The Accidental Feminist by Toby Molenaar

Author:Toby Molenaar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE GOLD OF CREPURI

I had first heard about the gold miners of Crepuri from the engineers in Maici camp, but did not have time to follow up on it. When I returned the year after and said I wanted to do a story on it, my friends first refused to help me. Hundreds of miles south of here, way far in the jungle, dangerous, drunken miners, diseases, planes can’t land for days because of the rain, anything could happen, etc. I insisted. They gave in. But not before they taught me how to handle a gun. The pilot who brought our staples also supplied Crepuri camp and was willing to take me, but he agreed with the engineers that I was crazy to go there by myself.

I arrived late in the afternoon, the only passenger in the Cessna. Before boarding, the pilot said, “How much do you weigh? I have a load of one thousand pounds of merchandise and cannot take another ounce.” He put me and my cameras on the scale, unloaded the weight in rice and we took off. After nearly three hours of flight I saw the camp, a tiny cluster of shiny wet roofs embedded in a tightly knitted carpet of green. When we descended on a narrow clearing of red mud that served as a landing strip, people stared at me. A woman loaded down with cameras? What is she doing here?

Crepuri had no main street or square. Its forty-odd houses huddled together at the end of the short runway. Weeds with bright red flowers grew high on the muddy paths between the huts, covering up blackened tree stumps where the jungle had been cleared and burned. No roads lead out of here, for the simple reason that there was nowhere to go. The nearest town was Itaituba, two hundred miles away. The only transport out if here a canoe or the small single-engine plane they called teco-teco. A speck of humanity in a vast green void: several hundred men, fifteen prostitutes, a group of ramshackle huts and three bars, which claimed to serve food. Malaria, fever and heat. With only one reason for it all: gold.

The current gold rush started in the town of Santarem, when a stocky man called Nilçon emerged from the jungle carrying several jerry cans filled with nuggets and gold dust. He distributed his treasure generously among the local girls and the stories of his riches and orgies spread like wildfire. Santarem lies in the State of Para, nearly 1,500 miles north of Rio and 500 miles inland from the Atlantic, at a junction where the blue Tapajos River flows into the muddy Amazon. The area was Indian territory, practically unknown, dangerous and unhealthy, but soon hundreds of men were paddling their canoes upstream. Settlements sprung up along the tributaries, but the search for gold remained a one-man operation for the freelance adventurer, the black market dealer, the individual prospector. The mining camps are so far removed from civilization, that even today very few Brazilians are aware of their existence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.