The story of the Amazon

A common presumption is that the Indian tribes of lowland Amazonia have always led a primitive and sparse existence, battling with disease and the rainforests, and that these miseries were made even more acute by the predations of white invaders.

But when Europeans first arrived in 1500, they found a prosperous land with some four to five million inhabitants. Moreover, many of the Indians stood a foot taller than their Spanish conquerors, and were among the healthiest people on the continent; recent research shows that their diet as hunter-gatherers of fish and game was far more balanced than that of their Inca contemporaries in ancient Peru.

Amerigo Vespucci, the first of the visitors, and one who left his name for the continent as a calling card, was so impressed by the physical beauty of the Indians and the architecture of their communal huts that he thought himself in "a terrestrial paradise".

How the serpent was then introduced to that paradise by the conquistadors over the following centuries is a story that John Hemming tells with great authority.

It begins with one of the most cack-handed journeys in the history of exploration. Francisco de Orellana was accidentally swept downstream while investigating the furthermost tributaries of the Amazon from the Pacific side.

Unable to paddle back up against the current, he and his men found themselves drifting down the entire length of the river, emerging nine months later on the Atlantic coast - where he was promptly court-martialled by his superiors for desertion.

Orellana brought back tales of "Amazonian women warriors" (a myth, according to Hemming, but one that named the river), of prosperous and extensive civilisations lining the riverbank, and even of gold that had found its way south from modern Columbia.

It was an enticing mix, calculated to lure more conquistadors down the river's beguiling length, despite the horrendous hardships of malaria and a climate to which Europeans, unlike the natives, never managed to adapt. Orellana himself returned, only to disappear and die in its sinuous folds.

Archaeologists are still divided over the full extent of those civilisations that Orellana glimpsed along the riverbank: the termites of the jungle have long since destroyed much of the evidence, for the Amazonians built in wood, not stone. Yet it is clear that pre-Columbian man had successfully managed to convert the shallow topsoil of the rainforest into rich black earth by a process that is still not fully understood.

The heartbreaking tale of Indian tribes offering manioc and shelter to Europeans who then enslaved or infected them is a familiar one. But this is tempered in Hemming's account with an awareness of the internal conflicts and differences between the tribes.

While much of the story plays out with a depressing litany of repeated mistakes - by slavers, rubber barons and latterly those growing soya beans, all raping the forest - there are some optimistic gleams of light through the undergrowth. Since the 1960s, the population of Amazon Indians has quadrupled and there is now far more respect for them in Brazil as the natural custodians of the planet's most important lung.

Few writers have the range to cover the full canopy of the rainforest from its remarkable botany to its exploration and even archaeology, but Hemming is an unusual polymath: as a past director of the Royal Geographical Society, he led a large research project in the Amazon; his previous trilogy on the history of the Amazonian Indians was acclaimed; moreover, as a young man he took part in a tragic expedition to the Iriri river, during which his companion Richard Mason was killed.

He has made "first contact" with more Indian tribes than any other non-Brazilian.

Tree of Rivers is consequently a book written from both the heart and the head. Much discussion on the Amazon generates more heat and carbon monoxide than light; this is a welcome corrective, lucid and learned. It will stand as the definitive single-volume work on the subject - but not, one hopes, as its elegy.

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