Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart Read Free Book Online

him a stone armadillo decorated with gems. Heye considered it one of the most stunning pieces in his collection. According to the doctor’s papers, the armadillo had come from a remote place somewhere in northeastern Honduras, near the rumored location of Ciudad Blanca.
    Convinced that there was more treasure to be found, Heye began sending explorers to the area. Before Murray, one of the most prominent had been Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who had traveled there in 1930 and again in 1931. The press loved to write about his adventures. When the New York Times profiled Mitchell-Hedges on his second journey, the story noted that he was seeking the “cradle of race in [the] American jungle.” His first trip to the Mosquitia had given him promise. “Within my knowledge,” he boasted, “the region contains immense ruins never yet visited, as well as Indian tribes of whom practically nothing is known.” The ruins, he speculated, “may change the entire scientific conception of the aboriginal races of Central and South America.” Mitchell-Hedges’s most important discoveries included the sprawling Maya city of Lubaantun, far in the jungles of Belize. There he also excavated a crystal skull, or, as he named it, “the skull of doom,” which, in his telling, the Maya high priests had employed “to will death” on their enemies.
    But after all his pronouncements, Mitchell-Hedges returned from his second trip some five months later with no evidence of the lost city. Two years after, Heye sent William Duncan Strong, an archaeologist from Columbia University. Strong discovered a grouping of prominent burial mounds along the Río Patuca, which he called the Floresta Mounds. Murray and others followed, sensing that they were closing in on a major discovery. But the city remained unfound.
    Now Murray was handing him Morde. When the two men met in New York, they hit it off and soon made a deal. The giant Heye grabbed Morde’s hand and shook it. It’s up to you now, he told him. Whether he knew it or not, Morde had been preparing for this moment his entire life; the journey would be dubbed the Third Honduran Expedition, following Murray’s first two attempts. Morde’s job, like the others’, would be to map the still mostly untraveled interior, document the indigenous tribes, and collect artifacts. The ultimate goal was, of course, to find the lost city.

The Coup
    O N JUNE 28 , a couple weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Honduras, a coup broke out and put the trip in jeopardy. That morning, two hundred soldiers charged into the Honduran presidential palace in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. With guns drawn, masked men handcuffed and dragged away the bleary-eyed president, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, popularly known as Mel.
    Like a dangerous criminal, Mel was taken by armored car to an air force base, where he was loaded onto a plane and sent to San José, Costa Rica. There he emerged in front of cameras and declared the coup illegal. “I am president,” he said, still in his pajamas. In his absence, the Honduran congress presented a signed resignation letter, later discovered to be a forgery, with the wrong date, and a man named Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as president.
    I spent the first few days of the overthrow worrying that Amy would find out and forbid me to go. I was transfixed by the images of chaos online and in the papers: the armed men in smoke-filled streets, the military vehicles rumbling about, the scared Hondurans looking as though they had no idea what would happen next.
    The exiled president had apparently gotten himself into the situation by offending elite businessmen and politicians with his populism and close ties to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s imperious leader. Mel had been born to a prominent ranching family and was famous around the country for his tall white Stetson hat, cowboy boots, and bushy mustache.
    The feeling in some quarters of power seemed to be that he had abandoned his