In Callao there is but little to interest the stranger. As in most seaports, tough characters abound, and there is a bevy of saloons; but unlike most seaports, Callao is comparatively clean, especially the show places. It has a large church, a few pleasant plazas, and some marble statues. In reputation it is one of the toughest towns in the world; it formerly was the jumping-off place for criminals and the tales of shanghaiing and murders that took place here not so many years back would fill volumes.
Callao Harbor
The harbor is landlocked by the mainland, a sandy point, and the mountainous island of San Lorenzo. The port works of stone are the best on the whole Pacific Coast but at the present time no ships anchor at them. This is due to the prevalence of bubonic plague (occasionally a few sporadic cases) which can be transmitted to the passengers and crews through the medium of rats. A reason more vital to the municipality for not allowing the ships to anchor at the docks is that of providing employment for the fleteros, or boatmen, who earn a few soles by rowing people and baggage to and from the ships. In the harbor are two Peruvian men-of-war. They have lain there several years. Their boilers are defective and their machinery needs repairing, but nothing is ever done to make them seaworthy. I saw the admiral in a street car. He is a big, fat fellow with about a fifty-three inch waist line, and resplendent with gold braid. From the servile humility of the conductor and the passengers towards him, one might judge that he ranked with von Tirpitz and I have no doubt but that he entertained the same opinion of himself.
Lima is about five miles distant inland from Callao, to which city it is connected by a trolley and two railway lines. The former, double-tracked, runs in a straight line through a decidedly Athenian landscape. On all sides are green fields, olive groves, black hills, and whitish soil. The air, odor, and decisive clearness of the atmosphere is Attic; the style of the country houses, nature of the crops, and appearance of the live stock is analogous to that of Attica. On the south side of the main road are two large country seats that would grace any rural scene; they are the residences of the Italian families Castagnone and Nosiglia, and are set back at some distance from the turnpike.
The population of Lima, Callao, and many of the seaboard Peruvian towns is composed of Aryans, Indians, Hamitics, and Mongolians, with a conglomerate mixture of all four races. In Lima, people with mixed white and Indian blood predominate; those of mixed white and negro blood are a close second. The aristocracy and better-to-do classes are white and are descended from the Spaniards. They do not marry outside of their own race and constitute the ruling element. There is a large Italian colony, many of whose male members are leading merchants and professional men. Far outnumbering the whites are the various hues of mixed breeds, Indians, negroes, and Chinese, which form the rabble. The cholo is a scion of an Indian and a white person, while a chino-cholo is the offspring of a Chinaman and an Indian. To get a good idea of Peruvian mixture as applied to the lower walks of society (which constitute all the classes not belonging to the white race, and which greatly predominate), one can take the following genealogical tree as an example. A white man marries a squaw which we can designate as union A. A Chinaman marries a negress; we can call this union B. The progeny of union A marries the progeny of union B, which is union C. The result is a child which has blood one fourth white, one fourth black, one fourth Indian, and one fourth Chinese. Although mixtures like this are uncommon, they nevertheless exist, but it is of great commonness for a person to have the blood of three of these races.
These mixtures diminish the intellect and decrease the vitality of the offspring, who are invariably inferior to the pure bloods, even if the pure blood is Indian or negro. The children of these marriages inherit few of the good qualities of their parents, but all of their vices. The cholos, proud of their white blood, tyrannize over the poor Indians and subject them to indignities and cruelties such as were never practiced in slavery times by their Spanish masters. These same cholos cringe like curs before the white man. Their natural disposition is good, excepting that they have the trait of dreadfully abusing and misusing the poor Indians. The Chinese, of which there are thirty thousand in the provinces of Callao and Lima, have not intermarried with the other races so much as the other three mentioned ones. They are lawabiding and quiet, but the mixed offspring from them is deficient in good qualities. The worst of all races in Peru is the offspring of the negro and the cholo. The result is a progeny that is downright bad. It is these that constitute the riotous mobs that murder and hurl missiles every time there is an abortive or a genuine revolution. They do not know what the row is about, yet they want to participate in it for the main love of wickedness. I saw a crowd of this degenerate gentry, evidently "egged on" by some political opponent, hurl legumes and bricks at the brother of ex-President Leguia when he was leaving the Doric-columned Senate Building. One of these bricks severely injured a stranger, and I, an unconscious spectator, had a white duck suit discolored by unsavory hen fruit. The Limeno bootblacks are recruited from this class, and as a rule when they are not shining shoes or up to some deviltry, they stand around the booths singing in an undertone obscene stanzas of their own composition to attentive dregs of humanity. The "buck-niggers" and their families, of untarnished ebony hue, originally migrated into Peru from Jamaica. They do not make bad citizens, but their population is fast diminishing, their numbers becoming assimilated with the other races.
