Argonauts of the Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 238

on von Humboldt's travels. *2 Barrington Brown and Lidstone, agents reviewing rivers
andwoodavailability fortheAmazonSteamship andNavigation Company,hadsuitable
breeding and natural history training for such enterprises, and one can imagine the two
ponderingwhether,asforvonHumboldtbeforethem,itwouldbemoreamusingtostake
out the Nile or the Amazon. Others like Robert Avé Lallemant, or plantation manager
Daniel Kidder steamed up to Tefé and back down the great channel to Belém in the
great steamship circuits, making routine observations on the flora and fauna. Even the
US environmental icon John Muir, frail and aged, was not immune to the allurements
of Amazonian tourism, producing what were among the more banal observations on
Amazoniana and the weakest prose ever generated by this otherwise lyrical and insight-
ful writer. 20 Even Muir knew his material was pedestrian; he constantly complained to
his editor that it would be difficult to pull much out of his trip. He liked mountains and
didn't really know what to make of the sweltering landscape.
Travelersdriftedthroughthemainchannel,visitedenterprises,andwroteoftheirvoy-
ages and the marvels they observed, repeating the social nostrums of the day about the
tropics and its people and making some commentary on the cuisine. This type of liter-
ature seems to have its own endless DNA and reproduces itself with mostly predictable
vignettesofunusualfruitsandanimals,movingandpicturesquemoments,thecharmsof
the native women or lack thereof, the close shaves, and, as often as not, how good the
shooting was. 21
Native Intellectuals
In Amazonia an array of homegrown scientists, surveyors, and chroniclers as well as
armies of local inhabitants supplied the local knowledge of rivercraft and the access,
logistics, and information on which the successful outcomes of expeditions rested. All
European travelers depended on an “invisible” set of native intellectuals who made it
possible for them to travel in these zones: they arranged for the labor that would haul
these explorers and their gear; they were the scouts and the mateiros —knowledgeable
woodsmen—who would do the hunting, navigate the treacherous waters, explain the
landscape, and carry out most of the collecting. In the case of Alfred Russel Wallace,
Luis, his black cook, was one of his main botanical and ethnoscientific informants.
Everywhere Wallace stopped he pressed locals into the service of collecting for him. 22
Theselocalguidesknewthenatives(andoftenwereatleastpartindigenousthemselves),
thenativelanguages,theentrepôts,andhowtokeepanoftenfairlyhaplessbunchofcol-
lectors alive, so travelers could dry their plant samples (often identified by these same
companions),fillbottlesofalcoholwiththeiranimalspecimens,anddreamofthesaleof
theircollectionsandlucrativespeakingtours.Theselocalguidesandinterlocutors,often
possessed of great knowledge of natural history, were only obliquely acknowledged or