Sonoma County author Bill Carlsen retraces Mayan trail expeditions

A West County writer has retraced the journey of two forgotten explorers who discovered the vast and highly advanced Mayan culture in the jungle overgrowth of Central America, rewriting the history of western civilization and laying the foundation for modern archaeology.

Before diving into deep research on what would become his biographical adventure, “Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya,” Bill Carlsen embarked on an adventure of his own. He followed the path of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood to better understand their experience.

The pair in 1839 undertook a 2,500-mile expedition as harrowing as Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery more than 30 years earlier. They cut their way through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet, enduring disease and tropical elements in a wild frontier rocked by civil wars.

Their mission? To investigate reports of extraordinary, intricately carved stones submerged in the depths of the rain forest.

What they found on their journey was far more than anyone could have imagined - the remains of a vast Mayan civilization with highly evolved systems of writing, mathematics and astronomy and an architecture that rivaled Greece and Rome. At the height of their power between 300 and 900 A.D., the Mayans numbered some 10 million people in a series of city-states stretching from The Yucatan to El Salvador.

“Before that people didn’t believe Native Americans could in any way have an ancient civilization of such sophistication,” Carlsen said. “They felt the only way these ruins could have been there was as the vestige of Old World civilizations such as the Egyptians or The Lost Tribes of Israel that somehow colonized the Western Hemisphere before Columbus.”

The book they would publish on their discoveries was lucidly written by Stephens, an attorney and successful travel writer, and illustrated by Catherwood, an architect and draftsman whose drawings were beautifully rendered with the assistance of an optical projection device. The book proved so captivating that reviewer Edgar Allen Poe called it “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published.”

Carlsen was similarly riveted when a friend gave him a copy of “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan.” Even though the book was a bestseller in its day and is still in print after 170 years, outside of academic circles, the pair failed to capture the international name recognition of other discoverers.

As a retired newsman who worked for The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, Carlsen, 71, knows a good story when he stumbles upon it.

“I couldn’t believe how well it was written, how exciting it was and how contemporary, even though it was written in the 1840s,” he said of the book.

More significant was the impact the pair’s discoveries had on the world’s understanding of the so-called New World. Up until that time, Carlsen said, Europeans and Westerners venturing into Central and South America believed they were bringing culture to savages.

He knew the turf well. Carlsen maintained a second home in the old colonial capital of Antigua in Guatemala, a city that had captivated him and his wife Kathy O’Shea when they first went down in 1990 to take an intensive course in Spanish.

Even before he had fully decided to start researching a biography of the explorers, Carlsen decided it would be “a hell of a thing to do, to follow in their path.” It would add authenticity to his own narrative.

Stephens and Catherwood started in Belize, traveling down the Rio Dulce to Guatemala. Having already been down the river, Carlsen began where they landed, in the Port of Izabal.

“I went at the same time of year,” he said. “I wanted to experience the heat. We lived in Antigua, which is 5,000 feet in the highlands and 70 degrees year-round. But down in the tropical jungles it is sweltering ... unbelievably hot and humid.”

Stephens and Catherwood traveled by mule. “I came up with the closet thing I could get to a mule - a 1985 beat-up Toyota Corolla with no air conditioning and no radio,” said Carlsen, explaining that a nice car is too attractive to thieves.

He named it “The Mule,” and it gamely went the distance, through jungle and along mud-caked, “bone-cracking stone roads.”

“I really think the most surprising thing to me is, the more I got into it, the more I realized how almost crazy they were. I was in awe of their courage and their determination,” he said.

Both men suffered multiple bouts of malaria. They were covered in ticks and dodged scorpions and poisonous snakes and narrowly escaped murder more than once.

Carlsen endured his share of jungle discomfort, from rustic accommodations and suffocating heat to tick bites, but he also had a few nights of relief Stephens and Catherwood could never imagine, like accommodation at Club Med next to Chichen Itza in the Yucatan.

Back home, Carlsen, discovered a trove of Stephens’ personal papers archived at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, where he was teaching journalism.

He began his own exploration through the available research to see if there was enough to enhance Stephens’ account of the journey. He found only one biography of each man, both by the same author and riddled with mistakes and outright falsehoods.

“He made up things,” Carlsen said of the biographer. “As a reporter, you don’t do that.”

During his years as a newsman, Carlsen covered the California Supreme Court when Chief Justice Rose Bird was booted out, as well as the celebrated trials of O.J. Simpson and kidnapped heiress turned revolutionary Patty Hearst. In 1999 he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series he wrote in the Chronicle about the dangers of needle sticks to health care workers, stories that led to tighter safety regulations on both a state and national level.

Carlsen concluded there was enough unplumbed research to not just rewrite Stephens’ and Catherwood’s book, but to advance the story of their search for the lost civilization of the Maya while also painting biographical portraits of the explorers themselves.

By the time Stephens was appointed envoy to Central America - a predecessor had killed himself after being ordered to return to his Guatemalan post - he was already a popular travel writer whose books on his travels in the Middle East and Egypt and Russia and Poland had brought him literary fame. The British-born Catherwood similarly was renowned for his drawings of monuments and ruins in Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine.

They were a natural team when they set out in 1839, making their way to Copan, Palenque, Uxmal and beyond. A second voyage found them exploring Chichen Itza, Tulum and other great ruins of the Yucatan. Adding to the drama was competition, with the British sending out a party hoping to beat the pair to Palenque. Spoiler alert. Team Stephens and Catherwood are first to the finish.

While the pair didn’t exactly discover all the ruins, they mapped, surveyed, made precise drawings and detailed descriptions of some 40 Mayan sites that were filled with spectacular stone monuments, bas reliefs, sculptures and hieroglyphics.

In the process, they advanced the world’s understanding of a great culture, Carlsen said, and laying the foundation for modern archaeological research in the New World.

“When they heard the rumors of stones in the jungle, they had to go. It’s almost like they had no choice. It ruined Catherwood’s marriage and basically killed Stephens in the end.”

Neither man lived to old age. Stephens died of malaria in 1852 at 46 while he was working on the Panama railroad; Catherwood died three years later in a steamship accident at 55.

Carlsen had his own thrilling moments of discovery, not all on the road. A high point was finding a rare copy of a book of colored lithographs by Catherwood at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was like finding gold,” he said.

For the past years, Carlsen and his wife Kathy have lived on an acre and a half above Freestone, a small Eden of fruit trees and berry bushes.

He hasn’t entertained any movie deals yet on the book, published in April by William Morrow. But given the world’s continuing love of Indiana Jones, he’s prepared for the possibility. He has already picked out his dream cast, James Franco as Stephens and Colin Firth as his sidekick Catherwood.

The pair’s quest also led to an understanding of how a great civilization can collapse, information that is relevant today, he said. The Maya were doomed by their overconsumption of resources, environmental degradation, deforestation and economic inequality.

“Their story has a lot to tell us,” Carlsen said, “if only we would listen.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.