Down by that tropic little river stands the stump of Columbus's tree, the actual tree to which the discoverer moored his ship when he came in on that morning of the fifth of December, 1492, and was met by the amazed tribesmen. Nine months ago it was a still living tree, and it is part of the grievance of the Dominicans that the marines tried to preserve it for all time by cutting it open and filling its hollow center with cement. That killed it. But it is a mighty burly stump, some fifteen feet high and of great girth. It sprawls rather, it has a burly moving shoulder and a bearded aspect that suggests a sort of Rip Van Winkle Christopher Columbus, enchanted for four hundred and thirty years and now stepping ashore.
What a change for the old man to see! Those chiefs, those red men and women who gave jewels for beads, all killed to the last child two hundred years ago. Africans are in their place, smooth and black, everywhere, as if they had come and conquered it. But they came as slaves and then won their freedom from Spaniards and from Frenchmen. Some speak Spanish, some speak bits of French. Further on, in Haiti all speak French. Where are the bold Spaniards with their flashing eyes and flashing blades, their wills, their lusts? Gone like the great trees of the river side. Gone like the Indians. Gone like the French who came after them. Mixed and married with the Negroes, or else gone soft and gentle as Orientals.
"These strapping fellows, these giants in sand-colored clothes?" Columbus might ask. "American soldiers," you would reply, and then conduct the poor old wight to the Carnegie Library and the shelves of the Encyclopedia Americana. It needs some explaining. Discovering America was child's play compared with explaining to Columbus the rise of the American Republic of the North.
Anyhow, here I am at the Hotel Inglaterra, and down below me is a bar where there is "beer on ice" and the "best old rum," for Santo Domingo has not been made dry, and there sit marines all in white and argue it over their pots. The question is: "Do not the Haitians eat their children at the age of five—not all of them, of course, but selected kids at festivals? Do not the outlaws and brigands of Santo Domingo need to be stamped out? Or again, Who has prior rights in the Panama Canal? Do not British warships come through without paying dues while American warships pay? Are not all vessels towed by electric mules through the canal?" They bet millions of dollars, they bet their adjectival shirts, because they know.
Outside is the city market place, where are sold live crabs and tortoises on strings and mangoes and gourds and coconuts and sugar-candy babies on wire. And black girls with coral ornaments and vari-colored turbans or kerchiefs do the selling—while purchasers on asses, on backs of calves, or walking with huge bundles on their heads, go past. The black people laugh and shout. It doesn't seem to mean much to them that they have no President and that their republic is in abeyance. They do not bet on what is going to happen, and they do not know. When you buy an orange for a cent they say to you Grand merci and are ever so pleased. In the square is a fine statue of Cristobal Colon, who points west by southwest to Latin America, bidding all men still think of a new world. But I am forgetting. Did I not leave him in the Library with the encyclopedia? Is it not there, on the shelf, that he will find his true place, in a history that is past?
2
Though at first sight the population of the capital of the Dominican Republic may strike the traveler as being wholly black, there are nevertheless a number of persons of fairer complexion—the people of the first families, the aristokratia. One or two of these are German. These keep within their houses more than do the Negroes who trade and traffic and gossip in market place and main street.
The island has a bad history. Columbus loved it as the first large materialization of his dream of a beyond—a transatlantic land. But the Spaniards raised Cain there, and the Negroes and French after them. The Indians were killed off early, and the Spaniards were soon killing one another. Bandits and pirates have lived there more securely than any one else.
It was in 1697 that the French came in. Spain ceded half the island to her. The French bred in rapidly with the colored people. The country became known as Haiti, and French was the spoken tongue. French Negro slaves in considerable numbers were imported. A hundred years later the rest of the island was ceded to France. That was in the Napoleonic era. England was at war with Spain, and in 1809 British warships stood off the little tropic harbor and gave encouragement to an uprising of Spanish colonists who proved successful in wresting the city from the French. By the Treaty of Paris in 1814 French rule was confined to the eastern part of the island—Haiti.
There came then speedily the great liberation movement of Latin America (1821-1825). Santo Domingo was able to succeed where Porto Rico failed. But hardly had the new republic proclaimed its independence when the Negroes of Haiti descended upon it and broke it up. Haiti by that time had also won independence. For nearly a quarter of a century the Haitians remained in control of the whole island. In 1844 a Dominican insurrection was successful, but there was no peace with Haiti, who seems to have been always the stronger power. Santo Domingo was forced to try to return to the bosom of Spain. In 1861 the president of the republic became governor, and the republic joined Spain. Two years later war against Spain was started and in 1865 the republic was restored. In 1868 the republic tried to join the United States, but America was not then willing. Insurrectionary movements followed one another with rapidity till the Negro general Ulysses Heureux obtained control of the country. He, it is said, pursued the policy later adopted by Lenin in Russia of having all his enemies killed, but he himself did not escape and was assassinated at last. It is said he ran the republic very deeply into debt. One wonders why financiers should have been willing to lend money to such a State. Some five millions sterling were owing, later it became six and a half millions. There was talk of foreign intervention. Some European power might have felt entitled to seize the country.