On the desolate stretch of Colombia’s Pacific coast there is but one city of importance, Buenaventura. This is the busy exchange that taps the fertile region of the upper Atrato basin, and when the Panamá Canal shall have been opened should spring into greater importance along with the other ports of the West Coast. In the interior Colombia possesses many cities of considerable size, ranging from thirty to sixty thousand inhabitants, which are centers for the mining and agricultural districts—Pamplona in the mountains near the Venezuela frontier, Bucarmanga, a little to the west, Mompóz, near the confluence of the Cauca and Magdalena, once a port on the latter river but now, owing to the erratic wanderings of that stream, twenty miles east of it, Medellín, in the Cauca valley; Popayán and Pasto near the head waters of that river, and La Plata on the other side of the Central Cordillera.
The Hon. John Barrett and Hon. William L. Scruggs, both former Ministers of the United States at Bogotá, have written extensively of Colombia’s commercial possibilities and predict great strides for the hermit republic. “Colombia,” writes Mr. Barrett, “is a wonderland of opportunity. Measured by the standards of other countries it can be said without exaggeration that the Republic of Colombia, in proportion to area and population, is the richest of all in the variety and extent of undeveloped resources, fullest in promise for future growth and reward to mankind.” “Colombia,” he continues, “is at our very doors; it is nearer to the principal ports of the United States than any other South American country, and yet we have done little to study her internal wealth or to take part in her foreign commerce.” The country is only nine hundred and fifty miles away from us; from Cartagena to Tampa, Florida, the distance is less than from New York to St. Louis. The foreign trade of Colombia last year amounted to $26,000,000, in which the United States participated to the extent of only $11,000,000.
Mr. Scruggs says in closing his interesting work on Colombia: “Such is the country as nature has made it—picturesque, beautiful, and exceedingly rich and varied in undeveloped resources. As yet man has done very little for it, the greater part being still unbroken wilderness.... The commercial possibilities of the country are almost incalculable; and the time is probably not very remote when the fact will be more fully realized by the great commercial powers of the world.”
XI
VENEZUELA
At the end of his “swing around the circle” of South American countries (having begun with Brazil), the traveler comes to Venezuela—the huge republic that bulges out into the northernmost nub of the continent, where the terminal ranges of the Andes turn eastward to meet the great Guiana Highlands and form those high-flung ramparts that protect the fertile, low-lying Amazon plains from the Atlantic. This black, mountainous front runs along the Caribbean coast line for some fifteen hundred miles, broken at intervals, however, where the lovely blue of the tropical sea sweeps inland to meet the bright green of some great river basin.
Southward, Venezuela spreads down over an irregularly shaped territory extending from twelve degrees north latitude to the equator. Her varied topography, too, produces almost every change of climate, from the cold of the mountains—some of whose peaks reach high enough to earn the title of nevada—down through the temperate zone of the llanos, or rolling plains that slope off into the great Orinoco basins, where wheat, corn, and cattle abound, and the country’s great staples, coffee, cotton, and tobacco are grown, to the hot Orinoco jungles that trail off to the south, where rubber and cacao trees luxuriate without cultivation, and sugar cane, oranges, fruits, and pineapples thrive in the clearings. More than half of Venezuela’s territory may be ignored from the commercial standpoint of to-day, for it is either Alaskan or Amazonian in character and can be reserved for later needs of the human family if, as Humboldt prophesied, the Amazon valley should become the feeding ground of mankind.
No description has ever done justice to the beauties of Venezuela’s landscape of mountain and valley and mighty rivers, of warm green pastures and blue skies, and the mystic shimmering white of an occasional snow-capped peak. The country that so appeals to the traveler’s interest is nearly six hundred thousand square miles in area, and could include within its confines the States of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. Its mountainous coast saw the beginning of the European invasion of the new world. Columbus, Vespucci, and Ojeda touched here. Ojeda gave the country its name. When, on his way west from the Orinoco, he rounded Cape San Roman and turned into the Gulf of Maracaibo, he saw Indian villages composed of houses built on piles in the water along the shores, which suggested something of a resemblance to Venice, and he called the place Venezuela (Little Venice); and soon the whole coast, and eventually the country beyond, became so known—a region larger than all Italy and Spain combined. This coast and the white-walled cities nestling in the heights among the magnificent trees formed the storied Spanish Main.
Cumaná, in the middle east, is the oldest European settlement in South America; it was in its old church that Las Casas preached—the saintly priest who was the Indian’s ablest champion in the early days of Spanish devastation, but who, with regret be it said, is reputed also to have been the father of African slavery in the new world, for it was he, so the chroniclers say, who suggested that negroes be imported to labor in the fields and mines and relieve the Indians of a burden they were both temperamentally and physically unfitted to bear. Venezuela was the birthplace of the resistance to Spain’s oppression of her colonies, and of Miranda, Bolívar, Sucré, and the fiery young patriot, Yáñez—the men who led the van of that resistance. Through her land flows one of the world’s greatest rivers, the Orinoco, with its four thousand miles of navigable waters. The vast productiveness of the country and its stores of mineral wealth are sufficient to sustain twenty times its present population of two millions and a half. And, finally, Venezuela is nearer to us than any other country in South America.
A most agreeable route for the traveler leaving Colombian ports for Venezuela is by the steamers which zigzag around the Caribbean Sea for ten days or more on the way to Europe, and touch at many of the once famous old ports before reaching La Guayra, the sea gateway to Caracas. Immediately after leaving Colombian waters and rounding the Guajira peninsula, the ship enters the great Gulf of Maracaibo, one hundred and fifty miles in extent from east to west, and sixty miles from north to south. Passing along in through a narrow strait, the almost equally large Lake of Maracaibo swells out before the traveler. This great body of water drains an extensive basin lying between two terminal spurs of the Andes—the Sierra de Parija and the Sierra Mérida—and into it flow many rivers having their source in the surrounding mountains. Inside, on the east bank of the strait, lies the city of Maracaibo, now one of the most important centers on the north coast, for here is shipped the produce of the vast fertile region of western Venezuela—coffee, cacao, tobacco, castor beans, hardwood timber, and dyewoods. Much of the produce of the eastern slope of Colombia also finds its way to Europe and the States through this port; fully half of what is known in our markets as “Maracaibo coffee” is really a Colombian product.