Working North from Patagonia by Harry A Franck PDF
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Title: Working North from Patagonia Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America Author: Harry Alverson Franck Release Date: August 30, 2017 [EBook #55455] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA *** Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, EARNED ON THE WAY, THROUGH SOUTHERN AND EASTERN SOUTH AMERICA BY HARRY A. FRANCK Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,” “Roaming Through the West Indies,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc., etc. ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, WITH A MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1921 Copyright, 1921, by The Century Co. Printed in U. S. A. FOREWORD Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my “Vagabonding Down the Andes.” The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the most part what they were when the journey was made. Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however, are almost indispensable; without them not only would there be a considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no English equivalent; because the nearest English word would be at best a poor translation; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest, for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at least the first time it is introduced; the pronunciation requires little more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter; and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the understanding, of those sentences in which they occur. Harry A. Franck. v CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I The South American Metropolis 3 II On the Streets of Buenos Aires 24 III Far and Wide on the Argentine Pampas 38 IV Over the Andes to Chile 64 V Chilean Landscapes 82 VI Healthy Little Uruguay 111 VII Bumping Up to Rio 138 VIII At Large in Rio de Janeiro 173 IX Brazil Past and Present 193 X Manners and Customs of the Cariocas 215 XI Stranded in Rio 242 XII A Showman in Brazil 270 XIII Adventures of an Advance Agent 295 XIV Wandering in Minas Geraes 315 XV Northward to Bahia 342 XVI Easternmost America 372 XVII Thirsty North Brazil 399 XVIII Taking Edison to the Amazon 430 XIX Up the Amazon to British Guiana 456 XX Struggling Down to Georgetown 502 XXI Roaming the Three Guianas 554 XXII The Trackless Llanos of Venezuela 610 vii ILLUSTRATIONS Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana Frontispiece FACING PAGE In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American consul general 32 The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires 32 A Patagonian landscape 33 The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio Negro of southern Argentine 33 A rural policeman of the Argentine 48 My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the Argentino calls a “soolky” 48 A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some of its inhabitants 49 A family of Santiago del Estero 49 A woman of Córdoba, mate bowl in hand 64 Even a lady would not look unladylike in the bombachas of southeastern South America 64 The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with snow 65 A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of May 65 At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the Andes” in a bleak and arid setting 80 The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile 80 On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in among the boulders 81 The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley 81 The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have women conductors 96 Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit less picturesque than Valparaiso 96 The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile 97 Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South American cities built of wood, even the streets being paved with planks 97 Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb 112 A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern Chile 112 A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo 113 A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at the loss of his life’s companion 113 ix A rural railway station in Uruguay 128 The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat Hills) district 128 “Pirirín” and his cowboys at an estancia round-up in northern Uruguay 129 Freighting across the gentle rolling plains of the “Purple Land” 129 A gaucho of Uruguay 132 A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia 133 An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the blood-red mud of his native heath 133 The parasol pine-trees of southern Brazil 140 Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande do Sul 140 A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of us and made our train half an hour late 141 A cowboy of southern Brazil 141 The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo 160 Santos, the Brazilian coffee port 160 A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in Nictheroy 161 The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock hills 161 An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo 176 Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose 176 The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on the left, a shack-built hilltop 177 A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio Branco 224 A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive noise-producer 224 The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the Brazilian capital 225 The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a distinctive whistle 240 The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil 240 The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha 241 At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth charged with the advertising painted his own portrait of Edison. He may be made out leaning affectionately on the right shoulder of his masterpiece 288 x The central praça of Campinas 288 Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church above the town 289 Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations 289 Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former Brazilian president 304 Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes 305 The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello Horizonte, are decorated with paintings 305 Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are found some of its gold and diamonds 320 A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina 320 In the diamond fields of Brazil 321 Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them 321 Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a tiny edition of picturesque Rio 352 Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João” 352 Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements 353 A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore 353 The site on which Bahia was founded 368 Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a steam laundry of Bahia 368 Taking a jack-fruit to market 369 The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil 372 The waterworks of a Brazilian city of some 15,000 inhabitants 372 A Brazilian laundry 373 Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival 373 The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay 380 Another Brazilian milkman 380 Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times 381 A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor gasoline 381 Ladies of Pernambuco 384 xi A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper 384 Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk and a dancing girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos behind the drummer 385 The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of downtown Recife 400 In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most important crop 400 Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink 401 Wherever a train halts long enough in Brazil the passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee 401 The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made entirely of palm leaves 416 Transportation in the interior of Brazil is primitive—and noisy 416 Our advertising matter parading the streets of a Brazilian town off the main trail of travel 417 The carnauba palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility as well as its beauty 417 Rural policemen of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of the region 432 From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street car 433 A street of São Luis de Maranhão 433 My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky negroes with nothing on their minds but a couple of trunks 448 Dolce far niente between shows in Pará 448 The cathedral of Pará 449 Pará has been called the “City of beautiful Trees” 449 Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of varicolored sails, a veritable fog rising from it under the equatorial sun 464 Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native, the other imported from India to improve the native stock 464 A family dispute on the Amazon 465 The captain and mate of our gaiola were both Brazilians of the north 465 An Amazonian landscape 480 A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is round 480 An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and Manaos, and the Brazilian flag 481 A lace maker on the Amazon 496 xii The Municipal Theater of Manaos 496 Here and there our batelão stopped to pick up a few balls of rubber 497 Now and then we halted to land something at one of the isolated huts along the Rio Branco 497 Our batelão loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals on the banks 500 The captain of my last Brazilian batelão, and his wife 500 Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along the Rio Branco 501 Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open campo of the upper Rio Branco 508 I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on the further bank of the Mahú 508 Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme edge of British Guiana 509 Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers 509 Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage might not have got across what had been trickling streams a few days before 512 We impressed an Indian father and son into service as carriers 512 Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points 513 An Indian village along the Rupununi 513 The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills, and paddled us down the Rupununi 528 Two of my second crew of paddlers 528 One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout 529 “Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo 529 We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old dugout 532 “Harris” and his wife at one of their evening campfires 533 Battling with the Essequibo 533 More trouble on the Essequibo 540 High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana 540 Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea 541 The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne have soft jobs and often wear shoes 541 A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a negro boss 560 xiii Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the negroes of the French possessions in America 560 The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the vultures 561 In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves 561 A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread 576 Homeward bound from market 576 French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne 577 White French convicts who would like to go to France, rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who would rather stay at home 577 Along the road in Dutch Guiana 580 A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana 580 A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native headdress 581 A lady of Paramaribo 581 Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of the Far East 588 Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a cacao plantation in Dutch Guiana 588 Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their native musical instruments 589 Wash-day in Dutch Guiana 589 An East Indian woman of Surinam 592 A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations 592 A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana 593 Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of rubber 593 A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections of the railroad to the interior 596 A Bush negro family on its travels. Less than half the dugout is shown 596 A Bush negro watching me photograph our engine 597 A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush negroes, returning from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor of Surinam, with his “commission” from Queen Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and footsore valet 597 The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the background 604 An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam plantation in order to kill the ants that would destroy it 604 Javanese workmen opening pods of cacao that will eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and cocoa 605 A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana 608 Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday before one of their barrack villages 608 Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on the Orinoco 609 The trackless llanos of Venezuela 609 An Indian family of eastern Venezuela 612 Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears on his travels 612 A Venezuelan landscape 613 Hammock-makers at home 620 The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable by rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning before the dew has dried 620 Lopez buying hammocks 621 We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to quench our raging thirst 621 Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a fellow-traveler 624 Dinner time in rural Venezuela 624 Lopez enters his native village in style 625 The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family 628 Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city waterworks 628 A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital 629 The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of Caracas 629 A bread-seller of Caracas 636 The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the “Washington of South America” 636 A street in Caracas 637 The Municipal Theater of Caracas 637 xiv WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA I CHAPTER I THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS n Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man” brought me into daily contact with all classes of Porteños, as natives of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in their own habitat. Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a true one. A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name of calles. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses; wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly provincial, conservative and fanatical. Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción. The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity. The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim. The Porteño has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate Casa Rosada, or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted calles of the downtown labyrinth. 3 4 5
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