Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  20.Danien, Sharer, et al., New Theories on the Ancient Maya, p. 13. There is also an excellent discussion citing two other pioneers in the field of Mayan hieroglyph interpretation by George Stuart at http://www.mesoweb.com/bearc/cmr/RRAMW29.pdf. It was to one of the scholars—Constantine S. Rafinesque—to whom Waldeck had written. In addition, there were others deeply interested in Palenque at the same time Waldeck was at the ruins. One was Francisco Corroy, a French doctor who lived nearby in Tabasco and had visited the ruins many times, and corresponded with Waldeck. See R. L. Brunhouse, In Search of the Maya: The First Archaeologists (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), pp. 66–73.

  21.See the Mesoweb website reference to earliest mentions of Uxmal at http://www.mesoweb.com/features/uxmal/history.html.

  22.Waldeck had apparently learned of Uxmal’s location from its appearance in J. S. Buchon’s Atlas of Two Americas, published in 1825 in Paris. Brunhouse, In Search of the Maya, p. 74. Note also that Del Río discussed Uxmal, referring to it as “Oxmutal” in his report, which may also have prompted Waldeck’s visit. In addition, Uxmal is mentioned in a history of Yucatán by the Franciscan priest Diego López Cogolludo. D. López Cogolludo, F. d. Ayeta, et al., Historia de Yucathan (Madrid: Jvan Garcia Infanzen, 1688).

  23. J. F. M. Waldeck, M. Mestre Ghigliazza, et al., Viaje pintoresco y arqueológico a la provincia de Yucatán (América Central) durante los años 1834 y 1836 (Mérida, Mexico, 1930).

  24.Danien, Sharer, et al., New Theories on the Ancient Maya. In his essay, “Quest for Decipherment: A Historical and Biographical Survey of Maya Hieroglyphic Investigation,” George E. Stuart points out that Waldeck’s original drawings were much more accurate than the published versions, which he may have altered to buttress his contention that Palenque was founded by people from the Old World.

  25.Brunhouse, In Search of the Maya, p. 74.

  26.See Waldeck in the “annotated bibliography” by Charles Rhyne of Reed College, as well as images from Waldeck’s book, at http://academic.reed.edu/uxmal/contents.html.

  27.In a remarkable coincidence, Colonel Galindo was in England at the time trying to persuade the British to cede back to Guatemala large chunks of territory that Britain claimed for Belize. Between his discussions with Lord Palmerston, he found time to attend the same Royal Geographical Society meeting. Galindo spoke to the members after Waldeck’s presentation, telling them that he had “little doubt but that Palenque was built prior to the foundation of the city of Mexico in 1342.” He added that he believed that Palenque and Copán had been built not by traders or conquerors from the Old World but by the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants now living in the region. He went further. In his opinion, he said, native Indians, though now a “senile” race, had created the world’s oldest civilizations. Palenque and Copán, as well as the cities later built by the Aztecs and Inca, were all “modern revivals” of a much more ancient American Indian civilization that predated even those of Japan and China. There is no account of Waldeck and Galindo engaging in conversation, though it was quite likely, and their discussion may have been heated given their personalities and their different views concerning the origin of the ancient cities. A short time later, Galindo headed back to Central America and his rendezvous with destiny, and Waldeck went on to Paris. The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (London: W. A. Scripps, 1835); The Family Magazine, no. 4 (New York: Redfield & Lindsay, 1837), p. 180.

  28.Waldeck’s turned out to be the more visionary assertion. Not only have archaeologists subsequently confirmed his estimate by other means—principally hieroglyphic decipherment and radiocarbon dating—but it would be another seventy years following Waldeck’s declaration before tree-ring dating, the science of dendrochronology, would develop as a reliable tool for archaeological dating.

  29.Since his 1838 volume was dedicated to Kingsborough, who had provided most of the money for his Yucatán venture and had recently died, Waldeck may have already agreed to or felt obligated to devote the first book to Uxmal. And perhaps more important, unlike with Palenque, no book had yet been published with images from Uxmal. Waldeck’s artistic abilities are on full display in the folio. But his distortions and embellishments of Uxmal’s ruins—added to his questionable accounts of his past—have clearly undermined his work on both Uxmal and Palenque. According to one account, Waldeck had planned at some point to publish a trio of books about the Maya and his expeditions. But it would be nearly thirty years before his drawings on Palenque were published in Paris, in 1866 in conjunction with text by Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg under the title Recherches sur les Ruines de Palenque. Waldeck had cut a deal with the French government, which had paid him a lump sum for 188 of his drawings. A commission of six scholars, however, was set up to compare his drawings with photographs taken at Palenque by Désiré Charnay. Only fifty-six of the drawings were given a favorable report and included in the book. See Brunhouse, In Search of the Maya, pp. 79–80.

  30.In 1952, Alberto Ruz, director of research at Palenque for Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, uncovered an elaborate tomb buried deep within the Temple of Inscriptions. The tomb contained a magnificently carved sarcophagus lid showing the great ruler of Palenque, Pakal, whose remains were found within. The discovery of the tomb, more than 1,200 years old, generated headlines around the world.

  31.M. E. Miller, S. Martin, et al., Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), p. 247.

  32.More than 1,500 structures were mapped in the surrounding area beyond Palenque’s urban core in 1998–2000, four times the estimated number located only fifteen years earlier. See E. L. Barnhart, “Palenque Mapping Project, 1998–2000 Final Report,” Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2000.

  CHAPTER 14: UXMAL

  1.H. H. Bancroft, The Native Races (New York: 1967). See footnote on p. 145 in volume 4 for earliest historic references to Uxmal.

  2.Stephens was referring to the fact that the Maya had never left a history of their cities (as far as he knew). But he knew of Uxmal from Waldeck’s book, published in 1838 in Paris, and an account of the site by Lorenzo de Zavala, the Mexican ambassador to France, who grew up in Yucatán and had visited the site. Zavala, “Notice sur les Monuments Antiques d’Ushmal, dans la Province de Yucatán,” in Baradère, Dupaix, et al., Antiquités mexicaines; Waldeck, Mestre Ghigliazza, et al., Viaje pintoresco y arqueológico a la provincia de Yucatán.

  3.The sculpture took an unusual path to the museum. It was displayed on Cruger’s Island in the middle the Hudson River for nearly eighty years before being bought by the museum in 1919 with eleven other artifacts collected by Stephens.

  CHAPTER 15: “MAGNIFICENT”

  1.The letter from James Catherwood is mentioned in news accounts of the legal proceedings concerning his wife’s affair.

  2.W. Carpenter, Peerage for the People (London: W. Strange, 1837), pp. 734–37.

  3.Newspaper coverage of the later trial.

  4.Catherwood’s uncle, Nathaniel Catherwood, had also been a partner.

  5.New York Passenger Lists, 1820–1957 (1840; Microfilm serial: M237:_44; Line 7; List number: 808), is the manifest for the ship Ontario, arriving in New York on October 23, 1840. Listed as passengers are Catherwood, his three children, and a twenty-six-year-old woman named MaryAnn Bennett, whose occupation is listed as “nurse” and who was almost certainly the children’s nanny.

  6.Panorama account book, New-York Historical Society

  7.The book contained 34 steel-engraved plates, 29 lithographed plates, 4 wood-engraved plates, and 9 wood carvings.

  8.In addition to accuracy in text and illustrations, Stephens’s other major objective was to make the book as affordable as possible in order to reach the widest number of readers. He made it clear from the beginning that he did not wish to create a tome on Central American antiquities, such as Waldeck and Kingsborough had done, that was so expensive it would be availabl
e only to a privileged few. He negotiated with the Harpers to set the price at five dollars, low by the norm of the day for an illustrated two-volume set, but still a hefty sum in a country in 1841 trying to lift itself out of economic depression.

  9.E. A. Poe, “Review of New Books,” Graham’s Magazine (1841): 90–96.

  10.“The Antiquities of Central America,” book review, United States Democratic Review 9, no. 38 (August 1841), http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=usde;cc=usde;rgn=full%20text;idno=usde0009-2;didno=usde0009-2;view=image;seq=00172;node=usde0009-2%3A1.

  11.Harper & Brothers offices were destroyed years later by fire and many records of payments and printings have been lost. But contemporaries at the time estimated the sales at 12,000–20,000 copies in the first six months of publication. The book continued to sell in large numbers for decades and well into the twentieth century, and continues in print today.

  12.“Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán,” book review, London Quarterly Review 69 (1842): 52–91.

  13.“The Antiquities of Central America,” United States Democratic Review.

  14.F. J. Cebulski, “Letter from William Hickling Prescott to John Lloyd Stephens,” typescript (seminar paper), ca. 1967, 33 leaves.

  15.Morison, William Hickling Prescott, 1796–1859, copy of handwritten letter from Stephens to Prescott dated February 2, 1841.

  16.Prescott added: “The French and Spanish travelers however write with such a swell of glorification and Waldeck’s designs in particular are so little like the pictures of ruins, that I had supposed there was some exaggeration in this respect. No one can be a better judge than yourself however, who are familiar with the best models in the old World, to compare them with. . . .” W. H. Prescott and R. Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), letter from Prescott to Stephens, March 1841.

  17.Ibid., pp. 240–43, letter from Prescott to Stephens, dated August 2, 1841.

  18.Lilly, L., C. S. Henry, et al., The New-York Review, vol. 9 (New York: George Dearborn, 1841), p. 242.

  19.“The Antiquities of Central America,” United States Democratic Review.

  20.Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, pp. 240–42, letter from Prescott to Stephens dated August 2, 1841.

  21.Although generally correct, Stephens would be found wrong on both points when further excavations and restorations were made to the ruins in Mexico and Guatemala. Columns were later found in several ruins and in one dramatic instance the tomb of the great lord of Palenque, Pakal, was found deep in the center of one of the site’s finest pyramids.

  22.Juan Galindo, however, made the same claim earlier, arguing not only that the indigenous population created the ruins at Copán and Palenque but that ancient American Indians societies were the cradle of the world’s civilization.

  23.Some wooden lintels have proven so extraordinarily durable that they have been found at much older Classic Maya sites, such as Tikal, though most from the Classic period have rotted away, resulting in the frequently seen collapse of doorways.

  24.It has been determined that Uxmal had ceased to be inhabited, except by a few Indians.

  25.Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, p. 257, letter dated September 24, 1841.

  26.Correspondence concerning the fate of the plaster casts was included by Stephens in the appendix to Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. In the appendix he also explains the twenty thousand dollars in pledges for a national museum.

  27.Catherwood would eventually join them there, where they lived most of their childhood and school years.

  28.Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, p. 257.

  CHAPTER 16: YUCATÁN

  1.Cabot’s mother wrote a letter to Samuel’s brother Elliott in Hamburg, Germany, describing the last-minute nature of Cabot’s departure. She noted that during the summer Sam had considered joining the expedition, which Prescott had apparently informed him about, but “it was understood that Stephens had given up the idea of returning, until one day Sam came out late to dinner and said he had a letter from Stephens telling him if he could bundle up his traps and come on so as to sail on Saturday (this was Thursday noon) he should be glad to have him. . . . Your father went with Sam to New York and saw Stephens and Catherwood. He was much pleased with their reception of Sam. They were in the midst of packing all sorts of things, amongst them two daguerreotypes which will be just what they want for copying the ancient monuments found in Central America. Sam thinks he shall have a chance to operate on some unlucky subject, tho’ Stephens told your father it could only be fancy work if he did anything of the kind.” A copy of the letter, dated October 28, 1841, is among documents in the Von Hagen papers at the New-York Historical Society, copied from the Cabot Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  2.The John L. Stephens Papers, BANC MSS ZZ 116, University of California, Berkeley. Box III, Folder 200.

  3.Two days after Stephens and Catherwood arrived, a Texas war schooner anchored off Sisal with an offer: for eight thousand dollars a month the Texans would provide protection along Yucatán coast against any invasion by Mexico. The offer was immediately accepted.

  4.See first endnote for this chapter.

  5.Catherwood describes the methods used in a short text included on his map in Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan.

  6.Before leaving for Yucatán, Stephens wrote to William Prescott to ask if he could borrow his Historia de Yucathan (published in 1688 and only available in Spanish) by Franciscan missionary Diego Lopez Cogolludo, who lived in Yucatán during the mid-1600s. At the time Stephens traveled to the peninsula, there was little available about the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, let alone on its history before the Spaniards arrived. The most important work was written in 1566 by another Franciscan friar, Diego de Landa, titled “Relacion de Las Cosas Yucatán.” However, Landa’s manuscript remained unknown until it was discovered in Madrid by Brasseur de Bourbourg, translated, and published in Paris in 1864, more than twenty years after Stephens journeyed through Yucatán. It is unknown whether Stephens carried Prescott’s copy of Cogolludo’s with him to Yucatán or used it only to prepare for the trip. “Can you lend Cogolludo? (Have I spelled it right?),” Stephens asked in the letter to Prescott dated September 24, 1841, just weeks before he left New York. “If so will you send it to me immediately by Hampden’s Express and please say whether I may take it with me, though probably I shall not wish to do so on account of its bulk.” Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, p. 257. Stephens cites Cogolludo several times in his Yucatán book.

  7.An excellent account of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán can be found in D. T. Peck, Yucatán: From Prehistoric Times to the Great Maya Revolt ([N.p.]: Xlibris, 2005), pp. 351–53.

  8.Stephens wrote that he found in Mérida one remaining fragment from Tiho’s earlier Mayan occupants: an archway inside Mérida’s Franciscan monastery. He explained that the “arch” was not the rounded Roman arches used by the Spanish but was constructed with a triangular apex characteristic of those he had found in all the ruins they had explored and that he identified specifically with the Maya. This singular remaining Mayan arch in Mérida and the historical record left by the Spanish conquistadors and priests describing the stepped “mounds” and temples they had found helped convince Stephens that the people who built the cities of Copán, Palenque, and Uxmal were the same race of native Indians who also built Tiho and lived in Yucatán at the time of the Conquest—and who still occupied the land.

  9.Archaeologists now believe that following the rebellion during which Mayapán was overrun and destroyed by fire, political power in northern region of the peninsula was broken up and decentralized in smaller city-states like Tiho.

  10.Stephens found many of the names in
Historia de Yucatán by Diego Lopez Cogolludo, who had recorded the popular names for structures at Uxmal.

  11.The first excavations were funded by the University of Pennsylvania and directed by H. E. Mercer in February 1895.

  CHAPTER 17: LONDON

  1.The account of what occurred at the trial is based on reports published in three London newspapers—the Times, Morning Chronicle, and Examiner. Each article corroborated the others, with only small details added or left out of some of the versions. I have combined the three to give the fullest account possible.

  2.The letter is mentioned in correspondence from “PM Gaskell” and addressed to JB (Joseph Bonomi), 9 Trafalgar Place, Kentish Town (in North London) and dated Saturday the 7th. There is no indication as to month or year. The relevant passages reads: “My dear Bonomi[,] I did not see a lengthened report of the proceedings in the unfortunate case—but in that I saw no one I think would have inferred from what passed that anything improper could have existed between Mr C & yourself. But if the counsel really succeeded in giving such an impression, as it was doubtless his dirty business to do if he could, still, as the matter stands now, excuse me if I suggest that the insertion of such a letter as that you inclose could do no good. Had it been possible on the trial to have cleared up any point which the jury may have mis-understood, it might of course have influenced their verdict in favour of Catherwood [ . . . ] I really doubt, whether it is worthwhile to send the letter—No one who knows the parties can of course suppose that there was any impropriety—and as to the public—they have ceased to look into the matter. And while every regard should be paid to your nice sense of honour, still I think that the Catherwoods themselves who are principally interested, would disapprove of the proceeding [. . .] Poor C—I heard from him just before he went to Yucatán—for the second time he seemed to feel depressed. . . .” The letter was forwarded to me in personal correspondence with author Selwyn Tillett.