On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the morning we crossed the river and entered first the paraná and then the igarapé of Alenquer. A paraná, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an igarapé is a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank, but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from Santarem to Obidos and never see this igarapé. We slid almost into the dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer, a typical small town of Amazonia.
There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot, grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta, the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low, wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest about Alenquer.
I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin. School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered. Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January 15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the castanhaes from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried, was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes.
The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends. The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the Andirá belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a fazenda house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease and grace suggesting that the montaría has a mind and a will of its own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained several hours, while the negro-caboclo crew of half a dozen carried the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these gaiolas usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine jararaca of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under them.
About dawn we emerged from the paraná upon the “sea-river” again, with a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and heavy shade of the cacaoaes, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across, grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns into vinho de cacao, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death from fever to spend a week in the castanhaes that they were never gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “Num mez ’stou lá—ou dois—In a month I’ll be there—or two.”
It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the creaking of a few tropical crickets.
I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight, and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout canoe or some other species of montaria creeping along the extreme lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies. These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag!
The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the pirarucú, a mammoth species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known to make a pirarucú tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike that in taste. Pirarucú and farinha d’agoa make up most Amazonian meals, as they did on board the Andirá. We landed boxes of this staff of life even at towns where the pirarucú abounds, the lazy inhabitants preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves. The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the peixe-boi, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste.
We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it, stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man, “Ha um passageiro para Manaos!” The captain, who seemed to know everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted back, “O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?” And that night we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá.
One day the talk on board ran to garzas, the bird that furnishes what we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them, said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos, say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of garzas, “giving the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off. He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big garzal with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers, however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of exertions to supply her demands, for real garza-hunting is no child’s play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in question from the decks of the Andirá, tall, slender, graceful, and generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$ a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the municipio collects 6$ an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians skim off most of the cream.”