Searching for the Amazons Read online

  To the south, with Amazons and gold always over the next river or mountain range, the conquistadores approached the Inca empire, ruling present-day Ecuador, Peru and Chile. On the way they heard rumours of El Dorado, the Golden Man, a ruler who once every year was covered in gold and immersed in a lake. It was true, in a small way: the chief of the Muisca people of Colombia had gold dust blown on to him, then washed it off in Lake Guatavita. This small reality seemed to confirm the legend that somewhere there was a gold-rich empire, waiting to be ravaged. The Spanish were also eager to find cinnamon, the bark of trees that supposedly grew on the eastern slopes of the Andes. If true, the find would make Spain independent of traders bringing this expensive spice from the Far East.

  To find these mythical regions, in February 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro led 4,000 manacled Indian porters, 5,000 pigs and 340 horse-riding Spaniards armed with guns and crossbows out of Ecuador’s high and temperate capital, Quito, over the eastern cordillera of the Andes and down into sweltering rainforests. Today, you can fly down in a few minutes or drive in a couple of hair-raising hours, skirting cliffs, with rivers raging below you and huge snow-capped volcanoes looming over the forests. Back then, weeks of clambering down singletrack paths, hacking through forests and undergrowth and building bridges over ravines led only to disease, starvation, exhaustion and death. Every day it rained. There was no cinnamon, just scattered trees27 with buds that Pizarro called cinnamon when he wrote up his journey. Of El Dorado there was no sign. By the end of the year, the pigs were eaten, the horses were mostly dead, and almost all of the porters too.

  Camping on the banks of the Coca River, Pizarro decided to build a good-sized boat to explore downriver, into the 500-metre-wide Napo and beyond, ‘until I should come out in the Northern Sea [the Atlantic]’, thus asserting Spain’s claim to all the unknown lands in between. His men forged nails for the boat-building from the shoes of the dead horses. Two days and 250 kilometres further on, with the surviving horses being led along the bank, across tributaries and bogs, they had found no villages, no willing traders, no food.

  Actually there was a lot of food. You just had to be extremely skilful and experienced to get it, as I discovered when I lived with a tribe of Indians who used to hunt over these forests. Once known as Aucas (‘savages’ in the language of the nearby Quechuas), they call themselves Waorani (in English orthography) or Huaorani (in Spanish, because Spanish has no w). They may not have been there when the Spaniards passed by, because over the next two centuries the European invasions from east and west would set off chain reactions of migrations all across the Amazon basin, but for those with the right skills, the rainforest was always a resource to be exploited, in the form of monkeys, birds, tapirs, pigs, fish, fruit (in season) and occasional glorious gobs of honey, if you can stand a few bee-nips (yes, they nip; if there are bees that sting, I didn’t encounter them). To live at all, let alone well, you need astonishing expertise. The rainforest is rich – but the wealth lies mainly in the canopy. It is hard to find food on the jungle floor. The traditional homeland of the Waorani is the size of Wales, for a semi-nomadic population of only 600, who defended their territory by spearing any outsiders they came across. The hardware needed includes palm-fibre hammocks, fire-sticks, spears, fish-poison, blow-guns and darts (or bows and arrows, depending on the culture), and poison for dart- and arrow-tips (either the boiled-down juice of curare vines or the toxic secretion from various species of frog). To develop the techniques took centuries of inherited, evolving skills. To know the materials, gather them and use them demands years of experience. The Spaniards and their highland slaves lacked all this know-how, let alone a knowledge of local languages and the tribal attitudes towards outsiders. Some tribes traded, others were implacably hostile. For example: pre-contact in the late 1950s, the Waorani were the most murderous tribe ever recorded. All outsiders were fair game, and 40 per cent of male Waorani deaths were the result of revenge spearings. Given what they faced, Pizarro’s army of highlanders had no chance.

  In the belief that salvation would be found downriver, Pizarro’s No. 2, Francisco de Orellana, volunteered to sail ahead with fifty-seven armed men and return with food. Pizarro agreed.

  So began an epic voyage, starting in the province now named after him. Orellana never returned. Pizarro and his small band, abandoned and apparently betrayed, made a slow and dismal retreat, wracked by scurvy, their clothes in rags. By the time he reached Quito, he had lost all but eighty men. He had achieved precisely nothing, excusing himself in his official report by blaming Orellana for treachery and ‘the greatest cruelty’.

  In fact, both parties were victims of their inexperience. The Napo, fed by tributaries, flows broad and fast away from the Andean foothills. Return by sail or oar was impossible. And still they saw no villages. Orellana’s men starved, boiling up the soles of their shoes to eat, occasionally tearing up roots that proved poisonous. Seven died before, at last, the rest came across a tribe willing to trade food for knick-knacks.

  After several weeks and 800 kilometres, they floated out into a vast and sluggish mainstream that would, they were sure, carry them to the huge river mouth known both as the Mar Duke and the Maranon, and so at last to the Atlantic. Other Indian groups provided food, and also materials that allowed them to build another, better boat. Then, in mid-1542, they came up against the aggressive Machiparo, a virtual nation of warriors dominating the river for hundreds of kilometres, and providing evidence of the size and complexity of some pre-Columbian flood-plain communities. The Spaniards were allowed to meet the chief, who was so amazed by their beards and awed by their weapons that he granted them living space. But they blew the opportunity by pillaging their hosts, who drove them out, killing sixteen of them.

  Downstream was another tribal nation, the Omaguas.28 ‘Numerous large settlements, very pretty country,’ recalled the voyage’s historian, Gaspar de Carvajal, with roads, decorated and glazed pottery ‘in the style of that made in China’, fine houses and stocks of food. One town stretched for 10 kilometres. Here, and further on, past the junction with the Rio Negro, where translucent ‘black’ waters run alongside the sediment-rich ‘white’ waters of the main river, the Spaniards raided village after village, shooting tribesmen and, as word of their vicious ways preceded them, fighting off flotillas of defiant warriors, paddling across a water-world swollen into an inland ocean by tributaries each larger than any European river.

  Now we approach the point of this story. An unnamed tribe had villages marked by totems on a huge tree-trunk:

  ten feet in girth, there being represented and carved in relief (thereon) a walled city with its inclosure and with a gate. At this gate were two towers, very tall and having windows, and each tower had a door, the two facing each other, and at each door were two columns, and this entire structure that I am telling about rested upon two very fierce lions, which turned their glances backwards as though suspicious of each other, holding between their forepaws and claws the entire structure, in the middle of which was a round open space: in the centre of this space there was a hole through which they offered and poured out chicha for the Sun . . . the one they worship and consider as their god.

  From a captured tribesman, Orellana understood that the altars were symbols of this community’s allegiance to a tribe of female warriors. Huts full of feathers and feather cloaks were apparently tributes for these women.

  The next villages were more threatening, and landings became rare. At one village, where Orellana agreed that his men could celebrate the festival of Corpus Christi (7 June), they found only women, until nightfall, when the men returned from the jungle and attacked. In the morning, the Spaniards retreated, taking with them prisoners, who were hanged ‘in order that the Indians from here on might become afraid of us and not attack us.’ It accomplished exactly the opposite. Attacks came almost daily. The crew kept their two ships well clear of the banks when possible, and killed when they ventured on land.

  At some point, somewh
ere in the 500 kilometres of river between today’s Manaus and Santarém, they saw villages, ‘very large ones, which shone white’. Subsequent events convinced Orellana that these villages were the homes of the fighting women they had heard about upriver. In Carvajal’s words, ‘we came suddenly upon the excellent land and dominion of the Amazons.’

  The Spaniards’ approach attracted armadas of canoes. ‘They mocked us and came up close and told us to keep going, for farther downriver they were waiting for us and would seize us there and take us to the Amazons.’ Crossbows and arquebuses took a heavy toll, but the tribesmen ignored their losses and kept raining down arrows on the two Spanish ships. As the Spaniards forced their way ashore, Carvajal himself was struck by an arrow that penetrated ‘as far as the hollow region’ – presumably his stomach. ‘Had it not been for my clothes that would have been the end of me.’

  How to explain such suicidal ferocity? Carvajal thought he could see the answer, in the form of club-wielding women warriors who seemed to be of a different tribe than the men.

  There came as many as ten or twelve, for we ourselves saw these women, fighting there in front of all the Indian men as women captains. They fought so courageously that the Indian men did not dare turn their backs, and anyone who did turn his back they killed with clubs, right there in front of us, and this is the reason why the Indians kept up their defence for so long. These women are very white and tall, and have their hair very long and braided and wound about their heads. They are very robust and go naked with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men, and indeed there was one woman among them who shot an arrow a span deep into one of the brigantines, and others less deep, so that our brigantines looked like porcupines.

  The Spaniards killed seven or eight of the ‘Amazons’ – ‘these we actually saw,’ writes Carvajal, as if foreseeing doubt – before reaching their boats and drifting away on the current, too exhausted to row.

  A little further on, they approached another village to get food, because it seemed deserted. In fact, the inhabitants were lying in ambush with their bows. The Spaniards protected themselves with shields, all except Carvajal himself: ‘they hit no one but me, for they planted an arrow shot right in one of my eyes, in such a way that the arrow went through to the other side, from which wound I have lost the eye and (even now) I am not without suffering.’

  They took with them a prisoner,29 who in the course of the journey onwards downriver became the source of some fascinating ‘information’, which he was able to divulge because Orellana had made a ‘list of words’. First Orellana asked about the man’s origins. He was from the village where he was captured, came the reply, and his overlord was called Couynco or Quenyue (the two written versions of Carvajal’s history vary). And the women? They lived inland, a seven-day journey away. Orellana’s prisoner said he had been there often, bearing tribute from his lord. The ‘Amazons’ ruled over seventy villages, in which the houses were built ‘out of stone and with regular doors, and from one village to another went roads closed off on one side and on the other and with guards stationed at intervals along them so that no one might enter without paying duties’.

  Did the Amazons bear children, asked Orellana. Yes, indeed. But how?

  He said that these Indian women consorted with Indian men at times, and when that desire came to them, they assembled a great horde of warriors and went off to make war on a very great overlord whose residence is not far from the land of these women, and by force brought them to their own country and kept them with them for the time that suited their caprice, and after they found themselves pregnant they sent them back to their country without doing them any harm.

  The male children they killed, the girls they raised ‘with great solemnity and instructed them in the arts of war.’

  All this was done under the control of a queen, ‘one ruling mistress who subjected and held under her hand and jurisdiction all the rest, which mistress went by the name of Coñori.’

  They possessed ‘a very great wealth of gold and silver’, and high-ranking women ate with gold and silver utensils, whereas those of lower rank used wood or pottery. Five large buildings in the capital were temples dedicated to the Sun:

  In these buildings they had many gold and silver idols in the form of women, and many vessels of gold and of silver for the service of the Sun; and these women were dressed in clothing of very fine wool, because in this land there are many sheep of the same sort as those of Peru [not sheep, of course, but llamas]; their dress consisted of blankets girded about them from the breasts down, [in some cases merely] thrown over [the shoulders] and in others clasped together in front, like a cloak, by means of a pair of cords; they wore their hair reaching down to the ground at their feet, and upon their heads were placed crowns of gold, as wide as two fingers . . . As we understand him, there were camels that carried them on their back . . . which were as big as horses.

  Their source went on: ‘They had a rule to the effect that when the sun went down no male Indian was to remain in all these cities.’ Neighbouring states were made to pay tribute, and with others they were at war, including the one they had just seen, whose men were carried home ‘to have relations with them’. The women were ‘of very great stature and white and numerous’, as he knew for certain, because he went back and forth daily.

  All this apparently confirmed a tale the Spaniards had heard not far from Quito. To see the women, men journeyed downriver 1,400 leagues (some 3,000 miles), so ‘anyone who should take it into his head to go down to the country of these women was destined to go a boy and return an old man.’ The country of the Amazons was cold, said the prisoner, without much firewood.

  Orellana and Carvajal made a willing audience, eager to believe that not far away was a land ripe for colonization. By the time Carvajal came to write his history, the dreams had hardened into an imperialist agenda:

  Inland from the river, at a distance of two leagues, more or less, there could be seen some very large cities that glistened in white, and besides this the land is good, as fertile, and as normal in appearance as our Spain . . . It is a temperate land, where much wheat may be harvested, and all kinds of fruit trees may be grown.

  Grasslands that called out for livestock, woods of ‘evergreen oaks, plantations of cork trees bearing acorns’, rolling savannas, game galore – why, the place was an Eden fit for seizure by king, country and Christ.

  What are we to make of this? Orellana gets into a fight with a previously unknown tribe and sees a dozen strapping women fighting with the men. They look different, and seem to exercise authority. There could obviously be no interpreter, because the Spaniards were the first European arrivals. Yet on the basis of a ‘word list’ Orellana builds a context: tribal hierarchies, a tribute system, seventy villages, stone houses, an economy.

  Take the language issue first. Orellana was, no doubt, as brilliant a linguist as Carvajal claimed. He was ‘next to God, the deciding factor by virtue of which we did not perish.’ But no one can be that brilliant. Once upon a time, it was not uncommon for anthropologists working in the field to claim to learn a new language in a couple of weeks. A century ago, they were safe to do so. Few worked with indigenous groups living traditional lives. The scholar was the only source. No one could check. After the Second World War, anthropology moved on. Language turned out to be rather more complicated than anyone had thought. You can’t pick up a language in a few weeks. The anthropologist and Waorani expert on whom I relied, Jim Yost, said it took him a year to feel comfortable in the language – and he had the immeasurable advantage that Waorani had already been analyzed by the missionary group he was working with. Waorani is a linguistic ‘isolate’, with no living relatives. It had taken years to crack. In a couple of months with the Waorani, thanks to a written grammar, I learned enough to ask a few simple questions, but certainly not enough to understand the answers.

  Yet here is Carvajal claiming that from a si
ngle ‘informant’ speaking an unknown language Orellana could, with nothing but a word list, elicit detailed information about an unknown culture in a few days. It’s simply not possible.

  So the result is rubbish. Stone houses and roads in a mud-floored tropical rainforest that was somehow short of firewood? Fields and oak trees? Take the mention of numbers: a seven-day journey, seventy villages. The numbers assume the existence of a counting system. But, it’s almost safe to say, most Amazonian tribes do not count. Well, they can, but they didn’t then, at least not in European terms. Both the Yanomamö and the Pirahã (more on them in the next paragraph) count ‘One, two, more than two’. Waorani is a bit more sophisticated: one to five is ‘One, two, two-and-one, two-and-two, a full hand.’ You can go up to ten (‘two full hands’), after which the system is too cumbersome to be of much use. It’s nothing to do with a lack of intelligence. The Waorani can learn to count in Spanish perfectly well. Once they have that intellectual tool, they can joke about how they count: ‘If we wanted to say twenty-two in our language, we would have to say “Two hands, two hands and two.’” It seems that, traditionally, these cultures could do just fine without counting much beyond five. Why this was so is an open question, but it’s our problem, not theirs.

  How to explain what Orellana ‘discovered’ from his informant, at least as reported by Carvajal? The answer is: projection, explaining the alien and the far-off in terms of one’s own experiences and prejudices. It’s reassuring to think that our beliefs are universal. But they’re not. There’s a story of a teacher deconstructing Hamlet to Zulus, eager to present the evil deed that underpins the play: Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his own brother to seize the throne. Nods of approval all round. Everyone agrees: ‘He did well.’ So much for Shakespeare’s universal appeal. When Dan Everett, a missionary working with the Pirahã on the Madeira River, proudly read his translation of St Mark’s Gospel, he was convinced that he was offering a message of salvation for all mankind. He had reckoned without the Pirahã belief in a world of dreams and spirits that was as real to them as our physical world. The morning after listening to St Mark, one of the men ‘startled me by suddenly saying, “The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.”