David Grann, The Lost City of Z, Simon & Schuster, 2009; paperback edition published by Pocket Books. ISBN 978-1- 84739-443-9

Well, not exactly. However, it is strange how very small Ricardian connections can be found in the most unlikely places. Reading a non-fiction book, The Lost City of Z (a must read for lovers of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Brian Fawcett’s Exploration Fawcett) I was abruptly stopped in mid-read about lizards, snakes, poison arrows and other must-sees on Amazon exploration by a familiar name. Sir Clements Markham.

We know him, of course, for his Richard III: His Life & Character in the Light of Recent Research and its appearance in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. So how did he earn a mention here?

Sir Clements, it appears, was at one time a president of the Royal Geographical Society that had sponsored Fawcett and he had been partly responsible for the failure of the Brazilian rubber boom. Markham had “engineered the smuggling of Amazonian rubber tree seeds to Europe”, from where they were distributed to plantations throughout British colonies in Asia where rubber production was easy and cheap and abundant.

And his cunning plan had left once-wealthy Amazonian centres as ghost towns, a fact that Colonel Fawcett discovered after a six-year absence.

A small footstep making its mark in a fascinating book – but a warning about the index in the paperback – an edition that suited my budget admirably – omitted to edit the original index so consequently the page numbers are way out of kilter, thanks to small print and page size. Once realised, you can shuffle back three or four pages to find the reference, but that spoils much of the pleasure of reading and learning.

Tags: Books, Sir Clements Markham