Rare Vintage Books. Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America. 1896

NATIVE WOMEN AT LIVINGSTON

There are two opposite features of landscape in the tropics which are always found together—the royal palm, which is one of the most beautiful of things, and the corrugated zinc-roof custom-house, which is one of the ugliest. Nature never appears so extravagant or so luxurious as she does in these hot latitudes; but just as soon as she has fashioned a harbor after her own liking, and set it off at her best so that it is a haven of delight to those who approach it from the sea, civilized man comes along and hammers square walls of zinc together and spoils the beauty of the place forever. The natives, who


 do not care for customs dues, help nature out with thatch-roofed huts and walls of adobe or yellow cane, or add curved red tiles to the more pretentious houses, and so fill out the picture. But the “gringo,” or the man from the interior, is in a hurry, and wants something that will withstand earthquakes and cyclones, and so wherever you go you can tell that he has been there before you by his architecture of zinc.

When you turn your back on the custom-house at Livingston and the rows of wooden shops with open fronts, you mount the hill upon which the town stands, and there you will find no houses but those which have been created out of the mud and the trees of the place itself. There are no streets to the village nor doors to the houses; they are all exactly alike, and the bare mud floor of one is as unindividual, except for the number of naked children crawling upon it, as is any of the others. The sun and the rain are apparently free to come and go as they like, and every one seems to live in the back of the house, under the thatched roof which shades the clay ovens. Most of the natives were coal-black, and the women, in spite of the earth floors below and the earth walls round about them, were clean, and wore white gowns that trailed from far down their arms, leaving the chest and shoulders bare. They were a very simple, friendly lot of people, and rail from all parts of the settlement


 to be photographed, and brought us flowers from their gardens, for which they refused money.

We had our first view of the Central-American soldier at Livingston, and, in spite of all we had heard, he surprised us very much. The oldest of those whom we saw was eighteen years, and the youngest soldiers were about nine. They wore blue jean uniforms, ornamented with white tape, and the uniforms differed in shade according to the number of times they had been washed. These young men carried their muskets half-way up the barrel, or by the bayonet, dragging the stock on the ground.

General Barrios, the young President of Guatemala, has some very smart soldiers at the capital, and dresses them in German uniforms, which is a compliment he pays to the young German emperor, for whom he has a great admiration; but his discipline does not extend so far as the Caribbean Sea………………….