With the Battle Fleet: Cruise of the Sixteen Battleships of the United States Atlantic Fleet from Hampton Roads to the Golden Gate, December, 1907-May, 1908Matthews, Franklin
History
With the Battle Fleet: Cruise of the Sixteen Battleships of the United States Atlantic Fleet from Hampton Roads to the Golden Gate, December, 1907-May, 1908
Matthews, Franklin
United States. Navy. Atlantic Fleet -- Cruise, 1907-1909
Then the explorers visited other churches which took one back to the
Middle Ages. There was the Franciscan convent and church. There was the
church where the remains of Santa Rosa, the only American woman saint,
rest. Then there were numerous other edifices with old doors and heavy
bolts and locks, and inside some of them were decorated with what seemed
to be solid sheets of gold about their pillars; churches where there
were beautiful old paintings of religious subjects, churches where the
tiling was brought from Europe and is now almost priceless in value,
churches where there were historic parchments.
The visitors then went to see the Senate Chamber, with its carved
ceiling, one of the wonders of the world in that line; brought from
Europe and paid for with Inca treasure in 1560. That room was used in
the days of the Inquisition, which lasted longer in Peru than in Spain
and was almost as terrible. In fact in this viceregal city, the second
founded in the Americas by the Spanish, one could see religious emblems
at every turn. Just outside the city on a hill overlooking the bullring
is an enormous cross, probably fifty feet high. Every year the society
that had it erected makes a pilgrimage up that hill after a parade in
the city and holds services, wherein vows to uphold the faith and lead
lives of purity and honor are retaken. On a dozen other hills crosses
and shrines may be seen.
It is evident that Peru as a nation is still devout, but if one could
have seen the crowd at the San Pedro Church on Sunday morning when the
doors were opened and the beauty and high blood of Lima came out from
their devotions he would have been convinced that Peru is really no
exception to other Latin American countries, and indeed most other
countries, in that the women are the mainstay of the church. That beauty
parade is one of the sights of Lima, and the Americans, officers and
men, were there, side by side with the men of the city to see the show.
As the visitors went about, one change, national in character, impressed
itself upon them immediately. Every writer on Peru has commented on the
fact that the headdress of the women, worn universally, is the black
manta. It is said that it is a relic that has come down from the Incas
when they put on mourning for their great chief Atahualpa. Rich and poor
have worn that headdress on the street for centuries. It was an
established institution.
Well, it is going. About one-half of the women, some of them in good
circumstances evidently, wore mantas on the streets, but as for the
rest--well, a man has no business to write about women's hats. All that
this man can say is that he never saw more dazzling specimens of flower
gardens than those bobbing around over the graceful drapery with which
the Peruvian women adorn themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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