The very first documents to emerge from the New World were travel ac- counts. Although this was not the earliest travel writing in Europe the en- counter with the Americas certainly stimulated a vast production of such literature and arguably made textual experience of the exotic a much more mundane occurrence. At the time of the discovery of the New World, the horizons of colonial Europe were also being expanded by travel to the east and south, but the unanticipated discoveries of Columbus provided a fris- son of mystery and a need for explanation. This was the basis not just for recurrent attempts to detail, catalogue, and locate the peoples, creatures, and geographies of the continents, but also for a particular sense of the possibility of encountering the marvellous, the novel, and the extreme. The cross-cutting of these themes and ideas has produced a travel writing in South America that is filled with the discovery of the fantastic, the survival of the anachronistic, and the promise of marvellous monstrosity.1
In this way, South America – more than its northern counterpart – and particularly the Amazon region, has been largely imagined through such travel writing. This becomes very evident in attempts to define and locate the region. The ‘Amazon’ might be restrictively identified with the main river channel or the river basin, but the Amazon river basin actually has a watershed connection with that of the Orinoco, so that hydrology defies neat boundaries and definitions. Likewise, although western Amazonia has an intensity of rainfall that is unrivalled elsewhere in the river basin, the actual extent of the ‘tropical rainforest’ in South America exceeds the limits of the Amazon basin itself, stretching into Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The Amazon could therefore be seen to comprise not only the contiguous forests that spread beyond the river- system, but also savanna and scrub forest environments. Writers of travel literature and of other kinds of account conflate these differences and distinc- tions into an idea of ‘Amazonia’ that is migratory and dislocated from specific physical spaces, allowing it to become an intense object of the imagination.
As a result, the notion of a heart to this forest darkness, an essence that lies deeper and ever deeper under the arboreal canopy, repeatedly drives the narrative forms of description, from the El Dorado of Walter Ralegh to Col. Percy Fawcett’s pursuit of the Seven Cities of the Matto Grosso. In this sense nothing could more clearly mark the region east of the Andes and north of the River Plate as a field of dreams for the external imagination than their identification, in the first traveller’s account of the river, by Gaspar de Carvajal, as the land of Amazon women. This imaginary geography excludes both the grasslands of the southern cone and, more significantly, the Andes and its Incan Empire, which have otherwise loomed large in the literature of the Americas. However, from the perspective of travel the literary production of those locales, being relatively devoid of surviving savages or uncharted spaces, has taken second place to the descent into the ‘green hell’ of jungle Amazonia.
Thus, as with any ‘place’, the Amazon is constituted through the cultural imagination but, unlike even ‘Africa’ or the ‘Orient’, the Amazon has been produced especially through the ‘imperial eyes’ of the colonial traveller.2
The relatively swift (in some places) and deeply destructive (in all places) European occupation of the South American shoreline and major riverways allowed the effective social and cultural domination of the indigenous pop- ulation, but left the larger continental geography untamed. No railways or roads came to criss-cross the forests, no pioneers sustained the sense of oc- cupation, and the enigmas of forest ecology challenged even the most brutal efforts of extractive industries to make the jungle profitable. These socio- political realities have defined the place of the Amazon in the colonial imag- ination, from Columbus to the present day, and have interacted with the imagining of the Americas more generally to produce a particular aesthetic in the writing of the Amazon. This aesthetic reflects a deeply historical sense of the epistemological disjuncture involved in encountering a ‘new world’, coupled with the persistent experience of an intractable ecology – be that the intemperate nature of the climate, fauna, flora, or ‘natives’.
This chapter will try to reflect that deep history, the purpose being to suggest a significant continuity in the aesthetics of travel writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Given the vast diversity of travel accounts only a few can receive attention, and writing in languages other than English can only be alluded to in passing, even though much of the framework for imagining Amazonia originates in Spanish and Portuguese texts. Nonethe- less, some Iberian, as well as Dutch, French, and German accounts were rapidly translated and issued in English and knowledge of such texts among readers is often presumed by subsequent authors. Later travel texts were also regularly translated or redacted into various compilations of voyages or
‘histories’ and so became part of English-language travel writing, especially with the foundation of the Hakluyt Society in the nineteenth century.
Given this borrowing from and translating of early travel texts, it is evi- dent that certain key metaphors and representations dominate this diverse body of writings which have their origins in the earliest encounters between Europeans and Americans. As the purposes of travel and exploration became increasingly disengaged from the direct business of colonial occupation and exploitation so the cultural space emerged where accounts of travel and dis- covery could use the genre to explore inner jungles, as much as vegetal ones. In this more restricted sense travel writing only really exists from the late nineteenth century on, whereas previously travellers’ writings were conceived and understood as instructive primarily in virtue of authors’ encounters with unaccounted for human difference and unfamiliar natural phenomena.
The chapter will also examine the relationship between travel writing and the emergence of academic genres such as ethnography, geography, and zool- ogy in which scientific description is often as important as the tale of travel itself. Also considered will be the way in which the literature of travel in Amazonia is echoed in the production of scientific knowledge. By the same token travelling as a professional exercise has become the occasion for eth- nological speculation and such works illustrate the current state of Amazon travelogues.
Imaginary origins: locating the civilised and the wild, 1500–1700
In the European exploration of South America, the Caribbean Islands, coastal Guiana, and the Brazilian littoral south of the Amazon were the easterly starting points for journeys into the hinterland. However, Spanish occupa- tion of the Incan Empire in the 1530s meant that the first journeys down the Amazon channel were made from the west, following the headwaters to the mouth. It is from these four regions that the first travel accounts began to emerge, all projecting different kinds of imagery of the interior, but – since simultaneously concerned with how that interior might be better known – also emphasising the character of indigenous peoples, the ramifica- tion of their social and political systems, and the opportunities for trade and plunder that existed among them. Equally significant for these early writ- ers were the hydrology, topography, and agricultural potential of the land, for both writing about one’s travels and getting them published required financial investment, and publication had to have demonstrable political utility.
The first accounts of travel along the Amazon were neither in English nor ever published by their authors. Gaspar de Carvajal’s account of the
journey made in 1541 by Francisco de Orellana from the Amazon headwaters in Peru to its mouth is nonetheless one of the most important documents of New World exploration for its description of societies of the Amazon before significant European occupation of the river in the 1630s.3Carvajal
also set a tone for the way in which the river would be described in most subsequent accounts – vast, incomprehensible, filled with wonder, and rich in life and culture. Such marvels also implied connections both with the Inca and the walled city of El Dorado, and these connections are repeatedly evidenced in the journey through references to the presence of llamas, copper axes, clothing, and so forth. Carvajal also announces the presence of the Amazons who came to fight against the Spanish expedition and informs us of a probable location of their principal city that was the seat of their ruler, Co ˜nori. Later writers would also adopt this location, on the north bank of the Amazon along the Trombetas river, as the focal point for tales of the Amazons. Carvajal initiated an ethnological framework for understanding the great diversity of peoples whereby those upstream subtly approximate the ‘civilised’ Indians of Peru, while those downstream, noted for their use of poison arrows and display of severed heads, appear more wild and distant. The Amazons thus occupy an ambiguous mid-point, both culturally and fluvially, as eminent women capable of brutal ferocity.
These themes of ethnological marvel and wondrous promise are all fully present in the idea of ‘El Dorado’, a persistent concern in English travel writing about the Amazon of this period. This concern definitively originates with Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie . . . [1596] where he describes his encounters in 1595 with various native leaders on the lower Orinoco river and how he garners intelligence on the establishment of a golden empire in the Pakaraima mountains by Incan refugees from the Spanish conquest in Peru. He also alludes to the Amazons encountered by Carvajal and unites a whole series of ethnological materials, taken from Spanish accounts, to describe the trade in golden objects, the wars and conflicts between the peoples of the Orinoco and the uplands, and to document such marvels as men with heads in their chests and the presence of cannibals.4
Overall, Ralegh’s constant iteration of place names, ethnic designations, and the names of native leaders serves to authenticate his broader claims, giving the reader the sense of someone who has (paradoxically) more than just a passing acquaintance. However, in Ralegh’s as in Carvajal’s account, the vastness of the landscape defies accurate mapping. Ralegh writes of the mouth of the Orinoco: ‘if God has not sent us another helpe, we might have wandered a whole yeer that laborinth of rivers, . . . for I know all the earth doth not yeeld the like confluence of streames and branches’ (p. 156). Such riverine entanglements also prompted the use of the name Mara ˜n ´on (from the
Spanish mara ˜nas, meaning thicket) for the Amazon, and hence the notion of a ‘River of Entanglements’ poetically alludes to the many ways in which Amazonia threatened a dissolution of moral, cultural, and geographical norms.
In the writings from the Brazil coast the experience of cultural difference is marked by the rumour and surmise of cannibalism, a topic only passingly mentioned in the materials reviewed so far. Despite the fact that the European encounter with the Tupi peoples of the Brazilian coast was geographically beyond even the most expansive definition of the Amazon region, the inten- sity and detail of the writings that describe those encounters have exercised a profound influence on subsequent attitudes to native South American peo- ples. The Tupi came to be seen as ‘cannibals’ par excellence. Early images of their rituals and descriptions of their cultural practices were often trans- posed to new settings, especially within French writings, since they became an exemplary case of the ethnologically pristine. Key amongst the various travel accounts that establish the Tupi in this cultural r ˆole is that written by Hans Staden.5
Little is known of Staden aside from the story of his nine-month captiv- ity among the Tupi in Brazil. While in Portuguese service as a gunner in the early 1550s, Staden was surprised by a party of Tupinamb ´a warriors, stripped naked and beaten, and immediately carried off. It was apparent that he was destined for sacrifice as a prisoner of war. He was duly pre- pared to be ritually killed but a timely attack of toothache led him to refuse food and he grew thin. Questioned about the disposition of the Portuguese, Staden instead suggested that it was the Tupinikin who were planning to at- tack his captors. When this prediction came true, Staden went on to suggest that the moon, a source of evil and sickness in native cosmology, was angry with the Tupinamb ´a. When his captors subsequently fell sick this became a further proof, and gave Staden an opportunity to perform as a prophet- healer and to suggest that he had interceded with his ‘all-powerful’ god to relieve them of their afflictions. His success gave him an untouchable status, but the Tupinamb ´a did not want to give up their strange and potent new prophet-healer and his captivity continued. Staden recounts his observation of the cannibal demise of other captives, including Portuguese, and the frustrated attempts he made to escape with various visiting ships. He also joined his captors on raids against enemy villages and observed and com- mented upon the practice of war. Finally, however, Staden was able to parlay his way aboard a French ship, reaching Honfleur, France, on 20 February 1555.
Staden’s text is also important because it is as much a homily of redemption and faith as it is a travel text, Tupi cannibalism being but one of the many tests
and redemptive proofs of Christian faith his experience offers. The etymol- ogy of ‘travel’ as ‘travail’ becomes fully realised. Amazonia certainly offers, as Carvajal first indicated, many such travails for the traveller. Moreover, as a repeated eyewitness to ritual anthropophagy, Staden’s account stands apart from other French materials of this period which intellectualised Tupi rituals by analogy with Catholic and Protestant doctrinal disputes. Jean de L´ery’s far more extensive account of his travels to Brazil in 1556–8, likewise intricately described Tupi culture;6but it is his position as captive that invests
Staden’s account with particular significance. Given the highly sympathetic portrait of the Tupi which emerges, despite their cannibal practices, Staden’s book alerts us – like other American captivity narratives – to a dimension of ‘captivity’ beyond those of physical restraint and personal erasure: the threat of cultural dissolution offered by a captivity of the senses, an enchant- ment, a bewitching of the imagination by the freedoms, lack of constraint, and force of exotic cultural practice: ‘going native’ or ‘going bush’ as it was expressed in the colonial lexicon. Staden remarks that, at the time of this physical capture, ‘I knew less of their customs than I knew later’ (p. 71), and that encounter with extreme exoticism was the key aspect of his expe- rience that required explanation. This possibility of a moral capture recurs most strongly in twentieth-century writing, but is ever present in travel writ- ing about the Amazon, first as imminent possibility, later as an aspect of colonial nostalgia for what had been destroyed.
These early narratives of travel thus set a framework for the European imagination that most subsequent writers employed: the vast and intricate nature of the land and riverscapes, the elusive presence of native peoples, enigmatic if not hostile, who threaten death and dismemberment by poison arrow or cannibal feast, and always the lure of marvellous discovery, whether of native empires of women, unsuspected fluvial connections, cities of gold, or wonders of nature. In short Amazonia provoked and inspired an aesthetic of extremes.
Colonial glimpses into the interior, 1650–1850
As the colonial regimes in South America moved permanently to occupy and expand their initial coastal enclaves, so the place of travel accounts in the cultural work of conquest changed. Although travellers coming directly from Europe are still represented, a new kind of traveller emerges – one who negotiates not so much geographical distance as cultural difference. The codification of that difference, its repeated proof and extension through journeys into the hinterlands beyond administrative control – the tribal zone of anthropology or the contact zone of literary scholarship – now becomes
the site for the production of exemplary experience and useful knowledge.7
The fact of encounter is itself no longer remarkable, rather specific kinds of encounter with moral and natural phenomena provide the evidence of authentic travel. As a result, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts move from more general evocations to the minutiae of particular landscapes, plants, and animals, or to the investigation of specific cultural proclivities and practices. Occasionally, unknown and wild peoples are seen at the terminal points of such journeying, sustaining a sense of boundless possibility in a limitless environment, and so the definitive searches for the elusive river highways of the continent, or even the great and golden city of El Dorado itself, begin in hope and end in expectation. Amazon women flit through the forest, while cannibals with poison arrows emerge unannounced from the apparently peaceful dispositions of more familiar natives. Nonetheless, it is the defeat of such possibilities by the continuing textual delineation of place, culture, and nature, which together with the success and profitability of the colonial project itself, underwrites and makes plausible these notices from the interior. Much of this literature was produced by travel writers with more sustained colonial (as opposed to metropolitan) identities, such as missionaries and administrators, signalling that the authenticating fea- tures of travel accounts now required evidence of more sustained journeying undertaken on the basis of already existing experiences of distance and difference.
The missionary narratives of Padre Acu ˜na and Padre Fritz return us to the sites first visited by Carvajal, but tell of the loss and destruction of native culture in the intervening 130 years. This apparent gap in writing about the Amazon was not absolute: there exist manuscript accounts of individual reconnoitering and even of a journey to the palace of Co ˜nori, Queen of the Amazons. The hiatus in published accounts was due to the fact that after Carvajal the only European presence in the river basin itself was provided by scattered trading posts manned by small companies of French, English, Irish, and Dutch adventurers. Only in 1639 did the Portuguese make their first attempt at settlement of the river, and Father Acu ˜na was part of that armed ingress. He is therefore overwhelmingly concerned with the economic and political prospects for the river and its peoples. He also explicitly revisits many of the sites of Carvajal’s narrative as if to exorcise the shadow of that