Free The Day the World Discovered the Sun by Mark Anderson Page A

ill treatment these poor Indians receive from their masters contributes as much as sickness to destroy the race,” Chappe wrote. “And the mines where they make them work yearly prove fatal to an infinite number of these poor wretches. . . . The province of Mexico is now but a vast desert compared to what it was in the time of Montezuma.” 18
    At noon on Easter Sunday, March 26, Chappe and his mule train arrived at the capital of New Spain. The colony’s viceroy had ordered his men to forgo the routine inspection of the visitors’ baggage. The distinguished guests were led to a spacious converted cathedral that would be their lodgings—a cathedral that Chappe learned had been seized from the Jesuits when Spain expelled the order from its territories two years before.
    The man who carried out the expulsion, Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix, was a former army general who made no pretenses about his preferences. For whatever unspecified reasons, de Croix took a liking to Chappe and company. “I am at a loss for words to express [his] friendshipand politeness,” Chappe wrote in his journal, adding that de Croix “left nothing undone to procure us whatever we wished for. . . . We had no table but his own for the four days we continued in the town, and he was so obliging as to send a cook to dress victuals for our attendants after the French fashion.” 19
    Just five hundred yards southwest of their accommodations, Chappe took a walking tour of the prime jewel of a city overflowing with rich mining families and their pillage. Mexico’s Metropolitan Cathedral (Catedral Metropolitana) shone with the glint of an encrusted crown. Silver rails surrounded the main altar, which barely contained an oversize lamp of solid silver enriched with ornaments of pure gold. Gold-fringed velvet hangings streamed down from the inside pillars. But the ground beneath the cathedral, the silty bottom of a drained lake, was starting to give way. “The outside of the cathedral of Mexico is unfinished—and likely to continue so,” Chappe recorded. “They are afraid of increasing the weight of the building, which already begins to sink.”
    While de Croix was known for his comparatively even-keeled administration, all was relative in New Spain. The Inquisition still burned penitents in the city’s nearby site of religious torture, the notorious quemadero . Seventeen heretics had paid the ultimate price in 1768, another four the year previous. “This is the place where they burn the Jews and other unhappy victims of the awful tribunal of Inquisition,” Chappe wrote in disgust. “This quemadero is an enclosure between four walls and filled with ovens, into which are thrown over the walls the poor wretches who are condemned to be burned alive—condemned by judges professing a religion whose first precept is charity.” 20
    In a city that rewarded ostentatious cruelty, Chappe had found a few kindred spirits during his four days in town. Most productive scientifically was Chappe’s meeting with a similarly omnivorous mind—the Mexican polymath priest, scientist, historian, cartographer, and journalist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez. Although Chappe did not record his personal interactions with Alzate, the Mexican philosophedrew up a detailed map of the New Spanish dominions Chappe’s team would be exploring. Alzate also shipped a chest full of Mexican natural history specimens for further study to the Academy of Sciences in Paris—specimens of local trees, fruits, leaves, fishes, butterflies, shells, crystals, rocks, ores, seeds, and flowers that Alzate and his French counterpart probably spent some time discussing during the visit. 21
    Chappe had also discovered a native Frenchman living in the city who spoke both Spanish and indigenous Mexican languages. “I took him for my interpreter,” Chappe wrote, “as I thought he would be very