The present chapter, it is seen, is, in some small degree, designed to prime the intending traveller to Spanish America—or, if not the traveller, the person athirst for information concerning the region—with such geographical detail as he or she may assimilate without mental indigestion. In accordance with this purpose we may consider a few figures, which are indispensable if we are to gather any intelligent idea of extent and distance.
There are twenty independent republics of Spanish, or rather Latin America, ranging from the enormous Brazil, with an area of three and a quarter million square miles, down to little Salvador, with only seven thousand two hundred and twenty-five square miles. Among these twenty States we include Hayti and Santo Domingo, places which, although often mentioned with a smile when independent republics are spoken of, are nevertheless worthy of geographical respect.
THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: STONE STELÆ AT QUIRIGUA, CENTRAL AMERICA.
Vol. I. To face p. 32.
Between these great extremes of area mentioned above we have such countries as Argentina, with over a million square miles, and Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, with from nearly to over seven hundred thousand square miles, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile, with from over four to under three hundred thousand, Ecuador and Uruguay with half and a third those areas, and the remaining nine States of from about seventy thousand square miles down to about a tenth thereof.
The total area thus covered of this very diversified part of the earth's surface is about eight and a quarter million square miles, with a total population in the neighbourhood of eighty million souls.
It is of interest further to recollect that Brazil is larger than the United States or Canada, or larger than Europe without Russia. Even the little but progressive country of Uruguay, crowded by Brazil and Argentina into a corner of the Atlantic coast, is much larger than England.[1]
It is to be recollected that the areas given to these countries themselves in some cases include territory claimed by their immediate neighbours, for there are unsettled boundaries and frontiers, especially in the Amazon Valley. They must be regarded as only approximate.
The same remark holds good with regard to the population of these States. Exact enumeration is impossible, for the reasons both that the inhabitants are often enormously scattered over vast territories and that they often refuse to be numbered, or escape the census, fearing that they are to be taxed, or pressed into military service against their will, which latter condition has been a curse of Spanish America all through its history.
Much of our earlier knowledge of Northern South America and Mexico was due to Humboldt, the famous German savant and traveller. He was born in Berlin in 1769, but it would appear that Berlin was certainly not his "spiritual home." Paris was the only centre congenial to him, and he settled there in 1808, after his travels, in order to be able to secure the needful scientific co-operation for the publication of the results of his work. "The French capital he had long regarded as his true home. There he found not only scientific sympathy, but the social stimulus which his vigorous and healthy mind eagerly craved. He was equally in his element as the lion of the salons and as the savant of the institute and the observatory. The provincialism of his native city was odious to him. He never ceased to rail against the bigotry without religion, aestheticism without culture, and philosophy without common sense, which he found dominant on the banks of the Spree. He sought relief from this 'nebulous atmosphere' in Paris."[2]
It was by an accident that Humboldt directed his steps to Spanish America, for he had hoped, with Bonpland, to join Bonaparte in Egypt, but in Madrid he determined to make Spanish America the scene of his explorations. He explored the Orinoco, crossed the frozen Cordillera to Quito, investigated the mighty avenue of the Ecuadorian volcanoes—the farm he occupied still exists at their foot—and did much else in South America and in Mexico, geological, archæological, and botanical.
The foregoing glimpse of Berlin which Humboldt's view of his native city affords is not without interest to-day, when the savagery of the German character—a curious development of that earlier obscure philosophy—has been brought so prominently before the world and has brought Germany to moral ruin, and what is in part financial ruin and the loss of her colonies.
As has been said, methods of travel here are less inviting to the ordinary tourist than the well-prepared fields of the Old World. Its hotels—apart, perhaps, from a few here and there—are primitive, its railways are conducted for commercial purposes, there are no planned centres of delight and ease. No roads traverse the countryside whereon the motor-tourist may spend his hours. Between the primitive mule-trail or the bypath which the simple Indian has found sufficient for his purposes since the world began, and the railway, there is no via media. The coaching days of England never had their counterpart in Spanish America. The caballero, the horseman-gentleman, transplanted from old Spain, and all he represented embodied, and still embodies, the philosophy of the road. Here no one may walk the countryside, except the necessitous Indian. The dust would smother him, the naked rocks would cut his feet, he would lose caste for being on foot. No "local" botanist, antiquarian, nature-lover sallies forth from Spanish-American villages. The country squire is unknown, the landed estate is a hacienda, a hive of peones, dependent body and soul on the will of their masters. There are no week-end cottages; the "picnic," though its English name is not unknown, is a rare event. Sport, where it exists, is an institution engrafted from abroad.
Woman here is much enclosed in the seclusion of her home, save when she ventures to the temple and the priestly Mass, or to well-chaperoned and formal events—she dare not traverse the road alone, and, it may be said, with sufficient reason! The Spanish American youth, with his patent leather shoes and breadth of cuff and collar, loves not to leave the easy pavements of his towns, or their bars and cafés, for the unknown world beyond, whose beginning is the squalid Indian quarter which fringes the place around—unless indeed he may have turned revolutionist, a phase which does not usually take place much before middle age, when the Latin American generally takes on his serious political habit. Then indeed he must take to the road, unless a fortunate golpe de estado[3] shall complete the uprising within the city plaza.
The inland method of travel is the horse or mule: the saddle. Unfortunately the horse is not very happy here. In the Day of Judgment, if the beasts of the field ever bear witness against man, the horse will have a severe indictment to bring against the Spanish American people. He and his relative the mule have nowhere perhaps been so dreadfully ill-treated as in these lands of mountains and deserts. In Mexico we see him ridden to death by the callous vaquero; his thin and starving body passing like a swift shadow across the wilderness under the stimulus of enormous spurs. Or he is gored to death in the bull-ring. In South America he climbs, with enormous loads, the dizzy ridges of the Andes, under the blows and curses of the arriero, and, stumbling over the precipice, finds rest at times a thousand feet below, where his mummified carcass remains a warning to his kind. Or he passes his life on high uplands where pasture is unknown: his fodder a little dry straw.
The fact is that the Spanish American lands, in great part, did not seem fitted by nature for the equine race, and there was no horse in America before the Europeans introduced the animal there. There was nothing but the llama, the friend of the Indian, which is not ridden, but bears a small burden. The Indian himself at first displayed great terror of the horse (especially with an armoured Iberian on its back). He himself was accustomed to carrying his burdens. When he was told to take a horse he said: "No, horses get tired; we do not." When a Spaniard rode across the Isthmus of Panama upon a jackass he met some Indians, and the animal brayed, and the Indians fell down in terror and offered up their gold ornaments!
Yet the Latin Americans are perhaps the most expert of horsemen, and train and manage their steeds as no one else can.
Spanish America is not a land for the huntsman, not a land of big game. Its zoology is stinted. The lion and the tiger are represented only by some almost insignificant felines, and the other huge quadrupeds of the sportsman's rifle came not to being in the New World, or deserted