The Amazon can drive you mad. In Werner Herzog’s cult movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, Klaus Kinski affected a crazed stare that bordered on self-caricature. But the real-life explorer he portrayed was a first-class, unquestionable, copper-bottomed maniac, who systematically murdered his companions, as they drifted downriver in torrid, febrile paranoia in 1560. He recast himself as both pope and king, and, when he at last emerged from the rivermouth, launched an ill-starred attempt to conquer the Spanish empire. His was an extreme case, but the strange, overpowering environment is unnerving to outsiders even to this day.
The first Spanish explorers who navigated the river in 1540-2 showed some of the symptoms. They imagined (or perhaps just wildly exaggerated) the presence of Amazon warriors whose legend gave the region its modern name. Most readers of their accounts have dismissed as comparable fantasies their descriptions of populous cities lining the riverbanks. Although the explorers could find no naturally occurring food ‘in four hundred miles’, they reported densely populated states and settlements of tens of thousands of inhabitants, living in substantial wooden buildings and maintaining lavish temples. Yet visitors to the region a generation later saw nothing of the sort.
So, understandably, the first round of reports induces incredulity in historians, along with all the El Dorados imagined by other over-excited conquistadores. Some- thing similar happened in the south-east of what is now the USA, where the first Spanish intruders in the 1530s found large concentrations of people who built impressive ceremonial mounds, but who seemed to have vanished — or never to have existed — when the next European visitors arrived.
Now, however, archaeology authenticates impressions formerly dismissed as insane. The Amazon had been home to sophisticated farming cultures for many centuries at the time of first European contact.
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