In the Footprints of the Padres | Page 9

might never again float through
Monkey Land, with clouds of parrots hovering over us and a whole
menagerie of extraordinary creatures making side-shows of themselves
on every hand.
At Virgin Bay we were crowded like sheep into lighters, that were
speedily overladen. Very serious accidents have happened in
consequence. A year before our journey an overcrowded barge was
swamped at Virgin Bay and four and twenty passengers were drowned.
The "Transit Company," supposed to be responsible for the life and
safety of each one of us, seemed to trouble itself very little concerning
our fate. The truth was they had been paid in full before we boarded the
Star of the West at Pier No. 2, North River.
Having landed in safety, in spite of the negligence of the "Transit
Company," our next move was to secure some means of transportation
over the mountain and down to San Juan del Sur. We were each
provided with a ticket calling for a seat in the saddle or on a bench in a
springless wagon. Naturally, the women and children were relegated to
the wagons, and were there huddled together like so much live stock
destined for the market. The men scrambled and even fought for the
diminutive donkeys that were to bear them over the mountain pass. A
circus knows no comedy like ours on that occasion. It is true we had
but twelve miles to traverse, and some of these were level; but by and
by the road dipped and climbed and swerved and plunged into the
depths, only to soar again along the giddy verge of some precipice that
overhung a fathomless abyss. That is how it seemed to us as we clung
to the hard benches of our wagon with its four-mule attachment.
Once a wagon just ahead of us, having refused to answer to its brakes,
went rushing down a fearful grade and was hurled into a tangle of
underbrush,--which is doubtless what saved the lives of its occupants,
for they landed as lightly as if on feather-beds. From that hour our
hearts were in our throats. Even the thatched lodges of the natives,
swarming with bare brown babies, and often having tame monkeys and
parrots in the doorways, could not beguile us; nor all the fruits, were

they never so tempting; nor the flowers, though they were past belief
for size and shape and color and perfume.
Over the shining heights the wind scudded, behatting many a head that
went bare thereafter. Out of the gorges ascended the voice of the waters,
dashing noisily but invisibly on their joyous way to the sea. From one
of those heights, looking westward over groves of bread-fruit trees and
fixed fountains of feathery bamboo, over palms that towered like
plumes in space and made silhouettes against the sky, we saw a long,
level line of blue--as blue and bluer than the sky itself,--and we knew it
was the Pacific! We were little fellows in those days, we children; yet I
fancy that we felt not unlike Balboa when we knelt upon that peak in
Darien and thanked God that he had the glory of discovering a new and
unnamed ocean.
Why, I wonder, did Keats, in his famous sonnet "On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer," make his historical mistake when he sang--
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims
into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He stared at the
Pacific,--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
It mattered not to us whether our name was Cortez or Balboa. With any
other name we would have been just as jolly; for we were looking for
the first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we
were shortly to brave it in a vessel bound for the Golden Gate. At our
time of life that smacked a little of circumnavigation.
San Juan del Sur! It was scarcely to be called a village,--a mere handful
of huts scattered upon the shore of a small bay and almost surrounded
by mountains. It had no street, unless the sea sands it fronted upon
could be called such. It had no church, no school, no public buildings.
Its hotels were barns where the gold-seekers were fed without
ceremony on beans and hardtack. Fruits were plentiful, and that was
fortunate.
There, as in every settlement in Central America, the eaves of the

dwellings were lined with Turkey buzzards. These huge birds are
regarded with something akin to veneration. They are never molested;
indeed, like the pariah dogs of the Orient, they have the right of way;
and they are evidently conscious of the fact, for they are tamer than