Costa Rica Red Earth

Westward from Panamá our steamer ploughs the Caribbean toward the rainbow countries. The white completeness of the Canal Zone fades behind, and with it the lonely, unaccented coast of the Panamá Republic. The Mosquito Gulf lifts us on its dark blue bosom with the uncertain, always threatening swell of the waters of the "Spanish Main." For we sail this sea, flecked with romance and mystery, toward regions that are still as wonderful and new as when Drake first came to try the prowess of his tiny ships against the might of sea and Spain.

This romance and mystery we shall not lose. With the morning we touch its outer rim, the purpled edge of the rainbow's crimson--in the solid, good red earth of Costa Rica. Dawn finds us at Port Limón, and about us a long, even coast, accented now with level forests that look like overgrown maize fields or a vast nursery of that aristocrat of the garden, the canna. And so it is the canna--a noble relative of the canna family-the banana of Costa Rica. Down to the very water's edge the groves seem to come, and only a suggestion of palm and tropical forest rises above and behind them.

Now, wherever there are bananas, somewhere in the hot quiet about them is civilization--in Central America. Port Limón is an excellent type of civilization, for it is a well-built port, and looks not at all forbidding as a town, merely a not too much modernized blotch of human-ness in the green of the jungle and banana groves. It welcomes us with its busy and efficient pier and after the Costa Rican doctor has come aboard our ship draws up alongside--a noble miracle of seamanship without a tug and with a single-screw steamer!

Port Limón is a banana port when all is said and done. The real Costa Rica is only sifting in on us, all the beautiful, vivid, proud Costa Rica that lies beyond the jungle, and beyond the hills, far up in the mountains.

Port Limón and the banana country are only the very formal and rather distantly related introduction to Costa Rica itself. The country the Spaniards knew is on the tableland, 3,000 feet above the sea. In fact, all of Costa Rica (save the two ports, one on the Caribbean and one on the Pacific) is concentrated in four little cities on the top of the Andean plateau. One can see the four of them from the slope of almost any Costa Rican mountain.

For all its diminutive size, however, Costa Rica is not one of the countries which the world can take lightly. It has only 23,000 square miles, or about the area of the American State of West Virginia, but it is one of the five American countries that have transcontinental railways within their own borders, it produces a goodly portion of the bananas we eat and some of much esteemed coffee. Costa Rica has a few mines, chiefly in one section, which have exported of gold and silver. But coffee and bananas and, increasingly, sugar and cacao are its chief products.

The Spanish influence on Central American history

The Spanish influence on Central American history is none the less overwhelming. Central America is no younger child of Spain. No less a personage than Christopher Columbus himself discovered Honduras in 1502, sailed south along the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua (where he was not impressed by any friendliness in the Indians), and reached, finally, to the land that he called Costa Rica (literally "Rich Shore"). There, for the first time on this voyage, the Spaniards found gold--in the ornaments worn by the natives. Those beautifully wrought ornaments of Costa Rica are rare archeological treasures today, and, as Columbus himself later learned, they were treasures to the Indians then, for gold was no common metal there. But the sign was enough for the Spaniards, and the short-lived settlement of Costa Rica, headed by Bartholomew Columbus, was one of the first on the mainland of the continent.

But in that very time there was passing away in the north, in what is now Guatemala, one of the greatest barbaric civilizations which history has ever seen, that of the Mayas, a wealth and a civilization of which the Spaniards were as yet entirely ignorant. Superb cities, built of stone elaborately wrought, with a literature even today only partially deciphered, a science in many ways more accurate and advanced than that of, the Europe of that time, and a social organization which the governments that have followed under Spain and the independence have hardly excelled,--these were the characteristics of the great history which preceded the Spaniards.

The conquest of these Central American Indians by the Spaniards came nearly two decades later. Although little known, in comparison with the conquests of México and Perú as immortalized by Prescott's vivid narratives, it lacks none of the heroism, or the cruelty, or the bigotry, of those larger canvases. The march of Pedro de Alvarado's army, overland from México into Guatemala through jungles that are utterly trackless to this day, is another of the striking stories of superhuman endurance that mark the whole history of Spain in America.
The battles whose scenes we shall visit in the highlands of Guatemala have a legendary glory awful in its horror and superb in its daring, while the hazy tales of ruthless and easy conquest of tribes other than the Mayas and their highland allies, are virtually hidden in the as yet unscratched archæology of these countries, yet for that matter, neither the one nor the other seems less lost in dim tradition than are the events of the Spanish rule that followed in succeeding centuries.

Indeed, the background of the Central America of today sometimes seems like a dim romantic panorama, of prehistoric civilizations, rivalling Egypt and India, of Spanish conquerors running rivers red with the blood of Indian armies, of pirates treading the "Main" with dripping swords and leathern sacks of yellow gold, and, in more modern days, of chivalrous revolutions and burning idealisms, of slavery and the wealth of coffee, of colorful dictatorships and the golden trove of the banana trade. It is all part and parcel of a past of isolation in the very midst of the world. For three centuries Spain held the world at bay, and then for an even hundred years revolutions, politics and diplomacy have shut Central America away not only from Europe and Asia but from the United States as well..