by Joe Jackson
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 19
13, 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. Althoug
h 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.
