AustLit

Want to take a voyage into the past? Then this well researched novel, although fictional, makes no definition between real and imaginary characters from the exciting era of Portuguese sea exploration in the late 1400s, and will intrigue the reader from the first sentence.

Beginning with the birth of hero Diego Del Fonzo and the death of his mother, it follows him through his over indulged childhood in Lisbon, his love for Cacao, an African princess, and his voyages as part of the crew which sailed with Christopher 'Columbus across the Atlantic and later, Vasco da Gama, when the sea route to India around the tip of the African continent was first discovered.

'At twenty seven years of age our hero finds himself marooned on an island in the southern hemisphere after a ship that he commanded became storm battered and crippled when attempting to round the southern most tip of South African.

'Only one other crew member lives after their ship is wrecked on the south west coast of what is now known as Tasmania- then named Trowenna.

'The story has all the ingredients of a great novel: excitement, romance, sex, adventure on the high seas and comparisons between Stone Age existence on an isolated island, native myths and legends and asks pertinent questions about Western religion far away from everything familiar in the luxury of Lisbon, in the earliest years of European expansion.

'Considered a white god by the native members of the Toogee tribe, which rescued both survivors of the wreck, Diego, through the Young Lanu rules the Toogee, following the death of her grandfather, the tribal chief.

'Diego presented the beautiful gold cross, a gift given to him by his adoptive father, to Lanu, whom he loved. The Cross became a tribal symbol for three hundred years and many generations. With the Cross went the promise of the return of the white gods.

It was however, not as they expected. Instead it meant genocide to this once proud group of people.' (Publisher's blurb)