From El Cuyo, recrossing the salt lakes which for twenty-four miles fringe the swampy forest coast lands at this part, we took a directly east course for sixty miles. Profitless as this part of our tour proved archæologically, it was geographically of interest. We have been enabled to prepare a map of this north-eastern corner of Yucatan, which attains an accuracy no map heretofore published has attained. This district is a dead level of primeval forest, untrodden, unknown, stretching for forty miles inland and fringed by swamps which are anything from five to ten miles wide. Here and there we discovered traces of Indian towns, in no case suggesting much size, the settlements of those sub-tribes which ranged this woodland and probably looked Chichen-wards for their supreme chief. This belt of forest land forms the gigantic concession of a Yucatecan trading concern, "La Compañía Agricola," founded in 1902; but a really infinitesimal part comparatively has been brought by them under cultivation, working with imported labour, chiefly from Cuba and Mexico. From the officials—all Cubans—we received the most perfect courtesy and the most generous assistance in forwarding our progress along the coast, and we shall directly describe a pleasant stay we made on their chief sugar plantation.
The days in the forest were monotonous enough. We followed a mule-track used by the woodcutters. Mile after mile the scenery was the same. There is nothing majestic in the Yucatecan forests. You see no giant trees, no mighty fathers of the woodland towering up. The highest is the sapota, from which the gummy sap chicle—basis of all American chewing-gums—is obtained. The characteristic of the forest is its deadly stillness. Thanks to the riverless nature of Yucatan there is little animal life. The swamps afford a haunt for the black duck, for wild geese, spoonbills, ibis and flamingo; and now and again you hear the hoarse cry of a parakeet, or a wild pig bustles through the undergrowth. But practically the forest is dead, flowerless, dark; matted, tangled underfoot, matted, tangled overhead; the long snake-like lianas hanging like fairy ropes from the highest, or weaving a network, like the web of some monster spider, between the shorter, trees.
On the site of the ancient Indian village of Labcah La Compañía Agricola has built itself a settlement which it has rechristened Solferino. On our arrival there we had the kindest welcome possible from the Cuban superintendent, who entertained us at a hastily improvised lunch what time he insisted on sending on in advance of us a message to the officials at the sugar plantation some ten miles off to prepare them for our visit. The company is one of the richest in Yucatan, chiefly owing to the great saline lagoons over which we had passed, from which is extracted rough salt, for the sale of which they practically have a monopoly throughout Northern and Western Yucatan, exporting large quantities as well to Vera Cruz and other ports on the Mexican gulf. They have also undertaken chicle-cutting, and at Solferino are opening up many acres of woodland for plantations of cocoa, cotton, and banana. This latter settlement showed every sign of their growing prosperity, being quite the model village, with trim huts fronting on to large corrals filled with cattle and mules. Thence late in the afternoon we started for their sugar farm, which is the industry latest initiated, but in which, as we afterwards learnt, there is not so much profit as their enterprise deserves, because of the cheap American sugars which are rapidly becoming a vast import throughout Yucatan.
Heading northward again, we were soon once more among the swamps, the forests thinning off and giving place to a low-lying country, just the steaming hot, miasmic soil for sugar. A few miles further and we entered the first plantations, each side of us stretching acres of the rusty-green rush-like plants topping the purple yellowy canes, each plantation marked with a board bearing the date of planting and the number of mecates[4] in the patch. Ahead of us we soon saw the tall brick chimney of the sugar mill, and then, as far as the eye could see, sugar-cane stretched on either side of the track till we entered the settlement. First a street of wooden huts, each built up on a platform two feet from the ground, and reached by a few wood steps like those of a bathing-machine, and then a wide clearing; on one side the sugar mill, a huge shed-like erection, on the other the large one-storeyed bungalow, built of Mexican cedar, the administrative building of the plantation. Here we were greeted by the chief administrator of the Company with such courteous kindness as made us feel deeply the disadvantage we laboured under in being such poor Spanish scholars. Señor Sanchez was but fifty, though he looked an old man. The stooping shoulders, the thin wasted figure, the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, the dried yellow skin, told only too sadly their tale of bitter battle waged with the fever fiend. For here where sugar grows men wither, and the little cemetery, lying a mile seaward behind the mill and established but a few years, could already boast a larger census than the settlement.
We were invited within to a room which was roomy enough, but not room-like in that it had no furniture, save half a dozen rocking-chairs. The walls were bare, and the boarded floor was innocent of carpet or matting and unseemly with a myriad expectorations. Here we were introduced to the staff, a group of Cubans, rough, bearded men in flannel shirts and leather-belted linen trousers grimy with coal dust and engine grease. These were the engineers; most of them men who had worked on plantations in Cuba before the Spanish-American War but had found their occupation gone owing to the dislocation of plantation work there, and so had come across to Yucatan. They were rough enough, but a real relief after the hypocritically civil Yucatecans, who had so far done their best to ruin our tour. After a general conversation, if indeed it deserves that adjective, seeing that we had to shoot the Spanish conversational rabbit as it dodged from rocking-chair to rocking-chair, a move was made to view the engines. The chief director of the Company is a henequen millionaire and shipowner, and no money had been spared to make the plant perfect. A powerful American type of vertical engine of the very latest make worked the huge crusher and the centrifugal machine which separates the sugar from the molasses. It was Saturday afternoon and the mill was not working, but the "hands" were loafing round, and we were struck with the number of Koreans. The administrator told us that he had quite a village of these. They are good workmen, easily satisfied, and stand the climate well. Another figure that attracted our attention was a huge bewhiskered nigger, who on seeing us was all smiles. He proved to be from Belize, British Honduras, and of course spoke good English. He was almost childishly proud of his rights as a British subject, and told us that he had served in one of the West Indian regiments. He said he liked the English soldier, and that the officers were always kind and treated the black man well. As we shook his hand in parting, we were glad to learn that he was happy, liked his work, and was fairly treated. The bulk of the men employed are Mexicans. As the administrator explained, the great difficulty of the Company is the dearth of labour: "Poca gente, poca gente," he kept on repeating ("There are very few people"); for the Indians around, who have been terribly thinned off by Mexican massacres, will not work. These Mexican labourers are a good-for-nothing, discontented, idle lot, and the calabozo, or prison-hut, close to the engine house, usually contained one or more of these recalcitrants. Drink is the great evil among them, and the most severe restrictions are in force limiting the amount of liquor they can obtain from the Company's store during the day. At sunset dinner was served in an inner room opening out upon the filthiest yard imaginable. There pigs, dogs, cats, turkeys, ducks, and chickens ran riot and trespassed into the dining-room to see what good things the Señores had for dinner. Nothing is stranger than the Spaniard's disregard for those comforts of cleanliness which can fill even the humblest home with "sweetness and light." Here was our host,—a Spanish Cuban of good birth, with the manners of a prince, courteous, kindly, cultured,—content to dine off a tablecloth so stained and filthy and thick with grime that a Pickford's van boy would resent such a cover for his humble board at Café Lockhart or Pearce-and-Plenty. It was nothing to him and his genial, intelligent subordinates that the mustard-pot was dark with dead flies, and that ugly grease spots decorated the cloth, which was ringed with the stains of myriad wineglasses. They were all living like pigs and indeed with them, for the porkers came in and rooted under the table for the crumbs that fell from the rich men. And we were rich as far as food was concerned, for they gave us an excellent dinner of chicken and rice, beef, pork, omelette, boiled plantains and sweet potatoes, with pineapple as desert, the waiters being two Mexican boys who wore their straw hats and blankets all through their dinner-duties.
The next morning we took our coffee with the administrator, sitting round the same fly-marked cloth. It was a lesson in Spanish dignity and how a man may tower above his surroundings to hear this grim fever-stricken Spanish gentleman talk history and politics in an almost stately old-world fashion amid such squalor. He insisted that we should stay to take breakfast with him at eleven, and we were glad we did, for we witnessed a curious scene well worth seeing. The previous evening the men had received their week's wages. As we had sipped our coffee we had heard the young Cuban clerk eternally calling "Antonio Rodriguez," "Lucio Perez," and such names; and then the chink of Mexican silver as the money, hard enough earned in those steaming hell-hot sugar swamps, was paid through the little iron-barred pigeon-hole. But there was one of these fellows who had gone away discontented. Each man is paid according to the amount of cane he cuts. This fellow, who had only been employed a fortnight, had cut none because he declared he had been engaged as an overseer, not a hand labourer. But during the two weeks he had had food and drink supplied him on credit, and now he had come up for pay. The clerk told him, naturally enough, that he would be paid when he did some work, and not before. So shortly after breakfast the man appeared before the pay-office to once more air his wrongs. The clerk referred the case to the administrator, who was talking with us, and the latter crossed over to the office. A minute later we heard angry voices, and then, to our amazement, the administrator dashed out of his office through the room where we sat and simply rushed at the grumbler. The latter backed off as Señor Sanchez made for him, apparently to kick or strike him.
Calling out threats, he disappeared, and we thought the scene was over; but it was obviously only a dress rehearsal, for he presently reappeared brandishing his machete. It was really quite exciting: the man was evidently going to run amuck. He was a sturdy fellow too, bullet-headed, bulldog-jawed, evil-eyed: just the man for mischief. There was quite a panic in the office. One old clerk picked up a long pole, the administrator seized a workmanlike walking-stick; but the coolest of the lot was a young Cuban who, with hands in his trouser pockets, went forward to parley with the man. It seemed that the outburst of the administrator had been due to the man's personal insolence, and that he had then ordered him to surrender his machete. This he was now brandishing, and it certainly looked like murder; but it was soon obvious that there was more cheap melodrama than business about the fellow. He went down on one knee and appealed to heaven to witness that he would rather give up his life than his machete; and then, as the young unarmed Cuban approached him, he got up and retreated a few steps further. But in such matters he who retires is lost, and slowly but surely round him were extending, like the horns of a Zulu impi, a semicircle of officials, in the centre the administrator, his fever-yellowed face grey now, but with anger, not fear, his whole emaciated figure expressive of an almost demoniacal rage. So the fellow made a bolt for it to his hut; and when, some half an hour later, we started for the coast, we saw him, as we looked back, disarmed and being led in by the plantation police to cool his heels for forty-eight hours in the calabozo.
The few miles which separated the sugar plantation from the sea were a kind of tropical saltings, mud and sparse grass alive with small land-crabs which galloped in hundreds to gain the shelter of boulder or fallen tree-trunk as we approached. With the utmost courtesy Señor Sanchez had insisted upon providing us with a boat for our journey to Holboch, lying four miles from the little rickety wooden quay which constitutes the Company's port of Chiquila. Holboch—sixteen miles long, low-lying, narrow—is quite the island of one's tropical dreams, a harmony of sparkling sand, blue sea, and palm-trees. An avenue of palms leads to the fisher-settlement, a square of wood huts, painted bright blue and white, built round a plaza of sand. We had the bad luck to arrive at the moment when the fisher folk were about to launch themselves upon a sea of dissipation in celebration of the New Year. Thus there were few who wished to launch on the other sea. But Yucatecans will do anything for money, and we soon found a boat, a dory of three tons, "La Esperanza," and a captain. Short, stout, bow-legged, with rolling rollicking walk and eyes twinkling under shaggy eyebrows, a big flap hat worn rakishly over one eye, he was such a ludicrous mixture of the truculent and the comic that we christened him "the amiable smuggler." But no Yucatecan can keep his word, and our new friend's amiability was not proof against this racial failing. Thus, having settled the terms overnight for the boat which was to take us round Cape Catoche, we were astonished to find him at our hut-door the next morning declaring he must have another four dollars a day. It was all the fault of the New Year festivities. The poor fellow wanted to get drunk, and he felt that if this could not be, he must receive heavy compensation. We compromised the matter by adding one dollar to the daily pay and agreeing to postpone our sailing till the New Year was in. We very foolishly advanced him and the two other Yucatecans who were to form our crew thirty dollars, and paid for our mistake by being obliged to spend the rest of the day watching the dipsomaniacal trio to check their Gadarenic descent into senselessness.
The Holbochians were not quite replicas of those proverbial South Sea Islanders who gained a precarious living by taking in each other's washing; but their relations were, if anything, even more intimate; for everybody appeared to be everybody else's brother, sister, cousin or aunt. We were told that the whole village—some three hundred—represented the ramifications of practically only two families, and the sickly pallor of some of the boys and girls suggested that this inbreeding was already making its evil influence felt. There was not an Indian in the place. It was a community of Yucatecan fishermen, as indeed are most of the inhabited islands as far south as Ascension Bay. They lead an easy-going, loiter life; swinging the sunny hours away in their hammocks, and loafing the evenings away drinking in the tiny spirit-stores presided over by a huge, bloated Dutch immigrant and his equally fat frau, or love-making among the thorn-bushes on the beach. Occasionally they fish or take a job as one of the hands of the small trading schooners which ply from Progreso to Cozumel; but life is cheap, and they do as little honest work as they reasonably can.