Jungle of Stone Read online

  These accounts of death and failure circled like a flock of vultures over the diplomatic mission and ought to have dissuaded any sensible person from considering such an assignment. Yet somehow the position carried enough prestige to attract a man of the caliber of William Leggett, who was named to replace De Witt. Leggett’s appointment turned out to be the shortest. He was a well-known writer, a radical Democrat and anti-monopolist who along with William Cullen Bryant edited the New York Evening Post. Leggett’s incendiary editorials were greatly influential during the 1830s (and helped form the basis of later libertarian doctrines). But the popular thirty-eight-year-old editor was plagued by ill health, the result of yellow fever contracted while serving in the navy. All the more reason he should have avoided a post in Guatemala. Yet when President Van Buren, a moderate Democrat who often felt the sting of Leggett’s pen, appointed him to replace De Witt, it was at the behest of a number of Leggett’s friends, who thought, bizarrely, that the change in climate would do him some good. Leggett died a month later, in May 1839, while preparing for his departure to Guatemala. The post of chargé d’affaires to Central America was nothing short of cursed.

  Van Buren next appointed an eager Stephens. No firebrand like Leggett, Stephens was a staunch Jacksonian Democrat like the president, and both men had deep roots in New York’s Democratic Party. Van Buren had been a powerful state legislator and the state’s governor before he joined President Jackson’s administration and succeeded him as the nation’s eighth president. Before traveling to Europe and beyond, Stephens had been particularly active in Democratic Party politics in New York City. But he owed his appointment as much to his success as a writer as to his party affiliations. His travel books were not only extraordinarily popular but had won high critical acclaim. And the president had a weakness for literary connections. The “Little Magician,” as Van Buren was called because of his small size and his brilliance as a political tactician, had never gone to college. He suffered from a lifelong sense of intellectual inferiority, which he sought to assuage through association with literary men.4 Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant were close friends, and he appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne and historian George Bancroft to government posts. Whatever the motivations, Van Buren seemed to recognize in Stephens that he had the right man for the job. Clearly Stephens was intellectually up to the challenge and, if his extensive travels were any indication, he was physically hardy enough as well. As important, Stephens seemed crazy enough to actually want the assignment. But then he and Catherwood had already been eagerly charting their course south.

  In the early evening, as the exhausting heat of Izabal began to ebb ever so slightly, Stephens set out to find the grave of James Shannon, a Kentuckian who had been the sixth U.S. envoy sent to Central America. With a local guide, he crossed Izabal’s primitive plaza and followed a path out of town that led after a few minutes to a deep gully recently flushed with the latest downpour. He crossed it on a plank and turned up a hill into a dark forest that overlooked the lake. There, among the rudimentary markers, Shannon’s grave was pointed out to him. It had no raised stone and was barely distinguishable from the earth around it. Stephens’s spirits sank at the sight.

  Shannon had come to Izabal in the summer of 1832, more than a year before De Witt finally arrived as his replacement. Optimistically or naïvely, he had brought with him his wife, his son Charles, and a niece, Miss Shelby. Soon after they had landed, both Shannon and his niece were struck down with yellow fever. They died a short time later.

  “I was melancholy that one who had died abroad in the service of his country was thus left on a wild mountain without any stone to mark his grave,” wrote Stephens. Returning to the town, he arranged for a marker and a fence to be built around the grave. The local priest promised to plant a coconut tree at its head.

  Catherwood, in the meantime, had been visiting the engineer of the Vera Paz, a fellow Englishman named Rush. He had taken ill aboard the steamer and was laid up in a hammock surrounded by townspeople. At a stout six feet, four inches, he was man of huge proportions, Stephens noted, but he lay in the hut “helpless as a child.” It was not a good omen.

  3

  Mico Mountain

  At seven the next morning Stephens and Catherwood carried their baggage out to a large gathering of men and animals lining up for the trip over Mico Mountain. The scene deflated any romantic notions of swashbuckling their way across the Guatemalan countryside on a couple of stallions. The journey would be made on mules, the sure-footed beast of burden that dominated the rugged trails of Central America. Before them was a scene of great commotion as goods were being hauled from the storehouses and loaded onto nearly a hundred mules lining up in an endless caravan attended by twenty to thirty muleteers. Stephens and Catherwood’s separate party consisted of five mules, one for each of them and their new traveling companion, the cook Augustin, and two for their baggage. Four natives had been hired to carry additional supplies on foot and attend to the mules.

  In the weeks before their departure, Stephens had sought out as many scientific instruments as he could muster. In a letter to Secretary of State Forsyth, with a copy to the president, he asked if it would not be too “impertinent” to obtain from the government a sextant, telescope, pocket chronometer, artificial horizon, and two mountain barometers.1 His request apparently was denied because he was only able to secure—at his own expense—one glass barometer, which he now slung over his shoulder, fearing to entrust it to one of the Indian carriers. This made the expedition a small-time scientific operation at best. Given the advancement of measuring instruments by early-nineteenth-century standards, their two-man team was bringing along the technological minimum. For example, Stephens’s hero, the great naturalist Baron Alexander Von Humboldt, in his much-celebrated trek through South America forty years earlier, carried a cyanometer, rain gauge, pendulum, magnetometer, eudiometer, and galvanic batteries, as well as the usual run of sextants, thermometers, compasses, artificial horizons, chronometers, and barometers. And on the same day Stephens and Catherwood were mounting up in Izabal, a tiny fleet of U.S. naval ships was weighing anchor in Apia Bay, Samoa, and sailing toward Australia in preparations for an assault on Antarctica, if such a place existed. The Americans were in a race with the French to claim first landfall on the still-undiscovered continent. The operation, called the U.S. Exploring Expedition, though small, was still outfitted with the best scientific instrumentation available.2 Stephens’s marching orders from the state department, however, were solely about trade, not science. He and Catherwood would have to accept their postdiplomacy explorations as no more than a private adventure by freelance antiquarians. The term archaeologist had not yet been created.

  Port of Izabal in 1860.

  Catherwood, however, was an accomplished professional artist with a great deal of field experience. He knew what he needed and it wasn’t much—a variety of sketchbooks, paper, and drawing and painting instruments. His most technologically advanced tool was a “camera lucida,” an optical device invented in 1807 and used by artists in the pre-photography era to draw true proportions of objects. It consisted of a reflective prism mounted on a small stand that attached to a drawing board. By directing the prism at an object at just the right angle, a tricky process requiring some patience, an artist would be able to look through the glass and see an outline of the object as if it were cast onto the surface of the paper. The object could then be traced. Catherwood also carried an old chronometer to help with longitudinal calculations and the expedition’s only pieces of surveying equipment: a compass and a long stretch of calibrated tape that he had used to measure the temples and monuments of Egypt.

  For Stephens, the writer, it couldn’t be simpler. He brought pencils, pens, and blank notebooks to jot down daily notes. It was a story, after all, and Stephens knew a good story when he saw one. But he was also the U.S. chargé d’affaires. So he brought, carefully packed in one of his bags, a custom-made diplomatic coat tailored from
the finest blue cloth to be found in New York, and decorated with a profusion of gold buttons. If rarely worn, it was, still, the requisite costume for his position as a minister of state. There was also the obligatory medicine chest. And though they were men of artistic temperament and sensibilities, both were nonetheless practical about traveling through unknown lands in troubled times. They were, Stephens wrote, “armed to the teeth.” Each had a double brace of pistols, ammunition, and large hunting knives strapped in belts across their bodies. Augustin was given a pistol, as well as a sword.

  They mounted at eight o’clock, an hour behind the mule train, and set off straight for Mico Mountain and the old Spanish highway, the Camino Real, which wound 120 miles inland to Guatemala City. It was over this road that most of the trade of Central America passed. It was, however, like no road or highway back home, and consisted of little more than a steep mountain track, which at this time of year—the rainy season runs from June through November—was filled with treacherous mud holes, narrow, slippery gullies, and deep ravines, with exposed tree roots stretching across the path three or more feet high. Rain poured down as they rode. Soon they were overwhelmed by blue muck and sweltering heat, and were barely able to squeeze through the ravines.

  The first hours proved a hard test of the two men’s friendship. Up to this point, their journey had been smooth going, even through the rough seas to Belize. Stephens’s mule fell first. “I lifted myself from off her back, and flung clear of roots and trees, but not of mud,” he wrote. “I had escaped from a worse danger: my dagger fell from its sheath and stood upright, with the handle in the mud, a foot of naked blade.” Mr. Catherwood—Stephens’s usual moniker for his friend—was thrown next and with such violence that he momentarily lost his reserve and at full volume cursed Stephens for dragging him into this godforsaken country.

  Soon all discourse ended entirely as the two men, coated in mud, struggled just to stay mounted. The jungle became thicker and the climb more precipitous. The trees and forest growth closed in around them so completely that little daylight came through. They peered ahead through the gauzy light. Eventually they caught up with the mule caravan as it ascended in a meandering line up a stony streambed. Loads slipped off the mules, some of the animals fell, and the curses and shouts of the mule drivers sounded through the forest. Stephens and Catherwood dismounted and tried to walk but the stones and tree roots were too slippery to gain a foothold. They had struggled upward for hours when Augustin’s mule fell backward in a mud hole and they thought for a moment they had lost him. He tried to kick free as the mule tumbled, but his leg was caught and he disappeared as the animal rolled over him. Stephens was certain their cook had broken every bone in his body, then Augustin and the mule rose together, plastered with mud but miraculously without serious injury.

  Finally, at one o’clock the rains stopped and they reached the summit of Mico Mountain. After a few minutes’ rest in the clammy heat, they pushed on and were soon surrounded again by the caravan. The descent from the top was as slippery and treacherous as the climb, and the muleteers seemed bent on covering ground as fast as possible as they drove the mules down. At one point Stephens and Catherwood were nearly crushed in a narrow ravine when a fallen mule blocked the passage in front of them and mules piled in on them from behind.

  But the worst was still to come, according to Stephens. After eight hours of grueling, steaming labor, most of it just to stay atop their mounts, they finally reached a wild mountain stream called, appropriately enough, El Arroyo del Muerto, or Stream of the Dead. They stopped next to the cool, clear water, their stomachs growling ravenously for their first meal of the day. As they rested under the shade of a large tree, dipping their cups into the water, their spirits lifted and, as Stephens recalled: “We spoke with contempt of railroads, cities and hotels.”

  Then Augustin unrolled their provisions: three days’ supply of bread, roasted fowl, and hard-boiled eggs. “The scene that presented itself was too shocking, even for the strongest nerves,” wrote Stephens. Augustin had mistakenly put in with the food a large paper roll of gunpowder that had broken, leaving the food “thoroughly seasoned with this new condiment.”

  “All the beauty of the scene, all our equanimity, everything but our tremendous appetites, left us in a moment.”

  There were other setbacks. The expedition’s sole barometer did not survive the trail. After struggling to stay mounted, Stephens became convinced the glass instrument would be safer on the back of one of the local men traveling on foot. The carrier toted it on his back with extreme care, along with a red-rimmed ceramic pitcher that hung from his belt. This he had held up proudly after every stumble, a sign he was up to the task. And in fact, he succeeded in carrying the barometer intact over the mountain, but they found the mercury had not been secured tightly enough and had drained off, rendering the instrument useless.

  After ten hours of riding—the hardest he had ever experienced, Stephens wrote—they had covered only twelve miles. With dusk approaching, they descended to an open patch of grassland, then through an arching grove of palms to a small rancho, no more than a hut, where they would spend the night. They were furious to find that their baggage mules had been taken ahead with the rest of the caravan, and they would have no change of clothes.

  They were now more than a dozen miles into Guatemala, looking out over a magnificent valley cut through by the Motagua River, an important drainage connecting the interior central highlands with the Gulf of Honduras. When they finally reached the river, they were down nearly to sea level again, having survived Mico Mountain. To the northeast the valley broadened into a wide alluvial plain running to the sea. At its far western end, it narrowed like a rapier thrust toward the heart of the shattered republic, Guatemala City. The city sat on a plateau five thousand feet above sea level; it still lay more than one hundred miles distant.

  The valley they were entering was tamer and more civilized than the wild mountain they had just crossed. There were ranches and small swales of agricultural land scattered on both sides of the river. But as in almost all of Central America, few comforts existed for travelers along the Camino Real. There were no inns or hotels or eating establishments. Much of Central America remained a primitive place, not unlike the western United States at the time, and traveling through it was a hit-or-miss proposition. If one had the proper introductions or a little luck, accommodation in someone’s house was possible. Town halls, called cabildoes, and church buildings also provided shelter to travelers. Occasionally there were thatched huts made with cane or mud walls, where one could sleep at a cost of a few pennies.

  Food was another matter. When they agreed to hire Augustin in Belize, neither Stephens nor Catherwood believed he was very quick-witted. But despite their fury over the gunpowder incident, it did not take long for them to change their minds. Augustin was born on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola to Spanish and French parents, and he grew up in the port town of Omoa, on the north coast of Honduras. He turned out to be resourceful, ambitious, and fiercely proud. He would always maneuver in the background along the trail, then as if by magic, he would emerge with chickens and eggs, chocolate, beans, and tortillas at just the right moment, and cook it all up to provide the fuel that kept the expedition moving. He was young, though Stephens never gives his exact age or a physical description. And he spoke no English. But his French-Spanish upbringing proved crucial. Stephens’s and Catherwood’s grasp of Spanish was weak to nonexistent when the journey began. Therefore Augustin would speak with the two men in French, which both spoke, and he served as their interpreter in Spanish, which most of the locals spoke.

  In the afternoon heat of the second day, they reached the Motagua. There, in a scene Stephens describes almost as a dream sequence, he and Catherwood finally freed themselves for the first time from their mud-caked, sweat-stained clothes. As the sun set, they plunged into the river, a luxury he said that could only be appreciated by those who had survived Mico Mountain. They stood up to
their necks in the cool, crystal water, surrounded by distant mountains and lush tropical foliage lining the riverbanks as flocks of parrots and other brilliantly plumed birds chattered and flitted through the air above them. Their enchantment was broken only by Augustin, who came down the opposite bank to call them to supper.

  They emerged from the river and realized in agony they still had not caught up with their baggage. They looked at their “hideous” clothing. “We had but one alternative, and that was to go without them,” wrote Stephens. “But, as this seemed to be trenching upon the proprieties of life, we picked them up and put them on reluctant.”

  That night they stayed with a family in a modest hut. They were invited to hang their hammocks in the central room, which contained the beds of their host, his wife, and their seventeen-year-old daughter. Stephens was already impressed by the various states of undress of the host and his wife. He woke several times during the night at the sound of steel clicking against flint and saw one of his neighbors lighting a cigar. During one such awakening, he found the teenage girl sitting sideways on her cot at the foot of his hammock. She was smoking a cigar and wearing nothing but a piece of cloth tied around her waist and a string of beads. “At first I thought it was something I had conjured up in a dream,” he recalled. “I had slept pell-mell with Greeks, Turks and Arabs. I was beginning a journey in a new country; it was my duty to conform to the customs of the people: to be prepared for the worst, and submit with resignation to whatever might befall me.”

  The Motagua Valley is one of the hottest and most arid regions in Central America during the dry season. Only twenty inches of rainfall reach the valley floor each year during the rainy season, compared to six times that amount in the surrounding mountains. Spiny cacti and thorny shrubs are among the few plants that thrive on the parched earth. But like the Nile, lush vegetation covers the banks of the river year-round, and now, near the end of the rainy season, the whole valley was green. Stephens and Catherwood followed the road southwest along the river through long galleries of trees, then along an open ridge with commanding views of the valley. They met stray cattle beside the road and a few Indians carrying machetes on the way to work in the fields. They finally crossed an open plain to enter the town of Gualán, the largest municipality they had so far encountered in the country. Without a whisper of a breeze, the sun hovered over them with blistering power. “I was confused,” Stephens said, “my head swam and I felt in danger of a stroke of the sun.” Then they felt the rumble of a slight earthquake, their first.