Engineers of Amazonia

摘要

Henry Walter Bates, the nineteenth-century British naturalist, normally documented his observations in great detail. Yet traveling in the vast rain forest of the Amazon estuary in August 1848, he passed through what, with uncharacteristic reticence, he described only as an "artificial canal" linking two important rivers. Oddly, Bates did not comment on this unusual feat of engineering. Who constructed this canal and why? Was it an ancient or a recent undertaking?