The Naturalist on the River Amazons

by Henry Walter Bates

October 3rd.—About midnight the wind, for which we had long been waiting, sprang up; the men weighed anchor, and we were soon fairly embarked on the Amazons. I rose long before sunrise to see the great river by moonlight. There was a spanking breeze, and the vessel was bounding gaily over the waters. The channel along which we were sailing was only a narrow arm of the river, about two miles in width: the total breadth at this point is more than twenty miles, but the stream is divided into three parts by a series of large islands. The river, notwithstanding this limitation of its breadth, had a most majestic appearance. It did not present that lake-like aspect which the waters of the Pará and Tocantins affect, but had all the swing, so to speak, of a vast flowing stream. The ochre-coloured turbid waters offered also a great contrast to the rivers belonging to the Pará system. The channel formed a splendid reach, sweeping from south-west to north-east, with a horizon of water and sky both upstream and down. At 11 a.m. we arrived at Gurupá, a small village situated on a rocky bank thirty or forty feet high. Here we landed, and I had an opportunity of rambling in the neighbouring woods, which are intersected by numerous pathways, and carpeted with Lycopodia growing to a height of eight or ten inches, and enlivened by numbers of glossy blue butterflies of the Theclidæ or hairstreak family. At 5 p.m. we were again under way. Soon after sunset, as we were crossing the mouth of the Xingú, the first of the great tributaries of the Amazons, 1200 miles in length, a black cloud arose suddenly in the northeast. Joao da Cunha ordered all sails to be taken in, and immediately afterwards a furious squall burst forth, tearing the waters into foam, and producing a frightful uproar in the neighbouring forests. A drenching rain followed, but in half an hour all was again calm and the full moon appeared sailing in a cloudless sky.

From the mouth of the Xingú the route followed by vessels leads straight across the river, here ten miles broad. Towards midnight the wind failed us, when we were close to a large shoal called the Baixo Grande. We lay here becalmed in the sickening heat for two days, and when the trade-wind recommenced with the rising moon at 10 p.m. on the 6th, we found ourselves on a lee-shore. Notwithstanding all the efforts of our pilot to avoid it, we ran aground. Fortunately the bottom consisted only of soft mud, so that by casting anchor to windward, and hauling in with the whole strength of crew and passengers, we got off after spending an uncomfortable night. We rounded the point of the shoal in two fathoms’ water; the head of the vessel was then put westward, and by sunrise we were bounding forward before a steady breeze, all sail set and everybody in good humour.

The weather was now delightful for several days in succession, the air transparently clear, and the breeze cool and invigorating. At daylight, on the 6th, a chain of blue hills, the Serra de Almeyrim, appeared in the distance on the north bank of the river. The sight was most exhilarating after so long a sojourn in a flat country. We kept to the southern shore, passing in the course of the day the mouths of the Urucuricáya and the Aquiquí, two channels which communicate with the Xingú. The whole of this southern coast hence to near Santarem, a distance of 130 miles, is lowland and quite uninhabited. It is intersected by short arms or back waters of the Amazons, which are called in the Tupi language Parána-mirims, or little rivers. By keeping to these, small canoes can travel a great part of the distance without being much exposed to the heavy seas of the main river. The coast throughout has a most desolate aspect; the forest is not so varied as on the higher land; and the water-frontage, which is destitute of the green mantle of climbing plants that form so rich a decoration in other parts, is encumbered at every step with piles of fallen trees; and peopled by white egrets, ghostly storks, and solitary herons. In the evening we passed Almeyrim. The hills, according to Von Martius, who landed here, are about 800 feet above the level of the river, and are thickly wooded to the summit. They commence on the east by a few low isolated and rounded elevations; but towards the west of the village, they assume the appearance of elongated ridges which seem as if they had been planed down to a uniform height by some external force. The next day we passed in succession a series of similar flat-topped hills, some isolated and of a truncated-pyramidal shape, others prolonged to a length of several miles. There is an interval of low country between these and the Almeyrim range, which has a total length of about twenty-five miles; then commences abruptly the Serra de Marauaqua, which is succeeded in a similar way by the Velha Pobre range, the Serras de Tapaiuna-quára, and Parauá-quára. All these form a striking contrast to the Serra de Almeyrim in being quite destitute of trees. They have steep rugged sides, apparently clothed with short herbage, but here and there exposing bare white patches. Their total length is about forty miles. In the rear, towards the interior, they are succeeded by other ranges of hills communicating with the central mountain-chain of Guiana, which divides Brazil from Cayenne.

As we sailed along the southern shore, during the 6th and two following days, the table-topped hills on the opposite side occupied most of our attention. The river is from four to five miles broad, and in some places long, low wooded islands intervene in mid-stream, whose light-green, vivid verdure formed a strangely beautiful foreground to the glorious landscape of broad stream and grey mountain. Ninety miles beyond Almeyrim stands the village of Monte Alegre, which is built near the summit of the last hill visible of this chain. At this point the river bends a little towards the south, and the hilly country recedes from its shores to re-appear at Obydos, greatly decreased in height, about a hundred miles further west.

We crossed the river three times between Monte Alegre and the next town, Santarem. In the middle the waves ran very high, and the vessel lurched fearfully, hurling everything that was not well secured from one side of the deck to the other. On the morning of the 9th of October, a gentle wind carried us along a “remanso,” or still water, under the southern shore. These tracts of quiet water are frequent on the irregular sides of the stream, and are the effect of counter movements caused by the rapid current of its central parts. At 9 a.m. we passed the mouth of a Paraná-mirim, called Mahicá, and then found a sudden change in the colour of the water and aspect of the banks. Instead of the low and swampy water-frontage which had prevailed from the mouth of the Xingú, we saw before us a broad sloping beach of white sand. The forest, instead of being an entangled mass of irregular and rank vegetation as hitherto, presented a rounded outline, and created an impresssion of repose that was very pleasing. We now approached, in fact, the mouth of the Tapajos, whose clear olive-green waters here replaced the muddy current against which we had so long been sailing. Although this is a river of great extent—1000 miles in length, and, for the last eighty miles of its course, four to ten in breadth—its contribution to the Amazons is not perceptible in the middle of the stream. The white turbid current of the main river flows disdainfully by, occupying nearly the whole breadth of the channel, whilst the darker water of its tributary seems to creep along the shore, and is no longer distinguishable four or five miles from its mouth.

We reached Santarem at 11 a.m. The town has a clean and cheerful appearance from the river. It consists of three long streets, with a few short ones crossing them at right angles, and contains about 2500 inhabitants. It lies just within the mouth of Tapajos, and is divided into two parts, the town and the aldeia or village. The houses of the white and trading classes are substantially built, many being of two and three stories, and all white-washed and tiled. The aldeia, which contains the Indian portion of the population, or did so formerly, consists mostly of mud huts, thatched with palm leaves. The situation of the town is very beautiful. The land, although but slightly elevated, does not form, strictly speaking, a portion of the alluvial river plains of the Amazons, but is rather a northern prolongation of the Brazilian continental land. It is scantily wooded, and towards the interior consists of undulating campos, which are connected with a series of hills extending southward as far as the eye can reach. I subsequently made this place my head-quarters for three years; an account of its neighbourhood is therefore, reserved for another chapter. At the first sight of Santarem, one cannot help being struck with the advantages of its situation. Although 400 miles from the sea, it is accessible to vessels of heavy tonnage coming straight from the Atlantic. The river has only two slight bends between this port and the sea, and for five or six months in the year the Amazonian trade wind blows with very little interruption, so that sailing ships coming from foreign countries could reach the place with little difficulty. We ourselves had accomplished 200 miles, or about half the distance from the sea, in an ill-rigged vessel, in three days and a half. Although the land in the immediate neighbourhood is perhaps ill adapted for agriculture, an immense tract of rich soil, with forest and meadowland, lies on the opposite banks of the river, and the Tapajos leads into the heart of the mining provinces of interior Brazil. But where is the population to come from to develop the resources of this fine country? At present, the district within a radius of twenty-five miles contains barely 6500 inhabitants; behind the town, towards the interior, the country is uninhabited, and jaguars roam nightly, at least in the rainy season, close up to the ends of the suburban streets.

From information obtained here, I fixed upon the next town, Obydos, as the best place to stay for a few weeks, in order to investigate the natural productions of the north side of the Lower Amazons. We started at sunrise on the 10th, and being still favoured by wind and weather, made a pleasant passage, reaching Obydos, which is nearly fifty miles distant from Santarem, by midnight. We sailed all day close to the southern shore, and found the banks here and there dotted with houses of settlers, each surrounded by its plantation of cacao, which is the staple product of the district. This coast has an evil reputation for storms and mosquitoes, but we fortunately escaped both. It was remarkable that we had been troubled by mosquitoes only on one night, and then to a small degree, during the whole of our voyage.

I landed at Obydos the next morning, and then bid adieu to my kind friend Joao da Cunha, who, after landing my baggage, got up his anchor and continued on his way. The town contains about 1200 inhabitants, and is airily situated on a high bluff, ninety or a hundred feet above the level of the river. The coast is precipitous for two or three miles hence to the west. The cliffs consist of the parti-coloured clay, or Tabatinga, which occurs so frequently throughout the Amazons region; the strong current of the river sets full against them in the season of high water, and annually carries away large portions. The clay in places is stratified alternately pink and yellow, the pink beds being the thickest and of much harder texture than the others. When I descended the river in 1859, a German Major of Engineers, in the employ of the Government, told me that he had found calcareous layers, thickly studded with marine shells interstratified with the clay. On the top of the Tabatinga lies a bed of sand, in some places several feet thick, and the whole formation rests on strata of sandstone, which are exposed only when the river reaches its lowest level. Behind the town rises a fine rounded hill, and a range of similar elevations extends six miles westward, terminating at the mouth of the Trombetas, a large river flowing through the interior of Guiana. Hills and lowlands alike are covered with a sombre rolling forest. The river here is contracted to a breadth of rather less than a mile (1738 yards), and the entire volume of its waters, the collective product of a score of mighty streams, is poured through the strait with tremendous velocity. It must be remarked, however, that the river valley itself is not contracted to this breadth, the opposite shore not being continental land, but a low alluvial tract, subject to inundation more or less in the rainy season. Behind it lies an extensive lake, called the Lago Grande da Villa Franca, which communicates with the Amazons, both above and below Obydos, and has therefore the appearance of a by-water or an old channel of the river. This lake is about thirty-five miles in length, and from four to ten in width; but its waters are of little depth, and in the dry season its dimensions are much lessened. It has no perceptible current, and does not therefore now divert any portion of the waters of the Amazons from their main course past Obydos.