Although many explorers had traveled into the Central American rainforests in the wake of Stephens’s discoveries, almost none had ventured into the daunting terrain of Mosquitia. In the 1920s, a Luxembourgian ethnologist, Eduard Conzemius, became one of the first Europeans to explore Mosquitia, traveling by dugout canoe up the Plátano River. On this trip he heard tell of “important ruins discovered by a rubber tapper 20 to 25 years ago, when he was lost in the bush between the Plátano and Paulaya rivers,” Conzemius reported. “This man gave a fantastical description of what he saw there. They were the ruins of a most important city with white stone buildings similar to marble, surrounded by a large wall of the same material.” But shortly after the rubber tapper reported his discovery, he disappeared. One Indian told Conzemius that “the devil had killed him for daring to look upon this forbidden place.” When Conzemius tried to hire a guide to take him to the White City, the Indians feigned ignorance, fearful (he was told) that if they revealed the location they would die.

By the beginning of the 1930s, the growing legend attracted the attention of American archaeologists and major institutions, who considered it not only possible, but even likely, that the unexplored, mountainous jungles along the Maya frontier could be hiding a ruined city—or perhaps even a lost civilization.* It might be Maya or it might be something entirely new.

In the early 1930s, the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology sent a professional archaeologist to explore eastward of Copán, to see if Maya civilization extended into the rugged thickets of Mosquitia. William Duncan Strong was a scholar, a man ahead of his time: quiet, careful and meticulous in his work, averse to spectacle and publicity. He was among the first to establish that Mosquitia had been inhabited by an ancient, unknown people who were not Maya. Strong spent five months traversing Honduras in 1933, going by dugout canoe up the Río Patuca and several of its tributaries. He kept an illustrated journal, which is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collections—packed with detail and many fine drawings of birds, artifacts, and landscapes.

Strong found major archaeological sites, which he carefully described and sketched in his journal, and conducted a few test excavations. Among these finds were the Floresta mounds, the ancient cities of Wankibila and Dos Quebradas, and the Brown Site. His journey was not without adventure; at one point his finger was shot off. (The exact circumstances are unclear; he may have accidentally shot it off himself.) He battled rain, insects, venomous snakes, and dense jungle.

What Strong realized right away was that these were not Maya cities: The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong’s work showed definitively that Mosquitia was not part of the Maya realm, however, his discoveries raised more questions than they answered. Who were these people, where had they come from, and why had all record of them vanished until now? How in the world did they manage to live and farm in such a hostile jungle environment? What was their relationship to their powerful Mayan neighbors? The earthworks posed another enigma: Did these mounds hide buried buildings or tombs, or were they constructed for some other reason?

Even as he uncovered many other ancient wonders, Strong continued to hear stories of the greatest ruin of them all, the White City, which he dismissed as a “lovely legend.” While sitting on the banks of the Río Tinto in Mosquitia, an informant told Strong the following story, which he recorded in his journal, under an entry entitled “The Forbidden City.”

The lost city, he wrote, lies on the shores of a lake deep in the mountains to the north, its white ramparts surrounded by groves of orange, lemon, and banana trees. But if one partakes of the forbidden fruit, he will be lost in the hills forever. “So goes the tale,” Strong wrote, “but it would be better to do as an informant’s father did, follow the river until it becomes a mere trickle among dark rocks and woods and then have to turn back. The city would still be there that way. Like the ‘Ciudad Blanco’—the ‘forbidden fruit’ will probably long remain a lure to the curious.”

All these rumors, legends, and stories set the stage for the next phase: on the one side, obsessive and ill-fated expeditions seeking the lost city, and on the other, the beginnings of serious archaeological research in the same region. Both would help begin to untangle the mystery of the White City.

CHAPTER 4

A land of cruel jungles within almost inaccessible mountain ranges

Enter George Gustav Heye. Heye’s father had made a fortune selling his petroleum business to John D. Rockefeller, and his son would go on to increase that wealth as an investment banker in New York City. But Heye had interests other than money. In 1897, fresh out of college and working on a job in Arizona, Heye came across an Indian woman chewing on her husband’s splendid buckskin shirt “to kill the lice.” On a whim he bought the lice-ridden garment.

The buckskin shirt launched one of the most voracious collecting careers in American history. Heye became obsessed with all things Native American, and he would eventually amass a collection of a million pieces. In 1916, he established the Museum of the American Indian on upper Broadway in New York City to house his collection. (In 1990, the museum moved to Washington, DC, and became part of the Smithsonian.)

Heye was a gigantic man, six feet four inches tall, almost three hundred pounds, with a billiard ball head and a baby face framed by heavy jowls; he wore a gold watch-chain draped across a stout chest and dressed in black suits with a straw boater’s hat, cigar protruding from a tiny pursed mouth. He often took buying trips across the country in his limousine, consulting the obituary columns in local papers and inquiring if the dearly departed had left behind any unwanted collections of Indian artifacts. On these trips he would sometimes put his chauffeur in the backseat and take the wheel himself, driving like a fiend.