Among the many artifacts he brought back were two he believed contained clues to the lost city: a stone with “hieroglyphic” characters on it, and a small statue of a monkey covering its face with its paws.

After the 1935 expedition, Murray moved on to other projects. In 1939, he was invited to be the guest lecturer on the Stella Polaris, the most elegant cruise ship of its day. There he met a young man named Theodore A. Morde who had been hired to edit the ship’s onboard newspaper. The two became friends. Murray regaled Morde with stories of his search for the Lost City of the Monkey God, while Morde told Murray of his adventures as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War. When the ship docked in New York, Murray introduced Morde to Heye. “I hunted for that lost city for years,” Murray said. Now it was someone else’s turn.

Heye immediately engaged Morde to lead the third Honduran expedition into Mosquitia, the trip that would finally—he hoped—reveal to the world the Lost City of the Monkey God. Morde was only twenty-nine years old, but his expedition and its monumental discovery would ring down through history. The American public, already captivated by the story of the Lost City of the Monkey God, followed it with enormous interest, and the expedition would give future historians and adventurers enigmatic clues to be endlessly debated and argued. If it weren’t for Morde and his fateful expedition, the many bizarre and misguided quests for the lost city that littered the decades of the 1950s to the ’80s would not have taken place. Without Morde, Steve Elkins would probably not have heard the legend and would never have embarked on his own eccentric search for the Lost City of the Monkey God.

CHAPTER 5

I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.

A handsome man with a pencil mustache, a smooth, high forehead, and slicked-back hair, Theodore Morde was born in 1911 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, into a family of old whaling stock. He was a sharp dresser, favoring Palm Beach suits, crisp shirts, and white shoes. He started his journalism career in high school as a sports reporter for the local paper, and then he moved into broadcast journalism as a writer and news commentator for radio. He attended Brown University for a couple of years, and then took a job editing newspapers aboard various cruise ships in the mid-1930s. In 1938, he covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and photographer. At one point, he claimed to have swum a river to cross the front lines between the Fascist and Republican camps, so that he could cover both sides.

Heye was eager for Morde to set off on his expedition as soon as possible, and Morde wasted no time in organizing it. He asked his former university classmate, Laurence C. Brown, a geologist, to accompany him. In March of 1940, as war was breaking out across Europe, Morde and Brown departed New York for Honduras with a thousand pounds of equipment and supplies, in what Heye officially called the Third Honduran Expedition. Four months of silence followed. When the two explorers finally emerged from Mosquitia, Morde fired off a letter to Heye about the astounding discovery they had made—they had accomplished what no other expedition had been able to do. The news was published in the New York Times on July 12, 1940:

‘CITY OF MONKEY GOD’

IS BELIEVED LOCATED

Expedition Reports Success in Honduras Exploration

“According to the communication received by the foundation,” the Times article read, “the party has established the approximate location of the rumored ‘Lost City of the Monkey God’ in an almost inaccessible area between the Paulaya and Platano Rivers.” The American public devoured the story.

Morde and Brown arrived back in New York in August to great fanfare. On September 10, 1940, Morde gave a radio interview for CBS. The script still survives, annotated in Morde’s hand, and it appears to be the most complete surviving account of their find. “I have just returned from the discovery of a lost city,” he told his audience. “We went to a region of Honduras that had never been explored… We spent weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams. When we could go no further we started hacking a path through the jungle… after weeks of that life, we were starved, weak and discouraged. Then, just as we were about to give up, I saw from the top of a small cliff, something that made me stop in my tracks… It was the wall of a city—the Lost City of the Monkey God!… I couldn’t tell how large the city was, but I know it extended far into the jungle and probably thirty thousand people once lived there. But that was two thousand years ago. All that was left were those mounds of earth covering crumbled walls where houses once stood, and stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples. I remembered an ancient legend told by the Indians. It said that in the Lost City a gigantic statue of a monkey was worshipped as a god. I saw a great jungle-covered mound which, when someday we can excavate it, I believe may reveal this monkey deity. Today the Indians near that region fear the very thought of the City of the Monkey God. They think it is inhabited by great ape-like hairy men, called Ulaks… In creeks near the city we found rich deposits of gold, silver, and platinum. I found a facial mask… it looked like the face of a monkey… On nearly everything was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god… I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.”