Anahuac Part 1

Anahuac.

by Edward Burnett Tylor.

INTRODUCTION.

The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback.

The author and his fellow-traveller enjoyed many advantageous opportunities of studying the country, the people, and the antiquities of Mexico, owing to the friendly a.s.sistance and hospitality which they received there. With this aid they were enabled to accomplish much more than usually falls to the lot of travellers in so limited a period; and they had the great advantage too, of being able to substantiate or correct their own observations by the local knowledge and experience of their friends and entertainers.

Visiting Mexico during a lull in the civil turmoil of that lamentably disturbed Republic, they were fortunate in being able to avail themselves of that peaceable season in making excursions to remarkable places and ruins, and examining the national collection of antiquities, and other objects of interest,--an opportunity that cannot have occurred since owing to the recommencement of civil war in its worst form.

The following are some of the chief points of interest in these Notes on Mexico, which are either new or treated more fully than hitherto:

1. The evidence of an immense ancient population, shewn by the abundance of remains of works of art (treated of at pages 146-150), is fully stated here.

2. The notices and drawings of Obsidian knives and weapons (at page 95, &c., and in the Appendix) are more ample than any previously given.

3. The treatment of the Mexican Numerals (at page 108) is partly new.

4. The proofs of the highly probable sophistication of the doc.u.ment in the Library at Paris, relative to Mexican eclipses, have not previously been advanced (see Appendix).

5. The notices of objects of Mexican art, &c., in the chapter on Antiquities, and elsewhere (including the Appendix), are for the most part new to the public.

6. The remarks on the connection between pure Mexican art and that of Central America, in the chapter on Xochicalco, are in great part new.

7. The singular native bridge at Tezcuco (page 153) is another novelty.

The order in which places and things were visited is shewn in the annexed Itinerary, or sketch of the journeys and excursions described.

CHAPTER I.

THE ISLE OF PINES.

In the spring of 1856, I met with Mr. Christy accidentally in an omnibus at Havana. He had been in Cuba for some months, leading an adventurous life, visiting sugar-plantations, copper-mines, and coffee-estates, descending into caves, and botanizing in tropical jungles, cruising for a fortnight in an open boat among the coral-reefs, hunting turtles and manatis, and visiting all sorts of people from whom information was to be had, from foreign consuls and Lazarist missionaries down to retired slave-dealers and a.s.sa.s.sins.

As for myself, I had been travelling for the best part of a year in the United States, and had but a short time since left the live-oak forests and sugar-plantations of Louisiana. We agreed to go to Mexico together; and the present notes are princ.i.p.ally compiled from our memorandum-books, and from letters written home on our journey.

Before we left Cuba, however, we made one last excursion across the island, and to the _Isla de Pinos_--the Isle of Pines--off the southern coast. A volante took us to the railway-station. The volante is the vehicle which the Cubans specially affect; it is like a Hansom cab, but the wheels are much taller, six and a half feet high, and the black driver sits postillion-wise upon the horse. Our man had a laced jacket, black leather leggings, and a pair of silver spurs fastened upon his bare feet, which seemed at a little distance to have well polished boots on, they were so black and shiny.

The railway which took us from Havana to Batabano had some striking peculiarities. For a part of the way the track pa.s.sed between two walls of tropical jungle. The Indian fig trees sent down from every branch suckers, like smooth strings, which rooted themselves in the ground to draw up more water. Acacias and mimosas, the seiba and the mahagua, with other hard-wood trees innumerable, crowded close to one another; while epiphytes perched on every branch, and creepers bound the whole forest into a compact ma.s.s of vegetation, through which no bird could fly. We could catch the strings of convolvulus with our walking-sticks, as the train pa.s.sed through the jungle. Sometimes we came upon a swamp, where cl.u.s.ters of bamboos were growing, crowned with tufts of pointed leaves; or had a glimpse for a moment of a group of royal palms upon the rising ground.

We pa.s.sed sugar-plantations with their wide cane-fields, the sugar-houses with tall chimneys, and the balconied house of the administrador, keeping a sharp look out over the village of negro-cabins, arranged in double lines.

In the houses near the stations where we stopped, cigar-making seemed to be the universal occupation. Men, women, and children were sitting round tables hard at work. It made us laugh to see the black men rolling up cigars upon the hollow of their thighs, which nature has fashioned into a curve exactly suited to this process.

At Batabano the steamer was waiting at the pier, and our pa.s.sports and ourselves were carefully examined by the captain, for Cuba is the paradise of pa.s.sport offices, and one cannot stir without a visa. For once everybody was _en regle_, and we had no such scene as my companion had witnessed a few days before.

If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a pa.s.sport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing. Now it so happened that a respectable brazier, who lived at Santiago de Cuba, wanted to go to Trinidad. His wife would not consent; so he either got her signature by stratagem, or, what is more likely, gave somebody something to get him a pa.s.sport under false pretences.

At any rate he was safe on board the steamer, when a middle-aged female, well dressed, but evidently arrayed in haste, and with a face crimson with hard running, came panting down to the steamer, and rushed on board. Seizing upon the captain, she pointed out her husband, who had taken refuge behind the other pa.s.sengers at a respectful distance; she declared that she had never consented to his going away, and demanded that his body should be instantly delivered up to her. The husband was appealed to, but preferred staying where he was. The captain produced the pa.s.sport, perfectly _en regle_, and the lady made a rush at the doc.u.ment, which was torn in half in the scuffle. All other means failing, she made a sudden dash at her husband, probably intending to carry him off by main force. He ran for his life, and there was a steeplechase round the deck, among benches, bales, and coils of rope; while the pa.s.sengers and the crew cheered first one and then the other, till they could not speak for laughing. The husband was all but caught once; but a benevolent pa.s.senger kicked a camp-stool in the lady's way, and he got a fresh start, which he utilized by climbing up the ladder to the paddle-box. His wife tried to follow him, but the shouts of laughter which the black men raised at seeing her performances were too much for her, and she came down again. Here the captain interposed, and put her ash.o.r.e, where she stood like black-eyed Susan till the vessel was far from the wharf, not waving her lily hand, however, but shaking her clenched fist in the direction of the fugitive.

To return to our voyage to the Isle of Pines.--All the afternoon the steamer threaded her way cautiously among the coral-reefs which rose almost to the surface. Sometimes there seemed scarcely room to pa.s.s between them, and by night navigation would have been impossible. We were just in the place where Columbus and his companions arrived on their expedition along the Cuban coast, to find out what countries lay beyond. They sailed by day, and lay to at night, till their patience was worn out. Another day or two of sailing would have brought them to where the coast trends northwards; but they turned back, and Columbus died in the belief that Cuba was the eastern extremity of the continent of Asia.

The Spaniards call these reefs "cayos," and we have altered the name to "keys," such as _Key West_ in Florida, and _Ambergris Key_ off Belize.

It was after sunset, and the phosph.o.r.escent animals were making the sea glitter like molten metal, when we reached the Isle of Pines, and steamed slowly up the river, among the mangroves that fringe the banks, to the village of Nueva Gerona, the port of the island. It consisted of two rows of houses thatched with palm-leaves, and surrounded by wide verandahs; and between them a street of unmitigated mud.

As we walked through the place in the dusk, we could dimly discern the inhabitants sitting in their thatched verandahs, in the thinnest of white dresses, gossipping, smoking, and love-making, tinkling guitars, and singing seguidillas. It was quite a Spanish American scene out of a romance. There was no romance about the mosquitos, however. The air was alive with them. When I was new to Cuba, I used to go to bed in the European fashion; and as the beds were all six inches too short, my feet used to find their way out in the night, and the mosquitos came down and sat upon them. Experience taught us that it was better to lie down half-dressed, so that only our faces and hands were exposed to their attacks.

The Isle of Pines used to be the favourite resort of the pirates of the Spanish main; indeed there were no other inhabitants. The creeks and rivers being lined with the densest vegetation, a few yards up the winding course of such a creek, they were lost in the forest, and a cruiser might pa.s.s within a few yards of their lurking-place, and see no traces of them. Captain Kyd often came here, and stories of his buried treasures are still told among the inhabitants. Now the island serves a double purpose; it is a place of resort for the Cubans, who come to rusticate and bathe, and it serves as a settlement for those free black inhabitants of Florida who chose to leave that country when it was given up to the United States. One of these Floridanos accompanied us as our guide next day to the Banos de Santa Fe.

When we left the village we pa.s.sed near the mangrove trees, which were growing not only near the water but in it, and like to spread their roots among the thick black slime which acc.u.mulates so fast in this country of rapid vegetable growth, and as rapid decomposition. In Cuba, the mangoe is the abomination of the planters, for they supply the runaway slaves with food, upon which they have been known to subsist for months, whilst the mangroves give them shelter. A little further inland we found the guava, a thick-spreading tree, with smooth green leaves. From its fruit is made guava-jelly, but as yet it was not ripe enough to eat.

In the middle of the island we came upon marble-quarries. They are hardly worked now; but when they were first established, a number of emanc.i.p.ados were employed there. What emanc.i.p.ados are, it is worth while to explain. They are Africans taken from captured slavers, and are set to work under government inspection for a limited number of years, on a footing something like that of the apprentices in Jamaica, in the interregnum between slavery and emanc.i.p.ation. In Cuba it is remarked that the mortality among the emanc.i.p.ados is frightful. They seldom outlive their years of probation. The explanation of this piece of statistics is curious. The fact is that every now and then, when an old man dies, they bury him as one of the emanc.i.p.ados, whose register is sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are told.

We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.

The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.

Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper patches nearer to the coast. The hills were covered with the pine-trees from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side by side.

Where we came upon a stream, the change in the vegetation was astonishing. It was a sudden transition from an English, plantation of fir trees into the jungle of the tropics, full of Indian figs, palms, lancewood, and great mahagua[1] trees, all knotted together by endless creepers and parasites; while the parrots kept up a continual chattering and screaming in the tree-tops. The moment we left the narrow strip of tropical forest that lined the stream we were in the pine wood. Here the first two or three feet of the trunks of the pine trees were scorched and blackened by the flames of the tall dry savannah-gra.s.s, which grows close round them, and catches fire several times every year. Through the pine forest the conflagration spreads un.o.bstructed, as in an American prairie; but it only runs along the edge of the dense river-vegetation, which it cannot penetrate.

The Banos de Santa Fe are situated in a cleared s.p.a.ce among the fir trees. The baths themselves are nothing but a cavity in the rock, into which a stream, at a temperature of about 80, continually flows. A part.i.tion in the middle divides the ladies from the gentlemen, but allows them to continue their conversation while they sit and splash in their respective compartments.

The houses are even more quaint than the bathing-establishment. The whole settlement consists of a square field surrounded by little houses, each with its roof of palm leaves and indispensable verandah.

Here the Cubans come to stay for months, bathing, smoking cigarettes, flirting, gossiping, playing cards, and strumming guitars; and they seemed to be all agreed on one point, that it was a delightful existence. We left them to their tranquil enjoyments, and rode back to Nueva Gerona.

Next morning we borrowed a gun from the engineer of the steamboat, and I bought some powder and shot at a shop where they kept two young alligators under the counter for the children to play with. The creeks and lagoons of the island are full of them, and the negroes told us that in a certain lake not far off there lived no less a personage than "the crocodile king"--"_el rey de los crocodilos_;" but we had no time to pay his majesty a visit. Two of the Floridan negroes rowed us up the river. Even at some distance from the mouth, sting-rays and jelly-fish were floating about. As we rowed upwards, the banks were overhung with the densest vegetation. There were mahogany trees with their curious lop-sided leaves, the copal-plant with its green egg-like fruit, from which copal oozes when it is cut, like opium from a poppy-head, palms with cl.u.s.ters of oily nuts, palmettos, and guavas. When a palm-tree on the river-bank would not grow freely for the crowding of other trees, it would strike out in a slanting direction till it reached the clear s.p.a.ce above the river, and then shoot straight upwards with its crown of leaves.

We shot a hawk and a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and took them home; but, not many minutes after we had laid them on the tiled floor of our room, we became aware that we were invaded. The ants were upon us. They were coming by thousands in a regular line of march up our window-sill and down again inside, straight towards the birds. When we looked out of the window, there was a black stripe lying across the court-yard on the flags, a whole army of them coming. We saw it was impossible to get the skins of the birds, so threw them out of the window, and the advanced guard faced about and followed them.

On the sand in front of the village the Castor-oil plant flourished, the _Palma Christi_; its little nuts were ripe, and tasted so innocent that, undeterred by the example of the boy in the Swiss Family Robinson, I ate several, and was handsomely punished for it. In the evening I recounted my ill-advised experiment to the white-jacketed loungers in the verandah of the inn, and was a.s.sured that I must have eaten an odd number! The second nut, they told me with much gravity, counteracts the first, the fourth neutralizes the third, and so on ad infinitum.

We made two clerical acquaintances in the Isle of Pines. One was the Cura of New Gerona, and his parentage was the only thing remarkable about him. He was not merely the son of a priest, but his grandfather was a priest also.

The other was a middle-aged ecclesiastic, with a pleasant face and an unfailing supply of good-humoured fun. Everybody seemed to get acquainted with him directly, and to become quite confidential after the first half-hour; and a drove of young men followed him about everywhere. His reverence kept up the ball of conversation continually, and showed considerable skill in amusing his auditors and drawing them out in their turn. It is true the jokes which pa.s.sed seemed to us mild, but they appeared to suit the public exactly; and indeed, the Padre was quite capable of providing better ones when there was a market for them.

We found that though a Spaniard by birth, he had been brought up at the Lazarist College in Paris, which we know as the training-school of the French missionaries in China; and we soon made friends with him, as everyone else did. A day or two afterwards we went to see him in Havana, and found him hard at his work, which was the superintendence of several of the charitable inst.i.tutions of the city--the Foundling Hospital, the Lunatic Asylum, and others. His life was one of incessant labour, and indeed people said he was killing himself with over-work, but he seemed always in the same state of chronic hilarity; and when he took us to see the hospitals, the children and patients received him with demonstrations of great delight.

I should not have said so much of our friend the Padre, were it not that I think there is a moral to be got out of him. I believe he may be taken as a type, not indeed of Roman Catholic missionaries in general, but of a certain cla.s.s among them, who are of considerable importance in the missionary world, though there are not many of them. Taking the Padre as a sample of his cla.s.s, as I think we may--judging from the accounts of them we meet with in books, it is curious to notice, how the point in which their system is strongest is just that in which the Protestant system is weakest, that is, in social training and deportment. What a number of men go to India with the best intentions, and set to work at once, flinging their doctrines at the natives before they have learnt in the least to understand what the said natives'

minds are like, or how they work,--dropping at once upon their pet prejudices, mortally offending them as a preliminary step towards arguing with them; and in short, stroking the cat of society backwards in the most conscientious manner. By the time they have accomplished this satisfactory result, a man like our Cuban Padre, though he may have argued but little and preached even less, would have a hundred natives bound to him by strong personal attachment, and ready to accept anything from him in the way of teaching.

We paid a regular round of visits to the Floridan settlers, and were delighted with their pleasant simple ways. It is not much more than thirty years since they left Florida, and many of the children born since have learnt to speak English. The patches of cultivated land round their cottages produce, with but little labour, enough vegetables for their subsistence, and to sell, procuring clothing and such luxuries as they care for. They seemed to live happily among themselves, and to govern their little colony after the manner of the Patriarchs.

Whether any social condition can be better for the black inhabitants of the West Indies, than that of these settlers, I very much doubt. They are not a hard-working people, it is true; but hard work in the climate of the tropics is unnatural, and can only be brought about by unnatural means. That they are not sunk in utter laziness one can see by their neat cottages and trim gardens. Their state does not correspond with the idea of prosperity of the political economist, who would have them work hard to produce sugar, rum, and tobacco, that they might earn money to spend in crockery and Manchester goods; but it is suited to the race and to the climate. If we measure prosperity by the enjoyment of life, their condition is an enviable one.