Soldiers,
Scientists and Sorcerers:
A History of Exploration (and Literature)
of Brazil's Rio Negro River
by
Mark Aitchison
Director, Swallows and Amazons Tours
Manaus, Brazil
Part
I
"On Saturday, the eve of Holy Trinity...we
saw the mouth of another great river on the left, which emptied into
the one we were navigating. Its water was as black as ink, and for
this reason we gave it the name of Rio Negro. 1"
On June 3, 1542, Brazil's Rio Negro river was given it's name in passing
by the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana as recorded by his
chronicler, Friar Gaspar Carvajal. Orellana was in the process of
"discovering" the Amazon river though what had brought him
into the Amazon in the first place was an expedition led by his uncle
Gonzallo Pizarro in search of the fabled forests of cinnamon, El Dorado
and a half dozen other treasures said to be found in that green hell
as the Amazon was then described. Brazil itself had only been discovered
in the year 1500 and the Amazon river was a major entry point into
the new world.
A history of exploration along the Rio Negro river is best presented
by the scientists, soldiers and sorcerers (or priests) who ventured
there. A fascinating collection of men have left accounts of their
wanderings and discoveries upon this little known Amazon tributary,
its largest in fact. Many of her early explorers were priests and
slavers both with little real interest in the natural wonders of the
river and even less concern for the well-being of her Indian inhabitants.
Few of these earliest commercial expeditions have left us any valuable
written record. But a handful of scientists and explorers after that
have left a small treasure of books for us to enjoy, a record of their
experiences on this mighty and mysterious river.
The Rio Negro river is 2,253 kilometers long2. The mouth of this mighty
river is 10 km across and lies just below the historic city of Manaus,
Brazil, at what is called the "meeting of the waters", where
the Rio Negro flows into the larger Amazon river. Traditionally it
is here that the Negro river joins the Solimoes river (as it is known
locally) and together form the Amazonas river. It is this part of
the great river that was named after the legendary women warriors
of Greek mythology whom Orellana claims to have encountered and fought
against during his epic journey across South America. Inside the gilded
Opera House of Manaus hangs a stage curtain painted by Crispin do
Amaral in 1893 depicting the meeting of these two rivers and formation
of the Amazonas, all guarded over by the goddess of water, Iara.
The birth of the Rio Negro river is much less celebrated than the
flowering of her mouth. And for good reason. [In all my reading and
research to date the only reference I have ever found to the discovery
of the source of the Rio Negro river is in a book by Wade Davis about
the famous Harvard University ethnobotanist, Richard Schultes. which
refers to the English naturalist Richard Spruce having visited her
headwaters and traveled past her source sometime between 1850 and
1855].
References to the source are vague and scattered. On contemporary
maps the Rio Negro river, by name, begins in a northwestern corner
of Brazil at one end of the Casiquiare canal which connects to Venezuela's
Orinoco river. Yet her main channel comes from still farther into
the Northwest Amazon, in Colombia in fact, where it is called the
Guainia river. Her headwaters, perhaps the rivers Chamusiguemi and
Tamon, appear to lie at about 2 degrees latitude north beneath an
isolated 600 meter hill called Aracuri in the region of Popaia, a
state in Colombia. Loro, Marinuma and Etipani are noted on maps as
settlements near here. But so remote and unknown is this part of Amazonia
that the map may as well be stamped "TERRA INCOGNITA"3.
*
In
1739 Lourenco Belfort, an Irish slaver, with father Aguillo Avogadri,
an Italian Jesuit, searched the Upper Rio Negro for bodies and souls4.
In 1744 the Portuguese slaver Xavier Mendes de Moraes reached the
Casiquiare canal5. In 1754 the governor of Maranhao and Grao Para,
Francisco Xavier de Mendoca Furtado, led an expedition to map out
the limits of the Upper Rio Negro. A shortage of native paddlers cut
their voyage short and it is unclear how far exactly they got6. In
1784, the first maps of the Upper Rio Negro river were drawn by Manoel
de Gama Lobo d'Almeida and one depicts a curious appendage called
the Thomon river that may form part of the Guainia7.
In 1799 the famous Prussian-German scientist, Alexander von Humboldt,
confirmed the existence of the Casiquiare canal as a natural passageway
between the Upper Orinoco river upon which he was traveling and the
Upper Rio Negro river from where he was turned back by Portuguese
soldiers who thought he was a spy8. His explorations of the rainforest,
the "hylaea" as he called it, were the first by a scientist
and are collected in his Personal Narrative of Travels, 1799-1804,
published in 1814. A second important scientific exploration of the
Amazon river itself was conducted by the Frenchman Charles Marie de
la Condamine who was also the first scientist to travel the length
of the Amazon river. Condamine traveled little on the Rio Negro however
and his adventures and explorations are recorded in Journal de Voyage
Fait por Ordre du Roi a l'Equator (1751).
The first substantial written account of a voyage up the Rio Negro
river was written by the Portuguese doctor, Francisco Xavier Ribeiro
Sampaio. His journey to the Upper Rio Negro, and the Vaupes and Icana
tributaries, was published as Diario da Viagem a Capitania de Sao
Jose do Rio Negro (1774). The first scientific exploration of the
Rio Negro river was also written by a Portuguese scholar, the tragic
figure Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, in Diario da Viagem Filosofica
(1785).
Ferreira's expedition took him all over the Amazon and the wealth
of anthropological and scientific information he gathered, as well
as his collections of natural history specimens, was impressive. All
were sent back to Portugal to be cataloged and presented in that kingdoms
many museums and libraries. But luck was not on Ferreira's side. Shortly
after his collections arrived in Portugal in 1808 the country was
invaded by Napoleon's armies led by General Junot and his collections
confiscated by the naturalist Geoffrey St. Hilaire of the Museum of
Paris. Along with Ferreira's written research, over 417 specimens
fell into Hilaire's hands9. To this day quite a number of Amazonian
species first described by Ferreira unjustly bear Geoffrey St. Hilaire's
name, the most famous being Inia geoffrensis (the pink river dolphin).
Another is Saguinus geoffroyi, (Geoffroy's tamarin monkey).
*
Contemporary Amazonian opinion holds in disfavor the modern day "discoverer"
of the pink river dolphin, Jacques Yves Cousteau, one of the greatest
explorers of all time who explored the Amazon basin in 1983. Perhaps
a great injustice would be corrected if the pink river dolphin were
renamed Inia ferreirensis.
*
In death, as well as life, history was not kind to Alexandre Rodrigues
Ferreira and he died in obscurity. Yet with the passage of time his
work, if not his soul, has been recovered, recollected, and recognized.
Impressive portions of his collections were presented worldwide in
exhibitions during 1995 and 1996. His prints and journals were prepared
and published by Brazil's National Library in 199010.
With the creation of the state of Amazonas in 1850 and the discovery
of rubber and other Amazon wonder products, most notably Quinine from
the Chinchona tree used to combat malaria, a new era of prosperity
and exploration began. Few however in the 19th century who would receive
accolades were Portuguese, let alone Brazilians. The stage is dotted
with merchants and mercenaries from a half dozen foreign nations,
principally England and Germany.
The English were led by Wickham, Spruce, Bates and Wallace. Henry
Wickham is best remembered as the Englishman who "stole the rubber
seeds" from Brazil11. He traveled between the Orinoco and the
Rio Negro rivers and wrote Rough Notes on a Journey...(1872). Richard
Spruce, the third great Amazon naturalist after Wallace and Alfred
Bates, helped transport seedlings of the Chinchona tree to London
for the development of Quinine medicine. His Rio Negro travels led
him far up her largest northern tributary, the Vaupes river, perhaps
to her source on the river Guainia12, and certainly beyond the Casiquiare
canal to Mount Cunucunumo on the river Duida in Southern Venezuela13.
His most famous work is entitled Notes of a Botanist in the Amazon
and Andes (1851).
Henry Wallace traveled the length of the Rio Negro right to the Colombian
border, and explored much of her greatest northern tributary, the
Vaupes. His journey is recorded in Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro
(1851). After years studying and collecting in the Amazon he would
curiously find fame and fortune in another tropical paradise, the
Malay Peninsula (Indonesia), where he devised a theory of evolution
at the very same moment in time as the evolutonist Charles Darwin,
his hero. Darwin later insisted they publish their discoveries together.
Wallace also ventured far up the Rio Negro river though his travels
in the area show he was more interested in confirming Humboldt's discovery
of the Casiquiare canal than in pursuing the source of the river itself.
Above the Casiquiare canal and the beginning of the Rio Negro by name
Wallace ultimately reached the village of Maroa on what is known as
the Guainia river. Maroa lies just below a small tributary of the
Guainia called the Pimichin.
"About a mile above Maroa, we reached the entrance of the little
river Pimichin, up which we were to ascend. At the very mouth was
a rock filling up the channel, and we had great difficulty in passing.14"
And just like that, without a second thought of the opportunity which
lay before him, Wallace turned away from being perhaps the first explorer,
if any, to have reached the source of the largest tributary of the
world's mightiest river. Wade Davis may have written that Richard
Spruce did travel beyond these headwaters and past the source of the
Guiania, but without reading Spruce's own account- which has proven
to be the most elusive of books- we cannot offer Spruce's own account
of the fact.
Perhaps it is fitting then that we end this first chapter on the history
of exploration of the Rio Negro with a bit of a mystery left to solve
in the next chapter.
01 Pg. 204, Discovery of the Amazon, ed. Jose Toribio Medina,
Dover Publications, New York, 1988
02 Grolier's CD Rom Dictionary
03 IBGE map, 2nd edition, 1982. Scale 1:1,000,000, Pico da Neblina,
NA-19
04 Pg. 78, Povos Indigenas do Alto e Medio Rio Negro, eds. Aloisio
Cabalzar and Carlos Alberto Ricardo, FOIRN Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira,
and ISA Sao Paulo, 1998
05 Ibid, pp. 78.
06 Ibid, pp. 79.
07 Ibid, pp. 81.
08 Pg. 242, Explorers of the Amazon, by Anthony Smith, Viking
Press, London, 1990.
09 Pg. 7, Viagem Filosofica-Memorias, by Alexandre Rodrigues
Ferreira, Conselho Federal de Cultura, Rio de Janeiro, 1972.
10 Memoria da Amazonia- Catalog from Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira
exhibition, Lisbon, 1997.
11 Op cit, pg. 280, Explorers of the Amazon.
12 Pg. 377, One River, by Wade Davis, Touchstone/Simon &
Schuster, New York, 1997.
13 Pg. 256, footnote # 47, Exploracao na Guiana Brasileira,
by Hamilton Rice, trans. Lacyr Schettino, Editora Itatiaia, Belo Horizonte
and Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1978.
14 Pg. 164, Travels on the Rio Negro, by Alfred Wallace, Haskell
House, New York, 1969.
Soldiers,
Scientists and Sorcerers:
A History of Exploration (and Literature)
Of Brazil's Rio Negro River
by
Mark Aitchison
Director, Swallows and Amazons Tours
Manaus, Brazil
Part
II
The Brazilian writings of the British Naturalists,
Alfred Wallace and Richard Spruce, in the middle of the 19th century
mark the end of the classical period of Rio Negro history and exploration
and the beginning of her modern period. Before the end of the nineteenth
century three very different writers would come to represent opposing
positions in an appreciation of Amazonian literature and culture. As
a group these writers define a turning away from mere observation and
cataloging to a process of definition and identity.
In 1850 the region known as the Captaincy of the Rio Negro became the
new state of Amazonas, and Bento de Figueiredo de Tenreiro Aranha was
named the first governor. His explorations of the Upper Rio Negro River
and her tributaries revealed to the rest of the world what the Portuguese
had long been doing behind closed doors in Amazonia. Obtaining Indian
slave labor had originally been church sanctioned only. Now, under Tenreiro
Aranha, it became open state policy. Tenreiro Aranha planned a huge
public works project for his capital Manaus and he knew exactly where
to find the cheap labor he needed; amongst the Indians of the Middle
and Upper Rio Negro River. The second half of the century marked the
beginnings of a systematic commercialization of forest products ("drogas
do sertao" as they were called) such as Piassaba palm fiber, Brazil
nuts and most important of all, rubber. The boom was on and Tenreiro
Arana was leading the charge.
Tenreiro Arana was born in 1769 in the first capital of the region,
Barcelos, located on the Middle Rio Negro River above its confluence
with the Rio Branco River. Apart from his questionable role as a politician
and his obvious familiarity with the region as a traveler he was also
a poet and playwright. As such he is arguably the first Amazonian writer
of note. "Works of the Amazonian Writer Bento de Figueiredo de
Tenreiro Arana" was published in 1850 and although his writings
are no longer in print, they are referred to as recently as the year
2000 in an article entitled, "A Poetics of the Waters" by
Socorro Santiago in the Amazonian Literary Review .
In the 1880s an Italian admirer of all things Amazonian, Count Ermanno
Stradelli, joined the explorer Joao Barbosa Rodrigues and traveled extensively
on the Jauperi River and other tributaries of the Upper Rio Negro. Rodrigues
created the first herbarium in Manaus- now lost- and later became director
of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens. His works include "Rio
Jaupery-Pacificacao das Chrichanas" (now known as the Waimiri-Atroari
Indians) completed in 1885, and an early study of the potent drug, Curare.
Most of Stradelli's work, like that of the Portuguese naturalist Alexandre
Rodrigues Ferreira a century before, has sadly been forgotten. Stradelli
was the first ethnographer to collect and publish material about the
legends and superstitions of many Upper Rio Negro indigenous groups.
An article of his entitled "La Legenda del Jurupary e outras Lendas
Amazonicas" was published by the Instituto Cultural Italo-Brasileiro
(Sao Paulo) in 1964. And a biography of sorts called "Em Memoria
de Stradelli" by Luis de Camara Cascudo was published in 1967 and
has recently been reissued.
Besides these three very different writers- Arana, Rodrigues and Stradelli-
the closing decades of 19th century are not remembered for much great
literature nor any great expeditions into Amazonia. Like the biblical
flood the collective imagination of the region seemed all at once engulfed
by an obsession for natural, liquid latex- rubber- of all things. At
a time of terrific global industrialization and invention the vast Amazon
rainforest was found to produce a product invaluable to the fortunes
of every civilized nation on earth. Almost overnight the sleepy hamlet
of Manaus became the market city for the global collection, trade and
distribution of natural rubber. Fortunes were made and lost in a wild
orgy of greed and exploitation. Voyagers no longer ventured into the
interior in search of new frontiers. Armies of poor "Nordestinos"
and Indians were conscripted as laborers to collect rubber for insatiable
masters and mistresses in far off capitals such as London and Berlin.
The rubber boom period lasted from 1870 to 1910 and the forests and
rivers of Amazonia were in the hands of the rubber barons. J.G. Araujo
and Waldemar Scholz were two Manaus merchants who benefited hugely from
the rubber trade. On the Upper Rio Negro and over into Colombia and
Peru Julio Arana lorded over a vast empire of Indian slaves. This infamous
rubber baron operated from the Putumayo River, a tributary of the Amazon
River, which today forms the frontier between Peru and Colombia. Atrocities
committed by this monster against the local Indians were finally exposed
by the explorer and champion of British justice, Roger Casement , though
not before possibly tens of thousands of people had been enslaved, tortured
and murdered.
The 20th century opens with one of the most interesting Rio Negro expeditions
of all; that of Doctor Carlos Chagas and a team from the Oswaldo Cruz
Foundation of Rio de Janeiro in 1907. An early authority on malaria,
Chagas is best known for the disease that bears his name, a deadly parasitical
disease of the circulatory system. Chagas traveled to Amazonia in order
to document the health of populations along the Rio Negro River between
Manaus and Sao Gabriel. In 1995 a medical team recreated this voyage
and were shocked to find that health conditions on the Upper Rio Negro
had actually worsened since Chagas' time …so much for the advancement
of science and technology in this part of the world.
As the rubber boom waned the Amazon interior once again was opened to
science and exploration. In 1924 the German ethnographer Theodor Koch
Grunberg teamed up with none other than J.G. Araujo's personal filmmaker
and the first cinematographer of Amazonia, Silvino Santos, on an expedition
to map the upper reaches of the Rio Branco River. The expedition was
led by the American explorer, Hamilton Rice whose various expeditions
in the region spanned the years 1910 and 1928 and are recorded in numerous
Royal Geographical and National Geographical Society articles .
Grunberg, Santos and Rice joined forces in an effort to find a link
between an Upper Rio Branco tributary, the Uraricoera, and Venezuela's
famous Orinoco River. The novelty of the expedition, however, lay less
in its filmed documentation than its use of a hydroplane to explore
the furthest reaches of the rivers visited. In Hamilton Rice's account
of the expedition a shocking discovery is made when the reader comes
across a photo of Koch Grunberg's funeral of all things . Apparently
the German died tragically and suddenly of malaria during the course
of the expedition. In Rice's dry text his death is passed over like
just another Amazon sunset though the loss of their friend and co-worker
must indeed have been shocking and sad for the other expedition members.
The farthest point reached by the expedition was the headwaters of the
Uraricoera/Parime River which does not, it turns out, flow northwards
into the Orinoco in any way, shape or form.
Another noteworthy incident during Rice's expedition was their encounter
with a group of nomadic Indians known as the White Guaribas ("the
white howler monkeys"). These Indians would later come to be known
as the Yanomami. Today they are recognized as one of the last, and most
threatened, traditional peoples of the world. Their Shangri-la lies
within the mountain ranges and valleys of Brazil's northern border with
Venezuela. Due to their determined resistance to the outside world it
is hardly surprising that the controversial anthropologist Napolean
Chagnon called them "the fierce people" in a book of the same
name.
In 1930 another book about the Yanomami- and the Upper Rio Negro- appeared.
But rather than just another explorers journal it was a biographical
account of life amongst the Yanomami written by a women who had been
kidnapped and held captive by them for almost twenty years. Helena Velero's
account is transcribed by the ethnologist and explorer Etore Biocca
and a more authentic description of life amongst the Yanomami has yet
to be written .
Moving west across her northern headwaters and once again tantalizingly
close to the source of the Rio Negro River lies what is still the least
explored part of Amazonia. Of the few who have explored this area the
most renowned is Richard Shultes, famed American ethnobotanist and Harvard
biology professor. His Amazon fieldwork spanned nothing less than 40
productive years, most in search of the secrets behind such Indian drugs
as curare and ayahuasca, but also in the service of the US government.
His most determined mission was to collect seeds of the best rubber
tree samples available for use in experimental American rubber plantations
to be created in Panama, Colombia and Peru . Sadly these plantations
were never realized and planters in the Far East today still hold monopoly
over the world's rubber supply as they have done so since the end of
Brazil's rubber boom almost 100 years ago.
Schultes' hero was, not surprisingly, the British naturalist Richard
Spruce and it is fitting that these two are the only explorers who have
ever approached anywhere near the headwaters of the Rio Negro River,
known as the Guiania River in Colombia. And like Spruce before him Schultes
also was quite blasé about the source of the Rio Negro; it simply
never was the sole objective of his travels. Like Spruce Schultes was
always in search of plants and if he ever did stand at the source of
the Rio Negro River he was probably alone when he did so. It was up
to Wade Davis, a contemporary ethnobotanist and author of a fascinating
book about the life and work of Richard Schultes, to tell us within
the space of 25 pages that both Schultes and Spruce had indeed traveled
to the source of the Rio Negro River during their plant collecting trips.
After describing the formation of the Rio Negro River in Brazil as a
meeting of Colombia's Guiania and Venezuela's Casiquiare canal Davis
locates the farthest source of this mighty river near a mountain called
Monachi in an area settled today by the Kuripaku Indians .
Our account of the exploration of the Rio Negro River as seen through
her writer-explorers ends with the impressive body of contemporary work,
both artistic and literary , of the Chilean born painter and anthropologist,
Roland Stevenson. While still a young man Stevenson came to Amazonia
in search of adventure and soon found himself studying and researching
the foundations of a number of Amazonian legends, most notably those
of the Amazon women warriors and El Dorado. With four decades of fieldwork
funded by the sale of his large figure paintings- depicting scenes both
real and imagined in the history of Amazonia- Stevenson has uncovered
controversial proofs of the real existence of groups of Amazonian women
warriors, perhaps descendants of Inca women fleeing the rape and pillage
of the Spanish conquest. He has also uncovered geological proof of the
real existence of Lake Parime, the legendary home of El Dorado ("the
golden one"), today a vast savanna at the edge of the richest gold
producing mountains in the southern hemisphere.
The Rio Negro River remains today one of the world's least inhabited
and least studied fluvial highways. The location of her headwaters deep
in one of the farthest corners of the Amazon rainforest coupled with
low fish populations and infertile soils have left most people uninterested
in her exploration and settlement. And though the literary history of
the river is not extensive it is, I think you'll agree, fascinating,
informative and worthy of further study. It was a desire to know more
about the river's history that led me to research the history of her
exploration. And I was surprised how little had been written about the
river, particularly her northwestern headwaters and the mountains which
separate Brazil and Venezuela. Likewise I was delighted to consider
how much still remained to be uncovered about her legends and mysteries.
Detailed maps of her northern headwaters are rare. Traditional Indians
still inhabit the botanically rich forests of these far flung tributaries.
And mountains and lakes without name stretch across her northern and
western boundaries. The world may be well mapped out now, and there
remain few regions left to truly explore, but the Upper Rio Negro is
one such place still to be traveled and discovered. In a world so sadly
racing towards an uncertain future the Upper Rio Negro may be the closest
thing to Eden we have left.
01 Pg. 146, “A Poetics of
the Waters”, by Socorro Santiago, Amazonian Literary Review,
ed. Nicomedes Suarez-Aruaz, Issue 1, Smith College, Northampton, 1998.
02 Em Memoria de Stradelli, by Luis da Camara Cascudo, Government
of the State of Amazonas, Manaus, 1967.
03 Pg. 313, Explorers of the Amazon, by Anthony Smith, Viking
Press, London, 1990.
04 Pg. 22, Revistando a Amazonia, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocrus
(Rio de Janeiro, 1996)
05 Dos Anos entre los indios: viajes por el nordeste brasileno
1903-1905, by Theodor Koch Grunberg, Universidad Nacional, 2v., Santa
Fe de Bogota, 1995.
06 National Geographic CD-ROM collection, 1924 disk.
07 Pg. 12, Exploracao na Guiana Brasileira, by Hamilton Rice,
trans. Lacyr Schettino, Editora Itaitiaia, Sao Paulo, 1978.
08 Yanoama, by Ettore Biocca, Kodansha International, New York,
1996.
09 Where the Gods Reign, by Richard Schultes, Synergetic Press/World
Wildlife Fund, London, 1988.
10 One River, by Wade Davis, Touchstone/Simon&Schuster, New
York, 1997.
11 Uma Luz nos Misterios Amazonicas, by Roland Stevenson, Suframa,Manaus,
1994.
From
1541 to the Mirror of the Moon
A History
Of Amazonia’s Legendary Tribe of Women Warriors,
The Amazons
By
Mark Aitchison
The
sources are vague and scattered. The sightings and reports are far
and few between. But like tales of Nessie, the legendary sea monster
of Loch Ness, Scotland, stories of a tribe of Amazon women warriors
living deep in the rainforests of South America persist to this
day. There must be something to the rumors, right?
The first report of a peculiar tribe of women warriors inhabiting
parts of South America’s Amazon basin dates back to the beginnings
of Amazonian exploration. In 1541 the Spanish conquistador Francisco
de Orellana, one of Gonzallo Pizarro’s most trusted lieutenants
(at least initially!), became by accident the first Europeans to
travel the Amazon River from the Andes to the Atlantic. His voyage
was chronicled by a Franciscan friar named Gaspar Carvajal who formed
part of Orellana’s group1.
Nowhere is the account more thought provoking or vivid- most of
the time it’s pretty tedious and repetitive- than when the
would-be Spanish plunderers find themselves fighting hand to hand
for their lives against a group of Indians who count a dozen splendid
women warriors amongst their number. Carvajal names these women
“Amazons”, after the legendary Greek myth, and goes
on to provide a fascinating account of their supposed existence
in the new world. Subsequently the name Amazon came to replace that
of Orellana as the name of the greatest river in the world2. And
from this, perhaps fictitious meeting, the legend of the Amazons
has passed from generation to generation of Amazon adventurers and
explorers to the present day.
As suggested though the source of the Amazon legend is not Amazonia.
Greek mythology tells of a tribe of tall women warriors called the
Amazons who lived in Scythia near the Black Sea. This is the source
of Carvajal’s coinage of the term, as it was for Columbus
and other early European mariners exploring the New World. Greek
mythology informs us that Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, was
killed by Achilles during the siege of Troy.
Two sources of the term Amazon are found in the early Greek language.
One word, A-mazon, had been translated to mean “without a
breast”; the Amazons reputedly cut off their right breasts
to facilitate the use of their bow and arrows. Oddly though there
has never been found a single piece of Greek pottery depicting this
peculiar practice of self-mutilation. A more plausible source is
the Greek word Ama-zona which means “joined with a belt”
and refers to an ancient tribe of African women warriors who fought
in pairs, often joined by a belt. Today the term Amazon suggests
what it did to the first explorers of the new world- an aggressive,
all-powerful tribe of beautiful women warriors.
Throughout the ages the power of this particular Greek myth has
persisted in the imagination of far-flung travelers. It reached
its fruition during the Spanish Discovery of the New World and Conquest
of the Americas. In a blood-thirsty rush for gold and other fabled
treasures the conquistadors feasted on a steady diet of legend and
fantasy. Besides El Dorado (“the Golden One”) the most
appetizing of these legends was that of the Amazons.
The legend- or longing- finally bore fruit when Orellana encountered
a group of fighting women near the mouth of the Nhamunda river,
a tributary of the Amazonas river 300 kilometers east of Brazil’s
Rio Negro river. In the words of his chronicler, Friar Carvajal,
Orellana did not doubt the indetity of his foes. But were they a
self-supporting tribe of Amazon women or part of a larger mixed
culture? The Chilean painter and anthropologist, Roland Stevenson,
believes there never was a unique tribe of women warriors though
he also believes Orellana was no liar.
Stevenson has researched the legends of Amazonia for 25 years. His
investigations suggest that several waves of women travelers known
as the “Virgins of the Sun” entered the Amazon in the
years following 1533. He believes the women encountered by Orellana
were Incas whom the Conquistadors had driven from Peru at the height
of the Conquest. Stevenson has uncovered a lost west-east highway
upon which these women refugees supposedly traveled. The highway
ultimately led to the fabled Lake Parime, an inland sea northwest
of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista on the Venezuelan border. Because
it had dried up 200 years before the first Europeans ever set foot
in the New World3, this legendary lake was never discovered by the
many expeditions that went in search of it and the golden city of
Manoa said to lie upon her shores.
No concrete evidence of the Amazons as an independent society has
ever been uncovered in the rainforests of Amazonia. Nor is any tribe
of women Indians known to presently exist in the vast Amazon basin-
Brazil alone is home to over 220 Indigenous tribes. This lack of
physical evidence adds weight to Stevenson’s argument that
the Amazons were a phenomena unique to a specific time and place,
namely one June morning in 1541 by the mouth of the Nhamunda river.
Still, Orellana is not the only visitor to tell of a tribe of women
warriors living deep in the Amazon rainforest. Alexander von Humboldt,
one of the first scientists to travel through tropical America,
collected numerous stories of an independent society of Amazon women
from isolated Indian tribes he encountered in the late 18th century4.
In Ecuador there exists an Indian tribe called the Yagua. To this
day their peculiar war dress includes grass skirts and long blond
grass wigs. Under the panic and tension of battle could naked Yagua
men have been mistaken for breastless women warriors by Spanish
soldiers? They may not have been as beautiful and tall as in legend
but neither were the ocean sirens who seduced so many of Odysseus’s
fellow sailors. And along the Vaupes River in northwestern Brazil
Indian men continue to wear their hair long and braided, pluck their
eyebrows, and keep themselves as clean shaven as possible in pursuit
of some intrinsic ideal of human beauty.
Indians from these and other Amazon tribes could easily have been
mistaken for Amazon women warriors, especially by a group of crazed
and lustful Conquistadors bloated by a steady diet of the strange
and fantastic since even before they reached the Americas with Columbus.
It is undeniable that the Spaniards brought the Greek legend of
the Amazons with them- Columbus himself wrote so- and it appears
to have been used to explain away, describe and even justify something
extraordinary which was encountered in the New World.
But for a moment let us push aside the legendary, the fantastic,
and the ridiculous, and look just a little deeper into this fascinating
story of the Amazons. As we search through the records and pry open
some oddly dispersed sources some very interesting facts are revealed.
Roland Stevens, in his book A Light on Amazonian Mysteries, suggests
that the Amazons (those encountered by Orellana anyway) formed part
of a migratory wave of Andean women who had abandoned their men
to be slaughtered at Cuzco and other Inca strongholds as the Conquest
of the Incas reached its climax and were fleeing the rape, pillage
and destruction of the Spanish.
After traveling across the north of the Amazon these “Virgins
of the Sun” dropped down into the Amazon basin and settled,
most often mixing with other Indian groups who already inhabited
these lands. Many of these Inca women were perhaps bearing bastard
children of the Conquistadors in their arms and bellies. Direct
links to this shameful wave of immigration may be seen today in
the facial structure, and eye and skin coloring of Indians from
the Yanomami, Tucano, Wai-wai and other tribes of the northern Amazon
rainforest. Stevenson suggests that Inca women who descended Amazon
tributaries such as the Vaupes, Negro, Branco, Nhamunda or Trombetas
Rivers would eventually have appeared upon the Amazonas river itself
accompanied by their spurned offspring. It must have been quite
a shock for Orellana to face these wrathful girls of European descent
in combat.
Stevenson’s further claim of an ancient highway running west
to east across the Amazon also has foundation. The highway was supposedly
built by the Incas or an even earlier Amerindian society to collect
gold from the mountains of Parime and transport it back to Colombia,
Ecuador and Peru. Evidence uncovered by Stevenson includes remnants
of stone guardrails or walls that recall Friar Carvajal’s
description of the walls of stone said to link one Amazon city to
another.
Roland Stevenson’s work certainly casts new light on the mysterious
legend of the Amazons. But it offers little conclusive proof, and
is mostly hypothesis and conjecture. Can there be any truth behind
Orellana’s story of a tribe of beautiful women warriors inhabiting
the Amazon basin? As an archaeologist in Alex Shoumataoff’s
book about the Amazons, In Southern Light, comments wryly, “who
knows for sure- who’s dug there?”5
Modern myth has it that an exclusive tribe of Indian women do still
live somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest. What if we were to
use Friar Carvajal’s chronicle as a sort of literary road
map and begin a search for the Amazons on the Rio Nhamunda where
Orellana claimed to have encountered them first…?
According to Shoumatoff the river was originally called the Conori
which was the name of the queen of the Amazons according to local
Indian superstition. An article dated April 17, 1994, from the Manaus
daily newspaper, “A Critica”, says that locals living
near the river’s mouth believe something supernatural is at
work around a small lake called the “Mirror of the Moon”
(Espelho da Lua). Residents swear they’ve heard women at night
laughing and swimming in the lake. The women are said to be ghosts
of the Amazons who once lived in the dark forest around the perimeter
of this mysterious “Mirror of the Moon”.
Do Indian women, or their ghosts, still venture forth from the forest
to press-gang local men into service as love slaves as Orellana’s
legend says they did? No one near Nhamunda wants to say for sure,
but strange things have been reported from this lake and all of
it has to do with the Amazons.
If we put together all the pieces of the puzzle we have at hand-
Carvajal and Medina’s literary road maps, Shoumatoff’s
wandering up and down the Nhamunda, and Stevenson’s archaeo/anthropological
treks across the northern Amazon- our search is directed away from
the Amazon river itself, “7 days north” as Carvajal
guides us, and up into some very little explored rainforest straddling
the Brazil/Guayana/Suriname borders.
Just above and west of this “terra incognita” lies the
dry bottom of the legendary Lake Parime, true source of the legend
of El Dorado, discovered by Roland Stevenson. It shouldn’t
surprise us that the mountains above Boa Vista are today the center
of the richest gold strikes in the Americas. To the east of “terra
incognita” lies a group of mountains known collectively as
the Serra de Tumucumaque where huge deposits of jade stone have
recently been discovered. Jade stone too, like gold, figures prominently
in the legend of Amazons in the form of green “muriquitas”
(amulets shaped like frogs) which were presented to the Amazon’s
lovers at the conclusion of their fabled love festivals.
Linking these two sources of gold and jade is a segment of Stevenson’s
highway of the “virgins of the sun”, a system of Pre-Columbian
roads which brought Inca women east and away from their Spanish
persecutors and into the annals of history and legend. Could there
be Amazons up there somewhere? Seven days north of the lake of the
Mirror of the Moon? Somewhere in the mountains of Serra Tumucumaque
or Serra Parime? Who knows? Who’s been there? Who’s
dug there? But there’s something up there, isn’t there?
You can feel it. In the air. On the water. Watching from the forest
even. Something very mysterious is out there waiting to be discovered.
01 The Discovery
of the Amazon, ed. Jose Toribio Medina, Dover Publications Inc.,
New York, 1988. Pg. 205.
02 A Brazilian expedition to the acknowledged source of the Amazon,
a mountain spring in the Mismi mountains of the Peruvian Andes named
after National Geographic photographer Loren Macintyre, claims that
the Amazon River is more than 240 kilometers longer than the Nile
River; from “Amazonas: O Parto das Aguas Magicas”, by
Paula Saldanha, Manchete Magazine (Brazil), April 1, 1995. Pg. 3.
03 Uma Luz Nos Misterios Amazonicos: A light on Amazonian Mysteries,
by Roland Stevenson, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 1994.
Pg. 135.
04 Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinotical Regions of
the New Continent, by Alexander von Humboldt, Penguin Books, London,
1995. Pg. 240-41.
05 In Southern Light: Trekking Through Zaire and the Amazon, by
Alex Shoumatoff, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986.
For further
readings those interested are directed to Mark Aitchison’s
short novel, The Mirror of the Moon, available by writing the author
or contacting him at swallows@internext.com.br.
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