COPAN IN 1885. (BY A. P. M.)
[Illustration: Sketch Map OF THE SITE OF RUINS AT COPAN.]
I was at Copan for a few days in 1881, and returned there again in
1885, determined to make a more thorough investigation of the ruins,
and the result of my work has been published at length in the pages of
the 'Biologia Centrali-Americana.'
The earliest description of the ruins is found in a letter addressed
by Diego Garcia de Palacio, an officer of the Audiencia of Guatemala,
to King Philip II. of Spain, dated 8th of March, 1576. Palacio was an
acute observer, and his description of the ruins shows that they were
in much the same condition when he visited them in 1576 as they were
when I began to work at them in 1885. It is, however, not to Palacio's
letter, which has only comparatively recently been unearthed from
the Spanish archives, but to the charming pages of Stephens and the
beautiful drawings of Catherwood that the world in general is indebted
for a knowledge of the wonders of Copan. But delightful as their great
book is in every other respect, it does not suffice for a detailed
study of Maya art and inscriptions, and my object in returning to the
ruins in 1885 was to gather together and publish such a collection
of accurate copies of the monuments and inscriptions as would enable
scholars to carry on their work of examination and comparison, and
to solve some of the many problems of Maya civilization, whilst
comfortably seated in their studies at home.
I had already gained some experience during an expedition to the ruins
of Quirigua for the same purpose in the spring of 1884, and the reader
of the foregoing pages will have learnt enough about the state of the
roads and the means of locomotion to appreciate the difficulties met
with in transporting from the Port of Yzabal to Copan the articles
which I knew to be necessary to the carrying out of my plans, of which
the following is a rough list: axes, machetes, pickaxes, spades,
crow-bars, wheelbarrows, surveying and photographic apparatus, dry
plates and chemicals, a barrel of lime, four tons of plaster of Paris
and some four or five hundredweight of moulding-paper, in addition to
food, personal baggage, and camp kit. The plaster of Paris was shipped
from England to Livingston in tin-lined barrels; at that port it was
landed and re-shipped in a small steamer which carried it up the river
and across the Golfo Dulce to Yzabal; there the barrels were opened and
the plaster put into waterproof sacks, which we had brought with us
from England for the purpose, and it was thence carried on mule-back
over the mountains to Copan. I remember making a calculation at the
time which showed me that the plaster for which I had originally paid
fifty shillings a ton in Carlisle had cost £50 a ton by the time it had
reached Copan.
We built a rancho among the ruins to accommodate Gorgonio Lopez and
his brothers, and Mr. Giuntini, a skilled plaster-moulder, whom I had
brought out from England to make plaster moulds of the monuments,
whilst I took up my quarters in the village, in a small mud-walled hut
which served as the cabildo. The particular attraction of this place of
residence was the prison cell attached to it, measuring about 7 feet
by 4 feet, which was speedily turned into a dark room for developing
photographs.
Through the courtesy of the Foreign Office I had been recommended to
the care of the English Minister to the Central-American States, and
it happened, luckily for me, that a few weeks before my arrival in
the country there had been held in the city of Guatemala a conference
of the Presidents of the five Republics, and during its session the
English Minister had been thrown into frequent communication with
General Bogran, the President of the Republic of Honduras. It was a
time of political ferment, and I strongly suspect that during the
official visits and social courtesies which the conference entailed, a
subject free from all the political dangers of the moment, such as my
expedition to Copan, was eagerly seized upon for friendly discussion.
The result was not a little to my advantage, but as at the time I
knew nothing of the cause, my astonishment may be imagined when, on
arrival at Copan, I entered the village under triumphal arches, and
was received by a guard of honour of barefooted soldiers, and by an
ex-Minister of State and a professor from the Government College, who
presented me with an official-looking document addressed to "El Sabio,"
which informed me that they had been appointed by the President of the
Republic of Honduras as his commissioners to assist me in my labours.
These gentlemen had already been awaiting my arrival for more than a
week, and it was an evident relief to the villagers when, at the end
of another week, I was able to impress upon them the value of the work
they had accomplished, and recommend them to rest from their labours
and return to their homes. Of General Bogran's good intentions and
really sympathetic interest in my work I had afterwards ample proof,
but pleasant and genial as were his commissioners, they were not
persons altogether suited to carry out the task entrusted to them.
After the departure of the commissioners it needed some tact to get
on good terms with the villagers, who had learnt to look on me with
suspicion; but at the end of a few weeks we became the best of friends
and remained so ever afterwards.
The sketch map at the beginning of this chapter will give a fairly
accurate idea of the site of the ruins. The surrounding hills are
somewhat sparsely clothed with pine-trees, but the level land of the
river valley has long been used as planting ground by the villagers,
and, where it is not actually under cultivation, is covered with an
almost impenetrable growth of scrub. Our first task was to clear
away this scrub, which completely hid from view the monuments in the
Great Plaza, and the next task was to mark out and carefully measure
a base-line for the proposed survey. The beautiful grove of trees
which covered the principal group of mounds and terraces had been left
untouched by the natives, as the ground on which it stood was totally
unfit for cultivation, and we did not find it necessary to do more than
remove the undergrowth and clear the surface of the ground, leaving the
great trees undisturbed to afford us their grateful shade.
It must be remembered that up to the time of this expedition in 1885
no trace of any house or temple had been discovered amongst the ruins
at Copan; but I found it difficult to believe that the great masses of
masonry could have been built up unless they were intended to serve as
foundations for temples such as I had already seen crowning the great
pyramids at Tikál. As the work of clearing proceeded and we gained a
better view of the great stairways and the outlines of the mounds my
hope of finding some trace of temple buildings was strengthened by
seeing that each of the higher mounds had usually a marked depression
running across its summit, which might be accounted for by the falling
in of a central doorway. Judge, then, of my delight when, on digging
into the top of the mound on the north side of the eastern court, I
came on unmistakable signs of the sides of a doorway and the remains
of an elaborate cornice running along the top of the interior wall of
a chamber. Digging on with the greatest care we finally unearthed the
fine ornamental doorway between the two chambers of the temple, of
which a drawing (with the fallen stones restored to their places) is
here given.
[Illustration]
After this successful beginning we set to work on other mounds, where
we unearthed more interesting sculpture, and succeeded in proving, as
I had hoped to do, that almost all the pyramidal mounds at Copan had
been raised to support temples, probably built at different epochs,
and possibly set at different angles on account of astronomical
considerations.
The accompanying plan shows the remains of the principal structures as
they would look denuded of their covering of vegetation and cleared
of some of the debris. Those mounds on which we found the remains of
temples are marked with a red cross, and the shape of the chambers is
roughly shown. The river has eaten into the east side of the largest
group, leaving exposed a cliff-like face of masonry and rubble, which
in one place is over one hundred feet in height.
[Illustration: THE EAST SIDE OF THE SCULPTURED DOORWAY.]
Whilst I had been busy over the excavations and the survey, Mr.
Giuntini had been at work making plaster moulds of some of the carved
monolithic stelæ, and Gorgonio and his brothers had been employed
making paper moulds of the numerous hieroglyphic inscriptions.
There are in all in the neighbourhood of the ruins about thirty carved
stelæ and altars (some of which are shown in the illustrations to
this chapter), and nearly all of them bear inscriptions; but I shall
defer all comment on the hieroglyphic writing to a later chapter,
when more material will be available from which to select examples
for explanation. In the meantime I may here give an account of my
efforts to impress on the mind of a Central American the great interest
attaching to the study of these carved inscriptions.
Whilst I was at Copan the village was visited by a General in the
Honduras army. I am told that in the army of that Republic Generals
are plentiful, and that the Government find it well to keep them
harmlessly employed, lest the devil should find some mischief for their
idle hands to do, in the shape of drawing up "pronunciamientos"; and
this particular general was in the employment of the department of
excise--that is to say, with the aid of a somewhat ragged following of
soldiers, he was hunting through the country for illicit stills. Of
course we paid one another formal visits and I had some very pretty
speeches made to me about Progress, and Liberty, and Science, which,
had they been printed with a free use of Capital letters, would
have read like a leading article in a Spanish-American newspaper.
The General thanked me formally for the distinguished service I was
rendering his country, and accepted with effusion my offer to take him
round the ruins and show him what discoveries had been made. On the
next morning he appeared with note-book and pencil in hand, and we set
off for the ruins, where I did my best in the capacity of showman. We
examined all the excavations, and then returned to have another look
at the monuments in the Great Plaza; but throughout our walk, although
the General's fingers played caressingly round his pencil, he never
took a note. At last we stood looking at the back of Stela A, which
is covered with a particularly well-preserved inscription inclosed in
a flat undecorated margin, on which some former visitor had rendered
himself conspicuous by deeply carving his distinguished name, J.
HIGGINS, in letters about three inches long. I was holding forth, in my
best Spanish, about the probability of an interpretation being found to
the hieroglyphics, and pointing out some glyphs which I had also met
with on monuments in Chiapas and Peten, when the General opened his
note-book, as I thought to make a drawing of the glyphs in question.
When his pencil had been at work for a few moments I glanced at the
sheet to see how proficient he might be as a draughtsman, and found
that he had got down J. HIG, and was carefully printing the second G,
when he turned round to me and said "Señor Don Alfredo, after all,
these hieroglyphics are very much like the characters we use now!"
During the early months of 1885 the difficulty in engaging labourers
to work at the ruins was even greater than usual, owing to two causes:
first, an epidemic of smallpox, which devastated the neighbouring
villages, although Copan itself luckily escaped its ravages, and,
secondly, the war which broke out between Guatemala and Honduras on
the one side, and Salvador and Nicaragua on the other. On our way to
Copan we had ridden through some villages which had been so completely
devastated by smallpox that every house stood empty, and the few
survivors from the disease had fled, leaving the long row of mounds and
hastily-made crosses by the roadside to tell their own tale. Then, when
the war came, the few labourers I had been able to engage were drafted
off as soldiers, and I was left with none but cripples and those who
were past the fighting age.
At one time matters really began to look serious. I had made
arrangements when in the capital for a supply of silver coin to be sent
me from time to time with which to pay the labourers; but at the end
of a few weeks the supply suddenly ceased, and my correspondents sent
a telegram to Zacapa, which was forwarded on to me, to say that owing
to the disturbed state of the country it was unsafe to send a messenger
with the money, that the tide of war was surging my way, and it was
advisable that I should make a speedy retreat to the coast.
I walked about for an hour with that telegram in my pocket, trying to
think out the chances of our being left unmolested; I knew by this time
that we had won the goodwill of the villagers, and I was loth to leave
the work which was daily growing more interesting, so finally I tore up
the telegram and said not a word about its contents to anyone. But my
silver was nearly at an end, and some of the workmen who had come from
a distance, and were naturally perturbed at the rumours of war, wanted
to get back to look after their own homes, and they had to be paid off.
It was then that the Niña Chica came to the front. When she was boiling
my kettle for me that evening I told her some of the difficulties I was
in, to which she listened attentively and then left the hut without
expressing any opinion. An hour or so later she returned and placed a
small bag of silver on the table. It seemed that she had gone the round
of the village and had borrowed every cent she could scrape together,
and to this she had added her own little store of dollars, and then
handed it over to me. It was done with such perfectly good grace that
it was impossible to refuse her help, but I had to explain that she had
not altogether caught my meaning. I had enough silver to pay all the
workmen up to date, but if I stayed on there was not enough left to
pay such labourers as I might be able to engage in the weeks to come.
"Don't you trouble yourself, Don Alfredo," she replied, "those that are
left in the village will go on working for you just the same; we know
well enough that you will pay us when these troubles are over."
I went to sleep that night in a happier frame of mind, but was careful,
before turning in, to bar the door and place a revolver handy, and
repeated these precautions every night until the war was over. I did
not think that the so-called regular troops would molest me; but in
these Republics, and especially near the frontiers of the States,
marauding bands are liable to crop up in war-time and exaggerated
reports of my doings might lead them to think that I was worthy of
their attention.
I asked the Niña Chica what chance there was of the villagers standing
by me in case of a night raid; perhaps I did not express myself as
though I had sufficient confidence in their courage, for the old
lady's eyes flashed and she cried "What! do you think all my boys wear
petticoats? You fire a shot for warning and just see if we don't all
turn out and give the rascals a good drubbing."
If all the villagers had been Niña Chicas no doubt any marauders
would have had a bad time of it, but as it was I had some misgivings.
However, their courage was never put to the test; every now and then a
report would come that troops were marching our way, and then most of
the villagers took to the bush with such valuables as they possessed
and left the village to the care of the Niña Chica and a few other old
ladies. After a time news came that a battle had been fought about
thirty miles away, and the men who had gone as soldiers began to
straggle back again; but no one could tell me what had really happened,
and the wildest rumours were afloat, and it was not until I sent to
Yzabal and got my letters and the newspapers from New Orleans that
I heard a true account of the battle and of the death of President
Barrios in action.
[Illustration]