Anahuac Part 6

As for the newspapers, indeed, one looked in vain in them for any free expression of public opinion. They were all either suppressed, or converted into the merest mouthpieces of the government. The telegraph was under the strictest surveillance, and no messages were allowed to be sent which the government did not consider favourable to their interests; a precaution which rather defeated itself, as the people soon ceased to believe any public news at all. In all these mean little shifts, which we in England consider as the special property of despotic governments, the authorities of the Mexican Republic showed themselves great proficients.

We were left, therefore, to form what idea we could of the real state of Mexican affairs, from the private information received by our friends. Just for once it may be worth while to give a few details, not because the people engaged were specially interesting, but because the affair may serve to give an idea of the condition of the country.

President Comonfort, not a bad sort of man, as it seemed, but not "strong enough for the place," and with an empty treasury, tried to make a stand against the clergy and the army, who stood firm against any attempt at reform--knowing, with a certain instinct, that, if any real reform once began, their own unreasonable privileges would soon be attacked. So the clergy and part of the army set up an anti-president, one Haro; and he installed himself at Puebla, which is the second city of the Republic, and there Comonfort besieged him. So far I have already described the doings of the "reaccionarios."

The newspapers gave wonderful accounts of attacks and repulses, and reckoned the killed on both sides at 2,500. There were 10,000 regular troops, and 10,000 irregulars (very irregular troops indeed); and these were commanded by a complete regiment of officers, and _forty_ generals. This is reckoning both sides; but as, on pretty good authority (Tejada's statistical table), the troops in the Republic are only reckoned at 12,000, no doubt the above numbers are much exaggerated. As for the 2,500 killed, the fact is that the siege was a mere farce; and, judging by what we heard at the time in Mexico, and soon afterwards in Puebla itself, 25 was a much more correct estimate: and some facetious people reduced it, by one more division, to two and a half. The President had managed, by desperate efforts, to borrow some money in Mexico, on the credit of the State, at sixty per cent.; and it seems certain that it was this money, judiciously administered to some of Haro's generals, that brought about the flight of the anti-president, and the capitulation of Puebla. The termination of the affair, according to the newspapers, was, that the rebel army were incorporated with the const.i.tutional troops; that their officers--500 in number--were reduced to the ranks for a term of years; that a hot pursuit was made after the fugitive Haro; and that, as it was notorious that the clergy had found the money for the rebellion, it was considered suitable that they should pay the expenses of the other side too; and an order was made on the church-estates of the district to that effect. Of course, it was an understood thing that the officers thus degraded would desert at the first opportunity, and thus the Government would be rid of them. As for Haro, it is not probable that they ever intended to catch him; and they were very glad when he disguised himself in sailor's clothes, and shipped himself off somewhere. When the Mexicans first took to civil wars, the victorious leader used to finish the contest by having his adversary shot. At the time of our visit, this fashion had gone out; and the victor treated the vanquished with great leniency, not unmindful of the time when he might be in a like situation himself.

Whether the President ever got much of the forced contribution from the clergy, I cannot say. At any rate, they have turned him out since; and for a very poor government have subst.i.tuted mere chaotic anarchy, as Mr. Carlyle would call it. While the siege was going on, all the commerce between Vera Cruz and the capital was interrupted, and, of course, trade and manufacturing felt the effects severely. Nothing shews the capabilities of the country more clearly than the fact that, in spite of its distracted state and continual wars, its industrial interests seem to be gaining ground steadily, though very slowly. The evil of these ceaseless wars and revolutions is not that great battles are here fought, cities destroyed, and men sacrificed by thousands.

Perhaps in no country in the world are "decisive victories,"

"sanguinary engagements," "brilliant attacks," and the like, got over with less loss of life. Incredible as it may seem to any one who knows how many civil wars and revolutions occur in the history of the country for the last four or five years, I should not wonder if the number of persons killed during that time in actual battle was less than the number of those deliberately a.s.sa.s.sinated, or killed in private quarrels.

Cheap as Mexican revolutions are in actual bloodshed, we must recollect what they bring with them. Thousands of deserters prowling about the country, robbing and murdering, and spreading everywhere the precious lessons they have learnt in barracks. We know something in England of the good moral influence that garrisons and recruiting sergeants carry about with them; and can judge a little what must be the result of the spreading of numbers of these fellows over a country where there is nothing to restrain their excesses! As for the soldiers themselves, one does not wonder at their deserting, for they are in great part pressed men, earned off from their homes, and shut up in barracks till they have been drilled, and are considered to be tamed; and moreover their pay, as one may judge from the general state of the military finances, is anything but regular. People who understand such matters, say that the Mexicans make very good soldiers, and fight well and steadily when well trained and well officered. They are able to march surprising distances, day after day, to live cheerfully on the very minimum of food, and to sleep anyhow. This we could judge for ourselves. One thing there is, however, that they strongly object to, and that is to be moved much beyond the range of their own climate. The men of the plains are as susceptible as Europeans to the ill effects of the climate of the tierra caliente; and the men of the hot lands cannot bear the cold of the high plateaus.

Travellers in the United States make great fun of the profusion of colonels and generals, and tell ludicrous stories on the subject. There is also talk of the absurd number of officers in the Spanish-American armies, but we should not, by any means, confound the two things. In the United States it is merely a harmless exhibition of vanity, and an amusing comment on their own high-minded abnegation of mere t.i.tles. In Spanish America it indicates a very real and serious evil indeed.

Don Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, in his statistical chart for 1856, quoted above, estimates the soldiers in the Republic at 12,000, and the officers at 2,000, not counting those on half-pay. One officer to every six men; and among them sixty-nine generals. These are not mere militia heroes, walking about in fine uniforms, but have actual commissions from some one of the many governments that have come and gone, and are ent.i.tled to their pay, which they get or do not get, as may happen.

Only a fraction of them know anything whatever about the art of war.

They were political adventurers, friends or relatives of some one in power, or simply speculators who bought their commissions as a sort of illegitimate Government Annuities. The continual rebellions or p.r.o.nunciamientos have increased the number of officers still further.

Comonfort's notion of degrading all the officers of the rebel army was a new and bold experiment. A very common course had been, when a p.r.o.nunciamiento had been made anywhere against the then existing government, and a revolutionary army had been raised, for an amalgamation to take place between the two forces; intrigue and bribery and mutual disinclination to fight bringing matters to this peaceful kind of settlement. In this case, it was usual for the rebel officers to retain their self-conferred dignities.

I think this body of soldierless officers is one of the most troublesome political elements at work in the Republic. The political agitators are mostly among them; and it is they, more than any other cla.s.s, who are continually stirring up factions and making p.r.o.nunciamientos (what a pleasant thing it is that we have never had to make an English word for "p.r.o.nunciamiento"). Several times, efforts have been made to reduce the Army List to decent proportions, but a fresh crop always springs up.

In the "lowest depth" of mismanagement to which Mexican military affairs have sunk, the newspapers still triumphantly refer to countries which surpa.s.s them in this respect, and, at the time of our arrival, were citing the statistics of the Peruvian Republic, where there are a general and twenty officers to every sixty soldiers, and as many naval officers as seamen.

These officers are not subject to the civil administration at all, whatever they may do. They have their _fuero_, their private charter, and are only amenable to their own tribunals, just as the clergy are to theirs. To the ill effects of the presence of such armies and such officers in the country, we must add the continual interruptions to commerce arising from the distracted state of the republic, and the uncertain tenure by which every one holds his property, not to say his life; and this, in its effect on the morale of the whole country, is worse than the positive suffering they inflict. So much for soldiering, for the present. We leave the President trying, with the aid of his Congress, to organize the government, and set things straight generally. This August a.s.sembly is selected from the people by universal suffrage, in the most approved manner, and ought to be a very important and useful body, but unfortunately can do nothing but talk and issue decrees, which no one else cares about.

In consequence of the alarming increase of highway-robbery, steps are taken to diminish the evil. It is made lawful to punish such offenders on the spot, by Lynch law. This is all. You may do justice on him when caught, but really you must catch him yourself. Sober citizens are even regretting the days of Santa Ana (recollect, I speak now of 1856, and they might regret him still more in 1860.) He was a great scoundrel, it is true; but he sent down detachments of soldiery to where the robbers practised their profession, and garotted them in pairs, till the roads were as safe as ours are in England. A President who sells states and pockets the money may have even that forgiven him in consideration of roads kept free from robbers, and some attempt at an effectual police.

There is a lesson in this for Mexican rulers.

The Congress professed to be hard at work cleaning out the Augean stable of laws, rescripts, and proclamations, and making a working const.i.tution. We went to see them one day, and heard talking going on, but it all came to nothing. Of one thing we may be quite sure, that if this unlucky country ever does get set straight, it will not be done by a Mexican Congress sitting and cackling over it.

On our return from the Real, we spent two days at the house of an English friend at Tisapan, at the edge of the great Pedrigal, or lava-field, which lies south of the capital. It was across this lava-field that a part of the American army marched in '47, and defeated a division of the Mexican forces encamped at Contrevas. On the same day the American army attacked the Mexicans who held a strongly fortified position at Churubusco, some four miles nearer Mexico, and routed the main army there. They beat them again at Molino del Rey, carried the hill of Chapultepec by storm, and then entered the city without meeting with further resistance; though the Mexicans, after they had formally yielded possession of the city, disgraced themselves by a.s.sa.s.sinating stray Americans, stabbing them in the streets, and lazoing them from the tops of the low mud houses in the suburbs.

An acquaintance of ours in Mexico met some American soldiers, with a corporal, in the street close to his house, and asked them in.

Presently the corporal sent one of the men off into the next street to execute some commission; but half an hour elapsed, and the man not returning, the corporal went out to see what was the matter. He came back presently, and remarked that some of those cursed Mexicans had stabbed the man as he was turning the corner of the street, and left him lying there. "So," said the corporal, "I may as well finish his brandy and water for him;" he did so accordingly, and the men went home to their quarters.

The American soldiers were, as one may imagine, a rough lot. Only the smaller part of them were born Americans, the rest were emigrants from Europe; to judge by what we heard of them--both in the States and in Mexico--the very refuse of all the scoundrels in the Republic; but they were well officered, and rigid discipline was maintained. So effectually were they kept in order, that the Mexicans confessed that it was a smaller evil to have the enemy's forces marching through the country, than their own army.

An elaborate account of the American invasion is given in Mayer's 'Mexico.' To those who do not care for details of military operations, there are still points of interest in the history. That ten thousand Americans should have been able to get through the mountain-pa.s.ses, and to reach the capital at all, is an astonishing thing; and after that, their successes in the valley of Mexico follow as a matter of course.

They could never have crossed the mountains but for a combination of circ.u.mstances.

The inhabitants generally displayed the most entire indifference; possibly preferring to sell their provisions to the Americans, instead of being robbed of them by their own countrymen. Add to this, that the Mexican officers showed themselves grossly ignorant of the art of war; and that the soldiers, though they do not seem to have been deficient in courage, were badly drilled and insubordinate. One would not have wondered at the army being in such a condition---in a country that had long been in a state of profound peace; but in Mexico a standing army had been maintained for years, at a great expense, and continual civil wars ought to have given people some ideas about soldiering. We may judge, from the events of this war, that Mexico might be kept in good order by a small number of American troops. The mere holding of the country is not the greatest difficulty in the question of American annexation.

One thing that struck our friends at Tisapan, among their experiences of the war, was the number of dead bodies of women and children that were found on the battle-fields. A crowd of women follow close in the rear of a Mexican army; almost every soldier having some woman who belongs to him, and who carries a heavy load of Indian corn and babies, and cooks tortillas for her lord and master. The number of these poor creatures who perished in the war was very great.

We spent much of our time at Tisapan in collecting plants, and exploring the lava-field, and the canada, or ravine, that leads up into the mountains that skirt the valley of Mexico. I recollect one interesting spot we came to in riding through the pine-forest on the northern slope of the mountains, where the course of a torrent, now dry, ran along a mere narrow trench in the hard porphyritic rock, some ten or fifteen feet wide, until it had suddenly entered a bed of gravel, where it had hollowed out a vast ravine, four hundred feet wide and two hundred deep, the inlet of the water being, in proportion, as small as the pipe that serves to fill a cistern.

Such places are common enough in the south of Europe, but seldom on so grand a scale as one finds them in this country, where the floods come down from the hills with astounding suddenness and violence. Mr. L. had experience of this one day, when he had got inside his waterwheel, to inspect its condition, the water being securely shut off, as he thought. However, an aversada--one of these sudden freshets--came down, quite without notice; and enough water got into the channel to set the wheel going, so as to afford its proprietor a very curious and exciting ride, after the manner of a squirrel in a revolving cage, until the people succeeded in drawing off the water.

It was after our return from Tisapan that we paid a visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe, rather an important personage in the history of Mexican church-matters. The way lies past Santo Domingo, the church of the Holy Office, and down a long street where live the purveyors of all things for the muleteers. Here one may buy mats, ropes, pack-saddles--which the arrieros delight to have ornamented with fanciful designs and inscriptions, lazos, and many other things of the same kind. Pa.s.sing out through the city-gate, we ride along a straight causeway, which extends to Guadalupe. A dull road enough in itself, but the interminable strings of mules and donkeys, bringing in pig-skins full of pulque, are worth seeing for once; and the Indians, trudging out and in with their various commodities, are highly picturesque.

On a building at the side of the causeway we notice "Estacion de Mejico" (Mexico Station) painted in large letters. As far as we could observe, this very suggestive sign-board is the whole plant of the Railway Company at this end of the line. A range of hills ends abruptly in the plain, at a place which the Indians called Tepeyacac, "end of the hill" (literally "at the hill's nose"). Our causeway leads to this spot; and there, at the foot and up the slope of the hill, are built the great cathedral and other churches and chapels, altogether a vast and imposing collection of buildings; and round these a considerable town has grown up, for this is the great place of pilgrimage in the country.

The Spaniards had brought a miraculous picture with them, Nuestra Senora de Remedios, which is still in the country, and many pilgrims visit it; but Our Lady of Guadalupe is a native Mexican, and decidedly holds the first rank in the veneration of the people.

In the great church there is a picture mounted in a gold frame of great value. Its distance from the altar-rails, and the pane of gla.s.s which covers it, prevent one's seeing it very well. This was the more unfortunate, as, according to my history, the picture is in itself evidently of miraculous origin, for the best artists are agreed that no human hand could imitate the drawing or the colour! It appears that the Aztecs, long before the arrival of the Spaniards, had been in the habit of worshipping--in this very place--a G.o.ddess, who was known as _Teotenantzin_, "mother-G.o.d," or _Tonantzin_, "our mother." Ten years after the Conquest, a certain converted Indian, Juan Diego (John James) by name, was pa.s.sing that way, and to him appeared the Virgin Mary. She told him to go to the bishop, and tell him to build her a temple on the place where she stood, giving him a lapful of flowers as a token. When the flowers were poured out of the garment, in presence of the bishop, the miraculous picture appeared underneath, painted on the ap.r.o.n itself. The bishop accepted the miracle with great unction; the temple was built, and the miraculous image duly installed in it. Its name of "Santa Maria de Guadalupe," was not, as one might imagine, taken from the Madonna of that name in Spain (of course not!), but was communicated by Our Lady herself to another converted Indian. She told him that her t.i.tle was to be _Santa Maria de Tequatlanopeuh_, "Saint Mary of the rocky hill," of which hard word the Spaniards made "Guadalupe,"--just as they had turned Quauhnahuac into Cuernavaca, and Quauhaxallan into Guadalajara, subst.i.tuting the nearest word of Spanish form for the unp.r.o.nounceable Mexican names. This at least is the ingenious explanation given by my author, the Bachelor Tanco, Professor of the Aztec language, and of Astrology, in the University of Mexico, in the year 1666. The bishop who authenticated the miracle was no less a person than Fray Juan de Zumarraga, whose name is well known in Mexican history, for it was he who collected together all the Aztec picture-writings that he could find, "quite a mountain of them," say the chroniclers, and made a solemn bonfire of them in the great square of Tlatelolco. The miracles worked by the Virgin of Guadalupe, and by copies of it, are innumerable; and the faith which the lower orders of Mexicans and the Indians have in it is boundless.

On the 12th of December, the Anniversary of the Apparition is kept, and an amazing concourse of the faithful repair to the sanctuary. h.e.l.ler, a German traveller who was in Mexico in 1846, saw an Indian taken to the church; he had broken his leg, which had not even been set, and he simply expected Our Lady to cure him without any human intervention at all. Unluckily, the author had no opportunity of seeing what became of him. The great miracle of all was the deliverance of Mexico from the great inundation of 1626, and the fact is established thus. The city was under water, the inhabitants in despair. The picture was brought to the Cathedral in a canoe, through the streets of Mexico; and between one and two years afterwards the inundation subsided. _Ergo_, it was the picture that saved the city!

For centuries a fierce rivalry existed between the Spanish Virgin, called "de Remedios," and Our Lady of Guadalupe; the Spaniards supporting the first, and the native Mexicans the second. A note of Humboldt's ill.u.s.trates this feeling perfectly. He relates that whenever the country was suffering from drought, the Virjen do Remedios was carried into Mexico in procession, to bring rain, till it came to be said, quite as a proverb, _Hasta el agua nos debe venir de la Gachupina_--"We must get even our water from that Spanish creature." If it happened that the Spanish Madonna produced no effect after a long trial, the native Madonna was allowed to be brought solemnly in by the Indians, and never failed in bringing the wished-for rain, which always came sooner or later. It is remarkable that the Spanish party, who were then all-powerful, should have allowed their own Madonna to be placed at such a disadvantage, in not having the last innings. I need hardly say that the shrine of Guadalupe is monstrously rich. The Chapter has been known to lend such a thing as a million or two of dollars at a time, though most of their property is invested on landed security.

They are allowed to have lotteries, and make something handsome out of them; and they even sell medals and prints of their patroness, which have great powers. You may have plenary indulgence in the hour of death for sixpence or less. We drank of the water of the chalybeate spring, bought sacred lottery-tickets, which turned out blanks, and tickets for indulgences, which, I greatly fear, will not prove more valuable; and so rode home along the dusty causeway to breakfast.

As means of learning what sort of books the poorer cla.s.ses in Mexico preferred, we overhauled with great diligence the book-stalls, of which there are a few, especially under the arcades (Portales) near the great square. The Mexican public have not much cheap literature to read; and the scanty list of such popular works is half filled with Our Lady of Guadalupe, and other miracle-books of the same kind. Father Ripalda's Catechism has a large circulation, and is apparently the one in general use in the country. Zavala speaks of this catechism as containing the maxims of blind obedience to king and pope; but my more modern edition has scarcely anything to say about the Pope, and nothing at all about the government. Of late years, indeed, the Pope has not counted for much, politically, in Mexico; and on one occasion his Holiness found, when he tried to interfere about church-benefices, that his authority was rather nominal than real. On the whole, nothing in the Catechism struck me so much as the multiplication-table, which, to my unspeakable astonishment, turned up in the middle of the book; a table of fractions followed; and then it began again with the Holy Trinity.

To continue our catalogue; there are the almanacks, which contain rules for foretelling the weather by the moon's quarters, but none of the other fooleries which we find in those that circulate in England among the less educated cla.s.ses. It is curious to notice how the taste for putting sonnets and other dreary poems at the beginnings and ends of books has survived in these Spanish countries. What used to be known in England as "a copy of verses" is still appreciated here, and almanacks, newspapers, religious books, even programmes of plays and bull-fights, are full of such dismal compositions. We ought to be thankful that the fashion has long since gone out with us (except in the religions tract, where it still survives). It is not merely apropos of sonnets, but of thousands of other things, that in these countries one is brought, in a manner, face to face with England as it used to be; and very trifling matters become interesting when viewed in this light. The last item in the list comprises translations, princ.i.p.ally of French novels, those being preferred in which the agony is "piled up" to the highest point.

German literature is represented by the "Sorrows of Werter." Of course, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is widely circulated here, as it is everywhere in countries not given to the "particular vanity" attacked in it.

One need hardly say that both literature and education are at a very low ebb in Mexico. Referring to Tejada again, I find that he reckons that in the capital, out of a population of 185,000, there are 12,000 scholars at primary schools; but of course, as in other countries, a large proportion of these children attend so irregularly that they can hardly learn anything. For the country generally, he estimates one child receiving instruction out of thirty-seven inhabitants, a very significant piece of statistics. Efforts are being made, especially in the capital, to raise the population out of this state. Mr. Christy took much trouble in investigating the subject, with the a.s.sistance of our friend Don Jose Miguel Cervantes, the head of the Ayuntamiento, or Munic.i.p.al Council. This gentleman, with a few others, has been doing much up-hill work of this kind for years past, establishing schools, and trying to make head against the opposition of the priests and the indifference of the people, as yet with but small success.

It seems hard to be always attacking the Roman Catholic clergy, but of one thing we cannot remain in doubt,--that their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico. For centuries they had the education of the country in their hands, and even at this day they retain the greater share of it. The training which the priests themselves receive will therefore give one some idea of what they teach their scholars. Unluckily, their course of instruction was stereotyped ages ago, when learned men devoted themselves to writing huge books on divinity, casuistry, logic, and metaphysics; concealing their ignorance of facts under an affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many millions of angels could dance on a needle's point; writing treatises "_de omni re scibili_," and on a good many things unknowable also; and teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not. This is a very vicious system of training for a man's mind, the more especially when it is supposed to set him up with a stock of superior knowledge; and this is what the Roman Catholic clergy have been learning, generation after generation, in Mexico and elsewhere. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, particularly among the higher clergy; but, so far as I have been able to ascertain, education in clerical schools has generally been of this kind. It is instinctive to talk a little, as one occasionally finds an opportunity of doing, to some youth just out of these colleges. I recollect speaking to a young man who had just left the Seminario of Mexico, where he had been through a long course of theology and philosophy. He was astonished to hear that bull-fighting and colearing were not universally practised in Europe; and, when his father began to question me about the Crimean war, the young gentleman's remarks showed that he had not the faintest idea where England and France were, nor how far they were from one another.

I happened, not long ago, to visit a celebrated monastic college in South Italy, where they educated, not ordinary mortals, but only young men of n.o.ble birth; and here I took particular care in inspecting the library, judging that, though the scholars need not learn all that was there, yet that no department of knowledge would be taught there that was not represented on the library-shelves. What I saw fully confirmed all that I had previously seen and heard about the monastic learning of the present day. There were to be seen many fine ma.n.u.scripts, and black-letter books, and curious old editions of great value, good store of cla.s.sics (mostly Latin, however), works of the Fathers by the hundred-weight, and quartos and folios of canon-law, theology, metaphysics, and such like, by the ton. But it seemed that, in the estimation of the librarians, the world had stood still since the time of Duns Scotus; for, of what we call positive knowledge, except a little arithmetic and geometry, and a few very poor histories, I saw nothing. It is easy to see how one result of the clerical monopoly of education has therefore come about--that the intellectual standard is very low in Mexico. The Holy Office, too, has had its word to say in the matter. This inst.i.tution had not much work to do in burning Indians, who were anything but sceptical in their turn of mind, and, indeed, were too much like Theodore Hook, and would believe "forty, if you pleased." They even went further, and were apt to believe not only what the missionaries taught them, but to cherish the memory of their old G.o.ds into the bargain. It was three centuries after the Conquest, that Mr. Bullock got the G.o.ddess Teoyaomiqui dug up in Mexico; and the old Indian remarked to him that it was true the Spaniards had given them three very good new G.o.ds, but it was rather hard to take away all their old ones. At any rate, the functions of the Inquisition were mostly confined to working the _Index Expurgatorius_, and suppressing knowledge generally, which they did with great industry until not long ago.

Here, then, are two causes of Mexican ignorance, and a third may be this; that Mexico was a colony to which the Spaniards generally came to make their fortunes, with a view of returning to their own land; and this state of things was unfavourable to the country as regards the progress of knowledge, as well as in other things.

CHAPTER VI.

TEZCUCO.

Across the lake of Tezcuco is Tezcuco itself, a great city and the capital of a kingdom at the time of the Conquest, and famous for its palaces and its learned men. Now it is an insignificant Spanish town, built, indeed, to a great extent, of the stones of the old buildings.

Mr. Bowring, who has evaporating-works at the edge of the lake, and lives in the "Casa Grande"--the Great House, just outside Tezcuco, has invited us to pay him a visit; so we get up early one April morning, and drive down to the street of the Solitude of Holy Cross (Calle de la Soledad de Santa Cruz). There we find Mr. Millard, a Frenchman, who is an _employe_ of Mr. Bowling's, and is going back to Tezcuco with us; and we walk down to the ca.n.a.l with him, half a dozen Indian porters with baskets following us, and trotting along in the queer shuffling way that is habitual to them. At the landing-place we find a number of canoes, and a crowd of Indians, men and women, in scanty cotton garments which show the dirt in an unpleasant manner. A canoe is going to Tezcuco, a sort of regular packet-boat, in fact; and of this canoe Mr. Millard has retained for us three the stern half, over which is stretched an awning of aloe-fibre cloth. The canoe itself is merely a large shallow box, made of rough planks, with sloping prow and stern, more like a bread-tray in shape than anything else I can think of.

There is no attempt at making the bows taper, and indeed the Indians stoutly resist this or any other innovation. In the fore part of the canoe there is already a heap of other pa.s.sengers, lying like bait in a box, and when we arrive the voyage begins.

The crew are ten in number; the captain, eight men, and an old woman in charge of the tortillas and the pulque-jar. All these are brown people; in fact, the navigation of the lakes is entirely in the hands of the Indians, and "reasonable people" have nothing to do with it. Reasonable people--"gente de razon"--being, as I have said before, those who have any white blood in them; and republican inst.i.tutions have not in the least effaced the distinction.

So it comes to pa.s.s that the canoe-traffic is carried on in much the same way as it was in Montezuma's time. There is one curious difference, however. These canoes are all poled about the lakes and ca.n.a.ls; and I do not think we saw an Indian oar or paddle in the whole valley of Mexico. In the ancient picture-writings, however, the Indians are paddling their canoes with a kind of oar, shaped at the end like one of our fire-shovels. But, as we have seen, the distribution of land and water has altered since those days; and the lakes, far greater in extent, were of course several feet deeper all over the present beds; and even at a short distance from the city poling would have been impossible. I suspect that the Aztecs originally used both poles and paddles, and that the latter went out of use when the water became shallow enough for the pole to serve all purposes. Otherwise, we must suppose that the Mexicans, since the Spanish Conquest, introduced a new invention; which is not easy to believe.

We had first to get out of the ca.n.a.l, and fairly out into the lake.

This was the more desirable, as the ca.n.a.l is one of the drains of the city, an office that it fills badly enough, seeing that there is scarcely any fall of water from the lower quarters of the city to the lake. I never saw water-snakes in numbers to compare with those in the ca.n.a.l, and by the side of it. They were swimming in the water, wriggling in and out; and on the banks they were writhing in heaps, like our pa.s.sengers forward. Two of our crew tow us along, and we are soon clear of the ca.n.a.l, and of the salt-swamp that extends on both sides of it, where the bottom of the lake was in old times. Once fairly out, we look round us. We see Mexico from a new point of view, and begin to understand why the Spaniards called it the Venice of the New World. Even now, though the lake is so much smaller than it was then, the city, with its domes and battlemented roofs, seems to rise from the water itself, for the intervening flat is soon foreshortened into nothing. At the present moment it is evident that the level of the lake is much higher than usual. A little way off, on our right, is the Penon de los Banos--"the rock of baths"--a porphyritic hill forced up by volcanic agency, where there are hot springs. It is generally possible to reach this hill by land, but the water is now so high that the rock has become an island as it used to be.

When the first two brigantines were launched on the Lake of Tezcuco by the Spaniards, Cortes took Montezuma with him to sail upon the lake, soon leaving the Aztec canoes far behind. They went to a Penon or rocky hill where Montezuma preserved game for his own hunting, and not even the highest n.o.bility were allowed to hunt there on pain of death. The Spaniards had a regular battue there; killing deer, hares, and rabbits till they were tired. This Penon may have been the Penon de los Banos which we are just pa.s.sing, but was more probably a similar hill a little further off, of larger extent, now fortified and known as El Penon, the Hill. Both were in those days complete islands at some distance from the sh.o.r.e.

Now that we are out of the ca.n.a.l, our Indians begin to pole us along, thrusting their long poles to the bottom of the shallow lake, and walking on two narrow planks which extend along the sides of the canoe from the prow to the middle point. Four walk on each plank, each man throwing up his pole as he gets to the end, and running back up the middle to begin again at the prow. The dexterity with which they swing the poles about, and keep them out of each other's way, is wonderful; and, as seen from our end of the canoe, looks like a kind of exaggerated quarter-staff playing, only n.o.body is ever hit.