IN THE time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco — the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity¹ — had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo². The clumsy deep-sea galleons³ of the conquerors⁴ that, needing a brisk gale⁵ to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere⁶ flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing⁷ calms of its vast gulf⁸. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary⁹ from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush¹⁰ of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant¹¹ cape¹² whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.

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