Los Fúcar

habiliments of an epic; but while the writing is excellent, the material itself, though exciting at times, has too much of sameness and too little of climax to lend much drama to the account.Argonautas de la selva has as its major thesis the justification of Orellana's conduct.Accounts based on the charges made against him by Gonzalo Pizarro brand the failure to return to the main expedition as treachery, carried out against the will of many of his men, some few of the most vocal of whom Orellana abandoned in the jungle.Senor Vinueza flatly denies these charges and asserts that Orellana was driven on down the river not by ambition but by the current, and that he con sented to take charge in his own right only on the written demand of his men.He further justifies Orellana's conduct in seeking from the Span ish court a governorship for himself.Direct quotations from the per tinent documents support these assertions, while the bibliography lists other contemporary sources bearing on the matter.After four hun dred years, Francisco de Orellana has found a champion to gather the witnesses on his side

Early Modern Spanish Literature · Environmental Science · Latin American history and culture · Medieval Iberian Studies