CHAPTER XIV

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.]