Fortunately, one of the crew happened to be a naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who spent much of his enforced time on the remote uninhabited island recording information about the animals he and his crew were scoffing. I feel for Steller. It’s hard enough studying wildlife at the best of times, without the added pressure of friends and colleagues eating your subjects as fast as you can write. He did it, though, and made the only detailed written record of the habits and appearance of the sea cow that was later to bear his name.
With full stomachs, the shipwrecked survivors cobbled together an escape boat and, some ten months and many almond-tasting, human-trusting sea cows later, made it back to the Russian mainland. But they blabbed about their miraculous discovery and prompted a rush of hunting expeditions. The sea cows didn’t stand a chance. They provided three square meals a day, and endless snacks in between, while the hunters killed fur seals, otters and other fur-bearing animals for big profit.
The outcome was predictable. Just 27 years after its discovery, Steller’s sea cow officially became extinct. The last one was killed in 1768.
Graca, our boat’s cook, overheard Ivano waxing lyrical about almond-tasting manatees and called out from the galley. I hadn’t seen her so enthusiastic and animated. She described some manatee recipes from her own childhood and told us about manatee-hunting expeditions with her father, armed with nothing more than a home-made harpoon and a rope. They would sit for hours in their little wooden boat, in complete silence, until a manatee surfaced near enough for her father to strike. Then they waited patiently for the injured animal to tow them around and tire itself out.
I asked Ivano and Graca if they still eat manatee meat today. Never, they told me. It’s illegal.
I pushed them a little more.
‘Well, you can still buy manatee meat on the black market in Manaus. Sometimes you can get it, but it’s not easy.’
‘Do you miss it?’ I asked.
‘A lot,’ laughed Ivano.
I left it at that.
The next day we returned to Arauazinho and met one of the villagers, Francisco, as well as his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and just a few of their innumerable chickens and goats. Francisco had kindly agreed to help us find manatees. He’d seen them just the day before, feeding on water lilies in a hidden lake behind the creek.
Manatees are not just vegetarians – they are greedy vegetarians. They eat a heck of a lot. In fact, they can eat up to ten per cent of their body weight in a single day. That’s the equivalent of me eating ninety three-course meals a day. They are fussy eaters, too, scoffing just a few, carefully selected species of aquatic plants and nothing else.
Understandably, the few carefully selected species of aquatic plants don’t like it at all. So they’ve developed a special anti-manatee device. What they’ve done is to stuff themselves with silica, which is hard and abrasive and wears out the manatees’ teeth very quickly (ironically, silica is used in toothpaste for precisely the same reason – but to remove plaque rather than the actual teeth).
The manatees wouldn’t allow themselves to be outwitted by a few plants and responded – not by carefully selecting other species of plants – but by growing replaceable teeth. They have a canny conveyor-belt system in which all their teeth move forward about a millimetre a month; as the front ones wear out, and fall out, they are replaced by the next in line.
I had woken up feeling quite ill with heatstroke on the morning Francisco offered to help, and was trying to alternate between filming, lying down, and feeling sorry for myself. But Francisco’s sighting, almost within a stone’s throw of where we were standing, had triggered a surge of adrenalin and I couldn’t bear the thought of missing our best chance yet of seeing a manatee.
We manhandled Francisco’s canoe out of the creek, up a steep bank, through the tangled forest and across to the hidden lake. It was hard to do it quietly. Actually, it was downright impossible. Francisco never uttered a word and effortlessly sauntered through the jungle in complete silence, like a ghost in slippers. The rest of us bumbled about like drunks in a coffee shop, stumbling over hidden roots, yelping in pain every time we gashed our legs, cursing whenever we were seized by horrible grasping plants, stepping on each and every snapable twig, swatting irritable mosquitoes, and in the end giggling uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all.
By the time we reached the lake I suspect every local manatee had either moved somewhere else, or died of old age.
Unwaveringly optimistic, though, we launched the canoe and paddled quietly (relatively quietly) across to the far side. We cruised along the shoreline, weaved in and out of the half-submerged trees, zigzagged backwards and forwards in the open expanse in the middle, and every so often waited in silent (relatively silent) anticipation.
Hot? Every morning arrived complete with a full body sweat.
But all our efforts were in vain. We didn’t see a manatee disappear beneath the surface of the lake. We didn’t see the ripples made by a disappearing manatee. We didn’t even nearly see the ripples.
For the next two days we searched rivers and lakes and ploughed tributaries and tributaries of tributaries.
Then we gave up.
It was such a disappointment. I really thought we might be lucky and so wanted to see an Amazonian manatee – even fleetingly – in the wild. But if there were manatees in the Aripuanã, they’d chosen to stay concealed in the river’s murky waters.
We’d been outmanoeuvred by one of the slowest creatures on earth.
Francisco didn’t know of any other likely places to look. We tried to console ourselves in the knowledge that if he didn’t know anywhere else to look, that was definitive. Definitely not knowing was at least better than vaguely not knowing.
Next morning we called Captain Wilson on the satellite phone, reported calm conditions, and settled down to wait for the flight back to Manaus.
The thought of going home (or, at least, returning to the familiarity and relative comfort of the Tropical Hotel, in Manaus) made Stephen bound around the deck with renewed energy and enthusiasm. I’ve no doubt he had enjoyed our little escapade enormously, but I think four consecutive wi-fi-free nights in the jungle was just about enough.
I have a maddeningly low boredom threshold and simply cannot leave the house without something to keep me occupied, just in case my train is delayed, I get caught in a traffic jam or the person I’m meeting happens to be late. My worst nightmare would be to get kidnapped and be forced to cope with days, weeks or (heaven forbid) months of captivity without a notepad and pen, a book, a magazine, a solar-powered laptop … anything to while away the time.
How anyone can embark on a 12-hour long-haul flight without a bulging bag of stuff to keep them busy for at least 14 hours (allowing for delays) I’ll never know. The mere thought of doing nothing but stare out of the window makes me feel downright fidgety.
Except in the Amazon, of course, where there are plenty of reasons to stare out of the window.
The scale of the jungle beggars belief. Describing it as big is like describing Bill Gates as fairly well off. ‘Big’ doesn’t even register on the scale. New York is big. Wembley Stadium is big. The Amazon is absolutely bloody ginormous. As we climbed above Arauazinho not-quite-a-village, and banked towards Manaus, the forest stretched out below us, unbroken except for the occasional mighty river or creek, as far as I could see in every direction.
It made me want to say something. My