The Sunday Oregonian., February 23, 1908, Magazine Section, Page 2, Image 46

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THE SUNDAY OREGOXIAN, PORTLAND, "FEBRUARY
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What the Officers and Men in
Fleet Will See to Amuse Them in the Most
Interesting Port in South America
IN the old days Callao wu famous as
refuge for -men who were "want
ed," elsewhere, and there were times
in the '80s when tbe accumulated re
wards for the British fugitive alone
within its sacred precincts would have
footed up Into the hundreds of thou
sands of pounds The most lucrative
part of the business of the speedy old
dippers of these times was the emus
Sling; of ex-hank presidents, get-rlch-quicksters.
and the like, away from
New York and London and the trans
porting; of them and their loot to th
snug Peruvian refuge beyond the line.
This traffic was carried on so exten
sively, and, moreover, so openly, that
the part of the cargo that did not ap
pear upon the bills of lading, and the
passengers whose names did not ap
pear upon the purser's list came to be
looked upon as regular routine busi
ness. Evidences of this attitude are
found In ome of the sailors' chanteys
still sung, and when these are he.ard
some old tar may knock the ashes out
of his pipe and tell you how they used
to walk round the capstan and bring
up the anchor out of the Thames mud
Extradition does not go
To the port of Cal-lvo;
Or whlled'away dog watches becalmed
In the windless Sargasso with
Oh, he won't come back any more,
'He's salted down shekels galore.
And he's otf for his eaue '
O'er tha tropical seas,
Where the breakers of C&l-la-o roar, i
It was the Callao of these days that
Kipling had In mind when1 he wrote his
lament of "The Broken Men":
We took no tearfus leaving'. r
We bade no long good-byes; ,
Men talked of crime and thieving-.
Men wrote ,of fraud and lies.
To Have our Injured feelings
'Twas time and time to go -Behind
was dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao.
With the march of progress extradi
tion came to Peru in time, and Callao
ceased to shelter picturesque fugitives
from justice and sank into compara
tive oblivion. All the "Broken Men"
of the good old days have either gone
uiJ or down, and no fresh, ,new faces
have come to take their places. Thoee
who failed in their new environment one
rarely meets, while those who succeeded
have become ' strangely sensitive in re
gard to, their pasts and refuse to ac
knowledge any connection with them.
I recall with amusement the admoni
tion I ..received in the Progfesso Club
of Lima one evening as I was about to
be introduced to one of the most prom
inent importers of Callao.. "Be care
ful not to try and joke with M about
the arrest of that Birmingham default
er when your eteamer comes In, In case
the subject is brought up," a friend
warned me; "It will make him think
you know all about how he mad his
'start' and be sure to turn him against
you. Try and stick to local topics."
Legion of Street Vendors.
But if Callao has ceased to 'be of Impor
tance as a haven for the big defaulters
of Europe and North America, to it still
belongs the distinction of presenting the
most interesting phases of street life, and
'the most varied types of street char
acters, of any city in the "Western hem
isphere. The way the clouds of the Pa
cific have of banking in agalnstt the Pe
ruvian Andes without precipitating any of
their moisture gives a climate which, for
coolness accompanied by dryness, is quite
without parallel in similar latitudes. The
conditions for out-of-door life are as near
the Ideal as in any place in the world,
and as a result of this, probably nine
tenths of Callao's .buying and selling is
done on the streets. The city has no
large shops whatever, and even the small
arcade stores so common in most South
American cities are very rare. . Itinerant
street venders and hucksters, on the
other hand, are legion, and among them
practically monopolize the retail trade of
the whole town.
Few carts are used in trade, most of,
the vendors carrying the wares on their
heads, or on horse or tnuleback. Prom
inent among the latter class is the pan
adero or baker. He bakes his bread in a
big stone outdoor oven during the early
hours of the morning and delivers It
during the day. His delivery outfit con
sists of two big skin-covered baskets
thrown on either side of a horse, between
which he perches himself usually with
both feet on one Bide, as though mounted
on a side-saddle and hands out his bread
to his customers as they respond to his
lusty hall at their doors. Sacks of stale
bread for chicken feed are also occasion
ally carried, being tied to thongs, like
the reef-points on a sail, on the outside
of the big bags. The bread loaves consist
of long, slender stipks of glazed gluten,
with crust so hard as' to almost scratch
glass when fresh, and which, stale, will
resist the thrust of a knife blade like a
piece of hippo hide. Loaves of five or
six feet in length are baked for certain
feast days; in fact, it is said that the
length of the loaves on these gala oc
casions are only limited by the width of
the extremely narrow streets through
which they must be delivered.
Groceries in Saddle Bags.
. The grocer boy delivers in two" big bags
made of untanned cowhide, 'and his
mount is-usually a mule. On the out trip,
when his baes are full, ho rides on the
neck of the mule, but going back empty
he cither rides with one foot In each bag,
or else cKmbs In one bag. Invites a
friend to climb into the other to make" a
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lying around, and "euidado, nlnos. el ;
pollero" ' dook out. children, the poul- ,
tryraan) Is the usual admonition his
coming evokes.
An amusing story was told me of a
pollero, who. In leaving a Callao hotel,
to the kitchen of which he had been
delivering some fowls, walked out
through the front entrauce and past
the ladies' parlor. An expensive Paris- ,
Ian hat belonging to one of the guests
chanced to be lying on a chair near (
the door, and without hesitation the
deft-Hngered fellow transferrer! It be- :
neath his coat, made his way out to
his horse and rode away. The hat waa .
mitised almost immediately, and a"" bell
boy, recalling the bulge he had no
ticed beneath the pollero's coat, tele- '
phoned tho police, with the result that, j
In less than five minutes, the man was I
intercepted In front of the police sta- I
tlon, and three blocks from the hotel. .
A most careful search, however, failed
to reveal tho lost hat, and tho officers
were finally compelled to let the smll- '
ing rascal go his way. Stirred by a 1
promise of substantial reward, the po-
lice raked the Second-hand stores of
the city for a week with a- tine-tooth j
comb, but with no tangible result. At :
the end of that time, chancing to be ',
searching the premises of the pollero ;
in question ori the complaint of a mer
chant who had lost a box of toilet soap,
the police, among other things of vari
ous and sundry descriptions, found the ,
missing hat. In court the man made a
full-confession, when it transpired that
immediately on reaching his horse with :
the stolen hat, he had thrust the dainty ;
thing in to an empty compartment in
one of his poultry cages, and there,
with its gaudy streamers and feathers
sticking. out through the wire mesh, it
had been all the time that the police
were holdlngits pre-emptor down on
the cobbles "and searching for It In his
pockets, In his hat and even In hi
shoes.
Candies and Fruit.
Candy and fruit are usually sold by
women, .the former from little stands un
der the trees in the plazas and along
the streets, and the latter from baskets
carried about on the heads. The sweets
are a fearful and wonderful array, very
saccharine and sticky, and with rather
too many marks of flies and fingers upon
them to prove really tempting to anyone
but a' native. The fruit, both in variety
and excellence, is. well up to the usual
tropical standard: it is, moreover, ridicu
lously cheap. The oranges are mostly of
an inferior variety of seedling, but still
very thin skinned and surprisingly sweet.
The most popular fruit appears to be una
with an unpronounceable Indian name,
which bears a very close resemblance to
that called the star-apple In tlie British
Islands of the West Indies. It has a
large seed and a thin skin like the man-
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balanced load, and thus has company for
the home trip. One of the most amusing
recollections I have -of Peru Is that of a
stand-up, give-and-take slugging match
between two youngsters,- one in either
bag of a delivery outfit. They had evi
dently come to a serious misunderstand
ing over something, and were having It
out then and there, while the old mule,
unmoved by a diversion which' furnished
unlimited entertainment for everyone
along three or four blocks of Callao'
principal thoroughfares, neither batted
en eye nor deviated an lota from the so
ber measure of his even, plodding tread.
The lechero or milkman has a light
case or frame of ' tintanned cowhide
fitted to his horse, and in this reals
his cans. At the bottom of each can
is a little brass faucet for drawing
off the milk. As the cream and richer
milk, of course, rise to the tops of the
cans, it has become a common trick of
the lecheros to leave tho last four or
five inches, after the rest has been
drawn off. for their own use, or for that
of some favorite customer. Food thus
carried on horseback comes In for a
good deal of jolting, and a shrewd
housekeeper is able to tell about how
long her purchases ' have been on the
way. by the amount of chafing her
loaf has received, and the quantity of
butter that floats on her milk.
Perhaps the strangest of all the
jnounUd merchants of Callao is th.e
pollero or poultryman. His stock is
carried in two huge cages, one on
either Bide of his horse, and In com
partments in one or the other of these
you may be pretty sure of finding doves,
ducks and chickens, and sordetl'mes
even geese and turkeys. They buy fowls
as well as sell them, and are always
ready to enter Into any kind of ex
change. The pollero's, as a class, have
the name of being rather rascally fel
lows. They are supposed to have an
uncontrollable propensity for annexing
any stray properly that may be left
go, but is possessed of a far more agree
able flavor than the latter. Cool 'drinks
of prismatic colors mostly .made from di
luted fruit juices are for sale at little
stands all along the streets, but the un
tidy old stone ollas that hold them, like
the candy, bear too much evidence of
handling to encourage one to sample their
.Tmtents.
Callao Bay teems with iish. and its
waters being several degrees cooler than
those of similarly located points on the
.Concluded on Page H.)