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Scientists and Adventurers

Europe was an exciting place in the 18th and 19th centuries. The greatest minds in Europe were pondering the workings of our world. Early scientists were unsatisfied with traditional explanations which explained everything in religious terms or by ancient superstitions. Instead, the scientists were determined to study and to find out for themselves how our world works. They invented what what we call "scientific method". This is the way that scientists investigate and learn things – gathering information through careful observation and experiments, and recording everything that they see.

The first scientist to travel though Amaz⌠nia was a Frenchman called Charles Marie de la Condamine. He was sent to South America in 1735 by the French Academy of Sciences to calculate the diameter of the Earth at the equator. On the way home to France, he travelled down the Amazon river and wrote many notes about the strange animals, plants, and customs of native Indians that he encountered along the way. His stories of electric eels, strange new plants and drugs, and exotic Indians caused great interest throughout Europe.

However, it was an epic journey by another member of his scientific team, Jean Godin, and his wife, Madame Isabela Godin, which really caught the public's attention. Jean Godin had been the chain-bearer (official measurer) on La Condamine's expedition when it was based in Quito. It was here that he met and married Isabela. When it came time for Godin to return to France he travelled down the Amazon by himself, in order to make arrangements for a second journey in which he would bring his wife. Unfortunately, the Portuguese authorities refused him permission to return upriver to collect Isabela – leaving the couple stranded on opposite ends of the Amazon for 20 years. When Isabela finally began the journey, all of the members of her party were killed as a result of accidents, malaria, and even attacks by vampire bats. Dazed and delirious, Isabela continued trekking through the rainforest by herself until she was found by local Indians. They took her to a Church Mission, from where she was able to continue her journey to eventually be reunited with her husband.

The Naturalist-Explorers

When South American travel restrictions were finally relaxed in the late 18th century, scientists and adventurers from around Europe made the long trip out to visit Amaz⌠nia. The greatest scientist to ever make this trip was the German naturalist, Baron Alexander von Humboldt.

Naturalists are scientists who wanted to learn about nature and about how life evolved and adapted to different environments. Amaz⌠nia was an important place to visit because it contained more species than anywhere else, and was a good place to observe a huge variety of lifeforms.

Another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, travelled to Amaz⌠nia in 1848. Wallace noticed that many plants and animals had special features enabling them survive the conditions in which they lived. Some animals had camouflage to help them hide from predators, some birds had specially-shaped bills to let them crack open nuts and extract nectar from plants, and some plants had clever defences to help fight attacks by insects. These observations led Wallace to develop a theory about how species of plants and animals gradually change through a process known as evolution or "natural selection". This theory was developed at the same time as that of another famous English naturalist, Charles Darwin.

In the second half 19th century, there were many scientific expeditions into Amaz⌠nia to study the wide range of exotic plants and animals which lived there, and even to study the people. Scientific explorers often gave exciting accounts of their exploits – with their letters and journals sometimes being serialised in newspapers and magazines. These were often illustrated with drawings showing pictures of the explorers' travels, strange new plants and animals, and Indian villages. It is through these journals that we now have our only records of what some Indian cultures were like when they first made contact with civilisation. Many of these cultures are now extinct.

Adventurer-Explorers

Another breed of explorers began travelling through Amaz⌠nia in the late 19th and the 20th century. Improvements in transport meant that it was much quicker and easier for people to travel to Amaz⌠nia. And with the scale of development that had occurred in both Europe and America, it was becoming one of the few great frontiers left to explore.

Despite transport improvements in other parts of the world, Amazon travellers still had to contend with exactly the same problems as their predecessors – dense forests, lack of roads, and dangerous animals. There was even still the risk of attack by hostile Indians.

Some notable Adventurer-Explorers were:

CΓndido Rondon was the creator of Brazil's Indian Protection Service (now FUNAI). He is a national hero in Brazil. Shortly before his death in 1956 (aged 90), CΓndido Rondon was awarded with the military rank of Marshall – making him Brazil's highest-ever ranking officer. Rondon is most famous for his work establishing rights for the Indian people. He felt that it was important that Brazil's Indians should be allowed to live in peace, without fear of their land being stolen by greedy developers. He was also responsible for sending Sertanistas to make contact with remote Indian tribes to help guide them into 20th Century life. The famous motto which he created for the Sertanistas was "Die if necessary, but never kill".

Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt was a renowned adventurer, and visited Amaz⌠nia in 1913 and 1914. A new river was discovered on one of these expeditions, and was named in his honour: Rio Roosevelt.

Colonel Percy Fawcett was an English explorer and achaeologist who spent many years searching the Amazon rainforests, looking for evidence of an ancient lost Indian civilisation. He disappeared in 1925, and was never seen or heard from again. The most likely explanation is that he was killed by hostile Indians in the depths of the jungle. However, there another explorer later told a story of a mysterious Indian tribe who were ruled over by a white English-speaking chief who suffered from amnesia and could not remember his former life. The story of Colonel Percy Fawcett, and his disappearance has become a legend in Amazonian folklore. Although there have been many searches for him, no trace was ever found.