Intro to the new edition of River of Darkness

It has been eleven years since the initial publication of River of Darkness, and while much remains seemingly timeless along the stunning waterways of the Amazon Basin, much has changed. The search for El Dorado (both as raw gold and in the form of the fabled golden man) by conquistadors like the Pizarro brothers and Francisco Orellana brought the first Europeans down the immense, 4,500-mile-long river system, but they would hardly be the last. The Spaniards set in motion a land and culture grab that would continue for the next four-plus centuries, up to the present day. El Dorado was real, as it turned out, just not in the way the conquistadors believed.

Threats to the region that existed when I first visited in 2008— by big oil, by eco-tourism, by encroachment on indigenous peoples, by deforestation and forest dehydration, by hydro-electric dams, by climate change—have only been exacerbated during the last decade. The importance of the Amazon Basin is hard to overstate: it contains sixty percent of the planet’s remaining tropical rainforest, a staggering one-fifth of the world’s fresh water flows through its colossal network of rivers, and it plays a significant role in determining global climate. With the re-release of this astounding adventure story of Francisco Orellana’s historic first descent from source to sea, it feels important and appropriate to revisit the unrivaled Amazon River and consider some of the existential challenges that continue to confront it, and to contemplate what hope might still exist to thwart or at least slow the ongoing degradation.

In May of 2008, while doing research for River of Darkness, I embarked on a three-week journey that would be among the most seminal and inspiring voyages of my life. I started in Quito, Ecuador, founded in the sixteenth century on the ruins of an Incan city and tucked between high Andes mountains that soar to thirteen thousand feet above sea level. I visited the archives, museums, and colonial buildings, literally catching my breath, acclimating to the elevation (at 9350’, it’s the second highest official capital city in the world—second only to La Paz, Bolivia) before my expedition to follow the route of the conquistadors over the mountains and down the Amazon.

I like to replicate—to the extent still possible—at least part of the journeys or voyages of the people that I’m writing about. It’s important for me to be there, on the ground, to sense the scale and scope, the sounds and sights and smells of the places I’m attempting to bring to life for the reader, sometimes hundreds of years after the events I’m depicting took place. The process of immersing myself in the landscape and among the people is the most exciting and rewarding aspect of my research. To describe Francisco Orellana’s historic first journey (by a European) from the stupendous Amazon River’s upper reaches in Ecuador all the way to its mouth where it spills into the Atlantic Ocean at Marajo Island in Brazil, it is essential to experience the flora, fauna, topography, and visceral feel of places like the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Basin.

The route of Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro (known as The Way of the Conquistadors) took me first up the steep eastern cordillera of the Andes on part of the old Inca Road to Papallacta Pass, at a breath- taking fourteen thousand feet. From there, the snow-capped Antisana volcano loomed high above the skyline, gleaming in the sunshine yet ominous with its immensity. After spending a day soaking my aching legs in the hot springs at Termas Papallacta, I descended through the Sumaco Forest Reserve and arrived at the oil-boom town of Coca, Ecuador, at the confluence of the Napo and Coca Rivers. Formally known as Puerto Francisco de Orellana—for it was from here that Orellana took to boats and started downriver—the city is considered the gateway to Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest.

Here I met José Shinguango, the guide who would take me by local ferry, then dugout canoe, through the Yasuni National Park and then 450 miles of river and rainforest travel to Iquitos, Peru, the terminus of my research voyage. After an eight-hour riverboat ride to Nuevo Rocafuerte, we transferred to a narrow, twenty-five-foot-long dugout canoe with a 40hp outboard motor and soon we were in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, designated as such by UNESCO in 1989. The unique tropical rainforest, located at the crossroads of the Andes Mountains, the Amazon, and the equator, has been called the most biodiverse place on the planet. The bioreserve sup- ports millions of species of plants, insects, amphibians, birds and mammals. José told me that though no one knows with certainty how Yasuni became so biologically diverse, the theory is that it’s the unique location coupled with low temperature variation and the historically high annual rainfall.

While cruising slowly through the park’s tributaries and Oxbow Lakes at water level, I saw resplendent scarlet macaws and yellow-throated tou- cans flying past overhead and watched with joy and awe as an Amazon River dolphin lolled and played up ahead, its greyish-pink skin striking against the calm, dark water of the lagoon. Beyond the waters, in the várzea amidst the giant Kapok and ceiba trees, I encountered furry taran- tulas the size of my fist and roaring, imposing howler monkeys.

Unfortunately, the wondrous Yasuni, home to the Waorani people, happens to sit on top of an estimated billion barrels of crude oil—nearly forty percent of Ecuador’s entire reserves. International Petroleum extraction companies including Texaco, Repsol (Spain), Agip (Italy), Sinopec (China), and state-owned Petroamazonas began drilling in and around Yasuni even before it was declared a national park and continue to do so today. Despite bold initiatives and proposals to protect the park— applauded by Western governments as enlightened environmentalism that would simultaneously conserve the rich biodiversity and curb global warming—big oil won out. Road building for at least four new drilling platforms were photographed and reported by Amazon Conservation (Conservation Amazonica) in June 2020, cutting through primary forests and encroaching on the so-called “Zona Intangible” (untouchable zone), a reserve created to protect the lands of the indigenous people (the Tagaeri and Taromenane) who remain voluntarily isolated. An oil spill of any magnitude in this region would be catastrophic.

Environmental organizations continue to fight, and the Waorani people have successfully won some lawsuits against the Ecuadorian government in recent years, but big oil may prove too big to thwart, unless global reliance on petroleum reduces drastically and very soon. It’s possible that concerted international movement toward electric vehicles—which is at least showing some impetus among the major automobile manufacturers worldwide—could slow drilling. So, I continue to hold out hope for the future, though it’s a tenuous hope.

To better understand what’s going on in the Amazon basin today, I recently talked with Alex Shoumatoff, a writer-explorer-conservationist extraordinaire who is an international treasure and a hero of mine. When I was doing my initial research for River of Darkness, I encountered his work for the first time and was enthralled. His 1986 New Yorker piece (“A Reporter At Large—Amazons”), on traveling up the Nhamunda River in Brazil spins the tantalizing story of the fierce Amazonian women warriors who, according to Orellana’s chronicler—the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal—attacked Orellana and his men. Alex Shoumatoff ’s handling of this story, weaving his personal journey into a kaleidoscopic tapestry of longform literary journalism, history, folklore, and socio-cultural reporting was revelatory, and I devoured everything he had written or would write thereafter. His fabulous 1978 book The Rivers Amazon became my go-to text during my research and writing of River of Darkness, and I keep my dog-earned and pencil-annotated copy on the bookshelf next to my desk today. Shoumatoff has been generous to me with his time and vast knowledge and over the years we’ve maintained a friendship, corresponding mostly via email and sometimes by phone. Oddly, we’re also bound in a very unconventional way, as members of an incredibly small club: Each of us, on separate assignments, got caught, cuffed, stuffed, and booked for trespassing at the Bohemian Grove near Monte Rio, California, but in both cases, it was worth it. His piece in Vanity Fair is excellent; and the episode I was filming for the HISTORY show DECODED had some of the series’ highest ratings!*

Alex Shoumatoff has devoted a great deal of time compiling his “Dispatches From the Vanishing World,” a website of his writings “ded- icated to documenting and preserving the diversity of life” on our planet, and especially the most pristine places remaining on earth. He’s devoted to, as he puts it, “identifying who and what is destroying them, and who is engaged in the heroic and often life-threatening struggle to save them.”† The Amazon is of course among these sacred places. In my recent con- versation with Alex, he alerted me to some of the most immediate and persistent threats to the region, of which there are sadly too many to list. Nearly all the menaces are caused by humans, and most can be attributed either directly or indirectly to climate change.

Deforestation (caused by slashing and burning of trees for cattle rais- ing, soy farms, palm oil, legal and illegal logging, road building, mining, and bulldozing for towns and so-called “colonization projects”) remains an ongoing problem. Since 1978, nearly half a million square miles of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed, an area about the size of Texas and California combined. Such dramatic forest loss matters since the Amazon’s immense water systems play a significant role in maintain- ing global and regional climate. The region has reached a slippery slope in which lost or destroyed rainforest gets replaced by more fire-prone savannah, which reduces water released into the atmosphere, which in turn produces higher regional temperatures, perpetuating the problem in a desiccating feedback loop. Long-term weather forecasts studied by the World Wildlife Fund predict that by the year 2050, average temperatures in the Amazon will increase by 2-3-degrees C., and this, coupled with deforestation, will result in decreased rainfall, longer periods of severe drought, and an eventual predicted 30-60 percent of the Amazon rain- forest being overtaken by dry savannah.*

According to Shoumatoff, of the myriad complex pressures on the Amazon, issues of great immediate concern are rainforest dehydration, encroachment on indigenous (and in some cases, uncontacted) peoples, and hydro-electric dams. Rainforest dehydration—significant reduction in water available to the plants, animals, and people—has reached alarm- ing levels. A decade of sustained mega-drought linked to global warming has resulted in decreased snowfall and retreating glaciers in the Andes, crucial to feeding the tributaries that drain into the Amazon Basin. It’s part of a global climate crisis that fewer and fewer people can ignore or deny with anything resembling a straight face.

For a variety of reasons, most of the approximately one hundred so-called “uncontacted” tribes of people left on earth live in the Amazon rainforest. “Uncontacted” is something of a misnomer—since despite the geographic isolation of the estimated eighty self-isolated tribes of people living in Brazil’s remote rainforests, it’s nearly impossible for them not to have seen (and been harassed by) airplanes, drones, helicopters, logging trucks, or nosy journalists looking for a story. I remember distinctly that when I finished my river voyage in Iquitos, Peru, back in 2008, I went online on one of my first days back to connectivity and I saw a dramatic series of aerial photos of members of a rainforest tribe in Acre, Brazil (bordering Peru), throwing spears and shooting arrows at the hovering craft. There was no misinterpreting their message: “Leave us alone.”

But being left alone to live in isolation, in their traditional ways, is becoming ever more difficult as industries like cattle ranching, logging, and hydroelectricity demand greater swaths of land and resources. The Enawene Nawe people, a small Amazonian tribe who live in the forests of the Mato Grosso state in Brazil, are a single emblematic example. They survive primarily by subsistence fishing in the Juruena River basin, important because they are one of the only tribes in the world who eat no red meat, so fish are their only source of protein. Their way of life has been severely compromised over the last decade due to cattle ranchers harvesting forests in their government-recognized tribal homeland. And even more dire, a series of proposed—and in some cases already under construction—hydroelectric dams upstream of their lands, on the Juruena River, threaten their fishery by disrupting migratory patterns and alter- ing the natural flow of the river system. The proposed Castanheira plant would irreparably damage the area by turning it into a sprawling hydro- electric complex, flooding out and destroying numerous riverside villages.

Despite the best efforts of crusaders like Sigourney Weaver, who along with Amazon Watch raised the alarm about the proposed Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in Brazil back in 2009-10, the third largest hydro- electric dam in the world was ultimately completed and opened in 2016. Controversial from the beginning, the costly and massive three-dam system proved an abject environmental and human rights disaster, displacing close to fifty thousand indigenous and traditional people who were forced to abandon their homes and their fishing livelihoods.* The Belo Monte dams also irreparably damaged Xingu’s aquatic ecosystem, reducing the river’s flow by as much as eighty percent, depleting fish stocks, and causing defor- estation. The tragic irony is that in the end, after all the socio-cultural and environmental devastation, because of climate change-induced drought, the dams don’t produce anywhere near the electricity promised! On numerous occasions, Norte Energia, the dam’s operator, has been forced to shut down the turbines because of drastically low water flows on the Xingu.The whole affair has been a multi-billion dollar boondoggle whose consequences will be felt by the people and the land for generations.

I must admit that before I visited the Amazon myself, the place, its importance, and its wonders were abstractions to me, just images and ideas. But going there changed me. Sleeping in a hammock deep in the flooded forests, hearing the timeless rush of the river and the whirrs and chirps of insects and birds harmonizing in weirdly soothing symphony, I felt a connection to a wild place deeper than any I had ever experienced— or have since. El Dorado, it occurs to me now, is real. But it’s not the gold the conquistadors sought, or the mythical golden man, or some city of gold. It’s the golden Amazon itself, the whole magnificent place and its people, and it is no longer for the taking. It has already been found, and enough has been taken.

Now, it’s time to do the work of saving what remains.

The true story you are about to read illustrates what the Amazon was like in 1541-42. It will never look that way again, but I tried to get as close as possible to describing the pristine, wondrous, mystical and at times terrifying place that existed when the Spaniards first encountered it. Remembering it as it was helps me to imagine how it could still be.

Buddy Levy Moscow, Idaho September 2021

To learn more about threats to the greatest rainforests on earth, and to help, check out the following organizations:

Amazon Watch https://amazonwatch.org
The Amazon Conservation Team https://www.amazonteam.org Amazon Aid Foundation https://amazonaid.org
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/ Dispatches From The Vanishing World http://www.dispatchesfromthe

vanishingworld.com
Mongabay https://www.mongabay.com
Survival International https://www.survivalinternational.org International Rivers https://www.internationalrivers.org
Rainforest Trust https://www.rainforesttrust.org/about-us/ Rainforest Action Network https://www.ran.org/mission-and-values/

* Alex Shoumatoff ’s Vanity Fair story “Bohemian Tragedy” appeared in the magazine’s May 2009 issue and can still be found online. The DECODED episode I was filming, “Secret Societies,” in which we were trying to uncover rumors of ritual sacrifice and secret agreements controlling the lives of everyday Americans, aired on January 27, 2011, and is still available at HISTORY.com and on YouTube.

† From Dispatches From the Vanishing World http://www.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com

*https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats /climate_change_amazon/

* According to Brazilian regional nonprofit, Xingu Vivo. https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02 /belo-monte-legacy-harm-from-amazon-dam-didnt-end-with-construction/

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon is available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.