Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

Corinto is the best harbor on the Pacific side of Nicaragua, but the town is not as large as the importance of the port would suggest. It consists of three blocks of two-story houses, facing the harbor fifty feet back from the water’s edge, with a sandy street between each block of buildings. There are about a thousand inhabitants, and a foreign population which varies from five residents to a dozen transient visitors and stewards on steamer days. The natives are chiefly occupied in exporting coffee and receiving the imported goods for the interior, and the principal amusement of the foreign colony is bathing or playing billiards. It has a whist club of four members. The fifth foreign resident acts as a substitute in the event of any one of the four players chancing to have another engagement, but as there is no one with whom he could have an engagement, the substitute is seldom called upon. He told me he had been sitting by and smoking and watching the others play whist for a month now, and hoping that one of them would have a sunstroke.

HARBOR OF CORINTO

We left Corinto the next morning and took the train to Lake Managua, where we were to connect with a steamer which crosses the lake to the capital. It was a beautiful ride, and for some distance ran along the sea-shore, where the ocean rolled up the beach in great waves, breaking in showers of foam upon the rocks. Then we crossed lagoons and swamps on trestles, and passed pretty thatched villages, and saw many beautiful women and girls selling candy and sugar-cane at the stations. They wore gowns that left the neck and shoulders bare, and wrapped themselves in silk shawls of solid colors, which they kept continually loosening and rearranging, tossing the ends coquettishly from one shoulder to the other, or drawing them closely about the figure, or like a cowl over the head. This silk shawl is the most characteristic part of the wardrobe of the native women of Central America. It is as inevitable as the mantilla of their richer sisters, and it is generally the only bit of splendor they possess. A group of them on a feast-day or Sunday, when they come marching towards you with green, purple, blue, or yellow shawls, makes a very striking picture.

These women of the pueblo in Honduras and Nicaragua were better-looking than the women of the lower classes of any country I have ever visited. They were individually more beautiful, and the proportion of beautiful women was greater. A woman there is accustomed from her childhood to carry heavy burdens on her head, and this gives to all of them an erect carriage and a fearless uplifting of the head when they walk or stand. They have never known a tight dress or a tight shoe, and they move as easily and as gracefully as an antelope. Their hair is very rich and heavy, and they oil it and comb it and braid it from morning to night, wearing it parted in the middle, and drawn tightly back over the ears, and piled upon the head in heavy braids. Their complexion is a light brown, and their eyes have the sad look which one sees in the eyes of a deer or a dog, and which is not so much the sign of any sorrow as of the lack of intelligence. The women of the upper classes are like most Spanish-American women, badly and over dressed in a gown fashioned after some forgotten Parisian mode, with powder over their faces, and with their hair frizzled and curled in ridiculous profusion. They are a very sorry contrast to a woman of the people, such as you see standing in the doorways of the mud huts, or advancing towards you along the trail with an earthen jar on her shoulder, straight of limb, and with a firm, fine lower jaw, a low, broad forehead, and shy, sad eyes.

THE PRESIDENT’S HOUSE AT MANAGUA

Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a most dismal city, built on a plain of sun-dried earth, with houses of sun-dried earth, plazas and parks and streets of sun-dried earth, and a mantle of dust over all. Even the stores that have been painted in colors and hung with balconies have a depressed, dirty, and discouraged air. The streets are as full of ruts and furrows as a country road, the trees in the plaza are lifeless, and their leaves shed dust instead of dew, and the people seem to have taken on the tone of their surroundings, and very much more of the dust than seems absolutely necessary. We were there only two days, and felt when we left as though we had been camping out on a baseball diamond; and we were sure that had we remained any longer we should have turned into living statues of clay when the sun shone, and of mud when it rained.

There was no American minister or consul at Managua at the time of our visit, but the English consul took very good care of us, and acted as our interpreter when we called upon the president. Relations between the consul and President Zelaya were somewhat strained at that time, and though we knew this we told the consul to tell the president how much he was admired by the American people for having taken the stand he did against the English on the Mosquito Coast question, and that we hoped he would see that the British obtained no foothold near our canal. At which the English consul would hesitate and grin unhappily, and remark, in a hurried aside, “I’ll be hanged if I’ll translate that.” So we continued inventing other pleasant speeches derogatory to Britons and British influence in Nicaragua until Somerset and his consul protested vigorously, and the president saw what we were doing and began to enjoy the consul’s embarrassment and laughed, and the consul laughed with him, and they made up their quarrel—for the time being, at least.

Zelaya said, among other things, that if there were no other argument in favor of the Nicaragua Canal than that it would enable the United States to move her ships of war quickly from ocean to ocean, instead of being forced as she is now to make them take the long journey around Cape Horn, it would be of inestimable benefit. He also said that the only real objection that had been made in the United States to the canal came from those interested in the transcontinental railroads, who saw in its completion the destruction of their freight traffic.