Chapter XIX: Up the Amazon to British Guiana (2)

More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a poor _caboclo_ was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the “Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a climate. But the _caboclos_ of the Amazon pay little attention to rain, water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor, with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we drew nearer, the _chacaras_ and “summer-houses” of rich _Manaoenses_ appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another, looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval castle in mid-ocean.

Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days. There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least three for every passenger landing and which without exception were manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced the captain, the _immediato_, and a few fellow-passengers—male only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer journey still ahead of them.

Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it had _igarapés_, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty wilderness that surrounds it.

Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners” that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far. The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in pushing on to be disillusioned in person.

Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram of beef cost a _milreis_ in the market, or even less after the day warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant table across the street one cost five times that; a _mamão_ selling for 300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained away hungry in the darker corners of their homes.

Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian for the most part. The _boínas_ of the Pyrenees are frequently seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly at home in any Spanish _pueblo_ or Galician mountain village. Many of the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,” asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion, on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition; bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands.

Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará, and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich, and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity, the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore, gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize 100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare _Manaoense_ who does not demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays.

The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst, a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a glass of beer.

Of other amusements and pastimes there were still a few automobiles for hire and a rare surviving café chantant, or—well, when the semimonthly steamer from Rio came in with the list of prizes in the national lottery a government band sat before the lottery agency and played all the morning, while firecrackers were exploded and the lottery winnings were paid. That was the Manaos idea of industry and “combatting the present grave crisis.” The zoo was gone, of course, and the imposing state theater, the _azulejo_ dome of which rose high above all else except the cathedral tower, had not been opened for more than two years and was a dried-mud ruin within. It was not as in the “good old days” when a _carregador_ got a fortune for carrying a _seringueiro’s_ trunk across the praça, and spent it to hear imported opera sung in the proud theater at the top of the knoll. There were still dramatic companies direct from Europe, changing every night as they made the rounds of the three theaters under one ownership—but they came on reels that fit into a lantern. The plot of the story they told was never a mystery; it consisted succinctly of the adventures of two men and a woman or, in contrast, of two women and a man. These original and refreshing themes, presented nightly under a new title and disguised in a new near-Parisian costumes, continued to attract such stray coins as still remained in Manaos, not to mention those to whom there are no earthly barriers. I had often told myself that what Brazilian theaters needed was a turnstile at the entrance, and was surprised to find that the cinemas of Manaos had exactly that thing. But system and strictness lead haunted lives in Brazil. I stood at the door of the principal cinema one evening and counted just as large a percentage of “deadheads” as even the Kinetophone had ever attracted. For instead of having a register on the turnstile and requiring the door-keeper to turn in a ticket for every click of the stile or pay the price of one, he was allowed to use his own judgment as to who should go in free—and the judgment of a Brazilian door-tender! In short, Manaos was entirely an exotic city, which even the few _caboclos_ and Indians paddling down to market in their canoes do not tinge with the local color and things native to Amazonia.

I had come up the Amazon with the faint hope of being able to make my way overland from Manaos to the capital of British Guiana. Such a trip should be wild enough to allay any craving for the wilderness for some time to come, and even if one could scarcely call plunging along jungle trails taking to the open road, the effect would be about the same. Even in Manaos, however, no one knew whether or not it was possible to reach Georgetown by land. Launches and _batelões_, a species of Amazonian barge, sometimes went up the Rio Branco to the frontiers of Brazil to bring down cattle, but they could go only at the height of the rainy season, when the Rio Branco was flooded, and the last one had made the trip in August, nearly nine months before.

“He who has no dog goes hunting with the cat,” the Brazilians say, so I turned my attention to the possibility of making the journey through my own exertions. That, too, it seemed, was out of the question. Even had I bought a canoe and hired a crew, it would have required at least two months of constant, laborious paddling to bring me to the Guianese frontier; and as to walking, that would have been as impossible in this Amazonian wilderness as on the open sea. My hopes had reached their lowest ebb when word reached my ears that heavy rains in the interior were rapidly raising the Rio Branco, and that if they continued, the first _batelão_ of the season would set out for what is known as the Brazilian Guyana on May 25. I settled down to endure with as much patience as I could muster a wait of half a month, and in all likelihood more, in such a climate and surroundings.

On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May 25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the _Macuxy_ was still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the _armazen_ to verify the chalked figures. _Não, senhor_, the launch would leave that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely endured as a necessary evil.

It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the “Launch _Macuxy_ leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the _batelão_ hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow, with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs, chickens, _rancho_, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table, a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but it would _amanhã_.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.

We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally across the _batelão_ from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug _Macuxy_, constantly puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy _batelão_ alongside, as is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.

All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory, retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water, though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous in the Amazon proper.

There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s run, the Indian and _caboclo_ crew tossing it stick by stick from one to another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from 35$ to 60$ a thousand.

Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous _pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_, with wine and condensed milk for those who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the people and the climate than Brazil.

Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the man boarded us, and we were off again.

Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north. This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil, Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America, has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown. As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank, eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left upright and wet now and then with fresh water.

About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants, and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The _cabra_, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called _borracha_, is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a much coarser and cheaper stuff called _caucho_, as full of holes as Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the _caucho_ tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty kilograms of _caucho_, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the many links from producer to consumer the _borracha_ has been replaced by _caucho_.

There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most of the region the _bugres_, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before. The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest. Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in 1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most represents most places marked on the map.

But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region, and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.

Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle, pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance. Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the hat-off greeting of some _caboclo_ far below his own caste. All the best things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs, special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living constantly among dependents.

There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board, one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated _fazendeiros_ of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men. They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance, superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance, even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little “bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room. Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.

The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation, though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean, selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians. This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.

That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime, who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the upper world.

The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper, which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.

At dawn of May 25 we found ourselves anchored at Caracarahy, four hundred and sixty miles above Manaos, with the first open camp I had seen in Amazonia, its tufts of bunch-grass quite green, and the joyful sight of a _serra_, or range of hills, dimly visible to the north. Yet the campo broke easily into dense woods in any direction. There were a few scattered _barracões_, or thatched warehouses, and three or four huts of natives. The place exists merely because there are falls above, this being the beginning of rising and rocky country, around which all goods must be transshipped. Here were twenty-four kilometers of _cachoeiras_, or rock rapids, which may be passed in three ways,—in high water by the Furo de Cojubím, a _paraná_ or natural canal flanking the falls, but which in the dry season is a mere succession of mud-holes; secondly, in certain seasons by dragging freight in small boats up over the rock falls; lastly, by a _picada_, or trail cut through the dense forest. I went ashore with the bug-catcher while the captain investigated. On the boat we had rarely felt a mosquito or any other form of insect pest, but the moment we landed we were in swarms of them, especially annoying tiny flies. Later we were to find that the grassy campo was alive with _mucuims_, an all but invisible red bug especially active in dew-wet grass, which conceals itself in the pores of the legs and sets them to itching fiercely a few hours afterward, keeping it up for days.

We returned on board, to hear the bad news that the early rains had slackened and that it would be impossible now for the smaller boat that was following us to pass through the canal and carry us on up the river. The water must be six feet higher, and as Colonel Bento Brazil put it laconically, “We may have to wait a month or two, or it may fill up from one day to another.” There were big cattle pens here, and cowboys who tended the cattle in shipment as they grazed on the campo before being jerked aboard the _batelões_ and carried off to Manaos, which is reached in high water on the down-trip in forty-eight hours. Late that evening the captain began filling our barge with the maltreated brutes, which, after a hard drive across the country, were swung by a winch cable about their horns from the shore corral to the boat, often breaking a rib as they struck it and now and then a leg as they were lowered into the hold. No wonder Amazon beefsteaks are tough! Cattle for the Manaos slaughter-house are almost the only down traffic from this Rio Branco region, which produces little else, being high open campo and almost the only place in the entire State of Amazonas that can do so to advantage. Here they sold for from 60$ to 100$ a head, and in the rainy season can be transported to Manaos for about 60$. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese established cattle-breeding stations here, so that even to-day the great territory drained by the Rio Branco is known as the “Fazenda National” and is federal property.

Even here there was no definite information as to whether one could cut across through British Guiana. All I learned was that, if I could reach Boa Vista, there were two or three ways of making toward the estate of an Englishman over the boundary, but even he seemed to be more closely in touch with Brazil and Manaos than with Georgetown. In the morning there appeared on board a lively little man native to the region, whom everyone called “Antonino.” He was dressed in slippers and the modified pajamas all males find most convenient in Amazonia, had not shaved for two or three weeks, and had the general appearance of a backwoodsman with a little plot and a few cattle of his own, who might be able to write his name with difficulty. In reality, he was the owner of a large _fazenda_ far up the river on the edge of British Guiana, the boundary being a stream at his front door. Beneath his lack of shave he knew Europe well, though little of Brazil, and had an astonishing knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. What was still more important, he was going to walk or wade the twenty-four kilometers around the _cachoeira_ next morning to his own barge-launch waiting above the falls to take him back to his ranch. I bequeathed my steamer-chair to Captain Santos, packed my valise to the screaming point, with even my private papers and twenty pounds in gold, and handed it over to a pair of Antonino’s Indian employees in a canoe half-roofed with thatch, who rowed away into the evening toward the falls.

Next morning I was disappointed to find that Antonino had hired “horses,” as they called the wabbly, starved, and degenerate descendants of those noble beasts that awaited us, eaten by vampire bats and beaten stupid by their unconsciously cruel Indian-Portuguese owners. I should much rather have walked, the cruelty of getting astride such miserable animals aside, for my greatest immediate desire was physical exercise. A broad-faced, independent Indian “guide” set off with us across open, bunch-grass country, everywhere lively with birds, the long scissors-tailed _tesoura_ most conspicuous among them. Mammoth ant-hills stood higher than horsemen above the thin, tufty grass. Soon we entered a wide road cut through a dense forest by the state government, at a cost to taxpayers of 2000 contos! Yet it had never been more than a poor clearing with a barbed wire fence on either side, and now it was half grown up to jungle again. In the mass, an Amazon forest is deadly monotonous; in detail there was an incredible mixture of species, with the same plant rarely half a dozen times in the same spot, and all showing a striking adaptability to environment. The great trees stood always erect, as if striving, like good soldiers, to touch with the crown of the head an imaginary object above them, spreading out at the top like a parasol to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible, wasting no branches farther down, where the sunshine never penetrates. There were many rivulets and mud-holes, with a jungle not unlike that of tropical Bolivia, except that the growth was thicker and greener, with more beautiful palms. Antonino, who had chosen the best animal, got out of sight ahead, the Indian urging me to hurry; but as I saw no need for that, I spared my wreck of a horse. Suddenly, toward noon, we heard a distant boat-whistle, followed by half a dozen shots from a revolver. The Indian redoubled his urging and I strove in vain to give my miserable steed new life. Then more whistles sounded, and the Indian said dejectedly, “There, the launch is gone.”

“Impossible,” I answered. “As it belongs to Antonino it must wait for him.”

But we soon came upon the horse Antonino had ridden, tied to the rail-fence of a cattle-corral in the woods, and I concluded that my new companion had proved a true Amazonian in thinking of himself alone. After taking down several fences and putting them up again, we came out on a little nose of land above the river—and found Antonino looking hopelessly away up it.

It turned out that Antonino, loving to boast, like most Latin-Americans, really had not the slightest ownership in the boat we had hoped to catch, and here we were apparently stranded at the Bocca da Estrada, with one small, ragged, thatched roof on poles under which to wait for days, if not weeks. Anyway, the baggage we had sent by canoe had not arrived. Antonino professed to think that the launch had stopped just a few miles up the river to overhaul its engines, but this sounded like another bluff to save his face. I quenched my thirst with a dozen gourd-cups of yellow river water, squeezing into it the juice of wild lemons, swung my hammock, and prepared for whatever might be forthcoming. It is fatal to lose one’s temper in Amazonia. A chunk of cow that had been torn off the still palpitating animal that morning had swung unwrapped from the Indian’s saddle during all the sixteen miles. This we washed, spitted, and thrust into a fire. From it we slashed slabs still oozing blood with the Indian’s _terçado_, as Brazilians call a machete, and these being too tough to bite, we cut off each mouthful below the lips with the huge knife in approved South American cowboy fashion, after dipping them in coarse rock-salt, tossed handfuls of dry _farinha d’agoa_ into our mouths with it, and washed it all down with river-water tempered with the fruit of the wild lemon tree that shaded our ragged roof. Our total resources were not enough for three meals, and how long we might have to wait no man knew. To add to the pleasure of the situation, we had struck a veritable colony of _puims_, as the Bolivian _jejene_, or tiny gnat of bulldog bite, is called in Amazonia, which quickly brought back memories of the tattooed skin with which had I emerged upon the Paraguay sixteen months before.

But, strange to say, Antonino had partly told the truth. About three o’clock the canoe arrived with our baggage and two sweat-dripping Indians, and we piled in the rest of our belongings and started on up the stream as if we really believed the tale that the launch was waiting not far above. I wished to add to our speed by paddling, but there were only three _pás_, and the Indians laughed at the thought of a civilized man doing so. In all Amazonia, with labor so badly needed, the man above the laboring class suffers most of all for physical exercise, and the development of the region is under the tremendous handicap of the ancient Iberian caste system. The Indians surely shoveled water behind them, however, though even so we made little headway against the swift current. If one of us spoke to them, they instantly stopped paddling to listen; hence motionless silence was our only salvation.

Then all at once we rounded a point, and there, sure enough, was the craft we were pursuing, barely a mile ahead. We quickly lost it to view again, and I waited anxiously until another bend disclosed it barely a stone’s throw away and tied to the bank! I should have been less worried had I known that it would not move an inch forward for another twenty-four hours.

We found her a battered old German launch attached to the most ancient wreck of a barge that I had ever seen afloat. They were anchored to a tree before the only dwelling in the vicinity, the home of a part-Indian family of countless children and innumerable hangers-on, who lived in a clearing with several primitive thatched huts. Among them was a youth who had been blind from birth, yet who went anywhere in the vicinity, through the dense forest or across the river in a dugout log, and did the same work as the rest of the men, even to splitting wood in his bare feet. Even here in the far wilderness the women were Moorish in their attitude. When a little gasoline launch, with two thatched barges on either side all but concealing it, arrived after a twenty-four hour trip around the falls with a crowd of men and women packed like sardines, these all came ashore for a full breath and to straighten out their kinks. Barely once did they speak to us men, yet when they were ready to leave, every woman and girl of the party went entirely around the circle, limply shaking hands with each of us, though we were nearly all total strangers. This courtesy is always expected in the far reaches of Amazonia, and if the traveler chances upon a party of thirty or forty, it takes an hour or more to get away.