Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Mark Honigsbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2004

In 1887, two British sailors landed on the coast of Ecuador and set off across the Andes on a secret mission. Their task was to locate an immense hoard of Inca gold which had been lost for hundreds of years. A botanist who had recently returned from Ecuador had provided them with documents proving it still existed and gave them the route to find it. And find it they did - but both perished before they could make their way back to the cave a second time.

In Valverde's Gold, Mark Honigsbaum attempts to unravel a riddle that has inspired frustrating and fatal treasure hunts for centuries. When he delves into the botanist's life and discovers an ancient Spanish treasure guide buried in his notebook, he cannot help but be drawn into the mystery. Undeterred by the cursed history of the gold, Honigsbaum embarks on an epic journey into the last uncharted range in the Andes-the Llanganati Mountains of eastern Ecuador. This is the story of how the lure of gold intoxicates even the most level-headed of historians, and of how men-and women-are seized with the desire to claim treasure from one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world. Honigsbaum battles through mountains, jungles, and conflicting stories, and, as he draws closer to the hidden cache, illuminates the allure of lost gold and the hold it has on our imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist and historian Honigsbaum was on a research trip in 2000 to Baños, Ecuador, when he heard an intriguing tale: in a cave somewhere in the mountains northeast of Baños, a hoard of gold originally intended as part of the ransom for Inca emperor Atahualpa was said to have been hidden in 1533, and a document known as Valverde's Guide indicated how to find it. Fascinated, Honigsbaum pored through archives; the more he read, the more complex the story became. His recounting of his journey of discovery, about the guides and maps (there turn out to be many), is deliciously detailed and dense, as satisfying as any mystery, since he's genuinely stymied by the riddles he finds. His cast includes a botanist who harvests microscopic orchids resembling bumblebees, an aging Ecuadoran playboy who drinks and lies, and wary descendants of men who held the original treasure maps in their hands. Despite warnings that the treasure's a chimera and that the mountains are perilously labyrinthine, Honigsbaum eventually sets out to find the treasure. What he finds is a spellbinding climax to this tale of adventure and of the age-old lure of treasure. Maps and illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In 1887, a four-masted schooner struck a reef off the coast of Ecuador, and two of the ships crew--the captain and his second in command--set out to find a hoard of Inca gold that reportedly had been lost for hundreds of years. They had been given a secret map by the English botanist Richard Spruce, and subsequently they discovered a cave filled with exquisite Incan and pre-Incan artifacts made from gold and silver. They hoped to return with more men and equipment to continue the search. One of the men became ill and died, the other returned to England, where he had the pieces appraised by the British Museum. Revealing that in 1892 the second sailor set sail for North America but fell overboard off the coast of Halifax and drowned, presumably drunk, Honigsbaum endeavors to determine the truth of this mystery by trekking into an uncharted range in the Andes. The result will hold the reader's attention from beginning to end. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374191700
• ISBN-13: 978-0374191702
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,337,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #58 in Books > History > Americas > South America > Ecuador

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacklustre - Read the first and last chapters and skip the rest, April 23, 2006

By 

J. Haack "Ellipsis" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure (Paperback)

This book is pretty disappointing. Whilst treasure hunts are inherently interesting (and this one is the biggest of them all), following Honigsbaum is more often than not utterly boring. In each chapter his quest for the lost Incan treasure diverges into a new dead-end avenue, and his research is so hodge-podge that it is difficult to follow.

Much of his prose is boring and ought to have been cut short. For instance, he spends a chapter detailing his study of old Spanish documents in Seville, despite the fact that he finds absolutely nothing of import. Historical research is not exactly something one needs to read about in detail. His prose reads something like, "And suddenly, I put a new search term in the computer! I waited, as the hourglass turned on screen for what seemed an eternity. Then, just as I thought I was about to find the key document, my search came back! 'No Documents Found,' it said." He might then look over an unrelated document, and spend a page talking about a story that has no bearing on the treasure or anything to do with it; it just seems to fill up space in the book.

Overall, the author seems out to intrigue his audience enough to buy the book, but that's the extent of his effort. It's like a bad movie in which the preview only shows scenes with pretty girls and cars blowing up. Suck the audience in, because once you've got their money, what do you care? As I labored to get through Valverde's Gold, all I could think was, "I know exactly how this ends... I mean, if he found the treasure, would he really have written this awful book?"

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Excessive, October 17, 2007

By 

William J Higgins III (Laramie, Wyoming United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure (Paperback)

I must agree with another reviewer... all that is required of this book is the first and last chapters.

Instead of high-level adventure or life threatening exploits into the mysterious, the reader is best to settle for historical research of past attempts to locate Ecuador's legendary Inca treasure. No Indiana Jones script here.

With such an entanglement of characters past and present, along with weak geographical perceptibility due to a map which is certainly difficult to interpret, the discourse turns into muddle.

The subject at hand is simply overdone to the point of exhaustion.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly researched and mostly entertaining...., February 16, 2005

By 

M. Bell (Tampa, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure (Hardcover)

First and foremost, this book is more of a literary and investigative adventure. It's not until the last chapter that the author actually details his own physical search for the fabled treasure in Ecuador of the Incan King Atahualpa. A treasure that by all accounts over the last 500 years may be the most valuable land cache of gold and other precious objects on earth. It provides interesting and entertaining background on the other treasure hunters and explorers who went before him on the search. This leads the reader through labrynthine twists of misinformation, questionable documents/maps and several "characters" the author encounters who come across as gold-crazed swashbucklers. The book is definitely well-researched, but I expected something more along the lines of an Indiana Jones type of real-life adventure and came away with something more along the lines of a day spent in a musty-smelling library....