The Heart of the Amazon - John Hemming

Late last year I heard John Hemming speak at the Royal Geographical Society on his latest book, Naturalists in Paradise (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Hemming, who was formerly Director of the RGS for over twenty years, is an expert on the Amazon having explored and studied in depth many of its lesser known reaches. This fact alone makes him the perfect author to recount the lives of three, similarly remarkable, adventurers who ventured into the Amazon rainforests in the mid-1800s – Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce.

These men were all naturalists – self-taught experts from the less well-advantaged strata of Victorian society – but they were also true explorers, taking months to travel through the most arduous of terrain, enduring oppressive climates, roughing it without complaint through unforgiving changes in weather and serious discomfort from insect pests and animal predators, shipwreck and bouts of malaria, to say nothing of the dangers that came from unpredictable encounters with disreputable and corrupt officials and bandits in distinctly isolated and out of the way places. These men were ‘jobbing’ collectors, who carefully collected, catalogued, described, packaged, and dispatched a staggeringly capacious supply of entomological, zoological, icthyological, botanical, and even ethnographic specimens to scientific societies, institutions, and dealers back home in Britain. 

Many of the specimens (often entirely new to science at the time) which they meticulously prepared and expertly preserved can still be found in major scientific collections held in museums to this day. Likewise, their writings on their travels and researches stand as a testament to this untiring achievement. It’s perhaps most remarkable that three such individuals intertwined their journeys and their researches with one another, coming together to correspond and compare notes not only amongst themselves from the furthest reaches of the Amazon basin, but also with like-minded scholars and scientists back home as well. These were ‘unlearned’ men, in the sense of the conventional education system of their day, but they were nevertheless rightly accepted into the scientific fraternity which helped revolutionise scientific thinking along Darwinian lines, proving that amicable and even selfless collaboration is the best and most noble means of advancing the pursuit of knowledge. Modern science clearly owes them a great debt. And John Hemming’s wonderful book is a fitting summation of that fact.

I first came across John Hemming’s writing in his now seminal first book, The Conquest of the Incas (1970). I was captivated by his prose which so deftly seemed to bring to life what the realities of being a part of that small force of Spanish Conquistadors might have been like as an individual’s experience, venturing into what must have felt like such a vastly formidable and alien civilisation at near the peak of its cultural rise. Vaster in geographical extent than the Roman Empire and yet still so vulnerable. The cultural misinterpretations and misunderstandings on both sides must have been mind-boggling! ... The surprise for an Inca when a Spanish soldier dismounted his horse, to realise that this was a composite of two creatures and not just one. Horses must have appeared as marvellously odd creatures to the Incas as much as llamas must have seemed strange to the Spanish. Yet, somehow the odds seem to have been stacked improbably in favour of the tiny force of European invaders. Their temerity and cunning, perhaps allied with the cultural myths and expectations of the Inca, as well as the Incas’ helplessness in terms of immunity to illness, germs and diseases brought from the “old world” helped wrong foot, weaken, and then irrevocably decimate their number. It was against their custom for the Inca military to fight after nightfall, the Conquistadors’ guile was less susceptible to such propriety. The shock and awe of their superior technology and weaponry added to the advantage.

As an explorer himself, John Hemming is well-experienced in cultural first encounters. When still only in his twenties, he was part of a three man expedition team which went into an uncharted reach of the Amazon in 1961, one of whom did not return home alive. Hemming’s friend, Richard Mason, the expedition team’s leader, was unexpectedly ambushed whilst walking alone on a forest path they had created in a part of the rainforest which was reliably believed to be uninhabited. A chance encounter with a long distance hunting party of indigenous and uncontacted Indians resulted in Mason's tragic death. Hemming’s sensitive response to the tragedy, leaving gifts for the Indians at the site of his friend’s murder, was met over forty years later by a reparation of sorts, when travelling on another expedition into a nearby region of the Amazon Hemming finally met the tribe who had been responsible for his friend’s death. You can read a fascinating account of this encounter on fellow explorer and Inca expert, Hugh Thompson’s website (see here).

Like Bates, Wallace, and Spruce – John Hemming is a true gentleman scholar, an explorer who adeptly counters the misconceptions which haunt the Amazon, which he feels has been over-romanticised and obfuscated with darkness and unwonted mystery by the likes of self-promoting adventurers and crack-pots, such as the legendary Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (see here). Instead, Hemming’s writings and his talks all seek to illuminate the true beauty of the Amazon, its remarkable flora and fauna, the sadly dwindling vibrancy of its indigenous cultures. To read Hemming’s writings is to travel with and see the world as it is through a genuine explorer’s eyes. You can’t help closing his books without feeling you have gleaned something of an enriched understanding of our shared world. This is why he sits large in the pantheon of my most favourite writers.

Related Articles

Missing Man - Colonel P.H. Fawcett

From the Heart of the World - Alan Ereira

A Questing Curiosity

IN SEARCH OF ZARATHUSTRA: ACROSS IRAN AND CENTRAL ASIA TO FIND THE WORLD’S FIRST PROPHET

by Paul Kriwaczek  

(Vintage, 2002)

I stumbled upon this book whilst browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Singapore’s Bras Basah. Usually any book which begins with the author proclaiming: “Hello, my name is X …”, or, “Thanks for coming on this journey with me …”, would have me returning it to the shelf immediately; but the opening lines of Paul Kriwaczek’s In Search of Zarathustra are an arresting start, as he continues – “I had been practising this little speech in Farsi …” Hence Kriwaczek’s intended introduction to his local interpreter, fixer, guide, and travelling companion, whom he was meant to meet at the Mehrabad airport in Tehran, instead ends up setting the tone of the book it introduces. Part travelogue, part historical enquiry, In Search of Zarathustra is a tour de force of writing style. It is a compelling read. Once started I could hardly put the book down.

I’m amazed I’d never come across Kriwaczek’s writings before, and now having read the book through, and having looked him up in more detail, I find I more than likely have come across him before without ever knowing it. Before he passed away in 2011 Paul Kriwaczek had an enormously varied career. A trained dentist who had spent many years working in Afghanistan, he later went on to become a radio and TV producer with the BBC, making documentary programmes on scientific and religious topics, before turning his hand to writing books on ancient history. In reading this book I was constantly put in mind of another favourite author of mine, John Romer. Like Romer, Kriwaczek’s lightness of touch when dealing with the weightiest of subject matter is the real key to what makes him a wonderful educator. In reading his writing he enthuses you with his own questing sense of curiosity, which was not simply nurtured over long time and meticulous reading, but is also augmented by his own travels and practical investigations – questioning locals and those more in-the-know than him, as well as those possibly less in-the-know too. His curiosity causes him to pose questions and suggest connections others might not necessarily have come up with; but modestly, he never asserts that his ideas are any more or less valid than anyone else’s. This is a journey of shared discovery. One imagines travelling with Kriwaczek and chatting with him would have been a fascinating adventure on so many different levels.

The book, as its title suggests, is a historical investigation into the thoughts and ideas which form the basis of one of humanity’s oldest religions – Zoroastrianism. Yet in doing so it takes in and looks at a variety of civilisations and subsequent religions which may well have been influenced by Zoroastrian connections that have long since become muddied and obscured with the passage of time and often intentional cultural obfuscation. Beginning with the writings of Nietzsche and retracing its narrative backwards in time through the ‘Great Heresy’ of the Cathars in Medieval Europe, to the Manichaens of Central Asia, the Roman Mystery Cult of Mithras, to Biblical times, touching on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism along the way, the book ends by bring us back up to the present when Kriwaczek visits one of the few remaining active Zoroastrian temples in Iran, where he finds expressed in the contrasts of lightness and dark – the ‘good words, good thoughts, good deeds’ – which are the essence of this ancient religious perspective on the world, both human and divine.

Kriwaczek skilfully gives historical continuity to his readings of earlier phases of antiquity in ways which deftly help elucidate for the modern reader what it might imaginably have felt like to live and think on the world in those times. For instance: “There is no moral equivalence between the medieval Catholic Church and the Nazis, even in their attitude to Jews. But like the Communist rulers of the USSR and the other tyrants of the twentieth century, they felt a pressing need to keep the people loyal to their version of the truth. No accident, then, that a ruler like Stalin took careful lessons from medieval Christendom. Like communism to the USSR, Christianity to medieval Europe was the doctrine that supported the state.”  

Or similarly, when reflecting upon the spiritual outlook of the ancient Prophet, Mani: “And then I realised it: Mani was a painter. Manichaeism’s battle between the light and the darkness is a painter’s vision. Caravaggio, who said ‘Painting is light,’ would have understood, so would de La Tour, Cézanne and every other artist who ever strove to create a world by the interplay of chiaroscuro, brightness and shadow. So would Germany’s greatest poet Goethe, who wanted to be a painter in his youth and who opposed Newton’s mechanistic theory of light with his own explanation, because of his passionate conviction that light is indivisible and cannot be reduced to a procession of particles. Manichaeism was fine art raised to the status of revealed religion – unique in spiritual history.”

“To walk on the high, wide, tawny mounds which are all that remain of many of the great cities of Middle Eastern antiquity is a strange experience. If you take an ancient eye-witness as your guide, you can’t help being struck by the stark contrast between the described glories of the distant past and the observed desolation of the immediate present.” Yet Kriwaczek’s prose helps train the reader to see more clearly in their mind’s eye: “Where archaeologists have dug among the fragments, you can make out the remains of walls, windows and doorways, sometimes rising to shoulder height, with stretches of paved street between, so well preserved that their empty abandonment seems quite eerie, like a landlocked Marie Celeste.” And often he does so with sly humour too: “What stonework this is. Every inch is covered in bas-relief decoration and the huge capitals that supported the roofs are sculpted in the shape of bulls, lions and eagles of exquisite design. The monumental ceremonial double staircase leading up to the main platform, cut from twenty-four-foot blocks and rising some fifty feet to the first terrace level, has steps shallow enough to ride horses up, or for notables in long robes to climb while protecting their dignity – or their angina.”

In this remarkable little book, packed with so much inspirational imagination, Kriwaczek makes no claim to be the definitive historian of his chosen subject. Indeed, he once said of himself that he was the “Master of the Tertiary Source.” Instead, he is the educated enthusiast, with open eyes, open mind, and, as I said before, an actively questing curiosity which cannot help but impress and endear, as well as inspire and reward, the attentive reader. It is his empathy with the past which makes him such a wonderful guide. I hope one day I might be able to write half as well as he did.

“It may be easy enough to dream ourselves back into the nineteenth century or even early modern Europe. It may not be much harder, particularly for fans of ‘sword and sorcery’ romance, to fantasise living during the European Middle and Dark Ages. Roman and Greek ways were much closer to ours than we often think and because of familiarity with the Old Testament, its characters and its anecdotes, even life in biblical times is not beyond our power to imagine. (Though the one thing which we can never leave behind, in our mental journeyings, is the knowledge of what was to come after.) But with Zarathustra, even the prophets of Israel are far in the future. We have arrived back at a period in human history whose mind-set is very hard for us to fathom, so different from ours are its accepted beliefs, ethics and values.

            To us, such times seem at the very beginnings of history, but of course, to the people who lived in those days, they had just as long a past to look back on as we do. Nabonidus of Babylon is said to have been as fascinated by archaeological digs as any television viewer today. They certainly must have told tales about their wanderings and the adventures they had on the way. Perhaps, like the Hebrews who long remembered their father Abraham’s origin in the ‘Ur of the Chaldees,’ they still had a dim recollection of the far distant time when their remote agricultural ancestors had cut their moorings and left village life behind in exchange for a nomadic existence on the steppe.”

The value of such a book is surely to teach us that our world and our history is a vast and unbounded place which we are meant to explore and understand for ourselves. To seek continuities, connections, and contrasts, and to think and reflect upon these ideas. In this respect, enlightened writers, such as Paul Kriwaczek, make the most inspiring of guides.

~

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to travel to India to work with colleagues from SOAS, the British Library, the V&A, the Ancient India & Iran Trust, The Hermitage, the National Museum of Iran, and the National Museum in New Delhi on an exhibition entitled: "The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination." First held at the SOAS Brunei Gallery in 2013 the exhibition opened at the National Museum in New Delhi last weekend and will close at the end of May 2016. (Click on the link above or the poster below for more information)