CHAPTER XII

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]