Soldiers, Scientists and Sorcerers: Explorers on the Rio Negro

On June 3, 1542, Brazil’s Rio Negro River was given its 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 by Europeans 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 has left accounts of their wanderings and discoveries on the largest, but little known, Amazon tributary.

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 long(2). The mouth of this mighty river is 10 km across and lies just below the historic city of Manaus, Brazil. Here you’ll find 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 Solimões River (as it is known locally) and together form the Amazon 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 Amazon, 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; it 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 Guainía 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 Amazônia 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 souls(4). In 1744 the Portuguese slaver Xavier Mendes de Moraes reached the Casiquiare canal(5). In 1754 the governor of Maranhão and Grão Pará, Francisco Xavier de Mendoça 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 got(6). 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 Guainía(7).

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 spy(8). 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 “Diário da Viagem a Capitania de São José 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 “Diário da Viagem Filosófica” (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 kingdom’s 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 hands(9). 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 visited 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 1990(10).

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. Yet few of those who would receive accolades in the 19th century 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 Brazil(11). 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 Guainía River(12), and certainly beyond the Casiquiare canal to Mount Cunucunumo on the Duida River in Southern Venezuela(13). 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 evolutionist 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 Guainía River. Maroa lies just below a small tributary of the Guainía 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 Guianía, 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.

Part II

The Brazilian writings of 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 19th century, three very different writers would come to represent opposing positions in 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 its tributaries revealed to the rest of the world what the Portuguese had long been doing behind closed doors in the Amazon. 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 cheap labor; 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 sertão,” backlands drugs, 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. 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.(15)

In the 1880s an Italian admirer of all things Amazonian, Count Ermanno Stradelli, joined the explorer João Barbosa Rodrigues and traveled extensively on the Jauperí 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 – Pacificação das Chrichanas” (The Jauperí River: Pacification of the Chrichanas, about a tribe 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” (Jauparí and other Amazonian Legends) was published by the Instituto Cultural Italo-Brasileiro (Sao Paulo) in 1964. And a biography of sorts called “Em Memoria de Stradelli” (Remembering Stradelli) by Luis de Camara Cascudo(16) 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 or any great expeditions into the Amazon. 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” (inhabitants of the Brazilian northeast) 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 the Amazon 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,(17) 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 the Amazon 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(18)…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(19) teamed up with none other than J.G. Araujo’s personal filmmaker and the first cinematographer of the Amazon, 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 from 1910 to 1928 and are recorded in numerous Royal Geographical and National Geographical Society articles.(20)

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.(21) 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.

Another noteworthy incident during Rice’s expedition was the group’s encounter with a contingent 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. Rather than just another explorer’s journal, it was a biographical account of life amongst the Yanomami written by a woman 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(22).

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 the Amazon. 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(23). 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. Like Spruce before him, Schultes was quite blasé about the source of the Rio Negro; it simply never was the sole objective of his travels. Like Spruce Schultes, he was always in search of plants; 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(24).

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(25), of the Chilean born painter and anthropologist, Roland Stevenson. While still a young man Stevenson came to the Amazon 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 the Amazon - Stevenson has reportedly uncovered controversial proof 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 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.

Notes

(1) Pp. 204, “Discovery of the Amazon,” ed. Jose Toribio Medina, Dover publications, New York, 1988.
(2) Grolier’s CD Rom Dictionary
(3) IBGE map, 2nd edition, 1982; scale 1:1,000,000, Pico da Neblina, NA-19.
(4) Pp. 78, “Povos Indígenas do Alto e Médio Rio Negro,” eds. Aloísio Cabalzar and Carlos Alberto Ricardo, FOIRN, São Gabriel da Cachoeira and ISA, São Paulo, 1998.
(5) Ibid, pp. 78.
(6) Ibid, pp. 79.
(7) Ibid, pp. 81.
(8) Pp. 242, “Explorers of the Amazon,” by Anthony Smith, Viking Press, London, 1990.
(9) Pp. 7, “Viagem filosófica,” by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, Conselho Federal de Cultura, Rio de Janeiro, 1972
(10) “Memória da Amazônia” - catalog of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira show, Lisbon, 1997.
(11) Op cit, pp. 280, Explorers of the Amazon.
(12) Pp. 377, ‘One River,” by Wade Davis, Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997.
(13) Pp. 256, footnote # 47, “Exploração na Guianía Brasileira,” by Hamilton Rice, translated by Lacyr Schettino, Editora Itatiaia, Belo Horizonte and Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1978.
(14) Pp. 164, “Travels on the Rio Negro,” by Alfred Wallace, Haskell House, New York, 1969.
(15) Pg. 146, “A Poetics of the Waters”, by Socorro Santiago, Amazonian Literary Review, ed. Nicomedes Suarez-Aruaz, Issue 1, Smith College, Northampton, 1998.
(16) Em Memoria de Stradelli, by Luis da Camara Cascudo, Government of the State of Amazonas, Manaus, 1967.
(17) Pg. 313, Explorers of the Amazon, by Anthony Smith, Viking Press, London, 1990.
(18) Pg. 22, Revistando a Amazônia, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz (Rio de Janeiro, 1996)
(19) Dos Anos entre los indios: viajes por el nordeste brasileño 1903-1905, by Theodor Koch Grunberg, Universidad Nacional, 2v., Santa Fe de Bogotá, 1995.
(20) National Geographic CD-ROM collection, 1924 disk.
(21) Pg. 12, Exploração na Guiana Brasileira, by Hamilton Rice, trans. Lacyr Schettino, Editora Itaitiaia, São Paulo, 1978.
(22) Yanoama, by Ettore Biocca, Kodansha International, New York, 1996.
(23) Where the Gods Reign, by Richard Schultes, Synergetic Press/World Wildlife Fund, London, 1988.
(24) One River, by Wade Davis, Touchstone/Simon&Schuster, New York, 1997.
(25) Uma Luz nos Mistérios Amazônicas, by Roland Stevenson, Suframa, Manaus, 1994.

Mark Aitchison is Director of Swallows and Amazons Tours in Manaus.

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