Pacific Shores From Panama

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Published by Charles Scribner's Sons

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To the Spanish Main

WHAT could be more delightful, upon a cold February morning, than the prospect of a voyage to southern seas—with pleasant assurance that in a day or two you will exchange the wintry blasts of the city streets for the soft trade-winds of the tropics, fanning your cheek and inviting you to languor and repose?

The winter had been a particularly severe one. Ice-packs floated along beside us all the way down the bay, and even after we had left the harbour and dropped our pilot beyond the Hook, long floes stretched dazzling white along the horizon like beaches of glittering sand.

As I looked about the deck I could scarcely realise that we were really headed for the Caribbean. These big Royal Mail packets, with their English officers and their English stewards counting in shillings and pence, seemed more like transatlantic liners (which in reality they are, sailing for Southampton via the British possessions in the West Indies) than like the usual Panama steamers.

We left upon a Saturday. All day Sunday we pounded the seas off Hatteras in a stiff sou'easter, but Monday morning dawned bright and clear, with a blue sea, diapered with those large saffron-coloured spots which come up the coast with the Gulf Stream.

Already on Tuesday the breeze blew warmer and the first signs of tropical weather appeared among passengers and crew. Sailors and deck-boys shed shoes and stockings, the ladies donned lighter frocks, and the men were shod in white. Flying-fish skipped from wave to wave, glistening like dragon-flies in the sunlight.

That afternoon we made our first land—a long island lying low upon the horizon, with a lighthouse at its highest point, Watling's Island, known to the Indians as Guanahuani. It was the landfall of Columbus upon his first blind voyage, the first bit of earth in the New World pressed by European feet, and was named by its discoverer San Salvador. Our captain described it as about twelve miles long and from five to seven wide, and one of the richest of the Bahama group. Its five hundred inhabitants keep in contact with the rest of the world only by means of a few coasters that now and then put into the little reef harbour at its northern end. In a few hours we sank it in the northwest and sighted no more land that day.

When I looked out of my port-hole at dawn next morning, I could make out, between the pale-pink sky and the sea that lay calm and opalescent as a great pearl shell, a long grey streak that each moment grew more distinct, gathering intensity and form, until presently a vivid shore of green, the freshest and brightest hue imaginable, gleamed along the horizon, and I realised that we were rapidly nearing the coast of Cuba.

The sun was just rising. I scurried into cool white linens and scrambled on deck just as we were threading the narrow entrance into Nipe Bay.

Upon the one hand stood a plantation set in gardens and fields of sugar-cane, and among thick clumps of palmettoes nestled a group of native huts thatched and wattled with grass. On the opposite shore the tall, column-like boles of a cluster of royal palms shone brilliantly against the distant mountains that, clear-cut and blue, wreathed their summits in thick clouds like the fumes of volcanoes, so heavy and motionless they lay. Even at this early hour a drowsy softness pervaded the air—a stillness that could be felt. Was it possible that we were but four days from the snow and sleet, the icy streets and blustering winds of New York City?

Of course we landed here at Antilla, though there was nothing much to see. The usual mixture of the types and races of the torrid zone stood crowded upon the dock: a negress dressed in old-rose calico; a mestiza with tattooed arms and bony hands that clasped a manta round her yellow neck; black faces peering from the shade of purple and magenta hats, soldiers in khaki, custom-house officials in sky blue, and in the background a lumbering ox-cart discharging its load upon a waiting scow.

We weighed anchor after luncheon, and all the afternoon skirted the north shore of Cuba. Ever since we left San Salvador we had followed in the wake of Columbus groping from coast to coast upon his first voyage. After landing at Guanahuani, he set sail southward to this north coast of Cuba, which he named Isabella, in honour of his queen, and

then, as we were now doing, he skirted its shore until he doubled Cape Maysi and saw Hayti, or Es- pañola, as he called it, rise from the sea to the eastward.

This Cuban coast is a long succession of beautiful blue mountains, finely drawn as the pencillings of an old Italian master, and as delicate in outline as the purple djebels of northern Africa. On the deck, every one was enjoying the balmy air and the prospect of the bright blue sea flecked with whitecaps. How different our passengers from the usual transatlantic crowd, bundled in shawls and veils and heavy ulsters! Wraps had been discarded, and the ladies sat about in fresh white gowns and leghorn hats, just as they would on summer verandas.

If the promenade-deck still looked Anglo-Saxon, not so the after-deck. Already it had caught the tropic atmosphere, for at Antilla we had taken aboard a crowd of Jamaican negroes as black as coal—the women lolling on the benches, the men half asleep in lavender shirts with their heads tied up in bandanas to ward off sea-sickness. In a corner a family had ensconced itself, rigging up a sort of tent made of counterpanes, one sky blue, one brick red, and the third an old-rose "spread" gaily figured with white. These were all tied together and their ends anchored to various articles of luggage, to the stanchions of the deck above, or to the ship's benches. In the shade of these bellying draperies, yet fanned by the breeze, lay these West Indian darkies, a man and three women, their heads pillowed on bundles, he half covered with a table-cloth, his head near that of one of the women whose scarlet skirt was short enough to disclose the flounces of a well-starched petticoat and a pair of black slippers slashed over white stockings. From time to time another woman's hand would appear to smooth her wind-blown draperies or quiet the half-naked pickaninnies that wriggled and kicked about upon the deck beside her—an exotic picture, certainly, one to be painted by an impressionist with a broad brush and crude, primary colour.

By evening we rounded Cape Maysi and steered southward through the Windward Passage. As our prow pointed toward the Caribbean, the romance of the Spanish Main seemed to fall about us with the deepening twilight. The furrows ploughed by the Spanish caravels have closed, to be sure, and no sign marks the pathway of their keels. Ashore, some old buildings on a battle-field, a bit of ruin or an aban- doned road, mark the progress of history and supply the stepping-stones that link the past with the present; but at sea the waves fill in the furrows as quickly as they are ploughed. Yet the ghosts of the "high-charged" galleons seem to linger in the Caribbean, lurking behind the reefs of its islands, taking refuge in its harbours, or cresting the dancing whitecaps. In its ports the English and the French lay in wait for the Spanish argosies and Drake laid the foundation of England's supremacy on the sea, while over yonder in the lee of Cape Tiburon Morgan fitted out his expedition of free-booters and buccaneers—the most lawless lot of rapscallions that ever assembled in all these pirate waters—for the sack of Panama. The flavour of their deeds still lingers in these archipelagoes—on these shores shaded by cocoa-nut palms, in their bamboo-built hamlets, and in the little harbours reefed about with coral.

Toward noon next day, Jamaica's lovely coast rose over the starboard bow. As we drew nearer we could make out the gleaming fringes of breakers along the reefs and the low shores vivid with mangoes and palmettoes. Big, vaporous mountains, purple and crowned with cumuli, rose behind, full of mystery and charm. For hours we skirted this enchanting island. Then a lighthouse appeared with, near it, the wreck of a German liner breaking to pieces upon the treacherous sand—an accident that happened just after the last earthquake when the lighthouse was put out of commission.

As we stood watching it we made out, in the surf near shore, a long-boat breasting the waves, now raised high in air upon their crests, now completely engulfed in the deeps between them. Its flags, fore and aft, stood taut in the clipping breeze, and as it approached we could see its oarsmen bending sturdily over their sweeps. What a picture it made as it drew under the lee of our great bulk, the green boat in the lapis sea with its brawny negro rowers, whose bare legs and chests, wet with spray, gleamed like polished bronze! Bright bandanas were knotted about their heads, and their scant clothing, old and tattered, scarcely concealed their nakedness. In the stern-sheets sat a man who steered with one hand, while with the other he baled out the boat with a cocoa-nut shell. Now from such a boat would you not expect some John Hawkins or Captain Kidd to step forth? But the man in the stern proved only the Kingston pilot as he clambered up the rope ladder to our deck.

The boat remained bobbing in the sea as our engines started again, and supplied just the proper foreground note to this picture of old Port Royal that now began to unfold itself. On the shore side of the long sand-spit that shields the harbour from the inroads of the sea, under the protection of the British flag, where the prim barracks are now lined up, the pirates of France and England used to careen and clean their ships and prepare themselves for their next bloody foray upon the Spanish settlements and the caravels taking the "King's Fifth" to Spain.

As we rounded the end of the spit and Kingston's harbour opened before us, we could see the beaches where these pirates landed, laden with loot from the Isthmus, and swaggered up to the taverns to squander their doubloons and pieces-of-eight in riotous living. Here Mansvelt and Morgan replenished their crews and refitted their ships; here they joined forces with a fleet of fifteen vessels manned by five hundred men, and here to Port Royal Sir Henry Morgan returned after Mansvelt's death, for it was his ambition to consecrate this harbour as a "refuge and sanctuary for pirates" and a store-house for their spoils. Here, too, in this town of buccaneers, he planned his raids

on Cuba and the Gulf of Maracaibo, and hence he set sail to join the fleet that he had assembled off Hayti for his attack on Panama.

All these memories crowded my thoughts as we slowly steamed up to the Royal Mail dock, catching glimpses as we passed of the straight streets swarming with people that lead up toward the vega, extending soft, green, and tropical toward the mountains. The flimsy houses with low-pitched roofs, the cocoanut palms waving their long arms in the easterly trade-winds, the pelicans fishing in the bay, the Jamaican negroes that swarmed about the dock, the English-looking shops of the main street,—excellent emporia, by the way, for outfitting in the tropics,—these compose Kingston of to-day, just as they composed Kingston of yesterday.

There is an excellent hotel, set in its own gardens, but unfortunately—or fortunately, I believe—there were no rooms to be had in it, so we tried a place in the town where we dined in a picturesque court with a fountain plashing beside us, a gaudy parrot in a silver cage moping among pale , a pair of doves cooing in a corner—a little place, in fact, whose romantic charm had caught even an old Civil War veteran, who somehow had been side-tracked here, and who after dinner tuned up his violin, or fiddle, as he called it, and played in the moonlight. Later we drove about in the darkness of the tropic night, catching glimpses of dimly lighted Rembrandtesque figures seated in open doorways or working in shops lit by flickering lamps.

There were the Hope Gardens and the markets to be visited next morning, and at two o'clock we left for the south. The governor had come aboard to see off some distinguished friends, and the English element became even more pronounced among the passengers. Army officers in khaki greeted each other as Sir John and Sir William, and dinner-coats became the rule after sundown.

Saturday we spent on the high seas, lashed by the "doctor," as the Jamaicans call this brisk trade-wind that kicks up such a swell in the Caribbean—a wind, as the captain expressed it, that "sometimes blows the bananas off the trees"; and he was authority, too, for the following verse, showing that in February we were only seeing the "doctor" at his feeblest:

June too soon; July stand by; August look out; September remember; October all over."

Before dawn on Sunday morning I saw a lighthouse blinking on a headland, and the dark mountains behind Porto Bello loomed faint and grey against the sky. Then all sign of land disappeared for a while, until a tropical shore, flooded in the rosy sunrise, suffused in humid atmosphere, appeared resting on a turquoise sea. A long lay to the right, a number of docks to the left. We were passed by the business-like Canal Zone doctor and soon were setting foot upon the Isthmus.

Panama

Then, go away if you have to go Then, go away if you will! To again return you will always yearn While the lamp is burning still!

You've drank the Chagres water, And the mango eaten free, And, strange though it seems, 'twill haunt your dreams, This Land of the Cocoanut Tree!"

HOW true this verse from "Panama Patchwork," penned by poor James Gilbert, who lost his life by dwelling too long under the spell of the Isthmus—which is scarcely to be wondered at, for his "Land of the Cocoanut Tree" certainly exerts a strange and potent fascination.

The achievements of its intrepid discoverers and conquistadores; the romantic episodes of its treasure-trains laden with the wealth of Peru; the bloody raids of the buccaneers; the onward rush to the gold-fields of California—all these and, finally, the digging of the great canal compose a historic background such as few countries can boast.

Every great personage of early American history has imprinted his footsteps upon its red clay soil. In his futile search for the Straits—the mythical Stretto Cubitoso that never could be found—Columbus beat along its coast, and Colon and Cristobal, the Atlantic entrance to the canal, perpetuate his memory. From a hill in Darien, Balboa first beheld the Pacific, and the Pacific gateway to the canal will hand down his name to posterity. Pizarro and Cortez waged their first battles along its sandy shores and slew the Indians in its treacherous jungles. Hernando de Soto made it the theatre of his first explorations and there prepared himself for the discovery of the Mississippi. Sir Francis Drake sailed his first boat, the Swan, in the troubled waters that wash its shores, and Henry Morgan harassed its coast-towns in his bloodiest forays. De Lesseps, hero of Suez, went down to defeat before its fevers and the crooked administration of his company. Finally, American enterprise, triumphing over all obstacles, has here given its best account of the value of collective endeavour, and carried through the dream of centuries, the greatest achievement of mankind. . . .

The town of Colon, though attractive enough when viewed from the harbour, is disappointing upon closer acquaintance. Its straight streets, flanked by two-storied houses, shaded above and below by broad verandas, remind one, to be sure, of some old town of Spanish California, but little tempts to linger. So, without regret, in a tumble-down cab we followed our luggage (given in charge to a turbaned East Indian) from the dock to the railroad station.

The ride to Panama proved full of interest. When we crossed upon this occasion the new line of the Panama Railway through the Black Swamp had just been opened, so that, beyond Gatun from the car-windows, we enjoyed rare glimpses of the virgin jungle, a tropical hortus of blooming trees, with orchids and flowering vines draped in their branches, hung amid screens of convolvuli and creepers as intricate as the pendent cords of Japanese curtains. Cane huts, primitive as those pictured by the old chroniclers in the woodcuts of their first editions, basked in the shade of cocoa-nut palms.

It was a Sunday, and at each station little parties of holiday-makers—engineers, army officers in immaculate white with their fresh young wives—came aboard or dropped off to see friends at the different camps.

Each station had a physiognomy of its own. Frijoles was a collection of negro cabins clustered about a primitive church; Matachin a railroad junction; Camp Elliott an army post, smart, spick, and span; Las Cascadas a steaming centre of locomotives and car shops; Culebra a thriving-looking place where, through the open church windows, we could see the congregation at prayer.

At many of the turns we had views of the canal work. Gatun Locks and the Spillway lay near the road, and the broad artificial lake formed by the dammed-up Chagres River spread its placid waters to shores adorned with bouquets of cocoa-nut trees and graceful palms. But after Culebra little verdure was to be seen. Later the great locks of Pedro Miguel and Miraflores appeared to the right, and finally Ancon Hill rose behind the Tivoli lying close to the track in the foreground.

Thus in a little less than two hours we had accom- plished the journey across the continent from ocean to ocean, the only place upon the hemisphere where it is now possible to behold both oceans in a single day.

And how different the journey nowadays from what it used to be! When Balboa set out to find the South Sea he forced his way for twenty-six days through the trackless jungle before he reached the hill from which he first beheld the Pacific. Morgan and his buccaneers almost lost their lives while on their way to sack Old Panama, poling up the Chagres River to Venta Cruz, wading waist high through the swamps; cutting their way painfully with machetes through the pulpy undergrowth, attacked by mosquitoes and jiggers and Indians with poisoned arrows; hearing the strange quick cry of the "chicaly" bird or the "corrosou tolling his bell-like notes"; watching the monkeys play "a thousand antick Tricks" in the branches above their heads. What strange dreams must have haunted their superstitious minds! What fears must have racked their bodies, wasted by hunger and disease! In desperation they were forced to eat the leather of their clothing and accoutrements, stripped and pounded upon stones, and when, on the sixth day, they fell upon a barn full of maize, they devoured it dry and raw.

Such was crossing the Isthmus in the old days. Now even the dread of fever—the last nightmare to haunt its morasses—has been conjured away, thanks to sanitary measures that will serve as models to all the world. Under army supervision the death rate in the Canal Zone has been reduced to a lower percentage than in any of the large cities of the United States.

Panama City of to-day dates from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Old Panama, the city of the conquistadores, lay a few miles distant, and we shall visit its ruins presently. The newer city possesses all the picturesque features, all the charm of an old Spanish town. Its streets are not straight and regular, as in most Latin-American cities, but wriggle and turn and twist out from and back to the long Avenida Central, the main street that traverses the city from end to end, containing the principal shops and crossing all the plazas.

The houses are substantially built and washed with those pastel tones—rose, pale blue, water green, buff, and grey—of which the Spanish peoples are so fond.

Verandas, as in Colon, overhang all the thoroughfares, and the indolent Panamans spend much of their time upon them or lounging about the numerous cafés and hostelries.

There are several plazas. The old church of Santa Ana overlooks one; another is named for Bolívar, liberator of Spanish America and founder of its republics; and, appropriately enough, the government buildings, a little tawdry perhaps, and the post-office lie near it. The third, and this is the largest and most important, is named for the cathedral that fronts upon it—a charming square planted with handsome palms and tropical gardens. The cathedral façade, while not bearing critical analysis, has all the allure of the big Spanish churches, and the other religious edifices of the city are picturesque and sometimes rarely charming in colour.

No matter what else you miss in Panama, do not neglect a walk upon the Bovedas, or city walls that skirt the gulf. These great fortifications, the most formidable, except those at Cartagena, that the Spanish erected in their American possessions, are forty feet in height and no less than sixty feet in thickness. Their tops afford the favourite promenade for the Panamans, who, toward sunset, when the heat of the day has spent itself, saunter up and down its broad esplanade enjoying the cool breeze and watching the sun slowly sink behind the hills.

No matter how long you remain in Panama, you never grow quite accustomed to the points of the compass, for the sun rises out of the Pacific and sets behind the wooded mountains of the Isthmus, which, of course, is due to the fact that Panama lies east, or rather southeast, of Colon instead of west, as one would naturally suppose.

From this sea-wall the view is beautiful. Off to the right lies Balboa, at the entrance to the canal, with the three fortified islands whose guns will command the fairway. Farther from shore Taboga and Taboguilla, lovely and wooded, rise from the blue waters, the former a healthy spot supplied with the purest of water and used by the government as a sanitarium. Other islets lie dotted about, and to the south the gulf stretches off to the Pearl Islands, coveted treasure-lands, whose gems at one time rivalled those of Ceylon and supplied the Spanish crown with some of its rarest jewels. Shoreward lies the city, encircling its harbour, dominated by the cathedral towers, whose spires are incrusted with pearl shells that, after the frequent rains, sparkle and glitter in the sunlight, serving as beacons to many a fisherman tossed in the troubled waters of the gulf.

But to my mind the sea-wall promenade is at its best at night when the wondrous stars—the stars of the southern seas—twinkle and sparkle in the firmament. Then no one disturbs your reverie but the sentry rattling his musket as he moves in his stone look-out at an angle of the walls, or the sereno as he whistles to and is answered by the other night watchmen. The acacias nod their delicate leaves in the night breeze that plays soft and cool upon your cheek, and out over the flat salt marshes (for the waters of the sea only lick the walls at high tide) the moon rises, touching pool after pool with silver.

To complete the evening, return to the plaza and watch the crowd that enjoys the music as the band plays: the women in black and the men in white; the natives (if it be Sunday) wearing the pollera, or national costume, filling an interminable string of hired carriages that slowly meander up and down the Avenida. The stately palms framing Santa Ana's belfry cut their silhouettes against the sky of indigo; the tread of human feet echoes on the glazed-tiled

pavement; but all is toned and put in tune by the glamour of the southern night.

It is with a sense of rude awakening that you enter the brilliantly lighted hall of the Hotel Tivoli —so typically American in every detail, so strangely discordant, yet so comfortable and clean, in all this tropic atmosphere.

An excursion to the ruins of Old Panama can easily be managed in one afternoon, and for it we preferred a carriage to a motor, so that we could enjoy it at our leisure. Our driver was an old Jamaican negro who spoke English with a cockney accent. He knew every plant of the tropics and pointed out as we went along the guava-trees and the poincianas, gorgeous with crimson flowers; the bread-fruits nodding their great, pointed leaves; and the trumpet-trees, whose vivid foliage, lined with silver, sparkled as the wind turned it over. He called our attention also to the whistling of the coral snake, saying that "if it stings you, it's a dirty business," and to an iguana, brilliant, green, that stood motionless by the roadside, strange relic of the Jurassic age—an esteemed delicacy of the natives, with meat as white and tender as that of squab chicken. Mango and rose apple, cocoa-nut palm and royal palm, engaged our attention turn by turn until we reached Las Sabañas.

I do not mean to imply that the country is thickly wooded or jungle-like in character. On the contrary, the hills are rather bare and grass-grown like pasture lands, for all the tangle of tropic growth has been cut back in the interest of health.

After the villas of Las Sabañas, where the well-to-do Panamans make their homes in summer, a few

native huts appear, thatched and faced with dried palm leaves or plaited like baskets with straw and cane.

We now left the main road, turning aside at a prison where a huge alligator-skin, some eight feet long, was drying in the sun—product of a recent hunt. Soon we met the prisoners themselves making a new road to the beach. And here we came upon the ruins of Panama Viejo.

They have been cleared lately of their tangle of underbrush, and so are seen to better advantage than they formerly were when smothered in vines and creepers. First you cross a ruined bridge, then substantial stone walls appear and foundations covering a considerable area, and finally the tall tower of the church of Saint Anastasius, rising close by the beach, overlooking the little harbour. Here lay the town that has caused such discussion among historians. The old Spanish chroniclers, with their customary enthusiasm, describe it as a great city of several thousand houses, with palaces and churches of sufficient splendour to make it resemble Venice! Benzoni, an Italian who visited it at this same early epoch, resented this comparison, and says that, on the contrary, it was nothing but a collection of rude mud huts.

The truth lay somewhere between these two extremes. The ruins that remain would certainly attest a well-built town of considerable importance, and it is probable that all about this substantial nucleus of stone clustered hundreds of flimsy constructions extending into the surrounding savannahs.

When a treasure-ship was despatched from Peru, an express was sent ahead to advise the people of Panama of its coming, and their governor, in his turn, notified the colonies along the Spanish Main. Upon

its arrival the treasure was carried across the Isthmus by recuas, or donkey-trains, convoyed by strong forces of soldiers. But the English and French buccaneers, the Cimaroons, and the San Blas Indians with poisoned arrows gave them many a bitter fight upon the way. Its destination was Nombre de Dios, that, owing to its unhealthy situation, had but few permanent inhabitants. Upon the arrival of these treasure-trains, however, it filled with a multitude of merchants from Panama and the colonies along the Caribbean, who bargained and bartered for weeks. The King's galleons, that had been waiting in the safe havens of Cartagena and Santa Marta, came over to load their precious cargoes and transport the King's Fifth to Spain.

Thus upon this pebbly beach of Panama Viejo—a cove large enough for galleons but scarcely capable of accommodating half a dozen modern ships—all the wealth of the Incas, Atahualpa's ransom, the golden plates from the Temple of the Sun, the vast products of the silver mines of Potosi were landed to be transported across the Isthmus.

The shore of the little bay still bears traces of its sea-wall and, I think, of a fortress such as one sees in towns of similar importance along the Mediterranean.

As you turn your back upon the sea you look up toward the mountains, the hills from which Morgan looked down upon his prey after the misery he had suffered in crossing the Isthmus. And it was from their heights that, with flags flying, trumpets blowing, and drums beating a bravery, he descended to attack the doomed city. He left it some days later burned to the ground, its inhabitants tortured, robbed, or killed—so effectually wiped out that it has never been rebuilt. Two hundred beasts of burden laden with spoils and six hundred prisoners held for ransom went with him as he set out again to rejoin his boats hidden on the Chagres River near Cruces.

We returned to Panama in the spell of the late afternoon. A marked change had taken place in the aspect of the road, especially after we passed Las Sabañas, for, instead of its mid-day loneliness, it was now dotted with buggies, carriages and motors of all descriptions being, toward evening, the favourite, in fact the only, drive from Panama.