The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(13)
In a twist on the Morde expedition, Glassmire, a geologist, had been hired to prospect for gold in Mosquitia and went looking for the lost city instead. He led three prospecting expeditions into Mosquitia in the late 1950s. A tough, weather-beaten man with a gravelly, slow-talking, New Mexico drawl, Glassmire had built a career as a respected scientist who had worked as an engineer for Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mid-fifties, when Los Alamos was still a closed city. He grew disenchanted with making nuclear bombs, so he moved to Santa Fe and set up a geological consulting firm.
In 1959, he had been hired by American mining interests to determine if there was placer gold along the gravel bars of the upper Patuca River and its tributaries. His employers had a lot of money: The budget for the first expedition alone was $40,000, and they would send Glassmire back twice more.
On that first expedition, Glassmire heard many rumors of the White City. “You hear about it as soon as you get in Honduras,” he recalled to Elkins.
As he explored the rivers looking for gold, he pestered his guides with questions. “I frequently heard natives mention the mysterious Ciudad Blanca,” he wrote in a 1960 article about his discovery in the Denver Post. “I asked my guide about it. He finally told me the men were afraid I planned to send the expedition up the Río Guampu [Wampu], toward Ciudad Blanca. If I did, he said, the men would desert.” When Glassmire asked why, the guide said that when the conquistadors arrived, Ciudad Blanca was a magnificent city. “Then came an unforeseen series of catastrophes. The people decided the gods were angry,” and so they abandoned the city, leaving all their belongings behind, and thereafter shunned it as a forbidden place.
On his third prospecting expedition into Honduras, Glassmire found placer beds along the Río Blanco and the Río Cuyamel—“gold beyond all my expectations”—in approximately the same area where Morde had struck gold. But Glassmire couldn’t get the lost city out of his mind. “When I got all through with my work,” he told Elkins, “I went off looking for it.” He selected ten men, including an old Sumu (Mayangna) Indian who said he had been to Ciudad Blanca as a boy and remembered where it was. “I had to bribe them pretty heavy with money to get them to go with me. We went far up a jungle river, what they call the Río Wampu, and then went off on a tributary called the Pao. We were in dugout canoes all this time. We ran out of stream and we had to take off on foot.” They slashed their way overland. “It’s one of the most terrific jungles in the world,” he recalled. “The area is very mountainous, very rough, and very steep… I don’t know of any more remote place in the world.”
After six days of brutal overland travel, on March 10, 1960, he saw an unusual mound “like a giant ice cream cone, overturned and covered with greenery.” In a small meadow they came across artifacts strewn over the ground, including what appeared to be a ceremonial seat or throne, decorated with an animal’s head. As they pushed forward, “Other mounds bulged out of the boundless jungle carpet… I also discerned elusive ash-gray specks sprinkled throughout the shimmering greenness. My nine-power binoculars exposed them for what they were—ruins of stone buildings!”
“I found it!” he cried out to his Indian guides. “I’ve found Ciudad Blanca!”
They hacked their way through and around the city for three days, but he estimated that their movement through the jungle was so slow that the entire exploration of the city amounted to no more than “a walk around the park.” He brought out a collection of beautiful stone carvings and other artifacts, saying he had to leave “tons” behind.
Glassmire tried to interest a foundation or a university in the discovery. The University of Pennsylvania expressed a desire to have his collection, he told Elkins, so he shipped off the majority of his artifacts, photographs, and maps, but still retained many sculptured heads and stone bowls. His daughter, Bonnie, still has the collection, which I have seen. It contains stone vessels, metates, and stone heads of fine workmanship, including a fabulous carving of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, identical to one in the Michael Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The artifacts alone suggest he found a major site, and a photograph taken of a cache of objects at the ruins shows a tremendous collection of sculptures that he had to leave behind. His hand-drawn map delineates previously unknown details of streams in the upper watershed of the Pao River, proving he did indeed penetrate that unexplored region. According to Glassmire’s interview, the university mounted an expedition, but instead of coming in from the sea and going up the rivers by canoe, it started in the town of Catacamas and they tried to take a “shortcut” over the mountains. “Three or four of them were killed,” he said, “two by snakes” and the others by disease. The expedition had to turn back.
I have been unable to confirm that this expedition ever took place, and the University of Pennsylvania insists they have no such collection. (I also checked with Penn State, in case he was confused.) But Glassmire’s daughter, Bonnie, is equally certain her father sent some of his materials to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Glassmire gave a copy of his map to Steve Elkins. It was not quite detailed enough to nail down the precise location, but it was accurate enough for Elkins to later identify a valley that probably contained Glassmire’s ruin. Elkins would name it “Target 4” in his aerial survey as we were looking for the White City many years later. Glassmire’s discovery was a major step forward: It gave Elkins a convincing report of at least one important, unknown ruin deep in the Mosquitia interior. He took it as strong evidence that the legends of lost cities were not fantasy.