The Naturalist on the River Amazons

by Henry Walter Bates

From the middle of October to the beginning of January, the second wet season prevails. The rise is sometimes not more than about fifteen feet, but it is, in some years, much more extensive, laying the large sand islands under water before the turtle eggs are hatched. In one year, whilst I resided at Ega, this second annual inundation reached to within ten feet of the highest water point as marked by the stains on the trunks of trees by the river side.

The second dry season comes on in January, and lasts throughout February. The river sinks sometimes to the extent of a few feet only, but one year (1856) I saw it ebb to within about five feet of its lowest point in September. This is called the summer of the Umarí, “Veraó do Umarí,” after the fruit of this name already described, which ripens at this season. When the fall is great, this is the best time to catch turtles. In the year above mentioned, nearly all the residents who had a canoe, and could work a paddle, went out after them in the month of February, and about 2000 were caught in the course of a few days. It appears that they had been arrested in their migration towards the interior pools of the forest by the sudden drying up of the water-courses, and so had become easy prey.

Thus the Ega year is divided into four seasons; two of dry weather and falling waters, and two of the reverse. Besides this variety, there is, in the month of May, a short season of very cold weather, a most surprising circumstance in this otherwise uniformly sweltering climate. This is caused by the continuance of a cold wind, which blows from the south over the humid forests that extend without interruption from north of the equator to the eighteenth parallel of latitude in Bolivia. I had, unfortunately, no thermometer with me at Ega; the only one I brought with me from England having been lost at Pará. The temperature is so much lowered that fishes die in the river Teffe, and are cast in considerable quantities on its shores. The wind is not strong, but it brings cloudy weather, and lasts from three to five or six days in each year. The inhabitants all suffer much from the cold, many of them wrapping themselves up with the warmest clothing they can get (blankets are here unknown), and shutting themselves indoors with a charcoal fire lighted. I found, myself, the change of temperature most delightful, and did not require extra clothing. It was a bad time, however, for my pursuit, as birds and insects all betook themselves to places of concealment, and remained inactive. The period during which this wind prevails is called the “tempo da friagem,” or the season of coldness. The phenomenon, I presume, is to be accounted for by the fact that in May it is winter in the southern temperate zone, and that the cool currents of air travelling thence northwards towards the equator become only moderately heated in their course, owing to the intermediate country being a vast, partially-flooded plain covered with humid forests.

Chapter XI.
EXCURSIONS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF EGA

The River Teffé — Rambles through Groves on the Beach — Excursion to the House of a Passé Chieftain — Character and Customs of the Passé Tribe — First Excursion to the Sand Islands of the Solimoens — Habits of Great River-turtle — Second Excursion — Turtle-fishing in the Inland Pools — Third Excursion — Hunting-rambles with Natives in the Forest — Return to Ega.

I will now proceed to give some account of the more interesting of my shorter excursions in the neighbourhood of Ega. The incidents of the longer voyages, which occupied each several months, will be narrated in a separate chapter.

The settlement, as before described, is built on a small tract of cleared land at the lower or eastern end of the lake, six or seven miles from the main Amazons, with which the lake communicates by a narrow channel. On the opposite shore of the broad expanse stands a small village, called Nogueira, the houses of which are not visible from Ega, except on very clear days; the coast on the Nogueira side is high, and stretches away into the grey distance towards the southwest. The upper part of the river Teffé is not visited by the Ega people, on account of its extreme unhealthiness, and its barrenness in sarsaparilla and other wares. To Europeans it would seem a most surprising thing that the people of a civilised settlement, a hundred and seventy years old, should still be ignorant of the course of the river on whose banks their native place, for which they proudly claim the title of city, is situated. It would be very difficult for a private individual to explore it, as the necessary number of Indian paddlers could not be obtained. I knew only one person who had ascended the Teffé to any considerable distance, and he was not able to give me a distinct account of the river. The only tribe known to live on its banks are the Catauishís, a people who perforate their lips all round, and wear rows of slender sticks in the holes: their territory lies between the Purús and the Juruá, embracing both shores of the Teffé. A large, navigable stream, the Bararuá, enters the lake from the west, about thirty miles above Ega; the breadth of the lake is much contracted a little below the mouth of this tributary, but it again expands further south, and terminates abruptly where the Teffé proper, a narrow river with a strong current, forms its head water.

The whole of the country for hundreds of miles is covered with picturesque but pathless forests, and there are only two roads along which excursions can be made by land from Ega. One is a narrow hunter’s track, about two miles in length, which traverses the forest in the rear of the settlement. The other is an extremely pleasant path along the beach to the west of the town. This is practicable only in the dry season, when a flat strip of white sandy beach is exposed at the foot of the high wooded banks of the lake, covered with trees, which, as there is no underwood, form a spacious shady grove. I rambled daily, during many weeks of each successive dry season, along this delightful road. The trees, many of which are myrtles and wild Guavas, with smooth yellow stems, were in flower at this time; and the rippling waters of the lake, under the cool shade, everywhere bordered the path. The place was the resort of kingfishers, green and blue tree-creepers, purple-headed tanagers, and hummingbirds. Birds generally, however, were not numerous. Every tree was tenanted by Cicadas, the reedy notes of which produced that loud, jarring, insect music which is the general accompaniment of a woodland ramble in a hot climate. One species was very handsome, having wings adorned with patches of bright green and scarlet. It was very common; sometimes three or four tenanting a single tree, clinging as usual to the branches. On approaching a tree thus peopled, a number of little jets of a clear liquid would be seen squirted from aloft. I have often received the well-directed discharge full on my face; but the liquid is harmless, having a sweetish taste, and is ejected by the insect from the anus, probably in self-defence, or from fear. The number and variety of gaily-tinted butterflies, sporting about in this grove on sunny days, were so great that the bright moving flakes of colour gave quite a character to the physiognomy of the place. It was impossible to walk far without disturbing flocks of them from the damp sand at the edge of the water, where they congregated to imbibe the moisture. They were of almost all colours, sizes, and shapes: I noticed here altogether eighty species, belonging to twenty-two different genera. It is a singular fact that, with very few exceptions, all the individuals of these various species thus sporting in sunny places were of the male sex; their partners, which are much more soberly dressed and immensely less numerous than the males, being confined to the shades of the woods. Every afternoon, as the sun was getting low, I used to notice these gaudy sunshine-loving swains trooping off to the forest, where I suppose they would find their sweethearts and wives. The most abundant, next to the very common sulphur-yellow and orange-coloured kinds, were about a dozen species of Eunica, which are of large size, and are conspicuous from their liveries of glossy dark-blue and purple. A superbly-adorned creature, the Callithea Markii, having wings of a thick texture, coloured sapphire-blue and orange, was only an occasional visitor. On certain days, when the weather was very calm, two small gilded-green species (Symmachia Trochilus and Colubris) literally swarmed on the sands, their glittering wings lying wide open on the flat surface. The beach terminates, eight miles beyond Ega, at the mouth of a rivulet; the character of the coast then changes, the river banks being masked by a line of low islets amid a labyrinth of channels.

In all other directions my very numerous excursions were by water; the most interesting of those made in the immediate neighbourhood were to the houses of Indians on the banks of retired creeks; an account of one of these trips will suffice.

On the 23rd of May, 1850, I visited, in company with Antonio Cardozo, the Delegado, a family of the Passé tribe, who live near the head waters of the Igarapé, which flows from the south into the Teffé, entering it at Ega. The creek is more than a quarter of a mile broad near the town, but a few miles inland it gradually contracts, until it becomes a mere rivulet flowing through a broad dell in the forest. When the river rises it fills this dell; the trunks of the lofty trees then stand many feet deep in the water, and small canoes are able to travel the distance of a day’s journey under the shade, regular paths or alleys being cut through the branches and lower trees. This is the general character of the country of the Upper Amazons; a land of small elevation and abruptly undulated, the hollows forming narrow valleys in the dry months, and deep navigable creeks in the wet months. In retired nooks on the margins of these shady rivulets, a few families or small hordes of aborigines still linger in nearly their primitive state, the relicts of their once numerous tribes. The family we intended to visit on this trip was that of Pedro-uassú (Peter the Great, or Tall Peter), an old chieftain or Tushaúa of the Passés.