Roaming Through the West Indies

We sailed across the bay on the mailboat Nereida, a wretched little single-masted derelict no larger than an average lifeboat. Though its bottom was already heaped with broken rock ballast, an incredible load of American patent medicine, of flour, rum, soap, cigarettes, sprouted onions, cottonseed oil, and sundry odds and ends was tumbled into it before the mails finally put in an appearance an hour after sailing time. Nine passengers and a crew of two, all negroes except “Mac” and myself, crowded the frequently sea-washed deck. What our fate would have been had one of the sudden squalls for which West Indian waters are noted overtaken us it was all too easy to imagine.

A steady wind on the beam carried us diagonally across the gulf in the general direction of our destination without the necessity of tacking. The shore we were leaving was the scene of the first bloodshed between Columbus and the aborigines of the New World, the forerunner of countless massacres. The bay was once offered to the United States by a Dominican president, but a single congressman caused us to decline the honor. Tiny fishing boats with palm-leaf sails ventured a few miles out from the land, then abandoned to us the seascape, which remained unbroken until we neared the southern shore well on in the afternoon. Constant quarrels between the two halves of the crew on the advisability of tacking or not tacking enlivened all our snail-like, zigzag course along the face of the land, and black night had come before we climbed over the water-soaked cargo to the drunken pier of Jovero.

A gawky village of some six hundred inhabitants, boasting only one two-story house, this out-of-the-world place was quickly thrown into a furore of curiosity over its unexpected white visitors. Even the commander of the guardia detachment was a native lieutenant; the most nearly Caucasian resident was the town treasurer, a young “Turk” from Tripoli, in the back of whose more than general store we were finally served a much needed meal. With three thousand persons in the region only two copies of a weekly newspaper, according to the post master, brought them the world’s news, and that was a pathetic little sheet from across the bay. No wonder false rumors have a free field in such a community. Cattle, pigs, cacao, and an unseasoned tobacco sold in mouldy-scented rolls six feet long, called andullos, made up the scanty exports of the district. Barely one per cent. of its territory is under cultivation, for like all the province of Seibo bandits still harass it long after the rest of the republic has been pacified.

Under superior orders the native lieutenant assigned a sergeant and eleven men of the guardia to accompany us through the bandit haunts beyond. As they lined up for final inspection they were spick and span out of all parallel in my tropical experience, from newly ironed breeches to oiled rifles; ten minutes later they were marching knee-deep through a river in the well-polished shoes they would gladly have left behind had American discipline permitted it. Their own fault, I mused, for they might have spent some of their ample garrison leisure in building a bridge; but I soon withdrew the mental criticism. A single bridge would not much have improved that route. It consisted of a wide cleared space through the mountainous forest, and nothing more—rather less, in fact, for in many places neither the stumps or the huge felled trunks had been removed. Streams succeeded one another in swift succession; the almost constant rains of this region had made the steep slopes precarious toboggans of red mud, where they were not corduroyed with camclones, slippery ridges of earth with deep troughs of muddy water between them. Here and there the guards were forced to climb a slimy bank virtually on their hands and knees; in other places the mud clung to their feet in hundred-weight; with the densest vegetation on either hand cutting off all suggestion of breeze, the sweat dripped from them in streams. Within half an hour the bedraggled, soaked, mud-plastered rifle-bearers staggering before and behind us along the trail showed slight resemblance indeed to the perfectly starched and polished young men who had been drawn up for the lieutenant’s inspection.

“Mac” and I on our sorry mounts were not much better off. It was beginning to be apparent why one can get from Santiago to New York more easily and in less time than to the Dominican capital. The ex-“top,” as a high government official, had been given Jovero’s best mule, but it would be easy to imagine a better one. My own steed had long since become a candidate for the glue factory and his suffering air had already riddled my conscience before a shifting of the saddle-cloth disclosed an open sore on his back larger than my two hands. Santo Domingo needs such a law as that with which we cured the Canal Zone of this heartless Latin-American custom of working their animals in a mutilated condition. But what could one do under the circumstances but urge on the suffering beast? We had come too far for me to turn back in the faint hope of getting another mount; it was as necessary to reach Seibo as it was not to leave “Mac” in the lurch, and even had I taken to my feet along with the mud-caked guards the abandoned animal would have been almost certain to fall into the still less compassionate hands of the bandits.

Precautions against the latter now began to be taken in earnest. We were approaching a labyrinth of sharp gullies and high hills which had always been a favorite lurking-place of the outlaws. Any turn of the now narrow trail would have made a splendid ambush. Drenching showers at frequent intervals made it easy for the ruffians to sneak up through the bush unheard; the heavy humidity of a tropical rainy season deadens sounds even when the sun shines. The sergeant arranged his men in skirmish formation, with strict orders not to “bunch up” under any circumstances. A barefoot native on horseback, who had overtaken us soon after our departure from Jovero, was forbidden to ride ahead of the party. We had no means of knowing whether his assertion that he had hastened to join us for safety’s sake, after waiting a fortnight for a chance to make the journey, was truth or pretense. These preparations concluded, we moved forward ready for instant battle.

Nothing of the kind occurred. I might have known it would not; there is no greater Jonah on earth than I for scaring off adventure. Trails worn deeper than a horseman’s head and so narrow as to rub our elbows offered attackers comparative immunity; the dense jungle might easily have concealed a score of men within a yard or two on either side of us; the steepness of the mountain-top, forcing us to dismount and drag our weary, stumbling animals behind us, left us scant breath to spend in physical combat, yet nothing but the deep, oppressive silence of a tropical wilderness enlivened our laborious progress. By the time the summit was reached we were ready to believe that the bandits of Seibo were a myth. An unbroken expanse of vegetation, dark green everywhere, spread away to the limitless southern horizon. Yet the rains ceased abruptly at the crest of the range, and the trail that carried us swiftly downward was as dry as the Sahara.

The sergeant gradually relaxed his vigilance and let his men once more straggle along at will, though he watched closely the rare travelers who began to appear. Several of the guards, I found, as we grouped together again for a rest, spoke to one another in Samaná English rather than Spanish. When I gave a cheering word in the latter tongue to a ragged native civilian who had plodded at my horse’s heels since the beginning of the journey, he glanced up at me with an expression of incomprehension and asked the guard behind him to interpret my remark. He was Canadian born, had been seven years in the sugar fields of Cuba without learning a word of Spanish, and had been robbed by Haitian cacos of everything except his tattered hat, shirt and trousers. “Nobody told me there were that kind of people in that country,” he explained, plaintively, “I never thought such things of people of my color.” The wisdom gained from that unexpected experience developed a precaution that had held him nearly three weeks in Jovero awaiting a safe opportunity to proceed to the sugar district of southeastern Santo Domingo.

We were soon down on the flatlands again, but it was a long time before the first signs of cultivation broke the dreary wilderness. This was a cacao canuco, or tiny plantation, overgrown with brush and weeds and with the scarred ruins of a hut in one corner of it. More of them lined the way for mile after mile, all abandoned for the past three years, fear of the bandits making it impossible even to pick the pods that ripened, rotted, and fell beneath the trees. These endless gardens choked with weeds made this wonderfully fertile valley seem doubly pitiful in its uncultivated immensity. The guards, who, after the fashion of their kind, had made no provision whatever against a long day’s hunger, climbed the rotting stick fences and picked half-green bananas and papayas, or lechosas, as the Dominican calls them, from the untended plantations. At length huts still standing began to appear, then inhabited ones, occupied almost exclusively by women, showed that we were approaching the safety zone. The creak of guinea hens, like rusty hinges, commenced to break the silence; goats took to capering out of our way; better dressed people of both sexes gradually put in an appearance, crowing cocks challenged one another in ever increasing number, and at sunset the again road-wide trail became the main street of the town of Seibo.

The capital of a province without so much as the pretense of a hotel is a rarity even in backward Santo Domingo. Nothing but the most miserable of thatched huts, with three human nests on legs in one tiny room, and a back-yard reed kitchen attended by a ragged old negro crone, offers accommodation to unbefriended strangers in Seibo. It is perhaps the most out-of-the-way, astonished-at-strangers, unacquainted-with-the-world town of any size that can be found in the West Indies. Though a large detachment of marines camp at its bandit-threatened door, it showed unbounded surprise to see American civilians. Groups of almost foppishly dressed men lounged about its streets, yet the town itself was little short of filthy. A curious old domed church, some of it built four hundred years ago, its original color faded to a spotted pale-blue, and its aged square tower surmounted by a marine wireless apparatus, is the only building of importance. From the top of this, or the one other place in town where one can go upstairs, Seibo is seen to be surrounded by low hills, everywhere wooded, without a hut outside its compact mass, its skirts drawn up like those of a nervous old maid in constant dread of mice. The inevitable fortress that gives Haitian and Dominican villages a likeness to the castle-crowned towns of medieval Italy watches over it from a near-by knoll and houses its guardia garrison. Built almost entirely of wood, the low houses of the better class are roofed with sheet-iron, the poorer with palm-leaf thatch. It has no plaza but merely a stony plowed rectangle of unoccupied ground in its center. The public school has no doors between its rooms, hence is a constant uproar of teachers and classes shouting against one another. Seibo bears the reputation of being always “agin’ the gover’ment,” and it is not strange that we found its people somewhat more surly toward Americans than those of the Cibao.

That did not hinder them from obeying “Mac’s” official commands with fitting alacrity, however, whether they were a hint to shop-keepers to display their licenses as the law required or a whisper to his local subordinates to correct their methods. The slip-shod ways of native rule cannot long endure where an exacting American official drops in unexpectedly every now and then to inspect things down to the slightest detail. Such close-rein methods are indispensable to the proper functioning of revenue laws in Santo Domingo. Your Latin-American can seldom rise to the point of impersonal application of governmental decrees; with him it is always a personal matter between official and inhabitant. Checked up in the courteous yet firm manner which “Mac” had learned by long contact with this race, his subordinates had a curious resemblance to backward schoolboys whom a teacher holds up to scratch by frequent kindly assistance with a threat of the switch behind it. The government of occupation has done everything possible to remove temptation from both inspected and inspector in internal revenue matters. Every distillery, for instance, is so constructed that the owner may watch his product behind iron bars as it runs from still to receptacle, yet not a drop can he extract without calling upon the inspector to produce his keys. By such contrivances Santo Domingo is being gradually weaned away from the irregularities that were long the curse of its financial legislation.

An invitation from the major in command caused us to change with alacrity on our second day in Seibo from the “hotel” to a tent in the marine camp on the edge of town, with a far-reaching view, an unfailing breeze, and a “swimming hole” in the river below. Here, by dint of spending most of the day insisting, by offering twice the local rate for good mounts, by promising a peon “guide” a week’s pay for a day’s work, by seeing that the horses were within the marine corral before going to bed, and by being generally and strictly from Missouri, we succeeded in getting off the next morning at five. The air was damp and fresh. For the first time in five years I beheld the Southern Cross I had once known like the features of an old friend. Endless forests with a level roadway cut through them shut us in all through the morning, only a few canucos breaking the perspective of sheer forest walls. As in Haiti, the peasants of Seibo live back out of sight from the main trails, for fear of bandits, as the vicinity of some of our railroads is still shunned out of dread of marauding tramps. At another large marine camp we left the roadway and sagging telegraph wire to La Romana and struck due southward along a half-cleared trail that after an hour or more brought us out upon the sun-toasted advance guard of the cane-fields of the south. Amid the stumps and logs of immense tropical trees, black with the recent burning, baby sugar-cane was already turning bright green the broad expanse of newly felled forest. Negroes almost without exception from the French or British West Indies were adding row after row of the virgin fields to the sugar supply of a hungry world. Farther on, beyond another strip of forest soon due for the same fate, came immense stretches of full-sized cane, then toiling groups of cane-cutters, huge creaking cane-carts, finally a railroad that scorns to carry anything but cane, and by ten we had brought up at the batey of Diego, our mounted “guide” straggling in far behind us.

Many of the workmen of the surrounding “colonies” had gone on strike that morning. The Dominican delegate to the recent labor conference in Washington had brought back with him this new method of bringing to terms the “wicked American and Cuban capitalists who would starve us while carrying off our national wealth.” It was noticeable, however, that only a small fraction of the idle groups crowding the batey were natives of the country; the great majority of them grumbled in the easy-going drawl of the British negro. Small wonder the arguments of the Spanish-speaking manager who harangued them from the door of the office fell chiefly on uncomprehending ears. Besides, though their own arguments were simpler, they were not easily refuted. “Wi’ rice twenty-fi’ cent a pound an’ sugah eighteen cent in Macoris town what y’u go’n’ a do, mahn, what y’u go’n’ a do? An’ de washer lady she ax you a shilling fo’ to wash a shirt! How us can cut a caht-load o’ canes fo’ seventy cent? Better fo’ we if us detain we at home.”

Leaving manager and strikers to settle their differences without our assistance we climbed to the top of a car-load of cane and were soon creaking away across the slightly rolling country. A train so long that it had to be cut in two at the first suggestion of a grade squirmed away before us like a great green snake. The land became one vast expanse of sugar-cane, broken only by the clustered buildings of the bateys and dotted here and there by a royal palm or ceiba, which the woodsmen had not had the heart to fell. Branch railroads, like the ribs of a leaf, brought the product of all this down to the main line, whence it poured into the capacious maw of the Central Santa Fé, the tall chimneys of which appeared toward sunset, backed far off by a slightly yellowish Caribbean.

San Pedro de Macoris on the southern coast is a more important town than its near namesake of the Cibao, yet it is disappointing for all its size. With a certain amount of modern bustle, more city features than we had seen since Santiago, a fair percentage of full white inhabitants, and a rather “cocky” air, it exists chiefly because of a bottle-shaped harbor with a dangerously narrow entrance between reefs, while its docks are largely manned by British negroes.

We finally found passengers enough to afford the trip by automobile from Macoris to the capital. With the single exception of the Haitian journey to Las Cahobas, I have never known of a worse road being actually covered by automobile. Sandy or stony beyond words, a constant succession of rocks, stumps, scrub trees, sun-baked mud-holes, without a yard of smooth going, it was in fact no road at all, but so often had travelers followed the same general direction that a kind of route had grown up of itself. Several times we came to temporary grief; once we ran into a tree and smashed a case of Cuban rum that had been tied on the running-board, and as the chauffeur felt impelled to “save” as much of the precious stuff as possible, his driving was far from impeccable during the rest of the journey. One after another we bounced through such towns as La Yeguada, Hato Viejo, Santa Isabela, all spread out carelessly on the flat, dry, prairie-like country peculiar to the coral formation of southern Santo Domingo. In one place the mud was so deep that we were forced to turn aside for a few yards into the private property of a Cuban ex-general, who occupies a wattled hut with his illegitimate brood of mulattoes. This wily individual, in spite of the fact that he draws a generous monthly pension through a foreign bank in the capital, has placed a guard at his gate and collects two dollars from every passing automobile. Then came more sugarcane, another large mill with its creaking ox-carts and striking negroes, and from San Isidro on sixteen kilometers of excellent highway to Duarte, a suburb of the capital, and across the Ozama river into Santo Domingo City. The American governor of the republic had recently made the official announcement that sixty per cent. of the great national highway from the capital to Monte Cristi was already completed! He could scarcely have taken his own words seriously had he been privileged to follow us in the opposite direction.

This is not the place to recapitulate in detail the busy history of Santo Domingo,—how the island of Quisqueya, or Haïti, was discovered by Columbus on his first voyage and named Hispaniola; how it was gradually settled by the Spaniards, who as usual massacred the aborigines and imported African slaves in their place to cultivate the newly introduced sugarcane; how French buccaneers from Tortuga eventually conquered the western end of the island and were recognized by having a governor sent out from France; how battles raged to and fro between the French and the Spaniards until something like the present frontier between Haiti and Santo Domingo was established; how the English expedition sent out by Cromwell was repulsed and contented themselves with occupying Jamaica instead; how the negroes of Haiti at length rose against their masters and drove the French from the island, then ruled the whole of it for twenty-two years; how the República Dominicana won her independence from Spain, voluntarily surrendered it again, regained it in 1865, and entered into that career of constantly recurring revolutions, in which the winner always became president and his supporters the possessors of the public revenues, that eventually led to the present American occupation. The interest of the modern reader is more apt to begin with this century. In 1906, in order to keep Germany, Belgium, Italy, and several other creditors from landing in Santo Domingo to collect the debts of their nationals, the United States advanced $20,000,000 and took over the custom houses as security. The following year the United States and the Dominican Republic signed a convention under which the former was to appoint a receiver for bankrupt Santo Domingo, five per cent. of the custom receipts to cover the expenses of the receivership and a certain amount to be set aside to pay off the national debts and provide a sinking fund. The convention further stipulated that Santo Domingo could not contract new public indebtedness without American consent, and that the United States could intervene if conditions within the country threatened to interfere with the collection of the custom duties.

The Dominicans soon broke the former agreement. The government illegally sold revenue stamps at a fraction of their value; pagarés were issued at great discounts; goods were purchased in the United States and abroad without being paid for or legally sanctioned. In five years following 1907 there were six presidents, including the Archbishop. In 1911 Cáceres was shot by his own cabinet members because they were not allowed to graft enough. The United States superintended the elections of 1914, with the understanding that all parties should abide by the result. A hard task that for the Dominicans. Within a year another revolution broke out, secretly sponsored either by the president himself for the advantage it would give the government in spending power, or by the opposition party, led by the minister of war. This outbreak was soon suppressed. In 1916 President Jimenez had barely retired to his summer palace when this same Deciderio Arias, a turbulent cacique who had been given the war portfolio in the hope of keeping him quiet, decided that his chief should never return to the capital. Supported by the military forces, with the police split between the two factions, this coup d’état was on the point of winning, when, at the end of April, 1916, the American Minister sent word that there was trouble again in Santo Domingo. Then the United States, which had “offered its good services” many times before and endured Dominican conditions with far too much patience, decided to act. An ultimatum was sent to Arias announcing that the United States would no longer permit the establishment of government by revolution. Marines from Haiti had been landed at Fort San Gerónimo with orders to support the government of Jimenez, and with his clandestine approval, and took the capital with little difficulty. The president publicly repudiated his secret agreement, in spite of having everything in his favor, and announcing in a bombastic pronunciamento that his “dignity” would not permit him to endure a foreign military occupation, resigned with all his government. For this the marines were duly thankful; it simplified the whole problem.

Meanwhile a force had landed at Puerto Plata and at Monte Cristi, and fought their way overland, suffering considerably from snipers on the way. Arias, who had escaped with all his supporters from the unprotected side of the city, hurried to the Cibao and attempted to hinder the marine advance, but was forced to surrender with the capture of Santiago. His power was still paramount in the capital, however, and he forced congress to make Hernandez y Carbajal, who had returned from long exile in Cuba, president. The United States refused to recognise this illegal election and declined to let the government have any money, with the result that the country was left without rulers. Finally American military occupation was proclaimed and our forces took over the entire government of Santo Domingo, a status compared with which the mere “advisory” one of our marines in Haiti was far more complicated, and has remained so to this day.

When the Americans took over Santo Domingo the republic was millions in debt—something like $40 per capita, to be exact—completely bankrupt, and the salaries of all but the higher officials were long in arrears. Now, after less than four years of occupation, there is some $4,000,000 in the treasury. The new land tax alone—which it has been impossible to duplicate in Haiti, where laws are still made by a native congress,—has already produced nearly a million. Most of this goes back to the municipalities. The old taxes bore far more on the poor man than on the man of property. Moreover, the government of occupation has collected more than three times as much from these older sources than was the case under native rule, chiefly because there is no tax-gatherer’s graft and the friends of the government are no longer let off unpaid. Every disbursement is now paid by check, on voucher in duplicate, and the same man cannot buy and pay. A few American civilians in supervising positions receive their salaries from Dominican funds—and render many times value received. The great bulk of the higher officials are of no expense whatever to the natives, being members of our military forces drawing their pay from the United States treasury.

The sovereignty of the República Dominicana has never ceased. Its functions are merely administered by representatives of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, officially called “The Military Government of the United States in Santo Domingo.” There is no president or congress. Even the laws are made by the military governor, an American admiral. There have been no elections since our occupation; all officials down to the least important are appointed, directly or indirectly, by the Americans. The latter control all financial matters and exercise supervision over the official acts even of the smallest municipalities. American money, chiefly torn, patched, sewn, dirty, half-illegible bills, constitutes the circulating medium. On the other hand, the republic has its own schools, courts, and minor officials. The Dominican flag flies from all public buildings except American headquarters. In short, in so far as any definite policy has ever been announced, we are in Santo Domingo to do exactly what we did in Cuba.

The Americans found the whole question of land titles one of incredible chaos and fraud. Not only were there few definite deeds in existence, but the country was overrun with what are known as “peso titles.” In the old days the King of Spain gave grants of land without any conception of the limits thereof, often supremely ignorant of its whereabouts. Not infrequently the same parcel was given to three or four of his faithful subjects. The grantees, who in many cases had never seen their property, divided their holdings among several children. The latter had no clear idea either of the amount or the location of their property. So they said, “Well, I think it is worth so many pesos,” whereupon each child was given his fraction of that amount—on paper—and thus the subdivision went on through many generations. Thousands of these “peso titles” were sold to speculators, or to natives or foreigners who had worse than hazy ideas of their worth. Then on top of this there grew up a big business in fake titles. As many as four thousand have been presented, where fewer than four hundred showed any evidence of being real. Moreover, the real ones, being often hundreds of years old and written by men who could neither spell nor find proper writing materials, were more apt to look spurious than did the false ones. To clear up this intolerable situation the Americans decreed that all land titles not proved up to a certain date reverted to the government. The ruling caused some injustices, but these were unavoidable under the circumstances and as nothing compared with the old order of things. The introduction of a land tax also has caused many who might otherwise have drifted on in the good old tropical way to clear up their titles. A certain amount of litigation between the government and individuals is still going on, but the whole problem is gradually coming to an orderly solution.

Another question which the Americans faced upon their arrival was the disarming of the country. It had long been the custom in Santo Domingo for even the small boys to carry revolvers. Among the weapons were many costly pearl-handled ones; most of them had been manufactured in Springfield, Mass., or Hartford, Conn. A date was set when all firearms must be turned in to the military government. The penalty for non-compliance was at first made very severe. There are men still serving sentence in the road-gangs of Santo Domingo for having guns in their possession three years ago. At present the standard punishment is six months’ imprisonment and $300 fine. With the exception of the bandit-infested province of Seibo, the entire country has now been completely cleared of firearms, at least those in actual use. Some, to be sure, are buried or hidden away in the jungle, but time and the rust of tropical climates will soon take care of those. The Americans burned whole roomsful of rifles; more than 200,000 revolvers have been thrown into the sea outside the capital. To-day it is difficult even for provincial officials to get permission to carry a shooting iron.

As in other lands under temporary or permanent American rule, from Haiti to the Philippines, a native constabulary was organized. The Guardia Nacional of Santo Domingo, consisting at present of a company of some eighty men in each of the fourteen provinces, has the same organization as the Marine Corps. Its members enlist for three years, and privates get $15 a month. Their uniform lacks only the hat ornament and somewhat more durable dye-stuffs to be an exact copy of that of our “leather-necks.” The only difference in equipment is the “Krag Jorgensen” instead of the “Springfield.” The officers are marines, usually sergeants, except in the higher commands and a very few natives who have climbed to “shave-tail” rank. All commands are given in English. A “non-com.” can put his men through the whole drill in that language, yet if you ask him his name, the answer is almost certain to be “No hablo Inglés.” Unlike the Gendarmérie of Haiti the Guardia is confined in its duties to matters of national defense; municipal police still keep order in the cities. We got the impression during our short stay that the Guardia officers were not quite the equal of those of the Gendarmérie. For one thing the pay is less attractive, though that of the men is fifty per cent. higher. Recently, too, all marine sergeants holding commissioned rank in the Guardia have unwisely been reduced to privates during their absence from their permanent organizations, with the unfortunate result that the few native lieutenants get more pay than their American captains, unless the latter are also commissioned officers of the Marine Corps. The native rank and file of the Guardia have a cocky, half-insolent air quite foreign to their simpler fellows of Haiti; they look as if they would be better fighters, more clever crooks, and not so easily disciplined.

The cacos of Santo Domingo are called gavilleros, caco in that country meaning merely thief or burglar. They are usually armed with “pata-mulas” (mule hoofs), which are rifles that have been cut down into revolvers, partly because they are too lazy to carry the whole gun, partly because the abbreviation is easier to conceal. In the olden days any one with a few hundred dollars could raise an “army,” especially by making copious promises of government jobs to everyone if—or rather, when—his side won. Not until the Americans came were these anti-governmental groups called bandits; they were dignified with the title of revolutionaries. Santo Domingo had long run more or less wild; many of its men preferred taking to the hills at fifty cents a day with rations and the possibility of loot to doing honest work at a dollar a day. As with all Spanish-sired races, the Dominicans have the gambling instinct well developed. They love the lotteries of life; they would rather take a chance on winning some big prize as bandits or revolutionists to toiling in safety at peaceful occupations. Then, too, many were forced to join these outlaw bands, lest their houses be burned or their families injured. The gavillero situation had been bad before the Americans landed. It became worse under the occupation, for reasons that we shall see.

To begin with, Arias released nearly all the criminals in the country during his revolt against the Jimenez government. These quickly turned bandits; later on they pretended to be patriots fighting the American occupation. As a matter of fact the majority of them were fighting for food, rather than for either political or patriotic reasons, but bombast is one of the chief qualities of the Latin-American. The forces of occupation might in some ways have handled this bandit situation better than they did; largely because of ignorance of local customs, partly because of inefficiency and a certain amount of brutality, they made something of a mess of it, or at least let it become more serious than it need have done.

Two regiments of marines are engaged in the occupation of teaching the Dominicans how to live without lawlessness—a scant 5000 of them among a population of 750,000. Unfortunately there are flaws in all organizations. There are marine commanders in Santo Domingo so just and broad-minded that they are almost loved by the naturally hostile population; there were others who have little real conception of their duties. The rascally, brutal, worthless, “Diamond Dick” class of American sometimes gets into the Marine Corps as into everything else and tends to destroy the good name of the majority. Boys brought up on dime novels and the movies saw at last a chance to imitate their favorite heroes and kill people with impunity: some of them, too, were Southerners, to whom the Dominicans after all were only “niggers.” The great majority of the forces of occupation were well meaning young fellows who often lacked experience in distinguishing outlaws from honest citizens, with the result that painful injustices were sometimes committed.

These ignorant, or movie-trained, young fellows were sent out into the hills to hunt bandits. They came upon a hut, found it unoccupied, and touched a match to the nipe thatch. They probably thought such a hovel was of no importance anyway, even if it were not a bandit haunt, whereas it contained all the earthly possessions of a harmless family. In their ignorance of local customs they could not know that the entire household was out working in their jungle yuca-garden. Or they found only the women and children at home, and burned the house because these could not explain where their man was. Or again, they met a man on the trail and asked him his business, and because he could not understand their atrocious imitation of Spanish, or they his reply, they shot him to be on the safe side. In still other places they burned the houses of innocent accomplices, because bandits had commandeered food and lodging there. If one can believe half the stories that are current in all circles throughout Santo Domingo, the Germans in Belgium had nothing on some of our own “leather-necks.”

A parish priest of Seibo, who seemed, if anything, friendly to the occupation, told me of several cases of incredible brutality of which he had personal knowledge. He could not divulge the secrets of the confessional, but he could assure me that many of the victims had been innocent even of hostile thoughts. The Guardia, he asserted, included some of the worst rascals, thieves, and assassins in the country, men far worse than the gavilleros, and these often egged the naïve Americans on to vent their own private hates. Scarcely a month before a sad personal experience had befallen him. On Christmas Day he had gone with acolytes to another town to attend a fiesta, when a drunken marine had fired his rifle twice into the wattled hut where it was being held and killed a boy of ten who was at that moment swinging the censer.

I cannot vouch for all the padre’s statements, but rumors of this kind were strikingly prevalent among natives and Americans all over Santo Domingo. On the other hand we must remember that the bandit-hunters often have no certain means of telling a gavillero from a “good citizen,” and they cannot always afford to give a man the benefit of the doubt. One is as apt as the other to look like an honest, simple, harmless fellow, and there have been sad mistakes on the side of leniency also, which have naturally led to over-caution. The Dominican is quite versatile enough to be a bandit one day and to be found scratching the ground of his jungle garden with his machete the next. Captured gavilleros have boasted that they hid their guns in a cane-field when a hostile force appeared, came out and helped the marines unsaddle, drank a round with them in the neighboring licorería, and recovered their weapons as soon as the hunters had taken to the trail again. The Guardia, too, has not always been free from spies. The difficulties of the situation, and the necessity of a wide knowledge of local customs and conditions on the part of those sent to handle it, is exemplified by the miscarriage of a plan to clear a certain district of Seibo of outlaws. The government of occupation ordered all “good inhabitants” to come into the towns on a certain day, so that the bad ones might be more easily corralled. But the gavilleros have a better news service than those who have no particular reason to keep their ears to the ground. The former learned of the order, concealed their weapons, and hastened into the villages, with the result that those who were shot were chiefly honest, simple peasants.

There have been several battles of importance between the marines and the gavilleros since the occupation. The latter are more worthy adversaries than the Haitian cacos, though the defeat of a band of four hundred by a score of Americans is not considered an extraordinary feat. Thanks either to his Spanish antecedents or to his revolutionary history, the Dominican has a ferocity and a desprecio of human life that makes it unwise to be compassionate. More than thirty marines have been killed in Santo Domingo, as against only four in Haiti. One band has announced a determination to completely exterminate the white foreigners, and makes a practice of horribly mutilating the dead and wounded. A persistent rumor has it that one of its leaders is an American.

The story of the killing of the bandit chieftain of Santo Domingo is not so heroic as the extermination of Charlemagne in Haiti—nor as definite. Vicentico and his men had overrun almost the entire province of Seibo. In July, 1917, one account has it, a gunnery sergeant who spoke imperfect Spanish went into his district unarmed and in “civies” and spent a week in winning the chief’s confidence. The Americans, he told him, had lost hope of defeating so expert a warrior and would make him a general and chief of the Guardia, with places for the best of his men, if he would disband his forces and support the occupation. Another version is that the real go-between was a “Turk” shopkeeper who had known him in other days. Questions of individual glory aside, Vicentico at length set out with seventy picked men to report to the marine commander. On the way he was suddenly startled to hear one of the wild birds of Seibo utter its peculiar shriek in a tree-top above him.

“You are betraying me!” cried the chieftain, whirling upon the “Turk”—or the sergeant—and covering him with his “pata-mulas.” “That bird has never failed to warn me of danger.”

The emissary, who was evidently gifted with a superhuman tongue, managed to talk his way back into the confidence of the outlaw, and the journey proceeded. Arrived at the American headquarters, Vicentico marched haughtily in upon the marine colonel, his swarthy face twitching with triumph, and announced himself ready to take over the command of the Guardia.

“You are under arrest,” said the colonel, dryly.

“Caramba!” cried the outlaw, while a detachment of marines disarmed his seventy followers, “I knew I should have listened to that bird!”

Just what happened after that is not very clear, except that it was nothing of which to be particularly proud. One version runs that the gunnery sergeant entered the outlaw’s cell one night and told him, amid curses and crocodile tears, that his superiors had repudiated their promise, but that he would redeem his own unintentional treachery in the matter by helping the bandit to escape at once—whereupon guards carefully posted outside met him with a volley sanctioned by the ley de fuga of his own race. Another termination of the tale has it that a group of marine officers, “lit up after a big party,” staggered to the prison and vindicated the loss of some of their comrades by shooting the outlaw with his handcuffs still on, and without even allowing him time to call a priest. Just how much truth there is in these varying accounts, or combinations of the two, will probably remain a mystery, but even the marines themselves do not often boast of the killing of Vicentico.

Chronic pessimists and sworn enemies of the occupation assert that the Americans have made ten bandits for every one they have killed. Without taking this statement at par, there is at least a grain of truth in the complementary assertion that the killing of Vicentico made all Seibo turn gavilleros. In some sections only women, children, and old men are seen; the young bucks have all taken to the hills. The leaders that are left have no confidence in Americans, especially those in a marine uniform, and they will no longer enter into negotiations of any nature. The province wants revenge for what it considers the treacherous betrayal of one of its popular heroes. We should remember the time-honored Spanish attitude towards bandits—something mere warriors, with no time to study history, cannot be expected to know. The government of Spain has always been more or less an oppressor of the common people; those who rise against it, either singly or in groups, are looked upon somewhat as champions of the helpless masses. The favorite heroes of Spanish dramas to this day are bandidos, and they are always equally noted for their absolute indifference to personal danger and for their knightly code of honor, to say nothing of their unfailing generosity toward the poor. It is not hard, therefore, to understand why los Americanos fell far down the moral scale of Seibo province by their uncaballeresco treatment of Vicentico.

If I may continue this unprejudiced explanation of things as they seemed to be in Santo Domingo at the beginning of 1920 without giving the false impression that the great majority of our forces of occupation are not a credit to the land of their birth, I would add a word about the effect of personal conduct. A few marines, some officers among them, vary the monotony of their assignment by starting irregular households; a somewhat larger number take undue advantage of their isolation from our new and not too popular constitutional amendment. The former lapse would attract but little attention in Santo Domingo, where it is almost a national custom, were it not an American habit to boast ourselves superior to other races in such matters, at least in view-point. The result is a frequent sneering whisper of “hypocrites.” As to the second, like all Latin races the Dominican is seldom a teetotaler, but he is even more seldom seen under the influence of liquor, at least publicly. In a land where any man of standing loses caste by the slightest evidence of intoxication, the effect on the popular mind of what to their self-appointed rulers is merely a “little celebration” is extremely unfortunate. The result of these things, of a certain amount of crude autocracy, and a tendency to let red tape have the precedence over common sense, is that our forces of occupation are far less popular in Santo Domingo than they could be.

There has been a growing tendency on the part of the Dominicans to show their enmity openly. Several outbreaks at dances and fiestas, ranging from individual encounters to near-riots, have indicated the feeling against Americans. Marine officers dancing with Dominican girls have been subjected to unpleasant scenes. Our men are less often invited to native clubs than formerly. A less serious and more amusing index, almost universal south of the Rio Grande, is the increasing refusal to call us Americans. Several newspapers have permanently adopted the clumsy adjective “Estadunidense.” If our Southern neighbors have their way I suppose we shall soon be calling ourselves “Unitedstatians,” or, as a fellow-countryman who has lived so long among them as to admit their contention always writes it, “Usians.”

What we need in such jobs as that in Santo Domingo are “long time men,” soldiers who have learned by experience that the task is rather one of education than of oppression. I should like to see all those removed from our forces of occupation who have not a proper respect for Dominicans; not an unbounded respect—I haven’t that myself—but who at least admit that our wards are human beings, with their own rights and customs, and not merely “Spigs” and “niggers.” There is too much of that “nigger” attitude among the more ignorant class of Americans, who too often make the color-line a protection against their own shortcomings.

“Mac”—or “Big George,” for that matter—is an excellent example of the kind of American we want in such places. An early training that has taught self-control as well as the power to command, a long enough residence to speak Spanish perfectly, with all its local idioms, a bit of Irish blarney, which goes a long way with these simple and really good-hearted people, a due knowledge and regard for their customs and point of view, yet with a sense of humor to see and enjoy, rather than be annoyed by, their ridiculous side—in short, a real American, by which I do not mean the boisterous, bullying fellow who sees no good outside the United States, but one who can adapt himself to all conditions, return courtesy for courtesy, concise and straight-forward, living up to the law in every particular, always giving common sense the right of way over red tape, kindly worded in all his dealings, yet always letting possible recalcitrants sense the revolver loaded and cocked under his—the government’s—coat. Such are the men needed for these jobs, not the haughty autocrat nor the ignorant “rough-neck.”

The majority of Dominicans object to American occupation for several reasons. A list of the most potent might run something as follows: That of the bad boy made to behave himself; the resentment of politicians who have lost their hold on the public purse; the knowledge that the Americans consider themselves a superior race; the sharpness of the American color-line; the military censorship; “unconstitutional” American military courts; the order against carrying arms; the alleged breaking by the government of occupation of the Dominican law restricting immigration. There are others, but they are unimportant as compared to these.

The first two or three need no explanation. Few Americans realize how irksome is our attitude on the negro question in a country where not one inhabitant in ten can show an unquestionable Caucasian pedigree. Even the Dominicans have a color-line; I have yet to find a country inhabited by negroes that has not; but they see no justice in ranking a well-educated, influential citizen of more than the American average of culture in the same socially impossible category as an illiterate black dock laborer, simply because his hair is curly and his complexion slightly dulled. As to the censorship, the occupation calls it excessively lenient; Dominican writers find it “intolerable.” That it is stupid goes without saying; it seems to be a universal rule that a censor must be supremely ignorant of literature and forbidden even to have a speaking acquaintance with the classics. Yet with an uninstructed, inflammable population and a pest of irresponsible, self-seeking scribblers, no military occupation could exist without taking measures to curtail printed sedition. This is a rock on which the rather popular military governor and even the best class of natives have split asunder. The Comisión Consultiva, headed by the Archbishop, that was formed to give the admiral unofficial advice on Dominican matters beyond his natural ken, resigned at the beginning of 1920 because the “insupportable” censorship was not wholly abolished, instead of being merely softened.

The Cortes Prebostales come in for a large share of Dominican invective. The American military courts, they protest, sometimes try and punish those who have been acquitted by the native courts, and vice versa. It is unconstitutional, they cry. True enough, but so is it unconstitutional to have made it necessary for a foreign military force to assume the government of the country. Courts martial are resorted to only in cases of carrying arms, insurrections, assaults on members of the forces of occupation, and sales of liquor to men in uniform. It takes no great amount of thinking to see how impossible it would be to have such matters passed upon by Dominican judges. For one thing, none of them are covered by the civil laws of Santo Domingo.