Sometime in the latter half of 1911, Harry A. Franck jumped out of a box-car and crossed the Rio Grande, from Laredo. Thus began a journey, often afoot, that Harry estimated would take him 8 months. It ended up occupying four years of his life. The first leg of his Latin American epic is recorded in "Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras; Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond" (The Century Company, 1916). He then headed south to the Canal Zone, Teddy Roosevelt's grand experiment in socialism, and applied within the Zone police force for a position as a census taker (chronicled in "Zone Policeman 88; A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and Its Workers", The Century Company, April 1913). Since he was one of the few Americans who actually spoke Spanish, and a bevy of other languages, he was hired immediately. By June, 1912, he'd bankrolled enough money to see him through the opening phase of the work I'll be reading for you, "Vagabonding Down the Andes; Being the Narrative of a Journey, Chiefly Afoot, From Panama to Buenos Aires" (The Century Company, 1917). Leaving the Zone in June of 1912, with "objections to his reemployment", he caught a steamer and entered the South American continent at Cartagena, Colombia. Approximate 30 months later, having walked most of the length of the Inca highway, he staggered from a trek that took him over mountains and through raw jungle onto a ferry, and thence sailed into Buenos Aires, regarded as one of the most glamorous and expensive cities on earth at the time. This leg of the four volume epic (which later concludes with "Working North from Patagonia; Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America, The Century Company, 1921) was the longest one, and in many respects, "Vagabonding Down the Andes" was also the most detailed. As you can see, the works were not published in chronological order. Why? I don't know, other than the last volume, which was delayed by Harry's enlistment and serving in WWI. Harry is an opinionated iconoclast with a strong American value system based upon self-reliance. He's both college-educated and what I suppose can best be called "street smart", though most of his trip took him through places where "street" was little more than an abstract concept. Before his South American journey, he'd already worked his way around the world, and had written a book about it ("A Vagabond Journey Around the World", The Century Company, 1910). Some people are going to get their Politically Correct dander up if they listen. Well, fast traveler, keep in mind that Harry was a man of his times, and thus he sees the world, as we are all people of our times, and thus we see and experience the world. Harry did his vagabonding with a pistol as his constant companion, and lived amongst the poorest classes of people. He drank water collected in the ruts of wagon wheels. Not knowing where his next meal was coming from was the norm, as opposed to the exception. In terms of travel writing he makes Paul Theroux look like an armchair dilettante. Take him as he is, and I think you'll soon become enmeshed in this extraordinary saga.
By : Harry A. Franck (1881 - 1962)
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A few years ago, when I began looking over the map of the world again, I chanced to have just been reading Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” and it was natural that my thoughts should turn to South America. My only plan, at the outset, was to follow, if possible, the old military highway of the Incas from Quito to Cuzco. Every traveler, however, knows the tendency of a journey to grow under one’s feet. This one grew with such tropical luxuriance that before it ended I had spent, not eight months, but four full years, and had covered not merely the ancient Inca Empire, but all the ten republics and three colonies of South America.
A considerable portion of this journey was made on foot. The reader may be moved to ask why. First of all, I formed the habit of walking early in life, developing an inability to depend on others in my movements. Then, too, the route lay through many regions in which no other animal than man can make his way for extended periods. Moreover, there was the question of caste. It is one of the drawbacks of South America that a white man cannot efface himself and be an unobserved observer, as on the highways of Europe. Social lines are so sharply drawn that he who would be received in frank equality by the peon, by the great mass of the population, must live and travel much as they do. Merely to ride a horse lifts him above the communality and sets a certain barrier, akin to race prejudice, between him and the foot-going hordes among whom my chief interest lay.
At best these lines of caste are a drag on observant travel in South America. The “gringo” can never get completely out of his social stratum. His very color betrays him. It is always “Goot mawning, Meestear,” too often with a silly, patronizing smile, from the “gente decente” class; among the rest his mere appearance makes him as conspicuous as a white man among West Indians. Never can he be an inconspicuous part of the crowd, as in Europe. To get in touch with the “common people” requires actually living in their huts and tramping their roads. The dilettante method of approaching them, “slumming,” will not do. The disadvantages of the primitive means of locomotion in wild regions, such as the Andes, are obvious. But the advantages of walking over more ordinary methods of travel are no less decided. Though the means be more laborious, the mind is far sharper for facts and impressions while on foot than when lolling half asleep on a horse or in a train. The mere pleasure of looking forward to his arrival, subconsciously building up before his mind’s eye a picture of his goal complete in every detail, not to mention that of looking back upon the journey from the comfort of his own armchair, is ample reward to any true victim of wanderlust. Thousands of men, supplied with all the comforts money can buy, roam the earth from top to bottom—and are supremely bored in the process. It is the struggle, the satisfaction of physical action, the accomplishment of something greatly desired and for a long time seemingly impossible, that brings real pleasure, that makes every step forward a satisfaction, every little success in the advance an enjoyment. For after all, real travel is real labor. He who journeys only so far as he can without exertion, who shirks the difficulties, will know no more of the real joy of travel than he who lives without toil, seeking pleasure only and finding but the cold, dead body thereof, without ever realizing the joy of life itself.
As in ancient times, so it is in the Andes to-day; distance cannot be covered without fatigue. On the other hand there is the compensation of knowing completely the country through which one passes, storing away in the mind a picture of each long-anticipated spot, indelible as long as life lasts. The Andean traveler will know the pleasures as well as the drawbacks of the journeys of earlier, more primitive days, the joy of evening hours, when suddenly, from the summit of the last toilsome ascent, he discovers, spread out in its smiling valley below, the peaceful village in which he is to take his night’s repose, or when he perceives from afar, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, the towers of the famous city so long sought,—hours of a vivid joy that few experiences can equal.
Thanks again to the barriers of caste, he who would really know the masses of Latin America should not only live with them, but should dress as plainly as they do. It is hard at best to get into more than superficial contact with the South American Indian, and to some extent his traits, like his blood, run through all classes. The upper-caste Latin American is by nature a masquerader; he treats a “distinguished stranger” as a real estate agent pilots a prospective buyer about the streets of some “New Berlin,” cleverly sidestepping the drawbacks; he shows his real self only when he is not on parade, before he learns that he is under observation, and claps on the mask he always has instantly at hand when he wishes to show “himself”; and he rates every man’s importance by the height of his collar and the color of his spats, cloaking himself in pretense accordingly. He who does not wish to know the truth about a Latin-American country should attire himself in a frock-coat, a silk hat, and appear with letters of introduction to the “people of importance.” His hosts will take him in regal style along two or three of the best streets and into the show-places, will gild every garbage-can that is likely to fall under his august eye, and will shield him from all the unpleasantnesses of life as carefully as the guardians of the princess in the fairy-tale. Hence the mere lack of ostentation, the mere appearance of being one of the negligible masses, goes far toward giving the unassigned wanderer a vast advantage in getting at the unmasked truth, in avoiding false impressions, over men of more brilliant mind and better powers of observation.
My purpose in journeying through South America was primarily to study the ways of the common people. I am no more fond of the unsavory, either in physical contact or on the printed page, than are the rest of my fellow-countrymen. But every occupation has its drawbacks. No traveler through interior South America with whom I have yet spoken has found conditions better than herein indicated; though for some strange reason it appears to be the custom to shield readers from this, to tell intimate facts only privately and to falsify public utterances by glossing over all the crudities. The fact is that the man who has spent four years afield south of the Rio Grande, and has come back to tell the tale, can only shake with laughter when an exponent of the “germ theory” speaks. Explorers with millionaire fathers-in-law tell us that the out-of-the-way traveler to such a country should take with him numberless supplies, from sheets to after-dinner coffee. It is the best plan, for those whose aim is to live in comfort—or a still better plan is to remain at home. Far be it from me to censure the man who journeys southward for other purposes for taking with him all the comforts he can carry; but he who seeks to know the people intimately must not merely tramp their trails; he must become, in so far as is possible, physically one of them. We should care little about the impressions of a European studying life in the United States who lived in his own tent and subsisted on canned goods he brought with him, however much we might admire his foresight.
It may be argued that by following the plan I have outlined I saw only the lower class and do not report conditions among the more fortunate inhabitants. Yet after all, the peon, the Indian, the masses, comprise nine tenths of the population of South America. There are fewer persons of pure European blood between our southern boundary and Cape Horn than in the state of New York; and by no means all of these live in even comparative comfort. The well-dressed minority of Latin America has often had its spokesman; numerically, and on the whole, the condition of these is of as little importance in the general scheme of things as are the doings of our “Four Hundred” in the life of our hundred million. I have, therefore, summed up briefly the ways of this small, if conspicuous, class, and its ways are so monotonously alike throughout the length and breadth of Latin America that this lumping together is not difficult. The chief problem in any country is the status of the great mass of population, the condition of the common people, and it is to this that I have almost entirely confined myself in the ensuing pages.
“Have you read ——’s book on Brazintine?” a noted French traveler once asked me. “He says all the brazintinos are immoral and dishonest. You and I, who have been there, know this is true. But those are things one tells to a circle of friends, that one shares over a pipe at the club, mais, enfin, ça ne s’écrit pas”!
It is due, I suppose, to a lack of Gallic finesse that I have never been able to grasp this point of view. Why the plain truth should be reserved for the fireside and personal friends, and should be kept from one’s friends of the printed page, is beyond my fathoming. At any rate, I have made no attempt to follow that plan. I tried not to expect everything in South America to be exactly as it is in the United States—I should, indeed, have considered that a misfortune. After all, I went south to see the Latin American as he is, not with the hope of finding him another American merely speaking another language. I have tried to judge him by his own ideals and history, fully aware that in the latter he did not have a “fair shake,” rather than by our own. Yet the traveler cannot entirely lay aside his native point of view; that would imply that he was not convinced of the wisdom of his own way of life, and the question would arise, Why not change? Neither the Latin-American nor the American point of view is all right or all wrong; they are simply different. Because we criticize does not necessarily mean that we claim superiority, though I am reminded of the American resident in South America who asserted that were he not convinced of his superiority to his neighbors, he would forthwith tie a mill-stone about his neck and jump in where it was deep. But the traveler who does not express his own honest opinions, “loses,” as the Brazilians say, “a splendid chance to keep silent.” I have, therefore, set down my real, heartfelt impressions. These may be false, even worthless; the reader has full right to reject them in toto. But at least they have the virtue of frankness.
Moreover, South America has had its fair share of apologists. Virtually every country publishes at intervals a luxurious volume of self-praise that resembles in its point of view the year-book of a high school or college class. Trade journals are constantly painting things South American in the rosiest of colors. It has been the traditional policy of certain branches of our government to cultivate Latin-American friendship by a myopic disregard of all the shadows in the picture. In our own capital there exists a criminally optimistic society for the propagation of emasculated information concerning our neighbors to the south. Among “distinguished strangers” from our own land who have visited Latin America there seems to have been a conspiracy to whitewash everything, an agreement to have all they see or experience bathed, barbered, and manicured before permitting it to make its bow to our public. The enormous majority of descriptions of South America resemble the original about as much as a portrait resembles the sitter after a professional photographer has finished with it.
I do not know what the Latin American may have been in other years—perhaps he was the splendid fellow many make him out. I am merely telling, as charitably as possible, how I found him. I am not interested in winning or losing his friendship, in selling him goods, or in gaining his “moral support” to our governmental activities. I am interested only in giving as faithful a picture as possible of my experiences with him. There are good things, praiseworthy things in South America; if, in the telling, these have been overshadowed by the less laudable, it is because the latter do so overshadow in point of fact.
Obviously, the experiences of four years, even in Latin America, cannot be crowded within the covers of a volume or two. I have, therefore, confined myself within certain limits. History, for instance, has been almost completely eliminated. I have taken for granted in the reader a certain basic knowledge of South America, though in the case of many even well-educated Americans this seems to be taking much for granted. I have passed as briefly as possible over those things which are already to be found within the walls of our libraries, confining myself so far as possible to that which I have personally seen or experienced. I have, however, dipped as freely into the literature of each country as into the life itself, and in the few cases where I have made use of facts so acquired, I have not taken of my cramped space to acknowledge the debt in words. For similar reasons, though it may seem ingratitude, I have not taken the reader’s time to thank individuals by name for personal kindnesses. They were many; but the doers know that their deeds were appreciated, without thanks being detailed here; or if they do not, it is the fate of those who lend passing assistance to world-roamers to take their reward in inner satisfaction.
The modern reader is prone to tire quickly of mere description; but nature is so important a factor in the Andes that it cannot be briefly passed over. Personally I like an occasional sunset, like it so much that I sometimes go to the unrequited toil of attempting to paint one. The reader who prefers his stage bare, as in Shakespeare’s day, can easily glide over those pages. If he does without stage-setting, however, and relies only on his imagination, his picture is apt to be false, for the imagination has very faulty materials from our school-books and the tales of wandering Münchausens to work upon. Yet after all, even with all one’s effort, it is sad how little of the splendid scenery, the atmosphere, the charm of it all—for in spite of its drawbacks, South America has charm—one can get down on paper.
This was not a voyage of discovery; or rather, if there was discovery, it was only of a different stratum of life, and not of new lands. My plan was not so much to find unexplored country in the ordinary sense, as to go by hitherto unmentioned paths through inhabited and known regions, the out-of-the-way corners of familiar cities and the undescribed gathering-places of mankind. In that sense South America is still chiefly “unexplored.”
Lastly, let me give fair warning that this is no tale of adventures. I would gladly have had it otherwise. I sought eagerly for experiences that would make the story more worth the telling; I tried my sincerest to get into trouble; all in vain. In Mexico I marched peacefully about between two falling empires. In Guatemala I strolled nonchalantly among Estrada Cabrara’s band of hired assassins. In Honduras I chatted with the leaders of the latest revolution. In Colombia I met many cripples of the civil war but recently ended. In Ecuador I found only peace and apathy in the very streets through which an ex-president and his henchman had been dragged to death a few months before. In Peru all was love and brotherhood—until after I left. In the Bolivian Chaco wild Indians wiped out a company of soldiers not a hundred miles from where I was passing in placid unconcern. In the Paraguayan capital I sat with the man who not a year before had captained a particularly bloody coup d’état. In Brazil I passed through two sections virtually in anarchy, and in one of its state capitals watched a riot that came perilously near being a revolution. In Venezuela I strolled serenely through the very ranks of revolters mere days before the leader and many of his band were killed. Yet hardly once did I knowingly come near personal violence. The fact is that South America is atrociously safe. Dangers are mostly those of popular novelists, from the pages of travelers who succumb to the natural temptation to “draw the long bow,” after the fashion of Marco Polo.
It may be that there was a better way to have told this story than as a day-to-day narrative. But even at that, it could not honestly have escaped a certain monotony; for monotony is ingrained in the fiber of South America. Not to have reported the journey chronologically would have made for succinctness, but at the expense, perhaps, of truth. It may be wearisome to hear of virtually every night’s stopping-place; yet as the traveler through the interior must stop at almost every hut along the way, the sum total of these is a description of the whole country. If the story appears sketchy and piecemeal, it is because I have denied myself, erroneously perhaps, even the Barrovian privilege of transposing or inventing enough to make a smoother and more interesting story. A book of travel cannot have something always happening; that is the privilege of fiction. The novelist can forge his materials to his liking; the travel-writer is very limited, even in opportunity to amalgamate, his material being very hard and nonplastic. Even to transpose and combine incidents is often to falsify, for what is true in one spot may never have been so a hundred miles further on.
The necessity of suddenly abandoning this task for other and more important duties has made it impossible to give it final polish, to eliminate much that should have been eliminated, and to improve much of what remains.
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