Hunting and Fishing of the Aztecs
"If the Aztecs had not been very skilful in hunting, they would not have been able to collect the numerous animals which filled the royal gardens..."
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From The Aztecs: Their History, Manners, and Customs by Lucien Biart, 1900.
If the Aztecs had not been very skilful in hunting, they would not have been able to collect the numerous animals which filled the royal gardens, and also their dwellings. In the chase they used bows, darts, nets, traps, and blow-guns. The blow-guns which the kings and nobles used were curiously wrought and painted, or ornamented with gold or silver.
Besides the hunts undertaken by individuals, either for amusement or to procure food, great battles were made, ordered by the king or established by custom, to supply the temples with victims. For these battles they chose a large wood, generally that of Zacatepec, a little distance from the capital, and placed traps and nets in the middle of it. Thousands of hunters then formed a circle, of a circumference calculated upon the approximate number of pieces of game they desired to take. Fires were lighted from place to place, and the trappers advanced beating drums, blowing conch-shells, hissing, and uttering cries. The terrified animals fled towards the centre of the wood, where the hunters, contracting their circle and continuing their cries, killed them with arrows.
The numbers of animals captured in these battles was so large that the first viceroy of Mexico, having heard of it, and not being able to believe it, wished to take part in one. The large plain between the villages of Xilotepec and Saint-juan del Rio was chosen for a hunting-ground, and the Indians were told to follow their usual methods. Eleven thousand Otomites formed a circle more than twelve miles in circumference, and after having executed the manoeuvre we have just explained, captured six hundred deer and wild goats, a hundred foxes, and an incalculable number of hares and rabbits. This place at the present time still bears the name of “Cazadero.”
The method of the Aztecs to catch ducks was rather curious, and it has not been abandoned. These web-footed and other aquatic birds abound on all the lakes of Mexico, and the people who live on the shores float large gourds on the waters, which the birds grow accustomed to seeing, and which they even carry off. When the time for hunting comes an Indian goes into the water, his head covered with one of the gourds; instead of fleeing the ducks approach, and the hunter has no difficulty in seizing them by the feet and drowning them.
The Aztecs boldly captured snakes and serpents; they seized them by the neck or squeezed their jaws between two fingers. But their most marvellous ability consisted in the sureness with which they followed the trail of a wild beast, simply by an examination of the plants upon which it had trampled.
In consequence of the situation of their capital in the middle of the waters and the proximity of Lake Chaleo, in which fish abounded, the Aztecs were, perhaps, still more given to fishing than to hunting. They engaged in it from the mo- ment of their arrival in the valley, for it furnished them with the food they needed. The implements they used were lines, hooks, and weirs. Their canoes, formed of the trunk of a tree hollowed out, which could contain as many as five persons, numbered thousands. In their military expeditions they used boats, into which as many as sixty soldiers could be crowded, and which were propelled by means of oars.
They took alligators by surrounding the neck with a cord, or in a way which, it is said, the Egyptians practise to capture crocodiles on the Nile. The hunter walked boldly up to the rep- tile, carrying in his hand a short stick, the ends of which were sharpened into a point. When the animal opened his mouth, the stick was placed between his jaws, and in closing on it he pierced them through and through. They then allowed the reptile to become exhausted by loss of blood, whereupon he was despatched. The pearl-divers on the coast of California employed, it appears, the same stratagem to overcome sharks.
Biart, Lucien. The Aztecs: Their History, Manners, and Customs. Translated by John Leslie Garner, A.C. McClurg & Co, 1900.
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