“Have you read ——’s book on Brazintine?” a noted French traveler once asked me. “He says all the brazintinos are immoral and dishonest. You and I, who have been there, know this is true. But those are things one tells to a circle of friends, that one shares over a pipe at the club, mais, enfin, ça ne s’écrit pas”!
It is due, I suppose, to a lack of Gallic finesse that I have never been able to grasp this point of view. Why the plain truth should be reserved for the fireside and personal friends, and should be kept from one’s friends of the printed page, is beyond my fathoming. At any rate, I have made no attempt to follow that plan. I tried not to expect everything in South America to be exactly as it is in the United States—I should, indeed, have considered that a misfortune. After all, I went south to see the Latin American as he is, not with the hope of finding him another American merely speaking another language. I have tried to judge him by his own ideals and history, fully aware that in the latter he did not have a “fair shake,” rather than by our own. Yet the traveler cannot entirely lay aside his native point of view; that would imply that he was not convinced of the wisdom of his own way of life, and the question would arise, Why not change? Neither the Latin-American nor the American point of view is all right or all wrong; they are simply different. Because we criticize does not necessarily mean that we claim superiority, though I am reminded of the American resident in South America who asserted that were he not convinced of his superiority to his neighbors, he would forthwith tie a mill-stone about his neck and jump in where it was deep. But the traveler who does not express his own honest opinions, “loses,” as the Brazilians say, “a splendid chance to keep silent.” I have, therefore, set down my real, heartfelt impressions. These may be false, even worthless; the reader has full right to reject them in toto. But at least they have the virtue of frankness.
Moreover, South America has had its fair share of apologists. Virtually every country publishes at intervals a luxurious volume of self-praise that resembles in its point of view the year-book of a high school or college class. Trade journals are constantly painting things South American in the rosiest of colors. It has been the traditional policy of certain branches of our government to cultivate Latin-American friendship by a myopic disregard of all the shadows in the picture. In our own capital there exists a criminally optimistic society for the propagation of emasculated information concerning our neighbors to the south. Among “distinguished strangers” from our own land who have visited Latin America there seems to have been a conspiracy to whitewash everything, an agreement to have all they see or experience bathed, barbered, and manicured before permitting it to make its bow to our public. The enormous majority of descriptions of South America resemble the original about as much as a portrait resembles the sitter after a professional photographer has finished with it.
I do not know what the Latin American may have been in other years—perhaps he was the splendid fellow many make him out. I am merely telling, as charitably as possible, how I found him. I am not interested in winning or losing his friendship, in selling him goods, or in gaining his “moral support” to our governmental activities. I am interested only in giving as faithful a picture as possible of my experiences with him. There are good things, praiseworthy things in South America; if, in the telling, these have been overshadowed by the less laudable, it is because the latter do so overshadow in point of fact.
Obviously, the experiences of four years, even in Latin America, cannot be crowded within the covers of a volume or two. I have, therefore, confined myself within certain limits. History, for instance, has been almost completely eliminated. I have taken for granted in the reader a certain basic knowledge of South America, though in the case of many even well-educated Americans this seems to be taking much for granted. I have passed as briefly as possible over those things which are already to be found within the walls of our libraries, confining myself so far as possible to that which I have personally seen or experienced. I have, however, dipped as freely into the literature of each country as into the life itself, and in the few cases where I have made use of facts so acquired, I have not taken of my cramped space to acknowledge the debt in words. For similar reasons, though it may seem ingratitude, I have not taken the reader’s time to thank individuals by name for personal kindnesses. They were many; but the doers know that their deeds were appreciated, without thanks being detailed here; or if they do not, it is the fate of those who lend passing assistance to world-roamers to take their reward in inner satisfaction.
The modern reader is prone to tire quickly of mere description; but nature is so important a factor in the Andes that it cannot be briefly passed over. Personally I like an occasional sunset, like it so much that I sometimes go to the unrequited toil of attempting to paint one. The reader who prefers his stage bare, as in Shakespeare’s day, can easily glide over those pages. If he does without stage-setting, however, and relies only on his imagination, his picture is apt to be false, for the imagination has very faulty materials from our school-books and the tales of wandering Münchausens to work upon. Yet after all, even with all one’s effort, it is sad how little of the splendid scenery, the atmosphere, the charm of it all—for in spite of its drawbacks, South America has charm—one can get down on paper.
This was not a voyage of discovery; or rather, if there was discovery, it was only of a different stratum of life, and not of new lands. My plan was not so much to find unexplored country in the ordinary sense, as to go by hitherto unmentioned paths through inhabited and known regions, the out-of-the-way corners of familiar cities and the undescribed gathering-places of mankind. In that sense South America is still chiefly “unexplored.”
Lastly, let me give fair warning that this is no tale of adventures. I would gladly have had it otherwise. I sought eagerly for experiences that would make the story more worth the telling; I tried my sincerest to get into trouble; all in vain. In Mexico I marched peacefully about between two falling empires. In Guatemala I strolled nonchalantly among Estrada Cabrara’s band of hired assassins. In Honduras I chatted with the leaders of the latest revolution. In Colombia I met many cripples of the civil war but recently ended. In Ecuador I found only peace and apathy in the very streets through which an ex-president and his henchman had been dragged to death a few months before. In Peru all was love and brotherhood—until after I left. In the Bolivian Chaco wild Indians wiped out a company of soldiers not a hundred miles from where I was passing in placid unconcern. In the Paraguayan capital I sat with the man who not a year before had captained a particularly bloody coup d’état. In Brazil I passed through two sections virtually in anarchy, and in one of its state capitals watched a riot that came perilously near being a revolution. In Venezuela I strolled serenely through the very ranks of revolters mere days before the leader and many of his band were killed. Yet hardly once did I knowingly come near personal violence. The fact is that South America is atrociously safe. Dangers are mostly those of popular novelists, from the pages of travelers who succumb to the natural temptation to “draw the long bow,” after the fashion of Marco Polo.
It may be that there was a better way to have told this story than as a day-to-day narrative. But even at that, it could not honestly have escaped a certain monotony; for monotony is ingrained in the fiber of South America. Not to have reported the journey chronologically would have made for succinctness, but at the expense, perhaps, of truth. It may be wearisome to hear of virtually every night’s stopping-place; yet as the traveler through the interior must stop at almost every hut along the way, the sum total of these is a description of the whole country. If the story appears sketchy and piecemeal, it is because I have denied myself, erroneously perhaps, even the Barrovian privilege of transposing or inventing enough to make a smoother and more interesting story. A book of travel cannot have something always happening; that is the privilege of fiction. The novelist can forge his materials to his liking; the travel-writer is very limited, even in opportunity to amalgamate, his material being very hard and nonplastic. Even to transpose and combine incidents is often to falsify, for what is true in one spot may never have been so a hundred miles further on.
The necessity of suddenly abandoning this task for other and more important duties has made it impossible to give it final polish, to eliminate much that should have been eliminated, and to improve much of what remains.