Negro idols found in Mexico.

Dr. Le Plongeon says: 

“Besides the sculptures of long-bearded men seen by the explorer at Chichen Itza, there were tall figures of people with small heads, thick lips, and curly short hair or wool, regarded as negroes.  ’We always see them as standard or parasol bearers, but never engaged in actual warfare.’” ("Maya Archaeology,” p. 62.)

The following cut is from the court of the Palace of Palenque, figured by Stephens.  The face is strongly Ethiopian.

The figure below represents a gigantic granite head, found near the volcano of Tuxtla, in the Mexican State of Vera Cruz, at Caxapa.  The features are unmistakably negroid.

As the negroes have never been a sea-going race, the presence of these faces among the antiquities of Central America proves one of two things, either the existence of a land connection between America and Africa via Atlantis, as revealed by the deep-sea soundings of the Challenger, or commercial relations between America and Africa through the ships of the Atlanteans or some other civilized race, whereby the negroes were brought to America as slaves at a very remote epoch.

And we find some corroboration of the latter theory in that singular book of the Quiches, the “Popol Vuh,” in which, after describing the creation of the first men “in the region of the rising sun” (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. v., p. 548), and enumerating their first generations, we are told, “All seem to have spoken one language, and to have lived in great peace, black men and white together.  Here they awaited the rising of the sun, and prayed to the Heart of Heaven.”  (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” p. 547.) How did the red men of Central America know anything about “black men and white men?” The conclusion seems inevitable that these legends of a primitive, peaceful, and happy land, an Aztlan in the East, inhabited by black and white men, to which all the civilized nations of America traced their origin, could only refer to Atlantis—­that bridge of land where the white, dark, and red races met.  The “Popol Vuh” proceeds to tell how this first home of the race became over-populous, and how the people under Balam-Quitze migrated; how their language became “confounded,” in other words, broken up into dialects, in consequence of separation; and how some of the people “went to the East, and many came hither to Guatemala.” (Ibid., p. 547.)

M. A. de Quatrefages ("Human Species,” p. 200) says, “Black populations have been found in America in very small numbers only, as isolated tribes in the midst of very different populations.  Such are the Charruas, of Brazil, the Black Carribees of Saint Vincent, in the Gulf of Mexico; the Jamassi of Florida, and the dark-complexioned Californians. . . .  Such, again, is the tribe that Balboa saw some representatives of in his passage of the Isthmus of Darien in 1513; . . . they were true negroes.”