author
Thomas Whiffen
1878–1922
An army officer turned Amazon explorer, he wrote one of the early firsthand English accounts of Indigenous life in the northwestern Amazon. His travel writing mixes adventure, field observation, and the attitudes of its era.
1 Audiobook
The North-West Amazons: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes
by Thomas Whiffen
About the author
Born in 1878, Thomas William Whiffen was a British army officer, explorer, and writer best known for his journeys in the Putumayo and wider northwestern Amazon. He later published The North-West Amazons in 1915, drawing on months spent traveling in Brazil and Colombia and recording what he saw of local communities, landscapes, and customs.
Whiffen is often remembered today less as a literary stylist than as an observer whose work became part of the early anthropological record. Modern readers usually approach his writing with two perspectives at once: as a vivid account of difficult travel and close contact with Indigenous groups, and as a document shaped by the assumptions and language of the early twentieth century.
He died in 1922. Even so, his name continues to surface in discussions of Amazon exploration, colonial history, and the complicated legacy of firsthand travel narratives from that period.