Ecuadorian Volcanoes
10,000 ft. Chimborazo.
10,000 ft. Cotopaxi.
10,000 ft. Caraguairazo.
10,000 ft. Pichincha.
We will now speak more particularly of the Andes of the equator. The mountain chain is built up of granite, gneissoid, and schistose rocks, often in vertical position, and capped with trachyte and porphyry.[60] Large masses of solid rock are rarely seen; every thing is cracked, calcined, or triturated. While in Bolivia the Eastern Cordillera shows a succession of sharp, ragged peaks, in contrast with the conical summits of the Cordillera of the coast, there is no such distinction in the Andes of the equator.[61] The Eastern Cordillera has a greater mean height, and it displays more volcanic activity. Twenty volcanic mountains surround the valley, of which twelve are in the oriental chain. Three of the twenty are now active (Cotopaxi, Sangai, and Pichincha), and five others are known to have erupted since the Conquest (Chiles, Imbabura, Guamani, Tunguragua, and Quirotoa). The truncated cone of Cotopaxi, the jagged, Alpine crest of ruined Altar, and the dome of Chimborazo, are the representative forms of the volcanic summits. The extinct volcanoes usually have double domes or peaks, while the active peaks are slender cones. Antisana and Cayambi are fashioned after Chimborazo, though the latter is table-topped rather than convex; Caraguairazo, Quirotoa, Iliniza, Sincholagua, Rumiñagui, and Corazon, resemble Altar; Tunguragua, Sangai, Llanganati, Cotocachí, Chiles, and Imbabura, imitate Cotopaxi; Pichincha, Atacatzo, and Guamani are irregular. The Ecuadorian volcanoes have rarely ejected liquid lava, but chiefly water, mud, ashes, and fragments of trachyte and porphyry. Cotopaxi alone produces pure, foam-like pumice, and glossy, translucent obsidian.[62] The paucity of quartz, and the absence of basalt, are remarkable. Some of the porphyroids are conglomerate, but the majority are true porphyries, having a homogeneous base. Dr. T. Sterry Hunt calls them porphyroid trachytes. They have a black, rarely reddish, vitreous, or impalpable base, approaching obsidian, with a specific gravity of 2.59 in pure specimens, and holding crystals or crystalline grains of glassy feldspar, and sometimes of pyroxene and hematite. They differ from the Old World porphyries in containing no quartz, and seldom mica.[63] D'Orbigny considers the porphyries of the Andes to have been ejected at the close of the cretaceous period, and formed the first relief of the Cordillera. The prevalence of trachyte shows that the products have cooled under feeble pressure.
From the deluges of water lately thrown out have resulted deep furrows in the sides; and from the prevalence of the east wind, which is always met by the traveler on the crest of either Cordillera, there is a greater accumulation of ashes, and less snow on the west slope. Cotopaxi is a fine example of this. In Pichincha, Altar, and Rumiñagua, however, the western wall is lowest, apparently broken down.[64] There is no synchronism in the eruptions of Cotopaxi and Pichincha. These volcanoes must have independent reservoirs, for the former is 3000 feet higher than the latter, and only thirty miles distant. The reputed eruptions of Pichincha are dated 1534, 1539, 1566, 1575, 1588, and 1660; that of 1534 resting on the assertions of Checa, Garcilazo, and Herrera, indorsed by Humboldt. Excepting the traditional eruption in 1534, which probably is confounded with that of Pichincha, Cotopaxi did not open till 1742; then followed the eruptions of 1743, 1744, 1746, 1766, 1768, 1803, 1851, and 1855. We must mention, however, that, since the recent awakening of Pichincha, Cotopaxi has been unusually silent. There is also a remarkable coincidence (which may not be wholly accidental) in the renewed activity of Pichincha, and the great eruption of Mauna Loa, both occurring in March, 1868. It is generally believed by the natives that Cotopaxi and Tunguragua are sympathetic.
There are fifty-one volcanoes in the Andean chain. Of these, twenty girdle the Valley of Quito, three active, five dormant, and twelve extinct.[65] Besides these are numerous mountain peaks not properly volcanic. Nowhere on the face of the earth is there such a grand assemblage of mountains. Twenty-two summits are covered with perpetual snow, and fifty are over ten thousand feet high.[66]
All of these would be visible from a single stand-point—the summit of Cotopaxi. The lofty peaks shoot up with so much method as almost to provoke the theory that the Incas, in the zenith of their power, planted them as signal monuments along the royal road to Cuzco. The eastern series is called the Cordillera real, because along its flank are the remnants of the splendid highway which once connected Quito and the Peruvian capital.[67] It can also boast of such tremendous volcanoes as Cotopaxi and Sangai. The Western Cordillera contains but one active volcano; but then it can point to peerless Chimborazo and the deep crater of Pichincha. These twenty volcanic mountains rise within a space only two hundred miles long and thirty miles wide. It makes one tremble to think of the awful crevice over which they are placed.[68]
[CHAPTER VIII.]
The Volcanoes of Ecuador.— Western Cordillera.— Chimborazo.— Iliniza.— Corazon.— Pichincha.— Descent into its Crater.
Coming up from Peru through the cinchona forests of Loja, and over the barren hills of Assuay, the traveler reaches Riobamba, seated on the threshold of magnificence—like Damascus, an oasis in a sandy plain, but, unlike the Queen of the East, surrounded with a splendid retinue of snowy peaks that look like icebergs floating in a sea of clouds.
On our left is the most sublime spectacle in the New World. It is a majestic pile of snow, its clear outline on the deep blue sky describing the profile of a lion in repose. At noon the vertical sun, and the profusion of light reflected from the glittering surface, will not allow a shadow to be cast on any part, so that you can easily fancy the figure is cut out of a mountain of spotless marble. This is Chimborazo—yet not the whole of it—you see but a third of the great giant. His feet are as eternally green as his head is everlastingly white; but they are far away beneath the bananas and cocoa-palms of the Pacific coast.
Rousseau was disappointed when he first saw the sea; and the first glimpse of Niagara often fails to meet one's expectations. But Chimborazo is sure of a worshiper the moment its overwhelming grandeur breaks upon the traveler. You feel that you are in the presence-chamber of the monarch of the Andes. There is sublimity in his kingly look, of which the ocean might be proud.
"All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gathers around this summit, as if to show
How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man below."
Well do we remember our disappointment as we stood before that wonder of the world—St. Peter's. We mounted the pyramid of steps and looked up, but were not overcome by the magnificence. We read in our guide-book that the edifice covers eight acres, and to the tip-top of the cross is almost five hundred feet; that it took three hundred and fifty years and twelve successive artists to finish it, and an expenditure of $50,000,000, and now costs $30,000 per annum to keep it in repair; still we did not appreciate its greatness. We pushed aside the curtain and walked in—walked a day's journey across the transept and up and down the everlasting nave, and yet continued heterodox. We tried hard to believe it was very vast and sublime, and knew we ought to feel its grandeur, but somehow we did not. Then we sat down by the Holy of Holies, and there we were startled into a better judgment by the astounding fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul—the largest edifice in Great Britain—could stand upright, spire, dome, body, and all, inside of St. Peter's! that the letters of the inscription which run around the base of the dome, though apparently but an inch, are in reality six feet high! Then, for the first time, the scales fell from our eyes; the giant building began to grow; higher and higher still it rose, longer and deeper it expanded, yet in perfect proportions; the colossal structure, now a living temple, put on its beautiful garments and the robe of majesty. And that dome! the longer we looked at it the vaster it grew, till finally it seemed to be a temple not made with hands; the spacious canopy became the firmament; the mosaic figures of cherubim and seraphim were endowed with life; and as we fixed our eyes on the zenith where the Almighty is represented in glory, we thought we had the vision of Stephen. Long we gazed upward into this heaven of man's creation, and gazed again till we were lost in wonder.
But the traveler needs no such steps to lift him up to the grand conception of the divine Architect as he beholds the great white dome of Chimborazo. It looks lofty from the very first. Now and then an expanse of thin, sky-like vapor would cut the mountain in twain, and the dome, islanded in the deep blue of the upper regions, seemed to belong more to heaven than to earth. We knew that Chimborazo was more than twice the altitude of Etna. We could almost see the great Humboldt struggling up the mountain's side till he looked like a black speck moving over the mighty white, but giving up in despair four thousand feet below the summit. We see the intrepid Bolivar mounting still higher; but the hero of Spanish-American independence returns a defeated man. Last of all comes the philosophic Boussingault, and attains the prodigious elevation of nineteen thousand six hundred feet—the highest point reached by man without the aid of a balloon; but the dome remains unsullied by his foot. Yet none of these facts increase our admiration. The mountain has a tongue which speaks louder than all mathematical calculations.
There must be something singularly sublime about Chimborazo, for the spectator at Riobamba is already nine thousand feet high, and the mountain is not so elevated above him as Mont Blanc above the vale of Chamounî, when, in reality, that culminating point of Europe would not reach up even to the snow-limit of Chimborazo by two thousand feet.[69] It is only while sailing on the Pacific that one sees Chimborazo in its complete proportions. Its very magnitude diminishes the impression of awe and wonder, for the Andes on which it rests are heaved to such a vast altitude above the sea, that the relative elevation of its summit becomes reduced by comparison with the surrounding mountains. Its altitude is 21,420 feet, or forty-five times the height of Strasburg Cathedral; or, to state it otherwise, the fall of one pound from the top of Chimborazo would raise the temperature of water 30°. One fourth of this is perpetually covered with snow, so that its ancient name, Chimpurazu—the mountain of snow—is very appropriate.[70] It is a stirring thought that this mountain, now mantled with snow, once gleamed with volcanic fires. There is a hot spring on the north side, and an immense amount of débris covers the slope below the snow-limit, consisting chiefly of fine-grained, iron-stained trachyte and coarse porphyroid gray trachyte; very rarely a dark vitreous trachyte. Chimborazo is very likely not a solid mountain: trachytic volcanoes are supposed to be full of cavities. Bouguer found it made the plumb-line deviate 7" or 8".
The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are in keeping with its colossal size. Narrower, but deeper than those of the Alps, the mind swoons and sinks in the effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The mountain appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin crust, and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, revealing deep, dark chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of the lower world. The deepest valley in Europe, that of the Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is 3200 feet deep; but here are rents in the side of Chimborazo in which Vesuvius could be put away out of sight. As you look down into the fathomless fissure, you see a white fleck rising out of the gulf, and expanding as it mounts, till the wings of the condor, fifteen feet in spread, glitter in the sun as the proud bird fearlessly wheels over the dizzy chasm, and then, ascending above your head, sails over the dome of Chimborazo.[71] Could the condor speak, what a glowing description could he give of the landscape beneath him when his horizon is a thousand miles in diameter. If
"Twelve fair counties saw the blaze from Malvern's lonely height,"
what must be the panorama from a height fifteen times higher!
Chimborazo was long supposed to be the tallest mountain on the globe, but its supremacy has been supplanted by Mount Everest in Asia, and Aconcagua in Chile.[72] In mountain gloom and glory, however, it still stands unrivaled. The Alps have the avalanche, "the thunderbolt of snow," and the glaciers, those icy Niagaras so beautiful and grand. Here they are wanting.[73] The monarch of the Andes sits motionless in calm serenity and unbroken silence. The silence is absolute and actually oppressive. The road from Guayaquil to Quito crosses Chimborazo at the elevation of fourteen thousand feet. Save the rush of the trade wind in the afternoon, as it sweeps over the Andes, not a sound is audible; not the hum of an insect, nor the chirp of a bird, nor the roar of the puma, nor the music of running waters. Mid-ocean is never so silent. You can almost hear the globe turning on its axis. There was a time when the monarch deigned to speak, and spoke with a voice of thunder, for the lava on its sides is an evidence of volcanic activity. But ever since the morning stars sang together over man's creation, Chimbo has sat in sullen silence, satisfied to look "from his throne of clouds o'er half the world." There is something very suggestive in this silence of Chimborazo. It was once full of noise and fury; it is now a completed mountain, and thunders no more. How silent was Jesus, a completed character! The reason we are so noisy is that we are so full of wants; we are unfinished characters. Had we perfect fullness of all things, the beatitude of being without a want, we should lapse into the eternal silence of God.
Chimborazo is a leader of a long train of ambitious crags and peaks; but as he who comes after the king must not expect to be noticed, we will only take a glimpse of these lesser lights as we pass up the Western Cordillera, and then down the Eastern.
The first after leaving the monarch is Caraguairazo. The Indians call it "the wife of Chimborazo." They are separated only by a very narrow valley. One hundred and seventy years ago the top of this mountain fell in, and torrents of mud flowed out containing multitudes of fishes. It is now over seventeen thousand feet high, and is one of the most Alpine of the Quitonian volcanoes, having sharp pinnacles instead of the smooth trachytic domes—usually double domes—so characteristic of the Andean summits. And now we pass in rapid succession numerous picturesque mountains, some of them extinct volcanoes, as Iliniza, presenting two pyramidal peaks, the highest seventeen thousand feet above the sea, and Corazon, so named from its heart-shaped summit, till we reach Pichincha, whose smoking crater is only five miles distant in a straight line from the city of Quito, or eleven by the traveled route.
The crown of this mountain presents three groups of rocky peaks. The most westerly one is called Rucu-Pichincha, and alone manifests activity. To the northeast of Rucu is Guagua-Pichincha, a ruined flue of the same fiery furnace; and between the two is Cundur-guachana.[74] Pichincha is the only volcano in Ecuador which has not a true cone-crater. Some violent eruption beyond the reach of history or tradition has formed an enormous funnel-shaped basin 2500 feet deep,[75] 1500 in diameter at the bottom, and expanding upward to a width of three fourths of a mile. It is the deepest crater on the globe. That of Kilauea is 600 feet; Orizaba, 500; Etna, 300; Hecla, 100. Vesuvius is a portable furnace in comparison. The abyss is girt with a ragged wall of dark trachyte, which rises on the inside at various angles between 45° and perpendicularity. As we know of but one American besides the members of our expedition (Mr. Farrand, a photographer) who has succeeded in entering the crater of this interesting volcano, we will give a brief sketch of our visit.
![[Crater of Pichincha.]](#8543082027330898494_133.png.id-774206619266721821.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Leaving Quito in the afternoon by the old arched gateway at the foot of Panecillo, and crossing a spur of the mountain, we stopped for the night at the Jesuit hacienda, situated in the beautiful valley of Lloa, but nearly ruined by the earthquake of 1859. On the damp walls of this monastery, perched 10,268 feet above the ocean, we found several old paintings, among them a copy of the Visitation by Rubens. The sunset views in this heart of the Andes were surpassingly beautiful. Mounting our horses at break of day, and taking an Indian guide, we ascended rapidly, by a narrow and difficult path, through the forest that belts the volcano, up to the height of 12,000 feet, emerging gradually into a thicket of stunted bushes, and then entered the dreary paramo. Splendid was the view of the Eastern Cordillera. At least six dazzling white volcanoes were in sight just across the Valley of Quito, among them table-topped Cayambi, majestic Antisana, and princely Cotopaxi, whose tapering summit is a mile above the clouds. Toiling upward, we reached the base of the cone, where vegetation ceased entirely; and, tying our horses to some huge rocks that had fallen from the mural cliff above, started off on hands and feet for the crater. The cone is deeply covered with sand and cinders for about two hundred feet, and the sides are inclined at an angle of about 35°. At ten o'clock we reached the brim of the crater, and the great gulf burst suddenly into view. We can never forget the impression made upon us by the sight. We speak of many things here below as awful, but that word has its full meaning when carried to the top of Pichincha. There you see a frightful opening in the earth's crust nearly a mile in width and half a mile deep, and from the dark abyss comes rolling up a cloud of sulphurous vapors. Monte Somma in the time of Strabo was a miniature; but this crater is on the top of a mountain four times the height of the Italian volcano. Imagination finds it difficult to conceive a spectacle of more fearful grandeur or such solemn magnificence. It well accords with Milton's picture of the bottomless pit. The united effect of the silence and solitude of the place, the great depth of the cavity, the dark precipitous sides, and the column of smoke standing over an unseen crevice, was to us more impressive than thundering Cotopaxi or fiery Vesuvius. Humboldt, after standing on this same brink, exclaimed, "I have never beheld a grander or more remarkable picture than that presented by this volcano;" and La Condamine compared it to "the Chaos of the poets." Below us are the smouldering fires which may any moment spring forth into a conflagration; around us are black, ragged cliffs—fit boundary for this gateway to the infernal regions. They look as if they had just been dragged up from the central furnace of the earth. Life seems to have fled in terror from the vicinity; even lichens, the children of the bare rocks, refuse to clothe the scathed and beetling crags. For some moments, made mute by the dreadful sight, we stood like statues on the rim of the mighty caldron, with our eyes riveted on the abyss below, lost in contemplating that which can not be described. The panorama from this lofty summit is more pleasing, but equally sublime. Toward the rising sun is the long range of the Eastern Cordillera, hiding from our view the great valley of the Amazon. To right and left are the peaks of another procession of august mountains from Cotocachí to Chimborazo. We are surrounded by the great patriarchs of the Andes, and their speaker, Cotopaxi, ever and anon sends his muttering voice over the land. The view westward is like looking down from a balloon. Those parallel ridges of the mountain chain, dropping one behind the other, are the gigantic staircase by which the ice-crowned Chimborazo steps down to the sea. A white sea of clouds covers the peaceful Pacific and the lower parts of the coast. But the vapory ocean, curling into the ravines, beautifully represents little coves and bays, leaving islands and promontories like a true ocean on a broken shore. We seem raised above the earth, which lies like an opened map below us; we can look down on the upper surface of the clouds, and, were it night, down too upon the lightnings.
The crater of Pichincha has a sharp, serrated edge, which, happily for Quito, is broken down on the west side, so that in the next eruption the volcano will doubtless pour its contents into the wilds of Esmeraldas. The highest pinnacle is 15,827 feet; so that the mountain just enters the region of perpetual winter. Water boils at 185°. The summit is generally bare, though snow is always found in the clefts of the rocks. It is not compact or crystalline, but resembles a conglomerate of little hailstones.[76] Out of the mingled snow and pumice-dust rise a few delicate flowers, particularly the violet Sida Pichinchensis, the same which we had observed on the side of Chimborazo. Think of gay flowers a thousand feet higher than the top of Mont Blanc!
The first to reach the brink of the crater were the French Academicians in 1742. Sixty years after, Humboldt stood on the summit. But it was not till 1844 that any one dared to enter the crater. This was accomplished by Garcia Moreno, now President of Ecuador, and Sebastian Wisse, a French engineer. Humboldt pronounced the bottom of the crater "inaccessible, from its great depth and precipitous descent." We found it accessible, but exceedingly perilous. The moment we prepared to descend our guide ran away. We went on without him, but when halfway down were stopped by a precipice.
On the 22d of October, 1867, we returned to Pichincha with another guide, and entered the crater by a different route. Manuel, our Indian, led us to the south side, and over the brink we went. We were not long in realizing the danger of the undertaking. Here the snow concealed an ugly fissure or covered a treacherous rock (for nearly all the rocks are crumbling); there we must cross a mass of loose sand moving like a glacier down the almost vertical side of the crater; and on every hand rocks were giving way, and, gathering momentum at each revolution, went thundering down, leaping over precipices, and jostling other rocks, which joined in the race, till they all struck the bottom with a deep rumbling sound, shivered like so many bombshells into a thousand pieces, and telling us what would be our fate it we made a single misstep. We followed our Indian in single file, keeping close together, that the stones set free by those in the rear might not dash those below from their feet; feeling our way with the greatest caution, clinging with our hands to snow, sand, rock, tufts of grass, or any thing that would hold for a moment; now leaping over a chasm, now letting ourselves down from rock to rock; at times paralyzed with fear, and always with death staring us in the face; thus we scrambled for two hours and a half, till we reached the bottom of the crater.
Here we found a deeply-furrowed plain, strewn with ragged rocks, and containing a few patches of vegetation, with half a dozen species of flowers. In the centre is an irregular heap of stones, two hundred and sixty feet high by eight hundred in diameter. This is the cone of eruption—its sides and summit covered with an imposing group of vents, seventy in number, all lined with sulphur and exhaling steam, black smoke, and sulphurous gas. The temperature of the vapor just within the fumarole is 184°, water boiling beside it at 189°. The central vent, or chimney, gives forth a sound like the violent bubbling of boiling water. As we sat on this fiery mount, surrounded by a circular rampart of rocks, and looked up at the immense towers of dark dolerite which ran up almost vertically to the height of twenty-five hundred feet above us, musing over the tremendous force which fashioned this awful amphitheatre—spacious enough for all the gods of Tartarus to hold high carnival—the clouds which hung in the thin air around the crest of the crater pealed forth thunder after thunder, which, reverberating from precipice to precipice, were answered by the crash of rocks let loose by the storm, till the whole mountain seemed to tremble like a leaf. Such acoustics, mingled with the flash of lightning and the smell of brimstone, made us believe that we had fairly got into the realm of Pluto. It is the spot where Dante's Inferno ought to be read.
Finishing our observations, and warming our dinner over the steaming crevices, we prepared to ascend. The escape from this horrid hole was more perilous than the entrance, and on reaching the top we sang, with grateful hearts, to the tune of "Old Hundred,"
"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."
We doubt whether that famous tune and glorious doxology were ever sung so near to heaven.
The second line,
"Praise him all creatures here below,"
had a strange meaning fifteen thousand feet high.
There have been five eruptions of Pichincha since the Conquest. The last was in 1660; that of 1566 covered Quito three feet deep with ashes and stones, while boiling water and bitumen descended in torrents. In 1867 the column of smoke did not rise above the crest of the crater, but the volcano has lately been showing signs of activity, such as it has not exhibited since the last grand eruption two centuries ago. On the 19th of March, 1868, detonations were audible at Quito, and three days after there were more thunderings, with a great column of vapor visible from Chillo, twelve miles to the east. These phenomena were accompanied by an unusual fall of rain. Since the great earthquake of August 16th, Pichincha has continued to send forth dense columns of black smoke, and so much fine sand that it is not possible to reach the crater. The solid products of Pichincha since the Conquest have been chiefly pumice, coarse-grained and granular trachyte, and reddish porphyroid trachyte. The roads leading to Quito cut through hills of pumice-dust. On the plain of Iñaquito and in the valley of Esmeraldas are vast erratic blocks of trachyte, some containing twenty-five cubic yards, having sharp angles, and in some cases a polished, unstriated surface. M. Wisse does not consider them to have been thrown out of Pichincha, as La Condamine and others have judged. It is true, as he says, that they could not have come out of the present cone at a less angle than 45°, for they would have hit the sides of the high rocky rampart and rolled back again; and at a higher angle they would not have reached their present location. But we see no reason why they could not be the upper portion of the solid trachyte cone blown into the air at the great eruption which cleared out this enormous crater. There is a rumipamba, or "field of stones," around each of the Quitonian volcanoes.
Leaving Pichincha, we travel northward along the battlemented Andes, passing by the conical mountains of Yana-urcu and Cotocachí. Yana-urcu, or "black mountain," is a mass of calcined rocks. Cotocachí (from cota? and cachí, salt) is always snow-clad. On its side is Cuycocha, one of the highest lakes in the world (10,200 feet), and formed by the subsidence of a part of the volcano.
[CHAPTER IX.]
The Volcanoes of Ecuador.— Eastern Cordillera.— Imbabura.— Cayambi.— Antisana.— Cotopaxi.— Llanganati.— Tunguragua.— Altar.— Sangai.
Near the once busy city of Otovalo, utterly destroyed in the late earthquake, the two Cordilleras join, and, turning to the right, we go down the eastern range. The first in order is Imbabura,[77] which poured forth a large quantity of mud, with thousands of fishes, seven years before the similar eruption of Caraguairazo. At its feet is the beautiful lake of San Pablo, five miles in circumference, and very deep. It contains the little black fish (Pimelodes cyclopum) already referred to as the only species in the valley, and the same that was cast out by Imbabura and Caraguairazo. Next comes the square-topped Cayambi—the loftiest mountain in this Cordillera, being nineteen thousand five hundred feet. It stands exactly on the equator, a colossal monument placed by the hand of Nature to mark the grand division of the globe. It is the only snowy spot, says Humboldt, which is crossed by the equator. Beautiful is the view of Cayambi from Quito, as its enormous mass of snow and ice glows with crimson splendor in the farewell rays of the setting sun. No painter's brush could do justice to the prismatic tints which hover around the higher peaks. But this flood of glory is soon followed by the pure whiteness of death. "Like a gigantic ghost shrouded in sepulchral sheets, the mountain now hovers in the background of the landscape, towering ghastly through the twilight until darkness closes upon the scene."
Ten miles farther south is the bare-headed Guamani range, over which passes the road to the wild Napo country.[78] The view from the crest is magnificent; but, like every grand panorama, eludes description. As we look eastward over the beginnings of the mighty forest which stretches unbroken to the Atlantic, the vast ridges, trending north and south, and decreasing in height as they increase in distance, seem like the waves of a great ocean rolling toward the mountains.
Near by stands Antisana in his snowy robe. This volcano ranks next to Chimborazo in dignity. It has a double dome, and an elevation of 19,000 feet. Snow of Dian purity covers it for over 3000 feet; but, judging from the enormous streams of lava on its sides, it must have been a fierce volcano in ages past. The lava streams are worthy of the great mountain from which they flowed. One of them (called "Volcan d'Ansango") is ten miles long and five hundred feet deep, with an average slope of 15°. It is a magnificent sight, as seen from the surrounding paramo—a stream of dark, ragged rocks coming down out of the clouds and snows which cover the summit. The representative products of Antisana are a black, cellular, vitreous trachyte, a fine-grained, tough porphyroid trachyte, and a coarse reddish porphyroid trachyte. An eruption, as late as 1590, is recorded in Johnston's Phys. Atlas. Humboldt saw smoke issuing from several openings in March, 1802.
We ascended this volcano to the height of sixteen thousand feet. On its side is the celebrated hacienda of Antisana, which, more than sixty years ago, sheltered the great Humboldt from the sleet and rain and blast of this lofty region. It was a welcome refuge to us, for we had well nigh perished with cold on the dreary paramo. It is one of the highest human habitations in the world, being thirteen thousand three hundred feet above the sea, or a thousand feet higher than the Peak of Teneriffe.[79] The mean temperature is the same as that of Quebec, so that thirteen thousand feet in elevation at the equator is equal to 47° in latitude.[80] Here is an extensive corral, inclosing thousands of cattle, owned by a rheumatic old gentleman, Señor Valdevieso, who supplies the beef-market of Quito.[81] A desire for beef has alone brought man and his beast to this chilly altitude. It is difficult to get a quart of milk, and impossible to find a pound of butter at this hacienda. The predominant colors of the cattle are red and black. They feed on the wild paramo grass, and the beef is not only remarkably cheap, but superior in quality. The lasso is used in catching the animals, but not so skillfully as by the Gauchos of Rio Plata. It is a singular fact that cattle have followed men over the whole earth, from the coast of Africa to the highlands of Antisana. The same species is attacked by crocodiles and condors.
The atmospheric pressure is here so small that they frequently bleed at the nose and mouth when hunted. We have already given our experience in ascending high altitudes. We may add that while the pulse of Boussingault beat 106 pulsations at the height of 18,600 feet on Chimborazo, ours was 87 at 16,000 feet on Antisana. De Saussure says that a draught of liquor which would inebriate in the lowlands no longer has that effect on Mont Blanc. This appears to be true on the Andes; indeed, there is very little drunkenness in Quito. So the higher we perch our inebriate asylums, the better for the patients.
Near the hacienda is a little lake called Mica, on which we found a species of grebe, with wings so short it could not fly. Its legs, also, seem fitted only for paddling, and it goes ashore only to lay its eggs. It peeps like a gosling. Associated with them were penguins (in appearance); they were so shy we could not secure one. The query is, How came they there? Was this a centre of creation, or were the fowls upheaved with the Andes? They could not have flown or walked to this lofty lake, and there are no water-courses leading to it; it is surrounded with a dry, rolling waste, where only the condor lives. We turn to Darwin for an answer.[82]
The ragged Sincholagua[83] and romantic Rumiñagui follow Antisana, and then we find ourselves looking up at the most beautiful and most terrible of volcanoes. This is the far-famed Cotopaxi, or more properly Cutu-pacsi, meaning "a brilliant mass." Humboldt calls it the most regular and most picturesque of volcanic cones. It looks like a huge truncated cone rising out of the Valley of Quito, its sides deeply furrowed by the rivers of mud and water which have so often flowed out. The cone itself is about six thousand feet high. The east side is covered with snow, but the west is nearly bare, owing to the trade winds, which, sweeping across the continent, carry the ashes westward. Cotopaxi is the loftiest of active volcanoes, though its grand eruptions are a century apart, according to the general rule that the higher a volcano the less frequent its eruptions, but all the more terrible when they do occur. Imagine Vesuvius on the summit of Mont Blanc, and you have the altitude of Cotopaxi.
The top just reaches the middle point of density in the atmosphere, for at the height of three miles and a half the air below will balance that above. The crater has never been seen by man; the steepness of the sides and the depth of the ashes covering them render it inaccessible. The valiant Col. Hall tried it with scaling ladders, only to fail. The telescope reveals a parapet of scoria on the brim, as on Teneriffe. Humboldt's sketch of the volcano, so universally copied, is overdrawn. It makes the slope about 50°, while in truth it is nearer 30°. The apical angle is 122° 30'.[84]
Cotopaxi is slumbering now; or, as Mr. Coan says of Hilo, it is "in a state of solemn and thoughtful suspense." The only signs of life are the deep rumbling thunders and a cloud of smoke lazily issuing from the crater.[85] Sometimes at night the smoke looks like a pillar of fire, and fine ashes and sand often fall around the base, to the great annoyance of the farmers. On the south side is a huge rock of porphyry, called the Inca's Head. Tradition has it that this was the original summit of the volcano, torn off and hurled down by an eruption on the very day Atahuallpa was murdered by Pizarro. The last great eruption occurred in 1803, though so late as 1855 it tossed out stones, water, and sand. Heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages, are scattered for miles around the mountain, among them great boulders twenty feet square. In one place (Quinchevar) the accumulation is 600 feet deep. Between Cotopaxi and Sincholagua are numerous conical hills covering the paramo, reminding one of the mud volcanoes of Jorullo.
Pumice and trachyte are the most common rocks around this mountain, and these are augitic or porphyroid. Obsidian also occurs, though not on the immediate flank, but farther down near Chillo. In plowing, thousands of pieces as large as "flints" are turned up. The natives know nothing about their origin or use; the large specimens were anciently polished and used for mirror. But Cotopaxi is the great pumice-producing volcano. The new road up the valley cuts through a lofty hill formed by the successive eruptions; the section, presenting alternate layers of mud, ashes, and pumice, is a written history of the volcano.[86] The cone itself is evidently composed of similar beds super-imposed, and holding fragments of porphyry and trachyte. What is Vesuvius, four thousand feet high, to Cotopaxi, belching forth fire from a crater fifteen thousand feet higher, and shooting its contents three thousand feet above its snow-bound summit, with a voice of thunder heard six hundred miles!
Leaving this terrible "safety-valve" to the imprisoned fires under our feet, we travel along the wooded flanks and savage valleys of the Llanganati Mountains, whose lofty blue ridge is here and there pointed with snow.[87] It is universally believed that the Incas buried an immense quantity of gold in an artificial lake on the sides of this mountain during the Spanish invasion, and many an adventurous expedition has been made for it. The inhabitants will tell you of one Valverde, a Spaniard, who, from being very poor, had suddenly become very rich, which was attributed to his having married an Indian girl whose father showed him where the treasure was hidden, and accompanied him on various occasions to bring away portions of it; and that Valverde returned to Spain, and on his death-bed bequeathed the secret of his riches to the king. But since Padre Longo suddenly disappeared while leading an expedition, the timid Ecuadorians have been content with their poverty.[88]
And now we have reached the perfect cone of Tunguragua, the rival of Cotopaxi in symmetry and beauty.[89] It stands 16,500 feet above the Pacific, its upper part covered with a splendid robe of snow, while the sugar-cane grows in the romantic town of Baños, 10,000 feet below the summit. A cataract, 1500 feet high, comes down at three bounds from the edge of the snow to the warm valley beneath; and at Baños a hot ferruginous spring and a stream of ice-water flow out of the volcano side by side. Here, too, the fierce youth of the Pastassa, born on the pumice slopes of Cotopaxi, dashes through a deep tortuous chasm and down a precipice in hot haste, as if conscious of the long distance before it ere it reaches the Amazon and the ocean. Tunguragua was once a formidable mountain, for we discovered a great stream of lava reaching from the clouds around the summit to the orange-groves in the valley, and blocking up the rivers which tumble over it in beautiful cascades. It has been silent since 1780; but it can afford to rest, for then its activity lasted seven years.[90]
Close by rises beautiful Altar, a thousand feet higher. The Indians call it Capac-urcu, or the "Chief." They say it once overtopped Chimborazo; but, after a violent eruption, which continued eight years, the walls fell in. Its craggy crest is still more Alpine than Caraguairazo; eight snowy peaks shoot up like needles into the sky, and surround an altar to whose elevated purity no mortal offering will ever attain. The trachyte which once formed the summit of this mountain is now spread in fragments over the plain of Riobamba.
Leaving this broken-down volcano, but still the most picturesque in the Andes, we travel over the rough and rugged range of Cubillin, till our attention is arrested by terrific explosions like a naval broadside, and a column of smoke that seems to come from the furnace of the Cyclops. It is Sangai, the most active volcano on the globe. From its unapproachable crater, three miles high, it sends forth a constant stream of fire, water, mud, and ashes.[91]
No intermission has been noticed since the Spaniards first saw it three hundred years ago. Stromboli is the only volcano that will compare with it. Its ashes are almost always falling on the city of Guayaquil, one hundred miles distant, and its explosions, generally occurring every hour or two, are sometimes heard in that city. Wisse, in 1849, counted 267 explosions in one hour.
We have now completed the series. What an array of snow-clad peaks wall in the narrow Valley of Quito—Nature's Gothic spires to this her glorious temple! If ever there was a time when all these volcanoes were active in concert, this secluded vale must have witnessed the most splendid pyrotechnics conceivable. Imagine fifty mountains as high as Etna, three of them with smoking craters, standing along the road between New York and Washington, and you will have some idea of the ride down this gigantic colonnade from Quito to Riobamba. If, as Ruskin says, the elements of beauty are in proportion to the increase of mountainous character, Ecuador is artistically beautiful to a high degree.
Here, amid these Plutonic peaks, are the energies of volcanic action best studied. The constancy of the volcanic fires is a striking fact. First we have the deluges of submarine lavas, which were poured out long before the Andes lifted their heads above the waters; then alternate porphyritic strata, feldspathic streams, and gypseous exhalations; then, at a later day, floods of basaltic lava; next the old tertiary eruptions; and, lastly, the vast accumulations of boulders, gravel, ashes, pumice, and mud of the present day, spread over the Valley of Quito and the west slope of the Cordilleras to an unknown depth beneath the sea. The incessant eruptions of Sangai, and the frequent earthquakes, show that the subterranean energy which heaved the Andes is not yet expended.
[CHAPTER X.]
The Valley of Quito.— Riobamba.— A Bed of "Fossil Giants."— Chillo Hacienda.— Otovalo and Ibarra.— The Great Earthquake of 1868.
The Valley of Quito has about the same size and shape as the basin of Salt Lake, but it is five thousand feet higher.[92] The two cordilleras inclosing it are tied by the mountain-knots of Assuay and Chisinchi, so that the valley is subdivided into three basins, those of Cuenca, Ambato, and Quito proper, which increase in beauty and altitude as we travel north. There are several subordinate transversal dikes and some longitudinal ridges, but all the basins lie parallel to the axes of the cordilleras—a characteristic feature of the Andes. The deep valleys on the outside flanks are evidently valleys of erosion, but the basins between the cordilleras were created with them.
The first is fifty miles long. It contains the cities of Loja and Cuenca,[93] the former distinguished for its cinchona forests, the latter for Inca graves and mines of precious metals. The middle basin (130 miles in length) is covered with vast quantities of volcanic débris, the outpourings of Cotopaxi, Tunguragua, and Altar, on one side, and of Chimborazo and Caraguairazo on the other. Nothing relieves the barrenness of the landscape but hedges of century plant, cactus, and wild heliotrope, which border the roads. Whirlwinds of sand are often seen moving over the plain. The mean temperature is 61°.5. Here exist, we can not say thrive, the cities of Riobamba, Ambato, and Tacunga, already noticed. Riobamba,[94] properly Rayobamba, the plain of lightning, was founded at the beginning of this century, or shortly after the destruction of the old city. Excepting the ecclesiastical buildings, the houses are of one story, built of stone plastered with mud, sometimes of adobe or bamboo, and the windows are grated like those of a prison. As in all Spanish-American towns, the main church fronts the great Plaza where the weekly fairs are held. Save on fair-day, the city is lifeless. Nothing is exported to the coast except a few eggs and fowls, lard and potatoes. Such is the power of habit, an Indian will take a hen to Bodegas and sell it for four reals (50 cents) when he could get three for it in Riobamba, and six on the road. Another instance of this dogged adherence to custom was related to us by Dr. Taylor: The Indians were accustomed to bring the curate of a certain village a bundle of alfalfa every day. A new curate, having no use for so much, ordered them not to bring any more. He was besieged by five hundred of his wild parishioners, and had he not been a powerful man, they would have killed him. They told him they were accustomed to bring the curate that much of alfalfa, and should continue.
Old Riobamba (Cajabamba) is situated twelve miles to the west. This has been the scene of some of the most terrible paroxysms that over shook the Andes. In 1797 a part of Mount Cicalfa was thrown down, crushing the city at its foot; hills arose where valleys existed; rivers disappeared, and others took their places; and the very site of the city was rent asunder. The surviving inhabitants could not tell where their houses had stood, and property was so mingled that litigation followed the earthquake. Judging from the numerous sculptured columns lying broken and prostrate throughout the valley, the city must have had a magnificence now unknown in Ecuador. Around a coat of arms (evidently Spanish) we read these words: Malo mori quam fedari, "I would rather die than be disgraced." In the spring of 1868 another convulsion caused a lake to disappear and a mountain to take its place.
Near Punín, seven miles southwest of Riobamba, we discovered in a deep ravine numerous fossil bones, belonging chiefly to the mastodon, and extinct species of the horse, deer, and llama. They were imbedded in the middle of an unstratified cliff, four hundred feet high, of very compact silt or trachytic clay, free from stones, and resting on a hard quartzoze sandstone. In the bed of the stream which runs through the ravine (charged with nitrate of soda) are some igneous rocks. The bones were drifted to this spot and deposited (many of them in a broken state) in horizontal layers along with recent shells. We have, then, this remarkable fact, that this high valley was tenanted by elephantine quadrupeds, all of which passed away before the arrival of the human species, and yet while the land, and probably the sea also, were peopled with their present molluscan inhabitants. This confirms the statement of Mr. Lyell, that the longevity of mammalian species is much inferior to that of the testacea. It is interesting to speculate on the probable climate and the character of the vegetation in this high valley when these extinct mammifers lived. The great pachyderm would have no difficulty in thriving at the present day at Quito, on the score of temperature or altitude. The mammoth once flourished in Siberia; and Gibbon met an elephant on the high table-lands of Bolivia that had walked over the Cordillera at the pass of Antarangua, sixteen thousand feet above the sea. Darwin thinks that the climate of the Cordilleras has changed since the pleistocene period. "It is a marvelous fact in the history of mammalia (says this naturalist) that in South America a native horse should have lived and disappeared, to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds descended from the few introduced with the Spanish colonists."
The high ridge of Chisinchi, stretching across the great plateau from Cotopaxi to Iliniza, separates the evergreen Valley of Quito from the arid and melancholy valleys of Cuenca and Ambato. It rolls out like a rich carpet of emerald verdure between the towering mountains of Pichincha and Antisana, Cotacachi and Cayambi. This was the centre of the most ancient native civilization after that of Titicaca. Here, while the darkness of the Middle Ages was settling over Europe, dwelt the Quitus, whose origin is lost in the mists of fable. Then, while Peter the Hermit was leading his fanatic host against the Saracens, the Cara nation waged a more successful crusade, and supplanted the Quitus. Here, too, in the bloody days of Pizarro, reigned, and was buried, the last of the Incas, ill-fated Atahuallpa. To him, indeed, it was a more delightful spot than the vale of Vilcamayu—the paradise of Peru.
The Puengasi Hills, running through the valley from north to south, partially divide the capital and its vicinity from the charming Valley of Chillo, spread out at the foot of Antisana. Here is the venerable hacienda of Chillo, where Humboldt and Bonpland resided for some time. It is owned by the Aguirres, who are grand-nephews of Don Carlos Montufar, the companion of the famous travelers. The hacienda contains two valuable paintings—an original "Crucifixion" by Titian, and a portrait of the great German from life, as he appeared in 1803. This latter relic interested us exceedingly, and, through the kindness of Sr. Aguirre, we were allowed to photograph it. It represents Humboldt in his prime, a traveler on the Andes, dressed after the court-fashion of Berlin; very different from the usual portrait—an old man in his library, his head, thinly covered with gray hair, resting on his bosom.
![[Humboldt in 1802.]](#8543082027330898494_154.png.id-81768029311634093.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Thirty miles north of Quito, near the volcanic Imbabura, is the ruined city of Otovalo, a thousand feet lower than the capital. It was well built, and contained 7000 inhabitants. Quichua was the prevailing language. Its chief trade was in saddles, ponchos, straw hats, and fruit. Here was the cotton factory, or quinta, of Sr. Pareja. Three miles from Otovalo was the enterprising Indian village of Cotocachí, at the mountain of the same name. It was noted for its hand-loom products. A heap of ruins now marks the locality. It is a doomed spot, suffering more than any other town in 1859.
Four miles northwest of Otovalo was the city of Ibarra, picturesquely seated on a plain 2000 feet lower than Quito, and surrounded with orchards and gardens. It numbered nearly 10,000 souls. It was not a commercial place, but the residence of landed proprietors. The neighborhood produced cotton, sugar, and fruit. A league distant was Carranqui, the birthplace of Atahuallpa. And, finally, the great valley fitly terminates in the plain of Atuntaqui,[95] where the decisive battle was fought which ushered in the reign of the Incas.
![[Ibarra.]](#8543082027330898494_156.png.id-5017812295705238564.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
This northern province of Imbabura was the focus of the late terrible earthquake. At half past one on Sunday morning, August 16, 1868, with scarcely a premonitory sign (save a slight trembling at 3 P.M. the previous day), there was an upheaving of the ground, and then one tremendous shock and rocking of the earth, lasting one minute. In that brief moment the rich and flourishing province became a wilderness, and "Misericordia!" went up, like tho sound of many waters, from ten villages and cities. Otovalo, Ibarra, Cotocachí, and Atantaqui are heaps of ruins. At Otovalo 6000 perished. After the first shock, not a wall a yard high remained. Houses, in some instances, seemed to have been cut from their foundation, and thrown ten feet distant. The large stone fountain in the Plaza was thrown many yards. The cotton factory, which was built on the edge of a ravine, was by one stroke reduced to fragments. Such was the force of the concussion, the looms smashed each other, the carding-machines were thrown on their sides, and the roof, with part of the machinery, was found in the river below. The proprietor was killed. Throughout this whole region roads were broken up, and vast chasms created crossing the country in all directions. One is 2000 yards long, 500 yards broad, and 80 yards deep. Large fissures were opened on the sides of Cotocachí and Imbabura, from which issued immense torrents of water, mud, and bituminous substances, carrying away and drowning hundreds of cattle. A caravan of mules going to Chillo with cotton-bales was found four days after grazing on a narrow strip of land, on each side of which was a fearful chasm, while the muleteers were killed.
At Quito comparatively little damage was done. Fifteen lives were lost, and the churches, convents, and many private houses are in a state of dilapidation. Domes and arches, which are much used because of the scarcity of timber, were first to fall.
In the fierceness of the shock, and the extent of the territory shaken, the earthquake of August, 1868, is without a parallel in the New World. The destruction of life (50,000 officially reported in Ecuador alone) has not been equaled in any other earthquake during this century. The tremor was felt over four republics, and from the Andes to the Sandwich Islands. The water-wave was felt on the coast of New Zealand sixteen hours after it had set a United States gunboat, on the sand-hills of Arica. In some respects it is surpassed only by the Lisbon earthquake, which reached from Sweden to the West Indies, and from Barbary to Scotland. The loss of property seems to have been greatest in Peru, and the loss of life greatest in Ecuador. The commotion seemed to be most violent along the Western Cordillera, though it was felt even on the Napo.
There are few places where the crust of our planet is long at rest. Brazil, Egypt, Russia, and Greenland are comparatively free from earthquakes. But had we delicate instruments scattered throughout the world, upheaval and subsidence would doubtless be detected in every part of the so-called terra firma. The sea, and not the land, is the true image of stability.
"Time writes no wrinkle on thy azure brow:
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."
Earthquakes have occurred in every period of geological history, and are independent of latitude. The first well-known earthquake came in the year 63, and shattered Pompeii and Herculaneum sixteen years before they were overwhelmed by the first recorded eruption of Vesuvius. The most celebrated earthquake, and perhaps the most terrible manifestation of force during the human period, was in 1755. The shock, which seemed to originate in the bed of the Atlantic, pervaded one twelfth of the earth's surface. Unhappy Lisbon stood in its path.
An earthquake is a vertical vibration, having an undulatory progression. An example of the simple bounding movement occurred in 1797, when the city of Riobamba, in the Quito Valley, was buried under part of a mountain shaken down by the violent concussion, and men were tossed several hundred feet. We saw one massive structure which had nearly turned a somersault. The ordinary vibrations seldom exceed two feet in height. The wave-movement has a rate of from twenty to thirty miles a minute, depending on the elasticity of the rock and the elevations on the surface. When two undulations cross each other, a rotatory or twisting motion is produced. The waves are generally transmitted along the lines of primary mountain chains, which are doubtless seated on a fracture. The Lisbon waves moved from southwest to northeast, or parallel to the mountain system of the Old World; those of the United States, in 1843, ran parallel to the volcanic chain in Mexico. In South America they roll along the Andes. That of 1797 left its tracks along a westerly line from Tunguragua through Peliléo and Guáno. It is a little singular, that while the late trembling at Quito seemed to come from the north, the great shock in Peru preceded that in Ecuador by three days. Though the origin of earthquakes is deep-seated, the oscillation is mostly superficial, as deep mines are little disturbed. The most damage is done where the sedimentary plains abut against the hard, upturned strata of the mountains. The shock is usually brief. That of Caracas lasted fifty seconds, that of Lisbon six minutes; but Humboldt witnessed one in South America which continued a quarter of an hour.
Several hypotheses have been advanced to account for earthquakes. Rogers ascribes them to billowy pulsations in the molten matter upon which the flexible crust of the earth floats. Mallet thinks they may be viewed as an uncompleted effort to establish a volcano. Dana holds that they are occasioned by the folding up of the rocks in the slow process of cooling and consequent contraction of the earth's crust. In this process there would occur enormous fractures to relieve the tension; tilted strata would slip, and caverns give way. All this no doubt takes place; but the sudden, paroxysmal heavings incline us to refer the cause to the same eruptive impulse which makes Vesuvius and Cotopaxi discharge pent-up subterranean vapor and gas. The most destructive earthquakes occur when the overlying rocks do not break and give vent to the imprisoned gas. There is some connection between volcanoes and earthquakes; the former are, to a certain extent, "safety-valves." The column of smoke from the volcano of Pasto suddenly disappeared just before the great earthquake at Riobamba. In the spring of 1868 Pichincha and Cotopaxi showed signs of increasing activity, but in the summer became quiet again. Cotocachí and Sangai, 200 miles apart, were awaked simultaneously; the former, silent for centuries, sent forth dense masses of earth and volcanic matter to a distance of many miles, covering thousands of acres; the latter thundered every half hour instead of hourly, as before. Still, the greatest earthquakes do not occur in the vicinity of active volcanoes. Lisbon and Lima (where, on an average, forty-five shocks occur annually, and two fearful ones in a century) are far distant from any volcanic vent; likewise Northern India, South Africa, Scotland, and the United States.
An earthquake is beyond the reach of calculation. Professor Perrey, of Dijon, France, is endeavoring to prove that there is a periodicity in earthquakes, synchronous with that in the tides of the ocean, the greatest number occurring at the time of new and full moon.[96] If this theory be sustained, we must admit the existence of a vast subterranean sea of lava. But all this is problematical. Earthquakes appear independently of the geology of a country, though the rate of undulation is modified by the mineral structure. Earthquake waves seem to move more rapidly through the comparatively undisturbed beds of the Mississippi Valley than through the contorted strata of Europe. Meteorology is unable to indicate a coming earthquake, for there is no sure prophecy in sultry weather, sirocco wind, and leaden sky. The Lisbon shock came without a warning. Sudden changes of the weather, however, often occur after an earthquake. Since the great convulsion of 1797 the climate of the Valley of Quito is said to be much colder. A heavy rain often follows a violent earthquake in Peru.
No amount of familiarity with earthquakes enables one to laugh during the shock, or even at the subterranean thunders which sound like the clanking of chains in the realm of Pluto. All animated nature is terror-stricken. The horse trembles in his stall; the cow moans a low, melancholy tune; the dog sends forth an unearthly yell; sparrows drop from the trees as if dead; crocodiles leave the trembling bed of the river and run with loud cries into the forest; and man himself becomes bewildered and loses all capacity. When the earth rocks beneath our feet (the motion resembling, in the words of Darwin, "that felt by a person skating over thin ice which bends under the weight of his body"), something besides giddiness is produced. We feel our utter insignificance in the presence of a mysterious power that shakes the Andes like a reed. But more: there is an awful sensation of insecurity. "A moment (says Humboldt) destroys the illusion of a whole life: our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel transported, as it were, into a region of unknown destructive forces." A judgment day seems impending, and each moment is an age when one stands on a world convulsed.
[CHAPTER XI.]
"The Province of the Orient," or the Wild Napo Country.— The Napos, Zaparos, and Jívaros Indians.— Preparations to cross the Continent.
On the eastern slope of the Ecuadorian Andes, between the Marañon and its tributary the Putumayo, lies the Napo country. This almost unknown region has the area of New York and New England together. The government of Quito, by a sonorous decree in 1854, baptized it "La Provincia del Oriente." Peru likewise claims it, but neither republic has done any thing to colonize it. A dense primeval forest, broken only by the rivers, covers the whole territory, and is the home of wild races untouched by civilization.[97] There is not a road in the whole province. A footpath, open only in the dry season, and barely passable then, connects Quito and the Rio Napo. Congress lately promised to put Canélos in communication with the capital; but the largest villages in this vast and fertile region—Archidona, Canélos, and Macás—still remain isolated from the outer world.[98] Ecuador once appointed a functionary under the high-sounding title of "Governor of the Orient," with a salary of $700; but now the Indians are not troubled with any higher official than an alcalde.
The country is very thinly inhabited. The chief tribes are the semi-Christianized Napos (sometimes called Quijos), dwelling on the north bank of the Napo; the peaceful but uncivilized Zaparos, living between the Napo and Pastassa, and the warlike Jívaros, spread over the unexplored region between the Pastassa and Santiago.
These oriental tribes would probably be assigned by D'Orbigny to the Antisian branch of the Alpine races of South America. Dwelling amid the darkness of primeval forests, and on the gloomy banks of mountain torrents, they have acquired modifications of character, physical and moral, which distinguish them from the natives of the high and open regions, or the steaming lowlands of the Amazon. In color, however, they do not appear to us to be entitled to the name of "white men;" they approach nearer to the bronze complexion of the Quichuans than the yellow cast of the Brazilians. We see no evidence of that "bleaching process" resulting from a life under the dense canopy of foliage of which the learned French naturalist speaks, neither did we perceive the force of his statement that the color of the South American bears a very decided relation to the humidity of the atmosphere.
The features of the Napo Indians are Quichuan, especially the low forehead, squarely-built face, and dull expression; but in stature they exceed the mountaineers. From a skull in our possession we take the following measurements, adding for comparison the dimensions of an ancient Peruvian cranium in Dr. Morton's collection:
| Napo. | Peruvian. | ||||
| Longitudinal | diameter | 6½ | in. | 6.1 | in. |
| Parietal | " | 5⅜ | " | 6. | " |
| Frontal | " | 4 | " | 4.7 | " |
| Vertical | " | 4½ | " | 5.5 | " |
| Capacity | 831/64 | cub. in. | 83 | cub. in. | |
| Facial angle | 70° | 81° |
From this it will be seen that the capacity of this individual Napo is 8 cubic inches greater than the average bulk (75 cubic inches) of the old Peruvians; a trifle less than the average North American (84); 10 cubic inches less than the European (94); and the same as the average Polynesian and native African. He has a rounded head, somewhat prominent vertex, not an excessive protuberance of brain behind—a line through the meatus dividing it into very nearly equal parts; but a narrow front as viewed from above, small vertical diameter, quadrangular orbits, vertical teeth, and low facial angle. These characters place him between the Toltecan and the more barbarous tribes of the New World.
The Napos are nominally subject to the Ecuadorian government, which is represented by three or four petty alcaldes; but the Jesuit missionaries, who have established a bishopric and three curacies, generally control affairs—spiritual, political, and commercial. The Indians of each village annually elect one of their number governor, who serves without salary, and whose only show of authority is a silver-headed cane about four feet long. He is attended by half a dozen "justices," whose duty it is to supply the curate, alcalde, and any traveling blanco who may happen to be in town with daily food at a reasonable rate.
The religion of the Napos is a mixture of Paganism and Christianity. In common with all the other orient tribes, they believe in good and evil principles, and in metempsychosis. They swear in the name of the devil. They bury their dead horizontally, in a coffin made of a part of a canoe, with a lid of bamboo. They are very kind to the aged. Monogamy is the rule: the usual age of wedlock is sixteen or seventeen. The parents negotiate the marriage, and the curate's fee is one castellano ($3.50). When a person dies they hold an Irish "wake" over the body, and then take the widow to the river and wash her. They have seven semi-religious feasts in a year. To us they appeared to be nothing more than meaningless drunken frolics. Attired in their best, with head-dresses consisting of a circlet of short, richly-colored feathers from the breast of the toucan, surmounted with the long tail-feathers of the macaw, and with necklaces of beads, seeds, and monkeys' teeth, they keep up a constant monotonous tapping on little drums, and trot around a circle like dogs on a treadmill, stopping only to drink chicha. This is kept up for three weeks, when they all start off, with wives and children, for the forest to hunt monkeys for meat.
Chicha, the favorite drink of all the Andean Indians, is here brewed from yuca, not from corn and barley as in the Quito Valley. So true is it, as Humboldt remarks, that almost every where man finds means of preparing some kind of beverage from the vegetable kingdom. The Chilotans, Darwin informs us, make chicha from a species of Bromelia. In every zone, too, we find nations in a low degree of civilization living almost exclusively upon a single animal or plant. Thus the Laplander has his reindeer, the Esquimaux his seal, the Sandwich Islander his tara-root, the Malay his sago-palm, the Napo Indian his yuca.
Yuca is the staple food in this region. It is more commonly roasted, but is sometimes ground into flour. The manufacture of chicha is primitive, and not a little disgusting. A "bee," usually old women, sit around a wooden trough; each one takes a mouthful of yuca root, and, masticating it, throws it into the trough. The mass is then transferred to large earthen jars containing water, and left to ferment. The liquor is slightly acid, but not intoxicating unless taken in excess. This is done on feast-days, when the poor Indian keeps his stomach so constantly distended for weeks that the abdominal protrusion is not only unsightly, but alarming to a stranger. Chicha-drinking is a part of the worship of these simple aborigines. They seem to think that the more happy they make themselves while paying their devotions to the Creator, the better he is satisfied. The Jesuits have found it impossible to change this method of praise. Here, as among all rude nations, an ancient custom is one half the religion. In eating meat (usually monkey, sea-cow, and peccari), we observed that they did not tear or bite it, but, putting one end of a long piece in the mouth, cut off what they could not get in, as Darwin noticed among the Fuegians. They keep no domestic animals except fowls.
As to dress, they make use of a coarse cotton cloth, called lienzo, woven by the more enlightened Indians of Quito, dyeing it a dull brown by means of achote juice. The men wear a strip of this around the loins, and the women a short skirt. On feast-days, or when musquitoes are thick, the men add a little poncho and pantaloons. They do not properly tattoo, but color the skin with achote or anatto. This substance, which serves so many purposes in this part of the world, is the red powder which covers the seeds contained in the prickly bur of the Bixa orellana. The pigment is an article of commerce on the Amazon, and is exported to Europe, where it is used for coloring butter, cheese, and varnish. They have no fixed pattern; each paints to suit his fancy. Usually, however, they draw horizontal bands from the month to the ears, and across the forehead; we never saw curved lines in which higher savages, like the Tahitians, tattoo.
The Napos have the provoking apathy of all the New World aborigines. As Humboldt observed of another tribe, "their poverty, stoicism, and uncultivated state render them so rich and so free from wants of every kind, that neither money nor other presents will induce them to turn three steps out of their ways." They maintain a passive dignity in their bearing not seen in the proudest pope or emperor. They seldom laugh or smile, even under the inspiration of chicha, and months of intercourse with them did not discover to us the power of song, though Villavicencio says they do sometimes intone fragments of prose in their festival orgies. They manifest little curiosity, and little power of mimicry, in which wild men generally excel the civilized.[99] The old Spartans were never so laconic. In conversation each says all he has to say in three or four words till his companion speaks, when he replies in the same curt, ejaculatory style. A long sentence, or a number of sentences at one time, we do not remember of hearing from the lips of a Napo Indian.[100]
The women do most of the work, while their lazy lords drink up the chicha and swing in their hammocks, or possibly do a little hunting.[101] They catch fish with bone hooks, seines, spears, and by poisoning the water with barbasco.[102] This last method is quite common throughout equatorial America. Mashing the root, they throw it into the quiet coves of the river, when almost immediately the fish rise to the surface, first the little fry and then the larger specimens. The poison seems to stupefy rather than kill, for we observed that some individuals behaved in a most lively manner shortly after they were caught. The Indians drink the water with impunity.
The Napos are not brave; their chief weapons for hunting are spears of chonta wood, and blowpipes (bodaqueras) made of a small palm having a pith, which, when removed, leaves a polished bore, or of two separate lengths of wood, each scooped out with patient labor and considerable skill by means of the incisor teeth of a rodent. The whole is smeared with black wax, a mouth-piece fitted to the larger end, and a sight made of bone imbedded in the wax. Through this tube, about ten feet long, they blow slender arrows cut from the leaf-stalks of a palm. These are winged with a tuft of silk-cotton (common cotton would be too heavy), and poisoned with urarí, of which we shall speak hereafter. This noiseless gun is universally used on the Upper Amazon.[103]
The Zaparos in physiognomy somewhat resemble the Chinese, having a middle stature, round face, small eyes set angularly, and a broad, flat nose. Their language is of simple construction, but nasal and guttural. They have no words for numbers above three, but show their fingers; above ten they know nothing. They take to themselves single names, not double. They reckon time by moons and the ripening of certain fruits. Their name for God is Piátzo, but we could not learn that it conveyed any distinct idea. They believe the evil spirit, "Mungia," is a black spectre dwelling in the woods. They think the souls of the good and brave enter beautiful birds and feed on delicious fruits, while cowardly souls become dirty reptiles. Polygamy is common. They bury in the sitting posture, with the hammock of the deceased wrapped around him. The very old men are buried with the mouth downward. They make use of a narcotic drink called Ayahuasca, which produces effects similar to those of opium. The Zaparos are pacific and hospitable, but there is little social life among them; they never cluster into large villages, but inhabit isolated ranchos. Nomadic in their habits, they wander along the banks of the Napo, between the Andes and the Marañon. They manufacture, from the twisted fibre of the chambiri-palm,[104] most of the twine and hammocks seen in Eastern Ecuador. Their government is patriarchal.
The Jívaros, or "Red Indians" par excellence, are the most numerous and the most spirited of the oriental tribes. They are brave and resentful, yet hospitable and industrious. While the Napos and Zaparos live in rude, often temporary huts of split bamboo, the warlike Jívaros erect houses of hard wood with strong doors. Blood relations live together on the communal principle, the women keeping the rear half of the house, which is divided by a partition. Many Jívaros approach the Caucasian type, the beard and lighter skin hinting a percentage of Spanish blood; for this tribe was never conquered by the Incas, nor did it brook Spanish avarice and cruelty, but in one terrible conflict (1599) the intruder was swept out of existence. The wives of the El Dorado adventurers spent the rest of their days in the harems of the Jívaros. These Indians have the singular custom and art of compressing the heads of their notable captives; taking off the skin entire and drying it over a small mould, they have a hideous mummy which preserves all the features of the original face, but on a reduced scale."[105] They also braid the long black hair of their foes into girdles, which they wear as mementoes of their prowess. They use chonta-lances with triangular points, notched and poisoned, and shields of wood or hide. They have a telegraphic system which enables them to concentrate their forces quickly in time of war; large drums are placed on the tops of the hills, and a certain number of strokes, repeated along the line, rapidly convey intelligence to the most distant habitation.
An odd custom prevails among these wild Indians when an addition is made to the family circle. The woman goes into the woods alone, and on her return washes herself and new-born babe in the river; then the husband immediately takes to his bed for eight days, during which time the wife serves him on the choicest dainties she can procure.[106] They have also the unique practice of exchanging wives. The Jívaro speech is sonorous and energetic. They do not use salt; so that they distinguish the Napo tribes as the "Indians who eat salt." The chief articles manufactured by them are cotton goods and blowpipes. They trade mostly at Canélos and Macás, generally purchasing iron implements, such as hatchets and knives.
Canélos consists of about seventy families of Quichua-speaking Indians, and lies on the south bank of the Bobonaza. A trail connects it with Baños, at the foot of Tunguragua. Canélos was founded in 1536, and derives its name from its situation in the Canéla, or American cinnamon forest. The bark of the tree has the flavor of the Ceylon aromatic; but, according to Dr. Taylor, it is cassia. Macás, in the days of Spanish adventure a prosperous city under the name of "Sevilla de Oro," is now a cluster of huts on the banks of the Upano. Its trade is in tobacco, vanilla, canela, wax, and copal. The Spaniards took the trouble to transplant some genuine cinnamon-trees from Ceylon to this locality, and they flourished for a time.
On the 30th of October we left Quito on our march across the continent, by the way of the Napo wilderness. The preparations for our departure, however, commenced long before that date. To leave Quito in any direction is the work of time. But to plunge into that terra incognita "el Oriente," where for weeks, perhaps months, we should be lost to the civilized world and cut off from all resources, east or west, demanded more calculation and providence than a voyage round the world.
We were as long preparing for our journey to the Amazon as in making it. In the first place, not a man in Quito could give us a single item of information on the most important and dangerous part of our route. Quitonians are not guilty of knowing any thing about trans-Andine affairs or "oriental" geography. From a few petty traders who had, to the amazement of their fellow-citizens, traversed the forest and reached the banks of the Napo, we gleaned some information which was of service. But on the passage down the Napo from Santa Rosa to the Marañon, a distance of over five hundred miles, nobody had any thing to say except the delightful intelligence that in all probability, if we escaped the fever, we would be murdered by the savages. The information we received was about as definite and reliable as Herndon obtained respecting any tributary to the Lower Amazon: "It runs a long way up: it has rapids; savages live upon its banks; every thing grows there." From M. Gillette, a Swiss gentleman trading at Pará in Moyabamba hats, we learned about the movements of the Peruvian steamer on the Marañon; but how long it would take us to cross the mountains and the forest, and descend the river, we must find out by trial.
The commissary department was of primal importance. As, from all we could learn, we could not depend upon obtaining supplies from the Indians or with our guns,[107] it was necessary to take provisions to last till we should reach the Marañon. But how long we should be in the forest and on the river, or what allowance to make for probable delays, it was impossible to prophesy. The utmost caution and forethought were therefore needed, for to die of starvation in the wilderness was, for all practical purposes, equivalent to falling into the hands of cannibals. As it turned out, however, we made a most fortunate hit, for on arriving at Pebas—the first village on the Marañon—we found we had just enough solid food left to have one grand jubilee dinner.
For the benefit of future travelers, and for the curiosity of others, we give the bill of fare we provided for this journey—stomachs, five; time, forty-two days:
| Flour | 100 | lbs. | Sugar | 90 | lbs. | Soda | 1 | lbs. |
| Corn meal | 27 | " | Chocolate | 25 | " | Tea | 2 | " |
| Pea flour | 30 | " | Dried meat [108] | 47 | " | Ham | 10 | " |
| Mashka | 47 | " | Salt | 10 | " | Tamarinds | 9 | " |
| Crackers | 100 | " | Lard | 10 | " | Eggs | 170. | |
| Rice | 50 | " | Cream tartar | 1½ | " | Anisado pts. | 5. |
To this we added by purchase from the Indians a few chickens and eggs, five gallons of sirup, and a peck of rice; and on the river we helped ourselves to a little wild game, as fish, peccari, deer, and turtles' eggs. But these made only a drop in the commissary bucket; had we depended upon finding provisions on the road, we must have perished from sheer hunger. Game, in the dry season, is exceedingly scarce. Our provisions were packed in kerosene cans, a part of which were soldered up to keep out moisture (for the Valley of the Napo is a steaming vapor-bath) and to keep out the hands of Indians. More than once have these treacherous yet indispensable guides robbed the white man of his food, and then left him to his fate; we lost not a pound by theft. A four-gallon keg of aguardiente,[109] from which we dealt out half a gill daily to each man, kept our Indians in good humor.
As we must ascend to the cold altitude of fifteen thousand feet, and then descend to the hot Valley of the Amazon, we were obliged to carry both woolen and cotton garments, besides rubber ponchos to shield them from the rain by day, and to form the first substratum of our bed at night. Two suits were needed in our long travel afoot through the forest; one kept dry for the nightly bivouac, the other for day service. At the close of each day's journey we doffed every thread of our wearing apparel, and donned the reserved suit, for we were daily drenched either from the heavens above or by crossing swollen rivers and seas of mud. Then, too, as boots would not answer for such kind of travel, we must take alpargates, a native sandal made of the aloe fibre, and of these not a few, for a pair would hardly hold together two days. Two bales of lienzo, besides knives, fish-hooks, thread, beads, looking-glasses, and other trinkets, were also needed; for the Napo Indians must be paid in such currency. There lienzo, not gold and silver, is the cry. On this we made a small but lawful profit, paying in Quito eighteen cents per yard, and charging on the river twenty-five.
An extensive culinary apparatus, guns and ammunition, taxidermal and medicinal chests, physical instruments, including a photographic establishment, rope, macheta, axe, saw, nails, candles, matches, and a thousand et cætera, completed our outfit. Among the essential et cætera were generous passports and mandatory letters from the President of Ecuador and the Peruvian Chargé d'Affaires, addressed to all authorities on the Napo and the Marañon. They were obligingly procured for us by Señor Hurtado, the Chilian minister (then acting for the United States), through the influence of a communication from our own government, and were of great value to the expedition.[110]
[CHAPTER XII.]
Departure from Quito.— Itulcachi.— A Night in a Bread-tray.— Crossing the Cordillera.— Guamani.—Papallacta.— Domiciled at the Governor's.— An Indian Aristides.— Our Peon Train.— In the Wilderness.
Forty miles east-southeast of Quito, on the eastern slope of the Eastern Cordillera, and on the western edge of the great forest, is the Indian village of Papallacta. From the capital to this point there is a path just passable for horses; but thence to the Napo travelers must take to their feet. Through the intervention of the curate of Papallacta, who has great influence over his wild people, but who has wit enough to reside in Quito instead of his parish, we engaged the Indian governor to send over thirteen beasts and three peons to carry our party and baggage to Papallacta. Wednesday morning the quadrupeds were at the door of our hotel, five of them bestias de silla. These horses, judging by size, color, shape, and bony prominences, were of five different species. The saddles, likewise, differed from one another, and from any thing we had ever seen or desired to see. One of them was so narrow and deep none of us could get into it; so, filling up the cavity with blankets, we took turns in riding on the summit. By noon, October 30th, we had seen our Andean collections in the hands of arrieros bound for Guayaquil, whence they were to be shipped by way of Panama to Washington, and our baggage train for Napo headed toward the rising sun. So, mounting our jades, we defiled across the Grand Plaza and through the street of St. Augustine, and down the Carniceria to the Alameda, amid the vivas and adeos of our Quitian friends, who turned out to see the largest expedition that ever left the city for the wild Napo country since the days of Pizarro. Few there were who expected to hear of our safe arrival on the shores of the Atlantic.
Crossing the magnificent plain of Iñaquito, we reached in an hour the romantic village of Guápulo. Here is an elegant stone church dedicated to the Virgin of Guadaloupe, to which the faithful make an annual pilgrimage. Thence the road led us through the valley of the Guaillabamba (a tributary to the Esmeraldas), here and there blessed with signs of intelligent life—a mud hut, and little green fields of cane and alfalfa, and dotted with trees of wild cherry and myrtle, but having that air of sadness and death-like repose so inseparable from a Quitonian landscape. The greater part of this day's ride was over a rolling country so barren and dreary it was almost repulsive. What a pity the sun shines on so much useless territory!
Just before sunset we arrived at Itulcachi, a great cattle estate at the foot of the eastern chain of mountains. The hacienda had seen better days, and was poorly fitted to entertain man or beast. The major-domo, however, managed to make some small potato soup, and find us shelter for the night. In the room allotted us there were three immense kneading-troughs and two bread-boards to match, for a grist-mill and bakery were connected with the establishment. In default of beds, we made use of this furniture. Five wiser men have slept in better berths, but few have slept more soundly than we did in the bread-trays of Itulcachi.
The following day we advanced five miles to Tablon, an Indian hamlet on the mountain side. Here we waited over night for our cargo train, which had loitered on the road. This was the only spot in South America where we found milk to our stomachs' content; Itulcachi, with its herds of cattle, did not yield a drop. Our dormitory was a mud hovel, without an aperture for light or ventilation, and in this dark hole we all slept on a heap of barley. Splendid was the view westward from Tablon. Below us were the beautiful valleys of Chillo and Puembo, separated by the isolated mountain of Ilaló; around them, in an imposing semicircle, stood Cayambi, Imbabura, Pichincha, Corazon, Iliniza, Rumiñagui, Cotopaxi, Sincholagua, and Antisana. As the sun went down in his glory behind the western range, the rocky head of Pichincha stood out in bold relief, and cast a long shadow over the plain. At this halting-place we made the mortifying discovery that the bare-legged Indian who had trotted by our side as a guide and body-servant, and whom we had ordered about with all the indifference of a surly slaveholder, was none other than his Excellency Eugenio Mancheno, governor of Papallacta! After this we were more respectful.
The next morning, our baggage having come up, we pushed up the mountain through a grand ravine, and over metamorphic rocks standing on their edges with a wavy strike, till we reached a polylepis grove, 12,000 feet above the sea. We lunched under the wide-spreading branches of these gnarled and twisted trees, which reminded us of the patriarchal olives in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then, ascending over the monotonous paramo, we stood at the elevation of 15,000 feet on the narrow summit of the Guamani ridge. Some priest had been before us and planted a cross by the roadside, to guide and bless the traveler on his way.
Of the magnificent prospect eastward, over the beginning of the Amazonian Valley, which this lofty point commands, we have already spoken. There was a wild grandeur in the scene—mountain behind mountain, with deep intervening valleys, all covered with one thick, unbroken mass of foliage. A tiny brook, the child of everlasting snows still higher up, murmured at our feet, as if to tell us that we were on the Atlantic slope, and then dashed into the great forest, to lose itself in the mighty Amazon, and be buried with it in the same ocean grave. The trade-wind, too, came rushing by us fresh from that sea of commerce which laves the shores of two worlds. Guamani gave us also our finest view of Antisana, its snow-white dome rising out of a wilderness of mountains, and presenting on the north side a profile of the human face divine.
And now we rapidly descended by a steep, narrow path, and over paramo and bog, to a little tambo, where we had the luxury of sleeping on a bed of straw. Here we made the acquaintance of two Indians from the Napo, who were on the way to Quito with the mail—probably half a dozen letters. A strip of cloth around the loins, and a short cape just covering the shoulders, were all their habiliments. We noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation of General Putnam's famous ride—over rocks, too, made wondrously slippery by a pitiless rain, but which our unshod Indian horses descended with great dexterity, only one beast and his rider taking a somerset—thus we traveled two hours, reaching Papallacta at 11 A.M.
We put up at the governor's. This edifice, the best in town, had sides of upright poles stuccoed with mud, a thatched roof, and ground floor, on which, between three stones, a fire was built for cookery and comfort. Three or four earthen kettles, and as many calabashes and wooden spoons, were the sum total of kitchen utensils. A large flat stone, with another smaller one to rub over it, was the mill for grinding corn; and we were astonished to see how quickly our hostess reduced the grains to an impalpable meal. The only thing that looked like a bed was a stiff rawhide thrown over a series of round poles running lengthwise. This primitive couch, and likewise the whole house, the obsequious governor gave up to us, insisting upon sleeping with his wife and little ones outside, though the nights were cold and uncomfortable. Parents and children were of the earth, earthy—unwashed, uncombed, and disgustingly filthy. We found the governor one day taking lice for his lunch. Sitting behind his little boy, he picked out the little parasites with his nails, and crushed them between his teeth with a look of satisfaction. Eating lice is an old Indian custom, and universal in the Andes. In Inca times it was considered an infallible remedy against sore eyes. We have seen half a dozen women sitting on the ground in a row, picking out vermin from each other's heads. We thought the arrangement was a little unfair, for the first in the series had no lice to eat, and the animals were left to roam undisturbed in the capillary forest of the last.
Papallacta is a village of thirty dwellings, situated in a deep valley on the north slope of Antisana, nearly surrounded by an amphitheatre of sandstone and basaltic precipices. Here, too, is the terminus of the fourth great lava stream from the volcano; it is not mentioned by Humboldt. Papallacta is a thousand feet higher than Quito, yet vegetation is more tropical. Its name signifies "the potato country," but not a potato could we find here. Though Mancheno was governor, he was not really the greatest man in Papallacta. This was Carlos Caguatijo; he was the ruling man, for he could read, write, and speak Spanish, while the governor knew nothing but Quichua. Carlos, moreover, was a good man; he had an honest, Quaker-like air about him, and his face reminded us of George Washington's. In all his transactions we noticed no attempt to prevaricate or deceive; what he promised he performed to the letter. It was refreshing to meet one such upright soul in Ecuador, though we found him not of Caucasian blood, nor dwelling under the tiled roofs of the proud capital. The old man was the spiritual father of Papallacta, and, in the absence of the curate, officiated in the little church. With him, therefore, and not with our host the governor, we negotiated for peons to take us through the wilderness.
The journey from Papallacta to the Napo occupied us thirteen days, including four days of rest. It was performed on foot, for the "road" is a trail. But the untraveled reader can have little idea of a trail in a tropical forest: fording bridgeless rivers, wading through interminable bogs, fens, marshes, quagmires, and swamps, and cutting one's way through dense vegetation, must be done to be understood. Half the year there is no intercourse between Quito and its Oriental province, for the incessant heavy rains of summer swell every rivulet into a furious torrent, and the path is overgrown and rendered impassable even by an Indian. The only time for travel is between November and April, for then, though it rains nearly every day, the clouds drop down in showers, not floods. But even then the traveler must sometimes wait two or three weeks beside a swollen river in imminent danger of starving, and throughout the journey entertain the comforting prospect that his Indians may eat up his provisions to lighten their load, or suddenly desert him as they did Dr. Jameson. There are other routes across South America much more feasible than the one we chose; these will be described in Chapter XXIII. But they all yield in interest to this passage along the equatorial line, and especially in the line of history. Who has not heard of Gonzalo Pizarro and his fatal yet famous expedition into "the land of cinnamon?" How he was led farther and farther into the wilderness by the glittering illusions of an El Dorado,[111] till the faithless Orellana, deserting him, floated down the Napo and made the magnificent discovery of the mighty Amazon. Gonzalo, "who was held to be the best lancer that ever went to these countries—and all confess that he never showed his back to the enemy"—returned to Quito with a few survivors to tell a tale of almost unparalleled suffering. A century elapsed (1530-1637) before any one ascended from Pará to Quito by way of the Rio Napo; this was accomplished by Pedro Teixeira.
![[Napo Peon.]](#8543082027330898494_182.png.id-3677745182785099168.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
An Indian will carry three arrobas (seventy-five pounds) besides his own provisions, his provisions for the journey consisting of about twenty-five pounds of roasted corn and barley-meal. The trunk or bundle is bound to his back by withes, which pass across the forehead and chest; a poncho or a handful of leaves protects the bare back from chafing. All our luggage (amounting to nearly fifteen hundred pounds) was divided and packed to suit this method of transportation, so that we required twenty Indians. So many, however, of the right kind—for they must be athletic young men to endure the fatigues of such a journey—could not be furnished by the little village of Papallacta, so we were obliged to wait a few days till more Indians could be summoned from a neighboring town. When these arrived, the little world of Papallacta, men, women, and children, assembled in front of the governor's house, while Don Carlos sat by our side on a raised seat by the doorway. A long parley ensued, resulting in this: that we should pay one hundred Ecuadorian dollars for the transfer of our baggage to Archidona; while Carlos solemnly promised for the young men that they should start the next morning, that they should arrive at Archidona within a stipulated time, and that they should not depend upon us for an ounce of food. The powerful influence of the curate, which we had secured, and the proclamation from the president, which Carlos read aloud in the ears of all the people, together with the authoritative charge of Carlos himself, had the desired effect; not a transportation company in the United States ever kept its engagement more faithfully than did these twenty peons—and this, too, though we paid them in advance, according to the custom of the country. Upon a blanket spread at our feet the money was counted out, and Carlos slowly distributed it with a grave and reverend air, to every Indian five dollars.[112]
Tuesday morning, November 5th, the peons promptly shouldered their burdens, and we, shod with alpargates, and with Alpine staff in hand (more needed here than in Switzerland), followed after, leaving the governor to sleep inside his mansion, and to eat his lice unmolested. On a little grassy knoll just outside the town our train halted for a moment—the Indians to take their fill of chicha, and bid their friends good-by, and we to call the roll and take an inventory. Our leader was Isiro, a bright, intelligent, finely-featured, stalwart Indian. He could speak Spanish, and his comrades acknowledged his superiority with marked deference. Ten women and children followed us for two days, to relieve the men of their burdens. Their assistance was not needed in the latter part of the journey, for our keen appetites rapidly lightened the provision cans. Starting again, we plunged at once into the forest, taking a northeasterly course along the left bank of a tributary to the Coca. The ups and downs of this day's travel of twelve miles were foreshadowings of what might come in our "views afoot" in South America. We encamped at a spot the Indians called Maspa. Herndon says: "The (Peruvian) Indians take no account of time or distance; they stop when they get tired, and arrive when God pleases."[113] But our Napo companions measured distance by hours quite accurately, and they always traveled as far as we were willing to follow. In ten minutes they built us a booth for the night; driving two crotchets into the ground, they joined them with a ridge-pole, against which they inclined a number of sticks for rafters. These they covered with palm-leaves, so adroitly put together that our roof was generally rain-proof. After ablution and an entire change of garments, we built a fire, using for fuel a green tree called sindicaspi (meaning the wood that burns), a special provision in these damp forests where every thing is dripping with moisture. The fall of a full-grown tree under the strokes of a Yankee axe was a marvel in the eyes of our Indians. Our second day's journey was far more difficult than the first, the path winding up steep mountains and down into grand ravines, for we were crossing the outlying spurs of the Eastern Cordillera. Every where the track was slippery with mud, and often we sank two feet into the mire. How devoutly we did wish that the Ecuadorian Congress was compelled to travel this horrid road once a year! At 10 o'clock we reached a lone habitation called Guila, where wooden bowls are made for the Quito market. Here we procured a fresh Indian to take the place of one of our peons who had given out under his burden. We advanced this day sixteen miles in ten hours, sleeping under an old bamboo hut beside a babbling brook bearing the euphonious name of Pachamama.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Baeza.— The Forest.— Crossing the Cosanga.— Curi-urcu.— Archidona.— Appearance, Customs, and Belief of the Natives.— Napo and Napo River.
Eight hours' hard travel from Pachamama brought us to Baeza. This "Antigua Ciudad," as Villavicencio calls it, was founded in 1552 by Don Egilio Ramirez Dávalos, and named after the quite different spot where Scipio the Younger routed Asdrubal a thousand years before. It consists of two habitations, the residence of two families of Tumbaco Indians, situated in a clearing of the forest on the summit of a high ridge running along the right bank of the Coca. This point, about one hundred miles east of Quito, is important in the little traffic of the Oriente. All Indian trains from the capital to the province pass through Baeza, where the trail divides; one branch passing on easterly to San José, and thence down through Abila and Loreto to Santa Rosa; the other leading to the Napo through Archidona. Here we rested one day, taking possession of one half of the larger hut—a mere stockade with a palm-leaf roof, without chairs, chimney, or fire-place, except any place on the floor. We swung our hammocks, while our Indians stretched themselves on the ground beneath us. The island of Juan Fernandez is not a more isolated spot than Baeza. A dense forest, impenetrable save by the trails, stretches away on every side to the Andes and to the Atlantic, and northerly and southerly along the slope of the entire mountain chain. The forest is such an entangled mass of the living and the fallen, it is difficult to say which is the predominant spirit—life or death. It is the cemetery, as well as the birthplace, of a world of vegetation. The trees are more lofty than on the Lower Amazon, and straight as an arrow, but we saw none of remarkable size. A perpetual mist seems to hang on the branches, and the dense foliage forms dark, lofty vaults, which the sunlight never enters. The soil and air are always cool, and never dry. Every thing is penetrated with dampness. All our watches stopped, and remained immovable till we reached Pará. It is this constant and excessive humidity which renders it so difficult to transport provisions or prepare an herbarium. The pending branches of moss are so saturated with moisture that sometimes the branches are broken off to the peril of the passing traveler. Yet the climate is healthy. The stillness and gloom are almost painful; the firing of a gun wakes a dull echo, and any unlooked-for noise is startling. Scarce a bird or a flower is to be seen in these sombre shades. Nearly the only signs of animal life visible thus far were insects, mostly butterflies, fire-flies, and beetles. The only quadruped seen on our journey to the Napo was a long-tailed marten caught by the Indians. The silence is almost perfect; its chief interruption is the crashing fall of some old patriarch of the forest, overcome by the embrace of loving parasites that twine themselves about the trunk or sit upon the branches. The most striking singularity in these tropical woods is the host of lianas or air-roots of epiphytous plants, which hang down from the lofty boughs, straight as plumb-lines, some singly, others in clusters; some reaching half way to the ground, others touching it and striking their rootlets into the earth. We found lianas over one hundred feet long. Sometimes a toppling tree is caught in the graceful arms of looping sipôs, and held for years by this natural cable. It is these dead trunks, standing like skeletons, which give a character of solemnity to these primeval woods. The wildest disorder is seen along the mountain torrents, where the trees, prostrated by the undermining current, lie mingled with huge stones brought down by the force of the water. In many places the crowns of stately monarchs standing on the bank interlock and form a sylvan arch over the river.
We left Baeza by the southerly trail for Archidona. From Papallacta we had traveled east, or parallel to the streams which flow down from the mountains. We were now to cross them (and their name is legion), as also the intervening ridges; so that our previous journey was nothing to that which followed. Sometimes we were climbing up an almost vertical ascent, then descending into a deep, dark ravine, to ford a furious river; while on the lowlands the path seemed lost in a jungle of bamboos, till our Indian "bushwhackers" opened a passage with their machetas, and we crept under a low arcade of foliage. This day we enjoyed something unusual in our forest trail—a distant view. The path brought us to the verge of a mountain, whence we could look down on the savage valley of the Cosanga and upward to the dazzling dome of Antisana; it was our farewell view of that glorious volcano. At the distance of twelve miles from Baeza we reached the banks of the Rio Cosanga, camping at a spot called Chiniplaya. This is the river so much dreaded by Indians and whites traversing the Napo wilderness. It is fearfully rapid—a very Tigris from its source to its junction with the Coca. The large, smooth boulders strewn along its bed show its power. Here, sixty miles from its origin in the glaciers of Antisana, it is seventy-five feet wide, but in the wet season it is one hundred yards. The day following we threaded our difficult way, a via dolorosa, fifteen miles up the left bank of the Cosanga, where we crossed and camped on the opposite side. The Indians had thrown a log over the deepest part of the river, and the rest we forded without much danger; but that very night the rain raised the river to such a magnitude that the little bridge was carried off. Had we been one day later, we might have waited a week on the other side of the impassable gulf. Between this point where we forded and Chiniplaya, fifteen miles below, the barometer indicated a fall of five hundred feet. The roar of the rushing waters is like that of the sea. In the beautiful language of Darwin (Journal, p. 316): "The sound spoke eloquently to the geologist; the thousands and thousands of stones, which, striking against each other, made the one dull, uniform sound, were all hurrying in one direction. It was like thinking on time, when the minute that now glides past is irrecoverable. So was it with these stones. The ocean is their eternity, and each note of that wild music told of one more step toward their destiny."
On account of the heavy rain and the sickness of a peon, whom finally we were obliged to leave behind, we rested one day; but on the morrow we traveled fourteen miles, crossing the lofty Guacamayo ridge,[114] fording at much risk the deep Cochachimbamba, and camping at a spot (the Indians have a name for almost any locality in the forest) called Guayusapugaru. The next day we must have advanced twenty miles, besides crossing the furious Hondachi. This river was very much swollen by the rains, and it was only by the aid of a rope that we made the passage. One stout Indian was carried down stream, but soon recovered himself.
As we had lowered our altitude since leaving Papallacta seven thousand feet, the climate was much warmer, and vegetation more prolific. Nowhere else between the Andes and the Atlantic did we notice such a majestic forest. The tree-ferns, ennobled by the tropical sun and soil, have a palm-like appearance, but with rougher stems and a usual height of fifty feet. Plants akin to our "scouring rush" rise twenty-five feet. We saw to-day the "water tree," or huadhuas of the natives, a kind of bamboo, which sometimes yields between the joints two quarts of clear, taste-less water. Late in the evening we reached an old rancho called Curi-urcu ("the mountain of gold"); but we had traveled so far ahead of our cargo-train we did not see it again till the next morning. We were obliged, therefore, to sleep on the ground in our wet clothes, and put up with hard commons—half parched corn, which our Indian guides gave us, and unleavened cakes or flour-paste baked on the coals. Thence, after a short day's journey of ten miles, we arrived at Archidona, by a path, however, that was slippery with a soft yellow clay. We were a sorry-looking company, soaked by incessant rains, exhausted by perspiration, plastered with mud, tattered, and torn; but we were kindly met by the Jesuit bishop, who took us to his own habitation, where one Indian washed our feet, and another prepared a most refreshing drink of guayusa tea. We then took up our quarters at the Government House, opposite the bishop's, sojourning several days on account of our swollen feet, and also on account of a swollen river which ran between us and the Napo. Here we made a valuable collection of birds, lizards, fishes, and butterflies.
Archidona is situated in a beautiful plain on the high northern bank of the Misagualli, two thousand feet above the Atlantic. The site is a cleared spot in the heart of an almost boundless forest; and it was a relief, not easily conceived, to emerge from beneath the dense leafy canopy into this open space and look up to the sky and to the snowy Andes. The climate is uniform and delightful, the mean annual temperature being seventy-seven degrees. Sand-flies, however, resembling our "punkies," abound; and the natives are constantly slapping their naked sides, eating the little pests as the Papallactans do their lice.[115] Archidona is the largest village in the Napo country, containing about five hundred souls. The houses are of split bamboo and palm-thatch, often hid in a plantation of yuca and plantain. The central and most important structure is the little church; its rude belfry, portico, chancel, images, and other attempts at ornament remind us of the fitting words of Mrs. Agassiz, that "there is something touching in the idea that these poor, uneducated people of the forest have cared to build themselves a temple with their own hands, lavishing upon it such ideas of beauty and taste as they have, and bringing at least their best to their humble altar." Founded by Dávalos in 1560, Archidona has been a missionary station for two hundred years. The people are child-like and docile, but the bishop confessed there was no intellectual advance. Every morning and evening, at the tinkling of a little bell, all Archidona assembled in the open porch, where the bishop taught them to sing and pray. It was a novel sight to see these children of the forest coming out of the woods on all sides and running up to the temple—for these natives, whenever they move, almost invariably go on a run. The men are tall and slim and of a dark red color, and their legs are bent backward at the knees. The governor was the only portly individual we saw. The women are short, with high shoulders, and are very timid; they seldom stand erect, and with the knees bent forward they run sneakingly to church. Their eyes have a characteristic, soft, drooping look. They carry their babes generally on the hip; not on the back, as in Quito. The men are hatless, shirtless, and shoeless; their only garments are short drawers, about six inches long, and little ponchos, both of lienzo, dyed a dark purple with achote—the red seeds of the bixa, which the cooks of Quito use to color their soups. All paint their bodies with the same pigment. The women wear a frock reaching from the waist to the knees; it is nothing more than a yard or two of lienzo wound around the body. The Archidonians are the most Christianized of all the Napo Indians, but they can not be called religious. Their rites (they can hardly be said to have a creed) are the a, b, c, of Romanism, mingled with some strange notions—the relics of a lost paganism. They are very superstitious, and believe, as before remarked, in the transmigration of souls. Maniacs they think are possessed by an evil demon, and therefore are treated with great cruelty. Negroes (of whom a few specimens have come up the Napo from Brazil) are held to be under the ban of the Almighty, and their color is ascribed to the singeing which they got in the flames of hell. They do not believe in disease; but, like the Mundurucus on the Tapajos, say that death is always caused by the sorceries of an enemy. They usually bury in the church or in the tambo of the deceased. Celibacy and polygamy, homicide and suicide, are rare.
The only sign of industry in Archidona is the manufacture of pita thread from the aloe. It is exported to Quito on human backs. The inhabitants also collect copal at the headwaters of the Hondachi, and use it for illumination. It can be bought in Archidona for three or four cents a pound. The gum exudes from a lofty leguminous tree having an oak-like bark. It resembles the animé of Madagascar rather than the copal of India, which flows from an entirely different tree. Guayusa, or "Napo tea," is another and celebrated production of Archidona. It is the large leaf of a tall shrub growing wild. An infusion of guayusa, like the maté of Paraguay (which belongs to the same genus Ilex), is so refreshing it supplies for a long time the place of food. The Indians will go to Quito on this beverage alone, its virtues being similar to those of coca, on the strength of which the posts of the Incas used to travel incredible distances. It is by no means, however, such a stimulant. It is a singular fact, observes Dr. Jameson, that tea, coffee, cacao, maté, and guayusa contain the same alkaloid caffeine. The last, however, contains only one fifteenth as much of the active principle as tea, and no volatile oil. Herndon found guayusa on the Ucayali.
At Archidona we took a new set of peons for Napo, as the Papallactans do not travel farther. The distance is sixteen miles, and the path is comparatively good, though it crosses two rivers, the Misagualli and Tena. On this journey we found the only serpent seen since leaving Quito. This solitary specimen was sluggish and harmless, but exceedingly beautiful. It was the Amphisbœna fuliginosa, or "slow-worm." It lives in the chambers of the Saüba ants. We met a procession of these ants, each carrying a circular piece of a leaf vertically over its head. These insects are peculiar to tropical America, and are much dreaded in Brazil, where they soon despoil valuable trees of their foliage. They cut the leaves with their scissor-like jaws, and use them to thatch the domes at the entrance of their subterranean dwellings.
At Napo we took possession of the governor's house. Each village in the Napo province was obliged to build an edifice of split bamboo for that dignitary; and, as he no longer exists, they are left unoccupied. They generally stand on the highest and best site in the town, and are a god-send to travelers. Immediately on our arrival, the Indian governor and his staff of justices called to see what we wanted, and during our stay supplied us with chickens, eggs, plantains, yucas, and fuel. His excellency would always come, silver-headed cane in hand, though the justices had only six eggs or a single fowl to bring us. The alcalde also paid us his respects. He is an old blanco (as the whites are called), doing a little traffic in gold dust, lienzo, and pita, but is the highest representative of Ecuador in the Napo country. Here, too, we met, to our great delight, Mr. George Edwards, a native of Connecticut, who has settled himself, probably for life, in the depths of this wilderness. He was equally rejoiced to see the face and hear the speech of a countryman. His industry and upright character have won for him the respect and good-will of the Indians, and he is favorably known in Quito. The government has given him a tract of land on the Yusupino, two miles west of Napo village. Here he is cultivating vanilla, of which he has now three thousand plants, and also his patience, for six years elapse after transplanting before a pod appears. He has been so long in the country (thirteen years) his English would now and then run off into Spanish or Quichua.
Napo is prettily situated on the left bank of the Rio Napo, a dense forest inclosing it on every side. The maximum number of inhabitants is eighty families; but many of these are in town only in festival seasons. It was well for us that we reached the Napo during the feasts; otherwise we might not have found men enough to man our canoes down the river. There are three or four blancos, petty merchants, who follow the old Spanish practice of compulsory sales, forcing the Indians to take lienzo, knives, beads, etc., at exorbitant prices, and making them pay in gold dust and pita. This kind of commerce is known under the name of repartos. It is hard to find an Indian whose gold or whose labor is not claimed by the blancos. The present and possible productions of this region are: bananas, plantains, yucas,[116] yams, sweet potatoes, rice, beans, corn, lemons, oranges, chirimoyas, anonas (a similar fruit to the preceding), pine-apples, palm cabbages, guavas, guayavas, castor-oil beans, coffee, cacao, cinnamon, India-rubber, vanilla (two kinds),[117] chonta-palm nuts, sarsaparilla, contrayerva (a mint), tobacco (of superior quality), and guayusa; of woods, balsam, red wood, Brazil wood, palo de cruz, palo de sangre, ramo caspi, quilla caspi, guayacan (or "holy wood," being much used for images), ivory palm, a kind of ebony, cedar, and aguana (the last two used for making canoes); of dyewoods, sarne (dark red), tinta (blue), terriri, and quito (black); of gums, estoraque (a balsam) and copal, besides a black beeswax, the production of a small (Trigona) bee, that builds its comb in the ground; of manufactures, pita, hammocks, twine, calabashes, aguardiente (from the plantain), chicha (from the yuca),[118] sugar and molasses (from the cane, which grows luxuriantly), and manati-lard; of minerals, gold dust. The gold, in minute spangles, is washed down by the rivers at flood time, chiefly from the Llanganati Mountains. The articles desired in exchange are lienzo, thread, needles, axes, hoes, knives, fish-hooks, rings, medals, crosses, beads, mirrors, salt, and poison. Quito nearly monopolizes the trade; though a few canoes go down the Napo to the Marañon after salt and poison. The salt comes from near Chasuta, on the Huallaga;[119] the urari from the Ticuna Indians. It takes about twenty days to paddle down to the Marañon, and three months to pole up. The Napo is navigable for a flat-bottomed steamer as far as Santa Rosa,[120] and it is a wonder that Anglo-Saxon enterprise has not put one upon these waters. The profits would be great, as soon as commercial relations with the various tribes were established.[121] Four yards of coarse cotton cloth, for example, will exchange for one hundred pounds of sarsaparilla. Urari is sold at Napo for its weight in silver. By a decree of the Ecuadorian Congress, there will be no duty on foreign goods entering the Napo for twenty years. The Napo region, under proper cultivation, would yield the most valuable productions of either hemisphere in profusion. But agriculture is unknown; there is no word for plow. The natives spend most of their time in idleness, or feasting and hunting. Their weapons are blow-guns and wooden spears; our guns they call by a word which signifies "thunder and lightning." Laying up for the future or for commerce is foreign to their ideas. The houses are all built of bamboo tied together with lianas, and shingled with leaves of the sunipanga palm. The Indians are peaceful, good-natured, and idle. They seldom steal any thing but food. Their only stimulants are chicha, guayusa, and tobacco. This last they roll up in plantain leaves and smoke, or snuff an infusion of it through the nose from the upper bill of a toucan. "The Peruvians (says Prescott, quoting Garcilasso) differ from every other Indian nation to whom tobacco was known by using it only for medicinal purposes in the form of snuff." There is no bread on the Napo; the nearest approach to flour is yuca starch. There are no clocks or watches; time is measured by the position of the sun. The mean temperature at Napo village is about one degree warmer than that of Archidona. Its altitude above the sea is 1450 feet. The nights are cool, and there are no musquitoes; but sand-flies are innumerable. Jiggers also have been seen. There are no well-defined wet and dry seasons; but the most rain falls in May, June, and July. The lightning, Edwards informed us, seldom strikes. Dysentery, fevers, and rheumatism are the prevailing diseases; and we saw one case of goître. But the climate is considered salubrious. Few twins are born; and there are fewer children than in Archidona—a difference ascribed by some to the exposure of the Napo people in gold washing; by others to the greater quantity of guayusa drunk by the Archidonians.
The Napo is the largest river in the republic. From its source in the oriental defiles of Cotopaxi and Sincholagua to its embouchure at the Marañon, its length is not far from eight hundred miles, or about twice that of the Susquehanna.[122] From Napo village to the mouth of the river our barometer showed a fall of a thousand feet. At Napo the current is six miles an hour; between Napo and Santa Rosa there are rapids; and between Santa Rosa and the Marañon the rate is not less than four miles an hour. At Napo the breadth is about forty yards; at Coca the main channel is fifteen hundred feet wide; and at Camindo it is a full Spanish mile. Below Coca the river throws out numerous canals, which, isolating portions of the forest-clad lowlands, create numerous picturesque islands. Around and between them the river winds, usually making one bend in every league. The tall trees covering them are bound together by creeping plants into a thick jungle, the home of capybaras and the lair of the jaguar. The islands, entirely alluvial, are periodically flooded, and undergo a constant round of decay and renovation. Indeed, the whole river annually changes its channel, so that navigation is somewhat difficult. The Indians, on coming to a fork, were frequently at a loss to know which was the main channel. Then, too, the river is full of snags and plaias, or low, shelving sand-banks, rising just above the water-level—the resort of turtles during the egg season. It was interesting to trace the bed of the river as we floated down; on the rapid slope of the Cordilleras rushing over or rolling along huge boulders, which farther on were rapidly reduced in size, till, in time, boulders were broken into pebbles, pebbles turned into sand, and sand reduced to impalpable mud.[123] The plaias are not auriferous. Below Coca there is a wilderness of lagunes, all connected with the river, the undisturbed retreat of innumerable water-fowl. The only spot on the Napo where the underlying rocks are exposed is near Napo village. There it is a dark slate, gently dipping east. Farther west, in fact, throughout this side of the Andes, the prevailing rock is mica-schist. But the entire Napo country is covered with an alluvial bed, on the average ten feet thick.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
Afloat on the Napo.— Down the Rapids.— Santa Rosa and its mulish Alcalde.— Pratt on Discipline.— Forest Music.—Coca.— Our Craft and Crew.— Storm on the Napo.
We embarked November 20th on our voyage down the river. It is no easy matter to hire or cajole the Indians for any service. Out of feast-time they are out of town, and during the festival they are loth to leave, or are so full of chicha they do not know what they want. We first woke up the indolent alcalde by showing him the President's order, and then used him to entice or to compel (we know not his motive power) eight Indians, including the governor, to take us to Santa Rosa. We paid them about twenty-four yards of lienzo, the usual currency here. They furnished three canoes, two for baggage and one covered with a palm-leaf awning for ourselves. The canoes were of red cedar, and flat-bottomed; the paddles had oval blades, to which short, quick strokes were given perpendicularly to the water entering and leaving. But there was little need of paddling on this trip.
The Napo starts off in furious haste, for the fall between Napo village and Santa Rosa, a distance of eighty miles, is three hundred and fifty feet. We were about seven hours in the voyage down, and it takes seven days to pole back. The passage of the rapids is dangerous to all but an Indian. As Wallace says of a spot on the Rio Negro, you are bewildered by the conflicting motions of the water. Whirling and boiling eddies burst as if from some subaqueous explosion; down currents are on one side of the canoe, and an up current on the other; now a cross stream at the bows and a diagonal one at the stern, with a foaming Scylla on your right and a whirling Charybdis on the left. But our nervousness gave way to admiration as our popero, or pilot, the sedate governor, gave the canoe a sheer with the swoop of his long paddle, turning it gracefully around the corner of a rock against which it seemed we must be dashed, and we felt like joining in the wild scream of the Indians as our little craft shot like an arrow past the danger and down the rapids, and danced on the waters below.
In four hours we were abreast the little village of Aguano; on the opposite bank we could see the tambos of the gold washers. At 5 P.M. we reached the deserted site of Old Santa Rosa, the village having been removed a few years ago on account of its unhealthy location. It is now overgrown with sour orange and calabash trees, the latter bearing large fruit shells so useful to the Indians in making pilches or cups. In pitch darkness and in a drizzling rain we arrived at New Santa Rosa, and swung our hammocks in the Government House.
Santa Rosa, once the prosperous capital of the Provincia del Oriente, now contains about two hundred men, women, and children. The town is pleasantly situated on the left bank of the river, about fifteen feet above the water level. A little bamboo church, open only when the missionary from Archidona makes his annual visit, stood near our quarters.
[Papaya-tree.] The Indians were keeping one of their seven feasts in a hut near by, and their drumming was the last thing we heard as we turned into our hammocks, and the first in the morning. The alcalde, Pablo Sandoval, is the only white inhabitant, and he is an Indian in every respect save speech and color. His habitation is one of the largest structures on the Napo; the posts are of chonta-palm, the sides and roof of the usual material—split bamboo and palm leaves. It is embowered in a magnificent grove of plantains and papayas. In the spacious vestibule is a bench, on which the Indian governor and his staff seat themselves every morning to confer with the alcalde. In one corner stands a table (the only one we remember seeing on the Napo); on the opposite side are heaped up jars, pots, kettles, hunting and fishing implements, paddles, bows and arrows. Between the posts swing two chambiri hammocks. From Santa Rosa to Pará the hammock answers for chair, sofa, tête-à-tête, and bed. When a stranger enters, he is invited to sit in a hammock; and at Santa Rosa we were always presented with a cup of guayusa; in Brazil with a cup of coffee. Sandoval wore nothing but shirt and pantaloons; the dignity of the barefooted functionary was confined to his Spanish blood. He had lived long among the Zaparos; and from him, his daughter, and a Zaparo servant, we obtained much valuable information respecting that wild and little-known tribe.
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At Santa Rosa we procured Indians and canoes for the Marañon. This was not easily done. The Indians seemed reluctant to quit their feasts and go on such a long voyage, and the alcalde was unwilling they should go, and manufactured a host of lies and excuses. He declared there was but one large canoe in town, and that we must send to Suno for another, and for men to man it. There were indeed few Indians in Santa Rosa, for while we were disputing a largo number went off with shoutings down the river, to spend weeks in the forest hunting monkeys.[124] It was a stirring sight to see these untamed red men in the depths of the Napo wilderness starting on a monkey crusade; but it was still more stirring to think of paddling our own canoe down to Brazil. After some time lost in word-fighting, we tried the virtues of authority. We presented the president's order, which commanded all civil and military powers on the Napo to aid, and not to hinder, the expedition; then we put into his hand an official letter from the alcalde of Napo (to whom Pablo was subordinate), which, with a flourish of dignified Spanish, threatened Santa Rosa with the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah if any impediment was placed in our way.
To all this Edwards, who had kindly accompanied us down the river thus far, added, with frightful gestures, that he purposed to report him to the Quito government. After this bombardment Sandoval was another man, and the two canoes and four Indians we wanted were forthcoming. We had to wait, however, two days for the Indians to prepare their chicha for the journey and to cover the canoes with palm awnings. The price of a canoe for the Marañon is twenty-five varas of lienzo, and the same for each Indian. Unfortunately we had only fifty varas left; but, through the influence of the now good-natured alcalde, we induced the Indians to take the balance in coin. After many delays, we put our baggage into one canoe, and ourselves into the other, and pushed off into the rapid current of the Napo. We had three styles of valediction on leaving. Our Indian quartet, after several last drinks of chicha, bade their friends farewell by clasping hands, one kissing the joined hands, and then the other. Sandoval muttered adios in reply to ours, meaning, no doubt, good riddance, while we shouted a hearty good-bye to Edwards as he pushed his way up stream to continue his lonely but chosen Indian life on the banks of the Yusupino.
The Napo at Santa Rosa runs at least five miles an hour, and we were soon picking our way—now drifting, now paddling—through a labyrinth of islands and snags. The Indians, so accustomed to brutal violence from the hands of the whites, had begged of us, before our departure, that we would not beat them. But shortly after we left, one of them, who was literally filled with chicha, dropped his paddle and tumbled into a heap at the bottom of the canoe, dead drunk. Pratt, our gigantic Mississippi boatman, whom we had engaged at Quito as captain and cook down the river, and who was an awful Goliath in the eyes of the red-skins, seized the fellow and gave him a terrible shaking, the like of which was never seen or heard of in all Napo. At once the liquor left the muddled brain of the astonished culprit, and, taking his paddle, he became from that hour the best of the crew. This was the only case of discipline on the voyage. Always obsequious, they obeyed us with fear and trembling. None of them could speak Spanish, so we had provided ourselves with a vocabulary of Quichua. But some English words, like the imperative paddle! were more effective than the tongue of the Incas. Indeed, when we mixed up our Quichua with a little Anglo-Saxon, they evidently thought the latter was a terrible anathema, for they sprang to their places without delay.
In seven hours we arrived at Suno, a collection of half a dozen palm booths, five feet high, the miserable owners of which do a little fishing and gold-washing. They gave us possession of their largest hut, in which they had been roasting a sea-cow, and the stench was intolerable. Nevertheless, one of our number bravely threw down his blanket within, and went to sleep; two swung their hammocks between the trees, and the rest slept in the canoe. Here, for the first time since leaving Guayaquil, we were tormented by musquitoes. Bats were also quite numerous, but none of them were blood-thirsty; and we may add that nowhere in South America were we troubled by those diabolical imps of imaginative travelers, the leaf-nosed species. So far as our experience goes, we can say, with Bates, that the vampire, so common on the Amazon, is the most harmless of all bats. It has, however, a most hideous physiognomy. A full-grown specimen will measure twenty-eight inches in expanse of wing. Bates found two species on the Amazon—one black, the other of a ruddy line, and both fruit-eaters.
The nocturnal music of these forests is made by crickets and tree-toads. The voice of the latter sounds like the cracking of wood. Occasionally frogs, owls, and goat-suckers croak, hoot, and wail. Between midnight and 3 a.m. almost perfect silence reigns. At early dawn the animal creation awakes with a scream. Pre-eminent are the discordant cries of monkeys and macaws. As the sun rises higher, one musician after another seeks the forest shade, and the morning concert ends at noon. In the heat of the day there is an all-pervading rustling sound, caused by the fluttering of myriad insects and the gliding of lizards and snakes. At sunset parrots and monkeys resume their chatter for a season, and then give way to the noiseless flight of innumerable bats chasing the hawk-moth and beetle. There is scarcely a sound in a tropical forest which is joyous and cheering. The birds are usually silent; those that have voices utter a plaintive song, or hoarse, shrill cry. Our door-yards are far more melodious on a May morning. The most common birds on the Napo are macaws, parrots, toucans, and ciganas. The parrots, like the majority in South America, are of the green type. The toucan, peculiar to the New World, and distinguished by its enormous bill, is a quarrelsome, imperious bird. It is clumsy in flight, but nimble in leaping from limb to limb. It hops on the ground like a robin, and makes a shrill yelping—pia-po-o-co. Ecuadorians call it the predicador, or preacher, because it wags its head like a priest, and seems to say, "God gave it you." The feathers of the breast are of most brilliant yellow, orange, and rose colors, and the robes of the royal dames of Europe in the sixteenth century were trimmed with them. The cigana or "gypsy" (in Peru called "chansu") resembles a pheasant. The flesh has a musky odor, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that they exist in such numbers throughout the country. The Indians never eat them. In no country as in the Amazonian Valley is there such a variety of insects; nowhere do we find species of larger size or greater beauty. It is the richest locality for butterflies; Bates found twelve hundred species in Brazil alone, or three times as many as in all Europe. The splendid metallic-blue, and the yellow and transparent-winged, are very abundant on the Napo; some rise high in the air; others, living in societies, look like fluttering clouds. Moths are comparatively rare. The most conspicuous beetle on the river is a magnificent green species (Chrysophora chrysochlora), always found arboreal, like the majority of tropical coleopters; they look like emerald gems clinging to the branches. There are two kinds of bees, the black and yellow, which the Napos name respectively cushillo mishke (monkey honey) and sara mishke (corn honey). It is singular these Indians have no term for bees, but call them honey, and distinguish them by their color. The black species is said to make the most honey, and the yellow the best. The quadrupeds of the Oriente are few and far between in the dry season. Not a sloth nor armadillo did we see. But when the rains descend the wilderness is a menagerie of tigers and tapirs, pumas and bears, while a host of reptiles, led by the gigantic boa, creep forth from their hiding-places. The most ferocious carnivores are found in the mountains, and the most venomous serpents haunt the lowlands. Darwin says that we ought not to expect any closer similarity between the organic beings on the opposite sides of the Andes than on the opposite shores of the ocean. We will remark that we obtained a peccari, a number of birds not accustomed to high flights, and five reptilian species, on the Pacific slope, identical with species found on the Napo.
Breakfasting on fried yucas, roasted plantains, fish, and guayusa, we set sail, arriving at Coca at 2 p.m. This little village, the last we shall see till we come within sight of the Amazon, is beautifully located on the right bank, twenty-five feet above the river, and opposite the confluence of the Rio Coca. Though founded twenty years ago, it contains only five or six bamboo huts, a government-house, church, alcalde's residence, and a trapiche for the manufacture of aguardiente and sirup from the cane.[125] The alcalde was a worthless blanco, who spent most of his time swinging in a hammock slung between the posts of his veranda, and playing with a tame parrot when not drunk or asleep. This spot is memorable in history. Pizarro having reached it from Quito by way of Baeza and the Coca, halted and built a raft or canoe (Prescott says a brig), in which Orellana was sent down the river to reconnoitre, but who never returned. Up to this point the Napo has an easterly course; but after receiving the Coca, it turns to the southeast. We remained here two days to construct a more comfortable craft for our voyage to the Amazon, a distance of at least five hundred miles. The canoe is the only means of navigation known to the Indians. But the idea of spending fifteen days cooped, cribbed, and cramped in a narrow canoe, exposed to a tropical sun and furious rains, was intolerable.
![[Trapiche.]](#8543082027330898494_206.png.id-5510348568702318047.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Our Santa Rosa canoes were about thirty feet long. These were placed about five feet apart and parallel, and then firmly secured by bamboo joists. Over these we spread a flooring of split bamboo, and planted four stout chonta sticks to support a palm-thatched roof. A rudder (a novel idea to our red-skinned companions), and a box of sand in the stern of one of the boats for a fire-place, completed our rig. The alcalde, with a hiccough, declared we would be forever going down the river in such a huge craft, and the Indians smiled ominously. But when our gallant ship left Coca obediently to the helm, and at the rate of six miles an hour when paddles and current worked together, they shouted "bueno!" Our trunks and provision-cans were arranged along the two sides of the platform, so that we had abundance of from for exercise by day and for sleeping under musquito-tents at night. A little canoe, which we bought of the alcalde, floated alongside for a tender, and was very serviceable in hunting, gathering fuel, etc. In the "forecastle"—the bows of the large canoes which projected beyond our cabin—sat three Indians to paddle. The fourth, who was the governor of Santa Rosa, we honored with the post of steersman; and he was always to be seen on the poop behind the kitchen, standing bolt upright, on the alert and on the lookout. On approaching any human habitation, the Indians blew horns to indicate that they came as friends. These horns must have come from Brazil, as there are no bovines on the Napo. Whenever they enter an unknown lagune they blow their horns also to charm the yacu-mama, or mother-of-waters, as they call the imaginary serpent.
At different points down the river they deposited pots of chicha for use on their return. The mass breeds worms so rapidly, however, as Edwards informed us, that after the lapse of a month or two it is a jumble of yuca scraps and writhing articulates. But the owner of the heap coolly separates the animal from the vegetable, adds a little water, and drinks his chicha without ceremony. During leisure hours the Indians busied themselves plaiting palm leaves into ornaments for their arms and heads. Not a note did they whistle or sing. Yet they were always in good humor, and during the whole voyage we did not see the slightest approach to a quarrel. At no time did we have the least fear of treachery or violence.
The Napos are not savages. Their goodness, however, as Bates says of the Cucáma tribe, consists more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones. Of an apathetic temperament and dull imagination, we could not stir them into admiration or enthusiasm by any scientific wonder; the utmost manifestation of surprise was a cluck with the tongue. [126] Upon presenting the governor with a vest, he immediately cut off the buttons, and, dividing the cloth into four parts, shared it with his fellows.[127] When it rained they invariably took off their ponchos, but in all our intercourse with these wild men we never noticed the slightest breach of modesty. They strictly maintained a decent arrangement of such apparel as they possessed. A canoe containing a young Indian, his bride, and our governor's wife and babe, accompanied us down to the Marañon. They were going after a load of salt for Sandoval. The girl was a graceful paddler, and had some well-founded pretensions to beauty. Her coarse, black hair was simply combed back, not braided into plaits as commonly done by the Andean women. All, both male and female, painted their faces with achote to keep off the sand-flies.
![[Our Craft on the Napo.]](#8543082027330898494_209.png.id-2101933085889098847.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Pratt managed the helm (the governor could not work the Yankee notion) and the kitchen. At Santa Rosa we had added to our Quito stock of provisions some manati-lard (bottled up in a joint of a bamboo) and sirup, and at Coca we took in three fowls, a bag of rice, and a bunch of bananas. So we fared sumptuously every day. We left Coca on Thanksgiving Day, November 28th, and to imitate our distant friends, we sacrificed an extra meal—fricasseed chicken, jerked beef, boiled yucas, bananas, oranges, lemonade, and guayusa. Favored by a powerful current and the rhythmic paddling of our Santa Rosans, we made this day sixty miles; but our average daily run was fifty miles. The winds (doubtless the trades) were almost unchangeably from the east; but an occasional puff would come from the northwest, when we relieved our paddlers by hoisting a blanket for a sail. Six o'clock was our usual hour of departure, and ten or twelve hours our traveling time, always tying up at a plaia or island, of which there are hosts in the Napo, but never to the main land, for fear of unfriendly Indians and the still more unwelcome tiger. Our crew encamped at a respectful though hailing distance.
On the second day from Coca we were caught in a squall, and to save our roof we ran ashore. Nearly every afternoon we were treated to a shower, accompanied by a strong wind, but seldom by thunder and lightning, though at Coca we had a brilliant thunder-storm at night. They always came after a uniform fashion and at a regular hour, so that we learned when to expect them. About noon the eastern horizon would become suddenly black, and when this had spread to the zenith we heard the rush of a mighty wind sweeping through the forest, and the crash of falling trees, and then down fell the deluge. The Indians have a saying that "the path of the sun is the path of the storm." These storm-clouds moved rapidly, for in half an hour all was quiet on the Napo. At Quito, two hundred miles west, the usual afternoon shower occurs two hours later. To-day we enjoyed our last glimpse of the Andes. Far away across the great forest we had traversed we could see the beautiful cone of Cotopaxi and the flat top of Cayambi standing out in proud pre-eminence. Long will it be ere we forget this farewell view of the magnificent Cordillera.
[CHAPTER XV.]
Sea-Cows and Turtles' Eggs.— The Forest.— Peccaries.— Indian Tribes on the Lower Napo.— Anacondas and Howling Monkeys.— Insect Pests.— Battle with Ants.— Barometric Anomaly.— First View of the Amazon,— Pebas.
The thirtieth of November was an exciting day on the monotonous Napo. We fell in with numerous sea-cows sporting in the middle of the stream. They were greatly disturbed by the sight of our huge craft, and, lifting their ugly heads high out of the water, gave a peculiar snort, as if in defiance, but always dived out of sight when fired upon. The sea-cow is called vaca marina by the Spaniards, peixe boy by the Brazilians, and manati in the West Indies. It has no bovine feature except in its upper lip. The head and skin remind one of a large seal. In many respects it may be likened to a hippopotamus without tusks or legs. It has a semicircular flat tail, and behind the head are two oval fins, beneath which are the breasts, which yield a white milk. The flesh resembles pork, with a disagreeable, fishy flavor.
To-day we anchored at several plaias to hunt turtles' eggs. Our Indians were very expert in finding the nests. Guided approximately by the tracks of the tortugas, as the turtles are called, they thrust a stick into the sand, and wherever it went down easily they immediately commenced digging with their hands, and invariably "struck" eggs. In four nests, whose contents we counted, there were one hundred and thirty-two, one hundred and fourteen, one hundred and twelve, and ninety-seven; but we have heard of one hundred and sixty eggs in a single nest. The turtles lay in the night, and in pits about two feet deep, which they excavate with their broad, webbed paws. The eggs are about an inch and a half in diameter, having a thin, leathery shell, a very oily yolk, and a white which does not coagulate. The Indians ate them uncooked. We used them chiefly in making corn griddles.
Here, as throughout its whole course, the Napo runs between two walls of evergreen verdure. On either hand are low clay banks (no rocks are visible), and from these the forest rises to a uniform height of seventy or eighty feet. It has a more cheerful aspect than the sombre, silent wilderness of Baeza. Old aristocrats of the woods are overrun by a gay democracy of creepers and climbers, which interlace the entire forest, and, descending to take root again, appear like the shrouds and stays of a line-of-battle ship. Monkeys gambol on this wild rigging, and mingle their chatter with the screams of the parrot. Trees as lofty as our oaks are covered with flowers as beautiful as our lilies. Here are orchids of softest tints;[128] flowering ferns, fifty feet high; the graceful bamboo and wild banana; while high over all countless species of palm wave their nodding plumes. Art could not arrange these beautiful forms so harmoniously as nature has done.
![[Hunting Turtles' Eggs]](#8543082027330898494_215.png.id-2469100667511928215.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
The tropics, moreover, are strangers to the uniformity of association seen in temperate climes. We have so many social plants that we speak of a forest of oaks, and pines, and birches; but there variety is the law. Individuals of the same species are seldom seen growing together. Every tree is surrounded by strangers that seemingly prefer its room to its company; and, such is the struggle for possession of the soil, it is difficult to tell to which stem the different leaves and flowers belong. The peculiar charm of a tropical forest is increased by the mystery of its impenetrable thicket. Within that dense, matted shrubbery, and behind that phalanx of trees, the imagination of the traveler sees all manner of four-footed beasts and creeping things. Tropical vegetation is of fresher verdure, more luxuriant and succulent, and adorned with larger and more shining leaves than the vegetation of the north. The leaves are not shed periodically—a character common, not only to the equator, but also to the whole southern hemisphere. Yet there is a variety of tints, though not autumnal. The leaves put on their best attire while budding instead of falling—passing, as they come to maturity, through different shades of red, brown, and green. The majority of tropical trees bear small flowers. The most conspicuous trees are the palms, to which the prize of beauty has been given by the concurrent voice of all ages. The earliest civilization of mankind belonged to countries bordering on the region of palms. South America, the continent of mingled heat and moisture, excels the rest of the world in the number and perfection of her palms. They are mostly of the feathery and fan-like species; the latter are inferior in rank to the former. The peculiarly majestic character of the palm is given not only by their lofty stems, but also in a very high degree by the form and arrangement of their leaves. How diverse, yet equally graceful, are the aspiring branches of the jagua and the drooping foliage of the cocoa, the shuttlecock-shaped crowns of the ubussú and the plumes of the jupati, forty feet in length. The inflorescence always springs from the top of the trunk, and the male flowers are generally yellowish. Unlike the oak, all species of which have similar fruit, there is a vast difference in the fruits of the palm: compare the triangular cocoa-nut, the peach-like date, and grape-like assai. The silk-cotton tree is the rival of the palm in dignity; it has a white bark and a lofty flat crown. Among the loveliest children of Flora we must include the mimosa, with its delicately pinnated foliage, so endowed with sensibility that it seems to have stepped out of the bounds of vegetable life. The bamboo, the king of grasses, forms a distinctive feature in the landscape of the Napo, frequently rising eighty feet in length, though not in height, for the fronds curve downward. Fancy the airy grace of our meadow grasses united with the lordly growth of the poplar, and you have a faint idea of bamboo beauty.
The first day of winter (how strangely that sounds under a vertical sun!) was Sunday; but it was folly to attempt to rest where punkies were as thick as atoms, so we floated on. It was only by keeping in mid-river and moving rapidly enough to create a breeze through our cabin, that life was made tolerable. A little after noon we were again obliged to tie up for a storm. Not a human being nor a habitation have we seen since leaving Coca; and to-day nothing is visible but the river, with its islands, and plains, and the green palisades—the edges of the boundless forest. Not a hill over one hundred feet high are we destined to see till we reach Obidos, fifteen hundred miles eastward. Were it not for the wealth of vegetation—all new to trans-tropical eyes—and the concerts of monkeys and macaws, oppressively lonely would be the sail down the Napo between its uninhabited shores. But we believe the day, though distant, will come when its banks will be busy with life. Toward evening three or four canoes pulled out from the shore and came alongside. They were filled with the lowest class of Indians we have seen in South America. The women were nearly nude; the man (there was only one) had on a sleeveless frock reaching to the knees, made from the bark of a tree called llanchama. All were destitute of eyebrows; their hair was parted in the middle, and their teeth and lips were dyed black. They had rude pottery, peccari meat, and wooden lances to sell. Like all the Napo Indians, they had a weakness for beads, and they wore necklaces of tiger and monkey teeth. They were stupid rather than brutal, and probably belonged to a degraded tribe of the great Zaparo family. With Darwin, "one's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these?—men whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or, at least, of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal; and part of the interest in beholding a savage is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa."
On the morrow our falcon-eyed Indians whispered "cuche" long before we saw any thing.[129] Williams went ashore and came upon a herd of peccaries, killing two. The peccari is a pugnacious, fearless animal. It is not frightened by the noise of fire-arms, and when wounded is a dangerous foe; but captured when young, it is easily tamed. It has a higher back than the domestic hog, and cleanlier habits; an odoriferous gland on the loins, and three-toed hind feet. We preserved the skins for science and a ham for the table; the rest we gave to our crew and fellow-voyagers, who devoured every thing, even the viscera. They sat up late that night, around their camp-fire, cooking peccari meat: part they parboiled in a pot, and some they roasted, skewered on sticks which slanted over the flames; the rest they cured with smoke, for lack of salt. The meat, though rank, is palatable, but not equal to macaw, which we served up the next day.[130]
We had now passed the mouth of the Aguarico, leaving behind us the Christian Quitus and the peaceful Zaparos. Henceforth the right bank of the Napo is inhabited by the Mazanes and Iquitos; while on the left are the wilder Santa Marias, Anguteros, Oritos, and Orejones. The Orejones, or "Big Ears," enlarge those appendages to such an extent that they are said to lie down on one ear and cover themselves with the other. This practice is now going out of fashion. These Indians received their name, Orejones, or Oregones, from the Spaniards, on account of this singular custom of inserting disks of wood in the ears to enlarge them; the like practice prevailed among the tribes on the Columbia River, Oregon. They trade in hammocks, poisons, and provisions. The Anguteros, or Putumayos, have a bad reputation. They are reported to have killed and robbed sarsaparilla traders coming up stream. Nevertheless, we kept watch only one night during the voyage, though we always anchored to an island, and between Coca and the Amazon we did not see twenty-five men. Equally rare were the savage brutes—not a jaguar showed himself, and only one anaconda. The anaconda, or water-boa (Eunectes murinus[131]), is larger and more formidable than the boa-constrictor which lives on the land. It has a hideous appearance, broad in the middle, and tapering abruptly at both ends. We did not learn from the natives that anacondas over twenty feet long had been seen on the Napo, but specimens twice that size are found on the Amazon. Land boas do not often exceed fifteen feet in length.
![[A Howler.]](#8543082027330898494_221.png.id-8914534136857513379.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Gangs of the large howling monkeys often entertained us with their terrific, unearthly yells, which, in the truthful language of Bates, "increased tenfold the feeling of inhospitable wildness which the forest is calculated to inspire." They are of a maroon color (the males wear a long red beard), and have under the jaw a bony goître—an expansion of the os hyoides—by means of which they produce their loud, rolling noise. They set up an unusual chorus whenever they saw us, scampering to the tops of the highest trees, the dams carrying the young upon their backs. They are the only monkeys which the natives have not been able to tame. Vast numbers of screaming parrots and macaws flew over our heads, always going in pairs and at a great height. Groups of "gypsy-birds" were perched on the trees overhanging the river, and black ducks, cormorants, and white cranes floated on the water or stalked along the plaias.
But one form of life superabounded. From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof clouds of ubiquitous sand-flies filled our cabin, save when the wind was high. As soon as the sand-flies ceased, myriads of musquitoes began their work of torture, without much preparatory piping, and kept it up all night.[132] These pests were occasionally relieved or assisted by piums—minute flies that alight unnoticed, and squatting close to the skin, suck their fill of blood, leaving dark spots and a disagreeable irritation. Our hands were nearly black with their punctures. We also made the acquaintance of the montúca, a large black fly whose horny lancets make a gash in the flesh, painless but blood-letting. All these insects are most abundant in the latter part of the rainy season, when the Marañon is almost uninhabitable. The apostrophe of Midshipman Wilberforce was prompted by sufferings which we can fully appreciate: "Ye greedy animals! I am ashamed of you. Can not you once forego your dinner, and feast your mind with the poetry of the landscape?" Right welcome was the usual afternoon squall, which sent these pests "kiting" over the stern.
On Wednesday we fell in with a petty sarsaparilla trader, with two canoes, bound for the Marañon. He was sick with fever. Sarsaparilla (written salsaparrilha in Brazil, and meaning "bramble vine") is the root of a prickly, climbing plant found throughout the whole Amazonian forest, but chiefly on dry, rocky ground. On the morning of the seventh day from Coca we passed the mouth of the Curaray, the largest tributary of the Napo. It rises on the slopes of the Llanganati mountains, and is considered auriferous. It is probably derived from curi, gold. Seeing a hut on the banks, we sent an Indian to purchase provisions; he returned with a few yucas and eggs. The day following we were attacked from a new quarter. Stopping to escape a storm, a party went ashore to cut down a tree of which we desired a section. It fell with its top in the river, just above our craft; when lo! to our consternation, down came countless hosts of ants (Ecitons). Myriads were, of course, swept down stream, but myriads more crawled up the sides of our canoes, and in one minute after the tree fell our whole establishment, from hold to roof, was swarming with ants. We gave one look of despair at each other, our provisions and collections, and then commenced a war of extermination. It was a battle for life. The ants, whose nest we had so suddenly immersed in the Napo, refused to quit their new lodgings. As we were loosely dressed, the tenacious little creatures hid themselves under our clothing, and when plucked off would leave their heads and jaws sticking in the skin. At last the deck was cleared by means of boots, slippers, and towels; but, had the ants persevered, they might have taken possession of the boat.
To-day we saw a high bank (called in Quichua pucaurcu, or red hill) consisting of fine laminated clays of many colors—red, orange, yellow, gray, black, and white. This is the beginning of that vast deposit which covers the whole Amazonian Valley. It rests upon a bed of lignite, or bituminous shale, and a coarse, iron-cemented conglomerate. The latter is not visible on the Napo, but crops out particularly at Obidos and Pará. The Indians prepare their paints from these colored clays.
Our Santa Rosans seemed to have little tact in fishing; still their spears and our hooks gathered not a few representatives of ichthyic life in the Napo. The species most common belong to the genus Pimelodus, or catfish tribe. Below tho Curaray the sand bars yielded turtles' eggs of a different kind from those found above, the tracajá. They were smaller and oval, and buried only six or eight inches deep, thirty in a nest.
December 9.—Passed early this morning the mouth of the Mazan; four huts at the junction. To-day we noticed the anomaly first observed by Herndon. From Papallacta to the Curaray the rise of the mercury was regular, but on the lower Napo there were great fluctuations. At one time both barometer and boiling apparatus, with which we made daily and simultaneous observations, unanimously declared that our canoes were gliding up stream, though we were descending at the rate of five miles an hour. The temperature is decidedly lower and the winds are stronger as we near the Amazon.
December 10.—Our last day on the Napo. In celebration of the event we killed a fine young doe as it was crossing the river. It closely resembled the Virginia deer. At 9 A.M. the Indians shouted in their quiet way—"Marañon!" It was as thrilling as Thalatta to Xenophon's soldiers. We were not expecting to reach it till night, being deceived by Villavicencio's map, which, in common with all others, locates the Curaray and Mazan too far to the north. We halted for an hour at Camindo, a little fishing hamlet claimed by Peru, and then hastened to get our first sight of the Amazon. With emotions we can not express, we gazed upon this ocean-stream. The march of the great river in its silent grandeur is sublime. In its untamed might it rolls through the wilderness with a stately, solemn air, showing its awful power in cutting away the banks, tearing down trees, and building up islands in a day. Down the river we can look till the sky and water meet as on the sea, while the forest on either hand dwindles in the perspective to a long black line. Between these even walls of ever-living green the resistless current hurries out of Peru, sweeps past the imperial guns of Tabatinga into Brazil, and plows its way visibly two hundred miles into the Atlantic.
At a small island standing where the Napo pays tribute to the monarch of rivers, mingling its waters with the Huallaga and Ucayali, which have already come down from the Peruvian Andes, we bade adieu to our captain and cook, who, in the little canoe, paddled his way westward to seek his fortune in Iquitus. At this point the Marañon (for so the natives call the Upper Amazon) does not appear very much broader than the Napo; but its depth is far greater, and there are few sand-bars.[133] The water is always of a turbid yellow; while the Napo, though muddy during our voyage, is usually clear. The forest, moreover, on the banks of the Marañon, is not so striking as on the tributary. The palms are not so numerous, and the uniform height of the trees gives a monotonous, sea-like horizon.
We arrived at Pebas December 12, ten hours after leaving the mouth of the Napo, and a month and a half from Quito. The first individual we met addressed us in good English, and proved to be Mr. Hauxwell of birds and insects, who has resided thirty years on the Amazon. His house, the largest and best in town, though but a roofed stockade, was generously placed at our disposal, and the fatted calf—an immense turtle—was immediately killed. To us, after the transit of the Andes and the dangers and hardships of the wilderness and the river, it seemed as if we had reached the end of our journey, though we were over two thousand miles from the Atlantic. Pebas is situated on a high clay bluff beside the Ambiyacu, a mile above its entrance into the Marañon. Excepting Mr. Hauxwell, the Peruvian governor, and two or three other whites, the inhabitants are Indians of the Orejones and Yagua tribes. The exportations are hammocks, sarsaparilla, palo de cruz, and urarí. Palo de cruz is the very hard, dark-colored wood of a small leguminous tree bearing large pink flowers. Urarí is the poison used by all the Amazonian Indians; it is made by the Ticunas on the Putumayo, by boiling to a jelly the juices of certain roots and herbs, chiefly of the Strychnos toxifera, though it does not contain any trace of strychnine. Tipped with urarí, the needle-like arrow used in blow-guns will kill an ox in twenty minutes and a monkey in ten. "We have reason to congratulate ourselves (wrote the facetious Sidney Smith) that our method of terminating disputes is by sword and pistol, and not by these medicated pins." But the poison appears to be harmless to man and other salt-eating animals, salt being an antidote.[134] We were not troubled with sand-flies after leaving the plaias of the Napo, but the musquitoes at Pebas were supernumerary. Perhaps, however, it was a special gathering on our account, for the natives have a notion that just before the arrival of a foreigner the musquitoes come in great numbers.
Many of the Indians are disfigured by dark blotches on the skin, the effect of a cutaneous disease very prevalent in Central Amazonia. Here we first noticed the singular habit among the children of eating clay. This habit is not confined to the Otomacs on the Oronoco, nor to Indians altogether; for negroes and whites have the same propensity—Mr. Hauxwell found it impossible to restrain his own children. Bates ascribes the morbid craving to the meagre diet. This may be true to some extent, but it is certainly strange that the extraordinary desire to swallow earth (chiefly unctuous clays) is found only in the tropics, where vegetation is so rank and fruit so abundant.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
Down the Amazon.— Steam on the Great River.— Loreto.— San Antonio.— Tabatinga.— Brazilian Steamers.— Scenery on the Amazon.— Tocantíns.— Fonte Boa.— Ega.— Rio Negro.— Manáos.
We left Pebas for Tabatinga in the Peruvian steamer "Morona," Captain Raygado. Going up to Jerusalem by railroad, or ascending the Nile by a screw whisking the sacred waters, is not so startling as the sight of a steamer in the heart of South America. There is such a contrast between the primeval wildness of the country and the people and this triumph of civilized life; and one looks forward to the dazzling future of this great valley, when the ships of all nations will crowd the network of rivers for the gold and perfumes, the gems and woods of this western Ophir. The natives call the steamer the "devil's boat," or "big canoe;" but they manifest little curiosity. Our Napo Indians were evidently afraid of it, and stood afar off. The first steamers that broke the deep solitude of the Marañon were the "Huallaga" and "Tirado," brought out in 1853 by Dr. Whittemore, for Peru. They were built in New York, of Georgia pine, costing Peru $75,000, and reflected no credit on the United States; they lie rotting near Nauta. Peru has now two iron steamers of London make—the "Morona" and "Pastassa"—besides two smaller craft for exploring the tributaries. These steamers are for government service, but three more are building in England with passenger accommodations. The "Morona" has a tonnage of five hundred, and an engine of one hundred and fifty horse-power. The engineers are English, and the cook is a Chinaman. She makes monthly trips between Yurimaguas, on the Huallaga River, and Tabatinga, on the Brazilian frontier. Her rate down stream is eighteen miles an hour, and from eleven to twelve against the current. These steamers do not pay expenses at present; but they preserve the authority of Peru on the Marañon, and supply with material the government works at Iquitos. They also do a little commerce, taking down sarsaparilla and Moyabamba hats, and bringing up English dry-goods. There were not half a dozen passengers on board.
The only towns of any consequence west of Pebas are Iquitos, Nauta, and Yurimaguas. Peru claims them—in fact, all the villages on the Marañon. Iquitos is the most thriving town on the Upper Amazon. It is situated on an elevated plain on the left bank of the river, sixty miles above the mouth of the Napo. In Herndon's time it was "a fishing village of 227 inhabitants;" it now contains 2000. Here are the government iron-works, carried on by English mechanics. In 1867 there were six engineers, two iron-molders, two brass-molders, two coppersmiths, three blacksmiths, three pattern-makers, two boiler-makers, five shipwrights, three sawyers, besides bricklayers, brick-makers, carpenters, coopers, etc.; in all forty-two. All the coal for the furnaces is brought from England—the lignite on the banks of the Marañon is unfit for the purpose. A floating dock for vessels of a thousand tons has just been built. Nauta lies on the north bank of the Marañon, opposite the entrance of the Ucayali. Its inhabitants, about 1000, trade in fish, sarsaparilla, and wax from Ucayali. Yurimaguas is the port of Moyabamba, a city of 10,000 souls, six days' travel southwest. This vast eastern slope, lying on the branches of the Marañon, is called the Montaña of Peru. It is a region of inexhaustible fertility, and would yield ample returns to energy and capital. The villages are open to foreign commerce, free of duty; but at present the voice of civilized man is seldom heard, save on the main fluvial highway between Moyabamba and the Brazilian frontier. The Portuguese are the most adventurous traders. The value of imports to Peru by the Amazonian steamers during 1867 was $324,533; of exports, $267,748.
In two hours and a half we arrive at Maucallacta, or "Old Town," an Indian village on the right bank of the river. Here our passports were viséd by the Peruvian governor, and the steamer wooded up. One of the hands on the "Morona" was Manuel Medina, a mameluco, who was employed by Bates and Agassiz in their explorations. We left at noon of the following day, and anchored for the night off Caballococha, for the Peruvian steamers run only in the daytime. Caballococha, or "Horse-lake," is a Ticuna town, situated on a level tract of light loam, closely surrounded by the dense forest, and beside a caño of clear water leading to a pretty lake. Ecuador claims this town, and likewise all the settlements on the Marañon; but her learned geographer, Villavicencio, with characteristic ignorance of the country, has located it on the north bank of the river!
We passed in the afternoon the little tug "Napo," having on board Admiral Tucker, the rebel, who, with some associates, is exploring the tributaries of the Upper Amazon for the Peruvian government. They had just returned from a voyage of two hundred and fifty miles up the Javarí. One of the party had a tame tiger-cat in his arms. We arrived at Loreto early the next morning. This village of twenty houses and a church is prettily situated on the left bank, with a green slope in front. It is the most easterly town of Peru on the Amazon. Here resides Mr. Wilkens, the Brazilian consul, of German birth, but North American education. The inhabitants are Peruvians, Portuguese, Negroes, and Ticuna Indians. The musquitoes hold high carnival at this place. In two hours we were at San Antonio, a military post on the Peruvian frontier, commanded by a French engineer, Manuel Charon, who also studied in the United States. One large building, and a flag-staff on a high bluff of red clay, were all that was visible of San Antonio; but the "Morona" brought down a gang of Indians (impressed, no doubt) to build a fort for twenty guns. The site is in dispute, a Brazilian claiming it as private property. The white barracks of Tabatinga, the first fortress in Brazil, are in plain sight, the voyage consuming but twenty minutes. Between San Antonio and Tabatinga is a ravine, on either side of which is a white pole, marking the limits of the republic and the empire.
Tabatinga has long been a military post, but, excepting the government buildings, there are not a dozen houses. Numerous Indians, however, of the Ticuna tribe, dwell in the neighboring forest. The commandante was O Illustrissimo Señor Tenente Aristides Juste Mavignier, a tall, thin, stooping officer, dressed in brown linen. He received us with great civility, and tendered a house and servant during our stay in port. We preferred, however, to accept the hospitalities of the "Morona" till the arrival of the Brazilian steamer. Señor Mavignier was commandante of Manáos when visited by Agassiz, and presented the Professor with a hundred varieties of wood. With the like courtesy, he gave us a collection of reptiles, all of them rare, and many of them new species. He showed us also a live raposa, or wild dog, peculiar to the Amazon, but seldom seen. Tabatinga stands on an eminence of yellow clay, and is defended by twelve guns. The river in front is quite narrow, only about half a mile wide. Here our passports, which had been signed at Maucallacta and Loreto, were indorsed by the commandante. They were afterward examined at Ega, Manáos, and Pará. The mean temperature of Tabatinga we found to be 82°.[135] Some rubber and salt fish are exported, but nothing of consequence is cultivated. Grapes, the people say, grow well, but are destroyed by the ants. The only fruit-trees we noticed were the mamaï (in Spanish, papaya), aracá, and abío. The papaw-tree bears male and female flowers on different trees, and hence receives the name of papaya or mamaï, according to one's view of the pre-eminence of the sex. The juice of this tree is used by the ladies of the West Indies as a cosmetic, and by the butchers to render the toughest meat tender. The fruit is melon-shaped, and of an orange-yellow color. Vauquelin discovered in it fibrine, till lately supposed to be confined to the animal kingdom.
The Peruvian steamers connect at Tabatinga with the Brazilian line. There are eight imperial steamers on the Amazon: the "Icamiaba," running between Tabatinga and Manáos; the "Tapajos" and "Belem," plying between Manáos and Pará; the "Inca" and "Manáos," between Obidos and Pará; besides two steamers on the Tocantíns, one between Pará and Chares, and projected lines for the Negro, Tapajos, and Madeira. The captains get a small salary, but the perquisites are large, as they have a percentage on the freight. One captain pocketed in one year $9000.
We embarked, December 12, on the "Icamiaba," which promptly arrived at Tabatinga. The commander, formerly a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, and for twelve years a popular officer on the Upper Amazon, was a polished gentleman, but rigid disciplinarian. As an example of Brazilian etiquette, we give his full address from one of our letters of introduction:
"Ilmo. Sr. Capn. de Fragata
Nuno Alvez Pereira de Mello Cardozo,
Digno Commandante de Vapor
Icamiaba."
The "Icamiaba" was an iron boat of four hundred and fifty tons, with two engines of fifty horse-power each. The engineer was an Austrian, yet the captain gave his orders in English, though neither could speak the language. The saloon, with berths for twenty-five passengers, was above deck, and open at both ends for ventilation. The passengers, however, usually swung their hammocks on the upper deck, which was covered by an awning. This was a delightfully breezy and commanding position; and though every part of the steamer was in perfect order, this was scrupulously neat. Here the table was spread with every tropical luxury, and attentively served by young men in spotless attire. Happy the traveler who sits at the table of Commandante Cardozo. The refreshment hours were: Coffee as soon as the passengers turned out of their hammocks, and sometimes before; breakfast at ten, dinner at five, and tea at eight. Live bullocks, fowls, and turtles were kept on board, so that of fresh meat, particularly beef (the first we had tasted since leaving Quito), there was no lack. At breakfast we counted nine different courses of meat. The Peruvian steamers are limited to turtle and salt fish. Rice and farina are extensively used in Brazil, but we saw very little tapioca. Farina is the flour of the country, and is eaten in hard, dry grains; it will not keep in any other form. It can not be very nutritious, as it contains little gluten. All bread and butter are imported from the United States and England. The captains of Brazilian steamers are their own stewards; and in the midst of other business in port, they stop to negotiate for a chicken, or a dozen eggs, with an Indian or Negro. The "Icamiaba" left Tabatinga with only three first-class passengers, besides our own party. On no Amazon steamer did we meet with a lady passenger. Madame Godin, who came down the river from the Andes, and Mrs. Agassiz, who ascended to Tabatinga, were among the few ladies who have seen these upper waters. But how differently they traveled! one on a raft, the other on the beautiful "Icamiaba."
Between Tabatinga and Teffé, a distance of five hundred miles, is perhaps the most uncivilized part of the main river. Ascending, we find improvements multiply as we near the mountains of Peru; descending, we see the march of civilization in the budding cities and expanding commerce culminating at Grand Pará. The scenery from the deck of an Amazonian steamer, if described, appears monotonous. A vast volume of smooth, yellow water, floating trees and beds of aquatic grass, low, linear-shaped, wooded islets, a dark, even forest—the shores of a boundless sea of verdure, and a cloudless sky occasionally obscured by flocks of parrots: these are the general features. No busy towns are seen along the banks of the Middle Amazon; only here and there a palm hut or semi-Indian village half buried in the wilderness. We agree with Darwin (speaking of the Plata), that "a wide expanse of muddy water has neither grandeur nor beauty." The real grandeur, however, of a great river like this is derived from reflecting upon its prospective commercial importance and its immense drainage. A lover of nature, moreover, can never tire of gazing at the picturesque grouping and variety of trees, with their mantles of creeping plants; while a little imagination can see in the alligators, ganoid fishes, sea-cows, and tall gray herons, the ichthyosaurus, holoptychius, dinotherium, and brontozoum of ancient days. Here and there the river is bordered with low alluvial deposits covered with feathery-topped arrow-grass and amphibious vegetation; but generally the banks are about ten feet high and magnificently wooded; they are abrupt, and land-slides are frequent.
A few minutes after leaving Tabatinga we passed the mouth of the Javarí, which forms the natural boundary between Peru and Brazil. Henceforth the river loses the name of Marañon, and is called Solimoens, or, more commonly, simply Amazon. We were ten hours in reaching San Paulo, a wretched Ticuna village of five hundred souls, built on a grassy table-land nearly one hundred feet high. Steps have been cut in the slippery clay bluff to facilitate the ascent. Swamps lie back of the town, rendering it unhealthy. "On damp nights (says the Naturalist on the Amazon) the chorus of frogs and toads which swarm in weedy back-yards creates such a bewildering uproar that it is impossible to carry on a conversation in doors except by shouting."
In ten hours more we had passed the Putumayo and entered the Tunantíns, a sluggish, dark-colored tributary emptying into the Amazon about two hundred miles below the Javarí.[136] On the bank of white earth, which strongly contrasts with the tinted stream, is a dilapidated hamlet of twenty-five hovels, built of bamboo plastered with mud and whitewashed. We saw but one two-storied house; and all have ground-floors and double-thatched roofs. The inhabitants are semi-civilized Shumána and Passé Indians and half-breeds; but in the gloomy forest which hugs the town live the wild Caishánas. The atmosphere is close and steaming, but not hot, the mercury at noon standing at 83°. The place is alive with insects and birds. The nights on the Amazon were invariably cool; on the Lower Amazon, cold, so that we required a heavy blanket.
![[Kitchen on the Amazon.]](#8543082027330898494_236.png.id-8613893526366530197.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Taking on board wood, beeves, turtles, salt fish, and water-melons, we left at half past 2 P.M. The Brazilian steamers run all night, and with no slackening of speed. At one o'clock we were awakened by a cry from the watch, "Stop her!" And immediately after there was a crash; but it was only the breaking of crockery caused by the sudden stoppage. The night was fearfully dark, and for aught we knew the steamer was running headlong into the forest. Fortunately there was no collision, and in a few minutes we were again on our way, arriving at Fonte Boa at 4 A.M. This little village stands in a palm grove, on a high bank of ochre-colored sandy clay, beside a slue of sluggish black water, eight miles from the Amazon.[137] The inhabitants, about three hundred, are ignorant, lazy mamelucos. They dress like the majority of the semi-civilized people on the Amazon: the men content with shirt and pantaloons, the women wearing cotton or gauze chemises and calico petticoats. Fonte Boa is a museum for the naturalist, but the headquarters of musquitoes, small but persistent. Taking in a large quantity of turtle-oil, the "Icamiaba" turned down the caño, but almost immediately ran aground, and we were two hours getting off. These yearly shifting shoals in the Amazon can not be laid down in charts, and the most experienced pilots often run foul of them. In twelve hours we entered the Teffé, a tributary from the Bolivian mountains. Just before reaching the Great River it expands into a beautiful lake, with a white, sandy beach. On a grassy slope, stretching out into the lake, with a harbor on each side of it, lies the city of Ega. A hundred palm-thatched cottages of mud and tiled frame houses, each with an inclosed orchard of orange, lemon, banana, and guava trees, surround a rude church, marked by a huge wooden crucifix on the green before it, instead of a steeple. Cacao, assaï, and pupunha palms rise above the town, adding greatly to its beauty; while back of all, on the summit of the green slope, begins the picturesque forest, pathless, save here and there a faint hunter's track leading to the untrodden interior. The sheep and cattle grazing on the lawn, a rare sight in Alto Amazonas, gives a peaceful and inviting aspect to the scene. The inhabitants, numbering about twelve hundred, are made up of pure Indians, half-castes, negroes, mulattoes, and whites. Ega (also called Teffé) is the largest and most thriving town between Manáos and Iquitos, a distance of twelve hundred miles. It is also one of the oldest settlements on the river, having been founded during the English revolution, or nearly two centuries ago. Tupi is the common idiom. The productions of the country are cacao, sarsaparilla, Brazil nuts, bast for caulking vessels, copaiba balsam, India-rubber, salt fish, turtle-oil, manati, grass hammocks, and tiles. Bates calculates the value of the annual exports at nearly forty thousand dollars. The "Icamiaba" calls here twice a month; besides which there are small schooners which occupy about five months in the round trip between Ega and Pará. "The place is healthy (writes the charming Naturalist on the Amazon), and almost free from insect pests; perpetual verdure surrounds it; the soil is of marvelous fertility, even for Brazil; the endless rivers and labyrinths of channels teem with fish and turtle; a fleet of steamers might anchor at any season of the year in the lake, which has uninterrupted water communication straight to the Atlantic. What a future is in store for the sleepy little tropical village!" Here Bates pursued butterflies for four years and a half, and Agassiz fished for six months.
[Natives on the Middle Amazon.]
![[Natives on the Middle Amazon.]](#8543082027330898494_239.png.id-2051643814479883099.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Ega is the half-way point across the continent, but its exact altitude above the sea is unknown. Herndon's boiling apparatus gave two thousand feet, and, what is worse, the lieutenant believed it. Our barometer made it one hundred feet; but as our instrument, though perfect in itself, behaved very strangely on the Middle Amazon, we do not rely on the calculation. The true height is not far from one hundred and twenty-five feet, or one fifth the elevation of the middle point in the North American continent.[138] Taking on board salt fish, turtle-oil, and tiles, we left Ega two hours after midnight, reaching Coary at noon. The Amazon began to look more like a lake than a river, having a width of four or five miles. Floating gulls and rolling porpoises remind one of the sea. Coary is a huddle of fifteen houses, six of them plastered without, whitewashed, and tiled. It is situated on a lake of the same name—the expanded outlet of a small river whose waters are dark brown, and whose banks are low and covered with bushes. Here we took in turtles and turtle-oil, Brazil nuts and cocoa-nuts, rubber, salt fish, and wood; and, six hours after leaving, more fish and rubber were received at Cudajá. Cudajá is a lonely spot on the edge of an extensive system of back-waters and lakes, running through a dense unexplored forest inhabited by Múra savages.
At three in the afternoon of Christmas, seventy-four hours' running time from Tabatinga, we entered the Rio Negro. Strong is the contrast between its black-dyed waters and the yellow Amazon. The line separating the two rivers is sharply drawn, the waters meeting, not mingling. Circular patches of the dark waters of the Negro are seen floating like oil amid the turbid waters of the Amazon. The sluggish tributary seems to be dammed up by the impetuous monarch. The banks of the latter are low, ragged, perpendicular beds of clay, covered with a bright green foliage; the Negro is fringed with sandy beaches, with hills in the background clothed with a sombre, monotonous forest containing few palms or leguminous trees. Musquitoes, piums, and montucas never trouble the traveler on the inky stream. When seen in a tumbler, the water of the Negro is clear, but of a light-red color; due, undoubtedly, to vegetable matter. The visible mouth of the river at this season of the year (December) is three miles wide, but from main-land to main-land it can not be less than twenty.
![[A Siesta.]](#8543082027330898494_242.png.id-8362491756493004294.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
In forty minutes after leaving the Amazon we arrived at Manáos. This important city lies on the left bank of the Negro, ten miles from its mouth and twenty feet above high-water level. The site is very uneven, and consists of ferruginous sandstone. There was originally a fort here, erected by the Portuguese to protect their slave-hunting expeditions among the Indians on the river—hence the ancient name of Barra. On the old map of Father Fritz (1707) the spot is named Taromas. Since 1852 it has been called Manáos, after the most warlike tribe. Some of the houses are two-storied, but the majority are low adobe structures, white and yellow washed, floored and roofed with tiles, and having green doors and shutters. Every room is furnished with hooks for hanging hammocks. We did not see a bed between Quito and New York except on the steamers. The population, numbering two thousand,[139] is a mongrel set—Brazilians, Portuguese, Italians, Jews, Negroes, and Indians, with divers crosses between them. Laziness is the prominent characteristic. A gentleman offered an Indian passing his door twenty-five cents if he would bring him a pitcher of water from the river, only a few rods distant. He declined. "But I will give you fifty cents." Whereupon the half-clothed, penniless aboriginal replied: "I will give you a dollar to bring me some."[140] While every inch of the soil is of exuberant fertility, there is always a scarcity of food. It is the dearest spot on the Amazon. Most of the essentials and all of the luxuries come from Liverpool, Lisbon, and New York. Agriculture is at a discount on the Amazon. Brazilians will not work; European immigrants are traders; nothing can be done with Indians; and negroes are few in number, the slave-trade being abolished, emancipation begun, and the Paraguayan war not ended. A laboring class will ever be a desideratum in this tropical country. With a healthy climate,[141] and a situation at the juncture of two great navigable rivers, Manáos is destined to become the St. Louis of South America. In commercial advantages it is hardly to be surpassed by any other city in the world, having water communication with two thirds of the continent, and also with the Atlantic. It is now the principal station for the Brazilian line of steamers. Here all goods for a higher or lower point are reshipped. The chief articles of export are coffee (of superior quality), sarsaparilla, Brazil nuts, piassaba, and fish. The Negro at this point is really five or six miles wide, but the opposite shore is masked by low islands, so that it appears to be but a mile and a half.
The country around Manáos is quite romantic for the Amazonian Valley. The land is undulating and furrowed by ravines, and the vegetation covering it is marvelously rich and diversified. In the forest, two miles from the city, there is a natural curiosity celebrated by all travelers from Spix and Martius down. A rivulet coming out of the wilderness falls over a ledge of red sandstone ten feet high and fifty feet broad, forming a beautiful cascade. The water is cool, and of a deep orange color. The foundation of a fine stone cathedral was laid in Manáos fourteen years ago, but this generation is not likely to witness the dedication. Life in this Amazonian city is dull enough: commerce is not brisk, and society is stiff; balls are about the only amusements. On Sunday (the holiday) every body who can afford it comes out in Paris fashions. There are carts, hut no coaches. We called upon the President at his "Palace"—an odd term for a two-storied, whitewashed edifice. His excellency received us with less formality and more cordiality than we expected to find in the solemn officials of the empire. The first glance at the reception-room, with the four chairs for visitors set in two lines at right angles to the chair of state, promised cold etiquette; but he addressed us with considerable familiarity and evident good-will. We found, however, that his authority was quite limited, for a written order which he gave us for a subordinate did not receive the slightest consideration. At the house of a Jew named Levy we met a party of Southerners, Captains Mallory, Jones, Sandedge, and Winn, commanded by Dr. Dowsing, who, since "the late onpleasantness," as Nasby calls it, have determined to settle in this country. The government grants them twenty square leagues of land on any tributary, on condition that they will colonize it. They were about to start for the Rio Branco on an exploring tour.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
Down the Amazon.— Serpa.—Villa Nova.— Obidos.— Santarem.— A Colony of Southerners.— Monte Alégre.— Porto do Moz.— Leaving the Amazon.—Breves.— Pará River.— The City of Pará.— Legislation and Currency.— Religion and Education.— Nonpareil Climate.
At 10 p.m. we left Manáos in the "Tapajos," an iron steamer of seven hundred tons. We missed the snow-white cleanliness and rigid regularity of the "Icamiaba," and Captain José Antunes Rodrigues de Oliveira Catramby was quite a contrast to Lieutenant Nuno. There were only five first-class passengers besides ourselves (and four of these were "dead-heads"), though there were accommodations for sixty-four. Between Manáos and Pará, a distance of one thousand miles, there were fourteen additions. Passing the mouth of the Madeira, the largest tributary to the Amazon, we anchored thirty miles below at Serpa, after nine hours' sailing. Serpa is a village of ninety houses, built on a high bank of variegated clay, whence its Indian name, Ita-coatiara, or painted rock. It was the most animated place we had seen on the river. The town is irregularly laid out and overrun with weeds, but there is a busy tile factory, and the port was full of canoes, montarias, and cubertas. The African element in the population began to show itself prominently here, and increased in importance as we neared Pará. The Negroes are very ebony, and are employed as stevedores. The Indians are well-featured, and wear a long gown of bark-cloth reaching to the knees.
Taking on board rubber and salt fish, the "Tapajos" steamed down stream, passing the perpendicular pink-clay cliffs of Cararaucú, arriving in ten hours at Villa Nova,[142] one hundred and fifty miles below Serpa. Villa Nova is a straggling village of mud huts standing on a conglomerate bank. The trade is chiefly in rubber, copaiba, and fish. The location is healthy, and in many respects is one of the most desirable places on the river. Here the Amazon begins to narrow, being scarcely three miles wide; but the channel, which has a rocky bed, is very deep. One hundred miles from Villa Nova is Obidos, airily situated on a bluff of pink and yellow clay one hundred feet above the river. The clay rests on a white calcareous earth, and this on red sandstone. It is a picturesque, substantially-built town, with a population, mostly white, engaged in raising cacao and cattle. Cacao is the most valuable product on the Amazon below Villa Nova. The soil is fertile, and the surrounding forest is alive with monkeys, birds, and insects, and abounds with precious woods and fruits. Obidos is blessed with a church, a school, and a weekly newspaper, and is defended by thirty-two guns. This is the Thermopylæ of the Amazon, the great river contracting to a strait not a mile in width, through which it rushes with tremendous velocity. The depth is forty fathoms, and the current 2.4 feet per second. As Bates remarks, however, the river valley is not contracted to this breadth, the southern shore not being continental land, but a low alluvial tract subject to inundation. Back of Obidos is an eminence which has been named Mount Agassiz in honor of the Naturalist. There is no mountain between it and Cotopaxi save the spurs from the Eastern Cordillera. Five miles above the town is the mouth of the Trombetas, where Orellana had his celebrated fight with the fabulous Amazons.
![[Santarem.]](#8543082027330898494_248.png.id-6562204811113919643.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Adding to her cargo wood, hides, horses, and Paraguayan prisoners (short, athletic men), the "Tapajos" sailed for Santarem. The river scenery below Obidos loses its wild and solitary character, and is relieved with scattered habitations, factories, and cacao plantations. We arrived at Santarem in seven hours from Obidos, a distance of fifty miles. This city, the largest on the Amazon save Pará, stands on a pretty slope at the mouth of the Rio Tapajos, and five hundred miles from the sea.[143] It mainly consists of three long-rows of whitewashed, tiled houses, girt with green gardens. The citizens, made up of Brazilians, Portuguese, mulattoes, and blacks, number about two thousand five hundred. The surrounding country, which is an undulating campo, with patches of wood, is sparsely inhabited by Tapajocos. Cattle estates and cacao plantations are the great investments, but the soil is poor. Considerable sarsaparilla of superior quality, rubber, copaiba, Brazil nuts, and farina come down the Tapajos. The climate is delightful, the trade-winds tempering the heat and driving away all insect pests. Leprosy is somewhat common among the poorer class. At Santarem is one of the largest colonies which migrated from the disaffected Gulf States for Brazil. One hundred and sixty Southerners pitched their tents here. Many of them, however, were soon disgusted with the country, and, if we are to believe reports, the country was disgusted with them. On the 1st of January, 1868, only seventy-five remained. The colony does not fairly represent the United States, being made up in great part of the "roughs" of Mobile. A few are contented and are doing well. Amazonia will be indebted to them for some valuable ideas. Bates says: "Butter-making is unknown in this country; the milk, I was told, was too poor." But these Anglo-Saxon immigrants have no difficulty in making butter. Santarem sends to Pará for sugar; but the cavaliers of Alabama are proving that the sugar-cane grows better than in Louisiana, attaining the height of twenty feet, and that it will yield for ten or twelve years without transplanting or cultivation. It is not, however, so sweet or juicy as the Southern cane. Some of the colonists are making tapioca and cashaça or Brazilian rum; others have gone into the pork business; while one, Dr. Jones, expects to realize a fortune burning lime. Here we met the rebel ex-General Dobbins, who had been prospecting on the Tapajos River, but had not yet located himself.
Below Santarem the Amazon vastly increases in width; at one point the southern shore was invisible from the steamer. The waves often run very high. At 10 A.M., eight hours from Santarem, we entered the romantic port of Monte Alégre. The road from the river to the village, just visible inland, runs through a pretty dell. Back of the village, beyond a low, swampy flat, rise the table-topped blue hills of Almeyrim. It was an exhilarating sight and a great relief to gaze upon a mountain range from three hundred to one thousand feet high, the greatest elevations along the Amazon east of the Andes. Agassiz considers these singular mountains the remnants of a plain which once filled the whole valley of the Amazon; but Bates believes them to be the southern terminus of the high land of Guiana. Their geological constitution—a pebbly sandstone—favors the Professor's theory. The range extends ninety miles along the north bank of the river, the western limit at Monte Alégre bearing the local name of Serra Ereré. Mount Agassiz, at Obidos, is a spur of the same table-land. The Amazon is here about five miles wide, the southern shore being low, uninhabited, and covered with coarse grass. Five schooners were anchored in the harbor of Monte Alégre, a sign of considerable trade for the Amazon. The place exports cattle, cacao, rubber, and fish.
In four hours we reached Prayinha, a dilapidated village of forty houses, situated on a low, sandy beach. The chief occupation is the manufacture of turtle-oil. In ten hours more we were taking in wood at Porto do Moz, situated just within the mouth of the Xingú, the last great tributary to the Amazon. Dismal was our farewell sail on the great river. With the highlands came foul weather. We were treated to frequent and furious showers, accompanied by a violent wind, and the atmosphere was filled with smoke caused by numerous fires in the forest. Where the Xingú comes in, the Amazon is ten miles wide, but it is soon divided by a series of islands, the first of which is Grand Island. Twenty miles below Porto do Moz is Gurupá, where we took in rubber. The village, nearly as inanimate as Pompeii, consists of one street, half deserted, built on an isolated site. Forty miles below Gurupá we left the Amazon proper, turning to the right down a narrow channel leading into the river Pará. The forest became more luxuriant, the palms especially increasing in number and beauty. At one place there was a forest of palms, a singularity, for trees of the same order are seldom associated. The forest, densely packed and gloomy, stands on very low, flat banks of hard river mud. Scarcely a sign of animal life was visible; but, as we progressed, dusky faces peered out of the woods; little shanties belonging to the seringeros, or rubber-makers, here and there broke the solitude, and occasionally a large group of half-clad natives greeted us from the shore. A labyrinth of channels connects the Amazon with the Pará; the steamers usually take the Tajapurú. This natural canal is of great depth, and from fifty to one hundred yards in width; so that, hemmed in by two green walls, eighty feet-high, we seemed to be sailing through a deep gorge; in some places it was so narrow it was nearly overarched by the foliage. One hundred and twenty-five miles from Gurupá is Breves, a busy little town on the southwest corner of the great island of Marajó. The inhabitants, mostly Portuguese, are engaged in the rubber trade; the Indians in the vicinity manufacture fancy earthen-ware and painted cuyas or calabashes.
Soon after leaving Breves we entered the Pará River, which suddenly begins with the enormous width of eight miles. It is, however, shallow, and contains numerous shoals and islands. It is properly an estuary, immense volumes of fresh water flowing into it from the south. The tides are felt through its entire length of one hundred and sixty miles, but the water is only slightly brackish. It has a dingy orange-brown color. A narrow blue line on our left, miles away, was all that was visible, at times, of the island of Marajó; and as we passed the broad mouth of the Tocantíns, we were struck with the magnificent sea-like expanse, for there was scarcely a point of mainland to be seen.
![[Pará.]](#8543082027330898494_253.png.id-8963625004383157922.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
At 4 P.M., eighteen hours from Breves, we entered the peaceful bay of Goajara, and anchored in front of the city of Pará. Beautiful was the view of the city from the harbor in the rays of the declining sun. The towering spires and cupolas, the palatial government buildings, the long row of tall warehouses facing a fleet of schooners, ships, and steamers, and pretty white villas in the suburbs, nestling in luxuriant gardens, were to us, who had just come down the Andes from mediæval Quito, the ultima thule of civilization. We seemed to have stepped at once from the Amazon to New York or London. We might, indeed, say ne plus ultra in one respect—we had crossed the continent, and Pará was the terminus of our wanderings, the end of romantic adventures, of privations and perils. We were kindly met on the pier by Mr. James Henderson, an elderly Scotchman, whom a long residence in Pará, a bottomless fund of information, and a readiness to serve an Anglo-Saxon, have made an invaluable cicerone. We shot through the devious, narrow streets to the Hotel Diana, where we made our toilet, for our habiliments, too, had reached their ultima thule. As La Condamine said on his arrival at Quito: "Je me trouvai hors d'état de paroitre en public avec décence."
The same year which saw Shakspeare carried to his grave beside the Avon witnessed the founding of Pará, or, speaking more respectfully, of Santa Maria de Belém do Gram Pará. The city stands on a low elbow of land formed by the junction of the rivers Guamá and Pará, seventy-five miles from the ocean. The great forest comes close up to the suburbs; and, in fact, vegetation is so rapid the city fathers have a hard struggle to keep the jungle out of the streets. The river in front is twenty miles wide, but the vast expanse is broken by numerous islets. Ships of any size will float within, one hundred and fifty yards of the shore. All passengers and goods are landed by boats at the custom-house wharf. The city is regularly laid out, there are several public squares, and many of the streets, especially in the commercial part, are well paved. Magnificent avenues, lined with silk-cotton trees, cocoa-palms, and almonds, lead out to beautiful rocinhas, or country residences, of one story, but having spacious verandas. The President's house, built in the Italian style, whose marble staircase is a wonder to Brazil; the six large churches, including the cathedral, after patterns from Lisbon; the post-office, custom-house, and convent-looking warehouses on the mole—these are the most prominent buildings. The architecture is superior to that of Quito. The houses, generally two-storied, are tiled, plastered, and whitewashed or painted; the popular colors are red, yellow, and blue. A few have porcelain facing. The majority have elegant balconies and glass windows, but not all the old projecting lattice casements have disappeared. Some of the buildings bear the marks of the cannonading in the Revolution of 1835. Instead of bedrooms and beds, the largest apartments and verandahs have hooks in the wall for hammocks. A carpeted, cushioned room is seldom seen, and is out of place in the tropics. Coaches and gas are supplanting ox-carts and candles. There are two hotels, but scant accommodations for travelers. Beef is almost the only meat used; the fish are poor and dear; the oysters are horrible. Bananas, oranges, and coffee are the best native productions on the table.
The population of Pará is thirty-five thousand, or double what it was when Wallace and Bates entered it twenty years ago. It is the largest city on the largest river in the world, and the capital of a province ten times the size of New York State. The enterprising, wealthy class consists of Portuguese and pure Brazilians, with a few English, Germans, French, and North Americans. The multitude is an amalgamation of Portuguese, Indian, and Negro. The diversity of races, and the mingled dialects of the Amazon and Europe, make an attractive street scene. Side by side we see the corpulent Brazilian planter, the swarthy Portuguese trader, the merry Negro porter, and the apathetic Indian boatman. Some of the more recent offspring are dressed à la Adam before the fall; numbers wear only a shirt or skirt; the negro girls who go about the streets with trays of sweetmeats on their heads are loosely yet prettily dressed in pure white, with massive gilded chains and earrings; but the middle and upper classes generally follow Paris fashions. The mechanic arts are in the hands of free Negroes and Indians, mulattoes and mamelucos.[144] Commerce is carried on almost exclusively by Portuguese
Fruit Peddlers.and other foreigners. Dry-goods come chiefly from England and France; groceries from Portugal; flour and hardware from the United States. The principal exports are rubber, cacao, coffee,[145] sugar, cotton, Brazil nuts, sarsaparilla, vanilla, farina, copaiba, tobacco, rum, hides, fish, parrots, and monkeys.[146] Pará exceeds in the number of its indigenous commodities any other port in the world, but the trade at present is insignificant when we consider the vast extent and resources of the country. The city can never have a rival at the mouth of the Amazon, and is destined to become a great emporium. But Brazilian legislation stands in the way. Heavy import duties are charged—from 35 to 45 per cent.; and on the 1st of January, 1868, it was ordered that 15 per cent. must be paid in English gold. The consequence has been that gold has risen from 28 to 30 above par, creating an additional tax. Exportation is equally discouraging. There is a duty of nine per cent. to be paid at the custom-house, and seven per cent. more at the consulado. But this is not the sum total. Those who live outside of the province of Pará, say above Obidos, must first pay an import of thirteen per cent. to get their produce into Pará. For example: up the river crude rubber can be bought for twenty-five cents a pound; the trader pays twenty-five cents an arroba (thirty-two pounds) for transportation to Pará from Santarem, exclusive of canoe hire and shipping; thirteen per cent. duty in entering Pará, ten per cent. to the commission merchant, and sixteen per cent. more as export tax; making a total loss on labor of about fifty per cent. Brazil abounds with the most valuable woods in the world, but is prevented from competing with other nations by this system of self-strangulation. In 1867 the import duty on timber was twelve per cent. Though situated on the edge of a boundless forest, Pará consumes large quantities of North American pine. There is not a grist-mill on the Amazon, and only two or three saw-mills. A dozen boards of red cedar (a very common timber) costs 60$000 per thousand (about thirty dollars) at Santarem. There is no duty on goods going to Peru. The current money, besides foreign gold, consists of copper coins and imperial treasury notes. The basis of calculation is the imaginary rey, equivalent to half a mill. The coins in use are the vintem (twenty reys), answering to our cent, the half vintem, and double vintem. The currency has so fluctuated in value that many of the pieces have been restamped. Fifty vintems make a milrey, expressed thus: 1$000. This is the smallest paper issue. Unfortunately, the notes may suddenly fall below par. As a great many counterfeits made in Portugal are in circulation, the government recalls the issue which has been counterfeited, notifying holders, by the provincial papers, that all such bills must be exchanged for a new issue within six months. Those not brought in at the end of that period lose ten per cent. of their value, and ten per cent. for each following month, until the value of the note is nil. The result has been that many persons trading up the river have lost heavily, and now demand hard money. Change is very scarce in Pará.
The province of Pará is governed by a president chosen at Rio, and every four years sends representatives to the Imperial Parliament. The Constitution of Brazil is very liberal; every householder, without distinction of race or color, has a vote, and may work his way up to high position. There are two drawbacks—the want of intelligence and virtue in the people, and the immense staff of officials employed to administer the government. There are also many formalities which are not only useless, but a hinderance to prosperity. Thus, the internal trade of a province carried on by Brazilian subjects is not exempt from the passport system. A foreigner finds as much trouble in getting his passport en règle in Pará as in Vienna. The religion of Pará is Romish, and not so tolerant as in Rio. We arrived during festa. (When did a traveler enter a Portuguese town on any other than a feast day?) That night was made hideous with rockets, fire-crackers, cannon, and bells. "Music, noise, and fireworks," says Wallace, "are the three essentials to please a Brazilian populace." The most celebrated shrine in Northern Brazil is Our Lady of Nazareth. The little chapel stands about a mile out of the city, and is now rebuilding for the third time. The image is a doll about the size of a girl ten years old, wearing a silver crown and a dress of blue silk glittering with golden stars. Hosts of miracles are attributed to Our Lady, and we were shown votive offerings and models of legs, arms, heads, etc., etc., the grateful in memoriam of wonderful cures, besides a boat whose crew were saved by invoking the protection of Mary. The facilities for edication are improving. There are several seminaries in Pará, of which the chief is the Lyceo da Capital. Too many youths, however, as in Quito, are satisfied with a little rhetoric and law. The city supports four newspapers.
Paráenses may well be proud of their delightful climate. Wallace says the thermometer ranges from 74° to 87°; our observation made the mean annual temperature 80.2°. The mean daily temperature does not vary more than two or three degrees. The climate is more equable than that of any other observed part of the New World.[147] The greatest heat is reached at two o'clock, but it is never so oppressive as in New York. The greater the heat, the stronger the sea-breeze; and in three hundred out of three hundred and sixty-five days, the air is farther cooled by an afternoon shower. The rainiest month is April; the dryest, October or November. Lying in the delta of a great river, in the middle of the tropics, and half surrounded by swamps, its salubrity is remarkable. We readily excuse the proverb, "Quem vai para Pará para" ("He who goes to Pará stops there"); and we might have made it good, had we not been tempted by the magnificent steamer "South America," which came up from Rio on the way to New York. On the moonlit night of the 7th of January, when the ice-king had thrown his white robes over the North, we turned our backs upon the glimmering lights of Pará, and noiselessly as a canoe glided down the great river. As the sun rose for the last time to us upon the land of perpetual verdure, our gallant ship was plowing the mottled waters on the edge of the ocean—mingled yellow patches of the Amazon and dark streaks from the Pará floating on the Atlantic green. Far behind us we could see the breakers dashing against the Braganza Banks; a moment after Cape Magoary dropped beneath the horizon, and with it South America vanished from our view.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
The River Amazon.— Its Source and Magnitude.— Tributaries and Tints.— Volume and Current.— Rise and Fall.— Navigation.— Expeditions on the Great River.
Near the silver mines of Cerro Pasco, in the little Lake of Lauricocha, just below the limit of perpetual winter, rises the "King of Waters."[148] For the first five hundred miles it flows northerly, in a continuous series of cataracts and rapids, through a deep valley between the parallel Cordilleras of Peru. Upon reaching the frontier of Ecuador, it turns to the right, and runs easterly two thousand five hundred miles across the great equatorial plain of the continent.[149] No other river flows in the same latitude, and retains, therefore, the same climatic conditions for so great a distance. The breadth of the Amazon, also, is well proportioned to its extraordinary length. At Tabatinga, two thousand miles above its mouth, it is a mile and a half wide; at the entrance of the Madeira, it is three miles; below Santarem, it is ten; and if the Pará be considered a part of the great river, it fronts the Atlantic one hundred and eighty miles. Brazilians proudly call it the Mediterranean of the New World. Its vast expanse, presenting below Teffé magnificent reaches, with blank horizons, and forming a barrier between different species of animals; its system of back channels, joining the tributaries, and linking a series of lagunes too many ever to be named; its network of navigable waters stretching over one third of the continent; its oceanic fauna—porpoises and manatis, gulls and frigate-birds—remind the traveler of a great inland sea, with endless ramifications, rather than a river. The side-channels through the forest, called by the Indians igarapés, or canoe-paths, are one of the characteristic features of the Amazon.[150] They often run to a great distance parallel to the great river, and intersecting the tributaries, so that one can go from Santarem a thousand miles up the Amazon without once entering it. These natural highways will be of immense advantage for inter-communication.
![[Igarapé, or Canoe-path.]](#8543082027330898494_263.png.id-6300674622755813710.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
But extraordinary as is this network of natural canals, the tributaries of the Amazon are still more wonderful. They are so numerous they appear on the map like a thousand ribbons streaming from a main mast, and many of the obscure affluents, though large as the Hudson, are unknown to geography. From three degrees north to twenty degrees south, every river that flows down the eastern slope of the Andes is a contributor—as though all the rivers between Mexico and Mount Hooker united their waters in the Mississippi. While the great river of the northern continent drains an area of one million two hundred thousand square miles, the Amazon (not including the Tocantíns) is spread over a million more, or over a surface equal to two thirds of all Europe. Let us journey around the grand trunk and take a glimpse of the main branches.
The first we meet in going up the left bank is the Rio Negro. It rises in the Sierra Tunuhy, an isolated mountain group in the llanos of Colombia, and enters the Amazon at Manáos, a thousand miles from the sea. The upper part, down to the parallel of one degree north, has a very rapid current; at San Gabriel are the first rapids in ascending; between San Gabriel and Barcellos the rate is not over two or three miles per hour; between Barcellos and Manáos it is a deep but sluggish river, and in the annual rise of the Amazon its waters are stagnant for several hundred miles up, or actually flow back. Its extreme length is twelve hundred miles, and its greatest breadth is at Barcellos, where it is twelve or fifteen miles. Excepting this middle section, the usual breadth of the Negro below the equatorial line is about one mile. It is joined to the Orinoco by the navigable Cassiquiari,[151] a natural canal three fourths of a mile wide, and a portage of only two hours divides the head of its tributary, the Branco, from the Essequibo of Guiana. The Negro yields to commerce coffee, cacao, farina, sarsaparilla, Brazil nuts, pitch, piassaba, and valuable woods. The commerce of Brazil with Venezuela by the Rio Negro amounted in 1867 to $22,000, of which $9000 was the value of imports. The principal villages above Manáos are San Miguel and Moroa (which contain about fifty dwellings each), Tireguin, Barcellos, Toma, San Carlos, Coana, San Gabriel, and Santa Isabel.
The next great affluent is the Japurá. It rises in the mountains of New Granada, and, flowing southeasterly a thousand miles, enters the Amazon opposite Ega, five hundred miles above Manáos. Its principal mouth is three hundred feet wide, but it has a host of distributing channels, the extremes of which are two hundred miles apart. Its current is only three quarters of a mile an hour, and it has been ascended by canoes five hundred miles. A natural canal like the Cassiquiari is said to connect it with the Orinoco. The products of the Japurá are sarsaparilla, copaiba, rubber, cacao, farina, Brazil nuts, moira-piránga—a hard, fine-grained wood of a rich, cherry-red color—and carajurú, a brilliant scarlet dye.
Parallel to the Japurá is the Putumayo or Issá. Its source is the Lake of San Pablo, at the foot of the volcano of Pasto; its mouth, as given by Herndon, is half a mile broad, and its current two and three fourths miles an hour.
Farther west are the Napo and Pastassa, starting from the volcanoes of Quito. The former is nearly seven hundred miles long, navigable five hundred. The latter is an unnavigable torrent. One of its branches, the Topo, is one continued rapid; "of those who have fallen into it, only one has come out alive." Another, the Patate, rises near Iliniza, runs through the plain to a little south of Cotopaxi, receives all streams flowing from the eastern side of the western Cordillera from Iliniza to Chimborazo, and unites near Tunguragua with the Chambo, which rises near Sangaí. Castelnau and Bates saw pumice floating on the Amazon; it was probably brought from Cotopaxi by the Pastassa.
Crossing the Marañon, and going eastward, we first pass the Huallaga, a rapid river of the size of the Cumberland, coming down the Peruvian Andes from an altitude of eight thousand six hundred feet, and entering the great river nearly opposite the Pastassa. Its mouth is a mile wide, and for a hundred miles up its average depth is three fathoms. In July, August, and September the steamers are not able to ascend to Yurimaguas. Canoe navigation begins at Tinga Maria, three hundred miles from Lima. The fertile plain through which the river flows is very attractive to an agriculturist. Cotton is gathered six months after sowing, and rice in five months. At Tarapoto a large amount of cotton-cloth is woven for export.
The next great tributary from the south is the Ucayali. This magnificent stream originates near ancient Cuzco, and has a fall of .87 of a foot per mile, and a length nearly equal to that of the Negro. For two hundred and fifty miles above its mouth it averages half a mile in width, and has a current of three miles an hour. At Sarayacu it is twenty feet deep. The Ucayali is navigable for at least seven hundred miles. The "Morona," a steamer of five hundred tons, has been up to the entrance of the Pachitéa in the dry season, a distance of six hundred miles, and in the wet season ascended that branch to Mayro. A small Peruvian steamer has recently ascended the Tambo to within sixty miles of Fort Ramon, or seven hundred and seventy-three miles from Nauta.
Leaving the Ucayali, we pass by six rivers rising in the unknown lands of Northern Bolivia: the Javarí, navigable by steam for two hundred and fifty miles; the sluggish Jutahí, half a mile broad and four hundred miles long; the Juruá, four times the size of our Connecticut, and navigable nearly its entire length; the unhealthy, little-known Teffé and Coary; and the Purus, a deep, slow river, over a thousand miles long, and open to navigation half way to its source. Soldan and Pinto claim to have ascended the Javarí, in a steamer, about one thousand miles, and it is said Chandlers went up the Purus one thousand eight hundred miles. The Teffé is narrow, with a strong current. Of all these six rivers, the Purus is the most important. It is probably the Amaru-mayu, or "serpent-river," of the Incas, and its affluents enjoy the privilege of draining the waters of those beautiful Andes which formed the eastern boundary of the empire of Manco Capac, and fertilizing the romantic valley of Paucar-tambo, or "Inn of the Flowery Meadow." The banks of this noble stream are now held by the untamable Chunchos; but the steam-whistle will accomplish what the rifle can not. The Purus communicates with the Madeira, proving the absence of rapids and of intervening mountains.
Sixty miles below the confluence of the Negro, the mighty Madeira, the largest tributary of the Amazon, blends its milky waters with the turbid king of rivers. It is about two thousand miles in length; one branch, the Beni, rising near Lake Titicaca, drains the fertile valleys of Yungus and Apollo, rich in cinchona, chocolate, and gold; the Marmoré springs from the vicinity of Chuquisaca, within fifteen miles of a source of the Paraguay, traversing the territory of the brave and intelligent Moxos; while the Itinez washes down the gold and diamonds of Matto Grosso. Were it not for the cascade four hundred and eighty miles from its mouth, large vessels might sail from the Amazon into the very heart of Bolivia. When full, it has a three-mile current, and at its junction with the Amazon it is two miles wide and sixty-six feet deep. Five hundred miles from its mouth it is a mile wide and one hundred feet deep. It contains numerous islands, and runs in a comparatively straight course. It received its name from the vast quantity of drift-wood often seen floating down. The value of Brazilian commerce with Bolivia by the Madeira was, in 1867, $43,000.[152]
At Santarem the Amazon receives another great tributary, the Tapajos (or Rio Preto, as the Portuguese call it), a thousand miles long, and, for the last eighty miles, from four to twelve miles in breadth. It rises amid the glittering mines of Matto Grosso, only twenty miles from the headwaters of the Rio Plata, and flows rapidly down through a magnificent hilly country to the last cataract, which is one hundred and sixty miles above Santarem, and is the end of navigation to sailing vessels. Thence to the Amazon it has little current and no great depth. From Santarem to Diamantino it is about twenty-six days' travel. Large quantities of sarsaparilla, rubber, tonka beans, mandioca, and guarana are brought down this river.
Parallel to the Tapajos, and about two hundred miles distant, flows the Xingú. It rises in the heart of the empire, has the length of the Ohio and Monongahela, and can be navigated one hundred and fifty miles. This is the last great tributary of the Amazon proper; if, however, we consider the Pará as only one of the outlets of the great river, we may then add to the list the grand Tocantíns.[153] This splendid river has its source in the rich province of Minas (the source, also, of the San Francisco and Uruguay), not six hundred miles from Rio Janeiro—a region possessing the finest climate in Brazil, and yielding diamonds and rubies, the sapphire, topaz and opal, gold, silver, and petroleum. The Tocantíns is sixteen hundred miles long, and ten miles broad at its mouth; but, unfortunately, rapids commence one hundred and twenty miles above Cametá. The Araguaia, its main branch, is, according to Castelnau, one mile wide, with a current of three fourths of a mile an hour.
Here are six tributaries, all of them superior to any river in Europe, outside of Russia, save the Danube, and ten times greater than any stream on the west slope of the Andes. While the Arkansas joins the Mississippi four hundred miles above New Orleans, the Madeira, of equal length, enters the Amazon nine hundred miles from Pará. But, vast as are these tributary streams, they seem to make no impression on the Amazon; they are lost like brooks in the ocean. Our ideas of the magnitude of the great river are wonderfully increased when we see the Madeira coming down two thousand miles, yet its enormous contribution imperceptible half way across the giant river; or the dark waters of the Negro creeping along the shore, and becoming undistinguishable five miles from its mouth. Though the Amazon carries a larger amount of sediment than any other river, it has no true delta, the archipelago in its mouth (for, like our own St. Lawrence, it has its Bay of a Thousand Isles) not being an alluvial formation, but having a rocky base. The great island of Marajó, in physical configuration, resembles the mainland of Guiana. The deltoid outlet is confined to the tributaries, nearly all of them, like "the disembogning Nile," emptying themselves by innumerable embouchures. To several tributaries the Amazon gives water before it receives their tribute. Thus, by ascending the Negro sixty miles, we have the singular spectacle of water pouring in from the Amazon through the Guariba Channel.
The waters of this great river system are of divers tints. The Amazon, as it leaps from the Andes, and as far down as the Ucayali, is blue, passing into a clear olive-green; likewise the Pastassa, Huallaga, Tapajos, Xingú, and Tocantíns. Below the Ucayali it is of a pale, yellowish olive; the Madeira,[154] Purus, Juruá, Jutahí, Javarí, Ucayali, Napo, Iça, and Japurá are of similar color. The Negro, Coary, and Teffé are black. Humboldt observes that "a cooler atmosphere, fewer musquitoes, greater salubrity, and absence of crocodiles, as also of fish, mark the region of these black rivers." This is not altogether true. The Amazon throughout is healthy, being swept by the trade-winds. The branches, which are not so constantly refreshed by the ocean breezes, are occasionally malarious; the "white-water" tributaries, except when they have a slack current in the dry season, have the best reputation, while intermittent fevers are nearly confined to the dark-colored streams. Much of the sickness on these tropical waters, however, is due to exposure and want of proper food rather than to the climate. The river system of South America will favorably compare, in point of salubrity, with the river system of its continental neighbor.[155]
As we might expect, the volume of the Amazon is beyond all parallel. Half a million cubic feet of water pour through the narrows of Obidos every second, and fresh water may be taken up from the Atlantic far out of sight of land. The fall of the main easterly trunk of the Amazon is about six and a half inches per mile, equivalent to a slope of 21'—the same as that of the Nile, and one third that of the Mississippi. Below Jaen there are thirty cataracts and rapids; at the Pongo de Manseriche, at the altitude of 1164 feet (according to Humboldt), it bids adieu to mountain scenery. Between Tabatinga and the ocean the average current is three miles an hour. It diminishes toward Pará, and is every where at a minimum in the dry season; but it always has the "swing" of an ocean current.
Though not so rapid as the Mississippi, the Amazon is deeper. There are seven fathoms of water at Nauta (2200 miles from the Atlantic), eleven at Tabatinga, and twenty-seven on the average below Mandáos.[156]
The Amazon and its branches are subject to an annual rise of great regularity. It does not take place simultaneously over the whole river, but there is a succession of freshets. At the foot of the Andes the rise commences in January; at Ega it begins about the end of February. Coinciding with this contribution from the west, the October rains on the highlands of Bolivia and Brazil swell the southern tributaries, whose accumulated floods reach the main stream in February; and the latter, unable to discharge the avalanche of waters, inundates a vast area, and even crowds up the northern tributaries. As the Madeira, Tapajos, and Purus subside, the Negro, fed by the spring rains in Guiana and Venezuela, presses downward till the central stream rolls back the now sluggish affluents from the south. There is, therefore, a rhythmical correspondence in the rise and fall of the arms of the Amazon, so that this great fresh-water sea sways alternately north and south; while the onward swell in the grand trunk is a progressive undulation eastward. As the Cambridge Professor well says: "In this oceanic river the tidal action has an annual instead of a daily ebb and flow; it obeys a larger orb, and is ruled by the sun and not the moon." As the southern affluents have the greatest volume, the Amazon receives its largest accession after the sun has been in the southern hemisphere. The rise is gradual, increasing to one foot per day. One lowland after another sinks beneath the flood; the forest stands up to its middle in the water, and shady dells are transformed into navigable creeks.[157] Swarms of turtles leave the river for the inland lakes; flocks of wading birds migrate to the banks of the Negro and Orinoco to enjoy the cloudless sky of the dry season; alligators swim where a short time before the jaguar lay in wait for the tapir; and the natives, unable to fish, huddle in their villages to spend the "winter of their discontent." The Lower Amazon is at its minimum in September or October. The rise above this lowest level is between seven and eight fathoms. If we consider the average width of the Amazon two miles, we shall have a surface of at least five thousand square miles raised fifty feet by the inundation. An extraordinary freshet is expected every sixth year.
The Atlantic tide is perceptible at Obidos, four hundred and fifty miles above Pará, and Bates observed it up the Tapajos, five hundred and thirty miles distant. The tide, however, does not flow up; there is only a rising and falling of the waters—the momentary check of the great river in its conflict with the ocean. The "bore," or piroróco, is a colossal wave at spring tide, rising suddenly along the whole width of the Amazon to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, and then collapsing with a frightful roar.
The Amazon presents an unparalleled extent of water communication. So many and far reaching are its tributaries, it touches every country on the continent except Chile and Patagonia. South America is well nigh quartered by its river system: the Amazon starts within sixty miles of the Pacific; the Tapajos and Madeira reach down to the La Plata; while the Negro mingles its waters with those of the Orinoco. The tributaries also communicate with each other by intersecting canals, so numerous that central Amazonia is truly a cluster of islands. Wagons and railroads will be out of the question for ages hence in this aquatic basin. No other river runs in so deep a channel to so great a distance. For two thousand miles from its month there are not less than seven fathoms of water. Not a fall interrupts navigation on the main stream for two thousand five hundred miles; and it so happens that while the current is ever east (for even the ocean can not send up its tide against it), there is a constant trade-wind westward, so that navigation up or down has always something in its favor. As a general rule, the breeze is not so strong during the rise of the river. There are at least six thousand miles of navigation for large vessels. It was lately said that the Mississippi carries more vessels in a month, and the Yang-tse-Kiang in a day, than the Amazon all the year round. But this is no longer true. Steamers already ascend regularly to the port of Moyabamba, which is less than twenty days' travel from the Pacific coast. The Amazon was opened to the world September 7, 1867; and the time can not be far distant when the exhaustless wealth of the great valley—its timber, fruit, medicinal plants, gums, and dye-stuffs—will be emptied by this great highway into the commercial lap of the Atlantic; when crowded steamers will plow all these waters—yellow, black, and blue—and the sloths and alligators, monkeys and jaguars, toucans and turtles, will have a bad time of it.
Officially free to the world, the great river is, however, for the present practically closed to foreign shipping, as it is difficult to compete with the Brazilian steamers. For, by the contract which lasts till 1877, the company is allowed an annual subsidy of $4,000,000, which has since been increased by 250 milreys per voyage. In 1867 the steamers and sailing vessels on the Amazon were divided as follows, though it must be remembered that few of the foreign ships, excepting Portuguese, ascended beyond Pará:
| Nationality. | No. | Tonnage | |
| United States | 37 | 39,901 | ½ |
| Brazil | 49 | 28,639 | |
| England | 52 | 13,276 | ½ |
| Portugal | 24 | 7,871 | |
| France | 18 | 5,344 | |
| Prussia | 4 | 889 | ½ |
| Holland | 3 | 538 | |
| Denmark | 2 | 525 | |
| Holstein | 3 | 498 | |
| Norway | 1 | 135 | |
| Spain | 1 | 90 |
The vessels carrying the stars and stripes exported from Pará to the value of 3,235,073$950, or eight times the amount carried by Brazilian craft, and 50,000 milreys more than England. While, therefore, the Imperial Company has the monopoly of trade on the Amazon, our ships distribute one third of the products to the world. The United States is the natural commercial partner with Brazil; for not only is New York the half-way house between Pará and Liverpool, but a chip thrown into the sea at the mouth of the Amazon will float close by Cape Hatteras. The official value of exports from Pará in 1867 was 9,926,912$557, or about five millions of dollars, an increase of one million over 1866.
The early expeditions into the Valley of the Amazon, in search of the "Gilded King," are the most romantic episodes in the history of Spanish discovery. To the wild wanderings of these worshipers of gold succeeded the more earnest explorations of the Jesuits, those pioneers of geographical knowledge. Pinzon discovered the mouth of the river in 1500; but Orellana, who came down the Napo in 1541, was the first to navigate its waters. Twenty years later Aguirre descended from Cuzco; in 1637, Texeira ascended to Quito by the Napo; Cabrera descended from Peru in 1639; Juan de Palacios by the Napo in 1725; La Condamine from Jaen in 1744, and Madame Godin by the Pastassa in 1769. The principal travelers who preceded us in crossing the continent this century were Mawe (1828), Pœppig (1831), Smyth (1834), Von Tschudi (1845), Castelnau (1846), Herndon and Gibbon (1851), and Marcoy (1867), who came down through Peru, and a Spanish commission (Almagro, Spada, Martinez, and Isern), who made the Napo transit in 1865. To Spix and Martius (1820), Bates and Wallace (1848-1857), Azevedo and Pinto (1862-1864), and Agassiz (1865), the world is indebted for the most scientific surveys of the river in Brazil.
Such is the Amazon, the mightiest river in the world, rising amid the loftiest volcanoes on the globe, and flowing through a forest unparalleled in extent. "It only wants (wrote Father Acuña), in order to surpass the Ganges, Euphrates, and the Nile in felicity, that its source should be in Paradise." As if one name were not sufficient for its grandeur, it has three appellations: Marañon, Solimoens, and Amazon; the first applied to the part in Peru, the second to the portion between Tabatinga and Manáos, and the third to all below the Rio Negro.[158] We have no proper conception of the vast dimensions of the thousand-armed river till we sail for weeks over its broad bosom, beholding it sweeping disdainfully by the great Madeira as if its contribution was of no account, discharging into the sea one hundred thousand cubic feet of water per second more than our Mississippi, rolling its turbid waves thousands of miles exactly as it pleases,—plowing a new channel every year, with tributaries twenty miles wide, and an island in its mouth twice the size of Massachusetts.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
The Valley of the Amazon.— Its Physical Geography.— Geology.— Climate.— Vegetation.
From the Atlantic shore to the foot of the Andes, and from the Orinoco to the Paraguay, stretches the great Valley of the Amazon. In this vast area the United States might be packed without touching its boundaries. It could contain the basins of the Mississippi, the Danube, the Nile, and the Hoang-Ho. It is girt on three sides by a wall of mountains: on the north are the highlands of Guiana and Venezuela; on the west stand the Andes; on the south rise the table-lands of Matto Grosso. The valley begins at such an altitude, that on the western edge vegetation differs as much from the vegetation at Pará, though in the same latitude, as the flora of Canada from the flora of the West Indies.
The greater part of the region drained by the Amazon, however, is not a valley proper, but an extensive plain. From the mouth of the Napo to the ocean, a distance of eighteen hundred miles in a straight line, the slope is one foot in five miles.[159] At Coca, on the Napo, the altitude is 850 feet, according to our observations; at Tinga Maria. on the Huallaga, it is 2200 according to Herndon; at the junction of the Negro with the Cassiquiari, it is 400 according to Wallace; at the mouth of the Marmoré, it is 800 according to Gibbon; at the Pongo de Manseriche, below all rapids, it is 1160 according to Humboldt; and at the junction of Araguaia with the Tocantíns, it is 200 according to Castelnau. These barometrical measurements represent the basin of the Amazon as a shallow trough lying parallel to the equator, the southern side having double the inclination of the northern, and the whole gently sloping eastward. Farthermore, the channel of the great river is not in the centre of the basin, but lies to the north of it: thus, the hills of Almeyrim rise directly from the river, while the first falls on the Tocantíns, Xingú, and Tapajos are nearly two hundred miles above their mouths; the rapids of San Gabriel, on the Negro, are one hundred and seventy-five miles from the Amazon, while the first obstruction to the navigation of the Madeira is a hundred miles farther from the great river.
Of the creation of this valley we have already spoken. No region on the face of the globe of equal extent has such a monotonous geology. Around the rim of the basin are the outcroppings of a cretaceous deposit; this rests on the hidden mezozoic and palæozoic strata which form the ribs of the Andes. Above it, covering the whole basin from New Granada to the Argentine Republic,[160] are the following formations: first, a stratified accumulation of sand; second, a series of laminated clays, of divers colors, without a pebble; third, a fine, compact sandstone; fourth, a coarse, porous sandstone, so ferruginous as to resemble bog iron-ore. This last was, originally, a thousand feet in thickness, but was worn down, perhaps, in some sudden escape of the pent-up waters of the valley. The table-topped hills of Almeyrim are almost the sole relics.[161] Finally, over the undulating surface of the denuded sandstone an ochraceous, unstratified sandy clay was deposited.
It is a question to what period this great accumulation is to be assigned. Humboldt called it "Old Red Sandstone;" Martius pronounced it "New Red;" Agassiz says "Drift"—the glacial deposit brought down from the Andes and worked over by the melting of the ice which transported it.[162] The Professor farther declares that "these deposits are fresh-water deposits; they show no sign of a marine origin; no sea-shells nor remains of any marine animal have as yet been found throughout their whole extent; tertiary deposits have never been observed in any part of the Amazonian basin." This was true up to 1867. Neither Bates, Wallace, nor Agassiz found any marine fossil on the banks of the great river. But there is danger in building a theory on negative evidence. These explorers ascended no farther than Tabatinga. Two hundred miles west of that fort is the little Peruvian village of Pebas, at the confluence of the Ambiyacu. We came down the Napo and Marañon, and stopped at this place. Here we discovered a fossiliferous bed intercalated between the variegated clays so peculiar to the Amazon. It was crowded with marine tertiary shells! This was Pebas vs. Cambridge. It was unmistakable proof that the formation was not drift, but tertiary; not of fresh, but salt water origin. The species, as determined by W.M. Gabb, Esq., of Philadelphia, are: Neritina pupa, Turbonilla minuscula, Mesalia Ortoni, Tellina Amazonenis, Pachydon obliqua, and P. tenua.[163] All of these are new forms excepting the first, and the last is a new genus. It is a singular fact that the Neritina is now living in the West India waters, and the species found at Pebas retains its peculiar markings. So that we have some ground for the supposition that not many years ago there was a connection between the Caribbean Sea and the Upper Amazon; in other words, that Guiana has only very lately ceased to be an island. There is no mountain range on the water-shed between the Orinoco and the Negro and Japurá, but the three rivers are linked by natural canals.[164] Interstratified with the clay deposit are seams of a highly bituminous lignite; we traced it from near the mouth of the Curaray on the Rio Napo to Loreto on the Marañon, a distance of about four hundred miles. It occurs also at Iquitos. This is farther testimony against the glacial theory of the formation of the Amazonian Valley. The paucity of shells in such a vast deposit is not astonishing. It is as remarkable in the similar accumulation of reddish argillaceous earth, called "Pampean mud," which overspreads the Rio Plata region.[165] Some of the Pampa shells, like those at Pebas, are proper to brackish water, and occur only on the highest banks. The Pampean formation is believed by Mr. Darwin to be an estuary or delta deposit. We will mention, in this connection, that silicified wood is found at the head waters of the Napo; the Indians use it instead of flint (which does not occur there) in striking a light. Darwin found silicified trees on the same slope of the Andes as the Uspallata Pass.
The climatology of the Valley of the Amazon is as simple as its physical geography. There is no circle of the seasons as with us—nature moves in a straight line. The daily order of the weather is uniform for months. There is very little difference between the dry and hot seasons; the former, lasting from July to December, is varied with showers, and the latter, from January to June, with sunny days, while the daily temperature is the same within two or three degrees throughout the year. On the water-shed between the Orinoco and Negro it rains throughout the year, but most water falls between May and November, the coolest season in that region. On the Middle Negro the wet season extends from June 1st to December 1st, and is the most sultry time.
Comparatively few insects, birds, or beasts are to be seen in summer; but it is the harvest-time of the inhabitants, who spend the glorious weather rambling over the plaias and beaches, fishing and turtle-hunting. The middle of September is the midsummer of the valley. The rainy season, or winter, is ushered in by violent thunder-storms from the west. It is then that the woods are eloquent with buzzing insects, shrill cicadas, screaming parrots, chattering monkeys, and roaring jaguars. The greatest activity of animal and vegetable life is in June and July. The heaviest rains fall in April, May, and June. Scarcely ever is there a continuous rain for twenty-four hours. Castelnau witnessed at Pebas a fall of not less than thirty inches in a single storm. The greatest amount noticed in New York during the whole month of September was 12.2 inches. The humidity of the atmosphere, as likewise the luxuriance of vegetation and the abundance and beauty of animal forms, increases from the Atlantic to the Andes. At the foot of the Andes, Pœppig found that the most refined sugar in a few days dissolved into sirup, and the best gunpowder became liquid even when inclosed in canisters. So we found the Napo steaming with vapor. Fogs, however, are rarely seen on the Amazon.
The animals and plants are not all simultaneously affected by the change of seasons. The trees retain their verdure through the dry veraō, and have no set time for renewing their foliage. There are a few trees, like Mongruba, which drop their leaves at particular seasons; but they are so few in number they create the impression of a few dead leaves in a thick-growing forest. Leaves are falling and flowers drooping all the year round. Each species, and, in some cases, each individual, has its own particular autumn and spring. There is no hibernation nor æstivation (except by land shells); birds have not one uniform time for nidification; and moulting extends from February to May.
Amazonia, though equatorially situated, has a temperate climate. It is cooler than Guinea or Guiana. This is owing to the constant evaporation from so much submerged land, and the ceaseless trade winds. The mean annual temperature of the air is about 81°.[166] The nights are always cool. There are no sudden changes, and no fiery "dog days." Venereal and cutaneous affections are found among the people; but they spring from an irregular life. A traveler on the slow black tributaries may take the tertiana, but only after weeks of exposure. Yellow fever and cholera seldom ascend the river above Pará; and on the Middle Amazon there are neither endemics nor epidemics, though the trades are feebly felt there, and the air is stagnant and sultry. According to Bates, swampy and weedy places on the Amazon are generally more healthy than dry ones. Whatever exceptions be taken to the branches, the main river is certainly as healthy as the Mississippi: the rapid current of the water and the continual movement of the air maintaining its salubrity. The few English residents (Messrs. Hislop, Jeffreys, and Hauxwell), who have lived here thirty or forty years, are as fresh and florid as if they had never left their native country. The native women preserve their beauty until late in life. Great is the contrast between the gloomy winters and dusty summers, the chilly springs and frosty autumns of the temperate zone, and the perennial beauty of the equator! No traveler on the Amazon would exchange what Wallace calls "the magic half-hour after sunset" for the long gray twilight of the north. "The man accustomed to this climate (wrote Herndon) is ever unwilling to give it up for a more bracing one."
The mineral kingdom is represented only by sand, clay, and loam. The solid rock (except the sandstone already mentioned) begins above the falls on the tributaries. The precious gems and metals are confined to the still higher lands of Goyaz, Matto Grosso, and the slopes of the Andes. The soil on the Lower Amazon is sandy; on the Solimoens and Marañon it is a stiff loam or vegetable mould, in many places twenty feet deep.
Both in botany and zoology, South America is a natural and strongly-marked division, quite as distinct from North America as from the Old World; and as there are no transverse barriers, there is a remarkable unity in the character of the vegetation. No spot on the globe contains so much vegetable matter as the Valley of the Amazon. From the grassy steppes of Venezuela to the treeless Pampas of Buenos Ayres, expands a sea of verdure, in which we may draw a circle of eleven hundred miles in diameter, which shall include an ever green, unbroken forest. There is a most bewildering diversity of grand and beautiful trees—a wild, unconquered race of vegetable giants, draped, festooned, corded, matted, and ribboned with climbing and creeping plants, woody and succulent, in endless variety. The exuberance of nature displayed in these million square acres of tangled, impenetrable forest offers a bar to civilization nearly as great as its sterility in the African deserts. A macheta is a necessary predecessor: the moment you land (and it is often difficult to get a footing on the bank), you are confronted by a wall of vegetation. Lithe lianas, starred with flowers, coil up the stately trees, and then hang down like strung jewels; they can be counted only by myriads, yet they are mere superfluities. The dense dome of green overhead is supported by crowded columns, often branchless for eighty feet. The reckless competition among both small and great adds to the solemnity and gloom of a tropical forest. Individual struggles with individual, and species with species, to monopolize the air, light, and soil. In the effort to spread their roots, some of the weaker sort, unable to find a footing, climb a powerful neighbor, and let their roots dangle in the air; while many a full-grown tree has been lifted up, as it were, in the strife, and now stands on the ends of its stilt-like roots, so that a man may walk upright between the roots and under the trunk.[167]
The mass of the forest on the banks of the great river is composed of palms (about thirty species[168]), leguminous or pod-bearing trees, colossal nut-trees, broad-leaved Musaceæ or bananas, and giant grasses. The most prominent palms are the architectural Pupunha, or "peach-palm," with spiny stems, drooping, deep green leaves, and bunches of mealy, nutritious fruit; the slender Assaï, with a graceful head of delicate green plumes; the Ubussú, with mammoth, undivided fronds; the stiff, serrated-leaved Bussú, and gigantic Mirití. One of the noblest trees of the forest is the Massaranduba, or "cow-tree" (Brosimum galactodendron), often rising one hundred and fifty feet. It is a hard, fine-grained, durable timber, and has a red bark, and leathery, fig-like foliage. The milk has the consistency of cream, and may be used for tea, coffee, or custards. It hardens by exposure, so as to resemble gutta-percha. Another interesting tree, and one which yields the chief article of export, is the Caucho, or India-rubber tree[169] (Siphonia Brasiliensis), growing in the lowlands of the Amazon for eighteen hundred miles above Pará. It has an erect, tall trunk, from forty to eighty feet high, a smooth, gray bark, and thick, glossy leaves. The milk resembles thick, yellow cream, and is colored by a dense smoke obtained by burning palm-nuts. It is gathered between August and December. A man can collect six pounds a day, though this is rarely done. It is frequently adulterated with sand. The tree belongs to the same apetalous family as our castor-oil and the mandioca; while the tree which furnishes the caoutchouc of the East Indies and Africa is a species of Ficus, and yields an inferior article to the rubber of America. Other characteristic trees are the Mongruba, one of the few which shed their foliage before the new leaf-buds expand; the giant Samaüma, or silk-cotton tree (called huimba in Peru); the Calabash, or cuieira, whose gourd-like fruit furnishes the cups used throughout the Amazon; the Itauba, or stone-wood, furnishing ship-timber as durable as teak; the red and white Cedar, used for canoes (not coniferous like the northern evergreen, but allied to the mahogany); the Jacarandá, or rose-wood, resembling our locust; Palo de sangre, one of the most valuable woods on the river; Huacapú, a very common timber; Capirona, used as fuel on the steamers; and Tauarí, a heavy, close-grained wood, the bark of which splits into thin leaves, much used in making cigarettes. The Piassaba, a palm yielding a fibre extensively manufactured into cables and ropes, and exported to foreign countries for brushes and brooms, being singularly elastic, strong, and more durable than hemp; and the Moira-pinima, or "tortoise-shell wood," the most beautiful wood in all Amazonia, if not in the world, grow on the Upper Rio Negro. A small willow represents the great catkin family.
The valley is as remarkable for the abundance, variety, and value of its timber as for any thing else. Within an area of half a mile square, Agassiz counted one hundred and seventeen different kinds of woods, many of them eminently fitted, by their hardness, tints, and beautiful grain, for the finest cabinet-work. Enough palo de sangre or moira-pinima is doubtless wasted annually to veneer all the palaces of Europe.
While most of our fruits belong to the rose family, those of the Amazon come from the myrtle tribe. The delicious flavor, for which our fruits are indebted to centuries of cultivation, is wanting in many of the torrid productions. We prefer the sweetness of Pomona in temperate climes to her savage beauty in the sunny south. It is a curious fact, noticed by Herndon, that nearly all the valuable fruits of the valley are inclosed in hard shells or acid pulps. They also reach a larger size in advancing westward. The common Brazil nut is the product of one of the tallest trees in the forest (Bertholletia excelsa). The fruit is a hard, round shell, resembling a common ball, which contains from twenty to twenty-four nuts. Eighteen months are required for the bud to reach maturity. This tree, says Humboldt, offers the most remarkable example of high organic development. Akin to it is the Sapucaya or "chickens' nuts" (Lecythis sapucaya), whose capsule has a natural lid, and is called "monkey's drinking-cup." The nuts, about a dozen in number, are of irregular shape and much richer than the preceding. But they do not find their way to market, because they drop out of the capsule as soon as ripe, and are devoured by peccaries and monkeys. The most luscious fruit on the Amazon is the atta of Santarem. It has the color, taste, and size of the chirimoya; but the rind, which incloses a rich, custardly pulp, frosted with sugar, is scaled. Next in rank are the melting pine-apples of Pará, and the golden papayas, fully equal to those on the western coast. This is the original home of the cacao. It grows abundantly in the forests of the upper river, and particularly on the banks of the Madeira. The wild nut is smaller but more oily than the cultivated. The Amazon is destined to supply the world with the bulk of chocolate. The aromatic tonka beans (Cumarú) used in flavoring snuff, and the Brazilian nutmegs (Puxiri), inferior to the Ceylon, grow on lofty trees on the Negro and Lower Amazon. The Guaraná beans are the seeds of a trailing plant; from these the Mauhés prepare the great medicine, on the Amazon, for diarrhœa and intermittent fevers. Its active principle, caffeine, is more abundant than in any other substance, amounting to 5.07 per cent.; while black tea contains only 2.13. Coffee, rice, tobacco, and sugar-cane are grown to a limited extent. Rio Negro coffee, if put into the market, would probably eclipse that of Ceará, the best Brazilian. Wild rice grows abundantly on the banks of the rivers and lakes. The cultivated grain is said to yield forty fold. Most of the tobacco comes down from the Marañon and Madeira. It is put up in slender rolls from three to six feet long, tapering at each end, and wound with palm fibre. The sugar-cane is an exotic from Southeastern Asia, but grows well. The first sugar made in the New World was by the Dutch in the island of St. Thomas, 1610. Farina is the principal farinaceous production of Brazil. The mandioca or cassava (Manihot utilissima) from which it is made is supposed to be indigenous, though it is not found wild. It does not grow at a higher altitude than 2000 feet. Life and death are blended in the plant, yet every part is useful. The cattle eat the leaves and stalks, while the roots are ground into pulp, which, when pressed and baked, forms farina, the bread of all classes. The juice is a deadly poison: thirty-five drops were sufficient to kill, in six minutes, a negro convicted of murder; but it deposits a fine sediment of pure starch that is the well-known tapioca; and the juice, when fermented and boiled, forms a drink. On the upper waters grow the celebrated coca, a shrub with small, light-green leaves, having a bitter, aromatic taste. The powdered leaves, mixed with lime, form ypadú. This is to Peruvians what opium is to the Turk, betel to the Malay, and tobacco to the Yankee. Thirty million pounds are annually consumed in South America. It is not, however, an opiate, but a powerful stimulant. With it the Indian will perform prodigies of labor, traveling days without fatigue or food. Von Tschudi considers its moderate consumption wholesome, and instances the fact that one coca-chewer attained the good old age of one hundred and thirty years; but when used to excess it leads to idiocy. The signs of intemperance are an uncertain step, sallow complexion, black-rimmed, deeply-sunken eyes, trembling lips, incoherent speech, and stolid apathy. Coca played an important part in the religious rights of the Incas, and divine honors were paid to it. Even to-day the miners of Peru throw a quid of coca against the hard veins of ore, affirming that it renders them more easily worked; and the Indians sometimes put coca in the mouth of the dead to insure them a welcome in the other world. The alkaloid cocaïne was discovered by Wöhler.
Flowers are nearly confined to the edges of the dense forest, the banks of the rivers and lagunes. There are a greater number of species under the equator, but we have brighter colors in the temperate zone. "There is grandeur and sublimity in the tropical forest (wrote Wallace, after four years of observation), but little of beauty or brilliancy of color." Perhaps the finest example of inflorescence in the world is seen in the Victoria Regia, the magnificent water-lily discovered by Schömberg in 1837. It inhabits the tranquil waters of the shallow lakes which border the Amazon. The leaves are from fifteen to eighteen feet in circumference, and will bear up a child twelve years old; the upper part is dark, glossy green, the under side violet or crimson. The flowers are a foot in diameter, at first pure white, passing, in twenty-four hours, through successive hues from rose to bright red. This queen of water-plants was dedicated to the Queen whose empire is never at once shrouded in night.
![[Coca-plant.]](#8543082027330898494_291.png.id-2302585033704064710.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
[CHAPTER XX.]
Life within the Great River.— Fishes.— Alligators.— Turtles.— Porpoises and Manatís.
The Amazon is a crowded aquarium, holding representatives of every zoological class—infusoria, hydras, fresh-water shells (chiefly Ampullaria, Melania, and Unios), aquatic beetles (belonging mostly to new genera), fishes, reptiles, water birds, and cetaceans. The abundance and variety of fishes are extraordinary; so also are the species. This great river is a peculiar ichthyic province, and each part has its characteristics. According to Agassiz, the whole river, as well as its tributaries, is broken up into numerous distinct fauna.[170] The pirarucú, or "redfish" (the Sudis gigas of science), is at once the largest, most common, and most useful fish. The Peruvian Indians call it payshi. It is a powerful fish, often measuring eight feet in length and five in girth, clad in an ornamental coat-of-mail, its large scales being margined with bright red. It ranges from Peru to Pará. It is usually taken by the arrow or spear. Salted and dried, the meat will keep for a year, and forms, with farina, the staple food on the Amazon. The hard, rough tongue is used as a grater. Other fishes most frequently seen are the prettily-spotted catfish, Pescada, Piranha, Acará, which carries its young in its mouth, and a long, slender needle-fish. There are ganoids in the river, but no sturgeons proper. Pickerel, perch, and trout are also wanting. The sting-ray represents the shark family. As a whole, the fishes of the Amazon have a marine character peculiarly their own.
The reptilian inhabitants of this inland sea are introduced by numerous batrachians, water-snakes (Heliops), and anacondas. But alligators bear the palm for ugliness, size, and strength. In summer the main river swarms with them; in the wet season they retreat to the interior lakes and flooded forests. It was for this reason that we did not see an alligator on the Napo. At low water they are found above the entrance of the Curaray. About Obidos, where many of the pools dry up in the fine months, the alligator buries itself in the mud, and sleeps till the rainy season returns. "It is scarcely exaggerating to say (writes Bates) that the waters of the Solimoens are as well stocked with large alligators in the dry season as a ditch in England is in summer with tadpoles." There are three or four species in the Amazon. The largest, the Jacaré-uassú of the natives, attains a length of twenty feet. The Jacaré-tinga is a smaller kind (only five feet long when full grown), and has the long, slender muzzle of the extinct teleosaurus. The South American alligators are smaller than the crocodiles of the Nile or Ganges, and they are also inferior in rank. The head of the Jacaré-uassú (the ordinary species) is broad, while the gavial of India has a long, narrow muzzle, and that of the Egyptian lizard is oblong. The dentition differs: while in the Old World saurian the teeth interlock, so that the two jaws are brought close together, the teeth in the upper jaw of the Amazonian cayman pass by the lower series outside of them. The latter has therefore much less power. It has a ventral cuirass as well as dorsal, and it is web-footed, while the crocodile has the toes free—another mark of inferiority. Sluggish on land, the alligator is very agile in its element. It never attacks man when on his guard, but it is cunning enough to know when it may do this with safety. It lays its eggs (about twenty) some distance from the river bank, covering them with leaves and sticks. They are larger than those of Guayaquil, or about four inches long, of an elliptical shape, with a rough, calcareous shell. Negro venders sell them cooked in the streets of Pará.
Turtles are, perhaps, the most important product of the Amazon, not excepting the pirarucú. The largest and most abundant species is the Tortaruga grande. It measures, when full grown, nearly three feet in length and two in breadth, and has an oval, smooth, dark-colored shell. Every house has a little pond (called currúl) in the back yard to hold a stock of turtles through the wet season. It furnishes the best meat on the Upper Amazon. We found it very tender, palatable, and wholesome; but Bates, who was obliged to live on it for years, says it is very cloying. Every part of the creature is turned to account. The entrails are made into soup; sausages are made of the stomach; steaks are cut from the breast; and the rest is roasted in the shell.[171] The turtle lays its eggs (generally between midnight and dawn) on the central and highest part of the plaias, or about a hundred feet from the shore. The Indians say it will lay only where itself was hatched out. With its hind flippers it digs a hole two or three feet deep, and deposits from eighty to one hundred and sixty eggs (Gibbon says from one hundred and fifty to two hundred). These are covered with sand, and the next comer makes another deposit on the top, and so on until the pit is full. Egg-laying comes earlier on the Amazon than on the Napo, taking place in August and September. The tracajá, a smaller species, lays in July and August; its eggs are smaller and oval, but richer than those of the great turtles.
The mammoth tortoise of the Galápagos lays an egg very similar in size and shape to that of the Tortaruga, but a month later, or in October. The hunting of turtle eggs is a great business on the Amazon. They are used chiefly in manufacturing oil (mantéca) for illumination. Thrown into a canoe, they are broken and beaten up by human feet; water is then poured in, and the floating oil is skimmed off, purified over the fire in copper kettles, and finally put up in three-gallon earthen jars for the market. The turtles are caught for the table as they return to the river after laying their eggs. To secure them, it suffices to turn them over on their backs. The turtles certainly have a hard time of it. The alligators and large fishes swallow the young ones by hundreds; jaguars pounce upon the full-grown specimens as they crawl over the plaias, and vultures and ibises attend the feast. But man is their most formidable foe. The destruction of turtle life is incredible. It is calculated that fifty millions of eggs are annually destroyed. Thousands of those that escape capture in the egg period are collected as soon as hatched and devoured, "the remains of yolk in their entrails being considered a great delicacy." An unknown number of full-grown turtles are eaten by the natives on the banks of the Marañon and Solimoens and their tributaries, while every steamer, schooner, and little craft that descends the Amazon is laden with turtles for the tables of Manáos, Santarem, and Pará. When we consider, also, that all the mature turtles taken are females, we wonder that the race is not well-nigh extinct. They are, in fact, rapidly decreasing in numbers. A large turtle which twenty years ago could be bought for fifty cents, now commands three dollars. One would suppose that the males, being unmolested, would far outnumber the other sex, but Bates says "they are immensely less numerous than the females." The male turtles, or Capitaris, "are distinguishable by their much smaller size, more circular shape, and the greater length and thickness of their tails." Near the Tapajos we met a third species, called Matá-matá. It has a deeply-keeled carapax, beautifully bossed, and a hideous triangular head, having curious, lobed, fleshy appendages, and nostrils prolonged into a tube. It is supposed to have great virtues as a remedy for rheumatism. But the most noticeable feature of the Amazonian fauna, as Agassiz has remarked, is the abundance of cetaceans through its whole extent. From the brackish estuary of Pará to the clear, cool waters at the base of the Andes, these clumsy refugees from the ocean may be seen gamboling and blowing as in their native element. Four different kinds of porpoises have been seen. A black species lives in the Bay of Marajó. In the Middle Amazon are two distinct porpoises, one flesh-colored;[172] and in the upper tributaries is the Inia Boliviensis, resembling, but specifically different from the sea-dolphin and the soosoo of the Ganges. "It was several years (says the Naturalist on the Amazon) before I could induce a fisherman to harpoon dolphins (Boutos) for me as specimens, for no one ever kills these animals voluntarily; the superstitious people believe that blindness would result from the use of the oil in lamps." The herbivorous manati (already mentioned, Chap. XV.) is found throughout the great river. It differs slightly from the Atlantic species. It rarely measures over twelve feet in length. It is taken by the harpoon or nets of chambiri twine. Both Herndon and Gibbon mention seals as occurring in the Peruvian tributaries; but we saw none, neither did Bates, Agassiz, or Edwards. They probably meant the manati.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
Life around the Great River.— Insects.— Reptiles.— Birds.— Mammals.
The forest of the Amazon is less full of life than the river. Beasts, birds, and reptiles are exceedingly scarce; still there is, in fact, a great variety, but they are widely scattered and very shy. In the animal, as in the vegetable kingdom, diversity is the law; there is a great paucity of individuals compared with the species.[173] Insects are rare in the dense forest; they are almost confined to the more open country along the banks of the rivers. Ants are perhaps the most numerous. There is one species over an inch long. But the most prominent, by their immense numbers, are the dreaded saübas. Well-beaten paths branch off in every direction through the forest, on which broad columns may be seen marching to and fro, each bearing vertically a circular piece of leaf. Unfortunately they prefer cultivated trees, especially the coffee and orange. They are also given to plundering provisions; in a single night they will carry off bushels of farina. They are of a light red color, with powerful jaws. In every formicarium or ant colony there are three sets of individuals—males, females, and workers; but the saübas have the singularity of possessing three classes of workers. The light-colored mounds often met in the forest, sometimes measuring forty feet in diameter by two feet in height, are the domes which overlie the entrances to the vast subterranean galleries of the saüba ants. These ants are eaten by the Rio Negro Indians, and esteemed a luxury; while the Tapajos tribes use them to season their mandioca sauce. Akin to the vegetable-feeding saübas are the carnivorous ecitons, or foraging ants, of which Bates found ten distinct species. They hunt for prey in large organized armies, almost every species having its own special manner of marching and hunting. Fortunately the ecitons choose the thickest part of the forest. The fire-ant is the great plague on the Tapajos. It is small, and of a shiny reddish color; but its sting is very painful, and it disputes every fragment of food with the inhabitants. All eatables and hammocks have to be hung by cords smeared with copaiba balsam.
The traveler on the Amazon frequently meets with conical hillocks of compact earth, from three to five feet high, from which radiate narrow covered galleries or arcades. The architects of these wonderful structures are the termites, or "white ants," so called, though they belong to a higher order of insects, widely differing from the true ants. The only thing in common is the principle of division of labor. The termite neuters are subdivided into two classes, soldiers and workers, both wingless and blind. Their great enemy is the ant-eater; but it is a singular fact, noticed by Bates, that the soldiers only attach themselves to the long worm-like tongue of this animal, so that the workers, on whom the prosperity of the termitarum depends, are saved by the self-sacrifice of the fighting caste. The office of the termites in the tropics seems to be to hasten the decomposition of decaying vegetation. But they also work their way into houses, trunks, wardrobes, and libraries. "It is principally owing to their destructiveness" (wrote Humboldt) "that it is so rare to find papers in tropical America older than fifty or sixty years."
Dragon-flies are conspicuous specimens of insect life on the Amazon. The largest and most brilliant kinds are found by the shady brooks and creeks in the recesses of the forest, some of them with green or crimson bodies seven inches long, and their elegant lace-like wings tipped with white or yellow. Still more noticeable are the butterflies. There is a vast number of genera and species, and great beauty of dress, unequaled in the temperate zone. Some idea of the diversity is conveyed by the fact mentioned by Mr. Bates that about 700 species are found within an hour's walk of Pará, and 550 at Ega; while the total number found in the British Islands does not exceed 66, and the whole of Europe supports only 300. After a shower in the dry season the butterflies appear in fluttering clouds (for they live in societies), white, yellow, red, green, purple, black, and blue, many of them bordered with metallic lines and spots of a silvery or golden lustre. The sulphur-yellow and orange-colored kinds predominate. A colossal morpho, seven and a half inches in expanse, and visible a quarter of a mile off, frequents the shady glades; splendid swallow-tailed papilios, green, rose, or velvety-black, are seen only in the thickets; while the Hetaira esmeralda, with transparent wings, having one spot of a violet hue, as it flies over the dead leaves in the dense forest looks "like a wandering petal of a flower." Very abundant is the Heliconius, which plays such an important figure, by its variations, in Wallace's theory of the origin of species. On the Marañon we found Callidryas eubule, a yellow butterfly common in Florida. The most brilliant butterflies are found on the Middle Amazon, out of reach of the strong trade winds. The males far outnumber the other sex, are more richly colored, and generally lead a sunshiny life.
The females are of dull hues, and spend their lives in the gloomy shadows of the forest. Caterpillars and nocturnal moths are rare.
There are no true hive-bees (Apides) in South America,[174] but instead there are about one hundred and fifty species of bees (mostly social Moliponas), smaller than the European, stingless, and constructing oblong cells. Their colonies are much larger than those of the honey-bee. The Trigona occurs on the Napo. Unlike the Melipona, it is not confined to the New World. A large sooty-black Bombus represents our humble-bee. Shrill cicadas, blood-thirsty mantucas, piums, punkies, and musquitoes are always associated in the traveler's memory with the glorious river. Of the last there are several kinds. "The forest musquito belongs to a different species from that of the town, being much larger and having transparent wings. It is a little cloud that one carries about his person every step on a woodland ramble, and their hum is so loud that it prevents one hearing well the notes of birds. The town musquito has opaque, speckled wings, a less severe sting, and a silent way of going to work. The inhabitants ought to be thankful the big noisy fellows never come out of the forest" (Bates, ii., 386). There are few musquitoes below Ega; above that point a musquito net is indispensable. Beetles abound, particularly in shady places, and are of all sizes, from that of a pin's head to several inches in length. The most noticeable are the gigantic Megalosoma and Enema, armed with horns. Very few are carnivorous. "This is the more remarkable," observes Darwin, "when compared to the case of carnivorous quadrupeds, which are so abundant in hot countries." Very few are terrestrial, even the carnivorous species being found clinging to branches and leaves. In going from the pole to the equator we find that insect life increases in the same proportion as vegetable life. There is not a single beetle on Melville Island; eleven species are found in Greenland; in England, 2500; in Brazil, 8000. Here lives the king of spiders, the Mygale Blondii, a monstrous hairy fellow, five inches long, of a brown color, with yellowish lines along its stout legs. Its abode is a slanting subterranean gallery about two feet in length, the sides of which are beautifully lined with silk. Other spiders barricade the walks in the forest with invisible threads; some build nests in the trees and attack birds; others again spin a closely-woven web, resembling fine muslin, under the thatched roofs of the houses.
Of land vertebrates, lizards are the first to attract the attention of the traveler on the equator. Great in number and variety, they are met every where—crawling up the walls of buildings, scampering over the hot, dusty roads, gliding through the forest. They stand up on their legs, carry their tails cocked up in the air, and run with the activity of a warm-blooded animal. It is almost impossible to catch them. Some of them are far from being the unpleasant-looking animals many people imagine; but in their coats of many colors, green, gray, brown, and yellow, they may be pronounced beautiful. Others, however, have a repulsive aspect, and are a yard in length. The iguana, peculiar to the New World tropics, is covered with minute green scales handed with brown (though it changes its color like the chameleon), and has a serrated back and gular pouch. It grows to the length of five feet, and is arboreal. Its white flesh, and its oblong, oily eggs, arc considered great delicacies. We heard of a lady who kept one as a pet. Frogs and toads, the chief musicians in the Amazonian forest, are of all sizes, from an inch to a foot in diameter. The Bufo gigas is of a dull gray color, and is covered with warts. Tree-frogs (Hyla) are very abundant; they do not occur on the Andes or on the Pacific coast. Their quack-quack, drum-drum, hoo-hoo, is one of our pleasant memories of South America. Of snakes there is no lack; and yet they are not so numerous as imagination would make them. There are one hundred and fifty species in South America, or one half as many, on the same area, as in the East Indies. The diabolical family is led by the boa, while the rear is brought up by the Amphisbænas, or "double-headed snakes," which progress equally well with either end forward, so that it is difficult to make head or tail of them. The majority are harmless. The deadly corál is found on both sides of the Andes, and wherever there is a cacao plantation. One of the most beautiful specimens of the venomous kind is a new species (Elaps imperator, Cope), which we discovered on the Marañon. It has a slender body more than two feet in length, with black and red bands margined with yellow, and a black and yellow head, with permanently erect fangs.
![[Iguana.]](#8543082027330898494_303.png.id-1548661902258781668.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
We have already mentioned the most common birds. Probably, says Wallace, no country in the world contains a greater variety of birds than the Amazonian Valley. But the number does not equal the expectations of the traveler; he may ramble a whole day without meeting one. The rarity, however, is more apparent than real; we forget, for the moment, the vastness of their dwelling-place. The birds of the country, moreover, are gregarious, so that a locality may be deserted and silent at one time and swarming with them at another. Parrots and toucans are the most characteristic groups. To the former belong true parrots, parroquets, and macaws. The first are rarely seen walking, but are rapid flyers and expert climbers. On the trees they are social as monkeys, but in flight they always go in pairs. The parroquets go in flocks. The Hyacinthine macaw (the Araruna of the natives) is one of the finest and rarest species of the parrot family. It is found only on the south side of the Amazon. The macaw was considered sacred by the Maya Indians of Yucatan, and dedicated to the sun. The Quichuans call it guacamayo, guaca meaning sacred. Of toucans there are many species; the largest is the toco, with a beak shaped like a banana; the most beautiful are the curb-crested, or Beauharnais toucans, and the P. flavirostris, whose breast is adorned with broad belts of red, crimson, and black. "Wherefore such a beak?" every naturalist has asked; but the toucan still wags his head, as much as to say, "you can not tell." There must be some other reason than adaptation. Birds of the same habits are found beside it—the ibis, pigeon, spoonbill, and toucan are seen feeding together. "How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of Nature! (wrote the funny Sidney Smith). To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy-dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The toucan, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose are certain foolish, prating members of Parliament created, pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end to such questions; so we will not enter into the metaphysics of the toucan."
![[Toucans.]](#8543082027330898494_305.png.id-4949142387698073523.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
On the flooded islands of the Negro and Upper Amazon is found the rare and curious umbrella bird, black as a crow, and decorated with a crest of hairy plumes and a long lobe suspended from the neck, covered with glossy blue feathers. This latter appendage is connected with the vocal organs, and assists the bird in producing its deep, loud, and lengthy fluty note. There are three species. Another rare bird is the Uruponga, or Campanéro, in English the tolling-bell bird, found only on the borders of Guiana. It is of the size of our jay, of a pure white color, with a black tubercle on the upper side of the bill. "Orpheus himself (says Waterton) would drop his lute to listen to him, so sweet, so novel, and romantic is the toll of the pretty, snow-white Campanéro." "The Campanéro may be heard three miles! (echoes Sidney Smith). This single little bird being more powerful than the belfry of a cathedral ringing for a new dean! It is impossible to contradict a gentleman who has been in the forests of Cayenne, but we are determined, as soon as a Campanéro is brought to England, to make him toll in a public place, and have the distance measured."[175] But the most remarkable songster of the Amazonian forest is the Realejo, or organ-bird. Its notes are as musical as the flageolet. It is the only songster, says Bates, which makes any impression on the natives. Besides those are the Jacamars, peculiar to equatorial America, stupid, but of the most beautiful golden, bronze, and steel colors; sulky Trogons, with glossy green backs and rose-colored breasts; long-toed Jaçanas, half wader, half fowl; the rich, velvety purple and black Rhamphocoelus Jacapa, having an immense range from Archidona to Pará; the gallinaceous yet arboreal Ciganas; scarlet ibises, smaller, but more beautiful than their sacred cousins of the Nile; stilted flamingoes, whose awkwardness is atoned for by their brilliant red plumage; glossy black Mutums, or curassow turkeys; ghostly storks, white egrets, ash-colored herons, black ducks, barbets, kingfishers, sandpipers, gulls, plovers, woodpeckers, oreoles; tanagers, essentially a South American family, and, excepting three or four species, found only east of the Andes; wagtails, finches, thrushes, doves, and hummers. The last, "by western Indians living sunbeams named," are few, and not to be compared with the swarms in the Andean valleys. The birds of the Amazon have no uniform time for breeding. The majority, however, build their nests between September and New Year's, and rarely lay more than two eggs.
![[Brazilian Hummers.]](#8543082027330898494_307.png.id-4439748665749240416.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Amazonia, like Australia, is poor in terrestrial mammals, and the species are of small size. Nearly the only game a hunter can depend upon for food, besides toucans and macaws, is peccari. One species of tapir, to represent the elephants and rhinoceroses of the Old World; three small species of deer, taking the places of deer, antelopes, buffaloes, sheep, and goats of the other continent; three species of large Felidæ; one peccari, and a wild dog, with opossums, ant-eaters, armadilloes, sloths, squirrels (the only rodents which approach ours),[176] capybaras, pacas, agoutis, and monkeys, comprise all the quadrupeds of equatorial America. The last two are the most numerous. Marsupial rats take the place of the insectivorous mammals. Of ant-eaters, there are at least four distinct species; but they are scattered sparingly, and are seldom found on the low flooded lands. Four or five species of armadillo inhabit the valley. These little nocturnal burrowing edentates are the puny representatives of the gigantic Glyptodon of Pleistocene times, and the sloths are the dwindling shadows of the lordly Megatherium. There are two species of three-toed sloths—one inhabiting the swampy lowlands, the other confined to the terra-firma land. They lead a lonely life, never in groups, harmless and frugal as a hermit. They have four stomachs, but not the long intestines of ruminating animals. They feed chiefly on the leaves of the trumpet-tree (Cecropia), resembling our horse-chestnut. The natives, both Indian and Brazilian, hold the common opinion that the sloth is the type of laziness.
[Capybara] The capybara or ronsoco, the largest of living rodents, is quite common on the river side. It is gregarious and amphibious, and resembles a mammoth guinea-pig. Pacas and agoutis are most abundant in the lowlands, and are nocturnal. These semi-hoofed rodents, like the Toxodon of old, approach the Pachyderms. The tapir, or gran-bestia, as it is called, is a characteristic quadruped of South America. It is a clumsy-looking animal, with a tough hide of an iron-gray color, covered with a coat of short coarse hair. Its flesh is dry, but very palatable. It has a less powerful proboscis than the Malay species. M. Roulin distinguishes another species from the mountains, which more nearly resembles the Asiatic. The tapir, like the condor, for an unknown reason, is not found north of 8° N., though it wanders as far south as 40°. We met but one species of peccari, the white-lipped (D. labiatus). It is much larger than the "Mexican hog," and, too thick-headed to understand danger, is a formidable antagonist. The raposa is seen only on the Middle Amazon, and very rarely there. It has a long tapering muzzle, small ears, bushy tail, and grayish hair. It takes to the water, for the one we saw at Tabatinga was caught while crossing the Amazon. Fawn-colored pumas, spotted jaguars, black tigers, tiger-cats—all members of the graceful feline family—inhabit all parts of the valley, but are seldom seen. The puma, or panther, is more common on the Pacific side of the Andes. The jaguar[177] is the fiercest and most powerful animal in South America. It is marked like the leopard—roses of black spots on a yellowish ground; but they are angular instead of rounded, and have a central dot. There are also several black streaks across the breast, which easily distinguish it from its transatlantic representative. It is also longer than the leopard; indeed, Humboldt says he saw a jaguar "whose length surpassed that of any of the tigers of India which he had seen in the collections of Europe." The jaguar frequents the borders of the rivers and lagunes, and its common prey is the capybara. It fears the peccari. The night air is alive with bats of many species, the most prominent one being the Dysopes perotis, which measures two feet from tip to tip of the wings. If these Cheiropters are as impish as they look, and as blood-thirsty as some travelers report, it is singular that Bates and Waterton, though residing for years in the country, and ourselves, though sleeping for months unprotected, were unmolested.
![[Capybara]](#8543082027330898494_308.png.id-1649769210264917766.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
![[Jaguar.]](#8543082027330898494_309.png.id-7089822592456134807.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
About forty species of monkeys, or one half of the New World forms, inhabit the Valley of the Amazon. Wallace, in a residence of four years, saw twenty-one species—seven with prehensile and fourteen with non-prehensile tails. They all differ from the apes of the other hemisphere. While those of Africa and Asia (Europe has only one) have opposable thumbs on the fore feet as well as hind, uniformly ten molar teeth in each jaw, as in man, and generally cheek-pouches and naked collosities, the American monkeys arc destitute of the two latter characteristics. None of them are terrestrial, like the baboon; all (save the marmosets) have twenty-four molars; the thumbs of the fore-hands are not habitually opposed to the fingers (one genus, Ateles, "the imperfect," is thumbless altogether); the nostrils open on the sides of the nose instead of beneath it, as in the gorilla, and the majority have long prehensile tails. They are inferior in rank to the anthropoids of the Old World, though superior to the lemurs of Madagascar. They are usually grouped in two families—Marmosets and Cebidre. The former are restless, timid, squirrel-like lilliputs (one species is only seven inches long), with tails not prehensile—in the case of the scarlet-faced, nearly wanting. The Barigudos, or gluttons (Lagothrix), are the largest of American monkeys, but are not so tall as the Coaitas. They are found west of Manáos. They have more human features than the other monkeys, and, with their woolly gray fur, resemble an old negro. There are three kinds of howlers (Mycetes)—the red or mono-colorado of Humboldt, the black, and the M. beelzebub, found only near Pará. The forest is full of these surly, untamable guaribas, as the natives call them. They are gifted with a voice of tremendous power and volume, with which they make night and day hideous. They represent the baboons of the Old World in disposition and facial angle (30°), and the gibbons in their yells and gregarious habits.[178] The Sapajous (Cebus) are distributed throughout Brazil, and have the reputation of being the most mischievous monkeys in the country. On the west coast of South America there are at least three or four species of monkeys, among them a black howler and a Cebus capucinus. The Coitas, or spider-monkeys, are the highest of American quadrumana. They are slender-legged, sluggish, and thumbless, with a most perfectly prehensile tail, terminating in a naked palm, which answers for a fifth hand. The Indians say they walk under the limbs like the sloth. They are the most common pets in Brazil, but they refuse to breed in captivity. Both Coitas and Barigudos are much persecuted for their flesh, which is highly esteemed by the Indians.
Mr. Bates has called our attention to the arboreal character of a large share of the animals in the Amazonian forest. All the monkeys and bats are climbers, and live in the trees. Nearly all the carnivores are feline, and are therefore tree-mounters, though they lead a terrestrial life. The plantigrade Cercoleptes has a long tail, and is entirely arboreal. Of the edentates, the sloth can do nothing on the ground. The gallinaceous birds, as the cigana and curassow—the pheasant and turkey of the Amazon—perch on the trees, while the great number of arboreal frogs and beetles is an additional proof of the adaptation of the fauna to a forest region. Even the epiphytous plants sitting on the branches suggest this arboreal feature in animal life.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
Life around the Great River.— Origin of the Red Man.— General Characteristics of the Amazonian Indians.— Their Languages, Costumes, and Habitations.— Principal Tribes.— Mixed Breeds.— Brazilians and Brazil.
We come now to the genus Homo. Man makes a very insignificant figure in the vast solitudes of the Amazon. Between Manáos and Pará, the most densely-peopled part of the valley, there is only one man to every four square miles; and the native race takes a low place in the scale of humanity. As the western continent is geologically more primitive than the eastern, and as the brute creation is also inferior in rank, so the American man, in point of progress, seems to stand in the rear of the Old World races. Both the geology and zoology of the continent were arrested in their development. Vegetable life alone has been favored. "The aboriginal American (wrote Von Martius) is at once in the incapacity of infancy and unpliancy of old age; he unites the opposite poles of intellectual life."[179]
We will not touch the debatable ground of the red man's origin, nor inquire whether he is the last remains of a people once high in civilization. But we are tempted to express the full belief that tropical America is not his "centre of creation." He is not the true child of the tropics; and he lives as a stranger, far less fitted for its climate than the Negro or Caucasian. Yet a little while, and the race will be as extinct as the Dodo. He has not the supple organization of the European, enabling him to accommodate himself to diverse conditions. Among the Andean tribes there are seldom over five children, generally but one, in a family; and Bates, speaking of Brazilian Indians, says "their fecundity is of a low degree, and it is very rare to find a family having so many as four children."[180]
While it is probable that Mexico was peopled from the north, it is very certain that the Tupi and Guarani, the long-headed hordes that occupied eastern South America, came up from the south, moving from the Paraguay to the banks of the Orinoco. From the Tupi nation (perhaps a branch of the Guarani) sprung the multitudinous tribes now dwelling in the vast valley of the Amazon. In such a country—unbroken by a mountain, uniform in climate—we need not look for great diversity. The general characters are these: skin of a brown color, with yellowish tinge, often nearly the tint of mahogany; thick, straight, black hair; black, horizontal eyes; low forehead, somewhat compensated by its breadth; beardless; of the middle height, but thick-set; broad, muscular chest; small hands and feet; incurious; unambitious; impassive; undemonstrative; with a dull imagination and little superstition; with no definite idea of a Supreme Being, few tribes having a name for God, though one for the "Demon;" with no belief in a future state; and, excepting civility, with virtues all negative. The semi-civilized along the Lower Amazon, called Tupuyos, seem to have lost (in the language of Wallace) the good qualities of savage life, and gained only the vices of civilization.
There are several hundred different tribes in Amazonia, each having a different language; even the scattered members of the same tribe can not understand each other.[181] This segregation of dialects is due in great part to the inflexibility of Indian character, and his isolated and narrow round of thought and life. When and where the Babel existed, whence the many branches of the great Tupi family separated, we know not. We only know that though different in words, these languages have the same grammatical construction. In more than one respect the polyglot American is antipodal to the Chinese. The language of the former is richest in words, that of the latter the poorest. The preposition follows the noun, and the verb ends the sentence. Ancient Tupi is the basis of the Lingoa Geral, the inter-tribal tongue on the Middle Amazon. The semi-civilized Ticunas, Mundurucus, etc., have one costume—the men in trowsers and white cotton shirts, the women in calico petticoats, with short, loose chemises, and their hair held in a knot on the top of the head by a comb,
Native Comb.usually of foreign make, but sometimes made of bamboo splinters. The wild tribes north and south go nearly or quite nude, while those on the western tributaries wear cotton or bark togas or ponchos. The habitations are generally a frame-work of poles, thatched with palm-leaves; the walls sometimes latticed and plastered with mud, and the furniture chiefly hammocks and earthen vessels.
The Mundurucus are the most numerous and warlike tribe in Amazonia. They inhabit both banks of the Tapajos, and can muster, it is said, 2000 fighting men. They are friendly to the whites, and industrious, selling to traders large quantities of farina, sarsaparilla, rubber, and tonka beans. Their houses are conical or quadrangular huts, sometimes open sheds, and generally contain many families. According to Wallace, the Mundurucus are the only perfectly tattooed nation in South America. It takes at least ten years to complete the tattooing of the whole person. The skin is pricked with spines, and then the soot from burning pitch rubbed in. Their neighbors, the Parárauátes, are intractable, wandering savages, roaming through the forest and sleeping in hammocks slung to the trees. They have delicately-formed hands and feet, an oval face, and glistening black eyes. On the west side of the Tapajos, near Villa Nova, are the Mauhés, an agricultural tribe, well formed, and of a mild disposition. On the Lower Madeira are the houseless, formidable Aráras, who paint their chins red with achote (anatto), and usually have a black tattooed streak on each side of the face. They have long made the navigation of the great tributary hazardous. Above them dwell the Parentintíns, light colored and finely featured, but nude and savage. In the labyrinth of lakes and channels at the mouth of the Madeira live the lazy, brutal Múras, the most degraded tribe on the Amazon. They have a darker skin than their neighbors, an extraordinary breadth of chest, muscular arms, short legs, protuberant abdomens, a thin beard, and a bold, restless expression. They pierce the lips, and wear peccari tusks in them in time of war. The Indians on the Purus live generally on the communal principle, and are unwarlike and indolent. The Puru-purús bury in sandy beaches, go naked, and have one wife.
On the great northwest tributary of the Rio Negro, the Uacaiari, there are numerous tribes, collectively known as the Uaupés. They have permanent abodes, in shape a parallelogram, with a semicircle at one end, and of a size to contain several families, sometimes a whole tribe. One of them, Wallace informs us, was 115 feet long by 75 broad, and about 30 high. The walls are bullet-proof. Partitions of palm-leaves divide it into apartments for families, the chief occupying the semicircular end. The men alone wear clothes and ornaments, but both sexes paint their bodies with red, black, and yellow colors in regular patterns. The men have a little beard, which they pull out, as also the eyebrows, and allow the hair to grow unshorn, tying it behind with a cord and wearing a comb; while the women cut theirs and wear no comb. They are an agricultural people—peaceable, ingenious, apathetic, diffident, and bashful.
The Catauishés inhabit the banks of the Teffé. They perforate the lips, and wear rows of sticks in the holes. At the mouth of the Juruá are the uncivilized, but tall, noble-looking Marauás. They pierce the ears and lips, and insert sticks. They live in separate families, and have no common chief. Above them live the treacherous Arauás.[182] On the opposite side of the Amazon are the nearly extinct Passés and Jurís, the finest tribes in central South America. They are peaceable and industrious, and have always been friendly to the whites. The Passés are a slenderly-built, light-colored, dignified, superior race, distinguished by a large square tattooed patch in the middle of the face. The Jurís tattoo in a circle round the mouth. Near by are the Uænambeus, or "Humming-birds," distinguished by a small blue mark on the upper lip. Higher up the Japurá is the large cannibal tribe of Miránhas, living in isolated families; and on the Tocantíns dwell the low Caishánas, who kill their first-born children. Along the left bank of the Amazon, from Loreto to Japurá, are the scattered houses and villages of the Tucúnas. This is an extensive tribe, leading a settled agricultural life, each horde having a chief and a "medicine-man," or priest of their superstitions. They are good-natured and ingenious, excelling most of the other tribes in the manufacture of pottery; but they are idle and debauched, naked except in the villages, and tattooed in numbers of short, straight lines on the face. The Marúbos, on the Javarí, have a dark complexion and a slight beard; and on the west side of the same river roam the Majerónas—fierce, hostile, light colored, bearded cannibals. In the vicinity of Pebas dwell the inoffensive Yaguas. The shape of the head (but not their vacant expression) is well represented by Catlin's portrait of "Black Hawk," a Sauk chief. They are quite free from the encumbrance of dress, the men wearing a girdle of fibrous bark around the loins, with bunches looking like a mop hanging down in front and rear, and similar bunches hung around the neck and arms. The women tie a strip of brown cotton cloth about the hips. They paint the whole body with achote.[183] They sometimes live in communities. One large structure, with Gothic roof, is used in common; on the inside of which, around the walls, are built family sleeping-rooms. The Yaguas are given to drinking and dancing. They are said to bury their dead inside the house of the deceased, and then set fire to it; but this conflicts with their communal life. Perhaps, with the other tribes on the Japurá, Iça, and Napo, they are fragments of the great Omágua nation; but the languages have no resemblance. Of the Oriente Indians we have already spoken. The tall, finely-built Cucámas near Nauta are shrewd, hard-working canoe-men, notorious for the singular desire of acquiring property; and the Yámeos, a white tribe, wander across the Marañon as far as Sarayacú. On the Ucayali are numerous vagabond tribes, living for the most part in their canoes and temporary huts. They are all lazy and faithless, using their wives (polygamy is common) as slaves. Infanticide is practiced, i.e., deformed children they put out of the way, saying they belong to the devil. They worship nothing. They bury their dead in a canoe or earthen jar under the house (which is vacated forever), and throw away his property.[184] The common costume is a long gown, called cushma, of closely-twilled cotton, woven by the women. Their weapons are two-edged battle-axes of hard wood, as palo de sangre, and bows and arrows. The arrows, five or six feet long, are made from the flower-stalk of the arrow-grass (Gynerium), the head pointed with the flinty chonta and tipped with bone, often anointed with poison. At the base two rows of feathers are spirally arranged, showing the Indian's knowledge of the rifle principle. When they have fixed abodes several families live together under one roof, with no division separating the women, as among the Red Indians on the Pastassa. The roof is not over ten feet from the ground. The Piros are the highest tribe; they have but one wife. The Conibos are an agricultural people, yet cannibals, stretching from the Upper Ucayali to the sources of the Purus. They are a fair-looking, athletic people, and, like the Shipibos, of ten wear a piece of money under the lip. The Cámpas are the most numerous and warlike.[185] They are little known, as travelers give them a wide berth. Herndon fancied they were the descendants of the Inca race. They are said to be cannibals, and from the specimen we saw we should judge them uncommonly sharp. He was averse to telling us any thing about his tribe, but turned our questions with an equivocal repartee and a laugh. The Cashíbos, on the Pachitéa, is another cannibal tribe. They are light colored and bearded. The dwarfish, filthy Rimos alone of the Ucayali Indians tattoo, though not so perfectly as the Mundurucus, using black and blue colors. The other tribes simply paint. It was among these wild Indians on the Ucayali that the Franciscan friars labored so long and zealously, and with a success far greater and more lasting than that which attended any other missionary enterprise in the valley.
The remaining inhabitants of the Amazon are mixed-breeds, Negroes, and whites. The amalgamations form the greater part of the population of the large towns. Von Tschudi gives a catalogue of twenty-three hybrids in Peru, and there are undoubtedly as many, or more, in Brazil. The most common are Mamelucos (offspring of white with Indian), Mulattoes (from white and Negro), Cafuzos or Zambos (from Indian and Negro), Curibocos (from Cafuzo and Indian); and Xibaros (from Cafuzo and Negro). "To define their characteristics correctly," says Von Tschudi, "would be impossible, for their minds partake of the mixture of their blood. As a general rule, it may be said that they unite in themselves all the faults without any of the virtues of their progenitors. As men they are generally inferior to the pure races, and as members of society they are the worst class of citizens." Yet they display considerable talent and enterprise, as in Quito; a proof that mental degeneracy does not necessarily result from the mixture of white with Indian blood. "There is, however," confesses Bates, after ten years' experience, "a considerable number of superlatively lazy, tricky, and sensual characters among the half-castes, both in rural places and in the towns." Our observations do not support the opinion that the result of amalgamation is "a vague compound, lacking character and expression." The moral part is perhaps deteriorated; but in tact and enterprise they often excel their progenitors.
Negroes are to be seen only on the Lower Amazon. By the new act of emancipation, such as are slaves continue so, but their children are free. Negroes born in the country are called creoles.
Of the white population, save a handful of English, French, and German, the Portuguese immigrants are the most enterprising men on the river. They are willing to work, trade, or do any thing to turn a penny. Those who acquire a fortune generally retire to Lisbon. The Brazilians proper are the descendants of the men who declared themselves "free and independent" of the mother country. Few of them are of pure Caucasian descent, for the immigration from Portugal for many years has been almost exclusively of the male sex. "It is generally considered bad taste in Brazil to boast purity of descent" (Bates, i, 241). Brazilians are stiff and formal, yet courteous and lively, communicative and hospitable, well-bred and intelligent. They are not ambitious, but content to live and enjoy what nature spontaneously offers. The most a Brazilian wants is farina and coffee, a hammock and cigar. Brazilian ladies have led a dreary life of constraint and silence, without education or society, the husband making a nun of his wife after the old bigoted Portuguese notion; but during the last twenty years the doors have been opened. Brazil attained her independence in 1823; Brazilian women in 1848.
Here, in this virgin valley, where every plant is an evergreen, possessing the most agreeable and enjoyable climate in the world, with a brilliant atmosphere, rivaled only by that of Quito, and with no changes of seasons—here we may locate the paradise of the lazy. Life may be maintained with as little labor as in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps no country in the world is capable of yielding so large a return for agriculture. Nature, evidently designing this land as the home of a great nation, has heaped up her bounties of every description—fruits of richest flavors, woods of finest grain, dyes of gayest colors, and drugs of rarest virtues; and left no sirocco or earthquake to disturb its people. Providence, moreover, has given the present emperor a wise and understanding heart; and the government is a happy blending of imperial dignity and republican freedom. White, Negro, half-caste, and Indian may be seen sitting side by side on the jury-bench. Certainly "the nation can not be a despicable one whose best men are able to work themselves up to positions of trust and influence."
God bless the Empire of the South!
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
How to Travel in South America.— Routes.— Expenses.— Outfit.— Precautions.— Dangers.
The most vague and incorrect notions prevail in respect to traveling in South America. The sources of trustworthy and desirable information are very meagre. Murray has not yet published a "Hand-book for the Andes;" routes, methods, and expenses of travel are almost unknown; and the imagination depicts vampires and scorpions, tigers and anacondas, wild Indians and fevers without end, impassable rivers and inaccessible mountains as the portion of the tourist. The following statements, which can be depended upon, may therefore be acceptable to those who contemplate a trip on the Andes and the Amazon.
The shortest, cheapest, most feasible, and least interesting route across the continent is from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres. The breadth of South America is here only eight hundred miles. By railroad from Valparaiso to the foot of the Andes; thence a short mule-ride by the Uspallata Pass (altitude 12,000 feet), under the shadow of Aconcagua to Mendoza; thence by coach across the pampas to the Rio Plata. The Portillo Pass (traversed by Darwin) is nearer, but more lofty and dangerous.
Bolivia offers the difficult path of Gibbon: From the coast to Cochabamba; thence down the Marmoré and Madeira. There are three routes through Peru: First, from Lima to Mayro, by way of Cerro Pasco and Huánaco, by mule, ten days; thence down the Pachitéa, by canoe, six days; thence down the Ucayali to Iquitos, by steamer, six days (forty-five hours' running time). When the road from Lima to Mayro is finished the passage will be shortened four days. No snow is met in crossing the Andes in summer, but in winter it is very deep. Second (Herndon's route), from Lima to Tinga Maria, by way of Huánaco, by mule, fifteen days, distance three hundred miles (the passage is difficult in the rainy season); thence by canoe fifteen days down the Huallaga to Yurimaguas. Third and best, by mule from Truxillo to Caximárca, five days (note the magnificent ruins); thence to Chachapoyas, seven days (here are pre-Incarial relics); thence to Moyabamba, eight days; thence on foot to Balsa Puerto, four days; thence by canoe to Yurimaguas, two days. Price of a mule from Truxillo to Moyabamba is $30; canoe-hire, $10. The Peruvian steamers arrive at Yurimaguas the fifth of every month and leave the seventh; reach Nauta the ninth and Iquitos the tenth; leave Iquitos the sixteenth and arrive at Tabatinga the nineteenth, to connect with the Brazilian line. Going up, they leave Tabatinga the twenty-first and arrive at Iquitos the twenty-fourth, stopping six days. Running time from Yurimaguas to Tabatinga, forty-eight hours; fare, $70, gold; third-class, $17. La Condamine's route, via Loxa and the Marañon, is difficult; and Md. Godin's, via the Pastassa, is perilous on account of rapids and savages. The transit by the Napo we will now give in detail.
Six hundred dollars in gold will be amply sufficient for a first-class passage from New York to New York across the continent of South America, making no allowance for stoppages. For necessary expenses in Ecuador, take a draft on London, which will sell to advantage in Guayaquil; so will Mexican dollars. American gold should be taken for expenses on the Amazon in Brazil; at Pará it commands a premium. On the Marañon it is below par; Peruvian gold should therefore be bought at Guayaquil for that part of the route. Also French medios, or quarter francs; they will be very useful every where on the route, especially on the Upper Amazon, where change is scarce. Fifty dollars' worth will not be too many; for, as the Scotchman said of sixpences, "they are canny little dogs, and often do the work of shillings." Take a passport for Brazil. Leave behind your delicacies and superfluities of clothing; woolen clothes will be serviceable throughout. A trunk for mountain travel should not exceed 24 by 15 by 15 inches—smaller the better. Take a rubber air-pillow and mattress: there is no bed between Guayaquil and Pará. A hammock for the Amazon can be bought on the Napo.
The Pacific Mail steamships, which leave New York on the first and sixteenth of each month, connect at Panama without delay with the British Steam Navigation line on the South Pacific. Fare, first-class, from New York to Guayaquil, by way of Panama and Paita, $215, gold; second-class, $128. Time to Panama, eight days; to Paita, four days; to Guayaquil, one day. A coasting steamer leaves Panama for Guayaquil the thirteenth of each month. There are two so-called hotels in Guayaquil. "Los tres Mosqueteros," kept by Sr. Gonzales, is the best. Take a front room ($1 per day), and board at the Fonda Italiana or La Santa Rosa ($1 per day). Here complete your outfit for the mountains: saddle, with strong girth and crupper; saddle-bags, saddle-cover, sweat-cloth, and bridle ($40, paper), woolen poncho ($9), rubber poncho ($4), blanket ($6), leggins, native spurs and stirrups, knife, fork, spoon, tea-pot, chocolate (tea, pure and cheap, should be purchased at Panama), candles, matches, soap, towels, and tarpaulin for wrapping up baggage. Convert your draft into paper, quantum sufficit for Guayaquil; the rest into silver.
Besides this outer outfit, an inner one is needed—of patience without stint. You will soon learn that it is one thing to plan and quite another to execute. "To get out of the inn is one half of the journey" is very appropriately a Spanish proverb. Spaniards do nothing d'appressado (in a hurry), but every thing mañana (to-morrow). You will find fondas, horses, and roads divided into the bad, the worse, and the worst, and bad is the best. But fret not thyself. "Serenity of mind," wrote Humboldt, "almost the first requisite for an undertaking in inhospitable regions, passionate love for some class of scientific labor, and a pure feeling for the enjoyment which nature in her freedom is ready to impart, are elements which, when they meet together in an individual, insure the attainment of valuable results from a great and important journey."
The journey to Quito must be made between May and November; in the rainy season the roads are impassable. From Guayaquil to Bodegas by Yankee steamer; fare, $2; time, eight hours. At Bodegas hire beasts at the Consignacion for Guaranda; price for riding and cargo beasts, $4 each. No extras for the arriero. A mule will carry two hundred and fifty pounds. Buy bread at Bodegas and Guaranda. The Indians on the road are very loth to sell any thing; buy a fowl, therefore, at the first opportunity, or you will have to live on dirty potato soup, and be glad of that. At the tambos, or wayside inns, you pay only for yerba (fodder). Never unsaddle your beast till it is cool; an Indian will even leave the bridle on for a time. To Guaranda, three full days. There take mules (safer than horses in climbing the mountains) for Quito; $6 25, silver, per beast; time, five days. Be sure to leave Guaranda by 4 a.m., for in the afternoon Chimborazo is swept by furious winds. Also start with a full stomach; you will get nothing for two days. Drink sparingly of the snow-water which dashes down the mountain. You will be tempted to curse Chuquipoyo; but thank heaven it is no worse.
There are two hotels in Quito, French and American; the former has the better location, the latter the better rooms. Best front room, furnished, half a dollar a day; cheaper by the month. Meals (two), twenty-five cents each. The beef is excellent, but the cuisine—oh, onions! "God sends the meat, and the evil one cooks." You can hire a professional male cook (Indian) for $5 a month, but you can't teach him any thing. Fish is not to be had in Quito. Gibbon speaks of having some in Cuzco, but does not tell us where it came from.[186] Price of best flour, $3 60 per quintal; butter, thirty cents a pound; beef, $1 an arroba (twenty-five pounds); refined sugar, $3 50 an arroba; brown sugar (rapidura),[187] five cents a pound; cigars, from six to sixteen for a dime; cigarettes, five cents a hundred. Horse hire, from fifty cents to $1 per day. If you are to remain some time, buy a beast: a good mule costs $40; an ordinary horse, $50. The Post-office Department is a swindle. If you "pay through" you will find on your arrival home that your letters have been paid at both ends. Ask our consul at Guayaquil to forward them.
The necessary preparations for the Napo journey have been given in a previous chapter (Chap. XI). We might add to the list a few cans of preserved milk from New York, for you will not see a drop between the Andes and the Atlantic. Fail not to take plenty of lienzo; you must have it to pay the Indians, and any surplus can be sold to advantage. A bale of thirty varas costs about five dollars. Rely not at all on game; a champion sharpshooter could not live by his rifle. Santa Rosa and Coca will be represented to you as small New Yorks; but you will do well if you can buy a chicken between them.
From Quito to Papallacta, two days and a half; riding beast, $2 silver, and $1 20 for each cargo of three arrobas. At Papallacta hire Indians for Archidona; each carries three arrobas, and wants $5 silver in advance. You take to your feet; time, nine days, including one day of rest at Baeza. At Archidona you take a new set of peons for Napo at twenty-five cents apiece; time, one day. From Napo down the river to Santa Rosa, one day. You give two and a half varas of lienzo to each Indian, and the same for the canoe. From Santa Rosa to Pebas, on the Marañon, fifteen days; cost of an Indian, twenty-five varas; ditto for a canoe. We advise you to stop at Coca and rig up a raft or craft of some kind; we ascribe our uninterrupted good health to the length and breadth of our accommodations. The Peruvian steamer from the west arrives at Pebas on the sixteenth of each month; fare to Tabatinga, $15 gold; time, four days; running time, eleven hours. Brazilian steamer leaves Tabatinga the twentieth of each month; fare to Manáos, $44 44 gold; time, five days; distance, one thousand miles. From Manáos to Pará, $55 55 gold; time, six days; distance, one thousand miles. The Brazilian steamers make semi-monthly trips. We found two hotels in Pará—the "Italiana," dear and poor; the "Diana," unpretending but comfortable. Charges at the latter for room and board, $2 a day. The best time for traveling on the Amazon is between July and December. The United States and Brazilian steamships on their homeward voyage call at Pará the seventh of each month; fare to New York, $150 gold (the same as down the whole length of the Amazon); second class, $75; time, fourteen days; distance by way of St. Thomas, 1610 + 1400 miles. Steamer for Rio the ninth of each month; fare, $125; time, twelve days; distance, 2190 miles. Fare from Rio to New York, $200. Fare by sailing vessel from Pará to New York, from $50 to $75; time, three weeks. A British steamer from Rio stops at Pará and Lisbon.
A word about health. First, take one grain of common-sense daily; do as the natives do, keep out of the noon-day sun, and make haste slowly. Secondly, take with you quinine in two-grain pills, and begin to take them before leaving New York, as the great African traveler, Du Chaillu, recommended us. As preventive against the intermittent fevers on the lowlands and rivers, nothing is better than Dr. Copeland's celebrated pills—quinine, twelve grains; camphor, twelve grains; cayenne pepper, twelve grains. Mix with mucilage, and divide into twelve pills: take one every night or morning as required. On the Amazon carry guarana. Woolen socks are recommended by those who have had much experience of tropical fevers. Never bathe when the air is moist; avoid a chill; a native will not bathe till the sun is well up. Rub yourself with aguardiente (native rum) after a bath, and always when caught in a shower. Freely exercise in Quito to ward off liver complaints. Drink little water; coffee or chocolate is better, and tea is best. Avoid spirits with fruit, and fruit after dinner. The sickliest time in Guayaquil is at the breaking up of the rainy season.
As to dangers: First, from the people. Traveling is as safe in Ecuador as in New York, and safer than in Missouri. There are no Spanish banditti, though some places, as Chambo, near Riobamba, bear a bad name. It is not wise to tempt a penniless footpad by a show of gold; but no more so in Ecuador than any where. We have traveled from Guayaquil to Damascus, but have never had occasion to use a weapon in self-defense; and only once for offense, when we threatened to demolish an Arab sheik with an umbrella. Secondly, from brutes. Some travelers would have us infer that it is impossible to stir in South America without being "affectionately entwined by a serpent, or sprung upon by a jaguar, or bitten by a rattlesnake; jiggers in every sand-heap and scorpions under every stone" (Edinburgh Review, xliii, 310). Padre Vernazza speaks of meeting a serpent two yards in diameter! But you will be disappointed at the paucity of animal life. We were two months on the Andes (August and September) before we saw a live snake. They are plentiful in the wet season in cacao plantations; but the majority are harmless. Dr. Russel, who particularly studied the reptiles of India, found that out of forty-three species which he examined not more than seven had poisonous fangs; and Sir E. Tennent, after a long residence in Ceylon, declared he had never heard of the death of an European by the bite of a snake. It is true, however, that the number and proportion of the venomous species are greater in South America than in any other part of the world; but it is some consolation to know that, zoologically, they are inferior in rank to the harmless ones; "and certainly," adds Sidney Smith, "a snake that feels fourteen or fifteen stone stamping on his tail has little time for reflection, and may be allowed to be poisonous." If bitten, apply ammonia externally immediately, and take five drops in water internally; it is an almost certain antidote. The discomforts and dangers arising from the animal creation are no greater than one would meet in traveling overland from New York to New Orleans.
Finally, of one thing the tourist in South America may be assured—that dear to him, as it is to us, will be the remembrance of those romantic rides over the Cordilleras amid the wild magnificence of nature, the adventurous walk through the primeval forest, the exciting canoe-life on the Napo, and the long, monotonous sail on the waters of the Great River.