Between the heaving slopes of the second and third ranges the Urubamba River, tumbling northward in glassclear rapids out of the southern confines of Peru, drains the valleys and canyons which were the seat of the Andean civilizations. There we had walked panting among the earthquake-battered remnants of Spanish Cuzco which totter precariously on the unshakable foundations fitted together stone by stone by the ancient Indian builders. We had seen the huge citadel of Sacsahuamán squatting on the mountain above Cuzco and, in the valley beyond, Ollantaytambo’s pyramid of ruins guarding its circus of green hills terraced in prehistoric days to the very summit. A few miles downstream we had scrambled around the stony masses of Machu Picchu, perched two thousand feet above the brawling river on a toothed height as steep as the mountains the Chinese painters imagined for their landscapes.
Two hundred miles north of Machu Picchu the Urubamba joins the Tambo to form the Ucayali which becomes navigable for river boats at Pucallpa. Already you can reach Pucallpa by truck or jeep or with luck by car from Lima. The Peruvians are pushing through a paved road from the coast to Pucallpa and its Brazilian extension is already groping its way through the wilderness of the new state of Acre to reach Pôrto Velho on the Madeira River six hundred miles to the east.
From Pucallpa barges and small river boats take five or six days to reach Iquitos. Iquitos, still in Peru, twentythree hundred miles from the Atlantic, is head of navigation for oceangoing steamers on the Amazon. From the junction of the Ucayali with Rio Marañón some fifty miles from Iquitos the Peruvians call the great river the Amazon, but the Brazilians insist that it is the Rio Solimoes until, more than a thousand miles downstream, it joins the Rio Negro below Manaus.
A Rainforest Economy
The only practical way of reaching Iquitos is by air. The head of ocean navigation of the Amazon is still an island inaccessible by road. After flitting between the jagged snowteeth of the highest Andes the plane starts to toboggan downward through the massed cumulus clouds that steam up incessantly from the rainy eastern slopes.
After rumbling for a long time amid a churn of mist we begin to see trees through rents in the clouds. The wooded slopes below us heave in ridges cut by swift straight streams occasionally barred by the white spume of rapids. As the hills subside the rivers seem for a while to strangle in the rainforest.
Now we are flying low over what seems a mossy plain, only the tendrils of the moss are gigantic trees. The rivers have broken through below us, muddy and turgid now, and flow in restless curves from oxbow to oxbow. As far as you can see in every direction the forest is cut by the meanderings and the arabesques of rampaging rivers.
We are looking down on an unending struggle between the weight of the hurrying water and the fibrous density of the treepacked land. This titanic wrestling match has left the jungle scarred by the scratches of old riverbeds as if by the claws of some vast jaguar. The rivers slither like great snakes between the tottering trees, leaving their castoff courses to one side or the other in lagoons and sickleshaped backwaters. In some places the subsiding waters have left reedy ponds or palegreen savannas. Every shape you see results from the war between land and water. There’s still not a sign of human occupation. Not a canoe, not a hut, not a smoke.
We are headed east flying low above the olivegreen coils of the Rio Marañon when, along the broadly curving silty beaches, a different green appears which could be rice that human hands have sown. A log half pulled up on a beach might be a dugout. A pile of dry palm leaves might be a thatched hut. There is smoke from brush fires.
Now there is an unmistakable canoe, the flash of the paddle of a man paddling in the bow. A long thatched object moving upstream must be a motorboat. There’s a road below with toy trucks, tin roofs, tiled roofs under palms, a beach hatched with rows of dugouts, a wide stretch of river full of canoes and launches; and the plane is spiraling down into the airfield.
Iquitos turns out to be two towns. There’s the outpost Peruvian city: a gridiron of streets of stone and rubble houses, stores, banks, a motion picture theater, markets, a hotel on a bluff overlooking the river run by the Peruvian Government to encourage tourists; and then there’s the Amazonian river town. This they call the port of Belén.
In the port everything is afloat. Houses, built of poles and thatch tied together with jungle vines, are set on rafts made of great logs of various light woods similar to balsawood. At high water the whole settlement would be afloat in the river but the waters in the upper Amazon basin are low now (mid-August), so half the riverport is stranded on the brown beach.
The houses stretch for half a mile in straggling rows. On the hump of the great sand bar are thatched shops selling groceries and drygoods, bars, small restaurants. The river merchants buy snakeskins, pelts, and alligator hides, bananas, rice. At the entrance to one thatched hut is a crate of orange and brown small monkeys. Their tiny black faces peer out wretchedly through the slats. From another door a big black terrapin is just about to make good his escape when he’s recaptured and turned ignominiously over on his back.
There are pet parrots and parakeets everywhere. Pigs and small children roam in the alleys. A dead iguana rots in a puddle at the river’s edge. Black buzzards perch on the roof-trees.
It is hot. The place smells, but now and then a gust of freshness comes from the river. The people are quiet and friendly and go about their business with an air of great goodnature. Nobody stares at a stranger.
These are not exactly Peruvians or Brazilians. They are river people of the Amazon, made up perhaps two thirds of forest Indian, a third of various brownskinned Mediterranean strains with a touch of Negro. They are darker than the Indians of the forest tribes.
The river is full of coming and going in dugout canoes, or in enlarged dugouts driven by an outboard motor where the passengers sit comfortably under a light thatch of palm leaves. There are motorboats and launches in all sorts of homemade shapes. Women are arriving from little hamlets up and down stream in their brightest clothes to market and to buy and sell. The man paddling is always in the bow. Often the woman in the stern has a pink or red sunshade.
On the bank, and from the rafts the houses float on, women are washing clothes. Brown children are bathing. One stark naked little girl, modestly hidden from view by an enormous straw hat bigger than she is, is dunking herself between her home and the muddy shore.
Further out men fish from canoes, using fishspears or throwing a round casting net. An occasional old man bottom-fishes with a bamboo pole. Fish are plentiful we are told because the water is low. Among the canoes dolphins occasionally surface, the famous pink porpoises of the Amazon. Some are pinkish, some light gray, some black. A boy tells us that the black ones are dangerous. They have been known to attack a canoe.
Iquitos proper—some people told us it had fifty thousand, others eighty thousand inhabitants—has considerable business in spite of the lack of overland links to the rest of the world. Everything that doesn’t come by air has to come by river. The manager of one of the three Bata shoestores told us that he found it more economical to fly in his shoes from the factory in Callao. This was because of the pilfering that went on during the long truck and boat haul via Pucallpa.
Gasoline is cheap and plentiful as the crude oil comes down river from the Peruvian fields in the upper Marañon to a distillery a few miles below Iquitos. There’s a plant for processing chicle brought in from the forest, an alcohol distillery and a sawmill for tropical woods.
The docks and warehouses for oceangoing steamers, mostly monthly ships of the Booth Line out of Liverpool, are new and modern. The channel is reported to have ample depth for ships drawing fourteen feet. The city is the furnishing center for a huge region of the upper Amazon basin reaching to the Ecuadorian and Colombian borders. Protected by chloroquin from malaria and by the vaccine from jungle yellow fever, with the help of outboard motors the mestizo watermen and half civilized Indians are pushing up the rivers of the upper Amazon basin in all directions. The
y are fast annihilating the wild life.
Shrunken heads are a thing of the past. The few smuggled with great pretense of secrecy to gullible tourists are mostly dried monkey skulls.
Science’s insatiable demand for small primates is depleting the monkey tribes. One dealer, a young man who started a number of years ago with a hundred soles for capital, and is now reputed to be a millionaire, told us how his hunters caught the poor banderlog. They pick a tree frequented by bands of small monkeys and hang ripe bananas in the branches to attract them. Gradually they get the monkeys accustomed to eating their bananas on the ground and then they set out pans of sweetened aguardiente among the bananas. The monkeys take to drinking it. The bands of drunken monkeys, the dealer told us, were irresistibly comic. Imagine a drunken monkey trying to peel a banana. When they are so drunk they can’t climb, the hunters rush in and thrust them by the hundreds into burlap bags.
The large monkeys that roam in family groups have a grimmer fate. Since a shotgun would scare them, the hunters still use the Indian pucuna (serebatana is the Spanish and Portuguese name). The blowgun is a remarkably deadly weapon, shooting a tiny dart poisoned with curare with great force and accuracy at short range. The hunters shoot an old male, who is usually carrying a baby monkey on his back, and bag the rest of them when they crowd around to try to carry off the corpse. So that the monkeys can’t pull the darts out in time the head of the dart is cut so that it breaks off under the skin. Curare kills even a large animal like a jaguar or tapir, we were told, in less than ten seconds.
There are seven firms in Iquitos exporting wild animals and tropical fish direct to the States. Tropical fish are the money makers. A rare specimen will bring a thousand soles. The story goes that there are more varieties of fish in the Amazon region than in all the other fresh waters of the world put together.
The trader equips the fishermen with boat and outboard and nets. When they bring in the fish he keeps them alive in tanks feeding them on tiny leeches which he breeds for the purpose until they can be sorted and counted. An expert waterman will count and sort forty thousand in an hour. Fungus diseases are the worst enemy.
The fish are shipped in plastic bags packed in cartons. Some of the spiny catfish types and the savage piranha have to be dosed with tranquilizers before they are packed so that they won’t tear their plastic bags to pieces en route. A weekly plane from Miami picks up the shipments of fish and forest animals for sale to pet shops and laboratories. Recently shipments have started direct to Hamburg, Germany.
The tropical fish dealer told us that his main difficulty was keeping his fishermen at work. An independent lot. The most skillful only needed to work for him two or three times a year to keep going. When they made a few hundred dollars they would knock off and drink pisco and collect women until their money was all gone. The tribal Indians are monogamous. In most tribes only the curaca (chief) is allowed more than one wife; but the half-breed watermen pride themselves on the number of women they can keep. The trader told of a man with a plantation way up one of the tributary rivers, who kept seventeen. Each has her appointed job, fishing, tending manioc plantings, cooking, weaving mats or hammocks, making pottery. A happy family, the trader called them.
Iquitos has a budding tourist trade. A very blond German named Herman Becker has a camp on the Rio Mamón a few miles out of town and arranges trips out into the rainforest. His brighteyed Portuguese wife is an enthusiast for life al aire libre. Cruising in the fresh breeze up the endlessly winding rivers, seated under an umbrella in an outboard-driven dugout canoe is one of the pleasantest ways of traveling imaginable.
Becker’s camp is full of local pet animals. It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson. None of them are in cages. They seem to stay around because they like it. There is a kinkajou, several monkeys—one of them looks like a black Winston Churchill—parrots and macaws, a toucan, and a trompetero. The trompetero is a businesslike walking bird who eats ants and insects and joins the party when Mr. Becker’s tourists walk through the jungle trails and to visit the half Indian settlements around about.
Roque, a Yagua boy whose grandfather was the tribal medicine man, walks ahead with a machete. Poor Roque, much against his will, has to put on his grass skirt and headdress when he shows off his skill with the blowgun for the visitors. When he is allowed to get back into his shirt and pants—like people—you can see the satisfaction stand out all over him. He leads the way through the forest path hacking at the underbrush with his machete.
This is a Saturday. In the first palmleaf shelter we visit the man of the family is asleep dead drunk on the floor. His hairless face wears an expression of innocent satisfaction. It is explained that there has been some sort of fiesta. His women and children peer out sleepily from the shadows of the hut.
In the next set of huts a tall man with an aquiline nose rises to greet us. With a dignified gesture he invites us to sit on a bench under his thatch. He offers bananas. He’s somewhat oddly dressed. He wears what looks like a woman’s boudoir cap on his curly gray head and an assortment of blazerlike garments over a weird striped shirt. A man of means. There’s an outboard motor in the yard and a shiny new piano accordion on one of the beds. A bottle of Italian vermouth stands among grimy glasses on the table. Mrs. Becker explains that he’s the best hunter in the region, the father of twentyfour children out of two wives. His womenfolk raise guineapigs in a little corral. We pass the time of day with him in formal Spanish.
In other huts scattered under the trees we find the women working on pottery. Since they have no wheel even the largest pots are built up by hand out of long snakes of kneaded clay coiled in a spiral. Firing them on the embers without an oven is long and tedious and highly expert work. Then they are painted with handsome geometric designs and glazed and fired again. “Lazy things,” says Mrs. Becker, “they’ll only work when they feel like it.”
A bonanza came to this whole part-Indian, part-halfbreed settlement a few nights ago when a herd of peccary swam the river and invaded their manioc plantation. The villagers turned out with clubs and guns and killed fiftysix. That means fresh and smoked meat for weeks. They proudly show us the skins—which bring a good price in Iquitos—stretched and salted for drying and several peccary shoats they captured for pets.
This happygolucky life is not without a certain enchantment. In another hut we find a group of men celebrating over a bottle of some kind of rotgut. More European blood here. You can tell by the stubbly beards. They swarm about us to offer us drinks. The stuff in the bottle smells like wood alcohol. We refuse as politely as possible. It’s already dusk and they really are too drunk.
The man with the bottle latches onto my arm. “Doctor, you must have a drink”—in these parts anybody who can read and write is addressed as Doctor—“Mr. Engineer,” he pleads, “please take a drink with us.” How can a man refuse?
One gulp does it. We break away and hurry down the slippery riverbank to the waiting canoe.
The Photographer’s Redskins
The other tourist entrepreneur is the local photographer, a genial and hospitable gentleman named Antonio Wong, who set up a hunting camp on the Rio Manaté, some fifty miles downstream from Iquitos, years ago before tourists were dreamed of, for his own pleasure, so he tells us. An enthusiastic hunter, he never hunts without a couple of Yagua Indians to find him the game. He whisks us downstream in a speedboat.
After lunch at his thatched and mosquito-netted camp set high on stilts on the bank of a narrow winding tributary river, we visit his private tribe of Indians. A large launch load of French tourists has come in ahead of us. The Indians—Yaguas of Mr. Wong’s pet tribe—have come down specially from their settlement three and a half hours’ walk back in the forest. They have dressed in their best grass skirts and grass headdresses to be shown off to the tourists. After the French depart Mr. Wong has us distribute cigarettes to the men and marshmallow candies to the ladies. He makes each of us hand out one item to each member of the tribe. In return the I
ndians present us with the little crowns of palm leaves they are wearing on their heads.
They are lightolive healthylooking people with mellow brown eyes. Their faces are daubed with ochre. Only a few of the women and children have the puffed-up bellies that come from eating too much cassava. They seem to be enormously amused by the tourists. Though they can’t understand Spanish they laugh and laugh at the slightest thing anyone says. Perhaps it’s embarrassment but more likely it is frank entertainment at the strange creatures that have appeared from the outer world. We get to laughing too. We look into each other’s faces and laugh and laugh.
The curaca is a very young man but the witch doctor is old with a crinkled parchment skin. He stands hesitantly off by himself as if he weren’t quite sure what his attitude should be.
After a while a flute and drum start playing a simple but not at all outlandish little tune and Mr. Wong and the oldest of the women, an old lady with numbers of rubber tires round her waist, dance a sort of twostep with incredible solemnity. It’s a sight worth coming three thousand miles to see.
A Swiss gentleman has been bringing the house down by giving extra cigarettes to the Indians who have traces of whiskers. This proves an enormous joke because it’s well-known that the forest Indians have very little hair on their bodies. Everybody roars. After giggling with them for a while more in their palmleaf shelter set high on stilts, where the women are smoking a few fish over a smoldering fire, we part amid fresh gales of laughter and return to our speedboat.
How come, we ask Mr. Wong, when we have him alone, that some of the Yagua women have permanent waves? Mr. Wong explains with a show of annoyance that it’s these Syrian traders. The Turkos, as they are known, scour the rivers in motorboats buying wild animal and reptile skins. To avoid paying in money they give the Indian women permanents in return for valuable pelts. Disgusting, says Mr. Wong.
Brazil on the Move Page 11