Chapter 41

Down the Amazon.--Serpa.--Villa Nova.--Obidos.--Santarem.--A Colony of Southerners.--Monte Alégre.--Porto do Moz.--Leaving the Amazon.--Breves.--Pará River.--The City of Pará.--Legislation and Currency.--Religion and Education.--Nonpareil Climate.

At 10 P.M. we left Manáos in the "Tapajos," an iron steamer of seven hundred tons. We missed the snow-white cleanliness and rigid regularity of the "Icamiaba," and Captain José Antunes Rodrigues de Oliveira Catramby was quite a contrast to Lieutenant Nuno. There were only five first-class passengers besides ourselves (and four of these were "dead-heads"), though there were accommodations for sixty-four. Between Manáos and Pará, a distance of one thousand miles, there were fourteen additions. Passing the mouth of the Madeira, the largest tributary to the Amazon, we anchored thirty miles below at Serpa, after nine hours' sailing. Serpa is a village of ninety houses, built on a high bank of variegated clay, whence its Indian name, _Ita-coatiara_, or painted rock. It was the most animated place we had seen on the river. The town is irregularly laid out and overrun with weeds, but there is a busy tile factory, and the port was full of canoes, montarias, and cubertas. The African element in the population began to show itself prominently here, and increased in importance as we neared Pará. The Negroes are very ebony, and are employed as stevedores. The Indians are well-featured, and wear a long gown of bark-cloth reaching to the knees.

Taking on board rubber and salt fish, the "Tapajos" steamed down stream, passing the perpendicular pink-clay cliffs of Cararaucú, arriving in ten hours at Villa Nova,[142] one hundred and fifty miles below Serpa. Villa Nova is a straggling village of mud huts standing on a conglomerate bank. The trade is chiefly in rubber, copaiba, and fish. The location is healthy, and in many respects is one of the most desirable places on the river. Here the Amazon begins to narrow, being scarcely three miles wide; but the channel, which has a rocky bed, is very deep. One hundred miles from Villa Nova is Obidos, airily situated on a bluff of pink and yellow clay one hundred feet above the river. The clay rests on a white calcareous earth, and this on red sandstone. It is a picturesque, substantially-built town, with a population, mostly white, engaged in raising cacao and cattle. Cacao is the most valuable product on the Amazon below Villa Nova. The soil is fertile, and the surrounding forest is alive with monkeys, birds, and insects, and abounds with precious woods and fruits. Obidos is blessed with a church, a school, and a weekly newspaper, and is defended by thirty-two guns. This is the Thermopylæ of the Amazon, the great river contracting to a strait not a mile in width, through which it rushes with tremendous velocity. The depth is forty fathoms, and the current 2.4 feet per second. As Bates remarks, however, the river valley is not contracted to this breadth, the southern shore not being continental land, but a low alluvial tract subject to inundation. Back of Obidos is an eminence which has been named _Mount Agassiz_ in honor of the Naturalist. There is no mountain between it and Cotopaxi save the spurs from the Eastern Cordillera. Five miles above the town is the mouth of the Trombetas, where Orellana had his celebrated fight with the fabulous Amazons.

[Footnote 142: Otherwise called, on Brazilian maps, Villa Bella da Imperatriz.]

Adding to her cargo wood, hides, horses, and Paraguayan prisoners (short, athletic men), the "Tapajos" sailed for Santarem. The river scenery below Obidos loses its wild and solitary character, and is relieved with scattered habitations, factories, and cacao plantations. We arrived at Santarem in seven hours from Obidos, a distance of fifty miles. This city, the largest on the Amazon save Pará, stands on a pretty slope at the mouth of the Rio Tapajos, and five hundred miles from the sea.[143] It mainly consists of three long-rows of whitewashed, tiled houses, girt with green gardens. The citizens, made up of Brazilians, Portuguese, mulattoes, and blacks, number about two thousand five hundred. The surrounding country, which is an undulating campo, with patches of wood, is sparsely inhabited by Tapajocos. Cattle estates and cacao plantations are the great investments, but the soil is poor. Considerable sarsaparilla of superior quality, rubber, copaiba, Brazil nuts, and farina come down the Tapajos. The climate is delightful, the trade-winds tempering the heat and driving away all insect pests. Leprosy is somewhat common among the poorer class. At Santarem is one of the largest colonies which migrated from the disaffected Gulf States for Brazil. One hundred and sixty Southerners pitched their tents here. Many of them, however, were soon disgusted with the country, and, if we are to believe reports, the country was disgusted with them. On the 1st of January, 1868, only seventy-five remained. The colony does not fairly represent the United States, being made up in great part of the "roughs" of Mobile. A few are contented and are doing well. Amazonia will be indebted to them for some valuable ideas. Bates says: "Butter-making is unknown in this country; the milk, I was told, was too poor." But these Anglo-Saxon immigrants have no difficulty in making butter. Santarem sends to Pará for sugar; but the cavaliers of Alabama are proving that the sugar-cane grows better than in Louisiana, attaining the height of twenty feet, and that it will yield for ten or twelve years without transplanting or cultivation. It is not, however, so sweet or juicy as the Southern cane. Some of the colonists are making tapioca and cashaça or Brazilian rum; others have gone into the pork business; while one, Dr. Jones, expects to realize a fortune burning lime. Here we met the rebel ex-General Dobbins, who had been prospecting on the Tapajos River, but had not yet located himself.

[Footnote 143: Herndon makes Santarem 460 miles from the Negro, and 650 from the sea. Bates calls it 400 miles from the Atlantic, and nearly 50 from Obidos.]

Below Santarem the Amazon vastly increases in width; at one point the southern shore was invisible from the steamer. The waves often run very high. At 10 A.M., eight hours from Santarem, we entered the romantic port of Monte Alégre. The road from the river to the village, just visible inland, runs through a pretty dell. Back of the village, beyond a low, swampy flat, rise the table-topped blue hills of Almeyrim. It was an exhilarating sight and a great relief to gaze upon a mountain range from three hundred to one thousand feet high, the greatest elevations along the Amazon east of the Andes. Agassiz considers these singular mountains the remnants of a plain which once filled the whole valley of the Amazon; but Bates believes them to be the southern terminus of the high land of Guiana. Their geological constitution--a pebbly sandstone--favors the Professor's theory. The range extends ninety miles along the north bank of the river, the western limit at Monte Alégre bearing the local name of Serra Ereré. Mount Agassiz, at Obidos, is a spur of the same table-land. The Amazon is here about five miles wide, the southern shore being low, uninhabited, and covered with coarse grass. Five schooners were anchored in the harbor of Monte Alégre, a sign of considerable trade for the Amazon. The place exports cattle, cacao, rubber, and fish.

In four hours we reached Prayinha, a dilapidated village of forty houses, situated on a low, sandy beach. The chief occupation is the manufacture of turtle-oil. In ten hours more we were taking in wood at Porto do Moz, situated just within the mouth of the Xingú, the last great tributary to the Amazon. Dismal was our farewell sail on the great river. With the highlands came foul weather. We were treated to frequent and furious showers, accompanied by a violent wind, and the atmosphere was filled with smoke caused by numerous fires in the forest. Where the Xingú comes in, the Amazon is ten miles wide, but it is soon divided by a series of islands, the first of which is Grand Island. Twenty miles below Porto do Moz is Gurupá, where we took in rubber. The village, nearly as inanimate as Pompeii, consists of one street, half deserted, built on an isolated site. Forty miles below Gurupá we left the Amazon proper, turning to the right down a narrow channel leading into the river Pará. The forest became more luxuriant, the palms especially increasing in number and beauty. At one place there was a forest of palms, a singularity, for trees of the same order are seldom associated. The forest, densely packed and gloomy, stands on very low, flat banks of hard river mud. Scarcely a sign of animal life was visible; but, as we progressed, dusky faces peered out of the woods; little shanties belonging to the _seringeros_, or rubber-makers, here and there broke the solitude, and occasionally a large group of half-clad natives greeted us from the shore. A labyrinth of channels connects the Amazon with the Pará; the steamers usually take the Tajapurú. This natural canal is of great depth, and from fifty to one hundred yards in width; so that, hemmed in by two green walls, eighty feet-high, we seemed to be sailing through a deep gorge; in some places it was so narrow it was nearly overarched by the foliage. One hundred and twenty-five miles from Gurupá is Breves, a busy little town on the southwest corner of the great island of Marajó. The inhabitants, mostly Portuguese, are engaged in the rubber trade; the Indians in the vicinity manufacture fancy earthen-ware and painted cuyas or calabashes.

Soon after leaving Breves we entered the Pará River, which suddenly begins with the enormous width of eight miles. It is, however, shallow, and contains numerous shoals and islands. It is properly an estuary, immense volumes of fresh water flowing into it from the south. The tides are felt through its entire length of one hundred and sixty miles, but the water is only slightly brackish. It has a dingy orange-brown color. A narrow blue line on our left, miles away, was all that was visible, at times, of the island of Marajó; and as we passed the broad mouth of the Tocantíns, we were struck with the magnificent sea-like expanse, for there was scarcely a point of mainland to be seen.

At 4 P.M., eighteen hours from Breves, we entered the peaceful bay of Goajara, and anchored in front of the city of Pará. Beautiful was the view of the city from the harbor in the rays of the declining sun. The towering spires and cupolas, the palatial government buildings, the long row of tall warehouses facing a fleet of schooners, ships, and steamers, and pretty white villas in the suburbs, nestling in luxuriant gardens, were to us, who had just come down the Andes from mediæval Quito, the _ultima thule_ of civilization. We seemed to have stepped at once from the Amazon to New York or London. We might, indeed, say _ne plus ultra_ in one respect--we had crossed the continent, and Pará was the terminus of our wanderings, the end of romantic adventures, of privations and perils. We were kindly met on the pier by Mr. James Henderson, an elderly Scotchman, whom a long residence in Pará, a bottomless fund of information, and a readiness to serve an Anglo-Saxon, have made an invaluable cicerone. We shot through the devious, narrow streets to the Hotel Diana, where we made our toilet, for our habiliments, too, had reached their _ultima thule_. As La Condamine said on his arrival at Quito: "_Je me trouvai hors d'état de paroitre en public avec décence_."

The same year which saw Shakspeare carried to his grave beside the Avon witnessed the founding of Pará, or, speaking more respectfully, of Santa Maria de Belém do Gram Pará. The city stands on a low elbow of land formed by the junction of the rivers Guamá and Pará, seventy-five miles from the ocean. The great forest comes close up to the suburbs; and, in fact, vegetation is so rapid the city fathers have a hard struggle to keep the jungle out of the streets. The river in front is twenty miles wide, but the vast expanse is broken by numerous islets. Ships of any size will float within, one hundred and fifty yards of the shore. All passengers and goods are landed by boats at the custom-house wharf. The city is regularly laid out, there are several public squares, and many of the streets, especially in the commercial part, are well paved. Magnificent avenues, lined with silk-cotton trees, cocoa-palms, and almonds, lead out to beautiful _rocinhas_, or country residences, of one story, but having spacious verandas. The President's house, built in the Italian style, whose marble staircase is a wonder to Brazil; the six large churches, including the cathedral, after patterns from Lisbon; the post-office, custom-house, and convent-looking warehouses on the mole--these are the most prominent buildings. The architecture is superior to that of Quito. The houses, generally two-storied, are tiled, plastered, and whitewashed or painted; the popular colors are red, yellow, and blue. A few have porcelain facing. The majority have elegant balconies and glass windows, but not all the old projecting lattice casements have disappeared. Some of the buildings bear the marks of the cannonading in the Revolution of 1835. Instead of bedrooms and beds, the largest apartments and verandahs have hooks in the wall for hammocks. A carpeted, cushioned room is seldom seen, and is out of place in the tropics. Coaches and gas are supplanting ox-carts and candles. There are two hotels, but scant accommodations for travelers. Beef is almost the only meat used; the fish are poor and dear; the oysters are horrible. Bananas, oranges, and coffee are the best native productions on the table.

The population of Pará is thirty-five thousand, or double what it was when Wallace and Bates entered it twenty years ago. It is the largest city on the largest river in the world, and the capital of a province ten times the size of New York State. The enterprising, wealthy class consists of Portuguese and pure Brazilians, with a few English, Germans, French, and North Americans. The multitude is an amalgamation of Portuguese, Indian, and Negro. The diversity of races, and the mingled dialects of the Amazon and Europe, make an attractive street scene. Side by side we see the corpulent Brazilian planter, the swarthy Portuguese trader, the merry Negro porter, and the apathetic Indian boatman. Some of the more recent offspring are dressed _à la Adam_ before the fall; numbers wear only a shirt or skirt; the negro girls who go about the streets with trays of sweetmeats on their heads are loosely yet prettily dressed in pure white, with massive gilded chains and earrings; but the middle and upper classes generally follow Paris fashions. The mechanic arts are in the hands of free Negroes and Indians, mulattoes and mamelucos.[144] Commerce is carried on almost exclusively by Portuguese and other foreigners. Dry-goods come chiefly from England and France; groceries from Portugal; flour and hardware from the United States. The principal exports are rubber, cacao, coffee,[145] sugar, cotton, Brazil nuts, sarsaparilla, vanilla, farina, copaiba, tobacco, rum, hides, fish, parrots, and monkeys.[146] Pará exceeds in the number of its indigenous commodities any other port in the world, but the trade at present is insignificant when we consider the vast extent and resources of the country. The city can never have a rival at the mouth of the Amazon, and is destined to become a great emporium. But Brazilian legislation stands in the way. Heavy import duties are charged--from 35 to 45 per cent.; and on the 1st of January, 1868, it was ordered that 15 per cent. must be paid in English gold. The consequence has been that gold has risen from 28 to 30 above par, creating an additional tax. Exportation is equally discouraging. There is a duty of nine per cent. to be paid at the custom-house, and seven per cent. more at the consulado. But this is not the sum total. Those who live outside of the province of Pará, say above Obidos, must first pay an import of thirteen per cent. to get their produce into Pará. For example: up the river crude rubber can be bought for twenty-five cents a pound; the trader pays twenty-five cents an arroba (thirty-two pounds) for transportation to Pará from Santarem, exclusive of canoe hire and shipping; thirteen per cent. duty in entering Pará, ten per cent. to the commission merchant, and sixteen per cent. more as export tax; making a total loss on labor of about fifty per cent. Brazil abounds with the most valuable woods in the world, but is prevented from competing with other nations by this system of self-strangulation. In 1867 the import duty on timber was twelve per cent. Though situated on the edge of a boundless forest, Pará consumes large quantities of North American pine. There is not a grist-mill on the Amazon, and only two or three saw-mills. A dozen boards of red cedar (a very common timber) costs 60$000 per thousand (about thirty dollars) at Santarem. There is no duty on goods going to Peru. The current money, besides foreign gold, consists of copper coins and imperial treasury notes. The basis of calculation is the imaginary _rey_, equivalent to half a mill. The coins in use are the vintem (twenty reys), answering to our cent, the half vintem, and double vintem. The currency has so fluctuated in value that many of the pieces have been restamped. Fifty vintems make a _milrey_, expressed thus: 1$000. This is the smallest paper issue. Unfortunately, the notes may suddenly fall below par. As a great many counterfeits made in Portugal are in circulation, the government recalls the issue which has been counterfeited, notifying holders, by the provincial papers, that all such bills must be exchanged for a new issue within six months. Those not brought in at the end of that period lose ten per cent. of their value, and ten per cent. for each following month, until the value of the note is _nil_. The result has been that many persons trading up the river have lost heavily, and now demand hard money. Change is very scarce in Pará.

[Footnote 144: We are inclined to doubt the assertion of Mansfield that Paraguay is the only country in eastern South America with an industrious peasantry.]

[Footnote 145: Brazil yields more than one half the quantity of coffee consumed by the world. That of Ceará is the best.]

[Footnote 146: In January, 1868, the current prices were as follows:

Refined Sugar, per arroba $3 00 Rice 1 40 Cacao 3 20 Coffee 3 50 Farina 75 Tapioca 3 00 Pure rubber 11 50 Plassaba cord 6 50 Tobacco 1 50 Sarsparilla 11 50

The Brazilian arroba is seven pounds heavier than the Spanish.]

The province of Pará is governed by a president chosen at Rio, and every four years sends representatives to the Imperial Parliament. The Constitution of Brazil is very liberal; every householder, without distinction of race or color, has a vote, and may work his way up to high position. There are two drawbacks--the want of intelligence and virtue in the people, and the immense staff of officials employed to administer the government. There are also many formalities which are not only useless, but a hinderance to prosperity. Thus, the internal trade of a province carried on by Brazilian subjects is not exempt from the passport system. A foreigner finds as much trouble in getting his passport _en règle_ in Pará as in Vienna. The religion of Pará is Romish, and not so tolerant as in Rio. We arrived during _festa_. (When did a traveler enter a Portuguese town on any other than a feast day?) That night was made hideous with rockets, fire-crackers, cannon, and bells. "Music, noise, and fireworks," says Wallace, "are the three essentials to please a Brazilian populace." The most celebrated shrine in Northern Brazil is Our Lady of Nazareth. The little chapel stands about a mile out of the city, and is now rebuilding for the third time. The image is a doll about the size of a girl ten years old, wearing a silver crown and a dress of blue silk glittering with golden stars. Hosts of miracles are attributed to Our Lady, and we were shown votive offerings and models of legs, arms, heads, etc., etc., the grateful _in memoriam_ of wonderful cures, besides a boat whose crew were saved by invoking the protection of Mary. The facilities for education are improving. There are several seminaries in Pará, of which the chief is the _Lyceo da Capital_. Too many youths, however, as in Quito, are satisfied with a little rhetoric and law. The city supports four newspapers.

Paráenses may well be proud of their delightful climate. Wallace says the thermometer ranges from 74° to 87°; our observation made the mean annual temperature 80.2°. The mean daily temperature does not vary more than two or three degrees. The climate is more equable than that of any other observed part of the New World.[147] The greatest heat is reached at two o'clock, but it is never so oppressive as in New York. The greater the heat, the stronger the sea-breeze; and in three hundred out of three hundred and sixty-five days, the air is farther cooled by an afternoon shower. The rainiest month is April; the dryest, October or November. Lying in the delta of a great river, in the middle of the tropics, and half surrounded by swamps, its salubrity is remarkable. We readily excuse the proverb, "_Quem vai para Pará para_" ("He who goes to Pará stops there"); and we might have made it good, had we not been tempted by the magnificent steamer "South America," which came up from Rio on the way to New York. On the moonlit night of the 7th of January, when the ice-king had thrown his white robes over the North, we turned our backs upon the glimmering lights of Pará, and noiselessly as a canoe glided down the great river. As the sun rose for the last time to us upon the land of perpetual verdure, our gallant ship was plowing the mottled waters on the edge of the ocean--mingled yellow patches of the Amazon and dark streaks from the Pará floating on the Atlantic green. Far behind us we could see the breakers dashing against the Braganza Banks; a moment after Cape Magoary dropped beneath the horizon, and with it South America vanished from our view.

[Footnote 147: "The traveler, in going from the equator toward the tropics, is less struck by the decrease of the mean annual temperature than by the unequal distribution of heat in different parts of the year."--_Humboldt_. The great German fixes the mean temperature of the equator at 81.5°; Brewster, at 82.8°; Kirwan, 83.9°; Atkinson, 84.5°.]