The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America's Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas (Hardcover)

by Todd Balf (Author) "THE SHIPS ROUNDING CAPE HENLOPEN at the mouth of the Delaware River were rushing home to port..." (more)
Key Phrases: ship canal route, weather deck, exploring expedition, New York, Caledonia Bay, Savana River (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In 1854, Isaac Strain, an ambitious young U.S. Navy lieutenant, launched an expedition hoping to find a definitive route for a canal across the isthmus of Panama. For hundreds of years, the Dari‚n isthmus had defied explorers; its unmapped wilderness contained some of the world's most torturous jungle. Yet Strain was confident he could complete the crossing. He was wrong. He and his men quickly lost their way and stumbled into ruin. Balf (The Last River) vibrantly recounts their journey, a disaster on a par with the Donner party or the sinking of the whale ship Essex. Using logs kept by Strain and his lieutenants, as well as other period sources, Balf follows the party from their first missteps (their landing boat capsized in roiling surf) to their near-miraculous rescue two months later. Strain and his crew endured exhaustion, heat, starvation and infestations of botfly maggots, which grew under the skin and fattened on human tissue. The men were forced to make heartbreaking life-and-death decisions; e.g., voting to leave behind sick companions who couldn't keep up with the rest (one shrieked after them as they trudged deeper into the jungle). Some men surrendered to despair; two of them quietly conspired to commit cannibalism. Balf has written a compelling, tragic story, reviving an adventure overshadowed, 60 years later, by the successful completion of the canal. Balf reminds readers that, like the transcontinental railroad farther to the north, the channel was "built on the bones of dead men." Illus., maps not seen by PW.
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From Booklist
The 1854 U.S. Darien Exploring Expedition, led by navy lieutenant Isaac Strain, was seeking a ship-canal route that would link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The men suffered from disease, exhaustion, deadly insects, starvation, despair, and failure. Despite a two-year search by Balf, author of The Last River, he was never able to find the journals and notebooks kept by the group's 29 members. The journal entries appeared in only one place, an account written by the then best-selling historian Joel Tyler Headley. His story appeared over three successive editions of the 1855 Harper's New Monthly, the most thought-provoking periodical of the day. The men had overcome unimaginable obstacles when they emerged from the rain forest after five months; six members of the expedition had died. Balf's colorful account of the venture is compelling reading. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (December 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609609890
• ISBN-13: 978-0609609897
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #538,131 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A place best visited on the pages of a book, January 16, 2004

By	"claklee" (Hartford, CT) - See all my reviews

An engrossing adventure story that describes the ultimate jungle trek gone bad. Authentic details starkly convey the expedition's desperate ordeal as they attempt to discover the shortest route between two oceans in Panama in the 1850's. I found the epilogue a satisfying wrap-up to the story as author Todd Balf details his own experiences 150 years later - almost as grueling without the tragedy. Another aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the first hand inforamtion on the Damien rain forest - one of the last unexplored regions on the planet.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ill-Fated Expedition, January 15, 2004

By	Brian D. Rubendall (Oakton, VA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Author Todd Balf's "The Darkest Jungle" comes along as the latest in a glut of recent books about historical expeditions that came to grief because they were ill-equiped, poorly led, misguided, or some combination of the three. The United States' Darien Expedition of 1854, led by earnest Naval Lieutenant Issac Strain fell squarely into the last category. Misled by erroneous maps drawn by previous charlatan explorers, the Darien Expedition set off across the Panamanian ismuth in seach of a viable ship canal route and became hopelessly lost. Six men of the party starved to death, and most of the rest would have followed suit but for a heoric rescue effort led by Strain himself.

"The Darkest Jungle" is a well written book that tells the story of the Strain party with a minimum of hyperbole. Particularly gruesome are Balf's depictions of the ravaging effects that starvation and parasites had on the members of the party. As an added bonus, in the last chapter Balf briefly describes his own travels in the expedition's footsteps.

The story of the Darien party isn't an epic, like that of the Scott party in Anarctica for example, but it still makes for enjoyable reading for anybody who likes real-life adventure tales.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Skinny Land, April 16, 2004

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This catchy little history book shows us how deceptively brutal the Panamanian isthmus can really be. Of course, long before the actual Panama Canal was completed, the region had been obsessed over by all types of explorers and speculators wanting to create the ultimate shortcut for world travel. This book focuses on the 1854 exploratory mission of Isaac Strain and his men, in search of a possible route for a canal in the Darien region of the isthmus, which ultimately was not selected for the canal. While Panama may appear to be just a skinny little strip of land, it is actually up to 100 miles across with steep mountains, punishing weather, the worst tropical diseases and insects, rivers that go in all the wrong directions, and the most impenetrable jungles on Earth. Here Balf documents the harrowing ordeal of Strain and his men, as the team ultimately discovered that the Darien region was definitely not suitable for a canal, losing several men along the way under gruesome conditions of starvation and suffering. Some parts of this book are quite terrifying as guys start dropping dead in the worst possible ways.

This mostly fascinating vignette is held back a little by Balf's rather thin and wandering writing style, as the characters (particularly Strain) fail to really come to life. Meanwhile, there are two different stories about the rescue of the nearly-dead Strain and his associates after months of being lost in the festering jungle. In the sensationalistic introduction, meant to draw the reader in, Strain is near death when rescued but dramatically fights his way back to lucidity. But later, in the actual historical account, he was certainly in ill-health but still competently commanding his men. This is one of several examples of inconsistency in this otherwise solid, if intellectually skinny, account. An added bonus is the epilogue in which Balf tries to retrace the steps of the Strain party, and finds for himself (and us) how unexpectedly treacherous Panama is even today. [~doomsdayer520~]