As I said before, the yellow fever still lingered in the place when I arrived from the interior in April. I was in hopes I should escape it, but was not so fortunate; it seemed to spare no newcomer. At the time I fell ill, every medical man in the place was worked to the utmost in attending the victims of the other epidemic; it was quite useless to think of obtaining their aid, so I was obliged to be my own doctor, as I had been in many former smart attacks of fever. I was seized with shivering and vomit at nine o’clock in the morning. Whilst the people of the house went down to the town for the medicines I ordered, I wrapped myself in a blanket and walked sharply to and fro along the veranda, drinking at intervals a cup of warm tea, made of a bitter herb in use amongst the natives, called Pajémarióba, a leguminous plant growing in all waste places. About an hour afterwards, I took a good draught of a decoction of elder blossoms as a sudorific, and soon after fell insensible into my hammock. Mr. Philipps, an English resident with whom I was then lodging, came home in the afternoon and found me sound asleep and perspiring famously. I did not wake until almost midnight, when I felt very weak and aching in every bone of my body. I then took as a purgative, a small dose of Epsom salts and manna. In forty-eight hours the fever left me, and in eight days from the first attack, I was able to get about my work. Little else happened during my stay, which need be recorded here. I shipped off all my collections to England, and received thence a fresh supply of funds. It took me several weeks to prepare for my second and longest journey into the interior. My plan now was first to make Santarem headquarters for some time, and ascend from that place the river Tapajos as far as practicable. Afterwards I intended to revisit the marvellous country of the Upper Amazons, and work well its natural history at various stations I had fixed upon, from Ega to the foot of the Andes.
Chapter VIII.
SANTAREM
Situation of Santarem — Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants — Climate — Grassy Campos and Woods — Excursions to Mapirí, Mahicá, and Irurá, with Sketches of their Natural History; Palms, Wild Fruit Trees, Mining Wasps, Mason Wasps, Bees, and Sloths
I have already given a short account of the size, situation, and general appearance of Santarem. Although containing not more than 2500 inhabitants, it is the most civilised and important settlement on the banks of the main river from Peru to the Atlantic. The pretty little town, or city as it is called, with its rows of tolerably uniform, white-washed and red-tiled houses surrounded by green gardens and woods, stands on gently sloping ground on the eastern side of the Tapajos, close to its point of junction with the Amazons. A small eminence on which a fort has been erected, but which is now in a dilapidated condition, overlooks the streets, and forms the eastern limit of the mouth of the tributary. The Tapajos at Santarem is contracted to a breadth of about a mile and a half by an accretion of low alluvial land, which forms a kind of delta on the western side; fifteen miles further up the river is seen at its full width of from ten to a dozen miles, and the magnificent hilly country, through which it flows from the south, is then visible on both shores. This high land, which appears to be a continuation of the central table-lands of Brazil, stretches almost without interruption on the eastern side of the river down to its mouth at Santarem. The scenery as well as the soil, vegetation, and animal tenants of this region, are widely different from those of the flat and uniform country which borders the Amazons along most part of its course. After travelling week after week on the main river, the aspect of Santarem with its broad white sandy beach, limpid dark-green waters, and line of picturesque hills rising behind over the fringe of green forest, affords an agreeable surprise. On the main Amazons, the prospect is monotonous unless the vessel runs near the shore, when the wonderful diversity and beauty of the vegetation afford constant entertainment. Otherwise, the unvaried, broad yellow stream, and the long low line of forest, which dwindles away in a broken line of trees on the sea-like horizon and is renewed, reach after reach, as the voyages advances, weary by their uniformity.
I arrived at Santarem on my second journey into the interior, in November, 1851, and made it my head-quarters for a period, as it turned out, of three years and a half. During this time I made, in pursuance of the plan I had framed, many excursions up the Tapajos, and to other places of interest in the surrounding region. On landing, I found no difficulty in hiring a suitable house on the outskirts of the place. It was pleasantly situated near the beach, going towards the aldeia or Indian part of the town. The ground sloped from the back premises down to the waterside and my little raised veranda overlooked a beautiful flower-garden, a great rarity in this country, which belonged to the neighbours. The house contained only three rooms, one with brick and two with boarded floors. It was substantially built, like all the better sort of houses in Santarem, and had a stuccoed front. The kitchen, as is usual, formed an outhouse placed a few yards distant from the other rooms. The rent was 12,000 reis, or about twenty-seven shillings a month. In this country, a tenant has no extra payments to make; the owners of house property pay a dizimo or tithe, to the “collectoria geral,” or general treasury, but with this the occupier of course has nothing to do. In engaging servants, I had the good fortune to meet with a free mulatto, an industrious and trustworthy young fellow, named José, willing to arrange with me; the people of his family cooked for us, whilst he assisted me in collecting; he proved of the greatest service in the different excursions we subsequently made. Servants of any kind were almost impossible to be obtained at Santarem, free people being too proud to hire themselves, and slaves too few and valuable to their masters to be let out to others. These matters arranged, the house put in order, and a rude table, with a few chairs, bought or borrowed to furnish the house with, I was ready in three or four days to commence my Natural History explorations in the neighbourhood.
I found Santarem quite a different sort of place from the other settlements on the Amazons. At Cametá, the lively, good-humoured, and plain-living Mamelucos formed the bulk of the population, the white immigrants there, as on the Rio Negro and Upper Amazons, seeming to have fraternised well with the aborigines. In the neighbourhood of Santarem the Indians, I believe, were originally hostile to the Portuguese; at any rate, the blending of the two races has not been here on a large scale. I did not find the inhabitants the pleasant, easy-going, and blunt-spoken country folk that are met with in other small towns of the interior. The whites, Portuguese and Brazilians, are a relatively more numerous class here than in other settlements, and make great pretensions to civilisation; they are the merchants and shopkeepers of the place; owners of slaves, cattle estates, and cacao plantations. Amongst the principal residents must also be mentioned the civil and military authorities, who are generally well-bred and intelligent people from other provinces. Few Indians live in the place; it is too civilised for them, and the lower class is made up (besides the few slaves) of half-breeds, in whose composition negro blood predominates. Coloured people also exercise the different handicrafts; the town supports two goldsmiths, who are mulattoes, and have each several apprentices; the blacksmiths are chiefly Indians, as is the case generally throughout the province. The manners of the upper class (copied from those of Pará) are very stiff and formal, and the absence of the hearty hospitality met with in other places, produces a disagreeable impression at first. Much ceremony is observed in the intercourse of the principal people with each other, and with strangers. The best room in each house is set apart for receptions, and visitors are expected to present themselves in black dress coats, regardless of the furious heat which rages in the sandy streets of Santarem towards mid-day, the hour when visits are generally made. In the room a cane-bottomed sofa and chairs, all lacquered and gilded, are arranged in quadrangular form, and here the visitors are invited to seat themselves, whilst the compliments are passed, or the business arranged. In taking leave, the host backs out his guests with repeated bows, finishing at the front door. Smoking is not in vogue amongst this class, but snuff-taking is largely indulged in, and great luxury is displayed in gold and silver snuff-boxes. All the gentlemen, and indeed most of the ladies also, wear gold watches and guard chains. Social parties are not very frequent; the principal men being fully occupied with their business and families, and the rest spending their leisure in billiard and gambling rooms, leaving wives and daughters shut up at home. Occasionally, however, one of the principal citizens gives a ball. In the first that I attended, the gentlemen were seated all the evening on one side of the room, and the ladies on the other, and partners were allotted by means of numbered cards, distributed by a master of the ceremonies. But the customs changed rapidly in these matters after steamers began to run on the Amazons (in 1853), bringing a flood of new ideas and fashions into the country. The old, bigoted, Portuguese system of treating women, which stifled social intercourse and wrought endless evils in the private life of the Brazilians, is now being gradually, although slowly, abandoned.
The religious festivals were not so numerous here as in other towns, and when they did take place, were very poor and ill attended. There is a handsome church, but the vicar showed remarkably little zeal for religion, except for a few days now and then when the Bishop came from Pará on his rounds through the diocese. The people are as fond of holiday-making here as in other parts of the province; but it seemed to be a growing fashion to substitute rational amusements for the processions and mummeries of the saints’ days. The young folks are very musical, the principal instruments in use being the flute, violin, Spanish guitar, and a small four-stringed viola, called cavaquinho. During the early part of my stay at Santarem, a little party of instrumentalists, led by a tall, thin, ragged mulatto, who was quite an enthusiast in his art, used frequently to serenade their friends in the cool and brilliant moonlit evenings of the dry season, playing French and Italian marches and dance music with very good effect. The guitar was the favourite instrument with both sexes, as at Pará; the piano, however, is now fast superseding it. The ballads sung to the accompaniment of the guitar were not learned from written or printed music, but communicated orally from one friend to another. They were never spoken of as songs, but modinhas, or “little fashions,” each of which had its day, giving way to the next favourite brought by some young fellow from the capital. At festival times there was a great deal of masquerading, in which all the people, old and young, white, negro, and Indian, took great delight. The best things of this kind used to come off during the Carnival, in Easter week, and on St. John’s Eve; the negroes having a grand semi-dramatic display in the streets at Christmas time. The more select affairs were got up by the young whites, and coloured men associating with whites. A party of thirty or forty of these used to dress themselves in uniform style, and in very good taste, as cavaliers and dames, each disguised with a peculiar kind of light gauze mask. The troop, with a party of musicians, went the round of their friends’ houses in the evening, and treated the large and gaily-dressed companies which were there assembled to a variety of dances. The principal citizens, in the large rooms of whose houses these entertainments were given, seemed quite to enjoy them; great preparations were made at each place; and, after the dance, guests and masqueraders were regaled with pale ale and sweetmeats. Once a year the Indians, with whom masked dances and acting are indigenous, had their turn, and on one occasion they gave us a great treat. They assembled from different parts of the neighbourhood at night, on the outskirts of the town, and then marched through the streets by torchlight towards the quarter inhabited by the whites, to perform their hunting and devil dances before the doors of the principal inhabitants. There were about a hundred men, women, and children in the procession. Many of the men were dressed in the magnificent feather crowns, tunics, and belts, manufactured by the Mundurucús, and worn by them on festive occasions, but the women were naked to the waist, and the children quite naked, and all were painted and smeared red with anatto. The ringleader enacted the part of the Tushaua, or chief, and carried a sceptre, richly decorated with the orange, red, and green feathers of toucans and parrots. The pajé or medicine-man came along, puffing at a long tauarí cigar, the instrument by which he professes to make his wonderful cures. Others blew harsh, jarring blasts with the turé, a horn made of long and thick bamboo, with a split reed in the mouthpiece. This is the war trumpet of many tribes of Indians, with which the sentinels of predatory hordes, mounted on a lofty tree, gave the signal for attack to their comrades. Those Brazilians who are old enough to remember the times of warfare between Indians and settlers, retain a great horror of the turé, its loud, harsh note heard in the dead of the night having been often the prelude to an onslaught of bloodthirsty Múras on the outlying settlements. The rest of the men in the procession carried bows and arrows, bunches of javelins, clubs, and paddles. The older children brought with them the household pets; some had monkeys or coatis on their shoulders, and others bore tortoises on their heads. The squaws carried their babies in aturas, or large baskets, slung on their backs, and secured with a broad belt of bast over their foreheads. The whole thing was accurate in its representation of Indian life, and showed more ingenuity than some people give the Brazilian red man credit for. It was got up spontaneously by the Indians, and simply to amuse the people of the place.
The people seem to be thoroughly alive to the advantages of education for their children. Besides the usual primary schools, one for girls, and another for boys, there is a third of a higher class, where Latin and French, amongst other accomplishments, are taught by professors, who, like the common schoolmasters, are paid by the provincial government. This is used as a preparatory school to the Lyceum and Bishop’s seminary, well-endowed institutions at Pará, whither it is the ambition of traders and planters to send their sons to finish their studies. The rudiments of education only are taught in the primary schools, and it is surprising how quickly and well the little lads, both coloured and white, learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But the simplicity of the Portuguese language, which is written as it is pronounced, or according to unvarying rules, and the use of the decimal system of accounts, make these acquirements much easier than they are with us. Students in the superior school have to pass an examination before they can be admitted at the colleges in Pará, and the managers once did me the honour to make me one of the examiners for the year. The performances of the youths, most of whom were under fourteen years of age, were very creditable, especially in grammar; there was a quickness of apprehension displayed which would have gladdened the heart of a northern schoolmaster. The course of study followed at the colleges of Pará must be very deficient; for it is rare to meet with an educated Paraense who has the slightest knowledge of the physical sciences, or even of geography, if he has not travelled out of the province. The young men all become smart rhetoricians and lawyers; any of them is ready to plead in a law case at an hour’s notice; they are also great at statistics, for the gratification of which taste there is ample field in Brazil, where every public officer has to furnish volumes of dry reports annually to the government; but they are woefully ignorant on most other subjects. I do not recollect seeing a map of any kind at Santarem. The quick-witted people have a suspicion of their deficiencies in this respect, and it is difficult to draw them out on geography; but one day a man holding an important office betrayed himself by asking me, “On what side of the river was Paris situated?” This question did not arise, as might be supposed, from a desire for accurate topographical knowledge of the Seine, but from the idea, that all the world was a great river, and that the different places he had heard of must lie on one shore or the other. The fact of the Amazons being a limited stream, having its origin in narrow rivulets, its beginning and its ending, has never entered the heads of most of the people who have passed their whole lives on its banks.
Santarem is a pleasant place to live in, irrespective of its society. There are no insect pests, mosquito, pium, sand-fly, or motuca. The climate is glorious; during six months of the year, from August to February, very little rain falls, and the sky is cloudless for weeks together, the fresh breezes from the sea, nearly 400 miles distant, moderating the great heat of the sun. The wind is sometimes so strong for days together, that it is difficult to make way against it in walking along the streets, and it enters the open windows and doors of houses, scattering loose clothing and papers in all directions. The place is considered healthy; but at the changes of season, severe colds and ophthalmia are prevalent. I found three Englishmen living here, who had resided many years in the town or its neighbourhood, and who still retained their florid complexions; the plump and fresh appearance of many of the middle-aged Santarem ladies also bore testimony to the healthfulness of the climate. The streets are always clean and dry, even in the height of the wet season; good order is always kept, and the place pretty well supplied with provisions. None but those who have suffered from the difficulty of obtaining the necessities of life at any price in most of the interior settlements of South America, can appreciate the advantages of Santarem in this respect. Everything, however, except meat, was dear, and becoming every year more so. Sugar, coffee, and rice, which ought to be produced in surplus in the neighbourhood, are imported from other provinces, and are high in price; sugar, indeed, is a little dearer here than in England. There were two or three butchers’ shops, where excellent beef could be had daily at twopence or twopence-halfpenny per pound. The cattle have not to be brought from a long distance as at Pará, being bred on the campos, which border the Lago Grande, only one or two days’ journey from the town. Fresh fish could be bought in the port on most evenings, but as the supply did not equal the demand, there was always a race amongst purchasers to the waterside when the canoe of a fisherman hove in sight. Very good bread was hawked round the town every morning, with milk, and a great variety of fruits and vegetables. Amongst the fruits, there was a kind called atta, which I did not see in any other part of the country. It belongs to the Anonaceous order, and the tree which produces it grows apparently wild in the neighbourhood of Santarem. It is a little larger than a good-sized orange, and the rind, which encloses a mass of rich custardy pulp, is scaled like the pineapple, but green when ripe, and encrusted on the inside with sugar. To finish this account of the advantages of Santarem, the delicious bathing in the clear waters of the Tapajos may be mentioned. There is here no fear of alligators; when the east wind blows, a long swell rolls in on the clean sandy beach, and the bath is most exhilarating.
The country around Santarem is not clothed with dense and lofty forest like the rest of the great humid river plain of the Amazons. It is a campo region; a slightly elevated and undulating tract of land, wooded only in patches, or with single scattered trees. A good deal of the country on the borders of the Tapajos, which flows from the great campo area of interior Brazil, is of this description. It is on this account that I consider the eastern side of the river, towards its mouth, to be a northern prolongation of the continental land, and not a portion of the alluvial flats of the Amazons. The soil is a coarse gritty sand; the substratum, which is visible in some places, consisting of sandstone conglomerate probably of the same formation as that which underlies the Tabatinga clay in other parts of the river valley. The surface is carpeted with slender hairy grasses, unfit for pasture, growing to a uniform height of about a foot. The patches of wood look like copses in the middle of green meadows; they are called by the natives “ilhas de mato,” or islands of jungle; the name being, no doubt, suggested by their compactness of outline, neatly demarcated in insular form from the smooth carpet of grass, around them. They are composed of a great variety of trees loaded with succulent parasites, and lashed together by woody climbers like the forest in other parts. A narrow belt of dense wood, similar in character to these ilhas, and like them sharply limited along its borders, runs everywhere parallel and close to the river. In crossing the campo, the path from the town ascends a little for a mile or two, passing through this marginal strip of wood; the grassy land then slopes gradually to a broad valley, watered by rivulets, whose banks are clothed with lofty and luxuriant forest. Beyond this, a range of hills extends as far as the eye can reach towards the yet untrodden interior. Some of these hills are long ridges, wooded or bare; others are isolated conical peaks, rising abruptly from the valley. The highest are probably not more than a thousand feet above the level of the river. One remarkable hill, the Serra de Muruarú, about fifteen miles from Santarem, which terminates the prospect to the south, is of the same truncated pyramidal form as the range of hills near Almeyrim. Complete solitude reigns over the whole of this stretch of beautiful country. The inhabitants of Santarem know nothing of the interior, and seem to feel little curiosity concerning it. A few tracks from the town across the campo lead to some small clearings four or five miles off, belonging to the poorer inhabitants of the place; but, excepting these, there are no roads, or signs of the proximity of a civilised settlement.