John Harrison - Into The Amazon

Foreword

In 1985 I had the pleasure of writing the foreword to John Harrisons Up the Creek, a memorable account of a gallant failure to paddle from Monte Dourado up the Jari and Mapaoni rivers to French Guiana. Since then John has remained closely involved with his beloved Amazonia, and some years later middle-aged and with an abdominal hernia he decided to try again, starting from Molocopote, crossing into Surinam and descending a few more unheard of rivers to the former French penal colony. Meanwhile he had acquired a suitable wife; so suitable that she was his companion on this journey and probably one of the reasons why it ended successfully after months of unimaginable hardship. As has often been proved over the centuries, what women lack in muscle-power is compensated for by their stamina and stoicism.

Not that marital bliss prevailed all the way that would be unnatural and its waning during the later stages gives yet another dimension to this polymathic adventure story. It took the couple thirty-six days to find a way across the pathless Tumucumaque Hills and then to transport their folding canoe and camping gear to the banks of the Ouaremapaan River in Surinam. This was an unexpected delay and by then their food supply was running out and their tolerance of each others idiosyncrasies had almost evaporated.

By contemporary standards, John and Heather Harrison are daft masochists. The invention of the outboard engine means that you no longer have to paddle your own canoe. The development of sophisticated communications systems means that you no longer have to be cut off for months from the rest of humanity. However, if you relish the challenge of travelling through uninhabited territory in a style that unites you with your forbidding but very beautiful surroundings, then you prefer to depend on wo/ man-power and trust to luck. John Harrison notes that when using an outboard engine, Drums of gasoline fill half the canoe under a halo of stinking fumes, and the engine leaves a trail of blue exhaust, emitting a din that obliterates the birdsong or the rustlings and calls that betray the presence of an animal nearby.

In times past, travellers in remote regions had no choice but to cut themselves off from the outside world for many months sometimes years. To me that (increasingly elusive) feeling of isolation is an essential ingredient of a real journey, as distinct from a mere trip. Yet the modern traveller is often condemned as irresponsible if s/he fails to keep in touch, or at least carry the means to do so in an emergency. Even thirty-three years ago this was the case, when I disappeared into the High Andes for four months with a nine-year-old daughter, a mule and no radio.

Now, as John Harrison notes, numerous gizmos are available, including HF radio transceivers, car-battery-powered and equipped with 30-foot aerials, which enable the user to contact any telephone number anywhere. As for the satellite phone, John succinctly explains that it would make a wilderness experience seem pretty erness to me. (Hear, hear!) Another gadget can send an SOS to jet planes way up there in the stratosphere but John dreaded an accidental switch-on and the arrival of rescue aircraft, marine commandos and the British press. Here I reckon he is flattering the British press: their twenty-first century representatives have little in common with Henry Morton Stanley.

Some readers of this superb narrative will ask, Whats the point? Why endure so many months of deprivation, exertion, isolation and danger? Why undertake a journey that taxes one physically, mentally and emotionally to the limit? Part of the answer must be that the Harrisons wanted to remain in touch with the realities of life as it was lived for hundreds of generations before technology rendered our survival skills redundant. They wanted to use their bodies to get from Point A to Point B, which inevitably makes them seem eccentric in an age that has devalued the human bodys potential.

Another clue to the motives of such eccentric travellers is offered by C. D. Darlington, whose magnum opus was The Evolution of Man and Society. He wrote:

Man has been brought to the point where, tightly packed in numbers and partly fixed in character, in beliefs and in institutions, he has come near to being deprived of his initiative. He is no longer completely the master of his destiny that he once imagined himself to be.

A remedy for this is to paddle your own canoe hundreds of miles up fast-flowing Amazonian tributaries through uninhabited primary forest.