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Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
Unavailable
Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
Unavailable
Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
Ebook298 pages5 hours

Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City and a True Story of Deadly Adventure

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

For fans of The Lost City of Z, The River of Doubt, and Lost in Shangri-La—a real-life Indiana Jones story, set in the mysterious jungles of Honduras.

"I began to daydream about the jungle...."

On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him.

Deep inside “the little Amazon,” the jungles of Honduras’s Mosquito Coast—one of the largest, wildest, and most impenetrable stretches of tropical land in the world—lies the fabled city of Ciudad Blanca: the White City. For centuries, it has lured explorers, including Spanish conquistador Herman Cortes. Some intrepid souls got lost within its dense canopy; some disappeared. Others never made it out alive. Then, in 1939, Theodore Morde claimed that he had located this El Dorado-like city. Yet before he revealed its location, Morde died under strange circumstances, giving credence to those who believe that the spirits of the Ciudad Blanca killed him.

In Jungleland, Christopher S. Stewart seeks to retrace Morde's steps and answer the questions his death left hanging. Is this lost city real or only a tantalyzing myth? What secrets does the jungle hold? What continues to draw explorers into the unknown jungleland at such terrific risk? In this absorbing true-life thriller, journalist Christopher S. Stewart sets out to find answers—a white-knuckle adventure that combines Morde’s wild, enigmatic tale with Stewart’s own epic journey to find the truth about the White City.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJan 7, 2014
ISBN9780062344199
Author

Christopher S. Stewart

Christopher S. Stewart is an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, where he shared a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. His work has appeared in GQ, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, New York, The Paris Review, Wired, and other publications, and he also served as deputy editor at the New York Observer and is a former contributing editor at Condé Nast Portfolio. Stewart is the author of Hunting the Tiger and Jungleland. He lives with his family in New York.

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Reviews for Jungleland

Rating: 3.6271186033898304 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book reads like the written edition of Expedition Unknown. A contemporary author is trying to follow the trail of an earlier explorer in the jungle. very hard to get into - not my favorite form of literature. Harder to read than see on TV.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jungleland is a true story that reads like fiction. This story is part adventure story and part WW2 spy story. I liked the short chapters and all the interesting characters Stewart meets along the way. Stewart is in search of the White City deep in the Honduran jungle. He tries to follow the same route Theodore Mode's expedition took in 1940. Will he find it and does the Ciudad Blanca actually exist?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Stewart, a journalist who "doesn't like camping" sets out to find a mysterious lost city in the Amazon rainforest. Alternating with his own story, he recounts the tales of others who have searched for the same goal. In my opinion, the success of this type of travel/adventure depends upon both the attitude and the storytelling ability of the author. An overly high opinion of oneself or the importance of one's "mission," or an inability to tell a story well are the two reasons some attempts at this fall flat. Stewart does not take himself or his "quest" so seriously that you want to laugh at him,but yet, his reactions and experiences feel genuine and interesting. He also tells the stories of others quite well. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys the travel/adventure genre. It is neither hardboiled nor saccharine, striking just the right balance for an exciting but essentially frivolous adventure story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Don’t come to this book expecting much about the wartime espionage activities of Theodore Morde. Apart from an episode in Istanbul where he talks with Franz von Pappen, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey and an old spymaster himself, about assassinating Hitler, this book has little to offer in that area, and you’d be better off just going straight to the listed bibliographic sources.While I didn’t get the espionage history I hoped for when picking up this book, I still enjoyed it. Stewart moves his narrative along quickly, alternating between Morde’s life – particularly his 1939 expedition to the Mosquito Coast –and his own expedition (with archaeologist Chris Begley as a guide) to that area 70 years later. Stewart juggles so many things in this book – archaeological discovery, self-discovery, Morde’s life, espionage, and Honduran history – that, if you’re bored with one subject, your area of interest quickly shows up again. The flip side of that is, of course, that it’s more of an appetizer than a meal, but it’s still an enjoyable book and not a major investment of time. I particularly enjoyed the encounters with Hondurans (and tourists) in both time periods.And, yes, there is a resolution of sorts to the matter of whether Ciudad Blanca exists.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A modern day reenactment of an old explorer's search for a lost city in the same vein as David Grann's The Lost City of Z but not of the same calibre as that book. Christopher Stewart follows in the footsteps of Theodore Morde who explored Honduras during the late 1930s looking for the fabled "White City". Chapters alternate between telling Morde's story and Stewart's. Morde's story comes from extensive diaries he kept during his expedition and life. An entertaining story, well-written and an enjoyable read. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer mentioning the WWII Spy bit as Morde did go on to do this after his exploration but this occupies only about two chapters of the book near the end. The book is about explorers, exploration, and lost civilizations, not wartime espionage. While the tale is a captivating read for those who enjoy jungle exploration, nothing much of actual note really happens. Neither Morde nor Stewart faced any unusual or unique dangers nor enthralling experiences. I enjoyed Morde's story the most. Stewart I found hard to like from the get-go. Here is a married man, father of a three-year old child who picks up and takes off for the jungle, a potentially life threatening action, for purely selfish reasons, trying to "find himself", etc. mostly against his wife's wishes though she doesn't make much fuss according to the author. I just found him an unlikeable, immature person and though he laments what he's done and "grows" through the experience, I found myself thinking about his poor wife and daughter left worrying about him back home while he basically traipsed around on this fool's errand. So, an interesting story but mostly for the historical aspect of Theodore Morde's story, in my opinion. I would have preferred a book just about Morde and not the author and his ego.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    First Line: The man called himself Rana, or Frog.Armed with a World War II spy's personal notebooks and the mysterious coordinates carved into the man's walking stick, journalist Christopher S. Stewart goes to Honduras to see if he can do what the spy (Theodore Morde) claimed he did in 1940: find the Ciudad Blanca-- the white city of gold hidden deep in the rain forest of the Mosquito Coast, one of the wildest places on Earth. What the journalist would learn is that the journey itself oftentimes is more important than reaching a destination. Alternating chapters tell us of Stewart, a New Yorker with a bad back and no fondness for camping or hiking, who decides to go off on this adventure even though there's political unrest in the area. Compared with the chapters on him, the ones about Theodore Morde sound like Indiana Jones. Morde was a seasoned amateur when he set out through the jungle in 1940. He'd already circled the globe five times and covered the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. After claiming that he had found Ciudad Blanca, Morde would go on to become a spy during World War II and attempt to assassinate Hitler. I found this book to be uneven. As long as the author focused on Morde and Morde's expedition or on the facts of his own, I found it very interesting. However, Stewart's attempt to show The More Sensitive Side of Explorer Man sounded too much like whining. Blisters, rain, heat, missing his family, listening to his wife whine about things she should have been able to take care of in his absence... these things all brought the enjoyment factor down further and further for me. If you like finite results in books like this, you may want to rethink reading this book. There are no real results to either man's journey into the jungle unless you count what Stewart learned about himself. However, as uneven as I think the book is, it is worth reading if you enjoy the search for lost civilizations. As wired and modern as most of us are, it makes me smile to think that there are still lots of adventures like this to be had on this planet.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Travel books have always been a favorite of mine. I love to travel, but don't get the opportunity to do so often enough, so I have to explore the world vicariously through books. When I read the description of Jungleland, it immediately caught my attention, because it combines my love of travel and my fascination with archaeology and lost civilizations. I was very excited to read it.I wasn't disappointed. Christopher Stewart has crafted a fascinating, well-written book that is less travelogue than adventure. He also does an outstanding job of comparing his own experiences with that of Theodore Morde, who made the journey over 50 years before. The alternating chapter points of view was a little jarring at first, but after a few chapters I got used to it and actually began to enjoy it.It's easy to think that the world is entirely explored, a known quantity. In this information age, when we can simply log onto the Internet to learn about anything we want to, we don't realize that there are so many places that are completely untouched by modern man. Stewart goes into just such places, and the story he tells of each place he stops is riveting. Even more, though, is the story within the story, of how his own attitudes and life are changed by the trip he takes and the people he meets. this, to me, is the mark of a great travel/adventure book; it certainly marks my own favorites, whether it is Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (which introduced me to the genre) or Bruce Feiler's explorations of faith, religion, and geography in his books. The physical journey is only really half the story in these books, and it is fascinating to see how the trip changes the author.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I love stories about explorers and modern people retracing their steps in exotic places. This book meets those criteria.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This could have been a fascinating book. But the author is a whiner having some sort of crisis. Two stars because its still an exciting story notwithstanding.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Following Colonel Percy Fawcett’s Amazonian Saga, the Rain Forests of South America intoxicated me. A couple of years back I saw the book “JUNGLELAND” by Christopher Stewart, an adventurer and free lance journalist describing his trip through the Jungles of Mosquitio Coast of Honduras, trying locate the mysterious lost city Theodore Morde was supposed to have discovered in 1940, which was known as the Lost City of Monkey God – also famous in myths as “Ciudad Blanca” or White City.

    In India we have what is called “Subh Muhurat” or Auspicious Time and it was only in February 2020 that the Subh Muhurat to read “Jungleland” came.

    The narrative starts with Chris Stewart obsession to locate the mysterious White City. After detailed and painstaking research and follow up with the relatives of Theodore Morde, Chris Stewart in the company of archaeologist Chris Bigley retraces the steps of Morde and his companions, ultimately locating the city Morde most likely located by the descriptions available in Morde’s journals - Las Crucitas – was it actually the legendary lost city also known as Ciudad Blanca.

    The travellers’ arrive in Honduras within a few days of a coup – the country is in turmoil – always a lawless place, at this time more dangerous.

    Trying to locate the Lost City of Z in Amazonian forest David Grann found none of the dense jungles described by Fawcett in his journals. In a matter of eighty years, the forest cover had greatly reduced. The savage, naked Amerinds lived in a symbiotic relationship with the Amazonian rain forests for many millennia. And then the conquistadors, the civilized, white barbarians out to bring the savages to Christ while robbing them of their wealth and destroying their health, came. Within half a millennium the forest cover reduced, rainfall pattern changed and hundreds of species of fauna along with thousands of species of flora became extinct. As someone commented – Nature is bountiful and there is sufficient and more for needs of everyone, but not enough for even one person’s greed.

    The forests of the Mosquitia jungles have similarly been denuded by the timber mafia. Chris Stewart writes in his book Jungleland “Soon there was no one but cattle and cut-down trees, dozens and dozens of blackened stumps in a wide-open space the size of probably six football fields. I was stunned and a little terrified. The impenetrable, supernatural-seeming mass of green that I had imagined had been completely and utterly slashed and burned. “So this is the jungle,” I said sarcastically. It didn’t exactly feel like Morde’s dense malarial wilderness.

    “It used to be,” said Chris. “It was different in Morde’s day.”

    Now the area looked like a giant lawn of ashes. Settlers, loggers, and ranchers had been clearing the jungle for years, illegally in many cases. “This is the colonization front,” Chris said. Jungle clearing was a problem all over Honduras. The colonizers took the land for houses or pasture, or just for the wood. Many times they didn’t replant anything.”

    In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the country had lost about 7 million acres (about 10,000 square miles) of forestland — an area the size of the combined Hawaiian Islands. Some of the timber ended up in products sold in the United States. The U.S. embassy has reported that the clearing continues at a rate of about 3 percent a year, further shrinking Central America’s largest rain forest and everything — birds, beasts, bugs, and all manner of flora that double as herbal medicine for the local people — within. Yes the blatant selfishness and greed of the white man – money and more money – let the rain forest biosphere, ecosystem and environment be damned. He never realizes that all this lucre will be left behind and all the land he requires will be 30 / 35 square feet for his body to be interred. He leaves behind a ravaged raped environment, which will takes centuries, if not millennia to once again become pristine. To retain the pristine glory of the forests – for every tree cut 10 new saplings have to be planted, since only one or maybe two of these ten will continue growing to maturity and then contribute to the biosphere.

    At the cost of repeating myself, within half a millennium of the white savage stepping on the shores of the New World and exploring the interiors of the Americas and the Dark Continent the forest cover reduced, rainfall pattern changed and hundreds of species of fauna (some exotic like Dodo, Great Auk, Tasmanian Tiger and others) along with thousands of species of flora became extinct, as did tribes of American Indians, Australian Aborigines and dark Africans.

    Returning to the journey of Chris Stewart and Chris Bigley along with their local guides Pancho and Angel. Like Theodore Morde and Brown his companion, they started by staying at Paris Hotel in Le Ceiba where 70 years before the explorers had checked in. Tracing Morde’s route they travelled through the cleared jungles, the swamplands and some remaining jungles to Catacamas, an eight hour drive that took eleven hours.

    From Catacamas, they took a bus to near Patuca and head upstream to Rio Blanco and tried to trace Morde’s Camp Ulak. They met with the Amerindians to get feedback on Ciudad Blanca. Tracing the route of Morde and his companions, they ultimately reach a site where there are many a mounds – the indicators of buildings buried underneath.

    This was the area, where Chris Bigley made his first discovery of ruins in the jungles of Mosquitia coast. As he explains to Chris Stewart ‘“That assumption that there was little in the Mosquitia, that this was always pristine rain forest, uninhabited,” Chris said now, “you can see how that’s just wrong.” He seemed to take particular pleasure in the evidence undermining all the people who had challenged him over the years, those who had warned him he was wasting his time in the Mosquitia. Those people and their tired old arguments against a city ever existing in this rain forest. “Just look at this place!” he exclaimed.

    On locating the ruins of Las Crucitas, amid the verdant green forests with towering peaks in the backdrop and howler monkeys providing the background cacophony (as described by Morde in his journal) one could conclude this was the Lost City of the Monkey God – was this then the Lost White City Ciudad Blanca?

    The night before they set out for the ruins of Las Cruicitas, an old Pech chieftain explains that to locate the Lost City one has to know all the Indian dialects and if the person is lucky enough to locate the place – the guardians of the city would welcome he traveller, but once inside the guardians would prevent the return of the traveller. They do not like people casually coming and going from their city. This was Ciudad Blanca the Lost White City.

    Explaining this concept further, Chris Bigley says, finding numerous ruins, initially he had concluded that there was not one but many Ciudad Blancas. Later, he understood the Lost City was a metaphor for what the Indians had lost, once they came in contact with the outsiders – their wealth, culture and even their lives. Ciudad Blanca was in their minds and memory and could not be located in the physical realm. Ciudad Blanca – the White City – would remain lost and could not be located in Americas.

    The journey described in the book occurred in 2009, but four / five years later the journalist Douglas Preston using the latest laser aerial photography located the ruins of the Lost City of the Monkey God – and we can be sure that this is not the mythical Lost White City – the Ciudad Blanca.

    The book is well written, the story line gripping and it is a page turner.