The on-the-ground reports from Del Río and Dupaix, undiscerning and biased, did nothing to upset this worldview. They only sharpened it. The discovery of an architecturally sophisticated site of possibly great antiquity simply prompted most of the faraway pedants and theorists to view Palenque as a single, unique colony that somehow found its way from the Old World to the New, thus leaving their basic historical narrative intact.17 It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their personal Old World explorations, to carefully examine all the evidence—the disparate and widely scattered ruins—and forge a new narrative.
In 1832, around the time of Kingsborough’s publication, a new, larger-than-life character arrived on the scene. As Yale University archaeologist Michael Coe described it, “During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americanist research was replete with eccentrics: the dead hand of the academy had yet to stifle the unbridled enthusiasms of a small band of amateurs in Europe and America.”18 Into Santo Domingo de Palenque rode “Count” Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck, a naturalized French citizen who at different times claimed as his birthplace Vienna, Prague, or Paris. He also gave his birth date as March 16, 1766, which, if true, would have put him in his mid-sixties by the time he arrived at Palenque. A man of hearty constitution and oversize, self-created legend, Waldeck made incredible boasts of his adventures—travel at the age of fourteen through South Africa, studies in neoclassical art in Paris, participation in the French occupation of Egypt and the Chilean fight for independence as well as friendships with Napoleon, Humboldt, King George III, Lord Byron, Marat, Robespierre—little of which could ever be documented.19 Even his birth date is suspect, a potential blow to his reputation late in life in Paris, where well past the age of one hundred he purported to be a famous “admirer” of women. A tall, imposing figure with a rich baritone, Waldeck took the title of “count” based on a claim of noble birth into the Waldestein-Württemberg family.
For all his self-mythologizing, however, he was a talented artist. And in 1822, he claimed to have had a life-changing experience when he was hired in London to engrave the Palenque drawings for Del Río’s book. Like Kingsborough he became obsessed with American antiquities. Then, after working for a silver-mining company in Mexico and as a portrait artist in Mexico City, he finally arrived at Palenque in May 1832. “From the moment I saw [Almendáriz’s] pen and ink drawings [for Del Río’s book],” he wrote the Société de Géographie in Paris, “I suspected that they were less than faithful to the originals and I began to cherish a secret desire to go and draw them for myself.”
Waldeck spent nearly a year traveling back and forth to the ruins from the village and lived four months in a hut at the foot of the so-called Temple of the Cross. He worked diligently sketching and painting the ruins, enduring, for the most part alone, the heat, rain, and tormenting insects. Like Almendáriz and Castañeda, he struggled mightily with the intricate hieroglyphs, writing to a friend at one point that he had spent twenty days copying just 114 glyphs.20 Finally, exhausted and running out of money, he made his way north to Yucatán. There he visited and worked in ruins that would become known as Uxmal.21,22 Famously irascible and contentious, however, he somehow offended the Mexican authorities, who appeared at his door in the Yucatán capital of Mérida and confiscated his writings and drawings. Anticipating such a move, however, Waldeck had made copies and had sent much of his original work on to Jamaica. In another version of the story, Kingsborough, who had been funding Waldeck, intervened and had his artwork returned to him. Waldeck finally left for London in 1836.23
Though he was a gifted artist, much of Waldeck’s work was infected by his neoclassical training and his own rich imagination. He often gave in to the temptation to idealize and romanticize what he had found.24 He was also unable to escape from his belief that the ruins were the work of Old World colonists, and some of his illustrations looked more Egyptian and Greek than the Maya originals.25 He created sculpted statues where none could later be found, his measurements were at times wildly inaccurate, and he drew imaginary elephants and turtles on walls and pavers. He also creatively restored parts of the ruins that were damaged. In one such fabrication he re-created Uxmal’s largest pyramid—originally built in an oval shape—with four flat sides in the Egyptian fashion.26
Yet shortly after his return to London, he used a novel method to come the closest of anyone to calculating the true age of the ruins. In an appearance before the Royal Geographic Society in May 1836, he first dazzled members with his drawings and then stated flatly that the ruins were at least one thousand years old.27 He based his claim, he said, on the trees he found growing in the ruins, explaining how he had cut down one of the trees and then counted 973 concentric rings on a cross section of the trunk. As he pointed out, the tree must have implanted itself after the building was already in ruins.28
Waldeck went on to Paris, where he published his work in a folio in 1838 made up almost entirely of illustrations of Uxmal and Yucatec Indian men and women in native dress. It included a single image of Palenque. He would not publish his drawings of Palenque for another three decades.29
View of Palenque Palace today from a nearby temple. (Carlsen)
Stephens’s first impressions of the ruins of Palenque mirrored those of Calderón, Dupaix, and Walker: lush tropical rain forest, dense undergrowth draped in lianas, mounds of stones, shapeless rubble over which their mules stumbled, then, finally, as they mounted first one terrace, then another, the large building and a tower through the trees that was, Stephens wrote, “unique, extraordinary and mournfully beautiful.”
It was as if Del Río’s “slash and burn” and the many clearings by others during the intervening decades had never happened. The jungle, resilient and automatic, had closed in and smothered Palenque once again. Thick vegetation reclaimed the top of the structure; roots snaked along its cornices and down the walls; trees edged in, their branches filling the doorways. Some of the walls had fallen but the elaborate ornamentation along the building’s façade could still be seen through the foliage, along with strange stuccoed figures on its pilasters. The Indians accompanying them cried out “el palacio,” the palace. Stephens, Catherwood, and Pawling scrambled up the last steps on foot and entered the palace’s outer corridors. They took a quick look around then returned to the entrance and fired off four rounds each into the air. It was a celebration of pure joy. But, wrote Stephens, “It was intended too for effect upon the Indians . . . who, we knew, would make such a report in the village as would keep any of their respectable friends from paying us a visit at night.”
Fearing rain, they wasted little time in setting up residence along the palace’s corridor, which ran partway around the building. Juan, their cook, who had pleaded to stay behind in the village, set up a rudimentary kitchen on stones at the end of the passageway, Pawling constructed a table of stone from the rubble; branches were cut from the trees and fastened together to form beds. Clearing away some trees on the terrace, they realized the elevated height of the palace offered a view out over the immense jungle at their feet, across a broad, flat, forested plain all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Deeply superstitious, their Indians carriers slowly melted away, refusing to stay at night in the ruins, and headed back to the village.
Just as Stephens and his companions sat down to supper, the sky darkened; looking out over the forest, they could see the trees bent down by the force of the wind. In an instant, the wind whipped through the corridors, followed by heavy rain. Their supper was drenched. The sky shook with thunder and lightning. It was a rude welcome—but only the beginning of the torments to come.
And yet there were moments of solace. The wind meant they could not light a candle as night fell, but Stephens discovered that hunkered down in a protected corner of the corridor his surroundings were so well illuminated by fireflies of such enormous size that the light from a single one allowed him to read an American newspaper that he had brought with him from Guatemala. “It was one of a pa
cket, full of debates in Congress . . . and it seemed stranger than any incident on my journey to be reading by the light of beetles, in the ruined palace of Palenque, the sayings and doings of great men at home.” His thoughts of home turned even more wistful as Catherwood, emptying the pockets of his shooting jacket, handed Stephens a Broadway omnibus ticket: “Good to the bearer for one ride.”
In the morning they were soaked to the skin and there was not a dry spot to stand on. Worse, the tortillas were moldy. “As often before in time of trouble,” Stephens wrote, “[we] composed ourselves with a cigar.” Fresh tortillas soon arrived with the village butcher, who served as Santo Domingo’s official guide to the ruins—the ban on visitors proving untrue—a service he had also provided to Waldeck, Caddy, and Walker. Without him, Stephens explained, they had no idea which direction to take because the jungle formed a solid curtain around the palace.
They spent the first full day getting their bearings and making a preliminary survey of surrounding temples. The next day the hard work began. Stephens and Pawling set about measuring the palace. Then, with the help of the few Indians who came daily, they cleared some of the trees and constructed scaffolding for Catherwood to set up his camera lucida. Their overriding objective was to allow for the utmost accuracy in the drawings. Moss, algae, and mold covered many of the stuccoed and carved stone reliefs, at times completely obscuring the sculpted figures and hieroglyphs beneath, and had to be scrubbed away. Courtyards within the palace were filled with trees and brush, so much so that it was impossible to see across them. All this vegetation had to be cleared.
In one courtyard, extracting the rubble revealed nine extraordinary figures, six feet in height, carved into limestone slabs below the corridor. “They are adorned with rich headdresses and necklaces but their attitude is that of pain and trouble,” Stephens wrote. “The design and anatomical proportion of the figures are faulty, but there is a force of expression about them which shows the skill and conceptive power of the artist.”
The rains came regularly at around three or four every afternoon but that became the least of their discomforts. Every night they were under siege from mosquitoes. The second night, in order to escape “these murderers of rest,” Stephens took his bedding down a pitch-black passage at the foot of the palace tower and found a low crawl space where he could spread his mat. The dampness of the spot was cooling and bats whizzed overhead, snapping up and driving away most of the mosquitoes. He wrote that he had “twinging apprehensions of the snakes and reptiles, lizards and scorpions, which infest the ruins,” but was finally able to fall asleep.
Palace courtyard at Palenque. (Catherwood)
Detail of sculptural relief in courtyard at Palenque. (Catherwood)
It proved only temporary relief; the next night was worse. Even an exposed fingertip was viciously attacked. But to stay completely under the sheets, the heat was unbearable. “In the morning, our faces were all in blotches,” he wrote. Exhausted from the grueling labors of the day, they knew they would not be able to continue without sleep. Finally they struck upon a solution. They sliced open their sheets, which had been sewn together to form sacks. Using their straw matting as a base, they bent three branches to arch over their beds, stretched the sheets over, and sewed them down tightly all around. This left a small opening to crawl in. Each night, Stephens noted, “hosts were waiting for us inside.” However, after they closed the opening behind them they hunted down each mosquito with the flame of a candle. There was a second advantage to the new arrangement: though they could not escape the spray of the rain, the damp sheet a foot or two above their bodies acted to cool the heated air within. “It is on occasions like this that the creative power of genius displays itself.”
But there seemed no solution to a torment that finally did Stephens in. Like Caddy before him, he fell victim to an insect the Indians called a nigua. This tiny tick, according to Stephens, ate its way into the flesh and deposited its eggs, which quickly hatched and multiplied. He carried one in his foot for several days, not knowing what was wrong. Finally Pawling tried to pick it out with a penknife, leaving a large hole. Soon the foot swelled to the point that Stephens had to sit for a day with his foot up. It was attacked by a swarm of small black flies, which inflicted hundreds of punctures. The swelling increased such that on his tenth day at the ruins, Stephens decided he had to return to the village. The foot was too swollen to fit in the stirrup and he could not let it hang down without feeling that his pulsating blood would burst through his skin. Resting it on a pillow over the pommel of the saddle, he managed to make his way slowly down through the forest to Santo Domingo.
Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque. (Catherwood)
The temple today. (Carlsen)
He spent two days on his back in a house rented from the village alcalde. Finally, with the help of the expedition’s medicine chest, the swelling went down enough for him to hobble around the town making various social calls, one of Stephens’s favorite diversions. Feeling guilty, however, he bought bread, parts of a butchered hog, and enough other delicacies for a small feast, and as soon as he was able, returned to the ruins with his haul. He had been gone only a few days, but he was stunned when he saw Catherwood. “He was wan and gaunt,” Stephens reported, “lame, like me, from the bites of insects; his face was swollen, and his left arm hung with rheumatism as if paralyzed.”
The changes at the ruins were equally startling given the short time he was away. The rain had seeped into everything, the walls were slick with moisture, water dripped through crevices in the palace roof. The saddles, bridles, boots, anything made of leather, were green with mildew, the pistols and guns covered in rust. Time was running out. Yet somehow Catherwood continued to work. Within days they knew they had to leave. Each night brought ever more rain until they feared the thunder and lightning would bring the palace down on their heads. “On Thursday, the thirtieth of May, the storm opened with a whirlwind,” Stephens wrote. “At night the crash of falling trees rang through the forest, rain fell in deluges, the roaring of the thunder was terrific, and as we lay looking out, the aspect of the ruined palace, lighted by the glare of the lightening such as I never saw in this country, was grand; in fact, there was too much of the sublime and the terrible.”
In the morning, the courtyard and lower compartments of the palace were flooded. Catherwood worked on for another day. In less than three weeks of almost continuous labor, he had achieved the nearly impossible, capturing the essence of ruins on paper with more accuracy than anyone before him, especially the hundreds of hieroglyphic inscriptions. But he could go on no longer.
Two temples at Palenque. (Catherwood, top; Carlsen, bottom)
On May 31 he completed his last drawing. They packed up on Saturday, June 1, and “like rats leaving the sinking ship,” Stephens wrote, they left Palenque.
Catherwood was barely able to make it back to the village. The trail was nothing but mud and gullies, the earlier streams swelling now into small rivers. Climbing up the bank of one of the rivers, Catherwood’s mule fell backward and rolled onto him. Pawling was able to pull him free. He was uninjured but badly shaken and faint.
Once in the village he collapsed, shattered and exhausted. He improved only gradually. Meanwhile, Stephens returned to his notebooks, which he had neglected for days. A month earlier, when they arrived in Santo Domingo, they were gratified to learn that Walker and Caddy had survived their journey and not been murdered. Stephens was also well aware of the earlier explorations of Del Río, Dupaix, Galindo, and Waldeck, and he gave each his due in his book. In fact, he was determined to disclaim any credit for discovering Palenque and one of his first written comments about the ruins was to describe graffiti they found on the palace walls. Caddy’s and Walker’s names were there, and several others, including that of the logging entrepreneur Noah Platt, who had described the ruins to Stephens several years earlier.
Stephens would end up devoting two book chapters—thirty-six pages—solely to descrip
tion of the Palenque ruins. But he understood it would be Catherwood’s work that would make the difference, and elevate their book above all that had come before. “I uphold [Catherwood’s] drawings against these costly folios,” he wrote referring to Kingsborough’s and the French volumes. “And against every other book that has ever been published on the subject of these ruins.”
Thirty-four illustrations of Palenque would accompany Stephens’s text, all of them engraved from Catherwood’s drawings, sketches, maps, elevations, cross sections, and floor plans. One of Catherwood’s most important achievements was the three pages he devoted to the large, complex hieroglyphic panels they found in a structure that would later become famous as the Temple of Inscriptions.30 Double-page engravings would also show the lords of Palenque, large, imposing figures in elaborate, feathered headdresses carved into limestone slabs embedded in the walls of the other temples. Catherwood would give the world its best look at the beauty and strangeness of the great ruined city, and yet the truly sublime art of Palenque continued to defy two-dimensional representation on the page.
Palenque was not Copán. There Catherwood had been able to use his architect’s eye, his skill at shading and perspective, to capture the great depth of the sculpting and the three dimensions of the large stelae, altars, and other monuments. At Palenque there were no monoliths, no stone pillars and stelae. The art was on flat surfaces. Stephens and Catherwood were only able to find a single three-dimensional statue, with one side unfinished, apparently fashioned to be set against a wall. Over the next century and a half, however, excavations at Palenque would yield a wealth of three-dimensional sculpture, astonishing ceramic and stone figures, heads, and incense holders, some formed in a naturalistic style almost unique in the Maya world. This naturalistic approach, so unlike the formulaic method of sculpture found at many other Maya sites, would bring Palenque’s inhabitants to life, often revealing their distinctive personalities. In 1840, however, they lay buried under tons of earth and jungle. The bas-relief sculpting found on the walls by Stephens and Catherwood, though intricate and remarkably elegant, was simpler, the human form and face shown mostly in profile. It was accomplished on vertical surfaces in very shallow relief, a skill that reached an apogee at Palenque.
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