The two following days were again calm, with heavy thunder-storms in the evening, so that we were compelled to remain all this time on the island. A more serious event, however, now occurred to detain me among the Indians. The day after the storm before mentioned, I found myself feverish and unwell, and two days after this I was severely attacked with dysentery, which is of frequent occurrence at this season, caused no doubt by the sudden transitions of temperature. In the meantime a favourable breeze had sprung up, and as I was far too ill to proceed, the canoe was obliged to sail without me; I was thus left behind in an old hut, the floor of which was still wet from having been a short time before overflowed by the river. In this place I was confined to my hammock for five days, during which time I was so ill that I never expected to recover; from being in robust health, I was in the course of a few days reduced to a mere shadow, with scarcely the power, when I did get out of my hammock, to drag one leg after the other. I felt severely the want of my medicine-chest, which I had left behind at Maceio, not wishing in this excursion to encumber myself with luggage; my only resource, therefore, was to trust to the remedial agents employed by the people themselves. This I found to consist in the use of castor oil, which is commonly made on the island, and afterwards a drink, ad libitum, of strong lemonades of vinegar and white sugar. There was only one venda in the village, in which the latter materials were to be obtained, but where, strange to say, the only other purchaseable article was rum. Nothing in the shape of provisions was to be had for any consideration, and as our long stay here had completely exhausted our stock, both Pedro and I were almost reduced to a state of starvation. Not even a particle of farinha was to be had, and had we not been supplied with a fowl or two by an old Indian woman, who attended very kindly upon me during my illness, we should have been miserably destitute. While still confined to my bed, I sent Pedro to another small village a few leagues further up the river, to purchase, if possible, some provisions, but he returned altogether unsuccessful. My chief regret was for this poor fellow, for he was well and felt the pangs of hunger far more keenly than I did. In the meantime a canoe fortunately arrived at the island with a little farinha for sale, of which I bought as much, at four times the usual price, as would suffice to take us back again to Penêdo, for I had now renounced all idea of going further up the river. The poor inhabitants of the island were themselves literally in a state of starvation, their principal food being the fruit of Geoffroya superba, the produce of a small tree growing rather abundantly on the south side of the island. It reaches to the height of nearly twenty feet, and produces a fleshy drupe about the size of a walnut; it is called umarí by the Indians. In almost every house, whether Indian or Brazilian, I observed a large pot of this fruit preparing, either indoors over a fire made on the floor, or on the ground under a tree in the neighbourhood of the house. As soon as they are nearly ready, groups of children in a state of nudity, and half naked men and women seat themselves around the pot, each furnished with two stones, a larger and a smaller one, for the purpose of breaking the nut after they have devoured the outward fleshy part; the taste of the kernel is not unlike that of boiled beans. Fish is in general the staple food of these people, but it is difficult to procure when the river is much flooded.
At the west end of the village there is a large wide-spreading Zizyphus tree standing alone, and as these trees retain their dense covering of leaves all the year round, their shade is sought after both by men and animals during the excessive heat of the day. Under that of which I now speak were to be seen a number of villagers of both sexes, the women squatting on mats spread on the ground, and occupied in spinning with a distaff a coarse kind of cotton yarn used principally as wicks for tapers, which they make of a brown coloured native wax. The men are much less industrious than the women, being generally to be seen standing about in a state of idleness, or swinging in their hammocks either in their houses or beneath the shade of a tree. Under the large Zizyphus tree several hammocks are hung up every morning, and they are seldom unoccupied. On Sundays the women lay aside their spinning apparatus, but immediately after mass, groups of them may be seen playing cards, at which they continue during the whole day; as they do not play for money, they use only french beans as counters. Until I gained sufficient strength to leave the island, I also spent much of my time under the shade of this tree, either listening to the conversation of these people, or answering the thousand and one questions put by them respecting my own and other distant countries. These questions were often sufficiently ridiculous, and I could often perceive that my answers were considered stretches of the long bow, although they were too polite to say so; nor was it only among the poor islanders of San Pedro, that I observed this to be the case, for the same often occurred among those who were considered well educated people. I remember once to have been conversing with the President of one of the inland provinces about Steam Navigation, and on telling him that many of the English Steam-boats were now entirely constructed of iron, he did not say he did not believe me, but simply remarked “that in Brazil, when iron was put into the water it always sank.”
On the twelfth of March I took leave of my Indian friends, and embarked in a canoe which I hired to take me down to Penêdo, having been exactly a fortnight on the island. We reached that place on the morning of the fourteenth, when I received a kind welcome from my friend the Juiz de Direito. I landed several times during the passage, for the purpose of making collections of living plants of the different kinds of Cacti, which grow in great abundance on the banks of the river, wherever they are rocky. At one of the places where we stopped, I observed several fine trees of Peltophorum Vogelianum, Benth. This tree, which belongs to the natural order Leguminosæ, reaches to the height of about forty feet, and has a great branching top: the leaves are large but very much subdivided, and very graceful, having more the appearance of the frond of a fern, than the leaf of a tree. The racemes of flowers which grow at the ends of the branches, are often more than a foot long, and the flowers are of a beautiful golden colour; at a distance it presents a more magnificent appearance, than almost any other tree I have seen. The canoe was carried down the stream by the force of the current, but in the afternoon, and during the greater part of the night, the sea breeze blew so strong as to impede our progress. The boatmen, however, adopted a plan to overcome this, which I have never seen elsewhere, nor even heard of, and I will therefore explain it in a few words. Landing at a place where the trees grew in abundance, the men set to work, and cut off a considerable number of branches, which were tied tightly together with cords, one end of a long rope was made fast round its middle, while the other end was secured to the canoe. They then steered for a part of the river where the current was strong, and threw the bundle overboard, which being heavy from its green state, floated just below the surface of the water, and in this manner being entirely out of the influence of the wind, it received the whole force of the current, by which means the canoe was dragged down at a rate little inferior to that by which we descended during the calm of the day.
I remained at Penêdo eight days, and, thanks to the very great kindness I received from the Juiz de Direito, my health rapidly improved, and I was enabled to make several little excursions in the neighbourhood. The Juiz is one of the few Brazilians I came in contact with, for whom I entertain feelings of esteem and respect. I found him to be a man of great intelligence, and well educated, having studied at the University of Coimbra. Even among the litigious Brazilians he was respected as a judge; and, indeed, both his opinions and actions were those of a mind deeply imbued with benevolence. At Coimbra he had paid some attention to the study of Botany, to which he was still partial, but more to the theoretical that to the practical department. He had made the acquaintance of M. Reidel and Dr. Natterer, both of whom had lived with him some years before, when he was residing in Pará. In the society of this excellent man, as well as in that of his brother, a priest who was then on a visit to him from Bahia, in the perusal of his books, and in visiting some families in the town, my time passed away very agreeably.
One day I went to Villa Nova, to visit a Colonel Bento Mello Pereira, the owner of a large sugar plantation. After receiving an invitation to return to dinner, I walked over to view his plantation, which was about two miles distant, but did not meet with much to reward my toil, for the sun was hot, and the country dry and sandy. I reached his house again a little before two o’clock, that being the dinner hour, where I found that two other persons, both belonging to the place, had been invited also. The dinner was both substantial and excellent, being served up with some degree of ostentation. We had a slave to wait upon each of us, and before beginning, a little black fellow supplied us with water from a large silver ewer in a silver basin to wash our hands, bearing round his shoulders a long towel with which to dry them. After dinner he took me to see a vessel he was building a little above the town; it was about one hundred and fifty tons burden, and nearly ready for launching. He intended her to trade along the coast, but principally to convey sugar to Bahia; the planking consisted of Pao Amarello and Oiti, said to be the two best woods for ship-building in the north of Brazil. I do not know to what genus the Pao Amarello belongs, but the Oiti is the Moquilea tomentosa of Bentham, first described from specimens which I forwarded to him from Pernambuco.
A proposal has recently been made to establish a communication by steam navigation, between the coast and the interior central provinces of Brazil, by means of the Rio de San Francisco. Upon a mere inspection of the map of this portion of the Empire, it would seem that every facility for this specious proposition has been offered by nature; an easy, cheap, although somewhat circuitous water conveyance leads directly from the sea on the confines of the province of Pernambuco into the heart of the inland, rich, and comparatively well-populated mining and diamond districts, which are separated from the great markets of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia by lofty mountain barriers, always difficult of access, and where the means of transport are tedious and costly. I have great doubts whether this plan will ever be carried into effect, in support of which opinion I will adduce three very substantial reasons.
In the first place, the bar at the mouth of the river is about two leagues broad, is always covered with a heavy surf, and has seldom more than four feet of water on it. In the second place, at the falls of Paulo Affonço there is a series of rapids and falls about sixty miles in length, forming a serious obstacle to the progress of any navigation. In the third place, there is a very limited population throughout the intervening country, which is not likely to increase, owing to the desert nature of the greater portion of the interior; from these causes the amount of produce likely to be taken to the coast must, consequently, be very small indeed, so that the enterprize would not be likely to succeed in a pecuniary point of view, even were it otherwise practicable. Were the interior of the middle portion of Brazil as fertile as is generally supposed to be by those who have never visited it, hopes might be entertained of its becoming hereafter a rich agricultural district, such as the belt of country along the coast is found to be; in that case some great national undertaking for rendering communication more easy, might be looked for; but while it exists as a dry arid tract scarcely fit for the rearing of cattle, it is not at all likely that any Brazilian at least will sink his money in attempting to render the San Francisco navigable. A company of Englishmen may probably be induced in periods of infectious speculation to venture upon this attempt, for some of the late ill-concerted schemes in Brazil have been far more absurd; in testimony of which we may instance that monument of folly, the Rio Doce Company.
The North Americans, particularly those of the back settlements, are celebrated for their inquisitiveness; but this seems to be a very general failing with all those who are shut out from frequent intercourse with strangers. A curious instance of this feeling occurred a few days after I returned to Penêdo. I had brought letters from Maceio to a gentleman who lived here with a married brother, they were among the most respectable people in the place. Although not yet eleven o’clock, I found the lady, a remarkably fine and good-looking woman, with her husband busily engaged at cards, she lying in a hammock, while he was seated on a chair beside her; she had recently been smoking, an almost universal accomplishment among the ladies of the interior, as a long pipe was lying near her, and the floor beneath bore strong indications of excessive expectoration. I was desired to be seated, and was immediately inundated with a flood of questions from the good lady who possessed great volubility of tongue. Among a host of others I may enumerate the following. What countryman are you? What is your name? How old are you? Are you a medical man? Are you married? Are your father and mother alive? What are their names? Have you any sisters? What are their names? Have you any brothers? What are their names? Have all your countrymen blue eyes? Have you churches and priests in your country? Do oranges and bananas grow there? &c., &c. If, however, she was inquisitive about my concerns, she was not less disposed to tell me much that related to herself. Thus she informed me that she was married when she was nineteen years of age, that she was now five years married, and in that time had presented her husband with a yearly gift, all of whom were alive with the exception of one. Her husband, she said, was thirty-six years of age, and she desired me to feel his pulse, as he was always complaining of bad health. I soon discovered his complaint to be indigestion, one of the most frequent ills that Brazilians are subject to, arising, no doubt, from the enormous quantities which they eat, and that generally not of the most digestive materials, as well as from the heavy late suppers which they indulge in. I had then to feel her pulse in turn, and she seemed much pleased when I told her it was an excellent one. I afterwards became very intimate with them, and spent many agreeable hours in their society; their brother to whom I brought the letters was a lawyer, and a well-educated and intelligent man.
On the afternoon of the 21st I bade adieu to the Juiz, and my other friends in Penêdo, and between eight and nine o’clock in the evening embarked in a canoe which I had hired to take me down to Piassabassú, which we reached after a sail of little more than four hours. As I knew of no house to go to, I was obliged to pass the remainder of the night in the canoe, tormented by mosquitos, which were in such abundance that long ere morning I was forced to go on shore, and walk up and down till daylight. The house in which I slept when I passed through the village before, was now empty, but I was allowed to occupy it, and as I could not get a cart to convey me to Peba before the following evening, I had to remain here a longer time than I intended. This interval I devoted to a few botanical excursions in the neighbourhood, and thereby added several new plants to my collections. On reaching Peba, I again had the use of the little hut which I formerly occupied, and was obliged to remain there two days before I could hire a jangada to take me to Maceio; that which I engaged was a fine large one that had never been to sea; and on the morning of the 26th, having got all my collections and luggage put on board, we began our voyage. Peba I found to be nearly, if not quite, as poor a place as the Ilha de San Pedro, and not a single article of provision could be purchased there. Its inhabitants are principally fishermen, and their chief food is fish and farinha; a want of success in the fishery and a bad crop of mandiocca had thrown them quite into a state of starvation. On the evening before we started, Pedro contrived somewhere to purchase a chicken; and when we embarked, our whole stock of provisions consisted of one of its wings, and a few green cocoa-nuts. Before we left, the owner of the canoe sent to Piassabassú to purchase farinha or French beans, as sea stock for his men, but neither were to be procured; the crew, therefore, consisting of three men, had to content themselves with only a few green cocoa-nuts. It rained the whole of the first day, but the elevated part of the jangada on which I lay, being well roofed over with cocoa-nut leaves, I suffered but little inconvenience in consequence. At night we did not put in to shore, as is usual with these crafts, the men being as anxious as myself to reach Maceio, but the wind being light, we could not make much progress. During the succeeding day the winds were again light, but having freshened towards evening we reached Maceio about 8 o’clock P.M.; the surf, however, running so high along the beach that I would not allow the jangada to run ashore, as by doing so my collections would have been completely spoiled. The crew wished me to remain on board till the tide went out, but I had suffered too much from hunger during the voyage, to think of staying any longer; so leaping into the water with Pedro, immediately after a large wave had passed us, we followed it, and reached the shore before another had time to overtake us, but not without being completely drenched. Leaving everything on board to be landed next day, I immediately set off for the house of Mr. Burnett, about a mile distant, and arrived just in time for tea, when, after changing my clothes I made a most comfortable meal, being the first I had enjoyed for two days.