CHAPTER I

THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA

Deep in the thick jungles of Central America are dozens of splendid stone cities, abandoned centuries ago. Of the mysterious race which built them there remain only a few thousand Indians, ignorant of their glorious past.

The lovely architecture of these desolate palaces, the faded paintings on crumbling temple walls, the grace and symmetry of sculpture found on monuments buried under the matted undergrowth of who knows how many years, all stamp the builders of these cities as the creators of the highest civilization that flourished in the New World before the coming of Europeans. “New World?” Outstanding facts in the history of these first Americans have now been traced back to the ancient days when Thales was founding Greek philosophy.

Whence came these people, whom we call the Mayas? What was the catastrophe that wiped out their civilization so suddenly that no tradition of them has been found among the Indians who today inhabit their territory? When we enter their deserted cities we feel the poignantly tantalizing quality of the mystery that surrounds a magnificent ship discovered in mid-ocean with sails set, gear in order and not a soul on board.

Why was this great ship, bearing no outward sign of wreck or misfortune, so abruptly abandoned? Why were these temples, palaces and astronomical observatories of cunningly carved white limestone suddenly left to the bats, the lizards and the sinister little owls the later Indians called “moan birds” and associated with death? It is conceivable that any race might forget its humble beginnings in the dawn of history. But how came legend to be so silent about the collapse of a cultivated nation, some of whose greatest cities were inhabited as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Christian era--perhaps later? One reiterates the query, one gropes for an answer, till the imagination aches.

The expedition which Dr. Herbert J. Spinden of the Peabody Museum of Harvard and I are leading through Eastern Yucatan will diligently seek data to piece out the dim record of these vanished builders. At present the earliest date in that record is August 6, 613 B.C. Harvard has just announced Spinden’s proof that that was when these ancient Americans began to give each day its consecutive number and to keep a close tabulation of celestial events.

We should be particularly pleased to throw light on the abrupt downfall and disappearance of this mysterious people. Human interest, after all, is the fundamental appeal in this riddle, and one cannot stop wondering what became of the sailors who abandoned a full-rigged, seaworthy ship in mid-journey.

The information the world now has is subject to revision in the light of future discoveries, and even in its entirety is sufficient merely to whet the appetite to know more. There is no more fascinating hobby for the layman of a romantic and imaginative turn than to follow the attempts of scientists to find a satisfactory answer to this conundrum. And if he has been lucky, as I have, and has once seen a white temple rising through the green of tropical foliage, or has stood on an old pyramid awed by the silence of a whole city silver in the moonlight...! What puzzle can compete for fascination with inscrutable hieroglyphs which contain now only secrets, although carved to proclaim facts?

It was a widespread civilization as well as a high one, for it left the ornate façades of its urban centers over what is today British Honduras, Southeastern Mexico, two-thirds of Guatemala and part of “Spanish Honduras.” To this oldest American civilization archæologists have agreed to give the name Maya (pronounce the first three letters like the pronoun my). This is a name of uncertain origin, connected with a late Yucatan capital called Mayapan. It has been extended to cover a great nation which once numbered many millions.

It seems fair to give the Mayas the palm for culture existing in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. Of course, the over-advertised Aztecs never reached the level of the Mayas. A comparison with the Incas presents some difficulties, but as Dr. Spinden points out, “The Peruvians had no system of hieroglyphic writing and no carefully elaborated calendar.” They were thus unable to conserve intellectual gains. But the Mayas had a well developed system of hieroglyphs, mostly ideographic, that is, consisting of abbreviated pictures of the thing intended or of an object associated with it.

Understanding of this writing was probably confined to an educated minority, mainly the priests, who probably formed the ruling caste. We are able to read some 30 per cent of their hieroglyphs, but our knowledge is confined chiefly to numerals, astronomical symbols and signs for natural phenomena.

Their calendar is now an open book and can be proved more accurate than the Julian Calendar of the Spanish conquerors--the same calendar that Greece and Russia abandoned only a few years ago. Moreover, the extraordinary astronomical science of the Mayas seems to have been built up without telescopes. Astronomical sighting lines marked with monuments were used to measure the true length of the year.

Of the Maya proficiency in painting, Spinden says, “In foreshortening they greatly excelled the Egyptians and Assyrians.”

One of the most interesting things about these first Americans is that they were very religious. All their arts seem to have sprung from the religious impulse or to have been developed in interpreting it. Their gods and culture heroes had the physical attributes of reptiles, birds or lower mammals, although they were often somewhat partly humanized, like the beast gods of Egypt.

Archæology really is not dry and dull. It is fascinating, intensely exciting. But, alas, the real romance of the search for knowledge about the first families of America, the Mayas, is often neglected by laymen in their eagerness to embrace flimsy myths and hifalutin fancies.

These fancies are mostly concerned with the assumption that the wonderful antiquities of the New World were the work of emigrants from Egypt, Burma, China or some other part of the Old World, real or imaginary. The emotional associations with the Old World which the Bible has given us are a factor in our predilection for attributing the origin of everything to the other hemisphere.

Thus, even to this day bobs up Lord Kingsborough’s thin theory that the stone ruins in Central America were the handiwork of the Lost Tribes of Israel. However, the most persistent of all the myths is that the people we call Mayas were a colony of the lost continent of Atlantis, which Plato said Egyptian priests had told Solon had sunk beneath the western ocean in prehistoric times.

Of this long-lived theory one can only say that not a particle of proof has been offered. Indeed for the Atlantis myth itself, irrespective of alleged American connections, about the most that a careful critic can say is expressed by the Encyclopædia Britannica as follows:

“It is impossible to decide how far this legend is due to Plato’s invention, and how far it is based on facts of which no record remains.”

Most attempts to link up this extinct Central American culture with Old World origins are based on fortuitous traces of slight similarities in customs. But it should be remembered that two peoples, occupying wide apart portions of the globe, under similar conditions of living will be likely to develop similar institutions. If the climate is hot and there is straw, straw hats are apt to be devised by both nations.

Because some stone figurines found in Yucatan have teeth filed in a manner still practised by certain tribes of Africa, it has been suggested that the stone cities of Central America were built by negroes.

Some of the earliest explorers were entirely misled by the huge noses jutting from “mask panels” which adorn the façades of many a limestone temple. Failing to recognize the other features in the highly conventionalized faces containing these noses, these early explorers dubbed the stone snouts “elephant trunks.” As there are no elephants in the Americas, this mistake in identification led to the wild conjecture that these temples must have been built by emigrants from a country of elephants, that is, India or Africa!

Pretty certainly the truth is that these snouts belonged to Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, whose nose was commonly elongated in conventionalized Maya art.

Some of the modern natives of Yucatan, who are called the Maya Indians, although their degree of relationship to the Great Builders is uncertain, wear at various times a short apron from waist to knees and a sort of towel wound around the head, with the ends hanging down the back. Garments similar to these may be found in bas-reliefs from Egypt, a fact which has been the basis for many a vigorous smoking-room argument that the ruins of Yucatan must have been built by Egyptians. It is astonishing how little proof satisfies the amateur scientist. There are among the Mayas, as there are among many other Indian tribes of Mexico, a good many persons with long, narrow eyes like the eyes of Orientals. This fact and the fact that some Chinese laundrymen in Merida learn Maya more easily than they learn Spanish has convinced not a few theorists that the stone palaces in the jungle were constructed by Chinese.

In China I met an apparently reliable American who said he had found a reference in early Chinese history to a voyage made by a Chinese missionary three or four centuries after Christ. This earnest preacher of Buddhism seemed to have crossed the Pacific, coasted along what is now California and the west coast of America until he reached Central America. There, according to my friend’s translation of Chinese history, he remained several years.

But if such a voyage was made by a Buddhist missionary he was too late to found civilization in Central America. And it is just as likely that careless early voyagers were blown from the so-called New World to the Old, as vice versa.

It is surprising how many men seem to resent letting America have an early history of her own. A refreshing exception to monotonous dreams of Old World origins for the Mayas was provided by that indefatigable, though over-imaginative, French-American, Le Plongeon. This gentleman, whose active work in the field was as valuable as his subsequent theorizing was useless, presented the world with the creed that Central America had been the cradle of the human race, and that the civilization of Europe, Asia, and Africa had been founded by emigrants from the isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Charmed by his originality, if nothing more, many of our fathers in the age of the bicycle flocked to the support of this garrulous Gaul.

The leading archæologists of the world are agreed that the Mayas were an indigenous American race, that their early leaders neither sailed to Yucatan from China nor walked there from Atlantis across a “land bridge” of which there is no trace. Of course, we may some day learn that man originated in one definite, small area of the globe. But apart from such possible common origin of all races in the very remote past the Mayas can be confidently assigned beginnings in the western hemisphere. It is believed by the experts that this race started on the highlands of Mexico. Up there are archæological remains three thousand years old. There, too, are traces of legends about a great tribe which emigrated from the shadow of Popocatepetl to Central America. And similarities in religion, art and social organization all strengthen the link between that advanced culture which flourished in Middle America and the lesser civilizations which belonged to the so-called Nahua stock of upland Mexico--which included the Aztecs, whose fame is relatively greater than their accomplishments warranted.

The oldest inscribed date of the Mayas yet found corresponds to 98 B.C. in our count. Between that first date in stone and the putting into operation of the Venus calendar which Spinden has recently proved was done in the sixth century B.C. there is a mysterious gap of more than four hundred years. Before history was written on stone there was almost certainly an earlier civilization, when records were put down on skin and wood. And it is quite possible that stone monuments considerably older than any now known will be found. The most ardent skeptic of the great antiquity of Maya culture would have a hard time proving that before the oldest known city was built other cities had not crumbled away.

Remember, these temples are all built of limestone, a soft, friable material quick to disintegrate before the unchecked vegetable growth of the tropics. But somewhere, under favorable conditions, a very old stone relic may have escaped destruction.

This is the sort of reflection which makes us chew our nails in impatience as our schooner, the _H.S. Albert_, fights a head wind in the shallow waters off British Honduras. Our course will be generally northward as we retrace the track of the clumsy high-pooped vessels of the first Spanish Discoverers in the effort to find a ruined city unknown to archæology.

Columbus, on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, just missed becoming the discoverer of Yucatan when he failed to follow a canoe believed to have been filled with Yucatecans, which he met off the coast of what is now Honduras.

In 1517, another Spaniard, Cordoba, touched the east coast of Yucatan, near Cape Catoche and Mujeres Island, and saw “a large town standing back from the coast about two leagues.” Juan de Grijalva a year later sailed from Cuba to the Island of Cozumel. After claiming that land for his sovereign with the usual blithe arrogance of his age, Grijalva crossed to the visible eastern shore of Yucatan, where his historian describes sighting “three large towns separated from each other by about two miles.”

Perhaps unfortunately for present knowledge, Grijalva decided not to land.

Then, in 1519, came Cortez, who stopped in Yucatan only long enough to pick up the shipwrecked Spanish priest, Jeronimo de Aguilar, before proceeding along the coast to Vera Cruz, whence he marched inland. The discovery of great wealth in upland Mexico, and later in Peru, turned the attentions of the Spanish conquistadores from Yucatan, where little gold was to be had. The conquest of the hot lowlands, inhabited by the valiant Indians, was long delayed. The natives have never given up the struggle for independence and in the eastern part of the Yucatan peninsula, called Quintana Roo, they have retained a practical independence.

Some of the priests, and especially Landa, the second Bishop of Yucatan, left accounts of the old Indian life, but their writings were locked up in archives and escaped attention.

The first real awakening of outside curiosity toward the mysterious stone cities in Yucatan and Guatemala came with the reports from the American explorer, John L. Stephens, and his companion, the English artist, Francis Catherwood. Between 1839 and 1842 these two men visited and, with admirable exactitude, described “forty-four ruined cities or places in which remains or vestiges of ancient populations were found.”

Nearly all our present information has been gained since Stephens’s time, that is, within the last ninety years. And most of our knowledge of the glyphs has been hammered out within the past thirty years by arduous study of the inscriptions on monuments and of the texts of three Maya books, or “codices,” as the experts call them, which fortunately escaped the Spanish zeal for destroying what were considered “writings of the devil.”

No Rosetta Stone has been discovered to make the decipherment easier by permitting comparison of the hieroglyphs with another language. Nor is it likely that such an aid to interpretation will be found, although it is quite possible that more codices will be discovered.

Hunting for ruined cities in the unmapped jungle is somewhat like hunting for a needle in a haystack. The chances of success are increased because of the fact that the country was more thickly populated than most countries of our modern world. The civilization of the Mayas was built up on an abundant reservoir of man power supported by the fertile vegetable growth of the tropics. Our admiration for them must increase when we reflect that their magnificent temples of worship were probably made with man power alone, man power wielding tools of stone.

Within a hundred years or so after the birth of Christ the Mayas were building these splendid stone cities in territory now included in the southern parts of the Mexican States of Chiapas and Tabasco, and in Guatemala and along the western edge of Honduras. In this region are the lofty temples and broad plazas of Copan, Tikal and Palenque. This period is comparable to the classic period in Greek art, and is noted for the best sculpture the Mayas ever produced. We call it their “Age of Sculpture.” The last date which has been found in this area corresponds to 630 A.D.

In other words, these magnificent cities of what scientists call the “First Empire” of the Mayas were abandoned about the beginning of our seventh century. The cause of their abandonment has been the source of many an archæological controversy.

[Illustration: The heavy black line shows the route of the Mason-Spinden Expedition and the black stars mark the new archæological sites which the Expedition discovered.]

By the year 1000 A.D., however, the Mayas had found themselves again. Then there began their renaissance, their “second blooming.” This occurred in Yucatan and Quintana Roo. Here appeared new cities of stone, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Mayapan, Labna, Zayil, and dozens of others. In this period perhaps the painting and certainly the sculpture of the Mayas never reached quite the high level of that earlier blooming in the southern area, but the architecture was the finest the race ever produced. Hence this age is called the “Age of Architecture.” It is also called the “Period of the League of Mayapan” as distinguished from that earlier “First Empire.” We do not know much about the details of Maya political structure. But apparently government followed the opposite course of that it has taken in our United States and tended to become less and less centralized. The Mayas were ruled by Priest-Kings, for religion and government went hand in hand. And toward the last days of the Mayas individual sacerdotal monarchs took more and more independence upon themselves. Each city-state was nearly sufficient unto itself. But the religion and the racial stock and the language of the various groups was the same and they maintained alliances for the purpose of common defence. For a very rough illustration of the relations between these city-states of Yucatan we may look at the famous Hanseatic League of European cities, although the ties between the old Central American towns were much closer.

The leaders in this era of flourishing city-states were the great cities of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Mayapan. Jealousy between the last two ushered in the civil wars which hastened the end of this Maya renaissance. Some commentators imply that a woman was the cause of the war which Hunnac Ceel, monarch of Mayapan, waged upon Chac Xib Chac, ruler of the “City of the Itzas at the Mouth of the Well”--as Chichen Itza means in English. At any rate Mayapan sought the aid of the Toltecs, who were just giving way to the Aztecs in the highlands around where now stands Mexico City.

The calling in of outside mercenaries was a step fatal to Maya civilization. The Toltecs found that even though their culture had had its day they could fight better than the Mayas, and they soon over-ran northern Yucatan as the Romans over-ran Greece.

Things seem to have gone from bad to worse until many Maya nobles banded together about the middle of the fifteenth century and sacked Mayapan, whose ruler apparently had been oppressing other cities with the aid of his Toltec allies. When the Spaniards came in 1517 they found a weakened and degenerate people occupying the seats of former splendor.

I am reciting Maya history with a positiveness perhaps not entirely warranted, yet there can be little doubt that civil dissensions were a contributing cause of the abrupt breakdown of civilization in Yucatan. But why is it that more traditions have not been left, that more details of the debacle are not known? The Spaniards are strangely silent about the Maya hieroglyphs. Did they come in contact with no natives who could read them?

The puzzle implicit in these and similar questions, the enigma presented by the swift and silent disappearance of the flower of Maya culture, has convinced scientists that civil war was not the only and perhaps not the chief cause of the vanishing of that great early American civilization. Other causes suggested, by men whose word carries weight, are climatic change in Central America, exhaustion of the soil and the outbreak of epidemics, especially Yellow Fever. Spinden believes that this disease which the ancients called “Black Vomit” may have been a large factor both in the abandonment of the cities of the “First Empire” and in the final breakdown of civilization in Northern Yucatan.

Life in ancient Yucatan was a matter of delicate articulation as in our own city civilization of today. Suppose, for example, shortage of food and water made it necessary to evacuate New York almost over night and set up a new city in a rural district. A million persons might conceivably die in the transfer. And if meanwhile yellow fever or smallpox broke out....

To me the final, abrupt collapse of this great civilization just before the Spaniards arrived is the most fascinating part of the whole Maya riddle. Isn’t the mystery which enshrouds the ruins more poignant than it would be if they were ten times older?

Spinden and I have chosen the eastern part of the Yucatan Peninsula as the field for this expedition partly because it is one of the least known sections of the whole Maya area, but partly, too, because it was here that Europeans first came to grips with the broken remnants of the first families of America.

It is said that when one sense is crippled the others become sharper. Perhaps it is due to their inability to make much of the hieroglyphs that scientists have been able to put together so much information about the Mayas from the evidence of sculpture and architecture. The discovery of a ruined city may mean much more to us than a mere count of so many buildings added to the list of those already known. It may give us important information about the nature of the people who built it, the sort of lives they led, the activities which interested them. And if we can only get some light on the connection between the modern natives and the dead builders ... find some survival of an ancient custom....

Just now a modern Indian is crossing our bow in a fishing boat propelled by a gasoline engine. It seems a far cry from this Indian with his noisy, smelly motor to the brown skinned warriors who stood up against Spanish cannon with flint tipped spears and shields of tortoiseshell!

[Illustration]