Mexico
by C. Reginald Enock · English · Gutenberg #20959 · 832,072 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mexico
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Mexico
Author: C. Reginald Enock
Author of introduction, etc.: Martin A. S. Hume
Release date: April 2, 2007 [eBook #20959]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20959
Credits: Produced by Ron Swanson
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEXICO ***
Produced by Ron Swanson
THE SOUTH AMERICAN SERIES
EDITED BY MARTIN HUME, M.A.
[Frontispiece: AN IDYLL OF MEXICO: INDIAN CARRIERS, RUINED CHURCH, AND
SNOW-CLAD PEAK OF ORIZABA.]
MEXICO
ITS ANCIENT AND MODERN CIVILISATION
HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS
TOPOGRAPHY AND NATURAL RESOURCES
INDUSTRIES AND GENERAL DEVELOPMENT
BY
C. REGINALD ENOCK, F.R.G.S.
CIVIL AND MINING ENGINEER
AUTHOR OF "PERU" AND "THE ANDES AND THE AMAZON"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
MARTIN HUME, M.A.
WITH A MAP AND SEVENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_First Edition_ 1909
_Second Impression_ 1910
_Third Impression_ 1912
_Fourth Impression_ 1914
_Fifth Impression_ 1919
_(All rights reserved)_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
The purpose of this work is to treat of Mexico as a topographical and
political entity, based upon a study of the country from travel and
observation; a method such as has found favour in my book upon Peru.
The method of viewing a country as a whole, with its people,
topography, and general conditions in natural relation to each other,
is one which commands growing acceptance in a busy age. I have been
able to observe much of the actual life and character of
Spanish-American countries from considerable travel therein. Both
Mexico and Peru ever lured me on as seeming to hold for me some El
Dorado, and if I have not reaped gold as the Conquistadores did, there
are nevertheless other matters of satisfaction accruing to the
traveller from his journeys in those splendid territories of mountain
and forest.
Mexico, superfluous to say, is not part of South America, although this
book appears in this series. But it is part of that vast
Spanish-speaking New World whose development holds much of interest;
and which may occupy a more important part in coming years than is
generally thought of at present.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi
INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN HUME. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv
CHAPTER I
A FIRST RECONNAISSANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Romance of history--Two entrance ways--Vera Cruz--Orizaba--The Great
Plateau--Fortress of Ulua--Sierra Madre--Topographical structure--The
Gulf coast--Tropical region--Birds, animals, and vegetation of coast
zone--_Tierra caliente_--Malaria--Foothills--Romantic scenery--General
configuration of Mexico--Climatic zones--Temperate zone--Cold zone--The
Cordillera--Snow-capped peaks--Romance of mining--Devout miners--
Subterranean shrines--The great deserts--Sunset on the Great Plateau--
_Coyotes_ and _zopilotes_--Irrigated plantations--Railways--Plateau of
Anahuac--The cities of the _mesa central_--Spanish-American
civilisation--Romance of Mexican life--Mexican girls, music, and
moonlight--The _peones_ and civilisation--American comparisons--
Pleasing traits of the Mexicans--The foreigner in Mexico--Picturesque
mining-towns--Wealth of silver--Conditions of travel--Railways--
Invasions--Lerdo's axiom--Roads and horsemen--Strong religious
sentiment--Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl--Sun-god of Teotihuacan--City
of Mexico--Valley of Mexico--The Sierra Madre--_Divortia aquarum_ of
the continent--Volcano of Colima--Forests and ravines--Cuernavaca--The
trail of Cortes--Acapulco--Romantic old _haciendas_--Tropic sunset--
Unexplored Guerrero--Perils and pleasures of the trail--Sunset in the
Pacific Ocean.
CHAPTER II
THE DAWN OF MEXICO: TOLTECS AND AZTECS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Lake Texcoco--Valley of Anahuac--Seat of the Aztec civilisation--
Snow-capped peaks--Pyramids of Teotihuacan--Toltecs--The first
Aztecs--The eagle, cactus, and serpent--Aztec oracle and wanderings--
Tenochtitlan--Prehistoric American civilisations--Maya, Incas--Quito
and Peru--The dawn of history--The Toltec empire--Rise, _regime_,
fall--Quetzalcoatl--Otomies--Chichemecas--Nezahualcoyotl--Astlan--The
seven tribes and their wanderings--Mexican war-god--The Teocallis--
Human sacrifices--Prehistoric City of Mexico--The Causeways--Aztec
arts, kings, and civilisation--Montezuma--Guatemoc--Impressions of the
Spaniards--The golden age of Texcoco--Vandalism of Spanish
archbishop--The poet-king and his religion--Temple to the Unknown
God--Aztecs and Incas compared--The Tlascalans--The Otomies--Cholula--
Mexican tribes--Aztec buildings--Prehistoric art--Origin of American
prehistoric civilisation--Biblical analogies--Supposed Asiatic and
Egyptian origins--Aboriginal theory.
CHAPTER III
THE STRANGE CITIES OF EARLY MEXICO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Principal prehistoric monuments--Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan--
Pyramids of Teotihuacan--Toltec sun-god--Pyramid of Cholula--Pyramids
of Monte Alban--Ruins of Mitla--Remarkable monoliths and sculpture--
Beautiful prehistoric stone-masonry--Ruins of Palenque--Temple of the
Sun, and others--Stone vault construction--Tropical vegetation--Ruins
of Yucatan--Maya temples--Architectural skill--Temples of
Chichen-Ytza--Barbaric sculpture--Effect of geology on building--The
Aztec civilisation--Land and social laws--Slavery--Taxes, products,
roads, couriers--Analogy with Peru--Aztec homes and industries--War,
human sacrifice, cannibalism--History, hieroglyphics, picture-writing--
Irrigation, agriculture, products--Mining, sculpture, pottery--Currency
and commerce--Social system--Advent of the white man.
CHAPTER IV
CORTES AND THE CONQUEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Landing of Cortes--Orizaba peak--The dawn of conquest--Discovery of
Yucatan--Velasquez and Grijalva--Life and character of Cortes--Cortes
selected to head the expedition--Departure from Cuba--Arrival at
Yucatan--The coast of Vera Cruz--Marina--Vera Cruz established--Aztec
surprise at guns and horses--Montezuma--Dazzling Aztec gifts--Messages
to Montezuma--Hostility of the Aztecs--Key to the situation--The
Cempoallas--Father Olmedo--Religion and hypocrisy of the Christians--
March to Cempoalla--Montezuma's tax-collectors--Duplicity of Cortes--
Vacillation of Montezuma--Destruction of Totonac idols--Cortes
despatches presents to the King of Spain--Cortes destroys his ships--
March towards the Aztec capital--Scenery upon line of march--The
fortress of Tlascala--Brusque variations of climate--The Tlascalans--
Severe fighting--Capitulation of Tlascala--Faithful allies--Messengers
from Montezuma--March to Cholula--Massacre of Cholula--The snow-capped
volcanoes--First sight of Tenochtitlan.
CHAPTER V
THE FALL OF THE LAKE CITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
The Valley of Mexico--The City and the Causeways--The _Conquistadores_
enter Mexico City--Meeting of Cortes and Montezuma--Greeting of the
Aztec emperor to the Spaniards--Tradition of Quetzalcoatl--Splendid
reception--The Teocalli--Spanish duplicity--Capture of Montezuma--
Spanish gambling--News from Vera Cruz--Forced march to the coast--
Cortes defeats Narvaez--Bad news from Mexico--Back to the capital--
Alvarado's folly--Barbarous acts of the Spaniards--The fight on the
pyramid--Destruction of Aztec idols--Death of Montezuma--Spaniards flee
from the city--Frightful struggle on the Causeway--Alvarado's leap--The
_Noche Triste_--Battle of Otumba--Marvellous victory--Spanish
recuperation--Cuitlahuac and Guatemoc--Fresh operations against the
capital--Building of the brigantines--Aztec tenacity--Expedition to
Cuernavaca--Xochimilco--Attack upon the city--Struggles and reverses--
Sacrifice of Spaniards--Desertion of the Allies--Return of the Allies--
Renewed attacks--Fortitude of the Aztecs--The famous catapult--
Sufferings of the Aztecs--Final attack--Appalling slaughter--Ferocious
Tlascalans--Fall of Mexico.
CHAPTER VI
MEXICO AND THE VICEROYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
General considerations--Character of Viceroy rule--Spanish
civilisation--Administration of Cortes--Torture of Guatemoc--Conquests
of Guatemala and Honduras--Murder of Guatemoc--Fall of Cortes--First
viceroy Mendoza--His good administration--Misrule of the _Audiencias_--
Slavery and abuse of the Indians--The Philippine islands--Progress
under the Viceroys--Plans for draining the Valley of Mexico--British
buccaneers--Priestly excesses--Raid of Agramonte--Exploration of
California--Spain and England at war--Improvements and progress in the
eighteenth century--Waning of Spanish power--Decrepitude of Spain--
Summary of Spanish rule--Spanish gifts to Mexico--The rising of
Hidalgo--Spanish oppression of the colonists--Oppression by the
colonists of the Indians--Republicanism and liberty--Operations and
death of Hidalgo--The revolution of Morelos--Mier--The dawn of
Independence--The birth of Spanish-American nations.
CHAPTER VII
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MEXICO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Monarchical _regime_ of Iturbide--Great area of Mexican Empire--Santa
Anna--The Holy Alliance--Execution of Iturbide--The Monroe Doctrine--
British friendship--The United States--Masonic institutions--Political
parties--Expulsion of Spaniards--Revolution and crime--Clerical
antagonism--Foreign complications--The "pie-war"--The Texan war--The
slavery question--Mexican valour--American invasion of Mexico--Fall of
Mexico--Treaty of Guadalupe--Cession of California--Gold in
California--Benito Juarez appears--Conservatives and Liberals--Massacre
of Tacubaya--The Reform laws--Disestablishment of the Church--Dishonest
Mexican finance--Advent of Maximilian--The English, Spanish, and French
expedition--Perfidy of the French--Capture of Mexico City by the
French--Crowning of Maximilian--Porfirio Diaz--Rule of Maximilian--Fall
of his empire--Death of Maximilian--The tragedy of Queretaro--Diaz
takes Mexico City--Presidency of Juarez--Lerdo--Career and character of
Diaz--First railways built--Successful administration of Diaz--
Political stability--Forward policy.
CHAPTER VIII
PHYSICAL CONDITIONS: MOUNTAINS, TABLELANDS, AND FLORA AND FAUNA. . 134
Geographical conditions--Tehuantepec--Yucatan--Boundaries and area--
Population--Vera Cruz--Elevations above sea-level--Latitude--General
topography--The Great Plateau--The Sierra Madres--The Mexican Andes--
General structure--The coasts--Highest peaks--Snow-cap and volcanoes--
Geological formation--Geological scenery--Hydrographic systems--
Rivers--Navigation--Water-power--Lakes--Climate and temperatures--The
three climatic zones--Rainfall--Snowfall--Flora and fauna--Soil--
Singular cactus forms--The desert flora--The tropical flora--Forest
regions--Wild animals--Serpents, monkeys, and felidae--Sporting
conditions--Birds.
CHAPTER IX
THE MEXICAN PEOPLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Ethnic conditions--Spanish, Mestizos, Indians--Colour-line--Foreign
element--The _peones_--Land tenure--The Spanish people--The native
tribes--The Apaches--The Mexican constitution--Class distinctions--
Mexican upper class--Courtesy and hospitality--Quixotism of the
Mexicans--Idealism and eloquence--General characteristics--Ideas of
progress--American anomalies--_Haciendas_--Sport--Military
distinctions--Comparison with Anglo-Saxons--Republicanism--Language--
Life in the cities--Warlike instincts--The women of Mexico--Mexican
youths--Religious observance--Romantic Mexican damsels--The
bull-fights.
CHAPTER X
THE CITIES AND INSTITUTIONS OF MEXICO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Character of Mexican cities--Value of Mexican civilisation--Types of
Mexican architecture--Mexican homes and buildings--The _Plaza_--Social
relations of classes--The City of Mexico--Valley of Mexico--Latitude,
elevation, and temperature--Buildings--Bird's-eye view--The lakes--
Drainage works--Viga canal and floating gardens--General description--
The cathedral--Art treasures--Religious orders--Chapultepec--Pasco de
la Reforma--The President--Description of a bull-fight--Country homes
and suburbs--Colleges, clubs, literary institutions--Churches and
public buildings--Army and Navy--Cost of living--Police--Lighting and
tramways--Canadian enterprise--British commercial relations--The
American--United States influence--A general impression of Mexico.
CHAPTER XI
MEXICAN LIFE AND TRAVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Travel and description--Mexican cities--Guadalajara--Lake Chapala--
Falls of Juanacatlan--The Pacific slope--Colima--Puebla--Cities of the
Great Plateau--Guanajuato--Chihuahua--The Apaches--The _peones_--
Comparison with Americans--_Peon_ labour system--Mode of living--Houses
of the _peon_ class--Diet--_Tortillas_ and _frijoles_--Chilli--
_Pulque_--Habits of the _peon_ class--Their religion--The wayside
crosses and their tragedies--Ruthless political executions--The fallen
cross--Similarity to Bible scenes--_Peon_ superstitions--The ignis
fatuus, or _relacion_--Caves and buried treasure--Prehistoric Mexican
religion--The Teocallis--Comparison with modern religious systems--
Philosophical considerations.
CHAPTER XII
MEXICAN LIFE AND TRAVEL (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Anthropogeographical conditions--The Great Plateau--The tropical belt--
Primitive villages--Incidents of travel on the plateau--Lack of water--
Hydrographic conditions--Venomous vermin--Travel by roads and
_diligencias_--A journey with a priest--Courtesy of the _peon_ class--
The curse of alcohol--The dress of the working classes--The women of
the _peon_ class--Dexterity of the natives--The bull-fights--A narrow
escape--Mexican horse equipment--The _vaquero_ and the lasso--Native
sports--A challenge to a duel--Foreigners in Mexico--Unexplored
Guerrero--Sporting conditions--Camp life--A day's hunting.
CHAPTER XIII
MINERAL WEALTH. ROMANCE AND ACTUALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Forced labour in the mines--Silver and bloodshed--History of
discovery--Guanajuato--the _veta Madre_--Spanish methods--Durango--
Zacatecas--Pachuca--The _patio_ process--Quicksilver from Peru--Cornish
miners' graves--Aztec mining--Spanish advent--Old mining methods--
Romance of mining--The Cerro de Mercado--Guanajuato and Hidalgo--Real
del Monte--Religion and mining--Silver and churches--Subterranean
altars--Mining and the nobility--Spanish mining school--Modern
conditions--The mineral-bearing zone--Distribution of minerals
geographically--Silver--The _patio_ process--Gold-mining and
production--El Oro and other districts--Copper--Other minerals--General
mineral production--Mining claims and laws.
CHAPTER XIV
NATURAL RESOURCES, AGRICULTURE, GENERAL CONDITIONS . . . . . . . . 282
Principal cultivated products--Timber--The three climatic zones--
General agricultural conditions--Waste of forests--Irrigation--Region
of the river Nazas--Canal-making--Cotton and sugar-cane--Profitable
agriculture--Mexican country-houses--Fruit gardens--Food products,
cereals, and fibrous plants--_Pulque_ production--India-rubber and
_guayule_--List of agricultural products and values--Fruit culture and
values--Forestry and land--Colonisation--American land-sharks--
Conditions of labour--Asiatics--Geographical distribution of products--
The States of the Pacific slope--Sonora--Lower California--Sinaloa--
Tepic--Jalisco--Colima--Michoacan--Guerrero--Oaxaca--Chiapas.
CHAPTER XV
NATURAL RESOURCES, AGRICULTURE, GENERAL CONDITIONS (_continued_) . 308
Central and Atlantic States--Chihuahua and the Rio Grande--Mining,
forests, railways--Coahuila and its resources--Nuevo Leon and its
conditions--Iron, coal, railways, textile industries--Durango and its
great plains and mountain peaks--Aguascalientes--Zacatecas and its
mineral wealth--San Luis Potosi and its industries--Guanajuato,
Queretaro and Hidalgo, and their diversified resources--Mexico and its
mountains and plains--Tlaxcala--Morelos and its sugar-cane industry--
The rich State of Puebla--Tamaulipas, a littoral state--The historic
State of Vera Cruz, its resources, towns, and harbour--Campeche and the
peninsula of Yucatan.
CHAPTER XVI
MEXICAN FINANCE, INDUSTRIES, AND RAILWAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
Financial rise of Mexico--Tendencies toward restriction against
foreigners--National control of railways--Successful financial
administration--Favourable budgets--Good trade conditions--Foreign
liabilities--Character of exports and imports--Commerce with foreign
nations--Banks and currency--Principal industries--Manufacturing
conditions--Labour, water-power, and electric installations--Textile
industry, tobacco, iron and steel, paper, breweries, etc.--Railways--
The Mexican Railway--The Mexican Central Railway--The National
Railroad--The Interoceanic--Governmental consolidation--The Tehuantepec
Railway--Port of Salina Cruz--Other railway systems.
CHAPTER XVII
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
Mexico's unique conditions--Her future--Asiatic immigrants--Fostering
of the native race--Encouraging of immigration--The white man in the
American tropics--Future of Mexican manufactures--The Pan-American
Congress--Pan-American railway--Mexico and Spain--The Monroe Doctrine--
Mexico, Europe, and the United States--Promising future of Mexico.
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
AN IDYLL OF MEXICO: INDIAN CARRIERS, RUINED CHURCH, AND SNOW-CLAD
PEAK OF ORIZABA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE ATLANTIC SLOPE: TUNNEL AND BRIDGE OF THE INFIERNILLO CANYON ON
THE MEXICAN RAILWAY, IN THE STATE OF VERA CRUZ . . . . . . . . . . 4
THE GREAT PLATEAU: NIGHTFALL IN THE DESERT . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
ON THE GREAT PLATEAU: VIEW OF THE CITY OF DURANGO . . . . . . . . 9
ORIZABA, CAPPED WITH PERPETUAL SNOW: VIEW ON THE MEXICAN RAILWAY
AT CORDOBA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
PINE-CLAD HILLS FORMING THE RIM OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO, 8,000
FEET ELEVATION ABOVE SEA-LEVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
TYPICAL VILLAGE OF THE PACIFIC COAST ZONE, STATE OF COLIMA . . . . 18
THE FINDING OF THE SITE FOR THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF MEXICO BY THE
FIRST AZTECS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
(_From the painting in Mexico_.)
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: TOLTEC PYRAMID OR TEOCALLI OF THE SUN AT SAN
JUAN TEOTIHUACAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
(_Exploration and restoration work being carried on_.)
THE VALLEY OF MEXICO; VIEW ON LAKE TEXCOCO; THE MODERN CITY OF
MEXICO IN THE DISTANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
THE LAND OF THE AZTEC CONQUESTS: MAIZE FIELDS NEAR ESPERANZA,
STATE OF PUEBLA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF EL FOLOC AT CHICHEN-YTZA, YUCATAN . . 35
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: THE PYRAMID OF THE SUN AT TEOTIHUACAN IN THE
VALLEY OF MEXICO, SEEN FROM THE PYRAMID OF THE MOON . . . . . . . 38
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; FACADE OF THE HALL OF THE
COLUMNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
(_The steps have been "restored" by the photographer._)
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; HALL OF THE MONOLITHS OR
COLUMNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; THE HALL OF THE GRECQUES . . . 48
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF TEMPLE AT CHICHEN-YTZA, IN YUCATAN . 53
PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF "THE PALACE" AT CHICHEN-YTZA IN
YUCATAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
THE LAND OF THE CONQUEST: STATE OF VERA CRUZ; VIEW ON THE MEXICAN
RAILWAY; THE TOWN OF MALTRATA IS SEEN THOUSANDS OF FEET BELOW . . 68
THE LAND OF THE CONQUEST: A VALLEY IN THE STATE OF VERA CRUZ, ON
THE LINE OF THE MEXICAN RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
THE LAKES OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO AT THE TIME OF THE CONQUEST,
SHOWING THE CAUSEWAYS TO THE AZTEC ISLAND-CITY OF TENOCHTITLAN . . 76
(_From Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico."_)
THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO: CORTES AT THE BATTLE OF OTUMBA . . . . . . 87
(_From the painting by Ramirez_.)
GUANAJUATO AS SEEN FROM THE HILLS: THE HISTORIC TREASURE-HOUSE OF
MEXICO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
STATUE OF HIDALGO AT MONTERREY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
THE CASTLE OF CHAPULTEPEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
CITY OF OAXACA: SPANISH-COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE; THE PORTALES OF THE
MUNICIPAL PALACE AND PLAZA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO, GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ . . . . . . . . . . 132
MEXICO'S ARTIFICIAL HARBOURS ON THE ATLANTIC: THE NEW PORT WORKS
AT VERA CRUZ, A SOLID AND COSTLY ENTERPRISE . . . . . . . . . . . 136
ASCENDING THE MEXICAN CORDILLERA, OR EASTERN SIERRA MADRE: THE
RAILWAY IS SEEN IN THE VALLEY FAR BELOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
THE PEAK OF ORIZABA; PLAZA OF THE CITY OF CORDOVA . . . . . . . . 140
THE FALLS OF JUANACATLAN: THE NIAGARA OF MEXICO . . . . . . . . . 144
THE PACIFIC COAST ZONE: GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY AND ENVIRONS OF
COLIMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
A RARE OCCURRENCE: SNOWFALL IN A MEXICAN TOWN; VIEW OF THE PLAZA
OF LERDO, ON THE GREAT PLATEAU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
A ROAD IN THE TEMPERATE ZONE, WITH PALMS AND VEGETATION . . . . . 151
VEGETATION IN THE TROPICAL FORESTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
THE MEXICAN PEONES: STREET SCENE AT CORDOVA . . . . . . . . . . . 160
TYPES OF MEXICANS OF THE UPPER CLASS: AN ARCHBISHOP; A FAMOUS
GENERAL AND MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS; A FAMOUS MINISTER OF
FINANCE, SENOR LIMANTOUR; A STATE GOVERNOR . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
MEXICAN LIFE: THE CATHEDRAL AND THE PENITENTIARY, CITY OF PUEBLA . 166
THE FAMOUS MEXICAN "RURALES," OR MEXICAN MOUNTED POLICE . . . . . 172
SPANISH-COLONIAL CHURCH ARCHITECTURE: A TYPICAL MEXICAN TEMPLE . . 176
SPANISH-COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE: THE PORTALES OF CHOLULA . . . . . . 180
A PUBLIC GARDEN IN TROPICAL MEXICO: VIEW AT COLIMA . . . . . . . . 184
THE VALLEY OF MEXICO: THE GREAT DRAINAGE CANAL . . . . . . . . . . 188
THE CATHEDRAL OF THE CITY OF MEXICO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
BULL-FIGHT IN THE CITY OF MEXICO, SHOWING THE SPECTATORS OF THE
"SOL," THE PICADORES, AND THE ENTERING BULL . . . . . . . . . . . 194
MEXICAN STREET SCENE: A PULQUE SHOP WITH ARTISTICALLY-PAINTED
EXTERIOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
MEXICAN ARTILLERY: A WAYSIDE ENCAMPMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
CITY OF GUADALAJARA: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL . . . . . . . . . . 208
A TOBACCO-PRODUCING HACIENDA: STATE OF VERA CRUZ . . . . . . . . . 213
MEXICAN PEON LIFE: TYPICAL VILLAGE MARKET-PLACE . . . . . . . . . 215
THE PACIFIC COAST ZONE: COCOA-NUT PALMS AT COLIMA . . . . . . . . 230
LIFE AND TRAVEL IN MEXICO: MULES, PEON, AND CACTUS . . . . . . . . 235
NATIVE WOMEN OF TEHUANTEPEC: ORDINARY DRESS AND CHURCH-GOING
COSTUMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
THE PACIFIC COAST ZONE: THE PLAZA AND ENVIRONS OF THE CITY OF
COLIMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
MEXICAN ARTIFICIAL HARBOURS ON THE PACIFIC COAST: THE NEW PORT
WORKS OF SALINA CRUZ, TERMINUS OF THE TEHUANTEPEC RAILWAY . . . . 306
GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY OF MONTERREY, STATE OF NUEVO LEON, UPON
THE GREAT PLATEAU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
TYPICAL SIDE STREET IN MEXICAN VILLAGE: THE TOWN OF AMECA AND
CLOUD-EFFECT ON POPOCATEPETL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
STATE OF VERA CRUZ: THE BARRANCA OR RAVINE OF MITLAC; VIEW ON THE
MEXICAN RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
(_Far below in the valley is seen the bridge depicted at p. 340._)
VERA CRUZ: SHIPPING IN THE NEW HARBOUR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
BRITISH ENGINEERING WORK IN MEXICO: BUILDING A BREAKWATER . . . . 336
THE MITLAC RAVINE: VIEW ON THE MEXICAN RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . 340
BRIDGES OVER THE ATOYAC RIVER: MEXICAN RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . 342
THE SEAPORT OF VERA CRUZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
NEW PORT OF SALINA CRUZ, ON THE PACIFIC: THE GREAT DRY DOCK . . . 346
(_See also page 306._)
_The Author is indebted for some of the photographs reproduced in this
book to The Mexican Financial Agency, Senor Camacho; The Mexican
Information Bureau, Senor Barriga; The Mexican Vera Cruz Railway
Company, Ltd.; Messrs. S. Pearson and Sons, Ltd.; The London Bank of
Mexico and South America, Ltd.; Arthur H. Enock, Esq.; "Modern Mexico";
"Mexico at Chicago," Senor Manuel Caballero; Holmes: Ancient Cities of
Mexico; and others._
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HISTORY
The history of Mexico at the time of the Conquest rests upon an
accurate basis; the five letters of Cortes to the Spanish Emperor,
Carlos V. These have been recently retranslated into, and published in,
English in two excellent volumes:
The Letters of Cortes to Charles V. F. C. MacNutt. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
London. 1908.
The most famous book on the Conquest is that of Prescott, the American
historian, and this never loses its charm, although to the traveller
who knows the country it may, at times, seem somewhat highly drawn.
Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. 3 vols. London. 1845.
The writers which, after Cortes, were the participators in the Conquest
or contemporary therewith, and upon whose writings all other accounts
are based, are those of:
Bernal Diaz, Author of the Verdadera Historia de la Conquista. 1858.
Ixtlilochitl, Aztec historian.
Other famous contemporary writers whose works also furnish material for
historians were:
Bartolome de las Casas, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Gonzalo Oviedo y
Valdez, Bernardino de Sahagun, Motolinia, Peter Martyr, Antonio de
Herrera. The works of all these writers are extant, principally in
Spanish, and they were written in the sixteenth century.
In the seventeenth century Juan de Torquemada wrote, and in the
nineteenth numerous works appeared upon Mexico. Among these may be
mentioned those of Manuel Orozco y Berra, Manuel Icazbalceta Raminez,
all modern Mexicans. Other authors, whether of historical or other
books and at varying epochs, are:
Clavigero, Duran, Tezozomoc, Camargo, Siguenza, Pizarro, Acosta, Gage,
Lorenzana, Olarte, Vetancourt, Solis, Cavo, Landa, Robertson, Irving,
Humboldt, Helps, Bancroft, Kingsborough.
Archaeological and Ethnological works are represented by the following:
Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States. 5 vols. New York. 1874-6.
Bandelier, The Art of War among the Ancient Mexicans.
Bandelier, Distribution and Land Tenure.
Bandelier, Social Organisation.
Bandelier, Archaeological Tour.
Bandelier, Indians of the South-west, U.S.
Batres, Cuadro Arquelogico de la Republica Mexicana; and other works,
including Teotihuacan.
Blake, Catalogue of Archaeological Collection of the Museum of Mexico,
&c.
Brinton, The American Race.
Brinton, Ancient Phonetic Alphabets of Yucatan, &c.
Chavers, Antiguedades Mexicanas.
Chavers, Mexico a traves de los siglos.
Charnay, Ancient Cities of the New World.
Garcia Cubas, Cuadro Geografico, &c.
Holmes, Archaeological Studies among the Ancient Cities of Mexico.
Maudsley, Biologia Centralia-Americana.
Kingsborough, famous work on Mexican Antiquities, &c.
Penafiel, Monumentos del arte Mexicano Antiguo. Berlin. 1890.
Payne, History of the New World. Oxford. 1899.
Starr, Maya Writing, &c. Chicago. 1895.
And many other pamphlets and books in English, Spanish, French, and
German.
For a fuller list of these, see the excellent volume on Mexico of the
International Bureau of the American Republics. Washington. 1904.
Of books on mining an excellent volume for reference is:
Southworth's Mines of Mexico.
Of mining and natural resources generally, a large complete work has
been issued in English, Spanish, and French, entitled:
El Florecimiento de Mexico. Mexico. 1906.
This work is published in Mexico, written by various authors, under the
patronage of the Government. It is a valuable book of reference, but
somewhat prolix, and the type is small and the volume unwieldy. After
the manner of books issued in Spanish-American countries, too much
space is taken up with adulations of public men. There are no less than
four full-page portraits of President Diaz in it.
Other general works are:
Mexico and the United States. Abbott. New York. 1869.
Guia General de la Republicas Mexicana. Mexico. 1899.
Barrett, Standard Guide to Mexico. Mexico. 1900.
Baedeker, The United States and Mexico. Leipzig. 1899.
Bancroft, A Popular History of the Mexican People. London. 1887.
Bancroft, Resources and Development of Mexico. San Francisco. 1893.
Baianconi, Le Mexique. Paris. 1899.
Brocklehurst, Mexico To-day. London. 1883.
Chevalier, Le Mexique Ancien et Moderne. Paris. 1886.
Congling, Mexico and the Mexicans. New York. 1883.
Garcia, Mexico, &c. Mexico. 1893.
Lummis, The Awakening of a Nation. New York. 1893.
Ober, Travels in Mexico. Boston. 1884.
Martin, Mexico of the Twentieth Century. London. 1908.
Gadow, Travels in Southern Mexico. London. 1908.
Tweedie, Mexico as I Saw It. London. 190?
Tweedie. Porfirio Diaz. London. 1905.
A. H. Noll. A Short History of Mexico. Chicago. 1903.
Romero, Mexico and the United States. New York. 1898.
Statesman's Year-book. London.
Camp Fires on Desert and Lava. Hornaday. London. 1909.
And numerous others in French, German, and English, including various
guide-books and pamphlets, scientific and otherwise.
The Mexican Year-book, London, 1908, is published by McCorquodale & Co.
The work is written under the auspices of the Mexican Government. It is
full of statistics and information, and forms a very useful work of
reference.
_Modern Mexico_, a monthly illustrated paper of high-class, issued in
Mexico and St. Louis.
_The Mexican Herald_, a daily paper published in English in Mexico, is
an excellent journal of current events.
INTRODUCTION
"From what I have seen and heard concerning the similarity between this
country and Spain, its fertility, its extent, its climate, and in many
other features of it, it seemed to me that the most suitable name for
this country would be New Spain, and thus, in the name of your Majesty,
I have christened it. I humbly supplicate your Majesty to approve of
this and order that it be so called." Thus wrote Hernan Cortes, the
greatest natural leader of men since Julius Caesar, to the sovereign
whom he endowed, as he subsequently told him bitterly, with provinces
more numerous than the cities he had inherited from his forefathers.
From the first appearance of the Spaniards upon the vast elevated
plateau upon which the Aztec empire stood the invaders were struck by
its resemblance in climate and natural products to their European
homeland. In his first letter to the Emperor Cortes wrote: "The sea
coast is low, with many sandhills.... The country beyond these
sandhills is level with many fertile plains, in which are such
beautiful river banks that in all Spain there can be found no better.
These are as grateful to the view as they are productive in everything
sown in them, and very orderly and well kept with roads and convenience
for pasturing all sorts of cattle. There is every kind of game in this
country, and animals and birds such as are familiar to us at home....
So that there is no difference between this country and Spain as
regards birds and animals.... According to our judgment it is credible
that there is everything in this country which existed in that from
whence Solomon is said to have brought the gold for the Temple."
Here, for the first time, the Spanish explorers in their wanderings had
come across an organised nation with an advanced civilisation and
polity of its own. The gentle savages they had encountered in the
tropical islands and the mainland of the isthmus had offered little or
no resistance to the white men or to their uncomprehended God. The
little kinglets of Hispaniola, of Cuba, and of Darien, divided,
unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their
necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a
struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating,
and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders
was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation
three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes
of warriors might be drawn, were ready to stand shoulder to shoulder
and resist the claims of the white demi-gods, mounted on strange
beasts, who came upon giant sea-birds from the unknown, beyond the
waste of waters. But the fatal prophecy of the coming of the avenging
white God Quetzalcoatl to destroy the Aztec power paralysed the arm and
brain of Montezuma, and rendered him, and finally his people, a prey to
the diplomacy, the daring, and the valour of Cortes, aided by the
dissentient tribes he enlisted under his banner.
The vast amphibious city of Tenochtitlan, when at length the Conquerors
reached it, confirmed the impression that the land of which it was the
capital was another wider and richer Spain. Its teeming markets, "one
square twice as large as that of Salamanca, all surrounded by arcades,
where there are daily more than sixty thousand souls buying and
selling"; the abundance of food and articles of advanced comfort and
luxury, "the cherries and plums like those of Spain"; "the skeins of
different kinds of spun silk in all colours, that might be from one of
the markets of Granada"; "the porters such as in Castile do carry
burdens"; the great temple, of which "no human tongue is able to
describe the greatness and beauty ... the principal tower of which is
higher than the great tower of Seville Cathedral"--all reminded Cortes
of his native Spain. "I will only say of this city," he concludes,
"that in the service and manners of its people their fashion of living
is almost the same as in Spain, with just as much harmony and order;
and considering that these people were barbarous, so cut off from the
knowledge of God and of other civilised people, it is marvellous to see
to what they have attained in every respect." Thus New Spain was marked
out of all the dominions of Spanish Indies as that which was in closest
relationship with the mother country.
The conquest and subjection of New Spain synchronised curiously with
the profound crisis in, and the conquest and domination of, Old Spain
by its own king, a governing genius and leader of men almost as great
as was the obscure Estramaduran squireling who was adding to the newly
unified crown of Spain that which was to be its richest jewel in the
West. When Cortes penned his first letter to the future Emperor and his
mad mother in July, 1519, telling them of the new found land, Spain was
in the throes of a great convulsion. The young Flemish prince had been
called to his great inheritance by the death of his grandfather,
Ferdinand the Catholic, and the incapacity of his Spanish mother, Queen
Juana. Charles had come to the country upon which, in a financial
sense, the burden of his future widespread empire was to depend, with
little understanding of the proud and ardent people over whom he was to
rule. He spoke no Spanish, and he was surrounded by greedy Flemish
courtiers dressed in outlandish garb, speaking in a strange tongue, and
looking upon the realm of their prince as a fat pasture upon which,
locust like, they might batten with impunity. The Spaniards had frowned
to see the great Cardinal Jimenez curtly dismissed by the boy sovereign
whose crown he had saved; they clamoured indignantly when the Flemings
cast themselves upon the resources of Castile and claimed the best
offices civil and ecclesiastical; they sternly insisted upon the young
king taking a solemn oath that Spain in future should be for the
Spaniards; and when tardily and sulkily they voted supplies of money
the grant was saddled with many irritating conditions.
When the letter of Cortes arrived in Spain Charles was at close grips
with his outraged people, for he had broken all his promises to them.
Hurrying across the country to embark and claim the imperial crown of
Germany, vacant by the death of his grandfather Maximilian, eager for
the large sums of money he needed for his purpose, which Spain of all
his realms alone could provide, the sovereign was trampling upon the
dearly prized charters of his people. The great rising of the Castilian
commoners was finally crushed, thanks to class dissensions and the
diplomacy of the sovereign. Thenceforward the revenues of Castile were
at the mercy of the Emperor, whose needs for his world-wide
responsibilities were insatiable; and the Indies of the West, being the
appanage of the crown of Castile, were drained to uphold the claim of
Spain and its Emperor-King to dictate to Christendom the form and
doctrines of its religious faith. It is no wonder, therefore, that the
despatches of the obscure adventurer who announced to his sovereign
that, in spite of obstacles thrown in his way by highly placed royal
officials, he had conquered a vast civilised empire with a mere handful
of followers, were received sympathetically by the potentate to whom
the possession of fresh sources of revenue was so important. Cortes in
his various letters again and again claims the Emperor's patronage of
his bold defiance of the Emperor's officers on the ground that the
latter in their action were moved solely by considerations of their
personal gain, whereas he, Cortes, was striving to endow his sovereign
with a rich new empire and boundless treasure whilst carrying into the
dark pagan land, at the sword's point, the gentle creed of the
Christian God.
Of this religious element of his expedition Cortes never lost sight; he
was licentious in his life, unscrupulous in his methods, and regardless
of the suffering he inflicted to attain his ends; but in this he was
only a son of his country and his time; such qualities might, and in
fact did, accompany the most devout personal piety and an exalted
religious ideal. That the imposition of Christian civilisation upon
Mexico meant the sacrifice in cold blood of countless thousands of
inoffensive human creatures was as nothing when once the legal forms
had been complied with and the people could be assumed to be
recalcitrant or rebellious to a decree of which they understood not a
word. The awful holocaust of natives which followed the Spanish
advance, the enslavement of a whole people to the demon of greed,
especially after the withdrawal of Cortes from the scene, left a bitter
crop of estrangement between the native Mexicans and their white
masters, of which the rank remains have not even yet been quite
eradicated. Cortes himself, as great in diplomacy as in war, it is true
made himself rich beyond dreams, though he was defrauded of his
deserts, even as Columbus, Balboa, and Pizarro were; but he was not
wantonly cruel, and in the circumstances in which he was placed it was
difficult for him to have acted very differently from what he did. It
was not until the smaller men displaced him and came to enrich
themselves at any cost that his methods were debased and degraded to
vile ends and the policy itself was rendered hateful.
Thus, whilst New Spain was always held to be nearer to the mother
country than any other American lands and more of a white man's home
than the settlements on the Southern Continent, the distrust engendered
by the ruthless cruelty of the earlier years of the occupation
contributed powerfully to retard any intimate intermixture of the
conquerors and the conquered races, the closer connection with Spain
also keeping the Spanish-Mexican decidedly more pure in blood than any
other Spanish American people. This will account for the fact that the
various Indian races of Mexico are still, to a large extent, distinct
from each other and from the pure white Mexicans after nearly a century
of native Republican government. In the State of Oaxaca alone there are
even now at least fifteen perfectly distinguishable separate tribes of
pure Indians, of which two, the Zapotecas and the Mistecas, comprise
more than half the whole population of the State. But, this
notwithstanding, no race question now really exists in Mexico. The
pure-blooded Indians frequently occupy the highest positions in the
State, as judges, soldiers, or savants, the greatest but one of Mexican
Presidents, Juarez, having been a full-blooded Zapoteca, whilst the
present ruler of Mexico, certainly one of the most exalted figures in
American history, General Porfirio Diaz, is justifiably prouder of his
Misteca descent than of the white ancestry he also claims. Nor, as in
other countries of similar ethnological constitution, does the Indian
population here tend to decrease. The Mexican Indian or half-breed
suffers under no disability, social or political, and is in a decided
majority of the population. The number of pure whites in the country is
estimated at about three and a half millions, out of a probable
nineteen millions of total inhabitants, eight millions being pure
Indians and about seven and a half millions of mixed castes, most of
whom are more brown than white.
The future of the Republic, therefore, in an ethnological sense, is one
of the most interesting problems of the American Continent. The old
Spanish aristocratic aloofness traditional on the part of the pure
whites will take many generations entirely to break down, and the
increased communication between the Republic and the citizens of the
United States will probably reinforce the white races with a new
element of resistance to fusion; but in the end a homogeneous brown
race will probably people the whole of Mexico--a race, to judge from
the specimens of the admixture now in existence, capable of the highest
duties of civilisation, robust in body, patriotic in character,
progressive and law-abiding to a greater extent, perhaps, than are
purely Latin peoples.
The present book relates in vivid and graphic words the history of
Mexico during the time that it served as a milch cow to the insatiable
Spanish kings and their satellites. But for the gold and silver that
came in the fleet from New Spain, when, indeed, it was not captured by
English or Dutch rovers, the gigantic imposition of Spanish power in
Europe could not have been maintained even as a pretence throughout the
greater part of the seventeenth century as it was. For nearly three
centuries one set of greedy Viceroys and high officials after another
settled from the mother country upon unresisting Mexico and sucked its
blood like vampires. Some of them, it is true, made attempts to
palliate their rapacity by the introduction of improved methods of
agriculture, mining, and the civilised arts, and Mexico, in close touch
with Spain, was not allowed, as the neighbouring Spanish territory of
the isthmus was, to sink into utter stagnation. The efforts of the
Count of Tendilla to keep his Viceroyalty abreast of his times in the
mid sixteenth century are still gratefully remembered, as is the name
of his successor Velasco, who struck a stout blow for the freedom of
the native Indians enslaved in the mines, and emancipated 150,000 of
them. But on the whole, especially after the establishment of the
Inquisition in Mexico, the story of the Spanish domination is generally
one of greed, oppression, and injustice, alternating with periods of
enlightened effort on the part of individual viceroys more high-minded
than their fellows.
With the early nineteenth century came the stirring of a people long
crushed into impotence. The mother country was in the throes of a great
war against the foreign invader. Deserted and abandoned by its Spanish
sovereign, and ruled, where it was ruled at all by civilians, by a body
of self-elected revolutionary doctrinaires, the colonists of the
various Viceroyalties of America promptly shook themselves free from
the nerveless grasp that had held them so long. A demand for an immense
sum of money beyond that which had voluntarily been sent by Mexico to
aid the mother country against Napoleon was refused in 1810, and a few
months afterwards the long gathering storm burst. The man who first
formulated the Mexican cry for freedom was a priest, one Miguel
Hidalgo. He had already organised a widespread revolutionary
propaganda, and on September 16, 1810, the Viceregal authorities
precipitated matters by suppressing one of the clubs, at Queretaro, in
which the independence of the country was advocated. Hidalgo at once
called his followers to arms, and under the sacred banner of the Virgin
of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, led some 50,000 ardent
patriots through the country towards the capital that had once been
Montezuma's. Subduing all the land he crossed, Hidalgo finally met the
royal troops on the 30th of October and completely routed them. Then
the rebel army gradually fell to pieces in consequence of unskilful
management, and at a subsequent battle in January, 1811, was entirely
defeated, Hidalgo and his lieutenant being shortly afterwards captured
and shot.
But the fire thus lit could never again be entirely extinguished. For
years the intermittent struggle went on under another priest, Morelos,
a true national Mexican hero who was betrayed to the Spaniards in 1815,
and punished first by the Inquisition as a heretic and afterwards shot
as a traitor to the King of Spain. The sun of the Spanish domination of
Mexico set in blood, for the wretched reactionary Ferdinand VII. was on
the throne of the mother country, determined if he could to terrorise
Spanish America into obedience as he had done Spain itself. His
eagerness to do so defeated itself. A large army, collected at Cadiz
for the purpose of crushing Mexico into obedience, revolted against the
despot, and then the Mexican patriots, under Iturbide, practically
dominated their country. The new Spanish Hibernian Viceroy, O'Dontroju,
could but bend his head to the storm, and in September, 1821, signed a
treaty with the insurgents by which Mexico was acknowledged to be an
independent constitutional monarchy under the Spanish king, Ferdinand
VII.
Such a solution of a great national uprising could only be temporary.
The Spanish Government refused to ratify the agreement arrived at for
Mexico's independence, and a barrack pronouncement acclaimed Agustin
Iturbide Emperor of Mexico in June, 1822. The empire of Iturbide lasted
less than a year, for the man was unworthy, and Mexican patriots had
not fought and bled for ten years against one despotism for the purpose
of handing themselves over to another. Iturbide was deposed and exiled,
and on his return for the purpose of raising his standard afresh in
Mexico, in 1824 the ex-Emperor was shot as an enemy to the peace and
tranquillity of his country.
The Republic of Mexico obtained the cordial support of England and the
United States, and when in 1825 the last Spanish man-at-arms retired
from the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, off Vera Cruz, all
Spanish-Americans on the two continents were free to work out their own
destiny. As was the case with the other Republics, inexperience in the
science of government and attempts to force the pace of progress,
condemned Mexico to fifty years of turbulence and alternating despotism
and license. Ambitious soldiers strove with each other for the place of
highest honour and profit. Texas, resenting the instability of Creole
government, separated from the Mexican States after a devastating war.
Amongst the higher classes of Mexicans the monarchical tradition which
had prompted the experiment of Iturbide's evanescent empire had not
entirely died out, and in 1840 a leading Mexican statesman, Estrada,
argued in an open letter that the republican form of government having
failed to secure peace to the country, it would be advisable to
establish a Mexican monarchy with a member of one of the old ruling
houses of Europe at its head. But the stormy petrel of Mexican
politics, General Saint Anna, pervaded the scene yet for many years
more; and in 1847 engaged in a disastrous war with the United States on
the subject of the Texan boundary, in which California was lost to
Mexico. In the meanwhile the suggestion that a monarchical experiment
should be tried never died out; and when in 1860 the country was a prey
to civil war between the anti-clericals under the great Juarez and the
Conservative elements, and the interest on the foreign debt was
suspended, a pretext offered for the intervention of France, England,
and Spain in the internal affairs of Mexico, supported by the
Conservative and monarchical parties in the country itself.
The ill-starred ambition of Napoleon III. ended in the sacrifice of a
chivalrous and well-meaning prince, but it effected for Mexico what
fifty years of internal strife had been unable to attain: it produced a
solidarity of Mexican national feeling which has since then welded the
people into a stable and united nation, in no danger henceforward of
falling a prey to foreign ambition or of lapsing into anarchy from its
own dissensions. That this happy end has been attained has been due
mainly to the genius of two men, the greatest of Mexico's sons, who
have in succession appeared at the moment when the national crisis
needed them. To Benito Juarez, the Zapoteca Indian, who held aloft the
banner of Mexican independence against the power of Napoleon's empire,
is due not alone the victory over the invaders but the firm
establishment of a federal constitutional system. Juarez, a lawyer and
a judge, insisted upon the law being supreme, and that ambitious
generals should thenceforward be the servants and not the masters of
the State.
The great Juarez died in 1872, and for the last thirty-three years,
with a break of one short interval only, Porfirio Diaz has been master
of Mexico, a benevolent autocrat, an emperor in all but name, governing
with a wise moderation which recognises that a country situated as
Mexico is, and with a population as yet far from homogeneous or
civilised in the European sense, must of necessity be led patiently and
diplomatically along the road of progress. To reach the goal of
material and moral elevation at which Diaz aims, stability of
institutions and of directors is the first need; and the President has
been re-elected seven times by his fellow citizens because they, as
well as he, can see that his brain and his hand must guide the mighty
engine of advance that he has set in motion.
The effects of this policy have already been prodigious, and there is
probably no country on earth that has made strides so gigantic as
Mexico in the last thirty years. It is due mainly to the labours of
Diaz that the national finance has been placed upon a firm and
satisfactory basis; to him are owing the extraordinary public works
which have completed the vast system of drainage of the Valley of
Mexico, initiated nearly three centuries ago; by him the Republic has
been covered by a network of primary and secondary public schools
rivalling those of the most advanced European countries. One of the
most beneficent of the President's recent acts has been the
rehabilitation in 1905 of the Mexican silver currency, by which a
fairly stable standard exchange value is secured for the national
coinage; the silver dollar fluctuating now within very narrow limits,
the normal value being one half of a United States dollar.
The constructive work of this really great man, indeed, is as yet
difficult to appraise. It covers nearly every branch of national
activity, and it is only by comparison with a past state of affairs
that anything like an adequate idea of the progress effected can be
formed. In 1876 the population of the Republic was 9,300,000; it is now
about 19,000,000. The increase in the length of railways constructed in
the same period is equally remarkable, rising from 367 miles in 1876 to
15,000 miles in 1908. The railways hitherto have been mainly built by
English and United States capitalists, and are in a great measure still
managed by English-speaking officers; but the important Transatlantic
line, which connects the port of Coatzacoalcos on the Atlantic side
with Salina Cruz on the Pacific, is a national undertaking carried out
under contract by a great English contracting firm. The future of this
Tehuantepec railway promises to be of the highest importance as
connecting Europe and America with the Far East. The geographical
situation of the line is more central than that of Panama, ensuring,
for instance, a saving of nearly a thousand miles between Liverpool and
Yokohama. The railway itself across the isthmus is under two hundred
miles in length, and the ports on both sides are capacious enough to
deal with the greatest ships afloat.
The railways running from the United States into the interior of Mexico
and the capital convey passengers thither in less than five days from
New York. They have naturally brought much Anglo-Saxon American
influence into the country, and until recent years this would have
offered some danger of the nation becoming an English-speaking land, as
its former States, Texas and California, have done. The new national
spirit and pride of race, which now justifiably stirs Mexicans, will in
future make such an eventuality improbable. It is, indeed, much more
likely that in the end the boundaries of a powerful, prosperous Mexico
may extend to the group of small and slowly-developing Central American
Republics that join it on the south, and that a vast Spanish-speaking
confederacy will under an enlightened system of government ensure for
all time the domination of this axis of the world's trade to the
descendants of the original Conquerors whose blood has mingled with
that of the peoples they subdued. This eventuality is rendered the more
probable by the advance of the Pan-American railway which is being
pushed southwest from the Tehuantepec line towards Guatemala, and will
when completed link North America with the southern continent, and
establish a continuous system from New York to the Argentine Republic.
This, however, is a dream of the future: for the present be it said
that a regenerated Mexico has saved Central and South America from
being finally swamped by Anglo-Saxondom, and has ensured the
perpetuation in "The Land of To-morrow" of the Spanish tongue and Latin
traditions. For this relief much thanks.
MARTIN HUME.
MEXICO
CHAPTER I
A FIRST RECONNAISSANCE
Romance of history--Two entrance ways--Vera Cruz--Orizaba--The Great
Plateau--Fortress of Ulua--Sierra Madre--Topographical structure--The
Gulf coast--Tropical region--Birds, animals, and vegetation of coast
zone--_Tierra caliente_--Malaria--Foothills--Romantic scenery--General
configuration of Mexico--Climatic zones--Temperate zone--Cold zone--The
Cordillera--Snow-capped peaks--Romance of mining--Devout miners--
Subterranean shrines--The great deserts--Sunset on the Great Plateau--
_Coyotes_ and _zopilotes_--Irrigated plantations--Railways--Plateau of
Anahuac--The cities of the _mesa central_--Spanish-American
civilisation--Romance of Mexican life--Mexican girls, music, and
moonlight--The _peones_ and civilisation--American comparisons--
Pleasing traits of the Mexicans--The foreigner in Mexico--Picturesque
mining-towns--Wealth of silver--Conditions of travel--Railways--
Invasions--Lerdo's axiom--Roads and horsemen--Strong religious
sentiment--Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl--Sun-god of Teotihuacan--City
of Mexico--Valley of Mexico--The Sierra Madre--_Divortia aquarum_ of
the continent--Volcano of Colima--Forests and ravines--Cuernavaca--The
trail of Cortes--Acapulco--Romantic old _haciendas_--Tropic sunset--
Unexplored Guerrero--Perils and pleasures of the trail--Sunset in the
Pacific Ocean.
Mexico, that southern land lying stretched between the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, upon the tapering base of North America, is a country
whose name is fraught with colour and meaning. The romance of its
history envelops it in an atmosphere of adventure whose charm even the
prosaic years of the twentieth century have not entirely dispelled, and
the magnetism of the hidden wealth of its soil still invests it with
some of the attraction it held for the old Conquistadores. It was in
the memorable age of ocean chivalry when this land was first won for
Western civilisation: that age when men put forth into a sunset-land of
Conquest, whose every shore and mountain-pass concealed some El Dorado
of their dreams. The Mexico of to-day is not less interesting, for its
vast territory holds a wealth of historic lore and a profusion of
natural riches. Beneath the Mexican sky, blue and serene, stretch great
tablelands, tropic forests, scorching deserts, and fruitful valleys,
crowned by the mineral-girt mountain ranges of the Sierra Madres; and
among them lie the strange pyramids of the bygone Aztecs, and the rich
silver mines where men of all races have enriched themselves. Mexico is
part of that great Land of Opportunity which the Spanish-American world
has retained for this century.
There are two main travelled ways into Mexico. The first lies across
the stormy waters of the Mexican Gulf to the yellow strand of Vera
Cruz, beyond which the great "star-mountain" of the Aztecs,
Citlaltepetl,[1] rears its gleaming snow-cap in mid-heavens, above the
clouds. It was here that Cortes landed, four centuries ago, and it is
the route followed by the tide of European travellers to-day.
Otherwise, the way lies across the Great Plateau, among the arid plains
of the north, where, between the sparsely-scattered cities and
plantations of civilised man, the fringe of Indian life is spread upon
the desert, and the shadowy forms of the _coyote_ and the cactus blend
into the characteristic landscape. Both ways are replete with interest,
but that of Vera Cruz is the more varied and characteristic. Here
stands Ulua, the promontory-fortress, where more than one of Mexico's
short-lived rulers languished and died of yellow fever, and which was
the last stronghold of Spain. Beyond it arise the white buildings and
towers of Vera Cruz, a dream-city, as beheld from the Gulf, of interest
and beauty; and to the west, are the broad coastal deserts, bounded by
the foothills and tropic valleys of the _tierra caliente_ of the
littoral. Piled up to the horizon are the wooded slopes and canyons of
the great Sierra Madre, topped by the gleaming Orizaba, towering
upwards in solitary majesty. We stand upon a torrid strand, yet gaze
upon an icy mountain.
[Footnote 1: Orizaba, 18,250 feet altitude.]
A country of singular topographic structure is before us. The Mexican
Cordillera conceals, beyond and above it, the famous Great Plateau; the
_mesa central_, running to the northwards eight hundred miles or more,
and reaching westwardly to the steep escarpments of the Pacific slope.
These plutonic and volcanic ranges encircle and bisect the great
tableland, and enclose the famous Valley of Mexico and its beautiful
capital, lying far beyond the horizon, above the clouds which rest upon
the canyons and terraces of that steep-rising country to the west. Our
journey lies upwards to this Great Plateau of Anahuac over the
intervening plains and mountain range.
It is a tropical region of foliage, flowers, and fruits, of rugged
countryside and rushing streams, this eastern slope of Mexico; and the
blue sky and flashing sun form the ambient of a perpetual summer-land.
We traverse the sandy Tertiary deserts of the coast, and thence enter
among groves of profuse natural vegetation, interspersed with
cultivated plantations. In these the gleam of yellow oranges comes from
among the foliage, and the graceful leaves of the platanos and
rubber-trees fan their protecting shade over young coffee-trees. But
away from the haunts of man along the littoral is a region of startling
beauty--of rivers and lagoons and hills, their shores and slopes
garmented with perennial verdure, the forest-seas bathing the bases of
towering peaks. Beautiful birds of variegated and rainbow colours, such
as Mexico is famous for, people these tropic southern lands of Vera
Cruz. Along the shores and in the woods and groves, all teeming with
prolific life, which the hot sun and frequent rains induce, the giant
cranes and brilliant-plumaged herons disport themselves, and gorgeous
butterflies almost outshine the feathered denizens. From the tangled
boughs the pendant boa-constrictor coils himself, and hissing serpents,
basking crocodiles, and prowling jaguars people the untrodden wilds of
jungle and lagoon. In these great virgin forests tribes of monkeys find
their home, and the tapir and the cougar have their being. Mangroves,
palms, rubber-trees, mahogany, strange _flora_, and ungathered fruits
run riot amid this tropical profusion, and flourish and fall almost
unseen of man. And here the malarias of the lowlands lurk--those
bilious disorders which man is ever fighting and slowly conquering.
This is Mexico's _tierra caliente_.
But our way lies onwards towards the mountains. A wildness of
landscape, unpictured before, opens to the view. Here rise weird
rock-forms, Nature's cathedral towers and grim facades magnificent in
solitude and awe-inspiring, as by steep bridle-paths we take our way
along the valleys, and draw rein to gaze upon them. Ponderous and
sterile, these outworks and buttresses of the great Sierra Madre rise
upwards, fortifications reared against the march of tropic verdure
beneath, cloud-swathed above and bathed below by forest-seas. Born in
that high environment of rains and snows, rippling streams descend,
falling in cascades and babbling rapids adown romantic glens, and their
life-giving waters, with boisterous ripple or murmuring softly, take
their way over silver sand-bar and polished ledge of gleaming quartz or
marble, winding thence amid corridors of stately trees and banks of
verdant vegetation, to where they fill the irrigation-channels of
white-clad peasants, far away on the plains below.
Still onwards and upwards lies the way. One of the most remarkable
railways in the world ascends this steep zone, and serpentines among
sheer descents to gain the summits of abrupt escarpments, from which--a
remarkable feature of the topography of the eastern slope of
Mexico--the traveller looks down as into another country and climate,
upon those tropical valleys which he has left below. This is the
Mexican Vera Cruz railway.
[Illustration: THE ATLANTIC SLOPE: TUNNEL AND BRIDGE OF THE INFIERNILLO
CANYON, ON THE MEXICAN RAILWAY, IN THE STATE OF VERA CRUZ.]
Let us pause a moment and gain a comprehensive idea of the character of
Mexico's configuration and climate. It is to be recollected that
Mexico, like other lands of Western America, is a country of relatively
recent geological birth. The form of the country is remarkable. It
shares the topographical features of others of the Andine countries of
America--of tropical lowlands and temperate uplands, in which latter
nearness to the heat of the Equator is offset by the coolness of the
rarefied air of high elevations above sea-level. This structure is the
dominant note of the scheme of Nature in Mexico--as it is in Peru and
other similar countries--and the anthropo-geographical conditions are
correspondingly marked. The region first passed is known as the _tierra
caliente_, or hot lands. Its climatic limit extends up the slopes of
the Sierras to an elevation of some 3,000 feet or more, embracing the
lowlands, hot and humid generally, of the whole of the Gulf coast and
of the peninsula of Yucatan, all of which regions are subject to true
tropical conditions--the dense forests, the great profusion of animal
life, the wonderful abundance and colour of Nature, and in places the
swamps and their accompanying malarias, shunned by the traveller. But
yellow fever and malaria are much less dreaded now than heretofore. In
the city of Vera Cruz and in Tampico the new era of sanitation, brought
about by British and American example and seconded by the Mexican
authorities, has almost banished these natural scourges.
Rising from the _tierra caliente_, the road enters upon the more
temperate zone, the _tierra templada_, extending upwards towards the
Great Plateau. The limit of this climatic zone is at the elevation of
6,000 feet above sea-level, and here are evergreen oaks, pine, and the
extraordinary forms of the organ cactus, as well as orchids. It is,
indeed, a transition zone from the hot to the cold climates, and the
zone embraces the greater part of the area of Mexico. Rising rapidly
thence up to and over the escarpments of the Sierra Madre and the high
plains, we shall enter upon the _tierra fria_ or cold lands, ranging
from 6,000 feet to 8,000 feet above sea level. Above this rise the high
summits of the Mexican Cordilleras, with their culminating peaks, some
few of which penetrate the atmosphere above the limit of perpetual
snow. Thus, three diverse climatic zones are encountered in Mexico,
which, ever since the advent of the Spaniards, have been designated as
the _tierra fria_, _tierra templada_, and _tierra caliente_
respectively. These conditions, as will be seen later, are also
encountered upon the Pacific slope.
We now ascend the steep upper zone of the Sierra Madre, and cross it,
descending thence to the Great Plateau or _mesa central_, the
dominating topographical feature of the country. Here lies the real
Mexico of history, and here is the main theatre of the new land of
industrial awakening. Within the mountain ranges--that which we have
crossed, and those which intersect this vast tableland and bound it on
three sides--lies the great wealth of minerals--gold, silver, and
others--which have attracted men of all races and all times since
Cortes came. Here the true fairy tales of long ago, of millions won by
stroke of pick, had their setting, and indeed, have it still. Upon
these hills the thankful miner reared temples to his saints, and
blessed, in altar and crucifix, the mother of God who graciously
permitted his enrichment! And as if such devotion were to be unstinted,
he also places his shrines within the bowels of the mines, and pauses
as he struggles through the dark galleries, with heavy pack of silver
rock upon his back, to bend his knee a moment before the candle-lighted
subterranean altar.
And now great desert plains unfold to view. Upon their confines arise
the blue mountain ranges which intersect them, their canyons and
slopes, though faint in distance and blurred by shimmering heat arising
from the desert floor, yet cast into distinct tracery by the rays of
the sun. Towards the azure vault overhead, as we behold the arid
landscape, eddying dust-pillars whirl skywards upon the horizon, or
perhaps a cloud of dust, far away upon the trail which winds over the
flat expanse, denotes some evidence of man--horseman or ox-cart
pursuing its leisurely and monotonous way. Upon the edges of the dry
stream-beds, or _arroyos_, which descend from the hills and lose
themselves in wide alluvial fans upon the sandy waste, a fringe of
scant vegetation appears, nourished by the water which flows down them
in time of rain.
Beneath our horses' hoofs the white alkali crust which thinly covers
the desert floor, crumbles and breaks. Gaunt cacti stretch their skinny
branches across the trail, which winds among foothills and ravines, and
the horned toads and the lizards, the only visible beings of the animal
world here, play in and out of their labyrinths as we pass. We are upon
the Great Plateau. All is vast, reposeful, boundless. The sun rises and
sets as it does upon some calm ocean, describing its glowing arc across
the cloudless vault above, from Orient to Occident. Sun-scorched by
day, the temperature drops rapidly as night falls upon these elevated
steppes, 7,000 feet or more above the level of the sea, and the bitter
cold of the rarefied air before the dawn takes possession of the
atmosphere. The shivering _peones_ of the villages rise betimes to
catch the sun's first rays, and stand or squat against the eastern side
of their adobe huts, what time the orb of day shows his red disc above
the far horizon. _La capa de los pobres_--"the poor man's cloak"--they
term the sun, as with grateful benediction they watch his coming, and
stamp their sandalled feet.
[Illustration: THE GREAT PLATEAU: NIGHTFALL IN THE DESERT.]
Impressive and melancholy is the nightfall upon the Great Plateau. The
opalescent tints of the dying day, and the scarlet curtains flung
across the Occident at the sun's exit give place to that indescribable
depth of purple of the high upland's sky. The faint ranges of hills
which bound the distant horizon take on those diminishing shades which
their respective distances assign them, and stand delicately,
ethereally, against the waning colours of the sunset, whilst the
foreground rocks are silhouetted violet-black against the desert floor.
The long shadows which were projected across the wilderness, and the
roseate flush which the setting sun had cast upon the westward-facing
escarpments behind us, have both disappeared together. Impenetrable
gloom lurks beneath the faces of the cliffs, the mournful howl of the
_coyotes_ comes across the plain, and their slinking forms emerge from
the shadow of the rocks. There is a shapeless heap, the carcass of some
dead mule or ox, some jetsam of the desert, lying near at hand, at
which my horse was uneasy as I drew rein in contemplation, and which
explains the nearness of the beasts of prey, and the long line of
_zopilotes_, or buzzards, which I had observed to cross the fading
gleam of the firmament. All is solitary, deserted, peaceful. The day is
done, the night has come, "in which no man can work."
At daylight the uncultivated desert gives place to human habitations;
and we approach the _hacienda_ of a large landowner, with its irrigated
plantations, and adobe buildings which form the abodes of the workers.
All around are vast fields of _maguey_, or plantations of cotton,
stretching as far as can be seen. Great herds of cattle, rounded up by
picturesque _vaqueros_ with silver-garnished saddles and strange hats
and whirling lassoes, paw the dusty ground, shortly to writhe beneath
the hot imprint of the branding-iron. Long irrigation ditches, brimming
with water from some distant river, and fringed with trees, wind away
among the plantations; and white-clad _peones_, hoe in hand, tend the
long furrows whose parallel lines are lost in perspective. Centre of
the whole panorama is the dwelling-house of the _hacendado_, the owner
of the lands; and almost of the bodies and souls of the inhabitants!
Quaint and old-world, the place and its atmosphere transport the
imagination to past centuries, for the aspect of the whole still bears
the stamp of its mediaeval beginning, save where the new Mexican
millionaire-landowner has planted some luxurious abode, replete with
modern convenience.
But these are not isolated from the world upon this Great Plateau so
much as might appear at first glance. There is a puff of smoke upon the
horizon, and the whistle of a locomotive strikes upon the ear. The
railway which links this great oasis of cultivated fields with others
similar, and with the world beyond, runs near at hand, and will bear
us, do we wish it, away to the confines of the Republic in the north,
to the United States, and in five days to New York. Southwards it winds
away to the great capital City of Mexico, to Vera Cruz, and thence on
towards the borders of Guatemala. But let us avoid the railway yet. Not
thus, in the comfort of the Pullman cushions, do we know the spirit and
atmosphere of Mexico; but the saddle and the dusty road shall be our
self-chosen portion. Indeed, it will be so from sheer necessity, for
our way will lie onwards to the Pacific Ocean, and no railway of the
plateau quite reaches this yet.
Throughout the Great Plateau of Anahuac, separated by long stretches of
dusty wilderness, unclothed except by scanty thorny shrubs, and
scarcely inhabited except by the _coyote_ and the _tecolote_,[2] are
handsome cities with their surrounding cultivation and characteristic
life. As we top the summit of a range and behold these centres of
population from afar, a bird's-eye view and philosophical comprehension
of their _ensemble_ is obtained. Seen from the outside, they present a
picturesque view of cathedral spires and gleaming domes and white
walls; the towers rising from the lesser buildings amid groves of
verdant trees, forming a striking group, all backed by the blue range
of some distant sierra. The main group shades off into a fringe of
_jacales_--the squalid habitations of the _peones_, and of the city's
poor and outcast, with rambling, dusty roads bordered by hedges of
prickly pear, or _nopales_; picturesque, quaint, the roads ankle-deep
in white adobe dust, which rises from beneath our horse's hoofs and
covers us with an impalpable flour upon traversing the environs of the
place. Clattering over the cobble-paved streets, we rapidly approach
the central pulse of the town, the _plaza_. Singular shops, where
fruits and meats and clothing are displayed in windowless array, line
the streets, and quaint dwelling-houses, with iron grilles covering
their windows, giving them the mediaeval Hispanic aspect familiar to
the Spanish-American traveller. Into these we gaze down from the height
of the saddle in passing, and perchance some dark-haired Mexican
damsel, who has been snatching a moment from her household duties to
gaze at the outside world, retires suddenly from the balcony with
well-simulated haste and modesty before the rude gaze of the
approaching stranger. Indians or _peones_ in loose white garments of
cotton _manta_, with huge Mexican straw hats, and scarlet blankets
depending from their shoulders, stalk through the street, or issue from
ill-smelling _pulque_ shops, whose singularly-painted exteriors arrest
the attention. Gaunt dogs prowl about and lap the water of the open
_acequias_, or ditch-gutters, between the road and the footpath,
fighting for some stray morsel thrown into the street from the open
doors of the shops aforesaid. Of stone or of adobe--generally the
latter--according to the geology of the particular neighbourhood, the
houses are whitened or tinted outside, with flat roofs, or _azoteas_.
Through the wide entrance-door a glimpse is obtained of an interior
paved _patio_, adorned, in the better-class homes, with tubs of palms
and flowers; and before one of such a character we draw rein--the
_meson_ or _fonda_, the hotel under whose roof temporary shelter shall
be sought. This abode faces the _plaza_, and opposite rises the quaint
church--or cathedral if it be a State capital city--which is the
dominating note of the community.
[Footnote 2: Mexican night owl.]
[Illustration: ON THE GREAT PLATEAU: VIEW OF THE CITY OF DURANGO.]
Exceedingly picturesque are the fine cities which form Mexico's chief
centres of civilisation along the Great Plateau--Chihuahua, Durango,
Guadalajara, Puebla, and many others. They have that quaint, old-world
air ever characteristic of Spanish-America, unspoilt by the elements of
manufacturing communities. Their shady _plazas_ are centres of
recreation and social life, always in evidence, distinctive of
Spanish-American civilisation, where music is a part of the government
of the people; a feature far more prominent than in Britain or the
United States. The cathedrals, the quaint architecture of the streets,
the barred windows, and the picturesque dress of the working class,
form an atmosphere of distinctive life and colour. Let us halt a moment
in the _plaza_. The band is discoursing soft music, varied by some
stirring martial air; the Mexican moon has risen, and now that the
sunset colours pale, vies with the lamps of the well-lit promenade to
illumine a happy but simple scene. Its rays shine through the feathery
boughs of the palms, and glisten on the broad, elegant leaves of the
_platanos_--which grow even in the upland valleys--whilst the scent of
orange-blossoms falls softly through the balmy air, as in ceaseless
promenade fair maidens and chatting youths, with coquetry and stolen
glance, pass round the square untiringly. White dresses and black eyes
and raven tresses--the olive-complexioned beauties of the Mexican
uplands take their fill of passing joy. The moment is sweet, peaceful,
even romantic; let us dally a moment, nor chafe our cold northern blood
for more energetic scenes. Do we ask bright glances? Here are such.
Shall we refuse to be their recipient? And moonlight, palms, and music,
and evening breeze, and convent tolling bell, and happy crowd--no, it
is not a scene from some dream of opera, but a phase of every-day life
in Mexico.
In many respects it is an atmosphere of charm and interest which the
traveller encounters in Mexican life, especially if he has recently
arrived from among the prosaic surroundings of Mexico's great northern
neighbour, the United States. Indeed, the transition from the busy
Anglo-Saxon world which hurries and bustles in strenuous life northward
from the Rio Grande, to that pastoral and primitive land of
Spanish-America is as marked as that between Britain and the Orient.
Yet it is only divided by a shallow stream--the Rio Grande. As the
traveller crosses this boundary he leaves behind him the twentieth
century, and goes back in time some hundreds of years--a change, it
maybe said _en passant_, which is not without benefit, and attractive
in some respect. The brusque and selfish American atmosphere is left
behind, the patience and courtesy of Mexico is felt. The aggressive
struggle for life gives place to the recollection that to acquire
wealth is not necessarily the only business of all men and all nations;
for the patient _peon_ lives in happiness without it. You may scorn
him, but he is one of Nature's object-lessons.
Singularly un-American--that is if United States and Canadian manners
and customs shall be considered typical of America--are the customs of
the Mexican. The influence and romance of the long years of Spanish
domination and character have been crystallised upon the Mexican soil.
The mien and character of the race created here in New Spain is marked
for all time as a distinctive type, which may possess more for the
future than the votary of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and strenuous
commercialism may yet suspect. Whatever critical comparison may be
applied to these people, the foreigner will acknowledge the pleasing
trait of courtesy they invariably show. The elegance and grace of
Spanish manners, wafted across the Atlantic in the days of ocean
chivalry, were budded to the gentle courtesy of the native; and the
brusque Anglo-Saxon is almost ashamed of his seeming or intended
brusqueness before the graceful salutation of the poorest _peon_. Hat
in hand, and with courteous or devout wish for your welfare on his
lips, the poor Mexican seems almost a reproach to the harbinger of an
outside world which seemingly grows more hard and commercial as time
goes on.
The picturesque and the simple are, of course, bought at the expense,
too often, of hygiene and comfort, and Mexico does not escape this
present law. Yet it is remarkable how soon the Briton or the American
in Mexico adapts himself to his surroundings, and grows to regard them
with affection. It is true that the government of the country is
practically a military despotism, yet the foreigner is respected, and
none interfere with him. On the contrary, he is often looked up to as a
representative of a superior State, and if he be worthy he acquires
some of the demeanour of race-_noblesse oblige_.
There are cities set on steep hill-sides, which we shall enter. Terrace
after terrace climb the rocky ribs of arid hills. Houses, interspersed
with gardens; communities backed by the soft outlines of distant
ranges, seen adown the widening valley; and walls, houses, streets,
people, landscape; all are of that distinctive colour and character of
the Mexican upland, over-arched by the cloudless azure of its sky.
Clustered upon these same steep mineral-bearing hills--and, indeed,
they are the _raison d'etre_ of the town at all in that spot--are the
great mining places, ancient and modern, which form so important a
feature of the life of the country on the Great Plateau.
Fabulous wealth of silver has been dug from these everlasting hills.
Grim and abandoned mine-mouths, far away like black dots upon the
slopes, and strange honeycombed galleries and caverns far beneath the
outcropping of the lodes, have vomited rich silver ore for centuries:
and the clang of miners' steel and the dropping candle are now, as
ever, the accompaniment of labour of these hardy _peones_. The very
church, perhaps, is redolent of mining, and was raised by some pious
delver in the bowels of the hill whereon it stands--a thank-offering
for some great luck of _open sesame_ which his saints afforded him.
But we will not linger here; Guanajuato and Zacatecas and Pachuca shall
be our theme in another chapter, and the tale of toil and silver which
they tell. For the moment the way lies down the Great Plateau, among
its intersecting ranges of hills, through the fertile valleys, which
alternate with the appalling sun-beat deserts.
The conditions of travel in this great land of Mexico--it is nearly two
thousand miles in length--are, perhaps, less arduous than in
Spanish-American countries generally. Mexico has lent itself well to
the building of railways in a longitudinal direction, upon the line of
least resistance from north-west to south-east, paralleling its general
Andine structure. Several great trunk lines thus connect the capital
City of Mexico and the southern part of the republic with the
civilisation of the United States, over this relatively easy route. Yet
the earliest railway of Mexico, that from Vera Cruz to the City of
Mexico, traverses the country in the most difficult direction,
transversely, rising from tide-water and the Atlantic littoral, and
ascending the steep escarpments of the Eastern Sierra Madre to fall
down into the lake-valley of Mexico, bringing outside civilisation to
that isolated interior world. But Mexico's singular topographical
position did not secure her from invasion. Three times the city on the
lakes has fallen to foreign invaders--the Spaniards of the Conquest,
the French of Napoleon, and the Americans of the United States. Indeed,
the flat and arid tableland stretching away for such interminable
distances to the north was formerly a more potent natural defence than
the Cordilleran heights which front on the Atlantic seas; and the axiom
of Lerdo is well brought to mind in considering the geographical
environment: "Between weakness and strength--the desert!"
[Illustration: ORIZABA, CAPPED WITH PERPETUAL SNOW: VIEW ON THE MEXICAN
RAILWAY AT CORDOVA.]
But away from the railways, and the roads where _diligencias_ ply their
lumbering and dusty course, the saddle is the only, and indeed the most
characteristic, mode of travel; and the _arriero_ and his string of
pack-mules is the common carrier, and the mountain road or dusty desert
trail the means of communication from place to place. Along these the
horseman follows, day after day, his hard but interesting road, for to
the lover of Nature and incident the saddle ever brings matter of
interest unattainable by other means of locomotion. The glorious
morning air, the unfolding panorama of landscape--even the desert and
the far-off mountain spur which he must round ere evening falls, are
sources, of exhilaration and interest. The simple people and their
quaint dwellings, where in acute struggle for life with Nature they
wrest a living from rocks and thorns--are these not subjects, even,
worthy of some passing philosophical thought? Not a hilltop in the
vicinity of any human habitations--be they but the wretched _jacales_
or wattle-huts of the poorest peasants--but is surmounted by a cross:
not a spring or well but is adorned with flowers in honour of that
patron saint whose name it bears; and not a field or hamlet or mine but
has some religious nomenclature or attribute. For the Mexicans are a
race into which the religion of the Conquistadores penetrated
indelibly, whose hold upon them time scarcely unlooses. The creeds of
the priests, moreover, are interwoven with the remains of Aztec
theistic influence, and the superstitions of both systems hold the
ignorant peasantry of Mexico in enduring thrall. Much of beauty and
pathetic quaintness there is in this strong religious sentiment, which
no thinking observer will deride; much of retrograde ignorance, which
he will lament to see.
The Great Plateau tapers away towards the south, terminating in the
Valley of Mexico, bounded by the snowy Cordillera of Anahuac. Within
this range are two great volcanic uplifts, two beautiful mountain
peaks, crowned with perpetual snow--the culminating orographical
features of the Sierras, and the highest points in Mexico. The loftiest
of these is Popocatepetl, "the smoking mountain," and its companion is
Ixtaccihuatl, the "sleeping woman," both of poetical Indian
nomenclature. These beautiful solitary uplifts rise far above the
canyons and forests at their bases: penetrate the clouds which
sometimes wreath them, terminating in a porcelain-gleaming summit of
perpetual snow. The mid-day sun flashes upon them, rendering them
visible from afar, and its declining rays paint them with that carmine
glow known to the Andine and Alpine traveller, which arrests his vision
as evening falls. So fell, indeed, the morning rays of the orb of day
upon the burnished golden breastplates of the image set on the sacred
pyramid of Teotihuacan: the sun-god, Tonatiuah, as in the shadowy
Toltec days he faced the flashing east.
Prehistoric fact and fable press hard upon us as we approach the famous
Valley of Mexico and its fine capital. This is the region where that
singular "stone age" flourished, of pyramid-building and stone-shaping
peoples. Here both geology and history have written their pages, as if
Nature and Fate had conspired together to mark epochs of time and space
in ancient temple, dead revolution, and slumbering volcano. And now
below us lies the City of Mexico. From the wooded uplands and
hill-summits--redolent of pine and exhilarating with the tonic
air--which form the rim of the valley, the panorama of the capital and
its environs lies open to the view. Plains crossed by white streaks of
far-off roads, intersecting the chequered fields of green _alfalfa_ and
yellow maize; _haciendas_ and villages embowered in luxuriant foliage;
the gleam of domes and towers, softened in the glamour of distance and
bathed by a reposeful atmosphere and mediaeval tints--such is Mexico,
this fair city of the West.
[Illustration: PINE-CLAD HILLS FORMING THE RIM OF THE VALLEY OF MEXICO,
8,000 FEET ELEVATION ABOVE SEA-LEVEL.]
The City of Mexico, like most centres of human habitation in whatever
part of the world, is most beautiful when seen from afar, and in
conjunction with Nature's environment. But the old Aztec city, the
dark, romantic seat of the viceroys, the theatre of revolutionary
struggle, and the modern centre of this important Mexican civilisation,
is a really handsome and attractive city. Indeed, the capitals of many
Spanish-American republics, and their civilisation and social _regime_,
are often in the nature of a revelation to the traveller from Europe or
the United States, who has generally pictured a far more primitive
State. With its handsome institutions and public buildings, and
extensive boulevards and parks, and characteristic social, literary,
and commercial life, the City of Mexico may be described as
Americo-Parisian, and it is rapidly becoming a centre of attraction for
United States tourists, who, avid of historical and foreign colour,
descend thither in Pullman-car loads from the north. The city lies some
three miles from the shore of Lake Texcoco, which, with that of Chalco
and others, forms a group of salt- and fresh-water lagoons in the
strange Valley of Mexico. At the time of the Conquest the city stood
upon an island, connected with the mainland by the remarkable stone
causeways upon which the struggles between the Spaniards and the Aztecs
took place, during the siege of the city at the time of the Conquest.
But these lakes, after the manner of other bodies of water, generally,
in the high elevations of the American Cordilleras--Titicaca, in Peru,
to wit--are gradually perishing by evaporation, their waters
diminishing century by century. The Valley of Mexico, however, of
recent years has received an artificial hydrographic outlet in the
famous drainage canal and tunnel, which conducts the overflow into a
tributary of the Panuco river, and so to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Valley of Mexico is surrounded by volcanic hills, forming a more
recent formation of the Andine folds, of which the Sierra Madres
compose the Mexican Cordilleras. We have now to cross this, for our
faces are set towards the Pacific Ocean. We ascend and pass the Western
Sierra Madre, the _divortia aquarum_ of the Pacific watershed, leaving
the intra-montane plateau of Anahuac and the _mesa central_ behind us.
Again the climate changes as the downward journey is begun, and again
the _tierra caliente_ is approached. The culminating peaks--the
beautiful Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl--sink now below the eastern
horizon, but as we journey to the west Colima's smoking cone will rise
before the view. The descent from the highlands to the west coast is
even more rapid than to the east, and the temperate climate of the
valleys, and the bitter cold of the early morning on the uplands, soon
give place to tropical conditions. Extensive forests of oak and pine,
clothing the sides of the canyons and _barrancas_ of the high Sierra
Madre, are succeeded by the profuse vegetation of the torrid zone. Down
in the soft regions of the west, where tropical agriculture yields its
plentiful and easily-won harvests, are romantic old _haciendas_ and
villages hidden away in the folds of the landscape, such as are a
delight to the traveller and the lover of the picturesque. The "happy
valley" of Cuernavaca is reached by railway from the capital, but
beyond this the road to the seaboard is still that ancient trail which
Cortes used, which descends to Acapulco, for the railway builders have
not yet completed their works to the Pacific waters.
Away from the main route of travel lie sequestered old sugar estates,
and villages of romantic and picturesque charm, yet untouched by
speculator or capitalist. Antique piles of stone buildings are there,
redolent of that peculiar poetry of the pastoral life of Mexico in the
tropics. The old Spaniards built well; their solid masonry defies the
centuries; and their most prosaic structures were invested with an
architectural charm which the rapid money-seeker of to-day cares little
for, in his corrugated iron and temporary materialism. Near to the
arches, columns, and turrets of the old _haciendas_ the garden lies,
replete with strange fruits and flowers. The gleam of oranges and limes
comes from the tangled groves; grapes and pomegranates vie with each
other in unattended profusion. The iguana sports among the old stone
walls of the great garden, and humming-birds and butterflies hover in
the subtle atmosphere. The tropic sunset throws a peaceful glamour and
serenity over all. The cocoanut palms, with feathery grace above and
slender column upward rearing, stir not against their ethereal setting
as we watch, and the passing water in the old aqueduct scarce breaks
the tropic silence, or if, perchance, it whisper, murmurs of centuries
past, a low refrain.
But we shall journey away from the haunts of man again, and penetrate
the deep dark _barrancas_ and little-known mountain-fastnesses of the
western slope of the State of Guerrero. Here are great uninhabited and
unexplored stretches of country, rugged and wild, replete with matters
of interest, whether for hunter, sportsman, or archaeologist. Indeed,
it would be difficult to find a region offering so varied a nature of
resource and interest in any part of the world, except possibly in the
still less accessible wilds of the Amazonian slopes of the Peruvian
Andes. The botanist will find on this Pacific side of Mexico an
unstudied _flora_, and the ethnologist and the antiquarian a number of
native races, speaking strange separate languages; and the ruins of
thousands of the habitations of prehistoric man. The climate in these
rugged regions ranges from the heat of the fierce tropical sun to the
bitter cold of the mountain summits. Abundant _bosques_ or forests of
oak cover the higher regions, and the wild and broken nature of the
country renders it difficult to traverse, and calls for the adventurous
spirit of the pioneer and explorer, without which the traveller will
but meet with discomfort and danger.
Yet the true traveller finds pleasure in these matters. The impressive
grandeur of the mountain landscape, the endless forests, the profound
ravines do but serve to divert his mind from the peril and discomfort
of the trail. Here he may revel in Nature's untamed handiwork of
mountain, forest, and flood, as day after day he journeys onward in the
saddle towards the Pacific Ocean. Here are the imposing _barrancas_ of
Jalisco which he traverses, and marks how they are buried in the
profuse vegetation which presses up to the very border of the lava of
smoking Ceboruco. Thence the myrtle forests of Tepic are penetrated. On
the tropic lakes thousands of log-like alligators lie, gloomily
awaiting their prey. From the verge, which rich forests fringe, and
where brilliant water-weeds encircle the shoals, dainty pink and white
herons rise, and below the blue surface gleams the sheen of myriad
fish. Far to the southwards the fitful volcanic flames of Colima light
up the landscape at night. A day's journey more across the coastal
plains, and our reconnaissance is finished. The long-drawn surf beats
upon the shore of the vast western ocean, for we have crossed the
continent; and the sun's glowing disc dips to the blood-red
waves--sunset in the Pacific.
[Illustration: TYPICAL VILLAGE OF THE PACIFIC COAST ZONE: STATE OF
COLIMA.]
CHAPTER II
THE DAWN OF MEXICO: TOLTECS AND AZTECS
Lake Texcoco--Valley of Anahuac--Seat of the Aztec civilisation--
Snow-capped peaks--Pyramids of Teotihuacan--Toltecs--The first
Aztecs--The eagle, cactus, and serpent--Aztec oracle and wanderings--
Tenochtitlan--Prehistoric American civilisations--Maya, Incas--Quito
and Peru--The dawn of history--The Toltec empire--Rise, _regime_,
fall--Quetzalcoatl--Otomies--Chichemecas--Nezahualcoyotl--Astlan--The
seven tribes and their wanderings--Mexican war-god--The Teocallis--
Human sacrifices--Prehistoric City of Mexico--The Causeways--Aztec
arts, kings, and civilisation--Montezuma--Guatemoc--Impressions of the
Spaniards--The golden age of Texcoco--Vandalism of Spanish
archbishop--The poet-king and his religion--Temple to the Unknown
God--Aztecs and Incas compared--The Tlascalans--The Otomies--Cholula--
Mexican tribes--Aztec buildings--Prehistoric art--Origin of American
prehistoric civilisation--Biblical analogies--Supposed Asiatic and
Egyptian origins--Aboriginal theory.
Like the misty cloud-streaks of the early dawn, the beginning of the
story of the strange empire of prehistoric Mexico unfolds from fable
and fact as we look back upon it. We are to imagine ourselves upon the
shores of Lake Texcoco, in the high valley-plateau of Anahuac, "the
land amid the waters." It is the year 1300, or a little later, of the
Christian era. The borders of the lake are marshy and sedgy, the
surrounding plain is bare and open, and there is no vestige of man and
his habitation. Far away, east, west, and north, faint mountain ranges
rise, shimmering to the view in the sun's rays through the clear upland
air, whilst to the south two beautiful gleaming snow-capped peaks are
seen,[3] and over all is the deep blue vault of the tropic highland
sky.
[Footnote 3: Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl.]
We have said that there are no vestiges of man or his structures to be
seen, yet upon gazing penetratingly towards the north-east there might
be observed the tops of two high ruined pyramids,[4] the vestiges of
the civilisation of the shadowy Toltecs. But we are not for the moment
concerned with these ruined structures, for, as we watch, a band of
dusky warriors, strangely clad, comes over the plain. They come like
men on some set purpose, glancing about them, at the shores of the
lake, at the horizon, expectantly, yet with a certain vague wistfulness
as of deferred hope. Suddenly their leader halts and utters an
ejaculation; and with one hand shading the sun's rays from his eyes he
points with outstretched arm towards the water's edge. His companions
gaze intently in the direction indicated, and then run forward with
joyous shouts and gesticulations. What is it that has aroused their
emotions? Near the lake-shore a rock arises, overgrown with a thorny
_nopal_, or prickly-pear cactus, and perched upon this is an eagle with
a serpent in its beak.
[Footnote 4: Teotihuacan: pyramids of the sun and moon.]
Who are these men and whence have they come? They are the first Aztecs,
and they have come "from the north"; and for centuries they have been
wandering from place to place, seeking a promised land which their
deity had offered them, a land where they should found a city and an
empire. The hoped-for oracle is before them, the promised symbol which
they had been bidden to seek, by which they should know the destined
spot--an eagle perched upon a _nopal_ with a serpent in its beak: and
their wanderings are at an end. Here they pitched their camp, and here
as time went on the wonderful city of Tenochtitlan arose, the centre of
the strange Aztec civilisation. Thus, fable records, was first
established the site of Mexico City; prehistoric, despotic, barbaric,
first; mediaeval, dark, romantic, later; handsome and interesting
to-day.
[Illustration: THE FINDING OF THE SITE FOR THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF
MEXICO BY THE FIRST AZTECS. (From the painting in Mexico.)]
But whence came these men? That, indeed, who shall say? Whence came the
strange civilisation of the American races--Maya, Toltec, Aztec, Inca?
To Mexico and Yucatan and Guatemala, to Quito and Peru, whence came the
peoples who built stone temples, pyramids, halls, tombs, inscribed
hieroglyphics, and wrought cunning arts, such as by their ruins,
relics, and traditions arouse our admiration even to-day. History does
not say, yet what glimmerings of history and legend there are serve to
take us farther back in time, although scarcely to a fixed
starting-point, for the thread of the tale of wanderings and
developments of these people of Mexico--a thread which seems traceable
among the ruined structures of Anahuac.
The first glimmerings of this history-legend refer to an unknown
country "in the north." About the middle of the third century of the
Christian era there proceeded thence the people known as the Mayas, who
traversed Mexico and arrived in Yucatan; and they are the reputed
originators of the singular and beautiful temples encountered there,
and the teachers of the stone-shaping art whose results arouse the
admiration of the archaeologist and traveller of to-day, in that part
of Mexico. The descendants of the Mayas are among the most intelligent
of the native tribes inhabiting the Republic, doubtless due to the
influence of the polity and work of their ancestors. Time went on.
About the middle of the sixth century A.D. another people came "out of
the north"--the famous Toltecs, and in their southward migration they
founded successive cities, ultimately remaining at Tollan, or Tula, and
to them are attributed the remarkable pyramids of Teotihuacan, Cholula,
and other structures. Tula is some fifty miles to the north of the
modern city of Mexico, and it formed the centre of the powerful empire
and civilisation of this cultured people. Eleven monarchs reigned, but
the Toltec Empire was overthrown; the people dispersed, and they
mysteriously disappeared at the beginning of the twelfth century A.D.,
after some 450 years of existence. None of these dates, however, can be
looked upon as really belonging to the realm of exact history.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: TOLTEC PYRAMID OR TEOCALLI OF THE
SUN AT SAN JUAN, TEOTIHUACAN. (Exploration and restoration work being
carried on.)]
Tradition also has it that the Toltecs were dispersed by reason of a
great famine due to drought, followed by pestilence, only a few people
surviving. Banished from the scene of their civilisation by these
disasters, the few remaining inhabitants made their way to Yucatan and
Central America; and their names and traditions seem to be stamped
there. Beyond this little is known of the Toltecs. Possibly some of
them found their way still further south to Ecuador and Peru, and
influenced the Inca civilisations of the South American continent. To
the Toltecs is ascribed the most refined civilisation of prehistoric
America, a culture which was indeed the source of the far inferior one
of the Aztecs, which we shall presently observe. The Toltecs wrought
cleverly in gold and silver, and in cotton fabrics; whilst the
remarkable character of their buildings and structures is shown by the
ruins of these to-day, as at Cholula and Teotihuacan. The art of
picture-writing is attributed to them; and the famous Calendar stone of
Mexico has also been ascribed to these people. From amid the shadowy
history of the Toltecs the traditions of the deity which so largely
influenced prehistoric Mexican religion arose: the mystic Quetzalcoatl,
the "god of the air," "the feathered serpent." This strange personage
was impressed upon the people's mind as a white man of a foreign race,
with noble features, long beard, and flowing garments; and he taught
them a sane religion, in which virtue and austerity were dominant, and
the sacrifice of human beings and animals forbidden. This singular
personage, runs the fable, disappeared after twenty years' sojourn
among them, in the direction of the rising sun, having promised to
return. When the Spaniards came out of the East their coming was hailed
as the return of Quetzalcoatl, and the reverence and superstition
surrounding these supposed "children of the sun" protected the
Spaniards and permitted their advance into the country, and indeed, was
at length conducive to the downfall of Montezuma and the Aztec Empire.
So pass the cultured, shadowy Toltecs from our vision. They had been
preceded in their southward migration by the Otomies, in the seventh
century A.D., an exceedingly numerous and primitive people who almost
annihilated the Spaniards during the Conquest, and whose descendants
to-day occupy a vast region, and still largely speak their own
language, rather than Spanish. The Toltecs were succeeded by yet
another tribe "from the north," the Chichemecas, who came down and
occupied their civilisation of Tula. These people, warlike and inferior
in culture to the Toltecs, allied themselves with the neighbouring
Nahua tribes, and an empire came into being, with its capital at
Texcoco, on the shore of the great lake. The famous Nezahualcoyotl, the
poet-king of this empire, who ascended the throne of Texcoco in 1431,
was one of the most remarkable figures of prehistoric Anahuac, and his
genius and fortunes recall the history of Alfred of England, to the
student's mind. He built a splendid palace at Texcotzinco, and ruins of
its walls and aqueducts remain to this day. His life is sketched in
these pages subsequently, and something of the beauty of his philosophy
set forth.
And thus history has brought us again to the Aztecs, the founders of
Tenochtitlan by the lake-shore, on the spot indicated by their oracle.
They had come "from the north," one of seven tribes or families, all of
which spoke the Nahuatl or Mexican tongue. This unknown country, called
Astlan, or "the land of the herons," was the home of these seven
tribes--the Mexicas, or Aztecs, the Tlascalans, Xochimilcas, Tepanecas,
Colhuas, Chalcas and Tlahincas--and has been varyingly assigned a
locality in California, and in Sinaloa. Why the Aztecs left their
northern home is not known, even in legend, but they were instigated to
their wanderings, tradition says, by their fabled war-god,
Huitzilopochtli, or Mexitl, from whom came the name "Mexica" or
"Azteca," by which these people called themselves. From the beginning
of the tenth to the beginning of the thirteenth century A.D. this tribe
journeyed and sojourned on its southward way, from valley to valley,
from lake to lake, from Chapala to Patzcuaro, and thence to Tula, the
old Toltec capital. Once more dispersed, they wandered on, and, guided
by their oracle, reached their final resting-place at Tenochtitlan.
This name, by which they designated their capital, was derived either
from that of Tenoch, their venerated high priest, or from the Aztec
words meaning "stone-serpent," in reference to the emblem they had
followed.
The first work of the people was to raise a great temple to their
god--the bloodthirsty Huitzilopochtli--who had led them on. It was
begun at once, and around it grew the habitations of the people, the
huts made of reeds and mud called _xacali_, such as indeed to-day form
the habitations of a large part of Mexican people under the name of
_jacales_.[5] This great Teocalli, or "house of god," at the time of
the arrival of the Spaniards, was a structure pyramidal in form, built
of earth and pebbles and faced with cut stone, square at base, its
sides--300 to 400 feet long--facing the cardinal points of the heavens.
Flights of steps on the outside, winding round the truncated pyramid,
gave access to the summit. Here in the sanctuary was the colossal image
of the Aztec war-god--the abominable conception of a barbaric
people--and the stone of sacrifice upon which the sacrificial captives
were laid. Upon its convex surface the unhappy wretches were
successively bound, their breasts cut open with obsidian knives, and
the still beating hearts, torn forth by the hand of the priest, were
flung smoking before the deity!
[Footnote 5: _X_ and _j_ are often interchangeable in Spanish.]
Upon the marshy borders of this lake, set in the beautiful and fertile
valley of Anahuac, the city rose to elegance and splendour. The
_jacales_ gave place to buildings of brick and stone, founded in many
cases upon piles, and between them were streets and canals, giving
access to the city from the lake. Centre of all was the great Teocalli.
The position of the city was peculiar. It was founded upon an island,
and was subject to inundations from the salt waters of the lake; for
the Valley of Mexico had at that time no outlet for its streams. It
formed a hydrographic entity; and in this connection it reminds the
traveller of the birthplace of that other strange, prehistoric American
civilisation, three thousand miles away to the south-east--Lake
Titicaca and the cradle of the Incas. To protect the city from these
inundations embankments were made, and other works which attest the
engineering capabilities of the people. Four great causeways gave
access to the marshy island upon which the capital was
situated--structures of stones and mortar, the longest being some four
or five miles in length. To-day one of these forms part of a modern
street, and the waters of the lake have retired more than two miles
from the city.
[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF MEXICO: VIEW ON LAKE TEXCOCO; THE MODERN
CITY OF MEXICO IN THE DISTANCE.]
The habitations of the principal people were built of stone, and the
interior of polished marbles and rare woods. Painting and sculpture
embellished these interiors and exteriors, although these were
generally crude and barbaric in their execution and representation.
Around the city and upon the shores of the lakes, numerous villages
arose, surrounded by luxurious gardens and orchards, and the singular
_chinampas_, or floating gardens, were made, with their wealth of
flowers, such as the early Mexicans both loved and demanded for
sacrificial ceremonies.
Naturally, all this development took time. Yet the rise of this
civilisation must be considered rapid--probably it was largely
inherited in principle. The first Aztec government was the theocratic
and military _regime_ established in the fourteenth century under
Tenoch, a military priest and leader who died in 1343. Less than two
hundred years afterwards the city of Tenochtitlan was in the zenith of
power and culture at the moment when it fell before the Spaniards. Ten
kings followed Tenoch, the first being Itzcoatl, who may be considered
the real founder of the empire. He was followed by the first Montezuma,
who greatly extended its sway, dying in 1469. Then came Axayacatl, who
is considered to be the constructor of the famous Mexican Calendar
stone. Tizoc, his successor, hoped to win the favour of the war-god by
the reconstruction of the great Teocalli, whose service was inaugurated
by the infamous Ahuizotl in 1487 and at whose dedication an appalling
number of human sacrifices were made. Then at the beginning of 1500 the
throne was ascended by Montezuma the Second, who further extended the
beauty and power of the Aztec capital, but who, vacillating and weighed
down by the fear of destiny, lived but to witness the beginning of the
fall of Mexico before the Spaniards in 1519. The brave Guatemoc, the
last of his line, strove vainly to uphold the dynasty against the
invaders.
There is no doubt that the Aztecs created a remarkable centre of
semi-barbaric civilisation, and the descriptions given by the Spanish
historians--whether those who accompanied Cortes, as Bernal Diaz, or
those who drew their colouring from these accounts--are such as to
arouse the interest and enthusiasm even of the reader of to-day. In
this connection, of course, it is to be recollected that Cortes and his
followers were not all men of education or trained knowledge of the
great cities of the civilised world, and there is no doubt that they
lacked somewhat the faculty of comparison, and over-estimated what they
beheld. Let us translate from Clavijero, a Spanish historian and Jesuit
who wrote later, and who describes the scene which the Spaniards beheld
from the summit of the great Teocalli as "many beautiful buildings,
gleaming, whitened, and burnished; the tall minarets of the temples
scattered over the various quarters of the city; the canals; verdant
plantations and gardens--all forming a beautiful whole which the
Spaniards never ceased to admire, especially observing it from the
summits of the great temples which dominated not only the city
immediately below, but its environs and the large towns beyond. No less
marvellous were the royal palaces and the infinite variety of plants
and animals kept there; but nothing caused them greater admiration than
the great market plaza." "Not a Spaniard of them," according to Bernal
Diaz, the soldier-historian of the Conquest, who was there and saw it
all, although he wrote about it long afterwards, "but held it in high
praise, and some of them who had journeyed among European cities swore
they had never seen so vast a concourse of merchants and merchandise."
Returning to our history, it is not to be supposed that this powerful
Aztec nation, with their fine capital of Tenochtitlan, were the only
people inhabiting the land of Anahuac at that time. Several other
peoples held sway there. On the eastern side of Lake Texcoco, a few
leagues away, lived the Texcocans, already mentioned; one of the tribes
who also had come "from the north" in early days and who had settled
there. They also had developed or inherited a civilisation akin to that
of the Toltecs, far more refined and important than that of their
neighbours and kindred, the Aztecs. It was about the end of the twelfth
century when the Texcocans established themselves, building a splendid
capital and developing an extensive empire. But misfortune fell upon
them as the centuries went on. Soon after the beginning of the
fifteenth century they were attacked and overwhelmed by the Tepanecas,
another of the seven kindred tribes: their city reduced and their
monarch assassinated. But there arose a picturesque figure, the saviour
of his country--Prince Nezahualcoyotl, son of the dead king. The prince
passed years in disguise, as a fugitive, but at length was permitted to
return to the capital, where he led a life of study. But his talents
aroused the jealousy of the Tepanec usurper, who saw a danger of the
people acclaiming him as their rightful lord and throwing off the yoke
of the strangers. Nezahualcoyotl again became a fugitive, having
escaped with his life by a stratagem, disappearing through a cloud of
incense into a secret passage. But as the years went on the Texcocans,
goaded to revolt by grievous taxation, arose: and seizing the moment,
the outlawed prince put himself at the head of his people and regained
his rightful position, largely with the assistance of the neighbouring
Mexicans of Tenochtitlan.
Then followed what has been termed the golden age of Texcoco. Its art,
poets, and historians became renowned throughout Anahuac, and its
collected literature was the centre of historical lore. Indeed, this it
was that was so perversely destroyed by the first Archbishop of Mexico,
Zumarraga, after the Conquest--an irremediable loss. The prince or
emperor was a philosopher and a poet, and he has left some remarkable
examples of his philosophical prayers to the "Unknown God," in whom he
believed, abhorring the human sacrifices of his neighbours the Aztecs.
He has been termed the "Solomon of Anahuac," although the severe code
of laws he instituted have earned him a harsher name in addition.
Under this _regime_ agriculture prospered exceedingly, and a large
population cultivated all the available ground, just as under the Incas
of Peru the Andine slopes were terraced and cultivated. Splendid
buildings were erected, and a style of luxurious living inaugurated
somewhat after the fashion of Oriental history, and the descriptions of
the magnificence of the royal appurtenances fill pages of the
historians' accounts. Most of this history was written by the famous
Ixtlilxochitl, son of this great emperor, who occupied the throne at
the time of the Conquest and became an ally of the Spaniards against
the Aztec. It is upon the writings of this prince-historian that much
of the material of the later writers of the history of Mexico and the
Conquest is founded.
In the construction of his palaces and buildings Nezahualcoyotl
employed vast bodies of natives, after the manner of an Egyptian
potentate of old. Baths, hanging-gardens, groves of cedar, harems,
villas, temples formed the beautiful and luxurious Texcotzinco, the
prince's residence, as described by its historian. To-day the mounds
and _debris_ of sculptured stone which formed the place scarcely arrest
the traveller's attention. In the midst of his luxury the emperor fell
a prey to a passion for the betrothed of one of his subjects, a
beautiful maiden. The unhappy individual who had thus become his
monarch's rival--he was a veteran chief in the army--was needlessly
sent on a military expedition, where he fell, and the hand of his
promised bride was free for the monarch's taking. So was enacted upon
these high regions of Anahuac a tragic episode, as of David and Uriah,
to the blemish of an otherwise noble name and of a mind above the
superstitions of his time.
"Truly, the gods which I adore; idols of stone and wood: speak not, nor
feel, neither could they fashion the beauty of the heavens--the sun,
the moon, and the stars ... nor yet the earth and the streams, the
trees and the plants which beautify it. Some powerful, hidden, and
unknown God must be the Creator of the universe, and he alone can
console me in my affliction or still the bitter anguish of this
heart."[6] So spake Nezahualcoyotl.
[Footnote 6: I have translated this from the Spanish of Ixtlilxochitl
as quoted by Prescott.--C. R. E.]
Urged probably by the feelings of the philosopher (whose ponderings on
the infinite may occasion him more anguish perhaps than the ordinary
vicissitudes of life), the monarch raised up a temple to the "Unknown
God," in which neither images nor sacrifices were permitted.
After somewhat more than half a century of his reign, and at a time
calculated as the beginning of the last quarter of the fifteenth
century, this remarkable philosopher-king died, and was succeeded by
his son Nezahualpilli, who in a measure followed in his father's
footsteps. But he also passed away, his life having been overshadowed
to some extent by the singular belief or prediction of the fall of his
people in the coming of the white man from the East--a belief which
influenced both the Texcocans and the Aztecs. His son Ixtlilxochitl,
the historian above named, was in power at the time of the conquest by
the Spaniards, but he hated the Aztecs with a bitter hatred in
consequence of their influence upon his people, and the installing by
the machinations of Montezuma of an elder brother upon the throne,
which had plunged the kingdom into civil war. This was in the second
decade of the sixteenth century.
The Texcocans, in conjunction with yet another and smaller people
living on the west side of the lake at Tlacopan, formed with the Aztecs
a confederation or triple alliance of three republics, by which they
agreed to stand together against all comers, and to divide all
territory and results of conquest in agreed proportion. They carried on
war and annexation around them for a considerable period, extending
their sway far beyond the Valley of Mexico, or Anahuac, which formed
their home, passing the Sierra Madre mountains to the east, until about
the middle of the fifteenth century--under Montezuma--the land and
tribes acknowledging their sway reached to the shores of the Gulf of
Mexico. To the south their arms and influence penetrated into what are
now Guatemala and Nicaragua, whilst to the west they exercised
sovereignty to the shores of the Pacific.
[Illustration: THE LAND OF THE AZTEC CONQUEST: MAIZE FIELDS NEAR
ESPERANZA, STATE OF PUEBLA.]
These conquered territories were not necessarily of easy subjugation.
On the contrary, they were plentifully inhabited by races of
warrior-peoples, many of them with strong and semi-civilised social and
military organisations. The analogy between this confederation of the
Aztecs and the extending area of their dominion and civilisation, and
the Incas of the Titicaca plateau of Peru, surrounded on all sides by
savage warlike tribes, presents itself to the observer in this as in
other respects. Like the Incas, the Aztec emperors[7] returned from
campaign after campaign loaded with trophies and embarrassed with
strings of captives from the vanquished peoples who had dared oppose
this powerful confederation. The rich tropical regions of both the
eastern and western slopes of the tableland of Anahuac thus paid
tribute to the Aztecs, as well as the boundless resources of the south.
[Footnote 7: Both these nations have been likened to the Romans in this
respect.]
But not all the nations of Anahuac fell under the dominion of the
Aztecs. Far from it. The spirits of the people of Tlascala would rise
from their graves and protest against such an assertion! Tlascala was a
brave and warlike little republic of mountaineers--a kind of
Switzerland--who inhabited the western slopes of the Eastern Sierra
Madre and the eastern part of the plateau of Anahuac, under the shadow
of the mighty Malinche, whose snow-crowned head arises on the eastern
confines of the tableland. Tlascala, indeed, was a thorn in the side of
Montezuma and the Aztecs. The latter had demanded that the little
republic pay homage and tribute, and acknowledge the hegemony of the
dominant nation, to which the Tlascalans made reply, "Neither our
ancestors nor ourselves ever have or will pay tribute to any one.
Invade us if you can. We beat you once and may do it again!" or words
to that effect, as recorded by the historians. For in the past history
of the Tlascalans--who were of the same original migratory family as
the Aztecs--a great conflict had been recorded, in which they had
vanquished their arrogant kindred.
Deadly strife and hatred followed this, but Tlascala withstood all
attacks from without, and, moreover, was strengthened by an alliance
with the Otomies, a warlike race inhabiting part of the great _mesa_ or
central tableland north of Anahuac. These were the people who so
grievously harassed the Spaniards after the _Noche Triste_ and against
whom the heroic battle of Otumba was fought. Except to the east, whence
approach was easy from the coast, the territory of Tlascala was
surrounded by mountains, and this natural defence was continued by the
building of an extraordinary wall or fortification at the pregnable
point. Through this the Spaniards passed on their journey of invasion,
and, indeed, its ruins remained until the seventeenth century. The name
of the Tlascalans well deserves to be written on the pages of the
history of primitive Mexico, for it was largely due to their alliance
with the Spaniards that the conquest of Mexico by Cortes and his band
was rendered possible.
In addition to these various and petty powers and independent republics
upon the tableland of Anahuac and its slopes, must be mentioned that of
Cholula, a state to the south of Tenochtitlan, in what now is the State
of Puebla. This region, which contains the remarkable mound or pyramid
bearing its name--Cholula--the construction of which is ascribed to the
Toltecs, was, with its people, dominated by and under tribute to the
Aztecs. So was the nation of the Cempoallas, upon the Vera Cruz coast,
who rendered assistance to the landing _Conquistadores_; and, indeed,
almost all the natives of that vast region acknowledged the sway and
lived in awe of the empire of Montezuma.
It is seen that Mexico, in prehispanic times, was fairly well
populated--comparatively speaking, of course. Indeed, at the present
time there are ten times as many Indians in that part of North America
which forms modern Mexico, as ever existed in the whole of the much
vaster area which forms the United States. The inhabitants of Mexico
were divided into two main classes--those living under a civilised or
semi-civilised organisation, such as the Aztecs and others already
enumerated, and those which may be looked upon as savages. These latter
were exceedingly numerous, and at the present day something like 220
different tribal names have been enumerated. This serves to show the
wide range of peoples who inhabited the land before the Conquest,
principally as clans, or _gentiles_, as in South America also.
Having seen, thus, what were the anthropo-geographical conditions of
primitive Mexico, we may cast a brief glance at the arts and
institutions of these semi-civilised peoples. Their buildings--most
indelible records of these civilisations--cover a considerable range of
territory, as has been observed: yet the antiquities of less important
nature cover one very much greater. The true stone edifices, the real
mural remains, are, however confined to certain limits--between the
16th and 22nd parallel of north latitude--that is to say, the southern
half of Mexico. Roughly, these buildings may be divided into three
classes--_adobe_, or sun-dried earthen brick, unshaped stone and
mortar, and cut and carved stone. In some cases a combination of these
was used in the same structure. The best elements of construction do
not seem to have been used. Domes and arches were not known to these
builders, although they had a system of corbelling-out over openings,
which, in the case of the Maya "arch," approximates thereto. They also
used lintels of stone and wood, and these last were the weak points,
and their decaying has sometimes brought down part of the facade. The
work of the sculptor is crude, like that of the Incas of Peru, of which
it reminds the traveller in some cases, but shows signs of evolving
power and a sense of the beautiful, as has been averred by the most
learned antiquarians who have studied it. It is held that there were
several schools of architecture represented.
The various kinds of structures and relics found throughout the country
include pyramids, temples, tombs, causeways, statues, fortifications,
terraced hills, rock-sculpture, idols, painted caves, calendar stones,
sacrificial stones, habitations, canals, pottery, mummies, _cenotes_,
or wells, &c. The northernmost point where any monument in stone is
encountered is at Quemada, in the State of Zacatecas, which seems to
mark the limit of the stronger civilisation of Southern Mexico, in
contrast to the less virile civilisation which seems to be indicated by
the clay and _adobe_ structures of the northern part of Mexico and of
the adjoining territory embodied at the present day in Arizona,
California, and New Mexico, beyond the Rio Grande.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF EL FOLOC AT CHICHEN-YTZA,
YUCATAN.]
But once more we ask, "Where did these people come from originally?" It
has been said that the origin of the people of a continent belongs not
to the realm of history but of philosophy. Well may it be so, but we
are not content. What was the origin of the first peoples of the
Americas, and where did the principle of their barbaric civilisation
come from? There were the fables of the lost continent of Atlantis--of
which, geologically, part of North America is a portion--to be
considered: and perchance, so thought the earlier thinkers, these
peoples, remnants of its population. But the generally accepted theory
assigns Eastern Asia as the source, and analogies are adduced in
architecture, customs, religions, physiognomy, and a multitude of
conditions. As to language, careful study has shown, on the other hand,
that none of the numerous indigenous tongues of the present-day Mexican
aborigines bear any resemblance whatever to Asiatic tongues, except
that some likeness between Otomie and Chinese is traced: whilst some
points of similarity are adduced with the speech of the Esquimaux. Last
century an Englishman--Lord Kingsborough--spent a fortune in
endeavouring to prove the theory, which had been advanced a hundred
years earlier, that these emigrating tribes of the Mexican plateau were
those lost ten of Israel! And he published a magnificent work,
reproducing the best examples of their picture-writing, to this end.
Indeed, in earlier times, analogies have run riot in attempts to prove
a common origin for fables and for real incidents, with those of
Biblical narrative. Among the prehistoric civilisations of the
Americas--Mexico and Peru--some of these analogies are remarkable, and
might well give rise to such speculation; among them being the stories
of the Deluge, and of a virgin birth for a leader or redeemer of men.
Further similarities are adduced in matters relating to the system of
chronology--that used by the Aztecs having analogy to that of the
Mongol family, and to some extent of the Persians and Egyptians.
Indeed, in the architecture of these prehistoric American ruins
resemblance is traced to Egypt, as well as similarity in other matters;
and this more strongly perhaps in Peru than in Mexico. In general terms
it may be said that many points of prehistoric Mexican civilisation
suggest analogy with Egypt and with Hindustan, and it has been said
that, from his head-dress to his sandalled feet, the native Mexican is
Hispano-Egyptian. But be it as it may, their civilisation seems to have
come from the West, not from the East. These aboriginal people and
their attributes have nothing in common with Europeans or negroes,
whilst they are not unlike Asiatics. I have often been surprised by the
strong "Japanese" or Mongol character in the Mexican face. How and when
such prehistoric immigrants came, whether by the approaching shores of
Behring Straits, whether in that geological time when land connection
between North America and Asia was intact, is buried in oblivion.
Beyond these theories there still remains that of an autochthonous
origin; and who shall yet affirm that both the people and their
civilisation may not have sprung and evolved upon the soil of the world
which we call new? Time and advancing knowledge may yet reveal these
secrets.
CHAPTER III
THE STRANGE CITIES OF EARLY MEXICO
Principal prehistoric monuments--Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan--
Pyramids of Teotihuacan--Toltec sun-god--Pyramid of Cholula--Pyramids
of Monte Alban--Ruins of Mitla--Remarkable monoliths and sculpture--
Beautiful prehistoric stone-masonry--Ruins of Palenque--Temple of the
Sun, and others--Stone vault construction--Tropical vegetation--Ruins
of Yucatan--Maya temples--Architectural skill--Temples of
Chichen-Ytza--Barbaric sculpture--Effect of geology on building--The
Aztec civilisation--Land and social laws--Slavery--Taxes, products,
roads, couriers--Analogy with Peru--Aztec homes and industries--War,
human sacrifice, cannibalism--History, hieroglyphics, picture-writing--
Irrigation, agriculture, products--Mining, sculpture, pottery--Currency
and commerce--Social system--Advent of the white man.
The most remarkable of the remaining monuments in stone of the peoples
who successively or contemporaneously inhabited Mexico, are those
well-defined and fairly well-known groups of ruins scattered at wide
distances apart in the southern and south-eastern part of Mexican
territory. The principal of these are: Teotihuacan, at Texcoco, in the
Valley of Mexico; Cholula, in the State of Puebla; Monte Alban and
Mitla, in the State of Oaxaca; Palenque, in the State of Chiapas; Uxmal
and Chichen-Ytza, in the peninsula of Yucatan.
Of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, or Mexico, but little of antiquity
remains, as, according to the historian of the Conquest, the place was
almost entirely razed to the ground by Cortes. It is probable, however,
that enduring stone edifices formed a much less considerable part of
this city than has been supposed. Nevertheless, modern excavations
continually lay bare portions of Aztec masonry, as well as sculptured
monoliths. A short time ago a sculptured tiger, weighing eight tons,
was unearthed and deposited in the museum in the capital. The principal
building of the Aztec city was the great Teocalli, upon whose site the
existing cathedral was built. This huge truncated pyramid has been
described already. It was surrounded by a great wall, upon the cornice
of which huge carved stone serpents and tigers were the emblematic
ornaments. From this wall four gates opened on to the four main
streets, which radiated away towards the cardinal points of the
compass. Its dimensions are given as 365 feet long by 300 feet wide at
the base, whilst the summit-platform was raised more than 150 feet
above the level of the streets and square. Here was set the great image
of the Aztec war-god, the idol of the abominable Huitzilopochtli which
Cortes and his men, after their frightful hand-to-hand struggle with
the Aztecs on this giddy platform, tumbled down the face of the pyramid
into the streets below, among the astonished Indians. The grandeur,
architecturally, of the ancient City of Mexico has probably been
somewhat exaggerated by the _Conquistadores_ and subsequent
chroniclers, whose enthusiasm sometimes ran riot.
The ruins of Teotihuacan are situated in the north-eastern part of the
valley of Mexico, some miles from the shores of Lake Texcoco and
twenty-five miles from the modern City of Mexico. They are generally
ascribed to the Toltecs, or, at any rate, to a civilised nation greatly
previous to the Aztecs; for the ruins were abandoned and their origin
unknown when these people arrived. Cortes and his Spaniards, defeated
and fleeing after the terrible struggle of the _Noche Triste_, passed
near to the great earth pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, which are the
main structures of Teotihuacan; but even at that time they were--as
they are to-day--mere mounds of earth, in which the pyramidal form has
been partly obliterated by the action of time.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: THE PYRAMID OF THE SUN AT
TEOTIHUACAN, IN THE VALLEY OF MEXICO, SEEN FROM THE PYRAMID OF THE
MOON.]
The very extensive mounds and remains which constitute Teotihuacan are
of numerous pyramids, and some ruined walls which have been excavated
of recent years. All of these are formed of _adobe_ and irregular
pieces of the lava of which the adjoining hills are composed. Rude
carved monoliths of deities have, however, been recovered from the
_debris_. The main features of the ruins are, first, the "Pyramid of
the Sun," a huge mound which forms the most colossal structure of
prehistoric man in America. It measures, approximately, at its
base--for its outlines are so indefined that no exact form can be
adduced--some 700 feet on each side, rising upwards in the form of a
truncated pyramid rather less than 200 feet above the level of the
plain. Next, the "Pyramid of the Moon," a similar but smaller
structure--about 500 feet at base--distant from the first some
thousands of yards along a strange road or path across the plain, known
as _Micoatl_, or the "Path of the Dead," some two miles in length. From
the summit of the "Pyramid of the Moon" the beholder looks down into
the great courtyard of an adjoining group of ruins; thence his eye
travels along this pathway to where the huge "Pyramid of the Sun"
arises, far off, on its left-hand side. Between these and indeed beyond
them, and bordering on the "Path of the Dead"--probably so called in
relation to human sacrifice--are numerous other mounds, which were
formerly pyramids of similar character, but of much less magnitude.
Probably, in ages past, they were all crowned by temples, and ascended
by staircases and terraces--evidences of which, indeed, still
remain--whilst the slopes were probably covered with stone and stucco.
It is stated that upon the high summit of the great pyramid--that
dedicated to Tonatiuh, the sun--a huge stone statue of this deity was
placed, and that a plate of polished gold upon its front reflected back
the first rays of the rising sun. The name Teotihuacan signifies the
"house of the gods." Doubtless it was, in unknown centuries past, the
centre of a thriving civilisation and busy and extensive agricultural
population. To-day the great pyramid casts its shadow toward a small
village of _jacales_, upon a semi-arid plain.
The pyramid of Cholula is of truncated form, like most of these
numerous structures. Its height is 200 feet and its base measures 1,440
feet, which is greater than that of the pyramid of Cheops, and it forms
the oldest and largest teocalli in Mexico. The presiding deity of this
"house of God" was the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. In company with
Teotihuacan at Texcoco, and Papantla, in the State of Vera Cruz,
Cholula is ascribed to the Toltecs. The elevation above sea-level of
the site of this structure is 7,500 feet, and at the time of Cortes the
surrounding town is said to have contained a population of 150,000
inhabitants. Its summit is more than an acre in extension, and although
partly obliterated and overgrown, the pyramid is crowned to-day with a
Roman Catholic church of Spanish-American type. As has been described,
these Teocallis were for purposes of religious rite and sacrifice, and
upon their upper platforms were the sanctuaries, idols, and
never-extinguished sacred fire, all reached by exterior staircases up
the slope of the structure.
The State of Oaxaca--and part of the adjoining State of Guerrero--is
remarkable for the numerous ruins of prehistoric inhabitants scattered
upon its ridges and mountain crests. Terraces, pyramids, and walls
crown the summits and extend down the slopes, actually clashing in some
cases with the natural profiles of the hills, and causing the natural
and artificial to mingle in a strange, and at first glance, scarcely
distinguishable blend. These numerous ruins, and the small cultivated
terraced patches on the almost inaccessible hill slopes, bring to mind
the similar constructions of the old ruins and the singular "andenes"
of the Andes of Peru.[8] They point to a busy and numerous population
in former times, and in some cases the topography of whole mountain
slopes has been remodelled by the hand of prehistoric man. No place was
too inaccessible, and terrace and temple crown the Andine summits in
Peru at more than 16,000 feet elevation above sea-level, and in Mexico
in similar or greater profusion, but at less altitude.
[Footnote 8: See my book, "The Andes and the Amazon."]
Among the remarkable ruins of this nature, in Oaxaca, are those of
Monte Alban, near the capital city of Oaxaca. Here are entire crests of
mountains, cut away into terraces, quadrangles, and courts, and their
great extent and strange environment create a sense of awe and
amazement in the beholder. The utter abandonment and sense of solitude;
the high ridges, thousands of feet above the valley, which, dim and
distant through the atmospheric haze, glimmers below; the vast expanse
of sky and landscape, without a sound or touch of life, invests the
remains of those seemingly unreal or fairy cities of prehistoric man
with a sense of mystery and unfathomed time. Pyramid after pyramid,
terrace after terrace, the latter from 500 to 1,000 feet in length,
extend along the ridge of the Alban hill--the numerous truncated
pyramids rising, like the playthings of some prehistoric giant, from
the levelled places. The beholder may imagine the chain of Teocallis
which crowned them, lighted up at night by the glare of the
never-extinguished sacred fires, as the thronging multitude of the
great population of those barbaric peoples of pre-Columbian Mexico
pressed along the streets below. He may fill in, in his mind's eye, the
picture, fanciful and unreal, as if borrowed from the pages of some
Eastern romance, were it not that the actual vestiges of that time are
before him. Vast labour--probably directed by autocratic mandate
without heed of native life, and working throughout generations--must
have been employed to collect and raise up in place the stone, and
earth, and _adobe_ material of these pyramids, and to make the great
levellings and excavations upon these inaccessible summits. They were
cities, as well as mere places of religious ceremony, and a large
number of people must have dwelt in these "mansions in the skies."
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; FACADE OF THE HALL
OF THE COLUMNS. (The steps have been "restored" by the photographer.)]
In the same State of Oaxaca are the famous ruins of Mitla, pride of the
archaeology of Mexico, situated some thirty miles from the state
capital of Oaxaca. These famous ruins of Mitla are of a different
character to the pyramidal structures of Monte Alban, although they
have a low pyramidal base and were built mainly for religious purposes,
it is probable, like most of these prehistoric monuments. They are
situated in an inhabited valley, and the ruins consist of five main
groups, some of which are exceedingly well preserved. Indeed, whilst
the ruins of Mitla are by no means so extensive as others described,
they are in the best state of preservation of any in the country. And
this is due both to their method of construction and to their
environment; for, unlike the low, tropical regions of Chiapas and
Yucatan, this district is at a considerable altitude above sea-level.
The great "palaces" or halls which these groups form, occupy an area of
about 1,800 feet from north to south, by 1,200 feet from east to west.
The principal groups are known as the "Hall of the Monoliths or
Columns," the "Catholic group," and the "Arroyo group." Like some of
the pyramids throughout Mexico, these are oriented, in this case the
variation being but a few degrees from the cardinal points of the
compass. The remarkable Hall of the Monoliths is a building some 125
feet long by 25 feet wide, with a row of great stone columns running
down the centre. These columns are cut from a single piece of trachyte,
15 feet in height, and 3 feet in diameter at the base, tapering
somewhat upwards, but of almost cylindrical form, without pedestal or
capital. Whilst these columns are intact, the roof, which was doubtless
supported on beams resting on the column, is gone. The weight of these
monoliths is calculated at five or six tons, and they were cut from
quarries in the trachyte rock of the mountains some five miles away,
and more than 1,000 feet above the site of Mitla. In this quarry
half-cut blocks for columns and lintels are still in place. Food for
thought, even for the modern engineer, is this work.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; HALL OF THE
MONOLITHS OR COLUMNS.]
But the monolithic columns here are by no means the only remarkable
features of the masonry of Mitla. The interior and exterior of these
great halls are carved with a beautifully executed geometrical
design--the Greek pattern enclosed in a quadrilateral, the blocks upon
which they are cut being exactly fitted and adjusted in their places
with scarcely visible joints. Indeed, at Mitla, as in other places in
the Americas--Huanuco[9] and Cuzco, in Peru, for example--it seems to
have been deemed an essential and peculiar art to adjust great blocks
of stone with so great a nicety that no mortar was necessary and the
joints almost invisible. This, of course, necessitated infinite time
and patience--both of which were at the disposal of these prehistoric
builders. It is to be recollected, in this connection, that each stone
was generally an individual and not a counterpart, and so often had to
be fitted to its fellows in the wall, by the laborious method of
continually placing and removing. The remarkable and intricate nature
of the mosaics and carved blocks at Mitla call forth the admiration of
the observer. A vast number of separate stones have been employed, each
requiring its respective forming, shaping, and placing, and one of the
halls alone shows more than 13,000 such stones in its walls. The stone
doorways to these halls are chaste, massive, and effective. The stone
lintels in some cases are more than 12 feet long, and nearly 4 feet
thick. Indeed, there exist at Mitla nearly a hundred examples of great
monoliths, whether columns, lintels, or roof stones, some weighing as
much as 15 tons, and up to 20 feet in length.
[Footnote 9: See the "Andes and the Amazon."]
The earliest account of the ruins of Mitla, by Francisco de Burgoa, a
priest of Oaxaca, who visited them in 1674, states that these beautiful
halls were the scene, in prehistoric times, of the most diabolical
rites. To-day the ruins are surrounded by a rude native population,
most of whom dwell in wretched _jacales_, in a waterless and sun-beat
valley--an environment in striking contrast to the antique splendour of
these halls of the earlier occupiers of the land.
The ruins of Palenque, in the State of Chiapas, are situated at the
base of the picturesque foothills of Tumbala, which border upon
Guatemala, in a true tropical environment of luxuriant forest and
brimming streams. From this setting the ruined temples and pyramids
stand forth like a vision of a charmed or fabled story. Dense tropical
undergrowth covers them, and grows again as soon as explorers, who have
removed portions of Nature's persistent covering, leave the place. The
main structures take the form of great truncated pyramids built up of
earth, stones, and masonry, with temples and palaces of masonry upon
their summits. Twelve of these pyramids have been discovered so far,
and eight are crowned by buildings, the principal of which are known
respectively as, the "Temple of the Sun," the "Temple of the Cross,"
"Temple of the Inscriptions," and the extensive group of ruins termed
"The Palace." These temples and palaces consist of massive masonry
walls, partly of roughly-shaped blocks, and partly of cut-and-carved
stone, and stucco sculpture, with numerous doorways or openings on to
the platform of the pyramid-summit. The interior of the buildings is a
singular vault-like construction, covered with roofs of masonry carried
by the vaulting. These vaults, however, do not embody the principle of
the arch, but rather of the off-set, or lean-to, and are very high in
proportion to their width. From the palace group arises a square tower
of four storeys, about 40 feet in height, forming the centre of the
group of extensive courts, buildings, and facades which surround it,
all built upon the summit of a pyramid some 200 feet square. As in the
Yucatan structures, the lintels over the doorway-openings in the walls
were of wood, and their decay has largely been the cause of the facades
having fallen into ruins, in many places. There are various interior
staircases to these buildings, and the huge and unique reliefs of human
figures are a remarkable feature of the interior. The beautiful figure
known as the Beau Relief is compared to the relief sculptures of
Babylon and Egypt. The material of construction was limestone,
generally in unshaped blocks, not laid in regular courses, but with
large quantities of mortar and stucco. The walls were lavishly painted
and coloured. Indeed, the nature of the building has doubtless obeyed
the character of the stone, which does not lend itself to careful
cutting and carving like the easily-worked trachyte of Mitla. A very
noteworthy structure of this prehistoric city, is the subterranean
passage-way for the stream, which passes down the valley upon whose
slopes the ruins of Palenque are situated. This, of stone-vaulted
construction, after the manner before described, is somewhat less than
1,000 feet long, and the stream still flows through a portion of it. On
every hand the extraordinary vigour of the tropical forest is evident,
and the dense growth of trees, vines, and herbs which cover valley,
pyramid, walls, and roofs, attest the power of the vegetable world.
The prehistoric structures of Yucatan--among the principal of which are
those of Uxmal and Chichen-Ytza--are exceedingly numerous. Indeed, the
traveller in this territory of the Mayas is rarely out of sight of
crumbling pyramid or temple, as he traverses the dense forests of these
curious flat and streamless limestone regions. Whilst most of these
edifices were for purposes of religious ceremonial, the object of many
of them can scarcely be conjectured. Their builders appear to have been
people of a peaceful nature, and their dwellings do not generally bear
evidence of defensive design. The architectural skill of the Mayas must
have been of a very high order. Among the buildings which exist some
are nearly perfect units of design, and seem almost to argue the use of
"working drawings," as the plan and detail must have been perfected as
a whole before the building was begun. This architectural skill of
conception, however, has been common in many countries. Some of the
buildings were in use when Cortes landed and fought on the shores of
Yucatan, nearly four hundred years ago; nevertheless, they are in a
remarkable state of preservation, notwithstanding the ravages both of
Nature and of man, tending towards their destruction; for on the one
hand, the roots of trees and profuse vegetation of a tropical region
are efficient levers in the throwing down of the masonry, and on the
other, the vandal ignorance of the surrounding inhabitants of the
modern towns of the region permits them to make use of the stones in
their own walls.
The ruins of Chichen-Ytza, the prehistoric city in the northern part of
Yucatan, are among the most important and best preserved of any of the
stone structures of the Americas. The ruins are grouped around two
great natural wells, the _cenotes_, famous in this remarkable
peninsula. Indeed, the derivation of the name of the old city is from
Maya words meaning the "Mouth of the Well," and it serves to show the
value in which these singular water-supplies were held in this
riverless region of Yucatan. Among the most interesting of the
structures of Chichen and Uxmal is that of the buildings known as El
Foloc, or "the Church." Another is that known as the "House of the
Nuns," and yet another the "Temple of the Tigers," which latter shows a
sculptured procession of tigers or lynxes. Again, "the Castle" is
remarkable, set upon a pyramid rising more than 100 feet above the
plain. The "Governor's Palace," the "House of the Pigeons," and "House
of the Turtles," are others of these remarkable structures.
The profuse and extraordinary, yet barbaric-appearing sculpture of the
facades and interiors of these buildings arrests the observer's
attention, and, indeed, fills him with amazement, as does their
construction in general. What instruments of precision did a rude
people possess who could raise such walls, angles, monoliths, true and
plumb as the work of the mason of to-day?
It would be beyond the scope of this work to enter more fully into the
details of these ruins. They have been minutely examined and described
by famous archaeologists, who have devoted much time thereto, and the
student may be referred to their works. The foregoing is but a sketch,
barely touching upon the extensive and beautiful handwork in stone of
the ancient dwellers of this land. Indeed, the traveller may behold
them for himself, without great risk or difficulty. He will observe
them with admiration. Pyramids rising from the plains or forest-seas
which surround them; strange halls where unknown people dwelt; great
cities where busy races lived. The character of the various groups of
ruins throughout the land shows the effect that the geology of the
respective regions has had upon the stone-masonry of these prehistoric
builders. As has been shown, the beautiful trachyte of Mitla, which,
whilst it is tough and enduring, is soft, and lends itself readily to
the chisel. The result has been handed down in the beautiful and exact
sculpture of the blocks and _grecques_ of the facades of these palaces:
work which could not have been performed in a more refractory stone.
Not a great distance away are the Monte Alban ruins, as described,
which, although extensive and remarkable, show nothing of exact and
intricate work in stone-shaping. The hard or silicious rocks which form
the immediate region, and the quartzite and crystalline limestone, did
not lend themselves, either in the quarry or under the chisel, to such
work. In Chiapas, the unshaped and uncoursed masonry of Palenque is
formed of a hard, brittle limestone, scarcely capable of being worked
to faces. No invisible joints, such as are the beauty of some of the
ancient stone structures of the Americas--North and South--were
possible, and mortar and stucco were freely employed. Very different,
however, was the limestone used in Yucatan. It was easily quarried from
its bed, and was of such a texture as lent itself to the profuse and
beautiful sculpture of those Maya cities of long ago. Again, the great
pyramidal structures of Teotihuacan and surrounding ruins of the Toltec
civilisation, had little for their composition but lavas of basaltic
nature, which did not possess a character adaptable for exact
stone-shaping. Thus it is seen how largely the existence, or
non-existence, of freestone influenced the character of these
prehistoric structures.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF MITLA; THE HALL OF THE
GRECQUES.]
Of exceeding interest are these old buildings of the early Mexicans,
whether upon the open plains of the uplands, or buried in the glades of
the tropical forests. There they arise, great palace walls where
sculptured tigers and serpents, and strange designs, run in barbaric
riot around their ruined facades, above grim vaults, subterranean
passages, and chambers of inexplicable purpose. There they stand,
chapters in stone of the history of a people whose destiny it seems to
have been to have formed no link in the purpose and evolution of man; a
people who seem to have been upon the threshold of a true civilisation.
The form of government of the principal peoples of Anahuac, the Aztecs
and Texcocans, was an uncommon one--that of an elected monarchy. The
king or emperor was chosen, however, from among members of the royal
family, whether brothers or nephews of the preceding sovereign, by the
four appointed electors. He was installed with barbaric splendour, a
main feature of the event being the great sacrifice of human beings in
the Teocalli--that diabolical custom which ever robs the Aztec _regime_
of the dignity of any appellation beyond that of semi-civilisation.
Otherwise the Aztec _regime_ may be considered as a military democracy.
The land was held, to some extent, by great chiefs under a species of
feudal system which carried with it certain obligations as to military
service, but it was also assigned to the use of the people. The
monarchy became of a despotic character, and legislative power lay with
the sovereign, although a system of judicial tribunals administered
justice throughout the cities of the Empire, and the Aztec civilisation
had at least advanced far enough to acknowledge and uphold, by legal
machinery, the rights and security of individuals and of property. Like
the customs of the Incas of Peru, heavy penalties--generally of
death--were meted out for bribery or corruption of the officers of
justice.
Indeed, the great crimes were in most cases capital offences, as
murder, adultery, thieving, as well as the misappropriation of funds,
and the removal of land boundaries with intent to defraud. Marriage was
a solemn and binding ceremonial, and divorce could be obtained only
after a careful judicial inquiry and sanction. Slavery existed in
several forms--captives of battles, reserved for the sacrifice;
criminals, paupers, and debtors became slaves voluntarily; and children
of poor parents who were sold into a species of mild servitude or
dependency. No child, however, could be born into the condition of
slavery--a somewhat unique proviso among systems of servitude.
The land system was, in some respects, similar to that which obtained
amongst the Incas: a just and philosophical distribution of the soil
amongst the people who dwelt upon it. Indeed, in the matter of land
tenure, both the Incas and the Aztecs--these semi-civilised peoples of
prehistoric America--employed a system which the most advanced nations
of to-day--Great Britain or the United States--have not yet evolved,
although in the case of Britain it seems that such is slowly appearing.
The system was that of parcelling out the land among the families of
the villages or country-side, and did not permit its absorption by
large, individual landholders. The peasant thus had his means of
support assured, and it was forbidden to dispose of the land thus
allotted, which reverted to the State in the case of extinction of the
family. This land system was governed by a careful code of laws, in
these American communities. In Peru the individual ownership of land
was a very marked feature of the social _regime_.[10] Lands were
nevertheless set apart for the sovereign.
[Footnote 10: See my books "Peru," and the "Andes and the Amazon."
These land systems are worthy of study by economists upon the land
question to-day.]
Taxes were paid upon agriculture and manufacture, in goods. These
included most of the very varied products of the empire--varying as
they did with the wide range of climate and topography, just as the
products of the Mexico of to-day vary. Gold and copper utensils,
pottery, arms, paper, cochineal, timber, cocoa, grains, fruits, gums,
animals, and birds, and the beautiful feather-work in which the people
excelled, were among these. Spacious warehouses in the capitals existed
(as in Peru) for the storing of these, and any embezzlement or
maladministration was rigorously punished.
Another institution of the Aztecs which calls to the traveller's mind a
similar one among the coeval Incas of Peru, three thousand miles away
in South America, was that of their means of communication. Such were
maintained by relays of runners or postmen, who journeyed at great
speed over roads which connected the distant parts of the empire; and
it is stated that two hundred miles were covered in a day by these
trained messengers, each of which performed the two leagues--the
distance between the post-houses--within an hour. Just as the Inca
Emperor of Peru, at Cuzco, beyond the great Cordillera of the Andes,
was served with fish brought in _fresh_ from the Pacific Ocean, so
Montezuma, the Aztec monarch, also ate it, straight from the Gulf of
Mexico, at his capital of Tenochtitlan beyond the maritime Cordillera
of Anahuac. Striking and of marked interest to the traveller of to-day,
in those vast and rugged regions of Mexico and Peru, is this matter of
the native couriers, who journeyed over mountain roads, swollen rivers,
desert plains, and ice-crowned summits.
The wealthier people lived in houses of stone, finished and furnished
with certain barbaric luxuriance, in which tapestries woven and richly
coloured, and secured with fastenings of gold, had their place. A
remarkable industry and article of clothing of the early Mexicans was
the beautiful feather-work, made of the plumage of the many-coloured
birds, for which Mexico is famous. Surtouts of this feather-work were
worn outside their military dresses, or armour, of padded cotton.
War was the great mainspring of action of the Aztecs. It is true that
they had a long peaceful period after their establishing upon the
lake-girt island of the Eagle and the Serpent, and that they developed
their civilisation in some security within this natural fortification,
but nevertheless, as previously shown, they extended their conquests on
all sides. Fear, not regard, kept the subject-nations of Anahuac under
their sway, however, and this was one of the elements leading to the
downfall of the empire, in the course of time. Military orders were
much esteemed and bestowed. The armies were well equipped and drilled,
and breaches of discipline were rigorously punished. The hospitals,
which were established for the treatment of the sick and wounded,
called forth the praise of the Spanish chroniclers. Captives of war
were made as abundantly as possible, to be reserved for the sacrificial
stone of the war-god, and the Aztecs carried on this appalling practice
of human sacrifice to such an extent as has not been equalled by any
other nation. But the most atrocious part of the ceremony, as practised
on some occasions, was that of the serving up of the body of victims at
a repast, where they were eaten!--sheer cannibalism, which is vouched
for as their practice as a religious rite.
How was the history of the early Mexicans handed down and perpetuated?
It is probable that the ancient civilisations of America were near the
dawn of a literature when their culture was destroyed. They had already
some phonetic signs in use, from which, in the natural course of time,
an alphabet might have evolved; but the picture-writing, or clumsy
hieroglyphical representation of things in line and colour to express
ideas, was their main method. Yet their laws, State accounts, history,
and other matters were so recorded. When the Spaniards set foot on the
coast a hieroglyphical representation of them and their ships,
delineated on native paper, was in the hands of Montezuma a few hours
afterwards--a species of rapid edition of a newspaper indeed! But these
written records were supplemented by oral descriptions, and the two
methods in conjunction formed the Aztec literature. Paper for such
documents were made of skins, or cotton cloth, or of the fibrous leaves
of the _maguey_, and this last, a species of "papyrus," was carefully
prepared, and was of a durable nature. Aztec literature of this nature
existed in considerable quantities at the beginning of the Hispanic
occupation. It was thoroughly destroyed by the execrable act of the
first Archbishop of Mexico--Zumarraga, who, looking upon these papers
as "devilish scrolls," had them collected, piled up, and burnt! Some
few, however, escaped, and were preserved and published in Europe. Some
famous Maya documents of this nature, from Yucatan, have also brought
to light some details of those people.
The Mexicans' scientific knowledge was simple and primitive. Some
arithmetical system had been evolved, but, on the other hand, they had
calculated and adopted a chronology--probably it had been inherited
from the Toltecs--which displayed a remarkable precision, in that they
adjusted the difference of the civil and solar year in a way superior
to that of contemporary European nations.
In primitive Mexico--like primitive Peru--agriculture was far advanced
as an industry. Land was apportioned, as has been shown, on a
philosophical basis for the needs of the inhabitants. In that respect
the system was far superior to that of the Republic of Mexico of
to-day, where the whole surface of the land is mainly held by large
landholders. Irrigation was an advanced art, artificial canals being
made to conduct the water from the streams to the arid lands. The main
article of diet among the mass of the people--then, as now--was _maiz_,
which grows freely from highlands to lowlands. Bananas,
chocolate--indeed, the latter, _chocolatl_, is an Aztec word--were
among their numerous agricultural products. The _maguey_--the _Agave
americana_--was an invaluable ally of life and civilisation. It
afforded them the famous beverage of _pulque_; they made ropes, mats,
paper, and other things from its fibre; and the leaves furnished an
article of diet.
Mining was confined to the getting of gold from riverbeds, where it had
been concentrated by Nature, and possibly on a small scale by
amalgamation with quicksilver. Copper and tin were found and used, and
indeed to-day the natives in certain places beat out large copper
vessels[11] and offer for sale masses of rude copper _matte_,[11] from
their primitive earthen furnaces. The obsidian mines of Itzala
furnished them with tools for the cutting of stone, sculpture, and
other purposes, and for their terrible weapons of war.
[Footnote 11: I have used and purchased these articles in the State of
Durango.]
Sculpture and painting were very rudimentary, the former being confined
chiefly to the representation of repugnant deities, although the carved
stone edifices and temples were in some cases singularly beautiful, as
elsewhere described. The sculptured figures of Mexican deities, in some
cases, remind the traveller strongly of similar representations of the
Incas,[12] such as exist in the fastnesses of the Andes of Peru. The
famous Mexican Calendar stone, weighing about fifty tons, which was
brought for many miles over broken country to the Aztec capital, is one
of the most remarkable examples of their sculpture. Numerous smaller
examples of prehistoric sculpture exist, some beautiful in design and
execution. The feathered serpent is a frequent symbolical device upon
these native works of art.
[Footnote 12: The figure of the conventionalised serpent-god on the
onyx tablet found in 1895 in the Valley of Mexico and taken to the
Museum of Chicago (see Holmes's "Ancient Cities of Mexico") strongly
reminds me of the figure on the stone from Chavin in Peru (see "The
Andes and the Amazon").]
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF TEMPLE AT CHICHEN-YTZA, IN
YUCATAN.]
Pottery was made without the potter's wheel, by modelling; and painting
and burning were practised. Musical instruments were also made of clay.
Trade was conducted in ancient Mexico in great fairs or marketplaces,
not in shops, and indeed this custom is still that preferred by the
Mexican natives of the _peon_ class to-day. The currency consisted of
quills of gold-dust, small pieces of tin, and stamped copper, and
barter was a principal mode of transaction. The merchants were an
important class, carrying on extensive operations and expeditions far
beyond the borders of the empire, under armed escorts, and they
occupied often a position of political, and even diplomatic nature,
such as was a peculiar feature of Aztec civilisation.
Social conditions showed much of quiet civilisation and tolerance. The
women were never employed in the fields; and they took equal part with
the men in social matters. They were modest and not unattractive,
traits which remain to this day among the peasant class of Mexico. The
_menage_ of Aztec homes, method of feasting, foods, napery, ablutions,
and other matters, as recorded by the historians show a marked stage of
refinement, except for the abominable practice of cannibalism.
Chocolate and _pulque_ were the favourite drinks.
Any survey of the Aztec customs shows a remarkable fact--they seem to
have received their civilisation and customs from more than one source.
For among the most refined habits and methods the most barbarous and
disgusting acts are found. A refined and humane spirit of culture
seems, by some method, or at some time, to have been grafted on to a
spirit of primitive savagery, and each to have retained its character
and practices. But their social system was not an unhappy one for their
people. It was an epoch of handiwork, where all were employed and all
were fed; and if there were few comforts and enlightenments in their
life, there was, at least, little misery, such as is so freely
encountered in the life of modern civilisation.
But destiny was now to compass the end of the Aztec _regime_, for from
the shores of the stormy waters of the seas towards the sunrise, came
rumours of strange white men. Who were they? asked the Aztec emperor
and his advisers, in solemn conclave. Were they not those heralded by
the long-expected Quetzalcoatl? If so, of what use was it to defy the
fates, which had set forth long ago that the land should be ruled, some
day, by a white race coming from the East? And when a fleet of great
"water-houses," with white wings, touched at Yucatan, and the swift
runners brought the tidings over nigh a thousand miles of forest and
mountain in a few days, the credulous ear of Montezuma listened easily.
And when the Spaniards landed at Vera Cruz, and won their way up to the
fastnesses of Anahuac, it was still the hand of destiny. The time was
fulfilled, the arm of civilisation had reached out towards the West,
and it fell athwart the Great Plateau of unknown Mexico.
CHAPTER IV
CORTES AND THE CONQUEST
Landing of Cortes--Orizaba peak--The dawn of conquest--Discovery of
Yucatan--Velasquez and Grijalva--Life and character of Cortes--Cortes
selected to head the expedition--Departure from Cuba--Arrival at
Yucatan--The coast of Vera Cruz--Marina--Vera Cruz established--Aztec
surprise at guns and horses--Montezuma--Dazzling Aztec gifts--Messages
to Montezuma--Hostility of the Aztecs--Key to the situation--The
Cempoallas--Father Olmedo--Religion and hypocrisy of the Christians--
March to Cempoalla--Montezuma's tax-collectors--Duplicity of Cortes--
Vacillation of Montezuma--Destruction of Totonac idols--Cortes
despatches presents to the King of Spain--Cortes destroys his ships--
March towards the Aztec capital--Scenery upon line of march--The
fortress of Tlascala--Brusque variations of climate--The Tlascalans--
Severe fighting--Capitulation of Tlascala--Faithful allies--Messengers
from Montezuma--March to Cholula--Massacre of Cholula--The snow-capped
volcanoes--First sight of Tenochtitlan.
"Brightly my star, new hope supplying,
Leads on the hour shall all, all repay!"
Such, indeed, might have been the sentiment which inspired the breasts
of Hernando Cortes and his Spaniards on that memorable Good Friday,
April 21, 1519, as they first set foot upon the Mexican mainland, upon
those sandy shores which in the act they christened Vera Cruz.
Before them, far away beyond the sandy desert and the tree-crowned
slopes, stretched a high cordillera, a curtain drawn between them and
the unknown world of the interior. What lay there? Matters of grave
interest and preoccupation! For beyond that far, blue maritime defence
of Anahuac--they had that moment learned it--there dwelt a mighty
potentate and people, steeped with savage soldier-craft, rendered more
terrible by the barbaric civilisation which it upheld. Here were no
gentle savages such as they had hunted in the forests of Cuba and
Hispaniola; and the mail-clad, helmeted Spaniards listened at first
with mixed feelings to the accounts of the friendly Indians who greeted
them at the shore, feelings in which the spirit of conquest rose high
and dominant.
The ten caravels of Cortes are swinging at anchor in the bay, whose
white-capped waters they have just passed. The Spaniards have
reconnoitred the beach, and their eyes have followed the rising
landscape to where, beyond the forest-clad mountains, and emerging from
the clouds which girt them, a single gleaming, snowy point appeared,
piercing the blue heavens like the gnomon of a mighty dial. It was
Citlaltepetl, the "mountain of the star," the natives told them. It was
the lofty Orizaba, the sunlight on its perpetual snow-cap bringing it
to deceptive nearness.
Halting thus upon this sunny shore, who were these Spaniards, and what
was their mission and character? Let us briefly sketch them. Those were
stirring times in "ocean chivalry." The dream of Columbus had been
accomplished for twenty-five years; Balboa had crossed the isthmus a
few years since and Panama was known. The islands of Cuba and Santa
Domingo had been settled and made starting-points for further
discoveries, and two years before--in 1517--a Cuban _hidalgo_,
Hernandez de Cordova, blown by a fierce gale, with his three ships, far
from his objective point of the Bahamas, landed on an unknown land
where the Indians said "_Tectecan_"--"I do not understand you." What
was this land? It was the peninsula now called
Yucatan--"_tectecan_"--part of the Mexico of to-day. And on Cordova's
return to Cuba, the governor of that island, Don Diego de Velasquez,
bestirred himself right actively, impelled by certain longings for
conquest he had long nourished, and by the adventures, and curious
things of laboured gold brought back by Cordova. Fitting out four
vessels, Velasquez put them under the command of his nephew, Juan de
Grijalva, and quickly sent them forth to win him riches and fame in
those unknown lands--May, 1518. Grijalva duly touched and coasted upon
the islands and shores of Yucatan, and his name remains to-day in the
great Grijalva river. Thence he followed the horseshoe curve of the
Gulf of Mexico, and arrived and landed at San Juan de Ulua, the same
point where we left Cortes and his Spaniards halting. To Grijalva is
due the prestige of first landing on the shores of Mexico, and of
having intercourse with its people of the Aztecs. But, Grijalva
tarrying long, Don Diego de Velasquez had despatched another
expedition, commanding his nephew to return, which the latter did and
was received coldly by the jealous and ungenerous Governor, as he is
painted by his historians. Still bent on greater conquest, Velasquez
cast about for men, money, and ships, and his eye fell on the capable
Hernando Cortes, the young Spaniard who, born in Estremadura in 1485,
had set out, impatient of the old world, to seek his fortunes in the
new: and had amassed--"God knows by what methods," as one of his
chroniclers says--a small fortune under the Governor's rule. Here was
the man, and, incidentally, here was part of the money! For Cortes was
popular and daring, and notwithstanding the several occasions on which
he had come into collision with the Governor and the law, Velasquez
held him in certain favour.
The life of Cortes up to that point--let us touch upon it before
accompanying him, and know what manner of man he was--had been urged
principally by selfish adventure and amorous intrigues. He had arrived
in Hispaniola in 1504, and upon being offered a grant of land and
_repartimiento_ of Indians replied that "he had left Spain in search of
gold--not to become a land-tilling peasant." In 1511, under Velasquez,
who had been appointed to the conquest of Cuba, Cortes found outlet for
his adventurous spirit, and in the Indian warfare of the island gave
promise of the valour and activity which underlay a jocular and
seemingly trivial character. At the same time he became accustomed to
the barbarous methods of conquest and cruelty displayed by the
Spaniards in those regions, and to the abuse of power and arbitrary
jealousies and exactions displayed both to natives and colonials by the
petty Imperial authorities. Cortes had soon fallen foul of Velasquez.
On two occasions he had been thrown into prison by the Governor's
orders, but had escaped, partly by his own activity, and partly--it is
held--by connivance of his gaolers. Associated with these episodes was
a beautiful Spanish girl, Catalina Juarez, whom he had refused to marry
in spite of the representations of her family, due to his relations
with her: Velasquez also being interested in the family, in the person
of Catalina's sister. However, after a time, Cortes married and lived
happily with her upon his estate. Land and Indians were granted him,
and he acquired some wealth from agriculture and mining, maintaining
good relations with the Governor, Velasquez.
Now it was that Pedro de Alvarado, the future conqueror of Guatemala,
who had accompanied Grijalva to Mexico, returned, and now it was that
Velasquez cast about for men, money and ships, to push the conquest of
Mexico. Choice fell upon Cortes. The long-nourished hopes of the young
Spaniard--he was thirty-four or five--were fulfilled. He realised all
his resources to subscribe towards the expense, covering indeed the
major portion of the cost of ships and stores. The little port of
Santiago de Cuba echoed with the bustle of preparation. The vessels,
most of which were simply open brigantines, the largest not more than
one hundred tons, were rapidly fitted out. Hundreds of men flocked
instantly to his leadership. Away to the West their thoughts and
enthusiasm carried one and all; gold, adventure, fame--who would not
go!
The light and easy character of Cortes changed under the grave import
and responsibility of this great mission, in which he seemed to
recognise some fulfilment by Providence of his lifelong hopes. Here he
was, a relatively humble subject of Spain, of relatively obscure
parentage, although conscious of that powerful instinct of being a
_caballero_--a gentleman--singled out for this great enterprise! There
was but one fear--that its command should be snatched from him at the
last moment! And, indeed, this was averted by a mere hair's breadth,
say the chroniclers. For the jealous Velasquez, influenced by other
jealous advisers, and fearing that the independent spirit of Cortes
would arrogate to himself the glory and profit of the enterprise, once
away from his influence, resolved at the last moment to quit him of his
command and substitute another. Cortes heard of it. Apprehension lent
him a superhuman energy. Once away from Cuba's shores--ah! then he
could parley with its Governor. He visited his trusty officers.
Butchers, bakers, ammunition-makers were bribed and hurried, the stores
were rushed on board, commander and crew embarked at midnight, and when
morning dawned the good people of Santiago de Cuba awoke to see the
white sails of the squadron rising to meet the breeze, whilst the
rattle of the cables of the up-getting moorings fell upon their ears.
Down rushed Velasquez from his bed, and galloped to the wharf. "Stop
them! Stop them!" But it was too late--who could stop them?
Before his sails filled to the breeze Cortes approached the shore in an
armed boat. "Farewell! good Governor," was the burden of his words.
"Time is short, and what is to be done 'twere well it were done
quickly!" And so he sailed away towards the West, into a sunset-land of
conquest-dreams, and left Velasquez fuming on the quay.[13]
[Footnote 13: This story of the departure of Cortes is doubted by some
writers, but it appeals to the mind of the adventurous traveller in
those regions, even to-day, with too strong a ring of probability to be
ignored.]
But the jealous Governor's resources were not quite exhausted. He
despatched swift messengers to other Cuban ports where the expedition
must touch for further supplies, ill-provisioned as it was by the hasty
departure, with orders for the authorities at these points to detain
Cortes at all hazards. It was useless. Far from detention, he received
supplies and reinforcements. A number of well-known _hidalgos_ joined
him, among them Pedro de Alvarado, Cristoval de Olid, Velasquez de
Leon, Gonzalo de Sandoval, Hernandez Puertocarrero, Alonzo de Avila,
and others who took a valiant part afterwards in the conquest. At his
last port of departure Cortes wrote a letter to Velasquez, of a
conciliatory nature: reviewed his forces, which amounted to nearly nine
hundred Spaniards and two hundred Indians, with ten heavy guns, several
falconets, ample ammunition, and sixteen horses, in eleven vessels.
Having addressed the forces in words of enthusiasm, dangling before
them the glories of conquest, specially pointing out to them that they
were carrying the Cross to set before savages, Cortes invoked the
patronage of St. Peter, and the squadron set sail for the shores of
Yucatan.
How they arrived at the island of Cozumel, fought with the Indians of
the mainland, tumbled the gross idols of the savages from their
pyramid-temple, and set up an altar to the Virgin; and how they
recovered an unfortunate Spaniard who had sojourned eight years, after
shipwreck, with the natives of Yucatan; how Alvarado antagonised the
natives and Cortes pacified them; and how they sailed thence to the
real shores of Mexico, where we left them halting, are fascinating
matters of their voyage which we must thus lightly pass over.
[Illustration: PREHISTORIC MEXICO: RUINS OF "THE PALACE" AT
CHICHEN-YTZA, IN YUCATAN.]
Behold a level, sun-beat, wind-swept plain, the drifting sand blown
into _medanos_, or sand-hills, by the hurricanes of the gulf, the
perennial _norte_. Here are the _Conquistadores_ grouped, Cortes and
his associates. Among them is the figure of a woman, and her name is
worthy to rank in the first verse and chapter of our story. It is
Marina, the beautiful Indian girl who had been given to the Spaniards,
among other female slaves, at Tabasco, in Yucatan, and who, Cortes had
learned, spoke the language of the Mexicans, in addition to her native
Yucatec. So Marina was the interpreter through whose medium
understanding was had with the natives. This was in conjunction with
the Spaniard Aguilar--the rescued castaway, who spoke the language of
Marina. But this was only at first, for as Cortes loved her and she
loved him, she soon acquired the Castilian of the _Conquistador_ as his
mistress.
Thus was parley opened with the natives and their caciques, and
knowledge gained of Montezuma, the great Emperor of the Aztecs, and of
the power and circumstances of their empire, whose rule extended to the
coast whereon they stood. Cortes and his captains made presents to the
caciques, and received such in return, and it was decided to establish
the colony of Villa Rica de Vera Cruz. A pretty piece of
juggling--singular yet not unjustifiable--took place in the
inauguration of this, Cortes establishing his captains as its
municipality, resigning the commission he had received from the
Governor of Cuba into the hands of the body he had called into being
himself, and then accepting from it a commission as captain-general,
all taking title as officials of the Crown of Spain! This proceeding,
solemnly carried out on the edge of the wilderness, and in sound of the
roaring waters of the Gulf, is not without a _Gilbertian_ spice.
Rude habitations had been built, guns mounted, and supplies secured
from the Indian population which flocked around the Spaniards. And
suddenly a new sensation was sprung upon these simple people. The
horses were brought on shore, and the cavalry manoeuvred upon the
beach; cannons were fired and trumpets sounded, the shot from the guns,
purposely directed against the trees, smashing them to splinters.
Filled with awe the Aztec chief of the place--the friendly cacique
Teuhtile--bade his picture-writers depict it all; and upon the native
paper these terrible gachupines[14] and their great "water-houses," and
thundering engines, and singular musical instruments, were drawn in
lifelike form by these native "newspaper artists," to be despatched
by the native postmen over the rocky fastnesses of the Cordilleras to
the great Montezuma. Then Cortes announced his mission. He was the
ambassador of a mighty Emperor from beyond the seas, come to greet the
Emperor of the Aztecs and to carry a present from his monarch, the
mightiest in the world. When could he be admitted before Montezuma? The
awe in which this potentate was held by his vassals was shown in
Teuhtile's reply: "Was it possible that a monarch, the equal of the
Aztec king, existed elsewhere? How could the white men ask, at such
short notice, to be admitted to the semi-sacred presence?" But he
brought forward presents of beautiful feather-work and ornaments of
gold for the Spaniards; and Cortes, not to be outdone, produced a
richly-carved chair and other things admired by the simple natives,
including articles of cut glass, which were held to be gems of great
price, as of course the Aztecs had no knowledge of glass. All these
matters were carried out with due ceremony, messengers with the
presents were sent to Montezuma, and the Spaniards, pending the return
of the emissaries of Teuhtile with their greeting, devoted themselves
to the perfecting of their dwellings.
[Footnote 14: The Aztec word for centaurs, which was applied to the
horsemen.]
Little more than a week elapsed. In that time the swift native carriers
had traversed and re-traversed the steep and rugged road from the coast
to the valley of Anahuac, a distance of about two hundred miles each
way. The substance of their message from Montezuma was "Come not
hither; the road is long and dangerous; return to your country with our
greetings to your great King." A magnificent present accompanied this
somewhat chilling reply--articles of gold and silver, beautifully
wrought, among them a huge gold plate, and one of silver, circular in
form and "as large as carriage-wheels," twenty-eight spans in
circumference, representing respectively the images of the sun and the
moon and engraved with figures of animals, doubtless indicative of some
chronological symbol--the value of the gold wheel was afterwards
estimated at more than 50,000 pounds sterling--other articles of
clothing and armour, including a number of beautiful golden shields
inlaid and decorated, necklaces of rubies and pearls, and a quantity of
the intricate and beautiful feather-work.
What was the result of all this, upon the Spaniards--this wealth of
treasure and this unencouraging greeting? "Go back again," was the
substance of Cortes's reply to the ambassadors of Montezuma; "tell your
monarch the mountain road and its dangers do not appal us--we who have
sailed two thousand leagues of troubled ocean to arrive here--and we
cannot return to our great sovereign without having personally greeted
yours." Again the Spaniards waited the messengers' return, weary of the
wind- and sand-swept plains of Vera Cruz; assailed by the _calenturas_
ever encountered upon the American coasts, the bilious malarial
disorders which Nature has made the scourge of the tropics, and which
the science of modern man has only just begun to investigate. Again the
messengers--within ten days--returned. Stripped of its diplomatic
covering of ceremony and further presents, the Aztec Emperor's reply
may be condensed as "Get thee hence!" And, as if to bear out some royal
mandate, the natives disappeared from the vicinity, the supplies were
cut off, leaving the Spaniards halting upon this debatable ground, in
chagrin and indecision.
But not for long. The stern design of the Spaniards had been forced,
and was growing. "I vowed to your Royal Highness that I would have
Montezuma prisoner, or dead, or subject to your Majesty," wrote Cortes
to Carlos V. of Spain, from Vera Cruz; and "Think you we were such
Spaniards as to lie there idly?" wrote Bernal Diaz, the soldier-penman,
afterwards. Yet there was some disaffection in the camp, a portion of
the men, wearied of inaction and fearful of dangers, desiring to return
to Cuba. Here Cortes's diplomacy came to the rescue. "On board, all of
you!" he exclaimed. "Back to Cuba and its Governor, and see what
happens!" The threat and sneer had the effect he expected. Scarcely a
man would return, but on the contrary they clamoured for the
establishment of a colony and for a march on Montezuma and his capital,
whilst the few who remained disaffected were clapped in irons, among
them the _hidalgo_ Velasquez, a relative of the Governor of Cuba.
And now it was that the key to the situation was put into the hands of
Cortes. An embassy from a semi-civilised, powerful nation to the north,
upon the gulf-shores--the Totonacs, of Cempoalla, as they announced
themselves--suddenly arrived in the colony of the Christians. They
brought an invitation from their chief for the Spaniards to visit him,
with the information--and here was the circumstance which should make
conquest possible--that the Totonacs were weary of the Aztec yoke, and
yearned for independence. "Ha!" thought Cortes and his _hidalgo_
associates, "they are delivered into our hands! They are divided, and
so they will fall." Father Olmedo, the wise and pious confessor of the
forces, to whose prudence the security of the Spaniards owed much, and
who was the representative of the great Church which became so potent
in those lands, blessed his comrades' conclaves, and celebrated solemn
Masses. Indeed, every move of the Spaniards was accomplished under such
auspices, and was always referred by Cortes to the influence of the
desire to carry the Cross of Christ and all it embodied, to those
heathen peoples; and in a spirited address to the soldiers he declared
that "without this motive their expedition was but one of oppression
and robbery." The true proportions of piety and hypocrisy contained in
these expressions and acts must be left to the knowledge of human
nature of the reader. Suffice to say that the Spaniards did, to a large
extent, look upon themselves as Crusaders, and that a militant
religious fervour animated them, in conjunction with a spirit of
avarice and cruelty.
And so they marched on Cempoalla, along the sandy shores of the gulf,
passing through villages, with temples devoted to the abominable
sacrificial rites which they had seen in Yucatan. Thence they
encountered the fringe of the tropical forests, and at length entered
the strange town of Cempoalla, with its numerous inhabitants, and
streets, and houses, and excellent surrounding cultivation. Here they
remained some days, the Spaniards delighted with the fertile region and
the hospitable natives. The great Cacique had received them in his
residence--a building of stone upon a pyramid, after the fashion of the
structures of that country, and, the fair Marina interpreting, Cortes
stated his mission--"to redress abuses and punish oppressors, and to
establish the true faith." The substance of the chief's reply was that,
though weary of the oppressive yoke of the Aztecs: Montezuma was a
terrible monarch, who could pour down his warriors upon them. But
Cortes gathered encouragement from his attitude, and in the meantime a
juncture had been effected with the ships upon the coast a few leagues
distant, at a port discovered by Montejo. Further deliberations took
place during the ensuing days, when a momentous event occurred in the
arrival of special emissaries from Montezuma to the Cacique, setting
forth the anger of the Emperor, and demanding instant reparation and
tribute for the disloyalty of the Totonacs in having entertained the
invaders. The fearful and hesitating Totonacs--it was but
natural--would have appeased their anger; but under the instigation of
Cortes these Aztec tax-collectors were seized and imprisoned.
Characteristic of the Spaniard of those days was the act of
double-dealing then performed by Cortes. He secretly released the
prisoners at night, soothed their feelings, sent them on board a ship,
and bid them report his goodwill to Montezuma!
The Totonacs were now too deeply compromised to do aught but become the
sworn allies of the Spaniards. The cherished dream of the return of
Quetzalcoatl had not been fulfilled, but here were these valiant
strangers, who had defied the omnipotent Montezuma! The Spaniards then
established a colony upon the coast near at hand, aided by the natives,
and a town soon arose which was a centre of operations and general
point of distribution for the subsequent operations. Engaged upon the
work was Cortes, when new emissaries arrived from the outraged
Montezuma. The Totonacs were only to be spared out of deference for the
white men who had liberated the tax-collectors! Montezuma was debating
much within himself and with his advisers at this time. "Surely these
terrible white strangers, who had come out of the East, were the
long-expected Quetzalcoatl and his people? It was necessary to placate
or temporise with them, for what destiny had written concerning the
passing of his empire must come to pass." So had pondered the great
Aztec chief, and it was this fear of destiny which had dictated his
attitude, vacillating as it was, towards the strangers. But the
emissaries returned to the lord of Anahuac with the same message as
before--that the white men would visit him in person.
Presents of wives--the soft, pretty Indian damsels, daughters of the
principal chiefs--were made to Cortes and his officers by the Cacique,
in gratitude for assistance against a neighbouring tribe, which the
Spaniards rendered. They must, however, be baptized first, said Cortes,
and the opportunity was taken to enforce the Christian religion upon
their allies. Protests and menace followed, but the idols of Cempoalla
were torn from their pyramid sanctuaries and hurled to the ground; the
foul sacrificial altars cleansed; the image of the Virgin installed
there; and a solemn Mass celebrated by Father Olmedo.
Other stirring events crowded rapidly on. A swift ship was despatched
to Spain with the wheel of gold; the beautiful feather-work, and the
other rare presents of the Aztecs, all given over by the Spaniards as a
royal gift to the young Spanish king; together with a voluminous
epistle. This was sent with the design of forestalling the machinations
of Velasquez; and though the vessel touched at Cuba, it escaped
detention, and safely arrived in Spain. But meantime disaffection arose
in the new colony, and a conspiracy was formed to seize a vessel and
escape to Cuba, by some of the Spaniards who were discontented and
fearful of the future. The plot was discovered and the authors seized
and executed, and a dramatic sequel to this conspiracy came about.
Cortes and some of his advisers resolved to prevent the recurrence of
any further danger of this nature; to put it out of the power of any to
desert; to place the knowledge of the inevitable before his troops,
that the conquest must be undertaken or death found in the attempt. He
sank his ships! Yes; the brigantines which had borne them thither, and
were their only means of retreat from those savage shores, were
dismantled and destroyed.
And now the Spaniards resolutely turn their faces to the mountains.
Threats and entreaties are stilled; the colony is established, the base
secured, the ships are sunk, save that single white-winged caravel far
over the waters of the gulf, prow to the shores of Spain. The Mass is
said, the books are closed. "Forward! my comrades," said Cortes;
"before us lies a mountain road; and adventure, gold, and glory!"
The traveller of to-day, as he traverses by rail the desert coast zone
of the Mexican littoral, and ascends the steep slopes of the eastern
Cordillera of the Sierra Madre, to gain access to the Great Plateau or
Valley of Mexico beyond it, reposing amid the cushions of his Pullman
car, will neither endure the fatigue which the _Conquistadores_
suffered nor be assailed, night and day, with the menace of savage foes
on every hand. But the grand and varied setting still remains: the
strange and beautiful fairyland of Nature's rapid transformation
scenes, the changing landscape and successive climates of this
remarkable region. The sandy wastes give place to tropical forests and
fertile valleys, with their bright accompaniment of profuse flower- and
bird-life. These, in turn, disappear from the changing panorama, and
the traveller reaches the appalling escarpments of the Mexican Andes,
looking down from time to time from dizzy ridges, where the ascending
steel lines of the railroad spiral has brought him, to where distant
fertile vales lie in the glimmering haze, thousands of feet below. And
then the scene changes, and the dark rocky ribs and bleak plateau show
that the summit is reached, ten thousand feet above the level of the
ocean's ebb and flow.
[Illustration: THE LAND OF THE CONQUEST: STATE OF VERA CRUZ; VIEW ON
THE MEXICAN RAILWAY; THE TOWN OF MALTRATA IS SEEN THOUSANDS OF FEET
BELOW.]
But what we shall have accomplished in a day the weary _Conquistadores_
have spent many marches in overcoming. Cortes and his men are halting
at the end of a broad valley. What is the cause of the delay? An
extraordinary fortification confronts them; a wall, twice as high as a
man, made of stone blocks, and of enormous thickness, absolutely closes
the passage of the valley, and extends for several miles on either hand
to where it abuts upon the rocky ramparts of the Sierra itself. Was
this some enchanted castle raised up by magician hand? Certainly not;
it was the outer defence of the land of the Tlascalans; the bulwark of
the brave and independent mountain republic, which had ever defied the
power of the Aztecs.
To reach this point the Spaniards had toiled on day after day, sleeping
at night upon their arms. From the tropical lands and climate of the
_tierra caliente_ they had reached the frowning fastnesses of the great
mountains and lofty peaks, which overhang the crest of the eastern
slope of the tableland of Mexico. The rainy season was upon them, and
the trails were wet and heavy, and the atmosphere and humour of the
tropic lands had been debilitating, as indeed they are to the European
of today. The brusque change of climate from heat to cold tried them
sorely, although the latter was the more invigorating. Day by day a
huge coffin-shaped mountain had overhung the horizon--the Cofre de
Perote, an extinct volcano, in whose vicinity the desolating action of
old lava-flows startles the traveller's eye. As they reached the summit
of the range--the crests of the Eastern Sierra Madre--the rain and snow
and bitter winds, the functions of Nature which she ever lets loose
upon the head of the traveller who defies her in such inclement
regions, assailed the Spaniards, and some of the unfortunate Indians,
natives of the tropic lands of the coast, succumbed to the cold. On, on
they toiled up this untrodden way--untrodden, that is, by the foot of
civilised man before that day, and at length, having crossed the
summit, the _divortia aquarum_ of the continent, they began the descent
towards the mild climate of the Valley of Mexico.
Upon the confines of this valley was a town surrounded by extensive
cultivated fields of _maiz_. Stone buildings, numerous _teocallis_, and
a large population attested the importance of the place; and when the
Spaniards asked if it was tributary to Montezuma the chief replied with
another question, asking with surprise if there existed any other lord
worthy of tribute. Another chief and tribe some miles beyond, gave a
good reception to the Spaniards, and there they gladly halted for some
days. The house of the chief was upon a hill, "protected by a better
fort than can be found in half Spain," wrote Cortes to his Emperor at
Castile. Here it was that the Spaniards received news of the existence
of the people of Cholula and Tlascala, who inhabited the regions of
their intended line of march. "Go by the road of the Tlascalans," the
friendly chief advised; "the Cholulans are a treacherous people."
Cortes despatched messengers to the chief of Tlascala, but no reply was
received, and after waiting some days the Spaniards continued their
march, to where we left them halting before the stone wall across the
valley.
And then began the most stirring events of their march. The Tlascalans
were a people who had developed a remarkable civilisation and social
and military organisation, akin to that of the Aztecs. On the arrival
of the messengers of Cortes much dissension had prevailed in their
councils, some of the chiefs--the community was ruled by a council of
four--maintaining that this was an opportunity for vengeance against
their hereditary enemies, the hated Aztecs and their prince, Montezuma.
"Let us ally ourselves with these terrible strangers," they urged, "and
march against the Mexicans." For the doings of the Spaniards had echoed
through the land already, with a tale of smitten tribes and broken
idols. But the wily old Xicotencatl thought otherwise. "What do we know
of their purpose?" was his counsel; so it was agreed that the army of
the Tlascalans and Otomies, who were in force near the frontier, under
the command of the fiery young warrior--son of old Xicotencatl, and
bearing the same name--should attack them. "If we fail," the old
barbarian urged, "we will disavow the act of our general; if we win--"!
The stone fortification at the valley's end had been undefended, and
with Cortes at their head the Spaniards entered Tlascalan territory.
Skirmishing was followed by a pitched battle between the Christians and
the Tlascalans, in which the firearms and lances of the Spaniards
wrought terrible havoc on their antagonists. Astounded at the sight of
the horses--those extraordinary beings, whether of animal or demoniacal
origin they knew not--and appalled by the thundering of the guns, which
seemed to have some superhuman source, the Tlascalans at first fell
back. But they overcame their fears, fell savagely upon the invaders,
and were with difficulty repulsed, having managed to kill two of the
horses. Greatly to Cortes's regret was this, for the noble animals were
few, and--more serious still--their death removed that
semi-superstitious dread regarding them, which the natives held.
However, the Spaniards afterwards burie
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/20959