Reviews

This is less a continuous history than a series of chapters dealing with the exploration of the Amazon River from the discovery of Brazil in 1500 to the expose of Indian exploitation on the rubber plantations of the early 1900s. Smith, a British TV and radio personality and freelance writer, presents a number of colorful characters from the homicidal Lope de Aguirre to the polymath Baron von Humboldt to the British adventurer Henry Wickham. Edward Goodman's The Ex plorers of South America (LJ 8/72) covers much of the same ground as Smith's work does, though in more scholarly fashion, but Explorers of the Amazon certainly merits consideration as a readable, popular account.-- J.F. Husband, Framingham State Coll. Lib., Mass .

Christmas, 1541: Francisco de Orellano and 57 Spanish soldiers set off downstream from the headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador; nine months later, they reached the Atlantic Ocean. In this history of Amazon exploration, Smith ( The Great Rift ) writes of mutiny and murder, miraculous survival, shifts in world power and international rivalries. A 1637 Portuguese expedition was the first to journey upstream to Quito, and a century later, the French made the first scientific studies of the region. Smith follows the trail of Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland up the Orinoco to their discovery of a natural link with Amazon waters in 1800. En route the pair collected and measured everything they could reach. We also meet 19th-century Englishmen Richard Spruce and Henry Wickham, who snatched the greatest prizes of the Amazon--seeds of the chinchona (source of quinine) and rubber trees. Later, in 1913, a young American traveler, Walter Hardenburg, brought to light the evils of the rubber industry. The book will appeal to travel and adventure buffs. Illustrated. (Jan.)