John Lloyd Stephens

Born in Shrewsbury, New Jersey; attended law school in Litchfield, Connecticut; practiced law in New York; traveled to the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, 1834–1836; published his experiences as Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837) and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838); visited Central America in 1839; chronicled those experiences in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841); returned to the area in 1841 and wrote Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843); opened navigation company; died in New York City. (See Dictionary of American Biography, 9:579–80; Hawks, “The Late John L. Stephens”; Preston, “America’s Egypt”; GQC journal, Nov. 24, 1853.)