Summary and Analysis of The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story: Based on the Book by Douglas Preston
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Summary and Analysis of The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story: Based on the Book by Douglas Preston
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This short summary and analysis of The Lost City of the Monkey God includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
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Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God is a gripping account of the search for a civilization lost in the impenetrable jungles of Central America.
For centuries, legends of the White City—the City of the Monkey God—have infused Central American culture and fired the imaginations of explorers and adventurers worldwide. The conquistadores heard of this marvel, but were never able to penetrate the jungle to find it.
Author and journalist Douglas Preston accompanies a team of filmmakers and archaeologists into the one of the deadliest jungles on the planet to rediscover a truly lost world.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504030267 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
Based on the Book by Douglas Preston
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3026-7
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Chapter 1: The Gates of Hell
On February 15, 2015, a group of scientists, photographers, filmmakers, archaeologists — and one writer — gathered in a conference room at a hotel in Catacamas, Honduras, for a lecture. They were about to enter the Honduran jungle, an area called La Mosquitia, one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Their lecturer was a British ex-special forces soldier, and his job would be to protect them from a mind-boggling host of dangerous flora and fauna, and from the drug cartels that trafficked through the remote and lawless region. Mosquitia — covered by dense rainforest shrouding jagged mountains and valleys, towering waterfalls, and dangerous quickmud — was nearly impassable, and home to jaguars, sand flies that carried a parasite capable of rotting off one's face, bullet ants whose bite was more painful than a gunshot wound, and the fer-de-lance, the deadliest snake in the New World. Mosquitia was one of the last scientifically unexplored places on the planet.
This motley group was preparing to set out in search of a lost city, said to be Mayan or perhaps much older. Legends called it Ciudad Blanca, the "White City," also referred to as the "Lost City of the Monkey God."
Need to Know: Douglas Preston, the author, listened to their guide's admonitions of safety measures and protocols, but he was pretty sure everything was going to be fine.
Chapter 2: I can tell you only that it is somewhere in the Americas.
Preston first heard of Ciudad Blanca in 1996 while researching and writing a story for National Geographic about NASA's use of an advanced radar system to uncover ancient temples in Cambodia. The team leader of that effort was Ron Blom, famous for discovering the lost city of Ubar in the Arabian desert. Blom hinted that they were using the technology to find other sites; however, he was circumspect when pressed for more information. He referred Preston to his employer, Steve Elkins, who described himself as "a cinematographer, a curious man, an adventurer." Elkins told Preston about the legends of the White City, and, on condition of secrecy, he also admitted that they were about to embark on confirming its location.
Need to Know: Preston inadvertently uncovered a fascinating story and got in on the ground floor of a major cultural and news event.
Chapter 3: The devil had killed him for daring to look upon this forbidden place.
Conquistador Hernán Cortés explored Honduras in 1526. The natives told him about rumors of a lost city of great riches hidden somewhere in Mosquitia. But Cortés was distracted by other concerns, including an insurrection by his subordinates, and was unable to confirm the tantalizing stories. However, he reported them to Charles V, King of Spain, and those reports fueled the legends for three centuries.
The tales of Ciudad Blanca ignited the imagination of an American named John Lloyd Stephens, who set out in 1839 to uncover cities lost in the Central American jungle. His ultimate discoveries of the ruins of Mayan cities and temples permanently altered previous perceptions of Native American tribes — he proved that great civilizations had arisen on the American continents, independent of European culture.
Stephens's work brought subsequent explorers to the region into the 20th century, and increased the rumors and speculation about Ciudad Blanca. In 1933, archaeologist William Duncan Strong traveled to Honduras and discovered sites that he realized were not Mayan: The Maya had built with stone, but this region had been settled by a culture that built large earthen mounds. Even as he uncovered many other ancient sites, Strong continued to hear stories about the White City, the greatest ruin of them all.
Need to Know: The rumors and legends inspired adventurers and explorers to launch expeditions to Honduras, in search of riches and forgotten civilizations. Some of the missions failed miserably. Other ventures provided the beginnings of serious archaeological research.
Chapter 4: A land of cruel jungles within almost inaccessible mountain ranges
George Gustav Heye was a wealthy investment banker utterly enthralled by Native American artifacts. By the time of his death in 1957, his collection of objects numbered in the millions. He had heard legends of Ciudad Blanca and mounted various expeditions to Honduras. Heye first hired an explorer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who was actually a "fraud on a spectacular scale." On his expedition, Mitchell-Hedges claimed to have found Atlantis but not the Lost City of the Monkey God.
Heye replaced Mitchell-Hedges with R. Stuart Murray, a Canadian journalist. Murray led two expeditions to Honduras, in 1934 and 1935, and returned with a variety of stone artifacts that he got from a Honduran Indian who claimed they came from the White City. Unfortunately, according to Murray, the Indian died from a snakebite without revealing the city's location.
Heye then hired Theodore A. Morde, a young journalist, to lead a third expedition into Mosquitia.
Need to Know: Without Morde's expedition, Steve Elkins would likely never have heard the legends of Ciudad Blanca and launched his own search decades later.
Chapter 5: I'm going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.
In 1940, Theodore Morde returned from his expedition to Honduras. His report, published in the New York Times, describing the discovery of Ciudad Blanca became a national sensation. Morde told brilliant tales of adventure and brought back a number of artifacts, but he would never reveal the city's location "for fear of looting."
It was not until Douglas Preston acquired and read Morde's journals that the decades-old hoax was revealed. Unbeknownst to Heye, Morde and his associates never even looked for the city — they were after gold. They spent months panning the rivers and streams of Mosquitia in hopes of finding the next Yukon. When their mining operation was destroyed by rainy season storms, they gave up their efforts and most likely bought artifacts from dealers on the coast to shore up their cover story. After hearing that France had fallen and that the United States was on the brink of entering World War II, they quickly returned to New York.
Need to Know: Morde told grand stories of finding the Lost City of the Monkey God, but once again the reports turned out to be a hoax.
Chapter 6: We took canoes into the heart of darkness.
For decades Morde's hoax fed the legends of Ciudad Blanca, which helped embed the story within the Honduran national psyche. Explorers continued to make dubious claims of having found the lost city, and archaeologists believed that it might exist somewhere deep in the jungle.
Steve Elkins first heard of the White City from an adventurer named Steve Morgan in the early 1990s. At the time, Elkins ran a business renting camera equipment to video productions crews, and he decided to produce and film an expedition himself. He mounted a mission to the jungle with the help of a local American ex-pat, fixer, and all-around shady character named Bruce Heinicke — "the kind of guy you want to have on your side. And not the other way around."
Elkins's first attempt at finding Ciudad Blanca was a failure, but it changed him forever. His interest in lost civilizations and cultures had been lifelong, but the experience infected him with the "lost city virus." He became obsessed with proving the existence of the White City and continued his efforts.
Steve Morgan introduced Elkins to Sam Glassmire, a geologist who had been hired to prospect for gold in Mosquitia in the 1950s. Glassmire claimed that on March 10, 1960 he found mounds and artifacts that were part of the ruins of Ciudad Blanca. He alleged to have brought back a cache of artifacts, leaving "tons" behind, and donated the majority of the relics to the University of Pennsylvania. However, the school insisted they received no such collection of artifacts, and Preston was unable to confirm that the expedition ever took place. Nevertheless, Glassmire's story was a lead for Elkins to follow.
Elkins turned to satellite imagery and radar to look for the regular structures that denote human construction. After months of analysis, he and his team identified a bowl-shaped valley, almost completely isolated, with no navigable rivers, surrounded by almost impassable mountains.
Need to Know: The legends of Ciudad Blanca were proven to be endless hoaxes, yet each contained tantalizing clues. When Elkins identified the isolated valley, however, he thought, "If I were a king, this would be the perfect place to hide my kingdom."
Chapter 7: The fish that swallowed the whale
Through painstaking political maneuvering with Honduras's government factions, Elkins managed to secure the necessary permits for an expedition to Ciudad Blanca. However, on the eve of fruition, October 1998, his plans were destroyed by Hurricane Mitch. The storm killed roughly 7,000 people, with damage equivalent to 70% of the country's GDP, and set back the Honduran economy by an estimated fifty years.
The country's government had already been permanently scarred by the meddling of the US government and international fruit companies that were making fortunes from the sale of bananas. In 1933, Samuel Zemurray, a Russian American immigrant and the man for whom this chapter was named, had seized control of the banana industry by taking over the United Fruit Company. Leveraging the power and wealth he accumulated, he engineered an overthrow of the United States–backed Honduran government. This colonialist revolutionary legacy left Honduras unstable, which exacerbated the effects of Hurricane Mitch. Into this vacuum came drug traffickers from Colombia, who turned Honduras into a distribution point for narcotics smuggled into the United States. They used Mosquitia's natural inaccessibility as the perfect hideout for their operations.
As the years passed and the miasma over the country deepened, Elkins could find no way to assemble his expedition in that political environment.
Need to Know: Honduras was a country with an extremely troubled history of political corruption and had been devastated by natural disaster. The circumstances made putting together an expedition an insurmountable task.
Chapter 8: Lasers in the jungle
For a decade, Elkins gave up his search for Ciudad Blanca. He turned his attention to searching for the so-called Loot of Lima, an alleged fortune in gold and gems estimated to be worth around a billion dollars. In the 1821 Peruvian War of Independence, this treasure was lost, supposedly buried somewhere on Cocos Island, a remote volcanic landmass in the Pacific that is now owned by Costa Rica.
In 2010, Elkins encountered too many roadblocks to continue the project, but he did learn of an exciting new terrain-mapping technology called lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging. Lidar works on the same principles as radar but uses invisible, harmless lasers instead of radio waves. The innovation was used with great success to map the Mayan city of Caracol in Belize. Whether lidar would be effective in a jungle as dense and rugged as Mosquitia remained to be seen.
Need to Know: The development of lidar and its use for archaeological projects like Caracol renewed Elkins's enthusiasm for finding Ciudad Blanca.
Chapter 9: It was something nobody had done.
Just as Elkins wondered if he had the fortitude to resume his search, a crazy coincidence occurred. Bruce Heinicke, like Elkins, had become obsessed with finding Ciudad Blanca. On a fortuitous trip to Honduras, Heinicke's Honduran wife Mabel seized the opportunity to speak directly with the new president, Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa, about getting the permits for a new White City expedition. Sosa, looking for ways to bolster his own popularity and the national mood, saw this as a perfect opportunity. He agreed to green-light the project immediately.
Heinicke called Elkins with the news, and Elkins secured a team, scheduled the use of the lidar equipment, and planned the sites to survey.
Mosquitia, however, was a land of narcotics traffickers and looters. Great swaths of the lush jungle had been cleared in the decade since Elkins had put the project aside. Planes were as likely to be shot down by the narcos as by America's drug interdiction efforts. Sites that Elkins had thought promising were now breached by deforesting ranchers. But two valleys remained unexplored.
Need to Know: As Elkins gathered his team and surmounted obstacles, still more impediments arose; however, the explorers retained hope.
Chapter 10: I would never go back up that river. That's the most dangerous place on the planet, that river.
Elkins procured funding for the expedition and assembled his team, which included documentary filmmakers Bill Benenson and Tom Weinberg. The expedition managed to get licenses from the US government to use the classified lidar equipment for two weeks. Because of the imposed security requirements, they chose the island of Roatán as their base rather than the mainland, hiring the Honduran military to guard their plane and equipment.
The lidar engineering team included Honduran-born lidar engineer Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández Díaz, data-mapping scientist Michael Sartori, and lidar technician Abhinav Singhania.
Bruce Heinicke filled the role of fixer, a Jabba the Hutt–like figure who wasn't afraid to get things done at the muzzle of a .45. Heinicke's checkered past included drug smuggling and looting archaeological sites in the area they would be searching. He claimed to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling Central American artifacts on the American black market.
Heinicke regaled Preston with stories, but made Preston promise that they not be published until after Heinicke died, which happened in 2013. Heinicke called Mosquitia the "most dangerous place on the planet," and asserted that life "has no meaning up there."
Need to Know: The team assembled on Roatán in April 2012 and began the process of organizing equipment and personnel for the lidar scan of the jungle sites in Mosquitia.
Chapter 11: It's uncharted territory: You're out there on your own, out in the middle of nowhere.
On May 1, the Cessna Skymaster carrying the lidar machine arrived in Roatán; it was the same plane that mapped Caracol in Belize. The world-class pilot was Chuck Gross, a lifelong flyer who had soloed over the Atlantic at 18 years old.
The expedition planned to survey three sites in Mosquitia, called T1, T2, and T3. On the second day of mapping T1, Preston begged Chuck and Juan Carlos for permission to ride along; he crammed himself into a nook and spent six hours in what was essentially an enclosed tin can with no toilet facilities. Their flight path wove back and forth across T1 and T2. For the lidar to work properly, the plane could not deviate from its direct path, which took incredible flying skill in an environment of gusting winds and unpredictable thermals.
When the plane returned that evening to Roatán, Michael Sartori began compiling the raw data. He sent it to Houston for further analysis. The team in Texas quickly spotted what appeared to be pyramids and other man-made structures laid out in perpendicular grids over an area of astonishing size, covering hundreds of acres.
Preston, Elkins, and the rest of team were ecstatic as they looked at the 3D images of a city, perhaps an entire civilization, that had been lost to history for five centuries. Bruce Heinicke's reaction to this amazing news: "Of course the White City was there, who the fuck thought otherwise?"
Before the team could map the remainder of T2 and start on T3, the lidar machine broke down. The only replacement circuit boards were in Canada, requiring a Canadian engineer to bring the replacement board all the way to Roatán. The airlines initially lost the luggage that contained the $100,000 top secret circuit board and all the tools needed to install it, but fortunately the luggage showed up the day after the Canadian engineer arrived.
With the lidar machine repaired, the mapping of T2 and T3 revealed additional structures.
Need to Know: The team found something extraordinary in T1. What the lidar revealed was unquestionably a city, and the discoveries in T2 and T3 revealed even more about the forgotten civilization than the rumors had suggested. At this point, they realized that Ciudad Blanca was actually a conflation of stories, a legend anchored in truth.
Chapter 12: There is a big city here.
The Honduran government was overjoyed at the discovery. They believed it would "put Honduras on the map in terms of tourism, scientific research, history, and anthropology." The American archaeological community reacted negatively, furious that no archaeologists were involved in the expedition — only filmmakers and adventurers — and that no real archaeological work was being done. They said that the expedition and announcements were all grandstanding and treasure hunting.
(Continues...)
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