This indeed is the average Yucatecan; an easy-going creature, fond of women, fonder of drink, and fondest of dancing. If there is anything which awakens the Yucatecan soul, it is the charms of la baile (the ball). The Holbochians took it rather hardly that we had descended upon them at such an intempestive moment. They would have so much liked to have given themselves wholeheartedly to the congenial task of dogging the footsteps of "los Americanos," as they insisted upon calling us, and jeering us at intervals; but they really had scarcely time to spare, for the whole village was agog over the New Year's Eve Ball. Most Yucatecan villages have dancing halls; Holboch had. It was a large palm-leaf-thatched open shed at the corner of the plaza, wood-floored. Round it were ranged wood benches; from the centre roof-pole hung two or three oil lamps, and the decorations were flags. Dancing began at about eight.
The American traveller Stephens was loud in his praises of Yucatecan dancing. Perhaps it has altered in the last sixty years. It certainly seemed to us the dullest performance we had ever witnessed. Those mechanical toys, metal trays upon which are fixed several couples of tin figures which, when wound up, go slowly round and round in a melancholy way on the same spot, give about the best idea of a Yucatecan dance. There is no life, no spirited movement, no gaiety in the entertainment. Perhaps this is really the fault of the orchestra. It is difficult even to speak of Yucatecan music without a shudder. It is curious that a people so devoted to dancing, even if it is only of the humming-top type, should have no music in them. They seem to be ignorant of air, tune, or time. Their dance music is one long droning chant, flat, stale, and unprofitable, absolutely maddening in its reiteration, reminiscent of childhood's jest about "the tune the cow died to." The band at Holboch consisted of a kettledrum and a concertina. There was no fixed orchestra; anybody who was handy beat the drum, and everybody in turn had a go at the concertina; each performer adding his little best to the musicless horror of the noise. There appeared to be no fixed step; some couples hopped round, some went round with a sliding slither, and others seemed to be walking round rapidly. As long as the music lasted the men's faces bore a look of concentrated earnestness, the girls' that of submissive boredom. When the music stopped, the girls were placed on the benches, and the men walked out into the plaza and stood staring at them. We were much interested in one performer, a young fellow of about twenty. We had seen him earlier in the day engaged in bathing in a pail, a method of ablution requiring much persistence. And now, in the most spotless of linen breeches and coloured cotton vest, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the evening's enjoyment. He danced as long as the drum beat, and then he put his partner upon the shelf, and came out into the plaza and mopped his forehead till the drum began again.
We bore with the scene for some hours, because we held a "watching brief" in the interests of the cruise of the "Esperanza"; for our "amiable smuggler" was very drunk, and we hoped, by keeping an eye on him, to prevent him from becoming drunker and passing into a comatose condition. He delivered himself into our hands, for he came up and invited us to dance with him, and as we were due to start soon after midnight we made this outrageous proposal an excuse for putting him in charge of the Jefe, who promised to see him into his hammock for a few hours' sleep before we wanted him. The second man was so far gone that there was no reasoning with him. We had to let him lie where he was in the plaza and trust to the night air to bring him round by the time we sailed. With the third sailor, who was sober, we took the boat round to where the deeper water allowed of her being ballasted and loaded.
By the time the boat was ready it was fast approaching midnight. The dance was over; the girls had left their shelves and gone home to their hammocks; the lamps were out; and a few belated revellers were straggling about or lying senseless on the sand, which glistened snow-white in the moonlight. We found our skipper in his hut. He had pulled himself together, and he came with us to find the first mate. The latter was in his hammock in a drunken sleep, and refused to answer to our repeated knockings. We were for starting without him; but the amiable smuggler said he had advanced him ten dollars and he had got to come. He evidently knew his man, for he called out some opprobrious words in Spanish. We did not catch what they were; but a well-trained ferret never made a rabbit bolt from his hole as quick as those choice epithets brought the toper from his hammock. The hut door burst open, and before the captain could realise he had overdone it, the fuddled Nicolas rushed at him and hit him full in the face. In a moment all was disorder. The wives of the combatants rushed out to act as seconds, and half a dozen neighbours tumbled from their hammocks and rushed over to see the battle. But a Yucatecan prize-fight under Queensberry rules did not form part of our programme, and we successfully intervened, seizing the struggling men, and held on to them till they had spluttered out the worst of their rage, when the storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun and they fell upon each other's necks, calling each other "bueno amigo" (good friend). Escorting them down to the boat and leaving them to get the sail up, we returned to our hut, shouldered our baggage, and carried it to the beach. As the New Year came in, we were thigh-deep in the tepid water, a pale eau-de-Nil in the moonlight, wading backwards and forwards to the "Esperanza." It was nearly two, however, before we got under way, and the dawn of the New Year's Day found us but some ten miles down the coast.
The shores we now explored were historic indeed. We were retracing the course of Cortes as he cruised round from the island of Cozumel, whither we were bound. But if they were historic, they were singularly uninteresting. The woods come down to within a few feet of the beach, woods which never deserve the title of forests and yet are so impenetrable that no one who has not tried to cut his way through would believe it. About midday we made a landing near to where it was said ruins existed, and cut our way through two miles of bush. Ruins we found, but they were of no moment, and if they were Indian they were certainly post-Conquest. It was a broiling hot day, and our eyes suffered from the sand-glare. On reaching the beach again, we were tempted to have a bathe, though this is risky work at any part of the coast of Yucatan, for there are more sharks to the square mile than there are probably in any other part of the world. But it was far too hot for us to be very prudent, and we had a delicious plunge, coming out none too soon though, for while we were putting on our shirts we saw Master Shark showing his fins a yard or two from where we had been revelling in the green water.
We made many landings, but they were quite disappointing in their results. Cape Catoche itself is a low spit of sand separated from the mainland by a shallow channel about a quarter of a mile wide. Here a light has been recently installed. The whole region for miles round is desolation. Just beyond the cape the coastline breaks into a large bay, an immense wooded oval of shallow water, guarded seaward by a natural breakwater of sand and entered by two narrow waterways, east and west. This great inlet, framed in thick woods, its sunlit, gently rippling surface dotted with beds of reeds and straggling water-flowers, is the haunt of the sea birds. As we stole into their solitude, vast flocks of ibis, of gulls, black duck, sandpipers, and the hideous brown pelicans rose and made off; while, fairest of all sights in the brilliant light, was a flight of flamingoes, a pink cloud passing overhead.
There can be little doubt that this bay was the scene of that first landing of Cortes on the American mainland which was destined so largely to shape the future of Central America. It was curious to land and wander in the desolate woods, the battle-ground of four centuries past, picturing to oneself the romance of it all. Further eastward we put in to examine some ruins which showed above the trees. They proved to be those of a Catholic church and monastery, probably eighteenth-century work. The church was full of bats, which fluttered down from the mildewed walls frightened at the unwonted intrusion. Here and there along the coast southward from the cape we found signs of ancient Indian settlements. The ruins were in no way majestic, but were probably relics of outlying fisher settlements, and only interesting because significant of the building zeal of the pre-Conquest Indians. This great sweep of coastline must have ever been what it is to-day—swampy and impassable; in no way inviting to the establishment of large cities such as Chichen and Uxmal, but used rather as a vast hunting ground by the tribes of the interior.
Even in typical tropic weather there is much discomfort in life in a three-ton boat. So far the weather had been perfect; and once round the cape, we got the full benefit of the trade-winds which blow here all the year round. As Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis writes:
"But now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more;
A constant trade wind will securely blow
And gently lay us on the spicy shore."
Our "spicy shore" was the fruitful island of Cozumel, of the fertile beauty of which we had heard such glowing accounts; but once round the cape, our troubles proved by no means over. After a few days the weather broke. The night was perfect. A full moon bathed the quiet sea and the wooded coasts in a wonderful silver light, and as we stared up into the sky from our bed of sand-ballast sacks in the bottom of the boat, it seemed as if the stars had never shone so brightly. But with the dawn we ran into the fringe of what is known in the Gulf of Mexico as a "norther"; and the weather ahead looked so dirty that we took refuge in a tiny islet called Isla Arena (Sand Island). It was an ideally lonely Robinson Crusoey spot. A few deserted huts marked it as the occasional home of passing fishermen. We swung our hammocks in that which had the most water-tight thatch, and then walked round the island with the guns in search of duck. In the centre was a touching little cemetery; a square of sand humbly marked off with sea-shells; the graves—six of them—each with a rudely fashioned wooden cross; and black spirit-bottles, which had once served as flower vases, stood around. It is a wild life these Yucatecan fishermen often lead, and as we stood bareheaded by this "Garden of Sleep," those haunting lines on Stevenson's Samoan tomb came to our minds: