With the dawn, after cocoa and biscuits, we sailed down the coast once more towards San José de Bega, near where it was rumoured there was a ruined cenote with remarkable carved figures. San José is the headquarters of a Mexican woodcutting company which has a paper concession of the whole east coast from Cape Catoche to Vijia. We say "paper concession" deliberately, for these Mexican trespassers on the independent Indian territory live in a state of siege, and of their nominal holding of about 4,000 square miles the administrator of the Company told us that his chicleros (chicle-cutters) were only able to work fifteen square miles just round the settlement. Thither from the rickety little pier we travelled up by mule-drawn trolley car on the plantation railway, the seats empty sugar-boxes, through swamps haunted by alligators. As at La Compañía Agricola, the administrator and the chief officials were Spanish Cubans, the "hands" all Mexicans. A dusty, dirty garbage-littered street of boarded shanties; in the midst the stuccoed administrative building. At one end a palisaded corral for the mules; at the other a desolate square of clearing, which looked as if it had never known any other use save its apparently present one of a gigantic rubbish-shoot, surrounded by wood cabins built up a foot or two from the ground. This was San José, and here we were received with a courtesy as kindly as that we had experienced at La Compañía Agricola. This Mexican company is known as La Compañía Colonisidora, and we shall have something to say directly about its finances in the sketch we are going to give of the war of extermination in progress hereabouts. The officials knew nothing about ruins, and cared less; but they were politely tolerant of our enthusiasm, and the administrator kindly dispatched a cowboy, dressed in leather from head to foot and armed with rifle, revolver and machete, a bandolier of cartridges slung round him, to a distant part of the estate to fetch a chiclero who could act as guide. Meantime we sat down to breakfast with loaded Winchester rifles leaning against the wall behind us, and every man with a revolver belted on him. They take their life of siege very easily; the Company owns a tramp steamer which comes round from Vera Cruz once a month with provisions; and after the meal the administrator showed us a stone fort which he had had erected in case of a general attack.
As it was now midday and no start could be made for the ruins till next morning at dawn, he proposed we should go out peccary shooting, and we sent down to the boat for our guns. Our hosts donned the most wonderful Mexican shooting-boots reaching almost to their waists, decorated with tassels of string. They had some half a dozen fine boarhounds, one of the dogs, a redoubtable hunter, bearing many a scar from duels with jaguars and the wild pig, the male of which latter, always heavily tusked, often accounts for two or three dogs before he is bagged. It was a picturesque afternoon we spent in the woods. The five Spaniards were keen sportsmen, if a trifle reckless in the angles at which they held their guns. The beating through the dense undergrowth was something of a "follow-my-leader," and we spent most of the time looking down their barrels, realistically literal personifications of "the man behind the gun."
The peccary were not at home, but one of the party bagged a superb specimen of the hoco, as large as the largest gobbler turkey, with crested head, its feathers all of gold and bronze. While we were supping the leather-clad vaquero returned with the Mexican workman who was to act as guide, and who, under severe cross-examination, seemed to sustain the reputation of the rumoured cenote. So it was arranged that at dawn a whole party of us should make a day of it, the administrator prettily assuming a positive archæological zeal (alas! he will never do so again) and giving generous orders for the preparation of the picnic baskets.
It is sad to reflect that man's pleasure is so largely dependent upon untimely deaths in the animal world, and we fear that the arranging for our archæological woodland junketings of the morrow was answerable for a porcine tragedy which was enacted while we took our coffee. The stone-floored room in which we supped opened out into the kitchen yard, and, in the friendly way to which we had now become quite accustomed, chickens, turkeys, and pigs ran through the room at intervals; one of the latter affording the dogs quite a boar-hunt between our legs and those of the chairs. We had dined both wisely and well, and were contentedly smoking the strong Mexican cigarettes when piercing shriek after shriek rent the night air. A poor pig was going the way of all flesh at the hands of the Mexican cook, not at a respectful distance from our Lucullus-like feast but actually at the door with its head in a pail; and its piteous cries, ending in a last gurgle as the knife did its brutal work, like the writing on the wall of the banqueting hall of Belshazzar, shook our nerves.
We had some reason to think on the morrow of poor piggy "butchered to make an archæologists' holiday," for we were destined to a fiasco as complete, to a disappointment as bitter, as any in our tour, and there were many. While it was still dark, the finest mules in the corral were saddled and brought round. Mexican cowboys, in all the glory of leather jerkins, hung wicker baskets, bursting full of cold meat and fruits, of flasks of cognac and flagons of red wine, over their saddlebows. The administrator's zeal had not evaporated with the night, and he appeared, booted and spurred, to preside over the coffee which was served to us just as the light was beginning to do successful battle with the slate-grey of the before-dawn sky. It was a most imposing cavalcade which started off a little later. All the shanties emptied their human contents among the rubbish on the clearing to give us a fitting send-off. First, in true military fashion, there were the Mexican guides, as scouts, on foot and mounted. Next came the administrator, commanding-in-chief, then came the archæological heroes of the occasion (not, alas! long to be heroes); and then some eight or ten sleek mules, in leather and braided string trappings, bearing Mexicans and Cubans eager for the cenote.
Everything was sunshiny at first. The forest was exquisite in the early morning sunlight. And then ... after a few miles a "change came o'er the spirit of our dreams." Long before the hour came for broaching those flagons of wine and sampling the contents of those ample baskets, "the travellers had returned" to San José, a very dispirited train of men and mules. The ruins were the fullest-grown, most phenomenally robust type of archæological failure possible. The cenote was a small surface cave with no suspicion of carvings or figures; the building was a post-Conquest erection of absolutely no merit. Our humiliation was complete. It was really quite a good thing that we were not alone with that guide, or we might have been sorely tempted to avenge with our revolvers the wrongs of hoodwinked archæology. With exquisite courtesy, the administrator waded into the cenote cave in his eagerness to "save our faces" and discover those obstinately invisible figures. But it was all no good. It was obvious, as he turned his mule's head San José-wards, he thought us fools, Probably, with Mr. Pickwick, he would have gone further and declared us impostors. The pig was avenged!
Twenty miles southward from San José is the Company's port, half a dozen huts and a jetty where provisions are landed, and such slender export of chicle, as it is possible to make from the limited area of forest the Indians permit the chicleros to work, is loaded. This is Puerto Morelos, and, as we were now in the district where war is—despite all official contradictions—actually in progress, it will be well here to tell briefly the story of perhaps the most iniquitous attempt at race extermination in modern times.
The Indians of the east coast have ever been independent. There is no doubt about that. Neither the old Spanish nor the modern Mexicans have ever conquered them; and when in 1872 some Mayan raidings on British Honduras boundaries brought a protest from England, Mexico's answer was equivalent to "These Indians are independent. Deal with them direct as with a separate State." Well, England did. She made an agreement with the chiefs which was amicably abided by. For years past these Indians, though bitterly resenting the presence of any white man on their lands, have been friendly to the British authorities, and have proved themselves a peaceful, self-supporting, industrious people who only asked to be left alone. They hate the Mexicans and Yucatecans, and with sound reason; and troubles occurred whenever there was a collision between the two. In 1893 the trading of the Mayans with the British attracted the jealous attention of Mexico. This jealousy took the form of a protest against the alleged selling of arms and ammunition by English traders in Orange Walk (second biggest town in Honduras) to the Indians. But though England promised to do all she could, matters did not improve; and when Mexico discovered that the Indians were turning the mahogany, logwood, and chicle in their territory to profit, she sought an excuse for starting the war which has now lasted for eight years.
The Mexican Government attempted to stop the Mayans from dealing in their own wood; and, when this failed, they tried to levy a tax on all lumber and goods going out of the Territory. The Indians flatly refused to pay, and when the Mexicans feebly urged that, as inhabitants of a geographical portion of Mexico, the Mayans should pay taxes and thus support the Federal Army and Navy, the latter said in effect, "We don't want your forces to protect us. If our land is threatened, every man and boy of us is ready to fight. We aren't doing you any harm: we simply ask to be left alone."