The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(6)

Heye’s obsession expanded to Honduras when a doctor in New Orleans sold Heye a sculpture of an armadillo said to come from Mosquitia. This curious and appealing object was carved in basalt, with a funny-looking face, an arched back, and only three legs so it could stand without wobbling. (It is still in the museum’s collection.) It captivated Heye, and he eventually financed an expedition to the treacherous region in search of more artifacts. He hired an explorer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, a British adventurer who claimed to have found the Maya city of Lubaantun in Belize, where his daughter allegedly discovered the famous crystal “Skull of Doom.” Mitchell-Hedges was the very picture of a dashing British explorer, down to the plummy accent, briar pipe, sunburned visage, and hyphenated last name.

Mitchell-Hedges explored the fringes of Mosquitia in 1930 for Heye until he was laid low with an attack of malaria and dysentery so severe it left him temporarily blind in one eye. When he recovered, he brought out over a thousand artifacts, along with an amazing story of an abandoned city deep in the mountains, home to a gigantic, buried statue of a monkey. The natives, he said, called it the Lost City of the Monkey God. Heye quickly sent Mitchell-Hedges back on a new expedition to Mosquitia to track down the lost city, cofinanced by the British Museum.

Interest in the second expedition was high. Mitchell-Hedges declared to the New York Times: “Our expedition proposes to penetrate a certain region marked on the maps of today as unexplored… Within my knowledge the region contains immense ruins never yet visited.” The location was somewhere in Mosquitia, but the exact position he declared a secret. “The region can be described as a land of cruel jungles within almost inaccessible mountain ranges.” But on the new expedition, Mitchell-Hedges did not go into the interior, perhaps wary of repeating his earlier travails. Instead, he spent most of his time exploring the sand beaches and coastlines of the Bay Islands of Honduras, where he pulled some stone statues from under the water, likely deposited there by coastal erosion. He justified his failure to go back into Mosquitia by claiming an even greater discovery: He had found the remains of Atlantis, which, he suggested, had been “the cradle of the American races.” He returned with more tales of the Lost City of the Monkey God, which he had heard on his journeys along the coast.

Heye immediately began planning another expedition to Honduras with a new leader, this time wisely bypassing Mitchell-Hedges, perhaps because he had begun to suspect, belatedly, that the man was a con artist. The truth was, Mitchell-Hedges was a fraud on a spectacular scale. He did not discover Lubaantun, and the crystal skull was (much later) revealed as a fake. Yet he succeeded in fooling many contemporaries; even his obituary in the New York Times would eventually repeat as truth a string of dubious facts that Mitchell-Hedges had been peddling for years: that he had “received eight bullet wounds and three knife scars,” that he fought alongside Pancho Villa, was a secret agent for America during World War I, and searched for sea monsters in the Indian Ocean with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s son. However, some skeptical archaeologists had dismissed Mitchell-Hedges as a charlatan even before his second voyage to Honduras, and afterward they heaped ridicule on his outlandish claims about having found Atlantis. Mitchell-Hedges published a book about his experiences, Land of Wonder and Fear, about which one archaeologist wrote: “To me the wonder was how he could write such nonsense and the fear how much taller the next yarn would be.”

For his third expedition into Mosquitia, Heye partnered with the National Museum of Honduras and the country’s president, who hoped the new venture would help open up the vast Mosquitia region to settlement by modern Hondurans. Knowing that such an expansion effort would, regrettably, involve the displacement or even destruction of the indigenous Indians who still lived there—not unlike what had happened in the American West—the government and the National Museum were eager to document the Indians’ way of life before they vanished. An important goal of the expedition was, therefore, to do ethnographic as well as archaeological research.

Although his intention was to employ a serious professional, once again Heye betrayed a weakness for swashbuckling men of questionable integrity. The man Heye chose to find his “great ruin, overrun by dense jungle” was a Canadian journalist named R. Stuart Murray. Murray had given himself the title “Captain” fifteen years before, when he involved himself in a shabby revolution in Santo Domingo. In an interview before he departed for Honduras, Murray said, “There’s supposedly a lost city I’m going to look for, which the Indians call the City of the Monkey God. They are afraid to go near it, for they believe that anyone who approaches it will, within the month, be killed by the bite of a poisonous snake.”

Murray led two expeditions for Heye into Mosquitia, in 1934 and 1935, journeys that became known as the First and Second Honduran Expeditions. In pursuing various tales and descriptions of the Lost City of the Monkey God, Murray believed he came tantalizingly close to finding it. But again and again, just as he thought he was on the verge of success, he always seemed to be thwarted—by jungle, rivers, mountains, and the death of one of his guides. In the archives of the Museum of the American Indian is a photo of Murray on the banks of a river, kneeling next to a row of small metates, or grinding stones, beautifully carved with the heads of birds and animals. On the back of the photo Murray wrote a message to Heye:


These come from the “Lost City of the Monkey God”—the Indian who brought them out was bitten by a Fer de Lance in September and died. With him died the secret of the city’s location—More when I return. R. S. Murray.