As is the case with Copan and Quirigua, so with Palenque—we have absolutely no knowledge of it as a living town. The existence of the ruins first became known to the Spaniards in the middle of the eighteenth century, and before the end of the century they had more than once been examined and reported on at the instance of the Colonial Government. That such examinations were somewhat ruthlessly conducted, and may account for some of the damage from which the buildings have suffered, is shown by the following quotation from the report signed by Antonio del Rio:—“I was convinced that in order to form some idea of the first inhabitants and of the antiquities connected with their establishments it would be indispensably necessary to make several excavations.... By dint of perseverance I effected all that was necessary to be done, so that ultimately there remained neither a window nor a doorway blocked up, a partition that was not thrown down, nor a room, corridor, court, tower, nor subterranean passage in which excavations were not effected from two to three yards in depth.”
During the present century travellers have frequently visited the ruins, and many descriptions of them have been published; amongst the best known are those of Dupaix, Waldeck, Stephens and Catherwood, Morelet and Charnay. There still remains, however, much work to be done—none of the foundation mounds have yet been cleared of the debris which covers their slopes, and very little attention has been paid to the tombs and burial mounds, which I know to be very numerous and believe will prove most interesting. Now that the heavier timber around the principal buildings has been felled, the work of examination will be somewhat easier, but the very rapid growth of vegetation will always entail on the visitor a considerable amount of clearing before he can obtain a satisfactory view of the buildings. Mr. W. H. Holmes, of the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, who visited the ruins in 1895, only four years after I had cleared them, wrote to me to say that he had to use a plan and compass and cut his way from building to building, as a dense-growth of over twenty feet in height completely obscured them from view.
THE SERPENT BIRD, TIKÁL.
CHAPTER XXIV. TIKÁL AND MENCHÉ.
SACLUC (LA LIBERTAD).
Before closing the notes on my wanderings a few words must be said about two other ruins, Tikál, which I visited both in 1881 and 1882, and Menché, which I visited in the latter year only. On both occasions I started from Coban and travelled northward for ten days through the then almost uninhabited forest to the Paso Real on the Rio de la Pasion, where the Government maintains a ferryman and serviceable canoes for the passage of the river, and thence to Sacluc, a village standing in the savannah land about fifteen miles north of the river.
Sacluc, which had risen into notice as the headquarters of the mahogany-cutters, had only recently become the residence of the Jefe Político of the department of Peten, and had been euphemistically renamed “La Libertad,” possibly to hide the fact that a condition not very far removed from slavery was more noticeable there than in other parts of the Republic. All labourers’ wages are paid in advance, and as the wood-cutters are a thriftless folk, any cash they may receive is soon dissipated, and then before returning to work an additional charge must be incurred for tools and the necessary stores for sustenance during many months’ absence in the forest. In theory the long score against a workman in the patron’s books will be wiped out by the product of a season’s work, but in practice it only increases until the debt has reached the limit of value which is placed on the man’s services. Then, if the patron is in luck, he may find a purchaser for his workman; that is to say, he may sell the debt to another employer and the man’s services pass with it, for the law compels him to serve his new master until the debt is paid. Of course it is vastly immoral, but the system does not seem to work so badly after all; for if the patrones are too harsh, which did not seem to be the case, the frontiers of Mexico and British Honduras are not far distant, and a man could always take a few days’ walk through the forest and leave his debts behind him. Such migrations are not at all uncommon, and many Mexicans from Tabasco, Campeche, and Yucatan, as well as some runaway negroes from the British West India regiments, were numbered in the population of Sacluc. As a last resort, if a man has made Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize all too hot to hold him there is yet left a refuge in the no-man’s land held by the Santa Cruz Indians, and he may add to the mongrel and turbulent population of Xaxe Venic or some of the other frontier villages. Naturally such a mixed community as that which inhabits the isolated province of Peten would be likely sometimes to give trouble to the officials sent to rule over it; the last Jefe Político had paid with his life for some effort to enforce the orders of the Central Government, and a custom-house officer had been murdered shortly before my arrival and his murderer was confined in the room next to that in which I slept. But although the Peteneros resent too much interference on the part of Government officials, and have a natural prejudice against a high customs tariff, I don’t think they can be called a disorderly people, and I have never heard of them causing any annoyance to travellers.