Chapter XVII: A Contrast in Civilizations

There have been three capitals of Guatemala. Ciudad Vieja (“Old City”), now a poor village with about three thousand Indian inhabitants, was founded by Pedro de Alvarado soon after he took possession of the country. He brought the best architects and workmen from Spain and planned to make this the metropolis of the New World. For a time it was the most magnificent city in the western hemisphere. But in 1541 it was suddenly destroyed by a flood when the lake in the crater of the volcano Agua (“Water”) broke through its banks.

The people then moved their capital two miles northeast and built another fine city. Long before any white men came to live in what is now the United States, the Guatemalan capital had tens of thousands of inhabitants. There were palaces and cathedrals there when we had only log cabins. Would you have imagined that in the heart of Central America a great city existed at the time the Dutch bargained with the Indians for the purchase of Manhattan Island?

The Spaniards had chosen a beautiful site, but nature again violently protested. This time the great volcano Fuego (“Fire”), quite as properly named as its destructive companion Agua, belched forth a flood of hot lava and destroyed the second capital. This city, now called Guatemala la Antigua (“the Ancient”), is famous for its ruins of great churches and palaces, but it has a population of only about seven thousand, mainly poor Indians. The volcanoes seem to be never satisfied, for the old capital has been devastated again and again by other eruptions, as well as by earthquakes, floods, and avalanches. It has also been visited by terrible epidemics of disease.

In the same year that our Declaration of Independence was written, our Central American neighbors built Guatemala la Nueva (“the New”), or Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. This city they located twenty miles from the second capital; but though it remains the capital, it also has been very badly treated. Some superstitious persons think that evil spirits live inside the earth and cause volcanoes and earthquakes. One might readily imagine that such spirits wanted to drive everyone away from that beautiful region about the foot of Agua and Fuego. Is it not queer that people insist on living again in places where they have been overtaken by disaster?

The present capital was to have been a copy of the old ones, but it has never equaled, in magnificence or population, Guatemala la Antigua. However, it has about 120,000 inhabitants and is the most important city of Central America. It stands on a small plain about 4,900 feet above sea level and seventy-two miles from San José, its port on the Pacific. Wool, cotton, leather goods and earthenware are manufactured, and there is quite an important commerce.

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A bird’s-eye view of Guatemala City. What a contrast this flat-roofed
town is to one of our skyscraper cities!
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Guatemala City is laid out in a checkerboard of wide but poorly paved streets. Most of its buildings are very low, because of the constant danger of earthquakes. The houses are covered with stucco, gaily painted. The main entrance door of a dwelling is often so large that a smaller door is cut in it for common use. The big door is opened only to admit the owner’s carriage or automobile, which goes through to the stable or garage at the back or side of the _patio_. Brass and iron knockers, beautifully wrought in the form of a human head or hand, take the place of bells at many of the best houses, and the great doors themselves are studded with iron or brass nails.

The shops which so often occupy the lower floor of a residence, instead of being in “business blocks,” have no glass windows, but only a big wide-open door. Goods are poorly displayed, and in most places prices are not fixed, so that one must do much bargaining before buying. In the public markets we see Indians who have walked many miles with merchandise on which they will make but a few cents’ profit. Indian women, in gaudy homespun garments, smoke big black cigars. Their heads are covered with masses of blue-black hair, and their skin shines like polished copper. The market, filled with the products of both tropical and temperate climates, gives one some idea of the richness of the country.

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The Cathedral in Guatemala City, damaged by the earthquake in 1917.
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Even this third and present capital of Guatemala has been several times destroyed. Indeed, it has been completely laid waste once since I first saw it. For a month following Christmas Day, 1917, it was shaken by a long series of earthquakes. Government buildings, schools, and hospitals were destroyed or damaged, as were the National Institute, with its laboratories, the museum, the meteorological observatory, the national theater, the metropolitan cathedral and other churches. Many of the buildings have been restored, but they have lost their old beauty as examples of Spanish art. The residence section has moved farther out into the country.

A Country inside Its Own Capital

So far as I know, Guatemala is the only country in the world of which one can see every nook and cranny by merely going to its capital. How? By means of a great relief map covering several acres, laid out inside the Guatemala City race track. It is made of cement, plaster and stone. There is a high platform on which one may walk clear around the map, studying it in detail. Turning a crank causes water to flow through the rivers, fill the lakes, and form the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Although I intended to see the rest of the real Guatemala, the map showed me all of its physical characteristics. Every mountain, every lake, river, valley, city, even the trail I intended to take out of the country, was there. If I had flown 230 miles across the country, between the two seacoasts, and from the Mexican border to Honduras and Salvador, I could not have learned more about the make-up of Guatemala than I did in my half-hour stroll around the relief map.

I could see that Guatemala is all mountains and high valleys, except for two strips of lowland along the coasts. Its highland scenery entitles it to be called the Switzerland of Central America. However, Switzerland is often snow-covered, while Guatemala, wherever vegetation can grow, is green all the year round. Among its mountains are twenty-eight volcanoes, some of them as perfect cones as Fujiyama in Japan. As most of these are still active, and many of them throw out lava and ashes frequently, part of the country is very bare. On the big relief map I could see the volcano that blew its head off in 1902, ruining the city of Quezaltenango and covering valuable coffee lands several feet deep with volcanic ash. I could locate all of Guatemala’s beautiful blue lakes. Over there, nearest the Pacific, is Lake Atitlán, filling the crater of an extinct volcano five thousand feet high, and almost in the shadow of three very active cones. This lake is twenty-five miles long, with eighteen green islands in it; and it is so deep that its bottom has never been found. Eighteen miles from the capital is Lake Amatitlán; along its shore and across part of it runs the railroad from the Pacific coast.

Inside the race track at Guatemala City is a big relief map of the
entire country. Every mountain peak, every stream, every trail is
shown. Water can be turned on to fill the rivers and lakes.
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Through Guatemala

Although I obtained from the big relief map at Guatemala City a clear idea of the lay of the land in the most important country of Central America, the map, of course, did not show me the people and their ways, and I was chiefly interested in these. So I took the train again a few days later, this time toward the east. After crossing a range of mountains, we started down toward the coast beside a racing river. Rather than go on to Puerto Barríos, the chief port of Guatemala on the Atlantic, I left the train sixty miles inland in order to visit one of the former centers of Mayan civilization.

Great civilizations almost always spring up in valleys, and here in the valley of the Motagua River the most advanced Indians in North America had their home. The Mayas flourished for some fifteen hundred years, beginning about the time of Christ. Quiriguá, the ruins of which I had stopped to visit, was probably built in the fifth century and abandoned more than a thousand years ago. No one knows why the Mayas left this part of the country and moved northward into Yucatan. Earthquakes, pestilence, human enemies, or even superstition may have driven them out. Or they may simply have decided to move, though most people would not have abandoned, without good reason, such splendid stone cities as they left behind.

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At Quiriguá, Guatemala, is this strange example of the carving left by
the Mayas.
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The ruins of Quiriguá, lost for centuries, were discovered in 1839 by John Lloyd Stephens, an American. Later, when Americans built the railway through Guatemala, great mounds and mammoth stone ruins were found. But the largest uncovering of ruins was done by the United Fruit Company in 1910. Where the Mayas once had a great city, there is now a 13,000-acre banana plantation. However, the company has left seventy-five acres, on which are the best ruins, free from planting. Fifteen of these acres have been cleared of jungle, but one who wishes to visit all the ruins must chop his way through dense tropical vegetation.

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A great stone left by the Mayas at Quiriguá.
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Ants and decay have destroyed all the woodwork in the ancient Mayan cities, not only at Quiriguá but at Cobán, at Copán in Honduras, and in many parts of Salvador and Yucatan. The stonework remains, and recent American expeditions have uncovered statues and curiously carved stones, some of them enormous, and whole buildings that must have been very splendid when new. Some of the carved stones you may see in American museums. Half above and half below the ground are great monuments, resembling those of Egypt, and bearing hieroglyphics that the archeologists are still trying to read. Some of the stone-carved faces look so much like the figures at Chinese imperial tombs that many people think the Mayas were Tartars who made their way from Asia across Bering Strait and down into Central America.

Like the Chinese, these Central Americans seem to have considered the turtle sacred, and to have used it as an emblem of long life. One of the largest monuments I saw at Quiriguá was a turtle eight feet high and said to weigh twenty tons. It was completely covered with carvings and hieroglyphics. Enough of the writing has been translated to show that here was once a great city, with _plazas_, temples and palaces. Great forests have overgrown the pyramids and mounds of the Mayas. As there is no natural stone in this region they must have brought from a distance the immense blocks of sandstone which they used. But how? Perhaps they floated them down the Motagua River on rafts. Yet how did they lift them to the places they now occupy?

At the height of their power the Mayas were as good architects and builders as the Aztecs, and their calendar, cut in stone, was better than the one in Mexico City. But about the fifteenth century they seem to have begun to weaken, and their downfall was hastened by the Spanish conquest. At first they fought stubbornly against the conquerors. But the Mayas of to-day are docile, almost childish, only half civilized; and they scarcely realize that their forefathers were once the most advanced people on the North American continent.

“Bananaland”

I spent a night with the American overseers of one of the banana plantations that cover the country between Quiriguá and the Atlantic. Many miles of private railroads run through the region that was formerly jungle-covered swamp, and from there millions of bunches of bananas go to the United States and Europe. Nearly all the hot lowlands of Central America grow bananas for us, most of the plantations belonging to Americans. Shiploads of bananas leave Puerto Barríos and other east-coast ports every week.

In the morning my hosts lent me a hand car having a seat, and two muscular West Indian negroes pumped me for miles through “bananaland.” This plantation of Quiriguá is one of the smallest in Guatemala, and there are much larger ones in other countries, yet as far as I could see were waving banana leaves, very green and very large, with here and there a huge hardwood tree. Banana fruit grows not on a tree but on a great plant having a fleshy rootstock or rhizome. Large buds or “eyes” develop on the rootstock. What looks like a trunk is really a mass of overlapping leaf-sheaths. Pieces of the rootstock are planted, and, if these fail to sprout, shoots are cut and stuck in the ground to grow. Only one bunch of bananas grows on a plant. It hangs over at the top, about ten feet from the ground, and at first glance it looks as if it were growing upside down. As a matter of fact the bunch is hung upside down later on when displayed in fruit store or grocery, and we are used to seeing it in that position.

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A fully developed bunch of bananas ready for harvesting.
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A burly negro, carrying a long pole at the end of which is a knife, nicks the plant, just below the middle of the “trunk”; the upper half swings down and a helper severs the bunch with his machete. The fruit is laid carefully on the ground, for if a single banana is bruised, the whole bunch and perhaps many others around it will spoil before the destination is reached. In a few minutes a train comes along, and each bunch is laid on a cushion of leaves in one of the open cars. The men know how many bunches will fill a car and how many carloads will fill a ship, and they know, too, just when each bunch should be cut so as to reach the American market in good condition. Bananas going to England have to be cut earlier. At the wharf the fruit is carefully carried aboard either on wide endless belts or on negroes’ heads. It is put in the ice-cooled hold of the ship, which is kept at just the right temperature.

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Bananas are carried to the railway by a steam tram which runs through
the plantation.
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After the old stalk has been cut down, another banana plant grows up rather quickly from it. Before long a big flower, usually purple in color, appears at the top of the plant, and slowly the tiny bunch of bananas beneath it grows to its full size and is ready, in its turn, to be cut. A banana plantation is more or less perennial, though it takes plenty of labor and watchfulness to keep it producing its best.

A _ripe_ banana is never seen in a banana plantation, unless someone has been careless. If the bunches were not cut down and shipped before a single banana turned yellow, the fruit would be completely decayed before it reached us. Its flavor is best when it is cut from the tree in a green condition and allowed to ripen slowly. The Central Americans fry and bake bananas, especially the species called the plantain which is never eaten until cooked. The natives dry bananas as we do grapes, they grind them up for flour, and they even make banana wine and vinegar.

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A banana steamship is quickly loaded by use of machinery.
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As nearly all plantation workers are negroes, and the bosses almost all Americans or Englishmen, English is much oftener spoken than Spanish in the banana lands of the Caribbean.