Jungle of Stone Page 6
Lieutenant John Herbert Caddy of the Royal Artillery lit a “genuine Havana” as they pushed off the embankment into Old River the afternoon of November 14. They were surrounded by plantain and fig trees along an airy stretch of the river. Puffing casually on his cigar, Caddy ordered the boats upstream. The boatmen struggled, going no more than four miles an hour against the stiff current. Twenty-four hours had lapsed since the British expedition left Belize City for Palenque under orders to investigate large ruins reportedly found there—and to outflank Stephens and Catherwood by publishing a detailed, illustrated report of their findings. At a farewell lunch with Colonel MacDonald at Government House, a last-minute glitch threatened to delay the expedition’s start: the disappearance of the Spanish interpreter, Mr. Nod. By the end of lunch, however, two policemen had rounded him up in an advanced state of drunkenness, and put him aboard the main canoe.
Besides Caddy and the expedition’s co-leader, John Walker, the party included fifteen soldiers of the Second West India Regiment, the interpreter, an artillery gunner who served as Caddy’s personal aide, and nine specially hired boatmen—a total of twenty-eight individuals in all. The men were spread between two pitpans, one for the luggage and the other carrying Walker and Caddy. The main canoe was forty feet long and five feet across, one of the largest pitpans on the river, and was carved from a single mahogany tree. A canvas canopy at the back shielded Caddy and Walker from the broiling sun.
Just before they left, MacDonald wrote to Lord John Russell in London, the secretary of state for the colonies: “It has been my intention for some considerable time past to bring the subject before the Secretary of State and to suggest that an attempt should be made to explore Polenki with the view of deciding satisfactorily whether those ruins from their huge and extraordinary nature are such to justify the reports concerning them, or whether these reports are exaggeration and the place unworthy of the notice of the modern traveler.” Months would pass before his correspondence reached Lord Russell and months before he received a response.
The settlement’s weekly newspaper, the Belize Advertiser, was a bit more candid about what led to the hastily thrown-together expedition. “We are happy to find the design of Mr. Catherwood has aroused the jealousy of our Settlement, and induced a visit with like object to the same place by a different route.” The article went on to note the danger involved. “We fear the two gentlemen from this, who have taken the direction of the Old River, and on by way of Petén, have chosen an unseasonable period, and will be greatly retarded both by water and by land.” Then, with typical British cheer, the writer added: “‘a stout heart . . .’ gets over many difficulties, and may add to their personal experiences.”2
Walker and Caddy spent their first night—the evening Stephens and Catherwood were toasting MacDonald in Camotán—quartered comfortably in a government cottage at a pretty bend in the river. The clearing was planted with fruit trees. It would be one of their last nights in such comfort. The next camp was set at Bakers Bank, where the men hung their hammocks under canvas and net pavilions. Though Caddy was trained in military engineering and artillery and possessed considerable artistic talent, his skills extended to language as well. “The mosquitoes were insufferable and had it not been for our Pavilions we should have been well-phlebotomized,” he wrote in a journal entry dated November 14. “As it was, their constant humming almost deprived me of sleep. Shakespeare could never have experienced the nuisance of these nocturnal musicians when he says ‘and hush’d with buzzing night flies to thy slumber.’”
The next day brought unpleasant encounters with even more vicious, blood-drawing “bottle rump” and “doctor” flies; deadly snakes and alligators the size of logs watched from the mud banks while the pitpans fought their way up the river. It was hard going for the boatmen. They strained mightily to maneuver the giant, heavy canoes against the fast current of the river, now at flood stage. At one point they approached a waterfall marked on their map, but never found it because the river ran so high that the two pitpans passed over its location without seeing it. The boatmen switched from paddles to poles at the shallower turns in the river. “The steersman has a rather difficult task,” wrote Caddy, “as from the great length of the Pitpan if he does not keep her directly against the stream, the current takes effect and turns her broadside on, to the great loss of time and labour, and to the risk of being upset—which is not at all an infrequent occurrence.”
Yet for all its treachery and power, the river possessed a haunting beauty that grew the farther up they went. Gold- and crimson-breasted toucans snapped their enormous bills like “the sounds of castanets,” wrote Caddy. Orange and black orioles appeared to catch fire in the blazing sun; bright green, almost fluorescent iguanas (which made for tasty meals) waddled along splintered mahogany logs embedded in the banks. And over the river towered the largest, wildest trees Caddy had ever seen, their gnarled roots sometimes projecting dangerously out into the river, their branches draped with bromeliads, orchids, and vines as thick and twisted as the braids of a ship’s rigging.
The morning of November 16, they passed under an old pitpan suspended in the lianas twenty feet above their heads. The river was capable of such extreme surges during the rainy season—rising and falling by as much as forty feet in a single day—that the rushing torrents had apparently swept the canoe downriver until it lodged upside down in the tangle of vines. There was no trace of what had become of its crew. It was an ominous sign for the men in the pitpans. They knew that no one in their right mind should be attempting a journey up river during this season, after weeks of continuous rain, with more sure to come. At this time of year, survival on the river was pure chance.
But the order had been given: get to Palenque as quickly as possible, before Catherwood and Stephens. The route mapped out for them, even under ideal weather conditions, was brutal and unforgiving. Going by sea would have been much easier. But Palenque was still a mysterious, little-known place, whose exact proximity to the coast was not clearly understood. Their path, straight west across the wild Petén, the demon heart of Yucatán Peninsula, would lead them over much the same ground Cortés had covered so grievously three hundred years earlier, going in the opposite direction. After three centuries, not much had changed. The jungle terrain was just as relentlessly difficult, equally as murderous.
Caddy was born to follow orders. The son of an English artillery captain, he was expected from his birth in Quebec in 1801 to follow in his father’s footsteps. Growing up in Canada, he understood the violence of armed conflict when England and the United States went to war in 1812. Three years later he was sent to England, where he entered the Royal Military Academy at the age of fifteen. By the time he and Walker set out for Palenque, Caddy was an army veteran with nearly twenty-five years of service as a cadet and officer in the Royal Artillery, and yet there was nothing of the hardened soldier about him. A rare, surviving portrait shows a man with large, doe-like eyes set in a soft, round boyish face.3 He had never served in combat. At one point he was a general’s secretary. And somewhere along the line he developed into a fine watercolorist.
On the river, he showed all of the entitlements of a British officer. He brought along a personal aide-de-camp and he drank fine Madeira. He hunted for sport (and food) with his double-barrel shotgun during stops along the embankments, and he saw all the men around him, with the exception of Walker, as inferiors. He also had a sharp eye, like Stephens, for details.
As they continued upriver past Labouring Creek to put in for the night at Beaver Dam, Caddy took another puff of his Havana. “We smoke nearly all day to keep away the flies,” he wrote, “but they seemed to care little about smoke, except those which had the temerity to attack our faces, and which were now and then brought down by a well-directed puff.”
5
Monkeys Like the Wind
Southeast of the Motagua River valley, the mountains run parallel, piled high, riven by deep fertile valleys, a landscape formed by tw
o massive slabs of the earth’s crust gnashing against one another—the great North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. When Stephens and Catherwood crossed the river valley days earlier, they traveled over the fault zone where the two plates meet. From above, the mountains to the north and south look like dark green sheets shoved up and crumpled against the long, flat valley. Here along the fault, more than 100 million years ago, North America was isolated from South America by the Caribbean Sea. Millions of years later, the land bridge of Central America began to rise from the sea, and the north and south continents were reconnected along the long, narrow Isthmus of Panama. The reunion melded the flora and fauna of both continents and set the stage for one of the richest biological shows on the planet.1
To the west, under the Pacific, lies the third geologic behemoth, the Cocos Plate, which thrusts eastward and northward under the lip of the Central American coastline. The collision of these three floating slabs makes Central America one of the most geologically violent regions on earth, battered by frequent earthquakes and perforated by a string of fiery volcanoes that run the length of the west coast.2 So brutal are these forces of nature that Central America sometimes seems like a step back into the elemental beginnings of time.
Stephens and Catherwood continued east over this steep, corrugated terrain. Within a day of their departure from Camotán, they caught their first glimpse of the Copán River coursing through the mountain valleys. They forded it several times and rode up a stony path along the mountainside, looking straight down on the rushing waters from a narrow, slippery trail high above. A damp rain forest surrounded them, dense and impenetrable.
Eventually, the party halted at a rustic wood-slatted hacienda. Unlike the disruptions of the evening before, this stop brought them a measure of rest. They spent the night in the hacienda’s single room, surrounded by nine men, women, and children. “All around were little balls of fire shining and disappearing with the puffs of the cigars,” wrote Stephens. “One by one these went out, and we fell asleep.”
The next morning, they crossed into Honduras—though no sign marked the border. A short time later, they stood looking down on the Copán Valley. They were no more than forty miles due south of where they had landed at Izabal, but they had traveled two weeks and more than a hundred hard miles. From the opposite end of the valley, the Copán River flowed down from the Sierra del Gallinero, cutting through a floodplain that formed the valley floor nearly two thousand feet above sea level. The river flowed westward, the direction from which they had come, and emptied eventually into the Motagua, joining its run to the sea.
In spite of the fertile earth, the exuberant foliage on either side of the river, and the mix of pine and subtropical forests along the slopes, the valley was surprisingly unpopulated. It had been all but empty of people for hundreds of years. There had been a time, however, more than a thousand years earlier, when its pockets of rich alluvial soil supported a dense population, and the Copán River formed the lifeblood of a stunning civilization.
Stephens had no way of knowing this in 1839. Nothing was known of the valley’s extraordinary history. Not only did Stephens and Catherwood lack the archaeological concepts and tools to unravel the mystery they were about to encounter, they shared their era’s near total ignorance of Native American societies as they existed before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. As Charles Darwin was to show two decades later with the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, the earth was only gradually giving up its secrets.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, much of the world’s physical and human history was still unknown. The U.S. Navy’s Exploring Expedition was racing at that moment toward Antarctica, a continent many believed did not exist. This around-the-world expedition would yield valuable scientific findings, gathering thousands of biological specimens, South Sea island artifacts, charts, and maps, all of which would form the initial collection of the Smithsonian Institution.3 The history of Central and South America, opening finally to the outside world, was next. But it, too, would take time. And Stephens and Catherwood would be among the first to bring it to the world’s attention.
As they looked east into the Copán Valley, they stood on the brink. There would be no turning back—and what they were about to discover would change the understanding of human history in the Western Hemisphere.
Well into the twentieth century, the belief persisted even among prominent ethnographers and historians that there existed a kind of natural Eden in the Western Hemisphere before the Europeans arrived, two virgin continents filled with endless empty forests, deserts, jungles, and grasslands. The area was thought to be sparsely populated by small primitive tribes isolated from one another by great distances, with only a few scattered pockets of semicivilized life. These suppositions could not have been more wrong.
The first reports of encounters between the Europeans and American natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were scarce and often inaccurate. In what would later become known as Mexico, Central America, and Peru, some cities were found. But the Spaniards who landed in those areas were preoccupied with conquest and gold, not discovery. Few extensive histories or ethnological observations were recorded. Very little of the advanced native Indian culture survived the European onslaught.
The Spanish Conquest was particularly brutal. Idols, monuments, and entire cities were destroyed; Indian books and other written texts, some recording histories that spanned centuries, were systematically gathered into piles and burned. The pyramids, palaces, and temples the conquistadors found—evidence of the native societies’ advanced level of social organization and technological skill—were quickly torn down, in part to provide material for the Spanish churches and residences that rose on their ruins, but also to subjugate the natives. The Spanish saw the Indians as pagan savages who indulged in human sacrifice and idolatry. Their culture and all vestiges of their religion were to be obliterated and the people converted to Christianity. Total submission was essential, according to the Spanish priests who accompanied the conquistadors, to save the Indians’ souls.
The problem was there were fewer and fewer souls to save. Diseases brought from the Old World and the inhumane, homicidal treatment often doled out by the Spanish quickly decimated the Indian populations. A debate continues today among scholars over how many Native Americans lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1491 and what percentage lost their lives because of Europe’s discovery of America. In Hispaniola, Cuba, and the islands of the West Indies, the first part of the New World settled by the Spaniards, the massacres, disease, and starvation were so horrendous that the Indian natives virtually disappeared within the first twenty years of Spanish occupation. The conquerors’ demand for workers on the plantations they established eventually led to a new network of human exploitation, the transatlantic African slave trade, created to supply the islands with replacement labor.4
Until the middle of the last century, ethnographers and historians believed that in 1491 no more than 20 million Indians inhabited the entire hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. Much lower estimates were widely accepted, as low as one million inhabitants for all of North America. Most demographers today dismiss these figures as wild underestimates. They now calculate that up to 100 million “Amerindian” peoples lived throughout the Western Hemisphere, though an accurate count will never be known. If true, this upper range means that the population of the Americas equaled or exceeded Europe’s at the time of Columbus’s first voyage.5
Yet by 1650, only 160 years later, the Indian population had plummeted to no more than six million, a decline of as much as 95 percent. Although the initial population figures and the amount of the decline are still debated, most scholars now agree that Europe’s discovery of America almost certainly resulted in the greatest demographic calamity in human history.
“The population losses were undisputedly considerable and swift,” writes University of Texas historian Alfred W. Crosby, an expert on the
biological consequences that followed Europe’s discovery of the Americas, or what has come to be known as the “Columbian Exchange.” Crosby adds, “The conclusion must be that the major initial effect of the Columbian voyages was the transformation of America into a charnel house. The European invasion of the New World reduced the genetic and cultural pools of the human species.”6
The primary cause of this annihilation was disease.
According to scientific studies, all Native American Indians are descended from a small number of hunters who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia—from today’s Siberia to Alaska—over a land bridge that appeared during the last ice age, and they began populating the Americas approximately 17,000–13,000 years ago. As the ice age ended, the glaciers melted, the seas rose, and the land bridge was covered over by the ocean waters once again. Cut off from Asia, the hunters and their succeeding generations were now trapped in North America. They moved southward, and finding limitless fertile land, they multiplied rapidly, many settling within the hospitable climate zone of Mexico and Central America and traveling as far as the tip of South America.
Isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years, the American Indians never developed antibodies and immunities to the diseases that later emerged in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Thus a form of biological genocide struck when the conquistadors and other European colonists arrived, bringing with them smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, diphtheria, whooping cough, chicken pox, and tuberculosis. Wave after wave of disease swept through native populations, with catastrophic results.7