Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  The sailor wanted to take Stephens back to the ship, but Stephens insisted on riding on to the town of Sonsonate, where he could get medical attention. Somehow he recovered sufficiently to mount a horse and ride three hours through the heat, reaching the town just before dark.

  Just outside Sonsonate he unwittingly encountered the federal republic he had been looking for. He wrote: “I met a gentleman well mounted, having a scarlet Peruvian pellon over his saddle, with whose appearance I was struck, and we exchanged low bows.” The gentleman, as Stephens later discovered, was Diego Vigil Cocaña, the vice president of the republic and the last remaining constitutional officer of the central government. “When I left Guatemala in search of a government, I did not expect to meet it on the road.”

  Even if he had recognized the rider, Stephens was in no condition to conduct official business. His first stop was the house of Captain De Nouvelle’s brother, where he was given a room and spent a number of days recovering. As soon as he was well enough, he sought out the government and to his surprise was introduced to Vigil. At the age of forty-five and suffering partial paralysis in both legs, the tall, thin, well-educated Honduran was a longtime confidant of Morazán. He had been serving as the acting president of what was left of the fractured republic ever since Morazán resigned from his second term as president a year earlier to become El Salvador’s chief of state and lead the army. In the discussions that followed, Stephens explained that he was on his way to present his diplomatic credentials in Cojutepeque, the republic’s temporary capital pending reconstruction of earthquake-damaged San Salvador. However, he told Vigil candidly that he did not want to make a “false step” if the federation no longer existed. Stephens understood that presenting his U.S. credentials would give valuable legitimacy to the government, while to withhold them would appear “disrespectful” and show favor to the rebellious states. “I was in a rather awkward position,” he wrote. Vigil assured him that the legitimate government did indeed exist in his own person, but sensing Stephens’s predicament, he did not ask him for his diplomatic documents.

  A compromise was settled on after Vigil explained that at that very moment delegates from the individual states were assembling in Honduras to resolve the constitutional crisis. He was confident, Vigil said, that they would reinstitute the republic, and if Stephens wished, he could wait for the official pronouncement before acting. In a dispatch to Secretary of State Forsyth a short time later, however, Stephens was pessimistic based on his experience in Guatemala. “My own opinion,” he wrote, “is that the convention will not do anything.”1 He felt, however, that his instructions required him to make every effort to complete his mission and that he was obligated to await the outcome. The impasse was frustrating. He was anxious to settle the matter and return with Catherwood to the search for more ancient regimes, which had been their primary motive for their coming to Central America. But he also saw an opportunity in the delay and seized on it. Within days he was sailing down the coast to the distant province of Costa Rica.

  Although not explicitly instructed by the State Department to examine the matter, Stephens was well aware of his government’s interest in the creation of a ship channel from the Caribbean to the Pacific by way of the San Juan River, a waterway along the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The river connected the Caribbean to Lake Nicaragua, and from there, if a short canal were to be built, ships could make their way to the Pacific.2 The route had been studied before; the biggest obstacle was the narrow ridge of land separating the lake from the Pacific. Stephens wanted to inspect it firsthand. To abandon his diplomatic post with the outcome of the treaty still pending was risky. But now recovered from his bout of malaria, he did not have the patience to sit around while Central America sorted itself out.

  The vision of a water route through Central America had captivated just about every ship master, adventurer, and entrepreneur since a surprised Columbus ran into the Western Hemisphere on his way to the East Indies. From the sixteenth century on, a number of routes were proposed but it was Humboldt who gave the possibility of a canal some scientific credibility. The great naturalist and geographer undoubtedly mentioned the San Juan route to President Jefferson during their visit in 1804.3 Years later, President Andrew Jackson dispatched a special agent to investigate both Nicaraguan and Panamanian routes.4,5 Eventually the ubiquitous Juan Galindo became involved. When he arrived in Washington on his way to England in June 1835, he carried with him surveys, historical accounts, and other documents bearing on the feasibility of the channel through Nicaragua, copies of which he left with the State Department.6 Stephens was aware of this history.

  His first stop, however, was San José, the capital of Costa Rica, where he met briefly with the chief of state, Braulio Carrillo. In Carrillo, a short, stout man of fifty who had been installed as head politico in a coup, Stephens encountered one of the reasons the federal republic was disintegrating. “He was uncompromising in his hostility to General Morazán and the Federal Government,” wrote Stephens, “and strongly impressed with the idea that Costa Rica could stand alone. Indeed, this was the rock on which all the politicians of Central America split: there is no such thing as national feeling.”

  Stephens arrived in Costa Rica with the intention of examining the San Juan River between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. But soon after he arrived in early February, his lips turned blue and his teeth started to chatter. Malaria struck him down again. As he lay bedridden in a convent for days, the plan to investigate the river faded. He was six hundred miles from Guatemala, lonely, depressed, and sick.

  When he recovered, he considered returning immediately to El Salvador by ship, but two things changed his mind. His health returning, he felt a surge of his usual nervous energy. And he had an opportunity to purchase one of the best mules in San José: “a macho, not more than half broke, but the finest animal I ever mounted,” an obvious overstatement since he said the same about the Arabian horse given him by the sheik of Aqaba. This “macho,” however, did prove special. A deep bond formed between the two as the animal carried him on its back for the rest of his journey through Central America and Mexico.

  Determined at minimum to explore the likely canal terminus on the Pacific side, Stephens and his macho headed up the coast, traveling through wilderness and staying at rough frontier haciendas along the way. Crossing into Nicaragua, he arrived finally at a stream that led down to the Pacific and the “port” of San Juan del Sur. The horseshoe bay was lined with bluffs tall enough to shelter ships and would thus provide an excellent outlet for any canal. The harbor and the surrounding area, however, were uninhabited. No ship had entered for years. “It seemed preposterous to consider it the focus of a great commercial enterprise,” wrote Stephens, “to imagine that a city was to rise up out of the forest, the desolate harbour to be filled with ships, and become a great portal for the thoroughfare of nations.”

  Stephens spent the afternoon walking along the shore, set up camp, and bathed in the ocean. “The scene was magnificent,” he wrote. “It was perhaps the last time in my life that I should see the Pacific.” It was an odd moment. Even as he was drawn to San Juan del Sur, convinced of an eventual connection between the two great oceans, he had no way of foreseeing the role he would play years later in just such a project, and one that would bring him back to the Pacific again and again.

  The next day he left the bay and explored the most probable path of the canal up through the jungle, over a ridge of hills and across an open plain to Lake Nicaragua, the largest inland body of water in Central America. The distance between the coast and the lake was slightly over fifteen miles, but they were rugged, difficult miles. Still, the distance was nothing compared to the stretch covered by the Erie Canal, which spanned nearly the entire width of New York. Yet this place bore no resemblance to Stephens’s home state. Before him, rising majestically from an island in the lake, were two towering, perfectly conical volcanoes. By the time he arrived in the old Spanish colonial town of Grenad
a, situated at the northern end of the lake, he was satisfied that the ship canal to the Pacific was feasible. When he entered the town he had been riding nearly two weeks, was still weak from malaria, and was nearing total exhaustion.

  Then fortune took another turn. Stephens found in Grenada a British engineer who had completed the most thorough survey of the canal route to date. John Bailey, hired by the Central American Republic to make the examination, had completed all but a small part of it when civil war broke out. With the collapse of the federal government, Bailey was never paid and was surviving in Nicaragua on half pay as a British naval officer. He happily put before Stephens all his maps and measurements, allowing Stephens to copy as much as he wanted for his book. Later, with the help of an engineer from New York, Stephens calculated that construction of the canal and the dredging of the San Juan River would cost $25 million, a gross underestimate by later accounts.

  Still, as he would prove later in Panama, Stephens was one of his era’s great evangelists for progress and trade. He was the son of a merchant, born in a city that substituted sailing masts for trees. “As yet,” he wrote, the idea of a canal “has not taken any strong hold upon the public mind. It will be discussed, frowned upon, sneered at, and condemned as visionary and impracticable.” He wrote of the undeniable trade and travel advantages of such a canal but he had in mind more than economic or mercantile benefits:

  It will compose the distracted country of Central America; turn the sword, which is now drenching it with blood, into a pruning hook; remove the prejudices of the inhabitants by bringing them into close connexion with people of every nation; furnish them with a motive and a reward for industry, and inspire them with the taste for making money, which, after all, opprobrious as it is sometimes considered, does more to civilize and keep the world at peace than any other influence whatever. The commerce of the world will be changed. . . . Steamboats will go smoking along the rich coasts of Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Grenada, Guatimala, California, our own Oregon Territory, and the Russian possessions on the borders of Behring’s Straits. New markets will be opened for products of agriculture and manufactures, and the intercourse and communion of numerous and immense bodies of the human race will assimilate and improve the character of nations. The whole world is interested in this work.

  Though focused on probing deeply into the past, Stephens could not keep his eyes from the future. In a book whose business was the discovery of an ancient civilization, he proffered an unabashed, utopian vision of the possibilities ahead. And because of the enormous success of his books, Stephens did more than anyone in his day to plant in the public consciousness the idea of such an oceanic connection. His readership included capitalists and investors—New York entrepreneurs in particular—who had the commercial instincts and means to do something about it. In the future they would become both his associates and competitors. Ironically, as he later struggled to build a railroad across Panama, his competitors sought to undermine the project by insisting Nicaragua was the better route and sending steamboats up the San Juan River to prove it.

  In 1840, however, as Stephens rambled over the ridgeline and saw the wild and fanciful volcanoes rising from the waters of Lake Nicaragua, no commercial self-interest drove his zeal. It was his belief—driven by his era’s raw American optimism—that the world could be improved, that progress was not only inevitable but inevitably good.

  Patrick Walker was the first member of the British expedition to reach the ruins at Palenque. Lieutenant John Caddy remained five miles behind in the village of Santo Domingo de Palenque, where he lay “indisposed” from tick bites on his legs so painful he could barely walk, much less ride horseback. Walker, accompanied by a local guide and two Indians, approached the ruins from the northeast over a rolling grassy plain covered with wildflowers, clumps of woods, and a latticework of streams. Thickly forested hills and mountains rose before them to the south. The remains of the ancient city were located on a flat escarpment that jutted out from the foothills into the plain. It was a steep ride up and onto the shelf of land, made even more difficult by dense jungle growing over piles of stones and the uneven fragments of fallen structures. Walker noticed a fast-moving stream that flowed out of the rocks from what appeared to be a subterranean aqueduct. Following the stream along a man-made stone channel, he was surprised to see the water emerge from the underground through the sculpted head of an alligator.

  He left his horse and, fighting to keep his footing, gingerly scrambled sixty feet up a large mound of loose stones. At the top he found the solid wall of a building flanked, he wrote, by well-constructed corridors, “the sight of which at once repaid me for all the toils of my travels past.” After two and a half months of often brutal transit, they had finally reached the ruins of Palenque. “The peculiar structure of the edifice and its splendid exterior ornature stamped it at once with the impress of great antiquity,” he continued. Rarely given to poetics in his official report, Walker could not resist an attempt here: “On further examination, the ‘cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces and the solemn temples,’ though shorn of their pristine proportions, were yet spared enough of time’s defacing hand to indicate that here had once existed a people, great and powerful, and perfected in art, the grand test of advancement in civilization.”7 After a quick look around, with shadows lengthening in the late afternoon, he hurried back to Santo Domingo and arrived just before nightfall to tell Caddy what he had found.

  The expedition had been on the move for more than three weeks since leaving the island town of Flores on Lake Petén Itzá. Half the time was spent on horseback through the empty, trackless savanna and forests of the Petén. The final leg was by canoe down the Usumacinta River, then on horseback to Santo Domingo de Palenque. Somewhere they had crossed an unmarked border leaving Guatemala and had entered the Mexican state of Chiapas. Caddy was already in agony. “I had been suffering much from the torments caused by the bites of mosquitoes and warri ticks,” he wrote, “and my legs from the knees downwards were in a state of rawness anything but agreeable.” But, riding from the river to Santo Domingo, he was ever the huntsman and still able to blast away with his shotgun to bring down a number of yellow-headed parrots that he noted made for an excellent stew.

  In Santo Domingo they easily gained permission from the local authorities to visit the ruins, which was a relief because they had heard reports along the way that no foreigners were allowed at the site. The only condition was that they must take a guide from the town who would watch that nothing was damaged or removed.

  Caddy’s excitement grew as he listened to Walker’s description of what he had found. Caddy had spent the day in his hammock rubbing his legs with a concoction made from a local plant called malbi. The cure worked well enough that within a few days he, Walker, and the rest of the expedition saddled up and headed out to the ruins with enough provisions to set up camp on the site. They were accompanied by the part-time Mexican army captain, identified only as Don Juan, who had acted as official guide for Walker on his first visit to the ruins.8

  For the next two weeks they probed the jungle, cleared away some of the growth, and took measurements of the principal buildings. Caddy spent most of his time making careful, accurate drawings of the structures and the bas-relief figures that decorated the walls, sketching an overall map of the central site and a floor plan of the main building, called the “palace.” In his drawings he was also able to capture details of some of the hieroglyphs that accompanied the human figures. Besides the main palace complex, which was the largest structure they encountered and which sheltered them at night, they explored several other temple-like structures perched on the summits of nearby mounds of crumbling stone. Most of the buildings they found were overgrown with trees and dense foliage, and many were defaced, cracked and thrown down by the forces of time and nature. The structures butted up against a steeply rising jungle hillside that all but engulfed them. Searching the surrounding areas, they found the broken walls and rubble of what
they assumed had been numerous other buildings and temples of a city that possibly extended for miles.

  Lieutenant Caddy’s final report on the ruins was fairly short and straightforward, consisting chiefly of dry factual descriptions and measurements. For some reason, perhaps the seriousness with which he approached the work, his account carried little of the lively personal details and amusing asides that characterized his diary entries of their journey. Most of his drawings, too, were honest, uncomplicated representations, limited in scope, concentrating only on key features. Some were truly remarkable—the first illustrations to give a viewer a true idea of what the ruins of Palenque actually looked like. Yet even in his most sweeping statement, he came to no conclusion about the origins of Palenque, and only carefully and conservatively summed up what they had found: “From the extent of these remains, whose fallen structures cover a space of some miles—the massiveness of the buildings which are still standing, the elegance of the Basso relievos—both sculptured on stone and moulded in stucco—and the beauty of the internal, and external ornature, stamp it as one of the most extraordinary and interesting monuments of the arts of the ancient people of this country—and proves that, at some far distant period it must have been inhabited by a race both populous and civilized.” His five-thousand-word report, however, which he kept separate from his daily journal, comes across as bureaucratic and lifeless, expressing none of the enthusiasm or emotion of discovery. Perhaps he was looking ahead to its intended audience—colonial officials, scholars and antiquarians.9 Caddy seemed more interested in getting back to his hunting, which accounted for the happiest and most exciting parts of his journal. Time would prove, however, that what he found at Palenque left a deep impression on him, and he would come to view it as one of the more important events in his life.