At daybreak, when the disinterment of those who had been overwhelmed commenced, the most heartrending scenes were witnessed. Mothers sought children only to find disfigured corpses; husbands discovered their dead wives pressing their babies in their arms. In many cases features could not be recognised, for fire had completed the work commenced by the falling habitations. Some lives were taken away in sleep, others when employed in various occupations. Here a hammock formed a shroud, and there an open book lay by the side of its reader. For days after the destruction of the town, shocks of earthquakes were felt and subterraneous rumblings heard, but at length these died out, and a troubled peace rested with the survivors of unhappy Cúa.
Perhaps I visited Carácas at an unfortunate time, but it certainly seemed to me to be the most stupid town I had ever seen. There was very little to see, and no amusements of any kind, unless a weekly lottery and the continual firing of rockets can be classed as such. Of the latter, the people were never tired, and day and night they were thus commemorating some civil or religious event. The perpetual hissing and explosions reminded me of the conversation once held by Ferdinand, King of Spain, and a Mexican courtier, when the news had arrived of a successful revolution.
“What do you suppose the Mexicans will be doing now?” said the King.
“Letting off rockets, your Majesty.”
“Well—I wonder what they are doing now in Mexico?” said the King in the afternoon.
“Letting off rockets, your Majesty.”
“What will your countrymen be doing at this time?” said the King in the evening.
“Letting off rockets, your Majesty.”
Day after day I attended the demure and uninteresting debates of the Legislature, and once witnessed the official presentation of the new American Minister to the President. This ceremony, which took place in the handsome state-room of the palace, was brilliantly attended by the élite of Carácas, and was simply but imposingly conducted. The Minister was an agreeable, well-read gentleman but, unfortunately, neither he nor any of his family understood a single word of Spanish, and of all towns Carácas is the least entertaining for a foreigner who does not speak the language. I think that, after arriving, they never ceased to regret that they had left their home in the valley of the Mississippi. To a very dry manner the Minister added great quaintness and humour of expression, and his society made a very pleasant change in the dulness of the hotel life. He was fond of exaggerating his natural American intonation and quaint pronunciation, and when with grave and rather pompous air he slowly uttered his long carefully worded sentences, the effect was irresistibly comic. “My young English friend,” he said one day to me, in the course of conversation, “we look upon your best men as Americans; John Bright, Cobden, Dickens and Gladstone: they air Americans. Our recent visitor, the Emperor of Brazil, ought to be an American, he had quite an outfit of intelligence, and, Sir, if Dom Pedro would come over to the States and settle, mind—I say and settle, we would make a senator of him.”
On another occasion he said, “Sir, you air a traveller, if you’ve been to Florida you air a traveller; out of a thousand people you may meet not five have visited Florida; and even in the great American nation, which stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from 49° north to the confines of Mexico, though ten may have been to Paris hardly one will have seen Florida. Sir, you air a traveller.”