The Isle of
Sentiment
Adventure, love, betrayal, a broken heart. Sounds like a bad soap
opera. But in reality, it was just the life of Fermín Mundaca de
Marechaja, the legendary pirate of the rural yet enchanting Isla
Mujeres.
Photographs by Steve Giralt
Photos don't do the Mexican
Caribbean waters justice. Up close, the color seems almost bluer
than blue. During my 40-minute ferry ride from
Cancun to Isla
Mujeres, a small island about nine miles off the Yucatan coast, one
of the crew members materializes with a tray: "Two beers, yes?" I'm
on the trail of Fermín Mundaca de Marechaja, the region's most
famous pirate. Drinking in the morning does seem appropriate. Okay,
why not?
Bob Marley tunes blast out from unseen speakers. Normally, I'd be
suspicious of any pirate who sang along with "No Woman No Cry." But
it's the perfect theme for Mundaca, because it was here on this
island that a local Mayan girl broke his heart.
Unlike most pirates, who gleefully pillaged their way across the
oceans - collecting diseases and watching their teeth fall out from
scurvy - Mundaca was a sensitive swashbuckler. In a very
unpiratelike moment of weakness, he allowed himself to fall in
love. And then she dumped him for a local guy.
It's an incredible tale of passion and rejection, like one of those
Mexican soap operas on Telemundo. I can imagine Mundaca standing
there in his pirate gear, pleading for her love, his eyes watery
and sad. She turns her back defiantly, her hair blowing up from an
unseen wind. A door opens; there stands a handsome Mayan fisherman.
She runs to his arms, and we see Mundaca trembling, a single tear
trickling down his craggy pirate face. Has this been done
already?
The Isla Mujeres coastline soon comes into view. The island is
small and narrow, only about five miles long. Our ferry docks at a
harbor on the west side, in front of the dolphin facility. Tourists
can get their photos taken while swimming with Atlantic bottlenose
dolphins or, if they're more adventurous, bull sharks.
Isla Mujeres offers your basic tropical paradise experience with
palm trees and white sand. Once you leave the beaches, though, the
landscape turns into quintessential rural
Mexico - a few expensive
homes, but primarily sunbaked cinder-block housing, with laundry
hanging from windows. There's an unfinished patina to everything.
Around 15,000 people live here. Most of the industry is fishing, as
it has been for centuries.
Tourism is relatively new to Isla Mujeres. People come for the
excellent snorkeling and diving among the coral reefs, and families
gravitate to the ecofriendly Garrafon Reef Park, at the island's
southern tip. A small beachfront hotel advertises "beer so cold,
it'll make your teeth hurt."
To attract more visitors, travel brochures have absorbed the local
pirate history. Mundaca has unwittingly loaned his name to a
Mundaca travel agency, a
real estate firm, and a diving company, as
well as to one of the trained dolphins. From Cancun's harbor, the
Captain Hook Pirate Cruise takes tour groups out on a
lobster-dinner sail, complete with sword-fighting actors dressed as
rogues.
Down the coastline, La Posada del Capitán Lafitte beachfront resort
carries on the tradition of
Louisiana pirate Jean Lafitte, who
supposedly also roamed the area. The Cedam museum in Puerto
Aventuras features artifacts collected from nearby shipwrecks, some
dating back to the 1600s.
But it's Mundaca's history that holds the most intrigue - and it's
why I'm here. With me on my visit are
Carlos Mora Vega and Roger
Ricardo Sauir Aguilar, two locals who work as historical guides. We
climb into a vehicle and hit the few paved roads of Isla Mujeres to
seek out the Mundaca legend firsthand.
Movies and cartoons often depict a pirate
as a gallant swashbuckler with a parrot on his shoulder, saying
"Arrrr!" and ordering people to walk the plank. In truth, most were
ruthless thugs, licensed by various European governments to target
Spanish galleons on the high seas.
The Golden Age of Piracy lasted roughly from 1690 to 1730, and
during this time, pirates, or privateers, as they were called, kept
busy by attacking ships on the trade routes between South America
and
Europe.
Pirates favored the
Caribbean for its central location and lingered
in seventeenth-century haunts like Petit-Goave in Haiti; Port
Royal, Jamaica; and the island of Tortuga. Along the coast of
Mexico's Quintana Roo, buccaneers would lie in wait for galleons
coming up from
Colombia. By setting lanterns along the Chinchorro
Reef, pirates would fool the ships' captains into thinking the
treacherous undersea shelf was easily navigable. When the vessel
ran aground or sank, the pirates pounced.
Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, and Jean Lafitte are familiar to
anyone interested in pirates. Fermín Mundaca de Marechaja is lesser
known, especially to Americans.
Mundaca made a fortune shipping slaves from
Africa to the New
World. He also worked the opposite direction, selling kidnapped
Mayan slaves to plantation owners in
Cuba. The Spaniard was
technically not really a pirate, but he insisted on referring to
himself as such, because, some say, he thought it was more
respectable than calling himself a slave trader.
When the British Royal Navy started cracking down on slave trading
in the mid-1860s, Mundaca thought it prudent to retire and
purchased nearly half of a tiny island off the coast of Mexico.
To the Mayans, this island was sacred to their moon goddess, Ix
Chel, who watched over the fertile women of society. The Mayans
created statues of pregnant women throughout the island and built a
temple to Ix Chel on its southern tip (where ruins still stand
today). When the Spanish first arrived in the sixteenth century and
noticed all the goddess images, they named the patch of land Isla
Mujeres, or "the Island of Women."
Roger, who is half Mayan, tells me the name also came about because
visiting Spaniards saw only women and children living on the
island. The men were frequently off fishing or doing business, so
it seemed like the residents were exclusively women. There's still
another story that it got its name because pirates would stop by
and stash their women on the island to retrieve later - which, of
course, only adds to the folklore.
After moving to the island, Mundaca wasted no time in throwing his
money around, building a lavish hacienda named Vista Alegre and
stocking the grounds with birds, livestock, and exotic gardens.
Sometime after arriving, a beautiful young local girl caught his
eye. Her name was Martiniana Gomez Pantoja. Her dark hair prompted
him to call her La Trigueña, "the Brunette."
I realize that you can't really blame him - the Mayan culture is
filled with beauty. They were the first people in the Western
Hemisphere to keep written historical records. Their art,
architecture, mathematics, agriculture, and astronomy developments
were highly advanced. The Mayan sport of hip-ball, in which players
moved a rubber ball down a court using only their hips, predates
many modern sports like
soccer,
rugby, and
hockey (an excellent
re-creation can be seen nightly at the Xcaret ecocultural theme
park in Playa del Carmen, south of Cancun).
Even today, the woven-grass
palapas,
which shelter bars from the sun, are built by Mayan
construction crews using ancient techniques. And don't even
get me started on Cochinita Pibil, an amazing local pork dish
prepared with Mayan spices.
Maybe Mundaca also liked the Pibil; history doesn't tell us. But
what is known is that he fell madly in love with La Trigueña, and
in her honor, he named the entrance archway to his hacienda El Paso
de la Trigueña, "the Step of the Brunette."
Unfortunately, as is so often the case, money can't buy love,
especially between a young girl and a middle-aged guy trying to
impress her with his money. La Trigueña would have nothing to do
with Mundaca and instead married a local closer to her own age.
Dejection festered in his heart, and by all accounts, he went off
the deep end. While La Trigueña raised her family on the island,
the jilted pirate puttered around his garden and walked the
beaches, stuffing stones in his pockets. If metal detectors had
been around, he probably would have had one.
In 1880, Mundaca left Isla Mujeres for the town of Mérida,
approximately 200 miles to the west, where he passed away that same
year at the age of 55. Some guidebooks suggest he died alone in a
brothel; others claim he succumbed to the plague. Roger, though,
tells me that Mundaca eventually married another woman, so who
knows what really happened. The ruins of Mundaca's hacienda are
located near Playa Lancheros, on the southern end of the island. A
brochure describes some gardens and pathways and a small zoo.
Carlos tells me we'll drive by, but that there's really nothing to
see: a few stone foundations and some cannons propped up to give it
that pirate feel. "It's not that old," he explains.
When we pull up to the crumbling brick wall, the gate is locked.
Closed for the day.
The Mexican Navy established a base on Isla
Mujeres in 1949. Underwater conduits brought fresh water and
electricity from the mainland. An elderly taxi driver informed me
that the island became further modernized as Cancun underwent
aggressive development in the mid-1970s.
We pull into Isla Town, the main village, and walk down the narrow
streets lined with shops and restaurants. Unlike Cancun, there are
no thundering discos or chain restaurants with a giant frog perched
on the roof. The pace is refreshingly laid-back - brightly
colored crafts and curios, racks of Che Guevara T-shirts, and
owners muttering "Cuban cigars, guys?" Locals sit languidly on
steps, chatting in the shade. A teenager whizzes by on a Segway,
dialing a cell phone.
Italian food is very popular, and Carlos tells me that, in general,
Europeans prefer Isla Mujeres to Cancun because they want a more
authentic Mexican experience. Except for the Italian food, I
suppose. On the other hand, Americans gravitate to the more
commercialized Cancun, where more English is spoken - especially in
restaurants that have a giant frog on top.
We walk through a sunbaked plaza filled with pigeons, cats, and
squealing children. Some youths are playing
basketball. Carlos says
the local team is the best in all of the Yucatan. When I ask why,
he smiles, "There's nothing else to do."
The town hits the ocean at Playa Norte, a well-known beach with
palapas-covered bars looking out over crystalline waters. After
Hurricane Wilma blasted the Yucatan in October 2005, the government
spent $21.5 million to rebuild Cancun's beaches with tons of sand
dredged from the ocean. Carlos says that here on this beach, the
storm actually brought them more sand.
We come upon a fishing contest in progress. Vendors, surrounded by
large inflatable beer cans, are selling food and drinks.
Pescadores stand in a line on the pier,
dead fish at their feet, waiting to have their catch weighed. First
prize is a
Ford F-150 pickup.
Behind a food booth, two women are drinking cans of Modelo and
hacking off the head of a barracuda that looks to be about six feet
long. They smile and wipe the sweat from their foreheads.
"Try some of this ice cream," says Carlos, pointing to a woman
behind a cart. "It's homemade." It's some of the best I've ever
had. We watch the contest for a bit and then head off to find
Mundaca's tombstone.
A pockmarked stone wall rings the municipal cemetery at the north
end of Isla Town. Sidestepping a young couple from
Chicago who are
squinting at their maps, I enter through a creaky metal gate.
It feels like the 1700s, except for the
electricity cables snaking
in between the crypts. Carlos motions me down a narrow pathway to
one tomb that looks older than the rest. Two out of four pillars
are broken off. Symbols of trees and a cross are chiseled into the
top.
Mundaca carved this tombstone for himself, with his own hands. He
added the date 1877, which would have been three years before he
left for Mérida. On one side, he etched the pirate
skull-and-crossbones symbol, hoping to be remembered as something
other than a slave trader. He also inscribed a special message for
La Trigueña.
"On this side," Carlos points, "It says 'As you are, I was.' On the
other, 'As I am, you will be.'?"
We don't talk. The graveyard is totally silent, and I think,
My God, he really was crazy about her.
Unless they were looking for it, nobody would notice this strange
monument to the love of a Mayan girl. Mundaca did not engrave his
name anywhere on the tomb. He didn't need to. La Trigueña lived her
entire life on the island, knowing his final words to her were
right here in the cemetery. A goodbye note for eternity from Fermín
Mundaca de Marechaja, the lovelorn pirate of Isla Mujeres.
Know Before You Go
Flights to Cancun
American Airlines offers 10 flights daily to Cancun (four from
Dallas/Fort Worth, one from New York's JFK, four from
Miami, and
one from Chicago O'Hare).
Ferries to Isla Mujeres
Boats depart from four places in Cancun: Gran Puerto, Puerto
Jaurez, El Embarcadero, and a car ferry from Punta Sam.
Single-person fare is 35 pesos (about $3.50).
www.islamujeres.info/planning/ferries.asp
To Do
Garrafon Reef Park:
www.garrafon.com
Dolphin Discovery:
www.dolphindiscovery.com/islamujeres
Xcaret historical theme park:
www.xcaret.com
Ziplining: The best ziplining in Mexico is
at the Selvática ecoadventure park, an hour south of Cancun.
011-52-998-898-4312
For the Pirate Buff
Subacuatico-CEDAM Museum: Donations accepted at the door. In
Puerto Aventuras, 43 miles from Cancun.
www.rivieramaya.com/eng/en-Puertoaventuras.htm
La Posada del Capitán Lafitte: A beachfront
resort 38 miles south of Cancun along the Mexican Riviera.
www.capitanlafitte.com