Our Neighbor-Mexico

Front matter

CATHEDRAL AND PLAZA BY MOONLIGHT.

OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR:

A WINTER IN MEXICO.

Table of contents

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.—TO THE CAPITAL.

I.

Book I To the Capital

OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

I.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING.

The Threshold.—From Snow to Flowers.—A Character, and what made him.—Our South and its Ethiop.—The Bay and Blaze of Havana.—Off.

T|here is properly a path to the front door of a house, or at least a few steps ere its entrance is reached. So every voyage has a preliminary, a before-the-door-step experience. This is sometimes excluded entirely from the journal of the journey, sometimes inserted in the preface—a proper place for the preliminaries (a fore-talk best occurring at the fore-threshold), sometimes made into Chapter First. The latter course is here adopted, though every reader is at liberty to skip the chapter, leap over the threshold, and press instantly into the centre of the house, that is, the volume.

The nearest things are often the farthest off, the farthest off the nearest. This is true of places as well as of peoples. We know more of Bismarck than of our next-block neighbor, of Paris than of many an American town. This law is verified in our knowledge, or ignorance rather, of our nearest national neighbor, Mexico. Few books are written, less are read, upon the most novel land on our continent, and one of the most attractive on any continent. Prescott's "Conquest" is esteemed a sort of historical romance, the very charm of his style adding to the unreality of his theme. And if it be reckoned strict history, it is still history; not a living, breathing power, as is England or Italy, Germany or Russia, but a vivid fact of three centuries and over ago, a mediæval story of marvel and mystery. In fact, Prescott's "Conquest" has made that of its subject, Cortez, to fade. And one is half tempted to believe that the real conquistador was not the strong-brained, strong-limbed, strong-souled Spaniard, but the half-blind and wholly meditative Bostonian. The Achilles and his Homer are worthy of their several fame. Yet the land on which, or out of which, each won his chief glory is still superior to them both. A run along some of its chief paths of interest may make this fact patent to other eyes.

Just as our North was putting on its winter night-robes, which it did not take off for four long months, I packed my valise, three of them, as became a "carpet-bagger," and moved southward.

Snow chased me as far as Richmond; moist, mild June met me at Montgomery; oranges, in clusters, plucked fresh from the boughs, were passed through the cars near Mobile; and New Orleans welcomed me to summer skies, and showers, and flowers. A Northern touch of sharp and almost icy weather made the steamer for Havana less unwelcome. So a glimpse at good friends, and a coming and going grasp of hands, including a coming but not going grasp of hearts, and the steamer and I are off.

A character that I met on the steamer, by its strangeness relieved the sea-qualms, and, if for no other reason, deserves a sketch. He was a type of a vanishing class—few, I hope, at any time, but not without existence. He was a Havana planter, who had come to New Orleans to sell his crop, and was returning brimful of cash and whisky; nay, not brimful of the latter, or, if so, with great capacity of enlargement—worse than some prolix preachers possess over their text. When the captain entered the cabin, he greeted him with a shower of oaths—not in rage, but in good humor—that being almost his only vocabulary. He called constantly for every sort of liquor—beer, gin, wine, whisky. He drank all the three days and nights like a fish, if a fish ever drinks. It never drinks such stuff as he constantly poured down his inflamed throat. The stuff that went in and that came out were alike horrible.

A clever colored lad from Philadelphia was the special object of his contemptuous detestation. He ordered him to get the liquors and hot water every few minutes until near midnight. When the fires were out, and hot water was not to be had, and the bar shut, and the liquors also absent, then he raved at the lad for not waking up steward and purser, and securing the delectable elements. If the boy went slowly to his impossible task, how he cursed him! how he blasphemed his people! how he cursed the Abolitionists for setting them free! declaimed against Massachusetts in particular for her share in this matter, and declared their incapacity for liberty, though the boy was tenfold more capable of freedom than himself. Yet he was as shrewd as any other Yankee, and said that slavery was as good as dead in Cuba, and he had persuaded his wife, and sold off all his "niggers" when he could get something for them. I am sure they were glad to get away from the lash of his tongue and arm, and I pitied the hired hands on whom he voided the rheum of an arrogant disposition, a trained contempt and hatred, a false theory, and a fearful appetite. Nay, his wife must suffer often from that scourge.

He was a good Romanist withal, though without any of the orthodoxy of his Church. He said that he prayed nightly to the Virgin, but he did not believe in her, or Christ, or the Bible, or any thing but God. I said, "If you believe in God, you believe in Christ, for Jesus Christ is God." "Jesus Christ!" he broke forth; "——Jesus Christ!" It was the worst oath I had ever heard. I called him quick to his senses, and he halted a moment in his mad and profane career. He was a Free Religionist, like three others whom I have met on this trip, two of whom were also European Roman Catholics, one a Bostonian, showing that there is no distinction of clime or race in this anti-faith. Like the others, he showed his free religion and modern theology by most outrageous swearing. It is the true creed of that churchless church, and shows that men who profess to deny damnation, hell, Christ, and even God himself, are most profuse in using terms which show that these are the profoundest beliefs of their real nature.

I pitied the poor rich man, and the system of religion and society that had turned such a creature of holy possibilities into a demon; and I prayed all the more earnestly for the abolition of the devil of drink, and that it might speedily follow to eternal destruction its kindred demon already slain.

What wonderful blessings has Abolition brought to all those who were held, like this rich victim, fast in more slavish chains! Our white brethren will rejoice as much over the liberty it has given them and their sons as in that which it has given their darker brothers. It has made such characters as this impossible. Men may drink yet, and curse Christ and his Church, but they can not be developed into such frightful specimens of diseased humanity.

He made me think of a like character I met on the road from Suez to Cairo. He was a genteel, well-dressed Turkish merchant, with his nice silk jacket "all buttoned down before" and behind, and tasteful silk breeches. He was bringing some Nubian boys to the Cairene market. He kept tormenting the poor lads by touching their arms, cheeks, and legs, anywhere, with the burning end of his cigar. He laughed at their silent cringes, and looked at us as if expecting reciprocal smiles. Had we known his language, we would have cursed him to his face. If such were his jokes, what must have been his treatment of them when roused to madness, as he undoubtedly often was! He was very devout withal, and at the sunset station was first from the cars, and on the wilderness gravel, in sight of all, was making his prostrations and muttering his prayers.

It is this frightful exception that proves the rule, an exception not so infrequent as it ought to have been, as the Rev. Mr. Bleby shows in his late most interesting book, entitled "Romance without Fiction; or, Sketches from the Port-folio of an Old Missionary," in which he gives thrilling illustrations of hardnesses of heart and cruelties of conduct in the English West Indies, and by English gentlemen, and clergymen even, that are harrowing after almost a century has passed since their enactment. All our Sunday-schools, North and South, should read this vivid record of modern martyr , not less horrible and holy than that given by Fox, and executed by false Christians upon the true in the Middle and the later ages. The evil that wrought it has ceased—thanks be to God!—in most lands, and will soon cease in all.

All this conduct was simply because this comely lad was colored. I thought I had escaped from caste and all its effects. When I mounted the Yazoo I did not expect to see colorphobia in any shape until I had gotten back to our beloved country, when I again expected to see it everywhere, in every shape. But the presence was not to be put by. It seemed even providential; for the first Sunday that I spent in the South, only the week previous, I opened my Testament and lighted upon the passage, "The angel of the Lord spoke unto Philip, saying, 'Arise and go into the south country.' "The next verse says, "He arose and went, and lo! a man, an Ethiop." It was, seemingly, a surprise to him that he was sent to this black Gentile. But he was without prejudice of color, though tempted, as a Jew, by that of blood and faith. For these latter reasons he may have hesitated a little, for the Holy Spirit has to enforce the order of the angel, and he says to Philip, "Go and glue thyself to this chariot." As the Testament was being read in course, I can hardly say the passage was selected by lot or of the Lord; yet it struck me very forcibly, and I fancied (was it fancy?) that the ordering in this case was providential. I had arisen and gone into the South country, and had found there the Ethiop, and now heard the Spirit say, "Glue thyself"—this the original means—"to him." I saw in his conversion the regeneration of all our South land and North land, too; for the Lord will uplift the whole nation only as we uplift our long down-trodden brethren into Christian oneness with ourselves. The Ethiop is riding already in his chariot, and as Lowell wittily somewhere, for substance, says, "The white man will be willing enough to run along by his side, and accept a seat with him, when the black man rides in his own chariot."

But our South country was not sufficiently South. So I am sent yet farther into the South country—the "mid country," as the orig hath it—till I find myself where our "Sunny South" is far away to the north, and where even our country is printed on the map "the United States of the North." Much as some of our good neighbors may dislike to be called Northern people, they are compelled to endure that affliction from Mexican lips. This proud and sensitive nation calls itself" the United States of Mexico," and it will not allow another body of commonwealths on the continent to call itself "the United States of America."

If our brethren had achieved their independence they might have been compelled to conform to this nomenclature, and called their country the Central United States. Fortunately, they can and will yet rejoice in the continental title which includes centre and circumference in its all-embracing area.

This experience on the steamer has led to all these musings. Better these than that dreary heaving of the stomach and the sea. How the outside and the inside miserably harmonize! The gray I get glimpses of through that bit of a hole in the side of the ship, as the berth tips over, lets me sickly see a like sick sea. The waves toss wearily on their bed, and I am glad, in a miserable way, that I have even this sort of communion with nature.

The Yazoo carries us to Havana and to midsummer in sixty hours. The hot bay seems hotter than New York's hottest. Its round rim is ablaze with direct and reflected burnings. The golden sand-hills shoot back the golden rays in increased fervor and brilliance. The palm gives a shadeless shade, as would an umbrella stuck on the top of a twenty-foot pole. The cactus, least lovely and not least useful of tropical plants, thick sets its quoit-like leaves with thorns. Deep sheds cover the quays, protecting from the fiery blaze both man and beast: which is which, is yet undecided, since both are beasts here, the mule often less so than the man. Under their broad roofs goes ceaselessly on the busy loading of sugar and oranges and bananas, the busy unloading of bales and barrels of Northern fields and mills.

The slave is still here. He is a vanished institution northward across that blue gulf, and already in his last stages of serfhood here. He exhibits, in this decay of brute hood and beginning of manhood, some traces of both natures. Here is a big, oily fellow, lifting freight out of the New York steamer. He is as lithe as a Greek wrestler, and, like him, anointed with fresh oil, his own oil, extracted by the Adamic curse, not from his brow alone, but from his back and breast and legs and arms, even the whole body. Like the precious oil on Aaron's head, it flows down to the bottom of his garments, or would if he had any on, a couvert alone composing his wardrobe.

THE BAY OF HAVANA.

He will make a good Touissant, give him education, or a bad one if he has not soon given him liberty. This he is soon to have; and some future visitor may see him clothed and in his right mind, well cultured, sitting in the council chamber or standing in the pulpit, serving in high places as he now serves in low.

This glimpse from the bay is all I can enjoy; for the steamer City of Merida is in, and will leave before night for Vera Cruz. The vessel must be off before sundown, or it can not leave for two days; for this is the night before Christmas, and the Church authorities forbid all leaving of ships or doing of any other work on this holiday, except on payment into their palms, professedly into her treasury, of double fees of doubloons; so, to escape committing the sin or paying the price of bribery, the captain is determined to get outside the Castle before sunset vespers ring.

The hot streets are touched; the collector and commandant are paid their demanded and needless fee; the filth and fever of the narrow streets about the wharf are duly interviewed; a coachman lashes his sick horses from officer to officer; a cup of coffee is drank at those best saloons of Spanish-speaking countries and some ten dollars are spent for the privilege of entering the port and exchanging steamers. Then the black sides of the goodly steamer are scaled, and Havana is left almost or ere it is reached.

"Out to sea the streamers fly."

We leave the port left three centuries and a half ago by a daring soldier-farmer, with his small accompaniment of ships and soldiers, for the land, whisperings of whose wonders had allured the commandant of Cuba to embark his treasures in its discovery and subjugation; and who also, less wisely for himself, but not for the world, had been induced to give command of the fleet to a reconciled foeman, who had made peace with his adversary, that he might thus gain over him the greater victory.

Velasquez, however, began to fear him before he sailed, and had revoked his commission. But Cortez, before he had received official knowledge of the revocation, hoisted anchor and sail, and fled in the night. We follow after at not far from the same hour. The city lights glimmer along the shore ere we lose sight of it and them, and we skim all night along the way that adventurer sailed.

Book I Chapter II

II.

A DAY IN YUCATAN.

The First-born.—An Opportunity accepted.—An Index Point.—Cocoa-nut Milk.—The Market-place.—Euchre as a Food.—A Grave Joke.—The Drink of the Country.—The Cocoa Palm.—The Native Dress.—A Hacienda.—A Pre-adamite Haciendado.—Jenequen.—Prospecting.—Almost a Panic.—Done into Rhyme.

Every thing is affected by first impressions. Sometimes they can never be overcome. That like or dislike often abides incurable. The first sight of a foreign shore is a love or a hate forever. How perfect Ireland is in my memory, because it looked so beautiful, rising, a green wave of stillness and strength, out of that sick and quaking sea, over which I had been rolling so long! Egypt is not a river of verdure so much as a strip of blazing sand, for Alexandria, and not Cairo, is its first-born in my experience.

Mexico has its first picture in my gallery. Whatever grandeurs of mountain or glories of forest it may unfold, its first impression will always be that first day in Yucatan. I never dreamed a month before of seeing Yucatan. Even if Mexico itself had crossed the mind as a possibility of experience, Yucatan had never been included in that concept. That prettily sounding name was as far off as Cathay or Bokhara.

Yucatan was, to me. Central America; a museum of ancient monuments; an out-of the-world corner. In fact, it did not belong to Mexico till Maximilian's time. He annexed it, and they hold together still. We often strike an unknown rock in our sail through life, and Yucatan was the unexpected shoal on which we first stranded. It happened in this wise:

The City of Merida makes a landing as near as possible to the city after which it is named. This city is twenty miles from the shore, in the peninsula of Yucatan. It has sixty thousand inhabitants, and is the centre of a vast hemp-producing country. This hemp finds a ready market in New York. Hence the pause at this spot; hence the name of our vessel. It is to land stores for the big city, and to take hemp for the bigger country.

The steamer lies four miles from shore. Wearied with its close confinement, three passengers, two of whom are General Palmer, president of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, who, with General Rosecrans, is seeking the extension of that system in Mexico, and Mr. Parish, their European financial representative, propose to spend on shore the day in which we are to remain here. We are met with protestations from various quarters. We are told that we will be sun-struck; will get the calentura, or fever; that the fleas will take possession of us; that a Norther will arise, and we can not get back to the steamer; and thus hobgoblins dire are piled on our path. The American minister, returning home, grand and genial, adds his preventive persuasions. But none of these things move us. We go. The captain of the boat which is rowing us ashore enlivens our depressed spirits with encouraging stories about the abundance of monkeys and parrots, of lions and tigers, and deer and wild boars, and every such terror and delight—none of which we see.

We land at a wharf covered with bales of hemp, and brown-skinned natives in their white suits. On it stands a small, pale-faced gentleman, whom we find to be Mr. Tappan, of Boston, the consular agent, and grandson of the minister who wrote the plaintive and pretty verses beginning,

"There is an hour of peaceful rest."

It is almost always fortunate for an American abroad if the United States official be an American. He knows his language, the first important consideration, and he knows what the visitor wants to know, the second and not less important consideration. Our Boston friend is expert in these two excellences. He takes us across the blazing sands of this holiday season to the cool arches of the collector's house. That gentlemanly official welcomes us to Progresso, the name of this new town. This name shows its newness, and also, possibly, that a Yankee had something to do with its christening; for the Mexican has hardly yet learned that there be such a thing as progress, much less that it can be concentrated into a town, though he indulge in titular progress, and put into names what his Northern brothers put into fact.

Our gentlemanly collector leads us through his official rooms into the domestic apartments, and introduces us to his family. He is a Spaniard, his wife a Cuban, and his three adopted daughters are representatives of the three races, so called, that hold harmonious possession of this soil. They consist of a white young lady of Anglo-Saxon lightness of complexion, seemingly of a Northern European origin, her adopted parents being dark to her; another, slightly her junior, whose tint is of that Afric sort that Mrs. Kemble Butler deemed richer than any European, and whose opinion our former aristocracy confirmed by their conduct; and the third was a pure Indian belle, none the less beautiful in contour and complexion, a half-way house between these two extremes of human colors. We did not see the Pocahontas of the family, but the Cleopatra and Boadicea were among our agreeable entertainers. They were dressed just alike, in neat, light, brown-checked muslins, with girlish modesty of array and manner that was cultivated and charming. Our ignorance of Spanish put a barrier between us, but their bearing was sisterly and filial; and we accepted this index of the New America as a token of the superiority of Yucatan over the United States, and a proof of the fitness of the name of the town. Had many an American father recognized, not his adopted, but his actual family, a like variety would have been visible about the paternal board. It will yet be, and without sin or shame, as in this cultivated circle.

The host offered us the milk of the cocoa-nut in large goblets, and grapes preserved in their natural shape. One cocoa-nut makes a tumbler of limpid water sweet and agreeable. His apart let the cooling breezes blow through, and we rejoiced an hour in the shelter from the July heat of December, and the stimulus of a Long Branch July breeze.

Then comes a walk through Progresso. This city, like our new Western enterprises, is better laid out than settled. It has its straight, broad streets running through chaparral, its grand plaza, with scarcely a corner of it yet occupied, its corner-lots at fabulous prices. That corner opposite the custom-house they hold at two thousand dollars. Others a little outside of the centre you can buy as low as fifty dollars. That is better than you can do on the North Pacific, where on a boundless prairie they will stake out a lot twenty-five feet by a hundred, and charge you hundreds of dollars for the bit.

The market-place is a projecting thatched roof over the side of a one-story edifice. On mats sit brown old ladies with almost equally old-looking vegetables. Here are oranges, bananas, black beans, squash seeds boiled in molasses, a sort of candy, and other esculents, to me unknown. Among them is one called euchre. Never having known what that too-familiar word means in the nomenclature of the States, I thought I would find out its meaning in Yucatan, so I invested a six-and-a-quarter-cent bit in this game of chance. I received a piece of the root—for so I judged it to be—looking like a cross between a turnip and a carrot. It was white, of various shapes, round, square, long. My piece was about as large round as a child's wrist, and as long as its hand. I tasted it, and was satisfied with euchre as an article of diet. If others, on one taste of their sort, would as quickly discard it, they might safely be left to make the experiment. But even my friend, the Rev. Mr. Murray, can not effect the prohibition of that appetite in that way. It is likely this would grow with tasting, as the other does, for it was sweet and not disagreeable, being like the turnip and carrot in nature as well as in looks. If it could replace the fatal fascination of its synonym, I should be glad to see it introduced into our country.

The houses of Progresso are of one story, of mortar or thatch, covered with a high roof of thatch. This high roof is open inside, and makes them shady and cool. The sides are also often of thatch, and they look like a brown dwarf with a huge brown straw sombrero pulled over his eyes. Some of those built of mortar have ornamental squares in the sides, where shells are carefully set in various shapes in the mortar, and which make a pleasing effect, the diamonds and other shapes giving the walls a variety that is really artistic. Why could it not be imitated in larger buildings at home? One house had the word "Sepulcro" in large letters chalked along its front. "What does that mean?" asks one of the party. The occupant was sick a long time, and the boys thought it was about time he had died, so they chalked that word along the door to express their conviction of his duty. He ought to be dead—dead he shall be called. A grave joke, that.

Here I first tasted the sort of chocolate of which Montezuma was so fond, and which he took so thick as almost to make it an edible. A brown, brawny woman made us a cup of the same in a bamboo-sided, rush-roofed cafe'. It was worthy Montezuma's praise: Parisian chocolate takes the second place hereafter, and a good way below the first. It is prepared in milk, and is a thick, soft liquid that melts on your tongue and "goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak." That dame would make her fortune by such a café in New York. But, then, she probably wishes for no fortune, and her secret, the secret of all the dames of the country, may never be revealed outside the land itself. You must come to Mexico to know how "chocolatte" can taste.

The fields about Progresso have chiefly shrubs of the cactus order. Beautiful flowers of purple, yellow, and crimson abound. Here grows wild the heliotrope, the fragrant purple flower that is scattered so generally at funerals. The sweet-pea and other cultivated delights of the Northern hot-house and garden are blossoming abundantly.

The cocoa-palm throws out its long spines, deep green, thrust straight out from a gray trunk, that looks as if wrapped in old clothes against the cold. This gray bark is a striking offset to the dark, rich leaves, which are the blanches themselves. Where these leaves push forth from the trunk, from ten to fifty feet from the ground, a cluster of green balls, of various sizes and ages, are hanging. This green rind is an inch thick. Then the black shell known to us is reached, and inside of that, not the thick white substance we find on opening it, but a thin soft layer, or third rind, the most of the hollow being filled with milk. Later in the season the milk coagulates to meat, and the cocoa-nut of commerce is completed. It is cultivated extensively here, both for home use and the Northern market.

The people are chiefly Indians, not of the Aztec, but Toltec variety. This is a nation hundreds of years older than the Aztecs, and who are supposed to be the builders of the famous monuments of Central America, and to have been driven from Mexico southward about a thousand years ago. They are of the usual Indian tint, but, unlike our aborigines, live in comfortable houses, are engaged in industrious callings, and dress in a comely manner.

Both sexes wear white, the men and boys having often one leg of their trowsers rolled up, for what purpose we could not guess, unless it be for the more cleanly fording of the brooklets and mudlets that occur. It was a token of neatness, if that was the reason, that was very commendable.

The women wear a skirt of white, and a loose white waist separate from the skirt, and hanging sometimes near to the bottom of the under-garment. This over-skirt, or robe, is ornamented with fringe and borders worked in blue. The head-dress is a shawl or mantle of light cotton gauze, of blue or purple, thrown gracefully over the head and shoulders. One lady, evidently thinking well of herself and her apparel, had a ring on every finger of each hand, and gold ornaments hanging profusely from her neck. I have seen many ladies who, if they distributed the rings singly on each finger, would not find both hands sufficient for their display. This light-brown laughing madam had her limits seemingly, beyond which she would not go—eight rings and no more.

As a proof of the industry and intelligence of these natives, let us go to a hacienda, or farm, a mile out of town. Though it is a short walk, yet having ordered a fly for a longer ride, we employ it on this excursion. We did not take the carriage of the country, which is a basket on two wheels, about the size of a cot-bed, which cot-bed itself lies on the bottom of the basket, and on which sit the passengers. A wicker covering bends over about two-thirds of this bed; the rest is open to sun and rain. Three mules abreast make this fly fly.