The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out. Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place, improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the climate easily, but is indifferent to the carrapatos, or ticks, and all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle, bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood, furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great plaga left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail, unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’ strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than $6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He ate anything, according to the fazendeiro—sugar-cane, melgaço, or crushed pulp, bread, farinha, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but, continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best, which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past discover their most cherished wares.
The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará. But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to improve things.
At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river. I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip of a month or more on one of these gaiolas without a page of reading matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the whole night hideous with their card games.
We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of fazendas to pick up sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their ubás, long, slender, dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner, appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators, parainhas, and a dozen other bichos. Woods, trees, ubás, houses, even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory not easily lost.
It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin.
Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron barracão, and then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk. We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand. Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny “jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with life. Neither the captain nor his immediato, a pleasing, well-mannered man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results as when nothing is left to individual judgment.
Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará, yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night, when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics, mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims.
On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or ridges, and as these always give footing for castanhas along the Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds. In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of “Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the castanhaes, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual pándego, or “blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever called sezões, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women, and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut” season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest of the year. Caboclos in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in Portuguese (pá), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest, well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp, sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be expected.
One afternoon the captain came back on board with a sapucaia, a larger and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer than the castanha and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the tall, graceful, arm-waving castanheiro. Unlike the familiar species, this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the sapucaia unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a tampa, or tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the castanha de macaco, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible qualities.
Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks, the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the Andirá’s run, near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large seringal, or rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his credit. Then one day some workers on the seringal came to the house and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off the seringal by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital, all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre.