Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone
A guest article by Jeanine Kitchel | January 2025
Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and Greek influences … Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due.
About Jeanine Kitchel, this week’s guest writer
Jeanine Kitchel writes about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán. Her ongoing love of Mexico led her to the Yucatán where she built a house and opened a bookstore in Puerto Morelos. Author of four books, Jeanine’s work has appeared in The Miami Herald, The News, Mexico City, Herald International, Mexico City, Fodor's Travel Guides, Mexico File, MexConnect, Sac-Be and more. Find her on Substack at the link below.
If you’re new here, the Society of History Writers is founded upon the principle of collaboration. It’s the ONLY space on Substack dedicated to bringing writers of history and historical fiction together to share their experience, grow in their craft, and share their writing exclusively with a growing worldwide audience. I am honoured to provide this space to spotlight your writing and share it with colleagues and readers across the world.
Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone
Jeanine Kitchel
In 1839 an energetic American writer and a talented British artist, adventurers to the core, braved the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras and became the first English speaking travelers to explore this region originally known only as Maya. William Carlsen’s Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya, magnificently captures their journey.
Though a lawyer by profession, John Lloyd Stephens fell hard for archeology after a two-year sabbatical took him to Europe and the Mediterranean in the mid-1830s. After trekking through deserts and ancient pyramid sites he came away fueled with a desire for more of the same. Simultaneously he discovered he could write and was dubbed ‘the American traveler’ after he penned his first best seller about Egypt’s pyramids, the Nile, Petra, and the Holy Land.
British artist Frederick Catherwood gained his footing during the ‘Egyptomania’ craze that hit London in the 1820s. A bit older than Stephens, he reached Egypt and the Nile in 1823 and discovered he had an uncanny ability to portray ancient monuments and archeological digs with great accuracy. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that in the end would take him to Copán and Palenque, Uxmal, Labna, Chichén Itzá, and beyond.
Central America Beckons
Serendipity brought the adventurers together in London and, shortly afterwards, Stephens received a special ambassadorship to Central America from President Martin Van Buren to negotiate treaties with several Latin America countries.
Stephens immediately contacted Catherwood and asked him to come along for the ride. After political issues were settled, they’d go exploring for ancient ruins.
The duo headed south and after an intense journey through war-torn Guatemala and Honduras, Stephens finished what he could of his diplomatic workload. It was time for exploration with their first destination, Copán.
Spurred on by a letter written to the Spanish king about ancient sites with large stone structures from an explorer named Deigo Garcia de Palacio three hundred years earlier, Stephens and Catherwood followed the trail of Central American patriot Colonel Juan Galindo. Galindo had discovered the archived letter and traveled to both Palenque and Copán in 1834. Stephens and Catherwood would arrive five years later after pouring over sketchy site coordinates from Galindo’s report made to higher-ups.
Advanced Civilization
Galindo believed whoever built these stone monuments had been an advanced civilization, and the artisans who created the works did so without iron tools. The monuments were covered in hieroglyphics and he conceived it was phonetic writing which proved accurate, though it would take more than a hundred years to confirm his theory.
He believed the site was the seat of a great power, a large population and a people advanced in the arts. It had a grand plaza that could compete with the colloseum of Rome, he wrote. He emphasized that local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s history. And, unbelievably, the account that pushed Galindo to explore Copán had accumulated dust in the archives of a Spanish court for more than three centuries. This mysterious and intriguing report was the reason Stephens and Catherwood found themselves in the depths of a Honduran jungle.
Because terrain in southern Mexico, western Guatemala and Honduras is a thick tangle of vegetation filled with rain forests and swamps, parts of the land were a mystery even to the Maya who lived there. Locals had no explanation for the stone blocks and imposing structures and knew nothing of their creators. So dense was the jungle that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés passed within one hundred miles of Palenque in the early 1500s, never learning how near he was to a massive pyramid site. (The classic Maya collapse occurred around A.D. 900).
Where did they come from?
Galindo’s revolutionary view of an ancient sophisticated civilization with no ties to their Northern European brethren fell on deaf ears. Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and Greek influences, speculating somehow one of these cultures had crossed the Atlantic, conquered the native locals, built the structures, never to be seen again. Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due.
These discoveries continued to baffle western intellects and religious scholars alike. The existence of vast sophisticated cities hidden in the middle of Central American jungles threatened the biblical order of the known world. Where did these people come from and how old were their cities? One explorer, a crazy outlier named ‘Count’ Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck, made an accidentally correct claim when he stated Uxmal was at least one thousand years old, basing his claim on the concentric tree circles he counted from a tree that implanted itself in the building’s entryway after it was already in ruins.
It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their old world explorations, to examine the evidence at the sites and forge a new, correct narrative.
Capturing Copán’s Essence
Though Stephens’ written descriptions of the sites were detailed and informative, it was Catherwood’s otherworldly sketches that would forever change the way the world viewed the mysterious, previously unknown Maya culture.
On their first week at Copán, Catherwood would toss out countless attempts at artistically capturing the Maya stelae (stones with hieroglyphs) that he found. At first his western mind could simply not contemplate, then draw, what he was seeing. To him, a western European, the gigantic Copán sculptures, some four to five meters high, were so profoundly different than the antiquities of the mideast he had a difficult time rendering them.
The two veteran travelers who had toured the wonders of Egypt knew they were in the cross hairs of an incredibly advanced civilization and they were now on ‘new ground’, as Stephens wrote later in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, his best seller about the Maya world.
To capture the soul of the sculptures and to assist himself in so doing, Catherwood took photos with his Camera Lucida, the precursor to a modern camera, then from those drawings, he attempted to re-draw what he saw. Though it took him many tries, a slight shift in his perspective broke through and with persistence, he finally got it right. He filled page after page with drawings rich in detail of the unfathomable hieroglyphics, monuments, sculptings. His drawings would prove so accurate that long into the future, archeologists would be able to read them when they finally broke the Maya code in 1976 at the famous Palenque Round Table in Chiapas, Mexico.
But at the time, to convince an uncertain world of what they were seeing, it would take not only the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed drawings to put Copán, Palenque and other Maya sites on the map, it would also take Stephens’ energetic and romantic prose to seal the deal.
Copán and Palenque were just the beginning of Stephens and Catherwood’s Maya explorations. They would go on to view 44 sites in all, many detailed in Jungle of Stone. The struggles they endured to bring this discovery to the world hit them hard. Both were forever plagued by side effects from malaria and other diseases contracted while chasing pyramids.
Catherwood’s Sketches
Even if you’re not in the mood for a long read, Frederick Catherwood’s incredible sketches shown in the book, many in color, make Jungle of Stone worthwhile. And if you want a concise overview of how the Maya civilization became recognized in the New World, this book is a gem.
Have you read Jungle of Stone?
What did you make of it? Are you tempted now, having read Jeanine’s review? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments and share this unique window into early western interactions with the extraordinary Mayan world.
What to write for the Society of History Writers?
All the details you need to know can be found in the post below. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
If you enjoyed this extract, here are three recent guest articles featured on the Society of History Writers.
Members!
Don’t forget that the window for feedback on your writing is open only until 25th February 2025. All details in the post below.
Want to find out more about the Society of History Writers?
 | A guest post by
|
Great article!!! I just pulled the book off our shelf, starting to read it. Thanks for posting this!