While we have been considering the great southern continent as a whole, our good ship, having crossed the equator, has been rapidly approaching its northern shore. After entering the broad mouth of the Amazon and ascending its course for many miles, we are now in sight of the thriving metropolis of Pará.
CHAPTER V.
City of Pará.—The Equatorial Line.—Spanish History.—The King of Waters.—Private Gardens.—Domestic Life in Northern Brazil.—Delicious Pineapples.—Family Pets.—Opera House.—Mendicants.—A Grand Avenue.—Botanical Garden.—India-Rubber Tree.—Gathering the Raw Material.—Monkeys.—The Royal Palm.—Splendor of Equatorial Nights.
Pará is the most northerly city of Brazil. It also bears the name of Belem on some maps, and is the capital of a province of the first designation. The full official title of the place is, in the usual style of Portuguese and Spanish hyperbole, Santa Maria do Belem do Grão Pará, which has fortunately and naturally simplified itself to Pará. It was founded in 1615, and the province of which it is the capital was the last in Brazil to declare its independence of the mother country, and to acknowledge the authority of the first emperor, Dom Pedro. It is the largest political division of the republic, and in some respects the most thriving. The city is situated about ninety miles south of the equator, and eighty miles from the Atlantic Ocean on the Pará River, so called, but which is really one of the mouths of the Amazon. It is thus the principal city at the mouth of the largest river in the world, a fact quite sufficient to indicate its present, and to insure its continued commercial importance.
As we entered the muddy estuary of the river, whose wide expanse was lashed into short, angry waves by a strong wind, large tree trunks were seen floating seaward, rising and sinking on the undulating surface of the water. Some were quite entire, with all of their branches still attached to the main trunk. They came, perhaps, from two thousand miles inland, borne upon the swift current from where it had undermined the roots in their forest home. Among the rest was a cocoa-palm with its full tufted head, some large brown nuts still hanging tenaciously to the parent stem. It had fallen bodily, while in its prime and full bearing, suddenly unearthed by some swift deviation of the river, which brooks no trifling impediment to its triumphal march seaward. How long, one would be glad to know, has this vast stream, fed by the melted snow of the Andes, poured its accumulated waters into the bosom of the ocean? A thousand years is but as a day, in reckoning the age of a mountain range or of a mammoth river.
As we approached the city, the channel became gradually narrowed by several prominent islands, crowded with rich green vegetation, forest trees of various sorts, mangoes, bananas, and regal palms. Though it is thus broken by islands, the river is here over twenty miles in width.
Pará is yielded precedence over the other cities on the east coast of South America in many respects, and is appreciatively called "Queen of the Amazon," her water communication reaching into the very heart of some of the most fertile valleys on the continent. One incorporated company has established a score of well-appointed steamers, averaging five hundred tons each, which navigate the river for a distance of two thousand miles from its mouth. Pará has an excellent harbor, of large capacity, accommodating an extensive commerce, a considerable portion of which is with the United States of North America. It has a mixed population of about fifty thousand, composed of an amalgamation of Portuguese, Italians, Indians, and negroes, and is the only town of any importance, except Quito, situated so near to the equatorial line, where the interested observer has the privilege of beholding the starry constellations of both hemispheres. Ships of five thousand tons measurement can lie within a hundred yards of the wharves of Pará, where the accumulation of coffee, dyewoods, drugs, tobacco, cotton, cocoa, rice, sugar, and raw india-rubber, indicates the character of the principal exports. Of all these staples, the last named is the most important, in a commercial point of view, occupying the third place on the list of national exports. As we have shown, the import and export trade of the Amazon valley naturally centres here, and Pará need fear no commercial rival.
For a considerable period this unequaled water-way, forming the spacious port, and conveying the drainage of nearly half of South America into the Atlantic, bore the name of its discoverer, Orellana, one of Pizarro's captains; but the fabulous story of a priest called Friar Gaspar, self-constituted chronicler of the expedition, gave to it the designation which it now bears. All the Spanish records of the history and conquests in the New World, relating to the doings of Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, and others, without an exception, were written in the same spirit of exaggeration and untruthfulness, leading that pious witness and contemporary writer, Las Casas, to pronounce them, with honest indignation, to be a tissue of falsehoods. Even our own popular historian, Prescott, who drew so largely upon these sources for his poetical productions, was forced to admit their manifest incongruities, contradictions, and general irresponsibility. This Munchausen of a priest, Friar Gaspar, recorded that a tribe of Amazons, or fighting women, was encountered far inland, on the banks of the mighty river, who were tall in stature, symmetrical in form, and had a profusion of long hair, which hung in braids down their backs. They were represented to be as warlike as they were beautiful, and as carrying shields and spears, the latter of which they could use with great skill and effect. It was this foolish story of the Amazons, hatched in the prolific brain of Friar Gaspar, which gave the river its lasting name.
The Indian designation of the mammoth watercourse was significant and appropriate, as their names always are. They called it Parana-tinga, meaning "King of Waters," and it seems to us a great pity that the name could not have been retained.