The Amazonia: Discovery, Colonisation, and Ecological Degradation

 

A World Hidden Inside the Woods

Mayan and Inca civilizations of the South and North Americas always evoke a mysterious charm, which also keeps hidden beneath it, the colonization and genocide that the native people of the Amazonia had to undergo through centuries. Both these civilizations emerged in their full glory around the 1400s and 1500s, but the sun set over them too soon, when the Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas. 

According to ‘The Handbook of South American Indians’, written in the late 1940s by J.H. Steward, the South American indigenous people can be broadly categorized into four groups- the nomadic hunter-gatherers, small farmers who lived in the farming villages inside the Amazon forest, irrigated cultivators of the Central Andes region, and the local chiefdoms of the Caribbean area. Steward was an anthropologist who concentrated his studies on the subsistence of people. He introduced to the world, the concept of cultural ecology.

Indigenous tribes' pre-history suggests their ancestors crossed an ice bridge from Siberia into Alaska about 25,000 years ago. It was only around 500 BCE that settled civilizations began to emerge in the Amazon region. Though it took 25,000 years for the South American civilizations to come of age, its destruction needed only one or two centuries to complete as the European colonizers reached this land of sun and rain.

Pedro Alvares Cabral

The year was 1494, just two years after Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Eager to pinion a strong rope to the New World, and take control of it, Spain and Portugal, united in marital ties, signed an agreement dividing the few American islands discovered so far, between them. What lies in store in the New World or to what extent the land extended, were facts still unknown. Columbus had just begun his third voyage to the North American continent. At that time, Pedro Alvares Cabral was a nobleman in King Manuel’s court in Portugal. In 1499, King Manuel put him in charge of a fleet of ships originally meant to voyage the sea route discovered by Vasco da Gama to reach India. By the hands of some tricky winds or human calculation error, this fleet reached the shores of Brazil, in 1500. Thus, Cabral became the discoverer of Brazil and the South American continent.

Daring the resistance from the Tupinamba Indians, a tribal sect of the native people, Portugal decided to build settlements there and become the sole trader of the precious redwood (dye-making raw material) to the world. Pan-brazil was the name of redwood in the Portuguese language. The newly found land was named after it. Soon, the redwood plantations spread eating up the rain forests as African slaves were brought in to establish and toil in them. After making landfall in Brazil, Cabral was not especially charmed by this new land but resumed his sea voyage to India. In those days, India was the much-coveted golden destination. Still, Cabral became the voyager who discovered South America, the land of the majestic Amazon rain forests. Unknowingly, Cabral also became the first European to set foot in the Amazon, as, in those days in South America, the forest began where the sea ended.

Francisco de Orellana: The First European to Travel Down the Amazon

In 1533, the legendary Francisco Pizzaro invaded the mighty and rich Peruvian Inca empire and defeated them through treachery. His was a Spanish inquisition mission aimed at converting and destroying the infidels for Christianity to spread its wings. Francisco de Orellana was a blood relative of Pizzaro and was among the 150-men-strong cavalcade Pizarro led. After the Inca conquest, in 1541, a team under the second command of Orellana was deputed by Gonzalo Pizzaro, the Governor of Quito, and the brother of Francisco Pizzaro, to look for Cinnamon forests near the Andes mountain ranges. After going deep into the forest, this team decided to travel further in a boat constructed then and there, through the Napo River, a tributary of Amazon. The food supplies were diminishing and this first voyage through the river was mostly in search of food.

In a strange twist of exploratory history, defying Gonzalo’s orders, the crew decided to row through the river until it reached the ocean. Maybe they were tired of the hardships the river and forest made them suffer; maybe, they longed for Europe where their families eagerly expected their return. Reaching the mouth of the river, Orellana and his team initially went to the Spanish island, Cubagua, and soon he sailed back to Spain. While navigating the river, the team encountered fierce Indian warriors who attacked them, and these attackers were sometimes led by native Indian women. The crew felt these fierce women warriors were from some Greek mythology as they remembered the Greek women warriors, the Amazons. Amazons were a women warrior tribe described in Greek mythology, and they were said to be at par with men in warfare and physical strength; no wonder Orellano and his friends named the mighty river and this fearsome forest, the Amazon.

The 17th and 18th Centuries

In 1637, the Portuguese Captain Petro de Teixeira navigated the full length of the Amazon River with his team. From the mouth of the river to the source of the river in the Andes mountains, the journey took them 2 years to complete. Meanwhile, European countries Spain, England, Portugal, France, and many more had already started warring with each other to gain control over the different trading pockets spread across Amazonia. The 1600 and 1700 expeditions revealed the presence of gold in some native tribal villages. This triggered a “gold rush” where many fortune seekers from Europe got themselves into a run for the yellow metal in Brazil. 

On the other side of this madness, came more ships from Africa bringing slaves in hundreds and thousands. The European settlers could expand agriculture in the region on a mammoth scale using these slaves. The native people often fought with their bows and arrows and knives against repression and the destruction and pillage of the forests. They held not even a minuscule amount of chance against the guns of the colonizers and were massacred across the continent. Within 150 years after Christopher Columbus stood on the northern part of this twin continent, the indigenous population numbers jumped from 70 million to a mere 3.5 million.

1911; Machu Picchu

Hiram Bingham III, a North American politician, academic, and explorer, discovered in the Peruvian forests the lost and forgotten Inca city, Machu Picchu in 1911. This city was situated on top of an 8000-foot-high mountain. Stunning and sophisticated architecture, extensive water supply and irrigation networks, and gorgeous gardens marked this ancient city, a religious hub of the Inca empire that once stretched about 4000 kilometres across the Amazon forests. The empire had a population of 10 million. When the Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro captured and killed the Inca king, Atahualpa, followed by the massacre of thousands of Incas, began the fall of that empire. Gold and the land of the Incas were grabbed from them without mercy or remorse.

Colonel Candido Rondon

In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by Colonel Candido Rondon, went on an expedition down an unexplored river in Brazil. Rondon was instrumental in laying telegraph wires through the Amazonia in a vast network of thousands of kilometres in the colonial state of Mato Grosso. Brazil as a country, was just taking shape, and this telegraph network linked Rio de Janeiro with the hinterlands of rural townships. Colonel Rondon was a legendary figure, known for making the first contact with many Amazonian Indian tribes. Rondon was an explorer who loved to communicate and study the indigenous people of Amazonia. He had a vision of Brazil that was united as one people and this vision included the indigenous tribes too.

However, in a country united by roads and a telegraph network built by Rondon, the United Fruits Company soon established banana plantations and brought migrant workers to labour there. The labourers, deprived of proper wages, food, water, and the slightest hint of dignity in life, went on a strike, only to be massacred by the army who colluded with the company and its thugs. In Aracataca, hundreds of labourers who fled the scene were caught and killed. This happened in 1928. In his book, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, Wade Davis narrates how Aracataca became Macondo, the imaginary magical place that exactly 49 years later, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garzia Marquis introduced to the world in his novel, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.'

The 1980s and the Steamroller of Development

Throughout the Amazonia, major human and commercial activities are limited to agriculture, mineral mining, and cattle rearing. Eyeing the treasure of natural resources, large companies have made big entries to the Amazon forests and river basins. These companies have upturned the livelihood and traditional lifestyle of the native populations, resulting in clashes between the companies and villagers. Minerals, land, oil, gas, and timber continue to attract plunderers to the region.

The government in Brazil colluded with the companies in exploiting natural wealth after it adopted the motto, ‘security and development’, in the 1960s. Under the claim of increasing food production and border security, the government encouraged the occupation of Amazonia by outside people and companies. From the 1950s, rubber plantations replaced vast stretches of pristine rainforests. With incentives, the government attracted private investment to develop the infrastructural facilities inside Amazonia and promoted permanent border settlements. The ecology of the forest suffered excessively under such varied pressures. The villagers who were traditionally self-sufficient farmers and gatherers turned into labourers, their subsistence at the mercy of their employers and companies. Researchers called this the official colonization of Amazonia.

The Amazon Rainforest

Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, is as big as the entire United States of America. A large chunk of these forest stretches falls within the borders of Brazil. Around 25-30 per cent of all the planet's known species are residents of this forest and the forest is rightly named, the lung of Earth. Amazon River is the second-longest river in the world, beaten in length only by the African Nile. Amazon’s width could expand up to 45 kilometres during the rainy season. The dark-coloured tributary, Rio Negro, the Xingu and Tapajos with their crystal-clear azure waters, and Madeira and Purus tributaries having white-coloured water, all merge with the mother river to become an incessant flow of white water. One could see a mirage of these colours dissolve into each other at the river mouths of these tributaries.

The Status of the Amazonians

Yanomamo, Wajapi, and Kayapo are a few tribal groups that still inhabit these forests. Instead of bows and arrows, they have now learned to hunt with guns, a gift from the outside civilization of settlers and colonizers. When the pressure on the land grew, these hunter-gatherer tribes adopted a sedentary lifestyle and shrunk their nomadic existence within the boundaries of crowded settlements. They live in the indigenous reserves demarcated by the governments of South America. Many of them make a living as tourist guides. Between the 1960s and 1990s, the non-indigenous population grew from 2 million to 20 million, while one-third of the indigenous tribes have gone extinct. Adding to the harm already done, the Peruvian government has opened up 72% of its Amazonian forests to oil and natural gas drilling.

The situation is the same in other South American countries. Some studies observe that wherever there are left-leaning governments in the region, those countries have adopted more environment-friendly and pro-indigenous people policies. However, the same studies warn that these governments generally favour mega infrastructure projects and mainstream development options just like their capitalist predecessors. They are rendered ineffective by a weak state apparatus.  That is the reality of almost all Latin American states.

Caught in the web of corporate interests and the apathy of weak nation-states, the Amazonia slowly withers away into wastelands and semi-urban industrial plots. 

References

The Handbook of South America Indians, by J.H. Steward

One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, by Wade Davis. 2014.

Explorers of the Amazon by Anthony Smith. 1990.

South America Indian People, Britannica.com.

Amazon People. WWF. https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/about_the_amazon/people_amazon/?

encyclopedia.com

A Brief History of Brazil, The New York Times Archives.

The Colonization and Occupation of Brazilian Amazonia by Henrique Rattner, In Agricultural Expansion and Pioneer Settlements in the Humid Tropics, Edited by Walther Manshard and William B. Morgan. 1985.

Candido Rondon, American Experience, pbs.org

Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil 1906-1930. By Todd A. Diacon.

Exploring the Amazon River, encyclopedia.com

Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism by Geoffrey W. Conrad and Arthur A. Demarest. 1984.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano. 1997.

The Destruction of the Inca Civilization by Alexis Burling, 2018.

The Amazon Rain Forest by Ann Heinrichs, 2010.

Indigenous People by Dave Lutz, Amazon Aid Foundation.

Environmental politics in Latin America: Elite dynamics, the left tide, and sustainable development. Edited By Benedicte Bull, and Mariel Cristina Aguilar-Stoen. 2015.