Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward B. Tylor

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 employé of Mr. Bowling’s, and is going back to Tezcuco with us; and we walk down to the canal 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 passengers, 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 razón”—being, as I have said before, those who have any white blood in them; and republican institutions have not in the least effaced the distinction.

So it comes to pass 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 canals; 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 canal, and fairly out into the lake. This was the more desirable, as the canal 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 canal, 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 passengers forward. Two of our crew tow us along, and we are soon clear of the canal, 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 Peñón de los Baños—“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 Peñón or rocky hill where Montezuma preserved game for his own hunting, and not even the highest nobility 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 Peñón may have been the Peñón de los Baños which we are just passing, but was more probably a similar hill a little further off, of larger extent, now fortified and known as El Peñón, the Hill. Both were in those days complete islands at some distance from the shore.

Now that we are out of the canal, 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 nobody is ever hit.

The great peculiarity of the lake of Tezcuco is that it is a salt lake, containing much salt and carbonate of soda. The water is quite brackish and undrinkable. How it has come to be so is plain enough. The streams from the surrounding mountains bring down salt and soda in solution, derived from the decomposed porphyry; and as the water of the lake is not drained off into the sea, but evaporates, the solid constituents are left to accumulate in the lake.

In England, I think, we have no example of this; but the Dead Sea, the Caspian, the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and even the Mediterranean, have various salts accumulated in solution in the same way. It seems to me, that, by taking into account the proportion of soluble material contained in the water that flows down from the mountains, the probable quantity of water that flows down in the year, and the proportion of salt in the lake itself, some vague guess might be made as to the time this state of things has been lasting. I have no data, unfortunately, even for such a rough calculation as this, or I should like to try it.