We were very kindly received by the English merchants to whom my companion had letters, and we set ourselves to learn what was the real state of things in Mexico.
On an average, the Presidency of the Republic of Mexico had changed hands once every eight months for the last ten years; and Don Ignacio Comonfort had stepped into the office in the previous December, on the nomination of his predecessor the mulatto general Alvarez, who had retired to the southern provinces with his army.
President Comonfort, with empty coffers, and scarcely any real political power, had felt it necessary to make some great effort to get popularity for himself and his government. He had therefore adopted the policy of attacking the fueros, the extraordinary privileges of the two classes of priests and soldiers, which had become part of the constitution under the first viceroys, and which not even the war of independence, and the adoption of republican forms, ever did away with. Neither class is amenable to the civil tribunals for debt or for any offences.[[3]] The clergy have immense revenues, and much spiritual influence among the lower classes; and as soon as they discovered the disposition of the new President, they took one Don Antonio Haro y Tamirez, set him up as a counter-President, and installed him at Puebla, the second city of the Republic, where priests swarm, and priestly influence is unbounded. At the same time, they tried a pronunciamiento in the capital; but the President got the better of them after a slight struggle, and marched all his regular soldiers on Puebla. At the moment of our arrival in the country, the siege of this city was going on quite briskly, ten thousand men being engaged, commanded by forty-three general officers.
[3] They must be judged by courts whose members belong to their own body, and in these special tribunals one can imagine what sort of justice is meted out to complainants and creditors. Comonfort’s hope was to conciliate the mass of the people by attempting to relieve them of this enormous abuse. I believe he was honest in his intentions, but unfortunately the people had already had to do with too many politicians who were to redress their wrongs and inaugurate a reign of liberty. They had found very little to come of such movements, but extra-taxation and civil war, which left them worse off than they were before, and the patriots generally turned out rather more greedy and unprincipled than the others; so it was not to be wondered at that no one came forward to give any very energetic support to the new President.
Whenever anything disagreeable is happening in the country, Vera Cruz is sure to get its full share. A month before our arrival, one Salcedo, who was a prisoner in the castle of San Juan de Ulúa, talked matters over with the garrison, and persuaded them to make a pronunciamiento in favour of the insurgents. They then summoned the town to join their cause, which it declined doing for the present; and the castle opened fire upon it, knocking about some of the principal buildings, and doing a good deal of damage. A 30-pound shot went through the wall of our hotel, taking off the leg of an unfortunate waiter who was cleaning knives, and falling into the patio, or inner court. A daub of fresh plaster just outside our bedroom door indicated the spot; and the British Consul’s office had a similar decoration. The Governor of the city could offer no active resistance, but he cut off the supplies from the island, and in three or four days Salcedo—finding himself out of ammunition, and short of water—surrendered in a neat speech, and the revolution ended.
We have but a short time to stay in Vera Cruz, so had better make our observations quickly; for when we come back again there will be a sun nearly in the zenith, and yellow fever—at the present moment hardly showing itself—will have come for the summer; under those circumstances, the unseasoned foreigner had better lie on his back in a cool room, with a cigar in his mouth, and read novels, than go about hunting for useful information.
There are streets of good Spanish houses in Vera Cruz, built of white coral-rock from the reefs near the shore, but they are mildewed and dismal-looking. Outside the walls is the Alameda; and close by is a line of houses, uninhabited, mouldy, and in ruins. We asked who built them. “Los Españoles,” they said.
Even now, when the “nortes” are blowing, and the city is comparatively healthy, Vera Cruz is a melancholy place, with a plague-stricken look about it; but it is from June to October that its name, “the city of the dead”—la ciudad de los muertos—is really deserved. In that season comes an accumulation of evils. The sun is at its height; there is no north wind to clear the air; and the heavy tropical rains—more than three times as much in quantity as falls in England in the whole year—come down in a short rainy season of four months. The water filters through the sand-hills, and forms great stagnant lagoons; a rank tropical vegetation springs up, and the air is soon filled with pestilential vapours. Add to this that the water is unwholesome; the city too is placed in a sand-bath which keeps up a regular temperature, by accumulating heat by day and giving it out into the air by night, so that night gives no relief from the stifling closeness of the day. No wonder that Mr. Bullock, the Mexican traveller, as he sat in his room here in the hot season, heard the church-bells tolling for the dead from morning to night without intermission; for weeks and weeks, one can hardly even look into the street without seeing a funeral.
We turned back through the city, and walked along watching the Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top. When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down leisurely upon it, one after another; their appearance and deportment reminding us of the undertaker’s men in England coming down from the hearse at the public-house door, when the funeral is over. In all tropical America these birds are the general scavengers, and there is a heavy fine for killing them.[[4]]
[4] No one ill uses them but the dogs, who drive them away when anything better than usual is met with, and they have to stand round in a circle, waiting for their turn.