The old Indian City of Mexico.--The Mosques.--Probable Extent of
Civilization.--Aztecs acquired Arts of the Toltecs.--Toltec
Civilization, ancient and original.--The Pyramid of Papantla.--The
Plunder of Civilization.--Mexico as described by Cortez.--Montezuma's
Court.--The eight Months that Cortez held Montezuma.--What happened
for the next ten Months.--The Siege of Mexico by Cortez.--Aztecs
conquered by Famine and Thirst.--Heroes on Paper and Victories
without Bloodshed.--Cortez and Morgan.
As we have carefully surveyed the suburbs, and all the valley of
Mexico, it is time to take a survey of the city itself, and examine its
condition at different periods of its history.
THE MEXICO OF THE AZTECS.
The Aztec city of Mexico perished with its conquest by the Spaniards.
Day by day, as the siege went on, the Indians that followed the
soldiers pulled the houses down, when the latter had passed, and threw
the rubbish into the canals; so that, on the day on which the conquest
was effected, the city ceased to exist. Many times has that old city
been restored, in the imagination of enthusiasts, with its forty
pyramids (_teocallis_) and unnumbered palaces, adorned with all the
luxury and magnificence of the most refined civilization, united with
barbaric grandeur and inhumanity in so strange a combination as to
distract our feelings between hate and admiration.
It was easy to build an Indian city that would present a most imposing
appearance, for the climate was well fitted for drying mud thoroughly.
Besides, there was an inexhaustible supply of pumice-stone
(_tepetate_), and an exceedingly soft, gray quarry stone, for caps and
lintels, with an excellent quality of cement, and material for
"_fresco_ painting" of the walls, abundant and cheap. All these
articles are combined in the building of the modern city, and give it
its present appearance of elegance and great durability. But in the old
city, one-story palaces of dried mud, plastered and frescoed, with
large interior courts like that I have described at Tezcuco, must have
been among the most imposing structures. If _tepetate_ was employed
in the construction of the royal palaces, it would not have added
materially to the weight resting upon the earthy foundations; for when
the water in the ditches occupied half the street,[41] the foundations
must have been so much softer than at present, that structures of the
lightest material only could be borne.
In his anxiety to keep up a resemblance between his conquests and that
of Granada, Cortez calls the _teocallis_, or Indian mounds which he
found, _mosques_, and speaks of "forty towers, the largest of which
has fifty steps leading to its main body, and is higher than the tower
of the principal church in Seville."[42] Bernal Diaz says there were
"115 steps to the summit."[43] I must reduce the size of this great
pyramid to the size of the isolated rock that the Cathedral is said to
occupy. The difficulty of getting rid of the earth that composed these
forty artificial mountains does not seem to have troubled historians so
much as it would a contractor. I have often thought that those hillocks
of earth on the north side of the town were once small artificial
mounds on which the Indians offered their worship, for in the canal
near by was found that collection of clay divinities of which I have
already spoken.
The difficulty in the way of forming a correct idea of that old city,
is owing to the defective character of our witnesses. The one confesses
to the habitual practice of falsehood for the purpose of deceiving the
Indians; the other acknowledges practices that render the character of
both infamous, and would make their testimony of no weight in a court
of justice unless corroborated. We must therefore feel our way as best
we can.
With the rude implements of the Indians, houses of the driest blocks of
mud, though covered with cement and painted with colored wash, could
easily have been thrown down; but gunpowder or iron bars would have
been necessary to overturn a wall composed either of stone or
_tepetate_ and cement. Villages built of dried mud are often imposing
in their appearance, and are yet most perishable; for the first
overflow of waters, that shall cover but a few inches of the walls of
the houses, will in a few hours reduce a whole village to a mass of
ruins. Again, the dry wall that has fallen becomes saturated, and
dissolves itself into soft mud. My hypothesis is, therefore, not
without its difficulty, for at every inundation of the city in the
times of the Aztecs we have to suppose it totally destroyed; an evil
that could not be remedied until the water had entirely subsided, and
new mud had been formed into blocks and dried in the sun, and a new
village or city built every twenty-five years.
To sum up my theory of Aztec civilization: they had earthen gods,
earthen cooking utensils, and earthen aqueducts; their temples were
small buildings, upon moderately-sized Indian burial mounds, and their
palaces and sacred inclosures were of dried mud, and of a single story
in height.
THE TOLTECS.
With this solution, the difficulty that occurred to Humboldt is in part
removed, viz., that the allotted time--one hundred and seventy
years--was too short a period in which to transform a tribe of North
American Indians into a settled community. The remainder of the
difficulty is explained by an event taking place in our own days. It is
hardly thirty years since the Apache Indians began the systematic
plunder of the northern states of Mexico, and now even these nomades
begin to show the first glimmerings of civilization. Their captives
teach them the use of much of the plunder they have brought to their
own villages. Though their treatment of female captives is inhuman, yet
it is not an uncommon thing for a captive to become a wife, and to
introduce into her wigwam, and to inculcate upon the minds of her
children, a few of the primary ideas of civilization. It is the
commonly received notion that the Toltecs abandoned the table-land
about the time of the arrival of the Aztecs, but continued to flourish
in the region of the Gulf coast and in other parts of the hot country;
that the vast ruins which abound in those regions were inhabited cities
till within a few generations of the coming of the Spaniards; and that
in Yucatan, the part most distant from Mexico, that civilization
continued quite down to that period; that for a great portion of the
one hundred and seventy years of their national existence, the Aztecs
kept up predatory excursions into the Toltec region, and out of its
dense population derived an inexhaustible supply of slaves and the
plunder of civilization, included in which may have been the best
wrought of the stone idols that are still preserved. So that the Aztec
civilization resolves itself into the very ancient civilization of the
Toltecs.
PYRAMID OF PAPANTLA.
We have removed to a greater antiquity, but have not got rid of the
question of the origin of Mexican civilization. The year 600, named by
Humboldt, may be considered as the time of their appearance on the
table-land; out many of the ruins in the hot country might claim a
thousand years earlier antiquity. These massive remains must have
stood, abandoned as they are now, in the midst of the forest, for a
long time before the Conquest, as their very existence was unknown to
the Spaniards until near the close of the last century. The close
resemblance between the apparently most ancient of these works, and
those of the Egyptianss and other Eastern civilizations, does not
involve the idea of a common origin or of intercourse, but only leads
to the suggestion that the human race, in its progress, naturally
follows the same path, whether upon the eastern or western continent,
and that it is separated by a cycle of thousands of years from the
civilization of our day. As a specimen of the works of the Toltecs, I
insert a sketch of the pyramid of Papantla.
[Illustration: PYRAMID OF PAPANTLA.]
"The pyramid of Papantla," says Humboldt,[44] "is not constructed like
the pyramids of Cholula and Mexico. The only materials employed are
immense stones. Mortar is distinguished in the seams. The edifice,
however, is not so remarkable for its size as for its symmetry, the
polish of the stones, and the great regularity of their cut. The base
of the pyramid is an exact square, each side being eighty-two feet in
length. The perpendicular height appears not to be more than from
fifty-two to sixty-five feet. This monument, like all the Mexican
_teocallis_, is composed of several stages. Six are still
distinguishable, and a seventh appears to be concealed by the
vegetation with which the sides of the pyramid are covered. A great
stairway of fifty-seven steps conducts to the truncated top of the
_teocalli_, where the human victims were sacrificed. On each side of
the great stairs is a flight of small stairs. The facing of the stories
is adorned with hieroglyphics, in which serpents and crocodiles, carved
in relievo, are discernible. Each story contains a great number of
square niches, symmetrically distributed. In the first story we reckon
twenty-four on each side, in the second twenty, and in the third
sixteen. The number of these niches in the body of the pyramid is three
hundred and sixty-six, and there are twelve in the stairs toward the
east. The Abbe Marquez supposes that this number of three hundred and
seventy-eight niches has some allusion to a calendar of the Mexicans,
and he even believes that in each of them one of the twenty figures was
repeated, which, in the hieroglyphical language of the Toltecs, served
as a symbol for marking the days of the common year, and the
intercalated days at the end of the cycles. The year being composed of
eighteen months of twenty days, there would then be three hundred and
sixty days, to which, agreeable to the Egyptian practice, five
complementary days were added.... This pyramid was visited by M. Dupe,
a captain in the service of the King of Spain. He possesses the bust,
in basalt, of a Mexican, which I employed M. Massard to engrave, and
which bears great resemblance to the _calautica_ of the heads of Isis."
I prefer in this way to copy from an author of unquestionable authority
an important historical fact, rather than to search for less accessible
sources of evidence on which I rest the theory, that what of this kind
we have seen at the city of Mexico are but fragments from the wreck
that befell the American civilization of antiquity, which had succumbed
before the inroads of northern savages. This is sufficient inquiry into
antiquities till we come to the museum.
MEXICO ACCORDING TO CORTEZ.
It is but justice to add the substance of Cortez's account of this
ancient city, which is embodied in the following paragraphs:
"This noble city contains many fine and magnificent houses, which may
be accounted for from the fact that all the nobility of the country,
who are the vassals of Montezuma, have houses in the city, in which
they reside a certain part of the year; and, besides, there are
numerous wealthy citizens who also possess fine houses. All these
persons, in addition to the large and spacious apartments for ordinary
purposes, have others, both upper and lower, that contain
conservatories of flowers. Along one of the causeways [the Chapultepec]
that lead into the city are laid two [water] pipes, constructed of
masonry, each of which is two paces in width, and about five feet in
height.... The inhabitants of this city pay greater regard to the style
of their mode of living, and are more attentive to elegance of dress
and politeness of manners than those of other provinces and cities,
since, as the cacique Montezuma has his residence in the capital, and
all the nobility, his vassals, are in the constant habit of meeting
there, a general courtesy of demeanor necessarily prevails.... For, as
I have already stated, what can be more wonderful than that a barbarous
monarch, as he is, should have every object found in his dominions
imitated in gold, silver, precious stones, and feathers, the gold and
silver being wrought so naturally as not to be surpassed by any smith
in the world, the stone-work executed with such perfection that it is
difficult to conceive what instruments could have been used, and the
feather-work superior to the finest production in wax and
embroidery?... He possessed out of the city as well as within numerous
villas, each of which had its peculiar sources of amusement, and all
were constructed in the best possible manner for the use of a great
prince or lord. Within the city, his palaces were so wonderful that it
is hardly possible to describe their beauty and extent. I can only say
that in Spain there is nothing equal to them. There was one palace
somewhat inferior to the rest, attached to which was a beautiful
garden, with balconies extending over it, supported by marble columns,
and having a floor formed of jasper elegantly inlaid. There were
apartments in this palace sufficient to lodge two princes of the
highest rank with their retinues.... The emperor has another beautiful
palace, with a large court-yard paved with handsome flags in the style
of a chess-board.
"Every day, as soon as it was light, six hundred nobles and men of rank
were in attendance at the palace, who either sat or walked about the
halls and galleries, and passed their time in conversation, but without
entering the apartments where his person was.... Daily his larder and
wine-cellar[45] were open to all who wished to eat and drink. The meals
were served by three hundred youths, who brought on an infinite variety
of dishes; indeed, whenever he dined or supped, the table was loaded
with every kind of flesh, fish, and vegetables that the country
produced. The meals were served in a large hall, in which Montezuma was
accustomed to eat, and the dishes quite filled the room, which was
covered with mats, and kept very clean. He sat on a small cushion
curiously wrought of leather.[46] He is also dressed four times every
day in four different suits entirely new, which he never wears a second
time. None of the caciques who enter his palace have their feet
covered, and when those for whom he sends enter his presence, they
incline their heads and look down, bending their bodies; and when they
address him, they do not look him in the face; this arises from
excessive modesty and reverence....[47] No sultan or other infidel lord,
of whom any knowledge now exists, ever had so much ceremonial in his
court."
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SPANIARDS.
It was in the spring of 1519 that Cortez and his company had landed at
Vera Cruz. From that point they had marched toward Mexico without
opposition, except the skirmishes with the Tlascalans, and without
opposition they had entered the city of Mexico on the 5th of November,
1519. Here they had been received with every mark of hospitality and
treated with every kindness. But this did not prevent their
treacherously seizing the person of their host, and making him a
prisoner in their quarters. In his name they had governed his tribe,
and ransacked his dominions in search of the treasures collected by the
gold-washers, and had even interfered in the religious worship of a
superstitious people, and murdered, in cold blood, a party of their
chiefs celebrating an Indian feast. Still there had been no war, until
Ordaz was sent, with his four hundred men, to recapture the concubines
of Cortez, who had been rescued, as already mentioned. This was in July
of the following year, eight months after their first entry into
Mexico, and on the 10th of July, 1520, the licentious rule of the
Spaniards at Mexico was terminated by the events of the _triste noche_.
The mere handful that had at first entered the city had been increased
by the army of Narvaez, so that when the news reached Cortez that
Alvarado and the eighty odd men that had been left with him in the city
were threatened with difficulty, he marched a well-appointed army of
fourteen hundred men, besides two hundred Tlascalans, to his relief.
Their retreat to Tlascala has already been described, the character of
the brigantines has been discussed, as well as the absurd story of his
having dug a slip or launching canal at Tezcuco, twelve feet broad and
twelve feet deep. We have seen that the towns and villages said to have
been built in the lake, and the still greater number of large towns on
the main land, could only have been petty Indian hamlets, and that the
central portions of the valley of Mexico would not have been habitable
if the lakes of Mexico had been any thing more than evaporation ponds.
And, lest I should venture too far, I will conclude this remark by
adverting to the testimony of Diaz, which concedes that when his book
was written the face of the country was substantially as it now is, and
as I have already described it to be. But he endeavors to save the
story of the Conquest by the shallow pretense that, during the few
years that intervened between that event and the date of his history,
the whole face of the country had completely changed.[48]
The great mystery is why so large a body of Spaniards, if they really
amounted to the number claimed by Cortez, should have retreated from
the city at all, as they do not complain of being short of provisions.
They had the great _teocalli_ for a fortress, on which they might have
planted their cannon, and leveled the city in a few days, if not in a
few hours, and the great Plaza in which to manoeuvre their cavalry
and protect the Indians while leveling the rubbish of the broken walls.
But a panic having seized them, and having escaped from the city by a
badly-managed night retreat, ten months elapsed before the Spaniards,
on the 13th of May, 1521, laid siege to the city. And with varying
success the siege was continued just three months, until Guatemozin was
taken prisoner, on the 13th of August, 1521, so that the siege was
carried on in the midst of the rainy season, when the flats must have
been covered with water, and the ditches well filled. No difficulty was
experienced in bringing up his flat-boats to the sides of the muddy
causeways, or in cutting off the supplies of provisions by water, or in
breaking down the earthen aqueduct of Chapultepec, so that the Indians
were finally subdued by the combined forces of hunger and thirst. When,
the Aztecs were so enfeebled by want that they could no longer offer
resistance, the Spaniards rushed into the town, seized the unresisting
Guatemozin, and shouted victory.
INDIAN WARFARE.
It requires a familiarity with Spanish character, and the Moorish,
Oriental origin of their literature, in order to read Spanish-American
military annals understandingly, as much so as it does a knowledge of
Indian character in order to sift out the truth from accounts of Indian
wars. The superstitious dread which the Aztecs at all times evinced for
the Spanish horses and horsemen is common to all savages.[49] The
appearance of two or three horses, kept ready for that purpose, was
sufficient to restore the battle after the Spaniards had taken to their
heels. And while the facts of the siege amount to little more than
keeping possession of the narrow causeways, by aid of superior
implements of war, until famine and thirst had done their work, yet the
Spanish histories of the Conquest make it to surpass in interest, and
in the magnitude of forces engaged, almost any siege on record. And so
plausibly is the narrative written, that the reader drinks it in with
breathless anxiety, without once stopping to ask himself how so many
hundreds of thousands of Indians could be fed in a salt valley,
inclosed by high mountains, without the aid of a regularly organized
commissariat department, or how such masses of undisciplined Indians
could be manoeuvred upon a narrow causeway, where numbers add no
strength, but only tend to augment the confusion--where, as in this
case, there had to be a daily advance and retreat in presence of an
active enemy.
IMPROBABILITY OF CORTEZ'S ACCOUNT.
The interesting note which we have copied describes an event within the
memory of the present generation. And it is well recollected what
trepidation was caused in that colony of the British Empire by the
approach to the frontier of a nation of barbarians who despised fear,
whose religion was war, and who knew no sin like that of turning the
back to any enemy. Yet a hundred horsemen, with firearms, from a
missionary village, unaccustomed to war, were sufficient to turn back
this mighty host of brave savages. It can not be claimed that the
Aztecs were superior to these Mantatees, or that the force of Cortez
was inferior in equipment to the hundred unwarlike Griquas whose
"thunder and lightning" (as they termed the musketry) drove them back.
The missionary was a Protestant, a man of truth, and had no glory to
win, and therefore told only the simple truth. Cortez, out of a much
inferior affair, has fabricated a romance, with such verisimilitude
that he has astonished the world by an account of achievements which he
never performed. To write well is nine tenths of a hero; and in the
time of Cortez, as it is even now at Mexico, it was the easiest thing
imaginable to manufacture an astonishing victory out of the very
smallest amount of material. If no lives were lost in the battle, so
much more astounding is the victory. This practice of sacrificing human
life is only a modification of cannibalism, and the very mission on
which the Spaniards came to Mexico was to extinguish that crime, so
that they would jeopardize their title to the country should they
presume to shed the blood of each other in their interminable wars. And
so long as only women, and children, and Indians are the sufferers,
they do no violence to the rules of warfare which Cortez and the
Conquistadors introduced. The armies of Mexico have never been
deficient in good writers; a specimen of the capacity of one of them I
have already given in the chapter on Texas; so that their stately and
dignified histories of the national squabbles of the last thirty years
are equal to Cortez in gross exaggeration, and not a whit behind him in
elegance of composition.
MORGAN AND CORTEZ.
A hundred years after the conquest of Mexico, there sailed out of the
harbor of Port Royal, now Kingston, in Jamaica, an unlawful military
enterprise, about equal in force to that with which Cortez first landed
at Vera Cruz, but immensely inferior to the panic-stricken host that
fled by night from the city of Mexico. The fitting out of this unlawful
expedition, like that of Cortez, had the connivance of the local
authorities. The difference between the two was, that Morgan did not
understand the Spanish Oriental style of proclaiming his own heroism,
and furthermore, his expedition was not directed against a
miserably-armed rabble of Indians, but against the fortified city of
Panama, held by a garrison of royal troops.
Mooring his little fleet in the harbor of Chagres, Morgan marched his
small force across the Isthmus, which then presented greater
difficulties to his passage with cannon and munitions of war than
Cortez encountered in his march to Mexico. Like Cortez in his first
expedition, Morgan met with no opposition in his first visit to Panama,
but, with his men, lived at free quarters in rioting and debauchery,
committing those atrocities that pirates alone can commit, until, their
appetites and their passions being satiated, they returned to the Gulf
coast, taking with them the plunder of a city which was then the
depository of the treasures drawn from South America. They returned a
second time to Panama, as Cortez did to Mexico. This time they met with
resistance, but they carried the town by assault, and devoted it to
utter destruction. Their efforts were seconded by a terrible
earthquake, from which the people fled, and built a new city at a
distance of a few miles from the ruins.
For more than two hundred years the rank vegetation of a tropical
forest has been driving its massive roots beneath its foundations, and
yet the ruins of Panama still bear the marks of having once been a city
of much magnificence. Two massive stone bridges, a pavement, diverse
broken walls, and a solid tower standing up above the tops of the tall
forest-trees, proclaim the incontrovertible fact that the traces of a
large city can not be altogether blotted out in the course of a few
centuries.
Morgan has never gratified the world with a narrative of his
adventures, nor has any of his gang enlightened us with a history of
the conquest of Panama, nor has any Saxon bishop Lorenzana yet been
found so lost to all moral sense as to commend the piety of such
infamous men. And yet, in the boldness of his enterprise, in the
courage of its execution, in the amount of plunder realized, in
military talent and prowess, Morgan the pirate was incalculably
superior to Cortez the hero.
[41] CORTEZ, _Letters_, p. 111.
[42] Ibid.
[43] _Diaz_, p. 247.
[44] _Essai Politique_, vol. ii. p. 172.
[45] This is a little too strong a statement, considering that
there never was and never could be a cellar at Mexico.
[46] The naked negro alcalde mentioned in Chapter XII. was also
seated on a leather cushion.
[47] This is not all fancy. No people in the world show more
profound reverence to the aged or deference to their chiefs than
the North American Indians.
[48] "Iztapalapan was at that time a town of considerable
magnitude, built half in the water and half on dry land. The spot
where it stood is at present all dry land; and where vessels once
sailed up and down, seeds are sown and harvests gathered. In
fact, the whole face of the country is so completely changed,
that he who had not seen these parts previously would scarcely
believe that waves had ever rolled over the spot where now
fertile corn-plantations extend themselves to all sides, so
wonderfully have all things changed here in a short space of
time."--BERNAL DIAZ, vol. i. p. 220.
[49] Moffatt's Southern Africa, page 242, furnishes the following
complete illustration of the effect produced by horsemen and
fire-arms upon savage warriors. "The commando approached within
150 yards with a view to beckon some one to come out. On this,
the enemy commenced their terrible howl, and at once discharged
their clubs and javelins. Their black, dismal appearance and
savage fury, with their hoarse and stentorian voices, were
calculated to daunt; and the Griquas [horsemen], on their first
attack, wisely retreated to a short distance, and then drew up.
Waterboer, the chief, commenced firing, and leveled one of their
warriors to the ground; several more instantly shared the same
fate. It was confidently expected that their courage would be
daunted when they saw their warriors fall by an invisible weapon,
and it was hoped they would be humbled and alarmed, that thus
further bloodshed might be prevented. Though they beheld with
astonishment the dead and the stricken warriors writhing in the
dust, they looked with lion-like fierceness at the horsemen, and
yelled vengeance, violently wrenching the weapons from the hands
of their dying companions to supply the place of those they had
discharged at their antagonists. Sufficient intervals were
afforded, and every encouragement held out for them to make
proposals, but all was ineffectual. They sallied forth with
increased vigor, so as to oblige the Griquas to retreat, though
only to a short distance, for they never attempted to pursue
above 200 yards from their camp. The firing, though without any
order, was very destructive, as each took a steady aim. Many of
their chief men fell victims to their own temerity, after
manifesting undaunted spirit. Again and again the chiefs and Mr.
Melville met to deliberate on how to act to prevent bloodshed
among a people who determined to die rather than flee, which they
could easily have done.
"Soon after the battle commenced, the Bechuanas came up, and
united in playing on the enemy with poisoned arrows, but they
were soon driven back; half a dozen of the fierce Mantatees [the
enemy] made the whole body scamper off in wild disorder. After
two hours and a half's combat, the Griquas, finding their
ammunition fast diminishing, at the almost certain risk of loss
of life, began to storm [charge], when the enemy gave way, taking
a westerly direction. The horsemen, however, intercepted them,
when they immediately descended toward the ravine, as if
determined not to return by the way they came, which they
crossed, but were again intercepted. On turning round they seemed
desperate, but were again soon repulsed. Great confusion now
prevailed, the ground being very stony, which rendered it
difficult to manage the horses. At this moment an awful scene was
presented to the view. The undulating country around was covered
with warriors all in motion, so that it was difficult to say who
were enemies or who were friends. Clouds of dust were rising from
the immense masses, who appeared flying with terror or pursuing
with fear. To the alarming confusion was added the bellowing of
oxen, the vociferations of the yet unvanquished warriors, mingled
with the groans of the dying, and the widows' piercing wail, and
the cries from infant voices. The enemy again directed their
course toward a town which was in possession of a tribe of the
same people still more numerous. Here again another desperate
struggle ensued, when they appeared determined to inclose the
horsemen within the smoke and flames of the houses, through which
they were slowly passing, giving the enemy time to escape. At
last, seized with despair, they fled precipitately. It had been
observed during the fight that some women went backward and
forward to the town, only about half a mile distant, apparently
with the most perfect indifference to their fearful situation.
While the commando was struggling between hope and despair of
being able to rout the enemy, information was brought that the
half of the enemy, under Choane, were reposing in the town,
within sound of the guns, perfectly regardless of the fate of the
other division, under the command of Karagauye. It was supposed
they possessed entire confidence in the yet invincible army of
the latter, being the more warlike of the two. Humanly speaking,
had both parties been together, the day would have been lost,
when they would with perfect ease have carried devastation into
the centre of the colony [of the Cape]. When both parties were
united, they set fire to all parts of the town, and appeared to
be taking their departure, proceeding in an immense body toward
the north. If their number may be calculated by the space of
ground occupied by the entire body, it must have amounted to
upward of 40,000. The Griquas pursued them about eight miles; and
though they continued desperate, they seemed filled with terror
at the enemies by whom they had been overcome.... As fighting was
not my province, I avoided discharging a single shot, though, at
the request of Mr. Melville and the chiefs, I remained with the
commando as the only means of safety. Seeing the savage ferocity
of the Bechuanas in killing the inoffensive women and children
for the sake of a few paltry rings, or to boast that they had
killed some of the Mantatees, I turned my attention to these
objects of pity, who were flying in consternation in all
directions. By my galloping in among them, many of the Bechuanas
were deterred from their barbarous purpose. Shortly after they
began to retreat, the women, seeing that mercy was shown them,
instead of flying, generally sat down, and, baring their bosoms,
exclaimed, 'I am a woman. I am a woman.' It seemed impossible for
the men to yield. There were several instances of wounded men
being surrounded by fifty Bechuanas, but it was not till life was
almost extinct that a single one would allow himself to be
conquered. I saw more than one instance of a man fighting boldly
with ten or twelve spears or arrows fixed in his body.... The
men, struggling with death, would raise themselves from the
ground, and discharge their weapons at any one of our number
within their reach: their hostile and revengeful spirit only
ceased when life was extinct. Contemplating this deadly conflict,
we could not but admire the mercy of God that not one of our
number was killed, and only one slightly wounded. One Bechuana
lost his life while too eagerly seeking for plunder. The slain of
the enemy was between four and five hundred.
"The Mantatees are a tall, robust people, in features resembling
the Bechuanas; the dress, consisting of prepared ox-hides,
hanging doubly over their shoulders. The men, during the
engagement, were nearly naked, having on their heads a round
cockade of black ostrich feathers. Their ornaments were large
copper rings, sometimes eight in number, worn round their necks,
with numerous arm, leg, and ear rings of the same material. Their
weapons were war-axes of various shapes, and clubs. Into many of
their knob-sticks were inserted pieces of iron resembling a
sickle, but more curved, sometimes to a circle, and sharp on the
outside. They appeared more rude and barbarous than the tribes
around us, the natural consequences of the warlike life they had
led. They were suffering dreadfully from want; even in the heat
of battle, the poorest class seized pieces of meat and devoured
them raw."