Through South America

by Harry Weston Van Dyke

Northward bound from Valparaiso to Callao, the traveler leaves behind him the last of those south temperate zone Latins who contend for the title of “Yankees of South America.” (And there is flattery in that pretension if they but knew it, for in the old strongholds of our vaunted Yankeeism much of the feverish progressiveness has subsided; in these days the title “Argentino” or “Chileno” would confer a real distinction on some of us of the North.) In Chile one leaves triumphant modernism and now enters the realm of antiquity and romance, the home of Spanish tradition and old-world stateliness. Not even on the Peninsula have the Spanish tongue, the Spanish dignity and the old Castilian ideals been preserved in their pristine charm and perfection as they have in Lima, and the three ancient seats of colonial splendor hidden away in the fastnesses of the northern Andes—Quito, Bogotá and Caracas, the capitals of the countries next in order.

Not that romance and antiquity are all that Peru and her sister republics to the north stand for to-day. If Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, which constitute the agricultural empire spurned by Spain in her days of prosperity, are, as John Barrett says in the Independent for March 11, 1909, destined, with Brazil, “to become deciding factors in the food supply of mankind,” Peru and the other Andean republics have also their part to play in furnishing elements necessary for the growing commerce of the twentieth century. “The complicated social and financial life of the world,” Mr. Barrett goes on, “must have something besides food and drink. Gold and silver as a medium of exchange, and, in the arts, copper and tin as essentials in so many phases of industrial development, the other metals useful in a thousand ways in applied science, the nitrate salts for prime necessities in both peace and war—all these and much more are to-day supplied in high proportion from this part of South America.” Deprive the world of the nitrate of Chile, the copper, gold, and guano of Peru, and the silver and tin of Bolivia, and “there would occur a disturbance in our business machinery which might have very serious consequences.”

In preference to the more direct German line, the visitor should by all means make the trip northward by a “west coaster,” that cross between an Atlantic liner and a river steamboat which meanders leisurely in and out among the Pacific ports and carries a conglomerate of all types of the genus Latin American, and of all the products of his infinitely varied soil. As one writer whimsically describes it, it has all the characteristics of a house-boat, freight carrier, village gossip and market gardener. With no cause to fear rain or rough weather, the ocean here being truly “pacific,” the builders of these boats have placed all cabins on deck, and even thus they seem superfluous except as lockers for luggage, for the heat keeps one always in the open.

Here the newcomer to these shores talks politics or crops or railroad concessions with the substantial hacendado returning to his plantation, or haggles interminably with the cholo woman who offers for sale woven hats of jipi-japa straw (known commercially as Panamas), little golden images unearthed from Inca ruins, or imitations of them fashioned from vegetable ivory, great white-pulped, juicy pineapples, leather belts of exquisite workmanship, brilliantly colored ponchos, and the inevitable convent embroideries and laces. These women spend much of their lives on board, traveling back and forth between Valparaiso and Panamá, and in their allotted corners sell everything from candied sugar cane wrapped in banana leaves to emerald necklaces. It is said that one old woman on a recent trip actually had hoisted aboard a live cow, which she would have sold piecemeal, in steaks, if the long-suffering captain had not protested that his ship was no slaughter-house.

And, besides the surfeit of “local color” one gets on the ship, the traveler has an excellent opportunity to study that vague institution known as international trade, at a familiarly close range. The terms “exports” and “imports” mean little to him until he sees huge cases of sewing machines marked “Hamburg—fragile,” or sections of milling machinery from Chicago, or something of the sort, swung over the side into the lighters, and later sees other lighters towed from shore laden with curious little bales of Panama hats, or cotton, or casks of rum, and all the, to him, exotic products of a different world.

Always wonderful, the mighty ramparts of the Andes rise tier upon tier from the reddish strip of desert shore, first in solid black, then in slaten pallor to the misty heights of inland distance where the peaks are ill-defined against the sky, except when the sun burns through the haze and makes brilliant for a moment some snow-capped summit floating apparently in mid-air four miles above. Ever northward the lazy coaster dozes on her course, dropping in at Iquique, parched and stifling, or Arica where the sun-baked nitrate lies piled for shipment in such quantities as fairly to blister the imagination, or Mollendo, the other open door to Bolivia’s wealth; and, finally, after a fortnight of such coasting, one enters Callao, the port of Lima, which is only nine miles away, up the valley. Situated in the center of Peru’s coast line, Callao is the busy exchange for the bulk of the country’s commerce. Its population is about 35,000. Most of its business men, however, live in Lima and look upon the port city as the Chileans do on Valparaiso, merely as the “down town” district of the capital.

Arriving in port the traveler’s thoughts instinctively turn back through the four centuries of white dominion over the country; and he pictures in his mind the stirring tragedies of Spanish conquest and the colonial régime in this dazzling colonial empire won from the Incas. Until 1717 the Viceroy of Peru held sway over the whole of South America except the then Portuguese Colony of Brazil. On that date the Viceroyalty of Santa Fé or New Granada (embracing what is now Colombia and Ecuador) and the Captaincy-General of Venezuela were created and severed from his jurisdiction; and in 1776 it was reduced to the dimensions occupied by the present Republic, by the creation of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, which included territory now occupied by Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia (then known as the Province of Alto Peru). The Captaincy-General of Chile had always enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and retained it until complete independence was gained by the revolution.

Although mightily shrunken from its former imperial estate, Peru is still a magnificent domain. Its area of 680,000 square miles is equal to the combined areas of Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico; its coast-line of 1500 miles is as extensive as our Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia. The country is divided longitudinally into three distinct regions: the coast, the cordillera, and the so-called Montaña, or wooded slopes, the latter stretching away into the Amazon valley. Along the Pacific coast is a ribbon of dry, tropical lowland, varying in width from twenty to eighty miles, and reaching up to the foothills of the coast range. On these foothills, and increasing gradually in number, through the extension of the irrigating systems toward the sea, lie extensive plantations of cotton and sugar, which form a large part of Peru’s exports. But the coastal stretches are, for the most part, still unreclaimed desert, for, as in the nitrate region of Chile, the rain falls so seldom that, without irrigation, nothing can grow. The explanation given by the scientists is that the moisture from the Atlantic, swept across the continent by the African trade winds, lodges finally in the Andes and flows back over the continental valleys in the great rivers confluent with the Amazon, while that from the Pacific is diverted in some other direction. It has been demonstrated by experiment, however, that these arid parts need only irrigation to make them luxuriantly fertile.

Back of the coast the country is cast in a mold of heroic dimensions. Here the Andes spread out into separate cordilleras which are joined at intervals by transverse ranges, forming great nudos (knots), with high plateaux between, surrounded by lofty snow-covered peaks. This mountainous area approximates three hundred miles in width. In these heights lay the wealth that made of Peru a fabulous treasure land, and in the lower valleys the cereals and fruits of the temperate zone, as well as cattle, provide in great abundance for the Peruvian of to-day. In her extensive guano deposits, too, Peru has another great source of wealth.

Descending the eastern slopes of the Cordillera, the Montaña region stretches away gradually into the Amazon valley, covering an immense area. This Montaña country comprises more than two-thirds of the total area, and lies wholly within the Torrid Zone. Watered by mighty rivers that have their source in the Andean snows, and graded in elevation, its varied productiveness and fertility are phenomenal. It is in the Peruvian Andes that the Amazon begins its long course to the Atlantic; the river, however, goes by the name of Marañon throughout its length in Peru. In the beginning it is augmented by the Huallaga, Ucayali, and Yavarí and a dozen more mighty streams having their sources in the same heights or in the foothills on the eastern slopes, and, while still within Peruvian territory, becomes a river of such immense depth that ocean liners steam clear across the continent to Iquitos, thus giving to Peru a port accessible from the Atlantic for her shipments of rubber and other tropical products.