It must be owned that this country has fine advantages for the gentlemen of the road. The highway between Vera Cruz and Mexico is the great conduit of life in the country. Nearly all the commerce goes by that way, and ninety out of every hundred travellers pass by the same route. The chief portion of the road is through an absolute desert. It frequently winds up the sides of mountains, and then is bordered by forests of evergreens, forming a capital shelter for the land pirate, the whole being a combination of Hounslow Heath and Shooter’s Hill on a grand scale, and making highway robbery not merely a showy but a safe speculation, the gaming-table being the chief recruiting-office of the whole battalion of Mercury.
The statistics of gaming might borrow a chapter from Mexico. The passion for play is public, universal, and unbounded. It is probably superior even to the passion for pulque. Every one plays, and plays for all that he is worth in the world, and often for more. But he has his resource—the road. A man who has lost his last dollar, but who is determined to play on till he dies, lays himself under strong temptations of coveting his neighbour’s goods. The hour when the stages pass is known to every one; the points of the road where they must go slowly up the hill, are familiar to all highway recollections. Associates are expeditiously found among the loiterers, who, after their own ruin, sit round the room watching the luck of others. The band is formed in a moment; they take the road without delay, post themselves in the evergreens, enjoy the finest imaginable prospect, and breathe the most refreshing air, until the creaking of the coach-wheels puts them on the alert. They then exhibit their weapons, the passengers produce their little purses, the stage is robbed of every thing portable, or convertible into cash, the band return to the gaming-table, fling out their coin, and play till they are either rich or ruined once more.
Some time after an adventure, such as we have described, the stage was robbed near Puebla by a gang, all of whom had the appearance of gentlemen. When the operation of rifling every body and every thing was completed, one of the robbers observed—“that they must not be looked on as professional thieves, for they were gentlemen; but having been unfortunate at play, they were forced to put the company to this inconvenience, for which they requested their particular pardon.”
An incident of this order occurring in the instance of a public personage, some years before, long excited remarkable interest. The Swiss consul had been assassinated at noonday. A carriage had driven up to his door, out of which three men came, one in the dress of a priest. On the doors being opened they seized and gagged the porter, rushed into the apartment where the consul was sitting, murdered and robbed him, and then retreated. None knew whence they came or whither they went; but the murdered man, in his dying struggle, had torn a button off the coat of one of the robbers, which they found still clenched in his hand. A soldier was shortly after seen with more money than he could account for; suspicion naturally fell upon him; his quarters were searched, and one of his coats was found with the button torn off. He was convicted, but relied upon a pardon through the Colonel Yanez, chief aide-de-camp of the president Santa Anna, who was his accomplice in the transaction. On being brought out for execution, and placed on the fatal bench where criminals are strangled, he cried out, “Stop, I will acknowledge my accomplices;” and he pronounced the name of the colonel. Search was immediately made in the house of Yanez, and a letter in cipher was found, connecting him with this and other robberies. This letter was left in the hands of one of the judges: he was offered a large sum to destroy it, and refused. In a few days after he was found dead, as was supposed, by poison. The paper was then transferred to another judge who was offered the same bribe, and who promised to destroy it; but on conferring with his priest, though he took the money, he shrank from the actual destruction of the document and kept it in silence. Yanez was brought to trial, and, believing that the paper was no longer in existence, treated the charge with contempt. The paper was produced, and the aide-de-camp was condemned and executed.
Puebla is one of the handsomest cities in the Mexican territory. The houses are lofty, and in good taste, and the streets are wide and clean About six miles from the city stood Choluta, which Cortes described “as having a population of forty thousand citizens, well clothed,” and as it might appear, peculiarly devout according to their own style, for the conqueror counted in it the towers of four hundred idol temples. Of this city not a vestige remains but an immense mound of brick, on which now stands a Romish chapel.
Beyond Puebla, cultivation extends to a considerable distance on both sides of the road. To the right lies the republic of Tlascala, so memorable in the history of the Spanish conquest, and once crowded with a population of warriors. The road then runs at the foot of Pococatapetl, the highest of the Mexican mountains, seventeen thousand feet above the level of the sea. The capital is now approached; and on passing over the next ridge, the first glimpse is caught of the famous valley and city of Mexico. From this ridge Cortes had the first view of his conquest. It must have been an object of indescribable interest to the great soldier who had fought his way to the possession of the noblest prize of his age. The valley of Mexico, a circuit of seventeen hundred square miles, must then have been a most magnificent sight, if it be true that it contained “forty cities, and villages without number.” Time, war, and the fatal government of Spain, have nearly turned this splendid tract into a desert. But it still has features combining the picturesque with the grand. The valley partially resembles the crater of an immense volcano wholly surrounded by mountains, some of them rising ten thousand feet above the city. In the centre of this vast oval basin is a lake, or rather a chain of lakes, through the midst of which the road now passes for about eighteen miles, on a raised causeway. The city stands in the north-eastern quarter of the valley, not more than three miles from the mountains, at an elevation of seven thousand four hundred and seventy feet, and its position seems obviously made for the capital of an empire.
Mexico is regarded as the “stateliest city” in the New World. Its plan was laid, and the principal portion of its public buildings are said to have been designed, by Cortes. They bear all the impress of a superb mind. The habitual meanness of democratical building has no place there; the majority of the fabrics were evidently constructed by a man to whom the royal architecture of the European nations was familiar, and the finest houses in the city are still inhabited by the descendants of the conqueror.
The principal square is the pride of the Mexicans, and the admiration of travellers. It has an area of twelve acres; unluckily, this fine space, which in England would be covered with verdant turf, shrubs, and flowers, is covered only with pavement. But the buildings are on a noble scale. The Cathedral fills one whole side of the square, the Palace another, and the sites of both are memorable and historical; the Cathedral standing on the ground where once stood the great idol temple, and the Palace on the ground of the palace of Montezuma! The latter building is 500 feet long, and contains the public offices, besides the apartments of the President. The Cathedral is of striking Gothic architecture, and after all the pressures and plunderings of the later period, still retains immense wealth. The high altar is covered with plates of silver, interspersed with ornaments of massive gold. This altar is inclosed with a balustrade a hundred feet long, not less precious than the high altar itself. It is composed of an amalgam of gold, silver, and copper, richly flourished and figured. It is said that an offer had been made to purchase it at its weight in silver, giving half a million of dollars besides. Of this balustrade there are not less in the building than 300 feet. Statues, vases, and huge candlesticks of the precious metals, meet the eye every where; and yet it is said that the still more precious portion of the treasure is hidden from the popular eye. The streets are wide, and cross each other at right angles, dividing the whole city into squares. But the Romish habit of giving the most sacred names to common things, is acted on in Mexico with most offensive familiarity. The names of the streets are instances of this profanation, which has existed wherever monks have been the masters. Thus, the Mexican will tell you that he lives in “Jesus,” or in the “Holy Ghost.” In the Spanish navy the most sacred names were similarly profaned; and the Santissima Trinidada (the Most Holy Trinity) was a flag-ship in the fleet destroyed at Trafalgar. What blasphemies and brutalities must not have been mingled with this sacred name in the mouths of a crew!
The churches are the chief buildings in the city, some of them of great size, and all filled with plate and other wealth. Yet the houses, even of the most opulent families, exhibit some of the vilest habits of the vilest southern cities of Europe. To pass over other matters, in the whole city there is perhaps not a stable separate from the house. The stud is on the basement story, and it may be conceived how repulsive must be the effects of such an arrangement in the burning climate of Mexico! The servants’ rooms are also upon this floor; and in some of the principal houses the visitors have to pass through this row of stables and sleeping rooms on their way to the chief apartments. In some, too, of the larger private houses, no less than thirty or forty families reside, each renting one or two rooms, and having a common stair of exit to the street. This crowding of families is produced, in the first instance, by the narrow limits of the city, which is scarcely more than two miles in length by a mile and a half in breadth; and in the next, by the lazy habits of their Spanish ancestry, which still gathered them together for the sake of gossiping and idling, and which seem every where to have had an abhorrence of cleanliness, of fresh air, and of the sight of a field; the population thus festering on each other, while the country round them is open, healthful, and cheerful. The inhabitants, to the amount of two hundred thousand, evidently prefer half suffocation in an atmosphere that tortures the nostrils of all strangers; and are content with the dust and dimness, the heat and the effluvia, naturally generated by a tropical sun acting upon a crowded population.
In addition to this voluntary offence, Mexico has two natural plagues, inundations and earthquakes. The city was once a kind of American Venice, wholly surrounded by water, penetrated by water, and built on piles in the water. A gigantic canal, which was tunnelled through its mountain barrier in the beginning of the seventeenth century, partially drained the waters of the lakes, and left it on firm ground. But the lakes, from time to time, take their revenge; clouds of a peculiarly ominous aspect begin to roll along the mountains, until they break down in a deluge. Then the genius of the land of monks exhibits itself, and all the bells in the city are rung, whether to frighten the torrent, or to propitiate the Deity. But the rain still comes down in sheets, and the torrents roar louder. The bells meet the enemy by still louder peals. At length the clouds are drained, and the torrents disappear; the bells have the praise. The city recovers its spirits, finds that its time for being swept from the earth has not yet arrived; the sun shines once more, and the monks have all the credit of this triumph over Satan and Nature.