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- National Geographic
- Men's Journal
- Book Page
- Publishers Weekly
- Kirkus Reviews
- Booklist
www.nationalgeographic.com
February 2004
The Darien Gap, on the Isthmus of Panama, definitely
makes the list of the most remote places on Earth. It's a jungle
so dangerous, so seductive, so impenetrable that the United Nations
had named it a World Heritage site in the vain hope, no doubt,
that the so-called forest-products industry will leave it alone.
Todd Balf's aptly named book is about a forgotten 1854 attempt
by U.S. Navy Lt. Isaac Strain to penetrate this wilderness--the
Darien is only some 50 miles across, Atlantic to Pacific--and
to find out whether it would be a suitable site for a canal.
What he sought was a pass. There is no pass, but
an Irish fabulist named Edward Cullen claimed to have found one
(though he had never been more than a few miles into the interior),
and he persuaded government after government to sponsor reconnaissance
expeditions. Lieutenant Strain's group (comprising 27 men) was
one of the first, and without question the unluckiest. They could
obtain no native guides. Trying to travel light, they didn't take
enough provisions. Existing maps were a joke. Vampire bats drank
their blood when they were sleeping. Scorpions stung them. Worms
hatched under their skin and started eating their flesh. The men
weakened and began to starve. Strain took off with three other
men to get help. In the process, he lost half his body weight;
he would never fully regain his health. Seven men died before
the expedition was finished. To read about their ordeal is horrendous
and thrilling and all the other things you want a book like this
to be. Balf's research is impressive, and he describes Strain's
trip with a fine sense of drama and in devastating detail.
When Balf made the journey himself in 2001, he found
himself in a native village in the heart of the Darien explaining
to locals—just as Strain might have done 150 years before—that
he was just passing through and had no interest in exploiting
their territory. In the end, Balf's feet became infected with
some sort of rot, and he couldn't go on. Three men on burros rescued
him. It's still a jungle out there.
www.mensjournal.com
February 2004
Expeditions from Hell
As with barbecued rib seasonings, this month's best
adventures come in two varieties: wet and dry. Dean King's Skeletons
on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival (Little, Brown; $25)
is the latter, and reader beware: This account of 12 Americans
shipwrecked in North Africa in 1815, enslaved by nomads, and then
hauled along on a Dantean odyssey through the desert, is scalding
enough to induce vicarious dehydration. "Our skins seemed
actually to fry like meat before the fire," wrote the ship's
skipper, whose men struggled against sand "as fine as house
dust and hot as coals of fire," a desert sun that charred
their eyelids, and edge-of-death thirst and hunger that reduced
them to creakily walking skeletons.
In Todd Balf's The Darkest Jungle (Crown;
$25), which chronicles a calamitous American expedition to Panama's
Darién Gap in 1854, the humidity level may be higher, but
the walking skeletons look much the same. On a mission in search
of a route for the Panama Canal, the expeditioners expected a
ten-day hike. Fat chance: Months would pass before the first dazed
survivors emerged from the rain forest, half their body weight
lost to starvation as well as the parasites, vampire bats, and
tropical diseases that further chipped away at their flesh. Wet
or dry, take your pick -- these are descent-into-hell tales of
survival at its most nightmarish.
www.bookpage.com
January 2004
Todd Balf continues to excel in writing about man’s
battle against the unknown and unforeseeable forces of nature.
He scored three years ago with his best-selling The Last River,
an action-packed account of an American whitewater kayaking team
in Tibet. Now comes The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of
the Darién Expedition and America’s Ill-Fated Race to Connect
the Seas, in which he focuses on the search for a route to
provide the world’s ultimate shortcut: a canal through Panama
to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Balf reconstructs the
absorbing 1854 saga of Navy Lt. Isaac G. Strain, whose 27-man
task force underwent a grueling ordeal marked by unreliable maps,
tropical fever, scorpions and flesh-dwelling parasites, rusted
weapons, fear of Indian attacks, bouts of hallucination, mutinous
temptations and cannibalistic impulses—in a terrain so torturous
and a climate so cruel they were compelled to abandon some of
their helpless colleagues who could not keep up.
Balf, a former senior editor of Outside
magazine, demolishes the widely held notion that starvation is
almost impossible in a lush jungle. Small game, reptiles and birds
were difficult to catch and, added to retch-provoking plants,
were unable to fulfill even the minimum food requirements of Lt.
Strain’s weakened colleagues. At one point, the crew members
survived by gorging themselves with palm nuts, the acid of which
dissolved their tooth enamel and eroded their digestive systems.
When rescued after the three-month nightmare, an emaciated Lt.
Strain weighed 75 pounds, half his normal weight.
By chronicling the details of this incredible journey
of survival, Balf has rescued Lt. Strain’s expedition from
vanishing into history.
www.publishersweekly.com
November 10, 2003
In 1854, Isaac Strain, an ambitious young U.S. Navy
lieutenant, launched an expedition hoping to find a definitive
route for a canal across the isthmus of Panama. For hundreds of
years, the Darién isthmus had defied explorers; its unmapped wilderness
contained some of the world’s most torturous jungle. Yet
Strain was confident he could complete the crossing. He was wrong.
He and his men quickly lost their way and stumbled into ruin.
Balf (The Last River) vibrantly recounts their journey,
a disaster on a par with the Donner party or the sinking of the
whale ship Essex. Using logs kept by Strain and his lieutenants,
as well as other period sources, Balf follows the party from their
first missteps (their landing boat capsized in roiling surf) to
their near-miraculous rescue two months later. Strain and his
crew endured exhaustion, heat starvation and infestations of botfly
maggots, which grew under the skin and fattened on human tissue.
The men were forced to make heartbreaking life-and-death decisions;
e.g., voting to leave behind sick companions who couldn’t
keep up with the rest (one shrieked after them as they trudged
deeper into the jungle). Some men surrendered to despair; two
of them quietly conspired to commit cannibalism. Balf has written
a compelling, tragic story, reviving an adventure overshadowed,
60 years later, by the successful completion of the canal. Balf
reminds readers that, like the transcontinental railroad farther
to the north, the channel was "built on the bones of dead
men."
(starred
review)
www.kirkusreviews.com
October 15, 2003
The author of The Last River anatomizes another
disastrous adventure in the unwelcoming outdoors: the 1853—54
effort to discover a potential waterway through the isthmus of
Panama.
It was the height of the canal era, and the canal that would cut
through Panama would be the grandest yet: the rude weather of
Cape Horn could be avoided, travel time to the gold fields of
California cut in half, the whole world of shipping turned on
its head. At the eastern end of Panama, in Darién, rumor of a
gap through the mountains had hardened into belief. Here the land
was only 40 miles wide, and 19th-century mapmakers avowed that
“the mountains parted and the oceans all but kissed."
The U.S. government sent the Darién Exploring Expedition, headed
by Lieutenant Isaac Strain, to "lead a ‘speedy’
overland crossing of the isthmus in an attempt to map and survey
the route." It was anything but quick. The local Kuna population
were evasive, worried about occupation of their land and reprisals
for their ill treatment of an earlier expedition. But Strain thought
he detected in their reticence a desire to hide the supposed gap’s
location. Bad maps slowed the expedition’s progress, jungle
damp fouled its scientific instruments, bloody flux and malaria
felled its members. Strain was in way over his head even before
he sailed into Caledonia Bay near Darién to find “mountains
rising above mountains, a sea of dark peaks clothed in dark forests"—and
no gap in sight. Balf pours on the historic doom and misery with
such practiced ease that readers will not be surprised when a
rescue party finally discovers Strain, weighing no more than 75
pounds, sporting a Panama hat, a tattered blue flannel shirt,
one boot, and sores inflicted by burrowing insects. An epilogue
recounts Balf’s own 2001 excursion to Darién and attests
to the region’s utter wildness.
Crack contemporary place writing, related in wrenching,
enchanting detail.
www.booklist.com
September 15, 2003
The 1854 U.S. Darién Exploring Expedition, led by
Navy Lieutenant Isaac Strain, was seeking a ship-canal route that
would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The men suffered from
disease, exhaustion, deadly insects, starvation, despair, and
failure. Despite a two-year search by Balf, author of The
Last River, he was never able to find the journals and notebooks
kept by the group’s 29 members. The journal entries appeared
in only one place, an account written by the then best-selling
historian Joel Tyler Headley. His story appeared over three successive
editions of the 1855 Harper’s New Monthly, the
most thought-provoking periodical of the day. The men had overcome
unimaginable obstacles when they emerged from the rain forest
after five months; six members of the expedition had died. Balf’s
colorful account of the venture is compelling reading.
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