PUEBLA. NOPALUCÁN. ORIZABA. POTRERO.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE VOLCANO ORIZABA.]
We reached Puebla in the afternoon, and found it a fine Spanish city,
with straight streets of handsome stone houses, and paved with
flag-stones. We rather wondered at the _pasadizos_, a kind of arched
stone-pavement across the streets at short intervals, very much
impeding the progress of the carriages, which had to go up and down
them upon inclined planes. In the evening we saw the use of them
however, for a shower of rain came down which turned every street into
a furious river within five minutes after the first drop fell. For half
an hour the pasadizos did their duty, letting the water pass through
underneath, while passengers could get across the streets dryshod. At
last, the flood swept clear along, over bridges and all; but this only
lasted a few minutes, and then the way was practicable again. The
moveable iron bridges on wheels, which are to be seen standing in the
streets of Sicilian cities, ready to be wheeled across them for the
benefit of foot-passengers whenever the carriage-way is flooded, are on
the whole a better arrangement.
We should never have thought, from looking at Puebla, that it had just
been undergoing a siege; for, beyond a few patches of whitewash in the
great square, where the cannon-balls had knocked the houses about,
there were no traces of it.
We made many enquiries about the siege, and found nothing to invalidate
our former estimate of twenty-five killed,—one per cent of the number
stated in the government manifestos. Among the casualties we heard of
an Englishman who went out to see the fun, and was wounded in a
particularly ignominious manner as he was going back to his house.
Revolutions and sieges form curious episodes in the life of the foreign
merchants in the Republic. Their trade is flourishing, perhaps,—plenty
of buyers and good prices; and hundreds of mules are on the road,
bringing up their wares from the coast. All at once there is a
pronunciamiento. The street-walls are covered with proclamations. Half
the army takes one side, half the other; and crowds of volunteers and
self-made officers join them, in the hope of present pillage or future
emolument. Barricades appear in the streets; and at intervals there is
to be heard the roaring of cannon, and desultory firing of musketry
from the flat roofs, killing a peaceable citizen now and then, but
doing little execution on the enemy.
Trade comes to a dead stop. Our merchant gets his house well furnished
with provisions, shuts the outer shutters, locks up the great gates,
and retires into seclusion for a week or a fortnight, or a month or
two, as may be. At the time we were there he used to run no great risk,
for neither party was hostile to him; and if a stray cannon-ball did
hit his house, or the insurgents shot his cook going out on an
expedition in search of fresh beef, it was only by accident.
Having no business to do, the counting-house would probably take stock,
and balance the books; but when this is finished there is little to be
done but to practice pistol-shooting and hold tournaments in the
court-yard, and to teach the horses to rayar; while the head of the
house sits moodily smoking in his arm-chair, reckoning up how many of
his debtors would be ruined, and wondering whether the loaded mules
with his goods had got into shelter, or had been seized by one party or
the other.
At last the revolution is over. The new president is inaugurated with
pompous speeches. The newspapers announce that now the glorious reign
of justice, order, and prosperity has begun at last. If the millennium
had come, they could not make much more talk about it. Our unfortunate
friend, coming out of his den only to hear dismal news of runaway
debtors and confiscated bales, has to illuminate his house, and set to
getting his affairs into something like order again.
Since we left the country things have got even worse. Formerly, all
that the foreign merchants had to suffer were the incidental miseries
of a state of civil war. Now, the revolutionary leaders put them in
prison; and, if threats are not sufficient, they get forced loans out
of them, much as King John did out of his Jews.
Even in times of peace, foreign goods must be dear in Mexico. In a
country where they have to be carried nearly three hundred miles on
mules’ backs, and where credit is so long that the merchant can never
hope to see his money again in less than two years, he cannot be
expected to sell very cheaply. But the continual revolutions and the
insecurity of property make things far worse, and one almost wonders
how foreign trade can go on at all.
One of our friends in Mexico had three or four hundred mules coming up
the country laden with American cotton for his mill, just when Haro’s
revolution began. He got off much better than most people, however;
for, greatly to the disgust of the legitimate authorities, he went down
into the enemy’s camp, and gave the revolutionary chief a dollar a bale
to let them go.
As may be supposed, commercial transactions have often very curious
features here. Strange things happen in the eastern states; but people
there say that they are nothing to the doings on the Pacific coast,
where the merchants get up a revolution when their ships appear in the
offing, and turn out the Custom-house officers, who do not enter upon
their functions again until the rich cargos have started for the
interior.
One little incident, which happened—-I think—at Vera Cruz, rather
amused us. When the Government is hard-up, a favourite way of raising
ready money is to sell—of course at a very low price—orders upon the
Custom-house, to pass certain quantities of goods, duty-free. Such a
transaction as this was concluded between the Minister of Finance and a
merchant’s house who gave hard dollars in exchange for an order to pass
so many hundred bales of cotton, free of duty. When the ship arrived at
port, however, the Yankee captain brought in his manifest with a broad
grin upon his face. The inspectors went down to the ship, and stood
aghast. There were the bales of cotton, but such bales! They had to be
shoved and coaxed to get them up through the hatchways at all. The
Customhouse officials protested in vain. The order was for so many
bales of cotton, and these overgrown monsters were bales of cotton, and
the merchants sent them up to Mexico in triumph.
To us, Puebla was not an interesting city. It was built by the
Spaniards, and called _Puebla de los Angeles_, because angels assisted
in building the cathedral, which does no great credit to their good
taste. Its costly ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, and variegated
marbles, are most extraordinary. One does not know which to wonder at
most, the value and beauty of the materials, or the unmitigated
ugliness of the designs.
We saw the festival of Corpus Christi while we were in Puebla; but were
to a certain extent disappointed in the display of plate and jewelled
vestments for the clergy, whose attempt to overthrow Comonfort’s
government had only resulted in themselves being heavily fined, and who
were in consequence keeping their wealth in the background, and making
as little display as possible. The most interesting part of the
ceremonial to us was to see the processions of Indians from the
surrounding villages, walking crowned with flowers, and carrying
Madonnas in bowers of green branches and blossoms.
At the head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, _tap,
tap, tap_, without a vestige of time. The other processions with stoles
and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow
kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough.
Neither during this ceremonial, nor at Easter in the Capital were any
miracles exhibited, like the performances of the Madonna at Palermo,
which the coachmen of the city carry about at Easter, weeping real
tears into a cambric pocket-handkerchief; nor is anything done in the
country like the lighting of the Greek fire, or the melting of the
blood of St. Januarius.
Puebla pretty much belongs to the clergy, who are paramount there. A
population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of
them very large. It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady
powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy
political state of the country. As is usual in cathedral-towns, the
morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere. I have said
already that the revenues of the Mexican Church are very large. Tejada
estimates the income at twenty millions of dollars yearly, more than
the whole revenue of the State; but this calculation far exceeds that
given by any other authority. He remarks that the Church has always
tried as much as possible to conceal its riches, and probably he makes
a very large allowance for this. At any rate, I think we may reasonably
estimate the annual income of the Church at $10,000,000, or £2,000,000,
two-thirds of the income of the State.
There is nothing extraordinary in the Church having become very rich by
the accumulations of three centuries in a Spanish colony, where the
manners and customs remained in the 18th century to a great extent as
they were in the 16th, and the practice of giving and leaving great
properties to the Church was in full vigour—long after it had declined
in Europe. It is considered that half the city of Mexico belongs to the
Church. This seems an extraordinary statement; but, if we remember that
in Philip the Second’s time half the freehold property of Spain
belonged to the Church, we shall cease to wonder at this. The
extraordinary feature of the case is that, counting both secular and
regular clergy, there are only 4600 ecclesiastics in the country. The
number has been steadily decreasing for years. In 1826 it was 6,000; in
1844 it had fallen to 5,200, in 1856 to 4,600, giving, on the lowest
reckoning, an average of over £200 a year for each priest and monk. A
great part of this income is probably left to accumulate; but, when we
remember that the pay of the country curas is very small, often not
more than £30 to £50, there must be fine incomes left for the
church-dignitaries and the monks. Now any one would suppose that a
profession with such prizes to give away would become more and more
crowded. Why it is not so I cannot tell. It is true that the lives of
the ecclesiastics are anything but respectable, and that the profession
is in such bad odour that many fathers of families, though good
Catholics, will not let a priest enter their houses; but we do not
generally find Mexicans deterred by a little bad reputation from
occupations where much money and influence are to be had for very
little work.
The ill conduct of the Mexican clergy, especially of the monks, is
matter of common notoriety, and every writer on Mexico mentions it,
from the time of Father Gage—the English friar—who travelled with a
number of Spanish monks through Mexico in 1625, and described the
clergy and the people as he saw them. He was disgusted with their ways,
and, going back to England, turned Protestant, and died Vicar of Deal.
To show what monastic discipline is in Mexico, I will tell one story,
and only one. An English acquaintance of mine was coming down the Calle
San Francisco late one night, and saw a man who had been stabbed in the
street close to the convent-gate. People sent into the convent to fetch
a confessor for the dying man, but none was to be had. There was only
one monk in the place, and he was bed-ridden. The rest were enjoying
themselves in the city, or fast asleep at their lodgings in the bosom
of their families.
In condemning the Mexican clergy, some exception must be made. There
are many of the country curas who lead most exemplary lives, and do
much good. So do the priests of the order of St. Vincent de Paule, and
the Sisters of Charity with whom they are associated; but then, few of
these, either priests or sisters, are Mexicans.
Among the curious odds and ends which we came upon in Puebla, in the
shop of a dealer in old iron and things in general, were two or three
very curious old scourges, made of light iron chains with projecting
points on the links—terrific instruments, once in very general use. Up
to the present time, there are certain nights when penitents assemble
in churches, in total darkness, and kneeling on the pavement, scourge
themselves, while a monk in the pulpit screams out fierce exhortations
to strike harder. The description carries us back at once to the
Egyptian origin of this strange custom; and we think of the annual
festival of Isis, where the multitudes scourged themselves in memory of
the sufferings of Osiris. A story is told of a sceptical individual who
got admission to this ceremony by making great professions of devotion,
and did terrific execution on the backs of his kneeling
fellow-penitents. Before he began, the place was resounding with
doleful cries and groans; but he noticed that the cry which arose when
he struck was not like these other sounds, but had quite a different
accent. The practice of devotional scourging is still kept up in Rome,
but in a very mild form, as it appears that the penitents keep their
coats on, and only use a kind of miniature cat-o’-nine-tails of thin
cord, with a morsel of lead at the end of each tail, and not such
bloodthirsty implements as those we found at Puebla.
It seemed to us that the great influence of the priests in Mexico was
among the women of all classes, the Indians, and the poorer and less
educated half-castes. The men of the higher classes, especially the
younger ones, did not appear to have much respect for the priests or
for religion, and, indeed, seemed to be sceptical, after the manner of
the French school of freethinking. It was quite curious to see the
young dandies, dressed in their finest clothes, at the doors of the
fashionable churches on Sunday morning. None of them seemed to go to
mass, but they simply went to stare at the ladies, who, as they came
out, had to run the gauntlet through a double line of these critical
young gentlemen. As far as we could see, however, they did not mind
being looked at. The poorer mestizos and Indians, on the other hand,
are still zealous churchmen, and spend their time and money on masses
and religious duties so perseveringly that one wishes they had a
religion which was of some use to them. As it is, I cannot ascertain
that Christianity has produced any improvement in the Mexican people.
They no longer sacrifice and eat their enemies, it is true, but against
this we must debit them with a great increase of dishonesty and general
immorality, which will pretty well square the account.
Practically, there is not much difference between the old heathenism
and the new Christianity. We may put the dogmas out of the question.
They hear them and believe in them devoutly, and do not understand them
in the least. They had just received the Immaculate Conception, as they
had received many mysteries before it; and were not a little delighted
to have a new occasion for decorating themselves and their churches
with flowers, marching in procession, dancing, beating drums, and
letting off rockets by daylight, as their manner is. The real essence
of both religions is the same to them. They had gods, to whom they
built temples, and in whose honour they gave offerings, maintained
priests, danced and walked in processions—much as they do now, that
their divinities might be favourable to them, and give them good crops
and success in their enterprises. This is pretty much what their
present Christianity consists of. As a moral influence, working upon
the character of the people, it seems scarcely to have had the
slightest effect, except, as I said, in causing them to leave off human
sacrifices, which were probably not an original feature of their
worship, but were introduced comparatively at a late time, and had
already been almost abolished by one king.
The Indians still show the greatest veneration for a priest; and Heller
well illustrates this feeling when he tells us how he happened to ride
through the country in a long black cloak, and the Indians he met on
the road used to fall on their knees as he passed, and ask for his
blessing, regardless of the deep mud and their white trousers. However,
this was ten years before we were in the country, and I doubt whether
the cloak would get so much veneration now. The best measure of the
influence of the Church is the fact that when Mexico adopted a
republican constitution, in imitation of that of the United States, it
was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the
country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles
of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the
press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble.
It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the
authority of the Roman Catholic religion, it considerably reduced the
church-revenues, by making the payment of tithes a matter of mere
option. The Church—of course—diligently preaches the necessity of
paying tithes, putting their obligation in the catechism, between the
ten commandments and the seven sacraments, and they still get a good
deal in this way.
We sent our horses to the bath at Pueblo. This is usually done once a
week in the cities of Mexico. We went once to see the process while we
were in the capital, and were very much amused. The horses had been to
the place before, and turned in of their own accord through a gateway
in a shabby back street; and when they got into the courtyard, began to
dance about in such a frantic manner that the _mozos_ could hardly hold
them in while their saddles and bridles were being taken off. Then they
put their heads down, and bolted into a large shed, with a sort of
floor of dust several inches deep, in which six or eight other horses
were rushing about, kicking, prancing, plunging, and literally
screaming with delight. I will not positively assert that I saw an old
white horse stand upon his head in a corner and kick with all his four
legs at once, but he certainly did something very much like it.
Presently the old _mozo_ walked into the shed, with his lazo over his
arm, and carelessly flung the noose across. Of course it fell over the
right horse’s neck, when the animal was quiet in a moment, and walked
out after the old man in quite a subdued frame of mind. One horse came
out after another in the same way, took his swim obediently across a
great tank of water, was rubbed down, and went off home in high
spirits.
Though slavery has long been abolished in the Republic, there still
exists a curious “domestic institution” which is nearly akin to it. It
is not peculiar to the plains of Puebla, but flourishes there more than
elsewhere. It is called “_peonaje_,” and its operation is in this wise.
If a debtor owes money and cannot pay it, his creditor is allowed by
law to make a slave or _peon _of him until the debt is liquidated.
Though the name is Spanish, I believe the origin of the custom is to be
found in an Aztec usage which prevailed before the Conquest.
A _peon_ means a man on foot, that is, a labourer, journeyman, or
foot-soldier. We have the word in English as “_pioneer_” and as the
“_pawn_” among chessmen; but I think not with any meaning like that it
has come to bear in Mexico.
On the great haciendas in the neighbourhood of Puebla, the Indian
labourers are very generally in this condition. They owe money to their
masters, and are slaves; nominally till they can work off the sum they
owe, but practically for their whole lives. Even should they earn
enough to be able to pay their debt, the contract cannot be cancelled
so easily. A particular day is fixed for striking a balance, generally,
I believe, Easter Monday, just after a season when the custom of
centuries has made it incumbent upon the Indians to spend all that they
have and all that they can borrow upon church-fees, wax-candles, and
rockets, for the religious ceremonies of the season, and the drunken
debauches which form an essential part of the festival. The masters, or
at least the _administradors_, are accused of mystifying the annual
statement of accounts between the labourer and the estate, and it is
certain that the Indian’s feeble knowledge of arithmetic leaves him
quite helpless in the hands of the bookkeeper; but whether this is mere
slander or not, we never had any means of ascertaining.
Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the
minds of these Indians. Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite
content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot
resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not
insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free
labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not
let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live
in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned
out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico,
is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.
There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these _peons_
to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having
travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does
not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the
opinions of writers who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms
of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness
of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius,
however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the
careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are
obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must
take the only security they can get. He says, and truly enough, that
the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers. Any one who
knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to
run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their
master’s service may form some faint idea of the way in which this
Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the
people.
But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case. It is
not the money which the masters lend the _peons_ to help them in
distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery. It is the money spent
in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All
Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of
their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and
marriages. These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of
the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary.
The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the
estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent. If they preferred
that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this
money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep
the _peons_ in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the
system upon them.
I have spoken of the _peons_ as Indians, and so they are for the most
part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in
Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors
travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money
was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,—not merely brown
Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.
Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great
riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the
country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly
even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes
can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things
has not produced a permanent aristocracy.
The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous
regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened
to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting,
often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and
made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are
not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the
last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the
Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and
leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they
hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their
inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty
by the third or fourth generation.
Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual
disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at
some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to
be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of
the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A
good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops
in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has
a share of the profits, and when there is a “good thing” going, he is
on the spot to profit by it.
When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable
ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do
cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to
manage them; and discounting merchants’ bills is a lucrative business.
But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such
as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious
transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for
orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial
transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications
of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.
We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road,
is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some. They are of blue steel
inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel,
from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. _(See page 220.)_
They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the
rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting
him than by their incessant jingling, which is increased by bits of
steel put on for the purpose. Monstrous as the spurs now used are, they
are small in comparison with those of a century or two ago. One reads
of spurs, of gold and silver, with rowels in the shape of five-pointed
stars six inches in diameter. These have quite gone out now, and seem
to have been melted up, for they are hardly ever to be seen; but we
bought at the _baratillo_ of Mexico spurs of steel quite as large as
this.
My companion sent to the Art-exhibition at Manchester a couple of pairs
of the ordinary spurs of the country, such as we ourselves and
everybody else wore. They were put among the mediæval armour, and
excited great admiration in that capacity!
We slept at Nopalucán that night, and rode on next day to San Antonio
de Abajo, a little out-of-the-way village at the foot of the mountain
of Orizaba. Our principal adventure in the day’s ride was that, finding
that our road made a détour of a mile or so round a beautiful piece of
green turf, we boldly struck across it, and nearly lamed our horses
thereby; for the ground was completely undermined by moles, and at
every third step the horses’ feet went into a deep hole. We had to get
off and lead them back to the road.
Orizaba is the great feature in the scenery of this district of Mexico.
It is one point in the line of volcanos which stretches across the
continent from east to west. It is a conical mountain, like
Popocatepetl, and about the same height; measurements vary from twenty
feet higher to sixty feet lower. The crater has fallen in on one side,
leaving a deep notch clearly visible from below. At present, as we hear
from travellers who have ascended it, the crater, like that of
Popocatepetl, is in the condition of a _solfatara_, sending out jets of
steam and sulphurous acid gas. About three centuries ago its eruptions
were frequent; and its Mexican name, _Citlaltepetl_, “Mountain of the
Star,” carries us back to the time when it showed in the darkness a
star-like light from its crater, like that of Stromboli at the present
time, when one sees it from a distance.
San Antonio de Abajo is a quaint little village, frequented by
muleteers and smugglers. Tobacco, the principal contraband article, is
grown in the plains just below; and, once carried up into the paths
among the mountains, it is hard for any custom-house officer to catch
sight of it.
When there was a government, there used sometimes to be fighting
between the revenue-officers and the smugglers; but now, if there is a
meeting, a few dollars will settle the disputed question to the
satisfaction of both parties, so that the contraband trade, though
profitable, is by no means so exciting as it used to be.
On the road towards San Antonio we saw ancient remains in the banks by
the road-side, but had no time for a regular examination. We slept on
damp mattresses in a room of the inn, where the fowls roosted on the
rafters above our heads, and walked over our faces in the early morning
in an unpleasant manner. We started before daybreak, and a descent down
a winding road, through a forest of pines and oaks, brought us by seven
in the morning from the region of pines and barley down to the district
where tobacco and the sugar-cane flourish, at the level of 3,000 to
4,000 feet above the sea.
We met a jaunty-looking party in the valley, two women and five or six
men, all on good horses, and dressed in the extreme of fashion which
the Mexican _ranchero_ affects—broad-brimmed hats with costly gold and
silver serpents for hat-bands, and clothes and saddles glittering with
silver. Martin rode up to us as they passed, and said he knew them well
for the boldest highwaymen in Mexico. Had we started an hour or two
later we should have met them in the forest, and have had an adventure
to tell of. As it was, the descent of three thousand feet had brought
us from a land of thieves to a region where highway robbery is never
known, unless when a party from the high lands come down on a marauding
expedition. It is an unquestionable fact that the Mexican robbers,
whose exploits have become a matter of world-wide notoriety, all belong
to the cold region of the plateaus, the _tierra fría_. Once down in the
_tierra templada_, or the _tierra caliente_, the temperate or the hot
regions, you hear no more of them; or at least this is the case in the
parts of Mexico we visited. The reason is clear; it is only on the
plateaus that the whites, preferring a region where the climate was not
unlike that of Castile, settled in large numbers; so that it is there
that Creoles and mestizos predominate, and they are the robbers.
We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the
mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations
of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the
valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields
near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized
it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road,
we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a
meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of
the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green
hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with
our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the
survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they
left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and
moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a
little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the
road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something
to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that
our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of
interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party
excited no curiosity,—talk of robbers still less. At every house the
question was, “¿_De donde vienen, Señores_?” “Where are you from,
gentlemen?”—and when we told them, “¿_Y estaban allí las langostas_?”
“And were the locusts there?” The whole country was being devastated by
them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though
they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to
diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving
off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets
were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the
destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in
six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately,
they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.
We had ridden a hundred miles over a rough country in the last
forty-eight hours, and were glad to get a rest at Orizaba; but on the
morning of the third day we were in the saddle again, accompanied by a
new friend, the English administrador of the cotton-mill at Orizaba.
Until we left the high-road, the country seemed well cultivated, with
plantations of tobacco, coffee, and sugar-cane; but as soon as we
turned into by-paths and struck across country, we found woods and
grassy patches, but little tilled ground, until we arrived at the
Indian village which we had gone out of our way to visit, Amatlán, that
is to say, “_The place of paper_.”
In its arrangement this village was like the one that I have already
described, with its scattered huts of canes and palm-leaf thatch; but
the vegetation indicated a more tropical climate. Large fields, the
joint property of the community, were cultivated with pine-apples in
close rows, now just ripening; and bananas, with broad leaves and heavy
clusters of fruit, were growing in the little garden belonging to each
hut. The inhabitants stared at us sulkily, and gave short answers to
our questions. We went to the cottage of the Indian alcalde, who
declared that there was nothing to eat or drink in the village, though
we were standing in his doorway and could see the strings of plantains
hanging to the roof, and the old women were hard at work cooking.
However, when Mr. G. explained who he was, the old man became more
placable; and we were soon sitting on mats and benches inside the hut,
on the best of terms with the whole village. The life of these people
is simple enough, and not unsuited to their beautiful climate. The
white men have never interfered much with them; and it has been their
pride for centuries to keep as much as possible from associating with
Europeans, whom they politely speak of as _coyotes_, jackals. The
priest was a _mestizo_, and, as the Alcalde said, he was the only
_coyote_ in the settlement; but his sacred office neutralized the
dislike that his parishioners felt for his race.
These Indian communities always rejoiced in being able to produce for
themselves almost everything necessary for their simple wants; but of
late years the law of supply and demand has begun to undermine this
principle, and the cotton-cloth, spun and woven at home, is yielding to
the cheaper material supplied by the factories. Though so averse to
receiving Europeans among them, they do not object to go themselves to
work for good wages on the plantations. Those who leave their native
place, however, bring back with them tastes and wants hitherto unknown,
and inconsistent with their primitive way of life.
Another habit of theirs brings them into contact with the “reasonable
people,” not to their advantage. They are excessively litigious, and
their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts
of justice are held, and where lawyers’ fees swallow up a large
proportion of their savings. There is a natural connexion between
farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as
remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small
farmers in England.
Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general
government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of
the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three
centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have
their votes, and are eligible for any office. Practically, these
advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is
stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own
aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond
the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards. These noble
Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as
the plebeians—the ordinary field-labourers or “_earth-hands_”
(_tlalmaitl_), as they were called in ancient times,—and a stranger
cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their
houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the
patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of
their power over the other Indians. In early times, when men of white
or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish
government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected
the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities. The common
people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of
their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them
than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver
is much severer than a white one.
Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution—the
_temazcalli_, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath. It
is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies
down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside. Upon
these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place
with suffocating steam. When he feels himself to have been sufficiently
sweated, he crawls out again, and has jars of cold water poured over
him; whereupon he dresses himself (which is not a long process, as he
only wears a shirt and a pair of drawers), and so goes in to supper,
feeling much refreshed. If he would take the cold bath only, and keep
the hot one for his clothes, which want it sadly, it would be all the
better for him, for the constant indulgence in this enervating luxury
weakens him very much. One would think the bath would make the Indians
cleanly in their persons, but it hardly seems so, for they look rather
dirtier after they have been in the _temazcalli_ than before, just as
the author of _A Journey due North_ says of the Russian peasants.
To us the most interesting question about the Mexican Indians of this
district was this, _Why are there so few of them?_ There are five
thousand square leagues in the State of Vera Cruz, and about fifty
inhabitants to the square league. Now, let us consider half the State,
which is at a low level above the sea, as too hot and unhealthy for men
to flourish in, and suppose the whole population concentrated on the
other half, which lies upon the rising ground from three thousand to
six thousand feet above the sea. This is not very far from the truth,
and gives us one hundred inhabitants to the square league—about
one-sixth of the population of the plains of Puebla, in a climate which
may be compared to that of North Italy, and where the chief products
are maize and European grain.
In the district of the lower temperate region, which we are now
speaking of, nature would seem to have done everything to encourage the
formation of a dense population. In the lower part of this favoured
region the banana grows. This plant requires scarcely any labour in its
cultivation; and, according to the most moderate estimate, taking an
acre of wheat against an acre of bananas, the bananas will support
twenty times as many people as the wheat. Though it is a fruit of
sweet, rather luscious taste, and only acceptable to us Europeans as
one small item of our complicated diet, the Indians who have been
brought up in the districts where it flourishes can live almost
entirely upon it, just as the inhabitants of North Africa live upon
dates.
In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer
flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy
cultivation. The _yucca_ which produces cassava, rice, the sweet
potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold.
According to the accepted theory among political economists, where the
soil produces with slight labour an abundant nutriment for man, there
we ought to find a teeming population, unless other counteracting
causes are to be found.
The history of the country, as far as we can get at it, indicates a
movement in the opposite direction. Judging from the numerous towns the
Spanish invaders found in the district, the numbers of armed men they
could raise, and the abundance of provisions, we must reckon the
population at that time to have been more dense than at present; and
the numerous ruins of Indian settlements that exist in the upper
temperate region are unquestionable evidence of the former existence of
an agricultural people, perhaps ten times as numerous as at present.
The ruins of their fortifications and temples are still to be seen in
great numbers, and the soil all over large districts is full of the
remains of their pottery and weapons.
How far these settlements were depopulated by wars before the Spanish
Conquest, it is not easy to say. During the Conquest itself they did
not offer much resistance to the European invaders, and consequently
they escaped the wholesale destruction which fell upon the more
patriotic inhabitants of the higher regions. Since that time the
country has been peaceable enough; and even since the Mexican
Independence, the wars and revolutions which have done so much injury
to the inhabitants of the plateaus have not been much felt here.
In reasoning upon Mexican statistics we have to go to a great extent
upon guess-work. A very slight investigation, however, shows that the
calculation made in Mexico, that the population increases between one
and two per cent. annually, is incorrect. The present population of the
country is reckoned at a little under eight millions; and in 1806, it
seems, from the best authorities we can get, to have been a little
under six millions. Even this rate of increase, one-third every
half-century, is far above the rate of increase since the Conquest;
for, at that rate, a population a little over a million and a quarter
would have brought up the number to what it is at present, and we
cannot at the lowest estimation suppose the inhabitants after the siege
of Mexico to have been less than three or four millions. So that, badly
as Mexico is now going on with regard to the increase of its
population, about ½ per cent. per annum, while England increases over
1½ per cent., and the United States twice as much, we may still discern
an improvement upon the times of the Spanish dominion, when it was
almost stationary.
Why then has this fertile and beautiful country only a small fraction
of the number of inhabitants that formerly lived in it? That it is not
caused by the climate being unfavourable to man is clear, for this
district is free from the intense heat and the pestilential fevers of
the low lands which lie nearer the sea.
It is a noticeable fact that the remains of the old settlements
generally lie above the district where the banana grows; and the higher
we rise above the sea, the more abundant do we find the signs of
ancient population, until we reach the level of 8,000 feet or a little
higher. The actual inhabitants at the present day are distributed
according to the same rule, increasing in numbers, according to the
elevation, from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, after which the severity of the
climate causes a rapid decrease.
In making these observations, I leave out of the question the hot
unhealthy coast-lands of the _tierra caliente_, and the cold and
comparatively sterile plains of the _tierra fría_, and confine myself
to that part of the country which lies between the altitudes of 3,000
and 8,000 feet, between which limits the European races flourish under
circumstances of climate which also suited the various Mexican races,
who probably came from a colder northern country. Now, if we begin to
descend from the level of the Mexican plateau—say 8,000 feet above the
sea—we find that less and less labour will provide nourishment for the
cultivator of the soil, until we reach the limit of the banana, where
the inhabitants ought to be crowded together like Chinese on their
rice-grounds, or the inhabitants of Egypt in the time of Herodotus.
Exactly the opposite rule takes effect; the banana-country is a mere
wilderness, and the higher the traveller rises the more abundant become
both present population and the remains of ancient settlements.
I suppose the reason of this is to be found in the habits and
constitution of the tribes who colonized the country, and preferred to
settle in a climate resembling that of their native land, without
troubling themselves about the extra labour it would cost them to
obtain their food. The European invaders have acted precisely in the
same way; and the distribution of the white and partly white
inhabitants of the country follows the same rule as that of the
Indians.
So far the matter is intelligible, on the principle that the
constitution and habits of the races which have successively taken up
their residence in the country have been strong enough to prevail over
the rule which regulates the supply of men by the abundance of food;
but this does not explain the fact of an actual diminution of the
inhabitants of the lower temperate districts. They were not mere
migratory tribes, staying for a few years before moving forward. They
had been settled in the country long enough to be perfectly
acclimatized; and yet, under circumstances apparently so favourable to
their increase, they have been diminishing for centuries, and are
perhaps even doing so now.
The only intelligible solution I can find for this problem is that
given by Sartorius, whose work on Mexico is well known in Germany, and
has been translated and published in England. This author’s remarks on
the condition of the Indians are very valuable; and, as he was for
years a planter in this very district, he may be taken as an excellent
authority on the subject. He considers the evil to lie principally in
the diet and habits of the people. The children are not weaned till
very late, and then are allowed to feed all day without restriction on
boiled maize, or beans, or whatever other vegetable diet may be eaten
by the family. The climate does not dispose them to take much exercise;
so that this unwholesome cramming with vegetable food has nothing to
counteract its evil effects, and the poor little children get miserably
pot-bellied and scrofulous,—an observation of which we can confirm the
truth. A great proportion of the children die young, and those that
grow up have their constitutions impaired. Then they live in close
communities, and marry “in-and-in,” so that the effect of unhealthy
living becomes strengthened into hereditary disease; and habitual
intemperance does its work upon their constitutions, though the
quantities of raw spirits they consume appear to produce scarcely any
immediate effect. Among a race in this bodily condition, the ordinary
epidemics of the country—cholera, small-pox, and dysentery—make fearful
havoc. Whole villages have often been depopulated in a few days by
these diseases; and a deadly fever which used to appear from time to
time among the Indians, until the last century, sometimes carried off
ten thousand and twenty thousand at once. It seemed to me worth while
to make some remarks about this question, with a view of showing that
the theory as to the relation between food and population, though
partly true, is not wholly so; and that in the region of which we have
been speaking it can be clearly shown to fail.
After spending a long morning with the Indians and their _cura_, we
took quite an affectionate leave of them. Their last words were an
apology for making us pay threepence apiece for the pineapples which we
loaded our horses with. In the season, they said, twelve for sixpence
is the price, but the fruit was scarce and dear as yet.
Our companion, besides being engaged in the Orizaba cotton-mill, was
one of the owners of the sugar-hacienda of the Potrero, below Cordova,
and we all rode down there together from the Indian village, and spent
the evening in walking about the plantation, and inspecting the new
machinery and mills. It was a pleasant sight to see the people coming
to the well with their earthen jars, after their work was done, in an
unceasing procession, laughing and chattering. They were partly Indian,
but with a considerable admixture of negro blood, for many black slaves
were brought into the country in old times by the Spanish planters.
Now, of course, they and their descendants are free, and the hotter
parts of Mexico are the paradise of runaway slaves from Louisiana and
Texas; for, so far from their race being despised, the Indian women
seek them as husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better
than the quieter ways of their own countrymen. Even Europeans settled
in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.
I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races,
whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion. In
Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such
mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In
America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures
of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three
races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their
combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race,
distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer
gives in his work on Mexico, such as _mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino_,
and so forth. Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race,
and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at all. If
we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are
existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with
from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.
Out of this immense variety of tribes, we can make one great
classification. The men of one race are brown in complexion, and have
been for ages cultivators of the land. It is among them only that the
Mexican civilization sprang up, and they still remain in the country,
having acquiesced in the authority of the Europeans, and to a great
extent mingled with them by marriage. This class includes the Aztecs,
Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Zapotecs, &c., the old Toltecs, the present
Indians of Central America, and, if we may consider them to be the same
race, the nations who built the now ruined cities of Palenque, Copan,
Uxmal, and so forth. The other race is that of the Red Indians who
inhabit the prairie-states of North Mexico, such as the Apaches,
Comanches, and Navajos. They are hunters, as they always were, and they
will never preserve their existence by adopting agriculture as their
regular means of subsistence, and settling in peace among the white
men. As it has been with their countrymen further north, so it will be
with them; a few years more, and the Americans will settle Chihuahua
and Sonora, and we shall only know these tribes by specimens of their
flint arrow-heads and their pipes in collections of curiosities, and
their skulls in ethnological cabinets.
One of the strangest races (or varieties, I cannot say which) are the
_Pintos_ of the low lands towards the Pacific coast. A short time
before we were in the country General Alvarez had quartered a whole
regiment of them in the capital; but when we were there they had
returned with their commander into the tierra caliente towards
Acapulco. They are called _“Pintos”_ or painted men, from their faces
and bodies being marked with great daubs of deep blue, like our British
ancestors; but here the decoration is natural and cannot be effaced.
They have the reputation of being a set of most ferocious savages; and,
badly armed as they are with ricketty flint- or match-locks, and sabres
of hoop-iron, they are the terror of the other Mexican soldiery,
especially when the war has to be carried on in the hot pestilential
coast-region, their native country.