The Port o’ Missing Men

Adapted from an article by LEWIS R. FREEMAN.

LIMA tempted; but the call of Callao, an earlier love, was the more insis tent and would not be denied. This morning should be for the world's first and most famous “Port o’ Missing Men.”

“Plaza-Puerto,” these were the only words necessary for the driver of the new Yankee taxi. Twenty minutes through the light early morning traffic on the paved eight-cars-wide Avenida Progreso turned the trick. I was back where I had landed twenty-seven years before from a German coaster.

At first it was the changes that im pressed me —new docks, modern banks and office buildings, asphalt in place of cobbles. Then a grinning limpiahotas slid up his box and, murmuring “ Lustre , Senor?” began to caress my toes; a mule trotted by with a load of cackling chic kens; an impish-eye muchacha pushed a tray of orange-colored sweets toward me and lisped “Dulce?” A Cockney tar called a leering street-tout a “bloddy, bloomin’ blighter!” shoved him into the fountain and ducked for the docks as the hue and cry concentrated.

It was this final homely touch that dropped the curtain of the years and landed me back in a Callao that had really only changed its clothes but not its spirit—adopted a new cut of coat, so to speak, while retaining the old baggy pants. It had always been more of a pants town than a coat town, anyhow.

In the old days Callao was famous for men who were “wanted” elsewhere, and there were times in the ’eighties when the accumulated rewards for the British fugitives alone within its sacred precincts would have footed up into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. One of the most lucrative side-lines of the speedy old clippers of these times was the smug gling of ex-bank cashiers, get-rich-quick sters and others of their ilk away from New York and London and the transporting of them and their loot to the snug Peruvian refuge “below the line.’’

Phis traffic was carried on so extensively and, moreover, so openly, that the por tions of the cargo not appearing upon the bills of lading, and the passengers whose names were not on the purser’s list, came to be looked upon quite as a matter of course.

Evidence of this is to be found in some of the old chanteys, some of which were sung in the wind-jammers still making the West Coast ports at the time of my first visit.

I recall especially an old Welsh tar (“First shipped out o’ Cardiff, matey”) who used to doze through the siesta hour in this same sun-soaked plaza. For a swig from a cana bottle he would knock the ashes out of his stubby pipe and tell in mingled song and recitative how the sailors used to walk around the capstan and bring up the anchor out of the Thames mud to “Extradishun does not go To the port of Cal-ya-o;” or whiled away dog-watches in the wind less Sargasso with “Oh, he won’t come back any more, He’s salted down shekels galore And he’s off for his ease For the tropical seas, Where the breakers of Cal-ya-o roar.”

In no other neck of the Seven Seas did I ever come upon anything compar able to the West Coast for sailors’ songs that were exclusively, uniquely its own.

And because Callao was frequently a port of call for outward-bound nitrate ships when there was cargo instead of ballast, and because its rippling syllables

dropped more readily into both rhyme and rhythm than did those of Iquique, Pisagua and Antofagasta, the name of Pizarro's old haven of refuge appears in almost every one of them.

With the reek of Callao’s water-front caressing my nostrils again, familiar chords of memory began to vibrate. There was that multum in parvo paean about Peruvian drinks, and their prolific fount; “Aguar-denty, kanyya, pisco— Cal-yo port’s as hot as Frisco.”

Anacraeon himself could not have com

pressed more into two lines than that, though a purist might point out that a proper pronunciation of that delectable brandy yclept pisco would demand that our California Barbary Coast suburb should be called “Freesco.” But of course purism would have meant no more than futurism to the hatchet-faced Aus tralian (called by his mates “The Tas manian Devil”) whom I first heard roar ing out that inspiring couplet in “El Jesus del Gran Poder" posada.

And then there was that one in some what qualified commendation of the muchachas del puerto: “Cal-yo gals are dark an’ vishus, But their lovin’ is delishus.”

Or those lines of admonition in the event there was some doubt about the ardency of response to tar-pawed caresses: “If you want ’em calienty, Fill ’em up wi’ aguar-denty.”

The fiery auguardiente still enjoys no mean reputation as a stimulator of the

languid pulse.

Other chaste classics come crowding, but Propriety frowns and lays a muting hand on throbbing memory-chords. I’m sorry, especially about not being able to include that limerick about — “ . . . the old Inca Cacique, Who married a maid from Iquique,’’ which fairly zizzed with verve and color.

In his incomparable poem to “The Broken Men” Kipling broadcast to the world the picture of early Callao very much as he had done that of its Brazilian vis-a-vis in “Roll Me Down to Rio.’’ It is one of those picturesque ambuscados of pre-extradition days who declares: “We took no tearful leaving.

We bade no long good-byes; Men talked of crime and thieving, Men wrote of fraud and lies.

To save our injured feelings ’Twas time and time to go— Behind was dock and Dartmoor, Ahead lay Callao.”

With the march of time and progress, extradition came to Peru, and Callao ceased to sequester picturesque fugitives from justice and became just a rich and prosperous puerto. All of the “broken men’’ of the good old days have either gone up or down, and no fresh faces or fortunes have come to take their place.

Those who failed in their new environ ment one rarely meets; those who have risen have become highly sensitive about their pasts and steer clear of any allu sions to them.

But if Callao has ceased to be of im portance as a haven for our most success ful defaulters, it still has the distinction of presenting the most interesting phases of street life, and the most varied types of street characters, of any city of the Western Hemisphere. The way the clouds of the Pacific have of banking against the Peruvian Andes without precipitat ing any of their moisture gives a climate which, for coolness accompanied by dry ness, is quite without parallel in similar latitudes on other coasts. The conditions for out-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 few large shops, and even the arcades so common in most Latin- American cities are rare. On the other hand, itinerant street vendors and huck sters are legion, carrying on a large part of the retail trade of the town.

Few carts are used in trade; most of the vendors carrying their wares on their heads, or on horse or mule-back. Promi nent among those using the latter system of distribution is the panadero, or baker.

Quite frequently his bread is baked in a large outdoor oven during the early hours of the morning and delivered dur ing the day. His outfit consists of two big skin-covered baskets thrown on either side of a horse, between which he perches himself —usually with both feet on one side as though mounted on a side saddle —and hands out his bread to cus tomers as they respond to his lusty hail at their doors. The bread loaves consist of long slender sticks of glazed gluten, with crusts so hard as almost to scratch glass when fresh, and which, stale, will resist a knife blade like a piece of hippo hide. Loaves of five or six feet in length are baked for certain feast days.

Delivery of goods from certain small shops is frequently made in two big bags of untanned cow hide, with the hair out side. The mount is usually a mule.

When his bags are full on the out trip, the delivery boy rides on the neck of his mule. Returning empty, he either rides with one foot in each bag, or else climbs in one unit, invites a friend to clamber into the other to make a balanced load, and so has company for the home trip.

One of the funniest things I ever saw in Peru was a stand-up give-and-take slugging match between two muchachos —one in either bag of a delivery outfit — who had evidently come to a serious dis agreement over something and were hav ing it out then and there, while the good old mula, unmoved by the diversion which was furnishing unlimited amuse ment for everyone along three or four blocks of one of Callao’s principal streets, neither batted an eye nor ear nor deviated an iota from the sober measure of his even, plodding tread.

The lechero, or milkman, has a light frame of untanned cowhide fitted to his horse, and in this rests his cans. At the bottom of each can is a little faucet for drawing off the milk. As the cream and richer milk rises to the tops of the cans, it is a common trick of the lecheros to leave the last four or five inches in the bottom for their own use or that of some favorite customer. Of course food carried thus on horseback comes in for a good deal of jolting, and a canny house keeper is able to tell how long her pur chases have been on the way by the amount of chafing her loaf has received or the quantity of butter which floats on her milk.

Perhaps the strangest of all the mounted merchants of Callao is the pollero, or poultryman. His stock is carried in two huge cages, one on either side of his horse, and in compartments of these one is fairly sure of finding doves, ducks and chickens, and sometimes even geese and turkeys. He buys fowls as well as sells them, and is always ready to enter into any kind of an exchange.

Callao Bay teems with fish, and, its waters being several degrees cooler than those of places of similar latitude in Africa, Asia, or Australia, the flesh of these is much firmer and more appetising than that of tropical fish caught else where. Fishing is carried on at night — much of it with hook-and-line—and at dawn the boats come in and turn their catches over to the pescaderos, or fish

mongers. The latter set out on their rounds carrying long bamboo poles, to one end of which, the large fish are sus pended by a thong of hide through their gills, while on the other is hung a wic ker basket full of small fry.

The Peruvians of the coastal ports and Lima, largely because of the expensive ness of beef and mutton, are great fish eaters. A pescadero will often stagger up to the malecon from the beach or the dock with a load of close to a hundred and fifty pounds. The fish are all known

by names unfamiliar to foreigners, but the principal ones seen in the mercado bear close resemblance to the bonito, smelt, mackerel, mullet and barracuda of the Pacific waters of North America. One flashy specimen appears closely akin to the toothsome red schnapper of the New Zealand bays and sounds.

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