He wanted to correct lies that were told about him, he said. He was not a robber or a murderer, and he had changed his opinions about foreigners over the last two years. He had come to know several of them, he said, and one, an English doctor, had removed a musket ball from his side. They were the only people who never deceived him, he explained.
Stephens responded that he had seen newspaper accounts of his last entry into Guatemala City, including one article in the United States, which had praised his moderation and his attempts to stop pillaging and massacres by his troops. Given his young age, Carrera appeared to have a long career ahead, Stephens told him, and there was much good he could do for his country. Hearing this, Carrera put his hand on his heart and in a burst of passion that surprised Stephens, said he would sacrifice his life for his country.
Stephens was impressed. “With all his faults and crimes,” he wrote, “none ever accused him of duplicity, or of saying what he did not mean. My interview with him was much more interesting than I had expected; so young, so humble in his origin, so destitute of early advantages, with honest impulses, perhaps, but ignorant, fanatic, sanguinary, and a slave to violent passions.” Stephens saw something else, too, a quick natural intelligence. And as boyish as he appeared, Stephens wrote, Carrera never smiled, was deadly serious and highly conscious of his power, even though he did not flaunt it. He said he was teaching himself how to write and could now throw away his stamp and write his name. Stephens suggested he would benefit from travel to other countries. “He had a very indefinite notion as to where my country was; he knew it only as El Norte, or the North; inquired about the distance and facility for getting there, and said that after the wars were over, he would endeavor to make El Norte a visit.”
Stephens came away with a prescient sense of Carrera’s potential. “I considered that he was destined to exercise an important, if not controlling influence on the affairs of Central America,” he wrote.6 Carrera was nevertheless a hard man to read. He cared little for wealth. He required no salary, but asked only for money for himself and his troops as he needed it, totaling a fraction of what it had cost the Guatemalan aristocracy and merchants to keep up the federal army. Carrera was both flattered and righteous about the title the Guatemalan government had given him—brigadier general—and he considered himself at the orders of the state. But in reality he remained capricious and unbound by law, Stephens noted. As Stephens returned home that morning, he witnessed a detachment of soldiers drawn up before the house of a member of the Constituent Assembly who had made the mistake of crossing Carrera. The soldiers were searching the house for him. “This was done by Carrera’s order, without any knowledge on the part of the government,” Stephens added.
Despite his successful meeting with Carrera, day-to-day life for Stephens did not change as he anxiously awaited Catherwood’s arrival. As one who thrived on human company and social intercourse, he found it unbearable to be locked up in the residence every night while the city remained under virtual siege. Lying in bed, he could hear the pop, pop of the soldiers’ muskets, the volleys of gunfire echoing down the streets from the plaza.
When he could no longer bear it, he set out on a whirlwind tour of the nearby countryside, which for the moment seemed relatively pacified under Carrera. His first stop was a nearby hacienda where he witnessed cattle being rounded up and branded, a stunning sight for the New Yorker and east coast merchant’s son. In the company of a group of young aristocratic women he followed a religious procession through the city and traveled north to an Indian village where an annual festival was under way.
With no word from Catherwood and a week until Christmas, he decided on one more trip. In all his travels, he had never seen the Pacific Ocean, now less than a hundred miles to the south. Passing through the historic city of La Antigua, he was impressed with the number of churches and other buildings still in ruins from the 1773 earthquake, many with their untouched remains laying exactly where they had fallen.
Just south of Antigua rose a massive cone capped by a jagged crater, Volcan de Agua, its slopes covered with cornfields and dark verdant forest. Clouds ringed the top. It was too great a temptation for Stephens. After a good night’s rest, he set out on the steep, miserable climb. Reaching the top, he was 12,300 feet above sea level. In the bitter cold, clouds and vapors swirled in the dormant crater. At its bottom he found several inscriptions written on the rocks. Blowing on his fingers to keep them limber, he copied a message left by three travelers from Russia, England, and Philadelphia. They described drinking champagne together, no doubt in celebration at reaching the top.
Several days later he reached the Pacific Ocean. “I had crossed the continent of America,” he wrote. Covered in mosquitoes and sandflies, he left his mule at the edge of the jungle and forded a river by canoe to the volcanic black sand beach beyond. The port was an open roadstead; a ship from Bordeaux bobbed at anchor a mile out.
Stephens meticulously recorded his mini-expeditions in his notebooks. He was compulsively curious, a prototypical journalist determined to paint in words the fullest possible picture of life in Central America for his countrymen to the north. Along the way, he visited cochineal plantations, priests in their churches, and sugar mills, and met a fellow New Yorker living on a farm. He would describe it all in his book, lacing the eight-day journey with a history of La Antigua, and notes about the conquistadors, who in their endless lust for gold fitted out their fleet to sail to Peru from the shore on which he stood.
On his return to the capital Stephens found a disturbing letter from Catherwood. It explained he had been robbed, had fallen ill, and was forced to leave the ruins for the shelter of the disagreeable Don Gregorio. Despite his ordeals, he was on his way to the capital. It was Christmas Eve. “I was in great distress,” Stephens wrote, “and resolved, after a day’s rest, to set off in search of him.”
That night he attended a Christmas party at the house of Central America’s former minister to England, and there for the first time met Frederick Chatfield. He had arrived in Guatemala during Stephens’s absence. Since his arrival, Chatfield, unknown to Stephens, had been plotting the final demise of the republic. Hearing that Stephens was sent to meet with the central government, Chatfield explained that his assignment was futile since the republic, as an effective entity, had already ceased to exist.
Stephens did not get home until three in the morning and, waking late, heard a knock on the door. Into the courtyard rode Catherwood “armed to the teeth, pale and thin, most happy at reaching Guatemala, but not half so happy as I was to see him.”
With intense sun beating down on his broad-brimmed Panama hat, Lieutenant John Caddy of the Royal Artillery held his double-barrel shotgun at ready. Since leaving the Belize River at Duck Run, he had taken the lead as chief huntsmen for their expedition, ready to shoot down anything that might prove the least edible. Sitting astride his old gray cob and outfitted in a green hunting jacket and blue serge trousers, he headed a column of horses, mules, and riders as they struck out from the village of Santa Ana on the last leg to Lake Petén Itzá, in the middle of the Petén. Caddy and his party were now nearly halfway through their difficult march across the Yucatán Peninsula.
Weeks before, Caddy sent back to Belize City the pitpan canoes, their crews, and most of the soldiers from the Second West Indian Regiment who had accompanied them on their seven-day journey upriver. Now the remaining overland party consisted of Caddy; the expedition’s co-leader, Patrick Walker; their interpreter, Mr. Nod; and five soldiers. As they departed Duck Run, they also picked up a guide, several muleteers, and Indian carriers for the baggage. The next two weeks of travel westward into the depth of the Petén were as grueling as anything Caddy and Walker had ever experienced. The trail led through jungle so thick it blotted out the sun, and they struggled crossing swollen streams and nearly impassible swamps and marshland. At times they were forced to camp in the swamps, inches deep in mud, plagued by mosquitoes, and even worse, microscopic ticks call
ed garrapatas that buried themselves in their skin and caused intolerable itching.
“The swamps again were so much inundated,” wrote Walker in his official report to Colonel MacDonald, “that for five consecutive days we hardly advanced a step without the horses being up to their girths in mud or water. Besides the path in some places was absolutely shut up and reduced us to the necessity of cutting away with our machetes thro’ the bush.”7 Food ran desperately low for days, with little or no game to feed the men. Caddy killed what he could find—a few birds, an occasional wild hog, a small fox, and an emaciated cow left for dead on the trail. At one point, he noted in his diary that the natives had a particular way of cooking and smoking the game, which they called “barbecue.”
Eight days into the journey, an artillery gunner identified only as Private I. Carnick, Caddy’s personal attendant, came down with a severe fever and was unable to proceed. After a day’s delay, during which Caddy administered various pills, salts, and a hot gruel to induce sweating, Carnick revived sufficiently to travel on. Two days later, however, Carnick was so weak he could barely stay on his horse. “I was obliged to have his horse led,” Caddy wrote, “and a man to walk along side of him to prevent his falling.”
On December 12, after two punishing weeks, they emerged from the forest and entered “a magnificent undulating plain—as far as the eye could reach over uninterrupted open pasture with here and there a clump of trees,” Caddy wrote. “I shall never forget the joyous sensation I experienced, and indeed it was felt by all.” They came upon a cattle ranch and took possession of the main hacienda building, which though deserted and filthy nevertheless felt like a luxury hotel. Carnick’s deteriorating condition tempered their mood, however. Now dysentery added to his fever, leaving him with intense craving for water. Caddy attributed his illness to the foul water they were forced to drink along the way, describing its appearance as tarlike.
They were visited the next day by a mestizo named Torribio, who offered to take Carnick into his nearby house, where his wife and daughter, who spoke English, would care for him and nurse him back to health. Walker and Caddy agreed, realizing the gunner was too ill to carry on. A cautionary letter was sent ahead to notify the Guatemalan authorities at Lake Petén Itzá that their party was approaching with the intention of traveling onward to Mexico. Six days later, when they arrived at the lake, Caddy was astonished by its beauty—“a magnificent sheet of water which sparkled in glorious sunshine, bearing the island town of Flores, with some smaller fairy looking Islets.” Walker estimated that Flores was separated from the lake’s shore by a half mile of water. In his diary he recounted what he had learned of the history of the lake as the last stronghold of the Maya Indians against the Spanish. It wasn’t until 1697, more than 150 years after the conquest of Guatemala, that the Indians of Itzá were finally subdued in battle. The Spanish had constructed a road through the savanna and jungle to the lake and then built a small fleet of boats on the shore for a direct assault on the island. In the end, Spanish technological superiority—cannons, muskets, and gunpowder—prevailed. As was their custom. the Spaniards then set to work destroying every temple, idol, and monument they could find, and a large church was erected over the ruins.
When Caddy and Walker arrived, only about five hundred people were living on the island. The houses and streets were in disrepair and the thatched roof over the town’s church had fallen in. A large dilapidated barracks and a monastery in ruins ran along one side of the main plaza.
The remaining seven-man expedition had been traveling for more than a month but had covered a distance of less than one hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies from Belize City. The men were exhausted. It was almost Christmas, and they fell easily into the local festivities. Dances were gotten up for them, hosted by the district commandant and a parade of the local ladies. Then they got news that drew a dark cloud over their entertainment. Private Carnick was dead.
Oddly, given Carnick’s close contact with Caddy as his personal attendant, Caddy makes no mention of Carnick’s death in his journal. Perhaps it was too painful. We are informed of it only in Walker’s official report. “From what I saw of this man on our journey,” Walker wrote, “he appeared a most respectable person.” Walker sent a letter to the local priest enclosing a fee so that prayers could be said for Carnick’s soul.
8
War
In regard to my official business,” wrote Stephens, “I was perfectly at a loss what to do.”
He had not found the government he was looking for in Guatemala City. The talk there was entirely one-sided: the federal republic no longer existed. But by Stephens’s count, the states were evenly divided on the question. Three provinces still clung to the republic—El Salvador, Honduras (by force), and the new breakaway state of Quetzaltenango (until recently a western department of Guatemala that had seceded and was now controlled by the Liberals). On the other side were the recently declared independent states of Costa Rica, far removed to the east, Nicaragua, and, of course, Guatemala, the most populous and powerful state in Central America. Stephens was convinced, however, that the entire equation could change quickly. The leader of the republic, General Francisco Morazán, had never been defeated on the battlefield, and even Carrera had always run before him. Now the two men were gathering forces for a final showdown. Like two lions pacing back and forth, they eyed one another across the border, waiting for an opening. Yet the contest would be decided not simply by the military acumen of Carrera and Morazán but by the still-beating heart of Mesoamerica itself, the peasant survivors of the lost civilization Stephens and Catherwood had come to find. Aroused from centuries of conquest, abuse, and servitude, the Maya Indians were rising up to take back control of their history.
The war had begun two and a half years earlier, during an outbreak of cholera in the countryside outside Guatemala City. The state government, then firmly under the control of the progressive Liberal party, ordered quarantines of the infected areas and sent doctors to treat the stricken. At the time, unfortunately, treatments were misguided and as ill-understood as the mysterious source of cholera itself. The remedies included bloodletting and water restriction (cholera victims die in the throes of extreme dehydration), the administration of brandy and the opiate laudanum. Many of the cholera victims, therefore, continued to die, sometimes at an even greater rate at the hands of the well-meaning doctors.
Finally, on May 6, 1837, Rafael Carrera led an enraged mob of nearly two thousand people to confront the health officials in Mataquescuintla, a town in the mountains forty miles east of the capital. Many in the crowd believed that cholera was poison put in their wells and streams by the Guatemalan ruling class in order to exterminate them so foreign companies could be brought in to develop their land. The medical officials, they claimed, were then sent to finish them off by dispensing poisonous medicines. By the end of the day the mob forced one or two doctors—the record is not clear—to consume all of the medicines they were dispensing. Laudanum taken in that quantity is fatal and the doctors’ deaths left little doubt in the people’s mind that the medicine was, in fact, poison. Armed revolts followed throughout the countryside, culminating in a list of grievances against the government.
The Mataquescuintla incident was Carrera’s first recorded appearance on the public stage. Within a short time, the pig herder who several years earlier had served as a drummer boy in the federal army was leading small bands of insurgents out of the mountains on lightning strikes against government troops—and his reputation began to take on almost mythological dimensions. Though he suffered a number of bullet wounds, his Indian followers came to believe he could not be killed and had been divinely appointed to save them. And by February 1838—only nine months after the insurgency began—Carrera headed an army of Indians and mixed-blood mestizos. At the age of twenty-three, he was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in Central America.1
Only one person stood in his path: Francisco Morazán, the powerful le
ader of the Central American Republic.
Morazán’s story began fifteen years earlier, soon after Central America’s independence from Spain, when the five original Spanish colonies joined into a federal republic that quickly weakened into a sharp contest for power. Underlying the conflict was a split between the conservative old guard—the powerful Catholic Church and wealthy aristocratic families—and a growing class of liberal thinkers, mostly aspiring creoles educated in science and the Enlightenment who were motivated by the revolutions in the United States and France and wanted to curtail the power of the church, forge a union, and develop the region economically.
Morazán was born in 1792, the son of a minor businessman of Italian descent and a mother of Spanish ancestry. Growing up in provincial Honduras, he had little chance for formal education. But he was a quick study and intelligent enough that by his late teens he was reading law in a notary’s office in the Honduran city of Tegucigalpa.2 After independence from Spain, he rose quickly through the new political order from clerk to secretary general of the Honduran state in 1824, and two years later became the Liberal president of the state legislature. He was dashing, handsome, politically astute. That same year, he married Maria Josefa Lastiri, who reportedly brought money into the marriage.
Then, in 1827, the Conservatives in Guatemala City seized control of the federal government, deposed the Liberal leaders of Guatemala’s state government, and marched the federal army in an attack on El Salvador and Honduras, both dominated by the Liberal party. Morazán fled to neighboring Nicaragua, where he assembled a small army of Liberals for a counterattack. In an amazing series of battles that followed, the former provincial clerk, an untested commander with no military background, led one surprisingly successful assault after another against the large, well-trained federal army. He inspired his men with daring charges across the battlefields on horseback. As a military leader, he was bold and charismatic and possessed extraordinary coolness under fire. He used his organizing skills to weld together an effective army of Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans, and in 1829 he swept through Guatemala and took its capital.
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