On the Trail of the Maya Explorer: Tracing the Epic Journey of John Lloyd Stephens
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On the Trail of the Maya Explorer: Tracing the Epic Journey of John Lloyd Stephens
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Overview
A Mesoamerican travel book from two perspectives and two centuries.
In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, then 31 years old, and his traveling companion, artist Frederick Catherwood, disappeared into the vast rain forest of eastern Guatemala. They had heard rumors that remains of a civilization of incomparable artistic and cultural merit were moldering in the steamy lowland jungles. They braved Indian uprisings, road agents, heat, and biting insects to eventually encounter what is today known as the lost civilization of the Maya.
In 1841 Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan to instant acclaim with both American and international audiences. His conversational style was fresh and crisp and his subject matter, the search for lost cities on the Central American isthmus, was romantic and adventurous. Stephens's book has been characterized as the "great American nonfiction narrative of the 19th century." Indeed, what Stephens wrote about the Maya makes a major contribution to Maya studies.
Steve Glassman retraces Stephens's route, visiting the same archaeological sites, towns, markets, and churches and meeting along the way the descendants of those people Stephens described, from mestizo en route to the cornfields to town elders welcoming the Norte Americanos. Glassman's work interlaces discussion of the history, natural environment, and architecture of the region with descriptions of the people who live and work there. Glassman compares his 20th-century experience with Stephens's 19th-century exploration, gazing in awe at the same monumental pyramids, eating similar foods, and avoiding the political clashes that disrupt the governments and economies of the area.
Stephens's books are still widely available, but his importance to literary professionals has been overlooked. With this new travelogue, Glassman reaffirms Stephens's reputation and brings his work to wider critical and public attention.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817383220 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2009 |
| Series: | Fire Ant Books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Steve Glassman is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and author of Blood on the Moon and The Near Death Experiment.
Read an Excerpt
On the Trail of the Maya Explorer
Tracing the Epic Journey of John Lloyd Stephens
By Steve Glassman
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8322-0
CHAPTER 1
Landfall in Belize
From the quarterdeck of the English brig Mary Ann in October 1839, John Lloyd Stephens took his first sighting of the Central American isthmus, which he called in his endearingly idiosyncratic way, Balize. The colony was a little nail paring of land controlled by the British, appearing like Venice and Alexandria to rise out of the water. A range of white houses extended a mile along the shore, terminated at one end by the Government House, and at the other by the barracks, and intersected by the river Balize, the bridge across which formed a picturesque object. While the fort on a little island at the mouth of the river, the spire of a Gothic church behind the Government House, and groves of coconut trees, which at the distance reminded us of the palm trees of Egypt, gave it an appearance of beauty. Four ships, sundry schooners, bungoes, canoes and a steamboat were riding at anchor in the harbor. Alongside the vessels were rafts of mahogany. Far out a negro was paddling a log of the same costly timber, and the government dory which boarded us when we came to anchor was made of the trunk of a mahogany tree.
The first task confronting the newly appointed U.S. minister to Spanish Central America—on a confidential mission to see a treaty with the central government ratified—was finding himself a room for the night. Throwing aside the dignity of his office, the five-foot, nine-inch Stephens, with sun-bleached reddish hair and searchlight eyes that matched the aquamarine of the Caribbean, slogged across the bridge over Haulover Creek to the low dives near the barracks. Although never one to stand on ceremony, it was only recently that the thirty-three-year-old Stephens had any particular reason to regard himself as a man of propriety. He started off as an underachiever.
After graduating from Columbia College and Tapping Reeves's law school in 1824, Stephens hung out in coffeehouses discussing books and politics rather than attending to his family's New York hardware business. In season, he stumped for populist Jacksonian Democrats, but after a particularly vociferous campaign he came down with a case of strep throat. His voice was gone; no more speeches. The prescribed cure was a change of climate. In 1834, at the age of twenty-nine, Stephens was packed off to Europe. His family's strategy worked: his interests evolved. He took up antiquities, and rumors of ancient ruins in Central America caught his fancy. Most authorities, on racial grounds, believed that Native Americans were incapable of high culture. Stephens determined to find out. Two enormous stumbling blocks lay in his way. The first, finances, was neatly solved when letters penned to friends found their way into literary magazines, and Harper & Sons tendered a book contract. In a few months he produced a manuscript with the ungainly title of Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petraea, and the Holy Land. It and the sequel did impressively well at the booksellers.
The book's popularity was due, in part, to the exotic places Stephens had ventured. But partly too it was due to the character of the author. He typified the kind of person Americans already believed themselves to be. He was adventurous, friendly, intelligent but without pretension—slogging through the muddy streets of the former alluvial swamp that was Belize did not bother him at all—and clean-cut in his way, showing a healthy, even clinical interest in the opposite sex.
The second stumbling-block problem was much harder to solve. Spanish Central America was embroiled in a fratricidal civil war, not a place for even the most intrepid traveler. When the newly appointed American minister to Central America, William Legget, a New York journalist with political connections died, Stephens applied for the post. Those speeches for the Democratic Party in New York were not forgotten. In the fall of 1839, Stephens had the appointment as American minister and was off to Central America.
I pushed my light pickup relentlessly for a solid week. Now, on New Year's Eve 1991, I had made Belize City, my first time in the capital of this Central American republic. In every other place where I had followed Stephens's trail, I could look through the pages of his Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan and see a template of the modern place. But Belize City was different. The streets of the town swarmed with humanity—as Stephens had reported—but everything else had changed. The groves of coconut trees Stephens had seen from the deck of the Mary Ann were gone. In fact, hardly anything green was visible. Weathered frame houses stood shoulder to shoulder at four or more stories along narrow serpentine lanes. My little truck crept along Freetown Road then got snarled among bodies and traffic in Cinderella Plaza, a gravel-paved court hemmed in by dilapidated buildings. I was expectinga paradise but instead found something considerably more urban, even inner-urban.
A tall, rangy Rasta, sporting dreadlocks—hair and beard reaching to his waist—marched, hands and elbows flying, down the street. On spotting me his eyes flared like a guttering lamp. In an instant he changed course, leaped to my window, and poked his head into the cab. "Hey, mon, don't you remember me?" he screamed, dealing me what I would learn was one of the street hustler's standard ploys. "You can spare a little change for your old friend. How about, say, twenty dollars?"
The car in front of me jolted ahead. I let out the clutch. A policeman in a snappy Sam Browne belt motioned me onto a bridge. Suddenly, for the first time since entering Belize, I got that funny sense of parallax vision as in an old rangefinder camera when you fiddle with the tuning knob and the images sync up. The bridge, the market-place and the streets and stores were thronged, John Lloyd Stephens had written of the scene. In Stephens's time, as now, old women in hats haggled with street vendors, and gangs of urchins jostled in the crowds. Long ago, elderly men chatted with cronies on corners, girls strolled, and the old-time equivalent of Rasta-guys strutted shirtless, although I imagine reggae was not blaring from every street corner.
My Ford Ranger poked along Albert Street, the city swarming with life all around. From the curb, a vendor offered a small paper bag of salt-dusted Indian jujubes—tropical fruit, the size and color of large olives and tasting oddly like miniature Granny Smith apples. A half-mile farther down the street I left-turned at the paint-peeling, derelict-looking Mopan Hotel, a Belize institution frequented by scholars and serious travelers, and parked parallel to the Caribbean.
The apartment I had rented by long distance was situated just fifteen paces from the sea and not far from where the Mary Ann, with Stephens aboard, rode at anchor exactly 152 years, two months, and one day earlier. Two blocks to my right in a coconut palm grove—finally there were some trees—loomed Government House, a large frame building that looked as though it was the same one Stephens viewed from the Mary Ann. The steeple of the Anglican cathedral, which was indeed the same edifice Stephens took in, rose above the roofs of neighboring houses. It is claimed that slaves built the church with bricks brought as ballast from England. Across the channel lay the district still named for old Fort George; its main street was Barracks Road, intersected by Fort Street. Just as in Stephens's day, various fishing boats and lighters were moored in the bay.
Stephens's perambulations about Belize fetched him—in lieu of a room—a friendly invitation to enter a house, where customs stranger than any he had encountered in the Levant, along the Nile, or in the frozen wastes of Russia and Poland embarrassed him. His host, a merchant, was indulging in a "second breakfast," something Stephens found disgusting. But it was the social customs, as Stephens put it, "that some of my countrymen might find particularly strange." At table sat the merchant, his wife, two British officers, and two mulattos—or Creoles, as they are known today. A place was made for the American minister between the Creoles.
Of the six thousand inhabitants of Belize, two-thirds were Creoles. The town—Stephens reported—seemed entirely in possession of blacks. Stephens could not help remarking that the frock was their only article of [female] dress, and that it was the fashion of these ladies to drop this considerably off from the right shoulder, and to carry the skirt in the left hand, and raise it to any height necessary for crossing puddles. Good democrat as well as Democrat, Stephens took the seat between the two men of color without batting an eye. He noted that before he had been an hour in Belize he had learned that the great work of practical amalgamation, the subject of so much angry controversy at home, had been going on quietly for generations in Belize.
In the meantime, lodging had been found. Stephens sloshed through the flooded streets to a vacant house, way over on the wrong side of the river. A large puddle had to be cleared by a jump, made all the more difficult by the kippered fish and eggs he had enjoyed with his new friends. Fortunately, the house sat on piles two feet above the ground; underneath stood water nearly a foot deep. The yard, notwithstanding the mud and water, swarmed with little children.
On the way back to my new digs on the Southern Foreshore from a grocery run, I crossed a wrong bridge over a canal and ended up in the area of town called Mesopotamia, which was served by Tigris and Euphrates Avenues. I passed blocks of houses, like the one Stephens rented, up on piers with the grounds flooded by recent heavy rains, the last gasp of the rainy season. A woman in gum boots was hanging clothes on the line while her children splashed in the water in the yard, much as Stephens had described so many years before.
Stephens spent three days and two nights in Belize City. The next day we had to make preparations for our journey into the interior, besides which we had an opportunity of seeing a little of Balize. I spent a semester as a Fulbright lecturer at the University College of Belize. And like Stephens, I spent time learning about and seeing the country. The fact sheet published by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Public Affairs described Belize as a cough-drop-shaped nation roughly the size and shape of Vermont, lodged between Mexico on the north and Guatemala on the west and south. The Caribbean Sea bordered it on the east. It had achieved independence from Britain barely ten years before, on September 21, 1981, and had only been officially called Belize again for the past twenty years, being known as British Honduras for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fewer than two hundred thousand persons inhabited the country. The most interesting fact was that neighboring Guatemala claimed Belize in its entirety as its twenty-third department.
The Honduras Almanac, which assumes to be the chronicler of this settlement, throws a romance around its early history by ascribing its origin to a Scotch buccaneer named Wallace. The fame of the wealth of the New World, and the return of the Spanish galleons laden with the riches of Mexico and Peru, brought upon the coast of America hordes of adventurers—to call them by no harsher name—from England and France, of whom Wallace, one of the most noted and daring, found refuge and security behind the keys and reefs which protect the harbor of Belize. Strengthened by an alliance with the Indians of the Mosquito shore [of Nicaragua and Honduras] for the purpose of cutting mahogany, he set the Spaniards at defiance. Ever since the territory of Belize has been the subject of negotiation and contest. To this day the people of Central America claim it as their own.
Modern scholars generally agree with Stephens that the corruption of the surname of pirate Peter Wallace—known as "Ballis" to the Spanish—accounts for the origin of the country's name, which in Stephens's time was officially known as the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras. Wallace's colony was not the only pirate's lair along the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean coasts. English-speaking enclaves existed as far north as Campeche in Mexico and south to Nicaragua. Wallace's crew was operating as early as 1638. After 1667, when the European powers agreed to suppress piracy, the pirates, so-called Baymen, settled down and started to extract logwood from the interior. Logwood is a small tree that was the principal source of yellow dye in the days before artificial coloring. The work was not difficult. The money was good. The life was rough. According to a shipwrecked mariner forced to live among the Baymen in 1720, they were "generally a rude drunken Crew, some of which [had] been Pirates." He said he had "little Comfort living among these Crew of ungovernable Wretches, where was little else to be heard but Blasphemy, Cursing and Swearing."
The 1670 Godolphin Treaty affirmed English rights to lands already occupied in the Caribbean. Unfortunately for the Baymen, the treaty did not spell out which specific territories were included. On at least four occasions, in 1717, 1730, 1754, and 1779, Spanish attacks forced the abandonment of the colony. But the Baymen returned each time, often reinforced by settlers from more exposed locations, such as Campeche in 1717 and Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast in 1787. Finally worn down, the Spanish gave the British the right to cut wood in the northern two-thirds of present-day Belize while the Spanish formally retained sovereignty to the land. Plantation agriculture and local government were prohibited, although the principal men continued their once-a-year legislative council, called the Public Meeting.
Not surprisingly, Stephens, a lawyer himself, was amused by the legal apparatus devised by the Public Meeting. The court consists of seven judges, five of whom were in their places. One of them, Mr. Walker, invited me to one of the vacant seats. I objected, on the ground that my costume was not becoming so dignified a position. He insisted, and I took my seat, in a roundabout jacket, upon a chair exceedingly comfortable for the administration of justice. As there is no bar to prepare men for the bench, the judges of course are not lawyers. Of the five then sitting, two were merchants, one a mahogany cutter, and the mulatto, second to none of the others in characters or qualifications, a doctor. There was no absence of litigation. I remarked that regularly the merits of the case were so clearly brought out, that, when it was committed to the jury, there was no question about the verdict.
Stephens took a particular interest in the black populace of the colony. He enumerated its population, four thousand, and its type and condition of employment: in gangs as mahogany cutters and that their condition was always better than that of plantation slaves. Even before the act for general abolition throughout the British dominions [in 1838], they were actually free. Stephens appears to have represented the perquisites of the Creole population of Belize as greater than the historical record warrants. For instance, the British superintendent had to insist the white population allow a Creole representative be seated at the Public Meeting (presumably the doctor Stephens sat the bench with) under the threat of penalty.
Stephens's seeming exaggeration may be due to his own liberal sentiments or simply to his desire to shock his American readers—and most likely both. In any case, Stephens visited what he termed the negro school [which] stood in the rear of the Government House. The boys' department consisted of about two hundred, from three to fifteen years of age. Other outings included a boat trip in the governor's pit-pan, discussed below, and a horseback ride with Mr. Walker. Immediately beyond the suburbs we entered upon an uncultivated country, low and flat, but very rich. We passed a racecourse, now disused and grown over. Between it and the inhabited part of Central America is a wilderness, unbroken even by an Indian path. In this passage the romantic Stephens, who obsessed on the wild state of the country, is at odds with Stephens the progressive, who was in favor of development. His paean to the fertility of the country was, no doubt, the obligatory boilerplate the local chamber of commerce types expected as payment for their hospitality. However, Stephens could not keep from being bemused by the fate of the great Central American agricultural association, formed for the building of cities, raising the price of land, accommodating emigrants, and improvement generally. On the rich plains of the province of Vera Paz they had established the site of New Liverpool, which only wanted houses and a population to become a city. On the wheel of the steamboat, the last remnant of the stock in trade [of the company], was a brass circular plate, on which, in strange juxtaposition, were the words, "Vera Paz," "London."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Trail of the Maya Explorer by Steve Glassman. Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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