‘Simon Park tells the dark, twisted, sometimes terrifying story behind the pageant we think we know: how Europeans went out to meet the world, ‘discover’ it and make their empires. He tells a story of lovers and cannibals, shipwrecks and mutinies and ruinous failures from a wide-angle view and a continent’s worth of sources. His immaculate scholarship puts the risk and the blood back into what sometimes seems just a lifeless parade, the human story of discovery’
