Viage pintoresco por los rios Parana, Paraguay, San Lorenzo y Cuyaba

Description

Bartolome Bossi was a Ligurian sailor who spent his life on South American rivers. In 1862 he took a steamer up the Parana and the Paraguay, then into the San Lorenzo and as far as Cuiaba in Mato Grosso — a route no steam vessel had completed. His account is the opposite of an explorer’s epic: he notes depths and currents, the price of hides, the state of the Indian missions, the look of a town at the water’s edge. That plainness is what makes it valuable. Published in Paris the following year with plates, it caught a continent’s interior at the moment river steam was about to open it, and shortly before the war that would devastate Paraguay.