Summary Of Chapter 5 Of 1491

Brazil is home to nearly 60% of the Amazon Rainforest. The Brazilian government recognizes only 13% of the total land mass of Brazil as being designated to its native tribes. Of this 13% total land mass, 98.5% lies in the Amazon Rainforest (http://survivalinternational.org/tribes/brazilian). In Chapter 5 of Mann’s 1491, Mann retells the story of the Gonzalo Pizarro exhibition. The first recorded and written description of the Amazon comes from Gaspar de Carvajal, the chaplain on the Pizarro voyage. Carvajal’s account was not recognized as being factual by most historians and was not even published until the 19th century however, in his manuscripts he states “the farther down we went the more thickly populated and the better did we find land”
Clement believed that “the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over” (Mann, p.341). Peach palms are the example that he uses for further proof of his theory. The wood from peach palms is very sturdy; the fruit is “soaked with oil and rich in beta-carotene, vitamin C, and, surprisingly, protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp makes flour for thin, tortilla-like cakes; when boiled and smoked, it becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented, it makes beer” (Mann, p341). The natives had ingenious methods for working the land so that it would provide, and have many uses; the peach palm is just one example of how the natives made the rainforest ‘work for them’. According to The Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, the natives did not raise livestock or plow fields; they ate “inhame, which is very plentiful here, and those seeds and fruits that the earth and the trees give of themselves” (Early Brazil, p.6). Is it possible that Pero Vaz de Caminha was referring to the peach
One thing that researchers and scientists are discovering is that the original theory that the natives were living a primitive, insubstantial existence is false. Researcher Michael Heckenberger found remains of a “grid-like pattern of 150-acre towns and smaller villages, connected by complex road networks and arranged around large plazas where public rituals would take place”