SINCE BARBARA AND I, ALONG with Conrad Jelinek for most of the way, had departed from Westport, we had covered more than thirty thousand miles of sea and ocean. A good third of that had been to windward. Hove to off the dangerous, wreck-strewn, sandbank-littered mouth of the Amazon, over a thousand miles from Recife, our last port of call, I fondly imagined that our long saga was close to a finish.
I little dreamed that it would take two more years of slogging effort and over another ten thousand miles of sailing and harrowing struggle before I would finally reach my destination, Lake Titicaca. Nor that this would eventually be achieved in another craft than Barbara. Reaching the Lake would not be the apogee of my odyssey; I would finally wind up doing nothing less than a complete crossing of the huge continent of South America in a sea craft—the first such exploit in the annals of navigation!
I was blithely unaware that I would be brought to grips with the mightiest sea-current in the world—the cold, gray, pitiless, unforgiving Humboldt—which surges up the west coast of South America. As we lay there, wallowing in the South Atlantic swell, waiting for the ocean tide to finally overcome the rush of the mightiest river on earth, I had no way of knowing that in order to regain the ocean after reaching my destination, I would have to tackle yet again the snow-sheathed Andes, nor that I would somehow have to cross the most inhospitable region on the face of the globe, more terrible than the arctic, the fetid Chaco desert and the biological riot of the Mato Grosso swamps—the Green Hell in the heart of the South American landmass!
Neither did I know that after all this I would find myself back in the South Atlantic Ocean after conquering some of the greatest natural obstacles known to man, after navigating uncharted and dangerous rivers for more than two thousand miles in a twenty-foot sloop! Nor, thank God, did I foresee that I would come closer to a miserable, hungry death than I ever had before, nor that there would be times when I would dearly wish that I was back in the good old days, frozen into the ice north of Spitsbergen or whale-wrecked in mid-Atlantic.
I naively and firmly believed that it would be a simple matter pushing up against the current to Pucallpa, and that from there on it would be merely a question of logistics in order to reach Titicaca. Logistics? In South America? What a joke! Now I know! But happily I had no inkling of this at the time we hoisted the mainsail and headed into the largest river estuary on earth.
The River Amazon is about four thousand nautical miles long from its source to its mouth. It drains an area bigger than the whole of the continental United States. It starts as a trickle in the bleak Andes from Lake Vilafro, high up in Peru. There it is known as the Apurimac. Coming down from the mountains on the eastern face of the cordilleras, it garners the waters of thousands of streams. The Apurimac, ever growing, ribbons its way for a thousand miles northward from the desolate mountain massives to the edge of the dense jungle where it becomes the Ucayali. Another thousand miles winding through hot, humid, steaming jungle, inhabited by some of the fiercest tribes in a fierce continent, it emerges into the relatively civilized Iquitos area, where it becomes the Solimões, which name it keeps, as it pours, ever wider, ever stronger, first north and then east, until it reaches Manaus, over one thousand miles from the ocean. Here it becomes the Amazon. At Manaus the Amazon is eighty miles wide! At the mouth it is two hundred and eighty miles wide! Sitting in the mouth is Marajó Island, which is bigger than Switzerland! It is estimated, by God only knows what pedantic mathematical genius, that the Amazon carries enough mud to sea every year to create an island four hundred and eighty miles long by four hundred and eighty miles wide and five thousand feet high off the seabed!
The average speed of the current in the dry season in the middle of the river is six knots; but when the sun moves south over the equator for the austral summer, it melts the snow on the high Andes peaks: Then the river becomes a mass of roaring water speeding along at fifteen knots, and the level of the river increases on average about thirty-five feet! Thousands upon thousands of square miles of jungle terrain are flooded, and an inland sea bigger in area than the Mediterranean exists until the waters again subside. Due to the annual inundations, either in rising or declining flood, mighty trees, some over two hundred feet high, great chunks of land, and masses of jungle undergrowth fall into the river forming floating islands, some more than five miles long, which charge downstream at the speed of the river itself.
As the mighty mass of yellow water reaches the sea, its volume is so great that it actually holds back the ocean tide until around fifteen minutes before high tide on the full moon, or spring, tides. Then the ocean overcomes the river and a wall of water up to fifteen feet high roars up the Amazon northern mouth. This vertical wall of water, moving at around fifteen knots, is the dreaded pororoca, which no small craft can hope to encounter and survive. We had avoided this hazard by entering the River Pará, the southern mouth.
This, then, was the mighty water system that Barbara set out to tackle. As the tide started to run in, we headed in with it, and were swept thirty-six miles in four hours—nine knots! All working sail up in the northeast trade wind! Bouncing from chop to chop in the muddy yellow waters, very badly buoyed, we could only guess at the channel. On most sandbanks, the masts of sunken steamers and sailing schooners stuck up as guides. It was like rushing pell-mell through a ships’ graveyard blindfolded, for our echo-sounder, an instrument for measuring the depth of water, had given up the ghost long ago. Conrad swung the lead to test for depth, while I struggled against the hard wind astern and heavy chop to keep a straight course. In the middle of the estuary, twenty miles inside, we couldn’t see either bank; in fact we were a good thirty-eight miles inside the river before we sighted any land at all—low jungle, a thin ribbon of trees, featureless.
When the tide turned again we soon knew it, for although we were sailing at seven knots through the water, we started moving astern at about five knots. I headed carefully inshore, sounding all the way and dropped the anchor, to await the next ingoing tide. It was heavy work. And so, patiently, in four tides, we covered the 120 miles from the ocean to Belém without mishap. But we were lucky, for upon inspecting the rudder in Belém I found that the violent action of the short choppy current had actually broken off three of the five rudder pintles, and the fourth was just hanging by a thread. If we’d lost the rudder in that sea, we’d have been in a pretty pickle, for I had nowhere near enough money to afford a tow, or a new rudder. As it was, when I arrived at Belém I was down to about two hundred dollars. Since undertaking the long voyage from the Seychelles, I had had little opportunity to write and earn cash. It was vital to beat the Andes flood. Nothing could delay us, for we had only another two months in which to make two thousand miles against the river current.
At Belém, we moored in the quaint old fishing port of Vero-Peso (which means “watch the weight”). The town was the marketplace of a vast area of Brazil, with boats negotiating the river for hundreds of miles to bring goods, fruit, fish, livestock, manioc, beans, coffee, to the Belém waterfront.
The heat at Belém is not too oppressive as it is tempered by rainstorms as regular as the clock from noon until sunset each day. It was a marvel to see how the market, abustle with thousands of shoppers and vendors at 11:45, was completely deserted and empty by 12:00. The town has some very beautiful old houses from the colonial Portuguese period, and a very well stocked zoo. We found the locals friendly, but had quite a bit of trouble repelling a few over enthusiastic cachaça drinkers. However, after we had thrown a couple headfirst into the Pará current, the rest got the message and we weren’t bothered as much. The fish-port was busy day and night, and very noisy, so after careening Barbara against the wall to clean and paint her bottom, we motored round to El Condor, an anchorage at the mouth of the Tocantins River. Here, after a night of blaring music, laughter, and screams, we discovered that we were, in fact, moored only twenty yards from the biggest brothel in South America, if not the world! They had a “staff” of at least five hundred! But the Madame, when we called for a beer, treated us exceedingly well and arranged for a cooked meal at seven each evening. This was a great honor, for the Brazilian does not usually eat dinner until around ten at night. The meals were good, too, great thick steaks and manioc at a most reasonable price. The girls kept an eye on the boat for us when we went into town for stores and lined up on the veranda to wave goodbye when we set sail upstream.
“See you soon!” shouted Conrad.
“Some hopes,” said I.
We called back into the main town of Belém to pick up Arthur, who accompanied us, with a friend, on the long monotonous haul upstream as far as Manaus.
The way to push against the Amazon for the first five hundred miles or so is to set off in the mid-forenoon, when the trade wind pipes up, preferably with the incoming tide, and try to keep to the leeward side of the river, close to the shore. That way you avoid most of the current and get the full benefit of the wind; though you must be careful, for you are on a lee shore all the time. We were always ready to drop the anchor on a second’s notice. The first four days’ run, about two hundred and fifty miles, led through Os Estrechos (The Narrows), a twisting, turning maze of small, but deep channels through an archipelago of islands, some of which are so extensive they take hours to pass. With the bends in the river, we were not able to use the sails much, and had to resort to the engine, using up half of our precious fuel supplies. But as soon as we emerged into the Amazon itself, we found we could use the mizzen, the stays’l, and the genoa. We could not use the mainsail, however, because we had to rig a canvas awning to guard against the intense heat and the heavy downpour. We also used this awning to catch rain for fresh water, as the river water is too muddy to drink.
All along the river, on the shores and on the islands, a jungle of high tropical trees, enshrouded in climbing lianas, dominates a sub-forest of dense undergrowth so thick the eye can only see a yard or so into it. This undergrowth is crawling with insects and teeming with animal life. Above, among the higher branches, the screaming howler monkeys and a thousand different species of birds join in a fantastic Devil’s chorus. Near the shores, and especially in the stinking, fetid marsh lagoons, in swamps thick with mosquitoes, lurk alligators by the thousands and fearsome piranha fish by the millions, always ready to attack any kind of food, animal or human. The water also swarms with snakes, many of them very dangerous indeed. In the relatively open spaces, which at first sight seem to be safer than the thicker undergrowth, prowl the jaguar and the anaconda, the latter growing to a length of thirty feet and able to coil itself around a man and squeeze him to death in less than five seconds (and have him digested by sunset too!).
Most of the Amazon basin is only a few feet above water level. Except for the trade centers at Belém, Santarém, Manaus, and Iquitos, the population is scattered, hungry, sordid, and miserable. As we negotiated the Estrechos passage we saw people so ignorant, so abysmally primitive, that they did not even know how to fish! This I had never come across before. They just lounged around, scantily clothed, mostly black or a mixture of black and Indian, half bitten to death by insects, the kids with the swollen bellies of severe malnutrition, the adults listless with the apathy of awful poverty. And yet they were living on top of a river full of fish—full of good, life-giving protein!
The Amazon is alive with fish, including catfish up to ten feet long. There is also the manatee, a mammal which suckles its young and moans at sunset like a woman in orgasm. The origin of the mermaid legend perhaps?
The Estrechos Islands cover an area bigger than Western Europe. It is low, swampy, and swarming with insects. The population is mainly black, the descendants of slaves. The average income, when we were there, was twenty-five dollars per year! And yet, I could not help noticing, as we passed within a few feet of their miserable bug-and disease-ridden hovels, that each one had flowers growing in rusty old tin cans on the open front stoop; nor could I not notice the obvious affection between the ragged, starved parents and their pitifully hungry children.
We pressed on up the Amazon for two weeks, calling at Obidos and Santarém, mostly under sail, using the engine only when there was no wind at all. At Obidos (the furthest the Atlantic tide reaches into the Amazon, five hundred miles from the ocean) we found an old building, which during the days of the rubber boom at the turn of the century used to be a hotel. French ships, on their way up to Manaus, used to call there. The place contained, in the only cellar I ever saw in Brazil, thousands of bottles of vintage Bordeaux wines going at the rate of twenty U.S. cents a bottle. Conrad and I stayed there for two days instead of one, the wine was so good.
“Cheers, may you live long and die happy!”
“Bottoms up mate! And may the . . . skin . . . of . . . your ass . . . never cover a bloody banjo!”
Steadily we sailed on up the mighty river. The scenery hardly changed—a monotonous prospect of thick jungle on the low shore, except around Almeirim, where there is the only range of small hills in the whole of Brazilian Amazonia. Our food supplies were in good shape, and we were catching a fish every other day or so; but the continuous strain of concentration at the wheel in the fluky winds and currents for twelve hours a day was beginning to tell. With the heat and humidity during the day and the insects at night, it was a wonder that we kept going as well as we did; but we managed to reach Manaus in just thirty-five days from Belém, mostly under sail against a six-knot current. By now it was the end of March. I was concerned, for our delays in South Africa and Recife and Obidos had eaten up precious weeks. We still had a thousand miles, maybe more, to go to reach Pucallpa. We stayed only one day in Manaus, though we wanted to stay more, and shoved off upstream against the eternal current. With only a month to beat the current and the floods, we had no margin for dallying.