Venezuela: The “Little Venice” of the Caribbean (1923)
William Cochrane
The Philatelic Database Library has recently acquired a set of weighty tomes entitled Peoples of All Nations, published by Educational Book Company in seven volumes in London in 1923. We hope to publish many of the illustrations and text contained therein. Specialist collectors shall find much of interest in these articles. Much of this material will be unique to Philatelic Database, not being found elsewhere on the Net. We begin with this fascinating article by L. E. Elliot on Venezuela.
The front door of the Republic of Venezuela is the Caribbean port of La Guayra. There are such side doors as Puerto Cabello, from which you can connect by train with the capital, pretty Carácas, in its upland valley, and there are isolated out-buildings, as it were, such as the new and enormously developing Maracaibo region, and there is the huge back door of the Orinoco’s mouth, leading to the up-river town of Ciudad Bolivar and the vast little-known Ilanos (plains) of Apure and the huge southward-bending area of Amazonas.
Above: Pack-donkeys laden with country merchandise passing through a street of Carácas. Carácas, the capital of Venezuela, lies in a beautiful mountain-girt valley watered by the river Guaire and nearly 3,000 feet above sea-level. Sugar and coffee plantations surround the city which, owing to its altitude, enjoys a moderate temperature, and claims to be the most perfectly and salubriously situated of all the South American capitals. The narrow street are paved with cobbles in the outer part of the city, in the centre with cement, and lined by one-storeyed houses which usually turn their blindside to the street, the barred windows and stuccoed walls suggesting little of the comfortable and even luxurious quarters behind them
La Guayra (a “guaira,” by the way, is a beacon fire set upon a hilltop) presents an unchanging face in every season. The steamer manoeuvres close to the wall of dark-red, sweltering rock, upon whose feet the narrow streets of the port run, steep and precarious and dirty. The sea is deep and blue against this mountain barrier, and the sun, all the year round, beats down upon the winding town and is reflected back from the crimson rock. Everybody of consequence wears white clothes, and the poorer folk tread, barefoot, the cobblestones of the tilted ways, jostling the mules.
La Guayra Gay with Flowers
The well-to-do, and certainly all the foreigners engaged in business pursuits, dwell in airy houses, with the living rooms often placed upon the second floor, the first being devoted to offices. These houses are built of wood, with heavy red-tiled roofs; the rooms are enormously large and rendered cool by wide balconies, numbers of unglazed windows, and a series of connecting doors which guarantee the utilisation of every faint breeze. Gay flowers, the pretty pink coralillo vine and the viuda alegre’s delicate mauve, the daring patchwork of the crotons and the scarlet blaze of hibiscus, the long trail of bougainvillea, adorn every balcony.
When Drake Fought the Spanish Don
A mile or so to the eastward, along the slender strip of shore, lies the pretty watering-place, Macuto. A motor-car, driven by a Venezolano with a bush of black hair and the usual Latin-American passion for rapid transit, carries you along the uneven coast road to a cool hotel and a bathing beach; on the way you pass the four-square white house, inside high walls draped with brilliant flowering vines, where in Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” the Spanish don held the “Rose of Torridge” a prisoner.
From La Guayra runs the railway up to Carácas. There are two other ways; first, the splendid motor road that winds more steeply down the sides of the mountains, skirting precipices and ravines; and, second, the most dizzy route of all, that is nothing but a clambering footpath. According to a very likely tradition, it was up this goat-path that Drake climbed with his band of sailors in Elizabeth’s day; it was a Spaniard of Carácas who acted as guide and betrayed his town into the hands of the English invaders. Drake hanged him for his trouble.
The railroad is a fine piece of mountain engineering, and as the train ascends and the fresher air of the hills is reached, you look out of the window and down upon bare purple-red rocky shoulders, with sparse verdure in clefts, and an emerald strip on the shore where a patch of soil gives foothold to a grove of coconuts.
Above: Dark-eyed daughter of Latin America. The houses of the Spanish of Carácas are usually built in similar fashion to those in their Mother Country. The windows are barred, and a private or court, affords a rendezvous for family gatherings
There is not so much as a village in the hills between the port and the capital, but Carácas itself is placed in a narrow and lovely vale with a delicious perennial-spring climate. The whole strip is a garden of flowers and birds, with white and pink and blue houses set in this blossomy frame, Every afternoon, when the sun is sinking behind the hills, it is the custom for the citizens to drive, ride, or even walk, along the beautiful stretch of gardens that border the valley, the Paraiso, which is covered with great thickets of bamboo, splendid mahogany and ceiba trees hung with a score of tillandsias and lianes, and beds of roses and lilies.
A string of houses edges the slope of the hills, their private gardens running up at a sharp angle. Many are sumptuously adorned, in a land where gay pictures may be painted on the exterior wall and suffer no damage. For one of these, standing a little back from the road behind tropical foliage, the visitor will spare a curious glance, for this is the palacio built for his pleasure by Cipriano Castro, that dictator of Venezuela who once upon a time defied the Powers, and upon another occasion got together an army to march upon the United States by land. All the flooring of this palacio was specially made of fine tiles with the entwined initials “C.C.”
As a result of the modern policy of highway construction, in the dry season the traveller may go right across the huge territory of Venezuela from La Guayra to Ciudad Bolivar by motorcar, in less than four days. From the beginning of the rains, about the middle of May, until December, interior Venezuela is no place for the visitor; water descends in a solid sheet, the plains are blotted out, the roads are roaring cataracts. But in the dry season the fertile country teems with wild life, and the Venezuelan reaps his harvest without the slightest fear of a troubled sky.
No better example of the fine highroads built of late years and their effect upon the enterprising farmer, can be seen than that between Carácas and Maracay. It plunges out into the green, hilly country westward from Carácas, rising to an altitude of 4,000 feet at one breezy spot, Los Teques, frequently skirting the precipitous sides of mountains and dipping to delicious green valleys. All this road is dotted with rich sugar estates, the red-tiled houses nestled among a sea of waving emerald.
It is an all-day run between Carácas and Maracay, and the warm, scented dusk of the little town is illuminated by a blaze of electric lights in the flowery plaza. All the houses are painted with pink or blue or some other delicate colour, the pavements are of stone mosaic, the roads asphalted, and although the residence here of the President is but one storey in height, it is equipped with such modem conveniences as electric fans and telephones.
Above: Street in Caracas showing the prevalent style of architecture. Earthquakes are frequent in Caracas, and a terrible shock practically destroyed the city in 1812. The houses, therefore, are low, with strong adobe walls, and there being littl or no need of fires for warmth, chimneys are seldom seen. Though alike in style, the houses are relieved of monotony by their colouring, and the red-tile roofs are singularly effective against the mountain background.
On the model farm of General Gomez at Maracay, splendid cattle of British breeding fill the beautifully planned and kept stables; at the aerodrome a score of French planes form the nucleus of the military aviation schools. There is a big wireless installation, which enables Venezuela to speak with points all over the Caribbean. The military hospital is a perfect copy of a European model. A paper factory makes pulp from the rushes growing thickly about the margin of Lake Valencia, a large and lovely sheet of water, dotted with islands, ringed with villages, that lies a stone’s throw from Maracay. From a highway running northward to the Caribbean, upon a mountain crest three thousand feet above sea-level, shaded with enormous tropical trees festooned with orchids and climbing ferns, you look down a sweeping declivity to the blue, sparkling bay of Ocumare.
Above: Common mode of travel in the mountains of Venezuela. The roads of Venezuela are rarely worthy of the name; with the exception of a few high-roads, only bridle-paths are available to the traveller, and these are often of very indifferent quality and some are scarcely passable for mud. The donkey is the chief pack-animal, and is often seen carrying not only country produce and its own provender, but its master as well
Below: Venezuelan water-carrier starts his rounds. In the streets of Venezuelan cities cooling “frescoes” are seldom lacking, and inviting drinks concocted from delicious fruits are refreshing, though not always effective thirst-quenchers. On his patient beast - almost every burden is borne by donkeys in Venezuela - the water-carrier makes his rounds, and has many customers, for in the torrid climate a glass of cold water is a boon
All this Maracay region is a centre of efficiency, typical of the ease with which. modem equipment and up-to-date public services can create a new atmosphere in South American towns. Water-power is plentiful, and since the coal-beds of South America have only in a few instances served for public utilities, and the making of gas for illuminating purposes is limited, upon the whole continent, to towns whose number can be counted upon one hand, the installation of electric systems is simplicity itself. The house built of adobe - dried mud brick - with a tiled or thatched roof, the home-made dip candle, the cooking fire of charcoal or sticks, is readily scrapped in exchange for reinforced cement, electric lamps and electric cookers, just as human labour is exchanged for the Diesel engine, or long line transmission.
Above: Balling cotton in a settlement of Venezuelan aborigines. The settlements of the Waiomgomo Indians, scattered about the vast dense forests of Guayana, are sometimes little more than a collection of miserable huts consisting chiefly of thatched roofs on supports, but providing, nevertheless, shelters for numbers of primitive creatures to whom they stand for home. Handmade hammocks, earthenware pots, and calabashes lie promiscuously about the earth floor
Before Ronald Ross discovered the guilt of the mosquito as a fever carrier, all the Caribbean margin was a hot-bed of such virulent diseases as yellow and blackwater fevers; La Guayra was a pest-hole and the sister ports only less dangerous in proportion to their diminished size. But to-day, with the “vigorous operation of sanitary services, the worst of the fever plagues have been banished, and careful measures are being taken to reduce infant mortality, to check contagious diseases by vaccination and inoculation, and to raise the standard of public health by regular inspection of foodstuffs and milk. Too much credit cannot be given to the Venezuelan, Dr. Chacin Itriago, trained in England and formerly the head of a department in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, for the creation of these nation-wide services in Venezuela. In so far as it is possible to counteract the result of an insouciant negro element in the coastal towns, and of a persistently hot chmate, Venezuela has benefited enormously from the few years of trained attention to civic sanitation.
Above: Making arrows, primitive pastime of a primitive people. The Waiomgono Indians branch of the Caribs, still inhabit their original haunts around the river Caura. In the more fertile regions, they cultivate miniature plantations, while in some of the higher forest land the collecting of the odoriferous tonka bean constitutes their chief industry. They generally shun civilization, caring nothing for its comforts and conveniences.
Work such as this, and the construction of the far-reaching network of roads, demands a good deal of money, and in Venezuela the government revenues are mainly obtained from indirect taxation - that is, from export and import dues and from internal dues upon sugar, tobacco and alcoholic liquors.
Nearly two-thirds of the national revenues have their origin in the Custom House, and there is also a yield to official pockets, for any flaw which can be detected in the invoice of goods brought into the country results in such goods being impounded without redress, and the hawk-eyed individual who discovers the error receives a halfshare of the value.
Above: A lake dweller. Dull, heavy faces are comon among the women of the Indian races who live in pile dwellings around Lake Maracaibo.
The bolivar, the national unit of currency in Venezuela, takes its name from that Venezuelan-born soldier of fortune, the Libertador of the Independence struggle, Simon Bolivar, who, having seen Napoleon enter Paris on one occasion during the Corsican’s heyday, became imbued with the same grandiose schemes; you will see in Carácas the house where he was brought up, with some delightful colonial period furniture, and you may see upon the walls of a government hall some rather excruciating paintings of the glorious victories obtained over the Mother Country; and, seeing these, you may remember, if you happen to have seen it, the old farmhouse among the banana groves of Santa. Marta in Colombia, where the disillusioned Libertador ended an embittered life, exiled and overthrown by the very people for whom he had done so much, and among whom he had posed as a semidivine hero.
Above: Women of the Maquiritare tribe. Near relatives of, if not identical with, the Waiomgomo, the Maquiritare occupy remote parts of the hinterland of Guayana. Convention makes little or no demand upon them and a practical absence of dress is one of their tribal characterisitics
Speaking generally, life is expensive in Venezuela for those who eat and drink, wear, and furnish their dwellings with, imported commodities; it is cheap for those who make the country provide them with all they need. The contrast between Venezuelan houses, built, for example, in the airy upland capital and upon themargin of Lake Maracaibo, displays a difference that is one of kind rather than of degree.
The Carácas residence lies not within the city, but a mile or so outside in a garden suburb developed during the last few years, approached by a charming flower-hung road. A broad motor-car drive runs up to the open front door, giving access to a wide, awning-shaded veranda and the cool rooms of the lower floor. Everybody has a car. Much of the population is of pure Spanish blood.
Above: In workaday garb. Short lengths of coarse material, or aprons of palm fibre, are the everyday garb worn by the aboriginal Indians of Venezuela
Here, on such an occasion as a children’s party, you appreciate the constancy with which Latin America looks across the seas to Western Europe, for all the little guests are dressed like delightful bisque-china dolls in French clothes; their manners are quite beautiful, and they dance gaily among the pink silk chairs. The parents, arriving in the glowing dusk to take away their offspring, are not the formal folk of Spanish traditon, by which the women are still all but secluded. There is an atmosphere of freedom and comradeship a frank interchange of thoughts and ideas between the sexes that speak eloquently of new ways.
Above: Conservatism in the backwoods. In his forest-clad habitat, surrounded by the solitudes of the Guayana jungle, the Waiomgomo fosters the beliefs and customs of his pagan ancestors, finding their inefficient ways of life more comfortable than those prescribed by the white civilization
It is true that you must drink liqueur with your tea, and that there are more extravagant sweets than you are accustomed to see, that the crystal-clear Spanish idiom is in your ears; but there is nothing “foreign” here; this is a society that conforms to the pleasant international standard. The parents of your hosts live in the city, in an “old” (i.e. 50 to 100 years old) house upon one floor; the heavily grilled windows open on to a main street, the enormous saguan door leads, through a wide opening, to the inside patio - a courtyard full of flowering shrubs with a pila playing in the middle; a veranda runs all about this patio, with every room of the four-square house opening on it.
Beyond, a second patio is surrounded by the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. With the saguan door barred, this is a fort, or rather, it follows the mode of Oriental houses constructed for the seclusion of women, the mode that the Moors carried to Spain, and that Spain carried to South America four hundred years ago.
Above: Sultry Afternoon in the main street of Peurto Cabello. Peurto Cabello, lying to the west of La Guayra, the port of Caracas, is practically at sea-level and is extremely hot. It has a considerable export trade and its harbour is one of the best in Venezuela; even the name, meaning Hair Port, was bestowed by the Spaniards to signify that a ship could be held with a hair in its tranquil waters.
No clmate could be sweeter than that of Carácas. But for white races none could be more pernicious than that of Maracaibo. Here, along a green, mosquito-haunted, heavily-hot coast, is an enormous lagoon, entered by none but small vessels because the sand-bar across its mouth prohibits ships of any considerable draught. Early Spanish explorers, discovering this bay, saw the same oddly built native houses that you may still find, perched above the margins of the water upon thin, shaky wooden legs, and constructed of wood and palm-thatch.
A primitive ladder, consisting sometimes of nothing more than a stout, notched bamboo pole, leads to this crow’s nest, and it was the sight of these lake-dwellings that gave the region the ironical name of Venezuela - “Little Venice.” Cassava root, plantains, beans and fish form the staple foods, the hammock is the chief article of furniture, and the villagers inherit much of the blood of the real natives of the country, those implacable “Indians” whose immense bows and poisoned arrows are still feared by the traveller who ventures into the deep interior.
Above: Lottery tickets for the many, lucky tickets for the few. Large public gambling schemes are in vogue in many of the cities of South America. Some governments have suppressed them as being injurious to the public good, while other legislatures authorise lotteries in order to devote their proceeds to public improvements. In Venezuela these games of chance are very popular and at La Guayra there is a church which was built by the sale of lottery tickets.
To-day these lake dwellers look down upon scenes of activity that bid fair to affect the life of all Venezuela. For it has been discovered that the great oil belt that lies all across the north of South America, from exterior islands such as Barbados to promontories in Ecuador, has formed huge deposits in the Maracaibo region. For years a keen competition between rival great companies has been fought upon this sweltering soil. All over the heat-hazed swamps near the lagoon, armies of geologists and engineers and road-makers have been brought in; thousands of tons of machinery, endless loads of construction material, carried into the bush and brought into service. Huge territories as big as Balkan kingdoms have been surveyed, probed, made to yield their underground stores of oil. Ten years of preparatory work and four or five millions of pounds sterling have paved the way for the stream of petroleum just commencing.
One thousand Venezuelans are labourers in this field, and the native-born, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, part Indian, part negro, with a dash of Spanish, has accustomed himself to regular hours and sustained toil. Wherever, in the colonial period, land was found suitable for sugar-cane crops, African slaves were imported, and the gregarious negro is still clustered in the same spots. He works as readily in the oil-fields as upon agricultural lands, and when you see him engaged in half a score of other occupations in Veneuzela you cannot deny his versatility.
In the miasmic swamp of Lake Bermudez the men work up to their waists in water, digging out the oozy asphalt; just across a strip of sea from the port of Cumaná is the pretty island of Margarita, where pearl-divers fetch up gems to the value of half a million bolivares annually; in the dry zones the collectors of the divi-divi pods, for tanning, fill thousands of sacks; the cocoa and coffee plantations call for another class of skill. Near Carúpano is a copra and coir factory; in the deep forest near Ciudad Bolivar on the Orinoco are the gatherers of balata (rubber), and of the chicle used for chewing-gum.
Profitable Egret Plumes
The fearless riders of the Ilanos, those wide plains which are only equalled by the pampas of Argentina, are expert cattlemen; there is the nucleus of a mercantile marine in the Venezuelan owned and operated steamship line which has the monopoly of navigation of the river Orinoco, and there is a unique occupation of certain interior regions near water - that of the men who tend the garzeros.
The garza is a bird of the heron family yielding the dainty white feathers known as egrets, grown and shed in the breeding season. These birds come annually to well-known open, watered areas in such numbers that the ground is white as snow when they settle, and the locality, the garzero, is defined by law and patrolled by armed watchers for the birds’ protection. The same authorised guards collect the dropped feathers at the end of the season; any man found selling the feathers without a licence is sent to gaol.
Religion and Strong Family Ties
The Venezuelan, apart from the civic centres, is a tough, open-air, individual, temperate, inclined to piety, accustomed to the lack of many comforts which are necessities in other climes. The part that women play in Venezuelan affairs, whether in a beautiful house in Caracás or a hut on a river bank, is purely domestic; the woman worker is practically unknown, and the feminist movement in Venezuela is not perceptible.
The hold of the Roman Catholic church is strong upon the women folk and they are as a rule perfectly contented with the interests of their large families. Here, as in many other parts of South America, relatives have a close call upon each other, and there is no out-of-work member of a family who cannot transfer his hammock and his wife and offspring to the house of a cousin or uncle, sure of receiving a welcome until he gets another job, when he will probably receive in like manner half a dozen relatives of his spouse.
With two chief exceptions, the centres of population of Venezuela are clustered close to the Caribbean. They are ports, with their backs to the vast national territory. Here is the asphalt port, Cristobal Colon; Guanta, shipping coal from the state-owned mines; Puerto Cabello, with its British-owned frozenmeat factory, drawing supplies from the cattle plains; Maracaibo, sending out sugar and oil, and Colombia’s coffee from the Bucaramanga region; La Guayra, doing the chief business of the country; La Vela, Cumanà, Carùpano, shipping coconut fibre and copra and pearls and the famous rum, the ron anciado sold in every cantina.
Damp and Deadly Hinterland
Behind lies a huge region, with great areas of water-threaded forest that are almost as they were in the Stone Age, where the trader seeking supplies of serrapia (tonka beans) and balata rubber takes to the river roads, in native piragua or curial (dug-out), his life in his hands. He fears the ubiquitous biting insects of the sweltering, encompassing forest as much as he fears the blow-gun and the curare poison of the wild Ventuari Indians; he risks death in the many cataracts of the Orinoco’s tributaries, or in an encounter with the caiman (alligator) that infests these banks. The headquarters of this trading is the odd river-port of Ciudad Bolivar, situate three hundred miles from the Orinoco’s mouth and fifty miles above the junction of the Caroni, that runs from the south and the legend-haunted mountains of Pacaraima; wood-built, cobble-paved, electric-lit, the town lies steeply on the river bank, a precarious, jungle-surrounded stronghold, where gambling runs high and lives are cheap.
The Ilanos, the cattle plains where the gauchos are bred, and the fine hilly country from which the rivers run, form another world. The trading centre for the stock-breeder of the plains is San Fernando de Apure, far removed from gracious, bedecked, Europeanised Carácas by more than mileage.
With a population of about seven persons to each square mile Venezuela will be for many generations a “new” country, with plenty of room to grow; so new, indeed is she, that only now are her boundaries being definitely inscribed. With Brazil and with British Guiana a definite conclusion was reached last century; but the question with Colombia has only recently been settled two commissions of Swiss experts.
Above: Cleaning orchids in a forest of tropical Venezuela. Venezuela lies wholly within the tropics, and full one half of the country is forest, penetrable only with considerable difficulty. These dense forests, much choked with undergrowth, abound in wild life, and among the exuberant tangled greenery orchids flourish abundantly. Here the orchid-lover can find numerous fantastic flowers in glowing and exquisite colours
The country is divided into three separate zones: the mountainous, the plain, and the forest region. Of these, the first is formed by an arm of the Andes range which passes through Trujillo and Tachira, and along the sea-line to the Paria peninsula; the region of the plains extends to the margin of the giant Orinoco river; and the forest area from the right bank of that river to the frontier of Brazil. In the first the climate is very variable, from cold to salubrious; in the second it is for the most part warm and healthy; and in the forests, tropical and unhealthy. The chief mountain peaks are the Sierra Nevada (16,437 feet), Naiguata and Maraguata. Volcanoes are absent, but thermal springs exist.
