NATIVE WOMEN
Every explorer is expected to have his experiences with native women.
If he does not have them he invents them, and during interludes in
his own country he regales his commuter friends with tales of dusky,
undraped beauties, unspoiled creatures with generous charms and
innocent hearts. Enjoyment of the envy in the eyes of the civilized
listeners to such narratives is often the chief reward of exploration.
Let me not be too flippant. There is a serious side to the matter. I
am not referring to that which every woman knows. I am alluding to
another facet of this subject, the neglect of which has cost the life
of more than one of those bold men who carry the first banners of
civilization into the wilds. In short, I mean the jealousy of native
men. This factor has brought many an expedition to disaster. I recall
that several years ago I was accepted as first substitute in reserve
for a party of exploration up the Amazon only after I had taken an
oath never to speak to a native woman except in the presence of three
witnesses.
Before I left the United States friends--mostly male, but not all
so--would look at me sideways and with a clearing of the throat or some
other introductory gesture would ask:
“What about the native women down there?”
Well, Frank Whiting and I have had our first experiences with native
women.
This milestone in our lives was passed, this qualification in our
careers toward full blown explorerhood was gained down here in Belize,
where we came to get medical help in extinguishing the malaria in our
systems.
Of course we had encountered native women earlier in the trip. At
Paalmul, Acomal and Cozumel there were a few of the species of the
big-bosomed type for which Gann seems to have invented the word
_slummocky_. (He should change the second letter to a _t_.) But these
creatures were--well, Gann’s adjective is sufficient description. And
mindful of the welfare of the Expedition we always had the full quota
of witnesses required by underwriters of exploration.
But in Belize, not being on active duty, we faced a different
situation. Each day we have been going to a _rendezvous_ with a pair
of native ladies. These private meetings have been usually in the
morning, for at other hours they have domestic duties--they are both
married.
Yes, every morning at ten o’clock we have been meeting them, and each
time we return to our boarding house with new hope, new interest in
life. These meetings have been taking place in the Belize Hospital, and
the ladies have been giving us nine grain injections of quinine.
Now I am tired of native women, and native men, too. There is something
depressing about living in a population which has one hundred black
faces to every white one. If these negroes were gay and musical like
ours, it would not be so bad. But they are a dour lot, afflicted with
unattractive forms of religion.
After three or four days of Griscom’s excellent nursing a Mexican
doctor at Cozumel diagnosed our malady as malaria. That meant that we
would simply be in the way for two weeks at least, for Spinden could
not plot his buildings and Griscom could not skin his birds with our
cots taking up all the open space in the hold of the schooner. They
politely urged us to depart, and with McClurg coming to Belize anyway
it seemed wisest to take advantage of two berths in the steamer which
brought him, and with the help of British medical skill try to get
well as quickly as possible.
[Illustration: Left to right, back row: McClurg, Spinden; front row,
Mason, Whiting, Griscom. Note malarial expressions of Mason and Whiting]
The first doctor we called on told us that the hospital was full,
and advised us to eat anything we liked and drink, “Well, not more
than a gallon of beer a day.” We had been starving, on the advice of
our shipmates and the Mexican doctor, and the news that we might eat
encouraged us so much that for a day and a half we deceived ourselves
into thinking that the fever had left us. We even cabled Spinden that
we could join the schooner in five days.
But an increasing unsteadiness of the legs as we walked about the town,
and a near-collapse of Whiting over the second glass of beer persuaded
us to the reluctant conclusion that the heat we felt was not entirely
caused by the tropical sun. The hated thermometer came out of the
pocket. I sent the mercury to only 102 but Whiting boosted it a full
degree higher.
After that for ten days we sallied out only to get our mail and the
daily injections. The rest of the time we lay about half dressed on
our beds in the stifling attic of the boarding house recommended to
us as Belize’s best hostelry. It certainly is superior to the more
conspicuous “International Hotel,” though to say merely that is to
damn with faint praise. It is conducted by a local celebrity, Miss
Staine (or Stayne?), a plump, warm-hearted mulatto lady from Jamaica
with a strong Nordic contempt for “Belize colored trash.” For ten days
we read and re-read her magazines and played the old game of matching
temperatures, with Whiting always winning.
We changed doctors and began to take quinine internally, which made it
easier to sleep. In spite of thirty grains a day it was soon apparent
that Whiting could not rejoin the schooner at all.
Meanwhile came an occasional radio indicating successful activity on
the part of Spinden and Griscom. Failing to get passage to Cozumel I
wirelessed Spinden to bring the schooner to Belize to pick me up. A few
hours after the _Albert_ had sailed the United Fruit Company consented
to Griscom’s importunities that a northbound freighter from Belize be
stopped at Cozumel to take him to Mobile, for he had finished his work
with the discovery of one more bird new to science and the collection
of proof that there _do_ exist on Cozumel some eighteen kinds of birds
found nowhere else. For days I had been trying to arrange to have this
steamer stop at Cozumel to put me off there, and I could have wept now
that Griscom’s mysterious pull had accomplished it just too late to
benefit me.
But it seems to be just as well, after all. For fifteen minutes before
the still feverish Whiting boarded this same steamer to go home
our schooner arrived with Spinden, boasting a fever of 102! My own
temperature had been normal for two days, but as Miss Staine said I had
got one patient (Whiting) off my hands only to acquire another.
Spinden was in bed two days. Thank Heaven it was not malaria in his
case. Just complete exhaustion and digestive breakdown brought on by
his almost continuous seasickness of the past six weeks.
Between visits of the doctor he narrated the adventures he and Griscom
had at Cozumel. Four days after we left them they anchored the schooner
about three miles west of Molas Point, the northeastern extremity of
the island, named for one of the many pirates who have hidden along
this coast between sorties out on the Spanish Main.
Spinden and Griscom went inland half a mile. There they found a small
temple, with a human figure carved in stone occupying a niche over the
doorway, and with a carved human face at each side. Over the door was a
round column two feet high, surmounted by a peculiar stone triangle. A
dog’s head carved in stone was affixed to the wall on the west side of
the temple.
Continuing inland, they crossed a fresh water lake with a viaduct made
of great stone slabs, which had been built by the ancient Mayas. It was
raised two feet above the water. For a quarter mile it could still be
used, but the balance was disintegrating for a considerable distance.
The slabs had either been worn smooth by pedestrians or had been chosen
for their smoothness to the bare feet of pilgrims coming to Cozumel’s
shrines as Greeks sought the shrine of Apollo at Delphi.
In a high forest, six miles from the landing place, they found five
buildings, three of them well preserved. Two were temples and the other
three belonged to the typical palace arrangement, facing inward around
a patio seventy feet broad. The main building of this group opened on
the front, with four pillars in the center, two of each group being
decorated with three-foot statuettes in rounded relief on stone, and
heavily plastered. The left hand of each figure was on the hip and
the right arm was raised in a gesture like a traffic cop signalling
automobiles to stop.
Another very interesting feature was that the flat roofs of these
buildings had cross beams, the larger wooden supports running in one
direction and the smaller ones going the opposite way. The holes
between had been filled in with stone and cement poured into the
cracks. The use of a few beams running in one direction is common
enough but this arrangement of criss-cross timbers is probably unique.
[Illustration: Though Cozumel Island is small, Spinden found ruins the
thick bush had hidden from previous explorers]
The guide said there were other ruins nearby. He called the site Saint
Tomas, after a large cattle ranch which had been abandoned in this
region forty years ago. But it was time to return to the schooner and
Spinden and Griscom did not look for these other structures, thinking
they could do so later. This was the afternoon of February 19.
They then returned to the schooner, making a cross cut north by west
and wading in lagoons up to the waist. On this trip they stumbled upon
a colony of flamingos, which Griscom had long wanted to find.
On February 20, while the entire crew, except one sick sailor, were
shooting flamingos, a violent norther suddenly burst over the island.
This was perhaps to the very day four hundred years after the fleet of
Cortes was dispersed by a storm off Cozumel. Our boats started for the
schooner at once, leaving Spinden and Griscom in the bush.
The smaller boat was so carelessly handled that its engine was damaged
and an oar was lost, so that its occupants had to be transferred to a
larger boat, except for a San Blas Indian, who manœuvred the boat to a
safe landing. Then he wandered along the beach all night in a panic,
cutting his bare feet on the jagged coral and falling into a deep hole
in the limestone. He was picked up feverish the next day on the east
side of the island.
Meanwhile, the other boat reached the schooner barely in time to work
her around, so that she could gain the protection of the east side of
the island. Finding the schooner gone, Spinden and Griscom walked for
four hours through the swamps and the thorny bush. They were sighted
from the schooner at dusk.
The next day they measured a large ruin on the east shore called Casa
Real. Near the southern point of the island they found another ruin,
containing three rooms and five doors, called _Cinco Puertos_. These
two ruins are used as landmarks by turtle fishermen, but are not
believed to have been examined previously by archæologists.
At the southern extremity of the island they found a temple built over
the entrance to a cave which contained a permanent fresh pool. Stairs
from the doorway descended to the cavern.
They next visited a village of thirty-five inhabitants on the west
side of the island south of San Miguel. This hamlet, inspected by
the Allison V. Armour Expedition in 1895, then had “two fairly well
preserved structures, while others, almost wholly destroyed by modern
builders, were traceable, thus indicating an ancient occupancy of more
than usual importance.” Spinden found that one of the ruins mentioned
by W. H. Holmes in the foregoing quotation had recently been torn down
to build a jail!
Seventeen years ago Arnold and Frost, the British explorers, found the
Mexicans making a stone quarry of a group of ruins near San Miguel,
including a building which contained “a remarkable carving representing
a figure of a god seated cross-legged, in true Buddhist attitude, in
a niche.” The senseless folly of looting the stones of ruins for the
construction of such valuable modern structures as jails and the walls
of cow corrals is a common sin in Mexico. In Merida, the capital of
Yucatan, one frequently sees in the wall of a modern house a stone
carved in the days of Tihoo, the Indian town destroyed by the Spaniards
to make room for Merida.
Although Cozumel is but some six miles wide and twenty-four long
and boasts such adjuncts of civilization as three lighthouses and
a radio it is not surprising that Spinden found there ruins new to
archæologists. Undoubtedly many more are waiting in the thick bush.
They should be worth seeking because Cozumel shrines seem to have had a
particular sanctity to the Mayas.
One very interesting discovery of Spinden’s was examples of the red
hand so conventionalized by the artist that the five fingers looked
like the five petals of a flower or the five flames of a lamp. This
shows that whether the red hand had a political significance or not it
also came to have a purely decorative use. It is possible that this
symbol originated in the dawn of Maya culture with the use of the five
digits of the hand in counting.
When Stephens visited Cozumel about eighty-five years ago the island
was uninhabited. Today it has a population of perhaps eighteen hundred,
of which all but three hundred live in San Miguel. This village has
taken a great boom with the growth of the chicle trade.
But the early Spaniards made as much of this island as the Mayas they
supplanted. There is on record somewhere the lament of a Spanish cleric
who thought he had been unjustly treated because he was made Bishop of
Mexico instead of Bishop of Cozumel!
[Illustration: This “lighthouse-temple” on Cozumel Island was both a
shrine to a marine god and a beacon to commercial flotillas of the
Mayas]
Spinden visited several high temples of the sort which impressed the
Spaniards, who called them “towers.” Any modern explorer of the island
will appreciate the rough accuracy of Juan Diaz’s description of the
temple where Grijalva annexed the island to Spain:
“One descended this tower by eighteen steps; the base was very
massive; it was 180 feet in circumference. On top there was a little
tower as high as two men; within were figures, bones, and cenise of
idols which they worshipped.”
Lothrop thinks that _cenise_ “may be a corruption of the Tainan word
_Zemi_, here used in the sense of ‘images.’”
Nearly all the buildings which Spinden saw on Cozumel were fairly
sizable, and all of them were two rooms deep.
While we were getting back some of our strength Spinden and I lay
around on Miss Staine’s none too soft beds and discussed the future.
With much regret we reached the decision to abandon the return to
Xkaret. It is out of the question now to expose Spinden to any more
seasickness than is absolutely necessary. Partly for this same reason
we have decided to try to reach Tabi not by returning to Ascension Bay
and taking the _Fotinga_ to Santa Cruz de Bravo again but by striking
inland from the head of Lake Bacalar, which is back of the peninsula on
which Payo Obispo is situated. Another factor which has influenced us
to this decision is that the changed itinerary will mean seeing more
territory which will be new to us. The Spaniards found many native
settlements in the Bacalar region, and a letter which Spinden has just
received from Dr. Tozzer, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, points out
that there is much unexplored country north and west of the lake.
Briefly, then, our plan is to go to the head of Lake Bacalar by boat,
and thence proceed by mule and Shanks’ Mare to Santa Cruz de Bravo,
Tabi and Peto, the southern end of the Yucatan railway system. If we
succeed in reaching the railhead we shall be the first archæological
party that has ever crossed the wild territory of Quintana Roo,
although the explorer Maler crossed the Yucatan Peninsula over a more
western route. And if we find any ruins in this primeval wilderness
they are likely to be older than the cities of the east coast. The
course of Maya civilization was from south to north, and until we are
nearly to Peto we shall be in lower latitude than Muyil, the most
southerly of the towns we have found thus far, and the oldest.
Even if we do not reach Peto we shall at least have followed one of the
most interesting eddies of the Conquest, shall have trod a country of
great historic interest.
If we were in good condition there would be little doubt about reaching
Peto, providing the Indians are as untroublesome as they have been.
Frankly I am worried by the fact that we are both still about forty
per cent below normal strength. I, for one, do not feel capable of
sitting on a mule’s back eight hours a day. The after-effects of
malaria are worse than the disease. Spinden has lost many pounds and is
still off his feed. But each day we become a little firmer on our legs,
and we can but try.
While Spinden was still in bed at Belize I boarded the _Albert_ to take
stock of stores. There was the old familiar smell of wet floorboards,
groceries, and an undercurrent of gasoline. It was like getting home
again, but to a deserted home. Rain was falling outside, another
norther. I opened a bottle of rum, but found small comfort in it.
Whichever way I turned there was the unaccustomed sight of a bare bunk.
I listened in vain for Whiting’s oaths, McClurg’s chuckle and Griscom’s
bubbling, runaway laugh. And the boat kept reminding me of Xoch because
she had planned this trip with me, had thought of sharing it, so the
schooner seemed like her boat. And soon I was leaving it.
There was too much tea, as Spinden had predicted, too much soup, and
not enough bacon. I traded the excess of the first two commodities for
more of the last.
We sailed again on Tuesday, March 2, at the very hour we had put out of
Belize before. But we shipped with three ghosts. We were not gay at
all this sailing, for we could not forget the empty places at table,
the empty bunks at night.
We ran aground on the same bar off Hicks’ Key, but worked free with
less trouble than before. We spent two days and a half in Payo Obispo
trying to hire mules. We went down to Corosal in British Honduras to
see a chicle man who has mules up on Lake Bacalar. He agreed to let us
have six at two dollars a day apiece. The next day, just as we were
ready to start, he sent a messenger to say the price was five dollars
apiece.
Spinden went over to Consejo Point on the British side of Chetumal Bay
and telephoned the pirate that we would not be robbed. He argued and
berated the fellow so successfully that the price went down to very
near the first figure.
Now it is the morning of Saturday, March 6. The _Albert_ is moored
against the north bank of the Hondo River just below where the Rio Chak
empties the overflow of Lake Bacalar into it. We made a reconnaissance
to the town of Bacalar and the chicle camp of Xtocmoc (shtocmoc)
yesterday. Today we shall take the small boats as far as Xtocmoc, spend
the night there, and pick up our mules and drivers at Santa Cruz Chico
at the north end of the lake tomorrow. There we send the small boats
back--burn our bridges behind us. Two hundred and twenty-five miles of
thick unexplored bush will be between us and Peto, and about half that
distance to the temples of Tabi. It’s just a case of give your mule his
head and hang on. If the fever doesn’t clutch us again we shall make it.
[Illustration: Buildings at Acomal showed an interesting use of stucco
faces (there is one at each side of this door)]
It is hard to say good-bye to infallible Gough and his six good boys.
And almost harder to say good-bye to the old _Albert_. We still know
she is not a beauty, but she has been ideal for this trip. She has
scraped reefs, plowed mud banks, bucked northers and come through. A
good sea and mud boat. Not since I left Pancho Villa’s private freight
car has it been so hard to leave a moving home.
_Delirium Tremens_ is loaded above the gunwales with our baggage.
Nelson holds the _Imp_ ready. We step in, the propeller beats the
water, we shoot into the narrow channel of the Chak and a thick green
bank blots out the _Albert_ and the waving caps of her crew.
[Illustration]