CHAPTER 3

The devil had killed him for daring to look upon this forbidden place.

Most Sacred Majesty:—… I have trustworthy reports of very extensive and rich provinces, and of powerful chiefs ruling over them… [I] ascertained that it lies eight or ten days’ march from that town of Trujillo, or rather between fifty and sixty leagues. So wonderful are the reports about this particular province, that even allowing largely for exaggeration, it will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the largeness of its towns and villages, the density of its population, and the policy of its inhabitants.

In the year 1526, Hernán Cortés penned this report, his famous “Fifth Letter” to the Emperor Charles V, while aboard his ship anchored in Trujillo Bay off the coast of Honduras. Historians and anthropologists believe this account, written six years after Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, planted the seeds for the myth of Ciudad Blanca, the City of the Monkey God. Given that “Mexico”—i.e., the Aztec Empire—had staggering wealth and a capital city of at least 300,000 inhabitants, his assertion that the new land was even greater is remarkable. The Indians called it the Old Land of Red Earth, he wrote, and his vague description placed it somewhere in the mountains of Mosquitia.

But at the time, Cortés was embroiled in intrigue and had to fight off rebellion by his subordinates, so he never did embark on a search for the Old Land of Red Earth. The jagged mountains clearly visible from the bay may have convinced him that such a journey would be daunting. Nevertheless, his story took on a life of its own, much as tales of El Dorado persisted in South America for centuries. Twenty years after the Fifth Letter, a missionary named Cristóbal de Pedraza, who would become the first Bishop of Honduras, claimed to have traveled deep into the jungles of Mosquitia on one of his arduous missionary journeys, where he came across an astonishing sight: From a high bluff, he found himself looking down on a large and prosperous city spread out in a river valley. His Indian guide told him the nobles in that land took their meals from plates and goblets of gold. Pedraza was not interested in gold, however, and he continued on and never entered the valley. But his subsequent report to Charles V fed the legend.

For the next three hundred years, geographers and travelers told stories about ruined cities in Central America. In the 1830s, a New Yorker named John Lloyd Stephens became obsessed with finding those cities deep in the Central American rainforest, if indeed they existed. He managed to wangle a diplomatic appointment as ambassador to the short-lived Federal Republic of Central America. He arrived in Honduras in 1839, just as the republic was falling apart into violence and civil war. Amid the chaos, he saw an opportunity (albeit a dangerous one) to strike out on his own to seek out these mysterious ruins.

He brought with him a superb British artist, Frederick Catherwood, who packed a camera lucida in order to project and copy every tiny detail of whatever they might find. The two trekked for weeks through Honduras with native guides, pursuing rumors of a great city. Deep in the interior, they finally arrived at a miserable, unfriendly, mosquito-ridden village called Copán on the banks of a river near the Guatemalan border. They learned from the locals that across the river there were indeed ancient temples, inhabited only by monkeys. As they reached the riverbank, they saw on the far shore a wall of cut stone. After fording the river on muleback, they climbed a staircase and entered the city.

“We ascended by large stone steps,” Stephens wrote later, “in some places perfect, and in others thrown down by trees which had grown up between the crevices, and reached a terrace, the form of which it was impossible to make out, from the density of the forest in which it was enveloped. Our guide cleared a way with his machete… and working our way through the thick woods, we came upon a square stone column… The front was the figure of a man, curiously and richly dressed, and the face, evidently a portrait, solemn, stern, and well fitted to excite terror. The back was of a different design, unlike anything we had ever seen before, and the sides were covered with hieroglyphics.”

Up to this moment of discovery, the image most North Americans carried of Indians came from the hunter-gatherer tribes they had read about or encountered along the frontier. Most viewed the aboriginal inhabitants of the New World as half-naked, savage Indians who had never achieved anything approaching what was termed “civilization.”

Stephens’s explorations changed all that. It was an important moment in history, when the world realized that stupendous civilizations had arisen independently in the Americas. He wrote: “The sight of this unexpected monument put at rest at once and for ever in our minds all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities… proving, like newly discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages.” The people—named the Maya—who had built this sprawling city of pyramids and temples, and who had covered their monuments with hieroglyphic writing, had created a civilization as advanced as any in Old World antiquity.

Stephens, a fine enterprising American, promptly bought the ruins of Copán for fifty dollars from the local landowner and made plans (later abandoned) to have the buildings disassembled, loaded on barges, and floated to the United States for a tourist attraction. Over the next few years, Stephens and Catherwood explored, mapped, and recorded ancient Mayan cities from Mexico to Honduras. They never did venture into Mosquitia, however, perhaps deterred by mountains and jungles far more discouraging than anything they had experienced in the Maya realm.

They published a two-volume work about their discoveries, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, packed with exciting stories of ruins, bandits, and brutal jungle travel, and lavishly illustrated with Catherwood’s splendid engravings. Their book went on to become one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of the entire nineteenth century. Americans were thrilled by the idea that the New World had cities, temples, and colossal antiquities that rivaled those of the Old World, equal to the pyramids of Egypt and the glories of ancient Rome. The work of Stephens and Catherwood established the romance of lost cities in the American mind and introduced the notion that the jungles of Central America must hold many more secrets waiting to be revealed.

Before long, the Maya became one of the most intensively studied ancient cultures in the New World, and not just by secular scientists. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified the Maya as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the Lamanites, as chronicled in The Book of Mormon, published in 1830. The Lamanites left Israel and sailed to America around 600 BC; The Book of Mormon tells the story that Jesus appeared to the New World Lamanites and converted them to Christianity, and it describes many events that occurred before the coming of the Europeans.

In the twentieth century the Mormon Church sent a number of well-funded archaeologists to Mexico and Central America to try to confirm the stories through site excavations. Although this resulted in valuable, high-quality research, it also proved difficult for the scientists themselves; facing clear evidence that disproved the Mormon view of history, some of the archaeologists ended up losing their faith, and a few of those who voiced their doubts were excommunicated.

The Maya realm, which stretched from southern Mexico to Honduras, seemed to end at Copán. The vast jungled mountains east of Copán, especially in Mosquitia, were so inhospitable and dangerous that very little exploration and even less archaeology took place. Glimpses of other, non-Maya, pre-Columbian cultures were being uncovered eastward of Copán, but these vanished societies also remained elusive and poorly studied. Just how far east and south of Copán the Maya influence stretched was also difficult to ascertain. In the vacuum, tantalizing rumors grew of even greater, wealthier cities—perhaps Maya, perhaps not—hidden in those impenetrable thickets, stories that fascinated archaeologists and treasure hunters alike.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, these stories and rumors had coalesced into a single legend of a sacred and forbidden Ciudad Blanca, a rich cultural treasure yet to be found. The name probably originated with the Pech Indians (also known as the Paya) of Mosquitia; anthropologists collected stories from Pech informants of a Kaha Kamasa, a “White House” said to lie beyond a pass in the mountains at the headwaters of two rivers. Some Indians described it as a refuge where their shamans retreated to escape the invading Spaniards, never to be seen again. Others said that the Spanish did, in fact, enter the White City, but were cursed by the gods and died or vanished into the forest, lost forever. Yet other Indian stories described it as a tragic city that was struck down by a series of catastrophes; the inhabitants, seeing that the gods were angry with them, abandoned the city. Forever after, it became a forbidden place, and anyone who entered it would die of sickness or be killed by the devil. There were also American versions of the legend: Various explorers, prospectors, and early aviators spoke of glimpsing the limestone ramparts of a ruined city rising above the jungle foliage somewhere in central Mosquitia. It seems likely that all these stories—indigenous, Spanish, and American—became conflated to form the basis of the White City or Monkey God legend.

Although many explorers had traveled into the Central American rainforests in the wake of Stephens’s discoveries, almost none had ventured into the daunting terrain of Mosquitia. In the 1920s, a Luxembourgian ethnologist, Eduard Conzemius, became one of the first Europeans to explore Mosquitia, traveling by dugout canoe up the Plátano River. On this trip he heard tell of “important ruins discovered by a rubber tapper 20 to 25 years ago, when he was lost in the bush between the Plátano and Paulaya rivers,” Conzemius reported. “This man gave a fantastical description of what he saw there. They were the ruins of a most important city with white stone buildings similar to marble, surrounded by a large wall of the same material.” But shortly after the rubber tapper reported his discovery, he disappeared. One Indian told Conzemius that “the devil had killed him for daring to look upon this forbidden place.” When Conzemius tried to hire a guide to take him to the White City, the Indians feigned ignorance, fearful (he was told) that if they revealed the location they would die.

By the beginning of the 1930s, the growing legend attracted the attention of American archaeologists and major institutions, who considered it not only possible, but even likely, that the unexplored, mountainous jungles along the Maya frontier could be hiding a ruined city—or perhaps even a lost civilization.* It might be Maya or it might be something entirely new.

In the early 1930s, the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology sent a professional archaeologist to explore eastward of Copán, to see if Maya civilization extended into the rugged thickets of Mosquitia. William Duncan Strong was a scholar, a man ahead of his time: quiet, careful and meticulous in his work, averse to spectacle and publicity. He was among the first to establish that Mosquitia had been inhabited by an ancient, unknown people who were not Maya. Strong spent five months traversing Honduras in 1933, going by dugout canoe up the Río Patuca and several of its tributaries. He kept an illustrated journal, which is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collections—packed with detail and many fine drawings of birds, artifacts, and landscapes.

Strong found major archaeological sites, which he carefully described and sketched in his journal, and conducted a few test excavations. Among these finds were the Floresta mounds, the ancient cities of Wankibila and Dos Quebradas, and the Brown Site. His journey was not without adventure; at one point his finger was shot off. (The exact circumstances are unclear; he may have accidentally shot it off himself.) He battled rain, insects, venomous snakes, and dense jungle.

What Strong realized right away was that these were not Maya cities: The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong’s work showed definitively that Mosquitia was not part of the Maya realm, however, his discoveries raised more questions than they answered. Who were these people, where had they come from, and why had all record of them vanished until now? How in the world did they manage to live and farm in such a hostile jungle environment? What was their relationship to their powerful Mayan neighbors? The earthworks posed another enigma: Did these mounds hide buried buildings or tombs, or were they constructed for some other reason?

Even as he uncovered many other ancient wonders, Strong continued to hear stories of the greatest ruin of them all, the White City, which he dismissed as a “lovely legend.” While sitting on the banks of the Río Tinto in Mosquitia, an informant told Strong the following story, which he recorded in his journal, under an entry entitled “The Forbidden City.”

The lost city, he wrote, lies on the shores of a lake deep in the mountains to the north, its white ramparts surrounded by groves of orange, lemon, and banana trees. But if one partakes of the forbidden fruit, he will be lost in the hills forever. “So goes the tale,” Strong wrote, “but it would be better to do as an informant’s father did, follow the river until it becomes a mere trickle among dark rocks and woods and then have to turn back. The city would still be there that way. Like the ‘Ciudad Blanco’—the ‘forbidden fruit’ will probably long remain a lure to the curious.”

All these rumors, legends, and stories set the stage for the next phase: on the one side, obsessive and ill-fated expeditions seeking the lost city, and on the other, the beginnings of serious archaeological research in the same region. Both would help begin to untangle the mystery of the White City.