Epistle to ..
(Musings of a Stephenian)
Part 4.
(Continued from Part 3)
But the carnival in Manaus, like everything beautiful, did not last long. The British, who were the supreme power in the nineteenth century, could not ignore the main chance. They dispatched two spies, who were highly trained and qualified naturalists, to the rubber plantation. They were on an ostensibly harmless mission to further their knowledge of flora of the Amazon. Throughout their so-called study, they never lost the sight of subterranean mission – to smuggle into their boat as many rubber plants, saplings and pods as they could.
When they arrived back in England, they were accorded a royal treatment by the Royal Society. The plants, saplings and the pods they brought with themselves found in the Kew Gardens in London a hospitable soil where they grew with gay abandon.
Three years later, these rubber plants were reincarnated in Malay, which was a British colony. The plants took to Malay soil as ducks to water. And that meant the party of Manaus was over. The rubber grown in Malay captured the market. It was all over for Manaus, almost overnight.
Nearly two centuries on, when Sandy and I glided through the city, I was struck by its repainted baroque splendour and thin glitter. But it was splendour and glitter of a woman who has outstayed her market and is desperately trying to project, by means of reconstructive surgery and thick make up, the giddy excitement of untampered young female body.
The owner of the freighter, a Greek shipping magnate, was friend of ours. The freighter had air-conditioned state rooms and came complete with two major chefs and several minor ones. We lived on fresh fish caught from Amazon waters. I made the captain weigh anchor at several Indian villages along the river’s downward journey. On such occasions, we roasted the fish on live fire and enlivened it with Greek and Italian spices and a generous dosage of lemon juice. Beer and wine were plentiful in the cellar of the freighter. We gave some of that spirit to Amazon Indians who offered us the hospitality that their ancestors had extended to Orellana and his companions.
Unlike the Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, Toltecs and Chichimecs, Amazon Indians were nomadic forest dwellers. In the jungles of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, on the mountains of Peru, Ecuador and Chile, the other Indians have left monuments which take one’s breath away. The Incas are the greatest road-builders after the Romans. Mayans were great artists, astronomers and mathematicians. Spaniards intermarried with them and created a new race of meztisos.
But the Spaniards who conquered the New World were medieval men. The great Italian Renaissance which is the mother of modern world and which began in Florence had passed by Spain. The Portuguese, on the other hand, created through mixing of blood between the slaves from Africa and the nomadic Indians a race of devitalised Brazilians.
Nothing in my imagination had prepared me for the immense panorama that is the Amazon. The Spaniards, encountering a race of tall women warriors, named the river after the Greek historian Herodotus’ description of women warriors as Amazons. The Spaniards called it Amazonas.
At its mouth near Atlantic, the river stretches more than hundred miles across. In the end, it is this mouth of Amazon which claimed Orellana, aged thirty four, and two of his companions.
With this awareness, I trekked back to America by way of Peru and Ecuador. The Spanish conquest of South America is as much a hair-raising adventure as an unrelieved cruelty to the native population. The magnitude of this cruelty can only be compared with Chenghis Khan inflicted on the conquered Chinese. Chenghis had reduced the Chinese population from hundred million to forty. Throughout my sojourn I was reminded of the cruel truth of the saying in Latin: Vac victis that is Woe to the vanquished.
It will not be until 1819, at the Congress of Angostura, that Simon Bolivar, a meztisos, would paint with poignant words the accursed heritage of the Spanish in South America as against the enlightened extermination by the British in North America of almost all the native tribes. The British settlers of North America used to say with relish: The only good Indian (that is, Native American) is a dead Indian. So the British settlers killed the Indians for their sport.
In subsequent trips I explored the noblest monuments of civilisation in Central and South America. The more I came to know of inhabitants, the more I liked them. And the more I liked them, the closer I came to being accepted as one of them. This love affair has been mutual and remains undiminished.
(To be continued)
About the author
Pradip Moitro (1939 – 2012) was born in undivided India, in today’s Bangladesh. Post partition, the family migrated to West Bengal, where he completed his schooling at Barrackpore, a Calcutta suburb. Then he studied at St. Stephens, Delhi and tnen moved to Oxford.Later he became an in -house polymath of White House and rose to a speech writer of an US President in the last quarter of 20th century. He breathed his last at Oxford.