John L. Stephens
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan

John L. Stephens
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, volume I and volume II, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1841
Books, 9 1/8 x 5 3/4 x 1 7/8 inches (23.2 x 14.6 x 4.8 cm) each
Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Early Americas, Exploration and Navigation, MDC PC 2020.3.4.1 and MDC PC 2020.3.4.2

John L. Stephens
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, volume I and volume II, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1843
Books, 9 x 5 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (22.9 x 14 x 4.1 cm) and 9 x 5 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches (22.9 x 14.6 x 4.1 cm)
Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Early Americas, Exploration and Navigation, MDC PC 2020.3.5.1 and MDC PC 2020.3.5.2

The American writer John Lloyd Stephens (1805–52) published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán in 1841, followed by Incidents of Travel in Yucatán in 1843, sparking the English-speaking world’s interest in the ancient Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. Stephens’s books, both richly illustrated with engravings based on drawings and watercolors of the monumental ruins by the English artist and archaeologist Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), described expeditions the two men had taken between 1839 and 1842. They introduced readers not only to many unpublished Maya sites but also to the indigenous peoples who lived there, the contemporary Maya. Stephens and Catherwood convincingly demonstrated that the local peoples were the descendants of the great builders of the past, a view not widely shared at the time.

Stephens’s books—the copies in the Kislak Collection are rare first editions—present an interesting mix of dry archaeological observation coupled with more romantic and exoticizing accounts of the adventures the two men experienced on their expeditions and the people and cultures they encountered. Similarly, in his engraved maps, plans, elevations, and illustrations, as the selection of reproductions below demonstrates, Catherwood strove for documentary accuracy. Stephens even writes of Catherwood’s use of the camera lucida—an optical device with a prism that enabled an artist to render a person or scene with a high degree of versimilitude—in creating his views of ancient Maya structures and depictions of stone carvings. But the books also include far more picturesque views of landscapes peopled by small figures and dotted with both ruins and modern buildings. Images that seem to combine these two modes remain among the most compelling today. Gigantic Head, for instance, from volume I of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, pictures a colossal stone head with huge eyes staring from a pile of rubble in an overgrown forest while a man in a wide-brimmed hat sits nearby, ostensibly for scale. No. 2, Stone Idol, back View, a few pages later, shows a standing Maya stela covered in carved images, hieroglyphs, and ornament against a more faintly limned background of lush vegetation that seems to visually rhyme with the stela’s decorative exuberance.

The two volumes of Incidents of Travel in Yucatan each feature an impressive fold-out frontispiece with panoramic views of ancient sites—the Casa del Gobernador at Uxmal in volume I and the two-story building now known as “El Palacio” at Labna in volume II. Catherwood enlivened these vistas of two of the longest Maya structures with engrossingly detailed renderings of the surrounding jungle vegetation, cloudy skies, a passing packtrain of men and horses in Uxmal, and animal skeletons that echo the desolate ruins at Labna, lending his engravings a cinematic appeal. In fact, in the 1830s, Catherwood had created drawings for panoramas, early nineteenth-century popular entertainments that offered viewers a wide-angle illusionistic experience of places and events, which are seen as precursors to the movies. His renderings of Jerusalem and Thebes, also made with the aid of the camera lucida, were used by the painter Robert Bruford for his panoramas in London.

Stephens and Catherwood’s adventures, and the archaeological and ethnographic knowledge that resulted, have continued to inspire many, including artists from both the United States and Latin America. The American artist Robert Smithson (1938–73), for example titled his 1969 essay about his work made in the Yucatan “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”; while the Catherwood Project by the Argentine Leandro Katz (b. 1938) constitutes a photographic retracing of Stephens and Catherwood’s expeditions and images.