Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [7]
A guide introduced himself as Jean Marx Muñiz Belvedere and politely broke into my reverie to invite me on a walk through the forest. To get him talking in English, which he claimed to be uncomfortable with, I asked what he had done before he came to the park. “I was an artist,” he said. “How you say, trapezista?”
He swung his arms and flashed a sly half-grin.
“A trapeze artist?” I said.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s right.”
To him, this was perfectly normal. This was one of those times when I felt I was missing something. When you finally do find someone to talk to in Brazil, he makes it sound like everyone local just happened to have a past that involved circus performances.
Jean the former trapeze-artist looked stereotypically Brazilian—tanned olive skin, hirsute, toned limbs, a head of short, dark, curly hair, and a perpetual humid-jungle fog on his thin-rimmed glasses. I asked what he knew about Charles Darwin, and he asked me how much time I had for the answer.
It turned out he didn’t ask because he was a Darwin expert, but because the best thing he could think of to do with my question was to take me hiking to the highest peak in the park, the 3,400-foot-tall Pico Tijuca. “It’s where we traditionally take visitors,” he said. “The ones who can walk. You can walk?”
There wasn’t much in Darwin’s own account to follow. On June 16, 1832, he left his cottage in Botafogo early in the morning to see the waterfalls in “Tijeuka.” “Neither the height or the body of water is anything very imposing,” he wrote, “but they are rendered beautiful, by the dampness so increasing the vegetation, that the water appears to flow out of one forest & to be received & hidden in another below.”
Now the park’s largest waterfall is the 115-foot-tall Cascatinha Taunay, and the main pathway into the park crosses a bridge directly below the falls. The rainy season was coming to a close and the waterfall was flowing fast, probably more so than in Darwin’s time. Moss and jungle plants clung to life on the sheer rock face supporting the falls, while vines and creepers webbed their way over the top of the waterfall. From the top, water cascaded into a small pool, flowed downhill into a larger, calmer pool, and then joined the creek running down toward the entrance to the park.
I asked Jean how the waterfall might have looked in Darwin’s time, and he surprised me. He said the park, in its present incarnation, was actually more jungly now than it was in 1832. Modern-day Parque Nacional Floresta Tijuca, Jean told me, was the result of a bold and successful environmental engineering project—one that dated to just after Darwin’s visit. Rio de Janeiro’s early history runs along the usual lines—backwater town booms when resources get discovered—but with a bit of a twist. The entire Portuguese royal family moved to the capital of their Brazilian territory when Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1808. The population of Rio boomed, and it kept expanding, carving rapaciously into the surrounding jungle in search of more land for plantations and suburbs. The entire forest where we stood admiring hundred-foot-tall trees that appeared ancient had been burned to the ground and turned into a coffee plantation. “Naked,” Jean said, staring off into the jungle. “This entire spot was naked .”
In the mid-1810s, King John, who continued living in Rio after Napoleon’s defeat, began to worry that the destruction would harm the city’s water supply and issued orders that the land around streams be replanted with trees to guarantee a potable water supply. His commands went ignored until the springs that provided fresh water for the city went dry and Rio suffered four massive droughts. Darwin, who visited in 1832, missed these—the last had happened in 1829, and the next would hit in 1833—and he didn’t mention any water supply troubles. But the most severe dry spell, which occurred in 1844, finally