On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts. This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand, and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not one fortieth that amount. From it a fiscal of the State of Pará came on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons, thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “Provavelmente estaba com o miolo molle” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins.
That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained. The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped in upon several caboclo families and found them instantly friendly, though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word, most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks, swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour, though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine. One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time making lace with a great rattling of birros.
Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view. Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century, with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony, as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production, taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab, uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton.
We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another gaiola of our line, the Indio do Brazil, so named, strangely enough, not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a paraná as straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle!
In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest fazenda we had yet seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees, the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them. The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised, therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies. The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight, pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them, similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing. The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “Não s’nho’,” the man replied, crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt.
The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak. It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came out of a paraná upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together, the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black” of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream.
More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a poor caboclo was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the “Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a climate. But the caboclos of the Amazon pay little attention to rain, water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor, with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we drew nearer, the chacaras and “summer-houses” of rich Manaoenses appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another, looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval castle in mid-ocean.
Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days. There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least three for every passenger landing and which without exception were manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced the captain, the immediato, and a few fellow-passengers—male only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer journey still ahead of them.
Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it had igarapés, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty wilderness that surrounds it.
Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners” that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far. The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in pushing on to be disillusioned in person.