The Lost City of the Monkey God Read online

  Elkins attended Southern Illinois University. An avid hiker, he roamed the nearby Shawnee National Forest with friends who called him Over-the-Next-Ridge Elkins because he was always urging them on “to see what was over the next ridge.” On one of these jaunts he found a rock shelter on some bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. He camped out there with friends, and they began scratching around in the dirt, turning up arrowheads, spearpoints, bones, and broken pottery. He brought them back to the university. His archaeology professor arranged an excavation of the cave as a special studies program for the semester. In test excavations Elkins and the group uncovered human bones, carvings in shell, stone tools, and remains of food. Radiocarbon dating indicated the bottom layers were thousands of years old.

  “That was the moment I became hooked on ancient history,” he told me. He spent many hours sitting in the shelter, looking out over the Mississippi River Valley and imagining what it would have been like to be born in the cave, grow up, raise children, get old, and die there—in the America of five thousand years ago.

  Elkins’s first expedition into Mosquitia had impressed on him one brutally simple fact: “Walking aimlessly through the jungle is crazy. This is no way to find anything.”

  He needed to address the problem in a more systematic way. He accomplished this with a two-pronged attack: historical research and space-age technology.

  He delved deeply into the many stories of people who had looked for the White City, some of whom actually claimed to have found it. Most of these people were obvious cranks or otherwise untrustworthy, but there was one person who stood out. Steve Morgan had introduced Elkins to a man named Sam Glassmire, who said he had located and explored the White City. When Elkins met Glassmire, he found him to be a solid, respectable scientist with a surprisingly credible story—and in his living room were impressive stone sculptures he had allegedly carried out of the ruins. In 1997, Elkins and his video team interviewed Glassmire at his home in Santa Fe, and they captured his story on tape. (I first met Steve on this trip, as I lived in Santa Fe myself.)

  In a twist on the Morde expedition, Glassmire, a geologist, had been hired to prospect for gold in Mosquitia and went looking for the lost city instead. He led three prospecting expeditions into Mosquitia in the late 1950s. A tough, weather-beaten man with a gravelly, slow-talking, New Mexico drawl, Glassmire had built a career as a respected scientist who had worked as an engineer for Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mid-fifties, when Los Alamos was still a closed city. He grew disenchanted with making nuclear bombs, so he moved to Santa Fe and set up a geological consulting firm.

  In 1959, he had been hired by American mining interests to determine if there was placer gold along the gravel bars of the upper Patuca River and its tributaries. His employers had a lot of money: The budget for the first expedition alone was $40,000, and they would send Glassmire back twice more.

  On that first expedition, Glassmire heard many rumors of the White City. “You hear about it as soon as you get in Honduras,” he recalled to Elkins.

  As he explored the rivers looking for gold, he pestered his guides with questions. “I frequently heard natives mention the mysterious Ciudad Blanca,” he wrote in a 1960 article about his discovery in the Denver Post. “I asked my guide about it. He finally told me the men were afraid I planned to send the expedition up the Río Guampu [Wampu], toward Ciudad Blanca. If I did, he said, the men would desert.” When Glassmire asked why, the guide said that when the conquistadors arrived, Ciudad Blanca was a magnificent city. “Then came an unforeseen series of catastrophes. The people decided the gods were angry,” and so they abandoned the city, leaving all their belongings behind, and thereafter shunned it as a forbidden place.

  On his third prospecting expedition into Honduras, Glassmire found placer beds along the Río Blanco and the Río Cuyamel—“gold beyond all my expectations”—in approximately the same area where Morde had struck gold. But Glassmire couldn’t get the lost city out of his mind. “When I got all through with my work,” he told Elkins, “I went off looking for it.” He selected ten men, including an old Sumu (Mayangna) Indian who said he had been to Ciudad Blanca as a boy and remembered where it was. “I had to bribe them pretty heavy with money to get them to go with me. We went far up a jungle river, what they call the Río Wampu, and then went off on a tributary called the Pao. We were in dugout canoes all this time. We ran out of stream and we had to take off on foot.” They slashed their way overland. “It’s one of the most terrific jungles in the world,” he recalled. “The area is very mountainous, very rough, and very steep… I don’t know of any more remote place in the world.”

  After six days of brutal overland travel, on March 10, 1960, he saw an unusual mound “like a giant ice cream cone, overturned and covered with greenery.” In a small meadow they came across artifacts strewn over the ground, including what appeared to be a ceremonial seat or throne, decorated with an animal’s head. As they pushed forward, “Other mounds bulged out of the boundless jungle carpet… I also discerned elusive ash-gray specks sprinkled throughout the shimmering greenness. My nine-power binoculars exposed them for what they were—ruins of stone buildings!”

  “I found it!” he cried out to his Indian guides. “I’ve found Ciudad Blanca!”

  They hacked their way through and around the city for three days, but he estimated that their movement through the jungle was so slow that the entire exploration of the city amounted to no more than “a walk around the park.” He brought out a collection of beautiful stone carvings and other artifacts, saying he had to leave “tons” behind.

  Glassmire tried to interest a foundation or a university in the discovery. The University of Pennsylvania expressed a desire to have his collection, he told Elkins, so he shipped off the majority of his artifacts, photographs, and maps, but still retained many sculptured heads and stone bowls. His daughter, Bonnie, still has the collection, which I have seen. It contains stone vessels, metates, and stone heads of fine workmanship, including a fabulous carving of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, identical to one in the Michael Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The artifacts alone suggest he found a major site, and a photograph taken of a cache of objects at the ruins shows a tremendous collection of sculptures that he had to leave behind. His hand-drawn map delineates previously unknown details of streams in the upper watershed of the Pao River, proving he did indeed penetrate that unexplored region. According to Glassmire’s interview, the university mounted an expedition, but instead of coming in from the sea and going up the rivers by canoe, it started in the town of Catacamas and they tried to take a “shortcut” over the mountains. “Three or four of them were killed,” he said, “two by snakes” and the others by disease. The expedition had to turn back.

  I have been unable to confirm that this expedition ever took place, and the University of Pennsylvania insists they have no such collection. (I also checked with Penn State, in case he was confused.) But Glassmire’s daughter, Bonnie, is equally certain her father sent some of his materials to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

  Glassmire gave a copy of his map to Steve Elkins. It was not quite detailed enough to nail down the precise location, but it was accurate enough for Elkins to later identify a valley that probably contained Glassmire’s ruin. Elkins would name it “Target 4” in his aerial survey as we were looking for the White City many years later. Glassmire’s discovery was a major step forward: It gave Elkins a convincing report of at least one important, unknown ruin deep in the Mosquitia interior. He took it as strong evidence that the legends of lost cities were not fantasy.

  The second prong of Elkins’s attack on the problem involved bringing the latest space-age technology to the search. For this, Elkins turned to Ron Blom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Elkins knew of Ron Blom’s successful quest to find the lost city of Ubar in the Rub’ al Khali Desert—the Empty Quarter—on the Arabian Peninsula. Ubar, also called
Iram of the Pillars, had been mentioned in the Koran, which said the “Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment” for corruption, smiting the city and driving it into the sands. By scrutinizing images of the Empty Quarter desert from space, Blom and his team discovered a radiating pattern of ancient caravan trails, not visible on the ground, that converged at what was already known to be an ancient watering hole and caravanserai, a place where ancient camel caravans bedded down for the night. The satellite data indicated far more was there than a mere campsite. When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.

  Elkins called Blom and asked if he was interested in looking for another lost city. Blom said yes.

  The problem, however, was that Mosquitia offered a far greater challenge than the Arabian Desert. The desert is an open book; synthetic aperture radar can peer fifteen feet or more into dry desert sands. The key is “dry”: Water molecules strongly absorb radar. For this reason, jungle foliage is far more difficult to see through with radar—a big leaf will block a radar beam that can penetrate several feet of dry sand. Undeterred by the challenge, Blom and his team started by analyzing scores of satellite images of Mosquitia taken in infrared and visual wavelengths of light. They looked at synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Space Shuttle. Blom combined images, crunched data, massaged and enhanced it. It took months of effort, but finally it seemed Blom hit the jackpot. He and his team identified an area that seemed to contain rectilinear and curvilinear shapes that were not natural. They termed both the valley and the unknown feature Target One, or T1.

  On May 12, 1997, Elkins faxed one of his partners, Tom Weinberg, with the news:

  THIS VALLEY IS COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY VERY STEEP MOUNTAINS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF ONE SMALL “CUT” THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS THAT ALLOWS ACCESS. THERE ARE TWO SMALL STREAMS THAT FLOW THROUGH THE VALLEY. IT IS A PERFECT SPOT FOR A SETTLEMENT… KIND OF REMINDS ME OF THE MOVIE, “SHANGRA LA”!

  Excitedly, he noted at the end of the fax that Blom had identified a “RATHER LARGE (1800 FT. ACCORDING TO RON’S MEASUREMENT) L-SHAPED OBJECT.”

  The valley itself was striking: a mysterious geological formation that looked like a crater or bowl, walled in by steep, encircling ridges, creating a natural fortress. It did indeed look very much like the descriptions of Shangri-la or, even more apposite, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “lost world.” The terrain inside the valley, watered by the two rivers, was gentle and friendly, consisting of hills, terraces, and floodplains, well suited for ancient farming and settlement. The satellite images showed no sign of human entry, occupation, or indigenous Indian use; it appeared to be pristine, untouched rainforest. Absolutely uninhabited areas of tropical rainforest are very rare in the world today; even the remotest reaches of the Amazon, for example, or the highlands of New Guinea, are used seasonally by indigenous people and have been at least minimally explored by scientists.

  It was an exciting idea, but for now it was just an idea, a hypothesis. Even with intensive image processing, the immense, 150-foot, triple-canopy rainforest did not yield its secrets. Most of the unclassified satellite imagery at the end of the twentieth century had a coarse, ninety-foot ground resolution—in other words, the smallest thing that could be seen in the images was at least ninety feet on a side. The images showed blurred outlines that, if one stared at them long enough, looked unnatural, but it was far from definite proof. They were a bit like Rorschach blots—perhaps the mind was seeing things that weren’t there.

  Eager to learn more, Elkins wondered if the valley had ever been explored. He and his partner Tom Weinberg scoured the world for people who had spent time in Mosquitia, and interviewed them on camera. He collected the stories of archaeologists, gold prospectors, drug smugglers, geologists, looters, and adventurers. He hired researchers who combed the archives in Honduras and elsewhere, piecing together which areas of Mosquitia had been explored and which had not.

  After much research, he determined that T1 was truly unexplored. Virtually all expeditions into Mosquitia had gone up the big rivers and their navigable tributaries. Rivers are the traditional highways of the jungle; expeditions that departed from those rivers never got very far in the fierce, impassable mountains. But T1 had no navigable rivers and it was completely walled off by mountains.

  In the end it was a gut feeling Elkins had about T1: “I just thought that if I were a king, this would be the perfect place to hide my kingdom.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The fish that swallowed the whale

  Convinced he was on the verge of solving the mystery, Steve immediately began planning an expedition into T1. The logistics were a nightmare. The Honduran government bureaucracy that controlled the permits was erratic and dysfunctional. The factionalized political environment meant that if one politician agreed to help, the opposition blocked it. But with gentle persistence and cultivation of both sides, along with some well-placed funds, Elkins finally did get the permits to explore T1. During this entire time, he had carefully kept the location secret from the Honduran government, fearing the information might lead to possible looting—a high-level diplomatic balancing act. He successfully lined up six figures in financing. Hoping to avoid weeks of brutal overland travel, he planned to go in by helicopter.

  But all his plans came to an abrupt end on October 29, 1998, when Honduras was struck by Hurricane Mitch. Mitch dumped as much as three feet of rain in some areas, causing catastrophic floods and mudslides, leaving seven thousand dead, spreading disease, and triggering looting and civil unrest. The storm inflicted damage equal to about 70 percent of Honduras’s GDP, and it destroyed two-thirds of Honduras’s roads and bridges. The expedition had to be cancelled. There was little sense of when, if ever, it could be restarted.

  The president at the time said the storm had set back the Honduran economy by half a century. Many years of chaos and collapse followed, in which the murder rate soared while investment and the judicial system crumbled. One Honduran businessman told a reporter for the Telegraph in 2013: “This country is turning into the perfect zombie apocalypse.”

  There are two major reasons why Honduras had such a difficult time getting back on its feet after the storm. The first was the land-tenure system it inherited from Spain, in which a small number of extremely wealthy families ended up controlling most of the land. But even more debilitating was the country’s unhealthy relationship with the United States, whose shortsighted policies and business interests had kept the country politically unstable for more than a century. From the time of its independence in 1821 to the present, Honduras has suffered through a tumultuous history that includes close to 300 civil wars, rebellions, coups, and unplanned changes in government.

  One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.” Originally from Asia, bananas had been grown in Central America for centuries since they had been brought there by the Spanish, but they were an exotic delicacy in the United States because of their scarcity and perishability. In 1885, Boston entrepreneur Andrew Preston* and a partner formed the Boston Fruit Company, with the idea of using fast steamships, rather than sail, to get bananas to market before they spoiled. It was a success: Inexpensive, delicious bananas took the country by storm. By the turn of the century Boston Fruit, which was later merged into the United Fruit Company, had carved out forty thousand acres of banana plantations along the northern coastline of Honduras, becoming the largest employer in the country. This was the beginning of a long and destructive relationship between American banana companies and the country o
f Honduras, earning it the pejorative nickname “Banana Republic.” United Fruit and the other fruit companies that soon followed became infamous for their political and tax machinations, engineered coups, bribery, and exploitation of workers. They strangled the country’s evolution and cultivated a corrupt and extreme form of crony capitalism, in which they subverted the government to their own ends.

  A central figure in this history was an American named Samuel Zemurray, a young Russian immigrant who started off as a pushcart peddler in Alabama. When he was eighteen, he noticed that the Boston Fruit cargo ships arriving in the port of Mobile were throwing away the bananas that had ripened during the voyage, because they would spoil before they could get to market. Zemurray bought a load of these ripe bananas for almost nothing, filled up a railroad car, and rolled it inland, telegraphing grocers along the way to meet the boxcar and buy his cheap bananas, quick. By the time he turned twenty-one he had made over $100,000 and had become known as Sam the Banana Man. Zemurray founded the Cuyamel Fruit Company, with two tramp steamers and five thousand acres of banana groves on the Honduran coast. The American appetite for bananas was insatiable. (And it still is; the banana is consistently the number one–selling item in Walmart superstores.)

  While the fruit companies were flourishing, the Honduran economy was in almost perpetual crisis. At this time, the British were still the bankers to the world, and they had unwisely loaned Honduras far more money than the country could repay. Honduran sovereign debt had grown so large that the British were threatening to go to war with Honduras to collect it. The possibility of the United Kingdom, or any European power, interfering in Central America was unacceptable to US President William Howard Taft. In 1910 his secretary of state, Philander Knox, recruited J. P. Morgan in a scheme to buy Honduran debt from the British—which he did at fifteen cents on the dollar—and restructure it. Under the deal Morgan struck with the Honduran government, Morgan’s agents would physically occupy Honduran customs offices and shortstop all tax receipts to collect the debt.