Introduction

Representations of the Amazon in travel writing, literature, journalism and, more recently, photography and film draw on narrowly circumscribed and often contradictory terms. Pristine and pestilential, a place of escape and imprisonment, a tropical paradise and a green hell, the visual and written portrait of this vast and varied river and its environs is remarkably homogeneous – a semantic continuity which extends over place as well as time, effacing not only the changes which have been wrought in the Amazon during the last five hundred or so years, but also the differences between the particular regions and landscapes that constitute Amazonia. Travel writing, as Neil Whitehead observes, has been a primary space for the imagination of the Amazon, particularly by Europeans who have variously recast the region as El Dorado, Eden, Utopia, and a botanical paradise. In the writings of travellers from Latin America too, particularly during the nation–building years following independence, the Amazon was figured as a ‘land of metaphorical desires’. As well as providing detailed topographical information, many nineteenth–century Creole writers surveyed the Amazon's landscapes and people through what Mary Louise Pratt has called ‘imperial eyes’, drawing upon established tropes of European travel literature on South America, particularly those relating to degeneration or native savagery in the tropics. Although inflected with European stereotypes, Creole travel writing on the Amazon nevertheless differed from country to country, region to region, and even decade to decade as borders expanded and national priorities shifted.

Although the Amazon basin had been the subject of prolonged exploration since the Conquest, the Putumayo River was one of a number of its tributaries which remained largely uncharted. Access to it, either overland or by boat, had been hampered by a series of natural obstacles, and its surrounding forests were notorious for high levels of disease and reputedly ‘cannibal’ tribes. Despite this forbidding reputation, there was a resurgence of interest in the Putumayo in the late nineteenth century, when many of the neighbouring republics began to expand their frontiers into previously ‘deserted’ land. The creation of the district of Loreto (1853) and investment in the small settlement of Iquitos, which by 1864 boasted docks and a naval shipyard, strengthened Peru's position in the region.