The Lost City of the Monkey God Read online

  Heye immediately began planning another expedition to Honduras with a new leader, this time wisely bypassing Mitchell-Hedges, perhaps because he had begun to suspect, belatedly, that the man was a con artist. The truth was, Mitchell-Hedges was a fraud on a spectacular scale. He did not discover Lubaantun, and the crystal skull was (much later) revealed as a fake. Yet he succeeded in fooling many contemporaries; even his obituary in the New York Times would eventually repeat as truth a string of dubious facts that Mitchell-Hedges had been peddling for years: that he had “received eight bullet wounds and three knife scars,” that he fought alongside Pancho Villa, was a secret agent for America during World War I, and searched for sea monsters in the Indian Ocean with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son. However, some skeptical archaeologists had dismissed Mitchell-Hedges as a charlatan even before his second voyage to Honduras, and afterward they heaped ridicule on his outlandish claims about having found Atlantis. Mitchell-Hedges published a book about his experiences, Land of Wonder and Fear, about which one archaeologist wrote: “To me the wonder was how he could write such nonsense and the fear how much taller the next yarn would be.”

  For his third expedition into Mosquitia, Heye partnered with the National Museum of Honduras and the country’s president, who hoped the new venture would help open up the vast Mosquitia region to settlement by modern Hondurans. Knowing that such an expansion effort would, regrettably, involve the displacement or even destruction of the indigenous Indians who still lived there—not unlike what had happened in the American West—the government and the National Museum were eager to document the Indians’ way of life before they vanished. An important goal of the expedition was, therefore, to do ethnographic as well as archaeological research.

  Although his intention was to employ a serious professional, once again Heye betrayed a weakness for swashbuckling men of questionable integrity. The man Heye chose to find his “great ruin, overrun by dense jungle” was a Canadian journalist named R. Stuart Murray. Murray had given himself the title “Captain” fifteen years before, when he involved himself in a shabby revolution in Santo Domingo. In an interview before he departed for Honduras, Murray said, “There’s supposedly a lost city I’m going to look for, which the Indians call the City of the Monkey God. They are afraid to go near it, for they believe that anyone who approaches it will, within the month, be killed by the bite of a poisonous snake.”

  Murray led two expeditions for Heye into Mosquitia, in 1934 and 1935, journeys that became known as the First and Second Honduran Expeditions. In pursuing various tales and descriptions of the Lost City of the Monkey God, Murray believed he came tantalizingly close to finding it. But again and again, just as he thought he was on the verge of success, he always seemed to be thwarted—by jungle, rivers, mountains, and the death of one of his guides. In the archives of the Museum of the American Indian is a photo of Murray on the banks of a river, kneeling next to a row of small metates, or grinding stones, beautifully carved with the heads of birds and animals. On the back of the photo Murray wrote a message to Heye:

  These come from the “Lost City of the Monkey God”—the Indian who brought them out was bitten by a Fer de Lance in September and died. With him died the secret of the city’s location—More when I return. R. S. Murray.

  Among the many artifacts he brought back were two he believed contained clues to the lost city: a stone with “hieroglyphic” characters on it, and a small statue of a monkey covering its face with its paws.

  After the 1935 expedition, Murray moved on to other projects. In 1939, he was invited to be the guest lecturer on the Stella Polaris, the most elegant cruise ship of its day. There he met a young man named Theodore A. Morde who had been hired to edit the ship’s onboard newspaper. The two became friends. Murray regaled Morde with stories of his search for the Lost City of the Monkey God, while Morde told Murray of his adventures as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. When the ship docked in New York, Murray introduced Morde to Heye. “I hunted for that lost city for years,” Murray said. Now it was someone else’s turn.

  Heye immediately engaged Morde to lead the third Honduran expedition into Mosquitia, the trip that would finally—he hoped—reveal to the world the Lost City of the Monkey God. Morde was only twenty-nine years old, but his expedition and its monumental discovery would ring down through history. The American public, already captivated by the story of the Lost City of the Monkey God, followed it with enormous interest, and the expedition would give future historians and adventurers enigmatic clues to be endlessly debated and argued. If it weren’t for Morde and his fateful expedition, the many bizarre and misguided quests for the lost city that littered the decades of the 1950s to the ’80s would not have taken place. Without Morde, Steve Elkins would probably not have heard the legend and would never have embarked on his own eccentric search for the Lost City of the Monkey God.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.

  A handsome man with a pencil mustache, a smooth, high forehead, and slicked-back hair, Theodore Morde was born in 1911 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, into a family of old whaling stock. He was a sharp dresser, favoring Palm Beach suits, crisp shirts, and white shoes. He started his journalism career in high school as a sports reporter for the local paper, and then he moved into broadcast journalism as a writer and news commentator for radio. He attended Brown University for a couple of years, and then took a job editing newspapers aboard various cruise ships in the mid-1930s. In 1938, he covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and photographer. At one point, he claimed to have swum a river to cross the front lines between the Fascist and Republican camps, so that he could cover both sides.

  Heye was eager for Morde to set off on his expedition as soon as possible, and Morde wasted no time in organizing it. He asked his former university classmate, Laurence C. Brown, a geologist, to accompany him. In March of 1940, as war was breaking out across Europe, Morde and Brown departed New York for Honduras with a thousand pounds of equipment and supplies, in what Heye officially called the Third Honduran Expedition. Four months of silence followed. When the two explorers finally emerged from Mosquitia, Morde fired off a letter to Heye about the astounding discovery they had made—they had accomplished what no other expedition had been able to do. The news was published in the New York Times on July 12, 1940:

  ‘CITY OF MONKEY GOD’

  IS BELIEVED LOCATED

  Expedition Reports Success in Honduras Exploration

  “According to the communication received by the foundation,” the Times article read, “the party has established the approximate location of the rumored ‘Lost City of the Monkey God’ in an almost inaccessible area between the Paulaya and Platano Rivers.” The American public devoured the story.

  Morde and Brown arrived back in New York in August to great fanfare. On September 10, 1940, Morde gave a radio interview for CBS. The script still survives, annotated in Morde’s hand, and it appears to be the most complete surviving account of their find. “I have just returned from the discovery of a lost city,” he told his audience. “We went to a region of Honduras that had never been explored… We spent weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams. When we could go no further we started hacking a path through the jungle… after weeks of that life, we were starved, weak and discouraged. Then, just as we were about to give up, I saw from the top of a small cliff, something that made me stop in my tracks… It was the wall of a city—the Lost City of the Monkey God!… I couldn’t tell how large the city was, but I know it extended far into the jungle and probably thirty thousand people once lived there. But that was two thousand years ago. All that was left were those mounds of earth covering crumbled walls where houses once stood, and stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples. I remembered an ancient legend told by the Indians. It said that in the Lost City a gigantic statue of a monkey was worshipped as a god. I saw a
great jungle-covered mound which, when someday we can excavate it, I believe may reveal this monkey deity. Today the Indians near that region fear the very thought of the City of the Monkey God. They think it is inhabited by great ape-like hairy men, called Ulaks… In creeks near the city we found rich deposits of gold, silver, and platinum. I found a facial mask… it looked like the face of a monkey… On nearly everything was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god… I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.”

  Morde declined to reveal the location of the city, for fear of looting. It seems he kept this information even from Heye himself.

  In another account, written for a magazine, Morde described the ruins in detail: “The City of the Monkey God was walled,” he wrote. “We found some of those walls upon which the green magic of the jungle had worked small damages and which had resisted the flood of vegetation. We traced one wall until it vanished under mounds that have all the evidence of once being great buildings. There are, indeed, still buildings beneath the age-old shroudings.

  “It was the ideal spot,” he continued. “The towering mountains provided the perfect backdrop. Nearby, a rushing waterfall, beautiful as a sequined evening gown, spilled down into the green valley of ruins. Birds themselves, as brilliant as jewels, flitted from tree to tree, and little monkey faces peered inquisitively at us from the surrounding screen of dense foliage.”

  He questioned the older Indians closely, learning much about the city, “handed down to them by their ancestors who had seen it.”

  “We would uncover, they said, a long staired approach to it which would be built and paved after the manner of the ruined Mayan cities to the north. Stone effigies of monkeys would line this approach.

  “The heart of the Temple was a high stone dais on which was the statue of the Monkey God himself. Before it was the place of sacrifice.”

  Morde brought back a number of artifacts—figures of monkeys in stone and clay, his canoe, pots, and stone tools. Many of these are still in the collections of the Smithsonian. He vowed that he would return the following year “to commence excavation.”

  But World War II intervened. Morde went on to become an OSS spy and war correspondent, and his obituary alleges he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler. He never returned to Honduras. In 1954, Morde—sunken into alcoholism, his marriage failing—hanged himself in a shower stall at his parents’ summer house in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He never did reveal the location of the lost city.

  Morde’s account of finding the Lost City of the Monkey God received wide press and fired the imagination of both Americans and Hondurans. Since his death, the location of his city has been the subject of intense speculation and debate. Dozens have searched for it without success, parsing his writings and accounts for possible clues. One object became the Holy Grail of searchers: Morde’s beloved walking stick, still in the possession of his family. Carved into the stick are four enigmatic columns of numbers that seem to be directions or coordinates—for example, “NE 300; E 100; N 250; SE 300.” A Canadian cartographer named Derek Parent became obsessed with the markings on the stick and spent years exploring and mapping Mosquitia, trying to use them as directions to the lost city. In the process, Parent created some of the most detailed and accurate maps of Mosquitia ever made.

  The most recent search for Morde’s lost city took place in 2009. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Christopher S. Stewart, undertook an arduous journey into the heart of Mosquitia in an attempt to retrace Morde’s route. Stewart was accompanied by archaeologist Christopher Begley, who had written his PhD dissertation on Mosquitia’s archaeological sites and had visited over a hundred of them. Begley and Stewart went upriver and made their way through the jungle to a large ruin called Lancetillal, in the upper reaches of the Río Plátano, which had been built by the same ancient people Strong and other archaeologists had identified as once occupying Mosquitia. This previously known city, which had been cleared and mapped by Peace Corps volunteers in 1988, was in the approximate area Morde claimed to be, at least as far as Begley and Stewart could ascertain. It consisted of twenty-one earthen mounds defining four plazas and a possible Mesoamerican ball court. In the jungle some distance behind the ruin, they discovered a white cliff, which Stewart believed might have been mistaken for a broken wall from a distance. He published a well-received book about his search, called Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure. It is a fascinating read, yet despite Begley and Stewart’s best efforts, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to settle the question of whether the Lancetillal ruins were indeed Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God.

  As it turns out, all these researchers have spent almost three-quarters of a century looking for answers in the wrong place. Morde and Brown’s journals have been preserved and passed down in Morde’s family. While the artifacts were deposited with the Museum of the American Indian, the journals were not; this in itself is a remarkable departure from standard practice, because such journals normally contain vital scientific information and belong to the financing institution, not the explorer. The keeper of the journals until recently was Theodore’s nephew, David Morde. I was able to get copies of the journals, which the Morde family had loaned to the National Geographic Society for a few months in 2016. Nobody at National Geographic had read them, but a staff archaeologist kindly scanned them for me because I was writing a story for the magazine. I knew that Christopher Stewart had seen at least parts of them but had been disappointed to find no clues as to the location of the Lost City of the Monkey God. He had assumed that Morde, for reasons of security, had withheld that information even from his journals. So when I began flipping through them, I didn’t expect to find much worthy of note.

  There are three journals: Two are hardcover books with dirty canvas covers stamped “Third Honduran Expedition,” and a third is a smaller spiral book with a black cover labeled “Field Notebook.” They run to over three hundred handwritten pages and give a comprehensive account of the expedition from start to finish. No dates or pages are missing; every single day was recorded in detail. The journals were the combined work of Brown and Morde, who each made their own entries in the same books as they journeyed into the heart of darkness. Brown’s easy-to-read, rounded handwriting alternates with Morde’s spiky, forward-slanted style.

  I’ll not soon forget the experience of reading those journals—first with puzzlement, then disbelief, and finally shock.

  Heye and the Museum of the American Indian, it seems, were conned, along with the American public. According to their own writings, Morde and Brown had a secret agenda. From the beginning, neither man had any intention of looking for a lost city. The only entry in the journal mentioning the lost city is a random note jotted on a back page, almost as an afterthought, clearly a reference to Conzemius. It reads, in its entirety:

  White City

  1898—Paulaya, Plantain,* Wampu—heads of these streams should be near location of city.

  Timoteteo, Rosales—one-eyed rubber cutter, crossing from Paulaya to Plantain—saw columns still standing in 1905.

  In hundreds of pages of entries, this is the entire sum of information touching on the lost city they were supposedly trying to find, the city they had described so vividly to the American media. They were not looking for archaeological sites. They made only cursory inquiries. The journals reveal they found in Mosquitia no ruins, no artifacts, no sites, no “Lost City of the Monkey God.” So what were Morde and Brown doing in Mosquitia, during those four months of silence, while Heye and the world held their breath? What were they after?

  Gold.

  Their search for gold was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Among their hundreds of pounds of gear, Morde and Brown had packed sophisticated gold-mining equipment, including gold pans, shovels, picks, equipment for building sluice boxes, and mercury for amalgamation. Note that Morde, who
could have chosen any partner for his expedition, selected a geologist, not an archaeologist. Brown and Morde went into the jungle with detailed information on possible gold deposits along the creeks and tributaries of the Río Blanco and planned their route accordingly. This area was long rumored to be rich in placer gold deposited in gravel bars and holes along streambeds. The Río Blanco is many miles south of where they claimed to have found the lost city. When I mapped the journal entries, day by day, I found that Brown and Morde never went up the Paulaya or Plátano Rivers. While going up the Patuca, they bypassed the mouth of the Wampu and continued far south, to where the Río Cuyamel joins the Patuca, and then went up that to the Río Blanco. They never came within forty miles of that area encompassing the headwaters of the Paulaya, Plátano, and Wampu Rivers, which was the general region in which they later claimed to have found the Lost City of the Monkey God.

  They were looking for another California, another Yukon. Everywhere they went they dug into gravel bars and panned for “color”—bits of gold—totting up in fanatical detail each fleck they spied. Finally, at a creek running into the Blanco River, called Ulak-Was, they did indeed strike gold. An American named Perl or Pearl (all this is noted in the journal) had set up a gold sluicing operation here in 1907. But Perl, the wastrel son of a wealthy New Yorker, frittered away his time drinking and whoring instead of mining, and his father shut him down; the operation was abandoned in 1908. He left a dam, water pipes, gate valves, an anvil, and other useful equipment behind, which Morde and Brown fixed up and reused.