It was evident that my luck, if I ever had any, had completely deserted me. Six hours before my arrival, the lonely little train of Barcelona had left for Huanta, whence the steamship Manzanares would have set me down in La Guayra the next morning at a cost of thirteen bolívares. Now, thanks to that half day of loafing in El Pilar, I might wait two or three weeks for another steamer. There were, to be sure, small freight-carrying sailboats advertised to leave from time to time; but their agents in Barcelona seemed to have little interest in passengers, particularly a mere “gringo.” For two days I pursued captains of such craft from rosy dawn to the last note of the evening concert in the central plaza, with no other gain than the rather sullen information that there might be a boat leaving mañana. Meanwhile my slender funds were going for corn-bread, and my patience was oozing away in the monotony of the sand-paved, donkey-gaited mud town where not even a book was to be had. Then one morning the captain of the sailboat Josefita agreed to let me sit on his deck from Huanta to La Guayra for only twice the steamer fare, and I bumped away in the ridiculous little train to a port consisting mainly of mud huts, cocoanut-trees, and an elaborate stone customhouse. Here a long formality and the payment of half a dozen government fees were required for a “permission to embark”—from one miserable port to another of the same country—and I was ready to intrust my future existence to the equally capricious ocean winds and Venezuelan temperament.
The Josefita was a large covered rowboat with a sail, on which was painted in huge figures the number required by Venezuelan law on all such craft. The captain took on a few extra beans for the benefit of his solitary passenger; but I played safe by filling my own sack with corn-buns, native cheese, and papelón, and by some stroke of luck I picked up a Spanish translation of Paul de Kock with which to pass the time. Besides the captain and myself there were four ragged sailors, neither old nor young, and, strangely enough, wholly free from African taint. We were loaded with a few hundred native cheeses in banana-leaf wrappings when we began crawling across the bay to take on mineral water at Lajita. A rocky, half-perpendicular coast with scanty tufts of green vegetation sloped down into the blue Caribbean in which I trailed my rapidly healing feet. At four o’clock we drifted up to a beach and a thatched village that we seemed to have passed by train that morning, where we anchored while the captain and half the crew rowed ashore. There they were gone for hours, evidently helping nature run down the mineral water, for toward sunset there came from the land the sound of boxes being nailed up. Meanwhile nature had produced considerable water on her own account in a long series of thunder-showers that fell with an abrupt whispering sound all around the boat. Most of this delay I spent swimming over the side, trusting to my eyes to detect in time any sharp-toothed danger in the clear, azure sea, then retired to the tiny cockpit, where the so-called cook brought me a plate of plain rice and, evidently as a special concession to first-class passengers, the front end of a boiled fish.
When the sun burned out again through the mists, we were speeding along in a spanking breeze after a night in which a heavy sea had tossed us constantly back and forth on the stone-hard deck, shipping water to soak us wherever the rain had not done so already. Lest we might have dozed in spite of all this, the ragamuffin at the wheel had broken forth every five minutes in a howling wail of extemporized “song” which was meant to encourage the wind and perhaps to scare off the evil spirits that ride the darkness. The wind soon died, however, and at noon we were still flapping with idle canvas in a calm, unbroken sea. The book I had picked up was too silly for words; my five companions were utterly devoid of human interest; our miserable fare, concocted by a “cook” who did not know enough to boil water, was strongly scented with kerosene; and most of the day was spent in a dispute between the captain and the singing sailor, who, it seemed, could not read the compass and had taken us far out to sea, when our safety depended on keeping within sight of land. The crew had almost nothing to do but tack two or three times a day, and spent the rest of the time sleeping on the bare deck, except the cook and steersmen, who were lazily engaged at their tasks most of the time. The sea, of the deepest possible blue, as if all the indigo trees of the tropics had spilled their product into it, rose and sank in its endless unrest without our advancing a yard. Well on in the afternoon a puffing breeze developed, and on the far port horizon appeared a few stenciled mountains. Gradually we drew near enough to see that they were clothed with forest to the very sea’s edge. With anything like a fair wind we could have made La Guayra that evening, but the breeze was genuinely Venezuelan. At sunset a school of dolphins surrounded the boat so closely as almost to graze its sides, and for an hour indulged in athletic feats, like a crowd of schoolboys showing off, not only diving entirely out of water so near that we could almost have put out a hand and touched them, but giving themselves two, and even three, complete whirling turns in the air, like somersaulting circus performers, before falling back into the sea with a mighty splash.
Dawn found us crawling close along a shore of sheer bush-grown mountains lost in low clouds, lame with constant rolling on the hard deck and disgusted with the monotony of existence. With La Guayra almost in sight at the far point of this range, called the Silla de Caracas, we tacked all morning against a head wind without seeming to advance a foot along the roaring rocky mountain wall. Life on the ocean wave may sound romantic on paper, but in a dirty and hungry sailboat off the coast of Venezuela it calls for other descriptive adjectives. No doubt I needed this final, post-graduate course in patience before leaving a patience-training continent. Once we anchored to keep from losing the little we had gained, and all day and the following night we rolled and tossed in the selfsame spot, the man at the rudder trying alternately to charm the wind with his raucous voice and to scare it into motion with a vociferous “Viento sinvergüenza, caramba!” Now and then during the night the snapping of canvas and the rattling of blocks above gave the sensation that we were really moving at last, but when morning broke we were off the very rock beside which we had lain down the night before. Gradually, however, the breeze increased with the rising sun, and we began to move swiftly through the water; but so strong is the current along this coast that we seemed to remain for hours opposite identically the same peak of the Sierra de Avila. Then we rolled for hours within plain sight of La Guayra in a sea as flat as if oil had been poured on it, without even a man at the rudder, so hopeless was everyone on board. I had nothing to read; there was not a foot of space in which to walk; I could not swim because of sharks; there was not a person of intelligence within sound of my voice; even our miserable food was virtually gone; there was only a bit of filthy, lukewarm water, full of all sorts of sediment, at the bottom of the barrel, and still we flopped motionless on a windless sea under a grilling sun. I understood at last what it means to get oneself into a boat.
By taking advantage of every faintest puff of breeze, our leather-faced old salt coaxed us along during the afternoon, until a stiffening wind overtook us at last and we slipped ever more rapidly along the great mountain wall. Tiny villages here and there clung far up on little knobs of land; great shadowy valleys and sun-defying corners; a town here and there along the base, all seemed to bake in the tropical sun, and certainly to sleep. By four o’clock La Guayra lay before us, its bathing resort of Macuto just off our port beam; yet so Venezuelan was the wind that we did not know whether we could reach harbor in time to be allowed ashore. I might have landed and walked into town long since, were it not illegal for passengers to enter Venezuela except at a regular port with a customhouse. It is a splendid arrangement for politicians, but of small advantage to becalmed or shipwrecked sailors. I shaved, however, poured sea-water over my maltreated body, put on the only clothing I had left after pitching my rags overboard, and presented the captain with the old felt hat that had protected me from the sun in fourteen countries. This last act may have induced his ally, the wind, to waft us in behind the breakwater while the sun was still above the horizon.
However, being in port in Venezuela is not synonymous with going ashore. Once at anchor, almost within springing distance of a stone wharf, I had to wait while the captain went to report my existence and set in motion all the formalities, including the payment of fees, that were required exactly as if I had been landing from a foreign country. To tell the truth, no sane person would be eager to get ashore in La Guayra, unless it was in the hope of immediately going elsewhere. A parched and thirsty town, in spite of the brilliant blue sea beating at its feet, with rows of unattractive houses, all alike except in slight variations of color, and even those in pastel shades lacking vividness, strewn irregularly, singly, in groups, and in one larger mass, up dull-red and sand-colored hills which piled precipitously into the sky, it plainly had little attractiveness except as a picturesque ensemble from a distance. Trails climbed straight up this sheer mountain-wall, as if in haste to escape the hot and ugly town at its feet, while a carriage-road and a railway set out more decorously along the shore for the same destination,—Caracas.
A brass-tinted, supercilious official with a prejudice against shaving, who was lolling beneath a regal awning, had himself rowed out at last to ask me a score of absurd questions and set my answers down at length in a book, after which he went ashore again to advise the government whether or not I should be granted an “order of disembarkment”—without which I must continue to sit out here in the blazing sun even though the “Caracas of Wilmington, Delaware,” across the harbor were about to sail and I eager to take it. By and by a yellow negro rowed out to ask if I had a visiting-card to prove my respectability, saying the prefectura was “making some question” about my landing. Another hour passed, and at last a boat was sent to take me ashore, where I applied at once to the collector of customs for the baggage I had intrusted to the purser of the Dutch boat that had dropped me at Trinidad. Luckily, the latter had carried out instructions, or I should scarcely have dared venture up to Caracas. Meanwhile, one of the men who had rowed out for me was dogging my footsteps with a want-a-tip air. He was, it turned out, collector for the corporación, the foreign company that built the docks of La Guayra, and which exacts forty cents for every passenger who lands—or sixty, if he comes from a boat not tied up to the wharf. But instead of collecting it in an office, or in an official way, he followed me about like a bootblack and then tried to squeeze an extra “commission” out of me on the ground that he had been forced to follow me about.
This “corporation,” which is English, holds what is rated “one of the finest grafts” in South America, having the right for ninety-nine years to charge for every person, every pound of merchandise, every trunk, valise, and even handbag, which embarks or disembarks in La Guayra, to say nothing of heavy fees for every ship that enters the harbor. Yet so overrun is it said to be with native employees forced upon it by politicians that the “graft” is by no means so splendid as it sounds. Venezuela is notoriously in the front rank of political corruption in South America, and La Guayra is its greatest single fleecing-place. From the instant he enters this chief port the stranger is hounded at every turn by grasping, insolent officials and political favorites permitted to indulge in the most absurd extortions, a spirit which pervades the entire population down to the last impudent, rascally street-urchin. Taxes, dues and customs duties have frankly been made not only as high and onerous but as complicated as possible, in order to mulct the taxpayer or importer to the advantage of swarming loafers in government uniform. A most intricate system of fines and penalties is imposed, for instance, by the customs regulations, for the slightest errors in invoices. The collectors receive meager salaries, but the discoverer of any “violation” of the elaborate statutes pockets one half the fine imposed, with the result that there is an un-Venezuelan zeal in looking for flaws, and fines are assessed even for the omission of commas, the faulty use of semicolons, and for abbreviations.
One can scarcely blame a man forced to live in La Guayra, however, for taking it out on his fellow-man. Piled up the sheer, arid mountain-wall with only two streets on the level, and with the sun baking in upon it all day, it feels like a gigantic oven; certainly it was the hottest place I had ever seen in South America. Nor was it the stirring, endurable heat, tempered by a constant breeze, of most of the continent, but a sweltering, melting temperature that not only left me drenched with perspiration within a minute after I had stepped ashore, but which made it impossible even to write because one’s hands soaked the paper, which set one to dripping before he sat down to early morning coffee. Everyone in town had a wilted, unshaven, downcast air, as if hating himself and the world at large for his uncomfortable existence. To add to my disgust, it was Friday, and the penetrating stink of fish pervaded every corner of the organized squalor, pursuing me even into the highest room of the dirty negro pension which posed as a hotel. The only endurable place in town was a little piece of park and promenade along the edge of the sea; but the bestial habits of the populace had sullied even the ocean breezes.
The “Ferrocarril La Guaira á Caracas,” built in 1885 by an English company, takes twenty-four miles to cover an actual distance of about eight, with a fare of ten cents a mile and a train in each direction twice a day. So often had I climbed by rail abruptly into the clouds in South America that this was no new experience. Moreover, the climb is much less lofty than several others, though there is much the same sensation as one goes swiftly up from sea-level in vast curves around the reddish desert hills, with an ever-opening vista of La Guayra and its adjacent towns along the scalloped shore. Then the train squirms in and out of Andean ranges, at times utterly barren, at others green, past dizzy precipices and mighty valleys, the stone-faced cartload climbing in vast turns in the same general direction. At the halfway station of Zigzag we passed the down train, after which we rumbled quite a while across a plateau country among mountain heights, until finally there burst upon me the last South American capital—striking, but not to be compared with the first view of several others.