From Italy we passed into Austria. At Vienna we had the opportunity, through the courtesy of some friends near the court, of witnessing a splendid celebration by the Order of Maria Teresa, which was the most gorgeous and most beautiful spectacle I think I have ever seen. We soon returned to London, and then came to America, where I was to resume work on projects and enterprises here.
BUILDING THE ATLANTIC AND GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY
The great project of a connecting railway between the Eastern and the Middle Western States had been in my mind for some years. Queen Maria Cristina's fortune, which was then the greatest possessed by any woman in the world, seemed to me to offer a solution of the problem. I had no idea, of course, of attempting to use her fortune in any schemes of my own and for my own interest, but I saw at once that I could utilize her idle wealth to the tremendous advantage of the United States and, at the same time, render a service to her.
The Queen had had a large quantity of funds in the old United States Bank that President Jackson smashed, and James McHenry, who was connected with me in many enterprises, learned that she had taken as securities some coal lands in Pennsylvania. I saw the Duke of Rianzares, the guardsman Fernando Muñoz, whom Maria Cristina had fallen in love with and made a grandee of her kingdom, and finally married in '44. He had his headquarters at Lillo's in the Square Clary, and he introduced me to the Queen's secretary, Salerno. I suggested to the Spaniards the advisability of hunting up these coal lands of the Queen. McHenry had already made arrangements for me to go to America with her assistant secretary, Don Rodrigo de Questa, who did not know a word of English. The preliminaries were arranged, and we set out for Liverpool and America.
One of the first of many difficulties into which poor de Questa fell because of his ignorance of English occurred the first day out from Liverpool. The Spaniard, with a fatuous assumption common to Europeans, thought that whenever he failed to find the exact word he wanted in another tongue than his own, all that was necessary was to use French. The Spaniard asked the steward to get him some fish for breakfast. He knew the Spanish word would not answer, and could not think of the English word, though he had tried to master it for some time. He then fell back upon the French, and asked for "poisson." Of course, the steward thought he wanted poison, and reported the matter to headquarters, thinking suicide was contemplated.