Land Without Evil: Utopian Journeys Across the South American Watershed

All too often, travel writers plunge into seemingly obscure parts of the globe with little knowledge of where they are, whom they are among or what has happened there in the past. In this trend-breaking anti-travel book, Richard Gott describes his own journey thru the heart of S. America, across the swampland that forms the watershed between the River Plate & the River Amazon. But the story of his expedition takes 2nd place to a brilliant resurrection of the historical events in the area over 500 years, of the people who have lived there & the visitors who have made the same journey. The land crossed by the Upper Paraguay river once formed the contested frontier in S. America between Spanish & Portuguese territory. The Portuguese sent expeditions thru it in attempts to reach the Spanish silver mines of the Andes, & the Jesuits (supported by the monarch in Madrid) established strategic hamlets--the famous Indian missions--to stabilize the frontier. But this wasn't the beginning or end of conflict in the area. Earlier, the Guarani-speaking Indian nations of Paraguay had made violent contact across the swamp with the Quechua-speakers of the Inca empire; later, after the departure of the Spaniards, the 19th century witnessed a prolonged period of purposeful extermination of the local peoples. Since the Spanish conquest, the area has seen an endless procession of newcomers pursuing unsuitable & utopian programmes of economic & social development that have inevitably ended in disaster for the local population. Intermingling accounts of his own travels over many years with those of Jesuit priests, Spanish conquistadores & Portuguese Mamelukes, together with those of other visitors such as Alcides D'Orbigny, Theodore Roosevelt & Claude Levi-Strauss, Gott weaves a complex web of narrative that brings to life the almost unknown frontier land of Brazil, Bolivia & Paraguay.