There are several well-stocked shops in the town, but business was at that time very dull. Every body was complaining of it. A schooner had been lying there for several months, waiting for a cargo; but the smallness of the cocoa crop, and the great decrease in the fishing business, and making of manteiga for this year, rendered it very difficult to make up one.
We had a great deal of heavy rain during our stay at Santarem, (generally at night,) with sharp lightning and strong squalls of wind from the eastward. The river rose with great rapidity for the last three or four days of my stay. The beach on which I was accustomed to bathe, and which was one hundred yards wide when I arrived, was entirely covered when I left. There were no symptoms of tide at that season, though I am told it is very perceptible in the summer time. Water boiled at Santarem at 210.5, indicating a height of eight hundred and forty-six feet above the level of the sea.
I left Santarem at 7 p. m., March 28. The Delegado could only muster me three tapuios and a pilot, and I shipped a volunteer. I believe he could have given me as many as I desired, (eleven,) but that he had many employed in the building of his new house, and, moreover, he had no conception that I would sail on the day that I appointed; people in this country never do, I believe, by any chance. If they get off on a journey within a week of the time appointed, they think they are doing well; and I have known several instances where they were a month after the time.
When the Delegado found that I would go with what men I had, he begged me to wait till morning, saying that the military commandant, who had charge of the Trabalhadores, had sent into the country for two, and was expecting them every hour. But I too well knew that it was idle to rely on expectations of this sort, and I sailed at once, thanking him for his courtesy.
I had several applications to ship for the voyage from Indians at Santarem; but I was very careful not to take any who were engaged in the service of others; for I knew that custom, if not law, gave the patron the service of the tapuio, provided this latter were in debt to the former, which I believe the patron always takes good care shall be the case.
I paid these men—the pilot forty, and the crew thirty cents per day. The Ticunas, who formed my crew from Tabatinga to Barra, I paid partly in money and partly in clothes, at the rate of four dollars per month. I paid the Muras, from Barra to Santarem, at the same rate. The Peruvian Indians were generally paid in cotton cloth, at the rate of about twelve and a half cents per day.
We gave passage to the French Jew who had given us lodgings in his house at Santarem. I had great difficulty in keeping the peace between him and Potter, who had as much antipathy towards each other as an uneducated Frenchman and Englishman might be supposed to have.
We drifted with the current all night, and stopped in the morning at a small cocoa plantation belonging to some one in Santarem. The water of the river was, at this time, nearly up to the door of the house; and the country seemed to be all marsh behind. I never saw a more desolate, sickly looking place; but a man who was living there with his wife and six children (all strong and healthy looking) told me they were never sick there. This man told me that he could readily support himself and his family but for the military service he was compelled to surrender at Santarem, which took him away from his work and his family for several months in every year.
Thirty miles from the mouth of the Tapajos we passed the mouth of a creek called Igarapé Mahica, which commences close to the Tapajos. We found the black waters of that river at the mouth of the creek, and therefore it should be properly called a furo, or small mouth of the Tapajos.
We stopped at 9 p. m. under some high land close to the mouth of a small river called Curuá, on account of a heavy squall of wind and rain.