The so-called “Nunnery” at Chichén Itzá. (Catherwood)
Detail, present day. (Carlsen)
Main pyramid at Chichén Itzá. (Catherwood)
Main pyramid and grounds today. (Carlsen)
These structures were catnip for Catherwood, who lavished some of his best work on them. It was as if they had been built and decorated for no other reason than the pure aesthetic pleasure of looking at them, and Catherwood reveled in it, capturing them in all their brilliant intricacy.
All of Chichén Itzá offered a wealth of material for Catherwood to work with. The site seemed to have one of everything that they had encountered at the other ruins, and some in better condition. For example, they found again the two parallel walls that would later come to be identified as ball courts. Only here the walls enclosing the court were incredibly massive, as were the carved stone rings implanted in the wall directly opposite one another.6 The rings were twenty feet from the ground, four feet in diameter, carved as “entwined serpents,” and perfectly intact, unlike the rings at Uxmal, which they found fallen and shattered. They discovered a huge round building similar to the one they found at Mayapán. And not far north of it sat the one structure that seemed obligatory at almost every site: a pyramid. But here was one of the most impressive stepped pyramids they had yet seen. At one of the four staircases that rose to the temple on top, Stephens observed “two colossal serpents’ heads” flanking the base, ten feet in length, with mouths wide open and tongues protruding.7 Climbing up to the temple they found over the doorways intact carved beams—again made of rock-hard sapodilla wood—with stone doorjambs also beautifully sculpted with human figures in bas-relief.
But as they stood on the platform outside the temple looking down, they saw something through the trees they had never encountered before.
Lightning strike over the ball court at Chichén Itzá. (Catherwood)
From this lofty height we saw for the first time groups of small columns, which, on examination, proved to be among the most remarkable and unintelligible remains we had yet met with. They stood in rows of three, four, and five abreast, many rows continuing in the same direction. . . . Many of them had fallen, and in some places they lie prostrate in rows, all in the same direction, as if thrown down intentionally. In some places they extended to the bases of large mounds, on which were ruins of buildings and colossal fragments of sculpture, while in others they branched off and terminated abruptly. I counted three hundred and eighty, and there were many more.
Chichén Itzá both amazed and confounded Stephens and Catherwood. The site displayed a stunning amalgam of styles, some extravagant and excessive, yet still containing clear threads of unity with the ruins they had explored earlier. The site was as vast as Uxmal and as grandiose, yet given the two cities’ proximity—less than ninety miles apart—their differences left a seemingly unsolvable riddle. Far from helping to shed more light on the mystery of these old and wondrous cities, Chichén Itzá seemed only to compound their inscrutability.
Photo taken from the top of the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá. (Carlsen)
The day before their departure they were drawn to Chichén’s north cenote, which for centuries had been a sacred place of pilgrimage for Yucatán’s Indians, and remained so. When they reached it through a thick forest of trees, a hawk was circling inside the huge, almost perfectly round cavity in the ground. They came to the edge and looked down into the water below. The cenote’s ragged, layered limestone walls dropped straight to the green pool twenty feet below, leaving no path down to the water’s surface—and no way up. Trees and shrubs cantilevered out over the sides and in one place along the edge the men came upon a stone structure. Standing on the brink looking down into the watery abyss sent a shudder through Stephens. According to legend, he explained, it was here that humans were thrown into the water below, as a sacrifice to the rain god.8
20
Tuloom
On March 29 they left Chichén Itzá and traveled due east to Valladolid, arriving ahead of their baggage. The city of fifteen thousand was founded very early in the Spanish era, and Stephens pronounced it run down and its seven churches “dilapidated.” The whole place had an air of “melancholy,” he wrote. Valladolid was their first stop on their way to the east coast of the peninsula, where, following up again on reports, they hoped to find the remains of a city described by the earliest Spanish sailors as stunning in size and splendor and—most intriguing of all—inhabited. The place was called Tuloom (Stephens wrote it phonetically but today it is spelled Tulum). They wanted also to sail across to the island of Cozumel, where the Spanish claimed to have discovered numerous stone temples.
The three men located lodgings in Valladolid, and as they settled in for the night, Albino came galloping into town and banged on the door to announce there had been a terrible accident. The horse carrying the daguerreotype broke and ran, smashing the apparatus to pieces. The device was a dead loss. The men consoled themselves with the thought that at least they had the images they had already developed on copper plates.
More disturbing than the loss of the daguerreotype was a sense of foreboding they felt in Valladolid. Earlier Stephens sensed a current of fear running through white Yucatecan society that in Valladolid seemed more palpable than anywhere else. In one of his frequent sociological asides, he had written that the peninsula’s Maya Indians had suffered centuries of brutal subjugation, many working in feudal bondage to their white masters. He asked: “Could these be the descendants of that fierce people who had made such bloody resistance to the Spanish conquerors?”
Since the Conquest the natives had been barred from owning weapons, but Stephens now learned that in the recent revolt against Mexico, the whites relied heavily on the Indians to do their fighting. Indians had been recruited from the countryside and armed to help expel the Mexican garrison from Valladolid. He wrote: “What the consequences may be of finding themselves, after ages of servitude, once more in the possession of arms, and in increasing knowledge of their physical strength, is a question of momentous import to the people of that country, the solution of which no man can foretell.”
While Stephens could not “foretell” the exact consequences, he understood the danger from his experience in Guatemala. Yucatán was, in fact, a time bomb. For once, Stephens and Catherwood’s timing was propitious: they would leave soon and finally miss a revolution. This was one they may not have survived. In the years that followed, the peninsula exploded and Valladolid would be the center of hundreds of massacres of whites by the Indians. The Yucatec Maya, often attacking with only their machetes, rose throughout eastern and central Yucatán and mounted a revolt of such savagery that it made Guatemala’s Indian uprising appear agreeable by comparison. By 1848, the Indians had swept from the east across Yucatán, surrounded Mérida, and nearly drove all the white inhabitants of the peninsula into the sea. What followed was eight years of conflict and fanatical slaughter that came to be known as the “War of the Castes.” Before it was over as many as eighty thousand people would die, 16 percent of the population, and another 25 percent were driven from the peninsula. The Spanish conquistadors never entirely crushed the will of Yucatec Maya, who had endured centuries of oppression while waiting for their moment of retribution.1
The expedition was spared any violence but on the road east of Valladolid they met a large group of indigenous men whose appearance brought back memories of Guatemala. “Naked, armed with long guns, and with deer and wild boars slung on their back,” wrote Stephens, “their aspect was the most truculent of any people we had seen. They were some of the Indians who had risen to the call [in the attack on the Mexican garrison in Valladolid], and they seemed ready at any moment for battle.”
Stephens was also surprised when they were unable to find anyone in Valladolid who had heard of Tuloom. There was a settlement on the coast named Tancah, they were told, but they would need to proceed east to the town of Chemax to determine if there was even a road to it.2 Che
max was located in a straight line between Valladolid and Tancah, and when they arrived they discovered that in fact they had reached what was effectively the eastern boundary of populated Yucatán. They were now at the frontier with nothing but forty-five miles of tangled jungle and wilderness between Chemax and the coast. And they were told Tancah was nothing but a “mere rancho.” There was a way through the jungle, however—a little-used, heavily overgrown foot path.
Stephens also learned Tancah was a camp set up by a smuggler and pirate named Molas. Sometime earlier Molas had been sentenced to death in Mérida but he had escaped from prison in the capital and fled to the coast, where he and his family set up their lonely camp, “out of the reach of justice.” When soldiers who were sent from Mérida to capture him reached Chemax and saw the jungle in front of them, they turned around and went back. Sometime later Molas was found dead on the footpath, though no one could explain why. “These accounts came upon us most unexpectedly and deranged all our plans,” Stephens wrote.
Tuloom was believed to be the first city spotted by the Spanish when they arrived off the Yucatán coast in the spring of 1518, on an expedition from Cuba led by Juan de Grijalva. The four Spanish ships stopped first at a large island the natives called Cozumel, and then sailed across the channel to Yucatán mainland. The expedition’s chaplain, Juan Díaz, described what came next: “We followed the coast day and night; on the following day . . . we sighted a city or town so large that Seville would not have appeared bigger or better . . . a very tall tower was to be seen there.” When Stephens met Juan Pío Pérez the month before, he told Stephens an explorer named Juan José Galvez had recently sailed the same stretch of coast and reported finding two ancient cities not far down from Cozumel—Tancah and Tuloom—and noted that the later was surrounded by a massive stone wall. How was it possible so little was known about these ruins? Stephens wondered.
The expedition had reached a crossroad. Tuloom appeared just out of reach, a siren’s song floating from beyond the jungle. Stephens’s final pair of shoes were so worn they would never survive a forty-five-mile footpath. But they were all now healthy and had come this far, and Tuloom, especially, loomed as an indispensable and probably final destination before the rainy season closed in on them and terminated the expedition. “Turning back formed no part of our deliberations,” Stephens wrote. They huddled and came up with an alternate plan, unfortunately one that would add unexpected weeks to their itinerary. A road led northeast from Chemax all the way to the northern port of Yalahao. There they could take a boat around the northern tip of the peninsula known as Cape Catoche, and then south to Cozumel, Tancah, and Tuloom. “This would subject us to the necessity of two voyages along the coast, going and returning,” Stephens admitted, “and would require, perhaps, a fortnight to reach Tancah, which we had expected to arrive at in three days.”
It took them three days just to reach Yalahao, over a hard road of sharp stones. “It was desperately hot,” Stephens wrote. “We had no view except the narrow path before us, and we stumbled along, wondering that such a stony surface could support such a teeming vegetation.” At Yalahao they found an isolated mini-port of palm-thatched huts shaded by coconut trees, a former haunt of pirates, many of whom had now settled down to the respectability of smuggling or growing sugar at nearby ranchos. But memories were still fresh of the days when the place was notorious for its pirate law, and for plunder brought ashore and spread around in gambling and drunkenness. One canoa, or boat, lying offshore was pointed out to them as a former pirate craft. The location was ideal for pirating because the tiny port faced the broad channel between Yucatán and Cuba, allowing the buccaneers to prey easily on passing merchant ships. And when the pirates were pursued by larger, heavily armed ships, they escaped by sailing their shallow-hull vessels into the long, lagoon-like bay where the larger ships could not follow.
While Cabot was enthralled with the bird life along the coast, Stephens and Catherwood wasted little time hiring a small canoa and buying provisions. After two days they were ready. The plan called for their horses to be taken all the way back through Valladolid, then west to a port near Mérida called Silan. The men would then sail to Silan on their return from Tuloom. When the canoa was filled with food, casks of water, and “implements” for making tortillas, there was little room left for the expeditionary party. The open craft, named El Sol, was thirty-five feet long, six feet wide, carried two sailors besides the captain, had two sails, and had no keel. They boarded on April 7, and, Stephens wrote, “prospects seemed rather unpromising for a month’s cruise. There was no wind; the sails were flapping against the mast; the sun beat down on us, and we had no awning of any kind, although the agent had promised one. Our captain was a middle-aged Mestizo, a fisherman, hired for the occasion.”
They drifted the first two days, making little headway. The first night they were crammed together in the stern, sleeping side by side so tightly, Stephens wrote, “that if the bottom had fallen out we could hardly have gone through.” Eventually they got around Cape Catoche, spent a night on a tiny island named Contoy, then the next day cruised the coast of Isla de Mujeres, an island that like Yalahao had been a notorious “resort” for pirates, including the well-known Jean Lafitte. El Sol sailed on, veering west to the mainland, and approached the empty sand hills of Kancune, today the major tourist resort of Cancún. They took time out to bathe along the shore and beachcomb for shells, but at sunset they found themselves running for their lives to the boat, “flying before the natives.” “Swarms of mosquitoes,” Stephens wrote, “pursued us with the same bloodthirsty spirit that animated the Indians along the coast when they pursued the Spaniards.”
The next day they sailed to the island of Cozumel before a stiff breeze; the choppy seas broke over the gunwales, soaking them, their provisions, and their baggage. They anchored offshore for the night, and in the morning, after searching the thickly forested shoreline they spotted a small estate of abandoned thatched huts. They threaded their way through the reef into a small bay, went ashore, and took up residence in the empty rancho. Relieved from the wet, packed confines of the canoa, the three men stretched out in the shade of a coconut tree to take in the beautiful little bay. “With our guns resting against the trees, long beards, and canoa costumes,” Stephens wrote, “we were, perhaps, as piratical seeming a trio as ever scuttled a ship at sea.”
Huts and encampment at Cozumel where Stephens, Catherwood, and Cabot stayed. (Catherwood)
Stephens had read accounts by Juan Díaz, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and other conquistadors who had accompanied Grijalva, and later Cortés, on their explorations at Cozumel; they had provided one of the chief motivations for their journey. All the reports described a populated island dotted with hamlets containing stone houses and “towers” where the natives worshipped idols. So Stephens and his companions were surprised to find the island seemingly uninhabited. The rancho was hemmed by tropical jungle so overgrown and dense that they realized it would be all but impossible to cut their way any distance inland in search of ruins. They might pass within feet of an old building and never see it. Cabot, however, found the island rich with rare species and quickly went to work bringing down as many as he could to add to his large and growing ornithological collection.
While inland exploration was ruled out, the next morning they investigated a square stone building that had been visible through the trees when they entered the bay. Small and squat, it little resembled the great structures they had seen at Chichén, Uxmal, and other sites on the mainland. But it bore the typical appearance of a small temple, built on a platform with steps all around, its four doors facing out to the four cardinal points of the compass. They found another ruin nearby, built on a low terrace, with vestiges of the original paint on its exterior walls. Not far away, buried in the jungle, they also discovered the remains of a Spanish church, possibly the one that Cortés had ordered built after landing on the island in 1519. The roof had collapsed but its walls still stood twen
ty feet high and a tree grew from the altar.
The next day was lost when a thunderstorm came up suddenly. The captain, to save his boat, quickly sailed out of the bay for safer anchorage, leaving the expedition party behind without baggage or provisions. With darkness coming on, Stephens feared for the boat’s crew in the roiling waters. Then he wondered about their own fate. “If she never returned,” he wrote, “we should be [four] Robinson Crusoes, all alone on a desert island.” They took some solace in the fact that they at least had guns—then discovered they had little ammunition with them onshore. “As the storm raged our apprehension ran high, and we had got so far as to calculate our chances of reaching the mainland by a raft.”
Such a measure proved unnecessary when the next day Stephens and Albino walked several miles over jagged rocks—strewn with old wreckage—and found the boat and crew safely ensconced in a protected cove. “Sails, luggage, Doctor Cabot’s birds, and my copy of Cogolludo, were spread out to dry.” When they left the following day, Stephens wrote, “a hawk mourning over its mate, which we carried away, was the only living thing that looked upon our departure.” Unsuccessful on Cozumel, they now pinned all their hopes on finding the city “as large as Seville” on the peninsula’s coast.
It took two days to sail back across the channel to the Yucatán mainland and south down the coast to the rancho at Tancah. Though the distance was not long, they had to fight rough seas, wind, and a strong northern current. Before landing at Tancah, they spotted in the distance high on a cliff the huge stone tower of Tuloom, and a charge of anticipation shot through the men. Here at last, they had reached their end point, the culmination of their long Yucatán journey. Stephens directed the captain to run El Sol onto Tancah’s white sand beach. They found an abandoned hut, which they cleared and set up as a residence. Within a short time they received a visit from the pirate Molas’s sons, two young men who had taken possession of the rancho after their father’s death the year before. They were welcoming, no doubt happy to have company in their isolated state. Tancah itself was reputed to contain stone buildings that were once visible from the sea. The young men led them through the jungle to a cornfield, where they found a less than impressive collection of broken and fallen structures scattered about on stone terraces.
Jungle of Stone Page 34