Company is working the Mines of Las Papas, Santa Ana, and Santi Christi, the last of which, it is thought, may prove productive. In general, the Mines both of Capula and Chico (with the exception of Arevalo) are poor; and although, where one good mine has been discovered, others may be found, there are so many districts in which the chances of success are greater, that the investments made by the New Mexican, United Mexican, and Anglo-Mexican Companies, in the inferior Mines of Chico and Real del Monte, appear to me to belong to that class of injudicious experiments into which Foreign Adventurers were betrayed, in the beginning of 1825, by the absurd competition for contracts which the mining mania in England created.
On the morning of the 23rd July, we left Chico, and proceeded to Real del Monte. The distance is not above three leagues and a-half, but the road is one continued ascent, and, in many parts, so very rugged, that it requires as many hours to perform the journey.
There is, perhaps, no British Company to which so little justice has been done by the Mexicans as that of Real del Monte; a circumstance which is to be attributed entirely to a misconception of the system pursued there. Many people imagined that Captain Vetch, the Director, having it in his power to make the Mines pay at once, had not done so, in order to allow time for the completion of surface works; which, though highly advantageous at
