Hamlet found something “rotten in the state of Denmark,” but it was sweet compared with what I discovered in Central America—the land of eruption and corruption, of dirt, disease, destitution, darkness, dilapidation, despots, delay, debt, deviltry and degeneracy, where a conservative estimate makes 90 per cent of the women immoral, 95 per cent of the men thieves, and 100 per cent of the population liars.
While strolling about the sultry seaport of Amapala, Spanish Honduras, and thinking of Morazan, the great Honduran liberator, two deceitful dames sought to enslave me. I was a stranger and they tried to take me in—their home nearby. Fortunately a policeman came up and warned me in broken English that these girls were “always—very—bad—to—everybody.” Each one took my arm and I thought it was time to take to my legs and get away. Anticipating my flight, one of them sprang upon me, wrapped her nether limbs about my waist and her arms around my neck. Thus in broad daylight in the heart of the town and in full view of the passerby I was attacked and assaulted. What a shipwreck of character might have happened had I landed at night! I hurried back to the ship and sought the seclusion my cabin afforded. The captain congratulated me on my narrow escape and informed me that on nearly every trip to this port native women of the town attempt to smuggle themselves at night on board to exchange their morals for the sailors’ money.
Panama
The last time I visited the Panama Canal it was closed, but the town was wide open. Former streets called straight were crooked and some rescued territory had relapsed. Just off the main street the scarlet woman and the red light flourished and flaunted. Posing as bar-girls these women came out boldly with the bar-sinister of their profession, came with forbidden fruit from the “Cocoa Grove,” and exposed it for sale on West Sixteenth street, contaminating the young. The groves may have been God’s first temples, but not this Panama “Cocoa” one. Here Satan conducts services every day of the year and passion-fruit is offered all who walk its thoroughfares. One finds all colors, classes and conditions of carnality. The U. S. soldiers are the police because the Panamanian police hate our boys sober or drunk, and when our boys had a fight the Panamanians beat them up. There are dens of high and low degree, full of filth, profanity, drunkenness, disease and debauchery, I know, for I saw, and I saw because I was there for local color and it was black enough.
Panama is famous for its canal, the wedlock of the oceans, but the city Panama is infamous, knows little of the family word “wedlock” and its red light “Cocoa Light” would make the fabled Daphne Grove wither up with envy. From the first to the fifteenth of each month the U. S. soldiers receive their pay and spend a large amount of it here in wine, women and song. In this pandemonium of profligacy, one may see, at any hour of the day or night, a brave soldier boy, intoxicated with love or liquor, sitting in a doorway with a half-dressed, bare-legged girl in his lap. These girls are o. k.’d by an M. D. twice a week and pronounced all right. Our soldiers cannot leave camp and visit them without a card certificate of good character. After they have made a night of it the boys repair to the “House of Lords” in the district and receive a bath and inoculation of anti-venereal dope. If they fail to take this treatment and are contaminated, they suffer more ways than one, being compelled to pay a fine. This is all too bad. Pleasures pure and simple should be given them at camp or in barracks. As it is, many of them are “shot to hell” before they ever go to war. If they have any extra money, strength or inclination, they may hit the opium-pipe, buy a get-rich-quick lottery ticket, or on Sunday attend a bullfight. A modern St. Anthony would find it difficult to withstand the temptations of this zone. More than one Pan-American religious conference is needed to make the moral atmosphere as pure as the city streets are clean. It is a bigger job to kill the devil than to exterminate the yellow-fever mosquito.
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Friendship and Love
What causes the majority of women to be so little touched by friendship is that it is insipid when they have once tasted of love.
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