Rio Negro Firsts: More Writers and Explorers of Brazilian Amazônia

Manaus - This essay is a continuation of Soldiers, Scientists and Sorcerers: A History of Exploration (and Literature) of Brazil’s Negro River, an introduction to the literature of exploration of Brazil’s enigmatic Negro River. The present work has two further objectives: to identify the specific texts of the writer-explorers of this historical period which are still available and to introduce readers of Amazonian history to other writer-explorers not mentioned in the first essay.

A list of early Amazonian writer-explorers whose work in one form or another I have found in Brazil or the United States includes: Lobo d’Almada, Francisco Xavier Ribeiro Sampaio, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, Bento de Figueiredo Tenreiro Aranha, Alfred Russell Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Theodor Koch-Grunberg, Joao Barbosa Rodrigues, Ermanno Stradelli, and Hamilton Rice. If their works could be found other 19th century writer-explorers of the Brazilian Amazon worth reading are Spix & Martius, Henri Coudreau, Robert Schomburghk and, in particular, Richard Spruce. The later towers above all the others. Not only is Spruce considered the father of modern ethnobotany (see writings by Richard Schultes and, most recently, Wade Davis), but he was also the first westerner to reach the source of the Negro River (the headwaters of the Guiania River in Colombia). Alas his classic book Notes of a Botanist in the Andes and Amazon is all but impossible to find.

With the exception of works by British naturalist Alfred Wallace, Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz and German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grunberg, the majority of works I cover here are in Portuguese. That shouldn’t be surprising. The lion’s share of Amazônia lies within Brazil after all and most of the earliest writings about the Negro River were written by Portuguese “soldiers, scientists and sorcerers” (a.k.a. priests, military figures and politicians). Happily a number of these books have been edited and re-issued by Brazilian publishers during the last few decades - though few have been translated into English.

Who’s Who

Let me summarize what is it about each figure that is important for us to remember.

Manuel da Gama (or Lobo) D’Almada was the first accurate mapmaker of the upper Negro River. A biographical study - written by former Amazonas state governor Arthur Cesar Ferreira Reis – can be found in the library of the Museu da Universidade do Amazonas in Manaus.

Francisco Xavier Ribeiro Sampaio published the first ethnographic, botanical and zoological studies of the Negro River in the 1770’s. A Portuguese edition of his book, “Diário da Viagem...da Capitania de São Jose do Rio Negro...de 1774 e 1775,” can be found in the library of the Museu da Universidade do Amazonas in Manaus.

Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira is credited with the first comprehensive scientific exploration of the Negro River in the 1780’s. Various editions of Ferreira’s works have appeared since he was “rediscovered” in the early 1970’s. First was a paperback series of his “Viagem Filosofica… “ published by the Brazilian Conselho Federal de Cultura between 1971 and 1974. A wonderful set of print reproductions from Ferreira’s Amazonian voyages (with accompanying text) was published by Brazil’s Biblioteca Nacional in the early 1980’s; first in a large two volume set, and later in a single boxed set. The Museu Goeldi of Belem published a small edition of “Viagem Filosofica ao Rio Negro” in 1980 (years earlier the famous Brazilian botanist Emilio Goeldi himself had written the first biography of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira). A beautifully illustrated book called “Memorias da Amazônia” was published in Portugal in 1996 as part of a traveling show of Ferreira’s anthropology collections. And most recently the Brazilian historian, Adelino Brandão, published a small paperback edition of “A viagem filosófica…” in 1999.

Bento de Figueiredo Tenreiro Aranha was a poet, playwright and the first governor of the state of Amazonas; he is considered by many to be the first truly “Amazonian” writer. Reproductions of his Amazonian Literary Review - he was editor of this influential periodical - may be read at the Museu da Universidade do Amazonas in Manaus.

Alfred Russell Wallace is famous as creator of the theory of natural selection alongside Charles Darwin. Wallace spent his formative years traveling and collecting on the upper Negro River and his later years in the Malay Peninsular of Southeast Asia. His writings, together with those of Henry Bates and Richard Spruce, form the backbone of modern Amazonian natural history studies. A reproduction of Wallace’s classic work, Narrative of Travels on the Amazon & Rio Negro, was published in 1985 by Dover Books.

Theodor Koch-Grunberg is an elusive figure in Amazonian history. He is arguably the first ethnologist of the upper Negro River/Northwest Amazon. Editions of two of his books (in German) are kept at the Museu da Universidade do Amazonas in Manaus. As well a small collection of his correspondence may be found in a book about the life and work of Manaus photographer George Huebner published (in French) by the Musée d’ethnographie, Geneva, in 2000. Koch-Grunberg tragically died of malaria while exploring the Branco River with the American explorer Hamilton Rice and Brazilian cinematographer Silvino Santos.

Joao Barbosa Rodrigues was director of the first herbarium in Manaus on what is today the grounds of the Instituto Benjamin Constant, Rua Ramos Ferreira. He was author of an early study of the muscle relaxant found in the Indian poison “curare” which may be found at the Museu da Universidade do Amazonas in Manaus. In later life he became director of Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Gardens.

(Count) Ermanno Stradelli was the first collector of upper Rio Negro Indian legends and languages. An essay by Stradelli entitled “O rio Negro, o rio Branco, e o Uaupes (1888-1889)” is included in Teresa Isenburg’s Naturalistas Italianos no Brasil

Louis Agassiz visited Manaus in the 1860’s and was the first popular American scientist to study the region. The Swiss-born zoologist led a colorful life in the scientific circles of Boston and Cambridge, USA. He was a popular figure with the public and opened the Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859 and The John Anderson School of Natural History in 1874. Apart from publishing numerous articles in The Atlantic Monthly magazine he is best remembered for his book, Journey In Brazil, (1867) and his deep sea trawling expedition (1871-72) aboard the ship Hassler. His wife and biographer, Elizabeth Agassiz, was herself the author of two early introductions to New England coastal ecology for children and later co-founded Radcliffe College, Cambridge (USA) in 1894.

Hamilton Rice was the first modern day scientific explorer of the Negro River and her northern tributaries, a charismatic figure cut from the same cloth as Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Peru’s Macchu Picchu. Both men were funded by, and wrote for, the National Geographic Society. In the 1920’s Rice used the first hydroplane to explore the upper reaches of the Branco/Uraricoera Rivers with Theodor Koch-Grunberg. His expeditions also featured the documentary film work of Silvino Santos, the Amazon’s first cinematographer. Hamilton Rice’s book on exploring the Branco River, “Exploracao na Guiana Brasileira,” was published first in French before being republished in Portuguese by Editora Itatiaia, Belo Horizonte, in 1980.

In the present essay I have chosen to write a little more about the following writer-explorers of the Negro River: Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira (Portuguese-Brazilian), Alfred Russell Wallace (British), Louis Agassiz (Swiss-American) and Hamilton Rice (American). The work of these four very different men is the most readily available today.

Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira

With the death of King Dom Jose in 1775 Portuguese expansionism in the New World - personified by the immortal Marques de Pombal - began to contract. The gold and diamond mines of Brazil had begun to run dry and new forms of riches were required to keep the Monarchy afloat. Europe was entering the Age of the Machine and Industrialization - led by the English - and Portugal would require raw materials to fuel her necessary industrial expansion if she hoped to remain a power to be reckoned with. Ferreira was instructed to investigate the terra incognita of Amazônia Legal with these political, economic and commercial needs in mind. Following the demarcation treaties of 1750 he was also assigned to address scientific questions of mathematics, astronomy and geography in the New World. He was instructed to collect and document as much of the three kingdoms of nature - animals, plants and minerals - as he could find.

Ferreira has been called the Brazilian Humboldt. And for good reason. The eight years of collecting and writing he began in 1787 were prodigious. In the field of geography he wrote diverse monographs on such topics as the Negro River, the Madeira River, Brazil’s inland waterways, agriculture in the region of Grâo-Pará (Amazônia Legal), and endemic diseases of the state of Mato Grosso. In zoology he wrote extensive reports about 83 species of fish; 59 preserved specimens were eventually sent back to Portugal. He described for the first time 20 species of monkeys and 40 other species of mammals. In botany he wrote at least five books about the trees and useful plants of Pará, Amazonas and Mato Grosso. In one three week period alone, in January of 1788, he collected and produced 52 volumes of plant specimens and 63 illustrations. In anthropology he wrote numerous treatises about the indigenous peoples he encountered during his Brazilian travels.

Despite the supposed importance of Ferreira’s work in Brazil a series of events conspired to relegate his enormous scientific contributions to the dustbins of history - events that began almost as soon as his first collections began arriving back in Lisbon. Professional incompetence meant his specimens went unaccounted for and were lost over time. Jealous colleagues deemed his shipments unimportant and redundant before they were even opened. When he returned to Lisbon in 1892 Ferreira began the monumental task of cataloging his scattered collections and preparing his material for publication and presentation. But the work was slow and tedious and was ultimately cut short by the invasion of Portugal by France in 1807; his collections were then confiscated by General Junot and awarded as war booty to Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire of the Paris Museum of Natural History. In 1815 - not long before Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo - Ferreira died, unknown and unpublished, his collections scattered and unaccounted for. Even then his work was kept under wraps by his critics.

In 1833 Lisbon’s Royal Academy of Sciences began to examine and put into order what remained of Ferreira’s works in the Botanical Gardens: only 22 pieces of manuscript - later grouped into 8 volumes - and 6 books of drawings and plant specimens. In 1842 these fragments were sent to Brazil where they were once again abandoned. They remained unaccounted for until – incredibly - 1972 when the Library of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro finally undertook to publish five volumes under the imprint of the Federal Council of Culture. Critical studies unanimously hailed Ferreira as a “man before his time”, a “true ecologist,” the “first scientific ethnologist,” and the “Brazilian Humboldt.” His work was neither redundant nor heretical; it was pioneering for its time and had gone unappreciated through a cruel combination of ignorance, incompetence and spite. In 1996 a huge traveling exhibition was put together and Ferreira was finally awarded his true place in the chronology of Amazon exploration and discovery. It seems incredible that such a forgotten figure in Rio Negro history is today the most celebrated and accessible of all. Surely this is poetic justice at its best.

Alfred Russell Wallace

Alfred Wallace is best remembered as co-creator with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection. His separate work though was based mostly on travels and explorations in the Malay Peninsular, today known collectively as Indonesia. A geographical meridian formed by a deep underwater canyon that separates the flora and fauna of western Indo-Malaysia from eastern Austro-Malaysian is known today as Wallace’s Line. Here, between the islands of Bali and Lombok, Wallace developed the science of biogeography that gave him, and Darwin, the key to the puzzle of evolution. What is less known about Wallace is that his formative studies in natural history, before Indonesia, were in the Brazilian Amazon on the Negro River. His part-time traveling companion there was Henry Walter Bates, author of The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863) and best remembered for his discovery of Batesian mimicry, “a most beautiful proof” - as it turned out to be - of the theory of natural selection.

Both men were also friends of the greatest Rio Negro explorer of them all, Richard Spruce who, as opposed to Ferreira, gained enormous fame in lifetime but in recent years has been slowly forgotten except by a cadre of enthusiasts led by ethnobotanist Wade Davis and recently deceased Harvard Professor Richard Schultes. Wallace’s reputation itself has been propped up by the writings of conservationist Paul Sochaczewski. Apart from Wallace’s book about the Amazon and his other, The Malay Archipelago (1869), I have found an interesting book called Wallace and Bates in the Tropics: An Introduction to the Theory of Natural Selection, Based on the Writings of Alfred Russell Wallace and Henry Walter (1969) edited by Barbara Beddall.

It makes sense to read Wallace first of all for the fresh imagery he uses to describe the new world he found in Amazônia. He was after all one of the first English writers to travel in this part of the world. And rather than question what he found to be important to science his book is best enjoyed for it’s enormous wealth of observations, lists, and anecdotes. Inspired by Darwin his intention in traveling to Amazônia, along with Bates, was to gather facts and evidences in an effort “towards solving the problem of the origin of the species”. Darwin had been hard at work on the question of evolution for years and his publications - slow in coming - were inspirational to Wallace and other naturalists who all wanted to be part of this new wave in science. Wallace’s first book thereby stands as a lively record of those first collections that would ultimately lead to his mature and pioneering work in Indonesia years later.

Louis Agassiz

Looking back it is virtually impossible to separate the work of Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz from that of his devoted wife, Elizabeth. Like Isabel Burton, chronicler of her famous husband Richard’s many adventures (and translator of his many exotic literary discoveries), Elizabeth Agassiz also worked side by side with her husband and co-wrote all of his works with him. Though untrained in the natural sciences she made the most of a long and intimate apprenticeship alongside Professor Agassiz. She wrote her own children’s books about the New England coast and was also a teacher and school director, and ultimately the biographer of her husband.

Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz visited Brazil twice: in 1871-72 the Hassler Expedition took them around the South American continent and past the Galapagos Islands trawling for marine life. Earlier in 1865-66 the Thayer Expedition had included 3 months in Rio de Janeiro as guests of the Emperor of Brazil himself, Dom Pedro II, and 10 months in the Amazon aboard a boat called the “Ibicuhy”. Agassiz sent numerous collections back to his museum in Cambridge from Amazônia; like other scientists of the time he was obsessed with Darwin’s theory of natural selection and collected data to support it.

As late as the mid 19th century naturalists traveling through the Amazon were still an uncommon sight and the Agassiz were quite conscious of their unique position as privileged foreigners in a land still guided by greed and exploitation today. “Brazilians do not know either how to work or play”, they wrote in Journey In Brazil. River travel was “for purposes of commerce only”…[the locals] don’t go off into the byways and know little of the life of the…forest population.” Their hugely popular book opened up a whole new world to Americans back home, a place of wonder and unequalled natural beauty, but also a place of unpardonable social inequality and hardship for her lower classes.

Hamilton Rice

Hamilton Rice remains today one of the most colorful and eccentric of all Amazon explorers. His work seems to straddle the ages of independent, glory-seeking adventurer and modern-day scientific commentator. Not only is he remembered for his explorations of distant Amazon tributaries by hydroplane but he brought together some of the most illustrious explorers of the early 20th century in his teams. Frequent traveling companions included the Amazon’s first cinematographer, Silvino Santos, and upper Rio Negro ethnographer, Theodor Koch Grunberg.

Hamilton Rice wrote often about his exploits in the National Geographic magazine. His most famous expedition in 1924-25 was to chart the headwaters of the Branco River (largest tributary of the Negro River), to find another connection with the Orinoco River, and to help settle the boundary question between Brazil and her northern neighbor Venezuela. His book, “Exploracão na Guiana Brasileira,” is noteworthy for it’s fantastic aerial photographs of the Negro and Branco River valleys, the first photographs of the Yanomami (then called the Guaribo) Indians on the upper Uraricoera River, and the perceptive social commentary of its author. In one aside Rice observes how well the Indians are adapted to their world but how incapable of action they are once taken out of that world. He also criticizes how the white merchants on the rivers exploit the native labor force and retard the development of the region in general. Regrettably comments like this could have been written yesterday.

It is hugely sad that the success and importance of this first truly modern Amazon expedition- combining the disciplines of geography, zoology, botany, anthropology and ethnography- should have been overshadowed by the death of Theodor Koch-Grunberg from malaria along the way.

Bibliography

Wallace, Alfred Russell. Narrative of Travels on the Amazon & Rio Negro, New York, Haskell House, 1969.

For books without specific links, try the Livraria Cultura website.

Copyright Mark Aitchison 2004. Mark Aitchison is owner and operator of Swallows and Amazons Tours based in Manaus. Send him an email.