Diego García de Palacio's relación of 1576 and the first description of Copán
The report an oidor of the Audiencia of Guatemala sent to Philip II on 8 March 1576, out of an inspection tour the crown had ordered for the redress of injustices done to the Indians. Inside it is the earliest known European description of the Maya ruins of Copán — the eagle-shaped stone, the stepped plaza its author compared to the Roman Colosseum, the sacrificial basins — by a man who says he could not find out what any of it was for.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Copán begin with John Lloyd Stephens in 1839, and where the 1576 relación is mentioned at all it is a half-sentence saying that a Spanish official had seen the ruins first. This object gives the text: the eagle stone with letters nobody could read, the plaza compared to the Roman Colosseum with eighty steps, the six colossal statues, the basins where the throats of the sacrificed were cut, the vaults exposed when the terrace fell into the river — and beside them the three things a summary always drops. The report was written because the crown required an oidor to tour his district and redress the injustices and vexations the Indians suffered, so the first survey of a Maya city is a by-product of an inspection ordered for their protection. Its author says he could not find out what the vaults were for and that he had found no books of their antiquities but the one he held himself. And his exactness rests on the assumption that "so barbarous a wit" as the living inhabitants could not have built it — which is quoted here rather than edited out.
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 report exists because of a standing royal order about the treatment of Indians, and it says so on its first pages. The author writes that "por otras ansi mismo manda V. M. que un Oydor por su turno ande visitando las provincias de su partido, para la buena conservacion é pulicia destos naturales i desagraviarlos de las injusticias i vexaciones que padescen i á componer i hacer justicia en las demas cosas que entre ellos se ofrecen", and that in fulfilment of it the Audiencia of Guatemala named him to that visita and assigned him provinces of its district, where he saw and found out things that "de raras i de consideracion me an forzado á dar quenta á V. M., aunque con rudo estilo". The injuries and vexations the natives suffer are named by the order itself, not by a later critic.
The same opening measures the district: it begins at the last bounds of Tehuantepec and ends at those of Costa Rica, runs south-east to north-west three hundred leagues and more, and is divided into thirteen principal provinces besides smaller ones — Chiapa, Soconusco, Suchitepeques, Cuauhthemalan, Verapaz, Izalcos, San Salvador, San Miguel, Honduras and the rest. The author sets that district inside a world he reckons at 5,625 leagues in circumference "segun la comun opinion".
Under the heading "Ruinas de Copan" the relación gives what is, so far as the record goes, the earliest European description of the site: near the road to the city of San Pedro, in the first town of the province of Honduras, "estan unas ruinas i vestijios de gran poblacion i de sobervios edificios", on the bank of a beautiful river in well-set and extended fields, land of middling temper, plentiful in fertility and in game and fish. Before reaching the mounds there is the mark of thick walls and a very great stone in the figure of an eagle, with a square a vara long worked on its breast bearing "ciertas letras que no se sabe que sea"; at the ruins another stone in the figure of a giant, which the old Indians say was the guard of that sanctuary, and inside it a stone cross three spans high with one arm broken; and further on a great statue more than four varas high "labrada como un obispo vestido de pontifical, con su mitro bien labrada i anillos en las manos".
The description continues into the plaza and is exact about it. It is "muy bien fecha con sus grados à la forma que escriben del Coliseo Romano", with eighty steps in some parts, flagged and worked in places in very good stone; six colossal statues stand in it, three of armed men in mosaic work with garters and many labours sown over the arms, two of women in long robes and Roman head-dresses, and one of a bishop seeming to hold a small coffer. Before each statue stood a great stone with a basin and a sink "donde degollavan los sacrificados i corria la sangre", with censer-pans beside them, and in the middle of the plaza a larger basin that seems for baptising. Beyond the plaza many steps rise to a high promontory; at one side a tower or terrace falls to the river, a great piece of it had collapsed, and in the fallen part two long narrow vaults were uncovered, with a stairway going down to the river.
The author does not claim to have solved the site, and twice says so in his own words. Of the vaults: "no he podido averiguar de que servian é para que se hicieron". Of the builders: he has tried with all possible care to learn from the memory derived from the ancients what people lived there, "i no he hallado libros de sus antiguedades, ni creo que en todo este districto hay mas que uno, que yo tengo" — a sentence that reports both the destruction of the written record and the fact that the reporting judge held one of the surviving books himself.
What he does record is the tradition and the linguistic evidence for it. The elders say that a great lord of the province of Yucatán had anciently come there and made those buildings, and after some years went back to his land and left it alone and unpeopled; he judges this "de las patrañas que cuentan es la mas cierta" because by that same memory the people of Yucatán anciently conquered Ayajal, Lacandón, Verapaz, the land of Chiquimula and this of Copán, "i ansi la lengua Apay que aqui hablan, corre i se entiende en Yucatan i las provincias dichas". He adds that the art of the buildings is like what the Spaniards found at Yucatán and Tabasco, and that since such work is found nowhere else it may be believed that one nation made both.
The admiration and the contempt are in the same sentence, and the object does not separate them. The buildings are of such skill "que parece que en ningun tiempo pudo haver, en tan barbaro injenio como tienen los naturales de aquella provincia, edificio de tanta arte i suntuosidad" — the exactness of the survey rests on a premise that the living inhabitants could not have built what he is measuring, and it is that premise, not the measurements, that later archaeology overturned.
The nineteenth-century editor prints the account precisely because it settles a question his own contemporaries had muddled. Squier's prefatory note records that Galindo believed the ruins to be the remains of the town of Copán captured and destroyed by Hernando de Chávez in 1530, and that Stephens fell into some confusion on the subject and copied out Juarros's account of the capture, though the extent and evident antiquity of the monuments forced him to doubt the identity of the spot; whatever doubts existed as to the high antiquity of the ruins "are set at Rest by this Account of Palacio", which shows them very nearly in their present condition three hundred years earlier and within fifty years of the conquest, their history already unknown and only the vaguest traditions surviving.
The relación closes, in the English translation printed facing the Spanish, "From Your city of Guatemala, March 8th, 1576. Your Royal Catholic Majesty's humble and loyal servant, THE LICENCIATE PALACIO", after an offer to give what he has retained in his memory if His Majesty thinks it useful, "in such a manner, at least, as to prove my good will". The 1860 edition carries a folding map that marks the Ruins of Copán, the route of Alvarado and the political boundaries of the editor's own day.
What is read here is Squier's 1860 printing and not the sixteenth-century manuscript, which was not reachable from this container. Every Spanish passage quoted above was read from the page images of the verso pages, where the Spanish text sits facing the English translation; the English translation was not collated against the Spanish, and the one sentence taken from an odd page is marked as translation where it appears. The edition has been judged handsomer than it is correct, a verdict recorded with its own citation in the related object on the same author's Instrucción náutica of 1587, and it is why the wording of these quotations is reported at 0.85 rather than higher. The judgement bears on the wording and not on the substance of the description, which Squier, having travelled the ground, checked against the site.