Jungle of Stone Page 13
Galindo, like Stephens and Catherwood, had no way of knowing the existence of Palacio’s unpublished letter, and, believing he was the first to investigate Copán, Galindo worked to make certain the world heard about his discovery.9 On June 19, 1834, the same day he completed his full report to the Guatemalan government, he also drafted two brief “remarks,” as he called them. The first he sent to the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc., which published it in July 1835. The second account showed up in the 1836 edition of a journal published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the American Antiquarian Society. A third, longer version, this one complete with his drawings and maps, was sent to the Société de Géographie in Paris. It was never published, though a summary without the drawings appeared in the society’s bulletin.
Galindo anticipated that his long report to the state of Guatemala, with all his maps and drawings, would be published by his government as well. But for unknown reasons it was filed away in the bureaucratic archives at Guatemala City and not discovered until decades later. The report was published by the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1920. The maps and drawings have never been found.10
By November 1839, however, publication of his scientific explorations was the last thing on Galindo’s mind. Following his diplomatic failure in England, he had fallen out of favor with the federal administration.11 Now, with the Liberal cause in grave danger and seeing a chance to redeem himself, Colonel Galindo cleaned his pistols and sharpened his sword in preparation for the final battles to save the Central American Republic.12
Although the abbreviated “remarks” Galindo published on Copán had all but faded into obscurity, they nevertheless caught the attention of a few antiquarians in New York and eventually reached Stephens. They were the reason Stephens and Catherwood now found themselves in the Honduran jungle. “He is the only man in that country who has given any attention at all to the subject of antiquities,” wrote Stephens. “These accounts, however vague and unsatisfactory, had roused our curiosity. Though I ought perhaps to say that both Mr. C. and I were somewhat skeptical, and when we arrived at Copán, it was with the hope, rather than the expectation, of finding wonders.”
Galindo’s accounts, flat and plodding in style, were just enough to fire the imagination of adventurers like Stephens and Catherwood. But it would take Stephens’s energetic, sometimes romantic prose, along with the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed and accurate drawings, to finally put Copán on the world map.
Stephens and Catherwood spent their second night at Copán swinging in hammocks outside the house of the ill-tempered Don Gregorio. “In the morning,” Stephens wrote, “we continued to astonish the people with our strange ways, particularly by brushing our teeth.” Don Gregorio was as unimpressed and unfriendly as ever, and the two men were determined to find another place to stay.
Meanwhile, Stephens and especially Catherwood had achieved a reputation as “medicos,” having used their traveling medicine chest to treat several people attached to Don Gregorio’s household. Word spread and soon nearly a dozen people showed up for treatment. Then, as they prepared to leave for the ruins, a tall, cleanly dressed man stepped forward, announced he was José Maria Asebedo, and handed Stephens a bundle of papers. He declared the ruins were located on his land—and he produced the documents to prove it. Stephens reviewed the papers, and then, drawing on his charm, assured Asebedo that none of the ruins would be disturbed. He added that he would be happy to compensate him for their time there before they departed.
Hut occupied by Stephens and Catherwood near Copán ruins. (Catherwood)
“Fortunately,” Stephens wrote, “he had a favor to ask. Our fame as physicians had reached the village, and he wished remedios for his sick wife.” Seizing on the opportunity to win Don Asebedo’s favor, Stephens set out at once for the village to treat the landowner’s spouse while Catherwood left for the ruins with some hired workmen.
That afternoon the rain began again and it soon reached such a torrent it halted all further exploration. Catherwood and Stephens, who had rejoined him, sought refuge just outside the ruins in a modest hut whose inhabitants, a family of three, kindly offered to take them in for the remainder of their stay in Copán. The structure consisted of a single room, half of it open to the air on one side. The family slept on a rawhide bed in one corner; there was room for only a single hammock, so Stephens agreed to sleep on a stack of corn husks. There, too, they treated the woman of the house, who was suffering from severe intermittent fevers, and her son, who had an infected liver.
That evening, wrapped in a blanket and smoking a cigar made from Copán tobacco—“the most famed in Central America”—grown and hand-rolled by the hut’s owners, Stephens had a vision. He would buy Copán. Ever the merchant’s son, he outlined for Catherwood his grandiose scheme. They would remove some of the monuments from the ruins and set them up in New York in a “great commercial emporium.” After all, he said, Copán was on “the banks of a river that emptied into the same ocean by which the docks of New-York are washed.” Stephens’s idea was not entirely far-fetched. Although public nonprofit museums had not yet come into existence in America—the founding of the Smithsonian Institution was still six years off—profit-making museums existed in New York and Philadelphia. They were filled with taxidermied animals, all kinds of scientific curiosities, and Indian artifacts. It would be only another two years before one of those establishments, John Scudder’s American Museum in New York, would be purchased and transformed into a world-famous emporium to scientific enlightenment and “freak” entertainment under the genius of Phineas Taylor (P.T.) Barnum.13
Stephens’s idea was not entirely profit driven. The commercial venture he envisioned would become, he wrote, “the nucleus of a great national museum of American Antiquities.” Even the comment from his host across the room, Don Miguel, who explained that downriver rapids made the Copán River impassable, did not dampen Stephens’s enthusiasm—or cultural chauvinism. Some of the large monuments could be cut up and transported in pieces, and portable plaster casts could be made of the others, he said. If casts of the Parthenon in Athens could be exhibited in the British Museum, those from Copán could be displayed in New York. And other ruins they hoped to discover on their journey might prove even more accessible. “Very soon their existence would become known and their value appreciated, and the friends of science and the arts in Europe would get possession of them,” he explained. “They belonged of right to us, and though we did not know how soon we might be kicked out ourselves, I resolved that ours they should be.”
Several days later, Stephens bought Copán.
It wasn’t easy. Don Gregorio took every opportunity to defame the two men in the village. His campaign was successful enough that the village alcalde came out to the hut to ask them to leave, out of concern their presence would bring the army. However, the mayor retreated as soon as he saw them. “When we returned to the hut to receive his visit,” Stephens wrote, “as usual, each of us had a brace of pistols in his belt and a gun in hand.”
Stephens still had to win over Don Asebedo, who held title to six thousand acres through a contract due to expire in three years. Fortunately, Stephens had a letter of introduction from a politician on the correct side of the civil war, and the next day an Indian courier trotted up with a letter from General Cáscara apologizing for their arrest in Camotán. Though these impressed Don Asebedo, he still balked. He was afraid, he said, he might get in trouble with the government for handing over the land to a foreigner. Finally, Stephens opened his trunk and put on his blue diplomatic coat with its large gold eagle buttons.
“I had on a Panama hat, soaked with rain and spotted with mud, a check shirt, white pantaloons, yellow up to the knees with mud,” Stephens recalled, “but Don Jose Maria could not withstand the buttons on my coat. The only question was who should find the paper on which to draw up the contract. The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Cen
tral America. I paid fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about price. I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would probably have considered me worse.”
With the ruins now under their control, the expedition went to work in earnest. While Catherwood set up to draw the monuments, Stephens and the workmen began methodically clearing away sections of the jungle. Right away Catherwood ran into trouble. The sculpting of the monuments appeared so enigmatic and complex as to be incomprehensible.
First, there was the problem of light. Although the monoliths were carved in deep relief, the gloomy light filtering through the forest canopy flattened everything, leaving the human forms and their fantastic headdresses and skirts hard to differentiate. And this was when Catherwood could even get a good look through vines, branches, and tree roots that smothered many of the “idols.” This problem proved fixable. Stephens and his workers were able to hack away the brush and bring down enough of the surrounding trees to open a hole in the canopy to allow the light in. When the cloudy skies cleared periodically, the sun’s rays intensified the deeply etched shadows and brought out the monuments’ bizarre and eccentric features.14
Comparisons of a Copán stela: present day
Catherwood’s rendering.
The second problem was more mental than visual and not so easily remedied. How was a Westerner, a European as Catherwood was, to reproduce sculptures that were so profoundly different, otherworldly, decorated so inscrutably, and covered in hieroglyphs from a mysterious but obviously advanced civilization? The two veteran travelers, who each had visited the singular wonders of Egypt and the Near East, now stood, wrote Stephens, on entirely “new ground.”
As he squinted through the steam and heat of the jungle, Catherwood, in particular, had arrived at an existential moment. Through all his work leading up to his arrival in Copán, he had been thoroughly schooled and practiced in a Western tradition of art that led from Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance to the present. When he journeyed through Tunisia, Egypt, and the Levant what he saw and what he drew were also intelligible, informed by centuries of cultural exchange. In Copán, he was lost. The monuments he stared at in the midst of the forest were so alien from anything he had ever seen that at first they didn’t register sensibly in his brain. During his first full day of work, the stone idols defeated him. Even his camera lucida, which helped project on his familiar drawing paper the outlines of the monoliths through its half-silvered mirror, was of no help. He was disgusted with the sketches he attempted. His skills seemed no match for the indecipherable complexities of the statues’ designs.
Camera Lucida.
Stephens, returning from a scouting survey in which he easily had located fifty new objects for his partner to draw, found Catherwood utterly dejected. “He was standing with his feet in the mud and was drawing with his gloves on to protect his hands from the mosquitoes,” wrote Stephens. “Two monkeys on a tree on one side appeared to be laughing at him and I felt discouraged and despondent. In fact, I made up my mind, with a pang of regret, that we must abandon the idea of carrying away any materials for antiquarian speculation, and must be content with having seen them ourselves. Of that satisfaction nothing could deprive us.”
The next morning, the discovery of lost waterproof boots, a good night’s sleep, and a brilliant sun seemed to clear Catherwood’s head. Standing on a piece of oiled canvas, his feet finally dry in his boots, he set down the first in a series of rough sketches that, while not yet satisfactory, helped restore some of his confidence. As the day wore on, with each new series he seemed to reach another level of perception that allowed him to draw the monolith before him with greater and greater precision. It may have been only a subtle shift in perspective caused by the sharp edge of the shadows cast by the sun, but it seemed he had broken down some cognitive barrier and had begun finally to grasp if not comprehend what he was seeing. His mastery and skills returned, driven by his perfectionism. He was resolved to catch every complicated detail of the stones before him, leaving nothing out, adding nothing. There would be no distortions. Such had always been Stephens’s intention: “from the beginning our great object and effort was to procure true copies of the originals, adding nothing for effect as pictures. Mr. Catherwood made the outlines of all the drawings with the camera lucida, and divided his paper into sections, so as to preserve the utmost accuracy of proportion.”
After capturing the larger-than-life figures with their preposterous costumes from the front, some with patches of original red paint still visible on the surfaces, Catherwood would move to the side and then to the back of the monuments, filling his drawing paper with the rich details of their unfathomable hieroglyphics. His drawings would prove so accurate that archaeologists long in the future would be able to read them when they finally broke the Maya Code, grateful to have his copied glyphs when some of the originals were lost to erosion and defacement.
The two men continued on for days, Stephens clearing the jungle, measuring the temples, the pyramids, other stone structures, endlessly jotting down notes. He would capture and bring home the context, the broad strokes, the sentiments:
We could not see ten yards before us, and never knew what we should stumble upon next. At one time we stopped to cut away the branches and vines which concealed the face of a monument, and then to dig around and bring to light a fragment, a sculpted corner of which protruded from the earth. I leaned over with breathless anxiety while the Indians worked and an eye, an ear, a foot, or a hand was disentombed. The beauty of the sculpture, the solemn stillness of the woods, disturbed only by the scrambling of monkeys and the chattering of parrots, the desolation of the city, and the mystery that hung over it, all created an interest higher, if possible, than I had ever felt among the ruins of the Old World.
Reverse view of stela at Copán. (Catherwood)
Catherwood, the man of few words, would bring out the first true renderings for the larger world to see of this hidden civilization, and his work would win him celebrity and a permanent place in the annals of archaeology. Day after day he stood working stoically through the mosquitoes, the ticks, heat, rain, and mud. Like the jungle surrounding him, it was one of the most luxuriant, fertile moments in his artistic life, and he would not fail in making the most of it.
For his part, Stephens had to go about his tasks with hardly any surveying instruments, just a good compass, the reel of tape Catherwood had used to measure the temples of Jerusalem and Thebes, and an “artificial horizon” to help determine their longitude. But when Catherwood attempted to use the device with their sextant, they discovered it was bent, and like their broken barometer, useless.
They dodged scorpions and snakes, wore their pants tightly tied around their boots, buttoned their collars to the chin to ward off the mosquitoes, and sewed up their sheets to make sleeping sacks to protect them at night from the fleas in Don Miguel’s infested hut. One day they took a break from the work and crossed two miles over broken terrain and jungle to the top of the ridge paralleling the river. There they were shown the quarries that produced the stone used for the giant idols and other structures in the city. Large blocks of stone still lay about, covered in brush and vines, apparently rejected centuries earlier for some defect or another. Some distance away, one huge block lay across a ravine, as if the work of transporting it to the city below had been only momentarily suspended with the intention of it soon being taken up again. The two men couldn’t resist: on one of the blank quarried blocks they carved their names into the stone.
When they returned to the ruins and finally cleared away enough of the jungle to complete their survey, they concluded they were in the middle of what must have been a much larger city, and were standing within its ceremonial center, complete with pyramid-like temples, plazas dotted with monolithic statues and altars, and courts surrounded by steps that gave the appearance of amphitheaters. Farther out, many large, suggestive earth-covered mounds top
ped with trees and thick foliage spread from the exposed ruins in every direction. The two men could only guess what other treasures lay beneath and what future generations might find.
In fact, Stephens and Catherwood had stumbled onto a city that twelve hundred years earlier had sprawled up and down the valley and climbed toward the ridges on each side of the river. In a space of a quarter square mile as many as nine thousand inhabitants lived in the city’s center, another ten thousand in immediate outlying districts, and thousands more in the surrounding countryside.
Future archaeologists would discover ceramic evidence that villages began forming in the valley as early as 1100 B.C. Later research would show that hieroglyphic monuments began to appear by the fifth century A.D.; carved upon them would be the story of a dynastic line of kings who ruled Copán for the next four hundred years. This history emerged in the later half of the twentieth century as scholars slowly began to unlock the meaning of Copán’s glyphs. One key was a solid block of sculpted stone, six feet square by four feet high, that Stephens and Catherwood discovered and Catherwood illustrated in perfect detail. The top of the block was covered with hieroglyphs, and carved deeply into each side were four seated figures. When the glyphs were finally deciphered, it turned out the figures depicted sixteen of Copán’s seventeen kings—starting with the dynasty’s founder, dating from A.D. 426, and ending with Copán’s penultimate king, whose death in A.D. 822 is now believed to have coincided with the beginning of the city’s collapse and eventual abandonment.
The kings told their stories on the towering statues, or stelae, in the plazas, on the façades of their palaces, altars, and temples, on the ball court, and on the great hieroglyphic stairway, which displays the longest Maya text ever found. Each ruler employed a succession of architects and sculptors who built Copán into a city now considered one of the most beautiful of the Classic Maya period. Copán grew into a small mountain as each king built on top of his predecessors’ palaces and temples, layer by layer, adding ever more brilliant refinement and artistry.