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Overview
In 1560 Lope de Aguirre, an obscure Basque of no great estate, joined the largest expedition ever mounted in Spanish Peru. Its goal was the mythical El Dorado, and before it came to an end, it would cross a continent, pushing well into terra incognita and leaving behind a trail of mutiny and blood. Nearing fifty when he set out, Aguirre was unattractive and overbearing, even faintly ridiculous. Yet somehow in the course of that long trek across South America, this crude and common man rallied a fighting force large enough to earn him the status of rebel and traitor so that, at his violent end, all traces of his passing were obliterated by official proclamation, his dwellings and land leveled, ploughed under, and strewn with salt. It was obliteration on a grand scale, and it says much about the threat Aguirre posed to the imperial order. For if Aguirre, a man of towering rages and rancors, was psychotic, he was also a precursor of the rampant individualism that would, almost three centuries later, climax in a ferment of revolution, extinguishing the old order forever. Contemporaneous history is unreliable in the best of times and no more so than with the chronicles of Aguirre's day. Thus he has remained shrouded in mystery. Now, knowledgeably sifting this original source material and measuring it against his own powerful imagination, Stephen Minta arrives at speculative history that rings with truth and narrative that pulses with life. Combining informed readings of the texts with his own adventurous re-creation of the journey, Minta spins a tale that radiates a strangely modern cast, one whose unanswered questions have haunted us through four centuries and whose protagonists epitomize so much of the European encounter with the New World. Theirs is a tale of human foible, grandiose ambition, and false pride, and it strikes with the immediacy and truth of the finest fiction, the authority and power of the best narrative history.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1560 the new Spanish governor of Inca Peru authorized an expedition to find and conquer El Dorado, the hoped-for source of Inca wealth. An enormous force of armed men, horses, supplies and ships were marshalled to navigate the Amazon. It was an ill-fated search fraught with unimagined disasters--ships sank, horses were lost, men were terrorized and starved by the jungles and the uncharted river. A traitor in the ranks, Lope de Aguirre, hungering for wealth and status, fomented a rebellion, killing the expedition's leader and lieutenants, his comrades and his own daughter. In the late 1980s Minta ( Gabriel Garcia Marquez ) set out with a companion to reconstruct the story by following the expedition's route. Their own ordeal on old Inca paths through jungle and over mountains, often on foot for lack of other transport, though dramatic in itself, continuously distracts from the narrative of Aguirre's drama. Nevertheless, Minta's intimacy with past and present Peru evokes the ambience of the conquest and its immediate sequelae, as well as the still palpable imprint of the Inca on contemporary and rarely visited Andean communities. (June)Library Journal
Minta (comparative literature, Univ. of York) traveled through Peru, down the Amazon, and on to Venezuela in 1987, retracing Lope de Aguirre's journey in the 1500s. Aguirre was a poor Basque in his forties who joined a large expedition in the 16th century in Peru, searching for El Dorado. He mutinied and went on a killing spree while guiding the remaining members down the Amazon, eventually winding up in Venezuela. Minta's trip is a modern travelog, utilizing the chronicles of Aguirre's disastrous expedition. In 1561 Aguirre was shot, ending the career of a ruthless, psychotic soldier. The author makes both Aguirre's expedition and his own memorable.-George M. Jenks, Bucknell Univ., Lewisburg, Pa.Book Details
Published
June 7, 1994
Publisher
New York : H. Holt, 1994, c1993.
Pages
208
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780805031034