Just one hundred years ago, which was fifty years before the time of the visit of Humboldt, two Capuchin friars came to preach at the estate which occupied the beautiful valley of Jorullo. This valley was situated between two basaltic ridges, and was watered by two small streams of limpid water, the San Pedro and the Cuitamba. These small parallel rivers furnished an abundant supply of water, which was well employed in irrigating flourishing sugar and indigo plantations. These Capuchins, not having met with a favorable reception at the estate of San Pedro, poured out the most horrible imprecations against the beautiful and fertile plains, foretelling that, as the first consequences of their curse, the plantation would be swallowed up by flames rising out of the earth, and that afterward the neighboring mountains would forever remain covered with snow and ice. After denouncing the curse, the two holy men went on their way.
ERUPTION OF JORULLO.
On the night of the 28th and 29th of September, 1759, horrible subterraneous noises were heard, which had been preceded by slight shocks of an earthquake since the June preceding. The affrighted Indians fled to the Aquasareo, and soon thereafter a tract of land twelve miles square, which now goes by the name of the "evil land" (mal pais), rose up in the form of a bladder, and boiled, and seethed, and bubbled like a caldron of pudding, shooting up columns of fire from ten thousand orifices. Sometimes a number of orifices would unite into one vast crater, and vomit forth such a column of fire as was never before seen by human eyes since the time when "the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Intelligent witnesses assured Humboldt that flames were seen to issue forth, which, from a surface of more than a mile square, cast up fragments of burning rock to a prodigious height. The two small rivers were swallowed up, and their decomposed waters added fuel to the flames, which burned for many months with a fierceness that is indescribable.
Such is the origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse pronounced by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in a country where convulsions of nature are matters of almost ordinary occurrence. Every extraordinary event in nature is ascribed to the exercise of supernatural power on the part of the clergy or the most holy images of the Church.
The fires of Jorullo have ceased to burn for half a century. The central crater that was eventually formed, and the numerous little orifices of fire, have long since become cold, and all the evidences of an active fire have passed away. But to this day the Indians watch the progress of the cooling process; as they anticipate that, before many years have passed, the unfulfilled portion of the curse will be realized, and that those now live who will see the surrounding mountains covered by perpetual snow—an evil which the half-clad Indians of the tropics appear to dread more than perpetual fire.
The last and only enumeration of the inhabitants of Mexico or New Spain was made in 1794, by that distinguished Vice-king to whom I have so often referred, Ravillagigedo. This enumeration gave as the actual population 3,865,529, besides the departments of Vera Cruz, Guanajuato, and Cohahuila, which were estimated to contain 518,000 more, making a sum total of 4,412,529. Since that time there has been a great deal of extensive guessing, until by this simple process the population was brought up to 7,661,520, in 1853.[62] ] The process by which this increase is effected is to add one sixth for supposed omissions in the census, and a like number for supposed increase in the subsequent fifteen years till the breaking out of war, and taking for granted that the population has not retrograded during forty-five years of intermittent war. Such conclusions are made in violation of all the laws of population.
POPULATION OF MEXICO.
It may not be uninteresting to my readers to run over the laws which regulate the decrease of population, although it is too much our custom to look only at the other side of the picture. The social and civil wars of Mexico have been of such a character, as we have seen, as to warrant the belief that from this cause alone population must have constantly diminished, from their very commencement in 1810 until 1840, when matters were comparatively resuscitated. The employment for labor during the time that the large estates were neglected, and while the canals of irrigation and the silver mines were in ruins, was of the most limited character; and the very indigent circumstances to which it reduced the majority of those who ranked above the leperos must also have diminished the population of the republic much below that of the vice-kingdom under Ravillagigedo.
Since 1840, notwithstanding the frequent wars, Mexico, in favored localities, may have slightly increased in population; but this increase is more than balanced by the Indian wars of the northern departments, which have depopulated large tracts of country, sometimes extending across one tier of states even into the heart of Durango and Guanajuato; so that I hazard nothing in affirming that the population of the whole country must be less to-day than it was in 1794, notwithstanding that Humboldt sets down an estimate of 5,800,000 for the year 1803, and 6,500,000 for the year 1808. I might go farther, and affirm that the constant insecurity of life and property in all but the central parts of the republic is such as to keep down the natural increase of a population never prolific, being made up of a combination of uncongenial races—whites and Indians, whose intermixture leads to sterility.