Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  It was all well and good for the early explorers, who had months or even years to get from A to B, and no pressing engagements back home. But we were on a tight BBC schedule. Stephen had to get back to the UK in time for multitudinous TV recordings and I had to be on several different continents for multitudinous other reasons. Sadly, we didn’t have months to spare.

  So we did what most people do under the circumstances. We hitched a ride on a missionary floatplane.

  Missionary pilot Captain Wilson Kannerberg did the usual pre-flight checks, bowed his head in prayer, leaned back on a seat cover made of wooden beads normally used by Greek taxi drivers, and reached for the throttle.

  Stephen was watching from the back and had that look on his face men get when their girlfriends start winding up tough guys in public. Not scared exactly, but wishing he were somewhere else. Wisely, he chose to ignore the religious mutterings from the cockpit and buried himself in a Portuguese–English dictionary, purchased at the airport. He had nearly two hours to learn Portuguese from scratch. Given that he already spoke French, German, Dutch and Spanish, and had a strong grounding in Latin and Greek, I was mildly shocked that he didn’t speak Portuguese already. But he was remedying the situation fast and I felt sure he’d be fluent by the time we arrived. I speak English and American.

  On a wing and a prayer, we flew 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Manaus and began searching for a converted wooden ferryboat called the Cassiquiari. After a few theatrical swoops and turns over the jungle canopy, we found it tucked away in Arauazinho Creek, a tributary of the Rio Aripuanã, and thanked the Lord when Captain Wilson successfully landed with a splash and aplomb right alongside our home for the next few days.

  ‘Have I told you about my flatulence?’ asked Stephen, as we gathered our belongings and clambered down onto the plane’s gargantuan float. He’d heard a malicious rumour that we would have to share a cabin. ‘Or that I’m a pyromaniac? And did I mention my stabbing obsession?’

  We were greeted by the boat’s skipper, Miguel Rocha, along with the guarantee of two entirely separate cabins. Such was Stephen’s cheering response, Miguel might have announced the end of income tax for one and all.

  Missionary pilot Captain Wilson landing on a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon with a splash and aplomb.

  There was, however, no power in Stephen’s private cabin. And that meant no power for his Apple Mac.

  ‘Right, that’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going back.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I replied consolingly, trying not to laugh. ‘It’ll be alright.’

  He looked a little wide-eyed and panicky as he tried to force his laptop plug into a cracked and rusty once-was-a-plug-socket hole in the cabin wall. ‘There’s no never mind about it. I cannot go four days without power.’

  I left the cabin, in mock despair.

  ‘You may well despair, but not as much as I do.’

  Miguel was a gentle, calm man in his late-60s. Born in the forest, but brought up in the city, he was one of nineteen brothers and sisters. His grandfather crossed the Atlantic from Portugal in the 1880s and his grandmother was a native Indian. This made him a caboclo, one of the so-called ‘forgotten people’ of the Amazon – mixed-race descendants of European settlers and Amerindians. The caboclos get none of the rights of the indigenous forest-dwellers and are ignored by government and aid agencies, and Miguel was leading their fight for recognition.

  He’d been exploring the Amazon Basin professionally since 1981 and knew a thing or two about life in the jungle.

  Two men in a boat – searching for one of the rarest and most elusive animals on earth.

  We had a long, relaxing lunch on the rear deck, poring over an Amazon-sized map of the forest and planning our mini-expedition. By the time we’d finished we had convinced ourselves that our chances of finding a manatee were actually quite good.

  Then it rained.

  We happened to be in the Amazon during the rainy season. It would have been a bit rich to complain – after all, rain is the whole point of a tropical rainforest. The clue is in the title.

  But there’s rain and there’s RAIN! I have rain at home, in Bristol. Rather a lot, as it happens. To be fair, it doesn’t rain all the time (the week before I left it had rained only twice – once for three days and once for four days), but I’ve always been convinced that I live in the rainiest corner of Britain, if not the entire known universe.

  Until, that is, I checked the figures. Bristol doesn’t even register on the scale. My garden receives less than a quarter as much rain in a typical year as the Amazon (not the whole of the Amazon – just an area the same size as my garden).

  But the biggest difference is that the Amazon has more professional rain. My garden gets a seemingly endless grey drizzle that starts around the beginning of January and continues through to the latter part of December. Meanwhile, the Amazon gets a heartfelt torrential downpour once or twice a day, complete with unforgettable displays of lightning and ear-splitting thunder, and that’s that. The daily ritual opening of the heavens would make Steven Spielberg’s special effects department glow with pride, but here’s the point: there’s plenty of time in between for everyone to go outside and do things without an umbrella.

  Rain stopped play while we were filming at least once every day, typically between midday and 2pm, making an excellent excuse to break for lunch. Sometimes it rained at other times, too, making an excellent excuse to break for caipirinhas or a snooze. The prognosis was unlikely to improve for several months, until the end of the rainy season, but we were always optimistic and never quite got the hang of this new daily routine.

  It was like spending a couple of hours every day in a power-jet shower.

  We watched the rain lashing against the side of the Cassiquiari, pouring off the blue tarpaulin roof, running across the deck in torrents and visibly swelling the creek. Then it was time for a nap. There were hammocks hanging from the rafters and I picked a bright red one, crawled inside and fell into a deep sleep.

  There’s a technique to sleeping in hammocks: you don’t lie in them straight, as in holiday brochures or dreamy advertisements for tropical drinks. You lie in them diagonally. That way it’s possible to lie completely flat and, over the years, you don’t end up with a permanently bowed back and forever curled up like a frightened armadillo.

  I woke with a start to find the entire crew standing around me, filming.

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ muttered Stephen in his very rich, very warm, very English, best TV voice.

  Stephen, meanwhile, had been counting mobile phones. He owns 121 altogether, at the last count, but was disappointed to discover that he had only six of them with him in the Amazon. Not a single one had reception. I made a mental note to buy him a satellite phone for his next birthday.

  The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, and we were able to embark on our mission (I suppose we could have started earlier but we didn’t want to get wet).

  Before searching for manatees we had to find Ivano, our fixer for the rest of the trip. Sure enough, as promised, he was ready and waiting for us in a delightful little settlement carved into a particularly wild and remote corner of jungle. Called Arauazinho, after the creek, and with just five families forming a population of fewer than thirty people, this teeny homestead of stilted wooden houses was too small to be called a village.

  I liked Ivano immensely. Short enough to stand at the table during mealtimes, as bald as a baby manatee and never without a mischievous grin, he had the habit of addressing everyone he met as if he wanted to marry their daughter. He made the perfect fixer – a man who, if he wanted to, could persuade Prince Charles to eat genetically modified crops.

  My only slight complaint is that Ivano introduced us to a long-haired Dutchman. This Dutchman talked so slowly, and in such a dreary monotone, that whenever he opened his mouth all you could hear was the sound of doors closing.

  He was utterly obsessed with what he claimed
to be a new, smaller species of manatee, which he’d already named the dwarf manatee. It’s found only in Arauazinho Creek, apparently, and he wouldn’t talk about anything else.

  We’d offer him a beer and he’d say something like ‘Why don’t they call the beer “Dwarf Manatee Beer” instead of “Brahma Beer”?’ We’d invite him to join us for dinner on the boat and, quick as a flash, he’d say ‘We could watch my video of dwarf manatees while we’re eating.’

  The Dutchman had been studying wildlife in the Amazon for decades, partly because he liked animals and partly because he was on the run. When we briefly managed to change the subject from dwarf manatees, with the help of a large jug of caipirinha, he told us hair-raising stories of warrants for his arrest issued by both the Brazilian and Dutch governments. He never satisfactorily explained exactly what he was supposed to have done, but it sounded serious.

  We’ll call him Hairy van Pit-bull, just in case (speaking in monotone isn’t bad enough to justify a long spell in a Brazilian jail – and he claimed to be innocent of all the other, unspecified charges).

  Travelling deeper and deeper into the flooded forest.

  In theory, I suppose, he could be right and there may indeed be such a thing as a dwarf manatee. After all, there are pygmy blue whales, lesser white-toothed shrews and dwarf caiman. But Hairy was one of those people who could have sworn blind that our names were Mark and Stephen and we wouldn’t have believed him. To make matters worse, his best evidence seemed to consist of a blurry home video of a vaguely diminutive manatee (most likely a youngster) lasting no more than a few fleeting seconds. It was pretty iffy, to say the least.

  He was clearly a bright man. He was fluent in even more languages than Stephen (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and taki-taki – the mother tongue of the Creoles, once spoken by African slaves working on plantations in Suriname) and was the author of scientific papers on everything from wild pigs to a lost cousin of the Brazil-nut tree. But something was clearly amiss.

  I wondered if it might be possible to be an unbearable bore in one language, but an exceptionally witty and enlightening raconteur in another. Perhaps, if we had made the effort to learn taki-taki, we’d have seen him in an entirely different light?

  Naturally, both Stephen and I did the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle and oozed as much politeness as we could muster. Despite our frustration, we couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. His whole world revolved around persuading the rest of the world that dwarf manatees are real. We even agreed to a 20-kilometre (12-mile) wild-goose chase, up the infamous clearwater creek, to search for his little hobbyhorses.

  It would only take 15 minutes to reach them, he assured us. Half a day later we decided to go back and return to the mother ship, leaving Hairy to sulk and us to revel in the brief period of heavenly peace.

  We said our goodbyes, politely but not too enthusiastically, and climbed back on board the Cassiquiari with renewed joie de vivre.

  I asked Ivano about his own encounters with more customary, proper-sized manatees. He laughed.

  ‘I love manatees,’ he said. ‘They taste better than beef.’

  He admitted that he hadn’t actually seen a manatee in the wild, and launched into a happy few minutes reminiscing about eating manatee meat as a child. He could barely stop licking his lips as he described its tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture and the unique, slightly almond-flavoured taste.

  Arauazinho village – home to Francisco, his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and innumerable chickens and goats.

  I’d heard about almond-tasting sea cows before. The Amazonian manatee has a long-lost relative, called Steller’s sea cow, which once lived in the Bering Sea between Kamchatka and the western tip of the Aleutian Islands. Three times the size of its Amazonian cousin, this monster among manatees was discovered by the crew of the Russian brig St Peter, who were shipwrecked on Bering Island in November 1741. In fact, the weak and scurvy-ridden castaways survived only by eating their friendly neighbourhood sirenians.

  Fortunately, one of the crew happened to be a naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who spent much of his enforced time on the remote uninhabited island recording information about the animals he and his crew were scoffing. I feel for Steller. It’s hard enough studying wildlife at the best of times, without the added pressure of friends and colleagues eating your subjects as fast as you can write. He did it, though, and made the only detailed written record of the habits and appearance of the sea cow that was later to bear his name.

  With full stomachs, the shipwrecked survivors cobbled together an escape boat and, some ten months and many almond-tasting, human-trusting sea cows later, made it back to the Russian mainland. But they blabbed about their miraculous discovery and prompted a rush of hunting expeditions. The sea cows didn’t stand a chance. They provided three square meals a day, and endless snacks in between, while the hunters killed fur seals, otters and other fur-bearing animals for big profit.

  The outcome was predictable. Just 27 years after its discovery, Steller’s sea cow officially became extinct. The last one was killed in 1768.

  Graca, our boat’s cook, overheard Ivano waxing lyrical about almond-tasting manatees and called out from the galley. I hadn’t seen her so enthusiastic and animated. She described some manatee recipes from her own childhood and told us about manatee-hunting expeditions with her father, armed with nothing more than a home-made harpoon and a rope. They would sit for hours in their little wooden boat, in complete silence, until a manatee surfaced near enough for her father to strike. Then they waited patiently for the injured animal to tow them around and tire itself out.

  I asked Ivano and Graca if they still eat manatee meat today. Never, they told me. It’s illegal.

  I pushed them a little more.

  ‘Well, you can still buy manatee meat on the black market in Manaus. Sometimes you can get it, but it’s not easy.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot,’ laughed Ivano.

  I left it at that.

  The next day we returned to Arauazinho and met one of the villagers, Francisco, as well as his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and just a few of their innumerable chickens and goats. Francisco had kindly agreed to help us find manatees. He’d seen them just the day before, feeding on water lilies in a hidden lake behind the creek.

  Manatees are not just vegetarians – they are greedy vegetarians. They eat a heck of a lot. In fact, they can eat up to ten per cent of their body weight in a single day. That’s the equivalent of me eating ninety three-course meals a day. They are fussy eaters, too, scoffing just a few, carefully selected species of aquatic plants and nothing else.

  Understandably, the few carefully selected species of aquatic plants don’t like it at all. So they’ve developed a special anti-manatee device. What they’ve done is to stuff themselves with silica, which is hard and abrasive and wears out the manatees’ teeth very quickly (ironically, silica is used in toothpaste for precisely the same reason – but to remove plaque rather than the actual teeth).

  The manatees wouldn’t allow themselves to be outwitted by a few plants and responded – not by carefully selecting other species of plants – but by growing replaceable teeth. They have a canny conveyor-belt system in which all their teeth move forward about a millimetre a month; as the front ones wear out, and fall out, they are replaced by the next in line.

  I had woken up feeling quite ill with heatstroke on the morning Francisco offered to help, and was trying to alternate between filming, lying down, and feeling sorry for myself. But Francisco’s sighting, almost within a stone’s throw of where we were standing, had triggered a surge of adrenalin and I couldn’t bear the thought of missing our best chance yet of seeing a manatee.

  We manhandled Francisco’s canoe out of the creek, up a steep bank, through the tangled forest and across to the hidden lake. It was hard to do it quietly. Actually, it was downright impossible. Francisco never uttered a word and effortlessl
y sauntered through the jungle in complete silence, like a ghost in slippers. The rest of us bumbled about like drunks in a coffee shop, stumbling over hidden roots, yelping in pain every time we gashed our legs, cursing whenever we were seized by horrible grasping plants, stepping on each and every snapable twig, swatting irritable mosquitoes, and in the end giggling uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all.

  By the time we reached the lake I suspect every local manatee had either moved somewhere else, or died of old age.

  Unwaveringly optimistic, though, we launched the canoe and paddled quietly (relatively quietly) across to the far side. We cruised along the shoreline, weaved in and out of the half-submerged trees, zigzagged backwards and forwards in the open expanse in the middle, and every so often waited in silent (relatively silent) anticipation.

  Hot? Every morning arrived complete with a full body sweat.

  But all our efforts were in vain. We didn’t see a manatee disappear beneath the surface of the lake. We didn’t see the ripples made by a disappearing manatee. We didn’t even nearly see the ripples.

  For the next two days we searched rivers and lakes and ploughed tributaries and tributaries of tributaries.

  Then we gave up.

  It was such a disappointment. I really thought we might be lucky and so wanted to see an Amazonian manatee – even fleetingly – in the wild. But if there were manatees in the Aripuanã, they’d chosen to stay concealed in the river’s murky waters.

  We’d been outmanoeuvred by one of the slowest creatures on earth.

  Francisco didn’t know of any other likely places to look. We tried to console ourselves in the knowledge that if he didn’t know anywhere else to look, that was definitive. Definitely not knowing was at least better than vaguely not knowing.