Following her adventurous grandfather's footsteps into the Amazon rainforest, Jessie Grimond spots rare river dolphins and red monkeys on an intrepid volunteer trip
"The beam, reaching out over the black water, picks up two specks of sultry red: his eyes. Our bows swing to them; the paddle bites the water silently. The two specks do not move; we gauge his size by the distance between them.
Soon we are very close, and still he waits for us, giving no sign of fear or fury... Our torch shines down into those smouldering, ineffectual eyeballs...
Literary precedent demands that he should charge and upset the canoe, as he very easily could; common sense dictates submersion. The alligator takes neither course.”
From Brazilian Adventure (1933) by Peter Fleming
Three quarters of a century, a world war and a man on the moon apart, I found myself, on a tributary of the Amazon in Peru, looking through my grandfather’s eyes, The wire noose glided with our bow until it swooped over its snout, grabbing the creature by its neck, and hauling it thrashing into our midst. Trussed and transfixed, we laid it across the boat’s bench.
Our episodes ended differently – my grandfather’s with the crack of a rifle. Mine with a weighing scale, a tape measure and a slightly soggy piece of paper on which I noted the alligator’s (more accurately, the caiman’s) vital statistics before returning it to the water.
I signed up as a volunteer on a scientific trip down the Peruvian Amazon lured by the prospect of so many animals. Some, I hardly knew existed: pink river dolphins, 2m-long otters, capybaras and manatees. Our expedition set out to measure these animals’ populations and how much they are threatened by hunting and the timber trade.
But there was also a piece of family history on my mind. At 25, my grandfather, Peter Fleming, saw an ad in The Times looking for people to join an expedition exploring the rivers of central Brazil. It aimed to find out what happened to Colonel Fawcett, an explorer whose disappearance in 1925 had become a popular mystery. It also aspired to map uncharted parts of Brazil. And it was a shooting trip. He signed up.
If my treads did not fit his footprints perfectly – I was bound for Peru and not Brazil – I would be travelling by water through a region of the Amazon roamed, swung and swum by the same animals he saw. It would be a link to a man who died before I was born.
His expedition succeeded only in its final objective – the shooting. But the book he wrote about it, Brazilian Adventure, shot my grandfather to fame (long before his brother Ian sketched out the spy who would make him the more famous). It was the start of a long career of travel writing, but one that coincided with the waning of the era of adventure.
Flying in to the Amazonian port of Iquitos, the forest had been mightily impressive. Below the plane lay a vast blanket of bubbling trees with the river’s doodling signature stamped across it. All those peculiarly romantic geographic terms sprang to mind – meanders, oxbow lakes, riffles.
I was bound for these waterways aboard the Ayapua, once a paddle steamer, built in Germany in 1906. She was brought to the Amazon, along with caviar and opera, as money from the rubber trade suddenly flooded the region in the early 20th century. It was to be a brief rush that had faded by the time my grandfather arrived. But it was enough to leave an enduring stamp on the region’s riverbanks.
Now, newly restored in red and white livery, the Ayapua cut through the same waters she’d first embarked on a century ago. Leaving behind brassy Iquitos and its primary-coloured market, she joined the trickle of traffic down the vast brown thoroughfare, the shade of a Starbucks caramel mocha.
As we drifted, I played at measuring the river’s width in football pitches – up to a handful of them, the biggest river in the world. Arriving at the Araguaya River, my grandfather had been similarly awestruck:
‘Forty feet below was the river: a river half a mile wide and more: a river so big, so long expected, and so phenomenal in every way that it hardly seemed possible to have come upon it so suddenly, to have had no more warning that it was waiting for us around the corner of those palms than we should have had of a dog’s dead body in the road: a river fired and bloody in the sunset: a river that we loved instantly, and learnt at last to hate. We gaped at this river. There was exultation in the air.’
And there was something of that atmosphere on board the Ayapua in our first days. We scoured the riverbanks with our binoculars in our eagerness to spot the exotic-sounding birds of the field guides – the long-tailed tyrant, the black-eared fairy or the umbrellabird. The hours started fruitlessly with just a few scudding kingfishers rewarding our efforts. But gradually the sightings grew more exotic.
Shrieking blue-and-yellow macaws flew over our heads; vast, iridescent morpho butterflies could be spotted from miles away flapping at the banks. Once, under the giant dangling teardrops of oropendola birds’ nests, we caught a tree being shaken up by a group of monkeys.The journey of more than 320km, four days’ sailing by day and night, landed us at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Lago Preto Reserve. Its remoteness is hard to describe without feeble mentions of mobile phone black holes or countries the size of Luxembourg. It was remote enough that at least one group of indigenous people is able to live in the forest in total avoidance of outsiders’ attempts to contact them. We pulled into the riverbank, at the forest’s toe.
My grandfather had described it as ‘ghostly and smoking, a riot of spare or opulent silhouettes staggering to the water’s edge’. And it was.
As soon as we arrived, the Ayapua came under attack – from ants. We had moored up against a tangaran, a tree that has a symbiotic relationship with a colony of ants, where the tree sustains the ants in return for protection. In this case their attack backfired, and we hacked off any branches that reached onto the boat.
The group aimed to collect information on several species, but particularly the bald, stumpy tailed red uakari. It may be blessed with all the beauty of an alcohol-soaked Scotsman but, the rarest of the 13 species of primate in the area, it’s becoming a flagship species for wildlife conservation.
In its pursuit, we made ungainly forays into the forest, crunching and clambering through the undergrowth, batting mosquitoes and swabbing sweat. From the ground rose the smell of monkeys and mud, and suddenly orchids. Occasionally the crash of a shallow-rooted tree falling interrupted the wolf whistle of the screaming piha bird.
I tried to scour the canopy for movement, but my eyes were always pulled downwards, to direct my feet over some forest debris – a boot-swallowing patch of mud or an ant-bearing tree trunk.
One of our field guides bore a cover illustration: in it, squirrel and howler monkeys swung through the trees, bats clung to the trunk, and a sloth hung from a branch above anteater, tapir and capybara. We didn’t really expect this sort of family photo, but after days of anticipation, we were slightly offended when the animals didn’t at once present themselves for introduction.
Inevitably they showed up when we didn’t expect them – the jaguar fixed fleetingly in the torchlight as we looked for caimans; the giant otters that swam by the macaw group; the translucent tree frog that landed on my wrist as I pulled a branch away from the canoe; the giant anaconda that surfaced tangled in the fish nets.
We even found our red uakaris, the big, ginger monkeys leaping in the trees from bough to bough as if on trampolines. As we stood quietly gaping, a group rushed over, filing into a tree in front of us. Each craned to see us from the crook of a branch. We scribbled down their numbers, ages, distances. I had little doubt they logged us too, reporting back to their troop the strange spectacle of the ugly, hairless, pink monkeys they’d seen in the forest.
My grandfather travelled in the last gasp of an era of adventure. He parodied its conventions and its language. Nonetheless the embers were still glowing of an explorers’ world peopled by ‘savages’, white hunters and missionaries, and prowled by fearsome animals.
I’d wager ‘Amazon’ is more often linked with ‘Harry Potter’ than with ‘piranha’ on Google.
I don’t think my grandfather would have heard of conservation. He was a keen naturalist, but game was his, well, game: ‘Most people hold the alligator in awe; nor is it difficult to see why. For here is the last of the dragons, a creature old in evil, of secret ways, living in noisome places; armoured, baleful, and as ugly as Miltonic sin... Alas, the alligator is a fraud... Of the many we killed, few did not die tamely... We acquired so great a contempt for these unenterprising creatures that, after we had killed well over one hundred in a month, we almost gave up shooting them.’
Exploration in the Amazon is now a scientific, rather than geographical, realm. The clinical language of ecology, biodiversity and sustainability has subsumed the drama of the adventure books and the new explorers are an altogether less romantic breed. But while the jungle is not yet all felled, and not all the animals extinct, the conservationists are trying to preserve the hostility of that world the explorers saw and prevent a frontier becoming just a resource.
