Jungleland Read online

  That made her laugh. “Maybe the parrots will be your friends,” she said, thinking it through. “They’re pretty. They can sing.”

  “That would be nice,” I agreed, and we imagined that together.

  When buying my plane ticket to Honduras, I had considered going by myself. I thought maybe it would be more meaningful, that I would find myself. That sounded romantic, in theory, but I realized after some time that the notion of going out there alone wasn’t exactly practical. I didn’t speak Spanish very well, and there were no road maps for the rain forest. I wasn’t afraid of losing myself or being lonely; I was scared of walking in circles and never getting anywhere.

  I told Sky that I was hoping I could find a partner to go along with me. “I’ll go,” she volunteered.

  I laughed, said good night to her, and then returned to my computer, where I spent the next hour zooming the Google satellite over the Honduran jungle and firming up plans for my trip.

  I wasn’t lying about the partner. A few days later, the archaeologist Chris Begley offered to be my guide in the jungle. We had been talking on and off for weeks about the White City and Morde’s notes. When I mentioned on the phone that I had a ticket for early July, he said he was going to be there already, leading a river rafting tour. “I can take you through the jungle when I’m done,” he said. “No problem.”

  I got lucky.

  Chris had spent more than a decade of his life trekking through the Honduran wilds, living in tents and hammocks, studying the lore about ancient worlds that had been covered up and left behind. He was a forty-year-old from Tennessee, a “good ol’ boy” with a head on his shoulders—a PhD from the University of Chicago and a Fulbright scholar in El Salvador. The official Web page for him at Transylvania University, in Kentucky, where he teaches anthropology, describes him as the school’s “own Indiana Jones, navigating Central American jungles and searching for ancient cities lost to time.” No one knew Honduras better. Even the local scientists brought him inquiries of their buried and lost history.

  We met for the first time one winter night at a dive bar in Brooklyn. He was in New York now for an event for his fashion designer wife. Chris stood out among the skinny, sleep-deprived Brooklyn hipster kids in black with angular, mussed-up haircuts. In fact, he looked as though he’d just jumped out of the pages of National Geographic. He wore sand-colored fast-drying pants with multiple pockets and a white safari shirt. He is about six foot two, with muscular arms and brown hair turning gray and trimmed military-style. His metal-framed glasses looked hard to break.

  He apologized for being late, explaining that he had mistakenly climbed on an express subway that had sent him zooming right past his stop and leaving him three neighborhoods and thirty-three blocks away from the bar. But instead of taking the local train back a few stations, which is what I would have done, he’d gotten out and walked. Chris, I learned, is mostly everything I’m not: he loves camping, doesn’t mind being wet, and couldn’t care less about bugs. As he sipped a Bud Light, he said, “When I’m down there, it’s like two different movies are going on. The one there, with me out in the jungle, and the one at home, with my wife and kids doing their thing. In this one”—he pointed at us in the dim bar light, as if it were the first act of a Hollywood show—“you never know how it’s going to end.”

  When I asked why he had first gone to Honduras, he said that he had actually started his fieldwork in Bolivia. But the highlands there had already been too worked over by scientists. “I wanted a place where I could strike out on my own,” he explained. “I liked the idea of searching for the unknown, you know, and there’s a lot of that out there. The unknown.”

  When he says “out there,” Chris always means the jungle. About the jungle, he also likes to point out that facts are sometimes obscure. “It’s hard to know what is real or not real,” he said. “The standards of truth are different. Here it is ‘My grandfather told me this story,’ versus our sort of evidence.”

  Chris can talk for hours about earthen mounds, magnet sites (ancient capitals), and indigenous cosmology. Although he is skeptical of the existence of Ciudad Blanca and Morde’s story, he finds the legend to be one of the world’s great detective stories. Once he told me, a bit cryptically, that Ciudad Blanca “might be discovered only in being lost.”

  A couple decades ago his obsession with lost cities in Honduras was considered eccentric. “Just after I began my research, someone asked a friend of mine why I was working out here since there was nothing to be found,” he recalled, with a laugh. People believed the area was a waste of time. Chris ignored them. “For a long time people thought it was impossible to develop a civilization in a rain forest. But now we know better than that.” He smiled. “It is not the counterfeit paradise that everyone talked about.”

  He was referring to the archaeologist Betty Meggers’s argument in the 1960s that although the jungle seemed lush, it was actually a rainy, hot, mushy hell, with little opportunity to do the kind of farming necessary to support a large civilization. Meggers suggested that this unfriendly world could be inhabited only by tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, people who had little attachment to one place over another.

  In more recent years, however, archaeologists such as Clark Erickson, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Heckenberger (who appears in David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z), of the University of Florida, have begun to refute that argument in the Amazon. In field research, the scientists discovered evidence of ancient life in the form of “black earth,” or fertilized land, suggesting that advanced farming was undertaken in these areas. Chris said it was that skepticism toward ancient life that persisted in debates he had about Honduras—until he began to document it in the early 1990s. “I did a lot of walking,” he said.

  Since then, he’s discovered hundreds of sites, many of them related, and mapped hundreds of others. He lived with the Pech tribe for five years, sleeping on a dirt floor, and has spent many more years mucking around the wilderness. By no means has he come close to exploring all of it. “No one really has,” he said.

  As we left the bar that night, Chris said he would begin making plans for our journey and would hire two locals to help carry equipment. “This is gonna be fun,” he said in parting.

  “I Was Lost”

  INDIANS CALLED GEORGE HEYE Isatigibis, or Slim-Shin—for the narrow legs holding up his colossal body. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with a fire-hydrant neck, a gold watch chain across his chest, and a cigar almost always dangling from his mouth. His money came from his father, an oilman who had sold out to John D. Rockefeller. He drove a Rolls-Royce and was regularly seen in New York’s finest nightclubs, sometimes, as a friend once said, with a “blond at either elbow and a bucket of champagne in front of him.” Long before he decided to go after the lost city, people referred to him as a “boxcar collector,” for his impulse to grab up every Native American artifact he could find, no matter how small. Others, though, called him a plunderer, because what he was doing sometimes appeared to be more akin to grave robbing.

  Heye’s obsession with Indian artifacts began in 1897 on a business trip to Arizona, where, after graduating from Columbia University’s School of Mines, he was working on a railroad project in Kingman. For ten months he lived in a tent, and at night he visited the Indians who worked for him. “One night I noticed the wife of one of my Indian foremen biting on what seemed to be a piece of skin,” he recalled once. “Upon inquiry I found she was chewing the seams of her husband’s deerskin shirt in order to kill the lice. I bought the shirt, became interested in aboriginal customs, and acquired other objects as opportunity offered, sending them back home. . . . That shirt was the start of my collection. Naturally, when I had a shirt I wanted a rattle and moccasins. And then the collecting bug seized me and I was lost.” That was a feeling Morde and Murray could relate to.

  Elsewhere, Heye described his mission to collect as an attempt to solve “the great mystery of the origin of the prehisto
ric races of the Western Hemisphere.” His critics, however, saw a less elevated man. “He bought all those objects solely in order to own them,” an unnamed professor of archaeology told the New Yorker in a 1960 profile of the collector. “George was fortified by the sufficient monomania to build up a superlative, disciplined collection.”

  By the time Morde met him in New York, Heye had truly gotten lost. He was sixty-three and had given up everything—first engineering, then a job on Wall Street—to build his new museum. “George would get himself a new limousine and make a pilgrimage, at ninety miles an hour, across the continent,” the professor recalled. “He’d pause at towns that took his fancy, look up the local mortician and the weekly-newspaper editor, and ask for word of people lately deceased, or soon likely to become so, whose possessions might include an Indian collection.”

  When Heye wasn’t out searching himself, he hired scores of anthropologists and adventurers to roam the Americas. “He collected the best anthropologists,” the professor continued. “His crew had the money to dig up or buy everything that the rest of us couldn’t afford.” Early on, he stored his collection in an elegant Madison Avenue mansion, where he lived with his socialite wife (the first of three; his second wife, tired of his artifacts and wandering, would lock him out of his house and ask for a divorce) and two children, but in 1939 it was housed in a four-story building in Harlem, at 155th Street and Broadway, and known as the Museum of the American Indian. (In 1989, the Smithsonian would acquire the entire collection; by that time, the museum had the largest assemblage of Native American artifacts in the world.)

  Heye’s interest in the lost city was likely owed to an obscure doctor in New Orleans who sold him a stone armadillo decorated with gems. Heye considered it one of the most stunning pieces in his collection. According to the doctor’s papers, the armadillo had come from a remote place somewhere in northeastern Honduras, near the rumored location of Ciudad Blanca.

  Convinced that there was more treasure to be found, Heye began sending explorers to the area. Before Murray, one of the most prominent had been Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who had traveled there in 1930 and again in 1931. The press loved to write about his adventures. When the New York Times profiled Mitchell-Hedges on his second journey, the story noted that he was seeking the “cradle of race in [the] American jungle.” His first trip to the Mosquitia had given him promise. “Within my knowledge,” he boasted, “the region contains immense ruins never yet visited, as well as Indian tribes of whom practically nothing is known.” The ruins, he speculated, “may change the entire scientific conception of the aboriginal races of Central and South America.” Mitchell-Hedges’s most important discoveries included the sprawling Maya city of Lubaantun, far in the jungles of Belize. There he also excavated a crystal skull, or, as he named it, “the skull of doom,” which, in his telling, the Maya high priests had employed “to will death” on their enemies.

  But after all his pronouncements, Mitchell-Hedges returned from his second trip some five months later with no evidence of the lost city. Two years after, Heye sent William Duncan Strong, an archaeologist from Columbia University. Strong discovered a grouping of prominent burial mounds along the Río Patuca, which he called the Floresta Mounds. Murray and others followed, sensing that they were closing in on a major discovery. But the city remained unfound.

  Now Murray was handing him Morde. When the two men met in New York, they hit it off and soon made a deal. The giant Heye grabbed Morde’s hand and shook it. It’s up to you now, he told him. Whether he knew it or not, Morde had been preparing for this moment his entire life; the journey would be dubbed the Third Honduran Expedition, following Murray’s first two attempts. Morde’s job, like the others’, would be to map the still mostly untraveled interior, document the indigenous tribes, and collect artifacts. The ultimate goal was, of course, to find the lost city.

  The Coup

  ON JUNE 28, a couple weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Honduras, a coup broke out and put the trip in jeopardy. That morning, two hundred soldiers charged into the Honduran presidential palace in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. With guns drawn, masked men handcuffed and dragged away the bleary-eyed president, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, popularly known as Mel.

  Like a dangerous criminal, Mel was taken by armored car to an air force base, where he was loaded onto a plane and sent to San José, Costa Rica. There he emerged in front of cameras and declared the coup illegal. “I am president,” he said, still in his pajamas. In his absence, the Honduran congress presented a signed resignation letter, later discovered to be a forgery, with the wrong date, and a man named Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as president.

  I spent the first few days of the overthrow worrying that Amy would find out and forbid me to go. I was transfixed by the images of chaos online and in the papers: the armed men in smoke-filled streets, the military vehicles rumbling about, the scared Hondurans looking as though they had no idea what would happen next.

  The exiled president had apparently gotten himself into the situation by offending elite businessmen and politicians with his populism and close ties to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s imperious leader. Mel had been born to a prominent ranching family and was famous around the country for his tall white Stetson hat, cowboy boots, and bushy mustache.

  The feeling in some quarters of power seemed to be that he had abandoned his friends—that he had hurt them with things such as raising the minimum wage and opposing the privatization of certain lucrative industries—and was scheming to rewrite the constitution in order to extend his term. Now his old friends felt he had to pay.

  As days passed, I kept hearing reports about how hazardous the situation was becoming. The State Department warned travelers to stay away, and some observers worried that the country was on the verge of civil war.

  The reckless, danger-seeking part of me grew more excited on hearing such news reports. I kept thinking, perhaps selfishly, how the backdrop of the coup would make for an even better story—not to mention a more intense personal journey. But I also wondered if I simply had a death wish.

  When I reached Chris Begley on the phone, he said, “You should be okay getting down there.”

  “Should?”

  “Well, you never know.” Then he said, with a laugh, “Very little is ever certain when it comes to this place.”

  HONDURAS—ABOUT THE size of greater Philadelphia, with a population of about 7 million—is one of the least developed countries in the Americas. After Haiti, it is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Only about 18 percent of its more than 9,000 miles of roads are paved. It is a rough and volatile place, bursting with desperation: Transparency International ranks it as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and frequently there are reports agonizing over the country’s rising levels of violence.

  With nearly seven thousand killings in 2011, averaging about eighteen bodies a day, it is the most murderous country in the world. Many of the murders go unsolved, including most of the 108 Americans killed there over the last seventeen years. As one local man would later say to me, “It’s cheap and easy to kill a guy in Honduras. Who is going to catch you? Not the police!”

  Honduras borders Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, all of which have suffered through civil wars during the past thirty years. There hadn’t been a coup in the country since 1982—though there had been almost half a dozen over the course of the previous twenty-five years. The United States has cast a long shadow over the tiny territory for the last century, mainly once the American banana companies arrived and immediately began to dictate how the country would be run. As the former head of United Fruit Company once said, “In Honduras, a mule costs more than a congressman.”

  During the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. military set up encampments in the jungle, where they trained the rebel Nic-araguan contras to fight the socialist Sandinistas. Some believe the Americans never left and even today wield influence over Honduran politicians
and military. The degree of U.S. involvement in the overthrow, if any, was impossible to know. But in public, the Obama administration was firm in its disapproval of the coup and called for Mel to be returned to power. The United States didn’t acknowledge the new president—few countries did—and in fact placed him and his coconspirators on a blacklist, barring them from ever coming to the United States.

  I sneaked in moments to continue monitoring the situation online. By the second week, the streets and town squares were brimming with angry Mel supporters—labor union members, teachers, and especially campesinos, or peasants. Tanks prowled the cities, and there were photographs of tear gas exploding in clouds around protesters and police wielding clubs and machine guns that fired rubber bullets.

  In the end it was impossible to hide it from Amy. One afternoon, I walked into the living room and saw her reading the New York Times. The front page chronicled the drama. “This is insane,” she said. “You know this, right?”

  “It’s not that bad,” I assured her.

  “It’s turning to war.”

  “It probably won’t,” I said.

  “But you’re still going?”

  “The flights are still going,” I said. “That means it’s not that bad.” The last part didn’t sound so convincing—and she knew it.

  “That doesn’t mean you should go.”

  I told her I’d be out in the jungle, far from the coup. “All that stuff is going on in the cities,” I said. “It’s quiet in the jungle!”

  A day later I read online that the police had started shooting civilians.

  “949 Miles to La Ceiba”

  IN LATE MAY 1940, Morde was on an overnight train from New York to New Orleans, where he would catch a ship to Honduras. He sat in a Pullman car, slumped on a hard but not uncomfortable seat, close to a dusted-over window, the rolling landscape whizzing past but the air inside quiet enough to think. There was so much to noodle: what would he see and find, and would he be a different person when he returned?