Pioneers in tropical America

Preface

THE publishers of this book asked me to write a series of works which should deal with "real adventures ", in parts of the world either wild and uncontrolled by any civilized government, or at any rate regions full of dangers, of wonderful discoveries; in which the daring and heroism of white men (and sometimes of white women) stood out clearly against backgrounds of unfamilar landscapes, peopled with strange nations, savage tribes, dangerous beasts, or wonderful birds. These books would again and again illustrate the first coming of the white race into regions inhabited by people of a different type, with brown, black, or yellow skins; how the European was received, and how he treated these races of the soil which gradually came under his rule owing to his superior knowledge, weapons, wealth, or powers of persuasion. The books were to tell the plain truth, even if here and there they showed the white man to have behaved badly, or if they revealed the fact that the American Indian, the Negro, the Malay, the black Australian was sometimes cruel and treacherous.

A request thus framed was almost equivalent

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Preface to asking me to write stories of those pioneers who founded the British Empire; in any case, the first volumes of this series do relate the adventures of those who created the greater part of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, by their perilous explorations of unknown lands and waters. In many instances the travellers were all unconscious of their destinies, of the results which would arise from their actions. In some cases they would have bitterly railed at Fate had they known that the result of their splendid efforts was to be the enlargement of an empire under the British flag. Perhaps if they could know by now that we are striving under that flag to be just and generous to all types of men, and not to use our empire solely for the benefit of English-speaking men and women, the French who founded the Canadian nation, the Germans and Dutch who helped to create British Africa, Malaysia, and Australia, the Spaniards who preceded us in the West Indies, and the Portuguese in West, Central, and East Africa, in Newfoundland and Ceylon, might — if they have any consciousness or care for things in this world — be not so sorry after all that we are reaping where they sowed.

It is (as you will see) impossible to tell the tale of these early days in the British Dominions beyond the Seas, without describing here and there the adventures of men of enterprise and daring who were not of our own nationality. The majority, nevertheless, were of British stock; that is to say, they were English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, perhaps here and there a Channel Islander and a Manxman;

Preface r Nova Scotians, Canadians, and New Englanders. The bulk of them were good fellows, a few were saints, a few were ruffians with redeeming features. Sometimes they were common men who blundered into great discoveries which will for ever preserve their names from perishing; occasionally they were men of Fate, predestined, one might say, to change the history of the world by their revelations of new peoples, new lands, new rivers, new lakes, snow mountains, and gold mines. Here and there is a martyr like Marquette, or Livingstone, or Gordon, dying for the cause of a race not his own. And others again are mere boys, whose adventures come to them because they are adventurous, and whose feats of arms, escapes, perils, and successes are quite as wonderful as those attributed to the juvenile heroes of Marryat, Stevenson, and the author of The Swiss Family Robinson.

I have tried, in describing these adventures, to give my readers some idea of the scenery, animals, and vegetation of the new lands through which these pioneers passed on their great and small purposes; as well as of the people, native to the soil, with whom they came in contact. And in treating of these subjects I have thought it best to give the scientific names of the plant or animal which was of importance in my story, so that any of my readers who were really interested in natural history could at once ascertain for themselves the exact type alluded to, and, if they wished, look it up in a museum, a garden, or a natural history book.

I hope this attempt to be accurate will not vi Preface

frighten away young readers, who will find in between these zoological or botanical notes a variety of exciting incidents, and many a strange and fascinating glimpse of savage life; plenty of hairbreadth escapes, deeds of heroism or of bloodshed, and triumphs of courage and dogged perseverance. There will be no maudlin sentimentality about my stories; at the same time they will contain nothing that a healthy-minded boy or girl may not read unharmed. There are cannibals in Robinson Crusoe, and you will meet them — real ones — in these books; scalps are taken and the prisoners are tortured by Fenimore Cooper's Red Indians: well, I will show you the very originals of Fenimore's noble savages, as described by the first Europeans who met them. You shall see what the pirates of the Spanish Main and the seas of Borneo were really like; witness slave-raids in Central Africa, trials for witchcraft, deaths from thirst, and terrible episodes of almost complete starvation. Yet you shall also behold rare acts of kindness from savages towards white men and white men towards savages, attend feastings and frolics as well as deaths and scenes of torture. Your feelings shall not be unnecessarily harrowed, you will learn much of geography and natural history by the way; and, if you can have patience with the author and his desire to instruct you occasionally, you will, by reading this series of books on the great pioneers of British West Africa, Canada, Malaysia, West Indies, South Africa, and Australasia, get a clear idea of how the British Colonial Empire came to be founded.

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You will find that I have often tried to tell the story in the words of the pioneers, but in these quotations I have adopted the modern spelling, not only in my transcript of the English original or translation, but also in the place and tribal names, so as not to puzzle or delay the reader. Otherwise, if you were to look out some of the geographical names of the old writers, you might not be able to recognize them on the modern atlas. The pronunciation of this modern geographical spelling is very simple and clear: the vowels are pronounced a = ah, e = eh, i = ee, 0 = 0, 6 = oh, o = aw, o = u in ' hurt ', and u = oo, as in German, Italian, or most other European languages; and the consonants as in English.

H. H. JOHNSTON.

Contents

CHAP.

I. TROPICAL AMERICA AND THE SPANISH DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

II. SPANISH PIONEERS IN TROPICAL AMERICA ...

CHAPTER I Tropical America and the Spanish Discovery of America

THE desire to reach the mysterious islands and peninsulas of Southern Asia — " The Indies", the region of pepper, cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon, incense, sandalwood, and dyewoods — by a western route, instead of the voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese already claimed as their monopoly ; or a journey through the Mediterranean and the Levant, hampered by the opposition of the Turks, Egyptians, and Venetians; prompted the Genoese Colombo (whom we call COLUMBUS and the Spaniards, Colon) to pilot two Spanish ships across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, and thence to Hispaniola and Cuba.

This was in the year 1492, seven years after the Portuguese had discovered the Cape of Good Hope. Columbus thought he had arrived on the outskirts of Asia, and possibly died in that belief fourteen years afterwards. The appearance and the condition of life of the gentle-natured Arawak Amerindians, the fierce valour of the cannibal Caribs, the superior culture of the clothed peoples of the i6 Pioneers \\irv Tropical America

Central and South American mainland — with their stone cities and temples, their picture writing, feather-trimmed garments, worship of many deities, human sacrifices, and immoral customs, their plantations of maize and cacao — all recalled to the minds of the better-educated Spanish adventurers, still more to the well-read Columbus, the descriptions of the Malay peoples of Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula, the Burmese and Annamese, which had already reached Europe through the travels overland to the Far East of adventurous Italians in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

It was probably not until about the year 1515 (by which time the Pacific or Southern Ocean had been sighted, or actually reached, from the Isthmus of Panama) that German and Italian geographers realized the separate existence of the Americas. In 1519 the search for a western route to the real Indies was resumed by the Spanish Government, who sent out the Portuguese pilot, Magellan (Magalhaes) to reach the " Spice Islands" of the Portuguese and Arabs after rounding the continent of South America.

Long afterwards, however, Tropical America was known to Spain as " Las Indias"-— The Indies — and it was probably only the French and British who in the seventeenth century styled the lands round the Caribbean Sea the "West Indies". Gradually this name became restricted to the Greater and Lesser Antilles,1 the many islands, large and small, of the Caribbean Sea and the

1 Antilles was a Spanish name probably first used at the end of the fifteenth century, and derived from " Antilia", the name given in medieval geography to half-mythical islands (confused with the Azores) lying west of Europe in the Atlantic. The Azores or Afores were discovered by the Genoese and Portuguese in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and named after the kites (Astures, A9ores) which frequented them ; so that Antilia had to be looked for farther to the west.

Gulf of Mexico; while the term " Spanish Main" (La Tierra Firma) was applied to the regions of continental Central and South America. The Spaniards were a very long time before they adopted the word " America" —perhaps officially not till the end of the eighteenth century. " Las Indias" covered all the region they knew or cared about in the New World. The easternmost part of South America was known by the Portuguese name of Brazil, the region to the north of it as Guiana or Guayana (the French "Cayenne"); south of Brazil were Rio de la Plata and Patagonia; then, to the north-west, came the Viceroyalty of Peru (Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador), and north of that the provinces of Cundinamarca, New Granada and Venezuela, and the Presidency of Panama; while all Central America and Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas were grouped under the title of "New Spain". Beyond New Spain the Spaniards were cognizant — after 1540 — of "California",1 which term covered all western North America, and of "Florida", the southern part of eastern North America.

The Spaniards and Portuguese found these lands and islands of Tropical America peopled by brown or yellowskinned native races; with broad, prominent cheekbones, narrow and sometimes aquiline noses, large brown eyes, smooth-skinned bodies and beardless faces, and with head hair that was long and lank and usually a deep black in colour. Further details as to their physical features, and the diverse stages of culture in which they were living when first discovered by Europeans, are given in the latter part of this chapter.

The first Amerindians encountered by the Spaniards

1 California, like Antilia, was the name of a mythical land of Romance, which figured in stories, masques, and plays of the early sixteenth century.

in their discovery of Tropical America in the memorable autumn of 1492 were the Lucayans of the Bahama Islands. These inoffensive people have been completely extinct for the last hundred and fifty years, though there are signs of their having lingered down to the end of the eighteenth century in the large and still somewhat unexplored island of Andros. The Lucayans were seemingly a branch of the Arawak group. Columbus found them an absolutely naked people, though they possessed cotton, yarn, and gold ornaments. Apparently they also used the brightlycoloured plumage of parrots for purposes of decoration. Their arms were wooden assagays. When the great Pioneer in American discovery reached Cuba on the 27th October, 1492, from his landfall at the Bahamas, he realized that the Arawaks of that large island were more civilized than the Lucayans. They were found to be inhaling the smoke from rolled cigars made of tobacco leaves.

Columbus passed on from Cuba to Hispaniola — the island which was afterwards the haunt of the Buccaneers, and now divided into the Spanish-speaking and Frenchspeaking republics of Santo Domingo and Haiti. Here the natives were also — like those of Porto Rico farther east and Jamaica farther south — mainly of the Arawak group (originally from the Lower Orinoko and Northern Guiana).1 Though going almost naked in the daytime, like the Lucayans, they nevertheless possessed clothing made of woven cotton, perhaps also of bark cloth. They cultivated the ground, and their principal food crop was manioc.2 Their weapons consisted of bows and arrows, stone hatchets, axes, and clubs.

1 There are traces, however, of other and older races in Cuba, Haiti, and Porto Rico, probably akin to the Maya stock of Yucatan and Honduras.

8 Manioc — tapioca — is the root of two species of Euphorbias, Manihot utilissima,

The people of Cuba, Porto Rico, and Jamaica were of much the same type, though the Borinkens of Porto Rico (at one time a thickly-inhabited island) were, like the Haitians, mixed with Carib blood. Those Borinkens (Borinquenos) had developed a considerable degree of art in the carving of stone, and had attained a much higher degree of civilization than the other Antilleans.

So much for the Greater Antilles, whose populations were almost entirely of the Arawak group, with occasional colonizations and invasions of marauding Caribs. But the Lesser Antilles, which stretch in a long chain from the Virgin Islands off Porto Rico to within sight of Venezuela and Trinidad, were inhabited mainly by Caribs, though there were traces here and there of former Arawak populations. These Caribs were as fierce and warlike as the Arawaks were gentle and non-resisting. They were remarkable, above all, to these early European pioneers, for their love of eating human flesh, in fact, the word " cannibal" is supposed to be a corruption of "caribal", and gradually took the place in European literature of renderings of the Greek word Anthropophagoi — " maneaters". The Caribs, like the Arawaks, came from north-eastern South America, the regions between the delta of the Orinoko and the delta of the Amazon; in fact, they belong to one of the South American groups of Amerindians, rather than to the North or Central American types. They were — and are — as already mentioned, a handsome, well -grown people, with beautifully proportioned bodies, very like those of Europeans, while their

and M. aipi, natives of South America. The original wild plant, the "bitter manioc", has tuberous roots which contain in their outer rind a poisonous element (hydrocyanic acid), which must be first got rid of by baking, or by soaking the root in running water. But in Haiti the natives grew the sweet manioc (M. aipi) in which no doubt by long cultivation the poisonous acid had been got rid of.

faces were much more of the Caucasian type than those of the Arawaks, the Peruvians, the Brazilian Indians, or even the Redskins of North America. They had large sparkling eyes and somewhat hooked noses. Little else than their reddish-yellow skin colour, their somewhat prominent, broad cheekbones, and the lack of beard and moustache in the men, distinguished them from Southern Europeans. They soon conceived, however, an intensely bitter hatred towards the Spaniard, and, in fact, prevented the Spaniards from permanently occupying and retaining the islands of the Lesser Antilles; consequently opening a way for the conquest and colonization of the New World by the French, English, and Dutch. Otherwise Tropical America might have been for a much longer time closed to the pioneers of those nations by Spanish garrisons in the long chain of islands between Trinidad and Florida. [Trinidad itself was not peopled by Caribs, but by a gentler race, probably allied mpre to the Arawaks, a tribe of Amerindians which only died out in the nineteenth century.]

Before we proceed to review the adventures of the more remarkable amongst the pioneers in these regions of the West Indies and the Spanish Main, portions of which have since come within the British Empire, we might pass in review the geographical conditions of the lands bordering the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Equatorial Atlantic (besides the extremity of South America), and glance at their botany, zoology, and the condition of their aboriginal population before the White man arrived on the scene at the close of the fifteenth century.

At different times in earlier — though not very remote

—periods of the earth's history there has been one very large island, as large as New Guinea, which has included the now scattered islands and islets of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles — Porto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba. Jamaica has sometimes been detached from this and connected independently by an isthmus with the coast of Honduras, while the Cuba-Bahamas region to the north has been united with Yucatan. But although the peninsula of Florida now extends southwards to within quite a short distance of Cuba or the Bahama Islands, a good deal of Florida has only recently been elevated above the sea and has had much less connection with the West India Islands than was the case with Central America. At one time, indeed — perhaps two million years ago — there was probably a belt of land or a chain of closely connected islands, including the Bermudas group (now reduced to a few coral rocks), which stretched right across the Atlantic to north-west Africa, the Canaries, the Azores, and Portugal. And again, about the same time, or earlier, another peninsula or archipelago of islands practically united north-east Brazil with the western projection of Africa (Sierra Leone and Liberia). Across these two bridges, which may in some periods have been partly united, there came to Central and to South America the ancestors of most of their existing types of beast, bird, freshwater fish, insect, spider, and land shell, besides a large proportion of their plants and trees. Of course the connection, which was alternately broken off and reconstituted, between Central America and California likewise served as a pathway for an introduction into Tropical America of beasts, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, and plants from eastern Asia, while other things found their way across the Pacific by archipelagos of Pacific islands now sunk beneath the level of the ocean.

Much of Central America and the islands of the Gulf of Mexico is very volcanic, and owing to earth movements there have been great oscillations of level in recent times. There are lofty snow-crowned mountains in that tremendous range of the Andes (which rises abruptly from the seashore along all western South America to altitudes of over 20,000 feet) which have been at no great distance of time under the sea, and are coated with many feet of sediment derived from the powder of sea shells. In like manner portions of the great West India Islands have been under the sea and then raised up into hills, ducked again, submerged for an age or two, and once more lifted to the winds of heaven. It is probable, in fact, that the paucity of mammalian life and the absence of many families of birds from the West Indies is due to the violent changes which have taken place in the shape, size, and level of these islands, while no doubt from time to time there has been an appalling destruction of living forms from volcanic outbursts, compared to which those of Mont Pele, devastating recently the Island of Martinique, were trifling. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as now, the earthquakes of Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, Central and South America were as disturbing and destructive to life and landscapes as they have been in more recent times. In nearly all the West India Islands, in Central America, and in northern and western South America, the surface, as compared to eastern North America, is very mountainous.

Most of the mountains are active or extinct volcanoes, but there are also the great peaks of the Andes, many high tablelands, mountains, and hills which are not volcanic in origin, but are due to wrinkles and elevations of the earth's crust, carved by the action of water, wind, frost, and heat into peaks, domes, tablelands, and the saw-like ranges to which the Spaniards gave the characteristic name of " Sierra". The loftiest altitude in the West India Islands is the mountain usually called Loma de la Tina, in Hispaniola, which has a height of over 10,000 feet. The greatest heights in Central America and northern South America are found in south-west Guatemala (nearly 14,000 feet); in Costa Rica (11,600 feet); Panama (11,700 feet); Colombia (Santa Marta, under 17,000 feet; Tolima, 18,500 feet, and several peaks and domes near Bogota over 18,000 feet in height); Ecuador (Chimborazo, 20,500 feet, and several other peaks over 20,000 feet in altitude); Venezuela (Picacho, 15,420 feet); and Guiana (Roraima, 8600 feet). A number of the loftier mountains of the mainland reach above the limit of perpetual snow, which in north Equatorial America is an average 15,000 feet above sea level. On the Andes, farther south in western South America, many peaks rise above 20,000 feet in altitude, the loftiest being Aconcagua in Chile (23,393 feet). In the ranges of the Andes, of course, from Ecuador southwards, there are glaciers (deposits of ice perpetually renewed by melting and freezing snow), and the climate of all this region facing the Pacific is much cooler than that of Brazil or eastern South America, partly also on account of the cold sea water which sweeps continually as a current from south to north, from the Antarctic seas to the Equator.

Owing to this and other causes there is also a great dearth of rain along the western side of South America, so that, besides being much cooler, the climate is also much drier; therefore altogether much healthier for the White man than the steaming forests of Brazil, of Panama, and Guiana. Much of the modern republic of Colombia is at a very lofty elevation, and there are plateaus with great cities on them at altitudes of between 6000 and 9000 feet, where the climate is as temperate as that of Europe. But it is not so well suited to Europeans as one might think from the moderated power of the sun, because the air is rather rarefied. A good deal of the north -coast region of Venezuela is also a high plateau, with a delightful climate. Not being so elevated as inner Colombia, it is far more suited to European occupation. Much of Mexico is superbly healthy, and quite fit to be a White man's country. The same is partly the case with Guatemala and San Salvador; but Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama are not lands that are suited in the main to the occupation of the White man. Yet the West India Islands (even as far south as Trinidad, which is within the equatorial belt) are healthy, as Nature made them. They have only been made unhealthy through the introduction of the Negro.

The Negro has brought with him in his blood the germs of several diseases which, when communicated to the White man or the Amerindian by the agency of bloodsucking flies, mosquitoes, or ticks, have had a deadly effect. Of such diseases were yellow fever and various types of malarial fever. The early pioneers do not seem to have suffered much from these maladies, though they fell ill with dysentery and other complaints. It was only after Negro slaves became well established in tropical America that the period of epidemics and the wholesale death of Europeans began. Although the power of the sun is very fierce over all Tropical America, yet, owing to the breaking up of this region into sea and land and broad lake-like river valleys, the heat is more frequently relieved by cooling breezes than is the case in the heart of Africa or in India. In short, except for an occasional hurricane, the climate of Tropical America is in the main an agreeable one, and Europeans do not suffer, have not suffered, so much from the effects of the climate as from the introduction into their blood of germ diseases, partly through the agency of insects and partly through the water they drank or the food they ate.

As there were almost no deserts, no rainless regions, within the area covered by the adventures of these pioneers (except along the coast of Chili and Peru), there was a splendid and abundant vegetation. Indeed, at the present day, to those who desire to see quickly and with little fatigue or personal risk the marvellous growths of the tropical world, a voyage to the West India Islands, to Trinidad above all, may be strongly recommended. Owing to the abundant rainfall, very little of the earth's surface here is without its covering of vegetation. Even the abrupt precipices of rock have growing in every hole and cranny tufts of exquisite ferns, of flowering fuchsias, balsams, orchids, cacti, and various members of the pineapple family.1 The branches and trunks of all the big trees contain vast families of poor relations — more pineapple-like plants, cacti, ferns, agaves, mistletoe, orchids, and lycopodiums. There is a great variety of palms. In Cuba (and introduced everywhere else) is to be seen the most beautiful member of this handsome family, the Royal palm (Oreodoxa regia), the smooth white trunk of which is like a slender, upright column of pale-grey stone. In the Greater and Lesser Antilles there are handsome, glaucous-green Fan palms of the genera Sabal, Thrinax, and Coccothrinax ; in Jamaica and the Windward Islands are the Acrocomia palms with heavy frondage and some with spiny stems,

1 These vary extraordinarily in appearance, from the Hohenbergias, with their immense, glaucous-green, leathery, frond-like leaves to the thread-like Tillandsias, which, in some examples — the celebrated Spanish Moss — are easily mistaken for a lichen. See p. 164.

besides one of the many " cabbage " palms (Oreodoxa oleracea, which in this case is a humbler and less beautiful relation of the splendid Royal palm), and slender, graceful Geonoma palms like coconuts in appearance. On the mainland of Central and northern South America the display of palms is one of the most notable features in the scenery and in the economic resources of the country. Putting on one side the ordinary coconut, which is possibly not a native of the American coasts but an introduction by Europeans from the Pacific islands, there is the gorgeous member of the Cocos genus, the "Coyol" of Central America and Colombia (Cocos butyracea), the "palma dolce " of much of Spanish-speaking Tropical America. The Coyol has enormous plume-like fronds 15 to 20 feet in length, and golden flower spikes 3 feet high. Its sap is intensely sweet and makes a delicious but intoxicating wine. Another magnificent and useful member of the Cocos genus is the "Corojo" of Cuba. Far-famed under divers names are the Mauritia or Moriche palms (Mauritia flexuosa is the most noteworthy) of South America, from which are obtained juicy, edible fruit (often made into beer), sweet sap that becomes a light wine, a sago-like pith from the stem (pounded, soaked, and baked into bread), fronds yielding useful fibre when macerated, and well suited for thatching, and, lastly, a hard core to the trunk, which splits into planks of useful timber. Other "wine" palms remarkable for their sweet and wholesome sap are species of the genus Euterpe — often called "assai " palms by Spanish writers. The Elais melanococca, a relation of the Oil palm of Africa, found in Equatorial America from Costa Rica to the Amazon, yields a useful oil for cooking from the rind of its nuts. This is known by the Spanish Americans as the "Manteca" or butter palm. The Peach palm

("pirijao") — Gulielma speciosa — has delicious peach-like fruit. The "Corneto" palm (Deckeria) with a tall slender trunk, rises from the apex of a curious cone-shaped cluster of aerial roots, and bears on its flower stalks immense clusters of edible nuts, which in the mass may weigh as much as 100 to 200 Ib. The numerous kinds of Areca palms supply in their compact clumps of undeveloped fronds the " cabbage"1 which was the delight of many a famished mariner in the pioneering days. Euterpe edulis is also another " cabbage" palm. The exceedingly beautiful Ceroxylon andicola of Colombia, Ecuador, and western Venezuela — the " Wax palm" — yielded from the inner side of its fronds a bluish-white wax which was most useful to the Spaniards for making wax candles. A similar service in the more eastern parts of northern South America was rendered by the Copernicia cerifera. The Carludovica palmata of Colombia and Panama is a climbing palm from the bast of whose fronds are made the celebrated Panama hats. The long-leaved fronds of the Attalea palms also supply bast and fibre for many purposes, and the Leopoldinia "piassava" palms produce from their fronds bristles for brooms and brushes. The Tagua palm (Phytelephas) has a short, thick stem, and its sheaf of fronds appears to grow straight out of the ground. Its fruit is as large as a melon, and contains inside a number