Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  My Portuguese was so poor I couldn’t really converse with Nildon except to ask, “Onde fica boto?” (“Where are the dolphins?”), which I realized must have sounded like a complaint. Nildon, who was eager to please us but who could not produce dolphins on demand, would shake his head and reply with disgust: “Não há boto aqui hoje.” (“There are no botos here today.”) He piloted the boat over to the island, where we saw two other boats and the hunched-over forms of five men working with nets.

  They were a team of electric fish experts from INPA, two of whom, to my delight, spoke English. A hefty young man in a wide-brimmed Panama hat introduced himself as José Gomes; wiry, thin Paulo Petry was wearing a camouflage hat and hornrim glasses. They were bent over a big black net, hauling out wet masses of water hyacinth as glittering dragonflies swarmed around them. Periodically, José inserted into the weeds a long bamboo pole with a voltmeter attached. It crackled with the current of electric fish.

  “Each species has its own signal,” explained José. The signals sent from the electric organs, which are similar to muscle tissue, are picked up by the electric receptors of other individuals. An individual fish can alter the shape of the electric field, the waveform of the discharge, the discharge frequency, and the timing patterns between signals to send different types of information.

  Had we heard fish signaling one another beneath our boat that morning? What were they saying to one another? Experiments in captivity show electric fish can convey to others their species, their sex, and their age class. They give territorial warnings, like birds. In some species, the broadcast can carry thirty-two feet. “The behavior is incredible,” said Jose. “They use these signals in social interactions, to detect objects, for dominance, to find mates—there are so many things we are trying to understand!” In the Encante beneath the waters’ surface, in the language of electricity, these tiny fish sing songs of lust and fear and courage—operas played out on a vast underwater stage.

  These fishes’ current isn’t dangerous to people. Unlike electric eels (who aren’t actually eels at all, but are themselves a kind of fish), they emit only a fraction of a volt. But Paulo called out, “Cuidado — cuidado!” (“Careful!”) A five-inch catfish was embedded in the tangle of vegetation, and it erects three toxin-tipped spines to turn itself into a poisoned trident spear when threatened.

  The INPA team, José explained, was looking for a particular species of electric fish belonging to the family Rhamphichthridae. They are transparent, shaped like streamers, long thin triangles with no back or side fins. “We didn’t find the one we are looking for,” said Paulo. They knew from the voltmeter that this family was not in the net. But instead, there was a surprise: they had come up with an eel unknown to science—a foot-long creature appearing to belong to a different family, Symbranchidae, whose pronounced jaw gives it a triangular head like a viper.

  “Last year there were only two new eel species reported in all of South America,” Paulo said, shaking out the water weeds. “There were five new ones from this one island in the past two years!” Among them is a species that makes nests and burrows in the mud in the dry season. They wait out the dry season in a state of suspended animation, until the water floods in and brings them back to life.

  The Amazon’s bewildering diversity is unheard of anywhere else on earth. Michael Goulding, who had generously offered me advice on watching botos, has single-handedly discovered two hundred previously unidentified fish species in the two decades he has worked in the Amazon. An acquaintance of Dianne’s, Dutch primatologist Marc van Roosmalen, had gone looking for a new species of marmoset he had heard about a year ago. In the process, he reportedly discovered four other previously unknown primates, a new species of dwarf porcupine, and spotted what he believes to be an undescribed tapir and an unknown subspecies of jaguar! All of them, incredibly, were discovered barely 190 miles from the city of Manaus.

  How to even begin to fathom such richness and complexity? What was I even doing here, trying to follow an animal I could not see into a world I could never know?

  Here, drenched in the ferocious light of the Brazilian noon, I understood why “fathom” is a water word, one we use when we are trying to understand something difficult and deep. In fact, a dictionary definition is “to determine the depth of.” Another definition of “fathom,” the verb, is “to sound.” Which is, of course, one way the dolphins penetrate the meaning of their world.

  Their eyes, though they appear small, are actually, in the skull, as large as those of marine dolphins, and they function quite well in air and in clear water. But in the brown murk of the Solimões, the botos rely on their sonar, throwing out a beam of sound to chart their world with its echoes. This is one reason the botos need such flexible necks: as they swim through the flooded forest, they turn the head from side to side, sounding their way through the maze of drowned branches with a series of pulsed clicks at frequencies up to 170,000 hertz, far higher than we can hear. Ordinary sounds would be too inaccurate on account of their longer wavelengths and would not produce a precise enough echo.

  One researcher has compared the sonar system of river dolphins with an electron microscope: the resolution of an ordinary microscope ends where the object is smaller than the wavelength of light, whereas the electron microscope uses a beam with a shorter wavelength than that of light to detect minuscule items. The boto’s sonar is thought to be the most highly developed of all. Alone among the whales, they can fathom the flooded forest.

  So I could hope for no better guide to the Amazon than the boto. Dolphins have guided humans for millennia. Legends older than the Minoans say dolphins led the ancients to the center of the world—a sanctuary named Delphi, in their honor. The Greek sea god, Poseidon, turned to a dolphin to find his lost bride, Amphitrite—a miracle commemorated by the dolphin constellation in the sky. Dolphins carried the souls of the Etruscan dead to the Isle of the Blessed; dolphins symbolized the Christian soul’s rebirth.

  I looked to the botos for no less of a miracle. Why was I drawn to follow them? Of course, I wanted to see where they go. But in my heart, I wanted to follow them deeper yet: I wanted to follow them to the Encante—to the city beneath the waters. I wanted to follow them to Eden. I wanted to follow them back, down, deep, to the watery womb of the world, to the source of strangeness and beauty and desire. I wanted to touch the very soul of the Amazon.

  The concept of under-standing implies probing something deep, something beneath, a search for a beginning or origin. The desire to fathom the world is perhaps our deepest human longing. The word “fathom” originates in the Old English faethm, meaning “outstretched arms”—a gesture, I realized, of divine supplication.

  And if math is the language of God, as the physicists say, it is no wonder that a fathom is also a unit of measure: six feet. Measurement is one way science tries to penetrate mystery: We measure voltages. We sort stomach contents. We count botos.

  But at the Meeting of the Waters, and at Marchantaria, not even Vera—much less Dianne and I—could reliably count botos. So the morning before we returned to Manaus, I measured the one thing I could count: their breaths. As what we believed to be two botos surfaced around our canoe, I counted their breaths. They breathed approximately every two minutes: 6:06, 6:09, 6:11, 6:13, 6:14, 6:15, 6:17 . . . and then they disappeared.

  Right before we left, we saw their shadows pass beneath our boat. It was the closest we had come to seeing the animals whole.

  PART TWO

  DESIRE

  “Here in the Amazon, there are two kinds of boto. Some are enchanted,” João Pena says. “There’s a time in the still of the night when you can tell the difference between the boto and the encantado. A lot of people, people like you, even people from the Amazon, they say they don’t believe it. They say, even if we are telling a story of something that really happened to us, that it’s just a fisherman’s lie. But there are people here that know. They know that it’s real. It’s really true.”

 
He was twelve when he saw his first encantado. It was the night when the great turtles come out of the river to lay their eggs on the white sand under the full moon.

  You must wait until they have finished laying before you take them, he explained, because you must ensure there will be turtles to eat the next year; so it was quite late by the time they began to collect their quarry.

  “Just as we were picking up the turtles, we saw three men sitting in the sand, dressed in white. Why would they sit when there were turtles to be caught? Who were they? We went closer to see.” But as they approached, the white-clad men sprang up and leapt into the Solimões. The boys watched for the men to emerge—but they never did. Instead, they saw three botos leap just where the men had disappeared. The botos came quite close to the shore, he remembers, chuffing spumes of spray through their blowholes, as if indignant.

  “There are so many stories of botos, you will die writing!” João Pena says. In the floating house at Marchantaria lived a man whose teenage daughter was beset by the attentions of an amorous boto. The dolphin had a distinctive white spot on the tail, and he was always near the house. At night, he would come out of the water to visit her room and enter her dreams. He appeared in the form of a man wearing white shorts—with a spot on his leg. The boto never touched her, but she was very afraid. She felt his presence, his longing for her. Day by day, she grew more pale and anemic. One night, the boto appeared to her mother in a dream, and asked her to give the girl to him. She refused. But the boto kept coming back, night after night.

  Finally, the family had to move from that place. Now the girl is twenty-five. She isn’t bothered by the boto anymore, she told us. But to this day, whenever she visits the river, botos come near the shore, desiring her still.

  João knows that the girl and her father are telling the truth, he tells us, for the same thing has happened to him. When he was seventeen, with his uncle, he had joined a fishing party that had gone to harpoon pirarucu. While they were on the beach gutting their catch, a boto came near the shore, looking at them. The uncle joked, “Pretty dolphin girl, are you looking for a handsome young man? See João Pena! Isn’t he a good-looking fellow!”

  That night, they slept in their canoes, anchored in the middle of the river. “The night was starry,” João remembers. He was in a canoe right next to his uncle’s. He felt the craft dip, as if it were taking on weight, and opened his eyes. Sitting in his canoe was a young woman. “Only, she wasn’t dressed in white,” he told us. “She was naked, with big breasts.

  “I leaned toward her. She was so beautiful, with long blond hair, and her skin was very pale. I was enchanted. And then she went back into the water, and turned into a boto.”

  The splash woke everyone in the party. They looked around and saw their canoes were surrounded by pink dolphins! The men were frightened and, trying to get away, paddled their canoes into the forest. But the botos followed, splashing their tails as if they were angry.

  Why were the dolphins following? “You see, the encantado, she had fallen in love with me,” João explains regretfully. “The other dolphins were jealous. Botos are very linked with one another.” The botos did not leave until the following morning, splashing all the while.

  And what if he had followed the boto-woman into the water? What would she have done with him? Is there such a thing as the Encante?

  “Oh yes—the Encante is very real,” he says. “In the time of my grandparents, they talked of it. Across from Manacapuru, there was land with a lake and grass on top of the water that never died. In the middle of that lake you would hear cattle, dogs, bands playing, singing. All of us went walking toward the lake—my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. We all heard it. We thought it was a party. And in those days we used kerosene lamps, and we carried one over, to see who was having a party. It got louder and louder—there was so much noise! But we never saw anybody. They said, and I know it is true, that the sound was coming from beneath the water, where the dolphins live.”

  João Pena and the father of the girl who was visited by the dolphin both work for Vera at INPA. She depends upon and respects both men. But she does not believe their stories—and she has heard so many in her work. “Not far from Marchantaria, a woman asked if I was afraid to be enchanted,” Vera told us one night back in Manaus. Rain roared over the tin roof of the open-air restaurant where we were sharing tambaqui com leite de coco, and lightning flashed on all sides. “She told me, ’ Don’t eat anything the boto offer you. If you eat, you’ll never come back!’” Vera laughed her bubbling laugh. “I told her I would like so much to visit the Encante. And she was horrified!”

  “But you said you don’t believe in the Encante,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered, “but sometimes, I wish it were true.”

  Iquitos

  Iquitos

  Actually, there is an underwater city. Two days after we left Manaus, we found ourselves canoeing through it.

  The swelling river had claimed half of Belen: the first, and half the second, floor of the Bar Don Freddy; the bottom floors of the cement and steel dental clinic; the lower half of a giant billboard advertising Inca Cola; the dirt streets; the wooden bridges; the bottom floors of the stilt houses; the people’s gardens—all were under water. Electric streetlamps poked up from the river, like the craned necks of the black water birds called anhingas. Farther away from shore, where the houses are made of salvaged tin and plywood and thatched with yarina palm, sticks thin as a child’s wrist held tangles of electric wires powering naked lightbulbs inches above the water’s surface.

  No dolphins live here, but people do. During the months that the rains flood half their town with the river’s wet embrace, some 40,000 people crowd into the topmost floors of homes and restaurants and little stores rising on stilts from the brown waters of the Amazon. Their chickens and pigs and dogs retreat up here, too, like residents of Noah’s Ark, and people grow vegetables and flowers in potted gardens until the water retreats and they can descend to the ground once again.

  Meanwhile, the people climb up and down wooden ladders to and from their canoes, and the youngest children splash in the river as if it were a suburban backyard, the girls’ frilly dresses plastered wet to their skins. The older children, wearing blue and white uniforms, paddle to the secondary school. At recess, they play soccer in a classroom, because the soccer field is under twenty feet of river.

  Iquitos, of which Belen is a part, receives 120 inches of rain a year, more than any other city in Peru. When authors Brian Kelly and Mark London visited it a decade ago, they found the place had “the feeling of a lifeboat, crowded with people and jammed against the jungle wall . . . one good rain, we felt, and the whole sodden city might slip away,” they wrote. In the early 1980s, the city was shrinking yearly, as the Amazon, meandering westward, chewed chunks from the banks during the rainy season. (In the last decade, the river has begun instead to cut a deep channel to the east of the city proper.) But Belen, its drowning slum, grows each year, as poor people come from the countryside, seduced by the prospect of money and the promise of “civilization” in Peru’s largest jungle city.

  The underwater city of Belen is no Encante. Salesmen paddle door-to-door offering tomatoes, fish, cigarettes, cola, and juãnes, the ubiquitous rice dish cooked with chicken or pork and wrapped in ginger-scented leaves. They stop at the houses where the women are washing their laundry in waters over which their own latrines are perched—the same water in which their children are swimming, the same water they drink unboiled, despite the public health warnings billboarded everywhere: EL COLERA ES UNA ENFIRMEDAD QUE PODEMOS EVITAR! urges a UNICEF poster. (CHOLERA IS A DISEASE THAT WE CAN AVOID.) But of course, most of the people who live here, like roughly half the population of Peru, can’t read, and some of those who can refuse to boil the water anyway. “But boiling it will kill all the life in the water!” one health worker recalled a client had protested.

  Though Iquitos as a whole is said to contain 328,000
people, no one even knows how many really live here. Most of them are poor. Many would rather not be counted. Like the Encante, Iquitos swallows people—but many here want to be swallowed. They are seduced not by enchanted dolphins, but by an underworld of a different kind. Iquitos swirls with seductions, a muddy whirlpool of need and greed, driven by poverty, passion, and whispered rumor, by displaced people and unfulfilled dreams.

  “No roads, no telephones, no radio—that’s for me!” Jamie R., who now runs a spacious, high-ceilinged restaurant on the waterfront, decided eighteen years ago when he arrived in Iquitos. It is the capital of the huge jungle province of Loreto, an area of 14,241 square miles, larger than Spain or Germany, but with no paved roads penetrating its forest. Like many Iquitos residents, Jamie came here to escape from something else—in his case, his wife. Expat gringos tell tall tales in the bars about their jungle exploits, and workers with the dozen jungle tour companies and the thirty-eight registered nongovernmental conservation and foreign-aid groups spread rumors about their competitors’ dark sins.

  In the dry season, we’d heard, the place is full of gringos like us. Tourism declined a bit in the early 1990s when many western nations issued travelers’ advisories warning of Shining Path terrorists and bandits (though there was never a single recorded terrorist act in the province of Loreto—mainly they stuck to the overland route from Lima to Cuzco). Another deterrent was that Faucett Airlines, the only company with direct flights to Iquitos from Miami, had a reputation for crashing its planes into the Andes. (Bankrupted by fines, the company folded shortly after our return flight from Peru.)