Agencies of the Letter: The Foreign Office and the Ruins of Central America

On 17 July 1851, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), sent a dispatch to his chargé d'affaires in Guatemala, Frederick Chatfield, informing him that the Government desired a collection of Mayan ruins for the British Museum. Thus was set in motion a secret, fourteen-year plot whose full reach has escaped the attention of cultural historians.² This oversight is partly because the plot failed to achieve its object; in the end, no monuments were obtained. It is also a result of the rigid logic of imperial record-keeping; the bulk of the relevant documents—some sixty dispatches, memoranda, reports, and letters—lie not in the British Museum but in the Foreign and Colonial Office archives, not the first place one might look for material about antiquities. They ended up there because the scheme was directed not from Bloomsbury but from Downing Street, a political distinction reflected in the present location of these papers. This curiosity of archival organization is not incidental but constitutive, inviting us to consider how the plunder of Mesoamerican ruins came under the administrative and ideological control of political officials, and how the imperial archive functioned not merely as a repository of information but also as a form of knowledge and a structure of power, one that, as Thomas Richards has argued, was both enormously enabling and fatally flawed. Tucked between memoranda on mahogany exports, naval maneuvers, and canal and railway routes across the Central American isthmus, the letters about pre-Columbian ruins provide an opportunity to test Bruno Latour's claim that while the "'cracy' of bureaucracy is mysterious," the "'bureau' is something that can be empirically studied," perhaps even to the point of explaining how power may be accrued "just by looking at files" (54). The files in question here constitute a particularly complex form of "inscription," the dispatch, a form of writing whose exchange across an intricate network enabled that quintessential trait of global empires, the ability to manipulate persons and things from afar.

Palmerston's dispatch provides a useful gateway to these issues, even as it crystallizes more specific questions about the plot itself. Given the otherness of Mayan ruins, their distance from received canons of aesthetic value, how was a notion of their desirability arrived at? What arguments were employed to justify their removal, and how were these arguments organized into a plan of action and an imperial quest rivaling any found in the pages of adventure fiction? How did diplomatic writing—its protocols and procedures, its iteration in systems of storage and retrieval, its function as the bearer of imperial will, its very style—figure in the attempted appropriation of the monuments? And in what ways did Britain's larger relationship to Central America shape the plot's motives and means? Here is the beginning of Palmerston's dispatch:

I enclose herewith a copy of a letter [24 June 1851] which I have received from Viscount Mahon suggesting that it would be desirable to obtain for the British Museum some specimens of the sculptures from the ruined cities of Central America, and stating that the principal sculptures to which he refers are to be found at a place called Copan....

I have accordingly to instruct you to make inquiries [into] the practicability of obtaining specimens of the sculptures referred to in L[ord] Mahon's letter to me and to report the result, together with any additional information which you may be able to collect respecting those sculptures. The sculptures are described in pages 134 to 144 of the first volume of an account of travels in Central America by Mr Stephens, a citizen of the United States who visited those ruins in 1839-1840.

(See figs. 1 and 2)³

As Palmerston makes clear, a request had come to him from Viscount Mahon (Philip Henry Stanhope [1805-75]), British Museum Trustee, President of Society...