Mules -- Cacao -- La Delicia -- My first trail -- Rum -- A first-class road -- The Córdovez Family -- Easy money -- Salinas -- Chimborazo -- A window-dresser -- An industrial revolution -- I retire from business.
IN Ecuador, from the Andes to the Pacific, the greater part of the non-inundated land is under
It was through the endless
were even more comfortable to ride than horses, especially on a bad trail. In really rough country, the stamina of such beasts as these exceeds that of a horse many times. Indeed, when it is a question of more than two days' journey the latter cannot be used at all, unless a change of animal is possible. Moreover, the spirit of a mule is always inferior to that of a horse, which, for practical purposes, is an advantage, for while the mule will not go beyond its endurance, the latter will go till he drops and leaves his rider helpless. However, the outstanding feature of a mule is always stubbornness, however fine an animal he may be, and if he takes it into his head to stop he will, and the only way to get him past the spot at which he has shied, is to take a half-hitch with your rope round his tender upper lip, pass the end of the rope around a tree a few yards ahead, walk back with the end of the rope behind the mule, and prod him with a stick. Every time he jumps, take up the slack.
After one memorable night in a hotel in Bodegas under conditions compared with which those in Panama smacked of Heaven, our little cavalcade set out on the long journey for the Córdovez plantations. The "Count," myself and one muleteer were all there were. I had left my kit in Bodegas, except what I could carry on the saddle, having made arrangements for it to be forwarded to Riobamba by the main and only road from the coast to Quito.
For the first three days we passed through nothing but
join in one great roof. But the fruit of the
At night we would stop at some overseer's cottage. Everywhere the name Córdovez gave us an easy entry, and I began to be somewhat impressed by our importance. In point of fact the family did occupy a position of importance in the country. They owned large cattle and horse ranches, as well as eight hundred square miles of uncleared forest, suitable for the planting of any of the three principal crops of Ecuador. Many Indian villages were situated within the confines of their territory, from which they drew their supply of peons (workmen) for the plantations and ranches scattered throughout their property. Politically, as happens in all the Republics of Latin America, their power rose and fell with the certainty of a thermometer in strict accordance with the changes of administration. When I arrived in the country it happened that an administration favourable to their interests had just fallen, and, until the necessary "influence" could be brought to bear once more, their power would be on the wane. I went into Ecuador on the invitation of my friend the "Count," expecting to find all sorts of commercial possibilities opened up by reason of the standing of his family, and their intelligent grasp of the country's needs and, when I first arrived I was not disappointed.
It is a wonderful experience to ride through the
intermittent light under the body. It is as if the insect world were holding a great fête throughout the plantations.
Once clear of the
Arrived at La Delicia, after passing over the scarcely used trail which ran up through some of the undeveloped Córdovez holdings, with the boy riding ahead to cut away the brush which had overgrown the trail since last it was used, we called a halt. La Delicia was the headquarters of Don Agosto Córdovez, famous for his picturesque cursing of the peons, one of the six or seven sons of the old man who managed for their father the various plantations and ranches on the vast estate. There we stopped for a delightful week or ten days to rest our mules, and for me to be introduced to forest and plantation life. It was my first experience of anything of the kind, so the novelty of even the most ordinary events of every-day life in such places appealed to me very strongly, as it would to any person with a love of outdoor life. I went hunting monkeys, turkeys, wild pigs, parrots, deer and jaguars, none of which I had ever shot before. The monkeys in particular, I remember, excited my enthusiasm, never having seen them outside a cage before. As novel as the hunting was the eating of many of these strange forest-dwellers. The impression my first taste of monkey made on me stands out clear in my memory. The gastronomical possibilities of a baboon probably occur to only a very few of the millions who gaze at him through iron bars.
I was introduced, too, to the arts of tapping rubber
All too quickly came the day when Domingo Córdovez announced that we must move on. Our destination was Riobamba, to reach which a long trail must be covered. So we set off on the much-used trail over which the mule trains pass every fortnight with the rum for consumption in the interior.
Rum plays such an important part in every peon's life that it is worth a few words. It is made from fermented cane-juice, its alcohol content being so great that it burns like methylated spirits. It tastes like a mixture of benzine and molasses. Life among the peons in Ecuador is one long string of fiestas in which the principal part is played by this spirit, which truly deserves the name of fire-water. For most peons a fiesta has no other significance than an excuse for drinking himself into a blessed state of oblivion, in that state the cares of the world trouble him not. From one fiesta to another they go, always in a state of semi-torpor, when not actually unconscious. If it happens that, by some grave oversight, there is a week without a public fiesta according to the Saints' Calendar, a private one is arranged. The drink was worth when I was there $1.20 per 120 litres. Thus for one cent a man could attain to the ideal state
The trail from La Delicia to Riobamba is reckoned first-class. It is, as a matter of fact, composed, on the level stretches, of a sea of mud, while on the gradients it has two distinct halves, one for ascending and one for descending. The road is cut out of the natural clay, which is heavy and slippery, with the result that the ascending side is one long series of parallel miniature ditches, twenty inches apart, where the mules set their feet, running at right angles to the direction of the road itself, while the descending side is smooth, hard and slippery, and serves as a slide down which the mules toboggan, enjoying the fun as much as the riders. There is no sport in the world, in my estimation, to equal coasting down the Equator on a mule. Many a time I have made trips down the mountains, when later on I lived at 14,000 feet, just for the fun of covering in five or six hours what it takes eight days to climb. When one reaches a spot where a slide begins, nothing in the world can persuade one's mule to keep to the corrugated side of the road and walk demurely down. It sticks out its ears, places its forefeet carefully on the top of the slide and away it goes! One ends up in the mud-hole at the bottom, which acts as a receiving station, generally on top, but not always. The trains of mules coming down the Riobamba-La Delicia trail with the empty rum barrels often get badly tangled up on the slides, as may be imagined. The
inches wide, but the mules, being accustomed to pack bulky loads over the same trail, always walk on the very outside edge, often with a thousand-foot drop a few inches away. Indeed the rider's leg is suspended over the clouds.
Córdovez and I, mounted on the same picked mules as brought us to Delicia from Bodegas, covered the eighty-odd miles between Don Agosto's house and Riobamba in six days, having passed through the "Count's" own plantation on the way. At Riobamba, the second town in Ecuador, with its twenty thousand inhabitants, his father had his headquarters, and was known as "Papa Domingo," in order to distinguish him from his son whose name was also Domingo. Here we pulled up.
The Córdovez ménage at Riobamba was composed, apart from the old man himself, of a daughter-in-law, who kept house for him, and a number of servants and peons. The sons were scattered all over the estate, while his wife kept house (a very different kind of house to his) in Quito. He was far more at home in his rough and tumble farmhouse where the hens walked about the living-room and foraged for scraps among the refuse on the brick floor than anywhere else. He, and his sons when they paid him a visit, lived after the fashion of the peasants of the West of Ireland, only rather worse. He had no use for soap, seldom changed his clothes, and always went to bed in his boots and his hat. If you took your hat off when you sat down to supper, you were cautioned to keep it on, as everybody else did, for fear of the draught. (Most of those in whose veins runs Spanish blood live in mortal terror of a breath of fresh air.)
His house, a one-story, whitewashed red-tiled affair, had, like most others in Riobamba, a patio and a corral, the former in the centre of all the living-rooms, the latter outside the back wall. The corral was used for
Apart from the other peculiarities of the place which I have mentioned already, there are two things that stand out strongly in my memory. The boys of the family had a habit of borrowing everything I had in the way of clothes and kit, and the family always opened my inward and outward mail.
It was into that household, then, that I rode (literally, for one always enters the patio of an Ecuadorian house on horseback) one evening in February, 1895, expecting to find something rather different from what I have described. The great extent and importance of the Córdovez ranches and plantations, the respect in which their name was held everywhere, and the knowledge that every one of them (including the old man himself) had been educated in Europe or the States, led me to expect that their houses would be models of up-to-dateness, instead of on a par with the primitive homes of their ordinary uneducated compatriots. As a matter of fact, the house in Quito which the old Señora Córdovez kept with her daughter was clean, well-furnished, and systematically run. However, when Papa Domingo went to visit that portion of his family, he had to change into a dress shirt and a black jacket, which pleased him very little, so, despite his great affection for the ladies, and his great popularity in the Capital, where he was known for his wit and his hospitality, he seldom spent much
Here I must leave the story of my travels for a brief space, to make a few general remarks on my life in Ecuador and its special relation to this volume.
The present record is not intended to deal in detail with Ecuador, the object of this chapter being to explain how my stay in the country came to be a stepping-stone to the wanderings in the wilds in the interior of the South American continent which form the main subject of my book. At the same time, there are a few of the outstanding features of Ecuadorian life which I cannot pass over without some brief comment, either because they bear directly on my tale, or because they are intrinsically too rich in humour to be forgotten.
Instead, therefore, of giving a chronological account of the two years which I spent in Ecuador, almost exactly corresponding to the years of the calendar 1895-6, I propose treating the greater part of that period as a whole, picking out the salient features of my adventures, both commercial and social, and only returning to a connected narrative when I am dealing with the causes of my leaving the country in the way I did.
From the day of my arrival in Riobamba I was treated by the Count to a series of commercial propositions which took me all over the country, but only one of which ever came to a head; even that one ended for me in a most unsatisfactory way. Commercially speaking, then, my time in Ecuador was one long series of disappointments, due partly to my gullibility, and partly to the spirit of procrastination which permeated the country from end to end. The only bright spot in the whole story is the fact that I personally lost no money, as I had none to lose. Of the $100 with which I had started from New York, a few were left when I reached Bodegas;
But if my finances were not very complex, the innumerable machinations of my business acquaintances, and the never-ending stream of get-rich-quick propositions with which I was deluged, certainly were. I remember how we were going to put up a furniture factory, start a modern sugar plant, clear fifty acres of forest and plant coffee, build a new road over the Córdovez holdings to Bodegas, put on a service of mule teams for transporting produce to and from the interior, light Quito by electricity, irrigate the arid lands in the Riobamba valley with the snow on Chimborazo, erect a tannery to be run with the bark off the Córdovez trees, bore for oil, distill fine old Scotch whiskey, and follow up a hundred other projects which our versatile minds conceived.
Every other week I would write home of the vast fortunes which I and my associates were going to amass, until at last I was myself so bewildered that for the sake of having some really definite occupation, I was ready to do anything from prospecting for a brass mine to building a health resort on the summit of Cotopaxi. Finally, however, something on which I could at any rate get busy presented itself.
At Salinas, which is 14,000 feet above sea-level (one of the highest villages in the world outside Tibet), there was a salt-spring which was worked by the Indian villagers. The land was owned by old Córdovez, who was paid about $1,200 a year by the villagers for the mineral rights. Well, the idea was that Córdovez should take over the active working of the spring, install modern machinery and, with me as "industrial partner" (that sounded good!), make the $30,000 a year which
The view from Salinas is, perhaps, second to none in the world. It is bewilderingly vast. To the East, Chimborazo's mammoth dome of dazzling silver rises from the very outskirts of the town, its summit five thousand feet above. To the North stretches the
To reach Salinas from Riobamba one traverses some fifteen miles of desert, a wilderness of boulders and volcanic sand, when the ascent of Chimborazo commences. Five or six miles of climbing through broken, deeply fissured country, the home of the condors, where the torrents of boiling water rushed down from the crater in the old days of its activity, bring one to the Arenal, the great sloping plateau of volcanic sand about a mile broad which lies at the base of the dome of ice and snow which forms the summit of the mountain.
As often as not the passage is dangerous, on account of the blizzards in which the traveller can easily lose his way and perish of cold and hunger before the sun breaks through again. We, however, were fortunate, for we crossed just after a storm which had left a foot of snow.
The story of my Salinas venture is worth relating briefly, for it bears directly on the tale I have to tell.
When I arrived at what was to be my home and the place where my fortune was to be made I cannot say that it struck me as being prepossessing. In the miserable village lived a vermin-ridden population swathed in blankets, which crawled in and out of its kennel-like huts through the only opening in the wall, and lived with the chickens and guinea pigs in the straw which served for beds and fuel. Cut off from the Córdovez plantations by forty miles of coasting through mud astride a mule, I was to amass a fortune with the aid of the yellow water which oozed through the cracks in the rocks. My hut was no better than the rest, except that it boasted a mud partition between the kitchen and the bedroom, the furniture consisting of pots and pans and kettles, a few rocks for a fireplace, and a pile of
The sole industry of the village, when I arrived, was salt-water boiling. Every household owned its copper kettle, which it filled at one or other of the springs, and boiled on a fire in its own home. The women looked after the kettles, while the men packed fuel from the nearest
To cut a long story short, after old Córdovez, who accompanied me to the village when first I went, had advised the headman that he was going to work the salt-springs himself, and do away with the old system under which the privilege was rented out to the Indians, I announced that I would pay ten
the foundations and walls of the factory, and kicking the coppersmith out of his normal state of drunken semi-stupor, the furnace was lighted for the first time. When the smoke poured out of the stack the whole village turned out to see the miracle. Nothing like it had ever been seen or heard of in the whole country. Everything was in working order at last; the mules were bringing up fuel from below the timber-line, the
One day there rode into the village on donkey-back an individual who made his way to my hut and walked in. He asked me for a job. Seeing before me an American the most natural thing for me to do was to ask him who he was, which I did. It was, to say the least of it, a shock to see the man there at all, but his answer certainly deserves recording.
"I'm a window-dresser from New York; have you got a drink handy?" he said.
We struck what must be one of the strangest commercial agreements on record. He was to be Assistant Manager of the salt mines at ten
was found dead a week later alongside a trail on the littoral. I am sure he died quite happy, for he never did anything but sing.
Trouble started soon after the factory began to run. A section of the Indians decided to get rid of the man who was standing between them and their money. So I was attacked by a party which lay in wait for me with clubs, beaten into unconsciousness, and left for dead in the road. I awoke in my bunk, whither the mayordomo (as they called the head-man) had packed me.
For a week I was unable to move, but at the end of that time Aurelio Córdovez, one of the sons, who had heard of the affair, arrived and stayed with me for a few days until I was on my feet.
The first pay-day, of which I have made no mention yet, deserves some comment. I started an industrial revolution (quite unconsciously, I may add) by the simple process of paying the wages which I had offered. Here I must digress for a moment on the subject of the peon system in that country.
A judge could be induced to sign any document for a trifling consideration and was consequently the tool of the white population. Thus it came about that the Indians owned none of the land which should have been theirs by right of heredity, as it had all been filched from them by process of law. Consequently they had no money, and had to give their labour in exchange for the necessities of life. Now the landowners saw to it that the longer they worked, the more hopelessly in debt they became, charging them up in the bogus accounts which were usually kept by the plantation overseers with enough to ensure their never being able to clear themselves. Every overseer kept a small general store for this purpose. Thus no Indian ever received the pay for which he nominally worked. Moreover, as everyone of them was
Accordingly, when I proposed to pay cash at the rate of ten
But the matter didn't end in Salinas. Word spread to the Córdovez plantations that I was paying out good money, and that in Salinas a man could make money instead of piling up debt by working. Gradually the Indians of my village would voluntarily come to work, instead of being driven like cattle, and I could get a man to do anything I wanted done. At last old Córdovez heard of this, and when next I met him, broached the subject. Nothing I could say would suffice to persuade him that it was not sheer folly to pay out some of the gross takings when promises would do just as well.
And that was the commencement of my quarrel with the Córdovez.
It will have become clear already that the quarrel had its origin in the complete incompatibility of our points of view, commercially speaking. As an instance of how
The gap between us widened as little by little I discovered that my own interests would never be considered, despite the family's surprise and pleasure at the success of the salt venture. As time went on, I grew to realize that I had given a year's hard work, living on mutton and guinea-pigs, for nothing. So at last one day, when my own money had given out entirely, I put in my pocket all the cash I had collected at the mine, coasted down to "The Count's" plantation at El Porvenir, and told him that I was off. And so ended my acquaintance with Salinas.
I have already mentioned that the question of my finances troubled me not one bit up to the time when I broke with the Córdovez family. It is at this point, therefore, that I ought to mention how it was that I had about 350
bringing in a fortune fifty or sixty years afterwards when the bark could be utilized). It so happened that, just as I was handing the Count the cash balance from Salinas we were talking (he being the most serious-minded of all the family) about a small debt of some 25
"Well, you'd better keep the money. You'll want it on your journey."
I, never dreaming that he was not speaking of the money I had in my pocket, kept the three hundred and fifty which I had brought down from the mine. Afterwards I learned that it was his intention that I should keep the twenty-five for my year's work!
So I rode off on my mule to Talagna en route for Riobamba, expecting to pick up one of the horses which were always at my disposal on the Córdovez ranch there. I was disappointed, for I found that the old man had ordered that none should be given me. So I walked the fifty-six miles to my destination, in the company of some Indians with pack-mules, who also had to cross the Arenal on their way to a village called San Juan. I covered the distance in eighteen hours, to the disgust of old "Papa," who assured me that "there had been a misunderstanding at Talagna"! At Riobamba, I found that two of the sons were enjoying themselves in Quito, having divided my kit between them.