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.”
CHAPTER 6
We took canoes into the heart of darkness.