father’s great love was ancient archaeology,’ she explained. ‘He had a very enquiring mind. He wanted to know more about the past and was the sort of person who liked to find things out for himself. He questioned the way things were and didn’t like to accept what other people told him.’
Indeed, according to Anna, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had been something of a legend in his own lifetime. He was your archetypal British adventurer-explorer, determined to make his mark in the twilight years of the British Empire. He was a flamboyant, charismatic and somewhat unconventional character who had no time for the petty niceties of suburban English middle-class life, and certainly no time for what he considered the boring nine-to-five existence of the various office jobs, in banking and the stock market, he had tried during his early career.
Instead he had turned to a life of adventure and exploration. His motto, ‘Life which is lived without zest and adventure is not life at all’, spurred him on in his various overseas missions ‘to see parts of the world no white man had ever seen before’. He funded his trips largely through silver-trading and lecturing. He enjoyed gambling and always allowed time to indulge his great love of deep sea fishing along the way. He was a man who seemed almost deliberately to court danger, at one stage apparently even finding himself taken prisoner by the famous Mexican bandit turned national hero Pancho Villa, unwillingly caught up in his border raids against the United States. He travelled extensively and his passion for adventure found its greatest fulfilment in organizing great voyages of exploration and discovery to far-flung places, all the while fuelled by his obsession with the idea of finding the treasures of lost civilizations.
For Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was a member of the Maya Committee of the British Museum. He believed that the cradle of civilization was not in the Middle East, as was commonly supposed, but was the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. He was convinced this was a real civilization which had disappeared after some natural catastrophe and that its remnants were to be found in Central America. Moreover, he was determined to prove it.
To this end he gathered together a party of explorers who set sail from Liverpool in 19242 bound for British Honduras (now Belize). On reaching the Americas they docked at the small port of Punta Gorda, from where rumours had emanated of a lost city hidden deep in the jungle. They tried, at first unsuccessfully, to penetrate the interior via the crocodile infested Rio Grande, a trip which ended in disaster with the loss of all their medical supplies aboard a dug-out canoe which capsized and sank. As a result, one member of the team contracted malaria and later died. Only with the help of the local Kekchi Maya tribespeople, direct descendants of the ancient Maya, was the party finally able to penetrate the dense tropical rainforest and continue their search.
One day, deep in the jungle, they stumbled across some mounds of stone, overgrown with moss and foliage and suffocated by roots and vines. This was the sign they had been looking for. Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was heard to cry out, ‘We can’t be very far from this lost city!’
Work began in earnest as the party and local Mayan helpers toiled in the jungle heat to clear the site. It was back-breaking, seemingly relentless work, hacking away at the undergrowth and felling huge trees which piled themselves high on top of the ancient stones below. It took over a year to clear most of the undergrowth. When they had finished, the trees lay fallen before them in a great mountain of twisted branches. It was time to set fire to the what was left of the forest. The fire raged hot and high for days beneath the blistering sun. It burned ‘like a mighty blast furnace’, spewing out white hot ash and burning red embers all around. It dried the lips, reddened the eyes and almost choked the very life breath from the parry of explorers. But as the flames subsided the ruins of a once great city slowly emerged from amidst the smoke and burning ashes. As Frederick Mitchell-Hedges recounts in his autobiography, published in 1954:
‘We were amazed at the immensity of the ruins. Walls, terraces and mounds came into view as the holocaust swept onwards … in its centre had stood a mighty Citadel.
…The Citadel was raised above the level of the surrounding countryside and when it was first built it must have stood out like a glittering snow-white island, one hundred and fifty feet high. Around it spread the lesser dwellings and burial mounds of the common people and, further out, the thousands of acres of green, waving maize that must have been necessary to feed and support the large population.’ 3
When the blaze had died away Mitchell-Hedges and his team were able to explore the great city:
‘It covered …a total area of six square miles with pyramids, palaces, terraces, mounds, walls, houses, subterranean chambers, [even] a huge amphitheatre designed to hold more than 10,000 people and appreached by two great stairways. The Citadel was built over seven and a half acres and originally every foot had been covered with cut white stone… ‘4
Mitchell-Hedges was amazed at the workmanship that had gone into the construction:
‘The magnitude of the labour required is almost beyond computation for their only tools were flint axes and chisels. I tried to square a similar block of stone with one of these implements, of which we found many. The task took an entire day.’ 5
Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was to spend several years uncovering the secrets of the past that lay hidden in this lost city. During the long excavation of the site he was joined by Anna, or ‘Sammy’ as she was affectionately known to her father (see plates 32 and 33). She settled instantly to life in the jungle, as if she had been born to it. Anna shared something of the same rebellious spirit of adventure as her father and had a strong, inquisitive nature. It was this that led her to make her dramatic discovery.
It was a particularly hot day, an afternoon when the air itself seemed to stand still in the drowsy heat. The archaeological site, which was usually very busy, was strangely silent. ‘Everyone had gone to sleep. They had been worn out by the heat,’ remembers Anna. It was a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday. She was alone in her hut and feeling restless. Suddenly it occurred to her there was something she had been wanting to do for a while.
‘I thought this was my chance to go up and see how far I could see from the top of the highest building. Of course, I was strictly forbidden to climb up there because the stones were very loose and dangerous. But I had heard that you could see for miles around from the top of one of the pyramids and that intrigued me.’
So Anna headed towards the site, knowing that the excavation team were sleeping soundly in their beds.
She began to climb the tallest pyramid. Monkeys chattered in the distant trees and insects buzzed noisily around her as she picked her way carefully over the loose stones until, at last, she reached the top. It had been worth it:
‘Once I was up there I could see for miles around and it was very beautiful. I felt that I could have stayed there for a very long time. But the sun was very, very strong and there was something shining in my face. Way way down below through a crack I could see something shining back at me and I got very, very excited. How I got down from that building so quickly I don’t know, but when I got back I woke my father up and told him I’d seen something. Then, of course, I got a very bad scolding because I shouldn’t have gone up there.’
Anna’s father was disinclined to believe she had seen anything at all:
‘ “You imagined it,” he said.
‘But the following morning my father got all his men together. Before I got up he had everybody moving the stones from the top of the pyramid, because there was no way we could get
