The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

In 1885, Boston entrepreneur Andrew Preston* and a partner formed the Boston Fruit Company, with the idea of using fast steamships, rather than sail, to get bananas to market before they spoiled. It was a success: Inexpensive, delicious bananas took the country by storm. By the turn of the century Boston Fruit, which was later merged into the United Fruit Company, had carved out forty thousand acres of banana plantations along the northern coastline of Honduras, becoming the largest employer in the country. This was the beginning of a long and destructive relationship between American banana companies and the country of Honduras, earning it the pejorative nickname “Banana Republic.”

The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Between 1990 and 2010, Honduras lost over 37 percent of its rainforest to clear-cutting.

The Honduran economy was the second poorest in the Americas. Large swaths of the countryside, towns, and parts of some large cities had been taken over by narcotraffickers. Gangs had sprouted up and were running brutal extortion and kidnapping rackets. The murder rate, already the highest in the world, was skyrocketing. Corruption was rampant. The judicial system and law enforcement were in collapse. The people were impoverished, adrift, cynical, and restive. The 2009 coup had left the country, including the archaeological community, bitterly fractured. Honduras was a country desperately in need of good news. The discovery of the White City, President Lobo told me later, would be that good news.

The first item on the agenda was getting our cover story straight for the locals. Only a few people in the Honduran government knew what we were doing. There was to be no loose talk of Ciudad Blanca or the Lost City of the Monkey God. We were, Elkins explained, merely a bunch of nerdy scientists doing an aerial survey of Mosquitia using a new technology, to study the ecology, rainforest, flora, and fauna. The legend had grown to the point where many Hondurans were convinced the White City hid an immense treasure in gold; it would not be safe if our actual activities became known.

It amazed me that a valley so primeval and unspoiled could still exist in the twenty-first century. It was truly a lost world, a place that did not want us and where we did not belong.

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race.

Historians once marveled at how Cortés, with his army of five hundred soldiers, defeated the Aztec empire of over a million people. Various ideas have been advanced: that the Spanish had crucial technological advantages in horses, swords, crossbows, cannon, and armor; that the Spanish had superior tactics honed by centuries of fighting the Moors; that the Indians held back, fearful the Spanish were gods; and that the Aztecs’ subjugation and misrule of surrounding chiefdoms had created conditions ripe for revolt. All this is true. But the real conquistador was smallpox.

Honduras is a spectacularly interesting country, whose people have a bifurcating history that goes back to both the Old World and the New. While the Spanish history of Honduras is well known, its pre-Columbian history (beyond Copán) is still an enigma.

Pandemics changed the very arc of human history. Despite our dazzling technology, we are still very much at the mercy of pathogens, old and new.

We First Worlders have become far too complacent in the idea that disease, especially NTDs, can be quarantined to the Third World, and that we can live safely in our communities supposedly gated against pathogens, ignoring the suffering of the poor and sick in faraway lands.

It seems that leishmaniasis, a disease that has troubled the human race since time immemorial, has in the twenty-first century come into its own. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.” We were, he said, confronted in a very dramatic way with what many people have to live with their entire lives. If there’s a silver lining to our ordeal, he told us, “it’s that you’ll now be telling your story, calling attention to what is a very prevalent, very serious disease.” If leish continues to spread as predicted in the United States, by the end of the century it may no longer be confined to the “bottom billion” in faraway lands. It will be in our own backyards.

Archaeology contains many cautionary tales for us to ponder in the twenty-first century, not just about disease but also about human success and failure. It teaches us lessons in environmental degradation, income inequality, war, violence, class division, exploitation, social upheaval, and religious fanaticism. But archaeology also teaches us how cultures have thrived and endured, overcoming the challenges of the environment and the darker side of human nature. It shows us how people adapted, lived their lives, and found fulfillment and meaning under fantastically diverse conditions. It tracks both the failures and the successes. It tells us how cultures faced difficulty and challenge, sometimes in successful ways and sometimes in ways that, while successful at first, sowed the seeds of eventual collapse.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.