The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  In her father’s store, Violet had read about the wild tribes who inhabited the country’s thousand streams. In 1541, Francisco Pizarro, secure in his defeat of the Incas on the Pacific coast, “had received tidings that beyond the city of Quito there was a wide region where cinnamon grew.” He ordered his brother Gonzalo and his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana to find this cinnamon land.

  They crossed the mountains with five hundred Spaniards, four thousand Indian porters, and herds of llamas and pigs. They descended the Andes into the jungle along the Rio Napo, and soon it was obvious there was no cinnamon, much less provisions for an army. The expedition was plagued by desertion, starvation, and sickness, and this river plunged on forever. Orellana was ordered to build a brigantine and scout ahead. Soon it became easier to continue downstream than return, so Orellana took the “flowing road” that carried him across the continent and months later into the ocean beyond.

  It was during this accidental voyage that the rain forest became the haunt for fantastic Western dreams. Soon after they took off down the Napo, an Indian chief told Orellana of El Dorado, a fantastic city of gold just a few miles off—probably nothing more than an attempt to get rid of these mad strangers. “It was here that they informed us of the existence of the Amazons and of the wealth farther down the river,” wrote Gaspar de Caraval, the Jesuit priest with Orellana’s band. A certain tribe lived by a lake whose banks were lined with gold. Each morning the Indians coated their chief with a thin film of gold; each evening, he washed it off in the lake in preparation for the next day. He was El Dorado—the gilded one. Although gold was not discovered, other delusions prevailed. The most famous was Orellana’s “encounter” with female warriors near the mouth of the Rio Trombetas, or River of Trumpets. These long-haired natives—more probably men than women—were responsible for the naming of what the Indians themselves called the Paranáquausú, or “Great River.”

  Three hundred years had passed, and the Amazon was still a mysterious river of dreams. An estimated 332,000 people lived in this region, up from 272,000 a decade ago. Brazil’s boundaries were legalized in 1750; in 1807, when Napoleon invaded Portugal, Queen Maria de Braganza and Regent Dom João transferred the entire court to Rio de Janeiro with British naval assistance rather than surrender and abandon its alliance with Britain. After Napoleon’s defeat, Dom João returned to Lisbon, but in 1822, his son, Dom Pedro, refused to depart and declared Brazil independent. In 1840, Dom Pedro II was installed as emperor at age fourteen; he still ruled today, his government a constitutional monarchy. Talk was underway of progressive policies, like outlawing slavery.

  But in the remote Amazon, tides of history had little meaning. History was measured by the riches pulled from the forest instead. The first such “extraction cycle” was that of brazilwood, which began in 1503 and lasted to the nineteenth century, halted by the near-extinction of the species and discovery of synthetic dyes. Also known as dyewood, the tree was abundant along the rainforest that lined the Atlantic coast. To extract the brick-red dye, the heartwood was crushed before it was cooked. As the trees gave out in one area, they were felled at increasing distances inland. During the first three decades of Portuguese settlement, the harvest was estimated at three thousand metric tons each year. For the next two centuries, Brazil was considered an inexhaustible mine of dyewood, a cornucopia of deep red trees.

  The next extractive cycle, involving sugarcane, began in the sixteenth century and reached its zenith in the first half of the seventeenth. Tea, chocolate, and coffee were becoming fashionable in Europe, and between 1600 and 1700, Brazilian sugar to sweeten them dominated the markets of the world. To break the monopoly, the Dutch occupied northeastern Brazil from 1630 to 1661, but they were eventually ousted and the Portuguese returned. Huge sugar plantations, or engenhos, spread along the coast because of more fertile land and easier access to Europe. Firewood was needed to maintain the sugarcane furnaces: They ran around the clock each year for seven to eight months, each engenho using up to 2,560 wagonloads of lumber per harvest. The industry created a wasteland. One historian lamented that sugarcane cultivation “left us a north-east despoiled of its very rich forests, [with] impoverished soils, and a miserable and servile population, possessing only its popular culture and the humility and humanity which only many generations of suffering can teach.”

  As Brazil’s sugar production faltered, mines were dug. The most important gold strike came in 1693 in what is now the state of Minais Gerais. Later discoveries produced gold rushes as intense as those in California and the Klondike. Workers abandoned the cane fields for the gold mines, delivering a killing blow to the sugar industry. This flow of gold allowed Portugal to live well beyond her means. Between 1500 and 1800, the Americas sent to Europe £300 million in gold. Of that amount, £200 million came from Brazil. An estimated three hundred thousand Portuguese citizens joined the gold rush, so depopulating the nation that travel restrictions were enacted. Famine and disease hit the mining camps, forcing prospectors to seek new gold fields. They burned down forests and enslaved Indians. In 1700, Brazil’s gold production reached 2,750 tons a year; by 1760, 14,600 tons. When the gold gave out, the depression that hit south central Brazil was as great as in the northeastern region, now the waste dump of sugarcane.

  The cotton cycle came next, in the southern half of the country, but in the forested north, livestock was king. An estimated 1.3 million head of cattle grazed in and around the Amazon in 1711. Trees were cut down and savannahs burned to “strengthen” the range. Deserts formed along the São Francisco River, in Minais Gerais, Goims, and Mato Grosso.

  Now the rubber cycle had begun. On one chilly morning, Violet awoke to see that their boat had anchored beside the small jungle port where the best rubber in the Amazon was said to be found. Santarém looked pleasant enough, resting on a slope at the meeting of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, with a fine sandy beach, a handsome church with two towers, and houses painted yellow or white, their doors and windows bright green. A mist rose from the forest in the hills above town. So this is my new home, she thought, and hoped she’d grow to love it. She prayed that life would be kind to them, the innocent prayer of every young bride.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE JUNGLE

  Violet liked Santarém from the start. It was a pretty little river port, with rows of white houses surrounded by green gardens, standing on a slope near the mouth of the Tapajós. A white sandy beach ran its length and a small, rocky knoll marked its western edge. Set at the juncture of the two massive rivers, the air was not stagnant, but pleasant and breezy. Rows of canoes lined the shore, and beyond them, a score of larger vessels. Since there was no pier in Santarém, barges ferried passengers and freight, or the boat pulled close to the beach and passengers hopped into the shallow water. The shore was lined with washerwomen of all colors: The occasional promenader picked his or her way through the drying clothes.

  Nearly every Amazon town was divided like Santarém into cidade and aldeira, the city and village—the former the modern town, the latter the Indian village from which it sprang. The avenues of the cidade paralleled the river but were overgrown with grass, since there were few vehicles and everyone walked. Three long streets ran the length of town, and after that a fringe of jungle, from which the shrieks of the jaguar could still be heard. At the far edges of town, in the aldeira, people still locked their doors at night in fear of the cat. Beyond that, a grassy plain, or campo, rose to a high, forested plateau. Although the Wickhams rented an empty house, Henry indicated that in a few days they would be heading into that high interior.

  Santarém was a trading town of about five thousand inhabitants whose livelihood depended on the Tapajós, not the Amazon. The locals called it the Rio Preto, or Black River. In fact, its waters were not black, but a deep, impenetrable blue. The Tapajós began 1,650 miles to the south in the jungles of the Mato Grosso, and although its drainage basin covered 188,800 square miles, it was only the fifth-largest tributary of the Great Rive
r. Where the rivers met, the Tapajós formed a huge lake: called rias by geologists, such “mouth-bays” are common in the Amazon. The mouth-bay of the Tapajós was so incredibly deep that oceangoing steamers could pass up the river to just below the trading villages of Aveiro and Boim. In high water they could go beyond that, past the limestone quarry at tiny Boa Vista and sometimes as far as 150 miles to the falls at Itaituba. Some Santarém trading houses had branches that distant. Canoes and lanchas brought rubber downriver, along with jungle drugs, cacao, small boxes of gold dust, and the occasional shrunken head.

  The very spirit of peace seemed to rest over the village, something Violet suspected she’d miss once they struck off for the interior. But Santarém had not always been peaceful, and there were many ghosts here. The area once supported one of the highest populations in the preconquest Americas, with the towns and villages of the Tapajós, or Tupaya, civilization stretching for miles along the riverbanks. According to tradition, the Tupaya descended from tribes that had emigrated from Peru or Venezuela. They subsisted off the rich stocks of fish in the river and corn grown in the rich alluvial soils, replenished each year when the Amazon flooded. A number of flat-topped hills surrounded Santarém, and on them could be found terra preta do Indio, the “Indian black earth,” a rich compost built up over the generations by Indian farmers. It was this black soil that Henry heard about on his first trip. He made the mistake, as did other newcomers, of confusing this manmade buildup with the natural state of the forest soil. The first European accounts, dating from the early sixteenth century, told of swarms of war canoes coming out to do battle and of Indian longhouses lining the banks. “Sixty thousand bows can be sent forth from these villages alone,” wrote one Jesuit chronicler, “and because the number of Tapajós Indians is so great, they are feared by other Indians and nations, and thus they have made themselves sovereigns of this district.” They were “corpulent” warriors, very “large and strong”; the tips of their arrows were poisoned, and “that is the cause why they are feared of the other Indians,” the Jesuit Father said.

  The modern town began when the Jesuits gathered the Indians to convert them to Christianity. The stone fort was built, and Santarém became a mission village. In 1773, the town was overrun by warrior Mundurucú Indians. The citizens and soldiers gathered in the fort and held off the attackers with concentrated musket fire. The Mundurucú fought hard, their wives carrying their arrows, but their greater numbers were repulsed by modern firepower.

  The first decades of independence were no more peaceful. A civil war raged along the Amazon from 1835 to 1841. Known as the Cabanagem, or War of the Cabanas, what started as a slave uprising soon turned into a race war. By the time it was brutally suppressed, 30,000-40,000 were dead. Those unable to speak the língua geral—or who had any vestige of facial hair—were put to death. The Cabanas plucked all hair from their faces so as to not be mistaken for Europeans. Attacks of Cabanas on the homes of colonizers at night were preceded by harsh, jarring blasts on the ture, a horn made of long, thick bamboo. Now, once a year, their descendants, called cablanos, would assemble for carnival and march by torchlight to Santarém’s European quarter, blowing the ture as they came. They danced before the doors of the principal citizens, but those old enough to remember shuddered at the sound, as if death descended from the forest once again.

  Even now, racial matters continued to shape life in Santarém. It has been estimated that one third of all African slaves shipped to the New World came to Brazil; by the nineteenth century, that figure approached 60 percent. Although the nation’s slave trade was banned in 1817, it didn’t truly end until 1850, when Britain, motivated by a newfound morality in foreign policy, threatened Rio with a naval blockade. Even then, slavery didn’t die. In reality, Violet observed, it still existed on the Amazon: “All children were born free but still the household had a large proportion of slaves one way and another.” She was amazed by the resilience of the slave women: They’d perfected the art of multitasking when carrying loads around town, “a large jar of water on their heads, a plate of meal in one hand, palm uppermost just over the shoulder, a child sitting on their hip on the other side.”

  The laxity of the slave laws allowed Santarém to be home to two diametrically opposed groups of exiles. Escaped slaves from the sugar plantations of Barbados had settled along the Trombetas and Maicuru tributaries across the river on the Amazon’s north shore. And there was a dwindling remnant from an original two hundred confederado refugees who’d come to Santarém in hopes of growing cotton and founding a new slave society. The confederados were scattered everywhere: on the Amazon’s north bank, so that their trading boats passed those of the jet-black Barbadians when they came to town; in Santarém itself; and in a farming community south across the campo in the forested plateau. “That is where we are headed,” Henry told her. Their new neighbors would not be the shopkeepers of Regent Street but backwoodsmen from the defeated Confederacy.

  The last and largest group drawn into the current form of slavery was the Indians. Old animosities still lingered after the War of the Cabanas and the depredations of the slavers. Indian slavery did not always go by that name. An orphanage of Indian children existed near the Wickhams. Children were “drafted out to the different families to be brought up,” a form of adoption that still takes place along the river, although along the Tapajós the practice seems more informal, between neighbors and extended families. In Henry’s time, however, these “adoptions” had an economic motive. Housewives in Santarém “all made their house keeping (sic) money by sending out their slaves with things to sell,” Violet wrote, “one day vegetables, another with drinks made from various kinds of palm fruits, another with pillow lace which these Indian girls made under their mistresses’ tuition.” The children seemed happy enough, “no cases of gross cruelty tho’ you could often hear the palmatore going, a piece of wood shaped like a bat, with which the mistress of the house kept order by striking the erring one on the palm of the hand.” Henry and Violet may have adopted a child themselves at this early date, for Violet later mentioned “a little Indian boy who had been given to H to bring up.” There is no hint of the palmatore in her memoir, and the boy seemed devoted, following Henry everywhere.

  Violet, too, followed where Henry led. This was to the campo. The path from town ascended a mile or two, passing through the narrow belt of woods, then entered grassy land that sloped gradually to a broad valley watered by rivulets. The vegetation of the campo reminded Spruce, who’d visited twenty-two years earlier, “of an English pleasure ground” like Hampstead Heath. Henry may have made the same connection, for there was a spring in his step, which Violet now recognized as a sign of his more ebullient moods. While the others tried to maintain some vestige of London fashion, Henry had gone native, or at least his interpretation—linen shirt, khaki pants and bush jacket, low-slung leather belt, and sheath knife hanging down his leg. He always looked the roughest of their group, with his black, tousled hair, black walrus mustache and permanent three-day’s growth of beard. He delighted in the image, and Violet seemed amused that the cheerful eccentric she’d married in London had become an even greater character out here. The plain they rode across was scattered with low trees, rarely exceeding thirty feet, and here and there gaily flowering shrubs. Beyond that, the deeply wooded hills extended as far as the eye could see. Some isolated hills were pyramidal peaks, the Indian black earth and pottery shards on top the last vestige of the huge Tupaya civilization. Complete solitude reigned over the campos as they rode south. The residents of town had little interest in a land they considered the haunt of jaguars and forest demons. A few tracks from town led to poor farms. Except for those, there were no roads, no signs of civilization.

  The ride from town took a day, women on horseback, men afoot. Violet never gives a complete listing of their party, but the English workers would have been with them to clear the farm, while the older women—Henry’s mother and John’s mother-in-law—probably stayed behin
d. Violet soon got a rough reminder that she was no longer home. The saddles they brought were built for sturdy English horses, not the stunted Amazon variety: “I had not gone far when my English saddle turned around the horse’s belly,” dumping Violet unceremoniously on the ground. It was a preview of things to come: Henry had cautioned the saddler to shorten the girth, but things never turned out exactly as Henry planned.

  They left the campos for a jungle path that seemed to Violet mostly “bush ropes and tangle,” then ascended a hill. At the top, Henry turned with a triumphant grin. “Here we are,” he said. They stood on an escarpment of the forested plateau six miles south of town in a place called Piqui-á Tuba, or “place of the Piqui-á trees.” The naturalist Henry Walter Bates, who sojourned in Santarém at the same time as Richard Spruce, called these namesakes “Pikia” trees, colossal things as tall as the gigantic Brazil nut trees. They bore an edible fruit surrounding a seed, “beset with hard spines which produce serious wounds if they enter the skin.” Although the fruit tasted to Bates like raw potato, the townspeople loved it and “undertook the most toilsome journeys on foot to gather a basketful.”

  They’d stopped in front of what Violet took to be a thatch-covered barn, and before that barn an old bearded man in high boots leaned upon a rake and smiled. She took him for a farmhand: It was not the last time she’d be fooled by appearances. The “farmhand” was Judge J. B. Mendenhall, leader of the confederados, and the barn was his home. Henry had decided to settle among these crazy-looking people until he could build his own house and clear his own land.

  The strange tale of the Amazon Confederates began with the man some blamed for the tragedy of the Donner Party, the California-bound group of pioneers whose name became synonymous with survival cannibalism. Lansford Warren Hastings dreamed of an empire. Born in 1819 in Ohio, he traveled to Independence, Missouri, in 1842, joined one of the first wagon trains to the Oregon Territory, and was elected one of its leaders. The next year found him in California, where he envisioned a new republic with him at its helm. This required followers, so Hastings wrote The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California, in which he extolled the virtues of the new land and encouraged wagon trains to head to California along a desert trail he’d scouted and called the Hastings Cutoff. Hundreds of families took the cutoff. One was the eighty-seven-member Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the winter of 1846-47 and forced in the end to dine on the recently dead. Barely half their number survived. One had to be restrained from killing Hastings after their rescue.