In 1839 Patrick Walker, secretary to the superintendent of the settlement of British Honduras, and Lieutenant John Herbert Caddy, a Royal Artillery officer and artist, set out from Belize on a government-sponsored expedition to explore the ruins of Palenque, a Mayan ceremonial center in Chiapas, Mexico, about which relatively little was then known. Proceeding by way of Flores, in the Petén of Guatemala, and returning through Yucatán, Walker and Caddy arrived at Palenque in advance of those more famous explorers, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. The Walker-Caddy Expedition has been all but forgotten, however, save for a brief reference in Marshall Saville’s “Bibliographic Notes on Palenque” published in 1928 by the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Now, thanks to the efforts of David M. Pendergast, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, an account of the expedition has finally been published, along with a number of John Caddy’s illustrations.
A large part of the book consists of extracts from John Caddy’s diary detailing the trip and a description of the Palenque ruins which he prepared to accompany his portfolio of paintings. Also included is the official report which Patrick Walker submitted to the superintendent of the Belize settlement, a report which, editor Pendergast notes, “contained many observations on the sentiments and actions of Mexican and Guatemalan subjects which the [British] Colonial Office deemed unsuitable for inclusion in any published account; these passages were bracketed by the Colonial Office, and are similarly marked here” (p. 156).
Pendergast supplies the volume with relevant notes drawn from various sources; he includes biographical sketches of Walker and Caddy and generally attempts to clarify a number of points touching on what they wrote.
In this reviewer’s opinion, the published account of the Walker-Caddy Expedition, though welcome to Middle Americanists, historians and archaeologists alike, is neither as interesting nor as important as John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, 1841; nor do I consider John Caddy’s illustrations of Palenque to be the artistic or scientific equals of those done by Frederick Catherwood. Nevertheless, there are things of interest in the work under review, and we owe David Pendergast our gratitude for making them available to us. Moreover, he certainly deserves to be commended for a fine work of scholarship. The University of Oklahoma Press is also entitled to praise for its American Exploration and Travel Series, which has made available at relatively modest cost a number of worthwhile and handsomely printed volumes—of which the one under review is the fifty-second.
