Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

THE THREE GRINGOS

San Pedro Sula lay in peaceful isolation in a sunny valley at the base of great mountains, and from the upper porch of our hotel, that had been built when the railroad was expected to continue on across the continent, we could see above the palms in the garden the clouds moving from one mountain-top to another, or lying packed like drifts of snow in the hollows between. We used to sit for hours on this porch in absolute idleness, watching Jeffs hurrying in and out below with infinite pity, while we listened to the palms rustling and whispering as they bent and courtesied before us, and saw the sunshine turn the mountains a light green, like dry moss, or leave half of them dark and sombre when a cloud passed in between. It was a clean, lazy little place of many clay huts, with gardens back of them filled with banana-palms and wide-reaching trees, which were one mass of brilliant crimson flowers. In the centre of the town was a grass-grown plaza where the barefooted and ragged boy-soldiers went through leisurely evolutions, and the mules and cows gazed at them from the other end.

Our hotel was leased by an American woman, who was making an unappreciated fight against dirt and insects, and the height of whose ambition was to get back to Brooklyn and take in light sewing and educate her two very young daughters. Her husband had died in the interior, and his portrait hung in the dining-room of the hotel. She used to talk about him while she was waiting at dinner, and of what a well-read and able man he had been. She would grow so interested in her stories that the dinner would turn cold while she stood gazing at the picture and shaking her head at it. We became very much interested in the husband, and used to look up over our shoulders at his portrait with respectful attention, as though he were present. His widow did not like Honduranians; and though she might have made enough money to take her home, had she consented to accept them as boarders, she would only receive gringos at her hotel, which she herself swept and scrubbed when she was not cooking the dinner and making the beds. She had saved eight dollars of the sum necessary to convey her and her children home, and to educate them when they got there; and as American travellers in Honduras are few, and as most of them ask you for money to help them to God’s country, I am afraid her chance of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge is very doubtful.

SETTING OUT FROM SAN PEDRO SULA

We contributed to her fund, and bought her a bundle of lottery tickets, which we told her were the means of making money easily; and I should like to add that she won the grand prize, and lived happily on Brooklyn Heights ever after; but when we saw the list at Panama, her numbers were not on it, and so, I fear, she is still keeping the only clean hotel in Honduras, which is something more difficult to accomplish and a much more public-spirited thing to do than to win a grand prize in a lottery.

We left San Pedro Sula on a Sunday morning, with a train of eleven mules; five to carry our luggage and the other six for ourselves, Jeffs, Charlwood, Somerset’s servant, and Emilio, our chief moso, or muleteer. There were two other mosos, who walked the entire distance, and in bull-hide sandals at that, guarding and driving the pack-mules, and who were generally able to catch up with us an hour or so after we had halted for the night. I do not know which was the worst of the mosos, although Emilio seems to have been first choice with all of us. We agreed, after it was all over, that we did not so much regret not having killed them as that they could not know how frequently they had been near to sudden and awful death.

The people of Honduras, where all the travelling is done on mule or horseback, have a pretty custom of riding out to meet a friend when he is known to be coming to town, and of accompanying him when he departs. This latter ceremony always made me feel as though I were an undesirable citizen who was being conveyed outside of the city limits by a Vigilance Committee; but it is very well meant, and a man in Honduras measures his popularity by the number of friends who come forth to greet him on his arrival, or who speed him on his way when he sets forth again. We were accompanied out of San Pedro Sula by the consular agent, the able American manager of the thirty-seven miles of railroad, and his youthful baggage-master, a young gentleman whom I had formerly known in the States.

Our escort left us at the end of a few miles, at the foot of the mountains, and we began the ascent alone. From that time on until we reached the Pacific Ocean we moved at the rate of three miles an hour, or some nine leagues a day, as distances are measured in Honduras, ten hours being a day’s journey. Our mules were not at all the animals that we know as mules in the States, but rather overgrown donkeys or burros, and not much stouter than those in the streets of Cairo, whether it be the Street in Cairo of Chicago, or the one that runs in front of Shepheard’s Hotel. They were patient, plucky, and wonderfully sure-footed little creatures, and so careful of their own legs and necks that, after the first few hours, we ceased to feel any anxiety about our own, and left the entire charge of the matter to them.