Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Esmeralda’s principal export was a particularly fine form of curare, which commanded a high price. On Humboldt’s arrival, most of the Indians were just returning from an expedition to collect plants used in producing the poison. Their homecoming was marked by a great festival among the men, with two days of feasting on roasted monkey and dancing to the music of crude reed pipes. While his neighbors drank themselves into a stupor, the old Indian charged with producing the poison went about his deadly business, allowing Humboldt to bring back to Europe the first detailed recipe for the drug.

  First, the poison master took the bark of the vines, which had already been stripped and pounded into fibers. To this he added water, which slowly filtered through the bark in a cone fashioned from plantain and palm leaves. The resulting yellow liquid was then boiled in large, shallow pots, with the poison master occasionally tasting the liquid, which became progressively more bitter as it boiled down. (Humboldt also took a taste of the poison, which was nontoxic as long as it didn’t come into direct contact with the blood; in fact, it was drunk as a stomach palliative, which was perfectly safe—as long as one had no open cuts or sores in the mouth.) When the liquid reached the desired concentration, the poison master strained it through rolled-up plantain leaves to remove the fibrous matter. Even in this concentrated form, the poison was still too thin to adhere to an arrow tip, so it was next mixed with the glutinous juice of another plant to give it body; this also imparted curare’s characteristic tarry color. The finished preparation was then poured into small calabashes, in which it was sold.

  As he worked, the poison master lectured his visitors. “I know,” he said, “that the whites have the secret of making soap,” whose mysteries he seemed to find second only to those of curare, “and manufacturing that black powder which has the defect of making a noise when used in killing animals. The curare, which we prepare from father to son, is superior to anything you can make down yonder. It is the juice of an herb which kills silently, without any one knowing whence the stroke comes.” Applied to the tip of an arrow and delivered through a long blowpipe, the curare maximized hunters’ yields, since several monkeys could drop noiselessly to earth before the rest of the troop became suspicious; with a gun, at most one animal could be taken at a time, because the others would scatter at the first shot. The curare would kill a bird in two to three minutes and a pig in ten to twelve. According to the missionaries, meat killed any other way simply didn’t taste as good.

  Producing its characteristic symptoms of dizziness, nausea, extreme thirst, and spreading numbness, curare was also quite capable of killing human beings, as the conquistadors had discovered. Humboldt himself soon received a lesson on the care with which the poison must be handled. On leaving Esmeralda, he packed a calabash full of curare beside his clothes, and in the warm, humid air the poison liquefied and leaked onto a stocking. As he was about to slip the stocking on, he happened to feel the gelatinous liquid in time: Since his feet were covered with bleeding insect bites, the curare would surely have entered his bloodstream, with fatal effect.

  At Esmeralda Humboldt toyed with the idea of traveling eastward, or upriver, in an attempt to discover the source of the Orinoco. However, not long before, the Indians of the region had driven off a force of Spanish soldiers. The resulting carnage had left the native people more hostile than ever toward whites, and there was no hope that Humboldt’s small party could accomplish what the Spanish army had not. But even under the best of circumstances, it’s unlikely that such a mission could have succeeded, since the headwaters of the Orinoco are now known to be unnavigable. In fact, it wasn’t until 1956 that the river’s source was finally located—by aerial survey.

  By this point in the expedition, the oppressive heat and humidity, the constant misery from biting insects, the irregular food, the cramped conditions in the canoe, had already taken their toll on the travelers. In Europe, once past his sickly youth, Humboldt had enjoyed tremendous physical stamina and near miraculous health, undimmed by long days working in German mines or climbing Alpine peaks. But now, after weeks of slogging through tropical rain forests, his ferocious constitution seemed to have met its match. Both Humboldt and Bonpland had begun to feel a “languor and weakness” that seemed to be growing worse.

  On May 23, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Humboldt ordered the pilot to steer the canoe westward on the Orinoco, retracing their route toward the coast. Four hours later the explorers reached the sandy bank where the ship’s dog had vanished a few days before. The men made a thorough search of the area but found no sign of the mastiff, whom Humboldt still considered “the most affectionate and faithful companion of our wanderings.” All through the night, they heard jaguars prowling very near camp, just as they had on their initial stay at the beach. Leaving before sunrise, the party made good time through a landscape devoid of any human presence. There were no rapids in this stretch of the Orinoco, and some nights the travelers didn’t even bother to disembark. To make better time, the pilot would steer the boat downstream as the other men slept, with the river propelling it effortlessly on its course.

  On May 25, the canoe arrived at the mission of Santa Barbara, on the banks of the Río Ventuari, one of the Orinoco’s principal tributaries. Two days later, the party regained San Fernando de Atabapo. The Orinoco was running fast and deep here, and the canoe was making good progress through familiar territory. The worst appeared to be behind them. “We seemed to be traveling as through a country which we had long inhabited,” Humboldt wrote. “We were reduced to the same abstinence; we were stung by the same mosquitoes; but the certainty of reaching in a few weeks the term of our physical sufferings kept up our spirits.” Even so, Father Zea was taken sick with one of his periodic fevers, and Humboldt and Bonpland were still experiencing their ominous symptoms of ill health.

  The party rested for two days at the mission of Maipures while the canoe was portaged back over the great rapids. Maipures was the home of Zerepe, the young Indian who had been whipped into joining the expedition at Pararuma and who had since become Humboldt’s interpreter. Entering the village, the young man eagerly sought out his betrothed, whom he’d been forced to leave behind, only to discover that she was no longer there. It seemed the fiancée hadn’t taken to life in the mission, and having been told that the white men would continue into Brazil instead of honoring their promise to return with Zerepe, she had lost heart and, with another girl her age, had stolen a canoe and fled into the forest. When Humboldt’s party arrived, the village was still buzzing over the girls’ adventure. Disconsolate at first, Zerepe soon recovered. “Born among the Christians,” Humboldt explained, not without condescension, “having traveled as far as the foot of the Río Negro, understanding Spanish and the language of the Macos [his own people], he thought himself superior to the people of his tribe, and he no doubt soon forgot his forest love.” The young man remained at the mission, while the four Europeans continued on with the rest of their Indian crew.

  In the late afternoon of May 31, the party landed at el Puerto de la Expedición, to inspect the cavern of Ataruipe, an Indian burial ground. “The grand and melancholy character of the scenery around fits it for the burying-place of a deceased nation,” Humboldt found. To reach the cave, it was necessary to climb a steep granite face affording only a few precarious hand- and footholds. But the view from the top was breathtaking, if somber. “On reaching the summit, the traveler beholds a wide, diversified, and striking prospect,” he discovered. “From the foaming riverbed arise wood-crowned hills, while beyond the western shore of the Orinoco the eye rests on the boundless grassy plain of the Meta, uninterrupted save where at one part of the horizon the mountain of Uniama rises like a threatening cloud. . . . All is motionless, save where the vulture and the hoarse goat-sucker [a nocturnal bird also known as the nightjar] hover solitary in midair, or, as they wing their flight through the deep-sunk ravine, their silent shadows are seen gliding along the face of the bare, rocky precipice until they vanish
from the eye.”

  A narrow ridge led to a neighboring summit, on which rested huge natural granite spheres fifty feet in diameter, seemingly poised to roll into the abyss at the slightest nudge. In a shady, solitary spot on the slope of an adjoining peak lay the cavern of Ataruipe. The entrance to the cave was festooned with Bignonia and aromatic vanilla plants, and the summit above was crowned with murmuring palms. Inside reposed nearly six hundred carefully preserved skeletons, the oldest perhaps a century old, which had been doubled over and placed in square baskets woven from palm fronds. Ranging from tiny infants to mature adults, the skeletons were all that remained of an extinct people, the Atures, for whom the great rapids had been named.

  To prepare a skeleton, the Indians would bury the corpse in damp ground to facilitate decomposition. Then, several months later, the body would be disinterred and the remaining flesh scraped from the bones, which would then be bleached or painted red or covered with an aromatic resin. (Stripping the bones in this way was still common at the time of Humboldt’s journey; in fact, some Indians wrapped their dead in nets and lowered them into piranha-infested rivers to let the voracious fish strip the bones clean. In areas where there were no caverns to serve as natural mausoleums, the Indians would generally wrap the deceased in his or her hammock and bury the remains in the floor of the house.) The bones were then arranged in their basket and deposited in this cavern. Also in the cave were handsome earthenware urns, some as large as five feet high and three feet long. Oval in shape and greenish in color, the urns had handles shaped like serpents or crocodiles, and edges painted with geometric patterns. Intermingled inside were the bones of an entire family.

  Though there was nothing of obvious monetary value there, a persistent rumor claimed that on their expulsion from the Spanish territories three decades before, the Jesuits had concealed a fortune in the cavern. In fact, Father Zea had been summoned to the Audencia, or High Court, in Caracas—some 450 miles away—to defend himself on charges of appropriating the fictitious treasure. Unpersuaded by his testimony, the Audencia had named a commission to inspect the cavern, but Father Zea wasn’t expecting a visit in the near future. “We shall wait long for these commissioners,” he boasted. “When they have gone up the Orinoco as far as San Borja, the fear of the mosquitoes will prevent them from going farther. The cloud of flies which envelops us in the raudales [rapids] is a good defense.”

  To the consternation of the guides, Humboldt insisted on opening some of the baskets and urns to examine the shape of the skulls. Though most were Indian, some were unmistakably Caucasian, belonging to Portuguese traders, he supposed, who had intermarried with the Atures. Worse, over the guides’ objections, Humboldt removed several skulls from the cave, along with the complete skeletons of a small child and two full-grown men. Horrified by this desecration, the Indians failed to mention two similar caves located nearby, which Humboldt heard about only much later. Knowing what he considered the “superstitions” of the Indians concerning the dead, he concealed the bones in mats of woven palm fronds, but thereafter whenever the travelers stopped and villagers gathered round their luggage to admire their monkeys, the local Indians would invariably detect the odor of death. Though the explorers would try to convince them that the mats held only skeletons of crocodiles and manatees, the villagers would insist that the men were carrying the bones of their ancestors.

  In some ways, this visit to the caverns of Ataruipe constitutes an uncomfortable, contradictory episode in Humboldt’s journey. A man so surprisingly modern in outlook, so sympathetic to Native American culture, was able to rob Indian graves with no more apparent unease than if they were middens of animal bones (which, indeed, he tried to pass them off as when questioned). Was it the graves’ antiquity that allowed him to rationalize such behavior? Their anonymity? Their racial provenance? One wonders if Humboldt would have dug up unmarked, century-old European graves with so little obvious concern. Perhaps it was his unbridled curiosity, along with his lack of religious feeling, that caused him to view human remains as just so many natural-history specimens. Or perhaps it was unfettered scientific acquisitiveness—the same drive that would fill dozens of cases with botanical, geological, and zoological samples—that rendered everything else secondary, including reverence for the dead.

  Whatever Humboldt’s self-justification, the visit to the catacomb put him in a meditative state of mind. “We turned our steps in a thoughtful and melancholy mood from this burying-place of a race deceased,” he wrote. “It was one of those clear and cool nights so frequent in the tropics. The moon, encircled with colored rings, stood high in the zenith, illuminating the margin of the mist, which lay with well-defined, cloud-like outlines on the surface of the foamy river. . . . Thus perish the generations of men!” he mused. “Thus do the name and the traces of nations fade and disappear! Yet when each blossom of man’s intellect withers—when in the storms of time the memorials of his art moulder and decay—an ever new life springs forth from the bosom of the earth; maternal Nature unfolds unceasingly her germs, her flowers, and her fruits; regardless though man with his passions and his crimes treads under foot her ripening harvest.”

  THE bottom of the canoe had worn so thin that the explorers had to take great care with it during the portage at Ature. At the mission, Humboldt, Bonpland, and Soto also bid farewell to Father Zea, who, despite his unreconstructed attitude toward the native peoples, had been of enormous service to the expedition and who, even with his recurring fevers, had gamely shared their privations over the past two months. During the party’s second stay at the village, the majority of the inhabitants were stricken by a fever so severe that they were confined to their hammocks, unable to even prepare their own food. Though Humboldt didn’t know the cause of the ailment, he worried that it was contagious, and the party left promptly.

  Below Ature, the travelers encountered an unnavigable stretch of river. They unloaded all the equipment and specimens onto an island, where Humboldt, Bonpland, and Soto ventured into an underwater cave to collect algae specimens. While the naturalists were exploring, the crew was to haul the lancha along the island, then stop to retrieve the passengers and gear. “This spot displayed one of the most extraordinary scenes of nature, that we had contemplated on the banks of the Orinoco,” Humboldt wrote. “The river rolled its waters turbulently over our heads. It seemed like the sea dashing against reefs of rocks; but at the entrance of the cavern we could remain dry beneath a large sheet of water that precipitated itself in an arch from above the barrier. In other cavities, deeper, but less spacious, the rock was pierced by the effect of successive filtrations. We saw columns of water, eight or nine inches broad, descending from the top of the vault, and finding an issue by clefts, that seemed to communicate at great distances with each other.”

  The Europeans had more time to examine the cave than they had counted on. It should have been a simple procedure to maneuver the lancha upstream, but after an hour and a half the boat had not appeared. Then, as the brief tropical dusk was falling, a tremendous storm broke, with the travelers trapped in the middle of the river. Had the crew been set upon by crocodiles or piranha? Had the frail canoe been wrecked, and the Indians returned to the mission? Drenched, the three men had no interest in spending the night on the unprotected island. Bonpland proposed swimming through the rapids to shore and enlisting the help of Father Zea at the mission. Even in daylight this would have been a hazardous proposition, but in the dusk, it could have been disastrous; at length, Humboldt and Soto managed to dissuade him. Cold and wet in their cages, the monkeys began to cry plaintively, and while the men were debating what to do, two huge crocodiles, apparently attracted by the whimpering, crawled ashore and began to eye the animals. Just before dark, the Indians finally arrived with the canoe. It seemed the river had proved impassible along the island, and the crew had had to pick their way through the maze of rocky shoals. But the boat had sustained no damage in the process, and instruments, provisions, animals, and passengers were so
on reembarked—though the experience had done nothing to alleviate Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s vague feelings of unwellness.

  Stopping at San Borja, where they had stayed on their upriver journey, the explorers were surprised to discover that their earlier visit had been the inadvertent cause of the settlement’s dissolution. After the Europeans’ departure, some dissident Guahíbos, who wanted to resume their traditional nomadic way of life, had spread the rumor that the white men intended to return to the village to enslave the Indians and carry them off to Angostura. Accordingly, when the villagers received word that Humboldt and his party were approaching again, they had fled en masse to the savannahs to the west. Thus Humboldt saw firsthand how easy it was to disrupt the fragile missions. Perhaps because of his skepticism surrounding the missionary enterprise, he betrays no pangs of conscience over the incident, but instead ascribes the desertion to the inhabitants’ inherent wanderlust. After all, he writes, “No tribe is more difficult to fix to the soil than the Guahíbos. They would rather feed on stale fish, scolopendras, and worms, than cultivate a little spot of ground.”

  The travelers stopped next at the mission of Carichana. By this time, Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s lethargy had deepened. The men needed time to recuperate from their exertions on the river. But the area around the mission was rich with plant life, and Bonpland couldn’t resist making extensive forays into the countryside in search of unusual specimens. As a result, he got very little rest, and with the frequent showers, his clothes became drenched several times a day.