Travel Central America

In explaining, and in answering, the geography of Central America is more illuminating, even, than its history. Central America is made up of five tiny nations, dovetailed into one another like baroche pearls on a string. México is the northern boundary, Panamá the southern, so that Central America lies between the ninth and fifteenth parallels of north latitude, stretching six hundred miles only between México and Panamá. Thus all the five countries are wholly within the tropics, all north of South America and south of Cuba and even Jamaica, and south, too, of most of the Philippine Islands.

In general the axis of Central America runs off from northwest to southeast, so that the most westerly point is nearly south of Galveston and the easternmost directly south of eastern Florida. So, strung on their slanting line from México to Panamá are the five countries; Guatemala, richest of all, at the north, then Honduras and Salvador (the latter, smallest but most thickly populated, tucked in on the Pacific side in a corner formed by Guatemala and Honduras), next Nicaragua, largest in size, and last Costa Rica with Panamá adjoining it on the south.
Although six hundred miles long, Central America is only from seventy-five to 250 miles wide, so that every point in the whole rich expanse of its territory is within a few hours, by rail or motor car, or a few days, by ox-cart or mule, from the sea and the ships and the ports of all the world. The backbone of the five countries is a comparatively low cordillera, 6,000-foot mountains with rich slopes for coffee farms. Toward the Atlantic side, down to the Caribbean Sea, are broad, low jungle valleys, rich for banana farms and for pastures, and on the Pacific side a comparatively narrow ledge, half desert and half a most luxurious garden, the site of the chief cities and of the richest of the coffee and sugar farms.

It is toward these lands and toward their promise that we now set sail. For across seas actual as well as symbolic the traveler must go to Central America. If we are inured to the discomforts of tropical railway travel, or if we find the sea sufficiently distasteful, we might go by rail all the way from New York to Guatemala City, passing through México, with many inconveniences and no great advantage in time.

And just here a word may not be amiss as to the preparations for a journey through Central America. Life there is very much like life anywhere else, but there are a few points in which the traveler from abroad will find adaptation necessary. Primarily these are due to the fact that the Central American, although his home is a model of comfort, does not, in his traveling, enjoy the luxuries which have come to seem necessities in travel elsewhere.

As to clothes, the keynote is that the travel is in the tropics, even while the formalities are of the great world. You will need tropical clothing; palm beach or mohair suits are indispensable, and "whites" if you care to take so much baggage, will be a great comfort. Riding clothes, of course, and they will be convenient, and quite the proper thing, for traveling by train or motor as well as horseback. A bathing suit and a light bathrobe should be taken.

The woman traveler needs only to know that laundry, while quick and cheap, is not very efficient and is likely to damage finer fabrics, and also (and this affects, too, the man's choice of tropical clothing) there are no good dry cleaning establishments in Central America. The woman traveler must, on the other hand, realize that she will be the happier and indeed comfortable only if she has clothes for every occasion, with almost the demands of a summer resort at home. Indeed, in spite of the fact that Central America lies in the tropics, three of the capitals enjoy an almost temperate zone climate in the mountains, and in addition, in all of them, all official gatherings and formal affairs call for proper dress, and men as well as women should provide accordingly.

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..