The American Egypt Part 8

This picuda, full-grown specimens of which weigh their fifteen or twenty pounds, makes exciting fishing. There is no science about it, for he is a regular sea glutton, and with a fresh fish (the picuda insists on this: he is no refuse-eater) as bait on a string quite ropelike in its thickness you are almost certain to hook one just about here. The monster comes on board with a regular hullabaloo, flapping and leaping like a veritable tarpon and inflicting ugly bites if you give him the chance. The sailors kill him by hitting him over the head with a wooden mallet; but this weapon proved ineffective in the hands of the lad Dolores, who, apparently in the hope of hastening the fish's escape from his sufferings, pressed his two brown fingers into the creature's eye-sockets. We were ashamed of the cruelty of the action, and motioned to him to stop. But Yucatecans have no humanity, and the boy, his handsome face lit up with a bewitching smile, went on gouging out the fish's eyes.

We had a shot or two at an alligator and bagged a few birds as we sailed out of this creek into a wide stretch of water, its thickly wooded sh.o.r.es making it look like an English lake. Towards evening we ran into another channel, and there at an inlet, tree-shrouded, we ran the boat into the boggy bank. The only inhabitant of the island is an old Indian, a regular Mayan Robinson Crusoe, nearly blind through a splinter of wood flying up into his face while he was chopping. We were greeted by the barking of some half a dozen dogs which came bounding down from the hut, followed by their master who could only just distinguish night from day, and yet made his way to the water edge with extraordinary confidence. He welcomed us with true Mayan hospitality, and in a little time we were dining like princes off roasted picuda, biscuit and rice, washed down with Cadbury's cocoa. There was one drawback to our new quarters: the mosquitoes were in possession.

Cancun is a sixteen-mile stretch, mostly dense bush; at the northern end one of the artificial mounds, examples of which we examined higher up the coast by Cape Catoche. Our old Mayan host was called Patricio Pat, quite probably a descendant of the cacique Naum Pat with whom, it will be remembered, the Spaniards made such friends on their first visits to Cozumel. He had two huts in a clearing near the water edge, surrounded by a grove of cocoa palms for the fruit of which a dory came periodically from the other islands. There was a certain distinction about the old man's face as he crouched in front of the fire on the earth floor of his hut and held his lean brown hands out to where he could half see the red flame. He had queer stories to tell of haunted ruins in the bush here; of how he had heard his name called several times, and c.o.c.ks crowing and all the other noises of a village; and how, long ago, a Yucatecan fisherman, wantonly breaking up a stone that had fallen from an Indian palace front, had been struck from behind by an unseen foe, and after hours of unconsciousness had crawled to the sea beach and for weeks had been on the point of death. It was all very quaint, and the old man's droning voice and his clearcut, wizened, hairless face in the glare of the fire made just such a figure as must have crouched round the fires when Naum Pat was lord hereabouts and the caravels of Spain had yet to be sighted from the wooded sh.o.r.es. We early tumbled into our hammocks, but long after, in the flickering light of the fire, Robinson Crusoe squatted in front of a small stool on which stood an earthenware pot, into which he laboriously sc.r.a.ped and squeezed with a broken fragment of cocoanut sh.e.l.l the meat of a pile of cocoanuts from which he was thus extracting the oil.

We were up at dawn hoping to steal a march on the enemy; but even at that early hour the insect curses of the tropics had taken down the shutters and started business. While we breakfasted, Crusoe squatted on his haunches in true Mayan fashion, meditatively rubbing his thin hands and giving us the best directions he could for our coming hunt in the bush. By seven, accompanied by Lucio and Pedro, we were off. As we dived into the woodlands at the back of the hut, the old fellow, machete on shoulder, in sack shift and patched striped cotton trousers, surrounded by a pack of leaping, barking dogs, started for the eastern sh.o.r.e, where he expected a dory to fetch a cargo of cocoanuts.

Our road led up a winding path, where the mosquitoes were "plentiful and strong on the wing," to the crest of the island, which was divided into the eastern side, all sand and low heather-like plant, sea-thistle and stunted cactus; and the western, all jungly woods. For some miles we had to keep to the eastward. The sand was soft and deep, and the roots of the plants sprawling around gave one no foothold. In antic.i.p.ation of the difficulty of changing even small paper money in the island _pueblos_, we had filled a money-belt with two hundred Mexican dollars (20), each in size nearly as big as an English five-shilling piece. This belt had always, so far, been a bit of a white elephant; to-day it was a positive cross. We realised for the first time what is described so eloquently as "the burden of wealth"; and before we had staggered and floundered our first mile in that relentlessly yielding sand we both, as our turn came to carry it, cursed a civilisation which had created the necessity of bullion and fervently wished we had not a copper in the world.

Following Crusoe's suggestion, we started cutting into the woods at a point where some cocoa palms stood. Though we thus lost the sand we found the mosquitoes; and n.o.body but the keenest of ruin-hunters would have stood the earthly h.e.l.l through which we pa.s.sed for the next hour.

In a wood too high and thick to admit air, but too low to shade you from the scorching sun; with every second bush bearing thorns an inch long; your legs entangled in bines and creepers so stout that once caught no struggles, however heroic, would free you; too hot to wear your flannel shirt-sleeves down, and too pestilential with mosquitoes for you to dare expose an inch more skin than was necessary; bathed in sweat, stumbling, stooping, creeping, leaping, over, under, in and out; cutting your way foot by foot,--you need the true explorer's zeal not to sit down and give it up. But we had not come six thousand miles to give it up; and after we had made two false detours we "struck" a ruin which well rewarded us for our sufferings.

Deep in the thickest bush, the trees around shrouding them with a curtain of speckled green, stood a group of buildings upon which we were probably the first white men to look, as there is no record of a Spanish landing in Cancun. At such a moment the most matter-of-fact being must yield to a certain feeling of solemnity. You are gripped by the romance of the quest after a vanished civilisation. But in Cancun at least there are winged fiends who serve as a very practical reminder that you cannot afford to day-dream but must get to work at once. While our men lit a palm-leaf fire to keep the mosquitoes at bay, we cut through the bush to see how many buildings there were and where to begin. There were four, and the first we tackled was an oblong building, 26 feet by 10, erected on a platform built up some 4 feet from the ground-level, making a terrace all round varying in width from 12 to 16 feet. On the west were two small doorways, and on the east three. These were so small that it was necessary to crawl through. Digging down, however, we found under a foot of earth the true flooring. This was a cement of lime and sand, and was two and a half inches thick over the entire floor. The interior of the building was in the same style as those of the mainland, having what is known as the Mayan arch, running up almost to a point, the rough corners of the stones standing out like steps inverted, a slab being laid across the two walls, thus making a narrow ceiling. The outside walls were built up to the same level as the pointed roof, and the s.p.a.ce between was filled with rubble, making a flat roof now entirely overgrown with cactus and trees. Above the centre door was a gap where the wall had fallen and where once stood what must have been more than a life-sized figure. On the platform below we found the head and shoulders, a fine piece of carving: legs, body and arms were smashed almost past recognition, and the feathered headdress had entirely disappeared. The head and bust was so heavy that it took the four of us to carry it a few yards and set it against the pyramidal mound near by where we could photograph it, and where it could be for the future out of the line of fire of falling stone.

We next visited the pyramid. It was approached by steps, but the temple which once crowned it had fallen and was a ma.s.s of stones, none of them apparently carved. But the most extraordinary ruins were what had evidently been two pillared halls standing about fifty yards apart. That on the south was the largest, and stood on a stone platform 90 feet long and 33 feet wide. The building itself measured 60 feet by 17 feet, and in two rows down the centre, ten in each row, were immense pillars, many monolithic and some as much as 8-1/2 feet high. These had originally supported the roof, now fallen and making a rooting place for trees and undergrowth which covered the whole platform. Around the platform on the ground-level was a paved walk, 16 feet wide, now buried under the fallen walls. The building on the north was no better preserved. It was exactly the same except that it had three rows of pillars running the length of the building, in their broken state looking like grey-barked trees severed by an axe. When newly erected these twin pillared halls must have been really magnificent. The architecture of all the buildings was rougher but more solid than that of those of the mainland. A noticeable feature, which we remarked again in Cozumel, was the prevalence of the monolithic pillar, which we found nowhere on the mainland among the richly decorated ruins such as Chichen, Labna and Sayil, where the pillar, almost always carved in relief, is square and built in sections a foot or two high. Of mural ornamentation there was no sign; and the general appearance of these Cancun ruins showed cruder workmanship than the rich facade work and carvings of Chichen and Palenque.

On our way back to the sh.o.r.e we discovered a small group of ruins, a mound and two or three houses, in hopeless decay. The isolated position of the island and its difficulty of approach perhaps explain the fact that no Spanish landing in the sixteenth century is recorded. Thus time and time alone has been the enemy of this city. Shattered as they were by the ravages of time, these Cancun buildings suggest--nay, they demand as their only explanation--a mult.i.tudinous population. The mere erection of the pillared halls by hand labour must have been a colossal task, and how the monoliths, many twice the height of the average Indian, were so perfectly hewn without metal tools seems almost a miracle. Cancun is a limestone island, and there is no doubt that the stones were quarried somewhere on its surface, though we were unable to find a suggestion of a quarry anywhere for miles around.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF CANCUN RUINS.]

At the extreme southern end of Cancun, whither we now sailed, we discovered another small ruin of no great interest, but further suggesting the once dense population of the island. Here, too, was a fisher-hut, four poles stuck in the sand with two cross-poles covered with palm-leaf for roof. Round this Cancun point, known as Nisuc, are turtle in plenty: both the green turtle (_Chelonia midas_), beloved of aldermen, and the hawk-billed turtle, the caret (_Eretmochelys imbricata_), which provides the commercial tortoise-sh.e.l.l. It is this latter which the Yucatecan fishermen chiefly hunt, for they can get as much as eight dollars a pound for the sh.e.l.l. For the flesh of the turtle they have no taste; an example of the truth of the saying that what we have we never value. The beaches of these Caribbean isles, around the fisher settlements, are often littered with the rotting carcases of turtle, spectacles of wilful waste sufficient to break the stoutest aldermanic heart. The preparation of turtle soup demands a culinary artist, and no Yucatecan is this. Their kitchen methods are ever those of the sloven cook who throws meat into a pot anyhow. But they begin to learn that there are people who prize the flesh of turtle, and a certain trade is done in the green reptilian with the captains of American trading schooners which come across the Gulf from Florida and the Eastern States. Thus a feature of the villages are the turtle "crawls,"

enclosures built some few yards out from the water edge, made of stakes driven in in the form of a small square bound together by lianas. Here the turtles swim about until they are wanted. At the "crawl" in Isla de Mujeres there were some two dozen, many of them monsters weighing four hundred pounds or more.

At this hut on Nisuc Point we met two young Yucatecan fishermen, handsome fellows in spotless cottons, their feet sandalled. They, too, were from Mujeres and they joined us in our evening meal, which we ate in picnic fashion at the water edge. But the mosquitoes were also feeding, so at sunset we put out into mid-stream to avoid their pressing attentions, and fished for picuda till dark. These Yucatecans are quite Arab-like in the simplicity of their sleeping habits, and it was quaint to watch at sundown the five men wrap themselves, head and all, in their coloured blankets, as if they were going to send themselves by parcels post, and fall asleep in little packets all over the fore deck. All night they sleep in the same att.i.tude in which they lie down, a dreamless sleep like that of a cat on a sunny window-ledge. And it is a good thing they do, for the few inches of gunwale would not save them from a ducking if they twisted a hand's breadth.

With the dawn, after cocoa and biscuits, we sailed down the coast once more towards San Jose de Bega, near where it was rumoured there was a ruined cenote with remarkable carved figures. San Jose is the headquarters of a Mexican wood-cutting company which has a paper concession of the whole east coast from Cape Catoche to Vijia. We say "paper concession" deliberately, for these Mexican trespa.s.sers 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 Compania 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 Jose, and here we were received with a courtesy as kindly as that we had experienced at La Compania Agricola.

This Mexican company is known as La Compania 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 ta.s.sels 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 a.s.suming a positive archaeological 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 archaeological 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 archaeologists' 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 archaeological 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 Jose, a very dispirited train of men and mules. The ruins were the fullest-grown, most phenomenally robust type of archaeological 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 archaeology. 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 Jose-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 Jose 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."

The Mexicans then played another card. They proclaimed their absolute authority over Eastern Yucatan, and granted concessions of the wood-cutting lands to Mexicans. Such proclamation was in direct breach of the Treaty rights of the Indians, and in contradiction of their own deliberate statement to the British Government that these Indians were independent. It was a Machiavellian scheme, and succeeded. The Indians naturally resented the companies' trespa.s.s, and, after due warnings, killed the trespa.s.sers. This was just what Mexico expected, and wanted.

Talking blather about unprovoked outrages, cannibals, and a menace of savages to the Republic, she started a war of extermination. From the first it was as cowardly a war as it is now. Troops were sent before dawn to surprise defenceless villages. Men, women, and children were butchered as they slept. In one case, that of Chansenote, a settlement of many hundreds was so successfully wiped out that when we visited the district the inhabitants numbered about thirty. To the south of the Peninsula the same policy has been pursued. The Indians have been ruthlessly ma.s.sacred, whenever a cowardly opportunity offered. The Mexican troops have invariably got the worst of it in such open fighting as the country permits.[5] Their actual invasions of the Indian strongholds have always resulted in their withdrawal without the slightest permanent success. The Indians are now concentrated at Tuloom, on the mainland opposite the island of Cozumel. Three times the Mexicans have taken this place, and three times have been obliged to evacuate it.

The position is a curious one. Scarcely any one probably in Mexico, even including the members of the Cabinet, knows the truth except President Diaz. The general who has had the conduct of the war throughout is an octogenarian, Ignacio Bravo, a ruthless, bloodthirsty old soldier who rejoices in the Gilbertian t.i.tle of "Inspector-General of Primary Instruction." He is an old comrade-in-arms of Diaz, and he has probably his orders, though it is said that the President is most anxious not to have the Indians killed. If you ask officials, they tell you the war is long ago over; and when you ask them how they know, they say, "Why, Bravo says so!" It is very much indeed to Bravo's interest to say so. He has made the Territory of Quintana Roo, as Eastern Yucatan has been called since the war started, his pocket property. He has ama.s.sed there since he took over the command a fortune of many millions of dollars, and his methods can be guessed at from his own cynical confession that he is "the sleeping partner of every merchant in the Territory." For him everything is subordinated to s. d. A slight but very significant instance of this was his reception of a proposal by an archaeologist that he should give his permission for the blowing up of old ruined Spanish churches in the Rio Hondu district. The request was dictated by the hope that in the foundations might be found, buried by the Franciscans, some ancient writings of the Mayans which would a.s.sist in the deciphering of the hieroglyphics. The General gave the characteristic answer that he would permit the demolition of the churches on the understanding that the "finds" were sold and he got half. Utterly unscrupulous, venal and self-seeking, the last thing Ignacio Bravo desires is any direct fighting which might lead to unfortunate defeats and eye-openers for the Mexican people. Under his able management the war has been whittled down to the occasional hanging of an Indian driven by starvation to surrender, or the "potting" of them in the bush. From Cape Catoche to Tuloom, he has no more authority than the man in the moon. We can give a good proof of this. While we were there he received a warning from the Indians that on the 16th of January they would attack and burn the chicle woods around Puerto Morelos. What did Bravo do? He feebly sends up a message to Puerto Morelos saying "The Indians will probably attack you on the 16th." As a matter of fact the Indians came that night, fired the woods, and we ourselves saw them burning for two nights. No! Bravo has given it up. He shirks all open fighting, and in his lifetime at least the subjection of the Indians will never be an accomplished fact.

He skunks at Bacalar or Santa Cruz in the south, or, surrounded by a battalion of troops, gallops from Bacalar to Peto and travels thence by rail to Merida.

To this method of campaigning is due the disastrous state of the Territory, through a part of which we pa.s.sed. The Mexican Government, presumably for economy's sake, sends the criminals from the Mexican gaols to fight the Indians. While we were in the islands a shipload of eighty of the worst specimens of half-bred Spanish gaol-birds pa.s.sed on their way in a Government transport to Bravo's headquarters. Many of these men desert, and the forests around are infested thus with fellows who will murder you for a dollar. With these Mexican cut-throats come gangs of women, the most degraded and miserable manufactures of Mexican debauchery. The conditions of life in the barracks at Santa Cruz and Ascension Bay are such as literally defy description. The barracks are mere filthy sheds; the half-starved soldiers, their toes rotting off from jigger fleas, their skins foul with disease and vermin, and their miserable women companions, some dying of malaria or venereal disease, some far advanced in pregnancy, some mere girls not far in their 'teens, sleeping on sloping boarded benches all huddled together. There are no attempts at sanitary arrangements, and the details of the lives of these wretched men and women are really unfit for publication. Such men are not worthy of the name of troops; but they serve the Mexican purpose of hired slaughtermen in the Indian shambles which Mexico has created in Yucatan.

Starvation and starvation alone will bring about the absolute subjection of the Indians of the east coast. The Federal Government has been lavish with its concessions; but they are not worth the printer's ink expended on their gazetting in the official newspapers of Mexico City. One land company has smashed, and La Compania Colonisidora is living simply on credit. So large a sum as 400,000 dollars has, it is said, been advanced by the National Bank of Mexico to keep it going. The deduction from this is obvious. The Government, having made worthless concessions, must take steps to hoodwink the shareholders by squandering the revenues. As we have said, we have it on the authority of the officials on the spot that out of the 4,000 square miles of their concession, they were at the time of our visit working but 15 square miles, and there was little hope of materially increasing this profitable area. The "war" is now as far as possible restricted to the occasional "potting" of an Indian and the burning of his _milpas_ or maize-fields. In the extreme north-east, as we have stated in Chapter VII., the Indians have for the time being a.s.serted their independence and are left in peace. The Mexican Government have no effective control of Eastern Yucatan, and they can never have save by a policy of merciless extermination unworthy of a Government which calls itself civilised.

And while this ruthless extermination of a n.o.ble race is being enacted in the extreme east of the Mexican territories, General Diaz's Government is disgracing itself by its cruel treatment of the Yaquis, a tribe of brave Indians in the State of Sonora. As lending complete corroboration to the story of horrors we have related, we think it worth while to quote the long and admirable account of this infamous campaign from a recent issue of a United States newspaper. It runs:

"Americans in Mexico have made a formal protest to President Diaz against the wholesale ma.s.sacre of Yaqui Indians. They back this protest with affidavits a.s.serting that shiploads of the unfortunate Indians, men, women and children, who are supposed to be deported are actually dumped into the sea as a means of riddance. In the present age of much-vaunted civilisation this seems incredible, but there is corroboration. Senor Rapael de Zayas Enrigues, a well-informed resident of Mexico, tells a story that bears the stamp of straightforward truth, and it is well worth perusal. It is evident he has deep feelings on this subject, for he exclaims: 'Poor Yaquis! poor race of heroes!'

"On the far north-west of the Mexican Republic is the State of Sonora; in the extreme south-east is the peninsula of Yucatan. There still exist in Yucatan the diminishing remnants of the most civilised nation of the pre-Columbian epoch of our continent. They are the Mayans, who for more than half a century have been forced to take up arms to defend themselves against the tyranny of the whites. In Sonora, in the small region lying between the Ihayo and Yaqui rivers, exists another race of Indians, the Yaquis, who have not builded magnificent monuments as have the Mayas, but who are intelligent, industrious, faithful, vigorous, and courageous.

"The Yaquis had always lived peacefully and submitted to the Mexican authorities, but without fusing with the whites. They conserved all their racial characteristics under the direct leadership of their own caciques. Both races, the Mayans and the Yaquis, are distinguished by their insuperable love for the small region they call fatherland, which has been from very ancient times their own, which they have defended against the invasion of other tribes and against the whites, to whom at last they submitted, retaining, however, always possession of the land.

The Yaquis are a strong, useful, and industrious race. They furnish nearly all the 'peones' or land workers to the farmers of Sonora and Sinaloa. After the harvest these peones returned to their land and devoted the rest of the year to the cultivation of their own soil.

"The Yaqui region is favourably situated, well irrigated, and the soil is extremely fruitful. The white men coveted the region and tried to despoil the Yaquis of what they had owned for centuries. The red men naturally became angry, enraged, and finally they rose, not in rebellion, but to defend and safeguard their homes, property, and families. Thus the origin of the Yaquis' struggle--a real struggle for life--was a despoliation perpetrated by the white people.

"A few years ago President Diaz wanted to put an end to the long warfare, and he accomplished his purpose. A pact was signed with the Yaqui chiefs by which their properties were returned to them, with the guarantee that they should never more be molested or deported. Peace was re-established; but it was of short duration, being more a truce than a permanent peace, and it was so not because the Yaquis did not fulfil their obligations, but because the white men wanted to work their nefarious schemes again. With this end in view, they dexterously got rid of the chief Indian leaders and took every necessary measure to destroy the whole Yaqui race at the first sign of trouble. The Indians scented the plot a little late, but still in time to avoid being exterminated.

They took the field again, forced to do so by the treachery of the whites.

"The above is an epitome of the history of the Yaqui war, and it will be seen that justice and right are on the side of the Indians. The world does not know how the merciless war is carried on; but to give an idea of the ways and means used it will be enough to say that all the barbarous methods of the Spanish Captain-General Weyler during the last Cuban insurrection are civilised compared to what is being done to the Yaquis. There is no cruelty, torture, infamy, to which they are not subjected. Prisoners are condemned to a fearful martyrdom, and they suffer it with the sublime stoicism characteristic of their race.

"Men, women, and children are sacrificed with the same cruelty. To prevent non-combatants from becoming hostiles, the Mexicans seize them and transport them from their fertile soil and benign climate to the death-breeding climate of Yucatan, where they are delivered as slaves to the landlords, who buy them at so much a head. The men who commit this crime make the public believe that they are performing an act of mercy, that these non-combatants are prisoners of war whom they forgive and send to work as free men, intending to civilise and protect them.

"These wretched beings, far away from wife and children, from their soil and sky, in slavery, ignorant of the language of their masters who speak Spanish, and the language of the natives themselves who speak Maya, become homesick and die or run away, forgetting in their longing for freedom the immense distance of thousands of miles that separate Yucatan from Sonora. Homeward they flee, to perish in the lonesome woods from hunger, thirst or fevers, or to be devoured by the wild beasts that swarm in those regions.

"History does not register anything superior to the heroism of this race. Not even in the glorious times of Sparta were enacted scenes of intrepidity or deeds of self-sacrifice that surpa.s.s those of the Yaquis.

One of the chiefs of the tribe was once pursued by a detachment of Rurales, a special body of cavalry very similar to our Rough Riders. The Indian chief was an excellent sharpshooter, as all the Yaquis are. He fired from behind a rock, killing one of his enemies with each shot. In the end he was surrounded by the Rurales. Then when a mounted officer of the detachment rushed at him, sabre in hand, he parried the thrust, jumped upon the back of the horse, pinioned the arms of his adversary and spurred with his heels the flanks of the horse, making it gallop at full speed towards a precipice near by. When the horse reached the edge of the abyss, it stopped suddenly, but the Indian plunged his knife into the animal's haunch. Neighing with pain, the animal cast itself headlong over the precipice, carrying with it the two men. Two cries were heard, one of terror shrieked by the Rurale, another of triumph emitted by the Yaqui.

"For what are these patriots fighting? To retain their small fatherland within the great fatherland: to live on the soil where they were born and where their ancestors are buried: to have the right of living in peace. They have not denied the rights of the Government: they have not rebelled against the local authorities. The Government has denied their rights: the local authorities have persecuted them.

"At present they are living in the mountains, constantly fighting. They are outcasts, pariahs, less than pariahs. They are treated as wild beasts; tracked and killed, hanged on the trees to be the food of the carnivorous birds and a warning to their fellows. Really, these corpses hanged on the trees are the shame of a society that boasts of being civilised.

"Poor Yaquis! poor race of heroes! destroyed by the infamous and unpatriotic ambition of a group at whose service is a nation of braves indifferent to what they are doing with their brothers of Sonora."

We hold no brief for the independent Indians, whether they be Yaquis or Mayans. They have many bad traits. The Mayans certainly are cruel, and they have become crafty and treacherous by long centuries of brutality and persecution. They have been guilty, too, of b.l.o.o.d.y reprisals; but mark that word! The story of the Spanish domination of the whole of Yucatan is a story of bloodshed, of basest cruelty, of the most hideous l.u.s.t. In the name of Christ, the white race has ground down the rightful owners of the soil; evicted them, robbed them, murdered them, beaten them, defiled their women and even their children. Are not reprisals, then, fair? In a later chapter we raise the corner of the curtain on as black a story of slavery as the world has ever known, the blacker because of its cowardice and hypocrisy--the slavery of so-called civilised Yucatan. For that great cancer "Surgeon" Diaz is said to be sharpening his operating knife. And in this far-eastern portion of Yucatan, because might is right, the last pure descendants of those who had attained a great and (if Spanish historians are to be trusted) a n.o.ble civilisation are to be brutally crushed out. If Mexico values a fair name, if she wishes to be reckoned a civilised Power, she will yet turn back. She will refuse to write the last chapters of that story of blood of which the Spanish wrote the first four centuries ago.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] A Central News telegram recently published in the London papers read as follows: "A surprise attack by a band of Maya Indians was made on Mexican troops encamped in their district. A sharp fight ensued, and as the Indians were superior in numbers, great difficulty was experienced in driving them off. A Mexican lieutenant and eight men were killed."

CHAPTER X

IN SEARCH OF THE MAYAN MECCA

The island of Cozumel lies twelve miles from the easternmost sh.o.r.e of Yucatan in the Caribbean Sea between 20 and 21 north lat. and 86 and 87 west long. Its name in Mayan means "Isle of Swallows," in allusion, tradition relates, to a Mayan deity _Tel Cuzaan_ (the swallow-legged) who was here chiefly worshipped. But the history of the island contradicts this tradition, for Tel Cuzaan appears to have been quite a minor G.o.d in the Mayan Olympus; while a religious importance, exceeding that of any other spot in the Mayan countries of Central America, seems to have attached to this island.