Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  THE spectacle of the huge rapids, formed by two granite ridges crossing the riverbed at right angles, almost made the arduous journey seem worthwhile. “Nothing can be grander than the aspect of this spot,” Humboldt rhapsodized. “Neither the [water]fall of the Tequendama, near Santa Fe de Bogotá, nor the magnificent scene of the Cordilleras [Andes], could weaken the impression produced upon my mind by the first view of the rapids of Ature and of Maipures. When the spectator is so stationed that the eye can at once take in the long succession of cataracts, the immense sheet of foam and vapors illumined by the rays of the setting sun, the whole river seems as if it were suspended over its bed.”

  The first, northernmost rapid was the Ature, named for the extinct Indian people who had once inhabited its banks. The cataracts, pinched on each side by high mountains, were a five-mile-long jumble of islands, rock shelves, and blocks of granite stretching from one side of the river to the other. “Persons who have dwelt in the Alps, the Pyrenees, or even the Cordilleras, so celebrated for the fractures and the vestiges of destruction which they display at every step, can scarcely picture to themselves, from a mere narration, the state of the bed of the river,” Humboldt wrote. “It is traversed . . . by innumerable dikes of rock, forming so many natural dams, so many barriers. . . . The space between the rocky dikes of the Orinoco is filled with islands of different dimensions; some hilly, divided into several peaks, and two or three hundred toises [about thirteen hundred to two thousand feet] in length, others small, low, and like mere shoals. These islands divide the river into a number of torrents, which boil up as they break against the rocks. . . .” In addition, the river “is engulfed in caverns; and in one of these caverns we heard the water roll at once over our heads and beneath our feet. We were struck with the little water to be seen in the bed of the river [owing to all the rocks], the frequency of the subterraneous falls, and the tumult of the waters breaking on the rocks in foam.”

  Both banks were steep and virtually inaccessible, but the left, generally lower than the right, formed part of a vast plain of meadows, crisscrossed by streams and studded with granite blocks and shelves on which flamingos, herons, and other water birds perched like sentinels. (Their resemblance to an army was so striking that the birds’ sudden appearance downriver at the capital of Angostura once panicked the citizens, who thought themselves surrounded by hostile Indians, until the birds suddenly took wing.) So great was the roar of the cataracts that they could be heard more than three miles away. Missionaries reported that Indians living along the river suffered hearing loss from the continuous thunder of the water. In the stillness of the night, the roar seemed even louder, and only served to underscore the remoteness of the place.

  The Indians living along the Orinoco had worked out various methods of passing the rapids. Where the natural dams were only two or three feet high, they could be run downstream in a canoe. To ascend the river in these places, the Indians would swim on ahead of the boat, tie a rope to an outcropping, then pull the craft over the top of the rocks, as Humboldt’s crew had done near the junction of the Meta. But this operation was more easily described than accomplished, since the boat would often fill with water or sometimes be dashed against the rocks, in which case the Indians, bruised and bleeding, would have to extricate themselves from the treacherous whirlpools and swim to the nearest island. Where the dams were too high for this technique, the canoes had to be portaged along shore, with tree trunks serving as rollers. At the great falls of Ature, this last method was the only option.

  To help with the portage around the rapids, eight Indians were hired from the nearby mission of San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures. Founded by the Jesuits in 1748, the mission was in a deplorable state by the time of Humboldt’s arrival, its population having dwindled from more than three hundred to just forty-seven, as the Indians, tired of mission regulations and fearful of epidemic fevers, had gradually drifted off to their ancestral home in the forest. So few canoes came this way that the missionary kept count: Over the past three years, exactly sixteen boats had passed the rapids—three to fetch the soldiers’ annual pay from Angostura, five with Indians bound for the turtle egg harvest, and eight laden with trade goods.

  In the two days the Europeans spent at the mission, the insects grew worse than ever, reaching a crescendo of carnivorous misery. “Persons who have not navigated the great rivers of equinoctial America . . . can scarcely conceive how, at every instant, without intermission, you may be tormented by insects flying in the air; and how the multitude of these little animals may render vast regions almost uninhabitable,” Humboldt lamented. “Whatever fortitude may be exercised to endure pain without complaint, whatever interest may be felt in the objects of scientific research, it is impossible not to be constantly disturbed by the mosquitoes, zancudos [large gnats], jejenes [venomous flies], and tempraneros [small gnats], that cover the face and hands, pierce the clothes with their long needle-formed suckers, and getting into the mouth and nostrils, occasion coughing and sneezing whenever any attempt is made to speak in the open air. . . .” In fact, “the lower strata of air, from the surface of the ground to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, [is] absolutely filled with venomous insects.” And this was all during the dry season. “I doubt whether there is a country on earth were man is exposed to more cruel torments in the rainy season,” he ventured.

  With customary thoroughness, Humboldt made a study of the six-legged perpetrators, discovering that the infestation followed a daily pattern, an orderly changing of the insect guard, broken only when a downpour would mercifully (but all too briefly) sweep away the pests: From half past six in the morning to five in the afternoon the air was filled with mosquitoes; the tempraneros emerged an hour before sunset, disappearing between six and seven; they were followed in turn by the zancudos, whose bite produced the worst pain of all, as well as a swelling that lasted for weeks.

  In the missions and villages along the river, la plaga de las moscas afforded an inexhaustible subject of conversation. When two persons met in the morning, they wouldn’t ask, “How did you sleep?” but “How did you find the zancudos during the night?” or “How are the mosquitoes today?” “How comfortable must people be in the moon,” one Indian exclaimed. “She looks so beautiful and so clear that she must be free from mosquitoes.”

  Condemned to live among these voracious pests, people along the river devised various means of self-defense—waving objects about the head and hands; erecting mosquito curtains woven from palm fibers; filling the air with the acrid fumes of burning cow dung; sleeping on rocks in the middle of the rapids, or surrounded by cattle (which were thought to attract the pests away from the humans), or buried in sand, with only the head exposed (and that covered with a handkerchief), even retreating to a windowless hut with a smoky fire in the center. (Bonpland found such hornitos [“little ovens”] ideal for drying plant specimens.) At his mission at Maipures, Father Zea had built a small, windowless room high in a grove of palm trees, in which Humboldt and Bonpland managed to find some peace from the insects. Still, Humboldt supposed, “it is neither the dangers of navigating in small boats, the savage Indians, nor the serpents, crocodiles, or jaguars, that make Spaniards dread a voyage on the Orinoco; it is . . . the perspiration and the flies.’”

  The explorers were grateful when the portage was accomplished on April 17 and they were able to leave Ature behind. Owing to its isolation, provisions were hard to come by at the mission, and Humboldt was able to buy only a few bunches of plantains, some cassavas, and several fowl to replenish their stores. Immediately above the rapids of Ature, the river was relatively free of shoals. The canoe easily passed the small Raudal de Garcita, but the swarms of biting insects were so thick that night that they filled the sky and prevented Humboldt from taking an astronomical reading to fix the party’s location. At three o’clock the next morning, the travelers got under way, to be sure of reaching the treacherous Raudal de los Guahíbos in daylight.

  At five that afternoon,
the rapids came into view. Following the prescribed method, one of the Indians swam to the natural dam in the center of the cataract. He fixed a rope to the rock, and the lancha was pulled close enough to allow the Europeans to disembark, along with the animals and all the gear. While the passengers waited for the boat to be hauled up the rapids, Father Zea was stricken by one of his periodic fevers. To offer relief, the others scooped some water from the river and poured it in a large hole in the top of the rock. They added sugar and lime juice, and “in a few minutes had an excellent beverage, which is almost a refinement of luxury, in that wild spot; but our wants rendered us every day more and more ingenious,” Humboldt wrote.

  After an hour, the canoe was ready to be reloaded. Above the rapids the river was about a mile wide, and still running fast. As the Indians worked against the current, rain began to fall in torrents. Thunder drowned out the roar of the water, and twice lightning struck the water very near the canoe. After twenty strenuous minutes, the paddlers began to lose their battle, and the canoe started slipping back toward the rapids. If the current managed to take the craft over the natural dam, at the least the lancha and its passengers would be dumped into the swirling waters; at the worst the fragile craft would be dashed against the rocks. “These moments of uncertainty appeared to us very long,” Humboldt admits; “the Indians spoke only in whispers, as they do always when they think their situation perilous.” Redoubling their efforts, the crew finally managed to pull away from the threatening cascade. Two hours later, drenched to the skin, the party arrived safely at the port of Maipures, located just downstream from the second great rapids of the Orinoco.

  Onshore, as soon as the rain let up the gnats reemerged with new voracity. At Father Zea’s suggestion the party decided to press on to his unfinished house at the nearby mission, in the hope that the insects would be less thick away from the river. Carrying tubes of bark filled with copal resin, which gave off more smoke than light (before they went out completely), the men stumbled over rocks and twice had to cross streams in the dark by balancing on the trunks of fallen trees, as all the while the Indian pilot warned against jaguars and poisonous snakes. At last, the travelers reached the village of San José de Maipures. The inhabitants were asleep, and the only sounds came from a few night birds calling above the distant roar of the rapids. Humboldt must have been glad to leave the river behind, at least temporarily. But even so, “in the calm of the night, amid the deep repose of nature,” he found that “the monotonous sound of a fall of water has in it something sad and solemn.”

  The party stayed for three days at the village while the canoe was portaged around the great caudal. Like the rapids at Ature, those at Maipures (named after the native people who still lived beside them) were strewn with small granite islands connected by natural dikes. But Father Zea had chosen his crew well, and the Indian guides could recite the name of every ledge and waterfall. One of the largest, known as el Salto de la Sardina (the Leap of the Sardine), was nine feet high and formed an imposing fall across a wide breadth. But the rapids’ danger derived not so much from their height, Humboldt realized, as from the narrow channel and the resulting currents and countercurrents.

  During the time the travelers spent at the mission, Humboldt never tired of climbing one of the low mountains and gazing at the spectacle. From the summit, he described, “a wonderful prospect is enjoyed. A foaming surface of four miles in length presents itself at once to the eye: iron-black masses of rock resembling ruins and battlemented towers rise frowning from the waters. Rocks and islands are adorned with the luxuriant vegetation of the tropical forest; a perpetual mist hovers over the waters, and the summits of the lofty palms pierce through the cloud of spray and vapor,” he wrote. “When the rays of the glowing evening sun are refracted in these humid exhalations, a magic optical effect begins. Colored [rain]bows shine, vanish, and reappear; and the ethereal image is swayed to and fro by the breath of the sportive breeze.” The rocks were covered with clusters of palm trees eighty feet tall. “I do not hesitate to repeat,” he averred, “that neither time, nor the view of the Cordilleras, nor any bode in the temperate valleys of Mexico, has effaced from my mind the powerful impression of the aspect of the cataracts. . . . The majestic scenes of nature, like the sublime works of poetry and the arts, leave remembrances that are incessantly awakening, and which, through the whole of life, mingle with all our feelings of what is grand and beautiful.”

  To the west of the rapids rose a peak known as Keri. The mountain’s western face was graced with a prominent white spot, visible from some distance, which to the Indians represented the image of the full moon. Opposite Keri, its twin mountain, Ouivitari, had a similar spot, facing east, which was taken to be the image of the sun. Humboldt regretted that the mountains were too sheer to permit a climb, but he believed the mysterious markings were formed by the conjunction of veins of quartz, often found in granite outcroppings.

  In the time of the Jesuits, the mission at Maipures had boasted more than six hundred souls, but, like the mission at Ature, it now numbered fewer than sixty. Humboldt found the remaining Maipures temperate, without the inordinate fondness for alcohol that prevailed among some of the tribes. And their huts were neater than the houses of most of the missionaries he had seen. The Indians cultivated cassava, kept pigs, and made a nourishing beverage from the fleshy fruit of the seje tree, which resembled a coconut. They also manufactured pottery, baking the vessels in brushwood fires and painting them with geometric patterns and the figures of crocodiles and monkeys. A number of tribes in the region had made painted pottery for centuries; Francisco de Orellana, the first white man to journey the length of the nearby Amazon (1541-42), had been impressed by the painted pots he’d discovered among the Omagua people there.

  On April 21, with the portage complete, the party resumed their journey toward the junction of the Orinoco and the Casiquiare. Though the lancha had been battered by the shoals and portages, it was still intact, and Humboldt hoped it would withstand the insults that still lay in store for it. Leaving the rapids, the party advanced cautiously, for they were entering a wild region that only a few white men had ever seen. “When the traveler has passed the Great Cataracts,” Humboldt explained, “he feels as if he were in a new world, and has overstepped the barriers which nature seems to have raised between the civilized countries of the coast and the savage and unknown interior.”

  Over the next several days, the canoe slipped by the mouths of the rivers Sipapo, Vichada, and Zama, and the peaks of Cerros and Sipapo, which formed an immense rock wall above the surrounding plain. Judging from the rivers’ mouths, the Vichada and the Zama appeared to be among the largest tributaries of the Orinoco, but since they had never been explored, one could only guess at their source or length. In truth, the entire region was terra incognita only three miles from the rivers’ banks, since no white man had ever ventured farther into the forest. These days the land was believed to be occupied by the fierce Chiricoas people, but they were little seen, since they didn’t have the art of boat building. In previous times, when the territory had been inhabited by the Caribs and their enemies the Cabres, no explorers could have safely camped at the junction of these rivers. But since the coming of the whites, these warlike tribes had retreated from the banks of the Orinoco, and now the region was eerily devoid of any human presence whatsoever.

  On April 24, a violent storm forced the party to break camp in the middle of the night. By two A.M. the drenched men were back on the river, having abandoned some books they were unable to locate in the darkness. That day the lancha passed the mouths of the Ucata, Arapa, and Caranaveni rivers, and by late afternoon the travelers had reached the outlying Indian plantations attached to the mission of San Fernando de Atabapo. Paddling in the gathering darkness, they left the Orinoco and entered its tributary the Río Atabapo, the first of the three rivers to be ascended before they reached the portage at the Caño (Stream) de Pimichín, where they would cross from the watershed of the Orinoc
o to that of the Amazon.

  The men reached the mission a little after midnight, and the surprised priest received them with hospitality. At daybreak the next morning, the travelers “found themselves as if transported to a new country, on the banks of a river the name of which we had scarcely ever heard pronounced [Atabapo], and which was to conduct us . . . to the Río Negro, on the frontiers of Brazil.” In the darkness, they had passed from the white waters to the black.

  SOUTH AMERICAN waterways are divided into two broad classes—the so-called white rivers and the so-called black rivers. The white include the Orinoco, the Casiquiare, and the Amazon itself. But the term is misleading, as these are actually a dirty yellow-green, tinted by the great quantities of silt washing out of the younger, softer Andes to the west, where virtually all the white rivers originate. Nearly all the black rivers, by contrast, flow south out of the Brazilian Highlands. One of the oldest geological formations on the planet, these highlands have long since given up most of their silt, and the basalt that remains is very slow to erode. Whereas the white rivers are cloudy, the black are so clear that even small fish can be seen at a depth of thirty feet or more, despite the dark tint, which is caused by plant matter dissolved over the rivers’ long courses. “Their waters,” Humboldt found, “seen in a large body, appear brown like coffee, or of a greenish black. These waters, notwithstanding, are most beautiful, clear, and agreeable to the taste. . . . When the least breath of wind agitates the surface of these ‘black rivers’ they appear of a fine grass-green, like the lakes of Switzerland. . . . These phenomena are so striking, that the Indians everywhere distinguish the waters by the terms black and white.” The Indians, in fact, could identify the water of a specific river by taste alone. So striking is the color difference between the two classes of river that at the Río Negro’s junction with the Amazon, the white and black waters flow side by side, readily discernible, for some fifty miles before merging.