De son très humble et très obéissant serviteur,
L. Agassiz.[[50]]
CHAPTER V.
FROM PARÁ TO MANAOS.
First Sunday on the Amazons.—Geographical Question.—Convenient Arrangements of Steamer.—Vast Dimensions of the River.—Aspect of Shores.—Village of Breves.—Letter about Collections.—Vegetation.—Variety of Palms.—Settlement of Tajapurú.—Enormous Size of Leaves of the Miriti Palm.—Walk on Shore.—Indian Houses.—Courtesy of Indians.—Row in the Forest.—Town of Gurupá.—River Xingu.—Color of Water.—Town of Porto do Moz.—Flat-topped Hills of Almeyrim.—Beautiful Sunset.—Monte Alégre.—Character of Scenery and Soil.—Santarem.—Send off Party on the River Tapajos.—Continue up the Amazons.—Pastoral Scenes on the Banks.—Town of Villa Bella.—Canoe Journey at Night to the Lake of José Assú.—Esperança’s Cottage.—Picturesque Scene at Night.—Success in Collecting.—Indian Life.—Making Farinha.—Dance in the Evening.—Howling Monkeys.—Religious Impressions of Indians.—Cottage of Maia the Fisherman.—His Interest in educating his Children.—Return to Steamer.—Scientific Results of the Excursion.
August 20th.—On board the “Icamiaba.” Our first Sunday on the Amazons; for, notwithstanding the warm dispute as to whether both the rivers enclosing the island of Marajó must be considered as parts of the great river, it is impossible not to feel from the moment you leave Pará that you have entered upon the Amazons. Geology must settle this knotty question. If it should be seen that the continent once presented an unbroken line, as Mr. Agassiz believes, from Cape St. Roque to Cayenne, the sea having encroached upon it so as to give it its present limits, the Amazons must originally have entered the ocean far to the east of its present mouth, at a time when the Island of Marajó divided the river in two channels flowing on either side of it and uniting again beyond it. We came on board last night, accompanied to the boat by a number of the friends who have made our sojourn in Pará so agreeable, and who came off to bid us farewell. Thus far the hardships of this South American journey seem to retreat at our approach. It is impossible to travel with greater comfort than surrounds us here. My own suite of rooms consists of a good-sized state-room, with dressing-room and bath-room adjoining, and, if the others are not quite so luxuriously accommodated, they have space enough. The state-rooms are hardly used at night, for a hammock on deck is far more comfortable in this climate. Our deck, roofed in for its whole length, and with an awning to let down on the sides, if needed, looks like a comfortable, unceremonious sitting-room. A table down the middle serving as a dinner-table, but which is at this moment strewn with maps, journals, books, and papers of all sorts, two or three lounging-chairs, a number of camp-stools, and half a dozen hammocks, in one or two of which some of the party are taking their ease, furnish our drawing-room, and supply all that is needed for work and rest. At one end is also a drawing-table for Mr. Burkhardt, beside a number of kegs and glass jars for specimens. This first day, however, it is almost impossible to do more than look and wonder. Mr. Agassiz says: “This river is not like a river; the general current in such a sea of fresh water is hardly perceptible to the sight, and seems more like the flow of an ocean than like that of an inland stream.” It is true we are constantly between shores, but they are shores, not of the river itself, but of the countless islands scattered throughout its enormous breadth. As we coast along their banks, it is delightful to watch the exquisite vegetation with which we have yet to become familiar. The tree which most immediately strikes the eye, and stands out from the mass of green with wonderful grace and majesty, is the lofty, slender Assai palm, with its crown of light plume-like leaves, and its bunches of berry-like fruit, hanging from a branch that shoots out almost horizontally, just below the leaves. Houses on the shore break the solitude here and there. From this distance they look picturesque, with thatched, overhanging roofs, covering a kind of open porch. Just now we passed a cleared nook at the water-side, where a wooden cross marked a single mound. What a lonely grave it seemed! We are now coasting along the Isle of Marajó, keeping up the so-called Pará river; we shall not enter the undisputed waters of the Amazons till the day after to-morrow. This part of the river goes also by the name of the Bay of Marajó.
August 21st.—Last evening we stopped at our first station,—the little town of Breves. Its population, like that of all these small settlements on the Lower Amazons, is made up of an amalgamation of races. You see the regular features and fair skin of the white man combined with the black, coarse, straight hair of the Indian, or the mulatto with partly negro, partly Indian features, but the crisp taken out of the hair; and with these combinations comes in the pure Indian type, with its low brow, square build of face, and straight line of the shoulders. In the women especially the shoulders are rather high. In the first house we entered there was only an old half-breed Indian-woman, standing in the broad open porch of her thatched home, where she seemed to be surrounded with live stock,—parrots and parroquets of all sorts and sizes, which she kept for sale. After looking in at several of the houses, buying one or two monkeys, some parroquets, and some articles of the village pottery, as ugly, I must say, as they were curious, we wandered up into the forest to gather plants for drying. The palms are more abundant, larger, and in greater variety than we have seen them hitherto. At dusk we returned to the steamer, where we found a crowd of little boys and some older members of the village population, with snakes, fishes, insects, monkeys, &c. The news had spread that the collecting of “bixos” was the object of this visit to their settlement, and all were thronging in with their live wares of different kinds. Mr. Agassiz was very much pleased with this first harvest. He added a considerable number of new species to his collection of Amazonian fishes made in Pará, already so full and rare. We remained at the Breves landing all night, and this morning we are steaming along between islands, in a channel which bears the name of the river Aturia. It gives an idea of the grandeur of the Amazons, that many of the channels dividing the islands by which its immense breadth is broken are themselves like ample rivers, and among the people here are known by distinct local names. The banks are flat; we have seen no cliffs as yet, and the beauty of the scenery is wholly in the forest. I speak more of the palms than of other trees, because they are not to be mistaken, and from their peculiar port they stand out in bold relief from the mass of foliage, often rising above it and sharply defined against the sky. There are, however, a host of other trees, the names of which are unknown to us as yet, many of which I suppose have no place even in botanical nomenclature, forming a dense wall of verdure along the banks of the river. We have sometimes heard it said that the voyage up the Amazons is monotonous; but to me it seems delightful to coast along by these woods, of a character so new to us, to get glimpses into their dark depths or into a cleared spot with a single stately palm here and there, or to catch even the merest glance at the life of the people who live in the isolated settlements, consisting only of one or two Indian houses by the river-side. We are keeping so near to the banks to-day, that we can almost count the leaves on the trees, and have an excellent opportunity of studying the various kinds of palms. At first the Assai was most conspicuous, but now come in a number of others. The Mirití (Mauritia) is one of the most beautiful, with its pendant clusters of reddish fruit and its enormous, spreading, fan-like leaves cut into ribbons, one of which Wallace says is a load for a man. The Jupatí (Rhaphia), with its plume-like leaves, sometimes from forty to fifty feet in length, seems, in consequence of its short stem, to start almost from the ground. Its vase-like form is peculiarly graceful and symmetrical. Then there is the Bussù (Manicaria), with stiff, entire leaves, some thirty feet in length, more upright and close in their mode of growth, and serrated along their edges. The stem of this palm also is comparatively short. The banks in this part of the river are very generally bordered by two plants forming sometimes a sort of hedge along the shore; namely, the Aninga (Arum), with large, heart-shaped leaves on the summit of tall stems, and the Murici, a lower growth, just on the water’s edge. We are passing out of the so-called river Aturia into another channel of like character, the river Tajapurú. In the course of the day we shall arrive at a little settlement bearing the same name, where is to be our second station.
August 22d.—Yesterday we passed the day at the settlement mentioned above. It consists only of the house of a Brazilian merchant,[[51]] who lives here with his family, having no neighbors except the inhabitants of a few Indian houses in the forest immediately about. One wonders at first what should induce a man to isolate himself in this solitude. But the India-rubber trade is very productive here. The Indians tap the trees as we tap our sugar-maples, and give the produce in exchange for various articles of their own domestic consumption. Our day at Tajapurú was a very successful one in a scientific point of view, and the collections were again increased by a number of new species. Much as has been said of the number and variety of fishes in the Amazons, the fauna seems far richer than it has been reported. For those of my readers who care to follow the scientific progress of the expedition as well as the thread of personal adventure, I add here a letter on the subject, written a day or two later by Mr. Agassiz to Mr. Pimenta Bueno, in Pará, the generous friend to whom he owes in a great degree the facilities he enjoys in this voyage.
22 Aout, au matin: entre Tajapurú et Gurupá.
Mon cher Ami:—La journée d’hier a été des plus instructives, surtout pour les poissons “do Mato.” Nous avons obtenu quinze espèces en tout. Sur ce nombre il y en a dix nouvelles, quatre qui se trouvent aussi au Pará et une déjà décrite par moi dans le voyage de Spix et Martius; mais ce qu’il y a de plus intéressant, c’est la preuve que fournissent ces espèces, à les prendre dans leur totalité, que l’ensemble des poissons qui habitent les eaux à l’ouest du groupe d’îles qu’on appelle Marajó, diffère de ceux des eaux du Rio do Pará. La liste des noms que nous avons demandée aux Indiens prouve encore que le nombre des espèces qui se trouvent dans ces localités est beaucoup plus considérable que celui des espèces que nous avons pu nous procurer; aussi avons nous laissé des bocaux à Breves et à Tajapurú pour compléter la collection.
Voici quelques remarques qui vous feront mieux apprécier ces différences, si vous voulez les comparer avec le catalogue des espèces du Pará que je vous ai laissé. À tout prendre, il me parait évident dès à présent que notre voyage fera une révolution dans l’Ichthyologie. Et d’abord, le Jacundá de Tajapurú est différent des espèces du Pará; de même l’Acará; puis nous avons une espèce nouvelle de Sarapó et une espèce nouvelle de Jeju; une espèce nouvelle de Rabeca, une espèce nouvelle d’Anojá, un genre nouveau de Candiru, un genre nouveau de Bagre, un genre nouveau d’Acary et une espèce nouvelle d’Acary du même genre que celui du Pará; plus une espèce nouvelle de Matupirim. Ajoutez à ceci une espèce d’Aracu déjà décrite, mais qui ne se trouve pas au Pará et vous aurez à Tajapurú onze espèces qui n’existent pas au Pará, auxquelles il faut ajouter encore quatre espèces qui se trouvent à Tajapurú aussi bien qu’au Pará, et une qui se trouve au Pará, à Brèves, et à Tajapurú. En tout vingt espèces, dont quinze nouvelles, en deux jours. Malheureusement les Indiens ont mal compris nos directions, et ne nous ont rapporté qu’un seul exemplaire de chacune de ces espèces. Il reste donc beaucoup à faire dans ces localités, surtout à en juger d’après le catalogue des noms recueillis par le Major Coutinho qui renferme vingt-six espèces “do Mato” et quarante-six “do Rio.” Il nous en manque donc au moins cinquante-deux de Tajapurú, même à supposer que cette localité renferme aussi les cinq espèces de Breves. Vous voyez que nous laisserons encore énormément à faire à nos successeurs.