Jungle of Stone Read online

  Dedication

  For Kathleen O’Shea

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Map

  Prologue

  PART ONE Expedition 1 South, 1839

  2 Upriver

  3 Mico Mountain

  4 Passport

  5 Monkeys Like the Wind Stephens

  PART TWO Politics 6 Ruins

  7 Carrera

  8 War

  9 Malaria

  10 Crisis at Hand

  11 Reunion Catherwood

  PART THREE Archaeology 12 Journey into the Past

  13 Palenque

  14 Uxmal

  15 “Magnificent”

  16 Yucatán

  17 London

  18 Discoveries

  19 Chichén Itzá

  20 Tuloom

  21 Home The Maya

  PART FOUR Friends 22 Views of Ancient Monuments

  23 Steam

  24 Panama

  25 Crossing the Isthmus

  26 Together Again

  27 Missing

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  As I crossed Guatemala’s largest lake and approached the village of Izabal, it was almost impossible to imagine that this loose collection of cinder-block houses and scattered huts was once the chief port of entry to nineteenth-century Central America. The walled army garrison that stood watch on the brow of the hill was now a tumble of stones, the main plaza an exhausted soccer field, and the tombs and markers of the port’s cemetery were overgrown and buried.

  I had come to the village to see for myself the place where two men came ashore in 1839 and altered the world’s understanding of human history. In some ways, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood were a mismatch, an unlikely pair for such a revolutionary journey. One was a red-bearded, gregarious New York lawyer; the other a tight-lipped, clean-shaven English architect and businessman. But their earlier, separate travels through the ancient ruins of Greece, Palestine, and Egypt had prepared them for the unusual archaeological foray they were about to undertake. And their brilliant, perfectly matched skills—Stephens with words and Catherwood with illustrations—made them ideal candidates to record and make sense of their impending discoveries.

  I had picked the same week in the year they had landed 170 years earlier. It was near the end of the rainy season, and I wilted under the same kind of oppressive, stifling heat they had described. If time had long passed the town of Izabal by—Guatemala’s major Caribbean port was now a hundred miles to the northeast—the surrounding landscape had not changed. The mountain ridge backing the town remained a barrier to the interior, its rain-soaked slopes still coated with dense jungle. As they had for generations, the local people, many occupying palm-thatched huts, still lived close to the earth, nurtured by subsistence tropical agriculture and fish from the lake.

  Stephens and Catherwood would lead me on a 2,500-mile chase through the mountains and jungles of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Where they had traveled on the backs of mules, I would follow in my own primitive beast, a mottled blue 1985 Toyota Corolla sans radio and air-conditioning. Where they complained of problems with muleteers and fretted over the health of their animals, I, driving alone down rutted, bone-cracking gravel and mud jungle roads, envisioned the team of workers on a Japanese assembly line tightening the bolts on my Toyota twenty years earlier and prayed they had done a good job.

  For all the rough similarities between our journeys through Central America, I had arrived at Izabal in a world already changed by Stephens and Catherwood’s discoveries. The two men fought their way through the thickest of jungles—often only to discover incomprehensible piles of carved stones and mysterious, seemingly inchoate structures. I, on the other hand, would arrive at fully excavated and restored archaeological sites filled with magnificent pyramids, temples, and palaces, sites whose art and hieroglyphics reveal a civilization of extraordinary sophistication and complexity. And while I knew what drove me on my journey—an overpowering desire to learn who these two men were and how they survived against seemingly impossible odds—I did not yet understand the insatiable yearning that drove them to undertake such a crazed and dangerous mission.

  Nor did I comprehend the world they had brought with them, carried in their heads. When they arrived, Charles Darwin was still twenty years from publishing On the Origin of Species. In the West, the Bible was still the basic template of history, and most Christians believed the world was less than six thousand years old. The natives found populating the “New World” when Columbus and his European successors showed up were considered unrefined savages: sparse and scattered Indian tribes who had never more than scratched out a bare subsistence from the land; idol worshippers who performed bloody human sacrifice atop stone mounds.

  After 1839, this worldview, the notion that the Americas had always been a land occupied by primitive, inferior people, would change forever. And so would the assumption that writing, mathematics, astronomy, art, monumental architecture—civilization itself—was only possible through so-called “diffusion” from within one part the “Old World” to another, and from the civilized “Old World” to the uncivilized “New.” Stephens and Catherwood’s historic journey radically altered our understanding of human evolution. In their wake, it became possible to comprehend civilization as an inherent trait of human cultural progress, perhaps coded into our genes; a characteristic that allows advanced societies to grow out of primitive ones, organically, separately, and without contact, as occurred in Central America and the Western Hemisphere, which were isolated from the rest of the world for more than fifteen thousand years. And, just as with the Old World’s ancient civilizations, they can collapse, too, leaving behind only remnants of their previous splendor.

  Stephens and Catherwood plunged headlong into a region racked by civil war. They endured relentless bouts of tropical fever, close calls, and physical hardships, and emerged to publish two bestsellers: the first works of American archaeology, so enchantingly written and illustrated that they have become classics and remain in print today. In 1839, they found the remains of what would come to be known as the Maya civilization. More than discovering them, they made sense of them, reaching conclusions that defied the conventional thinking of their time and initiated a century and a half of excavations and investigations, which continue today. After publication of their books, the mysterious stone ruins in Central America, the vast, sophisticated road network of the Inca in South America, and the monuments and temples of the Aztecs could no longer be viewed as vestiges of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the ancient seafaring Phoenicians, or the survivors of lost Atlantis. They were understood to be solely indigenous in origin, the products of the imagination, intelligence, and creativity of Native Americans.

  Jungle of Stone tells of the harrowing journey that led to these discoveries and the two extraordinary men who made it. The book weaves their little-known biographies through the narrative of their expeditions and their significant achievements afterward. Stephens would best the British Empire twice, and his successes personified the spirit of America on the rise in the nineteenth century.

  The book is the first text to combine the history of prior explorations, the circumstances and context of their discoveries, and their sudden and unexpected race with the British to be the first to show the world the art and architectural wonders of the Maya. Catherwood’s illustrations, drawn “on the spot,” are the first accurate, strikingly detailed
representations of this lost world from a time before photography.

  Even in a great age of exploration that would later reveal the source of the Nile in Central Africa and Machu Picchu in Peru, send expeditions to the north and south poles, Stephens and Catherwood stand apart. Known among archaeologists today as the originators of Maya studies, they accomplished much more. Like Darwin to come, they broke through dogmatic constructions of the past and helped lay the foundation for a new science of archaeology. They captured the romance, mystery, and exhilaration of discovery with a vividness and intensity that inspired the explorers of the future. And they opened to the world a realm of artistic and cultural riches of an ancient American Indian civilization whose remains stagger the imagination, draw millions of visitors every year—and still have much to teach us.

  When Christopher Columbus and his European successors began arriving in the so-called New World in the late fifteenth century, several advanced societies populated the Western Hemisphere. Hernán Cortés and his Spanish conquistadors marveled especially at the sophistication of the Aztec’s capital Tenochtitlan, now buried under present-day Mexico City. But they were less interested in archeological discovery than gold, and more concerned with subjugating the native populations, imposing “civilized” Christianity on their pagan practices, pulling down their temples to construct new cities, and putting the Indians to work for the Spanish overlords. What sophistication and social refinements they had found in Mexico and Peru, they also kept closely to themselves as they jealously closed off Spanish America from the rest of the world for nearly three centuries.

  At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Aztecs dominated central Mexico and the Inca administered a sprawling empire from their home based in the Peruvian Andes. The highly evolved civilization of the Maya, however, had ceased to exist. It was already ancient history. Their civilization was as distant historically from the Aztecs and the Inca as those two empires are from us today. The remains of the Maya’s once-dazzling, densely populated cities lay overgrown in the jungle. The lords of the cities, the scribes and astronomers, architects and artists, tradesmen, soldiers, and merchants had mysteriously disappeared. Yet if the Aztecs—geographically separated from the Maya heartland by only hundreds of miles—even knew of the Maya ruins, they had little or no historical understanding of who these ancient Maya were. They were unable to read the thousand-year written history that the Maya left behind, carved in hieroglyphs on their fallen monuments.

  At the zenith of their achievements, during a six-hundred-year period lasting through the tenth century A.D., the Maya were in a class of their own in the Americas. Even as archaeologists continue finding traces of long-ago Native American cultures, some predating the Maya, none has compared to the political complexity and artistry, the writing, mathematical and astronomical skills, the architectural acumen, and sheer longevity of the Classic-era Maya. During their civilization’s long run, the Maya built more than forty important city-states, and it is estimated that as many as ten million Maya inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula and lowland tropical forests of what is now Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. By comparison, today in a region of Guatemala known as El Petén, the Maya’s ancient heartland, the population barely exceeds half a million inhabitants.

  The Maya civilization was by any measure an exceptionally long and sustainable one. Arriving in the Pacific coast and highlands of Guatemala and spreading north to lowland tropical marshes as early as 1,500 B.C., the Maya developed more and more complex agricultural communities over the next millennium with harvests of manioc, beans, squash, and, most important of all, corn. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 B.C.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Without the benefit of metal tools or the wheel, they quarried thousand-pound stone blocks and constructed pyramids that rose above the jungle canopy.

  Timeline of Early Civilizations

  Over the next millennium dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by long roadlike causeways of crushed limestone. Though ruled by separate royal dynasties often warring among themselves, the Maya nonetheless developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas-reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. They coated their temples in brilliant, showy colors, decorated their palaces with stone mosaics, and painted vivid storytelling murals. They studied the night sky from astronomical observatories, created one of the world’s most complicated set of interlocking calendars, worked out great cycles of time mathematically—in the process inventing the concept of “zero”—and recorded their history with the only true writing system in the Americas, which allowed them to transcribe anything they could say.

  Then it all came to an end. The great Maya civilization—one of the most complex and advanced in the ancient world—dissolved and the tropical forests reclaimed their accomplishments, leaving a hidden jungle of stones that one day two explorers would bring to the world’s attention, and begin the process of unraveling the Maya’s amazing, improbable story.

  Map

  Map by Nick Springer

  Prologue

  John Lloyd Stephens was exhausted. It was April 1852 and he was in his second year as president of one of the most brazen undertakings of the age: construction of a railroad across the narrow, vicious, almost impenetrable Isthmus of Panama. It had been the dream of explorers and traders for centuries to find or build a link connecting the world’s two great oceans. Canal propositions had come and gone. They cost too much; the technology was not yet there. But now the timing seemed right. By midcentury, pressure to slice through the Western Hemisphere somewhere in Central America, if not by canal then by rail, had reached a breaking point. There was a stampede for gold in the California Sierras. It was the era of steamships, railroads, and the telegraph, an age compressing time and space. Technologically almost anything seemed possible.

  Early in April, weakened by overwork, his liver ravaged by chronic bouts of malaria, Stephens could no longer continue. His iron road was already years behind schedule. Unlike his well-heeled business partners living comfortably in New York, Stephens had spent most of the previous three years in Panama. Though not physically imposing, he possessed a steely constitution that had fought off every corporeal abuse imaginable during travels across the most disease-ridden regions of the planet. And he was intimately familiar with the treachery of Central America’s mountains and jungles. But the rain forest of Panama was different. It was dark and sadistic, more opaque and unforgiving than anything he had known.

  From the beginning almost everything had gone wrong. Instead of starting the railroad from the center of the isthmus, as first planned, where the ground was higher, drier, and more favorable, they were forced to start from an island in the mangrove swamps of the Caribbean coast. From there they had to hack their way inch by inch through the jungle toward the Pacific. The men waded up to their chests through waters infested with crocodiles and poisonous snakes. Where the swamps ended, the quicksand and mud began. The swarms of disease-laden mosquitoes were so thick they darkened the sky. And the volume of rain that fell, broken only by intervals of unbearable sun, seemed beyond human comprehension.1

  Sometimes it seemed like only sickness and death. Malaria and other tropical diseases, lumped together under the dreaded catchall known as Chagres fever, took a devastating toll. At times it was impossible to keep the workforce up. There had been more than one mutiny. Entire work crews perished or the men became so sick they could no longer carry on, their health damaged for the remainder of their lives. Some went mad. Others ran off to the gold fields in California or paid for passage home at their own expense
just to get out. Later, in mid-1852, cholera would again sweep the isthmus, and within weeks leave hundreds of new dead in its wake.

  The iron tracks stretched twenty miles through filled-in swamps and on good days it seemed like the whole crazy idea might work. But only a few months before, the money began to run out. More and more Stephens felt he was carrying the whole enterprise on his back. In letters to friends, he had predicted that by 1852 the railroad would have breached the continental divide and would be closing in on Panama City and the Pacific Ocean. The entire distance, after all, was less than fifty miles. Then, gradually, he stopped making any more predictions. Three years of hardship and labor, sickness and death, and they had not yet crossed halfway. The Chagres River, the most formidable obstacle, a river that in the rainy season raged like the wrath of God, remained to be crossed, and the summit dividing the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds still loomed miles away.

  Stephens rarely complained, but he started hinting darkly that he hoped to live long enough to see the hemisphere’s first transcontinental train run sea to sea. At the age of forty-six, his body was breaking down. He had crossed and recrossed the isthmus so many times, he had lost count. The rainy season would soon be upon them and the work would slow to a crawl. It was time to go home.

  There is no record of the exact state of his health when he boarded the steamer for New York, but not long before he left, he wrote his father a confession: “I am growing old and wearing out with hard knocks and hard service, but it is not worthwhile to put upon you the labors and anxieties and responsibilities which I must continue to bear.”2 He would see his father soon, he said.

  The railroad—a railroad across Panama—would happen, of that he was certain. He had faced incredible hardships and obstacles before and had triumphed. He was a visionary and Central America had never defeated him. He had seen things in its jungles few men had ever seen, made astonishing discoveries, and brought back stories almost impossible to believe, accounts that had changed the world’s view of human history—and made him rich and famous.