Yet, although as early as 1541 Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s little band of conquerors, who had crossed the Andes in quest of the fabulous country of El Dorado, and, after having traversed the whole course of the river through Brazil with a few companions in a canoe, had made his way back to Spain and told amazing stories of the wealth of the region he had discovered, and although a century later the astronomer La Condamine, and still later Baron von Humboldt, Castelnau, and others had successively published alluring accounts of their explorations in the same region, it was not until 1867 that the river was opened to free navigation.
It is gratifying to reflect that, probably more than to any other outside influence, it was due to the publication of the report of an expedition undertaken in 1851 by William Lewis Herndon, a lieutenant in the United States Navy, and to the explorations of Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor, that the interest was aroused which at last brought this about. Lieutenant Herndon, like Orellana, started from Lima, and, braving the passes of the Andes, entered the Amazon from one of its western affluents and made the journey in a canoe, with only a Peruvian guide and a few Indian rowers, all the way to its mouth. Professor Agassiz, whose explorations were begun fifteen years later, started from Belém and traveled in a steamboat, such as it was, accompanied by his wife and a corps of scientists, and was given every assistance possible by the late Emperor Dom Pedro, who took a lively interest in the expedition. But even then in Brazil, the Professor says in his book, “so little was known of the Amazon that we could obtain only very meager, and usually rather discouraging, information concerning our projected journey. In Rio, if you say you are going to ascend their great river, your Brazilian friends look at you with compassionate wonder. You are threatened with sickness, with intolerable heat, with mosquitoes, jacaraes (alligators), and wild Indians.”
Lieutenant Herndon, however, had already made known to the scientific world that the climate is healthful, notwithstanding the mosquitoes; that, humid and hot as it is during certain hours of the day, the nights are always cool, and that “the direct rays of the sun are tempered by an almost constant east wind, laden with moisture from the ocean, so that no one ever suffers from the heat;” and, when he got back to Rio de Janeiro, Professor Agassiz assured the Brazilians that this was so. Arthur Dias indignantly protests (in his Brazil of To-day) that “it is not true, as they say, that the climate of this region prevents the existence and the extending of the population.” “It is a legend, a fiction,” he adds. Mozans, who made a similar journey to Herndon’s very recently, also testifies to the same effect.
Here in this Amazon country, Lieutenant Herndon had reported, “we see a fecundity of soil and a rapidity of vegetation that is marvelous and to which even Egypt, the ancient granary of Europe, affords no parallel.... Here trees, evidently young, shoot up to such a height that no fowling-piece will reach the game seated on their topmost branches. This is the country of rice, of sarsaparilla, of cocoa, of tonka beans, of mandioca, black pepper, arrowroot, ginger, balsam, tapioca, gum copal, nutmeg, animal and vegetable wax, indigo and Brazil nuts, of India rubber, of dyes of the gayest colors, drugs of rare virtue, variegated cabinet woods of the finest grain and susceptible of the highest polish. Here dwell the wild cow, the fish ox, the sloth, the anteater, the beautiful black tiger, the mysterious electric eel, the boa constrictor, the anaconda, the deadly coral snake, the voracious alligator, monkeys in endless variety, birds of the most brilliant plumage, and insects of the strangest form and gayest colors.”
More than forty years of progress and improvement have passed since Dom Pedro decreed that the river should be open to international trade, yet all these wonders may still be seen there—the vast expanses of water, the shore lines varied by lofty bluffs and low plains of sand, rugged rocks and dense masses of foliage, the river surface dotted by islands, large and small—the magnificent forest still crowding to the banks and teeming with all the exuberant life and brilliant hues of the tropics—giant sumaumeras, their crests towering high above all other trees, their huge, white-barked trunks and limbs standing out in striking relief from the masses of green; tall cocoanut palms, tufted at the top with fan-shaped leaves cut into ribbons and bedecked with creamy blossoms; slender, graceful assai palms, tall and clean-stemmed like the cocoanuts, but with fluffy, feathery crowns; wine palms from which the flowers hang in long, crimson tassels, studded with berries of bright green; jupati palms with plumelike leaves forty to fifty feet long that start near the base of the trunk and curve upward on all sides in the form of a vase; the familiar fan palm, and a legion of others.
And there are rubber trees, which resemble in this region our northern ash; stately castanhas, the trees on which the Brazil nuts grow, and cacaos, that look like our cherry trees, only they give us our chocolate and cocoa beans instead and have blossoms of a saffron tint; mahoganies, rosewoods and satinwoods and great sheaves of whispering bamboo; myriads of ferns and exquisitely tinted orchids, acacias, scarlet passion flowers, begonias, yellow and blue—flowers innumerable in the wildest profusion. Not little ones like our violets hiding modestly among the mosses and grass, but big blossoms growing luxuriantly on bushes and on the parasite vines that twine about the trunks of the trees and hang in festoons from their branches, until the whole river border seems ablaze with their vivid lights; and there are still the monkeys and beautiful butterflies and humming birds, and the parrots, macaws, herons, egrets, toucans, and countless other gorgeously feathered birds, and the Indian villages, too, in the midst of their orange and banana groves or huddled near the beaches where the turtles breed.
Only now all these may be seen from the decks of ocean liners, or, if one starts from Belém or Iquitos, from river steamers as safe and comfortably equipped and setting as good a table as most of those in our northern waters. Now the alligators and snakes and tigers have been driven far from the beaten tracks—not too far, though, for the sportsman who loves the excitement of hunting big game—now the negro slaves have been freed and the Indians are no longer hostile; now, in many places, lands have been drained and clearings made in the forests, and waste marshes and giant trees have made way for pastures and thrifty-looking plantations, where grain, coffee, sugar, tobacco and cotton, and pineapples and many other things are cultivated; now the rubber and cacao and nut gatherers penetrate far into the woods; now small, isolated communities have grown to be large ones, that send their produce directly from their own docks to the markets of the world.
There is Manãos, for instance, the capital of the State of Amazonas. Manãos is situated at the mouth of the Rio Negro, which empties into the Amazon a thousand miles from the coast. When Lieutenant Herndon was there in 1851, it was a wretched little town, containing but four hundred and seventy houses, most of them one story in height, and had a population of about four thousand—whites, Indians, mixed breeds, and negro slaves all combined. To-day it is a modern, rapidly growing city, with a population already numbering fifty thousand, perhaps more, including many foreigners. There is an imposing stone State House, a white marble Palace of Justice, and a splendid monument commemorating the opening of the Amazon to international trade. It has broad, shaded, well-paved streets, lined with handsome buildings; it has electric lights, trolley lines, a telephone system, water and harbor works, an ice plant, banks, hotels, newspapers, up-to-date shops, warehouses and public markets, a good library and excellent educational institutions, and is rated among the greater ports of South America because of its extensive shipments of rubber and other products of the country round about.
A visit to the beautiful public gardens, where an orchestra plays in the evenings, and to the Amazonas Theater is well worth while. It is said to have cost $2,000,000 in gold, that theater—which is not at all surprising to any one who has seen it, for it is truly superb, a structure of stone with marble supporting columns, that stands on a great causeway of masonry occupying a commanding site on the Avenida Eduardo Ribeiro, the principal thoroughfare and fashionable promenade, and has a lofty, brightly colored dome that can be seen from the harbor, and a magnificent foyer adorned with paintings by a famous Italian artist.
Obydos, too, perched on the bluffs beside an old fortress near the mouth of the Trombetas, and Santarem, at the mouth of the Tapajos, about midway between Manãos and the coast, are other progressive cities that offer opportunities for agreeable breaks in the long journey. As it was in the Tapajos that gold was first found in the region, Santarem is one of the oldest if now one of the most up-to-date of the towns. It is possessed, besides, of a peculiar interest for North Americans because after our civil war it became the home of quite a number of our “unreconstructed” Confederates.