River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  I was glad to have Martin with me on this trip, the veteran of our heroically unsuccessful Congo expedition. Although he’s not an angler, I wanted him to be part of something when things went right, and for an enthusiastic naturalist, what could be better than seeing the mythical “red fish”? He was as keen to see the Amazon as I was, giving up his job and room in Paris for this shoestring journey to the rainforest, for which we’d specially acquired a £9.99 nonwaterproof children’s toy tent.

  The cheapest flights we could find were to the Brazilian coastal city of Recife, where the shoulder of South America pushes out into the Atlantic. Because we arrived on a day when banks were shut, we changed some money in the back room of a bar-cum-brothel in the port area, which held the biggest piles of cash I’ve ever seen. Brazilian hyperinflation was running at more than 40 percent per month, and we emerged as cruzeiro multimillionaires. Looking for food that evening, Martin and I came across a political rally and a funfair, where the main attraction was a noisy face-off between two men that ended when one man was floored from behind then repeatedly kicked on the ground. We returned to our hotel, with its strange system of paying by the hour, its wipe-down PVC mattresses, and the contraceptives on sale at the reception desk, and suddenly, with mutual horror, realized why the staff were giving us questioning looks.

  The next day we took a bus northwest through the drought-stricken sertão backlands, and two days later we staggered out into equatorial humidity at Belém, the city at the great river’s mouth.

  At Belém you can’t see the Amazon’s far bank. An island the size of Switzerland is in the way. After two days we boarded a boat, slung our hammocks with three hundred other passengers, and set off up the river. The next day the sun rose out of our wake, slowly climbed and passed above us, and then sunk into the watery horizon ahead. Distant gray islands floated between water and sky. Ghastly yodeling sertanejo music blared nonstop from speakers on the upper deck. Where possible, the boat hugged the bank, where the current is slower, with the other bank looking like a pencil-thin line. Looking out through the railings, as five days and nights came and went, I reflected how, if things had gone differently on an earlier trip to Southeast Asia, I might now be rotting in jail. It was something I could imagine only too well, having served eight years, from age ten, at boarding school. To get through this I’d developed the ability to dissociate mind and body, entering a state in which I could pass through empty time without feeling boredom. Minutes and hours lost meaning, ceased to exist. This stratagem served me well at the time, but back in the outside world, it became a handicap. Now this sleight of mind was no longer the default setting—something else had claimed the psychic vacuum—but I could still summon it when required, such as at times like this.

  Then there were our fellow travelers. Before coming here, I’d studied Portuguese using tapes and written exercises for three months, for three hours every day. But these people on the boat sounded nothing like the cake shop owner in Lisbon, from whom I used to buy imaginary custard tarts. A young man, if I heard him right, told me he was a “professor” of kung fu and that his baby boy was called Van Damme. A girl named Castia helped me with some colloquialisms, despite her disappointment that I knew neither Tom Cruise nor the New Kids on the Block. And her faux-blonde friend, sunbathing on the top deck, filled me in on Manaus: “There’s lots of corruption, prostitution, poverty, crime ... it’s great!”

  The presence of this city of more than a million inhabitants in the middle of the jungle is both reassuring and baffling. A noisy sprawl of high-rise blocks, stilt-house slums, and roller-shuttered shops, it owes its existence to the rubber boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when thousands of migrants poured into the Amazon to collect latex from wild Hevea brasiliensis trees. Along with its neoclassical opera house, Manaus had electricity before London, telephones before Rio de Janeiro, and electric trams when New Yorkers were still staring at horses’ backsides. But boom turned to bust when the British created rubber plantations in Malaya and Ceylon grown from Brazilian seeds. After that, to stop the region from becoming depopulated, the Brazilian government made Manaus a free-trade zone. This explained the shops selling tax-free TVs and computers from factories in the distrito industrial , mostly destined to be airlifted to Brasilia and São Paulo.

  But the high-tech communications didn’t extend to the Purus. At the floating port, they told us there were no boats this time of year. But we kept asking because we didn’t have any other ideas, and after three days we were directed to a disreputable-looking tub called the Mario Antonio III. The skipper, who looked like an incarnation of Beelzebub, assured us he was going up the Purus “tomorrow,” although the places he mentioned bore no relation to those on our map. The next day the price changed when the government announced a new currency, the cruzeiro real, which was actually the same as the old currency but with the last three zeros ignored. Three days after that, with our hammocks swinging on the upper deck, we rolled onto the water again.

  Once in the Purus, even boat time became distorted. As the river twisted this way and that, the confused sun whirled crazily around us. At night, in the close-packed hammocks, I’d wake to find a stranger’s toe picking my nose. Shifting position, I’d head-butt the sleeper on the other side. Some bends seemed to go on forever—past the same fallen tree, the same lonely stilt house. And on board the same pans of rice, beans, and fish (lunch? supper? breakfast?) were again plonked on the table. But something was changing. Each day the river sunk a little further below its banks. We finally disembarked down a narrow plank to soft mud and then climbed a steep flight of steps, at the top of which was the town. To get here from Recife had taken three weeks.

  Getting to a likely floodplain lake was equally laborious. In the following month, from a base in the forest, I managed just four days on Lago Grande. To get there I had to manhandle a wooden canoe down an overgrown creek, alternately heaving it over fallen trees and dragging it through mud. Baitfish were hard to catch and then lasted no time against the piranhas. So I trolled a lure behind the canoe, but piranhas cut the line, attacking the vee it made in the surface. But most disheartening was my growing awareness of the scale of commercial fishing for arapaima, which was driven by the imported Portuguese taste for salted fish. Traditionally this was cod, but here was an abundant freshwater alternative. Thus, arapaima became the bacalhau da Amazônia, or Amazonian cod. For former rubber tappers stranded up in tributaries, here was a new source of income. Having been left alone for thousands of years because of the pointlessness of hunting fish that were far too large to feed a family, whose leftovers would go rotten in hours, arapaima were now under relentless assault. Their habit of gulping air made them vulnerable to harpooning, and they were also taken on set lines attached to flexible tree branches. A fleet of traveling buyers filled their holds with tons of salted meat. I’ve seen old photographs from the Purus of unimaginable slaughter, the barrel-bodied corpses of giant arapaima alongside those of harpooned manatees, their nostrils plugged with wooden pegs to suffocate them to death.

  Now, with numbers much reduced and the easy availability of nylon monofilament, arapaima are most commonly taken in nets. Teams of fishermen wait for the precise day a lake becomes cut off by falling floodwater and then move in, watching and encircling. Sometimes, if there are branches in the water that would snag their nets, they dive down and clear them with saws. Often they will remove all the large fish from a lake in a matter of days. At first I saw the huge fillets, like six-foot kippers, spread out on drying racks by riverside houses, and took this as a good sign. Then I realized I could never beat the locals to the fish, certainly not on the Purus, which, it turns out, is the Amazon’s most heavily fished tributary. Fully 40 percent of the fish eaten in Manaus come from here.

  Four weeks before our flight home, we returned to the town and started waiting for a boat. If I’d achieved nothing else, I now understood why I’d seen no recent reports of arapaima caught by rod and line, and I tried to accept my
failure philosophically.

  I was back in England when the Amazon rains came. The footmarks I’d made in the mud now vanished under fifty feet of floodwater: fish swam where I had walked. Amazon folklore is full of stories about the encante, an enchanted underwater kingdom whose occupants enter the dreams of fishermen and lure them away from their human lives. Sometimes this is the explanation given for the empty canoe—the equivalent of being with the angels. A year later I was in a canoe again, back at Lago Grande, a water that fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. I had seen things here that I couldn’t explain—huge upheavals in the water, distant snakelike shapes—and my curiosity had drawn me back. I was still trying to make a break as a freelance writer, and I was sure there was a story here—something more substantial than a light piece for the travel pages—but I didn’t know what it was.

  That year and the next three had no direction that I could discern at the time other than a general lowering, further beneath the surface of the Amazon’s aquatic and human life. Slowly I gained fluency in the mutated, hybrid Portuguese of the interior, with its subvocabulary of hard-edged indigenous names. Every year I felt that my knowledge had increased to a point just short of some ill-defined critical mass. And while I reached, I had the sense that something was reaching for me: the line of bubbles, speeding toward me like the trail of a torpedo, then passing underneath the boat; the sudden explosion of air and water, right underneath me, nearly tipping me into the water from fright. These were boto dolphins: massive, hunchbacked, and pink-skinned, like giant fetuses—the malformed offspring of those lost fishermen perhaps. And indeed, Amazon folklore says dolphins do hybridize with humans. This happens when male dolphins take the form of young men and visit village festivals, taking care to keep their hats on to conceal their blowholes. In this way they are the cause of many otherwise unexplained pregnancies.

  The locals call this troublemaker the red dolphin, or boto vermelho, but foreigners call it the pink dolphin following a 1980s documentary series. “We know it’s pink, but its name is the red dolphin,” a man lectured me in the captain’s cabin of a riverboat. “Who does Jacques Cousteau think he is, changing the names of our animals?”

  He went on, “Did you know that a female dolphin has parts that are exactly the same as a woman’s? That’s why some of these fishermen try to catch them. So they can passar regra with them.” I nodded, not knowing what to say, as he gestured toward my notebook. “That’s another thing Jacques Cousteau doesn’t know about red dolphins.”

  Then there was that outlandish saw-backed animal in Lago Grande—the hallucination that turned out to be real. Finding out what it was took three years. One early possibility was a pink dolphin that a boat propeller had injured. But the profile was too clean for that, and in that part of the Amazon, at that time, nobody had outboard motors. Most likely, in the end, it was something that a fisherman suggested: a dolphin that had once gotten tangled in a net. This happens rarely because of the dolphins’ exceptional ability to “see” underwater by using echo-location. But when it does happen, it results in a torn net or a drowned dolphin. Amazon fishermen are not sentimental about dolphins; they see them as a nuisance and will throw a dead one aside with a curse. But maybe this one was still alive when the net was retrieved and the fisherman, angry about his ruined net, cruelly mutilated it. Then, being a resilient animal, it recovered from its wounds and began its new incarnation as a mystery monster, exacting revenge on the human race by frightening the wits out of the few people who glimpsed it.

  The dolphins then introduced me to the snakes. When I showed my pictures of the saw-backed dolphin to fishermen, most had never seen anything like it. But some had seen other things. Commonly this looked like a floating tree trunk, complete with root mass, but it would have been moving upstream, creating a wake. This apparition is the cobragrande , literally “giant snake,” and I met several sober fishermen who claimed to have seen it. This set me off on a prolonged anaconda hunt after the real-life giant snake of the Amazon. I was told about a distant creek that held veritable monsters that were the width of oil drums and thirty feet long. If I could verify that with a tape measure and camera, not only would it be the largest snake ever accurately recorded, but it would also qualify for the $50,000 prize, on offer since 1912 from the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York, for evidence of a (live) thirty-foot snake. But nobody ever went up that creek—except one team of fishermen: arapaima fishermen.

  They agreed to take me on their next foray. But they were on their own mission, and the snake hunt took second place. It was like a military operation, hacking our way through fallen trees with an axe, dragging canoes through swamps, catching and cooking up small jaraqui on the run. And this was just the journey to work. The fishing itself was done at a different pace entirely—silently watching then deploying the nets and then waiting for the fish to rise again. Finally, with the trap set, they would beat the surface with sticks and thrash the branches of sunken bushes to flush the fish out and drive them into the net. But the arapaima showed uncanny intelligence. I saw one gray torpedo launch itself four feet into the air and clear the net, to oaths from the fishermen; luckily no one was in the way. Another time, one of the net floats dipped fractionally then popped back up. One of the men then pulled up the net to show me the hole that had just been made. An arapaima had inserted its snout then expanded its head to break the meshes before sliding through to freedom. Then one day while traveling, I found the partial skeleton of an anaconda that I estimated at possibly twenty feet long. But the arapaima had come back to the fore. I had seen how they were killed and butchered and how the fishermen just ate the chopped-up heads with handfuls of gritty farinha, saving the boneless fillets for the merchants. At night, we rested our tired bodies in hammocks slung from trees while the group’s leader, who they called “the fat man”—though not to his face—told tales for hours about other fishing trips: the humanlike screams he’d heard not far from here and the patch of jungle floor near the place known as Meio do Mundo (Center of the Earth) that was so hot you couldn’t stand on it. On our third or fourth trip, with the live anacondas still not showing, he turned to me and asked what I was really looking for. Many people still thought that I was an undercover gold prospector, so this was a familiar question. I said I wanted to catch an arapaima on a line.

  He thought for a moment and then said, “I think there’s a place where you could do that. We hardly fish there because it’s too deep and there are too many trees in the water. But you’ve got to carry a canoe through the forest. I’ll get my son to take you.”

  A year later, with a piece of rag on my shoulder cushioning one end of a canoe, I sweated three miles along a twisting forest path to the lake. When we got there, his son Josiney and I were too exhausted to fish right away, so we walked a little way along the bank to a place where we could watch the water. The lake was long and narrow, about four hundred yards by seventy, with inlets at each corner reaching into the forest like tentacles. Along our bank, fallen trees with skeletal crowns sloped down into black water. Opposite, the bank appeared steeper, with vegetation reaching over the surface and creating a dark secret space underneath. A strong wind was blowing up the lake, but we spotted a couple of distant ripple-rings and launched the canoe. Then we saw another fish rise closer, but when we paddled near, the next movement was a tail-slap that flung water in a twelve-foot-high arc. This was the sign that they knew we were here. To have a chance of catching one, I needed their surfacing to be manso (calm), not brabo (wild). We’d be better leaving the boat and returning fresh in the morning.

  The next day a silent creature stalked the lake, twitching the single fin at its rear to creep forward stealthily, almost imperceptibly. At its other end a single tentacle extended, motionless for long periods and then flicking in the direction of its prey. Dangling from this rod was a dead six-inch ararí, suspended six feet beneath a cigar-sized float. But with the wind blowing again, this time down the lake, and the few rises
mostly out of casting range, my chances didn’t look good. I decided to change tactics and fish blind in an area where there had been some earlier rolls. With the canoe in the middle of the lake, the cast landed just short of the branches on the far side, and immediately the wind pushed a belly into the line, which started dragging the float parallel to the bank while we drifted alongside. I watched, holding my breath, as it passed some likely ambush spots, close to the galhadas, sunken treecrowns, where I’d seen arapaima move before. Then it was in an open gap. Then I couldn’t see it anymore, and my line was running out.

  The next minutes were a blur of me yelling at Josiney to keep the canoe “in the middle!” as the fish made for the sanctuary of the fallen trees. Then the canoe was spinning as water slopped over the sides, and the line was somewhere behind me as I tried to twist to face it. Then it was straight down, and I had the first feeling that I was gaining control. A mass of bubbles erupted underneath us and the rod kicked back—and then a sight I had waited six years to see: a long, shining, smokygray body trailing tendrils of water as it hung suspended in the air, level with my face. Then the back of a machete blade being brought down on its sculpted, bony head followed by a sickness in my stomach that this was part of the deal—my payment for being brought here.

  As arapaima go, it wasn’t a big fish. At fifty inches in length it would have weighed perhaps forty-five pounds. But caught on a rod and line from an area of intensive arapaima hunting, it was a momentous catch. My photograph of that fish, draped over my shoulder with its mouth threatening to engulf the camera, appeared in a British national newspaper, where it was seen by a TV producer in London who then gave me a call. For the next two years he knocked on doors, trying to get a broadcaster to commission a documentary about this iconic fish, during which time I returned to the Amazon at my own expense and shot DIY footage for a demo tape. Finally, after some tantalizing circling back and forth, the bait was taken, and I was heading back to Brazil with a TV crew.