Pacific Shores From Panama

Spanish America of the Pacific still remains one of the few countries undiscovered by the tourist. The few foreigners who use the steamers that slowly meander up and down its coast are for the most part commercial travellers, mining engineers, or a stray missionary or archæologist. The few books that have been written about it—and they are very few indeed—deal with the region from one or the other of these view-points.

But no book that I have been able to find treats of it as a journey of recreation, a quest for the knowledge usually to be obtained by travel. Yet viewed from this stand-point alone, it is a truly fascinating voyage. The luxurious indolence that possesses the traveller as he glides over this lazy tropical sea, the romance of the Spanish cities, the picturesqueness and the appeal of its vast Indian population, the desolation of its arid wastes, the dizzy heights of its Cordillera, the sharp contrast of climate and vegetation—where equatorial tropics and eternal snows are ​often but a few hours apart—all these make up a journey, the fascination of which can scarcely be overstated. And it is my belief that with the opening of the Panama Canal this West Coast will become a favourite winter cruise for the people of our hemisphere.

Living, outside of the larger cities, is primitive, to be sure. But where is the seasoned traveller who would let that deter his ardour? And even as it is the hotels are no better and no worse than they are in towns of the same relative importance in Italy or Spain. The railroads are well equipped for the most part with American rolling-stock, the people courteous, kind, and well-disposed toward the stranger—if he will but meet them half-way.

To properly appreciate the voyage one must have a taste for the novel and the untravelled; one must have an eye for the picturesque; and, above all, one must have read up the old Spanish chroniclers or at least Prescott's "Conquest of Peru," that still remains the vade-mecum of the traveller in the Andes. How strange, how wonderful that this blind historian, sitting in his library in Cambridge, could have grasped with such accuracy a country he had ​never seen, describing its mountain fastnesses, its tropical valleys, the romance of its old Inca civilisation, and the ardour of its Spanish conquerors as no one has been able to do before or since!

To those who wish to pursue the subject further, I would suggest a perusal of the original story of the Conquest by Xeres, Pizarro's own secretary, and the Commentarios of Oviedo and Herrera, and the poetic, if sometimes exaggerated, accounts of Garcilasso de la Vega.

I wish to express my sincerest thanks to the officials and captains of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Compañía Sud-Americana de Vapores, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, for their many kindnesses and courtesies; to the Peruvian Corporation, especially to its representative in Lima, Mr. W. L. Morkill, aptly called the "King of Peru," for the exceptional opportunities he gave us to see out-of-the-way places and interesting festivals with the comfort of a private car, and to the new-found friends in general who taught us what hospitality could mean to the stranger in a strange land.

June, 1913.