INTRODUCTORY NOTE

IN the following pages I have attempted to bring together the records and the impressions of many voyages in the American Mediterranean and many visits to all the Caribbean countries made by me during the last twenty years.

In those countries, where recent developments have been along traditional lines, such as unhappily has been the case in Hayti, I have made but little effort to more than summarise events which have occurred subsequent to the date of my last visit.

Our merchants and our legislators are at last awakening to the possibilities of the new world that borders the great South Sea to which the shipping and the industries of two hemispheres will soon penetrate through the water-gates of Panama. Before I myself follow in the wake of those pioneers I have in this volume sought to impress upon possible readers the great beauties and the magnificent resources of the lands nearer home which have never been separated from us by the geographical obstacle which the genius of the American people has at last surmounted, which to-morrow will lie adjacent to the main-travelled roads of the sea that are about to be re-charted to meet the almost miraculously changed conditions of the water-way through the Isthmus.

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In a work of this character I am necessarily under obligations for valued assistance derived from many sources, for which I think in every instance acknowledgment is made in the text. For statistical information I have drawn somewhat upon the official publications of the countries in question, but more heavily upon the bulletins and the other publications of the PanAmerican Union, which in the last few years, under the able and energetic direction of the Hon. John Barrett, have become the highest authority on the Latin-American world. Many fragments of the following chapters have been published in the New York Times, in the Chicago Tribune, and in the North American Review. My thanks are given to the editors of these publications for permission to republish these articles in their amended and definite form.

BEDFORD, N. Y.

STEPHEN BONSAL.

September 1, 1912.

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THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN

CHAPTER I

THE CARIBBEAN WORLD-YESTERDAY-TO-DAY

TO-MORROW

THE West Indies extend from the tip of Florida's toe, west to east, a thousand miles out to sea. This is the first and most important section of the Caribbean world and comprises the four large islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Hayti and Santo Domingo), and Porto Rico. Once this last island sinks down behind the horizon, the insular chain which surrounds the Caribbean waters takes a downward turn extending to the South American coast. The continental shore-line of South and Central America, the old Spanish Main, from the mouth of the Orinoco to the Yucatan Channel, completes the land boundaries of the American Mediterranean on the south and west, and brings us back to Florida waters and our point of departure.

The great majority of these island links, which are known as the Lesser Antilles, belong to England and they form two administrative divisions called, that in the north the Leeward Islands, that in the south the Windward Islands.

Geographers and sailors are far from being satisfied with these terms, because, for one reason, the islands off the Venezuelan coast are left high and dry without a collective name. As a matter of fact, all the islands which

form the beautiful crescent extending across the stormvexed seas from St. Thomas to Tobago (Robinson Crusoe's real home) and to Trinidad are Windward islands and the little outposts of the South American continent, Margarita, Tortuga, Orchilla, Aves, Buen Ayre, Curaçao, and Oruba, compose the true Leeward group.

One hundred and fifty years ago these to-day neglected islands were regarded, and justly so, as the most valuable portions of the world's surface then known and accessible to man. When muscovado sugar brought $300 a ton and cost less than $100 to produce, when slave labour was cheap and hard driven, a small 200acre Barbadian plantation represented an annual income of $75,000 to $125,000.

Lands as valuable as these had many suitors, and the ownership of the islands was only established after many severe and bloody struggles. One of these wars lasted for a hundred years, and for several decades at leastuntil, as usual, people forgot what they thought they were fighting about-was known as the war over Captain Jenkins' ear.

I remember once when I had the advantage and perhaps the audacity to talk history with Mr. Lecky, he expressed considerable scepticism as to the damage that was done to Captain Jenkins' ear, and was rather inclined to throw doubt upon the tradition or the legend which we learned as history when I went to school, according to which Captain Jenkins was a bluff sailorman who went on a trading venture to Martinico and had his ear severed from his honest bullet head by some tyrannical don or frog-eater, even in those days, it would seem, averse to anything like free or fair trade.