Seventy-two years old at the time of the project, Benenson is a fit, handsome man with a close-clipped beard. He speaks with deliberation, weighing every word, and he does not look like a man who takes risks. He admitted that the project was an “amazing insanity” but he felt driven to take a chance on it. “I’m interested in this story. And also in this lost city and all the adventurers, liars, and crazy people who’ve been looking for it. If you’re going to be a gambler at all with a film project, I thought this was the one to put my money on. This was my number 17 on the roulette wheel.”
Benenson’s grandfather, Benjamin, came to America from Belarus in the late nineteenth century and settled in the Bronx, New York. He worked as a carpenter, initially building houses for other people, switched to building for himself, and today Benenson Capital Partners, of which Bill is a principal, is a major real estate company owning premier properties in Manhattan and elsewhere. But Benenson’s real love is film and its intersection with anthropology and archaeology. Out of college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Brazil, where he made his first film, Diamond Rivers, which aired on PBS. Today he has more than twenty feature films and documentaries to his credit. He was an executive producer of the documentary Beasts of No Nation, and he directed and produced The Hadza: Last of the First, about the last true remaining hunter-gatherer people of East Africa.
Benenson had a keen eye for offbeat projects, and he believed that even if nothing was found, the failure of yet another crazy search for the legendary city would actually make an engaging film. Elkins and Benenson, with other partners, created a company called UTL, LLC—“Under the Lidar”—to handle the details of the expedition and film.
With things finally turning a corner on his decades-old project, Elkins proceeded to put together a team. He and I had been in regular communication for years, and he asked if I’d write about the search for the New Yorker, for which I occasionally wrote archaeological pieces. I agreed, but only reluctantly. Truth be told, I was so skeptical about the outcome that I decided not to pitch the idea to the New Yorker at all until after the expedition was over—and only then if they found something. I didn’t want to risk looking like a bloody fool if the lidar survey came up empty, which I thought was likely, given that every attempt to find the lost city in the past five hundred years had ended in fraud or failure. When I confessed this to Steve, he said, “Well, if we draw a blank, at least you’ll get a vacation out of it.”
On April 28, 2012, the ten members of the expedition rendezvoused in Houston and flew as a group to the island of Roatán, in the Gulf of Honduras. Roatán is a world apart from the Honduran mainland; thirty miles long and about two miles wide, it is a tropical paradise of pearlescent sand beaches, turquoise waters, dazzling coral reefs, fishing villages, and luxury resorts—a major cruise ship and scuba dive destination. Because of its history as a British colony, English is the primary language.
Lovely as it was for a vacation spot, Elkins and Benenson had chosen Roatán, above all, because the island’s airport offered better security than the mainland for our plane and its classified payload. The State Department had issued a two-week permit for the plane to leave the country, but the permit required it to be kept in a high-security, nonpublic area with armed guards protecting it day and night. Elkins and Benenson hired the Honduran military to do the job.
Roatán, being in the northeastern part of the country, was also well situated with regard to Mosquitia: The three target areas were only about an hour’s flying time away. It had one drawback, however: The Roatán airport was forbidden to stock aviation gas. Because of narcotrafficking, avgas was tightly controlled in Honduras. Fuel tankers were routinely hijacked, the drivers killed and the fuel diverted for drug smuggling. The Cessna would have to touch down at the airport in La Ceiba, on the mainland, to refuel after every lidar flight before returning to Roatán.
At our headquarters, the Parrot Tree Plantation on the island’s south shore, the expedition team occupied a cluster of bungalows with red tile roofs, spreading along the shores of a turquoise lagoon, surrounded by white sand beaches, burbling fountains, and rustling palm trees. The suites sported marble bathrooms, kitchens with granite countertops, and bedrooms trimmed in polished tropical hardwoods. The complex was air-conditioned to frostbite levels. Behind the bungalows sprawled a huge freshwater pool, set among fake rocks, waterfalls, bridges, and dew-laden clusters of tropical flowers, with pergolas draped in snowy sheets, chiffon curtains billowing in the tropical breezes. At the adjacent marina, million-dollar yachts sat in their berths, lapped by Caribbean waters, their polished hulls blazing in the sun. The hills above were sprinkled with whitewashed villas.
“Why be uncomfortable?” Elkins said, as we gathered for a dinner of grilled lobster tails under a palapa on the beach, looking out over the lagoon, the night sky glittering with stars, the waves whispering along the strand.
These luxurious surroundings, however, only heightened the expedition’s anxious mood. On its journey down from Houston, the tiny Cessna had gotten stuck in the Florida Keys, grounded by a series of storms over the Gulf. It could be days before the weather cleared. Benenson and Elkins were paying thousands of dollars a day for everyone to sit around waiting. Nobody was happy.
NCALM had sent down three lidar engineers to run the mission: Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández Díaz, mission planner and chief lidar engineer; Michael Sartori, resident skeptic and data-mapping scientist; and Abhinav Singhania, lidar technician.
Fernández was, by happy coincidence, Honduran by birth. He had a PhD in Geosensing Systems Engineering from the University of Florida; he also held an MBA, summa cum laude, from the Catholic University of Honduras, and he was a Fulbright scholar. His familiarity with Honduran politics and culture, his fluency in Spanish, his knowledge of lidar, and his engaging personality would make him one of the most indispensable members of the expedition. The thirty-five-year-old engineer had a calm, matter-of-fact presence, behind which lay a brilliant scientific mind and a sly sense of humor. He was diplomatic, soft-spoken, and never ruffled when everything was going to hell around him, which happened frequently during the course of the expedition. Juan Carlos was delighted to be part of the project, and his involvement has since made him into a kind of national hero in Honduras. “It has to be the Monkey Gods,” he said with a laugh, “an amazing combination of luck, chance, and fate that I was in a position to help. If you’re from Honduras, you’re a mix of so many different things, Spanish and Indian. Even though my name is Spanish, I know there is some Indian in there.” He was hopeful about what the effort would mean for his country. “The people of Honduras don’t have a clear cultural identity. We have to start learning more about our past in order to create a brighter future.”