"Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the fisherman, home from the sea;
The hunter home from the hill."
Here they rested, lulled by the eternal sigh of the ocean so long their home.
The weather had scarcely improved when towards dawn we made a start for Isla de Mujeres. Had we known what was ahead of us, we should have made Sand Island our home for yet another day, till the sea had had time to quiet down. In the deep gloom which heralded the approach of another day we tacked round Cayo Sucio (Dirty Point) and passed Rat and Pelican Keys, two miniature isles. The sea was rough and choppy, and a mile or so out a nasty squall came up and we hove to, taking in all sail, the little boat pitching and tossing like a walnut shell, while we crouched under mackintosh sheets to keep as dry as was possible. Thence, when the sky cleared, we had a straight run down the coast. The amiable smuggler had ominously talked of a via angusta (narrow way); but our Spanish was so limited that his explanations were lost on us, and his uneasiness, as he stared weatherwards, we took for the nervousness all Yucatecans show in any risk.
It was about an hour after dawn that away to our left—so far that it sounded like the last thunder-mutterings of a storm long past—we heard a low murmuring. We looked seaward, and the captain pointed to the horizon with the words "las rocas." Across the dreary waste of water, its night-grey yielding to a sickly green in the chill morning glare, it was at first hard to see anything. Then, as we stared, we saw at first a long, thin, black line, white-topped, starting leftwards some five miles off and running in till its end was lost in the rollers ahead. Evenly marked it seemed, like the black and white painting on a giant ship's hull. And then, in the minutes as we neared, the white became broken into cloudlets, showing up quick in succession like smoke of an engine above the edge of a railway cutting. And quickly the murmuring turned into a booming, like the hum of a great city's traffic heard from afar; and the booming into a low intense thunder. And as we passed into the tumbling waters, the even lines were gone and we saw an endless belt of black coral rock closing our whole horizon. The "Esperanza" was heading for the reef at seven knots. We ran to within half a mile; and the thunder of the Atlantic, as it broke upon the demon-shaped jags of coral, bursting in clouds of spray forty feet high, was like the dry roaring of wild beasts. The tiller went round, and we veered a point or two more into the wind; and then straight ahead we saw why the amiable smuggler had steered up so close. To our right a smaller line of reef, some two hundred yards long, bent out from the shore to meet the three-mile leftward curve. Between the shore and the coral was no safe way even for boats of three feet draught such as ours. Ahead lay the only way—between the deadly corals.
It was la via angusta, and to us landlubbers it looked like the gate of a water-hell; an ocean fiend's cauldron of bubbling, leaping grey water. As the two lines of rock closed in on us, the sea rolled down from the seaward reefs in great slate-coloured foamless rollers. From the level of the little boat they looked like moving hills. The wind was blowing fresh on the quarter, and the skipper had put the boat towards the bigger reef lest we should be blown clean on the smaller. There was not a dog's chance for us if we capsized, and an inchtwist wrong of the helm and we must. One second we sank low between rollers, looking down a lead-grey alley-way of water. The next we were flung up, light as an egg-shell, on the crest of a wave, balancing there long enough to measure with straining eyes the distance between us and the hell of coral. The next half-hour seemed the longest we had ever lived. It looked as if nothing but a miracle of seamanship could save the boat. We heard the captain mutter a prayer to the Virgin, and the sailors, their yellow faces now ashen-grey, crouched for'ad clinging to the shrouds, the spray soaking their thin cottons. When we ran once more into the open Atlantic, we cared not for the fiercer waves which charged us, breaking over the bows and drenching us, for we had faced what was worse than open sea. These reefs, the "graveyard of the Yucatan Channel," are the terror of the locality; and when, wet and numbed, we reached the picturesque little pueblo of Dolores in Isla de Mujeres three miles further on, the Yucatecan fishermen collected, amazed, on the beach to hear how an open boat had lived through the deadly passage on such a morning.
We had risked much to visit the island; but archæologically it was not worth it. Here it was that the Spaniards in 1517 got their very first sight of those stone buildings of Central America which were as much a marvel to them as they are to us to-day. The historians of the Conquest describe a temple of stone, surrounded by fruit trees and sweet-scented shrubs, and approached by well-laid steps. Within, the air was heavy with the smell of incense which burnt in stone and earthenware vessels before female idols clothed in cotton petticoats with the bosoms "decently covered." Before these images were well-ordered files of women-ministrants, who served in the temple. Hence Cordoba called the island Isla de Mujeres—Isle of Women. But all this old-time glory has disappeared. The only village edges with its whitewashed huts, their doors painted a light blue or green, the shallow semicircle of sand which forms the islet's only anchorage; behind this row of cottages the tiny cross-streets are almost knee-deep in its pale yellow glitter. Away southward stretches a barren waste, six miles long and never much more than a mile wide, of rock and sand, over which clambers a coarse-leafed sea-vine, a coarser thistly plant, with here and there a clump of fan-palms. Only at the extreme southern end on a rocky bluff stands a relic of the dead people. It is a solid-built structure about 18 feet square on the outside, and containing two rooms 14 feet by 6 each. There is no ornamentation or hieroglyphics on it, but outside, facing east, are two stone ledges, like plinths for statues, upon which, local rumour has it, once stood two gigantic statues of women. Near at hand is a small Spanish watch-tower, all to pieces, a contrast to the well-preserved Indian stone-work.
We intended making the island a base for further exploration of the east coast, and hired a hut which stood at the end of the village on a steep rock. The reefs had so completely shattered the nerves of our crew that they declared it impossible to proceed to Cozumel in the "Esperanza." Our belief in the proverbial halcyon calm of tropic seas had also been much shaken by our morning's experiences, and we were inclined to agree with the frightened sailors. So, paying them up to the next morning, we discharged them, determining to hire a larger boat for the rest of our cruise. But this was not the dénouement which the amiable smuggler hoped or wished, and he insolently declared that we must pay him for so many more days as it took him to return to the island of Holboch. When we refused, he muttered something about reporting us to the Jefe and disappeared. We thought no more about it, and busied ourselves in settling in to our new quarters. About half an hour later we were sitting in our hammocks polishing our top boots with soft soap, when a long scraggy-looking man arrived who declared himself to be a policeman. He certainly did not look like one, but he brought a message from the Jefe Politico that "los otros hombres" (the other men) were to appear before that functionary at two o'clock. This was altogether too much for our British blood. We had so far throughout our tour borne the Yucatecan fool as gladly as we could, but now our cup was running over. In an outburst of Spanish, utterly ungrammatical, but very much to the point, we consigned him and all Jefes to an even warmer place than Isla de Mujeres, and bade him return with all speed to his chief and tell that gentleman that we were not "the other men," but British subjects, bearing passports from the Federal Government; that nothing would induce us to appear at two or at any other hour, and that if the Jefe wanted to see us he would have to come to us, not we go to him. We were very angry, and the miserable Yucatecan creature backed out of our hut abashed.
We considered the incident closed, and continued polishing our boots. But about half an hour later, noticing a commotion at our hut door we looked out and, to our amazement, found a dense crowd assembled led by a fat Yucatecan, wearing a pith helmet. This was Señor El Jefe, and behind him, ranged in the order of their rank, were all the officials of the island. In the background stood the scraggy policeman, who certainly thought that we were now about to meet the due reward of our temerity in flouting the thunderbolts of this Caribbean island-Jove and to be hanged, drawn and quartered to "make a Yucatecan holiday." We invited the Jefe into the hut, and in a few sentences explained that we intended no personal affront to him, seeing that until that moment we had never had the pleasure of clapping eyes on him. But that the insolence of the message was such as, in Dogberry's words, was "most tolerable and not to be endured"; and that we therefore could not apologise for our refusal to obey it. The Jefe, as we afterwards learnt, was a thorough old rogue, but he had a fund of common sense. In a few minutes we had explained to him that the amiable smuggler had already been paid his full wages and we were shaking hands all round, the Jefe assuring us that the message had been misdelivered: that he had used the word supplica (supplicates), not manda (demands), in citing us to his court. It was delightful to watch the evident chagrin of the policeman and the barefooted crowd who had hoped to see "los Ingleses" haul down their colours.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Mecate—a Mexican square measure equal to about one-tenth of an acre.