ISABEL AND THE OTHERS knew that the most difficult and dangerous part of their journey would be the first 350 miles. They would travel overland down the steep eastern slopes of the Andes, from Riobamba to Canelos, and then they would canoe 225 miles down the turbulent Bobonaza River, from Canelos to Andoas. At that point, they would be on the broad expanses of the Pastaza River, and although the Pastaza below Andoas had its share of whirlpools and strong currents, canoes could traverse it fairly easily. They expected to take twelve days or so to reach Canelos and then another two weeks to make it to Andoas. Before the month was over, they hoped that the worst part of their journey would be behind them.
Isabel, who had traveled very little in her life, found the first few days delightful. Once they had turned their backs on Mount Chimborazo and headed east, they began following the Chambo River, one of a handful of rivers in the entire Andean valley that cut through the eastern cordillera and drained into the Amazon. They crossed the Chambo on their second day out, entering into the mountains, and with the river now on their left and far below them, they picked their way across a steep slope. Mount Tungurahua, its top half covered with ice and snow, loomed ahead. The summit of the great volcano topped out at 16,465 feet, and Isabel, who had seen it from afar so many times, was awestruck by its size and air of hidden power. The graceful and slender Tungurahua she had always known, the petite “wife” of Chimborazo, now seemed fierce and threatening, holding within the furious fires of the earth. As they worked their way north around its lower slopes, at an altitude of about 8,000 feet, they had to struggle to cross gullies cut by water tumbling down from the ice fields above. Each time they came to one, they had to climb higher up Tungurahua’s slopes until the gully narrowed enough that their Indian servants could throw a small bridge across it. Then they would descend the mountainside on the other side of the gully, to where the slopes of the volcano were not quite so steep, and proceed on their way. Although this was slow going, the air was cool, and they were hit by only an occasional burst of icy rain. Each night the Indians built them a shelter of tree branches and cooked a hearty meal over a fire. They had brought along several live chickens and an ample supply of dried corn, beans, potatoes, and dried meats—llama, sheep, and pig. Most likely, this trip was the first time that Isabel had ever slept outdoors.
On the fourth or fifth day of their journey, Isabel and the others reached the small town of Baños, perched on a shelf of land at the base of Tungurahua, about 250 feet above the Pastaza River. The Pastaza is formed by the merger of the Chambo and Patate Rivers a few miles above Baños, and it is a violent, turbulent river, hurling its way out of the Andes with a fury.
Since leaving Riobamba, they had traveled about fifty miles and dropped 3,000 feet in altitude, and they had now entered the cloud forest that covers the eastern slopes of the Andes, a lush world of moss-covered trees, delicate orchids, and hanging vines. There is no other place on the planet where massive snow-capped mountains so closely overlook steaming tropical forest, the two disparate climates separated by less than 150 miles. In rapid order, the alpine world of the mountains turns into a dense forest perpetually bathed in clouds and fog, and then, at 3,000 feet above sea level, the cloud forest gives way to a rain forest, where although it may rain nearly every day, clouds are not constantly present. At an altitude of about 1,000 feet, the vegetation undergoes a further change, into lowland rain forest. For every 1,000-foot drop in elevation, the temperature rises about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, such that it will be fifty degrees colder on the slopes of Tungurahua than it is at the headwaters of the Amazon, only 100 miles away. As a result of these extremes in temperature, the terrain in between receives more than 160 inches of rain a year.
The airflow that drives this wet climate originates in the Amazon basin. Along the equator, heat builds up each day and the warm air rises. Evaporation fills these currents with moisture, and as the air rises, it cools, the water condensing and falling as rain. While this cycle keeps the Amazon basin well watered, prevailing air currents bring a double dose of rain to the eastern slopes of the Andes. Moisture-laden clouds ascending from the jungle floor are pushed by prevailing winds toward the west, where they run smack into the Andes, and as the clouds rise up the slopes, they cool and the rains come. The Andes act as a moisture trap for the entire Amazon basin, and this brings showers to the region more than 250 days a year. It also bathes the mid-level slopes of the Andes, where Baños is located, in a perpetual mist, except for brief periods in the morning, when dawn may break clear.
The constant watering produces a profusion of plant life, every tree covered with ferns, lichens, and other parasitic growth. The entire forest drips moss, and even the tree tops, as the nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt exclaimed, are “crowned with great bushes of flowers.” Brightly colored birds, such as the golden tanager and the crimson-breasted woodpecker, find this world a paradise, as do bands of gibbering spider monkeys and such reclusive animals as the spectacled bear. But the thick vegetation, which is draped across the steep cliffs and crags of the Andes, makes this region almost impenetrable to humans. As travelers try to hack their way through the forest, they must cope with constant downpours that turn every path into a muddy quagmire. One stream after another has to be crossed, torrents racing down the mountainside, filled with snowmelt and the daily deluge of rain. This was the very region where Gonzalo Pizarro and his men got bogged down in 1541, when they set out for Canelos, the land of the cinnamon trees.
Isabel and her brothers did not tarry in Baños, stopping only long enough to purchase some additional food supplies and to enjoy a night of rest under a roof before plunging into the cloud forest. Barely had they started on their way before they had to confront the raging Pastaza. About three miles below the village, the river passed beneath two cliffs forty feet apart. They had to cross over on a bridge that consisted of three tree trunks that stretched from one cliff to the other. Thirty feet below, the river crashed against the rocks, throwing up a spray that kept the logs slick and wet.* Once they passed that peril, they began making their way along a narrow, muddy path that ran high above the river, just above the canyon cut by the Pastaza. Every few miles or so, they came to a stream cascading down from the mountains to the north. At times, the sheer beauty of the cascading waterfalls caught everyone’s breath, one river after another spilling down the steep mountainside and then, at the rim of the canyon, leaping outward into a free fall, dashing onto rocks hundreds of feet below.
Each time they came to one of these rivers, they had to stop and find a way to ford it. A few were small enough that a log could be placed from bank to bank, but the Indians needed to cobble together bamboo bridges to navigate the wider ones. To do so, they would cut long poles of bamboo from the forest and drop one pole across the river. An Indian would shimmy along it, dragging a liana rope with him. Once on the other side, he would use the liana to bring a second bamboo pole alongside the first. Then two or three more would be positioned in this manner and lashed together. The sure-footed Indians would cross the bridge loaded down with the goods or carrying Isabel in her chair, the bamboo bending slightly under their weight but never breaking.
Crossing a log bridge over a river in the jungle.
Natural History Museum, London. Bridgeman Art Library.
Their progress was slow—they were lucky to make twenty miles during the first two days. The trail was hopelessly narrow and slick with mud, and, perched as they were high above the Pastaza, it seemed to Isabel that at any moment her servants might slip and they would all perish. At every step, she was pitched to and fro in her chair, thrown backward one moment and forward the next, leaving her bruised and battered. So uncomfortable was the ride that she wished she could proceed on foot, like her brothers, but that was out of the question for a woman, and she had to be carried, no matter how unpleasant it was. As Jean later wrote, this road was “impractical even for mules, and [those] who are able effect the passage on foot, but others”—and by this, he meant women—“are carried.” The rains fell constantly, soaking the travelers and their goods, and there was never a chance to get dry. At night, the Indians hastily cut palm leaves and fashioned them into a shelter. The group made camp whenever they came upon the smallest patch of level ground, but the very air was wet, and all they could do each evening was cross another day off the calendar, thankful that they were twenty-four hours closer to Canelos.
Eighty-eight years later, the English explorer Richard Spruce made his way up this route, the first Englishman ever to traverse it. Although he was by then a seasoned traveler in South America, having spent ten years gathering plants from the forests, he was nearly defeated by this short sixty-five-mile trek from Canelos to Baños, which took him seventeen days. Every day, he complained, there was “rain from sunrise till nightfall. The sloppy ground, the soaked forest, and the unceasing rain kept us close prisoners.” At one point, he and his companions had to wade through “fetid mud” for nearly a mile. At another, they were slowed by “beds of prickly bamboos.” The path itself was “dreadful, what with mud, fallen trees, and dangerous passes, of which two in particular, along declivities where in places there was nothing to get hold of, are not to be thought of without a shudder.” In places, he noted, “the track ran along the very edge of the cliff, and the projecting bushes menaced thrusting us over.” He and his guides were constantly slowed by the charging rivers they had to cross, with one—the Topo—stymieing them for days. It “was one mass of foam, and the thunder of its waters against the rocks made the very ground shake to some distance from the bank.” When he at last arrived in Baños, the end of a journey that had involved climbing up out of the Amazon via the Bobonaza River, he was completely spent. He was emaciated, his face shrunken from the difficult trek, and so sick that he vomited up blood. He called the seventeen days from Canelos “heart-sickening,” and so filled with suffering that he could “hardly bear to think of it.”
After five or six days of such travel, Isabel and her entourage reached a point along the Pastaza where the steepest slopes were behind them. They had dropped 3,000 feet over forty miles, and now they had to make their way across a series of lesser hills to Canelos. The Pastaza here is too turbulent for canoes, and so the path cut by Jesuits in the early part of the eighteenth century left the Pastaza watershed for the Bobonaza’s, which was navigable starting at Canelos. This last stage of their overland journey was only twenty-five miles long, and they hurried across it. At Canelos, they knew, a priest and canoes would be waiting for them, as well as local Indians who would take them down the Bobonaza. This had all been arranged by her father Pedro, who had come through a month earlier. They would spend a night or two there, just long enough to get dry and refresh their spirits. Such thoughts quickened their pace, and late in the afternoon of October 12 they reached the banks of the upper Bobonaza, which—as Spruce would later write—was “crossed with difficulty and risk, as the turbid swollen waters careened violently among and over rocks and stones.” The mission station, they had been told, was only a little further downstream, located on a high bluff above the river. There was a chance now to delight in the trill of the forest birds, the bright-colored splash of a passing toucan or a purple-throated fruit-crow. But when at last the village came into view, they all came to a halt. Plumes of smoke were rising from the huts, every dwelling except for the bamboo church having been set to the torch.
Smallpox. And they found the village, as Jean would later write, “utterly abandoned by its population.”
ALTHOUGH THEY COULD NOT KNOW for certain, Isabel and her brothers guessed that it was their father’s party that had brought the plague into Canelos. Few people visited this village, and it was likely that Pedro Gramesón had been the last to come through. Many of the Indians living in the village had apparently died, and others, they surmised, “had hid in the woods, where each had his own hut.” Those fleeing had burned the huts to drive out the evil spirits, a sight that spooked Isabel’s thirty-one Indian servants, who, in “dread of the air being infected,” immediately dropped all of the supplies and fled toward their homes in the Andes. Isabel’s journey had just begun—she could still see the snow-capped mountains of her home in the distance—and already she and the others were in peril: Their servants were gone and they did not have the canoes they needed to proceed further.
They camped that night on the outskirts of the village, uncertain what to do. Their only option seemed to be to go back, but Isabel, as Jean would later write, was unwilling to think of it: “The desire of reaching the vessel waiting her, together with her anxieties to rejoin a husband from whom she had been parted twenty years, were incentives powerful enough to make her, in the peculiar circumstances in which she was placed, brave even greater obstacles.” The next morning, Isabel’s prayers were answered. Scouting around the village, they found two Indians who were free from the contagion. Isabel spoke to them in Quechua and quickly hired them to build a canoe and guide her party to Andoas.
As the Indians worked, fashioning a cedar tree into a dugout canoe with their machetes, Isabel and the others got their first extended exposure to a tropical forest. They could hear birds everywhere, even though these creatures were often hard to spot. They heard the rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers and the squawking calls of macaws and parrots, and spotted a number of hawks and falcons darting through the sky. Such sights and sounds were comforting, for they made the rain forest seem less foreign and threatening. Even the mosquitoes were not too nettlesome, at least within the village’s cleared area.
But the nights were a different matter. As dusk fell, the shrieks of howler monkeys living among the treetops across the river rattled their nerves. This bearded simian has a hollow and much-enlarged hyoid bone in its throat. As air passes over this cavity, it produces a plaintive call that some say resembles the sound of a human baby crying. Every evening at Canelos this piercing moan arose from the forest at the same time that a thick cloud of bats flew up from their roosts. Isabel and the others had heard all about the sinister habits of vampire bats, which abounded in this region. The furry creatures will creep into a hut at night, tiptoeing on their hind legs (rather than descending beneath noisy beating wings), and then climb onto their sleeping prey. Their incisors are so sharp that they can open a vein without waking their victims. When dining on human blood, they favor the face or feet, and although this blood sucking generally does not do much physical harm, newcomers to the jungle find it a deeply unnerving thought.
The Canelos Indians finished the canoe in about two weeks. It was nearly forty feet long, and toward the stern they had erected a small shelter with a thatched roof for Isabel, to protect her from the equatorial sun. Her only disappointment was that the canoe was too small for all their goods. She and her brothers had expected to have two or three canoes at their disposal, but now they had only one, and they were forced to leave some of their precious supplies behind. They stepped into the canoe uneasily—none of them knew how to swim—and then the two Indians, who had been steadying the craft, leapt from the sandbank and pushed off into the swift current. It was October 25, and in two weeks or so, Isabel and the others could hope to be in Andoas.
The Bobonaza drops about 100 feet over the course of the first twenty miles below Canelos, this stretch of river marked by more than a dozen small rapids that have to be carefully navigated. One of the Indians stood in the front of the canoe, using a long pole to push them away from the rocks, all the while employing hand signals and a sharp whistle to chart a course for the second Indian, who was seated in the rear and steering with a paddle employed as a rudder. They passed through several deep gorges, the stone walls rising more than seventy feet, and on each one, about twenty feet up, there was a high-water mark, the stone scoured clean to this line. Like all rivers that drained the eastern slopes of the Andes, the Bobonaza was a fickle beast. Should a storm of particular intensity break, it would rise with frightening speed, as much as fifteen feet in a single night. At such moments, a huge swell of water would descend downstream like a river tsunami, carrying with it a tangle of tree branches and other debris scoured from the banks.
When Spruce came to this stretch of the Bobonaza in 1849, he experienced this phenomenon. On his way from Andoas to Canelos, he was camped on a small spit of sand when, on May 21, a wave hit:
We had scarcely resigned ourselves to sleep, at about nine o’clock, when the storm burst over us, and the river almost simultaneously began to rise. Speedily the beach was overflowed, the Indians leaping into the canoes, the waters continued to rise with great rapidity, coming in on us every few minutes in a roaring surge which broke under the canoes in whirlpools, and dashed them against each other. Floating trees now began to careen past us like mad bulls. So dense was the gloom that we could see nothing while we were deafened by the pelting rain, the roaring flood, and the crashes of the branches of the floating trees, as they rolled over or dashed against each other, but each lightning flash revealed to us all the horrors of our position. Assuredly, I had slight hopes of living to see the day.
Two of Spruce’s companions that night fled into the jungle to escape the raging river, which rose eighteen feet in twelve hours. They retreated “inland,” Spruce wrote in his journal, “and when day broke it found them half dead with cold, and their clothes and bodies torn and wounded by prickly bamboos and palms.”
Such was the Bobonaza. At first glance, the river could seem rather tranquil, and in fact, there were days when it could be negotiated with relative ease. But its true power rested in the skies, in the gray clouds that came marching westward from the Amazon basin each afternoon, slamming into the Andes and dropping a torrent of rain. When that process peaked, or turned more violent than usual, the Bobonaza awoke with a vengeance. And for those who were not of the forest, like Isabel, a retreat inland offered not refuge but a host of life-threatening dangers.
With the Canelos Indians piloting the canoe, their first two days went well. They passed through the upper narrows without mishap, and by the second afternoon, most of the rapids were behind them. The rock walls receded, replaced by a crush of trees and brush that cast shadows over the water’s edge, creating a sensation of traveling through a cool, dark tunnel. The current had slowed, and with no big storm having hit above, the river seemed almost peaceful. As they floated downriver, new scenes of wildlife appeared at every turn. They could see a turtle riding on the back of a log, an alligator slipping into the water,* a family of capybaras playing on a muddy stretch of riverbank. (This last animal is the world’s largest rodent, a 120-pound relative of the common rat.) There were too many river birds to count: black caracaras cruised overhead, letting out a loud raspy scream that sounded like “kra-a-a-a-a-a”; blue-throated piping-guans perched in the treetops, occasionally taking noisy wing to cross the river; and red-breasted kingfishers plunged suddenly into the water, emerging more often than not with a small fish. Isabel and the others were also certain to have come across a strange-looking bird with red eyes, blue face, and spiky blond crest, crashing through the underbrush, barking at the canoe as it passed by, and—if the bird dared to try—struggling mightily to fly. This was a hoatzin, one of the rain forest’s more humorous creatures.
Each of those first two nights they camped on sandbars, their Indian guides building lean-tos to sleep in, and doing so with amazing speed. After tying up the canoe, they would plunge fearlessly into the jungle, apparently unconcerned about the poisonous snakes known to haunt these banks, emerging in a few moments with an armful of stout sticks and a bundle of palm fronds. After laying two sticks down on the sand, parallel to each other and about nine feet apart, they would quickly lash the palm fronds to them. This “roof” was then propped up on two forked sticks planted upright in the sand. Isabel and the others ate well on those nights, their usual meal of dried meats and corn supplemented by whatever their Indian servants could take from the wilderness—perhaps a turtle one night and catfish the next, caught with a small net brought along for this purpose.
They retired the second evening with reason to feel optimistic. They were making good progress toward Andoas, and a beach could be a fairly pleasant place to sleep, the terrors of the jungle kept at bay by the sand between them and the brooding trees. The howler monkeys were in there, and not out here, and so too were the snakes, which liked to remain hidden in the brush. While vampire bats could still be a problem and jaguars might prowl a sandbar at night, the Indians kept a fire burning to keep the man-eating beasts away. Such skills comforted Isabel and the others. However, when they awoke the third morning, they looked upon a horrible sight. Their “pilots,” as Jean later wrote, had “absconded.”
Isabel realized her mistake at once. She had paid the Canelos Indians in full ahead of time. That was the custom, and they had demanded the advance pay, but the arrangement had removed any incentive for them to remain until they reached Andoas. Doing so would simply have led to a more arduous return journey to Canelos. She and the others were now alone on a river they knew nothing about. Their only salvation was that the Indians had left them the canoe, apparently choosing to make their way back to Canelos on foot.
There was little possibility that they might do the same. “We didn’t know the path through the woods [to Canelos],” the French doctor Jean Rocha later told the priest at Andoas, “and it was even less possible to return by the river, since it was flowing very fast, filled with rocks and sticks. Even the Indians who were experienced in navigating the river found it terrible, and so we determined to lower ourselves on the river under the guidance of God, assigning to everyone a job.”
Rocha took the place of the navigator up front. Joaquín, Isabel’s slave, assumed the role of steersman in the rear, while Isabel’s two brothers, Juan and Antonio, took paddles in hand and, seated in the middle, “rowed,” hoping to propel them faster through the slower sections of the river. Isabel and the others—her nephew Martín, her two maids Tomasa and Juanita, the Frenchman’s companion Phelipe Bogé, and Rocha’s slave Antonio—sat scattered about the boat.
That day the river rose, and they could see it was raining in the mountains. A large tributary, the Sarayacu, flowed into the Bobonaza, adding to their sense that the river was growing exponentially in power and force. As Rocha was to tell the priest in Andoas, “None of us had any skills, which put the canoe at every instant in a million dangers, now against a stick, then against a rock, with the canoe filling with water often in the rough spots, with evident risk of going under.” At such moments, Isabel clutched the two gold chains around her neck and silently asked that the “Virgin hear their prayers.” It seemed that they would not survive the day. But they did, and at noon on the following one, they came upon a most welcome sight: “We saw a canoe,” Rocha related,
and next to it footsteps, and following the path to a hut, we found an Indian convalescing from the smallpox. He appeared like death, but this man was alive, and we were overjoyed at seeing him. He was in a state of total abandonment, as all his family had been killed by the smallpox. He was content to get on board and take over management of the canoe. Although he was weakened by his illness, he was animated by his skill.
The rest of that day and the next two—October 29 and 30—passed without incident. The Bobonaza continued to widen after yet another large tributary, the Rutunoyacu, flowed into it from the north. The landscape changed here as well. They were now more than 100 miles below Canelos, and the river had spilled out into a floodplain, snaking back and forth across the flat land, creating a swampy landscape of oxbows and lagoons. They were not moving at any great speed—indeed, at times it seemed they were just drifting along at a leisurely pace—and yet they could see the river pushing along huge logs and branches, a great force that kept them on edge. No one said much; they were all alone in their thoughts. Then, late on October 31, a gust of wind blew Rocha’s hat into the water, and their pilot, “stooping to recover it,” as Jean later wrote, “fell overboard, and not having sufficient strength to reach the shore, was drowned.”
Everyone was too stunned to move. One moment the Indian was there, behind them, safely steering the canoe, and the next he was slipping beneath the water, his arms flailing as the current carried him off. And now the canoe was “again without a steersman, abandoned to individuals perfectly ignorant of managing it.” They were adrift in the current, Joaquín trying to scramble past Isabel to the rear without upsetting the boat. In very short order, the canoe was turned sideways by the current, and, striking a log, was “overset.”
They spilled into the river, and so too did the woven baskets with all of their goods. Isabel, pulled under by the weight of her heavy silk garments, came up gasping for air and grabbing for the overturned canoe, as did everyone else. They were not far from the river’s edge, and by clinging to the upside-down boat, they were able, “with great work, to arrive at a beach.”
They were now in a dire predicament. Although they were able to retrieve most of their supplies, Isabel and her two brothers were so spooked by the Indian’s drowning and their own near escape that they resisted getting back into the canoe. They built a hut that night as far up on the beach as possible, planning to wait there for a day or two, to see whether the river would drop. But it did not. “Each day,” Rocha said, brought “greater dangers.” At last—on their third day on the beach—Rocha “proposed to repair to Andoas” and seek help. By everyone’s reckoning, they were “five or six days journey from Andoas,” and Isabel and her two brothers, with the river at such a height, were still not willing “to trust themselves on the water without a proper pilot.” Rocha laid out his rescue plan: He, Bogé, and Joaquín would take the canoe, and since it would no longer be so loaded down, they should be able to steer it fairly easily. They would hurry to Andoas, where they would gather “a proper complement of natives” to come back upriver and rescue those left behind. Isabel and the others could expect to see a well-supplied canoe return within two weeks, three at most.
At ten o’clock the next morning—the date was November 3—Rocha and the others left. Those remaining on the sandbar stood together as they paddled off, the canoe passing around a bend and slipping from their sight. Only then did they realize what they had done. They were now marooned on this spit of sand. They were miles from the nearest speck of civilization, alone in a fearsome wilderness, and they had to rely on the others to return. As they looked around the sand and took a quick inventory of their supplies, their panic rose. Although they had a fair amount of food left, enough for three weeks if rationed, they could see what was missing: Rocha, while packing up, had taken “especial care to carry his effects with him.” He had left none of his belongings behind.
* As a result of road construction, the river below Baños no longer passes through a channel this narrow.
* In South America, reptiles in the Alligatoridae family are more properly known as caimans. The caiman has a more heavily armored belly than the North American alligator.
