Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  When she left Liverpool for New York in 1854 on the last day of summer, she was filled to capacity, carrying 233 passengers, 175 crew members, and six lifeboats capable of carrying a maximum of 180 people. On board with Catherwood were dozens of New York society’s most prominent members, who were returning home from summer travels in Europe, including the wife and two children of Edward Knight Collins, the principal owner of the Collins Line. Also aboard were three grown children of James Brown, part owner of the largest investment bank in North America, and George Allen, partner in Novelty Iron Works, the company that built the Arctic’s giant steam engines, who was returning to New York with his wife and small son.10

  Seven days out from Liverpool, the Arctic steamed full ahead through a thick fog sixty miles south of Newfoundland. Approaching from the opposite direction was a smaller vessel called Vesta, an iron-hulled, propeller-driven steamship carrying more than a hundred sailors and fishermen on their way home to France following the fishing season on the Grand Banks. Though it was twelve noon, lookouts on each ship failed to see the other through the fog until the last moment. In an explosion of screeching metal, the 152-foot Vesta tore into the starboard bow of the Arctic, then continued on alongside and past the larger ship. When the Arctic’s captain, James Luce, ran out on deck and surveyed the damage he could see that the Vesta, whose bow was completely gone, was doomed to sink in a matter of minutes. Thinking that his much larger ship was not seriously damaged, he ordered the Arctic’s helmsman to circle the French ship in order to render all assistance necessary to save its passengers and crew. But within a short time it became clear the Arctic had also sustained serious damage along its starboard side, with a gaping hole below the waterline where much of the Vesta’s twisted iron bow now protruded. The Arctic began filling with water. Over the next hours, working frantically, the crew and passengers failed in every attempt to stop the inward rush of the sea.

  Drifting away from the Arctic in the fog, the crewmen and fishermen aboard the Vesta fought to buttress the ship’s forward bulkhead against the incoming water. They then shifted cargo to the stern and raised the ship’s bow enough to enable them to keep the vessel afloat long enough to make it to the Newfoundland coast three days later.

  On the Arctic, however, panic began to set in when it became clear that the ship was slowly settling deeper in the water and would not make it to the coast. Captain Luce, in a heroic effort, tried to get all the women and children on board into the ship’s few lifeboats. With several loyal officers he fought off crew members, some of them firemen and coal tenders who rushed up on deck as the rising water below doused the fires under the ship’s boilers. In a pitched battle that followed, they overwhelmed Luce, and along with some male passengers commandeered the boats. With the six lifeboats gone, most not even filled to capacity, the remaining crew and passengers ripped up planks and threw overboard spars from the ship’s masts, doors—anything that floated—in an effort to lash together a large raft. Four hours after the collision, as the Arctic sank deeper into the sea, many of its passengers climbed praying and crying onto the roof of the deck house. Then the huge steamship went down, the sea swallowing virtually all of its passengers, including the captain, his eleven-year-old son, Willie, the Collins, Brown, and Allen families—and Frederick Catherwood.

  Captain Luce, gripping his son, was sucked deep into the watery vortex but somehow managed to fight his way back up to the surface. A few moments later, one of the large round wooden covers that curved over the Arctic’s side paddle wheels broke free from the ship and, full with air, shot up through the surface. An edge left a deep gash across the captain’s head. When the half-circle box fell back into the water, it crushed the skull of his son, killing him instantly. Luce struggled for some time blinded by his own blood. Nearby George Allen, the partner of the Novelty Iron Works, had also surfaced alive. The two men clung to the floating paddle-wheel box, eventually pulling themselves into it. Twelve others made it through the freezing water and into the box, but only Luce, Allen, and another man were still alive two days later when they were rescued by a passing ship. Seven other passengers and crewmen who had also climbed onto large pieces of debris from the ship survived long enough to be found. In the end, seventy-six others in three lifeboats were rescued or made it to the Newfoundland coast. Fifty-nine were members of the crew and seventeen were passengers, not one of them a woman or a child. Of the original 408 passengers and crew aboard the Arctic, only 86 survived. Catherwood was not among them.

  The sinking of the SS Arctic.

  Horrifying accounts of the SS Arctic tragedy from the survivors, and an official report from Captain Luce, filled the newspapers in New York, London, and other cities for weeks. Obituaries for many of the Arctic’s most prominent passengers were published. But there was not one mention of Catherwood. Many days later the name “Mr. Catherwood” finally appeared, a single line in a list designated: “Missing.”

  Newspaper account of the tragedy of the SS Arctic.

  Six months afterward, in San Francisco, a note appeared in the April 15, 1855, edition of the Daily Alta California. It announced that a letter of credit from the Union Bank in London issued for Mr. Frederick Catherwood in the amount of 950 pounds sterling had been stopped—“Mr. Catherwood having perished in the Arctic.”11

  No obituaries ever appeared in London or New York or San Francisco. The blurred and elusive identity, the modesty and facelessness that had lingered around Catherwood all his life, followed him even into death.

  Epilogue

  The Petén sun, a huge bubble of molten gold rising off the edge of the world, lights up the old stones that jut through the jungle canopy. The stark, isolated temples of the Maya are the only objects visible above a sea of green. Standing for centuries atop their pyramids, glowing scarlet and saffron in the dawn, the stones have triumphed over nature for another day. The ancient city beneath the trees, originally called Yax Mutal and today Tikal, was the one place Stephens and Catherwood had most wanted to visit. A priest they met on their way to Palenque told them of it. The cleric said that as a young man he had climbed to the summit of the Cordilleras in the center of Guatemala, looked out over the immense forest extending to Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico, and saw at a great distance “a large city spread over a great space, and with turrets white and glittering in the sun.”

  “We had a craving desire to reach the mysterious city,” wrote Stephens.1 But it lay in the middle of uncharted lowland jungle, where no white men entered, and they had to get to Palenque before the start of the rains. “We had difficulties enough in the road before us,” he added, and they rode on to Palenque around the seemingly impenetrable Petén forest. They remained haunted, however, by the cleric’s vision of magnificence and splendor; they were convinced also that other cities lay buried in the Petén waiting to be unearthed. And it would not be long, they believed, before they were.

  Their speculations proved prescient but the timing wrong. Years would pass before Tikal was discovered and decades before other cities scattered throughout the Petén were found and their monuments, temples, and palaces laid bare. Deciphering the Maya’s hieroglyphic code would take more than another century. And today ruins still lie covered by the jungle.

  Tikal temples rising above the jungle canopy in El Petén, Guatemala. (Carlsen)

  Stephens had always been concerned about rivals, and he was certain that others would quickly follow in his path. But his books, despite their blazing rush of popularity, did not send an immediate surge of explorers into the heart of Central America. And he was in large part responsible. His vivid descriptions of Central America’s rugged topography and unforgiving jungles were daunting enough. But he had also, if unintentionally, set people’s teeth on edge with his repelling accounts of the political violence that permeated the region as well.

  For Americans in particular, whose daring Stephens had hoped to inspire, there were other powerful dynamics at work. The United States was in the throes of a
great westward expansion, “Manifest Destiny,” aided and abetted by the gold rush and Stephens and Catherwood’s second great adventure: the Panama Railroad, completed in 1855. As the nation shifted west, it also turned inward, its interests and energies consumed by settlement and improvements across its vast inner spaces. Then, in 1861, the country was swallowed whole—by civil war.

  Stephens’s books nonetheless remained extremely popular. New editions rolled off the presses year after year and stirred deep interest in Europe in particular. Rival England especially had been caught off guard, stung by Stephens and Catherwood’s success. After all, an American with the help of a “yankified English artist” had bested the British in finding a lost civilization in Central America right under their noses—even though Walker and Caddy had reached Palenque first.2 Sluggish under the weight of its bureaucracy, the British government did nothing for more than a decade after publication of Stephens’s books. It finally took the trustees of the British Museum to wake the Foreign Office from its slumber. Just as Stephens had feared, they decided it was essential that the great museum possess Maya antiquities for their collections—a desire no doubt aroused by the 1850 opening in Paris of an American antiquities gallery at the Louvre displaying artifacts from Mexico and Peru.3

  Therefore, in July 1851, while Stephens was struggling to hold together his railroad company in Panama, Lord Palmerston sent a dispatch to Frederick Chatfield in Guatemala stating “it would be desirable to obtain for the British Museum some specimens of the sculptures” from the ruins at Copán.4 The message was quite specific. The museum wanted the sculptures described and illustrated in pages 134 to 144 of Stephens and Catherwood’s first volumes on Central America.5 The request was remarkably ambitious given that these ruins constituted some of the largest statues and monuments in Copán. But after several years and innumerable dispatches back and forth between Belize, Guatemala, and England, nothing was done.6

  Central American officials, meanwhile, had also read Stephens. In 1848, after being alerted by a chiclero, or gum gatherer, who said he saw stone structures towering above the jungle, Petén’s governor, Colonel Modesto Méndez, ventured deep into the forest and found the overgrown, skyscraping temples of Tikal. The discovery resulted in the first official recording of the now-famous site. Méndez’s report was published in a Berlin journal in 1853, a year after Stephens’s death.7 Then the discovery faded into almost complete obscurity.

  For years no new explorations were made. Then gradually, over the next fifty years, starting in the late 1850s—twenty years after Stephens and Catherwood’s first expedition—individual explorers began arriving in Chiapas, Yucatán, and Guatemala—nearly all of them Europeans. Each one carried well-worn copies of Stephens’s books along with hundreds of pounds of cumbersome photographic equipment. Funded by American tobacco magnate Peter Lorillard, a Frenchman named Désiré Charnay was one of the first serious photographers of the ruins; in 1888 Harper & Brothers published his Ancient Cities of the New World. Alfred P. Maudslay, an English explorer, started out in 1881 with Incidents of Travel in hand and followed the exact route taken by Stephens and Catherwood up the Río Dulce to the town of Izabal, then over Mico Mountain to Quiriguá and Copán. By the time he completed his seventh and final trip through the region thirteen years later, he had meticulously documented Quiriguá, Copán, and Palenque and had penetrated deep into the lowland Petén jungle to record Tikal, Yaxchilan, and other previously unknown buried cities. He created an extraordinary record of the ruins using large-format cameras to produce beautiful, high-resolution black-and-white photographs. He also made maps, drawings, plans, and plaster casts.8 Maudslay was quickly followed by Austrian explorer Teobert Maler, who would unearth more cities and expand the record to include ruins at Piedras Negras, Naranjo, and Seibal.9

  Alfred Maudslay working in Chichén Itzá.

  Fallen monument at Copán. (Catherwood)

  The same fallen monument at Copán photographed by Alfred Maudslay.

  Then, what had been a trickle in the late 1800s became a flood of new exploration in the first half of the 1900s. The ancient world of the Maya was coming to life once again. Every year it became more evident that the “Classic” civilization the Maya had created a millennium and a half earlier had been larger, more densely populated, and more highly advanced than anyone had imagined.

  On-site photographs of the ever-growing number of ruins, as well as Catherwood’s and others’ precise drawings, became enormously helpful. The Maya’s hieroglyphic inscriptions, along with their art and architecture, could be studied carefully and comfortably outside their difficult jungle environment. And while it would take decades before the hieroglyphic code was broken, scholars more quickly decoded the Maya’s numbering system and complicated calendar. They deciphered the dates on the monuments, correlated them with our Gregorian calendar, and calculated the exact age of the ruins and their inhabitants. The history of the ancient dynasties inscribed in stone slowly began to emerge, and just as Stephens had predicted, the stern-faced, brooding statutes became real people with real histories.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the old “antiquarianism” of the nineteenth century had transformed itself, writes archaeologist Ian Graham, from “not much more than the cataloguing of curiosities into a nascent scientific discipline.”10 And if Mayanist exploration belonged to the Europeans during the last half of the nineteenth century, Americans charged into the field in the twentieth, quickly dominating the subject in a way that Stephens had always hoped. The Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the National Geographic Society, and a large number of universities and museums sent teams of archaeologists, ethnographers, and epigraphers to Mexico and Central America and worked with a growing number of local archaeologists. They scoured the forests, found and excavated new sites, and scrupulously documented and reconstructed many of the great ruined cites. Then slowly, in fits and starts at first, and finally with help from a Russian linguist named Yuri Knorosov, key breakthroughs in the 1950s through 1990s allowed epigraphers to crack the hieroglyphic code and unscramble the Maya’s remarkable system of writing.11

  Stephens and Catherwood would have been astonished only by how long it took. “One thing I believe,” wrote Stephens about the first towering stela he and Catherwood found in Copán in November 1839, “is that its history is graven on its monuments.”

  Today the ancient Maya are recognized for having achieved one of the most sophisticated early civilizations on earth. Tourists by the millions, from every part of the globe, annually descend on Maya ruins in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. They are drawn by the unusual beauty of the art and architecture but also the myths and legends, real and imagined, that still shroud the Maya in mystery. Their civilization has taken powerful hold in the popular imagination, stimulating interest in shamanism, creation mythology, new age cosmology, and the discovery of different ways of understanding our place in the universe. The Maya have also inspired dozens of books and films linking them, not with Egypt, the Phoenicians, and Lost Tribes of Israel as in the past, but with visitors from outer space. Doomsayers most recently claimed the Maya’s “long count” of 5,126 years, which ended (and started again) on December 21, 2012, meant the arrival of a cataclysmic apocalypse, a doomsday prediction that prompted Columbia Pictures to release a $200 million disaster movie titled 2012.

  Much still remains to be discovered about the ancient Maya, scientifically and archaeologically; new ruins continue to be found. And if we pay attention, the still-emerging story of their civilization has the power to teach us about another kind of apocalypse: environmental degradation, drought, war, and the dangers of overpopulation and overconsumption that threaten our world today. Their stone cities speak from across the centuries and tell us of the riches of great success and the risks of great failure—the very human story of kings and lords, their understanding of the cosmos, their sense of time, astronomical observations, mathematics, calendars, an
d language, as well their extravagance, overuse of resources, dynastic rivalries, conflicts and conquests. The glowering stone lords of the forest that so startled and mesmerized Stephens and Catherwood were not all-powerful gods but humans, and the ancient ruins surrounding them have now come to life—as Stephens wrote—with “orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory.”

  On January 27, 1855, work gangs on the rail line from the port of Aspinwall and the line running from Panama City met at the top of the continental divide. In driving rain at midnight, under the light of whale oil lanterns, the last rail of the Panama Railroad was laid and the final spike pounded into place. The next day the first train passed from sea to sea.12 Though Stephens did not live to see it, his dream had become a reality.

  “From its inception to its consummation, it is purely American,” crowed the editor of the Aspinwall Courier several days later. “American genius conceived the plan; American science pronounced it practicable; American capital has furnished the sinews; American energy has prosecuted the gigantic enterprise to its completion in spite of the most formidable difficulties.”13

  The construction of the forty-seven-mile rail line had cost hundreds, if not thousands of lives. It was per mile the most expensive railroad in the world, at a final cost of $6,564,553 (at least $250 million in today’s dollars). “The real wonder was that the road had been built at all,” wrote Tracy Robinson, who later served as an official on the line. “One cannot pass from ocean to ocean, and see from the car windows the dense masses of tangled verdure on either side, forming in many places green walls apparently impenetrable, without a sense of the marvelous.”14