Jungleland Read online

  At 4 a.m., the men woke to their first glimpse of civilization—the lights of La Ceiba. The two friends returned to the Paris Hotel, where for the first time in more than three months they enjoyed the simple luxury of a bed and the clean smell of its soft, freshly laundered cotton sheets. There were other comforts too: “First got a coca cola, a barber shop shave . . . ice in our glasses!”

  The days before their return to the United States were a blur of activity. Morde met with the U.S. consul and then traveled to Tegucigalpa, the dusty Honduran capital, where he visited with President Tiburcio Carías Andino and the cartographer Dr. Jesús Aguilar Paz. Fourteen years later, Aguilar Paz would produce the first official map of the country with its famous question mark, along with the notation “Ruinas Ciudad Blanca” stamped on a stretch of mostly unexplored territory in the eastern part of the country—above the Río Wampú.

  Finally, on July 20, the men located a fruit ship, the Patria, heading to Tampa, Florida. They paid the captain $40 for two spots among the roughneck sailors and bade Honduras good-bye. After six nights at sea and four months of travel, Theodore Morde’s Honduran expedition was at last going home.

  Ernesto’s Story

  THEY GUARD IT with their life. They war with others. They are not like they were. They war with themselves. They kill each other. It is a secreto. You know that?”

  We were gliding along the river now, and Ernesto was telling us about the Tawahkas, the tribe that inhabited the banks of the Patuca.

  Most of the Tawahkas are Catholic, as the tribe long ago fell under the spell of missionaries. Observers have lately described the tribe as “endangered,” like the nearby Pech, though the population was up from its low of 160 at the turn of the century. Tawahkas were leaving or marrying into other tribes and sometimes fighting one another.

  Bloods mixed; traditions dimmed and were forgotten. In 1940, Morde had reported that there were fifteen full-blooded Tawahkas in one camp. Today, there are fewer than ten full-blooded Tawahkas in five villages. The government had passed laws protecting the tribes from the outside world pushing in, converting their land into a “biosphere reserve.” But the police and military were a long way away; hence the tribe’s need to be protective of their lives, what they own, the histories and traditions and legends they cling to.

  The rain clouds had now dispersed, leaving behind twists of fog floating over the dimness. Howler monkeys groaned, their combined noises like a distant hurricane working up to force. Frog, in his muscle shirt, plied the engine. There were three of them, all packing their guns, and a young boy whom I had not seen the night before.

  Ernesto had joined Chris and me in the bow. He knew what we were searching for. Ernesto’s man had told him about our conversation the night before.

  “You must be careful about what Indians you talk to about that,” he said. “It’s a secreto.” Extracting a plastic lighter from his pocket, he lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then flapped his cigarette hand at the dense wall of woods around us as if he were waving off a mosquito cloud.

  “I have a friend who heard some things from the Indians and went out there looking,” he said. He nudged close to us, his gold teeth glinting in the sun, which had just emerged from the mess of morning fog. “He had been walking for two days,” he said. “He started finding beautiful pottery. Grinding stones, pieces of things. There were drawings on rocks—monkeys and people and circles. These were signs.”

  Ernesto paused while we took this in. On the left riverbank, I noticed a lonely hut on stilts, the first sign of habitation in many hours. Pancho and Angel stared off into the distance, listening to their radio, as Ernesto’s men watched us.

  Just as Ernesto was about to go on, a tree limb slammed into the side of the boat. “You see that?” he asked.

  “The tree?”

  “No,” he said. “The jungle. It wasn’t just a tree.” He flicked away his dying cigarette and smiled at us as if we were suddenly in this trip together, a shift in mood from last night.

  “The painted rocks,” he said, picking up his story. “He followed them for three more days. He said he felt close to the ruins.”

  “What part of the jungle?” I asked.

  “Out there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where.” He put his hands around his neck and stuck out his tongue, which was blobby and black like the gunk from the bottom of the river.

  “Whatever he heard from the Indians was wrong,” he said. “He grew sick. He could hardly walk.” He spat into the water before finishing. “The sickness was all over him. His head, stomach, feet. He had to turn back.”

  Only then did the man start to feel better. After a day of walking away, Ernesto said, the sickness vanished and from that day forward he would never again venture into the jungle.

  WHEN I’D SET out, I had imagined writing a book that might show my daughter what kind of man I was, how I had grappled with the big questions of life—getting older, leaving youth behind, commitments, the importance of experience and discovery, and even love. Instead I was fumbling through the jungle, falling apart, nearly dying. It was the opposite of strong.

  I grieved, in a way. I had gone from feeling lost at home to being literally lost in this jungleland. I wasn’t even sure there was anything to discover. What if Morde had been lying? What if the city didn’t exist? More and more the question crept into my mind. Even if it did exist, this jungle was a rabbit hole that opened up into scores of other rabbit holes. You could walk for months and months, slashing and hacking and climbing, and not see the same damn place twice. Except it all looked the same to me.

  For a stretch I tried to jot down my thoughts, describe the sound of the river passing by, and it calmed my mind a bit. I wrote about Sky asking me about socks in the jungle and tried to hang on.

  WITH NO BOTTLED water, we relied on the river and iodine drops, which made everything taste like iron. We passed the first Tawahka camp, where Morde had likely stopped, back when the camp boasted about twenty-four huts and a school. Now there was only tall grass. In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch had struck the site and swept everything away. Farther downstream, Ernesto directed the boat into a Tawahka settlement known as Yapuwas. His men decided to follow us up the steep dirt path to the village. I had heard them whispering to one another as we got off the boat, which made me think that they were coming along for information we might turn up.

  “This isn’t good,” I said to Chris.

  “Let’s just see how it plays out. Watch.”

  One carried a rifle, which he held with both hands, allowing for a quick shot. There was no one around, but it felt as if there were a hundred eyes staring out from the dozen or so huts. The huts straddled a dirt track. They were in various stages of decay, with rotting boards and thatched roofs that looked animal gnawed. Some appeared abandoned. The only sound was the loud buzzing of cicadas.

  Ernesto called out with something like a birdcall, and after a considerable hiatus four women in old skirts emerged from behind one of the huts. Two young boys in cut-off jeans followed. Ernesto’s man steadied his gun. We said hello, and the women nodded, though their faces remained expressionless. When we asked if there was anyone here who could talk to us, they shook their heads. One woman said that the men were out in the fields and wouldn’t be back until nightfall.

  When we mentioned Ciudad Blanca, there was a protracted silence. Then a young boy, wearing no shoes, stepped forward. “I know about it,” he said in Spanish, but the women stopped him, whispering something in their native tongue, and that was the end of our encounter.

  We walked once through the small village, with the women watching us, before we decided to keep going. Ernesto and his men did the same. Any imaginings they’d had of secret information leading to stores of gold or buried artifacts ended. Before he left, Ernesto said, “Good luck,” with a chuckle. He hadn’t noticed Pancho speaking to the Indian boy, who’d said a man at the next Tawahka camp could help us. “He knows many things,” the boy said. He told us
to ask simply for “the elder.”

  “This Strange Civilization”

  ON THE MORNING of August 2, 1940, Theodore Morde arrived at the Biltmore Hotel to tell his incredible story. The hotel was one of Manhattan’s stateliest, with two brick towers and a subterranean concourse opening to a platform for the luxury Chicago express 20th Century Limited train—“the world’s greatest,” according to the New York Times. A crowd of reporters turned out, eager to hear all about the lost city. Reporters were present from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Sun, and the Associated Press. Morde, twenty-eight pounds lighter, had come by train from Tampa. In photographs, he wears a double-breasted khaki suit, his hair swept back and shiny with pomade and a slender mustache that makes him look a bit like Clark Gable. Standing in front of the flashing cameras that morning, he projected the air of a man who had just returned from another planet. The jungle had imbued him with a palpable mystery.

  One reporter would describe Morde’s discovery as “romantic,” a welcome departure from the grim mood gripping the city. Having spread across Europe, World War II had seized the collective psyche of New York and the country at large. The New York Times was reporting the “scythe-like sweep” of Hitler’s German army. There was concern that once the führer finished with Britain he would sail his soldiers across the Atlantic to besiege the United States. National conscription was under consideration, and a city commission of engineers had been charged with fashioning defensive measures for possible gas attacks and bombings. Meanwhile, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia worked to fortify the spirits of a population suffering 15 percent unemployment.

  “A big part of our job was charting rivers and streams which no white man had ever traversed before,” Morde told the crowd. “We spent weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams.” He paused, taking in all the eyes on him. “When we could go no further, we started hacking a path through the jungle. It was tough going. There was a type of tiger claw bamboo that was full of thorns, and we could hardly get near enough to cut the branches away.” He relished the attention as he recounted the wild’s daunting obstacles: “dangers of isolation, disease, rains, devastating floods, and venomous snakes.” He told of the wild pigs that had nearly killed him as well as the deadly fer-de-lance. He said, “We had to eat wild boar, deer, and dragon-like iguana lizards. Our only vegetable was wild banana—generally cooked green.” At one point, he reached into his suit pants and produced a gleaming vial of gold. It was a land of incredible riches, he said. He called Honduras an “oil-bearing land” with deposits of silver and platinum. About the gold, he said, “We picked this up with our own bare hands.”

  The reporters wanted to know about the city, but Morde was cagey in his answers. He said that his expedition had returned with traces of an ancient kingdom dating back to “before Christ was born,” including several hundred artifacts, from pottery to a pitpan, which would be displayed at George Heye’s National Museum of the American Indian. He pronounced the capital city’s name for the scrum: the Lost City of the Monkey God. He had said the name many times to himself by now. It was a civilization, he said, “whose people had learned to build with stone and who worshipped monkeys as gods.”

  Stepping toward the clamoring reporters, he told them that the city was a buried, distant place with a long, ancient wall disappearing into the centuries-old murk. Crude roads lined with stone buildings had once radiated outward through the verdure. “All that was left,” he went on, “were mounds of earth covering crumbling walls where houses once stood as stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples.”

  He elaborated on his theory that the monkey capital had perhaps at one time been home to thousands of people—maybe up to thirty thousand—and that the inhabitants had likely been contemporaries of the Maya. “I saw a great jungle-covered mound which, when some day we excavate it, I believe may reveal a monkey deity,” he said. “I found a facial mask. . . . It looked like the face of a monkey. . . . On nearly everything we found was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god. What it stood for, I don’t know, but some day they will be deciphered and we will know the whole story of this strange civilization.”

  Morde wouldn’t go into details about the city’s location. He was afraid that people would plunder the site in his absence and disrupt a future excavation. As for the existence of the smelted gold goblets and dishes, like the Indian princess had mentioned to the Spanish bishop Pedraza in 1545, Morde didn’t talk about that either.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES published two stories, highlighting “evidence of a thriving agricultural civilization” that had been “wiped out by some major catastrophe.” The other prominent daily, the New York Sun, reported how “the people of that almost inaccessible spot were highly developed and very likely representative of an advanced civilization,” an assertion that helped Morde’s case against the long-entrenched narrative that a major farming civilization could never flourish in a rain forest.

  Morde was twenty-nine years old and that day walked away from the Biltmore a kind of legend: a man who had gone to a place where few men had dared to go before. Just as people around the world were feeling edgy and threatened, Morde gave them reason to dream again, to imagine going to a distant place and glimpsing the traces of another age. An op-ed in the Standard Tribune put it this way: “The world of ours has been pretty well explored since the days when map makers could show only the Mediterranean littoral and filled in the rest of their maps with pictures of sea monsters. Yet the fact that there are still things waiting to be discovered is brought home to us in Theodore Morde. . . . A discovery like his will add to mankind’s knowledge of the world’s past.”

  Meanwhile, Manhattan high society feted him. What was it like there? they asked. Did the natives try to kill you? A monkey cult? How much gold did you find? Women gravitated to him, intrigued by his bravery, pulled in by his handsome movie-star looks. But none of them could pin him down. He reunited with his sponsor, George Heye, and presented him with hundreds of artifacts. There is no record of their conversation, but it likely entailed Heye’s favorite subject, “the great mystery of the origin of the prehistoric races of the Western Hemisphere.”

  The mystery of the city was the subject of Morde’s lecture at the legendary Explorers Club, where other adventurers including Percy Fawcett and Charles Lindbergh had told their tales. He appeared on radio shows, on college campuses, and at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, where he was photographed at the telephone exhibit with a pretty, dark-haired woman. Later, he published his American Weekly story. The Hearst publication boasted, ridiculously, 50 million readers. Titled “In the Lost City of Ancient America’s Monkey God,” the cover line was breathless: “Explorer Theodore Morde Finds in Honduras Jungles a Vanished Civilization’s Prehistoric Metropolis, Where Sacrifices Were Made to the Gigantic Idol of an Ape—and Describes the Weird ‘Dance of the Dead Monkeys’ Still Practiced by Natives in Whom Runs the Olden Blood.”

  In his syndicated column, “New York Day by Day,” Charles B. Driscoll observed Morde’s “uncommonly handsome person.” “In white Palm Beach suit, immaculate white shirt and white shoes,” Driscoll continued, “he seemed to me the last person in the diningroom I’d have picked as the man who discovered the romantic City of the Monkey God, in Central American wilds.” In the same interview, Morde’s fellow explorer and mentor Captain Stuart Murray said he was impressed by his protégé’s superhuman abilities: “I hunted for that city for years. This fellow found it on his first try.”

  MORDE RETURNED HOME to New Bedford to see his family in the fall of 1940. It had been many years since he had first stood at the end of his block, near the harbor, and stared out at the ocean, wondering what the world held for him. He gave his sister two cups of gold that he had prospected from the rivers. The memory of Morde’s old life, who he was before he’d left on that cruise ship as a stowaway in his teens, before he’d left for the Spanish war, and then the jungle, all of that receded. It was
hard for his family to keep up with him. In his absence, he had become a different person. He was now a grown man. He told his family stories about his travels. But it was impossible for him to explain everything. Many things were simply untranslatable. He said he was thinking of writing a book, but right now he didn’t have any time.

  The New Bedford Standard, which had been following Morde’s traveling life over the years, interviewed him at length. After all the news stories recounting his adventures, Morde felt that he needed to clear something up. “Being interested in archaeology, as I naturally have been because of my travels to most of the famous ruins of the world, does not make me an archaeologist any more than my three months in Spain made me, as some interviewers described me, a war correspondent,” he said. “I think being termed an explorer would suffice.”

  When the reporter inquired about his plans to return to the city, Morde replied that with the help of George Heye he had already been at work organizing an expedition for January 1941. In his travel notes, he had mapped out a flat place in the forest, in the eastern part of the country, where a landing strip could be chopped out. Planes would be able to fly in supplies and a larger team. A dam could be set up to provide drinking water. As for timing, he expected it to take years to uncover the site.