SYLVANUS MORELY—THE MAN WHO MADE CHICHÉN ITZÁ FAMOUS

            “Only liars and damn fools say they like the jungle.”  Anonymous Yucatan Explorer

            While I sat in our little bookstore Alma Libre Libros in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in those early years when there was barely a tourist to be found, I had plenty of time to read about the Maya civilization and the explorers who stumbled onto their majestic pyramids. We sat within 100 miles of four major Maya sites, and I had become addicted to the Maya. I began compiling notes on the early explorers and their adventures, and at the time thought I’d write a book called Explorers of the Yucatan, but that idea was shelved. Now, finding those notes I realize how much I enjoyed the adventure of reading about their adventures. So this is Part One of that series. I’m beginning with my favorite explorer, Sylvanus Morley.

                                                         Alma Libre Libros

            Since 1839 adventurers, explorers and archeologists have attempted to unveil the mystery of the Maya and their pyramids.  Although each of these mavericks deserves a stellae in the Maya hall of fame, rising to the top like Venus on a new moon is Sylvanus Griswold Morley.

            Rumored to be Spielberg and Lucas’ inspiration for unforgettable archeologist Indiana Jones, Morley worked nearly three decades deciphering Maya glyphs and excavating ruins in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.  He was born June, 1883, in Baldwinville, Massachusetts.

                                                                                                    

SANTA FE

            Morley began his studies in civil engineering and then attended Harvard where he developed an interest in archeology. Harvard’s Peabody Museum had recently received Edward H. Thompson’s treasure trove of artifacts after he famously dredged the sacred well at Chichén Itzá in 1904. This ignited Morley’s interest in ancient civilizations.

            His degree along with his involvement in antiquities first took him to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he cut his teeth on researching and exploring Native American cultures. Morley’s influence in Santa Fe was so great that later on, he and a group of his contemporaries, including Georgia O’Keefe, would define what has come to be known as the “Santa Fe” style of architecture.

            Between 1909 and 1914 Morley did field work in Central America and Mexico for the School of American Archeology.  During this period his early archeological expeditions were used as a cover for espionage activities for U.S. Naval Intelligence during World War I.  According to one source, although his wartime activities have been largely forgotten, he laid the groundwork for modern U.S. intelligence efforts.

            After the war, Morley became a research associate for the Carnegie Institution where he applied for the position to head up explorations in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.  In 1915, he presented a proposal for funding a restoration project at Chichén Itzá.

RESTORATION

            Morley’s proposal was a 20-year plan to restore Chichén Itzá, now one of the New Seven Wonders of the Modern World, to its former grandeur and to invite tourists to become a part of that mix. He chose Chichén Itzá because it was close to Merida and easy to reach, thanks to progressive governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto’s efforts at building a new road that connected Merida with the soon to be famous site.

            Before Morley’s excavation, Chichén Itzá was merely clumps of grassy mounds as was common with all Maya sites in the early days of exploration. Morley would labor at excavation there for 18 years, until 1940.  Shortly after his work was complete, he published The Ancient Maya in 1946, the first comprehensive account of the Maya civilization.

NO GLAMOUR

            The rain forest held no glamour for Morley, nor did spending the night in a flea-infested palapa, eating canned goods, fighting insects, fearing snakes, taking water from a filthy water bag, nor running the risk of contracting serious tropical infections. Nicknamed the little hummingbird by Native Americans on one of his first expeditions to the southwest, Morley always dressed the part of the archeologist, looking more like Bill Gates than Harrison Ford, complete with pith helmet.

            He said he hated the jungle because he dearly enjoyed the comforts of civilization. But even the ill health that plagued him over the years in no way diminished his enthusiasm for advancing the knowledge of the Maya. His biography by Robert Brunhouse details how, at every turn, his good health was sabotaged by numerous illnesses. Seasickness seized him on entering a boat; he contracted malaria in the early years of his explorations, threw it off for several decades, only to contract it again. He suffered from colitis in 1924 and was continuously in and out of hospitals for tests.

            The following year amoebic dysentery forced him to leave Chichén Itzá and spend weeks in a New Orleans hospital. On returning to the site, he felt his energy was too great for his emaciated 109-pound body and was quoted as saying he had a Rolls Royce engine in a Ford Motor body.

MAYA TIES THAT BIND

After he had established himself at Chichén Itzá, Maya leaders asked him to help convince Queen Victoria to form an alliance with the Maya to drive the Mexicans out of Yucatán once and for all.  (This was before the final truce had been signed for the Caste War of Yucatán which lasted nearly one hundred years). After explaining that Queen Victoria was long dead, he became the unofficial spokesman for the Yucatec Maya from 1923 until his death in 1948.

            Inauguration of the Chichén Itzá project was his greatest contribution to Mesoamerica archeology. Financed fully by the Carnegie Institution, he continued hard at it until 1940. In the 1930s he discovered he had heart trouble but continued to travel, now by plane rather than mule or boat. His overall emphasis soon expanded into a vast multi-disciplinary study of the entire Maya area.  At Chichén Itzá, his work opened a new chapter in the history of archeology. On completion of the project in 1940, when he departed, he said he would never return and he never did. But his love affair with the Maya culture lasted a lifetime.

            He was scholar, explorer, informal diplomat, secret agent, planner, author and educator.  His explorations and excavations put the Maya and Chichén Itzá on the map.

Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone

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.