In late 1848, immediately following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War (1846–8), nearly a thousand Americans left New Orleans aboard a vessel named Florida to fight Mayan insurrectionists who recently launched a racially-driven campaign against the Yucatecan (criollo) ruling class in a multi-decade conflict known the Caste War (1847–1901). Coming on the heels a continental conflict in which U.S. leaders contemplated annexing of all of Mexico, and Yucatan under a recalibrated ‘Monroe Doctrine,’ the expedition was one of many operations reacting to a myriad of indigenous revolts throughout that country and the borderlands. The nine-hundred-plus mercenaries recklessly believed that they would easily overwhelm the Mayan insurgents, who were surprised at the unexpected arrival of non-Spanish-speaking foreigners from the opposite side of the Gulf. While some remaining members of the unnamed expedition aided Mexican military officers in the liberation of the eastern fortress port of Bacalar – where the Maya received weapons from the British in Belize – many of them perished in what amounted to an ill-conceived and poorly-conducted expedition emblematic of the antebellum era. Although the ‘pink-skinned’ foreigners were exceptionally good marksmen, the primary reason for the high number of casualties was their inability to adopt and adapt to the guerrilla tactics used on the peninsula by both Mexicans and Mayans.[1]

Right: A Scene from the Caste War, Oil on canvas circa 1850. The Maya. A millenary civilization. ISBN 978-3-8331-1959-0. In the Public Domain.

The Americans arrived at the northern Yucatecan port of Sisal under the command of a certain Captain George W. White. As with similar expeditions during the period, the mercenaries believed their success would result in obtaining prized land (320 acres each) and estates with allegiance to U.S. interests. Those aspirations were considerably tested, however, when reports began emanating from New Orleans that a couple of key officers commanding the “Gallant American Regiment” were killed around Christmas time near the town of Tihosuco after attempting to take on a vastly larger Mayan army. In addition to the officers, thirty-eight others were killed when the Maya employed their traditional tactic of erecting “barricades of rock and large masses of stone, at intervals across the road, leaving loop-holes to fire through.” This strategy, which was used to stunning effectiveness until the Yucatecans adopted guerrilla tactics to flank positions, was devastating to the U.S. mercenaries. “As the Americans stormed one barricade,” the New Orleans Delta reported, “the enemy retreated to another, and so on.” Jacinto Pat, one of the primary instigators of the rebellion, was also apparently involved in directing the “great force” opposing the Yucatecan-American effort to regain lost territory. “This has been, no doubt, the scene of a sanguinary struggle, where our gallant fellows have gained fresh laurels.” Another report from the same issue (indicating White had mysteriously become a colonel) confirmed the American charge against the Mayans. The report employed the contemporary phrase to ‘see the elephant,’ which meant becoming disenchanted after experiencing the actual toil and hardship that war entails. “The whole of Col. White’s command, each man of which was eager for a glimpse at the elephant, rushed forward and charged the enemy, Col. White taking the lead, and gallantly waving his men on, sword in hand.”[2]      

Nelson A. Reed, one of the early historians of the Caste War, also relies on reports from New Orleans to explain what happened to the mercenaries, and calls the stone walls the Mayans (and Yucatecans) used as trencherias, and the “little forts” or “enclosures” as plazuelas. He also cites a first-hand account of the fighting chronicled in 1905 by Edward H. Thompson, who was intrigued by American archeologist John Lloyd Stephens’s depictions of the ancient Mayan civilization, and embarked on his own multi-year inquiry in Yucatan in the late nineteenth century. Most of Thompson’s work involved dredging the fabled cenote of Chichén Itzá, but during his time there he learned much about its people, language, and history, and recorded an account by a farmer named Dionisio Pec, who fought against the Americans:

They fought like very brave men and caused us many deaths. We had guns and powder from Belize but we had few balls and so we often had to use small stones; also we made balls of red earth, well mixed with honey and hard dried in the sun. These balls made bad wounds and hard to heal. The stranger white men fought close together and for that reason it was easy to kill them. But they were brave men and laughed at death and before they died they killed many of our men.[3]

Reed also cites another account from Thompson by a man named Leandro Poot, who retold “Cresencio Poot’s account of the battle” with the Americans. In it, Poot claims the Mayans were at first “perplexed” with the arrival of the American dzulob (whites) because “they spoke the language of Belize, and Belize was not against us, so we waited to see what was meant.” When informants told them that the Americans were aligned with the leadership in the Yucatecan capital of Merida, they were obligated to wage war against them as well. “Then we fought them,” the account reads, “but we had rather they had not come, for we only wanted to kill those that had lied to us and had done us great harm… and even these we had rather send away across the water to where their fathers came from, and where they would cause us no more harm.” Poot’s account also corroborates Pec’s recollection in that the Americans used a close formation when charging “as if they were marching” while the “white men from T’Ho” (Merida) used guerrilla tactics and natural cover for protection. Despite their unwillingness to adapt to the tactics used in the Yucatan, Poot’s story is similar to Pec’s and lauded the bravery of the mercenaries from the other side of the Gulf. “But all the people said that the stranger white men were the bravest men they ever saw. They laughed at death and went toward it with joy, as a young man runs to a handsome woman.” Some of the Americans wore uniforms, others resembled the frontier fighters of the borderlands, but according to the Maya, they all appeared rather alien to them, with “big bodies… pink and red in the sunlight and from their throats came their strange war cry, Hu-Ha! Hu-Ha! (evidently a Hurrah).” These men were different than the descendants of the Spanish who had coexisted with them in an uneasiness since the sixteenth-century Conquest:

They were brave men and shot keenly. Some of them were such good shooters that no man could hope to escape when once they pointed at him; no, whether he ran or walked or crawled, it made no difference unless he could hide behind a tree before the shot was fired, and even then some of those who reached the tree were dead as they fell behind it, for the balls had found them… So for a time we greatly feared these strange white men and only sought to keep out of their reach. Had they stayed behind their defences and only used their guns as they could use them, no one knows what might have happened, for our people were so scared of the big, pink-skinned men with their terrible cries and their death shots, that they could not be made to stand up against them. But the stranger white men were too brave, for they threw their lives away…[4]

Left: Image of the Caste War from Yucatan Today. Source: https://yucatantoday.com/en/blog/the-caste-war-or-maya-social-war-of-yucatan

Indeed, routing the Mayans on their own territory without utilizing the tactics optimal to the terrain sapped the Americans of their fighting spirit. Nor were the Maya, like the Seminoles of Florida, about to engage them directly when ambush was more suited to their style of fighting and environment. Following the Christmas battles around Tihosuco, Colonel White accepted the resignations of several officers who may have objected to charging fortified positions or simply pined for the luxuries they ostentatiously received in Merida upon their arrival rather than eating “cats and dogs” while under siege for eight days in Tihosuco. Water was also hard to find on the peninsula. Adding insult to injury was the ten dollars they earned for their efforts from an empty Yucatecan treasury (and no land) – a paltry sum compared to expectations assuredly enhanced by banter aboard the Florida as it sailed to Sisal. Hundreds left and a few hundred remained, but by early February even Colonel White had reached his breaking point, and the regiment was formally disbanded. The only American officer remaining was a captain named Richard J. Kelly, who was “authorized to raise a company from the disbanded volunteers,” and led more than a hundred die-hards towards Bacalar, which was recaptured from the Yucatecans when the commanding officer relinquished the fort to spare the lives of the garrison short of supplies. By March 18, after four months, many mercenaries – all of whom had undoubtedly seen enough of the elephant – began arriving in New Orleans. One New York Herald article noted their “pitiful” condition, “their wo-begone countenances telling a tale of hardships, and hopes of golden expectations blasted… half starved, shoeless, and nearly naked,” and bitter about Yucatan.[5]

Leaving Sisal in April, the Yucatecan expedition to recapture Bacalar, led by a tenacious commander named Colonel José Dolores Cetina, consisted of around eight hundred soldiers with an auxiliary force of about sixty-five Americans. Preceding their arrival was uncommon public posturing by Mayan leaders who invoked Christian principles in a press release from Tepich claiming it was the whites who had plotted to exterminate the Indians. Those leaders also appealed to the British to send a commissioner to “divide Yucatan under the head of the supreme government of Belize.” The expedition arrived near St. George’s Caye, proceeded up the Rio Hondo in the direction of Bacalar, encountered some resistance along the way resulting in the death of Captain Kelly, and seized the Fortress of San Felipe from a garrison of about five hundred Mayan soldiers. Once again, the Yucatecans were in charge of Bacalar, and in a number of months the British issued an order prohibiting the sale of weapons to the Mayans, thus putting an end to speculation the British intended to enlarge the Belizean territory by arbitrating a political solution.[6]

The threat of American reprisals and involvement in Yucatan may have played a small role in that decision, as U.S. soldiers in Mexico City slated to be mustered out of the occupation army a year earlier had been recruited to take part in a post-war expedition to the peninsula. That effort never materialized – which prompted the organization of the ill-fated expedition a few months later by the pink-skinned men who laughed at death. On May 30, 1848, the American Star, the U.S. Army’s newspaper in the capital, reported the expedition would be “organized in this city, and not in Vera Cruz as had been the first intention.” When officials heard of it, they promptly forced the Star’s publisher to inform the soldiers that the US Army would “discharge no man from the service until after their arrival in the United States.” Despite being discouraged from partaking in the campaign, proponents believed it would only delay because “it will be easy to sail from New Orleans to Campeachy, as from Vera Cruz”. Apparently, there were at least a thousand U.S. soldiers in Mexico City still eager for action. “But very few of the thousand and more men,” the Star surmised, “who have volunteered their services to the assistance to the whites of Yucatan, will draw off because they have to go to New Orleans first; and at that point treble the number can be raised after their final discharge from the services of Uncle Sam.” There is little information available to determine how many former US Army soldiers took part in the Yucatecan expedition, and shortly after ratifying the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the US-Mexican War, Mexico officially asked the Polk Administration for three thousand soldiers to assist in their efforts in putting down the Mayan rebellion. While the US Navy was more than willing to assist civilians fleeing Mayan attacks, sending soldiers to Yucatan to help put down an indigenous rebellion was politically untenable. As a result, Secretary of State James Buchanan denied the request. Another important factor ending American interest in Yucatan was the gold fever that swept the country in 1849. The west, not the south, became the destination of choice, and those transiting the isthmus favored Panama over Mexico, and gold over a contest with little glory.[7]

[1] The following is an amended excerpt from: Benjamin J. Swenson, Wars of the Mexican Gulf: The Breakaway Republics of Texas and Yucatan, US-Mexican War, and Limits of Empire, 1835-1850 (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2024). 

[2] “Important from Yucatan” New Orleans Delta, Jan. 22, 1849; Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (1964: Reprint: Stanford University Press, 2001), 122–4. Reed called the stone walls Mayans (and Yucatecans) used trencherias and “little forts” plazuelas.

[3] Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (1964: Reprint: Stanford University Press, 2001), 124; Edward H. Thompson, “A Page of History” Paper Read Before the American Antiquarian Society, 12. Worcester, Mass., October 21, 1905. 

[4] Thompson, “A Page of History” Paper Read Before the American Antiquarian Society, 12–13.

[5] “Our Volunteers in Yucatan”/”From Yucatan” New Orleans Delta, March 19, 1849. First article reported by Captain Tobin, Valladolid, Jan. 18, 1849; “Interesting from Yucatan” New York Herald, April 19, 1849.  

[6] “Late From Yucatan – Capture of Bacalar” Charleston Courier, May 26, 1849. (Picayune May 30); “Later from Yucatan and Central America” New Orleans Delta, Oct. 1, 1849; Daily News, London, Dec. 19, 1849. 

[7] “Intelligence from Mexico” New York Herald, June 23, 1849. (via American Star, Mexico City, May 30); John Bassett Moore, ed. The works of James Buchanan, comprising his speeches, state papers, and private correspondence; vol. 8 (Philadelphia, London, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1909), 155–6. Aug. 7, 1848.