DESCRIPTION OF COPAN BY GALINDO. 603 
deep canyon in the vicinity, leaving to the south a single narrow entrance. After 
traveling some distance through it, a stone trench is encountered, with many 
quarried stones, which crosses the isthmus where it is not wider than 20 yards. 
After passing the trench, a plain of about 200 yards in diameter is found, surrounded 
by the river and elevated above it by perpendicular precipices more than 100 yards. 
The side opposite the peninsula is level with it, but at a distance of a rifle shot. 
As a point of defense it was excellent, the besieged having supplies of provisions 
and the means of drawing up water from the surrounding abyss. 
Bearing in mind the advancement the aborigines of Copan had made in art, 
science, and civilization, the coldest and most indifferent soul revolts against the 
barbarous conquerors who allowed even the memory of such an interesting nation 
to perish. 
It is due to the memory of the priests, who were themselves the victims of the 
Spanish rule, that, during the first years of the conquest, they were the strongest, 
or, it may well be said, the only defenders of the unhappy Indians, and they brought 
upon themselves, therefore, the universal hatred of the conquerors. Guatemala 
will always be proud of having had as one of its citizens that noble and untiring 
defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de las Casas. 
A number of Indians driven from Copan after the conquest, founded, it is 
believed, the neighboring towns of Jocotan and San Juan Ermita. Camotan, a 
village nearer to Copan, was founded many years afterwards by natives of the 
Chorti nation, who emigrated from Tachaluya, in the State of Salvador. 
Copan continued to be inhabited, even after the conquest, but in a state of 
perpetual decadence. Some 75 years ago the cultivation of tobacco was brought 
from there to the plains of Santa Rosa, and the population gradually decreased to a 
village of three houses situated to the west of the Sesesmil Canyon, which formerly 
comprised the western suburb of the city. ‘The site of the ancient capital is now 
entirely included in the lands of a chaplaincy founded by the curacy of Guatemala. 
I have the honor to express to you, citizen minister general, the assurance of 
my most humble respect and devotion. 
God, Union, Liberty. Juan GaLInpo. 
NOTE. 
Through a fortunate accident, when this volume was already on the press, 
the writer learned that Colonel Juan Galindo was born in Ireland, and was a Central 
American by adoption only. Thanks are due for this timely information to Dr. 
Don Policarpo Bonilla, former President of Honduras, and now Envoy Extraordi- 
nary and Minister Plenipotentiary on Special Mission from that republic to the 
government of the United States. 
Galindo, it seems, after his return from Copan in 1834, was sent by the govern- 
ment of Central America to Great Britain to effect a settlement of the boundary 
dispute then pending between the two countries, but when he arrived in London the 
British government refused to receive him as a diplomatic agent in the negotiations 
on the ground that he was a British subject, having been born in Ireland, and was 
thus disqualified from representing the government of Central America. 
The whole correspondence, so far as it affected the United States government, 
to which Galindo first appealed before going to England, was published in United 
States Senate Documents, second session, Thirty-second Congress, 1852-1853, Senate 
Document No. 27, pp. 1-13. Miss M. W. Williams, in her Anglo-American Isthmian 
Diplomacy, 1815-1915, also gives a brief summary of the affair. See Williams, 1916, 
PP- 33, 34- 
