Floating Texts: Listening Practices in the Accounts of Foreign River Expeditions in Brazil

Abstract

Western written travel narratives are a byproduct of the privileging of vision as the primary means of knowledge production, an epistemology often imposed on indigenous peoples through colonial practices. In contrast, indigenous cultures in Brazil have long relied on listening as a central way of engaging with their environment. In the present essay, I examine how listening practices appear in the written accounts produced by members of three foreign river expeditions in Brazil from the 16th to the 20th century. I analyzed travel accounts from Gaspar de Carvajal’s Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande (XVI century), Hercules Florence’s Voyage Fluvial du Tieté à l’Amazone (XIX), and Theodore Roosevelt’s In the Jungles of Brazil (XX). To explore what these travelers might have heard, I also collaborated with a sound designer to create a soundscape using actual recordings of local fauna and indigenous chants and music. The results show a variety of listening modes put into practice such as conquest-driven, scientific observation, contemplation, and hunting-focused and aesthetic appreciation. These narratives illustrate how European epistemologies reinforced Western dominance by shaping both colonial encounters and scientific approaches to Brazilian wilderness exploration.

1. Introduction

Throughout the modern era, the historical inclination of Western cultures to privilege vision as a means of producing meaning and connecting with the world transformed into a true supremacy of the visual. Although this inclination had been present since the classical period in Greece and in early Christianity—both geographically distant from Western Europe but part of the cultural mix that gave rise to it—it was in modernity that Europeans elevated vision as the primary epistemic tool, deciding that, from then on, “seeing with one’s own eyes” would mean more than just “hearsay”.

In the wake of late fifteenth-century colonialism, European worldviews spread across the globe and persistently confronted indigenous modes of living. In South America, at least, these modes were marked by cultures centered on listening and who were thus producers of “world hearings”.1 It is important to note that the very colonial enterprise was made possible by the development of a technical gaze that projected itself over the territories to be conquered. This gaze was amplified by astrolabes, compasses, telescopes, and nautical charts, and not only allowed Europeans to reach the Americas but also later validated attempts to control the occupied lands through maps, treaties, and other visual translations of the same illusion of territorial control.

There was also one visual tool whose utility became apparent only after each expedition. These were the written accounts of the travels that, by narrating overseas adventures, not only reinforced the view of Europe’s civilizational superiority but also—by producing the rest of the world—contributed to the creation (through contrast) of European civilization itself. At the same time, this type of literature encouraged potential explorers to undertake new journeys around the world and engaged urban readers eager for stories of conquerors and adventurers in exotic lands. These written accounts allow modern scholars to reconstruct European perspectives regarding non-European places; beyond this, they also reveal the potential listening practices of the travelers themselves.

By reading attentively with an ear to the accounts written by the first Europeans who visited the interior of Brazil, one can imagine several questions. For example, how did explorers, conquerors, colonizers, and other adventurers from outside interpret the sounds of rivers and animals, indigenous voices and music, wild cacophonies, and landscapes of the Amazon, Pantanal, and Atlantic forests? What different forms of listening might the ethnographies produced from these expeditions reveal? How did listening to nature reflect not only the objectives of the expeditions but also the purposes and spirits of the travelers themselves?

In the present essay, I examine listening practices in ethnographies that emerged from three distinct expeditions within Brazil. The first is Gaspar de Carvajal’s sixteenth-century Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande (Relation of the New Discovery of the Famous Big River), a contemporary account of Francisco de Orellana’s two-year expedition from the Amazon River’s source to its mouth. The second account is Hercules Florence’s Voyage Fluvial du Tieté à l’Amazone (River Voyage from Tietê to the Amazon, 1825–1829), a French travel narrative composed during the expedition organized by the Russian doctor and naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff. Finally, I turn to Theodore Roosevelt’s In the Jungles of Brazil (1914), written after the former US president had returned from the Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition, led by Roosevelt and Brazilian colonel Cândido Rondon. Together, these expeditions passed through—and listened to—different Brazilian regions and biomes, from the Atlantic Forest of Rio de Janeiro to the Pantanal of Corumbá, from the Atlantic coast to the deep Amazon, near the tripartite border with Peru and Colombia.

To come closer to what these explorers might have heard during their expeditions, I have partnered with a sound designer to create a short audio file that expands the scope of the present essay. The audio takes listeners through soundscapes recorded in some of the regions visited, including sounds of the local fauna mentioned in the texts (and gathered by bioacousticians in the field), along with music and chants from indigenous communities that live in the region today.2

2. Materials and Methods

I have selected the three works analyzed in this essay to present different views of foreign exploration in Brazil. In the first place, a thematic and geopolitical scope has guided my selection; I focused on accounts of river expeditions led by explorers whose nationalities (at the time of their respective expeditions) represented political and economic powers seeking to expand their international influence. Within this initial scope, I selected works across different continents and centuries, which led to accounts that resonate with the distinct historical contexts: the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire, the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, and the twentieth-century United States.

In all of the works under analysis, I have paid special attention to the presence of sounds in all forms, whether explicitly described or merely implied by the authors. These sounds might include natural elements (e.g., water, wind, thunder, and geological movements), sounds produced by animals (such as calls, cries, and sounds produced by their movement), as well as human sounds such as calls, conversation, music, instruments, firearms, motors, and utensils. In total, I located 156 entries: 11 for the 66 pages of Carvajal’s Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande, 54 entries for the 277 pages of Hercules Florence’s Voyage Fluvial du Tieté à l’Amazone, and 91 entries for the 360 pages of Theodore Roosevelt’s In the Jungles of Brazil.

3. Results

3.1. The Francisco Orellana Expedition (1540–1542)

After Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire, his younger half-brother Gonzalo went eastward in search of the mythical El Dorado and the Valley of Cinnamon. After a difficult Andean crossing, the group reached the vast Amazon rainforest and spent eight months of fruitless searching, during which, the expedition exhausted its food supplies. Captain Francisco Orellana then suggested that they form a detachment to descend the Napo River in a small boat and a few canoes to find supplies and save the starving group. With Gonzalo’s approval, the small party set off downstream and—prevented from returning by the strong currents pushing them farther and farther away from their starting point—embarked on the first European journey to traverse the entire Amazon River.

The hunger that initially struck the larger group and forced the split would soon also affect Orellana’s expedition. Carvajal recounts how the group was “in great danger of dying from the terrible hunger we were suffering” and then goes on to list what was then available to eat: “we only ate leathers, belts, and the soles of shoes boiled with some herbs” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 9). The first audible moment in the Carvajal’s account is directly connected to the promise of relief from starvation: “some of our companions thought they had heard Indian drums; some claimed it, others said they did not. They rejoiced, however, and walked with much greater diligence than usual” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 9). They found nothing, however, and attributed these sounds (in a way familiar to those with knowledge of European cultures) to a lapse in vision: “Since no village was sighted either that day or the next, it was all considered imagination, as it indeed was” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 9). A week later, however, their ears proved to be right. “Drums were heard very clearly”, recounts Carvajal, “far from where we were. It was the captain who heard them first and told the companions, and they all heard it, and confirmed it, so great was the joy that everyone felt, that they cast aside all past hardships, because we were in inhabited land and could no longer die of hunger” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 10). What they heard, to be clear, was not the sound of animals that might serve as food but rather the sounds of drums signaling inhabited land.3 For Carvajal and the others, the sound of human life in the midst of the Amazon landscape pointed to the existence of food, either because the natives would willingly share or because the members of the expedition were accustomed to taking what they wanted. Whatever the case, it was merely a matter of finding the indigenous village and receiving/taking from them whatever was necessary.

Had Carvajal and his companions been accustomed to hearing the forest in the indigenous manner, a life-long process of aural training developed and learned by many generations of forest dwellers, numerous other sounds—present in the landscape but inaccessible to the Spanish—would have indicated the exact opposite of what they experienced: the near impossibility of starving to death in one of the most abundant habitats on the planet.4 If the Spanish were accustomed to hunting and foraging by sight, countless generations of indigenous peoples had developed a way of listening adapted to the Amazonian landscape—a tool infinitely more effective than sharp eyesight and muskets for procuring food in that environment. This is so because a dense canopy of trees filters much of the sunlight in the forest, and this shifts the focus of hunting to what one hears rather than what one sees. This of course presents great difficulty for people who rely primarily on sight as their primary means of connection with their surroundings and explains to a great degree why the Orellana expedition was on the brink of starvation in one of the most food-rich environments on the planet. In a metaphor worthy of fiction, Carvajal later relates how he lost an eye when the expedition engaged in armed conflict with an indigenous group. The precise blow is like an unfriendly warning that one must temporarily suspend visual primacy to survive in the Amazon.

In practical terms, indigenous listening transforms the sounds of fish such as tambaquis and tucunarés, peccaries, and tapirs into food.5 Iberian (and by extension European) listening, on the other hand, transforms the sounds of indigenous drums into food. In both cases, the sounds in question are indices of food. In the case of indigenous listening, the sounds of animals directly and necessarily “point to” the presence of potential food. In the listening employed by the Spanish expedition, however, the sounds of drums do not point directly to the presence of food itself, but only the presence of people who have likely acquired it. The Spanish hear, in the sound of the drums, the possibility of obtaining food either through charity or plunder. In the South American context, this all too often meant the latter.

In semiotic terms, the culture of plunder in which European listening in South America was embedded became an interpretant that served to connect the sound of drums to the final desired object.6 In practice, the drums proved to be a true index of food since, after following their sound in a battle formation, the Spanish were able to frighten off the indigenous villagers and take what they wanted: “Here, the companions began to take revenge for the past, for they did nothing but eat what the Indians had cooked for themselves and drink their drinks, with such eagerness that they did not even think about satiating themselves” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 11).

In a sense, both sound signals—the indigenous aural perception of prey animals and the Spanish aural perception of a human settlement—are indirect indices of food. Both the sounds of animals themselves—perceptible to the indigenous and inaccessible to the Spanish—and those of the drums—produced by the former and interpreted by the latter—require a successful action by the hungry subject to materialize as food. The indigenous, upon listening and locating the prey, must hunt it; Carvajal and his companions, upon hearing the drums and locating the village, must rob its inhabitants. By equating the two sounds as communicative indices of the same order, although very different in nature, one can locate a perspectivist aspect in semiotics (Kruse 1991), meaning that reality is shaped by the perspectives of individuals or groups, and that there is not a single, fixed reality we all perceive. Perspectivism is a well-known aspect of Amazonian cultures and can be defined as “the conception, common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is inhabited by different species of subjects or people, human and non-human, who perceive it from distinct points of view” (de Castro 1996, Introduction).

From this premise, which seeks to resolve the contradiction between ethnocentrism and animism, comes the idea that all beings consider themselves to be people: if humans drink cauim and the jaguar drinks the blood of its prey, then, for the jaguar, blood is cauim.7 Similarly, if vultures eat worms from rotten flesh and humans eat grilled fish, then, for the vultures, worms from decaying flesh are their grilled fish. Perspectivism would compel the Orellana party to listen, in the darkness of the forest, to the indigenous as another species, animals whose natural sounds include drumming. The sound of those drums would, from the Spanish point of listening, be that of prey. One must note that—at least from an anthropological point of view—the inverse is also true; that is, many indigenous societies did not consider Europeans, or even indigenous people from other groups, to be human like them.8

Carvajal only mentions sound a few times in his narrative, and all of these are sounds produced by indigenous people. In most cases, he describes threatening sounds used to intimidate the Spanish in contexts of imminent confrontation. For example, “They were making an enormous uproar, playing many drums and wooden trumpets, threatening us that they would eat us” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 37) or “they called us to war, and immediately began to play their drums, horns, and wooden trumpets, and with great shouting, they attacked us” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 43); later on, “More than five thousand Indians rise up with their weapons and begin shouting and challenging us, banging their weapons together, making such a noise that it seemed like the river was about to collapse” (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 55).

Throughout the 66 pages of the Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento, there is no description of any sound produced by forest animals. The absence of any mention of these sounds in Carvajal’s narrative, even after months immersed in a rich, diverse, and unfamiliar soundscape, reinforces the idea that the European ear was then largely unable to tune into the natural sounds of the Amazon—or at the very least deemed them unworthy of documentation. This prevented any adequate recognition of the region’s beauty and mystery, but it also deprived them of a necessary survival tool—one that might have wholly altered the course of the expedition. As I suggested, this deafness seems to be, at the same time, both the cause and effect of a vision-based culture, a way of relating to the world that is incompatible with life in the Amazon.

3.2. The Langsdorff Expedition (1825–1829)

With the opening of Brazilian ports after the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in 1808, a new phase of European expeditions in Brazil began. The point of reference for these expeditions was the work initiated by Alexander von Humboldt in Spanish America at the turn of the nineteenth century: an adventure with encyclopedic aspirations (i.e., contributing to the effort of accumulating knowledge about the world, as proposed by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, creators of the first encyclopedia in the mid-eighteenth century). It is in this context that Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, the Russian consul in Rio de Janeiro and an accomplished doctor and naturalist, undertook a long scientific expedition from the Tietê River in São Paulo to the Amazon. In the mid-1820s, this project took on a distinctly artistic aspect with the arrival of the French draftsman Hercules Florence.

Florence produced the Voyage Fluvial between 1825 and 1829, and it recounts the years during which Baron Langsdorff sought to produce “scientific discoveries, geographical research, statistics […], studies of products still little known in commerce, [and] collections from all the kingdoms of nature” (Bertels 1981, p. 17). Beyond this, Langsdorff sought to bring back whatever else might “contribute to enriching the current collections of the Empire” and ensure that “Russia […] not fall behind other powers” (Bertels 1981, p. 17). There was, therefore, a geopolitical objective for the expedition, which could only be achieved through the collection of data and the methodical and rational observation of the Brazilian landscape (Bertels 1981, p. 17).

Apart from the short term Russian geopolitical objectives, the outcomes of the expedition would later be used as part of the strategic development of visual representations and narratives established by Brazil’s soon to be republic in the late nineteenth century. By opening its ports to foreign expeditions such as Langsdorff’s and their artists, the Brazilian monarchy fostered the foundational visions of ethnicities, landscapes and sociocultural heritage that would later coalesce into a modern nation-state, understanding soon enough that the state is “just as much a cultural form as it is a particular organization of the political”.9

Langsdorff’s desire to engage in the systematic observation of the explored territories had as its goal the production of a dispassionate and scientific account. The problem with this plan was that the literary output resulting from Humboldt’s earlier travels had already left an indelible aesthetic and subjective mark on this type of literature. This subjectivity—stemming from the romantic idealism of the time (according to which one must openly engage with the sense of awe produced by contact with nature)—was counterbalanced by Langsdorff’s pragmatism; however, it still comes through in Florence’s text. In the end, the Voyage Fluvial evinces an attempt to remain descriptive, objective, and exhaustive while still remaining open to the charms of poetry, not as a form of fascination, but as an aesthetic tool that might help science to describe such a fascinating reality.

At all times, Florence shows attentiveness to the record of the scenes before him. As a draftsman and future pioneer of photographic technique, his listening during the expedition is that of a chronicler, focused on the everyday events of the journey, such as arrivals and departures, encounters with indigenous people, the presence of natural accidents like rapids and waterfalls, and mosquito attacks. Like a microphone connected to a camera, he listens to what he sees and sees what he hears, balancing, in his writing, the senses of sight and hearing to follow good science, contribute to the expedition’s objectives, and please his superior on the one hand, while on the other, he effectively surrenders to the mysteries and fascinations of what he witnesses.

At the very beginning of the expedition, Florence describes both sonically and visually the entry into the Paraná River:

Then the rowers sing; with a jovial cry, they strike the air, while the steersmen strike the flat of the paddle with their hands, and at the bow, where they are always standing, they repeat their usual tap-dancing rhythm in cadence. With all this festive noise, we entered the waters of the Paraná. To call the Caiapós, the guide sounded the horn (a cow’s horn), an instrument that in these silent regions can be heard from a great distance and serves to gather scattered people in the forest. When monsoons occur, the prolonged sound of the horn echoes back and forth; sometimes it’s just a signal or also a way for the canoe’s crew to acknowledge a mistaken maneuver.

(Florence [1875] 2007, p. 46)

In another part of the Paraná, he chooses to describe the environment equally in terms of images and sounds: “Then our horizon was reduced to a few steps; the river flowed narrow and deep, but silent; the daylight faded, while the voices and noises grew louder” (Florence [1875] 2007, p. 78). He then shows some concern for the reader’s potential tedium and affirms the need to create a comprehensive account of what he sees and hears: “Perhaps the descriptions I make of waterfalls will eventually become tedious, because I am forced to repeat almost the same thing over and over, and everything boils down to water, foam, rocks, and noises, but I give account of them all, just as a logbook records even the slightest changes in the atmosphere” (Florence [1875] 2007, pp. 78–79).

Days earlier, still navigating the Tietê, Florence combines geology, linguistics, mythology, and ethnography to describe a rocky formation in the river:

We had already passed in front of the sheer cliffs, called Itanhaém, an indigenous name meaning ‘talking stone’. As it is known, the nymph Echo was condemned forever to only repeat the last syllables of what she heard: it seems she came here to enjoy more freedom. At least they say that during the time of the Portuguese discovery, she could repeat 14 syllables, but over time, as the rocks that made up her voice crumbled, she sank into complete muteness. Our shouts received no response from the unfortunate one.

(Florence [1875] 2007, p. 22)

The presence of Greek mythology in Florence’s description of the soundscape of the Tietê reflects the inescapable and constant presence of a Eurocentric gaze in most attempts to understand the Americas. One finds an early example of this is Carvajal’s Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento, when he describes the female indigenous warriors attacking Orellana’s expedition as the Amazons of Homer (Florence [1875] 2007, pp. 59–60). Similarly, Florence, despite not hearing the echo that named the stone, tried to listen for it as the Greek nymph Echo, even though he did have some knowledge of the Tupi–Guarani language.

Another passage, now on the Taquari River, which crosses Mato Grosso heading west until it reaches Peru, reveals both the sonic–visual relationship in Florence’s descriptions and the overlay of Brazilian and European soundscapes (the latter with bells and sounds of animals not native to the Americas):

Days ago, still navigating the Taquari, we frequently heard the songs of the anhumapocas and aracuãs. The first of these birds is a beautiful creature the size of a turkey: it has a tall stature, red eyes, a necklace of black feathers, and another formed by its bare skin. Its plumage is grayish, its long red legs, and its wings each armed with two spurs, with which it can dangerously wound. We frequently saw this interesting bird, always in pairs, or at most three together. The song it raises in the solitude of the swamps is reminiscent of the sound of a bell in the countryside. The aracuã couple is inseparable. When the male sings, the female responds, repeating the same notes, but in a different tone. When they multiply, the clamor is strong. This song imitates the cries of a hen being chased, with the difference that it is rhythmic and alternately repeated by one and the other.

(Florence [1875] 2007, pp. 102–3)

Further ahead, in the Amazon region, a large waterfall on the Juruena River prompts Florence to create a description that best synthesizes the relation between sound and vision in his account. At the same time, he makes explicit the tension between European references and the mission to report the novelties found in Brazilian lands:

By remarkable contrast, turning to the left, the eyes, still dazzled by this eternal whirlwind, rest on a cove struck by waves that break gently on the green moss of the platform, and beyond it, a wall cut in three planes of rocks, where a thousand threads of water descend, representing a sort of amphitheater of three orders of white stringed lyres, where the vibration falls and groans on the stone, blending distinct Aeolian sounds with the roars of the waterfall.

(Florence [1875] 2007, p. 229)

In contrast to Carvajal’s account, which is filled with the sounds of war, intimidation, warnings against invaders, or the results of actual confrontation, there is almost no description of sounds that indicate conflict; nevertheless, during the long duration of the Langsdorff Expedition, Florence would likely have encountered the dangers of the forest related in the harrowing accounts of Carvajal centuries prior, whether by trespassing in indigenous territories or due to inevitable encounters with wildlife. Florence’s decision to emphasize the more welcoming aspects of the natural, social, and cultural dimensions of the landscape in his accounts can be explained by a combination of two factors: the subjectivity of Florence, an artist mesmerized by the beauty of the surroundings, and the overall material conditions, mindset, and environment of the group. Reinforcing this point, it is worth mentioning that while Orellana’s undertaking was an unexpected and unplanned venture, with soldiers who had separated from Gonzalo Pizarro’s original voyage due to lack of resources and starvation, Langsdorff’s was a meticulously planned enterprise comprised of seven boats and forty people, including botanists, zoologists, and astronomers, who spent time investigating the surroundings while a staff of sailors, hunters, guides, and pilots took care of logistics. The fact that Wilhelmine von Langsdorff, the baron’s wife, also took part in the expedition is a testament to the far superior conditions in which the exploration took place.

Therefore, the majority of the references to sound in Voyage Fluvial describe the natural landscape, the sounds of animals, and the voices and music of the human groups encountered along the way. Even the few gunshots and musket sounds heard by Florence and included in the account appear in the context of festivity: “Then, from the city, shots of musket fire were exchanged with our rowers, and at the sound of that joyful blast, we left the shores, where I had the happiness of meeting a friend, living among good and kind people, and enjoying a simple and peaceful life” (Florence [1875] 2007, p. 20).

The relation between seeing and hearing nature that one takes from Carvajal’s account persists in Florence’s work. However, while one perceives that it is impossible for Carvajal to hear the forest, Florence attempts to merge seeing and hearing. This blending appears both in the text itself and in the abundant visual material produced by Florence during and after the expedition. He created 108 illustrations during the more than 10,000 km of navigation, some of which are included in the edition of Voyage Fluvial. These depict indigenous people, villages, animals, natural accidents, and scenes he witnessed.

After the expedition ended, Florence added to his diaries a pioneering work in the field of zoophony, in which “he developed his own methodology for recording the unusual sounds his European ears experienced in contact with Brazil’s nature” (Vielliard 1993, p. 7). This is a manuscript titled Memento and in it, Florence attempts to describe the sounds and vocal articulations of animals, which he adapts to the European musical notation system in an attempt to account for what he heard during Langsdorff’s expedition. This is another sign of the intimate relation between seeing and hearing, which guided the Frenchman’s deep immersion in the natural landscapes of Brazil.

3.3. Roosevelt–Rondon Expedition (1913–1914)

In 1909, after leaving the White House, former US president Theodore Roosevelt organized the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition, which aimed to hunt animal specimens to add to the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. The former president, who already had experience with bison hunting expeditions in the US territory of Dakota at the end of the nineteenth century, returned from Africa with more than 11,000 items, including skins from over a thousand large mammals such as hippopotamuses, elephants, lions, and rhinoceroses (Government Printing Office 1910). The African expedition was shared by Roosevelt himself in the book African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter–Naturalist, whose cover, in many editions, shows the “hunter–naturalist” himself posing, rifle in hand, next to a dead elephant.

When the Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition took shape in 1913, however, the condition for the participation of Brazilian colonel Cândido Rondon was that the expedition not limit its activities to hunting and that scientific work also be involved. The colonel presented the itinerary options to Roosevelt, and the chosen route was one that would follow the “River of Doubt”, which Rondon had navigated in 1909, but which was still unknown in terms of length, destination, and navigational difficulty (Rohter 2023). This would be the scientific portion of the journey to ensure Rondon and his team’s participation, without which, the expedition would likely have been doomed to failure.

The principal result of the four-month expedition was the mapping of the mysterious river to its mouth in the Madeira, the largest tributary of the Amazon. It also resulted in the book Nas Selvas do Brasil (Through the Brazilian Wilderness), the cover of which (both in its Brazilian and US editions) shows a photo of Roosevelt, the “hunter–naturalist”, posing, rifle in hand, next to a dead veado-campeiro (maned wolf). The weapon used to kill the animal is listed by Roosevelt in the first chapter of the book: “The naturalists brought, as defensive weapons, 16-gauge shotguns, one of which, Cherrie’s, had rifled barrels. For the rest of the group, the firearms were supplied by me and Kermit, including my Springfield rifle, Kermit’s two Winchesters, one in .405 and the other in .30–40, a 12-gauge Fox, another in 16-gauge, and a pair of revolvers, one a Colt and the other a Smith & Wesson” (Roosevelt 2010, p. 29). Despite the evidence, the author makes it clear, in the same chapter, that Rondon’s demand was respected, writing that: “Our journey was not planned as a mere hunt, but rather as a scientific expedition” (Roosevelt 2010, p. 46).

The modes of listening employed by Roosevelt during the expedition reproduce the ambiguity summarized by the phrase “hunter–naturalist”. The term reveals the idiosyncrasies of the time as well as Roosevelt’s own personality. An avid big-game hunter, Roosevelt did in fact champion important conservation measures during his presidency. He oversaw the establishment of numerous national forests, parks, and reserves, in addition to the United States Forest Service, a government agency responsible for the preservation and maintenance of natural areas. From Roosevelt’s perspective, hunting also appeared necessary to achieve scientific goals, such as assembling zoological collections. In fact, during the African expedition, when asked about the many animal deaths, Roosevelt responded: “I can only be condemned if the existence of the National Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and all similar zoological institutions are condemned” (O’Toole 2005, p. 67).

In addition to appearing in the listening practices reported by Roosevelt in Nas Selvas do Brasil, the contradictions inherent in a scientific/hunting endeavor also arose in discussions during the expedition. Roosevelt even questioned Colonel Rondon about his insistence on mapping the River of Doubt with the greatest possible precision. For the former president, who told Rondon that “great men don’t worry about small details”, the constant stops for measurements were delaying the expedition too much. The colonel’s response could not have been more direct: “I am not a great man, nor is this a small detail. (…) Mapping the river is indispensable; without that, this expedition is completely purposeless” (Rohter 2023). Both purposes—the hunt and the natural investigation—are revealed in scenes reported by Roosevelt in his travel account. In it, one witnesses a form of listening that, on one hand, perceives the subtleties of the surrounding landscape:

The forest appeared almost deserted and silent. We could not hear the chorus of birds and mammals, which occasionally happened on our land travels, when we were often awakened early by the cries, whistles, and chatter of monkeys, toucans, macaws, parrots, and parakeets. However, now and then, strange sounds came from the depths of the forest, and at night, various species of frogs and insects emitted strange cries and whines. The noise seemed to increase until midnight and then started to decrease throughout the early morning, when everything became silent.

(Roosevelt 2010, p. 260)

The same pair of ears, now focused on the hunt, relates the silence in the dogs barking to a jaguar that had outsmarted them: “The heterogeneous pack broke into howls and barks; and then, from the pack’s chase, it was clear that the prey had climbed a tree or hidden somewhere”.

At another moment, the force of the barking is taken as a sign of the appearance of a second jaguar:

We circled the thicket at half-gallop, hearing the dogs within. At a certain point, the pack broke into yelps, signaling that the jaguar was in sight. The few moments that followed were, in fact, the most exciting for the dogs during the hunt, and that’s when the beast climbs the tree. The furious barking of the pack, the shouts of encouragement from the riders, the jungle around, and the terror that the beast imposes, everything combined, it makes the moment anguished and full of sensation. (…), as soon as the prolonged barks and the distressing whimpers revealed that the jaguar had been reached, we saw it, a magnificent male, high in the branches of a large wild fig tree.

(Roosevelt 2010, p. 98)

One notices here the sound of the dogs barking, the riders egging them on, distressed canine whimpers upon contact with the jaguar, and then an abrupt switch to the realm of sight as the male jaguar comes into view. Roosevelt and his companions then shot and killed the animal.

At an earlier point, still preparing for the expedition, Roosevelt is enchanted by the songs of the region’s birds:

In the dense tropical forests, (…) I heard the songs of many birds that I couldn’t identify. However, the most beautiful of all was from a wary sabiá-da-mata, dark in color, which lived near the ground, on a tree trunk, but sang at the top of the branches. From a great distance, one could hear the resonant, lingering, musical note, like a bell, and with recurring tenderness, that it emitted during the intervals of its song. At first, I thought those notes were the actual song, but when I got closer, I realized they were just ‘fermatas’ emitted during the break of a long, melodious song. I never heard anything else that impressed me as much.

(Roosevelt 2010, p. 52)

He gives a similar level of attention in his listening and descriptive detail—though without the enchantment reserved for the birds’ songs—when encountering a group of peccaries:

However, we didn’t hear any noise, just an occasional bark from the dog, which sounded as though it was very far away. Finally, we heard a gunshot. Benedito had found the herd, which, by the way, wasn’t scared of his presence; it backed up a little and fired the gun as a signal. The three of us ventured into the forest, on foot, in the direction of the shot. (…) Shortly after, we began to hear the threatening grunts of the herd, in front and on our flanks. By this time, Benedito was already with us, and the dog was ahead. We began to walk slowly forward, towards the grunts, which were sometimes accompanied by the terrible clattering of jaws and teeth. (…) I shot at the dim outline of one of the peccaries, through vines, leaves, and branches, and the Colonel did the same. I fired three more times, and the Indian Antônio, once. The peccaries didn’t attack; they began to walk and trot with their bristles raised, grunting and clattering their teeth until they disappeared deeper into the forest.

(Roosevelt 2010, p. 163)

In the relationship between prey and predator, constantly revealed through Roosevelt’s listening practices, the poles sometimes reverse, with the explorers leaving the position of the threat and taking on the role of the threatened, whether from attacks by indigenous people or the natural dangers of the forest. In these moments, the sonic communication shifts from a hunting weapon to a survival tool, as in the scene where Roosevelt narrates his son Kermit’s advance through Nhambiquara territory:

It was a group of about twenty or thirty, including men, women, and children. Kermit, following the habits of the jungle, resolutely moved forward through the open field, shouting to announce his approach. Every land has its customs… The ancient Saxons considered it perfectly legal to kill any individual who ventured into foreign woods without announcing themselves with shouts or the sound of a horn. In the land of the Nhambiquaras, nowadays, it is against etiquette, and even dangerous, to approach the territory of others without prior warning.

(Roosevelt 2010, p. 244)

Another scene that shows how listening functions as a survival tool in the jungle is the following: “We left at dawn the next day. One of the crew members had gotten lost in the underbrush and was circling around in the hope of finding the river; we left without noticing his absence. Once the alarm was raised, we immediately stopped, and with great difficulty, he managed to free himself from the vines and thorns, guided by the sound of the engine and the horn” (Roosevelt 2010, p. 171).

Given what is now assumed to be the role of scientific and conservationist listening, which seeks to intervene as little as possible in natural dynamics, the scenes described here point to a polarization between contemplation and attempts at domination. In some way, these poles are synthesized in the two central figures of the expedition: on one side, Rondon, who would later be known as the ‘pacifist marshal’, and his concern with meticulous records and non-violence; on the other, Roosevelt, the ‘hunter–naturalist’ eager to add new specimens to his collection as a shooter. It is likely, however, that for these two characters, products of their time, the relation between the contemplation of nature and its domination is less that of opposite poles and more that of two sides of the same coin, as indicated by the contradictions now exposed in both of their nicknames.

4. Conclusions: Listening, Writing, and Conquest

Separated by more than 300 years, the three foreign expeditions traveled over 25,000 km into Brazilian territory and were carried out in distinct periods of Brazilian history—the colonial (1500 to 1822), imperial (1822 to 1889), and republican (1889 onwards) periods. In their own way, the written accounts based on these expeditions reveal the goals, emotions, dangers, enchantments, and contradictions of the presence of foreigners who ventured through Brazilian lands. These, in turn, inform the listening practices adopted by the members of each expedition. The oldest account, produced by Carvajal, shows a highly extractive and conquering mode of listening, typical of a colonial incursion that, paradoxically, proved incapable of listening to the forest enough to extract the basics for the group’s survival. Accustomed to looting and theft, Iberian conduct in the Americas during the early modern period produced a mode of listening that, at its limit, perceived the local anthrophony (in the form of indigenous drums) as though it were listening to prey revealing itself to potential predators.

Hercules Florence initially reveals a form of listening diametrically opposed to Carvajal’s, as he does not mention sounds indicating war or conflict; rather, he focuses his ear on the beauty and complexity of the natural soundscape. This landscape is absorbed and described by Florence in a way that balances the visual and the sonic, resulting in attempts (following the tradition of European musical notation) to write down the sounds of Amazonian biophony. The inevitable Eurocentrism is a point of contact between the two modes of listening, with both chroniclers comparing and describing the unheard-of sonic elements in European terms. While Carvajal hears the sounds of the indigenous populations as if they were produced by hunted animals from Europe, Florence forces the presence of the Greek nymph Echo to replace the stone that speaks, imposing, in his account, Greek mythology upon the Tupi.

In the third expedition, undertaken at the start of the twentieth century, hyphenation appears in many forms. Starting with the title of the expedition, Roosevelt–Rondon, which puts the former American president and his venatory ambitions first. The listening employed also becomes hyphenated, revealed in the very status of the author as a hunter–naturalist, sometimes contemplating the sounds of the natural landscape and other times silencing them by shooting their sources.

If Carvajal’s listening practices on the first mission, led by Orellana, reveal a clear sense of conquest, the listening modes employed by Florence on the expedition led by Langsdorff, three centuries later, presents what Mary-Louise Pratt called anti-conquest: “Strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony. (…) These strategies of innocence are constituted in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest associated with the absolutist era” (Pratt 1992, p. 7). Justified by a supposed and self-granted vocation for discovery and cataloging in the name of scientific progress, European men like Langsdorff and Florence undertook expeditions whose subsequent accounts exercised power similar to that of property titles—not only over the lands seen and heard but also over the beings and knowledge that, in an abstract and intellectual way, they aimed to possess.

Subtle practices of anti-conquest remained active in the modes of listening revealed by Roosevelt’s text as he yields to Rondon’s appeals for a scientific and peaceful expedition, resulting in moments where the former president shows himself truly enchanted by the Amazonian soundscape. In other moments, when his inner hunter speaks louder than his inner naturalist, his listening leaning towards absolutism. Just as Roosevelt’s face would later be sculpted into Mount Rushmore (deforming the sacred contours of ancient Lakota deities), his name would also be immortalized in the Amazonian landscape. By naming the river mapped during the expedition as the Roosevelt River and the state to the west of its banks as Rondônia, in honor of Colonel Rondon, the absolutist purposes of the expedition were fulfilled, solidifying the names of its leaders in the local geography. Similarly, the publication and circulation of the travel accounts recorded the names and deeds of their authors in history. Thus, by naming the landscape or listening to and describing it, both the conquest and anti-conquest intentions of the expedition were achieved.

Carvajal’s account, written in the sixteenth century, predates the period Pratt describes; however, it is possible to find elements in his text that resonate with Pratt’s arguments. While Florence and Roosevelt underpin their narratives with an explicitly scientific, liberal, and capitalist ideology that morally legitimizes the ‘conquest’—albeit through ‘anti-conquest’—in the name of classificatory knowledge, scientific advancement, and economic progress, in Carvajal’s account this justification occurs via humanitarian and religious avenues. Evidence of this lies in the numerous instances where the missionary invokes divine providence to explain the success of his travel companions in battle, while he compares his opponents to rabid and ferocious dogs (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, pp. 56, 72) and the devil (de Carvajal [1546] 1894, p. 273).

This imposition of a foreign lens finds concrete expression in the language used to describe the encountered world. The terms ‘indigenous’, ‘Indian’ and ’native’, extensively used in the three works to define not only human groups but also animals and elements of the local landscape, exist only within an epistemology imposed by foreign travelers. In fact, these terms do not refer to intrinsic traits of a given object; rather, they are relational identities proposed by outsiders. These are ‘etic’ categories placed upon those who had been there prior to European contact through the power of the written word. As Pratt herself argued in 2014: “nobody is indigenous until somebody else shows up”.10

In a similar way, elements of the soundscape are not ‘exotic’, ‘alien’, or ‘remote’ until foreign listeners step into them. Every soundscape will offer more sounds and potential meanings than what individual listeners are able to extract from them, as their perception is constrained by their material conditions, cultural repertoire, and subjectivity. Therefore, just as one should accept that written travel narratives record (more or less faithfully) the point of view of each traveler, it is also necessary to read the description of soundscapes within these narratives as the reflection of a particular point of listening, regardless of the political powers that underlie them.