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In 1839 President Martin Van Buren appointed Stephens as special
ambassador to Central America. Stephens immediately contacted
Catherwood requesting his presence on the project. They set
out for Central America. This journey spawned Stephen's first
work on the Maya, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas
and Yucatán. It was so popular that 12 editions were printed
the first year of publication creating what is now commonplace
but then a phenomenon: a bestselling author. This allowed Stephens
the leisure to follow his bliss -- exploration -- thus freeing
him from his law career.
In Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán,
Stephens states it is the most extensive journey made by a foreigner
to the Yucatán Peninsula, containing accounts of 44 ruined cities.
At this time, most of these ruins were unknown to the residents
of Merida, Yucatán's capital, as few had been visited by outsiders.
Desolate and overgrown with trees, the only evidence of these
structures appeared as grass-covered mounds. To the untrained
eye, it would take a wild stretch of imagination to visualize
their former grandeur.
NO ROAD MAPS
When Stephens, Catherwood and their physician, Dr. Cabot of
Boston,
first started out from Merida, they had no servants, a travesty
for explorers of that time, nor did they have a map of the area
because none existed. The closest thing they could find that
would set them in the right direction was a rough map etching
given to them by a friend, with the disclaimer that it was inaccurate.
So for these explorers, their expedition truly was a journey
into the unknown. It would include logging the number of hours
from village to village and the pace of their horses to better
assist future explorers who would eventually follow in their
footsteps.
Occasionally Catherwood shot the latitude of an area, and the
expedition measured distance in leagues, not miles. How did
Stephens prepare for this journey? What resources and materials
were required? In his books, Stephens jumped right into the
explorations themselves with little fanfare given to preparations,
but no doubt they were lengthy and costly.
Artist Catherwood was determined to make use of the Daguerreotype
camera and as no one in their group knew how to use it, the
men set up a quick portrait taking business in their Merida
hotel before heading into the field. Once familiarized with
the camera, they changed hats, became explorers again, and headed
into the Yucatán jungles.
MAYAPAN
The once great city Mayapan, 47 miles southeast of Merida,
was their first ruin sighting. "For ages, these ruins
went unnoticed," Stephens commented. Now linked to the
end of the Post Classic Period, Mayapan was founded in 1007
by the great ruler Kukulkan. After the fall of Chichén-Itzá
around 1200, Mayapan became the dominant force in the Maya world,
their center of civilization before the Spanish arrival. As
no great temples existed in Mayapan, this era was considered
a time when rulers were more interested in warfare than in appeasing
the gods with extravagant shrines, Stephens notes.
On the region, Stephens states that before the Spanish invasion,
the area was known only as Maya. It was the Spanish who named
it Yucatán, coming, Stephens believes, from one of two sources:
either from the word for the plant, ‘yucca' and
‘tale' or ‘thale' which is the earth
in which the yucca grows.
His other theory is that when the Maya were asked by the Spaniards,
"What is this country?" the answer in Mayan was,
"I do not understand these words," which sounded
like (according to Stephens) ‘Yucatán.'
TROPICAL DISEASE
After 14 months of continuous exploring both men came down
regularly with tropical fevers. Hounded by garrapatas (a biting
insect) and fever at Uxmal, Catherwood in particular had a bad
time of it. Stephens described Catherwood as working in spite
of his affliction, standing on top of crudely made scaffolding
or standing in mud, veiled with a net and wearing clumsy gloves
to protect his hands from mosquitoes.
At first, Catherwood had great difficulty in depicting the designs
of the Maya monuments (as stated in his work Views of Ancient
Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán in 1844),
due to their complexity and because they were so different from
anything he had previously seen. But with the aid first of the
Daguerreotype and then a camera lucida (precursor to the modern
camera) he developed a technique for fine tuning his expedition
drawings. His renderings were so accurate that many are still
useful today.
Eventually Catherwood collapsed, and then both Stephens and
Cabot came down with malarial chills. On New Year's Day
they departed from Uxmal, and Stephens said they never looked
back. "All interest we had felt in the place was gone,
and we only wanted to get away. Silent and desolate as we found
them, we left the ruins of Uxmal again to be overgrown with
trees, to crumble, to fall, and perhaps in a few generations
to become, like others scattered over the country, mere shapeless
and nameless mounds." Although both Stephens and Catherwood
would later return to Yucatán in 1842 to complete the work they
had begun, their first corroboration ended sooner than expected
due to tropical disease.
Stephens' Maya explorations took him to many famous pyramid
sites -- Uxmal, Labna, Kabah, Mayapan, Chichén-Itzá and Tulum--
and many lesser known sites --Chunhuhu, Iturbide, Labphak, Kewick,
Macoba, Xampon. He covered thousands of miles in his journeys,
explored numerous caves and cenotes, met hundreds of Maya, heard
countless tales of adventure, flirted with the Maya calendar,
slept in pyramids, and from these excursions two famous books
evolved, still popular 160 years after first publication.
AFTER Yucatán
After his adventures in Yucatán he went on to become director
of a U.S. steamship company, Ocean Steam Navigation, then took
an interest in Hudson River Railroad which went into partnership
with Panama Railroad Company. In 1849 he became vice president
of that company, negotiating contracts and because of his previous
explorations, he spent two years supervising the surveys in
Panama.
John Lloyd Stephens died in New York City in 1852 after contracting
a tropical disease during his stay in Panama. Although a forerunner
in the U.S. excursion into excavating Panama and laying ground-work
for the future Panama Canal, Stephens will be forever remembered
as the intrepid explorer who, along with his accomplished artist
friend Frederick Catherwood, toiled through the jungles of the
Yucatán bringing the world its first view --in artist sketches--
of this fascinating civilization.
Shortly after their return to the States in 1842, the Caste
War of the Yucatán broke out, closing the Yucatán's borders
to foreigners for nearly 60 years. But the writings and renderings
of these two men stoked the imaginations of countless minds
on two continents, as the world clamored to know more about
this then unknown, advanced civilization. Their tale, this incident
of travel in Yucatán, kept the world hanging on for half a century
until the next installment would come on the mysterious Maya,
by yet another explorer of the Yucatán.
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