Of those starving, wounded, battle-scarred survivors of several months' accumulated miseries the names signed to the parole contain at least six of men who had love for their leader, or enough of unconquerable daring, to send them, twelve months later, in search of fresh dangers and glories under the same commander.
Walker came back from Sonora, defeated but not disheartened. He had proved himself a leader of men, even in so small an arena. Thenceforth, until his star of "destiny" was eclipsed in death, his name was worth a thousand men wherever hard fighting and desperate hopes might call him. It must be said in his favour that he sought popularity by none of the tricks of the demagogue. In camp or field he was ever the same cold, self-contained, fearless commander, inflexible in discipline, sparing of speech, prodigal of action. He won the devoted obedience of the wildest spirits by governing himself. His word of command was not "Go," but "Come"—the Napoleonic talisman. Only to the youngest of his followers would he ever unbend his solitary dignity. One of them, whose name, William Pfaff, appears on the San Diego parole, was a youth of fifteen. He was with difficulty restrained from following his leader to Nicaragua. He lived through four years of service in our Civil War, but no dangers or hardships could erase the memory of his experience in Sonora. "The rebellion was a picnic to it," said he, in the fine hyperbole of California.
The trial of the filibuster leader for breaking the neutrality laws of the United States ended in a prompt acquittal. Walker resumed the editorial chair, supporting Broderick in the San Francisco Commercial, the personal organ of that ill-fated politician. Let us leave the filibuster in his Elba, and visit the country which was destined to become the scene of his dazzling but brief career of glory, defeat, and death.
CHAPTER VI
Nicaragua — "Mahomet's Paradise" — Buccaneering visitors — Philip II. and an Isthmian Canal — Nelson defeated by a girl — The apocryphal heroine of San Carlos.
Nature in lavishing her favours on Nicaragua, left little for man to add. It is a tropical country with a temperate climate, one half of its territory having a mean elevation of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. In that favoured land the primeval curse is stayed; where nature forestalls every necessity, no need for man to toil or want. Fruits grow in the reckless profusion of the tropics, and clothing is a superfluity wisely counted as such. Two-hundred and fifty thousand children, young and old, occupy a domain as large as New England. They are poor in accumulated wealth as the poorest peasantry of Europe; they are rich, knowing no want unsatisfied, as a nation of millionaires. But Nicaragua is a country in which to study with doubt the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The early discoverers called it "Mahomet's Paradise," an apt name for a land of sensuous happiness.
There man reaps without sowing, and the harvest never fails. He has but to stretch forth his hand and feast on dainties such as seldom grace the tables of kings; the citron, the lemon, the orange (with often 10,000 on a single tree), the banana, the mango, the papaya, the cocoa, the tamarind, the milk-tree, the butter tree, and a spontaneous perennial growth of coffee, cacao, sugar, tobacco, and everything that grows or can be grown in any tropical or temperate clime. Half the year he may sling his hammock beneath the shady trees. In the rainy season a few stakes and a thatch of palm leaves afford him ample shelter. Medicinal trees and herbs abound everywhere, for the relief of the few ills to which his flesh is heir. Birds of gayest plumage, flowers of loveliest hue, greet his eyes on every side. In the noble forests, where the pine and the palm grow beside the ceiba, the mimosa, and the stately cactus, the splendours of the rainbow are rivalled in the plumage of parrots, macaws, humming-birds, toucans, and the beautiful winged creature that bears the imperial name of Montezuma. It is the latest and the fairest land of earth, and the heavenly radiance of youth is on its face. So young, that the fires of nature's workshop have not yet died out. The volcano, towering thousands of feet towards heaven, still smoulders or flames, and the earth is shaken ever and anon by the engines of the Titans. Ometepe the glorious lifts his cloud-capped head five thousand feet out of the placid bosom of Lake Nicaragua; Madera, his neighbour, is but eight hundred feet less lofty. Momotombo and Mombacho and El Viejo, and the twin peaks which watch the mouth of Fonseca Bay, are flaming swords guarding the Eden to which the serpent has come, as of old, with a human tongue.
Little note takes the Nicaraguan of the lavish favours of nature, whose grandest mystery but awakens a languid Quien Sabe? and whose most winning plea extorts only a more languid Poco tiempo—the eternal by and by of indolence. One per cent. of the whole population makes a show of studying the elements of education. Why should they vex their souls in search of knowledge, when all that life needs can be had for the asking? Not, surely, to heap up wealth. Nature takes care even of that, for money grows upon trees of Nicaragua—that is to say, the fractional currency of the people is nuts, one cacao-nut being equal to a fortieth of a medio in value, and passing current as such in all the smaller affairs of trade. Nor is it worth the trouble of mastering letters where illiteracy is no bar to civil or military advancement, and where, especially if the "Serviles" be in power, an unlettered bandit ranks almost as high as a rascally advocate. In the days of President Chamorro the most notorious ruffians held high office, the revenues of the state were farmed out on the system which prevails to-day only in the more barbarous parts of Asia, so that it was a saying in the neighboring states, where, too, glass-houses are not scarce, that "the calf was not safe in the cow, from the thieves of Nicaragua."
It was not always so in Nicaragua. Years before the mail-clad Spaniard brought the curse of civilization across the western ocean, the simple Aztec built his altars to the sun on every hill-top from sea to sea. Centuries ere the Aztec, there flourished a semi-civilized race whose history is written in hieroglyphics of a language utterly dead and forgotten, and who have left no lineal descendants. Even such fragments of Aztec lore as survived the fanaticism of the Conquistadores in Mexico are wanting to the annals of the earlier Central American civilization. It was a culture of rich growth in its day and place, destined like that of the contemporary Roman Empire, to tempt the cupidity of a hardier race, and after an unavailing struggle, to fall before the might of numbers and superior physique. Howbeit, the Aztec Goths and Vandals overran the isthmus, and when the Spanish invasion came, it met only the late subjects of Montezuma's widespread, ill-governed kingdom.
The religion of Nicaragua before the conquest was a gloomy idolatry. The predecessors of the Aztec are conjectured to have been a gentle race, but no match in prowess for their conquerors. The Spaniards found a people of sun-worshippers degraded by human sacrifice and attendant cannibalism. Between them and distant Anahuac, to which they owed allegiance, lay the dense forests and trackless swamps of Yucatan. The journey by land at this day is long and toilsome. Cortez, nevertheless, projected and carried out an exploration as far as Honduras, until his appalled veterans refused to go further southward.