FA Mitchell-Hedges 1924

Science recently has become increasingly interested in the speculative possibility that the Western Hemisphere has for more than four centuries been miscalled the New World, and that it, rather than the Eastern Hemisphere, first cradled civilisation. The newly-found ruins of a great city and a high pyramid of the first Mayan Empire, discovered in the British Honduran jungle by a British expedition headed by Mr. Mitchell Hedges, is likely to yield new and interesting evidence.
     The expedition (writes the New York correspondent of the Manchester "Guardian") was conducted from a base near Belize, capital of British Honduras. Ruins of great stone structures scattered over hundreds of acres, together with a pyramid more than 300 feet high, were found. Much of the dead city, hidden for many centuries, was covered with jungle growth. Jungle beasts, birds, and snakes had been its long. No competent archaeologist has as yet made any estimate as to its age. It is far inland and distant from any modern path or trail.
     Limited explorations in recent years have uncovered other ancient Mayan cities and pyramids in Yucatan. The prehistoric city of Teotihuacan, less than 40 miles from Mexico city, has been only superficially explored. Together with its pyramids of the sun and the moon, Teotihuacan is one of the most remarkable archaeological finds in all history. The ruins of one ancient city were found to be superimposed upon the ruins of another. Competent archaeologists believe it to be possible that this submerged city may yield clues to a civilisation in Mexico and the Central Americas antedating that of the Valley of the Nile.

A Visit to the Ruins.

     The Teotihuacan pyramids are believed to have been built centuries after the building of the sub-merged city at their base. Estimates of the antiquity of the upper city place it as possibly as many as three thousand years before the Christian era. No archaeologist is willing to hazard any estimate as yet as to the antiquity of the lower ruins.
     Northward, in Southern California, near Los Angeles, in a territory formerly Mexican, has been found recently the skull of a man who, according to his geological placement, must have lived 500,000 years ago, greatly antedating the estimated age of the Piltdown and the Heidelberg men. This discovery is being investigated by the Carnegie and the Smitlisonian Institutions; scientific men connected with these institutions, including Professor Merriam of the Carnegie Institution, an archaeologist of high standing, are already convinced that a new find of great importance to anthropology has been unearthed.
     Dr. Manuel Gamio, chief of the Department of Anthropology of the Mexican Government, had a staff correspondent of the New York "World" conducted to Teotihuacan last summer. Dr. Gamio had suffered a broken hip from falling off a horse, and was not himself able to go, but he sent a member of his staff. The doctor is highly regarded by such authorities as Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian anthropologist, who aims himself to go to Mexico to carry forward preliminary explorations and studies he made there several years ago. When the correspondent left Washington for Mexico. Dr. Hrdlicka advised him to call upon Dr. Gamio. He found the Mexican anthropologist chary of making strong claims and inclined to postpone estimates until more evidence has been studied. In this he is hampered by the poverty of the Mexican Government, and the Government's unwillingness to turn over to aliens complete control of their archaeological fields.
     British and American explorers have been permitted to do a limited amount of field work amd the ruins of the Mayan and other American-Indian civilisations. They have been handicapped, as have Mexican investigators, by inability so far to decipher the more important hieroglyphics on temples and other buildings. Much more will be known when headway in this direction can be made.
     Dr. Gamio's assistant conducted the "World" representative down into the lower excavations. Little has been touched or removed. Tools and utensils which certainly must have been used by a civilised people were seen lying on stone and earthen floors as they had been left when some cataclysm, possibly volcanic, destroyed the first city. Civilised skill was evident in the construction of chambers and passageways and stairs.
     Some of the stone carvings, both on the surface and underground, are tinted with indelible colors. The art of this coloring is as completely lost as the ancient North African art of tempering copper. Nowhere in the region has there been found any material of which the colors could have been made by any known process.

Reconstructing the Old Civilisation.

     Dr. Gamio is at present engaged in a practical experiment upon the Indian in habitants of the valley surrounding the dead city of Teotihuacan, by which he hopes to restore at least part of the civilisation and culture of their ancestors. Dr. Gamio wants to restore at least the arts of the dead city, particularly its pottery and weaving. For this purpose he has opened a school at its very gates, and here he is trying to revive the old instinct of a decadent people for the arts which the Spanish conquest killed.
     Dr. Gamio believes that the continuing unrest characteristic of Mexico and Central and South America is due to the failure of the descendants of the Spanish invaders, still the ruling minority, to make allowance in their laws for the great difference between the cultures of the governors and the governed. He aims at a harmonious reconciliation of the two in a system retaining the best features of each.
     Dr. Gamio's anthropological experiment is more concerned at present with the future results than with delving into the remote past. How far this work will add in reconstructing the past of the old Indian civilisations will be deterinined largely by the amount of co-operation Mexico is willing to accept from scientists of wealthier countries. Mexico is jealous of its prerogatives, but recent permissions indicate that the Government is willing to accept considerable co-operation, provided it does not mean alien control.

Source

The British Museum has acquired a remarkable ethnographical collection of objects used for domestic, religious, and warlike purposes by a tribe of Indians living in a remote part of the Isthmus of Panama, of whose existence, it appears, nothing has hitherto been known (says The Times, London). The tribe was discovered by Mr. F. A. Mitchell-Hedges and Lady (Richmond) Brown, who have been engaged for two years in exploration and deep-sea research work in the Caribbean Sea north of Panama. Landing from their yacht at the Gulf of San Blas, 200 miles east of the Panama Canal, they had been for some days giving medical aid to sick San Bias Indians (a comparatively well-known tribe), when the news of their magical powers, penetrating inland, brought to the coast four men of a different tribe of Indians. They are known to the San Blas Indians as 'Chucunaques,' but, according to the explorers, not even the white population of the Panama Republic, the territory within which they live, knew anything of them. The explanation given of the seclusion and obscurity of the tribe is that few white people visit San Blas, as the uncharted waters of the gulf are difficult to navigate, and that the habitation of the Chucunaques is separated from San Bias by 20 miles of almost impenetrable forest and bush. If the Chucunaques had been heard of at all in Panama proper the talk was so vague and uncertain that their existence was regarded as mythical. The purpose of the visit of the four men of the tribe to San Blas was to invite the two explorers, as 'magic workers,' to visit the tribe, among which, it was said, sickness was very rife.

Smallpox Prevalent

Mr. Mitchell-Hedges and Lady Brown, with some San Blas Indians as interpreters, and the four Chucunaques as guides, reached the place in two days, travelling partly by water and partly on foot. The Panama Isthmus—that narrow neck of land connecting the American Continents—is at its narrowest point at San Blas, 31 miles wide, so that the home of the Chucunaquea—a clearing in the dense jungle—is rather near the shore of the Bay of Panama, an arm of the Pacific on the south. The explorers found smallpox very prevalent in the tribe. For ethnographical purposes the most remarkable discovery was that the Chucunaque Indians are a most primitive people, knowing nothing of the uses of metal or even of stone. All their belongings, for domestic or other purposes, were of wood or bone, save for some pottery of the rudest kind that can be made by hand from clay. Living in the twentieth century they recall a time antecedent to the stone age. The men and women of the tribe number 6,000, and there are numerous children. The average height of the adults is 4 ft. 6 in. They live in open huts, wear the scanty clothing common among the Indians of the Panama, and in habits and customs resemble, to some extent, their more civilized neighbours at San Blas.

Vividly Coloured Cloths.

Among the objects brought back by Mr. Mitchell-Hedges and Lady Brown, and presented to the museum, are earthenware braziers, necklaces made of the bones and teeth of rodents and sharks, also of quills and shells, and such weapons as wooden clubs, bows, and arrows. A most interesting part of the collection, is a large number of vividly coloured cloths of applique work, with intricate patterns, purely formal or representative of human beings, beasts, birds, and reptiles. The materials are obtained by trade with the San Blas Indians, who get them from Panama or some other part of America. But the patchwork designs with which they are decorated are done by the Chucunaques, by cutting narrow strips of and thread on the orange, crimson, and the cloths and stitching them with needle blue backgrounds. They show a barbaric taste in colour and design. The use to which the cloths are put is obscure, but it is supposed they are related, in some way, to religious rites and ceremonies. The collection also includes human figures ruddy carved in wood, which, no doubt, are the gods of the tribe. These are no more than a foot and a half long. One resembles a parson of the eighteenth century in low broad hat and long coat, which suggests that a missionary once found his way to the Chucunaques; and another is like a sailor, indicating likewise some touch with the white man, as an explorer, at one time or another. The Chucunaque region has hitherto been unrepresented in the British Museum, and the collection therefore fills an important gap. Attached to it is an interesting series of early pottery, belonging to the pre-Columbian period, from graves in the region occupied by the ancient Talamancan tribes further west and north. Certain types of Talamancan pottery (sometimes known as "Chiriqui"), as regards technical perfection, may be classed among the finest products of the primitive potter as yet ignorant of the wheel. Some of the pots display ornamentation motives which are new to the museum collection.

Given six months to live by her doctor, and thinking it better to die with a thrill, Lady Richmoid Brown went on some thrilling expeditions with Mr. Mitchell-Hedges, of Bournemouth, the explorer and scientist. Going in search of life, she found it, as she explained to a Press representative.
"I believed I had to die and I wanted to die with a thrill," she, said. "I did not want to feel that my life was ebbing easily and quietly out. Since it had to go I wanted it to go with a flourish.
"But I did not die, and now the life of aduenture and the quest for new and strange places has enslaved me." Once she saved the lives of her party on the Bayano River, in the Panama country, where an alligator, about 25 ft long, thought to have been killed, but only wounded, got under their dugout and threatened to capsize it.
"It's great mouth was gaping up at the side of the boat. A native could do nothing, and Mr. Mitchell-Hedges dare not shoot because I was between them and the monster. We had a very narrow shave, and during the fight I had my flesh ripped off my hands to the bone."
Off the island of Viento-Fria[?], in the Caribbean Sea; the party, in their little yacht Cara, were caught in a terrific storm.
"The waves were breaking thunderously on the reef and throwing foam into the air. It was hard to keep the little opening through which we must enter clear to the view.
"We drove the boat straight to wards the hissing barrier, where we should have cut through in the ordinary way. As we reached the gap an enormous roller reached us and lifted us through and over."
A haunting memory is the Night of the Malignant Silence, as Lady Brown describes it, on one of the Kaymllas[?], a group of unmapped and uninhabited islands in the Caribbean.
"There is no silence like it on earth, and I cannot imagine that there is anything like it so throbbing with horror, even above the earth or below it," she said.
When the party made their first attempt to penetrate into the interior of British Honduras their dug-out capsized, and everything was lost.
"We spent a night of hell there." said Lady Brown, "soaked to the skin, with only a mouthful of food and tortured with millions of mosquitos. All through the night two jaguars prowled round our clearing.
"The legacy of that night of evil memories was a body coverered in septic sores and a malarious dysentery from the foul water I had been obliged to drink. But our attempt ended in our penetrating into the interior, until we came to the lost city and the unknown tribe of the Chuonaque.
"No white people have been to this place before, and the existence of the tribe was unsuspected."
Asked if she thought the average modern girl would be capable of undergoing such adventures, Lady Brown shook her head in a somewhat disparaging manner.
"Women are hard to understand at times," she said. "Our land girls during the war showed what girls are capable of doing, but I do not think the girl of the present day is made of [???] and many of our girls of to-day have become dolls. They are slaves of the powder-puff. I certainly do not think the girls of our cities could stand the life. They might start out in a brave sort of way, but in three or four days they would be crying 'take me back.' The modern girl might make up her mind to die with the thrill, but she would get it at the Palais de Danse. The girls in our colonies and those who live the open life in the country have more of the independent self-reliant spirit that is required."

Mr. Mitchell-Hedges, the explorer and deep-sea research expert, on June 3 placed his valuable collection of Chucunaqwe specimens in the hands of the British Museum authorities.
He brought back the curios last year from an unknown race of Central American Indians, which he and Lady Richmond Brown discovered, and the museum authorities are to choose examples of each set of specimens for the national museum.
     The entire collection, which is said to have a value of about £150,000, consists of thousands of pieces.
     It includes wonderful exmaples of carving done by charring and by the use of shark and animal teeth; black palm bows and arrows: spears with points barbed like fish hooks (which were once steeped in virulent poison) ; over 800 pieces of picture writing on cloth; over 900 barbaric necklaces; 100 of the Chucunaque gods; and some hundreds of examples of crude pottery.
     There is also included the entire State regalia of the chief witch doctor. Some of the most valuable specimens are human heads, which have been reduced to model size—the hair being reduced in proportion—by a process absolutely unknown to modern science.

Mr. Mitchell-Hedges, the famous explorer and deep sea research expert, has through a London journal, made a vigorous attack on women, and speaks contemptuously of "petticoat government." He blames the advance of the sex partly for the pre-war troubles of Britain. Curiously, Mr. Mitchell-Hedges who is busy planning an official expedition into the heart of British Honduras, has been assisted in many of his travels by a woman—Lady Richmond Brown.
"One of this prime reasons for the bad trade conditions existing in Great Britain," he told an interviewer, "is undoubtedly the loss of the pioneer spirit. It is to those fearless men who went out to unknown parts, faced im- mense difficulties, took big risks, and triumphed that we owe the Empire, our world-wide commerce and the prestige that the country has throughout our colonies and foreign lands. But to-day the bacillus of inertia has crept into the system of Britons to such an extent that we are rapidly losing both our world- wide trade and our morale. There are three chief reasons for this state of affairs:—(1) Excessive taxation, (2) uncertainty of our political situation, (3) the insidious way in which women are creeping into power.
"It is foolish not to face facts, and as the history of the world shows, the day women are allowed to become equal with men marks the first stage of the degeneracy and virility of a nation's manhood. The suggestion that women of 21 should have a vote is on the face of it ridiculous. There would then be the certainty, because of the preponderance numerically of woman over man, of the female vote exceeding the male vote—pettitcoat government! Physically the average woman can never be equal to the average man, for the simple reason that from the Stone Age upwards it has been man's great mission to protect the female and her children. The day this law of nature is reversed sees the first step in the degeneracy of man. The history of the primitive tribes is an evidence of the fact. In the case of the Roman Empire one of the chief reasons for its fall was the worship of women with its attendant indulgence, in luxury and ease. Automatically, as the female rises to a dominating position over the male, so effeminacy rapidly spreads among the manhood of a nation. It is necessary to-day that the manhood of this country should assert itself in rigorous manner. The suggestion of a petticoat government is sickening to a degree."