Enslaving the Amazon

The wonder of the world's largest river, and what Europeans have done to it

Images of ants both open and close this wonderful book. In the early chapters the unforgettable opening scene of Werner Herzog’s historically inaccurate but utterly compelling film Aguirre: Wrath of God is evoked – columns of soldiers and bearers descending ant-like down the Andes towards the Amazon river to attempt the search for the mythical riches of El Dorado. The closing chapter describes the incredible richness of organisms found in the Amazon ecosystem, with ants probably the most species-rich group of all. Both descriptions call up teeming multitudes and suggest wealth; therein lies the story of the Amazon itself, one of the most fascinating forest regions on the planet. The fixation of the first Europeans who entered the Amazon with the mythical land of gold beyond measure – El Dorado – led to the destruction of the indigenous people in a greedy search for the wrong sort of riches. All the while, the true riches of the Amazon were destroyed and plundered without consideration of their value beyond mere economics. John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers is not about the Amazon ecosystem itself – so it is not the place to find out the why and how of Amazonian ecology – but instead it is a powerful chronicle of the effects European and European-derived cultures have had on this most diverse and fascinating of river basins.

Hemming has constructed a brilliantly coherent history of man’s exploration of and influence on the Amazon Basin, home to the largest river on Earth, whose drainage area covers a land area almost the size of the continental United States (minus Alaska) and that is so large that for more than a thousand kilometres inland one cannot see the opposite bank. The Amazon itself is superlative, but its effect on the human psyche has also been profound – if you ask people to name a rainforest or to tell you where life on earth is at its most diverse, nine out of ten will name the Amazon rainforest. The region has become more than a real place; it has become a symbol for the richness of life itself and for its fragility in the face of human exploitation.

Because the enslavement of generations of indigenous Americans did not touch cultures (after all, it all went on deep in the Amazon itself), it is in general an unwritten chapter in the litany of man’s inhumanity to man. In 1500, when Captain Vicente Yáñez Pinzón crossed the Atlantic for the second time – he had captained Columbus’s caravel La Niña in 1492 – and came on the muddy outpourings of the mighty river Amazon, he thought he had found the mouth of the Ganges, and had reached India after all. He was greeted with great friendliness, but skirmished with the natives and took some thirty back to Spain as slaves – not a good start for the peoples of the Amazon. Some forty years later, Gonzalo Pizarro, the younger and more dashing of the Pizarro brothers (Hemming describes him as “brave, impetuous and cruel”), led a party of conquistadores from Quito in an attempt to discover El Dorado – the source of the coveted gold of the Incas.

They should have realized how difficult it would be, but the lust for gold drove them on. Eventually, a smaller group led by Francisco de Orellana continued downriver, encountering group after group of indigenous people in large, well-kept villages all along the river; some were friendly and others not, but the overwhelming impression was of a land densely and productively populated. The group descended the entire length of the Amazon and two years later ended up on the island of Margarita off the coast of Venezuela, back in land under Spanish control. Their travellers’ tales brought back the legend of the Amazons, a tribe of women who fought like men and fuelled the desire of Europeans to exploit the region.

The “mad Basque” Lope de Aguirre (“hero” of Herzog’s film) went down the Amazon a few years later, and warned all others that the river was cursed and a “fearful lake” – all Europeans should avoid it like the plague. But he was wrong about who should be afraid: the first Europeans were indeed daunted by the vast and frightening (for them) forests on either side of the river, but the people who suffered from the “conquest” of the river basin were those in the villages seen lining the banks by Orellana and his men.

By the time the French scientist Charles-Marie de La Condamine travelled down the river in 1743, he saw a completely different picture – an uninhabited land where there was “no warrior nation hostile to Europeans on the banks of the Amazon; all have submitted or retreated far away”. This depopulation was due to a variety of nefarious practices, detailed by Hemming with matter-of-fact horror. His is a detailed and compelling account of how nation after nation was destroyed.

The government in Lisbon had technically outlawed slavery, but Lisbon was a long way away from the Amazon Basin, and it suited the Portuguese to have colonists sending income back home – so the persecution continued. Whole villages were transported to “aldeias”, or official communities, where they worked for payment in cotton cloth that they grew, harvested and spun themselves. These people were not characterized as slaves, but as “free”. Other peoples were “ransomed”. This insidious practice involved the putative rescue of indigenous peoples from other indigenous groups, ostensibly because they ran the risk of being cannibalized. Expeditions dedicated to ransoming people were common and successful: indigenous groups were understandably intimidated by Portuguese guns. The brutality with which the slavers hunted down indigenous groups appalled some of the clergy who came to the region – one quite correctly referred to them as no better than murderers, but others collaborated with the enslavers, intent on saving souls at whatever cost.

Slavery went on well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fuelled by the rubber trade. The discovery of white gold, the sap of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis, launched another rush for El Dorado. The tapping of rubber trees was undertaken by indigenous people, who in some places were enslaved, in practice if not officially. In the no-man’s-land of the Colombian Putumayo, the rubber baron Julio César Arana ran an empire of unbelievable brutality, totally dependent on indigenous labour to fell the trees of Castilloa elastica, an alternative and inferior rubber source. The methods used were similar to those used in the Congo that so horrified Victorian England; for quotas not met, children were executed, hands or limbs cut off, and the inhabitants of whole villages murdered. The atrocities practised far from prying eyes were exposed by a young American, Walter Hardenburg. His reports inspired Roger Casement, then British consul in Brazil, who had previously exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, to travel to the region in 1910 and 1912. His official reports eventually led to the removal of Arana’s companies from the London Stock Exchange.

South America had long fascinated naturalists; Alexander von Humboldt saw no human beings at all in his trip along the Casiquiare Canal (the stretch of river connecting the Amazon and the Orinoco), where he observed that “Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain for the traces of the power of man”. Although Spanish scientists had explored the edges of the basin, and Portuguese biologists had penetrated some distance into the southern reaches, their work was not widely disseminated and often not even published, leaving the documentation of the natural history of the Amazon to others. Charles Darwin’s famous image of the “tangled bank” certainly owes its origin to his impressions of tropical forests, but it is the impressions and experiences of Alfred Russel Wallace and his contemporaries that truly brought the natural history of the Amazon to the attention of science. Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates travelled to the Amazon in 1848 to explore “the origin of species”; inspired by Humboldt and Darwin, they came up with a scheme to sell specimens, mostly birds and butterflies, in order to finance their travels. Wallace stayed in the region for four years, travelling up the Rio Negro to Venezuela, while Bates collected for eleven years and went upriver on the Amazon itself almost as far as the border with Peru. Shortly after they had begun their journey another young Englishman, Richard Spruce, was encouraged by the authorities to go to the Amazon to collect plants. He had shown great promise collecting in the Pyrenees, but was of feeble health and only given a few years to live; he wanted to do something to advance botany before he died. Fourteen years later, after ascending the Amazon to the Andes and ultimately being employed by the India Office to collect seeds of Cinchona (the source of quinine and the cure for malaria), he returned to England, reinvigorated.

Hemming chronicles how, in 1850, Spruce, Wallace and Bates met in Manaus, surely proving the small-world adage; how on earth could these three have managed to be in the same small place at the same time in such a vast region? Wallace spent the next several years collecting up the Rio Negro, and produced an amazingly accurate map of the river, using only a compass, a sextant and a bucket of water (in which to reflect the moon) – it was still in use decades later. He suffered terribly from malaria high up on the river and vowed to return to England and never to travel alone again. Return he did, but in the middle of the Atlantic his ship caught fire and all his collections were lost. Undeterred, Wallace wrote a book about his travels, then immediately set off for South East Asia, from where he sent a famous letter to Darwin enclosing an essay entitled “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type” – which goaded Darwin into completing his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.

Spruce was utterly entranced by the Amazonian forests – “the largest river in the world flows through the largest forest” – and his collections were wonderful indeed. They are prized by botanists both for their quality and completeness: many plants he collected were not collected again until the late twentieth century. In the mid-1980s I lived in Tarapoto on the Río Huallaga, one of the three great tributaries of the Amazon in Peru, and I discovered for myself some of Spruce’s great localities – among them Guayrapurima and Cerro Pelado. I was told that a fern I found was the first collection since Spruce: there is still so much to discover in the tropical forests of the Amazon. Spruce crossed over the Andes to Ecuador and spent several years collecting seeds of Cinchona for the India Office so that the tree could be established in the British colonies to provide a reliable source of quinine. Seeds of Hevea brasiliensis had earlier been planted with great success in Malaysia, and establishing a source of quinine was deemed equally important. Some might characterize this as stealing or, more hysterically, as “biopiracy”, but plants of importance have always been taken by people wherever they go. Coffee, for example, now the mainstay of many Amazonian economies, was taken from Ethiopia – I suspect if you asked many people where coffee was native, they might say Brazil.

On his return from the Amazon, Bates wrote what has to be one the true classics of travel writing, A Naturalist on the River Amazons. His turn of phrase and talent for bringing the region to life made his name, as much as did his discovery of unique phenomena in natural history such as Batesian mimicry – where palatable butterflies mimic unpalatable ones so well that predators are fooled and leave them alone. Bates read Darwin’s book while in the Amazon, and framed all he observed in the light of evolution by natural selection. His observations from the field were among the first to really support the theory, now so strongly supported by weight of evidence that it has become scientific fact. In London, Bates was known as “Bates of the Amazon”, and fascinated all with his tales of “a region which may fittingly be called a Naturalist’s Paradise”. He became the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (for which post he competed with his old friend Alfred Russel Wallace).

Biodiversity studies in Amazonia today are very different from the collecting and documenting of the Victorian naturalists. The sheer diversity of life in the region means it has long fascinated those exploring mechanisms of speciation. Hemming only touches on the scientific study of Amazonian diversity: he focuses instead on the accelerated destruction of this rich and complex set of habitats. Recent research has suggested that about 40 per cent of rare tree species are likely to become extinct over the next decades – perhaps, to some, a small loss among so much diversity. But the intricate workings of tropical forests are not clearly understood even today; how the extinction of even a single species will affect an ecosystem is a subject of much current debate. The Amazon forest is more than a collection of species. The sheer vastness and exuberance of tropical forest growth led generations of European colonists to assume that once it was cut down, cultivation could be similarly exuberant and lush. Not so – the richness of the forest is locked up in the trees. These trees, too, absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide per year – global warming without the Amazon would be of far greater magnitude.

Far from being a great emptiness to be exploited and profited from, the Amazon must be appreciated for what it really is – a reservoir of natural richness from which we can learn much about how our planet works. The Peruvian Congress’s recent repeal of land laws aimed at opening up areas of the Amazon managed by indigenous peoples to oil and gas exploration is an indication that the region is no longer regarded as “el gran vacio Amazónico”, but as a place with a future to be managed in partnership with those who were so exploited in the past. The future of the Amazon lies in partnership. In this rich and important tapestry of a book, John Hemming has written a history of this most fascinating of regions that clearly shows why past ways will not work, but that the lessons we learn from the past can help to save a functioning, complex and rich Amazon for the future.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5465028.ece