Trail of Feathers (23 page)

At least, I pondered, we were now steering a clear and definite course. I had come far on my haphazard route since the auction of shrunken heads: across the mountains, the desert, and into the jungle. I cautioned myself to have courage, and to take the jungle in my teeth. Soon, I hoped, we would meet the Shuar, and fly with them … and reach conclusions.

Francisco and Richard climbed up onto the
Pradera’s
roof and smoked another giant cigarette. The shaman thanked me for the food which, he said, was the best meal he had ever eaten.

This is for you,’ he said, taking a string of beads from his neck. I held them in the candlelight. They were curious, odd-shaped beans, flame-red on one side and black on the other. Richard explained that the beads were from the bean-pod of a jungle tree, and that shamans prize the spot where they fall to earth. There is no place, they say, more sacred to take
ayahuasca
.

They’re
wayuro
seeds,’ said Francisco. ‘You must wear them until you reach your home. They’ll protect you. Do not take them off.’

‘Why not?’

Francisco spat into the water.

‘Take them off and you will meet death,’ he said.

*

My first night on the Amazon was among the most uncomfortable I can remember. Part of the problem was getting used to the hammock. But far worse was the jungle night-life. The boat was tethered to a low-hanging tree in the early hours. I shone my torch into the water and made out the eerie orange reflection of alligator eyes. But the caimans were not an immediate danger, unlike the nest of furious hornets hanging above the boat. As they struck, we desperately untied the boat and sought a safer spot upstream.

Slouched in my hammock, I tossed from side to side, thinking about the entire food chain’s eagerness to consume me. As I tossed, the
wayuro
seed necklace choked me. I would not have taken the shaman’s threat seriously, but I’m a sucker for superstition.

Pulling my sleeping bag over my head, I prayed for daylight. But Cockroach’s
plat du jour
was surging through my intestines at an alarming pace. My bowels were warning of impending catastrophe. I had to relieve them without delay. In one distraught movement I unfurled myself from the sleeping-bag, put on my shoes, and shuffled down the boat.

Getting from my hammock to the loo involved a complex obstacle course. First, there were the hammocks, which criss-crossed the body of the boat like nets on a tennis court. After the hammocks lay the oil drums and water barrels, which had to be scaled. Beyond them was the Johnson 65, which was passed by walking a narrow plank of wood running beside it.

After the plank, you found yourself in a snug, faeces-caked corner alive with cockroaches. This assault course was made even more difficult by the lack of light, and the uncertainty of a rogue bowel. Once squatting in that vile privy, you had to avoid falling down through the hole into the water. Flick on the torch and you’d be dive-bombed by insects.

On that first night I made the sombre pilgrimage to the end of the boat five times.

Long before dawn, Cockroach began preparing breakfast. He switched on my yellow camping lantern and banged about with the pots. I think he wanted to show his enthusiasm for the job. Richard got everyone else up before 6 a.m. The Vietnam training must have had something to do with his insomnia. He disliked it when people slept too much. He’d sit on the roof all night, rocking back and forth in a chair, smoking Marlboros.

I unzipped my sleeping bag, and checked the air for insects. All was clear on the bug front, so I dangled my legs over the hammock’s edge and fumbled for my shoes. Rats had feasted on the left one in the night. I told Cockroach to get rid of the rats at all costs.

Up on the roof, Francisco was gulping down his second helping of tuna and jam casserole. He said he’d had good dreams. The river mermaids would leave us alone.

‘Mermaids?’

‘Si,
las sirenas
, the mermaids,’ he said, licking the bowl with his tongue. They are evil. But I will keep them away.’ 

‘What are they like, these mermaids?’

Francisco lit his pipe and looked over at me in surprise. I must have been the only person on the Amazon who didn’t know about the mermaids.

‘They have blonde hair and teeth made of gold,’ he said. ‘If they fall in love with you, they lure you to their kingdom under the water. You can never escape. There are so many fishermen who live down there.’

I asked Walter if he’d heard of the mermaids.

‘Por supuesto
, of course, Se
ñ
or,’ he said, ‘everyone knows of them. One of the fishermen who worked on this very boat fell in love with
la rein a de la sirenas
, the queen of the mermaids. She sent hundreds of fish for him to sell, then she took him.’

‘Where is he now?’

Walter pointed over the edge.

‘Ah
í
 abajo
, down there,’ he said.

Every so often we passed a cluster of thatched houses set back from the water’s edge. Children skipped through the grass, their mothers ground clothes against the rocks; their fathers checked the fishing nets. They used green nets at night and white ones during the day, as the latter reflected the moonlight, making them visible to fish.

The main body of the Amazon carried an endless stream of flotsam. Entire tree trunks and branches frequently careered towards us. I had been keen to travel by day and by night, but the risk of running into a submerged tree trunk made night travel very hazardous indeed.

Walter said we had already got through ninety gallons of petrol, and that we’d have to load up with more at Nauta. It was impossible for so much fuel to have been used in less than a day of travel, but I couldn’t prove any wrongdoing. When we reached the small village of Nauta in the early afternoon, I said I would spend my remaining money on petrol. After that it was Walter’s job to get us to the Pastaza and back. I passed around my empty wallet. If we ran out of fuel up river we would all suffer.

Richard told me that pilfering supplies on a jungle expedition was considered as a perk. César, he said, had bought nineteen sacks of merchandise for a reason.

‘You’d find a few cans of tuna missing here, a sack of salt or a load of soap there,’ he said, ‘and before you know it you’d have nothing left. César would have had it all skimmed off and sold en route.’

The theft of supplies has been the bane of expeditions for centuries. When Stanley, the 19th century explorer, set off on his great African voyages, he’d take enough food and supplies to sink a ship. He knew very well that within months, even days, eighty per cent of the stocks would have disappeared. Only a regime of total ruthlessness, he said, could prevent failure. Any man found stealing was slapped in chains and fed on gruel. Taking Stanley’s example, I proclaimed that anyone found stealing would be left on the river-bank.

While waiting for fuel at Nauta, I sent Cockroach to spend my last ten
soles
on a high quality mosquito net. The one I’d brought from London was no good for the Amazon, where anopheles mosquitoes are unusually small.

When we had loaded aboard 430 gallons of fuel, Walter climbed into the pilot’s seat and started the engine. A crowd came to the quay to see us off. It was made up of Nauta’s football team, dressed in their blue and green strip, five or six prostitutes from the local bar, and a class of schoolchildren. One of the kids ran down to the boat and handed me a chicken as a gift.

I stayed on the roof for most of the morning. The Amazon had become the Maranon. Near Nauta the Ucayali River merges with the Maranon to form the Amazon proper. It has 2,300 miles to run before reaching the Atlantic. The water had already travelled so far from the snow-capped Andes that its reserves of oxygen were depleted. As a result, some species of fish had adapted. We saw them jumping out from the river to breathe the air. One large fish even jumped onto the deck. I said we should throw it back. But Walter took it down below where Cockroach was cooking a great pot of bony stew. The fish was cleaned and tossed in. I couldn’t understand how the crew could so enjoy such disgusting smelling fare.

‘This is much better than that tuna fish,’ said Francisco. ‘It’s fresh food. We like
fresh
food.’

When I asked Cockroach what he’d cooked up, he pointed at my feet.

‘Las ratas que se comieron sus zapatos
. The rats which ate your shoes,’ he said.

*

From the roof of the
Pradera
there was a fine view of the jungle. The trees were laden with creepers, their overhanging branches shrouded in moss and lichens. God knows how far back the undergrowth extended. It was as alien to me as it must have been to the Spanish Conquistadors when they first sailed up the Amazon, four and a half centuries before.

The plants, the animals, and the people they found, defied all that the Spanish understood. They had come in search of El Dorado, a fictitious metropolis, rumoured to be made from gold.

They had heard the legend of a great monarch, called El Dorado, whose kingdom lay in the Andean Cordillera, in what’s now Bolivia. At festivals, he would adorn his naked body with gold dust, before washing it off in Lake Guatavita. As he bathed, his adoring subjects would scatter jewels and sacrificial offerings into the water. From 1538, the Spanish combed the area, but found no trace of El Dorado. For some insane reason they moved the search to the New World’s most inaccessible region, the Amazon jungle.

At the same time as the frenzied search for the golden city was taking place, the Conquistadors came upon another legend. Francisco de Orellana was travelling down the Amazon River in 1542 when his party was attacked, he said, by an army of wild women, wearing grassy Hawaiian-type skirts. The Greek poet Homer had been the first to record the myth of a ferocious tribe of female warriors, known as Amazons. They were thought to reside in the Caucasus. But over the centuries the myth moved westward. Some said the Amazons lived in Scythia and Cappadocia, then Africa and, after that, the Americas. Of course we now know that Orellana wasn’t attacked by warrior women at all, but men in grass skirts.

When Orellana reported to Phillip II of Spain, the King assumed he’d been attacked by the Amazons he had read about in Herodotus’s narrative. Accordingly, he named the waterway after them, and not Orellana.

With their armour, horses and heavy weaponry, the Spanish must have been a hopeless sight in the jungle, a place they knew as
El Infiero Verde
, The Green Hell. Hundreds were struck down by terrible diseases and were left where they collapsed. Around them the jungle seethed with life, waiting to devour those who survived. The imaginations of tortured European minds ran wild. Few expected to escape with their lives. Cannibals and poison arrows were just two of many fears. No one had ever seen people as savage.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s work
The Discoverie of the large, rich and bewtifal Empyre of Guiana
contains a startling woodcut illustration of two headless figures, with faces on their chests. Raleigh said they were ‘Ewaipanoma’ people, whose ‘eyes were in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.’

Such legends persist. In her book
Witch-Doctor’s Apprentice
, Nicole Maxwell wrote of a common belief - that the USA was conspiring to take Indians from the jungle. Their bodies were melted down, and their fat, which was skimmed off, was taken away as a key ingredient in making atomic weapons. The practice, she said, was known in Peru as
Pishtao
. Maxwell’s book was first published in 1961, about the time when nuclear weapons were on everyone’s minds.

But she links the story to a much earlier legend. In the 16th century, lard was used to polish the Spanish armour, to ensure that rust didn’t set in, especially important for soldiers in a tropical climate. One tale, passed from generation to generation, told how the Conquistadors were unable to find any pigs to make lard. Instead, they captured some Indians, killed them, and melted down their corpses to obtain fat. I was impressed that the legend could have continued for more than four hundred years, transmuting over time.

When Cockroach had finished washing out his cooking pot, I asked him if he’d ever heard tales of Indians being boiled up for fat.

‘Yes, it is true,’ he remarked earnestly, ‘my mother told me when I was a child not to go in the jungle after dark. She said the
Sendero Luminoso
, the Shining Path, took children and boiled them up. They dipped their bullets in the fat.’

Two days further up the River Amazon we reached New York.

Despite the ambitious name, it was little more than a collection of thatched long-houses, with a tin-roofed church. The hamlet was a short distance north-west of the Maranon, up the River Tigre. We got down onto the muddy river-bank and greeted the chief. He was a fragile looking man with rounded shoulders and a pronounced limp. I told him we were going to the Pastaza, in search of the Birdmen.

‘A Shuar man used to live near here’ he said, ‘in a
maloca
in the jungle. But he disappeared, about three months ago.’

New York was arranged around a square of grass, at one end of which stood a home-made goal post. Most villages we visited were laid out in a similar way, with a football pitch in the middle. All Amazonian men were football mad. On the Tigre, Sunday-best no longer consisted of feathered capes and grassy skirts, but of a Manchester United football strip. No one asked why I, who had so much, didn’t wear football gear all the time. But I knew that in their heart of hearts they were desperate to know.

The chief said he would take us to the Shuar’s
maloca
, but first he directed us to his own home. It had a raised bamboo floor, open sides, and a densely thatched roof. His hunting dogs sounded the alarm as we approached, but with a whistle he called them to heel. Three or four stools were borrowed from neighbours’ houses. Thanking the chief, Richard, Francisco and I sat down. Cockroach and Walter had instructions not to leave the
Pradera
under any circumstances.