Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  Many miles later they arrived at an immense hacienda, again surrounded by huge water tanks. Catherwood, still recovering from the Palenque ordeal, fell into his hammock in a large, empty suite of rooms while Stephens went off to investigate a natural pool nearby. Surprised to find a large opening in the ground—his first cenote—he sent immediately for Catherwood. “It was a large cavern or grotto with a roof of broken, overhanging rock,” he wrote, “and at the bottom water pure as crystal, still and deep, resting on a bed of white limestone rock. It was the very creation of romance; a bathing-place for Diana and her nymphs.” The two men plunged in with “feelings of boyish exultation” and swam around the basin until dark.

  At dawn they were on horseback again, riding under a savage sun until midday, when they finally arrived at the Peons’ Uxmal hacienda. They had covered fifty miles in two and a half days but Don Peon had already left for the city and somehow they had missed him along the way. They were so dehydrated and drained of energy that they took immediately to their hammocks for a siesta.

  The hacienda was similar to the others, complete with chapel and water tanks, but it was much older and rougher in appearance, with an “unwholesome sensation of dampness,” Stephens recalled. There were also two majordomos, one of whom was a young Spaniard who, to their surprise, had recently arrived from New York, where he had served as a waiter at Delmonico’s, one of Stephens’s favorite restaurants. Don Peon, while in New York, had persuaded him to come south, saying he would train him to manage several of his family’s haciendas. However, the young man confessed to Stephens that he missed New York dearly, already nostalgic for the opera and Delmonico’s, where a friend who accompanied him to New York still worked as head chocolate maker. Stephens began to feel Yucatán was so close to New York by water it seemed like a suburb of the city, if a stony and unbearably hot one. Now only Uxmal stood between them and their return home, and the ruins lay just a mile away.

  Stephens was anxious to go. The two men set out on foot that afternoon, but Catherwood soon began to feel ill and turned back to the hacienda. When Stephens later breathlessly reported what he found—“mounds of ruins, and vast buildings on terraces and pyramidal structures, grand and in good preservation, richly ornamented, without a bush to obstruct the view, and in picturesque effect almost equal to the ruins of Thebes”—Catherwood, grumpy, and out of sorts with exhaustion and illness, brushed Stephens off as “romancing.” The next day, however, he made the trek to Uxmal and pronounced Stephens’s earlier description an understatement.

  Both men were incredulous. Here was the fifth major set of ruins they had encountered, each one magnificent, each different, and yet somehow mysteriously similar. Another large, obviously civilized city, filled with sophisticated sculpture, ornate architectural wonders, and yet, Stephens noted, not a word of its history known.2 The Peon family deed went back 140 years and the ruins were listed only as Las Casas de Piedra, the houses of stone. The current name of the ruins, Uxmal, had been taken from the hacienda.

  Catherwood wasted no time getting to work. Fortunately the site was relatively open and the views unobstructed because the forest that had encroached on it had been cut down the year before, primarily to allow for the planting of corn. Some clearing may also have been ordered by Waldeck four years earlier. In one day, Catherwood managed to make an important series of sketches. The most detailed captured a broad vista of the ruins including a towering pyramid, which the Indians called “the house of the dwarf,” based on a local legend, and a flamboyantly decorated nearby building they called “the Nunnery.” He then explored the ruins’ most imposing edifice, called the “House of the Governor” because of its massive size and elaborate stonework. He diagrammed the enormous platform on which the building stood and made a floor plan of the twenty-five rooms within the building, while Stephens measured and took down the dimensions. Late in the afternoon, Catherwood also made rough sketches of sections of the building’s long façade, struggling again to capture new and entirely different kinds of stonework, incomprehensible mosaics the two of them had never seen before.

  It was a promising start. That night, however, Catherwood was consumed by a violent fever, the symptom of a serious attack of malaria compounded by his already weakened and exhausted state. Later it would fall to Stephens to convey in words most of what they had found at Uxmal, barely aided this time by Catherwood’s abbreviated work. At the moment, he was in fear for Catherwood’s life. Although the fever broke the next afternoon, the two men decided to go back to Mérida immediately. They now understood how convenient Yucatán was to New York and agreed they could easily return later to complete the work at Uxmal and follow up on reports and rumors of other ruins on the peninsula. They also knew from an encounter they had at Sisal that a Spanish brig was due to sail within days for Havana. If they left early the next morning they might arrive at Sisal before it departed. They informed the majordomo of their intention and he climbed the belfry of the chapel. Soon Indians were busy piecing together a coach for Catherwood.

  They left at three in the morning, Catherwood in the coach on the shoulders of Indian carriers and Stephens on horseback carrying a letter from the junior majordomo to his friend, the Delmonico chocolate maker. The moon was high as Stephens followed behind the coach. “The stillness broken only by the shuffle of their feet,” he wrote, “and under my great apprehension for [Catherwood’s] health, it almost seemed as if I were following his bier.” During the morning they stopped at two villages for relief carriers, then set out the last twenty-seven miles to Mérida. They arrived in the city late at night after almost twenty-four hours on the road. The next morning they met with Don Peon, who was preparing to leave for Uxmal to meet them. Seeing Catherwood’s condition, he promised that if they returned he would join them at Uxmal and help make a thorough investigation of the ruins.

  At Stephens’s request, Peon agreed to ship two items from Uxmal to New York. The first was a sculptured stone figurehead from above one of the doors of the Governor’s House, “the face of a death’s head, with wings expanded, and rows of teeth projecting,” which today is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.3 Peon had already removed it from the building with the intention of setting it up as an ornament at the hacienda. The second was a fallen wooden lintel that Stephens and Catherwood found leaning against the wall inside the Governor’s House. Stephens considered the heavy beam invaluable because on it was carved a line of hieroglyphic characters similar to those they had seen at Copán and Palenque, providing a crucial link that tied the ruins at the three distant sites together. “There are at Uxmal no ‘idols,’ as at Copán; not a single stuccoed figure or carved tablet, as at Palenque,” he later explained. “Except for this beam of hieroglyphics, though searching earnestly, we did not discover any one absolute point of resemblance.” The wooden beam never made it to New York, for reasons unknown.

  At dusk after a heavy rainfall, Catherwood and Stephens set out by carriage for Sisal. On the way they met a detachment of Yucatán soldiers who had just arrived from their victory at Campeche. A short time later they congratulated the victorious general and his officers trailing behind. The short revolution appeared to be a success. Just before dawn they arrived at the port and almost immediately boarded the Spanish brig Alexandre. Two hours later they were under way, headed for Havana. It was June 24, only a week short of nine months—what seemed a lifetime—since they had sailed out of New York Harbor.

  Despite the hardships, physical obstacles, and threats of violence they had to overcome, Stephen and Catherwood knew they had accomplished an enormous amount, well beyond what they had imagined before the start of their journey. They had found Quiriguá, explored Copán, Toniná, and Palenque, and carefully recorded each in words and images. And even though their stay at Uxmal was frustratingly short, it was enough for them to weave its ruins into the pattern they saw emerging of a widespread, sophisticated civilization—still of unknown antiquity and origin—but an
advanced society and culture no one knew existed. What else, they wondered, still lay out there undiscovered in the jungle? And how soon would they be able to return to find out?

  Though Catherwood’s health was compromised, they felt tremendous relief that only water now separated them from home. The captain told them they would be in Havana in a week, and from there the two men expected to find quick passage to New York. But after four days sailing in light winds along the coast of the peninsula, they had covered no more than 150 miles by the captain’s reckoning. Then the wind stopped altogether.

  The sun was intensely hot, the sea of glassy stillness, and all day a school of sharks were swimming around the brig. From this time we had continued calms, and the sea was like a mirror, heated and reflecting the heat. On the Fourth of July there was the same glassy stillness, with light clouds, but fixed and stationary. The captain said we were incantado or enchanted, and really it almost seemed so.

  They had hoped to celebrate the Fourth of July with the U.S. consul in Havana. But day after day the ship drifted on the open sea, not a speck of land on the horizon. It seemed impossible at this point, after so many months of hard travel, to be floating aimlessly, going nowhere. The two men worked their way through every book in the ship’s library, mostly French novels translated into Spanish, with one exception they were not anxious to read: a history of “awful” shipwrecks. They idled the time away watching the sharks, eventually catching and eating two of them as provisions began to dwindle. On the July 12 the brig swung into a fast current, but the air remained a dead calm. The mate’s soundings stopped at 120 fathoms, still short of the bottom. “At this time our best prospect was that of reaching Havana in the midst of the yellow fever season, sailing from there in the worst of the hurricane months, and quarantine at Staten Island.” That is, if they ever got to Havana. The captain, a thirty-year veteran of the sea, sailed by reckoning and there was no chronometer aboard to take longitudinal readings. Catherwood’s chronometer was old, badly beaten up from their journey and now unreliable. Only able to guess where they were, the captain was growing anxious that they had entered the Gulf Stream and would be carried beyond Havana and out into the Atlantic.

  There were eight other passengers aboard, all Spanish, as well as nine crewmen and the captain. Food stores were running low, but the real concern was water. On the thirteenth they opened the last barrel. There were more sharks than ever, as if sensing time was running out.

  Then, on the fifteenth, three weeks out from Sisal, a slight breeze came up, sending a jolt of hope through the ship.

  A short time later salvation appeared as a tiny blip on the horizon. The captain headed leeward with all speed and slowly, ecstatically, they closed in on a sailing vessel bearing an American flag. They lowered the “jolly boat,” and since the captain was unable to speak English, Stephens and Catherwood were dispatched. But the jolly boat’s seams had opened while lying on the brig’s deck in the scorching sun and water poured in. The boat was half-full in minutes. Stephens and Catherwood sat up on the gunwales watching the sharks “playing around us,” and urged the crew to row harder. As they approached the American ship, its crew grew suspicious and claimed they were pirates. “But the captain,” Stephens wrote, “a long, cool-headed down-easter, standing on the quarter with both hands in his pockets, and seeing the sinking condition of our boat, said ‘Them’s no pirates.’”

  Once on board, Stephens could hardly believe it when the captain told them his ship was headed directly for New York. The vessel, named the Helen Maria, was carrying a full load of logwood out of Tabasco, but the captain agreed to take Stephens and Catherwood aboard. He had barely enough food for his crew, and now with two more passengers he had none to spare. Even so, he agreed to send a supply of water over to the Alexandre. He also provided the Spanish captain with the coordinates of their location. The Spaniard had miscalculated greatly. After twenty-one days at sea his brig was only two hundred miles from Sisal.

  Stephens and Catherwood returned briefly to the Alexandre for farewells. They shook hands all around. “They were not sorry to get rid of us, for the absence of two mouths was an object,” explained Stephens, who learned later that the brig made it to Havana safely, although in wretched condition and without a crumb of food aboard.

  Sixteen days later, Stephens and Catherwood sailed into New York Harbor. They arrived just short of ten months from the day they had left.

  15

  “Magnificent”

  Stephens and Catherwood were more than ready to embrace the civilized comforts of New York again. However, any relief the city might have provided Catherwood—his health uncertain—was short-lived. Waiting for him was a letter from his older brother James explaining that on the date he was living in the stone palace at Palenque, their mother, Anne, had died in London. There was more. It also appeared that his marriage was in some danger and James advised him to come to London as soon as possible. Catherwood booked passage and sailed for England sometime in August, less than a month after he landed in New York.1

  When he arrived in London weeks later, there was an ugly confrontation with Gertrude. In his letter James had explained to his brother that during his time in Central America Gertrude had moved out of the family home at Charles Square as their mother’s health declined and had taken up lodgings in Charlotte Street, Portland-Place. James added that she was also receiving visits from a notorious brawler and inebriate, Henry Beresford, the marquis of Waterford.2 Catherwood remembered Beresford from their brief travel together in Palestine six years earlier. Apparently during his “Grand Tour” of the Mediterranean, the marquis had also become acquainted with Gertrude in Beirut. The two of them crossed paths again in London. Catherwood now demanded to know if they were lovers. What was spoken between them during their confrontation was never fully disclosed but, as his attorney later described it, Catherwood afterward was convinced of “his dishonor and her perfidy.”3 The news, however, was worse than Catherwood had imagined. Gertrude was having an affair not with Beresford but with a family member, his second cousin, Henry Caslon.

  Catherwood must have reeled at the discovery. The Caslon and Catherwood families had been especially close: Frederick’s father, John James, had been a partner in a letterpress foundry with the Caslons, who were related to the Catherwoods through James’ and Frederick’s mother, Anne.4 James later testified that he had accompanied his brother to the Charlotte Street house for his meeting with Gertrude. He said he was not present for most of the conversation but did hear Gertrude tell his brother at the end: “You shall keep the children.” She had no intention of breaking off with Caslon. At this, Catherwood gathered up his son and two daughters, one of whom he barely knew, and left for Charles Square. His long absence in Central America had cost him dearly and he must have weighed over and over whether the journey with Stephens was worth the neglect of his family and loss of his wife. But he was furious with his cousin, an emotion that would not leave him.

  With reconciliation impossible, he had no intention of staying in London as his panorama business and his work with Stephens required he return to New York as quickly as possible. Devastated by the loss of the two women closest in his life, he sailed within weeks for New York, arriving in October with his three children and their nanny.5

  Stephens, meanwhile, had plunged almost immediately into work on his book. He was a demon writer and the ferocious pace of his writing put intense pressure on Catherwood to begin work on the illustrations as soon as he got back. Stephens no doubt expressed great sympathy for Catherwood and his personal troubles; he may even have felt some guilt concerning them. Yet there was little time for Catherwood to brood, and returning to work may have been the best salve for his wounds. While Stephens had always been a fast and fluid writer, now he felt added urgency, fearing that another account of the Central American ruins, including illustrations, might be published ahead of theirs. Indeed, the two men were aware that Caddy and Walker had survived their return to Belize. />
  We have no account of Catherwood’s physical health during this period but a friend described him as depressed. His anger so consumed him that in December he arranged for charges to be brought in London against Caslon, accusing him of “criminal conversation” with Gertrude, a Victorian-era euphemism for illicit intercourse. Such legal actions, similar to “alienation of affection” lawsuits in the United States at the time, permitted a husband or wife to bring charges against their spouse’s lover for monetary damages. It would be a year before Catherwood’s lawsuit would go to trial. Meanwhile, the upbringing of his children and work on the book were more than enough to preoccupy him. And while his panorama business must have taken up some of his time, it also appeared to be running smoothly under his partner’s supervision.6

  The book presented a serious challenge. For Catherwood, the priority was to make sure the illustrations represented the truest possible copies of the ruins as they had found them. He and Stephens were acutely aware of the ransacking force that tropical nature exerted on the ruins. They themselves had suffered its abuses. And they were aware also that the sites might be altered and even destroyed through excavations and removal, especially after their book was published. In fact, Stephens was already planning such removals with the justification that the artifacts and monuments would be better preserved if they were shipped to the United States and housed safely in a museum—and, of course, securely away from Europeans.

  Yet even if their intention was to remain faithful to the ruins and preserve them for history, the two men were also creatures of their time. The overriding artistic impulse of the day was “romanticism,” with its emphasis on infusing nature with emotion and drama. It was a filter from which they could not, like most artists of their era, entirely escape. It can be seen in some of Catherwood’s backgrounds, where hills and volcanoes appear exaggerated, roots and vines take on snakelike qualities, and his dramatic use of light and dark in the forests leaves viewers with a feeling of ominous, enveloping decay. It was as if his emotional response to the lushness and menace of the jungle had freed him from the dry precision of his work in Egypt and the Holy Land. That precision, however, never left him when it came to the stone monuments and temples themselves, which he depicted with the utmost accuracy.