The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  The Donner Party tragedy was infamous and ended Hastings’s dreams of empire in the West. But his ambition was adaptable. He married the daughter of Judge Mendenhall and became an adopted Confederate. After the war, he wrote a new book, The Emigrant’s Guide to Brazil, in which he painted an elysian Amazon, “a world of eternal verdure and perennial spring.” Like Matthew Fontaine Maury, he imagined a Southern empire in the rain forest, and before his death of yellow fever in 1868, he had organized and shuttled two hundred Confederate hopefuls to a land grant in the jungle highlands behind Santarém.

  But the empire wasn’t turning out as planned. Most of the newcomers were like Henry, people endowed with more hope than practical experience. When Wickham arrived, only fifty of the original two hundred remained. The others had returned home or died. Jungle farming proved harder than anyone anticipated, and the band’s more restless spirits returned to Santarém to drink and loaf. They were so raucous that the government withdrew the financial support promised for all. Those who stayed in the forest discovered that the soil was not as fertile as they thought. When they scratched away the topsoil, all that remained was clay. They could have stayed in Georgia for that, and at least in Georgia one could plow the land. Here it was a hopeless task, since the forest was laced with stubborn vines and shrubs. The confederados were too poor to buy tools or draft animals, so they pulled their own plows. The promise of growing cotton turned into a joke, so they hit upon sugarcane, distilling the juice into a rum sold in Santarém. Their wives and daughters toiled beside them until they dropped from exhaustion and succumbed to fever, and every year saw more wooden crosses planted in the Confederate cemetery.

  The confederados were still clearly struggling. The last fifty were grouped atop a five-hundred-foot bluff overlooking the Tapajós River. Only one of their number prospered, and he’d settled elsewhere: R. J. Rhome had arrived with lots of money and parlayed that into a managing partnership at Taperhina, the plantation owned by the Baron of Santarém, which lay twenty miles downriver on the Amazon. The others were backwoodsmen from Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, “lean, hard men with their wives and children . . . who had come to stay,” one observer said. Judge Mendenhall had assumed the colony’s leadership after the death of his son-in-law Lanford Hastings. R. H. Riker, a railroad president back in South Carolina, had established, with Clements Jennings, James Vaughan, and others, a satellite colony at Diamantino, a stream feeding into the Tapajós where diamonds had been found years earlier. There were no instant riches now.

  These were Henry’s friends. For the first time, Violet doubted her new husband’s wisdom, if not his sanity. She’d left her life in London for this? She could have dissolved into tears or started screaming at Henry, but instead she took a deep breath and determined that “we would never grow quite as they were.” At least, she told herself, she’d wear her best dress on Sunday, unlike these backwoods women, but no sooner had she put it on than it was suggested that they go see a field of sugarcane atop a nearby plateau. After a half hour’s climb, she looked down and saw her “white stockings and legs and feet about the color of the rich black soil we had been exploring.” She reassessed her fashion sense and admitted, “This put rather a damper on my ideas of finery.”

  It would be a good metaphor for her coming life. “Alas,” she later wrote, “I have grown as utterly careless of such things as any born backwoods woman anywhere.”

  This would be their home for the next three years.

  Piquiá-tuba sat on the edge of the escarpment, with vistas of the town to the north and the Tapajós to the west. The plateau was known as the Montanha, though there was nothing mountainous about it; it was just a spur of the higher region in central Brazil. The approximate location can still be found. Until 1997 and the advent of clear-cutting for rice and soybean farms, the plateau was much as it had been in Henry’s day, a rise of primary forest, home to hundreds of species of gigantic trees. Where, at most, twenty-five kinds of tree might be found in a temperate-zone forest, in the tropics the same area can hold as many as four hundred. The difference is that they grow singly, widely spaced, as protection against parasites, whereas in temperate zones a single species can grow in stands of hundreds or thousands. On Piquiá-tuba, in addition to rubber and the indigenous piquiá, some of the more common trees included the towering, golden-crowned ipe, or ironwood tree, now known in America as the wood used for the boardwalk in Bill Gates’s coastal mansion; the purple ipe, whose bark has been suggested as a possible cure for cancer; the giant Brazil nut tree, soaring at least 200 feet, with no lower branch less than 120 feet above the ground; and the rosewood tree, an essential ingredient in Chanel No. 5. Everywhere Violet looked she would see splendid masses of green—cacao trees, limes, great pale banana plants, and coffee bushes straying up from the campos into the woods.

  Why were there so many trees? The forty-square-mile Reserva Florestal Adolfo Duche, a rain-forest preserve northeast of Manaus, is currently estimated to have 1,300 species; while the preserve itself is two thousand times smaller than the land mass of England, it has forty times more native trees. About 120 theories grapple with this problem, but two seem to prevail. First, the ice ages that scoured the temperate zones repeatedly wiped out vegetation, leaving tough terrain in a tough climate that assured that only the hardiest plants survived. Second, in the tropics, the stresses are biological, not physical or climatic. A species of fewer, more widely spaced trees would stand a better chance against parasites and insects, which helps explain the rampant diversity.

  The rain forest was alien to Violet in so many ways. She had never experienced a silence like that found there. It was a force in itself, almost hypnotic. She might follow a large morpho butterfly into the woods, entranced by its wings of glistening cerulean, when suddenly she’d realize that even her footsteps did not make a sound. The ground was not ground as she’d known it; it was a dark compost that gave off a thick, bitter smell. The trees seemed as silent as centuries; no air stirred the leaves, not even a bird called. The morning light was strange and diffused, like light in a dark cathedral. There was a verdure in the air itself that seemed so thick she could crush it between her fingers. The forest’s real life swarmed overhead, where birds nagged and clicked and howler monkeys bawled with a strange plaintive loneliness that echoed for miles. It seemed like the cries of madmen. Once she spotted the white face and whiskers of a capuchin money, clutching its squashed fruit to its chest, leering at her like a gargoyle.

  Night was a different world too. After sunset, the forest’s silence was replaced by cacophony—the roar of the howler monkey, “the deafening clamour of frogs of all varieties of hoarseness,” the swoop of the giant bat among the trees. Strange forms of life came out at night—foot-long katydids with spines like armor plating and mandibles that cut through leather and vampire bats that crawled up at night and nipped a fold of flesh, lapping the drops of blood. These were particularly troublesome at Piquiá-tuba. Though Violet and Henry were never bitten, others were, and suffering most were the domestic animals. The bats would bite her poor horses night after night in the same spot, “not only weakening them but raising such a sore you cannot saddle them,” while her chickens emerged from the henhouse each morning “staggering from weakness and their combs as white as the rest of their bodies.” Those of their party whom the vampires preferred were usually nipped on the big toe; they would know nothing of the attack until they awoke in the morning “bathed in blood.”

  Violet liked to go riding at night; it was one of her few pleasures. Termite hills lay in the path and glowed in spots like coals in ashes. Fireflies and “other spots of electricity in decaying wood” made the jungle seem otherworldly. Henry went with her, carrying his gun, for jaguars still roamed the heights, and if you heard its cough, you were as good as dead. Some mornings she saw tracks around the house. The cats were drawn by her hens. There were half a dozen jaguar hunters living in the campos or in town. In Santarém, everyone told of the jaguar and
the three men, an incident that occurred a few years before Richard Spruce arrived. One of the men was armed with a musket, another a tercado (saber), and the third, tall and powerful, went unarmed. They were hunting on the montanha when the jaguar sprang at the third from the bush, but the man was strong and grabbed the beast’s forepaws. They struggled until the cat wrenched one paw free and tore the man’s scalp down over his eyes. The man with the tercado ran to his assistance, but the jaguar turned and wounded him severely. The cat sat between them, eyeing each disabled man as if wondering whom to devour first. At this point the man with the musket ran up and the battle was renewed. The “tiger” was killed, but not before wounding the third man, too. The man who’d been scalped still lived in Santarém, and people always pointed him out. He wore a black skullcap where his scalp remained tender. Violet had seen him and heard the stories; she didn’t have to be reminded when Henry warned her not to stray.

  Sometimes it seemed that the place was supernatural. Henry laughed when she said this, but she’d read his journals and knew there’d been times when odd feelings crept over him, too. It was as if she were being watched. More than once she disturbed a silk moth in its rest and its wings unfolded: staring back from the large pale wings were huge false eyes, deep blue spheres countershaded with ebony, laced with shiny silver flecks. After the initial jolt she realized that the “eyes” were there to startle predators, but it brought home to her that in the forest, eyes were hidden everywhere. Here on the Tapajós it was thought that the curupira, the spirit man of the forest, whom Henry’s saviors on the Orinoco believed had cursed him, wandered beneath the trees with his wife. He sported one eye in the middle of his forehead, as well as blue teeth and huge ears; his wife was even uglier, with one eyebrow in the center of her head and her breasts beneath her arms. Violet wondered if she’d look like that after a year in the forest.

  There were native witch/herbalists, too—feiticeira, who lived in solitary hovels at the edge of the forest, specializing primarily in love potions and forest cures. Henry Bates had come to know one named Cecilia, and although always very civil to his scientific party, she explained that some feiticeira were bitter women, familiar with various poisonous plants and not adverse to administering a debilitating dose to a rival in love.

  Anything seemed possible in a place where the forest breathed in and out like a giant set of lungs. The canopy provided shade 65 to 165 feet beneath its top, acting as a cooling and humidifying system for all life below. In transpiration, the trees pumped water from the soil back to the atmosphere, making runoff more gradual. The forest was a great recycler. The trees sucked potassium, phosphorus and other nutrients into the root mat and attached fungi as they drew water up through their roots. Such luxurious greenery suggested abundance, but this was an illusion. The soil was so poor that the only option was to allow nothing to be wasted.

  Then there were the storms. Violent thunderstorms were frequent, especially at night. Immense armies of clouds would swoop from the west. A suffocating calm preceded the onslaught, and then the sky disappeared, and gusts tore out rotten trees. Electrical explosions and fantastic rolls of thunder reduced everything to light and noise and water. As the sky merged with the land, it seemed to Violet that this must be what Noah experienced during the end of his world.

  After the rains, there came a suffocating humidity so overpowering that physicians of the time believed it weakened the lungs, creating a “fertile field” for the tuberculosis bacilli. One thing was certain—the wet was everywhere. In the walls, in the floor, even in the bedding. Nothing ever dried, especially clothing, unless dried over a fire. A white, hairlike fungus covered books and papers; tools were attacked by inevitable rust. The wet seeped between each fold of skin and into one’s private parts, creating a rash that itched unbearably and never went away.

  Henry said it would pass: such discomforts were merely temporary. They’d build a house, plant their crops, acclimatize to the weather as thousands of colonials had before them wherever the British Empire planted the flag. Violet wanted to believe him so badly. Their first home was made of thatch, which sounded exotic but really was nothing but palm leaves. Violet learned from Judge Mendenhall’s wife and daughter how to take a young, unripened palm frond, five to seven feet long, and with a shake and turn of the thumb and forefinger break the leaflets at right angles to the stalk “till it looks like a gigantic green fringe.” These were tied to the rafters three or four together, one above the other. “While green it was pretty,” she wrote, “but it soon looks shabby, although if well and thickly put on it lasts some years.”

  This first hut was a crude affair, fourteen feet long by nine feet wide, divided into two rooms by a partition and made of palm leaves tied to poles and rafters. Henry promised her a wooden house in a neighboring section of forest with a real plank floor and overlapping shingles to keep out the rain. To this end, he “started off early in the morning, and I saw him no more till evening.” Since there were no sawmills within reasonable distance, he cut down the trees at the home site and split them into boards. Hours might be spent felling a single gigantic tree, and when it dropped, it brought others with it. Lianas strung from tree to tree like cables seemed to tie the whole forest together. They rained down in twisted masses, dragging epiphytes and orchids down with them. Sarsaparilla was one such liana, and Henry could make some badly needed money in town when that fell on his head. Other times, he wasn’t so lucky: The juruparipindi, or “devil’s fishhook,” festooned with broad sharp thorns that could wound a man severely, would crash down. You never knew what was up there. Termite nests might fall like clay pots, or stinging ants drip like fiery rain. All a man could do was cover his head and run. A tree’s descent created pandemonium: Monkeys leapt from branch to branch; parrots screeched; toucans, the most inquisitive of the observers, flew down and canted their heads as they investigated the devastation.

  Violet had her own problems at the confederado farm. Cooking was a daily trial. Henry showed her how to make a fire—three logs, their ends pushed together—and each day she squatted in the dust blowing on the spark to get it going. “I get it burning, put on sauce pan or kettle, and leave it to attend to something in the house and when I return the wood has burned thru’ and upset the sauce pan and its contents,” she wrote. “This was always happening, sometimes to the destruction of the kettle, always to the fire.”

  Drawing water was an equally tiresome chore. Their farm was in the heights to escape the clouds of insects and miasmic effects of “bad air,” but the springs were in the valley, a half mile away on a steep incline. There were no wells, no pumps; any attempt to dig for water resulted in a black, brackish pool. Every day the men carried water uphill in what seemed the labors of Sisyphus. The women walked to the springs for a bath, but the humid return journey left them feeling “as tired, hot, and unrefreshed as before.” Trekking to the Tapajós took longer, and down there one had to avoid the piranha. Nineteen years earlier, in 1852, Henry Bates had found the Piquiá-tuba piranha ravenous: They would “attack the legs of bathers near the shore, inflicting severe wounds with their strong, triangular teeth.” The things one took for granted at home—clean water, a bath, no killer fish in the tub—were luxuries out here.

  It soon became evident to Violet that Henry’s promise of “ ‘temporary’ went on extending.” She may have been the last to publicly admit the fact; no doubt she heard grousing from the others about this hell on earth that her husband had brought them to. She knew Henry heard too. Running sores erupted from her arms and legs, some so deep they would not heal, leaving scars that lasted to old age. The rainy season was suddenly upon them, and although there was no flooding in the heights, the rains and daily trips to the planting site got on everyone’s nerves. They moved to the house Henry built long before it was finished “to save time with coming and going.” The bedroom was raised two feet off the ground and floored over, except for a yawning hole, which they concealed with the bed. In the absence of a chi
mney, smoke drifted from the hearth through the doors and windows. Henry and his English laborers planted manioc, sugar, and tobacco in the Indian black earth, but the seedlings died after germination or refused to grow.

  But this was child’s play compared to the first real crisis. The English laborers had never dreamed of a life like this, “and soon left us one after another,” Violet said. It is hard to tell if there was a precipitating event. One of the first deaths recorded in their group was a George Morley of Dorset and London, an older man, as Violet suggests, though his age is unrecorded. They left openly or in the night, singly or in pairs, back to Santarém, back down the river to Pará, back by monthly packet to Liverpool and home. Lack of labor could kill a farm as quickly as violence and disease. The “labor problem” was empire-wide, extending from small freeholds in the Queensland outback and Rhodesian veldt to rich plantations in India and Ceylon. When English workers deserted, farmers turned to native labor, but the indigenous idea of work was different from that of the British Isles. Henry tried hiring local Indians or the half-breed peasants known as caboclos, but they were “independent and lazy,” Violet complained, no doubt reflecting Henry’s frustration. This was a worldwide clash of cultures as well as of classes, the struggle between owners and workers that too often turned into abuse, violence, or slavery. There is no evidence that Henry abused his workers, but he was always unsuccessful with them, a problem that hounded his every effort across the globe.