PART I.
OLD MEXICO.
OLD MEXICO.
I.
BY WAY OF CUBA AND THE SPANISH MAIN.
I.
Boom! Two ruddy old castles domineering a narrow harbor entrance; on the other side a city, gray, warm-colored, and time-stained, and the bells of the Church of the Angels chiming for very early morning service! It was Havana!
I began this journey to Old Mexico and her Lost Provinces by sailing away from the foot of Wall Street, East River, on the 31st day of March, 1881. Some would have begun it, no doubt, by taking the railroad to our Southern confines, and sailing by the steamers, of medium size, which ply from New Orleans, Galveston, and Morgan City—all places feeling very much the new stimulus lately given to Mexican trade. Others—and very likely they could not do better—would have taken direct the excellent Alexandre Line, which carries the mail from New York, calling at Havana, Progreso, Campeachy, Frontera, and Vera Cruz.
Others, perchance, more adventurous, and fond of mixing as much hardship as possible in their pleasure, might have crossed the frontier at Texas, and, the new railroads
1
being yet unfinished, been bumped and thumped a thousand miles to the capital in the wretched diligencias (stage-coaches) of the country.
I did none of these. I shall not be guilty of the egotism of insisting that I did any better; but I had formed a little plan of infusing variety into the trip without making it too onerous. I stood boldly upon the deck of the luxurious steamer Newport, bound for Cuba only. From there I was to take the French packet making regular trips from the ports of St. Nazaire and Santander to Vera Cruz, and bringing much of the French and Spanish migration; or a British steamer from Southampton, or a Spanish one from Cadiz, might be taken in the same way. The fare by any and all of the direct sea routes is about the same, and may be set down roughly at $85.00. The time consumed, where all connections are expeditiously made, should be about eleven days.
II.
There was no uncontrollable excitement on that raw 31st of March when we took our departure. People in the great financial mart, hurrying about their stocks and bonds, even blockaded us in an unthinking way as we came down to the steamer. It might have been simply a case of going to Europe, or anything else quite usual and of little import. It was, instead, a case of going to a land remote far beyond its distance in miles; shrouded in an atmosphere of mystery and danger; little travelled or sought for; the very antipodes of our own, though adjoining it; venerable with age, though a part of a new world ; and said to have been suddenly awakened from slumber by the first touches of a phenomenal new development.
There are those of us whose conception of Mexico has been composed principally of the cuts in our early school geography, and the brief telegrams in the morning papers announcing new revolutions. We rest satisfied with this kind of concept about many another part of the globe aswell till the necessity arrives for going there or otherwise clearing it up. I saw, I think, a snow volcano, and a string of donkeys, conducted by a broad-brim hatted peasant across a cactus-covered plain. I heard dimly isolated pistol-shots fired by brigands, and high-sounding pronunciamientos and cruel fusillades accompanying the overthrow from the Presidency of General this by General that, who would be served in the same way by General somebody else to-morrow. To this should be added some reminiscence of actions in the Mexican War, and notably the portraits of General Scott and bluff old Zachary Taylor.
To this, again, I would add fancies of buried cities in Central America, and of Aztec antiquity, and the valor and astuteness of Hernando Cortez and his cavaliers, remaining from Prescott's history of the Conquest. One of the most captivating of volumes, this had seemed almost mythical in its remoteness; and as to the idea of actually verifying its scenes in person, it was beyond the wildest imagination.
But now all at once this uncertain territory had become real. The railroad had penetrated it, and made it accessible to the average private citizen. Not that it could yet be reached by railway, for the first international line is still incomplete, though its termination is near at hand; but a multitude of lines, undertaken by American capital and enterprise, and aided by a Government of liberal ideas, were traced over every part of the land, and some of them in progress. The locomotive screamed along-side the troops of laden donkeys and in sight of the snow volcanoes. Even the brigands were said to have been dislodged from their fastnesses, the revolutions had ceased, and a reign of peace and security begun.
Momentous rumors from these new enterprises were frequent in the newspapers, and predictions indulged in of the great increase of trade and population to result to Mexico by them. General Grant, to whose personal influence much of the turning of public attention in this unwonted direction, after his first visit, should certainly be ascribed, had taken the presidency of one of them. Their stocks and bonds were being prepared in bank-parlors, but as yet there was no "boom," little that was overt.
III.
I did not quite know, when standing on the deck of the departing steamer, that I was to return to this dense New York, with its tall towers and mansards and fairy-like bridge, from the other side of the world. This journey lengthened out into a long, desultory ramble, beginning with Cuba, and, after Mexico, concluding with the most remote, novel, and characteristic of our own possessions on the Pacific slope. There is unity of subject, and even a certain pathos, in the recollection that this latter was once Mexican territory also. Its most obvious basis of life is still Spanish, and it may be sentimentally considered a kind of Alsace-Lorraine—a part of the sister republic when it was well-nigh as large and powerful as ourselves.
It was naturally cold on the 31st day of March, and blustering weather followed us down the coast as far as it dared. Then I awoke one morning early, at the warm gleam of summer in the yellow lattices of my cabin window, and, looking out, saw that we were voyaging, on an even keel, on the placid blue sea of the tropics.
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Fragrant odors were wafted over to us from Florida, though we did not see the land. The Pan of Matanzas came in sight, and we studied the long, bold outline of the island of Cuba. It was the Spanish Main. It was the perfection of weather for piracy. If the "long, low, suspiciouslooking craft, with raking masts," which used to steal out from sheltered covers to plunder rich galleons, had many such days for their occupation, it was, so far at least, an enviable one.
We had on board a Cuban who had married a Connecticut wife, and lived so long in a Connecticut village that he had a kind of Connecticut accent himself, and he was taking his wife to see his family, where, no doubt, much astonishment awaited her.
The captain, a merry and entertaining soul, had promised us, for our last day's dinner, a baked ice-cream. He endeavored to get up bets on the improbability of his being able to accomplish it; but there, sure enough, it was, and doubters were put to scorn. There was a form of ice-cream, frozen hard and firm, and a crust over it, brown and smoking—a dish, as it were, typical of our situation, as a hardy Northern element in the embrace of the tropics. Not to continue the mystery of it, and as an earnest that there shall be no "tales of a traveller" in this record which are not strictly true, let it be explained that the ice had been covered with a light froth of white of egg, which was rapidly browned and scorched at the cook's galley before the interior had time to be dissolved.
IV.
And so, as I say, two ruddy stone castles, full of green old bronze guns (we found that out afterward), looking down upon a narrow harbor-entrance; and it was Havana!
It was the morning of the 5th of April on which we entered it. We steamed up the strait to where it widens out into a basin, made fast to a buoy, and had our first glimpse of cocoa-palms, growing, unfortunately, around a cluster of coaling-sheds. Some harbor boats took us ashore. We landed at broad stone steps pervaded by smells, passed into the Custom-house (which had been an old convent), and out of it into paved lanes full of donkeys, negroes, soldiers, sellers of fruits and lottery-tickets, engaged in transactions in a debased fractional currency. The money of the debt-ridden island is that of our "shin-plaster" war period, of unhappy memory. A couple of boiled eggs in a common restaurant cost forty cents; a ride in a horse-car, thirty-five. The wages of a minor clerk at the same time were but $30 or $40 a month. How does he make ends meet and provide for his future? He buys regularly a certain amount of hope in the Government lottery. "A demoralizing system indeed!" I said, as I frowned over the wares of a dealer who had lost a leg in the insurrection. I think it was No. 11,014 I bought, however, in a grand extra drawing, the first prize of which was to be a million, in paper. I trust the gentle reader will feel that I repented when I heard the result, some months after, in Mexico, and that I should have tried just as hard to repent had I won.
The Havanese were exercised just then over the discovery of great frauds in their Marine Department. Forty million dollars had been stolen, by collusion between contractors and the commissariat, since the outbreak of the rebellion in 1868. The Morro Castle was full of prisoners of distinction—officers, marquises, and counts, of the sugar aristocracy of the island, and Old Spain—awaiting their trial by court-martial. The principal operator, one Antonio Gassol, had already been sentenced to two years' confinement and the restitution of a million of his ill-gotten gains.
The talk of not a few intelligent persons was, that the ten years' insurrection had been purposely kept alive by rings of contractors for purposes of spoliation, and by ambition for military advancement. Dulce, they said—going through the list of Captains-General—had married a Cuban wife, and was secretly a traitor; De Rodas, when asked for re-enforcements at a certain place, withdrew a portion of the troops already there; Pieltan was occupied in intriguing for the republican cause in Spain, and the easy-going Concha for the cause of King Alfonso. Finally, Martinez Campos and Jovellar were sent out, and, yielding to the demand of the universal weariness, by a little display of vigor, the one in the cabinet, the other in the field, made an end of the languishing struggle.
This may have been, however, merely the story of the discontented, which should be taken with a grain of salt. It is true, on the one hand, that the area of the island is not great, and the despatch of forces from Spain easy; the insurgents never held a town, and received no aid worth mentioning from without. But, on the other hand, there were no railroads of consequence, the ordinary roads were wretched, and there was the wild manigua, as it is called, half forest, half swamp, with which a good part of the island has abounded from the date of Christopher Columbus down. It was in the manigua that the insurgents found refuge from pursuit.
V.
CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO.
peasants for general uses on the plantations, and which served also as their weapon in the strife.
There was an International Exhibition in progress at Matanzas, easily rivalled by almost any American county fair. The railway ride of three hours and a half by a ram-shackle train, run by a Chinese engineer, was hot and dusty, but how well repaid by the first deep draughts of satisfaction in understanding at last the heart of a tropical country! There was the thatched cabin, shaded by the broad-leafed banana. It was like "Paul and Virginia." Where was the faithful negro Domingo? The hedges were of cactus and dwarf pine-apple. There were groves of cocoa-nuts like apple-orchards with us, and unknown fruits too numerous to mention. It was as if each peasant proprietor had cultivated a gigantic conservatory, and were indulging himself in the luxuries of life in consideration of foregoing its necessities.
Matanzas was dull, even with its Exposition, a pretty plaza, and the memory of a locally immortal poet, Milanes, of whom a tablet in a wall testified that he was born and died in a certain house. I looked into his works at a book-stall. He wrote on "Tears," "The Sea," "Spring and Love," "The Fall of the Leaves," "To Lola," and "A Coquette." "Your mother little thought, when she held you an infant in her arms," he says, in substance, to the coquette, "of what wiles and perfidies you would be capable. Your beauteous aspect will in time fade away, and what remorseful memories will you not then have to look back upon!"
With this dip into the poetic inspiration of the heart of the island of Cuba let me take the train back to town, having made a beginning of the discovery that a glib rhyming talent—and facility in speech-making as well—is common among the Spanish-Americans.
I visited a sugar plantation, where the negro slaves, swarming out of a great stone barracks—the men in ragged coffee-sacks, the women in bright calicoes—were as wild and uncouth as if just from the Congo. Next I went to the bathing suburb of Chorrera, where there is a battered old fort that has done service against the pirates, and where the American game of base-ball has been acclimated.
VI.
Havana was gay with parks, opera-houses, clubs, and military music. Awnings were stretched completely across the two narrow streets of principal shops. Bright tinting of the modern walls contrasted with a gray old rococo architecture. An interior court of my hotel was colored of so pure an azure that it was puzzling at the first glance to say where the sky began and the wall ended. The more important mansions were of a size and stateliness within, which is probably nowhere surpassed, but neither in them nor the shabby little attempt at a gallery were there any pictures worthy of the name.
"You will find all that—the treasures of art—in Mexico," the Havanese say. "Yes indeed! That is the place for them."
They speak with great respect of Mexico, with which, perhaps, they have no very intimate personal acquaintance. Up to the independence of the latter, in 1821, it was the richest and greatest of all the Spanish possessions; and Cuba, made more important in its turn by this independence, was but a stopping-place on the way to it.
It is worth while to have seen Havana and Cuba as a preliminary to Mexico. The Spanish tradition pervading both is the same, with local modifications. It was here, too, that Hernando Cortez prepared his immortal expedition of discovery and conquest. Since I am preparing my own, to follow over exactly the same course, whyshould I repine that the Ville de Brest is a day or two longer in coming?
He was a wild young fellow in the island in early days, this Cortez, his chroniclers say, and gave little promise of the great qualities he developed in the enterprise which steadied him. The shilly-shally Velasquez would have stopped the sailing of his expedition and thrown him into prison, but he dropped down the harbor before his preparations were half completed and finished them elsewhere. He put to sea at last, with five hundred and fifty men, in nine small vessels, to undertake the conquest of an empire teeming with millions. The largest of his vessels was of a hundred tons, and some were mere open boats. In these he conveyed, too, sixteen horses, which cost him, it is said of them, "inexpressibly dear."
We make a boast of our hardihood sometimes, yet grumble at sea-sickness, delays, the ordinary mischances of the traveller. But think of it! To set out in such a fashion, without steam, without charts, subject to every bodily ill for which modern science has found a remedy, and carrying your horses, worth well-nigh their weight in gold, to proceed against an unknown empire! Why, we do not know the first principles of boldness!
VII.
At last, on the 11th of April, the Ville de Brest came in, and went out again on the same day. She was a steady-going, bourgeois-looking craft, as compared with the elegant American steamer, and showed traces of hard knocks in her long, plodding journey of twenty days to this point. She treated us well enough, however, and presented the novelty of surroundings for which I had come aboard. There was a little, gold-laced captain, and the crew wore white canvas hats and suits of two shades of blue cotton, as if equipped for some charming nautical opera. I believe I was the only English-speaking passenger; and as it has never been known to occur to a foreigner to practise his English, it was an excellent opportunity for practising the languages likely to be needed in the new country.
There was a young Frenchman who had been back to his own country to marry a wife, and brought her with him. There was a French engineer coming to report for principals in Paris on Mexican mines; an agent of a scheme for the establishment of a national bank. A young Italian of Novara, who had "Student" printed on his visiting-card, had secured an engagement as clerk in the capital for three years. An elderly Spaniard was coming over to look into the subject of forgotten heritages; another had obtained a position in the mines at Guanajuato. There were commercial men, and a well-to-do Mexican family, returning from their travels, with a son who had studied law at a Spanish university.
It has been proposed to call this body of water made up of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico the Columbian Sea, in compliment to sadly-neglected Columbus; and it seems a good idea, but it will hardly now be carried out. My predecessors have seen many an interesting sight on this tropical old Spanish Main, the source, too, of that greatest of natural mysteries, the Gulf Stream. But these must have been in times long gone by. In the day of steam, with the swift prow always in motion, the ocean is vacant. There is no catching of sharks and dolphins, hardly even a covey of flying-fish. Those things were for the long, lazy periods of calm, when the denizens of the deep gathered curiously around the craft half quiescent among them.
One of my predecessors in 1839—Madame Calderon de la Barca, whose book on Mexico remains full of interest still— was twenty-five days making the voyage from Havana to Vera Cruz. She saw, too, as she approached, the snow-clad peaks of Orizaba and the Cofre of Perote, thirty leagues inland. We saw nothing of these. The sky was of an opaque gray above low sand-hills, on which a white surf was tumbling. We made our transit in three days, including some stoppage by a "norther." The norther is of peculiar moment to the Mexican harbors of the eastern coast; they are little more than open roadsteads, and when it blows they cannot be entered.