Jungle of Stone Page 14
Ruins at Copán. (Catherwood)
Stephens and Catherwood knew they were in the presence of art and architecture of astonishing sophistication. But they did not realize what they were seeing was the final veneer of the fallen city, covered not only by jungle but the last layers of Copán’s long, dramatic history. Neither did they have a clear understanding of who could have built and occupied such a city, how such an advanced society could have sprung up and then disappeared, or how old it might be. They grasped, however, that no matter how many descriptive passages Stephens wrote, the only way they could convince the outside world of what they had found—of not only its existence but its uniqueness and exceptional elegance—would be through Catherwood’s careful, painstaking art. There was more than enough work for another month at his current pace.
Before they arrived in Copán, they had expected to stay no more than a few days, not knowing the extent of the ruins and the difficulties they would face. Now they had spent nearly two weeks at the site, and Stephens worried he was shirking his diplomatic duties. “I did not consider myself at liberty to stay longer,” he wrote. “I apprehended a desperate chase after the government; and fearing that among these ruins I might wreck my own political fortunes, and bring reproach upon my political friends, I thought it safer to set out in pursuit.” Several “councils” were held, and as reluctant as they were to split up, it was finally concluded that Stephens and Augustin should go on to Guatemala City while Catherwood stayed in Copán to finish his drawings.
Once the decision was made, Stephens wasted little time preparing the mules and supplies. Catherwood accompanied him partway to Don Gregorio’s. Stephens was tempted to heap indignation upon the Don for his discourtesies, but aware that Catherwood was stuck behind and still within the Don’s influence, he took satisfaction instead in demanding that the Don tally up the bill for the milk, meat, and eggs they had consumed, and paid the full sum, which totaled two dollars. He wrote: “I afterward learned that I had elevated myself very much in his estimation and that of the neighborhood generally, by my handsome conduct in not going off without paying.”
7
Carrera
Most of the way over the mountains it rained. At several points along their route Stephens and Augustin learned the road ahead was blocked by insurgent troops known for committing atrocities, especially against foreigners. The two men took detours. Some weeks later, when Catherwood followed Stephens’s route, he learned from a town’s padre that there had been a plot to murder and rob Stephens. He escaped only because he left earlier in the morning than the conspirators had expected.
In another town, Guastatoya, a second alleged robbery plot was foiled by the alcalde and a posse of townspeople who in the middle of the night rounded up Stephens—and his highly regarded firearms—to help them chase the suspected robbers through the countryside. Several shots were fired into the darkness. No robbers were found.
Wild, foreigner-hating insurgents roaming the countryside was bad enough. But as he and Catherwood quickly learned, the country was infested with brigands and cutthroats of every type. And as their experience in Camotán had demonstrated, even encounters with simple townspeople carried the risk of violence.
It was becoming increasingly clear to both men that they faced more hurdles than heat, jungle, mountains, and mosquitoes. The exploration they had undertaken in the disturbed arena of Central America would not be simply a venture of man versus nature like the polar explorations early in the next century or the assaults on Mount Everest that followed decades later. Stephens and Catherwood had plunged into an ugly man-made tempest. Daunting enough were the physical obstacles if they focused only on looking for ruins, but Stephens was forced now to hurtle himself into the eye of a political maelstrom to fulfill his diplomatic obligations.
Ten days after leaving Copán, Stephens and Augustin entered Guatemala City. It was exactly two months since Stephens had left New York, although, he wrote, it seemed like a year. The night was moonless and black when they reach the outskirts of the capital, where they found groups of drunken soldiers sitting around fires, sporadically firing their muskets into the air. Within the city walls there was hardly a soul on the eerie, lightless streets to welcome the exhausted travelers, nor did the city offer any hotels.
Finally, after fruitlessly stumbling around in the darkness in search of accommodations, Stephens resorted to imposing upon the British vice consul, William Hall, to whom he had several letters of introduction. Greeting him and quickly closing the door, Hall was stunned Stephens had been able to cross the city without being assaulted. The soldiers, furious at not being paid that day, had threatened to sack the city, the vice consul said; the citizens were in a state of terror. Stephens and Augustin were welcome to spend the night.
“For the first time since I entered the country,” Stephens wrote, “I had a good bed and a pair of clean sheets.”
The next morning he took a walk around the city and was impressed by its spaciousness and grandeur, comparing it favorably to the “best class of Italian cities.” The capital sat in a valley on a large plateau five thousand feet above sea level surrounded by barrancas, or deeply etched ravines. Although the city was well established, it was still relatively new by Spanish colonial standards. Sixty-six years earlier, it had been no more than a ranching village, its most impressive feature a convent called El Carmen. All of that changed in 1773 when a swarm of devastating earthquakes demolished the former capital of Central America, Santiago de los Caballeros, located only twenty-four miles to the west. Santiago, today known as La Antigua Guatemala, or “The Old Guatemala,” had been founded by the conquistadors who invaded Mexico with Cortés in the 1500s. It had served as the Spanish capital of all Central America and parts of southern Mexico for more than two hundred years. Throughout its history, it had been regularly rocked by major earthquakes, but the quake of July 1773 and its aftershocks were of such a magnitude the Spanish colonial authorities decided they’d had enough. The royal court in Spain ordered Santiago evacuated and its surviving inhabitants moved to the next valley to the east.
Nuevo Guatemala de Asunción rose from the valley plateau in the usual Spanish north–south, east–west grid, surrounding a great plaza. The new city’s plaza was much grander than Santiago’s and the streets wider. Whole convents, monasteries, and churches were transferred from Santiago to the new capital, their names intact. Residents were given plots similar to those they had owned in the old city, with the richest and most prominent families located closest to the main square. Everything of value—the artwork, religious sculpture, gold, silver, even the wood beams and columns—were stripped from the buildings in Santiago and carried off to the new capital. Nuevo Guatemala was constructed in the traditional Spanish colonial style: the whitewashed stucco walls of the houses flowing contiguously along the streets, broken only by iron window grilles and huge portals, some decorated in the Mudéjar style, with heavy wooden double doors tall enough for horsemen to enter without dismounting. The structures stood one story high with walls thick enough to resist the force of most earthquakes. By the time Stephens arrived, the relocated capital, commonly called Guatemala City or simply Guatemala, was a thriving center, with an imposing cathedral on one side of the great plaza, the seat of government (Palacio Real) on another, and the municipal building on the north side of the square.
“I have seldom been more favorably impressed with the first appearance of any city,” Stephens wrote, “and the only thing that pained me in a two hours’ stroll through the streets was the sight of Carrera’s ragged and insolent-looking soldiers.”
Stephens finally located the residence of Charles De Witt, the recently deceased U.S. chargé d’affaires. The house was closed up but remained the diplomatic mission of the United States and contained the legation’s archives. As Stephens made himself at home, he was delighted by the home’s large size and characteristic Spanish layout, which often surprises first-time visitors fooled by the unassuming exteri
or walls fronting the streets. The house was constructed around an inside courtyard paved with stones and surrounded by flowers. This space was ringed by covered corridors and doors leading to interior rooms, including kitchen, bedrooms, and the house’s main room, or reception sala, with its barred windows opening onto the street. In this reception room two imposing bookcases filled with bound diplomatic papers flanked De Witt’s writing desk, above which hung a copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. For a moment, Stephens was brought back home, to his college and law school libraries; then as the room’s small details came into focus, the poignancy of the scene gave him a momentary shudder as he recalled De Witt’s tragic end.
Diplomatic protocol required Stephens to present his credentials to the central authorities as soon as possible. Normally, this would have been a routine matter, but there was nothing settled about Central America at the moment. As special agent of the U.S. president, he was given specific orders and a list of instructions that were at the same time optimistic and realistic—and thus contradictory. His principal assignment was to arrange re-ratification of the recently expired treaty of “commerce, navigation and friendship” between the United States and the United Provinces of Central America. But because of the chaotic state of the republic, he also was ordered to close the U.S. mission upon achieving the treaty’s ratification; he was to secure the legation’s archives, ship the records back to the United States, and take formal leave of the Central American government.
It was a delicate mission, to say the least. Surrounded by political and military turmoil, Stephens effectively had to advance with the aim of withdrawing. In addition to settling the trade treaty, he was directed by Secretary of State Forsyth to deliver a letter to the republic’s foreign minister explaining why the U.S. mission was being withdrawn, while expressing the United States’ full support for the fragile federation. “You may, in conversation with the minister,” Stephens’s instructions said, “afford such additional explanations as may tend to remove any unfavorable impression, and to persuade him that in adopting this step the President has been actuated solely by views of the expediency unmixed with any feeling of unkindness toward Central America.”1 He was to add that as soon as the republic’s internal difficulties were resolved, the United States would reopen diplomatic relations.
At the time of Stephens’s mission, the United States was not yet a serious player on the international stage, nor did U.S. secretaries of state enjoy the power to influence world events they do today. In 1825, the United States had been the first non-Latin country to formally recognize the United Provinces of Central America. Then followed the string of tragicomic attempts to establish a presence in the country, as one U.S. diplomat after another failed even to reach the new republic’s capital in Guatemala. Now, as the intrepid John L. Stephens finally settled into De Witt’s former residence, his British counterpart, Frederick Chatfield of her majesty’s foreign service, was racing on horseback through El Salvador doing everything within his considerable power to tear the young republic apart—backed, of course, by Britain’s all-powerful Royal Navy.2
Great Britain was the power player of nineteenth-century geopolitics. And though it was not interested in annexing the whole of Central America to its empire, its imperial impulses were hard to contain. Along with its attractive natural resources, the region offered a ready market for British manufactured goods. From its foothold in Belize, Britain sought to expand its influence west and south into Guatemala, and east and south along the so-called Moskito Coast into Nicaragua and Costa Rica. And while Central America was a small affair to the foreign and colonial offices, it was not a backwater to Britain’s two aggressive representatives in the region—Colonel MacDonald and Chatfield, who held the formal title of minister plenipotentiary to Central America.
Chatfield had been dispatched to the region in 1834 after serving several years on assignment in Europe. At thirty-three, he was ambitious, abrasive, and shrewd. Because of the distance between London and Central America—round-trip correspondence sometimes took four to five months—Chatfield often felt free to set British policy toward the new republic. Like Stephens, his primary assignment had been to negotiate a commercial treaty, but he could not resist meddling in the new republic’s internal affairs.3
One nettle in his side turned out to be Colonel Juan Galindo. Because Chatfield considered him still a British subject, Galindo’s zeal on behalf of the federation grated on him, particularly when Galindo mounted a diplomatic mission to the United States and England to push back the borders of Belize. Given his Irish background, Galindo, for his part, had little love for Britain and he detested its representative’s interference in his newly adopted country.4 The animosity between them finally broke into the open in 1838, when a fourteen-year-old English servant employed by Galindo sought the protection of the British consulate in San Salvador claiming that he had been severely beaten by Galindo. Chatfield took the teenager in, enraging Galindo. The next day Galindo challenged Chatfield to a duel, which the consul ignored, but the scandal made the newspapers. Finally, the central government stepped in to resolve the quarrel.5
Chatfield initially supported the republic, believing it easier to deal with a single federation than five feuding provinces. Then territorial disputes over Belize and the Moskito Coast—at one point Colonel MacDonald personally led a charge onto islands off the Honduran coast after they were occupied by the republic—turned Chatfield against the central government. When General Francisco Morazán, the republic’s president, levied forced loans on British and other foreign businesses to finance his army, Chatfield informed his superiors in London that the time had come to support the opposition. And while Stephens was playing archaeologist in Copán, Chatfield scrambled round Central America to cut a deal with the separatist factions, promising them the support of the British navy even though Britain’s secretary of state, Lord Palmerston, had rejected an earlier proposal of armed intervention.
By the time Chatfield rode into Guatemala City in mid-December, Stephens had already met with members of the Conservative faction now controlling the state of Guatemala under the absolute authority of the mestizo rebel general, Rafael Carrera. He found no trace of Liberal republicans or the federal government left in the city. He made special note of the heavy hand priests played in the new Guatemalan government. Visiting the state assembly, he saw that half of the thirty deputies gathered in the old, dimly lit Hall of Congress were priests dressed in black gowns and caps. It reminded him, he said, of a “meeting of inquisitors.” The deputies were busy restoring the privileges of the church that had been so rudely torn away earlier by the Liberals.
Stephens was advised by those close to the government to present his credentials formally to the Guatemalan chief of state, Mariano Rivera Paz, recently installed by Carrera, and to the chiefs of the other Central American provinces individually, so as to preclude him doing so officially to the federal government, now based in El Salvador. But he considered the suggestion “preposterous” because he had been accredited only to meet with the central government. He recognized, however, that the suggestion meant he must act with great care in Guatemala. As the future of the republic still hung in the balance, he must at least appear neutral, even though his political views, and those of the U.S. government, clearly favored the Liberals over the Conservatives.
Having paid and sent Augustin on his way back home, Stephens arranged for an escort to retrieve Catherwood from Copán. Carrera was out of town but his soldiers were everywhere. Stephens had a tense encounter with them one night after dining across the street at the home of the woman who rented out the legation’s building. As he left to cross over to his house in the darkness, one of the sentries at the end of the street called out for the required password, which Stephens had not yet learned. The tone of the sentry’s voice was so fierce it “went through me like a musket-ball and probably in a moment more the ball itself would have followed, but an old lady rushed out of the house I had
left, and, with a lantern in her hand, screamed ‘Patria Libra.’” Stephens scurried to the safety of his doorway. He later learned that a sentry had fired and struck a woman not long before for failing to give the password promptly enough.
Carrera returned to the city and Stephens went to introduce himself the next day, fascinated to meet the former pig driver who was now master of all Guatemala. He was advised to wear his diplomatic coat because Carrera was taken with such external displays, even though the guerrilla leader lived modestly in a small house down a side street. Arriving, Stephens met Carrera’s guard of eight or ten soldiers outside the door. Unlike the rest of the ragtag army, each was well dressed in a red jacket and plaid cap. Stephens was led down a corridor along a row of well-maintained muskets and then shown into a small room off the parlor where he found Carrera seated at a table counting money.
Rafael Carrera, as portrayed some years after his meeting with Stephens.
“He rose as we entered,” Stephens wrote, “pushed the money to the side of the table, and, probably out of respect for my coat, received me with courtesy, and gave me a chair at his side.” He wore a short black jacket of thin wool and close-fitting trousers. He was no more than five feet, six inches tall with a light Indian complexion and no trace of a beard. Stephens was shocked by how young he looked, estimating that he could be no older than twenty-one. Stephens remarked on his youth and Carrera replied that he was twenty-three (he was actually twenty-five), and knowing how extraordinary that might seem, he went on to explain how he had started with no more than thirteen men who lit and fired their ancient black-powder muskets with cigars. He pointed to eight places where he had been wounded, adding that three musket balls still remained in his body.