Jungle of Stone Read online

  Stephens was also clearly amused by another Belize custom he knew would provoke his later readers, or at least a select group with whom he was intimately familiar. There was not a single lawyer in the place, there never had been, and the court got along fine without them, he wrote. None of the judges had legal backgrounds, either, even though they heard civil disputes involving large commercial transactions. One judge was a mahogany cutter, two were merchants, and the mulatto judge was a doctor.

  Stephens and Catherwood were given a full tour of the settlement by the fifth judge, Patrick Walker, secretary of the colony. He also arranged for a boat excursion up Old River and into the jungle. Stephens felt immediately drawn into the mystery of the dense forest, which closed over the river and blotted out the sun. “We were in as perfect a solitude as if removed thousands of miles from human habitation,” he wrote. But the river was in full flood and the rowers were struggling against the current, so the boating party turned back.

  When they finally arrived at Government House, the settlement’s superintendent, Colonel MacDonald, made a deep impression on Stephens. He was, according to Stephens, “one of a race fast passing away.” He had entered the British army as a young officer at eighteen, served for years in the Spanish campaign, and later commanded a regiment at Waterloo, receiving battlefield honors from the king of England and the czar of Russia. Conversing with the six-foot-tall MacDonald, a man of rigid military bearing, “was like reading a page of history,” Stephens wrote.

  The colonel greeted Stephens and Catherwood warmly and had assembled a dinner gathering of local officeholders and military men. While Stephens was clearly taken in by MacDonald’s graciousness, he was under orders not to discuss his official diplomatic assignments, in particular the negotiations over a trade pact with the new Central American republic. But he and Catherwood seemed to mesmerize the colonel with talk about their plans to search for traces of an old civilization buried in the forests of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Catherwood, they explained, would use his surveying and artistic skills to record what, if anything, they found.

  The afternoon of their departure, MacDonald arranged another dinner. There were toasts to Queen Victoria and President Van Buren. Then another round, and another. When it was all over, the colonel walked Stephens arm in arm down the sweeping lawn of Government House to the water’s edge, where a launch waited to take them out to the steamboat belching black smoke in the harbor. MacDonald turned to Stephens and warned him a second time about the political turmoil and bloody disturbances then under way in Central America. If he should find himself in danger, he said, Stephens was to assemble the Americans and Europeans in Guatemala City, hang out the flag, and send word for him. Stephens well knew of the dangers ahead and found the offer reassuring. “I knew these were not just words of courtesy,” he wrote, “and, in the state of the country to which I was going, felt the value of such a friend at hand.”

  The moment was a magnificent one and quite unlike their quiet, almost surreptitious departure from New York. As Stephens and Catherwood crossed the bay in the launch they were accompanied by the boom of a thirteen-cannon salute. Flags were run up at Government House, the fort, and courthouse. The whole scene was a classic display of British imperialism—the perfectly ordered outpost of civilization set against the wild, dark, barely suppressed jungle. It would be a final moment of comfort and security both men could recall in their days ahead.

  North and Central America: stars mark New York Harbor and Belize City.

  “I had visited many cities,” Stephens wrote, “but it was the first time that flags and cannon announced to the world that I was going away. I was a novice, but I endeavored to behave as if I had been brought up to it; and to tell the truth, my heart beat, and I felt proud; for these were honors paid to my country, and not to me.”

  Aboard the Vera Paz, the baggage was stowed and Stephens settled into his cabin. That evening they took tea on deck. When the captain came to them at ten o’clock asking for his orders, Stephens said he began to understand why men accepted the responsibilities of official appointments. “I have had my aspirations, but never expected to be able to dictate to the captain of a steamboat. Nevertheless, again as coolly as if I had been brought up to it, I designated the places I wished to visit, and retired.”

  Stephens’s and Catherwood’s free talk about their plans to hunt down old ruins, meanwhile, had not been lost on Colonel MacDonald. Back at Government House, he set immediately to work. He summoned Patrick Walker and an army lieutenant named John Herbert Caddy, a royal artillery officer stationed at the settlement. They were ordered to assemble an expedition and prepare to go up Old River, deep into the jungle of the Petén and across Yucatán Peninsula to a Mexican town called Santo Domingo de Palenque. There they were to conduct a thorough survey of the remains of old ruins whose existence had undoubtedly come up in the dinner conversation with Stephens and Catherwood. Lieutenant Caddy was a talented artist whose off-hours sketches of local scenes had earlier drawn MacDonald’s attention. Employing his artistic gifts and his training as a military engineer, Caddy was to make a visual record and a survey map of whatever they found at Palenque. Walker, whose list of offices and duties now included one more, was to lead the expedition with Caddy and draft the official written report.

  MacDonald made clear the mission was an urgent one despite the fact that Stephens and Catherwood were headed off in the opposite direction, south toward Guatemala and Honduras. There was to be no delay even though the rainy season was still upon them and the river was running high, swollen with treacherous logs and other debris. The strong current would work against them for more than a hundred miles but the two men accepted their orders without demurrer.

  Within two weeks, provisioned with barrels of flour, rum and pork, medicines, and other essentials, Walker and Caddy stood ready with twenty-seven men and two long dugout canoes called “pitpans.” In his haste to get the expedition off, however, MacDonald would make a serious mistake that he would later come to regret.

  2

  Upriver

  Leaving Belize for Guatemala, the Vera Paz steamed south along the Yucatán coast and then cut diagonally across a scalloped bay formed by the long, crooked finger of the Manabique Peninsula. A low wall of dark verdant hills rose slowly before them. In the distance white puffs of surf burst up before the blue-green backdrop, the spray vaporizing and mingling with the mist rising from the jungle. The heavy air pressed in around them. Inside the surf line, patches of sand marked the edge of a region so thick with mountains, rain forest, and swamps that few white men had ever passed through it. One of them was Hernán Cortés, the great conquistador himself, who, after his conquest of Mexico in the early 1500s, and slightly crazed by his success, set out overland with a small army for Honduras, intent on disciplining a rebellious subordinate. He had no idea what lay before him. He and his men left the civilized highlands of central Mexico with a large entourage and anticipated quick passage southeast across the Yucatán Peninsula. Six months later, stunned, exhausted, many of his men emaciated or dead from hunger and disease, most of their horses gone, Cortés emerged from the malignant horror of the Petén wilderness, finally hacking his way through the deep jungle to the same coast where the Vera Paz was now headed.

  This was an edge of a land where few humans, let alone white men, had planted a foothold against the raw force of nature. As Stephens and Catherwood approached the shore, a mass of tangled vegetation loomed. There seemed no way in. Then an opening finally appeared in what had seemed a solid wall of green, and they could make out the banks of a river. The Vera Paz crossed the bar and swung into the channel. High along the right bank a group of huts came into view, where Stephens briefly considered stopping. The settlement of Carib Indians and West Indian blacks barely clung to the skirt of the shoreline yet it held a key position as one of the only river entry ports to Central America. The ambitious cluster of houses bore the name of Livingston. Oddly enough, it had been named in h
onor of a former New York mayor and U.S. secretary of state, Edward Livingston. Among Livingston’s varied accomplishments, he had streamlined the civil, criminal, and penal codes of Louisiana, and these reforms were now being copied and imposed by the Central American government on its peasant population—over its violent protest.

  Catherwood’s illustration of Río Dulce.

  Photo of present-day Río Dulce. (Carlsen)

  Stephens instructed the captain to move in closer to the embankment. The inhabitants, listless in the afternoon heat, gazed down from their palm-thatched huts set among groves of plantain and coconut trees. But it was already four o’clock, too late to stop if they hoped to reach inland anchorage by sunset. So the steamer swung again into the center of the river.

  Ahead, a rampart loomed above them with a vertical cut that drew the Vera Paz slowly into a twisting, watery gorge of overwhelming beauty. Sheer walls of foliage rose hundreds of feet above them on each side, tropical plants sprouting from every crevice of the limestone cliffs. From the canopy of trees high above, lianas drooped to the river surface, and a profusion of bromeliads and orchids covered the tree limbs and vines. The air was delicious with fragrance. Another turn through the serpentine passage and they were enclosed again by the jungle walls. In the shadowed darkness they could see no entry and no exit—the passage had closed behind them—and they feared the boat might drive in among the encircling vegetation.

  Belize had been mere prologue. Here enveloping them was claustrophobic, delirious jungle they could reach out and touch, a narrow tropical fjord magnificent and enervating in the same moment. They had heard about this river, heard about its overpowering beauty. How was it possible this was the entrance through which much of the commerce of Central America flowed?

  Sparkling clear water drawn down from the Guatemalan cloud forests flowed beneath them to the sea. There was a brief choking odor of sulfur from hot springs that boiled up along the river’s edge. As they passed on, the late afternoon air became oppressive, saturated with wet, smothering heat, yet the deep shadows gave the illusion of coolness. The only birds they saw at first were pelicans. Monkeys scrambled along the vines, driven ahead by the “unnatural bluster” of the Vera Paz’s engine reverberating off the walls. Beneath the engine’s racket and the thumping of the paddle wheels lay a timeless, prehistoric stillness. Herons and parrots rousted from their perches on the cliffs and trees flew on before them.

  “Could this be the portal to a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, torn and distracted by civil war?” Stephens wrote. It was, he continued, “a fairy scene, combining exquisite beauty with colossal grandeur.”

  Nine miles up the river, it widened into a small lake dotted with islands and surrounded by a shoreline of reeds and clumps of mangrove trees. Behind swaths of lily pads and patches of reeds lay mirror-surface lagoons. The whole was encircled by ominous, forbidding green mountains. Ahead the lake narrowed again into the upper Río Dulce, and the setting sun floated like gold on the water as the Vera Paz plodded into the gathering darkness.

  Sometime during the night or early morning they passed Castillo San Felipe de Lara, a small stone fortress so picturesque it could have been designed by boys for their toy soldiers. It stood alone between the water and jungle, ghostly crenellated turrets rising above its ramparts and crumbling, moss-encrusted walls. The isolated garrison straddled a spit of land that nearly closed off the river before it opened again into a broad lake beyond. It was a natural defensive location for a fortress built from a single tower in 1595, a solitary guardian against pirates who came up the river to raid the Spanish storehouses on the lake. But like other failed attempts to domesticate the surrounding countryside, law and order here served only to delay the inevitable. Despite being enlarged several times with extra fortifications, more cannons, and finally a moat and drawbridge, the Castillo was overrun and sacked time and again by the English raiders.

  In the morning Stephens and Catherwood found themselves anchored off the town of Izabal, the main port of entry for Guatemala and much of Central America. They were surrounded by the waters of the Golfo Dulce, the largest body of water in Guatemala, known today as Lago de Izabal (Lake Isabel). Like the settlement at Belize, the town of Izabal was at once a major trading station and isolated outpost pressed between water and jungle. Izabal was smaller and more primitive by comparison, and the jungle rose dramatically on a wall of mountains around it. From here the trade route went inland, up through the thick growth and over the top of the mountains.

  Map showing Stephens’s and Catherwood’s route to Lago de Izbal via Rió Dulce.

  Stephens and Catherwood went ashore in search of an authority to approve their passports. Traveling with them now was an attendant and cook named Augustin, whose services they had engaged in Belize. The town contained a single wood-frame house. The rest were adobe or cane huts, thatched over with palm leaves, housing a population of about 1,500. They finally found the town’s commandant, Juan Penol, who had recently taken command of a barefoot troop of thirty men and boys dressed in white cotton shirts and trousers and armed with rusty muskets and old swords. Only three weeks earlier, Penol’s predecessor had been driven from the post when the balance of power in the current civil war tipped in favor of the party Penol represented.

  The new commandant expressed some trepidation over how long he could hold his command before the balance tipped again. Here there was nothing like the grand treatment Stephens had received in Belize. Penol barely acknowledged Stephens’s official capacity and he explained that he could authorize visas only for Guatemala because the rest of the Central American provinces were in a state of upheaval.

  As the day wore on, the heat became overwhelming. During most of the nineteenth century, the damp heat of the tropics, and the rising mists or so-called miasma exhaled by the swamps and lagoons, were still believed to be the cause of fever and death in northern white races, almost as a matter of course. Stephens had been warned Izabal was a particularly sickly place—that to pass through it was to “run the gauntlet” of death.

  More than one U.S. envoy to Central America did not make it. In fact, the whole enterprise of mounting a diplomatic mission to Central America was an act of nerve bordering on the presumptuous; it took ever-increasing amounts of courage. Since the Central American provinces declared their independence from Spain and the first U.S. diplomat was named to the region in 1824, only two out of eight appointees made it to Guatemala City. They included a former U.S. senator and a congressman, who were perhaps more fit for the job than the others because they had survived the rough-and-tumble of early U.S. politics. Four of the envoys died either en route, soon after they arrived, or before they had even left the United States. Two other appointees turned back shortly after landing at Izabal. It was as if some impermeable barrier of illness, death, or fear blocked entrance to the country.

  One of the two who succeeded in reaching Guatemala City was Charles G. De Witt, a former congressman from New York. He accepted the post in 1833 but dallied and did not book passage to Central America until five months had elapsed. At one point, he was so deterred by Izabal’s reputation for sickliness and the long, hard ride inland necessary to reach Guatemala City that he decided to sail all the way around Cape Horn to approach Guatemala from the Pacific side. This did not go down well with President Andrew Jackson, who had appointed him. Jackson, the stern war hero who defeated the British army at the Battle of New Orleans, had not earned the nickname “Old Hickory” from abundance of caution or a weak will. He made clear to De Witt, through Secretary of State Livingston, that De Witt’s planned route to the Pacific was unacceptable. “[The president] cannot by any means,” Livingston wrote De Witt, “approve the project of making the voyage to the South Seas, round Cape Horn, in order to get to Central America, a place almost at our doors. Add to this, that when you arrive at Valparaiso [Chile] you will be twice as far from your destination as you are now.” Chastened, De Witt quickly booked more direct passage to Gu
atemala, then promptly fell ill and was delayed an additional five months before finally departing.1

  Despite his slow start, De Witt endured at his post in Guatemala a remarkable five years. At the end he repeatedly pleaded for permission to come home, if only on temporary leave to take care of his ailing wife in New York. His relations with the State Department, however, never fully recovered from his inauspicious start, and he was ordered not to leave Guatemala until he renewed the trade treaty that was about to expire between the United States and the republic. De Witt’s dispatches became more and more desperate. At one point he described being hidden in the home of two widows when Indian guerrillas briefly overran Guatemala City, murdering its citizens and executing the republic’s vice president. He said he had been warned to leave the city. But, he wrote—with considerable bravura—“I invariably answered that if I must perish, let me perish in the house known as the North-American Legation beneath the flag of the United States.”2

  Finally, a year later, with the political situation disintegrating around him and conditions growing more dangerous by the day, he left for home without completing the treaty renewal. When he arrived in the States, he was ordered by the State Department to return to Guatemala at once to complete his duties and finalize the treaty. Instead, on April 12, 1839, while aboard a Hudson River steamboat opposite Newburgh, New York, De Witt killed himself. He was forty-nine years old.3