EXPLORER AND PHOTOGRAPHER ALICE DIXON ADDS THE MYSTIC INTO MAYA EXPLORATIONS

Alice Dixon LePlongeon

At 22 years old, Alice Dixon met Augustus Le Plongeon, a world explorer of antiquities, in London, in 1871. Le Plongeon, 26 years her senior, traveled to Europe after successful journeys to South America and California. His extensive explorations in Peru and Chile led him to London to study Mexican and Maya artifacts and manuscripts at the British Museum where they met. 

Considered an amateur archeologist, Dixon, a second generation photog- rapher, photographed ruins at Chichen Itza and Uxmal alongside her husband.

Alice Dixon's father, Henry, was a copper-plate printer who became a successful photographer and was recognized for his development of panchromatic photographic for his photos of London architecture. Alice learned the principles of photography from her father and worked as his assistant in his studio.

SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES

Another family member with a strong influence on Alice was her uncle, Dr. Jacob Dixon, who practiced spiritualism. Alice became involved in that movement at a young age, participating in seances at her uncle's home.

As for Le Plongeon, in Peru he studied earthquakes and explored the country's archeological sites, including Tinhuanaco which he photographed while trying to assimilate clues as to who the builders of that empire might have been. In combination with his own Peruvian explorations, he'd read the works of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, explorers of the Yucatan in the 1840s, and came to believe that civilization had early origins in the New World and he began to form philosophies on the world's great civilizations.

A few years into his South American sojourn, Le Plongeon heard of the California gold rush and jumped a ship to partake in that historic event, spending several years in gold country where he speculated on land and became a surveyor. There he managed to earn thirty thousand dollars in profits, enough to fund his trip to Europe as well as future South American travels. 

In Europe he stumbled onto a new photographic technique that used paper instead of metal and urged the inventor to teach him the process. This would serve him well when uncovering Yucatecan ruins, enabling he and Dixon to document their discoveries. Their photos of Uxmal and Chichen Itza remain some of the best ever taken as they show the pyramid sites as they stood for eons, long before archeologists re-discovered them.

HONEYMOON IN MEXICO

Soon after meeting, Alice and Le Plongeon were married. For their honey-moon they set sail for Cuba then onto Mexico, where they planned to explore ancient pyramid sites. They landed in Progreso, Yucatan, in 1873. 

A bout with yellow fever for Alice dampened their arrival but Le Plongeon nursed her back to health. During her recuperation the two studied Yucatecan Maya and became acquainted with local scholars. They believed communicating with present day Maya was an important step to interpreting the past. Alice remained a champion of the Maya her entire life, and wrote about them long after she left the Yucatan.

Alice in Palace of the Governors, Uxmal

Their first visit to see pyramids was at Uxmal, forty miles south of Merida. They were awed by the size of the site and camped in the Governor's Palace, sleeping on hammocks. They both took photos, cleared the land to better see the site and were determined to return again later.

Camping at Uxmal

CHICHEN ITZA

The number one item on the Le Plongeons' bucket list was Chichen Itza. He'd heard from a local that a sacred codex was buried there in a building with many chambers and he believed he could further his eccentric theory of Maya world supremacism if he could locate the text. Their timing overlapped the Caste War of Yucatan, and Piste, the pueblo nearby, was overrun with Chan Santa Cruz Indians. Le Plongeon, determined to search for the desired text, asked local authorities to post soldiers at the site as security.

He located the building, could not locate the text, but the building's lintel contained numerous glyphs which he believed could further his theory. He took 500 stereoscopic photos of the hieroglyphs, and he and Alice traced a number of murals and made molds of them in bas relief.

QUEEN MOO AND PRINCE CHACMOOL

They fixated on the Upper Temple of the Jaguars near the ball court. It was 1875. Workers discovered a large slab with carved figures holding outstretched arms. Le Plongeon called it Atlantis. Murals on the walls depicted village life, war scenes and rulers in court. The explorer concluded this was a generation of Maya rulers whose totem was an eagle or macaw. He declared it a symbol of a Maya princess who he christened Queen Moo (Maya for macaw). Her brother he named Prince ChacMool, powerful warrior, a reference to jaguar in Mayan. This flimsy attempt at a scholarly decision became the basis for his Maya myth as the center of world civilization and placed him squarely at odds with fellow archeologists of the time. His Maya "myth" led to much derision and plagued him his entire career.

The fabricated myth about a Maya princess and her warrior king brother who had been forced to flee Egypt, bringing their philosophies of the Maya with them, seduced the two at-one-time prominent Maya notables. They were viewed as the Maya world's "new age" scholars due to this far-fetched belief and the theory branded Le Plongeon as an eccentric crackpot, earning him disdain from those in his field. 

Excavation of ChacMool at Chichen Itza

Yet in spite of his oddball theories, Le Plongeon discovered the famous statue, ChacMool, five feet long weighing hundreds of pounds, which is virtually synonymous with Chichen Itza and the ancient Maya. Originally spelled Chaacmool, Maya for powerful warrior, the word was misspelled as ChacMool through a mis-translation by one of his missives to a benefactor. The ChacMool statue was lauded by the American Geographical Society as a great archeological find. The Le Plongeons struggled to bring the statue to the U.S. to display in Philadelphia at the America Centennial Exhibition but the president of Mexico denied their request. 

In the meantime, they sent other Maya artifacts to the U.S. to display at centennial ceremonies but the objects arrived too late. And in another spate of bad luck, the photos Le Plongeon had labored over were stolen by another archeologist who claimed them for his own. Soon even their main benefactor would give up on their excursions. At times they found it difficult to find money to eat, so dire was their situation. 

"SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES"

"Surrounded by enemies, Remington always at hand, death lurking in every direction," Alice wrote in a letter to a friend in 1877, describing their predicament. The Mexico government had refused to pay them for the extensive work they'd completed in not only raising the incredible ChacMool artifact but in delivering it to the pueblo Piste. With this final blow, they picked up and moved on to other ruins—Mayapan and sites in Honduras.

Their travels continued and in 1884 the Le Plongeons left Mexico and settled in New York. There Alice focused on her writing, both fact and fiction. She became well known for a series of articles written for the New York Times and other publications in which she romanticized the Maya world. Her best known work was Queen Moo's Talisman. Both she and her husband lectured non-stop in Europe and the U.S. promoting the Yucatan pyramids and the Maya. 

Queen Moo's Talisman

In A Dream of Maya, by Larry Desmond and Phyllis Messenger, Desmond explains if history had been kinder to the Le Plongeons, it would have depicted an extraordinary couple whose lifelong work had not been fairly appraised. The book gives deep insight into their lives and their controversial views and document their hard-nosed earnestness and early pioneering excavations—from digging up pyramid sites to drawing architectural floor plans and tracing murals to keeping detailed photographic records.

A Dream of Maya by Desmond and Messenger 

Their extensive explorations were done under the duress of the Caste War, yet they persisted and came away with great discoveries. 

Augustus Le Plongeon died in New York in 1908. Alice died in New York in 1910.

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

BUENOS AIRES SITS NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD BUT THRIVES IN EVERY WAY

 

Tango Attire in Buenos Aires

LOVE LETTER TO BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires is a thriving, elegant city situated at the end of the world. It doesn't seem possible that this phenomenon of a metropolis exists on the outset of the North American time zone (five hours earlier than San Francisco) so very far away from everything. It's like it just popped up, with lavish Paris style buildings, lush and well-thought out parks, magical tree buttresses the size of Volkswagens, fast drivers but patient citizens, grocery stores with vegetable sections that could vie for a Bon Appetit centerfold, each tomato, avocado, head of lettuce meticulously placed, tempting a caress.                 

                                                                               

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RESTAURANTS

Restaurants, too many to count, serving grass fed beef you can cut with a spoon, salads with up to five 'gustos' or additions: tomatoes, onions, corn, peas, carrots, beets. Old world waiters in starched white shirts, black bowties and waist-high aprons—even at the smallest coffee shops—seating you with a nod or a flourish, then standing by as you ponder the menu. The city's fixated on food, with the popular parrilla leading the way, followed by a concentration of Italian eateries from high end to pizzeria. Every other food appears too, with plentiful choices. Argentina's turn of the century melting pot had no limits: Italian, Greek, Spanish, Irish, French, Chinese, Indian, English, German, and now the occasional gringo.

Rio Alba Restaurant (by author)

                                                                                                

ARCHITECTURE

Ultra modern high-rise apartments intertwine with ancient buildings, some in disrepair like the sidewalks, where busy passersby go about their daily routines. Trees line the streets, stretching stories high, home to birds singing lovely solos, too melodic to seem real. Buses, subways and taxis move the active locals from Point A to B. Average stature, thin and trim, intelligence level high. Everyone has an opinion and you'll hear it if you ask. A common phrase: God is everywhere but serves in Argentina. There's a quick wit and readiness to laugh. Strangers help with questions, no rebuffs.

Summer weather (north of the equator's winter) borders on godly—mid-eighties with light humidity, just enough to make my hair have a little tweak. Short sleeves and sandals, the clothing of choice.

Flea markets appear in countless parks on weekends in contrast to high-end stores like Hermes and Yves Saint Laurent in various chic parts of town. Elderly women walk with doting daughters on their elbows, afternoon strolls to who knows where.

The peso fluctuates constantly, with two deep cuts on the heels of the 2000 debacle that brought this thriving country to its knees. But still, the Porteños find time to tango.

TANGO

La Boca, where tango was born, still compels locals and tourists alike to throng El Caminito, to watch non-stop street tango performed by tango dancers extraordinaire. La Boca, which means 'the mouth' in Spanish, was once literally the mouth of Buenos Aires as it's located in what used to be the city's biggest port. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants set up shop in the surrounding vicinity, working the docks, earning a wage, while yearning for their far away homelands. From these cravings was born the tango. The haphazard shanty houses, still standing, line the streets, made from sheet metal and wooden planks and painted in bright colors. 

La Boca streets (by author)

While strolling through La Boca, we took a seat at an outdoor cafe to have a café and watch street tango. This conversation floated my way.

"We're not American," I heard the guy next to me tell the waiter in Spanish as he looked over his check. 

Every restaurant table was filled in La Boca. The sun was out and so were the tourists."Why are you charging me to use a fork?"

That was a new spin. I'd lived in Mexico for years and had a knack for detecting certain discrepancies. But using a fork carried a surcharge? That was a new spin. The discussion heated up as his girlfriend got involved. I tuned out.

Time to watch the passersby and the street-side tango. What legs she had, the dancer, in an off-blue high slit backless dress. Dark hair with high sheen, pulled back in a low bun. I'd heard the sad lonely song from the bandoleon somewhere before. Her partner, black suit, white shirt, Cuban hat, moved along with her ignoring the crowd.

Tango Dancers (by author)

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy. 

Wood Mural in La Boca, Buenos Aires (by author)