Biographies, Articles
Musings of Mark Twain
on Nicaragua & the San Juan River
The Republic of Nicaragua has some populous cities in it. Leon, 48,000; Massaye [sic], 38,000; Rivas, 30,000; Managua, 24,000; Granada, 18,000; Chinandaga [sic], 18,000; and several other towns of 3,000 and 4,000. The total population is 320,000—all in towns and cities, nearly. Only property-holders who are declared citizens can vote."
At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled to Nicaragua and the San Juan River. A traveler for nearly a decade of his adult life, Twain needed to go from San Francisco to New York City. Instead of crossing the United States by land, he chose to make his way to New York City via Nicaragua and the San Juan River.
In a series of letters to the Alta California newspaper, Twain describes his travels through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River. Not published in book form until 1940 as Travels with Mr. Brown, Mark Twain’s commentary on Central America has remained relatively unknown to a good many historians and even readers of Twain. Mr. Brown is his imaginary friend accompanying him.
At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled from San Francisco to New York via Nicaragua and the San Juan River. He went aboard the steamer America from San Francisco to San Juan del Sur and journeyed by wagon across the twelve-mile stretch from San Juan del Sur to the Lake of Nicaragua. Then at Virgin Bay, he crossed the Lake of Nicaragua by steamer and at Fort Castillo, on the southeastern tip of the lake, made his way down the San Juan River to Greytown (San Juan del Norte), caught another steamer and, after a short layover in Key West, followed the eastern seaboard to New York City.
The trip took eleven days to arrive at San Juan del Sur, three days to cross the isthmus, and eleven more days to sail from Greytown to New York City. Twain, who spent nearly a decade on the road and once said that, if he had his way, he “would sail on forever and never go live on solid ground again,” wrote an account of his journey via Nicaragua to New York for a San Francisco newspaper called the Alta California. He wrote seven letters describing the sea trip from San Francisco to New York. These letters were not collected in book form until 1940 and then published as Travels with Mr. Brown, which includes all his letters to the Alta California—some twenty-six in total—dealing with his sea voyage from San Francisco to New York as well as his six-month stay in New York City and a few weeks in his native Missouri and elsewhere in the Midwest.
Mark Twain loved traveling and rivers. When he was only 23 and had not yet stepped outside of the United States or traveled much even in the United States, he said about traveling on the Ohio River:
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the “untraveled” with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. Although near the end of his life Mark Twain denied that he had ever enjoyed traveling, and he even claimed, “That there is no man living who cares less about seeing new places and peoples than I,” there obviously was something in travel that brought out the best in this man, that permitted him to see and feel life in all its complexity, and that no doubt complemented, if not cultivated, his literary skills .
When he traveled in Central America, it was to get somewhere quickly and to avoid the treacherous stagecoach ride across the continental United States. He crossed the isthmus three times on his way to and from New York and San Francisco. He did it via Nicaragua the first time and then, a few years later, he crossed the isthmus twice again by taking the easier route via Panama—by train from Panama to Colon. The more rugged Nicaraguan route apparently cured Twain of any desire to repeat it. He never took on the Nicaragua route again, and he only wrote an account of his Nicaragua crossing—never of the two Panama crossings by train.
Twain eventually came up with an idea to travel the world and be paid for his travels by continuing the practice that he had begun with the Sacramento Union: He would write a series of letters describing his travels, beginning with New York, then Europe and the rest of the world .
He convinced the editors of the Alta California to underwrite this venture and he set off for New York City where he would cross the Atlantic and commence his travels. The problem was getting to New York City. He had already once taken the overland route by stagecoach across the Midwest with his brother Orion, who, in 1861, had been named Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and the trip was filled with problems: Indians, rough riding, and the frequent breakdowns of stagecoaches . Aside from the dangers of crossing the lands of Native Americans and the cumbersome nature of stagecoach travel itself, Twain knew that it would take him some sixteen days to get to St. Louis and then he would have to take a long, tedious train ride to New York City.
He chose the Nicaraguan route instead. He would sail to Nicaragua, cross the isthmus via wagon and steamer, and arrive in New York City within a month. His choice was a common one. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Nicaraguan route was how most people traveled from San Francisco to New York if they opted not to weather the hazardous crossing of the continental United States by stagecoach.
Twain’s journey through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River was not without incident. He and his fellow passengers faced an outbreak of cholera, which killed a good many of his fellow shipmates. Cholera on steamships was common and traveling on a Vanderbilt steamship was not easy. When his ship arrived in San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast, an epidemic of cholera, as Twain says, was “raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York”. Although no infection occurred in Nicaragua, cholera did break out on the New York leg of the trip, and his steamer San Francisco became, as Twain himself describes it, “a floating hospital” and “not a single hour passes but brings its new sensation—its melancholy tidings”. Passengers were “sheeted and thrown overboard,” and Twain remained sober about the whole affair, noting the responses of his fellow passengers and his own to the epidemic and its toll on human life.
The Nicaraguan route itself was established by Cornelius Vanderbilt. There was already one route to California via the isthmus at Panama—bongos up the Chagres River to the village of Gorgona and then mule-back to the western coast of Panama—which had been set up by William Henry Aspinwall and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Vanderbilt opened the Nicaraguan route for wide commercial use in 1851, and it was done to ferry people to California to “pick nuggets.” After gold was discovered at Sutter’s mine in California, and after President James Polk’s curt but consequential comment before the United States Congress (“Recent discoveries render it possible that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated”), nothing could stop the stampede to California.
Vanderbilt had already made a fortune building and operating steamships, and he took note of the mad rush to California. He had conceived the idea of creating a passage to California via Nicaragua to compete with the Panama route and the California gold rush made his plans to traverse the isthmus all the more economically enticing.
The trip across the isthmus at Nicaragua was difficult in places. On a trip from New York to San Francisco (the directional inverse of Twain’s trip), a passenger once at Greytown (San Juan de Norte) had to go 120 miles up the San Juan River to the Lake of Nicaragua and then another 100 miles across the Lake of Nicaragua to Virgin Bay, traverse the land portion of the route to the Pacific coast by wagon or mule, some twelve miles, and then catch still another steamer to San Francisco. While the isthmus was wider at Nicaragua (165 miles) than at Panama (60 miles), a passenger who opted for this route would nevertheless shorten the trip to the eastern or western coasts of the United States by 1,000 miles. While often uncomfortable, especially the land portion of the trip, the journey was short in time (it could be done in a few days), and this route was better than taking the long sea voyage around Cape Horn, a total of 15,000 miles, which would take some five months to complete.
Since the Panama crossing proved to be remarkably profitable, Vanderbilt wanted a piece of this lucrative transportation business. Aspinwall’s Pacific Steamship Line was charging “Argonauts,” as the California gold diggers were called, 600 dollars to cross the isthmus through Panama. Vanderbilt knew that the route through Nicaragua was shorter and faster and it offered significant savings in time and distance for travelers who were desperate to get to California before all the gold could be panned and carted home.
After the British and the United States governments signed the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which resolved territorial claims between the two countries over an interoceanic trade route, the Nicaraguan route quickly became the competitor to the Panama crossing and it was a vastly superior alternative to get to California than the long way around,via Cape Horn.
By the time Mark Twain took the route in 1867, some sixteen years after its inauguration, it had not changed much. The route had endured, during the intervening sixteen years, the changing of hands, William Walker’s meddling, the United States Navy's shelling and burning of Greytown, and the territorial disputes between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. But the route that Vanderbilt had marked out in 1851 was still essentially the same in 1867: A steamship to San Juan del Sur, mule or wagons to the Lake of Nicaragua, another steamer to cross the Lake of Nicaragua, and then a riverboat steamer down the San Juan River to Greytown on the Atlantic Coast.
That Mark Twain loved ships and rivers is a cardinal fact of American literature, and he no doubt wanted to see both the Lake of Nicaragua and the San Juan River. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the quintessential American robber baron, made all that possible with his explorations and commandeering of the Nicaraguan route across the Central American isthmus.
In his Life on the Mississippi, looking back on his experiences as a cub-pilot and as a full-fledged pilot on the Mississippi River, Mark Twain details his wonder at life on the Mississippi River, and his singular admiration for the men who piloted ships up and down the river. Mark Twain took his name from the measurements or the soundings of the depths of a river—“mark twain” meant two fathoms deep, and he would convert those two little words into a name known both at home and abroad.
Twain piloted steamers on the Mississippi for four years until the American civil war brought to an end his career as a pilot. Much of Life on the Mississippi, written years later, concerns both his experiences and the characters that he met on the river. Twain’s reputation as a humorist and raconteur, and as the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and Pauper, has overshadowed his skills as an observer of nature. We seldom think of Twain as a writer of nature; indeed some critics argue that Twain’s descriptive passages often border on being “purple passages”. Yet when Twain is writing at his best about a landscape—be it the Mississippi, his stagecoach crossing of the United States, or Nicaragua— his descriptive powers are noteworthy, if not remarkable.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain seldom speaks of the river itself except in relation to piloting although he warns us precisely of this fact: At times Twain is genuinely impressed with tropical landscape and, like so many travelers to the tropics, the flora and fauna of Central America is seldom mentioned without noting the birds and the beasts—a few distant members of the human family in the trees.
And his references, as one would expect from one of the world’s greatest humorists, are not without jests and comical asides: [...] parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word!
But Twain’s humor, and the intervening passages and phrases describing the wonder of flight, of land and animal, tree and blossom, speak to a man who is deeply moved by the beauty of the natural world—even if he often wants to remake it after his own cultural image. Surprisingly, for a man so keenly in touch with his surroundings, not a single person from Central America ever speaks in Mark Twain’s account of his crossing of Nicaragua.
While a good many of his fellow passengers speak, never once does Twain record a direct encounter with a Nicaraguan. No one utters a word to Twain or Twain to them. Not one Nicaraguan is spoken to, be it in English or through a translator. Nicaraguans seem to have no language or voice that might coax Twain out of his sheltering silence. No doubt the trip was short and Twain was corralled amid hundreds of Americans who wanted, like Twain, to get somewhere quickly and, by all accounts, Twain knew little, if no Spanish.
Yet, when Twain does mention Nicaraguans, he describes them as “half-clad yellow natives, and the Nicaraguan men, whom he mistakes for soldiers, are “barefooted scoundrels”. The Nicaraguan driver of the wagon that facilitated getting Twain and his fellow passengers across the land portion of the trip, “commenced by beating and banging his team,” and the driver rants, according to Twain, not unlike “a furious maniac, in bad Spanish.”. In addition, when fellow female passengers point out a “dear, dear little baby”, Twain calls this Nicaraguan child a “vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat”. The gap between what the women and what Twain sees is funny to be sure. His sarcasm is brilliant, and his humorous undercutting of whatever the female passengers saw in the baby, pokes fun at the mawkishness of the women—more than at the “vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat making dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin”.
Yet Twain, who will be deeply moved by the poverty of New York City’s tenement houses, here seems to see Nicaraguan poverty as wholly acceptable and fitting in with the landscape. The poverty of Nicaraguans is not appalling, or tragic, as poverty is later in New York City. When Twain encounters Nicaraguan women on his trip, it is impossible for him to remain silent.
Mark Twain’s praising of Nicaraguan women is in line with his comments concerning other women around the world. These are standard comments from Twain as he travels from country to country—the traditional representation of unabashed masculine lust mixed with plaintive exuberance. That Nicaraguan women are viewed by Twain as having “dim” virtuous “lights” does not end the matter there. His imaginary travel companion, Mr. Brown, who had already accompanied Mark Twain on his excursion to the Sandwich Islands and would later accompany him to Europe in the so-called Quaker City letters, and who, as Walker and Dane state in their introduction to Travels with Mr. Brown, serves as “Mark Twain’s Sancho Panza,” makes a comment about Nicaraguan women that might make blush even Mark Twain’s normally brazen public self. Mr. Brown is an “infernal bore,” as Twain himself notes. He serves as a foil and utters whatever untoward thoughts that Twain would not utter himself to his readers back in San Francisco. After Twain’s reference and description of Nicaraguan “damsels,” Mr. Brown rejoins: “But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth”. Humor and imaginary characters aside, the image of Nicaraguan “damsels” reduced now to filthy “heifers,” dirty both physically as well as morally (dim virtuous lights), should not go unnoticed by even the most sympathetic readers of Mark Twain, who should ask themselves whether this comment would have ever been made about Italian women or any other European or American women that Twain so much admires physically.
And here, in Nicaragua, the language is that of desire without touching. Apparently Twain feels some wistful misgivings at his own desires—not at the objectification of women, but at his own yearnings for these women who, however stunning from afar, might lead one to the heart of moral darkness, a world of contamination where dirt and filth (and cholera?) become transmitted through a perceived dark “ravishing” woman unless, in the words of Nick Carraway, one has “interior rules that act as brakes on desires”.
One need not go very far into Twain’s account of Nicaragua to find equally common associations. Twain, who later in the Quaker City Letters would describe the countries of Central America “as one-horse Central American Republics [. . .] with a hundred thousand inhabitants, grand officials enough for a hundred millions, an ‘army’ of five hundred ragamuffins and a ‘navy’ consisting of one solitary 60-ton schooner,” writes in reference to the food of Central Americans: These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some or namental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
That the food comes from “dark maidens” reveals what Twain has already hinted at: The covert transference of disease by the dark sexualized women of America. That Twain would encounter cholera, which killed a good many passengers, does not take away from the fact that disease is present here in ways and places beyond the literal.
At the end of his account of his journey to Nicaragua, Twain runs through a long list of economic opportunities that can be had in Nicaragua, a consistent theme in his early travel writings. A tireless seeker, for most of his adult life, of money and business opportunities, Twain seems to relish the prospect of making Nicaragua into an economic satellite of American or British capitalism. He enumerates, for his readers back in San Francisco, company after company that is doing business in Nicaragua—generally the extraction of raw materials like gold, silver, opal—and informs them of what opportunities and possibilities the enterprising entrepreneur back home might find in Nicaragua.
In the end, for all his love of rivers, Mark Twain never mentions the San Juan River as a river. He stares out from the deck and is entranced by the tropical landscape and animals, the walls of dense tropical vegetation, the frolicking monkeys, the lounging alligators, the dense blossoming forests. The river itself goes unnoticed, but not the scenery, and no doubt Twain probably never separated one from the other. But it would have been nice to hear Twain, this steamboat pilot, speak of the river itself, to compare its twists and turns with those of the great Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The San Juan is remarkable as rivers go. But Twain seems not to notice its oft-reported magnificence.
Nor does Twain mention Costa Rica. He must have stared from both sides of the deck, and one pictures Mark Twain “surveying” Costa Rica and finding the landscape no doubt very much the same on one side of the ship as the other. Twain was an informed traveler who studied in earnest the countries that he visited, but he is remarkably silent on Costa Rica. The San Juan River is navigated on both sides—the ships no doubt made their way along one bank and then the other. Yet Twain speaks only of Nicaragua. Costa Rica seems not to exist, and while he apparently never set foot on Costa Rican land, he certainly walked over its waters.
Here are selections of the original English text on the Nicaragua journey:
Letter IV - San Juan and cholera
DECEMBER 29th. –One sea voyage is ended anyhow. We have arrived at San Juan del Sur, and must leave the ship and cross the Isthmus—not today, though. They have posted a notice on the ship that the cholera is raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York, and so we are not permitted to go ashore to-day. And to the sea-weary eyes of some of our people, no doubt, bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely, as these do that lie here within pistol-shot of us. But the law is spoken, and so half the ship’s family are looking longingly ashore, or discussing the cholera news fearfully, and the other half are in the after cabin, singing boisterously and carrying on like a troop of wild school children.
Ashore
San Juan, January 1st. –While we lay all night at San Juan, the baggage was sent ashore in lighters, and next morning we departed ourselves. We found San Juan to consist of a few tumble-down frame shanties—they call them hotels—nestling among green verdure and overshadowed by picturesque little hills. The spot where we landed was crowded with horses, mules, ambulances and half-clad yellow natives, with bowie-knives two feet long, and as broad as your hand, strapped to their waists. I thought these barefooted scoundrels were soldiers, but no, they were merely citizens in civil life. Here and there on the beach moved a soiled and ragged hite woman, to whom the sight of our ship must have been as a vision of Paradise; for here a vast ship-load of passengers had been kept in exile for fifteen days through the wretched incompetency of one man—the Company’s agent on the Isthmus. He had sent a steamer empty to San Francisco, when he knew well that this multitude of people were due at Greytown. They will finish their journey, now, in our ship.
Our party of eight—we had made it up the night before—being the first boat-load to leave the ship, was entitled to the first choice of the ambulances, or the equestrian accommodations that were to convey us the twelve miles we must go by land between San Juan and Virgin Bay, on Lake Nicaragua. Some of the saddle-horses and mules—many of them, in fact—looked very well; but if there was any choice between the ambulances, or especially between the miraculous scarecrows that were to haul them, it was hardly perceptible. You never saw such harness in your life, nor such mules, nor such drivers. They were funny individually and funny in combination. Except the ghastly sores on the animals’ backs, where the crazy harness had chafed, and scraped, and scarified—that part of it would move anybody’s pity for the poor things.
We climbed into one of the largest of the faded red ambulances (mud wagons we call them in the mountains), with four little sore-backed rabbits hitched to it, and cleared for Virgin Bay. The driver commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing them like a furious maniac, in bad Spanish, and he kept it up all through that twelve-mile journey of three hours and a half, over a hard, level, beautiful road. We envied the peo ple who were not crippled and could ride horseback.
But we clattered along pretty lively, and were a jolly party. The first thing the ladies noticed as we lost sight of the sea, and wound in among an overshadowing growth of dewy vines and forest trees, was a “dear, dear little baby—oh, see the darling!”—a vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat, mak ing dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin; and the first thing the men noticed was—was—but they could not make it out; a guideboard perhaps, or a cross, or the modest grave-stone of some ill-fated stranger. But it was none of these. When we drew nearer it turned out to be a sign nailed to a tree, and it said “Try Ward’s shirts!” There was some round abuse indulged in, then, of Ward and plantation bitters men, and all such people, who invade all sacred places with their rascally signs, and mar every landscape one might gaze upon in worship, and turn to a farce every sentimental thought that enters his brain. I know that if I were to go to old Niagara, and stand with his mists blowing in my face and his voice thundering in my ear, I would swell with a noble inspiration and say, “Oh, grand, sublime, magnificent—” and then behold on his front, “S. T. 1860 X Plantation Bitters,” and be incensed. It is a shame.
The procession under way
The bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious soft ness and coolness of the air (it had just showered a little before we started), the interest of unknown birds and flowers and trees, the delightful new sensation of the bumping and rattling of the ambulance—everything so cheery and lively, as compared with our old dull monotony and shoreless sea on board the ship—wrought our party up to a pitch of joyous animation and en thusiasm that I would have thought impossible with such dry old sticks. I ask pardon of the ladies—and even of the gentlemen, also. All hands voted “the Nicaragua route forever!” They used to do that every day or two—and then every other day or two they would damn the Nicaragua route forever. Such are the ways of passengers, all the world over.
About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer-house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them—damsels buff-colored, like an envelope—damsels who were always dressed the same way: in a single flowing gown of fancifully figured calico, “gathered” across the breast (they are singularly full in the bust, the young ones), and ruffled all round, near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth, and pleasant, smiling, winning faces.
They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them!
“But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth”— This attempted interruption was from Brown, and procured his banishment at once. This man will not consent to see what is attractive, alone, but always unearths the disagreeable features of everything that comes under his notice. These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some ornamental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
Our road was smooth, level, and free from mud and dust, and the scenery in its neighborhood was pleasing, though not particularly striking. Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and oc \occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest, greenest grass—a picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the bly the songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention.
All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women; the birds; the calabash trees, with their gourd-like fruit; the huge, queer knots on trees, that were said to be ants’ nests; the lime trees; and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in its winding folds—so like an ugly, endless serpent; but never did the party cease to consider the wild monkey a charming novelty and a joy forever.
Masquerading on the road
Our four hundred passengers on horseback, mule back, and in four-mule ambulances, formed the wildest, raggedest and most uncouth procession I ever saw. It reminded me of the fantastic masquerading pageants they used to get up on the Fourth of July in the Western States, or on Mardigras Day in New Orleans. The steerage passengers travelled on mule back, chiefly, with coats, oil-skin carpet sacks, and blankets dangling around their saddles. Some of the saddles were new and good, but others were in all possible stages of mutilation and decay. There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man seemed to consider that inasmuch as the animals belongedto “the Company,” it was a stern duty to ride them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles, and flapping and fluttering of coat-tails, and such frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed anything so much.
I never saw Brown’s equanimity so disturbed as it was that day, either. The philosopher had received a charge at San Francisco—a widow, with three children and a servant girl. Every day on the trip, he had been obliged to go down among the sweltering stenches of the ship’s hold, to pull and haul Mrs. B.’s trunks out from among piles of other baggage, and rummage among them for a shirt for Johnny, or a bib for Tommy, or a shawl for the mother or the maid, or a diaper for the baby, but these vexations were nothing to his Isthmus transportation troubles. He had to take his party horseback, and in order to keep them together amid the confusion of the procession, he tied his five mules together, end to end, and marched in single file—the forward horse’s tail made fast to the next one’s nose, and so on. He rode the leading horse himself, with the baby in his arms; Mrs. B. and the two boys came next, and the servant girl brought up the rear. It was a solemnly comical spectacle.
Everything went well, though, till the racing began, and then the philosopher’s mule got his ambition up and led the party a merry dance. Brown tried to hold him back with one hand for a while, and then triced the baby up under his left arm, and pulled back with both hands. This had a good deal of effect, but still the little detachment darted through the main procession like the wind, making a sensation wherever it went, and was greeted with many a whack and many a laugh. Occasionally Brown’s mule stopped and fell to bucking, and then his other animals closed up and got tangled together in a helpless snarl. Of course, Brown had to unlimber the baby and straighten things out again. He swore hard, but under his breath, and sweated as no man ever sweated before. The entire procession had arrived at Virgin Bay and were stowed on the boat before he got there. But his beasts had grown tranquil enough by that time. Their heads were all down, and it was hard to tell which looked the most jaded and melancholy—them selves or their riders. It was like intruding a funeral cortege upon the boisterous hilarity of the balance of the ship’s family.
All quiet again
Comfortably quartered on the little steamer, we sat in the shade and lunched, smoked, compared notes of our jolly little scamper across the Isthmus, bought handsome mahogany walking-canes from the natives, and finally relapsed into pensive and placid gazing out upon the rippling waters of Lake Nicaragua and the two majestic mountains that tower up out of its blue depths and wrap their green summits in the fleecy clouds.
On Ometepe
Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summitspierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at their bases, but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say theyare 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the Isthmus.
Sandwiches, etc.
Our boat started across the lake at 2 p.m., and at 4 a.m. the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out—a hundred miles in twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable. Here they changed us to a long, double-decked shell of a stern-wheel boat, without a berth or a bulkhead in her—wide open, nothing to obstruct your view except the slender stanchions that supported the roof. And so we started down the broad and beautiful river in the gray dawn of the balmy summer morning.
At eight we breakfasted. On the lake boat they fed us on coffee and tea, and on sandwiches composed of two pieces of bread enclosing one piece of ham. On this boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches composed of one piece of ham between two pieces of bread. There is nothing like variety. In a little while all parties were absorbed in noting the scenery on shore—trees like cypress; other trees with large red blossoms; great feathery tree ferns and giant cactuses; clumps of tall bamboo; all manner of trees and bushes, in fact, webbed together with vines; occasionally a vista that opened, stretched its carpet of fresh green grass far within the jungle, then slowly closed again.
An unpeopled paradise
As we got under way and sped down the narrowing river, all the enchanting beauty of its surroundings came out. All gazed in rapt and silent admiration for a long time as the exquisite panorama unfolded itself, but finally burst into a conversational ecstasy that was alive with excited ejaculations.
The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense, lofty, majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level.
And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charming fairy harbors fringed with swinging garlands; and weird grot toes, whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce; and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none knew whither; and there were graceful temples—columns—towers—pyramids—mounds—domes—walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture, wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion.
Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered into view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the in toxicating picture; corners and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond, of towering walls of verdure—gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth—wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as we advanced, changing and opening into Gothic windows, colonnades—all manner of quaint and beautiful figures!
Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes, like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin. We came upon another wrecked steamer turned into an emerald island—trees reaching above the great walking-beam framework, and the tireless vines climbing over the rusty and blistered old locomotive boiler. And by-and-by a retreating point of land disclosed some lofty hills in the distance, steep and densely grown with forests—each tree-top a delicate green dome, touched with a gleam of sunshine, and then shaded off with Indian-summery films into darkness; dome upon dome, they rose high into the sunny atmosphere, and contrasted their brilliant tints with the stormy purple of the sky beyond.
Along shore, huge alligators lay and sunned themselves and slept; birds with gaudy feathers and villainous hooked hills stood stupidly on overhanging boughs, and startled one suddenly out of his long cherished, dimly-defined notion that that sort of bird only lived in menageries; parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word! When the first one went by without saying “Polly wants a cracker,” it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird, but it did not immediately occur to me what it was. And there was a prodigiously tall bird that had a beak like a powder horn, and curved its neck into an S, and stuck its long legs straight out behind like a steering oar when it flew, that I thought would have looked more proper and becoming in the iron cage where it naturally belonged. And I will not deny that from the moment I landed on that Isthmus, the idea of a monkey up a tree seemed so consumedly absurd and out of all character, that I never saw one in such a position but I wanted to take him and chain him to a wagon wheel under the Bengal tiger’s cage, where he would necessarily feel more at home and not look so ridiculous.
The grave of the lost steamer
In this land of rank vegetation, no spot of soil can be cleared off and kept barren a week. Nature seizes upon every vagrant atom of dust and forces it to relieve her over-burdened store-houses. Weeds spring up in the cracks of floors, and clothe the roofs of huts in green; if a handful of dust settles in the crotch of a tree, ferns spring there and wave their graceful plumes in the tropic breeze. Filibustering Walker sunk a steamboat in the river; the sands washed down, filled in around her, built up a little oval island. The wind brought seeds thither, and they clothed every inch of it in luxuriant grass. Then trees grew and vines climbed up and hung them with bright garlands, and the steam er’s grave was finished. The wreck was invisible to us, save that the two great fore-and-aft braces still stood up out of the grass and fenced in the trees. It was a pretty picture.
Ancient Castillo
About noon, we swept gaily around a bend in the beauti ful river, and a stately old adobe castle came into view—a relic of the olden time—of the old buccaneering days of Morgan and his merry men. It stands upon a grassy dome-like hill, and the forests loom up beyond. They say that Lord Nelson once captured it and that this was his first notable feat. It cost him several hours, with 250 men, and good, hard, bloody fighting, to get it. In our time, Walker took it with 25 men, without firing a shot—through the treachery of the Commandante, they say.
There is a little straggling village under the hill, a village composed of a single rank of houses, extending some three hundred yards down the shore. There is a dangerous rapid here. It is said to be artificial—formed by man in former times to keep the pirate boats from penetrating the interior. We had to get ashore here, walk around the rapids, and get on another stern-wheeler. Every house we passed was a booth for the sale of fruits and provisions. The bananas, pine-apples, cocoa-nuts and coffee were good, and the cigars very passable, but the oranges, although fresh, of course, were of a very inferior quality. Cheapness is the order of the day. You can buy as much of any one article as you can possibly want for a dime, and a sumptuous dinner for two or three for half a dollar. Bring along your short bits when you come this way. It is the grand base and foundation of all values, and is better received, and with less suspicion, than any other coin.
Greytown
Greytown is not represented in the councils of the nation at all. The property there is held by temporary residents—foreigners—who care nothing about politics. There are a good many gold and silver mines in the country. The Chontales—gold quartz —(English Company—cost £250,000)—is worked by rude native machinery, but has new, modern machinery on the way. It’s first clean-up (my notes say) was £200,000. For the sake of our reputation we will consider that that was meant for £20,000—and it is unquestionably large enough, even at that.
A Company of Californians have bought two mines—the Albertin and Petaluma—and have just begun work. They paid $70,000 for one of them. An English Company are just beginning work on a mine which they paid £30,000 for. There are also coal, silver, copper and opal mines. One of the latter, near the road between San Juan and Virgin Bay, has produced opals which, in the rough, were as large as almonds.
The Republic also has, among its numerous attractions and sources of commercial prosperity, some lakes and rivers of sulphur, and some extinct volcanoes—(an American Company has bought one of these and are sinking on it—they think they can make it go again.) Nicaragua exports parrots and monkeys, India-rubber, logwood, sugar, hides, cochineal, coffee, deerskins, mahogany, chocolate, gold, opals, sarsaparilla, tortoise shells (quite a heavy business), and tropical fruits. The rubber trade is large; last year Greytown alone exported $112,000 worth. Rubber is worth 28 cents a pound when it starts—in Europe, 54.
One man does all the mahogany business that is done on the northern coast of Nicaragua. He had one log, worth $12,000, which was so large it had to lay several years before there was water enough to float it over the bar. He will clear $500,000 this year, they say. There is a very heavy export trade in logwood. Also in cacao (chocolate). Some of the plantations are very extensive. One owned by the Menier Manufacturing Company, of France, cost $500,000. They could export cocoa-nut oil profitably, but no one takes hold of it.
There is an ad valorem duty of ten per cent. on imports for Greytown, and a sort of incomprehensible tariff of forty per cent. for the interior. Laborers’ wages in the interior are 20 to 40 cents a day and found. But it don’t cost anything to board them; they never eat anything but plantains, and they eat them green, ripe or wrotten they are not particular—they would as soon have them one way as the other.
There is an English steamer monthly from Greytown to Jamaica and one or two other points, and thence to Southampton. The Transit Company’s charter has been extended to fifty years, and now it is expected that they will improve the ac accommodations on the stern-wheel boats. I don’t see any room for it, however, unless they can hatch out some more of those happy variations on the sandwiches.
The waters of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers are to be joined together, however, dykes built, and other projects instituted tending to the improvement of the Greytown harbor, that will eventually make it possible for ships to come inside the reef, no doubt, instead of pitching and charging at anchor in the open roadstead as at present.
on Nicaragua & the San Juan River
The Republic of Nicaragua has some populous cities in it. Leon, 48,000; Massaye [sic], 38,000; Rivas, 30,000; Managua, 24,000; Granada, 18,000; Chinandaga [sic], 18,000; and several other towns of 3,000 and 4,000. The total population is 320,000—all in towns and cities, nearly. Only property-holders who are declared citizens can vote."
At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled to Nicaragua and the San Juan River. A traveler for nearly a decade of his adult life, Twain needed to go from San Francisco to New York City. Instead of crossing the United States by land, he chose to make his way to New York City via Nicaragua and the San Juan River.
In a series of letters to the Alta California newspaper, Twain describes his travels through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River. Not published in book form until 1940 as Travels with Mr. Brown, Mark Twain’s commentary on Central America has remained relatively unknown to a good many historians and even readers of Twain. Mr. Brown is his imaginary friend accompanying him.
At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled from San Francisco to New York via Nicaragua and the San Juan River. He went aboard the steamer America from San Francisco to San Juan del Sur and journeyed by wagon across the twelve-mile stretch from San Juan del Sur to the Lake of Nicaragua. Then at Virgin Bay, he crossed the Lake of Nicaragua by steamer and at Fort Castillo, on the southeastern tip of the lake, made his way down the San Juan River to Greytown (San Juan del Norte), caught another steamer and, after a short layover in Key West, followed the eastern seaboard to New York City.
The trip took eleven days to arrive at San Juan del Sur, three days to cross the isthmus, and eleven more days to sail from Greytown to New York City. Twain, who spent nearly a decade on the road and once said that, if he had his way, he “would sail on forever and never go live on solid ground again,” wrote an account of his journey via Nicaragua to New York for a San Francisco newspaper called the Alta California. He wrote seven letters describing the sea trip from San Francisco to New York. These letters were not collected in book form until 1940 and then published as Travels with Mr. Brown, which includes all his letters to the Alta California—some twenty-six in total—dealing with his sea voyage from San Francisco to New York as well as his six-month stay in New York City and a few weeks in his native Missouri and elsewhere in the Midwest.
Mark Twain loved traveling and rivers. When he was only 23 and had not yet stepped outside of the United States or traveled much even in the United States, he said about traveling on the Ohio River:
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the “untraveled” with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. Although near the end of his life Mark Twain denied that he had ever enjoyed traveling, and he even claimed, “That there is no man living who cares less about seeing new places and peoples than I,” there obviously was something in travel that brought out the best in this man, that permitted him to see and feel life in all its complexity, and that no doubt complemented, if not cultivated, his literary skills .
When he traveled in Central America, it was to get somewhere quickly and to avoid the treacherous stagecoach ride across the continental United States. He crossed the isthmus three times on his way to and from New York and San Francisco. He did it via Nicaragua the first time and then, a few years later, he crossed the isthmus twice again by taking the easier route via Panama—by train from Panama to Colon. The more rugged Nicaraguan route apparently cured Twain of any desire to repeat it. He never took on the Nicaragua route again, and he only wrote an account of his Nicaragua crossing—never of the two Panama crossings by train.
Twain eventually came up with an idea to travel the world and be paid for his travels by continuing the practice that he had begun with the Sacramento Union: He would write a series of letters describing his travels, beginning with New York, then Europe and the rest of the world .
He convinced the editors of the Alta California to underwrite this venture and he set off for New York City where he would cross the Atlantic and commence his travels. The problem was getting to New York City. He had already once taken the overland route by stagecoach across the Midwest with his brother Orion, who, in 1861, had been named Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and the trip was filled with problems: Indians, rough riding, and the frequent breakdowns of stagecoaches . Aside from the dangers of crossing the lands of Native Americans and the cumbersome nature of stagecoach travel itself, Twain knew that it would take him some sixteen days to get to St. Louis and then he would have to take a long, tedious train ride to New York City.
He chose the Nicaraguan route instead. He would sail to Nicaragua, cross the isthmus via wagon and steamer, and arrive in New York City within a month. His choice was a common one. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Nicaraguan route was how most people traveled from San Francisco to New York if they opted not to weather the hazardous crossing of the continental United States by stagecoach.
Twain’s journey through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River was not without incident. He and his fellow passengers faced an outbreak of cholera, which killed a good many of his fellow shipmates. Cholera on steamships was common and traveling on a Vanderbilt steamship was not easy. When his ship arrived in San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast, an epidemic of cholera, as Twain says, was “raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York”. Although no infection occurred in Nicaragua, cholera did break out on the New York leg of the trip, and his steamer San Francisco became, as Twain himself describes it, “a floating hospital” and “not a single hour passes but brings its new sensation—its melancholy tidings”. Passengers were “sheeted and thrown overboard,” and Twain remained sober about the whole affair, noting the responses of his fellow passengers and his own to the epidemic and its toll on human life.
The Nicaraguan route itself was established by Cornelius Vanderbilt. There was already one route to California via the isthmus at Panama—bongos up the Chagres River to the village of Gorgona and then mule-back to the western coast of Panama—which had been set up by William Henry Aspinwall and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Vanderbilt opened the Nicaraguan route for wide commercial use in 1851, and it was done to ferry people to California to “pick nuggets.” After gold was discovered at Sutter’s mine in California, and after President James Polk’s curt but consequential comment before the United States Congress (“Recent discoveries render it possible that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated”), nothing could stop the stampede to California.
Vanderbilt had already made a fortune building and operating steamships, and he took note of the mad rush to California. He had conceived the idea of creating a passage to California via Nicaragua to compete with the Panama route and the California gold rush made his plans to traverse the isthmus all the more economically enticing.
The trip across the isthmus at Nicaragua was difficult in places. On a trip from New York to San Francisco (the directional inverse of Twain’s trip), a passenger once at Greytown (San Juan de Norte) had to go 120 miles up the San Juan River to the Lake of Nicaragua and then another 100 miles across the Lake of Nicaragua to Virgin Bay, traverse the land portion of the route to the Pacific coast by wagon or mule, some twelve miles, and then catch still another steamer to San Francisco. While the isthmus was wider at Nicaragua (165 miles) than at Panama (60 miles), a passenger who opted for this route would nevertheless shorten the trip to the eastern or western coasts of the United States by 1,000 miles. While often uncomfortable, especially the land portion of the trip, the journey was short in time (it could be done in a few days), and this route was better than taking the long sea voyage around Cape Horn, a total of 15,000 miles, which would take some five months to complete.
Since the Panama crossing proved to be remarkably profitable, Vanderbilt wanted a piece of this lucrative transportation business. Aspinwall’s Pacific Steamship Line was charging “Argonauts,” as the California gold diggers were called, 600 dollars to cross the isthmus through Panama. Vanderbilt knew that the route through Nicaragua was shorter and faster and it offered significant savings in time and distance for travelers who were desperate to get to California before all the gold could be panned and carted home.
After the British and the United States governments signed the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which resolved territorial claims between the two countries over an interoceanic trade route, the Nicaraguan route quickly became the competitor to the Panama crossing and it was a vastly superior alternative to get to California than the long way around,via Cape Horn.
By the time Mark Twain took the route in 1867, some sixteen years after its inauguration, it had not changed much. The route had endured, during the intervening sixteen years, the changing of hands, William Walker’s meddling, the United States Navy's shelling and burning of Greytown, and the territorial disputes between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. But the route that Vanderbilt had marked out in 1851 was still essentially the same in 1867: A steamship to San Juan del Sur, mule or wagons to the Lake of Nicaragua, another steamer to cross the Lake of Nicaragua, and then a riverboat steamer down the San Juan River to Greytown on the Atlantic Coast.
That Mark Twain loved ships and rivers is a cardinal fact of American literature, and he no doubt wanted to see both the Lake of Nicaragua and the San Juan River. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the quintessential American robber baron, made all that possible with his explorations and commandeering of the Nicaraguan route across the Central American isthmus.
In his Life on the Mississippi, looking back on his experiences as a cub-pilot and as a full-fledged pilot on the Mississippi River, Mark Twain details his wonder at life on the Mississippi River, and his singular admiration for the men who piloted ships up and down the river. Mark Twain took his name from the measurements or the soundings of the depths of a river—“mark twain” meant two fathoms deep, and he would convert those two little words into a name known both at home and abroad.
Twain piloted steamers on the Mississippi for four years until the American civil war brought to an end his career as a pilot. Much of Life on the Mississippi, written years later, concerns both his experiences and the characters that he met on the river. Twain’s reputation as a humorist and raconteur, and as the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and Pauper, has overshadowed his skills as an observer of nature. We seldom think of Twain as a writer of nature; indeed some critics argue that Twain’s descriptive passages often border on being “purple passages”. Yet when Twain is writing at his best about a landscape—be it the Mississippi, his stagecoach crossing of the United States, or Nicaragua— his descriptive powers are noteworthy, if not remarkable.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain seldom speaks of the river itself except in relation to piloting although he warns us precisely of this fact: At times Twain is genuinely impressed with tropical landscape and, like so many travelers to the tropics, the flora and fauna of Central America is seldom mentioned without noting the birds and the beasts—a few distant members of the human family in the trees.
And his references, as one would expect from one of the world’s greatest humorists, are not without jests and comical asides: [...] parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word!
But Twain’s humor, and the intervening passages and phrases describing the wonder of flight, of land and animal, tree and blossom, speak to a man who is deeply moved by the beauty of the natural world—even if he often wants to remake it after his own cultural image. Surprisingly, for a man so keenly in touch with his surroundings, not a single person from Central America ever speaks in Mark Twain’s account of his crossing of Nicaragua.
While a good many of his fellow passengers speak, never once does Twain record a direct encounter with a Nicaraguan. No one utters a word to Twain or Twain to them. Not one Nicaraguan is spoken to, be it in English or through a translator. Nicaraguans seem to have no language or voice that might coax Twain out of his sheltering silence. No doubt the trip was short and Twain was corralled amid hundreds of Americans who wanted, like Twain, to get somewhere quickly and, by all accounts, Twain knew little, if no Spanish.
Yet, when Twain does mention Nicaraguans, he describes them as “half-clad yellow natives, and the Nicaraguan men, whom he mistakes for soldiers, are “barefooted scoundrels”. The Nicaraguan driver of the wagon that facilitated getting Twain and his fellow passengers across the land portion of the trip, “commenced by beating and banging his team,” and the driver rants, according to Twain, not unlike “a furious maniac, in bad Spanish.”. In addition, when fellow female passengers point out a “dear, dear little baby”, Twain calls this Nicaraguan child a “vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat”. The gap between what the women and what Twain sees is funny to be sure. His sarcasm is brilliant, and his humorous undercutting of whatever the female passengers saw in the baby, pokes fun at the mawkishness of the women—more than at the “vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat making dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin”.
Yet Twain, who will be deeply moved by the poverty of New York City’s tenement houses, here seems to see Nicaraguan poverty as wholly acceptable and fitting in with the landscape. The poverty of Nicaraguans is not appalling, or tragic, as poverty is later in New York City. When Twain encounters Nicaraguan women on his trip, it is impossible for him to remain silent.
Mark Twain’s praising of Nicaraguan women is in line with his comments concerning other women around the world. These are standard comments from Twain as he travels from country to country—the traditional representation of unabashed masculine lust mixed with plaintive exuberance. That Nicaraguan women are viewed by Twain as having “dim” virtuous “lights” does not end the matter there. His imaginary travel companion, Mr. Brown, who had already accompanied Mark Twain on his excursion to the Sandwich Islands and would later accompany him to Europe in the so-called Quaker City letters, and who, as Walker and Dane state in their introduction to Travels with Mr. Brown, serves as “Mark Twain’s Sancho Panza,” makes a comment about Nicaraguan women that might make blush even Mark Twain’s normally brazen public self. Mr. Brown is an “infernal bore,” as Twain himself notes. He serves as a foil and utters whatever untoward thoughts that Twain would not utter himself to his readers back in San Francisco. After Twain’s reference and description of Nicaraguan “damsels,” Mr. Brown rejoins: “But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth”. Humor and imaginary characters aside, the image of Nicaraguan “damsels” reduced now to filthy “heifers,” dirty both physically as well as morally (dim virtuous lights), should not go unnoticed by even the most sympathetic readers of Mark Twain, who should ask themselves whether this comment would have ever been made about Italian women or any other European or American women that Twain so much admires physically.
And here, in Nicaragua, the language is that of desire without touching. Apparently Twain feels some wistful misgivings at his own desires—not at the objectification of women, but at his own yearnings for these women who, however stunning from afar, might lead one to the heart of moral darkness, a world of contamination where dirt and filth (and cholera?) become transmitted through a perceived dark “ravishing” woman unless, in the words of Nick Carraway, one has “interior rules that act as brakes on desires”.
One need not go very far into Twain’s account of Nicaragua to find equally common associations. Twain, who later in the Quaker City Letters would describe the countries of Central America “as one-horse Central American Republics [. . .] with a hundred thousand inhabitants, grand officials enough for a hundred millions, an ‘army’ of five hundred ragamuffins and a ‘navy’ consisting of one solitary 60-ton schooner,” writes in reference to the food of Central Americans: These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some or namental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
That the food comes from “dark maidens” reveals what Twain has already hinted at: The covert transference of disease by the dark sexualized women of America. That Twain would encounter cholera, which killed a good many passengers, does not take away from the fact that disease is present here in ways and places beyond the literal.
At the end of his account of his journey to Nicaragua, Twain runs through a long list of economic opportunities that can be had in Nicaragua, a consistent theme in his early travel writings. A tireless seeker, for most of his adult life, of money and business opportunities, Twain seems to relish the prospect of making Nicaragua into an economic satellite of American or British capitalism. He enumerates, for his readers back in San Francisco, company after company that is doing business in Nicaragua—generally the extraction of raw materials like gold, silver, opal—and informs them of what opportunities and possibilities the enterprising entrepreneur back home might find in Nicaragua.
In the end, for all his love of rivers, Mark Twain never mentions the San Juan River as a river. He stares out from the deck and is entranced by the tropical landscape and animals, the walls of dense tropical vegetation, the frolicking monkeys, the lounging alligators, the dense blossoming forests. The river itself goes unnoticed, but not the scenery, and no doubt Twain probably never separated one from the other. But it would have been nice to hear Twain, this steamboat pilot, speak of the river itself, to compare its twists and turns with those of the great Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The San Juan is remarkable as rivers go. But Twain seems not to notice its oft-reported magnificence.
Nor does Twain mention Costa Rica. He must have stared from both sides of the deck, and one pictures Mark Twain “surveying” Costa Rica and finding the landscape no doubt very much the same on one side of the ship as the other. Twain was an informed traveler who studied in earnest the countries that he visited, but he is remarkably silent on Costa Rica. The San Juan River is navigated on both sides—the ships no doubt made their way along one bank and then the other. Yet Twain speaks only of Nicaragua. Costa Rica seems not to exist, and while he apparently never set foot on Costa Rican land, he certainly walked over its waters.
Here are selections of the original English text on the Nicaragua journey:
Letter IV - San Juan and cholera
DECEMBER 29th. –One sea voyage is ended anyhow. We have arrived at San Juan del Sur, and must leave the ship and cross the Isthmus—not today, though. They have posted a notice on the ship that the cholera is raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York, and so we are not permitted to go ashore to-day. And to the sea-weary eyes of some of our people, no doubt, bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely, as these do that lie here within pistol-shot of us. But the law is spoken, and so half the ship’s family are looking longingly ashore, or discussing the cholera news fearfully, and the other half are in the after cabin, singing boisterously and carrying on like a troop of wild school children.
Ashore
San Juan, January 1st. –While we lay all night at San Juan, the baggage was sent ashore in lighters, and next morning we departed ourselves. We found San Juan to consist of a few tumble-down frame shanties—they call them hotels—nestling among green verdure and overshadowed by picturesque little hills. The spot where we landed was crowded with horses, mules, ambulances and half-clad yellow natives, with bowie-knives two feet long, and as broad as your hand, strapped to their waists. I thought these barefooted scoundrels were soldiers, but no, they were merely citizens in civil life. Here and there on the beach moved a soiled and ragged hite woman, to whom the sight of our ship must have been as a vision of Paradise; for here a vast ship-load of passengers had been kept in exile for fifteen days through the wretched incompetency of one man—the Company’s agent on the Isthmus. He had sent a steamer empty to San Francisco, when he knew well that this multitude of people were due at Greytown. They will finish their journey, now, in our ship.
Our party of eight—we had made it up the night before—being the first boat-load to leave the ship, was entitled to the first choice of the ambulances, or the equestrian accommodations that were to convey us the twelve miles we must go by land between San Juan and Virgin Bay, on Lake Nicaragua. Some of the saddle-horses and mules—many of them, in fact—looked very well; but if there was any choice between the ambulances, or especially between the miraculous scarecrows that were to haul them, it was hardly perceptible. You never saw such harness in your life, nor such mules, nor such drivers. They were funny individually and funny in combination. Except the ghastly sores on the animals’ backs, where the crazy harness had chafed, and scraped, and scarified—that part of it would move anybody’s pity for the poor things.
We climbed into one of the largest of the faded red ambulances (mud wagons we call them in the mountains), with four little sore-backed rabbits hitched to it, and cleared for Virgin Bay. The driver commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing them like a furious maniac, in bad Spanish, and he kept it up all through that twelve-mile journey of three hours and a half, over a hard, level, beautiful road. We envied the peo ple who were not crippled and could ride horseback.
But we clattered along pretty lively, and were a jolly party. The first thing the ladies noticed as we lost sight of the sea, and wound in among an overshadowing growth of dewy vines and forest trees, was a “dear, dear little baby—oh, see the darling!”—a vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat, mak ing dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin; and the first thing the men noticed was—was—but they could not make it out; a guideboard perhaps, or a cross, or the modest grave-stone of some ill-fated stranger. But it was none of these. When we drew nearer it turned out to be a sign nailed to a tree, and it said “Try Ward’s shirts!” There was some round abuse indulged in, then, of Ward and plantation bitters men, and all such people, who invade all sacred places with their rascally signs, and mar every landscape one might gaze upon in worship, and turn to a farce every sentimental thought that enters his brain. I know that if I were to go to old Niagara, and stand with his mists blowing in my face and his voice thundering in my ear, I would swell with a noble inspiration and say, “Oh, grand, sublime, magnificent—” and then behold on his front, “S. T. 1860 X Plantation Bitters,” and be incensed. It is a shame.
The procession under way
The bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious soft ness and coolness of the air (it had just showered a little before we started), the interest of unknown birds and flowers and trees, the delightful new sensation of the bumping and rattling of the ambulance—everything so cheery and lively, as compared with our old dull monotony and shoreless sea on board the ship—wrought our party up to a pitch of joyous animation and en thusiasm that I would have thought impossible with such dry old sticks. I ask pardon of the ladies—and even of the gentlemen, also. All hands voted “the Nicaragua route forever!” They used to do that every day or two—and then every other day or two they would damn the Nicaragua route forever. Such are the ways of passengers, all the world over.
About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer-house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them—damsels buff-colored, like an envelope—damsels who were always dressed the same way: in a single flowing gown of fancifully figured calico, “gathered” across the breast (they are singularly full in the bust, the young ones), and ruffled all round, near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth, and pleasant, smiling, winning faces.
They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them!
“But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth”— This attempted interruption was from Brown, and procured his banishment at once. This man will not consent to see what is attractive, alone, but always unearths the disagreeable features of everything that comes under his notice. These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges, pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some ornamental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of beverages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
Our road was smooth, level, and free from mud and dust, and the scenery in its neighborhood was pleasing, though not particularly striking. Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and oc \occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest, greenest grass—a picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the bly the songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention.
All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women; the birds; the calabash trees, with their gourd-like fruit; the huge, queer knots on trees, that were said to be ants’ nests; the lime trees; and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in its winding folds—so like an ugly, endless serpent; but never did the party cease to consider the wild monkey a charming novelty and a joy forever.
Masquerading on the road
Our four hundred passengers on horseback, mule back, and in four-mule ambulances, formed the wildest, raggedest and most uncouth procession I ever saw. It reminded me of the fantastic masquerading pageants they used to get up on the Fourth of July in the Western States, or on Mardigras Day in New Orleans. The steerage passengers travelled on mule back, chiefly, with coats, oil-skin carpet sacks, and blankets dangling around their saddles. Some of the saddles were new and good, but others were in all possible stages of mutilation and decay. There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man seemed to consider that inasmuch as the animals belongedto “the Company,” it was a stern duty to ride them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles, and flapping and fluttering of coat-tails, and such frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed anything so much.
I never saw Brown’s equanimity so disturbed as it was that day, either. The philosopher had received a charge at San Francisco—a widow, with three children and a servant girl. Every day on the trip, he had been obliged to go down among the sweltering stenches of the ship’s hold, to pull and haul Mrs. B.’s trunks out from among piles of other baggage, and rummage among them for a shirt for Johnny, or a bib for Tommy, or a shawl for the mother or the maid, or a diaper for the baby, but these vexations were nothing to his Isthmus transportation troubles. He had to take his party horseback, and in order to keep them together amid the confusion of the procession, he tied his five mules together, end to end, and marched in single file—the forward horse’s tail made fast to the next one’s nose, and so on. He rode the leading horse himself, with the baby in his arms; Mrs. B. and the two boys came next, and the servant girl brought up the rear. It was a solemnly comical spectacle.
Everything went well, though, till the racing began, and then the philosopher’s mule got his ambition up and led the party a merry dance. Brown tried to hold him back with one hand for a while, and then triced the baby up under his left arm, and pulled back with both hands. This had a good deal of effect, but still the little detachment darted through the main procession like the wind, making a sensation wherever it went, and was greeted with many a whack and many a laugh. Occasionally Brown’s mule stopped and fell to bucking, and then his other animals closed up and got tangled together in a helpless snarl. Of course, Brown had to unlimber the baby and straighten things out again. He swore hard, but under his breath, and sweated as no man ever sweated before. The entire procession had arrived at Virgin Bay and were stowed on the boat before he got there. But his beasts had grown tranquil enough by that time. Their heads were all down, and it was hard to tell which looked the most jaded and melancholy—them selves or their riders. It was like intruding a funeral cortege upon the boisterous hilarity of the balance of the ship’s family.
All quiet again
Comfortably quartered on the little steamer, we sat in the shade and lunched, smoked, compared notes of our jolly little scamper across the Isthmus, bought handsome mahogany walking-canes from the natives, and finally relapsed into pensive and placid gazing out upon the rippling waters of Lake Nicaragua and the two majestic mountains that tower up out of its blue depths and wrap their green summits in the fleecy clouds.
On Ometepe
Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summitspierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at their bases, but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say theyare 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the Isthmus.
Sandwiches, etc.
Our boat started across the lake at 2 p.m., and at 4 a.m. the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out—a hundred miles in twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable. Here they changed us to a long, double-decked shell of a stern-wheel boat, without a berth or a bulkhead in her—wide open, nothing to obstruct your view except the slender stanchions that supported the roof. And so we started down the broad and beautiful river in the gray dawn of the balmy summer morning.
At eight we breakfasted. On the lake boat they fed us on coffee and tea, and on sandwiches composed of two pieces of bread enclosing one piece of ham. On this boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches composed of one piece of ham between two pieces of bread. There is nothing like variety. In a little while all parties were absorbed in noting the scenery on shore—trees like cypress; other trees with large red blossoms; great feathery tree ferns and giant cactuses; clumps of tall bamboo; all manner of trees and bushes, in fact, webbed together with vines; occasionally a vista that opened, stretched its carpet of fresh green grass far within the jungle, then slowly closed again.
An unpeopled paradise
As we got under way and sped down the narrowing river, all the enchanting beauty of its surroundings came out. All gazed in rapt and silent admiration for a long time as the exquisite panorama unfolded itself, but finally burst into a conversational ecstasy that was alive with excited ejaculations.
The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense, lofty, majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level.
And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charming fairy harbors fringed with swinging garlands; and weird grot toes, whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce; and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none knew whither; and there were graceful temples—columns—towers—pyramids—mounds—domes—walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture, wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion.
Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered into view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the in toxicating picture; corners and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond, of towering walls of verdure—gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth—wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as we advanced, changing and opening into Gothic windows, colonnades—all manner of quaint and beautiful figures!
Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes, like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin. We came upon another wrecked steamer turned into an emerald island—trees reaching above the great walking-beam framework, and the tireless vines climbing over the rusty and blistered old locomotive boiler. And by-and-by a retreating point of land disclosed some lofty hills in the distance, steep and densely grown with forests—each tree-top a delicate green dome, touched with a gleam of sunshine, and then shaded off with Indian-summery films into darkness; dome upon dome, they rose high into the sunny atmosphere, and contrasted their brilliant tints with the stormy purple of the sky beyond.
Along shore, huge alligators lay and sunned themselves and slept; birds with gaudy feathers and villainous hooked hills stood stupidly on overhanging boughs, and startled one suddenly out of his long cherished, dimly-defined notion that that sort of bird only lived in menageries; parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word! When the first one went by without saying “Polly wants a cracker,” it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird, but it did not immediately occur to me what it was. And there was a prodigiously tall bird that had a beak like a powder horn, and curved its neck into an S, and stuck its long legs straight out behind like a steering oar when it flew, that I thought would have looked more proper and becoming in the iron cage where it naturally belonged. And I will not deny that from the moment I landed on that Isthmus, the idea of a monkey up a tree seemed so consumedly absurd and out of all character, that I never saw one in such a position but I wanted to take him and chain him to a wagon wheel under the Bengal tiger’s cage, where he would necessarily feel more at home and not look so ridiculous.
The grave of the lost steamer
In this land of rank vegetation, no spot of soil can be cleared off and kept barren a week. Nature seizes upon every vagrant atom of dust and forces it to relieve her over-burdened store-houses. Weeds spring up in the cracks of floors, and clothe the roofs of huts in green; if a handful of dust settles in the crotch of a tree, ferns spring there and wave their graceful plumes in the tropic breeze. Filibustering Walker sunk a steamboat in the river; the sands washed down, filled in around her, built up a little oval island. The wind brought seeds thither, and they clothed every inch of it in luxuriant grass. Then trees grew and vines climbed up and hung them with bright garlands, and the steam er’s grave was finished. The wreck was invisible to us, save that the two great fore-and-aft braces still stood up out of the grass and fenced in the trees. It was a pretty picture.
Ancient Castillo
About noon, we swept gaily around a bend in the beauti ful river, and a stately old adobe castle came into view—a relic of the olden time—of the old buccaneering days of Morgan and his merry men. It stands upon a grassy dome-like hill, and the forests loom up beyond. They say that Lord Nelson once captured it and that this was his first notable feat. It cost him several hours, with 250 men, and good, hard, bloody fighting, to get it. In our time, Walker took it with 25 men, without firing a shot—through the treachery of the Commandante, they say.
There is a little straggling village under the hill, a village composed of a single rank of houses, extending some three hundred yards down the shore. There is a dangerous rapid here. It is said to be artificial—formed by man in former times to keep the pirate boats from penetrating the interior. We had to get ashore here, walk around the rapids, and get on another stern-wheeler. Every house we passed was a booth for the sale of fruits and provisions. The bananas, pine-apples, cocoa-nuts and coffee were good, and the cigars very passable, but the oranges, although fresh, of course, were of a very inferior quality. Cheapness is the order of the day. You can buy as much of any one article as you can possibly want for a dime, and a sumptuous dinner for two or three for half a dollar. Bring along your short bits when you come this way. It is the grand base and foundation of all values, and is better received, and with less suspicion, than any other coin.
Greytown
Greytown is not represented in the councils of the nation at all. The property there is held by temporary residents—foreigners—who care nothing about politics. There are a good many gold and silver mines in the country. The Chontales—gold quartz —(English Company—cost £250,000)—is worked by rude native machinery, but has new, modern machinery on the way. It’s first clean-up (my notes say) was £200,000. For the sake of our reputation we will consider that that was meant for £20,000—and it is unquestionably large enough, even at that.
A Company of Californians have bought two mines—the Albertin and Petaluma—and have just begun work. They paid $70,000 for one of them. An English Company are just beginning work on a mine which they paid £30,000 for. There are also coal, silver, copper and opal mines. One of the latter, near the road between San Juan and Virgin Bay, has produced opals which, in the rough, were as large as almonds.
The Republic also has, among its numerous attractions and sources of commercial prosperity, some lakes and rivers of sulphur, and some extinct volcanoes—(an American Company has bought one of these and are sinking on it—they think they can make it go again.) Nicaragua exports parrots and monkeys, India-rubber, logwood, sugar, hides, cochineal, coffee, deerskins, mahogany, chocolate, gold, opals, sarsaparilla, tortoise shells (quite a heavy business), and tropical fruits. The rubber trade is large; last year Greytown alone exported $112,000 worth. Rubber is worth 28 cents a pound when it starts—in Europe, 54.
One man does all the mahogany business that is done on the northern coast of Nicaragua. He had one log, worth $12,000, which was so large it had to lay several years before there was water enough to float it over the bar. He will clear $500,000 this year, they say. There is a very heavy export trade in logwood. Also in cacao (chocolate). Some of the plantations are very extensive. One owned by the Menier Manufacturing Company, of France, cost $500,000. They could export cocoa-nut oil profitably, but no one takes hold of it.
There is an ad valorem duty of ten per cent. on imports for Greytown, and a sort of incomprehensible tariff of forty per cent. for the interior. Laborers’ wages in the interior are 20 to 40 cents a day and found. But it don’t cost anything to board them; they never eat anything but plantains, and they eat them green, ripe or wrotten they are not particular—they would as soon have them one way as the other.
There is an English steamer monthly from Greytown to Jamaica and one or two other points, and thence to Southampton. The Transit Company’s charter has been extended to fifty years, and now it is expected that they will improve the ac accommodations on the stern-wheel boats. I don’t see any room for it, however, unless they can hatch out some more of those happy variations on the sandwiches.
The waters of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers are to be joined together, however, dykes built, and other projects instituted tending to the improvement of the Greytown harbor, that will eventually make it possible for ships to come inside the reef, no doubt, instead of pitching and charging at anchor in the open roadstead as at present.
