These pages had already been written when I received Chicxulub’s Chronicles, written at the time of the Conquest, by the Cacique Nakuk-Peck; translated and published by Brinton, Philadelphia, 1882, containing most valuable information whereby my theory is strengthened with all the weight of an official document.
[Illustration: SACRED CENOTÉ OF CHICHEN-ITZA.]
Sec. 4. Nakuk-Peck, writing of Montejo’s expedition to Chichen-Itza, 1527, says: “He set out to reconnoitre the place called Chichen-Itza, whence he invited _the chief of the town_ to come and see him; and the people said unto him: ‘_There is a King_, my Lord, _there is a King, even Cocom aun Peck, King Peck, King Chel of Chicantum_;’ and Captain _Cupul_ said to him: ‘_Stranger warrior, take your rest in these palaces_.’ So spoke Captain _Cupul_.” After this, can it be further doubted that Chichen was inhabited at the Conquest? Of Izamal he says:
Sec. 18. “When the Spaniards established themselves at Merida in 1542, the chief orator, the _high-priest Kinich-Kakmó and the King of the Tutulxius from Mani, made their submission_.” Obviously Kinich-Kakmó was the generic name for the high-priests at Izamal who were in full possession of their religious prerogatives at the coming of the Spaniards; consequently the temples and palaces of both Izamal and Chichen were then inhabited. These passages tell us, moreover, what we did not yet know—that after the fall of Mayapan the head of the Cocomes took possession of the principality of Chichen (the fall of Mayapan and the migration of the Chichemecs were probably contemporaneous events), that Kinich-Kakmó was the ally of Tutulxiu, King of Mani, since, jointly with him, he offered his alliance to Montejo, and that the latter and Cocom, both of Toltec descent, were enemies struggling for supremacy over the province.[135]
We read in Torquemada and other writers that the first to arrive in the country were the Cocomes, penetrating the peninsula from Tabasco towards the end of the twelfth century, under the command of their chief Quetzalcoatl, after they had already subdued and civilised most of the northern portion of Yucatan. They were succeeded a century later by the Tutulxius, who marked their passage through the Usumacinta Valley by the erection of Lorillard and Tikal.