Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Jungle connections
We were on the bus taking us from the Mexican Riviera town of Playa del Carmen to the Mayan ruins of Tulum on the Caribbean coast.
Our passionate tour guide Manuel, who is mestizo, that is part Mayan and part Spanish, was waxing eloquent about what a majestic civilization the Mayans were in the centuries leading up to their decimation by the conquistadors in the early 16th century.
The remnants of the Mayan people were forced into ghetto-like villages surrounding the Spanish missions, and obliged to give up their religion and their language (much like our own aboriginal people).
Meanwhile, the beautiful cities they had built were gradually taken over by the Yucatan and Central American jungle, until even the descendants of the Mayans had forgotten they were there.
Then, early in the 19th century, an interest in antiquities which began in Greece and Egypt soon spread to the New World. In 1836 an English architect and artist met up with an American travel writer at an archaeological conference in London. They had both read some articles about a mysterious civilization in Middle America, and they made a pact to raise funds to explore the area over the next several years.
The American writer’s name was John Lloyd Stephens; he was to become famous much later for his pioneering studies on the Panama Canal.
But it was when Manuel mentioned the name of Stephens’ English artist companion that my ears pricked up.
For his name was Frederick Catherwood, and Catherwood was a name I had only ever encountered before in one place: Uxbridge.
When we arrived at Tulum and began exploring the fascinating stone structures, Manuel told us more about how these beautiful cities re-emerged from the mists of history.
Stephens and Catherwood’s first visit was in 1839 to Copan in Honduras, which had remained in the consciousness of the local Mayan population and was easily located. Over the next several years, guided by the oral traditions of the Mayans still inhabiting Guatemala, Belize and several provinces in southeastern Mexico, they re-discovered the remains of no fewer than 44 ancient Mayan cities, and documented them in several popular volumes with Stephens’ vivid words and Catherwood’s beautiful and detailed etchings and lithographs.
After their pioneering explorations of the region, the two men soon gave way to professional archaeologists who painstakingly cleared away the foliage to reveal the amazing accomplishment that cities like Chichen Itza, Tikal, Palenque - and Tulum - represented, with achievements in art and science that matched anything in early Renaissance Europe (though they never, strangely, discovered the wheel).
In 1849, Catherwood was drawn by the California gold rush, and became an outfitter in San Francisco. A few years later, at the age of only 55, he was lost at sea on a voyage back to England.
We have no idea of what he looked like; Catherwood left no image of himself, except perhaps a tiny distant figure in one of his early Mayan sketches. And his private life is even more mysterious.
What we do know, however, is that his family originally came from northern Ireland. And if you google the surname, about the only prominent Catherwood around nowadays is a broadcast journalist named Andrea Catherwood - in Belfast. So they seem to be an Irish brood.
When I asked Marjorie Brethour of Trinity Manor, born a Catherwood, what she knew about the Uxbridge clan, she could tell me two things for sure. The first is that they originally came to Canada about the middle of the 1800’s; her grandfather had been born in 1870, and it was his father who had homesteaded in this area before that.
The second fact was where they had come from: County Tyrone in Ulster, part of Northern Ireland. So probably if we were to wander around Tyrone today, we might find a whole mess of Catherwoods, some of them related to Andrea the broadcaster, some to Marjorie the Uxbridger, and some of them undoubtedly to Frederick, one of the men responsible for bringing the remarkable Mayan civilization back into the light of day.
They say it’s a small world, and it gets proven every hour of every day. So wouldn’t it be remarkable, though not really very surprising, if the Mr. Catherwood who was clearing forests for planting in Uxbridge in the 1840’s, was a cousin to the man clearing the jungle several thousand miles to the south in the Yucatan peninsula, at the very same time?
Someone should look into that some time.
