[Footnote 2.4]: A gloss reads "mesa de piedra en cassa del rei."
[Footnote 2.5]: This is difficult to understand, as the early Maya peoples had recorded numbers running into the millions.
Chapter III
[Footnote 3.1]: The claim of the Portuguese to have visited and mapped Yucatan is not founded on historical fact. Dr. Roger Merriman of Harvard was so kind as to put at my disposal his historical information on the subject of early voyages to Yucatan. It is his unqualified opinion that the map reported on by Valentini, and discussed in the list of maps in Appendix III, is greatly misdated, being placed about twenty to thirty years too early.
[Footnote 3.2]: Yucatan, at this time, was thought to be an island. Grijalva named it Nuestra Señora de los Remedios. (Oviedo, 1851, vol. i, p. 508.) Soon after leaving Cozumel, Grijalva reached a small place called Lazaro, which figures on the map known as the Turin-Spanish of 1523-1525. See Dr. Stevenson's edition, 1903.
[Footnote 3.3]: Bernal Diaz (vol. iv, p. 284) says 100 crossbowmen and musketeers and 22 horses. Gomara (1826, vol. ii, p. 126) says 150 horses, 160 foot-soldiers, and 3000 Indians. Cogolludo (p. 44 ff.) says 130 cavalrymen, 120 musketeers, and 3000 Indians.
[Footnote 3.4]: Cyrus Thomas (1885, pp. 171-172) once tried to prove that Cortes visited Palenque. Apparently he thought that either Izancanac or the large town reached after that was Palenque. This belief was proved to be erroneous by Brinton, who said (1885 a) that Cortes never reached Palenque, but passed to the north of it. Maler (1901, pp. 105-106) also discusses this point.
[Footnote 3.5]: For a description of the modern Lacandones, see Tozzer, 1907.
[Footnote 3.6]: This refers to the horse of Cortes, Morzillo, which was wounded in the foot either during the deer hunt described above or while crossing the Mountain of Alabaster. Morzillo's injuries were so severe that he became a burden to the expedition, and Cortes left him behind with Canek, charging the latter to take good care of him. When Morzillo died, probably from lack of proper food, the Itzas made an image of him which they treated as an idol. In 1618 Padre Orbita, infuriated by this idol and the worship accorded it, shattered the image.
[Footnote 3.7]: I am at a loss to explain why Gomara heads his chapter "De como Canec quemo los Idolos." Canek, according to most accounts, did not actually burn the idols; he merely promised to do so.