On the Trail of the Maya Explorer: Tracing the Epic Journey of John Lloyd Stephens

Introduction

The John Lloyd Stephens Tour Guide

In October 1839, John Lloyd Stephens climbed on a mule and began the arduous ascent of the Mico Mountains in eastern Guatemala. According to Stephens, Central America at that time was an obscure land filled with volcanoes and earthquakes, torn and distracted by civil war, and with not much to offer a young man seeking fame and fortune.

Stephens’s mule-back expedition was arguably the most important, from the point of view of the arts and sciences, undertaken by a lone American until then. His scientific achievement was the discovery of the lost civilization of the ancient Maya. The artistic upshot of the expedition was the first nonfiction international best-seller produced by an American.

I made the acquaintance of John Lloyd Stephens in Esquipulas, Guatemala, when a monk lent me a Dover reprint of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. As it happened, Stephens and I stayed at the same place in Esquipulas, the monastery attached to the gargantuan basilica built in 1747 to house the figure of the miracle-working Black Christ, the most revered shrine of Central America. Stephens was greatly impressed with the basilica; he likened it to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I was taken with the other things Stephens had to say about the place—for instance, that in good years eighty thousand pilgrims braved the roads of Central America to celebrate the Black Christ’s feast days in January.

It was downright eerie to read a book written in the first half of the nineteenth century that described the place with such telling accuracy almost a century and a half later. Just as importantly, Stephens’s book made a similar hit with his contemporaries. In the first three months after publication, his Incidents of Travel sold twenty thousand copies, an astronomical figure in those days. Today, professional antiquarians call Stephens the Father of American Archaeology.¹ At a time when the preferred explanation for Mesoamerican ruins was that they were the work of Atlantans or migrant Egyptians, Stephens made a good commonsense assessment of the ancient ruins he found. What he said about the Maya, a term he was the first to apply more or less as we understand it today, still holds up remarkably well.

Had the great Mayanists of the early and mid–twentieth century, Sylvanus Morley and J. Eric Thompson, paid closer attention to Stephens, they could have avoided one of the more embarrassing intellectual blunders of our time. Morley and Thompson claimed the Maya were a peaceful and peace-loving people ruled by priest-kings devoted to mathematical and astronomical studies. Modern scholarship—notably the breaking of the Maya hieroglyphic code—has shown, as Stephens predicted so many years ago, that the Maya were pretty much like other peoples (only a little more blood-sated).² For instance, Harvard archaeologist William Fash notes, Ironically, today’s scholars have come to realize the wisdom of many of Stephens’s original interpretations. Stephens correctly surmised that Copán and the other Maya ruins were the remains of indigenous New World peoples, that the human portraits on the monuments represented ‘deified kings and heroes.’ He also correctly guessed that the writing system recorded the history of the kings and their cities. However, many of Stephens’s contemporaries and successors, caught up in the romanticism of the era, proposed far less reasonable reconstructions.³

Given all this, you are probably asking yourself, why have I not heard of this fellow (assuming, of course, that you have not)? If you have not heard of Stephens, you are in abundant company. There have been few serious essays written by literary professionals on Stephens in recent years, and half (of the four) strive to introduce him to the reading and critical public with a general biography and a few pithy quotes from his work. Two such articles are Richard Preston’s America’s Egypt: John Lloyd Stephens and the Discovery of the Maya, which appeared in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, and Richard O’Mara’s The American Traveller, published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. The abstract of the latter says, O’Mara profiles American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and discusses some of his works. This provides an idea of the low level of critical discussion and exhibits the nearly supine literary profile Stephens cuts in O’Mara’s eyes; interestingly, the VQR is a creative journal, not a critical publication. In the past thirty-nine years, the Modern Language Association Bibliography, which indexes essays from all major and most minor critical sources in the English-speaking world, lists only two entries about John Lloyd Stephens. Neither study is devoted solely to Stephens.⁴ At the other end of the spectrum, a survey of anthologies of American literature used in freshman and sophomore courses turned up not so much as his name in the table of contents.

Nonetheless, three of Stephens’s four books are in print—all three, for instance, are on the shelf at the local Barnes & Noble. His masterpiece, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan is available in two editions, one from the Smithsonian Institution Press and the other a Dover reprint. The most ambitious secondary work on Stephens is Victor Wolfgang von Hagen’s biography, Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatán, which was written at the behest of Van Wyck Brooks shortly after World War II, and which has stayed in print sporadically through the years.

There is something incredibly romantic about a person who dies in oblivion and then long afterward is recognized as one of the great writers of the age (in point of fact, Stephens’s work was forgotten some time after his death). Just about everybody knows the story of Herman Melville, Stephens’s near-contemporary and admirer. Melville passed on thinking himself a wretched failure; his literary renaissance came four decades after his death. In recent years, the career of Zora Neale Hurston, who died in a poor-folks home and was buried in a potter’s field, has traced a similar trajectory. Stephens’s fortunes somehow seem more romantic than those two writers, because Melville, Hurston, and others such as Malcolm Lowry, have been restored by the literary establishment. Stephens, on the other hand, maintains a reputation as a classic writer by word of mouth (with some help from Central American historians and archaeologists who study him assiduously).

John Lloyd Stephens has fascinated—no, obsessed—me for the more than twenty years that have passed since I first made his acquaintance in that room of musty books in the basilica at Esquipulas, Guatemala. A few years ago, National Geographic did a spread on something called the Ruta Maya or the Maya route, a proposed trail through Central America for the serious amateur Mayanist. The route traces a path through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and lower Mexico. The bureaus of tourism in those countries readily took up the cry of the Mundo Maya, and today slick promotional material inveigling the modern traveler can be found in practically any travel agency in North America. And following that trail, or parts of it, are hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Is it any surprise that the Ruta Maya was blazed by John Lloyd Stephens—on the back of a mule—in his epoch-making journey long ago? Indeed, although he may have missed a few of the more obscure sites on the modern route, the indefatigable Stephens visited others that still have not been studied by modern archaeologists.

To me, all this meant a book about Stephens was simply crying to be done, and Lady Fortuna had tapped me on the shoulder and insisted I be the one to do it (or so I felt). But what kind of book? A biography was not suited to my interests. Although by profession I teach literature and creative writing, I was not interested in doing a textual or any other kind of analysis of Stephens. While I was trying to sort out exactly the kind of treatment this material would get, I had more or less retraced the route of Stephens’s Central American journey in piecemeal fashion. That was when I hit on the sort of book I’m offering here, what might be called a split-view travel book—partly from Stephens’s perspective and partly from that of a modern traveler.

Of all places in the world, Central America must rank as one of the most eligible for Stephens’s 160-year-old tour guide. For instance, even today in good years about eighty thousand pilgrims converge on Esquipulas for the feast days in January, the same figure Stephens reported.⁵ Likewise, the startling air of surrealism Stephens ascribed to the sudden appearance of the colossal basilica of Esquipulas in a remote mountain valley mirrored my own feelings, although in Stephens’s time, when the way into the valley was on mule back, the effect must have been even more stupendous.

Stephens’s book makes for an effective tour guide for the rest of Central America and lower Mexico. For one thing, it is historically accurate. For another, his observations of the local folk are on target. His descriptions often make a transcendent leap clearly recognizable more than a century and a half later. The questions ballooning in the reader’s mind might be, "If all that is true, what is the need for this book, which might be styled a travel book about a travel book? Why not just go down to your local bookseller and buy a copy of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, which you have assured me may be found there?"

First of all, do by all means acquire a copy of Stephens’s book (do not forget there are two volumes—watch out for condensed versions). You might even purchase the companion volume written the following year and devoted only to the Yucatán. (From time to time I cite from the latter work but by and large I confine my itinerary and commentary to the earlier one.) However, despite the lucidity of Stephens’s prose, whether you are a general reader or a literary professional casting around for a topic for a dissertation or a critical article, you will no doubt find that Stephens lacks something in the way of context. As it happened, Stephens was wandering through Central America at a time when the political infrastructure of the modern state was forming—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say misforming. He witnessed a key clash between the forces of Central American union (the Liberals) and disunion (the Conservatives) in something approaching a definitive battle. That the Conservatives came out on top is evidenced by the political fragmentation still seen on the isthmus. But it is not so clear that the state of peonage or near-peonage of much of the area’s Indian population is due to the return of the Liberals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even a cursory understanding of Maya archaeology will show that John Lloyd Stephens was dead-on accurate in his surmises about the remarkable ruins he found moldering in the jungles. What is not apparent are the dogleg twists the course of archaeology took to return to many of the basic positions Stephens chartered in his narrative.

On the one hand, the book I offer here can be regarded as a halfway refuge. Enough of Stephens’s prose is presented to give a feel for his literary abilities and accomplishments. On the other hand, a smattering and in some cases even a bit more than a smattering of background is provided to help assimilate the material. I also provide my own view as a traveler on Stephens’s trail. All this is given in a nonjargonistic and nontechnical way (for the good reason that I am not an archaeologist or historian), readily accessible to the average reader.⁶ In short, the book I offer gives the chairbound tourist some of the advantages of the Central American traveler who goes around with Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in hand, of whom there are many.

Questions nag about Stephens. Why were his books so successful on publication? Why did he as a literary and historical figure fall into total eclipse, like the Maya cities he studied, for so long? And, finally, just what is the literary merit of his work? Does he deserve higher praise and more study?

So why were his books successful? There are two parts to the answer. The first is political. Stephens was not only a bred-to-the-bone New Yorker, he was also a Knickerbocker in the sense of being a member in good standing of the Knickerbocker literary establishment. Early in his career his family believed that he was squandering his law degree and ruining his life chances by hanging out in the Astor House bookstore discussing literature and politics. For once, this leisurely avocation paid off. New York, then as now, was the center of the literary industry in the country. And Stephens, wittingly or unwittingly, happened to ingratiate himself to the nascent literary elite. Had his Maya narratives been as pedestrian as the several other Central American travel narratives by Americans of the time, Stephens’s books would still have received a hearty reception upon publication.

Stephens’s work had great strengths. The first-person narrator is a regular go-ahead American. He is enterprising, industrious, cocky, good-humored, friendly, adventurous, a bit brash, inventive, and irreverent. Better yet, he was seeking after lost cities, which at the time was a hot topic. Just a generation before, the British and the French—Napoleon Bonaparte at the head of the French troops—clashed before the mighty pyramids of Cheops. The prize the leading countries of Europe sought was not some far off, over-populated desert, but the prestige and grandeur of ancient Egypt. Jean François Champollion, the linguist who deciphered the Rosetta stone, unearthed by French troops, was considered one of the great minds of the age for his intellectual triumph. Suddenly, Americans had a literary production that showed that they too were making their mark in antiquities. Or at least one of them, a John Lloyd Stephens of New York, was doing on his own what formerly European nation-states had been required to accomplish, that is, to bankroll an expedition to uncover lost cities of incomparable artistic and historical merit.

Even today, the mystique would be irresistible. In Stephens’s day, it was a juggernaut. But there was much more in Stephens’s narrative than just the ruins of a lost civilization to excite the passions of the romantically inclined. A second civilization was going to ruin in the fastness of the Central American isthmus. The Spanish had erected great buildings for government and especially for religion. For three centuries they had ruled with an iron hand—and now they too were gone, not claiming a single square foot of territory on the American continent. The reading public ate all this up.

Stephens’s prose deserves special note. He wrote in a conversational style that 160 years later seems remarkably fresh and crisp. On occasion, he did not scruple to use fragments. His style established an intimate rapport with the reader with no trace of the irksome dear-reader familiarity common at the time. With a good pruning here and there, his writing could stand up to the very best nonfiction of today.

Given these formidable strengths, it is not surprising that Stephens’s Central American book (which ran to about nine hundred pages, the equivalent of three fat modern novels) shot right to the top of the best-seller list. The puzzle is that it fell off the horizontal best-seller list, the one that stands the test of time.

To a great extent the answer to the puzzle boils down to a shift in literary tastes. After the Civil War, Americans had new subjects to occupy them—the faded glories of the old South, and the winning of the West among them. Stephens’s books, published more than two decades before, no longer beguiled the always-fickle readership. This fact alone should not have completely proscribed a work with real claim as a literary classic (indeed, some of Stephens’s works stayed in print to the 1880s). It was the swing of the country’s literary center from New York to Boston that sealed Stephens’s literary fate.

The phrase banned in Boston was the unhappy lot of many books that did not meet that city’s literary establishment’s criteria of good breeding as well as good reading. Even New England’s own greatest thinker, Emerson, had difficulty breaking into the Boston literary elite because his ideas were too wild and unpredictable. Thoreau never made the grade. The New Yorker Herman Melville produced the greatest American novel in the nineteenth century without stirring a flicker of interest in the establishment. Therefore, it is no surprise that the bluenose Boston literary elite did not fall all over itself to keep alive the works of the irrepressible Stephens, who delighted in titillating his readers with glimpses of nude females, tales of crashing funerals, and going on and on about rock piles in obscure and now uninteresting lands.

Even worse for Stephens’s reputation—and for him personally—was that he perished in 1852 (at the early age of forty-seven). By and by, his books went out of print. The Panama Railroad Company, which he led as president, was succeeded by the Panama Canal. Although his death was front-page news in New York, fifty years afterward, Stephens was completely forgotten. Van Wyck Brooks tried mightily to resurrect his reputation in the 1940s. As noted above, he set Victor Wolfgang von Hagen to the task of a Stephens biography. In 1949, Rutgers University Press brought out an edition of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan. Almost two decades later Dover republished the Central American book; those and other of his titles have stayed in print in many editions ever since.

To date, Van Wyck Brooks is still the critic who has done the most to promote Stephens. According to Brooks,

There was something extremely attractive in the character of John Lloyd Stephens, the frankness and manliness of feeling that one found in his books, traits that Poe noted in his review, together with the author’s freshness of manner and his freedom and sound feeling and good sense. He had travelled through Egypt and Arabia alone with wild tribesmen, beyond the reach of any help, well knowing that everything depended on his coolness and discretion, while he had an infectious feeling of awe, a sense of the sublime that made his account of these travels singularly impressive. Thousands of years rolled through his mind as he gazed on the relics of faded kingdoms, recalling their mysterious uses and the men who built them and the poets, historians and warriors who had looked upon them with a wonder like his own in ages past. . . . in style, in the quality of his imagination, in his sombre sense of the flight of time, Stephens was one of the few great writers of travel, and he presently found his best account among the ruins of Central America. In his own way, John Lloyd Stephens, like so many other artists and writers, was one of the discoverers, in the [eighteen] forties, of the American scene. He revealed, at least in part, the visible past of a Pan America that was scarcely as yet aware of its own existence.⁷

In his youth Brooks wrote literary criticism with a firebrand. In mid-career he suffered a breakdown, going for the best part of a decade mentally incapacitated. The third Brooks was the discoverer of Stephens and a promoter of nineteenth-century American literature not until then highly regarded. As the venerable critic Malcolm Cowley said, Brooks’s studies caused a revolutionary change in our judgment of the American past, and a radical change in our vision of the future.⁸ But Cowley’s quote gives only half the story. The later Brooks marched out of step with the experimentation of modernists, the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, and even more so with the writers and critics of the post–World War II era. There was a tinge of politics. Brooks seemed to many of his former admirers as assum[ing] the role of laureate of American chauvinism.⁹ The upshot of all this was the blunting of interest in Stephens’s writing as serious literature. So despite the good work Brooks and von Hagen accomplished on Stephens’s behalf, serious literary critics looked elsewhere.

Stephens had the misfortune to be born in a country where travel writing is rarely taken seriously. Had he been born in a state with an overseas empire, his name today would be as well known as the African explorers and adventurers Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Grant, and Richard Burton are outside their homelands. In America the few travel books that managed to make it into the canon are the work of individuals known for something else. For instance, Mark Twain’s Roughing It and Innocents Abroad and Washington Irving’s travel chronicles were produced by professional writers whose names everyone knows. At almost the same level of recognition are Francis Parkman, who wrote the classic The Oregon Trail, and Richard Henry Dana, who did Two Years before the Mast. Parkman was a famous Harvard historian who became tragically crippled after a youthful adventure among the Sioux, which he details in his great work. Dana was a nationally infamous abolitionist and social reformer. By contrast, the greatest American travel writer of the eighteenth century, and perhaps the most influential American travel writer ever from a purely literary standpoint, was William Bartram. His Travels affected the British romantic poets in a large way. Nevertheless, his book, published in the 1790s with a press run of about a thousand copies, did not see a second printing in the United States until the 1920s.

Given the great strengths in Stephens’s work, namely his deft balancing of various narrative strains, the accuracy of his archaeological surmises, the poignancy of his ethnological observation, the great value of his work to area studies, and above all the pellucid quality of his prose—never forgetting that he has been widely read and admired in the post–World War II period—I contend that John Lloyd Stephens’s is one of the most powerful voices of nineteenth-century American letters. To put it in bolder terms, I assert he is an unknown literary great.

In Stephens’s day, nonfiction prose was a literary curiosity. Real literature included only poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay. In our own age, nonfiction prose (including travel writing) has come into its own. It may be the leading literary form. The inevitable reevaluation of the nonfiction narrative of the past couple of centuries will be the tide that lifts Stephens to his rightful place in American literature. Until a goodly number of critics study Stephens’s corpus closely, engage in a discourse, and come to a consensual judgment, it can be said, without fear of hyperbole, that Stephens’s work stands on an equal footing with the travel writing of any nineteenth-century American, whether it be Parkman, Dana, Irving, or Twain.

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.¹

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.² 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 expecting a 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