The tree which bears the Brazil nuts of commerce is one of the highest of the Amazonian trees and overtops the royal palm. Its foliage is of a deep green and spreads out on all sides. The nuts grow in a great pod as large as a good-sized apple, and inside the thick husk will be found fifteen or twenty of these rich and delicious nuts. Flowering trees are omnipresent in these forests, and some of them are covered with beautiful flowers; or perhaps it may be a vine that bears the flowers one sees in the canopy overhead. They are neither buttercups nor violets, and yet it may be that they resemble those better known blossoms.
After threading this system of narrow channels the boat enters the river proper, which at first is very wide and is more like an inland sea; the natives call it the sea-river. In places it opens out in sea-like expanses; at times the boat coasts along the shore near enough to hear the monkeys chatter, and again it is out so far that the shore is only a hazy line. The lower river varies from two to ten miles in width, but you are never sure whether you are not mistaking the shores of islands for the actual banks of the river. Slowly past you floats débris that has come for two thousand miles on these yellow waters. Mixed up with the water may be soil from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and half of the republics of South America. You pass the mouths of streams which are themselves navigable for a thousand miles by vessels. In all it has been said that the Amazon and its tributaries furnish fifty thousand miles of navigable waters, half of which are available for steamers. There are few towns of any size, and only a few miserable little villages. Along the bank is an occasional cleared patch on which stands the little wood and thatch hut of a rubber gatherer. Naked babies play on the shores and barefooted men and women gaze at your steamer as it goes by. There are no roads in the forest, and if a path is blazed to-day in six months it would be impassable. Every one travels by water, except the rubber gatherers and medicine hunters, who chop their way through the undergrowth.
Nature’s apothecary shop is located here, for hundreds of medicinal plants have been found in these woods and jungles. Sarsaparilla is probably the most profitable, but ipecac, oil of copaiba, and many other drugs useful in stopping a tooth-ache or poisoning a dog, are extracted from trees and vines of the Amazon Valley. Gums and balsams, essential oils and dyeing substances, spices and aromatic plants are also among the varied products.
Rain! Rain! Rain! One tires of hearing its ceaseless patter on the roof, and everything is soon covered with a coat of rust. Every article made of leather, which is allowed to stand for a few days, becomes covered with a down-like fungi of green mould. From November to February is the “rainy” season, and then the rain falls in perfect torrents, and the Amazon, fed by all its connecting streams, rises twenty-five, thirty or forty feet above its usual level. Thousands of square miles of territory are then submerged, and inland seas are formed in many places. The fall of the river is not more than two hundred inches in the first thousand miles from its mouth, and the current is not very swift. For this distance the depth will average one hundred and fifty feet.
After travelling up the Amazon as far as from Boston to Chicago the Rio Negro is reached. The name means the black river. As one writer says, “the Rio Negro is as black as one’s hat and the Amazon is as yellow as pea soup.” It is a very wide river at its mouth, and the steamer turns up into its black waters. Just ahead may be seen a haze of white buildings with their red tile roofs. Here, in the midst of this vast wilderness, where the forest stretches out for hundreds of miles in each direction, and where a monkey could travel for days by jumping from branch to branch, is located a live, hustling town with fine public buildings, electric lights, electric tram lines and a theatre that would be a credit to any town. The ridges of the roofs are sometimes so covered with turkey-buzzards as almost to make one think at first sight that they are artificial ornaments. They used to be the chief sanitary force, but the new waterworks and sewer system have greatly relieved their labours. Like Pará, this city smells of rubber and the day dreams of the inhabitants are permeated with that one idea.
Above the junction with the Rio Negro the Amazon is called the Solimoes, for a thousand miles, and beyond that it is known as the Marañon. At Iquitos, in Peru, this river is a mile wide. The area of the basin of this river is three times that of the Mississippi. The Tocantins, Xingu, Tapajos, Purus, Negro, Jurua, and Madeira, all noble streams in themselves, pour their floods into this one channel. The last named river leads to the famous Acre territory, which has proven a bonanza for Brazil. She paid Bolivia $9,600,000 in 1904, and in the next five years it paid back nearly $24,000,000 in export duties on rubber alone.
The great traveller of a century ago, Baron von Humboldt, declared that “The valley of the Amazon in the near future is bound to become a great centre of civilization and the world’s greatest storehouse.” This prediction has not proven true, for more than a century has passed since the statement was made and little development has been made. The natural resources are there, just as Humboldt saw them, however, and still await the efforts of man to turn them to good account. Right at the mouth of the Amazon lies the great state of Pará, as large as two states the size of Texas, with only half a million inhabitants, less than one person to each square mile of territory, scattered over its confines. It has a fertile soil capable of producing almost anything necessary for the support and comfort of life; it possesses tablelands at an elevation high enough to escape the moisture of the river and continued heat of a tropical sun; in the mouth of the Amazon is an island almost as large as Portugal, which is capable of supplying thousands of head of cattle for the world’s food supply.
The trouble with Pará is that the people think of nothing, deal in nothing and dream of nothing but rubber. To quote the American Consul: “Last year the United States took twenty thousand tons of crude rubber at a cost of $64,000,000, and we are still howling for more. The other things we took are small, although Brazil nuts, balsams, deerskins and a few other items amounted to something. What did we send them? Practically nothing that they could buy elsewhere. Some flour, petroleum, hardware and such other things as they themselves have looked up and found good.” And yet the city of Pará is a thousand miles nearer to New York than it is to London or Hamburg, where the principal buying is done. The federal government receives twenty per cent. of the market value of every ton of rubber shipped, and in return promises, at some time in the future, to give the people good roads and other improvements. That happy day has not yet arrived, but rubber seems to be becoming higher each year and more difficult to procure. This perhaps accounts for the lack of improvement in some directions, that neither government nor people take time to think of anything except the one staple of rubber.