For those of us who love the adventure of travel to remote and wondrous areas of the world, there is no better travel book than John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. In October 1839, Stephens climbed on a mule in the Mico Mountains of eastern Guatemala to explore an obscure land with “volcanoes and earthquakes, torn and distracted by civil war.” Accompanied by the talented and intrepid illustrator, Frederick Catherwood, Stephens embarked on an epic journey to find and describe the lost cities of the Maya. Incidents of Travel appeared in 1841, and was an instant success, selling an unheard number of 20,000 copies in the first three months.
Bored with the practice of law on Wall Street, Stephens learned travel writing and archaeology in Europe and the Middle East. But he was much more than a travel writer. He was the first to recognize that the human portraits that adorned Maya ruins were those of “deified kings and heroes.” He correctly guessed that the Maya hieroglyphs told the history of wars and kings and their great cities, now recaptured by the tropical forest.
Author Steve Glassman, a professor of English, retraces Stephens’ route, visiting the same Maya ruins, Spanish colonial towns, markets, and churches, many of them hardly changed in the 170 years since Stephens and Catherwood visited. Intertwining history, anthropology and the environment, Glassman presents a wonderful tale of Stephens’ adventure and his own. This is a fun and informative book for lovers of Mesoamerica who are drawn to the mysteries of the ancient and modern Maya.
