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Updated: May 11, 2025
Yet for these choice quarters, with two beds in each of two rooms, leaving no space practically between, we were expected to pay four dollars. Upon remonstrating with the proprietor at the price demanded, he cooly said, "Oh, yes, everything here costs high; but there is money to pay it with." This really stated the fact. Conditions in Mérida are the most abnormal of any place which I have visited.
Among our fellow-passengers were a company of fifth-rate comedians, going to Merida by way of Sisal. There was nothing interesting to us about them. Theatrical people and green-room slang vary but little over the whole civilized world. There were two or three Spanish and French tradesmen going back to Mexico.
The most difficult train-journey I remember is the twenty-hour trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a change of cars in the ghastly early morning at the border-town of Badajoz and another change at noon at the sun-baked, parched, and God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as red letters on my personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price of sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a colored cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment like a painting by Zuloaga.
A Dutch battalion under Storm de Grave, abandoned at Merida to the vengeance of the enraged people, was furiously assailed, but made a gallant defence and fought its way through the enemy. In the commencement of 1809, Napoleon had again quitted Spain in order to conduct the war on the Danube in person.
In the Dutch edition Nieuwe Caerte van het goudrycke landt Guiana, the Llanos of Caracas, between the mountains of Merida and the Rio Pao, bear the name of Caribana. I have visited those coasts in going from the Havannah to Porto Bello; and I there learned that the cape which bounds the gulf of Darien or Uraba on the east, still bears the name of Punta Caribana.
The footsteps of the Barbarians, who, in the reign of Gallienus, had penetrated beyond the Pyrenees, were soon obliterated by the return of peace; and in the fourth century of the Christian æra, the cities of Emerita, or Merida, of Corduba, Seville, Bracara, and Tarragona, were numbered with the most illustrious of the Roman world.
The union of Venezuela and New Grenada has also placed in the hands of one people the greater part of the quinquina exported from the New Continent. The temperate mountains of Merida, Santa Fe, Popayan, Quito and Loxa produce the finest qualities of this febrifugal bark hitherto known.
Thompson, our American consul to Yucatan, believes this dance is ancient, and thinks he has found representations of it painted on the walls of ancient ruins at Chichen Itza. Mérida prides itself upon its carnival, which, it claims, ranks third, Venice and New Orleans alone surpassing it. It was admitted that the celebration of this year was far below that of others.
The natural consequence of planting the whole country with hennequen has been so great a deficiency in the maize crop, that this year not enough was grown for the consumption, and people in the northeastern district were beginning to suffer from the want of it, when some merchants of Merida imported large quantities from New York.
There was a puchero simmering at the fire, half full of bacon, garbanzos, and other provisions; this was emptied into a large wooden platter, and out of this Antonio and myself supped; the other Gypsies refused to join us, giving us to understand that they had eaten before our arrival; they all, however, did justice to the leathern bottle of Antonio, which, before his departure from Merida, he had the precaution to fill.
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