Walking the Americas

by Levison Wood

The story of two friends who set off on one of the most remarkable expeditions of the early nineteenth century changed the way everybody in Europe and the United States thought about Central America for good. John Lloyd Stephens was a thirty-three-year-old American writer and lawyer and Frederick Catherwood was a thirty-seven-year-old British artist and architect. At a time when almost all of Central America was involved in violent rebellions and insurrections, the adventurers boarded a boat in New York bound for Belize, which was then known as British Honduras. They were on a mission to explore something that the Spanish, in their endless quest for

gold and riches, had overlooked – the ancient cities of Mayan civilization, now engulfed by the rainforest. Through his fame as a travel writer, Stephens had managed to land himself a job as US ambassador to what was then the United Federation of Central America – a loose jumble of countries and city states that had recently become independent from Spain. The only problem was that the loose jumble of countries and city states now wanted independence from their new federation. Countries and territories jostled for autonomy; the entire peninsula was alight with civil war. That didn’t deter Stephens, whose passion for antiquities had resulted in him meeting the equally fanatical Catherwood at an archaeological dig in Egypt. So, when Stephens landed the new job, he sent his English friend a letter asking if he would like to come along on a free trip to see what ruins they could find in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala. There were rumours, he said, of entire lost cities awaiting discovery. But even so, Stephens – enthusiasm and wide-eyed curiosity aside – remained a little sceptical. He wrote that their journey was in the hope, rather than the expectation of finding wonders. Surely no one could have anticipated the wonders that the two men would actually find. When they reached Belize, Stephens and Catherwood travelled inland without the vast entourage that was so common at the time. They based their movements on word of mouth, often arriving in an unmapped village and trust...