Amazon Ambassador
Although John Hemming has long been a widely respected scholar of the Amazon — its forests, rivers and people — the roots of his knowledge are much more than academic. When Hemming was just 26, his first full-scale expedition into the Amazon was cut short when the expedition’s leader, a friend of Hemming’s from Oxford, was ambushed by a group of Panará tribesmen. The Indians riddled the young man with eight arrows and crushed his skull with a handmade club. Hemming helped carry the embalmed and canvas-wrapped body out of the rain forest so that it could be buried in a British cemetery in Brazil. Before he returned home, however, he left gifts for the Panará at the site where his friend’s body had been found.
Exceedingly rare in the blood-soaked history of Amazon exploration, Hemming’s attempt to end the centuries-old cycle of violence has become one of the defining moments of his career. In the nearly 50 years that have followed his first, ill-fated expedition, he has become a powerful advocate for the rain forest and, even more, for its native inhabitants. He has visited dozens of tribes, four of whom had never before had contact with the outside world; served as president of Britain’s renowned Royal Geographical Society; and written several books on South America, including a trilogy about Brazil’s indigenous people that has become a classic.
Hemming’s most recent book, “Tree of Rivers,” covers ground familiar to anyone interested in the history of the Amazon. What makes the book important and, in many ways, even remarkable, are the breadth of the author’s experience and the depth of his understanding. Throughout, Hemming scatters modest references to his own extraordinary journeys. As an aside, while discussing the river’s multitude of swift, rapids-studded tributaries, he recalls that he was once nearly swept to his death in one. When explaining the potentially deadly diseases that Amazon explorers and natives alike have long suffered, he casually mentions that he has twice endured the searing fever and bone-grinding chills of malaria. Having cut trails through dense, remote rain forest, and having felt the sickening and very real danger of becoming hopelessly lost, he understands much better than most the extraordinary skill it takes for indigenous people to navigate their world.
While Hemming has a deep appreciation for the beauty of the rain forest, he also understands why explorers fighting for their lives might be forgiven if they did not often stop to admire it. “Occasionally a shaft of sunlight pierces the gloom, illuminating huge blue morpho butterflies or rare colored plants that brighten the prevailing browns and greens,” Hemming writes. “But the beauty is lost on explorers having to hack through such foliage. ... After a few weeks of such toil, nonindigenous men are pale, with clothes torn and boots disintegrating. Their skin is covered in bites, thorns and festering scratches, and the glands that filter insect poison from arms and legs are swollen and sore.”
Outsiders’ helplessness in the Amazon, particularly in comparison with the deftness of its native inhabitants, is a recurring theme in “Tree of Rivers.” The vast difference between the two groups is immediately apparent from the earliest European explorers to arrive in South America. Francisco de Orellana’s legendary descent of the Amazon River in 1541, for instance, is a story less of triumph than of utter disaster. “These young Spaniards were the finest fighting men in Europe,” Hemming marvels. “They were invincible in the Caribbean and open parts of the Andes. But as soon as they descended into the Amazon forests they became helpless incompetents.” Although they were traveling through the richest ecosystem on earth, seven of Orellana’s men starved to death, and the survivors were reduced to eating the soles of their shoes. “One race blundered around, torn, bitten and starving,” Hemming writes, “while the other slipped through the vegetation in good health and with a balanced diet.”
For thousands of years, Indians have survived in the Amazon much more effectively and gracefully than any outsider could hope to. Unfortunately, since the 16th century, their survival has depended largely on avoiding not poisonous snakes or razor-toothed fish, but white men. In “Tree of Rivers,” Hemming charts the near wholesale destruction of Amazonian Indians by men who saw no value in the rain forest beyond rubber and slaves — and stopped at nothing to acquire them. Villages were repeatedly attacked, the men kidnapped, the women raped and the children savagely murdered. Once enslaved, the Indians were tortured or worked to death.
Tens of thousands of Indians were killed and entire tribes wiped out during the rubber boom of the early 20th century and the hundreds of years of slaving expeditions that preceded it. Those who survived either moved so far up the river’s tributaries that no outsiders could possibly reach them, or they fought back. As early as the 18th century, the Mura, enraged by the enslavement of some of their own, became, in Hemming’s words, “brilliant guerilla fighters. They used large bows and long arrows, and by holding one end of the bow to the ground with their toes could fire missiles with enough velocity to pass clean through a man.” As skilled in strategy as they were in combat, the Mura patiently waited near rapids, attacking when their enemies were at their most vulnerable and helpless in the roiling waters.
By the time Brazil established the Indian Protection Service in 1910, the Amazon’s people were, as Hemming describes one group, “implacably hostile and justifiably suspicious of all whites.” Explorers throughout the 20th century — everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Hemming himself — learned this lesson firsthand as expeditions were attacked swiftly and silently. The Indian Protection Service attempted to make peaceful contact with the Amazon’s most isolated tribes, but in the end, it did more harm than good. “The first encounter was often done by skilled and well-intentioned officers,” Hemming explains. “But, almost inevitably, there was soon a terrible epidemic — measles, influenza or tuberculosis — for which there was no remedy or for which inadequate medical provision had been made. Also, all too often, when a feared tribe ceased to fight, its forests and rivers were invaded.”
Near the end of “Tree of Rivers,” Hemming invites readers to look at the Amazon through his eyes. As his title suggests, what he sees when he considers a satellite picture of the sprawling river is the outline of an enormous tree. “Twigs join branches that thicken as they move down towards a massive central trunk, which in turn broadens at its bole,” Hemming writes. The trunk of Hemming’s tree is the Amazon, the branches are its tributaries, the twigs their streams. After centuries of exploration and exploitation, the trunk of this great river system has been largely abandoned by its native inhabitants. The branches, however, are still home to scattered groups, some of whom have had no contact with the outside world. “Tree of Rivers” is a powerful reminder that it is our responsibility not only to protect them by leaving them alone but, if our paths do cross, to leave gifts rather than destruction behind us.
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