Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  The artists did their work in two media: on limestone or with lime stucco or plaster. They perfected their carving technique on extremely fine-grained limestone, some of the densest and smoothest in Mesoamerica. The material allowed them to sculpt in exquisite detail with sharp edges. While the stone’s hardness did not permit the depth of the sculpting in the softer stone of Copán and Quiriguá, the limestone’s density allowed the hard-cut details of Palenque’s art to survive more than a millennium of moisture, heat, and vegetative growth. Likewise, the very fine plaster they used, which hardened to concrete-like toughness, was built up only so far off the flat surface as if to replicate the limestone carvings, and it too was molded into reliefs of exacting delicacy. The meticulousness of the artists had reached such a level that in some cases each layer was painted even though it was to be covered over with another layer of plaster. “They dressed these figures,” writes archaeologist Merle Greene Robertson, “as though they were real humans, first the underwear, then the jaguar skirts, aprons, loincloths, and last the beads and feathers. However, each piece of clothing was first painted with a thin layer of lime stucco and then color put on top, even when another garment was to cover the first.”31

  The hieroglyphs, masterfully carved and molded, and carrying within them a record of Palenque’s dynastic history, must have presented the toughest challenge to the city’s artists. As they fashioned the intricate glyphs into small oblong forms, similar to the Egyptian cartouche, the figures and shapes sometimes displayed only subtle differences. The glyphs were remarkably complex, a written language passed down through generations of scribes. Catherwood struggled just in outlining them on paper; it seems unimaginable to have carved or molded them. He had little more than two weeks to reproduce it all, not only the glyphs but also the stuccoed and carved figures, the temples with their complicated roof combs, the palace and its courtyards, and he did so with extraordinary accuracy. Still, the true magnificence of Palenque’s art eluded capture. It would eventually take photography with dramatic lighting to even come close.

  Bas relief inside a Palenque temple. (Catherwood)

  Stephens scrupulously documented what they had found. He could rhapsodize with the best romantics of his day, but he disdained factual exaggeration and inaccuracy. Palenque had been described earlier as an immense city, occupying miles of ground east and west of the palace. In one article in the United States, Stephens later noted that it had been reported the site occupied an area ten times the size of New York City; in another, that it was three times the size of London. With firsthand knowledge of the site, he believed there was no evidence for these claims. It was entirely possible, he wrote, that the city had indeed been large, especially if most of the populace lived, as such did in ancient Egypt, in “frail and perishable” huts similar to those occupied by the Indians in the nearby villages. As for other such remains covering a vast area, it was impossible to know or claim to know. “The whole country for miles around is covered by a dense forest of gigantic trees,” he wrote, “with a growth of brush and underwood . . . impenetrable in any direction except by cutting a way with a machete. Without a guide, we might have gone within a hundred feet of all the buildings without discovering one of them.”

  Today, more of Palenque’s remains are still being unearthed. In the years 1998 to 2000, fifteen hundred structures were mapped in the area surrounding Palenque’s urban core, four times the number located only fifteen years earlier.32 Stephens’s guess was right that a large city was possible but no one could have known or claimed it in 1840.

  But it was not the size of Palenque that struck wonder in Stephens. And within the bounds of what they had found, he felt free to let his imagination loose:

  What we had before our eyes was grand, curious and remarkable enough. Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations; reached their golden age, and perished, entirely unknown. We lived in the ruined palace of their kings; we went up to their desolate temples and fallen altars; and wherever we moved we saw the evidence of their taste, their skill in arts, their wealth and power. In the midst of desolation and ruin we looked back to the past, cleared away the gloomy forest, and fancied every building perfect, with its terraces and pyramids, its sculptured and painted ornaments, grand, lofty, and imposing, and overlooking an immense inhabited plain; we called back into life the strange people who gazed at us in sadness from the walls; pictured them, in fanciful costumes and adorned with plumes of feathers, ascending the terraces of the palace and the steps leading to the temples; and often we imagined a scene of unique and gorgeous beauty and magnificence.

  Stuck in the village while Catherwood recovered, Stephens made the most of the extra time. He discovered that the six thousand acres surrounding the ruins was for sale by the state of Chiapas and had been for two years with no buyers, and to his amazement the offer included the ruins at no extra cost. The appraised value of the whole lot was estimated at fifteen hundred dollars. As with Copán and Quiriguá, Stephens’s interest in Palenque ran deeper than just capturing it in words and images. He desired to put the Americas on the world map with a museum that rivaled the great institutions of Europe. Pieces from Palenque would provide an incredible start. Stephens was never able to suppress his American entrepreneurial instincts. “I would fit up the palace and re-people the old city of Palenque,” he wrote excitedly, no doubt thinking of the dry season, a hotel or two, and a lemonade concession. Just how serious he was—it is never certain with Stephens—proved moot almost immediately. A “difficulty” arose that he could not easily surmount. In order to own land, a foreigner must be married to a “daughter of the country.” Stephens looked around. Santo Domingo was a small place. “The oldest (available) young lady was not more than fourteen,” he explained, “and the prettiest woman, who already had contributed to our happiness (she made our cigars), was already married.”

  There was another possibility. Two sisters occupied one of the best houses in town, which also happened to contain two carved stone tablets from the ruins. Stephens already had his eye on the house with the thought of renting it if he returned to spend more time in the ruins. Both sisters were about forty, one a widow and the other single, and both, he said, “equally interesting and equally interested.” Ownership of the ruins, a nice house, and two extraordinary stone tablets was tempting. But since there were two sisters it was a very delicate situation. Then new information changed everything. He learned he could purchase the ruins in the name of the American consul in the nearby port town of Laguna de Términos. The consul, Charles Russell, already owned large properties through his Mexican wife. Stephens quickly made arrangements with Pawling, who agreed to act as Stephens’s purchasing agent and return to Palenque from Laguna with the consul’s authorization and Stephens’s funds, assuming Russell was game. Pawling was also charged with returning with enough “plaster of Paris” to make castings of the ruins’ carved and stuccoed reliefs and arrange for their transport to New York.

  Catherwood, meanwhile, had recovered enough after three days that they were able to take their leave. They rode through the town saying their farewells and after a day’s ride reached a convent and a tributary of the mighty Usumacinta River, which in the ancient past had served as the major water route between Palenque and the great Maya cities buried and unknown in the lowland forests to the east.

  Their expedition, however, was headed the other way, northwest down the river to the Gulf of Mexico. Their final destination was Yucatán and they would take the sea route north to get there. But before stepping aboard the canoe and setting off, Stephens had one more goodbye:

  He had carried me more than two thousand miles, over the worst roads that a mule ever traveled. He stood tied to the door of the convent; saw the luggage, and even his own saddle, carried away by hand, and seemed to have a presentiment that something unusual was going on. I threw my arms around his neck; his eyes had a mournful
expression, and at that moment he forgot the angry prick of the spur. I laid aside the memory of a toss from his back and ineffectual attempts to repeat it, and we remembered only the mutual kind offices and good-fellowship. Tried and faithful companion, where are you now? I left him, with two others, tied at the door of the convent, to be taken by the sexton to the prefect at Palenque, there to recover from the debilitating influence of the early rains, and to roam on rich pasture-grounds, untouched by bridle and spur, until I should return to mount him again.

  14

  Uxmal

  There was nothing pleasant about the journey on the Usumacinta to the Gulf of Mexico. Clouds of mosquitoes patrolled the river and attacked the men at every opportunity; alligators watched ominously from the banks or floated just under the waterline. Frequent rain squalls compounded their misery. They were wet, crammed together in the bottom of the boat, and barely slept. It took several days but finally they floated through a vast flat swampland, crossed the Laguna de Términos, pulled into the Gulf port town of Laguna—and there found themselves in the middle of yet another revolution. Yucatán government leaders had just declared their state independent from the central authorities in Mexico City. But so far this revolt bore scant resemblance to the violent conflict they had left behind in Central America. In nearby villages and towns the insurrectionists drew little blood as they deposed central party officials. In the port of Laguna, the rebels of the Liberal party declared their allegiance to the new Yucatán state, then disarmed the Mexican army garrison and ran the soldiers out of town.

  Despite the political turmoil, Stephens and Catherwood were greatly relieved as they came ashore. The town seemed like heaven, filled with shops, cafés, and cantinas, a thriving depot for the export of logwood from the country’s interior to the United States and Europe. A dozen ships lay at anchor. It was an important enough settlement to merit a U.S. consul, and Charles Russell was sitting on his porch when Stephens and Catherwood strode up to greet him. “The wear and tear of our wardrobe [was] manifest to the most indifferent observer.”

  It had been more than seven months since they had seen the waters of the Caribbean. And New York felt closer than ever when a ship master sitting with Russell, who had just sailed in directly from New York, handed them some newspapers and passed along other news of the city. To Stephens’s delight, he recognized the man, whom he identified only as Captain Fensley. He turned out to be another acquaintance from New York whom Stephens had consulted about Mexico before departing the year before.

  Stephens and Catherwood’s plan was to hire a bungo, a large sailing canoe, and head north up the coast to Yucatán seaport of Campeche, but they learned it was occupied by Mexican troops and under siege by the rebels. Captain Fensley, leaving soon to return to New York, agreed to take them beyond Campeche to the port of Sisal, where they could continue their journey to Mérida and their final destination, the ruins of Uxmal.1

  Over the several days it took Fensley to ready his brig for the voyage, Stephens made financial arrangements with Russell, who agreed to help him buy Palenque and send parts of it to New York for his projected museum. Letters were drafted authorizing Pawling to return to Santo Domingo and act as their agent. And, as if matters were not going well enough, it also happened that the consul had a few extra barrels of plaster of Paris left from construction of his recently built house. Pawling now had all the materials he needed to make molds at the ruins. He accompanied Stephens and Catherwood out to Fensley’s ship for final farewells. “We had gone through such rough scenes together that it may be supposed we did not separate with indifference,” wrote Stephens in his best understated prose. Juan continued on to Sisal with them, where Stephens would make arrangements, as he had promised, to send him back to Guatemala.

  In a few days they were anchored off Sisal. After briefly entertaining the idea of staying aboard the ship all the way to New York, now less than three weeks away by sea, Stephens and Catherwood resolved to press on to Uxmal, their final objective, even if it meant dodging their way through yet another revolution. They entered Sisal along a pier under an old Spanish fort and were immediately challenged for their passports by several armed soldiers. Yet little else told them a rebellion was under way. Instead, moderation appeared to be the rule of the day, something they had seen little of in Central America.

  The next day they were in Mérida, a handsome city of thirty-five thousand residents, with a hotel on the main plaza that reminded them of the comforts of Europe. Stephens was hoping to meet another acquaintance from New York, a Mérida resident named Simon Peon, whom he had encountered the year before at a Fulton Street hotel where Stephens often dined. When Stephens had mentioned that he was soon heading south in search of ruins, Peon invited him to his hacienda, where some ruins were located—the remains of the old city of Uxmal.

  Stephens and Catherwood went to pay Don Peon a visit and were taken aback to see that the Peon family lived in a mansion that took up nearly half of one side of the central Plaza de Armas. The building had been constructed hundreds of years earlier by Francisco de Montejo, the Spanish conquistador who subdued most of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1546, after nineteen years of bloody fighting. The entrance to the residence was one of the most imposing in all of Mexico. It was framed by Corinthian columns and topped by an ornate balcony. The Montejo coat of arms was set in the wall, flanked on each side by sculptured figures of two giant Spanish soldiers holding pikes and crushing under their feet the heads of four howling Indians.

  Don Peon was not at home. His mother, Doña Joaquina, invited them in and explained that her son was at the Uxmal hacienda and due back in Mérida soon. When Stephens suggested they leave immediately in the hope of catching him there, Doña Joaquina offered to make the necessary arrangements and provide them with a guide.

  The next day, while the arrangements were being made, Stephens and Catherwood had a chance to take in some of Mérida society. The scene around the plaza seemed remarkably normal considering the state was in the midst of rebellion. In fact, independence from Mexico now seemed assured and peace at hand, at least temporarily, after news arrived that the Mexican army garrison at Campeche had surrendered. There was a flurry of activity, including promenades under the arched corridors surrounding the plaza and a procession celebrating one of the church’s biggest annual festivals, the Feast of Corpus Christi. In Stephens’s typical whirlwind fashion, in the space of a day, the two men were able to attend the service at the cathedral, take in the festival procession, call upon a lady with a beautiful daughter, pay a visit to Mérida’s bishop (“a man several feet around,” Stephens observed, “handsomely dressed, and in a chair made to fit”), and then finish with a night at the theater. At six thirty the next morning, they were on the road to Uxmal.

  The two men quickly discovered that northern Yucatán was nothing like the lush, wet mountains surrounding Palenque 280 miles to the south. The peninsula was, instead, an immense, flat bed of carbonates, mostly limestone, created over millions of years from accumulated layers of coral and other sea sediment. Once underwater, the Yucatán plateau now barely rises above the warm shallow sea surrounding it. Its thin, stony topsoil is more like chalk than loam, adequate enough for cattle and a few hardy crops like hemp and corn, but bone-dry more than half the year. Low tropical “dry” forests of short trees and scrub scratch out an existence on a terrain devoid of any rivers or streams. Water collects during the rainy seasons in low depressions or soaks through cracks in the limestone into subterranean caverns and streams. Access to water during the dry season is mainly through cave entrances and sinkholes that open onto startlingly beautiful underground pools called cenotes, some many feet deep, scattered by the hundreds across the peninsula—or from man-made cisterns and reservoirs constructed to store rainwater.

  The road the two men took was stony and rough; it cut through the scrub forest. Three miles out they came to the Peon family’s first hacienda, a hemp plantation. The hacienda consisted of a large stone house
, beside which sat a giant stone tank twelve feet deep and filled with much-needed water. Nine miles farther on they came to the next Peon hacienda, where they ate breakfast. The sun beat down mercilessly, and the heat became more and more oppressive with each mile. Each hacienda seemed more imposing than the last. This one had its own church, a large cross over the door. Fifteen hundred Indians lived as tenants on the property in a form of feudal bondage, dependent on the Peon family for their water during the dry season. Every hacienda was run by a majordomo, usually of mixed blood, who managed the operation for the Peons.

  Their guide suggested the young mestizo majordomo call for a coach to carry them to the next stop, due to the heat. From the belfry of the church he put out a call, not unlike, Stephens noted, the call to prayer from a Muslim minaret. Within fifteen minutes two dozen Indians appeared and began hacking at nearby trees and shrubs with their machetes. They quickly laid down poles and bound them together with hemp until they had built two platforms covered by branches bent like bows above. Grass hammocks were hung from the poles and matting was stretched over the branches to block the sunlight. Six Indians were chosen as carriers for each coach. Stephens and Catherwood crawled inside and were soon on their way. “In the great relief we experienced,” Stephens wrote, “we forgot our former scruples against making beasts of burden of men. They were not troubled with any sense of indignity, and the weight was not much. There were no mountains.”