Chapter XIX: Up the Amazon to British Guiana (1)

It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America. Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos.

On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a _gaiola_, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers never suspect. The _Andirá_ was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small, the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with a network of redes in all colors.

“_Todo é à vontade, senhores_,” said the captain, “_Aqui nada está prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo_;” and with nothing prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into nothingness.

Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too, seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many slender palms which I took to be the _carnauba_, though they turned out to be the _burity_. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden _tamancos_ wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad, strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop, an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it stood a large _cachaza_-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the _Andirá_. A group of reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the grassy yard beyond the distillery.

The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out. Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place, improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the climate easily, but is indifferent to the _carrapatos_, or ticks, and all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle, bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood, furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great _plaga_ left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail, unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’ strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than $6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He ate anything, according to the _fazendeiro_—sugar-cane, _melgaço_, or crushed pulp, bread, _farinha_, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but, continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best, which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past discover their most cherished wares.

The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará. But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to improve things.

At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river. I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip of a month or more on one of these _gaiolas_ without a page of reading matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the whole night hideous with their card games.

We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of _fazendas_ to pick up sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their _ubás_, long, slender, dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner, appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators, _parainhas_, and a dozen other _bichos_. Woods, trees, _ubás_, houses, even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory not easily lost.

It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin.

Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron _barracão_, and then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk. We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand. Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny “jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with life. Neither the captain nor his _immediato_, a pleasing, well-mannered man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results as when nothing is left to individual judgment.

Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará, yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night, when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics, mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims.

On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or ridges, and as these always give footing for _castanhas_ along the Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds. In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of “Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the _castanhaes_, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual _pándego_, or “blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever called _sezões_, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women, and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut” season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest of the year. _Caboclos_ in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in Portuguese (_pá_), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest, well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp, sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be expected.

One afternoon the captain came back on board with a _sapucaia_, a larger and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer than the _castanha_ and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the tall, graceful, arm-waving _castanheiro_. Unlike the familiar species, this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the _sapucaia_ unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a _tampa_, or tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the _castanha de macaco_, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible qualities.

Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks, the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the _Andirá’s_ run, near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large _seringal_, or rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his credit. Then one day some workers on the _seringal_ came to the house and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off the _seringal_ by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital, all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre.

A contrasting type was our _seringueiro_, or owner of a rubber-field far up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns, whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery, or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost without realizing that he was doing anything amiss.

At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make out none of the _giboyas_ (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man, dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness, you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor, and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come. Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights, slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across tropical Bolivia, and here called _puims_, gave us occasional annoyance, though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me.

On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the morning we crossed the river and entered first the _paraná_ and then the _igarapé_ of Alenquer. A _paraná_, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an _igarapé_ is a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank, but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from Santarem to Obidos and never see this _igarapé_. We slid almost into the dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer, a typical small town of Amazonia.

There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot, grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta, the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low, wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest about Alenquer.

I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin. School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered. Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January 15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the _castanhaes_ from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried, was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes.

The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends. The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the _Andirá_ belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a _fazenda_ house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease and grace suggesting that the _montaría_ has a mind and a will of its own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained several hours, while the negro-_caboclo_ crew of half a dozen carried the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these _gaiolas_ usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine _jararaca_ of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under them.

About dawn we emerged from the _paraná_ upon the “sea-river” again, with a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and heavy shade of the _cacaoaes_, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across, grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns into _vinho de cacao_, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death from fever to spend a week in the _castanhaes_ that they were never gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “_Num mez ’stou lá—ou dois_—In a month I’ll be there—or two.”

It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the creaking of a few tropical crickets.

I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight, and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout canoe or some other species of _montaria_ creeping along the extreme lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies. These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag!

The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the _pirarucú_, a mammoth species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known to make a _pirarucú_ tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike that in taste. _Pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_ make up most Amazonian meals, as they did on board the _Andirá_. We landed boxes of this staff of life even at towns where the _pirarucú_ abounds, the lazy inhabitants preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves. The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the _peixe-boi_, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste.

We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it, stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man, “_Ha um passageiro para Manaos!_” The captain, who seemed to know everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted back, “_O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?_” And that night we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá.

One day the talk on board ran to _garzas_, the bird that furnishes what we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them, said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos, say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of _garzas_, “giving the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off. He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big _garzal_ with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers, however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of exertions to supply her demands, for real _garza_-hunting is no child’s play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in question from the decks of the _Andirá_, tall, slender, graceful, and generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$ a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the _municipio_ collects 6$ an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians skim off most of the cream.”

On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts. This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand, and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not one fortieth that amount. From it a _fiscal_ of the State of Pará came on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons, thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “_Provavelmente estaba com o miolo molle_” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins.

That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained. The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped in upon several _caboclo_ families and found them instantly friendly, though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word, most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks, swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour, though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine. One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time making lace with a great rattling of _birros_.

Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view. Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century, with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony, as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production, taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab, uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton.

We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another _gaiola_ of our line, the _Indio do Brazil_, so named, strangely enough, not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a _paraná_ as straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle!

In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest _fazenda_ we had yet seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees, the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them. The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised, therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies. The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight, pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them, similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing. The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “_Não s’nho’_,” the man replied, crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt.

The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak. It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came out of a _paraná_ upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together, the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black” of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream.