“Were they dolphins or vast tambaqui? Otters or Manatees? In a sticky Amazon dawn I stood on the bow rubbing my eyes.”
Biochemist turned tree obsessive, Harriet Rix set out on a month-long expedition up the Rio Negro to study how rare trees thrive in the nutrient-poor soils of Brazil’s white-sand forests.
Armed with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and a book deal with The Bodley Head, she expected data. Instead, she found herself dodging tarantulas, trailing pink dolphins, and being seduced by the scent of an Aniba roseadora tree that smells uncannily like Chanel No. 5. Somewhere upriver of Manaus, she fell for the Amazon – hard. This is her account.
We were on the Rio Negro somewhere upriver of Manaus, on a boat slung with two decks of sardine-packed hammocks. On one side the bank was close, heaped with palms, iridescent blue butterflies, and towering angelim-vermelho covered with lianas. On the other side the river stretched out into a silvery sheet, marked with a few shivering rapids and a sleek back. As they came closer I saw that there were two dolphins, pinkish and smooth, and one of them had a smaller shadow next to it.
During the journey a Baré family had adopted me, and their little girl had dragged me out of my sweet-swelling palm hammock to look at an enormous moth, the size of my hand, which had landed on the deck in the night. It was the latest and most spectacular in a long line of visitors – a hawkmoth, a moth with grey chevron’d lines, a huge, brazil-nut pollinating black bee – and it had black-grey hieroglyphs like an ox-head in its beautiful forest chestnut, and delicate swallowtails.
When I looked up the dolphins were nearer. They, or some others, appeared at various times across the five days and nights that we were on the boat, all the way up to Sāo Gabriel da Cachoeira.
Once, looking at them, I found my attention caught instead by the shore, where a large snake slid like a fat green shade along an overhanging branch of a flowering Clitoria and down into the water; another time, as I stood by the stern at night and looked for the gleaming eyes of a black caiman, I heard a hiss, and realised that the wave I was staring at was flesh, a dolphin, coasting along with us at night.
The Rio Negro has a black oily slick on its water; a peat-rich gold that asks for a Scottish salmon to lurk over the white sand in its depths. Like a peat river it is acidic and full of humic acid, the result of water running off the granite of the Guiana highlands in Colombia and Venezuela, 1.7 billion years old, and being filtered through massed layers of rainforest, a million interwoven roots filtering it for any useful remnant.
By contrast, the other great tributary of the Amazon, the Rio Solimōes, is cappuccino-milky, carrying white sediment from the young Andes in Peru. They meet at Manaus, in a dolphin-torn expanse where the two waters push up against each other and tumultuously mix and divide like an alchemist’s dream.
A man called Solomon took me in his canoe to run my hand through the water’s difference, where the espresso warmth of the Rio Negro is pulled in little puffs into the ice-milk of the Rio Solimōes. Then we followed his favourite dolphin “the old grey one” up to the balsa-wood villages of wooden bungalows that floated on vast lightweight logs, where they sold fresh cashew-fruit juice from the floating corner shop.
On the way back to Manaus harbour a container ship, incongruous 1,000 miles from the sea, came roaring up the Amazon behind us. Manaus’ position as the last deep-water port on the Amazon made it rubber-boom rich, and as the tide withdrew it was left with belle-époque buildings of exquisite charm which are now being restored in a new boom.
Among them the opera house reigns supreme; gilded boxes and stalls, with seven hundred and one jacaranda and red-velvet seats impatient for an audience. On the stage curtain the Tupi goddess Uiara lounges in the cataracts of the meeting waters, surrounded by swags and roses.
The legend is that she was her father’s only daughter, and most beloved child. Her brothers – envious and bitter – fought and finally drowned her, whereupon she gained a dolphin tail and took to the Amazon, beautiful and immortal. In this guise and with the sweet music of the splashing waters she lures men to their deaths, and even those who survive never escape their longing for the sparkling waters she lives in.
Harriet’s first book, The Genius of Trees, is due to be released on 7th August 2025 – described by Penguin Books as “a mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, plants, animals, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined.”
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