Becker’s camp is full of local pet animals. It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson. None of them are in cages. They seem to stay around because they like it. There is a kinkajou, several monkeys — one of them looks like a black Winston Churchill — parrots and macaws, a toucan, and a trompetero. The trompetero is a businesslike walking bird who eats ants and insects and joins the party when Mr. Becker’s tourists walk through the jungle trails and to visit the half Indian settlements around about.
Roque, a Yagua boy whose grandfather was the tribal medicine man, walks ahead with a machete. Poor Roque, much against his will, has to put on his grass skirt and headdress when he shows off his skill with the blowgun for the visitors. When he is allowed to get back into his shirt and pants — like people — you can see the satisfaction stand out all over him. He leads the way through the forest path hacking at the underbrush with his machete.
This is a Saturday. In the first palmleaf shelter we visit the man of the family is asleep dead drunk on the floor. His hairless face wears an expression of innocent satisfaction. It is explained that there has been some sort of fiesta. His women and children peer out sleepily from the shadows of the hut.
In the next set of huts a tall man with an aquiline nose rises to greet us. With a dignified gesture he invites us to sit on a bench under his thatch. He offers bananas. He’s somewhat oddly dressed. He wears what looks like a woman’s boudoir cap on his curly gray head and an assortment of blazerlike garments over a weird striped shirt. A man of means. There’s an outboard motor in the yard and a shiny new piano accordion on one of the beds. A bottle of Italian vermouth stands among grimy glasses on the table. Mrs. Becker explains that he’s the best hunter in the region, the father of twentyfour children out of two wives. His womenfolk raise guineapigs in a little corral. We pass the time of day with him in formal Spanish.
In other huts scattered under the trees we find the women working on pottery. Since they have no wheel even the largest pots are built up by hand out of long snakes of kneaded clay coiled in a spiral. Firing them on the embers without an oven is long and tedious and highly expert work. Then they are painted with handsome geometric designs and glazed and fired again. “Lazy things,” says Mrs. Becker, “they’ll only work when they feel like it.”
A bonanza came to this whole part-Indian, part-halfbreed settlement a few nights ago when a herd of peccary swam the river and invaded their manioc plantation. The villagers turned out with clubs and guns and killed fiftysix. That means fresh and smoked meat for weeks. They proudly show us the skins — which bring a good price in Iquitos — stretched and salted for drying and several peccary shoats they captured for pets.
This happygolucky life is not without a certain enchantment. In another hut we find a group of men celebrating over a bottle of some kind of rotgut. More European blood here. You can tell by the stubbly beards. They swarm about us to offer us drinks. The stuff in the bottle smells like wood alcohol. We refuse as politely as possible. It’s already dusk and they really are too drunk.
The man with the bottle latches onto my arm. “Doctor, you must have a drink”—in these parts anybody who can read and write is addressed as Doctor—“Mr. Engineer,” he pleads, “please take a drink with us.” How can a man refuse?
One gulp does it. We break away and hurry down the slippery riverbank to the waiting canoe.
The Photographer’s Redskins
The other tourist entrepreneur is the local photographer, a genial and hospitable gentleman named Antonio Wong, who set up a hunting camp on the Rio Manaté, some fifty miles downstream from Iquitos, years ago before tourists were dreamed of, for his own pleasure, so he tells us. An enthusiastic hunter, he never hunts without a couple of Yagua Indians to find him the game. He whisks us downstream in a speedboat.
After lunch at his thatched and mosquito-netted camp set high on stilts on the bank of a narrow winding tributary river, we visit his private tribe of Indians. A large launch load of French tourists has come in ahead of us. The Indians — Yaguas of Mr. Wong’s pet tribe — have come down specially from their settlement three and a half hours’ walk back in the forest. They have dressed in their best grass skirts and grass headdresses to be shown off to the tourists. After the French depart Mr. Wong has us distribute cigarettes to the men and marshmallow candies to the ladies. He makes each of us hand out one item to each member of the tribe. In return the Indians present us with the little crowns of palm leaves they are wearing on their heads.
They are lightolive healthylooking people with mellow brown eyes. Their faces are daubed with ochre. Only a few of the women and children have the puffed-up bellies that come from eating too much cassava. They seem to be enormously amused by the tourists. Though they can’t understand Spanish they laugh and laugh at the slightest thing anyone says. Perhaps it’s embarrassment but more likely it is frank entertainment at the strange creatures that have appeared from the outer world. We get to laughing too. We look into each other’s faces and laugh and laugh.
The curaca is a very young man but the witch doctor is old with a crinkled parchment skin. He stands hesitantly off by himself as if he weren’t quite sure what his attitude should be.
After a while a flute and drum start playing a simple but not at all outlandish little tune and Mr. Wong and the oldest of the women, an old lady with numbers of rubber tires round her waist, dance a sort of twostep with incredible solemnity. It’s a sight worth coming three thousand miles to see.
A Swiss gentleman has been bringing the house down by giving extra cigarettes to the Indians who have traces of whiskers. This proves an enormous joke because it’s well-known that the forest Indians have very little hair on their bodies. Everybody roars. After giggling with them for a while more in their palmleaf shelter set high on stilts, where the women are smoking a few fish over a smoldering fire, we part amid fresh gales of laughter and return to our speedboat.
How come, we ask Mr. Wong, when we have him alone, that some of the Yagua women have permanent waves? Mr. Wong explains with a show of annoyance that it’s these Syrian traders. The Turkos, as they are known, scour the rivers in motorboats buying wild animal and reptile skins. To avoid paying in money they give the Indian women permanents in return for valuable pelts. Disgusting, says Mr. Wong.
Flight Downriver
From Iquitos to Manaus there’s only one flight a week. The plane is a Catalina flying boat of the amphibian type known to the U. S. Navy in the Pacific war as a P.B.Y. Most of the sixteen seats are already taken so we have to crawl through the narrow waist to places scrunched up against the radio man’s little table. Wicker seats have been set in the hull but otherwise very little has been done for the comfort of the passengers. There’s a reek of gasoline. The only ventilation comes when the pilots open their side windows.
The seaplane rattles like a truckload of scrap as it takes off. We fly out over the river and cut across its windings in the early haze. The mist rises from the great trees in thin wisps like cotton batting twisted between thumb and forefinger. We cruise at a couple of thousand feet above the rainforest. In every direction the treetops stretch to the horizon.
Things are pleasantly informal aboard. The prettily gotten up Brazilian girl in the front seat must be the pilot’s ladyfriend because before long she is sitting on his lap. So that the other passengers shan’t feel neglected he invites us in rotation to climb into the copilot’s seat where the air is fresh and the view magnificent. The steward, crawling among the packages that obstruct the seaplane’s narrow waist, keeps plying us with gummy sandwiches and sicksweet guaraná. Guaraná, which can be quite good, is the national soft drink of Brazil. The Peruvian lady sitting next to my wife asks her if she minds the smell of the package she holds on her lap: it is fresh turtle meat she is carrying to a friend in Manaus.