Jungleland Read online

  JUNGLELAND

  A MYSTERIOUS LOST CITY, A WWII SPY, AND A TRUE STORY OF DEADLY ADVENTURE

  CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART

  Dedication

  For Sky, Dash, and Amy, obviously.

  Epigraphs

  You can believe what you like about those regions: no one has the authority to contradict you. You can postulate the existence in them of prehistoric monsters, of white Indians, of ruined cities, of enormous lakes.

  —Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure

  To arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T. S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Part I

  A Professional Amateur

  The Mountain That Cries

  The Mystery Stick

  “Treading on Dynamite”

  My Lost-City Guide

  “I Was Lost”

  The Coup

  “949 Miles to La Ceiba”

  Good-bye

  Part II

  “Left for Dead but Too Mean to Die”

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  “Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”

  Snakes and Valium

  “Definitely on the Way at Last”

  The Valley of the Princess

  “Gold Fever”

  Pancho

  “The Last Outpost”

  Bandit Alley

  “The Equivalent of a State Secret”

  Mortal Threats

  Dance of the Dead Monkeys

  Catacamas

  “Green Hell”

  Loco Men

  “All Had Faded into Thin Air”

  Part III

  The Jungle That Disappeared

  “Beyond Hope”

  Looking for Camp Ulak

  “No Trace of Ruins”

  Calling Home

  “The Lost City of the Monkey God”

  Our Time with the Pirates

  “The Jungle Does Not Seem Like It Wants Us to Go”

  “Please Come Home”

  “Ice in Our Glasses!”

  Ernesto’s Story

  “This Strange Civilization”

  What We Learned from the Tawahkas

  Part IV

  Daisy

  Gateway to the Lost Cities

  “They Had Orders to Shoot”

  My Lowest Low

  “I’m Having the Time of My Life”

  Journey to the Crosses

  “From Journalist and Explorer and Spy to a Father”

  The Morde Theory

  The Lost City

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher S. Stewart

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THE MAN CALLED himself Rana, or Frog. A machete dangled off his leather belt, and he smoked a cigarette that I’d watched him roll. My three guides suspected that he, like the others who wandered far out here in the Honduran jungle, was a desperado, a convict, or some kind of trafficker. But all he wanted to talk about were the voices of the dead.

  “There are people out there,” he said. “You can’t see them. You only hear them now. The ancient people.”

  He pointed at his right ear, which glinted in the firelight with a silver stud earring, and his mouth extended into a sly smile, as if he possessed an old secret.

  “They are dead, of course. These people.”

  His cigarette smoke drifted around us in the moist night air. He shook his head. It was early July in the Mosquitia, rainy season, but the rain had stopped, and the two-room thatched hut was alive with noise—chirping, tweeting, burping, groaning.

  I squinted through a cutout in the hut: nothing for miles and miles. The closest road was probably two days of walking, and my satellite phone wasn’t working.

  Frog was probably in his late thirties, skinny and tough, in a red tank top emblazoned with dragons and ripped camouflage shorts, a scuffed cowboy hat cocked forward on his head. We had encountered him and two of his friends, all armed with rifles and machetes, earlier that day on a desolate stretch up the Río Cuyamel.

  Frog said he was on the run but wouldn’t explain what he was running from or what he was doing now in this remote part of southeastern Honduras. We didn’t want to join him, but we had no choice; otherwise, we might have been stranded on the Cuyamel for days. I was on a quest.

  For weeks I had been searching for the great lost city Ciudad Blanca. It is considered the El Dorado of Central America, and scores of explorers, adventurers, scientists, and government secret agents have pursued it for hundreds of years—all the way back to Christopher Columbus and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Some died; many got sick or lost, or simply disappeared. Douglas Preston, writing in the New Yorker, once described the lost city as among “the unanswered mysteries of the world.” Paul Theroux, in his novel The Mosquito Coast, doesn’t mention it by name but refers to a “secret city” in the Honduran jungle, inhabited by a secluded and enigmatic tribe called the Munchies.

  I’d never expected to come here. I’d heard the stories about how the vanished jungle metropolis might actually be the capital of a forgotten Mesoamerican civilization two thousand or more years old. I’d heard other equally archaic stories about ghostly spirits that protect the ruins, indigenous people with ancient secrets, murderous gold prospectors, and an American spy who had claimed in 1940 that he had found the sacred place, only to die unexpectedly before disclosing the location.

  The last story ultimately pulled me into the jungle. The man’s name was Theodore Morde. I had spent months studying his yellowed expedition journals, logbooks, and letters that few had ever seen. Morde wrote of burial grounds in the jungle; of a bizarre Indian ritual called the Dance of the Dead Monkeys; of murderers, runaways, and lost souls; and of the weeks trekking into what he called the “forbidden region.” In time, I grew obsessed.

  Now I had hiked more than a hundred miles in military-issue jungle boots with a forty-pound bag strapped to my back. Up mountains, through rivers, sometimes in propulsive rain, other times in burning sun, swinging a foot-and-a-half-long machete at thick vegetation. I was itchy from the bugs, aching everywhere, blistery, and wet. My boots were shot. My back hurt. I stank. I hadn’t slept in days, had run out of Valium the night before, and longed for my wife and three-year-old daughter, whose fourth birthday I was about to miss.

  Every day came with mortal threats: lethal snakes hiding in the bush, airborne viruses, bullet ants, road bandits, river pirates. The country was in the throes of a military coup, and I had already seen two dead bodies: a motorcyclist lying in the middle of a dirt road and a boy floating facedown in a river. I had never felt so alone. My mind strayed constantly, and my brooding always led me to the same disturbing place: I felt as though I were disappearing. Or, worse yet, that I had disappeared.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Frog said as the rain returned.

  I laughed, but he didn’t even crack a smile.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  He looked me hard in the eye. He said it was easy to lose your way in the jungle. “Don’t follow the voices of the dead,” he warned. “That’s my advice for you.”

  I said good night, retreated, and slumped into my hammock, the rain slapping the tarp over me. I looked out at the wet, impassable hell of the jungle and heard my wife’s voice over and over again from the day I left home. “What are you thinking? What are you really looking for? Why are you leaving?”

  M
orning was still hours away, but I couldn’t sleep.

  Part I

  A Professional Amateur

  REMEMBER THOSE DAYS, I’d start to say to Amy, my wife, when I was feeling particularly old and melancholy. Remember when we decided one night we wanted to go to Paris and the next day we were on a plane? Remember when we stayed out all night and you broke your heel and we ate breakfast at that diner in the West Village? How many times did we do that? Remember when we lived in that $500 studio in Williamsburg with views of the city and we thought we had it made?

  In our twenties, we’d bounced around from apartment to apartment. We’d go abroad at least three times a year, sometimes for Amy’s work—she’s a contemporary-art curator—other times for my freelance writing. My wanderlust had been born out of my largely sedentary childhood. I had grown up in a rigorously normal town of about 30,000 in upstate New York. We didn’t travel much, except for a family vacation every July when my brother, my parents, and I climbed into a Ford station wagon and drove to a beach in Delaware. There was a lake in my town, but with little horizon. The hills had no real vistas, and planes flew past overhead at 30,000 feet. Amy liked to joke that if it hadn’t been for her coaxing me into our first trip to Europe together, when we were twenty, I would have never left the States. We didn’t have much to worry about then. We made enough to get by. Now there was little time—or money.

  I still traveled as a writer, stringing along interesting assignments—a couple weeks in Iran, where I hunted down rogue military shipments, another couple weeks in the Balkans to search out diamond thieves, and more in Russia chasing down mobsters—but those trips never lasted long enough for me to feel as if I was fully inhabiting another world, living out another life. The assignments provided only an approximation of a sustained adventure. By the time the stories came out in the magazines, I was already back to folding laundry and changing diapers.

  Amy and I had been married for six years and had just moved with our three-year-old daughter, Sky, from the frantic crush of Manhattan to sleepier Brooklyn. Strapped with a mortgage and talking about having another child, we were settling down—or trying to. That stuff scared me, as I’m sure it does most young adults, especially those living in New York, where everything is so preposterously expensive. I was getting along in my thirties. I craved something more. Who isn’t charmed by the idea that there are still secrets left in the world?

  I first learned about the lost city in the spring of 2008. At the time, I was reporting a magazine feature about the growing Honduran drug trade. The jungles and Caribbean shores of Honduras were considered major transshipment points for cocaine traveling from Colombia up to the United States, and the business had created a healthy underworld economy. I was interested in a particular drug king who had apparently made a business of killing off the Colombian traffickers at sea, pilfering the cocaine from their submarines or speedboats, then selling it back home. He was said to live on a fortified hilltop mansion above the sea.

  After months of reporting, the story fell apart. One day I heard that the drug pirate had taken one of his speedboats out to sea, this time alone, without his gun-toting army, pointed the boat south, and never stopped. Stealing drugs as a business hadn’t turned out to be a very sustainable long-term proposition. The man had made his score, and now, it seemed, he would disappear.

  In the course of a phone conversation about the drug trade, though, a former U.S. soldier mentioned the lost city. He had been in the Mosquitia during the contra wars to train fighters in what he described as the “shittiest, buggiest shithole jungle in the world.” He’d slept in covered hammocks and tents. He’d always been wet and scratching his welts. “That place was bad, man,” he said.

  He couldn’t remember when he’d first heard about the city, if it had been in the bush or at a seaside bar where he chased women, but the stories revolved around the same reports of gold, priceless artifacts, overgrown temples and buildings, and “monkey gods.” “I always thought about going out there to find it,” he told me. He had never tried.

  Some nights, when my wife and daughter were asleep, I sat at my computer in the living room and mapped the Honduran jungle, shooting Google’s satellite camera downward, flying over winding rivers and tightly packed trees that made up one of the largest rain forests in the world. I zoomed until the image coming back was one impenetrable swath of green, and my imagination seized on what lay beneath.

  I researched the White City in down moments, when Amy was teaching in the late afternoons or on the weekends when Sky was at ballet or art class. I made phone calls to archaeologists, prospectors, adventurers, and crackpot conspiracy theorists. I found a magician who had been searching for the city for years and told me, “Once you start looking, it never lets you go. It sucks you up.” Another man mentioned “ghosts,” and an archaeologist named Chris Begley found the city’s legend so captivating that he described it to me as “one of the slipperiest and most elusive mysteries.”

  From what I could tell, the first inklings of a vanished city came from Christopher Columbus when, on his fourth voyage in 1502, he landed in the eastern part of Honduras at a point now known as the city of Trujillo. Walking the beaches nearby, he described in his journals rumors of gold nuggets “larger than lima beans” and an “island made entirely of gold.”

  But where? Almost twenty-four years later Hernán Cortés and his army of conquistadors arrived on the same eastern spit of land. In his letters home to King Charles of Spain, Cortés described the hunt for the legendary town of Hueitapalan, or the Old Land of Red Earth. His army searched the jungles of Honduras for almost two months but found nothing. Soon after, in 1544, Cristóbal de Pedraza, the bishop of Honduras, wrote a letter to the king about an arduous trip through swamps and forests outside Trujillo. He recalled his introduction to an Indian princess, who had told him of a fabulous civilization west of the sea, “where nobles drank from gold goblets, ate from gold plates.” It sounded like El Dorado—one of the original lost-city myths—a golden land ruled by a golden king.

  Over the centuries, there were loosely reported sightings. In 1927, on his flight over Central America, Charles Lindbergh spied an expansive stretch of white ruins—“an amazing ancient metropolis.” Several years later, an anthropologist named W. D. Strong claimed that he’d found ancient artifacts scattered about the Honduran river basins and that during his six-month expedition, he had heard “many stories of strange archaeological ruins.” Not long after, S. H. Glassmire, a mining engineer and gold prospector from New Mexico, announced that he’d found a lost city that was “five square miles,” with “crumbling limestone walls.” He said that it was overgrown and described walking along a “cornice that stuck out of the ground.” Later, his claims were questioned, though they seemed to only stir the seekers.

  I BEGAN TO daydream about the jungle, about what was under those green Google images, and about all the lavish stories of the lost city. I daydreamed as I strolled past the brownstone buildings of my leafy Brooklyn neighborhood, as I jogged around the paved lanes of Prospect Park, as I pushed my shopping cart through the colorfully stocked aisles of Fairway. At Ikea one Sunday morning, as Sky and Amy tested out a gray cotton pull-out couch, I stood off to the side and let my mind wander. I imagined myself tromping through the heavy jungle air—no iPhone blinking with e-mails and phone calls and Twitter updates. I imagined living off the forest, eating what I caught, drinking river water, my clothes soaked in sweat and rainfall, setting up camp when darkness came, the nights spent listening only to the simple buzz and whir of the forest. No air-conditioning. No aisle 7. No crowds. There I was, in the middle of the jungle, trying to find the lost city by myself. Driving home from the store, I couldn’t shake the thought. I drove right past our street and then backed into a sign when I was parking the car. “Sorry,” I said. “Just got distracted for a minute.”

  MY CURIOSITY CROSSED into obsession when I encountered Theodore Morde. In 1940, Morde returned from a four-month journey
into the deepest parts of the Mosquito jungle with news that he had finally discovered the city. He was only twenty-nine years old. He had already circled the globe five times and visited nearly a hundred nations. As a teenager, he had stowed away on freighters bound for England and Germany. He covered the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, lectured on cruise ships, and later worked as a spy during World War II for the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. intelligence agency that preceded the CIA.

  As with many of the great explorers of the past, Morde was more of a seasoned amateur, guided not by classroom study but by guile, boldness, and a tremendous self-confidence. The New York Times described his Honduran mission as “exploring hitherto unexplored land” with only a machete and pistol to defend himself. The McNaught Syndicate of newspapers called Morde “a true explorer,” as if to suggest that his lost-city discovery made him the last of a special breed of world adventurer.

  Morde fascinated me. And it wasn’t just his discovery, which would have helped overturn years of science arguing that a major civilization could never exist in such a harsh climate, but also something else: his extravagant life. The fact that he couldn’t seem to settle down, that he always burned for adventure.

  There was one big problem with the quest of Theodore Morde. Despite his claims of discovery, the city remained a complete mystery. No one knew the location of his city. Fearful that others would plunder the site in his absence, he never actually told anyone how to get to the site, and then he died before he could return to excavate it. His journals and everything else that he had written about the place disappeared after his death. Which made me wonder: Was Morde even telling the truth? And did the city really exist?

  At one point I found an article in a 1978 issue of Sports Illustrated that detailed an expedition to find the city. Titled “Quest in the Jungle,” the story featured two explorers, named Jim Woodman and Bill Spohrer, and mentioned the legend of Morde. I made calls and sent e-mails about the men, hoping that I might find them and that they might give me some more clarity on the legend. I jotted down notes from their trip and added it to my growing notebook on Morde’s adventure. When Amy saw my notes lying around the house, she sometimes asked where all this was going. At first I didn’t know and I told her so. “Only sniffing around,” I said. But soon I started to believe that I was onto something bigger than myself, bigger than anything I had undertaken before, and eventually, despite all the reasons to say no, despite all the trappings of the good life I lived, I just kept wondering—what if? What if I really managed to retrace Morde’s journey? What if I traveled to Honduras? What would I discover? Did I have the guts to actually try?