THE HOUSEHOLD OF CORTÉZ.
Cortéz was worse than the Mormon governor of Utah, who is said to have thirty-six wives in his household. But they are, at least, voluntary inmates of his harem, while the "household" of Cortéz had been taken by violence. It is one of the prominent traits of Indian character that, while they are inhuman to their female captives, they guard with the utmost jealousy the virtue of their wives. Even among the debased Indians of California, female infidelity is punished with death; and I have seen the whole population of an Indian village on the Upper Sacramento thrown into the utmost confusion—the women howling, and the men brandishing their weapons—because a base Indian had sold his wife to a still baser white man. "Such a thing was never," they said, "done in the tribe before." And here we have Cortéz, in contempt of even Indian notions of virtue, sending to bring to his harem, by violence, another daughter of Montezuma.
As Bernal Diaz goes more into detail than Cortéz, he now and then drops an expression that furnishes a clew to many an enigma otherwise unexplainable. In speaking of the avarice of the officers, he lets fall the following confession of his own infamy:
"This was a good hint to us in future, so that afterward, when we had captured any beautiful Indian females, we concealed them, and gave out that they had escaped. As soon as it was come to the marking day, or, if any one of us stood in favor with Cortéz, he got them secretly marked [viz., branded with a red-hot iron] during the night-time, and paid a fifth of their value to him. In a short time we possessed a great number of such slaves."[37] ]
Never was there a band of Anglo-Saxon outlaws, cut-throats, pirates, or buccaneers that reached that point of human depravity that they could brand, as cattle are branded, with a red-hot iron, swarms of women taken by violence, in order that they might not make any mistakes in recognizing their numberless wives! None but Spanish heroes of a "holy war" ever exhibited such a picture of total depravity.
When the Aztecs were thus roused to action by the brutal lust of Cortéz, they assailed him with phrensy rather than with courage, until his quarters in the city became untenable, and then this night retreat was undertaken, in which all the gold, if there really was any, and all other treasures, and two sons and one daughter of Montezuma, were lost in the confused rush of such a multitude over this foot-path. The Indian story is that Cortéz slew the children of Montezuma when he found himself unable to carry them off. Perhaps he did, but the probability is that they perished by chance, or, rather, it seems to have been by chance that Cortéz or any of his gang escaped and came safe to Tacuba.
We must now give up history to talk of things by the road-side.
The "hard water" from the springs on the south side of Chapultepec is carried over stone arches upon the causeway of Tacubaya to the gate of Belin. But at Santa Fé, several leagues distant from the city, is a stream of soft water, which is brought to the powder-mill (Molina del Rey), where it turns a wheel. Thence the aqueduct, passing by the north side of Chapultepec, is carried along the highway to the causeway of San Cosmo. It passes the gate of San Cosmo, enters the city, and terminates in the street of Tacuba. By these two gates, and by the side of these two parallel aqueducts, the American army entered the city of Mexico.
The objects of interest by the road-side, after I had passed the city gate, were, first, the French Academy, which is well worthy of a visit for its pretty grounds, if nothing more. When we had got farther on, the land rose a little above the water-level of the swamp. Here a branch-road and the aqueduct turned off to Chapultepec, and in the angle thus formed by the two roads is the English burying-ground or cemetery. In this resting-place of the dead there is not a spot that can not be irrigated at all seasons of the year, while the art of man has been busy in improving the advantages that nature has so lavishly bestowed.
Just before my first arrival in Mexico, public attention had been particularly directed to this quiet spot, from its having been chosen as the place for depositing the ashes of the last President of Mexico, at whose burial no holy water had been wasted and no candles had been burned, and for the repose of whose soul no masses had ever been said, or other religious rites performed, and yet he slept as quietly as those who had gone to their burial with the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral. No priest had shrived his soul, his lips had not been touched with the anointing oil, nor was incense burned at his funeral; yet he died in peace, declaring in his last hours that he had made his confession to God, and trusted in him for the pardon of his sins, and refused all the proffered aid of priests in facilitating his journey to heaven. Thus died, and here was privately buried, the first and last Protestant President of Mexico, the only really good man that ever occupied that exalted station, and probably the only native Mexican who ever had the moral courage to denounce the religion of his fathers upon his dying bed.