During my brief sojourn in Merida I was generally occupied during the day in observing the habits of the Indians who came into the town from the adjacent country. In the evenings, within the convent walls where, for many years, the nuns had led their quiet and secluded lives, I listened to the plans of my worthy and eager landlord for converting a building, constructed for the purposes of solitude and prayer, into a busy and prosperous inn. I frequently thought of the past of this land. The monastic institutions of an unknown race of Indians had flourished and had been destroyed, and were succeeded by the churches and convents established by an enthusiastic race of devoted missionaries who came across the Atlantic to spread their faith in the New World. Many changes had happened, the old order of things had passed away. The work of the Spanish priests for the education and conversion of the Indians, maintained for centuries with such zeal and self-sacrifice, was destined to become useless, and in their turn the monasteries of the Spaniards are doomed to fall into the same condition of ruin as the temples and religious structures of the Indians.
One evening the landlord (Miguel Yturran) told me that a brig had arrived and was at anchor off the port of Sisal, and was going to sail for Cuba on the afternoon of the next day. I accordingly arranged to leave on the following morning. A good level road led to the northern coast, the distance was about thirty-eight miles. We changed mules at a village called Junucuma, and reached Sisal before nine in the morning. We had left Merida at daybreak and travelled at an average speed exceeding twelve miles an hour. In the offing we saw the brig with her sails loosed, preparing for sea.
Upon getting on board I was told that she was the Aguinaga, belonging to the port of San Sebastian. She was manned by a crew of Basques. Shortly before weighing our anchor, I was leaning over the port side of the vessel looking at the long, low, line of coast stretching far away towards the east, when my attention was called to an animated conversation that was taking place between the Basques and a boat’s-crew of Indians who had come alongside, bringing provisions and fruit. It was surprising to hear a conversation carried on between men of races so absolutely distinct, and I asked the skipper, who was standing near me, how this power of communicating ideas between his crew and these Yucatan Indians had been established.
He said that he did not know, but as a matter of fact, his men, speaking Basque, were able to make themselves understood by the Indians living on these coasts, especially in the regions around Tabasco beyond Carmen and the bay of Terminos.
In the afternoon we left Sisal and were employed in beating against a fresh N.E. wind, usually standing in towards the coast during the day and tacking out to sea at night. It was not until the sixth day that we weathered the parallel of Cape Catoche, the extreme eastern point of Yucatan, and it was with no slight satisfaction that, after having been nine tedious days at sea, I heard that Cuba was in sight. The confinement on board the brig had been extremely irksome, and had only been made tolerable by the novelty of being thrown amongst a race of men that I had never met before and whose language was unintelligible.
These Basques were excellent sailors, quick and handy at their work aloft or on deck, and although incessantly employed, were willing and obedient. My messmates in the cabin consisted of the skipper, the boatswain and the mate, and a fellow passenger who had been for the greater part of his life a Honduras pilot. There was also a second class passenger who usually lived under the forecastle. This man was a wanderer upon the earth; an exile from his own land who, in the course of his travels, had seen much of men and manners. He told me that he was a Frenchman and had been drawn for the conscription, but he managed to evade his duty and had got away from France, consequently he was not able to return to his home as he was liable to be punished. He had managed to subsist by following various trades and he was about to try his fortune in one of the islands.
Upon approaching Havannah we at last got a fair wind and were able to find an obscure berth amongst the merchant shipping without difficulty.[96] After leaving the brig and her Basque crew I proceeded across the Gulf to Florida. Amongst the various places that I visited was Tampa, situated at the head of a bay, near the spot where Hernando de Soto landed in 1539 and began the conquest of that part of America.
About one hundred miles to the north of Tampa are numerous sand islets. Upon one of these was situated the old settlement of Cedar Keys. I was fortunate in meeting there a good seaman and enthusiastic antiquary named Clarke, who had made his home at that place. He was well acquainted with the various channels and bays of the coast, and in consequence of the interest that he felt in all that related to the customs of the Indian tribes, had gathered together a store of information that was exceedingly curious. He had also made discoveries respecting the haunts of the buccaneers, and knew of stories about hidden treasure. Fragments of old vessels that were supposed to have belonged to the pirates had been found, and clearings in the forest had been noticed, where it is supposed they formed their camps when the crews were landed. This part of the Florida coast with its tortuous channels and land-locked bays is precisely the position that buccaneers would have chosen for careening their vessels and for all purposes that required concealment after their raids upon the Spaniards.
Upon one of the islands near the main-land there was an ancient kitchen midden or shell mound of unusual size. We found that it extended along the beach for eight hundred yards. It averaged eighty yards in width and was forty feet high. It was composed principally of large oyster shells, but there were also the shells of clam fish and numerous smaller shells. The mound throughout its length presented on its face a series of alternate layers of earth, about half-an-inch thick. The thickness of these intervening deposits of shells was greater than at Damariscotta in Maine, from which fact it may be inferred that the tribes who came here were more numerous, or that they were capable of extraordinary powers of consuming oysters. Upon cutting away portions of the outer slope of the mound, we found many fish bones and quantities of fragments of broken pottery.
Not far from the shell mound was an ancient Indian burial place. Captain Clarke had made excavations into it, and amongst the accumulation of bones he had found some flint arrow heads and a few rude stone axes. I examined these and noticed that they were similar to those that had been found in several of the burial mounds of the Iroquois. As I wished to see this mound for the purpose of ascertaining certain points respecting the methods of burial adopted by the Florida Indians, Captain Clarke proposed that we should make an examination of it.