Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  By the time Stephens got back to Uxmal, he had visited seven locations with remnants of mounds, temples, and other stone structures, most of them at scattered minor sites. Seeing the monumental, intact artistry of Uxmal overwhelmed him once again. That night they made a large bonfire on the terrace in front of the Casa del Gobernador. “The flames lighted up the façade of the great palace,” Stephens wrote, “and when they died away, the full moon broke upon it, mellowing its rents and fissures, and presenting a scene mournfully beautiful.”

  The rains started again but did little to stop them from investigating many underground dome-like chambers they found scattered around Uxmal. Stephens, daring as ever, disregarded the risk of scorpions and snakes and allowed himself to be lowered on a rope into some of the caverns. They were coated with hard plaster inside. Stephens theorized they may have been granaries but in the end, after examining several more of what the natives called chultuns, he realized they were cisterns used to store water from the rainy season through the dry season. Stephens and the others wondered how the builders of these cities, obviously with large populations, could survive the long dry season in a region bereft of rivers, streams, and lakes. The chultuns and cenotes provided one answer. Later they found man-made lakes, including one nearby at Uxmal, complete with plastered stone bottoms that proved the engineering sophistication of the original inhabitants.

  Over the following days, as Catherwood kept drawing and Cabot hunted for bird specimens, Stephens continued to measure and explore. In one of the apartments of the palace he located the sculpted wooden beam they had found on their first visit, which was never shipped to New York. They had found other wooden lintels but this one was unique, the only wooden beam that was exquisitely carved with rows of hieroglyphs. Once again Stephens arranged to have the ten-foot beam carried to Mérida and sent to the United States, presumably with the consent of Don Peon, who had recently visited them at the ruins. Stephens planned to have it, along with the other artifacts they were collecting, transported eventually to Washington, D.C., for the national museum he still planned to create. “It left Uxmal on the shoulders of ten Indians,” he wrote, “after many vicissitudes reached [New York] uninjured, and was deposited in Mr. Catherwood’s Panorama.”

  In early December, Stephens found half-buried sculpted stones at the top of one of Uxmal’s highest mounds, which he believed led to a doorway. Indian workman started digging and the characteristic emblem of Uxmal, “a hideous face with the teeth sticking out,” slowly began to appear. But the stones started to totter and the workmen stepped back fearing they might topple on them. Stephens, who had been helping in the excavation, threw himself into the work alone, digging with all his strength, carried away by the thought he was about to enter a chamber that had been “closed for ages.” But when he got below the cornice and thrust his machete into the earth where he believed the doorway to be, he hit a stone wall.

  Masks of the rain god Chaac at Uxmal. (Catherwood)

  Crushed by the disappointment and covered in sweat, he reeled under the glare of the sun. “In descending the mound my limbs could scarcely support me,” he recalled. “With great difficulty I dragged myself to our apartments. My thirst was unquenchable. I threw myself into my hammock, and in a few moments the fiery fever was upon me. Disease had stalked all around us, but it was the first time it had knocked at our door.” He was again in the clutches of malaria.

  After four days of violent fevers and chills, he was finally able to mount his horse and ride nine miles to a hacienda, where he collapsed. He was then carried on the shoulders of Indians in a makeshift “coche” to the large town of Ticul, some twenty miles from the ruins. There he was taken into the church’s quarters by the town’s priest, whom Stephens identified only by the name Carillo. Explosions of fireworks marked another fiesta under way, but in his current condition, Stephens noted, the sounds were “murderous.”

  Under the care of the priest, Stephens remained in bed the next three days. On the fourth he felt well enough to take a stroll with the priest around the grounds, and when they returned they found Dr. Cabot lying on a stretcher in the corridor, racked with fever. “I was startled by the extraordinary change a few days had made in his appearance. His face was flushed, his eyes were wild, his figure lank.” It turned out Cabot had come down with the fever the day after Stephens left Uxmal and he had been in a state of delirium ever since. The next day, one of their regular helpers, named Albino, arrived shaking with chills and fever. With him was a note from Catherwood. He was now alone at Uxmal, he wrote, but would hold out for as long as he could. At the first sign of fever, he added, he would join them.

  17

  London

  On the morning of December 11, 1841, magistrate James Scarlett gaveled court to order in London’s medieval Guildhall, an imposing Gothic building on Gresham Street that had served as a stage for many of England’s historic trials. One year had passed since Catherwood filed suit against his cousin Henry Caslon, and now as he labored alone in Uxmal thousands of miles across the Atlantic, a jury assembled at Guildhall to decide his case. The jurors were promptly sworn in by Scarlett, whose formal title was Lord Abinger.

  When Catherwood had ordered his London solicitor to file the suit the previous year, his cousin and wife, Gertrude, had disappeared from London. It would have been highly unusual for Catherwood, a man of great personal reserve and privacy, to request a court trial that would expose his private life, and worse, an embarrassing affair between his wife and cousin, to public scrutiny. It is most likely, however, that he thought he could avoid a trial and win his case by default since the couple had vanished. But Henry and Gertrude had returned to London months later and began living openly as “man and wife” in the Caslon family home on Chiswell Street. The case had now become enough of a scandal that the trial attracted the attention of the London newspapers.1

  As was legal custom, Mrs. Catherwood, as the purportedly ill-used spouse, was not named a defendant in the lawsuit, and it is not clear from the record if she was present in court. As the case opened, Caslon pleaded not guilty to the charge of “criminal conversation” with Gertrude. His attorney, Frederic Thesiger, then presented a novel legal defense, claiming that no crime occurred in Caslon’s affair with Gertrude because the Catherwoods, in fact, were not married. They had not been legally wed in Beirut in 1834, he said, because the ceremony had been performed by an American Baptist missionary and not a clergyman from the Church of England, as required by English law.

  This shocking contention was put aside by Lord Abinger, who judged it was such an unusual legal question that it could only be decided by an appellate court if an appeal was filed later. He then ordered the trial to proceed on the presumption that the Catherwoods were married. The principal question before the jurors was whether illicit relations occurred between Henry and Gertrude before Catherwood filed his lawsuit the prior December and therefore Catherwood had a legal basis to sue.

  Though not directly representing Catherwood, Attorney General Frederick Pollock prosecuted the case as a criminal matter on behalf of the crown. To first establish the Catherwood marriage, he called Catherwood’s brother, James, who testified that the Catherwoods had lived together as man and wife at the family home on Charles Square for several years and bore three children together.

  Servants from Gertrude’s London household on Charlotte Street were then summoned and gave testimony indicating that Henry had stayed with Gertrude through the night on several occasions during the crucial period in question.

  Pollock also called Catherwood’s old traveling partner from Egypt and Palestine, Joseph Bonomi, to further establish the legitimacy of the Catherwoods’ marriage. Bonomi explained to the jury that he was present at the Beirut home of English consul Peter Abbott when the wedding took place on March 11, 1834. Gertrude’s father, stepmother, and two sisters were present at the ceremony. He added that the wedding was performed according to rites of the Church of England. Soon after the nuptials,
he said, the Catherwoods left to travel through Syria, and two or three months later he met them in Damascus. From there the three of them traveled to the ancient ruins at Baalbek, where they stayed for another month before the couple left for England. He described the newlyweds as affectionate and completely comfortable together.

  Caslon’s defense attorney, Thesiger, then took over and cross-examined Bonomi about exactly who had performed the wedding ceremony in Beirut. Bonomi answered that it was an American missionary. “I can’t say that Mr. Bird was of the Church of England,” Bonomi continued. “He wore no surplice.”

  Thesiger then worked to shift the focus of the trial from Henry and Gertrude to Catherwood himself. He asked Bonomi what the sleeping arrangements had been when he and the newlyweds traveled through Syria together.

  “At Baalbeck, I slept in the same tent with the plaintiff and his wife,” Bonomi replied, uncertain where Thesiger was headed.

  Did Mrs. Catherwood object? Thesiger asked.

  “She might have objected to this,” Bonomi responded. “I don’t know that she did, but it was almost a matter of necessity, there being but one tent. All the persons who traveled in that country had tents to sleep in. It was the custom of the country. Society at Beirut and Acre, and other places in Syria was what might be called very easy and familiar; very different to what it was in the cold northern climate of England.”

  Thesiger did not let up. Under further questioning Bonomi admitted that they met Gertrude’s father, Peter Abbott, at one of the ancient sites, and that on that occasion Bonomi did not sleep in the same tent with the Catherwoods. He slept under some ruins.

  From newspaper accounts, Thesiger’s questions appeared relatively innocuous, leaving at most a vague insinuation that an improper sexual relationship may have existed between the three of them. The implications, however, may have been much clearer in the courtroom. Bonomi apparently felt Thesiger’s cross-examination had left a stain on his honor.2 In later correspondence with his own attorney, he insisted that a letter be included in the court record that he felt would clear his name.

  Thesiger also asked Bonomi if Gertrude’s father had warned Catherwood to take extra precautions concerning his new wife because her mother had been Spanish and because she had grown up mostly in the East.

  “Of course, the society of the East is much more free and easy than in England,” answered Bonomi. “Mr. Abbott might have cautioned the plaintiff to take care of his wife on account of her blood and disposition.” Mrs. Catherwood, he added, was “of a particularly lively and fascinating disposition. She had an Eastern education, and was of exceedingly pleasant and fascinating manners, lively temperament and of Spanish blood.”

  Then Thesiger called Catherwood’s brother, James, and during his questioning attempted to show that Frederick had been a less-than-attentive husband. He asked James if his brother and Gertrude slept in separate beds or in separate rooms at Charles Square. James answered that he had never been aware of that, except perhaps during the last stages of her pregnancies. Thesiger made particular note of Catherwood’s ten-month absence in Central America, a fact some jurors may already have known from the publication of Stephens and Catherwood’s book.

  Thesiger: Did not your brother, Frederick, tell you that his marriage to Mrs. Catherwood was not worth “a farthing”?

  No, replied James.

  In his summation, Thesiger tried to lessen any possible damages the jury might award Catherwood by portraying Mrs. Catherwood as a loose woman and Catherwood as a negligent husband.” It was not at all unlikely,” he told the jurors, “with her peculiar blood and education, as well as the absence of her husband, that she had sinned ere she met the defendant. Such a wife, deserved the cautious guard suggested by her father to the plaintiff; but instead of adopting so prudent a course, he sends her home from New York alone, and exposes her to all the perils of neglect and desertion. This was an act of neglect so great as to deprive him of the shadow of a claim to compensation for anything that may have happened.”

  The jurors deliberated less than twenty minutes, returned a verdict in Catherwood’s favor, but awarded him damages of only 200 pounds sterling. He had asked for 5,000.

  Technically, Catherwood was vindicated. But his slender victory had come at considerable, mortifying cost. Questions had been raised about his moral character, as well his fitness and attentiveness as a husband, due in particular to his long absence in Central America.

  In effect, his marriage to Gertrude was over. And there would be no divorce. The minimal award from the jury was overturned two years later when an appeals court ruled that his marriage had never existed. The case (Catherwood v. Caslon) would be cited as a precedent for years to come, the appellate justices ruling that marriages conducted outside the Church of England were not legal—and the award of damages to Catherwood was therefore vacated.

  A month later a curious exhibit opened in central London a mile to the west, at Somerset House, between the Strand and the Thames River. Somerset House had once housed the Royal Academy’s exhibition hall, where Catherwood previously showed his work. On January 13, 1842, Captain John Caddy displayed his drawings and paintings of Palenque for the first time publicly. The showing took place in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries; the society’s minutes note that the drawings had “the appearance of great accuracy, and varying as they do from others published by Lord Kingsbury and Mons. Waldeck, they are entitled to the particular attention to the English Antiquary. Captain Caddy supposes these ruins to be of Egypto-Indian origin.”3

  It had been more than a year and a half since Caddy and Patrick Walker had returned safely to Belize from their Palenque expedition. Since that time, Lieutenant Caddy had been promoted to captain and had sailed home on leave to England, where he was reunited with his wife and children. Meanwhile, Colonel Alexander MacDonald had sent ahead to the Colonial Office in London a copy of Walker’s official Palenque report and Caddy’s drawings. He was hopeful the documents would finally justify to his superiors his quick decision in 1839 to order the expedition without prior approval. The report and drawings were received by Lord John Russell, sometime in early 1841, around the time Caddy had landed in England.

  In a return dispatch to MacDonald, Lord Russell praised Walker and Caddy, giving them “great credit for the zeal and spirit of enterprise.” He called the drawings “very curious and interesting.” At the time Russell was unaware that Stephens and Catherwood were in New York working to complete their book on the same subject. He said he wanted to relieve MacDonald of his concern over reimbursement for the Palenque expedition but noted that the colonel had not yet provided any accounting of the expenses. When you do so, he said, “I will, provided it shall appear that the expenses were moderate and reasonable, recommend to the Lords of the Treasury to relieve you from the responsibility.”

  At this point events took an ill-fated twist and the record of Walker and Caddy’s tortuous Palenque expedition all but disappeared from the history books—thanks in part to Stephens and Catherwood but also to Britain’s slow-moving, many-layered bureaucracy. It is unknown whether MacDonald’s “military chest” was ever reimbursed. Instead the whole affair was quietly buried in the archives. More than a century later David Pendergast, who published the account of the Walker-Caddy expedition, discovered the reason why in a deft piece of detective work. He managed to disinter from the colonial records MacDonald’s last letter to Lord Russell. On the cover of the dispatch Pendergast found an unsigned note, dated October 14. The author of the note had undoubtedly read Stephens and Catherwood’s book, which had only recently arrived from the United States.

  An American named Stephens made the same journey, & has published a full account of Palenque with drawings & far more complete than any which were made by Captain Caddy and with a far more extensive range of general observation. I fear, therefore, that nothing can be done with this Despatch than to lay it aside.

  Despite the recommendation to set it aside, the lette
r continued to wind its way up the bureaucratic ladder to a higher authority in the Colonial Office. The next officeholder, named, coincidentally, J. Stephens, appended a final note:

  Colonel Macdonald and Mr. Walker & Capt. Caddy executed this scientific mission with no previous sanction from the Treasury. The motive was merely that we might not be outstript in this case in scientific zeal by the Americans. This was not very wise, and the result is that we have been beaten by these new rivals in scientific research, who will now boast over our inferiority instead of having to boast only over our comparative inactivity. After all the Drawings and Travel have not been published, and now it is hardly to be supposed that any Bookseller would hazard the publication. In short the whole affair has been a blunder, though a very well meant one.

  No official publication or notice was ever made of the expedition. Lord Russell wrote MacDonald that he had forwarded Walker’s report and Caddy’s drawings to the Royal Geographic Society but the documents may never have arrived. The society shows no record of them. Instead, Pendergast found only Walker’s report and expense record in the Colonial Office archives and none of Caddy’s drawings. They apparently were returned to Caddy and ended up in the exhibit at Somerset House.

  Caddy soon had other distractions. In early 1842, not long after his exhibition, his fifth child was born. There would be eight eventually. A few months later he left England with his family for a new military posting to the town of London in Ontario, Canada, not far from where he had grown up. Before long, Palenque would become a distant memory and like Private Carnick, the single casualty of the expedition, who lay buried somewhere in the Petén, all but forgotten.

  18

  Discoveries

  By Christmas Day 1841, first Stephens, then Dr. Cabot, and finally Albino returned to Uxmal, all sufficiently recovered from their bouts of malaria. Catherwood, who remained healthy and alone at the ruins with nothing but work to keep him occupied, had completed most of the plans and drawings. Because he was the sole resident for weeks in the Governor’s House, each night he rigged a spring-loaded pistol with a cord across the doorway to “bring down” any uninvited guests. Fortunately, none had appeared.