Jungle of Stone Read online

As a consequence, Europeans arriving in America greatly underestimated the size of the original Indian population. They concluded that they had stumbled into empty, largely uninhabited lands when in fact their diseases were racing ahead with such speed that by the time the settlers reached inland native areas, they were already greatly depopulated. This made conquest and settlement easier, especially for the Spaniards, who seemed to accomplish so much with so few men. For example, Western historians have celebrated Hernán Cortés and his band of 550 fellow conquistadors as ingenious, tenacious warriors who overcame unbelievable odds in vanquishing central Mexico’s Aztec Empire. While there is some brutal truth to that assessment, a smallpox epidemic in 1521 cut down so many Aztec leaders and warriors that the disease played a significant role in the Spaniards’ final military victories. Without smallpox, history may well have turned against Cortés.

  Smallpox and the other European diseases continued southward with such speed that, by the time the conquistadors marched into Peru a decade later, the damage was done.8 Francisco Pizarro arrived in the South American region in 1532 with only 168 men, a pitiful number with which to take on the sprawling Inca Empire of five million, which stretched from present-day Ecuador through Peru to Bolivia and Chile. Smallpox, however, had arrived well ahead of Pizarro and killed the great Inca leader Huayna Capac, along with his designated heir and many captains of his army. The deaths set in motion a civil war between Capac’s two surviving sons, further weakening the empire militarily. Pizarro was able to seize on this opportunity and conquer most of the Inca holdings in less than three years.9

  The Indians of Central America suffered the same huge losses. Experts now calculate that the region’s indigenous population plunged from nearly six million people in the year 1500, soon after Columbus’s voyages, to fewer than 300,000 by 1680.10 The population was finally beginning to recover by the time Stephens and Catherwood arrived, and was approaching one million, but this was still one-sixth of what it might have been when the Spanish first landed.

  The Copán Valley did not escape the wave of devastation. According to early Spanish historians, the area was heavily populated and the center of some of the fiercest native resistance to the invading conquistadors. Thousands of Indians, led by a powerful leader named Copán Calel, fought battle after battle with the Spaniards and their allied Indian troops from Mexico. After incredible bloodshed on both sides, the Spaniards finally succeeded in subduing Calel and his warriors.11 Ultimately the defeated Indians succumbed to “a pestilence”—most likely smallpox—that soon wiped out most of the local population.

  For centuries afterward, the Copán Valley remained a hidden rural backwater, all but empty of people despite its mild climate and ideal growing conditions. But there was something different about this valley. It had been depopulated and left a ghost town once before. It had suffered a demographic calamity that long predated the arrival of the conquistadors when, centuries earlier, a powerful dynastic kingdom, the southern and easternmost outpost of an astonishing civilization, collapsed and disappeared.

  The few remaining inhabitants in the valley, those whom Stephens and Catherwood were about to meet, had no idea what lay beneath their feet. In other parts of Mesoamerica, the bludgeoning force of the Conquest had all but erased Indian memory. Here time and nature had done so. There were the odd, mysteriously carved stones. The inhabitants were aware of those, had seen them half-buried in the jungle along the valley floor. But biological forces, fecund and regenerative, were so hard at work that nature itself had obliterated their history—their grand story of Indian genius and glory, failure and desolation—and had seemingly wiped the slate clean.

  At two o’clock on the afternoon of November 15, 1839, Stephens and Catherwood rode into the small village of Copán. It consisted of no more than half a dozen dirt-floor thatched huts. Of the few inhabitants who quickly gathered around them—“our appearance created a great sensation,” Stephens noted—none could direct them to the ruins. They were sent instead to the largest hacienda in the area, a sprawling ranch owned by a local man of influence and importance, Don Gregorio.

  After a friendly welcome by the women of the ranch and a quickly prepared meal, the two men congratulated themselves on their good fortune. The country’s reputation for hospitality at last seemed deserved, they told each other, and this was an ideal place from which to launch an investigation of any old stone ruins they might find.

  But the welcome lasted only until late afternoon and the arrival of the Don himself, a surly man of about fifty, thick with whiskers and wearing the scowl of a tyrant. He did not like their looks, and he let it be known that they were not welcome.

  Stephens and Catherwood were in a bind. Don Gregorio was purposely ignoring them; the women, his sons, and the laborers coming in from the fields quickly followed his cue. Despite this rudeness, however, the two men could not afford a falling-out with “the great man of Copán” if they were to have any chance of finding and exploring the ruins. They were suspect foreigners, a delicate status.

  The two men smothered their pride. They had nowhere else to go, and nightfall was fast approaching. Eventually an unspoken truce prevailed. The Don was willing to tolerate their presence, apparently to prevent a “stain on his name,” but only if they slept in a cramped, sheltered area outside the house with the ranch hands. Stephens described the scene: “There were three hammocks besides ours and I had so little room for mine that my body described an inverted parabola, with my heels as high as my head.” The uneasy standoff continued the next morning when the Don appeared, still in the same bad mood. “We took no notice of him, but made our toilet under the shed with as much respect as possible to the presence of the female members of the family, who were constantly passing and repassing.”

  Finally, a guide was brought from the village to lead them to the ruins. The small caravan moved slowly down the southeastern slope, traversing the center of the seven-mile-long valley toward what is now called the “Copán pocket.” At this point, the valley is relatively narrow, no more than a few miles from ridge to ridge. At an altitude of two thousand feet, they were in a more temperate zone, finally free of the suffocating heat and humidity of the lowlands around Lake Izabal and the Motagua.

  The valley floor was nonetheless thickly overgrown with tropical and broadleaf forest, punctuated by colorful flashes of bougainvillea, hibiscus, and other exotic displays. The few huts scattered across the valley were surrounded by gardens and clearings cut from the jungle and planted with small plots of tobacco and corn. Cattle ranged through some of the fields, which were hedged with cacao plants, papaya, and mango. The fragrance of jasmine and frangipani, mixed with lemon, wafted through the air, and traces of cinnamon and nutmeg drifted from clusters of allspice trees.

  But the backdrop remained dense and gloomy, the forest ominous. In this rich bottomland, composed of silt and volcanic ash, almost anything seemed to grow, watered by the river and sixty to seventy inches of rain each year. Now, at the end of the rainy season, the earth was so saturated it gave off a heavy, cloying smell of loam, mixed with fresh, wet chlorophyll from the undergrowth. They stopped briefly to rest, and between the birdsong and screeches of scarlet macaws, they could feel the vegetation around them pulsating and swelling with life.

  José, their guide, took them along a narrow path some distance from the ranch, across a large field planted with corn. They tied their mules at the edge of the jungle. Using his machete, José methodically worked his way into the forest through the tangled underbrush. After a time, they emerged on the eastern bank of the Copán River. As they approached, Stephens and Catherwood looked through the trees—

  And were stunned by what they saw.

  They had been expecting scattered stone ruins, at best. But what appeared on the other side of the river was a massive stone wall that rose to a height of nearly one hundred feet. A large section had fallen, eroded and undermined by the river at its base. Stephens and Catherwood had read one eyewitness acco
unt and one vague historical reference to the ruins at Copán. Yet the enormity of the wall in front of them took their breath away. They had been to Italy, Greece, the Middle East. They had seen the pyramids and the remnants of ancient cities. But this place was assumed to have been occupied by savages. This was aboriginal America. No one expected its vanished peoples to engineer a solid face of stone rising far into the air and spanning hundreds of feet along the riverbank.

  After they crossed a shallow stretch of the river and arrived at the base of the wall, the two men realized that sections of it were faced with what appeared to be well-cut, finished stone. They climbed a set of stone steps, many jumbled and forced apart by tree roots growing through the crevices, and emerged high above the river on a small terrace pressed in and covered by so many trees that it was difficult to gauge its dimensions. José went to work again, hacking a pathway across the level ground through the underlying foliage, and soon they made out what looked like the side of a pyramid.

  Catherwood’s illustrations of a stela at Copán, from Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán. (Carlsen)

  Stela today. (Carlsen)

  A short time later, stumbling through the trees and underbrush, they came upon something they had never imagined possible and stopped in their tracks, struck with wonder. It was a tall monument of such size and artistic mastery, wrote Stephens, that it equaled the finest sculptures they had seen in Egypt.

  The two men had ventured two thousand miles, risked disease and injury, traveled in great danger through a land torn by civil war, all in the hopes of what they might find. This monolith alone exceeded anything they had dared to imagine. The massive twelve-foot stone idol loomed over them, sculpted from top to bottom on all four sides in bold relief.

  “The front was the figure of a man,” Stephens wrote, “curiously and richly dressed, and the face, evidently a portrait, solemn, stern, and well-fitted to excite terror. The back was of a different design unlike anything we had ever seen before and the sides were covered with hieroglyphics. The sight of this unexpected monument put to rest at once and forever, in our minds, all uncertainty in regards to the character of American Antiquities.”

  Buried Stela at Copán. (Catherwood)

  Fallen Monument in Copán. (Catherwood)

  Ahead, José continued slicing through the dimly lit jungle, making a path through the tangle of vines and undergrowth. The forest was so thick with trees—immense ceibas and grasping strangler figs—that it was difficult at times to see very far; the tops of the trees formed a solid canopy that blocked the midday sun. The men tripped and climbed over roots and vines that snaked along the forest floor. Mosses, lianas, and epiphytes wrapped themselves around every available tree and limb. Even José lost his way, leading them down several dead ends to walls of impenetrable green foliage.

  Before long, however, he guided them to fourteen more carved stone monuments, similar in appearance to the first. Some had toppled to the ground; some were half-buried, covered in creepers and roots. One was “locked in the close embrace of branches of trees and almost lifted out of the earth,” Stephens recalled. “One, standing, with its altar before it, in a grove of trees which grew around it, seemingly to shade and shroud it as a sacred thing; in the solemn stillness of the woods, it seemed a divinity mourning over a fallen people.”

  As they went on in the defused light, they began to make out half-buried walls, huge, round sculpted altars, and other carved stone fragments. Fat roots of the strangler figs wrapped themselves like pythons around broken cornices and rows of sculpted death heads. All around them, trees grew out of great shattered structures; enormous mounds of stone towered far above their heads. Trunks and roots had torn apart and dislodged ochre-colored building stones, mottled with green-gray patches of lichen, and had sent the precisely cut blocks tumbling down into huge piles at the foot of the pyramids.

  Yet for all its jumbled desolation, the remains left by the natural force of the jungle still displayed delicate tracings and intricate sculptured heads and figures, artistry carved into stone and frozen in time. Set in the overpowering forest, it was bewildering devastation and mystery, too much to grasp in a single take. The two men stumbled through the jungle after José in a state of disbelief. Yet Stephens realized almost immediately that they were in the presence of something extraordinary, something with the potential to change the understanding of history. These were not the remains of a raw and unrefined people, he wrote, but works of art that proved “the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages.”

  Stephens was alive as never before, his every sense and nerve stretched to its limit. Even the stillness of the jungle caught his attention—and the whispers he detected in it:

  The only sounds that disturbed the quiet of this buried city were the noise of monkeys moving among the tops of the trees, and cracking of dry branches broken by their weight. They moved over our heads in long and swift processions, forty and fifty at a time, some with little ones wound in their long arms, walking out to the end of boughs, and holding on with their hind feet or a curl of their tail, sprang to a branch of the next tree, and with a noise like a current of wind, passed on into the depths of the forest. It was the first time we had seen these mockeries of humanity, and, with the strange monuments around us, they seemed like wandering spirits of the departed race guarding the ruins of their former inhabitants.

  Climbing over the mounds, the men finally found the level ground and terrace where they had entered. Their eyes had grown accustomed to the filtered light, and they could now distinguish what appeared to be a large, rectangular plaza surrounded by steps on each side, which gave it the appearance of a Roman amphitheater. A huge sculpted head, embedded in the steps, stared at them from across the plaza. They crossed toward it, climbed the steps to a long, narrow terrace, and found themselves looking down at the river more than a hundred feet below.

  They had come to the crest of the wall they had viewed hours before from across the river. Above them, looming over the amphitheater, were two giant ceiba trees, their smooth gray trunks as much as twenty feet in circumference, their buttressed roots stretching out for hundreds of feet like the tentacles of an octopus holding down mounds of stones in its tight grip.

  The two men, emotionally and physically exhausted, sat down on the edge of the plaza and tried to comprehend what they had just found. Who were the people, they wondered, who had built these monuments and pyramids? And how long ago? The inhabitants of the valley had no idea. There were no written records, and apparently no oral accounts passed down from generation to generation. “All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery,” Stephens wrote. In Egypt, the temples stood out on the desert sands in open, unguarded nakedness. Here the temples and pyramids lay buried under thick jungle, lost to time and history. Stephens sought to capture the wonder of it:

  Architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory had lived and passed away, and none know that such things had been, or could tell of their past existence. It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her mast gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction.

  It was a mystery of staggering implications—but there seemed no immediate answers. Not only had Stephens and Catherwood found in Copán evidence of an advanced, seemingly ancient civilization, but the ruins lay in the jungle heart of Central America, a place where no one believed such a civilization could have existed.

  They knew immediately the challenge they faced—that this could not be the only proof of civilization in the region, that there must be other signs of ancient settlements in the jungle, other ruins for them to find, and when their existence was made known to the world, human curiosity would not be satisfied until the answers to all their mysteries, their untold stories
, were unearthed as well.

  Stephens

  I.

  At dusk Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander, Baron von Humboldt, appeared at the door of President’s House late in the spring of 1804. The famous Prussian naturalist had just arrived in Washington to visit with Thomas Jefferson after five years of exploration in Spanish America. Humboldt was always rushing somewhere, hyperactive, restless. He told his American host, the painter Charles Willson Peale, that he had been traveling since he was eleven years old and never lived in any one place for more than six months.1 After he had landed in Philadelphia, he eagerly accepted the invitation from President Jefferson to come to Washington to talk about his South American discoveries. The District of Columbia was only recently carved out of the Maryland wilderness, still sparsely populated and filled with empty, mud-rutted streets. The stately presidential mansion, which would be named the White House a century later by Theodore Roosevelt, stood out on a naked hill overlooking the Potomac River in the distance.

  When Humboldt was shown into the drawing room unannounced, he found the president on the floor surrounded by his grandchildren. An awkward moment passed as Jefferson continued playing with the children before he realized Humboldt was standing in the doorway. Jefferson rose immediately to shake Humboldt’s hand. The president loomed tall and slender over the short, sturdy Humboldt. “You have found me playing the fool, Baron,” Jefferson said.2

  During the following two weeks of Humboldt’s visit the two men became close friends. They could easily have been father and son, Jefferson still vigorous at sixty-one and Humboldt bursting with energy at thirty-four. They had much in common. They were cultured, well-read offspring of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, both of them scientists, philosophers, botanists. And each man was coming off a diplomatic and geographic coup of enormous magnitude. They had become, in their different ways, the masters of immense parcels of real estate, covering broad swaths of the Western Hemisphere. Jefferson had accomplished the feat just a year earlier with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte for a paltry $15 million, thereby doubling the size of the United States in a single, brilliant stroke. And Humboldt through the good luck of aristocratic connections had convinced the Spanish crown five years earlier to let him mount a grand, far-reaching exploration of South America in the name of science. Impressed with Humboldt’s credentials as a onetime mining expert, the royal court in Madrid was particularly eager to have him survey its colonies’ gold and silver resources, even if it meant opening South America to a foreigner.3