The road from Yucatan to Guatemala through the Peten (1695-1697)
Between 1695 and 1697 gangs of Maya axemen cut the first land route across the base of the Yucatan peninsula, linking Campeche to the Vera Paz through the Peten forest. The 1701 history prints its itinerary of named waterholes and distances, so that later travellers in either direction could measure their stages and not run out of water. The same road carried the army.
Why this wins its question: Ask what Spain built in the Peten and the answer that wins today is a battle in 1697. The road that made the battle possible - and that outlasted it as the first land connection between Yucatan and Guatemala - is not described anywhere a reader can easily reach. This object takes it off the 1701 sheets: who cut it (quadrillas of Maya hacheros and gastadores working ahead of the column), how it advanced (as a chain of new reductions, Zucthock, Bateab, Chumpich, Chuntuchi), how the southern half was surveyed by a pilot-engineer who sent the president of Guatemala the rumbos and alturas drawn out, and who was legally entitled to finish it, a question that went to the Audiencia of Mexico and produced a viceregal order timed to a single month. Most of all it prints the passage that makes the road a public work rather than a military line: an itinerary of named waterholes with the leagues between them, published, the author says, so that those who afterwards trade along this road from Yucatan to Guatemala or from Guatemala to Yucatan may measure their stages and not lack water. It also prints what the road was first used for, which is the part a triumphalist account would drop.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The source read for this object is the Historia de la conquista de la Provincia de el Itza, Primera Parte, by Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, relator of the Real y Supremo Consejo de las Indias, printed with no imprint on its title leaf but with the facing engraved plate signed "Marcus Orozco, Delin.t et Scup.t M.ti 1701". The author compiled it in Madrid from the papers that reached the Council; he was never on the road he describes, and every claim below is a claim about what the book prints.
The road was cut ahead of the column as it advanced, by Indian labour organised in gangs. The book describes quadrillas of Indios Hacheros - axemen - and Indios Gastadores going in front of the army "prosiguiendo el desmonte", and the army marching each day along what the gangs had opened that day. This is the labour on which the whole operation rested, and the book names it without comment on its terms; no wage, no levy and no muster of those gangs appears in the pages read, and this object asserts nothing about how they were recruited or paid.
The road was built as a chain of reductions as much as a track. The friars sent to the Itza in 1695 travelled by it through the pueblos "nuevamente reduzidos en el Camino" of Zucthock and Bateab, on to Chumpich, and to Chuntuchi where the teniente general Alonso Garcia de Paredes had set his camp while pushing the opening onward from Bateab. The settlements and the roadway advanced together.
The book prints an itinerary of water, and says why. At the sabana of Zucte, eight leagues along the newly opened stretch, it names the three aguadas and places them: the first, Becaxan, three leagues from Chavich inside the forest on the right hand, about twenty quadras in, entered from a large zapote standing on the road itself, where the first cross was set; the second, Bahalalha, a league further on, also on the right and deeper in, entered by a flooded place at Kalche "que los Indios llaman Petenlàn"; the third, Ain, another league and a half on, in sight of the road on the left; and two and a half leagues more from that last water to Zucte. The stated purpose is explicit: let this description of waterholes and of the rivers and streams still to be named serve "para consuelo de los que en adelante traginaren por este Camino, desde Yucatàn, à Guatimala, ù de Guatimala, à Yucatàn, y para que midan, y regulen las jornadas, de suerte, que no les falte Agua". A conquest narrative is here doing the work of a road-book.
Crosses were set as route markers as well as signs, and the book records them being numbered and named: the first at the entrance to the Becaxan waterhole, the second left standing at the site of Zucte and given the name of San Salvador.
The southern half was cut from the other end, surveyed, and was much the shorter. Captain Don Pedro de Zubiaur, with the piloto ingeniero Caravajal and his people, reached the Laguna and went on with the opening party cutting a new road, arriving in few days at the pueblo of San Agustin in the province of the Vera Paz with only thirty-five leagues of newly cut road behind them - saving, the book says, more than half the length of the road by which Alonso Garcia de Paredes had previously gone to Guatemala. Caravajal's letters described every transit, site and paraje on the new cut, and on reaching the city of Guatemala he informed the president of it, painting and delineating for him the rumbos and alturas along which it had been marked out.
Who was entitled to finish the road was fought out in court, and the book prints the procedure rather than the result only. Don Roque de Soberanis argued the right of the opening for himself; Don Martin de Ursua argued his own right to prosecute and complete it; the matter went to the Real Audiencia of Mexico, whose votos consultivos were always of opinion that the dependencia should be determined in Soberanis's favour, leaving him to finish the opening of the road and the reductions of the infidel Indians of those parts, and that Ursua should be ordered out of those provinces. The viceroy Conde de Galve delayed deciding, gave Ursua time and terms to finish the opening, and finally ordered that if the work were not concluded when Soberanis reached Merida to take over the government, Ursua should withdraw along the same road to its furthest opened point, finish opening it in the whole month of March, and at the end of that month, concluded or not, return immediately by that road to the port of Campeche without entering Merida, and embark - with Soberanis obliged to give him all necessary help to finish it.
The road's first use is the cost that has to stand beside the achievement. It was cut as the approach march of an armed expedition, it carried the army and the baggage train to the lake, and the chapter of the same book headed "Continuan en flechar los Barbaros ... Rompese la Guerra: Saltan los Nuestros en Tierra: Y tomase el Petèn" narrates what the road was for. The book also records, from the garrison left behind, that Don Martin Can disappeared overnight from the Peten with all the Indians who were on it, and that the presidio was threatened daily. Whatever the itinerary of waterholes was worth to later travellers, it was a by-product of a conquest.
What this object does not establish should be said plainly. It rests on one source, an official compilation printed by order of the Council of the Indies. No total length, cost, or completion date for the road is claimed, because the pages read give none in those terms; the thirty-five leagues in c6 are the southern cut alone. No claim is made about how the Indian axemen and gastadores were levied, paid or fed, about mortality on the work, or about how long the road remained passable after 1697. Libros I to III, VI, IX and X, the RA2 sequence and the Segunda Parte were not opened.