We have no evidence Stephens knew of Noah, although it is likely, as the two men traveled in the same literary circles in New York. And before Stephens left for Central America, he was intent on finding and absorbing every scrap of information about the region—its antiquities and politics. He also refers in his book to the wide range of speculation then rampant among scholars that if any civilization existed in North America, it was brought by “the Jews, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Scythians in ancient times; the Chinese, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Welsh and the Spaniards in modern.”9
At the other end of the spectrum stood the influential Scottish historian William Robertson, famous at the time for writing one of the first major histories of the Americas. Stephens noted that Robertson rejected entirely the idea that Old World travelers had brought any civilization to the New World. In his history, in fact, Robertson disputes there were any civilized people in the New World at all when Columbus arrived. “The inhabitants of the New World,” Stephens quotes from Robertson, “were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its advance toward improvement.” Robertson went on to argue in his history that the Spanish had simply exaggerated when they described the sophistication of the cities they encountered. The temples, he wrote, were nothing more than “a mound of earth” and the “houses were mere huts, built with turf, or mud, or the branches of trees, like those of the rudest Indians.” Robertson based his argument on an account from a person who had traveled in every part of New Spain, and he concluded “there is not, in all the extent of that vast empire, a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the conquest.”10
It was against this backdrop of wide-ranging assumptions and conjecture that Stephens and Catherwood had to work. Yet such speculations would not limit their thinking. Stephens took no sides. They were in Central America to see for themselves. And lawyer Stephens made clear that before he reached any conclusion he wanted to see the evidence—all the evidence.
It was not all single-minded antiquarian labor, however, not on an expedition led by John L. Stephens. He still had a book to write and there were other tempting sights to see. So they took a detour to Lago de Atitlán, a dazzling lake set high among Guatemala’s volcanoes. “From a height of three or four thousand feet,” he wrote, “we looked down upon a surface shining like a sheet of molten silver, enclosed by rocks and mountains of every form, some barren, and some covered with verdure, rising from five hundred to five thousand feet high. We both agreed that it was the most magnificent spectacle we ever saw. We stopped and watched the fleecy clouds of vapour rising from the bottom, moving up the mountains and the sides of the volcanoes.”
Not content just to look from afar, they embarked upon one of the necessary “incidents” of his books’ titles. They set out the next morning to sightsee along the lake’s edge in a tiny dinghy, no more than a flimsy local fishing craft made of flat wooden boards and generously meant for one occupant. “As we moved away, the mountainous borders of the lake rose grandly before us,” Stephens wrote. Then the trouble started. The huge lake was well known for its powerful and tricky winds, which began to blow them out toward the middle. Juan, the boatman, paddled furiously toward shore. “Mr. C was in the stern, I on my knees in the bottom of the canoe. The loss of stroke, or a tottering movement in changing places, might swamp her; and if we let her go she would be driven out into the lake, and cast ashore, if at all, twenty or thirty miles distant. . . . We saw people on the shore looking at us, and growing smaller every moment, but they could not help us.” Finally, Juan maneuvered the boat under the cover of a bluff that cut the wind, and he was able to paddle the boat to the shore. The sightseeing was over, and Stephens admitted: “We had enough of the lake.”
In Quetzaltenango, their next stop, politics emerged once again. They encountered everywhere the horror of Carrera’s execution of the town’s leaders. “The place was still quivering under the shock of that event,” he wrote. They heard firsthand accounts of the massacre. “I was told that Carrera shed tears for the death of the first two, but for the rest he said he did not care. It was considered a blow at the whites, and all feared the horrors of a war of castes.”
Quetzaltenango was Guatemala’s second-largest city—handsome, the streets well paved with cobblestones, its seven churches dominating the skyline. And it was Easter week. Elaborate processions and other religious displays quickly overwhelmed everything else. The plaza was filled with Indians from the countryside; most of the white residents, terrified by the recent events, stayed away. The religious rituals and ceremonies Stephens and Catherwood witnessed were, he wrote, “so thrilling, so dreadfully mournful, that, without knowing why, tears started from our eyes.” He added that even a descent from the cross on Good Friday that he had witnessed on Mount Calvary in Jerusalem did not compare to the religious fanaticism and frenzy he was now seeing.
Three days later, they were free of Central American politics for good, walking through yet another set of ruins outside the town of Huehuetenango, more than thirty miles to the north. The site was the third major Indian capital the Spanish overran during the early years of the conquest. Named Zaculeu, it was the royal ceremonial center of the Mam Indian nation. Like Iximche and Utatlán, it also sat on a plateau surrounded by ravines. It had been heavily fortified and the Mam Maya held off the Spanish for more than six weeks before surrendering to Alvarado’s brother, Gonzalo, in 1525. The Spanish siege had succeeded in weakening the trapped Mam to the point of starvation before they finally gave in.11
Stephens and Catherwood found the site weathered and broken into a confused jumble of grass-covered stones, like the two previous sites. Later archaeological excavations, however, would determine it was much older than the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel capitals, and had been originally settled almost a thousand years before the Spanish arrived. The two travelers met the owner of the property, who said he had bought the land from the Indians but that they continued to return, much to his annoyance, to perform ritual ceremonies on top of the sites’ two remaining pyramid-like structures. He agreed to allow Stephens and Catherwood to dig into the pyramids and mounds if they promised to turn over to him any treasure they might find. They spent the next day with laborers from Huehuetenango excavating the site but found little more than fragments of bones and a few clay vases. Stephens wrote that he regretted not having more time to explore, but Palenque, the shimmering goal beyond the horizon, still beckoned.
In Huehuetenango, they received a surprise visit from an American named Henry Pawling, whom Stephens had met earlier managing a cochineal plantation south of Guatemala City. Pawling, who grew up in Rhinebeck Landing on the Hudson River north of New York City, had been traveling and working in Mexico and Central America for seven years. When he learned that Stephens and Catherwood were headed to Mexico, he left his job and set out to catch up with them. Four days of hard riding brought him to Huehuetenango. An earlier plan to go to Mexico had been thwarted by his lack of a passport, and he hoped he might attach himself to Stephens, whose venture carried the proper diplomatic papers. Pawling offered his services in any capacity in exchange. Stephens did not hesitate. Pawling was young, spoke fluent Spanish, was a fellow American—and a New Yorker. He was on the road and in need. It did not hurt that he had also brought with him a pair of excellent pistols, an ominous-looking “short double barreled gun slung to his saddle-bow,” and a much-needed spare mule. “I immediately constituted him the general manager of the expedition,” Stephens explained.
The reinforced team now headed north into the most rugged part of their journey—the Cordillera de los Cuchumatanes, a formidable mountain range whose peaks reached 12,500 feet, Central America’s highest summits outside of the volcanos. The expedition now consisted of Stephens, Catherwood, Pawling, a cook and factotum named Juan, and a fugitive Mexican soldier named Santiago. An older, respectable muleteer acted
as a guide.
The next four days brought discomforts and obstacles on a biblical scale. The first night, camping on a windswept ridge, was so cold that they woke the next morning covered in frost, their water frozen with a layer of ice a quarter inch thick. The next day, traveling along another ridge so narrow that a strong gust might blow them off, they found themselves suddenly surrounded by a raging forest fire. They hustled back down the trail to a nearby hamlet and barely escaped being consumed by the sheets of flame roaring up the sides of the ravines. Next, a swarm of giant flies escaping the conflagration descended on them and began attacking their mules. “Every bite drew blood,” Stephens explained. “For an hour we labored hard but could not keep their heads and necks free. The poor beasts were frantic, and in spite of all we could do, their necks, the insides of their legs, mouths, ears, nostrils, and every tender part of their skin, were trickling with blood.”
Despite their appreciation for the breathtaking beauty of the mountain views, they were relieved when their long descent finally brought them to the Río Lagartero and the border with Mexico and North America. Their only concern was that the Mexican army, searching for smugglers along the border, might detain them for lack of a Mexican passport. But they crossed the river without incident. Reinvigorated by a leisurely bath in the river’s cool waters, Stephens felt he could ride clear across Mexico, up to Texas, and all the way home to New York. “Returned once more to steamboats and railroads, how flat, tame and insipid all their comforts seem,” he wrote. “We were out of Central America, safe from the dangers of revolution, and stood on the wild borders of Mexico, in good health, with good appetites, and something to eat. We had still a tremendous journey before us, but it seemed nothing. We strode the little clearing as proudly as the conquerors of Mexico, and in our extravagance resolved to have a fish for breakfast.”
Two days journey over mostly barren plains and hills brought them next to the Mexican town of Comitán, where they braced themselves for trouble for their lack of passports. In short order, however, Stephens’s diplomatic status, evident in his Central American papers, once again won the day. He and his entourage were all granted the necessary documents to continue on. “I recommend,” he wrote, “all who wish to travel to get an appointment from Washington.”
In Comitán they learned that the difficulties they faced getting to Palenque would be far greater than anticipated. They knew the road would be rough but were told its rugged, dangerous ascents and descents made it much longer than it appeared on the map. And far from leaving political upheaval behind, they discovered for the first time they would be traveling through two Mexican states, Chiapas and Yucatán, that were also convulsed by revolution. Worst of all, they were told the Mexican government had issued orders that Palenque was off-limits to foreigners.12
A tough trail did not much worry Stephens, not after Mico Mountain and their recent jaunt over the Cuchumatanes. “As to the revolutions,” noted Stephens with a touch of his usual bravado, “having gone through the crash of a Central American [one], we were not to be put back by a Mexican [uprising].” The ban on visits to Palenque, however, was not so easily dismissed. The options were not good. Stephens could travel north to Mexico City to argue his case, but that would add weeks or months to their timetable, assuming he was successful. If not, the game was over. Or they could chance it and sneak into Palenque.
They talked themselves into going ahead. Santiago, the fugitive soldier, left them but Juan remained. Now intrigued with seeing the ruins, Pawling decided not to go to Mexico City as planned but to continue on with them. They departed Comitán on the first of May more determined than ever to reach the destination they had dreamed about in New York, seemingly a lifetime ago.
The first leg of the journey was uneventful. After they arrived at a town named Ocosingo on the third day, a violent thunderstorm broke upon them, the opening volley of the new rainy season. Their effort to get to Palenque before the rains had failed. The lightning that thundered and crashed around them seemed ominous, given what they already had heard of the path through the mountains ahead.
Riding through Ocosingo, they saw along a church wall two sculpted statues they recognized immediately as cut in the style they had seen in Copán, though smaller. It was the first exciting hint they were entering new ground and had left behind the sculptureless ruins of the Guatemalan highlands. During his research Stephens had come across an account by a retired army captain named Guillaume Dupaix, who some thirty years before, in 1808, had passed through Ocosingo on his way to investigate Palenque at the request of the Spanish crown. Told of ruins near Ocosingo, Dupaix visited them and his brief written description along with several illustrations lay undiscovered until they were finally published in Paris in the 1830s.13
The ruins, known today as Toniná, lay eight miles east of town, and the next day Stephens, Catherwood, and Pawling rode out to take a look. Modern archaeologists have determined that between A.D. 600 and 900, during the height of the Classic Maya era, Toniná was the site of a major military power that rivaled Palenque, located forty miles to the north. At one point, in the year 711, according to hieroglyphs later deciphered at the site, Toniná’s “Ruler 3” succeeded in capturing and beheading one of Palenque’s kings.14 Despite its military prowess, however, Toniná never approached Palenque in the scale and beauty of its architecture or art, as Stephens was soon to find out. Stephens and his companions nonetheless found Toniná impressive.
As they approached they first glimpsed a stone building emerging high above the canopy of trees. Coming out of the forest onto a grassy plaza, they found two sandstone figures lying flat on the ground, their faces turned upward. Though they appeared weathered and eroded, Stephens noted that many of their features were still distinct. The three men looked up. The ruins towered above them, rising more than 230 feet, embedded in the side of a hill connected to mountains beyond. It looked like a fortress, wrote Stephens, an enormous pyramidal shape with numerous terraces, all faced with stucco still covering most of the stone construction beneath. They were able to ride up through gaps in the terrace walls until they reached the third level, where they tied their horses. The terraces were overgrown with grass and shrubs. From the third level they were able to climb to a building at the top. The structure was fifty feet wide by thirty-five feet deep, with a single entrance in the front. Entering they found it divided into five inner chambers. The stucco covering the stone walls had dropped away in many places. Clearly visible above an inside portal was a huge wing spread out on one side. The plaster on the other side, where the other wing would have been, had fallen into piles of rubble along the base of the wall. The doorway itself was topped with a lintel made of a long, thick wooden beam. They were stunned. It was the first time they had encountered any structural wood in the ruins, which they thought incredible given the obvious ancient age of the structure. They would later find similar wooden lintels in other ruins and their discovery would affect Stephens’s view of the age of the old cities. “It was so hard,” Stephens wrote of the lintel, “that, on being struck, it rang like metal and was perfectly sound, without a worm-hole or other symptom of decay.”
They had been told by Ocosingo’s alcalde that there was a passageway in the ruins that served as a subterranean route leading all the way to Palenque. Nothing would have pleased them more than to find such a shortcut, Stephens noted. Their guide pointed to the passageway but refused to enter. Undeterred, Stephens took off his coat and lay on his stomach to crawl in.
“When I had advanced about half the length of my body, I heard a hideous hissing noise,” he wrote. “And starting back, saw a pair of small eyes, which in the darkness shone like balls of fire. The precise portion of time that I employed in backing out is not worth mentioning.” They braced themselves, pistols drawn, swords and machetes at ready, waiting for the beast to dash out. Pawling finally stuck a long piece of wood into the hole and “out fluttered a huge turkey-buzzard which flapped through the building and took
up refuge in another chamber.” Undaunted, Stephens worked his way through the tight entrance a second time, only to find that it opened into a chamber that led nowhere. However, its stucco walls were covered with figures exquisitely formed in bas-relief, including images of monkeys, and along the back wall two life-size humans in profile, facing each other. Catherwood crawled in to make some sketches but the light was bad, and the heat and the smoke from the candles soon drove the two men out. The three men explored several other buildings as they climbed from terrace to terrace up the hillside. From the top, Stephens observed that the site commanded a view of the surrounding countryside for a great distance, which would have made it difficult if not impossible for any enemy to approach unnoticed.
It was the most remarkable site they had visited since Copán, or in Catherwood’s case, Quiriguá. Even though they were pressed for time, Stephens wanted to return the next day to make a more thorough examination. It was dark by the time they got back to Ocosingo. But when they met with the alcalde, he said it would take at least two days to gather enough men to do the kind of excavation Stephens wanted. And there were few if any tools available, not even a single crowbar in the town. The issue was decided when another violent storm broke and the rain came pouring down again: they would leave the next day for Palenque.
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