5. Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond: San Agustín, Copán, Honduras Part II

Written by: Harry A. Franck, in 1916:

Tobacco is grown about San Augustín, and every woman of the place rolls
clumsy cigars and cigarettes as incessantly as those of other parts knit
or sew. The wife and daughter of my host were so engaged when I
returned, toiling leisurely by the light of pine splinters; for rural
Honduras has not yet reached the candle stage of progress. For a
half-real I bought thirty cigarettes of the size of a lead-pencil, made
of the coarse leaves more fitted to cigars. The man and wife, and the
child that had been stark naked ever since my arrival, at length rolled
up together on a bundle of rags on the dank earth floor, the daughter of
eighteen climbed a knotched stick into a cubbyhole under the roof, and
when the pine splinter flickered out I was able for the first night in
Honduras to get out of my knee-cramping breeches and into more
comfortable sleeping garments. The festered heel gave me considerable
annoyance. A bread and milk poultice would no doubt have drawn the fever
out of it, but even had any such luxury been obtainable I should have
applied it internally. During the night I awoke times without number.
Countless curs, that were to real dogs what these people are to
civilized races, howled the night hideous, as if warning the village
periodically of some imaginary danger, suggested perhaps by the scent of
a stranger in their midst. Sometime in the small hours two youths,
either drunk or enamored of the bedraggled senorita in the cubbyhole
above, struck up a mournful, endless ballad of two unvarying lines, the
one barely heard, the other screeching the eternal refrain until the
night shuddered with it. All the clothing I possessed was not enough to
keep me warm both above and below.

One of the chief difficulties of the road in Honduras is the
impossibility of arousing the lazy inhabitants in time to prepare some
suggestion of breakfast at a reasonably early hour. For to set off
without eating may be to fast all the hot and laborious day. The sun was
already warm when I took up the task of picking my way from among the
many narrow, red, labyrinthian paths that scattered over the hill on
which San Augustín reposes and radiated into the rocky, pine-forested,
tumbled mountain world surrounding it. Some one had said the trail to
Santa Rosa was easy and comparatively level. But such words have strange
meanings in Honduras. Not once during the day did there appear a level
space ten yards in length. Hour after hour a narrow path, one of a score
in which to go astray, worn in the whitish rock of a tumbled and
irregular series of soft sandstone ridges with thin forests of pine or
fir, clambered and sweated up and down incessantly by slopes steeper
than any stairway, until I felt like the overworked chambermaid of a
tall but elevator-less hotel. My foot was much swollen, and to make
things worse the region was arid and waterless. Once I came upon a
straggling mud village, but though it was half-hidden by banana and
orange groves, not even fruit could be bought. Yet a day or two before
some scoundrel had passed this way eating oranges constantly and
strewing the trail with the tantalizing peelings; a methodical, selfish,
bourgeois fellow, who had not had the humane carelessness to drop a
single fruit on all his gluttonous journey.

When I came at last, at the bottom of a thigh-straining descent, upon
the first stream of the day, it made up for the aridity behind, for the
path had eluded me and left me to tear through the jungle and wade a
quarter mile before I picked up the trail again. Refreshed, I began a
task before which I might have turned back had I seen it all at once.
Four mortal waterless hours I toiled steeply upward, more than twenty
times sure I had reached the summit, only to see the trail, like some
will-o'-the-wisp, draw on ahead unattainably in a new direction. I had
certainly ascended four thousand feet when I threw myself down at last
among the pines of the wind-swept summit. A draught from the gourd of a
passing peon gave me new life for the corresponding descent. Several of
these fellow-roadsters now appeared, courteous fellows, often with black
mustaches and imperial "la Napoleon III", who raised their hats and
greeted me with a sing-song "Qué se vaya bien," yet seemed remarkably
stupid and perhaps a trifle treacherous. At length, well on in the
afternoon, the road broke through a cutting and disclosed the welcome
sight of the town of Santa Rosa, its white church bulking above all else
built by man; the first suggestion of civilization I had seen in
Honduras.

The suggestion withered upon closer examination. The place did not know
the meaning of the word hotel, there was neither restaurant, electric
light, wheeled vehicles, nor any of the hundred and one things common to
civilized towns of like size. After long inquiry for lodging, I was
directed to a pharmacy. The connection was not apparent until I found
that an American doctor occupied there a tiny room made by partitioning
off with a strip of canvas stretched on a frame a part of the public
hallway to the patio. He was absent on his rounds; which was fortunate,
for his Cuban interpreter not merely gave me possession of the "room"
and cot, but delivered to me the doctor's supper of potatoes, rice, an
imitation of bread, and even a piece of meat, when it arrived from a
market-place kitchen. Here I spent Sunday, with the extreme lassitude
following an extended tramp in the hungry wilderness. The doctor turned
up in the afternoon, an imposing monument of a man from Texas with a
wild tangle of dark-brown beard, and the soft eyes and gentle manners of
a girl. He had spent some months in the region, more to the advantage of
the inhabitants than his own, for disease was far more wide spread than
wealth, and the latter was extremely elusive even where it
existed. Hookworm was the second most common ailment, with cancer and
miscarriages frequent. The entire region he had found virtually given
over to free love. The grasping priests made it all but impossible for
the poorer classes to marry, and the custom had rather died out even
among the well-to-do. All but two families of the town acknowledged
illegitimate children, there was not a priest nor a youth of eighteen
who had not several, and more than one widow of Honduranean wealth and
position whose husband had long since died continued to add yearly to
the population. The padre of San Pedro, from whose house he had just
come, boasted of being the father of eighty children. All these things
were common knowledge, with almost no attempt at concealment, and indeed
little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such
customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience
proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete
illiteracy, common to all Honduras.

More excerpts from Harry A. Franck's:
Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond
Honduras, by Harry A. Franck 1916