Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1851–1852

An epic and intimate firsthand account of a true American hero’s daring journey into the heart of the Amazon forest in the nineteenth century. Captain William Lewis Herndon was memorialized in Gary Kinder’s bestselling book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea , which recounts Herndon’s final acts of heroism as his ship foundered in a hurricane off the Carolina coast in 1857. Seven years before those tragic events, the secretary of the Navy had appointed Herndon to lead the first American expeditio