Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  Aboard ship with them was Dr. Samuel Cabot Jr., a young Boston surgeon who at the last minute had joined the expedition principally to indulge a passion for ornithology, but also to help investigate the ruins and practice medicine when the need presented itself.1 A naturalist, physician, former top boxer at Harvard College, and master fencer, he seemed to have all the qualifications for the rough-and-tumble journey ahead—though whether he had Stephens and Catherwood’s panache for life-or-death adventure was yet to be proven. What must he have thought when five days after barely surviving detonation from lightning, the Tennessee was being driven by gale-force winds straight at a treacherous range of coral in the Bahamas known as the Abaco reef. Their true peril became apparent when the captain appeared at breakfast, his forehead gleaming with huge drops of sweat betraying his distress. “We sat with the chart before us,” Stephens wrote, “looking at it as a sentenced convict might look at an advertisement of the time fixed for his execution. The sunken rocks seemed to stand out horribly on the paper.” Hours later and just in time, the wind shifted and Stephens and Catherwood survived one more in a seemingly endless series of close calls, much to Cabot’s relief. Ten days later they were anchored off the port of Sisal.

  While they waited for the custom officials to allow them ashore, Stephens wrote his father about the anxiety he felt over how he would be received: “I am not quite as confident as when I had a diplomatic commission. An hour on shore would enable me to advise you whether the people remember my former dignity and pay me the respect due to fallen greatness.”2 He need not have worried. Arriving in Mérida the next day, Stephens found himself a celebrity; news accounts of his book had preceded them. And since the book had described the generosity and grace of Yucatán society, he and Catherwood were welcomed warmly by their former acquaintances. Per usual they found themselves in the middle of a fiesta, the more positive of the two situations they routinely encountered in their travels, the other being revolution. As for the political revolt during their first visit and Yucatán’s succession from Mexico, it was still afoot, though at such a low level as to be barely noticeable. The biggest news was Yucatán’s recent alliance with the Republic of Texas against the Mexican government.3 The nine-day Festival of San Cristobal was winding down, thus their first priority was to plunge in and enjoy it. Next a visit to the governor, then the social rounds, and finally they were ready for business.

  They unpacked the new technology they hoped would help them capture exact images of the ruins. Two years earlier, the first photographic instrument, called a daguerreotype, was demonstrated in New York—exactly two days after Stephens and Catherwood left for Central America. Just before their current voyage, they were able to acquire one. Now they needed to figure out how to make it work. So they set themselves up in the living room of their rented house as Mérida’s first ladies’ portrait studio. “It was a new line for us,” wrote Stephens, “but not worse than for the editor of a newspaper to turn captain of a steamboat; and, besides, it was not like banking—we could not injure anyone by a failure.”

  They practiced first on themselves, then invited the public. Since they were not asking for money, they reserved the right to pick their subjects—pretty young ladies, who began showing up at their door almost immediately. It was a difficult process, requiring perfect stillness from the young women for exactly ninety seconds while the camera lens was opened. Developing the images was equally delicate, a process of bathing the copper photographic plates with mercury and other chemicals in a darkroom. It was pioneering work at the leading edge of a new technology, but after a number of failures and successes over several days, Catherwood felt he had mastered the apparatus sufficiently that they could close up shop and head into the field.

  There was one more venture before the expedition left for the ruins. They learned that many Méridanos suffered from an eye condition called strabismus, or cross-eyes, and Dr. Cabot offered to perform at no charge a new surgical technique that could correct the condition simply by cutting one of the contracted muscles of the eye. It is debatable how much practice, if any, Cabot had in performing the surgery. He would go on later to become one of Boston’s most distinguished surgeons. But at twenty-six, he had finished advanced surgical studies in Paris only six months earlier. And in a letter his mother wrote to Cabot’s brother, Elliott, she noted that young Samuel saw the Yucatán trip as an opportunity to operate on “some unlucky subject.”4

  When word got out that the doctor from the United States could cure cross-eyes, a number of “subjects” began lining up outside the house. An operating room of sorts was set up, again in their living room, which was large enough to accommodate local doctors, as well as the governor and a small crowd of other invited and uninvited luminaries. Using fine, Parisian-made scalpels, Dr. Cabot performed the surgeries without anesthesia. Stephens and Catherwood served as his assistants. After several operations, all successes, including one on the “oldest general in the Mexican service,” who lived in Mérida in exile, Stephens had had enough: “My head was actually swimming with visions of bleeding and mutilated eyes.” With the loss of his assistants, Cabot explained the surgery in full to the gathered doctors and offered to send them surgical instruments on his return to Boston. As Stephens said, “considering the thing fairly introduced into the country, we determined to stop.”

  Cabot was a local hero. “And I could but think how fleeting is this world’s fame,” wrote Stephens. “At first my arrival in the country had been fairly trumpeted in the newspapers; for a little while Mr. Catherwood had thrown me in the shade with the Daguerreotype, and now all our glories were swallowed up by Doctor Cabot’s cure of strabismus.”

  The three men left Mérida on horseback on November 12, Stephens and Catherwood each armed with pistols and Cabot with a shotgun to bring down his ornithological specimens. They had no attendants or even a map, as there were no reliable maps available in the country. They would eventually produce one of their own by measuring distances by the hours traveled, taking compass bearings, and using a sextant Catherwood brought this time for latitudinal readings.5 In contrast to the magnificence of the volcanoes and lush, picturesque valleys of Central America, Stephens grumbled that the road here was boring—flat, stony, and straight, and tightly hemmed in on both sides by thick low forest.

  Their first goal had been to return to Uxmal. But while in Mérida they were told where they might find the remains of an old city named Mayapán—not far off the main road to Uxmal. They rode through haciendas and Indian hamlets until they finally reached a giant estate named Xcanchakán, which was owned by an acquaintance they had made in Mérida. The majordomo was expecting them and took them out into the forest. They found themselves stumbling over fragments of sculpted stone and broken walls. They had arrived at Mayapán. The remains of the city had never been formally explored, and the only person with any knowledge of the site was the majordomo, who said he had not visited it in twenty-three years. He explained that the ruins took up about three square miles and had once been surrounded by a strong wall.

  Hacienda Xcanchakán in Yucatán. (Catherwood)

  Starting at Mérida and stopping first at Mayapán, then continuing on to Uxmal, the men were, without knowing it, journeying backward through time, in the same sense they had when they left Guatemala City on their long trek through Iximche and Utatlán to Palenque. Stephens was not totally in the dark. Before the journey, he had sought out every book he could find that contained information about the Spanish conquest of Yucatán.6 He knew, for example, that Mérida had been built by the conquistadors over an Indian city called Tiho after the natives lost in a furious battle outside the city in 1542.7 Following the battle, the Spanish tore down Tiho’s step pyramids and temples and used the stones to construct their colonial capital.8

  Stephens also learned from the Spanish chroniclers that Mayapán had been one of the last great Indian capitals and was destroyed during a rebellion only a hundred years before the Spanish arrived. (The wo
rd Maya was originally used by the Spanish to describe the language of the Yucatán Indians and came to be used generally to describe the Indians in the early 1800s.) As the first archaeological explorer on the site, Stephens had no way to fit the ruins into the long chronological narrative of Maya history. Witnessing its extremely fallen condition, he theorized that Mayapán might have been founded long before Uxmal. Modern archaeologists, however, would come to categorize Mayapán as a “late postclassic” city and determine it was established centuries after Uxmal’s founding.9 They have now constructed a historical timeline in which Palenque and Copán flourished during the so-called Classic period of the Maya, from A.D. 400 to 900, Uxmal between 700 to 950, and Mayapán from 1000 to 1461. Tiho was one of the small surviving centers still occupied by the Maya at the time of the conquest, just as Iximche and Utatlán had been in Guatemala.

  Mayapán, near Mérida in Yucatán. (Catherwood)

  Nothing of this historical sequence was understood by the three men as they groped their way through the forest of Xcanchakán and ran almost head-on into a huge, square-shaped mound rising sixty feet from the ground. It had not been visible through the thick forest and was so covered with vegetation it looked like a small, steep, wooded hill. But they could make out the outlines of four grand staircases rising up each side to a flat platform at the top. They found sculpted stones of human figures or animals “with hideous features and expressions” scattered everywhere. Then they came upon a large unusual round building, something they had never seen before in their earlier explorations. From a large mound it rose to a height of twenty-four feet and was covered in layers of stucco still showing the remains of red, yellow, and blue paint. A single door led to a circular passageway inside, around a solid center. The opening was no more than three feet wide and they could not conceive of what purpose it had served. Next they discovered a platform protruding from a mound with what appeared to be a double row of broken columns, the first columns they had encountered among the ruins. While Catherwood went to work sketching the circular structure, Stephens and Cabot explored a nearby cenote that led down to a lime-encrusted pool of water.

  Present-day photo of Mayapán. (Carlsen)

  It was nearly dark when they reached the hacienda of Xcanchakán, one of the finest on the peninsula with its giant water tanks, huge cattle yard, and cool residential corridors. The next morning they saddled up for Uxmal. Though they found many more mounds and intriguing fragments the day before, hinting at the vast dimensions of Mayapán, the site was so overgrown and buried they would need a battalion of workmen to help clear it. They were anxious to pick up where they had left off at Uxmal, which was so much more in the open.

  At noon the next day, however, as they approached Uxmal they were startled by the change that had taken place over the last year and a half. The land surrounding the buildings had been cleared at the time of their first visit, but now they could barely see the ruins as they rode in. “The foundations, terraces, and tops of the buildings were overgrown, weeds and vines were rioting and creeping on the facades,” wrote Stephens. “A strong and vigorous nature was struggling for mastery over art, wrapping the city in its suffocating embrace, and burying it from sight. It seemed as if a grave was closing over a friend.”

  Hacking their way through the weeds up a stairway and over several terraces, they took up housekeeping inside the so-called Casa del Gobernador, or Governor’s House, an immense rectangular block edifice 320 feet long, 40 feet deep, and 26 feet high. The magnificent structure was cut with thirteen doorways and covered with an upper façade of incredibly intricate stone mosaics. Because the rain had continued longer than usual, they were warned in Mérida to delay their visit to Uxmal, considered one of the unhealthiest spots on the peninsula during the rainy season. As they entered the casa they realized they should have followed the advice. The air was so damp they could hardly breathe, and they were certain that if they did not do something fast they would fall victim again to the fever—malaria, or “bad air” in Italian—that had brought down Catherwood on their last visit. Their first order of business was to build a fire inside the stone building to dry it out.

  Even with the addition of a doctor to the expedition they were no closer to understanding the cause of the disease; it would be another sixty years, during the building of the Panama Canal, until health experts identified mosquitoes as the guilty culprits. That night puffing away on their cigars before climbing into their hammocks, they talked smugly about how they had taken the offensive against the dampness and found a way to hold off the fever, possibly until the rains stopped altogether. But the massive elevated terraces on which Uxmal was built contained solid rock depressions where the rainwater collected, giving birth to their enemy. And just as they lay down to sleep, they suffered the first attack. “Our heads were hardly on our pillows,” Stephens recalled, “before the whole population seemed to know exactly where they could have us, and dividing into three swarms, came upon us as if determined to lift us up and eject us bodily from the premises.” That would be the last night they slept without protective netting over each hammock, but it was already too late.

  Full view of the Governor’s Palace at Uxmal. (Catherwood)

  The next day they wasted no time getting to work. Indians arrived from the nearby Peon hacienda and started cutting away the vines and vegetation. As soon as vistas were cleared, Catherwood set up the daguerreotype. But he was not satisfied with the first images produced, as there was too much contrast between the parts of the ruins that fell in the sunlight and those in the shade. “They gave the general idea of the character of the buildings,” Stephens wrote, “but would not do to put into the hands of the engraver without copying the views on paper.” So Catherwood, meticulous as ever, began drawing each structure with his pencils and camera lucida, down to the smallest details. He created, Stephens reported, such “minute architectural drawings of the whole, and has in his possession the materials for erecting a building exactly like it.” The daguerreotype, however, still proved useful. Stephens and Cabot operated it to create broader views to supplement Catherwood’s drawings.

  Désiré Charnay’s photograph of the facade of Uxmal’s nunnery.

  Uxmal today: the Governor’s Palace with the Pyramid of the Magician in the distance. (Carlsen)

  Tireless and in good health, Catherwood would work almost continually for the next six weeks to capture Uxmal’s architectural and sculptural wonders—the so-called Nunnery quadrangle, the “pyramid of the magician,” the aptly named houses of the pigeons and the turtles, as well as the Governor’s House.10 He created drawings that took in sweeping vistas of the ruins as well as those capturing the smallest fragments of their ornate façades. The results would prove to be masterworks when he later published his own large-scale folio of the ruins.

  Stephens, soon satisfied that the clearing of the ruins was going well, decided to ride west from Uxmal to see if there were other remains worth investigating. Traveling alone over the next six days with guides he picked up at haciendas along the way, he visited vestiges of what appeared to be several smaller Maya cities. At one site, nearly forty miles to the west, he entered a chamber where he found a painting on a wall in bright primary colors, an image similar to a mask they had found in Palenque. He was so focused on the work, however, that he failed to notice the thousands of garrapatas (ticks) crawling over him. He fled the chamber and changed clothes, scraping the ticks off his body before they could bury themselves in his flesh.

  Catherwood’s illustration of the front of the Pyramid of the Magician at Uxmal.

  View of the back of the pyramid today. (Carlsen)

  Days later, on his way back to Uxmal, he stopped at the village of Maxcanú, where he was directed to a nearby cave rumored to be made by human hands. Although a group of villagers traveled out to the cave with him, none would enter. Intrepid as ever, Stephens went in alone with string attached to his wrist so that he could find his way out. He carried a candle in one hand
and a pistol in the other. The cave indeed proved to be man-made, with a series of narrow hallways that crisscrossed, doubled back, and formed an elaborate labyrinth. He was reminded of the passageways in the tombs and pyramids of Egypt, and he became excited at the thought he might discover a large room, a gallery, a royal tomb. Instead he was met with a rush of bats that swept past his head; the flaps of their wings nearly put out the candle. He was finally stopped by debris that completely blocked further passage. Back out in the fresh air, he looked up and realized that he had not been in a subterranean passage at all but had penetrated deep into a large pyramid. It was a revelation because he had always viewed these pyramids as solid masses. Now he believed this pyramid and others like it might hold secret chambers that could help in understanding who built them and why.

  The villagers explained there were a number of other mounds nearby along with sculpted stones. Stephens was intrigued as the site began to take on the dimension of a sizable city. There were no recorded accounts of these ruins, and even the Indians of the village said nothing about them before they set out that morning. He wanted to return for a more thorough examination, but when the expedition finished at Uxmal they decided to travel in the other direction, south and east. The ruins, which would come to be known as Oxkintok, turned out to be a major Maya city with roots older than Uxmal’s. It would be another a century before it was excavated and explored.11