O Bells of San Blas (part 1)

Some of our more literarily inclined readers might remember the name of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, very well regarded in his generation but who has lost the battle of memory against some of his contemporaries, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. You may be surprised to discover he was probably the first American to write about the Riviera Nayarit area. The last poem Longfellow wrote, just a couple of weeks before he passed away on March 24th, 1882, was The Bells of San Blas, inspired by an article he had read on that month’s edition of the venerable Harper’s magazine, recounting a trip along the Mexican coast.

In this text, William Henry Bishop, a rather inconsequential novelist of the era, describes San Blas as: “(…) hardly more than an extensive thatched village, has, on a bluff beside it, the ruins of a once more substantial San Blas. Old bronze bells brought down from it have been mounted in rude frames a few feet high to serve the purpose of the present poor church, which is without a belfry, and this is called in irony ‘the Tower of San Blas.’”

The “more substantial San Blas” Bishop refers to is the old colonial port, founded in the late 1530’s as a village for the nearby farms. However, there aren’t any noteworthy records of San Blas until 1768, when, in preparation for Fr. Junípero Serra’s expedition to California, Spanish visitador (inspector) José Bernardo de Gálvez decided to set up a naval port for the expedition to alleviate the load on the only relevant Spanish port in the Mexican Pacific, Acapulco. During the late colonial years, San Blas thrived as the port of departure for the Spanish Californias and the first port of call in the New Spain for the Nao de China, the regular galleon convoy that communicated the Spanish Americas with the Philippines, and brought precious goods like silk, spices, and, of course, chinaware, in exchange for the Mexican silver used to struck the coins of Qing China.

During this time (late 18th century until the Mexican Independence War) the port of San Blas was, in many ways, the last maritime outpost to the north of the Spanish colonial empire. Aside from the colonization and evangelization in the Upper California, the port was the base of exploration for the Spanish incursions into the western Canadian coast, and for more than 20 years, the San Blas command was responsible for resupplying the Spanish forts in Nootka Island, just to the other side of the sound of Vancouver Island.

The 18th century San Blas was a prosperous town, and a couple of very old buildings remain from this golden age: the Contaduría (customs house) and the ruins of the church of Our Lady of the Rosary, both dating to the 1770s. By the turn of the century, San Blas had around 30,000 inhabitants (more or less as many as there are now!) and was a prosperous town with a renowned military hospital; however, the mangroves around the actual port, as well as the changing tides and eroding of the bay due to the common floods in summer, caused the Spaniards to always be begrudgingly accepting of San Blas’ relevance, and then only because it was conveniently close to Guadalajara and Mexico City.

(This is a five-part story on San Blas: next week, we’ll discuss the importance of San Blas during the Mexican independence war and the early 19th century)