The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  This incensed Zemurray. Over the years, he had worked out a web of favorable tax-free deals with the Honduran government. Now Morgan was promising a banana tax so heavy, at a penny a pound, that Cuyamel Fruit would soon go out of business. Traveling to Washington to protest this new arrangement, Zemurray had a meeting with Knox. The meeting did not go well. Knox lectured Zemurray with self-righteous zeal, insisting that Zemurray do his part to help the fine bankers at J. P. Morgan make money for the good of the country. Zemurray left furious, and Knox was worried enough about his reaction that he ordered a Secret Service detail to follow him.

  Zemurray saw one simple solution to the problem: Overthrow the government of Honduras that had cut the deal with Morgan. Conveniently, a deposed former president of Honduras, Manuel Bonilla, was living penniless in New Orleans a few blocks from Zemurray’s mansion. Easily avoiding Secret Service surveillance, Zemurray furtively recruited mercenaries to acquire arms, get a ship, and smuggle Bonilla back into Honduras. Meanwhile, he made sure the Honduran press railed against the “Morgan plan,” emphasizing how it would subvert Honduran sovereignty. The Honduran people, already suspicious of the arrangement, were soon roused to revolutionary fervor. The “invasion” worked; Bonilla returned in triumph, the president of Honduras resigned, and Bonilla was elected in a landslide. He rewarded Zemurray with a twenty-five-year tax-free concession, a $500,000 loan, and a gift of 24,700 acres of excellent plantation land on the north coast.

  Although the Honduran debt would mostly go unpaid, Zemurray had achieved a remarkable personal victory. He had outmaneuvered Knox, successfully defied the US government, poked J. P. Morgan in the eye, and ended up a much wealthier man. In engineering the “invasion,” he had covered his tracks so well that contemporary investigations into the scheme were never able to connect him to it or prove he broke any laws. But he had also intentionally overthrown a government to achieve his own financial ends.

  Under the presidency of Andrew Preston, United Fruit had grown to be the largest fruit and sugar company in the world. But Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit had also grown and was now powerful enough to engage it in debilitating price wars. In 1930, United Fruit solved the problem by buying Cuyamel Fruit, paying Zemurray $31 million in United Fruit stock and giving him a seat on the board. But the Great Depression hit United Fruit hard; after Preston’s death in 1924, the company had become bloated, lazy, and mismanaged. Over the next few years, Zemurray watched United Fruit’s stock decline by over 90 percent, shrinking his stake to $2 million. He tried to offer the board advice, but was rudely rebuffed. At that point the board was dominated by members of the Protestant elite of Boston, many—though not all—of whom were ugly anti-Semites; they did not like the Jewish immigrant they had been forced to admit to the board as part of the Cuyamel deal. In a fateful meeting in 1933, Zemurray tried once again to persuade the board to consider his ideas for saving the company; the chairman, an effete Boston Brahmin named Daniel Gould Wing, listened to Zemurray’s heavy shtetl accent with open disdain and then, to the chuckles of other board members, said: “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can’t understand a word you say.”

  Zemurray was not a man to be ignored or insulted. He had come to that particular meeting with a weapon of mass destruction: a bagful of proxies from other United Fruit shareholders that gave him majority control of the company and the authority to act as he saw fit. He left the room, fetched the bag, came back in, and flung it on the table, saying: “You’re fired. Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?” He turned to the board and said: “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”

  After ousting the chairman, president, and most of the board, Zemurray took over the gigantic, bumbling company, roused it from its stupor, and swiftly returned it to profitability. This dramatic move caused the New York Times to call Zemurray the “fish that swallowed the whale.”

  With full control of United Fruit, Zemurray continued to play a heavy hand in Honduran politics until he retreated from business in 1954 to pursue philanthropy full time. In the latter part of his life, perhaps to make up for his earlier questionable dealings, Zemurray donated lavishly to Central American causes, schools, and philanthropic ventures; he played a significant role in the founding of Israel; he endowed a female professorship at Harvard, which led to the appointment of the first woman full professor at that university; and he financed the progressive magazine the Nation. Zemurray was a remarkably brilliant, complex, and contradictory man.*

  But, colorful as their history was, it must be said: Preston, Zemurray, and the fruit companies left a dark colonialist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since. The fruit companies’ effect on Honduras’s development was deeply pernicious. Though Honduras did eventually emerge from under their yoke, this legacy of instability and corporate bullying lives on in political dysfunction, underdeveloped national institutions, and cozy relationships among powerful families, business interests, government, and the military. This weakness magnified the disastrous effects of Hurricane Mitch. The country fell prey to narcotraffickers. Effective antidrug policies and raids in Colombia in the 1990s pushed much of the drug trade from that country into Honduras. Traffickers turned Honduras into the premier drug-smuggling transshipment point for cocaine between South America and the United States, and Mosquitia was at the heart of it. Crude airstrips were bulldozed out of the jungle and used for nighttime crash landings of drugs flown from Venezuela—the drugs being worth far more than the plane and the occasional death of a pilot. The murder rate soared while law enforcement and the judicial system crumbled. Violent gangs gained control of swaths of major cities, engaging in extortion and protection rackets and creating no-go zones for the military and police, except when the police themselves were involved in the activities, which was not uncommon. The unremitting gang violence caused thousands of desperate Honduran families to send their children northward, often alone, in search of safety in the United States.

  There was no way Elkins could get permits or mount an expedition in this environment. The country looked hopeless. He gave up on the search for the White City, apparently for good. He told me then: “I’ve had enough. I’m done. Maybe this will be one mystery I can’t solve.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Lasers in the jungle

  After giving up on the White City, Elkins turned his attention to the second item on Steve Morgan’s list of mysteries: the Loot of Lima. He hoped, among other things, that the cutting-edge technology he had learned about in the search for the White City might also be applicable to a hunt for buried treasure. That search, into which he also drew me, would consume the next ten years of his life.

  Also known as the Cocos Island treasure, the Loot of Lima was an alleged fortune in gold and gems—estimated to be worth around a billion dollars—that is believed to have been spirited out of Lima, Peru, in 1821, during the Peruvian War of Independence. The city of Lima was under siege, and the Spanish viceroy reportedly wanted to keep the city’s vast treasure out of the hands of the revolutionaries, should the city fall to the rebels.

  The revolutionaries had blockaded the harbor but were allowing noncombatant foreign ships free passage. The viceroy secretly entrusted the treasure to a British ship captained by an Englishman he knew well. Just in case, he placed on board a contingent of Spanish soldiers and priests to guard the treasure. The plan was for the ship to sail past the blockade and then either bring the treasure back if the city repelled the invaders, or take it to the Spanish treasury in Mexico for safekeeping.

  But, as the story goes, the temptation of the treasure was too much. At the first opportunity past the blockade, the British crew murdered the soldiers and priests, threw their bodies into the sea, then took off with the treasure. Pursued by the Spanish, they landed on Cocos Island, a remote, uninhabited volcanic landmass in the Pacific Ocean. There they buried the treasure and sailed off. They were soon captured by a Spanish frigate. The Spanish hanged the officers and cre
w for piracy, sparing only the lives of the captain and first mate, on the condition that they lead them back to the treasure.

  Once they arrived back on the island, the two men escaped into the island’s mountainous interior. The Spanish hunted them for weeks until their supplies ran low and they had to give up and sail away. The captain and first mate were eventually rescued by a passing whaling ship that believed they had been shipwrecked. In secret, the British captain and first mate drew a map and prepared other documents recording the location of the buried treasure, intending to return for it at the earliest opportunity.

  The captain died shortly thereafter. The first mate, a Scotsman named James Alexander Forbes, eventually settled in California, married the daughter of a prominent Spanish family, and became the patriarch of a wealthy, landowning California dynasty. He became so involved in his various business enterprises, and made so much money so fast, that he never did try to recover the treasure, but he allegedly gave his eldest son, Charles, the maps and documents indicating its location. Those materials were passed down in the Forbes family from father to son to the present day.

  After Hurricane Mitch scuttled his White City dreams, Elkins and his partners teamed up with the Forbes family descendants who still had possession of the papers, and they began making plans to recover the treasure. Because the island, now a national park, had changed greatly over the years, many landmarks were gone. Elkins was keen to try out the latest technological advances in the remote sensing of metal buried under the ground. He and his partners spent years trying to raise money and obtain the necessary permits from the government of Costa Rica, which owns the island, but the project collapsed before reaching the point of an actual expedition. The treasure, if there, presumably remains undiscovered.

  It was now 2010. Steve Elkins, at fifty-nine years old, had spent the last twenty years of his life and many thousands of dollars trying to solve two of the world’s most enduring mysteries—and he had nothing to show for it.

  And then, in that same discouraging year, Elkins read an article in Archaeology magazine entitled “Lasers in the Jungle.” The article described a powerful technology called lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, which had just been used to map the Maya city of Caracol, in Belize. The lidar mapping of Caracol was a watershed moment in archaeology. The article electrified him: He realized he might finally have the tool he needed to locate Ciudad Blanca.

  Explorers had discovered Caracol in the 1930s and realized it was one of the largest cities in the Maya realm. The article told the story of how, in the 1980s, the husband and wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase had begun the daunting project of mapping Caracol and its environs. For twenty-five years, the Chases and teams of assistants and students tramped through the rainforest, recording and measuring every wall, rock, cave, terrace, road, tomb, and structure they could find. By 2009 they had created some of the most detailed maps ever made of a Maya city.

  But over the years of work, the Chases felt continually frustrated. The city was enormous, and they always had the uneasy sense there was a great deal they weren’t finding, due to the thickness of the jungle and the struggle and dangers of mapping in such an environment. “We cut paths with machetes,” they wrote, “scramble through thick underbrush, and wonder what we might be missing.” They longed for a better way to map the city without, they said, “spending another twenty-five years in the field.”

  And so they turned to a new tool: lidar. Although lidar had been used for mapping the moon’s surface and doing large-scale terrestrial charting, only in the previous decade had it gained the resolution necessary to resolve fine-scale archaeological features. It had been used to map the ruins of Copán after the hurricane, but that was about the extent of its use in Central America. The Chases joined forces with NASA and the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) at the University of Houston to map Caracol using airborne lidar, a technology many times more powerful than the radar and satellite data available to Blom. The best ground resolution Blom could obtain in the mid-nineties was about ninety feet; lidar promised a resolution of better than three feet even under the forest canopy.

  NCALM owned a small Cessna Skymaster that had had its guts ripped out to carry a big green box containing the million-dollar lidar machine. A pilot trained in lidar missions flew the aircraft from Houston to Belize, where he was joined by three mapping engineers. The team flew five missions over Caracol and its environs, scanning the rainforest with lasers, a process that took a little over a week.

  When the images came back, the Chases were floored. “Seemingly without effort,” they wrote, “the system produced a detailed view of nearly eighty square miles—only 13 percent of which had previously been mapped—revealing topography, ancient structures, causeways, and agricultural terraces,” as well as caves, terracing, buildings, tombs—tens of thousands of archaeological features that their ground-mapping had missed. In five days, lidar had accomplished seven times more than the Chases had achieved in twenty-five years.

  Their paper declared lidar a “scientific revolution,” and an “archaeological paradigm shift.” It was, they said, the greatest archaeological advance since carbon-14 dating.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was something that nobody had done.

  The more Elkins studied lidar, the more he was convinced that, if the lost city existed and he had the fortitude to resume the search, lidar would find it. His excitement, however, was tempered by the thought of trying to get the permits from the Honduran government, which had been a nightmare the previous time around. The government had changed hands several times and undergone a military coup, and the permitting process looked more daunting than ever. “I wondered,” Elkins told me, “if I wanted to go through all that bullshit again.” Mosquitia in the dozen intervening years had become extremely dangerous, an outlaw region controlled by violent drug cartels and criminal gangs. Even to fly a plane in Mosquitia airspace was perilous, as it was the prime flight corridor of cocaine smugglers, where unidentified planes might be shot down by either the US or Honduran military.

  Then came one of those crazy coincidences that a novelist wouldn’t dare put in a book. As Steve Elkins was pondering what to do, he got a call from his old friend and fixer in Honduras, Bruce Heinicke.

  Bruce and his Honduran wife, Mabel, had moved to St. Louis in 1996 after Mabel’s sister had been murdered in Honduras. Bruce gave up his drug smuggling and looting career and settled down to more mundane pursuits. But he, like Elkins, couldn’t shake his obsession with finding the White City.

  At the end of 2009, Mabel returned to Tegucigalpa, without Bruce, to attend her father’s funeral. At the time, the country was recovering from a military coup. The coup had taken place earlier in the year, when the current leftist president, José Manuel Zelaya, had launched a heavy-handed effort to hold a referendum to rewrite the Constitution so that he could try to gain a second term of office. The Supreme Court ruled the attempt illegal; Zelaya defied the court; and the Honduran Congress ordered his arrest. Early on a Sunday morning, the military disarmed the presidential guard, rousted Zelaya from bed, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, where, in the airport, he gave a fiery speech of defiance still wearing his pajamas. The press reported that Zelaya had been forced out of the country so quickly he wasn’t allowed to dress, but Honduran officials privately told me later that he had been allowed to dress and take some clothes with him; in a moment of wily stagecraft, he had changed back into his pajamas on the airplane in order to garner more sympathy and outrage.

  The military turned power back over to the civilian sector, and elections were held five months later. Those bitterly contested elections brought into power Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa. While Mabel was in the church for the funeral, she heard that Pepe, the new president-elect, would be attending services in the same church the following Saturday with his cabinet, to get God’s blessing for his upcoming four-year term.

  She mentioned this in a phone call to Bruce, who u
rged her to seize the opportunity. Mabel told me in an interview: “Bruce kept bringing it up all week. ‘You get close with this guy,’ he said ‘and explain to him about the White City. Just leave the rest up to me.’”

  On the day of the president’s visit, she went to the church with her brother, Mango, a Honduran soccer star, to try to buttonhole the president. The place was jammed. The president arrived late, with twenty bodyguards and a contingent of local police with rifles.

  After the service, Mango told Mabel to stay in her seat and he would arrange everything. He went up to talk to the pastor, but as their conversation dragged on, it became clear to Mabel that he was getting nowhere. Meanwhile, the president and his entourage got up to leave, and Mabel realized she was about to lose the opportunity. She rose from her seat and barreled through the thronging crowds, shoving people aside. She drove toward the president, who was surrounded by a chain of bodyguards with arms linked. She called out his name—“Pepe! Pepe!”—but he ignored her. Finally she rammed her way to the ring of guards, reached over them, and grabbed the president’s arm. “I said, ‘Pepe, I need to speak to you!’”

  “Okay,” he replied, resignedly turning toward her, “you got my attention.”

  “I said to the bodyguards, ‘Excuse me, let me through.’ And they shook their heads no. The bodyguards put their hands on their guns. They were holding their hands very strong and I was trying to push them around. Pepe was laughing and I told him, ‘Can you tell them to let me through?’ They did, then they closed the circle around me holding hands again, very tight.