked truth, in avoiding false impressions, over men of more brilliant mind and better powers of observation.
My purpose in journeying through South America was primarily to study the ways of the common people. I am no more fond of the unsavory, either in physical contact or on the printed page, than are the rest of my fellow-countrymen. But every occupation has its drawbacks. No traveler through interior South America with whom I have yet spoken has found conditions better than herein indicated; though for some strange reason it appears to be the custom to shield readers from this, to tell intimate facts only privately and to falsify public utterances by glossing over all the crudities. The fact is that the man who has spent four years afield south of the Rio Grande, and has come back to tell the tale, can only shake with laughter when an exponent of the “germ theory” speaks. Explorers with millionaire fathers-in-law tell us that the out-of-the-way traveler to such a country should take with him numberless supplies, from sheets to after-dinner coffee. It is the best plan, for those whose aim is to live in comfort—or a still better plan is to remain at home. Far be it from me to censure the man who journeys southward for other purposes for taking with him all the comforts he can carry; but he who seeks to know the people intimately must not merely tramp their trails; he must become, in so far as is possible, physically one of them. We should care little about the impressions of a European studying life in the United States who lived in his own tent and subsisted on canned goods he brought with him, however much we might admire his foresight.
It may be argued that by following the plan I have outlined I saw only the lower class and do not report conditions among the more fortunate inhabitants. Yet after all, the peon, the Indian, the masses, comprise nine tenths of the population of South America. There are fewer persons of pure European blood between our southern boundary and Cape Horn than in the state of New York; and by no means all of these live in even comparative comfort. The well-dressed minority of Latin America has often had its spokesman; numerically, and on the whole, the condition of these is of as little importance in the general scheme of things as are the doings of our “Four Hundred” in the life of our hundred million. I have, therefore, summed up briefly the ways of this small, if conspicuous, class, and its ways are so monotonously alike throughout the length and breadth of Latin America that this lumping together is not difficult. The chief problem in any country is the status of the great mass of population, the condition of the common people, and it is to this that I have almost entirely confined myself in the ensuing pages.