After five or six days of such travel, Isabel and her entourage reached a point along the Pastaza where the steepest slopes were behind them. They had dropped 3,000 feet over forty miles, and now they had to make their way across a series of lesser hills to Canelos. The Pastaza here is too turbulent for canoes, and so the path cut by Jesuits in the early part of the eighteenth century left the Pastaza watershed for the Bobonaza’s, which was navigable starting at Canelos. This last stage of their overland journey was only twenty-five miles long, and they hurried across it. At Canelos, they knew, a priest and canoes would be waiting for them, as well as local Indians who would take them down the Bobonaza. This had all been arranged by her father Pedro, who had come through a month earlier. They would spend a night or two there, just long enough to get dry and refresh their spirits. Such thoughts quickened their pace, and late in the afternoon of October 12 they reached the banks of the upper Bobonaza, which—as Spruce would later write—was “crossed with difficulty and risk, as the turbid swollen waters careened violently among and over rocks and stones.” The mission station, they had been told, was only a little further downstream, located on a high bluff above the river. There was a chance now to delight in the trill of the forest birds, the bright-colored splash of a passing toucan or a purple-throated fruit-crow. But when at last the village came into view, they all came to a halt. Plumes of smoke were rising from the huts, every dwelling except for the bamboo church having been set to the torch.
Smallpox. And they found the village, as Jean would later write, “utterly abandoned by its population.”
ALTHOUGH THEY COULD NOT KNOW for certain, Isabel and her brothers guessed that it was their father’s party that had brought the plague into Canelos. Few people visited this village, and it was likely that Pedro Gramesón had been the last to come through. Many of the Indians living in the village had apparently died, and others, they surmised, “had hid in the woods, where each had his own hut.” Those fleeing had burned the huts to drive out the evil spirits, a sight that spooked Isabel’s thirty-one Indian servants, who, in “dread of the air being infected,” immediately dropped all of the supplies and fled toward their homes in the Andes. Isabel’s journey had just begun—she could still see the snow-capped mountains of her home in the distance—and already she and the others were in peril: Their servants were gone and they did not have the canoes they needed to proceed further.
They camped that night on the outskirts of the village, uncertain what to do. Their only option seemed to be to go back, but Isabel, as Jean would later write, was unwilling to think of it: “The desire of reaching the vessel waiting her, together with her anxieties to rejoin a husband from whom she had been parted twenty years, were incentives powerful enough to make her, in the peculiar circumstances in which she was placed, brave even greater obstacles.” The next morning, Isabel’s prayers were answered. Scouting around the village, they found two Indians who were free from the contagion. Isabel spoke to them in Quechua and quickly hired them to build a canoe and guide her party to Andoas.
As the Indians worked, fashioning a cedar tree into a dugout canoe with their machetes, Isabel and the others got their first extended exposure to a tropical forest. They could hear birds everywhere, even though these creatures were often hard to spot. They heard the rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers and the squawking calls of macaws and parrots, and spotted a number of hawks and falcons darting through the sky. Such sights and sounds were comforting, for they made the rain forest seem less foreign and threatening. Even the mosquitoes were not too nettlesome, at least within the village’s cleared area.
But the nights were a different matter. As dusk fell, the shrieks of howler monkeys living among the treetops across the river rattled their nerves. This bearded simian has a hollow and much-enlarged hyoid bone in its throat. As air passes over this cavity, it produces a plaintive call that some say resembles the sound of a human baby crying. Every evening at Canelos this piercing moan arose from the forest at the same time that a thick cloud of bats flew up from their roosts. Isabel and the others had heard all about the sinister habits of vampire bats, which abounded in this region. The furry creatures will creep into a hut at night, tiptoeing on their hind legs (rather than descending beneath noisy beating wings), and then climb onto their sleeping prey. Their incisors are so sharp that they can open a vein without waking their victims. When dining on human blood, they favor the face or feet, and although this blood sucking generally does not do much physical harm, newcomers to the jungle find it a deeply unnerving thought.
The Canelos Indians finished the canoe in about two weeks. It was nearly forty feet long, and toward the stern they had erected a small shelter with a thatched roof for Isabel, to protect her from the equatorial sun. Her only disappointment was that the canoe was too small for all their goods. She and her brothers had expected to have two or three canoes at their disposal, but now they had only one, and they were forced to leave some of their precious supplies behind. They stepped into the canoe uneasily—none of them knew how to swim—and then the two Indians, who had been steadying the craft, leapt from the sandbank and pushed off into the swift current. It was October 25, and in two weeks or so, Isabel and the others could hope to be in Andoas.
The Bobonaza drops about 100 feet over the course of the first twenty miles below Canelos, this stretch of river marked by more than a dozen small rapids that have to be carefully navigated. One of the Indians stood in the front of the canoe, using a long pole to push them away from the rocks, all the while employing hand signals and a sharp whistle to chart a course for the second Indian, who was seated in the rear and steering with a paddle employed as a rudder. They passed through several deep gorges, the stone walls rising more than seventy feet, and on each one, about twenty feet up, there was a high-water mark, the stone scoured clean to this line. Like all rivers that drained the eastern slopes of the Andes, the Bobonaza was a fickle beast. Should a storm of particular intensity break, it would rise with frightening speed, as much as fifteen feet in a single night. At such moments, a huge swell of water would descend downstream like a river tsunami, carrying with it a tangle of tree branches and other debris scoured from the banks.
When Spruce came to this stretch of the Bobonaza in 1849, he experienced this phenomenon. On his way from Andoas to Canelos, he was camped on a small spit of sand when, on May 21, a wave hit:
We had scarcely resigned ourselves to sleep, at about nine o’clock, when the storm burst over us, and the river almost simultaneously began to rise. Speedily the beach was overflowed, the Indians leaping into the canoes, the waters continued to rise with great rapidity, coming in on us every few minutes in a roaring surge which broke under the canoes in whirlpools, and dashed them against each other. Floating trees now began to careen past us like mad bulls. So dense was the gloom that we could see nothing while we were deafened by the pelting rain, the roaring flood, and the crashes of the branches of the floating trees, as they rolled over or dashed against each other, but each lightning flash revealed to us all the horrors of our position. Assuredly, I had slight hopes of living to see the day.
Two of Spruce’s companions that night fled into the jungle to escape the raging river, which rose eighteen feet in twelve hours. They retreated “inland,” Spruce wrote in his journal, “and when day broke it found them half dead with cold, and their clothes and bodies torn and wounded by prickly bamboos and palms.”
Such was the Bobonaza. At first glance, the river could seem rather tranquil, and in fact, there were days when it could be negotiated with relative ease. But its true power rested in the skies, in the gray clouds that came marching westward from the Amazon basin each afternoon, slamming into the Andes and dropping a torrent of rain. When that process peaked, or turned more violent than usual, the Bobonaza awoke with a vengeance. And for those who were not of the forest, like Isabel, a retreat inland offered not refuge but a host of life-threatening dangers.
With the Canelos Indians piloting the ca
noe, their first two days went well. They passed through the upper narrows without mishap, and by the second afternoon, most of the rapids were behind them. The rock walls receded, replaced by a crush of trees and brush that cast shadows over the water’s edge, creating a sensation of traveling through a cool, dark tunnel. The current had slowed, and with no big storm having hit above, the river seemed almost peaceful. As they floated downriver, new scenes of wildlife appeared at every turn. They could see a turtle riding on the back of a log, an alligator slipping into the water,* a family of capybaras playing on a muddy stretch of riverbank. (This last animal is the world’s largest rodent, a 120-pound relative of the common rat.) There were too many river birds to count: black caracaras cruised overhead, letting out a loud raspy scream that sounded like “kra-a-a-a-a-a”; blue-throated piping-guans perched in the treetops, occasionally taking noisy wing to cross the river; and red-breasted kingfishers plunged suddenly into the water, emerging more often than not with a small fish. Isabel and the others were also certain to have come across a strange-looking bird with red eyes, blue face, and spiky blond crest, crashing through the underbrush, barking at the canoe as it passed by, and—if the bird dared to try—struggling mightily to fly. This was a hoatzin, one of the rain forest’s more humorous creatures.
Each of those first two nights they camped on sandbars, their Indian guides building lean-tos to sleep in, and doing so with amazing speed. After tying up the canoe, they would plunge fearlessly into the jungle, apparently unconcerned about the poisonous snakes known to haunt these banks, emerging in a few moments with an armful of stout sticks and a bundle of palm fronds. After laying two sticks down on the sand, parallel to each other and about nine feet apart, they would quickly lash the palm fronds to them. This “roof” was then propped up on two forked sticks planted upright in the sand. Isabel and the others ate well on those nights, their usual meal of dried meats and corn supplemented by whatever their Indian servants could take from the wilderness—perhaps a turtle one night and catfish the next, caught with a small net brought along for this purpose.
They retired the second evening with reason to feel optimistic. They were making good progress toward Andoas, and a beach could be a fairly pleasant place to sleep, the terrors of the jungle kept at bay by the sand between them and the brooding trees. The howler monkeys were in there, and not out here, and so too were the snakes, which liked to remain hidden in the brush. While vampire bats could still be a problem and jaguars might prowl a sandbar at night, the Indians kept a fire burning to keep the man-eating beasts away. Such skills comforted Isabel and the others. However, when they awoke the third morning, they looked upon a horrible sight. Their “pilots,” as Jean later wrote, had “absconded.”
Isabel realized her mistake at once. She had paid the Canelos Indians in full ahead of time. That was the custom, and they had demanded the advance pay, but the arrangement had removed any incentive for them to remain until they reached Andoas. Doing so would simply have led to a more arduous return journey to Canelos. She and the others were now alone on a river they knew nothing about. Their only salvation was that the Indians had left them the canoe, apparently choosing to make their way back to Canelos on foot.
There was little possibility that they might do the same. “We didn’t know the path through the woods [to Canelos],” the French doctor Jean Rocha later told the priest at Andoas, “and it was even less possible to return by the river, since it was flowing very fast, filled with rocks and sticks. Even the Indians who were experienced in navigating the river found it terrible, and so we determined to lower ourselves on the river under the guidance of God, assigning to everyone a job.”
Rocha took the place of the navigator up front. Joaquín, Isabel’s slave, assumed the role of steersman in the rear, while Isabel’s two brothers, Juan and Antonio, took paddles in hand and, seated in the middle, “rowed,” hoping to propel them faster through the slower sections of the river. Isabel and the others—her nephew Martín, her two maids Tomasa and Juanita, the Frenchman’s companion Phelipe Bogé, and Rocha’s slave Antonio—sat scattered about the boat.
That day the river rose, and they could see it was raining in the mountains. A large tributary, the Sarayacu, flowed into the Bobonaza, adding to their sense that the river was growing exponentially in power and force. As Rocha was to tell the priest in Andoas, “None of us had any skills, which put the canoe at every instant in a million dangers, now against a stick, then against a rock, with the canoe filling with water often in the rough spots, with evident risk of going under.” At such moments, Isabel clutched the two gold chains around her neck and silently asked that the “Virgin hear their prayers.” It seemed that they would not survive the day. But they did, and at noon on the following one, they came upon a most welcome sight: “We saw a canoe,” Rocha related,
and next to it footsteps, and following the path to a hut, we found an Indian convalescing from the smallpox. He appeared like death, but this man was alive, and we were overjoyed at seeing him. He was in a state of total abandonment, as all his family had been killed by the smallpox. He was content to get on board and take over management of the canoe. Although he was weakened by his illness, he was animated by his skill.
The rest of that day and the next two—October 29 and 30—passed without incident. The Bobonaza continued to widen after yet another large tributary, the Rutunoyacu, flowed into it from the north. The landscape changed here as well. They were now more than 100 miles below Canelos, and the river had spilled out into a floodplain, snaking back and forth across the flat land, creating a swampy landscape of oxbows and lagoons. They were not moving at any great speed—indeed, at times it seemed they were just drifting along at a leisurely pace—and yet they could see the river pushing along huge logs and branches, a great force that kept them on edge. No one said much; they were all alone in their thoughts. Then, late on October 31, a gust of wind blew Rocha’s hat into the water, and their pilot, “stooping to recover it,” as Jean later wrote, “fell overboard, and not having sufficient strength to reach the shore, was drowned.”
Everyone was too stunned to move. One moment the Indian was there, behind them, safely steering the canoe, and the next he was slipping beneath the water, his arms flailing as the current carried him off. And now the canoe was “again without a steersman, abandoned to individuals perfectly ignorant of managing it.” They were adrift in the current, Joaquín trying to scramble past Isabel to the rear without upsetting the boat. In very short order, the canoe was turned sideways by the current, and, striking a log, was “overset.”
They spilled into the river, and so too did the woven baskets with all of their goods. Isabel, pulled under by the weight of her heavy silk garments, came up gasping for air and grabbing for the overturned canoe, as did everyone else. They were not far from the river’s edge, and by clinging to the upside-down boat, they were able, “with great work, to arrive at a beach.”
They were now in a dire predicament. Although they were able to retrieve most of their supplies, Isabel and her two brothers were so spooked by the Indian’s drowning and their own near escape that they resisted getting back into the canoe. They built a hut that night as far up on the beach as possible, planning to wait there for a day or two, to see whether the river would drop. But it did not. “Each day,” Rocha said, brought “greater dangers.” At last—on their third day on the beach—Rocha “proposed to repair to Andoas” and seek help. By everyone’s reckoning, they were “five or six days journey from Andoas,” and Isabel and her two brothers, with the river at such a height, were still not willing “to trust themselves on the water without a proper pilot.” Rocha laid out his rescue plan: He, Bogé, and Joaquín would take the canoe, and since it would no longer be so loaded down, they should be able to steer it fairly easily. They would hurry to Andoas, where they would gather “a proper complement of natives” to come back upriver and rescue those left behind. Isabel and the others could expect to see a well-supplied canoe ret
urn within two weeks, three at most.
At ten o’clock the next morning—the date was November 3—Rocha and the others left. Those remaining on the sandbar stood together as they paddled off, the canoe passing around a bend and slipping from their sight. Only then did they realize what they had done. They were now marooned on this spit of sand. They were miles from the nearest speck of civilization, alone in a fearsome wilderness, and they had to rely on the others to return. As they looked around the sand and took a quick inventory of their supplies, their panic rose. Although they had a fair amount of food left, enough for three weeks if rationed, they could see what was missing: Rocha, while packing up, had taken “especial care to carry his effects with him.” He had left none of his belongings behind.
* As a result of road construction, the river below Baños no longer passes through a channel this narrow.
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