John Lloyd Stephens
Attribution:
Esculapio
John Lloyd Stephens
American traveller and archaeologist
28 November 1805
American traveller and archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens was born in New Jersey, USA.
After spending eight years as a lawyer, ill health led to his doctors advising travel to Europe as a cure. This he did and, on his return from Egypt and Syria he published Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land in 1837. In 1838 he followed this with a second book Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland.
In 1839, with Frederick Catherwood of London, he made an expedition to Central America, with a view to discovering and examining the antiquities said to exist there. They traveled together for eight months and as a result Stephens published another book Incidents of Travels in Central
America, Chiapas and Yucatan.
A second expedition to the Yucatan followed in autumn 1841 which was also published in 1843 as Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. Stephens states this book "contains account of visits to forty-four ruined cities or places in which remains or vestiges of ancient populations were found."
He combined his archaeological career with that of a business man, primarily as the director of the newly-formed American Ocean Steam Navigation Company, which established the first American line of transatlantic steamships.
The climate of Central America was detrimental to his failing health and he died at New York on the 10th of October 1852.
