At noon, the crew put the boat ashore, and while the Indians were preparing the midday meal, Humboldt went off on his own to observe some crocodiles that were dozing in the sun, their plated tails curled one atop the other. The reptiles’ leathery skin, greenish-gray and caked with dried mud, lent the animals the appearance of bronze; in fact, some small white herons were striding along the creatures’ backs, and even on their heads, as if stepping over so many statues.
As Humboldt strolled along the shore, his eyes were trained on the riverbank. But just now his attention was caught by some bits of the mineral mica gleaming in the sand at his feet. As he bent down to examine them, he noticed some fresh tracks leading into the forest. Turning in that direction, he was startled to see a huge jaguar lying under a ceiba tree, a scant eighty paces away. From the safety of the lancha, Humboldt had seen many jaguars prowling the riverbank, but none had ever seemed so huge as this specimen. The Indians had given instructions on how to respond in such an event, and Humboldt, his heart pounding, now did his best to follow their advice. Keeping his arms at his side, he made a wide turn toward the water and away from the jaguar. Then he began to walk ever so slowly away. The Indians had warned not to look backward on any account, lest eye contact make the cat aggressive. So Humboldt inched down the riverbank, his back to the animal, not knowing whether he was being stalked or not. When he finally permitted himself a furtive glance, he saw the jaguar still lounging under the ceiba, its attention fixed on a herd of capybara fording the river. Redoubling his pace, Humboldt arrived, out of breath, at the canoe. He told the others what had happened, but by the time the guides loaded their rifles and returned with him, the jaguar had vanished.
That evening, the lancha passed the mouth of the Caño del Manatí (Manatee Creek), named for the many sea cows that congregated there. Growing ten to twelve feet long and weighing up to eight hundred pounds, the manatees were so huge that, after harpooning one of the creatures, the only way the Indians could load it into a canoe was to flood the boat, position it under the animal, then refloat the vessel by bailing it out with calabashes. Given the opportunity to examine the lungs of one of the manatees, Humboldt was astonished to see that the organs were three feet long, with a volume of more than a thousand cubic inches. The meat, he found, was “savory” and resembled pork; when salted and dried, it would keep for up to a year. Though the manatee is a mammal, the missionaries considered it a fish, and its meat was particularly prized during Lent. Besides the meat, the Indians extracted from each carcass nearly forty pounds of fat, used in lamps and for cooking, and stripped the inch-and-a-half-thick hide, which was cut into bands and fashioned into cords and whips to be used on recalcitrant slaves and impious Indians.
That night the guides lit campfires as usual, and Humboldt again noticed that, though the fires appeared to keep the jaguars at a distance, they seemed to attract the crocodiles. Porpoises, also drawn to the light, made playful noises in the river, leaving the travelers sleepless till the fires finally died out. But even then it didn’t prove a restful night. First a female jaguar and cub approached close to camp to drink from the river. The Indians succeeded in chasing the cats away, but mother and young were separated in the process, and the cub’s plaintive mews filled the camp for a long time, till the two were finally reunited. Soon after, Humboldt’s dog let out a yelp when it was bitten on the tip of the nose by one of the enormous vampire bats that hovered over camp each evening.
But even more troublesome than the vampires were the voracious insects that appeared every night after sundown and, able to pierce through clothing and even hammocks, covered the explorers with painful bites. Every visitor to the rain forest—not to mention the Indians and missionaries who made it their home—cursed the mosquitoes, gnats, flies, ticks, fleas, ants, and myriad other insects, and Humboldt’s experience would be no different. Biting, chewing, stinging, burrowing, preying on their fellow creatures, the most numerous class of animal made life hell for every other species that came into unfortunate contact with it. And the insects would only get worse as the party penetrated deeper into the forest, ever closer to the putative Casiquiare Canal.
The next evening, as the travelers were slinging their hammocks at their chosen campsite, they discovered two jaguars lurking behind a locust tree. Prudently returning to the canoe, they paddled upstream to an island near the junction of the Apure and the Orinoco. Since there were no trees here to sling hammocks from, the men passed an uncomfortable night on oxhides spread on the ground. In the rainy season, the mouth of the Apure would have spread across the savannahs as far as the eye could see, but at this time of year the river was reduced to a width of only four hundred to five hundred feet and a depth of just twenty to twenty-five feet. In fact, the water was so low that the next morning even the shallow-draft canoe had to be towed along the bank in several places. It was April 5. The journey down the Apure, some two hundred miles, had taken six days. More than a thousand miles of river lay before them, but they had reached the first milestone on their expedition into the rain forest. “It was not without emotion,” Humboldt wrote, “that we beheld for the first time, after long expectation, the waters of the Orinoco. . . .”
Six: The Orinoco
ONE of the great waterways of the new world, the Orinoco carves a thirteen-hundred-mile arc through the heart of Venezuela, from its source in the Guiana Highlands, in the southeastern tip of the country, to its vast delta on the Atlantic Ocean, just below the island of Trinidad. En route, the river and its four hundred-plus tributaries drain some 360,000 square miles—more than half the size of Europe. It’s thought that Columbus was the first European to spy the Orinoco’s mouth (on his third voyage, in 1498) and that the river’s massive, silty discharge convinced him that he had finally found tierra firma. Indeed, so fragrant was the evening air and so clear the starry sky that the great navigator, thinking himself in Asia, fancied he had found one of the four biblical rivers descending from Eden.
Thirty-three years later, Diego de Ordáz entered the labyrinthine delta and christened the river after its Indian name, Orinucu. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, several explorers ventured upstream, but, bent on conquest or pillage, all met with disappointment or disaster. In 1553, Alfonso de Herrera led an ill-fated expedition far up the Orinoco and into its tributary, the Meta, before being killed by an Indian arrow dipped in curare, the black, resinous nerve poison concocted from certain jungle plants. Seven years later, the Spanish adventurer Lope de Aguirre is believed to have traveled down much of the river during his quixotic, traitorous campaign to proclaim himself emperor of Peru.
In 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed three hundred miles up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado, the fabled country of gold. Returning with a few samples of the precious ore, he assured Queen Elizabeth I “that from Inglaterrra those Ingas should be againe in time to come restored and delivered from the servitude of the said conquerors. I am resolved that if there were but a small army afoote in Guiana marching towards Manoa, the chiefe citie of Inga, he would yield Her Majestie by composition so many hundred thousand pounds yearely as should both defend all enemies abroad and defray all expences at home, that he woulde besides pay a garrison of 3000 or 4000 soldiers very royally to defend him against other nations. The Inga will be brought to tribute with great gladness.” But despite a second expedition in 1616, Raleigh never discovered the riches he believed were waiting there.
The first European explorers found significant villages along the river, where the indigenous peoples supported themselves by fishing, hunting, and raising cassava, and over the next two centuries, the Lower Orinoco was thinly settled by missionaries and ranchers. But at the time of Humboldt’s journey, the so-called Upper Course of the river, beyond the great rapids at Ature and Maipures, was still a wild, unknown country visited by only a handful of white men—a trackless forest rumored to be filled with savage animals, cannibals, and races with a single eye in the center of their forehead, or a dog’s head
, or a mouth below their stomach. “He who goes to the Orinoco,” an old Spanish saying warned, “either dies or comes back mad.”
Humboldt had come to the Orinoco because it was the shortest route to the Río Negro. The Negro was known to intersect with the Casiquiare. And, if La Condamine could be trusted, the Casiquiare rejoined the Orinoco to form the natural canal whose existence was roundly denied by European geographers. Whatever the outcome, Humboldt was determined to settle one of the great geographic controversies of the age. He would need every shred of that resolve for the journey that lay ahead.
Humboldt saw that the country changed dramatically at the junction of the great river. During the rainy season, the Orinoco would have been nearly six miles wide here, but even in April it stretched before the lancha like a huge lake, well over two miles across and whipped with whitecaps several feet high. The flamingos, herons, and other water birds that had been the explorers’ constant companions on the Apure vanished, and even the ubiquitous crocodiles were reduced to a few individuals slicing obliquely through the waves. Forest stretched to the horizon, but along the riverbanks was only a vast, empty beach. Even the distant hills appeared forlorn. “In these scattered features of the landscape, in this character of solitude and of greatness,” Humboldt wrote, “we recognize the course of the Orinoco, one of the most majestic rivers of the New World.”
Despite the high waves, the north-northeast wind was ideal for sailing upstream. The canoe made good progress, arriving later that day at the mission of Encaramada, which was spectacularly situated before a chain of weathered granite mountains that resembled ancient ruins swallowed by forest. At the adjacent port, Humboldt had his first, fascinated glimpse of the Caribs, the people once renowned for their ferocity (and cannibalism—the tribe’s original name, Calibi, had been corrupted by the Spanish into Canibal). In the century before Columbus, the Caribs had come to dominate the Caribbean Basin and, utilizing their prodigious sailing skills, had spread as far as the South American mainland. Though the Caribs had put up a fierce resistance against the Spanish, they had proved no match for European technology, and by the time of Humboldt’s arrival the tribe existed only in isolated, missionized pockets.
“These Caribs are men of an almost athletic stature,” Humboldt noted; “they appeared to us much taller than any Indians we had hitherto seen. Their smooth and thick hair, cut short on the forehead like that of choristers, their eyebrows painted black, their look at once gloomy and animated, gave a singular expression to their countenances.” The Caribs’ features were more regular than those of the other native peoples Humboldt had seen, their noses smaller and less flattened, and the cheekbones not so high. “Their eyes, which are darker than those of the other hordes of Guiana, denote intelligence, and it may even be said, the habit of reflection. The Caribs have a gravity of manner, and a certain look of sadness which is observable in most of the primitive inhabitants of the New World.” The women, “less robust and good-looking than the men,” were also “very tall, and disgusting from their want of cleanliness.” Infants’ legs were wrapped at prescribed locations by tight strips of cotton cloth, with the flesh bulging out between the ligatures. “It is generally to be observed,” Humboldt explained, “that the Caribs are as attentive to their exterior and their ornaments as it is possible for men to be, who are naked and painted red. They attach great importance to certain configurations of the body; and a mother would be accused of culpable indifference toward her children, if she did not employ artificial means to shape the calf of the leg after the fashion of the country.”
Despite the Caribs’ loss of their empire to the white men, “the remembrance of their ancient greatness, has inspired them with a sentiment of dignity and national superiority, which is manifest in their manners and their discourse. ‘We alone are a nation,’ say they proverbially; ‘the rest of mankind are made to serve us.’” So great was their contempt of other peoples that Humboldt once saw a ten-year-old boy fly into a rage at mistakenly being called a Cabre—another local people—though he had never even seen a member of that tribe.
Traveling upriver for the annual turtle egg harvest, the Carib cacique, or chief, sat in his canoe, attended by a smaller boat. Seated beneath a canopy of palm leaves, his “cold and silent gravity, the respect with which he was treated by his attendants, everything denoted him to be a person of importance. He was equipped, however, in the same manner as his Indians. They were all equally naked, armed with bows and arrows, and painted with onoto [a vegetable pigment]. . . . The chief, the domestics, the furniture, the boat, and the sail, were all painted red.”
Among the Caribs and certain other tribes, body paint served as the principal “clothing.” Generally, in fact, it was considered less immodest to present oneself without a guayuco, the strip of cloth covering the genitals, than without paint. “Thus,” Humboldt reports, “as we say, in temperate climates, of a poor man, ‘[H]e has not enough to clothe himself,’ you hear the Indians of the Orinoco say, ‘[T]hat man is so poor, that he has not enough to paint half his body.’” The missionaries permitted the practice, and some made a handsome profit retailing the pigments to their charges.
The type of body paint used even indicated the wearer’s relative affluence. To make onoto, the more common variety, Indian women would mix with water the seeds of a plant called achote, beat the mixture for an hour, and allow a sediment to form. The residue would be collected, mixed with oil from turtle eggs, then shaped into little round cakes for later use. A more costly type of paint was made from a species of Bignonia, a family of woody vines, which Bonpland named Bignonia chica. The vine’s leaves became red when dried, and when soaked in water they produced a powder that was collected and patted (without added oil) into small cakes. So highly valued was the chica that a man would need to work for two weeks just to earn enough money to paint his body once.
Ever since the practice had been first reported, there had been speculation in Europe that the body paint helped to keep voracious insects at bay. But Humboldt proved that the intent was purely decorative and that painted skin was just as subject to bites and stings as unpainted. Not always satisfied to spread the pigment uniformly over their bodies, the Indians sometimes whimsically imitated European clothing. “We saw some [Indians] . . . ,” Humboldt wrote, “who were painted with blue jackets and black buttons. . . . [Others] are accustomed to stain themselves red with onoto, and to make broad transverse stripes on the body, on which they stick spangles of silvery mica. Seen at a distance, these naked men appear to be dressed in lace clothes. If painted nations had been examined with the same attention as those who are clothed, it would have been perceived that the most fertile imagination, and the most mutable caprice, have created the fashions of painting, as well as those of garments.”
After four centuries of oppression and dislocation at the hands of the Spanish—enduring forced labor, banishment from traditional homelands, the imposition of an uncompromising new religion, and even unheard-of diseases—the indigenous cultures of South America existed only as faded reflections of their former selves. Yet Humboldt seemed to be the only observer to recognize this insidious process of debasement, and now, as he studied the Indians of the Orinoco, he was struck again by how little they resembled Rousseau’s “noble savages.” “How difficult to recognize in this infancy of society, in this assemblage of dull, silent, inanimate Indians, the primitive character of our species!” he concluded. “Human nature does not here manifest those features of artless simplicity, of which poets in every language have drawn such enchanting pictures. . . . We are eager to persuade ourselves that these natives, crouching before the fire, or seated on large turtle-shells, their bodies covered with earth and grease, their eyes stupidly fixed for whole hours on the beverage they are preparing, far from being the primitive type of our species, are a degenerate race, the feeble remains of nations who, after having been long dispersed in the forests, are replunged into barbarism.”
In the area around Encar
amada were ancient petroglyphs of animals and symbolic figures carved on unscalable rock cliffs, often at great heights. When Humboldt asked the guides how their forebears could have created these images so far aboveground, “they answer[ed] with a smile, as if relating a fact of which only a white man could be ignorant, that ‘at the period of the great waters, their fathers went to that height in boats.’” Humboldt would discover that nearly every tribe along the Orinoco had a traditional belief in a devastating flood. According to their guides’ version, a man and a woman had saved themselves by landing on a tall mountain and had afterward repopulated earth by casting over their heads the seeds of the Mauritia palm.
Humboldt concluded that these flood myths were not simply local adaptations of the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, because the stories were current even in places that had never seen a missionary. “These ancient traditions of the human race, which we find dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly interesting in the philosophical study of our own species,” he wrote. “Like certain families of the vegetable kingdom, which, notwithstanding the diversity of climates and the influence of heights, retain the impression of a common type, the traditions of nations respecting the origin of the world, display everywhere the same physiognomy, and preserve features of resemblance that fill us with astonishment. How many different tongues, belonging to branches that appear totally distinct, transmit to us the same facts!”
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