Jungleland

by Christopher S. Stewart

  AMID THE DARKNESS, Morde’s mind regularly drifted back to the war years, stirring up demons that he’d rather forget. “He believed that someone from his days in the OSS was pursuing him,” his niece Susan Shumway told me. “He became very paranoid about that.” At another time, she added, “I think he may have been questioning everything. . . . What was really important? For example, the deaths of people he knew, possibly deaths he felt responsible for. War can do that.”

  Joan Cenedella, another niece, said it was impossible to know much of anything about him during these final years. He was closed up. “It was difficult to ever know what he was going to do,” she said. “He was sophisticated and handsome, but he was a mystery.”

  Shumway agreed. “That is very much how I remember Ted. Handsome, debonair, distant.”

  By the summer of 1954, it seemed clear that Morde’s marriage to Gustafson was over for good. No one remembers the exact date. But Morde returned to Stamford, packed his family into his black Oldsmobile sedan, and drove them to Gustafson’s family’s house in Rhode Island. It was there that he said good-bye. At the time his children were one and three years old. Later, Morde’s family would say that there was no indication that that good-bye was meant to be forever. He said it as though he would see everyone again soon; he just needed some time to think and figure things out.

  But on June 26, he was back in Dartmouth at his parents’ house, where his brother, Elton, found him at 3:30 p.m., suspended in the shower stall, naked except for his bathrobe, a thick rope looped around his neck. There was no saving him. Theodore Ambrose Morde was forty-three years old.

  HIS DEATH CAME as a complete shock. His family would never know what to make of it. He was not a deeply depressive person and had never spoken of suicide. “I want to believe it was a rival spy,” his nephew Dave Morde told me. “It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.” Others would suppose that the lost-city spirits had killed him. He had seen the city, they thought, and he would pay the price with his soul. “I know that my grandmother—Ted’s mother—once told me that the natives in Honduras believed the site he found was cursed and that he had violated this curse by going there,” Shumway said.

  Two days after his death, the New York Times published an obituary, remembering the man who had “explored the ruins of ancient Indian civilization.” He was buried at the Rural Cemetery in New Bedford, the city where he had been born and where he had watched the whaling ships go off to sea.

  On June 29, the secretary of the Explorers Club mailed a letter of condolence to the Morde family, describing their son and brother as a “true explorer. Both you and the Club have every reason to be proud of Theodore.” Albert Morde must not have seen the letter. Three days later, he composed a short note to the club—it was four sentences—notifying them of his son’s death. He asked that a note of it go into its records, and, as if he wanted to put those days to rest, he requested that they “kindly stop all mail for him from now on.”

  In the intervening decades, Gustafson would remarry and, according to family, try to forget some of those times she had spent with Theodore Morde. For her, I was told that it was impossible to reconcile the adventurous, loving man she had met that summer day in Manhattan in 1948 with the man who had abandoned her almost six years later. According to her grandson, Joseph Essaye, she never forgave his decision to leave her and their young children. Today Gustafson lives on the east coast of Florida, but she doesn’t talk much about any of it, according to family.

  As for the lost city, the legend became a casualty of time. Morde’s notebooks detailing his Honduran expedition gathered dust, were misplaced, and, for a while, went missing. Perhaps they got lost when the Museum of the American Indian was sold to the Smithsonian or when George Heye died in 1957. One journal was said to have burned in a fire. The walking stick disappeared for some time too, which was a fitting end for a man who seemed determined to protect his sacred discovery.

  After Morde was gone, the only living person with knowledge of what he had found and where he found it was his old expedition partner Laurence Brown. Whether the two friends saw each other again after the war or if Brown was present at Morde’s funeral, no one knows. Brown died in 1974 without adding anything more to the story of the lost city.

  The Morde Theory

  WE WALKED FOR hours in the blazing sun before we found the ruins. It was August 1, about a month from the day I had arrived in Honduras. Around us, the forest alternated with land that had been burned and cut, where copper-red shapes of mahogany stumps stood out of islands of second-growth grass and vines. The bandits had captured Chris close to this area, but we didn’t talk about that.

  Steadily, we pushed forward. We had paid a man from Blue Sky to come along with us. He had a pistol pushed into his belt and a rifle on the mule that high-stepped through the brush. We saw the large mounds that the settlers had mentioned the night before. Some as high as ten feet and in groupings of twos and threes, they were larger than the mounds we’d spotted along the river. “They’re everywhere!” exclaimed Chris, a bit stunned. I couldn’t stop thinking about the entombed giants, and I had the feeling I was walking through a graveyard. Pancho, who had been quiet most of the way, started to complain of stomach pains and blamed it on the evil mountain spirits. “We must be getting close to the city,” he said.

  Soon Chris paused in a stand of tall trees. “Look there,” he said, flicking his machete at the shaded ground. “It’s easy to miss.” He kicked away some vines, revealing disfigured cobblestones scattered about in what resembled a crude pathway. “It’s a road,” he said excitedly.

  “A road?” I repeated, imagining asphalt with yellow broken lines.

  “Yeah, a road. It’s probably a thousand years old or more.”

  He said that roads had been built between neighboring cities and from city centers to the closest river, where people and goods were shipped into and out of the jungle. “You couldn’t move here without a road. Think of all that mud we walked through.”

  Chris scrambled ahead until he stopped again at an open expanse where two large stone walls protruded from the grassy earth. Several feet tall, rounded off at the top, with decades of creepers and weeds engorging them, the walls extended for many yards, like giant serpents, before disappearing into the horizon. It reminded me of Morde’s notes: “We found . . . walls upon which the green of the jungle had worked small damages.”

  “Do you see it?” Chris asked now. He pointed across the upturned carpet of green wilderness. It was early afternoon. For the first time in days there weren’t any dark clouds in the sky. But the rain would come. It always did.

  “What?” I asked.

  He smiled. “The city,” he said.

  “What city?” I didn’t see anything. Of course, I had been imagining great ruined white buildings, tall vine-strangled columns, spooky statues of giant monkey kings.

  Chris chuckled. “You’re standing on it,” he said. “It’s all over.”

  THE GREAT LOST city sprawled across the jagged mountainside and along the Río Aner that rushed through the valley below. In Morde’s notes about his discovery, he wrote of “towering mountains . . . providing a backdrop to the scene” and “a rushing cataract.” He also noted that the ruins were “blanketed in centuries of growth.” We stumbled up and down, surveying the contours of the ground, the nubs of grass, and the rock formations. Chris noticed lots of things that I didn’t see. He pointed out clusters of twelve-foot-high man-made mounds—neighborhoods of the city’s elites or government buildings. There were more walls, where other structures would have been erected, more roads and open plazas. “This was once a big city,” he said.

  At one point, he leaned over the face of a blackened boulder the size of a truck tire, which was etched with curious markings—dots, lines, squiggles, faces. “It’s a petroglyph,” he said.

  “Does it mean anything?”

  One arrow looked as though it was entering a body. I thought I saw a sun and a happy face.r />
  Chris shook his head. “It could mean many things,” he said. He had lately begun using 3D technology to analyze the tiny eroded images on the stones, but he and his colleagues in the archaeological community were still a long way from any real understanding of language and meaning. The carvings, he said, could be astrological maps or directions to an important religious place, a route to the underworld or even to another city. They could also have been shamanic messages to the spirits. “We just don’t know,” he said.

  I was going crazy inside. What was this place? “So is this Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God?” I asked. In the distance I could hear the howler monkeys—Morde had worried about “monkey faces [that] peered inquisitively” in the forest. Pancho and Angel had lagged behind with the gunman, who kept looking over his shoulder, as if he was expecting company. When Pancho had said, “I can feel the mountain spirits here,” moments before, he had been only half joking.

  Chris kept climbing. Near the top of the mountain, I noticed a dramatic pyramid-like rise in the earth, unlike any of the other man-made outcroppings we’d seen on our journey. It was blanketed in razor grass and trees—about four stories tall and as long as a football field. “This is amazing,” said Chris. It was a temple.

  We stood in front of it for a long time, taking it in, the way you might stand frozen beside a found spaceship, not knowing what to do next. There were more mounds rising underneath us and around us, and slowly I began to see it. The city seemed to begin and end here, the nexus of this civilization. “These people laid out their cities in very complicated, symbolic ways,” Chris said. He said that the settlement had been built with beauty in mind but also with a sense of a specific cosmology, suggesting a more sophisticated civilization than the Spanish conquistadors had ever imagined. “They were more advanced than you’d think,” he added.

  He said that the city represented a kind of microcosm of their living universe—the upper world, the middle world, and the underworld. “The temple is the connection to the upper world,” he said. “The plaza”—he made a gesture at the overgrown field where we were standing—“is the middle world, or our world.”

  “What about the underworld?” I asked.

  “Maybe there was a cave somewhere or something built under the river. Or there could have been some sort of substructure at the south end of the plaza.” (In many traditions in Mesoamerica, south symbolized down, while north was up.)

  We trudged up the side of the temple. “You can see why they picked this place,” said Chris, waving his hand at the view. Miles of forest unfolded in front of us, dropping into the river and then rising up another mountainside, where the pockmarked land suggested more ruins. It did seem perfect, I thought. This had to be it.

  “That assumption that there was little in the Mosquitia, that this was always pristine rain forest, uninhabited,” Chris said now, “you can see how that’s just wrong.” He seemed to take particular pleasure in the evidence undermining all the people who had challenged him over the years, those who had warned him he was wasting his time in the Mosquitia. Those people and their tired old arguments against a city ever existing in this rain forest. “Just look at this place!” he exclaimed.

  I wanted to cry again, so many intense emotions were boiling up inside me. My knees wobbled.

  Chris guessed that the greater city had been occupied sometime between AD 1000 and 1500 and that thousands of people, ancestors of the Tawahkas and Pech, had lived there. “This was probably the capital,” he said. “All those small villages we passed—the mounds—were politically connected to this one.”

  “So what happened to the city?” I asked. Chris shrugged. He said a mass plague might have killed off the inhabitants. Or maybe there had been a war with a neighboring civilization. Or maybe they had died away slowly as the land or climate changed around them and the ones who remained abandoned the city. “It’s hard to know for certain,” he said. In his book Collapse, the scientist Jared Diamond argued that civilizations break down, fall into war, and end due largely to environmental issues, from deforestation and overfishing to soil loss and climate change. “A society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power,” he wrote.

  “A ghost town,” I said, thinking of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had been left behind, the houses falling apart, the town centers in various states of decay.

  In my mind, I could see Morde standing where I now stood: his overgrown beard, his emaciated body, the torn pants, the ruined boots. I thought of the extreme fatigue he must have felt during those four months in the wild, and then the awe and bliss of discovery at stumbling upon something that had been lost for so long. The romance of it.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked again, “Is this the city Morde found?”

  Chris looked up at the sky, which was now turning dark with rain. He didn’t answer in a straightforward way. “I have a theory,” he said. “Do you want to hear it?

  “I BET MORDE came up the Patuca hearing stories about the lost city and also working from what he knew from Heye and Captain Murray. He asked everyone about the city until someone offered to help. We know he was probably a very convincing man. Of course, he was probably very lucky too, because other people had gone searching for the city. But let’s say he did get lucky.

  “The first problem is time,” he said. “When on that calendar of his did he actually make his discovery? Because he never mentions the discovery on the calendar, and yet most of his time is accounted for.”

  “The calendar was a red herring,” I suggested.

  “Right,” he said. “It could have been off by a day or two. And in that time, he could have staged a trip from Ulak. But I bet he came here on his way home.”

  “Why?”

  “He said in his notes that he found it at the end of his trip. Maybe we can accept that. Ulak could be as many as three days from here, and as far as we know his Indian guides turned back. We can look at the Ulak days as time spent prospecting and collecting clues.”

  Chris paused and gathered his thoughts. “But then you have to ask another question: why did Morde keep saying in the press that the city was between the Paulaya and the Plátano?”

  Another diversion, I guessed.

  “Maybe, but here’s another way to think about it. If you look at a map, this site, by longitude and latitude, is actually between the headwaters of those two rivers. There’s a lot of land between there. A lot. It’s just a very broad interpretation, which would allow him to tell the truth.” He stopped as I wrote this down. “The truth,” he said, “but not the whole truth.”

  We munched Clif Bars and walked to the other end of the temple. “He probably would never have found this without a guide. That’s the last part. He would have had to convince someone not only to tell him but also to bring him here.” Chris paused. “Of course, he could also have totally stumbled into this place by pure luck.”

  “Luck?”

  “That’s how things are discovered sometimes. Luck.”

  I wondered what this place would have looked like around seventy years ago, when Morde was here.

  “It would have been completely covered in jungle. All those trails we walked would have been even more treacherous and muddy. This site would be almost impenetrable. But a guide could show him. That’s what I think happened.”

  “What about the gold?”

  Chris chuckled. “If there was any gold here, it was taken a long time ago.”

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF Morde’s walking stick remained a problem for us. What exactly did it mean?

  No matter how much we toiled over the question, Chris and I kept hitting a snag: if the coordinates running down the four sides of the stick were supposed to be directions to a significant place, where was the starting point? We needed more information.

  It would be only later, after leaving Honduras, that I’d get some answers from a man named Derek Parent. Parent had been thinking about the issu
e of the walking stick for a long time. A Canadian spatial analyst and cartographer specializing in mapping indigenous traditional knowledge, Parent was also the author of a technical guidebook and digital navigation maps of the Mosquitia region. In the decades that he had been obsessing over the White City legend, he had scoured old archives in Honduras, the University of Texas Institute of Latin American Studies library, and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, as well as bushwhacked through the forest. “I did jungle excursions two or three times a year,” he told me on the phone one morning. “I walked in water up to my chest for six or seven hours a day. Many times I walked tens of kilometers at night under the moonlight to avoid the oppressive heat and humidity.” He said he was probably the first to ever kayak the entire Mosquito Coast. “Originally it was designed for the special forces of the British army,” he snickered. “The locals thought it was a submarine.”

  Parent had also spent about ten years talking and theorizing with Morde’s nephew Dave in North Carolina. It was Dave who introduced us. Using Morde’s stick notations, Parent told me, he’d mapped more than a dozen different possibilities for the lost-city site. When we talked about that process, he called it “following the squiggle,” referring to the waving, doodling path that resulted from laying down the stick’s instructions—including bearings, as on a compass, and distance, as in a man’s stride—on one of his highly technical custom maps of the Honduran jungle.

  As he saw it, the stick’s first instruction, NE 300, was straightforward: walk northeast 300 strides, followed by E 150, meaning you were to pivot to the east and trek for another 150 steps—and so on for the stick’s thirty-three moves. Interestingly, the stick also noted a couple topographical references, such as “CREEK RIGHT,” providing the seeker at least some vague sense of the landscape.