Tomato Boats and Rebels

I

No American ships put in at the hidden harbor of La Paz, a Mexican pearl port on the southwestern coast of the Gulf of California, once known by a choicer name — the Red Sea of Cortes. The truth of it is that no boats except Mexican tomato boats and small Gulf craft go there at all.

My husband, an enthusiastic grower of oranges and apples on a Sierra Nevada ranch, did not relish the idea of a freighter, but he made me a gallant gesture and booked our passage on the Mexican government freighter, the Washington, with return passage on her sister ship, the Bolivar, captured by rebels at Guavmas and turned into a troopship some days before we saw the numerous windmills and coconut palms of La Paz.

The Washington was scheduled to leave the port of San Pedro on February 22, but on that, day there was no sign of her anywhere. And, as after arriving she had to trudge as far north as San Francisco with cheese and tomatoes from San Jose del Cabo, she did not put out for Mexico again until sundown on February 27. The Washington is a fifteen-hundred-ton freighter, better known as a tomato boat, with cabins for fourteen passengers; but she often carries two hundred, with their necessary cows and chickens, as the captain told us when we were three miles out and sipping tequila together in his cabin. Tequila is the peppery national liquor distilled from cacti. The very essence of sun fire, it seemed to me. The smallest sip, and I had fire in my throat and tears in my eyes.

‘Two hundred?’ I asked the captain. ‘But this is not the Ark!’

He explained that one must be hospitable, and that Baja Californians think nothing of rolling up in a blanket and sleeping on deck. In fact, this proved to be the usual accommodation offered passengers meandering from one Gulf port to another.

There were twenty passengers aboard when we left San Pedro, and no other Americans except a woman who had lived thirty-seven years in the old Mexican port of Mazatlan. She had gone out from Missouri at sixteen to join a socialist colony there and was now returning from her second visit to San Diego during all those thirtyseven years. This fellow American shared a cabin with an elderly Mexican woman, who she said was a leper. And it was true that the senora’s eyebrows and lashes were gone and her hands wasting. A thick black silk scarf covered her head and partially hid her face and often helped to cover up her sorry hands. Appalled, I asked the American why she did not seek a change of cabin. She said, ‘If I am to have leprosy, I shall have leprosy. And if I make a fuss about this gentle old woman, everyone on board will abhor me. Besides, I am being careful.’

This American was a theosophist, a teacher in Mazatlan of English and Spanish, and had weathered, she said, many more disquieting experiences. She had retained or somehow acquired a tempered spirit and a mind unconsciously tolerant.

There being scarcely room in our cabin for two young ranchers, six pieces of luggage, and a typewriter, it raised my eyebrows to find a Mexican family — tall massive man, tall massive mother, five lusty children, and a long-haired American dog — occupying a single cabin. These were not peons, but Mexicans of the meagre middle class, and all appeared spruce and clean.

The children, Lupe, Lorraine, Salvador, Josefina, and Maria Luisa, ranged from nine years to just-walking age. Lupe won me completely, as all children do who are just losing their front teeth. And, as this Mexican mother kept her brood huddled cautiously about her in the cabin, when confinement began to tell on usually docile tempers I told them fairy tales from their doorstep, the deck being too narrow for steamer chairs. To glance from the glittering Pacific with its multicolored fish into their cabin was to see a hive full of brown eyes, as alive as bees — for the man and the mother listened with excitement equal to that of the children.

San Francisco had diligently fumigated the Washington before it dropped anchor inside her Golden Gate, but fumigation acts merely as a sedative on the magnificently proportioned bronze cockroaches of Mexico, which might have been conceived and executed by Cellini. And yet, whatever the boat lacked of the sanctified American spirit of sanitation, it made up by a happier spirit of friendliness and no end of music. Everyone knew the beautiful, artless songs of Guty Gardena, of Yucatan. And everyone knew the stirring ranchero songs from Tepic. The captain’s son, a young caballero in yachting cap, his full name embroidered on all his handkerchiefs with hairs of his sister’s head, gave himself up to improving our Spanish, and we in our turn taught him bridge. Although he had never before seen an American pack of cards, after a few hands he played a completely Machiavellian game.

Early one morning the Washington dropped anchor in the green-ringed harbor of Ensenada with kerosene for that little town too close to the American border to be anything but banal, as Captain Torres had told us. Ensenada sleeps all day under her laurel trees and wakes at night to a wild shout. Our captain spent his time there lamenting that, while at San Pedro five hundred tons had been loaded in ten hours, at Ensenada, owing, as he said, to the haughtiness of the cargadores, we were two and a half days taking aboard a hundred and forty tons of mackerel, tuna, sardines, abalone, and flour. But as the passengers and many of the crew fished from the deck with great good luck, nobody but the captain complained of the delay.

Freighting at best is a meandering affair, and on a Mexican ship there is always to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. But with a sea like mountain meadows of wild blue lupin and nights lit by a moon and a retinue of stars in polished armor, it is hard to be sure that six days were used up in getting to Cape San Lucas. There the points are strange and harsh and stony, gnarled by Joshua trees, and alive only with crowds of desert crows; the town itself is nowhere in sight.

Perchance to busy themselves about spring mating, the gulls left off following our ship. But the harbor was full of fishing pelicans, and great frigate birds swept over us, their tails wideopen but tattered fans. Japanese came alongside with a launch and swung forty-five tons of salmon up to our crew.

All ships put in at the Cape to get their bearings, just as the Manilla Galleon, staggering with treasure, used to do when Queen Elizabeth was penning letters to ‘My deare Pyrat,’ with the Manilia Galleon on her mind.

II

San José del Cabo was the first port to welcome us, with a great rustle of coconut palms. It is a swampy, malarial little town, with thatched roofs, cow sheds and shelters entirely of palm, and sun-beaten streets.

Half-naked and handsome cargadores were waiting on the beach with twenty canoes, hollowed from mahogany logs, to fetch and carry away our cargo, as San José del Cabo possesses no modern boats or launches. It was a brilliant flotilla, with its cargadores in red shirts and bandannas, bringing out leafy packages of cheese. And no packages could be prettier. The cheese had been wrapped in fresh palm leaves and bound around with mesquite. Ten thousand pounds of cheese and fifteen thousand cases of tomatoes were brought out more than a mile and a half in this manner, through a high March tide. The canoes were loaded with flour for the return trip to shore. And, last of all, the two commercial Fords we had for San José del Cabo were taken off, each lowered on a couple of canoes lashed together with ropes, and rowed ashore by two singing rowers and an old sternsman apiece.

From San Jose del Cabo we took on a number of Spanish-speaking Chinese passengers with their gayly dressed children. A tall, rather striking-looking Mexican naval engineer also came aboard. He had graduated from the Naval Academy of Mexico with our captain, but they had not set eyes on each other for nearly forty years. As the engineer was an impassioned theosophist and our captain an agnostic, the fiesta brought on by the arrival of an old classmate was interrupted by religious discussions — partly, I think, because Captain Torres was worried about the revolution, word having reached him of the capture of the Bolivar.

The crew could think and talk of nothing but Mexican politics. The first and second mates confided to me their heated opinions, which were directly opposite, the pro and con of the situation. And our American friend was disturbed about her ripened bean and sugar-cane crops, knowing the Mexican soldier’s natural flair for both these foods. Last year the great tidal wave had carried off her harvest. But she was quickened and comforted by the thought of our arrival in Mazatlán, and said to me, ‘When we put in to Mazatlán to-morrow, you will think it is the most curiously painted and captivating spot on earth.’ And I thought that. We edged in through mountains in bloom with florid cacti, rolling so close that we could look into mountain caves. The harbor itself has islands, and solitary peaks, like fairy towers, smarting from aspiring foam.

Unfortunately, when the oficial de la emigración came aboard he found that our American friend’s passport, owing to delays caused by haughty cargadores, had expired a few days before we made port. Whereupon the poor woman began weeping, and the officer immediately gave her permission to land. There is nothing more effective than tears to settle passport difficulties in the Port of Mazatlan. A number of women were told they would have to be returned. But as a matter of fact nobody was returned. A few tears, and the oficial de la emigración was more than satisfied.

Mazatlan is old Mexico, with plaster houses of rose and ivory and alluring doorways. At every turn we meet with tropical plazas. The streets are narrow and cobbled, yet the peons dine there instead of on the sidewalks. Their tables are showy with ollas, and after dinner the men play the violin or guitar and sing for the applause of their families. And the applause is often deserved.

Our hotel was the hotel of the blue and Chinese-yellow tiled patio, with stair railings of solid ebony, and no elevators. Its bedrooms are hugechambers with ceilings all of twenty feet high. And from our windows we could see the gloriotas (stairways carved in the giant boulders of the shore), twowheeled wooden carts hauling wood up the Paseo Olas Altas, shoe and banana venders at the hotel entrance, and little bands of soldiers marching away with their officers, because the rebels were expected in at any minute.

We were beginning to feel at home in Mazatlan, enjoying its strange market and gardens, where green coconut juice is sipped, while ducks stand around with their mouths open waiting for coconut titbits, and had just come from getting ourselves a couple of talking and singing parrots, Maria and Felipe, when two men ran pell-mell after us to say that Captain Torres had to leave with the Washington in ten minutes or risk capture by the rebels.

We had grown fond of our delightful old captain, and felt reassured as to his safety when once we were headed toward La Paz.

‘In La Paz,’ said Captain Torres, ‘nothing ever happens. Revolutions seldom go that way. It is as peaceful as its name. There is always sun in La Paz, and boats with sails, fishing for tuna and pearls.’ The Sinaloa would pick us up there in a week or two.

III

At four o’clock the next afternoon we rode into the Bay of La Paz, once called Santa Cruz by Cortés, when he tried to found a colony along its shore on the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross.

The Bay was full of sun, and little craft with sails clouded its blueness. Not one of the innumerable windmills on shore moved and not one coconut tree rustled. It was all as peacefullooking as the captain had said. But in a few hours the Washington was in the hands of rebels and Captain Torres was in jail. He had nothing to fight with, except, bundles of tomatoes; consequently, when a hundred or more armed men scrambled aboard, there was nothing to do but surrender.

Two Indians waded ashore with our huge bags on their backs, while we went in a rowboat with María and Felipe. There arc no hotels in La Paz, but Doña Amelie has live bedrooms in her adobe house, which lies in a garden of plantains, hibiscus, and vegetables, out beyond the town’s few sidewalks.

Doña Amelie is a sandy-haired Chilean, full of high spirits and generosity. She was overcome with concern for us, as all her rooms were taken. One of them was occupied by poor Don Carlos, as she called him, a belated bridegroom. He had been sent to La Paz on a brief commission for the Federal Government, and was to have returned to Mexico City in a few weeks to attend his own wedding, but in the press of more important matters the Government, for two solid years, had ignored his existence. His recall had come two days ago, but now, with the only boats putting in at La Paz in the hands of rebels, there was no chance, she said, of giving us his room. She twisted her hand in her apron and groaned, ‘Es muy desgraciado.’ Yet she would do what she could do, as she felt miserable about us, her dear children, and Felipe and Maria. Once she had possessed a parrot exactly like Maria, and an American had given her fifty dollars for it. It was all too bad, too bad, and she hated to put us in the only bed she could, which belonged really to an engineer, but as soon as she was able she would make a pilgrimage to Mexico City, to the shrine of Our Lady of Peace, and ask her to pray for Mexico.

After this sympathetic preamble, and with many an exclamation of dismay and lifting of eyes and hands, Doña Amelie took us to a little staircase which went up from a flagged courtyard at the back, where a gaunt Indian woman was grinding corn for tortillas while another Indian fed a small stove with charcoal. The room we climbed to was a hall at the back, into which the other bedrooms opened. It had a single bed and a curtain at one end, hiding another bed given over to a Mexican newspaper man and his wife, who had boarded our boat at Mazatlan after a forced flight from Mexico City.

Dona Amelie kindly offered me her room to wash and dress in. It was a crowded room, containing a large altar and a statue of the Sacred Heart, set about with bouquets of red paper flowers. There was also a shrine in one corner devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe. One finds these altars and shrines in many of the houses of La Paz, because by government order no public service may be held in the church — an order of suppression that has naturally intensified the piety of the people.

Fortunately for everyone, the newspaper man and his wife came hurrying in for their luggage, as they had been invited to stay with friends. Whereupon we were moved behind the curtain and the Mexican engineer returned to his quarters. The bed behind the curtain proved to be a single bed, hardly large enough for the innumerable fleas already occupying it.

Dinner was cooked in the courtyard and served by the gaunt Indian, her head bound in a flowing scarf. She had assumed the name Amelie out of respect and affection for her mistress. The food was very good and the conversation excellent, as we sat at table with a distinctive, white-haired man from the race of elder Aryans — a Parsee, who was buying pearls for a Paris house. He had lived in Paris for more than a quarter of a century and spoke pleasurable English and French. He told us the only black pearls ever found in the world were found in La Paz and in certain waters of the South Seas. He told us the natives of the South Seas and the Indians of La Paz could dive down twenty fathoms without any equipment whatsoever, while ordinary pearl divers, with all modern paraphernalia, could make at the most only fifteen fathoms. But he believed that the pearl beds of La Paz would soon be exhausted, as so little effort was directed toward their conservation. He told us that there was no such thing, except in popular parlance, as a pearl oyster. Scientifically speaking, all pearls come from mussels. He told us of great shells on the northern coast of Australia large enough for a man to curl up in.

La Paz was astir bright and early next morning, for the old General of the garrison had been taken prisoner, and the rebels had gutted the bank of all its money. The two hundred soldiers in La Paz were in high feather. Their officers told them to sell their chickens, start their wives tying up the bundles, and get their cows together, ready to board the Washington, which would take them all to Guadalajara. Guadalajara was the magic word, as the city is famous among the soldiery for its food. There was a great bustle and smacking of lips among the soldiers, while the officers strutted, happy over the success of their trick. The boat, the officers knew, might go to Guaymas, and it might go to Mazatlan, and it might go to Manzanillo, but supping in Guadalajara was most unlikely. They rather expected orders from Mexico City somewhere out at sea, but they were not sure.

Hospitably they invited us to go along. Curiously enough, one and all urged us to accept their invitation, as the Sinaloa had run off’ and might hide out for six months. And with the Port closed, and all telegraphic communications cut off, there was small possibility of another boat. In the back of their minds there was also this: La Paz has no American consul, and they knew that, in all likelihood, the American Government would stand by the powers established, however unpopular they might be; and, as there was rumor of a force of rebels coming by land to loot the town, they felt that we were conspicuous and should be better off on our way to Guaymas, Mazatlan, or Manzanillo, all ports with foreign consuls. Besides, there was no law of any kind in the town, with the General on parole and the soldiers embarking. At such times, they told us, many individuals took occasion to pay off old scores. But we decided to stay and learn something about pearl fishing.

Before long the old General, a man of seventy-five, began to feel uneasy. He said, ‘I knew these rebels who just left, and that was all very well, but I don’t know this crowd who are coming in. And what will they care about me? For all I know, I may be shoved up against a wall and shot.’ He decided to break parole and steal away at night in a little boat belonging to a friend of his. It had one cabin with nine berths. Twenty cronies and relatives of the General were going with him, but he invited us to go along, as they intended to make for Ensenada. The journey was distastefid to me, as the boat was much too small for March seas, but the fleas at Dona Amelie’s were the worst examples I have ever seen of flea behavior. And when I called on a gracious senora for whom I had letters she advised me, as we sat under the coconut trees in her patio (which was really as big as a park), to go by all means. She felt the town was sure to be looted, and feared for our safety. She also feared, I thought, to seem too friendly toward an American, as she lived alone with her son, a very young man, who had evidently implicated himself.

IV

Just after dusk we said our goodbyes and consoled portly Don Carlos, a man of perhaps forty, as best we could about his wedding prospects. Sadly we left that blessed person, Dona Amelie, saying a rosary for our safety before her altar, and had just got our bags and parrots into a rowboat to put out to the little ship when three men rushed up to us shouting. One of them, who seemed intoxicated, held two revolvers in our faces and made us go back to the customhouse.

A number of young blades were leaning against the wall of the government building, and when they saw our plight they assured us that the man was drunk, and apologized while they overpowered him and escorted us back to the rowboat.

There was one man on the boat when we went aboard — an Indian. He took great pleasure in making María and Felipe comfortable by hanging their cages to the ceiling of the cabin, lit up by an old oil lamp. Small boats kept coming alongside with an amazing amount of luggage. We stood on the foot-wide deck watching them for more than an hour, as there was no place on the whole boat to sit down. At last a second member of the crew arrived, but I mistook him at first for another bundle. He was dead drunk. The men in the small boat threw him aboard, and he lay where he fell.

Another hour went by and luggage was still coming, when a launch chugged up and a big smiling Mexican came aboard with orders to bring us ashore. It seemed that the General had word of a rebel gunboat patrolling the coast, and did not wish to have any international complications in case the gunboat fired on his cockleshell. The Indian reluctantly gave up María and Felipe. And Dona Amelie was delighted at our return, as she laid it to the efficiency of her prayers.

Government orders being what they were, it was impossible for Dona Amelie to have a small Te Deum sung, so she contented herself, the day after our return, with a large dinner and celebration. She brought out her best wines, and effervescent speeches were made by the city magistrate and ‘other decent people,’ as Doña Amelie called them, expressing a desire for more comradeship between the two republics. My husband responded by making a speech in English to Don Carlos, who got up and delivered it magnificently, adding a few touches here and there. And the young Mexican engineer delighted us all with his remark: ‘There is nothing for you now but watchful waiting.’

But watching for a sail proved less absorbing than watching the activities of Dona Amelie’s courtyard, where enormous and beautiful baskets of fish were brought in from the teeming Bay, where neighbors called and exchanged gossip and the General’s wife came on a secret mission, where Indians gathered baskets of sturdy vegetables and carried them off on their heads to cry them through the town. The courtyard looked straight down over the Bay of La Paz, and I had never before seen stars make trails of light on the water —trails as wide as those made by our American moon.

Now it happens that, besides pearls, La Paz produces some extremely fine leather. And the tannery’s little craft, the Viosca, had eluded the rebels in its junketings for hides and finally came into port. We put off on her for San Jose del Cabo, and rocked for several days in the harbor waiting for a northward-bound tomato boat to pick us up.

The dining room and kitchen of the Viosca were one particularly small room. But the cook, who looked exactly as a pirate should, graciously permitted me to make some scrambled eggs and Scotch scones — a delightful change of diet. I did not attempt Boston baked beans, remembering a Latin American friend of mine who received a potful for a present and, to please a house guest from Boston, cautioned one of her maids to see that the fríjoles americanos were not finished up in the kitchen. The maid, who had already lasted them, lifted her eyes and hands to Heaven and cried, ‘God forbid!’

A tomato boat, bound for San Pedro, did pick us up, and we left adventure behind us. But some day, with no revolution in the wind, we shall go back to the genial courtyards and curious streets of La Paz, where life saunters along much as it did in the days of the Spanish Raleighs, and talk again with those ‘other decent people,’ so warm in their hearts and ever so polite, without losing their spontaneity.