Nicaragua - A Land Acquainted With Affliction

( Originally Published 1905 )

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Radical faith, and the Radical faith is this. Justice is justice, because the majority so declare it. And if the majority affirm one thing to-day, that is right ; and if the majority affirm the opposite tomorrow, that is right. —Froude.

THE morning I left the miserable little village at the mouth of the Realejo River for Leon, Nicaragua, it was raining fiercely. A curious crowd assembled at the mouth of the river to see us off. While I was stepping into the boat the bell in the village church began to ring. All hats were removed, all talk was stopped, and with bowed heads the sailors and those on the river shore stood still. With the last stroke of the Angelus bell our men gave the hoo-pah shout, the captain blew his conch shell, the marineros bent to the oars, we shouted adios to the shore crowd, and swept into mid-river.

For miles the banks of the Realejo were lined with gamelote grass, forming a sedge where the river broadened into shallow reaches. The silence was broken only by the whistle of the lizard or the bark of some far-off marsh frog. The river as we advanced deepened and narrowed, and the rising banks took on a covering of cabbage palms, whose broad, sweeping leaves flung a shadow on the quiet water. All day in a blazing sun the toughened rowers pulled against the current, tieing up only for dinner and the daily siesta, or mid-day rest. It was long after sunset when our anchor was run out in the middle of the river, and we hove to for the night, assured by our captain that few mosquitoes would trouble our rest. The air was hot and steamy, too hot to sleep in the bullhide chopa, so we sat out smoking and chatting with Diego, our captain. Frogs, lizards, tree-toads, sang, croaked and whistled in the shallow inlets, indifferent to discord or harmony. Innumerable fireflies flitted through the vines and palm-trees, and furnished us an unexpected display of bluish green pyrotechnics. Not many miles from where we now lay at anchor, the captain told us, the rebel chief Bernabe Somosa was captured after the defeat of his forces by the army of the government. He was taken to the town of Rivas, tried by court-martial, sentenced to death, and shot. He was a cruel and merciless scoundrel, whose memory is held in execration. No other part of the American continent, perhaps not of the world, has suffered so continuously from the scourge of civil war and the knife of the political assassin as Central America.

A beneficent Creator made it a paradise, and man, with his unholy ambition, his unrestrained and revengeful passions, has barely failed to make it a desert and almost a hell. To the man who knows the history of this unhappy land, our annual Thanksgiving Day has a meaning deeper than finds expression in a day of sport and a "good time." For eighty-five years Central America has been a huge theatre, on whose gruesome stage was enacted a continuous tragedy, and across whose boards there walked the ghosts of slaughtered men, women, and children. Adventurous corsairs, buccaneers, assassins, pirates, appear on the stage, the curtain falls on them and rises again, this time on the grim spectres of civil war, plagues, earthquakes, and volcanic horrors. Even while I write General Toledo, at the head of twenty thousand regulars and conscripts of San Salvador, is preparing to invade Guatemala to resent some real or fancied insult offered to San Salvador by President Cabrera, of Guatemala. But for prolonged agony, for bloody feuds, for internal broils and political upheavals, Nicaragua was and is pre-eminently conspicuous. It is the Haceldama—the field of blood—of the republican states. " Out of this sand," said Pope Gregory IX, holding a handful of earth he picked up in the arena of the Coliseum, "you may squeeze the blood of martyrs." From out the soil of Nicaragua the strong man may press the blood of her sons slaughtered by their own kith and kin.

Under the Spanish regime the kingdom of Guatemala was known as the Audiencia, and took in Costa Rica, Honduras, San Salvador, Yucatan, Chiapas, Nicaragua and Guatemala. These states, in 1821, threw aside their allegiance to Spain, and after two years formed a confederacy called the republic of Central America. The constitution was copied almost in its entirety after that of the United States. The signatures to the constitution were barely dry when dissensions threatened its permanency. Jealousies, conspiracies, riots, revolts, uprisings, ending in fraternal wars and violent separations, followed. These miserable feuds continue to this day and probably will continue till some strong man strides into the arena, declares himself a dictator, welds the petty republics into a homogeneous body, and, like Diaz of Mexico, rules as a benevolent despot.

Nor must we, among whom freedom, to cite Macaulay, has broadened down from precedent to precedent, be too severe in our condemnation of these mixed races. The memory of the Scottish tribal wars and Irish clan feuds, the faction fights and party fights, is too recent to warrant our boasting. Students of the inner history of the United States will remember how perilously near violent disruption was the union eight years after the signing of Jay's Treaty, and what masterly tact and diplomacy were summoned to the framing and binding of our own confederation. Three-fourths of the population of Central America have only been redeemed from barbarism for three hundred years, while we are heirs to a civilization of seventeen centuries and trained in the great Christian school of self-denial and self-sacrifice. More than that, the timber entering into the construction of our civilization has been hewn from trees planted and grown in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman soil.

For eighty-five years the Central American republics have tried to work out in strife, tyranny, and anarchy, the fate imposed upon them by a premature assumption of rule by peoples unprepared for such responsibility, and out of the welter of rapacity, dishonesty and violence there has come a pitiful and dismal failure. Of all forms of government a democracy or republic asks from the governed and governing a large measure of intelligence, unswerving honesty on the part of the executive and administrative bodies, and some approach to common sense among the people. To expect these mixed races, these human hybrids, to accomplish that which is testing the strength and intellect of France and the United States to achieve, is unfair to them and contrary to all Roman and Grecian precedent.

Diego, our captain, told us he anchored in mid-river in preference to bivouacking on the shore, where mosquitoes would make rest a mockery. It may be so, but all the same, the pests found us out, and that night I got a foretaste of purgatory. The mosquitoes of the Realejo River, for venomous and persistent attack, for bloodthirsty ferocity, have a bad pre-eminence over the worst I had ever met with elsewhere, and I say this having in mind my expereince in the swamps of the Orinoco and the forests of Demerara. With the dawning of the day we were again a move.

Suddenly a sound between a shriek and a roar came to us from the river bank. " What is it, Diego ?" I asked. "The lion bird," answered the captain. For miles as we advanced the cry of the bird broke the stillness of the forest. Unlike our northern diver, it never calls on the wing, but soars to a limb of the towering mora, and as the sun rises, so, too, rises over the forest the shriek and howl of this most extraordinary of forest birds. The lion bird is no larger than a pigeon, and how it can take in enough air to give out such an ear-splitting and far-reaching volume of sound is indeed surprising.