Mad White Giant: A Journey to the Heart of the Amazon Jungle is a 1985 semi-autobiographical adventure novel by British explorer and author Benedict Allen.

After a grueling period of starvation, recounted as a series of diary entries (actually written in one sitting[3]), Allen decides to shoot and eat Cashoe to survive.

[1] Several commentators doubted that Allen could have travelled his reported route within three months, leading to the cancellation of a lecture he was to give to the Royal Geographical Society.

[5] Allen admits that Mad White Giant is "unreliable" in terms of factual detail, a deliberate bid to distance his novel from the traditional travelogue genre.

[5]Douglas Ivison considers Mad White Giant to be written "within a tradition of British writing, in which boys had to venture out to the colonies in order to learn to become men.