| Nationality. | No. | Tonnage | |
| United States | 37 | 39,901 | ½ |
| Brazil | 49 | 28,639 | |
| England | 52 | 13,276 | ½ |
| Portugal | 24 | 7,871 | |
| France | 18 | 5,344 | |
| Prussia | 4 | 889 | ½ |
| Holland | 3 | 538 | |
| Denmark | 2 | 525 | |
| Holstein | 3 | 498 | |
| Norway | 1 | 135 | |
| Spain | 1 | 90 |
The vessels carrying the stars and stripes exported from Pará to the value of 3,235,073$950, or eight times the amount carried by Brazilian craft, and 50,000 milreys more than England. While, therefore, the Imperial Company has the monopoly of trade on the Amazon, our ships distribute one third of the products to the world. The United States is the natural commercial partner with Brazil; for not only is New York the half-way house between Pará and Liverpool, but a chip thrown into the sea at the mouth of the Amazon will float close by Cape Hatteras. The official value of exports from Pará in 1867 was 9,926,912$557, or about five millions of dollars, an increase of one million over 1866.
The early expeditions into the Valley of the Amazon, in search of the "Gilded King," are the most romantic episodes in the history of Spanish discovery. To the wild wanderings of these worshipers of gold succeeded the more earnest explorations of the Jesuits, those pioneers of geographical knowledge. Pinzon discovered the mouth of the river in 1500; but Orellana, who came down the Napo in 1541, was the first to navigate its waters. Twenty years later Aguirre descended from Cuzco; in 1637, Texeira ascended to Quito by the Napo; Cabrera descended from Peru in 1639; Juan de Palacios by the Napo in 1725; La Condamine from Jaen in 1744, and Madame Godin by the Pastassa in 1769. The principal travelers who preceded us in crossing the continent this century were Mawe (1828), Pœppig (1831), Smyth (1834), Von Tschudi (1845), Castelnau (1846), Herndon and Gibbon (1851), and Marcoy (1867), who came down through Peru, and a Spanish commission (Almagro, Spada, Martinez, and Isern), who made the Napo transit in 1865. To Spix and Martius (1820), Bates and Wallace (1848-1857), Azevedo and Pinto (1862-1864), and Agassiz (1865), the world is indebted for the most scientific surveys of the river in Brazil.
Such is the Amazon, the mightiest river in the world, rising amid the loftiest volcanoes on the globe, and flowing through a forest unparalleled in extent. "It only wants (wrote Father Acuña), in order to surpass the Ganges, Euphrates, and the Nile in felicity, that its source should be in Paradise." As if one name were not sufficient for its grandeur, it has three appellations: Marañon, Solimoens, and Amazon; the first applied to the part in Peru, the second to the portion between Tabatinga and Manáos, and the third to all below the Rio Negro.[158] We have no proper conception of the vast dimensions of the thousand-armed river till we sail for weeks over its broad bosom, beholding it sweeping disdainfully by the great Madeira as if its contribution was of no account, discharging into the sea one hundred thousand cubic feet of water per second more than our Mississippi, rolling its turbid waves thousands of miles exactly as it pleases,—plowing a new channel every year, with tributaries twenty miles wide, and an island in its mouth twice the size of Massachusetts.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
The Valley of the Amazon.— Its Physical Geography.— Geology.— Climate.— Vegetation.
From the Atlantic shore to the foot of the Andes, and from the Orinoco to the Paraguay, stretches the great Valley of the Amazon. In this vast area the United States might be packed without touching its boundaries. It could contain the basins of the Mississippi, the Danube, the Nile, and the Hoang-Ho. It is girt on three sides by a wall of mountains: on the north are the highlands of Guiana and Venezuela; on the west stand the Andes; on the south rise the table-lands of Matto Grosso. The valley begins at such an altitude, that on the western edge vegetation differs as much from the vegetation at Pará, though in the same latitude, as the flora of Canada from the flora of the West Indies.
The greater part of the region drained by the Amazon, however, is not a valley proper, but an extensive plain. From the mouth of the Napo to the ocean, a distance of eighteen hundred miles in a straight line, the slope is one foot in five miles.[159] At Coca, on the Napo, the altitude is 850 feet, according to our observations; at Tinga Maria. on the Huallaga, it is 2200 according to Herndon; at the junction of the Negro with the Cassiquiari, it is 400 according to Wallace; at the mouth of the Marmoré, it is 800 according to Gibbon; at the Pongo de Manseriche, below all rapids, it is 1160 according to Humboldt; and at the junction of Araguaia with the Tocantíns, it is 200 according to Castelnau. These barometrical measurements represent the basin of the Amazon as a shallow trough lying parallel to the equator, the southern side having double the inclination of the northern, and the whole gently sloping eastward. Farthermore, the channel of the great river is not in the centre of the basin, but lies to the north of it: thus, the hills of Almeyrim rise directly from the river, while the first falls on the Tocantíns, Xingú, and Tapajos are nearly two hundred miles above their mouths; the rapids of San Gabriel, on the Negro, are one hundred and seventy-five miles from the Amazon, while the first obstruction to the navigation of the Madeira is a hundred miles farther from the great river.