CHAPTER 4

A land of cruel jungles within almost inaccessible mountain ranges

Enter George Gustav Heye. Heye’s father had made a fortune selling his petroleum business to John D. Rockefeller, and his son would go on to increase that wealth as an investment banker in New York City. But Heye had interests other than money. In 1897, fresh out of college and working on a job in Arizona, Heye came across an Indian woman chewing on her husband’s splendid buckskin shirt “to kill the lice.” On a whim he bought the lice-ridden garment.

The buckskin shirt launched one of the most voracious collecting careers in American history. Heye became obsessed with all things Native American, and he would eventually amass a collection of a million pieces. In 1916, he established the Museum of the American Indian on upper Broadway in New York City to house his collection. (In 1990, the museum moved to Washington, DC, and became part of the Smithsonian.)

Heye was a gigantic man, six feet four inches tall, almost three hundred pounds, with a billiard ball head and a baby face framed by heavy jowls; he wore a gold watch-chain draped across a stout chest and dressed in black suits with a straw boater’s hat, cigar protruding from a tiny pursed mouth. He often took buying trips across the country in his limousine, consulting the obituary columns in local papers and inquiring if the dearly departed had left behind any unwanted collections of Indian artifacts. On these trips he would sometimes put his chauffeur in the backseat and take the wheel himself, driving like a fiend.

Heye’s obsession expanded to Honduras when a doctor in New Orleans sold Heye a sculpture of an armadillo said to come from Mosquitia. This curious and appealing object was carved in basalt, with a funny-looking face, an arched back, and only three legs so it could stand without wobbling. (It is still in the museum’s collection.) It captivated Heye, and he eventually financed an expedition to the treacherous region in search of more artifacts. He hired an explorer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, a British adventurer who claimed to have found the Maya city of Lubaantun in Belize, where his daughter allegedly discovered the famous crystal “Skull of Doom.” Mitchell-Hedges was the very picture of a dashing British explorer, down to the plummy accent, briar pipe, sunburned visage, and hyphenated last name.

Mitchell-Hedges explored the fringes of Mosquitia in 1930 for Heye until he was laid low with an attack of malaria and dysentery so severe it left him temporarily blind in one eye. When he recovered, he brought out over a thousand artifacts, along with an amazing story of an abandoned city deep in the mountains, home to a gigantic, buried statue of a monkey. The natives, he said, called it the Lost City of the Monkey God. Heye quickly sent Mitchell-Hedges back on a new expedition to Mosquitia to track down the lost city, cofinanced by the British Museum.

Interest in the second expedition was high. Mitchell-Hedges declared to the New York Times: “Our expedition proposes to penetrate a certain region marked on the maps of today as unexplored… Within my knowledge the region contains immense ruins never yet visited.” The location was somewhere in Mosquitia, but the exact position he declared a secret. “The region can be described as a land of cruel jungles within almost inaccessible mountain ranges.” But on the new expedition, Mitchell-Hedges did not go into the interior, perhaps wary of repeating his earlier travails. Instead, he spent most of his time exploring the sand beaches and coastlines of the Bay Islands of Honduras, where he pulled some stone statues from under the water, likely deposited there by coastal erosion. He justified his failure to go back into Mosquitia by claiming an even greater discovery: He had found the remains of Atlantis, which, he suggested, had been “the cradle of the American races.” He returned with more tales of the Lost City of the Monkey God, which he had heard on his journeys along the coast.

Heye immediately began planning another expedition to Honduras with a new leader, this time wisely bypassing Mitchell-Hedges, perhaps because he had begun to suspect, belatedly, that the man was a con artist. The truth was, Mitchell-Hedges was a fraud on a spectacular scale. He did not discover Lubaantun, and the crystal skull was (much later) revealed as a fake. Yet he succeeded in fooling many contemporaries; even his obituary in the New York Times would eventually repeat as truth a string of dubious facts that Mitchell-Hedges had been peddling for years: that he had “received eight bullet wounds and three knife scars,” that he fought alongside Pancho Villa, was a secret agent for America during World War I, and searched for sea monsters in the Indian Ocean with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son. However, some skeptical archaeologists had dismissed Mitchell-Hedges as a charlatan even before his second voyage to Honduras, and afterward they heaped ridicule on his outlandish claims about having found Atlantis. Mitchell-Hedges published a book about his experiences, Land of Wonder and Fear, about which one archaeologist wrote: “To me the wonder was how he could write such nonsense and the fear how much taller the next yarn would be.”

For his third expedition into Mosquitia, Heye partnered with the National Museum of Honduras and the country’s president, who hoped the new venture would help open up the vast Mosquitia region to settlement by modern Hondurans. Knowing that such an expansion effort would, regrettably, involve the displacement or even destruction of the indigenous Indians who still lived there—not unlike what had happened in the American West—the government and the National Museum were eager to document the Indians’ way of life before they vanished. An important goal of the expedition was, therefore, to do ethnographic as well as archaeological research.

Although his intention was to employ a serious professional, once again Heye betrayed a weakness for swashbuckling men of questionable integrity. The man Heye chose to find his “great ruin, overrun by dense jungle” was a Canadian journalist named R. Stuart Murray. Murray had given himself the title “Captain” fifteen years before, when he involved himself in a shabby revolution in Santo Domingo. In an interview before he departed for Honduras, Murray said, “There’s supposedly a lost city I’m going to look for, which the Indians call the City of the Monkey God. They are afraid to go near it, for they believe that anyone who approaches it will, within the month, be killed by the bite of a poisonous snake.”

Murray led two expeditions for Heye into Mosquitia, in 1934 and 1935, journeys that became known as the First and Second Honduran Expeditions. In pursuing various tales and descriptions of the Lost City of the Monkey God, Murray believed he came tantalizingly close to finding it. But again and again, just as he thought he was on the verge of success, he always seemed to be thwarted—by jungle, rivers, mountains, and the death of one of his guides. In the archives of the Museum of the American Indian is a photo of Murray on the banks of a river, kneeling next to a row of small metates, or grinding stones, beautifully carved with the heads of birds and animals. On the back of the photo Murray wrote a message to Heye:

These come from the “Lost City of the Monkey God”—the Indian who brought them out was bitten by a Fer de Lance in September and died. With him died the secret of the city’s location—More when I return. R. S. Murray.

Among the many artifacts he brought back were two he believed contained clues to the lost city: a stone with “hieroglyphic” characters on it, and a small statue of a monkey covering its face with its paws.

After the 1935 expedition, Murray moved on to other projects. In 1939, he was invited to be the guest lecturer on the Stella Polaris, the most elegant cruise ship of its day. There he met a young man named Theodore A. Morde who had been hired to edit the ship’s onboard newspaper. The two became friends. Murray regaled Morde with stories of his search for the Lost City of the Monkey God, while Morde told Murray of his adventures as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. When the ship docked in New York, Murray introduced Morde to Heye. “I hunted for that lost city for years,” Murray said. Now it was someone else’s turn.

Heye immediately engaged Morde to lead the third Honduran expedition into Mosquitia, the trip that would finally—he hoped—reveal to the world the Lost City of the Monkey God. Morde was only twenty-nine years old, but his expedition and its monumental discovery would ring down through history. The American public, already captivated by the story of the Lost City of the Monkey God, followed it with enormous interest, and the expedition would give future historians and adventurers enigmatic clues to be endlessly debated and argued. If it weren’t for Morde and his fateful expedition, the many bizarre and misguided quests for the lost city that littered the decades of the 1950s to the ’80s would not have taken place. Without Morde, Steve Elkins would probably not have heard the legend and would never have embarked on his own eccentric search for the Lost City of the Monkey God.