Indian population of the country lying between the great lakes
of Nicaragua and the Pacific.
Discovery and conquest of Nicaragua by the Spaniards.
Cruelties of the Spaniards.
The Indians of Western Central America all belonged to one stock.
Decadence of Mexican civilisation before the arrival of the Spaniards.
The designation "Nahuatls" proposed to include all the Mexican,
Western Central American, and Peruvian races that had descended
from the same ancient stock.
The Nahuatls distinct from the Caribs on one side and the Red Indians
on the other.
Discussion of the question of the peopling of America.
I RODE for some distance around the Lake of Masaya, and reached an
Indian village named Nandasme, about two leagues from the city. As
usual the streets were laid out at right angles, and the houses of
the Indians embowered in trees, many of which are grown entirely
for the beautiful odoriferous flowers they produce. There are
several other Indian villages around the lake, from each of which
paths have been cut through the forest down to the water, along
which the women are constantly ascending and descending to fill
their vessels for the supply of their houses.
All the fertile country lying between the great lakes and the
Pacific was densely populated at the time of the conquest, and it
was not far from Masaya that the great chief, Diriangan, lived, who
tried, but tried in vain, to stem the onward course of the
Spaniards. Gil Gonzales de Avila was in command of the first
expedition sent to explore the country of Nicaragua. He sailed from
Panama with one hundred followers and four horses, the latter,
auxiliaries whose aid was never dispensed with in these expeditions
on account of the superstitious terror with which the unaccustomed
sight of a man and a horse, apparently joined together, inspired
the Indians. He landed somewhere on the Gulf of Nicoya, near which
he entered the country of a powerful chief, after whom the gulf was
named. Nicoya entertained the Spaniards courteously, supplied them
with food, and embraced the Christian religion, being baptised
himself along with all his people, six thousand in number.
Pushing on to the northward for fifty leagues, Gonzales entered the
territories of a great chief named Nicaragua, whose country
comprised the present province of Rivas. Nicaragua had been
informed of "the sharpness of the Spanish swords" and received
Gonzales with hospitality, presenting him with much gold, equal to
"25,000 pieces of eight," and garments and plumes of feathers. He
asked the Spaniards many shrewd questions: about the flood, and
about the sun, moon, and stars; their motion, quality, and
distance; what was the cause of night and day and the blowing of
the winds? how the Spaniards got all their information about
heaven; who brought it to them, and if the messenger came down on a
rainbow? We are told that "Gonzales answered to the best of his
ability, commending the rest to God." Probably his interrogator
knew more of the visible heavenly bodies than he did, for Nicaragua
was of the Aztec race, a people who knew the true theory of
eclipses, and possessed an astronomical calendar of great accuracy.
Pedrarias, who was then in command at Panama, stimulated by the
accounts of the rich country that Gonzales had discovered, sent
Hernando de Cordova in 1522 to subdue and settle the country of
Nicaragua. Pascual de Andagoya tells the story of the rich land,
"populous and fertile, yielding supplies of maize, and many fowls
of the country, and certain small dogs which they also eat, and
many deer and fish. This is a land of abundance of good fruits and
of honey and wax, wherewith all the neighbouring countries are
supplied. The bees are numerous, some of them yellow, and these do
not sting." The poor Indians, too, could not sting, they were
powerless with their coats of feathers and swords of stone against
the arms of the Spaniards, who treated them like a hive of
stingless bees, turning them out and eating up their riches. "They
had a great quantity of cotton cloths, and they held their markets
in the open squares, where they traded. They had a manufactory
where they made cordage of a sort of nequen, which is like carded
flax; the cord was beautiful and stronger than that of Spain, and
their cotton canvas was excellent. The Indians were very civilised
in their way of life, like those of Mexico, for they were a people
who had come from that country, and they had nearly the same
language."
They had even in one direction reached a pitch of civilisation that
some of our philanthropists are only now hoping for. Women's rights
were acknowledged, and, if anything, they appear to have had too
much of them. Pascual says: "They had many beautiful women. The
husbands were so much under subjection that if they made their
wives angry they were turned out of doors, and the wives even
raised their hands against them."* (* This and the other quotation
are from the "Narrative of Pascual de Andagoya" translated by C.R.
Markham for the Hakluyt Society.) Much have the Indians changed
since then under the dominion of the Spaniard, and now all the toil
and labour fall to the lot of the weaker sex. One custom still
remaining amongst the Masaya Indians may be a relic of the old days
of woman's superiority. When they marry, the goods that the wife
had before her marriage still belong to her, and if she had a mule
or horse, and her husband had none, he cannot use hers without her
permission.
The poor Indians were ground down to the dust by the Spaniards with
pitiless barbarities. All their possessions were seized, and they
themselves exported to Panama and Peru, and sold as slaves to work
at the mines. Even in Pascual's time the country had been greatly
depopulated by these means. The people were harmless and patient,
but there was a noble independence about them that could not be
eradicated, and the Spaniards found it was cheaper to bring the
negro from Africa, with his light and careless nature, than to try
to enslave a people who did not resist, but who sought a refuge
from their persecutors in the grave rather than continue in
slavery. I shall not harrow the feelings of my readers with the
mass of treachery, avarice, blasphemy, and horrible cruelties with
which the conquerors rewarded the noble people who entertained them
so courteously. To me the conquest of Mexico, Central America, and
Peru appears one of the darkest pages in modern history. One virtue
indeed shone out--undaunted courage; and the human mind is so
constituted that this single redeeming point irresistibly enlists
our sympathies. But for this, Pizarro would be execrated as a
monster of cruelty, and even the fame of Cortez, immeasurably
superior as he was to the rest of the conquerors, would be
tarnished with innumerable deeds of violence, cruelty, and
treachery.
As has been already mentioned, the Pacific provinces of Nicaragua
were inhabited by a people closely related to the Mexicans, and
their language was nearly the same. According to Squier, who has
more than any other traveller studied the different races, the
Indians living at the island of Omotepec at the present time are of
pure Mexican or Aztec stock. So many of the names of towns in the
central provinces are also of Aztec origin, that they must have had
a considerable footing there also. They called the older
inhabitants, whom they had probably dispossessed and driven back to
the interior, "Chontalli," "barbarians," and hence the name of the
province of Chontales, where these tribes still existed in
considerable numbers at the time of the conquest.
All these races, differing as they did in language and in the
degree of civilisation at which they had arrived, were closely
affiliated.* (* According to Prescott the Aztecs and cognate races
believed their ancestors came from the north-west, and were
preceded by the real civilisers--the Toltecs.) The American
archaeologist, Mr. John D. Baldwin, is of opinion that they were
the descendants of indigenes. That at some very remote period,
before they had attained a high degree of civilisation, they
separated into two branches, one of which occupied Peru, the other
Central America and Mexico. Both branches advanced greatly in
civilisation, and both afterwards deteriorated by being conquered
by ruder but more warlike people belonging to the same stock. From
Mexico the ancient people spread northward and southward. The
northern emigrants peopled the banks of the Mississippi, and were
the mound-builders. The southern emigrants peopled Central America.
Then came an immigration from the far north-west, of nomadic tribes
from north-eastern Asia, who drove out the mound-builders. The
latter retreated back to Mexico, that their fathers had left ages
before, and were the ancient Toltecs. Later on, the Aztecs, who
were the southern branch of the ancient Mexicans, invaded Mexico
from the south, and supplanted the Toltecs. Another branch of the
same ancient stock were the Mayas of Yucatan.* (* "Ancient America"
by J.D. Baldwin, A.M.)
Looking then far back we have, according to the old traditions, a
few people who had escaped a great cataclysm, when fire and water
both fought against mankind; remnants perhaps of many tribes, who,
when the lowlands were overwhelmed, escaped to the mountains,
speaking a variety of languages, and bringing with them some
remembrances of the civilisation of their ancient homes. They
increased and multiplied in their new abodes. Some in Mexico, some
in Yucatan, and others in Peru arrived at a great pitch of
civilisation. Ages passed away, they had developed into several
distinct peoples, all showing traces of their common descent, but
having branched off in different directions in their lines of
progress; all underlaid by a few great principles: in their
religion, by the worship of the heavenly bodies; in their
government, by complete and absolute obedience to their kings and
leaders; in their mode of life all agriculturists and dwellers in
regular towns and villages. They spread northward and occupied the
valley of the Mississippi, and in summer time sent off large bodies
of workmen to extract the copper of Lake Superior. Then came the
nomadic tribes from the north-west, the Red Indians of the present
day, and drove out the mound-builders, who were turned back on
their ancient home, of which they had lost all recollection, and
where they appeared as immigrants and invaders. In the subjugation
of the ancient Choluans by the Toltecs, and afterwards the Toltecs
by the Aztecs, we see what has often occurred in the world's
history--a highly civilised race conquered by a ruder people, who
had advanced farther in the arts of war, and so overcame the people
who had advanced farther in the arts of peace. Therefore the
Choluans were replaced by the more warlike Toltecs, the Toltecs by
the ruder Aztecs, and those who look at the miserable towns and
villages of the present inhabitants alongside of the ruins of the
grand edifices, the roads and aqueducts of ancient Mexico and Peru,
may say, the Aztecs by the less civilised Spaniards.
The term Brown Indians has been proposed to distinguish the races
of Mexico, Central and South America, from the Red Indians of the
north; but it is a too general term, as it includes not only the
highly-civilised Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians, but the much ruder
Caribs of the eastern coasts of South America and the Antilles, who
were widely removed from them in race and language. Squier has
proposed the term Nahuatls for the people of Mexico and Central
America, and if it might be strained to include the Peruvians also,
and all the peoples descended from that ancient civilised race that
had spread northward and southward, it would supply a want that I
have greatly felt in studying these peoples. The Nahuatls--I use
the term in this extended sense--are one of three great Indian
races that occupy the greater part of North and South America. They
had the Red Indians to the north of them, the savage Caribs to the
south-east. From both these races they were profoundly different,
though not in equal degrees. To the Red Indian they have scarcely
any affinity, excepting such as had been brought about by the
nomads, who came down from the north-west, taking the women of the
Nahuatls, whom they conquered, for their wives, and thus bringing
about some points of structural resemblance, such as are to be seen
in a lesser degree in the citizens of the United States, through
whose veins the blood of the half-breeds of the earlier settlements
still courses. In Florida, and around the northern side of the Gulf
of Mexico, there had probably been a greater fusion of the two
races. But in origin the two peoples are distinct; the one came
from north-eastern Asia, the other, I believe, from a tropical
country joined on to the present continent, that was submerged at
the breaking up of the glacial period.
Was that country to the east or the west of the present continent?
Was it Atlantis, or was it a submerged country in the Pacific? I am
inclined to the latter opinion, and to believe that the inhabitants
of ancient Atlantis were the ancestors of the warlike and
adventurous Caribs. The Nahuatls, in their peaceful dispositions
and agricultural pursuits, are much more nearly allied to the
Polynesians, and their present preponderance on the western coast
favours the idea that they had a western origin.* (* I have already
at page 46 alluded to the fundamental difference in the food of the
Nahuatls and the Caribs.)
The Caribs, who were found in possession of most of the West Indian
Islands, and of the eastern coast of South America, were a warlike,
fierce, and enterprising race. Even in Columbus's time they were
found making long voyages to ravage the villages of the
peace-loving Nahuatls. If there be any truth in the story told to
Solon by the priests of Sais, they are a much more likely people to
have invaded the countries around the Mediterranean than the
Nahuatls. What seems foreign in the customs and beliefs of the
latter appears to have come from the west--from China and
Japan--whilst there are some few points of affinity between the
Caribs and the peoples of Europe and Africa. Thus, Mr. Hyde Clarke
states that the greater part of Brazil is covered by the Guarani or
Tupi languages, which are allied to the Agaw of the Nile region,
the Abkass of Caucasia, etc.
There is one singular custom amongst the Carib races of America,
and amongst some ancient peoples in Asia, Europe, and Africa, the
existence of which on both sides of the Atlantic cannot, I think,
be explained excepting on the theory that there was a remote
intercourse or affinity amongst the peoples who practised it. I
allude to the singular custom of the "couvade," in which the father
is put to bed on the birth of a child. I take the following account
of this curious practice from Mr. Tylor's philosophical "Early
History of Mankind".
The couvade is developed to the highest degree in South America and
the West Indies. The following account is given by Du Tertre of the
Carib couvade in the West Indies. When a child is born, the mother
goes presently to work, but the father begins to complain, and
takes to his hammock, and there he is visited as though he were
sick, and undergoes a course of dieting "which would cure of the
gout the most replete of Frenchmen." The imaginary invalid must
repose and take careful nursing and nourishing food. In Brazil, on
the birth of a child, the father was put to bed and fed with light
food, whilst the mother was unattended to, and went about her work.
The practice of the couvade was universal, in some form or other,
amongst the Carib races, but was unknown amongst the peoples whom I
have called the Nahuatls.
On the other side of the Atlantic the couvade has been noticed in
West Africa, and "amongst the mountain tribes known as the
Miau-tsze, who are supposed to be, like the Sontals and Gonds of
India, remnants of a race driven into the mountains by the present
dwellers of the plains." "Another Asiatic people, recorded to have
practised the couvade, are the Tibareni of Pontus, at the south of
the Black Sea, among whom, when the child was born, the father lay
groaning in bed with his head tied up, while the mother tended him
with food and prepared his baths." In Europe the couvade may be
traced up from ancient into modern times in the neighbourhood of
the Pyrenees. Above 1800 years ago Strabo mentions the story that,
among the Iberians of the north of Spain, the women, after the
birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed instead
of going themselves; and this account is confirmed by the evidence
of the practice amongst the modern Basques. In Biscay, says Michel,
"in valleys whose population recalls in its usages the infancy of
society, the women rise immediately after childbirth and attend to
the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking
the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours' compliments."
"It has been found also in Navarre, and on the French side of the
Pyrenees. Legrand d'Aussy mentions that in an old French fable the
king of Torelose is 'au lit et en couche' when Aucassin arrives and
takes a stick to him and makes him promise to abolish the custom in
his realm. The same author goes on to state that the practice is
said still to exist in some cantons of Bearn, where it is called
'faire la couvade.' Lastly, Diodorus Siculus notices the same habit
of the wife being neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated
as the patient among the natives of Corsica about the beginning of
the Christian era."
For a fuller account of the couvade I must refer my readers to
Tylor's "Early History of Mankind", from which I have so largely
quoted; his summing up of this curious custom is profound and
philosophical. He says: "The isolated occurrences of a custom among
particular races, surrounded by other races that ignore it, may be
sometimes to the ethnologist like those outlying patches of strata
from which the geologist infers that the formation they belong to
once spread over intervening districts, from which it has been
removed by denudation; or like the geographical distribution of
plants, from which the botanist argues that they have travelled
from a distant home. The way in which the couvade appears in the
new and old worlds is especially interesting from this point of
view. Among the savage tribes of South America it is, as it were,
at home, in a mental atmosphere, at least, not so different from
that in which it came into being as to make it a mere meaningless,
absurd superstition. If the culture of the Caribs and Brazilians,
even before they came under our knowledge, had advanced too far to
allow the couvade to grow up fresh among them, they at least
practised it with some consciousness of its meaning; it had not
fallen out of unison with their mental state. Here we find,
covering a vast compact area of country, the mental stratum, so to
speak, to which the couvade most nearly belongs. But if we look at
its appearances across from China to Corsica the state of things is
widely different; no theory of its origin can be drawn from the
Asiatic and European accounts to compete for a moment with that
which flows naturally from the observations of the missionaries,
who found it not a mere dead custom, but a live growth of savage
psychology. The peoples, too, who have kept it up in Asia and
Europe seem to have been, not the great progressive, spreading,
conquering, civilising nations of the Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese
stocks. It cannot be ascribed even to the Tartars, for the Lapps,
Finns, and Hungarians appear to know nothing of it. It would seem
rather to have belonged to that ruder population, or series of
populations, whose fate it has been to be driven by the great races
out of the fruitful lands to take refuge in mountains and deserts.
The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of China and
the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe they are the Basque race
of the Pyrenees, whose peculiar manners, appearance, and language,
coupled with their geographical position, favour the view that they
are the remains of a people driven westward and westward, by the
pressure of more powerful tribes, till they came to these last
mountains, with nothing but the Atlantic beyond. Of what stock were
the original barbarian inhabitants of Corsica we do not know; but
their position, and the fact that they, too, had the couvade, would
suggest their having been a branch of the same family who escaped
their persecutors by putting out to sea and settling in their
mountainous island."* (* E.B. Tylor "Early History of Mankind"
pages 288-297.)
Let us now return to the Nahuatls, and see if they present any
affinities to the nations of the old world. Humboldt's well-known
argument, in which he sought to prove the Asiatic origin of the
Mexicans, was based upon the remarkable resemblance of their system
of reckoning cycles of years to that found in use in different
parts of Asia. Both the Asiatic and Mexican systems of cycles are
most artificial in their construction, and troublesome in practice,
and they are very unlikely to have arisen independently on two
continents. Humboldt says: "I inferred the probability of the
western nations of the new continent having had communication with
the east of Asia long before the arrival of the Spaniards from a
comparison of the Mexican and Tibeto-Japanese calendars, from the
correct orientation of the steps of the pyramidal elevations
towards the different quarters of the heavens, and from the ancient
myths and traditions of the four ages or four epochs of destruction
of the world, and the dispersion of mankind after a great flood of
waters."* (* Humboldt "Aspects of Nature" volume 2 174.)
Whilst there are undoubtedly many curious coincidences in the
customs of the ancient Mexicans and the peoples of eastern Asia,
there are, on the other hand, so many differences that I believe it
is safer to infer that they were essentially distinct in origin,
and that there had been communication between the two peoples in
very early times, but that the foreign influence in Mexico was
extremely feeble, and too weak to check the growth of an
essentially indigenous civilisation. Possibly sun and serpent
worship, baptism, and the use of the cross as a sacred emblem, were
the survival of religious beliefs that had obtained in the very
cradle of the human race. We cannot, however, believe that mankind
had, before the separation and dispersion of the eastern and
western nations, attained to any great astronomical knowledge, and
it is quite possible that the extraordinary coincidences between
the chronological and astronomical systems of the Nahuatls and the
eastern Asiatics might have been brought about by some of the
latter having been stranded on the American shore.
Humboldt argued that, "as the western coasts of the American
continent trend from north-west to south-east, and the eastern
coasts of Asia in the opposite direction, the distance between the
two continents in 45 degrees of latitude, or in the temperate zone,
which is most favourable to mental development, is too considerable
to admit of the probability of such an accidental settlement taking
place in that latitude. We must then assume the first landing to
have been made in the inhospitable climate of from 55 to 65
degrees, and that the civilisation thus introduced, like the
general movement of population in America, has proceeded by
successive stations from north to south."* (* Humboldt "Aspects of
Nature" volume 2 176.) If we are obliged to assume that the people
themselves came from the old world, such an origin might be sought
for them as well as any other; but all research since Humboldt's
time has favoured the idea that there are no signs of the Nahuatls
being a newer people than the nations of Asia. And if it is not the
derivation of the people, but of some coincidences in their
observances and knowledge, we may seek for it some simpler solution
than the migration of a whole people down through North to Central
America. That solution is, I believe, to be found in the fact, not
taken into consideration by Humboldt, that the great Japanese
current, after traversing the eastern coast of Japan, sends one
large branch nearly directly east across the Pacific to the coast
of California, and an offshoot from it passes southward along the
Mexican coast and as far as the western coast of Central America.
In Kotzebue's narrative of his voyage round the world, he says:
"Looking over Adams' diary, I found the following notice--'Brig
Forester, March 24, 1815, at sea, upon the coast of California,
latitude 32 degrees 45 seconds north, longitude 133 degrees 3
minutes west. We saw this morning, at a short distance, a ship, the
confused state of whose sails showed that they wanted assistance.
We bent our course towards her, and made out the distressed vessel
to be Japanese, which had lost both mast and helm. Only three dying
Japanese, the captain and two sailors, were found in the vessel. We
took these unfortunate people on board our brig, and, after four
months' nursing, they entirely recovered. We learned from these
people that they had sailed from the harbour of Osaka, in Japan,
bound for another seaport, but were overtaken by a storm, in which
they lost the helm and mast. Till that day their ship had been
drifting about, a mere butt for the winds and waves, during
seventeen months; and of thirty-five men only three remained, all
the others having died of hunger.'" Is it not likely that in
ancient times such accidents may have occurred again and again, and
that information of the astronomical and chronological systems of
eastern Asia may thus have been brought to the Nahuatls, who, from
the ease with which they embraced the religion of the Spaniards,
are shown to have been open to receive foreign ideas?
The three arguments on which Humboldt principally relied to prove
that a communication had existed between the east of Asia and the
Mexicans may be explained without adopting his theory that the
Nahuatls had travelled round from the old world. The remarkable
resemblance of the Mexican and Tibeto-Japanese calendars might
result from the accidental stranding of a Japanese or Chinese
vessel on their shores, bringing to them some man learned in the
astronomy of the old world. The correct orientation of the sides of
their pyramidal temples was but the result of their great
astronomical knowledge and of the worship of the sun. And the
resemblance of their traditions of four epochs of destruction and
of the dispersion of mankind after a great flood of waters, arose
from the fact that the great catastrophes that befell the human
race at the melting of the ice of the glacial period were universal
over the world.