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River Of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage Of Death And Discovery Down The Amazon (2011)

by Buddy Levy(Favorite Author)

4.11 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0553807501 (ISBN13: 9780553807509)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bantam

review 1: I had a college class on pre-Columbian history of South America, so I thought I was semi-familiar with what I would read. No, no I was not. This reads like an amazing action-adventure. There are amazing feats of luck and derring-do, mutiny, adventures, and paperwork. Apparently the conquistadors were incredibly bureaucratic and filed a million reports. Which provide all of this amazingly detailed information of stuff that happened in the mid-1500s. Which is sort of a mind-bogglingly long time ago. Anyway. Like my beloved Arctic explorers, Pizarro's expedition starts to starve to death, but unlike the Arctic, there is the hope of food here. Orellana is sent to find food and ends up navigating down the Amazon and up to the Caribbean. It is jaw-droppingly incredible... more in several spots. The one thing I would have liked was a companion of the best anthropological research on what they saw - I have seen a few articles about discoveries about pre-Columbian civilizations, and if it's gotten on my radar I imagine it's a pretty happening field. But that's not a real criticism of this book, which doesn't purport to do that, it'd just be super-interesting.Also, don't give up when he gets back to civilization. I was appalled that there was a lot of the book left, but after a slow bit, it gets interesting again. Just...wow.
review 2: I really enjoyed this fascinating account of Francisco Orellana's excursion of the Amazon River, with first person quotes of the harrowing experiences by his chronicler and priest Carvalho. Orellana was smarter than Gonzalo Pizzaro, whose leadership he accidentally abandoned when his group went in search of food and were unable to row back upriver. Orellana tried peaceful methods first when he encountered Indians along the Amazon, though many times he and his starving men went straight into fighting. Even though his exploration was successful, he had trouble getting funding for a new expedition and when he finally started out again, he was beset by difficulties and went mad and died. less

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