I barely remember him and, unfortunately, my mother’s memory of him is not better. But he should be remembered, even if only briefly.
He was the camp carpenter — both the Administrative (“American”) and the Labor (“Otro”) camps.
And he did fine work with wood.
My early childhood years are roughly divided by la casa vieja and la casa nueva: “the old house” and “the new house”, meaning the house I lived in the first 6 plus years of life, and the house we moved to in 1960, after the birth of my second sister.
Mr. Montaño visited us in both houses, although I do not have specific recollections or anecdotes from “the old house” other than I remember seeing him there. And I do remember a bookcase that he built and which my sister bravely attempted to climb only to have the case fall on her. She was terribly frightened, but otherwise fine. At the time there were only a few books stored there, along with some photos and decorations.
In “the new house” my memories are a tad sharper.
“Remember to touch the electric appliance with the back of the hand, like so. Should you get shocked, you’ll easily move the hand away instead of inadvertently grasping the machine and prolonging the shock.” I’ve never forgotten that advice which he gave my mother as she asked whether he could take a look at the washing machine because for some reason everyone who touched it got shocked. I just watched and did not wonder about a carpenter being asked about electric matters.
Back then folks knew much about their field and quite a bit about just about everything else that helped with our daily lives.
“Here’s the queso de mano, Sra. Adita.” He lived on the carretera de Caruachi (the road to Caruachi) and somewhere in his neck of the woods was a lady who made the best queso de mano cheese I ever tasted. I know, childhood memories are notoriously deceiving, but let me enjoy the memory! It was great. And I’ve never tasted the like since.
My parents commissioned him to build a vinyl record storage piece of furniture. I remember the day he delivered it but did not appreciate the work done until many years later. We used it not only in El Pao, but also in Georgia where my parents had it shipped after leaving Venezuela. It is still in my mother’s house outside Atlanta, and I admire it every time I visit.
He was gentlemanly and proper and methodical. His Spanish was that of an educated man. I enjoyed his company.
I do not recall the circumstances of Mr. Montaño’s death. Only that it was a shock to us all, even small children. He was beloved.
May he rest in peace.
The vinyl storage furniture is seen in the background, behind my sisters, Brenda (left) and Elaine (right). The lamp was fashioned and preserved from a branch my father picked up from a shore of the Orinoco River. The vinyl storage is on the right. In the foreground are the Correa children, childhood friends from Fairburn, Georgia, circa 1979. In background, my sister, Elaine is seated on the left, my brother, Ronald, is in the center, and my sister, Brenda, on the right. Queso de mano (“Cheese of the Hand”) My father, Charles M. Barnes, not far from Caruachi, circa 1952.
In the remotest Amazonian jungle, off the Rio Negro — which the Indians called the River of Hunger, and for good reason — Jan Little, blind and deaf and emaciated with hunger, exhaustion, and grief, had managed to heat a little soup and turned towards her hammock. She had seen or heard no one for over four months in jungle isolation. As she felt her way to the hammock, she sensed a hand on her bare arm.
John Man in his book about Jan Little wrote, “[There] was nothing but river and jungle. A clearing was nothing against it. Here, the wilderness was all, a force that would, given the chance, embrace, permeate, and ingest anything that intruded upon it — clearings, people, life itself.”
Unlike Isabela Godin and Raiza Ruiz, whom I wrote about in Amazons II and Amazons III, Jan Little, her husband, Harry, and daughter, Becca, did not wish to return to Vermont or California whence they hailed. And unlike the warrior women described by Francisco de Orellana and Fr. Gaspar de Carvajal (Amazons I), Jan was not of the jungle nor from the jungle, nor was she in a region of the jungle capable of producing life-sustaining nutrition, as were the Amazons.
Harry Little was determined to succeed as a homesteader in the jungle, as far away from the nearest settlement, road, and neighbor as it was possible to be. His intense focus and energy brought Jan and Becca under his spell, a spell that only death would eventually break.
After a decade in the jungles of southern Mexico, angry by the Mexican authorities’ decision to build a road that would traverse not far from their homestead and offended by his perception that the authorities had not been fair with the Lacandones Indians who lived in that jungle, Harry uprooted himself, his wife, and his stepdaughter and arrived in Guyana, South America, making plans and arrangements to travel by rivers into the most forbidding reaches of the Amazonian jungle.
He eventually decided on homesteading in the Sierra Neblinas in what is now the Venezuelan state of Amazonas. However, Venezuelan politics intruded, and that plan had to be discarded, leaving the three stranded in Cucuí, Brazil, a town on the shores of the Rio Negro, which borders Amazonas, Venezuela.
One day, as was often the case with Harry, he was inspired to go to Serra do Padre, now known as Serra de Bela Adormecida (or Serra do Curicuriari) which locals told him was inaccessible. The Littles were persistent and eventually found men who would take them up the Rio Demiti, which was no more than swamps for a good portion of the way. They promised to, in effect, be their contact with the outside world by coming to them with supplies and mail and vice versa whenever the river was high enough to at least wade.
And so, they lived and produced — but very little as the soil and its depth were not conducive to agriculture. Over the years they cleared a “garden clearing” and a “nursery clearing” and a “pineapple clearing”, plus built two huts, one not too far from the water, the other higher up where on the rare clear days the Pico da Neblina could be seen. All this was described to Jan by Harry and Becca, her daughter.
This was a life of complete isolation, the only contact being the “cargo men” who would come when they could. Often “when they could” would be months from the last supply and the Littles were left to rationing the little grain they had from their last supply run. Some herbs grew but nothing near what was needed to maintain life.
They were able to finance the supplies and food with the Social Security and disability monies that were mailed to them from back home. Apparently, Harry never saw the irony: he hated “civilization” (and made that very clear, even to the point of cutting Jan and Becca off from Jan’s loving family), but he survived on what they received from the society he so despised.
Towards the end of the year 1979, they fell ill. Was it an unknown jungle virus? We don’t know. Malaria had been eradicated years before and Jan narrates that the symptoms were not malarial, which she and Harry had both battled in years past in Mexico.
Whatever it was, it weakened them to the point of inactivity.
One day, not hearing Becca, who by that time had been the most energetic of the three, doing the work of two men or more, Jan asked about her. “She’s finished,” said Harry. “She didn’t make it.”
The next morning, “You need to take the body out.” As sick and weak as Jan was, Harry was even sicker.
She dropped herself from the hammock, crawled to where Harry told her the body had fallen. Gathering all her strength, with effort she did not know she could muster, she wrapped Becca’s wasted body in her hammock and said, “I cannot move her, Harry!”
“You must! Drag it to the ditch.” Harry was adamant that Jan not refer to Becca’s body as “her” but as “it”.
Jan could barely crawl to the entryway of the hut alone. Now she was to not only crawl, but also drag her daughter’s body to the entryway and much beyond.
She pulled and fell exhausted. She had moved only an inch. She pulled again. And again. Inch by inch, hour after hour, she dragged her daughter’s body outside as far as she could drag it. Then she crawled back inside.
After two months, Harry died. And Jan did this all over again, except that by this time she had regained some strength, having eaten kernels of corn from a can, one kernel at a time.
All alone, deaf and blind; emaciated with hunger; she determined to make it. She determined to survive.
Using her powers of memory and typewriter ribbon in lieu of rope to palpably mark her way, over a period of days, she made her way to the hut up the hill, knowing that one mistake in direction would most probably mean death. But she found it and was able to put much needed supplies in a sack and bring it down to the main hut.
At this time in world events hostages taken from the American embassy were being held in Iran. The guerrilla war against the Soviets was bearing fruit in Afghanistan. Mount St. Helens was signaling a soon to come eruption. A funeral event attended by presidents and prime ministers took place in Belgrade as Josep Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia was buried. British Special Forces stormed the Iranian embassy in London to rescue hostages. And all the while, Jan Little, with typewriter ribbon, a long staff to fend off serpents, and her sharp memory, felt her way around “Homestead Hill” and did her best to survive.
One day, on her way back from the higher hut, she smelled pineapple. Remembering their failed attempts at harvesting crops, she followed where she remembered the pineapple clearing to have been. Reaching down, she touched the shrubby top of a pineapple. Overjoyed, she took it to the hut and could not describe the sweet, fresh sensation of the fruit and juice trickling in her mouth.
A few days after that, she felt the hand on her arm.
The men did not want to linger. The stench and the squalor were great. And the sight of Jan, blind and deaf, and emaciated, like a dead woman walking, stirred up ancient superstitions.
Harry Little did not appreciate other people. I would not go as far as to say he hated others; however, his self-centeredness did reflect itself in his lack of courtesy, appreciation, love for others, even his wife and stepdaughter. He said he was a Christian and insisted that the life he was creating was the Christian ideal.
No. Sorry, Harry, it is nowhere near the Christian ideal, which, in a society of believers and unbelievers, calls for a cooperative approach to life: the rural area needs the urban for its markets, the urban needs the rural for its food, for instance. But most of all, the Christian ideal calls for a love of neighbor, something lacking, to put it mildly, in Harry.
Harry should have read the Mayflower Compact and the history behind it. He would have seen that half the signers were not of the Pilgrim congregation. But they had to devise a means of living among one another in peace. And they succeeded.
Another possibility for cause of death? Starvation. Jan Little would almost certainly deny this vehemently. Nevertheless, it most certainly seems to fit the bill.
Jan Little eventually returned to Sacramento, California, and reestablished loving ties with her parents, whom she cared for until their deaths. She died in 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
The Cucuí rock near the town. Serranía la Neblina in Amazonas, Venezuela, where the Littles had originally intended to make their homestead. Pico da Neblina, in Brazil, which could rarely be seen from the Little’s homestead as it was usually shrouded in fog and clouds. Area — Serra da Bela Adormecida — where the Littles determined to build a homestead. I cannot find photos of the exact area, but this gives a picture of the remoteness. The book written by John Man with Jan Little (she is credited in the acknowledgments)
In other posts I’ve noted that often history is taught as if it were a series of chaotic events without rhyme or reason. For example, I do not recall having studied the background to The Magna Carta beyond its importance to our liberties. It was only as an adult, long out of high school and college that I learned its critical Christian background.
A few years ago, Christian commentator, Bill Muehlenberge wrote a concise post on the Christian background to the Magna Carta which I believe you will find not only interesting but provocative and encouraging.
He has graciously given me permission to post it in its entirety which I have done below. I also recommend and encourage you to check out his blog, Culture Watch.
Thank you, Bill Muehlenberg, for your permission to publish your post here on The Pull of The Land:
Magna Carta: The Christian Connection
Eight hundred years ago the Great Charter was written, and we still are enjoying the benefits of it today. Simply put, this hugely significant document helped secure genuine democratic reforms, restrictions on government powers, equality and freedom under law, and other vital social goods we often take for granted today.
As Lynda Rose of Voice for Justice in the UK put it:
On 15 June 1215, with England on the brink of civil war, King John met with the barons at Runnymede and put his seal to what was in effect a peace treaty: Magna Carta. Today, that Charter has become one of the most celebrated and influential documents in history, rightly seen as the foundation for Democracy worldwide. Lord Denning described it as “…the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
What is not so well known is the overwhelming influence of the Christian church on this vitally important document. Australian law professor Augusto Zimmermann explains the Christian roots:
Common law means a legal system based upon the English legal system; a mixture of customary law, judge-made law and parliamentary law. At least until the early 19th century, the common law was heavily influenced by Christian philosophy. This philosophy argues that there is a divine reason for the existence of fundamental laws, and that such laws are superior to human-made legislation, thus reflecting universal and unchangeable principles by which everyone should live. This assumption was expressed, among other things, in the Magna Carta of 1215, a charter which guaranteed the basic rights and privileges to the English barons against the king. Professor Aroney explains Christianity’s ideological influence upon the Magna Carta:
From [the time of Alfred] the kings of England have traditionally recognised their submission to God. At their coronations they take an oath before the Archbishop acknowledging the Law of God as the standard of justice, and the rights of the church. They are also urged to do justice under God and to govern God’s people fairly. Magna Carta was a development of these themes.
As Zimmermann explains in another important article:
At the time of Magna Carta (1215), a royal judge called Henry de Bracton (d. 1268) wrote a massive treatise on principles of law and justice. Bracton is broadly regarded as ‘the father of the common law’, because his book De legibus et consuetudinibus Anglia is one of the most important works on the constitution of medieval England. For Bracton, the application of law implies ‘a just sanction ordering virtue and prohibiting its opposite’, which means that the state law can never depart from God’s higher laws. As Bracton explains, jurisprudence was ‘the science of the just and unjust’. And he also declared that the state is under God and the law, ‘because the law makes the king. For there is no king where will rules rather than the law.’
The Christian faith provided to the people of England a status libertatis (state of liberty) which rested on the Christian presumption that God’s law always works for the good of society. With their conversion to Christianity, the kings of England would no longer possess an arbitrary power over the life and property of individuals, changing the basic laws of the kingdom at pleasure. Rather, they were told about God’s promise in the book Isaiah, to deal with civil authorities who enact unjust laws (Isaiah 10:1). In fact, the Bible contains many passages condemning the perversion of justice by them (Prov 17:15, 24:23; Exo 23:7; Deut 16:18; Hab 1:4; Isa 60:14; Lam 3:34).
A recent piece in the English press also discusses the Christian role in the production of the Magna Carta:
Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, played a central role in drafting the charter, which was signed by King John at Runnymede, Surrey. At least 11 other bishops were present.
A briefing note issued to members of the Synod reads: “The Church in England was central to the development of legal and human rights centuries before the French Revolution, now generally credited (along with the Enlightenment) for the secular genesis of human rights: the first parties to the charter were the bishops – led by Stephen Langton of Canterbury, who was a major drafter and mediator between the king and the barons; and its first and last clauses state that ‘the Church in England shall be free’.
“It is important that the Church’s crucial role in Magna Carta and its rights is not air-brushed out in 2015 – as was the role of Christians in the anti-slave trade celebrations.”
And recent research has even further demonstrated the Christians influence and underpinnings of this document.
New research suggests that Magna Carta may have been published predominantly by the church – rather than the Royal government of the day.
The revelations – announced as Britain prepares to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta – shed remarkable new light on the politics behind the issuing of the charter.
The research suggests that early 13th century England’s King John was so reluctant to publicize the now world-famous document that the church had to step in to ensure that sufficient copies were made and distributed.
A new investigation into Magna Carta, carried out by scholars from the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge and King’s College London, has revealed, for the first time, that England’s bishops actually placed their own scribes inside the government’s civil service specifically to make copies of Magna Carta – so that every region of the country could have one.
The article concludes:
King’s College London’s Professor of Medieval History, David Carpenter, believes that the new revelations are “exciting discoveries”.
“We now know that three of the four surviving originals of the charter went to cathedrals – Lincoln, Salisbury and Canterbury. Probably cathedrals were the destination for the great majority of the other original charters issued in 1215,” he said.
“This overturns the old view that the charters were sent to the sheriffs in charge of the counties. That would have been fatal since the sheriffs were the very people under attack in the charter. They would have quickly consigned Magna Carta to their castle furnaces.
“The church, therefore, was central to the production, preservation and proclamation of Magna Carta. The cathedrals were like a beacon from which the light of the charter shone round the country, thus beginning the process by which it became central to national life,” said Professor Carpenter.
Last year while in England I had the privilege of seeing one of the four original copies at Salisbury Cathedral. I wrote an article about this at the time, noting the huge discrepancy between the Christian beginnings and development of England and its current anti-Christian stance. As I wrote there:
England is now an incredibly darkened and demonic place, with so much intense hatred of all things Christian. It is very difficult indeed for biblical believers to stand strong at the moment. Nonetheless, I have met many of these champions of the faith, pinpoints of light in a very black place, who are fighting the good fight.
But one after another they are being sued, harassed, bullied, pursued by the police, or taken to task legally by the secular lefties. This is really leading to full-scale persecution of true Christians. I thought things in Australia were bad, but they are even worse in the UK.
So please pray for the remnant of believers who are seeking to stand strong here. They are few and far between, but they are some of the boldest and bravest believers I have found. They know how dire things are, and they are still holding firm.
Magna Carta forever changed the world, and we still are enjoying the fruit of this overwhelmingly Christian document. But the tragedy is, the Western world is quickly renouncing its Christian past. And with it, it is renouncing freedom, democracy and rule of law.
Bound copy of the Magna Carta from 1556, displayed February 22, 2006, in Philadelphia Bill Muehlenberg
