Amazons

by John Man

  His account sounds like a good explanation of why the river and its forests became the region of ‘las Amazonas’, at first in the plural. But it’s not quite as straightforward as it looks. For a few years the river was also known as the Orellana, after its discoverer. Secondly, Carvajal’s accountfn7 is a prime source today, but it only recently became so. After he wrote it, it vanished into the Peruvian archives and was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. So at the time his story spread by word of mouth. Orellana’s trip was so extraordinary and became so well known – especially after Pizarro accused him of treachery – that the story of the warrior women came to define the whole adventure. That’s why the river and its forest became the region of the Amazons.

  First for Spanish speakers, then for the rest of Europe and the world. In 1555, a French author, André Thevet, published an account of mainly French exploration in the New World, based on his own journey there and other accounts. The strange title of his book, Singularities of the French Antarctic, takes its name from a shortlived French colony around what became Rio de Janeiro, but it covers all America.fn8 It sounds like a proposal for expanding the French empire from Brazil to all points north. In fact, it is the first stab at an ethnography of the whole New World: people, animals, plants. He includes the Amazons as fact. How had they got there? No problem. After the Siege of Troy, they scattered to form an Amazon diaspora, wandering the world until they reached the Americas.

  These people live in little huts and caves among the rocks, they eat fish and various wild plants, roots and fruits grown in this region. They kill their male children, immediately after having put them into the earth, or give them into the hands of those they think responsible for them. If it is a girl, they keep them, as did the first Amazons. They usually make war against various other nations, and treat those whom they capture very inhumanely.

  Fifty years after Orellana’s journey, in 1597, a Flemish map-printer named Cornelius Wytfliet published a map of the world with all the latest discoveries. The Americas are there, very roughly. South America looks like a reject potato, with just seven names: Castilia del Oro (Golden Castile), Peru, Brezilia, Parana, Chili, Chica – and, marking a transcontinental river network, Amazones, the Amazons, the first mention of the name on a map. Eventually it lost its plural form and became the singular Amazon.

  By then, English explorers were laying the foundations of empire on behalf of their own warrior queen, Elizabeth, but found that Amazons were no longer taken seriously by those in authority.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, passing on what he had been told by a native chief, claimed they were a reality. After all, he wrote (with the spelling updated),

  in many histories, they are verified to have been … but they which are not far from Guiana do accompany with men but once in a year, and for the time of one month, which I gather by their relation to be in April; and that time all kings of the borders assemble, and queens of the Amazons, and after the queens have chosen, the rest cast lots for their valentines. This one month they feast, dance, and drink of their wines in abundance; and the moon being done they all depart to their own provinces. They are said to be very cruel and bloodthirsty, especially to such as offer to invade their territories. These Amazons have likewise a great store of these plates of gold.

  A likely story. What language was this conducted in, and how come the local rulers all act like European royalty at play? Was his queen also expected to believe in the headless Ewaiponoma, who had eyes and mouths in their chests? It was all intended to gain royal backing for yet another expedition. But the queen died, and Raleigh was implicated in a plot against her successor, James I, and ended up like the Ewaiponoma, headless.

  And anyway, by now there were doubts. Wasn’t it a little odd that the Amazons’ domain always moved further off as knowledge advanced? That information about them was always indirect? Samuel Purchas, in his account of the new worlds opened by exploration, dismissed these ‘solitary unimammians’ as fantasies. As a fantasy, the Amazon remained a popular character in plays and poems, as easily recognizable by her attributes – battleaxe, buskins, exposed breast – as the fairy godmother or pantomime dame is today. But now they’re tamed and domesticated, no longer real warriors. As Edmund Spenser wrote in The Faerie Queene, his verse homage to Queen Elizabeth –

  Vertuous women wisely understand

  That they were borne to base humilitie,

  Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereaintie,

  – the queen being the exception that proves the rule. Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream talks of hunting, not war. They were picturesque ornaments for pageants – famously tall and valiant – but, if taken seriously, would be dangerous examples of unwomanly conduct. Elizabeth was happy to be addressed as Gloriana, but if anyone had called her an Amazon he would have risked losing his head.

  Yet the Amazon myth survived, sanctioned by the name of the river, because surely such a vast entity with so many stories behind it had to contain some elements of truth?

  It was kept alive, for instance, by Cristóbal de Acuña, Jesuit bishop who went with the Portuguese explorer Pedro de Teixeira from the Andes down the Napo and Amazon, and published his account of the journey in 1641. He didn’t claim to see any Amazons, but had no doubts about accepting them. ‘The proofs of the existence of the province of the Amazons on this river are so numerous and so strong, that it would be want of common faith not to give them credit.’ The proofs? His investigation of the natives, or rather one native, of the Tupinambá tribe. This man confirmed everything that everyone ‘knew’: women of valour, no men, annual mating, boys killed, girls raised as warriors etc., etc. ‘There is no saying more common than that these women inhabit a province on the river, and it is not credible that a lie could have spread throughout so many languages, and so many nations, without such an appearance of the truth.’ Well, yes, it is perfectly credible, given that the Tupinambá lived, and still live, in Maranhão, which is on Brazil’s north-east coast a good 400 kilometres from the mouth of the Amazon, let alone the regions where Carvajal said that Orellana said a local Indian whose language he didn’t speak said the Amazons were.

  So the Amazons of Amazonia lived on. Though a number of the sceptical philosophers and scientists of the eighteenth century denied their existence, some did not. One was the French Jesuit missionary and anthropologist Joseph-François Lafitau, who spent five years (1712–17) with the Iroquois Indians in Canada, and also learned a good deal about the Hurons. His anthropology was so good that he has been called the ‘precursor of scientific anthropology’. He worked to an agenda that took a couple of centuries to fall out of fashion. His aim was to prove that all cultures evolved from others, back to the first – a comparative approach that works for languages and for the evolution of species, but not, in the end, for cultures. He couldn’t have known that, which is what makes his book – Moeurs des sauvages amériquains (Customs of the American Savages) – a worthy starting point for a new science. By recording cultures and comparing them, he hoped to derive the universal laws behind the evolution of culture. He believed that primitive cultures today in the Americas not only resembled primitive cultures in the ancient world – they actually both descended from pre-existing ones: ‘The largest number of the American peoples came originally from those barbarians who occupied the continent and islands of Greece.’ His evidence was Orellana’s report. The bearers of Greek culture were the Amazons. We might regard them as a myth, he said,

  if we had not been assured that, in our day, there are still found on the banks of the Marañón or Amazon River, some of those warrior women who glory in the works of Mars, live apart from men, practice continually drawing the bow, keep only the girls with them, either killing the boys or returning them to their fathers at stated times when they seek their company.

  He accepts the whole package, minus only the excised or cauterized breast. The second chapter of the second volume (it is an immense work of over 1,000 pages),fn9 ‘Women’
s Occupations’, begins: ‘The women of the Savages, just like the Amazons, the women of the Thracians, the Scythians, the Spaniards, and other barbarous peoples of Antiquity, work the fields,’ just as was done then, before the ‘transmigration’. Iroquois women recall the Lycians, mentioned by Herodotus. Like them, their houses are chosen by the mothers, they trace descent through the women, they have a power structure dominated by women. The unfortunate fact that Iroquois chiefs were male is explained by the fortunate fact that they were chosen by women. Like the Lycians and the Amazons, Iroquois society was a ‘gynococracy’ – the word now is ‘gynarchy’ or ‘gynocracy’ – rule by women. In Herodotus’s words, ‘Ask a Lycian who he is and he will tell you his own name and his mother’s, then his grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s and so on.’ The parallels – and Lafitau’s book has a mass of classical references in its margins – seemed to provide strong evidence that the Iroquois’ ways may ‘have come from the Amazons, whose empire was so vast in extent.’ How they got to Canada was a big question. Obviously not across the Atlantic, so they must have travelled all the way across Asia and over the Bering Strait, a suggestion backed up by the discovery that made him famous: ginseng, a plant long used as a drug by the Iroquois and which was identical to the ginseng used in China. So who brought the ginseng to Canada? Since no one yet knew the true age of the Earth, it did not occur to him that ginseng could have spread very well on its own. So he concluded that it must surely have been brought to the Americas by the Amazons and the Lycians.

  Another explorer who returned from the New World bearing news of Amazons was Charles Marie de la Condamine, who went to Ecuador to measure the exact length of a degree of latitude at the Equator. He travelled down the Amazon in 1743 and questioned many Indians, which he could do because there were now interpreters. No one had actually seen any Amazons. On the other hand, ‘they had all told us they had been informed of the same by their parents.’ Apparently, two centuries of questioning by Europeans had planted an idea of what Europeans wanted to hear, which had grown into a tangle of pseudo-information. La Condamine was assured by a seventy-year-old that his grandfather had actually spoken to four Amazons. More Indians, of the otherwise unrecorded Topaya tribe, told him their fathers had been given green stones by ‘women without husbands’ who lived above waterfalls and beyond high mountains. To la Condamine it seemed that the Amazons lived, or had once lived, in Guiana, where Europeans had not yet gone. Once again, the Amazons were to be found where no one could actually find them, just over the horizon. Of course, he wrote,fn10 you can’t trust natives, who are ‘liars, credulous and fond of anything surprising’; and of course it was ludicrous to think that the tribe of Amazons had migrated from the Old World. How they had developed was a mystery to be solved – perhaps they had escaped violent and brutal lives and set up on their own. Anyway, even la Condamine, scientist and rationalist, concluded that ‘there had been, in this continent, a commonwealth of females, who lived by themselves, without having any males amongst them.’

  So the name of this distant branch of the family of Amazons lived on, to affect the real world in ways now familiar to us all.

  In the twentieth century, after an extended controversy, the Amazon turned out to be the world’s second-longest river (6,516 kilometres) after the Nile (6,695 kilometres). But length is not a true measure of its scale. To understand its nature you have to understand its origin. It is the remnant of an inland sea. About 150 million years ago, South America and Africa were joined, both being part of the supercontinent of Pangaea (‘Earth Everywhere’). A great river, the future Amazon, flowed from the interior of what would become West Africa across what would become South America, spreading into a huge delta draining into the proto-Pacific. Torn by the slow flow of molten rock deep in the earth, the two split, moving apart by the thickness of a fingernail every year to form today’s jigsaw-like slabs. South America was a raft with a bow-wave of rock that pushed up a crumple zone we now call the Andes, raising the whole leading edge of the South American plate. The great river, which had once flowed east to west, tilted until the waters, now tumbling from the new mountains, began to flow the other way. Today’s Amazon is a delta in reverse, draining into the Atlantic, the ocean dividing South America from its former twin. That’s why the Amazon basin looks the way it does, and why its size is measured less by its length than the bulk of its waters. It delivers into the Atlantic over 200,000 tonnes of water per second, 12 million per minute, 17 billion per day. That’s five times the flow of the next biggest, the Congo. Its drainage area is twice the size of India. In world rankings of river size, No. 5 and No. 7 are tributaries of the Amazon: the Madeira and the Negro.

  Its scale has nothing to do with its name, but both together matter to internet users. In 1994 a young entrepreneur working out of a garage in Seattle, Washington state, had just set up a company to sell almost anything to almost anyone almost anywhere. Books would come first. He wanted to build the greatest book operation on earth. To evoke the magic of buying things online, he called the company not Abracadabra but just Cadabra. But not enough people knew what it meant, and when spoken it sounded too much like ‘Cadaver’. He needed a new name. Since he loved Star Trek, he suggested the catchphrase made famous by Enterprise’s captain, Jean-Luc Picard: ‘Make it so.’ He registered MakeItSo.com as a domain name, among others. None seemed right. Besides, it would be better if the name started with one of the first letters of the alphabet, to make sure it came up quickly on internet browsers. Aard.com, Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com? Still not right.

  We’re speaking, of course, of Jeff Bezos. In late October, he was leafing through the A section of a dictionary and stumbled on the word ‘Amazon’. Yes! The world’s largest river by far – it seemed the perfect name for what he had in mind. He walked into the garage next morning, told his colleagues of the company’s new name, registered the new URL on 1 November and started trading in July the following year.

  Amazon’s rise was meteoric. With no press promotion, it was selling books across the United States and in forty-five foreign countries within thirty days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week. It went public in 1997, expanded to trade almost anything, and escaped from its concept entirely. Twenty years later, Amazon sales topped $100 billion. To make amazon.com match the Amazon, you’d have to tilt South America until the river foams white all the way to the Atlantic.

  9

  A PAINTING, TWO PLAYS AND A SUICIDE

  IN 1600, THE Amazons were firmly lodged in Europe’s consciousness, placed there by Greek history, confirmed by exploration in the New World, cemented in place by novels. Everyone just knew they had once been real, and probably still were, somewhere over some distant horizon. So it was natural for writers to mention them and artists to paint them. There are good reasons why most contributions are forgotten. They’re boring or insignificant, just re-stating well-worn themes. But every now and then, over the next three centuries, somebody produced something worth a closer look. This chapter is about three of these instances, in which the Amazons were made to carry meanings very different from anything in the ancient world.

  Prague is a beautiful city, but it has a rather ugly tradition: they throw people out of windows. That is a bit of an exaggeration. There have been three defenestrations in Prague, each separated by centuries, so you could hardly call it a tradition. The first was in 1419, when a mob supporting the ideas of the executed heretic Jan Huss slung a dozen eminent officials to the waiting crowd below, and the third was in 1948, when Communist thugs tossed the anti-Communist foreign minister Jan Masaryk to his death. Let’s focus on the middle one. In 1618 Protestant leaders defenestrated three visiting Catholic hardliners, who, rather surprisingly, survived. Later, some claimed they had been saved by divine intervention, others that they had fallen into a dung heap. The point of this story is the religions. The incident started the Thirty Years’ War, which turned the Reformation begun by Luther a century before into the most brutal and
destructive outpouring of barbarity until 1914.

  In fast-forward, the years 1618–48 made mainland Europe into a cloud chamber of rag-tag armies fighting for changing faiths, dying dynasties and rising nation-states: German Protestants, German Catholics, German warlords – for there was no Germany yet, only a kaleidoscope of states and cities – the Emperor, the Pope, the Habsburgs (with possessions across all Europe and beyond to India, Africa and the Americas), the Wittelsbachs, France, Spain, Holland, Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden and various Italian states – for there was no Italy yet either – all combining and opposing, acting and reacting, with mercenaries changing sides at the sight of a ducat. Firearms, disease and famine turned much of the continent to a wasteland. Millions died: perhaps 3 million, perhaps over 10 million. In Germany, the heart of it all, probably more than 20 per cent of the population perished, possibly up to 40 per cent. In the most extreme case, in Magdeburg in 1631, virtually the whole population of 20,000 were murdered or burned to death in their homes. Across the continent, no one counted the atrocities, let alone the dead.

  But someone recorded a little of the suffering. He was a German, Hans von Grimmelshausen, and the suffering he saw and heard about when kidnapped by Hessian troops at the age of ten in 1631 formed the basis of a novel usually referred to as Simplicissimus, short for its very long title. It was the most popular German novel of its day. Before we get to the point of all this, here in the words of the simple-minded hero is a hint of the suffering imposed on ordinary people: pillage, rape, wanton destruction, and torture, including the seventeenth-century equivalent of water-boarding: