Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/268

258 In one of the outlets of the canal, opposite Piñon Island, we saw the wreck of the little stern-wheel steamer Guatamozin, which had exploded on her trial trip on the lake some months before. President Juarez and cabinet were on board, and the party just sitting down to dinner when the explosion took place. The little cabin was blown to atoms, and the whole upper works smashed into kindling wood, but strange to say, the whole party escaped unharmed, though Señor Romero was blown overboard, and was in the water sometime before being rescued. It seems as if Juarez must, indeed, bear a charmed life, and that his good fortune attaches itself to all about him.

On Piñon Island there are large deposits of nitrous earth, and a great number of Indians are engaged in collecting it, and washing it in small excavations, where the pure saltpetre is separated and dried in the sun. It was near the Garita de la Vija that Guatamozin's warriors were at last defeated, and where his monument now stands.

The story of the long siege, and the innumerable battles fought by Cortez and his determined band of Christian robbers, as they advanced, day by day, along this canal, destroying the houses and filling up with the ruins the gaps made in the causeway every night by the Mexicans, is told with vivid impressiveness by Bernal Diaz, and should be read by every student of history. This story knocks half the poetry out of the legends of old Mexico, and shows the besieged to have been ferocious cannibals and unmitigated savages, and the besiegers only a little worse, more savage, lawless, brutal and selfish, making the sign of the Cross with one hand, while they cut throats and robbed unoffending people with the other.