GUATEMALA .* THE Central American Republics certainly do not enjoy
a good repute. Fevers and earthquakes, revolutions and robbers, are the ideas which naturally suggest themselves in connection therewith. But, as far as Guatemala is concerned, Mr. Brigham's book is sufficient to prove that there is nothing to dread at the present day on the score of the two last-mentioned dangers, while serious earthquakes occur so seldom as to cause no practical apprehension to the traveller ; and as for the climate, he avers that more persons die of consumption in Massachusetts alone than of the most dreaded tropical diseases in Central America. The lowlands on the coast and the river-bottoms are no doubt subject to malaria ; but even in these situations ordinary attention to sanitary precautions, the chief of which are shelter and proper food, are sufficient to insure men of good constitution from its influence. It used to be said, when the Panama Railway was building, that every sleeper laid cost the life of a man ; but now that the conditions necessary to health in the tropics are better understood, we hear no such appalling stories from the canal which M. de Lesseps is engaged in cutting. Mr. Brigham's remarks as to the class of men re- quired for first colonists are eminently worthy of attention
• Guatemala, the Land of the Quetzal
Loudon: T. Fither Unwin. a Sketch. By William T. Brigham, A.M. 1N7. from those who have anything to do with the promotion of emigration to a tropical country :—
" Pioneers and frontiersmen should not be recruited from shops and counters. The pluck and caution needed for a struggle with untried conditions, the determination to be content with slim com- forts and undaunted in the face of every discouragement, looking always to the final result, experience shows cannot be found in this class. They do well enough as eleventh-hour assistants, when the strong men have felled the forest and broken the ground and built houses and shops for these weaker but still useful brothers; but the first colonists must be of sterner stuff."
The early Spanish conquerors included in the Kingdom of Guatemala the whole region between the Isthmus of Tehuan- tepec and that of Darien, a territory considerably larger in extent, both northivards and southwards, than is comprised in all the five Central American Republics of to-day. The name of Guatemala, however, is now restricted to the northernmost of these Republics. Its extent is variously stated by the best authorities at about forty or fifty thousand square miles, and the population at 1,200,000 or 1,500,000; but as there are no proper surveys, and no trustworthy census of the Indian tribes, it is impossible to speak accurately on these points. It appears certain, however, that, while Guatemala is equalled if not surpassed In size by both Honduras and Nicaragua, its population is about as great as that of the other four Republics combined. On the Pacific it has a coast-line of a hundred and eighty miles, while on the Atlantic it possesses barely fifty miles of sea-board, being wedged in between British Honduras on the North-West, and the Republic of Honduras on the East. The Cordillera, broken into several more or less parallel ranges, attains a mean height of about seven thousand feet, with a steep slope towards the Pacific, interrupted by many volcanoes, and a gently terraced in- cline on the Atlantic side. The ports on the Pacific are mere open roadsteads, but the principal one, San Jose, already possesses the advantage of a railway connecting it with the City of Guatemala, about fifty miles distant. It is in contemplation to construct a railway from the capital to the Atlantic, but up to the present time only a few miles have been laid inland from Puerto Barrios, and this spot appears to have been badly selected for the terminus, inasmuch as there is no shelter or depth of water, and the site of the pro- posed city is an uninhabitable swamp. Yet only three miles to the westward there is a fine natural harbour at Santo Tomas. At present, foreign trade finds its chief communica- tion at Livingston, at the mouth of the Rio Duke, the principal water-way into the interior. Mr. Brigham believes that the time will come when the fertile plains of Central America will be the garden and orchard of the United States, not necessarily by annexation, but by commercial in- tercourse. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, and india-rubber can be raised there cheaper and better than in any other country, to say nothing of oranges, bananas, pineapples, and other tropical fruits so largely in demand in the United States. Yet, of the present imports, the United States contributes less than a third part of what England sends, our share amounting to more than that received from all other countries put together. It is satisfactory to our pride to find that Mr. Brigham attributes this to the fact that Great Britain protects the interests of her subjects, wherever invested. Mr. Brigham notes, for the benefit of his countrymen in the United States, one way in which English manufacturers have secured a market in Guatemala,—namely, by packing their goods in small cases, suitable for carriage on mule-back.
It is somewhat difficult to gather from Mr. Brigham's book what is the extent of his acquaintance at first hand with the country. He has evidently read up his subject well, and in the appendix he gives a considerable bibliography of works relating
to Central America. In this, by-the-way, it is worth noting that although he gives Molina's Spanish and Mexican Diciionary, printed in Mexico in 1571, he does not mention the edition printed there in 1555, probably the first book printed in America. Apparently, Mr. Brigham has resided in Guatemala for business purposes several years a and on, chiefly, it would seem, at Livingston. Me describes in detail a short journey made by water to the mahogany-cutting district of Chocon, near
the frontier of British Honduras, and a longer one to the City of Guatemala and back, in the course of which he visited most of the points of interest in the country, ancient ruins as well as modern cities. The illustrations, reproduced from photographs taken by himself, add much to the value of the narrative, which
it is a pity that he should occasionally disfigure by bad jokes in his attempts at translation from the Spanish. To a botanist, Mr. Thighain's volume will be particularly interesting, as, during the course of his narrative, he constantly mentions and describes by their proper scientific names the trees, flowers, and fruits which he came across, an exuberance and variety of vegetation scarcely surpassed in any quarter of the globe. And further, in a chapter devoted to the vegetable and animal productions of the country, Mr. Brigham goes very fully into the economic aspect of the question, discussing both what it does and what it might yield if properly developed. In many places, no systematic cultivation is either known or needed, the crops growing very much as they did in the Garden of Eden. No plough ever furrows the ground; the hoe is all-sufficient for the planter's needs. It is very remarkable that the country is as yet free from foreign weeds, which in so many new countries have upset the balance of Nature. On the coast, bread is very generally made of cassava. The tuberous roots of the manioc are grated into a coarse pulp, the poisonous juice from which is expressed by placing it in a long sack of basket- work, appropriately called a serpiente ; this is slung by one end to a beam, while on a lever passed through the loop at the other, the children of the family sit in turn, or together if they are small. On the uplands, maize, ground on a met atle, is slapped into tortillas; and the usual drink is pulque, extracted from the aloe, just as in Mexico. Indigo and cochineal, which formerly ranked high among Guatemalan exports, have been so completely superseded by other dyes, the product of the labora- tory, that they are now scarcely cultivated ; and the cochineal insect, unfed and uncared for, is fast disappearing. In addition to the products already mentioned, sarsaparilla, vanilla, rice, cocoanuts, pita or silk-grass, and Sisal hemp, are exported in considerable quantities, as also are logwood and rosewood, as well as mahogany. Mr. Brigham describes the business of mahogany-cutting, the primitive process of extracting sugar, the methods of preparing chocolate from the cacao-bean, and of coagulating rubber from the milk tapped from the Castilloa rubber-tree. Turning from the flora to the fauna, Mr. Brigham observes that though insect life is abundant and many of the rivers swarm with fish, animal life is comparatively scarce, and game especially so ; red-deer and peccaries, wild turkeys and pigeons, being almost the whole bag. After the many pages devoted to the botany of the country, it is disappointing to find the ornithology of so rich and interesting a region dismissed in a single paragraph of fifteen lines, and this in spite of the hopes raised by the sub-title of the work, and the picture of the quetzal on the cover. Mr. Brigham probably only called attention to this bird on account of its having been adopted for the arms of the Republic. He seems never to have seen one alive, though he procured a skin at Coban, from which neighbourhood the whole of the skins that find their way to Europe are procured. This most beautiful of all trogons vies even with the birds of paradise in brilliancy and colour, and in the metallic reflections as well as in the feathery elegance of its plumage ; its elongated tail- coverts, nearly three feet in length and so light that they appear to float behind it, were used as the emblems of royalty in the days of the old Quiche Monarchy. The birds are ex- cessively difficult to find, as they frequent only the highest trees in the dense forests of the mountains of Vera Paz, at an altitude of six thousand feet. Mr. Osbert Salvin made a special expedition after them in 1860, and succeeded in observing them in their native haunts, and in bringing home specimens killed by himself. A curious superstition prevails among the natives that catching butterflies is bad for the -eyes ; they refused to help Mr. Brigham in collecting them ; and he is inclined to refer the origin of the popular belief to -the tired feeling given to the eyes by following their brilliantly coloured wings in their rapid flight under a blazing sun.
Mr. Brigham visited Quiche, Quirigua, and other ruined cities described and figured by Stephens in 1840. Many of the traces then existing have already disappeared, a confirmation -of the now generally received opinion that none of the above- ground remains of Central American ruins can be assigned to any very remote period of antiquity. The key to their strange hieroglyphs is still undiscovered, though some of the tradi- tions existing at the time of the Spanish Conquest have been handed down in the Popol Vuh, or sacred book of the Quiches, which has been translated both into French and Spanish, and from which Mr. Brigham gives copious extracts. Mr. Brigham
copies from the Swiss Professor, Dr. Stoll, an ethnographic chart distinguishing nineteen tribes chiefly by differences of language, though all are probably dialects of the Maya tongue of Yucatan ; and he goes very fully into a description, based on his own observation, of the remnants of the Caribs. This race, who left their name to the islands in which they were first dis- covered, but from which they have long been extirpated, are now only found along the coasts of the mainland. Their purity has probably not been preserved unmixed with other strains of Indian as well as of Negro blood ; at least, it is difficult to believe that the left-hand boy in the photograph given opposite p. 274 is not of African descent. The conquest of Guatemala by Alvarado, the ablest lieutenant of Cortez, at the head of only four hundred and twenty Spaniards, repeats exactly the old story of the Saxons invited over by the Britons ; the letter written by Cortez, October 15th, 1524, to Charles V. describes the embassy of Guatemalans which brought about such misery on their country. The government of modern Guatemala is republican in name only, for Mr. Brigham shows that the President has actually as much irresponsible power as the Czar. The dream of her statesmen is to renew the confederation of the five Republics, with herself at the head ; since the election of Barrios as President in 1871, his country has undoubtedly made more material progress than the other Central American Republics have effected in half-a-century. According to latest advices, General Barillas, the successor of Barrios, has recently assumed a dictatorship which has landed him in difficulties with his northern neighbours in Mexico, and may interfere with his schemes for a Confederacy of Central America. Mr. Brigham is not in favour of such a combination, which he thinks would not so readily attract foreign capital as a treaty affiance between quite independent Republics, owing to the widespread distrust of the per- manency of any Confederacy.
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