The Naturalist on the River Amazons

by Henry Walter Bates

We were amused at the excessive and almost absurd tameness of a fine Mutum or Curassow turkey, that ran about the house. It was a large glossy-black species (the Mitu tuberosa), having an orange- coloured beak, surmounted by a bean-shaped excrescence of the same hue. It seemed to consider itself as one of the family: attended all the meals, passing from one person to another round the mat to be fed, and rubbing the sides of its head in a coaxing way against their cheeks or shoulders. At night it went to roost on a chest in a sleeping-room beside the hammock of one of the little girls to whom it seemed particularly attached, regularly following her wherever she went about the grounds. I found this kind of Curassow bird was very common in the forest of the Cuparí; but it is rare on the Upper Amazons, where an allied species, which has a round instead of a bean-shaped waxen excrescence on the beak (Crax globicera), is the prevailing kind. These birds in their natural state never descend from the tops of the loftiest trees, where they live in small flocks and build their nests. The Mitu tuberosa lays two rough-shelled, white eggs; it is fully as large a bird as the common turkey, but the flesh when cooked is drier and not so well flavoured. It is difficult to find the reason why these superb birds have not been reduced to domestication by the Indians, seeing that they so readily become tame. The obstacle offered by their not breeding in confinement, which is probably owing to their arboreal habits, might perhaps be overcome by repeated experiment; but for this the Indians probably had not sufficient patience or intelligence. The reason cannot lie in their insensibility to the value of such birds, for the common turkey, which has been introduced into the country, is much prized by them.

We had an unwelcome visitor whilst at anchor in the port of Antonio Malagueita. I was awakened a little after midnight, as I lay in my little cabin, by a heavy blow struck at the sides of the canoe close to my head, which was succeeded by the sound of a weighty body plunging into the water. I got up; but all was again quiet, except the cackle of fowls in our hen-coop, which hung over the side of the vessel about three feet from the cabin door. I could find no explanation of the circumstance, and, my men being all ashore, I turned in again and slept until morning. I then found my poultry loose about the canoe, and a large rent in the bottom of the hen-coop, which was about two feet from the surface of the water: a couple of fowls were missing. Senhor Antonio said the depredator was a Sucurujú (the Indian name for the Anaconda, or great water serpent—Eunectes murinus), which had for months past been haunting this part of the river, and had carried off many ducks and fowls from the ports of various houses. I was inclined to doubt the fact of a serpent striking at its prey from the water, and thought an alligator more likely to be the culprit, although we had not yet met with alligators in the river. Some days afterwards, the young men belonging to the different sitios agreed together to go in search of the serpent. They began in a systematic manner, forming two parties, each embarked in three or four canoes, and starting from points several miles apart, whence they gradually approximated, searching all the little inlets on both sides the river. The reptile was found at last, sunning itself on a log at the mouth of a muddy rivulet, and despatched with harpoons. I saw it the day after it was killed; it was not a very large specimen, measuring only eighteen feet nine inches in length, and sixteen inches in circumference at the widest part of the body. I measured skins of the Anaconda afterwards, twenty-one feet in length and two feet in girth. The reptile has a most hideous appearance, owing to its being very broad in the middle and tapering abruptly at both ends. It is very abundant in some parts of the country; nowhere more so than in the Lago Grande, near Santarem, where it is often seen coiled up in the corners of farm-yards, and is detested for its habit of carrying off poultry, young calves, or whatever animal it can get within reach of.

At Ega, a large Anaconda was once near making a meal of a young lad about ten years of age, belonging to one of my neighbours. The father and his son went, as was their custom, a few miles up the Teffé to gather wild fruit, landing on a sloping sandy shore, where the boy was left to mind the canoe whilst the man entered the forest. The beaches of the Teffé form groves of wild guava and myrtle trees, and during most months of the year are partly overflown by the river. Whilst the boy was playing in the water under the shade of these trees, a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived until it was too late to escape. His cries brought the father quickly to the rescue, who rushed forward, and seizing the Anaconda boldly by the head, tore his jaws asunder. There appears to be no doubt that this formidable serpent grows to an enormous bulk, and lives to a great age, for I heard of specimens having been killed which measured forty-two feet in length, or double the size of the largest I had an opportunity to examine. The natives of the Amazons country universally believe in the existence of a monster water-serpent, said to be many score fathoms in length and which appears successively in different parts of the river. They call it the Mai d’agoa—the mother, or spirit, of the water. This fable, which was doubtless suggested by the occasional appearance of Sucurujus of unusually large size, takes a great variety of forms, and the wild legends form the subject of conversation amongst old and young, over the wood fires in lonely settlements.

August 6th and 7th.—On leaving the sitio of Antonio Malagueita we continued our way along the windings of the river, generally in a south-east and south-south-east direction, but sometimes due north, for about fifteen miles, when we stopped at the house of one Paulo Christo, a mameluco whose acquaintance I had made at Aveyros. Here we spent the night and part of the next day, doing in the morning a good five hours’ work in the forest, accompanied by the owner of the place. In the afternoon of the 7th, we were again under way; the river makes a bend to the east-north-east for a short distance above Paulo Christo’s establishment, and then turns abruptly to the south-west, running from that direction about four miles. The hilly country of the interior then commences, the first token of it being a magnificently-wooded bluff, rising nearly straight from the water to a height of about 250 feet. The breadth of the stream hereabout was not more than sixty yards, and the forest assumed a new appearance from the abundance of the Urucuri palm, a species which has a noble crown of broad fronds with symmetrical rigid leaflets.

We reached, in the evening, the house of the last civilised settler on the river, Senhor Joao (John) Aracú, a wiry, active fellow and capital hunter, whom I wished to make a friend of and persuade to accompany me to the Mundurucú village and the falls of the Cuparí, some forty miles further up the river.

I stayed at the sitio of John Aracú until the 19th, and again, in descending, spent fourteen days at the same place. The situation was most favourable for collecting the natural products of the district. The forest was not crowded with underwood, and pathways led through it for many miles and in various directions. I could make no use here of our two men as hunters, so, to keep them employed whilst José and I worked daily in the woods, I set them to make a montaria under John Aracú’s directions. The first day a suitable tree was found for the shell of the boat, of the kind called Itaüba amarello, the yellow variety of the stonewood. They felled it, and shaped out of the trunk a log nineteen feet in length; this they dragged from the forest, with the help of my host’s men, over a road they had previously made with cylindrical pieces of wood acting as rollers. The distance was about half a mile, and the ropes used for drawing the heavy load were tough lianas cut from the surrounding trees. This part of the work occupied about a week: the log had then to be hollowed out, which was done with strong chisels through a slit made down the whole length. The heavy portion of the task being then completed, nothing remained but to widen the opening, fit two planks for the sides and the same number of semicircular boards for the ends, make the benches, and caulk the seams.

The expanding of the log thus hollowed out is a critical operation, and not always successful, many a good shell being spoiled from splitting or expanding irregularly. It is first reared on tressels, with the slit downwards, over a large fire, which is kept up for seven or eight hours, the process requiring unremitting attention to avoid cracks and make the plank bend with the proper dip at the two ends. Wooden straddlers, made by cleaving pieces of tough elastic wood and fixing them with wedges, are inserted into the opening, their compass being altered gradually as the work goes on, but in different degrees according to the part of the boat operated upon. Our casca turned out a good one: it took a long time to cool, and was kept in shape whilst it did so by means of wooden cross-pieces. When the boat was finished, it was launched with great merriment by the men, who hoisted coloured handkerchiefs for flags, and paddled it up and down the stream to try its capabilities. My people had suffered as much inconvenience from the want of a montaria as myself, so this was a day of rejoicing to all of us.

I was very successful at this place with regard to the objects of my journey. About twenty new species of fishes and a considerable number of small reptiles were added to my collection; but very few birds were met with worth preserving. A great number of the most conspicuous insects of the locality were new to me, and turned out to be species peculiar to this part of the Amazons valley. The most interesting acquisition was a large and handsome monkey, of a species I had not before met with—the white-whiskered Coaitá, or spider-monkey (Ateles marginatus). I saw a pair one day in the forest moving slowly along the branches of a lofty tree, and shot one of them; the next day John Aracu brought down another, possibly the companion. The species is of about the same size as the common black kind, of which I have given an account in a former chapter, and has a similar lean body, with limbs clothed with coarse black hair; but it differs in having the whiskers and a triangular patch on the crown of the head of a white colour. I thought the meat the best flavoured I had ever tasted. It resembled beef, but had a richer and sweeter taste. During the time of our stay in this part of the Cuparí, we could get scarcely anything but fish to eat, and as this diet disagreed with me, three successive days of it reducing me to a state of great weakness, I was obliged to make the most of our Coaitá meat. We smoke-dried the joints instead of salting them, placing them for several hours upon a framework of sticks arranged over a fire, a plan adopted by the natives to preserve fish when they have no salt, and which they call “muquiar.” Meat putrefies in this climate in less than twenty-four hours, and salting is of no use, unless the pieces are cut in thin slices and dried immediately in the sun. My monkeys lasted me about a fortnight, the last joint being an arm with the clenched fist, which I used with great economy, hanging it in the intervals, between my frugal meals, on a nail in the cabin. Nothing but the hardest necessity could have driven me so near to cannibalism as this, but we had the greatest difficulty in obtaining here a sufficient supply of animal food. About every three days the work on the montaria had to be suspended, and all hands turned out for the day to hunt and fish, in which they were often unsuccessful, for although there was plenty of game in the forest, it was too widely scattered to be available. Ricardo, and Alberto occasionally brought in a tortoise or ant-eater, which served us for one day’s consumption. We made acquaintance here with many strange dishes, amongst them Iguana eggs; these are of oblong form, about an inch in length, and covered with a flexible shell. The lizard lays about two score of them in the hollows of trees. They have an oily taste; the men ate them raw, beaten up with farinha, mixing a pinch of salt in the mess; I could only do with them when mixed with Tucupí sauce, of which we had a large jar full always ready to temper unsavoury morsels.

One day as I was entomologising alone and unarmed, in a dry Ygapó, where the trees were rather wide apart and the ground coated to the depth of eight or ten inches with dead leaves, I was near coming into collision with a boa constrictor. I had just entered a little thicket to capture an insect, and whilst pinning it was rather startled by a rushing noise in the vicinity. I looked up to the sky, thinking a squall was coming on, but not a breath of wind stirred in the tree-tops. On stepping out of the bushes I met face to face a huge serpent coming down a slope, making the dry twigs crack and fly with his weight as he moved over them. I had very frequently met with a smaller boa, the Cutim-boia, in a similar way, and knew from the habits of the family that there was no danger, so I stood my ground. On seeing me the reptile suddenly turned and glided at an accelerated pace down the path. Wishing to take a note of his probable size and the colours and markings of his skin, I set off after him; but he increased his speed, and I was unable to get near enough for the purpose. There was very little of the serpentine movement in his course. The rapidly moving and shining body looked like a stream of brown liquid flowing over the thick bed of fallen leaves, rather than a serpent with skin of varied colours. He descended towards the lower and moister parts of the Ygapó. The huge trunk of an uprooted tree here lay across the road; this he glided over in his undeviating course and soon after penetrated a dense swampy thicket, where of course I did not choose to follow him.

I suffered terribly from heat and mosquitoes as the river sank with the increasing dryness of the season, although I made an awning of the sails to work under, and slept at night in the open air with my hammock slung between the masts. But there was no rest in any part; the canoe descended deeper and deeper into the gulley through which the river flows between high clayey banks; as the water subsided, and with the glowing sun overhead we felt at midday as if in a furnace. I could bear scarcely any clothes in the daytime between eleven in the morning and five in the afternoon, wearing nothing but loose and thin cotton trousers and a light straw hat, and could not be accommodated in John Aracu’s house, as it was a small one and full of noisy children. One night we had a terrific storm. The heat in the afternoon had been greater than ever, and at sunset the sky had a brassy glare, the black patches of cloud which floated in it being lighted up now and then by flashes of sheet lightning. The mosquitoes at night were more than usually troublesome, and I had just sunk exhausted into a doze towards the early hours of morning when the storm began; a complete deluge of rain, with incessant lightning and rattling explosions of thunder. It lasted for eight hours; the grey dawn opening amidst the crash of the tempest. The rain trickled through the seams of the cabin roof on to my collections, the late hot weather having warped the boards, and it gave me immense trouble to secure them in the midst of the confusion. Altogether I had a bad night of it; but what with storms, heat, mosquitoes, hunger, and, towards the last, ill health, I seldom had a good night’s rest on the Cuparí.