Flight Downriver
From Iquitos to Manaus there’s only one flight a week. The plane is a Catalina flying boat of the amphibian type known to the U. S. Navy in the Pacific war as a P.B.Y. Most of the sixteen seats are already taken so we have to crawl through the narrow waist to places scrunched up against the radio man’s little table. Wicker seats have been set in the hull but otherwise very little has been done for the comfort of the passengers. There’s a reek of gasoline. The only ventilation comes when the pilots open their side windows.
The seaplane rattles like a truckload of scrap as it takes off. We fly out over the river and cut across its windings in the early haze. The mist rises from the great trees in thin wisps like cotton batting twisted between thumb and forefinger. We cruise at a couple of thousand feet above the rainforest. In every direction the treetops stretch to the horizon.
Things are pleasantly informal aboard. The prettily gotten up Brazilian girl in the front seat must be the pilot’s ladyfriend because before long she is sitting on his lap. So that the other passengers shan’t feel neglected he invites us in rotation to climb into the copilot’s seat where the air is fresh and the view magnificent. The steward, crawling among the packages that obstruct the seaplane’s narrow waist, keeps plying us with gummy sandwiches and sicksweet guaraná. Guaraná, which can be quite good, is the national soft drink of Brazil. The Peruvian lady sitting next to my wife asks her if she minds the smell of the package she holds on her lap: it is fresh turtle meat she is carrying to a friend in Manaus.
After a couple of hours we were trundling down the landing strip at Letícia. Having dim memories of a noisy border dispute years ago between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, which was settled, if I remember right, by Rondón’s border commission awarding the place to Peru, I expected to find frontier guards, customs officers, and the like. There must be a village, but we saw no sign of it. We found the tiny new airport completely deserted except for a large crate of green parakeets. Inside were cartons and cartons full of plastic bags of tropical fish waiting for shipment. Out back a single dilapidated stationwagon stood waiting on the rutted road that wound off into the jungle.
Letícia is situated on the north bank of the Peruvian Amazon near the point where the borders of the three republics meet. If there were any internal trade between them the place should be an important riverport. Outside of the freight carried overseas by the Booth Line boats from Iquitos, the only largescale shipments we could hear of in these upper reaches of the river were the bargeloads of crude oil that go down from the Peruvian oilfields to the Brazilian government refinery near Manaus. The young man who managed one of the Bata shoestores in Iquitos had recently made a trip downstream to try to arrange some way of selling his product in the Brazilian settlements. He had come back discouraged. Bureaucratic complications made it impossible.
At Benjamin Constant, named for the Brazilian positivist who, as one of Pedro II’s ministers, helped negotiate his abdication and became known to history as the father of the republic, we alight on the sleek brown surface of a river. This is the first Brazilian outpost, on the Rio Yavarí just above its junction with the main stream of the Amazon. The seaplane is pulled in to a landing by hawsers and a Negro boy and a white boy start working a twohanded pump to suck the gasoline out of drums scattered on the steep sticky clay bank.
While we are lounging around the float in the punishing sun, waiting for the boys to pump the tanks full, we find ourselves looking into a canoe which contains an unmistakably American portable refrigerator, a picnic basket with a thermos, a little blond boy in jumper and shorts, and a young American couple in straw hats. Just the group you would see in a national park in the States. Before we have a chance to attract their attention the man has started the outboard and they go gliding away up the river.
Later we learned that these were missionaries who had started a school, just the two of them, to teach reading and writing and some simple hygiene to the river dwellers, and that the fame of their school had spread far and wide.
On the takeoff the water roars about the hull, and surges olivecolored over the ports. The old amphibian, shaking and creaking, hitches itself above the treetops. The treetops spread to the horizon in every direction. As we soar, from the copilot’s seat we can look out over the forest for ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred miles. Beyond those miles the same rivers the same treetops spread for a thousand miles to the north, to the south, to the west, and eastward for two thousand and more. The trees hide tiny settlements. In the open stretches of water between them you might see fishermen in canoes, or a lost gunboat with washing hung out to dry on the forward deck, showing the flag that flaunts the sovereignty of one of the three sovereign states. Hunters and fishermen, a few families collecting fruits and nuts, logging crews, now and then a sawmill. Thatched huts of halfbreeds who collect chicle and latex. The Weeping Wood, the romancers called it, the Green Hell. Outside of Antarctica it is the largest extension of terrain in the world that the human race has left unoccupied.
After Benjamin Constant the Catalina skims downstream, often following the river for many miles. We stop at occasional collections of thatched huts. At each stop the shape of the canoes that come alongside is a little different and the heartshaped paddles have a different design. The birds change; in some places herons predominate, in others flocks of small white gulls. Only the buzzards remain the same and the big cheerful yellowbellied bird you find all over Brazil, named from his call, Bem-ti-ví- (I see you). At one stop the only passenger to come aboard, along with a tiny package of mail, is a large scarlet macaw consigned to Manaus.
As we fly east the fine morning turns into a murky noon. It’s bumpy going amid the boiling clouds. Whenever there’s an opening below, a new river seems to be joining the main stream. Never the glimpse of a steamboat. Even canoes are rare. You can’t tell which is the main river among the many parallel channels boiling through the coppery glare. Below everything is hurrying water, dark islands seen through slanting stripes of rain, a flash of silver beyond a dark elbow of densepacked trees, a bilious khakitinted channel where some muddy confluent has poured in. A landscape like Gustave Doré’s dreams of hell.
At last we break out of the overcast and glide through sunlight over the lake of Tefé. The water is the color of clear weak coffee. The town of Tefé has an oddly civilized look, with one small row of houses that might be on the banks of the Seine. The air is clear as the water. The sky is full of gulls. There’s a cool breeze blowing. The passengers troop up the steep duckboards to the local boardinghouse where lunch is laid out on long tables. Turkey and rice and black beans and baked bananas all sprinkled with cassava flour. At the grocery next door you can buy cold beer.
From Tefé to Manaus is four long hours through turbulent clouds. In spite of cotton stuffed in our ears the motors are deafening. Legs are cramped. By the time the old Catalina goes slambanging down the runway at the Manaus airport the sudden night of the tropics is closing down.
Haunted City
Manaus, the capital of the vastest and least populated of the states that make up the Brazilian union, climbs a group of hills behind a bluff some ten miles above the junction of the Rio Negro with the Rio Solimoes to form the oceanlike flood of muddy fresh water the Brazilians call the Rio Mar, their Amazon. It is a city beset with nostalgia.
The opera house on the hill, now restored to all its gaudy splendor, testifies not only to the exuberant bad taste of the late nineteenth century but to a certain enthusiasm of the grand era of capitalist promotion which can never be recaptured. The fortunes of the rubber barons who put up the money to build it have long since been spent and forgotten, but ghosts of old bonanzas linger in the fetid streets which lead up to the wide square the building fronts on, which is paved in wavy mosaic like the famous Rocio in Lisbon.
The enormous steel pontoons of the floating wharves so ingeniously arranged to rise and fall with the stages of the Rio Negro are monuments not only to the nineteenth century
’s engineering skill, but also to its faith in the inevitable benefits of world commerce linking the nations. The crowding steamers from every European port that kept the central conveyor railroad so busy sank to the bottom during the First World War and were never replaced, but impressive traces of steamship offices and freight agencies still remain in the downtown buildings.
The wide ruined avenues with their broken pavements, dark at night because there is not enough electric power to light them, the scarfaced public buildings designed at the Paris Beaux-Arts, the neglected parks where rampant trees have invaded the footpaths, the dilapidated European trolley-cars, the empty aviary and the gay little clock tower that’s lost its clock in the waterfront square which is the center of the city’s traffic, all still echo memories of mighty projects that have failed.
Manaus is haunted by every feverish dream that has flitted through the shadows of this most enormous of the world’s rainforests ever since Orellana, more than four hundred years ago, after straying away from one of Pizarro’s expeditions, made his first desperate journey downriver. On the heels of the slavers and the prospectors for diamonds and the placerminers for gold came the seringueiros: the exploitation and the peonage and the quick riches of the great rubber boom. Borracha is still a word to conjure with.
An Englishman named Henry Wickham, whose name is a hissing among the riversettlements, smuggled seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, the wild rubber tree, out to the Malay States. Intelligent selection produced improved varieties and Amazonia lost its monopoly of the world market. The exploitation of Amazonian rubber strangled in its own ineptitude. Cultivated rubber soon proved it could outsell the wild product even in its home port. The production of synthetics, spurred on by the exigencies of the Second World War, relegated the natural product to a still more subsidiary position; but today an increasing demand, resulting from inordinately increased production in the automotive and electrical goods industries, has opened a new market for various natural rubber, latex, and gutta-percha products.
The challenge of Amazon rubber appealed to Henry Ford’s imagination. He was bound he’d find a way to cultivate the rubber tree in its natural home, but his carefully planned and segregated settlements; Fordlândia, and Belterra on the Rio Tapajós, have hardly left any more trace than the huts of the slaphappy seringueiros who plodded through the forests gathering the “tears” of the wild rubbertrees.
Ford’s was only one of a hundred projects that the junglevines have overgrown. The vast effort expended in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, which was to link Amazonas with Bolivia and the Pacific coast, though trains do occasionally run on it, has left little behind except legend. Stories of failure in face of the rainforest hang about every streetcorner in Manaus. The city’s history is of great plans gone awry. Even the building of the new airconditioned hotel, which was to have brought in the benefits of the international tourist trade, ended in the bankruptcy of the promoter. Already the new hotel wears the air of having seen better days.
Projects … Projects
In the bar and in the patio of the Hotel Amazonas, cooled by the forced draft from a large ventilating fan, men sit in their shirtsleeves and talk excitedly of the great future of the state of Amazonas. The old bogeys of malaria and yellow fever have been driven back up into the most distant tributaries. Hygiene will do the rest.
Some airline should buy this hotel and renovate it and channel the flow of tourists with money to spend into sport-fishing on the rivers, and exploration, so easy with proper motorboats, of the watery wilderness.
They rattle off lists of minerals and their locations: gold, nickel, hematite, manganese, tin, bauxite, tungsten. Companies are promoting the cultivation of the Brazil nut and the palms and other trees that produce vegetable oils. There are said to be a hundred and nineteen varieties susceptible of exploitation.
Agronomists are catching fire at the first rumors of a technical breakthrough on the production of fertilizers suitable for the special conditions of the tropical rainforest. Locked in certain crumbling formations of rock in the worndown mountain ranges of eastern Brazil there is said to be enough available minerals in a substance called biotite to revolutionize tropical agriculture. In northern Australia the experiment stations are turning under a nitrogenproducing plant named Indigofera that may solve the problem of nitrogen.
Agricultural colonies have been successful in the river valleys of Mato Grosso and Goiás. Why not turn the surplus population of the barren northeast into Amazonas? With proper farming and public health the merest corner of Amazonas could support a population equal to the present population of the entire nation.
While they talk they eat toasted Brazil nuts. Nothing better. Why not can them and ship them to New York and make a fortune?
The city of Manaus, when you walk around by day, does show a few signs of new construction. A new electric light plant, which is to operate on crude oil brought in from Venezuela and Peru, is about to go into operation to furnish muchneeded power and even light for the city streets.
The explanation of why this plant had to be bought entire was not without interest. A good deal of the component machinery could have been manufactured in Brazil, but the result of the laws passed by the federal congress seeking to insure the use of Brazilmade products was that if any item were bought in Brazil the whole inventory of things that had to be bought abroad: generators, various sorts of piping and tubing, copper wire and all the rest, would have had to be approved item by item by the interested government bureaus. Every purchase would be endlessly obstructed by the appropriate bureaucrats. The result would have been interminable delay. To buy an entire plant abroad only one authorization was necessary. A neat case of selfdefeating legislation.
A thoroughly uptodate factory newly installed produces laminated veneer woods. There German and Czechoslovakian machinery is powered by American furnaces. A nearby jutemill has just doubled its capacity. Each of these projects has brought in a group of foreign engineers to supervise the new installations. There aren’t enough Brazilian engineers, and those who are competent would rather work in the cosmopolitan regions of Rio and São Paulo. In spite of themselves the imported engineers catch the speculative fever.
A tall young Hungarian working on the generators at the electric light plant could talk of nothing but the bauxite and manganese he’s found on his wife’s ranch in Amapá at the northern mouth of the Amazon and his vast catches of fish, trolling up the Rio Negro north of Manaus, every afternoon after work.
The pleasantest part of Manaus is a region of gardens and candycolored villas which rambles among the hills that rise behind the old town. In these latitudes even the elevation of a couple of hundred feet above the river brings a noticeable freshness to the air. A new hardtop road extends between gardens, plantations of pineapple and sugarcane and shady mango groves, out into the sandy redsoiled uplands.
Since it’s a fine Sunday morning the road is full of small cars and families on bicycles or on foot headed out for the picnic grounds and swimming holes improvised wherever the road crosses a clear stream. Every rustcolored sandy beach is full of bathers, brown amid the vivid greens of mangoes and banana trees. We pass a nightclub where roulettewheels, supposed to be illegal in Brazil, spin undisturbed by the local authorities.
After the baths and the resorts, the road cuts through rolling hills planted with experimental groves of rubber trees grafted with new varieties imported from Africa and the Far East. Here, we are told, the present state governor, still hopeful in the face of the failure of the largescale experiments of the Ford Company years ago, is promoting a fresh effort to put Amazon rubber cultivation on a commercial basis.
Beyond the rubber plantations the homesteaders begin. Wherever a new road opens in Brazil a band of settlement spreads out along it. Here settlers are encouraged to build themselves houses and to clear small farms on six and a half acre tracts with a good wide frontage on the road. If the planting meets the requirements the settlers a
re supposed to get title to the land with the lapse of a year.
Clearing land in these parts is a rough business. We heard the same story from Iquitos on. Everything favors the growth of trees over other types of vegetation. Clearing a small patch is long and tedious, even with a bulldozer. It is doubtful whether it is worth the effort and expense. If, as in most cases, a man has only his own two arms and an axe and machete, about the best he can do is burn the underbrush and let the big trees lie where they fall. Grubbing with his machete or a long brushhook he’ll plant corn or manioc in the scorched loam. Chemical fertilizers are unobtainable and even if they could be had the types used in regions of moderate rainfall would wash away with the first tropical downpour. Often, after the tremendous labor of clearing, the patch will only yield one crop because whatever plantfoods there were in the soil will have been dissipated by the continual rains. The procedure is to let the land grow up after harvesting and to go to work to make another clearing.
The region we are going through this morning has, for Amazonas, better than average soil and a better than average climate. We find ourselves passing some flourishing plantations of corn, papaya and of the inevitable bushy manioc with its fivefingered redtinted leaves.
We notice a bristlebearded man walking out with a firm step down the center of the road. He wears a battered slouch hat. His clothes, all rags, are stained with the red color of the land. A long shotgun is slung over his shoulder. He makes no move to get out of the way of the car. It’s the car that has to swerve to get around him. “He’s a hunter,” says the stout citybred man who owns the car. “No struggling with unfriendly vegetation for him. He’ll shoot the animals and pick the wild fruits.” There’s a touch of awed admiration in his voice. “For weeks he’ll stay out in the forest alone, hunting game … The forest is his home.”
Brazil on the Move Page 12