South America Observations and Impressions. Viscount James Bryce
in any previous age; yet years may elapse before the full results of the opening of the Canal disclose themselves. Some of the commercial as well as the political consequences which have been due to the making of the Suez Canal were altogether unforeseen. If a dozen of the most important experts were, in 1914, to write out and place in the library of the British Museum and the library of Congress their respective forecasts bearing on this subject, sealed up and not to be opened till A.D. 2000, they might make curious reading in that latter year.
The chief impressions which the scenery of the Isthmus makes on the traveller have already been indicated, – the contrast of the wildness and solitude of the region with its wonderful geographical position, which long ago seemed destined to make it a centre of commerce and population, the contrast of the advantages offered by that position with the slothful neglect of those advantages by its Spanish rulers, the contrast one sees to-day between the busy crowd of workers along this narrow line cut out from the vast forest and the untouched unpeopled nature on each side, the contrast between the black cloud of death that hung over it for four centuries and the sunshine of health and energy which medical science has now poured around it.
But the strongest impression of all is that here one sees the latest, so far as can be foreseen, of any large changes which man is likely to try to work upon the surface of the earth. Tunnels longer than any yet made may be bored through mountains or carried under arms of the sea. The courses of rivers may be diverted. Reservoirs vaster than any we know may be constructed to irrigate arid tracts or supply electric power to cities, and bridges may be built to span straits like the Bosphorus, or railroads, like that recently opened in southern Florida, be carried through the sea along a line of reefs. But nowhere else do there remain two continents to be divided, two oceans to be connected, by a water channel cut through a mountain range.
There is a tale that when the plan for digging a canal at Panama was first mooted, Philip the Second of Spain was deterred from it by the argument, pressed by his clerical advisers, that if the Almighty had wished the seas to be joined, He would have joined them, just as, according to Herodotus, the people of Knidus were deterred by the Delphic oracle from cutting through the isthmus along which their Persian enemies could advance by land to attack them. If Zeus had wished the place to be an island, said the oracle, he would have made it one. But when an age arrived in which commercial and scientific views of nature prevailed against ecclesiastics, it became certain that here a canal would be some time or other made. Made it now has been. It is the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature.
CHAPTER II
THE COAST OF PERU
The first part of the voyage from Panama down the coast towards Peru is enjoyable when made in a steamer, for the sea is smooth, the southerly breeze is usually light, and after passing through the picturesque isles that lie off Panama one sees at no great distance those Pearl Islands which at one time rivalled the isles of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf as the chief pearl fishery of the world. One wonders at the difficulties experienced by the first Spanish adventurers, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and after him Pizarro, in their efforts to get south, but the reason is that a strong current sets into the Gulf, and against it and the prevailing south winds it was hard for the clumsy craft of those days to make progress. But on the second morning when we had got four or five hundred miles to the south, what was our surprise to find the temperature getting lower and the sky cloudier as we approached the equator. It was chilly that evening and we asked for blankets. Dreams of a delightful basking in the soft air of a sunlit sea were dispelled! We were entering cold weather, and it was to continue with us for thousands of miles, all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
Everybody knows nowadays how largely the climate and the flora and the civilization of western Europe are due to the Gulf Stream. But one may suspect that few people have heard of an ocean current on the other side of America equal in length and volume and scarcely less important in its influence on climate. The great Antarctic current, or Humboldt current, as it is sometimes called from the illustrious German who first scientifically observed and explained it, carries up from southern Chile to some distance north of the Equator a vast body of cold water which chills the atmosphere of the ocean and the coast and frequently covers them both with a roof of cloud. Before he crosses the Line, the traveller encounters this murky and ungenial weather, which excited the wonder of the early Spanish writers, who expected to find a zone just as torrid as they had found on the Atlantic. Seldom thereafter (during fully half the year) does he see clear blue sky, save for perhaps an hour or two each day, all the way southward as far as Valparaiso. The mists and clouds which this mass of cold water brings give the sun, the chief deity of the ancient Peruvians of the inner country, no chance on the coast, while the fogs are so frequent as to be a source of anxiety to the navigator, and the clouds so thick that the great peaks of the Andes, though at some points only fifty or sixty miles distant, can rarely be seen from the ocean.
But its cool and cloudy climate is only one of the singular features of the coast. From the Isthmus till one gets a little way south of the Equator at the Gulf of Guayaquil, the usual wet summer season of the tropics prevails and the abundant rains give to the highlands along the coast of Colombia and Ecuador splendid forests, which will one day be a source of wealth to those countries. But at this point, or to be more precise, about the boundary of Ecuador and Peru, near the town of Tumbez where Pizarro landed, the climatic conditions suddenly change, and there begins a rainless tract which extends down the coast as far as Coquimbo in 30° S. latitude. The vaporous moisture which the southeasterly trade winds bring up from the other side of the continent is most of it spent in showers falling on the eastern side of the Andes, and what remains is absorbed by the air of the dry plateaux between the parallel chains of that range, so that hardly any passes over to the western side of the mountains. The Antarctic current, cooling the air of the warmer regions it enters, creates plenty of mists but no rain, the land being warmer than the sea. Thus so much of the coast of western South America as lies between the ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes from Tumbez nearly to Valparaiso, for a distance of some two thousand miles, is dry and sterile. This strip of land varies in width from forty to sixty miles. It is crossed here and there by small rivers fed by the snows of the Andes behind, and along their banks are oases of verdure. Otherwise the whole coast of the strip is a bare, brown, and dismally barren desert.
We had hoped before reaching the arid region to touch at the city of Guayaquil, which is the chief port and only place of commercial importance in the mountain republic of Ecuador. It had, however, been put under quarantine by Peru, owing to the appearance in it of yellow fever and the Oriental plague, so we had to pass on without landing, as quarantine would have meant a loss of eight or ten days out of our limited time. Ecuador is not the most progressive of the South American countries, and Guayaquil enjoys the reputation of being the pest-house of the continent, rivalling for the prevalence and malignity of its malarial fevers such dens of disease as Fontesvilla on the Pungwe River in South Africa and the Guinea coast itself, and adding to these the more swift and deadly yellow fever, which has now been practically extirpated from every other part of South America except the banks of the Amazon. The city stands in a naturally unhealthy situation among swamps at the mouth of a river, but since Havana and Colon and Vera Cruz and Rio de Janeiro and even Santos, once the deadliest of the Brazilian ports, have all been purified and rendered safe, it seems to be high time that efforts should be made to improve conditions at a place whose development is so essential to the development of Ecuador itself.
Seeing far off the dim grey mountains around the Gulf of Guayaquil, but not the snowy cone of Chimborazo which towers behind them, we touched next morning at our first Peruvian port, the little town of Payta, and here got our first impression of those South American deserts with which we were to become so familiar. It is a row of huts constructed of the whitish sun-baked mud called adobe which is the usual building material in the flat country, with two or three shipping offices and stores and a railway station, for a railway runs hence up the country to the old town of Piura. A stream from the Andes gives fertility to the long Piura valley which produces much cotton of an extremely fine quality. There are also oil wells not far off, so Payta does some business, offering as good an anchorage as there is on this part of the coast. We landed and climbed to the top of the cliffs of soft strata that rise steeply from the water, getting a wide view over the bay and to the flat-topped hills that rise fifteen miles or more inland. The sun had come out, the air was clear and fresh,