Those pathogens invaded Mosquitia via two pathways. The first was through trade. When Columbus landed in Honduras’s Bay Islands, he described a memorable sight: a huge trading canoe, eight feet wide and sixty feet long, manned by twenty-five paddlers. The canoe had a hut built amidships and it was heaped with valuable trade goods: copper, flint, weapons, textiles, and beer. There was extensive maritime trade throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Some historians say the canoe Columbus saw must have been operated by Maya traders, but it’s more likely they were Chibcha traders, given that the Bay Islands were settled not by the Maya but by Chibchan-speaking people who had ties to Mosquitia. These merchants, whoever they might be, were certainly trading with the mainland, as well as with Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico—some archaeologists believe they may have reached as far north as the Mississippi River delta. And the two main highways into Mosquitia—the Río Plátano and the Río Patuca—flow into the sea not far eastward of the Bay Islands. During the time of plagues in the Caribbean, there can be little doubt these traders, peddling goods from the islands and coasts, carried European pathogens up the rivers into Mosquitia, where the microbes escaped into the local populations and burned deep into the hinterlands.
A second likely track of infection was the slave trade. Before slavery was restricted by the Spanish crown in 1542, slaving parties scoured Honduras, kidnapping Indians to work plantations, mines, and households. The first Indians enslaved came from the islands and coasts. As disease wiped out these early captives, the Spanish raiders went deeper into the countryside to find replacements. (The African slave trade also ramped up at this time.) By the 1530s, the slavers were ravaging the Mosquito Coast and the Olancho Valley, where Catacamas is today, destroying villages and rounding up people like cattle. On three sides—west, north, and south—Mosquitia was surrounded by brutal slave raids. Thousands of Indians fleeing their villages took refuge in the rainforest. A great many disappeared into the mountains of Mosquitia. Some of these refugees, unfortunately, carried European disease into the otherwise well-protected interior valleys.
If we follow this hypothetical scenario to its conclusion, then sometime in the early 1500s several epidemics of disease swept T1 in close succession. If the mortality rates were similar to the rest of Honduras and Central America, about 90 percent of the inhabitants died of disease. The survivors, shattered and traumatized, abandoned the city, leaving the cache of sacred objects behind as a final offering to the gods, ritually breaking many to release their spirits. This was not a grave offering for an individual; it was a grave offering for an entire city, the cenotaph of a civilization. The same abandonment, with broken offerings, occurred across the region.
“Think about it,” Chris Fisher said. “Even though they were suffering from the ravages of those diseases, for them to go and make that offering really underscores the importance” of the place where the cache was found, and the paramount meaning of the cache itself. “These places were ritually charged and remained that way forever.” And so it was until half a millennium later, when our little group stumbled over the cache—a tragic memorial to a once-great culture.
As it turned out, one of the answers to the mystery of the White City had been lying before us the whole time: The various myths of Ciudad Blanca, its abandonment and cursed nature, probably originated in this grim history. Viewed in the light of these pandemics, the White City legends are a fairly straightforward description of a city (or several) swept by disease and abandoned by its people—a place that, furthermore, may have remained a hot zone for some time afterward.
We have few accounts giving the native point of view of these pandemics. One of the most moving is a rare contemporary eyewitness description, called the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, which recalls the two worlds, before and after contact. It was written by an Indian in the Yucatec Mayan language:
There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; no stomach pains; no consumption… At that time people stood erect. But then the teules [foreigners] arrived and everything fell apart. They brought fear, and they came to wither the flowers.
CHAPTER 23
Four members of the expedition have become ill with the same symptoms.
In the weeks after our return from the jungle in February 2015, I and the other members of the expedition settled back into our everyday lives. The power of the experience stayed with us; I felt humbled and awed by the glimpse we’d had of a place completely outside the twenty-first century. We all shared a sense of relief, too, that we had emerged from the jungle unscathed.
A few days after our return from Honduras, Woody sent everyone a broadcast e-mail. It was part of his standard follow-up to any expedition he leads into the jungle, and it included this excerpt:
All, if you find anything at all, feel slightly unwell, develop a slight fever that goes away or any of your multitude of bites appear not to be healing I would advise seeking medical advice as soon as possible, explaining where you have been etc. Better safe than sorry.
At the time, I was completely covered, like everyone else, with bug bites that itched awfully, but that gradually began to fade. A month later, in March, I took a vacation with my wife to France, where we went skiing in the French Alps and visited friends in Paris. While walking around Paris, I began to feel a stiffness in my legs, as if they were sore from excessive exercise. At first I attributed it to the skiing, but over several days the stiffness grew worse, until I could hardly walk without becoming exhausted. When I developed a fever of 103, I went online to the website of the Centers for Disease Control, to check the incubation period for various tropical diseases I might have been exposed to. Thankfully, I was beyond the normal incubation period for chikungunya, Chagas’ disease, and dengue fever. But I was smack in the middle of it for malaria, and my symptoms matched those described at the CDC website. I was furious at myself for prematurely stopping my malaria medication. What the hell had I been thinking? But then I wondered how I could have gotten malaria, a disease transmitted between humans via mosquitoes, when the valley of T1 was uninhabited. Mosquitoes do not usually travel more than a few hundred yards in their entire lifetime, and the nearest humans potentially with malaria were many miles away.
My Parisian friends made some phone calls and found a hospital a short metro ride away with an infectious-disease lab that could test for malaria. I went that evening, they drew blood, and ninety minutes later I had the results: no malaria. The doctor thought I had a common virus, unrelated to the Honduran trip, and assured me it was nothing to worry about. My fever had vanished even while I awaited my test results. Two days later I had fully recovered.
Another month passed. The bug bites on my legs eventually faded away, along with the itching. But one bite did not go away. It was on my upper left arm, midway between elbow and shoulder, and it seemed to be getting redder and bigger. I didn’t worry about it at first because, unlike the other bites, it didn’t itch or bother me.