Probably the river Amazon is the last remaining region of the earth where the traveller can really feel that the twentieth century may be only an unpleasant dream.
It was not, however, for this reason that Mrs Rachel Goodman bought a ticket on the Liverpool cargo-liner Hubert, which set off nearly four months ago on a leisurely 15,000-mile trip to the Caribbean and the Amazon. She was in search of tropical birds to add to her collection of 300, which has spread from semi-detached house to garden aviary in Cranleigh Drive, Brooklands, near Manchester.
Mr and Mrs Goodman and their 24-year-old son jointly manage a small chain of bakers’ and confectioners’ shops, and each of them is intensely interested in a hobby which bores the others - Mr Goodman is a messer-about-in-boats and their son John is a motor racing enthusiast - so the family allocate the annual quota of work to be done so as to enable each to spend part of each year in pursuit of his favourite hobby.
Mrs Goodman, who is 46, took three months off this year and, armed with a series of introductions to fellow-enthusiasts, set off on her expedition. At Manaus the captain of the Hubert, the chief engineer, and Mrs Goodman went ashore to dine with a millionaire who provided an “astonishing” meal at a supremely luxurious hotel in the middle of the jungle.
At Santarem, another port of call on the Amazon, Mrs Goodman’s voyage made its only contact with the fashions of this century - there was an election in progress, and from amplifiers hidden high in the palm trees politicians competed with a musical programme for the votes of the population. But even here there was the sort of old-fashioned welcome which the holiday brochures claim awaits all visitors everywhere. Mrs Goodman was presented with armfuls of native fruits: mangoes, avocados, and guavas; mainly, she thinks, because her hair is blonde, a thing not seen in those parts before.
Hit-and-miss affair
But these pleasant experiences, repeated at each stopping place, were only preludes and entirely incidental to the real business of the expedition, which was to collect new specimens. Though she has been a collector for only four years - her interest grew after someone had given her a pair of budgerigars as a present - Mrs Goodman was on the look-out for rare and beautiful tropical birds. She had her import licences, and took her own crates; when there were not enough of these the ship’s carpenter knocked up a few more.
The actual trapping of wild creatures in the Amazon is still to some extent a hit-and-miss affair. Mrs Goodman made her major foray into the jungle when her 8,000-ton ship stopped at the small town of Cocal - “very jungly, with houses on stilts and the main road simply planks on trestles over the water” - to load limber. Here the Hubert’s call is “the event of the year.”
Terrified into nets
The native hunters go out from this place and lay nets in the undergrowth in a circle around a point where they intend to start a fire. When the nets are set up a large tree is fired, and terrifies almost every living thing - including birds - into the nets. Another, more peaceable, method of obtaining specimens is to buy them “fantastically cheaply” from the native boys who climb trees and take the young - parrots especially - from the nests. Then of course there was the little boy who gave her his favourite pet, a rare dwarf parrot, as a memento of her visit.
Back in Brooklands with her memories of the poor but contented communities a thousand miles up the biggest river in the world - she hopes to go there again next year - Mrs Goodman has transferred her new specimen to cages in heated sheds. Most of the colony thrive, as well they might, on spongecake soaked in honey; but some, like the red-headed sugar bird, jib at this diet, and for such fastidious birds a supply of grubs has to be bought.
For most people the ownership of a private tropical aviary obviously would be both impracticable and exorbitantly expensive. It absorbs all Mrs Goodman’s spare time and cash. She is president of cage bird societies in Cheadle and Wythenshawe and exhibits her birds from time to time, without going to any special lengths to groom them.
Apart from three dogs and “Woodbine Willie,” the small freshwater turtle, a visitor to the Goodman front room is confronted with a brilliantly coloured uncaged macaw pondering some immutable truth on the back of an armchair. A little farther off a blue-fronted Amazon parrot maintains a similarly severe and unmoving demeanour. In a cage in the corner a saddleback parrot may mumble to itself in its mother tongue, Portuguese (it is learning English now).
