Some years ago I made a tramping trip around the world for my own pleasure. Friends coaxed me to set it down on paper and new friends were kind enough to read it. Since then they have demanded more—at least so the publishers say—but always specifying that it shall be on foot. Now, I refuse to be dictated to as to how I shall travel; I will not be bullied into tramping when I wish to ride. The journey herewith set forth is, therefore, among other things, a physical protest against that attempted

We concluded that if we were to spend half a year or more rambling through the West Indies we would get sea-water enough without taking to the ships before it was necessary. Our first dream was to wander southward in the sturdy, if middle-aged, gasolene wagon we must otherwise leave behind, abandoning it for what it would bring when the mountains of central Cuba grew too difficult for its waning vigor. But the tales men told of southern highways dampened our ardor for that particular species of

A constant procession of Fords, their mufflers wide open, were hiccoughing out the Carlos III Boulevard toward the Havana ball-park. The entrance-gate, at which they brought up with a snort and a sudden, bronco-like halt that all but jerked their passengers to their feet, was a seething hubbub. Ticket-speculators, renters of cushions, venders of everything that can be consumed on a summer afternoon, were bellowing their wares into the ears of the fanáticos who scrimmaged about the ticket-window.

Steamers to Havana land the traveler within a block or two of the central railway station, so that, if the capital has no fascination for him, there lies at hand more than four thousand kilometers of track to put him in touch with almost any point of the island. The most feasible way of visiting the interior of Cuba is by rail, unless one has the time and inclination to do it on foot. Automobiles are all very well in the vicinity of Havana, but the Cuban, like most Latin-Americans, is distinctly

Cuba produces more sugar than any other country in the world. During the season which had just begun at the time of our visit she expected to furnish four million tons of it. Barely as large as England, being seven hundred and thirty miles long and varying in width from twenty-two to one hundred and twenty miles, the island is favored by the fact that the great majority of her surface is level or slightly rolling, though the Pico de Turquino rises 8320 feet above the sea. Her soil is largely of

We sailed away from Cuba on the Haitian Navy. It happened that the fleet in question put into Guantánamo Bay to have something done to her alleged engine at a time which happily coincided with our own arrival at the eastern end of the island. Otherwise there is no telling when or how we should have made our second jump down the stepping-stones of the West Indies, for Cuba and Haiti do not seem to be particularly neighborly. The once proud Adrea of the New York Yacht Club is a schooner of almost

The word caco first appears in Haitian history in 1867. The men who took to the bush in the insurrection against President Salnave adopted that pseudonym, and nicknamed zandolite those who supported the government. The semi-savage insurrectionists, flitting at will through the rugged interior of the country, indifferent alike to the thorny jungle and the precipitous mountains, saw in themselves a likeness to the Haitian bird which flies freely everywhere, and in their opponents a similarity to t

Of many journeys about Haiti, usually by automobile and in the company of gendarme officers, the first was to the caco -infested district of Las Cahobas. A marine doctor bound on an inspection trip there had a seat left after his assistant and a native gendarme had been accommodated. Among the four of us there were as many revolvers and three rifles, all ready for instant action. One can, of course, hire private cars for a tour of Haiti, but quite aside from the decided expense, a Haitian chauff

Ouanaminthe is the Haitian “creole” name for a town which the Spaniards founded under the more euphonious title of Juana Mendez. It is the eastern frontier station for those who travel overland by the northern route from Haiti to Santo Domingo. We might have been stranded there indefinitely but for the already familiar kindness of our fellow-countrymen in uniform who are scattered throughout the negro republic. Public conveyances are unknown in Ouanaminthe. Strangers are more than rare, and the

There are two railroads in Santo Domingo, confined to the Cibao, or northern half of the Republic, which by their united efforts connect Santiago with the sea in both directions. The more diminutive of them is the Ferrocarril Central Dominicano, covering the hundred kilometers between Moca and Puerto Plata, on the north coast, with the ancient city of the Gentlemen about two thirds of the way inland. It is government owned, but takes its orders from an American manager. It burns soft coal, as th

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

“When the queen asked for a description of the island,” says an old chronicle, “Columbus crumpled up a sheet of paper and, tossing it upon the table, cried, ‘It looks just like that, your Majesty!’” If we are to believe more modern documents, the intrepid Genoese made that his stock illustration for most of the islands he discovered. Even the firm head of Isabela must have wobbled under its crown as one after another of the misnamed “West Indies” were pictured to her in the same concise fashion,

The American who, noting the Stars and Stripes flying everywhere and post-offices selling the old familiar postage-stamps, fancies he is back in his native land again is due for a shock. Though it has been Americanized industrially, Porto Rico has changed but little in its every-day life. Step out of one of the three principal hotels of the capital and you are in a foreign land. Spanish is as necessary to the traveler in Porto Rico who intends to get out of the Condado-Vanderbilt-automobile belt

“It’s all I can do to keep from barking at you,” said a passenger on the Virginia , as he crawled on hands and knees from one of the four kennels that decorate her afterdeck. As a matter of fact, we all did a certain amount of growling before the voyage was over. Yet the four of us who had won the kennels were lucky dogs compared to the unfortunate dozen or more who had to snatch what sleep they could curled up on the bare deck or in a single sour-smelling cabin below, where neither color, sex n

Once he has reached our Virgin Islands, the traveler down the stepping-stones of the West Indies has left his worst experiences behind him. For while connections are rare and precarious between the large islands of the north Caribbean, the tiny ones forming its eastern boundary are favored with frequent and comfortable intercommunication. Several steamship lines from the north make St. Thomas their first stop, and pausing a day or two in every island of any importance beyond, give the through tr

The “Ancient and Loyal Colony of Barbados” lies so far out to sea that it requires a real ocean voyage to reach it. Low and uninteresting at first glance, compared to many of the West Indies, it is by no means so flat as most descriptions lead one to suppose. Seen from the sea it stretches up to a fairly lofty central ridge that is regular from end to end, except for being a trifle serrated or ragged in the center of the island. Dutch looking windmills, the only survivors of the cane-crushers th

AS his steamer drops anchor far out in the immense shallow of the Gulf of Paria, the traveler cannot but realize that at last he has come to the end of the West Indies and is encroaching upon the South American continent. The “Trinity” of fuzzy hills, to-day called the “Three Sisters,” for which Columbus named the island have quite another aspect than the precipitous volcanic peaks of the Lesser Antilles. Plump, placid, their vegetation tanned a light brown by the now truly tropical sun, they ha

It may be that our affection for Jamaica is tempered by the difficulties we had in reaching it. Lying well inside the curve described by the other West Indies, the scarcity of shipping caused by the World War has left it almost unattainable from any of the other islands and hardly to be reached, except directly from New York or Panama. We first attempted to visit it from Santiago de Cuba, early in our journey. But as this would have meant spending an interminable twenty-four hours, and perhaps m

There is a suggestion of the pathetic in the name by which the French call their possessions in the New World—“ L’Amérique Française .” It recalls the days when the territory they held on the western hemisphere was really worth that title, when Canada and Louisiana promised to grow into a great French empire in the west, and nothing suggested that a brief century would see their holdings reduced to a few fragments wedged into the string of British islands that form the eastern boundary of the Ca

Martinique, though considerably smaller than Guadeloupe, from which it is separated by the British island of Dominica, probably means more to the average American, possibly because within the memory of the present generation it was the scene of the greatest catastrophe in the recorded history of the Western hemisphere. Some forty miles long and averaging about half of that in width, it is essentially volcanic in origin, untold centuries of eruptions having given it an almost unbrokenly mountaino

The Dutch possessions in the West Indies consist of six islands in two widely separated groups. Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba lie just off the coast of Venezuela; Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin are scattered among the British islands hundreds of miles to the north. A colonial government for all of them sits in Willemsted, chief and only city of Curaçao, and spreads its feelers of red tape to each small dependency and back to the Netherlands. Fifty-seven thousand people live in the four hundre