Cozumel

Located 15 miles off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, during the 16th century Spanish explorers relied on the island of Cozumel as an important and well-known stopping point during expeditions from Cuba to the Mexican mainland.

At its broadest point, Cozumel is 30 miles by 12 miles long. Modern estimates place the island’s indigenous population between 2,000 and 3,000 persons at the time of first contact with Europeans. The name Cozumel is derived from the Mayan expression for a shallow island, Ah-Cuzamil-Pet en.

In May 1518, one week after departing from Cuba, JuAN DE Grijalva and his men, caught by a current, reached Cozumel during the second expedition by the Spanish to explore the Mexican coastline. Because they reached the island on the third of May, Grijalva named the island Santa Cruz in recognition of the holy day. Upon sight of the Spaniards, the Mayan-speaking Natives ran away from their villages and took shelter in the nearby woods.

Grijalva saw stone houses, elaborate pyramids, and towers constructed by the Natives. Men from Grijalva’s expedition wrote of impressive paved streets, a guttering system, strange crosses, and a white pyramid with a circumference in excess of 140 square feet. Religious rituals performed by the Indians, including human sacrifices and other offerings presented to the goddess of the rainbow, Ix Chel, also astounded the Spanish. While at Cozumel Grijalva met and exchanged gifts with the chief and learned that news of Spanish activities in the Caribbean had preceded their arrival on the island. There were supposedly two white men living on the island, but Grijalva failed to encounter either of them.

Although Grijalva departed Cozumel not long after his arrival, the next Spanish expedition, led by Hernan Cortes in 1519, remained on the island considerably longer. As bad weather created difficulty for him, Cortes used the favorable harbor of Cozumel as a meeting point for his ships. Like Grijalva before him, Cortes, too, encountered things he considered quite surprising, including foods of unanticipated complexity, cotton hammocks, and beautiful picture books.

Via a translator, Cortes immediately began to spread the word of Christianity to the island’s Indians, condemning indigenous ceremonies, idols, and human sacrifices. Although awed with the sophistication of Cozumel society, Cortes ordered his men to remove Native idols from the temples and to replace them with Christian ornaments, including an altar with the Virgin Mary. The Indians were astonished by his actions but did not stop him. Cortes and his men remained on the island long enough to repair their vessels and to be joined by a white man, Geronimo DE Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked in Yucatan.

After Cortes’s departure the Spanish continued to use Cozumel as a natural stopping point during their explorations and settlement of New Spain. Beginning with Cortes’s efforts, the Spanish presence in Cozumel suggested the permanent influence of Spain among the Mexica people, particularly in the spread of Spanish law and religious practices. Although it later changed the location to Tlaxcala, in 1519 the Crown created a bishopric for Cozumel. Also, during the early 1520s the Natives of Cozumel, like other indigenous peoples, experienced the debilitating effects of new disease when Spaniards unwittingly introduced smallpox to the island.

Further reading: Anthony Pagden, ed., Hernan Cortes: Letters from Mexico (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986); Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion, The Civilization of the American Indian Series, vol. 99 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).

—Kimberly Sambol-Tosco