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Tulum

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán (2 vols.)

Explorers audiobooks, Frederick Catherwood, John Lloyd Stephens, librivox, Maya, memoirs

John Lloyd Stephens (1805 – 1852)

The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a structure with steps up the side, shaped like a pyramid. Next they see a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with hieroglyphics, and with workmanship “equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians.”

Stephens records these discoveries and also his travels in Central America, where he had been sent by President Van Buren as special ambassador to the ill-fated Republic of Central America. The republic being engulfed in civil war when Stephens arrives in Guatemala, he finds himself dodging revolutionary armies while he hunts for a “legitimate government” to which to present his credentials. Catherwood, meanwhile, directs his immense artistic talent to illustrating views of Mayan architecture. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan was a best seller in its day and has been called an “Indiana Jones” saga by modern reviewers.


I have recorded both volumes: Vol. 1; Vol. 2 .

If you enjoyed Incidents of Travel, you might like

An 1890’s Sojourn in Saltillo, Mexico, by Fanny Chambers Gooch

1953 photo of merrygoround“This was before the time of railways in Mexico… The native who enjoyed the luxury of furniture…had also the romantic recollection that great old two-wheeled carts, towering almost above the house-tops, had brought it from the capital, nearly a thousand miles, or it was manufactured by the carpenters of the town…”

 

Across the Pampas and Among the Andes, by Francis Bond Head.

CD Cover, Across the PampasSir Francis Bond Head went to the Argentine in 1825 as mining supervisor for the Rio Plata Mining Association, a group of English speculators whose ill-planned and financially disastrous idea it was to send Cornish miners to re-open old gold and silver mines in the former Spanish colonies. His Rough Notes, written in a staccato style that is surprisingly fresh, show a gutsy, resourceful adventurer–riding across the Andes on mules which sank into snow above their knees at every step; clambering down 250 feet of notched sticks to inspect a silver mine; foraging bluntly for food for his men in a land of scarcity.

 

Driving the Lincoln Highway, Chicago to Rochelle, Illinois (1915) The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865

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