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

by Edward B. Tylor

Bernal Diaz tells how the Spanish invaders used to dress their wounds with “Indian Ointment.” He explains the nature of this preparation in another place. The Spaniards could get no oil in the country, nor anything else to make salve with, so they took some fat Indian who had just been killed in battle, and simply boiled him down.

Our ride next morning was but a few hours, the journey being so divided in order that the passengers may reach Vera Cruz before the heat of the day begins. We passed over a dreary district, generally too dry for anything but cactus and acacias, but now and then, when a little water was to be found, displaying clumps of bamboos with their elegant feathery tufts. Then the railway took us through the dismal downs, with their swamps and sand-hills, and so into Vera Cruz.

The English merchants we had already made acquaintance with were as kind and hospitable as ever, and I found an Englishman, whom we had known before, going as far as Havana by the same packet. The yellow fever was unusually late this year, and, though June had begun, there were but few cases. We heard afterwards that it set in a week or two after our departure, and by its extraordinary severity made ample amends for the lateness of its arrival.

After sunset, the air was alive with mosquitos, and the floors of the hotel swarmed with cockroaches. The armadillo took quite naturally to the latter creatures, and crunched them up as fast as we could catch them for him. I was surprised to find that our word “cockroaches” does not come from the German stock, like most of our names for insects and small creatures, but from the Latin side of the house. The Spanish waiter called them cucarachas, and the French ones coqueraches. The history of the armadillo ends unfortunately: for some days he seemed to take quite kindly to the diet of bits of meat which we had to put him on, on shipboard, but he fell sick at Havana, and died.

My late companion travelled up into the Northern States, went to the Indian assembly at Manitoulin Island, paid a visit to various tribes of Red Men in the Hudson’s Bay Territory—as yet unmissionized, carried away in triumph the big medicine-drum I have already spoken of, and saw and did many other things not to be related here. One sight that he saw, some months later, reminded him of the wild country where we had travelled together. He was in Iowa City, a little town of a year or two’s growth, out in the prairie States of the Far West. As he stood one morning in the outskirts, among the plank-houses and half-made roads, there came a solitary horseman riding in. Evidently he had come from the Mexican frontier, a thousand miles and more away across the plains; and no doubt, his waggons and the rest of his party were behind him on the road, beyond the distant horizon of the prairie. By his face he was American, but his costume was the dress of old Mexico, the leather jacket and trousers, the broad white hat and huge jingling spurs. His lazo hung in front of his high-peaked saddle, and his well-worn serape was rolled up behind him like a trooper’s cloak. As he approached the town, he spurred his jaded beast, who broke into the old familiar paso of the Mexican plains. “It was my last sight of Mexico,” said my companion. He saluted the horseman in Spanish, and the well-known words of welcome made the grim man’s haggard sunburnt features relax into a smile as he returned the salutation and rode on.

As for myself, my voyage home was short and unadventurous. From Vera Cruz to Havana, most of my companions were Mexican refugees who had been turned out of the country for being mixed up with Haro’s revolution or Santa Ana’s intrigues. They were showily got-up men, elaborately polite, and with much to say for themselves; but every now and then some casual remark showed what stuff they were made of, and I pitied more than ever the unfortunate countries whose political destinies depend on the intrigues of these adventurers.

In the hot land-locked bay of St. Thomas’s we, with the contents of eight or nine more steamers, were shifted into the great steamer bound homeward. I went ashore with an old German gentleman, and walked about the streets. St. Thomas’s is a Danish island, and a free port, that is, a smuggling depôt for the rest of the West India islands, much as Gibraltar is for the Mediterranean. It is a stifling place, full of mosquitos and yellow fever, and the confusion of tongues reigns there even more than in Gibraltar, for the blacks in the streets all speak three or four languages, and the shopkeepers six or seven.

We were a strange mixture on board the ‘Atrato’, over two hundred of us. Peruvians and Chilians from across the isthmus, Spaniards and Cubans, black gentlemen from Hayti, French colonists from Martinique, but English preponderating above all other nationalities. One or two governors of small islands, with their families, maintaining the dignity of Government House, at least as far as Southampton, and unapproachable by common mortals. Army men from West India stations, who appeared to spend their mornings in ordering the wine for dinner, and their evenings in abusing it when they had drunk it. West India planters, who thought it was rather hard that the Anti-slavery Society, after ruining them and their plantations, should moreover insist on their believing themselves to be great gainers by the change. We were all crowded, hot, and uncomfortable, and showed our worst side, but as we neared England better influences got the ascendant again.

It was pleasant to breathe a cooler air, and to feel that I was getting back to my own country and my own people; but with this feeling there was mixed some regret for the beautiful scenes I had left. The evenings of our latitudes seemed poor when we lost the gorgeous sunsets of the tropics, and the sea alive with luminous creatures. When I came on deck one evening and missed the brightest ornament of the sky—the Southern Cross, I felt that I had left the tropics, and that all my efforts to realize the life of the last half-year would produce but a vague and shadowy picture.

Since we left Mexico, I have not cared to follow very accurately even the newspaper intelligence of what has been and still is going on there. It is a pitiable history. Continual wars and revolutions, utter insecurity of life and property, the Indians burning down the haciendas in the South and turning out the white people, the roads on the plains impassable on account of deserters and robbers; sometimes no practical government at all, then two or three at once, who raise armies and fight a little sometimes, but generally confine themselves to plundering the peaceable inhabitants. An army besieges the capital for months, but appears to do nothing but cut the water off from the aqueducts, shoot stragglers, and levy contributions. One leader raises a forced loan among the foreign residents, and imprisons or expels those who do not submit. The leader on the other side does the same in his part of the country, putting the British merchant in prisons where a fortnight would be a fair average life for an European, and threatening him with summary courtmartial and execution if he does not pay.