In Amazonia (18 page)

O
N THE
N
ATURE OF
G
UIANA

When Ralegh claimed that nowhere else on earth was there such a confusion of streams, “the one crossing the other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take,” it was not an excuse for his disarray. Rather, he was underscoring difference to emphasize his ultimate achievement in overcoming it. Yet, in this passage and in many others like it, what Ralegh succeeds in conveying above all is the radical and protean otherness of Guianan nature. Rhetorically, on the heels of a long and scholarly preamble appealing for investment and patronage on the basis of the failures of previous El Dorado expeditions, what he offers is a characteristically self-defeating contradiction, one that undermines his own strategic interests. Because why should an investor risk dearly held capital to enter a world of such prodigious unpredictability?

American nature was psychically as well as physically unsettling. New nature demanded new vocabulary.
Waterfall, cataract, lagoon, whirlpool, swamp, hurricane, tornado
, and
thunderstorm
all entered the English language in the first hundred years of exploration.
¹⁰³
Ralegh gropes for neologisms, twisting existing terms to fit unfamiliar phenomena. Words, literally, fail him. He settles on
overfals
, “the turbulent meeting of contrary currents,” to capture what we now recognize as the spectacular Caroní Falls. But his usage will not survive past 1613.
¹⁰⁴

New referents demanded new signifiers. Peter Hulme has traced the steady displacement of the English vernacular “tempest” by “hurricane,” from the Arawakan
hurakan
. The English language seemed incapable of describing such alien terror, only the American word would do. The hurricane was “an attribute of native savagery, a fact confirmed by its tendency of attacking … the marks of civility: the building of towns
and the practices of tillage and husbandry.”
¹⁰⁵
The otherness of such phenomena was only meaningful when tied to its geographical and human context. It was through such congruencies and correspondences between the natural and the human that Ralegh and his contemporaries found order in their pullulating world, and regulated—E.M.W. Tillyard's word is “tamed”—the anomalies of New World nature.
¹⁰⁶
Yet Ralegh consistently avoids the negative conflation of human and natural menace. Rather than between European and native, his principal arenas of conflict in Guiana are those between English and Spanish, and between humans—English, Spanish, and native—and nature.

The unpredictable logic of this nature is at times unfathomable to the European traveler. Tides, currents, islands, winds, rains, and hills circumscribe travel and open its potentialities. But they do so firmly on their own account, not as embodiments of human difference. Looking through the eyes of his native pilots, Ralegh sees a landscape that is intensely mercurial, as frequently inimical as it is harmonious. Even at its most familiar, this animate New World remains more exotic than the indigenous Guianans with whom he is able to converse and whose signs he can claim to interpret. This nature, he knows, is profoundly meaningful, but too often its meanings elude him, to the point that his entire enterprise is under threat.

The heightened imaginative pitch of the opening scenes on the Orinoco establishes a tension between the invaders and nature that Ralegh never fully succeeds in ordering. Although he manages to acquire a knowledgeable pilot, he can never relax because “many times the old man himselfe was in great doubt which river to take.”
¹⁰⁷
The traumatic crossing of the estuary shakes Ralegh's confidence, and
The Discoverie
is peppered with commentary on the punishments he and his men endure from waters and climate. It is a struggle that continues right up until their nail-biting departure from the delta:

[W]hen we were arrived at the sea side then grew our greatest doubt, and the bitterest of all our journey forepassed, for I protest before God, that wee were in a most desperate estate: for the same night which we ancored in the river of
Capuri
, where it falleth into the sea, there arose a mighty storme, and the rivers mouth was at least a league broad, so as we ran before night close under the land with our small boates, and brought the Galley as neere as we could, but she had as much a doe to
live as coulde be, and there wanted little of her sinking, and all those in her.
¹⁰⁸

Much like the storm through which Shakespeare was to deposit Antonio, Ferdinand, and the rest on Prospero's Island in
The Tempest
(1611), Ralegh's bracketing of his time on the Orinoco in this way is an effective device to dramatize the distinctiveness of the New World. Like those of Shakespeare's shipwrecked Italians, the torments undergone by Ralegh and his men pervade the narrative, potent auguries that enliven natural phenomena and bring them to life as actors, center stage in the drama of discovery, a nature that colonizes consciousness and manipulates mortality.

Such anxiety here. Part stems from the enforced dependence on local people that these unnerving natural conditions create. Three days after capturing their new guide, a man familiar with this stretch of the river, their galley hits a sandbar. They haul it off and press on. But the next day finds them rowing hard against the swiftly running current:

[W]e had then no shift but to perswade the companies that it was but two or three daies worke, and therfore desired them to take paines, every gentleman and others taking their turns to row, and to spell one the other at the howers end…. When three daies more were overgone, our companies began to despaire, the weather being extreame hot, the river bordered with verie high trees that kept away the aire, and the currant against us every daie stronger than other: But we evermore commanded our Pilots to promise an end the next daie, and used it so long as we were driven to assure them from fower reaches of the river to three, and so to two, and so to the next reach: but so long we laboured as many daies were spent, and so driven to draw our selves to harder allowance, our bread even at the last, and no drinke at all: and our men and our selves so wearied and scorched, and doubtfull withall whether we should ever perform it or no.
¹⁰⁹

These are desperate straits. Weak from hunger and heat, Ralegh is reduced to pleading with his men to keep going lest “the worlde … laugh us to scorne.”
¹¹⁰
At this moment of despair, suddenly, unannounced, Guianan nature shows its other face:

On the banks of these rivers were divers sorts of fruits good to eate, flowers and trees of that varietie as were sufficient to
make ten volumes of herbals, we releeved ourselves manie times with the fruits of the countrey, and sometimes with foule and fish: we saw birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orenge tawny, purple, greene, watched [pale blue], and of all other sorts both simple and mixt, as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the reliefe we founde by killing some store of them with our fouling peeces.
¹¹¹

This is the first intimation Ralegh gives us that nature in Guiana can be as paradisaical as it is nightmarish. It is a decisive moment, but hardly unexpected. One unspoken premise of the voyage to Guiana has always been “the literalization of the celestial Jerusalem” in El Dorado's gilded hallways.
¹¹²
This, of course, is merely one migration of many in this period: Berrio has moved El Dorado from the upper Amazon to Guiana; Montaigne's natural savage has relocated to Brazil from Cicero's Scythia and Tacitus' Germany; and, here, with Columbus and Ralegh, Mandeville's missing paradise of the east finds an American home.
¹¹³
What is significant is the need to fix these places geographically as well as imaginatively, to find in them objects of exploration, discovery, and possession. Ralegh, we know, consistently comes up short of his stated goal and must always resort to finding substance in the mostly inconsequential. He does not discover El Dorado or even its outliers. He fails to secure meaningful alliances, and the meager treasure with which he returns nowhere approximates the cost of his voyage. But there are numinous moments in
The Discoverie
when he comes close to finding earthly paradise.

It is not just an image of effortless plenty in the above passage; it is the experience of surfeit, thrilling for minds that find science in the blatantly sensuous (
ten
herbals!). And at the very moment the writing convinces that all human needs could be met right here, Ralegh organizes a reconnaissance party and they are off once again—this time to a village where the pilot has told them they can find more familiar foods: “bread, hens, fish, and … countrey wine.”
¹¹⁴
Having reached this enchanted place after such suffering, they leave so soon; despite its abundance such exotic nature is inadequate—an early anticipation of Buffon's thesis on the inferiority of the Americas. The Eden of Ralegh's imagination will be more pastoral.

There is a further anticipation here. In the recurrent ambivalence toward Guianan nature resides the germ of the tropical—the equatorial
colonial world of natural excess, sensual and brutish, that will come to saturate European geographies of northern South America.
¹¹⁵
With no looking back, in what will eventually be a well-worn trope of tropicality, Ralegh leads his men out of the haven of domestic security, and the expedition again plunges into the uncanny waters of illegibility and distrust. The pattern is repeated. Rowing endlessly and without food on the pitch-black river, using their swords to hack through the branches that bar their path, they suspect treason and “[determine] to hang the Pilot” who, in a startling reversal tells his captors that their goal is just a little farther, just one more reach of the river.
¹¹⁶
At the moment all hope seems lost, they hear dogs barking and spy a light. They find bread and hens. They almost meet the local chief who, laden with gold “came so neer us” while they rode at anchor in the night “as his
Canoas
grated against our barges.”
¹¹⁷
And the next morning, elation, epiphany. “On both sides of this river, we passed the most beautifull countrie that ever mine eies beheld.” It is the same leap from despair to rapture, the same vertiginous lunge between unstable poles:

[A]nd whereas all that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, bushes, and thornes, heere we beheld plaines of twenty miles in length, the grasse short and greene, and in divers parts groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose: and stil as we rowed, the Deere came downe feeding by the waters side, as if they had been used to a keepers call. Upon this river there were great store of fowle, and of many sorts: we saw in it divers sorts of strange fishes, and of marvellous bignes[s] but for
Lagartos
[alligators] it exceeded, for there were thousands of those uglie serpents.
¹¹⁸

Unlike the terrifying country through which they had just passed, this is an eminently legible scene, a thoroughly civilized prospect—at least, that is, until the irrupting
memento mori
, the serpents in paradise. What distinguishes this place, as Ralegh makes clear in emphasizing the contrast, is the sense of space and perspective it allows the relieved travelers. Claustrophobia is gone, and all of a sudden they behold the landscape stretching in a great plain to the horizon. In this visual reckoning there is, for the first time, the possibility of possession, and a glimmer of what Ralegh will see in his final figure of Guiana, never sackt.

It is this sympathetic landscape's ability to offer itself as a prospect
that makes it so ripe for colonization. The forests and mountains beloved of modern guerrilla armies are anathema to an invading force; open space allows for defensive encampment as well as advance. And the prospect allows possession in other ways: by virtue of its familiarity and its naturalness. The short green grass, the tame deer, the attractively arranged groves of trees, the abundant fowl (ready for a gentleman's sport)—if it weren't for the reptiles it could be the same Thames “Meadow, by the Riuers side” where Edmund Spenser “a Flocke of
Nymphes
… chaunced to espy” in
Prothalamion
, his neo-pastoral wedding allegory of the following year.
¹¹⁹

But what else? It was Raymond Williams who pointed out that Philip Sidney's definitive
Arcadia
(1590) “was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants.”
¹²⁰
In England, such landscapes had to be manufactured from nature's craggy raw materials. Ralegh, who devoted time and money to the planting of his gardens at Sherbourne in Dorset, knew the aesthetic, social, and moral value of such improvement. The revelation here is that such a landscape could apparently simply exist. Rather than having to undertake the labor of recreation, this scene offers the prospect of a simple occupation of the idyllic picturesque—a prospect that is not just a view, but a projection into a domesticated future.