“Everything changes on entering the Río Atabapo,” Humboldt wrote; “the constitution of the atmosphere, the color of the waters, and the form of the trees that cover the shore. You no longer suffer during the day the torment of mosquitoes; and the long-legged gnats (zancudos) become rare during the night. . . .” Crocodiles also disappeared, along with manatees, tapirs, and howler monkeys, though the freshwater dolphins were still in evidence. Huge water snakes resembling boas, up to fourteen feet long, swam beside the canoe, making it dangerous for the travelers to bathe. The jaguars on the banks appeared large and well fed, but were reputed to be less aggressive than those on the Orinoco. “Nothing can be compared to the beauty of the banks of the Atabapo,” Humboldt found. “Loaded with plants, among which rise the palms with feathery leaves; the banks are reflected in the water, and this reflex verdure seems to have the same vivid hue as that which clothes the real vegetation.” So lovely was this new terrain, and so blessedly free of insect pests, that Humboldt “began to regret the Lower Orinoco.”
In 1756, Jesuits under Father Solano had founded a mission at the junction of the Orinoco, the Río Negro, and the Atabapo, among the Guaypunave people. The Guaypunaves’ chief, Cusero, warned Solano to wait at the cataracts of Maipures for a year before attempting to settle his mission, so that a cassava plantation could be established upstream. But Solano, impatient to begin God’s work, refused this advice, with the result that a large proportion of his party, as well as many of the mission Indians, died of starvation in the coming months.
By the time of Humboldt’s journey, no one was starving at San Fernando, which had grown into one of the largest settlements along the Upper Orinoco. There were only seven or eight cattle in the entire village, but every Indian family cultivated a grove of coconut palms. Cassava and plantains were also raised, and for several months of the year the Indians supplemented their diet with the fruit of a remarkable palm called the piritú. More than sixty feet high, the piritú produced a starchy fruit, yellow and slightly sweet. Eaten boiled or roasted like plantains, the fruit of the piritú seemed to confirm Linnaeus’s belief that the palm had served as the original food of mankind. “Man dwells naturally within the tropics,” the great Swedish botanist had written, “and lives on the fruits of the palm tree; he exists in other parts of the world [including Linnaeus’s native Europe], and there makes shift to feed on corn and flesh.”
The missionary at San Fernando lived in a neat house surrounded by gardens. As he conducted his visitors around the mission, he proudly described the depredations still made on the surrounding villages, when, “for the conquest of souls,” priests and mission Indians would travel up the Río Guaviare and raid settlements, seizing children above eight or ten years of age and carrying them to San Fernando to be parceled out as slaves among the Indians of the mission. Hearing these stories, Humboldt was outraged by the persistence of a barbaric practice outlawed many years before.
One account in particular excited his fury. Beyond San Fernando, where the Atabapo overspread its banks and merged with the surrounding forest, flat rocks, or piedras, protruded above the surface of the water, forming familiar landmarks. One such rock, known as La Madre, or la Piedra de la Guahíba, had been christened after a courageous woman of the Guahíbo tribe. Not three years before Humboldt’s arrival, the missionary at San Fernando had led a raiding party up the Guaviare, and among the prisoners taken were a Guahíba and her two small children, surprised at home while her husband and older children were away fishing.
The prisoners were transported to San Fernando but managed to escape repeatedly, only to be recaptured each time. Finally, after ordering the woman mercilessly beaten, the missionary separated mother and children and had the woman transported up the Atabapo to a mission called Javita. En route, she managed to slip her restraints, jump out of the canoe, and climb onto the rock that afterward bore her name. But her captors rowed ashore, tracked her down in the woods, and dragged her back to the rock, where they administered another brutal beating with manatee whips. Bound more securely, the mother was then conveyed to Javita, where she was imprisoned in “the king’s house.”
But during the night, the Guahíba escaped once again. For days, she trekked through the forest, fording rivers and clawing through vines and underbrush, making her way over territory thought to be impenetrable, all the while living on ants she dug out of the ground. Four days after her escape, she was spied hiding outside the mission at San Fernando, where her young children were still being held. Retaken yet again, the Guahíba was exiled to a faraway mission on the Upper Orinoco, where, her spirit finally broken, she refused all nourishment and soon expired.
Humboldt was deeply moved by this story of courage and resistance in the face of cruelty. “In this relation of my travels I feel no desire to dwell on pictures of individual suffering,” he explained, “—evils which are frequent wherever there are masters and slaves, civilized Europeans living with people in a state of barbarism, and priests exercising the plenitude of arbitrary power over men ignorant and without defense. . . . If I have dwelt longer on the Rock of the Guahíba, it was to record an affecting instance of maternal tenderness in a race of people so long calumniated; and because I thought some benefit might accrue from publishing a fact, which I had from the monks of San Francisco, and which proves how much the system of the missions calls for the care of the legislator.”
Humboldt’s canoe made slow progress over this portion of the river, due in part to the swift current and in part to frequent stops for plant collecting. On the night of April 29, the party put in at the well-tended mission of San Baltasar, where they watched Indians preparing a substance resembling caoutchouc, or India rubber. Produced from the milky sap of several tropical plants, rubber had been reported by Spanish and Portuguese explorers from Columbus onward. The first to study the substance in detail, La Condamine had called it latex. (The name rubber had been coined in 1770 by the great English scientist Joseph Priestley, who had noticed that it could be used to rub out pencil marks; the “India” in the name was a reference to the East Indies, where it was mistakenly thought to originate.) For the first part of the nineteenth century, the material was used mainly for rubber bands, erasers, and crude waterproof clothing, but in 1839 Charles Goodyear stumbled on vulcanization, the process in which rubber is heated and combined with sulfur, greatly enhancing its strength, elasticity, and resistance to heat and cold.
After that breakthrough, the world rushed to exploit rubber’s huge commercial potential, transforming the frontier village of Manaus, Brazil, located where the Río Negro joins the Amazon, into the center of the worldwide rubber market. By the late nineteenth century, Manaus boasted mansions, paved streets, streetcars, an opera house, a racecourse and bullring, twenty-three department stores, seven bookshops, and a cost of living four times higher than that of New York City. The boom, which lasted till the early years of the twentieth century (when Asian rubber and later synthetic rubber came to dominate the world market), would vindicate Humboldt’s prophesy that “there [in the Amazon Basin], sooner or later, the civilization of the world will be found.”
The material that Humboldt discovered and introduced to Europe under the name dapicho, or zapis, was similar to but not the same as so-called India rubber. Instead of being collected as a milky liquid, this white, fungous substance was dug from two or three feet deep in the earth, amid the roots of certain trees. The dapicho would be placed on a spit and roasted like meat, giving off a resinous odor, till it gradually grew black and elastic. Then it would be formed into balls, to be used in an Indian game resembling tennis, or fashioned into drumsticks for beating hollow trees, or cut into artificial corks. But the genus Hevea, whose sap flowed freely from slashes in its trunk, was destined to become the commercial source of the world’s natural rubber.
Five miles above the mission of San Baltasar, Humboldt’s party left the Atabapo and entered the second of the small rivers that would conduct them toward the Casiquiare
—the Río Temi, which, about a mile wide, frequently overspread its banks even during the dry season. Venturing into the flooded forest to avoid the brunt of the current, the pilot attempted to follow narrow, shallow channels between the trees while one of the crew crouched in the bow, chopping at the underbrush with a machete. Finally, at five that evening, the boat regained the main channel. Then the canoe caught between the trunks of two trees, and after the crew finally managed to free it, they immediately reached a confusing intersection of several channels. Choosing one, the pilot led them into forest so thick that navigation was impossible by either sun or stars. It was long after dark when they finally found a place dry enough to camp for the night.
The next morning, May 1, they departed well before sunrise and held to the riverbed till daylight, when they veered once again into the network of channels snaking through the inundated forest. At the junction with the smaller Tuami, the canoe turned up that river, traveling southwest, till it reached the mission of San Antonio de Javita, where the unfortunate Guahíba woman had been transported. Here the explorers planned to hire Indians to help them make the portage to the Caño de Pimichín, which would carry them from the watershed of the Orinoco to that of the Amazon.
It would be a matter of four or five days to maneuver the canoe over the portage. In the meantime, Humboldt, Bonpland, Zea, and Soto stayed at the mission, whose population of about 160 Indians of various tribes were occupied in building dugout canoes. Like all the Spanish missions, San Antonio de Javita combined a saint’s name with an Indian name. For the sake of clarity (since there might be several missions named after a particular saint), the missions were generally known by their Indian name, except in cases where that proved too difficult for the Spanish to pronounce. Following this convention, the mission of San Antonio was popularly known as Javita, in honor of a local Indian leader.
Renowned for his courage and energy, Javita had at first been an ally of the Portuguese, who, encroaching into Spanish territory, had authorized him to conduct slaving expeditions in the region under the pretext of making converts. On one such excursion, Javita was captured by the Spanish, who managed to win him over to their camp. With the chief’s help, the Portuguese were driven from the area, and the mission of San Antonio was founded. Though the chief was now advanced in age, Humboldt found him “of great vigor of mind and body” and still exerting considerable influence over the neighboring Indian nations.
Javita accompanied Humboldt and Bonpland on their botanizing forays during the time they passed at the mission and regaled them with stories of days gone by, when it had been a common custom to eat enemies captured in battle. Whatever the practice of cannibalism may say about human nature, Humboldt believed that the impenetrable terrain of the rain forest played a crucial role in the gruesome practice, by keeping the various tribes isolated and suspicious. “In Spanish Guiana a mountain, or a forest half a league broad, sometimes separates hordes who could not meet in less than two days by navigating rivers,” he wrote. “In open countries, or in a state of advanced civilization, communication by rivers contributes powerfully to generalize languages that appear to us radically distinct and keep up national hatred and mistrust. Men avoid, because they do not understand each other; they mutually hate, because they mutually fear.” Was this comment, one wonders, intended as a reflection on the political turmoil in Europe as well as that in South America?
The mission was located in an extremely wet area, and even when it wasn’t raining the sky was overcast, making astronomical measurements impossible. In fact, the missionary told them, it was not uncommon to see rain for four or five months without letup. From April 30 to May 4, Humboldt was unable to take a single geodetic reading. During that time, the travelers added to their botanical collection, though the extreme height of the trees—over a hundred feet, with foliage only at the crown—made the work inordinately confusing. Leaves and flowers would fall to the ground, but it was devilishly difficult to determine which materials had dropped from which specimen. “Amid these riches of nature herborizations caused us more chagrin than satisfaction,” Humboldt confessed. “What we could gather appeared to us of little interest, compared to what we could not reach.”
During their stay at the mission, Humboldt and Bonpland determined to rid themselves of some painful parasites. For the past two days, both men had suffered from an extraordinary irritation on the backs of their hands and in the joints of their fingers, where under a magnifying glass they could make out parallel white furrows beneath the skin. The missionary recognized the culprits as aradores,or “ploughers,” and he sent for the woman who was the curandera, or healer, of the village. Heating the point of a hard bit of wood over a lamp, the curandera dug into the furrows and, after a lengthy, excruciating excavation, removed three or four of what appeared to be tiny round sacks. Though painful, the operation did give immediate relief. It had grown late, and since the explorers’ hands were covered with the furrows, further treatment was postponed till morning.
However, before the curandera’s return the next day, the Europeans met another Indian, who claimed to have a quick and painless cure for their misery. He made a cold infusion of the bark of a shrub called uzao, which bore small, glossy leaves. With a bluish color and a taste like licorice, the infusion became frothy when beaten. Humboldt and Bonpland drank it, and found that the irritation from the aradores disappeared, without any painful subcutaneous probing. So effective was the cure that the travelers took some of the bark away with them, in case of reinfestation.
Every day Humboldt and Bonpland went to check on the progress of the portage. Altogether, twenty-three Indians, including their own crew, were employed in cutting trees to serve as rollers and in propelling the long, fragile canoe through the forest. It was hazardous as well as exhausting work. On the evening of May 4, one of the Indian workers was bitten by a viper. Though the man was robust, the bite rendered him comatose, and even after regaining consciousness he continued to suffer such nausea and vertigo that Indians and Europeans alike feared the worst. After he was administered a traditional antidote, he eventually recovered.
The next day the canoe cleared the portage. Reaching the boat at dusk, Humboldt and Bonpland spent the night in a hut recently abandoned by a native family, who had left behind their fishing nets and tackle, pottery, and other domestic accumulations. Before the party settled into the house, the guides killed two vipers that had taken up residence there. With white bellies and brown-and-red-spotted backs, the snakes were beautiful but deadly. Since there was no place to hang their hammocks, the travelers slept on grass spread on the floor, passing a restless night in which every rustle evoked images of unseen snakes. Indeed, in the morning one of the Indians lifted the jaguar skin he’d been sleeping on and discovered that a viper had slithered beneath it in the night.
In the daylight, Humboldt examined the canoe. Though its hull had been worn noticeably thinner during the portage, no cracks were visible. The Caño de Pimichín’s banks were low but rocky, and there was only one rapids to cross. The lancha was lowered into the water, and four and a half hours later the travelers entered the Río Negro. After thirty-six days’ confinement in a crowded, unstable boat; surviving encounters with crocodiles, jaguars, and poisonous snakes; suffering horribly from hordes of biting, stinging, and burrowing insects; withstanding the discomfort and insalubrity of one of the wettest climates in the world; successfully passing some of the most celebrated rapids on earth; completing the arduous portage between two of the world’s great river systems with their fragile canoe intact, the travelers had at last left the Orinoco. “After all we had endured,” Humboldt wrote, “it may be conceived that we felt no little satisfaction . . . in having reached the tributary streams of the Amazon.”
But there remained another thousand waterborne miles before the party would reach the delta city of Angostura. And Humboldt still hadn’t fulfilled “the most important object of our journey, namely, to determine astronomically the course of tha
t arm of the Orinoco which falls into the Río Negro, and of which the existence has been alternately proved and denied during half a century” since its putative discovery by Jesuit missionaries. If all went well, he hoped to be able to report at last whether the so-called Casiquiare Canal existed, as La Condamine had believed, or whether it was a fiction, as the geographers of Europe had decided. Either way, the explorers now found themselves in the basin of the most fantastic river on the planet.
Seven: The Amazon
THE Amazon is the quintessential river of Earth. Rising at eighteen thousand feet in the Peruvian Andes, just 120 miles from the Pacific, it first rushes and later meanders across four thousand miles to the Atlantic, on the far side of the continent. It is not the longest river in the world; the Nile nudges it out of that honor by about two hundred miles. However, the Amazon lays claim to every other superlative. It is the deepest river on the planet. And it has by far the greatest volume, disgorging some 3.4 million gallons of water per minute into the Atlantic—a staggering one fifth of all the world’s fresh water (twelve to fourteen times the amount disgorged by the Mississippi). The Amazon has more than a thousand tributaries—seventeen of which are over a thousand miles long—longer than the Rhine—and six of which are themselves among earth’s ten longest rivers. Moreover, because the Amazon flows so slowly in its flat lower course, it is estimated that, at any given time, the river and its nearly fifty thousand miles of tributaries contain a staggering two thirds of the world’s river water.
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