Jungle of Stone
Page 48
2.With the exception of what would become known as Brazil, which was granted to Portugal in the famous 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.
3.W. R. Manning and U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1932).
4.V. W. von Hagen, Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947).
5.Catherwood arrived in New York City on June 7, 1836, on the ship Barque Union from London, England. National Archives Microfilm Publication, M237, roll number 30, list number 447. Stephens arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, on May 11, 1836. See the final page of J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970). His arrival in London would have been many weeks after Catherwood left England (sometime around the middle of May) and was already in New York. Stephens landed in New York on September 6, 1836, arriving on the ship Hiberia from Liverpool, England. National Archives Microfilm Publication.
6.Architectural Publication Society, The Dictionary of Architecture (London: Richards, 1852).
7.Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land.
8.The original contract is among Stephens’s papers at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
9.The contract added in stilted legalese: “It being understood that all the money which shall so be paid to Mrs. Catherwood and family shall be deducted from the above-said sum of $1500 or otherwise taken into the amount of a final settlement as so much paid to the said Catherwood.”
10.There is one vague sketch Catherwood made of himself in the ruins of Tulum, Mexico, but with so few details as to leave the mystery of his appearance largely intact.
11.W. M. Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). The reference to the slaves owned by Judge John Lloyd (Stephens’s maternal grandfather) is found in letters to Stephens’s father, Benjamin Stephens, from his sister-in-law, concerning the disbursement of Judge Lloyd’s estate: John Lloyd Stephens Collection, 1946–47, New-York Historical Society, Von Hagen Papers.
CHAPTER 2: UPRIVER
1.J. B. Lockey, Diplomatic Futility (Durham, N.C.: [N.p.], 1930).
2.Manning and U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States.
3.“De Witt, Charles Gerrit, 1789–1839,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Suicide referenced in Lockey, Diplomatic Futility, p. 281.
4.A. M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).
CHAPTER 3: MICO MOUNTAIN
1.John Lloyd Stephens Collection, 1946–47, New-York Historical Society, Von Hagen Papers.
2.N. Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2004).
CHAPTER 4: PASSPORT
1.R. L. Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
2.D. M. Pendergast, Palenque: The Walker-Caddy Expedition to the Ancient Maya City, 1839–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967). Pendergast includes Caddy’s personal diary of the expedition and his description of the ruins at Palenque, as well as Walker’s official report, all of which form the basis of this narrative. He also uncovered the crucial dispatches between Colonel MacDonald and the Colonial Office and the story from the Belize Advertiser.
3.Ibid. See illustration after p. 32.
CHAPTER 5: MONKEYS LIKE THE WIND
1.D. R. Wallace, The Monkey’s Bridge: Mysteries of Evolution in Central America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997).
2.C. Hall, H. Perez Brignoli, et. al, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
3.Philbrick, Sea of Glory.
4.H. Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
5.Europe’s population to the Ural Mountains was estimated at 80 million at the time, according to Alfred Crosby. See The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1987), p. 19.
6.Ibid.
7.The Indians were not without some form of payback in what is now referred to as the “Columbian Exchange.” It is believed that they infected the Europeans with syphilis, although some controversy remains about whether the disease existed in Europe unrecorded prior to 1492. The first recorded case in Europe was reported in 1495.
8.C. Mann, 1491 (New York: Knopf, 2005); H. Dobyns, “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 493–515.
9.There is still controversy among scholars about whether Capa and his heir’s death were caused by smallpox. As with so much of the speculation surrounding the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, few adequate records have been found, leading to arguments and counterarguments over the degree to which Old World disease impacted the New World. For example, since the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the subsequently heightened concern about terrorists’ potential use of smallpox as a weapon, scientists have debated just how quickly the disease can spread and how infectious it really is. Some have pointed out that it is not as infectious as often claimed; some have used that information to argue that smallpox was not the sweeping scythe of death in the Americas that historians have made it out to be. What is often missed in the debate over details, however, is that the Europeans brought with them multiple deadly viruses and pathogens. Taken together, they would have been devastating. In addition, there is a multiplying effect from interruptions to farming and hunting that affected entire generations, leading to malnutrition and starvation. Few experts today argue that the totality of the disease impact was anything less than demographically catastrophic for Native Americans. For a sampling of a counterargument concerning smallpox, however, see Francis Brooks,: “The First Impact of Smallpox: What Was the Columbian Exchange Rate?” in Columbus and the Consequences of 1492, edited by A. R. Disney (Melbourne: La Trobe University, 1994).
10.Hall, Perez Brignoli, et al., Historical Atlas of Central America.
11.U.S. Department of State, Mediation of the Honduran-Guatemalan boundary question, held under the good offices of the Department of State, 1918–1919 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), pp. 62, 172.
STEPHENS
1.Alexander von Humboldt Digital Library, 2006.
2.Ibid.
3.A. v. Humboldt and J. Wilson, Personal Narrative (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid.
7.Alexander von Humboldt Digital Library.
8.A. v. Humboldt and A. Bonpland, Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the New continent during the years 1799–1804 (London: Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown, 1814).
9.Humboldt and Wilson, Personal Narrative.
10.A letter from John L. Stephens’s mother, Clemence, to her sister Mary Hendrickson, sent from New York City to Middleton, New Jersey, indicates that by March 11, 1907, when the letter was written and John would have been fifteen months old, the family was living in New York. The letter is in the Victor von Hagen Papers at the New-York Historical Society.
11.E. G. Burrows and M. Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
12.In fact over the next decade, three-foot, nine-inch-long stone markers—1,549 of them—indicating every future street corner were placed all the way up the island. P. E. Cohen and R. T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1997), p. 104.
13.K. T. Jackson and D. S. Dunbar, Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 119.
14.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 333–34.
15.Records of Benjamin Stephens’s early business transactions starting in 1796 can be found in the Stephens family files at the New-York Historical Society. Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.
16.J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854). “The Bowling Green was associated with my earliest recollections. It had been my play-ground when a boy; hundreds of times I had climbed over its fence for my ball, and I was one of a band of boys who held on to it long after the corporation invaded our rights” (p. 282).
17.G. Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 223–45.
18.Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.
19.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 424–28.
20.BANC MSS ZZ 116, John Lloyd Stephens Papers, 1795–1882, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Hereinafter referred to as BANC MSS ZZ 16.
21.Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, “Poe’s Criticisms from Southern Literary Messenger,” January 1837.
22.R. Hawks, “The Late John L. Stephens,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art 1 (1853): 64–68.
23.Von Hagen, Maya Explorer, p. 14.
24.Columbia University and W. J. Maxwell, Catalogue of Officers and Graduates of Columbia University from the Foundation of King’s College in 1754 (New York: The University, 1916).
25.Von Hagen, Maya Explorer, p. 15.
26.BANC MSS ZZ 116.
27.John Lloyd Stephens Collection, 1946–47, New-York Historical Society, Von Hagen Papers.
28.Hawks, “The Late John L. Stephens.”
29.Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland.
30.Ibid.
31.It may have been that Stephens sent the letters directly to Hoffman, who traveled in the same circle as Stephens in New York and may have been a friend. So that their publication was more calculated and less a surprise than he let on. His only comment came on page 122 of his second book, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland.
32.American Monthly Magazine, October 1835, p. 91.
33.J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in the Russian and Turkish Empires (London: R. Bentley, 1839), p. 200.
34.Ibid. P. 216.
35.L. Kuhnke and eScholarship, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
36.Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland.
37.Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land.
38.A. Keith, Evidence of the truth of the Christian religion: Derived from the literal fulfillment of Prophecy, particularly as illustrated by the history of the Jews, and by the discoveries of recent travellers (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1834).
39.A. Greene, A glance at New York: Embracing the city government, theatres, hotels, churches, mobs, monopolies, learned professions, newspapers, rogues, dandies, fires and firemen, water and other liquids, &c., &c (New York: A. Greene, 1837), pp. 149–66.
40.Stephens makes a reference to the hard times in the preface to the fourth edition: “And, in reference to the whole, [the author] can only say, as before, that in the present state of the world it is almost presumptuous to put forth a book of travels.”
41.Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 571–617.
42.T. L. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life (London: Longmans Green, 1874), p. 343.
43.E. Exman, The Brothers Harper: A Unique Publishing Partnership and Its Impact upon the Cultural Life of America from 1817 to 1853 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 93.
44.Ibid., p. 93.
45.J. A. Stevens, B. F. DeCosta, et al., The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries (New York: A. S. Barnes), pp. 29–30.
46.T. Weed, H. A. Weed, et al., Life of Thurlow Weed Including His Autobiography and a Memoir (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), pp. 435–36.
47.L. Lilly, C. S. Henry, et al., The New-York Review (New York: George Dearborn, 1837), pp. 351–67.
48.Southern Literary Messenger, August 1839.
49.W. H. Seward and F. W. Seward, Autobiography of William H. Seward, from 1801 to 1834 with a memoir of his life, and selections from his letters from 1831 to 1846 (New York: Appleton, 1877).
50.D. S. Dickinson, J. R. Dickinson, et al., Speeches, Correspondence, etc., of the Late Daniel S. Dickinson of New York (New York: Putnam, 1867).
CHAPTER 6: RUINS
1.J. W. Griffith, “Juan Galindo, Central American Chauvanist,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1960): 25–52.
2.I. Graham, I. (1963). “Juan Galindo, Enthusiast,” Estudios de cultura maya México 3 (1963): 11–35. Griffith and Graham give well-researched and complementary accounts of Galindo’s involvement in Central America both politically and archaeologically.
3.Ibid. See miniature in Figure 2.
4.S. G. Morley, The Inscriptions at Copan (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1920).
5.Galindo’s guess about the phonetic basis of the hieroglyphic writing is curious. He gave no basis for his supposition, which would seem to follow French savant Jean Champollion’s partially phonetic decipherment of the Rosetta Stone ten years earlier, which had famously unlocked the written language of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But Galindo in his limited learning seems unaware of Champollion’s phonetic breakthrough, for Galindo wrote in his report: “This [Mayan] writing is hieroglyphic-phonetic, representing sounds, and is greatly superior to the paintings of the Mexicans, and the symbolic hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, which only represented things.” For the next century epigraphers stubbornly refused to believe the Mayan hieroglyphs had phonetic components, and in fact were no more than calendar references, until finally in the latter half of the twentieth century it was proven to be a fully realized phonetic writing system.
6.Galindo was wrong on a number of counts as well. For example, he believed that Copán was founded around the eleventh century A.D. and that it was still flourishing, like the Aztecs, when the Spanish arrived.
7.D. Garcia de Palacio, E. G. Squier, et al., Letter to the King of Spain: Being a description of the ancient provinces of Guazacapan, Izalco, Cuscatlan, and Chiquimula, in the Audiencia of Guatemala, with an account of the languages, customs, and religion of their aboriginal inhabitants, and a description of the ruins of Copán (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1985).
8.Ibid.
9.Galindo was very hopeful for recognition, as well as a gold medal offered by the Société de Géographie in Paris for the best description of ruins found in the Americas.
10.Morley, The Inscriptions at Copan.
11.One scheme involved bringing his father from England to set him up as profitable head of a port in Boca de Toro, in what is now a part of Panama. The project failed miserably and only served to provoke New Granada, the nation today of Colombia, to send armed forces to claim the area.
12.Griffith, “Juan Galindo, Central American Chauvanist.”
13.R. T. Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Evans discusses Stephens’s unabashed nationalistic position at the time that Americans should be custodians of the archaeological treasures and that Latin Americans were too ignorant or uninterested to preserve them (pp. 54–62).
14.J. L. Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (2000): 544–67. The author discusses in some detail the perceptual problems Catherwood faced and how he dealt with them.
CHAPTER 7: CARRERA
1.W. R. Manning and U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin-American Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925), vol. 2, doc. 741, pp. 22–23.
2.M. Rodríguez, A Palmerstonian Diplomat in Central America: Frederick C
hatfield, Esq. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1964).
3.Ibid.
4.Graham, “Juan Galindo, Enthusiast.”
5.Rodríguez, A Palmerstonian Diplomat in Central America.
6.Jose Rafael Carrera y Turcios would continue rule Guatemala as military leader and conservative dictator for twenty-two of the next twenty-five years. He was declared Guatemala’s “president for life” in 1854 and died in 1865 at the age of fifty-one.
7.Pendergast, Palenque. Walker’s official report and Caddy’s journal are found in full in Pendergast’s book.
CHAPTER 8: WAR
1.Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871. This is an extraordinary, deeply researched account of the period.
2.P. F. Wollam, “The Apostle of Central American Liberalism: Francisco Morazan and His Struggle for Union” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1940); Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871.
3.Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871, p. 484.
4.Ibid. p. 49
5.K. L. Miceli, “Rafael Carrera: Defender and Promoter of Peasant Interest in Guatemala, 1837–1848,” The Americas 31, no. 1 (1944): 72–94. Woodward and Miceli give the most complete description in English of the conditions that led to the 1837 insurrection. Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871, pp. 37–55; Miceli, “Rafael Carrera,” pp. 72–75.
6.M. L. Moorhead, “Rafael Carrera of Guatemala: His Life and Times” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1942).
7.Ibid., p. 18.
8.Manning and U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States.
9.H. H. Bancroft, History of Central America (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1882).
10.Manning and U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States.