FOOTNOTES:
[16] We saw the Indian women go down on one knee and kiss the hand of the haciendado whose farm we were viewing.
[CHAPTER XX]
YUCATAN AS IT IS TO-DAY AND THE YUCATECANS
The Yucatecans are a race of parvenus. They have been unfortunate both by inheritance and fate. The Spanish have never been successful colonisers. History teaches that they have always suffered from "wind in the head," both socially and religiously. They are bigots, and they are naturally bullies. To these racial failings Fate has added for the Yucatecans the last and most fatal of gifts, sudden wealth. There is no doubt about the wealth of the Yucatecans. Many of them are rich beyond the dreams of even their avarice, and that is saying much. But when to mushroom millionaires is given the governance of an enslaved race, it would be nothing short of a miracle if the very finest and largest breed of parvenus was not produced. If you think of all the bad qualities, the pettinesses and meannesses of all the parvenus you have ever met or heard of, you will have some sort of mental picture of a Yucatecan. If there are any unpleasant characteristics of the parvenu you have forgotten, the typical Yucatecan has got those too.
Avarice is their besetting sin. Money is their god. There is a saying that "Jews cannot live in Yucatan." The sharpest Hebrew would come off second-best in a business deal with a Yucatecan. This is the characteristic of all ages and all ranks. The Yucatecan is always "on the make." It matters not if he is a multi-millionaire. The richest man in the city of Merida would not be in the least offended if you offered to buy the flowers from his patio or garden. He himself would cut what you wanted and drive a hard bargain with you. In a rich quarter of the capital a wealthy family make a practice every dry season of selling water at ten centavos a pail! A foreign resident, accustomed to buy eggs from the servants of one of the great land-owning families of Merida, called one day and found the housekeeper out. The little daughter of the house, ten years old, and entitled, on coming of age, to a million dollars in her own right, overheard the caller speaking to one of the maids, and came out to offer for six centavos one egg which her pet hen had laid. Three centavos is the price of an egg all the year through in Yucatan!
There are no poor Yucatecans. Small wonder: for not only do they lose no opportunity of raking in the shekels, but they openly boast that they never entertain or show hospitality, unless it pays them to do so. We can bear eloquent witness to this, for from end to end of our tour never once was so much as a cup of coffee offered us by a Yucatecan, with the single exception of the semi-official breakfast we earlier described. At the town of Tizimin, where we spent Christmas, though the Jefe and all the authorities of the town knew we were inhabiting a hovel destitute of everything except pegs in the walls on which to swing our hammocks, not a soul in that town of several hundreds of well-to-do people was found to come forward with the offer of a chair or a table, a basin to wash in, or the loan of a little kitchen crockery. No, if we needed such things we must buy them; and if we did not wish to do that, why then we must go without. We had gone to Yucatan intent on roughing it, and we did not mind dining with one of our baggage boxes for table, squatting Turk-fashion on the stone floor. We only mention it as typical of Yucatecan inhospitality, which really passes all understanding.
But rich as the richest Yucatecans are, it is curious to see how little they know how to spend their money. A dozen shoddy rocking-chairs, a roll-top desk, a few Oriental rugs or mats, some painfully modern china, and the walls adorned (!) with a half-dozen hideous oleographs: there you have the typical room of the typical rich Yucatecan. They feel this lack of intelligence in using their enormous wealth, and it leads them into all kinds of bizarre extravagances. They can spend money when they like and when it adds, or they think it adds, to their comfort. One henequen lord went a few years ago to the St. Louis Exhibition. He hired a special steamship, and, on reaching New Orleans, ordered a special train, making the condition that it was to travel never quicker than fifteen miles an hour, and must stop at sunset, no matter how inconvenient this proved to the railway officials. This precious train cost him six hundred pounds; and his whole trip of thirty days cost sixty thousand dollars, or six thousand pounds.
As a people the Yucatecans are illiterate to a degree which is almost inconceivable. With wealth untold, they care nothing for books or learning. A man worth three millions sterling confessed to us that there was not a book in his house, and that he never read a paper. And he was certainly one of the most intelligent men in the country, and a man, too, who had travelled extensively in Europe. But if the men are supremely ignorant of everything except money-making, and uninterested in aught but the gross sensuality which is the be-all and the end-all of their worthless lives, the women are worse. It is really not their fault; for they are little better, if at all, than odalisques, leading in youth the lives of toys; in age spending their days in over-eating and over-sleeping. Of their colossal ignorance of facts within the knowledge of every National School child, the following is an amusing example. A young Yucatecan lady, daughter of one of the richest of the families in the State, was sent to New York for a trip for her health, and she was to go on to England. She suffered so much from seasickness on the voyage out that the doctors in America said that she must not undertake the longer voyage to England, but must return at once to Yucatan. Her married sister in Merida, talking of her return, said she would come back by land. The family are so enormously rich that it was quite possible for them to contemplate the great cost of the overland trip; but it was pointed out to the señora that the invalid would have many weeks of travel, and would have to make a very wide detour south, to avoid the swamps of Chiapas. "Oh no" sweetly replied the millionairess, "she is to come by diligence via Havana!"
The illiteracy of the wealthier classes is reproduced in a grosser form among the ordinary Yucatecans. They have no thoughts beyond their food, their women, and their drinks. But there is much to be said for the dolce far niente view of life, and one could easily forgive this race of sybarites if they were otherwise agreeable. Really it sounds like an exaggeration, but the Yucatecans seemed to us the most disagreeable folk in the world. They are avaricious to the degree of dishonesty. They will not actually steal, but they will cheat you every time and chortle over it. Quite a big man, a Jefe, who also kept a shop in one town we visited, again and again tried to cheat us out of odd centavos over some trifling purchase. It was incredible, but it was deliberate. They are entirely untrustworthy in business: they will give their word and break it without scruple if it suits their interests. A practical example of this came to our notice in the islands, where there is a good deal of trade with American ports such as Key West. An American skipper told us that he had, at the moment of speaking, no less than one hundred and sixty pairs of women's shoes on his hands, through the impertinent shuffling of his customers. They would ask him to bring them shoes from the States, give the number, and then if the shoes did not quite look what they thought they wanted, they said "No quiero" ("I do not want"), and the poor trader, having paid cash for the footgear, was "landed."
No Yucatecan will pay a debt unless you dun him ad nauseam. It is always "mañana" (to-morrow), and, as the stranger in Yucatan learns to know only too well, mañana never comes. If a Yucatecan owes you five dollars, he will pay you three. For themselves, they are the most remorseless dunners. If you have the misfortune to owe a few dollars, for, say, the hire of a volan, you will have the wretch literally before dawn at your door, beating at it and demanding the money, though he well knows you are stopping some days. It is not so much the demanding of the money, which is, after all, their right, as it is the grossly uncivil way they do it. We found this to be the experience of all foreigners resident in the country, so we were forced to acquit ourselves of having any especially dishonest look. An American told us that, owing a trifling sum to a wealthy woman, the latter came to the hotel and demanded the money with an insolence which was almost intolerable.
Our friend the American skipper, who had traded with the islands for more than ten years, told us that the insolence of the people in matters of trade was extreme. Knowing him to have boots or shirts to sell, they would call from their doors, "Capitan, yo quiero" ("I want"), whatever it was. "Damn 'em," said the little man, "let 'em come up to my store and choose. No, they want me to fag things to their doors, literally put the boots on their feet." Another peculiarity of the people is that they do not recognise a difference of goods. They think the cheapest shoe or cloth should be the standard for all goods.
The Yucatecan women are, there is no denying it, very often extremely lovely. It is just that beauty which one instinctively associates with a people who have brought sexual relations to a fine art of absolute self-indulgence. By one of the only three Englishmen in the country we were told that the state of morality among the Yucatecans themselves, quite apart from the very sad side of the slavery question to which we have referred in the last chapter, beggars description. We can well believe it.
Marriages are contracted at very early ages, sometimes the bride's and groom's years totalling a good deal under thirty. Among the wealthier Yucatecans marriages are nearly always de convenance, and are arranged by the two families: the boy seldom, the girl never, having a say in the matter. Thereafter the child-wife passes into a quasi-seraglio type of life. There are never any men visitors to the house, and such things as wholesome exercise are rigorously taboo to all upper-class Yucatecan matrons. If the doctor orders exercise, the miserable little animated toy of the Yucatecan Croesus drives some miles out of the city, and then stops her carriage and solemnly walks up and down the dusty roadway for the allotted time. No Yucatecan woman of position must ever walk in public: that would be a social faux pas far more serious than to have a child before marriage. The exalted women of Merida very rarely leave their homes till dark, when they drive round the plaza. Occasionally they go shopping, when they remain in their carriages, and the goods are brought out to them by obsequious shopmen. The life they lead is of the most empty and vapid nature. Surrounded by dozens of Indian servants, they loll all the day in their hammocks, listening to such gossip as their women friends or their servants can tell them. A curious result of this harem life they lead is the roaring trade done by Turkish pedlars who travel all over Yucatan. Hours are spent by the rich women examining their rolls of cloths and finery. Once a year the Paris milliners and modistes visit Merida and take the orders of the richer wives.
The women accept their lot in life very philosophically. It cannot be said of them, as Canning said of the Dutch traders, and as might only too truly be said of many English and American women, that "in matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch is giving too little and asking too much." They ask very little but the amorous attentions of their lords and masters, as long as their looks last; when they see themselves replaced with really complete apathy in those special functions. Not that even in their bridal years they have not already been well broken-in by a running fire of infidelities on the part of their menfolk. But they have long been used to that, when as children they have seen the fate of their little Indian girl playmates. Of the Yucatecan woman one might say only too truly, quoting the reported saying of the Empress Eugenie when her rather erratic Emperor brought up to introduce a countess, who was notorious as a royal mistress, and who on this particular evening appeared as "Queen of Hearts" with a large gold heart swinging some way below her corsage, "Madame, vous portez votre cœur très bas." She does, but she really is not to blame. She has been taught nothing better.
The Suffragette question has not yet invaded Yucatan, and lovely woman is content with the life of a lapdog. As well ask the Dudus and Haidees of a Turkish pasha's harem to rebel as these charming señoras, swinging in their hammocks and puffing at their cigarettes. As for housekeeping, they are contemptible in their uselessness. An American lady very kindly volunteered one day to show a Yucatecan lady how to make a cake to which she had taken a great fancy. While our friend was busy mixing the ingredients, she quite naturally said, "While I'm doing this, you beat up the eggs." A look of absolute horror came over the woman's face. "Beat up eggs! Oh! I could not possibly do that. One of my Indian girls can do that for you." But as we have said, they fill the rôle of pretty toys to perfection; and they later prove excellent mothers. They are great breeders, these Yucatecans, and family life is of the closest, the big mansions of Merida often housing four generations. Curiously enough, despite the tropical climate, the Yucatecan woman retains her looks quite late into life very often. Our hostess at the breakfast was the mother of seven children, the eldest a girl of eleven, as tall as herself, and yet she certainly did not look more than twenty-two or three, and so girlish that it was difficult to believe she was a mother at all. But a far more remarkable case was that of a woman who was but forty-six and had had twenty-four sons! We did not see this latter-day Hecuba, but we were told that she was still quite comely.
There is very little rebellion among Yucatecan women at their fate, and we certainly heard nothing at all of divorce. We do not think it exists as an institution, though it is possible that in this, as in all else, the men have their own way and, if they want to, can get rid of their wives. Among the less wealthy families, the marriages are less formal in their makings and the wives do more work: that is really the only difference. Re-marriage among the men is the rule. Most of the elder men appear to have been married at least three times, which rather suggests that the average life for males is longer than for females. This is possibly so. The Yucatecans certainly look a healthy people, though the superfluous fat which is noticeable even in the boys and girls scarcely suggests real constitutional strength. What surprised us greatly was the terrible prevalence of leprosy among the richest classes. It is not an exaggeration to say that you could scarcely find a wealthy family without this ghastly taint; and some of the greatest land-owners and their children are eaten up with it. No steps appear to be taken to isolate the cases, and just before our arrival in the country a young leper, enormously rich, had contracted a marriage with a lovely girl, though he was then in a moribund condition. He had died a few months after his wedding, and while we were in Merida the bride died of the loathsome disease. It is said to have been brought from Spain in the earliest days of the Conquest, and it has remained curiously restricted to the richer classes. You see little or nothing of it among the lowlier Yucatecans, and it appears unknown among the Indians, who, as a rule, are wonderfully free of all skin troubles. The lepers or those threatened with the terrible curse were some of them men of advanced years, and their general health did not appear in any way affected. One old fellow had but just lost two brothers from it, but he himself had so far escaped, though his children certainly looked tainted. Like insanity, it often skips a generation. It was curious to see these sybaritical plutocrats, eager of life's "ecstasy's utmost to clutch at the core," living their apolaustic days out, haunted by this terrible shadow.
The Church! What can we say about the Church in Yucatan? Does the reader remember those spittoons in Merida Cathedral which we mentioned in an earlier chapter? Well, those ugly etceteras of an ugly habit are a fitting commentary upon the Church. It was in 1867 that President Benito Juarez disestablished the Church throughout the whole of the Republic of Mexico. The effect has been simply disastrous as far as Yucatan is concerned. Her Church is so discreditable that the Pope would be really only consulting the best interests of Catholicism if he abolished the priests altogether. As there is no State provision, the padres must "hold their private dripping-pans to catch the public grease"; and right skilfully they do this. A set of dirty unwashed rogues, men whose faces are enough to hang them, men whom no father would trust with his girl or boy the other side of a glass door, they are most of them "carpet-baggers," wastrels from Spain, many expelled for very excellent reasons from their colleges, who come into Yucatan to find a living. Even the amiable Stephens, who looked at everything Yucatecan, except the garrapatas, through rose-tinted glasses, is obliged to confess that their morals were loose. But that was a long time ago. They are much looser now. The last incumbent of Tizimin was drunk every day, and kept twelve Indian girls in the parsonage. Even the Tiziminites rebelled at last, and this clerical Brigham Young had to go.
His place had been taken at the time of our arrival by a priest who had, it was said, means of his own, and had come from Spain especially to feed the "hungry sheep" of the poky little Yucatecan town. He was a little ratty man with a face suggestive of previous incarnations as a ferret and a money-lender. A blood-sucking, lecherous little thief: that is what the man looked, and we have good reason to believe we have done him no great injustice in this description. He was the hero of the "corner in candles" to which we referred in the chapter dealing with Tizimin. We had called in at the tienda to buy a candle by the light of which to eat our humble supper, but the storekeeper told us he had not got a candle left. To our astonishment he said that the padre had bought up every candle in the place: that, as it was fiesta week, all the Indians would buy candles to burn before the images of the Virgin and the saints; and that the wily curer of souls had, in short, made a corner in dips. The shopkeeper jubilantly announced that he himself had made a profit out of the deal of one hundred dollars, but that the priest would make at least three thousand dollars or three hundred pounds, enough for him to live on very comfortably for the rest of the year. There is evidently a great deal in candles in Yucatan.
The tienda-keeper assured us that the padre was a good man; but we had our doubts on this point. This cunning vicegerent of God had a young priest to help him in the duties, to whom he paid the handsome salary of a shilling a day, of course providing him with food and lodging. We saw the lad daily sitting at the window of the rectory, and it would be difficult to imagine a more saturnine, sensual face. The relations of these men to the girls and women are those of privileged lovers. They are in truth licensed libertines, whose "benefit of clergy" covers a multitude of sins venial and otherwise. It did not need great acumen to guess at some of these latter. Six priests were recently deported from Merida on the gravest charges: no prosecution being contemplated because one of the boys was the son of a very prominent official.
The priests, who are not allowed to wear clerical attire in the streets, are on the best terms with the haciendados, and do their utmost, by trading on the superstition of the unfortunate Indians, to keep slavery in being. There is no appeal for the hacienda slave from the action of master backed up by a priest. Friendly with the local slave-owner, the padre can, and does, seduce what girls he pleases. It is most unlikely that the bishop would hear of it. The priests must look for monetary support from the land-owners, so they are cheek by jowl with them all the time. In the train one day we saw a band of young haciendados elaborately mocking the intoning of the Mass, while a priest who was with them was holding his sides with delighted laughter. All the Yucatecans will gladly join in a jest at the expense of Mother Church. One night at a show in Merida where some very questionable cinematograph views were delighting the worthy townfolk and their children, the loudest guffaws and shrieks of joy were evoked by a view of a church in the course of repainting and cleaning. You first saw the worthy padre directing the workmen. Then the painter leaves a pot of black paint on the pedestal of a statue of the Virgin. Enter on the scene two ladies. They approach the image, reverently cross themselves, and, mistaking the paint for a piscina, dip their fingers in what they think holy water, crossing their foreheads and then their faces. The fun comes in when they catch sight of each other. This mockery simply enchanted the Catholic audience.
Talking of piscinas, at the south door of the Tizimin church was one. In it was a chipped enamel bowl, half full of water with a suspicious sediment. We just touched the edge of the cup, and the sediment began to move about "on its own." The water was alive with myriads of small worms and magotty creatures! The man who had faith enough to believe that the touching of his forehead with that stinking compound was a short cut to salvation deserves his faith. There was another of these tadpole basins in the church at Izamal; and judging from reports that reached us, holy water with some "body" in it seemed quite the fashion in the Yucatecan churches. Agua Sagrada indeed! Agua podrida would certainly be a better name.
The spittoons in the cathedral at Merida had replicas, we found, in most of the churches. But the palm must surely be awarded to a "Don't Spit" notice which we saw on an altar in one church. That the notice was there was no mere accident either, for we saw it in December, and when we returned through the town in the spring it was still there. Evidently that was the permanent position of this offensive decoration.
But at least the clergy can plead a very real necessity for the spittoons and such notices. It is not a pleasant subject, but any one who wrote of the Yucatecans without mentioning the absolutely universal habit would be a faulty chronicler. At all times, everywhere, everybody, young and old, of both sexes, expectorate. They have not the excuse of smoking, for the children and young girls are as guilty of this horrible and unhealthy habit as their elders. The prevalence of the practice was so marked that we asked several Yucatecans to explain what seemed both climatically and physically inexplicable. They pleaded guilty to what really amounted to a racial custom, but they could not explain it. While we were being taken round the Museum of Merida, the eleven-year-old son of the curator spat the whole time on the floor. One day in the islands a baker-boy of about twelve came to our hut to sell us cakes. While we were looking in his basket, he spat on the floor by our hammock-side. He seemed absolutely amazed when we reproved him for it. Quite a gentlemanly ranchero who walked some miles with us one gloriously sunny day in Cozumel hawked and spat, not once or twice, but literally every half-minute till we wondered how his poor rasped throat stood the strain hour after hour. The queer thing was that the habit was not prevalent among the Indians. It seemed to be essentially a Yucatecan vice: it really amounted to that.
But to return to the Church. At the risk of appearing prejudiced, we must say that the Catholicism of the country is so decadent that its disgraceful services would be best done without. The drunken priest at Campeachy, with an unlighted cigarette in his hand, seated in a chair at the altar, his legs stuck up on the chancel rails, trying to take part in the intoning of Mass is not the exception he should be. Good padres there must be, men who would still deserve the high encomiums that Stephens found it possible to write of the Yucatecan clergy of his day. We saw nothing of them. We saw the prostitution of a great ecclesiastical institution, which, with all its terribly bloody history, its soul-choking bigotry, has yet numbered among its servants some of the noblest men who have ever lived. We saw Catholicism at its worst, and its worst is very bad indeed. Nobody, not the veriest Non-conformist, could surely speak without reverence and admiration of the noble old man who to-day rules over the Church of Rome. He, assuredly, would be the first to grieve over the decadence of his creed in this far-off corner of the Catholic world, as there can be no doubt he sorrows at the bloody past of a religion which has ever lived, and must ever live, on the ignorance—invincible in the case of the better educated—of its followers.
If graver charges lacked against Catholicism, there would always be the indelible blot on its teachings that they tend inevitably to encourage indifference and callousness, if not actually cruelty, towards the animal world. Everybody who has had the misfortune to visit the market of a French town, such as Dieppe or Havre, or has driven behind a Neapolitan cabman, knows more than he or she wishes of Latin cruelty. It is not really that they desire to inflict pain for the mere delight of inflicting it, though there are some fiends enough for that. No, their creed and whole upbringing rob them of that lively sympathy with God's creatures which He, but surely not for tyranny, has placed in our power.
This Catholic characteristic is very marked in Yucatan. The pleasantest Yucatecan families we met on our wanderings were living happily amid the victims of such cruelty as would keep an Englishman, if he were capable of it, awake at nights. These were the dogs. Every Yucatecan keeps—it is really absolutely euphemistic to use the word—not one or two, but a whole pack of assorted terriers and hunting dogs; but he never bothers to feed them. It is really a heartbreaking sight for a lover of animals to go into one of the huts or ranches and see the poor things. They hang round the doorways, sometimes so thin and weak that they cannot stand up. Some poor, halfbreed collie will raise its weary head to your knee-level and stare piteously up at you with eyes which are really hollow from starvation. In one ranch we counted a dozen of all sizes and ages and every one of them was a disgrace to their owner, who, as it happened, was quite a good fellow in other ways. No, he could not see why he should feed the dogs. They went out hunting with him, those at least that were not too weak, and then they got a square meal of peccary-guts or other offal. But the man could not see that the gaunt staring-eyed creatures, their ribs almost seeming to be on the point of piercing through their coats, their bellies one sorry flap of fur, were a real disgrace to him and his children. Wherever you go in Yucatan you see these spectres of dogs: they are really nothing else. As a witty fellow-traveller put it, they have to lean against a fence to bark and have to stand a long while to make a shadow.
This indifference towards animals is general among Yucatecans. There is no one to raise a protest against the barbarously cruel practice they have of plucking live fowls. The miserable birds, with their skins still bleeding, are hawked round the streets, carried always by their legs. It is enough to make any one sick. Brought up amid such callousness, it is not at all surprising that the children are usually brutal to every creature they have no reason to fear. On one of the islands we saw a very characteristic incident. We were on a pier, waiting for a boat. Three boys were fishing, the eldest perhaps thirteen. One of the smaller boys caught a fish. The eldest seized it from him, and, producing a knife, stuck the blade through the gills, thus pinning the struggling fish to the boards of the jetty. Two or three times he stabbed the fish, each time exclaiming "More, more, more" ("Die, die, die"). When the poor little creature had ceased to flutter its tail, the lad deliberately wiped the bloodstained knife on the bare brown calf of his smaller boy companion, who was lying on his stomach with his head over the jetty side. It was not so much the killing of the fish which struck us, though that was cruel enough, as the extraordinary exclamation. An English or American boy could have killed the fish just as cruelly; but neither of them would have been capable of that ferocious exhortation. Nothing could have exceeded the savage joy in the power to kill which was expressed in the tone of the lad's voice as he uttered those three words.
Inquiring at a hut one day for a fowl, we were taken by a positive fairy of a little girl, perhaps nine, to the yard where, "regardless of their fate," the poultry were picking about. Our golden-haired guide (she was a beautiful specimen of the fair Latin) seized a dainty white hen and, swinging her by the legs, invited us to kill her there and then. It was really too much for our sensitiveness, and we bolted, only, half-way down the village, to hear some one running after us. Our fairy's do-a-deal-at-any-cost Yucatecan blood was up, and, thinking our sudden exit was due to a dissatisfaction with the price asked, she had brought after us another bird which she said could be sold cheaper. It was a perky little cockerel, and as it sat in what should have been those tender child's arms, and looked up at us with its bright beady eyes, we really felt so ashamed that we could not look it in the face. To have ordered its death would have been an impossibility, however ravenous we had been. We stroked its head and begged its untender little mistress to let it live a while longer.
But all this is due to a lack of sympathy with the animal world. Unfortunately deliberate cruelty is also very common. A people who could find fun in watching pain deserve the name of savages. In Merida you can see a brute throw a poisoned crust of bread to a stray dog, and then be joined by a crowd of folks who form a laughing circle round the dying animal to gloat over its agonised writhings.
This terrible cruelty is a sad heritage of all Yucatecans. The Spaniard is naturally cruel, and there is no kind of doubt that the Mayans, like all the Indian races of the Americas, are so too. Thus the Yucatecans inherit this detestable trait from both their parents. One has to be very sharp with one's Indian servants to prevent cruelty. Stephens relates how his men found an iguana in one of the ruins in a crevice. They pulled until the tail came off. "They then untied the ropes of their sandals," writes Stephens, "and fastening them above the hind legs, and pulling till the long body seemed parting like the tail, they at length pulled him out. They secured him by a gripe under the fore part of the body, cracked his spine, and broke the bones of his legs so that he could not run; prised his jaws open, fastening them apart with a sharp stick so that he could not bite, and then put him away in the shade. This refined cruelty was to avoid the necessity of killing him immediately, for if killed, in that hot climate he would soon be unfit for food; but mutilated and mangled as he was, he could be kept alive till night." The distinguished American does not tell us how it was that he was content to witness "this refined cruelty" without apparently making an attempt to stop such hellish torturing. The Indians will do the same to-day: once or twice our men caught these poor reptiles, which they regard as a great delicacy; but we always insisted on their being killed outright.
Every village has its tienda or store where you buy the eternal black beans, peppers, rice, tortillas, and where usually an assortment of tinned American meats and fruits can be purchased by those tired of life. But there is nowhere such a thing as a butcher's shop. The cattle range the woods at will, only to be brought in occasionally to be freshly branded with the owner's mark. When one is to be killed it is "rounded up" and driven in to the pueblo. The method of slaughter is stabbing in the region of the heart, just above the left foreleg. In a large village fresh meat will be procurable perhaps thrice, but not more than once, a week in the hamlets. The richer villagers take it in turns to kill, and thus become butcher for the day only, usually flying a flag as a sign that fresh meat is to be bought. Nothing could be queerer than the effect of this co-operative butchering. The Jefe of a town will invite you into his drawing-room or the Yucatecan equivalent, and there you will find joints of blood-boltered pork and beef hanging from a clothes-line, with palm-leaves beneath to catch the gore. He is butcher for the day, that's all. Meat is never jointed, but cut into strips and carried home fastened to a string; cut just as it is wanted by the kilo, about two pounds. Joints such as we have are literally unknown in Yucatan, and for the very excellent reason that there are no means of cooking them.
Their culinary methods are typical of that indolence which is the chief characteristic of all Yucatecans. Their staple dishes are stews, boiled greasily: the sloven cook's way of throwing meat into a pot. When your host has put before you a great messy stew of fowl, onion, and potato swimming in fat, he gives you a cup of black coffee and the meal is over. Puddings and sweets are things for which he has no taste, and vegetables are never served, as with us, separately, or indeed many of them at all. This is not due to any lack of fruit or vegetable, because it was the case even where both abounded. Nothing short of a culinary earthquake would alter the prehistoric kitchen methods of the average Yucatecan family. Every day of the year, morning and evening, the housewife is at the metate or stone tray crushing the maize for the tortillas; and this despite the fact that American flour is coming into the country in ever-increasing quantity. Obstinate or conservative—you can call it which you like—they will take no advantage of an import which would mean that they could bake twice a week and get it over.
The average Yucatecan housewife is always at the metate in season and out of season. For most Yucatecan families it is a hand-to-mouth existence, though they live in a land which, were they industrious, might be made to "smile with plenty." The Yucatecan is an easygoing creature, fond of drink, women, dancing, and his cigarette. He has no love of work, and will spend the few dollars he has earned in a reckless spirit, as if he had millions: afterwards living on his tortillas till luck comes his way again. In all this he is but a replica of his kinsmen in Mexico. This natural indolence is encouraged by the weakness of even Diaz's rule. He is just as much afraid of the people to-day as when first made President: he is afraid to tax rum or other spirits. He has to get his revenues out of the foreigners. People in Yucatan complain because labour is scarce. If machinery was imported to thresh corn, to take but one example, they would be able to sell the staple food of the land cheaper and pay higher wages. As it is, perfectly prohibitive duties are levied on all the machinery coming into all the Mexican ports. Thus throughout the whole Republic agriculture is practically where it was in the time of Moctezuma. The anomaly of all this is very patent in Yucatan, where the henequen lords have found an Eldorado in the cactus and are each year improving their "plant," while too stupid to see that if the same progressive methods were applied to the general cultivation of their country, they would soon be able to view without terror the abolition of that detestable slavery which is to-day essential to their fortune-building.
Fortunes are waiting to be picked like blackberries by the foreign "devil" who will teach the Yucatecan to use what bountiful Nature has given. Where is there better food than orange marmalade? Every garden almost in Yucatan swarms with the bitter-orange tree, and the fruit rots and falls, no one thinking it worth while, although sugar-cane grows almost wild, to bring the two together and make the delicious preserve. In Merida we had to pay two shillings for a half-pound glass jar of French marmalade. Year after year the Yucatecan is content to pay seventy-five centavos (eighteen pence) for a tin of American preserved fruit, when he could get the same from Cozumel for five. It is the same with everything. They pay seventy-five for a kilo (two pounds) of salt or dried fish, when they could buy their own fish for twelve centavos a kilo and salt it themselves: or catch the fish themselves. This trade is entirely in the hands of the Cuban sailors. The Yucatecans, for the matter of that all Mexicans, hate foreign intrusion, but they will do nothing themselves. Fancy a country, the chief omnipresent difficulty of which is the density of its forests, importing timber! Yet that is what Yucatan is doing to-day. She buys American lumber; she allows her markets to be glutted with American fruits and meat when she could supply her own wants at an extraordinarily small cost of labour; and if there were deficiencies, Mexico possesses some of the finest cattle-raising land and fruit-soils as rich as California.
With the only pots and pans German-made and so heavily taxed that you have to give five shillings for a saucepan which in London would cost you a shilling or at most eighteen pence, it is no wonder that the culinary arrangements of Yucatan are as antediluvian as they are. If they do not stew, they grill over the burning wood. Time and time again birds we had shot were reduced to such a dried and mummified condition as to be quite uneatable. The simplicity of their cooking methods is only matched by the simplicity of their service. None but wealthy folk use knives or forks. The tortilla, doubled up, serves as spoon and fork, and a knife is not needed as the meat is cut up before it is cooked. There is no such thing as a saltspoon in Yucatan. You are expected to shake the salt out or take it out with your fingers. Indeed the saltspoon seems unknown in Mexico too. There may be one, but we never saw it. Tables are rare, and most families squat round their food in true Indian fashion. As a rule women do not eat with the men; but they and the children have what is left after their husbands and brothers have finished. We found this often very embarrassing; but our protests were greeted with as much ingratitude by the ladies as astonishment by the men.
We met and lived with all grades of Yucatecans; but perhaps it was on the coasting vessels that you saw most of general Yucatecan manners. These are often curiously contradictory. They will tear ungainly pieces of meat to pieces with their fingers; but they religiously wash those fingers after each meal. They will use the edge of their white shifts as a handkerchief; but even the common sailors will clean their teeth after a meal. They will convert the gunwale of the boat into a sedes stercoraria, engaging you in "animated conversation" the while; yet nothing would induce them to undress before you and bathe. They will spit on the floor of your room; but they will not move an inch in your presence without a "con permiso." They are a frugal race, and you were expected to throw the broken remains of your tortillas into a pail provided for the purpose, though they do not appear again. Perhaps the women eat them.
We have written something earlier about Yucatecan music when describing the dance at Holboch. Nothing could well be more distressing than it is. Every town of any size aspires to have a band. The worst German band which ever disgraced itself and murdered melody for filthy lucre in London's streets is a combination of the orchestras of Strauss and Sousa compared with a Yucatecan band. As one lies in one's hammock at night, forced to listen to the musical hell it creates, one wonders why indignant citizens do not leap from their hammocks and make butchery in the plaza of its unscrupulous members. But the Yucatecans like it. The more noise the merrier for them. A most popular custom is what they call la serenata. At about two or three in the morning half a dozen young men make "rough music" (it is very rough) with drums and concertinas outside the home of some village belle. In the stillness of the darkness it is not without its weird charm, if it lasted a few minutes. But it often lasts an hour or more till you become suicidal. Their discordant music is matched by their singing voices. No Yucatecan knows the first principles of voice-production. A tiny, squeaky chant is the most they achieve. Indeed there is something very queer about the Yucatecan voice, even in talking: a curious whiny sing-song, beginning low and ending in an almost indescribable treble note.
The true Irish wake is a dearly prized institution among the Yucatecans. Every occasion is seized on for an indulgence in the habanero they so much love; and death itself cannot rob the liquid refreshment of its charm. The corpse is toasted till the mourners are incoherent; singing, dancing, and merrymaking going on often in the very room where the body lies. Burial follows within twenty-four hours owing to the climate, and in those many places which are only periodically visited by a priest there is no religious ceremony in the cemetery; its place being taken by the chief mourner "standing" a bottle of habanero, which is literally broached at the graveside and drunk instanter. By the richer folks a grave is bought but no grave is dug; the coffin rests on the level of the earth as a rule, owing to the rocky nature of the soil. At the head is placed a big stone, at the foot another. Then over the coffin is built a dome of cement. In some cemeteries bodies are buried in walls, the coffin on its end. Where a family is only rich enough to buy ground enough for one grave, on a second death the headstone is removed and the coffin is drawn out and the bones placed in the new coffin, the old one being burnt. In cases of the very poor the body is buried as far down as the nature of the soil permits, and at the end of a year the bones are dug up by the relatives and burnt there and then in the cemetery. The most prominent outward and visible sign of mourning is a long streamer of crape or black cloth, which is fastened to the door of the house and left there till it rots off. On the first anniversary, when the soul of the deceased is believed to revisit its old haunts, there is a second wake and much drinking.
Yucatan is a happy hunting ground for "Jacks in Office." The pomposity of this race of parvenus would be amusing if it were not that they have the power to wreck your plans. We have described our delightful encounter with the Jefe of Isla de Mujeres. We suffered many other annoyances from jumped-up officials who took a childish pleasure in exhibiting their authority. A delicious example of what the Mexican official is capable of when he puts his mind to it was afforded to us at Vera Cruz on our return. The British armoured cruiser "Euryalus" came over from Jamaica flying the flag of Rear-Admiral Inglefield. President Diaz seized the chance, the first since the King gave him the G.C.B., of paying a pretty compliment to England by sending down an invitation to the admiral and his officers to visit the capital. The "Euryalus," fearing to come into the harbour, which, even despite the splendid work of Sir Weetman Pearson, is still risky for vessels of such draught as a British man-of-war, anchored just outside the breakwater. To her, after the admiral had landed, went out the port pilot, for whom she had not signalled, as she was not coming in. He asked the captain to move a little as, so he said, they were in the fairway. It was probably merely an excuse to show an authority which he had thought flouted. The British, with the utmost courtesy, at once got steam up and moved a few cables' lengths. Later in the day, to the natural astonishment of the commander, a bill for pilotage arrived—nineteen dollars! The British officers in charge refused to pay this absurd demand, and then the port authorities actually had the impudence to summon them to appear to show cause why they should not pay. This latter demand was ignored. But the beauty of the situation lay, of course, in the fact that while these Vera-Cruzian jackanapeses were dunning the huge battleship, Diaz and Mexico City were banqueting and cheering the admiral and his staff as guests of the nation. When we left Vera Cruz the truth about this heavenly incident had not leaked out. The port authorities must have had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed, if the relentless Diaz ever heard of it.
That is the Mexican all over; and the Yucatecan is, as is natural, worse because his authority is still pettier. The American traders with the islands feel the full force of it. A captain sailing from such a port as Key West to Cozumel must go to Ascension Bay, some eighty miles south of his destination, because none but a national boat can retail the goods to the islands. When he gets to Ascension Bay, he must, with his own labour (the Yucatecans will not supply men), unload and place his cargo on the beach. Then, when it has been tallied with the "manifest," the unfortunate trader has to reload, again at his own cost, in a native vessel: afterwards sailing his boat empty behind the other. Arrived at Cozumel he has to unload, again at his own cost, and then, and then only, is he entitled to meet his customers.
The tyranny of the Custom House officials is the tyranny of men who are intent on filling their own pockets. Here is an example. An American captain shipped a cargo of tomatoes, upon which no import duty is payable. At Ascension Bay it was found that he had on board one more barrel than was declared in his "manifest." This was quite an accident. A barrel more or less on his final takings would not have amounted to more than a few coppers, and in any case the cargo was not dutiable. No matter: the officials fined him ten dollars on every barrel of tomatoes he had on board—fifty—making a fine of £50. Could greater injustice be conceived? He refused to pay, and his cargo was impounded. He appealed to Mexico City and the fine was immediately remitted. The blackguards at Ascension Bay knew it was not the law. They were simply going to pocket the fine. Another man's cargo of potatoes, because he had a sack or two too little, was left to rot on the beach because he refused to pay a ludicrous fine.
Of amusements the Yucatecans have none that could be called really national. They are happiest when they are loafing and drinking. They are all fond of gambling, and play the ordinary card games. All forms of lotteries are popular, and a State lottery is run from which the profit netted by a high official is said to be as much as twenty thousand dollars a month.
Matters theatrical in Merida were in rather a spring-cleaning condition when we were there, for the old theatre was dismantled and a really fine one was being built at a great cost. Meanwhile the bull-ring had been requisitioned and turned into a theatre. There we went one evening and witnessed a very second-rate play. The chief thing which struck us was the fact that between the acts the women all stood up in the stalls and gazed round at the people. It was so singularly un-European.
Bull-fights are still immensely popular throughout Yucatan; but a praiseworthy effort is being made by those in authority to discountenance them, though without much effect. At Merida there are several yearly, but it is a very decadent form of the Spanish sport. Around the ring are small shelters into which the toreador can dodge when the bull charges. Thus there is little or no real courage demanded of the fighters. Nothing draws the people as a bull-fight will, and to those two or three towns where fights are annual fixtures thousands flock in from miles around. Tizimin is such a place. At the fiesta held while we were there no less than thirty thousand people collected. It is the love of blood which really attracts, and a fight is successful or not according to the number of animals slain. In the seven days at Tizimin fifty bulls died. It is really mere clumsy brutal slaughter, for the creatures are undersized steers as a rule, with about as much fight in them as an English cow. The young bloods of Yucatan are fond of improvising these bullock baitings; and one showed us with pride a scar on his wrist, a memento of a fight two or three days earlier. It was just such a scratch as a child would get while out blackberrying.
HACIENDA CHILDREN
INDEPENDENT INDIANS
As we wrote in an earlier chapter, so complete is the isolation of the two sexes publicly, that the casual visitor would conclude that the Yucatecans were a most moral race. You never see youths and girls walking together. Such a sight as Hyde Park, for instance, presents on a summer evening, a couple, sometimes two, on each seat, carrying on a passionate courtship, regardless of the passers, you would never see in Yucatan if you lived there fifty years. More than that: you never see a husband out with a wife. An American who had known the country for ten years told us that he had never seen a young fellow and girl walking together in the evening. Of course, the richest girls never walk at all; and their lovers are found for them. The poorer maidens find their own at a precociously early age. If trouble results, the lover can adopt one of three courses. He can marry the girl; pay a fine of five hundred dollars to her father; or go to prison for five years. These Draconian rules obviate our degrading system of affiliation summonses. The utmost cynicism prevails in all sex questions, and it would probably be hard to find a Yucatecan father who would not be ready to sell his daughters, so long as the price was high enough. And it is really sale, not merely the worldly method of England and America of getting a rich suitor and a fat settlement for a girl. The fathers pocket the money.
Courtship is a formal affair conducted always before one or both parents. If a youth fancies a maid, he calls at her house and, scarcely noticing her, talks to her father about anything in the world but his errand. This must go on for many nights till he is allowed by etiquette to mention his desires. If he is an eligible parti, he is then admitted to the family circle as son-in-law elect. There are two stages in the wedding; first a publication of it, somewhat equivalent to our banns, which constitutes the formal betrothal; and then the ceremony, at which there are no bridesmaids or groomsmen. By law the civil ceremony alone is legally binding, but in practice the religious service is also often held. How loosely this all works in practice can scarcely be realised till it is known that money unlocks every door in this venal land. Men can do just what they like in Yucatan if they can pay. On one of the islands a young American trading on the coasts, with the full approval of her parents who slept in the next room, spent every night with an unmarried girl, though they all knew that he was himself married. These temporary alliances are easily arranged, if you satisfy the father's demands, which are by no means exorbitant from all accounts.
In Merida this venality has reached such a pitch as to be really hardly credible. There is one old ogre, whose name we must naturally suppress, who has a charming wife; and keeps five mistresses formally, not counting those informal ones represented by the dozens of slave-girls on his ranches. But all this is not enough. He buys young girls from their parents, most of them well-to-do folk, and when he has ruined and tired of them, he assigns them as wives to one of his countless dependents with a small dowry. Quite scientific, is it not? And that man is regarded with veneration by every Yucatecan. They would all like to be as rich as he and do likewise. Meanwhile, at least they have daughters to sell, black-eyed, black-haired, plump-limbed Hebes, fresh enough and dainty enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded ogre, the most glutted of purse-proud Yucatecan Joves.
All this is really no one's business, and to the stranger does not matter a pin. We are not Hot Gospellers intent on preaching morality. Yucatecan vices affect Yucatecans alone. The ogres are pleased, the avaricious fathers are pleased, and the girls are doubtless willing victims of this combination of greed and lust. All this is no one's affair if—and it is a very large IF—all this very agreeable self-indulgence was only at the expense of freemen and equals. But when a whole race is forcibly prostituted to the avarice and lasciviousness of an upstart people, trespassers in the land; when womanhood, as pure and sweet as any which the Almighty God has created for the world's honour, is trampled under swinish feet; when a barbarous serfdom stops not at murder in its unrestrained tyranny, then of a truth it is time for some one to raise his voice against such race exploitation. We do so here, and on our return to London we addressed to the President of Mexico a letter telling him the truth. To this letter His Excellency made no reply. It is more than likely it never reached him, was suppressed by an official. Be that as it may, we now consider ourselves at liberty to publish it, and we do so here as the fitting close to this review of social Yucatan.
To His Excellency
Señor General Diaz, MexicoMost Excellent Sir and General,
We travelled out to Mexico with the purpose of exploring North-Eastern Yucatan and studying the wonderful ruined cities there.
We held a letter of introduction to Your Excellency explaining who we were and what we hoped to do, but on arrival in Mexico City we were dissuaded from presenting it and were referred to your Minister of Public Instruction.
We had much desire to see Your Excellency and present our respects in person, for in recent years there has been a growing interest taken by the English in Mexico owing to the publication of two books by an English lady, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mexico As I Saw It and Your Excellency's own biography, which books have made much stir. Being, however, strangers in a strange land, we yielded to advice and saw Señor Justo Sierra. He was courteous and gave us letters to Señor Olegario Molina, then Governor of Yucatan, to General Bravo, and passports satisfactory, but scarcely generous.
On landing in Yucatan we immediately presented the letter of Señor Sierra, together with a most courteous letter from ourselves, at the House of the Governor. Not only did Señor Molina do nothing for us; he had not even the courtesy to acknowledge the letters; a breach of manners for which there could be no excuse.
We regret to tell Your Excellency that during the subsequent months we spent in Yucatan we met with discourtesy, inhospitality and neglect from the officials such as would be impossible here in England if one of your people visited us. We went among the Yucatecans with no feelings but those of kindliness, and an enthusiastic interest in the attempt we were making to throw fresh light upon the problem of Mayan archæology. But for those foolish enough to take an interest in their country's past, Yucatecans, rich and poor, appear to have no feelings but that of a pitying contempt combined with an eager desire to share in "plucking" them.
The only kindness we received was from Spanish Cubans attached to the plantations, and Señores Aristegui and Augusto Peon, the latter apologising to us for the gross rudeness of Señor Molina, whom he declared to be an ill-bred parvenu.
We liked the Indians as much as we disliked the Yucatecans, and we deeply regret the terrible cruelties and massacres which we know have been and we fear still are being perpetrated in your name in Quintana Roo. The state of that Territory, as we told Señor Peon and reported by letter to Señor Sierra, could not possibly be worse. General Bravo, who behaved to us in a singularly discourteous and shuffling way, declares the war to be over. This is absolutely untrue.
we lived some time on the east coast and in Cozumel, and we know that the war can never end except by a brutal policy of extermination entirely unworthy of Your Excellency's great record and of Mexico if she is to retain her place among civilised Powers. General Bravo has no effective control over the country, as we are prepared to and shall prove in the book which we are about to publish.
Last, but not least, so-called civilised Yucatan is rotten with a foul slavery, the blacker because of its hypocrisy and pretence. We have gathered facts which make truly a sad story. The girls and women on the haciendas are treated like cattle, a prey to the detestable lusts of the haciendados and their sons; Indian workmen are flogged, even to death, and in one case which came to our knowledge those who attempted to expose such foul murder were put into Merida prison without trial, and, as we are informed, are still there. For the Indian there is no justice, and at his expense the great henequen growers daily increase their millions, some of which they lavishly used in their attempts to hide from Your Excellency the utter rottenness and degradation of Yucatan's social system. If Your Excellency desires particulars we shall gladly give ourselves the honour of sending names and details.
We have the honour to avail ourselves of the opportunity which now offers of expressing to you our sentiments of the highest consideration and respect.
We have the Honour to Remain
Your Excellency's
Obedient and faithful Servants and Admirers
(Signed) C. A.
F. J. T. F.His Excellency
Señor General Don Porfirio Diaz,
Chapultepec,
Mexico.
[CHAPTER XXI]
THE GREEN GOLD OF YUCATAN
Eight hundred million Mexican dollars!
Eighty million pounds sterling!
These are the profits which the score or so of Yucatecan henequen growers are said to have divided in the last fifteen years. What then is this Pactolus-plant from which has been crushed this river of wealth? It is true enough that half the world does not know how the other half lives, and this is a good example, for there is probably not 1 per cent. of Englishmen, and scarcely more than 10 per cent. of Americans (though the States is the main market for the staple product of Yucatan) who could tell you to what botanical family it belongs, or indeed that it is a plant at all.
Henequen (Spanish jeniquen or geniquen) is a fibre commercially known as Sisal hemp, from the fact that it is obtained from a species of cactus, the Agave Sisalensis, first cultivated around the tiny port of Sisal in Yucatan. The older Indian name for the plant is Agave Ixtli. From its fleshy leaves is crushed out a fine fibre which, from the fact that it resists damp better than ordinary hemp, is valuable for making ships' cables, but the real wealth-producing use of which is so bizarre that no one in a hundred guesses would hit on it. It is used in the myriad corn-binding machines of America and Canada. They cannot use wire, and cheap string is too easily broken. Henequen is at once strong enough and cheap enough. Hence the piles of money heaping up to the credit of Yucatecans in the banks of Merida.
There is no doubt that henequen was known to and possibly cultivated by the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan; but its commercial value was not discovered until late in the nineteenth century. The first henequen plantation was formed in 1850. Soon there were several more, though they were one and all on the humblest scale both as regards extent and methods of cultivation. It was our good fortune to visit one of the very earliest, that of Yaxche, now the property of Señor Augusto Peon, and the photographs reproduced are of that estate. Señor Peon himself conducted us over it, and told us that as a lad he remembered the first clearing being made in the woods for the Eldorado-cactus about 1850. A mere acre, that was all! To-day he has close on six thousand acres under cultivation on this farm alone, with villages containing four thousand souls, and it would be quite rash to hazard a guess at his wealth. He is certainly a sterling millionaire three or four times over, and he told us that his income had actually doubled in less than ten years. Such is henequen!
But the plant was a long time winning its way to its present exalted position. Until within the last thirty years the only market for the fibre was the Mexican Republic itself, where fortunes were being coined by the crushing of yet another cactus, the Agave Americana or maguey, from which is obtained the foul-smelling pulque, dearly loved drink of all Mexicans. And then three decades back henequen began to win a reputation abroad, particularly in the States. In 1880, 97,351 bales, weighing 39,501,725 lb. and valued at about one and three-quarter million dollars, were exported. In 1904, 627,700 bales, weighing about 207,141,000 lb. and valued at 15,629,730 dollars, were exported, and during 1906 the amount shipped rose to 726,785 bales, each averaging 330 lb. in weight and totalling in value between twenty-five and twenty-six million dollars. Of these, 595,024 bales were sent to the United States (or 186,747 to New Orleans; 144,916 to Boston; 119,688 to New York; 63,620 to Texas City; 59,235 to Mobile; and 20,818 to Galveston); the remaining 131,761 bales going to various ports in Canada, Europe, and Cuba.
These amazing figures tell their own tale of the growth of the staple industry of Yucatan. A local trade has in a few short years become almost a world-monopoly, and from being a poor land the Peninsula has become a Monte-Cristo territory. Once the fibre was discovered by the corn growers, the trade went up by leaps and bounds; but it was the Spanish-American War of 1898 which gave it its great boom, and it may be said to be still "booming." The destruction and stoppage of the Manila hemp crops in the Philippines during the conflict gave the Yucatecans their chance. They met the shortage, and importers found that they had in the henequen fibre at once a cheaper and a stronger corn-binder. To-day Yucatan can sell all the henequen she can grow, and every month sees more and more woodland reclaimed and prepared to bear its share in swelling the receipts of the Meridan mushroom millionaires.
In North-West Yucatan you can travel mile after mile, league after league, and see absolutely nothing but henequen. It seems to need no soil. Out of the grey boulder-strewn ground stick the great green pineapple-like stalks crowned with a widely parted bunch of fleshy green leaves with black thorny points. Planted in even lines about four yards apart, they stretch endlessly towards the horizon, the monotony broken only here and there by the grey stone walls, like those of a Yorkshire farm, which mark off and enclose each plantation. As we wandered round his huge estate, Señor Peon explained to us the process through which henequen goes from planting till it is fibre white and clean. In preparing land for planting it must first be cleared of all timber, and in the outlying districts from dawn till sundown one hears the ring of the axe as the Indians fell the trees. After this clearing comes a period, usually about a year, during which the land is allowed to lie fallow, the fallen timbers rotting and everything preparing for the flames. Towards the end of the dry season this burning takes place. This is also the method of preparing the milpas or maize fields for their new crops, and thus in April all over the country you see mighty columns of black smoke rising into the cloudless blue, like the smoke of burnt offerings to the Harvest-God. If rain does not come—and it very rarely does—the fallen timber and dried undergrowth burn for days until there is nothing left but a few black smouldering tree-trunks, which by another season will have been effectually dealt with by the broad-mandibled digging ant and the myriad woodlice. A second year is allowed to pass before the henequen is planted. Usually maize is sown on the clearing for the season, and then once again they set fire to it all and with this second conflagration the ground is ready.
But the planter must wait for the rains. These come towards the end of May. Dark clouds roll up, and between five and six o'clock each day a sharp shower may be expected. By the middle of June the floods of the sky break loose, and for hours each day and night the baked earth is deluged. Now the haciendado must get his plants ready. This is an easy matter if he has other plantations. In any of these where the agave is old and has had most of its leaves cut away, he can find what he wants. From some of the plants a long stalk-like stem will be seen shooting up from the centre, and this will have thrown out branches from which the seeds have grown and fallen to the ground. Thus around its base there will be young seedlings in plenty sprouting. The largest of these are taken. On the bigger haciendas there are regular nurseries for these seedlings, which are carefully fostered for a year or so that they may be of fair size when they are needed for planting out. These are planted in the new clearing in rows about fourteen feet apart, each plantling being eight feet from its neighbour.
Now there is a wait of five or six years before the first crop of leaves can be cut. But if this is rather a wearily long time for the planter to wait for his returns, at least it is not expensive. For the plants need little or no attention: all that is necessary is to keep the spaces between the rows fairly free from weeds which would otherwise smother the young cactuses. At the end of the fifth year the plants are ready for their first cutting, and the healthy ones will bear well for twelve or fifteen years. The cutting is begun at the base of the stem, where the leaves are more fully developed. Eight to ten are cut at a time, and usually three or four cuttings are made each year, so that the average yield of each plant is about thirty-two leaves annually. Slowly year by year the cutting creeps nearer the top, and the space between the leaves and the ground becomes greater. When the top is reached all the leaves which will ever grow have grown and the plant is useless unless the seed-stem has appeared, when it is left for the production of young plants. If it has not run to seed, then it is cut down and left to rot, the ground being ready again at once for replanting.
But the rearing and cutting of this "green gold of Yucatan" is not all. There is a long process before it is ready to be sold under the hammer of an American or European auctioneer, in much the same way as cotton is dealt with on the Liverpool or Manchester Exchanges.
Crossing and recrossing each henequen plantation, small toy-like two-foot gauge iron tracks are laid, on which small mule-drawn trolley-cars convey the henequen leaves to the hacienda buildings. On some of the larger of the haciendas these tracks often cover thirty or forty miles, and at first sight it would seem an unnecessarily expensive means of transit, and that it would be cheaper to cart it as an English farmer does his corn. But when you remember the cost of making level roads over miles of rock-strewn plantation, and that each fleshy leaf represents an average weight of four or five pounds, and that on a trolley-car drawn by one mule can be packed one thousand of these weighing about two tons and needing four or five carts with mules and men to match, you see that the trolley method, after the original outlay, is far cheaper. On the trolleys, then, the henequen leaves are conveyed to the hacienda buildings, where an elaborate machinery is waiting to crush out the gold-yielding fibre. The track runs right into the building, the mule is unhooked, and returns once more to the plantation with an empty car for another load of fodder for the crusher. And while the empty car is returning the leaves of the newly arrived laden car are being dealt with.
Three or four Indians set to work to arrange the leaves so that their black-pointed ends are all in one direction. Next these thorny points are severed by a machete and in small bundles of six or eight the leaves are handed to men who are feeding a sliding belt-like platform about a yard wide, and on this they are conveyed to the machine. Before they enter its great blunt-toothed, gaping jaws, they are finally arranged, as the sliding belt goes its unending round, so that they do not enter more than one at a time. Woe betide the Indian who has the misfortune to get his fingers in these revolving jaws of the gigantic crusher, and many indeed are there fingerless, handless, and armless from this cause. The leaves enter broadways, for the blunt-toothed rollers are a little wider than the longest leaves. On entering the first rollers the fleshy leaf is crushed like sugar-cane in a crusher. The sappy juices fly around, but the wet, dripping machine continues with its work and the thick, greeny water runs into a trough below to be carried away in a channel back to the fields. The leaf is passed from one to another, each crushing away more fleshy matter until the fourth or fifth roller has been reached, when it is no longer a leaf, but one mass of greeny-yellow threads in the hands of an Indian who is kept continually receiving it as it is thrown from the machine.
The next process is the drying of the fibre, which takes place in drying-yards. From the machine to these another trolley-track is laid, and there on wire lines, as will be seen in our illustration, the fibre is hung in the scorching sun. The Yucatecan can always be sure of his weather, and the fibre is no more bother to him until the sun has thoroughly bleached the greeny-yellow threads. Two or three days of this sunbath is quite enough, and then the last process, before the Yucatecan rakes in his shekels, is the pressing of the fibre into bales ready for transport. This final process is very similar to our English hay-trussing. The fibre is placed in the press, weighed, and compressed into the smallest possible space and bound with rope.
But what becomes of the green pulpy waste which forms 90 per cent. of the fleshy leaves before it is put into the machine? Part of this is water and the remainder, as the fibre is thrown off one roller to another, falls through the machine into a truck-like trolley awaiting it underneath. It is a mangled mass of verdure, and to the inexperienced eye as useless as the green water running away in the narrow channel. But the Yucatecan finds use for it, and it is carried to the corral, where we find a herd of cattle making a meal off it amid myriads of tormenting flies.
The fibre is not sent direct from the grower to the market, but is passed through the hands of the large agents resident in the country, who ship it to the various ports. This has become such a trade in itself that one agent has grown so rich upon his commissions that he now runs a special line of steamers between Progreso and New York for the traffic, as well as holding the "lion's share" in the railway concerns of the Peninsula. Owing to the shallow water at Progreso and the cost of dredging on coral-beds, he has had to go to the expense of having his boats built specially for the traffic. But his flat-bottomed small-draught steamers have made his family one of the richest of the money-grubbing ring in Yucatan. For there is money for every one who touches the magic fibre except the miserable Indian, by whose never-ending labours the purse-proud monopolists of the Peninsula are enabled to be ever adding to their ill-gotten gold. There are in Yucatan to-day some 400 henequen plantations of from 25 to 20,000 acres, making the total acreage under cultivation some 140,000 acres. The cost of production, including shipping expenses, export duties, etc., is now about 7 pesos (14s.) per 100 kilogrammes. The average market price of henequen is 28 pesos per 100 kilogrammes, so the planter gets a return of 400 per cent.
HENEQUEN FIBRE IN DRYING-GROUND.
THE FIBRE MILL.
All this is obviously only possible as long as he can get slave-labour and the hideous truth about the exploitation of the Mayans is kept dark. The Indian gets a wage of 50 centavos for cutting a thousand leaves, and if he is to earn this in a day he must work ten hours. Near the big towns, 75 centavos are paid, but practically, on many haciendas, it is so managed that the labour is paid for by his bare keep.
There is much in the henequen agave beside its fibre which might be turned to commercial uses, but these side-products, such as alcohol made from the juicy substance of the leaves, and paper made from the leafless stems of the plants, have so far been neglected. An enterprising German has started a rope factory near Merida with a capital of $2,500,000, but this is the first attempt at working up the hemp in the country. Henequen is cultivated in Cuba and the Bahamas and the Germans have introduced its culture into East Africa, where they have planted 150,000 agaves. Whether it will thrive there is doubtful, but in both Cuba and the Bahamas it has been a failure, the plant for some reason degenerating and producing a poor fibre.
[CHAPTER XXII]
FLORA AND FAUNA
There is perhaps nothing which strikes one at first sight in travelling through Yucatan so much as the absence of animal life. For the stay-at-home the usual idea of the Tropics is that it is that part of the earth where the deadliest serpents wait for you in the seclusion of the bathroom, or twine round your legs while you breakfast; that such cohorts of fearsome creatures watch for you with the patience of writ-servers at the garden gate that it is a miracle if by lunch-time you find you still "have the luck to live"; and that a reckless indulgence in even moderate walking-exercise will most certainly end in your falling a prey to one or more of those great beasts which, like the troops of Midian in the hymn, "prowl and prowl around."
The truth is very disappointing. Nothing is ever so bad or so good as we expect it to be. The Tropics, as far as Yucatan is concerned, are a case in point, both as regards beauty and dangers. The most luxuriant of Yucatecan woodland scenes would have real difficulty to hold its own in a beauty competition against an English lane when June has lavished her wild roses and her honeysuckle on the sun-kissed hedgerows. And for the matter of risk, a modern city infested with motor-cars is the "valley of the shadow of death" compared with an average part of the tropics of Central America. There are, of course, real dangers, but one usually survives them, probably for the same reason that a dyspeptic lives so long, because one takes care. The annual death-roll in Paris, London or New York from motor-cars is far higher than the yearly toll of native lives taken by the serpents of Yucatan.
Yet the country is famous for its snakes, but you do not see them. In all our wanderings and campings in forests, in all our often foolhardy explorations of weird caves and pot-holes, so frequented by snakes as sleeping-places, we only saw seven, and none of them were large. The most exciting adventure we had was in one of the islands. We were following a very narrow Indian trail single file, when the one of us who was leading ran his face right into a snake which was stretched across the path at the height of one's eyes, its tail curled round a shrub on one side, its head round one on the other side. It was a tree-climbing species, a bright green, and looked evil enough, but was probably harmless. We had but half an hour before seen the snake the Mayan Indians call uolpoch (pronounced wolpoach), the deadliest of all New World serpents, perhaps the deadliest in the world. It was among the leaves at the side of the path, and wriggled away as we approached. It is about two or at most three feet long, of a dirty brown-grey colour with the belly a trifle lighter in tint, and is remarkable as having both ends blunt like the slow-worm. It is said to be the only snake known to attack before it is attacked, and is specially feared as being most active at night when it wanders around. Another of its accomplishments is an extraordinary power of leaping: it is alleged to be capable of a jump of six feet high. We do not, however, guarantee this serpentine high jump, as we never, thank goodness, saw it perform. The uolpoch's bite is always fatal, and the Indians dread the little blunt-nosed reptile, which sleeps the sunny hours away hidden in hollows in rocks or in ditches.
The rattlesnake is very common in Yucatan, especially in the south and more marshy portions of the Peninsula. The python, too, is met with in the lower-lying forests, though we did not have the luck to see one. They never, however, attain the size of the monsters which infest the valley of the Amazon and its tributaries. There are several of the Elaps genus of serpents in Yucatan, the most common being Elaps corallina, or coral-snake, ringed with red and black. He is a pretty fellow but highly venomous, and shows much fight if provoked. A friend of ours trod on one which was asleep in the cab of an engine, of all places in the world. He luckily had on top-boots, or probably he would not have lived to tell the tale, for the little beast was round on him and made a deep mark on the leather in a second. The Spilotes Salvini (Greek [Greek: spilos], a spot), a large but quite harmless serpent, is of spotted black with a yellowish belly, and attains almost pythonic dimensions, the average specimens being about six and a half feet long. Another harmless serpent family, the Dipsadidæ (so called from the Greek [Greek: dipsa], thirst, in allusion to an ancient superstition that this genus of snakes caused a mortal thirst, to which Shelley refers in his "Prometheus Unbound": "He thirsted, as one bit by a dipsas"), is represented in Yucatan by the Dipsas splendida, a tree-climbing reptile with bright mottled skin, averaging two to two and a half feet in length. It is chiefly active at nights, when it climbs in search of the insects which form its food.
In the larger mammals, particularly the carnivora, the Peninsula is notably poor. Practically the only formidable creature is the jaguar, which would, however, never deserve Bottom's immortal dictum anent the king of carnivora, for it is in no sense "a terrible wild-fowl." Felis onca, to give the animal the dignity of his full official title, is most like the leopard or panther of the Old World. He is of a tawny colour with spots which differ, however, from the true leopard inasmuch as they are ocellated, i.e. eyed, black with a tawny eye of colour in the centre, or are broken up into rosettes of black on a tawny ground. Full-grown specimens measure between four and five feet in length with a tail of some two feet. In Yucatan the jaguar is distinctly cowardly, and will never attack unless in a corner or when attacked. We met one when wandering one afternoon in the woods around Chichen, and though we were unarmed, it fled incontinently and climbed a tree. This they are very fond of doing, especially when pursued by dogs. The natives face them with the machete as their only weapon, and show much courage often in tracking them to the caves where they shelter. While even the biggest jaguar will avoid an encounter with man, they are bold in their night attacks upon cattle and pigs. At one settlement on the east coast which we visited, thirteen porkers had disappeared in as many nights, and though a hunt was organised in one expedition of which we took part, the "tiger," as the natives insist on calling the jaguar, had not been found when we left.
Allied to the Felis onca are two other "cats," the Felis pardalis and Felis concolor or puma, which are both found in Yucatan and the neighbouring parts of Central America. The former is far more rare than the jaguar, and somewhat smaller, measuring seldom more than three feet in length of body, with a two-foot tail. It is of a greyish-tawny colour and is more like a wild cat than a leopard, its tail striped and coat marked with small black spots. The puma is of a uniform greyish or reddish-grey, and is between three and four feet in length. The young are born marked with dark-brown spots in three rows on the back, and the whole coat marked sporadically. The puma is greatly hated by stock-breeders because of its habit of killing but not eating. One puma has been known to kill many animals in a night, just lapping a little of the blood of each and then leaving the carcase for a fresh prey.
The creature which is at once the largest and least offensive in Yucatan is the tapir, a genus of Ungulata or hoofed animals, in general appearance looking much what one could imagine a cross between a rhinoceros and a wild pig would be like. Indeed naturalists incline to the belief that the tapir is somewhat closely allied to the former animal. There are four known species, three American—viz. Tapirus terrestris, T. Bairdi, and T. Dowi, and one Asiatic, T. malayanus. Though the species differ somewhat in size, the tapir is usually about the size of a small ass. The body, which in the adult is of a uniform deep brown, though the young are marked with yellowish spots and stripings, is short, stout and clumsy, with thick legs ending in four small hoofs on the fore feet and three on the hind. It has small piggy eyes, and its most characteristic feature is a queer flexible snout prolonged some inches beyond the jaw, but apparently without the prehensile powers of the elephant's trunk. The tapir loves water, and when attacked by a jaguar will, where possible, take to a river or lake, diving and plunging. It is quite inoffensive and never attacks man, but when at bay will give ugly bites. It is very powerful, and has so thick a skin that it can force its way through the densest forest. The commonest tapir is the South American one, the T. terrestris, but this is not found north of the Panama Isthmus. The tapir of Yucatan and Guatemala is T. Dowi. This with T. Bairdi is generally regarded as generically separate from other tapirs, and they are scientifically termed Elasmognathus. All tapirs are vegetarians, living on the shoots of trees, on fruits and seeds; but they will eat almost any substance which they come across. Thus pieces of wood, clay, and stones have been found in their stomachs.
The liveliest sport in Yucatan is derived from the peccary, a kind of swine, belonging to the genus Dicotyles, of which there are two species. The name is probably from an American Indian word which is cited by Pennant as paquiras. The peccary is the only indigenous representative of the Old World Suidæ or swine in the New World, and both its species are found in Yucatan—D. torquatus or tajacu, the Texan or collared peccary, and D. labiatus, the white-lipped peccary. The range of the former is from Arkansas to Patagonia, while the latter are restricted to Central America and as far south as Brazil. The generic name is from the Greek [Greek: dikotylos] ([Greek: di] two, and [Greek: kotylê], a hollow), and was given the peccaries by Cuvier in allusion to a curious glandular organ on the back which was regarded by old travellers as a second navel. This gland secretes a foul-smelling liquid, and unless quickly removed after the animal has been killed, taints the flesh, making it almost uneatable. We hunted peccary and eat them. The meat has a rather rich, spicy taste, like stuffed veal, and is fairly tough. The two species breed freely together, but the true D. labiati are far the fiercer of the two, go about in small herds and are known to attack man and even the jaguar. The Yucatecans hunt them with dogs, and seldom does an expedition return without leaving two or three of the latter dead in the woods, ripped up by the short tusks of the peccary boars. The animals make their home in natural hollows and caves, or in holes beneath large trees. In appearance they are like pigs, but the bristles are coarser and variegated somewhat like a porcupine's. They have fewer teeth than the ordinary pig—viz. thirty-eight as against forty-four—and a very short tail.
The deer of Yucatan are quite small, about the size of our fallow-deer. They are of two species, Cervus virginianus and Cariacas toltecus, the latter quite small. You see little or nothing of either in North-Eastern Yucatan, but on the southern sierras there are a good many in the thick woodland. Down south, too, but still further south, you find the monkey most frequenting this part of Central America, of the genus Mycetes, familiarly known as "the howler" or "howling monkey," in allusion to its strange, weird, and very loud cries, which can be heard miles off. This peculiar vocal power is due to an extraordinary development of the larynx, the hyoid bone in which is very much enlarged and excavated, thus forming a hollow drum which acts as a reverberator. The species of Mycetes found in Yucatan and Guatemala is M. villosus or ursinus. The Mycetinæ are the largest monkeys of America, nearly three feet in body length, with long prehensile tails. They are quite black, and are almost entirely arboreal in habits, living in the trees. The Indians regard their flesh as a great luxury, and white men agree that it is very palatable. Another monkey, rare in Yucatan, but very common in Guatemala, is the spider-monkey or sapajou (genus Ateles), of which the species A. vellerosus is the commonest.
Of smaller mammals there are a good number in Yucatan. There is the coati, known to naturalists as Nasua narica, but always called by the natives pisote. It is closely related to the racoons, but has a longer body and tail and a thin and flexible snout, hence the generic name Nasua (Latin nasus, nose). It is of a dark-brown colour, and is thus distinguished from its Brazilian cousin the red ring-tailed coati (Nasua rufa). It is carnivorous, and is particularly fond of the large lizards, the iguanas, which abound throughout the Peninsula. Birds, too, fall prey to them. They are distinctly attractive-looking little creatures and are readily tamed. We saw a pair in a courtyard of a restaurant in Merida, which eagerly made friends with the guests in return for a piece of meat or fruit. The Indians relish their flesh greatly, and the animals have little chance if they are rash enough to venture near a village. Sitting one night in the wonderful tropical moonlight at a lonely settlement, suddenly an indescribable din of dogs yelping and Indians shouting arose. We really thought the place was about to be raided when we saw the women as well as the men and boys arm themselves with cudgels and make for the wood. A yelp or two and a piteous cry, and then with huge delight an Indian rushed back with the still quivering furry body of the poor coati. A fire was built, and in a very few minutes the creature had been dried into that most unappetising mummification in which all Indian cooking of meat ends. The pisote tastes much like an old rabbit.
Talking of rabbits, these ubiquitous rodents are found in Yucatan, but in no great numbers. Hares are unknown. The common racoon (Procyon lotor) is found, but there are no crab-eating racoons (Procyon cancrivorous) in Yucatan: these are restricted to South America proper. The racoon eats fruits and is fond of young maize; but he is also carnivorous, and will attack fowls, biting their heads off and sucking their blood. He feeds, too, on grubs and frogs, but he most enjoys sugar-cane, to crops of which he is very destructive. In Yucatan is found the grey fox of the States (Urocyon virginianus). A pretty little fellow is the grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), which has a marvellously bushy tail. A species of the agouti (Dasyprocta punctata or acouchy) is found in Yucatan, a guinea-pig-like creature, the size of a small rabbit, which when disturbed gives pig-like grunts. There are many bats, the commonest being the so-called bulldog bat, in allusion to the bulldog-like expression due to the pendulosity of the skin around the snout and jaw. A genus of armadillos (Tatusia novemcincta) usually called Dasypus novemcinctus, the only armadillo found in the United States, is fairly common in the woods of Yucatan.
While writing of Mammalia we must not forget to mention that curious creature the manatee, which is found fairly plentifully in the creeks and shallow inlets around the coast of the Peninsula. In Guatemala and Southern Yucatan it is called Vaca de Agua (Sea-Cow). Its scientific name is Manatus americanus or australis. In shape it is something like a small whale; but it belongs to a different order, though it was once believed to be a herbivorous cetacean. It is some ten or twelve feet in length with a stout naked body, fish-shaped, with no trace of hind limbs, and ending in a wide shovel-shaped tail. The fore limbs are paddles, on which there are rudimentary nails; the eyes and ears are small; the neck short and thick. They live in either fresh or salt water, but never far from land or far from sea. They feed on sea-grasses and never leave the water. Their flesh, which is white and sweet-tasting, is relished by the natives, who hunt them as did their ancestors, usually with harpoon, for their fat and leather as well as for the meat.
We have already spoken of the snakes in Yucatan, and now we must say a few words as to other reptiles. Yucatan is the happy hunting ground for the largest land lizard known to Natural History, the iguana. His prevailing colour is grey, shading to a light green with a lighter tint on the belly, and he has black markings crosswise his whole length to his tail and a crest of spines down his back. The creature is grotesquely ugly with his great pouched under-jaw and eyes snake-like in their smallness, and as you often meet specimens upwards of three feet long (they are known to attain five feet or more in length), one is apt to hasten to the conclusion that they are fearsome foes. As a matter of fact they are the most inoffensive of creatures unless molested, feeding entirely on a vegetable diet. But they can and will bite, if annoyed, and we came across cases of Indians whose fingers had been bitten off, though of course there is no venom like that of a snake in the iguana's teeth. They are arboreal in habits, but the Yucatecan iguanas love most to make their homes in the ruined facades and roofs of Mayan palaces. We hardly ever explored a building without one of these great clumsy reptiles bustling out of its hiding-place and scurrying up the palace front or the falling stairways, looking for all the world like a gargoyle animated of a sudden. The flesh of these lizards is much appreciated by the natives, and tastes like chicken. There are a great quantity of smaller lizards in Yucatan; in fact, as you walk through the woods the undergrowth, especially in the sunnier patches, seems positively alive with them. Browns, greens, and yellows; mottled, striped, and spotted; some of them are really very pretty, and all of them quite harmless.
There are plenty of alligators to be found round the coasts, particularly on the east, where they shelter in shallow muddy streams and in the mangrove swamps, or bask on the landward side of the islets which so often only lie a few yards from the mainland. The alligator is a savage beast, more savage it is said than his congener the crocodile, and will take the offensive often without provocation. If anything, they look more repulsive in their habitat than they do in a Zoo, where they are surrounded by the softening influences of civilisation and the sweet simplicity of a cemented tank. We heard a story worth quoting, as at once illustrating the brute's ferocity and the courage of the Indian. Down in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec two Indians were floundering in a swamp when one suddenly disappeared into a hole, to utter in a second a howl of agony, while the water around him became tinged with blood. Down in the hole an alligator had seized him by the leg, biting it off at the knee. Without a moment's hesitation his comrade leapt into the pool and, planting his foot firmly on the lizard's head, thus kept it from making a second attack while he helped the exhausted, bleeding man to scramble out.
The average alligator in Yucatan measures between seven and nine feet, though the one typical of the genus, the Alligator lucius or mississippiensis of the United States, attains a length of seventeen or eighteen feet. In Guatemala and the Rio Hondu a special species is found known as the Alligator punctulatus. Alligators differ from true crocodiles in having a shorter and flatter head, cavities in the upper jaw into which the long teeth of the under-jaw fit, and feet much less webbed. It is a very common mistake to believe that the true crocodile is unknown in the New World. As a matter of fact, a typical one, the Crocodilus americanus, long confused with the alligator, has recently been identified in Florida and the West Indies. The alligator feeds chiefly on fish, and his voracity is such that he lives on very strained relations with the inhabitants of his fishy world, which avoid him with the same fanatical earnestness with which a Kaffir avoids his mother-in-law. But the alligator is more than a glutton; he is a cannibal, and does not, unfortunately, even respect the family circle. His wife has to be very careful to put the children to bed before he returns from his wanderings, for if he catches sight of them or gets the least chance he instantly eats them. The female alligator lays a great quantity of large eggs, dropping them in the sand, where they are left to be hatched by the sun's heat. As many as sixty eggs may be found in one nest arranged in separate layers.
We have spoken of the turtles which are found in huge quantities around the coasts and in the islands. There are any number of their land cousins, the tortoises, in the woods of Yucatan, most of them quite small, among them the box tortoise (Cinostemon leucostomum), that queer little reptile who has a kind of front door which he slams in your face, shutting his head in so that there is no way of arguing with him. Frogs and toads there are in plenty, too, some of the latter being very large; but we must get on to the insects. Of these the most fearsome are the tarantulas, the commonly used but incorrect name for the largest spider known, the Mygale Hentzi, a black hairy creature with body about the size of a two-shilling piece and black hairy legs two inches long. The bite of these spiders is really dangerous, although seldom fatal to adults. A friend of ours was bitten in the wrist by one some three years ago. His arm became seriously inflamed and terribly painful, and could not be used for some months; and even now he still suffers pain at times in the neighbourhood of the wound. The ruins in Yucatan are the happy hunting ground for these monsters, which will even attack small birds. Scorpions are very common, too, hiding by day under stones or logs or in the crevices of house walls. There are two kinds, a black and a white, though the latter is more yellow than white. We never saw any large specimens, but they are said to reach seven or eight inches in length Their sting is distinctly dangerous, and we heard of cases of Indians dying through it.
The jigger or chigoe (to give it the more correct native name from which the first is a corruption), that detestable flea which burrows beneath the toenails and there lays its eggs, is common in Yucatan, especially on the east coast. It closely resembles the common flea in form, though it is much smaller. The sandal-shod natives are particularly liable to it, and of the Mexican troops at Chan Santa Cruz a large percentage have one or two toes missing. In the south of the Peninsula you find that curious insect the Praying Mantis, so called in allusion to the attitude of its forelegs, which are held as are hands in prayer. These creatures wage remorseless war on one another, and fight until the stronger literally pulls its foe's head off. This was actually witnessed by a friend of ours.
That detestable insect the centipede is common in Yucatan, and not the harmless type to which one is accustomed in an English garden, but a formidable creature half a foot or more long. You find the Scolopendra castaniceps of a greenish colour with a chestnut-tinted head averaging six inches, and in the south the giant centipede (Scolopendra gigas) which is sometimes a foot long. Humboldt, in his Personal Narrative, says that he saw Indian children pull centipedes out of the ground and eat them; but the present-day Indians fear and avoid them as much as they do a scorpion. There is no doubt that their bite is very poisonous, and even often dangerous.
The ants of Yucatan are wonderful, except when you have the misfortune to get them on you, when you forget to admire them in the torrents of blasphemy which their bites evoke. We came across four types, a pitch-black small tree-ant, which appeared to live principally beneath the shelter of the bark of rotting trees; a big yellow fellow often nearly an inch long, a large black ant, and a smaller reddish black ant. The third kind, a broad-mandibled digging ant, called by the Indians zay (pronounced tzay), infests the woods of Yucatan to an almost incredible degree, honeycombing the roadways to such an extent in some places that you sink almost to your knee in the loose red earth. Sometimes in the woods you will come across patches an acre or two in extent of loosened earth dotted here and there with hillocks thrown up by these tiny excavators. They carry out their operations, too, among the ruins; but their work is distinctly unscientific, and many interesting memorials of the ancient Mayans have been destroyed by these insect vandals.
More than this, they actually make paths through the woods. As you follow an Indian trail you will of a sudden come to a place where it is crossed by quite a distinct path, traceable for yards. Sometimes you actually find them travelling on these paths. One evening in the woods near Occeh we came across a procession of ants or, to write correctly, two processions of ants; for there was one set going in "follow-my-leader" style across the road one way, and another set going the other way. It was interesting to see that the insects never stepped out of the ranks. One set were carrying each a piece of leaf which they held up over them (it was about half an inch square) like a huge sail. Some of them were literally staggering under the weight of the pieces of leaf, but they never dropped them. The other set were returning into the wood "empty-handed" to get fresh loads. For a long time we watched these ordered ranks, and we had the curiosity to follow them into the wood, where we found them actually at work on a leafy shrub, chewing off the pieces and climbing down with them, and then without the least confusion taking their places in the marching line of the loaded party. It is possible that these ants are to be identified with those called by Henry Walter Bates (Naturalist on the Amazons: 1863) the umbrella ant of Brazil, which he says "thatches its large mansion (sometimes 40 yards in circumference and 2 feet high) with circles of leaf cut with accurate precision from coffee and orange trees, which they oftentimes strip bare to carry out their bold architectural design." It seemed to us, however, more likely that, as was observed by Thomas Belt (Naturalist in Nicaragua: 1874), the leaves are gathered as provisions and are stored till their decay generates a fungus upon which the ant feeds.
The cockroaches of Yucatan are truly tropical, and grow to a great length. We saw some between two and three inches long. The little village stores throughout Yucatan are infested with these pests, and one day when purchasing some bananas, on the storekeeper lifting up the lid of the wooden bin in which the fruit was kept, it sounds incredible, but one could scarcely see the fruit, such hundreds of them filled the bin. In the ruins you constantly find hornets' nests hanging against the walls almost like swallows' nests, and if they happen to be "at home" and do set about you, the only thing is to run. Yucatan is very rich in dragonflies. They seem of almost all colours. Those we noticed most were one of electric blue, one of grass green, and one, apparently rare, almost red. At nights the trees are alight with fireflies. As we sat in the clearing in our forest home on Cozumel, it looked as if armies of Indians with lanterns were concentrating on us from all points of the belt of dark woodland. The light these insects give is undoubtedly strong, though we had not the luck to see, as did Stephens at Palenque, "'lightning-bugs,' four of which together threw a brilliant light for several yards around, and by the light of a single one we read distinctly the finely printed pages of an American newspaper." No account of a Yucatecan night would be complete without mentioning the wonderful chorus of crickets which sing from sunset until the eastern sky fades into the grey of dawn. It is literally a chorus, for there must be thousands of the insects contributing to the endless serenading of the lady crickets.
An hour after the sun is up and the dew has disappeared before the rapidly increasing heat of the wonderful tropic sunshine, the Yucatecan woodlands become beautiful with those most exquisite of all God's creatures, the butterflies. There was a great deal in Yucatan which was very disappointing; there was much which was actually heartbreaking; but however footsore, tired, and hungry we were, we found it impossible not to momentarily forget our troubles in our admiration for these flying triumphs of Heaven's paint-box. Alas! we are not possessed of any scientific knowledge, and all that this chapter attempts is to indicate "the birds, beasts and fishes" one sees in travelling through the Peninsula, and thus we cannot give the scientific names for these marvellous insects. Perhaps it is as well, for it is really a kind of desecration to label some fairy form of amber and blue with a hendecasyllabic name, the pronunciation of which can only be mastered after months of practice.
Most beautiful of all was a monster of sky blue, all four wings framed with a delicate border of black. He must have measured five inches from wing-point to wing-point. Exquisite, too, were the striped butterflies: some striped scarlet and black, some white and black, some yellow and black. The daintiness of these combinations was past all description. The forest paths were bright, too, with wonders of yellow; amber and orange, sulphur-tinted and palest lemon, huge butterflies fluttered before our horses, such miracles of Nature's painting as made the woodland seem a fairyland of colour. One of the commonest (it seems an insult to use the adjective, it was so beautiful) of Yucatan's butterflies was one with body and inner portions of the wings all black and the outer parts a brilliant scarlet, a combination giving it as it flew the appearance of a daintily slender bobbin or reel of vermilion. And amid all this riot of colour were some quite as enchanting in the Quaker-like sobriety of their tints. One specially struck us: a triumph of silver greys and browns, a veritable incarnation of Autumn. But enough! Neither glowing epithets nor the dry-as-dust names given them by entomologists can do justice to Yucatan's butterflies: you must go and see them for yourself to realise their beauty.
One of the most startlingly beautiful birds in Yucatan is the cardinal bird, a large finch of a gorgeous red even to its beak, its face alone being black around the base of the bill and on the upper throat. But the full glories of its scarlet coat are the prerogative of the male, for the female is a far duller colour. Species of the bird are common in the warmer parts of the States, where it is often known as the Virginia Nightingale, in allusion to its powers of song. The Yucatecan specimen, about a foot long, makes a wonderful spectacle as it flashes through the blaze of sunshine.
But if Yucatan has to share her cardinal bird with the more southern States of America, she can claim to have all to herself, and the Central American countries neighbouring her, perhaps one of the most beautiful birds in the world, the Meleagris ocellata, the ocellated turkey, so called in allusion to the ocelli or eyes, much like those of a peacock, marking its plumage, which is of blue, brown, and gold. Its bare head is a deep blue studded with caruncles of an orange colour, and it has no ugly dewlap as has the common turkey, than which it is much smaller. This wonderful bird is fairly common in Yucatan, but is very shy and keeps to the woods. A bird far more common, and a vivid contrast in the sobriety of its feathering to this glorious fowl, is a species of guan (Ortalis vetula maccalli), known in Spanish America as the chachalaca in allusion to its astoundingly loud cry. They are about the size of a hen pheasant, the wings and body of a brown shading to a greeny grey with a lighter grey-brown belly. They may be said to be the great game birds of Yucatan as far as eating goes, and their flesh tastes much like pheasant. They are pretty birds until they speak, and one often sees them tame in the Indian villages. Of the same family of gallinaceous birds (Cracidæ) to which the chachalaca belongs, the curassows and hoccos found in Yucatan are members. Both the red curassow and the globose curassow are fairly common; the natives call them kambūl. Another type of curassow is the latter-mentioned hocco, a name said to be a native word in Guiana. This bird we shot on the east coast. It is a magnificent creature as big as a large turkey, feathered in gold and brown, its head crested. Partridge and quail are said to be plentiful, but we did not come across them.
One of the commonest yet one of the prettiest birds in the Peninsula is a jay (Cyanocitta yucatanica) which goes about in small flocks. They are about the size of a large blackbird, but with a longer tail. The head and the belly are black and the back, wings, and tail are of a beautiful electric blue. The legs are yellow, and, like the English blackbird, the male has a yellow beak and the female a black one. The Mayans call them tchel and are always keen to kill them, for they are very destructive to the crops; but nothing could well exceed the beauty of a dozen of them darting from treetop to treetop in the early morning sunshine.
Of hawks there are many species. One large black one found in Cozumel is rare, but a common one which we specially noticed in that island is a beautifully marked bird of black and brown which is said to belong to the same division of hawks as the hobby-falcon of Europe. It is about a foot long with a fairly long tail. The curious point about it was its astounding boldness. It would sit on a tree a few yards ahead of you, and when you came up and stood beneath it, refuse to be scared away. On the eastern beach of Cozumel one of these birds settled on a fallen tree near us, and refused to go although, of course without any desire to actually hurt it, we pelted it with small pebbles. This hawk has a curiously insistent and weirdly plaintive cry, with which the woods of Cozumel echo all day. We never saw it actually strike at small birds, and certainly its warning scream was calculated to give the most careless finch a good chance of escape.
Of owls there was one of the large wood variety, and there are said to be two peculiar to the country, neither of them much more than six inches long, of a generally tawny colour and lighter on the bellies. In parrots Yucatan is rich, the finest being the white-crowned parrot, its plumage being green, blue, red, white, and yellow. The red-and-blue macaw is known, though rare; but the woods are everywhere full of the green parrot or parakeet, dainty little creatures who usually go about in pairs, but sometimes are seen flocking and are for ever screaming and chattering as they fly.
You see the common American kingfisher, some twelve inches long with plumage of blue, white, spotted and barred, the head crested, sitting sometimes above the cenotes. Of woodpeckers there are several varieties, the commonest appearing to be the red-headed or crested woodpecker. If you have luck (we did not have it), you can see in the Yucatecan woodland the wonderful Trogon resplendens, scientifically associated with the family of woodpeckers. There are some fifty species of Trogons, but the most remarkable is the Yucatecan one, the Quetzal, a sacred bird in Central America, the plumage of which is a gorgeous golden green, its tail being in the male nearly three feet long, though the bird is about the size of a pigeon. This Trogon in the sheen of its plumage almost rivals the beauty of the humming-birds. Of the latter there are many to be seen in Yucatan, but it really needs a poet to describe these winged jewels of the woodland. As we sat on the verandah at Chichen prosaically eating breakfast, amid the pink San Diego blossoms which clustered round the house was a perpetual whirr of
"Pinions of pale green, melting to black
By bronze and russet passages."
One really is obliged to fall back upon quotation in speaking of these tiny creatures, which seem veritably "plumaged from rainbows."
We have spoken of the sleek little piches which chattered in the trees of the plaza at Vera Cruz. There were any number of these in Yucatan, and a much larger black bird, probably akin, infesting gardens and distinguished by the most liquid and mellifluous note it is possible to imagine. Swallows, too, though they seemed somewhat larger than the ordinary swallow, were common everywhere; while a bird, which we think belonged to the cuckoo family, often startled us when at work on the ruins by a reiterated whistle which sounded like mocking laughter dying away in a choking spasm of mirth.
The coasts of the Peninsula are rich with seafowl, so many and so varied that it would need a skilled ornithologist and many pages to chronicle them accurately. There are duck of all kinds, mallard, teal, widgeon; wild geese, bitterns, herons, snipe, sandpipers, plovers, curlews, and gulls galore. The bays and inlets are beautified by the stately ibis, snowy white or slate-grey. Flamingoes are rarer; and indeed a flamingo standing is not an object of beauty, for he is altogether too long in the legs. Moreover his beautiful pink plumage is seen at its best when he is in flight. As hideous as they are common are the brown pelicans. In their way they are as detestable as the zopilotes which we were at pains to describe in our first chapter, though their habits are not so filthy.
We really have no space to say much of the fishes (pelicans naturally suggest fishiness); but we ought to say that the brightest jewel in the fishy crown of the Gulf of Mexico, at least from the gastronomic point of view, is that fish which rejoices in the name of Red Snapper. At all times and in all places you can get it. It appears to have no close season, and whether in the smart restaurants of Mexico or Merida or in the little coast cabins of the fishing Indians, you eat it, or try to till nauseated. The Indians are clever fishermen, and catch with both hook and net, but their most picturesque method is spearing. They paddle their dug-out into shallow waters, stand on the end of the canoe, and thrust a spear at the fish. This spear has a detachable point to which a cord is fastened. They scarcely ever miss, and the struggling prey is hauled in by the string. We saw a man land half a dozen big fish in little more than as many minutes. The natives of Chiapas shoot the fish from the end of the canoe with bow and arrow.
If a hundred people who have not travelled, or whose travels have been confined to the typical Rhine, Switzerland and Riviera tours of modern life, were asked what was their idea of a primeval forest in the tropics, eighty per cent. at least would declare for a woodland notable for giant trees beside which the forests of civilised countries would seem mere park enclosures. Nothing could be further from the truth. The average primeval forest in the tropics, of which the boundless woodlands of Eastern Yucatan are a fair example, are disappointing in the extreme from the very fact that, though dense to a degree that is heartbreaking, you never see really noble trees. One of the largest trees in Yucatan is the sapota (Achras sapota). This is an evergreen with thick shiny leaves, and is said to sometimes reach a height of a hundred feet, but we cannot say that we ever saw one so high. It is from the sapota that there is obtained the chicle, the milky juice of the tree which forms the basis of all American chewing-gums. The chicleros, as the cutters are called, climb the tree, cut broad arrow-shaped grooves through the bark pointing groundward, the shaft of the arrows making a drainage groove down the full length of the tree, a vessel being placed at the foot under this groove to catch the sap. But the Mayans do not care about chicle. They like the sapota because it produces a fruit of which they are passionately fond. And no wonder, for it is really very pleasant eating. About the size of a small apple and the colour of a medlar, the inside is a reddish-brown pulp, which has a delicious flavour.
The woods of Yucatan are full of acacias of many species, among them the logwood (Hæmatoxylon campechianum). Mahogany is found and is especially common in the south, where it is much used by the Indians for canoes, the whole trunk being hollowed out. The leafiest tree in the country is the ceiba (Bombax ceiba), called by the Mayans yaxche or yastse. This noble tree often attains a considerable height, gives an extraordinary shade, and has ever been held as sacred by the Mayans. It figures in their mythology. Their ancestors believed that there were seven heavens, each having a hole in the centre and each immediately above the other. A ceiba was believed to stand in the centre of the earth, and its branches grew through the successive holes in the seven heavens until the leaves reached the highest. By the branches of the tree the dead climbed through the series of heavens until they reached the utmost Mayan paradise. There is a tradition that a ceiba grew in Valladolid. It was cut down but sprouted again, having this time four boughs each directed to a cardinal point. A hawk had its home on the highest branch, and the bird was considered to be the spirit of the tree, its cry of "suki, suki," it is said, having given the ancient Indian town Zaci, on the site of which Valladolid was built, its name. There is another tree which rivals the ceiba in shadiness, but this you only see on the haciendas which have been long in cultivation. It is a laurel introduced into the Peninsula from Cuba some forty years ago by a Spaniard named Cervera. His grandson, appropriately enough, showed us at Yaxche near Merida the finest examples we saw, laurels so large and leafy as to rival in size and shade our forest beech. They were probably the Portugal Laurel (Cerasus lusitanica or Ficus laurifolia).
A fairly large tree is the mamey (Lucuma mammosa), belonging to the same family as the sapota, and bearing a fruit almost rivalling that of the latter in popularity among the Indians. It is egg-shaped, with a rough brown skin, and inside is a pinky pulp tasting like quince marmalade with a distinct flavour of almond-paste about it. By a beneficent dispensation of Providence in a country where grass cannot grow, there does grow a tree, the ramon (Alicastrum Brownei), called by the Mayans ŏs, upon which Yucatecan horses thrive. It is certainly very comforting when you camp for the night in the forest to be able to send the Indians to cut an armful of the branches thus generously provided by Nature's baiting stable, and to hear your cattle contentedly munching it while you sup. The ramon grows fifty to sixty feet high and has an abundance of evergreen leaves which form the fodder. The fruit of the ramon is eaten boiled either alone or mixed with honey or Indian corn, and the milky juice is used medicinally in cases of asthma. Tree-palms grow everywhere in the woods, some of them reaching eighty feet. The more common kinds, notably the Sabal mexicana, called by the Mayans x̆aan, are used to thatch the Indian huts. There are cocoanut palms in plenty, particularly on the islands. From the Lignum vitæ the Indians make bows. From a small tree (Pretium heptaphyllum) the ancient Mayans obtained the incense used in their temples which they called pom and which the Mexicans call copal.
In fruit trees Yucatan is fairly rich. She has the sweet and sour orange in plenty and the lemon and lime, the latter of which often grows wild in the woods. Bananas and plantains are everywhere. A small variety of the former, the banana-apple (Musa paradisiaca), has a flavour finer than the Canary banana. Then there is the Anona squamosa or custard-apple, the Anona muricata or guanabana, the aguacate, alligator pear (Persea gratissima), the caumita and the papay (Carica papaya), called by the Mayans put, of which the fruit is pear-shaped, about a foot long, of an orange-salmon colour and deliciously juicy. The finest pineapples in the whole of the Mexican Republic are said to be those grown in Cozumel, and the cultivation of cocoa, which grows wild throughout Yucatan, is being seriously taken up. There are one or two types of plums cultivated by the Mayans, and figs, tamarinds and mangoes are grown. Camote, a kind of sweet potato, and tomatoes are produced, usually in the milpas with the maize. Tobacco, sugar-cane, and cotton are agricultural products to which increasing attention is being given. Many kinds of gourds are grown by the Mayans. Chief among these is the calabash tree (Crescentia cujete), the gourd of which is universally used in Yucatan in its entirety as a drinking-bottle—the Indians carrying them slung over their backs full of water—and halved as drinking-cups or dippers, and is often elaborately carved or painted. The Spanish name for these drinking-gourds is jicaras, the Mayans calling them luts.
The flowers of Yucatan are disappointing. They suffer, as do the larger plants, from the dryness of the soil, due to the fact that, heavy as the rains are when they come, they rapidly drain away through the porous limestone. In the gardens of cities and villages you see roses, the gorgeous scarlet trumpet-shaped tulipans, magnolias, vari-coloured irises, clematis and other bright-tinted creepers, red and yellow foxglove-like flowers, and over all and everywhere convolvuluses, white, purple, and blue. Some of these latter are cultivated by the Mayans in the fields, as for instance a small white one which they call x̆taventun, from the honey collected from which the Indians distil an alcoholic drink which has a soft aromatic smell of the flower, and the intoxicating effect of which (it is enough to make the mouth of the dipsomaniac water) lasts for three days and leaves no headache behind it!
The wild flowers are for the most part small. Amid the ruined cities you almost always find quantities of the small yellow flower, called by the Mayans x̆canlol, of the Tecoma stans, a shrubby climber. The woodland paths everywhere are bright with the jasmine-like amapola; while the roadsides are made more picturesque by a climber bearing white sweet-smelling flowers. At Chichen there was much Salvia coccinea, a small brilliant scarlet-flowered shrub called by the natives zic x̆in. Here again we saw Heliotropium parviflorum, which the Indians call xnaheax. In the woods you see many orchids growing like mistletoe on the trees. Among the genera met with, the Oncidium and Epidendrum are the commonest, and of these the species Schomburgkia tibicina and the Epidendrum bicoruntum are those oftenest found. We saw very few wild ferns. Here and there are beautiful flowering cactuses.
YUCATAN.
BY THE AUTHORS
[INDEX]
Quick Links to Index Letters
[[A]] [[B]] [[C]] [[D]] [[E]] [[F]] [[G]] [[H]] [[I]]
[[J]] [[K]] [[L]] [[M]] [[N]] [[O]] [[P]] [[Q]] [[R]]
[[S]] [[T]] [[U]] [[V]] [[W]] [[Y]] [[Z]]
[A]
Acacia, [384]
Acanceh, village, Indian ruins at, [188]
Agave Americana (Maguey), [20], [362]
Agave Sisalensis. See [Henequen]
Agouti, [374]
Aguilar, Jeronimo, [48], [82]
Akad-zib, Chichen, [103]
Algonkins and Toltec Theory, [246]
Alligators, [375];
carved heads of, in ruins, importance of, [268]
Alphabet, Mayan, attempts to compose, [299]
America's first architects, Who were?, [257]
American Man, age of, [260]
Ants, [377]
Anuradhapura, ruins of, Ceylon, [263]
Apalachians, [245];
Mayans branch of, [254]
Arawaks, in Cuba, [254]
Armadillos, [374]
Astronomy, Mayan knowledge of, [314]
Athapascans, Aztecs branch of, [245]
Aztecs, arrival in Mexico, [247];
raids into Honduras, [225];
influence on Mayans, [296]
[B]
Bancroft, H., on Mexican priests, [275]
Bats, [374]
Behring Straits, Was America peopled via?, [260]
Bharahat, Stupa of, hand as symbolic decoration on, [266]
Biologia Centrali Americana, A. P. Maudslay's account of Quirigua in, [213];
Mayan decorative art in, [269]
Birds of Yucatan, [380]
Boro Budor, Palenque resembles, [263];
date of building, [280]
Bourbourg, Abbé Brasseur de, Mayan Alphabet of, [299];
on Day Signs, [304]
Bramhanan, Java, Crawfurd on methods of building at, [264];
ground plan similar to Copan, [285]
Brigands in Yucatan, [112]
Brinton, Dr. D. G., on tapir worship, [239];
on baselessness of Toltec Theory, [244];
on Mexican traditions, [249];
on Mayan origin, [254];
on sacred footprints in Central America, [276];
on Mayan MSS., [277];
on Day Signs, [304];
on meaning of glyphs, [312];
on "Drum Signs," [314]
British Government and Mexico, agreement as to Mayans, [156]
British Honduras, Mayans and, [156]
Brooks, C. Waldcott, on ocean currents, [278]
Buddhist ruins resemble Central American buildings, [263]
Bull-fighting in Yucatan, [356]
Butterflies, [379]
[C]
Caciques, Ancient Mayan, [227]
Calotmul, village, [115]
Campeachy, Spaniards discover, [50]
Cancun Island, [147];
ruins on, [149]
Caracol ("Winding Staircase"), Chichen, [100]
Cardinal Bird, [380]
Caroline Islands, ruins on, [281]
Casa de las Monjas, Chichen, [101]
Castes, Mayan system of, [277]
Castillo, El, Chichen, [87];
sacrifices at, [88]
Castillo, Uxmal, [201]
Catoche, Cape, origin of name, [50];
visit to, [136]
Caumila, fruit, [73]
Cave, H. W., on ruined cities of Ceylon, [269]
Caves in Yucatan, [251]
Ceibo tree, legend of, [384]
Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichen, [89];
Spanish report on, [90];
dredging, [92];
skulls found in, [92]
Centipedes, [377]
Chachalaca, bird, [380]
Chac, Mayan god, [239]
Chac Mool, discovered at Chichen, [30], [99]
Chansenote, Indian village, [122];
destruction of, [157]
Chapultepec, [26];
park of, [31]
Chaques, priestly order, [240]
Charnay, D., visit to Menché, [222]
Chichanchob, Chichen, [100]
Chichen Itza, Spaniards reach, [51];
history of, [85];
description of ruins, [87]-[103];
probable age of, [290]
Chicle, gum of Sapota tree, [128]
Chilan Balam, books of, [54], [315]
Chilans, priestly order, [240]
China, Mayan architecture and, [261]
Christian, F. W., on ruins of Caroline Islands, [225]
Chultunes, subterranean rooms in ruins, [195]
Citas, village, [83]
Coati, [231], [373]
Cocomes, Caciques of Mayapan, [56]
Cockroaches, [378]
Codex Cortesianus, "snouted mask" in, [267]
Codex Ramirez, date of fall of Tula in, [245] note
Codices, Mayan, [315]
Columbus, Yucatan first heard of by, [47]
Cones, Temple of, Chichen, [98]
Copal as offering to gods, [93];
shrub from which obtained, [385]
Copan, ruins of, [204];
Buddhist survivals at, [269];
Asiatic influence at, [284];
absurdity of Itza Theory, [284];
probable date of, [287]
Cordoba, Hernandez de, [50]
Cortes, expedition to Yucatan, [51];
scene of first landing on American mainland, [137]
"Cozumel Cross," [79]
Cozumel Island, [164] et seq.;
ruins in forest, [180]
Crawfurd, John, on Buddhist structures in Indian Archipelago, [264];
on ruins of Bramhanan, Java, [285]
Cresson, Dr. Hilbone T., theory as to glyphs, [300]
Crickets, [379]
Cross, Tablet of the, Palenque, [219];
probable explanation, [270]
Cuba, antiquities of, [255]
Cuculcan, Mayan legendary hero, [239]
Cunningham, Sir A., discovery of Bharahat Stupa by, [266]
Curasson, [154], [381]
Customs House, Mexican, [7];
dishonesty of, [355]
Cuyo, El, Yucatan, [127]
[D]
Deer in Yucatan, [372]
Deschnev, Russian navigator, discovers Behring Straits, [260]
Diaz, President Porfirio, genius of, [34];
sketch of, [37]-[40];
signs peace with Yaquis, [161];
letter of authors to, [358]
Dogs of ancient Mayans, [231];
Yucatecan cruelty to, [347]
Dragonflies, [379]
Dupaix, report on Palenque, [216]
[E]
Egypt, Mayan architecture and, [259]
Elephant? Did Mayans worship, [273]
Eskimos, suggested affinity with Japanese, [260]
Espita, town, [186]
Euryalus, H.M.S., dunned by Mexicans, [354]
Evans, Sir John, on stone implements, [261]
[F]
Farming, methods of, in Yucatan, [323]
Fireflies, [379]
Fishing, [383]
Flamingoes, [383]
Flora and fauna of Yucatan, [368] et seq.
Flowers of Yucatan, [386]
Foliated Cross, Temple of, Palenque, [219];
probable origin of design, [270]
Footprints, sacred, in Central America, [276]
Forstemann, Prof. E., on tablet of Cross, Palenque, [220];
on glyphs, [300];
on similarities in glyphs, [311]
Fournereau, Lucien, on ruins of Angkor, [272]
Foxes, [373]
Fruit-trees of Yucatan, [385]
Fuentes y Guzman, F. A., historian, [204]
Fusang, "Land of the, fable" as to, [262]
[G]
Galindo, Copan first surveyed by, [208]
Gann, Dr. T. W., discovery of Aztec wall-paintings in Honduras by, [225], [296]
Garrapatas, cattle-louse, [112]
Garudas in Hindu myth, replicas of in Mayan carvings, [271]
Glyphs, Mayan, [298] et seq.
Goodman, J. T., on Mayan Calendar, [304];
on date of Copan, [310]
"Green Gold of Yucatan." See [Henequen].
Grijalva, Juan de, [51];
report on Cozumel by, [168]
Grünwedel, Prof. A., on Buddhist art in India, [272]
[H]
Hardy, R. Spence, on American and ancient Buddhist ruins, [262];
on Buddhist wall-paintings, [265]
Haritri, Hindu Goddess on Palenque carvings, [272]
Hawks, [381]
Henequen, cultivation of, [361] et seq.
Hermit Crabs, [145]
Herrera, historian, on Aztec ballgame, [94]
Hieroglyphics, Mayan, [298] et seq.
Hoco, bird, [154]
Holboch, island, [132]
Holpop, Mayan official, [228]
Huastecas, Panuco River tribe, origin of, [253]
Huitzopochtli, Mexican War-God, [88], [296]
Hulneb, Mayan God, [239]
Humboldt, collection of Mexican pictographs by, [299]
Humming-birds, [382]
Hunab Ku, Mayan Supreme God, [239]
[I]
Ibis, [383]
Iguana, [374]
India, Mayan architecture and, [262]
Itzamna, Mayan deity, tapir as symbol, [239];
importance in Mayan problem, [313]
Ixtlilxochitl, on Tula, [245] note;
on downfall of Toltecs, [246] note;
credibility of, [249]
[J]
Jade carvings at Copan, [208];
burial with dead by Mayans, [277]
Jaguar, [370]
Japan Current, the, importance in Mayan problem, [278]
Japan, Mayan architecture and, [261]
Japanese, suggested affinity with Eskimos, [260]
Jays, [381]
Jigger flea, [377]
Juarros, Domingo, historian, [210]
[K]
Kabah, ruins of, [199]
Kantunil, Indian town and district, [121]
Khmers, [280]
Kikil, village, [122]
Kinch Ahau Haban, Mayan God, [239]
Kingfisher, [382]
Klaproth, H. J. von, on "Land of the Fusang," [262]
Kuro Siwa, the Japan Current, in Mayan problem, [278]
[L]
Labcah, village, [128]
Labna, ruins of, [194]
Lacandone Indians, [222]
Landa, Bishop, on evils of Spanish Conquest, [54];
on sacrifices at Chichen, [90];
destruction of Mayan MSS. by, [298] note;
Mayan alphabet of, [299]
Laurels, [384]
Le Plongeon, Dr., theory as to Mayan civilisation, [258];
on existence of "red hand" in India, [265];
Mayan alphabet of, [300]
Li Yen, Chinese historian, on "Land of the Fusang," [262]
"Lion-seat" (Simhasana) of Buddhism in Central America, [271], [288]
Lizards, [374]
Lotus, Buddhist, in Central American carvings, [269]
Lund, Dr., on age of American Man, [260]
[M]
Madura, ruins of, Dutch Government Report on, [270]
Maguey, cactus, [20]
Malay Peninsula, Mayan architecture and, [262]
Maler, Teobert, at Piedras Negras, [224]
Mamey tree, [385]
Mammoth, existence of in America, [274]
Manatee, [374]
Manco Capac, first Inca King, [259] note
Marriage among ancient Mayans, [234];
among Yucatecans, 341, [357]
Marshall Islands, [281]
Maudslay, A. P., on ruins of Copan, [211];
on Quirigua, [213];
discovers Menché, [222];
on Mayan decorative art, [269];
on age of ruins, [286]
Mayan alphabet, attempts to form, [299]
—arch, diagram and description, [264]
—paintings compared with Buddhistic, [265];
description of, [316]
— priests and Buddhism, [275]
Mayans, Ancient, [226] et seq.;
Who were they?, [254] et seq.;
army, [227];
law and justice, [228];
social castes, [230];
slavery, [230];
domesticated animals, [231];
housing, [231];
hammock unknown to, [231];
common lands, [231];
as hunters, [232];
adornment, [233], [318];
food, [233];
marriage, [234];
education, [235];
status of women, [235];
trade, [236];
dancing, [237];
burial customs, [237];
religion, [238];
calendar, [240], [301];
problem as to cradleland, [242];
priests, [240], [275];
system of castes, [277];
customs evidencing Eastern influence, [277];
building methods of, [290];
hieroglyphics, [298];
knowledge of astronomy, [313]
Mayans, Modern, physical appearance of, [118];
War of Extermination against, [156];
independence recognised, [156];
Mexican criminals employed against, [159]
Mayan War, Story of, [156]
Mayapan, ancient Indian capital, [56], [188]
Mecca, The Mayan, in Cozumel, [164]
Meco, El, ruins of, [143]
Menché, ruins of, [222];
probable date of, [288]
Mercer, H. C., on caves of Yucatan, [252];
on Mayan methods of building, [292]
Merida, City of, [59];
cabs, [59];
bells in, [62];
cathedral, [64];
life in plaza, [66];
old street signs, [67];
water supply, [68];
prison, [74]-[78];
museum, [78]-[80]
Mexico, relations with United States, [42];
future of, [43];
government of, [37];
war of extermination of Mayans started by, [157];
Mexico City, [21] et seq.;
cathedral, [24];
Paseo de la Reforma, [26];
hotels, [27];
police, [28];
Guard, Republican, [28], [31];
funeral cars, [29];
streets, [29];
tramways, [29], [31];
museum, [30];
officials, [33], [39];
justice, administration of, [35];
prisons [36]
Mississippi district, Mounds of, [255]
Molas, pirate, Cozumel headquarters of, [166]
Monkeys, [372]
Monuments, Conservator of, in Yucatan, [81]
Montejo, Francisco de, [51]
Morality, Mayan, [334]
Morse, Prof. E., on American ethnology, [258];
pamphlet quoted, [262];
on Asiatic invasion of Central America, [278]
Mosquitoes at El Meco, [144];
terrible nights with, [174]
Mounds on East Coast, [127]
Mounds, Ohio, Prof. Thomas on, [255]
Mujeres, Isla de, [50], [140]
[N]
Nacomes, Mayan priestly order, [240]
Nahuatl, D. G. Brinton on derivation of, [248] note
Naual, Mayan dance, [236]
Newberry, Prof., on prehistoric man in America, [274]
"Norther," caught in a, [138] Nunnery, Chichen, [101];
Uxmal, [200]
Nuns in Mayan religion, [275]
[O]
Occeh, sepulchral mounds at, [125]
Ocean Currents, importance in Mayan problem, [278]
Ohio Mounds, problem of, [255]
Olas, Buddhist, on Copan and Quirigua stelæ, [269];
and Mayan MSS., [277]
Opichen, carvings in cave of, [252]
Orange Walk, Mayan trade with, [156]
Owls, [381]
[P]
Paintings, Mayan and Buddhist compared, [265]
Palacio, Diego, report on Copan, [205]
Palenque, ruins of, [214];
"Crosses" at, possible explanation of, [270];
Orientalism of, [271];
probable date of, [287];
like Boro Budor, [287]
Palms, [385]
Panuco River, Huastecan settlement on, [253]
Parrots, [382]
Pearson, Sir Weetman, [5], [42]
Peccary, [371]
Pelicans, [383]
Peonage System, abuses of, [324]
Peru, ruins in, probable date of, [259] note
Picuda, fish, [146]
Piedras Negras, ruins of, [224];
probable date of, [287]
Pigeons, House of, Uxmal, [200]
Pinzon, Vincente Yañez, discovers Yucatan, [47]
Pisote. See [Coati].
Poey, Andres, on Cuban antiquities, [255]
Polonnaruwa, Ceylon, ruins of, [268]
Praying mantis, [377]
Prea Khane, Cambodian ruins, [288]
Progreso, Port of Yucatan, [57]
Puerto Morelos, [156];
burning of woods by Indians at, [158]
Pulque, [20], [262]
Pyramids, Buddhistic and Central American, [263]
[Q]
Quetzalcoatl, [97];
self-torture by priests of, [224]
Quintana Roo, Territory of, [158]
Quirigua, ruins of, [212];
Buddhist survivals at, [269];
probable date of, [287]
[R]
Racoon, [373]
Ramon, tree, [385]
"Red Hand," importance of, [265]
Reefs, Coral, dangerous passage through, [138]
Rio, Antonio del, report on Palenque, [214]
Rurales, Mexican country police, [9], [20], [35]
[S]
Sahagun, Father, historian, on Tula, [245] note
San Miguel, Cozumel, [166];
ruins at, [169]
Sapota tree, [383];
as lintels, [294]
Sayil, ruins of, [196]
Schellhas, P., on Mexican MSS., [289]
Schoolcraft, H. R., on "red hand," [266]
Scorpions, [376]
Sea-fowl, [382]
Seler, Prof. E., on Mayan Calendar, [304]
Sharks, [136]
Shell-heaps, Japanese and American, [261]
Shoshonees, Aztecs akin to, [254]
Sisal hemp, [361]
Slavery among Ancient Mayans, [230];
in Yucatan to-day, [321] et seq.
Snakes in Yucatan, [368]
"Snouted Mask" on Mayan ruins, [267]
Squirrels, [373]
Solis, Diaz de, discovers Yucatan, [47]
Stephens, J. L., on "Cozumel Cross," [79];
on sealed rooms, Sayil, [197];
on Copan ruins, [205] et seq.;
on Palenque, [216];
on "red hand," [266]
Sugar-growing in Yucatan, [128]
Sun, Temple of, Palenque, [219]
Sunda script and Mayan glyphs, [319]
[T]
Tables, Temple of, Chichen, [98]
Tapir, [371];
worshipped, [105], [239];
"snouted mask" symbol of, [267];
was its worship a Buddhist survival?, [374]
Tarantula, [376]
Tel Cuzaan, god, [239]
Tennis Court, Chichen, [93]
Tenochtitlan, founding of, [249] note
Thomas, Prof. Cyrus W., on Ohio Mounds, [255];
theory as to glyphs, [300]
Thompson, Edward A., [86];
work at Chichen, [96]
Ticul, town, [189]
Tigers, Temple of, Chichen, [95]
Tikal, wood lintel at, [271]
Tissandier, A., on Boro Budor and Cambodian ruins, [268]
Tizimin, town, [116]
Tlachtli, Aztec game, [94]
Toltec Theory, [243]
Toltecs, no evidence for existence of, [246];
Who were they?, [247]
Torrell, Dr., on affinity of Eskimos and Japanese, [260]
Tortoises, [376]
Trees of Yucatan, [383]
Trogon resplendens, [382]
Tula, place in Toltec Theory, [243];
site of, [244];
Brinton on, [244];
date of, [245] note
Tuloon, Indians encamped at, [157]
Tunkul, Mayan sacred drum, [228]
Turkey, ocellated, [380]
Turtles, trade in, [152]
[U]
Usumacinta, ruins on, [222]
Uxmal, ruins of, [200]
[V]
Valentini, Dr. Ph. J. J., on Toltecs, [246]
Valladolid, town, [104]
Vega, Garcilaso de, on Peruvian ruins, [259]
Vera Cruz, [5]-[11]
Vietia, Spanish chronicler, credibility of, [249]
Volan, Yucatecan carriage, terrors of riding in, [185]
[W]
Waldeck on tapir worship, [239]
Williams, Sir Monier, on Buddhist monks, [275]
Woodpeckers, [382]
Writing, Mayan, Was it indigenous?, [319]
[Y]
Yaqui Indians, story of persecution of, [160]
Yaxchilan, tower like those at Angkor, [272]
"Yucatan Channel," graveyard of, [140]
[Z]
Zapotecan priests, trances of, [276];
calendar of, [304]
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
Transcriber's Note(s):
- Included: Quick Links to Index Letters