Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  During the next five months, he surveyed sixty miles of coastline for a railway project to connect coastal plantations with Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. Then he sailed to Jamaica to examine a railroad between Kingston and Spanish Town that presented conditions similar to Guyana’s. Impressed, he would report to his board: “I could not help feeling, that if the Jamaica Railway was successful, with scarcely any but passenger traffic, how much more so ought be the Demerara line, with its vast amount of actual and prospective goods traffic, in addition to a large amount of passengers.” After a stop in the United States to investigate locomotive and rail “manufactories” (and a likely stop in New York to visit Stephens and his family), he returned to London. There he presented his report to the company in October 1846. Pleased with his projections, the railroad board extended his contract and sent him back to Guyana to superintend the construction of the line, the first to be built in South America.

  Meanwhile, in New York, Stephens appeared almost idle by comparison. In 1843, the year the Yucatán book was published, he had set up an office at 67 Wall Street, but no documents exist to show that he practiced law from there. The year before, in a report on New York City’s wealthiest citizens, Stephens’s father, Benjamin, was estimated to be worth $500,000, a fortune that would equal millions in today’s dollars. “A carpenter of a New Jersey family,” the report continued, “he was very industrious, a good workman, and has made all his money by hard toil and shrewd management. He built the old state prison in this city, and was a large contractor for building.” John L. Stephens, “the distinguished Traveler,” was listed next with a separate fortune of $100,000.6 Both amounts were almost certainly exaggerations. Some of the best-known and wealthiest financiers of the day were worth no more than $500,000, and Benjamin Stephens, though rich, was not in that category. John Stephens certainly was not, though revenues from his books continued to pour in. Records from this period indicate he kept busy with investments. Besides speculating in uptown lots as the city spread rapidly north through Manhattan, both father and son were acquiring and renting properties in upstate New York, New England, and as far away as Ohio and Michigan.7

  For the years immediately following publication of Yucatán, little is known about Stephens’s personal life. He almost certainly lived with his father, with whom he usually stayed when he was in New York. They shared a comfortable four-story home with an elegant granite façade at 13 Leroy Place, a federal style row house that had an unusual ten-foot setback from the street. It was located in an elite section of the city one block off Broadway in what had once been the village of Greenwich, until it was overtaken by the city.8

  By the summer of 1844, Stephens had apparently shaken off the mysterious depression that Prescott had noted. And if he was not actively practicing law, he may simply have been savoring the fruits of his eight years of hard travel and prolonged periods at his writing table. His literary and archaeological work had drawn him into the top ranks of the city’s intelligentsia. He was seen frequently at the nearby offices of the Evening Post, where he visited the paper’s editor, well-known poet William Cullen Bryant.9 Described by a journalist at the paper as “a small sharp, nervous man,” Stephens had joined Bryant on the management committee of the Century Association, a private club they helped organize in 1847. The association was limited to one hundred members, some of whom dreamed it would become the American equivalent of the French Academy. While its initial members were writers, artists, scientists, and other men of talent and intellectual achievement, it evolved within a few years into an association also of “bankers, railroad executives, insurance officials, leading lawyers and physicians.”10 And by then Stephens had become a fixture in both worlds.

  He was also a regular at Bartlett & Welford’s bookshop, located in Astor House, across from City Hall.11 One of the owners, John Russell Bartlett, had concentrated much of his early book buying on Mexico and claimed to be the first to encourage Stephens to investigate the ruins in Mexico and Central America. His shop carried rare books and antiquarian tomes and was a meeting place for the city’s savants and literati. Bryant, Washington Irving, Albert Gallatin, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper were regulars. Bartlett along with Gallatin founded the American Ethnological Society in 1842, which was devoted to “inquiries into the origins, progress and characteristics of the various races of man.” Stephens and Catherwood were charter members.12 Bartlett & Welford in 1844 also published the American edition of Catherwood’s Views of Ancient Monuments.

  During this period Stephens made a minor foray into politics. He was elected in 1846 as a delegate to a state convention to revise New York’s constitution. He was a lifelong Democrat but was so popular he was picked as a consensus candidate by both the Whigs and the Democrats.13 Through a sweltering summer in Albany, despite his fiery Tammany Hall past he avoided most of the spirited political debates, spoke little, and limited his efforts to court reforms.14 The experience did not appear to spark any deeper interest in a political career. He was later urged by friends to run for the state senate but declined.15

  Instead, like Catherwood, he gave in to the consuming force of the steam age. That same year he joined a group of investors putting together America’s first transatlantic steamship company. Their plan was to build four large paddle-wheel steamers to carry cargo, mail, and hundreds of passengers regularly between New York and Bremen, Germany.16 But unlike Catherwood, Stephens came in at the top. He was made vice president of the Ocean Steam Navigation Company.17 And by the spring of 1847, when the first ship was ready, he agreed to accompany it on its maiden voyage, his first trip abroad since returning from Yucatán five years earlier.

  The 230-foot wooden steamer was constructed in the New York shipyards of Westervelt & MacKay, and its giant “side-lever” steam engines built at nearby Novelty Iron Works.18 The vessel was also equipped with sails to provide auxiliary power. On June 1, 1847, the three-deck SS Washington, the potent symbol of America—a figurehead of the first president—on her bow, departed New York carrying Stephens, First Assistant U.S. Postmaster Major Hobbie, and 125 other passengers to the cheers of thousands lining the docks. While not a canal across Nicaragua, Stephens was still determined to expand America’s (and New York’s) reach and connect nations in his fervent belief that only good could come of it. America itself was in the middle of its greatest expansion since the Louisiana Purchase, annexing Texas and on verge of taking full control of the Oregon Territory. “We are bound to go ahead,” enthused the New York Herald, reporting on the ship’s launching. “And steam is the agent of the age.”19

  The Washington arrived in Bremen more than two weeks later, greeted by cannon salutes, musical bands, and thousands of citizens lining the city’s wharves. Over the next days the Washington’s crew and passengers were showered with banquets and other festivities. Stephens spoke briefly at a formal dinner where the Americans were welcomed by the foreign secretary of Prussia. After a round of toasts, he read a letter from the directors of the company asking that Bremen accept a model of the Washington. In marched eight Bremen natives, now citizens of the United States who had returned for a visit, carrying on their shoulders a six-foot replica of the steamship. “This was received with a storm of enthusiasm,” a spectator reported.20

  Finally Stephens was able to slip away and board a train for Berlin, where he arrived on July 1 in the “mellow twilight” of midsummer. “I had but a day for Berlin,” he noted, before he had to catch the Washington back to New York. “There was but one object in it I had any special desire to see, and that was—Humboldt.”21

  Baron Alexander von Humboldt, who had been reported in ill health, lived at the court of King Frederick Wilhelm IV in Potsdam, fifteen miles away. Stephens decided to take a chance and left immediately for Potsdam. The seventy-seven-year-old Humboldt, one of the king’s closest counselors, lived in the royal palace, a splendid rococo residence called San Souci, set among hundreds of acres of manicured gardens. After boldly knocking at
the door of Humboldt’s apartment, Stephens was told the baron was not receiving visitors that day. Discouraged and with time running out, he left a letter of introduction from the former Prussian ambassador to the United States and his card, noting that he would call again at two o’clock. When he did he was ushered into the apartment’s salon. A short time later Humboldt greeted him in heavily accented but fluent English, saying that no letter of introduction was necessary and that he was more than familiar with Stephens’s writings and his famous travels.

  Stephens was stunned. He could scarcely believe Humboldt, his boyhood hero, was standing before him praising his work. “Nearly half a century ago, he had filled the first place in the world of letters,” Stephens wrote, “sitting as it were, upon a throne, lighting a pathway of science to the philosopher, and teaching the school-boy at his desk.” Though ill, the baron appeared much younger than his years. He was dressed in a simple suit of black, the same simplicity reflected in his apartment.

  They spoke briefly about the ruined cities of America, but the conversation turned quickly to the advantages of trade between the United States and Prussia when Humboldt learned of Stephens’s connection with the steamship line to Bremen. Humboldt had just completed the first two volumes of his monumental work on the unity of all natural phenomenon, titled Kosmos, but Stephens noted that he was just as consumed by the current politics of Germany and Europe.

  From European politics the conversation shifted to Mexico, whose ruins Humboldt had investigated not long before Stephens was born. Humboldt praised Prescott’s History of the Conquest, adding that “there was no historian of the age, in England or Germany, equal to him.” Then he surprised Stephens with the extent of his interest in the recent war between the United States and Mexico.

  “He was full of our Mexican war,” Stephens wrote. For all his liberal views, he added, Humboldt was still a native of Prussia, a state steeped in militarism. “In Prussia,” Stephens continued, “war is a science, and according to the leading policy of Europe, to be always ready for war, every male in Prussia, the highest nobleman’s son not excepted, is compelled to serve his regular term in the army.” Even given that, Stephens was startled to learn that Humboldt, the king, and his military council often huddled around Humboldt’s maps to follow the course of the Mexican War with every news dispatch from across the Atlantic. According to Humboldt, they had “followed General [Zachary] Taylor from his encampment at Corpus Christi . . . through the storming of Monterey, and the bloody scenes of Buena Vista. They had fought over all his battles, and with his positions all marked on the map.”

  Stephens said he was aware the American army had won the respect of much of Europe and that the army’s success in Mexico had raised the nation to the ranks of a “first rate” power. But he had no idea until his conversation with Humboldt just how much it had also upset the “whole doctrine” in Europe, and especially Prussia, of standing, professional armies. “In the teeth of all settled opinions,” he continued, “General Taylor, with a handful of regulars, and a small body of volunteers who had never been in battle, had stood up for a whole day against the murderous fire, and had finally defeated four times their number. Field marshals and generals of Prussia, among them veterans who had studied the art of war on the great battlefields of Europe, were struck with admiration at the daring and skill displayed at Buena Vista; and this admiration, Baron Humboldt said, they expressed without reserve, freely, publicly, and everywhere.”

  The two men had been talking for more than an hour when a servant entered and called the baron to dinner—with the king. Humboldt asked if Stephens might remain several days and accept a letter of introduction from him to several important gentlemen in Berlin with whom Stephens should become acquainted. “Circumstances did not permit me to deliver the letter,” he wrote. “But I had the satisfaction of bringing it home with me, written in German, in a strong, firm hand, as an autograph of Humboldt, and a memento of one of my most interesting incidents of travel.”

  Seven weeks later, at a board meeting of Ocean Steam Navigation Company, Stephens moved that one of the next two steamers being built by the company bear the name “SS Humboldt.” A letter to that effect was sent to Humboldt through the Prussian minister in Washington and in a reply, dated September 21, 1847, the baron agreed.22

  The next month a three-page article titled “An Hour with Alexander Von Humboldt” appeared in a Boston periodical called Littell’s Living Age. It would be Stephens’s last published work—but not his last adventure. He would soon travel again, drawn once more into the jungle. However, this time steam and the gathering power of America’s ambition in the world, not antiquities, would be the driving force.

  24

  Panama

  The SS Humboldt would never be built. Even with the help of a lucrative U.S. mail subsidy, the company was never able to raise the capital needed to complete its grand four-ship plan. And by the spring of 1848, when the company’s second and last steamship, the 235-foot SS Herman was launched, Stephens’s energy and attention were elsewhere. He had gone south on another journey of discovery. Though very different from his explorations with Catherwood, this adventure would nevertheless reunite the two of them and consume the final years of Stephens’s life. He was in Panama. He had gone under an agreement reached with William Henry Aspinwall.

  How and when the two men met is unclear. Both their fathers were successful New York merchants and investors, and by the time Stephens became a director of the Bremen line, he and Aspinwall were traveling in the same business and social circles. Aspinwall came from a seafaring family that traced its lineage to the Pilgrims. He was born in 1807 in New York, educated at local schools, and went to work as a young clerk for his uncles Gardiner and Samuel Howland in their shipping firm. His grasp of the import-export business came so readily that by the age of twenty-five he was a partner. The company, which started with the Caribbean trade, had grown rapidly to include routes to England and the Mediterranean. A few years later, when the two senior partners retired, Aspinwall, then only thirty, and his cousin took over management of the company under the name of Howland & Aspinwall.1 At the time, the firm had grown into the preeminent shipping line in New York, operating as far away as South America and China. For young Aspinwall, soft-spoken and modest but driven with ambition, it had been a meteoric ascent.2

  At that point, with the company on firm financial footing, Aspinwall turned his attention to ship design and hired a pioneering naval architect named John Willis Griffiths.3 A chronic risk taker, Aspinwall took a chance on Griffiths.4 What Aspinwall wanted was speed. He knew that fresh tea leaves from China would sell at a premium in New York. So Griffiths designed for him what came to be known as the first “extreme” clipper ship, called the Rainbow.5 He followed quickly with one of the most beautiful sailing vessels ever built, the Sea Witch, a black-hulled China clipper launched in New York in 1846. In March 1849, under billowing clouds of canvas, a golden dragon head thrust from her bow, the Sea Witch sailed into New York harbor 74 days and 14 hours out from Hong Kong, a sailing record not broken for the next 154 years.6 At auction a short time later, the tea leaves carried in her hull made Howland & Aspinwall enough money in one trip to cover the cost of her construction. The long, sleek Aspinwall-Griffiths model, with its stacks of sails, would dominate the perishable cargo trade for decades. Yet even as the Sea Witch appeared over the horizon in 1849, clipper ships and speed records no longer consumed the restless Aspinwall. Ever farsighted, he had already moved on. He knew the steam engine was transforming the world, and it was racing forward at a speed even the Sea Witch would never be able to keep up with.

  Given their background and close age—Stephens was two years older than Aspinwall—and the compact world of New York business, the two men’s paths inevitably crossed. They made an odd pair: Aspinwall’s smooth, doughy features and quiet demeanor a contrast to Stephens’s sharp intensity and volubility. Both men possessed quick intelligence, yet Stephens remained an
idealist in the face of Aspinwall’s mercantile pragmatism. It was, in fact, a powerful combination. The two men found they shared a single compelling vision, which was about to draw them into deep alliance. Sometime in late 1847, not long after Stephens’s return from Germany, they got together to talk about Panama.

  Only a short time before, Aspinwall had completed his most audacious move yet, the culmination of a sequence of events that started in 1846 when the United States settled a long-running dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory. The two countries signed a treaty that gave the land below the 49th parallel, with the exception of Vancouver Island, to the United States. Then, a year later, as the U.S. government prepared to take over California following its victory in its war with Mexico, it offered subsidies to shipping firms in exchange for carrying the U.S. mail from the east coast down to Panama and from Panama on to Oregon and California. Aspinwall grabbed the mail contract for the Pacific route, a subsidy worth $199,000 a year.7 With a small group of business associates he set up the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and began building three steamships to send around South America to the Pacific coast.8

  Hearing the news, a number of fellow capitalists in New York looked on in disbelief, wondering if Aspinwall had lost his mind. They pointed to the fact that almost no infrastructure for steamship repairs and coaling existed along the west coast, and with California and Oregon so distant and undeveloped, they questioned how the company could ever expect to turn a profit on its investment.9 Aspinwall, however, had taken the long view, convinced California and Oregon held great promise. He also had a much more enterprising plan in mind. Panama was the key, he believed, to vast commercial transactions east and west, stretching from Europe to Asia, and he had now captured one link in the network.