The Mighty Orinoco. Jules Verne

      These promises about the joys of Verne’s characterizations must stop here in order to preserve your right to savor suspense. Discussion of other characters and the androgyny theme must wait for the notes. You might appreciate, however, a few reminders about the political situation in South America at the time of Verne’s story—the kinds of things Verne’s original audience knew and that he would spell out if he were writing for us today.

      For centuries, Spain had controlled her American colonies with a firm racist policy. Only men born in Spain itself (peninsulares) could serve in colonial governments; even whites born in the Americas (Creoles, criollos) were given little chance to gain any administrative experience. Of course, persons of mixed white and Indian blood (mestizos), of mixed white and African blood (mulattoes), and of mixed Indian and black heritage (zambos), as well as full-blooded Indians and Africans all had less and less chance, in that descending order.

      Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), “The Liberator,” solved some of these problems but created many new ones. He headed the political faction that wanted to transfer political power in Venezuela from the peninsulares to the Creole aristocrats, continuing to exclude the mixed masses from government. When the Spaniards were finally thrown out in the 1820s, the civilians remaining—even the Creoles—had insufficient know-how to take over the reins of administration. In the ensuing chaos (essentially a complex class and race struggle), only the caudillos, the military leaders, had the resources and experience to govern—and they did so in their own way.¹¹

      As our story opens, in 1893, the first three Venezuelans we meet—and many thereafter—are of European descent. With his Positivist mind-set, Verne carefully identifies most of the succeeding characters according to their places in the scheme we’ve outlined here. The first high government official we meet is a military governor. The president is a general. We shall monitor the details as they demand notes.

      As you head upstream with Verne, you’ll make discoveries gustatory as well as geographic, social, and psychological. According to his grandson, Jean Jules-Verne, the author was no gourmet. He sat in a low chair at table to be nearer his plate, able to shovel his food down more easily. But in his imagination, at least, he actually savored and judged the whole world’s menus. In Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, Andrew Martin points out, “diet, no less than travel (the two are effectively inseparable), furnishes an organizing metaphor … to the accumulation of knowledge. Nutrition and cognition … are serviced by an identical vocabulary and coupled by a unitary philosophy.”¹²

      So prepare now for the oily toughness of possum, the surprise of stewed earthworm, cooked lice, and termites, but also for fragrant ducks “better than any European variety” and “monkey roasted until a golden brown, truly a succulent meal.”

      And let the Quest—for father, fulfillment, and food—begin.

      WALTER JAMES MILLER

       Professor of English

       School of Continuing and Professional Studies

       New York University

       PART ONE

       CHAPTER I

      M. Miguel and His Two Colleagues

      “There is not the slightest reason to believe that this discussion can come to an end,” said M. Miguel, who was seeking to intervene between the two fiery discussants.

      “Well, it won’t end,” answered M. Felipe, “not if it means sacrificing my views to those of M. Varinas!”

      “Nor by abandoning my ideas for those of M. Felipe!” replied M. Varinas.

      For nearly three full hours, these stubborn scholars had been arguing about the Orinoco Question, neither giving an inch. Did this well-known river of South America, the primary waterway of Venezuela, flow in the first part of its course from east to west, as the most recent maps indicated, or did it flow from the southwest? In the latter case, were not the Guaviare or the Atabapo wrongfully considered to be its tributaries?¹

      “The Atabapo is really the Orinoco,” M. Felipe affirmed stubbornly.

      “It’s the Guaviare,” affirmed M. Varinas no less energetically.

      As for M. Miguel, he sided with the geographers of the day. According to them, the Orinoco’s sources are located in that section of Venezuela bordering on Brazil and British Guyana, making this river Venezuelan throughout its entire length. But M. Miguel tried in vain to convince his two friends, who were bickering over a point of no little importance.

      “No,” one kept repeating, “the source of the Orinoco is in the Colombian Andes. The Guaviare, which you claim is a mere tributary, is quite simply the Orinoco itself, Colombian in its upper course, Venezuelan in its lower course.”

      “Totally erroneous,” the other avowed. “It’s the Atabapo that is the true Orinoco, and not the Guaviare.”

      “Come now, my friends,” answered M. Miguel. “I prefer believing that one of the most beautiful rivers in America at least belongs to our own country.”

       Three geographers: MM. Miguel, Filipe, and Varinas.

      “It’s not a question of self-esteem,” replied M. Varinas, “but rather of geographic fact. The Guaviare—”

      “No! The Atabapo!” exclaimed M. Felipe.

      And the two adversaries, who had sprung to their feet, glared into the whites of each other’s eyes.

      “Gentlemen … gentlemen!” repeated M. Miguel, a fine man and very conciliatory by nature.

      There was a map hanging on a wall of the room, which was shaking from the outbursts of this discussion. On that map, in great detail, was an area of nine hundred seventy-two thousand square kilometers of the Spanish-American country of Venezuela. Political events had greatly modified it since the year 1499 when Hojeda, companion of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci,² disembarked on the shore of the Gulf of Maracaibo³ and discovered a village built on pilings in the middle of the lagoons, to which he gave the name Venezuela, or “Little Venice.” Then came the war of independence and the heroism of Simón Bolívar,⁴ then the founding of the military post in Caracas, then the separation that took place in 1839 between Colombia and Venezuela, a separation that turned the latter into an independent republic—the map represented Venezuela according to its present legal status. Colored lines separated the region of Orinoco into three provinces: Varinas, Guyana, Apure. The elevations of its orographic relief and the branchings of its hydrographic system stood out clearly by the multiple hachures and the network of its rivers and streams. One could also make out its maritime border along the Caribbean Sea, extending from the province of Maracaibo, with its capital city of the same name, to the mouths of the Orinoco, which separate it from British Guyana.

      M. Miguel was looking at the map, which by all evidence proved him to be more right than his colleagues, Felipe and Varinas. Indeed, on the surface of Venezuela, meticulously drawn, a great river was marked by an elegant semicircle. Both along its first curve, which was fed by the waters of a tributary, the Apure, as well as along its second, where the Guaviare and the Atabapo brought to it the waters of the Andean Cordilleras, it was uniquely baptized with the magnificent name of Orinoco along its entire course.⁵

      Why then did Varinas and Felipe persist in seeking the origins of this watercourse in the mountains of Colombia and not in those of the Sierra Parima next to the gigantic military column of Mount Roraima, 2,300 meters