The Wayfinders (8 page)

Known as the Kula ring, it was a system of
balanced reciprocity based on the ceremonial exchange of two items,
necklaces of discs chiselled from red spondylus shells known as the
soulava
, and arm bands of white cone shell, the
mwali
.
These were strictly symbolic objects with no intrinsic or utilitarian value.
And yet for at least five hundred years men had been prepared to risk their
lives to carry these jewels across thousands of kilometres of open sea. The
necklaces moved clockwise through the years, while the arm bands flowed in
reverse, always travelling in a counter-clockwise direction. Each individual
involved in the trade had at least two partners, relationships that like
marriages were intended to last for life, and even be inherited by
subsequent generations. To one partner a voyager would give a necklace in
exchange for an arm band of equal value, and to the other he would pass
along an arm band and receive in return a necklace. Each contact had his
second partner on another island, and thus there was a continuous
distribution chain. The exchanges did not occur all at once. Once in
possession of a highly valued object, one was expected to savour for a time
the prestige it conferred even as one made plans ultimately to pass it
along. As a single object made its way around the Kula, perhaps taking as
long as twenty years to complete the passage, only to continue again, its
value grew with each voyage, with each story of hardship and wonder,
witchcraft and the wind, and with the names of all the great men whose lives
it had passed through. Thus the sacred objects were in constant motion,
encircling the scattered islands in a ring of social and magical power.

Malinowski understood and wrote of the functional
purpose of the Kula ring. It established relationships over great distances
among peoples of different languages, facilitating the ultimate movement
back and forth of utilitarian objects, pigments and dyes, stone axes,
obsidian, ceramics, polished ceremonial stones, woven goods and certain
foods. The Kula also provided the context for the display of prestige and
status upon which the authority of the hereditary chiefs was based. Their
names were associated with the most valuable arm bands and necklaces, and it
fell to them to organize and lead the voyages. Preparations were rigorous
and costly. Men from widely separated villages had to be coordinated.
Gardens had to be planted simply to grow the food to be consumed during the
preparations for the journey. There were taboos to enforce, ritual magic to
perform, feasts to celebrate, supplies to secure and store for the journey.
Fleets of canoes had to be built, new sails woven from pandanus leaves,
outriggers polished and painted, paddles carved and the ornate prows
ritually cleansed and empowered to ward off all evil — giant sea creatures,
living rocks, the witches dwelling in the deep who consumed shipwrecked men.
Months went by and with each passing day the excitement grew. As Malinowski
so elegantly distilled in the title of his book, the voyagers really were as
Argonauts sailing forth into the unknown, in search of honour and glory,
uncertain whether they would ever again see home and family, driven by the
thrill of adventure and the siren call of the open water. “It is beautiful
always to sail in a native canoe,” Malinowski wrote his wife, Elsie. “It
gives you the impression of being on a raft, quite on the surface of the
water, floating as if by a miracle.”

SOME YEARS AGO I
was fortunate to sail through the Trobriand
Islands, on a journey that began in Fiji and passed through Vanuatu and the
Solomon Islands before entering the waters of Papua New Guinea. Eventually
we circled much of the Kula ring, moving east to west past Woodlark Island
to Kitava and Kiriwina, where Malinowski was based, and then south to the
Deboyne Island group, moving as a soulava necklace in a counter-clockwise
direction, heading ultimately for Port Moresby. Unlike Malinowski, we
travelled in considerable comfort on an expedition vessel, equipped with a
small flotilla of zodiacs that allowed us to land on virtually any shore,
weather and currents permitting. The place I remember most was Bodaluna
Island in the Laughlin group, our first point of contact with the Kula ring.
We came from the rising sun across an open expanse of ocean several hundred
kilometres wide, the Solomon Sea. To the Trobriand Islanders, Bodaluna was
the most extreme point of their world, an islet on a coral atoll at the
easternmost limits of the Kula ring.

Bodaluna was the most remote and isolated place I
had ever been, a sliver of sand on the fringe of a reef, no more than a
metre above sea level at any point, and protected from the typhoons by
nothing more than a scattering of coconut palms and frangipani trees. The
people of the island, perhaps twenty families, drew sustenance from small
gardens with soil crushed from coral, and from the reef and the sea beyond;
giant clamshells littered the sand and fishnets dried along the shore. Their
houses were simple structures, mostly coconut thatch on a skeleton of palm
wood. The children had bronze skin, and all of them wore white and red shell
necklaces and white scented blossoms in their hair.

Along the shore I came upon a Kula canoe, pulled
up on the beach and protected from the elements by coconut fronds. It seemed
to have been there for some time. The elegantly carved splashboard, or
lagim
, that encloses the end of the hull, and the decorative
wavesplitter or
tabuya
it rests upon, were both bleached grey by the
sun, and only fragments of white paint remained. I ran my fingers over the
shallow carvings, all the symbols of magical wisdom and spiritual flight
that had faded with exposure. It was definitely a
masawa
canoe, built expressly for the Kula, but I was
surprised by how small it was, less than 2 metres wide and barely longer
than the deck of the
Hokule’a
was wide. Its hull caulked by tree resin,
blackened with paint made from charred coconut husks and banana sap, with a
short wooden mast rigged in place by fibre ropes, it lay on the sand as
awkwardly as in the water, at a slight list, so that the stabilizing
outrigger might just skim the surface of the sea. It was not a design that
inspired confidence. Once on the water it could not come about, let alone
tack into a wind. It was built to go point-to-point, sailing with the wind,
like an arrow on a single trajectory. Kula implied, if nothing else,
commitment.

A storm was growing to the east and the light
falling through the clouds darkened great swaths of the sea, even as the
western sun cast shadows on the sand and illuminated the turquoise waters
immediately offshore. Out on the reef, young boys, aware of the coming
storm, paddled back toward land. Looking at them, I tried to imagine what it
would have been like to sit on this small island when suddenly out of the
horizon emerged a fleet of Kula canoes, as many as eighty at a time, all
brightly painted and decorated with cowry shells, feathers, and streamers of
flowers. On board the cramped canoes some five hundred men would have been
preparing for hours, anointing themselves in coconut oil and adorning their
hair with red hibiscus blossoms, performing private ceremonies and casting
spells conceived to seduce the islanders into giving up their Kula
treasures, thus ensuring the success of the expedition. On the beach the
entire population of the island, feigning hostility, would have gathered to
await the summons from the leader of the visiting fleet. Still offshore, he
would call out for them to be generous in their welcome, to be sure that the
gifts received would be equal to those that had been carried so far and at
such risk and expense. A chorus of conch trumpets from the beach would then
have acknowledged the obligation, and each important man of Bodaluna would
have walked into the surf bearing gifts. Only once the exchange was
completed would the visitors disembark and come ashore.

How long they would stay would depend on the
wind. Time meant little. Wealth was not defined as ownership, but by the
prestige and status that came to one who gave well and thus secured a social
network, a sort of human capital of culture, a treasury of ritual debts and
obligations that would yield interest to one’s clan and family forever.

As we made our way off-island, manoeuvring
through the narrow channels cut by hand in the coral, I was told an amazing
story. The Kula canoe I had admired belonged to a party of men who had been
stranded by the wind for over four months, waiting for an opportunity to
sail home. In the meantime they had worked their way quietly into the circle
of life of this small coral atoll. If our ship expected to pass back this
way, they had asked one of our crew, perhaps we might give them a ride. They
were going east as we went west. Our ship, in fact, did expect to return,
but not for a long while. Six months would be fine, had been their response.
Though I do not think that this is precisely what Thor Heyerdahl had in
mind, it may explain something of the courage and patience that allowed
human beings to settle that impossibly vast ocean.

Three

PEOPLES OF THE ANACONDA

“In the West, time is like gold. You save it, you
lose it, you waste it, or you don’t have enough of it. In the Barasana
language there is no word for time.” — Stephen Hugh-Jones

LET’S BEGIN THIS THIRD
of the Massey Lectures with a story from the
shadowy days of the Spanish Conquest. In February of 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro,
half-brother of Francisco, conqueror of the Inca, began a journey across the
Andes in search of El Dorado and the fabled lands of Canela, of cinnamon and
gold. Leaving Quito with 220 soldiers, 4,000 native porters, and 2,000 pigs
as food, the expedition crested the heights of the Cordillera and began a
long, slow descent through the tangled lianas and stunted trees of the cloud
forest. By the time it reached the tropical lowlands, where the riverbanks
gleamed by night with black caiman, the hogs and horses had long since been
consumed and most of the Indian slaves had perished, as had 140 Spaniards.
The surviving men, reduced to stewing leather and wild herbs, scavenged for
roots and berries that left several of them deranged by poison. In
desperation Gonzalo dispatched his second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana,
along with forty-nine men, down a high jungle tributary in search of
provisions and deliverance. Among this group was a white-frocked Dominican
friar, Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote an astonishing account of the
subsequent journey.

Reaching the Napo, just one of the 1,100 major
rivers that drain the Amazon, the men led by Orellana mutinied, refusing in
their agony to return upstream as per the original orders. The current was
too powerful, and at any rate, no food had been found. Orellana, in a fit of
legal formality, for which the Conquistadores were famous, officially
resigned his commission, with Gaspar de Carvajal as his witness, that he
might accept by acclamation a new command at the head of the bedraggled
survivors. Abandoning Gonzalo Pizarro to his fate, Orellana and his band set
off into the unknown one day after Christmas 1541, heading down the
swift-flowing Napo on a launch hastily crafted from jungle trees and iron
nails scavenged from the hoofs of dead horses.

Tormented by the sun, and haunted at night by the
roar of howlers, the low hallucinatory drone of frogs and cicadas, and the
unexpected bark of jaguars, they reached after several days the confluence
of the Napo with the Río Ucayali, as the Upper Amazon is known in Peru.
There, to their horror, they found the shores lined with Indian settlements,
each linked to the next by the sound of messenger drums that guaranteed a
hostile reception at every bend of the river. Three Spaniards died, targets
of the flying death, darts coated in curare and shot silently from the
forest. Gaspar de Carvajal was himself blinded in one eye by an arrow, which
fortunately for history was not poisonous. His journal records the anguish
of men festering with disease, their lethargic bodies riddled with
parasites, their guts wrenching from lack of food. It was cruel torment
indeed, for with each passing kilometre the richness and prosperity of the
native villages only increased, along with the bounty of the fields, the
physical beauty and numbers of inhabitants, and the evident elaboration of
high culture. After nine days and several hundred kilometres, the Spaniards
entered the lands of the Omagua, and found to their astonishment a
continuous series of villages reaching some 320 kilometres along the shores,
each no more, as Carvajal reported, than a crossbow shot apart. One
community stretched for five leagues, roughly 25 kilometres, a single
concentration of thatch-roofed houses.

After six months, Orellana’s group passed the
confluence of the Rio Negro, a tributary four times the size of the
Mississippi, that were it to exist on any other continent would be the
second largest river on earth. The scale of forest, river, and sky utterly
unsettled their senses. On the banks of the Rio Nhamundá, two days farther
downstream, they met Indians who claimed to be vassals of a ferocious tribe
of female warriors, outliers
of a civilization of women who dwelt in
the distant head-waters, in villages of stone at the edge of saltwater
lakes. There they rode camels, wore the finest woven cloth, and worshipped
the divinity of the sun in temples lined with macaw feathers and parrot
plumes. To procreate they captured men solely for the purposes of breeding;
all male offspring were summarily killed. A fortnight later, according to
Carvajal, the expedition entered the land
of the Amazons and actually
encountered and did battle with squadrons of Indians led by female captains
— naked women, tall and white, with long braided hair wound about the head.
Each fought with the power of ten men, and it was only after several had
been killed that the Spaniards, their brigantine riddled with arrows,
escaped.

The farther the Spaniards drifted downstream, the
more elaborate were the settlements. At the mouth of the Rio Tapajós, near
the modern Brazilian town of Santarém, the expedition was met by a flotilla
of two hundred war canoes, each carrying thirty men, all in full regalia,
with brilliant cloaks of feathers and coronas that shone like the sun.
Thousands more inhabitants stood warily along the shore. The riverbanks for
a hundred kilometres were dense with houses and gardens, and away from the
shore there were signs, as Carvajal wrote, of “very large cities.”

When finally, on August 24, 1542, eight months
after setting out on the Napo and a year and half since leaving the cool
mountain air of Quito, Orellana’s naked band, too weakened by hunger to row,
reached salvation and the sea, they remained confounded by the wonder of the
river that had brought them there. In the delta there were islands the size
of European nations. The riverbanks, such as they were, lay more than 300
kilometres apart. The expedition limped out to sea and was kilometres off
shore, out of sight of land, before the water turned too brackish to drink.

Returning to Peru, Gaspar de Carvajal completed
his journals, a remarkable saga of adventure and discovery that was almost
immediately reduced to ridicule, dismissed even by his fellow clergy as
pura mentiras
, a pack of lies. His problem lay in the fantastic
story of the female warriors, which to his critics was an obvious
fabrication, because it echoed so closely Greek myth and the accounts of
Herodotus. The word
Amazon
is derived from “a-madzon,” meaning without
breast, and it had long referred to a legendary nation of women warriors
living beyond the known world of the Mediterranean who reputedly sliced off
their right breast to facilitate the use of the bow in battle. Such was
their reputation as fighters that Hercules in his ninth labour was charged
with the capture of the girdle of their queen. The discovery of such women
in the savage heart of the New World was simply too much to believe,
especially as Carvajal was hardly the first to have laid claim to such an
encounter, albeit in a new location.

Christopher Columbus, seeking evidence of the
Indies and recalling Marco Polo’s discovery of an island of women in the Sea
of China, described to Queen Isabella an island of women who lived without
men, wore copper armour, and took cannibals as lovers. Amerigo Vespucci
found man-eating women on the Caribbean Island of Martinique. Cortés sent
his cousin Francisco north along the coast of Mexico to investigate reports
of a land of women ruled by a mythical black Queen Califia — hence the name
California. Indeed, like El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, the land of
the women warriors was on every explorer’s itinerary. In time, the European
myth became modified by the fertile imagination of the Amerindian peoples,
who had learned from cruel experience to tell the whites whatever it was
they wanted to hear. Thus the tale of the female warriors was fed back to
the Old World in a new and enlivened form, which had a ring of authenticity
that transformed myth into history. King Charles V was particularly
intrigued, and because of him, the river that had always been known as the
Mar Dulce, the Sweet or Freshwater Sea, took a new name, the Río Amazonas,
the river of the Amazons. But skeptics such as the Spanish historian
Francisco López de Gómara, writing as early as 1552, remained unconvinced,
dismissing Carvajal’s entire account as a sensational effort to mask the
fact that Orellana had committed treason in abandoning his commander,
Gonzalo Pizarro, and had found on his expedition neither gold nor cinnamon,
nor anything of value for the Crown. Buried by court gossip and intrigue,
largely ignored by history, Carvajal’s
Relación
, the record of the
first European descent of the world’s greatest river, would not be published
until 1895. Ironically, had the friar not spoken of the Amazon women, his
remarkable journal might long have been celebrated for what he undoubtedly
did see and faithfully record, observations that today read as revelations
to anthropologists and archaeologists. The Amazon at the time of European
contact was no empty forest, but an artery of civilization and home to
hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of human beings.

THE AMAZON PROVOKES CLICHÉS
even as it defies hyperbole. It is, after all,
the world’s greatest single expanse of tropical terrestrial life, a rain
forest the size of the continental United States, a blanket of biological
wealth as large as the face of the full moon. Joseph Conrad described the
jungle as less a forest than a primeval mob, a remnant of an ancient era
when vegetation rioted and consumed the world. Travelling in the lowlands of
the Putumayo in Colombia in the 1930s, the Capuchin priest Gaspar de Pinell
described a sojourn in a land where “tall trees covered with growths and
funereal mosses create a crypt so saddening that to the traveller it appears
like walking through a tunnel of ghosts and witches.” This was the Amazon as
“Green Hell,” the name of a popular travel account published in London in
1935. The setting is lowland Bolivia, but it could have been anywhere in the
basin. On its opening page the author is blinded by the sun’s glare,
scorched by its rays, cowed by the eerie, creeping silence of the forest,
and brought to agony “by the festering stings, the cracking drought of
throat and lips, the misery of tropical rain.”

By the time I became a student of botany in the
1970s, the
jungle
— a word that had long gone out of fashion — had
become an Eden, but a delicate one to be sure, a “cornucopia of life,” as I
wrote in one of my first published papers, “far more fragile than it
appears. In fact, many ecologists have called the tropical forest a
counterfeit paradise. The problem is soil. In many areas, there essentially
is none. It is a castle of immense biological sophistication built quite
literally on a foundation of sand.” This rather bold statement, as clichéd
in its own way as the notion of a Green Hell, had by the time I entered
graduate school become a mantra of the emerging conservation biology
movement. Its scientific inspiration was a classic study by a bryologist, a
student of mosses, Paul Richards, whose seminal book,
The Tropical
Rainforest
, was first published in 1952.

Forests, Richards pointed out, have two major
strategies for preserving the nutrient load of the ecosystem. In the
temperate zone, with the periodicity of the seasons and the resultant
accumulation of rich organic debris, the biological wealth is in the soil
itself. In the tropics, by contrast, with constant high humidity and annual
temperatures hovering around 27 degrees Celsius, bacteria and microorganisms
break down the plant matter as soon as the leaves hit the forest floor.
Ninety percent of the root tips may be found within the top 10 centimetres
of earth. Vital nutrients are immediately recycled into the vegetation. The
wealth of this ecosystem is the living forest, an exceedingly complex mosaic
of thousands of interacting and interdependent living organisms.

Removing this canopy sets in motion a chain
reaction of destruction. Temperatures increase dramatically, relative
humidity falls, rates of evapotranspiration drop precipitously, and the
mycorrhizal mats that interlace the roots of forest trees, enhancing their
ability to absorb nutrients, dry up and die. With the cushion of vegetation
gone, torrential rains cause erosion, which leads to further loss of
nutrients and chemical changes in the soil itself. “In certain deforested
areas of the Amazon,” I warned ominously, “the precipitation of iron oxides
in leached exposed soils has resulted in the deposition of mile upon mile of
lateritic clays, a rocklike pavement of red earth in which not a weed will
grow.”

While fundamentally sound as a way of
understanding the basic dynamics of tropical forests, this model, when
applied in a sweeping manner to a region as vast
as the Amazon, was as
much slogan as science. For one,
it implied an ecological uniformity
to the basin that fifty years of field research has exposed as a gross
simplification. A third of the Amazon is savannah. Perhaps half is upland
forest, but there is an enormous amount of diversity not only in plant and
animal species but also in geomorphology and soils. No simple scheme could
possibly encompass a geographical expanse seven times the size of the
province of Ontario. But the notion of
fragility held for two reasons.
First, it served an environmental agenda, and the very legitimate concerns
that people everywhere had about the rate of deforestation in the Amazon,
much of which was being caused in Brazil, in particular, by the expansion
from the south of the agricultural frontier. Second, and more relevant to
this story, the suggestion that the forest was a marginal environment fit
Western preconceptions of what it meant to live as a native in the Amazon.