In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Yet, where we could expect triumphalism in the imperial vision, Ralegh’s prose suggests insecurity and doubt, the worry that such Arcadian landscapes may not be quite what they seem. De Bry’s engraving captures this hesitation well, the river a heaving mass of classical monsters through which they must pass to enter the garden. It picks up on the textual anxiety that emerges through Ralegh’s disbelieving subordinate clauses: “as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose … as if they had been used to a keepers call.” Surrounded by serpents in paradise, the intruders have their first casualty. One of the crew, “a very proper yoong fellow,” is beguiled by the scenery to dive in for a swim and at once, before their eyes, is savagely dismembered by alligators.124 Et in Arcadia Ego.

  As if to confirm Ralegh’s unease, recent archaeological research presents these Orinoco savannas and the immense Venezuelan llanos of the “plaines of the Sayma” surveyed by his scouting party as areas of intense pre-Columbian manipulation, gridded by networks of raised and ridged fields, mounds, and causeways, and deep in a native history of cultivation.125 Similar grasslands cover huge expanses of the region—perhaps 15 to 20 million hectares of the Amazonian terra firme—and there is considerable uncertainty about their origins.126 Even if, as botanists João Murça Pires and Ghillean Prance maintain, these areas predate the arrival of people in tropical South America, it seems inconceivable that their extent and ecology have not been greatly modified by the human use of fire in their management.127 Writing in 1596, Keymis describes such practices south of the Orinoco in the context of native defensive action against the Spanish, observing that “the Iwarewakeri have nourished grasse in all places, where passage is, these three yeeres, and … it is at this present so high, as some of the trees; which they meane to burne, so soone as the Spaniard shall bee in danger thereof.”128

  In addition to the direct material aid that native leaders like Topiawari gave Europeans—food, shelter, orientation, and military information and support—there was also a less obvious indigenous contribution to the colonizing process. By planting and burning, by flood-control and earthworking, by attracting game animals such as deer, by concentrating valued plant species in accessible sites, native Americans created a landscape that Europeans were able to recognize and understand, a place that offered the sudden sensation of being at home in the world.129

  Early modern European travelers were already halfway there. The erasure of people and labor that begins in the letters patent drew spontaneously on the eagerness of voyagers to locate the earthly paradise. Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, the captains of Ralegh’s 1584 reconnaissance of the Carolinas, find that “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour.”130 Where Montaigne’s cannibals lived, “the whole day is spent in dancing.”131 Ralegh’s Tivitivas “never eate of anie thing that is set or sowen.”132

  But how to avoid fatalism? There was nothing inevitable about the terrible disaster that befell native Americans. Although so much was ranged against them, the future was still unwritten, and—hard as it is—we must try to imagine the anxieties of the irresolute moment. Nevertheless, there was classical tragedy on the Plaines of Sayma: Guianans achieved the English ideal of rendering the artifice involved in the manufacture of these virgin landscapes entirely invisible. Free of both the epistemological dichotomization of nature and culture, and of English notions of Arcadia, indigenous Americans produced a landscape that fulfilled the colonialists’ nostalgic yearnings for nature at its most amenably pristine. In doing so, they unwittingly created the conditions for the imaginative and material dispossession of their own golden land.

  I have a favorite passage in The Discoverie. Reading it now confirms what I have suspected all along: that at some point, like so many others, I fell for Ralegh’s charms. I fell for his charms and I fell for his frailties. And his Guiana became a part of my Amazon.

  I include the passage at length here, partly because it is such wonderful writing and partly because it is perhaps the one moment in which Ralegh finds a unity in his experience of Guianan nature, a moment when the angels and the demons, the rapture and the horror, collapse into each other’s arms, creating their own kind of terrible peace. It is the closest he will get to El Dorado, the farthest point he reaches in Guiana, and it is not really very far. He must transform defeat into accomplishment, to make the text somehow confound the failure of the voyage. It is a passage of complex beauty. As always, the language is tactile and immediate, and Ralegh draws us skillfully into his experience, sharing the excitement, the trepidation, the comradeship, the vulnerability, the wonder, and the inevitable disintegration. He is tired, but he is running up the hill:

  When we ronne to the tops of the first hils of the plaines adjoyning to the river, we behelde that wonderfull breach of waters, which ranne down Caroli: and might from that mountaine see the river how it ran in three parts, above twentie miles of, and there appeared some ten or twelve overfals in sight, every one as high over the other as a Church tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of waters made it seeme, as if it had beene all covered over with a great shower of rayne: and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had risen over some great towne. For mine owne part I was well perswaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footeman, but the rest were all so desirous to goe neere the said straunge thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better discerne the same. I never saw a more beawtifull countrey, nor more lively prospectes, hils so raised heere and there over the vallies, the river winding into divers braunches, the plaines adjoyning without bush or stubble, all faire greene grasse, the ground of hard sand easy to march on, eyther for horse or foote, the deare crossing in every path, the birds towardes the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes & herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching on the rivers side, the ayre fresh with a gentle easterlie wind, and every stone that we stooped to pick up, promised eyther golde or silver by its complexion … and yet we had no meanes but with our daggers and fingers to teare them out heere and there.133

  It is the earthly paradise, home of the gold for which they have endured so many trials. And, as so often, Ralegh gives us an image of irresistible potentiality, spiraling into defeat. It is a prophetic and self-negating scene, it is the death of all pretense: the language continues to promise possession, but the adventurers merely grovel in the dirt, their aspirations pitifully base, framed by the transcendent glories of the New World.

  NEVER SACKT

  In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, James Williamson has usefully told us, an interested observer “might well have predicted that Guiana was the destined chief sphere of English colonization.”134 That energies would then turn so decisively to Virginia had much to do with the lack of Crown support and the (minimal but sufficient, given James’ policy) Spanish response. In the face of such uncertainties, merchants put their capital firmly behind the northern ventures—despite the potential returns from Guianan tobacco, a considerably more profitable item than its Virginia equivalent.135

  Although Guiana was still of interest in 1617, by choosing to enter via the Orinoco, Ralegh was already sailing against the tide of colonial enterprise. In the twenty years since The Discoverie had captured the attention of English, Dutch, and Irish adventurers, interest had drifted to the southern part of the region, and settlers were now heading to the Rio Oiapoque—the present border between Amapá and French Guiana—and to the Canal do Norte.136 Spanish power was less evident in this area, and settlers negotiated and traded among themselves in an atmosphere free from military engagement and the constraints of the chartered companies. As this suggests, the commodities that attracted the settlers were more mundane than those promised by El Dorado. John Wilson, one of the ten survivors of Charles Leigh’s failed Oiapoque colony of 1604–6, included timber, dyes, pepper, cotton,
flax, oils, gums, wax, tobacco, sugar, and feathers “such as Ladies doe weare in their hats” in his list of tradable resources of the area.137 Although the golden kingdom had not disappeared from mental maps, it was being steadily displaced by more conventional enterprise.

  In the Tower, c. 1615

  Leigh had followed the transatlantic route established in 1596 by Keymis and by Leonard Berry, another Ralegh captain, in the following year. The standard crossing, a relatively short and easy one, now ended with landfall at the mouth of the Rio Araguarí, just north of the Amazon itself. Initially, this southern route had been determined by the effort to find unguarded access to Lake Manoa, but it also brought the entire Wild Coast and its resources to the attention of the settlers. John Ley, a “lone trader,” who had trailed Keymis out in 1597, visited the Oiapoque but also turned south, entering the Canal do Norte on an exploration that took him all the way to the mouth of the Xingu.138

  It was voyages like this, and the increasingly ambitious attempts to secure strategic landmarks by building forts and defense works, that would finally attract the attention of the Portuguese. Having recently displaced the French from Maranhão, they established the fort of Belém-do-Pará in 1616. Their suppression of the native population both near São Luís and around their new base sparked a general Indian rebellion that spread rapidly to Marajó and the Amazon estuary.139 The ferocious response of Bento Maciel Parente, the Portuguese governor, was doubly effective. His destruction and enslavement of the Tupinamba and other native groups between 1616 and 1621 inspired such widespread terror among native Amazonians that it removed the logistical basis for northern European settlement. Native Americans were no longer prepared to risk collaboration with English, Irish, or Dutch. The sack of Trinidad and capture of Berrio that had stood Ralegh in such good stead with Topiawari had been drastically superseded. The politics of nominal equivalence were dead and irrecoverable. In the decade after 1623, a ruthless Portuguese campaign led by Pedro Teixeira forced all foreign rivals out of the estuary.140

  For all intents and purposes, this was also the end of Guiana. Its imperial rationale displaced, we can trace its gradual disappearance from European cartography and incorporation within an expansive, if variable, Amazonian regionalism. Although the boundaries seem secure and the dark blob of Ralegh’s Manoa still fills the central space, the inscription on the cartouche of Blaeu’s map of 1638 reads “The Region of GUIANA or Amazon,” an index of ambivalent and shifting territory.141 This is the beginning of a long retreat as Guiana falls back behind the borders of the northerly nation-states, leaving only a vestigial persistence as an arcane usage in scholarly ethnohistory.142 When the English finally return to northern South America 200 years later, it is again in the idiom of discovery, following Ralegh’s gloried footsteps yet beginning anew, with histories rewritten and landscapes pristine, arriving once more to claim the riches of a virgin land.

  5

  THE USES OF BUTTERFLIES

  Bates of the Amazons, 1848–1859

  A Hydrographic Region—The Cabanagem, Another Region—Multiple Taxonomies and Taxonomic Immanence—“Where Are the Horrors?”—The Mimesis for Which He Is Famous—Unglamorous Beginnings but a Presumptuous Agenda—Destabilizing Scientific Hierarchy—Popular Science—A Programmatic Landscape—Race, Nature, and Difference—Liberty, Independence, and Yearning—Centers of Calculation, Cycles of Accumulation—The Collection as Region-Maker—The Power of Numbers—Overdeterminations of Spatial Practice—Mimesis and Epistemological Hybridities—Those Pervasive Instabilities

  In 1863, when Henry Walter Bates published the now famous account of his eleven years in northern South America, there was still no obvious way of naming the spaces from which he had recently returned. Bates opted to call his book The Naturalist on the River Amazons, revealing just how much the great river had captured contemporary imaginations.

  By tying himself so firmly to the river, Bates laid claim to its most alluring quality: the capacity to transgress and remake not only space, but the boundaries of geography, biology, culture, and politics. As the maps he commissioned to accompany his narrative made clear, in doing so he was swept away in the currents of an irresistible hydrography.

  When Bates first crossed the Atlantic in 1848 on the barque Mischief, the Amazon was still largely unmapped beyond the estuary and only spottily occupied by non-Indians.1 For the second time, European explorers found themselves—in Humboldt’s phrase—on “the New Continent,” a world reborn by the collapse of Iberian influence in the Americas and the coincident re-visioning of matter through the optic of the natural sciences.2 By no means, though, was this unimagined territory. The northeastern reaches of what Bates sketched as “the Basin of the Amazons” were emerging as a semi-autarkic economy with particularly close ties to Europe, and, as we know, they had long been present in metropolitan consciousness as the ambiguous location of rich and seductive resources, of a super-abundant nature, and of potential settlement. They had also, since Brazilian independence in 1822, fostered an intensifying political regionalism that in 1835 spilled over into revolt, rapidly setting fires raging throughout the countryside as a chaotic and fluctuating alliance of Indians and slaves plunged the huge province of Grão-Pará into the vortex of the Cabanagem rebellion. This latter, though, was not the region-making in which Henry Bates participated.3 More than many contemporary travelers, Bates acknowledged the continuing shock of the Cabanagem, and its after-tremors regularly agitate his narrative. Yet, the region in which he saw himself traveling and that he brought back with him to Europe was only tangentially formed from these histories. Instead, Bates’ Amazons was nourished in a matrix of his own moral and philosophical formation, the institutional and epistemological tensions of Victorian natural science, and the everyday practices of natural historical fieldwork.

  Nineteenth-century naturalists traveled through a world of emergent taxonomies, a world in which nature’s superficial disorder merely masked its immanent logic. New ways of figuring the distinctions between humans and nature that had developed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had been powerfully expressed in Linnaeus’ Systema naturae (1753), had underwritten innovation in the physical and chemical sciences, agriculture, navigation, and allopathic medicine to make the alien and unsettling nature that had so troubled Ralegh increasingly pliant and predictable.4 Bates set out on his adventure from a Europe flush with new habits of thought. Innovative classificatory schema were sweeping up race as well as the non-human biologies of botany and zoology and were simultaneously plotting new global geographies through the hierarchical taxa of spatial scale.5 Despite being a process that relied on and, in fact, created particularity and difference, Victorian region-making emerged from the contradictions of a self-consciously universalizing and domesticating metropolitan science. It is in the context of these transformations that we can understand Bates’ disappointment on arrival in Brazil. “Where are the dangers and horrors of the tropics?” he wrote home to his friend Edwin Brown. “I find none of them.”6

  MIMESIS AND ALTERITIES

  It was Amazonian butterflies and beetles that turned Henry Bates into the leading entomologist of his day and created a man who, along with his friend and temporary traveling companion Alfred Russel Wallace, still dominates the story of European entanglement in the region. Bates spent the eleven years from 1848 to 1859 in the forests, towns, and savannas of northern South America, frequently working in places no European scientist had previously set foot, assembling and cataloguing a vast natural history collection that was dominated by insect and bird specimens, but that also promised other treasures—human hair, for one thing—with a more ethnological appeal. On his return to England, he wrote The Naturalist, an account widely considered the pre-eminent Victorian narrative of Amazonian natural history, and he secured the coveted position of assistant secretary at the recently formed Royal Geographical Society (RGS), a post he held for the remainder of his life. This final, metropolitan phase of Ba
tes’ career placed him squarely at the institutional center of British imperial science (as well as of nascent academic geography) and makes explicit some of the connections between imperial policy and biological fieldwork that are often submerged in the celebratory narratives of Amazon exploration.7

  Back from the Amazons, c. 1859

  Bates is well known to modern biologists as the discoverer of “Batesian mimicry.” He was collecting at Óbidos, not far from Santarém on the middle Amazon when he noticed that unusual and vulnerable butterflies were often effectively identical to common, unpalatable species and varieties that predators avoided. In Bates’ view, expressed in a famous paper given at the Linnaean Society in November 1861, the protective mechanism leading to mimetic resemblance provided “a most beautiful proof of the truth of the theory of natural selection,” and Darwin enthusiastically seized upon this solution to a delicate puzzle for the definitive sixth edition of the Origin of Species (1872).8

  Darwin, Bates, Wallace, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and T. H. Huxley were prominent members of an assertive alliance that was to succeed in establishing the unsettling hegemony of evolutionism in the natural sciences. And there is much to be learned about the workings of British science at this formative moment from tracing the letters and specimens passing between these and other scholars as they falteringly assemble the elements of a convincing theory of natural selection and strategize on the most effective means for its deployment.