The very first documents to emerge from the New World were travel accounts. Although this was not the earliest travel writing in Europe the encounter with the Americas certainly stimulated a vast production of such literature and arguably made textual experience of the exotic a much more mundane occurrence. At the time of the discovery of the New World, the horizons of colonial Europe were also being expanded by travel to the east and south, but the unanticipated discoveries of Columbus provided a frisson of mystery and a need for explanation. This was the basis not just for recurrent attempts to detail, catalogue, and locate the peoples, creatures, and geographies of the continents, but also for a particular sense of the possibility of encountering the marvellous, the novel, and the extreme. The cross-cutting of these themes and ideas has produced a travel writing in South America that is filled with the discovery of the fantastic, the survival of the anachronistic, and the promise of marvellous monstrosity.

In this way, South America – more than its northern counterpart – and particularly the Amazon region, has been largely imagined through such travel writing. This becomes very evident in attempts to define and locate the region. The ‘Amazon’ might be restrictively identified with the main river channel or the river basin, but the Amazon river basin actually has a watershed connection with that of the Orinoco, so that hydrology defies neat boundaries and definitions. Likewise, although western Amazonia has an intensity of rainfall that is unrivalled elsewhere in the river basin, the actual extent of the ‘tropical rainforest’ in South America exceeds the limits of the Amazon basin itself, stretching into Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The Amazon could therefore be seen to comprise not only the contiguous forests that spread beyond the river-system, but also savanna and scrub forest environments.