I’ll not soon forget the experience of reading those journals—first with puzzlement, then disbelief, and finally shock.

Heye and the Museum of the American Indian, it seems, were conned, along with the American public. According to their own writings, Morde and Brown had a secret agenda. From the beginning, neither man had any intention of looking for a lost city. The only entry in the journal mentioning the lost city is a random note jotted on a back page, almost as an afterthought, clearly a reference to Conzemius. It reads, in its entirety:

White City

1898—Paulaya, Plantain,* Wampu—heads of these streams should be near location of city.

Timoteteo, Rosales—one-eyed rubber cutter, crossing from Paulaya to Plantain—saw columns still standing in 1905.

In hundreds of pages of entries, this is the entire sum of information touching on the lost city they were supposedly trying to find, the city they had described so vividly to the American media. They were not looking for archaeological sites. They made only cursory inquiries. The journals reveal they found in Mosquitia no ruins, no artifacts, no sites, no “Lost City of the Monkey God.” So what were Morde and Brown doing in Mosquitia, during those four months of silence, while Heye and the world held their breath? What were they after?

Gold.

Their search for gold was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Among their hundreds of pounds of gear, Morde and Brown had packed sophisticated gold-mining equipment, including gold pans, shovels, picks, equipment for building sluice boxes, and mercury for amalgamation. Note that Morde, who could have chosen any partner for his expedition, selected a geologist, not an archaeologist. Brown and Morde went into the jungle with detailed information on possible gold deposits along the creeks and tributaries of the Río Blanco and planned their route accordingly. This area was long rumored to be rich in placer gold deposited in gravel bars and holes along streambeds. The Río Blanco is many miles south of where they claimed to have found the lost city. When I mapped the journal entries, day by day, I found that Brown and Morde never went up the Paulaya or Plátano Rivers. While going up the Patuca, they bypassed the mouth of the Wampu and continued far south, to where the Río Cuyamel joins the Patuca, and then went up that to the Río Blanco. They never came within forty miles of that area encompassing the headwaters of the Paulaya, Plátano, and Wampu Rivers, which was the general region in which they later claimed to have found the Lost City of the Monkey God.

They were looking for another California, another Yukon. Everywhere they went they dug into gravel bars and panned for “color”—bits of gold—totting up in fanatical detail each fleck they spied. Finally, at a creek running into the Blanco River, called Ulak-Was, they did indeed strike gold. An American named Perl or Pearl (all this is noted in the journal) had set up a gold sluicing operation here in 1907. But Perl, the wastrel son of a wealthy New Yorker, frittered away his time drinking and whoring instead of mining, and his father shut him down; the operation was abandoned in 1908. He left a dam, water pipes, gate valves, an anvil, and other useful equipment behind, which Morde and Brown fixed up and reused.

At the mouth of Ulak-Was, Morde and Brown dismissed all their Indian guides and went up the creek, setting up “Camp Ulak” in the same place Perl had worked. They then spent the next three weeks—the heart of their expedition—in the backbreaking daily work of mining gold.

They repaired Perl’s old dam to divert the creek into sluice boxes, where the flow of water over riffles and burlap was used to separate and concentrate the heavier gold particles from gravel, and recorded their daily take in the journal. They worked like dogs, drenched by downpours, eaten alive by swarms of sand flies and mosquitoes, picking thirty to fifty ticks a day off their bodies. They were in perpetual terror of poisonous snakes, which were ubiquitous. They ran out of coffee and tobacco and began to starve. They spent most of their free time playing cards. “We thrash out our gold prospects again and again,” Morde wrote, and “ponder the probable progress of the war, wondering if America has already become involved.”

They also dreamed big: “We have located a fine spot for an airport,” Brown wrote, “just across the river. We will probably build our permanent camp on this same plateau if our plans go through.”

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.)