網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed]
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small]

The indifference of the public, as reflected in the newspapers, to the loss of life in freight-car-accidents is strikingly illustrated by the meager accounts in the New
York dailies of the wreck shown in the above picture. Yet in this accident seven men were killed and several injured, with an estimated property loss of $100,000.
Defective air-brakes are given as the cause of the accident, with possibly a too heavy train as a contributing cause. The train, composed of sixty cars loaded with
steel and iron billets, got beyond control near Altoona, Pennsylvania, and crashed into four locomotives coupled together. The result was the destruction of five
locomotives and forty-seven cars, while the victims were buried beneath the wreckage, which took fire

A SOCIALISTIC DESPOT IN YUCATAN

BY GREGORY MASON

STAFF CORRESPONDENT IN MEXICO

This is the third in the series of Mexican articles by Mr. Mason, who has been investigating conditions in Mexico from Yucatan to the American border. The next article will deal with the monopoly of sisal hemp, the "green gold of Yucatan." Every American who eats bread is affected by this monopoly, for the grain crops of the United States could hardly be harvested without the binder twine which is made from sisal hemp. As a result of the increased price charged by the Yucatan monopoly in 1916 the American farmers paid $4,000,000 more for their binder twine than in 1915. THE EDITORS.

A

LONG band of yellow cutting the equal blue of sea and sky. A thin crust of green along the upper edge of the yellow. Here and there the white speck of a building, and the single warning finger of a lighthouse. That is Yucatan from the steamer anchorage off Progreso.

There is no harbor, no cove to shelter even a catboat, and the anchorage is offshore, across five miles of gently shoaling waters. A feeble thing to stop an ocean liner seems that far-stretched yellow ribbon, so tenuous and low.

Indeed, from the masthead you can see water beyond the bar, but beyond that again. is a land as flat and as slaty green as a billiard cloth.

At each of the four long piers which stretch seaward from a group of vast warehouses roofed with the ubiquitous corrugated iron of the tropics he one or two freight steamers and three or four small schooners, all of less draught than the liner which the shallows hold offshore. On each pier mules are pulling flat cars back and forth on two lines of narrow track. The cars coming from the steamers are empty. Those going down are apparently loaded with bales of a yellow straw, which on closer view looks like coarse and close-packed yellow hair.

Hemp it is, sisal hemp, the product of the henequen plant. Those bales are going to New Orleans and New York to be made into binder twine. With that twine is bound most of the grain crops of the United States. Without the hemp of the henequen plant the American farmers could hardly harvest their wheat. And eighty per cent of the world's henequen comes from Yucatan.

When the little wood-burning locomotive has pulled you across the lakes and marshes back of Progreso, you enter the level slatygreen plain like a vast billiard-table, which you might have seen with glasses from your steamer's masthead. If you are hunting variety of scenery, you might as well go back. From the northwest of Yucatan to the south

east, in a strip from forty to a hundred miles deep back from the coast, the land is all level and all gray green. The cause of this color is the henequen, which is everywhere in that coastal strip. Above a stump a foot or two from the ground and scaled like a giant pineapple rises a plant which looks like a cluster of swords. Whatever stem there is is hidden by the bases of the formidable leaves, pointing outward in rising whorls. Each leaf is the size of a broadsword and exactly the same shape, except for saw-teeth on each edge and a lance point at the tip. The color is the gray-green of a shark's back seen through a few feet of crystal tropic brine. Growing where little else will grow in the limy soil of that land, and growing there with greater fertility than anywhere else in the world, this spiky plant, whose commercial value was discovered about ninety years ago, did for that land what has been done for others by the discovery of gold. So that's what the natives call it the green gold of Yucatan.”

This article is not about henequen. But you cannot write about the people of this colorful State without mentioning what is the main economic reason for their existence, their green gold. Most of the chicle for the world's chewing gum comes from the forests of interior Yucatan, valuable woods grow in the same place, and the coast provides fish and tortoise-shell. Still, what diamonds are to Kimberley and yellow gold to Nome is its own green gold to Yucatan.

Henequen is one of the two main reasons why Yucatan is as different from the other States of Mexico as Ulster is different from the rest of Ireland. The other reason is the Mava Indians.

The original people of Yucatan were the Maya Indians. They may have been the original people of the Western Hemisphere. Some ethnologists even believe that the cradle of the human race was Yucatan. The interior of Yucatan is filled with the cities of the ancient Mayas-most of the buildings half buried and unexplored. But from the few

[graphic]

A PLANTATION OF HENEQUEN-THE "GREEN GOLD OF YUCATAN

From henequen comes the sisal hemp used in making the twine with which most of the grain crops of the United States are bound in sheaves

[graphic][merged small]

PEONS SECURING FROM THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT THEIR ALLOTMENT OF LAND

In this town thirty peasants received each about fifty acres of land; a similar distribution of homesteads throughout Yucatan is a part of the revolutionary programme

« 上一頁繼續 »