A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is round
An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and Manaos, and the Brazilian flag
On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the barefoot Portuguese carregador I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May 25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the Macuxy was still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the armazen to verify the chalked figures. Não, senhor, the launch would leave that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely endured as a necessary evil.
It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the “Launch Macuxy leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the batelão hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow, with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs, chickens, rancho, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table, a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but it would amanhã.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.
We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally across the batelão from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug Macuxy, constantly puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy batelão alongside, as is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.
All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory, retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water, though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous in the Amazon proper.
There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s run, the Indian and caboclo crew tossing it stick by stick from one to another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from 35$ to 60$ a thousand.
Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous pirarucú and farinha d’agoa, with wine and condensed milk for those who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the people and the climate than Brazil.
Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the man boarded us, and we were off again.