by Tod Olson
In the meantime, Pizarro’s conquest unleashed a craving for gold. When news of Atahualpa’s treasure got out, European adventurers started to dream: Why couldn’t there be another empire, as rich as the Incas’, lost in the depths of the rainforest?
Spaniards began to tell a story picked up from Indians around the city of Quito, in present-day Ecuador. According to the legend, buried in the jungle was a kingdom so wealthy that its lord “goes about continually covered in gold dust as fine as ground salt.” Every night, the Great Lord washed the gold off in a lake. Every morning he woke up and powdered himself again. In Spanish accounts of the story, the king became known as the Golden One, or El Dorado.
Expedition after expedition set off into the rainforest in search of El Dorado’s kingdom. One after another, they ended in disaster. Not a single European was swallowed whole by a man-eating snake, devoured by an alligator, or speared by a mythical headless Indian. The rainforest defeated them in a much slower, more agonizing way: It starved them to death.
Francisco Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo led one of the first expeditions, in 1541. He left with 220 soldiers, 200 armored horses, 2,000 war hounds, and more than 2,000 pigs for food. Some 4,000 Indian slaves carried their supplies. Pizarro tortured indigenous villagers along the way, demanding that they tell him where the riches lay. When he wasn’t satisfied with the answers, he had his captives burned to death or thrown to the dogs. Within a few months, nearly all the Indian slaves had fled into the jungle or died of smallpox.
By the end of the year, the Spaniards were starving. They heard animals everywhere but couldn’t get close enough to take a shot. From time to time, they killed a small lizard or a snake and devoured it. Otherwise, they ate palm stalks and fruit pits that fell from the trees. When they had killed all their dogs and horses for food, they boiled the leather from boots and belts into a thin broth and drank it.
Finally, 80 emaciated men limped back to Quito. “They were so pale and disfigured that they were scarcely recognizable,” reported a Spanish official.
A German expedition a couple of years earlier fared even worse. They resorted to cannibalism after 240 men died of disease and starvation. “Some, contrary to nature, ate human meat,” reported an expedition member. “One Christian was found cooking a quarter of a child together with some greens.”
Lope de Aguirre, the conquistador whose story Werner Herzog was filming when he tried to fly out of Lima on Christmas Eve, led yet another ill-fated expedition in search of El Dorado. In the heart of the rainforest, Aguirre rebelled against the Spanish king. He then murdered his own daughter before he was assassinated by his men. While still in the jungle, he wrote the king to tell him there were no riches hiding in the Amazon. “The reports are false,” he said. “There is nothing on that river but despair.”
To outsiders peering into the thick, dark forest, the Amazon became known as the “green hell.”
That is not the way millions of rainforest natives would have described their home. Europeans often dismissed the indigenous people of the Amazon as “savages” or “barbarians.” But the “savages” had one advantage over the “civilized” intruders: They knew how to survive in the jungle.
When the Europeans first arrived, the people of the Amazon had no access to metal, horses, or guns. There were no kingdoms rich enough to coat their kings in gold. But most communities supported themselves comfortably. Asháninka farmers in Peru cultivated manioc, a hardy root that doesn’t need rich soil to grow. Throughout the rainforest, hunters wielded 10-foot-long blowguns with deadly accuracy, taking out birds and monkeys high in the treetops with poison darts. Fishermen learned to use a natural poison, scattering it in the water and scooping up fish when they surfaced to gasp for air. Riverside villages of the Omagua people in Brazil raised turtles for food and let nothing go to waste. Oil from the turtle eggs provided fuel for lamps. Turtle shells became bowls, and the jawbones became hatchets.
European explorers often marveled at how well the Indians lived off the land, but rarely did they learn to do it themselves. Instead, they tried to live off the Indians.
Francisco de Orellana, the Spaniard whose supposed encounter with women warriors gave the Amazon its name, traveled the entire river from west to east in the 1540s. He and his men attempted to hunt birds with crossbows and catch fish with lines and hooks. Usually, they came up empty-handed.
Orellana taught himself enough of the native languages to ask for food at villages along the way. Some Indians were kind—or scared—enough to hand over supplies. The Spaniards stocked up on “meats, partridges, turkeys, and fish of many sorts,” recorded Gaspar de Carvajal, who kept a diary during the expedition. When negotiation didn’t work, Orellana fought his way to the food supplies. Usually, the Indians were no match for the Spaniards’ guns and crossbows.
Eventually, more and more Europeans came to the Amazon to settle—and they still relied on Indian labor to survive. On the rivers, indigenous men were enslaved to paddle white passengers from place to place. In the forest, Indian porters literally carried Spaniards on their backs. They wore harnesses with stirrups dangling below their waists for the lazy travelers’ feet.
In the 1600s, a Portuguese priest named António Vieira pointed out just how helpless a European became in the rainforest. “For a man … to eat meat he needs a hunter; to eat fish a fisherman; to wear clean clothes a washerwoman; and to go to mass or anywhere else a canoe and paddlers … All the labor of the settlers is done by the native Indians.”
Even the naturalists, who spent years studying the plants and animals of the Amazon, never understood the jungle as well as the men who paddled their boats. Richard Spruce, the Englishman who marveled at the size of the rainforest, once overheard a native man talking about him behind his back. “This man knows nothing,” the Indian scoffed. “I doubt he can even shoot a bird with an arrow.”
By the time Juliane Koepcke was growing up in Peru, big cities had sprung up around the rainforest. The Incan capitals that Pizarro plundered had become tourist attractions. Roads were starting to open new areas of the forest to jeeps and trucks. Bulldozers hauled out trees to feed the timber industry. Planes scanned the forest with radar, looking for minerals to mine.
But even then, the Amazon was one of the most remote places on Earth. Vast areas had a population density less than two people per square mile. You could find more signs of human life than that in parts of the Sahara Desert.
A traveler dropped into the heart of the rainforest could walk for miles in any direction without meeting another human being. Trees? There were billions of them—some taller than a 20-story building. Animals? More than you could count—at least one-tenth of all the planet’s species. Water? Gallons upon gallons—one-fifth of all the world’s river water was in the Amazon River alone.
People, however, were few and far between. Hidden in the depths of the forest were more than 100 indigenous groups that had never been in contact with the outside world—people who had never seen a television, a phone, or a car.
And when outsiders strayed too far into the jungle, the results could still be disastrous. In 1970, an American journalist named Bob Nichols headed into Peru’s Madre de Dios region with two French adventurers and six Mashco-Piro Indian guides. Like the Spanish conquistadors, they were hunting for a lost city—a legendary Incan hideaway called Paititi. The guides turned around when the expedition went too far for comfort. Nichols and the two Frenchmen pressed on and were never heard from again.
People were still searching for them late in 1971, when LANSA Flight 508 disappeared into a storm over the largest rainforest in the world.
Juliane Koepcke woke on Christmas Day 1971, curled in a ball on the rainforest floor under a row of airplane seats. She’d been dreaming—two dreams, braiding together in her mind. In one, she flew, soaring along a wall close to the ground. In the other, she was filthy with mud, dying to get up and wash herself off. Then she was flying again, barely avoiding the wall, with a roar so loud
in her ears it was as though she herself had an engine. And then she lay in the mud again, desperate to get clean but unable to move.
It was like this for minutes or hours, back and forth between the two dreams until, still asleep, she said to herself, Just get up and go wash yourself in the bathroom. It’s simple.
And suddenly, there she was, lying like a baby, face pressed toward the base of the seats with the seatbacks perched above her like a lean-to roof. She was covered in mud and drenched from head to foot. Vaguely, she remembered thunder and rain and crawling under the seats for shelter. All afternoon and night, she must have drifted from one dream to another, in and out of consciousness.
Now it was daytime. Far above the seatbacks, the treetops filtered sunlight into a dim, greenish glow. From above, she’d thought the trees looked like broccoli. Down here, they towered over her like skyscrapers. And gradually, all the pieces—the trees and the seats and the mud and the rain—began to make sense.
One minute, she had been sitting in the plane, her mother next to her and the sleeping man on the aisle. Lightning struck the plane, and in the next moment everyone had vanished. She was upside down in the seat, plummeting through the sky with the seat belt squeezing the breath out of her. When she dropped below the clouds, she saw the forest below.
Then she must have blacked out. She did not feel the impact when her seat hit the upper reaches of the trees, or the thrashing from the vines, or the final jolt when she struck the ground in a thick stew of mud and decaying leaves.
She had fallen from the plane in a storm, and somehow she had survived.
But had anyone else? Except for the row of seats, the plane seemed to be gone. The obese man in the aisle seat was gone. Her mother was gone.
Juliane crawled out from under the seats, the thought forming in her mind that she had to find her mother. She made it to her knees before everything went black and she crumpled to the ground.
When she managed to pull herself to a sitting position, she looked at her watch. It was ticking, so she knew it worked, but she couldn’t bring the face of the watch into focus. Her glasses had vanished, and her eyes were in bad shape. The left eye had swollen shut, and the right one had narrowed to a slit barely big enough to see through. She squinted until the face of the watch came into focus: 9:00.
She tried again to stand. The earth spun, and she collapsed. Her head felt as though it were packed in cotton. For the moment she was helpless, and a desperate loneliness began to settle around her. Everyone was gone, and she had no idea where she was.
Finally, after a few more tries, she stood. As she began to move, her body came back to her. Her hand found its way to a lump just below her neck—a bone pressing against the skin as though it were trying to push through. Her collarbone had broken on the right side like a stick snapped not quite in two. On the lower part of her left leg, something sharp had torn a gruesome-looking gash in the flesh. The cut ran at least an inch and a half long and an inch deep. She found another puncture the size of a coin on the triceps of her right arm.
For some reason, the wounds weren’t bleeding, and she felt no pain. She had just fallen more than half a mile from an airplane to the earth and nothing hurt.
But where was everyone else? If she had survived, she thought, others must have too. She called out for her mother. The forest gave up no sign of human life. She dropped to her knees and crawled through the dirt and decaying leaves. Again and again, she yelled for her mother. Only the frogs responded, with a strange chorus of clicks and chirps.
Juliane felt abandoned and utterly alone. The world around her seemed familiar from her time at Panguana. And yet, the rainforest has a way of making humans feel like they don’t belong. The canopy created by the treetops screens out 95 percent of the sun’s light and shrouds the ground in perpetual twilight. There’s life everywhere, but it rarely makes itself visible. Sitting on the forest floor, you hear leaves rustle and birds screech. High overhead, creatures move from tree to tree—sloths and howler monkeys, parrots and raptors. Leafcutter ants climb 100 feet to chew greenery, then transport it belowground, where it feeds fungus that transforms the leaves back into nutrients for the trees. Life cycles that have been established for thousands—even millions—of years play themselves out with no regard at all for human beings.
The naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace spent years collecting specimens in the Amazon in the mid-1800s, and he never quite got used to it. “There is a weird gloom and a solemn silence,” he wrote, “which combine to produce a sense of the vast—the primeval—world of the infinite. It is a world in which man seems an intruder.”
Juliane tested her legs again, ready to search for a sign of the world she had been torn from 24 hours before. She had boarded the plane in a pair of flimsy sandals, open at the heel. Only one of them had survived the fall. By instinct, she kept it on. In the rainforest, she had always worn tough rubber boots to protect against snakes; now, some protection seemed better than none.
Slowly, she began to walk in circles around the airplane seat. There was really no good reason to stay close to it, but she didn’t stray. As far as she could see, the seat was the only sign of civilization besides herself.
Far above her, the canopy looked undisturbed. If the LANSA flight had crash-landed nearby, it would have cut a long scar through the treetops. Instead, a tangled, unbroken web of vines, known as lianas, hung from the branches and trunks.
In the rainforest, lianas are champions in the vicious competition for survival. They start life as a sprout on the light-starved floor of the forest and climb toward the sun by any means necessary. They wrap themselves around tree trunks, even other vines, until they reach the canopy. The strongest lianas grow as thick as a human thigh. When they reach the light, they can sprout leaves the size of bedsheets and cut off the sun’s rays, starving the trees that gave them life in the first place.
Juliane probably had these hardened survivors to thank for her own survival. Unless some unseen force had slowed her on the way down, she had plummeted into the treetops at 120 miles an hour. The lianas, along with the tree branches in the canopy, must have acted like a rough-hewn net. They pummeled her on the way down. Most likely they were responsible for her collarbone, the swollen eyes, the gash in her calf, and whatever was making it hard to stand without the entire world spinning around her. But once they had bruised her, they had, unthinkably, delivered her to the ground alive.
“Hello!” she cried out. “Is anyone there?”
Again and again, she yelled into the vines and the trees.
Only the frogs replied.
She broadened her circles from the row of seats, combing the area for signs of the plane. On the sodden ground she found a bag of hard candies and a panettone, the Italian Christmas cake that Peruvians had adopted for the holidays. She tore off a piece of the cake and tried to eat it, but it was soggy and covered in mud. It tasted disgusting. She kept the candies and left the panettone where it lay.
Then came another sign from the world beyond the trees. A plane engine whined above the canopy, and then another. People were searching for her … for all of them … for anyone who might be left. But whatever comfort the sound brought vanished as soon as Juliane looked overhead. The dense canopy that kept light from reaching the rainforest floor also kept the sight of anything on the ground from reaching the sky. From above, there was only dense forest. No pilot, no matter how carefully he looked, would ever be able to see her.
Juliane still felt like her brain was packed in cotton. She had suffered a concussion during her plunge to the ground. She was also in a state of shock that could easily have paralyzed her. In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, the Japanese noticed that many of the survivors seemed unable to make decisions. They called the reaction burabura, or “do-nothing sickness.” It’s a state that often affects people in times of extreme stress.
Alone in the rainforest after plummeting from the
sky, Juliane could easily have turned her airplane seat over, sat down, and waited for someone to save her. Instead, she decided that if she did nothing, she was dead. Somehow, she had to get herself to a clearing so the pilots could find her. She might even have to find her way back to civilization by herself.
Just how she was going to make that happen remained unclear.
It is notoriously hard to navigate in the rainforest without a compass. Hikers in deciduous forests can tell direction by the path of the sun. But the rainforest canopy makes it hard to pinpoint the sun in the sky. Indigenous travelers learned to mark their path by breaking branches or hacking marks into trees with a machete. But that practice only led you back to your starting point. Juliane needed to get away from her patch of the Amazon, with its battered airplane seats and its mud-soaked Christmas cake. And even a compass would have done her little good. Since she had no idea where she was starting from, she had no idea which way to go.
The forest felt familiar to her, and that was a good sign. The species of trees, the bird calls, the frog noises—she knew them all from the long walks she had taken with her parents at Panguana, learning to identify birds and plants. It could be that she wasn’t far from home. But even if that were true, any direction she chose might take her deeper into untraveled land.
It was a terrible feeling. Get lost in the city or the suburbs, and you may not know which way to go, but you have routes to follow—roads or paths that will lead you somewhere. When outsiders get lost in the forest, they have nothing familiar to guide them. The American explorer Gene Savoy went hunting for a lost Incan city in the Peruvian wilderness in 1964. His crew spent one day hacking their way through the jungle with machetes, only to come full circle to a trail they had cut earlier. “Strange how the shallow little footpath of the day before gives the men a sense of assurance,” he wrote later. “Even I feel it. It is our mark upon the jungle, a meandering ribbon we had claimed from the unknown. It is our link with the outside world. A trail is everything in the jungle. Without it a man is unsure of himself, on unfamiliar ground.”
