A Journey in Brazil

by Louis Agassiz; Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz

De Votre Majesté le serviteur le plus dévoué et le plus affectueux,

L. Agassiz.[^[91]]

February 24th.—Pará, Nazareth. Our time has passed so quietly here that it gives me nothing to record. Mr. Agassiz has found himself in such absolute need of rest, after having arranged and put in order for transportation to the United States the collections accumulated, that our intended trip to the island of Marajo has been postponed day after day. Yesterday I witnessed a religious procession in Pará,—one of the many festas said to be gradually dying out, and to be already shorn of much of their ancient glory. It represented a scene from the passion of Christ. The life-size figure of the Saviour, sinking under the cross, is borne on a platform through the streets. Little girls, dressed as angels, walk before it, and it is accompanied by numerous dignitaries of the Church. Altars are illuminated in the different churches; the populace, even down to the children, are dressed in black; and the balconies of every house filled with figures in mourning, waiting for the sad procession to pass by.

February 28th.—Off Marajo, in the steamer Tabatinga. All great rivers, as the Nile, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Danube, have their deltas; but the largest river in the world, the Amazons, is an exception to this rule. What, then, is the geological character of the great island which obstructs its opening into the ocean? This is the question which has made a visit to Marajo of special interest to Mr. Agassiz. Leaving Pará at midnight, we reached the little town of Sourés early this morning. It is a village lying on the southeastern side of the island, and so far seaward that, in the dry season, when the diminished current of the Amazonian waters is overborne by the tides, the water is salt enough to afford excellent sea-bathing, and is resorted to for that purpose by many families from Pará. At this moment, however, the water has not even a brackish character. The only building of any interest in the town is the old Jesuit church, a remnant of the earliest chapter in the civilization of South America. However tinged with ambition and a love of temporal power, the work of the Jesuits in Brazil tended toward the establishment of an organized system of labor, which one cannot but wish had been continued. All that remains of the Jesuit missions goes to prove that they were centres of industry. These men contrived to impart, even to the wandering Indian, some faint reflection of their own persistency and steadfastness of purpose. Farms were connected with all the Indian missions; under the direction of the fathers, the Indians learned something of agriculture, which the Jesuits readily saw to be one of the great civilizing influences in a country so fertile. They introduced a variety of vegetables and grains, and had herds of cattle where cattle now are hardly known. Humboldt, speaking of the destruction of the Jesuit missions, says, in reference to the Indians of Atures, on the Orinoco: “Formerly, being excited to labor by the Jesuits, they did not want for food. The fathers cultivated maize, French beans, and other European vegetables. They even planted sweet oranges and tamarinds round the villages; and they possessed twenty or thirty thousand head of cows and horses in the savannas of Atures and Carichana.... Since the year 1795, the cattle of the Jesuits have entirely disappeared. There now remain as monuments of the ancient cultivation of these countries, and the active industry of the first missionaries, only a few trunks of the orange and tamarind in the savannas, surrounded by wild trees.”[^[92]]

Our walk through the little village of Sourés brought us to the low cliffs on the shore, which we had already seen from the steamer. The same formations prevail all along the coast of this island that we have found everywhere on the banks of the Amazons. Lowest, a well-stratified, rather coarse sandstone, immediately above which, and conformable with it, are finely laminated clays, covered by a crust. Upon this lies the highly ferruginous sandstone, in which an irregular cross stratification frequently alternates with the regular beds; above this, following all the undulations of its surface, is the well-known reddish sandy clay, with quartz pebbles scattered through its mass, and only here and there faint traces of an indistinct stratification. This afternoon Mr. Agassiz has been again on shore, examining the formation of both banks of the Igarapé Grande, the river at the mouth of which stands the town of Sourés. He has returned delighted with the result of his day’s work, having not only obtained the most complete evidence that the geological formation of Marajo corresponds exactly with that of the Amazonian Valley, but having also obtained some very important data with respect to the present encroachments of the sea upon the shore. He found upon the beach, partially covered by sea-sand, the remains of a forest which evidently grew in a peat-bog, and which the ocean is gradually laying bare.

February 29th.—Early this morning we crossed the Pará River, and anchored at the entrance of the bay within which stands the town of Vigia. We landed, and while the boatmen were dragging the net, we wandered along the beach, which is bordered by thick forest, now full of flowers. Here we found the same geological formations as on the Marajo shore, and on the beach the counterpart of the ancient forest which Mr. Agassiz unearthed yesterday on the opposite coast. There can hardly be more convincing evidence that the rivers which empty into the Amazons near its mouth, like all those higher up, as well as the main stream itself, have cut their way through identical formations, which were once continuous. Evidently these remains of forests on the beaches of Vigia Bay and at the mouth of the Igarapé Grande are parts of one forest, formerly uninterrupted and covering the whole of the intervening space now filled by the so-called Pará River. We followed the beach to the entrance of an igarapé, which here opens into the river, and which looked most tempting with the morning shadows darkening its cool recesses. As the boatmen had not been very successful in fishing, I proposed we should put their services to better use and row up this inviting stream. To this day, though I have become accustomed to these forest water-paths and have had so many excursions in them, they have lost none of their charm. I never see one without longing to follow its picturesque windings into the depths of the wood; and to me the igarapé remains the most beautiful and the most characteristic feature of the Amazonian scenery. This one of Vigia was especially pretty. Clumps of the light, exquisitely graceful Assai palm shot up everywhere from the denser forest; here and there the drooping bamboo, never seen in the higher Amazons, dipped its feathery branches into the water, covered sometimes to their very tips with purple bloom of convolvulus; yellow Bignonias carried their golden clusters to the very summits of some of the more lofty trees; while white-flowering myrtles and orange-colored mallows bordered the stream. Life abounded in this quiet retreat. Birds and butterflies were numerous; and we saw an immense number of crabs of every variety of color and size upon the margin of the water. However, it was not so easy to catch them as it seemed. They would sit quietly on the trunks of all the old trees or decaying logs projecting from the bank, apparently waiting to be taken; but the moment we approached them, however cautiously, they vanished like lightning either under the water or into some crevice near by. Notwithstanding their nimbleness, however, Mr. Agassiz succeeded in making a considerable collection. We saw also an immense army of caterpillars, evidently following some concerted plan of action. They were descending the trunk of a large tree in a solid phalanx about two handbreadths in width, and six or eight feet in length; no doubt coming down to make their chrysalids in the sand. We returned to the steamer at ten o’clock; and, after breakfast, finding our anchorage-ground somewhat rough as the tide came in, we went a little higher up, and entered the Bahia do Sul. Here again we went on shore to see the net drawn, this time more successfully. We should have had a delightful walk on the beach again, had it not been for hosts of minute flies which hovered about us, and had a power of stinging quite disproportionate to their size. On returning we met with an unforeseen difficulty. The tide had been falling during our walk, and the canoe could not approach the beach within several yards. The gentlemen plunged in, and walked out over knees in water; while the boatmen made a chair of their arms and carried me through the surf.

March 5th.—Our excursion in the harbor closed with a visit to the small island of Tatuatuba, distant about six miles from Pará. In order to examine the shores, we made the circuit of the island on foot. Here again the same geological structure presented itself; and there was one spot in particular where the sharp, vertical cut of the bank facing the beach presented an admirable section of the formations so characteristic of the Amazonian Valley; the red, sandy clay of the upper deposit filling in all the undulations and inequalities of the sandstone below, the surface of which was remarkably irregular. The sea is making great encroachments on the shore of this island. Senhor Figueiredo, who lives here with his family and by whom we were received with much hospitality, told us that during the last eighteen or twenty years, the beach had receded considerably in some places; the high-water line being many yards beyond its former limit. The result of this excursion has shown that, with the exception of some low mud-islands nearly level with the water, all the harbor islands lying in the mouth of the Amazons are, geologically speaking, parts of the Amazonian Valley, having the same structure. They were, no doubt, formerly continuous with the shore, but are separated now, partly by the fresh waters cutting their way through the land to the ocean, partly by the progress of the sea itself.

March 24th.—Our quiet life at Nazareth, though full of enjoyment for tired travellers, affords little material for a journal. A second excursion along the coast has furnished Mr. Agassiz with new evidence of the rapid changes in the outline of the shore, produced by the encroachment of the sea. So fast is this going on that some of the public works near the coast are already endangered by the advance of the ocean upon the land. During the past week he has been especially occupied in directing the work of a photographist employed by Senhor Pimenta Bueno, who, with his usual liberality towards the scientific objects of the expedition, is collecting in this way the portraits of some remarkable palms and other trees about his house and grounds. One of the most striking is a huge Sumauméra, with buttressed trunk. These buttresses start at a distance of about eight or ten feet from the ground, spreading gradually toward the base; they are from ten to twelve feet in depth. The lower part of the trunk is thus divided into open compartments, sometimes so large that two or three persons can stand within them. This disposition to throw out flanks or wings is not confined to one kind of tree, but occurs in many families; it seems, indeed, a characteristic feature of forest vegetation here. Occasionally the buttresses partially separate from the main trunk, remaining attached to it only at the point from which they start, so that they look like distinct supports propping the tree. I copy here an extract from Mr. Agassiz’s notes upon the vegetation of the Amazons, in which allusion is made to the Sumauméra.

Buttressed Tree (Eriodendrum Sumauma).