Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

We passed through the pretty village of Trinidad early the next morning, and arrived at nightfall at the larger town of Santa Barbara, where the sound of our mules’ hoofs pattering over the paved streets and the smell of smoking street lamps came to us with as much of a shock as does the sight of land after a week at sea. Santa Barbara, in spite of its pavements, was not a great metropolis, and, owing to its isolation, the advent of five strangers was so much of an event that the children of the town followed us, cheering and jeering as though we were a circus procession; they blocked the house in which we took refuge, on every side, so that the native policemen had to be stationed at our windows to wave them away. On the following morning we called to pay our respects on General Louis Bogran, who has been President of Honduras for eight years and an exile for two. He died a few months after our visit. He was a very handsome man, with a fine presence, and with great dignity of manner, and he gave us an audience exactly as though he were a dethroned monarch and we loyal subjects come to pay him homage in his loneliness. I asked him what he regarded as the best work of his administration, and after thinking awhile he answered, “Peace for eight years,” which was rather happy, when you consider that in the three years since he had left office there have been four presidents and two long and serious revolutions, and when we were in the capital the people seemed to think it was about time to begin on another.

GENERAL LOUIS BOGRAN

We left Santa Barbara early the next morning, and rode over a few more mountains to the town of Seguaca, where the village priest was holding a festival, and where the natives for many miles around had gathered in consequence. There did not seem to be much of interest going on when we arrived, for the people of the town and the visitors within her gates deserted the booths and followed us in a long procession down the single street, and invaded the house where we lunched.

Our host on this occasion set a table for us in the centre of his largest room, and the population moved in through the doors and windows, and seated themselves cross-legged in rows ten and fifteen deep on the earth floor at our feet, and regarded us gravely and in absolute silence. Those who could not find standing-room inside stood on the window-sills and blocked the doorways, and the women were given places of honor on tables and beds. It was somewhat embarrassing, and we felt as though we ought to offer something more unusual than the mere exercise of eating in order to justify such interest; so we attempted various parlor tricks, without appearing to notice the presence of an audience, and pretended to swallow the eggs whole, and made knives and forks disappear in the air, and drew silver dollars from the legs of the table, continuing our luncheon in the meantime in a self-possessed and polite manner, as though such eccentricities were our hourly habit. We could see the audience, out of the corner of our eyes, leaning forward with their eyes and mouths wide open, and were so encouraged that we called up some of the boys and drew watches and dollars out of their heads, after which they retired into corners and ransacked their scantily clad persons for more. It was rather an expensive exhibition, for when we set forth again they all laid claim to the dollars of which they considered they had been robbed.

OUR PACK-TRAIN AT SANTA BARBARA

The men of the place, according to their courteous custom, followed us out of the town for a few miles, and then we all shook hands and exchanged cigars and cigarettes, and separated with many compliments and expressions of high esteem.

The trail from Seguaca to our next resting-place led through pine forests and over layers of pine-needles that had been accumulating for years. It was a very warm, dry afternoon, and the air was filled with the odor of the pines, and when we came to one of the many mountain streams we disobeyed Jeffs and stopped to bathe in it, and let it carry us down the side of the mountain with the speed of a toboggan. We had been told that bathing at any time was extremely dangerous in Honduras, and especially so in the afternoon; but we always bathed in the afternoon, and looked forward to the half-hour spent in one of these roaring rapids as the best part of the day. Of all our recollections of Honduras, they are certainly the pleasantest. The water was almost icily cold, and fell with a rush and a heavy downpour in little water-falls, or between great crevices in the solid rocks, leaping and bubbling and flashing in the sun, or else sweeping in swift eddies in the compass of deep, shadowy pools. We used to imprison ourselves between two rocks and let a fall of water strike us from the distance of several feet on our head and shoulders, or tear past and around us, so that in five minutes the soreness and stiffness of the day’s ride were rubbed out of us as completely as though we had been massaged at a Turkish bath, and the fact that we were always bruised and black and blue when we came out could not break us of this habit. It was probably because we were new to the country that we suffered no great harm; for Jeffs, who was an old inhabitant, and who had joined us in this particular stream for the first time, came out looking twenty years older, and in an hour his teeth were chattering with chills or clinched with fever, and his pulse was jumping at one hundred and three. We were then exactly six days’ hard riding from any civilized place, and though we gave him quinine and whiskey and put him into his hammock as soon as we reached a hut, the evening is not a cheerful one to remember. It would not have been a cheerful evening under any circumstances, for we shared the hut with the largest and most varied collection of human beings, animals, and insects that I have ever seen gathered into so small a place.

I took an account of stock before I turned in, and found that there were three dogs, eleven cats, seven children, five men, not including five of us, three women, and a dozen chickens, all sleeping, or trying to sleep, in the same room, under the one roof. And when I gave up attempting to sleep and wandered out into the night, I stepped on the pigs, and startled three or four calves that had been sleeping under the porch and that lunged up out of the darkness. We were always asking Jeffs why we slept in such places, instead of swinging our hammocks under the trees and camping out decently and in order, and his answer was that while there were insects enough in-doors, they were virtually an extinct species when compared to the number one would meet in the open air.