Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), September 27, 1845, vol. 2, no. 12, p. ???, col. ?

[page 178, column 2, continued:]

Journal of the Texian Expedition against Mier; Subsequent Imprisonment of the Author; his Sufferings and Final Escape from the Castle of Perote, with Reflections upon the Present Political and Probable Future Relations of Texas, Mexico, and the United States. By Gen. Thomas J. Green. Illustrated by Drawings taken from Life by Charles M’Laughlin, a Fellow-Prisoner. New York: Harper and Brothers.

This work was prepared for the press soon after the writer's escape from the castle of Perote, but has been kept back through fear of injuring the Texians detained, until recently, prisoners of war in Mexico.

The title fully conveys the general design; — the narrative in the author's own words, is one “of Texian daring, of battles lost and won, of dungeons and old castles, of imprisonment and hair-breadth escapes, of unparalleled sufferings and cruel murders.” No one can take up the book without becoming thoroughly interested in its details. The reflections on the political relations of Mexico, Texas and the U. States, are if not profound, at least acute, and we listen to them with respectful attention, as the views of an evidently sincere man, and one whose extensive personal experience entitles him to speak, on many points, with authority.

By way of instancing the general manner of the book, we quote a passage giving an account of the escape from Perote:

John Toowig was a son of Old Ireland, a small, energetic man, and a true-hearted Republican. His size and energy both befitting the operation in the hole, he had done more than his share of the work. He was the same who, in the spring of 1842, at San Antonio, put a match to a keg of powder and blew up his store, with several thousand dollars worth of goods, rather than they should fall into the hands of the Mexican General Vascus. It was less difficult for him than some others to get through the perforation in the wall. I found much difficulty in passing through, though I was now reduced from one hundred and sixty pounds, my usual weight, to one hundred and twenty. The gradual funnel-shape of the breach made it like driving a pin into an auger-hole, for the deeper we went, the closer the fit. The smallest of us having gone through first, for fear that the largest might hang in the hole and stop it up, it now came to Stone's turn, who was a large man.

He hung fast, and could neither get backward nor forward. In this situation, being wedged in as fast as his giant strength could force him, our friends on the inside of the room, who had been assisting us, had to reach in the hole, tie ropes to his hands, and draw him back. This operation was very like drawing his arms out of [page 179:] his body, but did not satisfy him. “I have a wife and children at home,” says he, “and I would rather die than stay here longer: I will go through, or leave no skin upon my bones.” So saying, he disrobed himself: his very great exertion, causing him to perspire freely, answered nearly as well for the second effort as if he had been greased, and he went through after the most powerful labour leaving both skin and flesh behind.

John Young, if anything, was a larger man than Stone, but was much his junior in years: he was as supple as a snake, and no Roman gladiator ever exhibited more perfectly-formed muscles: nor was his determined temper in bad keeping with his physical conformation. He was the last that came out; and while the balance of us sat under the side of the wall, we feared that it would be impossible for him to get through. Presently, with the aid of a dim sky above us, we saw his feet slowly protruding, then his knees, and when he came to his hip joints, here for many minutes he hung last. When this part of his body was cleared, the angular use of his knees gave him additional purchase to work by; but still our boys said, “Poor fellow! it will be impossible to gel his muscular arms and shoulders through.” We sat under him with an agony of feeling not to be described, while he ceased not his efforts. His body was now cleared to his shoulders, but still he hung fast. Having the full purchase of his legs, he would writhe, first up and down, and then from side to side, with Herculean strength; and when he disengaged himself, if it was not like the drawing of a cork from a porter-bottle, it was with the low, sullen, determined growl of a lion.

Being now through our greatest difficulty about the castle, we adjusted carefully, though silently, our knapsacks and blankets, passing orders from one to another in low whispers, which were interrupted alone by the almost perpetual cry of “centinela alerta” of the sentinels above us, both upon the right and left bastions, and between which we had now to pass. The moon had gone down at 8 o’clock; and being favoured by the darkness in the bottom of the moat, through which the sentinels overhead could not penetrate, we slowly crossed over to the outer wall in Indian file, then felt along the wall until we came to a flight of narrow steps eighteen inches wide, up which we crawled upon all-fours. When we reached the top of the wall, which formed the outer side of the moat, we passed on to the chevaux de frize, which was about twelve feet high, of pointed timbers set upright in the ground. These upright timbers passed through a horizontal sill about six feet from the ground, which we could reach with our hands, and then pull ourselves up, from which we could then climb over the sharp points of the upright posts, thence down to the bottom of the outside ditch, up the outside bank of which we crawled, it not being walled. When we reached the lop we breathed more freely, for we were now in the wide world, and felt more like freemen; and as the sentinels drolled out their sleepy notes of “centinela alerta,” we jumped up, and cracked our heels together three times, as a substitute for cheers three times three.

The volume is beautifully printed and bound — a large octavo of 487 pages.