Travel in the Amazon |
“Buy
yourselves hammocks before you get on the ship.”
This is the Amazon, more different from the rest of
Brazil than the rest of Brazil is from Europe or America. There are
no roads here, only rivers, one has to travel by ship. Ships have a
few cabins but most of the passengers just hang their hammocks from
the ceilings above the decks. This is what one sees most of the time
when one travels in Amazon – hammocks dangling everywhere.
Everybody brings their own hammocks and we – just arrived from
Europe – have to buy them before we go. In Manaus there is a whole
street of shops where one can buy hammocks. Various hammocks:
expensive and cheap, heavy and light, made of different materials and
of all possible colours. They are folded on shelves or hanging from
the ceiling, one can check whether they are nice to touch. We have
been advised to buy big and comfortable hammocks because we'll be
dangling in them for several days.
Finding a ship that goes in the right direction is
another problem. Timetables don't exist here, one has to go to the
right quay (one has to know which one is the right one) and ask
around: which of the ships moored there goes where, on which day, at
what time. Tickets are purchased an a table standing at the quay.
Having purchased the ticket one gets a band around the wrist and can
board the ship. Having entered one has to find a place to hang a
hammock. Decks on Amazonian ships are spacious and always have a roof
under which there are rails and hooks especially for hammocks. During
holidays before the New Year ships are especially crowded and only
with difficulty we find room for our hammocks on the uppermost deck.
All around us people with copper coloured skin, whole
multi-generational families. Amazing how young some of the mums are,
they seem to be teenagers, but they look after their babies as they
should. They breastfeed in their hammocks taking no notice of the
people around.
Almost all the passengers have copper coloured skin and
Indian features but officially they are not Indians. Officially there
are no Indians living on the shores of the Amazon River. They are not
called “Indios” but “caboclos”, or “river people”.
Our
journey from Manaus to Tefé
lasts three days. This could be shortened if someone is in a hurry
and has a lot of money. This applies to the Western tourists who have
short holidays and want to visit Mamiraua National Park. This is the
park that covers the part of the jungle regularly flooded by rising
waters of the river and tree trunks stand in the water. This is the
habitat of the famous uakari monkey that has white fur and red face.
For those tourists in a hurry a special floating hotel has been
built. The tourists fly to Tefé,
from the airport they go by taxi directly to the port, from which
speedboats take them to the floating hotel and local guides show them
the secrets of the jungle. After a couple of days they speed back to
the airport without stopping at Tefé.
Inhabitants of Boca de Mamiraua |
The
local guides are caboclos who lived there for generations. They have
copper-coloured skin and Indian features but they arenot Indians.
They not daft either. They figured out that if they can work as
guides for tourists who pay a lot of money to stay in a floating
hotel, they probably can welcome other tourists, who have a little
less money but a little more time. They can welcome these tourists in
their own casa
de caboclo,
or “caboclo home”. This is exactly what the inhabitants of a
village called Boca de Mamiraua decided to do. And this is where we
decided to go.
Boca de Mamiraua
lies at the very edge of an inland delta between Japura and Solimoes
rivers. This inland delta is a flat area full of canals and islands
that are flooded every year but are covered in dense forest. Houses
in the village have to stand on high stilts as here nobody can say
they didn't expect the flood. Sometimes there is more water than
usual and the first floor of the houses are flooded, too. Only some
houses have a second floor and in times of exceptionally high water
they have to house not just one family but also the neighbours. The
church standing in the middle of the village is of course also on
stilts. In Boca de Mamiraua it is an evangelical church where music
is accompanied by electric guitars. It must be interesting to hear a
reading about Noah when the church is up to its neck in water.
Kitchen gardens with onions and dill are in boats filled with soil
and placed on stilts, high above the ground. There is a little manioc
field behind the village but it has to be harvested before the next
flood, not as in other Amazonian villages, where manioc is harvested
whenever needed, all year round. Fish, on the other hand, are
plentiful always. And what fish! A pirarucu can be as big as a grown
man. It cannot be eaten at once, it has to be cut into sheets and
dried like washing in the sun, which is also plentiful. Later the
dried fish-sheets can be sold in Tefé. Fish of this size cannot be
angled, it has to be speared and still jumping in anger pulled into a
canoe. This is the Indian way of fishing, although the inhabitants of
Boca de Mamiraua claim they are caboclos, not Indians.
Fish hung out to dry |
Fish and manioc are
staple foods in Amazonia. In Tefé on the market square one can eat a
freshly fried piranha in an open air kitchen. Whole families work in
those kitchens, including teen-age children. In one of them a
teen-age helper sat to eat with us. She looked wide-eyed at Justyna
and asked: “Where do such beautiful people come from?” I am of
course flattered when somebody speaks like that about my daughter but
I guess there is deeper meaning here. Justyna with her North-European
features and blond hair looks like a model from a fashion mag,
whereas the inhabitants of Tefé are of course not Indians at all,
but they do look like Indians.
Somebody told me
that there is a Polish priest in the cathedral of Tefé so I went to
the office there, started talking Polish and somebody answered; this
was father Piotr. Poles are not a common sight in Tefé, so we were
immediately invited for dinner. It was served by a lady of dark
complexion and clearly Indian features. Father Piotr told us that she
came from a village of Ticuna Indians but she is ashamed of it and
says that she is not an Indian. After all everybody in the town looks
like that.
A couple of days
later father Piotr took us to the village of Ipapuku on the other
side of the Lake Tefé. The village stands on higher ground, houses
don't need to be on stilts. The inhabitants say the are caboclos,
which means they consider themselves ordinary civilised Brazilians,
not Indians. They even have a flush toilet in one of the houses,
which is where I am led (quite far) when the need arises. The central
building of the village is a little church, neatly maintained even
though a priest comes only sometimes, once a few months. “I'll have
to come here once to celebrate a mass for them” said father Piotr
seeing the neat church. When we arrived the villagers were busy
producing granulated and roasted manioc. The procedure is exactly the
same as described by travellers who visited Indian villages deep in
the jungle, although here some mechanical implements were used to
make the work easier. Raw manioc was grated in a mincer and then
pressed into characteristic socks weaved from palm fibre. I have seen
socks like that in pictures from Indian villages in old travel books.
Manioc's poisonous juice is squeezed out in those socks. Afterwards
granules are formed inside a cylinder turned by hand. Later, the
granules are sieved to sort various sizes and finally roasted on a
huge pan.
Clearing the jungle in Ipapuku |
We were also shown a
manioc field. This is on a spot where forest was burned out a few
years earlier. Nearby, another spot is being burned out to make room
for another field when the present field becomes less productive.
This has been a time honoured economy of Amazonian Indians – a plot
of burned out forest was used for some years but when it became less
fertile – it was left fallow, then the forest returned while
another plot was burned out for agriculture.
Another
day father Piotr took me to a town called Alvaraes. He said that in
the 18th
century this was a famous slave market and actually this is what the
name means. This name is a witness of an important aspect of history
of this part of the world.
The Portuguese
didn't come to the New World to seek gold, as Spaniards did. The
Portuguese wanted to cultivate sugar which could be sold in Europe
for gold. They wanted to cultivate it but it does not mean they
wanted to do all the physical work themselves. The plantations were
to be worked by slaves. Some of the slaves could be brought from
Africa, bought from African princes on the coast of Guinea. The
earliest Portuguese sugar plantations were started on uninhabited
islands like Madeira and Cape Verde and were worked only by slaves
bought on African coast. The African slaves were also taken to Brazil
but considering costs of transport across the ocean, they weren't
cheap. On the other hand there were natives in Brazil, too. They
didn't have their own slaves to sell, as the African princes did, but
they had war prisoners which were captured in order to be tortured
and – if they proved that they were brave enough while tortured –
eaten, so some of that bravery would enter those who ate them. This
was of course a barbarous custom in the eyes of the Portuguese who
thought saving lives of these prisoners was a good deed. It wasn't
difficult to persuade the captors to part with their prisoners
because all Indians desired certain metal that the Portuguese
possessed. To obtain this metal they would not only part with their
prisoners but they would gladly go again on the war path to capture
some more.
Roasing manioc in Ipapuku |
The metal they so
badly desired had almost miraculous properties. With an axe made of
it one could cut a tree in almost no time at all, or split somebody's
head in a second. A knife made of it could easily cut meat or go
right into a heart of an enemy. Those who possessed this metal could
much easier win a war and bring some more prisoners whose lives could
be then saved in exchange of some more axes and knives.
Some
of those prisoners sold to white settlers were women. One can guess
that quite a lot of them were women as it was more difficult to catch
men because men tended to defend themselves. It was much simpler to
attack a village, kill men, bind women and children and take them
away. One can also guess that the white purchasers used those women
not only for hard labour. The result was a population of people of
mixed race and rooted in both cultures, who felt in the bush just as
much at home as in the white man's town. Soon it was those people who
organised expeditions into the interior to catch more prisoners. In
the 17th
century those expeditions, called bandeiras, were organised on a
regular basis and their participants, called bandeirantes, are today
considered discoverers of Brazilian interior. And the Amazon was an
open waterway into the interior.
It
is of course terrible that people who considered themselves
“Christians” behaved so badly. One has to remember, however, that
the people who considered “Christianisation” as a pretext of a
conquest are only one side of the story. In history of any country
there is a tension between gangsters who have power and independent
pressure group who tries to restrict the power of those who rule. In
the 16th
century Europe this taming pressure group was without doubt the
Church, both in Spain and Portugal it was the Roman Catholic Chuech.
In those days there was no police who could be called if a husband
mistreated his wife, but there was a priest who had no sanction but
the penance given at confession. There were no parliaments which
could restrict the power of kings but there were priests who who
reminded the kings that their power has to respect the message of
Gospels. The message of Gospels was that all people are children of
God and therefore cannot be enslaved and treated like animals.
A street in Tefe |
Priests followed
conquerors into colonies. The conquerors wanted to get rich but the
priests who followed were often members of of religious orders
committed to poverty, like Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits. These
people did not go to the colonies to get rich. They went there to
persuade the natives to stop practices which in Europe were not
considered appropriate, like torturing and especially eating
prisoners of war, or having more than one wife. They went there also
to protect the natives from the excesses of white colonisers. The
most famous of those was a Dominican friar, Bartolomeo de las Casas,
who wrote a book that was much discussed at the time. The most
influential missionaries in Brazil were the Jesuits. They were
influential at the highest levels of power, sometimes they even
managed to persuade kings to ban or at least restrict slavery. It
depended on the period because the sugar-planters were also
influential and at times managed to persuade the king to revoke the
anti-slavery laws. For most of the colonial period in Brazil it was
lawful to enslave prisoners taken in defensive wars or those who were
“ransomed” and thus saved from torture and death.
The Jesuits also
organised missions far from white settlements. In those settlements
they gathered the baptised peaceful Indians. In theory this was to
protect those Indians from slavers because the baptised Indians
weren't aggressive (so there could not be a “defensive” war
against them) nor did they eat any prisoners who could be “ransomed”
and saved from death. Unfortunately it did not always work because
for the bandeirantes the fact that Indians were God-fearing was of
little importance. What was more important was that many of them were
gathered in one place and if they weren't aggressive, they wouldn't
fight back. At certain periods the Jesuit missions were the main
targets of the bandeirantes. To justify their actions the
bandeirantes, as well as the planters, spread the word of the
supposed abominable behaviour of Jesuits in their missions. They kept
repeating their accusations so persistently that somebody in the end
believed them and as a result the Jesuits were banned from Brazil
after several centuries of work.
Is it surprising
then that in this situation the Indians preferred to say that they
are not really Indians? Whatever their origin, they preferred to
claim that they weren't Indians and should not be enslaved.
Especially if they were good Catholics, had a church in the middle of
the village and looked after it even though there was no priest
enywhere near.
Indians of Nova Esperanza |
The Indians who
lived by the Solimoes in the old days were called Cambeba by the
Portuguese and Omagua by the Spaniards. Early travellers noticed that
the unlike other Amazonian tribes the Cambeba did not walk around
naked but wore cotton clothes. They are also credited with the
discovery that hugely influenced the motor industry – they were the
first to find use for the juice of rubber trees. However, when the
Portuguese hunted slaves on the Solimoes the Cambeba moved upriver,
to the missions of Spanish Jesuits from Peru. So the sources say,
anyway. Other tribes found refuge in the upper courses of other
rivers, avoiding any contact with white people. They don't want any
iron tools and just to drive the point home they shoot poisoned
arrows at anyone who turns up in the vicinity of their villages. All
Indians vanished from the Solimoes, only a few caboclos stayed, and
caboclos, as everyone knows, are not Indians.
There
was one more person invited to dinner at father Piotr's when we were
there. This was brother Marius, a Polish Franciscan who lived in
Tefé. He also showed us around the town. He took us to the part of
the town which is regularly flooded and therefore all houses and the
paths leading to them are on stilts. He also took us to CIMI, or
Conselho
Indigenista Missionário,
which means
Indian Missionary Council. There we were welcomed by a group of young
people who do missionary work in this area. They were of dark
complexion like all other inhabitants of Tefé but unlike the others
the young people at CIMI admitted they were Indians. They said that
since the leftist government of Brazil found some funds specifically
for Indians, for example for education of their children, some groups
suddenly remembered that they were descendants of this or that tribe.
Sometimes they don't remember their tribal language, but so what? If
they are accepted as Indians, their village is declared an Indian
reservation where strangers can only enter with permission from the
government agency that is supposed to deal with Indians and make sure
they are safe. This is the case even if the village is no different
from a neighbouring caboclo village.
One
day we went with brother Marius in a Franciscan Land Rover to visit a
few villages in the vicinity. One of those villages stood on a high
shore over the Solimoes. A village as any in this area. Houses had
low floors because the land they were built on was well above the
regular floods. There was an impeccably maintained church in the
middle of the village. As we came there, some young people were
gathering, beautiful dark skinned girls, boys in sunglasses, they
were about to practice something. As we came, somebody ran to call
the touchan.
Brother Maruis said that if they are calling a tuchan,
this must be an Indian village, otherwise that person would be called
“a president of the village council” or something of the sort.
The church is Catholic and the villagers look after it but a priest
only comes once a year. Brother Marius asked of what tribe they were.
They said they were Cambeba and the village is called Nova Esperanza,
which means New Hope.
As
we were leaving the village I noticed a board at the entrance which
stated that this is an Indian Reservation and to enter one has to
apply for a permit from a government agency.
Fishing in Boca de Mamiraua |