Jungle of Stone

by William Carlsen

  3.Pendergast, Palenque, pp. 187–200.

  CHAPTER 18: DISCOVERIES

  1.Both doorjambs are on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, among the few artifacts that remain from Stephens and Catherwoods’ expeditions.

  2.There was at this time no “national museum” in Washington and Stephens may have been anticipating the opening a few years later of the Smithsonian Institution. By 1841, when the expedition left New York, the U.S. Congress had already accepted the large bequest from the estate of British scientist James Smithson that would eventually be used to establish of the Smithsonian Institution. For several years there were ongoing debates covered by the newspapers about opening a national museum with the money.

  3.Traveling north to Chichén Itzá, Stephens stopped at the town of Peto, where he again met Juan Pío Pérez, who had held the post of department chief until his retirement a few years before. Since that time he had devoted himself almost entirely to the study of the Mayan language, ancient calendar, and history. He would prove a valuable resource. Pérez gave Stephens a copy of a remarkable document that he had unearthed in the government archives that would prove extremely useful later to archaeologists working to decipher the Mayan hieroglyphs. It recounted the ancient history of the Yucatec Maya. The document was a fragment from an oral history, recorded in both the Mayan and Spanish languages a short time after the Conquest. Because the Spanish had burned virtually all the bark-paper texts written with Mayan hieroglyphics, this document would prove to be among the most important accounts of Mayan history. Stephens would include it in the appendix to his book. Pérez also provided Stephens with a memorandum he had worked out explaining some of the verbal forms and the grammar of the Mayan language as well as a vocabulary comprising more than four thousand Mayan words. Stephens would later give these documents, as well as a copy of a roughly drawn 1557 map showing Indian towns that existed in Yucatán at the time of the Conquest, to the New-York Historical Society.

  CHAPTER 19: CHICHÉN ITZÁ

  1.P. A. Means, A. s. d. Avendano y Loyola, et al., History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatán and of the Itzas (Cambridge, MA: The [Peabody] Museum, 1917), pp. 43–46

  2.Sharer and Morley, The Ancient Maya, pp. 743–44.

  3.There is evidence that groups of Indians continued to use some of the ruined sites for ceremonial purposes through the period of the Conquest.

  4.The latest chronological dating of the major sites of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá indicates that they were founded between A.D. 400 (Chichén Itzá) and A.D. 500 (Uxmal). But both reached the zenith of their political power and architectural grandiosity between A.D. 750 and 1050, during periods that modern archaeologists classify as the Post- and Terminal-Classic. See A. A. Demarest, P. M. Rice, et al., The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), pp. 525–43.

  5.Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847; P. E. Palmquist and T. R. Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 252. Stephens always gave credit to anyone he knew who had explored a site before he and Catherwood had. He did so with Chichén Itzá in his book, noting that the first non-Yucatán citizen or non-Spaniard to visit the ruins was an American by the name of John Burke, an engineer working in Valladolid who traveled to the site in 1838. Two years later, Stephens wrote, a young Austrian diplomat and botanist named Baron Emanuel von Friedrichsthal arrived at Chichén Itzá with a daguerreotype to record the ruins. A year later, in 1841, he exhibited twenty-five daguerreotype images of Chichén Itzá and several other Yucatán ruins, including Uxmal, in New York, London (at the British Museum), and Paris. Friedrichsthal died in 1842 in Vienna (apparently of pneumonia) before he was able to publish his account of his expedition. He was thirty-four years old. Though always generous in giving credit, Stephens could not resist in his book pointing out that it was he who had recommended the route through Yucatán to Friedrichsthal, who became interested in visiting Yucatán after hearing about Stephens’s adventures in Chiapas and Yucatán. Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, pp. xxi, 691. For biographical information on Friedrichsthal see Palmquist and Kailbourn, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West, p. 252. Also see U. Fischer-Westhauser, “Emanuel von Friedrichsthal: The First Daguerreotypist in Yucatán,” Photoresearcher (European Society for the History of Photography) 10 (2007).

  6.Chichén’s ball court would prove to be the largest in Mesoamerica.

  7.At this pyramid, now called the Pyramid of Kukulkán, during the spring and autumn equinox the sun’s shadow moves down the balustrade flanking the staircase and lights up what appears to be a snake’s body until it reaches the serpent’s head at the base.

  8.When the cenote was dredged in the early twentieth century, human bones were found, along with pottery, gold trinkets, jade, and other items. Sharer and Morley, The Ancient Maya.

  CHAPTER 20: TULOOM

  1.Nelson A. Reed describes this extraordinary rebellion in vivid detail. N. A. Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Population losses, pp.141–42.

  2.Tancah is today known as Tan Kah.

  3.The illustration of one of the buildings, identified as Plate XLVIII in Stephens’s book, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, vol. 2, shows three indistinct and shadowy figures silhouetted on the steps in front of the structure. However, when Catherwood several years later produced his own book of large lithographs, Views of Ancient Monuments, he added to the illustration what are believed to be images of himself wearing a long brown coat with either Dr. Cabot or Stephens. The two men are holding Catherwood’s measuring line as they pace off the distance in front of the building. Incredibly, Catherwood’s autobiographical image is considered to be the only image of him that has ever been found.

  4.Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan.

  5.Today the Dominican Republic claims that Columbus’s bones remain in Santo Domingo, and that the remains transferred to Havana and eventually to Seville were those of his son, Diego Columbus. DNA results appear to confirm, however, that at least some of the bones in Seville are those of the famous admiral and explorer.

  CHAPTER 21: HOME

  1.New York Herald, July 30, 1842, p. 2. The Herald ran a short follow-up article concerning the monetary loses and insurance coverage on August 1, 1842, p. 2.

  2.In 1842 there was no “National Museum of Washington.” Stephens was apparently referring to exhibitions and collections housed in the recently constructed United States Patent Office in Washington. In 1841, the secretary of state had assigned use of the large hall in the building to an organization called the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor to the Smithsonian Institution. Starting in 1838, Stephens had no doubt followed the intense public and congressional debates written up in the newspapers over what should be done with a half-million-dollar bequest to the United States from English scientist James Smithson. The many proposals included a National University, astronomical observatory, National Library, a scientific research institute, and a National Museum. Congress finally compromised in 1846 and created an amalgam organization, known today as the Smithsonian Institution, which incorporated many of the suggestions.

  3.New York Herald, July 30 and August 1, 1842, both articles on p. 2.

  4.Sadly, none of the daguerreotypes and Catherwood’s original drawings and sketches have ever been found. In the preface to Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Stephens noted some of the daguerreotypes were used as the basis for illustrations for the book.

  5.W. H. Prescott and C. H. Gardiner, Literary Memoranda (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 93–94.

  6.In letters between the two men, Stephens mentions borrowing the histories of Cogolludo, Herrera, and Juarros.

  7.V. W. von Hagen, Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens
and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatán (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947). p. 256

  8.Stephens and Catherwood generally worked fast. During the writing of their first collaboration they believed John Caddy and Patrick Walker might publish their own research and illustrations of Palenque before they did. Now they learned a New Orleans bookseller named Benjamin M. Norman had traveled through the Yucatán only a month or two after they did in 1842, and took a great many notes. Originally inspired to explore the Yucatán by Stephens’s first book, Norman apparently raced to publish his account and was able to get out a first edition of his book, titled Rambles in Yucatan, at the very end of 1842. The book describes visits to Kabah, Zayi, and Uxmal (after Stephens’s visit) as well as to Chichén Itzá (several months before Stephens), and includes illustrations of the ruins and site plans made by Norman. But Stephens and Catherwood must have breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Norman’s 304-page book and the meager space he devoted to the ruins. Written in a pedestrian if workmanlike style, it was no match for the 900-page book Stephens published only three months later, which included descriptions of forty-four ruined sites that they had visited, as well as the daguerreotypes and Catherwood’s illustrations. Norman’s illustrations were at best simple sketches that might be expected from a bookseller who was clearly not an artist—or at worst they were fanciful in the extreme. Pushed almost immediately into the shadow by Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Norman’s book was destined to become no more than an interesting footnote for future Mayan studies. B. Norman, C. C. Moore, et al., Rambles in Yucatán, or, Notes of travel through the peninsula: Including a visit to the remarkable ruins of Chi-Chen, Kabah, Zayi, and Uxmal (New York: J. & H. G. Langley; Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait; New Orleans: Norman, Steel, 1843).

  9.In the original publications of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, the engravings were entirely devoted to the ruins. In a later edition, in 1854, Catherwood would add various scenes and landscapes unconnected to the ruins.

  10.The appendix in his first work consisted of no more than six pages of correspondence concerning the failure of his plaster-of-Paris project at Palenque.

  11.Included were basic items like temperature readings, a full-page table of various “statistics of the Yucatan,” and population charts. Catherwood’s five-page treatise with architectural diagrams was on the construction of the triangular Mayan arch. And the eight-page “memorandum for the ornithology” contributed by Cabot included a list of all the birds he observed during the expedition.

  12.The historical manuscript was written from memory in the Mayan language by an unknown author who lived during the immediate post-Conquest period. Stephens provided both the original Mayan text and an English translation. Pío Pérez pointed out in his comments that this rare manuscript was the only one that had been found treating the history of the Maya. He added that the Franciscan brothers under the orders of Bishop Diego de Landa had confiscated after the conquest all the “histories, paintings and hieroglyphics” the Indians had about their history. He failed to note that Landa had all of the material, which included the Maya’s hieroglyphic “books,” burned.

  13.Von Hagen, Maya Explorer.

  14.Stephens was no doubt influenced concerning the possible Toltec origin of the southern architecture by Prescott, who had assembled documentary accounts of the Toltec’s history. Prescott later wrote in his famous history of the Conquest that Stephens’s fieldwork helped corroborate his theory, which he claimed he had arrived at on his own: that American natives built the cities scattered through Mexico and Central America, although he only suggested it might have been the Toltecs. Prescott’s research concerning the Toltecs derived from mostly oral historical accounts gathered by the Spanish in their earliest encounters with the Aztecs and other Indians. Stephens, however, as he indicated in his book published seven months before Prescott’s, was not entirely convinced the Toltecs were responsible for the ruins he had explored. W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, and History of the Conquest of Peru (New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. 688.

  THE MAYA

  1.This is at best a brief review of the Maya’s extremely complex civilization and only begins to tell their story. For readers who would like a more comprehensive understanding there are a wealth of excellent books. The following four books, however, will provide the reader with a solid grounding in the subject: The Ancient Maya, by Robert J. Sharer, for a broad yet highly detailed account of the Maya civilization; Maya Cosmos, by David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, for an understanding of Maya mythology and their view of their place in the universe; Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, for an understanding of the ancient Maya writing system told through the story of how the code was deciphered; and Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, for detailed accounts of the royal dynasties of eleven of the greatest Maya cities based on decipherments of their hieroglyphs. My apologies to all of the many other authors who have written superb books on the subject.

  2.L. Schele and P. Mathews, The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya Temples and Tombs (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998), pp. 133–74.

  3.S. Martin and N. Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 191–225.

  4.J. M. Diamond, J. M. (2003). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 354–60.

  5.M. D. Coe, The Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), p. 45.

  6.A. A. Demarest, Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 113–47.

  7.Because of the suddenness of the buildup of complex Maya centers, archaeologists are still not certain whether the Mayan-speaking people had settled in the area for a long period of time or whether they had migrated to the lowland area from somewhere else.

  8.http://www.newmedia.ufm.edu/gsm/index.php/Mapping_the_Mirador_Basin:_Exploration_and_New_Technology_in_the_Cradle_of_Maya_Civilization.

  9.http://www.academia.edu/366565/Building_Materials_of_the_Ancient_Maya_A_Study_of_Archaeological_Plasters.

  10.Coe, The Maya, p. 80.

  11.Demarest, Ancient Maya, p. 83.

  12.Coe, The Maya, p. 91.

  13.Ibid., p. 231.

  14.Demarest, Ancient Maya, p. 88.

  15.D. A. Freidel, L. Schele, and J. Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow, 1993).

  16.Ibid., p. 317.

  17.Ibid., pp. 337–91

  18.Sharer and Morley, The Ancient Maya, p. 143.

  19.An untold number of these books were also gathered in great piles and burned by Spanish priests not long after the conquest of Yucatán. Three now famous accordion-like “codices,” written not long before the arrival of the Spanish, have survived and are housed in European libraries and museums. They were reproduced in Kingsborough’s volumes.

  20.Martin and Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, pp. 26–40.

  21.Ibid., pp.190–213.

  22.Demarest, Rice, et al., The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands, p. 189.

  23.Martin and Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, pp. 101–15.

  24.Ibid., pp. 203–9, 218–22.

  25.Ibid., pp. 169–72, 180–84.

  26.To estimate population size, archaeologists have mapped these house mounds and have included in their formula additional presumed dwellings occupied by the lowest classes who lacked house mounds but left remains such as pottery shards and other evidence of occupation.

  27.Estimates have ranged wildly from 3 to 13 million.

  28.G. H. Haug et al., “Climate and the Collapse of the Maya Civilization,” Science 299 (2003): 1731–35.

  29.Schele and Mathews, The Code of Kings, pp. 259–60.

  CHAPTER 22: VIEWS OF ANCIENT MONUMENTS

  1.United States Democra
tic Review, May 1843, p. 492.

  2.D. W. Shaw, The Sea Shall Embrace Them: The Tragic Story of the Steamship Arctic (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  3.Exman, The Brothers Harper, pp. 171–72.

  4.R. Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 403.

  5.Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, pp. 339-41.

  6.Stephens’s grand plan called for the first article from well-known Egyptologist Sir John G. Wilkinson, who, Stephens noted, would be able to compare with great authority the “supposed resemblance between American signs and symbols and those of Egypt.” Wilkinson and Catherwood had known each other in Egypt. The second expert was former congressman, diplomat and U.S. Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin, who late in his life had taken up the study of Native Americans, publishing several monographs on the subject. Stephens and Gallatin, who lived in New York, were friends. The third authority was to be Alexander von Humboldt. Stephens said he was hopeful that Gallatin, who had formed an “intimate acquaintance” with Humboldt while serving as U.S. minister to France, could convince the great naturalist and explorer to contribute. And lastly, Stephens told Prescott: “The fourth and only other person to whom I have thought of applying is yourself.” He explained that by his estimate of expenses, he would only be able to compensate Prescott with a copy of the work, to be called American Antiquities, and $250. If Prescott agreed, Stephens said he would need an article of some twenty to thirty pages in about a year. Prescott agreed. Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, pp. xxi, 691, 339–41.

  7.In the same exchange of letters with Stephens, Prescott also mentioned that he had been in contact with the Cabot family. The doctor had fallen ill sometime after Stephens’s visit months earlier. “Your friend Dr. Cabot has had one foot in the grave, poor fellow and is still very feeble,” Prescott wrote, “though I trust the great difficulty is overcome.” The “great difficulty” was apparently a serious bout of appendicitis, though Stephens may have feared it was the result of something he had picked up in the Yucatán. Cabot survived and went on to become a prominent Boston physician. Prescott and Wolcott, The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847; Morison, William Hickling Prescott, 1796–1859, personal letter from Dr. Cabot son, Godfrey L. Cabot, to Von Hagen, dated February 26, 1945.