He seemed to be a very able man, and more a man of the world than Bonilla, the President of Honduras, and much older in many ways. He was apparently somewhat of a philosopher, and believed, or said he did, in the survival of the fittest as applied to the occupation of his country. He welcomed the gringos, he said, and if they were better able to rule Nicaragua than her own people, he would accept that fact as inevitable and make way before them.
PRESIDENT ZELAYA OF NICARAGUA
We returned to Corinto after wallowing in the dust-bins of Managua as joyfully as though it were a home, and we were so anxious to reach the ocean again that we left Granada and Leon, which are, so we are told, much more attractive than the capital, out of our route.
Corinto was bright and green and sunny, and the waters of the big harbor before it danced and flashed by day and radiated with phosphorescent fire by night. It was distinctly a place where it would occur to one to write up the back pages of his diary, but it was interesting at least in showing us the life of the exiles in these hot, far-away seaports among a strange people.
There was but one hotel, which happened to be a very good one with a very bad proprietor, who, I trust, will come some day to an untimely death at the end of one of his own billiard-cues. The hotel was built round a patio filled with palms and ramparts of empty bottles from the bar, covered with dust, and bearing the name of every brewer and wine-grower in Europe. The sleeping-rooms were on the second floor, and looked on the patio on one side and upon a wide covered veranda which faced the harbor on the other. The five resident gringos in Corinto lived at the hotel, and sat all day on this veranda swinging in their hammocks and swapping six-months-old magazines and tattered novels. Reading-matter assumed an importance in Corinto it had never attained before, and we read all the serial stories, of which there was never more than the fourth or sixth instalment, and the scientific articles on the Fall of the Rupee in India, or the Most Recent Developments in Electricity, and delighted in the advertisements of seeds and bicycles and baking-powders.
The top of our veranda was swept by a row of plane-trees that grew in the sandy soil of the beach below us, and under the shade of which were gathered all the idle ones of the port. There were among them thieving ships’ stewards who had been marooned from passing vessels, ne’er-do-wells from the interior who were “combing the beach” and looking for work, but not so diligently that they had seen the coffee plantations on their tramp down to the coast, and who begged for money to take them back to “God’s country,” or to the fever hospital at Panama. With them were natives, sailors from the rolling tug-boat they called a ship of war, and barefooted soldiers from the cartel, and longshoremen with over-developed chests and muscles, who toil mightily on steamer days and sleep and eat for the ten days between as a reward.
All of these idlers gathered in the shade around the women who sold sweet drinks and sticks of pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public characters of the place and the centre of all the gossip of the town, and presided over their tables with great dignity in freshly ironed frocks and brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and very clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders, and their hair always shone with cocoanut oil, and was wonderfully braided and set off with flowers stuck coquettishly over one ear. The men used to sit around them in groups on the bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the only import. And sometimes a small boy would buy a stick of candy or command the mixture of a drink, and the woman would fuss over her carved gourds, and rinse and rub them and mix queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that she spun between the palms of her hands. We would all watch the operation with great interest, the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon the balcony, and regard the small boy while he drank the concoction with envy.
The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and gaping knot-holes through which the legs of our chairs would sink suddenly, and which we could use on those occasions when we wanted to drop penknives and pencils and water on the heads of those passing below. Our companions in idleness were the German agents of the trading-houses and young Englishmen down from the mines to shake off a touch of fever, and two Americans who were taking a phonograph through Central America. Their names were Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will always remember them as the only Americans we met who were taking money out of Central America and not bringing it there to lose it.
Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two up the beach in the hot sun for the sake of a quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was delightful in itself, and which was rendered especially interesting by our having to share the surf with large man-eating sharks. When they came, which they were sure to do ten minutes after we had arrived, we generally gave them our share.