CHAPTER XXIV.
The National Museum.--Marianna and Cortez.--The small Value of this Collection.--The Botanic Garden.--The Market of Santa Anna.--The Acordada Prison.--The unfortunate Prisoner.--The Causes of that Night of Terror.--The Sacking of the City.--The Parian.--The Causes of the Ruin of the Parian.--Change in the Standard of Color.--The Ashes of Cortez.
MUSEUM.--BOTANIC GARDEN.--MARKET.
The National Museum has its weekly exhibitions, and attracts as great a crowd of the common people as does the Academy of Arts. Here as perfect equality reigns as in the San Carlos or in the Cathedral. The first object of interest is the large collection of stone idols which have been dug up from time to time in and about the Grand Plaza. There are dog-faced idols, and apish gods, and unearthly things, besides the sacrificial stone, and a rude attempt to represent a goddess. Whether or no this was a sort of Aztec Lady of Remedies I did not learn. The Aztecs might easily have produced these works without exhibiting much civilization; but I have heard it surmised that they must have been among the plunder of more civilized tribes.
On the two opposite sides of the first hall we entered, I saw spread out the pictorial chronology of two dynasties that had passed away--the vice-regal line of potentates standing over against the royal line of Aztec emperors. The portraits of the vice-kings, from Cortez down to the last of his successors, stretch entirely across one side of the hall, and about the same number of Indian caciques are daubed upon a piece of papyrus that is fastened upon the opposite wall. It requires the greatest possible stretch of liberality for one accustomed to Indian efforts of this kind to dignify such intolerable daubs with the name of paintings. And yet this is the picture-writing of the Aztecs, with which the world has been so edified for centuries. If there is or ever was an Iroquois Indian that should undertake to stain so miserably, I verily believe he would be expelled from his tribe. To make it manifest that this was intended for a chronological record of the imperial line, black lines were daubed from one of these effigies to another. From a printed label in Spanish affixed to this wonderful relic, I learned that it was intended to represent the wanderings of the Aztecs from California.
It is usual for North American Indians to store up traditions of the extensive wanderings of their ancestors, and if one is asked to represent the tradition on bark, he would produce very much such an affair as this, though with a somewhat greater resemblance to the human form. Another picture represents Marianna, the mistress of Cortez, with her rosary, and Cortez with his fingers in much such a position as boys place them in when they wish to convey the idea that they have perpetrated a joke--a very satisfactory method of representing the piety of Cortez. Close by the pious couple is the representation of a scene which they seem to have come out to witness. A bloodhound is represented tearing an Indian to pieces, while a Spaniard is holding on to the end of the dog's chain.
The banner under which Cortez fought, or rather one of them--for he had two--is here preserved in a gilt frame. It represents the Virgin Mary portrayed on crimson silk. In this hall is also a miniature representation of a silver mine, with the workmen at their several branches of labor. The remains of the vice-regal throne are here piled up in a corner.
In the next room there are some paintings of no very great value, which should have been kept in the Academy; also a miniature fortress and a small mineral collection, and any quantity of specimens of Indian idols, so misshapen as to be unfit for use as images of the Virgin and of the saints.
As a Vice-royal and National Museum, the whole affair is beneath contempt. If the few articles in it that are valuable were divided between the Mineria and the San Carlos, and the rest thrown away, it would be an advantage to all concerned. The Indian relics in this museum are not only much inferior to the specimens of the art of the savage islanders of the South Seas, but immensely inferior to many private collections of Indian curiosities that I have seen, and they go far to demonstrate the entire absence of civilized arts among the aboriginal inhabitants of Mexico.
In an interior court of the museum is the Botanic Garden. This, like the National Museum, is a paltry affair. With the exception of the _Manolita_, or tree that bears a flower resembling the human hand, of which there are but two in the Republic, there is nothing deserving of notice in this garden. In the large interior court of San Francisco a Frenchman has, as a private speculation, opened a garden and made a collection of the national plants of Mexico that is well worth a visit. In this private garden is one of the finest and rarest collections of the cactus family that I have ever seen, either in Mexico or elsewhere.
The market of Santa Anna is the central market of the city. It adjoins the palace, and is close to the canal. The products of the chinampas are here displayed to the best advantage. As Mexico is within easy marketing distance of the hot country, we have here daily presented the fresh productions of two zones. This is one of the places where the appetite of a stranger can not only be gratified with the greatest variety of delicacies ever collected in one spot, but the excellency and abundance of the articles presented are perplexing to the person who would venture upon the bold experiment of tasting every new article offered to him. As a vegetable and flower market, it has no equal.
THE ACORDADA.
The Acordada Prison is the principal state as well as city prison. Here are confined men charged with every offense, from rioting to murder. Oftentimes these extremes are found together in the interior court of the prison, where the felon, with his hands steeped in innocent blood, is entertaining a crowd of novices in crime with the details of his adventures, and of his many hair-breadth escapes from the cruel officers of the law. He is as eloquent in giving lessons to novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel of sin and tumult.
The Acordada gave its name to that night insurrection to which I have so often referred. Two regiments of artillery, quartered in the palace of the Inquisition, _pronounced_ against the legality of the election of Pedraza to the presidency. One night they took possession of the Acordada, where they were joined by the whole body of desperadoes there confined. Among the persons at that time detained in this prison, and on that night wantonly killed, was an Englishman, who had been kept in prison for several years, charged with the singular offense of having married the daughter of an ex-marquis. There had been romance in his courtship and romance in his marriage, but it had not met with the approbation of the father, who unfortunately had influence enough to get the newly-married man into prison, and to keep him there. At last the father had relented, and on the next day the poor Englishman was to have been set at liberty. Long and trying had been the sufferings of the unfortunate man, doomed to pass the best years of his life among robbers and assassins. Though every thing that kindness could do to lighten his sufferings had been done lay his own countrymen, yet the weary years of imprisonment, superadded to the sudden blasting of his hopes, had brought premature old age upon him while yet in the prime of life. But now all was forgotten in anticipation of a to-morrow that he was never to see. When the attack was made upon the prison, he went to the door of his cell to learn the cause of so unusual a disturbance, and was instantly killed--the first victim of the night of the Acordada.
On that fearful night the Acordada was unusually full of desperadoes, whom the civil disorders and stagnation of business had driven to crime. A battle in the night in the streets of a large city is a fearful thing, at least when cannon are the chief weapons used; but when there is added to this cause of alarm that the news had spread through the city that all the murderers and housebreakers in the prison had been let loose, with arms in their hands, to murder and to ravage the city, an idea may be formed of the terror of a population who were cowards by instinct. The contempt with which they had regarded the lower orders was to be fearfully retaliated. Hate, mingled with avarice, and inflamed by _pulque_ and bad liquor, was to do its work, and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position, but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the consequences of that neglect.
It is a thankless task to labor for the elevation of the degraded, and oftentimes we are stung with the ingratitude of those whom we have desired to aid. But God, who has enjoined this unpleasant duty upon us, has borne our daily ingratitude without casting us off, and we but imitate him when we continue to minister to the ungrateful, and the unthankful, and even the unmerciful. The people of Mexico had shown more liberality, and given more than we. But they had not given it to educate and to elevate the condition of the poor, but to feed pampered priests, "who walked in long robes, and who loved salutations in the markets," and to women like them, who had placed themselves in an unnatural relation to the world. God requires of all men not only contributions of money, for that is but half charity, but personal services in discharge of the duties of good citizens, and in relieving the afflicted; and he that disregards such duties may suffer as the Mexicans did in the night of the Acordada insurrection, which turned young hairs gray, and destroyed forever the happiness of unnumbered families.
When the common people, brutalized by oppression, found themselves masters of the city, and their oppressors powerless, then burst forth the pent-up hatred of ten generations. "They call us _leperos_ and dogs," said some of them; "let us play the part of dogs--hungry dogs, among these spotted sheep." The palaces of the great were no protection against these infuriated _peons_, and women who boasted of titles of nobility were not safe. The wealth that generations of unjust monopolists had accumulated was scattered to the winds. _Leperos_ now rioted on carpets from Brussels and on cushions of Oriental stuffs, and quaffed the choice wines of Madeira and Champagne. In the fury of their intoxication they lost all restraint, and indulged in every excess and enormity. Robbery and murder were the order of the day. In carrying away the plunder, disputes arose, and then they murdered each other as readily as they had murdered those who claimed the title of citizens. Fear was the only authority they had learned to respect, and they knew no other government than the hated police; but now, when the police were powerless, they could amuse themselves according to the instincts of their brutish natures. They had never been taught self-control, and animal indulgence was the utmost of their ambition, and they found amusement in violating all laws, human and divine. The murders, the ravishings, the wanton destruction of the richest household stuffs, and luxuries, and works of art in that night, can not all be written, nor can they ever be effaced from the memory Of those who witnessed them.
THE PARIAN.
Stretching across the Grand Plaza, opposite the Cathedral and in front of the buildings of the Municipality, once stood the noted mart of commerce called the Parian, an ill-looking structure, in which was accumulated the mass of foreign merchandise. In this same pile of buildings had been concocted the conspiracy which, in the year 1808, had caused the seizure of the Vice-king, Iturrigaray, and his imprisonment in the Inquisition. The complaint against the Vice-king was that he was about to recognize the political equality of the native-born population with the emigrants from Spain. For this offense, his reputation and that of his kindred was to be forever blackened by a suspicion of heresy.
In the night of the Acordada insurrection, the Spanish shop-keepers of the Parian found themselves utterly defenseless. They could no longer invoke the aid of the Inquisition in oppressing and trampling on the people, whom their wantonness, and the wantonness of others like them, had brutalized. The neglect and oppression which had reduced a laboring man to a _lepero_ had not made him insensible to the unequal laws which elevated above him a race of beings destitute of that manly courage which oftentimes gives plausibility to oppression. Now the lepero took delight in visiting upon the present occupants of this building a fearful punishment for the crime committed there twenty years before, and among the guilty crowd there was to be found many an innocent sufferer.
The isolated crowds that had been traversing the streets, and indulging their wantonness on a small scale, at length, as the night wore away, began to concentrate around the Parian, and quickly such devastation of property was made as might be expected where the rich and poor had no common interest in its preservation, and where criminal and poor man were almost convertible terms. The plunderers had little idea of the value or uses of the property they were scattering to the winds; and while they wasted millions worth of property, they wantonly shed the blood of the proprietors in the midst of their merchandise. Nor did the evil end when daylight appeared; for among the consequences of this night insurrection was the transfer of all authority to new hands. Those who the day before had been stigmatized with the impurity of their blood, were now the governing power, who, under the forms of law, were to carry into effect the behest of the successful insurgents. Neither the sight of the ruins of the night before, nor bales of merchandise strewed about among corpses and spattered with blood, could move the new masters of the city to pity the fallen condition of a class of men who had proved themselves too cowardly to defend their own usurpations, and too tyrannical to instill into the lately proscribed races any ideas of compassion.
THE OVERTURN.
For three hundred years pure white blood and Spanish birth was an indispensable qualification for promotion in the vice-kingdom, and the slightest tincture of colored blood was an indelible disgrace. But one night of tumult and rapine changed the popular standard of color. And he who had boasted the day before of his pure white blood and Spanish origin, now sought to hide himself from the officers of the law, who visited with the penalty of banishment the crime of having been born in Spain. Men now, for the first time, boasted of their Indian origin, and of the slight infusion they were able to discover of colored blood in their veins; while a man of Indian descent, and who spoke a provincial dialect, was declared elected President of the Republic of Mexico: so uncertain are all divisions of rank formed on the arbitrary distinction of color.
During the night strange murmurings were heard against "the accursed enslaver of their race." The descendants of Cortez were fearful for the safety of his ashes, which had lain quietly in the convent of San Francisco[54] so long as the Inquisition possessed the power of compelling men to reverence his memory as the champion of the Cross, the favorite of the Virgin Mary, the hero of a holy war against the infidels. But now that this accursed institution, and the infamous gang connected with its management, had become powerless, the national feeling began to manifest itself so openly that the remains were removed secretly and by night to the sanctuary of the most sacred shrine of Mexico, that of Santa Teresa, where they remained until a safe opportunity presented itself for shipping them off to the Duke of Montebello, a Sicilian nobleman, who inherits the titles and also the vast estates of Cortez in the valleys of the Cuarnavaca and Oajaca, upon which none of the revolutionary governments have laid violent hands.
[54] For a more authentic account, see Appendix E.