It might once have been possible to retell the history of certain peoples by the space unfamiliar animals occupied in their cultural psyches. As it was in ancient Greece, for example, where political ideas were inextricably linked with beings with half-human, half-animal characteristics. This was also true during the time of the great navigations—a foundational moment for the modern concept of Europe, and which culminated in the violent colonization of the American continents and the genocide of their native population—when Portuguese and Spanish maps were illustrated with countless imaginary creatures.
The appearance of a Balaenoptera acutorostrata, a minke whale, in Piquiatuba, a small village on the banks of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon in the state of Pará, roughly a thousand kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, aroused the imagination and curiosity not only of local people but of the entire nation, due to the case’s huge media impact. Piquiatuba lies within the Tapajós National Forest, which is maintained by the ICMBio.
When it first appeared, stranded on a public beach, it was not immediately identified as a whale—an animal that was absolutely unimaginable in the middle of the Amazon. Partially covered by mud and moss, first impressions suggested it was simply a decomposing tree trunk that had been exposed during the dry season. As time went by, and with the considerable mass appearing to move at times, rumors spread that thiswas an animal: the great snake of the Tapajós River, perhaps; from the riverine myth about a woman who gives birth to twin snakes, which anthropologists consider to be a variant of a pre-Colombian Indigenous myth.
It was only with the arrival of Jonathás Xavier dos Santos, then a twenty-nine-year-old teacher, in a boat with his students from Piquiatuba, and their observations of water splashing from the animal’s back, that the improbable conclusion was reached: the object stranded here was, in fact, a whale.
The crowded bus, with passengers and bags piled on top of one another, bounced along BR-163, the highway which connects Cuiabá, in Mato Grosso, with Santarém, in Pará. Under a scorching sun, residents were returning to their homes in the Tapajós National Forest after stopping in the city to buy bread and gallons of gas—essential purchases for those living in a place so hard to access.
It takes about three hours to travel the hundred kilometers between Santarém and Piquiatuba, which sits on the east bank of the Tapajós River, in the Belterra municipality. Piquiatuba, a reference to the towering piquia trees in the forest, was hot and muggy on the afternoon I arrived. The air felt thick without the breezes that usually help to cool the riverside communities in the late afternoon, but this was tempered by the sense of serenity and organization in the village, which has a health center, elementary school, radio, and lodging.
Remerson Castro Almeida was at the school on November 14, 2007. He was taking Jonathás Xavier dos Santos’s Portuguese class when, around three in the afternoon—the hottest part of the day, some people burst into the classroom shouting, “Something’s in the river spraying water like a giant caiman!” Jonathás didn’t think twice; he and his class hopped in his bajara, a small wooden vessel commonly used in the Amazon. The whale’s location was quite far from the community hub and rather difficult to access: a stream and a sand bank had to be forded in order to reach it.
At that time, the IBAMA was the administrative body responsible for the Tapajós National Forest, and they allowed cattle rearing with access to the jungle, although this is prohibited today. One of the stockbreeders asked his stepson to go after a bull that had run off to the river’s edge. It was then that the young man realized the giant mass was not a decomposing tree trunk and ran back to the school. The local fishermen who first spotted the strange mass had assumed it was a fallen tree and had given it a wide berth, looking to avoid the collisions common in times of drought when the river level drops and allows large trunks to emerge, bobbing up and down in the current.
Ten minutes in the bajara, and the teacher and his class reached the end of the beach where the stranded animal lay. Just twelve or thirteen people in all. Cautiously, they moved around it, making sure it wasn’t dangerous, considering the rumors about the great snake. Upon further examination, Jonathás verified that it was not a snake, and wondered instead if it might be a great fish, though this wasn’t cause for immediate relief. Praying for the safety of his students, he moved them back to prevent them from touching the animal. Knowing that the largest fish in the region is the pirarucu, which reaches onlyabout three meters in length, the teacher thought it could be a shark, for there are stories of such animals being caught in the area around Santarém.
It was then that Remerson, in the prime of his teenage years and endowed with a particular spirit of adolescent adventure—in his own words—took matters into his own hands and touched the animal, removing some of the silt and slime from its back. Jonathás then realized that it was a whale. Within a few hours, the place would be transformed into a veritable tourist attraction, drawing thousands of visitors in the days following the animal’s discovery.
Dona Teca, Remerson’s sixty-year-old mother, was born and raised in Piquiatuba. Her home, located on the river, has an open cooking area for better air circulation. Despite having many good memories of the time she lived outside the community during the 1970s, when she camped out on Ilha do Amor, one of the best-known postcard-perfect spots in all of Pará, she never quite got used to it and eventually returned to Piquiatuba.
A nostalgic if ambiguous tone dominates when she talks about the transformations Piquiatuba has undergone since she was a child: the arrival of electricity, the school, the health center, and a small supply system for groundwater are sources of pride, while changes in eating habits prompt reflections on the increase in certain diseases primarily caused by too much sugar. She remembers the time they traveled to Santarém by rowboat—a trip that took a week, even with the wind at their backs—to exchange sacks and sacks of açaí berries for candles and soap, which were then considered essentials from “outside.”
The Lower Tapajós River Basin, through which the minke whale passed in 2007, is today a true battlefield, marked by confrontations between different worldviews and beliefs about the area. Development plans—which envision the construction of no fewer than forty-three hydroelectric plants across the region, and increases in deforestation as well as in mining, timber, and soybean cultivation—are just some of the threats the local population fears. These changes are an unadulterated affront to their ways of life.
Márcia Marinho Viana was a new arrival in Piquiatuba at the time of the whale’s stranding. She had come to work as a teacher at the school where Sebastião dos Santos Alves Filho worked as the secretary. Today they’re married, with a son and daughter, and they’re afraid that the violence and disrespect being wielded against the Munduruku Indians over their land access rights, due in large part to government plans for hydroelectrical plants in the Middle Tapajós region, could have consequences for them.
In their eyes, the only reason the area they live in isn’t being overrun by soybean farms, as other areas in Belterra are, is because it’s a protected area, owned by the government, and therefore cannot be sold. The local community survives on fishing, hunting, and subsistence agriculture, and has recently begun investing in the creation of a community tourism agency, and also a collective of cooks, to allow resources to flow in without destroying the environmental wealth in which they live.
Despite these limited guarantees and relative stability, the greatest fear among these people is that they will eventually be physically removed from the area. Their fear is not unfounded, for the practice of removing traditional Amazonian populations has been going on since the military dictatorship began in 1964, when Indigenous people were expelled from their lands and relocated in accordance with the federal government’s developmental interests. Sebastião recalls that, during the creation of the Tapajós National Forest in 1974, the inhabitants of the region had to fight to stay because the government wanted an uninhabited jungle reserve. More recently, when the Belo Monte Dam was built, countless families in the Altamira region, on the Xingu River, were forced to leave their homes, which were subsequently flooded by the hydroelectric plant.
Exhausted, agitated, with countless scrapes on its belly and a gash on its back, most likely from colliding with a boat, the minke whale needed help, which the community quickly came together to offer. On that same day, when night fell, they scheduled shifts of people to keep watch over the animal, lest it escape on its own and get lost further up the river. They also tried contacting IBAMA by phone, reporting the extraordinary case of a whale that had become stranded on one of their community’s beaches and asking for help. But the body responsible for the Tapajós National Forest was skeptical. “Next time you call, why not say an elephant wandered into Piquiatuba!” was the first response. It was only when Jonathás, the educator, got on the phone that employees started believing the story and began to mobilize.
The whale appeared a week before the annual açaí festival, which draws many river residents and Indigenous visitors to Piquiatuba. As the news had already begun to spread, the day after the animal had appeared, which was a national publicholiday, the community was already filling with people from other villages and communities throughout the region as well as from Santarém—which is where blogger Manuel Dutra got the scoop and broke the news to Brazil and the rest of the world.
Children scurried to take pictures next to and on top of the whale while community members took turns covering it with damp sheets to protect it from sunburn. This remote region, about a kilometer from the center of Piquiatuba, had become one massive parking lot. Four-by-four trucks, with enough power to ford the river and cross the sandbar that separate the beach where the animal lay from the path that leads to the village, parked very close to the stranding site. Smaller cars pulled over at the water’s edge, and their occupants continued on foot up to the whale.
Throughout the day, biologists and veterinarians from IBAMA and the Santarém city council arrived on site and initiated appropriate veterinary treatments. Meanwhile, IBAMA contacted the Instituto Baleia Jubarte, or Humpback Whale Institute, which immediately dispatched Milton Marcondes, a veterinarian responsible for monitoring the breeding of humpbacks in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Bahia state. But despite the best efforts of the community, the whale managed to escape that night.
The end of the beach where the whale was stranded is a muddy area of the Tapajós riverbank, full of cauxi, a type of stinging freshwater sponge that remains on the banks when the water level drops during the dry season. On the sandy part of the beach, Remerson and Sebastião point to myriad scatteredpieces of Indigenous pottery: ceramics of different shapes, colors, sizes, and materials which community members identify as belonging to their Indigenous ancestors, and which still lack in-depth archaeological studies, making this location something of a huge, abandoned cemetery.
Although they don’t consider themselves Indigenous, the population of Piquiatuba speaks respectfully of its ancestors and seems to have much admiration for its neighbors in Takuara and Bragança, which were among the first communities in the Lower Tapajós River Basin to identify themselves as Indigenous at the end of the twentieth century. This process is locally acknowledged as a time of reorganization for the Indigenous movement, in which the population begins to recognize and claim their rights, living in villages and questioning the violent narrative of the whitening process in the name of appreciation and validation for their ways of life.
It takes a little under two hours by boat to get from Piquiatuba, on the east bank of the Tapajós, to the Tupinambá villages of Jaguarituba and Santo Amaro, on the west bank of the TapajósArapiuns Extractive Reserve. It’s a frightening crossing, and many local residents wished us good luck and to take care, as we were going out in a small vessel with a tiny outboard motor into the turbulence of this immense river.
From what the locals say—and everyone seems to know even the most peculiar details of this story—after escaping from Piquiatuba, the whale went unseen for several long hours before becoming stranded again the next day, November 16, on a beach between Jaguarituba and Santo Amaro. Inhabitants ofboth villages had heard about the whale, and were preparing to cross the river to see the animal when they learned it had escaped. So it came as a surprise to the Indigenous people when local fishermen announced that the animal had come to a stop right there, between the two villages.
Despite the whale’s being well cared-for as well as enjoyed—as attested by the many photos taken of adults by its side and children climbing on its back—the animal escaped again. But this time, there was an additional, important detail: a rumor that the whale had been wounded by a harpoon or arrow during its stay in Jaguarituba and Santo Amaro. Some even said it was beaten with a stick and killed. These stories stigmatized the two communities as places where the whale was harmed.
Such speculations are quickly countered by the local Indigenous people, who claim that the animal already had a deep wound in its back, an observation also made by residents of Piquiatuba and by Jonathás, the teacher, and later corroborated by a veterinary report which states the likely cause of the gash was a collision with a boat. In addition, Seu Azulai, a Jaguarituba resident, looked under the fins and reported seeing several candiru—a kind of fish known as a bloodsucker. “We were very sorry, because we took very good care of her,” he said, showing us photos of the event from his collection and inviting us to take a bath in the stream that runs underneath his house.
While unusual, it is not unprecedented to find a whale swimming into a river. In 2006, a northern bottlenose whale, a species that can grow up to five meters long and seven metric tons in weight, ran aground in the River Thames in central London. It had goneoff-course from the icy seas of Scotland and Northern Ireland as it was departing the Arctic Ocean in search of less frigid waters. It was the first whale seen in London since records began in 1913. And in November 2016, a humpback whale, which can weigh up to thirty metric tons and reach sixteen meters in length, was seen in New York’s Hudson River near the George Washington Bridge. She didn’t run aground, and was likely able to find her way back to salt water. In fact, American scientists have recorded an increase in whale sightings in the New York Area over the past several years. They credit this to better water quality and increasing populations of Atlantic menhaden, a favorite prey of humpbacks. These improvements in environmental conditions is likely the result of public policies passed back in the 1970s.
The minke whale in the Tapajós River, in turn, broke all records, and is considered the cetacean (an infraorder of marine animals which includes whales) that has traveled the longest distance upstream: more than a thousand kilometers from Marajó Island, in the Amazon River Delta, where it entered, to the beach in Piquiatuba.
Also known around the world as the zwergal (German for “dwarf whale”) and the vågehval (Norwegian for “bay whale”), the minke belongs to the Mysticeti suborder, characterized by having baleen: structures more like bristles in the mouth instead of teeth. In order to feed, these animals draw in huge volumes of water and filter out the plankton or krill, a group of invertebrates similar to shrimp. This particular species usually spends the summers feeding in Antarctica before heading north for warmer waters during the winter. In November, then, with the austral summer approaching, this particular minke would have been making its way back to Antarctica on an empty stomach when, for some reason, it entered the mouth of the Amazon River.
It was in the midst of a heated game of pool, on the eve of the November 15 holiday, at a bar in Caravelas, in southern Bahia, that Milton Marcondes received an unusual call from Fábia Luna, at IBAMA, with whom he had previously worked. After taking the call, Milton told his friends that he had to leave immediately on an emergency trip. The mission? To rescue a whale in the middle of the Amazon. His friends didn’t buy it, believing Milton was just changing the subject as a lame excuse for abandoning the game.
Marcondes spent the entire night and much of the next day traveling. He went from Caravelas to Vitória, and from there to Rio, Brasília, and Manaus before finally arriving in Santarém. For two days, November 16 and 17, Marcondes joined team searching for the animal by helicopter, without any real hope of finding it, when the next day they got a report that the whale had reappeared at the mouth of the Arapiuns River in São José do Arapixuna, just northwest of Santarém.
The whale had been found stranded near the shore. Again, it had been covered with damp cloths to protect it from the sun, and Marcondes put together a first aid plan: dive underwater to check for injuries, take the necessary measures, and hold tight until a large net arrived from Santarém which they would use to contain the animal in a nearby tributary while providing for its recovery.
When the net failed to arrive, Milton began his work, though observing the animal from underwater proved difficult due to the murky water. He felt around with his hands, and confirmed the presence of a superficial wound, which locals assumed had been caused by an arrow or stick. Pink river dolphins appeared around the whale, as if offering their support to their suffering distant cousin. Milton treated the animal with antibiotics and was preparing to perform blood tests when the rescue helicopter landed again. The whale started to tremble: it looked like it might be a seizure, but Milton soon realized the animal was frightened by the noise and rotor wash from the helicopter’s arrival.
Panicked, the animal escaped again, and began swimming in circles. By then it was late in the afternoon, and the lack of light made a safe capture risky for both the animal, which could get caught up in the newly arrived netting and drown, and for the people attempting to rescue it, who could easily be crushed by its seven-ton mass. Considering such dangers, the decision was made to postpone the operation to the next day. Around ten o’clock that night, the people along the riverbank monitoring the whale could no longer hear its breathing. The next morning, the animal was gone, and nowhere to be found.
Searches were resumed, but in vain. The whale would only reappear on November 20, on the same beach from which it had disappeared two days before, its carcass distended and already in a state of advanced decomposition—a detail that truly astonished the veterinarian.
Raimundo Castro das Neves, now an evangelical minister, was forty at the time of the minke whale’s stranding, and living between Piquiatuba and Alter do Chão along a route he still takes every week to work with relatives in the tourist village’s burgeoning construction industry. He recalls with excitementhow he boarded the helicopter sent by IBAMA to search for the whale on the night of November 15, when it escaped from Piquiatuba. But they were never able to spot it. Convinced that the whale’s fate could have been different, Raimundo deeply regrets that the Piquiatuba community wasn’t able to resolve the issue on its own. He admits that he cried when he first learned of the animal’s death.
Among the other possibilities suggested by community members was situating the whale between two catamarans and sailing the thousand kilometers separating Piquiatuba from the sea, thus returning the whale to the open Atlantic Ocean. The human and financial costs of such an undertaking, however, were prohibitive. The other plan they had discussed was to gather a group of strong men to carry the whale, in their arms, to the large lake in the heart of Piquiatuba. Packed with fish, they believed there would have been plenty of food for the whale to happily live out its life with them.
Owing to the cetacean’s arrival, Piquiatuba gained fame as “the place where the whale appeared.” Everyone in the region knows the story, everyone enjoys retelling it, and many, to my surprise, were quick to remember that 2017 was its tenth anniversary. The beachings were a landmark event for the community, and the subject of countless projects and activities by students in the local schools—in addition to the basic curriculum these schools run classes on Amazonian Studies and the History of Belterra.
Sávio Viana Alves, Sebastião and Márcia’s son, wasn’t even born when the minke whale appeared in Amazonian waters. Even so, he is well aware of what happened. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have let the whale die. I would have dug a well for her to stay in,” the six-year-old says. I also had the opportunity to talk with an elementary school class whose students at the time of the whale’s appearance would have been only two or three years old, yet this does not limit their affection for the story. “I would have liked her a lot,” “I’d give her a hug,” and “I’d take a selfie” were some of the students’ statements about how they would react if another whale were to appear in their community.
Some of the activities organized by the school to respond to the event were storytelling and holding discussions about it, as well as artwork—all of which was lost when one of the school’s computers died during a storm.
One of the most striking passages in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is the moment when the narrator and protagonist, Ishmael, reflects on the importance of whales to contemporary commerce in its global form. He implies that, despite the insignificance of whaling in world literature and the low status that whalers occupy in nineteenth-century American society, it is precisely they who are primarily responsible for the growing geopolitical importance of the United States. This was happening, according to Ishmael, because only whaling, and the commercialization of whale oil for lighting, had managed to break the Spanish stranglehold on trade in the Pacific between its Asian and American colonies and the motherland:
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whalemenwho first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
One of the subsequent stages in the development of modern international trade was tied directly to the creation of Belterra. In 1934, the industrialist Henry Ford decided to clear the jungle and create a rubber plantation for latex extraction, eventually intended to supply the tires of his cars, which sold around the world. Belterra was designed and built as a village for American workers, complete with hospitals, schools, basic sanitation, and a brand-new port to handle the rubber production. The residents of Piquiatuba, in turn, took advantage of the new demand and began extracting latex from rubber trees themselves, which they went on to sell in Belterra.
Ultimately, it is no exaggeration to say that the current arrangement of international trade has one of its geopolitical nodes right there in the Lower Tapajós region: as much due to the soy produced in Mato Grosso (and already spreading across Pará), which helps sustain growth in China, as to the potential for deforestation to establish new, clear acreage coveted by factory farms.
The João Fona Cultural Center, whose façade looks out over the Tapajós River in downtown Santarém, has an impressive collection of Amazonian archaeology, as well as displaysfeaturing historic documents and furniture from the city, a temporary exhibition room, and our whale’s skeleton on display: the most visited attraction by far. The building, built in 1865, has previously served as the city hall, the Santarém Chamber of Commerce, the courthouse, and the jail.
Jussara Silva de Almeida, an educator responsible for the institution’s library and for leading some of the guided tours, seems excited about the way things are going at the cultural center, which is currently partnering a teaching and knowledge creation program not only with local schools but with the greater Santarém community and tourists as well. Many visitors, especially the locals and their children, come just to see the whale. Tourists who are unaware of the story often assume the bones have been brought there for some other reason.
Even so, the João Fona staff are not short of stories to tell. For example, there was the teacher who, upon entering the exhibition room, was struck by the size of the bones: “A dinosaur!” she exclaimed. And then there are the old fishermen from the region, who enjoy comparing this animal to the large fish and caimans they caught when they were young.
But the story that most appeals to Jussara—and she’s heard it several times—has to do with the whale’s supposed route into Amazonian waters: according to some, foreign ships would arrive, loaded with salt water from the ocean, which was then emptied into the river so they could then steal clean fresh water from the region. During one of these operations, the whale must have been dumped in the Tapajós, and, unable to find its way back to the Atlantic, ended up stranded in Piquiatuba.
The likelihood of such a tale is irrelevant. In a more or less imaginary sense, its value lies in its being one of the ways the local population reflects on life and the political issues of their time. It is a poetic conception, a way of giving meaning to the world as it transforms around them, even stemming as it does from an event as unusual and peculiar as the life and death of a minke whale in the Amazon.