The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

In the book and in this study guide, the terms “Lost City,” “White City,” “Ciudad Blanca,” and “Lost City of the Monkey God” are used interchangeably. Preston recounts how he first heard the legend of the Lost City in 1996 while working on an aerial radar imagery project to find archaeological sites in Cambodia. Ron Blom, the leader of the project, hints to Preston that he is working on locating a legendary lost city in Central America. The project is secret, but Blom agrees to discuss Preston’s interest with his employer. Preston later discusses the issue with Harvard archaeologists David Stuart and Gordon Willey, who suggest that it must be the legendary White City reported to exist in an unexplored area of Honduras. Preston is later contacted by Blom’s employer, Steve Elkins, who asks Preston to keep the lost city’s location in Honduras a secret. Elkins’s team has narrowed down the search to a one-square-mile area in the La Mosquitia region called Target One, or T1.

Preston opens the chapter with part of a letter from Hernán Cortés to Emperor Charles V, in which Cortés describes reports of a city with even greater riches than the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in Mexico. This began the search for the White City, although Cortés was never able to search for it himself. Twenty years after the letter, a missionary named Cristóbal de Pedraza claimed to have seen a massive city in a valley in La Mosquitia.

In the 1830s famed explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood traveled to Honduras and discovered the ancient Maya city of Copan. The city’s exceptional architecture and sculpture challenged the typical view of New World indigenous peoples as savages who had never achieved civilization “as advanced as any in Old World antiquity” (14). Stephens and Catherwood’s book became a massive best-seller, encouraging the study of ancient Maya civilization and the search for more secrets in Central America.

Less research was done east and south of the Maya area, including the Mosquitia region, creating further rumors and legends that culminated in the White City legend. In various versions of the legend, “anyone who entered it would die of sickness or be killed by the devil” (16). Smithsonian archaeologist William Duncan Strong explored Mosquitia in the 1930s, finding a number of sites that were clearly not Maya but a different culture. Strong heard stories about the Ciudad Blanca, but he did not pursue them.

Preston introduces George Gustav Heye, a wealthy investment banker who became an obsessive collector of Native American objects, eventually establishing the Museum of the American Indian. Heye eventually contracted British adventurer (and con artist) Frederick Mitchell-Hedges to explore the Mosquitia region in 1930. Mitchell-Hedges returned with more than a thousand artifacts and a legend of an ancient city with a “gigantic, buried statue of a monkey” (21). He claimed that the natives called it the Lost City of the Monkey God. Heye sent Mitchell-Hedges on a second expedition to find it. Mitchell-Hedges did not venture again into the interior of Mosquitia but instead claimed to have found the lost city of Atlantis on the coast. Heye financed two further expeditions led by R. Stuart Murray, a Canadian journalist who also failed to find the ruined city. Heye finally financed an additional expedition led by young journalist Theodore A. Morde. By then the Lost City of the Monkey God was a famous legend in American media, and Morde’s expedition would inspire many later “bizarre and misguided quests for the lost city” (25).

In 1940 Morde, accompanied by his geologist friend Laurence C. Brown, began his expedition to Mosquitia to search for the Lost City. When they surfaced four months later, they claimed to have found the Lost City of the Monkey God, to much fanfare. Morde claimed to have found the ruined city as well as a monkey mask and nearby deposits of gold, silver, and platinum. Morde declared, “On nearly everything was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god” (28). Morde kept the location of the city a secret, even to Heye, “for fear of looting” (28). He did bring back some artifacts, including stone and ceramic figures of monkeys. Morde’s desire to return was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a spy and war correspondent. He hung himself in 1954, taking the secret of the city’s location with him.

His accounts of the ruined city inspired many later explorers, who never found the city Morde had described. In 2009 journalist Christopher S. Stewart and archaeologist Christopher Begley ventured into Mosquitia and tried to follow Morde’s route. They made their way to the known site of Lancetillal, close to where Morde placed the Lost City. Stewart believed this site, made of earthen mounds, was mistaken for a walled, stone city by Morde due to a white limestone cliff behind it.

Preston then explains that he gained access to the three journals written by Morde and Brown during their expedition, which no one has ever read in full. After reading the journals, Preston discovers that Morde and Brown had lied, never even attempting to find the Lost City. Instead, they spent four months following the Río Blanco looking for gold. They eventually found gold at an abandoned mine, but their operation was soon destroyed by a flood. They fabricated the entire story about finding the ruined city.