South America Observations and Impressions

PREFACE

This book records observations made and impressions formed during a journey through western and southern South America from Panama to Argentina and Brazil via the Straits of Magellan. The nature of its contents is briefly outlined in the Introduction which follows, so all that I have to do here is to acknowledge gratefully the many kindnesses I received in every part of South America which I visited, and in particular from the following persons: Colonel Goethals, Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal, and other officers of the United States engineers stationed there, and Colonel Gorgas, head of the medical staff; the officials of the Peruvian Corporation in Lima and of the Peruvian Southern Railways in Mollendo, Arequipa, and La Paz; the officials of the Antofagasta and Bolivia Railroad Company; those of the Transandine Railway Company in Chile and those of the Buenos Aires and Pacific and Argentine Great Western Railways Companies in Mendoza and Buenos Aires, and also those of the Leopoldina Railway in Brazil. Nor must I fail to express my obligations to the heads in New York of the firm of Messrs. W. R. Grace Co., who advised me regarding my journey, and to my friend Professor Bingham of Yale University, who, familiar with South America from his own travels and studies, has given me valuable help in many ways.

I have also to return my respectful thanks to the Governments of Chile and Brazil, who were good enough to extend to me facilities for travel on their railways, and to the Governments of Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Uruguay for other courtesies. To many statesmen and scholars in these six republics, too numerous to mention by name, as also to not a few of my own fellow-countrymen from Britain and Canada who are there settled, I am indebted for hospitality, for private acts of kindness, and for valuable information.

JAMES BRYCE.

June 27, 1912.

INTRODUCTION

Whoever read as a boy the books of old travellers in the Andes, such as Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, or pored over such accounts of the primitive American peoples as are given in Prescott's Conquest of Peru must have longed to visit some day the countries that fired his imagination. These had been my experiences, and to them there was subsequently added a curiosity to learn the causes which produced so many revolutions and civil wars in Spanish America, and, still later, a sense that these countries, some of them issuing from a long period of turbulence, were becoming potent economic factors in the modern world. So when after many years the opportunity of having four clear months for a journey to South America presented itself, I spent those months in seeing as much as I could within the time, and was able to make some observations and form certain impressions regarding the seven republics I visited. These observations and impressions are contained in the following pages. They are, of course, merely first impressions, but the impressions which travel makes on a fresh mind have their value if they are tested by subsequent study and by being submitted to persons who know the country thoroughly. I have tried so to test these impressions of mine, and hope they may be of service to those who desire to learn something about South America, but have not time to peruse the many books of travel that have been written about each of its countries.

The chief points of interest which these countries have for Europeans and North Americans may be summed up as follows: —

1. The aspects of nature.

2. The inhabitants, the white part of whom are of Spanish origin, except the Brazilians, who come from Portugal.

3. The economic resources of the several countries.

4. The prospects for the development of industry and commerce.

5. The relics of prehistoric civilization.

6. The native Indian population.

7. The conditions of political life in the several republics.

It may be convenient that I should explain how far and in what order each of these topics is dealt with.

The first eleven chapters of the book contain a description of what I saw of scenery and of social and economic phenomena in the seven republics of Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, and in these chapters the first three of the above-mentioned subjects are dealt with when and as each country is described. It is Nature that chiefly engages the traveller's mind in Peru and Bolivia, as it is economic development which interests him in Argentina and Uruguay. In Chile and Brazil he must be always thinking of both. The fourth topic has been treated so fully by many writers who have brought special knowledge to it and have written professedly for the information of business men, that I have not thought it necessary to fill this book with statistical tables or, indeed, to do more than indicate the possibilities for commercial development or agricultural immigration which the natural resources of each country seem to promise.

It is only in Peru and Bolivia that any prehistoric monuments exist. Some of the most important and interesting of these I saw, and in describing them I have endeavoured to convey an idea of the character of the ancient Peruvian civilization (if that name can properly be applied to it) and of the people who produced it. This is done in Chapters III, IV, and V.

Only in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile did I have opportunities of seeing the native Indians. In the two former states they constitute a part of the total population far larger than in any other state (except Paraguay): they are nominally Christians, and they lead a settled agricultural life. In Chile there is only one considerable Indian tribe remaining, the famous Araucanians. Of these warriors, of the Quichuas in Peru and of the Aymarás in Bolivia, some account will be found in Chapters III to VI.

In the above-mentioned eleven descriptive chapters I have endeavoured to individualize, so to speak, the chief countries of South America, so as to bring out the chief characteristics, natural and human, of each of them.

But marked as are the differences between the various republics, they have all something in common, something that belongs to South America as opposed to Europe or North America or Australia. There are also certain general questions affecting the whole Continent which present themselves to the traveller's mind and need to be discussed upon broad and general lines. To these questions the last five chapters of the book have been devoted. One chapter endeavours to indicate the causes which have divided the vast Spanish-American dominion (including Mexico and Central America) as it stood in A.D. 1810 into the sixteen independent republics of to-day, some of which have become, others of which are becoming, true nations with marked national characteristics. Another chapter deals with the relations to the white population of the aborigines in the Spanish countries and of the negroes in Brazil, the only state in which negroes are numerous. It is a subject of study all the more interesting because these relations are altogether different from those borne by the European element to the coloured races in the British colonies, in India, and in the United States of North America, and also because the intermixture of races which is now going on in South America suggests physiological and ethnological problems of high interest.

A third chapter (Chapter XIV) briefly compares the conditions of settlement and of government which determined the course of economic and political development in North and in South America respectively and enquires how far the latter Continent is to be considered any more closely related to the former than it is to Europe. Is there, in fact, such a thing as that which the word Pan-Americanism is intended to describe, or does the expression denote an aspiration rather than a fact?

Of the political history of these republics very little is said in this book, and of their current politics nothing at all. That is a topic on which it would not be fitting for me to enter. But in travelling through the seven countries, in observing their physical features and the character of their people, and the state of knowledge and education among them, as well as in reading accounts of the kind of administration which the Spanish Crown gave them during nearly three centuries, I was struck by the influence which all these facts must have had upon the free governments which the Revolutionary leaders tried to set up when they broke away from the mother country. The history of Spanish America since 1810 cannot be understood or fairly judged, without taking these things into account. They have been the fundamental and determinative conditions of political life in these countries; and to them Chapter XV has been devoted.

In the last Chapter (XVI) I have touched upon several subjects relating to the South American lands and peoples in general for which no appropriate earlier place could be found, and have indulged in a few conjectures as to the future both of the several states and of the Continent as a whole. These are not meant as predictions, but rather as suggestions of possibilities which may serve to set others thinking.

Lest some of the views presented, especially those regarding the native races and political conditions should be deemed unduly optimistic, let me try to meet any such criticism by a few words on optimism in general.

Pessimism is easier than optimism, as it is easier to destroy than to construct. There was an old dictum in the Middle Ages, "Omnia tendunt naturaliter in non esse,"¹ and Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust tells us that

Alles was entsteht

Ist werth dass es zu Grunde geht.²

If pessimism is easy, the more need to stand on guard against it.

The duty of a traveller, or a historian, or a philosopher is, of course, to reach and convey the exact truth, and any tendency either to lighten or to darken the picture is equally to be condemned. But where there is room for doubt, and wherever that which may be called the "temperamental equation" of the observer comes in, an optimistic attitude would seem to be the safer, that is to say, likely to be nearer to the truth. We are all prone to see faults rather than merits, and in making this remark I do not forget the so-called "log-rolling critics," because with them the question is of what the critic says, not of what he sees, which may be something quite different. If this maxim holds true, it is especially needed when a traveller is judging a foreign country, for the bias always present in us which favours our own national ways and traits makes us judge the faults of other nations more severely than we do those with which we are familiar. As this unconscious factor often tends to darken the picture that a traveller draws, it is safer for him, if in doubt, to throw in a little light so as to secure a just result. Moreover, we are disposed, when we deal with another country, to be unduly impressed by the defects we actually see and to forget to ask what is, after all, the really important question, whether things are getting better or worse. Is it an ebbing or a flowing tide that we see? Even in reflecting on the past of our own country, which we know better than we do that of other countries, we are apt, in noting the emergence of new dangers, to forget how many old dangers have disappeared. Much more is this kind of error likely to affect us in the case of a country whose faults repel us more than do our own national faults, and whose recuperative forces we may overlook or undervalue.

Such considerations as these have made me believe that the natural propensity of a West European or North American traveller to judge Spanish Americans by his own standards needs to be corrected not only by making allowance for differences of intellect and character, but also by a comprehension of the history of these peoples and of the difficulties, many of them due to causes outside their own control, which have encompassed and entangled them ever since their ancestors first set foot in the Western world. Whoever compares these difficulties as they stand to-day with those of a century ago will find grounds not only for more lenient judgments than most Europeans have passed, but also for brighter hopes.

Neither in this matter, however, nor anywhere in the chapters which deal with the social and political conditions of South America have I ventured to dogmatize. My aim has rather been to start questions and to indicate various sides from which South American problems may be approached. The interest of these new countries lies largely in the fact that while some problems already familiar to the Old World, have here taken on new aspects, others appear here almost for the first time in history. Some of them involve phenomena of race growth and race intermixture for the investigation of which the data we possess are still insufficient. Others turn upon the still unascertained capacity of European races for working and thriving in tropical countries. It may take many years before science can tell us half of what we desire to know regarding the economic possibilities of the central regions of the Continent, for the development of which no labour is now available. The future of the temperate South is more certain, for all the material conditions that make for prosperity in North America and Australia are present there also. These countries will be the home of rich and populous nations, and possibly of great nations. The most interesting of all the questions which a journey in South America suggests are those which concern the growth of these young nations. What type of manhood will they develop? What place in the world will they ultimately hold? They need fear no attacks from the powers of the Northern Hemisphere, and they have abundant resources within. Their future is in their own hands.

CHAPTER I
THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA

South America is bounded at its northern end by an isthmus and at its southern by a strait. They are the two gateways by which the western side of the Continent, cut off from the western and central portions by a long and lofty mountain range, can be approached from the Atlantic. It was by crossing the Isthmus that Vasco Nuñez de Balboa discovered the South Sea. It was by penetrating the Strait that Magellan, seven years later, discovered that this South Sea was a vast ocean stretching all the way to the coasts of Asia. In old Spanish days all the commerce of the west coast passed over the Isthmus,³ but when the days of steam navigation arrived, that commerce passed through Magellan's Strait. Now the Isthmus itself is to be turned into a strait and will be a channel for sea-borne trade, the main gateway to the West.

An isthmus and a strait are, to the historical geographer and to the geographical historian, the most interesting things with which geographical science has to deal. Commerce and travel and naval warfare concentrate themselves at the spot where a narrow channel connects wide seas, and the strip of land which severs two seas from one another interposes a barrier to water-borne trade and turns it off into other directions. It becomes a point the control of which can stop the march of armies, and it furnishes a central stronghold whence ships can go forth to threaten the neighbouring coasts. Thus every strait and every isthmus has a high commercial importance, and almost always a political importance also, since lines of commerce have usually been, and are now more than ever, potent factors in human affairs, while the command of a water passage for fleets, or that of a land passage for armies, may be of capital importance in war.

The Eastern Hemisphere has an isthmus which has been significant for world commerce and for world history almost from the beginning of civilization. It is the Isthmus of Suez. So the Western Hemisphere has its isthmus of supreme importance, – that of Panama. It is a link between continents and a barrier between seas, which, though its history is far shorter than is that of Suez, yet has been at some moments in the last four centuries, and may be still more hereafter, of high significance for the movements of the world.

There are some notable points of similarity between these two isthmuses. Their breadth is not very different, – Suez sixty miles, Panama about fifty-four. The shortest line across each runs nearly due north and south. The continents which each unites are gigantic. Each lies in what is, or was till quite lately, a practically uninhabited country.

Here, however, the likeness ends; and we come to points of contrast that are more remarkable. The Isthmus of Suez is flat as a table from one end to the other; that of Panama is covered with high and generally steep hills. Suez is an arid waste, where there is not a brook and scarcely even a well, and by consequence not a tree, nor any growing thing save a few thin and thorny shrubs. Panama has a tremendous rainfall in places, varying from one hundred and forty inches a year on the north side to sixty on the south, and is covered with wood so dense that roads have to be not only hewn through the forest but defended by incessant cutting against the efforts of a prolific nature, always seeking to reassert her rights. Having a keen, dry, desert air, the whole Suez region is a healthy one, where man need fear disease only in those few spots which he has in recent years brought under irrigation. Panama had for centuries a climate so deadly that even passing travellers feared to halt more than a few hours on either side of the Isthmus. Yellow fever, intermittent and remittent fevers, and all sorts of other tropical maladies made it their favourite home.

A still more remarkable contrast, however, between these two necks of land lies in the part they have respectively played in human affairs. The Isthmus of Panama must, in far-off prehistoric days, have been the highway along which those wandering tribes whose forefathers had passed in their canoes from northeastern Asia along the Aleutian Isles into Alaska found their way, after many centuries, into the vast spaces of South America. But its place in the annals of mankind during the four centuries that have elapsed since Balboa gazed from a mountain top rising out of the forest upon the far-off waters of the South Sea has been small, indeed, compared to that which the Isthmus of Suez has held from the beginning of history. It echoed to the tread of the armies of Thothmes and Rameses marching forth on their invasions of western Asia. Along the edge of it Israel fled forth before the hosts of Pharaoh. First the Assyrian and afterwards the Persian hosts poured across it to conquer Egypt; and over its sands Bonaparte led his regiments to Palestine in that bold adventure which was stopped at St. Jean d'Acre. It has been one of the great highways for armies for forty centuries, as the canal cut through it is now one of the great highways of commerce.

The turn of the Isthmus of Panama has now come, and curiously enough it is the Isthmus of Suez that brought that turn, for it was the digging of a ship canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and the vast expansion of Eastern trade which followed, that led to the revival of the old designs, mooted as far back as the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, of piercing the American Isthmus. Thus the comparison of the two isthmuses becomes now more interesting than ever, for our generation will watch to see whether the commerce and politics of the western world will be affected by this new route which is now being opened, as those of the Old World have been affected by the achievement of Ferdinand de Lesseps.

So many books have been written, and so many more will be written, about the engineering of the Panama Canal and about its commercial possibilities, that of these very little need be said in such a sketch as this. But as everybody is already curious, and will, two years hence, be still more curious regarding the region it traverses, I shall try to convey some sort of notion of the physical aspects of the Isthmus and of the impressions its past and its present make on the traveller's mind. In taking the reader with me across the neck of land, I shall in the first instance say nothing of the works of the canal which I saw in course of execution, but will ask him to remember that it runs, as does the Trans-Isthmian railway, from north to south, the coast-line both on the Atlantic and on the Pacific side trending in this region east and west.⁴

Approaching in the steamer from Europe or New York across the Caribbean Sea one sees low hills rising gently from the shore, fringed with palms and dotted with small white houses half hidden among the trees. In front, on an islet now joined to the mainland, is the town of Colon, a new town, with a statue of Christopher Columbus "protecting" a female Indian figure of America, but no buildings of interest and little history, for it is only sixty years old, built as the terminal point of the railway. The old fortified ports where the Spanish galleons used to lie at anchor in former days, Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello, stand farther to the east. Behind the town, higher hills, covered with those thick, light green woods that characterize the tropics, cut off the view to the south. No depression in the land is visible. There is nothing to suggest that another ocean lies beyond, only fifty miles away, and that here the great backbone which traverses two continents for many thousands of miles sinks to a point a few hundreds of feet above sea level.

The traveller on landing steps into the railroad car, and after running for three miles along the shore of the shallow bay of Limon into which the Canal is to issue, strikes in four miles more the valley of the Chagres River. Here is the point (to be described later) at which the huge Gatun Dam is being built across that valley to flood it and turn it into a navigable lake. Thence the line keeps in the same general south-southeast direction on the east side of the Chagres River, parallel to its course. The Chagres, a muddy and rather languid stream, has in the dry season about as much water as the Scottish Tweed and in the wet season rather more than the Potomac and much more than the Shannon. There are few stations on the way, and at first no dwellings, for the country was uninhabited till the work of canal construction began. Morasses are crossed, and everywhere there is on each side a dense, dark forest. So deep and spongy are the swamps that in places it has been found impossible to fill them up or to lay more than one set of rails upon the surface. So dense is the forest, the spaces between the tree trunks filled by shrubs and the boughs bound together by climbing plants into a wall of living green, that one cannot see more than a few yards into the thicket, and can force a way through it only by the help of the machete, – that long, cutlass-like knife which people carry in Spanish America. Hardly a trail running into the woods is seen, and a mile or two back the wild cats and monkeys, and their terrible enemies, the anacondas or boa constrictors, have the place all to themselves.

After some twenty-three miles of this sort of country, beautiful when the outer boughs of the trees are gay with brilliant blossoms, and pendulous orchids sway in the breeze between their stems, but in September rather monotonous in color, the railway crosses and leaves the Chagres River, whose valley turns northeast far in among higher hills. The line continues to run southward, rising gently between slopes from which the wood has been lately cut away so that one can see the surrounding landscape. All around there is a sort of tossing sea of miniature mountains – I call them mountains because of their steep slopes and pointed crests, though few of them exceed a thousand feet in height. These are set so close together that hardly a dozen yards of level ground can be found between the bases of their declivities, and are disposed so irregularly that they seem as if the product of scattered outbreaks and uplifts of igneous rock. Their sides are clothed and their tops plumed with so thick a growth of wood that the eye cannot discover crags or cliffs, if any there be, and the tops of all are practically unapproachable, because no trails have yet been cut, except to one conspicuous summit. This one rises boldly to a height of about 1200 feet, and has received the name of Balboa Hill, because from it alone in this region – so one is told – can both oceans in a season of fair weather be descried. The gallant Vasco Nuñez deserves the honour of being thus commemorated; but it is to be feared that before long the legend will have struck root among those who dwell here, and will be repeated to those who pass along the canal, that it was from this height, and not from a peak in Darien, seventy or eighty miles farther to the east, that the bold adventurer first looked out over the shining expanse of the South Sea.

We are now more than halfway to the Pacific and may pause to survey the landscape. Though there is moisture everywhere, one sees no water, for neither ocean is visible, the Chagres is hidden among the folds of the hills, and the brooks at the valley bottoms are insignificant. But otherwise it is cheerful and pleasant in its bright green and its varied lines, – a country in which a man might be content to live, faintly reminding one of the Trossachs in Scotland by the number of steep little peaks crowded together and by the profusion of wood. The luxuriance of nature is, however, far greater than in any temperate clime, and the trees have that feathery lightness which belongs to the tropics, their tops springing like green bubbles into the soft blue air.

Here, at a place called Culebra, is the highest part of the crossing from ocean to ocean, 110 feet above sea-level; and as it was here that the deepest cutting had to be made for the canal it is here that the headquarters of the engineering staff has been fixed. Of the cutting more anon. The railway follows a devious course among the hills, rattling here and there through cuttings in hard igneous rock, and in a few miles, descending gently, it passes out into a wide valley, the farther end of which, to the south, is open, with a bold hill guarding it on the east side and several more distant rocky eminences visible far away against the horizon. The hill is Ancon, overlooking Panama city on the one side, and, on the other, the bay which the canal enters. The eminences are islands lying out in the Pacific. Being now quite down on the level of the ocean, we do not see its waters till the railway, passing along the edge of a brackish tidal swamp, reaches the city of Panama, forty-six miles from Colon.

As the Pacific side of the Isthmus is much the most picturesque part of the whole, and impresses itself most on the imagination, the visitor who desires to enjoy the scenery and grasp the configuration of land and sea, ought to climb, if he is an active walker, to the top of the hill of Ancon, on the lower slopes of which, rising just above Panama city, are the United States government offices and the villas of its officials. Steep everywhere, and in parts slippery also, is the foot-path that leads over pastures and through thickets to the top of the hill, some six hundred feet high. But it is worth while to make the ascent, for from the summit one obtains an ample prospect worthy of the historic greatness of the spot.

From this breezy height let the traveller turn his eyes first to the north, and look back over that maze of low forest-covered mountains through which he has passed from Colon and which form the watershed between the two seas. No more from this side of the Isthmus than from the other does one discern any depression in the watershed, any break in the range sufficient to indicate that at this point there is an easy passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The hollows through which both railroad and canal pass are hidden deep in the folds of the hills, which stand so thick together that it is hard to believe any waterway could ever be carved out between them and impossible to tell the spot where the cutting is being made.

Very different is the view when the gaze is turned eastward along the far-winding bays and promontories of the Gulf of Panama. There the coast is for a long space flat, and a plain runs back toward distant hills. Beyond this plain other ranges rise to the southeast, bordering the Pacific till they sink below the horizon opposite the Pearl Islands. Somewhere among those ranges is the height to which Balboa climbed and whence he made the great discovery; somewhere along those shores the place where, clad in armour, he strode into the waves, and with sword drawn, took possession of the sea on behalf of the king of Spain. It is rather across that plain that any one looking from this side might fancy the lowest passage from sea to sea would be found. Yet not there, but much farther to the southeast, far behind the hills, in the Gulf of Darien, there is a point still lower, where between the Atrato River which falls into the Caribbean and the River San Juan running to the Pacific a few miles of cut would enable a ship to pass from sea to sea. Now let the traveller turn round and face to the west. His eyes will follow a long mountain chain which rises high and bold from the opposite shore of the Gulf of Panama and runs out southwest until it too is lost to sight beneath the far horizon. In front, a group of rocky isles lies basking in the sunny sea. Just beneath the Ancon hill, at its eastern foot, the little city of Panama stands on its promontory, a mass of grey, red-roofed houses with a half-demolished Spanish fort of the eighteenth century guarding the shallow roadstead, while on the opposite side of the hill, at the base of its steep slopes, is the mouth of the Canal.