[310] Chimalpopoca, MS., Brasseur de Bourbourg, Popol Vuh., p. lxxxviii; see also Memorias para la Historia del Antiguo, Reyno de Guatemala, por Franc. de Paula Garcia Pelaez (Guatemala, 1851). Pelaez states that Votan founded the ancient Culhuacan, now known as Palenque, in the year 3000 of the world and in the tenth century B. C.
[311] Brasseur de Bourbourg, Popol Vuh, p. lxxxx, on the authority of Ordoñez.
[312] Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. v, p. 159.
[313] Ordoñez, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Popol Vuh, p. lxxxvii.
[314] Constituciones Diocesanes del Obispado de Chiappas. Rome, 1702.
[315] Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. v, p. 160: “It is not altogether improbable that a genuine Maya document similar to the Manuscript Troano or Dresden Codex, preserved from early times, may have found a native interpreter at the time of the Conquest, and have escaped in its disguise of Spanish letters the destruction which overtook its companions.”
[316] “The memoir in his possession consists of five or six folios of common quarto paper, written in ordinary characters in the Tzendal language, an evident proof of its having been copied from the original in hieroglyphics, shortly after the Conquest. At the top of the first leaf, the two continents are painted in different colors, in two small squares, placed parallel to each other in the angles; the one representing Europe, Asia and Africa is marked with two large S’S upon the upper arms of two bars drawn from the opposite angles of each square, forming the point of union in the centre; that which indicates America has two S’S placed horizontally on the bars, but I am not certain whether upon the upper or lower bars, but I believe upon the latter. When speaking of the places he had visited on the old continent, he marks them on the margin of each chapter with an upright S and those of America with a horizontal S. Between these squares stands the title of his history: ‘Proof that I am Culebra (a Snake),’ which title he proves in the body of the work by saying that he is Culebra because he is Chivim.”—Cabrera, Teatro Critico Amer., pp. 33–4.
[317] Title of Ordoñez in brief: Historia de la Creation del Cielo y de la Tierra Conforme al Sistema de la Gentilidad Americana.
[318] See his Teatro Critico Americano, p. 32 et seq., in Rio’s Description of the Ruins of an American City. London, 1822, quarto.
[319] “Mais il y défigura complètement l’ouvrage d’Ordoñez qu’il no connaissait pas assez et auquel il ajouta des opinions extrêmement hasardées. D. Ramon se plaignit amèrement de ce plagiat et des fausses idées que Cabrera donnait de son travail, obtint contre lui un jugement, où le plagiaire fut condamné par le tribunal de l’audience royale de Guatémalà, le 30 Juin, 1794. Mais Cabrera, tout en pillant les idées du savant antiquaire, n’en rendait pas moins justice à son talent et à son merite.”—Brasseur de Bourbourg on Ordoñez MS. Cartas, p. 8.