Jungle of Stone Page 12
We have no account of whether Stephens’s father’s business had been directly affected. But by the time Stephens arrived home in late summer of 1836, less than a year following the fire, a new city was rising from the ashes. Five hundred buildings were under construction or already built. The old seventeenth-century Dutch lanes, narrow and crooked, that had once meandered through the district were being straighten and widened into modern gas-lit streets. And a new inferno was raging: a real estate boom fueled by easy, inflated paper money. A speculative surge in Manhattan land values had already been under way when Stephens left for Europe, but now it flared out of control. So feverish had the reconstruction boom become, some of the burned and cleared properties now commanded prices that far exceeded their values with their previous structures intact.
And then it was over. Stephens was back barely nine months and the nation’s economy collapsed in the infamous “Panic of 1837.” In May of that year New York banks could no longer pay their depositors in hard currency, or gold and silver “species,” as it was known. The crisis spread as bank after bank failed across the country, businesses shut down, and unemployment soared to record levels.41
When the panic began, Stephens was nearing completion of his book. He started it not long after his return, putting off any full-time return to the law. Encouraged by favorable comments from friends regarding his published travel letter, he dropped in at 82 Cliff Street, a plain brick building seven blocks north of Wall Street in an area untouched by the fire. There he met James Harper, the oldest of four brothers whose firm, Harper & Brothers, was one of the country’s foremost publishing houses. The brothers had begun years before as printers but quickly branched out into publishing. They were making a small fortune reprinting mostly English authors, a lucrative business since America had no international copyright laws, and thus they were not obligated to pay out any royalties to the foreign authors. By the time Stephens showed up, however, the house was beginning to nurture homegrown American writers.
Stephens asked Harper, according to one account, what kind of books sold the best. “Travel sells about the best of anything we get hold of,” Harper said. “They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer and in the end, pay better.” Aware that Stephens had just returned from two years of travel, Harper suggested he write a book about his journeys.
“Never thought of such a thing,” Stephens replied. “I traveled in out-of-the-way places and went very fast.”
“That’s no matter. You went through and saw the signs. We’ve got plenty of books about those countries. You just pick out as many as you want, and I will send them home for you. You can dish up something.”42
By the next summer, the first plates for Stephens’s book were being readied for the printer. But Harper & Brothers, like nearly every firm in New York, was in serious financial straits. With the boom over, the brothers had cut back severely on the number of books they published, going from an average of two a week in 1834 to one a month in the summer of 1837.43 Stephens’s manuscript, however, had generated so much enthusiasm among the brothers that they decided to go ahead with it. It helped that Stephens was also able to put up four hundred dollars of his own—or his father’s—money, a substantial sum at the time, toward the cost of getting the first edition into print. It would turn out to be one of the best investments he ever made. Not only did Stephens get the usual royalty arrangement with the house—an even split of all net profit—but his agreement stipulated that after seven years he would be allowed to purchase the copyright and the stereotype printing plates at no more than the cost of the plates.44 The book would ultimately make a fortune, selling straight through the end of nineteenth century, and it continues in print today.
Stephens poured himself into the work, and incredibly, finished the 522-page, two-volume book in less than eight months. He then employed the often-used convention of the day by publishing it anonymously, yielding to the notion that writing books was not a respectable pursuit for gentlemen and professionals. As a result, the author of the first edition is identified only as “An American.”
There was another reason for the anonymity. Stephens had doubts about whether the book was any good. In fact, as the publication date approached, he decided to leave town and traveled up the Hudson River to Albany to pay a visit to the family of Stephen Van Rensselaer III, one of the state’s wealthiest landowners. While upstate, Stephens found he had not escaped the publication of his book after all. He was seated at the family’s dinner table one night when a servant brought in the latest edition of the Albany Evening Journal. One of the young ladies opened the newspaper and started reading when her father asked “if there was any news.”45 She replied there was a new book that the Journal thought was extremely charming “and I suppose must be, for ma believes everything the Journal says.” She was asked to read the article, which delighted everyone so much they sent a servant to “Little’s,” the local bookstore, for a copy. Unknown to the family, the guest sitting at their table was the book’s “American” author. Stephens, however, said nothing and soon excused himself.
He tracked down the paper’s editor, Thurlow Weed, and in a short time showed up at his house. Weed, who would later become a major force in American politics, had once worked alongside the Harpers as a journeyman printer and usually received advanced copies of their books to review. Later, in his autobiography, he explained: “I wrote an elaborate and glowing review, predicting an extended sale of [Stephens’s] book, and bestowing high praise upon its unknown author.” Stephens arrived at his house, he wrote, “with emotions that cannot be described.” He introduced himself, related what had just taken place at the Rensselaer residence, and thanked Weed for his review. Weed continued: “He left New York, he said, nervously anxious and doubtful about the reception of his book, the publication of which had been urged by those whose affection he feared had misled their judgments.” Stephens’s successful style, Weed went on to say, had come about from writing long letters he thought would be read by only family and friends, and “this circumstance imparted a freshness and freedom to his letters which constitutes the peculiar charm of his books. Stephens was not less interesting in conversation than as a writer. We became close friends.”46
Stephens’s anonymity did not last long, as it was obvious to many in New York City that only Stephens could have written Incidents. In the October issue of the New York Review, he received one of his most glowing reviews yet, from a writer who himself was trying hard to get his first novel published by Harper & Brothers. Edgar Allan Poe, who was at the time an influential critic, devoted seventeen pages to a detailed analysis of the book, in which he identified Stephens in the first paragraph. “Mr. Stephens has here given us two volumes of more than ordinary interest—written with a freshness of manner, and evincing a manliness of feeling, both worthy of high consideration,” wrote Poe, who, as a reviewer, could be savagely caustic at times. He devoted a large part of the review to discussing Stephens’s journey through Idumea; he was fascinated with the prophets’ biblical curse and Stephens’s ability to survive it. But in the end, he was taken by the sheer appeal of Stephens’s writing and the persona he had created on the page. “The volumes are written in general with a freedom, a frankness, and an utter absence of pretension, which will secure them the respect and good-will of all parties. We take leave of Stephens with sentiments of hearty respect. We hope it will not be the last time we shall hear from him. He is a traveler with whom we shall like to take other journeys.”47
Stephens had hit a vein of gold. Everyone, it seemed, wanted the journey to continue, so he quickly “dished” up his second two-volume work: Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland, which was published by the Harpers the next year. It, too, brought favorable reviews—and considerable money. “Before Mr. Stephens shall have attained his ‘middle age,’” wrote the Southern Literary Messenger in August 1839, “he will accumulate a competent fortune from his wr
itings—an extraordinary fact in the history of American authorship, and the more remarkable when it is considered that he was not educated to literature.”48
The reviewer was obviously referring to Stephens’s education at law and was unaware of how much Stephens had learned from his classical education, from Charles Anthon, and how much—stylistically—he had had to unlearn.
Stephens now had little interest or need to return to the law. But what now could take its place, given that he had exhausted all his travel material? The answer came in a petition from the New-York Historical Society to the state legislature to finance an investigation into the early colonial history of the state and New York City. In response, in May 1839 Albany lawmakers passed a bill providing four thousand dollars for the retrieval of early colonial documents from the Netherlands, France, and England. Stephens, along with several other local literary figures, lobbied for the prestigious appointment. Governor William Seward was a Whig, however, and Stephens’s well-known affiliation with the Democratic Party clearly hurt his chances. Seward instead appointed a member of the powerful Bleecker family, descendants from New York’s original Dutch settlers.49
The setback for Stephens was fleeting. He had already met Catherwood. The ruins of Central America beckoned. The death in quick succession of the United States’ chargé d’affaires, Charles De Witt, and his appointed replacement, William Leggett, then created the opening. Democratic president Martin Van Buren closed the deal with his appointment of Stephens as special agent to the disintegrating republic. Stephens was thrilled. Despite its uncertain and dangerous prospects, the journey into the dark heart of Central America loomed before him like another Petra. Returning from Washington on June 20, 1839, with his new appointment in hand, he wrote his friend Daniel S. Dickinson, a future U.S. senator and New York State attorney general:
It seems ordained that I shall quit the country. The Whigs prevented my going to England and Holland; or, as the Herald, my stanch friend on the occasion, expressed it: “going to bob for Dutch records.” Virtue is its own reward; and I have been appointed Diplomatic Agent to Central America. You will doubtless believe me when I say this hits my humor infinitely better than the Albany project; indeed, now I consider that it would have been very unfortunate if I had succeeded in that.
My friends are full of badinage; they call me the “extraordinary Envoy,” and persist that there is no such country on the map; but fortunately an arrival from that region bringing accounts of a revolutionary army overrunning the country and a revolutionary general entering the capital, brought it to notice. The mission promises some incident; for the “government” seems to be playing “hide and seek” about the country, and at this moment, the “extraordinary Envoy” does not know exactly where to find it. Is it not almost enough to make a man commit himself blindly to fortune and fate? The course of my life is changed by an accident. . . .50
With that, Stephens went off to his tailor to be fitted for a dark blue diplomat’s coat, complete with gold buttons, as befits an envoy extraordinaire sent off in search of a republic few in the United States were aware existed.
PART TWO
Politics
6
Ruins
Across Honduras, to the east of Stephens and Catherwood’s tenuous Copán encampment, Colonel Juan Galindo was preparing, he was certain, for the final battles to save the republic. Galindo was an Irishman turned Central American patriot who had been struggling for some time to rebuild his reputation after an ill-fated diplomatic mission to England. He had gone to London on behalf of the republic to push back Belize’s border but had returned in failure and near disgrace.1 Now, with the central government under siege and his adopted world crumbling around him, he understood that his future and only chance at redemption lay in picking up arms once again to defend the federation.
He was born John Galindo in Dublin in 1802 and had zealously taken up the republican cause after traveling to Guatemala as a young man in 1827.2 Wounded in battle during the country’s first civil war in 1829, he was awarded Central American citizenship by the new liberal federal congress. Over the next ten years, he took on a series of military and government assignments, at one point serving as governor of El Petén, Guatemala’s northernmost department and the area directly bordering on Belize and Mexico. He was intimately familiar with the ground over which Stephens and Catherwood and Walker and Caddy were now treading. In 1831, he explored the stone ruins at Palenque on the Mexican–Guatemalan border. Three years later, he was commissioned by Guatemalan government to investigate a mysterious grouping of stones rumored to lie near the Guatemalan–Honduran border. He arrived at Copán in April 1834, more than five years before Stephens and Catherwood.
His years before arriving in Central America remain a mystery. His mother was an Irish actress and his father an English actor and fencing master of Spanish descent. The extent of Galindo’s schooling is unknown but he undoubtedly advanced through grammar school and probably had some higher education. He was darkly handsome, with swirls of black hair ringing his forehead, thick lashes, and oversize eyes dominating a Roman nose and small, almost feminine mouth.3 Ambitious and intelligent, he possessed kaleidoscopic curiosity and a scientific mind. While deeply involved in military and diplomatic matters for his adopted country, he still found time to become a member of the Royal Geographical and Horticultural Societies in London, the American Antiquarian Society in the United States, and the Société de Géographie in Paris, contributing papers and reports to each of them.
In June 1834, Galindo drafted a report to the Guatemalan government from Copán describing the stone ruins he had found there, an account filled with the chauvinistic pride of an adopted son.4 The report stated the ruins supplied clear evidence of an advanced civilization in America that not only predated the arrival of Columbus but indicated American Indians were the oldest race on earth. In fact, he claimed America may well have been the cradle of human civilization, a statement daringly out of step with prevailing intellectual thought at the time.
Though he gave little scientific evidence to back up his statements, Galindo’s ambitious assertions go some way to evidence the dizzying impact an encounter with Copán and Palenque could have on the European imagination. Buried in his sweeping, if erroneous, pronouncements are clear, concise, and valuable descriptions of the Copán ruins. He describes the fallen statues, carved obelisks, and crumbling stone steps, plazas, and temples at the site. He correctly pointed out that the architects of the temples and the artisans of the elaborately carved monuments accomplished their work without the benefit of iron tools. Most presciently, he guessed that the hieroglyphs he found were at least partially a form of phonetic writing, representing sounds and not merely ideograms. It was a remarkable guess.5 His assessment would turn out to be right, though it would take another hundred years of investigation to support that conclusion.”6
Galindo also claimed to be the first explorer to investigate Copán—but he was not. Lying in the Royal Archives in Spain, unknown to Galindo, was another Copán report. It would not surface until 1858, long after Galindo and, for that matter, Stephens and Catherwood, were dead.7 It was written in the late sixteenth century, only thirty years after the conquistadors had subdued the Indian warriors of Guatemala and Honduras.
Diego García de Palacio, a magistrate in the governing council known as the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala, set out in 1576 from the colonial capital at Santiago, known today as Antigua, to inspect the conquered provinces on orders from King Philip II of Spain. Palacio was an intelligent, educated government man born in Asturias, Spain, in 1530 who had quickly grasped the importance of Central America in the grand scheme of Spain’s expanding empire. He saw the region, in particular Honduras, as a good crossing point to connect the crown’s small but growing Pacific fleet with its powerful Atlantic armada. He appears also to have had personal reasons for exploring the hinterlands of what are now Honduras and El Salvador. He wanted to become governor of the Philippines
, a region he thought more worthy of his ambitions, and he no doubt thought that finding a quick and easy way across Central America would aid him in reaching that goal. It appears he never made it to the Philippines but ended up some years later in Mexico writing naval manuals and leading a coastal armada that went after English marauders, such as Francis Drake, who were playing havoc with Spain’s shipping along the Pacific coast. At that point Palacio’s name disappears from the record books.
His small place in history, however, was already secure. Palacio was the first non-Indian to investigate the stone monuments of the “Classic” Maya civilization, having visited Copán in 1576. Amazed by what he found, he was also the first to set down what he observed in writing.
In a letter addressed to his king, dated March 8, 1576, Palacio writes: “Here was formerly the seat of a great power, and a great population, civilized, and considerably advanced in the arts, as is shown in various figures and buildings.” He gave a generalized description of the ruins, noting that he found six large statues of men, two of women, altars, terraces, and a large plaza resembling the Colosseum at Rome. Much of the stone work was of such skill, he told the king, it could not possibly have been created by people “as rude as the natives of that province.” He added that the local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s history.
It was a section of only about 850 words, coming at the end of his lengthy account of his entire journey through the provinces, and it is not known if the Spanish king ever personally read it. It was added to the mound of intelligence piling up from the colonies and eventually filed away in one of the royal court’s swelling archives. There it lay for nearly three centuries, until it was discovered by an American diplomat, translated, and published in English for the first time—two decades after Stephens and Catherwood arrived in Copán.8