Probably due to a week’s forced disconnection from the internet, I’ve managed to get through a few more books this summer than I have in recent times. Before I went away for a week, I grabbed a couple of books from the shelf at South Library. They were by the same author, John Hemming, and next to each other. One might have sufficed, but they also complemented each other nicely. They were Tree of Rivers, a history of the Amazon, and Naturalists In Paradise. The first is an overview of the river, the basin that feeds it, and the people who live in and have lived in it. The Naturalists in the title of the latter book - Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce - are covered in the first book, though the second clearly focusses in on them much deeper.
Hemming was the Director of the Royal Geographical Society in London, and has spent lots of time in the area. He clearly knows the area well, and it comes across through the two books. The history of the area is one of exploitation and tragedy. Though estimates vary, there were thought to be between 2 and 5 million indigenous people living in the Amazon basin at the time that the Spanish and Portuguese first explored the area. Contact with Europeans led to all the usual calamities - diseases, missionaries, slavers, warfare and death. Some of these people have survived until now; many more are no longer. Hemming also looks at the modern exploitation of the Amazon, with the highways being built by the Brazilian government leading to huge swathes of forest being cut down. Through both books, one of the recurring themes is that the despite the lush vegetation in the Amazon, the soil underneath is actually very poor. So when the forest is cleared for livestock or agriculture, the results are usually very disappointing for the farmers.
The second book covers the same area, but only a small period of time (approx 1848 - 1860) when these 3 English scientists and collectors descended on the river. Though Bates and Wallace initially went together, they split up, and all three had different interests. Bates’ big thing was beetles; Wallace liked birds and also was interested in indigenous rock art, and Spruce was a botanist who loved mosses and liverworts. All three sustained their travels for a number of years by collecting and sending back to museums and private collectors in England and Europe - birds, monkeys, crocodiles, butterflies, beetles, flowers, trees, seeds, even manatees. Aside from cataloguing thousands of species, many of which weren’t previously known, each of these largely self-taught scientists made significant contributions to their fields. Bates gave his name to an evolutionary device by which non-poisonous species copy the patterning of a poisonous species as a form of protection - Batesian Mimicry. Spruce was instrumental in getting the cinchona tree - the bark of which contains quinine, used in the treatment of malaria (a disease that all three explorers incidentally suffered from during their time in the Amazon) - from South America to the subcontinent, where the Brits promptly invented gin and tonic. Wallace made the most significant contribution, He observed that the flora a fauna on Bali were radically different from that on Lombok, despite them being separated by a short boat ride. This is now know at the Wallace line. Moire significantly, while he was in Indonesia, he wrote a letter to his mate Charles Darwin in which he outlined his theory, based on his years of observations in the Amazon, that was remarkably similar to Darwin’s as yet unpublished theory of evolution. Though Darwin is obviously more famous, the two are jointly credited with the discovery of the theory.
I’ve not been to South America or the Amazon - the closest I’ve got is Mexico - but I’d love to get there sometime, assuming we’re able to travel again at some point. In lieu of being there, there are a couple of films that convey some of the immense grandeur of the place. Werner Herzog’s two Amazonian epics, AGUIRRE and FITZCARRALDO, are both loosely based on real events. AGUIRRE follows an ill-fated mission of a group of gold-mad Spanish conquistadors. They climb over the Andes from the recently-conquered Peru, and descend to the headwaters of the river. There is some debate as to whether the real Aguirre went down the Amazon or the Orinoco, another massive river which runs almost parallel, but it doesn’t really matter to the film. It’s about madness and exploration and isolation, as everything that could go wrong does. FITZCARRALDO, again played by the manic Klaus Kinski, concerns a man who decides to haul a steam ship up and over a hill. As covered in both books, parts of the Amazon have sections of rapids that make them unnavigable. Fitz’s plan would enable him to run his steamer up and down a section of the river that would otherwise be inaccessible; this would allow him to gather rubber from untapped trees on this part of the river. A more recent film, EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT, is about the explorers on the river, with many similarities to the exploits of Bates, Wallace, and Spruce. It’s filmed in black and white, with indigenous actors. The slow pacing evokes some of the tedium that these explorers faced - in an age before steam-powered river travel, it would often take them weeks, if not months, to get from place to place travelling up the river. Another film that was in a recent NZ International Film Festival was MONOS, which takes a while to get to the Amazon, and doesn’t use it as effectively as the other films I’ve mentioned, but still has some merit.