In February 1852, while Stephens spoke at the cornerstone-laying ceremony on Manzanillo Island, Catherwood addressed members of the London’s Banking Institute in Threadneedle Street. Members were concerned about the inflationary effects of the gold discoveries in California and, more recently, Australia. He described the overall situation in California and told the bankers that an estimated 180,000–200,000 men were currently working in the mining districts, averaging about seven or eight shillings a day.7 Then, no doubt seeking investors among the bankers, he displayed samples of the gold-veined quartz he had brought from the Grass Valley mine.
In April he wrote Stephens from Charles Square asking if he was interested in investing in Gold Hill. He said he would understand if Stephens was cautious about such a speculative operation. “But I think it will turn out alright,” he said, pointing out that he had already collected his first 10 percent dividend. He was trying to arrange a merger of Gold Hill with another mining operation, he explained, and he and others were working to raise new capital for the combined companies. “Let me know before all the stock is sold.”
Then he mentioned again the Indian ruins he had heard about in California but had not yet had a chance to visit. Where exactly they were he didn’t say, but he claimed they were “remarkable antiquities” of “massive and important character.”8 Only three or four others knew of them, he added, and he was anxious to get to the site before they did. (The reference is a mystery, as no ruins similar to those of the ancient Maya are known to exist in California.)
“My idea was to have made my careful drawings and then to have passed a month or so with you getting out a little addenda to a new edition of your work. How does that idea please you?”9 Stephens may have welcomed the idea now that the weight of the railroad was slowly lifting from his shoulders with the new construction contract arranged by Law. Unfortunately we have no letters from Stephens to Catherwood to tell us.10
At the end of June, Catherwood learned from Stephens that he was back in New York and wrote how relieved he was to know he was safely home again. He wrote about coming to New York but indicated the merger negotiations were delaying his travel. Then he struck an apprehensive note. While he had been positive about his mining venture in April, now he was not so sure about its prospects. He indicated something may have gone wrong in California because financial accounts from Gold Hill were not being regularly sent to him. Then he added, ominously:
You must not be surprised if I should once again come to you for employment in connection with the Panama railroad, and I think it well to ask you in advance whether you can give me a berth on it should I be obliged eight or ten months hence or possibly sooner to look out for a situation. I have embarked $13,000 in the mine, and I should not be surprised if I were to lose the greater part of it. Of course this is between ourselves. It annoys and worries me beyond expression, on account of my children, for as to myself I care nothing.11
Then silence. The June letter is the last to be found among the correspondence between the two men.
Since May’s banquet, Stephens’s health had gone into steady decline. Then sometime during the summer, the exact timing is not certain, he grew seriously ill. Because of the heat and humidity in the congested city, he left Manhattan for Long Island, possibly to the country home of a family member or friend. But he was not so ill that he did not follow closely all the business of the railroad as well as other news. “I have seen Mr. Lawrence [the U.S. ambassador to England],” Aspinwall wrote in a short note to Stephens on July 13, “and had a pleasant talk with him which I will communicate to you when I come up to see you. Glad to hear you are easier.”12
Francis Spies, the secretary for the railroad, wrote him regularly concerning company business and the progress on the isthmus, which had slowed to a crawl during the peak of Panama’s wet season. Spies visited with Stephens every chance he could get out of the office. “I have been trying to get down this week and see you but so far without success,” he wrote on August 18. “I must come down on Saturday.”13 And whenever a steamer arrived from the isthmus, Spies brought out the latest news, some of which must have weighed heavily on Stephens and added to his sense of urgency in finishing the road.14
The SS John L. Stephens.
One report told of a U.S. Army regiment that had been dispatched from New York to cross Panama and take up garrison duty in California and Oregon. Accompanied by their wives and children, 550 soldiers landed at the railroad’s docks at Aspinwall on July 16, then traveled more than twenty miles over the company’s existing rails to the center of the isthmus, where the construction was continuing. From there most of the men continued on foot over the mountain to Panama City while the women and children waited with the baggage as a young lieutenant in charge, Ulysses S. Grant, struggled to round up enough mules for the final descent. The delay, which lasted more than a week, proved fatal. By the time Grant got the rest of the party to the Pacific coast, their ranks had been decimated by cholera. The future general and U.S. president estimated that one out of three in his group had died. During the following weeks, many more in the regiment succumbed while quarantined in an abandoned ship in Panama Bay. By the time the regiment sailed for San Francisco at the end of August, Grant wrote his wife, they had “lost one hundred persons, counting men, women and children.”15
Stephens’s condition wavered. He had beaten back fevers before and there were periods of improvement. At one point Spies dashed off a note, undated, mentioning that he had heard from a mutual friend that “you appeared to be much more comfortable yesterday” and at last “the doctors are on the right track.”16
But while his doctors by now understood the likely cause of Stephens’s disorder, there was little they could do about it. He was diagnosed with a diseased liver, the result of hepatitis and an accumulation of tropical diseases picked up on the isthmus and at Bogotá. On August 31, the Long Island Farmer and Queen County Advertiser carried a short item: “John L. Stephens, esq., well-known traveler and artist, is said to be lying dangerously ill” in Hempstead, New York, a village not far from New York City on Long Island.
At this point Aspinwall, deeply affected by his close friend’s illness, decided to name his latest Pacific Mail steamship in Stephens’s honor. The 274-foot vessel, a magnificent state-of-the-art wooden side-wheeler, was in the final stages of construction at the Smith & Dimon shipyard on the East River. The ship was being fitted out with luxurious, wood-paneled staterooms, large glass portholes, improved ventilation system, tanks for twenty thousand gallons of fresh water, and an extensive suite of baths for its nine hundred passengers and crew, complete with hot and cold water. Aspinwall arranged for the steamer’s launch and christening to take place on September 21, attended by Stephens’s father, family, friends, and the public. Stephens was not well enough to join them. He had been moved to his father’s house at 13 Leroy Place, where he could be cared for more easily by his doctors and family.
At two o’clock in the afternoon on the last day of summer—a “muggy” day, according to one newspaper—a large crowd gathered at the east end of Fourth Street. It had been forty-five years since two-year-old John Stephens and his family stood on the other side of Manhattan and watched the launch of the Clermont by steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton. Now, at half past three the enormous hull of the John L. Stephens slid into the East River and cheers went up from the spectators. At the time, New Yorkers gathered by the thousands to witness such launchings. “She is a very sharp, handsome craft and the beauty of her model was a matter of remark among the large assemblage present to witness her enter the water,” the New York Herald reported the next day.17 The John L. Stephens was the fourteenth steamship in the Pacific Mail line, its largest and most lavish. And standing that day in the thick of the “assemblage,” almost certainly, was Frederick Catherwood and his son, Frederick, Jr.
Stephens was home again on quiet tree-lined Leroy Place, not far from the playing fields of his youth: the promenade along New York’s
Battery, the Bowling Green, where he dared to climb the iron fence in defiance of city elders to retrieve the balls that got away.18
A growing abscess had taken hold in Stephens’s liver. Doctors in the mid-nineteenth century had almost no resources to deal with such a condition, no antibiotics or other medicines to treat the infection. Short of surgery, which in the pre-antiseptic age was just as likely to kill as cure a patient, they could at best offer only opiates and other palliative concoctions. And Stephens may have been delirious when Catherwood showed up at Leroy Place.
We know from Catherwood’s own account that he and Stephens met at least once again after their brief time working together in Panama. Catherwood mentioned being separated for two years in a short profile of Stephens that he later published. We have no details, however, no records, no eyewitness accounts or descriptions of any kind for Stephens’s final days. But we know from ship manifests that Catherwood and his son left Liverpool on September 4 aboard the steamship SS Pacific and arrived in New York on September 20, the day before the launch of the SS John L. Stephens.19 The Stephens family, to whom Catherwood was devoted like a son and brother, would have been his first stop. Did he learn then for the first time the seriousness of Stephens’s illness and the steamship’s launch? Or had he found out while still in England and rushed to New York to be at his old friend’s side? Without surviving letters or other accounts we will never have the answer. We know only that he arrived just in time.
The appearance of Catherwood and his son standing at his bedside must have seemed to Stephens like a figment of his imagination, an apparition, a fevered dream. Now seventeen years old, Frederick Jr. had been no more than six or eight when Stephens last saw him. And what did Catherwood see—and feel? Lying before him was his dearest friend, his old fellow traveler, the man with whom he had shared hardship and daring, a partnership of near madness and genius. They had endured severe illnesses together and yet Catherwood would have been shocked to see his old companion’s emaciated body, his eyes sunken and skin yellow with jaundice. Just two years earlier, writing from Panama to an unnamed person, probably Stephens’s father, Catherwood had been reassuring. “Knowing the strength of his constitution and how rapidly he recovers from attacks of the fever,” he said of Stephens’s accident and sickness in Bogotá, “I trust to find him in good health when we meet.”20
Burial vault of John L. Stephens at New York City Marble Cemetery, with detail of Maya glyph sculpted from an image by Catherwood.
But this was no relapse of fever. Stephens’s great heart and indomitable spirit were now overwhelmed by disease and deadly toxins. He was dying. No amount of rebounds the two men had known before could be reassuring now.
Had Catherwood arrived too late? Was Stephens too distracted and feverish, his brain too confused for the two men to communicate? Or in their last hours together did they have time to talk—and remember? Talk of making books, railroads, of Egypt and Jerusalem? Recall the tormented ride up through the mud of Mico Mountain? Relive the moment the angry mob burst into the cabildo in Camotán and pointed muskets at their hearts; laugh again at the gold-dollar eagle pressed into the hot sealing wax? In his delirium, did Stephens gape once more with Catherwood, looking in utter wonder at the phantasmagoric Mayan lords towering over them in the Copán forest—the monoliths that changed their lives?
Did they remember their anxiety at traveling apart through Central America and their relief upon falling into each other’s arms when they met again in Guatemala City? Were they able to share the memory of drifting perilously from the shore on the startling blue lake of Atitlán, feel the freezing cold nights, dodging the swarms of insects and fire along the trail as they crossed the Cuchumatanes range? Conjure up the giant fireflies at night in the palace at Palenque while they watched the black sky pierced by lightning as rain clouds swept toward them across the bent treetops? Did they recall the sharks circling their becalmed ship in the Gulf of Mexico, the daguerreotype sessions in Mérida and fumbling eye surgeries? Feel the cool, lime-infused crystalline water of the cenotes, where they swam at the end of long hot rides across stony Yucatán, relive one last time the descent on the rickety giant ladder at Bolonchen, their endless fevers and chills, their brief bearded sojourn on the palm-shaded sands of Cozumel Island, the murderous attacks of the mosquitoes at Tulum, and over and over and over again the haunting, perplexing beauty of the stone cities they had found together, buried so deep in the jungle?
The great arc of their extraordinary journey and long, close friendship came to an end on Tuesday evening, October 12, 1852.21 Stephens died at his father’s home on Leroy Place at the age of forty-six.
Stephens’s body was taken by horse-drawn hearse three days later to St. Thomas Church, where an Episcopal service was performed. The rosewood coffin was then brought to Marble Cemetery at Second Street. Among the pallbearers was Samuel J. Tilden, a close friend of Stephens who would later become New York’s governor and win the popular vote for the U.S. presidency in 1876, only to lose a disputed Electoral College vote to Rutherford B. Hayes.22 Stephens’s remains were put temporarily in an unmarked vault set aside for his brother-in-law. They were transferred nearly a century later to a large vault, where they remain today, marked by a Maya glyph with the appearance of a scribe copied from an earlier Catherwood illustration.23
27
Missing
Stephens had been Catherwood’s best friend, his anchor, the man he had trusted and loved more deeply than any other, and whose loss must have pierced him grievously. And there were signs, too, that he was losing his equilibrium.
He had been under great pressure to get to California as fast as possible to salvage his mining investment. But within days of his return his merger plan began to unravel. Arriving in San Francisco, he demanded “immediate payment of a large sum” from the new partners on top of the amount that had been agreed on in England. The company’s agent refused and the joint venture collapsed.1 Catherwood’s seemingly inexplicable demand may have been justified as the other company was already negotiating for other mining claims before he arrived.
What this meant for Gold Hill is not clear. During his absence in England an election of company officers took place and he was not reelected president.2 Even if these events somehow undermined his personal investment, as he had hinted to Stephens might happen, the mining company itself continued to thrive financially for at least another year.3 But Catherwood’s name never came up in connection with Gold Hill Mining again. Instead he found himself a railroad surveyor once more, hired to help lay out a hundred-mile line from Marysville, near the mining districts, to Benicia, near San Francisco Bay.4 The project was delayed by winter rains but completed by March 1853.5
Then Catherwood dropped from sight once again, only to reappear a year later in London with the publication of a revised edition of his first book with Stephens: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán.6 The book, which went on sale in March 1854 for twelve shillings, turned out to be the inexpensive, single-volume reprint that Catherwood earlier declined to publish without Stephens’s “sanction and approbation.”7
“In preparing the present Work for publication in a cheap form,” Catherwood wrote in the book’s preface, “I have not omitted any of the illustrations that appeared in the American Edition, and have given some additional ones, which are now published for the first time.”8 And while he had augmented his own work, he explained that he had “curtailed a portion” of Stephens’s narrative in order to reduce the book to a single volume. Yet the abridgements were minor and the new British edition still took up 548 pages—in smaller letter type. Catherwood’s edits were also judiciously made in a way that kept the narrative force of the two-volume original.
Catherwood also made two significant additions to the work. The first was a portrait of Stephens, engraved “from a daguerreotype,” in which a stern-looking Stephens glares from the page with intense, burning eyes, a shock of thick black hair swept from his high
forehead, his chin and jaw firmly set, framed by his beard. The selection is a curious one from the person who knew Stephens and what he looked like probably better than anyone—an image that Catherwood may have felt captured Stephens’s determined, unwavering spirit, but one also at odds with the few other, softer, more flattering portraits of Stephens that still exist.
The other addition was a two-page “biographical notice” by Catherwood briefly covering the high points of Stephens’s life and the two men’s partnership over more than a decade. It ends with a one-sentence tribute in Catherwood’s characteristically formal—almost repressed—phraseology: “As his fellow-traveler and intimate friend, I may be permitted to bear testimony to his kindly disposition, and the many excellent qualities of head and heart which endeared him to a large circle of friends and connexions.” He added that if the new edition was well received in England, it would be followed by a “continuation of our travels in Yucatán in the years 1841, 1842.” That volume would never be published.
Six months later, on September 20, 1854, Catherwood boarded the SS Arctic in Liverpool, bound for New York, this time traveling alone. The Arctic was the pride of the so-called Collins Line, based in New York, which had been battling its English rival, the Cunard Line, for several years for supremacy in the transatlantic packet trade.9 Packets were steamships that ran on regular schedules, unlike most sailing ships, which were dependent on favorable winds and full cargo holds.
The “Great Atlantic Race,” as it came to be known, stirred patriotic passions on both sides of the Atlantic. The Arctic was launched in 1850 in New York to great fanfare. At 284 feet and 2,856 tons, like the SS John L. Stephens, she was among the largest, most luxurious, and most powerful ships afloat. And within two years she had broken several records, steaming from New York to Liverpool in less than ten days.
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