The Lost City of the Monkey God Page 4

“We ascended by large stone steps,” Stephens wrote later, “in some places perfect, and in others thrown down by trees which had grown up between the crevices, and reached a terrace, the form of which it was impossible to make out, from the density of the forest in which it was enveloped. Our guide cleared a way with his machete… and working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column… The front was the figure of a man, curiously and richly dressed, and the face, evidently a portrait, solemn, stern, and well fitted to excite terror. The back was of a different design, unlike anything we had ever seen before, and the sides were covered with hieroglyphics.”

Up to this moment of discovery, the image most North Americans carried of Indians came from the hunter-gatherer tribes they had read about or encountered along the frontier. Most viewed the aboriginal inhabitants of the New World as half-naked, savage Indians who had never achieved anything approaching what was termed “civilization.”

Stephens’s explorations changed all that. It was an important moment in history, when the world realized that stupendous civilizations had arisen independently in the Americas. He wrote: “The sight of this unexpected monument put at rest at once and for ever in our minds all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities… proving, like newly discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages.” The people—named the Maya—who had built this sprawling city of pyramids and temples, and who had covered their monuments with hieroglyphic writing, had created a civilization as advanced as any in Old World antiquity.

Stephens, a fine enterprising American, promptly bought the ruins of Copán for fifty dollars from the local landowner and made plans (later abandoned) to have the buildings disassembled, loaded on barges, and floated to the United States for a tourist attraction. Over the next few years, Stephens and Catherwood explored, mapped, and recorded ancient Mayan cities from Mexico to Honduras. They never did venture into Mosquitia, however, perhaps deterred by mountains and jungles far more discouraging than anything they had experienced in the Maya realm.

They published a two-volume work about their discoveries, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, packed with exciting stories of ruins, bandits, and brutal jungle travel, and lavishly illustrated with Catherwood’s splendid engravings. Their book went on to become one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of the entire nineteenth century. Americans were thrilled by the idea that the New World had cities, temples, and colossal antiquities that rivaled those of the Old World, equal to the pyramids of Egypt and the glories of ancient Rome. The work of Stephens and Catherwood established the romance of lost cities in the American mind and introduced the notion that the jungles of Central America must hold many more secrets waiting to be revealed.

Before long, the Maya became one of the most intensively studied ancient cultures in the New World, and not just by secular scientists. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified the Maya as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the Lamanites, as chronicled in The Book of Mormon, published in 1830. The Lamanites left Israel and sailed to America around 600 BC; The Book of Mormon tells the story that Jesus appeared to the New World Lamanites and converted them to Christianity, and it describes many events that occurred before the coming of the Europeans.

In the twentieth century the Mormon Church sent a number of well-funded archaeologists to Mexico and Central America to try to confirm the stories through site excavations. Although this resulted in valuable, high-quality research, it also proved difficult for the scientists themselves; facing clear evidence that disproved the Mormon view of history, some of the archaeologists ended up losing their faith, and a few of those who voiced their doubts were excommunicated.

The Maya realm, which stretched from southern Mexico to Honduras, seemed to end at Copán. The vast jungled mountains east of Copán, especially in Mosquitia, were so inhospitable and dangerous that very little exploration and even less archaeology took place. Glimpses of other, non-Maya, pre-Columbian cultures were being uncovered eastward of Copán, but these vanished societies also remained elusive and poorly studied. Just how far east and south of Copán the Maya influence stretched was also difficult to ascertain. In the vacuum, tantalizing rumors grew of even greater, wealthier cities—perhaps Maya, perhaps not—hidden in those impenetrable thickets, stories that fascinated archaeologists and treasure hunters alike.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, these stories and rumors had coalesced into a single legend of a sacred and forbidden Ciudad Blanca, a rich cultural treasure yet to be found. The name probably originated with the Pech Indians (also known as the Paya) of Mosquitia; anthropologists collected stories from Pech informants of a Kaha Kamasa, a “White House” said to lie beyond a pass in the mountains at the headwaters of two rivers. Some Indians described it as a refuge where their shamans retreated to escape the invading Spaniards, never to be seen again. Others said that the Spanish did, in fact, enter the White City, but were cursed by the gods and died or vanished into the forest, lost forever. Yet other Indian stories described it as a tragic city that was struck down by a series of catastrophes; the inhabitants, seeing that the gods were angry with them, abandoned the city. Forever after, it became a forbidden place, and anyone who entered it would die of sickness or be killed by the devil. There were also American versions of the legend: Various explorers, prospectors, and early aviators spoke of glimpsing the limestone ramparts of a ruined city rising above the jungle foliage somewhere in central Mosquitia. It seems likely that all these stories—indigenous, Spanish, and American—became conflated to form the basis of the White City or Monkey God legend.

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