Chapter XVIII: In the Depths of Honduras

Just south of Guatemala is Honduras, nearly as large and in many ways much like it. But while Guatemala has a population of two and a quarter million, Honduras has only a third as many inhabitants. It has about as many people as Pittsburgh, but is larger than Pennsylvania. The Keystone State would be very thinly populated if 600,000 men, women and children were scattered through it. It is not strange, therefore, that during long stretches of my tramp across Honduras I saw not a single soul.

Except for a narrow strip of swampy land on either coast, Honduras consists in a series of elevated plateaus and rows of mountains. The cordillera, or main range of mountains, runs from northwest to southeast, parallel to and only about fifty miles from the Pacific coast. The slope toward the Atlantic is longer and more gentle than on the opposite side. Unlike Guatemala, Honduras has no active volcanoes, and no lakes. It is watered by many streams, but most of them are swift and stony, and none are really navigable. Because the smallest country of Central America crowds into Honduras on the west, its Pacific coast line is only sixty miles long as compared with an Atlantic coast line of four hundred miles.

Columbus discovered this country in 1502, on his fourth voyage to the New World. He called it Honduras, which in Spanish means “Great Depths,” because of the difficulty of getting anchorage in the deep waters along its Atlantic coast. But it is a land of great depths in another way also, for between its mountain ranges are immense valleys which sometimes seem to have no bottom. Peasants plant their patches of corn on slopes as steep as a church roof. Walking through the country is much like forever going up and down stairs.

In the higher parts of Honduras there are many pine and oak forests, and down on the narrow coasts the banana is much at home. Though tropical fevers are common, up on the table-land two blankets feel very comfortable at night. Near as Honduras is to the equator, frosts are frequent. The banana is the most important product, then come coffee, coconuts, rubber, tobacco and hides. There is considerable silver, mixed with a little gold, and some other valuable minerals. The American-owned mines of Rosario at San Juancito, twenty-five miles from the capital, are the largest silver mines in Central America. When I was there they employed about eight hundred men.

Social and Political Conditions

The early explorers found not only ancient rich mines but numerous pyramids and carved stones showing that there was once a real civilization in what is now Honduras. To-day the population is largely a mixture of Indian and Spanish blood. The people seldom weave their own garments, since they can buy foreign cloth with the profit from products that almost grow themselves. There are some negroes on the north coast, among the banana plantations, and on the Mosquito Coast there are Caribs, descendants of fierce Indians who once inhabited the West Indies and gave their name to the Caribbean Sea. Once the favorite refuge for runaway slaves from the West Indies, the Mosquito Coast even to-day has one of the most mixed populations in Central America.

Pan American Union

The famous Rosario mines in Honduras, showing ore being sorted by
native boys.
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From 1539 until 1821 all Central America was one Spanish colony. In 1822 Honduras was a part of the Mexican Empire; from then until 1839 it was a member of the Central America Federation. Since 1839 it has been independent, though it has tried several times to join with the other small republics in forming a Union.

I Plan to Walk

The only public railway in Honduras is a little line that starts out bravely from Puerto Cortés toward the capital, 250 miles distant. Puerto Cortés is a squalid village of wooden buildings in a hot swampy region on the low _north_ coast. (The link between the American continents swings almost due eastward below Guatemala.)

The railroad’s old wood-burning locomotive somehow manages to crawl thirty-eight miles to Potrerillos in the foothills. There, as if it were afraid to venture into the real mountains beyond, the daily train turns back again. Tegucigalpa and Bogotá (in Colombia) are the only American capitals that have no rail communication with the outside world. Beyond Potrerillos the rest of the journey consists of five rough hours in a very aged automobile, then four or five days on mule-back.

I might have taken the Guatemala railroad down to Puerto Barríos, where I could easily have crossed the Bay of Honduras, or followed the hot and swampy shore, to Puerto Cortés. There I might have taken the little Honduras railroad, later an automobile, and finally a mule to the capital. But I decided that it would be more interesting to go right down through the country to Tegucigalpa. That meant a long walk, for the trails of Honduras are so bad that in many places an animal cannot get over them. In such a country a man’s own legs are his surest means of transportation.

A Lonely Trail

Instead, therefore, of descending to the coast, I went back up the Motagua River from Quiriguá and left the railway at Zacapa. There I exchanged my ragged paper money for Honduran dimes (called _reales_ and worth only a nickel) and for some silver dollars from half a dozen near-by countries. Almost any kind of silver money can be used in Honduras but paper money is often quite worthless. Besides a full knapsack, I took with me a hammock to sleep in. Made of a kind of grass by the Indians of Guatemala, it weighed only three or four pounds, and cost but thirty cents!

The journey began with a hard afternoon walk over dry hills. I crossed four ranges and spent the first night in a narrow valley dense with vegetation. The home of the man who took me in was made of poles set up to form four walls, with roof of thatch. It would have looked to Americans like a poor tool shed. Such huts would be very unpleasant places to sleep in without a hammock. I hung mine between two posts and was soon asleep. I was not yet in Honduras, for I did not pass the unmarked boundary until the next day, but this was typical of my lodgings on the trip through that country.

Sometimes I had to hang my hammock from rafters so high that I could get in only by “chinning myself” and swinging over as if on a trapeze. Sometimes I swung from the porch of a cowshed, sometimes in a dirty hut where all the doors and windows were tightly closed. The price for such lodgings was usually five cents. One night when I occupied the corner of a _hacienda_-house veranda, if I had fallen out of my hammock I should have dropped eight or ten feet to a flagstone floor or twice that distance into a cobbled farmyard. At other times I hung so low that pigs wandering about in the night looking for something to eat lifted me up as they crawled under me; and several times children or grown people with blazing torches came to wake me up and look me over. Once in a while the night might be fairly quiet, but there was nearly always a great hubbub of roosters, dogs, cattle and pigs, or of people snoring.

As my hammock was merely a net, and the mountain nights were chilly, I was often too cold to sleep much. It was not always possible to find a house by nightfall, and several times I slept out under the trees, not knowing but that some wild animal would take it into his head to attack me. I remember one such night when a group of drunken peons wandered along the trail not far away, but they did not catch sight of me. Once I spent the night high up on a mountain in the hut of an old woman who was ill. A girl kept a fagot fire burning all night and smoked me like a ham hanging from the rafters. Yet how much filth that simple little thirty-cent hammock kept me out of! The country people of Honduras seldom have beds, and their houses have no floors. Once I tried sleeping Honduran fashion on a sun-dried oxhide thrown down on the uneven earth, with two empty grain sacks as mattress and covering, but I never tried it again!

Honduran Food

Each morning I folded up my hammock and set out again, nearly always without breakfast. The people got up late and I seldom had patience to wait for them to cook food for me. Yet if I did not wait, it might be half a day before I came to another hut. Often I almost lived on water, and none too good water at that, for the people of Honduras, lacking wells, use any near-by stream or pond. The traveler simply kneels at the water’s edge and drinks.

Two women of Honduras shelling corn and getting a meal ready for me.
Many Honduran houses have even poorer kitchens.
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A boy of Honduras with his father’s yoke of oxen. They do not plow
much land in a day, but the family raises only a little corn and a
few vegetables—just enough to live on.
]

There was no milk, butter, or cheese, though I saw plenty of cattle. Sometimes I was offered stale bread, but not often. Beans and Indian corn, and corn _tortillas_ that were heavier than those of Mexico, made up nearly every meal. Occasionally tough strips of sun-dried beef hung from the rafters; but even that kind of meat was rare. Once in a while there might be tomatoes as small as cherries; and always there was very bad black coffee. Even if roosters had kept me awake all night, the people would usually assure me that all the chickens had died or that they “belonged to someone else.” So I seldom got chicken—but when I did, an entire spring chicken never cost more than ten cents. I had better luck with eggs. However, the women insisted on breaking a hole in the egg before boiling it, and as neither cooks, water, nor dishes were clean I did not like the custom. The people of Honduras seem to have a superstition that an egg will not cook unless the boiling water gets inside it. Even if I offered to pay more for eggs without holes, the holes would be there and the cook would tell me that the eggs “broke themselves.”

One of the carved stones left by the Mayas at Copán, Honduras.
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