as he frankly states, of a roving, incorrigible disposition and apparently was given by the authorities the alternative of joining the expedition to Yucatan or going to prison. He enlisted and served with White until the rangers were disbanded, when he married a native of Yucatan by whom he had one son, Carlos Foster, still living. Michael Foster was, at the time of making his statement, in 1904, clear in intellect but had almost forgotten his native tongue. He spoke the Spanish and the native Maya tongue with far greater facility than he did the English language. His statement is as follows: We disem "I came to Yucatan with Colonel White. barked at Sisal and then marched on to Merida. There we executed the Cacique of Santiago; he was shot in the yard of the Santiago Police Station where we were in barracks. During the battles of Peto and Ichmul we lost many of our men. At Santa Maria we lost forty-seven and at Tabi thirty-six, but at Calumpich nearly three hundred of our bravest men were killed. The Indians there played us a trick; they made concealed pitfalls in the path and placed sharp pointed stakes at the bottom; then they appeared and dared us to come on; we rushed after them with hurrahs and many of our men fell into the pits; we lost many men that day but we killed a great many more of the Indians than they did of our men. Pinkus and myself are now the only ones left and I guess that we will go soon too. I am over eighty and have lived hard all my life." General Naverrette, an old Indian fighter of Yucatan, whose scarred body bears witness to his valor, stated to me as follows: "Colonel White was my friend and so was Captain Daws; both were brave men and strict disciplinarians. The men they commanded were brave men and died valiantly, almost to a man. They suffered their greatest losses at the siege of Tijosuco and the battles of Calumpich." I will now give the statements of those who actually fought against those men and, right here it may be well to note two interesting facts, that by a curious coincidence make me, perhaps, of all living persons, the only man who could produce these statements. Several years ago, while on an exploration into the then almost unexplored interior, I chanced upon an aged native working his milpa alone. I spent some time in the neighborhood investigating a hitherto unknown ruined group, and during a part of this time he worked for me. Being conversant with his language, although a stranger, gave him confidence in me to the extent that he told me his life history. He had been one of the Sublevados and had fought in the battles of Tabi and Ichmul against the white strangers. Afterwards, when the great war chief, Cresencio Poot, was traitorously killed by an under chief, Aniceto Dzul, he, too, fled with other adherents of Poot, in fear of his life. Since then he had lived alone and in constant fear on one hand of the white men and on the other of the Indians. Upon my next return to Merida, I interested the Governor in his story and was to bring him back with me to Merida, guaranteeing him safety and good treatment. But when I went back on my next trip, no traces of him personally could be found, although his gun and his hammock were in their accustomed place. It seems most probable that he was killed, either by some poisonous reptile, a jaguar, or perhaps by some roving band of the Sublevados, his former companions. The second interesting fact is that Leandro Poot, the younger brother of the former war chief of the rebellious Mayas, is now and has been for several years a dweller upon my plantation of Chichen. We have had many hours of pleasant and interesting conversation and the statement he gives was in this way obtained. Dionisio Pec, the solitary maker of milpas made his statement as follows, and I have tried as far as was possible to preserve his style of making it in the vernacular. "Among those who fought us at Ichmul and Tabi were strange white men, 'Dzulob.' They fought like very brave men and caused us many deaths. We had guns and powder from Belize but we had few balls and so we often had to use small stones; also we made balls of red earth, well mixed with honey and hard dried in the sun. These balls made bad wounds and hard to heal. The stranger white men fought close together and for that reason it was easy to kill them. But they were brave men and laughed at death and before they died they killed many of our men." Statement of Leandro Poot, giving Cresencio Poot's account of the battle with the stranger white men: "I was then young and not in the councils of those who commanded in those days, but I well remember the tales. told me of the strange white men. When the strange white men came up against our people we were perplexed and did not know what to do. Our quarrel was not with them. and they spoke the language of Belize, and Belize was not against us, so we waited to see what was meant. Then some of our people who came over to us from the white man's side, told us that these big stranger white men were friends of the white man of T'Ho (Merida) and had come to help him kill us. Then we fought them, but we had rather they had not come, for we only wanted to kill those that had lied to us and had done us great harm, to us and to our families, and even these we had rather send away across the water to where their fathers came from, and where they would cause us no more harm. It is finished. We fought them and we fought the white men from T'Ho and from Sacci (Valladolid) too, and we killed both the stranger white men and the white men from T'Ho and those from Sacci. It was easy to kill the stranger white men, for they were big and fought in line, as if they were marching, while the white men from T'Ho and Sacci fought as we do, lying down and from behind the trees and rocks. "But these white men were very brave. Their captain was very brave. My brother said he was the bravest man he ever saw. So brave was he that my brother said he very foolishly spared his life once when he could easily have shot him. My brother admired a brave man, but he said that he was foolish that he did not shoot the captain when he had the chance, for it is a man's duty to kill his enemy. But all the people said that the stranger white men were the bravest men they ever saw. They laughed at death and went toward it with joy, as a young man runs to a handsome woman. When first we met the stranger white men, they had built up, right in our path, a strong fence of thick tree trunks and behind that were the stranger white men and in the woods on each side were the white men from T'Ho and Sacci. Some of the stranger white men were clothed in uniform, the kind they always wore, while others were naked to the waist, with a red cloth tied around their heads and their swords buckled about their waists. Their big bodies were pink and red in the sunlight and from their throats came their strange war cry, Hu-Ha! Hu-Ha! (evidently a Hurrah). They were brave men and shot keenly. Some of them were such good shooters that no man could hope to escape when once they pointed at him; no, whether he ran or walked or crawled, it made no difference unless he could hide behind a tree before the shot was fired, and even then some of those who reached the tree were dead as they fell behind it, for the balls had found them, even as they ran behind it. "So for a time we greatly feared these strange white men and only sought to keep out of their reach. Had they stayed behind their defences and only used their guns as they could use them, no one knows what might have happened, for our people were so scared of the big, pink-skinned men with their terrible cries and their death shots, that they could not be made to stand up against them. But the stranger white men were too brave, for they threw their lives away, and when they found that we did not come up to them, they jumped over the wall that they had made and came to seek us. We hid behind the trees and rocks, wherever we could, that they might not see us, and so, one by one, we killed them. They killed many of us but we were many times their numbers and so they died. Brave men, very brave. Some died laughing and some with strange words in their own tongue, but none died cowardly. I do not think any escaped. I think they lay where they died, for in those days we had no time to eat or to sleep or to bury the dead." |