The Mapmaker's Wife (35 page)

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.”

A
LTHOUGH 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.”