Chris Morton - The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls

In fact nobody really knew where the Maya had originally come from or, for that matter, where they had got the advanced knowledge necessary to build their great civilization in such a short space of time. There remained many mysteries about the ancient Maya.

As we wandered around the crumbling pyramids pondering why the ancient Mayan civilization had simply disappeared, Catarino spoke again. ‘One of the strangest things the Maya left behind was found right here at Lubaantun.’

He reached in and pulled something out of his pocket. It was an old black-and-white photograph that had definitely seen better days.

‘This was discovered in the 1920s by Mr Mitchell-Hedges’ daughter Anna when she was 17 years old.’

He handed us the dog-eared photo. My eyes were immediately drawn to the image. It was unmistakably a photograph of a real crystal skull. It was an extraordinary object, at once horrifying and yet beautiful. Even in that tattered old photo, the skull had a strange, mesmerizing quality. As I stared into those hollow crystal eyes, I was captivated.

As Chris handed back the photo, I wanted to know more. The image of the skull had drawn us in, raising questions that demanded answers. Who had made such an object and why? Where was it now? Were there any others like it and if so, where? Was this one of the 13 skulls of legend? The questions raced through my mind. Now we knew for sure that a real crystal skull did exist we felt compelled to find out more.

The first question was, where had Catarino got this photo? We were a little surprised when he said it was Anna Mitchell-Hedges herself who had given it to him. After all, this was the woman he said had originally discovered the crystal skull way back in the 1920s. How could this be?

Catarino explained that Anna Mitchell-Hedges had subsequently returned several times to visit the place of the skull’s discovery and her last visit had been in 1987. We worked out that if Anna had discovered the skull as a teenager in the 1920s, she would probably now be in her late eighties. But was she still alive?

According to Catarino, when Anna had made her last trip back she had been a very elderly woman. He had got the impression that she had come back to see the site one last time before she died. Given these words, it now seemed very unlikely that she was still around to tell the tale.

As Catarino was speaking, the shadows started lengthening across the ancient ruins and we realized it was time to leave. We thanked Catarino for his patience with our questions and wandered back to our vehicle, wondering how we could ever track down this old lady. We were just climbing into the truck when Catarino came rushing over.

‘Wait, wait,’ he said. ‘I remember. Anna Mitchell-Hedges did give me her address, but it was a long time ago and I don’t know if I’ve still got it.’

But we had to leave there and then. Our driver was getting impatient. So we swapped addresses with Catarino and he assured us he would look for Anna’s address and send it on to us if he found it.

As we made our way back to the coast for the last few days of our holiday, the whole story began to seem somehow unreal. A young girl on an archaeological dig finding an ancient artefact known only in legend seemed so unlikely, so impossibly romantic. In any case, we didn’t really expect to hear anything more from Catarino and it was soon time to put the whole idea of crystal skulls out of our minds as we returned to the everyday realities of life in Britain.

But we had only been home for a few weeks when a letter did arrive from Belize. It was from Catarino. He had found Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ address. It was in Canada. We were delighted and wrote to her, albeit with some trepidation. We were unsure we would get any answer and half expected that if we did it would only be to inform us that Anna had now passed away. So when a letter did arrive back from Canada, we opened it nervously. As we read its contents, we were thrilled to find that Anna Mitchell-Hedges, now aged 88, was still living happily and healthily – and complete with her crystal skull. Not only that, but she would be only too pleased to tell us the story of the skull’s discovery.

Anna had enclosed a copy of her father’s autobiography, Danger, My Ally , 1and from this, together with subsequent telephone calls to Anna, we were able to piece together the remarkable tale.

The story began in the Britain of the 1920s, with Anna’s father, Frederick Albert, or ‘Mike’, Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959), a real Indiana Jones-type figure, who had adopted Anna when she was a young orphan. For many years Anna’s life remained inextricably linked to that of her father. She had never married and had accompanied him on many of his overseas voyages.

‘My 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 1924 2bound 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!’