The Lost City of the Monkey God Read online

  At the mouth of Ulak-Was, Morde and Brown dismissed all their Indian guides and went up the creek, setting up “Camp Ulak” in the same place Perl had worked. They then spent the next three weeks—the heart of their expedition—in the backbreaking daily work of mining gold.

  They repaired Perl’s old dam to divert the creek into sluice boxes, where the flow of water over riffles and burlap was used to separate and concentrate the heavier gold particles from gravel, and recorded their daily take in the journal. They worked like dogs, drenched by downpours, eaten alive by swarms of sand flies and mosquitoes, picking thirty to fifty ticks a day off their bodies. They were in perpetual terror of poisonous snakes, which were ubiquitous. They ran out of coffee and tobacco and began to starve. They spent most of their free time playing cards. “We thrash out our gold prospects again and again,” Morde wrote, and “ponder the probable progress of the war, wondering if America has already become involved.”

  They also dreamed big: “We have located a fine spot for an airport,” Brown wrote, “just across the river. We will probably build our permanent camp on this same plateau if our plans go through.”

  But the rainy season fell upon them with a fury: torrential downpours that started as a roar in the treetops, dumping inches on them daily. Ulak-Was creek swelled with every new downpour, and they struggled to manage the rising water. On June 12, disaster struck. A massive cloudburst triggered a flash flood, which tore down the creek, bursting their dam and carrying off their gold-mining operation. “Obviously, we no longer can work gold,” Morde lamented in the journal. “Our dam is completely gone—so are our planks. The best course of events we feel, is to wind up our affairs here as hastily as possible, and head down the river again.”

  They abandoned their mine, loaded the pitpan with their supplies and gold, and set off down the swollen rivers at breakneck speed. They careened down the Ulak-Was to the Blanco, to the Cuyamel, and into the Patuca. In one day they covered a stretch of the Patuca that had taken them two weeks to motor up. When they finally reached the edge of civilization, in a settlement along the Patuca where the residents had a radio, Morde heard about the fall of France. He was told that America “was practically in the war and would be officially in a day or so.” They panicked at the thought of being marooned in Honduras. “We decided to haste completion of the entire expedition’s aims.” What they meant by this enigmatic sentence is debatable, but it appears they might have realized they had to get busy fabricating a cover story—and get their hands on some ancient artifacts allegedly from the “lost city” to bring back to Heye. (There is no mention in the journals up to this point of finding or carrying any artifacts out of the Mosquitia interior.)

  They continued on, ripping down the swollen Patuca by day and sometimes at night. On June 25 they reached Brewer’s Lagoon (now Brus Laguna) and the sea. They spent a week there, no longer in a rush as they had learned America was far from joining the war. On July 10 they finally arrived in the capital city, Tegucigalpa. At some point between these two dates Morde wrote the fabricated report to his patron, George Heye, which generated the New York Times article.

  On their return to New York, Morde told the story of their discovery of the Lost City of the Monkey God again and again, and each time it got more detailed. The public loved it. Their rather modest collection of artifacts was put on display at the museum, along with a pitpan, or dugout canoe. The journals indicate that the two men hastily acquired these artifacts after they left the jungle, in a place west of Brewer’s Lagoon near the coast; a Spaniard showed them a site with pottery scattered about, where they did some digging. It seems likely they also purchased artifacts from locals at the same time, but the journal is silent on that question.

  Morde and Brown made no effort in the journals to conceal or dissemble their actions. Why they wrote down such a frank record of deception is hard to understand. Clearly, they had no intention of ever sharing the contents of these journals with their patron, Heye, or the public. Perhaps they were filled with hubris and dreamed that a fabulous gold strike would be part of their legacy, and they wanted to record it for posterity. Their announcement of the lost city discovery might have been a last-minute impulse, but it seems more likely it was planned all along as a cover for their real agenda.

  We do know this: For decades, many have wondered if Morde found a city. The general consensus up until now has been that he probably did find an archaeological site, perhaps even an important one. The journals, however, are proof that Morde found nothing, and his “discovery” was an out-and-out fraud.

  But what about the walking stick and its enigmatic directions? I recently corresponded with Derek Parent, who had spent decades exploring La Mosquitia, studying Morde’s route, and trying to decipher the stick. He probably knows more about Morde than anyone alive, and he had been in close contact with Morde’s family for decades.

  Over the years, David Morde had sent Parent photocopies of various bits of the journals, a few pages at a time. At one point in our correspondence, Parent told me that Morde’s discovery of the city was in the missing parts of the journals.

  What missing parts? I asked.

  That was when David Morde’s apparent ploy unraveled.

  David Morde had claimed to Parent that most of Journal 2 was missing. All that remained, he said, was the journal’s first page, which he photocopied and sent to Parent. The rest of Journal 2 was gone, and he said he felt sure that the missing section was the part that recorded Morde’s journey up the Paulaya River to the City of the Monkey God. And why was that part missing? Morde explained to Parent that British military intelligence had ordered the family to burn Morde’s papers after his death, and it might have been lost that way; or it may have been destroyed during a period when the journals were being stored in a damp warehouse in Massachusetts that was infested with rats.

  I was surprised when Parent told me this, because those pages David Morde claimed were gone are not missing from the original journal at all. I had the entirety of Journal 2—every single numbered page, firmly bound into the hardcover book—with no gaps in dates or missing text. The allegedly lost part of Journal 2 records nothing more than the time Morde spent relaxing in Brewer’s Lagoon, “getting chummy” with local expats, sailing, and fishing—and taking a day trip to dig for artifacts.

  Why the deception? One might speculate that David Morde may have been protecting the memory of his uncle or the honor of his family, but unfortunately he is unavailable to explain; he is serving a prison term for a serious crime. After his incarceration, his wife, perhaps unwittingly, loaned the complete journals to the National Geographic Society.

  When I shared these findings with Derek Parent, and sent him a copy of the rest of Journal 2, he e-mailed me back: “I’m in utter shock.”

  Despite the skullduggery, the mystery of the walking stick persists. In the wake of this news, Parent told me his latest theories. He thinks the stick may have recorded directions from Camp Ulak or its environs to “some locale of interest.” Morde, he believes, found something and carved the directions to it on his walking stick instead of putting them in his journal—something so important he wanted to keep it even more secret than the journal he was sharing with Brown.

  Parent took the directions from the walking stick and mapped them. The compass bearings and distances, he says, corresponded with the twists and turns of the Río Blanco going upstream from the mouth of Ulak-Was creek. He believes the stick logged a journey “recording steps along the river bank to a now well-defined end point.” That end point, Parent identified, was a narrow, 300-acre valley through which the Río Blanco flowed. This valley has never been investigated. It might have been another promising deposit of placer gold, which Morde hoped to return to later, perhaps without Brown, or it might have marked some other discovery of interest. The mystery of the walking stick remains unsolved.

  We now know, however, that it does not contain coded directions to the lost city. In a journal entry on J
une 17, 1940, on the very last day of the expedition before his reemergence from the wilderness and arrival in a civilized town, Morde wrote:

  “We are convinced no great civilization ever existed up there. And there are no archaeological discoveries of importance to be made.”

  CHAPTER 6

  We took canoes into the heart of darkness.

  For three-quarters of a century, Morde’s tall tale, so rich in romance and adventure, has given impetus to the fable of the lost city. The White City or Monkey God legend became a part of the Honduran national psyche, a tale familiar even to schoolchildren. In 1960, the Honduran government drew a line around two thousand square miles of the largely unexplored interior of Mosquitia and called it the Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Reserve. In 1980, UNESCO named the area the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve and, two years later, declared this unique rainforest a World Heritage Site. Meanwhile, ambitious explorers continued to make dubious and unverified claims of having found the lost city, while many archaeologists suspected a city of that nature might exist, in some form, deep in the jungle, either near Morde’s claimed area or somewhere else. In 1994, the chief of archaeology for the Honduran government, George Hasemann, said in an interview that he believed all the large sites in Mosquitia may have been part of a single political system whose center, the White City, had not yet been found.

  Steve Elkins first heard of the White City from an adventurer named Steve Morgan, who was a professional collector of legends and stories. Morgan had compiled a list of what he considered to be the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and he had boxes of files of research into various lost cities, pirate treasures, ancient tombs, and shipwrecks loaded with gold. Morgan engaged in marine salvage for a living and had actually found a number of shipwrecks. His house was full of stacks of Chinese porcelain and chests heaped with silver Spanish reals and pieces of eight. Elkins, who owned a business in LA renting camera equipment to television production crews, decided he wanted to go into television production himself, since he had the gear. He consulted Morgan and pored over his list of unsolved mysteries with fascination. Two mysteries attracted Elkins’s special attention: the legend of Ciudad Blanca and the Loot of Lima, also known as the Cocos Island treasure.

  Elkins and Morgan teamed up, did some research into Ciudad Blanca, and identified an area in Mosquitia they thought might contain it. They organized an expedition, led by Morgan. Elkins sold the idea of a television show about the search to Spiegel TV in Germany.

  Elkins, his German coproducer and correspondent, along with his California film crew, arrived in Honduras in 1994. They hired a local fixer, a man named Bruce Heinicke, to handle logistics. A childhood friend of Morgan’s, Heinicke was an American married to a Honduran. He’d been doing business in Honduras for many years as a gold prospector, drug smuggler, treasure hunter, and archaeological looter. While the choice of a man like Heinicke might have seemed eccentric, the expedition required someone who not only knew his way around Honduras but also had a keen understanding of when and how to bribe people (a delicate art), how to manage Honduran bureaucracy, how to intimidate and threaten, and how to deal with dangerous criminals without getting killed. Elkins recalled seeing Heinicke for the first time in the airport parking lot after their arrival. He was a big fat guy dressed in a pineapple shirt, pinky ring and gold watch, cigarette dangling from his mouth, with a wad of bills in his fist. He was barking orders in Spanish and passing out money. “We got a video of him,” said Elkins. “It’s hilarious.”

  It would be the beginning of a long and complicated relationship.

  The crew filmed in Copán and then took a bush flight to a little town called Palacios on the Mosquito Coast. From there they set off into the interior, with indigenous guides and a rough idea of where the lost city might be, based on their research and interviews.

  “We took canoes into the heart of darkness,” Elkins remembered. Morgan led the expedition, hiring local informants who claimed to know of an area deep in the mountains where there were ruins. “To be honest,” Elkins said, “I just tagged along. I really didn’t know where the fuck we were going.”

  The canoes were forty-foot dugouts, hollowed out of a single mahogany tree trunk, equipped with small outboard Evinrudes. Each could fit six people and a bunch of gear. “We went up some little river. I don’t even know the name of it.” Upstream the water became so shallow and full of sunken logs and mud bars that they had to raise the engines and propel themselves along by poling. They went miles and miles through endless swamps and up unknown tributaries, following wavering, uncertain maps. “We were constantly in and out of the canoes, in the muck. It got denser and denser and denser, until we were up high in the mountains.”

  There was no sign of any lost cities, but they did make a discovery. “All of a sudden there was this big boulder in a stream,” Elkins said, “with a carving on it showing a guy with a fancy headdress planting seeds.” He had what he called an “epiphany”—here was proof, if more were needed, that a sophisticated and mysterious people had once lived and farmed in a land that today was deep, uninhabited jungle. Led by local Indian guides, Elkins and the group pushed on, forced to abandon their canoes and continue on foot, slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. On a hard day’s travel they were lucky to make one or two miles. Steve and his crew ate MREs, while the Indian guides ate iguanas. At one point the guides became agitated; taking out their weapons, they confided that the group was being tracked by jaguars. They frequently ran into venomous snakes and were assaulted day and night by insects. “After I came out,” Elkins recalled, “I had bites for six months.” He was grateful not to have been stricken with one of the many frightful tropical diseases common to the area.

  One night, he exited his tent to go to the bathroom. The entire forest was glowing with millions of points of bioluminescence, caused by fungi that glow when the temperature and humidity are right. “It was like looking down at LA from thirty thousand feet,” he said. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Somewhere in the rainforest, they did find a scattering of broken stone sculptures, pottery, and tools. If there were mounds, it was impossible to tell, because the jungle was so thick. But either way, it was a small site and clearly not the White City. They finally gave up, exhausted and out of money.

  Elkins was repeatedly shocked at Heinicke’s methods of getting things done in Honduras. After they reemerged from the jungle and were filming on Roatán Island in the Bay of Honduras, Elkins’s German producer got an emergency call on his satellite phone requiring his return to Hamburg immediately on business. They rushed to the airport to catch a flight out, but when they arrived they learned the plane was already full and on the runway. The next flight out wasn’t for several days. Heinicke huffed and puffed his way out on the tarmac, boarded the plane, pulled out a Colt .45 pistol, and inquired who was the last to board. He waved his pistol at the unfortunate passenger. “I need your fucking seat,” he said. “Get off.” The man stumbled off the plane in terror; Heinicke shoved the gun back into his waistband and said to the German producer, “Okay, you got your seat.”

  Many years later, when Heinicke told me this story, he explained how he saw his role in the partnership: “See, Steve, he’s kind of dangerous to be with. He’ll tell me the good points he sees in someone, and I’ll say, ‘Fuck him, I don’t like him, I don’t trust him.’ That’s probably why we make a good partnership.”

  Elkins, for his part, said, “Bruce is definitely the kind of guy you want to have on your side. And not the other way around.” He added, lowering his voice: “In order to make this happen, I had to dance with the devil at times.”

  That first attempt to find the White City changed Elkins. He went in curious about the White City legend and returned having found his life’s mission. “I call it the ‘lost city virus,’” he told me later. “I became an addict. I was obsessed with the idea of trying to prove whether the lost city really existed.”

 
Elkins has an appealing streak of persistence and an indefatigable nature, which may very well come from his unconventional family. Originally from England and Russia, his great-grandparents arrived in the States through Ellis Island in the 1890s. His grandfather Jack Elkins was a jazz piano player who toured with Dixieland bands in the 1920s. Elkins’s father, Bud, went in an entirely different direction: into the army. He lied about his age to sign up at fifteen, but was caught during basic training and his mother had to come get him and drag him back home to finish high school. During World War II, Bud flew against the Japanese in the Aleutian Tigers squadron; after the war he went into the garment business, landing a contract to manufacture bunny outfits for Playboy clubs. He then went back into the army and took part in combat and intelligence-gathering missions in Vietnam, reaching the rank of colonel. His ultimate retirement dream was to own a Chicago-style kosher hot dog business; so after leaving the military he built a giant truck in the shape of a hot dog and drove it around LA selling dogs and Polish sausages before the business failed. Bud was a charmer and a ladies’ man, restless, with a yearning for adventure. Because of his philandering, Steve’s mother divorced him when Steve was eleven, and Steve grew up more or less fatherless in Chicago. “My mother was the salt of the earth and steady as a rock,” he said.

  Elkins seems to have inherited his father’s wanderlust along with his mother’s pragmatic steadfastness, a mixture of traits that would serve him well in the search for the lost city.