returned to the province of Tabasco, and thence crossed the base of the peninsula of Yucatan in the course of his celebrated march to Honduras.
No effort was made to subdue the Mayas of Yucatan until the year 1528, when Francisco de Montejo, who had been appointed Adelantado of Yucatan, landed on the north-east coast with four hundred Spaniards and marched towards the interior. Unfortunately no contemporary record of this expedition is in existence, and we know little more than the fact that at the end of two years the Spaniards were driven from the country. It was not until the year 1540 that any further attempt was made at conquest; in that year Francisco de Montejo, the son of the Adelantado, marched inland from Campeche, and two years later founded the town of Merida, the present capital of the country, whilst his cousin, another Francisco de Montejo, marched to the eastward and founded a settlement at Chuaca, which a few years later was moved to the present site of the town of Valladolid. From this time forward the dominion of the Spaniards over the northern and western portions of Yucatan remained undisturbed, but they never succeeded in subduing the natives in the central and eastern part of the province, and the Santa Cruz Indians maintain their independence of the Mexican Government to the present day.
The northern part of Yucatan is little better than a coral-reef raised a few feet above sea-level, covered with a thin coating of earth which supports a scrubby growth not worthy of the name of forest. The sea around the coast is everywhere shallow, and to the northward the great Bank of Yucatan extends for more than eighty miles from the shore before the line of fifty fathoms is reached. We had drifted over the edge of this bank in a steamer with a broken shaft on my return from Guatemala in 1885, and found an anchorage in forty-five fathoms of water at a distance of over fifty miles from the land. The most curious fact about this strange country is the total absence of rivers and even of streamlets. The heavy rainfall soaks through the porous limestone rock and oozes out again along the northern coast-line. The water-supply of the inhabitants is found in deep caves or openings in the limestone, known as "'cenotes," the Spanish form of a Maya word, which the reader will nearly approach by trying to pronounce "tznot" as a monosyllable[1].
With a low coast-line, a shallow sea, and an absence of rivers, follows a lack of good harbours; at Progreso there is merely an open roadstead, where the steamers anchor two miles from the shore, and at Campeche the conditions are much the same, only small vessels finding a little shelter by lying inside a raised coral bank.
- ↑ An inverted C or 'C is frequently used in Maya to indicate the sound "tz."
