Jungleland Read online

  By now Morde was twenty-nine years old. He had the posture of a two-by-four and tended to dress theatrically in white suits with wide lapels and string ties. Tall and square-shouldered, he had a frontier face, sharp blue eyes, and the lean physique of a long-distance runner. Typically, he wore his wavy brown hair combed back, slick with a handful of pomade. His deep voice was made for radio. Lots of people told him that. In photographs, he sometimes posed with a rifle, but, no matter what, he always seemed to project that faraway look.

  The passengers around him slumped in their own chairs, men in thin ties and women in billowy dresses, sipping soft drinks, their tired faces behind newspapers and books, squinting in the cabin light. It was a hard time for most of them. Over the last eleven years, they had lost jobs and homes and dreams. Now, as the Great Depression loomed large, there was a new concern—another war in Europe. They heard about Joseph Stalin’s Soviet army gobbling up Poland, and Hitler preparing an attack on France and Britain. Would the führer come across the Atlantic? War bulletins played on the radio, stories of destruction filled the daily news. They worried that their country would again be swept up into conflict, and what would that mean for their already tenuous lives?

  They tried to be hopeful, all of them, clinging to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promises not to be the world savior this time around, to stay out of battle.

  It was hard for Morde to sit still. He was leaving all of that behind. Days before he departed Manhattan, he had written a letter to his parents in Massachusetts, explaining that he was headed “where no white man has been before”—unmapped wilderness on the Mosquito Coast that few knew anything about. He would be gone for four months, and every major news organization was watching one of the most talked-about journeys of that generation: this man headed out to discover a vanished civilization. As a media phenomenon, it was the equivalent of a man traveling to outer space.

  Centuries ago, explorers had most of the world yet to discover. But now much of it had been traveled and seen and written about. Ships had circled the globe. The North and South Poles had been reached. The sea had been mined. Mountains had been climbed. There were no more continents to name. Yet Morde remained a dreamer. He had become addicted to an idea that dies hard: that there was something richer out there than the New Bedford in which he had grown up, someplace more beautiful than the sea that he had seen from the decks of many ships, more perfect than any faraway land he’d already seen—a land that could possibly tell us about ourselves, that might even have the power to make us better. He believed that he could find that place.

  On April 2, a few days after he’d arrived in New Orleans, he headed straight for the Piety Street Wharf. The reek of brine stung his nostrils as he dodged banana carts and sailors and scanned the crowded docks for his ship, the SS Wawa. With him he hauled more than a thousand pounds of equipment, including clothing, cooking pans, candles, kerosene lights, mosquito nets, dynamite, a Luger pistol, and a rifle. He had notebooks for charting rivers and chronicling the natives he met. He had brought a camera to keep a visual record of the journey. He also had a wood walking stick—chest-high, smooth up and down, its handle emblazoned with the words THIRD HONDURAN EXPEDITION—to get him through the tight, tough spots. Once out of the harbor, the ship would sail down the Mississippi, through the bayous, skirting the barrier islands, and then through the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean. Four days later, the Wawa would arrive in La Ceiba, Honduras, and from there Morde would voyage on to the Mosquito Coast.

  Morde was well aware of the dark fates of the explorers who had gone searching before him. He knew the dangers of trekking into the murk—the thousands, for instance, who had perished looking for El Dorado. He knew the stories of ghosts, of warring Indians, of tropical sicknesses. And he knew he couldn’t be certain that he would make it out alive—yet still the jungle drew him.

  The city, for Morde, seemed to represent something profound—not just a vanished metropolis, concealed by centuries of moldering soil and lavish vegetation. He imagined an important regional capital, a sprawling city with high walls to fortify it against marauding armies, many buildings and plazas inside, with roads coming and going. A city in the jungle was a grandiose idea, audacious even, challenging the popular view going back centuries that such a developed civilization, with its own economy, politics, and religion, could never have emerged in such an unkind place. And then, if it ever existed, there were further questions to ask: how had it all come to an end, and where had the inhabitants gone?

  Wrapped up in all this mystery was another mystery, something even more personal, more elementary to Morde. He was just about to plunge into his thirties. Youth was falling away. Was part of his wanderlust born of anxiety or ambivalence about reaching middle age? Was he feeling the pressures that society put on a man to settle down into domestic convention and make a family? Perhaps he looked at his stable parents, who had been living in the same two-story Massachusetts house for most of their lives, and saw what he didn’t want to become, what he thought was too limited. Maybe this journey would help him understand his life better, bring the world into perfect, crystalline focus, the kind of insight that every human being wants.

  AS HE STOOD on the deck of the Wawa, Morde watched workers load the hull with lumber, cement mix, gas, dynamite, and drums of oil. A 1,650-ton steamer, with two hulking smoke stacks and a dinged-up hull, the ship was owned by Standard Fruit Company, which, along with United Fruit Company, controlled the lucrative banana trade between the United States and Honduras. (Decades later, Standard Fruit would become Dole Food Company, and United Fruit would become Chiquita Brands International.) Because it was a working boat, though, there were only a few other passengers, among them a commissary agent and a salesman of cast iron.

  There was also Laurence Brown, whom Morde had recruited to come along with him. Brown was an old university classmate, a year older and quieter than Morde. He was tall, with a heavy build, dark buzz-cut hair, and a crooked nose that looked as though it had been broken one too many times. In college, Brown had studied geology and played varsity football. He was a quick thinker with the brute strength of a bull. When Morde contacted him about the expedition, he was working for a company in the oil fields of Texas.

  The men made beds in the lower cabin with the other passengers, making sure to keep their belongings close. With the tight quarters, the rolling seas, the gale-force winds beating against the ship, and concern about pirates haunting their dreams, there was no way to get comfortable. They would hardly sleep.

  It was 3:30 in the afternoon when the crew finally threw off the thick ropes and picked up anchor and the Wawa steamed away from the wharf. Later, as the ship rolled out of the Mississippi and into the bluing Gulf of Mexico, Morde wrote in his journal, “949 miles to La Ceiba.”

  Good-bye

  I FEEL LIKE YOU’RE going off to the moon or something,” Amy said on the day I left to find the White City. It was early July, punishingly hot. On the steps in front of our brownstone, Amy and my daughter watched as I headed for the yellow cab waiting at the curb.

  I felt a little queasy and wondered if Morde had felt this way when he had said good-bye himself. Amy had come around grudgingly to accepting the trip by now, but her anxiety persisted. She still didn’t think I knew what I was doing—and part of me knew she was probably right.

  As I threw my bag into the trunk, she stepped down and asked, “Are you sure you have everything?”

  The day before, I had spread out my things on our living room floor: two sets of “jungle clothes,” which consisted of one pair of pants and shirt for the day and one set for sleeping at night; Tylenol with codeine; Tiger Balm hot pads, to take care of the pain after the marathon walks; Valium, to fight back those anxious nights of being days from anywhere; Lariam, to kill off malaria; iodine, to purify river and stream water for drinking; and a bagful of antibiotics.

  In bed that night with Amy, there had been some last-minute discussions about abandoning
the trip. “You don’t have to do this,” she had said. “You could just not go.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “I thought you wanted me to go.”

  “I do, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she turned toward me. I loved her green eyes. When we were first dating in college, I wrote a poem describing them as “bottom-of-the-lake eyes,” posturing as the romantic. I wrote her lots of poems then, but I didn’t anymore.

  She said, “You know, you’re not the only one who’s trying to figure things out.”

  I told her I knew that.

  “No,” she said. “Just know that.”

  Now, as we stood there on the street, I expected Amy to make some jest about Outward Bound and her being the better camper, but she didn’t. She bit her lips. I could tell she was worried about me, about what I would get myself into, especially now that there was a coup. But she didn’t say it. She didn’t say that she was upset either. She twirled a piece of her hair and said, “Be safe, okay?”

  Then Sky bounced down into my arms and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and I could have held her like that for hours. “Watch out for the crocodiles,” she said. “Remember, Daddy, they have sharp teeth.”

  We said good-bye, and I stepped into the car. As the taxi pulled away, I realized it would be an eternity before I saw Amy and Sky again. I missed them already, and, for the first time, I thought, You’re probably making a big mistake, you’re screwing up everything that’s good in your life.

  BEFORE BOARDING MY plane, I puttered around the gate for a while, restlessly walking up and down the long corridor, past the fast-food restaurants and magazine shops, battling second thoughts. At one point, I sat across from a family and watched as the man read Goodnight, Moon to his baby son. I had read that book to Sky when she was a baby. The family looked as though they were going on vacation, something that I should have been doing instead of heading into a virtual war zone. My chest felt hollowed out, and my head was light. For a moment I considered getting up and walking out of the terminal.

  I popped some Tylenol and closed my eyes. My thoughts dispersed with the woman’s voice over the speaker announcing it was time to go.

  The flight to Atlanta was without incident. But Delta flight 575 from Atlanta to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, was mostly empty, with entire rows of seats without passengers. When I asked an older flight attendant if that was typical for the season, she laughed. “It’s not exactly tourist season with a coup going on,” she said.

  Even with the State Department’s recent travel advisory warning Americans to stay away from the country during the conflict, all the flights were still going.

  “Let’s just hope we can land,” the man next to me interjected. He smiled, as if he knew something I didn’t.

  The week before, the exiled president had attempted to fly back into the country on a jet supplied by Chávez, but the army had blocked the runway with trucks. Rumor had it that he was now planning a return, either dressed as a woman or on a donkey over the mountains and through the jungle.

  The pilot throttled the plane, and it charged down the runway. In the air, some of the flight attendants looked a bit nervous about what they would find on the other side.

  I slept through the trip. Six hours later the plane skidded onto the runway. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. We were early.

  Part II

  “Left for Dead but Too Mean to Die”

  AFTER ALMOST A week of being tossed around at sea, the explorers arrived at La Ceiba, Honduras. It was April 6; the port air was hot and muggy. As Morde and Brown gathered their equipment and lumbered ashore, their muscles throbbed from all the awkward sleeping positions, their heads bursting from the onslaught of the rough waters. They needed rest, but giddiness ran through them like a flash flood. Looking up, they could see the green mountains, angled and curved like a broken rib cage, climbing in the distance before disappearing into a white haze that appeared slightly cursed. Morde wore gabardine breeches, leather boots, and a lightweight shirt. At customs, he and Brown registered their guns; then they headed for the town.

  The streets were mostly unpaved, heavily dusted, and dimly lit. There were few electric lights to hold off the darkness pressing in. It was Saturday, and people milled outside—dockworkers, banana hawkers, missionaries, whores. The scene was not unlike the old cowboy West, a place at the edge of civilization, ceaselessly teetering on the verge of chaos. As they walked, they noticed that men carried weapons: guns tucked visibly into their pants, machetes dangling off their belts. There was liveliness in the air, though it was hard to read: a land where you had to watch your back.

  La Ceiba wasn’t much different from the rest of Honduras, which was going through a stormy moment. The economy, supported mainly by fruit exports, was struggling to get back onto its feet after suffering its own Great Depression. Neighboring countries had dissolved into coups, and the lantern-jawed Honduran president, an ex-general named Tiburcio Carías Andino, was doing everything he could to stave off bedlam. Dissidents were jailed and occasionally executed. A brutal secret police force ranged over the country.

  The American banana companies—Standard Fruit, based in La Ceiba and New Orleans, and United Fruit, out of Boston and Tela—had inserted themselves into this political void, and very little happened without their knowledge. They behaved like drug cartels that happened to sell fruit. The companies had muscled their way into most of Central America, with the help of the region’s cruelest dictators, and were notorious for their blood-soaked labor fights.

  One of the most extreme episodes occurred in Colombia in 1928, about a decade before Morde’s trip. It became known as the banana massacre. Banana workers took to the streets to demand more pay and better hours. Military forces, reportedly operating at the behest of United Fruit, which had become known as El Pulpo, or the Octopus, for its wide, sucking strength, opened fire on the crowds. How many died that day is unknown; stories say between forty-seven and two thousand. Later, Gabriel García Márquez would fictionalize the event in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  That night, Morde settled down in one of the few hotels in the city—the Paris, a multistory hulk of a building on a public square a few blocks from the sea. There were parrots and palm trees in the courtyard. The jungle was only a few blocks away. Other internationals were also putting up there: hard, grizzled men looking for an angle in the frontier, maybe in bananas or rubber. Restless from their sea voyage, Morde and Brown wandered out for a drink at a rough bar. Still, even with a few drinks in them, it was hard to sleep that first night. Voices from the street kept them awake. So did the temperature.

  THE FIRST FEW days were enervating. The narcotic heat never let up. It took almost every ounce of their energy to get themselves together and plan out their thousand-plus–mile journey. There was a lot to do. They visited the port looking for boats to take them down the Caribbean coast into the jungle. They went through their equipment, pored over maps, and bought antisnakebite serum made with potassium permanganate. They inquired about guides. Who could help them navigate the wilderness?

  As they asked around, they heard about expats living in the river basins: ex-cons who had fled the authorities, dropouts afraid about the war in Europe, prospectors looking to get rich. They heard about some Germans running a plantation and sent word that they were coming.

  “The tropics seem to have gotten hold of us,” Morde wrote one day in his journal, as if describing a phantom parasite.

  A week passed. Morde felt antsy, worried that they’d never get to the jungle. “The Patuca seems so far away,” he wrote at one point, referring to the country’s longest river, which would deliver them into the deepest parts of the country’s interior.

  One night, as a diversion, they made a trip to a sparsely inhabited island off the coast called Roatán. A couple centuries before, the island had been home to a reported five thousand pirates who had worked the seas for shipments of gold and silv
er leaving the Spanish Main, the area from the Gulf of Mexico down to the Caribbean tip of South America. Morde had heard about some ruins in an inland cave.

  It was a stomach-turning boat ride through high seas. Wedged between a man and woman “who smelled of goats,” Morde couldn’t get to sleep. It didn’t help that the woman kept throwing up as the boat rose and fell in the swelling waters. When they arrived at the port the next morning, the explorers joked that the boat was appropriately named—Adiós. They felt lucky to have made it back onto land.

  Talking to locals about rumors of ancient life, they heard about “a great light that blazed up [in the sky] and died down three nights in a row.” It had stirred the town into frenzy. What was it? As they stood in the sunshine, a man pointed at the forested interior.

  They walked four miles into the bush, looking for the source of the light or some sign of ancient life. When darkness rolled in, they were met by sand flies, which they spent the next few nights picking off their skin. No sign of anything.

  Back in La Ceiba that night, they encountered a bloody man outstretched on the dirty street, not far from the hotel. It was late, with few people out. Minutes before, the man had been hacked with a machete, and big red tears of skin flapped from his slender body. Whoever had done it had fled. One hand was completely severed, and his head had been cut wide open, like a watermelon. Miraculously, he was still alive—“left for dead but too mean to die.”

  If there was any doubt creeping in on them that night, it was soon after replaced by more than a little bit of hope. They located a ship that was going south, and it would take them down the Caribbean coast to Trujillo, the tiny out-of-the-way city in the east that would be their last stop before entering the jungle.