The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(101)

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes place in Mexico, against the backdrop of a real conflict. Because of its location and the difficulty of maintaining contact with the rest of Mexico, Yucatán, although a peninsula, sometimes felt like an island. Some old Spanish maps indeed showed it as such. Hence the original spark for this novel.

The Caste War of Yucatán began in 1847 and lasted more than five decades. The native Maya people of the peninsula rose against the Mexican, European-descended, and mixed population.

The reasons for the conflict were complex and rooted in long-simmering animosities. Landowners expanded their haciendas, seeking to raise cattle or cultivate sugar. The Maya people were the principal source of labor, and landowners employed an abusive system of debt and punishment to keep them in check. Taxes were also a point of contention, as well as the violence and discrimination heaped on the Maya.

Conflicts and interactions in the Yucatán peninsula did not only involve Mexican and Maya communities. There were Black people in Mexico who tended to occupy a higher social position than the Maya and served what Matthew Restall calls an “interstitial position.” There were also some Chinese and Korean laborers, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, and it is true that hacendados even tried hiring Italians, who grew ill and died. There were mixed-race people in a dizzying array of combinations (pardos, mulattoes, mestizos were some of the terms used to describe them, borrowed from Spanish colonial racial classifications). And there were the British.

The British had established themselves in what is present-day Belize and formed what was then called British Honduras. The British traded with the Maya, and in 1850 they recognized a free Maya state (Chan Santa Cruz), as a move to undermine Mexico’s claim in the region and also in order to benefit from the natural resources in the area.

Relations between the British and the Maya were complex because the Maya rebels did not necessarily represent a unified faction. In 1849, rebel leader José Venancio Pec murdered another important leader, Jacinto Pat, accusing him of using the armed struggled for his own enrichment. Another leader, Cecilio Chí, was killed by one of his followers. As the years advanced, Maya rebels clustered in the east, while hacendados in the western portion of the peninsula switched from sugar plantations to the cultivation of henequen, a type of fiber and a very profitable crop. A henequen boom began in 1880 and lasted until the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, around 1910. The treatment of the Maya did not improve during those years. The system of debt and peonage continued.

In 1893, the British government signed a new treaty with the Mexican government, recognizing its control of all of the Yucatán. They ceased in their support of Chan Santa Cruz and the Maya rebels.

The Island of Doctor Moreau was originally published in 1896. Five years later, the Mexican army had occupied Chan Santa Cruz.





   To my husband,

   my joy and inspiration





Acknowledgments


A big thank-you to the production team at Del Rey, led by editor Tricia Narwani, who trusted me to write this novel as well as other books. Also a big thank-you to my agency and my longtime agent, Eddie Schneider. Thanks as usual to my family and to my first reader, my husband.


For this novel, I utilized modern Mayan Yucatec spelling rather than nineteenth-century Mayan spelling. Although the spelling is intended to be as accurate as possible, Ya’ax áaktun (green grotto) is rendered as Yaxaktun, in an attempt to reflect a plausible colonial transliteration. Thanks to David Bowles who revised my Mayan vocabulary.