CHAPTER 5 
I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.
A handsome man with a pencil mustache, a smooth, high forehead, and slicked-back hair, Theodore Morde was born in 1911 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, into a family of old whaling stock. He was a sharp dresser, favoring Palm Beach suits, crisp shirts, and white shoes. He started his journalism career in high school as a sports reporter for the local paper, and then he moved into broadcast journalism as a writer and news commentator for radio. He attended Brown University for a couple of years, and then took a job editing newspapers aboard various cruise ships in the mid-1930s. In 1938, he covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and photographer. At one point, he claimed to have swum a river to cross the front lines between the Fascist and Republican camps, so that he could cover both sides.
Heye was eager for Morde to set off on his expedition as soon as possible, and Morde wasted no time in organizing it. He asked his former university classmate, Laurence C. Brown, a geologist, to accompany him. In March of 1940, as war was breaking out across Europe, Morde and Brown departed New York for Honduras with a thousand pounds of equipment and supplies, in what Heye officially called the Third Honduran Expedition. Four months of silence followed. When the two explorers finally emerged from Mosquitia, Morde fired off a letter to Heye about the astounding discovery they had made—they had accomplished what no other expedition had been able to do. The news was published in the New York Times on July 12, 1940:
‘CITY OF MONKEY GOD’
IS BELIEVED LOCATED
Expedition Reports Success in Honduras Exploration
“According to the communication received by the foundation,” the Times article read, “the party has established the approximate location of the rumored ‘Lost City of the Monkey God’ in an almost inaccessible area between the Paulaya and Platano Rivers.” The American public devoured the story.
Morde and Brown arrived back in New York in August to great fanfare. On September 10, 1940, Morde gave a radio interview for CBS. The script still survives, annotated in Morde’s hand, and it appears to be the most complete surviving account of their find. “I have just returned from the discovery of a lost city,” he told his audience. “We went to a region of Honduras that had never been explored… We spent weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams. When we could go no further we started hacking a path through the jungle… after weeks of that life, we were starved, weak and discouraged. Then, just as we were about to give up, I saw from the top of a small cliff, something that made me stop in my tracks… It was the wall of a city—the Lost City of the Monkey God!… I couldn’t tell how large the city was, but I know it extended far into the jungle and probably thirty thousand people once lived there. But that was two thousand years ago. All that was left were those mounds of earth covering crumbled walls where houses once stood, and stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples. I remembered an ancient legend told by the Indians. It said that in the Lost City a gigantic statue of a monkey was worshipped as a god. I saw a great jungle-covered mound which, when someday we can excavate it, I believe may reveal this monkey deity. Today the Indians near that region fear the very thought of the City of the Monkey God. They think it is inhabited by great ape-like hairy men, called Ulaks… In creeks near the city we found rich deposits of gold, silver, and platinum. I found a facial mask… it looked like the face of a monkey… On nearly everything was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god… I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.”
Morde declined to reveal the location of the city, for fear of looting. It seems he kept this information even from Heye himself.
In another account, written for a magazine, Morde described the ruins in detail: “The City of the Monkey God was walled,” he wrote. “We found some of those walls upon which the green magic of the jungle had worked small damages and which had resisted the flood of vegetation. We traced one wall until it vanished under mounds that have all the evidence of once being great buildings. There are, indeed, still buildings beneath the age-old shroudings.
“It was the ideal spot,” he continued. “The towering mountains provided the perfect backdrop. Nearby, a rushing waterfall, beautiful as a sequined evening gown, spilled down into the green valley of ruins. Birds themselves, as brilliant as jewels, flitted from tree to tree, and little monkey faces peered inquisitively at us from the surrounding screen of dense foliage.”
He questioned the older Indians closely, learning much about the city, “handed down to them by their ancestors who had seen it.”
“We would uncover, they said, a long staired approach to it which would be built and paved after the manner of the ruined Mayan cities to the north. Stone effigies of monkeys would line this approach.
“The heart of the Temple was a high stone dais on which was the statue of the Monkey God himself. Before it was the place of sacrifice.”
Morde brought back a number of artifacts—figures of monkeys in stone and clay, his canoe, pots, and stone tools. Many of these are still in the collections of the Smithsonian. He vowed that he would return the following year “to commence excavation.”
But World War II intervened. Morde went on to become an OSS spy and war correspondent, and his obituary alleges he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler. He never returned to Honduras. In 1954, Morde—sunken into alcoholism, his marriage failing—hanged himself in a shower stall at his parents’ summer house in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He never did reveal the location of the lost city.
Morde’s account of finding the Lost City of the Monkey God received wide press and fired the imagination of both Americans and Hondurans. Since his death, the location of his city has been the subject of intense speculation and debate. Dozens have searched for it without success, parsing his writings and accounts for possible clues. One object became the Holy Grail of searchers: Morde’s beloved walking stick, still in the possession of his family. Carved into the stick are four enigmatic columns of numbers that seem to be directions or coordinates—for example, “NE 300; E 100; N 250; SE 300.” A Canadian cartographer named Derek Parent became obsessed with the markings on the stick and spent years exploring and mapping Mosquitia, trying to use them as directions to the lost city. In the process, Parent created some of the most detailed and accurate maps of Mosquitia ever made.
The most recent search for Morde’s lost city took place in 2009. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Christopher S. Stewart, undertook an arduous journey into the heart of Mosquitia in an attempt to retrace Morde’s route. Stewart was accompanied by archaeologist Christopher Begley, who had written his PhD dissertation on Mosquitia’s archaeological sites and had visited over a hundred of them. Begley and Stewart went upriver and made their way through the jungle to a large ruin called Lancetillal, in the upper reaches of the Río Plátano, which had been built by the same ancient people Strong and other archaeologists had identified as once occupying Mosquitia. This previously known city, which had been cleared and mapped by Peace Corps volunteers in 1988, was in the approximate area Morde claimed to be, at least as far as Begley and Stewart could ascertain. It consisted of twenty-one earthen mounds defining four plazas and a possible Mesoamerican ball court. In the jungle some distance behind the ruin, they discovered a white cliff, which Stewart believed might have been mistaken for a broken wall from a distance. He published a well-received book about his search, called Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure. It is a fascinating read, yet despite Begley and Stewart’s best efforts, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to settle the question of whether the Lancetillal ruins were indeed Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God.
As it turns out, all these researchers have spent almost three-quarters of a century looking for answers in the wrong place. Morde and Brown’s journals have been preserved and passed down in Morde’s family. While the artifacts were deposited with the Museum of the American Indian, the journals were not; this in itself is a remarkable departure from standard practice, because such journals normally contain vital scientific information and belong to the financing institution, not the explorer. The keeper of the journals until recently was Theodore’s nephew, David Morde. I was able to get copies of the journals, which the Morde family had loaned to the National Geographic Society for a few months in 2016. Nobody at National Geographic had read them, but a staff archaeologist kindly scanned them for me because I was writing a story for the magazine. I knew that Christopher Stewart had seen at least parts of them but had been disappointed to find no clues as to the location of the Lost City of the Monkey God. He had assumed that Morde, for reasons of security, had withheld that information even from his journals. So when I began flipping through them, I didn’t expect to find much worthy of note.
There are three journals: Two are hardcover books with dirty canvas covers stamped “Third Honduran Expedition,” and a third is a smaller spiral book with a black cover labeled “Field Notebook.” They run to over three hundred handwritten pages and give a comprehensive account of the expedition from start to finish. No dates or pages are missing; every single day was recorded in detail. The journals were the combined work of Brown and Morde, who each made their own entries in the same books as they journeyed into the heart of darkness. Brown’s easy-to-read, rounded handwriting alternates with Morde’s spiky, forward-slanted style.
I’ll not soon forget the experience of reading those journals—first with puzzlement, then disbelief, and finally shock.
Heye and the Museum of the American Indian, it seems, were conned, along with the American public. According to their own writings, Morde and Brown had a secret agenda. From the beginning, neither man had any intention of looking for a lost city. The only entry in the journal mentioning the lost city is a random note jotted on a back page, almost as an afterthought, clearly a reference to Conzemius. It reads, in its entirety:
White City
1898—Paulaya, Plantain,* Wampu—heads of these streams should be near location of city.
Timoteteo, Rosales—one-eyed rubber cutter, crossing from Paulaya to Plantain—saw columns still standing in 1905.
In hundreds of pages of entries, this is the entire sum of information touching on the lost city they were supposedly trying to find, the city they had described so vividly to the American media. They were not looking for archaeological sites. They made only cursory inquiries. The journals reveal they found in Mosquitia no ruins, no artifacts, no sites, no “Lost City of the Monkey God.” So what were Morde and Brown doing in Mosquitia, during those four months of silence, while Heye and the world held their breath? What were they after?
Their search for gold was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Among their hundreds of pounds of gear, Morde and Brown had packed sophisticated gold-mining equipment, including gold pans, shovels, picks, equipment for building sluice boxes, and mercury for amalgamation. Note that Morde, who could have chosen any partner for his expedition, selected a geologist, not an archaeologist. Brown and Morde went into the jungle with detailed information on possible gold deposits along the creeks and tributaries of the Río Blanco and planned their route accordingly. This area was long rumored to be rich in placer gold deposited in gravel bars and holes along streambeds. The Río Blanco is many miles south of where they claimed to have found the lost city. When I mapped the journal entries, day by day, I found that Brown and Morde never went up the Paulaya or Plátano Rivers. While going up the Patuca, they bypassed the mouth of the Wampu and continued far south, to where the Río Cuyamel joins the Patuca, and then went up that to the Río Blanco. They never came within forty miles of that area encompassing the headwaters of the Paulaya, Plátano, and Wampu Rivers, which was the general region in which they later claimed to have found the Lost City of the Monkey God.
They were looking for another California, another Yukon. Everywhere they went they dug into gravel bars and panned for “color”—bits of gold—totting up in fanatical detail each fleck they spied. Finally, at a creek running into the Blanco River, called Ulak-Was, they did indeed strike gold. An American named Perl or Pearl (all this is noted in the journal) had set up a gold sluicing operation here in 1907. But Perl, the wastrel son of a wealthy New Yorker, frittered away his time drinking and whoring instead of mining, and his father shut him down; the operation was abandoned in 1908. He left a dam, water pipes, gate valves, an anvil, and other useful equipment behind, which Morde and Brown fixed up and reused.
At the mouth of Ulak-Was, Morde and Brown dismissed all their Indian guides and went up the creek, setting up “Camp Ulak” in the same place Perl had worked. They then spent the next three weeks—the heart of their expedition—in the backbreaking daily work of mining gold.
They repaired Perl’s old dam to divert the creek into sluice boxes, where the flow of water over riffles and burlap was used to separate and concentrate the heavier gold particles from gravel, and recorded their daily take in the journal. They worked like dogs, drenched by downpours, eaten alive by swarms of sand flies and mosquitoes, picking thirty to fifty ticks a day off their bodies. They were in perpetual terror of poisonous snakes, which were ubiquitous. They ran out of coffee and tobacco and began to starve. They spent most of their free time playing cards. “We thrash out our gold prospects again and again,” Morde wrote, and “ponder the probable progress of the war, wondering if America has already become involved.”
They also dreamed big: “We have located a fine spot for an airport,” Brown wrote, “just across the river. We will probably build our permanent camp on this same plateau if our plans go through.”
But the rainy season fell upon them with a fury: torrential downpours that started as a roar in the treetops, dumping inches on them daily. Ulak-Was creek swelled with every new downpour, and they struggled to manage the rising water. On June 12, disaster struck. A massive cloudburst triggered a flash flood, which tore down the creek, bursting their dam and carrying off their gold-mining operation. “Obviously, we no longer can work gold,” Morde lamented in the journal. “Our dam is completely gone—so are our planks. The best course of events we feel, is to wind up our affairs here as hastily as possible, and head down the river again.”
They abandoned their mine, loaded the pitpan with their supplies and gold, and set off down the swollen rivers at breakneck speed. They careened down the Ulak-Was to the Blanco, to the Cuyamel, and into the Patuca. In one day they covered a stretch of the Patuca that had taken them two weeks to motor up. When they finally reached the edge of civilization, in a settlement along the Patuca where the residents had a radio, Morde heard about the fall of France. He was told that America “was practically in the war and would be officially in a day or so.” They panicked at the thought of being marooned in Honduras. “We decided to haste completion of the entire expedition’s aims.” What they meant by this enigmatic sentence is debatable, but it appears they might have realized they had to get busy fabricating a cover story—and get their hands on some ancient artifacts allegedly from the “lost city” to bring back to Heye. (There is no mention in the journals up to this point of finding or carrying any artifacts out of the Mosquitia interior.)
They continued on, ripping down the swollen Patuca by day and sometimes at night. On June 25 they reached Brewer’s Lagoon (now Brus Laguna) and the sea. They spent a week there, no longer in a rush as they had learned America was far from joining the war. On July 10 they finally arrived in the capital city, Tegucigalpa. At some point between these two dates Morde wrote the fabricated report to his patron, George Heye, which generated the New York Times article.
On their return to New York, Morde told the story of their discovery of the Lost City of the Monkey God again and again, and each time it got more detailed. The public loved it. Their rather modest collection of artifacts was put on display at the museum, along with a pitpan, or dugout canoe. The journals indicate that the two men hastily acquired these artifacts after they left the jungle, in a place west of Brewer’s Lagoon near the coast; a Spaniard showed them a site with pottery scattered about, where they did some digging. It seems likely they also purchased artifacts from locals at the same time, but the journal is silent on that question.
Morde and Brown made no effort in the journals to conceal or dissemble their actions. Why they wrote down such a frank record of deception is hard to understand. Clearly, they had no intention of ever sharing the contents of these journals with their patron, Heye, or the public. Perhaps they were filled with hubris and dreamed that a fabulous gold strike would be part of their legacy, and they wanted to record it for posterity. Their announcement of the lost city discovery might have been a last-minute impulse, but it seems more likely it was planned all along as a cover for their real agenda.
We do know this: For decades, many have wondered if Morde found a city. The general consensus up until now has been that he probably did find an archaeological site, perhaps even an important one. The journals, however, are proof that Morde found nothing, and his “discovery” was an out-and-out fraud.
But what about the walking stick and its enigmatic directions? I recently corresponded with Derek Parent, who had spent decades exploring La Mosquitia, studying Morde’s route, and trying to decipher the stick. He probably knows more about Morde than anyone alive, and he had been in close contact with Morde’s family for decades.
Over the years, David Morde had sent Parent photocopies of various bits of the journals, a few pages at a time. At one point in our correspondence, Parent told me that Morde’s discovery of the city was in the missing parts of the journals.
What missing parts? I asked.
That was when David Morde’s apparent ploy unraveled.
David Morde had claimed to Parent that most of Journal 2 was missing. All that remained, he said, was the journal’s first page, which he photocopied and sent to Parent. The rest of Journal 2 was gone, and he said he felt sure that the missing section was the part that recorded Morde’s journey up the Paulaya River to the City of the Monkey God. And why was that part missing? Morde explained to Parent that British military intelligence had ordered the family to burn Morde’s papers after his death, and it might have been lost that way; or it may have been destroyed during a period when the journals were being stored in a damp warehouse in Massachusetts that was infested with rats.
I was surprised when Parent told me this, because those pages David Morde claimed were gone are not missing from the original journal at all. I had the entirety of Journal 2—every single numbered page, firmly bound into the hardcover book—with no gaps in dates or missing text. The allegedly lost part of Journal 2 records nothing more than the time Morde spent relaxing in Brewer’s Lagoon, “getting chummy” with local expats, sailing, and fishing—and taking a day trip to dig for artifacts.
Why the deception? One might speculate that David Morde may have been protecting the memory of his uncle or the honor of his family, but unfortunately he is unavailable to explain; he is serving a prison term for a serious crime. After his incarceration, his wife, perhaps unwittingly, loaned the complete journals to the National Geographic Society.
When I shared these findings with Derek Parent, and sent him a copy of the rest of Journal 2, he e-mailed me back: “I’m in utter shock.”
Despite the skullduggery, the mystery of the walking stick persists. In the wake of this news, Parent told me his latest theories. He thinks the stick may have recorded directions from Camp Ulak or its environs to “some locale of interest.” Morde, he believes, found something and carved the directions to it on his walking stick instead of putting them in his journal—something so important he wanted to keep it even more secret than the journal he was sharing with Brown.
Parent took the directions from the walking stick and mapped them. The compass bearings and distances, he says, corresponded with the twists and turns of the Río Blanco going upstream from the mouth of Ulak-Was creek. He believes the stick logged a journey “recording steps along the river bank to a now well-defined end point.” That end point, Parent identified, was a narrow, 300-acre valley through which the Río Blanco flowed. This valley has never been investigated. It might have been another promising deposit of placer gold, which Morde hoped to return to later, perhaps without Brown, or it might have marked some other discovery of interest. The mystery of the walking stick remains unsolved.
We now know, however, that it does not contain coded directions to the lost city. In a journal entry on June 17, 1940, on the very last day of the expedition before his reemergence from the wilderness and arrival in a civilized town, Morde wrote:
“We are convinced no great civilization ever existed up there. And there are no archaeological discoveries of importance to be made.”