Brazilian Adventure: A Quest into the Heart of the Amazon

by PeterFleming (Author), NewForewordbyGilesFoden (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $6.53

  This title presents new Foreword by Giles Foden. In the summer of 1925 Colonel Fawcett - soldier, spy and legendary explorer - embarked on a journey into the dark and uncharted heart of Brazil in search of the lost 'City of Z'. He was never seen again. Rumours abounded - that Fawcett had been killed by Indians or wild animals or that he had lost his memory and become chief of a cannibal tribe - and many became obsessed with discovering what had become of him. In 1932, when The Times advertised for 'guns' to join an expedition to find Fawcett, the lure was too great for a young Peter Fleming and he immediately signed up, intending to send dazzling dispatches from the jungle. The expedition set out from Sao Paulo and, following tributaries of the Amazon, headed to Fawcett's last-known position. What followed was, in Fleming's words, 'a venture for which Rider Haggard might have written the plot and Conrad designed the scenery'. As the expedition forged its way deeper into the Amazon, disagreements fractured the group and the entire adventure ended in a chaotic race to be the first to report back home. Though the fate of Colonel Fawcett remains a mystery, Peter Fleming's wild escapade in the heart of Brazil has become one of the 20th century's best-loved travel classics.

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $14.08

  Beyond the completion of a 3,000-mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, nothing of importance was achieved. Nothing indeed. In 1932, Peter Fleming, a literary editor, traded his pen for a pistol and took off as part of the celebrated search for missing English explorer Colonel P.H. Fawcett. With meager supplies, faulty maps, and packs of rival newspapermen on their trail, Fleming and his companions marched, canoed, and hacked through 3,000 miles of wilderness and alligator-ridden rivers in search of the fate of the lost explorer. One of the great adventure stories, Brazilian Adventure is as fresh a story today as it was when originally published in 1933.