On the morning of April 6, paddling upstream on the Orinoco, the travelers came upon an encampment of more than three hundred Indians on a sandy island in the middle of the river. It was the cosecha, or annual harvest of turtle eggs. Several tribes had converged for the event, each distinguished by the color of their body paint, and had constructed temporary huts of palm fronds. They were all mission Indians, but Humboldt found them “as naked and rude as the ‘Indians of the woods’” even though “they go to church at the sound of the bell, and have learned to kneel down during the consecration of the host.” Among the Indians were several white traders, or pulperos, who had come upriver from Angostura to buy turtle oil. Clear, pale yellow, and odorless, the oil was used in lamps and for cooking (as well as for making onoto, the more common form of body paint), and by buying at the source the traders were able to turn a profit of seventy to eighty percent.
A Franciscan priest was on hand to say Mass each morning and to set down the rules of the harvest. The Jesuits had organized the annual turtle hunt before they had been expelled from Spain’s New World colonies in 1767 as a result of ecclesiastical infighting and, by making it more efficient and less wasteful, had maximized the yield while ensuring that some nests went undisturbed each year. However, the Jesuits’ successors in the missions, the Franciscans, now allowed the entire beach to be dug, with the result that the harvest had become less productive from year to year.
Astounded to see strange white men in the area, the missionary was skeptical that Humboldt and Bonpland had come to verify the existence of the Casiquiare Canal. “How is it possible to believe,” he asked, “that you have left your country, to come and be devoured by mosquitoes on this river, and to measure lands that are not your own?” Fortunately, Humboldt had brought a letter of recommendation from the superior of the Franciscan Missions, which served to allay the priest’s suspicions. The missionary invited the travelers to share his frugal meal of plantains and fish, then, after admiring their scientific instruments, warned them of the dangerous wilderness they would face in ascending the Orinoco beyond the cataracts at Ature and Maipures.
Undeterred by this friendly advice, the explorers took on some provisions of turtles, dried turtle eggs, fresh meat, rice, and even wheat biscuits, and pushed off at four in the afternoon. The wind had freshened and was now blowing in squalls. Since entering the open waters of the Orinoco, the travelers had discovered that their light canoe did not carry sail very well. However, as they left shore, the Indian pilot, eager to impress the spectators onshore, insisted on heaving as close to the wind as possible so as to reach the middle of the river on a single tack. But even as he was boasting of his prowess, the boat was struck by a violent gust and the leeward gunwale was forced beneath the surface. Before anyone could react, water swept over the table in the stern where Humboldt was writing, and the passengers found books, papers, and plant specimens floating about their knees. As the water continued to fill the heavily laden canoe, it began to sink.
Bonpland had been napping in the floor of the boat but was awakened by the deluge and immediately assumed his characteristic coolness under pressure. Because the canoe from time to time managed to right itself enough to draw the rail out of the water, he concluded that the craft might be saved. If not, he thought it might be possible to swim to shore, as no crocodiles were in immediate sight. Humboldt was a poor swimmer, and Bonpland offered to carry him on his back.
But even if they survived the long swim, what then? How would they replace their instruments, books, and provisions? Without a canoe, how would they continue their journey or even rescue themselves from the wilderness? As they struggled with the unsavory possibilities, the boat was struck by another squall, which snapped the mainsheet, the line regulating the mainsail. Emptied of wind, the sail began to shake, and the little craft popped unexpectedly upright. Thus Humboldt writes, “The same gust of wind, that had thrown us on our beam, served also to right us.” Within half an hour, the boat was bailed out and the mainsheet repaired. With the sail set at a more prudent angle, the canoe got under way once more, the only casualty one book lost overboard, Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber’s Genera Plantarum.
In the Personal Narrative Humboldt generally went out of his way to minimize the risks and discomforts of the journey. But realizing how close they had come to catastrophe on the river, he couldn’t conceal his deep concern over this incident. “We had escaped as if by a miracle,” he felt, though the pilot, whether out of insouciance or bravado, didn’t seem to share their dismay. “To the reproaches that were heaped on [him] for having kept too near the wind, he replied with the phlegmatic coolness peculiar to the Indians, observing ‘that the whites would find sun enough on those banks to dry their papers.’”
That night, seated on turtle shells on a moonlit beach, Humboldt and Bonpland were still reliving the events of the afternoon. “What satisfaction we felt on finding ourselves thus comfortably landed!” Humboldt wrote. “We figured to ourselves the situation of a man who had been saved alone from shipwreck, wandering on these desert shores, meeting at every step with other rivers which fall into the Orinoco, and which it is dangerous to pass by swimming, on account of the multitude of crocodiles and caribe fishes. We pictured to ourselves such a man, alive to the most tender affections of the soul, ignorant of the fate of his companions, and thinking more of them than of himself. . . . Our minds were full of what we had just witnessed.”
The near accident had driven home to Humboldt the dangers of the rain forest in a way that even his encounter with the jaguar had not. Behind the rapturous beauty, the fantastic plants, the marvelous creatures, lay an implicit violence that threatened to engulf the unwary at any moment. Thus, with the Orinoco expedition barely under way, Humboldt uncharacteristically began to question the wisdom of his plan. “There are periods in life when, without being discouraged, the future appears more uncertain,” he confides. “It was only three days since we had entered the Orinoco, and there yet remained three months for us to navigate rivers encumbered with rocks, and in boats smaller than that in which we had so nearly perished.”
That night was intensely hot, and to add to the explorers’ misery, the torments of the mosquitoes had magnified daily. With no trees to hand, the men were forced to sleep on the ground again. And, as if to exacerbate their disquiet, the campfire failed to keep jaguars away from camp. Toward morning, the animals’ cries were heard very near. The next day, the canoe passed the mouth of the Río Auraca, renowned for its huge flocks of birds. Though the Orinoco’s mouth was some six hundred miles distant, during the rainy season this section of river would have been more than four miles across. As the travelers paddled on, the mountains pressed closer to the eastern bank, constricting the flow and magnifying the force of the current. Progress upstream became proportionately harder, especially since the mountains also blocked the wind—except at narrow passes, where it careened through in dangerous, violent gusts. As the river narrowed, crocodiles became more numerous again.
Early on the morning of April 9, the party beached their canoe at a place called Pararuma, where they found another encampment of Indians collecting turtle eggs. The great rapids at Ature and Maipures were approaching, and, having had no experience with the notorious cataracts, Humboldt’s pilot and crew refused to venture any farther upriver. Not two weeks into the rain forest, the explorers were abruptly stranded, without boats or guides.
Their dilemma was partially resolved when one of the missionaries on the beach agreed to sell Humboldt a canoe. Crafted, like all the Indian boats, from the trunk of a single tree, the fine lancha had been hollowed out with fire and hatchets. Though forty feet long, larger than their first canoe, the boat was less than a yard across, not wide enough for three persons to sit abreast. Still, the lancha would serve Humboldt’s purpose well—if he could find a crew.
The explorers might have languished at Pararuma for weeks searching for new guides if another missionary, Bernado Zea, hadn’t come to th
eir rescue. Having traveled down from his mission at Maipures for the turtle hunt, Father Zea volunteered to accompany the expedition upriver to the Casiquiare, despite the intermittent fevers that he’d suffered for years. Thus he became the second additional member of the party, after Soto. The priest also volunteered to recruit another crew. But “the missionary from the cataracts made the preparations for our journey with greater energy than we wished,” Humboldt found. Finding two men familiar with the cataracts, Zea ordered them imprisoned in the cepo, a kind of stocks, in case their resolve faded in the night. And the next morning, Humboldt was awakened by the cries of another young Indian, named Zerepe, who was mercilessly beaten with a manatee whip when he declined to join the expedition. When Humboldt protested, the missionary explained, “Without these acts of severity, you would want for everything. . . . If left to their own will [the Indians] would all go down the river to sell their productions, and live in full liberty among the whites. The Missions would be totally deserted.” Zerepe’s reluctance may have stemmed from the fact that he was about to be married. After his whipping, he joined the party, and his twelve-year-old fiancée agreed to wait at Maipures for his return. Though Humboldt was appalled by Zea’s methods, he was relieved to have a crew.
Besides the canoe, Humboldt purchased a veritable menagerie at Pararuma—some two dozen caged birds and monkeys to add to the books, instruments, provisions, botanical and geological samples, and myriad other gear heaped onboard. With the exception of the mastiff, Humboldt didn’t consider these creatures pets, but living natural-history specimens. Privileged to be conducting the first extensive scientific exploration of the New World, Humboldt felt a deep responsibility not only to observe and record and interrelate all that he could himself, but also to make available to his Europe-bound peers—and to posterity—the physical means of additional study. One never knew whether an anomalous rock or a previously unknown animal would fill a gaping taxonomic gap, or overthrow a long-held theory, or lead to some startlingly original new idea. “I aim at collecting ideas rather than material objects,” Humboldt wrote, but he considered the safe delivery of these many thousands of specimens a crucial purpose of his journey as well.
However, the ever-growing collection of cases and cages presented a problem in the narrow confines of the lancha. The travelers distributed the cargo as carefully as they could in the unstable canoe, but even so, if one of the passengers wanted to move about, he had to first warn the paddlers, seated two by two in the front, so they could lean to the opposite side in compensation. If Humboldt or Bonpland wanted an instrument, the boat had to be landed while the object was unpacked.
To increase the canoe’s capacity, a framework of branches was constructed over the gunwales at the stern. This was covered with a thatched roof, or toldo. But to keep down weight and to present a smaller surface to the wind, the roof was built low and short. As a result, the Europeans were consigned to spend interminable days stretched out flat on the uncomfortable branches, their legs exposed, alternately, to burning sun and soaking rains. To the perennial restless Humboldt, it was a torture. “It is difficult,” he comments curtly, “to form an idea of the inconveniences that are suffered in such wretched vessels.”
Cramped though their quarters were, that was nothing compared to the growing misery of the mosquitoes. “We attempted every instant, but always without success, to amend our situation,” Humboldt recounts. “While one of us hid himself under a sheet to ward off the insects, the other insisted on having green wood lighted beneath the toldo, in the hope of driving away the mosquitoes by the smoke. The painful sensations of the eyes, and the increase of heat, already stifling, rendered both these contrivances alike impracticable.” As the canoe continued upriver, Humboldt’s characteristic rapture at the mysteries of nature began to flag noticeably, replaced by a grim determination to keep going. One has to wonder how the four Europeans—Humboldt, Bonpland, Soto, and Zea—were getting along in such cramped quarters. Did Soto, newly arrived in South America, regret ever meeting these naturalists-cum-madmen? Were the mosquitoes puncturing the travelers’ camaraderie as well as their epidermis? But Humboldt reported that morale was still good. “With some gaiety of temper, with feelings of mutual goodwill, and with a vivid taste for the majestic grandeur of these vast valleys of rivers,” he explains, “travelers easily support evils that become habitual.”
On the tenth of April, at four o’clock in the morning, the lancha left the beach at Pararuma. Near the mouth of the Paruasi River they passed a ruined Jesuit fortress that once boasted three gun batteries and a complement of soldiers. The fort had not been built as a defense against hostile Indians, but as a base for the conquista de almas, or “conquest of souls.” The soldiers, animated by hope of material gain as much as by pangs of religious duty, would use the fortress to launch illegal incursions, called entradas, into the surrounding territory, during which they would kill Indians who resisted, burn their huts, destroy their crops, and carry away their women, children, and old men to work in faraway missions. Yet such atrocities were reckoned necessary for the Lord’s work. As one missionary explained, “The voice of the Gospel is heard only where the Indians have heard also the sound of firearms. By chastising the natives, we facilitate their conversion.” After the expulsion of the Jesuits, their successors in the missions had discontinued the entradas, and the fort, Humboldt was pleased to note, had been abandoned.
As the party proceeded upstream, the Orinoco continued to narrow, and the current grew more insistent. Little islands and shoals began to dot the riverbed, and even small cascades spawned dangerous eddies. A rapids known as the Raudal de Marimara stretched across nearly the entire river, passable only via a narrow channel carved through a block of solid granite some eighty feet high and three hundred feet around. Mile by mile, the river became more foreboding. None of the Europeans except Father Zea had ever experienced anything remotely like this terrain. Though Humboldt had spent a fair amount of time trekking the mountains of Europe, that was meager preparation for a journey through the South American rain forest. As he watched the landscape literally closing in on them, one wonders whether Humboldt’s characteristic optimism wasn’t at last deserting him. With so many waterborne miles stretching before them, he must have wondered at times whether the Casiquiare Canal, if it existed, was worth all the misery and danger.
The explorers passed the huge rock known as the Piedra del Tigre (Rock of the Jaguar), where the water was so deep that their line could find no bottom. That afternoon, there was a violent squall, and, hemmed in by rocks, the river began to swell. As the canoe approached the mouth of the Río Meta, one of the principal tributaries of the Orinoco, the vicious current pinned the craft against a rock in the middle of the river. With dusk coming on, the explorers were forced to spend the night on the bare rock, surrounded by raging water. At four o’clock the next morning they pushed off again, struggling for every foot of headway. Wherever the river became too strong to paddle against, the Indians could work the canoe upstream only by leaping into the water, fixing a rope to a rock shelf, and hauling the boat behind them. After twelve hours of brutal labor, without even a break for food, the crew finally maneuvered the craft through a five-foot-wide dam of granite boulders and into the relatively quiet waters beyond.
At nine o’clock the next morning, the canoe passed the mouth of the Meta, on the border of present-day Colombia and Venezuela. The junction was a desolate place. The sandy banks held the forest from the river’s edge, and on the eastern shore blocks of granite were stacked atop one another like the ruins of a bygone civilization. A huge boulder in the middle of the river was called la Piedra de la Paciencia, or the Rock of Patience, because canoes were sometimes trapped in its treacherous whirlpool for two days before their crews could extricate themselves. Humboldt’s party were lucky that day; it took them only two hours of ferocious paddling to negotiate the eddy.
Above the junction with the Meta, the Orinoco became wider and smoother for a
time, and there was no need to tow the canoe. That evening, the explorers stopped just below a cataract known as the Raudal de Tabaje, forced to sleep on a steep rock shelf. Bats swarmed in the crevices of the rock and jaguars prowled very close; sensing the great cats, the mastiff howled for hours. It was a miserable, exceedingly dark night. The rumble of thunder mingled with the roar of the cataract, though it never rained.
Early the next morning the canoe cleared the rapids and pulled into shore to allow Father Zea to say Mass at the mission of San Borja, established just two years before. The Indians here were Guahíbos, a notoriously nomadic, omnivorous people who subsisted on fish, centipedes, worms, and anything else they could forage. (The other Indians had a saying that “a Guahíbo eats everything that exists, both on and under the ground.”) To Humboldt’s eye these Indians’ relative independence lent them a more animated manner than he’d seen among the Indians of the longer-established missions. Though the Guahíbos listened dutifully to Father Zea’s Mass, they betrayed not the slightest comprehension of the rite.
As the explorers struggled up the Orinoco toward the Casiquiare, the temperatures moderated, but the mosquitoes grew steadily worse. Now at San Borja, the men “could neither speak nor uncover our faces without having [their] mouths and noses filled with insects.” Worse yet, the piranha and huge crocodiles, up to twenty-four feet long, prevented them from bathing in the river to gain some relief. After another miserable night, the party broke camp at five o’clock in the morning of April 14, hoping the mosquitoes would be less thick on the river. Just to the southeast lay the infamous cataracts of the Orinoco, the Ature and the Maipures, dividing the so-called Lower Course from the Upper. The travelers were now nearly eight hundred miles from the coast and some five hundred miles from the river’s source.
Humboldt's Cosmos Page 17