GUATEMALA AND THE HIGHEST NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 217 



per day, the company takes 2 per cent to pay for sanitary measures. Every plantation 

 has its doctor and dispensary, and natives and foreigners alike are continually dosed with 

 quinine. Yet even so, at certain seasons of the year, a single train may carry a score of 

 staggering fever patients. The present hospitals are wholly inadequate, and in 1913 the 

 company was erecting a new hospital at a cost of .$125,000. Mr. Victor M. Cutter, manager 

 of the Guatemala division of the United Fruit Company, states that in his district about 

 90 per cent of the people, including both natives and whites, suffer from malaria and its 

 sequeL-e. He thinks that approximately 20 per cent have malaria in a serious form in 

 spite of preventive measures. 



In the entire Peten strip of the Atlantic forest, from Copan on the south up through 

 Quirigua, the lake of Izabal, and the province of Peten, it is probable that the total popu- 

 lation does not exceed 20,000 in an area of nearly 15,000 square miles. If the cattle-raisers, 

 mahogany-cutters, gum-gatherers, and banana-raisers be excluded, and if we hiclude only 

 the people who procure a living in ways possible before the coming of the white man, the 

 population is reduced to probably less than 10 per cent of the figures given, or only 1 person 

 for 7 square miles. Of course these figures are mere approximation; there is no such thing 

 as a census, for much of the country is still unexplored and the wild Indian tribes practically 

 ignore the Guatemalan supremacy. Yet day after day the traveler finds no inhabitants, 

 and places which appear on the map as villages prove to have only two or three houses or 

 merely an abandoned hut. Roads and even trails are almost non-existent, and m most 

 places the machete must constantly be used to open up a pathway. Mr. Frank Blance- 

 neaux, who for 6 or 7 years spent a large part of his time in traveling through Peten m 

 search of mahogany, probably knows that province as thoroughly as any one. He thinks 

 that the population does not exceed 10,000, and that at least 95 per cent of it consists of 

 cattle-raisers, mahogany-cutters, and gum-gatherers. Nowhere has he seen a village of 

 more than a hut or two in the genuine forest, and nowhere do people practise any real 

 agriculture in the forest as opposed to the jungle. South of Peten, along the fine of the 

 railway from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala, for 60 miles from the Atlantic coast, until one 

 comes to the poor Uttle village of Los Araates, there would not be a single inhabited place 

 were it not for the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company. Los Amates itself 

 Ues on the edge of the forest, where it breaks down into big jungle. 



Whatever may be the exact figures as to population, it is evident that heavy rains, 

 dense vegetation, and malignant fevers to-day render the Peten strip of the Atlantic forest 

 almost uninhabitable; yet in the past this was by no means the case. Practically all of 

 the great Maya ruins outside of Yucatan lie in this strip or in its northern and northwestern 

 continuation in the Mexican provinces of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche. Copan, one 

 of the most remarkable of the ancient cities, Ues on its edge, although not actually in it; 

 Quirigua lies within it, although only a few miles from the border; and Seiba,!, Tikal, 

 Naranjo, and a score of others as far as Palenque in the north, he well within its dense 

 jungle and forests. These places were obviously towns of importance, such as grow up 

 in interior agricultural districts far from important fines of communication only when 

 there is a considerable population round about. How dense the former population may 

 have been we can not estimate, for the cover of vegetation is so thick that we have no idea 

 of the exact number of ruins; b\it it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for every family 

 now supported by ordinary agriculture there was probably a town or village in the days of 

 the Mayas. 



Turning now to the relatively dry portion of Guatemala, the second of our three divi- 

 sions, we find it divided into arid bush country, lying in low, isolated valleys or basins, 

 such as Zacapa, and highlands where pine or temperate forests prevail. The bush country 

 is unimportant, being of small area. In some places it is so hot and dry that cacti and 

 mesquite bushes make it look like the lowlands of Arizona. It is fairly well inhabited and 



