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.
