TheThiefattheEndoftheWorld

Henry’s voyage to the New World had not been a rousing success. His packages of skins and feathers to his mother were not abundant; his drawings and journals were haphazard and confused. He even tried to buy a parakeet for his sister and failed. He came home weary and dispirited, with a lingering case of malaria and ugly scars on his ankles and shins. He made friends in Nicaragua and lost them; he’d seen the diminishment of a people he loved. He gazed at beauty and found death instead.

Given the tone of his closing journal passages, it is surprising that he chose to return to the tropics. Most young men would chalk the affair up to sad experience and announce their wanderlust permanently cured. Not Henry. There were times when he seemed dazzled, as if the tropics transcended reality, like an opium dream. The gateway to his journey had been Castries, the naval base and capital of the island of St. Lucia. The cliffs plunged from overhead into the ocean, and “the very rocks are robed in the deepest green.” He chose to remember this, not the horrible deaths of the Woolwá sisters, the stabbing of the man in Consuelo, or his fruitless search for the grave of Captain Hill.

From autumn 1867 to autumn 1868, Henry stayed at home in Marylebone and probably helped his mother in her Sackville Street shop. He worked on his journals and sketches and probably tried, without success, to get them published. That in itself would have made it hard for him to forget the tropics, but popular art and entertainment also seemed smitten. In February 1868, the Crystal Palace opened a Great Show of Singing and Talking Birds. Macaws, mynah birds, parakeets, and other winged tropical wonders were showcased in the newly built Tropical Department, “the most pleasing place for such a great exhibition.”

Henry’s choice for a second expedition was just as dangerous as Nicaragua, if not more so. When Venezuela gained her independence in 1830, she initiated a seventy-four-year conflict between liberals and conservatives, including the feudal landlords called caudillos, which resulted in the death of three hundred thousand combatants and seven hundred thousand civilians. Venezuela’s civil strife was unusually virulent, even for South America. Operating in a sparsely populated country separated by huge geographical obstacles, the caudillos developed a rare skill in tearing the republic apart to increase their own power, and the creation of twenty federated states gave them the opportunity to do as they pleased. Now a new war had started. By 1871, another three thousand would be dead.

Henry’s new route was more ambitious than the wide circular track he’d planned in Nicaragua. For the first leg of his trip, he proposed traveling the length of the Orinoco River, the massive waterway that stretches 1,500-1,700 miles and includes 436 tributaries, whose total basin covers 340,000-470,000 square miles. The river delta itself extends 165 miles, with 50 mouths opening to the sea. The Orinoco was the principal highway into wild country and had only been open for navigation since 1817. It was also the principal escape route for draftees avoiding military service and for blacks and Creoles fleeing slavery in the West Indies. But such freedom was precarious, and one observer commented that “all that many Creoles enjoyed along its banks was a gun, a hammock, a woman, and a fever.” The wars of liberation left large tracts of land abandoned and uncultivated. Between 1810 and 1860, millions of people left Europe for new homes, but only 12,978 settled in Venezuela. This was a harsh land that few people wanted, but it was up for grabs.

When he left England in December 1868, Henry hoped to become the first Englishman to duplicate the route of German explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his companion Aimé Bonpland—and survive to tell his adventures. Von Humboldt was probably the greatest European explorer of South America of his age: he and Bonpland did nothing halfheartedly. When they set out for the Orinoco’s source in February 1800, they began by walking across the long flat grassland, or llano, that stretched between Caracas and the River Apure, the Orinoco’s largest tributary. From there they embarked on a long canoe journey, and by May 1800, accompanied by a Jesuit priest, had completed an overland portage to the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon. Near San Carlos de Rio Negro, on the disputed frontier between Brazil and Venezuela, they found the legendary Casiquiare “canal.”

The Casiquiare is actually a two hundred-mile tributary of the upper Orinoco that also flows southwest through level marsh into the Rio Negro, forming a natural link between the Orinoco and Amazon that makes it the largest “bifurcation” on the planet. Until Humboldt’s account, it was just another jungle legend. In 1639, the Jesuit priest Father Acuna reported rumors of the canal, and in 1744, another Jesuit, Father Roman, accompanied some Portuguese slave traders when they returned from Venezuela to Brazil via the Casiquiare. No other European explorer had plied it since von Humboldt, though not for lack of trying. Alfred Russel Wallace tried from the Brazilian side but fell victim to a bout of malaria that nearly killed him. Spruce had contemplated the ascent until he found himself in the armed standoff in San Carlos between Portuguese merchants and Indians. Henry intended to drop down to San Carlos via the Casiquiare, then float down the Rio Negro to the Amazon and from there to the Atlantic, a journey of approximately five thousand miles.

He began in typical fashion, with little preparation, carrying with him his fowling piece, trade goods, and sketchbook. There was no mention of a map or bottle of quinine: He’d depend on a mental sketch of the landscape and the good will of strangers. Historian Edward V. Lane believed “the main purpose of his journey was to study the rubber trade,” but in truth he didn’t mention rubber until he ran out of money and cast about for a quick source of funds. If there was a change in his method, it was that he took a companion, Rogers, “a young Englishman who accompanied me.” Henry seemed to know very little about him: Lane called him a sailor, which suggests they met on the voyage over from England. Their journey would be a litany of hardship, and through it all, poor Rogers rarely got a kind word. Why Henry invited him remains a mystery.

Something had changed in Henry this second time around, and it wasn’t always attractive. He was more impatient with others than in Nicaragua, at times downright disdainful, a trait that led one historian to dub him a “self-respecting British prig.” Part of the change might lie in different circumstances. In Nicaragua, he’d been a tourist, happy to let new experiences wash over him, thinking perhaps his drawings of the tropics would bring some recognition. This time he was a seeker: His craving had blossomed during his year’s wait in London, and he sought, like others before him, an unspecified El Dorado.

Henry was also more solidly “English” now than he’d been a year earlier. In Nicaragua he could easily criticize his homeland for abandoning the Mosquito Shore and their protection of his Indian friends. This time, on the way to St. Lucia, when they were delayed by the three-masted British warship Royal Alfred for a routine check of documents, he proclaimed, “What a difference there is in the appearance of the boat’s crew from an English man-of-war, on a foreign station, to the sailors belonging to any other power.” On board the Tamar with him was a recruiter for the 4th West Indian Regiment, “a very fine specimen of a West Indian soldier,” Henry enthused.

Finding that no steamer would leave for the Orinoco for another three weeks, Henry spent two days securing passage on a smaller vessel. On January 11, 1869, Rogers and he hitched a ride with a boatload of smugglers. “Our little craft, about the size of a Margate lugger, was well manned; the crew were all excellent fellows in their way, although confirmed smugglers; indeed, the boat was afterward confiscated by the authorities.” The Creole master from Trinidad had been to England and seen the Crystal Palace; a man from Guadeloupe steered, while the Trinidadian cook “had traversed the Spanish main ever since he was twelve years old.” Pedro, a mestizo from the island of Margarita, wrote down the native names of local fish and birds: “One hardly expects to find such a pitch of education in fellows with shirts like the rags remaining to us as relics of the Waterloo standards!” They crossed a well-defined line “where the greener water of the sea is borne back by the yellow tide of the Orinoco.” Sand spits around the mouth were thick with egrets and scarlet ibis. They penetrated the delta’s narrow, mangrove-lined channels and were engulfed by clouds of mosquitoes and flies.

For two days they drifted up the labyrinthine channels of the delta, the sun broiling the inhabitants of the open boat, the still air sweltering and thick by midday. Sometimes they’d spot in a side channel the small canoes, or curiaras, of the indigenous Guarani, but they’d always disappear among the dense thickets, “paddling as for dear life,” Henry said. The tribe’s members were kidnapped and sold into slavery by the Spaniards, and smugglers like Henry’s hosts were not above participating. These Indians were said to “possess the knowledge of an ointment that is obnoxious to mosquitoes, which cease to torment them after they have anointed their bodies with the valuable charm.” After two days of this torment, they sailed into the main channel of the Orinoco and were driven upstream by a cooling coastal breeze. At sundown on January 22, nine days after entering the delta, they pulled into Ciudad Bolívar.

The chief city on the Orinoco, Ciudad Bolívar was picturesque, built on a low hill overlooking the river. It was flanked by a deep lagoon and the dry, sandy llanos, which stretched for miles in every direction. Simon Bolívar hoped the city, then called Angostura, would be the great port of South America. This didn’t happen, but it did become the gateway to a frontier that in many ways resembled the American West. The llano was filled with cactus and tough, thorny hedges; cattle ranches stretched for thousands of miles. This prairie was not the rolling kind of the American West but a flat, treeless expanse covered in short brown grass, extending from the Orinoco delta to the spurs of the Andes, where the sun beat down with an average temperature of 90° F. Rumors of gold beyond the eastern hills brought streams of prospectors for supplies. Beyond the horizon, hostile Indians still threatened. The city was an oasis, a neat Spanish town of “rough-paved, but clean streets” dominated by a German merchant class who’d grown rich off local salt. In the harbor lay German, Dutch, and American ships that had come for salt and beef to trade in the Caribbean.

Ciudad Bolívar was also home to the governor, Antonio Della Costa, whose permission Henry needed to continue in-country. Henry and Rogers slung their hammocks in a large stone-flagged room in the town’s only hotel, and the next day Henry went to the Government House, where he was graciously received. Della Costa was proud of his district: The gold near the hills of Utapa would bring riches like the California gold rush, he claimed. His nation might be in turmoil, but in this region there was law and order; there was opportunity. He gave Henry a signed letter allowing free passage up the river and wished him Godspeed.

Henry soon witnessed frontier justice in action. Prison labor maintained the roads and public works. Each morning, a chain gang straggled from the district jail under guard, “and a more villainous-looking collection of different types of men I think I never beheld:

Among them was a low-class Frenchman, who, associated with a repulsive visaged Negro, had long been in the habit of robbing and murdering travelers on the road from the Caratel mines. On the quay, one day, some soldiers ran past, loading their old flint-lock muskets as they went, halting occasionally to level a shot at a man who had just left a pulperia, and was making up the road. The object of pursuit (but that day released from a term of imprisonment) had found his former sweetheart at the pulperia in the company of a rival, and overpowered by jealousy, had run her through with a machete. The miscreant was a tall Negro, who had been notorious as a bully among his fellow convicts; he was ultimately severely wounded and captured.

Obtaining the governor’s passage was just the first step in leaving Ciudad Bolívar. Henry had to find a boat, and this proved difficult. Although Della Costa gave him an iron lifeboat salvaged from a wrecked river steamer, the boat was rusted through at the seams. For the first time, Henry’s habitual lack of planning had consequence: The daily two dollar hotel charge ate into his meager savings, so the travelers moved their hammocks to the house of an American woman, “one of the last of the southern settlers who came two years before.” She hailed from that peculiar and desperate species of American exile that Henry would find sprinkled throughout the tropics, a refugee group that would have such an impact on his destiny.

In the first four years following the end of the American Civil War, 8,000-10,000 former Confederates left the South and sought new homes in Latin America. Called the confederados, they thought they could escape the wreck and ruin that covered the former Confederacy from Texas to Virginia. Although the majority of Southerners stayed home, a few thousand sailed from southern ports to colonize land grants in the wilds of Latin America. The Confederate dream of spreading south to form a new slave society predated the Civil War. Its main spokesman was Matthew Fontaine Maury, one of the most renowned American scientists of his day, famous internationally for his achievements in astronomy, geography, and hydrography. Maury was superintendent of the U.S. Hydrographical Office and astronomer of the Naval Observatory in Washington; the fact that he was also a Southern expansionist gave the idea of colonizing the tropics in the name of the South an air of legitimacy. From 1849 to 1855, Maury wrote unceasingly about turning the great rivers of South America into the South’s own slave colony. He was as enthusiastic as Clements Markham in England, painting Latin America as a land of unlimited resource ripe for the taking. Maury was, in fact, sounding the same imperialist trumpets as Britain, but with an overlay of slavery; his real focus, however, was the Amazon Valley. It was “a gold and diamond country” awaiting the cultivation of cotton, coffee, sugar, “and numerous other commercial agricultural products,” but kindred colonizers used his arguments for the Orinoco, too. It only seemed logical, said Maury, that “the fingers of Manifest Destiny pointed southward as frequently as westward.”

Maury was such a believer that in 1851-52 he used his influence to promote a scientific survey of the Amazon Valley by a relative, William Lewis Herndon, and Midshipman Lardner Gibbon, an officer assigned to accompany him. In letters to the two, he confided that, although the expedition’s stated purpose was to expand “the sphere of human knowledge,” they must remember that this was “merely incidental.” The real object was to investigate the possibility of transporting a large portion of the South’s slave population to the jungle and to gain land grants for future Southern planters.

Such schemes did not bear fruit until after the Civil War. The Confederate colony in Venezuela, chartered on February 5, 1866, was one of the first to start, and one of the first to fail. Called the Price Grant after the colony’s leader, Dr. Henry M. Price, the land given to the ex-Confederates for settlement was a vast, 240,000-square-mile tract extending along the Orinoco’s right bank to Colombia, then stretching to the common lands between Venezuela, British Guiana, and Brazil. The first fifty-one colonists arrived in Ciudad Bolívar on March 14, 1867, and were greeted by Governor Della Costa. They settled in Borbon, a small town twenty miles upriver, but they didn’t stay long. Fourteen left to dig for gold 125 miles away, and all fell ill or died. Back in Borbon, the leader, Frederick A. Johnson, woke one morning to find himself alone. At noon the others appeared, said they’d found gold in a nearby bluff, and held forth a bucket filled with glistening black sand. Johnson took the sand to be assayed in Ciudad Bolívar. The test identified the sparkly stuff as mica, and the only use for the yawning hole outside Borbon was a grave in which to bury their dreams. That drained the heart from the settlers, and most went home. Johnson remained until April 12, 1867, when he left to recruit more colonists. His personal resources had dwindled to sixty-five cents, and as far as is known, he never returned.

Henry did not sympathize with his American hostess or her bitter plight. She “was not blessed with a particularly amiable temper,” he said. In addition, she kept a raucous “stock of some dozen parrots in readiness for a Yankee skipper, who traded with New York.” To escape the din, he and Rogers explored the surrounding llanos and made a practice of swimming in the river near town. The daily constitutional was a ritual that Henry prized: “I believe exercise is even more essential to health in a tropical than in a cold country,” he said, a nod to the Victorian belief that regular habits prevented malaria, and so he took a dip every sunrise and sunset. It was also tempting fate: A local man warned them of the dangers of tembladors, or electric eels. “A shock from an eel would send a bather to the bottom without reprieve,” Henry said.

La Condamine was the first to bring Electrophorus electricus to Europe’s attention, but von Humboldt was the first to determine the nature of its deadly charge. When his guides drove a herd of mules and horses into a marsh where eels were known to rest, the disturbance caused them to deliver a shock. The frightened animals stampeded from the water, and the guides drove them back in. After several repetitions, during which a few horses died, the eels exhausted their batteries and could be 82 flipped onto land with dry lengths of bamboo. Humboldt dissected the fish and discovered that its fibers of electrical generation were equal in weight to its muscular tissue. He was the first to detail the Hunter organs and Sacks bundles—but not before accidentally stepping on an eel. “I cannot remember ever having received a more terrible shock,” he wrote, realizing he would have been killed if not for the sacrifice of the horses. As it was, he had violent pains in his knees and other joints that lasted the rest of the day.

Forgoing a bath was “a tremendous denial in such a climate,” so Henry bathed with a calabash, or tutuma, in a shallow creek past town in the cool morning. During one of these dips “poor Rogers was stuck by a raya, [or] ‘stingray,’ whilst wading in the shallow water at the brink of the river, and suffered considerably; his leg swelled and he was rendered almost incapable of walking for some twenty-four hours.” This was one of the twenty-five to thirty species of mottled freshwater Potamotrygon stingray, more feared on the Amazon and Orinoco than the piranha or eel. Fishermen were stung while spreading their nets. The large venomous sting at the base of the tail was known to kill children, and even adults if it hit a major vein or artery, while others told of affected limbs feeling numb for years. One can’t help but feel that Henry was partly responsible: He’d been in the tropics before and should have been aware of its dangers. Since he described Rogers as a “young acquaintance,” he probably was younger and less experienced than Henry. From this point on, Rogers’s health began to deteriorate, and they pushed on before the young man recovered. After this, Henry grew increasingly irritated with his companion and seemed to have little sympathy for those who, for whatever reason, slowed him down.

Besides further delaying their leavetaking, Rogers’s injury had additional consequences. They moved their quarters again to an even cheaper location, the house of an old Barbados woman named Mother Saidy “who was quite motherly to Rogers” in his pain. Mother Saidy seemed to realize that cockiness and spirit were not enough in this harsh environment. She looked out for all wayward young men, black and white, whose tumbling fortunes led them to her door. Such kindness extended to children. She had a weakness “for picking up, and caring for stray chicks of doubtful pedigree,” Henry observed, apparently unaware that he was a “stray chick” too. Expatriate blacks from throughout the British West Indies rendezvoused at Mother Saidy’s: “It was most amusing to see what pride they took in being British subjects, and the contempt in which they held their dark brothers” who were not so blessed, he said.

They lingered a month, a delay that grated on Henry’s nerves. They’d steadily lost money, and when they finally cast off on February 22 in a “fast little native-built lancha” with a pilot named Ventura, Henry also felt they’d lost valuable time. The rains would come in April, and with them flood, fever, and disease. His impatience included himself and others. Something valuable had to come from this journey, but what could it be?

He may have caught a glimmer three days before leaving town. On that day, he considered tapping rubber for the first time. “I proposed exploring the Caura, a major tributary on the south bank which joined the Orinoco about 100 miles upstream from Ciudad Bolivar, in search of India-rubber.” Nowhere in his journal did he seem swept away by the gold fever then consuming young men of all nations, but commercial plants of all stripes—that was a different story. At this point, any valuable species would do. As he ascended the river, he searched for the sarrapia tree, Dipteryx odorata, source of the tonka bean, a black-skinned, aromatic seed that smelled like vanilla and was used as its substitute in soaps, perfumes, and pipe tobacco. Antonio Della Costa may have alerted Henry to such possibilities, either he or an English trader named Derbyshire, for whom Ventura worked. The most likely source of his newfound commercial interest, however, was Mother Saidy, a walking encyclopedia of botanical lore. Rogers and Henry both would be nursed through virulent fevers by her knowledge of jungle medicine. She knew plants that were helpful and harmful, and where they could be found.

The voyage upriver seemed cursed from the beginning. The river was low; they constantly ran aground. The Orinoco’s bends were compressed between high banks; the wind worked against them and the lancha was too bulky to steer. They abandoned it in the village of Maripe for more nimble canoes, one for each man and his gear. They planned to paddle up the nearby Caura River, but just before they left, Ventura got roaring drunk, so Henry stowed him away in the bottom of a canoe and pressed on. Forest surrounded them at the tributary’s mouth. Cicadas sang in the trees, one sounding like a train whistle, another like “the jingling of little bells.” Masses of cloud rolled up behind the forest, and their camp was swamped in a deluge. They paddled deeper up the river in search of better luck. The left bank was held by hostile Taparitos, the right by agricultural Arigua awed by their wild enemies. “There does not appear to be much actual fighting between them, however, as an alarm of their approach occasions a general bolt into the bush,” Henry observed. “The Taparitos then content themselves with planting a few arrows in the deserted houses.” Nevertheless, Henry carried his double-barreled shotgun and Rogers a Snider rifle wherever they went. When Henry tried to persuade several Arigua to search with him for rubber, no one volunteered. They continued on alone.

On April 2, fever arrived with the rainy season. Several species of the anopheles mosquito that can transmit malaria flit around the Amazon and Orinoco basins, each as ubiquitous as rain: A. darlingii breeds in swamps; A. aquasalis breeds in salt water along the coast; A. cruzi prefers the dirty pools of water in bromeliads. Whichever species attacked bit Henry first. That morning he’d gone into the forest to shoot some birds when “a feeling of giddy faintness came over me, accompanied by a disagreeable sensation of doubt as to whether I should be able to get back to the camp.” He struggled on, “and succeeded in reaching that destination just before the fever obtained mastery over my limbs.” He tried to tell himself that he’d succumbed to the “effluvia” of a tree that he examined, but by April 15, all three companions were touched by fever. They abandoned their quest and turned downstream.

It took nine days to return to Maripe, a journey they’d made upstream in six. They lashed the canoes together and drifted with the current. The sun beat upon them in the open boats, and Ventura alone had strength to steer. Sometimes they couldn’t even do that but beached the canoes and lay in the water. They were in the same position now as Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d been attacked by fever on the Rio Negro in 1851: “I began taking doses of quinine and drinking plentifully cream of tartar water, though I was so weak and apathetic that at times I could hardly muster resolution to move myself to prepare them,” Wallace recalled. “During two days and nights I hardly cared if we sank or swam. . . . I was constantly half-thinking, half-dreaming, of all my past life and future hopes, and that they were all doomed to end here.” Henry wasn’t even taking quinine, his only relief a wet towel wrapped around his head. After each spasm of fever, he’d drag himself “to the brink of the river and lay myself down in the rippling water.”

They reached Maripe on April 24, only to find the lancha ruined. The hawser that made her fast had been stolen; she’d rolled on her side in the current, and her planks were warped and sprung. Henry was deathly ill, and his companions were probably as pitiful as he. Their only choice was to float back to Ciudad Bolívar in the canoes. On May 8, they arrived and were put up by Mother Saidy. The “good natured Barbados woman” nursed them back to health and probably saved their lives.

Henry had to face facts: All his plans had fallen through. He had no cash. His sailboat was ruined. His only possessions were the three canoes and what he could carry. A return to Trinidad would be an admission of failure, but he couldn’t even do that, since he lacked sufficient funds for the fare.

While Henry mulled his dim future, he was approached by a young confederado named Watkins—and Watkins had a plan. He wanted to get out of this damned country, he said, and he intended to do so by ascending the cataracts of the Orinoco and gaining the Amazon via the Casiquiare canal. Any alternative seemed better to Henry than rotting in Ciudad Bolívar. “Watkins and I were in good condition,” he said, a bit of wishful thinking since his fever never fully abated. Watkins “had seen much rough service in the late American war and in New Mexico,” and had just arrived in town after walking across the llanos from the coast. Henry perked up: He was with a man again, not just that whiner Rogers. He agreed wholeheartedly to Watkins’s project and “did not fear as to the result.”

On August 6, three months after returning in tatters, Henry set out once more into the interior, this time with Rogers, Watkins, and an Indian named Ramón, a replacement for Ventura. The rain was at its highest, but all were overjoyed to finally be away. The governor had given Henry letters of safe passage to the governor of Amazonas, his opposite upriver. They were as ready as they’d ever be.

Four days into the journey, things again went awry. They’d only made it upriver about twenty-five miles, close to the first confederado settlement of Borbon, when “declaring himself unwell, [Watkins] took leave of the expedition, and returned to Bolivar.” This was a blow for Henry: “As I had rather relied upon him, I was much disappointed.” It was as if every plan was doomed from the onset. They entered Borbon in hopes of hiring someone to take Watkins’s place, but no one could be tempted, and they moved on. By now, the woods were flooded. “At this, the height of the rainy season, little or no land is to be met with . . . for several days’ journey,” so they made fast beneath a huge floating tree trunk and ended their day with a meal of jerked meat and tea.

This upriver journey grew worse as they paddled deeper into the inundated world. Rogers’s malaria returned full-force. By midday, all steering and paddling lay with Henry and Ramón. Massive tree trunks reared from the water. The only animal life they encountered were unforgiving insects and perros de agua, packs of huge river otters. When the strange beasts heard the stroke of their paddles, they “gave forth their peculiar mewing cry . . . or suddenly lifted their heads and shoulders out of the water, in order to reconnoiter us, at the same time displaying a goodly set of sharp white fangs.” When Henry found land on a small island, the dank smell of earth was replaced by the musty odor of otter droppings and urine. Henry watched as the dark-brown, slickly furred heads, flattened on top, thrust from the water; the pack chattered at the intruders: “Uh! Uh! Uff! Uh!” Ramón imitated the chatter, and the otters surfaced beside them, six feet in length. Drops of water slid from their side-whiskers. They resembled murderous representatives of some Ministry of Madness. This was an alien world he’d entered, so different from Nicaragua, where life at least had some semblance to the known world.

One day they entered a stretch of forest dominated by matapalo, or “tree-killer,” the local name for the strangler fig. Henry was reminded of a “vegetable Anagonda (sic):

[O]nce it has embraced the trunk of a forest tree, it mounts higher and higher, till its glowing foliage mingles with, and then tops that of its supporter: its supple limbs, now tightly compressed, flatten out, and gradually spread over the whole trunk of its victim, so enclosing it as to deprive it of life.

In actuality, the pressure exerted by the matapalo’s aerial roots reduce the host’s ability to move nutrients to and from its crown. In effect, it starves. The host dies off, and then the matapalo “stands self-supported, a great tree, bearing aloft a dark green dome.”

Resting in its shade, Henry studied the parasite fig. If the tree were in fruit, raucous green parrots fed noisily in its upper limits. A troop of spider monkeys passed on their daily rounds. There was a wealth of life on its trunk, every niche occupied. Geckos and anolis lizards fought for territory across a no-man’s-land of bark; army ants and Polistes paper wasps battled for nesting space in the large cavities. The meandering creatures of the forest floor climbed up the surface in the absence of dry ground. Land snails left silver mucus trails behind them; centipedes hunted constantly. Around the roots the men cast their hooks and caught a “caribee,” no longer than a perch, whose sharp, powerful teeth protruded from its jaws and took off the top of Henry’s finger when he spitted it for the grill. Another day Ramón gave a whoop as a cayman steered straight for the canoe prow where Rogers lay dreaming. There was a splash; the cayman moved on.

This pitiless river was like the matapalo, spreading over the visible world. It drowned men in its molten waters, snipped at their hopes like the crazed abominations that mewled and chattered at the edge of the gunnels, or tore off the tip of one’s finger when by all rights it should be dead. This was the modern world; Henry was a citizen of one of the most prodigious empires the world had ever known. Yet out here that fact counted for nothing, as if Nature herself harbored an animus against civilization and took special pleasure in grinding her representatives into the loam.

By August 20, they’d passed the mouth of the Caura; by September 1, the Rio Cuchivero, and by September 4, the Apure, the huge tributary heading west into the plains. They rose from the water-soaked world to dry land. Sandy beaches lined the banks; villages dotted the shore. Their mackintoshes were ripped to pieces by the thorns through which they’d forced passage. All was rotten or damp, and they called a halt to dry their clothes. With land came a new plague: zancudos, or sand flies, and clouds of mosquitoes. But there were glories, too. One night as they camped on an island to escape insects, an immense flock of snowy egrets roosted close. “They were very noisy,” Henry wrote, “as the sun went down in a glorious sky.” As they approached the end of each day’s journey, Henry would ask, “Bostante lejos, Ramón?”—Far enough, Ramón?

And Ramón, whom he trusted, grunted back, “Lejos.” Far enough.

He’d come far, indeed, and now he was about to step into the Abyss. On September 4, Henry’s fever returned, his calentura as he called it, and that left him vulnerable to the most repulsive thing he’d ever encountered—the zamora vulture, the ubiquitous “turkey buzzard” that glides in great gyres over the sick and the dead. Henry was sick, all right, and he wrote, “When one is unwell, it is especially unpleasant to have a mob of these disgusting birds fluttering and croaking disagreeably in the trees you select for shelter and rest.” In great enough numbers, they rendered a place unendurable with their odor. Sometimes he could no longer stand their presence and, grabbing his rifle, sent a bullet “at one more intolerably impertinent than the others.” They were “half-weird . . . when skulking about a camp, dodging behind stones and bushes, or peering down from the boughs over-head.” If he hit one, its death was sinister and absurd: “If a bird was struck whilst walking on the ground, he appeared simply to lie down suddenly on his side; there was no kicking; the ball drilled a hole through the body, and continued its way.” Like an old man in a stained overcoat, it fell over and lay still.

With this second bout of malaria, things went a little mad. By September 5 and 6, the fever was so bad that Henry could no longer paddle. He fell into deep sleep, only to be jerked awake by a squall that threatened to drown them all. The night was “pitchy-dark,” and he could only see Rogers and Ramón by the “rapid flashes of vivid lightning. Ramon looked really terrified and was yelling out something,” which Henry could not hear above the tempest. Everything in the canoe was lost, drenched, or in shreds. They landed at a village, and an old Indian named Cumane was so alarmed by Henry’s condition that he “wanted to take me home with him to be doctored by his women for a few days.”

But Henry refused, insisting that they push upriver. When they left the next day, they passed Cumane’s rancho high on the riverbank. Cumane called out, begging him to stay, but Henry refused, conceding to accept a drink of sugarcane juice before pressing on. Toward noon, the fever hit again in full force. He pulled to a shady spot, but the calentura felt as if it would burn him to cinders, and he tried to walk back to Cumane. “I managed to control my legs just long enough to stumble into the rancho, where there were two pretty Spanish-looking girls.” He fell at their feet and they screamed for their father. “I did not remember anything until the fever lessened,” he said.

He stayed with Cumane six days, until September 15, the fever recurring the same time each day. He drank hot fluids when in a sweat and cold when the fever broke. The girls fed him soup and a decoction of a medicinal plant he called frigosa. This was apparently the mimosa frigosa, or mimosa pudica, the so-called sensitive plant native to South America that, when touched, closed up on itself. “Stay longer, do not be in a hurry,” Cumane urged, pointing out the richness of the soil of his farm, the abundance of game in the forest and manatee in the river. “All of this, but I am old,” hinting also that he’d saved much silver. Henry realized what he suggested: A young fellow like him might take a fancy to one of his daughters and stay with him forever, working and inheriting this corner of Eden.

The next day Henry said good-bye. In two days, his band reached Urubana, sheltered beneath a rocky hill overgrown with trees. Several rocks had faded inscriptions etched upon their face; they were entering a land of cultures that were ancient or dead. Secure at the dock was a lancha large enough to house twenty-four men and women under the palm-thatched toldo (awning) built on-deck. It belonged to the Governor of Amazonas, the state beyond the cataracts, and was bound for the Rio Negro. Henry arranged with the captain to take him and the supplies beyond the falls, while Ramón and Rogers took the canoe on ahead.

The land took on an ominous air. The falls at Atures and Maipures denote a major declination between the llanos of northern Venezuela and the forests of the south. The llanos were the home of over two million cattle, the feudal ranchers, and traditional Spanish culture as represented by Acting Governor Della Costa; the forests were unknown, and outposts of civilization seemed fewer and more fragile. On September 23, they crossed the mouth of the Meta River, flowing into the Orinoco from the west; in the grasslands to the horizon “myriads of fireflies sparkled like gems low over the surface, seeming to give an undulating motion to the misty plain.” But as they drew closer to the Atures and its brutal three-mile portage, the river around them grew brutal, too. On the 25th, they made a landing at which the vultures rustled around them in a great flock. An oarsman baited a fishhook and caught one, and what happened next was very strange. The man plucked out two of the vulture’s long tail feathers and thrust them through the bird’s nostrils in its beak, forming “a pair of ferocious moustaches.”

Released with a kick, the unfortunate bird . . . endeavoured to regain the mob of his companions, which had been gravely looking on; but the more he tried to do so, the more they edged away from him, and at last took themselves off altogether.

Part of the brutality was inspired by fear. This was the haunt of the “dreaded Guahibos [or “Guaharibos”], who appear to be perfect Ishmaelites, whose hand is against every man.” Today the tribe is known as the Yanomami, dubbed the most violent people on earth. Now they’ve been pushed back into the upper Orinoco and the forest around the Siapa, a tributary of the Casiquiare canal, but in Henry’s day their range extended to the cataracts, and Europeans and local Indians alike were terrified of them. They were fair-skinned and green-eyed, and some anthropologists think their ancestors were the first Indians to reach South America from the north, linking them to the warlike island Carib. Although they cultivated plantain, they were primarily hunter-gatherers, and there was not always enough food to go around. During lean times they killed newborn girls, which created a vicious cycle—since there were never enough women, the men incessantly fought for them. Within the tribes, these fights were ritualized—combatants hit each other over the head with ten-foot poles. But between tribes, they raided for women, killing rivals with six-foot arrows tipped with curare. They had no concept of natural death, attributing it instead to black magic—which had to be avenged.

Henry heard them described as a kind of human army ant, which nothing could stop. They spread out on march, their sole purpose to pillage, building bridges of palm leaves when they swarmed across a stream. In 1853, Richard Spruce suggested they had good reason for ferocity, considering the depredations of the slavers:

Shortly after the separation of Venezuela from the mother country . . . the Commandant of San Fernando was sent with a considerable body of armed men to endeavour to open amicable relations with the Guaharibos. He reached the Raudal de los Guaharibos with his little fleet of fifteen piragoas, and as the river was full, the whole of them might have passed the raudal, but it was not considered necessary, and his own piragoa alone was dragged up, the rest being left below to await their return. A very little way above they encountered a large encampment of Guaharibos, by whom they were received amicably, in return for which they rose on the Indians by night, killed as many of the men as they could, and carried off the children. Treatment such as this of course, is calculated to confirm, and perhaps it was the original cause, of the hostility of these Indians. . . .

Henry soon witnessed such casual enslavement first hand. On September 27, they reached the deserted pueblo of Atures, an abandoned Spanish mission over which hung “an unpleasant air of mortality.” The ancient footpath connecting the Lower and Upper Orinoco passed through this ruin. The last four inhabited houses surrounded an overgrown square, their sides fallen in and rafters exposed. The villagers reminded Henry of London chimney sweeps, “their faces being covered with black spots, that are left after the attack of the mosquitoes.” The bones of the tribe, for which the town was named, were interred in a nearby cave. Once stored in large baskets, or mapiri, the bones lay scattered on the floor, along with a horse’s skull. Henry gazed at the plains below, stretching out of sight, and noted the silence. “Whilst I gazed into the tomb,” he wrote, “a beautiful little humming-bird flitted by, and hovered over the white bed of bones.”

That night, their journey took an even coarser turn when they met “Señor Castro,” the Governor of Amazonas. The governor’s rum flowed freely as he waited for his lancha to take him above the falls. Soon everyone in Atures was drunk, singing his praises in inebriated falsettos. Castro sang back, his own voice shrill. The festivities continued into the next night, even after they left Atures, and annoyed Henry as much as anything he’d encountered. “It is singular,” he groused, “that these people endeavour to render their voices as ridiculously effeminate as possible whenever they attempt to sing!”

The besotted revelry continued, around the Upper Falls at Maipures, through the nearby pueblo and beyond. Whether from boredom, fear, or discomfort, Castro’s behavior assumed a desperate tone. “Drunken carousels continued without intermission,” Henry wrote. “Wishing . . . to make a forced march, El Governador plied his men with so much rum” that three paddles were lost, and they returned to Maipures for more. “Castro at length reduced himself to such a pitch of nervous . . . phrenzy, that I thought it advisable to give him an opiate, which had the desired effect.”

The next morning, they tried to leave at sunup, but the men were hung over. The governor exploded. “I was sorry to see Castro bend his bright toledo in thrashing the first offender that appeared,” Henry said.

They rowed through groves of giant thorny palms, past the mouth of the Vichada River, on to San Fernando de Atabapo, the last sizable outpost of civilization, situated at the confluence of three tributaries where the Orinoco veered east into the forested mountains. There was no stop to rest. It was the first wakeful night for the rowers, and Castro fueled them from a demijohn of Málaga by his side. “Row!” he screamed. They dropped asleep in midstroke, still keeping time to the chants, though sometimes “the stroke might be taken in air.” One man dropped his paddle and kept rowing until he woke from his coma and looked “round with a stupid grin.”

A canoe filled with cassava appeared in the river; a “good-looking matron” sat beside the produce while her two sons rowed. Castro pulled aside to buy cassava, but suddenly pressed the two boys into service as oarsmen and stole the cassava for his own. The mother began to cry, but to no avail—she was left in the curiara alone.

Later in the morning, Castro ordered a stop for breakfast. When they put to shore, the boys disappeared into the trees. “It is a wonder that these simple people do not even more seclude themselves in their mountain forests,” Henry concluded. Whole tribes would disappear like the boys: “No one had seen them go, but they were nowhere to be found.”

On the morning of October 9, the lancha rounded a bend and, nestled in a grove of cocoa palms, lay the thatched roofs of San Fernando de Atabapo. The air was heavy and close. Without warning, the sky turned overcast, and a torrent came down. Castro was home and installed Henry in the empty house next to his. The door and windows were riddled with bullets, evidence that even here, in what the Venezuelans called Ravo de Venezuela, the tail of the country, the endless faction fights could erupt at any time.

Henry stayed in San Fernando for two and a half weeks, reduced to debility by the heavy atmosphere and a constant diet of “fish, fish, fish!” he said. He longed to return to his tiny curiara on a breezy river, potting with his rifle the contents of a simmering stew. Birds flitted across his window—a lively finch of a deep russet color and sky-blue finches that perched in guava bushes and orange trees. He paid them little mind. He was in a funk, a deep, incapacitating depression that had not appeared in his journals but would be repeated in his history. He’d considered dropping south along the Rio Atabapo until reaching the nine-mile Pissuchan portage to the Rio Negro, but what would that accomplish? He wouldn’t duplicate von Humboldt’s route; he wouldn’t do anything but survive. He was too broke to pay the passage back to London; his clothes were in tatters, his future more so. In the South Pacific, he’d be labeled an “island bum.” Here there weren’t even balmy beach breezes to cool him or tropical women for consolation. A bad case of malaria was the only thing he could call his own.

Then another stranger arrived, like Watkins in Ciudad Bolívar, this one bearing fantastic tales. Although Henry never seemed tempted by mineral wealth, we now see the buds of a lifelong pattern: He’d rush headlong into any scheme that might turn him into a planter, with all the prestige and power that implied. A “Venezuelan Spaniard” named Andreas Level, a young friend of the governor, regaled Henry with sagas of the Upper Orinoco. Level had traveled three days above the supposedly impassable cataracts of Maguaca. He’d seen Indians with skin as white as Wickham’s, and red hair. He’d married the daughter of a local chief and hoped to corner the market in balsam and Indian hammocks, which he’d sell to export houses at Ciudad Bolívar and on the Amazon. He’d start a trading empire in this corner of the jungle. He’d grow rich before his thirtieth birthday.

But more than anything else, Level described rubber, miles of untapped rubber trees growing along the banks of the Upper Orinoco between the old Spanish mission of Santa Barbara and Esmeralda, deep in Yanomami country. The Indians had tapped trees for centuries, but they were lazy, not like a European, a man of daring whose vision stretched beyond this fevered river to the commercial heart of the world.

Henry was sold. On October 24, Ramón and he left to go scouting, leaving Rogers behind. “The air was heavy with the odour of the flowers of the water-loving gica tree, when the sun rose over the rolling bank of mist,” he recalled. They headed east toward the Serra Yapacini, the mountain range that lay across the river like an immense blue bar. They passed the ruined mission of Santa Barbara, overgrown with guava, a lonely wooden cross standing at the water’s edge.

By November 3, the river curved into the mountains’ shadow, splitting into the Ventuari, which angled north, and the Orinoco, which angled southeast toward Brazil. Several people were already at work in the area, collecting rubber, or goma, as it was locally called. This was not the Hevea of the Amazon basin, but Siphonia elastica, a similar tree that produced latex of an inferior grade. Two days upstream they found the camp of a “Señor Hernandez,” a white Creole from the coast who’d fled to the forest to avoid the wars. He was glad to see a friendly face and showed Henry how to tap the rubber trees that dotted the island where he made his camp. The trickle of latex was slow, he said, apologetic, but he lived in hope of better things when the dry season set in.

Henry was convinced, and they headed back to San Fernando for supplies. They arrived on November 12, at noon. The town was deserted: “We found that the whole of the inhabitants had been seized by a kind of mania for goma, and were gone al monto in search of it,” he said. A “rubber madness” had them in its grip: “The idea appeared to have struck them that this really must be a good thing, if an Englishman, like myself, coming from so far, desired to go in for it.”

They struck out ten days later, on the morning of November 22. Joining Henry, Ramón, and Rogers were two boys they hired in San Fernando. Manuel was very bright, “somewhat approximating in character to a London street boy,” intelligent in a canny, watchful way. Henry made him a kind of personal servant, but like street urchins, he was “given to pilfering.” Narciso was twice the size of his companion, but “decidedly stupid; he did not seem to comprehend Spanish very well, so it was trabajoso [difficult] with him.” Along the way they picked up two others: Mateo, “a queer, wizened-looking old fellow, who, whenever he glanced at me, assumed a most insinuating grin, making me feel as if my own features were involuntarily taking the same expression,” and Benacio, “a stolid old man” whose most distinguishing characteristic was the way he took his time in getting anywhere. Henry dubbed Ramón the headman, since he had tapped rubber before; he did this despite Rogers, who by now had taken a dislike to Ramón.

They went past the meeting of the Orinoco and the Ventuari, where Señor Hernandez had been joined by friends from San Fernando, deep into the forest until, after five days of paddling, they reached a tributary called the Caricia, or Chirari, a stream so small it rarely shows on maps. This is difficult country, a landscape alternating so suddenly between choked forest and swamp that travel by foot is almost impossible. There were few footpaths, and most travel was by curiara. Birds and insects dominated the wildlife. Large squawking swarms of parrots and macaws glided over the treetops, while clouds of mosquitoes explained why no other rubber tappers were near.

But rubber trees were everywhere. On the first day, he let Mateo and Benacio off on a small dry spit, and soon they returned with fifty-seven notches carved on their counting sticks—that many trees in a small space of land. Farther upriver he found an island dominated by rubber; two streams within sight pierced deep into the shadows, and they found more rubber trees. Henry’s depression seemed ages in the past; he’d found the cure he wanted, and it showed by his plans. On December 1, he built his rancho on a bluff overlooking dark water and settled his workers on tiny creeks at various rubber stands. He’d collect rubber in a triangle formed by his creek and the Orinoco, clearing paths between the trees with machetes while Rogers went for supplies. He estimated that by the start of the dry season he’d have a thousand trees for tapping—a grandiose plan for a beginner, but one he didn’t consider unrealistic. He was cutting a plantation out of the jungle, a tiny empire “in this little creek in the very core of the continent.”

Henry’s typical day as a rubber tapper began at 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. He ate a frugal breakfast—black coffee and a handful of chibéh, or farina with cold water—then strolled into the forest with his gun, shot pouch, powder flask, and machete at his side. He followed the path for two or three hours as it meandered between the rubber trees, always alert for any dangerous snake or unexpected game. He stopped before a rubber tree and seized one of the small tin cups piled at its foot. He ran his finger around the rim to clean out dirt, and with a small curved faca, or rubber knife, he examined the trunk of the tree. He selected a spot above the last day’s cutting and with the blade of the faca struck one sharp blow sideways at a rising angle, letting the blade almost bite into the cambium, or formative layer of the tree. This is the real art of the tapper: Too shallow, and he doesn’t reach the latex; too deep, he injures the tree. After this stroke, he stuck the tin cup into the bark under the lower angle of the cut so that the slowly exuding latex would ooze down into it. He made three or four such gashes in the tree, and if the tree were newly tapped, as many as five to seven per day, a lattice of cuts that extended 10 to 12 feet high. Greedy seringueiros made more cuts; the prudent tapper rarely exceeded five.

What exactly had he done? He’d severed several bundles of vascular ducts that carried the latex through the tree’s outer cell layers, causing it to bleed. His little ax had cut a gash of about one and a half inches in length and no more than three eighths of an inch in width. If he exceeded these dimensions or cut deeper into the trunk he’d destroy his livelihood, Ramón explained. The wood bled for three or four hours. It was very much like dragging a razor blade across the skin. Severed blood vessels bleed freely, but then begin to heal, the edges of the wound meeting and closing, leaving only a slight scar. Cut too deep and infection gains a foot-hold; the surrounding tissue becomes diseased. So with a tree. The faca’s gash is often attacked by ants and other insects, and by fungus: Cut too deeply and rot sets in. Some tappers twist the blade of the ax to increase the flow of the milk, not knowing or caring that by doing so the vessels are widely separated, thus creating a permanent wound. Treat the tree with respect and the riches keep flowing, Ramón preached. One must be a good husbandman and give his trees time to heal.

On a good day an experienced tapper could visit 150-200 trees during his morning round. This was impressive enough, considering the torturous route of the estrada, the path, doubling back on itself, crossing fallen logs over gaps in the hillside or stream. By noon, he’d finish tapping and return to his rancho for the balde, or hollow gourd, used to collect latex. He repeated his morning route, emptying each tin cup of white milk into the balde, then placing it bottom up in the pile beneath the tree. A tin cup filled with two ounces of latex was a good average per tree: Those trees that were young and healthy could yield three to four ounces, while those that were old or abused might yield less than one.

Henry ate lunch—usually a repeat of his breakfast—then devoted the afternoon to smoking the latex over a fire. Every tapper had a defumador, or rubber-smoking hut, near his rancho. The best fuel for smoking rubber was old nutshells scattered at the base of the cucurito palm. When the smoke rose steadily, Henry settled down for the most tedious part of his day. With a wooden paddle alongside the blaze and the basin containing latex at his side, he dipped the paddle into the milk and twirled it over the smoking fire. In a few seconds, the latex coagulated and turned the color of cream. After a dozen turns of the paddle, he’d created a thin layer of cured rubber. Again he dipped the paddle, repeating the performance until all the milk was gone. He might attain a thickness of one or two inches, depending upon the amount of latex collected that day. It might not look like much, but the operation took at least three hours and required some 1,200-1,500 movements of his hands and arms. When all the milk was smoked, the fire was extinguished and the paddle supported on sticks so that the blackened, pliable ball of rubber retained its shape as it hardened and was not pulled out of shape by gravity.

Henry sometimes felt “shut out from the rest of the world.” He’d pass through the mouth of the creek and all trace of humanity was lost, even those in his band. It was silent as a grave. A chief feature of the forest around him was the corded vines, or bejucas, that bound the forest together—they tied the canopy into bundles, wound around the trunks, and coiled upon the ground. Cutting through them wore him out, but that exhaustion gave him peace. In his rancho at night, he would “watch the cold shadows of night gradually creep up from the water on the opposite side of the creek, and when the topmost boughs of the forest trees were alone tipped with golden light, I had the fires built for supper.”

Psychologists have suggested that place, as a force, can impress itself upon the psyche and serve as a crucible for creating a sense of the holy. They speak of “peak” and “flow” sensations, where the individual experiences a loss of self; where the normal distinctions between subject and object, “I” and “everything else,” break down. When that happens, the observer becomes immersed in the present: He or she transcends. This is when people feel the touch of God—the connection to all things.

Now Henry felt touched by that hand. “Sometimes, during the time for rest, I would sit down and look up into the leafy arches above and, as I gazed, become lost in the wonderful beauty of that upper system—a world of life complete within itself.” Above him existed a world of strangely plumaged birds and the “elvish little ti-ti monkeys, which never descend to the dark, damp, soil throughout their lives, but sing and gambol in the aerial gardens of dainty ferns and sweet-smelling orchids.”

He felt heavy and earthbound, while all above him was light. “All above overhead seemed the very exuberance of animal and vegetable existence,” he wrote, “and below, its contrast—decay and darkness.”