Lest it be thought that wishful thinking about Lake Chapala is a recent trend, here is an early published piece about the lake that I think is a prime example of wishful thinking. Taking into account the illustration, it established a high bar for the many later instances of wishful thinking.
Felix Leopold Oswald (1845-1906) was born in Namus, Belgium, and became a physician before turning his attention to natural history. He traveled extensively, all over the globe, and was a prolific writer. He first visited Mexico with the Belgian Expeditionary Corps in 1866. From the 1870s to the 1890s, Oswald was a correspondent for various French and English periodicals. His first full-length work seems to have been Summerland Sketches (1880), based on a series of articles he had written for Lippincott’s Magazine.
Summerland Sketches purports to tell the story of explorations over a period of eight years. In the introduction, the author writes that:
This collection of Summerland Sketches is … a guide-book to one of the few remaining regions of earth that may give us an idea of the tree-land eastward in Eden which the Creator intended for the abode of mankind. In the terrace-lands of Western Colima and Oaxaca, near the head-waters of the Río Lerma and the mountain lakes of Jalisco, and in the lonely highlands of Vera Paz, we may yet see forests that have never been desecrated by an axe, and free fellow-creatures which have not yet learned to flee from man as from a fiend.”
Garold Cole, in his descriptive bibliography of American travelers to Mexico, wrote that “because Oswald was a doctor and naturalist, his observations on the healthfulness of the region and on the flora and fauna should be authoritative.” Unfortunately, Oswald’s descriptions—especially those in the chapter entitled “The Lake-Region of Jalisco”—appear to be a pastiche of half-remembered, or invented experiences. Despite the fanciful nature of Oswald’s accounts, it should be remembered that they were well received at the time they were written by an American public willing to devour almost anything, real or imaginary, about its southern neighbor.
Men in general are unacquainted with the fairest regions of their world. I am almost sure that there are towns of ten thousand inhabitants in the United States, and much larger cities in Western Europe, where it would be impossible to find one man who ever in his life heard even the name of Lake Chapala, while every other village schoolmaster in Europe and North America could write a treatise on Lake Leman or Loch Lomond…. Yet this fair lacus incognitus is ten times as large as all the lakes of Northern Italy taken together, and forty times larger than the entire canton of Geneva,—contains different islands whose surface area exceeds that of the Isle of Wight, and one island with two secondary lakes as big as Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine!”
Fact check:
(1) Lake Chapala is 1100 sq km in area, compared with about 11,300 sq km for ‘forty times… canton of Geneva.’
(2) The area of the Isle of Wight (381 sq km) is about 35% of the area of Lake Chapala, and hundreds of times the total area of all the islands in the lake.
(3) The largest island in the lake is Mezcala Island (0.2 sq km in area). Loch Lomond (71 sq km) is about 350 times larger and Loch Katrine (12.4 sq km) about 61 times larger than Mezcala Island.
This illustration (page 84 of Summerland Sketches) would do justice to many an Alpine lake, but bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lake Chapala then or now.
The shores of Lake Chapala had not borrowed their enchantment from the distance of the view. Sturdy hemlocks and bignonia trees crowd the impertinent underbrush out of the way, forming natural avenues along the beach, which slopes so gradually that the water line is almost everywhere accessible. The water is steel blue and wonderfully transparent, in spite of the algae and pond weeds that weave their tangled tendrils wherever the bottom is a little less obdurate. From the racks of an open wagon we could see the mountain forests of the opposite shore glittering with a moist and tremulous light and a thousand hues,—all possible shades, variations, and combinations of green and blue, darkened here and there by the gloom of a mountain gorge or the floating shadow of a cloud. But on the eastern shore the sierra presents a mural front to the lake, and discharges its drainage in the form of dripping springs and cascades, tiny rivulets mostly, except at the northeastern extremity of a triangular bay, where the falls of the Rio Blanco come down with a thunder that can be heard and felt for leagues around. A mile below the falls a few jagged rocks rise from the water, forming the southern outposts of the motley archipelago of cliffs and islands that extends along the eastern shore for at least sixty English miles. A meadow of pond reeds near one of the mid lake islands seemed to be a rendezvous for all possible kinds of waterfowl. Moor hens, surf ducks, flamingos, a long legged bird that looked like a stork, but might be a species of white heron, coots, and black divers, arrived and departed from and in all directions; and a little apart from the rest a flock of gansas, or swamp geese, disported themselves in the open water.”
Fact check:
Poetic as this description may be, it does not match the physiography or drainage characteristics of Lake Chapala. For example, ‘on the eastern shore the sierra presents a mural front to the lake, and discharges its drainage in the form of dripping springs and cascades’? The reality is that the eastern shore of Lake Chapala is (and was in the nineteenth century) a lowland area of floodplain and marsh with no significant hills or mountains.
Oswald’s other works included Physical education; or, The health-laws of nature (1882); Zoological sketches: a contribution to the out-door study of natural history (1883); The secret of the East, or, The origin of the Christian religion, and the significance of its rise and decline (1893); and Adventures in Cuba: How an American boy saved his friend and escaped from a Spanish prison (1898).
This is a lightly edited version of chapter 31 of Lake Chapala Through the Ages: an anthology of travelers’ tales.
Source
- Felix Leopold Oswald. 1880. Summerland Sketches; or, Rambles in the Backwoods of Mexico and Central America. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
- Garold Cole. 1978. American Travelers to Mexico, 1821-1972; a descriptive bibliography. New York: Whitson Publishing Co.
My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.
Comments, corrections or additional material welcome, whether via comments feature or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).