He has indeed studied his sources closely and well. They were good observers and give the author much more to work with. The book picks up interest as the scientist explorers of the eighteenth century take their turn on the page. Then, a few chapters later, the bandeirantes fan out over Brazil, hunting for slaves and gold, but we never learn until pages later that they ever found any gold-long after subsequent explorations have been discussed. Each of the early voyages seems to begin and end in a vacuum. Strangely, the author relies on antique English spellings of period translations for much of his flavor in the early sections.Īnother problem is the lack of room to place the expeditions in their own historical setting. There is little chance to taste the flavor of the individual exploits, for there is little room to quote from the sources. And soon the explorers run together in the mind too. One can scarcely do more than say of the explorer that “he went here, then he went there, and finally he reached someplace else.” The mosquitoes, the cold, the heat, the jungle, the mountains, the sickness, the Indians become familiar participants in nearly every enterprise. The first 100 pages, for example, treat more than 50 expeditions-a virtue, but also a hazard.

The bare mention of a few well-known names hardly reveals the scope of this book. Bingham and Fawcett were hunting for lost cities Sebastian Cabot 400 years earlier was searching for the Enchanted City of the Caesars. As for scientific exploration in the twentieth century, well, it is “careful, detailed, unspectacular, and prosaic,” and hence, we presume, a good reason for the author to stop right there, else it “wash much of the romance out of our lives” (p. Ironically, considering the title of this last section, the author devotes most of a single chapter on the twentieth century to the romantic adventures of Teddy Roosevelt, Hiram Bingham, and Colonel Fawcett.

First came the sixteenth-century discoverers and conquerors, and here the list is most familiar second, the seekers after souls, slaves, and gold-the missionaries and bandeirantes among them third, the scientist-explorers of the eighteenth century, from La Condamine to Humboldt and finally, “The Great Age of Scientific Exploration,” primarily concerned with the nineteenth century. The author helpfully divides his narrative into sections, clarifying the principal motive that drove each explorer to clamber over the harsh face of the southern continent. Fawcett disappeared into Mato Grosso in 1925. This is a book that needed to be written, for nowhere else may one find so comprehensive a vista of exploration in South America- from the day Columbus set foot on the coast of Paria in 1498 until Colonel P.

Colol fawcett south america