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Updated: June 6, 2025


A great forest of this character covers the southern-half of Yucatan, and extends far into Guatemala, which is half covered by it. It extends also into Chiapa and Tabasco, and reaches into Honduras. The ruins known as Copan and Palenque are in this forest, not far from its southern edge. Its vast depths have never been much explored.

'Discovery of ancient books, manuscripts, etc., relating to Atlantis. Apparently, Thomas Maitland, when shipwrecked on an island, called Inisturk, off Mayo, in Ireland, found a wooden chest of rare workmanship he had seen, he says, similar ones in Egypt and Yucatan containing some very ancient books curiously bound, and some vellum manuscripts, which, after an infinite amount of labour, he managed to translate.

I got some of his story and guessed the rest. The Mexican government is trying to root out the Yaquis. A year ago his tribe was taken in chains to a Mexican port on the Gulf. The fathers, mothers, children, were separated and put in ships bound for Yucatan. There they were made slaves on the great henequen plantations. They were driven, beaten, starved.

But there were several ways in which this might have been brought about, and it is no real proof that the civilization of either country was an offshoot from that of the other. To consider it as such would be like arguing that the negroes of Cuba and the Indians of Yucatan had derived their civilization one from the other, because both peoples are Roman Catholics, and use the same almanac.

Formally, I had delivered up the reins of my government; formally, Tatho had seated himself on the snake-throne, and had put over his neck the chain of gems which symbolised the supreme office; and then, whilst the drums and the trumpets made their proclamation of clamour, he had risen to his feet, for his first state progress round that gilded council chamber as Viceroy of the Province of Yucatan.

Within a day or two he would have arrived at Yucatan; the discovery of Mexico and the other opulent countries of New Spain would have necessarily followed, the Southern Ocean would have been disclosed to him, and a succession of splendid discoveries would have shed fresh glory on his declining age.

In the time of the Spaniards there was in the forest at Lake Peten a solitary native town, founded nearly a century previous to their time by a Maya prince of Itza, who, with a portion of his people, fled from Yucatan to that lonely region to escape from the disorder and bloodshed of a civil war. This was the civil war which destroyed Mayapan, and broke up the Maya kingdom of Yucatan.

In his first voyage, made in 1497, Vespucci reached the coast of Honduras, and sailed into the Gulf of Mexico. Here he found, probably on the coast of Yucatan, a queer little sea village which reminded him of the great city of Venice near his home. The houses in this village were made of wood, and were built on piles running out into the water.

We slept on board the steamboat off the pier of Batabano, and the railway took us back to Havana next morning. On the 8th of March, we went on board the "Méjico" steamer, American-built, and retaining her American engineers, but in other respects converted into a Spanish vessel, and now lying in the harbour of Havana bound for Vera Cruz, touching at Sisal in Yucatan.

The ship likewise contained ten cases of gilded mass-books and papal bulls. The bulls, two million and seventy thousand in number, for the dead and the living, were intended for the provinces of New Spain, Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Philippines. The quicksilver and the bulls cost the king three hundred thousand florins, but he sold them for five million.

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