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YELLOW RAIN

One of the most notorious modern myths of the rainforest succeeded in combining the mystery of the jungle with the paranoia of the Cold War. In September 1981, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, announced to an incredulous press conference that ‘for some time now, the international community have been alarmed by continuing reports that the Soviet Union and its allies have been using lethal chemical weapons in Laos, Kampuchea [Cambodia] and Afghanistan …We now have physical evidence from southeast Asia which has been analysed and found to contain abnormally high levels of three potent mycotoxins – poisonous substances not indigenous to the region and which are highly toxic to man and animals.’

He had, in fact, a couple of leaves from remote Cambodian rainforest close to the border with Laos that carried on their surface tiny amounts of natural poisons called trichothecenes. Some in the Pentagon believed the Russians were manufacturing these chemicals as weapons, and a hue and cry ensued. Here on these leaves was proof that Russia was waging biological warfare in the jungle. The revelation excited defence analysts and elicited long articles in the Wall Street Journal analysing the threat. The Reagan administration accused Russia of violating arms control agreements, and claims and counterclaims followed for years. Then, in 1987, Harvard biochemist Matthew Meselson came back from the jungle with samples of bee faeces and proved to the satisfaction of all but a few – who can still be found busily making their case on the Internet – that the yellow rain was nontoxic bee faeces: perfectly natural bee shit produced from time to time by swarms of giant honey-bees in the forest, apparently in response to heat stress. The spooks had been spooked by the rainforest.

And the story had a splendid sequel. In 2002, a nervous India was gripped by fears that it, too, had come under attack from chemical weapons. For two days, green rain fell on the town of Sangrampur close to the mangrove forests of West Bengal, spattering clothes and buildings. Villagers rushed to temples to pray, and rumours spread that the rain was contaminated with chemical warfare agents. When the state’s chief pollution scientist arrived from Calcutta, he reported that the mysterious yellow-green droplets were in fact bee faeces, coloured by pollen from local mangoes and coconuts. He said the green rain was caused by a mass migration of a swarm of giant Asian honey-bees, whose propensity for producing ‘golden showers’ is well known to bee biologists. Panic over … until the next time.

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FROM DARKNESS
TO LIGHT

From the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, and Portugal’s Henry the Navigator set his sailors ashore in West Africa, Europeans went to conquer the jungles with bravado, lust and fear. They regarded these steaming, fetid, alien lands as both places ‘of the utmost dread’ and ‘the entrance to paradise’. First they went in search of El Dorado, a mysterious jungle city of gold, and of Christian kings like Prester John. But they were seduced, too, by weird hallucinogenic plants that blew their minds, by the sheer biological wonder of this ‘inexhaustible treasure trove’ and, finally, by its greatest secrets – the real El Dorado, the mysteries of evolution.

IN SEARCH OF EL DORADO

Christopher Columbus, in his log dated 28 October 1492, reported stepping ashore amid the forests of Cuba. ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful,’ he wrote. ‘The country is full of trees, beautiful and green and different from ours, each with flowers and its own kind of fruit. There are many birds of all sizes that sing very sweetly, and there are many palms.’ It was an idyllic scene – but not what he had come for. From the day they first set foot in the Americas, the Spanish were seeking gold. Columbus had persuaded his Royal patrons back home that his journey, to what he presumed to be Asia, would deliver the contents of the ‘gold mines of Japan’. So, rather than lazing under the palm trees, bird spotting or fraternizing with the natives, Columbus got down to business: ‘The search for gold began the day after our arrival.’

As Columbus, his fellows and successors spread out across the New World, conquering the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru, and scattering the numerous tribes of the Amazon, there was a manic fervour about their search for gold that combined the mercenary and the spiritual. Columbus himself was clear about his dual motivation: ‘Whoever possesses gold can acquire all that he desires … with gold he can gain entrance to paradise.’ As one of the most successful conquistadors, the cruel and handsome Hernando Cortez, put it after sacking the Aztec capital: ‘We have a sickness of the heart for which there is only one cure – gold.’

It wasn’t hard to find gold in the halls of the mountain peoples that the Spaniards swiftly conquered. Civilizations like the Chimus, Moches and Incas of Peru, the Chibcha of Colombia and the Aztecs of Mexico were all avid workers of gold. But even as they sacked these kingdoms, the conquerors appeared dissatisfied with their plunder. They began to believe that there was more, much more, gold buried deep in the continent’s darkest corners, in the forests of the Amazon lowlands. It is hard to understand where this belief came from, but rainforests and myths about gold seem always to have gone together. Gold, the most valued but least attainable commodity throughout the Middle Ages, seemed to Europeans to be buried, of necessity, in the most inhospitable and impenetrable places – the forests of distant and alien lands.

Many believed that the ‘perfect metal’ was an organic part of the forest and grew in the jungles like a living organism; and experiences in the Americas did not dent that belief. The late-sixteenth-century Jesuit naturalist Jose de Acosta, who wrote an early natural history of Peru, argued that ‘minerals seem to grow like plants … they emerge from the bowels of the earth as a result of the virtues and efficiency of the sun and other plants, so that over a long time they continue to grow and almost propagate.’ To put a missionary spin on things, the priests argued that God put gold among the primitive forest people to encourage Christians to seek them out and convert them. As one priest put it: ‘A father with an ugly daughter gives her a large dowry to marry her; and this is what God did with that difficult land, giving it much wealth in mines so that by this means he would find someone who wanted it.’

* * *

But if the forest was the door to paradise, it was also a hell on Earth. Its invaders went in fear of demons, both animal and human, real and imagined. By day, as they slashed their way through the jungle, the conquistadors faced snakes and jaguars, natives with poisoned arrows and mosquitoes carrying killer diseases. And as they set up nervous camp each night, they swapped stories about serpents that could swallow a man whole, and of a tribe whose members had no heads, but eyes in their shoulders and mouths on their breasts. They muttered, too, about a tribe of warrior women who procured and discarded slave men at will. These Amazons were ‘very white and tall, go about naked with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men’, wrote Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican missionary who went on one of the most famous expeditions into the Amazon jungle in 1540 with his captain, Francisco de Orellana.

The myth of a tribe of female warrior Amazons was not new. Like the stories of gold in the jungle, the invaders had brought it with them from Europe. Indeed, the Amazons had a history dating to Greek times: for a long time they were believed to live near the Black Sea, on the borders of Europe and Asia; but ever since de Orellana and de Carvajal claimed to find them in the Brazilian rainforest, and named after them the river down which they journeyed, the Amazons have been relocated in the world’s imaginings. Right into the nineteenth century, serious scientists continued to argue in favour of their existence somewhere in the jungles of South America.

But even more than the mythology of the Amazons, the conquistadors came, most of all, to believe in the story of El Dorado, a city of gold deep in the Amazon jungle. Nobody knows quite how the myth got going: some say it had its origins in the traditions of the Chibcha people in the mountains of modern-day Colombia, who said the mountains had once been ruled by an Indian chief who was so wealthy that every morning he got his servants to cover him in gold dust, which he washed off in a lake. However it arose, the myth of El Dorado soon lost all its geographical bearings as conquistadors went up the Orinoco and down the Amazon, over the Andes and into the forests on the continent’s Pacific shores, seeking out the fabled king and his city.

If they had a direction at all, it was generally to the continent’s great interior, into the largest jungle on Earth. There, said one guide for prospective conquistadors, seekers of gold ‘should try to enter inland as far as they can – for they cannot fail to find great secrets and riches’. From Venezuela and Peru, Panama and the Guyanas, most seekers of El Dorado make a beeline for the heart of the continent – for the jungle fastness where gold must be there for the taking. But where in the jungle? The Amazon jungle is a big place. Some said it was in the west, twelve days’ march from Quito; others that it was somewhere in the headwaters of the Orinoco, in the north of the rainforest region; still others mapped it further east, close to the home of the Amazons, who ruled a land somewhere deep in the rainforest that was ‘very rich in gold’. But in their fervour to join the gold rush, it scarcely seemed to matter: the lure and the chase were the thing.

* * *

Who were these conquistadors seeking El Dorado in the jungle? One of the first was Diego de Ordas. He had already become one of the richest men in the world after sending home huge amounts of loot gathered while he was Cortez’s captain during the sacking of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in Mexico in 1520. But he wanted more. He got himself appointed governor of Maranon, the first name given by the Spaniards to the Amazon, and set about putting together an expedition to go looking for gold near the source of the Orinoco. His watery journey up South America’s second greatest river and through the jungle became the prototype of all future searches for El Dorado, a journey through a dreamland alternating between heaven and hell, in search of a paradise of riches.

Disease and fever were everywhere, he recorded. ‘This region was so terrible and the vapours so corrupt and heavy that if someone was bitten by a vampire [bat] or got a small cut he immediately became cancerous. Men from one day to the next had their entire feet consumed by cancer. They were dying one by one.’ There were jaguars in the jungle, cayman and anacondas in the river, and the air was filled with mosquitoes and black flies. Their bodies became infested with worms that buried themselves beneath the skin and grew till they were several inches long.

Things looked up when the crew met some Indians from the Aruak tribe. The expedition reported, with perhaps understandable descriptive zeal, that the women were naked except for ‘a rag in front of their private parts, which is loose. When they sway, or in the wind, everything is revealed.’ And there was more, according to the great English historian of the period John Hemming: ‘The tribe provided an attractive woman to sleep with any stranger; and when he left, the woman was free to go with him.’ But it was too good to last – the conquistadors were not so easily seduced away from their warrior yearnings. When the Aruak people innocently dropped by at the conquistadors’ camp to look at a collection of pigs they had brought for food, Ordas decided that they were planning to slaughter the pigs, so he and his men slaughtered the Indians instead. From then on, the Indian women were forcibly taken rather than granted as gifts.

As tales of mythical gold spread, Ordas was soon joined in the jungle by motley bands of hopeful soldiers, adventurers and even civil servants. One of the latter was the Royal treasurer Jeronimo Dortal, who had had enough of cataloguing the booty from the conquests back home in Europe, and sought to make his own fortune. He set out to find a new route south to the Orinoco headwaters that avoided the treacherous and fever-ridden delta region, but he ended up alone after suffering a mutiny.

Outstanding among these journeys, however, was the expedition organized by Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Francisco, the conqueror of Peru. He and his companion and second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana, set out east from Peru in February 1541. It was a vast expedition: Pizarro and de Orellana took with them 4,000 Indian porters, 200 horses, 3,000 pigs, as well as llamas and packs of hunting dogs that were trained, it was said, to attack Indians. It was a brutal and ill-fated affair. Pizarro, in particular, tortured his porters for not telling him what lay ahead, when these peasants from the Peruvian mountains knew no more than he what the jungle contained. Likewise, he used his dogs to tyrannize every forest native who claimed not to know the whereabouts of El Dorado. ‘They must be liars,’ he said.

Within a month, three thousand of Pizarro’s Indian bearers had died or deserted, taking the pigs with them. So had many of his Spaniards, for whom even the lure of gold was not enough. Without hunters or pigs, they were also starving. De Orellana took a small contingent downstream on a tributary of the Amazon to find food, but he was unable to return because of the strong current. Pizarro failed to follow, so de Orellana sent messengers back overland. They discovered that Pizarro had hightailed it back to Quito, which he eventually reached with just eighty men left. Perhaps relieved to be rid of his impulsive master, de Orellana decided not to follow. Instead, he headed on downstream into the Rio Negro, which he named, and eventually to the main stream of the Amazon.

De Orellana’s journey continued for months. Along the way he made many contacts with Indian communities and had several skirmishes. In June, four months after he and Pizarro had set out from Peru, he fought off an attack from warrior women. Thus he initiated, or at any rate enhanced, the story of the lost female tribe of Amazons from Asia Minor who were, for reasons never explained, now alive and well and living in South America. In late August, he reached the open Atlantic Ocean, becoming the first European to travel the width of the Amazon basin. He returned for a while to Spain where he was feted for his voyage – and told stories of seeing big roads in the jungle that he believed must lead to a fabulous kingdom. Five years later, de Orellana returned to the jungle in a second attempt to find the city of El Dorado or, failing that, to construct a city of his own. But he achieved neither and died somewhere on the Amazon.

* * *

The invasion of the Amazon in search of El Dorado was rapidly becoming a major undertaking. As Hemming puts it: ‘For sheer endurance, mileage walked and tribes, hills and rivers “discovered”, these exploits far exceed the famous travels of the nineteenth-century African explorers.’ Strange, when all the gold so far found had been in the drier and cooler highlands of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes and the Mexican highlands; but each failure, each new outbreak of fever and attack by jaguar or insect, simply relocated the fabled city somewhere further east and triggered yet more journeys.

Adventurers from other nations joined the hunt. In 1541, as Pizarro and de Orellana squabbled in the headwaters of the Amazon, a German named Philip von Hutten led a party up the Orinoco in search of a reputedly fabulously wealthy tribe called the Omaguas. He found a heavily populated area, but no golden city. The Portuguese, meanwhile, went searching for El Dorado in northeast Brazil; and Walter Raleigh, the sometime favourite of Queen Elizabeth of England, twice sailed up the Orinoco in search of ‘that great and golden city’, which he called Manoa. He eventually wrote a best-selling book, The Discovery of the Empyre of Guiana, that did much to popularize the legend of El Dorado across Europe.

Raleigh wrote of the forest through which he travelled as ‘a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent’. This virginal paradise held terrors: his hundred-strong crew huddled together in their small boats, attacked by natives and alligators. But it seems to have been the smell of his own men that got to Raleigh most: ‘What with the victuals being mostly fish, and the wet clothes of so many men thrust together, and the heat of the sun, I will undertake there was never any prison in England that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome.’ Having once been locked up in the Tower of London by his Queen for bedding one of her chambermaids, Raleigh knew all about prisons.

Thanks to their earlier sacking of mountain empires, many of the conquistadors became some of the richest people in Europe – like the billionaires of a modern dot-com boom, which, not coincidentally, has itself often been called a gold rush; and the story of the search for El Dorado spoke to the heart of a new yearning in Europe to explore and conquer the world in pursuit of personal fortune. According to some commentators, El Dorado was the first great symbol of what became the American dream – ‘a myth of self-creation, personal escape and social transformation’, as writer Mark Cocker put it. But while we can recognize that yearning, it is hard today to understand how the myth of an El Dorado in the jungle persisted against all the evidence. Somehow, the failure of each expedition seemed simply to raise the stakes and embellish the original tale. Was it all madness? Well, perhaps so. But, as we shall see later, all those stories of great jungle cities were not necessarily myths. They may have been there, though they disappeared into the jungle almost whenever and wherever the conquistadors went.

The conquistadors meanwhile went looking for El Dorado in rainforests even beyond South America. In 1526, Alvara de Saavedra, after loading up with cloves in the Moluccas islands in the East Indies, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, reported that he had landed in Isla del Oro, the Land of Gold. This was the giant forest-covered island of New Guinea. It is not clear whether he found gold, but he clearly expected to. Subsequent explorers moved on to the equally forested Philippines, from whence reports soon emerged of an El Dorado where communities lived by mining gold. Here, at any rate, there was gold, which the Spaniards assiduously looted, much as they had in the Andes. They took it back to Acapulco in Mexico, before taking it on to Spain in a fleet of huge new galleons built for the purpose. But they failed to find the gold mines, which the natives of the Philippines kept hidden from them.

Throughout the sixteenth century and on, the rainforests of the tropical regions of the world were almost literally mapped in gold. Nothing else there mattered and, since gold was rarely found and nothing else was properly observed, we are left with a mythological landscape, where paradise and hell almost become one. Almost unnoticed at the time, millions of natives died as the dreamsmiths rampaged through the rainforests. Most died not from direct attack by the invaders, but from the diseases they brought, against which the native populations had no defence. Smallpox arrived in the New World in 1518, measles in 1530, typhus in 1546 and flu in 1558.

By comparison, the invaders got off rather more lightly in this clash of disease cultures. Only one major disease appears to have made it back to the Old World with the returning invaders: syphilis, which burst across the continent after French troops invaded the port of Naples in 1495. The disease claimed an estimated 10 million victims in the next fifteen years. This is a lot – but probably a small return for what happened unnoticed in the New World.