The Municipal Theater of Manaos

Here and there our batelão stopped to pick up a few balls of rubber

Now and then we halted to land something at one of the isolated huts along the Rio Branco

If there had been water enough, the launch would have taken us on up the Takutú to Antonino’s door, but we were lucky to be able to push on to the home of the captain before the water ran out. From the shallow Takutú we turned into the narrow Surumú, with barely sufficient water to float us. This the English once claimed as the frontier, but the King of Italy, as arbitrator, set it farther east. The thinly wooded banks grew ever closer together, and in mid-morning we grounded the launch—the old wreck of a batelão, had been left before the estate of its owner near the mouth of the branch—at the captain’s fazenda, “Carnauba.” In the baked-mud house we were welcomed by his good-hearted, if diffident and laconic, part-Indian wife and family. I asked the captain how much I owed him for my passage, at which he showed great surprise and after long reflection remarked that he thought twenty milreis would be generous. This was distinctly reasonable for Brazil, and especially in Amazonia, where the higher you go and the poorer accommodations become, the more exorbitant are apt to be the charges. Money is not the common medium of exchange thus far up-country, where favors are usually returned by some species of barter. Thus Antonino was welcome to ride free because he often shipped cattle by this launch and batelão, and the man who offers money is looked upon somewhat as a “tenderfoot” is on our western plains.

Eager to stretch my legs, I would have pushed on without delay. But Brazil is Brazil, even on its edges, and haste was difficult. First coffee must be served; then came talk enough to settle the terms of a treaty of peace, after which we finally packed all but the most indispensable of our baggage and sent it away by canoe with Antonino’s servant, who must descend again to the Takutú and paddle his way up it. By this time “breakfast” was ready, and we sat down to a heavy Brazilian meal of several kinds of meat, chicken included, and farinha wet in broth, ending with the unescapable black coffee. Then the nearest neighbor, from several miles away, dropped in, and the chatter went on while we lolled in capechanas sipping more black coffee. This was my first acquaintance with the typical seat of the region, a short hammock made of dried cowhides and used not as a bed by night, for which it would lack comfort and size, but as a lounging-place by day. There were six of these capechanas swinging under the veranda. Cowhide is so plentiful in these parts that stiffened ones are often set upright as walls or partitions. There was not a chair in the house, though there were two American sewing-machines and a rusty American phonograph with a hundred records, both so long maltreated that every song sounded like the squawking of the same hen in a slightly different key. The most prized product of the outside world seemed to be kerosene, used in everything from launch-engines to lamps, and always eagerly sought. A ten-gallon box of two cans cost 25$, say seven dollars, and for several months a year it is not obtainable at any price.

First we were to start at ten, then at noon; now we must wait until the sun was lower. A dozen horses were rounded up in the corral, where two were lassooed, and for once it looked as if I were to have a real mount. But the captain insisted on having him tried out first, and after fiercely bucking and rearing for some time, he took the Indian peon on his back for a gallop which he ended suddenly by throwing the rider over his head into a shallow pool, breaking the ancient weather-rotted leather of both saddle and bridle—which was lucky, for otherwise we might never have recovered them. I was quite willing to try my luck, if they would catch him again, but the captain insisted on choosing a substitute, which turned out to be another of those equine rats it seemed always my fate to ride in South America. Notwithstanding his unpromising appearance, however, I was no sooner astride him than he gave a splendid plea for admission to a Wild West show, bucking, jumping up into the air and coming down stiff-legged on all fours, kicking, rearing, and finally taking the cowhide “bit” in his teeth and galloping wildly away across the bushy campo. For a time I was undecided whether to stay on his back or catapult over his head, but decided that the ground was hard and that the honor of my race depended on my performance before those Amazonian gauchos. Somehow, therefore, even with the kodak over my shoulder thumping me in the back at every jump, I kept aboard and returned to the house, which astounded the natives so profoundly as to imply that every other “gringo” of their acquaintance had toppled limply off at the first jump.

Even when I got him quieted down, the animal was so ticklish that if a foot or a bush touched him, he instantly went through the impersonation of a bronco all over again, so that a dozen times that afternoon I had the same sport. Antonino in time caught up with me and we rode on together across a great plain, with scrub trees here and there, many clusters of the burity palm from the fan-like fronds of which all roofs of the region are made, and countless tepecuim, conical ant-hills from six to ten feet high. The range of hills, which I now knew to be the Kanuku Mountains in British Guiana, stood out blue, yet clear, against the far eastern horizon when, about five o’clock, we stopped at the “Fazenda Maravilha” on a bank of the Takutú River. It was a “marvel” only in its own estimation, though the part-Indian owners showed all the hospitality of the region by not only serving the ceremonious black coffee, but by insisting that we remain for the evening meal. Here, also, there were leather hammocks, and a sadly abused phonograph which did its best to entertain us. We were off again at dusk, meaning to take advantage of the full moon; but the clouds were thick, and even after it appeared we saw little of it. Before it rose we stumbled upon what Antonino called a “maloca,” a cluster of huts built and intermittently inhabited by more or less wild Indians. In the darkness between two of the shanties we found a pair of Indian youths, dressed in the remnants of cotton shirts and trousers and lying in their only other possession,—old hammocks swung from posts under the projecting eaves. They belonged to the Macuxy (pronounced “ma-coo-shée”) tribe scattered through the hills of the three countries about the source of the Rio Branco. My companion wanted them to go back to “Maravilha” and help row his canoe and baggage home next day, and the argument he was forced to put up resembled that of a spellbinder seeking votes. In words of one syllable—for they understood little Portuguese—and with such reasoning as one might offer a child of six, he told them at least a dozen times that he would pay them two days’ wages, either in food or money, and that they might be on their way again the following evening. Though they admitted that they had not eaten that day, that they had no water, and asked for tobacco, their unvarying reply was an indifferent monosyllable, and it was only after half an hour of pleading that they gave a grunted promise to roll up their hammocks as soon as the moon was high and be in “Maravilha” in time to start up the river at dawn.