Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  Stephens was not immune. He also was unable at times to keep emotions, especially feelings of sheer wonderment and awe, from invading his prose. But, all told, the degree to which both men indulged in romantic sentiments was minor and they labored hard to represent the actual ruins, the structures, glyphs, and idols, as true to their originals as possible.

  For Catherwood the most difficult task came with the transfer of his artwork to engraving plates. In the field he had created innumerable pen and pencil sketches, other drawings with great exactitude using his camera lucida, and he painted many scenes in sepia and watercolor. These works had to be coordinated with Stephens’s text and reduced to single book-size images for the engravers to copy. Stephens decided that the fidelity of the illustrations was so important that no expense should be spared, and so he authorized Catherwood to hire the finest engravers in New York and London. But after seeing the results produced by the professionals’ engravings on wood, the perfectionist in Catherwood was not satisfied. “Though done with exquisite skill, and most effective as pictures,” Stephens later explained in the book, “they failed in giving the true character and expression of the originals; and at some considerable loss of time and money, were all thrown aside.” The surreal imagery of the stone monoliths, in particular their twisting, incongruous shadows, which Catherwood had captured with such depth and dimension at Copán, must have driven the engravers crazy.

  A decision was made to have them re-engrave the illustrations on steel, which would create extremely fine lines. “And, in my opinion,” Stephens wrote, “they are as true copies as can be presented; and, except the stones themselves, the reader cannot have better materials for speculation and study.” In the end, the book contained seventy-nine engravings and lithographs, including a map showing their route through Central America.7

  In Central America Stephens had filled notebooks with details, keenly aware of the material he would need when he returned. The corresponding scenes in the book emerge with startling immediacy. Though there is little question about his detailed descriptions of the ruins themselves, it is impossible to know how faithful his accounts are about people and events. Yet a reading of the book is likely to dispel any doubt about his commitment to get everything right—the people, landscapes, the interviews, and the “incidents.” He traveled most of the time with Catherwood, sometimes with others, and described a variety of occasions when others were present, including such figures as Morazán and Carrera, all of whom could have contradicted or challenged his accounts if inaccurate. Indeed, as with Catherwood’s illustrations, he openly professed the necessity to create as true an account as possible and was critical of others who took liberties or exaggerated what they found in travels and explorations.

  In May 1841 the text was completed. Stephens had written nearly nine hundred pages of crisp, engaging prose in less than ten months, a remarkable achievement. He delivered the manuscript to the Harper brothers at 82 Cliff Street along with a brief preface expressing his appreciation to former president Martin Van Buren for making it all possible. Still struggling with his engravers, Catherwood approved the last of the illustrations the next month and the two-volume set began rolling off Harper’s presses in July, less than a year after their return to New York.8

  For a hefty double volume on a stuffy subject like antiquities, the work was a stunningly popular success. Edgar Allan Poe, for one, declared it “magnificent.” In an abbreviated review published the month the book came out, he wrote that he had yet to receive a review copy but was so anxious to read it he borrowed and skimmed an advance copy from a friend. A bare-knuckled critic at times, Poe bowed before the clean, direct energy of Stephens’s prose, praising the book as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published.”9

  And despite its stodgy—though conventional at the time—title, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, the Harpers could not run their presses fast enough. “The appearance of the book,” wrote the United States Democratic Review, “was hailed by an instantaneous rush upon its publishers, who were for many days literally unable to bind and deliver copies in sufficient quantities to supply the still increasing demand.”10 The book went through twelve printings in the first three months with estimates of up to twenty thousand copies sold by December, an incredible number at the time and far outstripping the great success of Stephens’s previous books.11 It was quickly published in Britain as well, and there, as in the United States, it received almost universal acclaim. By February of the next year a French translation appeared and a German one was in the works.

  Title page from Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán.

  “We close this book with regret,” wrote the reviewer in the London Quarterly Review. “From the first page to the last, the animation, the characteristic energy, and the buoyant spirit of the author remain undiminished. The political details . . . would in themselves be sufficient to render the work one of high interest and permanent value.”12 As they had with his earlier book on Egypt and the Holy Land, the critics succumbed again to the charm of Stephens’s persona. “There is something exceedingly agreeable to a reader in the manner of Mr. Stephens,” noted one reviewer; “there is a good humor, a bonhomie about him, which is irresistibly fascinating. He is the very Democritus of travelers, laughing at inconveniences, which would make some men gnash their teeth and tear their hair in anguish, making the best of everything that turns up.”13

  The accolades were not confined to the book reviewers—or to comments on Stephens’s writing and persona. Historian William Hickling Prescott, then hard at work on his pioneering study of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, was greatly impressed. Four years earlier, publication of his book The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella had established him as a master of narrative history, renowned for his deep research, impartiality, and elegant writing. Publication of his Conquest of Mexico in 1843 would catapult him into the rank of one of the greatest historians of his time. Because of blindness he worked almost exclusively from his home in Boston, dictating his prose and relying on researchers in Spain. But he had traveled in 1838 to New York, where he and Stephens met for the first time right after Stephens’s debut book appeared.14 A friendship grew with their mutual interest in Spanish America.

  In a quick exchange of letters following his return from Mexico, Stephens summarized for Prescott some of his findings, which the historian found invaluable for his own book. Stephens told him the quality of the Central American ruins were equal to “the finest of the Egyptians” and “the buildings at Palenque and Uxmal are very large and really one can hardly help speaking of them extravagantly.”15 Prescott replied, expressing his astonishment that the structures were “so well executed.” He fully agreed with Stephens that the then-preeminent historian of the Americas, William Robertson, was probably wrong in his insistence that Native Americans were too primitive to have developed an advanced civilization.16 When Stephens’s book came out, Prescott dashed off a long letter to Stephens: “I cannot well express to you the satisfaction and delight I have received from your volumes. I suppose few persons will enjoy them more, as very few have been led to pay much attention to the subject. You have indeed much exceeded the expectations I had formed, which were not small.”17

  Prescott and other scholars were impressed with Stephens’s conservative approach regarding the portrayal of the ruins: not exaggerating their size or age as others had done but describing and showing them just as he and Catherwood found them. Aside from the adventures and close calls of the rest of his story, in the end it was the ruins that most captivated his readers. “[Stephens] avows that he does not attempt to solve the great question of the history of Central America,” wrote the New York Review, “but merely to furnish the as yet inexplicable and unexplained pages of that history . . . aided by the practiced eye and the obedient pencil of Mr. Catherwood.”18 The critics lavished praise on Catherwood, one calling him “one of the most accomplished an
d accurate draughtsman of the day.”19 Prescott wrote to Stephens that Catherwood’s drawings “carry with them a perfect assurance of his fidelity, in this how different from his predecessors who have never failed by some over-finish or by their touches for effect to throw an air of improbability, or at least uncertainty, over the whole.”20

  At the end of his book, Stephens took great care in addressing the question of who could have built these grand, seemingly ancient cities in the jungle. As a lawyer, he knew that his readers, like jurors, wanted a good summing up, and he felt he had accumulated enough facts to lay out very basic conclusions. And like a good attorney he coolly and rationally argued his case from the evidence. “Much learning and research have been expended upon insufficient or incorrect data, or when a bias had been given [as] a statement of facts,” he wrote. He insisted that he and Catherwood had come to the ruins with no preconceived bias and sought only to learn from what they found.

  As a result, he said, he felt compelled to strongly refute the persistent arguments that the ruins they found were left by Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Jews, Chinese, or Hindus, who had somehow migrated to America in the distant past. Having traveled personally among Old World ruins, he argued that the Central American and Mexican remains bore no resemblance to any Greek or Roman works. And having extensively studied the ancient architectures of Asia, he found no similarities with those, either.

  As for an Egyptian connection, he said, that theory was based primarily on the appearance of pyramidal structures in Egypt and the New World. But, he wrote, they are not the same. Egypt’s pyramids are four-sided and smooth, and come to a point. He and Catherwood found no such structures in the jungle among the ruins. At Uxmal, the pyramid is oval—despite Waldeck’s images—and in Palenque and Copán they appear as sloping terraced platforms with stairways up their sides and temples on top. He added: “The pyramidal form is one which suggests itself to human intelligence in every country as the simplest and surest mode of erecting a high structure upon a solid foundation.” Each pyramidal type also served a different function, he argued: in Egypt as burial places for the pharaohs and other high-status people, and in Central America as platforms apparently for worship and sacrifice.

  They also had found no columns in the ruins of Copán, Palenque, and Uxmal; in contrast, columns were a striking feature repeatedly used in the temples along the Nile.21 And there was nothing to be found in Egypt like Copán’s and Quiriguá’s huge isolated monoliths or stelae portraying strangely feathered lords and covered with hieroglyphs—which also bore no resemblance to the cartouches of Egypt.

  Eliminating the connection with the “Old World,” there appeared only one remaining possibility, he declared. The monuments and pyramids of Central America and Mexico are “different from the works of any other known people, of a new order, and entirely and absolutely anomalous: they stand alone.” Then Stephens drew his pioneering conclusion—a concept that flew in the face of prevailing scholarship, and that would prove prescient and ultimately correct:22

  Unless I am wrong, we have a conclusion far more interesting and wonderful than that of connecting the builders of these cities with the Egyptians or any other people. It is the spectacle of a people skilled in architecture, sculpture, and drawing, and, beyond doubt, other more perishable arts, and possessing the cultivation and refinement attendant upon these, not derived from the Old World, but originating and growing up here, without models or masters, having a distinct, separate, independent existence; like the plants and fruits of the soil, indigenous.

  Native Americans had built the cities, created the art, raised the towers, temples, and pyramids, and fashioned their own unique system of writing. This conclusion would forever alter the understanding of human history on the American continents and provide new insight into human cultural evolution.

  Stephens nonetheless remained cautious about the antiquity of the civilization he and Catherwood had found. Spanish explorers and conquistadors, after all, claimed to have seen large inhabited cities on Yucatán Peninsula as they first sailed along its coast in the early 1500s. And Hernán Cortés and his men reported in 1519 on the wonders of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, the site of modern-day Mexico City. Could those cities have been the same age as the ruins they explored in the jungle?

  Stephens focused also on the condition of the ruins themselves in questioning their antiquity. He said it was difficult to imagine the ruins surviving one or two thousand years in the face of the onslaught of tropical growth and decay. He was also puzzled by their discovery of wooden beams in the ruins, particularly the carved example he found at Uxmal “in a perfect state of preservation.” Finally, he said, the hieroglyphs on the bark paper codices taken by Spaniards from New Spain and later discovered in the libraries of Europe by Kingsborough resembled the hieroglyphs on the monuments they encountered in the forests. “The inference,” he wrote, “is that the Aztecs and Mexicans, at the time of the conquest, had the same written language with the people of Copán and Palenque.”

  Stephens based his speculations, however, on incomplete knowledge and unconnected data. He had no way of knowing, for example, that the Aztecs had no hieroglyphic written language, but only rudimentary pictographs. Or that the wooden beams they had found were made of rock-hard sapodilla wood, capable of holding up for more than a millennium.23 But he deserves credit for not venturing beyond the evidence he had accumulated, even if it meant possibly diminishing the significance of their discoveries by assigning the ruins a more modern age.

  We began our exploration without any theory to support. Our feelings were in favour of going back to a high and venerable antiquity. During the greater part of our journey we were groping in the dark, in doubt and uncertainty, and it was not until our arrival at the ruins of Uxmal that we formed our opinion of the comparatively modern date.

  However, he and Catherwood were uncertain.

  Some (ruins) are beyond doubt older than others; some are known to have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and others, perhaps, were really ruins before; and there are points of difference which as yet cannot very readily be explained.24

  They had, after all, spent too little time at Uxmal, and too many questions remained unanswered. Still, Stephens had expressed mixed feelings to others about going back. Furthermore, following the enormously positive reception of his book, he was offered an appointment as secretary to the U.S. legation in Mexico. He gave it serious thought but declined.25

  He still had not given up his dream of establishing a “National Museum of American Antiquities” and received pledges totaling twenty thousand dollars from well-off friends in New York to bring back artifacts and monuments to fill it. But he had been frustrated in all his attempts so far. The Payes brothers in Guatemala were still holding out for a huge sum to ship to New York one or more of the colossal monoliths at Quiriguá. He also received news that twenty-eight plaster molds Pawling had laboriously cast at Palenque had been confiscated by the Mexican authorities.26 And the ten-foot wooden beam carved with precious hieroglyphs from Uxmal, which Don Peon in Mérida had agreed to send to New York, never arrived.

  By late summer 1841, in the months after the book’s release, he and Catherwood were scheming again. The pull south was too powerful. Catherwood would once more have to leave his children, who would be sent back to London with their nanny to live with family members on Charles Square.27 Gertrude had disappeared from London with his cousin. In the end it was as if Catherwood and Stephens had no choice. They knew there was more. They had not finished what they started.

  Their success was now their greatest enemy, as the book probably had excited rivals. They had not heard yet of Walker and Caddy, and Stephens especially feared expeditions from Europe. They made up their minds to leave quickly and quietly, no later than October. He told Prescott of their intentions but asked him to keep their confidence. “We wish to get off without any newspaper flourishes,” he wrote Prescott in September, two weeks be
fore they put to sea. “We wish to complete what we have begun before others can interfere with us.”28 And this time, they would carry with them an unusual apparatus, which may have added to their reasons for going. Technologically, they were on the cutting edge. This time they hoped to bring back more than words and drawings.

  16

  Yucatán

  In their quest for lost worlds, Stephens and Catherwood could never seem to get enough hardship and danger. Faced once more with mosquitoes, ticks, disease, and political upheaval, they chose to sail south again into the heart of yet another hurricane season—as they had two years before—pressing to reach Yucatán for the start of the dry season. And they did so in classic Stephens and Catherwood fashion—aboard a ship carrying six hundred kegs of gunpowder.

  They left New York on October 9, 1841, aboard the sailing ship Tennessee, bound directly for the Yucatán port of Sisal. The gunpowder belowdecks was headed for the newly independent Yucatán government in its fight with Mexico. The risk of hurricanes seemed like nothing to the two men now. On the fourth night out, they looked up to see lightning flash across the sky. With a storm approaching, Stephens wrote, long, jagged spears of light shot down to the sea “as if expressly to ignite our gunpowder.” A quick meeting was called. “We discussed, though rather disjointedly, the doctrine of conductors and non-conductors, and advised the captain to put a few links of chain around the mainmast, and carry the end over the side. We had some consolation in thinking that six hundred kegs were no worse than sixty, and that six would do our business. . . .” The next morning the sea had calmed; they had survived once more.