|
|
6
A.M.
12
M. 6
P.M.
Oct.
30
78
81
81
"
31
81
82
82
Nov.
1
82
83
82 "
2
80
82
81 "
3
78
80
80 "
4
80
77
77 "
5
77
78
78 "
6
74
77
76 "
7
74
76
76 "
8
75
78
78 "
9
75
78
78 "
10
74
79
79 "
11
76
79
79 I may remark, however, that in the
interior of the country we found a much greater variation
than any noted in the table published in the Appendix. The general aspect of the city is
Moorish, as it was built at a time when the Moorish
style prevailed in Spanish architecture. The houses
are large, generally of stone, and one story in height,
with balconies to the windows and large courtyards.
In the centre of the city stands the plaza major,
a square of about six hundred feet. The whole
of the east side is occupied by the cathedral and
the bishop’s palace. On the west stand
the house of the municipality and that of the Dona
Joaquina Peon. On the north is the palace of
the government, and on the south a building which
on our first visit arrested our attention the moment
we entered the plaza. It is distinguished by
a rich sculptured façade of curious design and workmanship.
In it is a stone with this inscription: Esta obra
mando hacerla el
Adelantado D. Francisco de Montejo
Ano de MDXLIX. The Adelantado Don Francisco
Montejo caused this to be made
in the year 1549. The subject represents two knights
in armour, with visors, breastplates, and helmets,
standing upon the shoulders of crushed naked figures,
probably intended to represent the conquering Spaniard
trampling upon the Indian. Mr. Catherwood attempted
to make a drawing of it, and, to avoid the heat of
the sun, went into the plaza at daylight for that
purpose; but he was so annoyed by the crowd that he
was obliged to give it up. There is reason to
believe that it is a combination of Spanish and Indian
art. The design is certainly Spanish, but as,
at that early period of the conquest, but five years
after the foundation of Merida, Spaniards were but
few, and each man considered himself a conqueror,
probably there were none who practised the mechanic
arts. The execution was no doubt the work of Indians,
and perhaps the carving was done with their own instruments,
and not those furnished them by the Spaniards. The history of the erection of this
building would be interesting and instructive; and,
with the hope of learning something about it, I proposed
to examine thoroughly the archives of the cabildo;
but I was advised that all the early archives were
lost, or in such confusion that it would be a Herculean
labour to explore them, and I saw that it would consume
more time than I should be able to devote to it. Besides the inscription on the stone,
the only information that exists in regard to this
building is a statement in Cogolludo, that the façade
cost fourteen thousand dollars. It is now the
property of Don Simon Peon, and is occupied by his
family. It has been lately repaired, and some
of the beams are no doubt the same which held up the
roof over the adelantado. Eight streets lead from the plaza,
two in the direction of each cardinal point.
In every street, at the distance of a few squares,
is a gate, now dismantled, and beyond are the barrios,
or suburbs. The streets are distinguished in a
manner peculiar to Yucatan. In the angle of the
corner house, and on the top, stands a painted wooden
figure of an elephant, a bull, a flamingo, or some
other visible object, and the street is called by
the name of this object. On one corner there
is the figure of an old woman with large spectacles
on her nose, and the street is called la Calle de
la Vieja, or the Street of the Old Woman. That
in which we lived had on the corner house a flamingo,
and was called the Street of the Flamingo; and the
reason of the streets being named in this way gives
some idea of the character of the people. The
great mass of the inhabitants, universally the Indians,
cannot read. Printed signs would be of no use,
but every Indian knows the sign of an elephant, a
bull, or a flamingo. In the front wall of a house in a
street running north from the plaza, and also in a
corner house near the square of the Alameda, are sculptured
figures from the ruins of ancient buildings, of which
Mr. Catherwood made drawings, but, in the multiplicity
of other subjects, we do not think it worth while
to present them to the reader. The great distinguishing feature of
Merida, as of all the cities of Spanish America, is
in its churches. The great Cathedral; the parish
church and convent of San Cristoval; the church of
the Jesuits; the church and convent of the Mejorada;
the chapels of San Juan Bautista; of Our Lady of Candelaria;
of the Santa Lucia and the Virgin, and the convent
de las monjas, or the nunnery, with
its church and enclosures occupying two whole squares,
are all interesting in their history. Some are
of good style in architecture, and rich in ornaments;
but there is one other, not yet mentioned, which I
regard as the most interesting and remarkable edifice
in Merida. It is the old Franciscan convent.
It stands on an eminence in the eastern part of the
city, and is enclosed by a high wall, with turrets,
forming what is now called the Castillo. These
walls and turrets are still erect, but within is ruin
irretrievable. In 1820 the new constitution obtained
by the patriots in Spain reached the colonies, and
on the 30th of May Don Juan Rivas Vertiz, then Gefe
Politico, and now living in Merida, a fine memorial
of the olden time, published it in the plaza.
The church sustained the old order of things, and
the Franciscan friars, confident in their hold upon
the feelings of the populace, endeavoured to put down
the demonstration of liberal feeling. A mob gathered
in the plaza; friars appeared among them, urging them
on; field-pieces were brought out, the mob dispersed,
and Don Juan Rivas marched to the Franciscan convent,
opened the doors, drove out the monks, above 300 in
number, at the point of the bayonet, and gave up the
building to destruction. The superior and some
of the brothers became seculars or regular priests;
others turned to worldly pursuits; and of this once
powerful order, but eleven are now left who wear the
garb of the Franciscan monks. It was in company with one of these
that I paid my last visit to this convent. We
entered by the great portal of the castle wall into
an overgrown courtyard. In front was the convent,
with its large corridors and two great churches, the
walls of all three standing, but without doors or
windows. The roof of one of the churches had fallen,
and the broad glare of day was streaming into the
interior. We entered the other the
oldest, and identified with the times of the conquerors.
Near the door was a blacksmith’s forge.
A Mestizo was blowing at the bellows, hauling out
a red-hot bar of iron, and hammering it into spikes.
All along the floor were half-naked Indians and brawny
Mestizoes, hewing timber, driving nails, and carrying
on the business of making gun-carriages for artillery.
The altars were thrown down and the walls defaced;
half way up were painted on them, in coarse and staring
red characters (in Spanish), “First squadron,”
“Second squadron;” and at the head of
the church, under a golden gloria, were
the words “Comp’y Light Infantry.”
The church had been occupied as barracks, and these
were the places where they stacked their arms.
As we passed through, the workmen stared at my companion,
or rather at the long blue gown, the cord around his
waist, and the cross dangling from it the
garb of his scattered order. It was the first
time he had visited the place since the expulsion
of the monks. To me it was mournful to behold
the destruction and desecration of this noble building;
what, then, must it have been to him? In the floor
of the church near the altar and in the sacristía
were open vaults, but the bones of the monks had been
thrown out and scattered on the floor. Some of
these were the bones of his earliest friends.
We passed into the refectory, and he pointed out the
position of the long table at which the brotherhood
took their meals, and the stone fountain at which they
performed their ablutions. His old companions
in their long blue gowns rose up before him, now scattered
forever, and their home a desolation and ruin. But this convent contains one memorial
far more interesting than any connected with its own
ruin; one that carries the beholder back through centuries
of time, and tells the story of a greater and a sadder
fall. In one of the lower cloisters going
out from the north, and under the principal dormitory,
are two parallel corridors. The outer one faces
the principal patio, and this corridor has that peculiar
arch so often referred to in my previous volumes,
two sides rising to meet each other, and covered,
when within about a foot of forming an apex, by a
flat layer of stones. There can be no mistake
about the character of this arch; it cannot for a
moment be supposed that the Spaniards constructed
anything so different from their known rules of architecture;
and beyond doubt it formed part of one of those mysterious
buildings which have given rise to so much speculation;
the construction of which has been ascribed to the
most ancient people in the Old World, and to races
lost, perished, and unknown. I am happy thus early in these pages
to have an opportunity of recurring to the opinion
expressed in my former volumes, in regard to the builders
of the ancient American cities. The conclusion to which I came was,
that “there are not sufficient grounds for belief
in the great antiquity that has been ascribed to these
ruins;” “that we are not warranted in going
back to any ancient nation of the Old World for the
builders of these cities; that they are not the works
of people who have passed away, and whose history is
lost; but that there are strong reasons to believe
them the creation of the same races who inhabited
the country at the time of the Spanish conquest, or
of some not very distant progenitors.” This opinion was not given lightly,
nor without due consideration. It was adverse
to my feelings, which would fain have thrown around
the ruins the interest of mystery and hoary age; and
even now, though gratified at knowing that my opinion
has been fully sustained, I would be willing to abandon
it, and involve the reader and myself in doubt, did
circumstances warrant me in so doing; but I am obliged
to say that subsequent investigations have fortified
and confirmed my previous conclusions, and, in fact,
have made conviction what before was mere matter of
opinion. When I wrote the account of my former
journey, the greatest difficulty attending the consideration
of this subject was the absence of all historical
record concerning the places visited. Copan had
some history, but it was obscure, uncertain, and unsatisfactory.
Quirigua, Palenque, and Uxmal had none whatever; but
a ray of historic light beams upon the solitary arch
in the ruined convent of Merida. In the account of the conquest of
Yucatan by Cogolludo it is stated, that on the arrival
of the Spaniards at the Indian town of Tihoo, on the
site of which, it will be remembered, Merida now stands,
they found many cerros hechos a mano, i.
e., hills made by hand, or artificial mounds,
and that on one of these mounds the Spaniards encamped. This mound, it is stated, stood on
the ground now occupied by the plaza major. East
of it was another large mound, and the Spaniards laid
the foundation of the city between these two, because,
as it is assigned, the stones in them were a great
convenience in building, and economized the labour
of the Indians. These mounds were so large, it
is added, that with the stones the Spaniards built
all the edifices in the city, so that the ground which
forms the plaza major remained nearly or quite level.
The buildings erected are specified, and it is added
that there was abundance of material for other edifices
which the Spaniards wished to erect. Other mounds are mentioned as obstructing
the laying out of streets according to the plan proposed,
and there is one circumstance which bears directly
upon this point, and, in my opinion, is conclusive. In the history of the construction
of the Franciscan convent, which was founded in the
year 1547, five years after the arrival of the Spaniards
in Tihoo, it is expressly stated that it was built
upon a small artificial mound, one of the many that
were then in the place, on which mound, it is added,
were some ancient buildings. Now we must
either suppose that the Spaniards razed these buildings
to the ground, and then constructed this strange arch
themselves, which supposition is, I think, utterly
untenable, or that this corridor formed part of the
ancient buildings which, according to the historical
account, stood on this artificial mound, and that
for some purpose or other the monks incorporated it
with their convent. There is but one way to overthrow
this latter conclusion, and that is by contending
that these mounds were all ruined, and this building
too, at the time when it was made to form part of
the convent; but then we are reduced to the necessity
of supposing that a great town, the fame of which
reached the Spaniards at Campeachy, and which made
a desperate and bloody resistance to their occupation
of it, was a mere gathering of hordes around the ruined
buildings of another race; and, besides, it is a matter
of primary importance to note that these artificial
mounds are mentioned, not in the course of describing
the Indian town, for no description whatever is attempted,
but merely incidentally, as affording conveniences
to the Spaniards in furnishing materials for building
the city, or as causing obstructions in the laying
out of streets regularly and according to the plan
proposed. The mound on which the convent stands
would perhaps not have been mentioned at all but for
the circumstance that the Padre Cogolludo was a Franciscan
friar, and the mention of it enabled him to pay a tribute
to the memory of the blessed father Luis de Villpando,
then superior of the convent, and to show the great
estimation in which he was held, for he says that
the adelantado had fixed upon this mound for the site
of one of his fortresses, but on the application of
the superior he yielded it to him readily for the
site of the convent; and, more than all this, even
in the incidental way in which these mounds are referred
to, there is one circumstance which shows clearly
that they were not at that time disused and in ruins,
but, on the contrary, were then in the actual use
and occupation of the Indians; for Cogolludo mentions
particularly and with much detail one that completely
obstructed the running of a particular street, which,
he says, was called El grande de los Kues, adoratorio
que era de los idolos. Now
the word “Kues,” in the Maya language,
as spoken by the Indians of Yucatan at the present
day, means their ancient places of worship, and the
word “adoratorio,” as defined in
the Spanish dictionary, is the name given by the Spaniards
to the temples of idols in America. So that when
the historian describes this mound as El grande de
los Kues el adoratorio de los idolos,
he means to say that it was the great one, or the
greatest among the places of worship of the Indians,
or the temples of their idols. It is called the “great one”
of their places of worship, in contradistinction to
the small ones around, among which was that now occupied
by the Franciscan convent In my opinion, the solitary
arch found in this convent is very strong, if not
conclusive, evidence that all the ruined buildings
scattered over Yucatan were erected by the very Indians
who occupied the country at the time of the Spanish
conquest, or, to fall back upon my old ground, that
they were the work “of the same race of people,”
or “their not very distant progenitors.” Who these races were, whence they
came, or who were their progenitors, I did not undertake
to say, nor do I now.
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