Old Port, New Day

The battle of the ports was being fought with fresh vigor. Cartagena, 414 years old and long a sleeper behind ancient, 50-foot-thick walls, had roused itself and gone after business. Its parvenu competitors: Barranquilla and Buenaventura. Stake: the trade between Colombia's rich, highland interior and lands across the sea.

A bright lawyer named Manuel Ramon Navarro Patron had shown the way. Sent to Bogota to lobby for Cartagena (pop. 100,000), he had campaigned so well that by last week the Government had agreed to channel to Cartagena a big chunk of the Magdalena River traffic that had lately overcrowded Barranquilla's docks. Lawyer Navarro also got Government backing for a modern $2,500,000 sewage system, plus promises of new Government buildings and a railroad to tap Cartagena's hinterland.

Pearls & Pirates. Once Cartagena, metropolis of the Spanish Main, was the great port where the gold of Peru, the silver of Bolivia and the pearls of Rio Hacha (in Colombia) had awaited shipment in the annual convoy to Spain. The treasures drew freebooters and pirates--English and French; even today the names of Hawkins and Drake and Morgan are as familiar to Cartageneros as the names of Dion O'Bannion and Al Capone are to Chicagoans.

The Spaniards spent hundreds of millions to fortify Cartagena. Miles of tunnels, ventilated by shafts driven 100 feet through solid rock, served Fort San Felipe's twelve gun emplacements (one named after each apostle). A stone barrier, thrust across one of the two harbor entrances, forced men-of-war into a narrow passage raked by Spanish guns. Cartagena knew what it was to be sacked (e.g., by Drake in 1585, and the French in 1544 and 1697), but in 1741, the fortifications paid off: the Spanish routed a 28,000-man, 186-vessel British fleet thrown at them by Admiral Sir Edward Vernon.*

New Invasion. In the past century, Barranquilla gradually cut in on Cartagena. The upstart used U.S. loans to improve its harbor, then made the most of the fact that it was close to the mouth of the wide, serpentine Magdalena, chief communications line from coast to capital. (Cartagena's harbor is connected with the Magdalena by a canal.) Last year, Barranquilla handled 80% of the nation's exports of cotton, coffee and oil. On Colombia's Pacific side, filthy, swampy Buenaventura (literally, good luck) had made good its name: the outlet for the booming western industrial regions, Buenaventura accounted for almost half of Colombia's entire foreign trade.

Cartageneros knew that their battle with the other ports would be hard, that the job of moving into the mainstream of modern life would not be easy. But they had big plans. A fine new hotel set on a sand beach was already helping to establish Cartagena as a tourist center. The Great Colombian Fleet, established jointly by Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, had just gone into operation with eight newly purchased ships; soon the vessels would bring cargoes and tourists.

* Among the attackers: Captain Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George, who later named Mount Vernon for the Admiral.

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