The first historical notice of the Maya Indians comes to us from Columbus, who did not get in touch with the more civilized races of America until the end of his career as an explorer, and then by an unlucky chance he failed to follow up the clue. During his fourth voyage Columbus landed on Bonacca, one of the Ruatan group of islands lying about thirty miles from the northern coast of Honduras, and the story of his meeting with the Maya Indians is well told by Washington Irving:—
“The Adelantado, with two launches full of people, landed on the principal island, which was extremely verdant and fertile. The inhabitants resembled those of other islands, excepting that their foreheads were narrower. While the Adelantado was on shore, he beheld a great canoe arriving, as from a distant and important voyage. He was struck with its magnitude and contents. It was eight feet wide, and as long as a galley, though formed of the trunk of a single tree. In the centre was a kind of awning or cabin of palm-leaves, after the manner of those in the gondolas of Venice, and sufficiently close to exclude both sun and rain. Under this sat a cacique with his wives and children. Twenty-five Indians rowed the canoe, and it was filled with all kinds of articles of the manufacture and natural production of the adjacent countries. It is supposed that this bark had come from the province of Yucatan, which is about forty leagues distant from this island.
“The Indians in the canoe appeared to have no fear of the Spaniards, and readily went alongside of the admiral’s caravel. Columbus was overjoyed at thus having brought to him at once, without trouble or danger, a collection of specimens of all the important articles of this part of the New World. He examined, with great curiosity and interest, the contents of the canoe. Among various utensils and weapons similar to those already found among the natives, he perceived others of a much superior kind. There were hatchets for cutting wood, formed not of stone but copper; wooden swords, with channels on each side of the blade, in which sharp flints were firmly fixed by cords made of the intestines of fishes; being the same kind of weapon afterwards found among the Mexicans. There were copper bells, and other articles of the same metal, together with a rude kind of crucible in which to melt it; various vessels and utensils neatly formed of clay, of marble, and of hard wood; sheets and mantles of cotton, worked and dyed with various colors; great quantities of cacao, a fruit as yet unknown to the Spaniards, but which, as they soon found, the natives held in great estimation, using it both as food and money. There was a beverage also extracted from maize or Indian corn, resembling beer. Their provisions consisted of bread made of maize, and roots of various kinds, similar to those of Hispaniola. From among these articles, Columbus collected such as were important to send as specimens to Spain, giving the natives European trinkets in exchange, with which they were highly satisfied. They appeared to manifest neither astonishment nor alarm when on board of the vessels, and surrounded by people who must have been so strange and wonderful to them. The women wore mantles, with which they wrapped themselves, like the female Moors of Granada, and the men had cloths of cotton round their loins. Both sexes appeared more particular about these coverings, and to have a quicker sense of personal modesty than any Indians Columbus had yet discovered.
“These circumstances, together with the superiority of their implements and manufactures, were held by the admiral as indications that he was approaching more civilized nations. He endeavoured to gain particular information from these Indians about the surrounding countries; but as they spoke a different language from that of his interpreters, he could understand them but imperfectly. They informed him that they had just arrived from a country, rich, cultivated, and industrious, situated to the west. They endeavoured to impress him with an idea of the wealth and magnificence of the regions, and the people in that quarter, and urged him to steer in that direction. Well would it have been for Columbus had he followed their advice. Within a day or two he would have arrived at Yucatan; the discovery of Mexico and the other opulent countries of New Spain would have necessarily followed; the Southern Ocean would have been disclosed to him, and a succession of splendid discoveries would have shed fresh glory on his declining age, instead of its sinking amidst gloom, neglect, and disappointment.”
Intent on discovering a strait by which he might gain the southern sea, Columbus ignored the advice of the Indians to travel towards the west, and thus the discovery of Yucatan and Mexico was left to others.
In the year 1517 an expedition was organized in Cuba under the command of Francisco Hernandez de Cordova, for the purpose of discovering new lands to the westward, and among the volunteers who joined the expedition was that perfect type of the Spanish “conquistador,” Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who was the eye-witness of so many stirring events of those days, and whose delightful account of his adventures, dictated to his children in his old age, is one of the most valuable contributions to the history of the time. On leaving the west end of the island of Cuba the three vessels which carried the explorers were nearly lost in a severe storm, and it was not until the twenty-first day of the voyage that they made land near Cape Catoche, the north-east point of Yucatan. Here, for the first time, the Spaniards saw Indian houses built of stone; to quote Bernal Diaz, “From the ships we saw a great town about two leagues from the shore; as we had never seen in Cuba so great and populous a place we named it ‘El Gran Cairo.’” The natives, who came off to the vessels in large dug-out canoes, made friendly overtures to the Spaniards and induced them to land and march towards the town, but as soon as the Spaniards got into broken ground a treacherous attack was made on them, and they were forced to retreat and take refuge in their ships. The expedition then coasted along the north and west shore of Yucatan, until it reached the town of Campeche, when again men were landed, and this time met with a somewhat better reception from the natives. “They led us,” Bernal Diaz writes, “to some very large houses well built of stone and plaster, which were the sanctuaries of their Idols, where we saw figures of great serpents and other Idols carved and painted on the walls surrounding an altar which was drenched with blood still fresh.”
The next landing was made a little further down the coast at Champoton, where the explorers received such a rough handling from the Indians that only one of them escaped unhurt, and Hernandez de Cordova himself died of his wounds on the return voyage when within a few days’ sail of Cuba. Throughout the account of this expedition Bernal Diaz notes the bravery of the Indians, who fought the Spaniards hand to hand, and the excellence of their clothing, their arms, and their buildings. During the following year another expedition was despatched, under the command of Juan de Grijalva, who, also failing to make any headway against the natives of Yucatan, continued his voyage to the westward, discovered the coast of Mexico, and brought to light the riches of that country. The success of Grijalva’s expedition fully aroused the interest of the Spaniards, and it was immediately followed up in February 1519 by the far-famed expedition under the command of Hernan Cortés, which resulted in the conquest of Mexico. Cortés, like his predecessors, on leaving Cuba made for the coast of Yucatan, but after a stay of some days’ duration in the Island of Cozumel, he pushed on round the coast without delay to the mouth of the Tabasco River, where he fought a battle with the natives and took formal possession of the land in the name of the King of Spain. No attempt, however, was then made at colonization, and Cortés re-embarked his soldiers and pressed on to the rich prize of Mexico. Five years later, after Mexico had been conquered, Cortés returned to the province of Tabasco, and thence crossed the base of the peninsula of Yucatan in the course of his celebrated march to Honduras.
No effort was made to subdue the Mayas of Yucatan until the year 1528, when Francisco de Montejo, who had been appointed Adelantado of Yucatan, landed on the north-east coast with four hundred Spaniards and marched towards the interior. Unfortunately no contemporary record of this expedition is in existence, and we know little more than the fact that at the end of two years the Spaniards were driven from the country. It was not until the year 1540 that any further attempt was made at conquest; in that year Francisco de Montejo, the son of the Adelantado, marched inland from Campeche, and two years later founded the town of Merida, the present capital of the country, whilst his cousin, another Francisco de Montejo, marched to the eastward and founded a settlement at Chuaca, which a few years later was moved to the present site of the town of Valladolid. From this time forward the dominion of the Spaniards over the northern and western portions of Yucatan remained undisturbed, but they never succeeded in subduing the natives in the central and eastern part of the province, and the Santa Cruz Indians maintain their independence of the Mexican Government to the present day.
The northern part of Yucatan is little better than a coral-reef raised a few feet above sea-level, covered with a thin coating of earth which supports a scrubby growth not worthy of the name of forest. The sea around the coast is everywhere shallow, and to the northward the great Bank of Yucatan extends for more than eighty miles from the shore before the line of fifty fathoms is reached. We had drifted over the edge of this bank in a steamer with a broken shaft on my return from Guatemala in 1885, and found an anchorage in forty-five fathoms of water at a distance of over fifty miles from the land. The most curious fact about this strange country is the total absence of rivers and even of streamlets. The heavy rainfall soaks through the porous limestone rock and oozes out again along the northern coast-line. The water-supply of the inhabitants is found in deep caves or openings in the limestone, known as “’cenotes,” the Spanish form of a Maya word, which the reader will nearly approach by trying to pronounce “tznot” as a monosyllable[2].
With a low coast-line, a shallow sea, and an absence of rivers, follows a lack of good harbours; at Progreso there is merely an open roadstead, where the steamers anchor two miles from the shore, and at Campeche the conditions are much the same, only small vessels finding a little shelter by lying inside a raised coral bank.