by Tod Olson
Like most Amazon waterways, Juliane’s stream meandered in loops like a slithering snake. It’s not unusual for a rainforest stream or river to travel four or five times longer than a straight line drawn through the center of its path. Juliane could hear her father’s voice: Stick to the water; don’t take shortcuts. But if she could just cut straight through the forest from bend to bend, she would save hours, if not days, in the end.
During five centuries of ill-fated expeditions in the Amazon, it was a temptation that had proved hard to resist.
On October 1, 1769, just over 200 years before Juliane fell into the rainforest, a strange parade of travelers left the town of Riobamba, in the mountains of Spanish Peru. Thirty-one Puruhá Indian porters labored down cliffside trails toward the lowland forest. They dragged with them trunks and packs loaded with silver bowls, fine china, linens, and a lady’s wardrobe, including lace underwear, shawls, and shoes with gleaming gold buckles. They also carried the lady herself.
In a sedan chair supported on the shoulders of several Puruhás sat Isabel Godin, descendant of Spanish conquistadors. She wore an outfit about as appropriate for a rainforest expedition as Juliane’s minidress—a long, billowing dress and dainty cotton shoes. Her silver bracelets and gold necklaces jingled as she bounced along.
She may have overdressed for the occasion, but Isabel could hardly be considered soft. At the time, women of her class in the Spanish colonies rarely even visited neighbors without a maid or husband escorting them. Isabel was setting out to cross 2,000 miles of largely uncharted rainforest.
Her aim was to reunite with her husband, a French engineer who had been shut out of Peru by Spanish authorities. In addition to the porters, Isabel had her two brothers, a black slave named Joachim, and several other companions along for the ride.
It didn’t take long for the expedition to fall apart. After a week on muddy, mountainous trails, Isabel was carried like a queen into a village of smoldering huts. The Puruhá porters knew only too well what they were looking at. The town had been ravaged by smallpox and burned to the ground in an attempt to kill the disease. In the 270 years since white explorers first arrived in the Americas, European germs—with smallpox at the head of the list—had wiped out millions of Indians. The Puruhás had no desire to become the next victims. All 31 of them fled into the rainforest.
Isabel and her companions left the sedan chair to rot and traveled on by canoe down the Bobonaza River. When the overstuffed boat hit a log and tipped, the party found themselves stranded on a riverbank. Joachim and two others paddled off again with a much lighter load. They promised to come back with a rescue party.
Isabel and the rest waited more than three weeks for Joachim to return. Finally, starving and ravaged by mosquitoes, they decided to move. Isabel traded her ragged silks for a pair of pants from one of her brothers, and the desperate crew headed downriver.
That’s when they ran into the dilemma that has plagued many a traveler in the Amazon. Like Juliane’s stream, the Bobonaza wandered in a broad, endless “S” pattern. A dense tangle of underbrush and lianas clogged the banks. Frustrated by their creeping pace, Isabel and her brothers made a fateful decision. “By keeping along the river’s side,” Isabel’s husband later reported, “they found its sinuosities greatly lengthened their way, to avoid which inconvenience they penetrated the wood.”
For Isabel’s companions, it would be the final mistake. Hours after they left the riverbank, the travelers were hopelessly lost. They dragged themselves through the jungle, hoping to stumble onto the Bobonaza again. After three or four weeks, they lay on the rainforest floor, unable to move. Isabel watched her two brothers die slowly of starvation and dehydration. In their final days, they were little more than food for swarms of hungry insects.
Horrified by the decaying corpses, Isabel found the strength to move on. She staggered through the forest, found the riverbank, and collapsed at the feet of a very surprised Indian couple, who brought her to the next town downriver. There she learned that Joachim had returned to their original camp on the riverbank more than a month earlier. Help had come just a week after they decided to shortcut the river bends and “penetrate the wood.”
With her father’s advice in her ear, Juliane stuck to the stream. She plodded for hours through the dim light, the rain coming more often now. It was Wednesday, maybe Thursday, when she heard a scratchy, rhythmic call in the distance. Someone who didn’t know the forest might easily have thought a metalworker had set up shop in the trees with a handsaw. But the same noise had often filled the air around Panguana, and Juliane knew exactly what made it—a chicken-sized bird called a hoatzin. Hoatzins have scraggly orange crests that make them look like goths with spiked and dyed mohawks. Their chicks are born with claws on the “elbows” of their wings, like their distant ancestor, the archaeopteryx.
Juliane knew all of this because her mother had studied the birds. And thanks to her mother, she knew another thing about hoatzins: They nest only on the banks of relatively large rivers.
The wheezy call of the birds pulled Juliane forward with a new urgency. Before long, she could see her little stream emptying into a broad channel, rich with churning brown water and measuring at least 30 feet across. Nearly a week after Flight 508 ejected her high over the rainforest, she had found her way to a real river.
The forest made her pay to get there. A thick maze of dead logs and underbrush blocked the intersection of the stream and the river. She fought painfully through a patch of razor-sharp cana brava reeds that towered over her head. It took hours to get around the underbrush, but finally Juliane found herself standing on the banks of a broad waterway. Above her was a sight she had not seen in days: a clear, uninterrupted swath of sky.
After nearly a week imprisoned in the jungle she had found two pathways out—the river and the sky. They were two links, however tentative, to the world she had left behind.
Plane engines hummed in the distance for a while, well out of sight. Why weren’t they coming closer? When she’d been hidden, they had sounded near enough to touch. Now that the sky lay open above her, they were nowhere to be seen. Finally, a plane appeared above the gap in the trees. She yelled and waved her arms in the air, but the pilot veered off and disappeared over the canopy.
As the day wore on, Juliane’s spirits fell. The sound of the engines disappeared altogether. The sky looked angry, and rain fell hard and often. The river that had inspired so much hope a few hours ago now looked like a wild, untraveled piece of the jungle. Driftwood and giant logs floated in the current; no boat would dare try to navigate this river.
And where were the planes? They had given up the search; she was sure of it. They had probably found the rest of the survivors and airlifted them to safety. No one had any idea she was still wandering the forest floor, hopelessly lost and alone.
On Wednesday, December 29, dozens of Pucallpa residents spent the day hacking through the jungle with machetes, looking for signs that the 4-engine plane had eased itself through the trees on Christmas Eve and made a landing on the forest floor. Adolfo Saldana was one of the searchers. His son Roger had been coming home from college for Christmas on Flight 508. Saldana had joined a civilian patrol and headed into the forest, hoping to find his son alive.
The patrols moved at a painfully slow pace. Rain had flooded parts of the forest and turned others to thick, slimy mud. The families had pooled their resources to buy supplies for the patrols, but transporting them into the forest wasn’t easy. They had asked Commander Teddy del Carpio, head of search operations, for a helicopter. Del Carpio refused, insisting the helicopter would be used only to evacuate survivors—if they were lucky enough to find any.
On Wednesday night, done with his work until the next day, Saldana got on the road to drive home to Pucallpa. Like most routes through the rainforest, the “highway” was unpaved and riddled with ruts. Just after dark, he tried to negotiate a curve and skidded in the mud. His car rolled onto its hood and smashed into a tre
e. Adolfo Saldana was killed on impact.
Under grim skies and the shadow of Saldana’s death, the search efforts stalled. On Thursday, three planes took off from Pucallpa. They were enveloped by storm clouds and had to turn around. Friday—New Year’s Eve—was not much better. Commander del Carpio grew worried he would lose more family members to the weather. As people gathered for Saldana’s funeral in Pucallpa, del Carpio set up guards to stop any new civilian patrols from venturing into the jungle.
When the clouds broke for an hour or two, a few planes tried to take off. Bob Weninger flew whenever he could get aloft. Usually, a new storm forced him back to base before he could cover much ground. Even when skies were clear, all the pilots could see was an endless carpet of green. A flier from the missionary base at Yarinacocha told a reporter: “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Juliane had no idea that Adolfo Saldana had died. She didn’t know that police were trying to prevent people from searching for her. But she definitely felt as small and insignificant as a needle in a haystack. She had discovered a river—and it had not led her to people. She had found an opening to the sky—but the planes that had patrolled it for days seemed to have vanished.
Emotions that had started to surface when she found the bodies now broke through. Staring at the empty sliver of sky, she grew furious. How could they stop searching less than a week after the crash? If they had found other survivors, why wouldn’t they keep looking for her?
The anger turned quickly to despair. She had fooled herself into thinking that water would save her—that if she found a river she would find people. Well, she had done it, and look where her efforts had gotten her. No canoe had ever tried to navigate this dismal stretch of water; it looked like a graveyard for half the trees in the rainforest. And nothing about the landscape suggested that it had ever played host to a human being. There were no broken branches to mark a once-traveled path, no pile of palm fronds from a collapsed shelter.
She’d been fighting the rainforest with her bare hands in nothing but a minidress and one sandal and she was no closer to civilization than she had been at the start. Open wounds on her calf and her arm were in danger of becoming infected. She’d had no real food for nearly a week. She was little more than a walking meal for the mosquitoes and black flies. Why shouldn’t she just find a tree to lean against and wait for whatever came?
As it had so often since Saturday, her father’s voice came back to her. It had become a mantra, a motto, something she didn’t have to summon: Follow the river; rivers lead to people.
Juliane knew that Hans Koepcke was not one to sit on a riverbank and wait. As a young man, he had been so determined to get to Peru that he had walked most of the way from Germany. Had there not been an ocean in his path, he probably would have made the entire journey on foot.
World War II had just ended, and Hans wanted to make a name for himself as a biologist. He knew the best place to do it was in the rainforest. When the natural history museum in Lima offered him a job, he set out on foot. He crawled under the border fence into Austria and hitchhiked to Italy. He crossed a minefield to France and climbed a mountain range to Spain. From there he hid himself in a pile of salt on a freighter and made it to the coast of Brazil. He was out of money but ecstatic that he had finally made it to the rainforest. So to get to Peru, he walked more than 2,000 miles across the continent, studying the forest along the way.
Hans Koepcke had left Germany in 1948; he arrived in Lima in 1950. In contrast to so many of the naturalists and explorers who had come before him, he mastered the jungle. “When we have really resolved to achieve something, we succeed,” he liked to say. “We only have to want it.”
Juliane did not feel especially close to her father. He was the kind of man you respected, not the kind of man you adored. But he had a presence that was hard to ignore. After 17 years listening to his lessons and living up to his expectations, Juliane too had become the kind of person who could not sit on a riverbank and wait. With the skies still threatening, she picked herself up and began to follow the water.
For centuries, rivers have been the arteries of human civilization in the Amazon. Indigenous craftsmen carved 40-foot dugout canoes from individual tree trunks. They navigated churning rapids with ease. They feasted on bass, catfish, eel, and turtles pulled with great skill from river waters.
The white colonists who arrived in the 16th century needed the rivers to transport goods and people. Like Isabel Godin, they lost their way as soon as they strayed into the forest. But they had no idea how to negotiate the whirlpools and unpredictable currents of rainforest rivers, so they enslaved Indian boatmen to navigate for them. And the waters themselves were a mysterious place. Hidden beneath the surface were creatures that bit, shocked, and killed in ways that fired the imaginations of frightened travelers.
South American alligators, known as caimans, lay all day in the weeds of the riverbanks, disguised as logs. At night they slipped into the water to hunt. Their eyes, big as plums, gleamed in the moonlight. The naturalists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa insisted that once caimans got a taste of human flesh they would do anything to get more.
Piranha fish, with their jutting lower jaws and razor-like teeth, had a particularly bloodthirsty reputation. Former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt, who traveled in the Amazon after leaving the White House, claimed he once saw a school of piranhas turn a cow into a skeleton in minutes. “They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast,” he reported, “for blood in the water excites them to madness.”
The puraque, or electric eel, attacked in an even more exotic way: It gave its victims a 650-volt shock. In 1799, the German naturalist Alexander Humboldt sent a few horses into an eel-infested bog to observe their reaction. Their manes stood on end and they scrambled for dry land. Two of the unfortunate creatures gave up their lives to science, drowning in the bog.
But it was the needle-shaped candiru that inspired the worst nightmares of all. This tiny parasitic catfish swam into body cavities, opened spines along its body, and latched on to feast on the blood of its host. The candiru normally fed in the gills of other fish. But it was said to possess a skill that was of special interest to anyone who considered relieving himself in a river. Supposedly, the candiru could swim up a stream of urine and lodge itself in a human urethra.
As Juliane made her way downstream, she knew the legendary reputations of the river creatures. She also knew the difference between real and imagined dangers. She tried to stick to the banks. But without a machete, she didn’t make much progress. The underbrush scraped at her arms and legs. Vines swiped at her head. The tangled growth pushed her into the shallows, where she picked her way across sharp and slippery rocks. She poked at the riverbed with a stick before each step, looking not for voracious piranhas or bloodsucking candirus, but for stingrays.
To people who know the rainforest, stingrays inspire more fear and caution than 16-foot caimans. They lie on the river’s floor, camouflaged in mud. If a foot disturbs their rest, they lash out with a barbed tail sharp enough to slice through a rubber boot. Their poison won’t kill a human unless it strikes a vital organ. But in Juliane’s case, it wouldn’t need to. In her weakened state, a wound from a 5-inch stingray spike could leave her unable to walk for days—and that would be enough.
In the shallows, Juliane stumbled along in a ritual pattern: stick first, then sandal, then bare foot. Slippery rocks and overhanging vines tormented her. She made slow and painful progress, and after a while she decided to slip into the middle of the river and drift with the current. Churning silt turned the water a murky brown. She could have been escorted by a river full of piranhas, and she wouldn’t have known it.
More than once, as she swam in the murk, Juliane startled a caiman dozing on the bank. What happened next was enough to make most travelers scramble to shore and run screaming into the heart of the forest. A prehistoric-looking reptile with a foot-long jaw slipped with startling speed into the water a
nd headed straight for Juliane. It took willpower, but she kept swimming. She knew that caimans had little interest in attacking humans. It was simply their instinct when threatened to flee into the water, no matter where the threat came from.
As for the other predators, Juliane had the comfort of science on her side. Piranhas, she knew, attack only in stagnant water. If she stuck to the fast-moving current of her river, they would probably leave her alone. Eels take no interest in humans, and the electrical jolt they pack lasts for only two milliseconds. Despite the experience of Humboldt’s horses, that was hardly long enough to drown a full-sized human. And the fearsome candiru? Only a couple of cases have been documented in which the spiny beasts had to be removed from a human being.
As she drifted with the current, Juliane felt her confidence return. More often than not, the skies were clogged with storm clouds and gave up no sign of rescue planes. But with the current behind her, she made better progress. She could only hope it was bringing her closer to another human being.
By the end of the week, Juliane could tell she was getting weaker. The candies were long gone. She hadn’t eaten solid food since Christmas Eve morning. She’d been drinking murky brown river water for days.
Walking took tremendous effort, and she was happy to let herself drift in the middle of the river. Occasionally, she had to paddle or kick to avoid logs bobbing in her path. Mostly, she treaded water and floated, letting the current carry her. The river water was cool. It did most of the work for her exhausted body. It also gave her relief from the most voracious predators in all the jungle—the bugs.
