Alone in Mexico is a travel account by the Austrian botanist Karl Bartolomeus Heller, who visited Central America and the Caribbean between 1845 and 1848 to study the region's fauna and flora. Terry Rugeley offers the first English translation of this work, originally published in Heller's native German and largely neglected by English speaking scholars. The text documents Heller's experiences in Mexico, as he roamed through the little known states of Yucatán, Tabasco and Chiapas. It also furnishes interesting observations on Mexican culture and politics during the crisis years of the Mexican-American War and the Caste War in the Yucatán.
Heller's narrative forms part of a broader genre of travel literature popular in the nineteenth century. In the years following Spanish American independence, many northern European naturalists descended on Spain's former colonies to examine their natural resources, and, in some cases, to staff nascent universities and museums. Most of these men, following in Alexander von Humboldt's illustrious footsteps, consigned their experiences to print when they returned to Europe, producing exhilarating travel accounts to accompany their scientific works. These texts usually shared several key themes: they presented America as an unexplored continent brimming with untapped natural resources and potentially lucrative markets for consumer goods; they proffered comments on American customs and society; and they enumerated the multiple dangers facing the intrepid explorer.
Heller's account conforms to this general model, illuminating the numerous perils and discomforts that afflicted the scientific traveller in Spanish America. The Austrian contends with vicious mosquitoes, choppy seas and hazardous roads. He succumbs to debilitating sickness. He endures many a night in substandard inns consuming questionable cuisine, and he repeatedly emphasises the dangers posed by bandits, from whom he has several lucky escapes. Such tribulations, which are pretty much the standard fare of nineteenth-century travel narratives, cast Heller in the familiar guise of self-sacrificing savant, willing to risk his life in pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Heller's account is also of interest to historians because he views Mexico at a critical juncture in its history and dispenses valuable information about Mexican culture and society. He chronicles the progress of the Mexican American war, as US troops advance inexorably on Mexico City. He witnesses the mounting racial tensions in Yucatán in the lead-up to the brutal caste war of 1847, and he disapproves, like many foreign visitors, of the prevalence of excessive alcohol consumption and gambling, observing that ‘Mexicans of both sexes love idleness as much as the foreign merchant loves industry and activity; and they are never happier than when they sit on a handsome steed or in a carriage, at the gaming table or the theatre, and are able to give free rein to their ostentation’. An interest in Pre-Colombian civilisations spurs Heller to visit the Maya ruins at Uxmal, where he professes to feel ‘a solemn respect’ towards ‘the vanished people who once constructed such grand and magnificent buildings’, and he also inspects the selection of Aztec artefacts on display in the Museum of Mexico. He lists the items exhibited in the institution, admiring ‘an anthropomorphic figure wrapped around with serpents, equipped with a necklace of human hearts, hands and skulls’ and marvels at a beautiful mask, ‘fashioned and burnished out of obsidian with such perfection that one cannot recognise the slightest trace of a tool on it’.
As a naturalist, Heller is particularly keen to evaluate the state of the sciences in post colonial Mexico, though his appraisal is, in the main, less than encouraging. The Austrian laments that the botanical garden, founded by Vicente Cervantes in 1788 and once ‘a very interesting spot’ is now ‘so neglected that the visitor could sooner take the whole thing for a courtyard than for a botanical garden’. The natural history collection in the museum is, in Heller's opinion, ‘neither scientifically arranged nor especially well preserved’, ‘a few fossils and the remains of a mammoth’ constituting ‘the only notable items’, whilst the School of Mines, ‘which in former times included collections on physics, mechanics and mineralogy, is now worth seeing as little more than a monument of consummate architecture’. Heller concludes that scientific study has declined in Mexico in the thirty years since independence, with the majority of scientific institutions ‘nearing their collapse’. The botanist does, however, temper this decidedly bleak picture with reference to a few enterprising Mexicans who, to his surprise, exhibit an interest in natural history. He reserves particular praise for two clergymen from Campeche, who possessed ‘a small private collection of antiquities and objects of natural history’, and a young hacendado from Tabasco who, to Heller's astonishment, brandished ‘books about botany, the science of horticulture, history and so forth’ and cultivated an impressive variety of plants in his garden.
Terry Rugely's highly readable translation brings Heller's account to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It includes a short but useful introduction to the work in which Rugely supplies relevant biographical details about the botanist and the historical circumstances surrounding his sojourn in Mexico. It also includes comprehensive explanatory notes, where Rugely puts some of the Austrian's more obscure references into context, corrects some of his misconceptions and indicates, where necessary, any changes between the translation and the original work. Like many travel narratives from this period, Heller's account is occasionally a little repetitive and his observations are sometimes tainted by the social and racial prejudices of his era – particularly apparent in his attitude towards slavery. Nevertheless, the work contains a wealth of information and should be of interest to historians of science and exploration or politics and society in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico.
