Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  The vast area drained by these waterways encompasses 2.5 million square miles (equal to eighty percent of the continental United States) and takes in two fifths of South America, including half of Brazil and parts of eight other nations. The river is two hundred miles wide at its mouth, where the largest island is the size of Switzerland. In fact, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, the Spanish captain who first spied the river in 1500, sailed two hundred miles upstream before realizing he’d even left the ocean; he thought he’d discovered some bizarre arm of the Atlantic, which he christened the Freshwater Sea. A thousand miles from the ocean, the river is still seven miles wide. Oceangoing vessels on the Amazon can navigate more than two thousand miles inland.

  In 1639, Jesuit missionary and explorer Cristóbal de Acuña, traveling with Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira, published the earliest first-person account of the Amazon. “It flows along, meandering in wide reaches,” he wrote, seeking to capture the river’s majesty, “and, as absolute lord of all the rivers which run into it, sends out its branches, which are like faithful vassals, with whose aid it goes forth, and, receiving from the smaller streams the lawful tribute of their water, they become incorporated into the main channel. . . . In breadth it varies greatly, for in some parts its breadth is a league, at others two, at others three, and at others many more; . . . spread out into eighty-four mouths, it may [be placed] on an equality with the ocean.”

  The Amazon is known by various names over different segments of its length. Near its source, where it descends an alarming sixteen thousand feet in only six hundred miles, the river is known as the Marañon. From the Brazilian border to the mouth of the Río Negro, it is called the Solimões. It is only in the second half of its length, as it descends a lazy quarter inch per mile, that the river is universally known as the Amazon. So convoluted is its course that there was no definitive map of the river until the latter half of the twentieth century, when it was finally charted from the air. No wonder that for centuries it was called the Amazons, in acknowledgment of its multiple guises.

  Hundreds of millions of years ago, when South America nestled into the western bulge of Africa to form (along with Australia, India, and Antarctica) the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland, the Amazon flowed from east to west. About 150 million years ago, as earth’s tectonic plates shifted, Gondwanaland started to splinter and South America began its drift to the west, opening up the South Atlantic Ocean. As the continent drove into the plates beneath the Pacific floor, the Andes were forced upward, eventually damming the Amazon and creating a huge inland lake. Then, perhaps 50 million years ago, the lake breached two of the oldest rock formations on earth, the Guyana Shield to the north and the Brazilian Shield to the south, and the Amazon carved a course to the Atlantic, establishing the west-to-east flow that exists today.

  Though this vast river system was still relatively little known at the time of Humboldt’s journey, it was actually better explored than the Upper Orinoco. By 1799 five expeditions had sailed the length of the Amazon. The first, led by Francisco de Orellana in 1541-42, was a journey of accident and desperation, not exploration. Orellana had followed the conquistador Gonzálo Pizarro east of the Andes in hope of discovering El Dorado, and when the expedition ran urgently short of provisions, he volunteered to lead a party downriver in search of food. Prevented from returning by the overpowering current, he and his beleaguered men continued downstream all the way to the river’s mouth—a horrific nine-month journey of starvation and warfare with the native peoples. When the survivors finally reached the Atlantic, Orellana sailed for Spain, where he was charged with desertion but ultimately exonerated.

  After Orellana’s harrowing experience, it was more than a century before anyone tried to emulate his achievement. Then in 1637-38, Spain’s rival Portugal dispatched Pedro Teixeira up the Amazon, starting from the mouth on the Brazilian coast. In just under a year, Teixeira managed to reach the river’s source in the Andes, becoming the second man to travel the length of the Amazon and the first to make the journey upstream. It was on his return passage, downstream to the river’s mouth, that Teixeira was accompanied by Cristóbal de Acuña, whose account of the Amazon added enormously to Europe’s knowledge of the river.

  La Condamine was the next man to travel the length of the Amazon, in 1743, on his way home to France after his geodetic mission in the Andes. Covering some twenty-six hundred miles in not quite two months, he made a brief survey of the region’s geography, plant life, and human inhabitants and brought back to Europe quinine, curare, and rubber, along with tales of the Casiquiare Canal. Though his journey was cursory, La Condamine was the first scientist to explore the river, and his published accounts captured the imagination of Enlightenment Europe. He became celebrated—not, ironically, for his backbreaking seven-year effort to measure an arc of longitude at the equator, but for his seven-week sail down the Amazon. In fact, until he was eclipsed by Humboldt nearly seventy years further on, it was La Condamine, more than any other man, who was associated with the rain forest in the public imagination. (Several years later, two of La Condamine’s countrymen also journeyed down the Amazon on their way home to Europe—Jean Godin, one of La Condamine’s chain bearers, from 1749 to 1750, and Godin’s wife, Isabella, the first woman to complete the journey, from 1769 to 1770—but, like Orellana, their purpose was transportation, not exploration.)

  Though Humboldt would spend more time in the rain forest than La Condamine and would explore its plants, animals, and peoples in far greater depth, he had no intention (at least on this leg of his journey) of traveling as far as the Amazon itself, preferring to focus instead on the issue of the Casiquiare Canal. Entering the Amazon Basin at the Río Negro, the great river’s principal tributary, he would ascend the Negro to its junction with the Casiquiare, then—assuming La Condamine was right—sail up that river to the Orinoco, then downstream on the Orinoco to the town of Angostura, in the delta near the coast. Fourteen hundred miles long (slightly shorter than Europe’s Danube), the Río Negro rises in eastern Colombia, where it is known as the Río Guiana, then flows east to the Venezuelan border, then south along the Colombia-Venezuelan frontier, thence into Brazil, where it joins the Amazon at the famous rubber city of Manaus.

  As the name implies, the Río Negro is the ultimate blackwater river. In 1854, William Herndon, charged with surveying the Amazon for the United States government, became the first American to descend that river from Peru to the Atlantic. As he passed the mouth of the Río Negro, he wrote, “There has been no exaggeration in the description of travelers regarding the blackness of its water. It well deserves the name of Río Negro. When taken up in a tumbler, the water is a light-red color like a pale juniper water, and I should think it colored by some such berry. An object immersed in it has the color, though wanting the brilliancy, of red Bohemian glass. It may have been fancy,” he admitted, “but I thought that the light cumuli that hung over the river were darker here than elsewhere. These dark, though peaceful-looking clouds, the setting sun, the glitter of the rising moon upon the sparkling ripple of the black water with its noble expanse, gave us one of the fairest scenes that I have ever looked upon.”

  Having passed the small cataract at the junction of the Pimichín and the Río Negro, on May 5, Humboldt’s lancha pulled into the thriving mission of Maroa, where he added some live toucans to his floating menagerie. Two hours later the canoe arrived at the mission of San Miguel de Davipe, where the explorers took on provisions, including some fowls and a pig. It had been a good while since the men had had any meat, and spurred on by the prospect of roast pork that evening, they cut short their stay at Davipe. Just above the mission was a branch of the Casiquiare called the Conorichite, which as late as the mid-1700s had been frequented by Portuguese slavers trading beads, knives, fishhooks, mirrors, and other trinkets with the Caribs for human captives. “Thus,” Humboldt wrote, “the unhappy natives before they came into immediate contact with the Europeans, suffered from their proximity. The same caus
es produce everywhere the same effects. The barbarous trade which civilized nations have carried on, and still partially continue, on the coast of Africa, extends its fatal influence even to regions where the existence of white men is unknown.”

  At sunset, the travelers landed at the island of Dapa, picturesquely situated in the middle of the river, where they found a hut occupied by more than a dozen Indians eating their evening meal of smoked ants mixed into cassava cakes. Father Zea, “whose fever seemed rather to sharpen than to enfeeble his appetite,” according to Humboldt, encouraged his companions to try the concoction. “It somewhat resembled rancid butter mixed with crumb of bread” was Humboldt’s assessment. But “some remains of European prejudices prevented our joining in the praises bestowed by the good missionary on what he called ‘an excellent ant paste.’”

  That night there was a violent rainstorm, and instead of sleeping out of doors, the explorers were invited to share the Indians’ hut. Rest was elusive, though, since their hosts, like most tribes in the area, habitually slept from about eight in the evening to two in the morning, after which they would lie in their hammocks and chat, throw wood on the fire, and prepare a bitter, caffeinated beverage from the seeds of the soapberry plant. Knowing the customs of the native peoples, the Spanish and Portuguese used to launch their slaving raids between the hours of nine and twelve, when the Indians were in their first, deepest slumber of the night.

  Leaving the mission long before daybreak, the explorers paddled for twelve hours to the Fort of San Carlos, at the fork of the Río Negro and Casiquiare. The upper story of the fort afforded a fine view of the latter river, which, although notoriously tortuous over most of its course, here ran north to south in a line as straight “as if its bed had been dug by the hand of man.” A garrison of seventeen soldiers was assigned to the fort, though ten were detached to outlying missions. Owing to the extreme humidity, only four muskets were in working order.

  This intersection of the Río Negro and the Casiquiare was the closest that Humboldt would come to the Amazon on this portion of his journey (it was about four hundred miles away), before turning north to complete his circuit back to the Venezuelan coast. In fact, it wouldn’t have taken much more time to sail down the Río Negro to the Amazon and all the way to the Atlantic. To be within striking distance of the fabled river, to be traveling on its principal tributary, Humboldt must have been sorely tempted to continue in that direction. But the Río Negro and the Amazon had already been explored, and he knew he could make a greater contribution to knowledge by charting the controversial Casiquiare. Besides, the other route would have meant crossing from Spanish territory into Portuguese, and given the tense relations between those countries, that would have been very difficult if not impossible.

  Though not one of the longest rivers in South America, the Río Negro had always had strategic importance disproportionate to its length, because the Spanish controlled the upper reaches, in present-day Colombia and Venezuela, while the Portuguese claimed the more populated lower course, in present-day Brazil. For the better part of three centuries, the Iberian rivals had been unwilling neighbors in the New World, sometimes arguing their boundary disputes before the pope and other times simply seizing whatever land they could—on which occasions the river provided a ready-made invasion route into the other’s territory. To make matters worse, Portugal remained the closest trading partner and military ally of Spain’s perennial nemesis, Great Britain. At the time of Humboldt’s journey, tensions were running particularly high between the two nations, as Britain and Portugal were still fighting against Napoleon’s France, whereas Spain had sued for peace four years before. As a result of these continuing hostilities, security was especially tight on the border between their American colonies. Commanders of frontier outposts were on constant alert, and even the Indians in neighboring Spanish and Portuguese villages were on dangerous terms. Though they were ignorant of the raging geopolitical storm, the Indians could see that their missionaries wore cloaks of different colors, and thus were the lines of mutual antipathy drawn.

  Against this background, it’s not surprising that outsiders were objects of suspicion, especially when poking around the frontier seeking geographical knowledge that could conceivably be valuable to one’s enemies. By venturing into the borderlands between the hostile colonies, Humboldt realized he was incurring a new element of risk. Yet the courses of the Orinoco and the Río Negro were fixed by Nature, not by the courts of Lisbon and Madrid. If he were to verify the existence of the Casiquiare Canal, Humboldt had no choice but to follow where the rivers led. And that meant accepting this new political threat, along with the by-now-familiar perils of river rapids, cannibal tribes, savage animals, and tropical diseases.

  Indeed, had Humboldt journeyed south on the Río Negro instead of north, he would in all probability have ended up in a Portuguese prison. For, though he didn’t know it at the time, a Brazilian newspaper had published an account of his activities based on reports from the locals and, fearing that the foreigner would incite the native peoples against Portugal, had implored the governor to take action: “A certain Baron von Humboldt, a native of Berlin, has been traveling in the interior of America making geographic observations for the correction of certain errors in existing maps, collecting plants . . . a foreigner who, under pretext of this kind, might possibly conceal plans wherewith to spread new ideas and dangerous principles among the faithful subjects of this realm. Your Excellency should investigate at once . . . as it would be extremely injurious to the political interest of the Crown of Portugal if such were the case. . . . ” In response, orders had been issued for the outsider’s arrest and for the seizure of all his instruments and notes. If captured, Humboldt would have had his voyage down the Amazon after all—in leg irons—and thence across the Atlantic to Lisbon. Though he would have been released eventually, it would, of course, have meant the end of his South American adventure.

  CONTINUING upstream, the party encountered a group of Indians who collected green minerals called Amazon stones. Carved into cylinders and inscribed with sacred symbols, the amulets were worn around the neck for protection against fevers, nervous disorders, poisonous snakes, and other hazards. In fact, a few years before, Amazon stones were believed to be a powerful febrifuge even in Europe. “After this appeal to the credulity of Europeans,” Humboldt scoffed, “we cannot be surprised to learn that the Spanish planters share the predilection of the Indians for these amulets, and that they are sold at a very considerable price.” Though the exact source of the stones was unknown, they were thought, by long tradition, to originate to the north, in the country of the “women without husbands,” i.e., the Amazon warriors of legend.

  The original Amazons were a people of Asia Minor who were renowned for their horsemanship. Their name is thought to derive, through the Greek, from the Iranian ha-mazan, meaning “fighting together.” As incorporated into Greek mythology, the Amazons were a tribe whose women served as warriors and statesmen while the men took care of the domestic chores. Fighting on horseback like their real-life namesakes, the mythological Amazons cut off one of their breasts to improve their bowmanship, and they supposedly conquered a large swath of Asia Minor and did battle with many Greek heroes, including Hercules.

  The Amazons of the New World were originally described by Francisco de Orellana in 1541, the first European to travel the length of the river that now bears their name. Among the many native peoples that his expedition battled en route, Orellana told of a ferocious race of tall women warriors, whom he named after the Amazons of Greek mythology. His account, perhaps an exaggeration of a tribe in which the men and women took up arms together, was perpetuated by the Europeans who followed, including Sir Walter Raleigh. La Condamine accepted the stories and even reported that the Amazons had migrated up the Río Negro. In Humboldt’s time, the legend was still current. “Since my return from the Orinoco and the river Amazon,” he wrote in the Personal Narrative, “I have often been asked, at Paris,
whether I embraced the opinion of that learned man [La Condamine], or believed, like several of his contemporaries, that he undertook the defense of the Amazons, merely to fix, in a public sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience somewhat eager for novelties.” Though the perpetrators of the legend had a vested interest in exaggerating the wonders of the New World, Humboldt concluded that, considering the number of similar independent reports, these questionable motives may not be sufficient to reject the stories outright. Could it have been, he wondered, that a group of women, growing tired of mistreatment by the men of their tribe, had struck out into the forest to live independently, learning the martial arts and, to perpetuate their race, periodically admitting the company of the opposite sex? Yet no one ever substantiated the legend of the South American Amazons.

  Humboldt’s party passed three nights at the fort of San Carlos, not far below the fork of the Río Negro and the Casiquiare. Each night, Humboldt sat up in the darkness, instruments at the ready, waiting for the skies to clear long enough to permit an astronomical sighting that would fix the junction of the two rivers. But his sleeplessness went for naught. “What a contrast,” he exclaimed in frustration, “between the sky of Cumaná, where the air is constantly pure as in Persia and Arabia, and the sky of the Río Negro, veiled like that of the Faroe Islands, without sun, or moon, or stars!”

  Before sunrise on May 10, the explorers finally resumed their journey upriver. The morning broke clear, but as the temperature rose, clouds gathered and eventually obscured the sun. Humboldt was worried that the overcast skies would prevent him from charting the Casiquiare, particularly the crucial points where it branched from the Río Negro and entered the Orinoco. As if that weren’t bad enough, their priceless plant collection, each one painstakingly selected, dried, and identified, was rotting. “We grieve almost to tears when we open our plant-boxes,” Humboldt wrote. “The extreme humidity . . . has caused more than one third of our collection to be destroyed. Daily we discover new insects destructive to paper and plants. Camphor, turpentine, tar, pitched boards, and other preservatives so effective in a European climate prove quite useless here.” For a naturalist, it was the ultimate disaster—the same one, in fact, that had reportedly caused La Condamine’s botanist, de Jussieu, to go mad several decades before.