33.Ibid. Aspinwall writes from New York to Stephens at Navy Bay on April 10, 1851.
34.According to the manifest of the steamer Empire City, Stephens arrived in New York on July 7, 1851.
35.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Stephens writes his father from Navy Bay on January 27, 1852.
36.Eissler and Totten, “The Panama Canal.”
37.The name was changed later to Colón by the New Granadan government.
38.“City of Aspinwall,” Daily Alta California (San Francisco), 1852. See also Totten’s account in “The Panama Canal.”
39.This account is given in Von Hagen’s Maya Explorer, for which no reference is given. No other such account could be found, and the opposite evaluation of Stephen’s health appeared in Hawk’s obituary in Harper’s Magazine.
40.See letter Francis M. Preston, July 24, 1851.
41.According to the manifest for the steamer Georgia, Stephens arrived on April 21, 1852.
42.Hawks, “The Late John L. Stephens.”
43.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Stephens writes his father from Navy Bay on January 27, 1852.
44.BANC MSS ZZ 116. A copy of his hotel bill for the dates April 20 through May 6.
45.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Stephens writes his father from Navy Bay on January 27, 1852.
46.New York Evening Express, May 21, 1852; New-York Tribune, May 21, 1852.
CHAPTER 26: TOGETHER AGAIN
1.“No. 297 Site of One of the First Discoveries of Quartz Gold in California,” California State Historical Landmarks in Nevada County, California Environmental Resources Evaluation System.
2.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Catherwood writes Stephens from San Francisco on June 11, 1851.
3.A. Delano and I. McKee, Alonzo Delano’s California Correspondence: Being Letters Hitherto Uncollected from the Ottawa (Illinois) Free Trader and the New Orleans True Delta, 1849–1952 (Sacramento, CA: Sacramento Book Collectors Club, 1952).
4.Sacramento Transcript,1851; Sacramento Daily Union, 1853.
5.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Catherwood writes from San Francisco to Stephens on June 11, 1851.
6.Ibid. Catherwood writes from San Francisco to Stephens January 1851.
7.“Banking Institute,” Daily News (London), 1852.
8.The site has never been identified and no ruins of an ancient civilization like the Maya are known to exist in California.
9.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Catherwood writes from London to Stephens in Navy Bay on April 28, 1852.
10.Catherwood had once chided Stephens that he should destroy the letters that he sent to Stephens, “knowing how lax you are about your letters.” Ibid., Catherwood to Stephens, August 28, 1850. Whether this amounted to a policy on Catherwood’s part also to destroy letters he received, we do not know. Regardless, without Stephens’s letters a major part of their relationship has been lost. Stephens ignored Catherwood’s entreaty, fortunately, and saved at least some of his correspondence.
11.Ibid. Catherwood writes from London to Stephens in New York on June 25, 1852.
12.Ibid. Aspinwall in New York writes Stephens in Hempstead, New York, on July 13, 1852.
13.Ibid. Spies in New York writes to Stephens in Hempstead, New York, on August 18, 1852.
14.Ibid. Various letter from Spies to Stephens describe the arrival of steamers with news from the isthmus.
15.U. S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1990); U. S. Grant and J. M. McPherson, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 235.
16.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Spies in note to Stephens on “Wednesday” but undated.
17.New York Herald, September 21, 1852; New York Daily News, 1852; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 22, 1852.
18.Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, p. 33.
19.Catherwood’s “biographical notice” in the 1854 British edition of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan states that he and Stephens met a second time nearly two years following their time together in Panama. Catherwood’s September 20, 1852, arrival on the SS Pacific with his son appears in the ship’s manifest for the “District of New York – Port of New York.” Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897. The National Archives.
20.BANC MSS ZZ 116. Catherwood writes from Panama to Benjamin Stephens in New York on April 23, 1850.
21.Various dates have been given for the day Stephens died. October 10, 1852, was engraved on a silver plate on his casket. See death notice in Stephens’s Bancroft papers. His death certificate states October 14. His biographer Von Hagen gives the date as October 5 and 13 in his book Maya Explorer. But the consensus of the newspaper obituaries was that he died on a Tuesday evening, which would have been October 12. There is no dispute that he was interred in New York City’s Marble Cemetery on Friday, October 15. Stephens’s death certificate, issued by the New York State Department of Health, stated that the cause of death was hepatitis. John Lloyd Stephens Collection, 1946–47, New-York Historical Society, Von Hagen Papers.
22.BANC MSS ZZ 116. The details of Stephens’s funeral are contained in wtwo unidentified death notices found among his papers at the Bancroft Library.
23.New York City Marble Cemetery, a national historic landmark, is generally closed to the public, but can be visited by appointment or on certain days of the year when it is open to the public. It is located at 52–74 East Second Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village. Stephens’s crypt is one of the most prominent, centered directly opposite the gate as you enter. Nearly a century after Stephens’s interment, a ceremony was held in his honor on October 9, 1947, during which a plaque and a cartouche of a Mayan glyph designed by Catherwood were place above the entrance to the vault.
CHAPTER 27: MISSING
1.“West Mariposa Gold Quartz Mine Company,” Times (London), December 15, 1852. p. 9.
2.Daily Alta California (San Francisco), August 30, 1852.
3.“Gold Hill Mining,” Sacramento Daily Union, 1853.
4.W. H. Chamberlain and H. L. Wells, History of Yuba County, California with illustrations descriptive of its scenery, residences, public buildings, fine blocks and manufactories (Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1879), ch. 38. The railroad project was dropped the next year and resumed after four years in 1857 with new survey.
5.W. J. Lewis, F. Catherwood, et al., Report of the Engineers on the Survey of the Marysville and Benicia National Rail Road (Marysville, CA: California Express, 1853).
6.Times (London), March 22, 1854, p. 13; Stephens and Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.
7.It could be argued that Catherwood, who seemed perennially short of funds, had decided to cash in on Stephens’s book. With Stephens gone and at that time no international copyright law, he clearly would have been able to make his own publishing arrangement in England. While that could have been a motivation, the book—and their arduous exploration itself—had been a joint venture to some degree, and while Stephens was alive he reaped most if not all of the book’s monetary benefits, which proved to be substantial. It is conceivable also that he and Stephens had discussed and Stephens has approved such an edition before he died.
8.Stephens and Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. All following references are from the 1854 revised English edition.
9.The Collins line was formally called the New York & Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company.
10.Shaw, The Sea Shall Embrace Them. Shaw’s excellently researched book is a riveting account of the SS Arctic’s final voyage. Information here about the ship’s background and its final voyage and sinking have been taken from Shaw’s book, as well as eyewitness newspaper accounts. See, specifically, “The Loss of the Arctic,” New-York Daily Tribune, October 13, 1854, p. 1; “Loss of the United State Steamer Arctic,” Times (London), October 13, 1854, p. 13.
11.“Letter of Credit #7185,” Daily Alta C
alifornia (San Francisco), April, 15, 1855.
EPILOGUE
1.Based on the priest’s account and reports from nearby Indian villagers, Stephens believed the city might still be occupied. “If he is right,” Stephens wrote, “a place is left where Indians and an Indian city exist as Cortez and Alvarado found them; there are living men who can solve the mystery that hangs over the ruined cities of America; perhaps who can go to Copán and read the inscriptions on its monuments.” Tikal had been abandoned, however, like all the Classic-era Mayan cities, a thousand years earlier.
2.Pendergast, Palenque. Pendergast quotes from a March 18, 1840, dispatch sent from Frederick Chatfield to Belize superintendent MacDonald: “Mr. Stephens & the Yankified English artist who accompanies him, are gone to Quesaltenango, intending to get to Palenque across the Mexican border” (p. 143).
3.I. Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology: The Vanished Civilizations of Middle America (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 132.
5.This would have been a moment of sweet vindication for Stephens. Chatfield had belittled Stephen’s expedition to Central America in a dispatch to Colonel MacDonald ten years earlier: “I have no intelligence of the Travellers. Stephens is flying about the country to get materials for his Book.” But, of course, Stephens had no way of knowing about either dispatch.
6.Finally, in 1854, frustrated British Museum trustees commissioned two foreigners who were traveling through Central America, German explorer Moritz Wagner and Austrian naturalist Karl Ritter von Scherzer, to go to the ruins and investigate the practicalities of removing the sculptures. However, the two men were unwilling to risk their lives going to Copán while a war was under way between Honduras and Guatemala. They settled on investigating Quiriguá instead. Scherzer produced a report on the ruins there for the museum. But in the end the entire project was dropped and it would be decades before the British obtained any significant Mayan sculptures.
7.J. Peréz de Lara, “A Brief History of the Rediscovery of Tikal and Archaeological Work at the Site,” http://www.mesoweb.com/tikal/features/history/history.html.
8.I. Graham, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Graham provides a fascinating and affectionate account of Maudslay’s life.
9.Although Teobert Maler was Austrian, some of his work was sponsored by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
10.Graham, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya.
11.Coe, Breaking the Maya Code. Coe gives a masterful account of the long and arduous work involved in the decipherment of the Maya’s hieroglyphs. In addition, he covers the history of Maya research through the twentieth century with interesting biographical snapshots of many of the characters involved.
12.Eissler and Totten, “The Panama Canal.”
13.http://www.czbrats.com/Articles/prropen.htm.
14.Robinson, Panama, p. 21.
15.McCullough, The Path Between the Seas.
16.http://www.panarail.com/en/history/index-03.ht.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
Pages in italics contain illustrations.
Abbott, Peter, 213–214, 307, 308
Abbott y Suarez, Gertrude Pasquala, 213–214
Abinger, Lord (James Scarlett), 306–310
Aglio, Augustino A., 250/490-13
Aké (Yucatán), 354
Albino (helper), 305, 313, 320, 321, 325, 327, 340, 346
Alexander, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich (Baron von Humboldt). See Humboldt, Alexander von
Alexandre (ship), 274–277, 354
Allen, George, 449, 450, 451
Almendáriz, Ignacio, 247, 248, 249, 489-9, 251
El Alouin, Sheik, 97, 98–100, 101, 103–106
Alvarado, Gonzalo, 234
Alvarado, Pedro de, 228, 229, 230
American Museum of Natural History (New York), 274, 320/498n1
Ancient Cities of the New World (Charnay), 456
The Ancient Maya (Sharer), 363/502n1
Anna Louise (ship), 355, 435
Antarctica claim, 31, 52–53
Anthon, Charles, 74–75, 112
La Antigua Guatemala, 134, 142–143, 228, 486-3
Antiquités Mexicaines (Baradère), 249/490n12, 250
Aqaba, 95–98, 97
archaeology
ball courts, 315, 337, 338, 372, 374
Catherwood theory on ruin builders, 366–367, 393
Chichén Itzá cenote dredging, 339/499n8
Chichén Itzá equinox sun, 337/499n7
Coba (Yucatán), 353
explorers inspired, 455–459, 456, 457
first sight of Copán ruins, 59–65
Incidents of Travel in Central America appendices, 359
Labphak population, 328–329. See also population figures
layers of monuments, 383
Mayan hieroglyphs, 330/498n3, 363/502n1, 459
Mayan history, 130, 359
Mayapán as late post-classic, 295
as new science, xii, 31, 362
Oxkintok excavations, 302
Palenque tomb, 261/493n30
Palenque’s urban core, 264
speed of civilization advancement, 369, 370
Stephens’s Egypt trek, 91
Stephens’s theories on ruin builders, 285–288, 294/497n8, 358, 359–362
timelines of ruins, 295, 333, 361, 386
Toniná later finds, 240
architrave, 318–319. See also wooden lintels
archways, 294/497n8, 317–318, 321–323, 322, 359/501n11, 393
SS Arctic, 449–452, 451, 452
Arundale, Francis, 209, 211, 212, 215
Asebedo, José Maria, 121–122, 124
Aspinwall, New Granada, 433–434, 435, 441, 460
Aspinwall, William Henry, 407–409, 411, 412, 416, 417–418, 423, 426–427, 430, 435, 436, 440, 442
Athens, 82–83, 84, 200
Atitlán, Lago de, 233
Augustin (cook), 25, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 44, 132, 133–134, 139
Aztecs, xii–xiii, xiv, 56, 250/490n13, 334, 375
Baldwin, James, 410, 411, 420, 425, 428, 432, 461
Bancroft, George, 28
Baradère, Abbé, 249/490n12, 250/491n16
Bartlett, John Russell, 222, 402
HMS Beagle, 69
Bedouin, 12, 91, 94–101, 99, 103–106
Belize, 10, 15–17, 137, 138
Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 201
Bennett, MaryAnn, 279/494n5
Benton, Thomas Hart, 413
Beresford, Henry, 278–279
Bingham, Hiram, 396
Bogotá, New Granada, 420–421, 422, 423
Bolonchen, Yucatán, 326–328
Bonomi, Joseph, 209, 211, 214, 216, 217, 307–309
Bonpland, Aimé, 68
Breaking the Maya Code (Coe), 363/502n1
British Guyana, 399–400, 415
British Museum, 123, 206/484n31, 455
Brown, James, 449, 450
Bryant, William Cullen, 28, 401, 402
Burckhardt, Johann, 91, 98
Burford, Robert, 216, 217–218, 220, 220/485n52, 221
Burke, John, 333/499n5
Cabañas, José Trinidad, 169
Cabot, Samuel, Jr.
bird memorandum in Incidents, 359
bird specimens, 290, 293, 303, 344, 345, 346, 351, 353, 354, 355
Bolonchen water cave, 327
Dzibilnocac, 329
as eye surgeon, 292–293
joining expedition, 290–291
malaria, 305, 320, 325
Mayapán cenote, 296
Prescott on Cabot illness, 391/503n7
on Stephens to Prescott, 397
Stephens’s visit post-Yucatán, 358
Tuloom, 349, 351
Caddy, John Herbert
as British officer, 49–50
Lake Petén Itzá, 146
name as Palenque graffiti, 261
Palenque illustrations displayed, 310, 312
tick attacks, 144, 165, 166
See also Palenque British expedition
Calakmul (Mexico), 378, 385
Calderón, José Antonio, 245, 246
Calel, Copán, 56
California
Catherwood, 426–428, 437, 438
Gold Hill Quartz Mining Co., 437–440, 447
London’s Banking Institute, 439
gold rush, 3, 4, 411–412, 413, 414, 418, 431, 437, 454
Panama Railroad workers, 4, 425, 429
Indian ruins, 427, 439
Panama City jammed, 412/507n18, 420
U.S. state, 409
SS California, 411, 412/507n18
camera lucida, 31–32, 126, 127, 210, 255, 281, 321, 350
Camino Real, 32–38
Camotán, Honduras, 42–45, 124
Capac, Huayna, 56
Carlos III (King of Spain), 246
Carlos IV (King of Spain), 248
Carmi, Illinois, 79, 80
Carnick, I., 145, 146, 312
Carrera, Petrona (wife), 186
Carrera, Rafael, 140
background of, 152–153
cholera, 148
Church and, 139, 155, 156, 157, 174
Guatemala City overrun, 41, 135, 139, 153–155
Morazán versus
Guatemala City aftermath, 180
meeting Morazán in battle, 173, 187
origins, 149
Quetzaltenango uprising, 185–186
republic at stake, 147, 154–155, 170–175
San Salvador assault, 187
Palenque journey safety, 184–185, 186–187
president for life, 141/480n6
Quetzaltenango control, 172, 180, 183, 184–185, 233–234
Stephens’s meetings with, 138–142, 186–187
wounds, 140, 141, 148, 153, 155
Carrillo, Braulio, 161–162
Cáscara, Francisco, 41, 43, 45, 124, 178
Caslon, Henry, 279, 280, 288, 306–310
Castañeda, José Luciano, 248, 249
Catherwood, Alfred (brother), 194, 195, 268, 392