by Joe Jackson
We know who set him on this course—one that would change so much and affect so many. For when his notes were published, Henry dedicated the book to James de Vismes Drummond-Hay, C.B., “in remembrance of the many kindnesses by which the author was indebted for a pleasant ending to a somewhat arduous journey.”
Henry arrived home in London in autumn 1870 a changed man. His mother had never seen him this way. When he’d returned from Nicaragua, he’d seemed lost. Now he was talking as if a new life awaited them all in the jungle, and the more he talked, the more convincing he sounded. More than that, he got things done with a drive that had never been part of his makeup before. Within the space of a few months after his return, he wrote up his notes and found a publisher. And he got engaged.
Her name was Violet Case Carter, the daughter of a bookseller on Regent Street whose shop was only a few short blocks from Harriette’s on Sackville. She was four years younger than Henry, and it is possible they could have known each other before he left for the Orinoco. Although booksellers were not the most fashionable shopkeepers on Regent Street, they were the most interesting and controversial. By displaying in their windows lithographs and etchings of everything from tranquil landscapes to current artwork and classic nudes, they were a draw for window-shoppers and a good indicator of popular and intellectual tastes. Violet’s father, William H. J. Carter, set up his shop at 12 Regent Street, just off Piccadilly Circus. Carter lived on the premises with his wife Patty and daughter Violet. Like most booksellers of the time, he was a literary jack-of-all-trades. He printed books, sold artwork, and gave speech lessons.
William Carter also published Henry’s journals of his Nicaraguan and South American adventures, combined in one volume: Rough Notes of a Journey through the Wilderness from Trinidad to Pará, Brazil, by Way of the Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, Atabapo, and Rio Negro. The book contained sixteen line drawings by Henry, including sketches of a rubber tapper in the jungle and the leaf and nut of Hevea brasiliensis, drawings that would have a greater impact on his future than the daily narrative.
The production seems rough and hurried. The journals are unedited and unchronological. The reader suffers with Henry through the Orinoco before he gets to meet the younger Henry Wickham in Nicaragua. People come and go without introduction or description, most notably the poor, suffering Rogers, whose origins are never given and whose fate we never learn. If ever an authorial voice is shackled to immediate sensation, it is Henry’s. One suspects that this was his entire approach to life, and for all his bonhomie and physical courage, he seemed unable to empathize with others. It’s hard to call this selfishness, for that implies awareness of another’s wants and desires. Henry’s lack of empathy is more elemental. Victorians called it manly force of will. Literary naturalists like Jack London or Joseph Conrad cast it as a “force of nature,” usually destructive. Freud would christen it the id.
People like Henry are on fire, and he must have burned like a nova. During those nine months, from his arrival in London in autumn 1870 to his return to the Amazon in summer 1871, he convinced his mother, sister Harriette Jane and her fiancé Frank Pilditch, brother John, and an unspecified number of English laborers to return with him to Santarém to start new lives as planters. John Wickham was so filled with Henry’s vision that in the 1871 census he listed his occupation as “farmer.” Henry convinced Violet’s father to publish his Rough Notes even though he would be gone when the book came out. Family lore suggests that Carter also subsidized many of Henry’s future adventures. He burst into the life of a girl who’d lived around travelogues and exotic prints and no doubt dreamed of far-off places. He swept her up in a whirlwind courtship, and they married on May 29, 1871, Henry’s twenty-fifth birthday.
“Born within the sound of Bow Bells, and therefore a thorough Cockney,” she said of herself, Violet had never left England. A group photo taken four years later in Santarém shows a small woman, with a sharp jaw and high forehead, the most wan and sickly of the six posed. By then, three of their original party had died; within another year, two more would succumb to malaria or yellow fever. Her sharp features and mousy brown hair made her the least attractive of the three women seated for the photo, but she would prove tougher than all of them, more adaptable to the wild places that Henry dragged her into than even Henry himself, able to face hardship with a straightforward humor that Henry never had.
As a working-class girl, marriage had been an expectation since she could remember. “To be married is, with perhaps the majority of women, the entrance into life,” proclaimed the article “Old Maids” in the July 1872 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Marriage was “the point they assume for carrying out their ideas and aims.” There was also a belief that behind every successful man an intelligent and sensitive woman oiled the gears—that, in fact, a man needed such a woman to succeed. “The general aim of English wives is practically to convince their husbands how much happier they are married,” assured the author of an 1852 women’s health manual, but Henry didn’t need convincing. So great by now was his need to rise in the world, so wholeheartedly did he accept the Victorian formula for success, that the “good wife” of Proverbs was part of his internal equation—she was identified with him, and he with her. She deserved the benefits of his success. Left unsaid was that she shared the reality of his failures.
Unlike Americans today who subscribe to ideas of empire, Victorians felt that they must not only civilize and dominate but also populate the world. Young men were not the only ones recruited to inhabit the world’s wild places; family groups were encouraged to establish little islands of English values. A lot was vested in these domestic outposts of civilization, wrote Herman Merivale in his popular Lectures on Colonization and Colonies: “The sense of national honour, . . . pride of blood, tenacious spirit of self-defense, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilization and our religion over the world.” All traits, it was believed, that made the British an imperial people and ensured an ever-expanding empire. The men would clear the land, brave the dangers, and dominate or convert those who were not British, white, or Christian. A woman’s role was subtler. Childbearing had obvious imperial functions, but women were needed to civilize males. It was feared that men without women went native and indulged in local mistresses. A wife embodied the moral standards of empire, and husbands must “tenderly preserve them, as the plantation of mankind.”
Given this, it is understandable but still remarkable how many women Henry convinced to accompany him to the Amazon. Henry’s mother would go, his sister Harriette Jane, and his brother John Joseph. Harriette Jane was accompanied by her fiancé, twenty-five-year-old London solicitor Frank Slater Pilditch. John Wickham brought his fiancé, Christine Francis Pedley, who also brought her mother, Anna Pedley, age fifty-two.
The older women may have felt they had no option but to go. An 1875 group photo taken in Santarém shows Christine Pedley in profile. With long, curled tresses and dark, doe eyes, she was the most classically beautiful of the bunch. According to the 1871 census, she was the daughter of fifty-nine-year-old architect James Pedley, who made his home in St. Georges Square, Marylebone, close to the communal residence of the Wickhams. This was a comfortable address, a life not easily cast off, and the fact that Anna Pedley left it for the Amazon suggests either an incredible devotion to her fairylike daughter or the sudden death of James Pedley in the interim. If the latter was the case, and her only child was headed to the jungle, she faced the prospect of a widow’s life, alone.
Henry’s mother had faced that prospect for a long time. By now she was in her sixties, and her eldest had convinced everyone in the house to start life anew in the Amazon. What was Harriette to do? The milliner’s shop on Sackville Street had never been a great success. There’s the suggestion that she gave it to her daughter and lived in semiretirement with her children when not needed at the store. There was no safety net for Harriette if her
children left—no Social Security, pension, or 401K. She would have faced a life in the workhouse as she grew old and feeble.
However, Henry’s sister left the most behind. The 1871 census listed Harriette Jane as “head of household” in the Wickham residence, a woman “of independent means.” In all likelihood she’d inherited her mother’s millinery shop. She was headed for a comfortable middle-class existence, the same she’d forfeited to cholera as a child. She was picking up where her mother left off: Frank Pilditch, her fiancé, was a solid, conventional choice, much like her father. The 1875 photo shows a watch chain hanging from his vest pocket, a cigar balanced confidently between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He is safe, uninteresting, a flat, forgettable face that fit nicely in court, not with the band of swarthy pirates that the Wickhams resembled. Harriette Jane stares straight at the camera, the rock-solid center of the group, a level-headed counterbalance to her brother Henry’s flights of fancy.
And what did Henry offer in exchange for this future of privilege? Adventure, riches, exotic climes. A chance to work together as a family for a new beginning. They could build a world on their own terms. Henry promised Paradise, and they bought it hook, line, and sinker.
It was a paradise they thought they would recognize. Paradise is almost always tropical; the vegetation is lush and filled with succulent fruit; the men and women are beautiful and wear little or no clothing. Columbus in his first letters to Ferdinand and Isabella described his New World as a paradise; Gauguin and Rousseau peopled Paradise with fantastic vegetation, sensuous inhabitants, peaceful lions and tigers. To be a denizen of such a place meant a life that was happy and languid.
They left Liverpool by steamer at the end of summer 1871 and a month later were in Pará, now Belém. The capital of this rain-forest state is not actually on the Amazon but lies sheltered in the Bay of Marajó and connects to the continent-crossing waterway by the Pará River and a series of natural canals. Heading for the mouth of the Amazon itself was a tricky business for an oceangoing steamer. New shoals and sandbars were always forming and dissolving; a powerful eastward-flowing current threw a ship from side to side.
It was almost exactly a year since Henry had departed this place, and he hurried to the British consulate to announce his return. Except for letters and a legal suit, Henry would write no more about himself until 1908. Henceforth, the story is picked up by public records, scant correspondence, the chance observations of others, and Violet’s unpublished memoir. Her observations are sharp, short, and to the point; she spares no one, least of all her husband. And now, her first contact with the tropics as she strolled through the narrow streets and tree-lined avenues of Pará with this congeries of Wickhams “was very like being dropped into deep water never having learned to swim.”
Pará was a gateway to and preview of all the surreal beauty and mortal absurdities a tropical newcomer would encounter. There was the intermixture of Portuguese, Indian, and Negro races; the nobles dressed in their scratchy woolen suits and high stiff collars; the imposing cathedral and customs house; and the slow construction of the Teatro do Paz, one of the largest theaters in South America, begun in 1869. Perched in rows along the rooftops were Henry’s old friends, the Urubu turkey buzzards. Henry muttered under his breath when he saw them. Violet knew the story and understood her husband’s loathing. After a tropical shower they stood erect with their wings outstretched, a blasphemous imitation of a crucifix, feathers clacking in the breeze. Sometimes they seemed to commit suicide, flying across the open square to smash against a large white building. Examination showed them to be swarming with parasites, “a singular winged parasitical insect of a disgusting appearance,” one observer later noted, “resembling a flattened house-fly.”
They transferred to a river steamer in a matter of days. Steam navigation began on the Amazon in 1853, and by 1871, forty steamers owned by the Amazon Steam Company plied the waterway. Each was a multideck affair, open on all sides, popularly called a gaiola, or “bird cage.” The upper deck was reserved for officers and first-class passengers, the lower for the engine, cargo, second- and third-class passengers, animals, and crew. The cargo was loaded in layers: merchandise, mules, and dogs on the bottom, passengers swinging in their hammocks above them, with space in the rafters for monkeys, boxes of insects, and squawking birds.
Violet had never seen anything like this mode of travel. Hammocks were strung from every rafter; she didn’t know what to think of the gently swaying rede, or “net,” but soon found them delightful in hot climates and discovered she couldn’t sleep in anything else. “They should be nearly square,” she wrote, “and you lie diagonally across them instead of lengthwise.” They should also be high enough to place one’s foot on the ground to keep up the swinging, “the rocking and the rhythmical ring of the swinging cords soon lulling you off.”
One hundred miles above Pará they entered a channel called the Narrows. This is ninety miles long, seldom one hundred yards across, threading a maze of one thousand forested islands. The main channel twists and curves to the west of Marajó, the central alluvial island about the size of Switzerland. Once past that, they were in the Amazon itself, which at the mouth was like entering an inland sea. Violet saw a vast expanse of water, a milky, yellow-olive concoction that stretched three to six miles from shore to shore. Great beds of aquatic grass lined the banks or broke loose to form floating islands. These had to be avoided at all cost, lest the propeller foul and they became part of the island themselves, borne backward to the sea. Fruit, leaves, and giant tree trunks floated past them in such quantity that it seemed the interior must be denuded of plant life. The level banks were lined with lofty, unbroken forest, the dark, straight tree trunks forming a living green wall right to the river’s edge. A range of low hills that connected to the mountains of Guiana stalked back from the north for about two hundred miles. All was covered by forest, with frequent flocks of parrots and great red-and-yellow macaws screaming overhead.
She’d entered one of the largest rivers and most massive river basins in the world. The best current estimate is that the Amazon stretches approximately 4,000-4,200 miles, if the river’s source is considered near Balique in the Andes, just east of 50° W longitude. The length of the Nile is usually set at 4,100 miles. The Amazon’s flow is five times that of the Congo and twelve times that of the Mississippi; it disgorges as much water every day into the Atlantic as the Thames moves past London in a year. Brazilian hydrologists believe that the river’s annual discharge is about 57 million gallons per second: by such an estimate, the Amazon could supply in two hours all the water used by New York City’s 7.5 million residents each year.
The valley itself is fan-shaped. In the delta, Violet bobbed in its 200-mile-wide apex. From there, it broadens until reaching the Andes, where the valley’s width exceeds 1,500 miles. It drains an area of 2.4-2.72 million square miles—nearly all of northern and central Brazil, half of Bolivia and Colombia, two thirds of Peru, three quarters of Ecuador, and part of southern Venezuela. Until the 1970s, rain forest covered two thirds of that expanse. Since then, 10-15 percent has been cut back, though some has returned as secondary forest. There is no discernable slope: The main river drops a mere 213 feet between Peru and the Atlantic, a distance of 1,860 miles, while eleven of its main tributaries flow more than 1,000 miles uninterrupted by a single rapids or waterfall. Yet the current maintains an average velocity of 1.55 mph during the dry season and more than double that during high water, and in some places the water level rises and falls 50 feet or more. So much water flows below Manaus and Santarém that the river is a plow, cutting a channel below Manaus that has been sounded to depths of 330 feet. So much sediment is deposited that the lowlands have begun to sink under their own weight, and sediment depths of more than 16,400 feet have been recorded. Violet would hear the river described as the basin’s excretory system, the means by which the waste products of the huge forest around her were eliminated, as if the endless riverine landsca
pe were not so much an ecosystem but a creature itself, a huge, relentless, uncomprehending thing.
Richard Spruce saw the forest as a monstrous tree. Its tributaries were the boughs; its streams and creeks, the branches and twigs. He imagined in his journals a dark region where the river branched without end, losing itself in an impenetrable wall of green. One entered this verdancy and vanished; you stepped off the path and density closed behind you, as if civilization had never been considered, not even a gleam in God’s eye. Only the forest mattered, the sole reality since the beginning of time.
But time had no real meaning here. Hours flowed into hours, and at first domestic details made the strongest impression on Violet. The bread, for example, was sliced and rebaked so that it could be carried into the interior, and its stale taste was her first foreboding that trouble lay ahead. “We had a few people traveling with us 2nd class intended as laborers for our new venture,” she wrote. “One of them came up as a spokesman for the rest to show us the bread they gave them to eat—however, on hearing we had the same, they were somewhat quieter.”
But even stale bread was a luxury. The “real bread stuff,” she soon learned, was farinha, made from the manioc root—tiny dry pellets of starch that the locals picked up between the fingertips and popped into the mouth like popcorn. This took a little getting used to. Violet compared farinha to sawdust and was able to get it down only after soaking it in soup or gravy.
