CHAPTER 11
THE TALKING CROSS
Then, when all seemed bleak, another savior appeared, like Captain Hill in Nicaragua, young confederado Watkins on the Orinoco, James Drummond-Hay in Pará, Violet’s father, and Clements Markham. At each point in Henry’s life when his future seemed ruined, a stranger responded to some quality in him that evoked sympathy or trust and bucked him up again. On to the next wilderness, the savior seemed to say. On to better things.
This time, however, we do not know the savior’s identity, only Violet’s note that one existed. In summer 1886, shortly after his defeated return to London, Henry “agreed to join a friend in journeying to British Honduras,” she said. On November 12, 1886, he sailed on the Godalming, and on December 18, he disembarked in Belize, the capital city. It was the first time in a decade that Violet had been home to visit her family, and now her wayward husband was heading back to South America. “I let him go back some six months in advance,” she wrote, resigned.
During those six months, it must have seemed to her that old friends and family lived in a different galaxy than the one she’d loved as a girl. It was a faster, brighter world than any she’d known in the tropics, and she couldn’t help but feel left behind. In 1878, two years after Henry and she took the Scottish Knight to Queensland, electric lights had just been introduced in London. Now they seemed to be everywhere. The underground trains, reaching far out of the city, were powered by electricity, their cables insulated in rubber from the Amazon. In 1881, the papers said, London’s population topped 3.3 million, making her birthplace the largest city on earth, larger by far than New York, with only 1.2 million. The year before, the Englishman John Kemp Starley had introduced the “safety” bicycle, and soon, people said, every Englishman would own one. She tried to imagine 3.3 million Londoners all on their bicycles at once, riding down Piccadilly, ringing their bells for the right-of-way.
London was the world center for finance and transport, and all England was in motion. In 1881, the clipper ship James Stafford crossed the Pacific Ocean in twenty-one and a half days, a world record. Almost anywhere on earth was accessible in a matter of months. Soon there would be no place untamed by civilization, no place to run or hide. Even the vast American desert was no longer intractable: on September 4, the elusive Apache chief Geronimo had surrendered in a place called Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, thus ending the last major U.S.-Indian war. The papers said forty-eight thousand new homes were built in London last year. She’d stroll through old neighborhoods and they’d transformed into colonies of French, Italians, Russians, or Greeks, every space filled with settlers far from home.
Violet knew she’d eventually have to leave this modern world to rejoin her husband, and in April or May of 1887, she did.
British Honduras was a tiny place, an 8,867-square-mile strip of beach and jungle. The low coastline was swampy, with thick mangroves blocking the passage inland, punctuated by rivers. The colony was tucked like an armpit beneath the shoulder of Mexico’s violent Yucatán Peninsula and bordered on the west and south by Guatemala. The latter claimed British Honduras as part of her territory but never pressed the issue, and the British refused to leave. In that way, it was like Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast: The Spanish claimed but never settled the unhealthy strip of mangrove swamp, and only wanted it back when the British crept in under their noses. Most historical sources agree that the origin of Belize City, and thus British Honduras—for the two were synonymous during their early history—occurred in the 1600s. The earliest settlers at the mouth of the Belize River may well have been British privateers hiding from the Spaniards, for no coastline was better suited for guerilla warfare. The maze of islands and concealed channels was perfect for staging sudden attacks and retreats. The channels led into the trees to become a web of lagoons. The shore was protected ten miles out by a wall of coral that fringed the coast from the Yucatán down to Guatemala, a distance of about two hundred miles. Inside this strip water was smooth even when rollers pounded on the reef, but to pierce that reef one needed knowledge of its breaks and channels, something the Spanish never learned.
There was an economic reason for settlement, however, and the buccaneers found it first. Very soon after landing they turned the minute colony into an important source of logwood, a dyewood that grew along the coast and was one of the great prizes on pirate raids. It was a short step from plundering logwood to cutting it in the interior, and by 1670 logwood sold for about £100 a ton, a good profit in those days. By 1705, the British shipped most of their logwood from the Belize River area.
By the end of the eighteenth century, demand for logwood declined as new technology and better natural dyes were adopted by dyemakers, but as so often happened, the forest provided a new moneymaker. Mahogany, or Swietenia mahogani, began replacing logwood as the colony’s principal export as early as 1771. By the early nineteenth century, mahogany exports climbed to twelve thousand tons, providing a yearly revenue of nearly £20,000. Mahogany was a handsome red wood that had been popular with eighteenth century cabinetmakers and now was used in shipbuilding, construction, and later in railway carriages. Although the best trees grew in the limestone sands of the north, they could be found throughout the jungles of British Honduras. The trees were scattered, like rubber, and scouts pierced the forest in search of new trees. Crews disappeared into the wilderness in August, cut crude logging roads from the trees to the nearest river, and had to be out before the summer rains in May, which turned the roads into quagmires. Once dragged out, the giant trees were floated down rivers swollen by the storms, then halted by booms in the river mouth. They were formed into huge rafts and floated to the wharves of the Belize City timber companies for shipment abroad.
In 1863, when British Honduras became a Crown Colony, overcutting had taken its toll and the business was in decline. New companies, squeezed from better logging areas, roamed far afield to find new trees. As early as 1790, they began raiding Spanish territory. Such “foreign wood” was forbidden, but as competition stiffened, the companies sent cutters into Guatemala and Mexico to cut mahogany then quietly ship it to Belize as “local wood.” By the 1820s, cutters operated north of the Hondo River, which formed the border with the Yucatán, and south of the Sarstoon River on the Guatemala side.
When Henry and Violet arrived, the “plantocracy,” as locals called it, was the most powerful force in British Honduras. It held onto power even as supply ran short and profits fell. Its stranglehold on land stifled farming, which was prohibited on logging property. This meant that the entire population depended on imported food. Rather than change, the plantocracy entrenched, consolidating their capital, resisting all attempts at reform. By 1859, the British Honduras Company, which originated as a partnership between old settler families and a London merchant, emerged as the colony’s predominant landowner. It spread like an amoeba in the 1860s, usually at the expense of competitors, who were forced to sell their land. In 1871, the firm became the Belize Estate and Produce Company, a London-based business that owned about half the privately held land in British Honduras and acted as the chief force in the colony’s political economy for over a century. There were other companies that operated on the borders and in the deeper forests, but they did so by arrangement with Belize Estate and Produce.
Thus, Henry and Violet came to British Honduras during one of the most openly corrupt periods of its history. The population was changing. As more black immigrants moved in from the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica, the white population dropped from 4 percent in 1845 to 1 percent in 1881. The timber houses still controlled the colony, but as the white settlers moved out, the houses came under absolute foreign control, usually from London. The Crown did not control British Honduras; the timber companies did, a fact that set British governors at odds with the “monied cutters.” The mahogany houses maintained British Honduras as a private timber reserve, and to do so they controlled the press, the government, and the courts. When the Wickhams arrived, British Honduras was in danger of becoming a colonial dead end.
The main opponent of the mahogany houses was the colony’s new governor, Sir Roger Tuckfield Goldsworthy, a hero of the Indian Mutiny. Appointed by the Foreign Office in 1884, he’d alienated the plantocracy by summer 1885. Belize City had a history of yellow fever and malaria. Built on a muddy flood plain, surrounded on three sides by water, and rising a mere eighteen inches above sea level, the city was a sink of stagnant canals, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. When Goldsworthy took office, he sought land reforms and awarded all public works contracts to improve sanitary conditions to a local man who was no friend of the plantocracy. Within two years, the colony’s treasury, which had a £90,000 surplus when Goldsworthy took office, was in the red. The improvements and the governor were blamed. Goldsworthy also seemed bent on improving conditions for the nonwhite immigrants. Belize’s Colonial Guardian railed that he “never for one moment ceased to be a friend of the least reputable portion” of the population. The plantocracy-controlled press delighted in calling the governor “the most hated man in the colony.”
Henry and Violet sailed into this storm like blind mariners. The politics would determine their lives, because Henry and Goldsworthy had become close friends. The two had met in 1877-80, when Goldsworthy was colonial secretary of Western Australia and Henry was Australia’s sole promoter of Brazilian tobacco. They took to each other immediately, and Goldsworthy’s governorship may have been the deciding factor in setting Henry’s course toward Belize. The governor was fond of the rubber thief. Both were brash and reckless, and both believed without doubt in the superiority of the British Empire. When Henry sailed on the Godalming on November 12, 1886, Goldsworthy was going in the other direction, having boarded his steamer for England on November 2. He’d been called home by the Foreign Office to answer questions about the furor surrounding his administration. The two old friends passed each other on the high seas.
Goldsworthy may have prayed that he’d never have to return. Yet he was sent back in spring 1877—around the same time Violet arrived—and he would stay until 1891, the longest tenure during the nineteenth century of any colonial administrator in British Honduras. The Foreign Office never explained its reasons for sending him back, and his return threw the plantocracy from elation into despair. “Whether it was simply a matter of completing a routine tour of duty or whether it was to teach the townspeople some proper respect,” moaned the Colonial Guardian, “it was surely a crushing blow.”
Despite the controversy, Violet put Goldsworthy’s affection for her husband to good use when she arrived. The fear of God grabbed her by the throat when she saw Henry’s ramshackle homestead nine miles outside Belize. It was a nightmare flashback of all she’d endured in Brazil and Queensland, and she acted with alacrity. “A friend and I persuaded him to take a Government post,” she wrote. When Henry presented himself to the governor, his employment was immediate. For the next two years he was diverted from his self-immolating dream of becoming a planter, sent instead across the colony as a locum tenens, a substitute magistrate when the regular office-holder went on leave.
According to the Honduras Gazette, the official colonial organ, Henry did a little of everything. From May 1887 to December 1888, he served as acting district magistrate, acting sub-inspector of the constabulary, and foreman of the works in the Toledo District in the extreme south of the colony. From December 1888 to May 1889, he was justice of the peace and acting district magistrate in the Orange Walk District along the troubled border with the Yucatán. He was then appointed fruit inspector, which took him up and down the coast checking deceptive practices by banana exporters. In 1890, he became inspector of forests, checking trespasses on crown lands by the mahogany companies, a position that earned him their enmity.
“This period was the easiest and most pleasurable of my life,” Violet wrote. While Henry was away, she stayed in Belize. It didn’t matter to her that the homes were flimsy and unpainted, the streets narrow, the open canals choked with sewage. For once, she was around friends, not stuck in the middle of nowhere. Belize had its beauties: the open verandas were shaded by red-blooming poincianas; red, pink, and cream oleanders glowed behind white picket fences. The races and tongues were a virtual Babel—Creoles of African descent, black Caribs, mestizos of Spanish and Indian blood. The market was a tropical cornucopia: logger-head turtles, bananas, papaya, custard apples, red chili peppers, breadfruit, yams. “Being in contact with the Governor I was invited to such social functions as went on there, such as balls, tennis parties.” Gone were the days of fighting constrictors, watching her house burn to ash, or nearly drowning in the Amazon.
And Henry was sent to some of the wildest places imaginable, which meant that, once again, he became known as a local character. Years later, in an official memo dated September 16, 1892, this assessment would be made:
Mr. Wickham is a large-framed idealist, dreamy, sympathetic, artistic, a great wanderer and naturalist in tropical America, but not well qualified for official or commercial business. He was appointed by Sir R. Goldsworthy, who had a great liking for him, to be Fruit Inspector, in which capacity he had to check sharp practice by the contract purchasers of bananas for the weekly Mail steamer at the villages along the coast, and afterwards to be Inspector of Forests, to check trespasses on Crown Lands by Logwood and Mahogany Cutters. In this capacity he did some useful work by fits and starts, but also made some mistakes.
Above all else, it was always remembered that he was Roger Goldsworthy’s man.
Henry’s government service may not sound exciting, but tucked away in colonial archives is evidence that he spent his tenure hunting for pirate gold, evading sharks, conquering a supposedly inaccessible mountain, and negotiating with Mayan revolutionaries who believed God spoke from an enchanted crucifix and told them to kill any white interloper found trespassing on their land.
The treasure hunt occurred first, in the form of a yacht filled with Americans. According to a dispatch by Goldsworthy to the Foreign Office, the Maria arrived in port on January 28, 1888, amid a shroud of rumors. Soon afterward, Mr. John Benjamin Peck presented himself to Goldsworthy. Peck was a retired special agent with the U.S. Treasury. On January 1, he’d cast off from New York in the Maria with some friends. In the hold was a “boring machine” designed for digging through sand and coral. Peck had an old map marked with the location of treasure worth half a million dollars “to be had at or near the island of Turneffe to the north of Belize.”
Goldsworthy was highly amused. “I believe [Peck’s] errand to be somewhat fanciful,” he informed the Foreign Office, but just in case it wasn’t, Peck agreed to place the riches in the Colonial Treasury. The Crown would keep 10 percent and relinquish the remainder to Peck and his friends. There was an additional provision—that Wickham tag along as watchdog, observing the excavations and inspecting the treasure, if found.
From January to March 1888, Henry camped with the Americans on Turneffe, a barrier island at the very edge of the sea. On the lee side, coral reefs glimmered through the water in shades of opal, emerald, and turquoise; on the ocean side, the air throbbed with the boom of the crashing surf. There were several wrecks on Turneffe, including the English merchantman Mary Oxford, lost in 1764, and the HMS Advice, wrecked in 1793. The most exciting rumor concerned a Spanish galleon said to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in gold specie, lost on Turneffe’s northeastern tip in 1785. This seems to be the treasure sought by Peck and his adventurers.
At first, Henry was as skeptical as Goldsworthy, but by March the search had focused on Half Moon Cay, a speck forty-seven miles out from the coast in a line of tiny coral islands known as Lighthouse Reef. Half Moon Cay was a hatchery for red-footed boobies, and the birds wheeled around them as they worked. Spiny-tailed iguanas called “wish-willies” blinked at them from the underbrush. A seventy-foot lighthouse stood at the cay’s southern point, a fixed white light that could be seen in clear weather twelve miles out to sea. An iron human skeleton, painted white, was fixed to the lighthouse. Its keeper, “A. Martin,” earned the annual equivalent of $480 to stay in this supremely lonely spot. Peck and his partners probed through twelve feet of coral quicksand with iron rods and grew convinced that crates and chests lay underneath, but every time they dug a hole, sand and water rushed in.
“[Henry] believes they really were on the spot, as they brought up such things as might be expected,” Violet wrote later. “But the inrush of water was too much for them.” In March, Peck and his partners began their return to the United States for a coffer dam to sink in the spot. But on the voyage home, the Maria was “wrecked on the way and never returned,” the yacht sinking somewhere in the Caribbean with all hands during a gale.
Thus ended another El Dorado dream. After Peck sailed off, Henry pulled a stunt that entered local legend. Violet and Henry lived on an island in sight of Belize—probably Haulover Island—and one night Henry was delayed late in town. He could not secure a boat, and the quarter-mile channel separating him from Violet was notorious for sharks. Sir Eric Swayne, governor from 1906 to 1913, gave a sense of the danger:
[W]ild tales are told of men who have missed their footing, have fallen into the sea, and have been shot up into the air again minus a leg, to fall back again into a seething mass of sharks. There is a well-known shark known to the fishermen as Sapodilla Tom, who is popularly supposed to be of an enormous size. One of the pilots who is not, I think, deficient in imagination, gravely informed me that Sapodilla Tom had on several occasions swum alongside his 45-foot sloop, and when the nose of the shark was level with the bow of the boat the tail was level with the stern.
Despite such tales, Henry feared that Violet would worry about his safety, and so jumped in the channel and swam home. Violet’s reaction is not recorded.
In April 1888, Henry was once again offered the chance to wander. In the southwest lay the Cockscomb Mountains, then called the Corkscrews, an undulating granite and quartz massif whose 3,680-foot Victoria Peak was the highest point in the colony. Gold was rumored there, the district clouded in mystery. The natives believed the jungle to be home to Sisimitos and Sisimitas, hairy people of the forest who wore their feet backward and liked to eat humans. Any approach to Victoria Peak was believed impossible. “Strange as it may seem in a colony so old, and only eighteen days from England,” wrote geographer J. Bellamy in an expedition account for the Royal Geographic Society, “the interior is less known than Central Africa.” Authorities hoped that opening up such virgin territory might relieve the “congested state of the mother country,” Bellamy wrote, but the expedition’s true purpose was to scout out undiscovered reserves of rubber and gold.
They started on April 4, 1888, proceeding up the forested South Stann River in five dugout canoes paddled by Carib porters. Exploring this wilderness was unnerving and strange. A settler cutting through the dense tropical growth would sometimes come upon a hewn block of stone covered with hieroglyphics or carved into a monolithic head, all that remained of the Mayan civilization that vanished from this part of the world. Some said it disappeared when the climate changed and rains became torrential, others that epidemics killed them all. The forest was always man’s enemy, with its fevers, its extraordinary vitality, creeping over man’s works like an insistent sentient being. Once it got a head start, said Sir Eric Swayne, it was “impossible . . . to recover lost ground.”
On April 11, the party struck the spur of the main peak, and they rested awhile. A series of escarpments rose from the forest like volcanic upthrusts. The perpendicular rocks were covered in a thick, beautiful moss that seemed to make ascent impossible. Everything was crowned with incredible growth: vines crawled across the smallest twigs, orchids with sweet-smelling purple blossoms grew on ledges and crests. While Goldsworthy waited for Henry, who’d been delayed, Bellamy pushed ahead to look for gold. Its signs were abundant in the washing of the sand and clay and specimens of quartz, which also showed signs of lead and silver. The party began its ascent up the 1,250-foot Bellamy Peak, then to the 1,800-foot saddle, where they made camp. On April 15, they prepared to climb Victoria.
Henry went ahead, alone. Trailblazing seemed to be his role. “Mr. Wickham continued the ascent, which he managed by climbing round the heads of the spurs, over many difficult and dangerous places,” Bellamy wrote. “[F]inally, after a precipitous and arduous climb, especially up the last 500 feet, he succeeded in reaching within a short distance of the summit.” Yet he couldn’t make the last few feet. The moss was so thick that “the final ascent became in sensation very like crawling over the edge of a great sponge,” said a guidebook of the time. “One could thrust in an arm up to the shoulder before reaching the perpendicular face of the rock with the tips of the fingers.” Henry repeatedly attacked the final ascent, but each time he slipped back. In the afternoon, Bellamy and Goldsworthy were walking along the saddle when they met him “returning with the good news of his success in finding the peak accessible, but he was terribly exhausted with his exertions and want of food and water.”
The next day the entire party retraced Henry’s route, and five climbers made it to the top with ropes attached to overhangs. Henry stayed below, too spent to continue. The five mountaineers, “having recovered sufficient breath, celebrated the ascent by giving three cheers for the Queen and Governor.” That night, the exhausted party turned in early: “During the night one of the Carib porters shrieked in his sleep, and this so alarmed his companions . . . that they rushed through our camp, upsetting mosquito nets, tents, themselves, and everything else in the darkness, imagining that Tapir Peccary or some other evil genii of the place were among them.”
Of the many gods in this wilderness, the Christian ones were most deadly.
Since its beginning in 1848, the Caste War of the Yucatán made it impossible for a light-skinned person to travel in the eastern Yucatán and come out alive. Only the indigenous Maya were safe; Caucasians and light-skinned mestizos were killed on sight. The Spanish had battled nineteen years to conquer the Yucatán Maya, who, unlike the Aztecs in central Mexico, were never permanently subdued. The Caste War began as a political, rather than racial, uprising when three Mayan revolutionaries defending communal land rights against Spanish owners were executed in Valladolid. But the ancient hatreds of the Santa Cruz and other Indians were so great that the goal quickly became the extermination and expulsion of all Caucasians.
It was a particularly bloody war, with years of racial violence on both sides. From 1847 to 1855 alone, approximately three hundred thousand people died. The massacre of Spanish settlers and townspeople received the most publicity, partly because two British peace commissions sent from Belize watched as forty Spanish women and fourteen men were executed despite efforts to pay off the executioners. Only little girls were spared—and one small boy who later told his story. When Spanish refugees flowed into British Honduras, the Indians crossed the Hondo River and defeated a contingent of troops sent to the refugees’ aid. The breakaway state inspired other Mayan communities to revolt. In 1870, the Icaiche Maya attacked Corosal Town in the colony’s far north and then Orange Walk Town ten years later.
In 1850, the Mayan insurgents were on the brink of defeat, when the war took a religious turn and the Talking Cross appeared. Mexican folk-Catholicism had for centuries produced a string of prophets and miracles, each claiming to be a messiah or appearing at critical moments of struggle. In the 1700s, the Indian leader Tzantzen emerged in the north. In 1810, during the Mexican War of Independence, the miracle-working nun Sor Ercarnación arose. The Talking Cross was not God Himself, but Santo Jesucristo, God’s intermediary, able to speak to the Maya, His Chosen People. It appeared beside a cenate, or natural well of drinking water, and promised the desperate Mayan fighters that, if they continued the war against the whites, they would be invulnerable to bullets. The place where the Cross was found was transformed into the town of Chan Santa Cruz, or Small Holy Cross. A church was built around the Talking Cross, from which it continued to talk to its followers, the Cruzob. Eventually, the Cruzob and the British reached an uneasy peace: If there were no more attacks, the British would unofficially supply arms to the insurgents to fight their old foes, the Spanish. But there was still violence. Sometimes the mahogany cutters penetrated too far into Cruzob territory; sometimes individual Indians and whites were killed. By 1887, responding to the rumors of arms sales, the Mexican government filed a formal complaint and asked that the practice end.
In January 1888, while Henry hunted buried treasure, events unfolded along the colony’s border with Yucatán that would send him on his last great adventure for Goldsworthy. On January 8, the Santa Cruz chiefs sent a letter to Goldsworthy in response to the Mexican charges. “We are . . . a people living under our own laws and are peacefully governed by men of our own race,” it said. The Cruzob needed firearms for hunting and “for our own protection,” the chiefs entreated.
Soon after this letter arrived, William Miller, the colony’s assistant surveyor-general, rode into the Yucatán as far as Chan Santa Cruz. Miller’s was not an official mission. Although obviously mapping an area unseen by whites for decades, he said, in an account written for the Royal Geographical Society, that he simply went out of curiosity. If this was a secret mission, it was only partly successful. He traveled twenty-five miles from Corosal to Bacalar, site of the famous massacre, where he spotted a number of human bones in an old church. He traveled another eighty-five miles along a flat, straight road to Chan Santa Cruz, only to find the town deserted and the Talking Cross moved another forty-seven miles north to the town of Tulum. He met the governor, Don Anis, who lived four leagues outside Santa Cruz: “When I arrived there he had just lost the sight of one eye, and believing he was bewitched, he had killed the man and his wife whom he suspected of doing it, the day before my arrival.” Don Anis was still in a bad mood. When Miller asked questions about the Empire of the Cross, Don Anis replied, “Why do you want to know?” When Miller suggested riding to Tulum to see the Cross, his men refused. He returned home unharmed but unenlightened.
On December 15, 1888, Henry was appointed Justice of the Peace of Orange Walk, across the River Hondo from Yucatán. Sometime after this, Goldsworthy asked his friend to contact the Santa Cruz Indians again. We know very little about this mission; no official correspondence has been found. Due to the Mexican complaint, any contact between British Honduras and the Cruzob demanded secrecy. All we know is a passage in Edward Lane’s biography that apparently came from family tales:
[T]he governor, fearing a raid by the Santa Cruz Indians, invited Wickham to make diplomatic approaches to the tribe. Forcing his way on horseback through dense bamboo country, Wickham persuaded the tribal chief to maintain the peace. . . . Veneration for the [Talking Cross] is so profound that no stranger may look at it. Nevertheless, Wickham caught a glimpse through a convenient peep-hole; he may have been the first European admitted to the tribal territory since the massacre of the Spaniards.
It makes sense that Henry was chosen to go. As justice of the peace, it was his duty to maintain peace along the border. He had a history in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Brazil of working well with Indians; it was just with whites that he could not get along. The timing was right, and he was reckless enough to do it, plunging into forbidden territory in the same way that he launched himself at Victoria’s Peak, without training, alone.
Henry’s best protection was his respect for Indians. He believed them capable of anything. He rode to Santa Cruz on a road that was eight feet wide and kept clear by Indian work crews. Every few miles a cross was propped up with stones and covered by a little shelter of palm leaves. A garrison of 150 armed men was stationed at the Chan Santa Cruz fort, but the village itself was a ghost town.
The road to Tulum was rougher than the one he’d just ridden, a four-day journey on a narrow jungle path fraught with danger. A few years earlier, when a Catholic priest arrived by sea, he was taken to the Cross and interrogated. Displeased with the priest’s unannounced incursion, the Cross demanded the priest’s execution. Since then, few outsiders had attempted to enter the Yucatán.
Deep down, Henry believed himself invincible, so he went. The church housing the Cross in Tulum was shaped like a crucifix, with the sanctuary itself forming the upright and the guards’ quarters forming the perpendicular arms. The Cross sat in the center in profound darkness, in a separate room called the gloria. Two sentries guarded the door to the Cross. Only four people—the high priest, the Cruzob’s commanding general, and their wives—were allowed inside. The priest talked for the Cross, but how this was accomplished, whether by ventriloquism or through a concealed speaking tube, has never been learned. The rest of the sanctuary was filled with people muttering in prayer. A strange hollow whistling issued from the Cross before it spoke. As the holy words poured out, the worshippers pounded on their chests or blew ardent kisses in the air.
Since Henry’s visit was sanctioned, he was not interrogated by the Cross, and he lived. He said he saw the Cross through a peephole, but with all the guards and worshippers present, this is probably braggadocio. Nevertheless, his was a great honor, and as Edward Lane asserted, few if any other Europeans had been admitted to the presence of the Cross and survived. The border calmed down after Henry’s mission, and from then until the Caste War ended in 1901, there was peace between the British and the Cruzob.
The Maya had a direct relationship with the Almighty. When Henry left, his hosts would not have thanked him for coming. Instead, they’d say, “Dios botik,” God thanks you.
Sometime after this, Henry began hearing his own voices, commanding him to wrest status from the soil. “Alas,” wrote Violet, “back came [Henry’s] old longing for plantation life, being his own master, and in spite of all I would do, he saw something that took his fancy and got what he called a valuable concession . . . and away we went, 60 miles or so away from everyone and everywhere, to plant India rubber, cocoa and bananas.” During his travels as inspector of forests he came upon what he described as “the finest block of land in the Colony,” a 2,500-acre plot on the south bank of the Temash River, the most remote river in the most remote southern district of British Honduras, only six and a half miles from the Guatemalan frontier. Five houses were located on the Temash River, and Henry’s would be the sixth. His concession fronted the deep river. He paddled into the forest past old abandoned plantations to large, horizontal blocks of limestone hewn by the ancient Maya. The land across the river, to the north, was owned by the mahogany cutters Messrs. Cramer and Company, but according to surveys the south bank was all Crown Land, open for agriculture. Based on his reputation “as the man who brought the rubber seeds from the Amazon” and a promise to grow rubber, Henry signed Lease No. 22 on January 1, 1890, at an annual rate of $500, payable for ten years. If, after that time, “value to the extent of $10,000 to consist of India Rubber trees can be proved to the satisfaction of the Government to have been planted on the land . . . [an additional] grant for 5000 acres will be issued.”
It seemed his dream had come true, the chance for which he’d struggled so long. But there were bad omens. In 1889-90, fever swept through Belize, taking several acquaintances—the Rev. Mr. Nicholson, the prominent barrister-at-law W. M. Storach, the merchant Robert Niven. There was enough death that correspondent G. S. Banham for the New York Herald portrayed the city as a charnel house. On June 23, 1889, Banham was prosecuted for “maliciously fabricating false reports to the detriment of the colony by representing it as ravaged by pestilence,” for which, on August 5, he apologized. During that time, death nearly caught up to Henry, too. He “had an attack of the fever and as nearly as possible died,” Violet wrote. “The Roman Catholic priest came over and administered a very heavy dose of quinine which checked the fever till the doctor returned.” When he recuperated, his obsession with his plantation intensified. His latest brush with death made him think about what he wanted most from life—and how, at age forty-two or forty-three, half his life was over.
When he felt able, he set to work like a dog. He thought the fertile soil well-suited for coffee, cocoa, tropical fruit, and rubber. He planned to pay his way by cultivating bananas, then plant the fast-growing Castilloa rubber to ensure a good return before the ten-year lease expired. It may seem strange that he did not plant hevea, his “blessed tree,” but Castilloa elastica was native to British Honduras, and in the 1880s many still believed it to be more profitable. He built another log house, with an iron roof and veranda. “He lived contentedly enough,” wrote Violet, “working early and late through all sorts of difficulties.”
But there were rumblings that could make anyone uneasy whose land sat close to the plantocracy’s. On May 5, 1890, a special hearing of the Supreme Court considered the complaint of Don Filipe Yberra Ortol against Messrs. Cramer and Company. Ortol wished to restrain the firm from cutting logwood on his land, which sat on the border with Yucatán. He had sole right to work his land, he said, but the suit was dismissed. Then, on July 8, C. L. Gardrich, editor of the Independent, was found guilty of contempt for publishing Ortol’s open letters to Mexican woodcutters about his treatment. In essence, a gag order restricting unfavorable press against the plantocracy was imposed on the colony, and the editor was ordered to pay court costs and a two-hundred-dollar bond.
It simply was not wise to stray too close to the mahogany men. They controlled the law, the courts, and public opinion; they were a law in themselves. Some of their holdings stretched over a million acres. With the high rents and taxes, the sale or lease of land to small settlers like Henry was blocked as much as possible. In order to ensure a constant supply of timber, owners would only cut one-twentieth of their land each year, just selecting trees that had grown more than seventeen inches in diameter; in the course of twenty years, they’d come back when smaller trees had grown. This rotation allowed them to stay solvent by fixing the levels of capital and labor in advance, but it also led to confusion and court suits regarding ownership of plats. When the plantocracy returned to a site, their surveyors checked to see if there was anything they’d missed earlier or if any squatters had moved in.
By December 1891, Henry had built his house, cultivated forty acres, planted ten thousand banana trees, four acres of cacao, a few dozen oranges, lemons, and mangoes, and a small number of Castilloa rubber trees. He seemed to deliberately avoid hevea while building his reputation on its theft, but one could never call him lazy. His improvements amounted to “exceedingly good work,” wrote the government, which estimated the house value at $1,500 and his concession’s at $4,000. Yet his profits were meager—his account books showed a monthly balance between $13 and $47.96—and he’d been unable to pay anything on the two years’ rent then due. That month, in a letter to the Colonial Secretary, he pointed out the hardship of paying $500 in advance and asked to be allowed to invest as much as possible in developments in the early years, then pay the equivalent increase on improvements at the end of his ten-year term.
He was asking for a favor, but the time for favors had passed. He was Roger Goldsworthy’s man, and when Sir Roger was governor, his request might have been granted. But Goldsworthy had been transferred earlier in 1891 and was now the governor of the Falkland Islands, those cold, lonely specks in the South Atlantic that would be repeatedly claimed and contested with Argentina. His replacement, Sir C. Alfred Maloney, made twelve thousand pounds, the highest salary for any colonial governor at that time. The plantocracy and its press rejoiced. The Colonial Guardian of October 4, 1890 said that “honest men, as a rule, [kept] aloof” from Goldsworthy. A new wind was blowing in British Honduras, but it wasn’t favorable for Henry.
In early 1892, the inevitable occurred. The colonial secretary rejected Henry’s compromise solution. If he did not pay his rent, the lease would be forfeit. And there was an addendum—most of his concession belonged to Messrs. Cramer and Company.
This clause seems openly malicious and corrupt. Of Henry’s 2,500 acres, Messrs. Cramer and Company said that 1,470 belonged to them, and the government agreed. The surveyor who “discovered” the flaw in Wickham’s title was the same who originally drew the map safely placing Henry’s property on Crown land. The surveyor general said he had no other map of the Temash, pleading that his department was too busy to conduct an accurate survey. Everything came back to Henry: The mahogany company could sue him for trespass. The government could escape liability by canceling the lease for nonpayment of rent. As former inspector of forests, Henry should have known which lands were Crown and not blame the government for his own error. Messrs. Cramer offered to sell “their” land back to the government at two dollars an acre, on the condition that they had right of way on the only path from the river to the back lands, where the mahogany grew. But Henry’s house was on that path, along with his bananas and rubber. To buy back his land from the government, he’d have to tear down his house and uproot every crop he’d planted.
He went to court, the only option left to him. On May 11, 1892, his solicitor submitted a lengthy statement to the secretary of state citing Wickham’s experience as a tropical planter, his official posts in British Honduras, and his value to the British Empire for bringing the seventy thousand hevea seeds to Kew. He was a man of “great and rare experience,” an asset to any colony. Wickham’s position was critical; he could neither work on the property, nor invite partners to invest, and creditors were circling. An investor from Guatemala had been ready to sink £2,000 into Wickham’s plantation when he heard about his legal troubles. Two others—“Mr. D. Wells” and “Mr. Strange”—had already arrived in Belize when they learned that all that Wickham owned was a lawsuit. All three backed away. The dispute dragged on and Henry was going broke.
So in the spring of 1892, Henry appealed to the queen.
In 1892, Victoria had been on the throne for fifty-five years. Her Jubilee Celebration five years earlier had been one of the triumphs of her career. She was compared to Elizabeth, but Elizabeth had ruled a little island of merely 5 million people, while Victoria ruled nearly half the world. Her name and face were stamped on coins and documents in cities that had not even been established when she came to the throne as a girl. When British subjects acted out their separate dramas for the empire—when General Gordon died at Khartoum, or Henry fretted over his seeds on the Amazon—at some point, they thought of Victoria and ransomed their lives and hopes to her.
Victoria understood perfectly the importance of her colonies. They had to be protected. Everything rested on their backs—the riches, the dominance, the vital British interests. The most fundamental interest of all was the ability to trade and invest throughout the world, an ability that lay at the heart of every major foreign decision, and it had been so for decades. The word “imperialism” in the 1880s and 1890s was usually associated with a desire for territorial expansion, but at the core of this expansion lay the guaranteed markets, limitless resources, and free market capitalism the Victorians enjoyed and revered. In such a world, corporate interests were of greater importance than individual interests. After all, corporate profits benefited the greater whole. Imperialism was a faith as well as a business, and as it spread, so spread the mystique of empire. Prefiguring Calvin Coolidge, she knew that the business of England was business.
In due course, Henry’s statement of his value to the empire was returned to the colonial government, denied by the queen in her handwriting: “Let Justice be done. Victoria R. & I.”
It was an oracular condemnation as final as any by the Talking Cross. With that royal snub, Henry—once again—was ruined.
