Cutting the cane, bringing it in, stripping it and cutting off the tops, supplying the mill, boiling the sugar, and making the chancaca, employ about twenty men and four mules. With this force one hundred dollars' worth of chancaca may be made in a day; but Mr. Dyer says that he is not now making more than twenty or thirty dollars, and not paying his expenses. He attributes this to the fact that his fields are wearing out and require replanting. He thinks that cane should be replanted every ten or fifteen years. It is fit for cutting in twelve months after planting. This is a very extensive establishment; and Mr. Dyer, besides his cane-fields, which are on the river side, cultivates a farm for raising wheat, maize, peas, beans, and potatoes, on the hills above.
We left Quicacan at noon, in company with Mr. Dyer and my French friend; stopped at another hacienda, about a mile and a half from this, belonging to a gentleman named Ingunza, and at another a little lower down, called Andabamba, belonging to Señor San Miguel, to whom I brought letters from Lima. All these, with another on the same road, belonged to a Colonel Lucar, of Huanuco, who gave them to these gentlemen, his sons-in-law. Quicacan was the family mansion, and had been longest under cultivation. At half-past four we arrived at Huanuco, and, presenting a letter to Colonel Lucar, from his son-in-law Dyer, we were kindly received, and lodgings appointed us in his spacious and commodious house.
July 17.—Huanuco is one of the most ancient cities in Peru. It is prettily situated on the left bank of the Huanuco or Huallaga river, which is here about forty yards wide, and at this time (the dry season) about two feet deep in the channel. It, however, every two or three hundred yards, runs over rocks or a gravelly bed, which makes it entirely innavigable, even for canoes, though when the river is up I believe articles are transported on it from hacienda to hacienda in small scows. A smaller stream, called the Higueros, empties into it just above the city.
The houses are built of adobe, with tile roofs, and almost all have large gardens attached to them—so that the city covers a good deal of ground without having many houses. The gardens are filled with vegetables and fruit-trees, and make delightful places of recreation during the warmer parts of the day.
The population numbers from four to five thousand. They seem to be a simple and primitive people; and, like all who have little to do, are much attached to religious ceremonies—there being no less than fifteen churches in the city, some of them quite large and handsome. The people are civil and respectful, and, save a curious stare now and then at my spectacles and red beard, are by no means offensive in their curiosity, as Smyth represents them to have been some seventeen years ago.
The trade of the place is with Cerro Pasco on the one hand, and the villages of the Huallaga on the other. It sends chancaca, tobacco, fruit, and vegetables to the Cerro, and receives foreign goods (mostly English) in return. A shop-keeper gave me the price of some of the articles in his store: Broad striped cassimere, such as gentlemen's trousers are made of, five and a half dollars the yard; very common silk handkerchiefs, one dollar; common silk hat, five dollars; blue cloth drillings, twenty-five cents the yard; baize, eighty-seven and a half cents; narrow ribbon, one dollar and twenty-five cents the piece; cotton handkerchiefs, two dollars and twenty-five cents the dozen; tolerable Scotch carpeting, one dollar and a half the vara, of thirty-three English inches; bayeta castilla, (a kind of serge or woollen cloth, with a long shag upon it, and of rich colors,) one dollar and seventy-five cents the vara. In the market, beef and mutton from the province of Huamalies sell at six and a quarter cents the pound; Indian corn, twenty-five cents the olla, of twenty-five pounds; potatoes, seventy-five cents for the costal, of fifty pounds; salt, from the coast at Huacho, six and a quarter cents the pound; sugar, generally from the coast, twenty-five cents the pound, (this in an eminently sugar country;) coffee, twelve and a half cents. Very little meat is raised. I saw a small quantity of pork, with plenty of tallow candles; and rotten potatoes for the consumption of the Indians. Bread is good, but is generally made, in the best houses, of American flour from Lima. Vegetables and fruit are abundant and cheap. This is, par excellence, the country of the celebrated chirimoya. I have seen this fruit in Huanuco quite twice as large as it is generally seen in Lima, and of most delicious flavor. They have a custom here to cover the finest specimens with gold leaf, and place them as a decoration on the altar of some patron Saint on his festival. The church afterwards sells them; and I have seen several on Colonel Lucar's table.
This gentleman is probably the richest and most influential man in Huanuco. He seems to have been the father of husbandry in these parts, and is the very type of the old landed proprietor of Virginia, who has lived always upon his estates, and attended personally to their cultivation. Seated at the head of his table, with his hat on to keep the draught from his head—and which he would insist upon removing unless I would wear mine—his chair surrounded by two or three little negro children, whom he fed with bits from his plate; and attending with patience and kindness to the clamorous wants of a pair of splendid peacocks, a couple of small parrots of brilliant and variegated plumage, and a beautiful and delicate monkey—I thought I had rarely seen a more perfect pattern of the patriarch. His kind and affectionate manner to his domestics, (all slaves,) and to his little grandchildren, a pair of sprightly boys, who came in in the evening from the college, was also very pleasing. There are thirty servants attached to the house, large and small; and the family is reduced to the Colonel and his lady, (at present absent,) and the boys.
The climate of Huanuco is very equable and very salubrious. There are no cases of affection of the chest which commence here; on the contrary, people with diseases caused by the inclemency of the weather about Cerro Pasco come to Huanuco to be cured. Dysentery and tabardillo are the commonest diseases; and I see many people (particularly women) with goitre. I saw a woman who had one that seemed to arise under each ear and encircle the throat like an inflated life-preserver. The affection is said to be owing to the impurity of the water, which is not fit to drink unless filtered. The lower class of people do not attend to this, and thus the disease is more general with them than with the higher classes. It is disagreeable to walk out in the middle of the day, on account of a strong northerly wind, which sets in at this season about noon, and lasts till dark, raising clouds of dust. The mornings and evenings are very pleasant, though the sun is hot for an hour or two before the breeze sets in. The height of Huanuco above the level of the sea is, by boiling point, five thousand nine hundred and forty-six feet.
There is a college with about twenty-two "internal," and eighty day-scholars. Its income, derived from lands formerly belonging to convents, is seven thousand and five hundred dollars yearly. It has a fine set of chemical and other philosophical apparatus, with one thousand specimens of European minerals. These things were purchased in Europe, at a cost of five thousand dollars; and the country owes them to the zeal for learning and exertions of Don Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, formerly prefect of the department, director general of the mines, and now consul general to the Netherlands, where he is said to be preparing a voluminous work on the antiquities of Peru. As I shall probably not have occasion to refer to him again, I must in this place express my sense of gratitude for the information I have received from his most valuable publication, "The Memorial of Natural Sciences, and of National and Foreign Industry," edited by himself and Don Nicolas Pierola, the modest and learned director of the museum at Lima. The Department of Junin owes much to its former prefect. He has founded schools, improved roads, built cemeteries, and, in short, whatever good thing I noticed on my route might generally be traced back to Rivero.
July 18.—I called on the sub-prefect of the province, and delivered an official letter from the prefect of the department, whom I had visited at Cerro Pasco. This gentleman's name is Maldonado. He received me courteously, and promised me any assistance I might stand in need of. He seemed to be at bitter feud with all my friends; and they represented him as a high-handed personage. We met at Quicacan a colonel who was going to Lima, escorted by a number of his friends, to complain to the government of his having been illegally imprisoned by the sub-prefect. I believe the cause was an alleged libel, or libellous publication against the sub-prefect; and if it was of the nature of some of the publications daily seen in the Lima papers, he deserved imprisonment, or worse punishment, for they are generally the foulest and most scurrilous things, which no decent paper in the United States would publish, and which would certainly bring upon the writer a fine or the horse-whip.