Peru in the Guano Age

I was employed to take the level of a railway that was to connect the Roblé with the shores of the Mediterranean. The proposed line passed through one of the great estates of the Marquis de Blanco, and the Marquis gave me a letter to his capitaz or overseer, who occupied a house, the sight of which would have charmed the soul of an artist, on one of the overhanging cliffs which rose above el Rio Verde. I arrived late and, after twelve hours hard work beneath an Andalusian sun. I was well received by the capitaz and his charming wife Doña Carmen, who with her own hands and in my presence prepared for my supper a partridge and other delightful things. If the day had been hot, the night on the highest point of the royal road to Ronda was cold. A glorious wood fire added to the universal beauty of everything. A table was spread for me with a snowy diaper cloth. I can see it now – a bottle of fine wine, most sweet bread, raisins and what not. Just as my partridge was ready, a clatter of twenty horses' hoofs was heard in the patio. The capitaz went out to see the new arrivals, who turned out to be farmers of the district on their way to the horse fair, which was to be held in Ronda the following day. In came the twenty pilgrims to Ronda, to whom I was formally introduced, and Doña Carmen set to work to prepare an enormous Olla for the whole company. My partridge was not served until the Olla was ready, when we all set to work and ate our supper in peace and good-will. An hour afterwards, whether from the effects of the delightful wine – only to be enjoyed in Spain, the fumes of my own pipe and the cigarettes of the twenty pilgrims, the labours of the day, or all combined, I fell a nodding: whereupon the good-natured capitaz enquired if I would not like to throw myself into bed. On which I rose, and declared with great solemnity that for my rudeness in having gone to sleep in such worshipful company, I was ready to throw myself not only into bed but into the river below.

'Doña Carmen,' said the capitaz, 'shall take you to your room.'

And with a general good-night to the pilgrims and a shake of the hand with the capitaz, away I went in the wake of Doña Carmen.

It was a spacious room, filled with implements of sport, the walls adorned with heads of deer and other trophies of the gun, and there were also unmistakeable signs of its being a lady's room.

'Doña Carmen,' I observed in an imperative tone, 'this is your own room. I am an old traveller, and can sleep in a hay-loft or on the floor, with my saddle for a pillow. At any rate, I will not sleep here. I will not turn you out of your own room.'

'And,' she demanded, 'what would the Marquis say if he knew that you had slept here in the hay-loft or on the floor, with your saddle for a pillow?'

Other expostulations followed, which were answered with great eloquence and stately determination, mixed with that grave humour which can no more be acquired than can be acquired the wearing of a cloak as it is worn by an ancient hidalgo, or the arrangement of a mantilla as it is arranged on the head and shoulders of a high-born lady of Granada.

At last, as I caught up my satchel to leave the room, she caught me by the arm, and nudging me with her elbow, she said with much archness, 'I am coming back again,' and with that she swept out of the room, leaving me no longer with my eyes half closed in sleep.

She never came back. Nor did I ever see her again. She never intended to come back. Those who think so are incapable of making or understanding a joke, and will never be able to appreciate the uncommon wit and humour of Spanish women. That there are shallow fools in the world who interpret everything they hear in a carnal and literal sense is the reason why we have so many childish, not to say unpleasant, stories from Spain and Peru regarding the questionable morals of the fair sex of those countries. What is meant for fun and drollery is mistaken for naughtiness, and much that is offered as a spontaneous natural hospitality has been wilfully or ignorantly misconstrued. I do not defend the method Doña Carmen took in putting her guest at his ease, and making him feel at home; I think it was a daring act of politeness, and it is not pretty to find so much knowledge of the world in the possession of a woman, however dexterous her use of it may be. There is, however, another kind of culture besides that which comes from reading expensive novels, dressing for church or dinner, and living in a climate somewhat cold, foggy, and changeable. The ladies of Peru are beautiful, natural, very intelligent, and fond of living an unconstrained life. Their climate is provocative of freedom, ease, and delightful idleness. Their fair speech and delightful wit partake of these characteristics. It is born of these. It can be misinterpreted – but only by those who know not their language, and do not respect their ways.

A common source of error on the subject of Peruvian hospitality arises from the fact that in Lima, for example, a foreigner, even an Englishman, is rarely or never invited to dine with a native family. With us, if we meet a man in Bond Street, or anywhere on the wing, whom we have not seen for a year, we ask him to come and take pot-luck with us, and if he is a foreigner he generally does – and notwithstanding the detestable anxiety of our wives, our pot-luck dinners are the best dinners that we give. What is lacking in the mutton we can and often do make up with the bottle or the pipe. This is the kind of thing we expect in return when we visit Lima and pick up a man who has thus dined with us at home. But the thing is impossible. In Lima a married man dines with his grandmother, his wife's grandmother, his wife's father and mother, together with his wife and the children, whom the old people love to spoil with sugar-plums. The ladies are only half dressed, the service is somewhat slatternly, the dishes, although excellent in their way, are such as do not please the weak stomachs of benighted Englishmen, much less the French, who have not made the acquaintance of the puchero, the ajijaco, or the omnipresent dulces. In short, a stranger at a Peruvian family dinner, unexpected and without a formal preparation, would be as acceptable as a dog at Mass. And when an Englishman is invited to one of these houses he never forgets the things done in his honour – the loads of dishes – the floods of wine – the magnificent dresses of the ladies – the elaborate display of everything; – and oh! the stately coldness, the searching of dark eyes, and the awful sense of responsibility which rests on the being for whom all this has been done, and who is the solitary cause of it all. He never accepts another invitation. And yet the people have strained every nerve to please him; they have made themselves ill, have spent an awful sum of money, and less and less believe in dining a man as the most perfect form of showing him their respect or esteem.

But out of Lima, in El Campo – the country – where everybody is free as the air, everything is changed, everybody is happy, nothing goes wrong. The abundance is glorious, the ease and liberty delightful; there is nothing to equal it in the riding, dancing, eating, drinking, laughing, sleeping, dreaming, card-playing, smoking, joking world.

El Señor Paz Soldan, in his 'Historia del Peru Independiente,' says: 'Peru, essentially hospitable, admitted into her bosom from the first days of her independence thousands of foreigners, to whom she extended not only the same fellowship she afforded her own children, but such was the goodness of the country that she considered these new comers as illustrious personages. Men who in their native country had never been anything but domestic servants, or waiters in a restaurant, among whom there might perhaps be numbered one or two who, by their superior ability, might, after the lapse of twenty years, come to be master tailors or shop-men, have gained fortunes in Peru all at once, have won the hand of ladies of fortune, birth, riches, and social distinction. Those who have entered the army or navy have quickly risen to the highest posts. If they devote themselves to business, at once they become capitalists; and in civil and political appointments the foreigner is hardly to be distinguished from the native. The first decrees ever issued gave every protection and preference to foreigners resident in the country. They have the same right to the protection of the laws as Peruvians, without exception of persons, becoming of course bound by the same laws, to bear the same burdens, and in proportion to their fortunes to share in contributing to the income of the State… Such as have any knowledge of science, or special industry, or are desirous of establishing houses of business, can reside in perfect freedom, and have given to them letters of citizenship. He who establishes a new industry, or invents a useful machine hitherto unknown in Peru, is exempt for a whole year from paying any taxes. If necessary, the Government will supply him with funds to carry on his art; and it will give free land to agriculturists. And yet, strange to say, and more painful to confess, many of these foreigners have been the cause of serious difficulties to the country, plunging it into conflicts which more or less have taken the gilt off the national honour. They have wished for themselves certain distinct national laws. They have thought themselves entitled to break whatever laws they pleased, and when the penalty has been enforced they have applied to their Governments, who have always judged the question in an aspect the most unfavourable to the honour and interest of Peru.'

As regards this hospitality given to English tailors and tailors' sons by Peru, it is quite true; true is it that they have married the rich daughters of ancient families, and made marvellous progress in all things that distinguished Dives from Lazarus. Men who would never have been anything but lackeys in their own country have become masters of lands and money in Peru. It is all true. Without wishing to disparage my own countrymen, and still less my countrywomen, I am bound to confess that the Peruvians have derived very little edification from their presence and example. Within the Guano Age a British minister has been shot at his own table in Lima while dining with his mistress. The captain of an English man-of-war lying in Callao was murdered in the outskirts of Lima while on a drunken spree: the murderers in both cases never being brought to justice.

The English merchants were men noted for neither moral nor intellectual capacity, utterly innocent of any culture, or regard for it; of no manners or good customs that could reflect honour on the English name, and who gained fortunes after such fashion as only the practices of a corrupt government could sanction or connive at. Few English ladies have ever been permanently resident in Lima. It has been visited by one or two showy examples of the money-monger class; but the Lima people have not had the opportunity of knowing by actual contact in their own country the gentry of England. This has been a disadvantage to us and to them of the greatest magnitude: for while we have accepted the hospitality of Peru, we have not returned it in a manner worthy of the English name.

Nor can it be said that English travellers who have written on Peru make any very great figure in the cause of truth and honesty; whilst the amount of literary pilfering has been almost as notorious as that of the pillage of the public treasury by native officers of state.

The commanders and petty officers of the Steam Navigation Company in the Pacific come more in contact with the better class of Peruvians than any other portion of the English community. Among these numerous officers there are a few to be met with who can speak grammatical English. No doubt, grammar to a sailor is an irksome thing, at any rate it is a thing of minor importance, and we rather like our sailors to be free of everything except their courage, their gentleness, their love of truth, and, above all, their glorious self-abnegation. But it is a pitiable sight to see a British tar with lavender kid-gloves on his fists, Havannah cigars in his great mouth, widened by an early love for loud oaths, rings on his fingers, and other apings of the fine gentleman; and it is disgusting to see him dressed in an authority he knows not how to adorn, and placed in a position which he can only degrade. Yet these British tars are looked up to as English gentlemen, and, what is more, as English captains; and not a few Peruvians come to the natural conclusion that it is no great thing to be an English gentleman after all.

It is very grievous to make these remarks; justice demands, however, that if we would criticise the Peruvians from an English standpoint, we should take into consideration the English example which has been placed before them during all the years of an Age of Guano.

An English sailor in every part of the commercial world which he visits is too often a disgrace to himself and a dishonour to his country. But in Peru he is a standing disgrace to humanity. When on shore, if he is not drunk, he is kicking up a row. His language is foul, his manners brutal, his associates the off-scouring of the people, and his appearance that of a wild beast. We have of late been turning our attention to unseaworthy ships, and the amount of wise and unwise talk that this important subject has evoked has been great and surprising. It is a pity that no one has thought it necessary to take up the subject of the unworthy sailor, which should include not only the ignorant, drunken, and grossly depraved seaman, but the oftentimes illiterate, ill-conditioned, and brutal creature called a captain, who commands him. There are many considerations why the captain of a British ship should be a man of good character, and there are imperative reasons why he should be compelled to earn a certificate of good conduct, as well as a certificate of proficiency in the science of navigation. The ability to represent the country whose flag he carries, as a man well-instructed and of good manners, is not the least of those reasons.

I recently had the opportunity of becoming personally acquainted with nearly five hundred captains of merchant ships in the Pacific. I am ashamed to confess that the French, the Italian, the North American, and the Swede were everyway superior men to the English captains. There were exceptions of course; the superiority was not in physical force, but in intelligence, in manners, in the cleanliness in which they lived, and the sobriety of their lives. If the Pabellon de Pica may be compared to a pig-stye, the British sailors who frequent its strand may be likened unto swine. Indeed, it is an insult to that filth-investigating but sober brute to compare him with a being who at certain times is at once a madman, a drunkard, and not infrequently a murderer. It is not easy to escape the conviction that captains such as these must be of use to their employers, and are needed for purposes for which ordinary criminals would be unfitted. At the Pabellon de Pica a choice selection of these British worthies may be seen daily getting drunk on smuggled beer, winding up with smuggled brandy, wallowing among the filthiest filth of that foul concourse of filthy inhuman beings, a detestable example to all who witness it; and a living ensample of what England now is to a guano-selling people.

All this has come of our trying to do some justice to the Peruvians, and no doubt it will become us as quickly as possible to attend to the mote which is in our own eye.

It should likewise be borne in mind that the Peruvians have suffered the greatest indignities at the hands of successive British Governments. Claims for money of the most vexatious, frivolous and irritating nature have been pressed upon Peru with an arrogance equal only to their ridiculous extravagance. When at last, with great difficulty, our Government has been induced to submit one of these claims to arbitration, judgment has invariably been given against us – as it only could, or ought to have been given.

This chapter should not be closed without noticing the fact that for nearly fifty years the English have had their own burying-place at Bella Vista, which is midway between Lima and Callao, and their own church and officiating chaplain. The Jews likewise have their synagogue, the Freemasons their lodges, the Chinese their temples; and although liberty of worship is not the law of the land, the utmost toleration in religious matters exists. The women of Lima, who have retained the old religion with ten times more firmness than the men, are the sole opponents of all religious reforms in the Peruvian Constitution. And because it is the women who stand in front of their Church, guarding it with their lives, let us have some respect for them. They are a powerful and determined body, as courageous as they are beautiful, which is saying much. In times of great excitement they will take part in the parliamentary debates! Not, indeed, in a parliamentary and constitutional manner, but in a manner quite effectual. These fair champions of their Church, when liberty of worship, or liberty of teaching, or any question that touches the Roman Catholic faith is being debated in the assembly, proceed thither in the tapada attire, with only one eye visible, and from the Ladies' Gallery will throw handfuls of grass to a speaker – intimating thereby his relationship to one of our domestic quadrupeds – or garlands of tinsel, just as it pleases them, and as the words of the speaker are for or against their cause. Our own House of Commons should take knowledge of this, and pause before they remove the lattice work from before their Ladies' Gallery!

CHAPTER II

The Mormons are coming to Peru. Five hundred families of this formidable sect are formally announced as being on their way to the land of the Incas, and the Peruvian Government has been very liberal in its grant of free land: this may be called a revolution indeed. A Spanish law existed in Peru but little more than half a century ago, which ran as follows: 'Because the inconveniences increase from foreigners passing to the Indies, who take up their residence in seaport towns and other places, some of whom are not to be trusted in the things of our holy Catholic faith, and because it becomes us diligently to see that no error is sown among the Indians and ignorant people, we command the Viceroys, the Audiencias, and the Governors, and we charge the Archbishops and Bishops that they do all that in them lies to sweep the earth of this people, and that they cast them out of the Indies and compel them to put to sea on the first occasion and at their own cost1.' We may also note that among these sublime laws one may be found which absolutely forbade the importation of printed books.

Since then it cannot be denied that Peru has made great progress in the matter of toleration to foreigners. It has not perpetuated the insane and suicidal policy of the nation that expelled the Moors, the real bone and muscle of the country, from its soil. And it may truly be said that what the Moors were to Andalusia and Southern Spain, Europeans and Asiatics have been to Peru; supplying it not only with literature and science, but industry also. All the great estates of Peru are tilled by foreigners; so are its gardens. All the steam ships on its coast are driven by foreigners; foreigners surveyed and built their railways, their one pier, gave them gas, and would give them water if the Peruvian Government would only be wise. There is nothing of importance in the whole country that does not owe its existence to foreign capital and foreign thought, and it cannot be denied that Peru has done much in making her laws conform to such a state of things. It may yet do more. Ten more years of peace and tranquillity will work wonders in a land that at present may be said to be practically unacquainted with both. Ten years will close the accursed Age of Guano. Practically it may be said to be closed now. Peru is putting her house in order: she has learned much in the course of the last four years, and with economy, persisting in her present course of real hard, honest work, giving up playing at soldiers, and keeping an expensive navy which is of no earthly use to her, she may redeem herself from her past degradation, and become as great as she says she is.

But Mormons!

If there be a country in the teeming world which offers a field for Mormonism, it is Peru. If Mormonism be a belief that it is the chief end of man to multiply his species, to replenish the earth, and find the perfection of his being in subduing it, Peru is the very place for the Mormons. One might even go the length of saying that it was made on purpose for them.

Peru, with the immensity of its territory and the riches that are enclosed in it, requires a people with a religious faith in the divinity of polygamy and agriculture to make the most of the truly wonderful land.

Let the Mormons leave the country in which they are at present looked down upon, for one where they will be welcomed.

Mormonism is not, with the exception of its name, new to Peru. The Incas were great breeders of men, they pushed their humanising conquests north and south; not so much by the power of the spear and the sling, as by building great storehouses of maize. They first reduced the people whom they would conquer to the verge of starvation, and then fed them on sweeter food than they had ever tasted before. Count von Moltke was not the first who reduced a great city by besieging it, and surrounding it with a vast army. This was done in the days before the tragedy of Ollanta had been rehearsed in Cuzco. What the Incas gained by giving corn, they maintained by teaching the people how to grow and cultivate it. Men had as many wives as they pleased, provided that they were able to maintain them, and they had no fawning immoral priests to make women barren and unfruitful; who preached godliness to the people, but practised devilry themselves.

And here one may be allowed to notice by the way, that it is a thing altogether singular and inconsistent that these loud-tongued republicans and apostles of the rights of women, will allow and tolerate among them a body of men who believe that it is God's will they should burn and not marry, and cannot think of allowing among their mighty respectablenesses a people who believe that it is God's will they should have a plurality of wives. Perhaps when the great Americans are tired of the vanity of being a hundred years old, and can find time to look this matter in the face they may reconsider their Mormon policy, and give up persecuting a people who at least have many divine examples for their way of life. If Mormonism be good for South America, why should it not be good for the North? and what will be nothing less than the blessing of heaven on Lake Titicaca, why should it be esteemed a curse at the Lake of Salt? Happily the logic of great events in the lives of nations is more easy to comprehend than the logic of mere professors.

The history of colonisation in Peru is not interesting reading; much less so are the personal reports of those who have been connected with carrying out the various schemes of the Government. There were the usual delays, the usual difficulty in obtaining the promised funds at the appointed times, followed by confusion and disaster.

The first colony formed in Peru consisted of Germans, who established themselves at Pozuzo, a small district formed of mountains and valleys fifteen days journey north-east of Lima. The proposal was made in 1853, and the first batch of the new comers arrived in 1857. In 1870 they numbered 360 souls, 112 of whom were children. Their progress had not been very brilliant; among them were carpenters, coopers, cigar-makers, cabinet-makers, blacksmiths, shoe-makers, tailors, saddlers, machinists, and tanners. A priest, a grave-digger or clerk, a schoolmaster and an architect were also among the number. Each colonist was expected to cultivate a plot of ground measuring 33,000 yards by 13,000 yards, on which they grew tobacco, coca, maize, yuca (a most delicious farinaceous root), haricot beans, rice, coffee, and garden stuff. The people lived in wooden houses, and there were among them all three houses of wrought stone. An enthusiastic Peruvian deputy in giving a description of this little struggling colony, concluded his peroration thus: 'We have an eloquent example in the industrious colony established at Pozuzo, where in the midst of savage nature they have erected a city which perhaps is on a level with any city of Europe!' On which it might be remarked that there is a great deal of the perhaps, but very little of the city in this statement. It is in fact nothing but a city of the honourable deputy's brain.