The Last of the Aztecs

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Any good history book will tell you the Aztec empire vanished in 1521 when Cortés destroyed Tenochtitlan, its capital city.  And I do mean destroyed—the last time a city was dismantled so effectively, the Romans were doing a little urban renewal in Carthage.

The empire was destroyed, but the people remained and today over 1.5 million people still speak Nahuatl—the language of the Aztecs—as their primary language.  Most of these descendants of mighty warriors still live in Central and South Mexico.

The fact that there are roughly as many Aztecs today as there were five centuries ago makes a story about the last Aztecs a little…. weird.  Almost blog like.

In the summer of 1853, the hottest book in London was the gripping tale of the Hammond Expedition into the forgotten jungles of Central America.  Pedro Velasquez, one of the expedition members, told the tale of how the intrepid team of explorers had penetrated deep into the dense jungles, discovering the lost remnants of the Aztec Empire.

The explorers not only discovered the lost “idolatrous city” of Ixihaya, but rescued the last two members of the “Sacerdotal caste, (now nearly extinct) of the Ancient Aztec Founders of the ruined temples.”  These last two members of the priestly class were children, worshipped by the other natives.  Or, as it said in the book:

“Forbidden, inviolably sacred laws, from intermarrying with any persons but those of their own caste, they had here dwindled down, in the course of many centuries, to a few insignificant individuals, diminutive in stature.  They were, nevertheless, held in high veneration and affection by the whole Iximayan community, probably as living specimens of an antique race nearly extinct.” 

Hammond and Velasquez were able to bring the two children, Bartola and Maximo, out of the jungle and take them to New York, where their presence caused a sensation.  The children were small even for their young age, with proportionately small heads, dressed in colorful native garb, and obviously members of a different and strange race.  Everyone wanted to see them, scientists discussed them in the newspapers, and a scholarly article was published in the American Journal of Medical Sciences.

All the public attention guaranteed that the booklet detailing their rescue would be widely read by a fascinated public.  After they were presented to everyone from Horace Greeley to President Millard Fillmore, an eager public was finally able to  view the children for only twenty-five cents (half price for children).

When the Aztec children, now known to be brother and sister, arrived in London, at the request of Prince Albert, they were taken to Buckingham Palace and presented to Queen Victoria.  Publicly, she expressed a happy fascination with the Aztecs, but privately in her diary she revealed she found the exhibition of the children “disgusting and frightful”.  (Perhaps a diminutive queen who was always on public display could empathize).

After visiting the queen, the children went on to tour Europe, meeting Napoleon III, Tsar Alexander III of Russia, the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, as well as most of the other crowned heads in every country they visited.   For the next five decades, the two Aztec children would be almost continually on display at various freak shows and circuses as they traveled from Europe to the Americas and returned.  Eventually, they were even displayed at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum.

When they were older, the siblings even married, as this was allowed in the customs of their people.  (At least, this is what their handlers explained).

Of course, the entire farce was a complete sham.  Let’s start at the beginning:   There was neither a Hammond expedition, nor a Pedro Velasquez.  The Aztec city of Ixihaya never existed. 

The sensational booklet was a reworked version of an earlier account of the travels of John L. Stephens, who had investigated the Mayan ruins of Central America.  Basically, wherever Stephens had written “Maya”, the new book was altered to say “Aztec”.  The entire section about “rescuing the Aztec children” was just pure nonsense.

Maximo and Bartola (if those were their real names, were from El Salvador) and were suffering from microcephaly and cognitive developmental disability.  It is very doubtful that the children could ever have given consent to being exposed like zoo animals, which is why there are no pictures of the children accompanying this blog post.  Microcephalic children were frequently exhibited as “pin heads”, or referred to as a cross between humans and apes.

Why were so many people in so many countries willing to believe a rather obvious hoax?  At the time, most Western nations were expanding their empires and found the notion of primitive and inferior races to be comforting to a tortured conscience.  Eventually, most of the same nations would eagerly accept the concept of Social Darwinism, wanting to believe that it was their duty to exploit peoples too backward to take care of themselves—especially those who happened to be living where there were valuable natural resources.

And what happened to the poor children?  Eventually, the crowds that had rushed to see them found new wonders to gape at and stopped coming.  Over time, the children were exhibited in smaller and smaller exhibit halls, then small museums, and finally small traveling circuses.  The news reports are contradictory with one story reporting Maximo’s death in South Carolina while traveling with a small circus.  Other stories have them still being exhibited as late as the 1880’s, but no one knows for sure what eventually happened to the “last of the Aztecs”.

It is doubtful that the children’s mother ever learned what happened to her children after she had turned them over to the promoter who had taken them away from El Salvador.  Nor is it clear how many years it took her to realize that the charlatan’s promise that the children could be “cured by doctors in America” was a lie.