As far as sangfroid goes, an episode recounted in Simon Park’s Wreckers takes some beating. It involves an adventuring German soldier called Hans Staden who in the 1550s was captured by the Tupinambá people in South America. One day during his imprisonment, Staden fell into conversation with another captive, who was due to be ‘roasted and devoured’. Asking this man ‘whether he was ready to meet his fate’, Staden was amazed by his reply. ‘He spoke about what was happening to him’, Park explains, ‘with the lightness of somebody talking about going to something like a village fete. He quipped about the quality of the ropes that bound him, saying that they were too short and inferior to those his own community made.’ The man was eaten the following day.

Staden’s own trials weren’t yet over. The Hesse-born mercenary, fighting for the Portuguese on the coast of Brazil, was suspected of possessing shamanic powers by the Tupinambá. For weeks, his life lay in the balance, his captors weighing up whether to consume him too. Once, in a scene Ian Fleming would have enjoyed describing, Staden made a headlong dash for freedom from a beach, running out into the shallows with the Tupinambá splashing close behind. His aim was to reach a French ship in the bay. But as he scrambled up its sides, he found to his horror that the sailors wanted nothing to do with him. He was cast overboard and back once again into his former state of peril.

There is a singularity to Staden’s story, which combines the unlikely, the terrifying and the colourful. Yet in one sense, it is not remarkable at all. During the century after Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, Europe was agitated by something we might think of as exploration fever.