Valverde’s Gold by Mark Honigsbaum, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, ISBN 0374191700 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
RESEARCHING a book on malaria, Mark Honigsbaum ran across the 19th-century English botanist Richard Spruce on his quest for cinchona trees, the source of quinine to treat the disease. Honigsbaum discovered that Spruce had also “stumbled on” a map to reach a fabulous treasure.
This was the enormous amount of gold that the Incas amassed to ransom their king Atahualpa, treacherously imprisoned by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. When Pizarro murdered Atahualpa, the shocked Incas buried the gold in the Llanganatis mountains, now part…
