Brazilian Adventure –Peter Fleming
The 1933 narrative is among the classics of between the wars travel writing, up there with The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron. It is one of the few from that golden era still in print.
The narrator Peter Fleming was Ian”007” Fleming’s older smarter more debonair brother. In April 1932 Peter answered a recruitment listing in the agony column of The Times for an expedition to Brazil to locate a missing explorer.
The expedition traveled to São Paulo, then overland to the rivers Aragauaia and Tapirapé, heading towards the last-known whereabouts of the missing expedition. Arguments broke up the expedition and so Fleming and Roger Pettiward (a university chum) went up the Tapirapé to São Domingo.
This not working out real well makes up most of the book, which was a best-seller when it was first released. Modern readers may be put off the red-blooded English love of the hunt (they shot dead about 100 alligators).
Roger was killed in a commando raid on Dieppe in 1942 and Peter himself died while on a shooting expedition in Scotland in 1971.
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