What made you decide to write this non-fiction work? I came across the story of Francisco Orellana’s first voyage while I was researching and writing another book called Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs. It turns out that one of Cortes’s captains, a man named Diego Ordaz, went on to South America after the conquest of Mexico and did a major expedition up a river in Venezuala called the Orinoco. While researching this journey and the search for El Dorado (the golden man), I discovered the story of Orellana’s voyage and was mesmerized.
Click on the below link to purchase Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs.
Click to read about Francisco Orellana’s life and adventures on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana
Can you talk about your experience of researching this non-fiction work? And the dates of when you began researching and when your research was complete? Researching this book was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. I say this because I ended up going to Ecuador and Peru (LEFT) in 2008 to follow the route of the conquistadors over the Andes (from Quito at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level), going over Papallacta Pass at nearly 14k feet, then descending into the Amazon basin.
I traveled with a guide in dug-out canoes through Yasuni National Park, one of the most bio-diverse regions in the world, and then down the Coca and Napo Rivers all the way to Iquitos, Peru. During the journey I was reading the primary research documents from the conquistadors, and it was fascinating to try to imagine the place clear back in 1541.
Also important was sleeping in the jungle and rainforest in hammocks strung between trees. In this way I was able to get a sense of the sounds and sights and smells of the place and come away with a real, first-hand visceral sense of the remarkable region. And then of course I read everything in existence on the subject before writing the book River of Darkness. Also, I interviewed some key sources and scholars, like archeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt (Great granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt) and Alex Shoumatoff. I started research 2008, the book was first published in 2011, and it was recently re-released in paperback in 2022, with a new introduction that I wrote about the ongoing environmental threats to the Amazon Basin.
Click on the below link to visit Anna Curtenius Roosevelt’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/people/Anna-C-Roosevelt/100001441569586/
Click on the link below to visit Alex Shoumatoff’s Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/alex.shoumatoff
Click on the below link to visit Alex Shoumatoff’s website DISPATCHES FROM THE VANISHING WORLD
What is the date you began writing this piece of non-fiction and the date when you finished writing the piece of non-fiction? Began 2008—finished 2010. Then picked it up again in 2021 and did more research and writing for the release of the paperback in 2021-22.
Where did you do most of your writing for this non-fiction work?I mostly wrote this book (and all my nonfiction books) in offices in my town of Moscow, Idaho. For over 20 years I’ve rented an office so that I’m not distracted by anything (like my dogs, my refrigerator, the house phone, my lovely spouse Camie). I like head out of the house, roll up my sleeves and go to work. My office has room for all of my research materials, too, which include many, many books, articles, papers, dissertations, etc.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I use noise cancelling headphones to block out distraction and also listen to acoustic music (or classical, or world beat) that is typically in a language other than English so that I am not distracted. I try to begin writing in the mornings and knock off around 5pm. I write primarily on a laptop, but also use notebooks (Moleskin) for ideas, jottings of connections and things I don’t want to forget, things to look up, etc.
Please include an excerpt of one FACT or one set of FACTS that you were most impacted by in this non-fiction work. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. (This excerpt is from Chapter 7)
“Indeed, the Amazon River is so immense that superlatives fall short of doing it justice. At over 4500 miles long, the Amazon discharges one-fifth of all the freshwater that flows into the earth’s oceans, about sixty times the amount contributed by the Nile, its closest rival in size. Snaking across an entire continent in a languid west to east flow, the stupefying river drainage is fed by some 500 tributaries, a number of which themselves, were they located anywhere else in the world, would be the largest river on their continent. In places the Amazon sprawls a remarkable fifty miles wide, can rise in depth as high as fifty feet, and, near its terminus at the Atlantic, it contains an island the size of Switzerland.”
Why was this one fact or one set of facts so compelling for you to discover and to write about? It’s hard to comprehend, or explain to someone who has not been there, the sheer volume and magnitude of this river basin. It’s stunning and difficult to even believe. I traveled for a few weeks downstream and by the end of my research trip in Iquitos, Peru, I was still some 2300 miles from the mouth of the river at the Atlantic Ocean.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt? Unfortunately, I don’t have any copies of the notebooks here. They are somewhere in storage.
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