Pará is distinctly a maritime city, though it is ninety miles from the ocean. With the exception of a short government line to Bragança on the coast to the west, constructed in 1877, one cannot go anywhere from it except by boat. It is almost less a Brazilian than a European city, with little brotherhood for the rest of the republic. In the newspapers of Pará “America” means New York, which can be reached from there in two or three days less time than are required for a journey to Rio. It was not until we had met some fellow-countrymen who had been treading Broadway ten days before, long after the returning senator of Pará who landed with us had sailed from the national capital, that we realized why the eyes of Pará are fixed on the north and east rather than upon the great country to the south to which it governmentally belongs.

Pará is an exotic growth, a bit of Parisian civilization isolated in an enormous wilderness, which encroaches so constantly upon it that the European air of the center of town quickly disappears in grass-grown alleyways of swamp and jungle. The heavy rains cause this grass to grow with tropical luxuriance and rapidity, so that there are many wide streets laid out between unbroken rows of buildings that are nothing but deep green lawns with a cow-path or two straggling along them. Densest jungle may be found a short stroll from the central praça, and wild Indians, living as they did centuries ago, are only a few hours distant. It is an unfinished city of pompous, got-rich-quick fronts and ragged rears, with only the old town on its knoll, and the few principal streets of the new town paved in stone blocks. The rest is much as nature left it, and while one may find almost anything in this little culture-importing heart of the city which can be had in the centers of civilization, a short walk brings one to isolated houses on stilts and uninhabited clearings through the jungle in which men, driving carts drawn by one bull, wade to their thighs cutting and loading grass. Scarcely a rifle-shot from shops offering the latest Parisian creations one must depend, even for life, on the strength and agility of primitive man.

Pará has been called the “City of Trees.” Corinthian columns of royal palms wave their elegant heads in every direction, mammoth tropical growths of which we of the North do not even know the name shade the squares and praças; the important streets and avenues are lined with shade trees, in nearly every case the mango, with whitened trunks as a protection against tropical plagues and trimmed to a few main branches, instead of being left to its natural appearance of a deep-green haystack. There is a wealth of tropical vegetation in parks and gardens, terminating with the Bosque Rodrigues Alves in the outskirts, a sample of the real Amazonia, dense wild forest where humidity and semi-darkness reign and great trees stand on tiptoe straining their necks in the struggle for air and light above the solid roof of vegetation. Yet the considerable market gardens on the edges of town, tended by Portuguese and other white laborers, show what European immigration can and might do against this prolific militancy of unbridled nature.

In contrast to the surrounding primeval wilderness, there is a suggestion of the vieux port of Marseilles in the Ver-o-peso (See-the-weight), the old rectangular landing-place, so named because in the time of the monarchy fish brought to town were weighed there and assessed a government tax. It is still the chief port for small vessels, and may be found almost any morning packed with sailing ships, their many colored sails giving the scene an effectiveness usually lacking in the monotonously green aspect of equatorial Brazil. These gather from all directions, bringing the products of the adjacent mainland, the Island of Marajó opposite, and of the waters between, and carrying back to the towns and hamlets scattered along either side of this false mouth of the Amazon the products of civilization, ranging from French perfume to manufactured ice. Along the quay of the Ver-o-peso and for some distance back is the public market, filled with many Amazonian products unknown in northern climes. First and foremost is the pirarucú, a fat, reddish-brown fish sometimes called the “cod of the Amazon,” so huge that each scale is nearly two inches across, less often eaten fresh than salted and boxed in great slabs and shipped to every community along the river. Pirarucú is the beef of the Amazonian regions, as farinha is its bread. Turtle flesh is also in great favor, and butter made from the turtle eggs is the most common in the Pará market. Oil of capivara, or river-hog, of tapir, and even of alligator furnish the Paraenses their emulsions. The state taxes every fisherman, and the federal government takes its toll of every turtle, pirarucú, or bottle of oil he brings in. Castanhas, or chestnuts, as what we call the “Brazil nut” is known at home, are to be found in great heaps; these and cacao constitute the principal products of Grão Pará, with one world-famous exception. There are scores of such local commodities as cheiro de mulata, which might be translated as “scent of mulatto-girl,” ground up bark sold in little packages and sprinkled in the frizzled tresses of the purchasers, both as a perfume and to bring good luck. Of native fruits wholly unknown in the temperate zones there are no end,—the mamão, better known by the Spanish-American name of papaya; the graviola, with big green scales and a cream-like interior similar to the chirimoya of Andean valleys; the cupuassú, with an apple taste; the barcury, maracajú, mangaba, muruxy, taxperebá, and many others, less often used as table fruits than as flavoring to sorbets or ice cream, or what a local café-keeper stronger on mixing than on spelling advertises as “cookstails.” The maxixe, by the way, which has reached the North in the form of a Brazilian rag-time dance elaborated from Portuguese and African originals by the negroes of Pernambuco and Bahia, is in its legitimate sense an Amazonian pepper. Above all, there is the assahy, the small fruit of a palm-tree not unlike the date in appearance, from which a non-alcoholic refresco is made, reddish in color and drunk with farinha. This is so great a favorite among Paraenses that they have a saying:

Quem vai para Pará para;Whoever goes to Pará stops;
Quem toma assahy fica.Whoever drinks assahy remains.

Rubber, the second national industry of Brazil, is of course the life of Pará, which is the reason the city had lost most of its old-time energy. Not only was the rubber market in a chaotic state on account of the World War, but the Amazon was just beginning to feel seriously the competition of the planted rubber-fields of Ceylon, where, in contrast to the high prices of Amazonia, the cost of living is perhaps the lowest in the world. Warehouses that two years before could not hold the rubber that poured in upon them now had a few dozen of the big balls scattered about their huge floors. There they were being cut up—giving them a striking resemblance to dried meat—to make sure the rubber-gatherer had not included a few stones or a low-grade near-rubber called caucho and packed in heavy boxes of native wood for export. All Amazonia, from the laborers who tap the trees to the speculators and explorers and their long train of hangers-on, was feeling the change acutely.

Vinhães never recovered from his astonishment at the difference between this Pará and the one he had known on previous trips. In the good old days of only a few months back Pará was sure it would soon outstrip Paris, so that it had many public and private buildings out of all keeping with its present condition, sumptuous three-story structures marked “Municipal School” on the outside that were mere dusty ruins within, pretentious mansions sitting out wet and lonely, knee-deep in grass, on an imaginary avenue. Then throngs of humanity, all leaving money behind them, poured in and out of the gateway to the Amazon. To-day, with her chief commerce languishing in the throes of death, Pará was provincial again—a stranger attracted attention and everyone knew everyone else. Even now there were few beggars, thanks, perhaps, both to habit and to the scarcity of negro blood, but in the days of prosperity, we were assured, almost any barefoot Portuguese carregador had a conto or two in his pocket. The “Theatro da Paz,” built in the time of the monarchy more than thirty years before, and the most sumptuous in Brazil until the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo were constructed, had not been opened in months. On its façade still hung the remnants of advertising of one of the favorite entertainments of the old money-flowing days:

Theatro Da Paz

Setembro, 1912

A Grande Revista Paraense