CHAPTER 6

THE RETURN OF THE PLANTER

Rubber was many things to many people. For Henry, it had nearly been his death, but it had also become an addiction. For Joseph Hooker, it was a means to maintain power; for Clements Markham, a door to past glories. To Charles Goodyear, a religious calling; to Thomas Hancock, an international commodity to be bought and sold. The governors in Manaus and Pará, and the emperor in Rio, saw it as a future source of greatness. To the seringuieros scattered through the Basin, it was the escape from a miserable existence; to their patrãos, a dream of wealth and ease. The white milk that dribbled like blood became a mirror: In rubber’s slick, obsidian surface, each man saw his need.

Strange tales surfaced of those who disappeared into the forest in search of rubber, then emerged reborn. The most famous was that of Crisóstavo Hernández, a Colombian mulatto who fled into the dense Putumayo region separating Colombia and Peru. Information about him is sketchy at best. In the same decade that Henry floated into Manaus, Crisóstavo wrenched a rubber empire from the forest by force and maintained it into the 1880s. With the aid of a tribe of Huitoto Indians as his personal army, he enslaved a whole region to tap rubber. In the mid- 1900s, a Huitoto oral history emerged told by a man whose mother was Huitoto and father a white rubber tapper: according to this, Crisóstavo was a cauchero in Southern Colombia who killed a man in a fight and fled to escape imprisonment. He rafted down the Caquetá River until spotting thatch roofs; when he entered the village, the Indians froze. Was this black creature a person? A spirit? They’d never seen a black man before. He was taken to the village chief, who decided that Crisóstavo was a harmless refugee. He learned the tribe’s language, was honored with a wife, and became a member of the tribe. In time, however, he fell for another man’s wife; they consummated their affair and fled into the jungle.

After six days of travel, the couple came to another Huitoto village. The pattern repeated: the villagers were frightened but decided that he was, after all, a man. This time, however, Crisóstavo had brought with him an iron ax, shotgun, and machete, wonders they’d never seen. These, with his singular blackness, made Crisóstavo unique and powerful, and an idea dawned in him. He’d move again, but this time with two hundred Huitoto allies from his new tribe; he continued like this, building an army, until finally coming to the large and powerful village of Chief Iferenanuique. He settled there, increasing the chief ’s power and prestige, but after four years told Iferenanuique that he wanted to go home and visit friends. But he could not do so empty-handed. The chief asked what he wanted. Crisóstavo marked out a space three meters long that reached over his head—he said he wished this filled with rubber. In three months it was done, and when Crisóstavo returned from civilization he brought with him a similar mountain of magical gifts: metal axes, knives, clothing, machetes and shotguns, needles, beads, combs, salt, mirrors, and cane liquor. There was something for everyone, and thus his power grew. Although he would be known as a conqueror, feared throughout the Putumayo, the core of his power lay in temptation and trade.

Crisóstavo’s was the British way, using rubber as a fulcrum for wider influence. Great Britain didn’t have the political or military muscle in South America that it had in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: early attempts at expansion in Argentina threw the people into civil war; clumsy attempts to bully Rio de Janeiro to abolish slavery weakened Britain’s influence in Brazil. But it did possess economic clout, what has since been called “informal empire.” After 1856, that economic clout became considerable when Brazil’s railways—built and operated by British companies—gained generous concessions from the emperor. The São Paulo Railway Company, Ltd. operated a railway down the mountain from its namesake city to the coffee port of Santos: the company lasted from 1876 to 1930, climbed from £2 million to £3 million in total shares, and paid an average dividend of 10.6 percent per year. Business was good. Although the railroad was Britain’s most lauded investment, Englishmen bought stock in Brazilian mines, banks, coffee exporters, public utilities, and natural gas; from 1825 to 1890, they preferred Brazil as a field of investment to all other Latin American countries because of its political stability. In 1856, Great Britain got its foot in the rubber trade when it bought the Amazon Steam Navigation Company and a million acres of Amazon real estate; Goodyear’s discovery and the opening of the river to international trade made rubber cheap and accessible. It was as if the world had suddenly discovered rubber; with a solid stake in its trade, there might be no limit to Britain’s power in the region.

One person who saw this clearly was James de Vismes Drummond-Hay, the British Consul in Pará. The office of “consul” was ancient: It was natural that merchants in foreign lands, trading in alien and sometimes hostile cities, would appoint a spokesman to conduct affairs with the local authorities. For their part, the local authorities found it easier to deal with one official than a mob of businessmen. In a seaport like Pará, a consul’s first responsibility was the protection and regulation of British ships and seamen, but in Latin America especially he often found himself thrust into the role of the “man on the spot,” that strategic British character who rose above himself when Britain’s interests were at stake and gave his all for the empire. For consuls in particular this meant watching for new opportunities and acting as agents for expanding British trade. The role sounds important, but in practice consuls were the forgotten stepchildren of the Foreign Office. They were considered “lower in dignity” than diplomats since their mercantile duties belonged “rather to individual interests than those of the state.” The uniform was embroidered in silver and not the diplomat’s gold; the pay could be below subsistence level. Diplomats did not call on them; they did not belong to the same club.

Few of these restrictions applied to the family Drummond-Hay. James Drummond-Hay came from a long line of distinguished consul-generals, all posted in Morocco. Because of its interests in Gibraltar, Britain was anxious for that North African country to remain independent, and a remarkably close relationship sprang up between the British Empire and Morocco’s sultan, due in large part to two successive consuls, Edward Drummond-Hay (1829-45) and his son John (1845-86). The latter was so effective that he was knighted in 1862. Between them, they arranged for the Royal Navy to take the sultan’s sons to Mecca for the hajj, smoothed the way for the English education of Moroccan princes, and arranged the military training of Moroccan officers in Gibraltar and England. James was the younger brother of Edward, and in 1856, the vice-consulship in Tetuan passed to him. He stayed in Morocco for ten years, married, had a son, then in 1866 was appointed vice consul in Pará with the understanding that it would lead to a consul-generalship somewhere in the New World.

The Amazon must have seemed like another planet to someone from the Levant. Tangier was dry and exotic, blown by sea breezes; Pará was humid and crumbling, plagued by periodic bouts of yellow fever. In Morocco, he was days away from London on a fast clipper ship; from Pará the journey took weeks, and the fare was an astounding £60 or £70, a sizable portion of his annual salary. Although the approach to Brazil itself from the sea was lovely, running from deep blue to light green water, Pará lay another eighty miles up a wide muddy estuary afloat with uprooted trees and vast islands of grass that had drifted from thousands of miles inland. The city fought a constant struggle with vegetable life; the jungle was like an invading army, and from roofs and cornices grew plants and small trees that stormed the ramparts and waved their tops like enemy flags. Every consul found himself the inheritor of at least one Distressed British Subject: faced with such a pathetic case at his doorstep, the consul had no choice but to come to his aid. One consul in Siam found such a case asleep in his bed, full of the contents of his liquor cabinet. Here they floated from the jungle filled with madness and parasites. They looked more animal than British, as penniless as church mice, demanding the fare back home.

But now a particularly interesting straggler had materialized: he called himself Wickham, and Drummond-Hay was intrigued. In September, the consul had drafted his “Report on the Industrial Classes in the Provinces of Pará and Amazonas, Brazil,” in which he concluded that the average English worker could do well for himself out here, if he were willing to apply himself scientifically to rubber’s domestication. Yet none of the natives seemed to consider its possibility: “The labour of extracting rubber is so small, and yet so remunerative,” he wrote, “that it is only natural” to continue tapping rubber for a few months each year. In a good district a man could extract thirty-two pounds of rubber per day, yet no real attempt had been made to tap rubber on a large scale. The investment potential was phenomenal: “The rubber-bearing country is so vast,” yet locals had not considered “the idea of planting the rubber-tree or caring for its growth.”

Now into his office came this twenty-four-year-old, burned-out Britisher named Henry Wickham, who’d hopped a steamer from Manaus and floated downriver. He seemed like any other wanderer down on his luck until Drummond-Hay flipped through his journal and spotted the first accurate taxonomic drawing of hevea he’d ever seen, something even the vaunted Richard Spruce hadn’t sketched. This was tucked away among other drawings—an Indian standing by a rubber tree, a sunset on the Orinoco, a rancho in the jungle. What’s more, the boy had learned to tap rubber, had actually made enough money from the effort to cover his passage back to Pará and Liverpool. This was another first—the first time, to the consul’s knowledge, that an Englishman had gone native and tapped rubber himself. Richard Spruce had described the process, as had Wallace and Bates, but none had spent a season as a seringuiero. As far as he knew, it had never been done.

So Drummond-Hay did something unusual for a consul. He took Wickham into his confidence, bucked him up, and turned his life around. He told Wickham that a young man willing to sweat and suffer a bit could remake himself out here. Rubber was the key. If a man arrived with some capital or fellow hopefuls, was willing to work hard, he’d become in two or three years the only rubber planter in the entire Amazon Basin. His fortune would be as great as the sugar planters of the West Indies, the coffee men of Malaya, the tea planters of Assam. The place to do it was five hundred miles back upriver in a region rumored to have the best hevea in the Amazon Basin. Somewhere in the unmapped jungle near the town of Santarém.

In fact, Wickham already seemed to know the place. It was one of the few excursions he’d made off the boat, though he was apparently more interested in the town’s dwindling group of American Southerners than in its bordering jungle or environs. The consul urged the young man to publish his “rough notes” as a travel diary, and he did something unprecedented. He gave him his own report to include in his book, as a kind of afterword.

Wickham seemed inspired by the confidences of this important man. After a narrative of privation, failure, disease, and near death, he would unexpectedly write:

I have come to the conclusion that the valley of the Amazon is the great and best field for any of my countrymen who have energy and a spirit of enterprise as well as a desire for independence, and a home where there is at least breathing room, and every man is not compelled to tread on his neighbour’s toes. I purpose to make the tablelands in the triangle betwixt the Tapajos and the Amazon, behind the town of Santarem, in future the base of my operations.

We know who set him on this course—one that would change so much and affect so many. For when his notes were published, Henry dedicated the book to James de Vismes Drummond-Hay, C.B., “in remembrance of the many kindnesses by which the author was indebted for a pleasant ending to a somewhat arduous journey.”

Henry arrived home in London in autumn 1870 a changed man. His mother had never seen him this way. When he’d returned from Nicaragua, he’d seemed lost. Now he was talking as if a new life awaited them all in the jungle, and the more he talked, the more convincing he sounded. More than that, he got things done with a drive that had never been part of his makeup before. Within the space of a few months after his return, he wrote up his notes and found a publisher. And he got engaged.

Her name was Violet Case Carter, the daughter of a bookseller on Regent Street whose shop was only a few short blocks from Harriette’s on Sackville. She was four years younger than Henry, and it is possible they could have known each other before he left for the Orinoco. Although booksellers were not the most fashionable shopkeepers on Regent Street, they were the most interesting and controversial. By displaying in their windows lithographs and etchings of everything from tranquil landscapes to current artwork and classic nudes, they were a draw for window-shoppers and a good indicator of popular and intellectual tastes. Violet’s father, William H. J. Carter, set up his shop at 12 Regent Street, just off Piccadilly Circus. Carter lived on the premises with his wife Patty and daughter Violet. Like most booksellers of the time, he was a literary jack-of-all-trades. He printed books, sold artwork, and gave speech lessons.

William Carter also published Henry’s journals of his Nicaraguan and South American adventures, combined in one volume: Rough Notes of a Journey through the Wilderness from Trinidad to Pará, Brazil, by Way of the Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, Atabapo, and Rio Negro. The book contained sixteen line drawings by Henry, including sketches of a rubber tapper in the jungle and the leaf and nut of Hevea brasiliensis, drawings that would have a greater impact on his future than the daily narrative.

The production seems rough and hurried. The journals are unedited and unchronological. The reader suffers with Henry through the Orinoco before he gets to meet the younger Henry Wickham in Nicaragua. People come and go without introduction or description, most notably the poor, suffering Rogers, whose origins are never given and whose fate we never learn. If ever an authorial voice is shackled to immediate sensation, it is Henry’s. One suspects that this was his entire approach to life, and for all his bonhomie and physical courage, he seemed unable to empathize with others. It’s hard to call this selfishness, for that implies awareness of another’s wants and desires. Henry’s lack of empathy is more elemental. Victorians called it manly force of will. Literary naturalists like Jack London or Joseph Conrad cast it as a “force of nature,” usually destructive. Freud would christen it the id.

People like Henry are on fire, and he must have burned like a nova. During those nine months, from his arrival in London in autumn 1870 to his return to the Amazon in summer 1871, he convinced his mother, sister Harriette Jane and her fiancé Frank Pilditch, brother John, and an unspecified number of English laborers to return with him to Santarém to start new lives as planters. John Wickham was so filled with Henry’s vision that in the 1871 census he listed his occupation as “farmer.” Henry convinced Violet’s father to publish his Rough Notes even though he would be gone when the book came out. Family lore suggests that Carter also subsidized many of Henry’s future adventures. He burst into the life of a girl who’d lived around travelogues and exotic prints and no doubt dreamed of far-off places. He swept her up in a whirlwind courtship, and they married on May 29, 1871, Henry’s twenty-fifth birthday.

“Born within the sound of Bow Bells, and therefore a thorough Cockney,” she said of herself, Violet had never left England. A group photo taken four years later in Santarém shows a small woman, with a sharp jaw and high forehead, the most wan and sickly of the six posed. By then, three of their original party had died; within another year, two more would succumb to malaria or yellow fever. Her sharp features and mousy brown hair made her the least attractive of the three women seated for the photo, but she would prove tougher than all of them, more adaptable to the wild places that Henry dragged her into than even Henry himself, able to face hardship with a straightforward humor that Henry never had.

As a working-class girl, marriage had been an expectation since she could remember. “To be married is, with perhaps the majority of women, the entrance into life,” proclaimed the article “Old Maids” in the July 1872 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Marriage was “the point they assume for carrying out their ideas and aims.” There was also a belief that behind every successful man an intelligent and sensitive woman oiled the gears—that, in fact, a man needed such a woman to succeed. “The general aim of English wives is practically to convince their husbands how much happier they are married,” assured the author of an 1852 women’s health manual, but Henry didn’t need convincing. So great by now was his need to rise in the world, so wholeheartedly did he accept the Victorian formula for success, that the “good wife” of Proverbs was part of his internal equation—she was identified with him, and he with her. She deserved the benefits of his success. Left unsaid was that she shared the reality of his failures.

Unlike Americans today who subscribe to ideas of empire, Victorians felt that they must not only civilize and dominate but also populate the world. Young men were not the only ones recruited to inhabit the world’s wild places; family groups were encouraged to establish little islands of English values. A lot was vested in these domestic outposts of civilization, wrote Herman Merivale in his popular Lectures on Colonization and Colonies: “The sense of national honour, . . . pride of blood, tenacious spirit of self-defense, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilization and our religion over the world.” All traits, it was believed, that made the British an imperial people and ensured an ever-expanding empire. The men would clear the land, brave the dangers, and dominate or convert those who were not British, white, or Christian. A woman’s role was subtler. Childbearing had obvious imperial functions, but women were needed to civilize males. It was feared that men without women went native and indulged in local mistresses. A wife embodied the moral standards of empire, and husbands must “tenderly preserve them, as the plantation of mankind.”

Given this, it is understandable but still remarkable how many women Henry convinced to accompany him to the Amazon. Henry’s mother would go, his sister Harriette Jane, and his brother John Joseph. Harriette Jane was accompanied by her fiancé, twenty-five-year-old London solicitor Frank Slater Pilditch. John Wickham brought his fiancé, Christine Francis Pedley, who also brought her mother, Anna Pedley, age fifty-two.

The older women may have felt they had no option but to go. An 1875 group photo taken in Santarém shows Christine Pedley in profile. With long, curled tresses and dark, doe eyes, she was the most classically beautiful of the bunch. According to the 1871 census, she was the daughter of fifty-nine-year-old architect James Pedley, who made his home in St. Georges Square, Marylebone, close to the communal residence of the Wickhams. This was a comfortable address, a life not easily cast off, and the fact that Anna Pedley left it for the Amazon suggests either an incredible devotion to her fairylike daughter or the sudden death of James Pedley in the interim. If the latter was the case, and her only child was headed to the jungle, she faced the prospect of a widow’s life, alone.

Henry’s mother had faced that prospect for a long time. By now she was in her sixties, and her eldest had convinced everyone in the house to start life anew in the Amazon. What was Harriette to do? The milliner’s shop on Sackville Street had never been a great success. There’s the suggestion that she gave it to her daughter and lived in semiretirement with her children when not needed at the store. There was no safety net for Harriette if her children left—no Social Security, pension, or 401K. She would have faced a life in the workhouse as she grew old and feeble.

However, Henry’s sister left the most behind. The 1871 census listed Harriette Jane as “head of household” in the Wickham residence, a woman “of independent means.” In all likelihood she’d inherited her mother’s millinery shop. She was headed for a comfortable middle-class existence, the same she’d forfeited to cholera as a child. She was picking up where her mother left off: Frank Pilditch, her fiancé, was a solid, conventional choice, much like her father. The 1875 photo shows a watch chain hanging from his vest pocket, a cigar balanced confidently between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He is safe, uninteresting, a flat, forgettable face that fit nicely in court, not with the band of swarthy pirates that the Wickhams resembled. Harriette Jane stares straight at the camera, the rock-solid center of the group, a level-headed counterbalance to her brother Henry’s flights of fancy.

And what did Henry offer in exchange for this future of privilege? Adventure, riches, exotic climes. A chance to work together as a family for a new beginning. They could build a world on their own terms. Henry promised Paradise, and they bought it hook, line, and sinker.

It was a paradise they thought they would recognize. Paradise is almost always tropical; the vegetation is lush and filled with succulent fruit; the men and women are beautiful and wear little or no clothing. Columbus in his first letters to Ferdinand and Isabella described his New World as a paradise; Gauguin and Rousseau peopled Paradise with fantastic vegetation, sensuous inhabitants, peaceful lions and tigers. To be a denizen of such a place meant a life that was happy and languid.

They left Liverpool by steamer at the end of summer 1871 and a month later were in Pará, now Belém. The capital of this rain-forest state is not actually on the Amazon but lies sheltered in the Bay of Marajó and connects to the continent-crossing waterway by the Pará River and a series of natural canals. Heading for the mouth of the Amazon itself was a tricky business for an oceangoing steamer. New shoals and sandbars were always forming and dissolving; a powerful eastward-flowing current threw a ship from side to side.

It was almost exactly a year since Henry had departed this place, and he hurried to the British consulate to announce his return. Except for letters and a legal suit, Henry would write no more about himself until 1908. Henceforth, the story is picked up by public records, scant correspondence, the chance observations of others, and Violet’s unpublished memoir. Her observations are sharp, short, and to the point; she spares no one, least of all her husband. And now, her first contact with the tropics as she strolled through the narrow streets and tree-lined avenues of Pará with this congeries of Wickhams “was very like being dropped into deep water never having learned to swim.”

Pará was a gateway to and preview of all the surreal beauty and mortal absurdities a tropical newcomer would encounter. There was the intermixture of Portuguese, Indian, and Negro races; the nobles dressed in their scratchy woolen suits and high stiff collars; the imposing cathedral and customs house; and the slow construction of the Teatro do Paz, one of the largest theaters in South America, begun in 1869. Perched in rows along the rooftops were Henry’s old friends, the Urubu turkey buzzards. Henry muttered under his breath when he saw them. Violet knew the story and understood her husband’s loathing. After a tropical shower they stood erect with their wings outstretched, a blasphemous imitation of a crucifix, feathers clacking in the breeze. Sometimes they seemed to commit suicide, flying across the open square to smash against a large white building. Examination showed them to be swarming with parasites, “a singular winged parasitical insect of a disgusting appearance,” one observer later noted, “resembling a flattened house-fly.”

They transferred to a river steamer in a matter of days. Steam navigation began on the Amazon in 1853, and by 1871, forty steamers owned by the Amazon Steam Company plied the waterway. Each was a multideck affair, open on all sides, popularly called a gaiola, or “bird cage.” The upper deck was reserved for officers and first-class passengers, the lower for the engine, cargo, second- and third-class passengers, animals, and crew. The cargo was loaded in layers: merchandise, mules, and dogs on the bottom, passengers swinging in their hammocks above them, with space in the rafters for monkeys, boxes of insects, and squawking birds.

Violet had never seen anything like this mode of travel. Hammocks were strung from every rafter; she didn’t know what to think of the gently swaying rede, or “net,” but soon found them delightful in hot climates and discovered she couldn’t sleep in anything else. “They should be nearly square,” she wrote, “and you lie diagonally across them instead of lengthwise.” They should also be high enough to place one’s foot on the ground to keep up the swinging, “the rocking and the rhythmical ring of the swinging cords soon lulling you off.”

One hundred miles above Pará they entered a channel called the Narrows. This is ninety miles long, seldom one hundred yards across, threading a maze of one thousand forested islands. The main channel twists and curves to the west of Marajó, the central alluvial island about the size of Switzerland. Once past that, they were in the Amazon itself, which at the mouth was like entering an inland sea. Violet saw a vast expanse of water, a milky, yellow-olive concoction that stretched three to six miles from shore to shore. Great beds of aquatic grass lined the banks or broke loose to form floating islands. These had to be avoided at all cost, lest the propeller foul and they became part of the island themselves, borne backward to the sea. Fruit, leaves, and giant tree trunks floated past them in such quantity that it seemed the interior must be denuded of plant life. The level banks were lined with lofty, unbroken forest, the dark, straight tree trunks forming a living green wall right to the river’s edge. A range of low hills that connected to the mountains of Guiana stalked back from the north for about two hundred miles. All was covered by forest, with frequent flocks of parrots and great red-and-yellow macaws screaming overhead.

She’d entered one of the largest rivers and most massive river basins in the world. The best current estimate is that the Amazon stretches approximately 4,000-4,200 miles, if the river’s source is considered near Balique in the Andes, just east of 50° W longitude. The length of the Nile is usually set at 4,100 miles. The Amazon’s flow is five times that of the Congo and twelve times that of the Mississippi; it disgorges as much water every day into the Atlantic as the Thames moves past London in a year. Brazilian hydrologists believe that the river’s annual discharge is about 57 million gallons per second: by such an estimate, the Amazon could supply in two hours all the water used by New York City’s 7.5 million residents each year.

The valley itself is fan-shaped. In the delta, Violet bobbed in its 200-mile-wide apex. From there, it broadens until reaching the Andes, where the valley’s width exceeds 1,500 miles. It drains an area of 2.4-2.72 million square miles—nearly all of northern and central Brazil, half of Bolivia and Colombia, two thirds of Peru, three quarters of Ecuador, and part of southern Venezuela. Until the 1970s, rain forest covered two thirds of that expanse. Since then, 10-15 percent has been cut back, though some has returned as secondary forest. There is no discernable slope: The main river drops a mere 213 feet between Peru and the Atlantic, a distance of 1,860 miles, while eleven of its main tributaries flow more than 1,000 miles uninterrupted by a single rapids or waterfall. Yet the current maintains an average velocity of 1.55 mph during the dry season and more than double that during high water, and in some places the water level rises and falls 50 feet or more. So much water flows below Manaus and Santarém that the river is a plow, cutting a channel below Manaus that has been sounded to depths of 330 feet. So much sediment is deposited that the lowlands have begun to sink under their own weight, and sediment depths of more than 16,400 feet have been recorded. Violet would hear the river described as the basin’s excretory system, the means by which the waste products of the huge forest around her were eliminated, as if the endless riverine landscape were not so much an ecosystem but a creature itself, a huge, relentless, uncomprehending thing.

Richard Spruce saw the forest as a monstrous tree. Its tributaries were the boughs; its streams and creeks, the branches and twigs. He imagined in his journals a dark region where the river branched without end, losing itself in an impenetrable wall of green. One entered this verdancy and vanished; you stepped off the path and density closed behind you, as if civilization had never been considered, not even a gleam in God’s eye. Only the forest mattered, the sole reality since the beginning of time.

But time had no real meaning here. Hours flowed into hours, and at first domestic details made the strongest impression on Violet. The bread, for example, was sliced and rebaked so that it could be carried into the interior, and its stale taste was her first foreboding that trouble lay ahead. “We had a few people traveling with us 2nd class intended as laborers for our new venture,” she wrote. “One of them came up as a spokesman for the rest to show us the bread they gave them to eat—however, on hearing we had the same, they were somewhat quieter.”

But even stale bread was a luxury. The “real bread stuff,” she soon learned, was farinha, made from the manioc root—tiny dry pellets of starch that the locals picked up between the fingertips and popped into the mouth like popcorn. This took a little getting used to. Violet compared farinha to sawdust and was able to get it down only after soaking it in soup or gravy.

In her father’s store, Violet had read about the wild tribes who inhabited the country’s thousand streams. In 1541, Francisco Pizarro, secure in his defeat of the Incas on the Pacific coast, “had received tidings that beyond the city of Quito there was a wide region where cinnamon grew.” He ordered his brother Gonzalo and his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana to find this cinnamon land.

They crossed the mountains with five hundred Spaniards, four thousand Indian porters, and herds of llamas and pigs. They descended the Andes into the jungle along the Rio Napo, and soon it was obvious there was no cinnamon, much less provisions for an army. The expedition was plagued by desertion, starvation, and sickness, and this river plunged on forever. Orellana was ordered to build a brigantine and scout ahead. Soon it became easier to continue downstream than return, so Orellana took the “flowing road” that carried him across the continent and months later into the ocean beyond.

It was during this accidental voyage that the rain forest became the haunt for fantastic Western dreams. Soon after they took off down the Napo, an Indian chief told Orellana of El Dorado, a fantastic city of gold just a few miles off—probably nothing more than an attempt to get rid of these mad strangers. “It was here that they informed us of the existence of the Amazons and of the wealth farther down the river,” wrote Gaspar de Caraval, the Jesuit priest with Orellana’s band. A certain tribe lived by a lake whose banks were lined with gold. Each morning the Indians coated their chief with a thin film of gold; each evening, he washed it off in the lake in preparation for the next day. He was El Dorado—the gilded one. Although gold was not discovered, other delusions prevailed. The most famous was Orellana’s “encounter” with female warriors near the mouth of the Rio Trombetas, or River of Trumpets. These long-haired natives—more probably men than women—were responsible for the naming of what the Indians themselves called the Paranáquausú, or “Great River.”

Three hundred years had passed, and the Amazon was still a mysterious river of dreams. An estimated 332,000 people lived in this region, up from 272,000 a decade ago. Brazil’s boundaries were legalized in 1750; in 1807, when Napoleon invaded Portugal, Queen Maria de Braganza and Regent Dom João transferred the entire court to Rio de Janeiro with British naval assistance rather than surrender and abandon its alliance with Britain. After Napoleon’s defeat, Dom João returned to Lisbon, but in 1822, his son, Dom Pedro, refused to depart and declared Brazil independent. In 1840, Dom Pedro II was installed as emperor at age fourteen; he still ruled today, his government a constitutional monarchy. Talk was underway of progressive policies, like outlawing slavery.

But in the remote Amazon, tides of history had little meaning. History was measured by the riches pulled from the forest instead. The first such “extraction cycle” was that of brazilwood, which began in 1503 and lasted to the nineteenth century, halted by the near-extinction of the species and discovery of synthetic dyes. Also known as dyewood, the tree was abundant along the rainforest that lined the Atlantic coast. To extract the brick-red dye, the heartwood was crushed before it was cooked. As the trees gave out in one area, they were felled at increasing distances inland. During the first three decades of Portuguese settlement, the harvest was estimated at three thousand metric tons each year. For the next two centuries, Brazil was considered an inexhaustible mine of dyewood, a cornucopia of deep red trees.

The next extractive cycle, involving sugarcane, began in the sixteenth century and reached its zenith in the first half of the seventeenth. Tea, chocolate, and coffee were becoming fashionable in Europe, and between 1600 and 1700, Brazilian sugar to sweeten them dominated the markets of the world. To break the monopoly, the Dutch occupied northeastern Brazil from 1630 to 1661, but they were eventually ousted and the Portuguese returned. Huge sugar plantations, or engenhos, spread along the coast because of more fertile land and easier access to Europe. Firewood was needed to maintain the sugarcane furnaces: They ran around the clock each year for seven to eight months, each engenho using up to 2,560 wagonloads of lumber per harvest. The industry created a wasteland. One historian lamented that sugarcane cultivation “left us a north-east despoiled of its very rich forests, [with] impoverished soils, and a miserable and servile population, possessing only its popular culture and the humility and humanity which only many generations of suffering can teach.”

As Brazil’s sugar production faltered, mines were dug. The most important gold strike came in 1693 in what is now the state of Minais Gerais. Later discoveries produced gold rushes as intense as those in California and the Klondike. Workers abandoned the cane fields for the gold mines, delivering a killing blow to the sugar industry. This flow of gold allowed Portugal to live well beyond her means. Between 1500 and 1800, the Americas sent to Europe £300 million in gold. Of that amount, £200 million came from Brazil. An estimated three hundred thousand Portuguese citizens joined the gold rush, so depopulating the nation that travel restrictions were enacted. Famine and disease hit the mining camps, forcing prospectors to seek new gold fields. They burned down forests and enslaved Indians. In 1700, Brazil’s gold production reached 2,750 tons a year; by 1760, 14,600 tons. When the gold gave out, the depression that hit south central Brazil was as great as in the northeastern region, now the waste dump of sugarcane.

The cotton cycle came next, in the southern half of the country, but in the forested north, livestock was king. An estimated 1.3 million head of cattle grazed in and around the Amazon in 1711. Trees were cut down and savannahs burned to “strengthen” the range. Deserts formed along the São Francisco River, in Minais Gerais, Goims, and Mato Grosso.

Now the rubber cycle had begun. On one chilly morning, Violet awoke to see that their boat had anchored beside the small jungle port where the best rubber in the Amazon was said to be found. Santarém looked pleasant enough, resting on a slope at the meeting of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, with a fine sandy beach, a handsome church with two towers, and houses painted yellow or white, their doors and windows bright green. A mist rose from the forest in the hills above town. So this is my new home, she thought, and hoped she’d grow to love it. She prayed that life would be kind to them, the innocent prayer of every young bride.