IN 1839 an
energetic American writer and a talented British artist, adventurers to the
core, braved the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras and became the
first English speaking travelers to explore this region originally known only
as Maya.
Though a lawyer by profession, John Lloyd Stephens fell hard
for archeology after a two-year sabbatical took him to Europe and the Mediterranean
in the mid-1830s. After trekking
through deserts and ancient pyramid sites he came away fueled with a desire for
more of the same. Simultaneously he discovered he could write and was dubbed “the
American traveler” after he penned his first best seller about Egypt’s
pyramids, the Nile, Petra and the Holy Land.
British artist Frederick Catherwood gained his footing
during the “Egyptomania”
craze that hit London in the 1820s. A bit older than
Stephens, he reached Egypt and the Nile in 1823 and discovered he had an
uncanny ability to portray ancient monuments and archeological digs with great
accuracy. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that in the end would take him to
Copán and Palenque, Uxmal, Labna, Chichén Itzá and beyond.
CENTRAL AMERICA
BECKONS
Serendipity brought the adventurers together in London, and
shortly afterwards.
Stephens received a special ambassadorship to Central
America from President Martin Van Buren to negotiate treaties with several
Latin America countries.
Stephens immediately contacted Catherwood and asked him to
come along for the ride. After political issues were settled, they’d go
exploring for ancient ruins.
The duo headed south and after an intense journey through
war torn Guatemala and Honduras, Stephens finished what he could of his
diplomatic workload. It was time for exploration with their first destination Copán.
Spurred on by a letter written to the Spanish king about ancient sites with
large stone structures from an explorer named Deigo Garcia de Palacio three
hundred years earlier, Stephens and Catherwood followed the trail of Central
American patriot Colonel Juan Galindo. Galindo had discovered the archived
letter and traveled to both Palenque and Copán in 1834. Stephens and Catherwood
would arrive five years later after pouring over sketchy site coordinates from
Galindo’s report made to higher-ups.
ADVANCED CIVILIZATION
Galindo believed whoever built these stone monuments had
been an advanced civilization, and the artisans who created the works did so
without iron tools. The monuments were covered in hieroglyphics and he
conceived it was phonetic writing, which proved accurate, though it would take
more than a hundred years to confirm his theory. He believed the site was the
seat of a great power, a large population and a people advanced in the arts.
The site had a grand plaza that could compete with the coloseum of Rome, he
said. He emphasized that local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s
history. And unbelievably, the account that pushed Galindo to explore Copán had
accumulated dust in the archives of a Spanish court for more than three
centuries. This mysterious and intriguing report was the reason Stephens and
Catherwood found themselves in the depths of a Honduran jungle.
Because terrain in southern Mexico, western Guatemala and
Honduras is a thick tangle of vegetation filled with rain forests and swamps,
parts of the land were a mystery even to the Maya who lived there. Locals had
no explanation for the stone blocks and imposing structures and knew nothing of
their creators. So dense was the jungle that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés
passed within one hundred miles of Palenque in the early 1500s, never learning
how near he was to a massive pyramid site. (The classic Maya collapse occurred
around 900 AD).
WHERE DID THEY COME
FROM?
Galindo’s revolutionary view of an ancient sophisticated
civilization with no ties to their Northern European brethren fell on deaf
ears. Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and
Greek influences, speculating somehow one of these cultures had crossed the
Atlantic, conquered the native locals, built the structures, never to be seen
again. Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s
doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in
contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due.
These discoveries continued to baffle western intellects and
religious scholars alike. The existence of vast sophisticated cities hidden in
the middle of Central American jungles threatened the biblical order of the
known world. Where did these people come from and how old were their cities?
One explorer, a crazy outlier named “Count” Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck,
made an accidentally correct claim when he stated Uxmal was at least one
thousand years old, basing his claim on the concentric tree circles he counted
from a tree that implanted itself in the building’s entryway after it was
already in ruins.
It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their
old world explorations, to examine the evidence at the sites and forge a new,
correct narrative.
CAPTURING COPÁN’S
ESSENCE
Though Stephens’ written descriptions of the sites were
detailed and informative, it was Catherwood’s otherworldly sketches that would
forever change the way the world viewed the mysterious, previously unknown Maya
culture. On their first week at Copán, Catherwood would toss out countless
attempts at capturing the Maya stelae (stones with hieroglyphs) that he found.
At first his western mind could simply not contemplate, then draw, what he was
seeing. To him, a western European, the gigantic Copán sculptures, some four to
five meters high, were so profoundly different than the antiquities of the
mideast that he had a difficult time rendering them. The two veteran travelers
who had toured the wonders of Egypt knew they were in the cross hairs of an incredibly
advanced civilization and they were now on “new ground” as Stephens wrote later
in Incidents of Travel in Central
America, Chiapas and Yucatán, his best seller about the Maya world.
To capture the soul of the sculptures and to assist himself
in so doing, Catherwood took photos with his Camera Lucida, the precursor to a
modern camera, then from those drawings, he attempted to re-draw what he saw. Though it took him many tries, a slight
shift in his perspective broke through and with powerful persistence, he
finally got it right. He filled page after page with drawings rich in detail of
the unfathomable hieroglyphics, monuments, sculptings. His drawings would prove
so accurate that long into the future, archeologists would be able to read them
when they finally broke the Maya code in 1976 at the famous Palenque Round
Table.
But at the time, to convince an uncertain world of what they
were seeing, it would take not only the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed
drawings to put Copán, Palenque and other Maya sites on the map, it would also
take Stephens’ energetic and romantic prose to seal the deal.
Copán and Palenque were just the beginning of Stephens and Catherwood’s
Maya explorations. They would go on to view forty-four sites in all, many
detailed in Jungle of Stone. The
struggles they endured to bring this discovery to the world hit them hard. Both
were forever plagued by side effects of malaria and other diseases contracted
while chasing pyramids.
CATHERWOOD’S SKETCHES
Even if you’re not in the mood for a long read, Frederick Catherwood’s
incredible sketches shown in the book, many in color, make Jungle of Stone worthwhile. It’s available at Alma Libre Bookstore
in Puerto Morelos, 360 pesos.
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Jeanine Kitchel, author of Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, has a new novel out this April, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival.
