AND COMMON CROCODILES
Griscom and I were to take the smaller boat to the nearest beach and
hunt birds all morning. Whiting and McClurg with gamegetters, Gough
and Nelson with Griscom’s two sixteen gauge shotguns, were to take the
larger boat to the farther side of the island, exploring the coast and
trolling for barracuda on their way.
Griscom and I asked Spinden if he would like to come with us. He said
he thought he would not. But just as we were shoving away from the
_Albert’s_ side he looked down at us and said gently, wistfully.
“I guess I’ll come.”
A suggestion of something eerie and ominous hangs over this desert key.
Perhaps our narrow escape from the teeth of the reef put us in a mood
to feel this with particular poignancy. Certainly with coral heads and
sandbars on all sides the mariner must feel uneasy here. But it was
more than that. The island did not like us.
A fringe of sea grass seems to surround the whole key out to a distance
of fifty feet. And this grows from a bank of soft mud near enough the
water’s surface to stop all but the very shallowest skiff. When we
stepped overboard to drag our dory through it we sank over our boot
tops. Struggling on we were confronted by the pointed branches of dead
trees, which here seem always to fall outward in protection of the
key--a secondary line of defense. Almost as many of the standing trees
are dead as alive, and the sharp gestures of the long ash colored limbs
only add to the weird feeling the place gives one. All the dead trees
are inhabited by ants, which stung promptly when we let the branches
touch us.
The solid land where the trees grow is a mere rim--here thirty yards
wide, there perhaps a hundred. The center of the island seems to be one
lagoon, or a series of connected lagoons. But the word is misleading,
here is no deep clear pool over sparkling, sandy bottom such as our
imaginations had visualized. Rather there is a vast forbidding swamp,
filled with putrefying vegetation, except near the little channel from
the sea where the tide sweeps it clean. The water is too shallow to
hide the zigzagging dorsal fins of hunting sharks and the sinister
ripples where thick bodied crocodiles and alligators prowl.
Griscom particularly wanted a rail. We heard these shy birds calling on
every side but could not see one. Finally he said to me in desperation:
“If you see anything slinking through a thicket near the water, take a
chance and blaze away at it.”
There was not much danger to ourselves in this, for there were only two
directions to go. We turned our backs to each other and began to slip
through the brush. Spinden followed me.
The two of us made a crackling such as would warn any sensible bird to
fly before we were in range. There was not room for two to hunt here
anyway. I threw Spinden an impatient glance, and said:
“I’m going off by myself.”
He gave me that appealing, wistful look, somehow doubly affecting in
a man of his size and attainments. I managed to drag the _Delirium
Tremens_ through the clinging mud and rowed north half a mile beyond
what I judged would be a fair limit to Griscom’s beat. I was sorry I
had been impatient with Spinden, felt ashamed of my meanness.
The guardian mud bank was nearer the land here, and green bushes
mingled with the dead trees to the very water’s edge. I poled with one
oar, thinking I might see more game by this quiet skirting of the brush
than if I landed.
A two foot lizard dropped out of a tree and ran along a big log. I
fired as he reached the shrouded end of it. A small yellowish bird flew
up at the noise and I let go the other barrel.
I dragged _Delirium Tremens_ over the mud and made her fast to a
mangrove.
No sign of Mr. Lizard. But there was the bird, a handful of crumpled
feathers. I had the guilty sensation I had not felt since a barbarous
boy’s air-rifle potted his last Cedarwaxwing in Tucker’s Woods. It
was “for science” I did this, I told myself. But I could feel the old
savage hunt lust warming somewhere within me.
I pushed through clinging, thorny brush into grass growing waist high
out of hollow, lumpy soil which gave way and dropped me a foot at
every other step. There was the serpentine hissing sound of scuttling
crabs. Then more bushes and I came out on a whole maze of natural
ditches, between banks of mud which grass lent a false air of solidity.
Something moved in the sedge near the water forty feet away. I took a
chance and blazed away, hoping for a rail. Pshaw, a little green heron.
But the report brought crying, squawking life from the swamp brooding
in the heat. Frightened by the first gunshot they had ever heard marsh
fowl of a dozen kinds betrayed their hiding places.
From the invisible farther side of the great bog a flock of big whitish
birds, their wings set far back like ducks, came flapping my way. The
exciting first glimpse of birds I had never seen before sent me down
into the veiling grass, groping for number fours--“heavy duck load.”
Where had I put them? Excited by the hope that here was a new kind of
water fowl--Chinchorro’s gift to ornithology, I jammed a pair of number
sixes into the gun just as the stunning big birds came into doubtful
range and began to swing away on silver wings. Perhaps there was a
chance with the choked left barrel.
At the shot the marsh broke into pandemonium again. The main flock of
the mysterious white birds winged back to the far side of the marsh.
But the one I had aimed at turned a flip-flop, caught himself, flapped
unsteadily a hundred yards up this side of the swamp and took a nose
dive beyond a clump of mangroves.
I tried to pick out distinguishing features of that clump, but it
looked just like a dozen other clumps. I began a detour to avoid the
deeper mud, but with a sinking heart realized there was precious little
chance of finding the lovely mysterious white bird which so piqued my
curiosity.
When it seemed I had gone far enough north I turned and struck into
the thick mangrove. The footing was surprisingly solid here and I
could have made rapid progress, but went slowly--on the _qui vive_ for
another shot. Through the dark laced growth came the weird guttural of
herons--so out of proportion to the size of the birds which experience
told me uttered it that I could well believe the sound came from great
monsters wallowing in the mud. There was another noise--a shrill
half-human wailing and cackling--which made my skin prickle and my hair
rise. It suggested women in hysterics, or a quarrel of witches.
It ceased abruptly, with the croaking of herons. I had been seen, or
heard. Yet _I_ heard no wing whir, saw no feather stir.
The thicket grew lighter. I reached the edge of this little table of
firm ground and parted branches to look out on a wide shallow lagoon.
It was obviously shallow, for stranded logs lay all about.
I crouched silently. Something splashed. There was my white bird
struggling feebly in the water, two hundred feet away near a bunch of
mangroves. As I was estimating the thin possibility of my reaching that
thicket by another detour, a long dark snout reached out of the water,
absorbed my bird, and disappeared with hardly a ripple.
Crocodile! Then I looked at the stranded logs closely. It was hard to
tell which _were_ logs and which were basking imitations--crocodiles
or alligators. There are both in this country.
I went back to the boat, through grass whispering with crabs, across
sand sibilant with streaking lizards.
As I paddled the skiff along the shore again there was a sharp smack in
the water behind me. Startled, I turned to see only a widening ring on
the smooth sea. “The flip of a shark’s tail did that,” I told myself.
But when it happened a second time and a third without my getting a
glimpse of the fish I began to dislike it.
I moved into shallower water and paddled very gently. Gradually there
came over me the unpleasant feeling of being watched. Turning quickly I
saw the yellow, snake-like head of a big turtle pulled under water. I
picked up the gun and waited for turtle soup. I waited in vain. But I
had hardly exchanged the gun for an oar when that same creepy feeling
came over me and I turned just in time to see the turtle go down.
This place was getting on my nerves. Life was everywhere--but furtive,
hostile life. It lurked in the lagoons with their harmless-seeming
logs, in the mangrove clumps guttural with invisible herons and shrill
with that blood-curdling witch-cackle of I knew not what bird or
reptile. It rustled in the high grass of sod which gave way under
foot and it stirred along dead sticks on the open sand where loathsome
lizards sunned. Now it stalked me and mocked me behind the placid face
of the sea.
I was glad to hear Griscom and Spinden hailing me up the shore.
They were covered with mud and sweat and the carcasses of mosquitoes,
but their bearing was triumphant. For Griscom could cut another notch
in the upper barrel of his gamegetter, he had shot another bird new to
the catalog of ornithology. It was a flycatcher of obscure coloration.
It was the first or second bird he had shot. All morning he had looked
vainly for another specimen. He says it is possible that this species
has been reduced to the verge of extermination owing to the killing
of the big trees by the hurricane. It may be that he got this lone
specimen in the nick of time.
We found the _Albert_ looking like a hunting camp. The Captain, Nelson,
Whiting and McClurg had burned enough powder for a battle.
Birds of many sizes, hues and peculiarities of shape were arranged in
rows on the sloping top of the engine room--just forward of that part
of it which serves as our dinner table. Griscom went over them quickly.
“Good work men,” he said, in his ever cheerful, slightly clipped way
of speaking. “There’s nothing new here, but there are several birds
which are interesting because they’re migrants from the United States
belonging to species which are usually found wintering in the Antilles,
a long way east of here. In other words bird life on this island
resembles the far off West Indies more than the mainland over there.
That’s the same peculiarity which they say Cozumel has. Your shooting
has proved something well worth while.”
The mainland is only fourteen or fifteen miles west of here. Strange
that that narrow strip of water should set apart two such distinct
types of _fauna_.
The birds were in the shade and in the breeze, but already flies were
at them. Spinden sat down to lunch with a grimace at the trophies.
“As the sun gets hotter the birds get rotter,” he chanted.
Griscom let out a whoop of delight as he saw the soup which the cook
set on the table. Twice a day we had been eating asparagus soup, and
already we were sick of it. I scolded Joe this morning and told him not
to select his soup from the same crate each time. The result was that
we now had before each of us a tin bowl of mock turtle.
How absurd though, to be eating mock turtle soup in the home of the
turtle! _Chinchorro_ means _turtle net_. The men who visited the
southeast side of the island this morning saw there two or three tiny
thatched huts, put up by the turtle fishermen who were probably the
key’s only human visitors until we arrived. They come for a few days
each year.
All afternoon Griscom skinned birds. So did Belize John, who seems to
have a natural bent for this art. We others hunted again, but without
getting another specimen of Griscom’s fly-catcher or one of the rails
he desired above everything.
With the tide high McClurg and I took the _Delirium Tremens_ through
the little opening from the sea and explored the big lagoon.
Chinchorro is the sort of place a twelve year old boy would adore.
This swamp reminds me of the big Cape Cod marsh where my brother and I
hunted blue crabs and yellowlegs from our home-made punt. Beyond the
expanse of water where the sharks pursue their prey and the crocodiles
ambush theirs is a maze of narrow twisting channels, screened by high
marsh grass or overhanging mangrove.
Even though it was the hottest hour of the day the place teemed with
herons, egrets, and white ibis--for such is the mysterious white bird
which I thought I was discovering this morning, says Griscom. It is a
lovely, sheening, shy thing. Egyptians showed a taste for fine things
when they selected the ibis to worship.
McClurg shot a five-foot shark with a ball from the larger barrel
of his gamegetter. I bagged three stilts, well named shore birds
of elongated legs and black and white plumage. We’ll have them for
breakfast tomorrow with two the Captain shot this morning. This fresh
meat will be welcome. The beef we bought at Payo Obispo provided much
exercise but little taste or nourishment. Mexicans don’t know how to
cure beef.
Our never-idle Skipper and Whiting circumnavigated the key this
afternoon, finding it a “circle of sameness,” says the latter. But they
caught two barracuda and a weird fish which looks like our northern
sea-robin. They put Spinden off at the southern end of the island and
he came back with an exciting story of a crocodile slide. This was a
sloping mud bank which the great lizards were using as small boys use
the well sung cellar door.
He wants to take McClurg and me there tomorrow morning to try for
moving pictures of the saurian playground. Griscom is anxious for one
more chance at a rail, and dawn is the best time for these birds, he
thinks. So we decide not to leave this anchorage until late tomorrow
morning.
We will risk letting Chunyaxché wait another day. For whether or not
we find the ruined temples we are prayerfully hoping to find Griscom’s
work has already made the expedition worth while. Two new birds in
his first two forays into the bush is a mark beyond our fondest
expectations.
* * * * *
The alarm clock watch which was Xoch’s parting gift buzzed in my ear at
half past four. Griscom and Whiting and I dressed quickly, drank our
coffee and rowed softly toward the inlet. Even from the schooner the
rails could be heard calling. Surely we’d get one this time.
But we did not. The sun came up and burned off the miasma which had
lent that swamp a deeper air of mystery than ever. Still the rails
called from mangrove islet to mangrove islet--yet not a feather to fire
at.
We rowed back to the schooner hot, hungry, disgusted and more than
ever impressed with the haunting, evasive quality of this island. The
feeling we all had was expressed by Whiting with a shudder:
“I felt all the time as if the birds were laughing at me.”
After breakfast Spinden, McClurg, Griscom and I embarked our cameras in
the _Imp_ for a crocodile hunt. We left Whiting and the Captain as a
committee on Ways and Means of catching a fifteen-foot shark which hung
about the schooner, disdaining all ordinary baits and possessed of a
charm against rifle bullets.
When we rounded the southwestern point of the island we encountered a
little swell. But the _Imp_ is a very good sea boat, even if we have
to step gingerly on her bottom, which, in spots is as soft as blotting
paper. Fortunately her gratings transfer nearly all the strain to side
boards which do not have the canvas-like flexibility of two or three
strips along her shallow keel.
Indeed, whenever we take to a dinghy it is a choice between the risk of
sinking and the risk of capsizing. We have all decided we prefer the
former, it is less violent anyway. So we take the _Imp_ as often as
possible and leave _Delirium Tremens_ to the crew.
Moreover, I think there is some appeal to our flair for scientific
observation in the state of the _Imp’s_ bottom. It is in a very
interesting state of rot indeed. Each time one of the narrow planks is
bent by an over eager wave we reach down and mold it into place like
putty.
Whenever possible we avoid risking contact with even the softest beach.
Thus we anchored the little boat when Spinden sighted a clump of trees
he had memorized to mark the crocodile slide--trees of dark, shiny,
leafage and squat shapes like live oaks.
We stepped overboard in two feet of water, which was a slight obstacle
compared with the mud bank beyond. At every step we sank to mid thigh.
Keeping balance would have been hard enough even had we not been
burdened with guns and cameras. Fortunately one of the ubiquitous dead
trees had fallen far outward. I reached the security of this bridge in
time to make a movie of the flounderings of the others.
Spinden had carefully marked an approach to the crocodile slide which
he thought would permit us to come within camera range undetected. But
when, after laborious crawling through grass and brush, we parted the
last branches, not a saurian was in sight. Perhaps they had heard us,
or perhaps this was only an _afternoon_ playground.
Intensely disappointed we separated on minor hunts. Griscom strolled
eastward with an eye to birds. Spinden, determined to get some kind of
a lizard anyway, began shooting the six inch variety which infested the
dead trees along the beach. He said he had a colleague at Harvard who
would be delighted with a jar of pickled lizards.
McClurg and I managed to flounder back to the _Imp_ without leaving
anything in the mud but holes. We reconnoitered eastward a mile or two.
Turning back we saw Spinden wave from the beach. We anchored, while
Spinden shouted that Griscom was watching some stilts which he wanted
me to shoot for the larder, as they were out of range of gamegetters.
The mud being worse than ever here I encumbered myself only with
shotgun and a few cartridges.
After squirming through fifty yards of the most tangled brush we had
yet seen I found Griscom crouching behind a dead tree at the edge of a
mud flat. He pointed out four stilts, a hundred yards east of us and
too far from the nearest cover to give him any certainty of a kill with
his tiny weapon. At best he might get one of the birds, with luck I
might get them all.
I started to crawl on hands and knees, but had to inch along on my
stomach like an Indian the last ten yards where there was nothing
between me and the game higher than the trunk of a prostrate tree. When
I reached this I was barely within range, but the long-legged black and
white birds were showing signs of uneasiness and I dared not try to
approach nearer. Not till afterwards did I fully realize that the alarm
of the birds seemed directed beyond them rather than in my direction.
After waiting two or three seconds to regain a little breath and wipe
the sweat out of my eyes I fired the right barrel. The cartridge was
loaded with number ten shot and black powder--the only explosive that I
could get in Belize. For an instant I could see nothing. Then through
the dark smoke I saw one bird flying, and gave him the left barrel. He
fell on the far side of the little mud flat. I now perceived that I had
bagged the other three birds with my first shot.
But at the attempt to reach them I sank over my hip rubber boots in mud
as soft as oatmeal and as sticky as flypaper. When I pulled up my left
leg the straps fastening the boot-top to my belt broke and the boot
remained in the mud. By the time I had dug it out with the branch of
a tree I was covered with mud from head to foot and perspiration was
making little channels through the bog on my face. No use trying to
reach the birds this way.
Griscom now pointed out that by making a detour over reasonably solid
ground I could reach a chain of mangrove clumps which ran out to within
twenty feet of where the three bunched birds lay. The trunk of a dead
palm would make a bridge between these small islands of safety.
I got a piece of dead palm fifteen feet long and holding a smaller
stick to balance with crossed it like a man going over a tight rope.
Pulling in the log I threw it ahead over the next morass. When I
reached the third little island I found the space between it and
the last one was almost short enough to jump. This was unnecessary,
however, for in the water between these two mangrove clumps lay a large
log. It looked solid, and a bit of the upper side with a knot in it
was out of water. I had raised my right foot to step down, but had not
yet let go of the slim mangrove trunk in my left hand, when I noticed
something queer about that knot. The horrifying truth shot through me
just in time to prevent my stepping on a large crocodile!
I slipped to the shore side of the mangrove clump and in a tense voice
called:
“Griscom, for God’s sake, throw out my gun quick. Crocodile!”
With admirable speed and quiet Griscom got my shotgun and another palm
tree bridge. He passed me the gun, butt first. In my trouser pocket
were two buckshot shells, always carried on shore parties for such
emergencies. At this range probably number tens would have settled
Mr. Crocodile. But the awful thought of what I had nearly done still
covered me with goose flesh, and I meant to take no more chances.
With the loaded and cocked gun pointed ahead of me I slipped to the
other side of the hummock.
He had not moved, he did not even flicker his eye now as I stared at
him. No wonder I had been deceived. His resemblance to a rough-barked
tree trunk stranded in the stagnant puddle was superb. It was only a
slight liquidity about that eye which had saved me; except for this
slight moistness it was still for all the world a knot hole in the log
of his body. Now that I studied it however it seemed to have a dull but
unmistakable expression, an air of cold diabolical confidence. Though
he is describing crocodiles in a zoo Llewellyn Powys has caught this
look exactly when he speaks of,
“... those curious reptiles who spend their captivity immobile as
stones; and yet have that in their eye suggestive of a sly knowledge
that they and their kind will have little or no difficulty in
outliving the terrible régime of men.”
At a range of five feet I aimed carefully at that sly, cold eye, and
fired. There was a tremendous commotion, I was showered with mud and
water. Half expecting the monster to come up the bank after me I sprang
back into the mangrove. As the beast’s struggles subsided somewhat I
stepped forward. Catching a glimpse of the lower part of the hideous
scaly body I fired at the back just behind a point over the rear legs.
That finished him.
My hand must have been shaking when I fired the first shot, which had
struck well over the target of the eye. Through an egg sized hole in
his back bluish white intestines protruded.
By vigorous use of our voices and Griscom’s police whistle we managed
at last to get the attention of Spinden, and sent him back to ask
McClurg to bring the movie cameras from the _Imp_. Meanwhile we hauled
and rolled the great lizard out of the shade for his photograph. When
the cameras came we pried apart his jaws with the muzzle of Griscom’s
gamegetter and posed him so that his teeth would show. Four of them
were more than an inch long. And the triangular, sharp upright scales
on his muscular tail were equally gruesome weapons.
What would he have done if I had stepped on his eye? My inability to
say may be a loss to science but I shall be satisfied never to know.
Now I recalled that the alarm of the stilts had seemed to be directed
toward the neighborhood occupied by the crocodile rather than toward my
proximity when I shot. No doubt he had been stalking them from one side
while I approached from the other. Later had he turned his attention to
stalking me?
With the help of the palm logs I gathered in three of the shore birds,
but could not have reached the fourth without a hydroplane.
Spinden had gathered a dozen big coconuts, and what with cameras, guns,
birds and coconuts we feared we should sink to our necks instead of our
thighs in returning to the _Imp_. But Spinden had the happy inspiration
of tying the birds around my neck, as one ties a chicken to a dog to
break him of roost robbing. Then the archæologist waited till we others
had crossed the ooziest mud and tossed us the coconuts. We caught
deftly and he hurled with brilliant aim till the last one, which fell
short and spattered Griscom like a bomb.
The little motor purred energetically and we reached the schooner tired
but satisfied--above all satisfied to see no more of _Cayo Grande_.
The Captain and Whiting had not caught the big shark, but at least had
shown their contempt for him. While he hung sluggishly alongside the
_Albert_ the Captain had jumped fairly upon his back. Never was a shark
so startled, said Whiting. However, after swimming off one hundred
feet he returned. Whereupon this extraordinary man Gough had repeated
his audacious performance. This time the big fish moved off only fifty
feet and was close beside the schooner by the time the Captain had
scrambled out of the water. Whiting had dissuaded the Skipper from a
third try at marine bareback riding. “He respects you now,” Whiting
said. “Don’t rub it in.”
Eventually the shark moved away. When we returned in the _Imp_, Whiting
was diving from the schooner with no concern for finny marauders. No
one of the crew knows of an authentic case of a shark attacking a man,
although tales of mutilations by barracuda seem well verified.
The tide was lower than it had been since we arrived here, and two
unsuspected coral heads were awash only fifty yards from the _Albert’s_
stern.
We got our anchor, and one engine pushed us cautiously northward.
Griscom took advantage of the smooth water to skin the rest of his
birds. He has secured an interesting series of mangrove warblers in
addition to his new fly-catcher, and is well pleased.
At the northern end of Chinchorro Bank are two smaller keys. We planned
to anchor east of the most northern one. The chart shows enough water
for us here, but we found a bar had made out, so we ran through a
break in the reef east of the key and reëntered protected water
through a reef channel to northwest of the island. It was pleasant to
fly out of smooth water into the boisterous, tumbling blue of ocean
again, the wind whistling through our hair, and sea birds heightening
the excitement of the scene, flinging themselves into the brine and
screaming with anger when they missed their prey.
During the few minutes that we ran outside the reef the two _Matchees_
caught several barracuda, a yellowtail and a rockfish--a stocky
creature of perhaps twenty pounds, brown with darker dapplings. Both
these last fish were taken on McClurg’s green line, which the crew is
beginning to credit with “white man’s magic,” so does it out-catch the
Captain’s white line. The San Blas boys are thrown into half-delirious
joy every time there is a strike. They were a sight which I hope the
movie camera has recorded as they danced on the high swaying “porch
roof,” pulling in fish simultaneously and grinning and grimacing in an
absolute abandon of primitive triumph.
At the north tip of the northernmost of Chinchorro’s three keys is the
loneliest lighthouse I have ever seen. It was not visible from the
Big Key. It is visited by the Mexican supply boat only once every two
months, but the light keeper’s assistant complains bitterly that he has
to punch a time clock every two hours. I used to think that the job of
lighthouse keeper would be a perfect one for the impecunious chap who
would be content with a position which gave him a bare living so long
as it left him leisure to write poetry or some _magnum opus_ on the
side, but the time clock has changed all that.
In a last attempt to get a rail Griscom, McClurg and I visited the
uninhabited twin of this key. We saw white egrets and the white young
of the little blue heron. I shot a catbird, and a flycatcher which I
could not find, and made a peregrine falcon turn a somersault, from
which he righted himself out of range to my disgust and Griscom’s,
who, unknown to me, was watching from the farther end of this island’s
central lagoon. The sweet smell of gunpowder is in my nostrils
continually, and the small boy in me is coming to the top. I bagged a
two-foot iguana which the crew ate for supper with relish. And again a
grass-shrouded heron died because it might have been a rail. But when
we left the island the rails still mocked us from secret security.
We fished going back to the _Albert_; got four strikes and McClurg
landed a small barracuda.
These northern atolls are higher than the Big Key, have broader cleaner
beaches and less of that grim desolation. With fine fishing and some
shooting they would make a vacation paradise for yachtsmen with time
for sport. But Chinchorro Bank will always mean _Cayo Grande_ to us,
the sort of vivid half unpleasant place you are glad to have seen but
glad to have left behind.
There is madness in the air of Cayo Grande. Madness and Caliban
cruelty. Two weeks there would make a solitary man a lunatic. Yet we
would not have missed it for anything. I am certain we shall look back
on our forty hours there as on certain experiences every man has, which
he thinks of always with a shudder, and yet which he knows gave him
something invaluable, if it is no more than an appreciation of a snug
chair or a warm bed on nights when hail bombards the roof and wind
shakes the rafters.
_Chinchorro!_ Years from now a chance glance at a map, or some
sailor’s casual tale of wreck, and it will all live before me again as
vividly as John Silver throwing his crutch, and the surf thundering on
Stacpoole’s Kerguellen. I shall see those stranded logs where death
lurks, hear the whisper of crabs through the grass, the slap of a
shark’s tail on the water, and feel the creepiness of being watched by
great turtles I cannot see and mocked by some invisible creature of the
sinister swamp with horrid witch-cackle.
From Chinchorro may well have come such tales of fiendish sea monsters
and haunted islands as frightened the sailors of Columbus.
But now we have other things to think of. At the first sign of dawn we
shall start for Ascension Bay. There we hope to meet our first Indians
of the tribe which guards the ruins, and much depends upon their
reception. Their hostility is the chief reason why Maya temples exist
on this coast still unseen by white men. The Indians turned back the
Allison V. Armour expedition at Tulum and the Howe expedition a few
years later. More recently they surrounded the party of Morley, who
thinks that his possession of a small phonograph is what persuaded them
to let him live.
We have a phonograph and all kinds of records from the latest jazz to
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We have boxes full of calico, perfume,
cigarets, hunting knives and Woolworth jewelry. But our best asset
with the natives is probably the friendship of the chicle companies,
which have given us credentials to native chiefs and which have already
sent word through their agents that we are coming with good-will--and
_pesos_. The Governor’s letter is useful with Mexicans like this
lighthouse keeper but we shall hide it when we meet the natives, who in
four hundred years of contact with men who speak Spanish have learned
only to hate those tainted with the blood of the Conquerors. (Indeed,
the fact that none of us can speak Spanish like a Mexican can be
counted as a thing which will help us.)
We must not bank too heavily even on the good offices of the Chicle
Development Company, for the business alliance between white chicle
bosses and native chicle gatherers is subject to many vicissitudes.
Only three or four months ago there was a slight flare-up against the
chicle operators.
In the last analysis we shall have to depend on our own tact--and luck.
Simply by donning our uncomfortable British pith helmets when we enter
the bush we can at least make certain that no sniper will mistake us
for Mexicans. This is the sole reason we have brought this cumbersome
type of headgear, which properly belongs only to stage explorers.
Down here a pith helmet means a Britisher, and such slight regard as
the Indians of Quintana Roo have for foreigners is mainly bestowed on
subjects of His Majesty, King George V. Well--we shall see.
[Illustration]