Near the house was a fine specimen of the japuim tree, hundreds of oriole-like nests of the japuim-oro-pendula hanging from its branches. They are a noisy bird with a surprising vocabulary, black with white wings having yellow spots, and yellow from the hips down, so to speak, with a black end to the tail, and a long, whitish beak. Their nests are cleverly woven, with the entrance near the top, and every morning the birds clean them out as carefully as any New England housewife. The japuim has a saucy, noisy half-cry, half-whistle with which it keeps up a constant hubbub from daylight until dark. But the most striking of its habits is its love of company. It does not live in single nests, like our northern oriole, but hangs scores and even hundreds of them from the same tree, though there may be countless others without a nest for miles roundabout. They choose trees near houses, perhaps because the human inhabitants and their dogs scare off monkeys, snakes, bats, and other creatures that might do them harm, and like apartment dwellers in our large cities, they live so close together that the arrival or departure of one bird shakes up a dozen or more of his neighbors.
We were to have left early next morning, but this was Brazil and we finally crawled away at four in the afternoon. The batelão was a floating sty. The hold, directly under the rotten-board deck on which we lived and where every step was precarious, sloshed with bilge-water having a strong scent of livestock, and everything made a transatlantic cattle-boat seem incredibly luxurious by comparison. I dipped my water direct from the river, but the crew bailed bilge-water out of the bottom of the barge, and then filled the drinking-water jar with the same bucket without even rinsing it. I had grown faint with hunger before a tiny cup of black coffee came to poison and deceive the stomach, and not a mouthful of food did we get until three in the afternoon. Passengers are not taken on these boats, though the man who presents himself will not be put off; but he has no rights and can make no demands. We ate, standing up at a dirty little workbench on the launch, some beef and farinha cooked and served by an Indian boy with a rotting forefinger that suggested leprosy or something worse, and who had never heard the word “wash.” There were three tin plates on board, which we took turns in using. Bread is considered an extravagance along the Amazon, and I had seen none since the first day out of Manaos. Potatoes are as unknown as cleanliness. I would have given considerable to see a moving-picture of a germ-theorist dropping dead at sight of us.
In such predicaments moderation is the only hope; eat and drink no more than is absolutely necessary, and do not worry. My legs itched and tingled from the mucuims of two days before; indeed, our whole skins were tattooed with all manner of abrasions, but there was nothing to do but play Indian and smile at anything. With perfect weather one enjoyed life, for all its drawbacks, and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that everyone else on board was as badly off, which is more conducive to contentment than living on cattle-boat fare with the scent of first-cabin mushroom steaks in the air. Still, active rather than passive hardships would have been preferable.
The captain was a full-blooded Indian with filed teeth. Many aborigines and part-breeds along the Amazon, some of them “civilized” and living in the larger towns, file their front teeth to points. A native dentist told me that this was not due to superstition, but because it keeps them from decaying and saves people from one of the curses of wild places—toothache. While I do not recommend the custom, I was frequently assured, both by Amazonian dentists and the natives themselves, that a filed tooth never spoils. An Indian who spoke Portuguese, and who was so familiar with modern progress that he made no objection to my photographing him and his wife with their pointed fangs displayed, said that the work had been done when he was twelve, with a three-cornered file—though the wilder tribes chip them off—that the only hurt was a few days’ dull ache, and that the only purpose of the custom was to save the teeth and at the same time be able to cope with the tough “green” beefsteaks of Amazonia.
The owner of the barge, who sat chupando canna—“sucking” sugar-cane it was, indeed—by the light of a brilliant full moon, tried to force his cabin upon me; but I declined extra favors and swung my hammock with the others on the lower deck over the sloshing cattle-water. In the moonlight the mirror-clear river reflected every hump and turn of the banks far ahead. When I finally fell into a doze in spite of the constant hubbub on launch or barge, someone woke me and told me to take my hammock away while the crew loaded wood, which they did for some hours. Like a magnet, we seemed to pick up everything along the river and drag it with us. When daylight came we were towing the launch of a rival, which appeared to have broken down, our own clumsy old barge with some three feet of odorous water in its hold, two very large boats, roofed, and with tons of cargo, a dead gasoline launch, two large and heavily laden rowboats, two empty rowboats, four canoes, and perhaps seventy-five persons all told, some of whom had waited half a year to get this trip up the river. To say that we made speed against the swift current would be exaggerating.
We stopped for wood again during the day and I had my first swim in Amazonia, for here the danger of pirainhas was said not to be great. This savage small fish, having double rows of teeth of razor edge with which it tears the flesh even of man, is the horror of the swimmer in nearly all the waters of the Amazon basin. Let the skin show the suggestion of a wound, and whole schools of these bloodthirsty creatures dart forward to the attack with lightning-like rapidity. The river remained wide, but was now very shallow, and much of the year it is almost completely dry. On the morning of May 28 we sighted the first town since leaving Manaos. This was Boa Vista, founded forty years ago on the left-hand bank of the river, where the dense forests begin to die out into open campo. Its red-tiled roofs and other colors gave a striking and welcome contrast after an unbroken week of watching the monotonous unrolling of jungle-forested banks. There were perhaps forty houses and huts, including a church in ruins, three shops, two dentists, one of whom was also the pharmacist, and the self-complacent air of a backwoods metropolis. Boa Vista is the “capital” of the cattle plains of northernmost Brazil, and as such has an importance out of all keeping with its size, like many another insignificant town in a boundless wilderness. Yet it had the profound melancholy, the mournful tranquillity that is the ordinary existence of sertanejo populations, where nearly every individual is true to his relaxed and indolent environment. There was, however, really a “boa vista” for this region, a far-reaching view across the river and the grassy plains to ranges of hills purple-blue with distance.
For some days Antonino had been suffering from some violent throat infection, and he was now speechless. Everyone advised him to stay in Boa Vista, where at least there was a pharmacy and a dentist, if no doctor—and the next boat, I recalled, would probably be at least a month behind. I kept silence, however, rather than let my own convenience tempt me to advise him; but after everyone else had tried their turn at wheedling him to remain, he refused, and having had his throat sprayed, we were off once more. In the brilliant moonlight that night we passed, high up on a low hill, the snow-white chapel of the monks of São Bento, and below it on the river stood Fort São Joaquim. The old fortress was built by the Portuguese in 1775 to keep the Spaniards to the north and west from stealing Portuguese territory. It is now in ruins, but there was still a “garrison” of a dozen men living in thatched huts about it.
This was the junction of the Parima and the Takutú Rivers, which form the Rio Branco. We turned into the latter and struggled on. The last of our tows had dropped off at Boa Vista, and of passengers, there remained only Antonino, his servant, and myself. In the morning we were skirting the broad acres of the Fazenda Nacional. Across it, near the Venezuelan boundary, was the legendary Lago Dourado and Manoa del Dorado, said to have been built by Peruvians before the Conquest, where everything was reputed to be made of pure gold. Even Walter Raleigh took the existence of fabulous Manoa seriously, and planned an expedition to find and conquer it. To this day, however, it has not been discovered. The Manoas were the most numerous and valiant tribe in the Rio Branco region, but they grew weak under missionary civilization and retreated to British territory, though they left descendants in all the Amazon basin. It is the boast of many of the “best families” of the Rio Branco Valley that they are of the true aristocracy because some of their ancestors were Manoas.
A lace maker on the Amazon