Steam navigation should also be established beyond the rapids on the rivers forming the upper basin. This could be done at first by means of small steam-launches such as are used in the affluents of the Amazon River, but the service should be carried out faithfully and periodically, even though at first freight and passengers were lacking. People in Spanish America are generally very sceptical as to these enterprises, but once a feeling of confidence was created, explorers would flock both from Colombia and from Venezuela, as they would know that they would have an outlet for whatever products they might gather.
The Indians on the Vichada, and even those on the Meta, would supply abundant labour, and the exports of natural products would soon furnish all the freight that might be desired to make the whole arrangement of steamers above and below the rapids, and the railway along the same, a paying concern.
A line of steamers should also follow the course of the Meta River as far as La Cruz, a port situated about ninety miles from Bogotá, thus tapping the import and export trade of the most thickly-populated region of Colombia, the inhabitants of which in the three provinces of Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, are over 1,500,000 in number.
Supposing four steamers to be needed for navigation on the lower river and on the Meta, to be bought at Ciudad Bolivar at a cost of £10,000 each, £40,000 would be required under this head. Taking the length of the railway at 60 kilometres, including the bridges, at a cost of £2,000 per kilometre, £120,000 would be required for the railway; and supposing that ten small steam-launches of twenty to thirty tons burden were started for the rivers on the upper basin, £20,000 would be required—in all, £180,000 for the whole undertaking.
The preceding figures are not imaginative, and might, perhaps, be reduced in actual practice. If it has been possible to raise the capital required for the construction of a railway of upwards of 200 kilometres in length along the shores of the Congo, where climate, distance, and natives combine to establish far more serious obstacles than exist on the Orinoco, should it not be possible to find the capital for the establishment of modern means of transportation in a region which offers far brighter and surer prospects than the Congo? Let it be remembered that from Colombia and from Venezuela civilized white, coloured and Indian labour could be found in abundance, and that Europeans engaged in the undertaking, and provided with steamers, could in two days, if on the Meta, reach the high and healthy plateaus of Bogotá and find themselves in a civilized community where they would lack none of the luxuries or comforts of their own land; and that in the Lower Orinoco they would have Ciudad Bolivar, to which the same remarks, barring the advantage of climate, may be applied. The two Governments of Colombia and Venezuela, equally interested in the development of the Orinoco basin, might unite their efforts and guarantee in a form satisfactory to European capitalists the paltry yearly amount required to pay the service of interest and sinking fund on the £180,000. Taking the interest at 6, with a sinking fund of 1 per cent., £12,600 yearly would be required—that is to say, £6,300 for each Government. I know that at the present moment such a task would be well-nigh impossible, but I also know that if a sincere effort were made, notwithstanding the universal feeling of distrust, it would be possible to create securities specially applicable to this purpose, which would satisfy the most exacting capitalist.
In the midst of the daily turmoil and agitation and sanguinary struggle which constitutes the life of those democracies, these problems, urgent and vital as they are, pass unheeded; and the more the pity, for in their solution lies the basis of a permanent peace. Prosperity begets abhorrence of internal revolutions. The development of Mexico is a case in point, from which Colombia and Venezuela might take heed. Woe to them if they do not! The world begins to sicken at the very mention of the constant strife which converts into a positive hell those regions where Nature has shown herself prodigal beyond measure in all her gifts. Not only the valley of the Orinoco, with its boundless prairies, its dense forests, and its innumerable affluents, but the uplands of the Andine regions and the plains extending in Venezuela towards the North Atlantic or Caribbean Sea, and in Colombia to the Pacific Ocean, are coveted by nations where humanity is overcrowded by races which would fain establish colonies in those regions. The development of humanity cannot be stayed; the human wave, even as the stream of water contained by a dyke, will sooner or later break through the walls that imprison it and flood the surrounding country. It were well for men animated by real patriotism in Colombia and in Venezuela to ponder over these possibilities, so that the two nations might themselves open the flood-gates for immigration without delay, so that the new-comers would prove a fresh source of strength and power, helping to build up on the basis of the now existing nations free and mighty commonwealths, rather than as conquerors, who (whether they come from the North as wolves in sheep’s clothing under cover of the Monroe doctrine, or from across the ocean, driven by necessity stronger than all political conventionality) would come as masters.
Now is our accepted time. The moments are counted during which the danger may be averted and the inevitable turned to account; but, alas! feuds and errors deep-rooted in medieval soil, luxuriant in this our twentieth century, darken the minds of men, influence their judgment, turn away their activity from the real aims that would lead their nations to greatness, and force them into barbarous struggles which the world regards with amazement and brands as crimes against mankind.
CHAPTER XX
After a week in Ciudad Bolivar, we bethought ourselves of continuing the journey to the sea. Civilization had reclaimed us for her own, and rigged in European attire, such as befits the tropics, with all the social conventionalities once again paramount in our mind, we set forth on that, the last stage of the journey. We had been, not a nine days’ but a nine hours’ wonder in the historical town which rears its houses and churches alongside the narrows of the majestic stream. Early in the afternoon of a dazzling tropical day, cloudless, blue and hazy from the very brilliancy of the air, we stepped into the large steamboat that was to carry us to the neighbouring British island of Trinidad, once also a Spanish possession. The usual events accompanying the departure of all steamers from the shore repeated themselves: clanging of chains, shouting of orders, groans of the huge structure, shrill whistles, and that trepidation, the dawn as it were of motion, something like a hesitation of things inert apparently unwilling to be set in motion, which is the life of matter inanimate; then the steady throbbing of the machinery, the stroke of the paddles, splash, splash, until regularity and monotony are attained, and the ship, wheeled into midstream after describing a broad arc, set the prow eastward with the current to the ocean.
We looked at the town as it dwindled indistinct, seeming to sink into the vast azure of the horizon, swallowed in the scintillating folds of the blue distance. We sat on the deck as if in a trance. Shortly after starting, wild Nature reasserted her sway, and the small oasis built by the hand of man in the heart of the untamed region, seemed to us who knew how unmeasurable were those forests and those plains, like a tiny nest perched on the branches of a lofty and over-spreading ceiba. A feeling of superiority over our fellow-passengers unconsciously filled our breasts. For were we not boon companions, fellow-travellers, tried and trusted comrades of those rushing waters? Had we not shared their pilgrimage for days and days, in calm and in storm, in sunshine and in darkness? Had we not slept on their bosom or travelled upon it for countless hours, till the secret of their mystery and the joy of their wandering had penetrated into our very soul? What knew they, the other travellers of a few hours, of the intimate life of those waters which we had watched, gathering their strength from all the points of the compass, swelling the current of the central stream, mingling their life with it, now as rivulets, now as rivers, now placid in the embrace, now plunging, foaming, as if loath to loose their identity? Yea, verily, we were comrades, fellow-pilgrims, with the splendid travelling sea, there on its final march to the boundless deep.