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The Wide Belts
By roughly two million years ago, humans had spread out
of Africa and into Europe and Asia. Hundreds of thousands of
years later, they migrated to Australia and New Guinea, which were
then connected as a single continent. Because they did not yet have
boats and could not endure the cruel cold of Siberia, tens of thousands
of years more passed before they crossed the Bering Land
Bridge and made their way into the Americas. When they finally began
to populate North America, however, human beings quickly dispersed
throughout the continent and, by crossing the Panamanian
Land Bridge, soon reached South America. Some twelve thousand
years ago, they entered the Amazon.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, the humans who reached the
Amazon Basin virtually disappeared. For thousands of years, there
was no further contact with the Amazonians. Whereas most regions
of the world continued to change and interact, to form new peoples
and nations by fusing races and cultures, the inhabitants of the
Amazon remained insular and isolated. Even in 1500, when European
explorers began to land on the shores of South America, claiming the
land for themselves and their kings and enslaving its aboriginal inhabitants,
the continent’s vast interior remained untouched and its people
unknown and unreachable.
After the Spanish explorer Orellana finally penetrated the Amazon
Basin in 1542, he returned with startling tales of dense jungles, deadly
poisons, and, most astonishing of all, a tribe of vicious women warriors.
The expedition’s chronicler, the Dominican friar Gaspar de
Carvajal, described the women as going “about naked but with their
privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing
as much fighting as ten Indian men.” Orellana named these women
the Amazons, after the famed women warriors of Greek mythology,
who were said to have removed their right breast so that they could
more effectively shoot a bow and arrow. It is from the Greek word
a-mazos, or “no breast,” that the word “Amazon” is derived.
After Orellana, few outsiders disturbed the Amazon’s native peoples
for the next two hundred years, In the mid-eighteenth century,
however, things changed dramatically and, for the Amazon’s human
inhabitants, disastrously. While traveling down the Amazon River
from Ecuador, the French naturalist and mathematician Charles-
Marie de La Condamine saw natives extracting a milky substance
from a tall tree. After the strange liquid, which the Indians called
caoutchouc, had coagulated, it was used to make everything from
boots to bottles. La Condamine saw potential in caoutchouc and
brought a sample with him back to France. When the strange, pliable
substance made its way across the channel, the British soon discovered
that it worked extremely well as an eraser, and so began referring to
it as “rubber.” By the end of the eighteenth century, rubber was well
known and widely used throughout Europe and the New World. By
the middle of the nineteenth century, the Amazon was exporting more
than 150 metric tons of it each year.
La Condamine’s discovery meant great wealth for a few South
Americans and Europeans, but nothing but sorrow and terror for
Amazonian Indians. Settlers who had made their way to the Amazon
in the hope of making their fortunes in rubber, quickly became frus-
trated by the dearth of willing cheap labor and began to organize
slaving expeditions. Already laid low by European diseases, many
Indian tribes were nearly decimated by these expeditions. Those
Indians who survived were perhaps even less fortunate than those who
lost their lives. Rubber barons were notorious for treating their slave
laborers with exceptional cruelty. Julio César Arana, the son of a
Peruvian hatmaker who made millions of dollars harvesting and selling
Amazonian rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, ordered his men to go into the rain forest with rifles to “recruit”
Indians. The tens of thousands of men, women, and children
whom they rounded up were shackled into chain gangs. If they did
not make their quotas, Arana’s men would burn them alive, hang and
quarter them, or shoot off their genitals. During the twelve years that
Arana held his reign of terror along the banks of the Rio Putumayo,
the native population plummeted from more than fifty thousand to
less than eight thousand. Those who survived did so with horribly disabling
and disfiguring wounds that became known as “la marca
arana,” the mark of Arana.
The Indians’ only advocates were the missionaries who had already
established themselves in the Amazon by the early seventeenth century,
searching for souls to save. They made an effort to protect their
charges, but they were powerless against wealthy and merciless settlers
such as Arana. Their best hope came in offering the Indians as
wage laborers instead of slaves. The settlers, however, reverted back to
slavery when they found that they could not get as many laborers as
they needed and did not have as much control over them as they had
had over their slaves. Even the missionaries themselves wanted to
force the Indians into reductions, or missions, in which they were
made to wear clothing and worship the Christian God.
Before Rondon’s Indian Protection Service was established in 1910,
and even after, the Indians’ best protector was the Amazon itself. So
dense and dangerous was the rain forest that few white men were able
to venture very far into it, even for the promise of rubber. Despite the
intense search for Indians by the men who wanted their labor or their
souls, several tribes had not yet had any contact with the outside
world by the time Roosevelt reached South America in 1913. Even
those who had had some limited contact with outsiders were so isolated
by the jungle in which they lived that they did not have even the
vaguest understanding of what the rest of the world looked like.
“Such isolation makes it well nigh impossible for them to grasp
the significance of large communities,” George Cherrie observed.
“The distant villager is incapable of picturing a much larger group
of human beings living together than that in his own tiny settlement.
. . . They picture the rest of the world as one of jungles, great
rivers, and vast seas; with here and there tiny pools of humanity no
larger than their own. Thus it is that they look upon the stranger from
afar as a traveller between villages.”
* * *
The mysterious Indians who surrounded Roosevelt and his men
on the banks of the River of Doubt were so isolated that they had
never seen a white man. The intersection of their world and that of
Roosevelt and Rondon was not simply a clash of different cultures; it
was a collision of the Industrial Age and the Stone Age, the modern
world and the ancient. Known by modern anthropologists as the
Cinta Larga, which is Portuguese for “wide belt” -- a reference to the
strips of bark that they wrap around their waists -- this tribe had remained
shrouded from the rest of the world not just by the impenetrable
rain forest but by the very thing that had exposed most
Amazonian Indians to settlers and missionaries: a river.
For European explorers, South America’s rivers had long been the
only highways into the interior. It had been along the Amazon River
and some of its thousands of tributaries that they had discovered the
rain forest and its occupants, and the Indians had discovered another
world beyond their own. Some Amazonian tributaries, however, were
so rapids-choked that they were impossible to ascend and too dangerous
to descend. The River of Doubt’s fierce rapids had dissuaded even
the most determined settlers from exploring its course. The same
rapids that had already cost the expedition the life of one man and
had nearly robbed Roosevelt of his son had kept the Cinta Larga in a
time capsule, which had been sealed for millennia.
While the world in which Roosevelt lived had undergone dramatic
recent changes, including skyscrapers, automobiles, and even airplanes
(Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their first successful
flight over Kill Devil Hill eleven years earlier), the Indians in this region
were still using the simplest of tools. Their axes were ground and
polished stone, and their cutting tools sharp slivers of bamboo. They
made their fires by drilling a hard stick of wood into a softer one. The
men all carried their hard “drills” with them while they were out
hunting so that they could start a fire.
So cut off from the outside world were the Cinta Larga that, when
they first saw the expedition, they were not even certain that
Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men were human. By this point in their
journey, most of the men in the expedition had grown rough beards,
which looked strange and animalistic to the Cinta Larga, who, like all
native Amazonians, had little facial or body hair. After watching the
men from the shadows of the forest, the Cinta Larga mothers warned
their children to sleep close to the fire at night so that they would not
grow a patchy layer of fur like these strange creatures.
The Cinta Larga must also have been curious about the expedition’s
canoes. As simple and crudely made as they were, the dugouts
represented a level of technological sophistication that was unknown
to the Cinta Larga. Although they lived on both sides of the River of
Doubt, fishing from it, drinking from it, bathing in it, and traveling
long distances along its banks, the Cinta Larga had not yet conceived
of boats, even those as simple as the expedition’s dugout canoes. The
only means they had developed for crossing the river were simple
rope-and-plank bridges. Nor, despite their dependence on the river,
had they yet developed the means of fishing with a hook and line, relying
instead on spears or arrows to kill the fish that were so central
to their diet.
* * *
Despite these limitations and, in part, because of their isolation,
the Cinta Larga were masters at surviving in the jungle. During their
portages, the men of the expedition crashed through the underbrush,
scaring off game and announcing their presence to the Indians. Even
when they did not have to wrestle with their dugouts, the men found
it nearly impossible to fight their way through the jungle. Long vines
crisscrossed the forest. Sharp branches caught their loose clothing,
snagging and ripping it and holding them hostage while they struggled
to set themselves free.
In contrast to Roosevelt and his men, the Cinta Larga moved
through the rain forest quickly and silently. They wore no clothing
and so were able to slip through the tangle of vegetation unrestrained.
The women, who wore their hair long and parted down the middle,
had nothing on their bodies but necklaces of black vegetable beads,
which they strung around their necks, wrists, waists, and ankles. But
for a simple liana covering to protect their penises, the men were similarly
naked.
The Cinta Larga were also fast and invisible in the jungle because
they had blazed trails that an outsider could not possibly discern or
follow. Even if Rondon, in his ardor to make contact with this unknown
tribe, had started down the Cinta Larga trail that he had
found near Lobo’s body, it would have been useless to him. The Cinta
Larga’s trails zigzagged through the forest, cutting in and out of
thickets, crisscrossing the river, and going over rather than around any
obstacle they encountered.
The tribe’s trails were marked, but ingeniously so. Markers appeared
only once every twelve or eighteen feet and were simply small
branches that the blazer had half broken and then bent backward. To
anyone but a Cinta Larga, these markers were indistinguishable from
any of a million other broken and bent branches in the rain forest. A
change of direction was indicated by nothing more than a slightly
larger broken branch whose bent end vaguely pointed the way. Only
the Cinta Larga knew, moreover, that the markers also showed the direction
to and from their camp: In a system like that used in modern
maritime navigation, markers were placed so that when approaching
the tribe’s camp they appeared on the left side of the trail, and leading
away from camp they appeared on the right.
The Cinta Larga were as skilled at hunting as they were at trailblazing.
While the men of the expedition slowly starved, wandering
through what seemed to them to be a lush but empty rain forest, the
Indians saw, heard, and smelled game everywhere they turned. Their
ability to move soundlessly through the forest also helped them to
sneak up on their prey as the members of the expedition never could,
and their skill with a bow and arrow was uncanny. These Indians were
such expert hunters that they were even able to trick their game into
coming to them. As Rondon had learned when they lured him with
the whinny of the spider monkey, the Cinta Larga were talented mimics
and could re-create nearly any animal call. In fact, so familiar were
they with these calls that they used them not only to draw game
within striking distance but even to express time. When referring to
a time before sunrise, for example, they used the cry of the howler
monkey.
One of the greatest frustrations that the men of the expedition
faced on the River of Doubt was that they were descending a river
crowded with fish that they could not catch. Those same fish, however,
were easy prey for the Cinta Larga. The Indians made up for their lack
of poles, lines, or hooks with the type of fishing basket that Rondon
had found. More important, they had timbó. This milky liquid, which
the Cinta Larga extracted from a vine by pounding it with a rock,
stuns -- or, depending on the quantity, kills -- fish by paralyzing their
gills. Used in slow-moving inlets and pools, timbó allowed the Indians
to spear or scoop up the fish as they floated to the river’s surface.
As well as being expert hunters and fishermen, the Cinta Larga had
access to crops that Roosevelt and his men did not, and they were
willing to consume a larger variety of protein sources. The Indians
grew vegetables such as manioc, yams, and sweet potatoes, but even
they struggled to do so. Clearing the land in the jungle was grueling
work. It often took a man with a stone ax an entire day just to fell a
single large tree. Then, while sowing his crops, he had to contend with
the long tree roots that lay frustratingly near the surface of the soil.
After only three or four years had passed, the cleared land -- scorched
by the sun, robbed of its nutrients by the growing crops, and deprived
of the cyclical nutrient exchange that had sustained it when it supported
a forest -- would become depleted, and the Indians would be
forced to find another patch of land to till.
Each Cinta Larga village, which had one or two large houses that
each held three to five families, was almost completely autonomous
from the larger tribe, and every one had its own chief. The chief had
to exhibit strong leadership qualities, such as taking the initiative in
building a house or clearing a garden, but he was not their commander
in the traditional sense. The Cinta Larga would not allow
their village chief to tell them how to live their lives. Instead, the
chief’s job was to oversee the tribal ceremonies -- an important role,
because the Cinta Larga did not have a written language. Their only
ceremonial guides were their own memories and the stories that they
had heard their parents and grandparents tell.
Not only did the chief not command the village as a whole, he did
not have power over any family within it but his own. Each man was
the chief of his own family, which consisted of as many wives as he
could convince to marry him and as many children as his wives could
bear. A Cinta Larga man usually chose a new wife as soon as his first
wife began to age. Girls were considered to be ready for marriage
when they were between eight and ten years old, and they often married
their mother’s brother. In such small communities, a young man
ready to take his first wife often found that there were no eligible girls
left in his village. He was then allowed to take a wife from a man who
had three or more, or, failing that, he had to look for a wife in a neighboring
village. It was not unusual for villages to trade women. The
women, however, usually consented to the switch.
Like women in most early cultures, the Cinta Larga women did not
have a voice in tribal or even family decisions. However, the Indian
women did have a surprising amount of control over their own lives.
For instance, if a Cinta Larga woman was unsatisfied in her marriage,
she was free to do something about it. She could dissolve the marriage.
She could marry another man. Or she could even stay with her
husband and take a lover. In such circumstances, a husband would
usually look the other way, unless he became the object of derision
within his village.
As important as children were to the future of a village, they were
far from coddled, and they were expected to take on the role of an
adult by the time they turned twelve years old. Also, although the
Indians lived together in one or two large huts, they did not appear to
feel any particular responsibility for anyone outside their own immediate
family. Each family had its own corner of the hut and its own
fire, and when a man had been out hunting and returned with game,
his neighbors rarely benefited from his good fortune. The hunter ate
first, then his wives, children, and other relatives -- in that order.
* * *
Although Roosevelt and Rondon did not realize it, the Cinta
Larga’s strong independence was probably keeping the men of the expedition
alive. Because the Indians did not have a traditional chief,
they were forced to make all of their decisions by consensus. If it was
time to move the village, for instance, they had to agree on the time
and location of the move. When it came to dealing with the expedition,
the Cinta Larga were divided. Some of them believed that they
should remain invisible to the outsider. Others, however, argued that
they should attack. These men had invaded their territory, and there
was no reason to believe they did not mean the Indians harm. By attacking
first, the Cinta Larga would have the upper hand. They would
also be able to loot the expedition, which was carrying valuable provisions
and tools -- especially those made of metal.
War was not a rare event for the Cinta Larga. The most common
cause was the death of one of their own, from an earlier attack or
even from natural causes. The Cinta Larga believed that death was
brought about by witchcraft. If a man became ill and died, the others
in his village never blamed their healer, a man who used plants and religion
to cure the sick. Instead, they looked around their own village,
and if they did not find anyone suspicious, they assumed that someone
from another village must have performed the dark magic. The
only response was to avenge the death by attacking the offending village.
The Cinta Larga also occasionally went to war if the population of
their own village had become so depleted by disease, murder, or both
that they needed to steal women and children. Such attacks took place
at night. The men would camp near their victims’ village, and then,
after the sun had set, they would slip inside their communal hut. As
the male members of the other village slept in their hammocks, the
warriors would club them to death before rounding up as many
women and children as they could find.
Although the Cinta Larga rarely wore much adornment, when they
went to war they dressed for the part. They would cut their hair very
short, place hawk-feather headdresses over their shorn heads, paint
their bodies with animal and plant extracts, and hang bead necklaces
from their necks. The most important item in the Cinta Larga’s war
dress, however, was the wide belt for which the Portuguese would later
name them. These belts were made from the couratari tree, which was
difficult to find. The men were sometimes forced to walk for several
days in order to harvest the smooth, mahogany-colored bark of this
tree. They wrapped an eight-inch-wide strip around their waists one
and a half times and then tied it tightly with a fine liana. The stiff
bark, which was a tenth of an inch thick, was uncomfortable and often
cut their stomachs and backs, thus exposing them to infection, but
the belt was ubiquitous among the warlike Cinta Larga because it covered
the abdomen and so was useful as body armor.
Although skilled with both clubs and poison, the Cinta Larga’s
most lethal weapons were bows and arrows. As Rondon learned when
he examined the arrows that had killed Lobo, the Cinta Larga’s arrows
were exquisitely made and deadly accurate. Made from bamboo,
the shaft was adorned with braids of peccary hair and topped
with a knife-shaped bamboo tip. The arrows were, on average, five
feet long -- nearly as tall as the Cinta Larga men, and taller than many
of the women -- and were adorned with hawk wings or curassow
feathers, which stabilized them in flight. The tribesmen made several
different types of arrows -- for shooting fish, birds, monkeys, large animals,
and men -- but they used only one type of bow. About six feet
long, the bows were made from the trunk of the peach-palm tree
and were so stiff and difficult to pull that it is doubtful that any of the
men in the expedition could have used a Cinta Larga bow had they
found one.
* * *
The most striking fact about the Cinta Larga -- and one that would
have alarmed the men of the expedition had they known it -- was that
these Indians were cannibals. Unlike the type of cannibalism much of
the world had come to know -- among desperate explorers, marooned
sailors, and victims of famine -- the Cinta Larga’s consumption of human
flesh was born not out of necessity but out of vengeance and an
adherence to tribal traditions and ceremony. The tribe had very strict
rules for cannibalism. They could eat another man only in celebration
of a war victory, and that celebration had to take place in the early
evening. The man who had done the killing could not grill the meat
or distribute it, and children and adults with small children would not
eat it. If they did, the Cinta Larga believed, they would go mad.
The most important rule of cannibalism within the tribe was that
one Cinta Larga could not eat another. The tribe drew a clear distinction
between its own members and the rest of mankind, which they
considered to be “other” -- and, thus, edible. An enemy killed during
war, therefore, was ritually dismembered and eaten. While still on the
battlefield, either in the enemy’s village or in the forest, the Cinta
Larga would carve up the body just as they would a monkey that they
had shot down from the canopy. First they would cut off and discard
the man’s head and heart. Then they would section off the edible portions:
the arms, legs, and a round of flesh over the stomach. They
grilled this meat over an open fire and brought it home to their village
for their wives to slice and cook with water in a ceramic pan.
If Indians from other tribes were considered “other,” then the men
of the expedition, who did not even look human to the Cinta Larga,
certainly fell into that category. Moreover, should the Indians attack
the expedition, Roosevelt would likely be one of their first targets.
After watching the expedition for several weeks, the Cinta Larga had
surely figured out by now that Roosevelt and Rondon were its commanders.
Not only did they give orders and do less physical work than
the other men, but the camaradas and even the other officers clearly
treated them with deference. Even if the Indians had only recently
stumbled upon the expedition, they probably would have aimed for
Roosevelt first -- simply because of his substantial girth. The Cinta
Larga often tossed pieces of a slain enemy into the jungle if they
thought that he was too lean. Although Roosevelt had already begun
to lose much of his 220 pounds to illness and the intense physical
work and meager diet of the past few months, he was still by far the
heaviest man in the expedition. If the men were massacred, the former
president would make the best ceremonial meal.
