The Amazon, immense and mysterious, speaks a universal language.
Its vocabulary is scientific knowledge, business profits and pure adventure.
All tenses are present, all verbs active.
The Amazon is cruel, limitless, sexy. You can escape into its network of jungles, the Great Green Hell of legend, and be safe forever; you can make your fortune there, idle away your life, or disappear without a trace. The Amazon is the stuff that dreams are made of, the illusion of another world, alluring but veiled, beyond the confines of the familiar one.
A coming series of articles, under the rubric Amazon Dreams, will explore the myths and mysteries–human, natural and, a few, inexplicable—of the mighty river and its vast rainforest surroundings.
Myths and Mysteries
Amazon history is a web of myths, probably the greatest of which is that of material wealth, the endless abundance of the world’s greatest rainforest and its easy exploitation.
The mythic kingdom of Manôa, or El Dorado (“The Gold Encrusted One”), is traditionally located in or near the Amazon. Seventeenth Century explorers such as Francisco de Orellana, the first European to traverse the entire Amazon Basin, and Lope de Aguirre, the psychotic Spaniard who hoped to become the first white emperor of Amazonia, were less interested in national glory and the conversion of souls than in the gold of El Dorado. They didn’t find it. Orellana found only some half-naked women running a matriarchal mini-state in the middle of the jungle; Aguirre found an early death.
A Portuguese explorer, Francisco Raposo, may have discovered Manôa two centuries later. His 10-page report, which can be viewed at Rio de Janeiro’s National Library (Document 512), describes “a rock-built city with arches of great height” over which brooded “a feeling of great age.”
Raposo’s city of stone and gold was not rediscovered in colonial times, although modern technology has revealed a possible site, called Ingrejil, in the western reaches of Brazil’s Bahia state. The location would have surprised a Twentieth Century explorer, Percy Fawcett, who placed the mythic city hundreds of miles west. Fawcett, a British Army colonel, wrote in 1925, “It is certain that amazing ruins of ancient cities, ruins incomparably older than those of Egypt, exist in the far interior of Mato Grosso.”
That same year, Fawcett, accompanied by his son Jack, disappeared forever in an area of northern Mato Grosso which skirts the southern reaches of the Amazon. But for more than a decade he himself became one of the chief myths of the region, the subject of a dozen stories told by missionaries and adventurers of a hobbled, white-bearded Caucasian living among tribes in the remote interior.
Black Gold
But the actual riches of the Amazon are even gaudier than the gold of El Dorado or “the ruins of ancient cities” as described by Raposo and Fawcett. For 25 years around the turn of the last century, the Amazon river port of Manaus, a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) inland from the Atlantic, was one of the richest cities in the world. Its wealth came from the black gold of Amazon rubber and the system of debt slavery used to harvest it over a huge expanse of jungle.
The Amazon “Rubber Barons” lit their cigars with 50-pound bank notes and would spend a thousand pounds sterling “for a night with an Indian princess.” The elaborate fountains in front of Manaus’ historic Amazon Opera House ran with champagne on opening nights. The hundred or so barons who controlled Manaus, everything and everyone in it, and a half million square miles of rubber-rich jungle besides, could afford to send their laundry to Lisbon and their wives and children on vacations to Paris.
The boom ended when British-controlled plantations in Malaya and Ceylon undercut Amazon rubber prices starting just before World War I. American industrialist Henry Ford, dreaming of a bold vertical integration of the auto industry, attempted to replicate the British model by organizing his own Amazon rubber plantations starting in the 1920s. He failed, losing millions over a 19-year period. His two plantation sites, Fordlândia and Belterra, although difficult to reach, can still be seen. Pre-war trucks and electric generating equipment sit rusting in the tropical air behind the rows of white Dearborn houses with screened-in porches– another Amazon dream shattered, another Amazon myth created.
The Naked Amazon
But if nature is subtly vengeful in the Amazon, man is crudely so.
“There’s only one constitution in the Amazon. It’s called the Winchester .44,” said a turn-of-the-century rubber baron. And he meant it.
Júlio Cesar Arana, one of the cruelest of the barons, is said to have murdered 40,000 Amerindians during his 20-year reign as “King of the Putumayo River.” Another baron, Nicolas Suarez, reportedly killed 300 Amerindians during a single day’s “hunting expedition.” Miguel Loayza favored the murder of captive Amerindian children, feeding their remains to his dogs.
But savagery and genocide were not peculiar to the Rubber Barons. English mercenary John Pascoe Grenfell, who “conquered” the Amazon port city of Belém in 1823 for Brazil’s newly independent Empire, was merciless. When a poorly organized rebellion was crushed, 256 captives were imprisoned in the hold of the bizarrely named O Palhaço (The Clown), one of Grenfell’s ships, where they were permitted to die slowly of suffocation and thirst. When the cries of the prisoners grew distressingly loud, Grenfell’s men poured chalk over their heads. Later, they used meat hooks to haul the bodies out. Miraculously, there were four survivors, whom Grenfell freed in a rare mood of magnanimity.
But the single incident which probably best illustrates the diverse elements of Amazon mythology is the building of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, 227 miles of standard gauge track in what is still a remote region of western Rondônia state.
The Madeira-Mamoré, completed in 1912, was born of a typical Amazon dream—that of continental unification and limitless, hoped-for profits from the deep jungle rubber trade. In execution, however, it proved fantastically expensive in both human life and treasure. Once again, both nature and man conspired brutally against an Amazon enterprise, nature in the guise of beriberi, heat exhaustion, dysentery and malaria, man in the form of hostile tribes and negligent project managers.
And, in the end, the whole thing was futile. The railroad’s inauguration coincided with the collapse of the Brazilian Rubber Boom. Today, the tracks lie in ruins, except for a small portion that is part of a Madeira-Mamoré museum in Porto Velho. As in Fordlãndia and Belterra, there are still reminders of the doomed exploit—rusted hulks of locomotive engines, including some from a failed 1873 attempt to lay track along the same route, the boarded-up shacks of the railroad workers and the rows and rows of headstones at Candelária Cemetery, which one Madeira-Mamoré veteran compared to a sprawling plantation of the dead. Another Amazon dream in ruins, not the first, and not the last.
Photo Credits: Amazon River Tributary, Alex Astro, https://flicks.com/photos/72482589@NO7/33658242888; John Pascoe Grenfell, https://grenfell.history.users.btopenworld.com/Biographies/john_grenfell.htm
-Thomas Murphy, 2025
Coming in January: Searching for Lindbergh