I MUST now take the reader from the pic: turesque, hilly country of the Tapajos, and its dark, streamless waters, to the boundless wooded plains and yellow turbid current of the Upper Amazons or Solimoens. I will reBume the narrative of my first voyage up the river, which was interrupted at the Barra of the Rio Negro in the seventh chapter, to make way for the description of Santarem and its neighborhood. the tearing current, two or three miles in breadth, bore along a continuous line of up rooted trees and islets of floating plants. The prospect was most melancholy; no sound was heard but the dull murmur of the waters; the coast along which we traveled all day was incumbered every step of the way with fallen trees, some of which, quivered in the currents which set around proMotúca, began to torment us as soon as the jecting points of land. Our old pest, the sun gained power in the morning. White egrets were plentiful at the edge of the water, and humming-birds, in some places, were whirring about the flowers overhead. The desolate appearance of the landscape ircreased after sunset, when the moon rose in mist. This upper river, the Alto-Amazonas, or I embarked at Barra on the 26th of March, zilians as a distinct stream. This is partly Solimoens, is always spoken of by the Bra1850, three years before steamers were introduced on the upper river, in a cuberta which owing, as before remarked, to the direction was returning to Ega, the first and only town the inhabitants of the country, from their it seems to take at the fork of the Rio Negro; of any importance in the vast solitudes of the Solimoens, from Santarem, whither it bad partial knowledge, not being able to combeen sent with a cargo of turtle-oil in earth- prehend the whole river system in one view. enware jars. The owner, an old white-haired It has, however, many peculiarities to distinPortuguese trader of Ega, named Daniel guish it from the lower course of the river. Cardozo, was then at Baira, attending the assizes as jury man, a public duty performed without remuneration, which took him six weeks away from his business. He was about to leave Barra himself, in a small boat, and recommended me to send forward my heavy baggage in the cuberta and make the journey with him. He would reach Ega, 370 miles distant from Barra, in twelve or fourteen days! while the large vessel would be thirty or forty days on the road. I preferred, how ever, to go in company with my luggage, looking forward to the many opportunities I should have of landing and making collec tions on the banks of the river. The trade wind, or sea breeze, which reaches, in the height of the dry season, as far as the mouth of the Rio Negro, 900 or the upper river. The atmosphere is there1000 miles from the Atlantic, never blows on fore more stagnant and sultry, and the winds that do prevail are of irregular direction and short duration. A great part of the land on the borders of the Lower Amazons is hilly; there are extensive campos, or open plains, and long stretches of sandy soil clothed with thinner forests. The climate, in consequence, is comparatively dry, many months in succession during the fine season passing without rain. All this is changed on the SoliI shipped the collections made between moens. A fortnight of clear sunny weather Pará and the Rio Negro in a large cutter the river and its affluents flow, after leaving is a rarity: the whole region through which which was about descending to the capital, the easternmost ridges of the Andes, which and after a heavy days' work got all my Poppig describes as rising like a wall from chests aboard the Ega canoe by eight o'clock the level country, 240 miles from the Pacific, at night. The Indians were then all em- is a vast plain, about 1000 miles in length, barked, one of them being brought dead and 500 or 600 in breadth covered with one drunk by his companions and laid to sober uniform, lofty, impervious, and humid forhimself all night on the wet boards of the tombadilha. The cabo, a spirited young either a stiff clay, alluvium, or vegetable cst. The soil is nowhere sandy, but always white, named Estulano Alves Carneiro, who has since risen to be a distinguished citizen mould, which latter, in many places, is seen in water-worn sections of the river banks to of the new province of the Upper Amazons, be twenty or thirty feet in depth. With Boon after gave orders to get up the anchor. The men took to the oars, and in a few hours we crossed the broad mouth of the Rio Negro; the night being clear, calm, and stailit, and the surface of the inky waters smooth as a lake. When I awoke the next morning we were progressing by espia along the left bank of the Solimoens. The rainy season had now set in over the region through which the great river flows: the sand-banks and all the Lower lands were already under water; and such a soil and climate, the luxuriance of animal forms which are already so great in vegetation, and the abundance and beauty of the upper river. The fruits, both wild an the region nearer the Atlantic, increase on cultivated, common to the two sections of the country, reach a progressively larger size in advancing westward, and some trees which blossom only once a year at Pará and Santarem yield flower and fruit all the year round at Ega. The climate is healthy, although one lives here as in a permanent vapor bath. I must not, however, give here a leagthy description of the region, while we are yet on its threshold. I resided and traveled on the Solimoens altogether for four years and a half. The country on its borders is a magnificent wilderness where civilized man, as yet, has scarcely obtained a footing, the cultivated ground from the Rio Negro to the Andes amounting only to a few score acres. Man, indeed, in any condition, from his small numbers, makes but an insignificant figure in these vast solitudes. It may be mentioned that the Solimoens is 2130 miles in length, if we reckon from the source of what is usually considered the main stream (Lake Lauricocha, near Lima); but 2500 miles by the route of the Ucayali, the most considerable and practicable fork of the upper part of the river. It is navigable at all seasons by large steamers, for upward of 1400 miles from the mouth of the Rio Negro. On the 28th we passed the mouth of Arianů, a narrow inlet which communicates with the Rio Negro, emerging in front of Barra. Our vessel was nearly drawn into this by the violent current which set from the Solimoens. The towing-cable was lashed to a strong tree about thirty yards ahead, and it took the whole strength of crew and passengers to pull across. We passed the Guariba, a second channel connecting the two rivers, on the 30th, and on the 31st sailed past a straggling settlement called Manacápurú, situated on a high rocky bank. Many citizens of Barra have sitios, or country-houses, in this place, although it is eighty miles dis tant from the town by the nearest road. Beyond Manacapurú all traces of high laud cease; both shores of the river, hencefor ward for many hundred miles, are flat, except in places where the Tabatinga formation appears, in clayey elevations of from twenty to forty feet above the line of highest water. The country is so completely destitute of rocky or gravelly beds that not a pebble is seen during many weeks' journey. Our Voyage was now very monotonous. After leaving the last house at Manacápurú we travelled nineteen days without seeing a human habitation, the few settlers being located on the banks of inlets or lakes some distance from the shores of the main river. We met only one vessel during the whole of the time, and this did not come within hail, as it was drifting down in the middle of the current in a broad part of the river, two miles from the bank along which we were laboriously warping our course upward. After the first two or three days we fell into a regular way of life aboard. Our crew was composed of ten Indians of the Cucáma nation, whose native country is a portion of the borders of the upper river, in the neigh borhood of Nauta, in Peru. The Cucámas speak the Tupí language, using, however, a harsher accent than is common among the semi-civilized Indians from Ega downward. They are a shrewd, hard-working people, and are the only Indians who willingly and in a body engage themselves to navigate the canoes of traders. The pilot, a steady and faithful fellow named Vicente, told me that he and his companions had now been fifteen months absent from their wives and families, and that on arriving at Ega they intended to take the first chance of a passage to Nauta. There was nothing in the appearance of these men to distinguish them from canoe-men in gencral. Some were tall and well built, others had squat figures with broad shoulders and excessively thick arms and legs. No two of them were at all similar in the shape of the head: Vicente had an oval visage, with fine regular features, while a little dumpy fellow, the wag of the party, was quite a Mongolian in breadth and prominence of cheek, spread of nostrils, and obliquity of eyes; but these two formed the extremes as to face and figure. one of them were tattooed or disfigured in any way; and they were all quite destitute of beard. The Cucanas are notorious on the river for their prov. ident habits. The desire of acquiring prop. erty is so rare a trait in Indians that the habits of these people are remarked on with surprise by the Brazilians. The first possession which they strive to acquire, on descending the river into Brazil, which all the Peruvian Indians look upon as a richer country than their own, is a wooden trak with lock and key; int they slow away carefully all their earnings converted into clothing, hatchets, knives, harpoon heads, needles and thread, and so forth. Their wages are only fourpence or sixpence a day, which is often paid in goods charged a hundred per cent above Paiá prices, so that it takes them a long time to fill their chest. It would be difficult to find a better-behaved set of men on a voyage than these poor Indians. During our thirty-five days' journey they lived and worked together in the most perfect good fellowship. I never heard an angry word pass among them. Senhor Estulano let them navigate the vessel in their own way, exerting his authority only now and then when they were inclined to be lazy. Vicente regulated the working hours. These depended on the darkness of the nights. In the first and second quarters of the moon they kept it up with espia, or oars, until toward midnight; in the third and fourth quarters they were allowed to go to sleep soon after sunset, and aroused at three or four o'clock in the morning to resume their work. On cool, rainy days we all bore a hand at the espia, trotting with bare feet on the sloppy deck in Indian file, to the tune of some wild boatman's chorus. We had a favorable wind for two days only out of the thirty-five, by which we made about forty miles; the rest of our long journey was ac complished literally by pulling our way from free to tree. When we encountered a remanso near the shore, we got along very pleasantly for a few miles by rowing: but this was a rare occurrence. During leisure hours the Indians employed themselves in sewing. Vicente was a good hand at cut ting out shirts and trousers, and acted as master tailor to the whole party, cach of whom had a thick steel thimble and a stock of needles and thread of his own. Vicente made for me a set of blue-check cotton shirts during the passage. travelling encircled the whole earth, and that the land was an island like those seen in the stream, but larger. Here a gleam of curi osity and imagination in the Indian mind is revealed the necessity of a theory of the earth and water has been felt, and a theory has been suggested. In all other matters not concerning the common wants of life the mind of Vicente was a blank, and such I always found to be the case of the Indian in his natural state. Would a community of any race of men be otherwise, were they isolated for centuries in a wilderness like the Amazonian Indians, associated in small num bers, wholly occupied in procuring a mere subsistence, and without a written language, or a leisured class to hand down acquired knowledge from generation to generation? The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others among whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones; in other words, it was negative rather than positive. Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament, coldness of desire and deadness of feeling, want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull, gloomy quality, and One day a smart squall gave us a good lift they seemed never to be stirred by the emo- onward; it came with a cold, fine, driving tions-love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, rain, which enveloped the desolate landscape joy, enthusiasm. These are characteristics as with a mist: the forest swayed and roared of the whole race. The good fellowship of with the force of the gale, and flocks of birds our Cucámas seemed to arise, not from warm were driven about in alarm over the treesympathy, but simply from the absence of tops. On another occasion a similar squall cager selfishness in small matters. On the came from an unfavorable quarter: it fell morning when the favorable wind sprang upon us quite unawares when we had all our up, one of the crew, a lad of about seventeen sails out to dry, and blew us broadside foreyears of age was absent ashore at the time must on the shore. The vessel was fairly of starting, having gone aione in one of the lifted on to the tall bushes which lined the montarias to gather wild fruit. The sails banks, but we sustained no injury beyond the were spread, and we travelled for several entanglement of our rigging in the branches. hours at great speed, leaving the poor fellow The days and nights usually passed in a dead to paddle after us against the strong current. calm, or with light intermittent winds from Vicente, who might have waited a few up river, and consequently full against us. minutes at starting, and the others, only We landed twice a day to give ourselves and laughed when the hardship of their compan- the Indians a little rest and change, and to ion was alluded to. He overtook us at night, cook our two meals-breakfast and dinner. having worked his way with frightful labor There was another passenger besides myself the whole day without a morsel of food. He a cautious middle-aged Portuguese, who grinned when he came on board, and not a was going to settle at Ega, where he had a dozen words were said on either side. brother long since established. He was acTheir want of curiosity is extreme. One commodated in the fore-cabin or arched coverday we had an unusually sharp thunder- ing over the hold. I shared the cabin-proper shower. The crew were lying about the with Senhores Estulano anu Manoel, the latdeck, and after each explosion all set up a ter a young half-caste, son-in-law to the loud laugh; the wag of the party exclaiming, "There's my old uncle hunting again!" an expression showing the utter emptiness of mind of the spokesman. I asked Vicente what he thought was the cause of lightning and thunder. He said, “Timaá ichoquá,' -I don't know. He had never given the subject a moment's thought! It was the same with other things. I asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees? He didn't know, and had never heard the subject mentioned among his tribe. The Tupt language, at least as taught by the old Jesuits, has a word-Tupána-signifying God. Vicente sometimes used this word, but he showed by his expressions that he did not attach the idea of a Creator to it. He seemed to think it meant some deity, or visible image, which the whites worshipped in the churches he had seen in the villages. None of the Indian tribes on the Upper Amazons have an idea of a Supreme Being, and consequently have no word to express it in their own languages. Vicente thought the river on which we were owner of the vessel, under whose tuition I made good progress in learning the Tupí language during the voyage. Our men took it in turns, two at a time, to go out fishing, for which purpose we carried a spare montaria. The master had brought from Barra, as provisions, nothing but stale salt pirarecú-half-rotten fish, in large, thin, rusty slabs- farinha, coffee, and treacle. In these voyages passengers are expected to provide for themselves, as no charge is made except for freight of the heavy luggage or cargo they take with them. The Portuguese and myself had brought a few luxuries, such as beans, sugar, biscuits, tea, and so forth; but we found ourselves almost obliged to share them with our two companions and the pilot, so that before the voyage was one third finished the small stock of most of these articles was exhausted. In return we shared in whatever the men brought. Sometimes they were quite unsuccessful, for fish is extremely difficult to procure in the season of high water, on account of the lower lands, lying been to inlets and infinite chain of pools and lakes, being flooded from the main river, thus increasing tenfold the area over which the finny population has to range. On most days, however, they brought two or three fine fish, and once they harpooned a manatee, or Vacca marina. On this last-mentioned occasion we made quite a holiday; the canoe was stopped for six or seven hours, and all turned out into the forest to help to skin and cook the animal. The meat was cut into cubical slabs, and each person skewered a dozen or so of these on a long stick. Fires were made, and the spits stuck in the ground and slanted over the flames to roast. A driz zling rain fell all the time, and the ground around the fires swarmed with stinging ants, attracted by the entrails and slime which were scattered about. The meat has somewhat the taste of very coarse pork; but the fat, which lies in thick layers between the lean parts, is of a greenish color, and of a disagreeable, fishy flavor. The animal was a large one, measuring nearly ten feet in length, and nine in girth at the broadest part. The manatee is one of the few objects which excite the dull wonder and curiosity of the Indians, notwithstanding its commonness. The fact of its suckling its young at the breast, although an aquatic animal resembling a fish, seems to strike them as something very strange. The animal, as it lay on its back, with its broad rounded head and muzzle, tapering body, and smooth, thick, lead-col ored skin, reminded me of those Egyptian tombs which are made of dark, smooth stone, and shaped to the human figure. Notwithstanding the hard fare, the confinement of the canoe, the trying weather, frequent and drenching rains, with gleams of fiery sunshine, and the woful desolation of the river scenery, I enjoyed the voyage on the whole. We were not much troubled by mosquitoes, and therefore passed the nights very pleasantly, sleeping on deck, wrapped in blankets or old sails. When the rains drove us below, we were less comfortable, as there was only just room in the small cabin for three of us to lie close together, and the confined air was stifling. I became inured to the Piums in the course of the first week; all the exposed parts of my body, by that time, being so closely covered with black punctures that the little bloodsuckers could not very easily find an unoccupied place to operate upon. Poor Miguel, the Portuguese, suffered horribly from these pests, his ankles and wrists being so much inflamed that he was confined to his hammock, slung in the hold, for weeks. At every landing place I had a ramble in the forest, while the redskins made the fire and cooked the meal. The result was a large daily addition to my collection of insects, reptiles, and shells. Sometimes the neighborhood of our gypsylike encampment was a tract of dry and spacious forest, pleasant to ramble in; but more frequently it was a rank wilderness, into which it was impossible to penetrate many yards, on account of uprooted trees, entangled webs of monstrous woody climbers, thickets of spiny bamboos, swamps, or obstacles of one kind or other. The drier lands were sometimes beautified to the highest degree by groves of the Urucurí palm (Attalea excelsa), which grew by thousands under the crowns of the lofty ordinary forest trees; their sinooth columnar stems being all of nearly equal height (forty or fifty feet), and their broad, finely-pinnated leaves interlocking above to form arches and woven canopies of elegant and diversified shapes. The fruit of this palm ripens on the upper river in April, and during our voyage I saw immense quantities of it strewn about under the trees in places where we encamped. It is similar in size and shape to the date, and has a pleasantly-flavored juicy pulp. The Indians would not eat it; I was surprised at this, as they greedily devoured many other kinds of palm fruit, whose sour and fibrous pulp was much less palatable. Vicente shook his head when he saw me one day eating a quantity of the Uruçurí plums. I am not sure they were not the cause of a severe indigestion under which I suffered for many da, s afterward. In passing slowly along the irrminable wooded banks week after week, I observed that there were three tolerably distinct kinds of coast and corresponding forest_constantly recurring on this upper river. First, there were the low and most recent alluvial deposits, a mixture of sand and mud, covered with tall, broad-leaved grasses, or with the arrow-grass before described, whose featherytopped flower-stem rises to a height of fourteen or fifteen feet. The only large trees which grow in these places are the Cecropiæ. Many of the smaller and newer islands were of this description. Secondly, there were the moderately high banks, which are only partially overflowed when the flood season is at its height; these are wooded with a magnificent varied forest, in which a great variety of palms and broad-leaved Marantaceæ form a very large proportion of the vegeta tion. The general foliage is of a vivid lightgreen hue; the water frontage is some times covered with a diversified mass of greenery; but where the current sets strongly against the friable earthy banks, which at low water are twenty-five to thirty feet high, these are cut away, and expose a section of forest, where the trunks of trees loaded with epiphytes appear in massy colonnades. One might safely say that three fourths of the land bordering the Upper Amazons, for a thousand miles, belong to this second class. The third description of coast is the higher, undulating clayey land which appears only at long intervals, but extends sometimes for many miles along the borders of the river. The coast at these places is sloping, and composed of red or variegated clay. The forest is of a different character from that of the lower tracts: it is rounder in outline, more uniform in its general aspect; palms are much less numerous and of peculiar species the strange bulging-stemmed species, Iriar tea ventricosa, and the slender glossy-leaved case. The attention of naturalists has only Bacaba-í (Enocarpus minor), being espetially characteristic; and, in short, animal life, which imparts some cheerfulness to the ther parts of the river, is seldom apparent. This terra firme," as it is called, and a large portion of the fertile lower land, seemed well adapted for settlement; some parts were originally peopled by the aborigines, but these have long since become extinct or amalgamated with the white immigrants. I afterward learned that there were not more than eighteen or twenty families settled throughout the whole country from Manacápurú to Quary, a distance of 240 miles; and these, as before observed, do not live on the banks of the main stream, but on the shores of inlets and lakes. lately been turned to the important subject of occasional means of wide dissemination of species of animals and plants. Unless such be shown to exist, it is impossible to solve some of the most difficult problems connected with the distribution of plants and animais. Some species, with most limited powers of locomotion, are found in opposite parts of the earth, without existing in the intermedi. ate regions; unless it can be shown that these may have migrated or been accidentally transported from one point to the other, we shall have to come to the strange conclusion that the same species had been created in two separate districts. The fishermen twice brought me small rounded pieces of very porous punice-stone, which they had picked up floating on the surface of the main current of the river. They were to me objects of great curiosity, as being messengers from the distant volcanoes of the Andes: Cotopaxi, Llanganete, or Sangay, which rear their peaks among the rivulets that feed some of the early tributaries of the Amazons, such as the Macas, the Pastaza, and the Napo. The stones must have already travelled a distance of 1200 niles. I afterward found them rather common; the Brazilians use them for cleaning tust from their guns, and firmly believe them to be solidified river foam. A friend once brought me, when I lived at Santarem, a large piece which had been found in the middle of the stream below Monte Alegre, about 900 miles farther down the river; having reached this distance, pumice-stones would be pretty sure of being carriedout to sea, and floated thence with the north-westerly Atlantic current to shores many thousand miles distant from the volcanoes which ejected #them. They are sometimes stranded on the banks in different parts of the river. Reflecting on this circumstance since I arrived in England, the probability of these porous fragments serving as vehicles for the transportation of seeds of plants, eggs of insects, spawn of fresh-water fish, and so forth, has suggested itself to me. fheir rounded, vater-worn appearance showed that they Lust have been rolled about for a long time in the shallow streams near the sources of the rivers at the feet of the volcanoes, before they leaped the waterfalls and embarked on the currents which lead direct for the Amazons. They may have been originally cast on the land and afterward carried to the rivers by freshets; in which case the eggs and seeds of land insects and plants might be accidentally introduced, and safely inclosed with particles of earth in their cavities. As the speed of the current in the rainy season has been observed to be from three to five miles an hour, they might travel an immense distance before the eggs or seeds were destroyed. I am ashamed to say that I neglect ed the opportunity, while on the spot, of ascertaining whether, this was actually the Canoe-men on the Upper Amazons live in constant dread of the terras chaidas," or landslips, which occasionally take place along the steep earthy banks, especially when the waters are rising. Large vessels are sometimes overwhelmed by these avalanches of earth and trees. I should have thought the accounts of them exaggerated if I had not had an opportunity during this voyage of seeing one on a large scale. One morning I was awoke before sunrise by an unusual sound resembling the roar of artillery. I was lying alone on the top of the cabin; it was very dark, and all my companions were asleep, so I lay listening. The sounds came from a considerable distance, and the crash which had aroused me was succeeded by others much less formidable. The first ex planation which occurred to me was that it was an earthquake; for, although the night was breathlessly calm, the broad river was much agitated, and the vessel rolled heavily. Soon after, another loud explosion took place, apparently much nearer than the former one then followed others. The thundering peal rolled backward and forward, now seeming close at hand, now far off; the sudden crashes being often succeeded by a pause, or a long-continued dull rumbling. At the second explosion, Vicente, who lay snoring by the helm, awoke and told me it was a cahida;" but I could scarcely believe him. The day dawned after the uproar had lasted about an hour, and we then saw the work of destruction going forward on the other side of the river, about three miles off. Large masses of forest, including trees of colossal size, probably 200 feet in height, were rocking to and fro, and falling headlong one after the other into the water. After each avalanche the wave which it caused returned ou the crumbly bank with tremendous force, and caused the fall of other masses by undermining them. The line of coast over which the landslip extended was a mile or two in length; the end of it, however, was hid from our view by an intervening island. It was a grand sight; each downfall created a cloud of spray; the concussion in one place causing other masses to give way a long distance from it, and thus the crashes continued, swaying to and fro, with little prospect of a termination. When we glided out of sight, 66 terra |