Across Unknown South America

In 1913, a solitary English explorer crossed Brazil's unmapped interior with little more than determination and a desperate optimism. Arnold Henry Savage Landor undertook a journey that most considered suicidal: traveling alone through regions that existed on no European map, encountering tribes who had never seen a white man, and navigating rivers that swallowed all who ventured too close to their banks. This is not tourism. This is what exploration actually looked like before satellites, before radios, before the world shrank. Landor documents his expedition with an explorer's eye for the useful and an artist's eye for the strange. He catalogs Brazil's staggering natural wealth, from minerals hidden in mountain ranges to rubber forests worth fortunes, while also recording the indigenous peoples, customs, and landscapes that have since been altered beyond recognition. His mission was partly to prove wrong the cowardly European conventional wisdom that Brazil's interior was impenetrable, a death trap for any who dared enter. He succeeded, though the cost in hardship and near-starvation would break a lesser man. A century later, this travelogue reads like a dispatch from a vanished planet. The Brazil Landor describes no longer exists. For readers drawn to the romance of real exploration, the loneliness of the open road, and the brief window when a determined individual could still discover blank spaces on the map, this book is a time machine.