In Amazonia (19 page)

An Englishman could stop and settle in these Guianan plains. They were places to create a future out of the reminders of a faraway life, places to know that peaceful “sensation of suddenly being at home in the world.”
¹²¹
Why should Ralegh be immune to this prospective nostalgia of the traveler? Overlooking “the valley of
Amariocapana
,” he shades his eyes to view the savanna receding into the far distance:

[A]s fayre grounde, and as beawtifull fieldes, as any man hath ever seene, with divers copses scattered heere and there by the rivers side, and all as full of deare, as any forrest or parke in England, and in every lake and river the like abundance of fish and fowle.
¹²²

At moments such as these,
The Discoverie
is suffused with familiar analogy. Ralegh sees a mountain as “a white Church towre,” and hears bells clashing in the sound of cataracts. The “town of
Toparimaca
… standing on a little hill, in an excellent prospect, with goodly gardens a mile compasse round about it, and two very faire and large ponds of fish adjoyning” could be in his own Mendip Hills.
¹²³
The exotic landscape
resonates with Englishness: the inevitable point of reference and the sign of the latent materiality of colonial transformation.

Yet, where we could expect triumphalism in the imperial vision, Ralegh's prose suggests insecurity and doubt, the worry that such Arcadian landscapes may not be quite what they seem. De Bry's engraving captures this hesitation well, the river a heaving mass of classical monsters through which they must pass to enter the garden. It picks up on the textual anxiety that emerges through Ralegh's disbelieving subordinate clauses: “
as if
they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose …
as if
they had been used to a keepers call.” Surrounded by serpents in paradise, the intruders have their first casualty. One of the crew, “a very proper yoong fellow,” is beguiled by the scenery to dive in for a swim and at once, before their eyes, is savagely dismembered by alligators.
¹²⁴
Et in Arcadia Ego
.

As if to confirm Ralegh's unease, recent archaeological research presents these Orinoco savannas and the immense Venezuelan
llanos
of the
“plaines of the
Sayma
” surveyed by his scouting party as areas of intense pre-Columbian manipulation, gridded by networks of raised and ridged fields, mounds, and causeways, and deep in a native history of cultivation.
¹²⁵
Similar grasslands cover huge expanses of the region—perhaps 15 to 20 million hectares of the Amazonian
terra firme
—and there is considerable uncertainty about their origins.
¹²⁶
Even if, as botanists João Murça Pires and Ghillean Prance maintain, these areas predate the arrival of people in tropical South America, it seems inconceivable that their extent and ecology have not been greatly modified by the human use of fire in their management.
¹²⁷
Writing in 1596, Keymis describes such practices south of the Orinoco in the context of native defensive action against the Spanish, observing that “the Iwarewakeri have nourished grasse in all places, where passage is, these three yeeres, and … it is at this present so high, as some of the trees; which they meane to burne, so soone as the Spaniard shall bee in danger thereof.”
¹²⁸

In addition to the direct material aid that native leaders like Topiawari gave Europeans—food, shelter, orientation, and military information and support—there was also a less obvious indigenous contribution to the colonizing process. By planting and burning, by flood-control and earthworking, by attracting game animals such as deer, by concentrating valued plant species in accessible sites, native Americans created a landscape that Europeans were able to recognize and understand, a place that offered the sudden sensation of being at home in the world.
¹²⁹

Early modern European travelers were already halfway there. The erasure of people and labor that begins in the letters patent drew spontaneously on the eagerness of voyagers to locate the earthly paradise. Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, the captains of Ralegh's 1584 reconnaissance of the Carolinas, find that “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour.”
¹³⁰
Where Montaigne's cannibals lived, “the whole day is spent in dancing.”
¹³¹
Ralegh's Tivitivas “never eate of anie thing that is set or sowen.”
¹³²

But how to avoid fatalism? There was nothing inevitable about the terrible disaster that befell native Americans. Although so much was ranged against them, the future was still unwritten, and—hard as it is—we must try to imagine the anxieties of the irresolute moment. Nevertheless, there was classical tragedy on the Plaines of Sayma: Guianans achieved the English ideal of rendering the artifice involved in the manufacture of these virgin landscapes entirely invisible. Free of both the
epistemological dichotomization of nature and culture, and of English notions of Arcadia, indigenous Americans produced a landscape that fulfilled the colonialists' nostalgic yearnings for nature at its most amenably pristine. In doing so, they unwittingly created the conditions for the imaginative and material dispossession of their own golden land.

I have a favorite passage in
The Discoverie
. Reading it now confirms what I have suspected all along: that at some point, like so many others, I fell for Ralegh's charms. I fell for his charms and I fell for his frailties. And his Guiana became a part of my Amazon.

I include the passage at length here, partly because it is such wonderful writing and partly because it is perhaps the one moment in which Ralegh finds a unity in his experience of Guianan nature, a moment when the angels and the demons, the rapture and the horror, collapse into each other's arms, creating their own kind of terrible peace. It is the closest he will get to El Dorado, the farthest point he reaches in Guiana, and it is not really very far. He must transform defeat into accomplishment, to make the text somehow confound the failure of the voyage. It is a passage of complex beauty. As always, the language is tactile and immediate, and Ralegh draws us skillfully into his experience, sharing the excitement, the trepidation, the comradeship, the vulnerability, the wonder, and the inevitable disintegration. He is tired, but he is running up the hill:

When we ronne to the tops of the first hils of the plaines adjoyning to the river, we behelde that wonderfull breach of waters, which ranne down
Caroli
: and might from that mountaine see the river how it ran in three parts, above twentie miles of, and there appeared some ten or twelve overfals in sight, every one as high over the other as a Church tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of waters made it seeme, as if it had beene all covered over with a great shower of rayne: and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had risen over some great towne. For mine owne part I was well perswaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footeman, but the rest were all so desirous to goe neere the said straunge thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better discerne the same. I never saw a more beawtifull countrey, nor
more lively prospectes, hils so raised heere and there over the vallies, the river winding into divers braunches, the plaines adjoyning without bush or stubble, all faire greene grasse, the ground of hard sand easy to march on, eyther for horse or foote, the deare crossing in every path, the birds towardes the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes & herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching on the rivers side, the ayre fresh with a gentle easterlie wind, and every stone that we stooped to pick up, promised eyther golde or silver by its complexion … and yet we had no meanes but with our daggers and fingers to teare them out heere and there.
¹³³

It is the earthly paradise, home of the gold for which they have endured so many trials. And, as so often, Ralegh gives us an image of irresistible potentiality, spiraling into defeat. It is a prophetic and self-negating scene, it is the death of all pretense: the language continues to promise possession, but the adventurers merely grovel in the dirt, their aspirations pitifully base, framed by the transcendent glories of the New World.

N
EVER
S
ACKT

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, James Williamson has usefully told us, an interested observer “might well have predicted that Guiana was the destined chief sphere of English colonization.”
¹³⁴
That energies would then turn so decisively to Virginia had much to do with the lack of Crown support and the (minimal but sufficient, given James' policy) Spanish response. In the face of such uncertainties, merchants put their capital firmly behind the northern ventures—despite the potential returns from Guianan tobacco, a considerably more profitable item than its Virginia equivalent.
¹³⁵

Although Guiana was still of interest in 1617, by choosing to enter via the Orinoco, Ralegh was already sailing against the tide of colonial enterprise. In the twenty years since
The Discoverie
had captured the attention of English, Dutch, and Irish adventurers, interest had drifted to the southern part of the region, and settlers were now heading to the Rio Oiapoque—the present border between Amapá and French Guiana—and to the Canal do Norte.
¹³⁶
Spanish power was less evident in this
area, and settlers negotiated and traded among themselves in an atmosphere free from military engagement and the constraints of the chartered companies. As this suggests, the commodities that attracted the settlers were more mundane than those promised by El Dorado. John Wilson, one of the ten survivors of Charles Leigh's failed Oiapoque colony of 1604–6, included timber, dyes, pepper, cotton, flax, oils, gums, wax, tobacco, sugar, and feathers “such as Ladies doe weare in their hats” in his list of tradable resources of the area.
¹³⁷
Although the golden kingdom had not disappeared from mental maps, it was being steadily displaced by more conventional enterprise.

Leigh had followed the transatlantic route established in 1596 by Keymis and by Leonard Berry, another Ralegh captain, in the following year. The standard crossing, a relatively short and easy one, now ended with landfall at the mouth of the Rio Araguarí, just north of the Amazon itself. Initially, this southern route had been determined by the effort to find unguarded access to Lake Manoa, but it also brought the entire Wild Coast and its resources to the attention of the settlers. John Ley, a “lone trader,” who had trailed Keymis out in 1597, visited the Oiapoque but also turned south, entering the Canal do Norte on an exploration that took him all the way to the mouth of the Xingu.
¹³⁸

It was voyages like this, and the increasingly ambitious attempts to secure strategic landmarks by building forts and defense works, that would finally attract the attention of the Portuguese. Having recently displaced the French from Maranhão, they established the fort of Belém-do-Pará in 1616. Their suppression of the native population both near São Luís and around their new base sparked a general Indian rebellion that spread rapidly to Marajó and the Amazon estuary.
¹³⁹
The ferocious response of Bento Maciel Parente, the Portuguese governor, was doubly effective. His destruction and enslavement of the Tupinamba and other native groups between 1616 and 1621 inspired such widespread terror among native Amazonians that it removed the logistical basis for northern European settlement. Native Americans were no longer prepared to risk collaboration with English, Irish, or Dutch. The sack of Trinidad and capture of Berrio that had stood Ralegh in such good stead with Topiawari had been drastically superseded. The politics of nominal equivalence were dead and irrecoverable. In the decade after 1623, a ruthless Portuguese campaign led by Pedro Teixeira forced all foreign rivals out of the estuary.
¹⁴⁰