The secretary called Carrera from the other room and after a few minutes the general returned with Stephens’s passport in hand, the ink still drying with Carrera’s signature. “It had taken him longer than it would have done to cut off a head, and he seemed more proud of it,” wrote Stephens. “I made a comment upon the excellence of the handwriting, and with his good wishes for my safe arrival in the North . . . I took my leave.”
That evening Stephens packed up his diplomatic coat, its large gold buttons glowing rich and warm in the lamplight, and bundled it with the other items he was sending home. He and Catherwood wrote out the last of their letters, and the next morning, April 7, 1840, they set out for Chiapas, Mexico—and Palenque.
Two days earlier, on April 5, Caddy and Walker sailed into Belize harbor. It was nearly five months since they had launched their expedition up the Belize River and a month and a half since they left Palenque. Their return took them down the Usumacinta River—Caddy blasting away with his shotgun at twenty-foot-long alligators on the river banks—to the large estuary on the Gulf of Mexico called Laguna de Términos. From there they made their way north by boat along the Yucatán coast to the port of Sisal, and traveled inland to Mérida, Yucatán’s capital. They then journeyed overland across the dry upper reaches of Yucatán to the peninsula’s east coast, where they boarded a ship and sailed south to Belize. Compared to their agonizing journey through Petén to Palenque, their path home crossed the much more forgiving scrubland of the north and they must have wondered why they hadn’t taken that route to Palenque in the first place. Sailing into the Belize harbor they were greeted by an anxious Colonel MacDonald, who with the rest of colony breathed a sigh of relief. The report of their demise was unfounded and their expedition an obvious triumph.
There was only one problem. Shortly after their return, MacDonald received a troubling dispatch from the Colonial Office. MacDonald’s November letter to the office outlining the expedition had not been well received in England. There were concerns deep within the bowels of the bureaucracy that the colonel had acted out of place by advancing government money for the expedition without prior approval.
The dispatch from Lord John Russell, secretary of state for the colonies and soon-to-be prime minister, noted that he had not received MacDonald’s November communication until February, which, as it turned out, was about the time Caddy and Walker were leaving Palenque to return to Belize. Lord Russell’s letter, dated February 19, said that he had learned that MacDonald had appropriated two hundred pounds sterling from the “Military Chest” for the expedition.
The deputy Asst. Commissary Genl. in Honduras has advised the Lords of the Treasury of this advance having been made & their Lordships have communicated to me their opinion, in which I concur, that you were not in any respect warranted in directing an issue from the Military Chest for objects of the description to which your dispatch refers without the previous authority of Her Majesty’s Government.
Their Lordships further state that they would not be justified in giving their sanction for relieving you of the responsibility on account of this advance, until the manner in which the money may have been disbursed has been distinctly specified, & such report of the Expedition has been made as may shew that the result of it has proved beneficial to the Public.
So much for “English scientific prestige” when fiscal accountability was in question, wrote David Pendergast in his 1967 book, Palenque: The Walker-Caddy Expedition to the Ancient Maya City, 1839–1840.3 Instead of praise for his initiative to advance science in the queen’s name—and of course to beat out an American rival—the colonel now faced the possibility of having to personally reimburse the “Military Chest” two hundred pounds simply because he failed to observe bureaucratic protocols. The pressure was now on MacDonald and he put his two explorers to work immediately.
The interchange of dispatches was one more example of the paralyzing slowness of communications in the early nineteenth century, unimaginable today. Just a few months earlier, a worried MacDonald wrote Chatfield in Guatemala asking if he had heard anything there about Walker and Caddy. In his March reply, weeks after the two men were already on their way back to Belize, Chatfield said he had heard nothing. He wrote again on April 8, three days after Walker and Caddy were safely home in Belize, that he still had no news. But he filled MacDonald in with some other intelligence: “Mr. Stephens & the Yankified English artist who accompanies him are gone to Quesaltenango, intending to get to Palenque across the Mexican frontier.”
Within six weeks of Walker and Caddy’s return, MacDonald had in hand Walker’s official ten-thousand-word report. He seemed pleased enough with it that on May 13 he wrote Lord Russell: “I am quite sensible that previous to authorizing any expedition of the kind I ought to have had the authority of H M Government but I trust that when I have submitted to Your Lordship my explanation on the subject that Your Lordship will free me from the imputation of having acted prematurely or without consideration in the matter.” He added that he was now only waiting for completion of Caddy’s drawings “illustrative of the expedition” before forwarding Walker’s report on to London.
With one casualty, the two Englishmen had beaten Stephens and Catherwood to Palenque, a point of national pride for them, MacDonald, and the rest of the colony. Others, however, including Juan Galindo, had visited the ruins before them. And it would soon become evident that it wasn’t so important who got there first but who made the most of the visit. Walker’s businesslike report would prove no match for the written account Stephens would make of Palenque. The contrast would be clear enough in the prose—Stephens unquestionably the more talented writer—but the greater problem was the lack of attention Walker gave to the ruins. Although it was the primary goal of their expedition, Palenque received no more than four paragraphs of description in his thirty-page report (Stephens would write more than forty pages on Palenque). Walker devoted the bulk of his report to describing the local populations, their customs, agricultural production, the geography and terrain, as well as the politics of Guatemala and Mexico, mixed with blatantly chauvinistic comments. So many of Walker’s remarks touched on delicate political issues that the Colonial Office later ordered them deleted.
Though short on descriptions of Palenque, Walker was perfectly willing to speculate on theories concerning the ruins’ origins: “The one I am most prone to indulge in is that a large fleet had ploughed the Atlantic in search of undiscovered country.” Once they sailed up the Usumacinta River, he wrote, they found this fertile site nestled against the mountains and they decided to stay. “Each building rigidly constructed according to one undeviating model marks the despotic character of Egyptian architecture.” He added that Asians from the Far East or India might also have built Palenque. The one hypothesis Walker rejected out of hand was that the aboriginal natives of the Americas could have created such an advanced city. He called the Indians who inhabited the land prior to the arrival of the Spanish “an unskillful and feeble race, incapable of great designs or the ability to execute any work of magnitude and art.” Curiously, he failed to notice that the human figures carved so artfully throughout the ruins—also drawn by Caddy—and who clearly represented the ancient city’s lords and nobles, bore a distinct resemblance to the contemporary Indians of the district.
In fairness to Walker, he may have believed Caddy’s drawings were intended to tell the real story of the ruins, and that his report was to be no more than a travelogue of interesting observations “beneficial to the public.” After all, MacDonald appeared satisfied with it.
Everything now depended on Caddy, who labored for months on his illustrations. Some of his drawings would prove exceptional, the best to date—that is until Catherwood started his work at Palenque. Yet in the end, the molasses of colonial communications would prove a maddening obstacle. Lord Russell would not receive Walker’s report and Caddy’s drawings until the following February. And by then it was too late.
Catherwood
He was born forty-one years earlier, on February 27, 1799, in Hoxton, a district then on the northern fringe of London, and he grew up in a three-story townhouse similar to most of the adjoining brick residences surrounding Charles Square. The pragmatic, faceless buildings were marked by level rows of windows and façades protected by spiked wrought-iron grillwork separating the buildings and their below-grade basement wells from the sidewalks. The square’s central garden had a feeling of the country, “set with greens, plants, fruit and other trees,” and the neighborhood—some buildings on the square dated from the 1600s—was known for its genteel residents.2
The Catherwoods, while not patrician, were solidly upper middle class. Catherwood’s grandfather, William Catherwood, had come to London in 1745 from the central English town of Coventry. He was originally listed on his children’s christening records as an apothecary but later took the job of landwaiter, a civil service position collecting duties at London’s custom house. Of his many sons, two became watchmakers, one a teacher and later a brass founder, and another a type founder. His middle son, John James, who would become Frederick Catherwood’s father, followed his father’s path into the civil service and eventually rose to become “receiver general of corn returns and accountant general of excise,” positions of significant fiscal responsibility in the government service. He also became a partner in one of England’s most important letter type foundries, a firm established half a century earlier by William Caslon that produced popular typefaces for printing presses.
Prosperous and well established, John James Catherwood married late, at age forty-one, to Anne Rowe in 1793. Little is known about Anne other than that she descended from a prominent aristocratic family whose lineage included Sir Thomas Rowe, an ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I, and Sir Henry Rowe, lord mayor of London. Over the next nine years, she and John had six children, three sons and three daughters, one of whom died young. Frederick was their fifth child, followed by Alfred, the youngest, who was born in 1802.
Nothing is known about Frederick’s childhood other than that it appeared to be a comfortable one. Charles Square at the time was on the edge of London, where nurseries for decades occupied much of the surrounding open space. The countryside was close by, so it would have been easy for young Frederick to ramble through the northern fields much as Stephens had done as a boy in the rolling rural meadows of Manhattan, not far from New York City’s then-northern boundary. And during the first decades of the 1800s, like Stephens, Catherwood witnessed the open areas surrounding his neighborhood fill in rapidly as London’s population expanded northward.
For years the Hoxton district had been known for its almshouses and mental asylums, some transformed from old country manor houses constructed centuries earlier by rich Londoners escaping the smoke and disease of the central city. Yet Charles Square was insulated, looked in on itself, and must have seemed an oasis of intimacy and security as young Catherwood grew up alongside his many siblings and cousins. Frederick’s family lived at 21 Charles Square, while his father’s brother, Nathaniel Catherwood, with his wife and children occupied No. 20, and his aunt Elizabeth, his mother’s sister, lived close by with her family.3 The Reverend John Newton, the famous abolitionist and author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” once lived just down the street at No. 13. Newton wrote that he often gazed out his back window at nearby fields filled with cows, birds, and trees.4
There was no public school system in London at the time and nothing is known about Frederick’s early education. He likely attended one of the many private schools established for middle- and upper-class children. Whatever schools the Catherwood children attended, they received a solid education. Alfred, Frederick’s younger brother, went on to Glasgow University and became a prominent London physician, authoring a major treatise on pulmonary diseases.5 Frederick, whose literary skills are evident in his writings, also mastered mathematics and science well enough to become a surveyor, architect, and railroad engineer.
His initial career path, like Stephens’s, was undoubtedly decided by his father. At sixteen he entered into a five-year apprenticeship with architect-surveyor Michael Meredith on Great Winchester Street.6 Around that time he also appeared to take an interest in art. On January 17, 1817, in the middle of his apprenticeship, he registered at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts as a “probationer.” This allowed a three-month period within the academy to produce work sufficient to gain him full admission. But no records exist showing that he became a full-time student.7 He achieved a measure of recognition, however, when a work of his, described only as “Buckingham Gate, Adelphi” (now lost), was shown in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1820, the year he left Meredith’s office.8
England was at war in both Europe and the United States during Catherwood’s childhood and teenage years, and though he was not directly affected, he would eventually feel the consequences of Napoleon Bonaparte’s relentless military campaigns. On July 1, 1798, eight months before he was born, Napoleon landed with a large expeditionary force at Alexandria, Egypt. The British would eventually defeat the French army in Egypt but only after Napoleon opened the country’s ancient temples and pyramids for the first time to scientific examination, an act that would influence the course of Catherwood’s life.
Before Egypt, Napoleon had conquered much of Italy. The subsequent French occupation over the next two decades effectively sealed off what had been an essential component in the education of English artists and architects: firsthand study of Roman ruins, and Italian art and architecture. That ended with Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 and his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The doors to Italy were once again thrown open and waves of British artists and architects poured in to make up for lost time, especially eager to study French excavations of the Roman Forum and other classical sites. The artists were followed in quick turn by English aristocrats and a generation of writers and Romantic poets, including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
Indirectly, it was Keats’s decision to travel to Rome that drew Catherwood there as well. While there is no documentary evidence the two men knew each other, it is very probable they did. They most likely met through a mutual friend, Joseph Severn, an artist who grew up in Hoxton and whose family of musicians were friends of the Catherwoods. In late 1820, Keats, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis and sensed he would not survive another English winter, decided to go to Italy. Severn was devoted to the gifted five-foot, one-inch poet and volunteered to drop everything in London to care for Keats during his journey. They arrived in November and took rooms in the center of Rome at 26 Piazza di Spagna, overlooking a broad white marble staircase that would later come to be known as “the Spanish Steps.” The splendid views from their windows, however, provided little solace as Severn nursed his friend through the Roman winter, rarely leaving his side. On February 23, 1821, Keats died in Severn’s arms at the age of twenty-five, painfully aware that his slender volumes of poetry had drawn little but disdain from the critics. As he lay dying, he insisted his gravestone be inscribed: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water.” The Italian authorities ordered everything in the room where he died burn
ed and even the walls scraped clean. They were afraid, Severn wrote his father, of “the English Consumption.”
Portrait of Joseph Severn in 1822.
Poet John Keats on his deathbed in Rome, drawn by Joseph Severn.
The grieving Severn sent word of Keats’s death to their friends in England and buried Keats in Rome’s small Protestant cemetery. Then he decided to stay on in Italy to complete his artistic studies. He wrote his family of his plan and included a letter to his longtime friend Frederick Catherwood. In September, seven months after Keats’s death, Catherwood showed up in Rome.
“Mr. Catherwood arrived here last night in perfect health and safety,” Severn wrote his sister Maria. “I found him sitting in my study with the same look and manner that I recollect from London.”9 It was a joyous reunion. Though Severn was five years older, the two had become close in Hoxton and during Catherwood’s brief time at the Royal Academy. They shared similar upbringings. While Catherwood apprenticed to an architect, Severn spent eight unhappy years as an engraver’s apprentice before finally breaking away to pursue his art. Catherwood passed on family gossip from home. The next day they could barely contain themselves as they rushed out the door. “We have this morning seen St. Peters—and the Vatican—with which he is quite delighted or should I say astonished,” Severn wrote Maria. “I have introduced him to many brother Artists here—Englishmen—there are three Architects among them—whom he will begin to study with.”
Severn explained he had found rooms they could share “at a most reasonable rate—and with every possible convenience for us two—there are two studys two sitting rooms two bedrooms and a view all over Rome.” But even before they could settle in, their plans were disrupted by a domineering British noblewoman named Jane Huck-Saunders, the countess of Westmorland. Since Keats’s death, the mercurial countess had taken up Severn and his art. She had found him portrait commissions with other British aristocrats living in Rome and invited him to dinner parties at her home, Villa Negroni. Then in September, the month Catherwood arrived, she had fallen under the spell of Egypt and was preparing a grand tour of its ancient ruins. She insisted Severn accompany her. Though flattered, Severn declined, noting that his friend Catherwood had just arrived from England. She said both of them must then come to Egypt. Writing his sister, Severn explained:
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