The National Museum.--Marianna and Cortez.--The small Value of
this Collection.--The Botanic Garden.--The Market of Santa Anna.--The
Acordada Prison.--The unfortunate Prisoner.--The Causes
of that Night of Terror.--The Sacking of the City.--The Parian.--The
Causes of the Ruin of the Parian.--Change in the Standard of
Color.--The Ashes of Cortez.
MUSEUM.--BOTANIC GARDEN.--MARKET.
The National Museum has its weekly exhibitions, and attracts as great a
crowd of the common people as does the Academy of Arts. Here as perfect
equality reigns as in the San Carlos or in the Cathedral. The first
object of interest is the large collection of stone idols which have
been dug up from time to time in and about the Grand Plaza. There are
dog-faced idols, and apish gods, and unearthly things, besides the
sacrificial stone, and a rude attempt to represent a goddess. Whether
or no this was a sort of Aztec Lady of Remedies I did not learn. The
Aztecs might easily have produced these works without exhibiting much
civilization; but I have heard it surmised that they must have been
among the plunder of more civilized tribes.
On the two opposite sides of the first hall we entered, I saw spread
out the pictorial chronology of two dynasties that had passed away--the
vice-regal line of potentates standing over against the royal line of
Aztec emperors. The portraits of the vice-kings, from Cortez down to
the last of his successors, stretch entirely across one side of the
hall, and about the same number of Indian caciques are daubed upon a
piece of papyrus that is fastened upon the opposite wall. It requires
the greatest possible stretch of liberality for one accustomed to
Indian efforts of this kind to dignify such intolerable daubs with the
name of paintings. And yet this is the picture-writing of the Aztecs,
with which the world has been so edified for centuries. If there is or
ever was an Iroquois Indian that should undertake to stain so
miserably, I verily believe he would be expelled from his tribe. To
make it manifest that this was intended for a chronological record of
the imperial line, black lines were daubed from one of these effigies
to another. From a printed label in Spanish affixed to this wonderful
relic, I learned that it was intended to represent the wanderings of
the Aztecs from California.
It is usual for North American Indians to store up traditions of the
extensive wanderings of their ancestors, and if one is asked to
represent the tradition on bark, he would produce very much such an
affair as this, though with a somewhat greater resemblance to the human
form. Another picture represents Marianna, the mistress of Cortez, with
her rosary, and Cortez with his fingers in much such a position as boys
place them in when they wish to convey the idea that they have
perpetrated a joke--a very satisfactory method of representing the
piety of Cortez. Close by the pious couple is the representation of a
scene which they seem to have come out to witness. A bloodhound is
represented tearing an Indian to pieces, while a Spaniard is holding on
to the end of the dog's chain.
The banner under which Cortez fought, or rather one of them--for he had
two--is here preserved in a gilt frame. It represents the Virgin Mary
portrayed on crimson silk. In this hall is also a miniature
representation of a silver mine, with the workmen at their several
branches of labor. The remains of the vice-regal throne are here piled
up in a corner.
In the next room there are some paintings of no very great value, which
should have been kept in the Academy; also a miniature fortress and a
small mineral collection, and any quantity of specimens of Indian
idols, so misshapen as to be unfit for use as images of the Virgin and
of the saints.
As a Vice-royal and National Museum, the whole affair is beneath
contempt. If the few articles in it that are valuable were divided
between the Mineria and the San Carlos, and the rest thrown away, it
would be an advantage to all concerned. The Indian relics in this
museum are not only much inferior to the specimens of the art of the
savage islanders of the South Seas, but immensely inferior to many
private collections of Indian curiosities that I have seen, and they go
far to demonstrate the entire absence of civilized arts among the
aboriginal inhabitants of Mexico.
In an interior court of the museum is the Botanic Garden. This, like
the National Museum, is a paltry affair. With the exception of the
_Manolita_, or tree that bears a flower resembling the human hand, of
which there are but two in the Republic, there is nothing deserving of
notice in this garden. In the large interior court of San Francisco a
Frenchman has, as a private speculation, opened a garden and made a
collection of the national plants of Mexico that is well worth a visit.
In this private garden is one of the finest and rarest collections of
the cactus family that I have ever seen, either in Mexico or elsewhere.
The market of Santa Anna is the central market of the city. It adjoins
the palace, and is close to the canal. The products of the chinampas
are here displayed to the best advantage. As Mexico is within easy
marketing distance of the hot country, we have here daily presented the
fresh productions of two zones. This is one of the places where the
appetite of a stranger can not only be gratified with the greatest
variety of delicacies ever collected in one spot, but the excellency
and abundance of the articles presented are perplexing to the person
who would venture upon the bold experiment of tasting every new article
offered to him. As a vegetable and flower market, it has no equal.
THE ACORDADA.
The Acordada Prison is the principal state as well as city prison. Here
are confined men charged with every offense, from rioting to murder.
Oftentimes these extremes are found together in the interior court of
the prison, where the felon, with his hands steeped in innocent blood,
is entertaining a crowd of novices in crime with the details of his
adventures, and of his many hair-breadth escapes from the cruel
officers of the law. He is as eloquent in giving lessons to novices as
his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful
pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in
the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in
obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to
labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this
babel of sin and tumult.
The Acordada gave its name to that night insurrection to which I have
so often referred. Two regiments of artillery, quartered in the palace
of the Inquisition, _pronounced_ against the legality of the election
of Pedraza to the presidency. One night they took possession of the
Acordada, where they were joined by the whole body of desperadoes there
confined. Among the persons at that time detained in this prison, and
on that night wantonly killed, was an Englishman, who had been kept in
prison for several years, charged with the singular offense of having
married the daughter of an ex-marquis. There had been romance in his
courtship and romance in his marriage, but it had not met with the
approbation of the father, who unfortunately had influence enough to
get the newly-married man into prison, and to keep him there. At last
the father had relented, and on the next day the poor Englishman was to
have been set at liberty. Long and trying had been the sufferings of
the unfortunate man, doomed to pass the best years of his life among
robbers and assassins. Though every thing that kindness could do to
lighten his sufferings had been done lay his own countrymen, yet the
weary years of imprisonment, superadded to the sudden blasting of his
hopes, had brought premature old age upon him while yet in the prime of
life. But now all was forgotten in anticipation of a to-morrow that he
was never to see. When the attack was made upon the prison, he went to
the door of his cell to learn the cause of so unusual a disturbance,
and was instantly killed--the first victim of the night of the
Acordada.
On that fearful night the Acordada was unusually full of desperadoes,
whom the civil disorders and stagnation of business had driven to
crime. A battle in the night in the streets of a large city is a
fearful thing, at least when cannon are the chief weapons used; but
when there is added to this cause of alarm that the news had spread
through the city that all the murderers and housebreakers in the prison
had been let loose, with arms in their hands, to murder and to ravage
the city, an idea may be formed of the terror of a population who were
cowards by instinct. The contempt with which they had regarded the
lower orders was to be fearfully retaliated. Hate, mingled with
avarice, and inflamed by _pulque_ and bad liquor, was to do its work,
and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above
them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there
was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position,
but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor
instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the
consequences of that neglect.
It is a thankless task to labor for the elevation of the degraded, and
oftentimes we are stung with the ingratitude of those whom we have
desired to aid. But God, who has enjoined this unpleasant duty upon us,
has borne our daily ingratitude without casting us off, and we but
imitate him when we continue to minister to the ungrateful, and the
unthankful, and even the unmerciful. The people of Mexico had shown
more liberality, and given more than we. But they had not given it to
educate and to elevate the condition of the poor, but to feed pampered
priests, "who walked in long robes, and who loved salutations in the
markets," and to women like them, who had placed themselves in an
unnatural relation to the world. God requires of all men not only
contributions of money, for that is but half charity, but personal
services in discharge of the duties of good citizens, and in relieving
the afflicted; and he that disregards such duties may suffer as the
Mexicans did in the night of the Acordada insurrection, which turned
young hairs gray, and destroyed forever the happiness of unnumbered
families.
When the common people, brutalized by oppression, found themselves
masters of the city, and their oppressors powerless, then burst forth
the pent-up hatred of ten generations. "They call us _leperos_ and
dogs," said some of them; "let us play the part of dogs--hungry dogs,
among these spotted sheep." The palaces of the great were no protection
against these infuriated _peons_, and women who boasted of titles of
nobility were not safe. The wealth that generations of unjust
monopolists had accumulated was scattered to the winds. _Leperos_ now
rioted on carpets from Brussels and on cushions of Oriental stuffs, and
quaffed the choice wines of Madeira and Champagne. In the fury of their
intoxication they lost all restraint, and indulged in every excess and
enormity. Robbery and murder were the order of the day. In carrying
away the plunder, disputes arose, and then they murdered each other as
readily as they had murdered those who claimed the title of citizens.
Fear was the only authority they had learned to respect, and they knew
no other government than the hated police; but now, when the police
were powerless, they could amuse themselves according to the instincts
of their brutish natures. They had never been taught self-control, and
animal indulgence was the utmost of their ambition, and they found
amusement in violating all laws, human and divine. The murders, the
ravishings, the wanton destruction of the richest household stuffs, and
luxuries, and works of art in that night, can not all be written, nor
can they ever be effaced from the memory Of those who witnessed them.
THE PARIAN.
Stretching across the Grand Plaza, opposite the Cathedral and in front
of the buildings of the Municipality, once stood the noted mart of
commerce called the Parian, an ill-looking structure, in which was
accumulated the mass of foreign merchandise. In this same pile of
buildings had been concocted the conspiracy which, in the year 1808,
had caused the seizure of the Vice-king, Iturrigaray, and his
imprisonment in the Inquisition. The complaint against the Vice-king
was that he was about to recognize the political equality of the
native-born population with the emigrants from Spain. For this offense,
his reputation and that of his kindred was to be forever blackened by a
suspicion of heresy.
In the night of the Acordada insurrection, the Spanish shop-keepers of
the Parian found themselves utterly defenseless. They could no longer
invoke the aid of the Inquisition in oppressing and trampling on the
people, whom their wantonness, and the wantonness of others like them,
had brutalized. The neglect and oppression which had reduced a laboring
man to a _lepero_ had not made him insensible to the unequal laws
which elevated above him a race of beings destitute of that manly
courage which oftentimes gives plausibility to oppression. Now the
lepero took delight in visiting upon the present occupants of this
building a fearful punishment for the crime committed there twenty
years before, and among the guilty crowd there was to be found many an
innocent sufferer.
The isolated crowds that had been traversing the streets, and indulging
their wantonness on a small scale, at length, as the night wore away,
began to concentrate around the Parian, and quickly such devastation of
property was made as might be expected where the rich and poor had no
common interest in its preservation, and where criminal and poor man
were almost convertible terms. The plunderers had little idea of the
value or uses of the property they were scattering to the winds; and
while they wasted millions worth of property, they wantonly shed the
blood of the proprietors in the midst of their merchandise. Nor did the
evil end when daylight appeared; for among the consequences of this
night insurrection was the transfer of all authority to new hands.
Those who the day before had been stigmatized with the impurity of
their blood, were now the governing power, who, under the forms of law,
were to carry into effect the behest of the successful insurgents.
Neither the sight of the ruins of the night before, nor bales of
merchandise strewed about among corpses and spattered with blood, could
move the new masters of the city to pity the fallen condition of a
class of men who had proved themselves too cowardly to defend their own
usurpations, and too tyrannical to instill into the lately proscribed
races any ideas of compassion.
THE OVERTURN.
For three hundred years pure white blood and Spanish birth was an
indispensable qualification for promotion in the vice-kingdom, and the
slightest tincture of colored blood was an indelible disgrace. But one
night of tumult and rapine changed the popular standard of color. And
he who had boasted the day before of his pure white blood and Spanish
origin, now sought to hide himself from the officers of the law, who
visited with the penalty of banishment the crime of having been born in
Spain. Men now, for the first time, boasted of their Indian origin, and
of the slight infusion they were able to discover of colored blood in
their veins; while a man of Indian descent, and who spoke a provincial
dialect, was declared elected President of the Republic of Mexico: so
uncertain are all divisions of rank formed on the arbitrary distinction
of color.
During the night strange murmurings were heard against "the accursed
enslaver of their race." The descendants of Cortez were fearful for the
safety of his ashes, which had lain quietly in the convent of San
Francisco[54] so long as the Inquisition possessed the power of
compelling men to reverence his memory as the champion of the Cross,
the favorite of the Virgin Mary, the hero of a holy war against the
infidels. But now that this accursed institution, and the infamous gang
connected with its management, had become powerless, the national
feeling began to manifest itself so openly that the remains were
removed secretly and by night to the sanctuary of the most sacred
shrine of Mexico, that of Santa Teresa, where they remained until a
safe opportunity presented itself for shipping them off to the Duke of
Montebello, a Sicilian nobleman, who inherits the titles and also the
vast estates of Cortez in the valleys of the Cuarnavaca and Oajaca,
upon which none of the revolutionary governments have laid violent
hands.
[54] For a more authentic account, see Appendix E.