Few flying over the Amazon basin for the first time are prepared for the unchanging vistas of forest receding to the horizon, hour after hour, seemingly a rebuttal to headlines about the vanishing rain forest. I often get the same reaction from visitors in northern California driving up Highway 101 through Douglas fir forests and the occasional redwood grove, mile upon mile.

But just as in California, where the “beauty strip” either side of the road often conceals desolate stretches of stumps amid dispirited second-growth saplings, so, too,that first glimpse of Amazonia affords false comfort. A single road, a thread lying on a billiard table, can mean disease and extinction for a dozen Indian tribes, plus uncounted other species. In three or four years a corporate cattle ranch can reduce primeval forest to a degraded pasture and washed-out soils. With miners comes mercury in the rivers, and poisoned fish. Since Europeans first arrived in the Amazon half a millennium ago, the leitmotif has always been destruction.

It would be hard to find someone better qualified than John Hemming to evoke both the natural splendour and biological complexity of Amazonia and the impact of the white man and his technology, from the knife blades that so entranced the Indians, to the chains that linked them as slaves under the horrified eyes of Roger Casement and others, to the D-9 bulldozers of today chewing up the rainforest for soya bean plantations. With a shelf full of distinguished books and papers on the Amazon, this former director of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) reassures his readers, without conceit, that he really knows what he is talking about. Describing the great English mid-19th century botanist Richard Spruce's terror of getting lost, “even when not far from salvation”, Hemming comments, “Getting lost is one of the few fatal dangers in this environment. I have also experienced the panic of finding myself alone and disoriented in unexplored forests, far further from help than Spruce was at that time, knowing that if I continued in the wrong direction I would never survive.”

In pleasantly paced chapters Hemming guides us expertly through the historical as well as the physical landscape. The rubber boom, famously symbolised by the opera house in Manaus, is a rite of passage for everyone writing the Amazon's history, but Hemming brings freshness to the topic, not least in his humorous demolition of the myths promoted by Henry Wickham, on how he engineered the export of the seeds of Hevea brasiliensis - the wild rubber tree - for germination at Kew for British plantations in Ceylon and Malaya. Wickham spun a fanciful legend of smuggling the seeds on a leased river steamer under the noses of the vigilant Brazilian authorities, zealous to protect their resource. All nonsense. Wickham's supposed smuggling was probably legal and the Brazilians complaisant at the time about the export, though ever since they have howled about Wickham as “the Prince of Smugglers”. Anyway, their own theft in 1727, of the seeds of Coffea arabica from the French colony of Cayenne, sponsored Brazil's largest export to this day, “greater and more enduring than rubber”, as Hemming points out.

The rubber plantations flourished in Asia, and the great wild rubber boom spluttered to an end. Hemming remarks, apropos the opera house, “Abandoned for decades, the theatre has recently been lovingly restored, even down to belle époque lettering and decorations. The author saw an operatic intermezzo by Telemann staged there, but this had a cast of only three singers and a dozen musicians.” Tourists often rush to rather dreary Manaus to savour the historical aroma of the boom, but they would be better advised to stay in the pleasant city of Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, which has plenty of Portuguese colonial history and wonderful food besides.

Hemming does not spare us the violence with which the region has always been drenched, from the appalling cruelties of the Cabanagem - an uprising of the early 1830s by Indians and mestizos (people of mixed racial ancestry) against the savageries of the colonists - through the rubber boom to the unrelenting exterminations to this day of native tribes. Hypocrisies on this matter were blatant in the 1980s, when the death of the rainforest was a news staple both sides of the North Atlantic. American congressmen from the Pacific northwest, whose grandparents had murdered Indians without remit, lectured affronted Brazilians on how to manage their forests as national parks along North American lines, meaning expulsion of all humans. Hemming emphasises not only the degree to which Indians such as the Kayapo manipulated the supposedly “natural Eden”, but also how the vitality of the Amazon's protected forest reserves depends on the social and economic well-being of forest dwellers - Indians, rubber tappers and river folk.

Hemming gives us a manly epic. Women (aside from courtesans in Manaus, prostitutes along the advancing frontier, and the archeologist Anna Roosevelt) scarcely obtrude in this virile saga. Its most vivid scenes concern the men who most delight the former head of the RGS - explorers and botanists. We meet Charles Waterton, “the first Englishman to write in praise of tropical forests”. In his later years he turned his Yorkshire estate “into a wildlife sanctuary full of artificial burrows and nests...liked to dress as a scarecrow and sit in trees”, and “launched the world's first successful legal action over environmental pollution, against the owner of a nearby soap-works whose chimneys released noxious chemicals”.

Particularly honoured by Hemming are extraordinary heroes such as Candido Rondon and the German-born, self-taught anthropologist Curt Nimuendaju, both of whom devoted substantial portions of their lives to protecting the Amazon's Indian tribes. It was Rondon who coined the famous injunction to men confronting hostile tribes: “Die if you must, but never kill!” His crowning achievement was the creation of the Indian Protection Service in 1910. Four years later he guided former president Teddy Roosevelt down the River of Doubt.

Most of all, Hemming honours nature in all its overwhelming Amazonian profligacy. His last pages are appropriate homages to the beetle and the ant. “In one sense,” he concludes in his penultimate paragraph, “ants rule the rainforests. Their biomass is greater than that of all mammals, or birds, or reptiles, even of beetles. Forests are full of fragrant smells, but these are drowned by the smell of rotting vegetation and the rotting reek of formic acid. During the rains, the ants' pungent smell is ever present.”

Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming

Thames & Hudson £20 pp368

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