In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  According to Buarque, this had all happened in the 1820s, before the explosion in rubber prices that was to transform many of these riverine towns, and at a time when the sugar economy dominated the southern channel of the Amazon estuary.12 The petulant cruelty exhibited in this slapstick vignette of colonial life—in its topsy-turvy ironies like a scene from a period-dress telenovela—was, Buarque establishes, anything but random. With a sudden shift in tone, he leads us from this framing episode to the story of the canal itself:

  There’s more to tell about this Italian. When he opened the Canal it was those slaves that he didn’t like that he put to work on the last stretch. So when the Mojú poured into the Mucajatuba there were those unfortunate souls, swept away by the rush of the waters and dragged into the fearsome abyss.13

  All at once, Buarque sweeps us up in the rushing stream of modern Amazonian history, the story of the canal collapsing into tragedy. We are in terra anfíbia, an amphibious universe, where the lines between earth and water, between living and dying, are friable and fluid.14 Or look at it another way: he has taken us to a place where the casual waste of life in pursuit of overbearing engineering schemes is almost a trope, with its own eclectic genre—read, for instance, Márcio Souza’s Mad Maria or H. M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle, stories of the building of the Madeira–Mamoré railroad, a famously gruesome episode from the rubber period invoking corruption, disease, brutality, and the perverse utopianism of the metropolitan tycoon; or watch Werner Herzog’s delirious Fitzcarraldo, or better still, Les Blank’s disbelieving commentary, Burden of Dreams.15 Or a third way to hear what Buarque is saying: how, as a liberal modern, he calls up the now-standard geographical metaphor, the canal as another instance of the lawless workings of capital on the periphery, looking too similar to recent massacres of landless workers at Corumbiara and Eldorado de Carajás (close, as it happens, by road as well as history to Igarapé-Miri). And the rationalization that often emerges as the palliative corollary to such willful brutality arrives with abruptness—again—in Buarque’s account, although this time as anticlimax. “On the other hand,” he writes, “this barbarian provided a great service to the region, protecting the little vessels from the furies of the Bay of Tocantins.”16

  But Buarque’s is not the last word on the canal either. Eladio Lobato’s Caminho de canoa pequena, a very different kind of book, tells the official story of Igarapé-Miri: an institutional history of its founding, an annotated genealogy of its elite, a tour of its natural wealth, and a chronicle of the municipality’s steady progress toward modernity. The canal holds a special place in this story and Lobato retells Buarque’s narrative in a very different register:

  The work was started from the Rio Igarapé-Miri on May 21st 1821, and it was only on the seventh of August of the following year, when there were just slightly more than a hundred meters to go, that excavation began from the Rio Moju side. However, it so happened that the team of slaves working from the Rio Igarapé-Miri left a fragile bank of about four meters standing in the middle of this narrow passage, when, on November 23rd 1823, while the slaves were digging, the Moju flooded suddenly and violently, at the same time that a swollen tide provoked the so-called phenomenon of the POROROCA, which tore down the bank.17

  Lobato goes on to list the eighteen slaves who died in this tragedy (out of the thirty-seven put to work by Carambola—presumably the entire group working from the Rio Moju).

  The pororoca is indeed a phenomenon: an intense tidal reflux occurring in summer, most notoriously on the Amapá coast near the mouth of the Rio Araguarí. In L. H. Myers’ melodramatic novel The Clio (1925), Professor Brown, the mysterious traveling scientist who offers commentary on the region’s physique générale as he steams into tropical intrigue with an assorted party of rich adventurers and vacationers, succeeds in capturing its mythic force:

  The great estuary up which we have been steaming all day is little more than a backwater of the main stream of the Amazon, which flows north of Marajó. There the current fights with the Atlantic tides and creates a dangerous bore. Three waves which are sometimes as much as twelve feet high rush up the river, sweeping over the low islands with devastating force. No-one lives in those parts…. This part of the earth is not yet ready to be the abode of man.18

  In Lobato’s narrative, the pororoca is the town’s alibi as well as Carambola’s, transmuting crime into fate at this formative moment of municipal history. But right at the end of Lobato’s list of slave victims, there is a clue that tips the scales toward Buarque’s account. The last-named casualty is Pedro Salgado, “called Salgado [Salty/Spicy], [because he] was constantly whipped owing to his defiance of his master and overseers.”19

  Neither Buarque nor Lobato leaves much doubt about the local economic importance of the canal. When Buarque visited Igarapé-Miri in April 1905, he found it a depressing backwater of a place, the future of which, he thought, depended entirely on the widening of the canal to allow free passage for large ships bound between Belém and the Rio Tocantins. In this era of highly active commerce in the eastern Amazon, all kinds of vessels were carrying Brazil nuts from Marabá and rubber (and later the inferior caucho latex) from Conceição do Araguaia and stations along the Rio Tocantins out into the Bay of Tocantins and on to Belém for distribution around Brazil and overseas. Yet Buarque’s boat was too large to get through the canal, and he had to switch to something smaller, suggesting that Carambola’s channel had closed over considerably by this point.

  Buarque saw that the potential benefits of the canal were not washing up on the bedraggled waterfront at Igarapé-Miri. Although it should have brought profits to the town through service industries, taxes, and toll payments, income from the canal was instead flowing out past the small interior community to arrive in Belém. When they did use the canal, boats carrying sugar from the interior mills and Brazil nuts and rubber from the Tocantins sailed straight on through, heading directly for the Moju and the capital. There seemed to be little in Igarapé-Miri to detain them. In a tale characteristic of both the sugar trade and the historically important extractive economies, Igarapé-Miri, the provincial municipality with little political clout, failed to capitalize on its costly engineering triumph. Profits from forest and farm either stayed in the interior or drained out to the capital.

  But it is Carambola, the engineer, the canal-dreamer, the vindictive slave master, who captures my imagination. Lobato, by no means a straightforward apologist, points out that this nickname came from the star fruit—of which the engineer was so fond that he would order brutally flogged any of his slaves found picking it on his land without permission. Yet, where Buarque talks of Carambola as an arbitrary tyrant, Lobato portrays him also as a fugitive outsider. Carambola, he tells us, was to live out much of the latter part of his life afflicted with leprosy, alone in a shack at the mouth of an isolated creek, excommunicated for ordering the beating of the local priest, shunned even by travelers passing by his remote homestead, visited by a single black man, Felisberto, “the only person who had the courage to see him.”20 Nevertheless, in a discreet gesture, public history and the municipality of Igarapé-Miri have perhaps been more generous: the contemporary visitor who knows that a star fruit was once also a man finds the immigrant immortalized in the principal thoroughfare leading off the town square: Avenida Carambola.

  Carambola’s biography makes compelling reading. As a small child, he was one of the 11,000 Portuguese colonists evacuated from Morocco when the garrison at Mazagão fell to the Moors in March 1769. These 340 families were shipped first to Belém, from where most were sent off to strategic outposts of the Brazilian colony. Some stayed in the capital; a large number crossed the estuary to the recently founded garrison town of Macapá, and almost half of these went farther into the forests of Amapá to settle the rice colony of a new Mazagão.21 There are, however, no records that I have seen of refugees from this debacle heading into the hinterlands south of Belém and no accounts of how the child Carambola, th
e illiterate son of a Portuguese man and an African slave, grew up to become the largest producer of timber in this part of the Amazon.

  At the very least, Carambola’s mercantile universe would have stretched between his immediate forests and the fast-growing city of Belém, the regional market nexus and administrative center of the vast province of Grão-Pará. Although he lived in the municipality of Igarapé-Miri and married from the town’s society register, the nature of the extractive economy in Amazonia would have compelled Carambola to establish debt-credit relationships in Belém that effectively bypassed a dependence on local commerce. The canal promised safe passage of forest products to his urban patrões (patrons/buyer-suppliers) and it must have seemed a presumptuous venture for a local merchant. But Carambola, we know, had already crossed oceans.

  Regional mercantile networks extended well beyond the individual. In fact, each person in the municipality would have been caught at different points and in different ways in the tangle of economized personalist relations called aviamento (from the verb aviar, to supply).22 But, as well as imposing constraints, such relationships always offer opportunities. In Carambola’s case, those reciprocal dependencies expressed in his links to powerful interests in Belém may have been what enabled him to establish his fractious autonomy from the normative morality of his municipal peers. Did he die out there on the creek, racked by disease, fine clothes in tatters, only Felisberto to berate? With a finely understated irony, Lobato completes the tale:

  After many years, the excommunication was finally lifted by Father Caetano Brandão, the bishop of Pará and interim governor, who was constructing a large warship in Belém, and who needed a quantity of timber that only Carambola was able to supply.23

  Despite its individualist inception, once opened the canal was effectively public property. Successive provincial governments funded a series of improvements and maintenance works, some on a quite significant scale. In 1841, for example, only twenty years after its inauguration, thirty workers spent sixty days clearing the canal of wood and debris and shoring up its banks with stakes. Around this time, the municipality began levying a toll on vessels taking the route.

  Although the Canal de Igarapé-Miri was the most important artificial waterway in this part of Pará, it was far from being the only one. Lobato comments that public money was readily forthcoming from a state administration that always showed itself willing to help such engineering projects (“sempre se faz constar as ajudas às escavações”).24 His review of funding for public works affecting the municipality makes this clear. Local and provincial government officials were preoccupied with maintaining free access through a number of canals and streams in the area during the second half of the nineteenth century. Relatively large-scale works were financed throughout this period: in 1849, along with the canal at Igarapé-Miri, maintenance money was given for the same purpose to the town of Salinas; in 1899, the year following the very grand opening of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Governor José Paes de Carvalho signed a law providing money to clear not only the Canal de Igarapé-Miri, but streams at Suruú, at Soure on Marajó Island, and to drain a swamp close to the town of Porto de Mós near the mouth of the Rio Xingu. Lobato, concerned only with laws and decrees that included money specifically earmarked for his municipality, details ten projects of this type between 1841 and 1899. Then nothing for fifty years, as the region sank into decline in the aftermath of the rubber frenzy, and the canal rapidly shrank to the sorry state in which it was encountered by Buarque.25

  Having read about the canal in Wallace, Bates, Buarque, Baptista de Moura, and Lobato, I was happy to reach Igarapé-Miri and see that, yes, the cut was still there. Nowadays, though, the journey is much easier, and I arrived in just a few hours, a crowded ferry ride and bus trip from Belém.

  Igarapé-Miri is still a small town, a staging post for even smaller interior settlements such as the irresistibly named Rio das Flores (known for the local clay that supplies its roofing tile factories). There is a lively waterfront crammed with brightly painted riverboats brimming with paying passengers and goods coming from Belém, waiting for the tide to carry them upstream from the modern municipal jetty. These days, though, it seems that most traffic reaches Igarapé-Miri by road, and behind the jetty is a cavern of a bus station. There is also a handsome white church, a conveniently central place for teenagers to hang out. A few stalls selling beer, snacks and sweets line one side of the dusty plaza. Behind these, the town extends a few hundred yards along the river with one-story wooden houses standing back from the slatted boardwalk. Walking this way in the mid-afternoon sun, I first passed a row of busy workshops turning out boats of various sizes and then overgrown, muddy fields as the riverbank curves off to follow the course of the canal.

  Boat-building with local timber is clearly one of the main economic activities in Igarapé-Miri today. But there are still fifty-two sugar mills in the municipality, some sending cane to Belém to be crushed into sweet juice, most producing cachaça. This is the bitter residue of a healthy market in artisanal liquor that collapsed when manufacturers of cheap, industrial rum from São Paulo established road contact with Belém and, repeating the pattern of Brazilian sugar history, drove local producers even farther into the margins. More important now for Igarapé-Miri and many of the other towns that line the estuary and dot the coast of Marajó within striking distance of Belém and Macapá are the trades in the fruit and heart-of-palm of the açaí palm, a floodplain staple and an urban fancy whose cultural and economic role in the contemporary estuary is hard to overestimate. Despite its immersion in the açaí boom, Igarapé-Miri has little of the bustle of its larger neighbor, Abaetetuba, a town that is working this expanding market with a vengeance.

  On making the obligatory hour-long homage through the canal, I was impressed by the amount of traffic. After a number of restorations, the canal is now fully as wide as the Rio Igarapé-Miri Velho into which it flows. Workers from town were on their way to and from the large sawmill on the Rio Moju, cargo boats and barges of all sizes were heading downstream to Belém laden with Brazil nuts, sawn timber, and sacks of açaí, returning weighted down with household goods for sale here and along the Rio Tocantins. Everyone was keeping to their side as if on a two-lane highway. Nowadays, it seems, there is no need for maintenance work on this route: the huge timber barges clear any debris out of the channel as they push their way through. Vessels of this size must play havoc with those residents of Igarapé-Miri who intensified fishing and shrimping activity on the canal, even moved out here to live, in response to the evaporating job opportunities caused by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s Plano Real currency stabilization. If you look carefully, there are low breaks in the forest wall where people have cut narrow channels to take them by canoe to houses and fields set back from the main stream.

  Something else you may notice traveling through the canal is a change in its microgeography. Starting at Igarapé-Miri, the broad channel meanders gently in a beguilingly natural manner. The forest on each side is characteristic of the estuarine floodplain: a confusion of species often associated with human occupation—açaí, buriti, imbaúba, pau mulato, and, less decoratively, bamboo. Once in a short while there is a wooden house, typically raised on low stilts to stand above the flood. Then, about ten minutes before you reach the Rio Moju, there’s a subtle change. The width, the vegetation, and the houses remain consistent, but the channel stops meandering, and, for the first time, takes on the aspect of a canal: it runs straight, like a Roman road. Geraldo, the boat owner piloting us through, explained that from here on in the channel had been dug out of the forest. From Igarapé-Miri up to this point, the slave workers had followed the course of a tiny, seasonally navigable creek, cutting, clearing, digging, and widening as they went. But from here, it was an “escavação,” an excavation. Indeed, he said, pointing down over the side of the boat, at low tide you still need to beware of the strong currents from the submerged waterfall that marks the headwaters of this
stream.

  So it would have been here that the mud caved in, sweeping away those eighteen slaves sent to die by Carambola. And that story of the slave deaths (with its evocative coda in the turbulent waters that mark their graves) was the recurring motif that had sedimented in popular commentary, preserving the troubled memory of Carambola, and fixing at least one meaning of the canal among the people I talked to in Igarapé-Miri: “Muita gente morreu … Aquela época dos escravos era dura” (“So many people died … Those days of slavery were really hard”).

  THE ARAPIUNS BASIN

  More than 500 miles upstream, on the floodplain that surrounds the city of Santarém, economic history has been quite different from that in the estuary where Igarapé Guariba and Igarapé-Miri are located. Rather than the sugar trade giving way to timber and açaí, as at Igarapé-Miri, here the trajectory has been from jute, introduced in the 1930s by Japanese immigrants, to extensive cattle and buffalo pasture, and the human depopulation that follows in its wake.26

  In their typology of Amazonian floodplains, botanists João Murça Pires and Ghillean Prance distinguish these “true” várzea floodplains washed by the Andean sediments of the whitewater rivers from the flooded igapó forests of clear and blackwater rivers such as the Tapajós, the Arapiuns, and the Rio Negro.27 This is a helpful clarification if you want to map an economic geography of the region, as the links among rivers, soil, and vegetation can be almost linear in Amazonia.28 Classification based on optical properties of rivers is standard here, in both academic and local notations, and the terminology is more than descriptive. The turbidity of whitewater rivers indicates their high silt and biotic content. Clear water rivers, generally flowing from the harder pre-Cambrian shields, are transparent because of a lack of particulate nutrients. Blackwater rivers take their color from the often toxic humic and fulvic plant acids that leach in soil organic matter from their terra firme (upland forest) watersheds.29 Logically enough, these blackwater and clear water rivers, the so-called rivers of hunger, have greatly reduced animal populations, and, as one indication of this, on arrival there is immediate relief from the armies (and air forces!) of biting flies and mosquitoes that make life on the whitewater Amazon so uncomfortable.30