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The Comprachicos, or Comprapequeños, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. The Comprachicos are like the "succession powder," an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old human ugliness.
At all epochs in history one finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison around them. The gipsies were a tribe; the Comprachicos a freemasonry a masonry having not a noble aim, but a hideous handicraft.
A statute of the early part of William and Mary's reign hit the association of child-buyers hard. It was as the blow of a club to the Comprachicos, who were from that time pulverized.
One bitterly cold night in January 1690, when Ursus and his van were at Weymouth, a small vessel put off from Portland. It contained a dozen people, and it left behind on the rock, and alone, a small boy. The people were called Comprachicos. They bought children, and understood how to mutilate and deform them, thus making them valuable for exhibition at fairs.
For the first time he realized what playthings of Fate are men and women, how completely circumstance can make or mar them, and what utter paralysis results from the strangling grip of poverty. History hints that during the Middle Ages there flourished an association known as Comprachicos "child-buyers" which traded in children.
The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a mighty measure. Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise. Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh.
And Henry Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham, told John Baron Colepepper the whole anecdote how the waif-flask had been carried to the Admiralty, about the parchment of the Comprachicos, the jussu regis, countersigned Jeffreys, and the confrontation in the torture-cell at Southwark, the proof of all the facts acknowledged by the Lord Chancellor and by the Queen; the taking the test under the nave, and finally the admission of Lord Fermain Clancharlie at the commencement of the sitting.
Whatever you may think of them, they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed open a door, entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed. All was done with propriety. They were of all countries. Under the name of Comprachicos fraternized English, French, Castilians, Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, make such fusions.
You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot-print of a savage in a forest. Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word signifying Child-buyers. The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of industry.
The Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gipsies, they had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common tie was association, not race.
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