The museum’s third expedition, led by an eccentric journalist named Theodore Morde landed in Honduras in 1940. Morde emerged from the jungle five-months later with crates of artifacts. “The City of the Monkey God was walled,” Morde wrote “We traced one wail until it vanished under mounds that have all the evidence of once being great buildings.” Morde declined to reveal the location, for fear, he said, of looting, but he promised to return the following year to begin excavations. He never did, and in 1954 he hanged himself in a shower stall. His city, if there was one, remains unidentified
In subsequent decades archaeology in tales, first recorded by Hernan Cortes in 1526, of fabulously rich towns hidden in the Honduran interior. Anthropologists who spent time with the Miskito, Pech, and Tawahka Indians of Mosquitia heard stories of a “White House,” a refuge where indigenous people retreated from the Spanish conquest, never to be seen again.
Mosquitia lies on the frontier of Mesoamerica, adjacent to the realm of the Maya. While the Maya are among the most studied of ancient cultures in the Americas, the people of Mosquitia are among the most mysterious –a question mark embodied by the legend of the White City. Over time the myth became a part of the Honduran national consciousness. By the 1930s Ciudad Blanca had also captured the imagination of the American public, and in many quarters it was taken seriously, Several expeditions were launched to find it, including three by the Museum of the American Indian in New York City financed by George Gustav Heye, an avid collector of Native American artifacts. The first two came back with rumors of a lost city containing a giant statue of a monkey god. waiting to be unearthed.