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?
Gold.
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.”