Aztec Fire Read online

  That shed was a typical gunsmithery—shelves crammed with flintlocks, wheellocks, matchlocks, barrels, hammers, handles, trigger housings, damaged pistols of every sort. Tools hung from pegs on the walls—hammers, tongs, awls, files, chisels, hand drills, and pliers. Work benches were equipped with anvils and vises beside smoking braziers.

  For reasons of personal pride and mutual self-protection, my bond master insisted on concealing my gun- and powder-making from the public, and I acquiesced. You might think I owed him no less. As owner of the gun shop and gunpowder plant where I lived and worked, Felix Baroja was the man who had redeemed me from certain death in the silver mines. Nonetheless, I served him under conditions that negated any gratitude I might have conceivably felt. The laws—which allowed him to purchase me and if he had so chosen, flog, castrate even, or kill me like a dog—were the ubiquitous laws of the land and the bane of New Spain. In the nearly three hundred years since the Conquest, those laws had allowed Spanish conquistadors and slave drivers to shackle and imprison, exploit and murder my people—annihilating ninety percent of them with their guns and whips, prison mines and forced-labor haciendas. For those three hundred years, the gachupine “spur-wearers” and their criollo brothers had roweled our bloody backs and flanks with their razor-sharp spurs to enrich themselves.

  Felix was pure Basque, a gachupine breed from northern Spain that is renown in both hemispheres for its legendary gun-makers. But the exquisite pistol in my hand was crafted not by him but by his bond slave, Juan Rios, in a compound near the shores of Lake Chapala in the Guadalajara region of the New Spain colony.

  He reaped the fruits of my sweaty, sweltering, stifling labor and accepted the accolades due me.

  The compound was situated by a creek a few miles east of the town of Chapala. Nearly fifty miles long and ten miles wide, Lake Chapala was the largest lake in the New Spain colony, and our creek was one of its tributaries. Thirty miles from Guadalajara, six thousand feet above the ocean shore’s elevation, our lake was comfortably ensconced—a fortuitous altitude, which kept the climate temperate year round.

  The pistol falsely bore the legend of the Basque gun-maker and his Iberian Peninsula home city for many reasons. My lord and master would not acknowledge to anyone—not even to me—that I had designed, forged, and fabricated the weapons, which had made him rich. That his hard-used, long-suffering bond slave was as talented as any gunsmith alive and far more industrious than himself was a fact his gachupine pride would never accept.

  An indio slave, whom he routinely ridiculed as his “Aztec cannibal,” underwrote both his fame and fortune.

  Compounding his vanity was his fear. As I have said, in allowing an indio to master the craft of gun-making, he had breached one of the Crown’s most inviolable laws—one that underpinned its entire tyranny. The Crown had not forgotten Father Hidalgo’s bloody and costly uprising, and Felix’s and my transgression had threatened that tyranny in the most devastating way imaginable. Were the gachupines to learn that Felix was allowing an indio to practice and perfect the craft of pistol and musket manufacturing, the full weight of royal retribution would crash down on the vain, greedy Basque like a volcanic eruption.

  Despite the risk, he never once suggested curbing my lucrative labors. While I reaped little for my industry and peril—common food and shelter—he profited extravagantly. His life had grown relatively affluent, his workday exertions reduced to bragging to his friends, bedding down his mistresses, and besotting himself with brandy and vino.

  When I first approached Felix, I was hardly more than a boy—a prisoner sentenced to suicidal slavery for backing Hidalgo’s Independence Movement. Like many others who’d backed Father Hidalgo, I was deemed an irredeemable enemy of the Crown.

  Nor, in truth, had the fury that had fired the country’s impassioned rebellion ebbed. With each succeeding year since Hidalgo’s death, the padre’s dream of freedom had spread and swelled in my heart, in everyone’s hearts. Since 1810, when Father Hidalgo first proclaimed the Cry of Dolores on the church steps, his revolutionary vision had never dimmed but had secretly grown.

  But that vision had not freed the Good Father’s people nor tamed the Spaniards’ tyranny.

  Seven years ago—at the Battle of Calderon Bridge, not far from Guadalajara—a royal cannoneer’s lucky shot had detonated an overloaded powder wagon, its flaming debris igniting furious firestorms throughout his camp. The conflagration razed his army and incinerated their supplies, weapons, ammunition, materiel. Afterward Spanish troops captured and imprisoned Hidalgo, eventually executing him by firing squad.

  Another son of the Church, Father Morelos, picked up Hidalgo’s struggle. Fighting to the bitter end, he was at last captured and executed in 1815. Since then, scattered bands—some no more than bandido gangs—harassed the Spanish swine in many places throughout the colony. General Guerrero’s guerrilla army conducted operations in the China Road region, cutting a bloody swath from Acapulco to the Valley of Mexico. The most stubborn resistance, however, was waged on a small island near the coast of the lake—not far from our small factory—where a band of rebels had held off the Spanish for years.

  Nonetheless, all the years of war, rebellion, and rampant banditry had achieved little. The oppression of peons continued unabated. If anything, the criollos exacerbated their depredations, trusting only in violence and terror and the utter suppression of their starved and brutalized subjects.

  ELEVEN

  I WAS EXAMINING the rifling in the pistol’s bore—using my mirror to reflect candlelight down the barrel—when Felix entered. Spiral grooves, meticulously cut into the inside of a barrel’s interior, spun the rotating ball as it sped through the barrel. This rifling—as it was called—greatly increased the weapon’s accuracy. Despite the benefits of these spiraling grooves, few weapons were rifled because it was expensive and the weapons required continuous upkeep. Black powder and residue from the spinning lead balls filled the grooves, requiring that the barrels be re-bored periodically.

  Felix was garishly garbed with a black broad-brimmed, low-crowned caballero’s hat and a matching silk jacket, under which he sported a ruffled shirt of imported alabaster linen and a red brocade vest. His tight black breeches were stuffed into knee-high ebony riding boots, which he’d ordered me earlier in the day to burnish to a mirror-gloss and heel with four-inch sterling silver spurs. A plaited wrist-quirt of inky ox-hide rested horizontally in his hands.

  “The marques will be here soon,” Felix said without preamble, not even bothering to inspect my craftsmanship. “Pray—for your sake—that the pistol more than meets the marques’s expectations … and mine. Make sure it is in its case and in my hand before the marques’s carriage arrives.”

  “Sí, Patrón.”

  He swung the wrist-quirt against his boot top, casually cracking the triple three-inch poppers against it. Felix had used that quirt on me more than once when my efforts or attitude did not suit his insufferable vanity or supercilious fancy. And I had resisted the urge to kill him.

  He wanted the pistol in his hand so he could present it to the marques as his handiwork, not letting the marques know that an indio’s skill and sweat had produced a weapon of such singular sturdiness, incomparable precision, and, yes, surpassing beauty. Basking in the grandee’s praise, my patrón would then pocket the gold that was the reward for excellence.

  As I spoke, my foot nudged saddlebags I’d concealed earlier under the table, pushing them farther out of sight. If Felix knew the contents of the bags—and what I was doing with them—he would have handed me over to the constable, who would have flogged me to the point of death and then dragged me to the viceroy’s gallows. Not even the piles of dinero and fame my craftsmanship had lavished on him would have saved me.

  “Did you finish repairing his hunting muskets?”

  “Sí, Patrón. He will find that all three shoot better than the day he bought them.”

  “He wants those delivered to his house this afternoon. He
won’t be taking them into the city with the pistol.”

  The “city” was Guadalajara.

  Felix set an old wheel-lock musket on the table. “This belongs to Ruiz, the grain merchant. Repair it for him, but don’t make it like new. It’s a piece of junk. He’s a bastardo and too cheap to pay what I so indisputably deserve.”

  Without a muchas gracias, he left the shop.

  TWELVE

  IN THOSE SEVEN years in Felix’s gun shop, I had worked diligently at gunsmithing and studied the history of such weaponry and munitions.

  The size and shape of muskets and pistols had not changed significantly since these weapons had first become commonplace among Europeans three hundred years ago.

  Gunpowder was still poured and compressed into muskets, pistols, and cannons, and a lead ball was still rammed through the barrel and into the breech. Gunpowder was also put in a flashpan on the weapon’s top. When the trigger was pulled, the powder in the flashpan ignited the main powder charge in the breech, blowing the ball out the barrel at a speed sufficient to kill a man.

  Early on, the shooter had to hold the weapon with one hand and light the powder in the flashpan with the other. A device was needed so both hands could be used to hold and aim the weapon.

  The first effective one was the “matchlock.” The “match” was a piece of cord attached to an arm and lighted. When the trigger was pulled, the arm holding the match dropped down, igniting the gunpowder in the flashpan.

  Ayyo! Having a frighteningly flammable cord near gunpowder was hazardous. Accidents were inevitable, and the consequences could be catastrophic. Moreover, matchlocks in wet weather were notoriously unreliable. At night the glow made it easy to spot the shooter.

  Since the weapon was relatively inexpensive to make, the matchlock remained the preferred musket throughout Europe for centuries.

  Gun owners still occasionally sent me one for repair.

  The next improvement was a spinning wheel that replaced the burning cord. A metal jaw gripped the flint, and when a shooter squeezed the trigger, a steel wheel with edges rotated against the flint, firing sparks into the flashpan, igniting the powder.

  I’ve been told that Leonardo da Vinci invented the wheel lock, though to hear Felix brag about it, you would think he himself invented it and everything else under the sun.

  Wheel locks have been around for three hundred years, back to about the time Cortés was conquering the One World. Due to the high cost of weapons, people passed them down for generations.

  The preferred weapon in my own time was the flintlock. Like the wheel lock, a spark from flint was used to ignite the powder, but the flintlock was much less complicated: the flint was held in a small vise called a cock that fell and sparked when it struck a glancing blow to a piece of steel after the trigger was pulled.

  Of course, all muskets had one purpose: to kill.

  THIRTEEN

  AFTER FELIX LEFT, I went to work on the grain merchant’s wheel lock. I saw immediately that the spring beneath the jaws that held the flint was missing. Since we had few spare parts for weapons repairs and no extra springs, a new spring would have to be fabricated. Such missing or irreparably damaged parts had to be handcrafted in the shop foundry. The process was not simple, but I had already fabricated entire weapons with our limited equipment.

  Consequently, the flintlock had become the weapon of choice for infantry since the seventeenth century. Most of the pistols and muskets I worked were flintlocks.

  Thanks to my expansion of Felix’s business, the compound—in which I performed my duties as a gunsmith and maker of gunpowder—had grown substantially. It now consisted of several buildings. The buildings stood two hundred paces apart, and each shed was long and narrow. The powder shed’s brown mud-brick walls were of double thickness. In the event that one of us accidentally discharged a weapon in the compound, we didn’t want it entering the powder shed and causing an explosion.

  Beside the two buildings, we had constructed storage areas, a stable and corral for mules, and a bunkhouse for the workers. Felix and his family lived on a hillock far from the destructive range of an explosion in the gunpowder shed.

  He also stabled his horses at the main house.

  He clearly worried more about his livestock than his workers.

  As a matter of law, Felix was not supposed to manufacture guns. The Crown required that all weapons must be imported from Spain and that only repairs be locally done. But as with most Spanish laws, legal exceptions were available for a price. Our favorite method is to call the work a “repair”: We start with a part from one weapon, such as a butt-plate … and build the new weapon from that point on. That way Felix could claim that he is merely “repairing” the weapon.

  The firearms Felix had previously crafted were not nearly as fine as the pistol I had made for the marques in our gun shop. Similar to a blacksmith’s shop, the gun shop housed some special tools that were indispensable to gun-making and to manufacturing the parts needed for weapon repairs: anvils, bellows, hammers, boring and grooving tools and other instruments, as well as a forge, which was a furnace or fire pit where metals could be melted or heated so they could be shaped, hardened, and infused with tenacity.

  Muskets and pistols were made with the Damascus barrel technique. The barrel was made by heating thin rods of steel so that they were pliable, then twisting them around a center bar. Wrapping the rods around the center bar created a continuous open seam that had to be filled. Heating and pounding the metal, in what was called a “wielding” process, closed the seam. Inadequately closing the seam caused most defective barrels. Another common defect was making the barrel too hard and brittle. As with a sword, the iron had to give a little or it might crack, snap, or break.

  After the barrel was shaped, the center bar was pulled out and a boring tool smoothed the barrel’s interior.

  The barrel had to be “proofed” to test its reliability. We proofed a weapon by firing two balls at once with twice the powder used for a single ball. If the barrel survived this double load, we’d “pickle” it with an acid bath to remove an iron layer that would easily rust. The pickling made the barrels black and brought out the characteristic Damascus twisted wire pattern on the barrel.

  Felix confided in me once after too much wine that while his Damascus barrels were inferior to most of those he’d made in Spain, they were better than the cheap, often defective muskets he had occasionally made for use in the slave trade. In that trade, guns were the profession’s legal tender—one gun bought one slave from a native chief or a professional trader. As often as not, the guns were so cheaply fabricated that they blew apart on firing, killing the customers who purchased them.

  Through Felix’s books and from our occasional discussions, I learned that cleaning the rust off old horseshoe nail stubs and melting them down produced superior gunmetal. That steel could then be forged into long rods used in the Damascus process.

  Horseshoe nails were superior to wrought iron because horses were so valuable—in both war and peace—that their horseshoe nail stubs were made from superior steel. I learned that melting pieces of steel carriage springs in with the nail stubs produced an even higher quality gunmetal for the manufacturing of firearms’ barrels. The spring steel increased the barrel’s resilience and tenacity.

  Using that process, the flintlock pistol I made for the marques was a finer weapon than most and not just because of the rifled barrel.

  At one point during the colony’s crisis in weapons shipments, Felix even let me forge a cannon. The best cannons are cast, usually out of bronze, while lesser expensive ones are made of iron. But a cannon barrel is nothing more than a tube bigger than a musket or pistol barrel, and I modeled my cannon on the Damascus barrel, using the twisted-wire technique.

  I’d read that the Chinese had actually loaded and fired gunpowder in bamboo tubes and that after reinforcing bamboo with steel tubes, Arabs had fired metal arrows from the tubes.

  Closer to home for me, I
had worked with my uncles who had reinforced hardwood to create cannons for Father Hidalgo. Not the best weapons in a battle, but if carefully loaded, they could send a broadside of nails into advancing troops.

  I admit, my Damascus cannon was far from a perfect weapon. The problem was that the seams left from the twisting were so large, they had to be partly filled with lead, a soft metal, and that created a weak seal. But with light powder charges, the cannon was useful.

  Working for Felix had also honed my skill at making gunpowder. Ayyo! Great care had to be taken when working with gunpowder because few tasks were as dangerous.

  Each step involved care—the making, storing, handling, and transporting of the powder. We removed from the shop all metal that could collide, spark, and ignite the explosive. Finished powder was stored only in copper and transported in copper casks, each weighing about twenty-five pounds and covered with leather pouches that were sealed at the top.

  The formula for making gunpowder was well known—but making gunpowder is in the end alchemy and the alchemist’s art is perfected only by getting the combination exactly right, by tweaking the formula here and there to suit the actual strength of the ingredient. Saltpeter was especially tricky, its purity varying from deposit to deposit. The quality of charcoal differed widely, depending on the type of wood burned and even the age of the tree it came from. Willow or hazel charcoal was preferable for cannon powder, dogwood charcoal for small arms.

  I also preferred using urine instead of water in mixing the ingredients, having found that a beer drinker’s urine was better than water, and a wine drinker’s best of all.

  I began by working with the ingredients separately, grinding each by hand into a fine powder. Dissolving the saltpeter in urine in one drum while the charcoal and sulfur were dissolving together in another, I then mixed the compounds together in a wet mixture.