!H1 i! ,: k" »' V THE ¦ •»>,„ CON TIN QFPORTUN C n • <| ° 1 Q/givc theft Books for the founding of a College in this Colony" • JLIlMI&&IRir - Gift of Dr. Hiram Bingham of the Class of 1898 1907 The Continent of Opportunity AN AVENUE OF ROYAL PALMS IN RIO DE JANEIRO. The Continent of Opportunity The South American Republics — Their History, Their Resources, Their Out look. Together with a Traveller's Im pressions of Present Day Conditions By FRANCIS E. CLARK, D. D., LL. D. Author of " A New Way Around an Old World" "Fellow Travellers" " Training the Church of the Future," etc., etc., etc. New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1907, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street To William Phillips Hall, well known alike in religious, in philanthropic and in business circles, whose generosity to the newly formed South American Christian En deavour Union makes it possible to spread the tidings of the Society, by means of the printed page, throughout the " Continent of Oppor tunity," this volume is gratefully dedicated by His friend The Author ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To many kind friends in the South American Republics, who greeted us on our arrival, gave us Godspeed on our departure, and furnished me with first-hand information about the countries of their birth or their adoption, with out which this volume could not have been written ; To the United States ministers to Panama, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina ; to the Secretary of Legation at Lima, Peru ; to our Ambassador to Brazil ; and to the American Consuls in Valparaiso, Buenos Ayres and Eiode Janeiro, for generous official and social courtesies, and for much printed information concerning the countries to which they are accredited ; To their Excellencies the Presidents of the Republics of Panama, Peru, Chile and Argentina, and to members of their cabinets and others in high official station, for kindly interviews, and for documents which helped me materially in obtaining a knowledge of their peoples and their countries ; To President Theodore Roosevelt for a most generous letter of introduction to the diplomatic and consular representatives of the United States in South America ; To T. C. Dawson's valuable volumes on the History of South American Republics, published in the "Story of the Nations " series ; To W. H. Prescott's undying -work on " The Conquest of Peru"; 7 h 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To books of travel by Carpenter, Pepper, Tucker and Jothers with whose stories of journeying by land and sea I ^compared and sometimes revised my own impressions ; ioth To many volumes relating to the missionary operations of various societies, the reports of the American and the British and Foreign Bible Societies, the volume entitled, ' ' Protestant Missions in South America, ' ' Miss Guinness' s " Neglected Continent," and many pamphlets and leaflets which have enabled me to supplement and correct with the wisdom and experience of others my own impressions of the past and present religious condition of South America ; To the publishers of The Independent, The Congrega- tionalist, The Interior, The Advance, The Missionary Re view of the World, The Journal of Education and The Chris tian Endeavor World, for permission to republish some material which has appeared in their columns. CONTENTS I. By Way of Introduction . . . .13 II. South America — a Country in the Making 17 III. The Smallest Republic in the World . 26 IV. Contradictions and Contrasts in the Canal Zone 34 V. The Republic of Colombia ... 43 VI. Ecuador, the Republic of the Equator . 51 VII. Curiosities of Travel on the West Coast 59 VIII. The Empire of the I ncas .... 66 IX. Peru, Yesterday and To-Day ... 76 X. Peru Redivivus 85 XI. Lima, the Paris of the South ... 94 XII. An Adventure in the High Andes . . 100 XIII. Where the Stars Sit for Their Portraits 107 XIV. Bolivia, the Country of the Great Pla teau 114 XV. The Switzerland of South America . 121 XVI. The Hermit Republic of the Andes . . 130 XVII. Our Window in La Paz . . . 1 39 XVIII. Ancient and Modern Chile . . . 147 XIX. The Wealth of Chile . . . 155 XX. Valparaiso — The Earthquake-Stricken . 165 XXI. The Jamestown of South America . .174 XXII. The Famous Journey Across the Andes . 181 9 10 CONTENTS XXIII. XXIV.XXV.XXVI. XXVII.XXVIII.XXIX. XXX. XXXI.XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV.XXXV.XXXVI. XXXVII. XXXVIII. XXXIX.XL. Argentina, the Land of the Limitless Pampas .... A Prosperous Republic Peculiarities of Buenos Ayres Uruguay and the Uruguayans Paraguay, the Isolated Brazil, the Boundless Rio de Janeiro, the City Beautiful The World's Coffee Cup and How it is Filled .... A Thousand Miles in Brazil Venezuela, the Turbulent Republic of the North .... The Three Guianas With the Presidents of Four Repub lics How We Journeyed . The Progress of Education The Inscrutable Politics of South America .... South America as a Mission Field A Bird's-eye View of Protestant Mis sions Lights and Shadows on the Map Statistical Tables Index ... 190 200 208214221 229240249257 263 271 278286 295 304 3"320 330 338343 ILLUSTRATIONS Facing Page An Avenue of Royal Palms in Rio de Janeiro - Title The Cathedral of Panama - 26 A Steam Shovel at Work on the Canal - - 40 Culebra Cut, Part of the Old French Excavation - 40 Some Native Panamanians 46 The Throne of the Ancient Incas 66 Modern Descendants of Incas - - 66 An Indian of Chile - -....148 A Bolivian Indian - - - - - - -148 A Market Scene in Chile - - - - -152 Along the Roadside in Chile - - - - - 160 In the Straits of Magellan - - 160 The Entrance to " Santa Lucia " - - 178 The Universal Costume of the Women of Chile on Good Friday - - I7% The Christ of the Andes - -186 An Argentine Farmhouse - - 190 Argentine Indians - - - - 190 Rio Harbour and City as Seen from Corcovado - 240 The " Finger of God " Near Rio de Janeiro - 242 The Most Beautiful Street in the World - 246 Drying Coffee -- -----252 An Indian Alcade Away in the Sierras - - 3H The Altar at the Doorway of the Jesuit Church, Arequipa, Peru - - " 3 '4 Map of South America - - - 33° 11 I BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION THE material for this volume was gathered dur ing a five months' journey to South America in the interests of the Christian Endeavour move ment which the author undertook early in 1907 at the invitation of Christian workers in different countries. He crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sailed down the west coast from Panama to Valparaiso, touching at many ports. From Valparaiso he crossed the continent by the famous trans- Andean route to Buenos Ayres. Thence he sailed to Montevideo and thence to Santos and Rio de Janeiro, and, after spending nearly a month in Brazil, sailed for Boston by the longest but most available route, via Portugal, Spain and England. In the course of this journey he visited eight of the eleven republics of South America, namely, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. During his long sea voyages of more than fifteen thou sand miles, he had the opportunity of supplementing his own observations by reading many volumes on South American history and travel, and, while on shore, enjoyed unusual privileges in meeting people of all walks of life, from the presidents of several of the republics to the hum blest citizens. He lived not only in hotels and on railway trains but in the homes of many of the people, and sought from all sources that which might be of interest and profit to his readers. During these months of travel and residence he learned that South America is peculiarly a country of lights and 13 14 THE CONTINENT OP OPPORTUNITY shadows. It is possible for the traveller to bask in the sunlight, or dwell altogether in the shadow. A writer is tempted to make his picture too bright or too dark ac cording to his own personal equation, or perhaps accord ing to the section of the continent he visits. The writer who knows only the northern half of South America would be likely to declare the continent to be the most turbulent, unprogressive and benighted of any of the five. The traveller who visits only the southern half, especially if he confines himself largely to the great cities, will be likely to declare that South America stands near the head of the progressive continents. I have read some of the wildest claims for South America, and I have seen it, on the other hand, painted in colours so dark that a Bushman or a Hottentot -would be ashamed to own it as his abode. For instance, a recent writer on Ecuador describes it as an earthly para dise, a paradise before the fall, undisturbed by any de ceitful serpent. The climate, the people, the productions, the means of communication, are all perfect, and even the hens are such prolific layers that "the owners have to give them medicine to prevent an over-production of eggs." This statement gives the impression that the writer, all through his article, is making game of his readers, and is endeavouring to find out how gullible they are, for Ecuador is a land of pestilence and disease, of revolution and political graft, of ignorance and supersti tion beyond almost any South American country. On the other hand I have read magazine articles on Argentina and Brazil, written in the most lurid style of our own professional "muck-rakers," describing their weaknesses and mistakes, and making no mention of their wonderful progress, their present glories and the more glorious future that is opening before them. Such ar ticles deceive only those who are utterly ignorant of BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 15 South American affairs, but naturally those who have not studied the situation on the ground, cannot refute these absurdities. The object of this volume is to give, so far as its brief compass and the author's ability will allow, a compre hensive view of the countries and peoples of South America, their history, their possibilities, their chief re sources, their intellectual and religious life, together with a traveller's impressions of present day conditions. South America is preeminently a country which one cannot treat as a whole. It would be no more mislead ing to consider the United States and Mexico, or Spain and Great Britain, as one country, than to write of Ven ezuela and Argentina as having a common history and destiny because they happen to occupy the territory of the same continent. Indeed, every one of the eleven re publics, small and insignificant as some of them are, has its own individuality and its own interesting history and development. To the average foreigner all the republics, except Brazil, seem to have the same genesis : — a settlement of adventurers, long centuries of exploitation by Spanish extortioners, followed by liberation from the Spanish yoke and a turbulent emergence into a more or less stable national life. Though this outline is true of them all in a general way, it is too meagre and lacking in details to satisfy one who desires any real knowledge of South America and South Americans. He who sympathetically studies these countries will be surprised to find the many currents and cross-currents of history which give to each land its own individuality. This history throws light upon the present conditions and character of the peoples as nothing else can do. For the sake of bringing out the individual character istics of these republics a chapter is devoted to the his- 16 THE CONTINENT OF OPPORTUNITY tory and present condition of each. Other chapters give the writer's view of the resources, recent development and future outlook of many of the republics, while still others describe the politics, educational features, modes of travel, and religion of the people. The writer in this volume, as in his journey, begins with the Republic of Panama, follows down the west coast, crosses the Andes, and then travels north describ ing the Republics of the East Coast and their character istics. While the book is written from a Christian standpoint, and some chapters are devoted to the religious and evangelistic features of the country, it does not profess to give an exhaustive review of the missionary situation in South America. It would take several volumes of this size to accomplish that task, but the author hopes that enough has been written to show the value of the Chris tian work already accomplished, and to indicate that in respect to Protestant missionary effort, South America is no longer the " Neglected Continent," but the Continent of Opportunity. I have chosen my title as containing the one word that describes most accurately the present and the future of South America. In all material matters, as well as in matters more spiritual, in her mines and manufactures, in her forests and fisheries, in her commerce and agricul ture, in her schools and churches, in her politics and business, South America is to-day preeminently the Continent op Oppobtumty. n SOUTH AMERICA— A COUNTRY IN THE MAKING A Continent with a Future— The Climate of South America— West Amerioa and EaBt America— Physical Features on a Gigantic Scale South America's Greatest Handicap— Her Great Men— No Plymouth Book— A Cruel Triumvirate— Simon Bolivar— A Curiosity in Con stitutions— A Bright Outlook. SOUTH AMERICA is a country in the making. Some parts of it, politically, are yet without form and void. In some parts order has come out of chaos, while other sections are still in the birth throes of revolution and evolution. But South America is a continent with a future. It is a land of possibilities and opportunities. It is interesting to almost every class of men. To the student of history it presents a fascinating field which has allured some of our greatest historians. The story of the Incas and the Chibchas of Colombia, those wonder ful nations that, without knowledge of each other or the rest of the civilized world, attained such a high and complicated civilization of their own, never loses its charm. To the archaeologist the ruins of Cuzco and Quito and a score of other places are of supreme interest. To the student of political science the history of the brutal Spanish invasion and the brutal Spanish rule, as well as the innumerable failures and more recent suc cesses of the modern republics are constant warnings of " how not to do it." The naturalist will find in South America birds and 17 18 THE CONTINENT OF OPPORTUNITY beasts, fish and reptiles, shrubs and trees which grow in no other part of the world. The entomologist will not lack for bugs,— the most beautiful and the most noxious that crawl or fly. The geologist will find a country rich in minerals of every description. The devout man will find among the people professing the religion of the ancient as well as the modern South Americans, " a feeling after God, if haply they may find Him," and, amid all the superstition and ignorance of ancient and modern faiths, he recognizes the fact that man is " incurably religious," and rejoices in the clearer light of a rational Biblical faith that is beginning to shine at many points in the great South land. Before considering the individual republics into which South America is divided, it is interesting to call to mind some geographical and historical facts which account in large measure for the backward state of civilization which one finds in some parts of this continent, as com pared with the more progressive twin continent of the north. Though almost as large in territory as North America, the greater part of South America lies in the tropics, while North Ajnerica lies almost wholly within the temperate and Arctic zones. To speak roughly, North America is a cold country and South America a hot country, and, in recent centuries at least, however it was with earlier civilizations, extreme heat has been a handi cap to progress. To be sure, the vast plains of Argentina, the long seacoast of Chile and the table-lands of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil have a comfortable and equable climate, but the approach to the plateaus of the north is through steaming, miasmatic lowlands which have proved a terrible barrier to civiliza tion. SOUTH AMERICA 19 It is interesting to notice in passiDg how much farther east the southern continent lies than the northern. The two might with almost as much propriety be named West America and East America as North and South America. Payta, the most western town in South America, is about the same longitude as Cleveland, while Valparaiso, and almost the whole of the Peruvian, Chilean and Patagonian coast, are nearly on the same longitudinal line as New York. Indeed, there is a difference of but three or four minutes in time between Valparaiso and New York City. On the other side, Brazil juts far out into the Atlantic Ocean towards Africa, and there the Atlantic is only about half as wide from shore to shore as in the north. The physical features of South America are on a more gigantic scale than in North America. Its mountains as a rule are higher, its rivers broader and deeper, its forests more impenetrable, and all these features have presented obstacles to man which have daunted and delayed, if they have not utterly discouraged him in the conquest of the country. It is as though this continent were waiting for a later race of giants who, with scientific and me chanical skill superior to any yet achieved, shall be able to subdue this richest of continents, which yet guards her riches so securely. The greatest handicap of South America, however, in comparison with North America, has come from the character and actuating motives of her first European occupants, and it takes a continent many a century to overcome the wrong bias given by the original settlers. "Gold, gold, gold, gold, Hard and yellow, bright and cold," brought the first settlers to the shores of South America. The religious motive, when present, was largely overlaid with the desire for conquest and riches, and was often 20 THE CONTINENT OF OPPORTUNITY used as a cloak for the most horrible atrocities, as when the Friar Valverde betrayed Atahuallpa, the great em peror of the Incas who had received Pizarro and his cohorts so hospitably. With a cross in one hand and a Bible in the other, Valverde demanded that Atahuallpa should declare himself a subject of the Bang of Spain and receive baptism. When the mighty emperor of Peru threw down the book with indignant scorn at this outrageous demand, the friar cried out : " Fall on, Castilians, I absolve you." "Into the helpless crowd," we are told, "burst a mur derous fire from the doors of the houses all around, where the Spaniards had previously been stationed. Aghast and bewildered by this display of powers which to them seemed necromantic, the survivors nevertheless manfully stood to the attack of the mail-clad horsemen who rode into the huddled mass, ferociously slashing and slaugh tering. The Indians strove desperately to drag the Spaniards from the horses with their naked hands, and interposed a living wall of human flesh between the murderers and their beloved sovereign. At length Pizarro' s own hands snatched Atahuallpa from the litter. The Indian soldiers outside, hearing the firearms and the noise of the struggle, tried to force their way through the square, but the Spanish musketry and cannon mowed them down by the hundreds, and they fled before the charges of the cavalry, dispersing in the twilight." 1 This quotation is only one of hundreds that might be made from the history of South America to show the perfidious and utterly inhuman way in which religion was made the handmaid of cruelty, treachery and avarice. South America had no Mayflower, she has no Plymouth Rock, and in these two facts can be summed up largely the difference between the two halves of America, re- 1 Dawson's "South Amerioan Republics." SOUTH AMERICA 21 ligiously, educationally, industrially. There has been little of the Puritan and Pilgrim leaven at work in the meal of the southern continent, until a comparatively re cent date. But the leaven has been introduced of late, and has already begun to bring about its blessed and inevitable results. The character of the great public men of the two con tinents has been another determining factor in the civili zation of North and South America. North America has had Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and many smaller Franklins, Washingtons and Lincolns. South America has had Pizarro, Almagro, and Bolivar, and many smaller adventurers of the same type, whose selfish lust for gold and power has cursed the land in the early days of European occupation. If there is any worthy exception in this cruel triumvi rate who showed a spark of unselfish patriotism, it is Simon Bolivar, sometimes called the Liberator. He cer tainly aided his own country, Venezuela, and most of the other countries of South America to throw off the intoler able Spanish yoke, but he imposed or tried to impose a yoke of his own, almost as galling, and his character seems to have lacked the high moral motives and the "saving common sense" which marked each one of the great North American triumvirate. His character has been thus described by Mr. Dawson in his careful history of the South American republics: " From his earliest childhood a little feudal lord, owing obedience to no par ent (he was left an orphan at three years of age) with hundreds of slaves at his orders, his precocious intelli gence the object of that ruinous admiration with which thoughtless strangers and servants spoil a rich and lonely child, his naturally strong will uncurbed by any discip line, he grew into manhood — arrogant, uncompromising, solitary, a deep thinker, wildly ambitious, marvellously 22 THE CONTINENT OF OPPORTUNITY brilliant, though lacking steady common sense, blindly confident in his own moral and intellectual infallibility, firmly convinced that he was destined for vague great things, inordinately fond of honours and praise, and ut terly unable to distinguish his desires of gratifying selfish ambitions, and his yeasty notions of regenerating man kind." Such was doubtless the character, as the stories of his varied adventures prove, of the most widely heralded he roic figure of modern South America. It is not a model on which the youth of a continent could safely shape their lives. Preeminently, too, the history of South America has been the history of carnage and bloodshed. There is not another continent among all the six, if we count Aus tralia as one, which has been so drenched in blood as South America. Australia has had no war and no blood shed. Large sections of Asia, within historic times, have been free from carnage on a great scale. Our own conti nent, even remembering our two great wars, has suffered but little compared with South America. Even before the Spanish conquests, the Incas, though on the whole a peaceful race, imposed their rule at the point of the sword and spear, on surrounding tribes, while during and since the Spanish conquest blood has flowed like water from Darien to Cape Horn. Every revolution in the olden times, and revolutions have been numbered by hundreds, was a gory one, and in some the slaughter has been incredible, so that some sections of South America have fewer inhabitants than they had four centuries ago. The siege of Cartegena in Venezuela, in 1815, by Mar shall Morillo, one of Spain's greatest generals, is thus de scribed: "The besiegers suffered terribly in the pesti lential swamps, but the defenders were reduced to the SOUTH AMERICA 23 most horrible extremities, during four months and a half. The provisions ran out ; fevers decimated the people ; the starving garrison ate rats and hides ; sentinels fell dead at their posts ; the commander drove out of the city two thousand old men, women and children, and of this procession of spectres only a few reached the Spanish line. Finally the surviving soldiers escaped by boats in the midst of a storm which dispersed the Spanish squad ron, and Morillo entered a deserted city where the very air was poisoned by the rotting bodies of famished people. It is calculated that six thousand persons died of hunger and disease." Yet this was only a minor engagement ; thousands of similar tales might be told, each one vying with every other for gruesome slaughter. In one of the most recent civil wars in Colombia which took place between 1899 and 1902, largely on the Isthmus of Panama, it is esti mated that 200 armed encounters took place, and 30,000 Colombians were slain, — a very considerable percentage of the whole population. So numerous have been these bloody revolutions that history will probably never re cord half of them in detail. Another fact, if borne in mind, will help us to under stand the history and present condition of South America, and this is that feudalism has always been contending with monarchy ; extreme states' rights ideas with auto crats of personal force and power, who have constantly tried to play the absolute tyrant. When Spain conquered the Incas, and practically the whole of South America fell into her lap and that of her sister nation Portugal, the Djerian peninsula was just emerging from feudalism. Ferdinand and Isabella were practically the first successful exponents of a strong cen tralized government. The Spanish generals and conquer ors brought feudal ideas with them, and these ideas in 24 THE CONTINENT OF OPPORTUNITY the course of the centuries developed into the extreme re publicanism, tempered by assassination and revolution, which has characterized the South America of the last century. Bolivar dreamed of a United States of South America and worked for it. At one time his dream seemed about to be realized, but Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru fell apart, and even his genius and daring were notable to bring them together. The "United States of South America " seem as far from realization as in the days of Pizarro or Bolivar. States' rights have sometimes been carried to an extreme and absurd length. Some fifty years ago Colombia, then called New Granada, adopted a new constitution, the sixth it had enjoyed in thirty years. The name was changed to "United States of Colombia" and the nation was com posed of nine independent states. One article of the con stitution declared that " when one sovereign state of the union shall be at war with another, or the citizens of any state shall be at war among themselves, the national gov ernment is obligated to preserve the strictest neutrality." The result of such a constitution among such a people could easily be foretold, and civil war succeeded civil war in quick succession for two and twenty years, until tired of extreme states' rights, in 1885, under a strong president, Rafael Nunez, who was dictator in all but name, the " United States of Colombia " became the " Republic of Colombia," with a strong centralized government, and the sovereignty of the individual states was expressly de nied in the new constitution. Another provision of the earlier constitution was that "in naming the eight generals spoken of by the consti tution from whom must be chosen the commander-in-chief of the army, all Colombians over twenty-one shall be con sidered generals of the republic." This provision would SOUTH AMERICA 25 surely have more than satisfied the alleged ambitions of the Colonels of Kentucky. This early bias in favour of feudalism, and this constant conflict between individual and state rights and the ambi tions of selfish dictators, accounts for the seesawing of many of the republics from one extreme to the other, and for the political turmoil and unrest which have been the bane of most of the South American countries. If this picture of greed, ambition and bloodshed, of unscrupulous and cruel leaders, seems hopeless and dark, let us remember that, nevertheless, South America is a land of vast resources, that she has given to the rest of the world some of our most valuable foods and drugs, like the potato, Indian corn, quinine and peruvian bark ; that her mines are unexhausted and her forests scarcely touched ; that moral and spiritual light has dawned upon many sections ; that freedom of religious thought and worship has been secured in almost every republic ; that education is being more and more prized and extended to the common people ; that apparently stable govern ments have been established in more than half the conti nent, — in a word, that the light is breaking everywhere, and that South America is after all the great continent of Opportunity and Possibility. m THE SMALLEST REPUBLIC IN THE WORLD « Something About Panama, Past, Present, and Future The Smallest Eepublic but not the Least— The Number of Panamanians —An Important Bit of Territory— Outside of the Canal Zone— Cu rious Golden Treasures— The Children's Place in Ancient Panama— Within the Canal Zone — The Bights of the United States — Colonel Gorgas, the Sanitary Saviour of Panama — A Mixed Population — The President of the Eepublic— Our American Minister. A PROMINENT American official is reported to have brought greetings, when he came to Panama, from "the largest Republic in the world to the smallest Republic in the world." Then he smoothed over the wounded dignity of the Panamanians by explaining that, though small in population, Panama was great in possibilities, and great in strategic impor tance, and thus saved and salved their sensitive feelings. Panama is certainly not large geographically, for it stretches only from Colombia on the one side to Costa Rica on the other, and is a narrow, contorted ribbon of land that seems to serve principally to connect North and South America, and to afford a tremendous barrier to the navies of the world, compelling them to sail 10,000 miles to get around to a spot less than fifty miles away as the 1 The four chapters on Panama and the Canal Zone were written on the spot in February and March, 1907. It is believed that they por trayed accurately the condition of things as they existed then. Naturally, conditions rapidly ohange from year to year, and even from month to month, but a description of the Canal Zone as seen by a traveller near the beginning of the American occupation will always have an interest of its own. 26 -A