Situated in the drainage basin of the Amazon River and its tributaries, the Amazon Rainforest is one of the world’s most biologically diverse habitats and harbors millions of animal and plant species, including many that have yet to be documented by science. Since its discovery by Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón in 1500, the Amazon has captured the European imagination as an exotic territory full of both dangers and riches. Over time, many European scientific and commercial expeditions have been launched, motivated by Romantic Portrayals of Wilderness Exploration and Human Greed and Exploitation.

The novel is set in the early 1900s, a time in which much of the rainforest was still unsettled wilderness, before large-scale deforestation began in the 1960s. During the early 1900s, it was common for American and European natural history entrepreneurs to fund their voyages of exploration to the Amazon by collecting and selling exotic specimens. One famous example is the British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, who made multiple journeys along the Amazon River between 1906 and 1925. He chose to travel light and live off the jungle to avoid attracting the attention of Indigenous tribespeople, who were known to react with hostility to white invaders.