Jungleland Read online

  Hours passed as we pored over the journal. Each time Dave turned a page, a musty smell rose up and tickled the inside of my nose. The journals described Morde’s way into the wilderness, and I imagined him writing the notes as he floated down the Patuca or as he stayed the night at an Indian village or as he looked out over the valley of Ciudad Blanca.

  One thing was still missing in the papers: the specific location of the city. But there were clues—in one passage he noted that the ruins, which included high crumbling walls swallowed up by vegetation, were “between the Wampu and Platano Rivers.”

  “He was a very secretive man,” Dave said when I asked if he thought his uncle had been telling the truth about the city and not advancing a giant fiction. “You know, he was a real spy.”

  Later, Diana brought us egg-salad sandwiches and a tray of delicious chocolate-chip cookies. When we finished, Dave pulled out a faded piece of paper the size of a diploma and handed it to me. It was his uncle’s death certificate.

  Morde died in the summer of 1954, and though it was described in his death notice and in the press as a suicide by hanging, Dave and others in the family harbored serious doubts. “He had some very bad enemies,” Dave told me. “I like to think someone did him in.”

  Sadness crossed Dave’s face. He had been only thirteen years old when his uncle died, and I could tell the loss still troubled him.

  “You think someone killed him?” I asked.

  Dave speculated that he might have been killed for his work as a U.S. spy in the Middle East. Or his death could have had something to do with his knowledge of the White City—the spirits that Woodman had talked about. I would later hear this line of thinking from other family members and encounter rumors of his murder online. One web conspiracy theory in particular actually placed his death in London and involved someone deliberately running him over with a car as he planned his return trip to the lost city. At times, the myth of Morde blurred the truth of Morde. What is known is that his life was never the same after he left the jungle and headed to the war. It seemed that he began to question what all of those years of journeying amounted to. Dave suggested that solving the mystery of the lost city might also solve the puzzle of his uncle and why he ended up dead.

  I felt a bit overwhelmed about what I was getting myself into.

  Now Dave announced that he had one more thing to show me. He disappeared upstairs and came back with the gnarled piece of a wood staff.

  “This is it,” he said.

  I held it and turned it over in my hand.

  “This was part of his walking stick,” he said. It was darkened in places where Morde had likely held it in his sweaty hands for all those miles of trekking. On the smooth part of the wood was a stamp that read THIRD HONDURAN EXPEDITION. But this was not some mere artifact of sentimental value. A series of coordinates had been etched in knife and ink down the lengths of each of the four sides, as if logging the walking directions to an important place. Some of the combinations read: NE 300; E 100; N 250; SE 300.

  I wondered if the numbers might lead me to the center of the mystery.

  “Do you think,” I asked, “it leads to the lost city?” He thought it might.

  I was about to find out.

  “Treading on Dynamite”

  THEODORE AMBROSE MORDE’S life changed irrevocably the day he decided to head for the sea. During the first decades of the twentieth century, New Bedford, Massachusetts, was a whaling city, fifty miles south of Boston. There were textile factories too, but fishing was king. Whaling boats crowded the city’s salt-stained docks, their hulls faded and beaten, their rudders nicked, and their masts rising stoically against the sky, signs of experiences and survival. Herman Melville set the first chapter of Moby-Dick in the city, where he had once worked aboard one of the whalers. “In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel,” Melville wrote, “and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.”

  New Bedford was then a city where people still made a living from the sea, and some made tremendous fortunes. When Morde was growing up, the population was around 100,000, though the city still felt small, where people knew a face. Morde was a scrawny kid with bushy brown hair. His father, Albert, worked at the city’s post office and dabbled at inventing. Among other things, he owned patents for an adjustable carrier strap that would soothe the shoulders of hot dog and soda pop vendors as they climbed up and down the steps of a baseball stadium, and a priming device for internal combustion engines. His mother, Louise, stayed at home to care for Theodore and his two younger siblings, Alice and Elton. Louise was known to be firm. She was a Christian Scientist and preferred suffering over medicine. A teetotaler, she spent whole afternoons inside, or else on the porch, reading the Bible. Albert died of a heart attack at age 69, and Louise lived to be 101. Both outlived their son Theodore.

  The family lived in a three-story wood-frame house, coal-heated, with a sweeping roofline, halfway up a steep hill on Pope Street, a block from the water. A cupola provided views of the harbor and the ocean farther off. From up there, Morde could see a good storm blowing in, its swirling blackness, like a pugilist’s new bruise, swelling above the water before it came ashore.

  A transformation soon overtook young Morde. The exact timing is imprecise. Perhaps it was in middle school, when he was working for pocket change at the local pharmacy and imagining life outside the city, or later on, when he began to linger on the docks, the salty air in his face, reading the names of the ships, watching the men as they packed their boats and sailed off to catch whales, returning weeks or months later, the boats’ hulls full of blubber. He heard the fantastical stories of travel and conquest. It was hard to compare that excitement to his own family’s settled existence in New Bedford. His father owned a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser named Star Dust. Theodore liked to fish as much as to stare off at the distant horizon and daydream of all the sailors heading off to remote places. What was out there in the world for him? More and more, he wanted to get away and find out.

  Sitting in a classroom bored him, despite his interest in books, and Morde kept itching. He graduated from New Bedford High School in 1928 and picked up work at the local radio station, where he became a reporter. Eventually, he enrolled in Brown University, where he studied Spanish and French—until one day he simply disappeared.

  The details of his life are mostly murky from that point on. Whether or not he’d been planning his flight is a mystery. He was eighteen or nineteen years old. And for a period of days or weeks, no one heard from him. The rumor among the family was that he’d stowed away on a ship to Germany. There are no records of how he got there, only of his return.

  On February 4, 1929, according to a ship manifest, he sailed back in style to New York from Hamburg on the SS Washington, a 722-foot luxury steam liner with four masts and two smokestacks. Then one of the most beautiful and opulent ships at sea, she boasted an “electric gymnasium,” “electric staircases,” and murals and statues inside recalling the life of the first U.S. president.

  After that, it was as though he’d been asleep for the first part of his life and was now suddenly awake. He understood something important: his life ran parallel to all the other lives he might lead, other places he might see, so many stories he could one day tell. Later on, his family would talk about his charm, his good looks. But some would also say that once he left New Bedford, he became someone else, an enigma. He could be there with you, laughing and showing you every affection, and at the same time, in his mind, be a million miles away. The day he decided to leave on that ship for Germany was likely the same day that the improbable and perplexing life of Theodore Morde began.

  BETWEEN 1928 AND 1937, Morde sailed 250,000 miles and circled the globe five times. It was not a life of comfort, but comfort was not the point. He traveled in crowded, squalid crew quarters, sleeping on bunks or on the floor. The rooms were tight, the air fetid, the ship never stil
l.

  Sometimes, he worked as a bellboy, other times as a cook. Some crew members played poker and drank in down moments, but Morde read; he could quote Kipling and kept at his Spanish and French.

  The living conditions were worse on the tramps, roaming work vessels that claimed no port of call and followed no fixed schedule. Like migrant workers, the freighters wandered the ocean looking for jobs, and Morde wandered with them. It was nearly impossible to have close friends because people never stuck with the same ship. He endured long stretches alone, but he seemed to enjoy that time. It made him stronger. The sea was his education. After all the traveling, he was no longer a kid. He was in his late twenties. He sent his family telegrams from faraway places with a simple but cryptic message: “STANDBY.”

  He traveled with a small typewriter and began writing copy about the distant lands he saw; his byline started appearing in Associated Press wire stories, as well as Reader’s Digest, among other publications. He wrote about confidence men in Paris; a dead man being burned on a pyre in Bombay; cockfighting in Siam. In Nias, a remote island off the western coast of Sumatra, he lived with a tribe of headhunters. He was surprised to find stone houses and paved roads in such a distant place, which made him start to ponder the early seeds of civilization—how does a city like this grow? he wondered. “Where does it get its motive?” he wrote.

  By the summer of 1938, he had plunged headlong into the Spanish Civil War, covering the Popular Front’s struggle against the Nationalists. He was in good company. The war drew Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Morde wandered along with them, among the bombed-out front lines in Madrid and Barcelona, through trenches, and into and out of buildings blasted by enemy fire. “The air was full of tracer bullets, long lines of purple across the blue sky,” he recalled later in a lengthy two-part interview with his local newspaper. “With the white puffs of bursting shrapnel it was a pretty, though horrible, sight.” He lost fourteen pounds. It was never easy to find a meal, and in time his sleep-deprived and shell-shocked body felt, as he put it, “the tingling sensations of treading on dynamite.”

  One summer night, when the Nationalist military blocked him from crossing the border into Basque territory in the north, he swam across the Bidassoa River, barely eluding machine gun–armed sentries. “The water was cold, the current was quite fast, but we landed on the other side without mishap,” he recalled in the same newspaper interview. “We lay flat on our faces for a few moments, after which, hearing nothing to indicate the presence of sentries, we inched our way through a corn field to a house on the outskirts of Irun. I could have cheered.”

  There, in Nationalist territory, he disguised himself as a Basque fisherman and made friends with a Spanish spy ring, which helped him navigate the bloodshed. He filed reports detailing the massive casualties, the poverty overtaking the land, and the disturbing rise of “the world’s newest uncrowned dictator,” Nationalist leader Francisco Franco, a friend and ally of Adolf Hitler. As the months passed, Morde believed he was witnessing the collapse of Western civilization—the rise of fascism and the fall of democracy. He worried that the West, and the United States in particular, was blind to the impending darkness.

  The fighting had an intense effect on Morde. At one point, on a small boat that he’d stowed away on in the Mediterranean Sea, he felt for the first time that his life was in danger. Out of nowhere, an enemy military ship appeared. “It was about 4 a.m. when suddenly searchlights were focused on us by some vessel whose outlines we soon discovered to be those of a rebel warship,” he said later. “We stayed in the full beam for a full five minutes, expecting them to shell us at any second. Passenger and crew were in a state of hysteria. Personally, I would have given 10 years of my life to have been back in New Bedford,” he went on, even though the cruiser eventually moved on “for some reason” without firing. “I wish I had never heard of the Spanish War.” All along, he seemed to yearn for another adventure, one that was as exciting as war but maybe not as sinister or political.

  BEFORE HE FINALLY returned to the United States, Morde got mixed up in a bit of intrigue. In late 1938, Claude G. Bowers, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, wrote an official letter to Spain’s minister of state, Don Julio Álvarez del Vayo, about Morde, who, he claimed, “has had a very interesting adventure in which you may be interested.” The ambassador recommended that the two meet, describing Morde’s intelligence as “very confidential.”

  The contents of this top secret material and the meeting it inspired are unknown. But the missive is the earliest suggestion of Morde’s future life as a spy. In fact, it is possible that by then he had already begun to work as a state operative in at least an informal role.

  The notion of a journalist moonlighting as a spook was not exactly far-fetched. Since at least the nineteenth century, governments around the world enlisted reporters and writers as an effective way to get a secret agent into another country. They were skilled at reconnaissance and digging up sources. They could blend into foreign milieus and disappear if necessary. Reader’s Digest and Time were often rumored to be home to U.S. agents during both world wars. Journalists weren’t the only ones. Missionaries, geographers, mapmakers, and adventurers too were tapped for espionage efforts. The British government, for instance, was reported to employ explorers from the Royal Geographical Society.

  Whatever his relationship with the U.S. government at the time, Morde kept traveling, writing, making radio broadcasts, searching for something, though he never seemed to be quite sure of what. That changed in 1939, on an ocean liner plowing across the Atlantic, when he encountered an explorer named Captain R. Stuart Murray, who told him about the lost city.

  BY THEN, CAPTAIN MURRAY was already a legend among explorers. Wiry and perpetually tan, with wavy beach-blond hair, he had spent much of his life tromping around the wilderness of Central and South America, searching for traces of ancient civilizations. He was a member of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, two of the most prestigious explorer groups in the world, as well as the American Ethnological Society. Camel Cigarettes featured him in a national ad campaign dressed in desert-colored explorer garb and the words: “When I’m trekking through the wilds of Honduras, I like to take a break and smoke a Camel.” In interviews Murray cited Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, likening himself to a character embarked on his own great drama. The St. Petersburg Times once described him as inhabiting a “world of poison arrows and blow guns.” It was a scary place to be, but Murray told the paper that he was actually more afraid of himself. “The main thing that gets on one’s nerves in the jungle is solitude,” he mused.

  When Murray ran into Morde on the Stella Polaris in late 1939, he must have seen a bit of his own wandering self. As the 445-foot boat rolled through high seas, the men exchanged stories about what they’d seen abroad. “I used to sit night after night on the deck of the Stella Polaris talking with Murray,” Morde recalled later to the Sunday Standard-Times, his hometown paper. Murray was on board as a lecturer, Morde as a writer. Conversation soon veered to Honduras, where Murray said he had recently been on two expeditions.

  The U.S. State Department, the Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the American Indian had sponsored his three-month-long journeys—the first in 1934, the second a year later. The jungle was unpredictable, he said. And fascinating. While traveling, he had come upon obscure native tribes with languages and rituals he did not understand. But the most remarkable part of those journeys had been the rumor Murray kept hearing about a secret ancient city: Ciudad Blanca.

  Murray’s original mission to survey the unfamiliar land and hunt for artifacts had morphed almost fully into a quest for the lost city. Ciudad Blanca consumed him. At times, he told Morde that he felt he was getting close. He found clues scattered all over the leafy wilderness, like a puzzle waiting to be put together. But among the thousands of relics he carted home, two were especially notable: a small worn stone with eleven hieroglyphic characters chiseled
into one side and a miniature sculpture of a monkey shielding his face with his front paws, as if blinded by some penetrating light. What were the makers of those objects saying? He didn’t know for certain, but thought that they might have come from the Chorotega, a pre-Columbian group thought to be contemporaries of the Maya. Very little was understood about them.

  So there was an obvious question for Murray: Why didn’t you go back? If you were so close, why not keep trying?

  Saddened, suddenly distant, Murray told Morde that he had always intended to return to the search, but—ahh—life had its way with him. He’d been swept away to other matters. Perhaps Morde would have better luck himself.

  When they landed in New York, Captain Murray introduced Morde to the man who had mostly paid for his expeditions. His name was George Heye, and it happened that he was looking for another explorer.

  My Lost-City Guide

  WON’T YOU BE lonely in the jungle?” my daughter, Sky, asked me one night before she went to sleep.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  I could see her little eyes blinking in the darkness as we lay on her bed. “You’ll be all by yourself,” she said.

  “There are lots of animals,” I pointed out. “They’ll keep me company.”

  “But they might eat you up!” she said, sitting up.

  “That’s true,” I said. “They do have very sharp teeth.”