Travels on the Amazon

by Alfred Russel Wallace

Perhaps no country in the world contains such an amount of vegetable matter on its surface as the valley of the Amazon. Its entire extent, with the exception of some very small portions, is covered with one dense and lofty primeval forest, the most extensive and unbroken which exists upon the earth. It is the great feature of the country,—that which at once stamps it as a unique and peculiar region. It is not here as on the coasts of southern Brazil, or on the shores of the Pacific, where a few days' journey suffices to carry us beyond the forest district, and into the parched plains and rocky serras of the interior. Here we may travel for weeks and months inland, in any direction, and find scarcely an acre of ground unoccupied by trees. It is far up in the interior, where the great mass of this mighty forest is found; not on the lower part of the river, near the coast, as is generally supposed.

A line from the mouth of the river Parnaiba, in long. 41° 30´ W., drawn due west towards Guayaquil, will cut the boundary of the great forest in long. 78° 30´, and, for the whole distance of about 2,600 miles, will have passed through the centre of it, dividing it into two nearly equal portions.

For the first thousand miles, or as far as long. 56° W., the width of the forest from north to south is about four hundred miles; it then stretches out both to the north and south, so that in long. 67° W. it extends from 7° N., on the banks of the Orinoko, to 18° S., on the northern slope of the Andes of Bolivia, a distance of more than seventeen hundred miles. From a point about sixty miles south-east of Tabatinga, a circle may be drawn of 1,100 miles in diameter, the whole area of which will be virgin forest.

Along the Andes of Quito, from Pasto to Guancabamba, it reaches close up to the eastern base of the mountains, and even ascends their lower slopes. In the moderately elevated country between the river Huallaga and Marañon, the forest extends only over the eastern portion, commencing in the neighbourhood of Moyobamba. Further on, to the east of Cuzco and La Paz, it spreads high up on the slopes of the Bolivian Andes, and passing a little to the west of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, turns off to the north-east, crossing the Tapajóz and Xingú rivers somewhere about the middle of their course, and the Tocantins not far above its junction with the Araguàya, and then passes over to the river Parnaíba, which it follows to its mouth.

The Island of Marajó, at the mouth of the Amazon, has its eastern half open plains, while in the western the forest commences. On the north of the Amazon, from its mouth to beyond Montealegre, are open plains; but opposite the mouth of the Tapajóz at Santarem, the forest begins, and appears to extend up to the Serras of Carumaní, on the Rio Branco, and thence stretches west, to join the wooded country on the eastern side of the Orinoko. West of that river, it commences south of the Vicháda, and, crossing over the upper waters of the Guaviáre and Uaupés, reach the Andes east of Pasto, where we commenced our survey.

The forests of no other part of the world are so extensive and unbroken as this. Those of Central Europe are trifling in comparison; nor in India are they very continuous or extensive; while the rest of Asia seems to be a country of thinly wooded plains, and steppes, and deserts. Africa contains some large forests, situated on the east and west coasts, and in the interior south of the equator; but the whole of them would bear but a small proportion to that of the Amazon. In North America alone is there anything approaching to it, where the whole country east of the Mississippi and about the great lakes, is, or has been, an almost uninterrupted extent of woodland.

In a general survey of the earth, we may therefore look upon the New World as pre-eminently the land of forests, contrasting strongly with the Old, where steppes and deserts are the most characteristic features.

The boundaries of the Amazonian forest have not hitherto been ascertained with much accuracy. The open plains of Caguan have been supposed much more extensive than they really are; but I have very nearly determined their limits to the south and east, by the observations I made, and the information I obtained in my voyage up the Uaupés. Again, on the Uaycáli there is a district marked on the maps as the "Pampas del Sacramento," which has been supposed to be an open plain; but the banks of the Amazon up to the mouth of the Uaycáli are clothed with thick forest, and Messrs. Smyth and Lowe, who crossed the Pampa in two places, found no open plains; and from their observations and those of Lieut. Mawe we must extend the forest district up to near Moyabamba, west of the Huallaga, and to the foot of the mountains east of Pasco and Tarma. I was informed by a native of Ecuador, well acquainted with the country, that the Napo, Tigre, Pastaza, and the adjacent rivers all flow through dense forest, which extends up even to Baéza and Canélos and over all the lower slopes of the Andes. Tschudi informs us that the forest districts commence on all the north and east slopes of the Andes of Peru, near Huánta, and at Urubámba north of Cúzco. I have learnt from a gentleman, a native of La Paz, that immediately on crossing the Bolivian Andes from that city and from Oropéssa and Santa Cruz, you enter the great forests, which extend over all the tributaries of the Madeira. Traders up the Purús and all the southern branches of the Upper Amazon, neither meet with, nor hear accounts of, any open land, so that there is little doubt but that the extent here pointed out is one vast, ever-verdant, unbroken forest.

The forests of the Amazon are distinguished from those of most other countries, by the great variety of species of trees composing them. Instead of extensive tracts covered with pines, or oaks, or beeches, we scarcely ever see two individuals of the same species together, except in certain cases, principally among the Palms. A great extent of flooded land about the mouth of the Amazon, is covered with the Mirití Palms (Mauritia flexuosa and M. vinifera), and in many places the Assaí (Euterpe edulis) is almost equally abundant. Generally, however, the same species of tree is repeated only at distant intervals. On a road for ten miles through the forest near Pará, there are only two specimens of the Masserandúba, or Cow-tree, and all through the adjoining district they are equally scarce. On the Javíta road, on the Upper Rio Negro, I observed the same thing. On the Uaupés, I once sent my Indians into the forest to obtain a board of a particular kind of tree; they searched for three days, and found only a few young trees, none of them of sufficient size.

Certain kinds of hard woods are used on the Amazon and Rio Negro, for the construction of canoes and the schooners used in the navigation of the river. The difficulty of getting timber of any one kind for these vessels is so great, that they are often constructed of half-a-dozen different sorts of wood, and not always of the same colours or degrees of hardness. Trees producing fruit, or with medicinal properties, are often so widely scattered, that two or three only are found within a reasonable distance of a village, and supply the whole population. This peculiarity of distribution must prevent a great trade in timber for any particular purpose being carried on here. The india-rubber and Brazil-nut trees are not altogether exceptions to this rule, and the produce from them is collected over an immense extent of country, to which the innumerable lakes and streams offer a ready access.