Aguirre: The Re-Creation Of A Sixteenth-Century Journey Across South America

The Story

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 epitomizeso 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.