Jungle of Stone Read online

  And—for a time—he had basked in the acclaim.

  He believed, now, in a new dream—a very American dream—and that when the rainy season ended, nothing could stop him from returning to Panama to finish the work he had started.

  PART ONE

  Expedition

  View of Manhattan in 1851.

  1

  South, 1839

  Thirteen years earlier, before dawn, Stephens stepped aboard a British brig to embark on the boldest, most extraordinary journey of his life. In the early morning as the tide began to ebb along the docks on New York’s Hudson River, the Mary Ann, her sails slack in the dead air, slipped from her moorings. “The streets and wharves were still,” wrote Stephens, “the Battery was desolate, and, at the moment of leaving it on a voyage of uncertain duration, seemed more beautiful than I had ever known it before.”1 It was the third day of October 1839.

  The ship rode the outgoing tide around Castle Garden, a onetime fortress in the waters just off the Battery, and then swung slowly around Governors Island in the company of a large whaler bound for the Pacific. With Stephens aboard the Mary Ann was a single fellow passenger, an English artist and architect named Frederick Catherwood. Stephens was about to turn thirty-four and Catherwood, taller and leaner than his companion, was six years older. They made an odd pair, opposites in many ways, but were friends, and now by written agreement, working colleagues. Stephens, a lawyer, had drafted their unusual contract himself.

  Several friends accompanied them as far as the Narrows, at the bottom of Brooklyn, where they said their farewells and disembarked, followed an hour later by the harbor pilot. Now alone with only the Mary Ann’s captain and small crew, Stephens and Catherwood waited for the wind. After a time the sails began to fill and slowly pointed the two-masted transport east toward the Atlantic. Finally they rounded Sandy Hook and the two men watched the New Jersey highlands drop with the sun below the western horizon. The next morning they were well at sea.

  They were headed south for the Gulf of Honduras. At the time, the Honduran gulf was unknown to most North Americans. U.S. trade routes to the south focused chiefly on the islands of the Caribbean: the West Indies, Cuba, and Jamaica, all well east of the gulf. The sea routes continued south through the Caribbean, skirted the eastern hump of South America, then dropped down around the southern tip of the continent at Cape Horn and into the Pacific.

  The Gulf of Honduras, a blunt triangle of water that cut into the side of Central America just south of Mexico, lay removed from U.S. sea-lanes for good reason. More than three hundred years earlier, in 1502, not long after Columbus crossed its water on his final voyage to the New World, a great curtain was drawn from Mexico south around the landmass of Central and South America. The conquistadors who followed Columbus and their rulers in Spain had closed off Spanish America from the rest of the world.2 It was not until the political upheavals in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century that the situation began to change. The French Revolution and rise of Napoleon Bonaparte set in motion the dissolution of the Spanish Empire. One by one, Spain’s American colonies broke free from Spain and the curtain began to lift. And the mysterious lands to the south, shut off for so many years to North Americans, finally began to open.

  While U.S. traders were slow to exploit the opening, their rivals, the British, always pushing the boundaries of their own empire, had already secured a foothold along one side of the Honduran gulf. They had carved a niche into the edge of the Yucatán Peninsula, where they had established a colony called Belize. The English settlement lay sheltered behind a long string of coral reefs and small islands that for hundreds of years had protected British buccaneers who preyed on Spanish galleons sailing back and forth between Central America and Spain.

  Just to the south of Belize, the triangular gulf narrows to a point at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula where a river named Río Dulce (Sweet River) had funneled most of Spain’s trade into and out of Central America. Stephens and Catherwood were headed to that point, then inland to their ultimate destination: Guatemala City, the former capital of Spain’s Central American colonies. Stephens’s mission had been set out for him by U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth. As chargé d’affaires and confidential agent appointed by President Martin Van Buren, he was directed to meet the leaders of the recently formed United Provinces of Central America and conclude a trade agreement.3 There was, however, one problem. The two men were landing in a region lacerated by civil war, and the odds that Stephens would be able to complete his diplomatic assignment were uncertain at best.

  But he and Catherwood were on another mission as well, one they had carefully planned months before Stephens unexpectedly and fortuitously landed his presidential appointment. They had read vague reports of intricately sculpted stones buried within the Central American jungle. And the accounts had aroused in them suspicions and hopes that these remains might be more than random scattered stones—something perhaps more sophisticated, signs possibly of a hidden unknown world. So, after Stephens settled his official duties—successfully or not—the two men were determined to cut a path into the jungle and see for themselves what they could find.

  It is unclear exactly when or where Stephens and Catherwood first met.

  Neither man left an account of the meeting, nor do we have a description of the encounter by any of their contemporaries. It has been long assumed that the meeting took place in London in the summer of 1836, three years before they boarded the Mary Ann.4 Catherwood had been working in London, and Stephens passed through the city on his way home to New York after traveling for two years through Europe, Egypt, and the Near East. While visiting Jerusalem earlier that year, he came across a tourist map of the holy city that had been drawn up and published by Catherwood—his first encounter with the artist, if by name only. In London that summer, adventurers like Stephens and Catherwood made up a small society, and it’s logical to conclude they crossed paths. But recently discovered ship manifests show Catherwood had left London to move with his family in New York before Stephens arrived in the English capital.5 Most likely, they met in New York City later that year or the next. Again, their interests would have made such a meeting almost inevitable given New York’s small but growing circle of artists and intellectuals. (New York’s population was less than a quarter that of London.) And indeed the two men had had remarkably similar adventures. Each had covered the same rough ground of the Middle East, explored many of the same ancient historical sites—Catherwood preceding Stephens by nearly a decade—and they had both survived the region’s often hostile political and natural environment. It was as if both men, following parallel tracks for years, were destined to be drawn together.

  As a youth Catherwood apprenticed with an architect-surveyor in London, then continued his studies in Rome and Greece before landing in Cairo in 1824. He arrived in the same year that Jean-François Champollion announced to the world that he had cracked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic code with the help of the Rosetta Stone. Europe was in the grip of an Egyptian “craze,” and over the next decade Catherwood took part in two expeditions on the Nile surveying and illustrating pyramids and temples. He became conversant in Arabic, wore a turban, and at times risked his life dressing as a native to gain entrance to forbidden Muslim holy sites in order to record them.6

  Stephens, too, had put on the costume of a Cairo merchant, a disguise that helped him cross the Sinai desert unmolested to one of the most dangerous historical sites in the region, the ancient stone city of Petra, located in a rock canyon in what is now southern Jordan. Petra was sealed off from the outside world and guarded by wild Bedouin tribesmen—a destination as far removed from Stephens’s comfortable life as a New York lawyer as he could find.

  Whatever the circumstances of their first meeting, something had taken hold of both men in the desert. Neither was exactly reckless. In fact in many ways they were conventional men. Catherwood was a professional architect, married, a father of three, conscientious about
supporting his family. Stephens practiced law, owned property, and had dabbled in politics for nearly a decade before leaving for Europe and the Middle East. Yet something viral—an almost pathological compulsion to push to the edge, to test the limits—had infected both men in the desert, and neither man seemed able to shake it. The adrenaline had never quite worn off. The comforts of New York seemed unwarranted; something was missing from their lives. Then after three years in the city, they read the tantalizing references to mysterious carved monuments and ruins of stone buildings found in the jungles of Central America—along with windy speculations about what the discoveries meant. Could these possibly be remains of an old civilization lost and buried under the jungle—unlike the Egyptian ruins they had witnessed lying open on the desert sands? It seemed too much to hope for, but the thought was intoxicating. The old cravings flooded back, the hunger for adventure, the quest, the whiff of danger—insatiable curiosity.

  Still, there were mundane matters to be settled first.

  In 1836, when Catherwood moved his family to New York, he quickly found work as an architect. But within a year he embarked on construction of a cavernous “panorama” exhibition hall to show his huge canvases of the Middle East. The enterprise took off instantly and drew in healthy profits.

  Stephens, meanwhile, was coming off two phenomenal publishing coups. He had never drafted anything more exciting than law briefs and contracts, but on his return from Europe he decided to try his hand at writing up his European and Middle Eastern adventures. He turned out to be a gifted storyteller. His first book, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, was a runaway bestseller.7 According to John R. Bartlett, an Astor Place bookseller, “No book awakened a deeper interest in New York.” The book was so successful Stephens immediately followed with a second work, an account of his travels through Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland.

  In the span of two years he managed to turn out two incredibly popular and critically acclaimed works totaling nearly a thousand pages, containing some of most refreshing prose of his time. He had left the law far behind and was primed for another adventure—and another book. He also understood that if he could work Catherwood’s artistry into it, the next book might be even more successful. The two men began plotting their escape to Central America, then, unexpectedly, the U.S. attaché to the region died, followed by the sudden death of his replacement, and fate appeared to seal the matter. Drawing on old Democratic Party connections, Stephens won the diplomatic assignment from President Van Buren.

  A long journey south was not so easy for Catherwood, who had a family and a new business to look after. So Stephens, flush with book royalties, made him an offer. Under a “memorandum of agreement” signed by both men on September 9, 1839, Catherwood was to accompany Stephens to Central America and remain with him until Stephens finished his official duties for the U.S. government, at which time the two of them would be free to travel to “ruined cities, places, scenes and monuments.”8 Catherwood would make drawings for the “sole use and benefit” of Stephens. In exchange, Stephens agreed to pay all of Catherwood’s expenses during their journey and $1,500—a significant sum at the time—deducting $25 a week that would be paid to Mrs. Catherwood during his absence.9 Catherwood put the operation of his panorama hall into the hands of a business partner.

  It is difficult to know how much the agreement, with its spelled-out contractual language, reflected a lack of familiarity and trust between the two men or something else, something more formal, more typically nineteenth century. Certainly, Catherwood had his family to look out for, and Stephens was still a lawyer, with a lawyer’s mind and a lawyer’s appreciation for the value of contracts. Yet the two men would reveal so little about their personal relationship over the coming years that it remains an enduring mystery despite their famously public travels together. In the more than 1,800 pages of storytelling and illustrations that were to pour forth from their future adventures, Stephens never once described Catherwood. In fact no image of Catherwood, no drawing or daguerreotype of him, has ever been found.10 And he remained “Mr. Catherwood” or “Mr. C” throughout Stephens’s writings, even if the “Mr.” was sometimes dropped in Stephens’s letters. But this was also the advent of the Victorian era, when two men’s restraint and decorum toward one another, at least publicly, would have been expected. In this regard, the outward formality between the two was not much different than that of other famous traveling partners of the time: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, or Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, or Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland.

  In addition, the Mr. Catherwood indirectly revealed in Stephens’s writing is taciturn by nature, droll in his sense of humor, a man of deep reserve, a perfectionist. In part, his training as an architect and especially as an artist—the observer who trafficked in images—may have made him stand back and let the voluble, gregarious Stephens hold the stage. If they were opposites in personality, there was no question about their loyalty and respect for one another, which would surface again and again over the next thirteen years of their partnership and close friendship. They loved history, shared a compulsive interest in antiquities, and possessed a physical courage and doggedness of such staggering scope that it would see them through the greatest hardships that lay ahead.

  It was an especially precarious time to sail south. The hurricane season was not yet over. Ship captains and their passengers had none of today’s weather forecasting and sailed into Caribbean waters in the late summer and early autumn on courage and blind faith, aware of the great dangers they faced. But within eight days the Mary Ann was moving easily between Cuba and Hispaniola. Then they were hit by a tropical storm. The little brig headed straight west into the Gulf of Honduras through a torturous eighteen days of rain, wind, and pounding seas before drawing into the protected harbor at Belize just as the last of the storm abated.

  The scruffy frontier town rose from aquamarine waters as a flat mile-long white line against the dark green backdrop of coconut palms and jungle. The night before, a teenager, the son of one of the harbor pilots, came aboard to steer them safely through the jagged coral reefs. The Mary Ann came to anchor next to several rafts loaded with mahogany logs, the colony’s chief export. A dozen ships, brigs and schooners, lay at anchor, along with one old steamboat. The coastal settlement, clinging to the edge of the great Yucatán Peninsula, was more like an island than a country. It had evolved from its pirate days into the major trading post for disbursal of European goods headed for the Honduran, Guatemalan, and Moskito coasts and then inland to the Central American states. But its warehouses, residences, and six thousand inhabitants were isolated from the interior by dense, virtually impassable jungle. A river bisected the town. Referred to as simply “Old River,” it was the only way inland, its source so deep within the rain forests it remained a mystery.

  Many of the streets were ankle-deep in mud from the downpours that had just swept in from the sea. Some of the houses were elevated on pilings and surrounded by open verandas to catch any wisp of air that might alleviate the damp, crushing afternoon heat. Wood planks served as sidewalks, crowded round with tropical flowers and palms. A wooden bridge over the river connected the two ends of town. At the southern end was a tidy complex of white clapboard public buildings—the residence of Her Majesty’s Superintendent, the courthouse, offices, a hospital, jail, and free school. In the middle sat a stone church complete with tall spire as if transplanted straight from the English countryside.

  As Stephens was to record, he was stunned at his reception on landing, unfamiliar with the exalted formalities and perquisites that came with his new diplomatic office. He was immediately invited to Government House to meet with the settlement’s superintendent, Colonel Alexander MacDonald. Then, while arranging for passage down the coast to Guatemala on the old steamboat in the harbor, he found the agent willing to delay the steamer’s departure for several extra days to allow Stephens more time in Belize. “Used to su
bmitting to the despotic regulations of steamboat agents at home,” Stephens wrote, “this seemed a higher honor than the invitation of his Excellency; but, not wishing to push my fortune too far, I asked for a delay of one day only.”

  In another contrast with home, slavery had been banned in all of Britain’s colonies five years before, but it quickly became clear to Stephens that slavery had never really taken hold in Belize, where two-thirds of the population was black and most whites were descendants of shipwrecked or retired English pirates. He marveled at the mixture of the races. “Before I had been an hour in Belize,” he wrote, “I learned that the great work of practical amalgamation, the subject of so much controversy at home, had been going on quietly for generations.” He described his first meal, breakfast at the table of a merchant and his wife with two British army officers and two men Stephens identified as well-dressed, well-educated mulattos. “They talked of their mahogany works, of England, hunting, horses, ladies, and wine.”

  Stephens was a New Yorker, a northerner, but his grandfather on his mother’s side, Judge John Lloyd, had been a slaveholder in New Jersey until his death in the 1820s.11 Thus Stephens, growing up in a close-knit family, was familiar with the institution of slavery firsthand. In his writings, he never commented on his childhood experience, but it is clear where his sympathies lay from his reaction to what he witnessed in Belize. He barely disguises his delight at shocking some of his American readers with descriptions of the equality among the races. During a visit to the colony’s law court, for example, he was invited to take one of the judges’ vacant seats. Of the five sitting judges, one was a mulatto, as were two of the jurors. The judge sitting next to him said he was aware of the racial feelings in the United States, but in Belize, he said, “there was, in political life, no distinction whatever, except on the ground of qualification and character, and hardly any in social life, even in contracting marriage.”