In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  A few days later and a couple of miles across town, when I raise the same issue with Dona Rita and her daughter Lene in the presence of their two elderly family servants, the response is again uneasy. Dona Rita loved Guariba with that same intense carinho she attributes to her dead husband. Even though it has been more than ten years since she visited, that affective link is simultaneously a territorial claim and a mark of the injustice of her banishment. It is the natural beauty, the wildlife, the river, that she recalls most vividly. Dona Rita is willing to acknowledge fluvial manipulation, but she is also keen to establish its limited character. She too talks about tides and the pororoca. But her language is more guarded: nature is prepared to undergo all kinds of alterations by all kinds of people, and, yes, she says, she has seen the drastic changes. But, she adds, this is no way to think about my husband and what he built in Igarapé Guariba. These are not the things that matter.

  Let’s pause here, just for a moment. Let’s stop momentarily to ask what on earth you do with a statement like this. The blunt declaration that these are not the things that matter. A statement with which it is impossible not to both agree and disagree, fundamentally. We all guard our loved ones’ memories, defend them from calumny, resist unjust representation and narrative. Dona Rita was telling me to honor this man, to give respect to someone who still stirred such tangled feelings in all who remembered him. Because Raimundo’s remaking of nature had become too compromised—not by its unanticipated radical outcome, but by the transformed context in which it now found meaning. Dona Rita knew full well that in the power-laden geometry of international politics, the triumph of the pioneering will over Amazon nature was no longer a script that sold. Despite our differing locations, we both understood that once it began to travel the story of Igarapé Guariba would read instantly as one of deforestation and a hapless Amazon peasantry. And here we agree: this truly is not the thing that matters!

  But, Dona Rita’s refusal is also itself the sign of significance, revealing that what does count here is the very vitality of this contentious politics of nature. The incontrovertible fact is that people actually did these things, that, in Igarapé Guariba, place, nature, and locality were transformed—invented, even—through embodied practice. These micropractices of locality, these very things in which Octávio, Edinaldo, Dona Rita, the Macedos, and everyone else here are so profoundly invested, are precisely the natural-cultural histories to which this book cleaves. And for good reason. Because, as the travels that follow suggest, it is largely by the elision of the multiple agencies through which places are made that the Amazon itself, the Amazon that many of us know only as the space of a very particular nature, has come into existence.

  4

  A COUNTREY NEVER SACKT

  Guiana, 1587–1631

  Guiana and the Wild Coast—Correspondence of Native and Colonial Mappings—Ralegh, Hakluyt, and the Imperial Project—His Rapid Rise and Vapid Tumble—Failures of Science, Civility, and Knowledge—A Politics of Restraint and Equivalence—Circulations—Dialogue without Communication—The Rape of Guiana, Its Promised Lands—Difference and Similitude, Proof and Credence—The Ralegh Circle, Vernacular Science, and Scientific Imperialism—A Pullulating World—Faced with Such Nature, Words Fail Him—The Germ of the Tropical—The Plaines of Sayma Are Not What They Seem—Violence, Subjection, and the Displacement of Guiana

  A river not a region. On the edge of a place, rather than the place itself. The Amazon entered Europe as a liminal space in an unsettled cosmography.

  It hardly mattered that the Spanish had long since witnessed populous hierarchical societies as they sailed downstream and out into the Atlantic. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Amazon’s principal significance to Europeans was as the southern margin of Guiana, a region whose boundary reached from the mouth of the Orinoco, along the shore of what is now Amapá, down to the Canal do Norte.1 This was what Europeans knew as the Wild Coast, the eastern seaboard of a still mysterious territory that stretched an uncertain distance inland—at times, depending on imperial hubris, all the way to the Pacific.2 For the English who fill the pages that follow, there was little reason to distinguish between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Edmund Spenser, for example, celebrating Sir Walter Ralegh’s return from his first voyage to the Orinoco in search of El Dorado, locates the “land of gold” on the Amazon, “that huge Riuer, which doth beare his name / Of warlike Amazons, which doe possesse the same.”3

  This was not simply vague geography. The two rivers melded as sites of the spectacularly indeterminate, and both their main channels and the great landscapes between figured centrally in colonial-entrepreneurial design. For nearly fifty years, from the late 1580s to the 1630s, English, Irish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish maneuvered to establish secure footing in a region that none could convincingly claim, and to which they were drawn not only by gold, but by hardwoods, dye-stuffs, tobacco, and a more general sense of abundance.4 It was this latter that Ralegh detailed to James I in strikingly domesticated terms in his Apologie of 1618, a long, involuted letter written from Salisbury while feigning illness following his catastrophic second voyage to Guiana:

  [B]esides the excellent air, pleasantness, healthfulness, and riches, it hath plenty of corn, fruits, fish, fowl (wild and tame), beeves, horses, sheep, hogs, deers, conies, hares, tortoises, armadiles, [ig]wanas, oils, honey, wax, potatoes, sugar canes, medicaments, balsamum, simples, gums, and what not.5

  Although Ralegh’s prose would draw him into other modalities, this was a nature that invited colonization rather than mere plunder. And it was consistent with a defining characteristic of his Guiana: the competence of its native population, their self-conscious and developed political subjectivity, their recognition of the virtues of English restraint and protection, and their unjust subjugation beneath the feet of the Spanish intruder.

  Indeed, it was not just in European cosmography that this expansive Guiana achieved cohesion. Beyond the wild coastline lay a complex of shifting indigenous polities that spanned the Pakaraima uplands dividing the watersheds of the Amazon and Orinoco.6 Formed out of long-distance trade, as well as by conquest and kin-based and military alliance, here was a parallel region deeply sedimented in traveling narrative and “politically integrated in native conceptions.”7 It was a realm of active politics, sharpened by the intensifying presence of Europeans that followed Orellana’s descent of the Amazon in 1540. To the English, it was an unexpectedly volatile realm, and they were wrong-footed by the leadership and territorial changes that took place between Ralegh’s visit in 1595 and Lawrence Keymis’ return a mere six months later—reconfigurations that left them scrambling to reassemble a native alliance.

  There is, of course, no mystery to the correspondence between indigenous and European mappings. Exploration was both dialogic and textual, a fundamentally ethnographic practice.8 Ralegh, who learned Spanish specifically to read the accounts of the early expeditions, and who twice had the opportunity to test his skills on captive conquistadores, is explicit about this. His enterprise, he makes plain, is accretive and cumulative, building on the experience and authority of the Iberians who forced their way through the forests in search of El Dorado.9 And how did these ill-equipped men chart this world? Through the stories of their native interlocutors, through the calculations of encounter and the tales of invasion and flight, through the same local narratives of history and nature in which Ralegh himself would participate, through stories inhabited by the immanent spatial logic of the region.

  Guiana was the focus of English ambition in South America at a time of much-fabled English ascendancy. Between 1550 and 1630, a London-based alliance of merchants, gentry, and scholars effectively reinvented the English nation, creating an emergent imperial power out of an island backwater on the cold periphery of a disdainful Europe—an island barely present in the centers of continental trade and whose own domestic commerce was largely controlled by outsiders.10 Yet, although the Elizabethan age is today recalled in nati
onal narratives as a triumphal era of maritime expansion, this was a period marked by political vacillation and by the reluctance of the queen and her successor, James I, to respond materially to the efforts of the imperialist lobby. As a result, English ventures in the New World were to suffer repeated failure and personal disaster.

  Of all the failures, the most conclusive was Guiana. Of the personal disasters, the most compelling was that of Ralegh, which it contained. When the elderly courtier’s flight to France was intercepted on the Thames and his captors rifled his pockets before removing him to the Tower, it was, symptomatically, mementos of Guiana that they discovered—maps, ingots, a spleenstone, an “idol of Gold”—the fetishes of obsession.11

  Yet, to many contemporary and modern observers, Ralegh’s two voyages to Guiana were of little moment. The first, wrote Vincent Harlow in 1928, “merely consisted in traversing the Orinoco from its estuary to the cataract on the Caroni, a journey with which every Spanish soldier at Trinidad was perfectly familiar.”12 The second, in 1617–18, although involving a substantial force, was even less effectual, and Ralegh himself spent most of the time cabinbound off Trinidad, feverish and exhausted, anxiously awaiting word from the expeditionaries. No gold was recovered, no settlement founded, no enduring alliances established.

  It is true that Ralegh returned from South America with insufficient material rewards to win his argument at Court. And it may well be that to imperial dreamers the eventual claiming of British Guiana was, as Pablo Ojer puts it, no more than a consolation prize.13 But there is much more here than such narrowly instrumental assessments would suggest. Ralegh’s voyages and his vivid 1595 account, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, proved an enduring colonial inspiration. In the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century, they guaranteed that the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon were thrown into violent and messy imperial competition, a definitive disaster for those already living in the region. Reinvoked in the nineteenth century, they stood for lyrical precedent, the lineage through which the English renewed their territorial claims within reconfigured geographies.14 At a moment when Europeans were still formulating a language through which the New World would enter the vernacular imagination, Ralegh issued an invitation to a region and a nature at once familiar and strange, an unsettling yet alluring vision of what would become tropical America.15

  DESTINY AND DESIRE

  From the defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the accession of James I in 1603, English activity on the high seas was almost entirely dedicated to privateering. Ralegh’s complementary roles as a principal sponsor of English maritime “picory” and chief architect of the Virginia and Guiana campaigns indicate the extent to which trade and plunder were entwined in these early imperial ventures.16 Northern South America and the Antilles were prime sites for opportunistic pillage, and in the Discourse of Western Planting (1584), a foundational appeal to the Crown to stand behind American exploration and settlement, Richard Hakluyt the younger drew particular attention to the Wild Coast:

  All that parte of America eastwarde from Cumana vnto the River of Saint Augustine in Bresill conteyneth in length alongest to the sea side xxj C [2,100] miles, In whiche compasse and tracte there is neither Spaniarde, Portingale nor any Christian man but onely the Caribes, Indians, and saluages. In which places is greate plentie of golde, perle, and precious stones.17

  Hakluyt wrote the Discourse “at the requeste and direction” of his patron, Ralegh. It was an important state paper, initially intended for the most restricted audience, and it represented the programmatic expression of the expansionist party at Court. It is here that Hakluyt introduces the two arguments repeatedly marshaled in support of the Guiana enterprise: absence of prior possession and presence of wealth beyond measure. In advancing these claims to the queen and Privy Council, the members of the influential circle gathered around Ralegh sought to formalize English maritime practice, and simultaneously to disrupt the aura of Spanish invincibility that underwrote national marginalization prior to the defeat of the Armada.18 They understood clearly that without significant state financing the prospects for New World colonization were slim. Yet, with a nervous eye to future Spanish wars, Elizabeth was diffident. She rewarded Ralegh with a knighthood and Hakluyt with a prebend. But that was all.

  Ralegh would repeat these same claims, again and again, right up until his silencing in late 1618. Even after Elizabeth had died, as if refusing to admit the changed circumstances of the Jacobean era, he continued to press a policy that could lead only to confrontation with a Spain whose ambassador now had the run of the English Court and a king deep in negotiation to marry the Infanta. At the last, both the logic and substance of Guiana eluded him. Having failed for so long to deliver on their promise, the claims he promoted with such bluster became themselves the basis of the charges used to justify his execution. Hadn’t he intended war with Spain from the beginning? Didn’t he know all along that the gold of El Dorado was just for fools?

  The second voyage to Guiana came at the end of a long period of imprisonment. Sentenced to death by James for conspiracy and consigned to the Tower, Ralegh wrote his monumental History of the World (1614) to demonstrate the vanity of kings. His return to the Wild Coast took the form of a parole, and it was James who set the terms. In concluding the Treaty of London with Spain in 1604, the king had withdrawn Crown protection from any English who trespassed into Spanish-held territory. English adventurers might sail to the Wild Coast—a region of ambiguous sovereignty—but were then subject to Spanish attack and, should they retaliate, to charges of piracy on their return.19 Only a highly profitable outcome could revise this calculus. In Ralegh’s case, rehabilitation was possible only should he both find the gold mine he promised and avoid confrontation with the Spanish soldiers billeted in its approach.

  In the event, the expedition, a large-scale affair involving at least a thousand men, was even more of a disaster than anticipated. No mine was found, the Spanish garrison of San Thomé was unprofitably sacked in the inglorious episode that claimed Ralegh’s eldest surviving son, and as the Destiny limped home, in a clumsy and pathetic coda, Lawrence Keymis, his closest aide, first shot, then stabbed himself to death, adrift in love, loyalty, and humiliation.

  Persuaded by a mutinous crew that flight for France, Newfoundland, or other potential safe harbor was out of the question, Ralegh returned to London and, with hair disheveled and clothes unkempt, climbed the awaiting scaffold. The decapitation scene, as a number of biographers have pointed out, was among the finest that he played, even if, by its nature, it simultaneously denied him the opportunity to savor the laudatory reviews.20 No matter, it seems the death of the sustaining dream had killed him even before he faced the executioner’s axe.

  The failure of the second voyage to Guiana casts the trials of the first into tragic relief. But we should resist any sense of gathering futility. There was nothing to tell Ralegh and his associates that the fatal vision of unlimited wealth in Guiana was a chimera. Indeed, the lesson of the still recent sackings of the Aztec and Inca empires was that treasures inconceivable in their vastness awaited men bold enough in spirit.21 As Ralegh himself reasons: “although these reportes [of El Dorado] may seem straunge, yet if wee consider the many millions which are daily brought out of Peru into Spaine, wee may easely beleeve the same.”22

  Interest in the Americas reflected a late realization that the bulldog strategy of intercepting and harrying the Spanish treasure fleet as it passed through the Caribbean was a poor substitute for the possession of equivalent sources of specie.23 Despite the decline in New World gold and silver exports in this period, the inflationary instability of the Spanish economy, and the rapidity with which American bullion flowed from Castile to the finance houses of northwest Europe (and thence, in Fernand Braudel’s chilling phrase, to the “necropolis” of Asia), the ambitious and patriotic Ralegh circle remained dazzled by the glint of precious metal and dedicated to usurping the Spanish monop
oly.24

  It was Hakluyt who provided this project’s most public expression. His massive Principal Navigations (1589) was a striking embodiment of global ambition, conjuring imperial precedent from the English failure to capitalize on the fifteenth-century fishing voyages to the Brazilian coast from Bristol and on Cabot’s trips to Newfoundland. His work was the earliest English institutional welding of science, commerce, and empire, part of the effort to pressure a Crown happy to benefit from private initiative but unwilling to venture its own diplomatic or financial resources. More decisively, Hakluyt brought together merchants and adventurers in a textual juxtaposition that materialized concretely in the innovative joint-stock companies of the period.25 As a propagandist for expansion, he integrated the rhetorics of economy and travel with such skill that he was to begin the nineteenth century lionized as a prophet of free trade and to end it as the equally vaunted giant of imperial ambition.26 In an important sense, this malleability of Hakluyt’s reputation merely demonstrated the capacity of the Elizabethan “golden age” to function as a shifting signifier of nostalgic glory in later British politics. But it also accurately reflected the ties between commerce and militarism in Hakluyt and Ralegh’s aggressively imperial mercantilism.

  In March 1584, soon after the disappearance of his half brother Humphrey Gilbert off Newfoundland in the first concerted English attempt at American colonization, Ralegh received royal charter to find and settle what would ultimately become Virginia. It was the year before war broke out with Spain, and the queen’s letters patent urged him