First Sight of the Valley of Mexico.--A Venice in a mountain
Valley.--An Emperor waiting his Murderers.--Cortez mowing down
unarmed Indians.--A new kind of Piety.--Capture of an
Emperor.--Torturing an Emperor to Death.--The Children paying
the Penalty of their Fathers' Crimes.--The Aztecs and other
Indians.--The Difference is in the Historians.--The Superstitions
of the Indians.--The Valley of Mexico.--An American Survey of the
Valley.--A topographical View.--The Ponds Chalco, Xochimulco, and
Tezcuco were never Lakes.
My first view of the Valley of Mexico was from the point where the
Acapulco road passes the Cross of the "Marquis of the Valley." I had
read with eagerness the History of the Conquest, and of the adventures
of the noble _Conquistador_. Not a shadow of a doubt had then crossed
my mind in regard to the truth of all that had been so elegantly
written. Beautiful composition had supplied the place of evidence, and
that practice of writing romances of history which the Spaniards had
inherited from the Moors had completely captivated me, as it had
thousands of others. The aspect of the valley was all that my fancy had
painted it. The sun was in the right quarter to produce the greatest
possible effect. The unnumbered pools of surface-water that abound in
the valley appeared at that distance like so many lakelets supplied by
crystal fountains, as each one reflected the bright sun from its
mirror-like surface; these all were inclosed in the richest setting of
nature's green.
It was such a scene as would justify the extravagant language which
Spaniards have employed in describing it. While I recalled its
traditional history, I was tempted to exclaim as a native would have
done, and to give credence to the fables of which this valley has been
the scene. Here, as the story ran, amid floating gardens of rarest
flowers and richest fruits, lay, in olden time, another Venice--a
Venice in an inland mountain valley--a Venice upon whose Rialto never
walked a Shylock with his money-bags; for in this market-place the most
delicious fruits the world produces, the loveliest flowers, rich stuffs
resplendent with Tyrian dyes, and princely mantles of feather-work,
were bought with pretty shells, and such money as the sea produces. It
was a Venice with its street of waters and its central basin, where
jostled the gondolas of the Aztec nobles and the light canoes of birch
bark among the vessels of commerce which came laden with slaves and
other merchandise from the surrounding villages--a basin that
disappeared the same day that the Indian empire fell.
GUATEMOZIN.
This basin was the last vestige of Aztec dominion; and when there no
longer was any safe shelter upon the land, Guatemozin retired to his
canoe and took shelter here, and calmly waited till his time should
come to be murdered. He could not flee. He could not capitulate, for he
was an emperor. As he sat here waiting for death, what must have been
his reflections! What thoughts did not the very boat he occupied call
up! How often had it carried him out upon the lake to the floating
gardens and volcanic islands, where he had witnessed so many times the
gorgeous reflections of an evening sun upon the snow-capped
Popocatapetl, in whose bowels "the god of fire" had his dwelling! And
then the lake itself, how much it had perplexed his thoughts, that in
one part its waters should be fresh, with islands teeming with the
richest vegetation, and in another part salt and bitter, with utter
barrenness resting upon its shores! How he used to meet his brother of
Tezcuco in the after part of the day, to exchange congratulations and
talk over affairs of interest to both the royal families! Now all these
pleasures were terminated forever. His brother of Tezcuco was in the
ranks of his enemies, seeking his destruction.
Thus sat the emperor, surrounded by a numerous fleet of canoes, whose
occupants were without hope of escape or strength to fight; but, with
Indian stoicism, all sat waiting their inevitable doom from freebooters
whom they had disappointed of their prey. As the emperor and his nobles
sat here witnessing the destruction of their pumice-stone palaces and
mud-built huts, and the filling up of their canals, they consoled
themselves with the reflection that their gold and their wealth were
all at the bottom of these canals, and that the Spaniards, in their hot
haste to enjoy the spoils of the city, were unwittingly burying forever
the prize for which they were contending. Such were the thoughts of
these Aztecs as they sat in their canoes, longing for death to relieve
them from agony of suspense, enduring all the torments of the extremest
thirst, which they vainly sought to quench by draughts of the brackish
water of the lake. They had not long to wait; for, by the express
commands of Cortez, his followers were mowing down unresisting
citizens, because the emperor, over whom they had no control, would not
surrender himself.
Who can stand for the first time upon the mountain rim that incloses
this valley, and not have his thoughts carried back to some such scene
as this? The recollection is not easily eradicated that the remnant of
a once powerful tribe of Indians, partially emerged from barbarism,
here received their death, in cold blood, at the hands of a party of
white murderers. The good Archbishop Loranzana commends the piety of
Cortez in never neglecting to attend mass before going out to his daily
work of slaughter. It was a pious act, no doubt, that on the last
morning of the siege he stopped and listened to a mass--that pantomime
which set forth the death of the Redeemer of the world--preparatory to
consummating the butchery of Indians incapable of resistance.
Garci Holguin, the master of a brigantine, or rather flat-boat, bolder
than the rest, drove through the fleet of canoes that occupied the
basin, until he encountered in the centre a canoe containing the person
of the emperor, whom he made prisoner and brought to Cortez, whereupon
the slaughter ceased.
Neither the horrid sight which the city presented, nor the fallen
fortunes of a brave enemy, could move the soul of Cortez. A brigand
knows no remorse and feels no pity. Gold had been the object of his
pious mission, and when he found not gold enough to satisfy the
cravings of his gang, he soaked the fallen emperor's feet in oil, and
then burned them at a slow fire, to extort from him a confession of the
place of concealment of his supposed treasure; and when, in after
years, he was tired of the burden of such a prisoner, he wantonly
hanged him up by the heels to die in a distant forest.
In this very city where Cortez tortured Guatemozin was a son of Cortez,
who inherited the spoils of his father's atrocities, put to the torture
by one of the Vice-kings, while the children's children of the
Conquistadors paid for the wealth they inherited in the terrible
penalties inflicted upon them by the buccaneers, that ravaged their
coasts for two hundred years. Have not the sins of the fathers been
visited upon the children?
The Aztecs, their empire, and their city, have long since disappeared;
their crimes, and the despotism which they exercised over the tribes
they had conquered, are all forgotten in the terrible catastrophe that
extinguished their national existence. Three hundred years of servitude
in the indiscriminate mass of Indian serfs has blotted out every
feeling of nationality. A few vagabonds among them still claim royal
descent, and, by virtue of their blood or their imposture, pretend to
exercise, in obscure villages, an undefined jurisdiction over Indians
as oppressed as themselves. But the characteristics of the North
American Indians are still visible; they still exhibit the
contradictory traits of Indian character--cruelty and kindness, shyness
and self-possession; enduring the greatest trials without a murmur, and
suffering oppression without complaint; delighting as much as their
northern brethren in tawdry exhibitions, in traditions of the
marvelous, they seem to carry hidden in their inmost soul an idea that
the time will come when they may take vengeance of the despoilers of
their race. They have the Indian's love of adventure and want of
courage. They delight rather in a successful stratagem than in open
hostility, and deem no act of treachery dishonorable by which they can
gain an advantage. Still, they have less romance in their composition
than the unenslaved northern Indians, into whose souls the iron of
despotism has never entered.
THE AZTECS AND THEIR HISTORIANS.
The great difference between what is recorded of the North American
Indian and the Aztec is owing less to any difference in themselves than
to the character of the historians who have written of them. The
northern writers were not carried away by the romance of Indian life;
they were matter-of-fact men, and they drew only matter-of-fact
pictures. Spanish historians, and all early Spanish writers upon New
Spain, except the two brigands, Cortez and Diaz, were priests. With
them, truth was not an essential part of history. By the law of all
countries, the Conquistadors had outlawed themselves by levying
unlicensed war; but as they bore a painting of the Virgin Mary on one
of their standards and the cross on the other, it would be impiety to
place their conduct in its true light. Las Casas was an exception, and
endured persecution for speaking the truth. "He had powerful enemies,"
was all that his apologist dare say, "because he spake the truth." And
if we add to this the sevenfold censorship already described, my reader
will agree with me that it is absurd to place confidence in records
over which the Inquisition exercised a surveillance.
The fabled Aztec empire has almost passed from the traditions of the
Mexican Indians. The name of only one of their chiefs, Montezuma,
remains among them, and this name is affixed to almost every thing that
has an ancient look and is in a dilapidated condition. In my wanderings
among them, I never rejected their proffers of rude hospitality, and I
have listened with pleasure to their wild traditions. I soon found
that, like other Indians, they draw from a supernatural "dream-world"
the fortitude that enables them to bear without a murmur their hard lot
in the present. They readily embraced the superstitions of the
Spaniards, and rendered to the virgin of Guadalupe the adoration they
had formerly bestowed upon their own gods. Their conversion may be
summed up in the words of Humboldt: "Dogma has not succeeded to dogma,
but ceremony to ceremony. The natives know nothing of religion but the
external forms of worship. Fond of whatever is connected with a
prescribed order of ceremonies, they find in the Christian religion
particular enjoyment. The festivals of the Church, the fire-works with
which they are accompanied, the processions mingled with whimsical
disguises, are a most fertile source of amusement to the lower Indians."
THE VALLEY OF MEXICO.
There has been a great deal of poetry and very little plain prose
written about the valley of Mexico. At an early morning hour I stood
upon the heights of Rio Frio; at another morning, as already said, at
the Cross of the Marquis; again, upon the highest peak of the Tepeyaca,
behind Guadalupe, I saw a tropical morning sun disengage itself from
the snowy mountains. From these three favored spots I have looked upon
the valley, where dry land and pools of water seemed equally to compose
the magnificent panorama. Immense mirrors of every conceivable shape
and form were reflecting back the rays of the sun, while the green
shores in which they were set enhanced the effect. The white walls, and
domes, and spires of the distant city heightened the effect of a
picture that can only be fully appreciated by those who have looked
downward through the pure atmosphere of such a lofty position; but when
I came down to the common level, the charm was broken. Instead of
lakelets and crystal springs, I found only pools of surface-water which
the rains had left; and the canals were but the ditches from which, on
either side, the dirt had been taken to build the causeway through the
marsh, and were now covered with a coat of green. These lakes have no
outlet, and as evaporation only takes up pure water, all the animal,
vegetable, and mineral matter that is carried in is left to stagnate
and putrefy in the ponds and ditches.
A practical "man of the times," with more common sense than poetry in
his composition, must grieve as he looks at the great advantages here
possessed for drainage and irrigation which are unimproved. There is
not a spot in the whole valley that is not capable of the most perfect
drainage,[28] while basins have been formed by nature in the highest
points, from which irrigation could be supplied to the whole valley;
but decay and neglect--fitting types of the social condition of the
people--every where exhibit themselves. Water stands in all the narrow
canals or ditches that occupy the middle of the streets, for the want
simply of a sewer to draw it down to the level of the Tezcuco. Once a
year the flags are taken off from the covered ditches, and the mud is
dipped out, while a bundle of hay, tied to the tail of a dirt-cart, is
daily dragged through the open ones.
I have spoken only of the lower division of this valley--the valley in
which the city stands. If we consider the two partly separated valleys
as one, the whole will constitute an oval basin 75 miles long from
north to south, with an average width from east to west of 20 miles.
Two thirds of the southern valley is a marsh, and might well be called
the "Montezuma Marsh," it so strikingly resembles the marsh of that
name in the State of New York, though the whole body of ponds and
marshes of this valley contains much less water than its northern
namesake. The stage-road from Vera Cruz crosses this marsh for fourteen
miles, and has a great number of small stone bridges, beneath which the
water runs with considerable current toward the north, on account of
the difference of level between the southern fresh-water ponds and the
lower salt-water ponds, as in the days of Cortez. There are occasional
dry spots, and now and then there is open water; but the greater
portion is filled with marsh grass, and furnishes good feeding for the
droves of cattle that daily frequent it for that purpose. The ancient
village of Mexicalzingo, or "Little Mexico," the traditional home of
the Aztecs before they built Mexico, is situated on one of the dry
spots, slightly elevated above the level of the fresh water; and on
another dry spot or island, six miles distant, stands the famous city
of Mexico itself, resting on piles driven into a foundation of soft
earth. The canal of Chalco commences at the northerly extremity of the
Xochimulco, and, passing by Mexicalzingo and the floating gardens,
continues along the eastern front of the city, and empties itself into
the salt (_tequisquite_) pond of Tezcuco, having received as a
tributary the canal of Tacubaya, which passes along the southern
boundary of the city.
THE LAKES OF THE VALLEY.
The highest water of the valley of the city of Mexico is the pond of
Chalco, in the extreme southeast, being 4-8/12 feet above the level of
the Grand Plaza of the city, and 20 miles distant therefrom, and
11-2/12 feet above Tezcuco;[29] but its volume being small for the last
400 years, the slight impediments of long grass and a few Indian dikes
have prevented any injury to the city by a too rapid flow to the
northward. Xochimulco is the pond, or open space in the marsh, that
extends from the Chalco to near Mexicalzingo. Tezcuco is the lowest
water in the valley, being 6-1/2 feet below the Grand Plaza of the
city.[30] It receives the surplus of the waters that have not already
been evaporated in the other ponds. At this great elevation, 7500 feet,
evaporation does its work rapidly all over the valley, but it is in
Tezcuco that the residuum of the waters is deposited.
[28] Report of M. L. Smith, Lieutenant of Topographical
Engineers, United States Army.
[29] Lieut. Smith's Report.
[30] Ibid.