The hero-god of the Mayas was Itzamna, and he was a beneficent personage like the others. Like Cadmus, he invented letters, and he also devised their calendar. He is spoken of as an historical personage and “is intimately associated with the noble edifices of Itzamal, which he laid out and constructed, and over which he ruled, enacting wise laws and extending the power and happiness of his people for an indefinite period.”[360] Brinton identifies him with the dawn myth, but here again it is not conclusive. It seems quite as probable that he was a real person, upon whose history certain myths have been engrafted. In putting the Amerind stories into other languages, embellishments and variations have often been introduced, or the translators have been deceived by interpreters or by the Amerinds themselves, while sometimes both causes have operated to colour or to alter the tales. Schoolcraft has generally been regarded as a faithful recorder, but in some instances he has gone considerably astray. In his time the Amerinds were not so well understood, nor were they, in all their various stocks, so accessible as now. Formerly the European was prepared to find in the Amerind rites evidences of the Lost Tribes of Israel, of the Chinese, or some other extraordinary or romantic idea. He was not content to take things as they were. Marquette on arriving at Green Bay was delighted with what he believed to be an evidence of Christianity, a large cross set up in the middle of the village, adorned with skins, bows, etc., which the people were offering to their gods. It was only one of the symbols of the Midē society, and was in use long before the Discovery. In the same way Coronado found crosses in New Mexico, and there were also in Yucatan the tablets of the cross referred to in a previous chapter. The early Spaniards turned loose their own myths in the New World and then started in pursuit of them. Columbus himself was the first to float the Amazon myth to these shores, for in a letter to Rafael Sanchez he speaks of an island inhabited solely by women, and the Spaniards had a long and fruitless chase after it.[361] Thus they also pursued the myth of the _Seven Cities_, _El Dorado_, and similar tales. _El Dorado_, or, “The Gilded Man,” really existed in a ceremony in New Granada, where a man was sprinkled with gold dust, but when the Spaniards had taken all the gold from these people they went on hunting for El Dorado just the same, though they never found him again. [Illustration: LACANDON (MAYAN) AMERIND FROM CHOCOLHAO, YUCATAN Photographed by M. H. Saville ]