Chapter XI: Part I: Old Mexico (9)

Two days after this we came down to Acapulco. It is a town for the most part of straggling huts, with a straggling thirty-five hundred of people. It has no vestiges of its antiquity but an old Spanish fort, after the order of Morro Castle, dismantled by Maximilian’s French on their abandonment of the place.

Near the fort lay a couple of rusted rails in position on a bit of washed-out embankment, the beginning of a railroad inaugurated here with a flourish on the 5th of May, 1881. Having passed over the line, one would judge that it might be much more than dread of American aggressions which would prevent its speedy completion.

There was no small pleasure in discovering at last, like another Balboa, the Pacific Ocean, in boarding the fine steamer of the Pacific Mail Company, the _City of Grenada_, which had come her long jaunt from Panama northward, and re-establishing connection with the outer world.

With this, too, began an acquaintance with the western ports of Mexico. One of the semi-monthly steamers, rightly chosen, each month puts into them all. An idea of the country can thus be got which would not be possible otherwise without much greater fatigue and expense, but it is not at all as favorable as that presented by the interior.

Neither of the three lower ports is of great size. Acapulco has the most complete and charming harbor. Manzanillo is a small strip of a place, on the beach, built of wood, with quite an American look. The volcano of Colima appears inland, with a light cloud of smoke above it.

San Blas is larger, but still hardly more than an extensive thatched village. On the bluff beside it exist the ruins of an ancient, substantial San Blas, shaken to pieces by an earthquake. Some old bronze bells from its church have been brought down and set up on some rude wooden trestles, on the ground in front of the poor chapel, without a belfry, which now fills the ecclesiastical needs of the place. This arrangement is sometimes referred to satirically as _la torre de San Blas_—the steeple of San Blas. My slight sketch of these bells, made on a fly-leaf of my note-book in the first instance, came to have an importance far beyond its own merits. I have the gratification of knowing that it proved to be the source of nothing less than the last inspiration of Longfellow. The great and good poet died on the 24th of March, 1882. In his portfolio was found his final work, “The Bells of San Blas,” dated March 15, which afterward appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_. His memorandum-book contained a reference, as a suggestion for a poem, to the number and page of _Harper’s Magazine_ of the same month, in which the sketch was published.

At Mazatlan we are in a bustling harbor, and a well and handsomely built little city, with improvements and shops of the better sort, which other countries than Mexico might be satisfied with. It seems surprising, until we comprehend the extensive back country which is tributary to it, how a city of but fourteen thousand people can be justified in maintaining so elaborate a stock of goods.

We steam finally across the Gulf of California and up the coast of that peninsula which seems one of the remotest points of the globe. The days are calm and blue; the bold outlines of the shores offer constant novelty. An arbitrary line is passed: we have lost Mexico, but gained California—the richest and most marvellous of her provinces.

It is remarkable now to recall that, upon the accession of the Emperor Iturbide, Mexico boasted of being, with the exception of Russia and China, the most extensive empire in the world.