CHAPTER II

WE HEAR OF A RUINED CITY

_It’s a great hour, it’s a grand hour When your anchor slams down, When the old yawl lets her wings fall And you land on the town._

_It’s a great hour, it’s a grand hour But the best hour I know, Is the morning, grayly dawning, When you make sail--and go!_

Not even the premonitory gray of dawn was in the sky, however, when I was wakened by the rattle of the windlass as the _Albert_ pulled up her left bower.

Buttoning my sweater and lighting a corn cob I reached the deck to hear Spinden moan through three blankets and an overcoat:

“I’ve got a longitudinal crease in my foot!”

“Is that why you kept it in my face all night?” came from under the greasy tarpaulin with which Whiting had reinforced his swathings.

The port engine coughed, sputtered, began to flare through the exhaust like a machine gun. Into the eastern sky crept hints of lemon, violet and apricot. The trade was rising with the sun--a favorable wind, thank God! Jib, staysail and foresail were helping the motor. The starboard engine was idle--there were certain shallow spots ahead which the Captain did not want to reach till the tide had lifted a little.

“Breakfas’ ready,” announced one of the two moon-faced San Blas Indian boys in our crew, which numbers six, beside pilot and Captain.

Our dining table is the engine room top. Spinden, Whiting and McClurg crouched on it like Turkish tailors, half encircling the food which the cook put on the table all at once from bananas to bacon. Griscom balanced on the bulge of a water barrel abaft the engine room. I sat on an upturned pail just in front of the wheel. These are our permanent seats, said the steward, ebony Jake who has been with Captain George Gough since the _Albert_ was built.

Spinden and McClurg, each 46, are the senior members of the expedition. They have ten years on me and I shade Griscom a scant twelve-month. Whiting, at 21, is the kid of the party, as he is frequently reminded by Spinden. The latter, who talks even more than I (as I see it) and has twice as much to say, is the leader in the free-for-all, Donnybrook Fair of badinage, personal animadversion and “ragging” which has kept up with no intermission except for sleep since we assembled at New Orleans. This worried me a bit at first, I was afraid some soft spots might be found and seeds of trouble sown. That no soft spots seem to exist speaks well for the crowd.

To find a ruined city is not the only objective of the Mason-Spinden expedition. Most of the country ahead of us has never been visited by an ornithologist and we have good reason to hope Griscom’s work will be very useful to science. With wise modesty he refrains from predicting that he will discover a new species, although there is a splendid chance that he will. He was lent to the expedition by the American Museum of Natural History chiefly to study the fauna of Cozumel Island and the adjacent mainland, for previous scientists to visit Cozumel have made the astonishing report that on that small island are several kinds of birds not recorded anywhere else in the world--not even on the Mexican mainland some twelve miles away!

Ruined cities and rare birds: a good program, but we have yet another aim, namely, general exploration with the emphasis on coastal and hydrographic observation. The Navy Department has asked McClurg (a full-fledged Commander in the Naval Reserve) to check up the positions of certain lights and other landmarks of value to mariners which seem to be of a migratory species to judge by conflicting reports of their whereabouts which reach the men who make charts.

Cozumel Island is on the route of steamers from Galveston, New Orleans and Mobile to Central America, yet our Government’s only chart of Cozumel is based on a British survey made no more recently than 1831. Opposite a large lagoon near the south end of the island a legend on the chart reads: “There is a channel into this lagoon but it was not seen by Captain Owen.” Which is better than no information to a mariner in a storm, but it might well be expanded. On the same chart the heads of Ascension and Espiritu Santo Bays are drawn in the fascinating broken lines which indicate doubt--unexplored territory. We hope to investigate the uncharted parts of at least one of these great bays. The very meagre soundings shown for both these bodies of water were made by a British war vessel in 1839. Yet Ascension Bay was described by its Spanish discoverer as large enough to hold the navies of the world. Terminating in Allen Point at the northern side of Ascension Bay is a long sliver of land which our Navy Chart shows as a peninsula. But we were told by a fisherman in Belize it is an island.

From Labrador to Tierra del Fuego it would not be easy to find a piece of coast so little known to white men as this. Yet the coastal places I have just mentioned are only from 150 to 250 miles distant from the western tip of Cuba.

In the whole Maya territory it would be hard to find a piece of land so nearly _terra incognita_ to the archæologist as the narrow strip of hinterland between the coast of the Mexican Territory of Quintana Roo (formerly part of the State of Yucatan) and a parallel line drawn through the end of the Yucatan railroad system at Valladolid, about seventy-five miles away.

We are as certain that there are in this strip undiscovered birds and important Maya ruins unknown to archæologists as men can be certain of things they have not seen.

Breakfast was interrupted by a check to the schooner’s progress so sudden that the coffee pot waltzed into Whiting’s lap.

Our Skipper dropped the fish line he was unsnarling and jabbed at the bottom with a fifteen foot pole which takes the place of a sounding lead on this “good sea and mud boat,” as McClurg calls her.

“Start da starboard engine, Nelson,” he yelled to the young engineer below, “an’ go ahead on both. Hey, _Matchee_ an’ Jawn, get up da main.”

The obstacle impeding our advance was a bar which blocked most of a narrow channel between two pieces of Hicks’ Key. Engrossed with the repartee of the breakfast table the helmsman had not noticed that the wind had been blowing us far to loo’ard--indeed with the centerboard raised on account of the shallows the old schooner had been sliding sideways like a dishpan.

In raising the mainsail and going ahead on both engines the Captain thought to plough through the obstacle. But the bar stood its ground, or mud. The only result of Gough’s manœuvre was to imbed the schooner so deeply that it seemed she might stay there forever.

“There’s only about a foot rise of tide here, and it’s more than half up already,” McClurg observed pleasantly. “A three or four inch lift may take us off--and it may not, after the way we’ve dug into the bar.”

The sails were dropped. Both engines raced full speed astern, but the only result was two streams of mud whose speed away from us emphasized the solid and stationary nature of our position.

Seeing the futility of this effort the Captain launched the crazy half-dory we call _Delirium Tremens_ and carried an anchor off to port of the _Albert’s_ bow. Hauling on the cable the men tried to turn the schooner’s head, while the port engine backed and the starboard motor went ahead to help the turning operation. But the vessel wouldn’t budge her nose, for with all the drums of gasoline and kerosene that had been stowed forward she was down by the head and the bar had got a good grip on her bow.

We now tried shifting cargo. Meanwhile one of the two San Blas boys--who look like twins but are not related--dove for the anchor, which seemed to have acquired the schooner’s intention of cleaving to this bottom indefinitely. Each time the Indian came up he was a splendid sight with his nude muscular body glistening in the sun. After several futile attempts he loosened the anchor from the clinging marl, and the dory carried the big iron hook out astern of the schooner.

The dusky manpower of our crew was applied to the cable again while both motors heaved hard astern. Sulphurous oaths in English, Spanish and San Blas came from the sweating crew, and choking blue fumes poured out of the engine room.

“She moves,” yelled the Skipper, “yah, she’s movin’!”

He pointed to a nine-foot oar jabbed perpendicularly into the bottom with its shaft brushing the counter of the _Albert_.

[Illustration: A good sea and mud boat was the _H. S. Albert_]

“An inch a minute,” agreed Whiting. It was hardly much faster at first, a motion comparable to the movement of the minute hand on a Grandfather clock. As the encouraged seamen threw every ounce they had on the hawser and the fervent incantations of Chief Engineer, Nelson, coaxed a little more power from the two 24-horse-power Lathrops the _Albert’s_ rearward speed increased to six inches a minute, a foot a minute. Her stern approached the anchor, which had not been carried very far behind us. As if resenting her release she rushed at the hook with sudden savagery and struck it with her port propeller.

“Stawp her, stawp her,” shouted Gough, and the punishment of the anchor was stopped. Everyone thought the port propeller must be a ruin. But the naked San Blas went overboard to look and came up with a dripping grin. Just a little nick in one blade, “no bigger’n a sardine could nibble,” explained Gough. He has a miraculous way of understanding the jargon of these San Blas Indians, who are his pets among the crew. They are built like short, stocky men of 25, but neither is yet 16. The Captain calls them _Matchee_ indiscriminately, which adds to our difficulty in distinguishing them. It seems that _matchee_ means “boy” or something like that in San Blas, and that they really have proper names, one being Joe and the other John.

The nick in the propeller blade was not serious, but the port engine had inhaled mud to the capacity of its cylinders, and the nick was the final insult. The engine quit.

The starboard one was stopped by order in five minutes when Griscom sighted a fishhawk’s nest on the key we were passing. He, Whiting, Spinden and I let ourselves very gingerly into _Delirium Tremens_. With cumbersome nine-foot oars delicately handled we rowed this damnably unbalanced craft into the squdgy grass which fringed the mangrove bog that was the key. Floundering through the morass three of us made still pictures of the nest and movies of the parent birds in the air, while Spinden from the rear snapshotted our flounderings.

Griscom was elated. This was a new “farthest south” for nesting fishhawks. This was the second time our ornithologist had scored, for he had already seen a herring gull in Belize harbor--a “farthest south” record for that species.

We are delighted with our schooner, which I chartered at Belize, Capital of British Honduras, through the good offices of Spinden’s friends in the United Fruit Company. She is comfortable and the most strongly built vessel of her size I have ever seen.

Certainly, though, she is no beauty with her patched sails, and with the two frame structures which loom up on her stern with all the grace of the little building which dogs the rear of every good, old-fashioned New England farmhouse. That is just what one of them is. The other is the galley.

The _Albert_ has been used as a combination passenger and cargo carrier, like many small schooners and big yawls in Central America where the sun has not yet set on the day of the old style, freelance trading vessel. She has just had an interesting operation by which a forty-seven-foot yawl became a sixty-five-foot schooner, mainly through the simple process of having a chunk inserted in her middle. One result of her visit to the ship hospital is that she is clean--so clean that she is a moving contrast to the fears we had of what she might be.

The great centerboard box divides the after part of the hold, and in the rear of these compartments, piled against the bulkhead between us and the engines, are dozens of crates and boxes of provisions. A steep companionway enters the starboard hold, and a ladder gives other egress to the deck through a hatch over the wide, open part of the hold just forward of the centerboard box. Forward of this again, under the lower, foremost deck which would be the fo’c’s’le head if she had a fo’c’s’le are stowed her chains, spare anchors and cable, two hundred pounds of ham and bacon, the axes, pickaxe and shovel of our archæological outfit, and four fifty-gallon drums of fuel. The remaining six hundred gallons is stored on deck in cases. At the most there is five feet ten inches of headroom, not enough for Spinden and me.

Hinged against the _Albert’s_ sides and suspended from her deck beams above by galvanized chains are six planks, six swinging bunks, three on a side. Spinden and McClurg have taken port bunks, the junior trio berths to starboard. The berths are short and Whiting, Griscom and I cannot occupy our beds simultaneously without the feet of at least one man being on another’s face. But Griscom, Whiting and Spinden announce that to escape the heat and the odor of fuel here they prefer to sleep on deck in the folding cots they have brought for the bush. Which suits McClurg and me perfectly.

Already we are all keen about George Gough. Only one request of ours has he unfulfilled. That was to get the permission of the British authorities to insert the letter M between the H and S of the _Albert’s_ name. Never sailed schooner on romantic quest with more prosaic title. “H. S. Albert!” It sounds like the name of a coal barge. However, with the ridiculous frame shacks on the poop, and the roof with rolled up carriage curtains raised on uprights over the engine house the good vessel resembles an East River floating home for tuberculous children.

[Illustration: A rare moment when both Spinden and Mason were silent]

But her name bothers me less now that I know the explanation. It seems that Gough is only one of three owners of the little ship. Like his partners he is a parent, and the schooner is named for a child of each of them--Harold Stella Albert, I think it is.

George F. Bevans is the name of our old negro pilot. He goes forward to peer at the shoals and relay back directions through the two shouting San Blas Indians to the Skipper, who takes the wheel. Now the light glints on a long, tanned face--humor and initiative in the strong mouth and straight eyes--the face of a man in whom leadership is so instinctive that he never feels the responsibilities of command.

It is late afternoon. With the wind nearly abeam we are hot. It must be a stifling day in the bush, out of the breeze. McClurg and I have finished opening and sorting the stores, and we have all rigged racks for guns and towels beneath our bunks, and nailed boxes there to hold toilet articles, tobacco and books. Griscom has overhauled his shining cutlery for skinning birds and his arsenic and cornmeal for curing the skins. His belongings and Whiting’s are well arranged, but McClurg’s are put out in the apple pie order of the Navy. What a contrast to the careless aspect of my quarters! As for Spinden’s dunnage, a great mixed mass of papers, books, cigar boxes, photographic material, hunting knives, candy jars, boots, medicine bottles, ink bottles, blankets, and disordered clothing buries not only his bunk--which he does not sleep in--but the spare bunk between his and McClurg’s as well. He has made several attempts to reduce this mountainous chaos to an orderly plain, but while the engines are running the poor fellow cannot stay below two minutes before he begins to turn green.

Spinden and McClurg--already firm friends, are a delicious contrast. When he can forget the internal torment created even by this slight roll of the schooner the archæologist puts off the manner of a pathetic child lost in the dark for a sudden smile of winsome friendliness. His fund of information is amazingly vast, ranging from thermo-dynamics to bar-room ballads. McClurg talks little, but always to the point. His charm is in his crisp dependability, his way of putting his head a little on one side with a quick smile. He says frankly he hasn’t the slightest interest in ruined temples or old frescoes. He vows he will never go far ashore and his curiosity about the land we plan to visit is confined to reefs and islands. He hopes we will travel fast, in order that he may see as much of the coast as possible before his business calls him home in about a month. McClurg’s ruling passion is the sea and ships, two things which are poison to Spinden. The latter sharpens his _machete_ and longs to endure the bugs and thorns of the bush for a glimpse of the faces of old gods. Sharing the pet enthusiasm of each of these men to a lesser degree, I find the conflict of hobbies vastly entertaining. Spinden and McClurg have given up trying to win the other’s interest to ruined cities and ships, respectively, and have found neutral ground in conversations on astronomy and cooking, subjects on which knowledge is essential both to archæologists and navigators.

The water in the starboard butt is tinctured with tar. The flavor in the port barrel is gasoline. Whiting has solved the thirst problem for today at least by adding to a bucket of the tarry fluid generous quantities of sugar, limejuice and rum.

The dull masts of our schooner are great gold pencils in the generous sun. From her maintop the five-starred flag of Honduras snaps and crackles in the breeze--a fair wind to the coasts of the unknown. Now, at last, I really believe we are going up the buccaneer coast of Yucatan in a schooner, looking for an old, ruined city of the Mayas. We are bound first to Payo Obispo, capital of Quintana Roo, to get permission from the Mexican Governor to explore his Territory. Thereafter our plan is to use the schooner as a houseboat, a base from which to sally into the interior. The coastal jungle which we want to explore is more easily reached by water than by land. We are urged to hasten by a rumor that the British explorer, Dr. Thomas Gann, whom we left in Belize yesterday, January 16, 1926, is going to Cozumel Island or Progreso, Yucatan, to get a boat to bring him southward along the same piece of coast which we are aiming to reach by northerly sailing.

“Stawp her,” yells the Skipper.

Anchor chain rattles. The schooner’s head comes up into the trade wind, warm, strong, steady as a fine friendship. A light gleams out astern. “Payo Obispo,” says the Captain. But we cannot land tonight, the Customs House has closed.

Since the sun rose over Saint George Key we have nearly crossed Chetumal Bay, which separates British Honduras from Mexico. When Montejo, conqueror of Yucatan, came up here in 1529 his caravel must have been of very slight draft. In large areas the wide bay is of insufficient depth to drown a Maya Indian, and the Mayas are short. As McClurg has just said:

“There’s a lot of water here, but it’s spread on thin.”

The Assistant Engineer, the Pilot and the Cook are already playing cards by a lantern under the canopy over the engine room. Spinden, Griscom and Whiting stumble over each other and the folding cots they are opening in the brief spaces between water barrels and fuel cases.

McClurg has already turned in below. I follow the beam of my flashlight down there, kick off sneakers and thrust a leg up to my swinging berth. Grasping the chains which hold it I pull myself up like a man coming over a high wall. But I cannot sleep. The reality of the dream I am living is too sharp to be suspended by physical weariness.

My body gropes for the hard plank through the thin mattress. My hand grips the four by six timber overhead. They are real. This is not a dream any longer, this schooner off the coast of the old Mayas.

The mind races ahead to places I know by heart though I have never seen them. It might pay to take a look at that long lagoon back of that thin piece of land where Morley, Gann and Held found the ruins of Chacmool--that ought to be explored. I reach down to a box I have nailed under my berth and pull up Hydrographic Office Chart Number 1380. An examination with a flashlight confirms the impression that it gave no depths for this lagoon. Very shallow, doubtless, but perhaps we could get in there with the _Delirium Tremens_.

Chart Number 966 comes up, bearing the thumb marks and pencillings of three years of study. In the northeast corner of Yucatan a cross and a question mark show where it may be possible to find remains of the great city of Choaca, which seems to have impressed greatly the Spaniards who sacked it. Further south, roughly opposite the southern end of Cozumel Island, I have pencilled in a cross and the words: “Acomal--Lothrop thinks ruins here.” The exact words of Lothrop in his fascinating “Archæological Study of the East Coast of Yucatan” come to me: “From these ... Indians of the small village of Acomal ... we learned of the ruins of Xelha, and they also stated that near their own village were remains of equal importance.”

But someone else may get to these places ahead of us; Gann is up to something I am sure.

And what if all these stories of ruins are fairy stories and we should find nothing, not one solitary little shrine! I shiver. The leadership of the expedition is shared by Spinden, but responsibility for complete failure would be mine alone. This trip originated in my mind, it was my dream. I sold it, and if we find not a single building, not even one solitary little shrine!

Groping for consolation my mind turns to memory of a conference in the Peabody Museum of Harvard in November, when Dr. Tozzer of that distinguished institution agreed to lend the expedition not only the services of Spinden but the Museum’s warm moral support. A number of men who know the conditions we are likely to meet went over our proposed itinerary with us.

“You are bound to find something worth while,” Tozzer said at the conclusion of the conference, and Morley of the Carnegie Institution and Lothrop of the Heye Foundation nodded emphatic assent. “The bush is full of good stuff,” declared Morley, who has found many ruins by his own efforts and some by virtue of his standing offer--widely advertised among the Indians of the chicle camps--“_veinte cinco pesos para un ciudad real_” (“twenty-five _pesos_ for a royal city”).

Well, I’ll offer a hundred _pesos_, no a hundred dollars gold. Two hundred silver _pesos_, more silver than an Indian could carry in his cat-skin pouch. A pile of silver, a pyramid. There rises before me a typical Maya pyramid, four-sided, with ascending terraces and a wide stairway of limestone which shines like silver under the moon. And on its top a temple--the grinning stone face of a Maya god at each corner, a temple no archæologist has yet seen. An old Maya temple waiting for us to find it, silvery in the moonlight.

Another dawn, this one not so cold. McClurg’s test shows the water is virtually fresh. Rid of the fear of sharks and barracuda we swim, hurried by the fragrance of bacon and coffee.

Payo Obispo presents a pleasant front of white stucco houses with grey or red roofs. There’s a glimpse of humbler thatched huts in the rear. We anchor near a chicle schooner in a bevy of sloops and nondescript launches.

Governor Candelario Garza is very cordial. He has had instructions from Mexico City to treat us well, and the only request he denies is that he pose for his photograph. He asks to be excused because he has not shaved today. Spinden, who is much more practical than archæologists are commonly supposed to be, delights Governor Garza by arguing that the development of a port and railroad in Northern Quintana Roo on the track of the steamers from New Orleans to Central America would make a hustling commercial state of what is now a wilderness inhabited by a few Indians who exist by hunting turkeys and chicle.

“I understand you are looking for ruins,” says the Governor. “I do not know of any which are not known to the world, but I suggest you go and talk to _Señor_ Enriquez. He’s in charge of our forestry work in Quintana Roo and has been all through the bush. He may be able to help you.”

We thank the Governor and walk out of his office and through wide streets in which the grass is indifferently kept down by the bare feet of the inhabitants. We walk abreast, we five and tall, handsome young _Señor_ Fidencio Arguelles, the Governor’s Chief Clerk. Burros, pigs, goats, and children trail us.

_Ingeniero_ Raymundo E. Enriquez is the seventh Mexican we have this morning asked:

“Do you know of any Maya ruins?”

“I do,” he says confidently, “at Chunyaxché, back of Boca de Paila. I was there looking for chicle once. You cross the bar at Boca de Paila, cross a lagoon, go up a river, and just before you reach a lake you’ll see one ruin.”

“What’s it like?” asks Spinden, suspicious from long experience.

“It is a one story building with a rather flat roof. It has three doors with a decoration over them carved in the limestone.”

“Yes; are there any others?”

“Yes, you go on, cross this lake to a sort of canal connecting with a second lake. On the farther side of that second lake is a chicle camp. Right close by are several more ruins.”

“What are they like?” pursues Spinden.

“I didn’t pay much attention to them, for ruins are not my business. But I remember a temple on a pyramid like _El Castillo_ at Chichen Itza.”

Spinden’s eyes glisten. “It sounds like the real thing!” he whispers to me, while _Señor_ Enriquez reaches for cigarets in his linen coat hanging from a nail.

We pull out our maps. Boca de Paila is shown, but there is no indication of the river and the two lakes. Confidently Enriquez sketches them in with a pencil.

“Can we get a _practico_--a pilot?”

“I think you can at Boca de Paila. I think the _chicleros_ are still there, or else up at the camp on the lake, the place called Chunyaxché. But if I were you I’d stop at Ascension Bay first. It’s right on your way--and there you won’t fail to get a guide.”

We thank him profusely. Will he come on board for lunch? Many, many thanks, but he is “_muy occupado_” today.

We go out walking on air. This sounds like a real clue. And it comes “the first crack out of the box.”

It is an everyday occurrence for explorers in this country to be told of ruins by _chicleros_, muleteers and other ramblers of the jungle. Nine times out of ten these men cannot take you to the temples they have glimpsed months or perhaps years before in the roadless bush. In other cases their ruins prove to be an old Spanish church or even a stone-walled coral, as _chicleros_ and muleteers generally have little appreciation of the features which characterize Maya architecture. However, _Señor_ Enriquez seems so intelligent, and gives such a convincing description of what he has seen, that even the cautious Spinden is giving free rein to the most sanguine hopes.

No ruins in such a location as Enriquez describes are on any archæological map. The fact that Enriquez has seen the ruins will not deprive us of the right to call ourselves the discoverers of the old City of Chunyaxché if we reach it. All the ruined Maya cities now on scientific maps were known to natives before they were “discovered” by explorers. America was known to thousands of Indians inhabiting it when Columbus arrived, but the civilized world calls Columbus “the discoverer of America.” It is the accepted usage to say that an explorer or archæologist is the “discoverer” of an ancient building if he is the first to report it to the modern scientific world for study.

This day drags like the last day of convalescence in a hospital, or the day before a long awaited vacation. We itch to make sail and go! Even Spinden is yearning for the vibration of the _Albert’s_ motors and the gas fumes which will make him sick again.

But we must wait for valuable letters of introduction which the Governor has promised to deliver this afternoon.

Arguelles and the Chief Customs Officer come to luncheon. Both are pleasant chaps, but I fear we are all absentminded hosts. We are full of the desire to be alone to think over the great news given us by Enriquez, to make our plans and paw over our maps for the thousandth time. The strain of maintaining a conversation in Spanish makes us want to scream. Good chaps that they are, our guests probably sense our condition, for they do not linger after the cigars.

“Egad, it’s good to speak English again, fellah!” exclaims Griscom with a thump on my back. “I never took my linguistic responsibilities so hard before. Wish I were like Whiting and McClurg and couldn’t be expected to do anything but smile and murmur ‘_Gracias_’ ten times a minute!”

It is six o’clock before the papers are given to Spinden and me at the Governor’s office. After enthusiastic thanks we run to the dock.

The two “_matchees_” give way with a will, _Delirium Tremens_ caroms along with a bone in her teeth.

Our impatient crew has set foresail and mainsail already. The windlass creaks, the engines bark, and the schooner swings off toward Chunyaxché and the vindication of a dream.

[Illustration]