[CHAPTER XIX]
SLAVERY ON THE HACIENDAS
"O coch—i—nos! Coch—i—n-o-o-s!"
You wake and turn in your hammock. Through the verandah doorway the breath of morn comes chill to you. The stars twinkle still, and the orange trees are blots of black shadow in the quiet garden. And then there comes to you, again and again repeated, the haunting melody of this cry, the reveille of the hacienda. The Indians are herding the pigs; but if they called "O pigs! O pigs!" there would be none of the romance that there is in this long-drawn weird cry "O Cochinos!"
Outside in the yard a hustling crowd of pigs worry round a heap of pumpkin gourds. In the semi-darkness the barelegged Indians with scarlet blankets wrapped round them move to and fro; the boys chasing the pigs and the fowls, and the men foddering the mules and horses in the corral. Thus does every hacienda throughout Yucatan awake to its day's work. While it is still dark the Indian families tumble out of their hammocks, and the housewife builds a little wood fire in the blackened ring of stones on the earth floor which serves for kitchen range. The coffee is boiled, and, crouching round on their hams, the family drink it black and munch the coarse tortillas of yesterday's baking. Then the boys herd the "cochinos," and the men, if it is a ranch where cattle are kept, straggle out into the woods and "round up" the cows, driving them into the yard to be milked. But this is rare, for there is very little milking done in Yucatan, partly because as a drink milk is not appreciated by the Yucatecans, or indeed by the Indians; and partly because such pasture as exists is of the coarsest kind and the cows are nearly always dry.
When you have seen one hacienda you have seen them all, allowing of course for the difference in size. A large rambling, one-storeyed stuccoed house raised on a small terrace, with a wide arcaded stone verandah in front, and standing in a huge yard bordered by grey stone walls, its surface the natural earth and rock, its entrance usually a pretentious archway, almost ecclesiastical in its pitch and size. Round the yard cluster the huts of the Indians, the corral for the mules, stables and what not. Most of these haciendas, at any rate those deep in the country, have a very shabby and down-at-heel appearance. Between the pompous gateway the iron gates have sagged off their hinges or are missing altogether, their place being taken by two hurdles fastened together by ropes or loops improvised out of lianas. But just around Merida, where are the haciendas of the richest of the henequen lords, much has been done of late to turn these farms into lordly pleasure-houses. Money is no object to the Yucatecan landlord; and his apathy or want of taste is all that can set limits to the beautifying of his country seat. At the hacienda of Yaxche, eighteen miles out of the capital, we saw a good proof of what money can do in the hands of an intelligent land-owner. One of the greatest difficulties in Yucatan is the lack of feed. Grass, as we know it, will not grow, and the best that can be done for the cattle is to provide them with a coarse clover. At Yaxche two large paddocks had been planted with this, and were watered by a contrivance which had cost no less than £30,000. Into several large round galvanised watertowers erected on iron trelliswork standards thirty feet high, the water is pumped from the limestone wells by steam. From these large tanks pipes lead out to feed smaller ones running in parallel rows from one end of the field to the other at distances of about six yards apart. Every twenty yards along these small pipes a standard is erected about five feet high, on the top of which is a rose like that on a gardener's watering-pot. When the water is turned on at the tanks the pressure attained from its height forces it along the pipes up through the standards, and a few seconds later the whole field is being deluged with an artificial rainfall as if from a myriad fountains. Three times a day the clover crop is thus watered.
By the time the sun is up, the cattle have been tended and the Indians are off to the milpas or the henequen fields. The description of the latter we leave to Chapter XXI., where we give an account of the whole henequen industry. Apart from this comparatively artificial product, maize is to-day what it has always been for the Peninsula, what it was to the Mayans four centuries back, the be-all and end-all of Yucatecan agriculture. The Indian is a poor farmer. He has not moved with the times. It is true that in many localities he has not had the chance; but it is also true that he would not take the chance if it offered. The plough is unknown, and if a benevolent society was formed with the object of presenting one to each Indian labourer, he would not be able to use it because of the nature of the soil, which is for the most part a very thin layer of earth on a rock bed, and also because he never takes the trouble to properly clear the ground. An Indian-corn field would give an Essex corn-grower a shock from which his constitution would never rally.
There are two ways in which the farmer in Yucatan sets about making his maize-patch. Each or at least every second year a new piece must be claimed from the dense woodland, for the poorness of the soil does not allow more than two crops to follow each other. The commonest method is to first clear the patch by cutting down the trees one season for the next. After this has been done, the timber is allowed to lie where it falls and rot during the rainy months. When the dry season comes the whole fallen timber is set on fire and all but the largest of the trees are burnt, the charred remains of these lying in all directions year after year. The second method, apparently the most ancient and that still used by the present-day independent Indians, is to fire the forest at the end of the dry season in May just as it stands, cutting down the large trunks that escape the flames about a yard from their base, and letting them lie where they fall. In this condition the Indian considers that his patch is ready. To view it after having been used to English fields is at once rather a strange and depressing experience. Charred tree-trunks lie scattered in all directions. Trees-trunks that have been cut off a yard or so from the ground stand up like the piles of a pier at a watering place after a heavy gale in which the deck of the pier has been carried away. Huge boulders and stones of all sizes are scattered over the soil, making the use of machinery absolutely impossible. But to the native of Yucatan it seems ready enough, and as soon as there comes the first heavy rainfall at the opening of the wet season, the Indians go out to the fields to plant the corn. This is all done by hand, being dibbled in much the same way as is often seen in the Fen districts of England, when a cottager has a patch too small to get a corndrill to work. The rest is "on the lap of the gods," though the Indian has little reason for anxiety. For the rain is sure to come, and then the sun baking down on his sodden milpas will bring up, as if by magic, the long green shoot presently to swell out into a golden yellow crown of leaf shrouding the cob.
The Indian harvest is about our Christmas time, and the labourers troop into the milpas, wicker baskets slung on their brown backs, and pick the cobs, dropping them over their shoulders into the baskets. Milpas are seldom of any great size, and the harvester usually carries his load back to the hacienda when he returns thither for his first real meal of the day, which he takes between ten and eleven. His menu is of the simplest, monotonously the same from year end to year end; just that fare upon which his lowlier ancestors toiled in the sun to build pyramid and temple. Black beans, always black beans; sometimes crushed into a purple-black pulp, sometimes frizzled in lard, sometimes with a thin vegetable soup, the stock,—pork, peppers, garlic, and a slice or two of pumpkin gourd. To this staple dish of frijoles there is very seldom added any meat save when he has been able to bag a chachalaka on his tramp to the milpas or a hacienda pig has been killed. Tortillas and coffee, not always the latter, complete his meal. Before the hour of noon he is back at his work till about five, when his day's labour is over.