CHAPTER XX.

A crippled Dog.--Island of Cozumel known to the Natives by the Name of Cuzamil.--Discovered by Juan De Grijalva.--Extracts from the Itinerary of his Voyage.--Towers seen by the Spaniards.--An ancient Indian Village.--Temples.--Idols prostrated by the Spaniards.--Present State of the Island.--Overgrown with Trees.--Terrace and Building.--Another Building.--These Buildings probably the Towers seen by the Spaniards.--Identical with those on the Mainland.--Ruins of a Spanish Church.--Its History unknown.--Vanity of Human Expectations.--Opinion of the old Spanish Writers.--Their Belief that the Cross was found among the Indians as a Symbol of Christian Worship.--The "Cozumel Cross" at Merida.--Platform in Front of the Church.--Square Pillars.--Once supported Crosses.--The Cozumel Cross one of them.--The Cross never recognised by the Indians as a Symbol of Worship.--Rare Birds.--A Sudden Storm.--The Canoa in a Strait.--Fearful Apprehensions.

The next morning, while breakfasting on the old hatch, we saw a dog peering at us from a distance, as if wishing, but fearful to approach. The poor, beast was crippled, limped badly, and had his fore shoulder horribly mangled, the patron said by an encounter with a wild boar. We endeavoured to entice him to us, but, after looking at us a few moments, he went away, and never came near us again. No doubt he was one of the five left by Don Vicente Albino, and, abandoned once, he had lost all confidence in man. In a few years, if these are not eaten up by stronger beasts, a race of wild dogs may inhabit this deserted island.

The island of Cozomel, as it is now called, was known to the natives by the name of Cuzamil, signifying in their language the Island of Swallows. Before setting out from home I had fixed upon this island as one of the points of our journey. My attention was directed to it by the historical accounts of its condition when it first became known to the Spaniards. It was discovered accidentally in 1518 by Juan de Grijalva, who, in attempting to follow in the track of Cordova, was driven in sight of it. The itinerary of this voyage was kept by the chaplain-in-chief of the fleet, under the direction of Grijalva, and, with a collection of original narratives and memoirs, was published for the first time in 1838 at Paris. The itinerary opens thus:

"Saturday, the first of March of the year 1518, the commandant of the said fleet sailed from the island of Cuba. On the fourth of March we saw upon a promontory a white house.... All the coast was lined with reefs and shoals. We directed ourselves upon the opposite shore, when we distinguished the house more easily. It was in the form of a small tower, and appeared to be eight palms in length and the height of a man. The fleet came to anchor about six miles from the coast. Two little barks called canoes approached us, each manned by three Indians, which came to within a cannon shot of the vessel. We could not speak to them nor learn anything from them, except that in the morning the cacique, _i.e._, the chief of that place, would come on board our vessel. The next morning we set sail to reconnoiter a cape which we saw at a distance, and which the pilot told us was the island of Yucatan. Between it and the point of _Cucuniel_, where we were, we found a gulf, into which we entered, and came near the shore of Cuzamil, which we coasted. Besides the tower which we had seen, we discovered fourteen others of the same form. Before leaving the first, the two canoes of Indians returned; the chief of the village was in one of them, and came on board the vessel of the admiral, and spoke to us by means of an interpreter (one of the two Indians carried off from Yucatan on the previous voyage of Cordova), and prayed the commander to come to his village, saying that it would be a great honour to him....

"We set sail, following the coast at the distance of a stone's throw, for the sea is very deep upon the borders. The country appeared very agreeable; we counted, on leaving this point, _fourteen towers_ of the form indicated. At sunset we saw a large white tower, which appeared very high. We approached, and saw near it a multitude of Indians, men and women, who were looking at us, and remained until the fleet stopped within musket shot of the tower. The Indians, who are very numerous in this island, made a great noise with their drums.

"On Friday, the sixth of May, the commandant ordered one hundred men to arm themselves. They embarked in the boats, and landed. They were accompanied by a priest, and expected to be attacked by a great number of Indians. Being prepared for defence, they arranged themselves in good order, and came to the tower, where they found no one; and in all the environs they did not see a single man. The commandant mounted upon the tower with the standard bearer, the flag unfurled. He planted this standard upon one of the facades of the tower, took possession in the name of the king, in presence of witnesses, and drew up a declaration of said taking possession.

"The ascent to this tower was by eighteen steps; the base was very massive, one hundred and eighty feet in circumference. At the top rose a small tower of _the height of two men placed_ one upon the other. Within were figures, bones, and idols that they adored. From these marks we supposed that they were idolaters. While the commandant was at the top of the tower with many of our people, an Indian, followed by three others who kept the doors, put in the interior a vase with very odoriferous perfumes, which seemed of storax. This Indian was old; he burned many perfumes before the idols which were in the tower, and sang in a loud voice a song, which was always in the same tone. We supposed that he was invoking his idols.... These Indians carried our commandant with ten or twelve Spaniards, and gave them to eat in a hall constructed of stones very close together, and covered with straw. Before the hall was a large well, from which everybody drank.... They then left us alone, and we entered the village, where all the houses were built of stone. Among others, we saw five very well made, and commanded by small towers. The _base_ of these edifices is _very large_ and _massive_; the _building is very small at the top_. They appeared to have been built a long time, but there are also modern ones.

"That village, or bourg, was paved with concave stones. The streets, elevated at the sides, descended, inclining toward the middle, which was paved entirely with large stones. The sides were occupied by the houses of the inhabitants. They are constructed of stone from the foundation to half the height of the walls, and covered with straw. To _judge by the edifices and houses, these Indians appear to be very ingenious_; and if we had not seen a number of recent constructions, we should have thought that these buildings were the works of the Spaniards. This island appears to me very handsome.... We penetrated, to the number of ten men, three or four miles in the interior. We saw there edifices and habitations separated one from another, and very well constructed."

On the tenth of February, 1519, the armament of Cortez rendezvoused at this island. Bernal Dias was again a companion, and was an actor in a scene which he describes as follows: "There was on the island of Cozumel a temple containing some hideous idols, to which all the Indians of the neighbouring districts used to go frequently in solemn procession. One morning the courts of this temple were filled with Indians, and curiosity having also drawn many of us thither, we found them burning odoriferous resins like our incense, and shortly after an old man in a large loose mantle ascended to the top of the temple, and harangued or preached to the multitude for a considerable time. Cortez, who was present, at length called to him Melchorejo, an Indian prisoner taken on a previous voyage to Yucatan, to question him concerning the evil doctrines which the old man was delivering. He then summoned all the caciques and chief persons to come before him, and as well as he could, by signs and interpretations, explained to them that the idols which they worshipped were not gods, but evil things, which would draw their souls down to hell, and that, if they wished to remain in brotherly connexion with us, they must pull them down, and place in their stead the crucifix of our Lord, by whose assistance they would obtain good harvests and the salvation of their souls, with many other good and holy reasons, which he expressed very well. The priests and chiefs replied that they worshipped these gods as their ancestors had done, because they were kind to them, and that, if we attempted to molest them, the gods would convince us of their power by destroying us in the sea. Cortez then ordered the idols to be prostrated, which we immediately did, rolling them down some steps. He next sent for lime, of which there was abundance in the place, and Indian masons, by whom, under our direction, a very handsome altar was constructed, whereon we placed an image of the Holy Virgin; and the carpenters having made a crucifix, which was erected in a small chapel close to the altar, mass was said by the reverend father Juan Dias, and listened to by the priests, chiefs, and the rest of the natives with great attention."

These are the accounts given by eyewitnesses of what they saw on the first visits of the Spaniards. The later historians are more explicit, and speak of Cozumel as a place containing many adoratorios and temples, as a principal sanctuary and place of pilgrimage, standing to Yucatan in the same relation as Rome to the Catholic world. Gomarra describes one temple as being "like a square tower, broad at the base, having steps on the sides, and at the top a chamber covered with straw, with four doors or windows, with their breastworks or corridors. In the hollow, which seems like a chapel, they seat or paint their gods. Such was that which stood near the seacoast."

By these accounts I had been induced to visit the island of Cozumel; and an incidental notice in the Modern Traveller, speaking of existing ruins as remains of Spanish buildings, led me to suspect that their character had been mistaken, and that they were really vestiges of the original population; but on the ground we asked ourselves where to look for them. Amid all the devastations that attended the progress of the Spaniards in America, none is more complete than that which has swept over the island of Cozomel. When I resolved to visit it I was not aware that it was uninhabited; and knowing it to be but thirty miles long, I supposed that, without much difficulty, a thorough exploration could be made; but even before landing we saw that it would be impossible to accomplish this, and idle to make the attempt. The whole island was overgrown with trees, and, except along the shore or within the clearing around the hut, it was impossible to move in any direction without cutting a path. We had only our two sailors, and if we should cut by the compass through the heart of the island, we might pass within a few feet of a building without perceiving it. Fortunately, however, on the borders of the clearing there were vestiges of ancient population, which, from the directions of Don Vicente Albino, we had no difficulty in finding. One of them, standing about two hundred feet distant from the sea, and even now visible above the tops of the trees to vessels sailing by, is represented in the engraving that follows. It stands on a terrace, and has steps on all four of its sides. The building measures sixteen feet square; it had four doors facing the cardinal points, and, as will be seen by the figure of a man sitting on the steps, it is very low. The exterior is of plain stone, but was formerly stuccoed and painted, traces of which are still visible. The doorways open into a narrow corridor only twenty inches wide, which encompasses a small room eight feet six inches long and five feet wide, having a doorway opening to the centre.

[Engraving 58: Square Building]

South-southeast from this, near an opposite angle of the clearing, and five or six hundred feet from the sea, stands another building raised upon a terrace, consisting of a single apartment, twenty feet front and six feet ten inches deep, having two doorways and a back wall seven feet thick. The height is ten feet, the arch is triangular, and on the walls are the remains of paintings.

These were the only buildings in the clearing, and though, doubtless, many more lie buried in the woods, we saw no other on the island; but to us these were pregnant with instruction. The building presented in the engraving, standing close to the sea, answers, in all its general features, the description of the "towers" seen by Grijalva and his companions as they sailed along the coast. The _ascent is by steps_, the _base is very massive_, the _building is small at the top_, it is _about the height of two men placed one above the other_, and at this day we may say, as the Spaniards did, that, _to judge by their edifices, these Indians appear to be very ingenious_. It is an interesting fact, moreover, that not only our patron and sailors called this building a "tower," but in a late article published in the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society at London, entitled "Sketch of the Eastern Coast of Central America, compiled from Notes of Captain Richard Owen and the Officers of her Majesty's Ship Thunder and Schooner Lark," this building, with others of the same general character, is indicated by the name of a "tower." So far as the route of Grijalva can be traced with certainty, there is strong reason to believe that the Spaniards landed for the first time in the bay on the shore of which this building stands, and there is no violence in the supposition that the building presented is the very tower in which the Spaniards saw the performance of idolatrous rites; perhaps it is the same temple from which Bernal Dias and his companions rolled the idols down the steps. And more than this, establishing the great result for which we had visited this island, these buildings were identically the same with those on the mainland; if we had seen hundreds, we could not have been more firmly convinced that they were all erected and occupied by the same people; and if not a single corroborating circumstance existed besides, they afford in themselves abundant and conclusive proof that the ruined cities on the continent, the building of which has been ascribed to races lost, perished, and unknown, were inhabited by the very same Indians who occupied the country at the time of the conquest.

At the rear of the last building, buried in the woods, so that we should never have found it but for our patron, is another memorial, perhaps equal in interest to any now existing on the island of Cozumel. It is the ruins of a Spanish church, sixty or seventy feet front and two hundred deep. The front wall has almost wholly fallen, but the side walls are standing to the height of about twenty feet. The plastering remains, and along the base is a line of painted ornaments. The interior is encumbered with the ruins of the fallen roof, overgrown with bushes; a tree is growing out of the great altar, and the whole is a scene of irrecoverable destruction. The history of this church is as obscure as that of the ruined temples whose worship it supplanted. When it was built or why it was abandoned, and, indeed, its very existence, are utterly unknown to the inhabitants of New Spain. There is no record or tradition in regard to it, and, doubtless, any attempt at this day to investigate its history would be fruitless. In the obscurity that now envelops it we read a lesson upon the vanity of human expectations, showing the ignorance of the conquerors in regard to the value of the newly-discovered countries in America. Benito Perez, a priest who accompanied the expedition of Grijalva, solicited from the king the bishopric of this island. At the same time, a more distinguished ecclesiastic was asking for that of the island of Cuba. The king advanced the latter to the higher honour of the bishopric of Cozumel, and put off Benito Perez with what was considered the comparatively insignificant see of Culhua. Cozumel is now a desert, and Culhua, or Mexico, is the richest bishopric in New Spain.

But I have a particular reason for presenting to the reader this ruined church. It is a notion, or, rather, a principle, pervading all the old Spanish writers, that at some early day Christianity had been preached to the Indians, and connected with this is the belief that the cross was found by the first conquerors in the province of Yucatan as a symbol of Christian worship. Prophecies are recorded supposed to show a traditionary knowledge of its former existence, and foretelling that from the rising of the sun should come a bearded people and white, who should carry aloft the sign of the cross, which their gods could not reach, and from which they should fly away. The same vague idea exists to this day; and, in general, when the padres pay any attention to the antiquities of the country, they are always quick in discovering some real or imaginary resemblance to the cross. A strong support of this belief is advanced in the "Cozumel Cross" at Merida, found on the island of Cozumel, and in the time of Cogolludo, as at this day, supposed to have been an object of reverence among the Indians before their conversion to Christianity.

Until the destruction of that edifice it stood on a pedestal in the patio of the Franciscan convent, and, as we were told, from the time when it was placed there, no lightning had ever struck the building, as had often happened before. It is now in the Church of the Mejorada, and in looking for it at that place, Mr. Catherwood and myself were invited into the cell of an octogenarian monk then lying in his hammock, for many years unable to cross the threshold of his door, but in the full exercise of his mental powers, who told us, in a tone which seemed to indicate that he had done what would procure him a remission from many sins, that he had himself dug it up from among the ruins, and had it set up where it is now seen. It is fixed in the wall of the first altar on the left; and is almost the first object that arrests the eye of one entering the church. It is of stone, has a venerable appearance of antiquity, and has extended on it in half relief an image of the Saviour, made of plaster, with the hands and feet nailed. At the first glance we were satisfied that, whatever might be the truth in regard to its early history, it was at least, wrought into its present shape under the direction of the monks. And though, at that time, we did not expect ever to know anything more about it, the ruins of this church cleared up in our minds all possible mystery connected with its existence.

In front of the building is a cemented platform, broken and uprooted by trees, but still preserving its form; and on this stand two square pillars, which, as we supposed on the spot, had once supported crosses, and we were immediately impressed with the belief that one of these missing symbols was that now known as the "Cozumel Cross," and that it had probably been carried away by some pious monk at or about the time when the church became a ruin and the island depopulated. For myself, I have no doubt of the fact; and I regard it as important, for, even though crosses may have been found in Yucatan, the connecting of the "Cozumel Cross" with the ruined church on the island completely invalidates the strongest proof offered at this day that the cross was ever recognised by the Indians as a symbol of worship.

At noon we had finished all our work, but there was a charm about our absolute proprietorship of this desolate island which made us regret that there was not more to give us occupation. Doctor Cabot found in it a rich field for his ornithological pursuits, but he was rather unfortunate. Two specimens of rare birds, which he had dissected and put away to dry, were destroyed by ants. In the clearing was a dead tree, holding on its topmost branches the nest of a hawk of a rare species, the eggs of which were unknown to naturalists. The nest seemed to have been built in apprehension of our visit. The dead branches were barely able to support it, and would evidently bear no additional weight. The patron and sailors cut down the tree, and the eggs were broken, but preserved in fragments.

In the afternoon we picked up shells along the shore, and toward evening we again took a bath; while we were in the water black clouds gathered suddenly, thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and sea-birds flew screaming over our heads. Rain following quickly, we snatched up our clothing and ran for the hut. Looking back for a moment, we saw our canoa under way, with scarcely a yard of mainsail, and seeming like a great bird flying over the water. As she turned the point of the island and disappeared our fears were roused. From our experience of a little rough weather we judged it impossible for her to live through a storm so sudden and violent; and our sense of thankfulness at not being on board made us feel more sensibly the danger of those who were. The patron was not familiar with the coast, there was but one place in which he could find shelter, a narrow passage, difficult to enter even by daylight, and night was almost upon him; Mr. Catherwood had timed the precise moment when he turned the point, and we knew that the canoa would not be able to reach the cove before dark, but would have to ride through the storm, and, perhaps, be driven to sea. It was fearful to think of the danger of the poor patron and sailors; and mingled with these fears was some little uneasiness on our own account. All our luggage and provisions were on board, as we had intended to sail early the next morning. The storm had come up so suddenly that though Albino stood on the bank entreating, the patron would not wait to put a single thing on shore. We had only our box of table service, with coffee, sugar, tea, chocolate, and a few biscuit; even if no accident happened, several days might elapse before the canoa could return, and if she never returned we should be five Robinson Crusoes, all alone on a desert island. We had our guns to look to for provisions, but, unluckily, we had an unusually small quantity of ammunition on shore. As the storm raged our apprehensions ran high, and we had got so far as to calculate our chances of reaching the mainland by a raft, finding some relief in the occupation of moving our hammocks occasionally to avoid the rain as it beat through the thatched roof, and at length we fell asleep.