Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

It was in the boat of this latter line that we finally awoke one morning to find her anchored in the harbor of Puerto Cortez.

The harbor is a very large one and a very safe one. It is encircled by mountains on the sea-side, and by almost impenetrable swamps and jungles on the other. Close around the waters of the bay are bunches and rows of the cocoanut palm, and a village of mud huts covered with thatch. There is also a tin custom-house, which includes the railroad-office and a comandancia, and this and the jail or barracks of rotting whitewashed boards, and the half-dozen houses of one story belonging to consuls and shipping agents, are the only other frame buildings in the place save one. That is a large mansion with broad verandas, painted in colors, and set in a carefully designed garden of rare plants and manaca palms. Two poles are planted in the garden, one flying the blue-and-white flag of Honduras, the other with the stripes and stars of the United States. This is the home of the exiled lottery. It is the most pretentious building and the cleanest in the whole republic of Honduras, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific slope.

I confess that I was foolish enough to regard this house of magnificent exterior, as I viewed it from the wharf, as seriously as a general observes the ramparts and defences of the enemy before making his advance. I had taken a nine days’ journey with the single purpose of seeing and getting at the truth concerning this particular building, and whether I was now to be viewed with suspicion and treated as an intruder, whether my object would be guessed at once and I should be forced to wait on the beach for the next steamer, or whether I would be received with kindness which came from ignorance of my intentions, I could not tell. And while I considered, a black Jamaica negro decided my movements for me. There was a hotel, he answered, doubtfully, but he thought it would be better, if Mr. Barross would let me in, to try for a room in the Lottery Building.

“Mr. Barross sometimes takes boarders,” he said, “and the Lottery Building is a fine house, sir—finest house this side Mexico city.” He added, encouragingly, that he spoke English “very good,” and that he had been in London.

Sitting on the wide porch of the Lottery Building was a dark-faced, distinguished-looking little man, a creole apparently, with white hair and white goatee. He rose and bowed as I came up through the garden and inquired of him if he was the manager of the lottery, Mr. Barross, and if he could give me food and shelter. The gentleman answered that he was Mr. Barross, and that he could and would do as I asked, and appealed with hospitable warmth to a tall, handsome woman, with beautiful white hair, to support him in his invitation. Mrs. Barross assented kindly, and directed her servants to place a rocking-chair in the shade, and requested me to be seated in it; luncheon, she assured me, would be ready in a half-hour, and she hoped that the voyage south had been a pleasant one.

And so within five minutes after arriving in the mysterious harbor of Puerto Cortez I found myself at home under the roof of the outlawed lottery, and being particularly well treated by its representative, and feeling particularly uncomfortable in consequence. I was heartily sorry that I had not gone to the hotel. And so, after I had been in my room, I took pains to ascertain exactly what my position in the house might be, and whether or not, apart from the courtesy of Mr. Barross and his wife, for which no one could make return, I was on the same free footing that I would have been in a hotel. I was assured that I was regarded as a transient boarder, and that I was a patron rather than a guest; but as I did not yet feel at ease, I took courage, and explained to Mr. Barross that I was not a coffee-planter or a capitalist looking for a concession from the government, but that I was in Honduras to write of what I found there. Mr. Barross answered that he knew already why I was there from the New Orleans papers which had arrived in the boat with me, and seemed rather pleased than otherwise to have me about the house. This set my mind at rest, and though it may not possibly be of the least interest to the reader, it is of great importance to me that the same reader should understand that all which I write here of the lottery was told to me by the lottery people themselves, with the full knowledge that I was going to publish it. And later, when I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Duprez, the late editor of the States, in New Orleans, and then in Tegucigalpa, as representative of the lottery, I warned him in the presence of several of our friends to be careful, as I would probably make use of all he told me. To which he agreed, and continued answering questions for the rest of the evening. I may also add that I have taken care to verify the figures used here, for the reason that the lottery people are at such an obvious disadvantage in not being allowed by law to reply to what is said of them, nor to correct any mistake in any statements that may be made to their disadvantage.

I had never visited a hotel or a country-house as curious as the one presided over by Mr. Barross. It was entirely original in its decoration, unique in its sources of entertainment, and its business office, unlike most business offices, possessed a peculiar fascination. The stationery for the use of the patrons, and on which I wrote to innocent friends in the North, bore the letter-head of the Honduras Lottery Company; the pictures on the walls were framed groups of lottery tickets purchased in the past by Mr. Barross, which had not drawn prizes; and the safe in which the guest might place his valuables contained a large canvas-bag sealed with red wax, and holding in prizes for the next drawing seventy-five thousand dollars.

Wherever you turned were evidences of the peculiar business that was being carried on under the roof that sheltered you, and outside in the garden stood another building, containing the printing-presses on which the lists of winning numbers were struck off before they were distributed broadcast about the world. But of more interest than all else was the long, sunshiny, empty room running the full length of the house, in which, on a platform at one end, were two immense wheels, one of glass and brass, and as transparent as a bowl of goldfish, and the other closely draped in a heavy canvas hood laced and strapped around it, and holding sealed and locked within its great bowels one hundred thousand paper tickets in one hundred thousand rubber tubes. In this atmosphere and with these surroundings my host and hostess lived their life of quiet conventional comfort—a life full of the lesser interests of every day, and lighted for others by their most gracious and kindly courtesy and hospitable good-will. When I sat at their table I was always conscious of the great wheels, showing through the open door from the room beyond like skeletons in a closet; but it was not so with my host, whose chief concern might be that our glasses should be filled, nor with my hostess, who presided at the head of the table—which means more than sitting there—with that dignity and charm which is peculiar to a Southern woman, and which made dining with her an affair of state, and not one of appetite.

I had come to see the working of a great gambling scheme, and I had anticipated that there might be some difficulty put in the way of my doing so; but if the lottery plant had been a cider-press in an orchard I could not have been more welcome to examine and to study it and to take it to pieces. It was not so much that they had nothing to conceal, or that now, while they are fighting for existence, they would rather risk being abused than not being mentioned at all. For they can fight abuse; they have had to do that for a long time. It is silence and oblivion that they fear now; the silence that means they are forgotten, that their arrogant glory has departed, that they are only a memory. They can fight those who fight them, but they cannot fight with people who, if they think of them at all, think of them as already dead and buried. It was neither of these reasons that gave me free admittance to the workings of the lottery; it was simply that to Mr. and Mrs. Barross the lottery was a religion; it was the greatest charitable organization of the age, and the purest philanthropist of modern times could not have more thoroughly believed in his good works than did Mrs. Barross believe that noble and generous benefits were being bestowed on mankind at every turn of the great wheel in her back parlor.

This showed itself in the admiration which she shares with her husband for the gentlemen of the company, and their coming once a month is an event of great moment to Mrs. Barross, who must find it dull sometimes, in spite of the great cool house, with its many rooms and broad porches, and gorgeous silk hangings over the beds, and the clean linen, and airy, sunlit dining-room. She is much more interested in telling the news that the gentlemen brought down with them when they last came than in the result of the drawing, and she recalls the compliments they paid her garden, but she cannot remember the number that drew the capital prize. It was interesting to find this big gambling scheme in the hands of two such simple, kindly people, and to see how commonplace it was to them, how much a matter of routine and of habit. They sang its praises if you wished to talk of it, but they were more deeply interested in the lesser affairs of their own household. And at one time we ceased discussing it to help try on the baby’s new boots that had just arrived on the steamer, and patted them on the place where the heel should have been to drive them on the extremities of two waving fat legs. We all admired the tassels which hung from them, and which the baby tried to pull off and put in his mouth. They were bronze boots with black buttons, and the first the baby had ever worn, and the event filled the home of the exiled lottery with intense excitement.