Stone of Kings Read online

  STONE OF KINGS

  ALSO BY GERARD HELFERICH

  High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta

  Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World

  STONE

  OF

  KINGS

  IN SEARCH OF THE LOST

  JADE OF THE MAYA

  GERARD HELFERICH

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Gerard Helferich

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl Kober

  Layout: Justin Marciano

  Project editor: Ellen Urban

  Maps: Trailhead Graphics Inc. © Morris Book Publishing, LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Helferich, Gerard.

  Stone of kings : in search of the lost jade of the Maya / Gerard Helferich.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-6351-1

  1. Mayas—Implements. 2. Mayas—Jewelry. 3. Mayas—Antiquities. 4. Jade implements—Central America. 5. Jade jewelry—Central America. 6. Jade art objects—Central America. 7. Central America—Antiquities. I. Title.

  F1435.3.I46H45 2012

  972.81—dc23

  2011035824

  To Florence Hood Nicholas,

  who has lived a quiet life

  of great adventure

  Contents

  Map of the Maya World

  Map of the Olmec World

  Prologue

  Part I: The Bonediggers

  One: “The Most Romantic of All Gems”

  Two: Olmec Blue

  Three: Maya Green

  Part II: The Entrepreneurs

  Four: Serpentine

  Five: Aventurine

  Six: Jadeite

  Seven: Jade Guatemalteco

  Part III: The Storytellers

  Eight: Los Jaderos

  Nine: “The Most Mysterious Stone of the World”

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  It’s a warm April evening on the cusp of the rainy season. We’re seated under the long, tiled colonnade of a centuries-old house in Antigua, in the highlands of Guatemala. My wife, Teresa, and I have come to do some research for a travel publisher. But as the shadows deepen and the volcanoes disappear into the darkness, our hostess begins to spin a remarkable tale.

  A tall, blonde gringa of a certain age, she is the sister of a friend back in our adopted home of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. But you might say we were introduced by Alexander von Humboldt. A few years ago, our hostess’s husband read my Humboldt’s Cosmos, an account of the great German naturalist’s New World odyssey. As I relate in the book, Humboldt was born into an aristocratic Prussian family during the Second Great Age of Discovery, when titanic figures such as James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville were completing their historic circumnavigations of the earth. Though the young Alexander longed to make a grand journey of his own, his mother pressed him into a more sensible career as a government inspector of mines. But on coming into his fortune after his mother’s death, Humboldt persuaded King Carlos IV to entrust him—not yet thirty, a foreigner, and a Protestant—with the first extensive scientific exploration of Spain’s New World empire. And during five astonishing years, from 1799 to 1804, Humboldt, with his companion Aimé Bonpland, blazed a hazardous, six-thousand-mile swath through Latin America, from Cuba to Peru, from the Andes to the Amazon, opening the continent to science and transforming himself into one of the most celebrated figures of his age.

  For reasons I don’t fully appreciate at the time, our hostess’s husband has been moved by Humboldt’s story, and he has invited me to drop by if I’m ever in Antigua. When Teresa and I arrive, he’s too ill to see us, but his wife graciously invites us for a drink. I expect a simple social call; then she begins her story. A story of jade. Like most people, I’ve never thought much about the stone—where it comes from, why it’s important or interesting, even what it is. But as her voice echoes down the darkening colonnade, I feel the mounting exhilaration of a writer encountering his subject.

  When I return from Antigua, I begin reading about jade and pestering archaeologists and geologists, learning everything I can about its formation, its lore, its ties to the great cultures of the past. I also discover a connection I hadn’t expected. In Humboldt’s Cosmos, I wrote about his admiration for America’s native peoples and his pioneering studies of cultures such as the Aztec and the Inca. Among the tens of thousands of specimens Humboldt brought back at the end of his journey were some pre-Columbian figurines, one of which was reproduced in my book.

  The enigmatic Humboldt Celt, as it appeared in Humboldt’s Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America with Descriptions and Views of Some of the Most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras.

  But this time, my thoughts turn to another of Humboldt’s souvenirs. It’s a celt, a polished stone shaped vaguely like the head of an axe, which was presented to the explorer by Andrés Manuel del Río, professor of mineralogy at Mexico City’s national school of mining. Bluish in color, about nine inches long and a little better than three inches wide, the celt had lost its pointed end. The rest was incised with a dozen rebus-like symbols. Though a few were recognizable—a pair of crossed arms, a hand, an ornate cross, perhaps an oar and a spear thrower—their significance was long forgotten. As Humboldt realized, the celt was carved from jade.

  Back in Europe, Humboldt presented the artifact, which he believed to be an Aztec hatchet, to his sovereign, Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia, for display in the royal cabinet of curiosities, a collection of natural history and anthropological specimens. For the next century and a half, the Humboldt Celt, as it came to be known, remained in Berlin. Though the stone’s message was inscribed in no known language, that didn’t stop a scholar named Philipp J. J. Valentini from venturing an impressively detailed translation in 1881:

  The man, in whose tomb the sacred stone was laid, stood high in rank and personal achievements. He never failed to appear before his gods to burn the incense on the temple’s brazier. He caused his arms to bleed and sacrificed his blood by sprinkling it in the glowing embers. When he entered the tlachco court, his was the victory. Like darts, his balls of hule were flying through the ring. He had no equal in bringing to the ground his foe by tlacoctli, and when he seized the oar and went upon the river, he was certain to bring home the sweet turtle quivering on the barb of his harpoon. Great was the strength of his arms; the heavy cudgel was the toy of his youth. There was no deer so distant nor its legs so fleet, that his eyes could not spy or his lasso reach.

  Eventually, the celt ended up in the national ethnographic museum on Stresemannstrasse. When that building was destroyed during the Second World War, the Humboldt Celt—shattered, looted, or perhaps buried in the rubble—was lost.

  As I immerse myself in my new subject, the errant celt takes on a meaning for me as well, more vague but perhaps no less idiosyncratic than that suggested by Philipp Valentini: Wi
th its strange carvings and unexplained disappearance, it seems to embody the enigma of jade.

  To peoples such as the Maya, jade was not only heartbreakingly beautiful but supremely powerful, and no substance was more eagerly acquired or more jealously guarded. Yet when Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Latin America, a millennium after the Maya decline and three centuries after the Spanish Conquest, no one knew where the ancients had found their jade. Humboldt searched for the source, to no avail. “Notwithstanding our long and frequent excursions in the Cordillera of both Americas,” he wrote, “we were never able to discover a rock of jade; and this rock being so scarce, the more we were surprised at the immense quantity of jade hatchets, which are found on digging in plains formerly inhabited, from the Ohio to the mountains of Chile.” Humboldt exaggerated the range of jade artifacts, but by the time his keepsake went missing, the mystery of the stone’s origin still hadn’t been solved. Like the Humboldt Celt, the Maya’s jade mines had vanished.

  The story that our hostess shares this evening in Antigua is of the long search for Maya jade. Part history, part science, part treasure hunt, the tale spans more than three thousand years, embracing great kings, lost civilizations, renowned archaeologists, unlettered prospectors, and hopeful entrepreneurs. It’s a tale of mystery and obsession, and I can’t escape its peculiar pull. Like all the others, I’m drawn into the quest for Maya jade.

  PART I

  THE BONEDIGGERS

  ONE

  “The Most Romantic of All Gems”

  Yucatan, 1909. The middle-aged man was sweating inside his canvas diving suit. Peering through the helmet’s tiny faceplate, he saw the tropical foliage spilling over the limestone walls of the cenote. At the other end of the pontoon, the Indian crew was working the pumps, and he felt the rhythmic puffs of oily air wafting into his helmet. He could only hope that Nicolas had trained the men well. Lumbering to the ladder, he carefully adjusted his speaking tube, lifeline, and air hose, their corked-bottle floats tied at intervals like so many crystal beads. Then, one by one, the workers approached, peered up into his clear blue eyes, and offered a solemn handshake, as though expecting never to see him again.

  Chichen Itza’s Sacred Well was dark and “still as an obsidian mirror.” The diver released his grip on the ladder and felt cool water envelop him. Weighted down by the copper helmet, the lead bars across his chest, the iron-soled boots, he began to drop. There was a searing pain in his ears, and he reached for the valve on either side of his helmet. A hiss, and the pressure subsided. Drifting through the murk, he imagined himself as weightless as one of the silvery bubbles arcing to the surface.

  Within the first ten feet, the scant sunlight faded from yellow to green to nearly black. He took out his submarine flashlight. There were thirty feet of water in the Sacred Well, and beneath that an unfathomable layer of muck, masking the secrets of centuries. Not far from the cenote’s sheer wall, the dredge had opened an underwater pit eighteen feet deep, its flanks studded with stone columns and blocks. As he floated past, one of the stones toppled into the darkness, loosing a shock wave that sent him tumbling; struggling to right himself, he felt as tremulous as an egg white in a glass of water. Then a strange thrill came over him when he realized that he was the only creature who had ever come here with any expectation of leaving alive.

  Edward H. Thompson in his diving gear at Chichen Itza, with his workers poised at the air pump. On his first dive into the cenote, Thompson wrote, “I felt a strange thrill when I realized that I was the only living being who had ever reached this place alive and expected to leave it again still living.”

  The local people said that huge snakes and horrific monsters prowled the depths of the Sacred Well, guarding the entrance to Xibalba, the underworld that Maya kings and shamans sought to penetrate in their ecstatic trances. In 1904, when the workers were beginning to dredge, a wise man from the village had pointed to a spot beneath the water and told him, “There is where the palace of the rain god lies.” Now, bounding across the mud in that direction, the diver found a deep natural depression. Through the gloom he made out a whitish smudge on the hollow’s edge. Then as he drew closer, he saw that it was a collection of bones—not of jaguars or deer, but of human beings—three women, stretched out in the silt as though dozing in their hammocks. The cool, dark water had preserved fragments of their plain-woven cotton dresses, and around the neck of one were draped exquisite pendants of carved jade, their facets as crisp and lustrous as the day they were cast into the Sacred Well.

  Edward Herbert Thompson had been obsessed with the ruined city of Chichen Itza for decades, ever since reading Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán in his college days. Written around 1566 but rediscovered in a Madrid library only in 1862, the Relación was a veritable catalog of Maya language and culture, including their intricate, interlocking calendars. But Thompson had been especially captivated by Landa’s description of Chichen Itza’s Sacred Cenote and the grisly rites that supposedly had taken place there. “Into this Well,” Landa had written, “they had, and still have, the custom of throwing men alive as a sacrifice to their gods in time of drought, and they believed they would not die, though they never saw them again. They also threw into it many other things like precious stones and things they prized, and so if this country had possessed gold it would be this Well that would have the greater part, so great is the devotion that the Indians show for it.” It was said that sometimes during these rites, the cenote’s water turned from jade green to blood red.

  When it came to the religious customs of the Maya, Landa may not have been the most reliable of witnesses. Even before his promotion to bishop of the Yucatan, he had conducted a pitiless inquisition that imprisoned and tortured hundreds of people and burned most of the Maya books, or codices. Consisting of bark pages that opened like a folding screen, washed with lime, then painted with a brush, the codices were the repositories of the Maya’s historical, religious, and astronomical learning. But to Landa, “they contained nothing but superstition and lies of the devil,” and thanks to his implacable piety, only three examples survive, named for the European cities in which they reside—Dresden, Paris, and Madrid. (The authenticity of a fourth, fragmentary codex, the Grolier, has been debated ever since it was supposedly discovered in a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1965.) For good measure, Landa forbade the Maya from writing anything else in their elegant, playful, maddeningly complex script. But he did record the words for the days and “months” of the Maya calendar, and with the help of native speakers, he compiled an exhaustive syllabary pairing each letter of the Spanish alphabet with the corresponding Maya symbol.

  But was Landa’s account of the rites that took place at the Sacred Well, repeated and embellished by later authors, just a sham to justify his repression—or had human sacrifices really been performed there? In 1579, Diego Sarmiento de Figueroa, mayor of nearby Valladolid, also claimed to have witnessed Maya rituals conducted at the cenote. After sixty days of abstinence and fasting, he reported, the “lords and principal personages of the land” would arrive at the Sacred Well at daybreak, “throwing into it Indian women belonging to each of these lords and personages, at the same time telling these women to ask for their masters a year favorable to his particular needs and desires.”

  “The women, being thrown in unbound, fell into the water with great force and noise,” he went on. “At high noon those that could cried out loudly and ropes were let down to them. After the women came up, half dead, fires were built around them and copal incense was burned before them. When they recovered their senses, they said that below were many people of their nation, men and women, and that they received them . . . and when their heads were inclined downward beneath the water they seemed to see many deeps and hollows, and they, the people, responded to their queries concerning the good or bad year that was in store for their masters.”

  For three decades, Thompson had dream
ed of exploring the Sacred Cenote and testing these rumors of human sacrifice. Like other archaeologists of his time, he had no formal training in the science. His technique was spotty, and he was often guided by intuition more than evidence. But even as a boy in Worcester, Massachusetts, he’d been captivated by the past, digging up arrowheads and other relics and donating them to the natural history society. He’d devoured John Lloyd Stephens’s bestselling accounts of his travels among the Maya ruins, which had only whetted Thompson’s fascination with ancient cultures.

  When he was an engineering student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Thompson began publishing articles, including one called “Atlantis Not a Myth,” which appeared in Popular Science Monthly in 1879, the year of his graduation. Though he’d never been within two thousand miles of Central America, Thompson confidently wrote that Maya civilization had originated on the fabled lost continent popularized by Plato. Once, he claimed, “an immense peninsula extended itself from Mexico, Central America, and New Grenada, so far into the Atlantic that Madeira, the Azores, and the West India Islands are now fragments of it. This peninsula was a fair and fertile country inhabited by rich and civilized nations, a people versed in the arts of war and civilization, a country covered with large cities and magnificent palaces, their rulers according to tradition reigning not only on the Atlantic Continent, but over islands far and near, even into Europe and Asia.”