Was there any connection between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean?

by Ktorn_Ragga

I recently learned that the Tainos also played a ball game ("batey"), and so I wondered in which extent these two worlds knew each other. I'm also interested in any interactions between the Caribbean and the rest of their neighbourhood.

MolybdenumSteel

I've heard some talk about it, but I haven't been able to find much. It seems they had extensive coastal trade routes and used some coastal islands as trading outposts, but they were hesitant to travel farther out than Guanaja or cross over from Cancún to Cuba.

It might be a little dated, but here are some excerpts from The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (1961)

On Mayan trade:

p. 269-270

The routes are best detailed in the Yucatán, for here the Mayas were concentrated in the last centuries of their cultural existence, and here they were conquered by the Spanish, who chronicled the details of their lives. Christopher Columbus was the first man to make a record of Maya trade. His caravels, on his fourth and last voyage to the Americas, met a Maya trading canoe on the isle of Guanaja in 1502. The canoes were forty feet long. They brought obsidian razors, copper hatchets, and cotton draperies of many different colors, and the Maya chieftain explained that they had come to this island, which lay twenty miles off the coast of Honduras, to trade for green parrot feathers and crystals.

When Cortés was in Xicalango in 1524, seeking the route to Honduras, one of the Maya traders there gave him a well-made map, painted on finely woven cloth, showing the entire inland routes through Mayadom, from Xicalango in Campeche to Nito, on the Gulf of Honduras, a distance of four hundred land miles.

All sea or land communications led to the great emporium of Xicalango. To the Aztecs it was Anáhuac Xicalango and called "the place where the language changes," that is, the tribes to the southeast of Xicalango spoke Maya.

Xicalango lies a few miles inland from the Laguna de Términos. Into this outsized lagoon debouch four rivers, the largest of which is the Usumacinta. At the northeast end of the forty-mile-long lagoon there is a smaller one, the Laguna de Pom; on its shore was Xicalango. It was strategically placed. To reach it traders coming southward had to use canoes. It was surrounded on three sides by bog and swamp. On the northeast side there was a causeway leading to Vera Cruz and Aztec Mexico. Xicalango was a meeting place of Maya, Aztec, Toltec, Mixtec, and Totonac.

On Mayan sea communications, p. 373-375

The Mayas also used the sea road, which required no upkeep. They and they alone of all the great civilizations of the Americas were a maritime people, going out in large ocean-going dugouts, traveling over thousands of miles of coastal sea.

The first thing that Columbus met when he landed at Guanaja in 1502 were Maya boats. At one of the islands he saw and examined one "as long as a galley, eight feet in breadth, rowed by twenty-five Indian paddlers," and laden with commodities--cacao, copper, bells, flint-edged swords, cotton cloth--brought from the mainland, twenty miles distant.

As Spanish voyages began to multiply, others reported seeing immense dugout canoes that held as "many as forty Indians." In 1542 at the siege of Omoa, a trading colony in Honduras, fifty war canoes were sent at one time all the way from Chetumal, a distance of over two hundred sea miles, to aid in resisting the conquistadors. Many of the early Spanish accounts mention the tremendous number of canoes and the amount of canoe traffic along the entire coast from Tabasco to Panama.

The Maya canoe(chem) was usually made from cedar, and carved out of a single tree trunk often as long as eighty feet. It was built with a high bow and stern more or less as the Mayas have themselves pictured it in the murals of Chichén Itzá.

[...]

Between A.D. 400 and 800 Tikal and other interior cities had contact with the sea, using the river roads that emptied into Chetumal Bay. Farther north at Bahía de la Ascensión--anciently, Zamabac--was a place for the embarking of "maritime traffic destined for Honduras and other regions south" [The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, p.548]. By the time of the Spanish arrival, circa 1511, trade had shifted farther north to Tulum.

[...]

The whole coast about the Laguna de Términos--where Xicalango was located--was a network of rivers, bayous, and creeks. A Spanish map of the seventeenth century shows inland waterways and describes in detail routes by narrower channels, such as appear on the Florida coast where boats of small draft can move without actually going out into the open sea. This coast was difficult for European ships, which had to stand out to sea, but not for the Maya dugouts.

Inland waterways led to Usumacinta River, up which (by portage and prayer) the Indians managed to navigate two hundred miles. The rivers of Honduras were navigable for canoe traffic many miles inland, and salt, for example, was carried in sacks direct from the Yucatán salt ponds to the interior of Honduras. There the sacks were filled with cacao and obsidian for the return voyage. The whole coast was a Maya economic bloc with some concessions to the Nahuatl-speaking traders from Xicalango. Seafaring was coastal. Signs were erected, feather banners, to help sailors navigate the flat shore. The murals of Chichén Itzá, which illustrate Maya canoes, also show signs that could be so interpreted.

[...]

There were limits to Maya seafaring. There is no evidence that the Mayas had contact with Cuba, even though it is only 125 miles away, perhaps because a bewildering and dangerous current runs between Cuba and Yucatán. Yet there was an occasional accidental, if not purposeful, contact with the Antilles. Bernal Díaz met at Cozumel Island "a good-looking Indian woman" who--spoke "the language of the Island of Jamaica . . . As I . . . knew the language . . . we were very much astonished, and asked the woman how she happened there. . . . two years earlier she had started from Jamaica with ten Indians in a large canoe intending to go and fish . . . the currents had carried them over to this land where they had been driven ashore . . . her husband and all the Jamaica Indians had been killed and sacrificed to the Idols."

400-Rabbits

There's evidence, however scant, that some level of contact did exist between the Yucatan and Cuba. The problem is that this evidence is very slight. This article from FAMSI is one of the better summations of evidence of Meso-Carib trade, but even it has to note that the evidence comes down to a few cultural artifacts (like the ball game) and even less physical artifacts (like "vomit ladles").

The article does correctly note that any travel between Mesoamerica and the closest Caribbean island (Cuba) would have necessitated a several day journey at sea out of sight of land. While circum-Yucatan trade routes are attested down to the coast of what is now Honduras, these routes were (like many ancient trade routes) based upon keeping the coast in sight. Open water sailing is a skill more difficult to develop and learn than most people would think. The Caribbean itself was most likely peopled from South America along a route that allowed a great deal more island hopping than a Meso-Carib route provides.

So while there is some evidence that a few intrepid traders from Mesoamerica did interact with the Caribbean, the problem remains that this contact does not appear to have been much more beyond that. Cultural artifacts like ball games are much more easily adopted than physical practices. Mesoamerican merchants simply had more lucrative options for martime trade down along Central America and overland trade up to the US Southwest (were ball courts and Mesoamerican iconography can be found).