THE FIRST AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE
Toward evening on July 30, 1502, four Spanish caravels, looking for
the long-desired coasts of Cathay, drew near an island off what is now
Northern Honduras. Thinking to annex this land for the crown of Spain,
the discoverers felt their way into a cove, the hails of the leadsman
on the foremost caravel mingling with the cries of birds never before
seen by European eyes.
Four anchors dropped through the pale green of water, so clear that
the eye could see, at six fathoms, the flukes bite the white sand. At
this moment there swept around a point a canoe, eight feet wide and
very long, though fashioned from a single log. The last rays of the sun
flashed upon twenty-five dripping paddles and the fifty brown arms that
drove them. An air of exotic and mysterious splendor was exhaled by the
wealthy merchant who owned the boat as he sat under a canopy surrounded
by the rich textiles and pottery he had come here to sell.
There was no more traveled man then alive than the commander of
those four Spanish vessels, ornate but clumsy, with high ends and
rakish masts. He had voyaged much through the New World within the
past decade, yet never before had he seen there clothes and general
accoutrement of such a civilized aspect as the gold ear-rings, cotton
mantles and other trappings of these brown traders. The European’s
attempt to question the merchant through Cuban interpreters seemed to
draw out the information that the canoe came from “a country called
Maiam.”
That land lay west and north of this island (which today is called
Bonacca). The commander of the Spanish ships wanted to visit it. Yet
on the morrow he turned his ships southward, lured by a high range of
mountains that offered the baffled man his hundredth and last illusion
of the long-sought Cathay.
Thus was the distinction of being the discoverer of the country
of the Mayas narrowly missed on his fourth and last voyage by the
broken-hearted old Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus.
This picture of the first contact between Europeans and representatives
of the highest native race ever developed in the Americas ought to
be more generally known. The merchant in his great trading canoe
is a truer index of the life of the Mayas than are the painted and
nearly naked warriors encountered by the later European discoverers,
whose greed, bigotry and tyranny awoke the hostility of a naturally
peace-loving people.
For that such the Mayas were, the findings of our expedition strongly
indicate. That is to say, the Mayas were essentially a nation of
peaceful farmers and traders. There is more significance in this
statement than may appear at first.
Bear in mind that heretofore most of the world’s information relating
to the builders of the great ruined cities of Central America has
concerned the small ruling upper class, the priests who worked out the
elaborate and accurate calendar and the monarchs at whose orders public
buildings were decorated with sculpture and painting--the admiration
of discerning critics throughout the world today. For obvious reasons
fewer data have come to hand concerning the huge lower class, the small
merchants, peasants, artisans and slaves. Some of the most important
of our recent findings, however, relate to this inconspicuous but
important bulk of the Maya nation.
The release of part of the population from the mere labor of gaining
daily bread is necessary before any people can produce even a
rudimentary science or art. Several hundred years before the birth of
Christ the Mayas had accomplished this. So fertile was the soil of the
wet tropics in what is now northern Honduras and Guatemala, that the
minds and bodies of many men were set free from humdrum toil. It became
possible for priest-scientists to isolate themselves in monasteries and
observatories, where they studied the bright night skies, building up
an extraordinarily comprehensive body of astronomical knowledge.
From the rich mural reliefs and paintings of cities that have emerged
from the refuse of long tropical years it is clear that by the first
century or so of the Christian era the arts of the Mayas were nearly
abreast of their science. By this time they were making pottery and
textiles that were highly esteemed by neighboring tribes. Of course,
the products of the soil continued to be the basis of their existence;
but manufacturing and trade sprang up to engage the energies of the
laity.
Archæological evidence indicates that in the days when Christianity was
young the Mayas were developing the arts of peace; that, as nations go,
they then and always rather slighted the arts of war. Compared with
other early American peoples, the Mayas had little taste for blood.
It is true that the horrible rite of human sacrifice obtained some
hold among them; but this was as nothing compared with its prevalence
among the Aztecs of highland Mexico. Their sculptures, paintings and
pictured books are the work of a religious and peacefully inclined
people. There are, indeed, a few representations of warriors leading
home captives; but the figure of the soldier in Maya art is negligible.
That of the priest is ubiquitous. The Maya War God, the “Black
Captain,” enjoyed no such importance as did the bloody Huitzilopochtli
in the pantheon of the Aztecs.
The manner of the Maya resistance to the Toltec invasion, like the
manner of the later Maya resistance to the Spanish invasion, shows that
the Mayas did not take kindly to fighting.
Drouth, starvation and epidemics led the way to the downfall of the
Toltec monarchy in the middle of the eleventh century. Remnants of this
warlike nation left the region of the present Mexico City and drifted
southward.
About 1200 A.D. they seem to have begun a series of successful battles
with the Mayas of Northern Yucatan, who had just been enjoying a
renaissance of culture under the league of three great cities, Chichen
Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan. These Toltecs were wandering adventurers and
mercenaries, their national epic now nearly told. Yet the fragments of
Toltec architecture we found even on Cozumel Island, the easternmost
outpost of the Mayas, show that the northern fighters ran through that
fat southern country as wolves run through a sheepfold.
Although Spanish commentators of those times were eager to find excuses
for the _Conquistadores_, eager to put the best possible light upon
their aggressions, interlinear evidence convinces the neutral reader
that hostilities were usually provoked by the Europeans and that the
Mayas were ever ready for honorable peace. Summarizing the reports of
the contemporary Spanish writers, the English historian, Fancourt,
tells how the Indians of Eastern Yucatan had had ample reason, by
previous experience with Spanish expeditions, to distrust the motives
with which the Conquistador Montejo came among them in 1527. Yet the
Indians “were unwilling to commence hostilities and suffered the
Spaniards to disembark on the mainland,” which was promptly annexed by
Montejo in the name of the Emperor-King Don Carlos.
Later 200 Spaniards occupied the Indian town of Tihoo (the site of
Merida, present capital of the State of Yucatan). This occupation
aroused the Indians as nothing else had done, and their army grew to a
size variously estimated at from 40,000 to 70,000. Cogolludo describes
them as naked, except for loin cloths, their bodies smeared with
colored earth of various tints, ornaments and stone hanging from their
pierced nostrils and ears. They were armed with bows and arrows, pikes,
darts, lances tipped with flint and huge two-handed swords of hardwood.
Blowing conch shells and striking their spears on their shields of
large turtle shells, they advanced on the Europeans from all sides
“like fiercest devils.”
This fight was the bloodiest in the history of the conquest of Yucatan.
It lasted nearly all day. The Indians were completely routed and their
spirit forever broken. Cogolludo says: “The fame of the Spaniards rose
higher than before and the Indians never rallied again for a general
battle.”
As our expedition skirted shores once eagerly scanned for landing
places by lookouts on the war vessels of Grijalva and Montejo, and
as we cut our way through jungles where the feet of the Spanish
men-at-arms had once trampled the tender growth of the wide Indian
cornfields, we were constantly alert to discover remains that would
throw light on the question, were the Mayas a warlike nation? Deserted
Spanish forts we found aplenty, guarded now by nothing more deadly than
stinging ants and the thorns of the thick bush. The testimony of the
Maya ruins, which we found in abundance, answered the question with an
emphatic negative.
The city of Xkaret is surrounded by a wall, but it is the wall of a
people who sought security, not a wall built by men who knew much about
fighting. It showed us none of the moats and turrets with which old
Spanish forts were strengthened.
With military works a rarity in the Maya territory, walls that have
an opposite connotation are found on every hand. These are much lower
and narrower than the defensive walls, and are not unlike the familiar
stone fences that mark off divisions of property in our own stony New
England. There is reason to believe that they served a similar purpose
among these ancient Americans--an agricultural and commercial people
like ourselves.
It is well known that some of the fine roads that the Romans left to
their successors in Europe were built for military purposes. Several
elevated stone roads comparing favorably with the work of Julius
Cæsar’s engineers have been found in the Maya area; but they seem to
have been constructed for anything but warlike purposes. The “Via
Sacra” at Chichen Itza was just what its name implies, a holy road down
which the priests led the virgins to be sacrificed to the God of Rain.
This god presided over a sinister sunken pool into which these hapless
maidens were hurled. The causeway leading up to the city of Coba is
believed by some archæologists to have connected with Chichen Itza--in
which case its use was probably religious and civil, not military.
Edward Herbert Thompson, who examined this road several years ago,
believes there may have been a continuation of it on the unexplored
eastern side of Coba, for use by pilgrims bound for the island of
Cozumel, known to have been an objective of many journeys taken by
devout Mayas. In fact, it is quite likely that our Xkaret, with its
fine canoe harbor, marked the mainland terminus of some such pilgrimage
route, being, in short, the point where the faithful were ferried
across to the holy island.
With the exception of the twelve odd miles of open water, there may
have been a fine stone road all the way from the chief temple of
Chichen Itza to a temple, measured and photographed by Spinden, on the
eastward and ocean side of Cozumel. A link in such a transportation
system may well have been the causeway we found crossing a fresh water
lake in this extraordinary island.
So much for the contention that the Mayas were a peaceful people. Now
for the evidence we have found that aside from the small upper class,
engaged in art and science, the Mayas devoted much time to trade and
commerce.
In conquering a large part of the New World, the first motive of the
Spaniards was mercenary. Consequently they were quick to observe any
signs of prosperity among the natives whom they encountered. Their
comments upon signs of this sort of thing among the Mayas are much more
numerous, unfortunately for archæology, than are their references to
native culture, toward which they felt hardly a passing curiosity. They
reported the riches of Indian trading flotillas and described in detail
the golden and jeweled ornaments of Maya _caciques_.
There are many Spanish allusions to the cotton of the natives and to
“nequen cloth,” perhaps a sort of matting of henequen, or sisal fiber,
the chief product of Yucatan today. These products are but two of the
many gifts of the American Indian to the world. In the long catalogue
Spinden places corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins,
squashes, cocoa, peanuts, tobacco, cocaine, quinine, rubber and many
other valuable things. The plants of America show signs of having
been domesticated longer than do the plants of Asia. This evidence is
annoying to dogmatists who hold that America was settled from Asia!
The Spaniards soon learned, however, that the gold and precious stones
the Mayas wore had been imported to Yucatan, and that opportunities
for gain there were much fewer than in Peru and in upland Mexico.
Adventurers flocked to the standards of Pizarro and Cortes, in these
respective regions, many of them deserters from the force of Montejo in
Yucatan.
Spanish historians tell us that the colored cotton fabrics of the Mayas
were distributed over the whole of New Spain. Certain types of Maya
pottery have also been found over a wide area, indicating commercial
distribution of this product. The Mayas made many different classes
of pottery for various markets, and they were very proficient at
decorating it, applying modified hieroglyphs or the geometric patterns
so common in their architectural decoration.
On the other hand, the list of trade articles found in the Maya area
and certainly not made there is a large one. As already noted Spinden’s
work in Colombia some years ago established the fact that most of
the pearls and emeralds of the Mayas were imported from that region.
The turquoise, found by the Spanish in Yucatan, came from what is
now our State of New Mexico. Even if Colombia and New Mexico marked
the southern and northern limits, respectively, of Maya trade, these
bounded an area of which any nation confined to primitive means of
communication might well be proud.
Material for the ornaments of gold and jadeite worn by the Mayas came
from the highlands of Mexico and from Central America, in payment for
figured cotton goods and graceful pottery.
There is no doubt, then, that the Mayas maintained extensive trade
relations with other American nations. Recent additions to the world’s
knowledge of these people of Yucatan make one wonder whether toward
the end of their history commerce was not taking almost more of their
energy than the ever-necessary agriculture.
Heretofore inland trade routes have engaged the attention of students
of Maya history. Pretty surely the famous march of Cortes from the
highlands of Mexico to Guatemala was along inland roads of commerce.
Another overland trail connected the highlands of Mexico with the big
cities of northern Yucatan, and probably an offshoot left this, in
what is now the State of Campeche, to connect with the southward route
Cortes followed.
Our expedition brings home very strong evidence of a water route down
the east coast of Yucatan. Strung along this reef-bound coast we found
good canoe harbors connected with ruined trading towns at Xkaret,
Paalmul, Chakalal, Ac, Acomal and Muyil.
Probably there was much more shipping from the region of Xkaret and
Cozumel southward than from that vicinity northward, around Cape
Catoche. In other words, the overland trail from the big cities of
northern Yucatan, by which pilgrims used to reach Cozumel Island, was
pretty certainly an important artery of trade to the coastal cities we
found, forming a missing link in the water route to the south.
When Spinden and I crossed the Yucatan Peninsula we found a
considerable inland area south of Chichen Itza in which evidences
of Maya occupation were much thinner than in the vicinity of that
great city and along the coast. In short, there seems to have been no
considerable commerce by land route due south from the Chichen Itza and
Coba region.
The overland trade route from that district to Guatemala and Honduras,
which went west to Campeche and then southward by the trails Cortes
followed, was much longer than the land and water route via Xkaret or
Paalmul or Chakalal. We believe that this latter route was much used,
from the second occupancy of Chichen Itza in the tenth century up to
shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards.
When all the evidence for the existence of this coastal trade route is
reviewed, one fact stands out above all others. That is the extremely
thick settlement of this region, with traces of extensive public
works. A purely pious interest in the shrines of Cozumel Island would
not have produced such extensive construction.
The canal that connects the two lakes east of the ruins of Muyil
was not dug for the passage of pilgrims. Some of the high buildings
overlooking the dangerous rocks that the trade winds whiten with foam
were lighted to God, no doubt, but they were also excellent beacons to
belated argosies bearing the incense and feathers and jade so dear to
the deities of a nation of peaceful traders.
[Illustration: Examples of the mysterious red hand. The four in the
center are a conventionalized form found by Spinden on Cozumel Island,
indicating that whatever religious or political significance the red
hand may have had it also had at times a primarily artistic use. The
imprint at the left was made by wetting the human hand in red paint or
dye and slapping it against the wall. The two at the right were made by
holding the hand against the wall and painting around it.]